Thank you very much for honoring me with this distinct honorary degree. I really don't deserve it, but thank you very much for giving it to me anyway.
As I stand here today, I want to thank the chairman of your board, Gina Adams. Gina and I have worked together at the Economic Club of Washington for many years. And Gina is an incredibly energetic person who has really made the Economic Club of Washington much more viable than it otherwise would have been. She's also at FedEx, as you may know. At FedEx, as the head of Global Affairs and Regulatory Affairs, she's done a lot of things for this community, including making certain that when the pandas come to Washington and when they leave from Washington, they go on a FedEx plane. And I'm very confident that in the not-too-distant future, the FedEx plane will be bringing back more pandas to the zoo. So, I'm hoping you'll be involved with that as well.
I'd like to thank Sylvia Burwell as well. I've worked with Sylvia for many years at the Council on Foreign Relations, and she's done a spectacular job as president of the American University. In a number of years, I hope she can be president of the American government. Now she's about 25 years too young. You need to be about 80 to be president. In about 25 years, she'll have enough seasoning, and I hope she can lead our country as well as she leads this university.
I'd like to also thank Bob and Arlene Kogod for their incredible, incredible generosity to this country and to the city. Bob and I served together on the Smithsonian board for many, many years. And Bob had incredible, incredibly transformative gifts to the Smithsonian among other things. But the good thing is all the years I've dealt with Bob, he never mentioned again that the first time I went to raise money from him in my first deal at Carlyle, I lost all the money he invested with me. He'd never mentioned that to anybody, and I appreciate that, Bob.
I also want to thank David Marchick. David, as somebody who’s worked with me for many, many years at Carlyle, has done an incredible job. His biggest deficiency is I tried to tell him that private equity as a higher calling than education, but he said no, he'd rather be dean of the Kogod School rather than stay in private equity. So, I failed in that mission to convince him to stay in private equity, but maybe someday he'll come back to the most important calling of mankind—private equity.
So, how many students here never thought that they would be living to see the day that they actually graduated when they came here? The first year? How many of you actually never thought you'd actually graduate? Anybody?
How many parents here never thought they would live to see the day? How many of you are pleased with the education you got at this school? How many? Alright, how many are glad you came here? How many of you used AI to finish your final exams this year? How many of you thought you might get caught but you thought it was still worth the effort? Anybody? How many of you are graduating today know exactly what you're going to do in your career starting tomorrow? How many of you are clueless as to what you're going to do? How many of you expect to be living with your parents for a while? How many parents are happy with that? How many of you would like to join me in the owner’s box for the Orioles and go into the clubhouse with the players? Because you'd like to see what baseball is up close. Anybody here? So, they asked the dean of the Kogod School to pick the best students in this graduating class and have them come with David and me to an Orioles game, and you'll meet all the players and go into their clubhouse. Maybe you go on the field, maybe you can pitch a game or so. And so, we'll do that, and David will work that out with you, and I hope to see a number of you at the Camden Yards very, very soon.
In 1962 before all of you were born and before any of you were conceived, John F. Kennedy made a speech at the American University. And he talked about the importance of bringing peace to the world. At the time, he was urging the governments of the world, particularly the Soviet Union, to figure out how we could end nuclear weapons being used in the atmosphere. Ultimately, shortly before he was assassinated in 1963, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was agreed to, inspired in part by the words he gave to the world at the American University commencement in 1962. As a result of that, we don't have nuclear bombs going off in the atmosphere, in space, or in the oceans, but obviously, we still have lots of tensions around the world. And obviously, war hasn't gone away. Think about this. As long as humans have been on the earth. We have unfortunately, had a complicated brain that has enabled certain things to happen that maybe shouldn't have happened. We have a brain that has been able to create Shakespearean plays, Beethoven symphonies, and Picasso paintings, and now our lives are dependent on the brilliance that has come up with things like cell phones, smartphones, Amazon products, Google searches, and so forth. We now can treat cancers we couldn't treat before. Now we can figure out what your diseases are through MRIs, CAT scans, and an incredible amount of technology since President Kennedy gave that speech in 1962. Our lives have changed dramatically for the better. Yet the human brain still has a flaw which says if you don't look like me, I might discriminate against you. And if you don't like the way I am doing certain things, I might go to war with you. And war is still, unfortunately, troubling our civilization. The wars we now see today and are visible in the paper, the Ukraine war and the war in the Middle East, are only two of eight to 10 different wars in the world right now. And so, as long as humans have been on this face of the earth, we still haven't figured out how to avoid war. And we still haven't figured out how to say to somebody, I disagree with you without trying to kill people, and it's a sad situation.