My Conversation with Marc Maron
More than a decade ago, I sat down with Marc Maron in his garage to tape something new called a podcast. This time, he came to me to record his last episode.
We talked about the power of conviction, decency in an age of division, and the true story of America. I’ll miss Marc’s voice, but I hope his legacy of deep conversation and connection will continue.
Listen to our conversation on the final episode of the WTF with Marc Maron podcast now at www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1686-barack-obama or wherever you get your podcasts.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Can I say before we start, or wherever you want to start — to me, I can’t imagine anything tougher or more terrifying than doing standup comedy. So once you do that, I mean, everything else is –
MARC MARON: Is easy?
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I won’t say easy. I’m saying –
MARC MARON: Not as frightening.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah. To me, standing alone on a stage and hoping a bunch of people laugh stuff at this stuff –
MARC MARON: Yeah, you get used to it, but not unlike, I’m sure, your gig, sometimes it’s not going to go exactly right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: It’s not always going to — you’re not always going to hit it out of the park, but I guess what I’m saying is, at a certain point for you, there’s got to be just — you’ve had a lot of reps.
MARC MARON: Yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Reps are helpful, man.
MARC MARON: Reps, talking to people and reps in comedy, but it’s weird with both for me, because I seem to get just as anxious and — (laughter) –
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: (Laughter/inaudible.) It never goes away.
MARC MARON: Not for me, because I don’t know if it’s part of my preparation, but with stand up, it’s a little less where I know that a part of me lives up there, that I exist on that stage. And so, I don’t freak myself out as much, but with conversations, I don’t generally know what’s going to happen. And the anxiety is different, but yeah, I still keep it fresh by being terrified. (Laughter.)
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Well, look, there’s Bill Russell.
MARC MARON: Yep, Bill Russell.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: The greatest champion of North American sports, kept throwing up even after, right before games.
MARC MARON: It’s true, right? Yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah. I mean, you’ve got to have a little bit of — a few butterflies. Otherwise…
MARC MARON: You don’t get it?
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Not just having conversation.
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: If there’s a big speech that I’ve got to give, then there’s still a little bit of –
MARC MARON: A little bit of fear?
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: A little bit of adrenaline.
MARC MARON: Yeah?
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, a little bit like, I want to make sure I’ve got –
MARC MARON: Yeah, you’re ready to go. You’re focused.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I’m focused.
MARC MARON: Lit up? (Laughter.)
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I’m pumped up.
Are we just going to dive in here?
MARC MARON: I think we’re already doing it.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: We’re already doing it? Let’s go.
MARC MARON: I do want to ask you — I’ve got a weird question I want to ask you, and I decided to start with this, as opposed to end with it. It’s kind of business, but it’s important for me. It’s important for the show. I’m going to ask you to for your signature on something.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Absolutely. What do we got?
MARC MARON: All right, I’ll tell you.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Is it a commutation? I can’t do that anymore.
MARC MARON: No. (Laughter.) No, this is — I created this pseudo legal document to honor — this is our last episode. And this is something I wrote, and it’s honest, but I wanted to witness, and you’re here.
“So to all concerned, this is dated 10/13/25, the date of the last show, I, Marc Maron hereby formerly release Brendan McDonald from the professional responsibility of listening to me talk from now and in perpetuity.” (Laughter.) “Brendan has listened to me talk no less than 10,000 hours over the last 22 years, often several hours in one sitting. That’s a lot, even more than I’ve listened to myself talk.
“Brendan is free to talk to me socially, but that is entirely up to him. If he chooses to do so, I will be delighted and promise not to abuse the privilege. It has been a lifechanging ride on my yammering, and I am forever grateful to Brendan for keeping me at my best.”
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I’m more than happy to –
MARC MARON: I’m going to sign it.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: You sign it. I will witness it, and this is kind of a commutation. I mean, essentially, Brendan is released.
MARC MARON: Yes, it’s a big deal.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: From…
MARC MARON: From me.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: From you. (Laughter.) I have a sense that he kind of likes hanging out with you.
MARC MARON: Yeah, it’s been a hell of a partnership.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: It may be a little Stockholm Syndrome.
MARC MARON: No, no, he won’t let that happen. Yeah, I’m completely aware that I have not had that impact on his brain, because if I did, we’d both be in trouble. (Laughter.) He’s like the better half of — he’s protected me. I’ll say shit, and it’ll go on the — I’ll record stuff, and in the back of my head, I’ll think Brendan’s not going to leave that in.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: No, probably not. You’ve got to have a… he’s like your superego.
MARC MARON: That’s exactly right, and he’s a functioning part of my memory. I don’t remember — obviously, I remember our conversation, but there’s been 1,600 and more, almost 1,700 conversations.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: That’s a lot. Tell me how you’re feeling. Look, first of all, congratulations. Second of all, I’m honored to be on your last show. How are you feeling about this whole thing, transition, moving on from this thing that has been, well, one of the defining parts of your career and your life.
MARC MARON: Sixteen years.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, that’s a long time.
MARC MARON: I mean — well, I mean, maybe you could help me. I feel okay. I feel like I’m sort of ready for the break, but there is sort of a fear there of what do I do now? I mean, I’m busy, but not unlike your job — I’m going to compare my job to the presidency now –
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, I think it’s pretty similar.
MARC MARON: Thank you. (Laughter.) I’ve got a lot of people who, over the last 16 years, have grown to rely on me.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yes. You’ve got a lot of fans just around — and in unlikely places.
MARC MARON: Oh yeah?
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah.
MARC MARON: As in here?
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah.
MARC MARON: Yeah, but they need something, that there is a feeling of how am I going to feel less alone? How am I going to deal with my mental — this or that? And how am I going to find a way to exist in the world that we’re living in? I mean, I’m not offering them solutions, but I am commiserating, and it’s comforting to me.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: They trust you, and they feel as if what you’re going through and what they’re going through occupies a similar space.
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And so, they don’t feel like they’re traveling this journey that can be frightening alone sometimes.
MARC MARON: That’s right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And there’s a power in the human voice that you grow attached to.
MARC MARON: Yeah. When you left…what did you do for your mental health with the weight of –
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Well, look, how old are you now?
MARC MARON: I’m 62.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Right. You’ve still got a couple of chapters left. And my theory was… Somebody gave me advice right before I was leaving office, and it was, don’t rush into what the next thing is. Take a beat and take some satisfaction looking backwards and saying, huh, you know what, didn’t get everything done that I wanted, it wasn’t always exactly how I planned it, but there’s a body of work there that I’m proud of.
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Pat yourself on the back for a second. Just be a little brain dead for a while. I’ve read a bunch of books that had been stacked up by — I had a big deficit with my wife — (laughter) — and had to kind of work my way out of. We went on a lot of trips and hung out and just had nice dinners and slept in. And then I think, wait, this is an opportunity for you, it was an opportunity for me, was figuring out, all right, what’s my next highest and best use, and what’s a new purpose that scratches that itch? And it may not come to you right away.
The podcast was kind of a random thing. You said, all right, let’s try this out. And you didn’t know it was going to go for 16 years. I assume when you did the first show –
MARC MARON: No, we didn’t know anything.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: (Laughter.) You didn’t know anything. You were trying to figure it out. And so, but you probably have an inkling of what you just described about people trusting you, connecting, partly because you’re willing to be vulnerable in front of people and kind of let them know what’s going on inside your gut, there’s a power to that. What’s another way of channeling it that may be different than you playing a character in a movie, or even you doing standup. There’s something more raw, honest, exposed, about what you do when you’re just having a conversation and connecting with people.
And so, the question is, well, is there another way for me to catch that? But you don’t have to rush into it. I guess my main thing would be take your time, unless you’ve really got some bills to pay.
MARC MARON: No, no, I’m okay, but it feels like the… I remember when you left, and there is this sort of a vacuum. And in terms of obviously, my responsibility to my audience is different, but how do you sort of — did you feel the weight of that responsibility?
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah. I mean, what was unusual for me was obviously, a lot of what I represented, a lot of what Michelle and I had tried to project, the values, our thinking about America, my successor seemed to represent the opposite.
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Not seemed, did. And so, I think there was a lot of anger, a lot of sadness, some fear among a big chunk of the country. And one of the problems with the American political system is, although we have political parties, we don’t have a parliamentary system. Basically, the President, in my case, Democrat, I leave office, and there’s no obvious person who’s now the shadow Prime Minister, the leader of the –
MARC MARON: For the Democrats.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: For the Democrats, right? And so, there were a lot of terrific people who were doing good work, but we had this weird situation where you don’t have a designated person who’s speaking on behalf of the whole party. I actually found myself drawn back into the day-to-day politics or commentary, more than I’d wanted to be –
MARC MARON: After the second term.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, in 2017, 2018. And I thought I was going to be able to remove myself more from being out there in public, and was going to be able to concentrate on what I really wanted to do, which was coach the next generation of leadership, move from player to coach, essentially. And I kept on being asked to comment on news of the day and look at this outrage, and why aren’t you out there more, and that kind of thing.
And, look, that’s flattering, and it’s an indication that you made a connection with people, but I tried to be a little bit disciplined about recognizing that I’d moved on to a new phase where I did not have formal power. I have some hopefully, moral suasion, some credibility, but I didn’t have formal power.
And so, more than anything, for the long term, what I could do that would be most helpful would be to start promoting, lifting up, shining a spotlight on those, that next generation of leadership and talent, new voices, because part of what also happens is, as you get older, Michelle and I joke about this, no matter how much you want to pretend otherwise, you’re starting to get a little out of touch. You’re not completely plugged into the zeitgeist.
MARC MARON: And it happens naturally.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: It just happens, yeah. I mean, look, I don’t my brain doesn’t register TikTok –
MARC MARON: Yeah, mine, either.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — the same way that it does my 16-year-old niece, right?
MARC MARON: Right. You’ve got to get guy to do it for you. (Laughter.)
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: It’s not just the technology itself, it’s that I am not plugged in. I’m not relating to the cultural stream in the same way that somebody who’s 20 or 25 or even 35 is.
MARC MARON: But that’s an interesting point, is that human connection, TikTok, like when you and I did the podcast, 2015, the landscape was, was not as glutted. Instagram didn’t have the power it does. TikTok, I don’t even know if it was around.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: No, not that I remember.
MARC MARON: And there was a way of making a real connection. And it seems like a lot of these platforms now, like TikTok is just an inundation of stuff that what — I know when I talk to you, and I can feel it and you can hear it, that there’s a human connection. And it seems like that’s necessary.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, listen, I’ve been wrestling with this for a while. People talk about me being the first digital president, and that’s true. Obviously, the internet existed before me, but when I came into office in 2009, the smartphone was not yet widely around. And so, the smartphone comes out around 2010. Facebook, Twitter, a lot of social media is just taking off.
MARC MARON: It seemed optimistic.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: It did, right?
MARC MARON: Yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: There’s all this sense of this is human connection. My campaign wouldn’t work. (Laughter.) I joke about the fact that I was an early adapter of all the social media, not because, by the way, I was so smart. It was that my campaign was broke enough that I had to rely on a bunch of 20 and 25 year olds volunteering in our office.
And they’d say, “Hey, Senator, this is a website.” I said, “Oh, website, great.”
MARC MARON: (Laughter.) “Sounds good.”
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: “Sounds good.” And they say, “So you can have pictures, and you can have even video on there. And see this little box? People can click it and they can contribute money.” And I’d be like, “Really?”
MARC MARON: “That’s good.” (Laughter.)
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: “Well, that seems useful.” And then they say, “And this one, they can volunteer.” And I’d be like, “Well, that’s great. Yeah, let’s do that.” And so, I probably…I mean, part of the reason I was elected was we were adapting all these new media, but this dates myself when I talk to audiences. My social media — our social media — was MySpace and Meetup.
Now, Meetup is the one that I always tell people is the most interesting to me.
MARC MARON: I don’t even know what it is. I missed it.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Meetup, it was social media –
MARC MARON: Early, yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — early application. And you could send basically text over. Let’s say there were a bunch of volunteers up in Idaho.
MARC MARON: Oh, yeah, yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And Idaho is not a big blue state with a lot of delegates, so we don’t have the resources to send a whole staff, paid staff up to Idaho, but we have a few volunteers. Some people, some supporters, they send us a message saying, “Hey, we’re Idahoans for Obama, and we’d love to build a — we think you can win this state.” And so, we go, “Alright.” We’d send a bunch of information through Meetup, and we’d give them the app. And basically what the app would do is you could send out, here’s Obama’s positions on things, here’s dates of debates and this and that. But the main thing it did, hence the name, was it would help these volunteers organize themselves to meet up.
MARC MARON: In person.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: In person, in the church basement, in a bar, in a VFW hall, whatever. And what I always tell people was wonderful about this rudimentary app was they’d show up when they actually met in person, and maybe they were assuming that they were all thought the same way and had the same positions on everything. And they’d show up at some Obama volunteer meeting, and you’d have what looked like an ex-Army Sergeant with a crew cut. And you’d have a young Black woman with a nose ring, and you’d have suburban mom with some kids.
And it turned out that, by virtue of meeting in person, you kind of realize that people are a little more complicated. Maybe they don’t agree with me on everything. Maybe they’re… and that’s a good thing. It creates this friction and this interest, and it forced people to kind of say, all right, well, it turns out that I don’t have to agree with everything to work with somebody.
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And then, out of those meetings, they’d have to go out and start knocking on doors, and that’s the ultimate meet up, because now you’re forcing yourself to talk to strangers who definitely don’t agree with you on stuff. But there was that sense of human interaction that gave people a sense of how somebody could be a good guy, but also have blind spots. Somebody could seem like a real jerk, and yet, there’s this redeeming quality.
It’s the same sense that you get living in a neighborhood, right, which is you go to the soccer game and all the parents are sitting around. Some guy or gal may not be your cup of tea, but then you see him hug their kid, and you go, oh, you know what –
MARC MARON: He’s all right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: He’s all right.
MARC MARON: And that’s foundational to democracy working.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Correct.
MARC MARON: And what happens now is that with us and them, and with all these social media platforms being individuals’ reality, so there’s no conversation. You’ve just got people blasting away at your face all day.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And the whole reeling thing, the algorithm –
MARC MARON: Yes, yes, yes.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — it does capture your mind and send you down a very narrow track in a way that — and it’s interesting for me. I said my brain doesn’t work that way, but I’ll be honest with you. With me, it’s mostly sports videos. (Laughter.)
MARC MARON: Yeah, sure.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: But I see how this mechanism works, where you can just get on a track. The great algorithm is powerful, and you will suddenly be consumed by this thing for half an hour. And you look up and you’ve wasted a whole bunch of time, but what it’s also done is it has narrowed your world significantly. And if you get on a political or social track on those reels, it’s hard to break.
MARC MARON: It’ll break your brain.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: It’ll break your brain.
MARC MARON: And it’s so terrifying and disturbing where you don’t… and also the dopamine part of it. People don’t have, necessarily, whether they do or not, it will annihilate their sense of values. It will annihilate principles in a way, because it works them up by delivering the same.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Well, it is well known — I mean, this has been documented — the design of phones, the way social media apps are set up, a lot of that is science based that arose out of figuring out how to make –
MARC MARON: Addiction, right?
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — figuring out how to make slot machines –
MARC MARON: Sure, sure.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I mean, there’s a reason why all these pings and light and stuff comes up on your phone. When notifications come, if you haven’t silenced it on your phone, just that sense of — (laughter) — the only game I really play on my phone is Word with Friends with Pete Souza, my old photographer from the White House.
MARC MARON: Sure. He took our picture.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, and it’s just a way for us to stay in touch. There’s a very particular ping that comes up when he’s played, and if I hadn’t turned my phone off, I could be in the middle of negotiations on a nuclear treaty, and that ping goes on, there’s a part of me that’s like, you know what –
MARC MARON: I’ve got to — (laughter).
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — I wonder what he played. All that is shaping the political environment in ways that even when you and I talked in 2015, that didn’t exist. And now the interesting thing is, podcasting, obviously it’s gotten segmented, and it’s getting chopped up so that people don’t listen to the whole conversation.
MARC MARON: On the video, yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: On the video and all that stuff. There is still, I think, a power in just people listening to conversations, if they listen to the whole thing, that I think is different. You and Rogan, I guess, came up, started right around the same time.
And it was interesting to me when people started criticizing Bernie or somebody else for going on Rogan. It’s like, why wouldn’t you? Yeah, of course, go. If you have time to go have a conversation with somebody, then that is consistent with democracy. To me, engaging in an honest conversation that’s not just yelling, not just trying to score points, but I’m going to take time to listen, and then I’m kind of sure how I’m thinking about things.
MARC MARON: Still valuable.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: That part of it is valuable, and the fact that we can have access to that, that we can, in some ways, participate in that conversation, I think, is actually not the big problem. But the problem that happens with podcasts is that they get all chopped up, and it gets put up on the video stream.
MARC MARON: The content economy. The one thing that we did was always keep it audio, so then we were kind of — it’s harder to clip audio.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Correct.
MARC MARON: And the people that listen to my show are in for the whole conversation. And I think what you’re talking about, which I try to kind of understand or wrap my brain around, is that there’s a tribalization happening in terms of even if Bernie goes on Joe, that Bernie is focused, and he knows what he wants to say. But when it’s taken out of context, or it’s solely looked at by a bubble of people, that the message can become obscured, right, and diminished.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, but look, there’s this young state rep, James Talarico, who was on there a while back from Texas.
MARC MARON: Yeah. Oh, that guy’s good.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: He’s terrific, a really talented young man. And it does require a certain confidence in your actual convictions to debate and have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you on a whole bunch of stuff.
MARC MARON: What makes him so good, though, because there is something grounded about him that — you had it, too.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: You know what? In our Foundation, a lot of the work that that I do is working with young civic leaders, political leaders, journalists, human rights lawyers, not just here in the United States, but around the world. And one of the first things I say to them is, know what you really believe. That’s your starting point.
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And if you know what you — first of all, if you understand your convictions, you’ve got a moral compass, you’ve got a code, you’ve spent time wrestling with what it is that you care about and what you believe, then it’s a lot easier now to be open and actually listen to other people as opposed to constantly trying to beat off anybody who might contradict your current perspective.
And I think a guy like him, his starting point is, let me say what I believe. And it doesn’t mean that anybody in public life — and by the way, anybody who’s married, anybody who’s in a relationship — it doesn’t mean that you can’t practice the art of diplomacy, that you can’t say it –
MARC MARON: Sure, compromise.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — in ways that are more likely to be received, but I think now more than ever, what people long for — and the word “authenticity” gets overused, I think — what people long for is some core integrity that seems absent, just a sense that the person seems to walk the walk, just talk the talk.
MARC MARON: Well, there’s a vulnerability to that.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yes.
MARC MARON: And there’s a vulnerability to having that integrity and having those principles, where, if you’re going to do it straight, that you have to leave yourself open to what’s going to come back at you and still stand strong.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Correct, and sometimes it’s going to be uncomfortable.
MARC MARON: And painful.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, look, and I think that that’s… There’s been a lot of postmortem about Democrats and progressives. And I saw your standup where you said somehow, we figured out how to be so annoying –
MARC MARON: We’ve annoyed the average American into fascism. (Laughter.)
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Which cracked me up because — I wasn’t as funny about saying this, but even four or five, six years ago, I’d say, you can’t just be a scold all the time. You can’t constantly lecture people without acknowledging that you’ve got some blind spots too, and that life’s messy.
And so, the vulnerability, I think, comes in and saying, right, I’ve got some core convictions. I’ve got beliefs that I’m not going to compromise, but I’m also not going to assert that I am so righteous and so pure and so insightful that there’s not the possibility that maybe I’m wrong on this, or that other people, if they don’t say things exactly the way I say them or see things exactly the way I do, that somehow they’re bad people.
And so, there was this weird, what I saw, and I think this was a fault of some progressive language, was almost asserting a holier-than-thou superiority that’s not that different from what we used to joke about coming from the right moral majority –
MARC MARON: Right, right –
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — and a certain fundamentalism about how to think about stuff that I think was dangerous.
MARC MARON: Because it was also a single issue, that if you have progressives, and how you straddle this stuff in general with being constantly trolled and attacked by the right, and then you have the left who are like, well, he droned a lot of people, and then it never goes away.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, I get my ass kicked a lot.
MARC MARON: But it seemed like the intention on your behalf. And I noticed this is something that happened me recently. I was in Canada for a couple days, and I was talking to somebody up there. And I said, “The best thing that Trump has done is bring your country together.” (Laughter.)
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: They do seem to be rallying around the maple leaf.
MARC MARON: But it was fundamentally like despite whatever differences they have, and it is a parliamentary system up there, but as individuals, that however they were leaning culturally right or left, that when the bullying started and the tariff started and the threat started, they were able to go down to their core beliefs of what their country meant, and what it what it meant to them, and how they were going to come together and rebuild from the inside, so we don’t have to deal with this. But it struck me as to, well, how are — and I know the answer to some level — how are we not capable of it? How is it that most people don’t understand the civic responsibility, or the civic structure of how this country is supposed to work, outside of the people that are shamelessly against it?
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, look, I mean, I think the way I describe it, America has always had warring narratives. A lot of American history is a war of ideas. And I gave a speech, probably my…The speech that is closest to my heart that I gave throughout my presidency was the speech I gave on the 50th anniversary of Selma, the March on Selma over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And I talked about that clash being as important as Gettysburg or Appomattox.
You’ve got, on one side, John Lewis and a ragtag band of pullman porters, maids and clergy and a couple rabbis and college kids, and they’re marching from one side. And on the other side, you’ve got folks with billy clubs on horseback and firehoses and dogs and all that. And what John Lewis represented was the narrative that says, “We the People,” means just what it says, that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. And on the other side was the fact of slavery and conquest and hierarchy and domination, and if you didn’t have property, you didn’t vote, and women weren’t involved. And that was always part of America, too.
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And the question has always been, can we pull off this experiment in which people are showing up from all over the place — they’re not tied together by blood. They don’t necessarily worship God in the same way, or worship God at all, but they speak different languages. They have all these weird foods. They show up with these odd customs. And some of them were dragged here in chains, and some of them had their land taken from them and their culture destroyed. And out of all that, can we create a shared creed that allows us to live peacefully together and get stuff done?
And on the other side, there has always been the idea that, no, no, “We the People” means something very particular…
MARC MARON: Yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: At each stage, then look, this led to, ultimately, the civil war. But even after the civil war, you get Jim Crow and reconstruction and the Klan. There’s always been this fight over, what is the true story of America. And I believe deeply in this story that, yeah, if we can pull this off, if we can actually treat everybody with decency and respect and compromise and make democracy work, it shines a light for the entire world.
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And the other path of tribe and a zero sum game and everything’s dog eat dog and a competition, and you try to take advantage of the other person, because they’re going to try to take advantage of you, and if they don’t look like you, and they don’t believe what you do, and they have a different faith than you, then they’re a threat to you, that is the path that leads to things like World War II and the Holocaust and slavery and Pol Pot and Rwanda. We see how that plays out.
And so, the question is, can the better, in my mind, can that better story win? And I think that after World War II — you and I are basically the same generation. We grew up in a monoculture, and as flawed as it was with TV and Walter Cronkite, we were all watching the same things. We were seeing the same things. We were listening to the same things.
There were groups that weren’t represented; there was bias in it. Women didn’t have power and were stereotyped in all kinds of awful ways. The LGBT community was just invisible and forced in the closet. There was all kind of flaws to it, but there was a common narrative that said, yeah, we can all pledge allegiance to the flag. We can all feel that we are full-fledged, true-blooded Americans, because we believe in these certain ideals.
And what you’re seeing right now is a reassertion of this idea of, nope, if you don’t look a certain way, you don’t think a certain way, you don’t practice a certain faith, you’re not a real American. And I started to see this during my — that’s what birtherism was about. That’s when Sarah Palin was talking about real Americans versus, I guess, the unreal Americans. It was that that was already boiling over.
And I say all that because I think that the majority, the vast majority of Americans, still, I think still believe in that creed, that sense of unity, that sense of a shared narrative, but it’s not reinforced a lot in the media. And that’s where we get back to this whole issue of social media. You don’t hear that sense of what we have in common, except during the Super Bowl and a couple other, maybe during the Olympics.
MARC MARON: Yeah, a sense of unity, a sense of people helping each other. I believe that what you’re talking about politically, in terms of what we spoke about earlier, that people are different, and some may have different beliefs, but there was a compromise that could be met, and that tolerance, in and of itself, is conditional to democracy working.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, forbearance, I think, is the formal term that political science uses. You have to put up with folks.
MARC MARON: That’s right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: As long as they’re not actively hurting you, you’ve got to put up with. And you can battle them, and ultimately, it gets sorted out in politics. And the winners get to move their agenda forward, and the losers lick their wounds and come back later, but there’s always that sense of, yeah, but we’re not going to call each other “vermin.” And we’re not going to try to crush you if you lose.
MARC MARON: That’s right, but the –
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: We’re not going to target you.
MARC MARON: But the brains have been broken through exploiting grievance and anger. And in talking about the left, the fact that so many decided to not vote out of protest because they didn’t feel that the situation in Israel, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and whatnot, was not going to be dealt with by Kamala, or however that goes. You get this protest vote of people not willing to make a compromise for what you used to talk about as the incremental progress.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah. Well, and look, that’s the thing that I spend a lot of time talking to younger leaders about this. And there’s no simple solution to it, but I will say that part of what a liberal democracy requires is an acceptance of partial victory, and not perfection.
When I was in the White House, I’d sit around on any issue with my cabinet or my staff, senior staff, and we’d go around analyzing everything. And at some point I’d say, “All right, I think I’ve got all the information. If we do X, is this going to make things better, because — ” and I’d say, I’d tell them, “Better is good. We’re not going to get to perfect.”
If you’re telling me that the Affordable Care Act is going to ensure 50 million people, do I think that’s better than…if we were starting from scratch, and I could get a single-payer plan instituted and get that through Congress, and suddenly we had universal health care, and we had taken the profit motive out of it, do I think that would probably be a smarter way to do it? Absolutely.
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: But since I can’t do that, I don’t have the votes for that, how about this?
MARC MARON: Yeah, we can make it better, a little bit.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: We can make it better. And this sense that things aren’t worth it unless we get everything we want, I think, is either a recipe for disappointment in a democracy, but also maybe in life, or it leads to this weird cynicism where you’re just withdrawn entirely.
MARC MARON: That’s –
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And that’s part of what happened to too many of our folks. I think we decided, all right, if I’m not going to get everything, then that justifies doing nothing.
It’s interesting. I had a conversation with Malia, my daughter. This was probably three, four years ago, and she was saying to me, “Dad, I’m talking to a bunch of my friends and this climate change thing, everybody just feels like it’s hopeless now. It looks like we just keep on throwing this crud into the air. People aren’t listening to science, and we’re going to blow through these targets. And the scientists tell us if we don’t keep it at 2% Celsius increase, we’re going to have these catastrophes. And it doesn’t seem like there’s any chance for us to do it. A bunch of my friends now say, what’s the point? It’s too late. So what should I tell them?”
And I said, “Well, you know what? It’s true that we probably will blow through this target, because it’s really hard for humans. It’s never been done before to completely reengineer our energy sources in one generation. And there’s greed and profit motives and just getting people organized and legacy systems. It’s hard, but actually, we’re making some progress.”
I said, “If we’re able to stop the increase at 2.5 instead of three, there’ll still be a lot of disruptions and flooding and drought and wildfires and some bad stuff will happen. But you know what? That half a centigrade difference, that could make a difference in a billion people’s lives.”
MARC MARON: Right, totally.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And so, I told her, I said, “You tell your friends, well, that’s worth working for.” It doesn’t mean that we won’t have some really serious problems because of climate change.
MARC MARON: But that’s the reality.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: But that’s the reality. But you know what? That half percent difference, that could be entire coastal villages. It could be what happens in Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands or millions of people can eat instead of not eat. It could affect whether or not people can make a living where they live, as opposed to trying to cross the oceans, to migrate to places where they can, and all the political conflicts that come with that.
That mentality of understanding, we should be doing better than we’re doing. It’s a shame that we’re stuck with this crazy, shortsighted approach to climate, but let’s see what we can get done. That, I think, is the mentality that all of us have to carry with us.
MARC MARON: Well, I think what you’re talking about, about cynicism and disengagement, is now there’s a level of fear that is real.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Right, and justified.
MARC MARON: Totally. What happens in terms of what we’re talking about, all the things that you lived through, and we lived through, whether we were kids or not, the progress that was made, civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, policies that were meant to make an attempt at sort of expanding democratic ideas. And you always had this core group of the other side that have been trying to dismantle this since the New Deal.
But now, and look, the left and people like me, you know, you throw around the words “fascism” in relation to authority, just willy-nilly. And you talk about authoritarianism as if it’s something that happens everywhere else. And I think right now you have a lot of people who are still locked into this, like it could never happen here, but at some point, don’t we have to wake up and say, it’s happening?
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I think there is no doubt that a lot of the norms, civic habits, expectations, institutional guardrails that we had, that we took for granted for our democracy, have been weakened deliberately. I don’t think they’re destroyed, but I think they have been damaged, and they’ve been systematic about it.
When I used to travel around the world, this is back when democracy promotion was still bipartisan — (laughter) — George Bush was for it, Bill Clinton was for it. I was for it. Marco Rubio apparently was for it, right? It wasn’t controversial for me to go to other countries and say, “You know what? It’s a good idea for militaries to be under civilian control,” because when you have military that can direct force against their own people, that is inherently corrupting.
And so, when you now start seeing the politicization of the military deliberately –
MARC MARON: They just landed in Chicago.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — when you have what looks like a deliberate end run around not just a concept, but a law that’s been around for a long time, Posse Comitatus, that says you don’t use our military on domestic soil, unless there is an extraordinary emergency of some sort, that when you see an administration suggest that ordinary street crime is an insurrection, or –
MARC MARON: Or terrorist act.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — or a terrorist act, that is a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy. And that was understood by Democrats and Republicans. I always try to — I mean, it’s almost too easy of a thought experiment.
If I had sent in the National Guard into Texas and just said, “You know what? A lot of problems in Dallas, a lot of crime there, and I don’t care what Governor Abbott says. I’m going to kind of take over law enforcement, because I think things are out of control,” it is mind boggling to me how Fox News would have responded.
MARC MARON: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I mean, there were times where I remember, there was a moment I don’t remember what year this was, where the military just had regular exercises in Texas out of one of the bases. And Ted Cruz and a number of other folks were out there lending credence to the fact that I was preparing for the whole black helicopter [inaudible] federal government, I was about to take over Texas. And this is like a sitting U.S. senator, just retweeting about what’s going on with these exercise.
MARC MARON: Secret ops.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I didn’t even have any — I didn’t monitor military exercise, because you know what? That was the Pentagon’s job. That was the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the COCOMS. That was their job to prepare and focus on military readiness, and then they report to me.
The point is that we have blown through, just in the last six months, a whole range of not simply assumptions, but rules and laws and practices that were put in place to ensure that nobody is above the law and that we don’t use the federal government to simply reward our friends and punish our enemies. The same thing is obviously happening in the Justice Department. So, people are right to be concerned.
The interesting thing, and what I’ve been trying to do when I’ve been speaking about this publicly, is just to remind folks, just as was true during the McCarthy era and has been true throughout our history, what’s required in these situations is a few folks standing up and giving courage to other folks.
And then more people stand up and kind of go, yeah, no, that’s not who we are. That’s not our idea of America. We don’t want masked folks with rifles and machine guns patrolling our streets. We want cops on the beat who know the neighborhood –
MARC MARON: Neighborhood.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — and the kids around, and that’s how we keep the peace around here. We don’t want kangaroo courts and trumped up charges. That’s what happens in other places that we used to scold for doing that. We want our court system and our Justice Department and our prosecutors and our FBI to be, just playing things straight and looking at the facts and not meddling in politics the way we’ve seen lately.
And I think if enough people start not to being in a fetal position, but also not being just not worrying about it and –
MARC MARON: Detached.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — and detached from it, but being vigilant, but also saying, you know what –
MARC MARON: I’m not (inaudible).
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, we can stand up to this. We can call it like we see it. We need people who have whatever platforms they have to be able to say, no, that’s not who we are, and to be willing to get attacked on X by whoever for doing that. And it’s not easy.
MARC MARON: Yeah, because sometimes you fear for your life.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, and there’s this whole process of doxxing, and…
MARC MARON: Yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I always used to — Michelle and I talk about the fact that a lot of our friends, we used to call them civilians, because if they got criticized on the comment page about something, they’d be freaked out. (Laughter.) And we’re like, you know what? I mean, we’ve had so much incoming and over the course of 10 years. Now, we chose it, or at least, I chose it, as Michelle will point out, and then she was subjected to it, that, yeah, you do get a tougher skin. But I understand how it’s hard when suddenly your email or your phone is filled up with hostile, nasty –
MARC MARON: Trolling garbage.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — trolling garbage. And you’ve gotten used to it, too, but I tell you, it’s not like we’re not at the stage where you have to be like Nelson Mandela and be in a 10x12 jail cell for 27 years and break rocks.
MARC MARON: Not yet, yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: We’re not at that point. Right now, there’s just a little discomfort. And so, when I say, for example, if you’re a law firm, you saying we’re going to represent who we want, and we’re going to stand up for what we think is our core mission of upholding the law, and maybe we’ll lose some business for that, but that’s what we believe, that’s what’s needed.
If you’re a university president, say, well, you know what? This will hurt if we lose some grant money in the federal government, but that’s what endowments are for. Let’s see if we can ride this out, because what we’re not going to do is compromise our basic academic independence.
If you’re a business, you say, You know what? We’re going to… we think it’s important, because of what this country is, to hire people from different backgrounds. And we’re not going to be bullied into saying that we can only hire people or promote people based on some criteria that’s been cooked up by Steve Miller. We all have this capacity, I think, to take a stand.
And ultimately, this goes back to something I said earlier about convictions. If convictions don’t cost anything, then they’re really just kind of fashion. They’re not really convictions. And I do think that our generation, yours and mine, Marc, because, again, we’re about the same age, we were so accustomed to things kind of getting better consistently over our lifetimes, a little less racist, a little less sexist, less homophobic, a little more generous, that it was easy, I think, to say, well, yeah, I’m a progressive, but it didn’t really cost us anything. We could take positions on things that we thought were –
MARC MARON: Correct.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — correct, but they were never really tested.
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Well, here’s the test. And I think, ultimately a lot of people will pass, but I think they haven’t realized yet, now we’re being tested right now. I think people — and that includes young people. Understand there are consequences to the choices that we’re making.
If you decide not to vote, that’s a consequence. If you are Hispanic man and you’re frustrated about inflation, and so you decided, ah, you know what, all that rhetoric about Trump doesn’t matter. I’m just mad about inflation. And now your sons are being stopped in LA because they look Latino –
MARC MARON: May be incarcerated for a few days.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — and maybe without the ability to call anybody, might just be locked up, well, that’s a test. There’s some clarity that’s coming about right now that I wish — it’d be great if we weren’t tested this way, but you know what? We probably need to be shaken out of our complacency anyway.
MARC MARON: Yeah, and what’s interesting about the test and standing up, and what you said, the difference between fashion and standing up, is that if people are comfortable in their own lives and they can convince themselves that it doesn’t affect them, I mean, that’s the biggest challenge.
And also on the list of universities and law firms and businesses, is that corporations are a different animal in relation to the bottom line and to whatever which way the wind blows politically, and that certainly with the destruction of DEI policy, they’re not beholden to toe a democratic line. And that becomes the biggest fear in terms of certain freedoms.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Well, look, I mean, you saw what happened with Kimmel –
MARC MARON: With Jimmy, yeah, yeah.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And I mean, the consolidation of media, it’s interesting. We’re talking about there used to be sort of a monoculture, three TV stations and PBS, but partly because it was coming out of World War II, and I think people had been sufficiently scared and traumatized by what had happened in terms of propaganda and Hitler and all this, we set up a bunch of structures that created journalistic standards and fact checking and clear lines between opinion and fact.
And now, we’ve got just as — media is just as concentrated, but none of the rules, right?
MARC MARON: Right.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: And it can feed some worst impulses and tell each segment of people out there, just feed back their own biases and prejudices back to them and make money on it.
This whole point about corporations, this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, also, is that I do think so much of what’s been driving political instability everywhere is this widening, massive gulf in opportunity, wealth, income within countries, between countries. I mean, the idea that some people now have $300-$400 billion on their way to a trillion dollars, and you’ve got ordinary people still trying to figure out how to –
MARC MARON: Eat.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — eat and pay the rent, that is driving a lot of this. And part of what I think we have to spend more time thinking about is some old-fashioned values that aren’t based just on money and how much you’ve got and material concerns. And I’m somebody who believes that market-based economics is actually not only the best way to create enough stuff for everybody to be okay, but I also think it’s tied to freedom.
State-run economics generally don’t work very well, but so much of our culture now, so much of what we teach our kids is geared around buying stuff and having stuff and posting it on Instagram. And then –
MARC MARON: Right, it’s winning, to some people.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Right. Winning is now defined solely by material goods, how much you got, and to some degree, fame. That’s become another currency.
And I do think part of what our conversation needs to be more about, and it used to come out of the church or out of the stories we told our kids, was this sense of, oh, you know what, character matters, honesty matters, community and family and loyalty and kindness matters. Those are the stories that — that’s part of our political project, is reaffirming that stuff.
I think you were asking how I navigated some of these conflicts, and I’d get attacked from the right, and I’d get attacked from the left. One way I did that was trying to tell people what I really thought, but the other thing was, I actually had some pretty old-fashioned values, even if I had progressive or newfangled ideas.
If I talked about trans issues, I wasn’t talking to down to people and saying, oh, you’re a bigot. I’d say, you know what? It’s tough enough being a teenager. Let’s treat all kids decently. Why would we want to see kids bullied –
MARC MARON: Or shamed.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — or shamed? Why would we want to do that? Why wouldn’t we want to just — what if it was our kid? And I think spending more time talking about why those values are important, not being cynical about them, not being ironic about it, but saying no, no, that stuff matters, that would make a difference.
MARC MARON: All right. Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah. You know what? I think we’re going to be okay. And I think that part of the reason you had such a big fan base during the 16-year run is there was a core decency to you and the conversations you had, maybe slightly edited by Brendan –
MARC MARON: Yeah, thankfully. (Laughter.)
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: — that, I think, speaks to who we are. And we can’t take this stuff for granted, but my experience is most people are really decent. And I think that’s why, when they hear somebody else who is, it gives them courage and gives them hope. And you should be proud of having done that.
MARC MARON: Well, thank you, Mr. President. And thank you. I’m glad I made the trip. You came to my house the first time. I’ll come here, and I hope to talk to you again.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: We’ll meet halfway next time.
MARC MARON: Okay, buddy. Thanks, man.
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: All right.
