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The Secret Inside my MIT Commencement Speech

2025-06-06 · explainer · Hank · 20:25 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Everyday life (also: Nerdfighteria, US politics & society, Projects) · mode: Personal essay · tags: timely hook, on location

Hank explains that he wrote his MIT commencement speech from a survey of the graduating class, the way the brothers' work has been collaborative with its audience; in the speech he urges graduates to orient their curiosity toward the everyday problems of normal people and toward people, not only toward building tools.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Why the speech was hard to write and its organizing principle: collaboration with the audience through a student survey

  • ★★★ Hank says he gave the MIT commencement speech last week (week of 26 May 2025) and found it surprisingly hard to write, less from impostor syndrome than from the craft difficulty. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank says the speech had an audience problem: it was mainly for the students there but would reach a broader audience once uploaded to YouTube. — 00:00:13 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank says he represents more than himself: the people at Crash Course, Study Hall, SciShow and Good Store, the community that is the only reason any of it happened, science communication and John. — 00:00:29 · Crash Course, Study Hall, SciShow, Good Store, Nerdfighteria, John Green
  • ★★ Hank recalls that Mark Rober gave the MIT commencement a couple of years ago and represented himself by having his graduation cap fly away, which inspired Hank to capture the brothers' own way of working. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Hank says the first thing that interested the brothers about online video in 2007, and a through line of their work, is that creation can be collaborative between audience and creator. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ Hank sent the students a survey before writing, so the speech was partly their creation and partly his, all inspired by them, just like this YouTube channel. — 00:01:56 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank says that even having lived through it he does not understand in detail how all this happened, but knows it is not something he did by himself. — 00:02:20

00:02:35 — Speech opening: impostor-syndrome joke, TikToker self-introduction, thanks and bone facts

  • ★★ Hank introduces himself to the graduates as a TikToker who recently blind-ranked AI companies by how much they look like buttholes, now giving the MIT commencement speech. (playful) — 00:03:14 · TikTok
  • ★ As a thank-you bone fact, Hank says the average human skeleton contains more than 25,000 calories. (playful) — 00:04:12
  • ★ Hank says most of a person's bones, more than 50%, are in the hands and feet. (playful) — 00:04:20
  • ★ Hank says bones are oxygen-dense: freeing a skeleton's oxygen atoms would make enough breathable air for more than 24 hours. (playful) — 00:04:28

00:04:43 — Survey answers: the most MIT thing graduates did, and the most common word, built

  • ★★ Hank thanks the class of 2025 because more than half of them filled out the survey he sent all of them, and says he loved reading their answers. — 00:04:43
  • ★★ Asked for the most MIT thing they did, graduates mentioned counting on the Harvard Bridge, being Tim the Beaver and impressing a date with train facts; many answered just 'hack'. (playful) — 00:05:23
  • ★★ Hank says the most common word in those answers was 'built': bridges, robots, incubators, startups, Geiger counters, an eight-foot periodic table and a ukulele. — 00:06:17

00:07:12 — A messy time to graduate: attacks on institutions, climate change, AI and other disruption

  • ★★★ Hank finds the graduates' building reassuring because the world is going to need a lot of building in this messy time to graduate. — 00:07:12
  • ★★★ Hank says attacks on speech, higher education, trans rights, the federal workforce and the rule of law are coming from inside the house. — 00:07:41
  • ★★ Hank says the world is getting hotter faster, and the sudden acceleration of AI, communications and biotechnology promises huge opportunities and tremendous disruption. — 00:07:55 · climate change

00:08:28 — Advice from classmates read from the survey

  • ★★ Hank reads a graduate's advice that there is no one definition of success and your idea of it will change, which you should let it; he calls it old-person advice. — 00:09:21
  • ★★ Hank reads a graduate's advice to open a Roth IRA, jokes that a dad wrote it, and agrees that now is the time. (playful) — 00:09:43
  • ★★ Hank reads a favourite piece of graduate advice, to collaborate, help each other be brave in reaching out and be forgiving, and loves that it is about people, not technology. — 00:09:59
  • ★★ Hank reads a graduate's advice: even if it probably won't work, try anyway. — 00:10:16
  • ★★ Hank reads a graduate's advice, which he calls very MIT: don't start with the solution, start with the problem. — 00:10:16

00:10:41 — Hank's ludicrous career and what he attributes his success to: learning

  • ★★ Hank describes his ludicrous career: TikTok dances to Elmo remixes, two best-selling science fiction novels, fart listicles, interviewing presidents, videos about giraffe sex and selling multiple companies. (playful) — 00:10:41 · TikTok
  • ★★★ Hank says he helped build an educational media company that provides free videos to everyone with an internet connection, whose content is used in most American schools. — 00:11:10 · Complexly
  • ★★ Hank says he is good at having an idea he believes in and just doing it, consequences be damned, which has served him well though it is not relaxing, on the shifting ground of online video and social media. (hedged) — 00:11:35 · social media
  • ★★★ Besides luck, Hank attributes his success to never believing there is a better use of his time than learning something new; a day he learns something is a good day. — 00:11:58 · curiosity

00:12:22 — Curiosity expands tools and the problem space; orient it toward people and everyday solvable problems

  • ★★★ Hank says curiosity expands not only the tools you have but your understanding of the problem space, and opportunity lies where tools and problems overlap. — 00:12:22 · curiosity
  • ★★ Asked what is giving them hope, most graduates answered entirely about people: friends, family, peers, people who care and fix problems. — 00:13:16
  • ★★★ Hank says curiosity is not out of your control: you decide how to orient it, and that orientation will shape your life and may be the most important factor in your career. — 00:14:06 · curiosity
  • ★★ Hank guesses it will be really easy to focus on the compelling and, he says, not that complicated problem of building ever more powerful tools, and never notice that the problem space is much bigger. (hedged) — 00:14:06
  • ★★★ Hank says social content platforms are great at steering curiosity, but sometimes toward fear, the most impossible problems or the hottest rifts in society. — 00:15:04 · recommender system
  • ★★★ Hank says the capitalist impulse orients toward problems most easily turned into money, overweighting the problems the most powerful and wealthy want solved. — 00:15:33 · capitalism
  • ★★★ Hank asks the graduates to stay curious about the world's diverse problem space, including the everyday solvable problems of normal people that these forces ignore. — 00:15:57 · curiosity
  • ★★ Hank says this is not a choice between financial stability and ideals: there will be money in these spaces because the problems are real. — 00:16:26

00:16:50 — Hank's four pieces of advice and closing: joy, ideas out, people as the source of value, building yourself

  • ★★★ Hank advises that one problem graduates will solve is finding joy in an imperfect world, and they may not feel productive until they accept that joy can be something they produce. — 00:16:57
  • ★★★ Hank advises that ideas cannot help anyone in your head: stop waiting and get them out, and even in failing you will build new tools. — 00:17:27
  • ★★★ Hank says value and meaning come from people, not banks, tech or cap tables; people work is hardest but often most important, so orient toward people's needs, including your own. — 00:18:07
  • ★★ Hank says feeling a birthday party or a playlist for a friend is insignificant next to climate change, AI or the erosion of democracy alienates you from human existence and your place as a builder of meaning. — 00:18:40 · climate change
  • ★★ Hank says it took three billion years to go from the first single-celled organisms to this graduation, more than a quarter of the life of the universe. — 00:19:10
  • ★★★ Hank says something special and strange is happening on this planet, and it is the graduates; the greatest thing they build will be themselves, a person built for people. — 00:19:24
  • ★★ Hank closes that when asked what they did at MIT the graduates said they built, but when asked what gave them hope they said people, and sends them forth for themselves, others and the world. — 00:20:02

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says all creation is collaborative, but inviting that into the brothers' work through the tools of the internet has been a big deal. — video description

Humor (significant)

  • Hank says he doesn't do impostor syndrome; instead he has a superior syndrome. — 00:02:52

    “It's called ha-ha-ha, I fooled them again syndrome”

  • Hank begins thanking the graduates, then expresses his thanks with bone facts. — 00:04:12

    “The average human skeleton has more than 25,000 calories.”

  • Reading about Tim the Beaver from the teleprompter, Hank notices the name. — 00:05:50

    “Is MIT spelled backwards? I was today years old when I hit that fact.”

  • After listing the world's crises, Hank says he would want advice, but he is just a TikToker. — 00:08:00

    “I am a TikToker who will now and forever be known as the first person to say the word butthole during an MIT commencement speech.”

  • Hank complains the huge podium makes him feel little; it had to fit the seal. — 00:08:53

    “And then I said, you could just make a new seal. And they did not like that.”

  • A graduate's advice to open a Roth IRA sounds like 45-year-old advice. — 00:09:50

    “Did your dad do the survey for you”

  • Hank admits the students partly wrote his speech for him. — 00:10:16

    “at least you didn't know that I didn't have Claude do it for me.”

  • Hank opens his heartfelt numbered advice with an unexplained first item. — 00:16:57

    “don't eat grass.”

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: curiosity · Hank's MIT commencement address · Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Also: People: Mark Rober

Projects: Complexly · Crash Course · Good Store · SciShow · Study Hall

Organizations: TikTok · YouTube

Concepts: artificial intelligence · capitalism · climate change · democratic backsliding · freedom of speech · higher education · human skeleton · impostor syndrome · individual retirement account · joy · online video · recommender system · rule of law · science fiction · social media · transgender

Places: Harvard Bridge

Characters: Elmo · Tim the Beaver

Products: Claude

Also centred on Massachusetts Institute of Technology: LOSERS!!!!

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