Episode 1686 - Barack Obama

Lock the gates!

All right, let's do this.

How are you, folks?

This is it.

This is the last episode of WTF.

I didn't really know what we were going to do for this episode.

Initially, I thought, well, maybe I could just talk to you guys and reflect, but we did that on Thursday.

So then it came down to, well, who are we going to have on the last episode?

And,

well,

you know, I do a lot of talking about how I feel about the world, both interior and exterior, micro, macro, what's going on in me, how am I reacting to what's going on in the world?

And it became clear.

that the guest we needed to have was singular in that he could could address the importance of this being our final episode, but also address

how we move through the world we're living in, as frightening as it is with what's happening.

And how do we do it with some grace and perhaps some hope and some focus and really call what's going on what it is.

And that guest is...

President Barack Obama.

So I went to Washington, D.C.

He came to my house the last time, so I figured I'd go to him.

And we sat down for about an hour plus,

and we talked about a lot of things, but I think there's a lot of

grounding,

sort of instructive advice in this conversation about how we frame where we're at and how we think about it and what's necessary.

So this is me talking to Barack Obama, President Barack Obama, in Washington, D.C.

Can I say before we start or

whatever you want to start,

to me,

I can't imagine anything tougher or more terrifying than doing stand-up comedy.

So once you do that,

I mean, everything else is...

Is easy?

I won't say easy.

I'm saying...

Not as frightening.

Yeah.

To me, standing alone on a stage and hoping a bunch of people laugh at you stuff.

Yeah.

It's, yeah, you get used to it, but not unlike, I'm sure, your gig.

Yeah.

You know, sometimes it's not going to go exactly right.

It's not always going to, you're not always going to hit it out of the park.

Right.

But I guess what I'm saying is at a certain point for you, there's got to be just like, you had a lot of reps.

Yeah.

Reps are helpful, man.

Reps in talking to people and reps in comedy, but it's weird with both for me

because

I seem to get just as anxious and

it never goes away.

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 like I know that a part of me lives up there.

Yeah.

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's different.

But yeah, I still keep it fresh by being terrified.

Well, look, there's

Bill Russell.

Yep, Bill Russell.

Greatest champion of...

North American sports.

Yep.

Kept throwing up even after, yeah, but right before games.

It's true, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you got to have a little bit of a few butterflies.

Otherwise.

Did you, you don't get it?

You know, not

just having a conversation.

Right.

You know, if there's a big speech that I've got to give,

then there's still a little bit of.

A little bit of fear?

A little bit of adrenaline.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A little bit of like, all right, let me make sure that.

Yeah.

You know, I got.

You're ready to go?

You're focused?

I'm focused.

Lit up?

I'm pumped up

are we are we just gonna dive in here or how are we already doing it we're already doing it I do want to ask you

I got a weird question I want to ask you and I want I decided to start with this as opposed to end with it and it's it's kind of business yeah but it's important for me it's important for the show I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you to for your signature on something absolutely what do we got

is it a commutation I can't do that anymore

no this is uh 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 a witness, and you're here.

So to all concerned, this is dated 10-13-25, the date of the last show.

I, Mark Maron, hereby formally release Brendan McDonald from the professional responsibility of listening to me talk from now and in perpetuity.

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 life-changing ride on my yammering, and I am forever grateful to Brendan for keeping me at my best.

I am more than happy.

I'm going to sign it.

You sign it.

I will witness it.

And this is kind of a commutation.

I mean,

essentially,

Brendan is released.

Yes, it's a

from me.

From you.

You know, I have a sense that

he kind of liked hanging out with you.

Yeah,

it's been a hell of a partnership.

I mean, it may be a little Stockholm syndrome.

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.

He's like the better half of, he's protected me.

You know, I don't say shit.

And it'll go on, I'll record stuff, and in the back of my head, I'll think like, Brendan's not going to, he's not going to leave that in.

No, no.

Yeah, it's

got to have, he's like your superego.

That's exactly right.

And he's a functioning part of my memory.

Yes.

Like, I don't remember, like, obviously I remember our conversation, but there's been 1,600 and more, almost 1,700 conversations.

That's a lot.

So 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?

Well, moving on from this thing that has been

one of the defining parts of your career now.

16 years.

Yeah.

It's a long time.

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, you know,

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.

I think it's recently.

Thank you.

I've got a lot of people who over the last 16 years have grown to rely on me.

Yes.

You've got a lot of fans just around.

Yeah.

In unlikely places.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

As in here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But like, you know, they need something.

Right.

That there is a

feeling of like, how am I going to feel, you know, less alone?

How am I going to deal with my mental this or that?

And how am I going to find, you know, 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.

They trust you.

Yeah.

And

they feel as if

what you're going through

and what they're going through occupies a similar space.

Right.

And so they don't feel like they're traveling this journey that can be frightening alone sometimes.

That's right.

And there's a power in the human voice

that

you grow attached to.

Yeah.

So when you left,

what did you do for your mental health with the weight of well?

Look, how old are you now?

I'm 62.

Right.

So

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 of work there that I'm proud of.

Right.

You know, pat yourself on the back for a second.

Just be a little brain dead for a while.

You know, I've

read a bunch of books that had been stacked up.

I had a big

deficit with my wife that I had to

kind of work my way out of.

Right.

So we went on a lot of trips and hung out and

just had nice dinners and slept in.

And then I think

what 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?

What's a new purpose that

scratches that itch?

And it...

it may not come to you right away.

The podcast was kind of a random thing, right?

You said, 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, no, we didn't know anything, you didn't know anything, you're trying to figure it out, and and and so,

but but you probably have an inkling of you know, what you just described about

people trusting you, you connecting partly because you're willing to be vulnerable in front of people and kind of let them know

what's going on in inside your gut.

There's a power to that.

What's another way of channeling it, right?

That may be different than you playing a character in a movie or

even you doing stand-up.

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?

Yeah.

You know, but you don't have to rush into it.

I guess my main thing would be, you know, take your time, unless you really got some bills to pay.

No, no, I'm okay.

But like, it feels like,

like, I remember when you left,

and the, you know, there is this sort of a vacuum.

And in terms of like, my, obviously, my responsibility to my audience is

different.

But how do you sort of,

you know, didn't, did you feel the weight of that responsibility?

Yeah, I mean, what was unusual for for me was,

obviously,

a lot of

what I represented, a lot of what Michelle and I had tried to project, the values

are thinking about America,

my successor seemed to represent the opposite.

Right.

Not seemed, did.

Yeah.

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.

So 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 party for the Democrats.

And so

there were a lot of terrific people who were doing good work, but

we have this weird situation where you don't have a designated person who's

speaking on behalf of the whole party.

So

I actually found myself drawn back in to

day-to-day politics or commentary more than I had wanted to be.

After the second year, after the

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.

Sure.

Yeah, 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

and that kind of thing.

And look, that's flattering.

Yeah.

And,

you know, it's an indication that you made a connection with people.

Sure.

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

that next generation of leadership and talent, new voices.

Because part of what also happens is know,

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, you know, plugged into the zeitgeist.

And it happens naturally.

It just happens.

Yeah, I mean, look,

I don't, my brain doesn't register TikTok.

Yeah, mine either.

The same way that it does my

16-year-old niece.

Right.

Right?

You got to get a guy to do it for you.

It's not just

the technology itself, it's that I'm not plugged in.

I'm not relating to

the cultural

stream in the same way that somebody who's 20 or 20.

25 or even 35 is.

But that's an interesting point is that

human connection, you know, TikTok, like when you and I did the podcast, 2015, the landscape was not as glutted.

You know, Instagram didn't have the power it does.

TikTok, I don't even know if it was around.

Not that I remember.

And, you know, 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.

Like, I know when I talk to you, and I can feel it and you can hear it, that there's a human connection.

Right.

And it seems like, you know, that's necessary.

Yeah, it's I listen, I've been wrestling with this for a while.

You know,

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.

It seemed optimistic.

It did, right?

So

there's all this sense of this is human connection.

My campaign wouldn't work.

I joke about the fact that I was an early adapter of all this 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, like, hey,

Senator,

this is a website.

And I said, ah, website, great.

Sounds good.

Sounds good.

And say, so you can have pictures and you can have even video on there.

And see this little box, like people can click it and they can contribute money.

Right.

And I'd be like, really?

That's good.

Well, that seems useful.

And then they'd say, and this one, they can like 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, you know, this dates myself.

I talked to audiences.

I was like,

my social media, our social media was MySpace.

Yeah.

And Meetup.

Now, Meetup is the one that I always tell people is the most interesting to me.

I don't even know what it is.

I missed it.

So Meetup was, you know, it was a social media

application.

And you could send basically text over.

So, let's say there were a bunch of volunteers up in Idaho.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And, you know, 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 know, you can win this state.

And so we go, all right.

So 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.

In person.

In person.

Yeah.

In a 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 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 a

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 a suburban mom

with some kids.

And it turned out that by virtue of meeting in person, you kind of realize people are a little more complicated.

Sure.

Maybe they don't agree with me on everything.

Right.

Maybe they're, and that's a good thing, right?

So it creates this friction and this interest.

And it

forced people to kind of say, all right, well, you know, it turns out that I don't have to agree with everything to work with somebody.

Right.

And then out of those meetings, they'd have to go out and start knocking on doors.

And that's the ultimate meetup 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 be,

you know,

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 like you go to the soccer game and all the parents are sitting around and, you know, some guy or gal may not be your cup of tea, but then you see them hug their kid, and you go, oh, you know what?

He's all right.

He's all right.

Well, and that's foundational to democracy working.

Correct.

And what happens now is that with us and them and with all these social media platforms, you know, being individuals' reality.

Right.

So there's no conversation.

You just got people blasting away at your face all day.

And

the whole reeling thing, the algorithm.

Yes, yes, yes.

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, like, my brain doesn't work that way.

Right.

But I'll be honest with you, with me, it's mostly like sports videos.

Yeah, sure.

But I see how this mechanism works where you can just get on a track and you will suddenly be consumed by this thing for half an hour or 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.

It'll break your brain.

It'll break your brain.

And it's so terrifying and disturbing that where you don't,

and also the dopamine part of it, it's that people don't have necessarily whether they do or not it'll annihilate the their sense of values it'll annihilate principles you know in a way because it works them up by delivering this thing well they it is well known i mean this has been documented that right uh you know the the design of phones the way social media apps are set up a lot of that is science-based uh that that arose out of

you know figuring out how to make

figuring out how to make slot machines.

Sure, sure.

I mean, there's a reason why all these pings and lights and

stuff comes up on your phone.

When notifications come, if you haven't silenced it on your phone, right?

Just that sense of...

The only game I really play is

on my phone is Word with Friends with Pete Sousa, my old photographer from the White House.

Sure.

Took our picture.

Yeah.

And it's just a way for us to stay in touch.

Yeah.

There's a very particular ping that comes up when he's played.

And

if I haven't turned my phone off,

I could be in the middle of negotiations on a

nuclear treaty.

Yeah.

And that ping goes off.

There's a part of me that's like, you know what?

I wonder what he played.

Right?

So

all that is shaping

the political environment in ways that 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 a whole conversation.

On the video, yeah.

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.

Sure.

That

i think is different yeah you know i i you you and rogan i guess came up yeah started right around the same time right and it it was interesting to me when

you know people started criticizing i don't know bernie or somebody else for going on rogan right it's like well why wouldn't you

yeah of course go go if if you have time to go have a conversation with somebody

you know 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, all right, I'm going to take time to listen and then I'm going to kind of share how I'm thinking about things.

Still valuable.

That part of it is valuable, and the fact that we can have access to that, we can in some ways participate in that conversation,

I think is actually

not

the big problem.

The problem that happens with podcasts is that they get all chopped up.

And

then it gets put up on

the video stream.

The content economy.

The one thing that we did was always keep it audio.

So then we were kind of, it's harder to...

to clip audio.

Correct.

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 yeah but but look there's this young state rep James Torico who was on there a while back out of Texas oh that guy's good right he's terrific a really talented young man and and you know

it 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 what makes him so good though because there is something grounded about him that you had it too I You know what?

So at our foundation, a lot of the work 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.

Right.

Like, that's your starting point.

Right.

And first of all, if you understand your convictions, you got a moral compass, you 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, you know, it doesn't mean that you can't practice the art of diplomacy, that you can't say it

in ways that

are more likely to be received.

Right.

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,

ah, you know,

the person seems to

walk the walk, doesn't just talk the talk.

Well, there's a vulnerability to that.

Yes.

And there's a vulnerability to, you know, having that integrity and having those principles where if you're going to do it, you know, straight.

Yeah.

that you have to leave yourself open

to what's going to come back at you and still stand strong.

Correct.

And sometimes it's going to be uncomfortable.

It's painful.

Yeah.

Look, and

I and I think that that's,

you know, there's been a lot of post-mortem about Democrats and

progressives.

And,

you know, I saw

your stand-up where you said, you know,

you know, we figured out how to be so annoying.

And we annoyed the average American into fascism.

Yeah.

Which Which

cracked me up because

I wasn't as funny about saying this, but even

four, five, six years ago, I'd say, you know,

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 in saying, all 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.

Sure.

Or that, you know,

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

in,

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,

you know,

the right and the moral majority and, you know,

our way and a certain fundamentalism about how to think about stuff that I think was dangerous.

But because it was also a single issue.

Yeah.

That if you have progressives, like, you know, and how you straddled this stuff in general with being, you know, 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.

I'd get my ass kicked.

Right.

But it seemed like the intention on your behalf, and I noticed this is something that happened to me recently.

I was in Canada for a couple of days.

And

I was talking to somebody up there.

And I said, the best thing

that Trump has done is bring your country together.

They do seem to be rallying around the maple leaf.

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, you know, 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 meant to them

and how they were, you know, going to come together and,

you know, rebuild from the inside so we don't have to deal with this.

But it struck me as to like, you know, well,

how, 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?

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 of ideas.

Right.

And,

you know, I gave a speech,

probably

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 Pettis 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 and maids and clergy and a couple of 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 fire hoses 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.

Right.

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.

They speak different languages.

They have all these weird foods.

They show up with 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.

Yeah.

And so at each stage, and look, this led to ultimately Civil War, but even after Civil War, you got Jim Crow and Reconstruction and the Klan.

And

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.

Right.

And

the other path of tribe and

a zero-sum game, and everything's dog-eat-dog in 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 in you that 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.

And

we see how that plays out.

And so the question is,

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, you know, with TV and Walter Cronkite, and 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 into the closet.

There was all kinds 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, you know,

true-blooded Americans

because we believe in

these ideals.

And what you're seeing right now is a reassertion of this idea of like, nope.

If you don't look a certain way, you don't think a certain way, you don't practice a certain faith,

you know, you're not a real American.

And I started to see this during my, that's what birtherism was about, right?

Yeah, that's, that's what, 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

I think the majority, the vast majority of Americans, I 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, yeah, maybe during the Olympics.

There's a sense of unity, a sense of like people helping each other.

Like, I believe that what you're talking about, you know, 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.

Forbearance, I think, is the formal term that political science use.

You have to put up with folks.

That's right.

As long as they're not actively hurting you.

Right.

You've got to put up with them.

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.

We're not going to target you.

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.

So you get this protest vote of people not willing to make a compromise for what you used to talk about as the incremental progress.

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.

You know, 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 tell them, better's good.

We're not going to get to perfect.

Right.

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 can 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.

Do I think that would probably be a smarter way to do it?

Absolutely.

But since I can't do that,

I don't have the votes for that.

How about this?

Yeah, we can make it better.

We can make it better.

And

this sense that

things aren't worth it

unless

we get everything we want

I think

is

is either a recipe for disappointment in a democracy but also maybe in life

or it leads to this weird cynicism where you just withdraw entirely that's that's and that's part of what happened to too many of our folks

we we

i think we were

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, it was probably three, four years ago, and she was saying to me,

Dad, you know, I'm talking to a bunch of my friends and this climate change thing, you know, they're just, everybody just feels like it's hopeless now.

It looks like, you know,

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 that the scientists tell us.

You know, 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.

So a bunch of my friends now say, you know, what's the point?

Right.

Like,

you know, 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 re-engineer 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,

you know, if if we're able to stop the increase at 2.5 instead of 3,

there will 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.

Right, totally.

And so I told her, I said, you tell your friends, well, that's worth working for.

Yeah.

It doesn't mean that we won't have some really serious problems because of climate change.

But that's the reality.

But that's the reality.

But you know what?

That half percent difference, that could be in

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, you know, short-sighted 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.

Well, I think what you were talking about about cynicism and disengagement is now there's a level of fear

that is real.

Right.

And justified.

Totally.

So, you know, what happens, you know, in terms of what we're talking about, all the things that

you live through and we live 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 from, you know, since the New Deal.

But now, you know, and look, the left

and people like me, you know, you...

You throw around the words, you know, fascism in relation to authority, just willy-nilly.

And you talk 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?

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,

You know, this is back when

democracy promotion was still bipartisan, right?

Yeah, you know, George Bush was for it,

Bill Clinton was for it, yeah, I was for it, Marco Rubio apparently was for it, right?

So, so

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,

you know, yeah, yeah, because

when

you have

militaries

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, right?

They just landed in Chicago.

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, pase comitatus, that says, you know,

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

a terrorist act

that is a genuine effort to weaken

how we have understood democracy and that 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,

you know, 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.

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, Fort Hood.

And

Ted Cruz and

a number of other folks were out there lending credence to the fact that I was preparing for

You know, the whole black helicopter, one world government.

I was about to take over Texas.

And this is like a sitting U.S.

Senator

retweeting about

what's going on with these exercises.

Secret ops.

I didn't even have any.

I didn't monitor military exercises 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'd 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's above the law.

and that we don't use the federal government to simply reward our friends and punish our enemies.

And the same thing's 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 is a few folks standing up and giving courage to other folks, and then more people stand up and kind of go like, 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

local neighborhood 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 to be, 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 being in a fetal position,

but also not being just

not worrying about it

and detached from it, but being vigilant, but also saying, you know what?

Enough of this.

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.

Yeah, because sometimes you fear for your life.

Yeah.

And

there's this whole process of doxing.

And

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, you know, on the comment page about something, they'd be freaked out.

And we're like, you know what?

I mean,

we've had so much

incoming over the course of 10 years.

Now we chose it, or at least I chose it, as Michelle will point out, and 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, trolling garbage.

Trolling garbage, right?

And you've gotten used to it too.

But I tell you, you know, it's not like

we're not at the stage where you have to be like Nelson Mandel and be in a 10 by 12 jail cell for 27 years

and break rocks.

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 know,

you saying to,

you know, 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 from 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 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 by Steve Miller.

Yeah.

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 conviction.

And I do think that our generation, yours and mine, Mark, 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.

You know, we could take positions on things that we thought were

correct,

but they were never really tested.

So, well, here's the test.

And

I think ultimately a lot of people will pass.

But I think they haven't realized yet, no, we're being tested right now.

I think people, and that includes young people, right?

Like,

understand

there are consequences to the choices that we're making.

If you decide not to vote, that's a consequence.

If you are a Hispanic man and you're frustrated about inflation and so you decided,

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 L.A.

because they look Latino.

Maybe incarcerated for a few days.

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, you know,

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.

Yeah, and what's interesting about the test and standing up and what you said, the difference between fashion and

standing up, is that people, 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 tow a democratic line.

And that becomes the biggest fear in terms of certain freedoms.

Well,

look, I mean, you saw what happened with Kimmel.

And, I mean, the consolidation of media.

It's interesting.

We were talking about

there used to be sort of a monoculture, you know, 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

media is just as concentrated, but none of the rules, right?

And it can feed some of our worst impulses and tell each segment of people

out there, you know, 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, right?

within countries, between countries.

I mean, the idea that some people now have three, four hundred billion dollars on their way to a trillion dollars, and you've got ordinary people still trying to figure out how to eat and pay the rent.

That is driving a lot of this, right?

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 got and material

concerns.

And

I am 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

winning to some degree.

Right.

Winning is now defined solely

material goods, how much you got, and to some degree, fame.

That's become another currency, right?

Right.

And I do think part of what our conversation needs to be more about is, and it used to come out of the church or 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, right?

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 you know, the other thing was

I actually had some pretty old-fashioned values, even if

I had

progressive or newfangled ideas.

You know, if I talked about trans issues,

I wasn't talking

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?

Or shamed.

Or shamed.

Why would we want to do that?

Why wouldn't we want to just, you know, what if it was our kid?

Right?

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.

Sure.

That would make a difference.

All right.

Well, we've got our work cut out for us.

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.

Yeah.

Thankfully.

That

I think speaks to who we are.

And,

you know, 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.

Well, thank you, Mr.

President.

And thank you.

And 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.

We'll meet halfway next time.

Okay, buddy.

Thanks, man.

All right.

So that's it.

I hope that was

helpful.

It was certainly an honor for me.

And I was very moved that he took my work into such consideration.

And thank you to his amazing team who

made it a smooth undertaking and also really helped us get it all together.

And

again, if you didn't listen to Thursday, I think I addressed almost everything I needed to address as a thank you to you and as a farewell in terms of how I felt.

And now I think it's important that we thank some people that were essential to this show.

John Montagna, who created our theme music.

Nathan Smith, who created our logo.

Olivia Wingate, my manager when we started.

David Martin, my manager now.

Kit Pleasant, who has been on board for the last five years.

Kelly von Valkenberg.

Nikki Herarian, Walter Heyman, Frank Capello, Ashley Barnhill, Sam Varela, Stosh Kusaki for all their assistance through the years.

Joanna Jordan, Bella Harkins, Lindsey Johnson, Abigail Parsons, Ashley Wheeler, and everyone who booked anyone on the show.

Chris Lopresto for his work on the Full Marin.

Don McDonald and Owen McDonald for letting Brendan McDonald do the work.

And of course, all our guests, and of course, all our listeners, all of you.

Boomer Lives, Monkey and Lafonda,

Cat Angels Everywhere.