I am honored to be part of this joyous day celebrating your outstanding achievements here at St. Andrew’s. It also happens to be an important life milestone for me: it has been 50 years minus one day since I was sitting where you’re sitting now, wearing exactly the same clothes the guys are wearing, graduating with the class of 1976. I’ll be back here in three weeks with my classmates. Yesterday, I was in Princeton for my 45th reunion. Somehow, I’ve reached the era of reunions with big numbers in front of them. 

I’d like to think that the feelings I remember having on my graduation day—excited, happy but also a bit sad, proud but anxious about my future and how well I would measure up in the world outside of this special, nurturing place—might not be too far from the emotions you’ve been feeling this weekend and here today.

Still, 50 years is by almost any measure other than the geological a very long time. When your head of school visited my wife, Lisa, and me in our home in Brooklyn last January and asked me to speak today, my first thought was, “What can 1976 have to say to 2026?” I arrived at St. Andrew’s in its very last year as an all-boys school. It was the era of Watergate and the OPEC energy crisis. There was one computer at the school, and it took up and whole room down in the basement. There was a room on C Corridor where students could smoke!

But I am here today, because I had this idea. If I could speak to my younger self at his graduation, knowing what I know now, what would I tell him? In Christopher Nolan’s science fiction film Interstellar, there’s a scene at the climax when the main character, Cooper, tries to warn his younger self not to go to on the mission he’s now on by sending the message STAY back through time.  What messages would I send back to my 17-year-old self, if he could hear me now? I came up with three things.

The first thing I would say is, although it seems like you’re saying goodbye to St. Andrew’s today, you’re actually not. You’re going to carry all the best things about your years here—friendship, mentorship, the joy of learning, the desire to excel, teamwork, and faith—along with you as you go through life, not just for the next five or 10 years, but for the next 50. Your SAS experience is a moveable feast. You’re going to find yourself relying on it to keep you grounded, and remind you who you are, as go through life, no matter where it takes you.

The second thing I would say to young me is, “Don’t expect that your education and your classroom knowledge and book smarts will align with the opportunities that the world is going to offer you.”  Your career is going to lie in a completely different field than what you’ve got planned for yourself. You’re never going to believe this, but the observational skills you learned in biology class with Mr. Amos, all those hours you spent closely observing and reporting on a colony of pine beetles in a dead log in the woods near Noxontown Pond, will end up being put to use not in a laboratory as a researcher, or even in the practice of science. Instead—spoiler alert!—the hours will lead to a long career of writing nonfiction for The New Yorker, where you will study and report on colonies not of beetles but of people, whose stories you will tell. Oh, and all those hours you spent training with Dave Washburn, the now legendary coach of the crew team, will never get you to the Olympics, but they will give you the grit to face the challenges that lie ahead. 

The last thing I would say to myself is that your real diploma, your credential, is not the document you’re getting today. Your credential is your prepared mind. A prepared mind possesses critical thinking skills, and it has the ability to adapt, to learn, unlearn, and relearn—to live with uncertainty and keep moving. That’s what will matter most in the years ahead.  

 A prepared mind isn’t the same as knowing what you want to do with your life. If you are lucky, opportunity will present you with a chance to do something that you love. But it might not be obvious what that thing is. Instead of your mind, you may have to trust your intuition, and your heart, to find it. Whatever it is, it probably is not going to fit neatly into the future you may be imagining for yourself today, or what your parents have imagined for you. It’s going to mean taking chances. It might be hard, and full of doubt and struggle, but if you figure out how to do something you love, doing it will be its own reward. 

In my case, it meant discovering that while I enjoyed biology and natural history, the thing I really liked was the teacher, the great William Amos. I liked how he explained things. It took me a while to realize it, but I didn’t actually want to do science, I wanted to explain it. Discovering that there was a field of writing—long-form journalism—that matched my skill set, and a place that would employ me to practice it, didn’t occur until some years later, when I took John McPhee’s Literature of Fact course at Princeton in 1980. Then it required another 10 years after that of honing my craft before I got my first New Yorker piece published, and five more years until a joined the staff. Twenty years after I left college, I returned to teach the Literature of Fact course myself, and one of my former students, a young woman from Wilmington, North Carolina named Lauren Collins, is now a colleague and one of the magazine’s star millennial staff writers.  

All of that is going to happen to that kid sitting there with his class, and he has no idea. But it’s all already in him, he just has to find it.

But what if I were graduating with the class of 2026? As it happens our daughter, Rose Seabrook, is graduating with the class of 2026 from her high school in Brooklyn, so I do think a lot about the world your generation is going to inherit and how best to prepare for it.  One thing I didn’t need to worry about back in 1976, but I suspect that many of you may be thinking about now, is—and yes, here comes the AI part of the speech; please hold your booing until the end—how do you prepare to compete with a super intelligence that can do almost any job faster and cheaper, and maybe even better than humans can? I say to my daughter, “Congratulations! You’re graduating at the most interesting possible moment in human history!” which is not something we heard a lot back 1976. She reminds me that, “May you live in interesting times,” is thought to have been an ancient Chinese curse.

One of the things I’ve observed over a long a career of writing about technology is how hard it is to predict the future. I think that’s because while it is sometimes possible to infer future outcomes from current events, it’s impossible to anticipate how other changes will shape the way those outcomes are perceived. 

Still, it might be prudent for us to begin to imagine a world in which we are not the superior intelligence, because by the time you’re out of college, that could be the case. I have a couple thoughts on what that world might be like.

There’s no question that AI is going allow your generation to accomplish incredible things. In science and medicine, it will enable researchers to make extraordinary discoveries of new drugs, and possibly find cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and cancer. In business, whole new industries will grow up around applications and consumer products and new sources of energy built around AI.  

In the arts, on the other hand, although AI will continue to democratize access to making movies and music, I see vibrant communities of AI resistance growing up, giving birth to new economies of artisans and craftspeople whose products will be “AI-free,” similar to the organic movement in agriculture. We’re already seeing anti-AI political movements; we’ve hardly even begun to figure out how to regulate AI at a government level; and we will need new laws and policies to ensure that more than just a few get to share the wealth AI will create. 

I'm actually kind of optimistic about having a superintelligence around, not just because of the things we might do with it, but also because of the things we might do in response to it. It seems to me that AI is going to force us to become more aware of our shared humanity—of what it means to be human. Paradoxically, I think that AI could lead to a kind of new workplace humanism, when the metrics of how we measure success begin to shift toward values like empathy, social intelligence, commitment to helping others, and building communities. What does success look like when skill is no longer scarce? Maybe success is not just productivity and profit, maybe it’s also measured in kindness and moral courage.  Humans will seek roles that require presence, accountability, and a genuine stake in the outcome—things AI doesn’t have. You're never going to outwork the machine. But you can out-human it.

I can’t think of a better place to discover, learn, and internalize those human values than St. Andrew’s. And here, 1976 can speak to 2026, because the school’s core values of mutual respect, empathy, and service haven’t changed. 

So take pride in your critical thinking skills, hold onto your humanity, bring St Andrew’s along the way to help you, and go out and be fantastic.  

Thank you all very much.

And God bless the Class of 2026.