Thank you so much, President Folt. I'm so grateful for such a warm and generous introduction and heartfelt congratulations for 20 years of extraordinary leadership at Dartmouth, UNC and now USC.

Thank you for this opportunity to be with you at such a special moment in your lives.

It’s great to be here among the Trojans.

I know historically a Greek showing up in the land of the Trojans didn’t end all that well for the hosts. But I promise, there’s no Trojan horse here. Traveler is the only horse in the area!

Graduation is actually my favorite time of the year. It’s like wisdom season, a parenthesis in time in which we gather together, pause, and collectively reflect on life’s big questions.

Commencements often focus on how to succeed in the world and get ahead. And that’s certainly important.

But today is the baccalaureate, and a baccalaureate is less about how to build a career and more about how to build a life — a life that includes a career but is not defined by it.

And building a good life, however modern, requires tapping into some ancient truths.

That’s especially important right now. Because you’re not just graduating at any time, or in any year.

You’re graduating at a time of profound transition.

Of course, every generation assumes they are living in an age of transition. Maybe even Eve turned to Adam and said, darling, we’re living in a time of transition.

But this really is a time of transition.

You’ve been surrounded by technology your whole lives. But this is different.

This wave of AI technology is going to change everything about how we live, how we work, and our sense of who we are.

From the beginning of time, there have always been moments that are inflection points, that change human history, that separate life into what came before and what comes after. The discovery of fire, the wheel, the printing press, electricity — these were all transformational to the fate of humanity.

But of all the transformational possibilities AI opens up, the one I’m most passionate about is the one that’s rarely discussed: how AI can help humans become more human.

In a fireside chat with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, I asked him what he expected the world his children will inherit to be like.

He replied that his children will be the first generation that will never be more intelligent than AI.

Now, before you accuse Sam of being too hard on his kids, all experts agree that AI’s cognitive abilities will soon be greater than humans’ — even those humans graduating from USC.

If Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” no longer defines us — if the things humans are better at continue to narrow — that raises the question: what does it then mean to be human?

What are the most essential qualities — wisdom, resilience, compassion, courage, loving — that humans need to bring into this new era?

And how can AI help us tap into that center, that powerful place inside us where all these qualities live?

In 1968, as part of Apollo 8, William Anders became one of the first four humans to orbit the moon.

As he did, he took the famous “Earthrise” photo, and later declared, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

Right now, we are at an equivalent moment.

We’re going to great lengths to explore AI and make it more human, but AI’s greatest potential will be in helping us discover ourselves and who we truly are — helping humans become more human by forcing us to ask the big questions we have been neglecting for centuries.

The celebrated social critic Susan Sontag once said that “every era has to reinvent the project of ‘spirituality’ for itself.”

And with AI, you can be the first generation that will be able to use the most modern technology to reconnect us with our most ancient and universal longing — the longing to connect both with ourselves and with something larger than ourselves.

Of course, that part of our humanity beyond our intelligence — whether we call it consciousness, soul, spirit, atman — has been the foundation of every spiritual tradition, of both Western and Eastern civilizations. It’s that centered place of wisdom, peace and strength that’s in all of us — that’s actually our birthright.

But as true as that is, it’s just as true that we’re all going to veer away from that place again and again and again. That’s the nature of life.

In fact, we’ll probably be off course more than we’re on course. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, "it's never been easier to run away from ourselves."

But it’s impossible to live a good life, a full life, without keeping a pathway to this place open.

In the last few decades, millions of Americans have left organized religion, but now a new Pew survey found that a staggering 92% of adults say they have a spiritual belief in God, in the afterlife, in “something spiritual beyond the natural world,” or in the existence of a soul.

It’s no coincidence that this flourishing of the spiritual impulse is happening as AI outstrips humans in intelligence, putting into stark relief the spiritual truth encoded within us that makes us uniquely human.

It doesn’t matter what we call this spiritual part of ourselves, or what practices we introduce into our lives to help us connect to it, but it does matter — it matters very much — whether we acknowledge it and incorporate it into our lives.

When we don’t, we amputate from our experience a fundamental truth and thousands of years of Western and Eastern wisdom that celebrate this part of ourselves.

And for that we pay a heavy price. Looking at the breakdowns all around us — the mental health crisis, depression, anxiety, suicides, deaths of despair — we see the huge costs we’re bearing both individually and collectively.

So while AI will soon exceed our intelligence capabilities, it will never exceed our consciousness capabilities.

The question is, how can we use what AI can do to help augment what it can’t do?

AI’s superpower is hyperpersonalization, and we can use this superpower to help us tap into our superpowers.

At the core of philosophy and religion is the idea of self-knowledge. To become who we want to be we have to know who we are.

In ancient Greece it was distilled in the simple Delphic admonition at the Temple of Apollo, “Know thyself.”

The Bhagavad Gita exhorts us to take up the “sword of self-knowledge.”

And AI can know us better than we know ourselves because AI never forgets!

With its ability to process and store several billion data points, and with its super-human memory, AI will know what sacred texts, music and nature move us. It will recall that piece of poetry that inspired you in college — which, trust me, you will forget.

So we can use AI not just to know much more about the world around us, but to discover more about the world inside us.

AI can give us real-time nudges and recommendations when we most need them to keep us connected to that centered place of wisdom and strength.

That’s a personal mission of mine to have AI be a copilot on our journey, not just toward greater productivity, or better PowerPoint presentations, or optimized dating profiles, but toward greater physical health, greater mental health and greater spiritual health — a kind of GPS for the soul.

And like the GPS in our car, when we fall short or take a wrong turn, the GPS doesn’t judge us. It doesn’t say, “I said turn left, you idiot.” It just recalculates and course-corrects with a new route to where we need to be.

Once AI helps us fulfill the directive to know thyself, it will then be our job to fulfill the directive to be true to ourselves.

There are many AI doomsayers who claim that AI will hack the operating system of civilization. Let’s be honest: social media technologies have already hacked the operating system of civilization, exploiting our weaknesses, biases and addictions with skyrocketing increases in polarization as well as depression and anxiety.

But with AI, we have a technology that, instead of accelerating the problems caused by previous technologies, can actually be a defense against them.

As the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

By creating a barrier against the noise of the outside world and the attention-mining algorithms of previous technologies, AI can help quiet the noise.

Of course, AI and algorithms will continue to be used to exploit the worst in us. But humans are a mixture of good and bad.

As you venture forth today, never forget that we’re all works in progress.

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “The line separating good and evil passes… right through every human heart.”

And with the benefit and clarity of hindsight about what led us to where we are now, we can proceed with eyes wide open to use this new technology to strengthen what’s best in us, to nurture what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

I know there is a lot of excitement at the moment about exploring outer space. But I’m really so much more excited about how AI will help us explore a more neglected, unmapped and equally infinite frontier: inner space.

That's, of course, the ultimate frontier. Because that’s where that centered place, the eye of the hurricane, is to be found.

And given the time of radical uncertainty and turbulence you’re graduating in, trust me, you will need to find it more than ever as you leave this place.

Incentives are superpowers. They help shape the future.

Up to now, much of our technology has produced a world that consumes our attention, that keeps us living in the shallows, barraging us with constant, insistent, flashing, high-volume signals that distract us from asking life’s big questions.

It can lock us into a perpetual present, keeping us from tapping into the wisdom of the past, or building the future that we truly want.

Remember, your attention is your most valuable resource. And, what you give you attention to is what you give your life to.

So as you leave these beautiful grounds and take your place in the world, demand a world of technology that’s worthy of you.

And now that we have a technology that can answer any question in seconds, can we please use this moment not just to ask the right questions of the machines but to also ask the right questions of ourselves?

In the conversation on AI, we hear a lot about agents and how the world will be shaped by them. Yes, you will be surrounded by agents. But you are the ultimate agent. You are the architects of the future.

And if you build it based on what’s best in humanity, they will come, because the longing to connect with what’s best in us, with the better angels of our nature, is at least as deeply imprinted and encoded as what’s worst in us.

And now, USC class of 2025, Congratulations! Onward, upward and inward!

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