“So what’s been going on while I’ve been gone?” laughed former US President Barack disarmingly, speaking to students at a University of Chicago event. In a speech peppered with his trademark humour, he held out a helping hand to young leaders looking to make it in public life.

This is what he said:

“I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what is the most important thing I can do for my next job and what I’m convinced of is that, although there are all kinds of issues that I care about and all kinds of issues that I intend to work on, the single most important thing I can do is to help in any way I can prepare the next generation of leadership to take up the baton and to take their own crack at changing the world.”

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Bringing up pressing concerns of economic inequality, lack of opportunities, a skewed criminal justice system and climate change, he reassured his audience that these issues were not “insoluble”. An underlying reason for the concerns, he noted, might be “political gerrymandering” and a fracturing of the relationship between the two parties. He made his point deftly without once mentioning his successor by name.

And then while reflecting on his own career in politics, he delivered a winning one-liner: “If you had pictures of everything I’d done in high school, I probably wouldn’t have been president of the United States.”