(inspiring music)
- [Narrator] Stanford university
- Please direct your attention to the video screens
and join me in welcoming Reed Hastings.
(crowd cheers)
- Oh, Hey.
Sorry to be doing this remote.
You know the COVID.
Thank you and welcome
to all the graduates, their families, their friends,
the faculty and staff, president, board, provost, everyone.
What a great day to come and celebrate.
When I got the invitation, I had to wonder, why me?
And then I realized,
oh you probably want Netflix recommendations
on what to watch.
So Adam Sandler, new movie, "Hustle"
about breaking into the NBA
and Heart Stopper", British teen romance, so sweet.
And best of all,
both are safe to watch with your parents this weekend.
Now that we've got the important business over with,
let's talk a little about how the world changes.
The changes to the world
since Stanford was founded have been tremendous
and it's only going to speed up.
So that gives you a lot of opportunity
and a lot of risk for you and humanity.
As the world speeds up, will our wax wings melt?
Or will we bend the arc
of the moral universe towards justice?
To think about that, let's look at the past.
It seems to me the two most powerful drivers of change
have been invention and stories.
Inventions meaning broadly all of science and technology,
are the most obvious way society moves forward.
Think about the agricultural hoe, the wheel,
electricity, discovery of DNA, the internet,
it's all amazing.
Positive inventions, large and small,
have improved our lives.
And of course there are some
negative and destructive inventions, like chemical weapons.
But for the most part, inventions give us more light.
I've always been drawn to inventions.
Sometimes it hasn't really worked out.
When I was a grad student here 35 years ago,
it was the era of desktop computers.
So our hands went back and forth
between the keyboard and the mouse,
the keyboard and the mouse.
A lot of typos introduced. It was slow.
And so I had a great idea.
The foot mouse.
I was gonna build a company
to develop a mouse for your foot
so you played at a desktop like you play a piano.
Well, I almost dropped outta Stanford to do this.
I was so excited.
But then I got the prototypes
and it turns out your leg cramps after 20 or 30 minutes
and it's very dirty down there
so the mouse got pretty gross.
So luckily I stayed and graduated like all of you.
I didn't give up on new ideas
and 10 years after discarding the foot mouse,
we started Netflix.
At first, we mailed a lot of DVDs.
But then streaming got fast enough
to deliver content in seconds, instead of days
and our business took off.
And we were able to produce amazing series
like "Stranger Things" and "Squid Game".
I know many of you will invent all kinds of things,
from personal drones that transport you anywhere
to robots with a sense of humor,
maybe even the cure for the hangover.
But I really hope that you focus on one area in particular,
climate change. (crowd cheers)
A lot of conversation around climate change
is around reducing emissions from the rich world,
which is something we need to do to buy us more time.
But it only really buys us some time.
Ultimately, using less of everything delays disaster,
it doesn't prevent disaster.
Moreover, people in poverty around the world,
they need and deserve more energy, more steel, more cement,
all of which emits a lot of CO2.
The looming crisis, it can feel overwhelming.
But I'm confident your generation will find a way
to invent our way out of the greenhouse.
We need better electricity, storage, and transmission
for intermittent solar and wind.
We need clean and safe nuclear.
We need cost-effective green cement and steel
and carbon capture technology, and so much more.
Green solutions need to be better solutions
than their carbon intensive predecessor,
just like electric cars today
are now better than gasoline cars.
There are thousands of inventors in this university
and we need all of you.
200 years ago, Malthus predicted mass starvation
as the population grew,
but we invented mechanized farming,
hybrid seeds, fertilizer, and much more.
Today, with a population 10 times larger than Malthus had,
we have many problems,
but food production is not one of them.
Human beings invent their way out of crisis.
Being in Silicon Valley,
you're already very aware of the power of invention.
The power of story, however, might be less obvious.
You all know many stories, from "Animal Farm"
to "Silence Spring" and perhaps "Don't Look Up,"
but today I'm gonna talk about the broader notion of story.
Creative ideas that we mostly accept as fact
and that have helped us cooperate at great scale
to move humanity forward.
When "an eye for an eye" of the old Testament gave way
to "turn the other cheek" from the new Testament,
it was a huge moral advance and a reduction in violence.
An old story was that governments
derived their legitimacy from being descended from the king.
And that gave way to governments
deriving their legitimacy from the consent of the governed,
which triggered the American and French
and many other revolutions against the monarchy.
And the stories continued to evolve.
For example, the Civil Rights Movement
expanded the idea that all members of society
deserve to have their voices heard.
As historian Yuval Harari points out,
money, corporations, law,
many other aspects of modern life,
are just widely accepted stories.
The dollar bill is not very useful
as a piece of paper to write on or eat or burn,
and yet we accept it as having value, and so it does.
Humans are very adept at turning useful stories
into accepted facts.
Think about human rights.
The more we believe that humans have rights,
the more rights we have.
We are working to expand the universe of human rights
so that they get more widely accepted as fact.
These are good stories, constructive stories,
but like with inventions,
the wrong stories can be incredibly destructive.
For several centuries,
it was very profitable for white society
to evangelize the story
that black people were subhuman
and therefore could be enslaved.
Nazi-ism and the idea
of the innate superiority of the aryan people
is a more recent falsehood,
which also led to untold human suffering.
Recovering from these evil stories
is a multi-generational effort.
That's why any story we hear,
especially when it is widely accepted,
should trigger something else.
Doubt. Doubt is so important.
Take time every day to examine different beliefs
and stay skeptical.
Doubt is an essential counterbalance to story
and one that we should keep developing
as we struggle to be more independent thinkers
and better human beings.
My heartbreak is two stories in particular
that my generation failed to fully develop,
which is why I'm passing the baton to all of you.
They're about equality and interdependence.
When Carl Marx rejected the exploitative
factories of the 1880s,
his story was about replacing the bosses
with the dictatorship of the proletariat,
power to the people.
Unfortunately, we came to learn
that dictatorships of any flavor
stifle human flourishing.
We need a new story around equality,
something beyond Margaret Thatcher and Carl Marx
that bonds together the very lucky and less lucky.
By very lucky, I mean those born beautiful, healthy,
athletic, intelligent, empathetic,
those born in peaceful countries to caring parents,
and those who got bedtime stories read to them every night.
Many of you, like me, have won several of these lotteries
and have also worked hard to build on that luck.
So what is the duty of the more lucky to the less lucky?
In the natural world, it is zero.
The lion feels no obligation towards the lamb
and the human world isn't much different.
In the United States,
we tell ourselves a story about rugged individualism,
which encourages people to work hard
and keep what they produce,
without the obligation to share much
with others around the world.
My generation did not find a new story
that provides the moral backbone to an era
of common prosperity for both the very lucky and less lucky.
I hope you find such a story
which changes human behavior towards each other.
Another story my generation had only partial success in
is the interdependence for preventing war.
For almost a thousand years,
major European countries fought each other,
virtually nonstop.
Then after World War II,
the European leaders said "Never again."
They worked to tie countries
like Germany and France together economically,
the basic idea behind the European union.
And it worked.
Today, the EU is not perfect,
but it has succeeded at avoiding war in core Europe
longer than ever before.
France and Britain may squabble in football,
but it's not The Hundred Year War of the 1400s.
The story of European identity is a huge success.
Now on a global scale, this story fell flat.
Leaders in my generation have been working
to economically net the whole world together through trade
so that war between any two countries would be unthinkable.
We worked so hard and we were this close
to delivering to you a world of peaceful interdependence
and without war.
But as we've seen with the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
we failed.
And now the world is decoupling into hostile blocks.
Our story about how globalization inhibits war
wasn't good enough.
That's why it's up to your generation
to come up with a better story
about the connection between countries.
One that is more powerful, more heartfelt,
than globalization.
A story that can end war.
Inventions and stories.
One is about harnessing the natural world.
The other is about harnessing the human spirit.
One is about generating more power and prosperity.
The other about generating large scale human cooperation.
Both are avenues for progress.
Now at this point, some you are probably thinking,
"This is all well and good, but I need some downtime.
I just spent four years working my butt off.
Can't I get a little time to Netflix and chill
before I have to go out and save the world?"
(crowd laughs)
The answer is of course, yes.
Which brings me to my final point.
We all know the story of the tortoise and the hare.
Some of you will be hares,
getting your first jobs at Bain and Google and Goldman,
curing your first disease
or making your first billion by 30.
I hope you stay grounded with all that early success.
Others of you will be tortoises and start out slow.
Maybe your path won't be clear
or you'll keep starting over in different areas.
You'll read the class notes five years in
and wonder about yourself
for not doing as well as your classmates
and then you'll chastise yourself for thinking that way.
Please, if you're a tortoise, embrace it.
Collect experiences and wisdom that will serve you later on.
Applaud your hare friends and their successes,
but don't let it bother you.
And when you are older, you will love each other more
if you accept each other's different paths.
I was more tortoise than hare.
I didn't have my first romance until I was 20.
After undergrad, I taught high school math for a few years
in the Kingdom of Eswatini.
And when I eventually made it
to grad school here at Stanford,
I was far behind my classmates
and I wondered why I had spent so much time in Africa.
In hindsight, the challenges I faced as a teacher
gave me the resilience and empathy to be a better CEO.
I didn't start Netflix until I was 37.
I didn't figure out the value of real honesty
until marriage counseling made me realize
how often I said one thing, but did another.
I learned
and Patty and I are celebrating
our 31st anniversary this summer.
(crowd cheers)
My point is if you're a tortoise,
emotionally, economically, intellectually,
artistically, or otherwise, don't despair.
You have the rest of your life
to create the inventions and stories the world needs.
Michelangelo talked about
releasing a statue from a block of marble
as if the statue had its own destiny.
And he was simply it's handmaid.
I think of ideas in the same way.
They have their own destiny and our job as handmaids
is to help these ideas burst out of their marble block.
Graduates, carve your marble blocks
until you release the invention or story
that is yearning to breathe.
I know you can do it.
You grew up on the farm.
Congratulations class of 2022
(crowd applauds)
- [Narrator] For more, please visit us at stanford.edu.