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№ 2025.001 — Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Commencement address
Hank Green
Science communicator, video creator, and entrepreneur
Hank Green, science communicator and online video creator, addresses MIT's Class of 2025 with humor about his unconventional background before turning to serious advice for graduates entering an unstable world. Drawing on survey responses he collected from the graduates themselves, he argues that curiosity is the key to success but warns that social media and capitalist incentives can misdirect attention away from the everyday, solvable problems of ordinary people. He encourages graduates to orient their curiosity toward people rather than just tools, to release their ideas into the world, and to find joy and meaning in human life.
Key moments
- 01 Opening with self-deprecating humor and bone facts to thank the graduating class
- 02 Drawing on graduates' own survey responses for advice and reflections
- 03 Naming current threats to science, speech, higher education, and democracy
- 04 Arguing curiosity must be deliberately oriented toward overlooked, solvable human problems
- 05 Closing advice to build oneself and find meaning in people, not just tools
Visual speech map
Hank Green at MIT, 2025
A commencement address about curiosity, attention, technology incentives, human problems, and building meaning through useful work.
- 01 Bone facts
- 02 Graduate survey
- 03 Curiosity
- 04 Attention economy
- 05 Human problems
- 06 Build publicly
- 07 Meaning
- 08 Joy
Opening
Humor lowers the guard
Green opens with self-deprecating science jokes, then pivots into serious advice about attention, instability, and responsibility.
Humor creates permission to ask direct questions without turning away from difficulty.
The graduates' own responses become source material for the address.
Absurdity and urgency can coexist when the point is honest attention.
Warning
Curiosity can be misdirected
The same curiosity that powers discovery can be captured by incentives that reward spectacle over service.
Social systems train attention toward reaction, novelty, and conflict.
Capitalist incentives do not automatically prioritize ordinary human needs.
Graduates must choose where their minds spend force.
Reframe
Look for solvable human problems
The class is urged to notice ordinary people, unmet needs, and smaller problems that are easy to ignore because they are not glamorous.
People are not abstractions around the tool; they are the point of the work.
Useful work often starts with careful attention to overlooked experience.
Meaning grows when curiosity serves lives beyond the self.
Release
Put ideas into the world
The closing advice is practical: build the self, share the work, and find joy in the human reality around every technical system.
Ideas matter after they leave private notebooks and meet other people.
A self is built through repeated contribution.
Joy is not a distraction from serious work; it helps sustain it.
Transcript
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