Graduation season produces a lot of forgettable advice. Fareed Zakaria’s address at Bard College this year was not that.
The TV host and journalist walked onto that stage and did something rare: he made the case for being human at exactly the moment everyone is debating whether machines might do it better.
His challenge to graduates was to be intellectually provocative, politically aware, artistically sensitive, historically informed, ecologically conscious, emotionally authentic, and, in his words, most importantly, brief.
On a hot summer day, he encouraged graduates to get an ice cream cone at the school’s famous Holy Cow Ice Cream joint. For us, it might be a trip to Uncle Ray’s (if you know, you know). I found myself replaying his ideas and scribbling notes.
The goal is not to compete with machines. It is to be more fully human. A great teacher. A loyal friend. A parent who sacrifices. Someone who struggles honestly and loves generously.
Zakaria flipped the AI conversation. Forget artificial intelligence, he said. Champion HI — Human Intelligence. The human brain runs on roughly 20 watts of energy. An entire data center cannot replicate what a toddler does naturally: read a room, sense tension in silence, or detect a fake smile. Aristotle told us more than 2,000 years ago that we are social animals. We are not computers. We never were.
A computer can describe fear. It cannot lie awake at midnight.
He reached for John Keats’ concept of “negative capability,” the human gift of sitting with uncertainty and doubt without demanding resolution. He pointed to the Japanese art of kintsugi, also known as golden joinery, the practice of repairing broken pottery with veins of gold and finding beauty precisely in the fracture. Hemingway said it differently: The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
The qualities no algorithm can produce — empathy, wisdom, judgment, courage, compassion, humor, and love — are ours. The goal is not to compete with machines. It is to be more fully human. A great teacher. A loyal friend. A parent who sacrifices. Someone who struggles honestly and loves generously.
Use AI to do things, he said. Use your mind to be human.
He closed by asking graduates to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, written by a deaf composer who never heard a single note of it performed.
That is the thing about human intelligence. It does not reduce things. It transcends.
To the Class of 2026: Go be champions of HI.
Thank you to Scott Ward, Rotarian of Linden, for sharing the commencement address with me. I hope others in our community will enjoy it as well. Fareed Zakaria Gives the 2026 Commencement Address at Bard College.
Noah C. Morgan, MBA, CFP, EA, is a Certified Financial PlannerTM and Principal at Acorn Wealth Advisors, a boutique SEC-registered investment advisory firm in Fenton, MI. For nearly two decades, he has helped individuals, business owners and families make confident, well-informed decisions in every area of their financial lives, from investments and retirement to tax and estate planning to live the life they want and need.
