In the final stretch of advice before her closing, Poehler urges graduates not to let past hurt make them guarded. She follows it with a perfectly targeted joke for a Harvard audience: 'Don't try to give me that nerd argument that your heart is a Batman with a limited edition silver batarang and therefore if it stays in its original packaging it increases in value.' The joke works because it acknowledges the temptation to treat vulnerability as a risk to be managed — something Harvard students, trained to optimize everything, might be especially prone to. But Poehler's whole speech has been an argument that the messy, uncontrolled parts of life — collaboration, connection, showing up even when scared — are where the real value lies.