Conversation At Hamilton College

President Obama’s conversation with Hamilton College President Steven Tepper on April 3, 2025. The conversation was part of the school’s Sacerdote Series.

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Thank you. Thank you. Hamilton. Oh! Woo! Woo! Okay, I’m fired up. Thank you so much.

(Cheers.)

STEVEN TEPPER: All right. I just need to acknowledge that there are some nerves on stage, some butterflies right now. I just want to say, you do not have to be nervous.

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Thank you. I’m getting over it.

STEVEN TEPPER: It’s easy to talk to a current sitting president.

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Hard act to follow after Anna. (Cheers) She’s fantastic. I also understand that she’s on the basketball team, so you know I like that, and I appreciate the fact that she didn’t mention that her bracket is doing better than mine.

(Laughter.)

STEVEN TEPPER: Okay. Look, I’m a sociologist, and we talk about people who have front stage lives and backstage lives, and we’ve seen your front stage life in so many ways up on stage in the Rose Garden giving speeches. We don’t get a chance to see backstage, although, I guess a couple of days ago, we saw you photobomb a family.

(Laughter.)

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I felt terrible. I’m not used to walking around, so I screwed that one up.

STEVEN TEPPER: But what is life like now out of the White House? What do you do? What do you enjoy doing? How do you spend your days?

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Well, right now, at the at the moment, I’m splitting time between the work for the foundation. Michelle and I set up the Obama Foundation to train the next generation of leaders here in the United States and around the world, and that keeps me busy.

(Cheers.)

I am also finishing the second half of my presidential memoirs, which in case any of you feel sorry for yourself, this is like 50 term papers. I mean, it just goes on forever. But people ask me, “Do you enjoy writing?” I say, “Absolutely not,” but I do enjoy having written when it’s finished. I’m hoping to get to the finish line on that. Beyond that look I was in a deep deficit with my wife, so I have been trying to dig myself out of that hole by doing occasionally fun things.

(Laughter.)

STEVEN TEPPER: We would love to ask you what you’re doing, what you’re having fun doing, but I want to ask you, just you mentioned writing your memoirs. Here at Hamilton College, we really pride ourselves on graduating master communicators. People know how to write, who know how to communicate, who know how to tell stories.

You’re one of the best communicators in the modern era. I mean, this is an art form. Could you let us in a little bit into your creative process? How do you tell a compelling story? How do you advance an idea?

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I think the first thing to note is that at least when I started as a politician and public speaker, I was often terrible. Look, there are some people who are naturally gifted, and others have to work at it. I think that the first thing to know about speaking, writing, or communicating generally is if you practice like everything else, you can get better.

I’ve had a lot of reps. People have asked me this, I actually believe that the single most important thing about being an effective communicator is having conviction, believing what you say. At least for me, that’s the most useful thing. If you know what you believe as a starting point, then you will naturally communicate that conviction to other people, and you will seem authentic.

In contrast, you’ll see a lot of people who will try to sound a certain way or they’re worrying about trying to get the zinger one liner or the pithy quote. I was never particularly good at that, but I was pretty good about trying to figure out what I believed in and then try to say it as best I could. That’s probably the most important piece of advice. Now, there’s some mechanical things like actually write out what you’re going to say.

(Laughter.)

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Those of you. I don’t care how good you are, you’re probably going to be better if you actually sit down and try to figure it out ahead of time. Talk like a normal human and not like a book. That’s also useful. I’m always puzzled by people who in speaking to an audience, whether it’s an audience of ten or an audience of 10,000 will try to go out of their way to talk in ways that they’d never talk to their friends or neighbors or family members or coworkers or fellow students. I think that’s important.

Part of how to talk like a human is to tell stories. I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t necessarily as good as I should have been when I first started. It was usually because I was filling my speeches up with facts and policies. That’s not how most of us get information. We get information from stories about our own experience, about other people’s experience.

Which brings me to the final thing. That is if you’re a good communicator, you should also be a good listener. When I first started on the campaign trail with all those facts and policies, etc., it was pretty flat and dry. What actually made me into a better communicator was when I started actually listening to the stories of the people I was meeting.

By knowing their lives, what they had gone through, losing a job, not having health care, their aspirations for their kids, the challenges that they had gone through as a minority group or the things they’d overcome, their fears, their hopes. Weaving that into a broader story about how we could work together and live together that’s what ended up working for me.

When we are at our foundation, when we bring in young people who are already incredibly accomplished, and when I say young, they’re older than a lot of you. I mean, these are doctors who’ve set up women’s clinics in Sub-Saharan Africa or folks who are battling the opioid crisis in Appalachia, or people who are working on climate policy at the highest levels, a lot of what we do initially is just get them to practice listening.

Because the other thing that happens is when you listen and you get a sense of other people’s priorities, lives, values, then you have the capacity to also reach people who do not agree with you on everything, who don’t think exactly like you or have the exact same priorities or perspectives as you do. That means that you can reach a broader audience.

STEVEN TEPPER: Has there been an idea that was important to you, even as a great communicator, that you have not been able to communicate as effectively as you wanted to, either as president or after?

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: All the time. First of all, I constantly lose arguments to my wife, my daughters. (Laughter.) They mock me and ridicule me at the dinner table, so yes. As president, look, there are things that I cared deeply about but couldn’t move at least Congress and apparently couldn’t move the country forward.

We had a photo line backstage, and a woman mentioned that she had been in Sandy Hook in Newtown right after I had been elected to my second term. the fact that we live in a country in which routinely children are killed, are shot, that doesn’t make sense to me. Hunting, I understand hunting. I understand shooting for sport, or I understand wanting to have a firearm for protection, potentially at home.

I don’t really understand what it is that we’re doing in allowing semiautomatic weapons in people’s hands. (Applause.) But I could not persuade enough of the country and certainly enough of Congress to prioritize that. But that doesn’t mean you stop trying. You stay at it. There have been a lot of injustices and bad ideas in the world that lasted a pretty long time. Then eventually you get a breakthrough. Then sometimes after the breakthrough, folks decide they want to go back to bad ideas, and then you got to go back at it.

(Laughter, applause.)

STEVEN TEPPER: All right. Maybe you’ve opened the door for some tougher stuff here. It appears that many people in this country have lost not only trust in government, but maybe even more importantly, the relevance of democratic norms that undergird our government. Why has that happened? Does it matter? What can we do to repair it?

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Let me preface this by saying what everybody knows, which is I have deep differences of opinion with my most immediate successor — who’s now president once again. There are a host of policies that we could be discussing where I have strong opinions, but at least for most of my lifetime, I’d say the post-World War II era, there was a broad consensus between Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals around a certain set of rules where we settle our differences.

There are some bonds that transcend party, region, or ideology. There was a creed that we all stuck to. That basic notion of American democracy as embodied in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights said, all of us count, all of us have dignity, all of us have worth that we’re going to set up a system in which there’s rule of law and separation of powers and an independent judiciary.

There are these freedoms, a freedom of worship and freedom of the press and an assurance that if we go before the law, there will be an impartial process to make decisions. We all stuck to that, more or less. It doesn’t mean there weren’t corrupt politicians. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t abuse of power. In society itself, obviously, there were vast differences in terms of access and influence and having a megaphone. But we said, even though that ideal wasn’t always observed, that was the right ideal to have.

I do believe that our commitment to those principles has eroded, and I think it eroded in part because the government itself got really big. What that meant is sometimes it felt distant and unresponsive, and rules are a hassle. Some of the rules aren’t smart, and people get frustrated. I think part of what happened also is that it’s to agree to disagree and have forbearance to people who you don’t agree with if they all look like you.

In the United States Senate, when I got there, I was the only African American. There was one Hispanic in the United States Senate. I’m not that old, so this is fairly recently. You had a sense of how different it was by looking at the men’s gym in the Senate versus the women’s gym. Men’s gym, really big, and old guys walking around not wearing enough stuff.

(Laughter.)

Then the women’s gym was basically a modified closet with a bike because there just weren’t that many. During that period of our history, I think there was a general sense of, well, if I’m a Dixiecrat, Southern Democrat, if I’m a Republican from up north, if I’m a this or that, have this or that perspective in terms of being fiscally conservative or socially moderate, we all went to the same club and we all talked about the same things.

Then starting around the ’60s and ’70s, people crashed the party. Now it’s a little harder to agree to disagree without being disagreeable if your sense is, well, that person isn’t like me. It doesn’t look like me, maybe doesn’t think exactly the way I think. I’m more prone to feeling attacked or threatened. That, I think, made us a little more tribal in our politics.

Then the economy wasn’t working for everybody. Now, that in part, had to do with the fact that government wasn’t as responsive as it should have been, and inequality grew. Then finally, media. I think one of the most important aspects of our democratic practice is having a well-informed citizenry which is reliant on a free, objective, effective press, and that started getting attacked.

You combine all those factors together, and we saw them over the course of decades. But obviously, it’s gotten a lot worse now. When I watch some of what’s going on now, it does not — look, I don’t think what we just witnessed in terms of economic policy and tariffs is going to be good for America, but that’s a specific policy. I’m more deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don’t give up students who are exercising their right to free speech.

(Cheers, applause.)

I am more troubled by the idea that a White House can say to law firms, “If you represent parties that we don’t like, we’re going to pull all our business or bar you from representing people effectively.” That kind of behavior is contrary to the basic compact we have as Americans.

Imagine if I had done any of this. (Laughter.) I just want to be clear about this. (Cheers, applause.) Imagine if I had pulled Fox News’ credentials from the White House press corps. You’re laughing, but this is what’s happening. Imagine if I had said to law firms that were representing parties that were upset with policies my administration had initiated, that you will not be allowed into government buildings.

We will punish you economically for dissenting from the Affordable Care Act or the Iran deal. We will ferret out students who protest against my policies. It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me, or a whole bunch of my predecessors.

(Applause.)

I say this not on a partisan basis. This has to do with something more precious, which is who are we as a country and what values do we stand for? Now, this is not just an abstraction. I think this is one of the challenges that we have, and I saw this even before the last election. I think people tend to think, oh, democracy, rule of law, independent judiciary, freedom of the press. That’s all abstract stuff because it’s not affecting the price of eggs. Well, you know what? It’s about to affect the price of eggs.

One of the things that has distinguished us in the past has been this basic idea that we are a rules-based society. What that means is that you know what? I can support one candidate instead of another, and I don’t have to worry that the police are going to come harass me or my customers. That’s what happens in other places. That’s what happens in Russia.

We take for granted the idea that we don’t have to pay bribes or hire somebody’s cousin in order to get a business permit. That’s how we built the economy we did. That’s why this place worked. It has very concrete impacts on all of our lives. This is the first time I’ve been speaking publicly for a while. I’ve been watching a little bit.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Inaudible, laughter.)

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah. Let me just close this portion of my remarks by saying it is up to all of us to fix this. (Applause.) It’s not going to be because somebody comes and saves you. The most important office in this democracy is the citizen, the ordinary person who says, no, that’s not right. I do think one of the reasons that our commitment to democratic ideals has eroded is that we got pretty comfortable and complacent.

It has been easy during most of our lifetimes to say you are a progressive or say you are for social justice or say you’re for free speech and not have to pay a price for it. Now we’re at one of those moments where, you know what? It’s not enough just to say you’re for something; you may actually have to do something and possibly sacrifice a little bit.

If you’re a law firm being threatened, you might have to say, okay, we will lose some business because we’re going to stand for a principle. (Applause.) If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion? If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.

(Cheers.)

We’ll stand up for what we believe in, and we’ll pay our researchers for a while out of that endowment, and we’ll give up the extra wing or the fancy gymnasium — that we can delay that for a couple of years because academic freedom might be a little more important.

(Cheers, applause.)

For most of human history, and to this day, in most of places in the world, there is a cost to challenging the powers that be, particularly if they’re abusing that power. There’s this idea, and I’ve noticed this among some wealthier folks who after George Floyd, they were right there and a bunch of companies were talking about how they cared about diversity, and they wanted to do this, and they were all for that. They are mute right now.

But what that tells me is it was okay when it was cool and trendy and when it’s not, not so much. That, I think, is what each of us has to examine in our own hearts. We say we’re for equality, are we willing to fight for it? Are we going to risk something for it? We say that we’re for rule of law, are we going to stick to that when it’s tough not when it’s easy? We believe in freedom of speech; do we stand up for freedom of speech when the other person talking is saying stuff that infuriates us and is wrong and hurtful? Do we still believe in it?

For university students and for your generation I think that’s important because part of how we got confused around some of these issues is that those who claimed to be fighting on behalf of social justice and freedom of speech and equality, sometimes we didn’t observe it ourselves.

I’m glad to hear that on campus here you focus on the Common Ground initiative. I have been absolutely clear throughout my presidency, post-presidency, the idea of canceling a speaker who comes to your campus, trying to shout them down and not letting them speak, even if I find their ideas obnoxious, well, not only is that not what universities should be about, that’s not what America should be about. You let them speak and then you tell them why they’re wrong. That’s how you win the argument.

(Applause.)

Sort of the delicacy of sensibilities in classrooms, Michelle and I talk about this all the time.

Let me tell you, you will deal with people in the world who don’t like you and say mean things about you. You better get used to it. Don’t be in the classroom thinking, I can’t be triggered, and then you think you get on the job — you will have horrible bosses on occasion, or coworkers who say obnoxious things and it may turn out that in some cases, they’re actually good people that just didn’t use the right word for something, or need to be educated on something. Well, you need to get used to that here.

Some of these principles are ones in which it’s not just one side or the other that hasn’t been true to, I think, our founding principles. I think in some cases, we’ve all been guilty of it, some more than others, and it’s important now for us to refocus our attention on who are we and what we believe.

STEVEN TEPPER: You mentioned Common Ground. It’s important to us here. It’s trying to model how to disagree and how to have debates in civility and compromise. And I know that’s important to you. You probably have talked to your girls about how to defend but also how to listen.

It’s been eight years in office, eight years out of office, and polarization is at the highest level ever. Seems like the partisan wedge just keeps digging in getting deeper. You talked about the norms in Washington, but it also feels like that ability to see each other, to be curious about one another, has broken down beyond Washington. What are the strategies for bridging those divides right now?

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Well, you mentioned the first one, which is just being curious and listening to other people and getting their stories and getting their getting context. During the negotiations around the Paris Agreement, the key was to get China and India bought in on them taking responsibility for reducing their emissions, setting standards despite the fact that most of the existing greenhouse gasses up there were created by the West during the long period of our industrialization.

Now, I could have gone to President Xi or Modi and said, no, we’re only going to do something if you do exactly what we do. But that wouldn’t have taken into account the fact that, on a per capita basis, each American has a much bigger carbon footprint than they do. They’re at a different stage of development in India. You’ve got a third of the country that still doesn’t have electricity, that they need energy.

And so, if I don’t listen and understand their perspective, if I think that I can talk to a leader of India and dismiss the pressures on him to deliver basic electricity, even if it uses coal, if I don’t have an answer for how, look, I understand you can’t leave half a billion people in poverty, that you need development, and are there ways in which we can encourage you to leapfrog dirty energy and go straight to clean energy? And we may give you help with subsidies or new technologies, so that you can still grow just as fast, but without boiling the planet. If I’m not hearing that, if I don’t see their perspective, then not only am I not going to get their cooperation, I’m not going to solve the problem that’s in my interest to solve.

Now, that’s a big, global example, but that’s true of every interaction that we have with people. And it’s, by the way, something we understand in our own relationships, in our friendships, in our families. Everybody’s got a family member who says crazy stuff. We don’t just see them through that single lens. We also see the wonderful things that they — you may have an uncle who at Thanksgiving is just wacky but is also that standup guy who helped you learn how to play hockey or is always there to haul people around during a snow storm, or is generous to a fault with his friends. That’s him, too.

And I think this relates to one of the contributors of polarization, and certainly, it’s not the entire cause, but it is an accelerant. And that’s what’s happened with media. I’m not so old, I’m not such a Luddite that I don’t have a phone and social media accounts and all that stuff. (Laughter.) In fact, I would not have gotten elected president had I not been for us being probably one of the earliest adapters of social media.

The reason was because my campaigns were so broke initially that I had to rely on 20-year-old volunteers who actually understood it. (Laughter.) I was like, “What’s this thing called, a website? And look, people can volunteer through this. They just press a button? And then they can send money, too? (Laughter.) Okay, let’s try it out.” (Laughter.)

But I always tell this story about one of the changes that happened in terms of social media. When I started my presidential campaign, the two dominant social media platforms were My Space and Meetup. (Laughter.) And you weren’t getting fancy videos through this thing, right? I mean, this is like buffering and weird sounds coming out of the phone and all that stuff. But Meetup, I always used meet up as an interesting example.

We would have entire states that got organized. We didn’t even have a staff there, but just a bunch of volunteers would use Meetup to contact or advertise, hey, we’re Idahoans for Obama. We’d like to get together. And we’d communicate with them, sending them materials about my positions on issues and where I stood on this or that.

But for those of you not familiar with Meetup, the name of the platform kind of gives it away, you actually meet up after you’ve contacted somebody. (Laughter.) What would end up happening would be, let’s say the Idahoans for Obama were hosting this first meeting in the church basement at some place. And people would show up and they’d look around the room. And you’d have a middle-aged Army veteran with a crew cut, and you’d have a black woman with a nose ring, and you’d have a mom with some kids in a stroller.

And it turned out that whatever your idea of an Obama supporter was, wasn’t as neat and tidy as you thought, but once you had a chance to sit down and meet them and have a conversation with them and heard their stories, not only did you get a new perspective about who Obama voters were, but you got a new perspective about who your neighbors were. And then those people who met up, now they had to go knock on doors with people who were even more different.

Today, we have these siloed communities online that never meet, and all they’re doing is reinforcing, over and over again, the ideas that everybody agrees with. And anybody who strays from the orthodoxy or the dogma that exists online can be attacked, often viciously, because it’s easier to go after somebody if you’re not sitting with them face to face. And they might punch you in the nose, or at least look hurt. And it makes you embarrass that you were such a jerk.

I say all this to say that the more we can encourage, I believe, space, institutions, practices that just get people talking to each other and working together on something in the real world, the more likely we are to break down some of that polarization and rebuild trust. And a bunch of mediating institutions that used to do that, whether places of worship, churches, synagogues, mosques, unions, Rotary Clubs, bowling leagues — a lot of the decline in those voluntary associations, mediating institutions, because it’s so much — not even having to shop. I’m calling DoorDash. You don’t even have just the casual interaction with the person at the store that might give you some sense of, oh, that person who doesn’t look like me isn’t scary, actually. “Oh, you go to that church? Oh, yeah, my kid’s in a little league, too.”

Those are the things that pull us out of our isolation. And obviously, COVID made this worse, which is why we have to be that much more intentional and now trying to get back to that kind of interaction and be intentional about doing it.

STEVEN TEPPER: I just can’t let it go. You mentioned uncles teaching hockey, and Hamilton won the NESCAC championship this year in hockey!

(Applause.)

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Way to go.

STEVEN TEPPER: There’s a lot of good uncles out there.

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: As somebody who grew up in Hawaii, it’s fair to say that I do not play hockey. (Laughter.) And it was no accident that I used the hockey example, which was an example of good communications, for those of you who are taking notes.

(Applause.)

Because if I said, yeah, your uncle is the guy who taught you how to surf, it might have kind of gone over people’s heads. (Laughter.)

STEVEN TEPPER: Okay, I want to switch gears just a little bit. The future is racing towards us at accelerating speeds. You mentioned your phone, which is an incredible, complicated technology, but there are other technologies emerging. There’s artificial intelligence, and you’ve long recognized that AI can be a force for good, a benefit to humanity, but you’ve also been very cautious about needing guardrails to help us make sure it’s safe and fair and ethical.

And I’m just wondering, as we prepare our students, who I say a different kind of AI, authentic intelligence, to bring their authentic intelligence into this world of emerging technologies where everything in our lives are shaped by them, what’s your advice for future leaders? How are we to adopt or resist or explore or consider, how fast, how slow?

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Well, first of all, this is happening fast. In fact, it’s already happening. It’s just you haven’t quite noticed it yet. I had the odd distinction of essentially being the first real digital president. I come into office in 2009. Smartphones really don’t start getting broadly adopted until about 2010, 2011. It gives you a sense of how recent this is. (Laughter.)

It’s just, for the students here, you’re young enough that it seems like, yeah, it’s always been around. But my daughters, who are only 27 and 23, they didn’t get their first phones, and they constantly remind me of this, until they were 13 and 10, 14 and 11, and they’re still in their 20s. I mean, that’s how recent these changes have happened.

As profound as that technology has been, AI will be more impactful. And it is going to come faster, and the reason is that its applications aren’t just in the communications and information area. It has potential application across the board. To some degree, it’s an extension of this long trend towards automation, but it’s not now just automating manufacturing processes or the use of robot arms. We’re now starting to see these models, these platforms be able to perform really high level — what we consider to be really high level intellectual work.

Already, the current models of AI, not necessarily the ones that you purchase or that you just get through the retail ChatGPT, but the more advanced models that are available now to companies, they can code better than, let’s call it 60%-70% of coders. We’re talking highly skilled jobs that pay really good salaries, and that, up until recently, has been entirely a seller’s market in Silicon Valley.

A lot of that work is going to go away. The best coders will be able to use these tools to augment what they already do. But for a lot of routine stuff, you just won’t need a coder, because the computer or the machine will do it itself. That’s going to duplicate itself across professions.

And so, it’s one of the reasons I mentioned to you when we were backstage that I would argue right now, unless you are really good, like one of the top 1% of in terms of understanding how to code, you’re better off with liberal arts education.

(Applause.)

But here’s the reason. I would say that the biggest questions we are going to face as more and more of the capacity of AI gets introduced and gets into manufacturing and law firms and accounting and a whole bunch of white collar professions, and it will be just as disruptive as it was for factories. Manufacturing in areas like this — steel mills and textiles, what these machines can’t yet do, and I don’t anticipate will be able to do, is tell as good a story or show compassion or be able to inspire a child or build a sense of team work and get people to understand and believe in a common mission. Those kinds of people-based skills, human skills that are unique to us, that’s going — there will be more need for that than ever.

And so, that’s sort of some a bit of practical advice.

Now, from a policy perspective, it also means, and this could be five years from now, 10 years from now, whenever you have big disruptions like this, that is going to require us to reorganize our societies. It may be that everybody now, not just blue collar workers, not just factory workers, are going to have to figure out, where do I get a job? How do I get enough income to feed my family?

All of us will be facing some questions about: we’re producing a lot of stuff, how do we distribute it, and what’s fair and what’s not? And how do we get purpose and meaning in our lives, because work isn’t just a way of making money, and feeding, clothing, and housing ourselves? It also gives us our life shape and direction and a sense that we matter. How are we going to reconstruct that?

And that’s going to be a lot of work. And it’s going to be contentious, and we’re going to have to have to figure that out. And then the effects on what is already a problem, which is the death of facts and reason and logic in our information space, we’re going to have to figure that out.

One of the things about being the first digital president was I was filmed so much, there was so much footage of me talking, so many photographs of me, recordings, I was usually the lab rat, my images were, for all these deepfakes.

STEVEN TEPPER: It is you, right now. (Laughter.)

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I’m actually here.

STEVEN TEPPER: Okay.

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: If it wasn’t, there’d be less gray hair, and I’d look a little more jacked. (Laughter.) This is the authentic me. (Laughter.) But the capacity to create, on TikTok or Instagram, pretty much any image of anybody doing anything, that’s going to not ease up. That’s going to get worse. And what that means is the need for us all to recommit to sorting out what’s true and what’s false, what are facts and what are opinions, to understand the way that images can tap into the reptile side of our brain and feed anger and resentment rather than hope.

Those are the kinds of issues that we’re going to deal, we’re going to have to deal with it. And again, that’s going to be up to us actively, citizens, parents teaching kids, schools with their students to grapple with we’re not going to be — we cannot cooperate if we don’t see the same facts. If I say, this is an elephant and not a table, you will think I’m crazy. We can’t have a discussion. But if I say, yeah, this is a table, or something like that — (laughter) — and I’d rather have a square one instead of a pentagon, well, then we can have a conversation about that.

STEVEN TEPPER: Come back, we’ll have a square table next time. (Laughter.) Look, we’ve got one — this is the last question. I know that makes us all very sad, but your foundation is really built around — and your purpose post presidency has been to lift up this next generation of leaders across the world. You want to inspire others to commit to change, to experiment with citizenship.

Here you are sitting in a room of future leaders. I mean, they are leading now, but they will lead with accelerated impact, going forward. Thinking about the work of the foundation and advice for this group of students, how can they make a difference?

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Well, let me, first of all, describe why I think it was important for our foundation to operate, not just in the United States, but internationally, because I think that’s relevant for today.

I mentioned that after World War II, there was a consensus in this country around just the basics of democracy. Even if we had disagreements on tax policy or abortion or what have you, there was an agreement in terms of how our societies and our politics needed to function.

One of the remarkable things about America is that we did the same to a great degree for the world. I mean, all of you have grown up in an international order that was largely created by the United States and its allies after World War II.

(Applause.)

Out of the rubble that and the carnage that had destroyed Europe and destroyed much of Asia, and it was so shocking that I think people pulled back. And they said, all right, yes, the United States, we’re the most powerful country at this point. A lot of our competitors are destroyed. We were relatively protected because of geography.

And so, we’ll set up a rules-based system internationally that allows for freedom of navigation and rules governing trade. And we’re going to have an alliance with Europe, including our former enemies, and in Asia, including our former enemies, because even though we are the most powerful country, we know that, having seen what happened in World War II, we’re better off if we can figure out how to get everybody to cooperate.

And this is an important moment, because in the last two months, we have seen a U.S. government actively try to destroy that order and discredit it. And the thinking, I gather, is that somehow, since we are the strongest, we’re going to be better off if we can just bully people into doing whatever we want, and dictate the terms of trade all the time, and if we see a piece of land, be like, who’s going to stop us? Greenland looks good. (Laughter.)

And what that doesn’t seem to — what doesn’t seem to be registering right now in some of our decision makers is the fact that that was a huge force multiplier for us. Even people who didn’t like us and disagreed with us oftentimes went along with us because they said, you know what? The system that’s set up, it’s actually helped us grow. It helped China lift a billion people out of poverty. It meant that if there was a pandemic or a disease like Ebola, that there was an international system to try to fix that.

And so, at the foundation, we’ve been getting leaders, not just in the United States but from every continent, to practice this notion that if we all agree on certain core values of everybody’s got dignity, everybody’s got worth, rule of Law is a good thing. Sometimes it’s in your self-interest to help people who have less than you, because they’re less likely, then to attack you or get sick and spread diseases that hit your kids. And that cooperation, or at least competition, that is based on some agreement about not blowing each other up or invading each other, that that ultimately is going to be better for all of us.

I say that, and I know we’re going over time, but like I said, I haven’t spoken to people in a while now. (Laughter.) I’ve been writing.

(Applause.)

I think this other idea that might makes right and the powerful bully the weak, and you grab what you can, if nobody can stop you, that is sort of been the default rule for most of human history. I mean, democracy is pretty recent in its vintage. An international order where you cooperate instead of fight, it’s new. And so, it’s a little bit fragile.

So, it’s not surprising that when things are disruptive and people get scared, and just in the same way that sometimes those who are running democratic institutions in the United States didn’t always do things right, the same was true for how we managed international affairs. Sometimes there were countries like China that did cheat on trade and they needed to be dealt with. You had to push back on that. There were times where we did dumb things and did bully people despite our ideals, or tried to reorganize entire countries in ways that were destined to fail.

But overall, this system we set up created the wealthiest, healthiest, most peaceful era in human history.

(Applause.)

And so, there’s a whole bunch of stuff we need to fix, internationally, in particular. One of the challenges of globalization was the fact that it did accelerate inequality. And it was very good for corporations that could operate internationally, but they oftentimes weren’t willing to share that bounty with their own populations. And so, the populations, if you’re a worker in the United States and you saw, okay, I’m getting cheap flat screen TVs, and I’m glad that the stock market is booming, but I was laid off my factory job, that we did not take care of those folks.

But that wasn’t a problem of globalization, per se. That was a failure of policy here in the United States to help — that we didn’t do enough to help people who weren’t benefitting from globalization. And that was a failure globally, and a failure here in the United States. That’s going to need to be fixed.

But the main message that we try to impart on leaders in the foundation is that these values of cooperation and rule of law, and an adherence to facts and hopefulness, optimism about the ability of humans to work together and solve their problems, and the belief that we are all God’s children, that I know that these days, the idea of inclusion is somehow been deemed illegal, but you know what? I believe in it.

(Applause.)

I believe that people, regardless of their skin color or gender or sexual orientation or nationalities, or how they worship God, that they all have worth and that I can communicate with them and cooperate with them. Those values that — we think those are the values that are worth fighting for, and that will ultimately lead to better outcomes.

And I guess there’s one last quality, and this, I do want to leave you with that we’ve been talking a lot, particularly in this moment, to our leaders about is resilience.

The rug in the Oval Office, each president gets to kind of design their own rug. It’s a weird custom, but it’s nice. (Laughter.) The rug on mine, I had a bunch of quotes that were stitched into the rim of the oval rug. And one of them was a quote that Dr. King used. He may not have — it may not have originated with him. That’s a little bit unclear, but he talks about, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And it obviously denotes optimism that things do get better. There’s a faith in that, but people forget the first clause of it, which is, “The arc of the moral universe is long.”

And what we talk about with our leaders, particularly young people, is a recognition that change does not happen overnight, that history zigs and zags, that sometimes we take two steps forward, and then we take a step back. And the two presidents up here on this stage were lucky enough to be born during this sort of anomalous period in history in which each decade, things pretty much got better for the majority of people.

If you had to choose a moment in history in which to be born, we were born in a pretty good one, especially if you were born in the United States or advanced economies, but that’s unusual. Usually, history zigs and zags and goes up and down, and there are times of conflict and there are times of stupidity and there are times of danger. And progress is slow, and it’s hard.

And I guess the main message I have for all of you, which we talk a lot about with our leaders, is, do not get discouraged because you don’t fix everything all at once.

(Applause.)

Don’t get discouraged because racism still exists in the world. Well, that’s kind of — humans aren’t that bright. (Laughter.) We’re chimps. And when we see people who aren’t like us, we get kind of scared, and that’s a little bit embedded in us. And then it’s taught to us and passed on to us, but it’s gotten better.

Women are still treated badly in a lot of the world and in our country. And there are barriers, despite the fact — well, because, in some cases, the fact that women are operating superior to men in many ways.

(Applause.)

But you know what? It’s gotten better. Even something as existential a threat as climate change, my daughters came and said, “What should I tell our friends? Some of them, they say they’re not going to have kids, because what’s the point?” And people talk about like we’re not going to hit sort of the target levels of two degrees Centigrade increase. It could go above that. And so, why bother?

And I say, well, maybe we don’t hit that mark, but the difference between it getting three and a half degrees warmer and three or four and two and a half, that might save a billion people living in coastal areas around the world. It might make the difference between whether we maintain progress in our civilization or we don’t. That’s worth working for, but you’re not going to fix it all at once.

That kind of resilience, I think, is, more than anything, what’s needed, understanding that if you work hard, you’re still going to fail sometimes. If you do the right thing, it’s not always going to be rewarded. You’re going to be disappointed. People are imperfect, but it’s worth trying. And if you try, not only do you usually end up getting better outcomes, but you’re going to live a better life. You’re going to feel better about yourself, and you’re going to find fellow travelers what share those values, and that’s as important as any of it.

Yeah, don’t get discouraged. I know it’s a little crazy right now, but we’re going to be okay.

(Applause.)

STEVEN TEPPER: Your hope continues to inspire. And can we give President Obama a big round of applause for joining us at the most important liberal arts college in the world?

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: All right, thank you.