The reporter apparently knows his age, but not his birthdate. So, I guess you have two choices. 
It’s like my brothers, who were born close together on the timeline. Sometimes, they’re only a year apart calendar-wise by year, and sometimes two years.
An intern at my work just graduated and his cap was pretty impressive too. It had a famous spaceship mounted to a fully functional 6-degree-of-freedom motion base, along with lights and sound. That guy is going places.
The reason most structures like that are so boring is because they’re so well built they don’t hit the news due to collapsing, tilting, breaking apart, or being exceptionally flammable. This is a good thing. Not everyone needs to be a diva in their chosen career.
I agree with all of that. I also stand by my statement that people who are are known for their quiet competence working on well-understood, conservative designs do not typically make for interesting and entertaining commencement speakers. Good engineering professors, maybe. But that’s not always the same thing.
“I completed my degree in under 12 parsecs.”
… when I’m crossing a bridge or visiting a skyscraper the last thing I want is to be “excited” by the experience 
I have no problem with Mark Rober but this seems like a singularly uninspired gag. Even a primary school student could glue a drone to a mortarboard. You’d think that an engineer known for his stunts would bring his a game to a graduation speech, especially one at MIT. At the very least the drone could have been hidden entirely in the cap, so it flew off without warning.
… I often get excited when I spot a really clever detail or just from seeing how well it was designed and built overall.
No matter what field of human endeavour, you just get more out of it when you’ve learned how to spot the finer things.
Yeah, it wasn’t the most amazing gag, but most of his truly impressive stunts involve a lot of trial-and-error, iterating the design until it finally works. In this instance he had only one chance to make it work, and any kind of failure could have sent spinning blades into the crowd, so I guess he was just playing it conservative.
Was he told that day? It’s not like he couldn’t have had roped off test areas with the right measurements to do said trial and error. You don’t have to test in production.
I don’t know for sure about MIT but I’ve read that the majority of elite universities don’t pay speaking fees to their commencement speakers, even the ones who are well-known celebrities. So if he wasn’t getting paid it’s pretty understandable that he wouldn’t want to put in the weeks or months of effort that he does with his more famous gags. The speech was what it was.
Caltech has spoken.
In spite of the usual boring reputation, things still go badly.
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