Matt Damon’s prophetic commencement speech for the MIT Class of 2017: “Not every problem has a high-tech solution”

Boston-native Matt Damon grew up in the shadow of MIT, the institution where he filmed his breakthrough film Good Will Hunting, which he starred in and co-wrote with friend Ben Affleck. He was invited in 2016 to give that year’s commencement speech at the world-renowned university attended by some of the brightest minds on the planet.

Damon gave a stirring address in which he challenged the graduates to take their “pick from the world’s worst buffet” of problems and solve it.

“Try to eliminate your blind spots”

The actor rattled off a list of seemingly intractable problems that still plague the world today before he shared a piece of advice that he received from President Bill Clinton: “Turn toward the problems you see.” Damon added though that they shouldn’t just be “voyeurs” of those problems, but “engage with them.”

“Walk right up to them, look them in the eye ... then look yourself in the eye and decide what you’re going to do about them,” he told the graduates. Damon then urged his audience to go out and see things for themselves, “try to eliminate your blind spots.”

“In my experience, there’s just no substitute for actually going and seeing things,” he said. He shared that he got this insight from his mother taking him and his brother to see the world outside of Boston, “places like Guatemala, where we saw extreme poverty up close.” He noted that it changed his “whole frame of reference.”

He recounted how on another trip, this time in Zambia, he found his own calling, setting up Water.org to tackle the global water and sanitation crisis. Despite being told that “water is the least sexy aspect of the effort to fight extreme poverty… The enormity of it, and the complexity of the issue, had already hooked me,” he told the graduates.

“People are always looking for some scientific quick fix”

While Damon acknowledged that “if anybody has a right to think we can pretty much tech support the world’s problems into submission,” it was these MIT graduates, he warned that “not every problem has a high-tech solution.” He said that science can’t always find the solution, that “there is not always a freaking app for that.”

He used as an eample the “big problem” that he is doing his part to solve, water. “People are always looking for some scientific quick fix for the problem of dirty and disease-ridden water. A pill you put in the glass, a filter, or something like that,” he observed.

“But there’s no magic bullet. The problem’s too complex,” Damon pointed out. He encouraged them to look for innovative solutions through public policy, financial models, and beyond.

Damon closed by acknowledging the immensity of the problems the world is facing, but he still hoped that the 2016 MIT graduating class would turn toward the problem of their choosing, drop everything, and solve it. “Because you must.”

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