Obama on AI and More

Speaker 1

Good evening and welcome to Colgate University in beautiful Hamilton, New York. Yeah, Hamilton, New York deserves an applause line. And welcome to tonight’s edition of the Kirshner Family Global Leaders Series.

Through this series, made possible by the Kirshner Family and the Parents Fund, Colgate has welcomed a remarkable array of men and women in the arts, in politics, and from the academy. And of course, tonight, we’re going to welcome one of the most consequential figures of the 21st century, not just in the United States, but around the world. It’s a rare thing to be able to say, “Tonight’s guest needs no introduction.”

“Tonight’s guest needs no introduction.” So without further ado, please welcome to the stage, President Barack Obama.

Barack Obama

I don’t want to milk this too much. It is good to see you, Colgate. And whoever was in charge of arranging the weather, good job. But I am not fooled. I know it’s going to get a little colder around here.

Speaker 1

Not for a while. We’re good. We’re good. Welcome to Colgate, Mr. President.

Barack Obama

Thank you so much, Mr. President. It’s great to see you.

Speaker 1

Now that we’ve established parity, I think we can begin the conversation. I have to say, we’re going to have an hour together in which we’re going to talk about a number of topics.

Barack Obama

This is true.

Speaker 1

This is true. But what I have to say is, ever since we announced that you were coming, The one question that has come at me as I walk across the campus, the one question everybody wants to answer, so I might as well open up with the first question, which is, how’s Michelle Obama?

Barack Obama

Well, listen, I understand I’m your second choice. I get it. In the popularity rankings in the Obama household, I am last.

So I am — this was a tough week. Some people are aware we lost our dog, Sonny, this week. And we were talking about it backstage because you have an older dog.

And I also know there are parents here. The connection you have with your pets, obviously, are really important. When they’re pets that grew up with your kids, then they’re more than just — it’s not just that you love them, they’re the repository of memories that you have with your children as they were growing up and the passage of time.

So that’s been a little tough on Michelle. Otherwise, though, she is living her best life. And she is working with our foundation around empowering young women and girls.

She is doing a podcast and looking cute. And the fact that she has not kicked me to the curb is - I am grateful for it.

Speaker 1

The President: It’s early.

Barack Obama

The President: It’s early. Well, it’s not that early. It’s not that early. I re-celebrate 35 years this year, so.

Speaker 1

The President: Congratulations.

Barack Obama

The President: I feel like I’m at the stage where her retraining another guy - — not worth the effort. She might as well just ride it out.

Speaker 1

The President: Well, I’m glad she’s settling. And I think I should congratulate both of you on the opening of the Obama Center.

Barack Obama

The President: Thank you very much. I will tell you, we were taking some photographs backstage, and a number of people had already gone to visit. And for those of you, if you get a chance in Chicago, I think you will enjoy it.

Because the story is — it’s not really just the story about my presidency. The museum tells a story about America. And the goal here is to create a campus around which we can learn from each other about how to bring about positive social change, and not just here in this country, but internationally.

And that’s a lot of what our program is about.

Speaker 1

Well, it seems very exciting. It looks very beautiful. So you must be relieved and thrilled.

Barack Obama

Well, you’ve been through capital campaigns.

Speaker 1

Oh, yeah.

Barack Obama

They’re a lot better when you’re on the other side.

Speaker 1

I’m looking forward to that, Dave. So the first couple questions I have, I would like to invite you to just reflect on your presidency and your time there. So before you became president of the United States, you taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

You were a community organizer. You were a U.S. senator.

You also were in the Illinois House. So in all of those positions, you start learning about America and you build conceptions of what America is and what Americans are like. But the presidency must reveal something about the nation and its people that all those other positions wouldn’t have shown you.

So for like good or ill, what did that seat show you about the nation and its people?

Barack Obama

It’s a great question. I’d preface it by saying this. I had the advantage of serving in the Illinois Senate for a while.

And Illinois is an interesting state because demographically it’s about as representative of America as any state. It doesn’t just reflect sort of the racial makeup of the country, but it’s also urban and rural, and it’s north and south. If you go to southern Illinois, it’s much closer to Kentucky than it is to Chicago, culturally as well as geographically.

So spending time in the state legislature there, you’re meeting folks from the inner city, but you’re also meeting hog farmers and bean farmers, and you’re getting a sense of the diversity of the country. And campaigning, partly because I had such a long primary, which was, at the time, I won’t say I was thrilled with grinding it out for 18 months, but it did have the benefit of me campaigning in every state, which is rare. because these days things get so divided.

That’s a red state, that’s a blue state. We really went everywhere, Idaho and Mississippi. And I think the only state we didn’t go to was Alaska during the campaign.

So I had gotten a sense of what the country was like from that process. And going into the presidency, my conclusion has always been, and it was affirmed, this is a really big country. It’s really complicated.

You’ve got people whose ancestry is rooted in every corner of the globe. There is a certain optimism, a certain character of neighborliness. There is a — the thing that strikes you when you is that we are not as divided as our politics or our media would suggest.

Now, that’s a problem structurally. There are reasons why our politics divides us, whether it’s gerrymandering or unrestricted campaign spending and negative ads. And there’s also structural reasons why the media divides us, because in this social media world now, we’re all siloed off, and we each are pushed towards a very particular vision of the world, often fed by fear, that makes us mistrust each other.

When you’re on the ground, what’s striking is that - I remember the first time I started campaigning in Iowa, and look, there is a lot of corn there. That stereotype is true. But you’ll go into a rural community in Iowa and discover that here’s a town that was founded by hippies, and here is, there’s an Orthodox community, Jewish community living side by side with a bunch of farmers, and people work together, and they extend grace towards each other in ways that you do not see in your doom scrolling.

And so that I think was something that I, I came to appreciate even more when I was in office. Just two other things I would say are worth noting, and this has less to do with the American people than the role of America, the vantage point that you get. The first is that our government is vast, and our system of government is deliberately set up decentralized power.

It is very hard to make that thing work if you have the levels of mistrust that we currently have in our system, particularly between the parties. And the other thing that is striking is the degree to which America, up until recently, really did underwrite order in ways that you sort of understand, but it’s not until you get into the office that you realize so much of what we take for granted about freedom of navigation or the global nature of the Internet, or how do we respond when there’s a natural disaster somewhere in the world, or how do we set an agenda to deal with certain security issues. Even our adversaries often expect us to solve big problems that cross national boundaries.

And that’s something we should be proud of, but it’s also something that we should feel some responsibility for, because when we don’t get things right, when we’re not our best selves, the whole world gets a little dimmer. And when we stand up for values like human rights or freedom of speech or express concern and are proactive around issues like climate change, then not everybody goes along 100%, but the world leans into a better direction.

Speaker 1

I wanna pick up on something. You’re talking about, the American people gave you a sense of hope that they were not as divided, but then you’re talking about how fear is working these days. The President of the United States, in some ways, sets the emotional weather for the nation.

An optimistic President can be an optimistic, can create a sense of optimism, not only around that President about the nation, but I just wanna pick up something, how the world sees the United States can be driven by the behavior of the President. What you honor, what you dignify, what you deride, what you notice, what you don’t notice. When did you feel that when you came into the office?

What did you do with that responsibility, that power? Was it a heavy thing to carry?

Barack Obama

You know, I… I had certain expectations for myself in terms of how I was going to conduct myself in office. I didn’t find it that hard, ‘cause they were the expectations I had for myself in terms of how I acted as a grown man. So, you know, like… You know, basic behavior, honesty, hard work, doing your homework, treating people with respect.

Speaker 1

The President: Bless your heart.

Barack Obama

The President: So I didn’t find it to be a strain. There are certain moments in the presidency - let’s take, for example, disasters. I remember there was a series of tornadoes, I think in 2011, ‘12, and Missouri got hit, and then later Alabama got hit.

And you’d go as President to places where nobody voted for you. And you’d see — or at least didn’t vote for me, because you’d see Confederate flags on the trucks. But you know what, when you showed up and somebody had lost their home or they had lost their lives, and you gave them a hug and you listened to them and you said, “I see you and what you’re going through, and the country’s here to help,” the political stuff went away, right?

It got stripped away, and now there was a very basic sense of, we look out for each other. And that was a powerful moment. And so you’d go through times where this was particularly important.

Obviously, as Commander-in-Chief, for example. I remember there was a terrible incident in which a bunch of US service members had been killed, and intelligence officers had been killed in one event. And I flew to Dover, and the plane came in, and there’s what’s called a dignified transfer.

The caskets are offloaded from the military plane. And generally, the President, during wartime, isn’t visiting all the time, but on this particular occasion, I decided to go up, and we stood there. And it’s a remarkable, solemn, deeply moving ceremony, because it’s just quiet.

And I, myself, I think Attorney General Holder was there, and you hold the salute. These are caskets that are draped with the American flag. And you hold the salute there, and it took, because of the tragedy, the number of people who had been killed, you know, We stood there for an hour or so.

No speeches, no commentary. It was just, again, a signal of what is important and the sacrifices that have been made. And it’s interesting how later on you’d see certain service members who, again, weren’t big Obama fans.

but they would notice that and sometimes they’d come up and say, “I didn’t vote for you, “but that meant a lot to me.” So you’re constantly, I think, in that office trying to signify, “Who are we?” And try to exhibit some of our best selves.

Now, when I first came into office, the last point I’d make about this, You guys will remember there was quite a bit of hoopla about me getting elected. And I was very sensitive to not play into the celebrity aspects of the presidency, because we were also going through an unprecedented financial crisis. We had two wars going on.

And so I spent my first year really just focused on policy and had kind of a lunch pail attitude. I did not want to be a show horse. I wanted to be a workhorse.

And the country benefited from our focus, and we had a lot of really great people in the administration, and we got a lot done. But what I came to realize, partly because we got clobbered in a midterm, because unemployment was 10 percent the fallout from the financial crisis. Part of my job was, in fact, to tell stories about the country, to tell stories about how we manage adversity, how we treat each other.

There was a poetry that I think Governor Cuomo of New York once said, “You campaign in poetry and you govern in prose.” But in fact, actually, you have to govern with a little bit of poetry as well. You have to be able to inspire people because a lot of the issues that we work on are hard.

And people get discouraged. And progress can be slower than I think most folks want.

Speaker 1

Speaking of a challenge right now, you’re on a campus, and we are wrestling with what AI is, what it means on a campus. You have recently, just this week even, you’ve been speaking about AI. And I’m trying to remember where I saw it, but you had said perhaps the greatest risk of AI, And by the way, you acknowledge what good it could bring to us in science and medicine.

I mean, you’re very clear about that. But you identified a particular risk, which was to have this tool that is changing by the day, to have this tool in the hands of a very small number of private companies. That presents a quite specific risk.

How do you address that risk in a democracy? What’s the democratic, I can imagine what an autocratic response would be, like this is ours. What is the democratic response to a tool, a power, that we don’t know what it is?

So what is the, again, I really think in our culture, in our system, in our government, how do we regulate this or how do we address this?

Barack Obama

Okay, settle in here. I might have to — I’m a former senator. This might feel like a filibuster, but I’m going to take some time on this, and I want to go a little deep on it, partly because I am encouraged that this week, last couple of weeks, this has finally popped as a central issue.

People were talking about it, people were concerned about data centers, but I don’t think as a society we fully grappled with how important the choices we make around this will end up being over the next generation. So, let me start with some basics. I do not believe that this technology is overhyped.

The commercial benefits of it may be overhyped. The valuations of AI companies may be overhyped. The technology itself is not overhyped.

I’ve been tracking this for a long time. I actually — in 2015-16, in the last couple of years of my presidency, I actually was focused on this, pulled together a commission of the best minds in this area to talk about the — not just the technology, but also the political, social, economic, ethical concerns around this produced a terrific report. Apparently, it got put in the same bin as my pandemic proposal.

It wasn’t picked up by the administration that followed me. So we could see this coming, but part of what makes this profound is it accelerates. So what is happening right now is we have reached this point of what’s called recursive learning where essentially, and we had anticipated this, but we’re now seeing it, the machines are starting to be able to teach themselves.

They don’t have to wait for humans to start figuring things out. And so if you think about it as, let’s say humans are teachers, and the AI models are students, as recently as, let’s say, a year ago, 90% of the learning of these models was given to them by the teacher, humans, And maybe five to 10%, they could fill in some gaps and figure stuff out. In less than a year, maybe even less than six months, we’re now at a stage where it’s 50-50.

And if the trend lines continue, the expectation is it might be 90-10. What this means is that we’re now, if the learning track of AI has been like this, we’re now hitting the hockey stick trajectory where the models are going to get smarter and smarter and better and better at a much faster pace, at an exponential pace. What are the risks of that?

There’s the big science fiction risk of, wow, these models get smarter than us and they decide humans are fine, but not necessary, they start setting their own goals, and the killer robots kill us, or we bow down to them. I do not want to exaggerate that particular risk, but I will say there is a non-zero risk, There’s a non-zero chance of that happening. But that’s not actually the risk that I’m most concerned about, although it’s the risk that gets most attention.

And the reason that’s a risk is not because the computer models are conscious necessarily. It doesn’t mean that they are necessarily feel malice towards humans. It’s just that if they start setting their own agendas, they, you may get a misalignment between what they wanna do and what we want them to do, and that gap can be dangerous.

That’s problem number one. The more serious problem is these models are getting powerful enough that if they get in the hands of bad humans, they can do bad things. They can be weaponized in certain ways.

They can do a lot of mischief. So, the classic example would be, we will be at a point, even if there are certain safeguards around it, if we haven’t done a good enough job in the safeguards, it’s conceivable that somebody could take them, the equivalent of a future Claude or OpenAI, and say, I want to come up with a new strain of smallpox and release it in the New York subway system, show me how it’s done using ingredients I can buy at Home Depot. And the computer might figure it out.

Or somebody might not even try to be that destructive, but just say, hey, I want a program maximizes my returns on investment in the stock market, do whatever it takes, and if the instructions are illegal, don’t worry about it, and suddenly that could bring down the stock market. So that’s a much bigger danger, and if I said the danger of the first, sort of what’s called the singularity, and super intelligence taking it, over, if I say that’s still a relatively small chance of that, there’s a great likelihood that rogue AI can cause a lot of havoc. Then you’ve got issues of job displacement.

And there’s debates about how many jobs are going to be displaced. I will say this — you and I are both lawyers, if I’m mistaken. partners at law firms, rely on a bunch of junior associates.

They charge a lot of money for the time of those junior associates. There’s a pyramid. The promise to the associates is they work their way up, and at some point they’ll be at the top of the pyramid and they can make some bank.

If you are investing in AI at a law firm, and they’re pretty expensive, The reason you’re making that investment is because it will allow you to do things without those associates. And that’s at a fairly high-skilled, highly trained job. So the economic disruptions that will come at this speed I think are gonna be profound as well.

And then finally you’ve got all kinds of psychological issues like AI companions. And do we want a teddy bear who’s becoming your kid’s best friend, and is trained to be as addictive as possible, just like social media. So you’ve got all these issues.

It’s moving so fast that what happened over the last couple of weeks is that the leaders of what are called the frontier companies, the folks who are developing the very cutting edge of these models, got scared enough themselves that you know what, we need to slow down. Now, two of those companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, are about to launch massive IPOs that make all their employees millions and billions of dollars. It is unprecedented for companies in that position to say, you know what, our stuff is a little bit dangerous and maybe we need to stop.

or slow it down, not stop, but slow it down. I say that because I think there are some people who think, and understandably think, well, these tech companies, they might just be trying to block out competition by saying we need to slow this down, et cetera. The mistrust of these big tech companies and the amount of power that they have amassed, I understand.

I will say that in this situation, they are genuinely worried about their product. All right, so now that I’ve got your attention, the good news is that these are still, AI is a tool, it’s a machine. It’s built to give you the illusion that it’s not, but it is.

It’s a really sophisticated, remarkable technology, but it should be thought of as a tool, which means we have choices in terms of how we use this. And you’re right. If we use it properly, if we direct it at drug development to cure cancer, it could vastly accelerate our ability to rid the world of cancer.

If we train it and, say, figure out zero-carbon emission energy sources, it could come up with a safe formula for nuclear fusion that actually gives us much more plentiful energy without warming the planet. Really useful stuff. But if we get this wrong, it could be chaotic and potentially catastrophic.

So my view this week has been it is good that we can some of the leading companies have said we need to slow this down, and we should encourage that. There have been some on the left who have said we shouldn’t allow them to make that decision. I agree that that can’t be a long-term solution.

Government has to be regulating this. I heard one of Donald Trump’s main advisors on this make the argument that the market will take care of it. These companies will solve the safety issues because they have every incentive to do so.

If it turns out to be dangerous, people will just sue them and they’re worried about financial liability. That’s not how we treat airlines. or drug companies, or food companies.

We now have 150 years of experience just letting the market do whatever it wants when it comes to things that deeply affect our health and our safety. And so there’s no replacement for an effective government regulatory structure. And the challenge we have is that obviously we have a president currently that has said that’s for losers.

So we’ve got a gap at least in a couple of years where things are moving really fast and we have an administration that is not capable of or willing to, I would argue both, of putting together a serious regulatory framework, which is why I actually think we should be encouraging some sort of voluntary industry restraint, not because it’s a replacement, but because that’s probably, that may be the best we can do for now until we can get Congress and the White House to start getting serious about this. I know some states are going to be trying to initiate regulatory stuff, but it’s hard to do this state-by-state just like gun control. In my home state, Illinois, you have some strict gun control laws, but the surrounding states do not, which means that they don’t work.

This is more dangerous, and it moves faster. Last point — and I warned you I was going to filibuster, but I really wanted to get this stuff in, because it really does matter. I mentioned earlier that what’s called the alignment problem is one of the greatest dangers of AI.

If AI, if you give an instruction to AI and it’s not precise, even if AI is not going rogue, and it goes off and does things that, man, I didn’t think of the fact that when I said maximize my returns on investment, that you might hack into a power grid to cause a blackout ‘cause you shorted a stock, right? Right, right. So you wanna make sure that you are dealing with that core problem of alignment.

There is another alignment problem, though, And that is the misalignment between how this technology can be best used for society and the commercial imperatives of these companies. We are, these companies have attracted more capital and it’s a bigger spend than the moon, the Apollo program, it is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, investment in infrastructure and science and technology in human history. And it’s happening very fast.

And investors want a return. And what that means is that there is pressure on these companies, even if they’re worried, that they have to come up with models that will justify all that investment. So the big thing right now in AI is what are called agents, agentic AI.

You guys, those of you who’ve watched like Iron Man, right? Iron Man’s in this little suit, and he, I don’t remember what the guy’s name is, Jeeves or whatever, and he just talks, and the guy’s like, he has a British accent or something, and he kind of goes, “Yes, sir,” you know? And he solves all of these problems just with voice orders.

Or if you’ve seen her, Scarlett Johansson, a very cool agentic AI. That’s the direction we’re going in. Because the notion is that agentic AI will allow these AI bots to operate, these models to operate in the world.

Be your assistants, be the, replace the law associate or the accountant. The problem is when you, if that’s your business model, you want to then get it out. And sometimes you have to test it by letting it run wild in the world to see if it’s actually working.

And that’s where a lot of the danger may come in, because you’re not in a sealed box. It’s in the internet, it’s looking at your bank accounts, et cetera. I use that as an example to say, if we are thinking about AI just in terms of how do we cure cancer or get better energy, you can do that without having agentic AI and having it just roaming free in the internet.

The reason you are doing that is because you have to market a product that people will pay money for. That’s a misalignment between what our society needs and the commercial imperatives that these companies are facing. Not because necessarily they’re trying to do bad things, but because they’ve got to justify these valuations.

So that’s one more reason why it is really important for us to have a competent government and a serious bipartisan conversation around this issue, and we have to do it fast. And I would encourage voters to pay attention to this. If somebody does not have a serious plan for how to deal with this, then they’re not meeting the moment, and you should probably look for somebody else.

Sorry about that, but I wanted to - All right. It’s not the only thing we got to deal with but it’s a big one.

Speaker 1

So since this is family weekend and I want people to feel good I’m gonna go from bots to the threats to our democracy.

Barack Obama

There you go. Okay. Yeah, because we’re doing great on that front.

Speaker 1

Well here you go.

Barack Obama

Well happy news.

Speaker 1

Okay this is a question and a job offer. Okay, which is this. Say Colgate University was lucky enough to say former constitutional law teacher at the University of Chicago is going to join our faculty as a distinguished visiting professor of political science. Seems like a popular idea. And you’re going to teach a course on democracy.

Barack Obama

But only in September.

Speaker 1

Only in September. We have a very good basketball team and you would like it very much here in the winter. So, you are now going to teach a course on democracy only in the early fall, but at this moment, at this moment, what would you teach them?

I mean, I can imagine you’re a constitutional law expert. You could do that. You could say, hey, this is how the government works.

But this is a moment. What would you do in an advanced seminar as a professor at Colgate about democracy?

Barack Obama

I think it’s a great question. I think the first thing I’d want to discuss with the students, since it’s a seminar, I’d kind of open it up. Everybody in this gym grew up in a fairly unique time.

Even old people like me. The post-World War II era, in which in fits and starts, and with Watergate and riots and assassinations, a lot of terrible stuff happened, but if you were lucky enough to live in this country during that period, you saw a broadening of democracy over time. Civil rights movement, women’s movement, LGBTQ movement, expansion of the franchise, one person, one vote, and a solidification post the McCarthy era of notions of civil liberties and freedom of speech.

And we built a pretty remarkable consensus around that. that was shared by both parties, both major political parties. That began to break down.

You can argue when. Maybe it was, according to Lyndon Johnson, the minute he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, you could argue that it happened as a consequence of changes in the economy and after Ronald Reagan. But what you saw was people mistrusting that progress or taking it for granted.

And I think the main thing I would be teaching, just by virtue of looking at American history, which I know that you studied deeply, is democracy is not self-executing. It requires a certain set of norms, habits, and social trust. And those muscles have to continually be built, built up and passed on.

You can’t passively just sit there and say you’re in a democracy if you are not actively engaged in it. And I think that what we have seen, for a variety of reasons, is not just the ways in which inequality and economic power have distorted our democracy, but also how we’ve lost a lot of those habits of citizenship. And the thing we now have to grapple with is, how do we create not just a governmental system, but also education systems, civic institutions, what used to be called mediating institutions, things like, it used to be the church, or unions, or what have you.

How do we adapt those to a internet information, digital age, that engages people and gives them a sense of agency? because if people don’t feel like they have a responsibility to make democracy work, it doesn’t work. It starts breaking down.

And if you, look, the syllabus I’d have would start with the American Revolution. Those of you who don’t want to take the entire course, since it’s a fantasy, because my wife’s not going to be happy if I’m gone for the fall. But if you wanted just a quick synopsis, watch Ken Burns’ American Revolution.

Six parts, I think two hours each, so 12 hours, you can do it on the treadmill. What is striking when you watch it is just how contingent this whole experiment was. And it started, truthfully, with a bunch of rich guys not wanting to pay their taxes.

Democracy was not the beginning, wasn’t the core animating principle at the start of the American Revolution. There was frustration with the empire and the colonialist feeling as if they were being imposed upon. And it was a fairly narrow agenda.

And over time, what happened is that these actions behind the initial actions like the Boston Tea Party, you start getting an articulation of this broader idea. Props to Thomas Paine, by the way. That guy actually believed in democracy.

And so you start getting these ideas circulating about what democracy means for ordinary people. And people like Phyllis Wheatley, African-American woman suddenly gets Thomas Paine, she reads this and she says, you know what, this is a good idea, this idea of the franchise and everybody having a say in their government. This might apply to black people, or it might apply to women.

And slowly, by the time you get to the Declaration of independence, as flawed as it is, you do have this precious idea. I think one of the best ideas in human history, if not the best. We’re all created equal.

We’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. And then we have to try to operationalize it. I say that because it is not a static thing and it’s not a given.

And I can give you all kinds of specifics about how we might get rid of the filibuster or reform campaign finance or this or that or the other, but at its core, democracy means everybody in this auditorium and beyond says, I have a say in how we collectively live and I have a responsibility that goes beyond my narrow self-interest to make sure that thing works. And we have to find better ways in this ultra-fast, dynamic, disruptive society that we’re living through to recreate that sense of agency on the part of individuals. And that we believe that’s important enough that there are times where we will set aside our interests.

We can have debates, let me, I’m just gonna give you one specific example. We can have debates about what our marginal tax rates should be, and I would argue that wealthy people in this country do not pay enough in taxes, and the very ultra-wealthy oftentimes faxes and have figured out how to game the system. But we can have that debate.

But when I hear billionaires, not millionaires, but folks who cannot spend ever a fraction of their wealth, and neither can their kids or their grandkids, say they are moving to Florida, not because they love Florida. They might. It’s nothing against Florida, nice weather.

But because they’re trying to avoid a state tax, which is a rounding error in their wealth. There’s a certain mentality there that says, I should not have to give up anything. Despite the fact that that wealth, whatever you want to argue about how hard they worked or this or that or the other, that wealth was, the foundation of that wealth was a social order and a system that had amazing universities and roads and fire protection and a judicial system that could enforce contracts, all of which cost some money to maintain.

If we don’t get that right, then the mechanics of democracy won’t be enough, as we’ve seen, because we’ve just seen a whole bunch of laws in place that have been blown through in ways I would never have anticipated. My imagination could not foresee some of the stuff that’s going on right now. I believe there was just an announcement that the White House decided.

You know what, CNN, MSN, MSNOW, maybe the New York Times was included, you just can’t come to the White House press briefings anymore because you’re giving the current president unfavorable coverage. I’m trying to think what would have happened if I had said, you know what, Fox News, you’re out of here. It’s unimaginable.

So, but the point I’m making here is that if you have a certain cohort, let’s call it 30 to 35 percent of the country right now, which thinks that’s okay, well, what that means is we have not developed the kind of understanding of what democracy requires. And we’ve got to shore that back up. I don’t think that’s inevitable.

I don’t think all is lost on that front. But we have to roll up our sleeves and get working.

Speaker 1

Yeah, Platt. I want to build on what you actually just did, and then I want to move that to the work you’re going to do in the Obama Center. Because when I asked you about democracy, What you did was offer an intellectual history of the American Revolution. I would argue that great universities, which are under significant strain right now, that’s the work of great universities to train people to understand the intellectual history of what just happened. So yay for universities.

Barack Obama

Yay for universities.

Speaker 1

There you go. But you’re also making the argument that these are practices and norms that can be inculcated, developed muscles. Is that the work of what you…

When I look at the Obama Center, the core of it is training leaders. Can you train people to be leaders? Can you train people in democracy?

Barack Obama

Absolutely. Well, I was elected president because I had an army of 20-something-year-olds, basically the age of a bunch of the young people who are about to graduate, who we dropped into cornfields in Iowa and small towns in New Hampshire, and created a democratic movement and process, out a whole cloth in some ways, that then swamped all the professional consultants and pollsters and machinery, upended the political system. And it was kids who did it.

Because actually, these habits I talk about, about democracy, draw on things that are inside of us. I’ll give you a simple example. So the leaders we have vary in both the work they do and the stages they are in their careers.

I mean, we have programs for young boys and girls who are still in secondary school. We’ve got a program called Voyagers for university students who are interested in public service careers. But we also have a leaders program, not just here, but in Europe and Africa and Asia, that includes members of parliament or chiefs of staff of governments or doctors who have already set up women’s health clinics Sub-Saharan Africa, or are working on misinformation, or human rights lawyers in Russia, or conservationists in Vietnam.

People in their 30s who have already done amazing stuff. We get them together. The first thing we do is we have a whole module listening to people.

Because it turns out that you can teach people to tap into their curiosity about other people, people who are not like them. Instead of going into a community saying, I want to be a leader and I’ve got a plan, what we say is go into a community and ask people who they are and what their stories are and what their traditions are and what their values are. And be quiet and show some humility because it turns out that if you are open to listening, people will tell you amazing things about their lives.

They’ll talk about the immigrant grandparents who came here and sitting, listening to their grandma’s stories, and they’ll talk about the great migration and how African American family in Alabama made their way to Chicago, and they’ll talk about their fears and their hopes. And when you do that, when you listen to people’s stories and you start stitching it together with yours, you are now creating a relationship with them that transcends just self-interest. And you’ve built some trust, and now you’re in a to actually say, you know what, we actually share this stuff, maybe we should work together and get this done.

What do you think? So you can teach, and I’m just using that as one example, you can teach these skills. And I think one of the things that we are missing, and what universities at their best can provide, is developing a practice that can be a part of the practice of how do we talk to each other, and see each other, and recognize each other, and respect each other, even in deep disagreement, that is the essence of democracy, but I would also argue is the essence of the best forms of leadership.

There’s another model of leadership, and it’s got a longer lineage, which involves hierarchy and dominance and submission and scapegoating, and racism and anti-Semitism and putting women in their place and putting gay people back in the closet. That is, and is backed by coercion and violence. And that is a, you know, a long-time mechanism for rule and power.

But the American experiment’s premised this different idea at its best. And we had conquest, and we had slavery, and Native Americans were removed from their land, and we did a bunch of terrible things. But at our best, what came out of that American Revolution was this different idea.

And that’s the kind of leadership we not only believe we can develop, but I would argue has to be developed at this time, at this moment in our history. Because the world, what the interconnectivity has done is it has, the worlds have collided. You have villages in my grandmother’s, you have people in my grandmother’s village in Alego, in rural Kenya, who are watching the Kardashians on their cell phones.

Part of why culture wars seem to accelerate and people feel so threatened is because it used to be that folks in San Francisco and folks in Lubbock, Texas, didn’t necessarily know how the other was living. And now it’s in their faces and they feel threatened by that. And if we can’t develop a capacity to see each other and recognize our common humanity, the kinds of old-style leadership with the destructive weapons we have and the means of propaganda that we currently have, that will be a recipe for tragedy.

And we’ve got a better option. It’s more fun not hating each other and trying to get along. and working together.

So, at least that’s my view.

Speaker 1

You know, I’m listening to you, and we’re getting near the end of our time. We’re actually at the end of our time, but I’m going to ask this question. Listening to you and remembering the optative political frame of hope that you brought, and I look at the Obama Center and its work, what percentage of your work now is based on this faith in this optimism, hope? Or how much of it is like a rearguard action of despair?

Barack Obama

No, look, I mean, you were asking about the role of universities, right?

Speaker 1

Right.

Barack Obama

My university years involved some excessive partying at the beginning. And then I kind of flipped a switch became sort of way too serious and isolated and almost monkish for the latter part of it, I was all out of balance trying to figure stuff out. But the one thing that happened to me during my time in the university is, and I think this is an essential role of a university and particularly liberal arts universities, to get you to think deeply about what are your deepest commitments, your values, do you have a code, are there things you’re willing to sacrifice for, what gives meaning and purpose to your life.

And that was a great gift and a luxury. and each university has to do different things or can choose to do different things. There are some universities, their mission is we’ve gotta make sure that people find work in a new economy and are trained, and that’s a noble mission and pursuit.

But during that time, particularly in your late teens, early 20s, that’s the time to figure out what’s important to you. I say all that because one conclusion that I drew from this period of time, both partying and reading a lot of books, was that the world is complicated and humans are really complicated. and we are wandering through, during this brief time that we have, with good and bad and beauty and ugliness and violence and love constantly pulling at us and happening to us and inside us.

where we get power is when we make a decision to pursue and embody and try as best we can imperfectly to live out a sense that, you know what, this is a wondrous, amazing journey I’m on and let me share it with some fellow travelers and do my best and work through the tough times and appreciate the good ones. And so hope for me, and I’ve said this in the speech that kind of launched my national political career, about hope is never blind optimism. And hope is grounded in a clear-eyed recognition that tough things happen and the world is deeply imperfect.

But we have the agency, we make choices about what we feed and what we starve. And I’d rather feed in that sense that there is a commonality and a goodness in people and I’d rather starve those parts of me that are greedy or selfish or scared or mean. And I think that’s something that we all wrestle with, and we all have the capacity to make our own choices.

I like my choice, and I like it for the country as well. So, all right. Thank you.

Speaker 1

I think we’re good. Of course, I have more questions, but I think to end on that note, which is not just a political manifesto, but a manifesto that should animate any college or university. So you’re hired to be a professor.

This whole thing was a job interview. Let’s thank President Obama for being here. Here we go.

That was really terrific.