The last time Matt Damon was seen on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was mopping the hallways in his role as a gifted janitor and unrecognized math genius for the 1997 hit movie “Good Will Hunting”. Nearly twenty years later, the Cambridge native — who now shares a zipcode with the prestigious university — returned to his home turf to deliver his address to more than 1,000 undergraduates.
Below is an abridged transcript of his speech, edited for clarity and brevity.
” Thank you so much.
Thank you President Reif.
Thank you class of 1966. That was alarming walking along and seeing 66 and then somebody saying it’s their 50th.
I almost had a heart attack. Time flies.
And mostly thank you to the class of 2016.
It’s such an honor to be part of your day; to be here with you, your friends, professors and parents, but let’s be honest: this is an honor I didn’t earn.
I’ve seen the list of previous commencement speakers: Nobel prize winners, the UN Secretary General, President of the World Bank, President of the United States. And who did you get? The guy who did the voice for a cartoon horse!
If you’re wondering which cartoon horse I’m talking about, that’s “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” — a movie some of you might have grown up watching. It’s definitely one of my best performance… as a cartoon horse.
Look, I don’t even have a college degree. As you might have heard, I went to Harvard, I just didn’t graduate from Harvard.
I got pretty close, but started getting movie roles and couldn’t finish all my courses. But I put on a cap and gown and I walked down with my class. I just never got an actual degree. You could say I “fake graduated.”
So you can imagine how excited I was when President Reif invited me to speak at the MIT commencement. And now you can imagine how sorry I was to learn that the MIT commencement speaker does not get to go home with a degree.
So, yes for the second time in my life I’m “fake graduating” from a college in my hometown. My mom and my dad and brother are here again. And this time I brought my wife and my four kids. Welcome, kids, to your dad’s second fake graduation! You must be so proud.
As I said, my mom is here. She’s a professor so she knows the value of an MIT degree, and also knows that I could not have gotten in here. Harvard? Barely. Or a safety school, like Yale.
Look I’m not running for any kind of office, so I can say pretty much whatever I want up here.
I couldn’t have gotten in at MIT, but I did grow up in the neighborhood; in the shadow of this imposing place. My brother Kyle and I and my friend Ben Affleck (Brilliant guy. Good guy. Never amounted to much.), we all grew up right here in Central Square; children of the sometimes rocky marriage of this city and its great institutions. To us, MIT was kind of like “the man”: this big impressive, impersonal force — at least that was our provincial, knee jerk teenage reaction.
Then Ben and I shot a movie here.
One of the scenes in “Good Will Hunting” was based on something that happened to my brother Kyle. He was visiting a physicist we knew at MIT, and walking down the infinite corridor, he saw the blackboards that lined the halls. My brother is an artist so he picked up some chalk and wrote an incredibly elaborate, totally fake version of an equation. It was so cool and completely insane that nobody dared to erase it for months. This is a true story!
Kyle came back and said: “Listen to this. They’ve got blackboards running down the hall because these kids are so smart they need to just drop everything and solve problems.” It was then we knew for sure we never could have gotten in.
But like I said, we later made a movie here, which did not go unnoticed on campus. In fact, I’d like to read some selected passages from the review of “Good Will Hunting” in the MIT school paper.
If you haven’t seen it, Will was me and Sean was played by the late Robin Williams — a man I miss a hell of a lot.
I’m quoting here: “Good Will Hunting is very entertaining, but then again any movie partially set at MIT has to be.”
There’s more: “In the end,” the reviewer writes “the actual character development flies out the window. Will and Sean talk, bond, solve each others problems and then cry and hug each other. After said crying and hugging the movie ends. Such feel good pretentiousness is definitely not my mug of egg nog.”
Well, that kind of hurts. But don’t worry, I now know better than to cry at MIT and I’m happy to be here anyway. I might still be a knee jerk teenager in key respects, but I know an amazing school when I see it. We’re lucky to have MIT in Boston and lucky it draws the people like you from around the world.
You’re working on some crazy stuff in these buildings; stuff that would freak me out if I actually understood it: theories, models, paradigm shifts . Let me tell you about one that’s been on my mind lately: simulation theory.
Most of you probably heard of this and maybe even you took a class with Max Tegmark. But for the uninitiated, there’s a philosopher at Oxford who’s postulated that if there’s a truly advanced form of intelligence out there, it’s probably advanced enough to run different simulations of entire worlds — maybe even our own.
So the basic idea is that we could be living in a massive simulation run by a far smarter civilization (like a giant computer game) and we don’t even know it. And here’s the thing: a lot of physicists and cosmologist won’t rule it out. I just watched an online discussion moderated by Neil de Grass Tyson, and by and large the panel wouldn’t give a definite answer. Tyson himself, put the odds at 50/50.
I’m not sure how scientific it was, but it got me thinking. What if this —all of this — is a simulation? And if there are multiple simulations, how come we have to be in the one where Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee for President?
Can we, like, transfer to a different one? Well professor Tegmark has an excellent take on this.
“My advice” he said recently “is to go out and do really interesting things, so the simulators don’t shut you down.”
Now what if it’s not simulation? My answer is the same either way. Either way what we do matters.
What we do affects the outcome. You have to go out and do really interesting things, important things, inventive things because this world — real or imagined — has some problems that we need you to drop everything for and solve.
[…]
But before you step out into our big troubled world I want to pass along a piece of advice that Bill Clinton offered me over a decade ago. (At the time, it felt less like advice and felt more like a direct order.) He said: “Turn toward the problems you see. You have to engage and turn towards the problems that you see.”
It seemed kind of simple but the older I get, the more wisdom I see in this. That’s what I want you to do: turn towards the problems that you see and engage with them. Walk up to them and look them in the eye and look at yourself and decide what you’re going to do about them.
In my experience, there’s no substitute for going and seeing these things. I owe this insight, like many others, to my mom. When I was a teen mom thought it was important for us to see the world outside of Boston and I don’t just mean Framingham.
[…]
There is a lot of trouble out there MIT. But there’s a lot of beauty too and I hope you see both. The point is not to become some kind of well-rounded high minded voyeur, but to eliminate blind spots — the things that keep us from grasping the bigger picture.
I grew up in this multi-cultured neighborhood that was a little rough at the time; I find myself before you as a middle aged white male American movie star, and I don’t even know where my blind spots begin.
Looking at the world as it is and engaging with it is the first step towards identifying our blind spots. That’s when we can really start to understand ourselves better and begin to solve problems. With that as your goal, there’s a few more things I hope you keep in mind.
First you’re going to fail sometimes and that’s a good thing.
For all the amazing successes I’ve been lucky to share, few things have shaped me more than auditions that Ben and I used to go on as young actors. We would get on a bus, show up in New York, wait for our turn, cry our hearts out for a scene and then be told: “Okay, thanks.” Meaning GAME-OVER.
We used to call it being “okay-thanked” and those experiences became our armor. Now you’re thinking: “Great, thanks Matt. Failure is good, thanks a ton. Tell me something I didn’t hear at my high school graduation!” To which I say: “Okay, I will.”
You know what the real danger is for MIT graduates? It is not getting “okay-thanked,” but all the smoke blown up under your graduation gowns about how freaking smart you are. Well you ARE that smart, but don’t believe the hype that’s thrown at you. You don’t have all the answers and you shouldn’t and that’s fine. You’re going to have your share of bad ideas.
For me, one was playing a character named Edgar Pudwhacker. I wish I could tell you I’m making that up.
As the great philosopher Benjamin Affleck once said: “Judge me by how good my good ideas are, not by how bad my bad ideas are.” You have to suit up in your armor and get ready to sound like a total fool. Not having an answer isn’t embarrassing, it’s an opportunity. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. I know so much less the second time I’m fake graduating than the first time.
The second thing I want to leave you with is you gotta keep listening.
The world wants to hear your ideas, good and bad. But today is not the day you switch from receive to transmit. Your education should never be over.
Even outside of your work, there are always ways to keep challenging yourself. I just retook a Philosophy course I took at Harvard at 19. Go to MIT Open Course Ware, go to Ted.com. I’m told there’s even a Trump University! I have no earthly idea what they teach there. But whatever you do just keep listening. Even to people you don’t agree with at all.
I love what President Obama said at Howard University commencement last month. He said: “Democracy requires compromise even when you’re 100 percent right.”
I heard that and thought: “Here is a man who has been happily married for a long time.” Not that the first lady has ever been wrong about anything.
Just like my wife. Never wrong. Not even when she decided last month that in a family with four kids the thing that was most missing was a third rescue dog. That was an outstanding decision, honey and I love you.
The third and last thought I want to leave you with is that not every problem has a hi-tech solution.
If anyone has the right to think we can tech-support the world’s problems into submission it’s you. Think of the innovations that were started by MIT students and alumni : The worldwide web. Nuclear fission. Condensed soup. That’s true. You should be very proud of that! But the truth is we can’t science the you-know-what out of every problem.
There’s not always an app for that.
So let me ask you this in closing: What are you going to be part of? What’s the problem you will try to solve? Whatever you answer, it’s not going to be easy. Sometimes your work will hit a dead-end. Sometimes your work will be measured in half-steps and sometimes your work will lead you to wear a white sequin military uniform and make love to Michael Douglas. Ok, maybe that’s my work…
All your work starts today. And seriously how lucky are you?
[…]
Here you are, alive at a time of potential extinction level events; a time when fewer and fewer people can cause more damage; a time when science and technology may not hold all the answers but are indispensable to any solution. What are the odds that you get to be you right now? The MIT class of 2016 with so much on the line?
[…]
So I hope you’ll turn toward the problem of your choosing, and I hope you’ll drop everything and solve it. This is your life, class of 2016, this your moment. It is all down to you.
Ready, player one, your game begins now.
Thank you.
Congratulations.
