I wasn't sure I was coming to fashion week.

President Levin, Vice President Lorimer, if I had -- you

know, all I got was this little class napkin.

I feel if it were a little bigger, I'd turn it into

a doo-rag so I could feel right at home.

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

I just went over and said a word to Dean Brenzel, because

you may have seen he had an article in the Huffington Post.

It said, now if they'd asked me to give this speech, this

is what I would have said.

It's really good.

It's really good.

But if you had done that then I'd have missed all your hats.

How could anybody possibly be worried about the future of the

world when it's in your hand?

[APPLAUSE]

I mean anybody with this kind of judgment and head gear

will have no problem solving all the other challenges.

Let me say, in all seriousness, I'm honored to be here.

I congratulate the graduates, and I want to thank you and

your families, your friends, the faculty and staff for

letting me share this day.

I am profoundly grateful to Yale because of the things I

learned, the professors I had, the friends of a lifetime, the

fact that I still work with a lot of people from Yale in

public health and endeavors we have together in Ethiopia

and in Liberia.

The President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is

here and I thank her.

But most of all, I'm grateful because if I hadn't come here I

never would have met Hilary.

[APPLAUSE]

So, she's been in Shanghai for two days at this big world expo

they're having over there, and she called me last night and

told me she had given this speech and how much it meant to

her, how much you loved it.

She didn't prepare me for your sartorial splendor quite as

much as she should have, but I'm very proud of the work

she's doing and I'm very grateful to Yale because I

would have missed it if I hadn't come here.

And we've had a remarkable life together.

I say that because we've been gone from Yale since 1973

-- that's 37 years, if my math still works.

And yet it seems to me as if we were here yesterday.

So I thought and thought and thought.

I said how can I be brief, which I owe you -- you know,

when you have as good a sense of humor as you've displayed

today, you're at least entitled to a short speech, and still

say something that might be helpful.

Here's the best I can do.

The world you are going into that you will shape, should be

the most interesting, exciting, fulfilling, stunning

time in human history.

I mean after all, we've torn down all these barriers of time

and space and people are no longer confined to where they

were born, and so America has become explosively diverse.

You might be interested to know that at our pavilion in

Shanghai, one of the things that is most emphasized is how

there's somebody here from everywhere.

I'm trying to get the World Cup of soccer to come to America in

2018 or 2022, and my main pitch is this is the only place you

can go where everybody will have a home team

cheering squad.

It's an amazing thing and it makes life a

lot more interesting.

The internet is amazing.

When I became President, believe it or not -- I know for

a lot of you this is the dark ages, but it was really just

yesterday -- on January of 1993, January 20th, you know

how many sites there were on the entire worldwide web? 50.

5-0.

More than that have been added since I started talking.

The average cell phone on the day I took the Oath of

Office weighed five pounds.

Now you know somebody like me with big hands has to have one

wide enough so that you only had to redial about one

in every four times.

It's a fascinating time.

Look at all these scientific discoveries that have been

coming out -- the genome was sequenced first in 2000,

probably the major scientific advance of the eight years I

served, and I spent a lot of your family's tax money

trying to get that done.

[LAUGHTER]

But certainly the most amusing, off-shoot of genome research

appeared the last couple of weeks when we learned that

every one of us in our genomic make up are between 1% and 4%

descended from neanderthals.

And I'm glad all of us made it because if only the men had

made it, we'd never hear the end of it.

And now we all have an excuse for every dumb thing we've ever

done going back to age five.

It's great.

I say that but it is interesting.

It is interesting furthermore that the genome sequencing's

first profoundly significant finding was that, from a

genetic point of view, all human beings are

99.9% the same.

Then Craig Ventor's independent project said, no that's all

wrong, we're only 99.5% the same.

Now with three billion units, 4/10 of 1% is significant, but

from a social, political, philosophical point of

view, it doesn't matter.

You just look around this vast crowd of your classmates, every

single physical difference you can see is the product of

somewhere between 1/10 and 5/10 of a percent of your

genetic makeup.

And what I want to say is most of us spend 99% of our

time thinking about that 1/10, the 5/10 of 1%.

You're going to have a lot of people tell you, and it'll all

be true, how smart you are, how gifted you are, how fortunate

you've been, how, as our committee said, if we just give

one of you a lever, you can move the world.

It's all true.

What I want you to take a few minutes thinking about is the

99.5% of you, because my basic belief is the only way that you

can make the most of the world that lies before you, is to

believe that it's interesting and fascinating and profoundly

important as all of our diversities are, our common

humanity matters more.

And that leads us to certain fundamental conclusion, as does

the fact that our fate has caught up with the fate of

the planet which we occupy.

I think about this a lot now.

I think about what young people who have more tomorrows than

yesterdays are to make of the world they have inherited.

It's really quite extraordinary.

I read just this week, we had this amazing breakthrough in

physics attempting to determine how life on earth began, and

the results seem to suggest that subatomic elements of

matter, which normally under the laws of physics would be

expected to cancel each other out over and over and over

again so life could never have formed in the first place,

didn't because there were slightly more positive than

negative elements of the most basic building block of matter.

If that's true, it is a metaphor for how

you have to live.

Thank God and the primordial slime that positive

outweighed the negative.

That's about it, and about what you have to do.

And I say that because the world you live in for all

of its joys has three problems not very much

in evident here today.

It is too unstable, it is too unequal, and it is

completely unsustainable.

So that if you want your children and grandchildren to

be sitting on this lawn with their own inevitable choices of

funky hats, you got to deal with those three things, and

you gotta deal with them as an integral part of your life, not

something that's over here that you think about sometimes,

because these three challenges, that's where your 99.5%

to 99.9% comes in.

It doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter how

wealthy you grow, you're going to have to share

that with everyone.

The world is too unequal.

Half the world's people live on less than $2.00 a day, a

billion on less than $1.00 a day, a billion people have no

access to clean water, a billion people go to bed hungry

every night, two and a half billion people have no access

to sanitation, one in four of all the people who die on

planet earth this year will die of AIDS, tuberculosis, Malaria

and infections related to dirty water. 80% of them will

be children under five.

Those are the killers of the poor.

And there are no health networks out there

for many of them.

I work with wonderful people from Yale, who just took a

picture with me before I came in, and our Health Access

Initiative in Ethiopia and Liberia, and Ethiopia, when we

started, the country has 80 million people, 58 million live

in villages of fewer than 1,000, 60,000 villages, there

were 700 clinics in the whole country.

Now moving toward 17,000.

We get 17,000 built, everybody will be within a day's

walk of a health care.

These are things that we don't think about all the time,

but the world is unequal.

You're sitting here getting a degree from one of the greatest

universities in history, founded in 1701.

There are more than 100 million children today that still never

darkened a schoolhouse door, and another 100 million who go

to school but not really, because they don't have trained

teachers or adequate learning material.

When even one year of schooling in a poor country adds 10%

a year to learning capacity for life.

It's an unequal world within wealthy countries -- most but

not all, the world has grown more unequal.

The day before the financial meltdown, 2/3 of American

families after inflation had lower incomes than they did

the day I left office seven and a half years earlier.

Median family income dropped $2,000 while the cost of health

care doubled, the cost of college after inflation went up

75%, and America fell from first to tenth in the world for

the first time since World War II in the percentage of our

young people 25 to 35 that had four year degrees.

Now I think the Bill just passed by Congress to cut the

cost of student loans, the cost of repayment, and let all of

you pay it back as a share of your income is a very good

start, because that means people can graduate from

college with a degree and still join Teach For America, still

join the Peace Corps, still join Americorps, still go out

into rural areas and serve people, or go halfway

around the world.

This is a very good thing, but we have to face the

fact that our own country grew more unequal.

The world is more unstable.

It's entirely too unstable.

We deal with the threat of terror in every country -- in

America, all the way from the first World Trade Center

bombing in 1993 to this poor tragic Pakistani man who got

two degrees in America, got his citizenship, used it to fly

home to Waziristan and learn how to make a bomb and tried to

set it off in Times Square.

Thank God he didn't learn his lesson very well, and

people escaped unharmed.

But it shows you that when you tear down all the walls and you

can break through all the barriers of information, that

the same things that empower you to get access to more

information more quickly than ever before, could empower

you to build bombs.

It's an unstable world.

The financial crisis started in America, pretty soon it's all

over Europe, then it hurts Latin America and Asia.

Now you've got Greece, a very small part of the European

union imperiling the whole enterprise of the common

currency and spooking investors around the world in every place

that has significant debt.

We have to reduce the instability.

And the third thing we have to recognize is that because of

the way we produce and consume energy, the world you live in

is totally unsustainable.