You're listening to Comedy Central. Now, it's been 30 years since the first episode of Beverly Hills, 1981, OK, 30 years since we walk the halls of West Beverly High and since we all hung out at the Peach Pit, relive it all with Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling on their new podcast, Two and OMG. We get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happened to them as they watch every episode of the beloved 90s TV show from the very beginning.

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Are you going to filibuster me or because I don't have all the time you want me to be very good. So is this like a roundabout way of saying you just want me to give a short pithy. No, I don't want your question. You want me to speed up? You want me to talk fast?

No, no, no, no. Please, Mr. President, I will not I will not purposely filibuster, but sometimes I will have a pause as I'm formulating my thoughts. As you well know, Michelle, Michelle has been speeding up my auto my my audio book. So, you know, I guess you can press a button. So, yeah. You like point two, five or one and a half. Yes. Yeah. Well, yeah, you were one and a half guy.

You did want to talk.

I was a little offended by that, but that's okay. That's fine.

It does, it doesn't communicate the depth of feeling with which I'm doing the reading but it's OK.

How do you like being referred to.

Like just as a human being. Do you like Mr. President?

People call me Barack, but then sometimes some folks feel awkward doing it. Obviously, that's what my friends call me. So I consider you a friend, but you may feel, you know. So no, no, no.

The people the people will feel like like even Africans will. They'll write me a letter saying, how dare you, this is my fault, too.

So I don't want to get you in trouble. So you can say, Mr. President, makes sense. You can call me Protus.

My favorite one was. Oh, Bizzle. That was my favorite. Please call me that. Mr. President, welcome to the Daily Social Distancing Show.

I am very happy to be here with you. You're out there promoting a brand new book, A Promised Land, a seven hundred page book, if I may add. I love reading your stuff. Don't get me wrong. But like I would have liked three fifty three fifty.

Why seven hundred pages, you know, I would have, I would have broken it up even more. But, you know, the publishers thought that breaking it up into two volumes would be about right. And look, the goal of the book was to give people a sense of what it's like to be in the White House. Right. As a normal person, finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances. And I think part of the goal, particularly for young people, I wanted them to get a sense that, you know, not everybody is going to end up being president.

But if you decide that your voice makes a difference, if you decide that you can have an impact, then through the ups and downs, you will end up having some pretty extraordinary experiences. And one, I wanted to be an encouragement for people to say, you know, the guy is OK, but he's not so special and look what he ended up doing. Maybe I can do something, something as well.

It feels like this book is Barack Obama convincing Barack Obama to remain optimistic? And what I mean by convincing Barack Obama, I think of like a young Barack Obama, I think of a fledgling Barack Obama. I'm not trying to emulate you, per say, but rather anyone who's trying to make a change in the world or their world.

That's what that's what it feels like if you if you are writing to young people to be optimistic in the book.

What are some of the frustrations that you understand on this side that may hinder that optimism? Because if a young person says, yeah, but the system right now is crumbling more and more, how do you how do you maintain that optimism or do you think there has to be a point where they go? I'm not optimistic. I'm just fighting to break what it is to create something new.

Part of the reason that it's 700 pages long is because by reading the book, they'll see men. There are a lot of structural problems or barriers in making this place better.

We're learning right now in Vivid, a vivid example of the fact that our democracy is not the way we would imagine it to be. But there are all kinds of elements to it where the most votes don't necessarily translate into the equivalent amount of power. Very popular proposals can wither on the vine because of a filibuster in the Senate. And so I don't try to gloss those over.

You know, the Paris accord did not solve climate change, but it created the first global framework whereby all countries agreed, we have to do something about this and here's a mechanism to do it. You can still be terrified about the pace at which we are burning up the planet and yet think that was a worthwhile endeavor because it gives us at least the opportunity maybe three, four or five years down the road to keep building on that. So that is the kind of mentality I want young people to have a certain impatience, a certain frustration, a certain anger about the status quo.

There are times now where, you know, you have younger activists criticizing me for Obama. Why don't you take care of this or that or the other? And I, I welcome them feeling frustrated and impatient because that's how I was before I got started. And then they'll get their own knocks on the head and, you know, some stuff won't work out exactly the way they want. But the impulse. Is the one that I want to encourage, because it's as a consequence of that, that constant striving and imagining something better, that things don't get exactly as we want it, but they get better.

You're a very serious person because, I mean, you're a president of the United States, but at the same time, you're a lot more fun than a lot of people think.

You know, I'm constantly trying to explain to people I'm a funny guy, but but I don't know. But you're right. But you really are. You really, really are. And what I liked in the book is there are moments where there's just like a roasting of people or life like the G20. I've never I've never heard of a world leader. Describe the G20 the way you do in the book. The high school of it all. I wanted on a personal level, have you maintained connections with those world leaders as like like do you do you send Angela Merkel means do you like who are you still close with just as a human being?

You know, I don't send Angela Merkel names, but I talk to her sometime. Sometimes, you know, she'll give me a call, I'll give her a call and we'll trade notes. You have there are a handful of folks who you've been in the foxhole with.

Right. You've done some good, important work. Some of them are still in power. So I don't want to mention that, you know, that I'm giving them a call because I did get them in trouble. You mentioned something like an Angela Merkel look. You know, the stance she took in Europe relative to immigration. And the enormous political cost she paid for that, and yet there was something inside her that said, look, I'm not going to simply abandon a million people who are in desperate need.

You know, you see that in somebody and you say it, it encourages you that for all the cruelty and venality and corruption around the world, there are a lot of good people doing good work and some of them actually rise to significant positions of power. And in that sense, democracy can work the way it's supposed to. If. You know, we have a vigilant citizenry, and that's not always the case. You've started leadership programs not just in South Africa but all over the world.

The Obama Foundation has set about on a journey to inspire young people to grow up to become leaders growing up in South Africa. I was taught about the different levels of what a struggle is going to be. You know, the freedom fighters may not necessarily be the best politicians, the best politicians may not necessarily be the best leaders, the best activists may not be the best organizers and so on and so forth. Everyone has a role to play in trying to get to a certain place.

And so I wonder, when you set up these this leadership academy that's all over the globe, you know, you're clearly trying to create mini Obamas everywhere, which is probably like a fever dream of the right. But what you what you're trying to do is create something specific. And I would like to know what that is. What do you what do you believe a leader is not just somebody who's in power, but a leader?

The program we did in Johannesburg, we gathered up two hundred young leaders from 50 countries on the continent of Africa, and it was as varied. You had young women who had started rural health clinics. Yeah.

You had MPs who had taken a more conventional political route. You had entrepreneurs.

The thing they all had in common, though, was this this sense not only that the world could be better and that they had a role to play in it, but also the belief that they couldn't do it by themselves and that they had to in some ways unlock the potential and power of other people. A speech I gave in Johannesburg in conjunction with that is for the anniversary of Mandela's 100th anniversary where I contrasted that.

Sort of democratic, inclusive leadership to the strongman leadership that in some ways we've seen ascendant in certain parts of the world in some ways has was ascendant here in the United States.

And those are two different stories of what it means to be a leader and and power and that conflict, that battle between a more democratic, inclusive vision and one that's Top-Down dominant subordinate. That's a contest that's taking place here in the United States and around the world. And it's not going to be finished just because the election's over and Donald Trump was defeated because you see examples of this in the Philippines and Hungary in a variety of countries in Africa and Asia.

And so that that contest is going to continue.

What I find fascinating about the conversation that a lot of Americans are having now, and you talk about this in the book as well, is how America's influence in the world has diminished over the past few years, how how countries around the world have no longer said, what is America doing? We'll work with them. It's it's been more like, no, guys, we can't wait for America. We're doing our own thing. But I wonder, as somebody who has grown up in other parts of the world, as someone who has family in other parts of the world, is there an argument that maybe that's a good thing, that the world doesn't follow America anymore?

Or what what would the what would the inverse of that argument be like? Should the world follow America or is it time for the world to start doing its own thing? And America should be less the world police, I think.

It is a good thing that other countries catch up and have their own capabilities and their own agency. That's not something that I think America should fear. My argument would be that even in a more multipolar world where you don't have just one big power, but you have other countries who are coming into their own, the principles that America articulated at its best about rule of law, human rights, freedom of speech, democracy, those values, at least I choose to believe, are not exclusively American.

If you as somebody who lived in South Africa, you know, the the the play that in other countries, sometimes you hear where somebody who's doing something entirely for power and money and influence will say if they're criticized, you say, you know, you've been just influenced by Western thinking that that's colonial thinking.

No, no, no, no. You are stealing from your people don't. And when we criticize, you don't don't claim that somehow this is some American hegemony being asserted against you. We're calling you on the fact that you're a thief. I think it's important for us to to to. To recognize that for all its failings, the values that America is often articulated on the world stage have been ones that I would still believe in and that a lot of people took comfort from.

And when we are not asserting them, oftentimes they don't you know, they don't play out on the world stage.

I sometimes wondered if you ever grappled with the difficulty of the paradox that America was creating and what it was trying to do in the world and then what its actions was sometimes creating in the world know. I mean, I think about that in the Middle East wars that have been started under false pretenses, people who have been killed, who had nothing to do, you know. And so I wonder, as someone who had to make decisions and someone who was in that leadership position, do you sometimes grapple with how America did or did not help itself in how it acted with the world?

Because in the world, like I'll tell you, as an international person, we would oftentimes go like men. Yes, America's great. And it's doing wonderful things. But then you'd be like, but also men. Sometimes they just break the rules and no one can say anything about it. Absolutely.

And I record examples in the book of where I'm grappling with this. Right. And one of the interesting challenges of being president, the United States. But I think being head of government or state in any country is you inherit a legacy. Right. So if I come in as president and. I can't undo the Iraq war, the decision to go into Iraq now, I can manage as best I can how we can wind down that war, mitigate some of the damage that's been done, but I can't reverse it.

Do you ever did you ever envy, though, how like Trump just came in and basically broke shit, though? Because, I mean, he didn't care?

No, I didn't envy it because I do care. And I do not think that is an option to simply pretend that the legacy of problems or issues that you inherit are somehow things you can just brush aside. So the answer is yes, I. I would struggle with the fact that any action I took, particularly when you're talking about. You know, counterterrorism, right? That's probably the area where I wrestled with this most because my obligation first and foremost.

In the United States was to make sure that people didn't get hurt. That's sort of the bare minimum that you expect out of a nation state that you're living in is that you can defend against harm because you're dealing with non-state actors. That meant that by the time I took office, you had networks that were embedded in societies not necessarily supported by those societies, but they're there and they are plotting and they're planning. And that wasn't made up. And there were organizations that if they could blow up the New York subway system, they would if they could get their hands on a biological weapon, they would use it.

You then are wrestling with how do I protect? The American people from those actors.

But do it in a way that is morally and ethically justified and war is madness, kinetic action of any sort, military action of any sort that results in death and destruction. At a certain level is not the thing I would want humanity to do and what happens to people is tragic. It is not it is not something you gloss over what what what it does to our soldiers and our troops. You know, as I talk about in the book, it's not just the harm that our young men and women suffered.

And I would witness in Walter Reed, but it's also how it changes them internally when they have engaged in violence, even if necessary and justified against others. So the best I could come up with was to never glorify it, to never pretend like it isn't a dilemma. And so those kinds of questions, I think, are ones that. Not only should American leaders have to grapple with, but I think the American people have to be aware and sometimes the media does not do a very good job.

It's a very binary, you know, the Iraq war, it's glorious for the first year and a half and then suddenly it's not.

Yes. And we're shocked that. US invading another country might turn out to be messy. Hopefully that's not a lesson we have to repeatedly rely on.

It's been 30 years since the first episode of Beverly Hills, 1981, OK, 30 years since we walk the halls of West Beverly High and since we all hung out at the Peach Pit, relive it all with Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling on their new podcast, 1991. OMG, we get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories actually happened to them as they watch every episode of the beloved 90s TV show. From the very beginning, listen to Nyarota and OMD on the I Heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Who was David Bowie? Well, that depends on who you ask or which record you play. To some, he's Ziggy Stardust. To others, the thin white do or Major Star. But who is David Bowie? Were you to answer that question will have to go off the record. My name is Jordan Rontgen. I'm the host of Off the Record, a new music biography podcast from my heart. Radio off the record goes beyond the songs and into the hearts and minds of rock's greatest legends.

Every season profiles one classic artist taking listeners on a wild ride through their extraordinary career.

The first season examines the life or rather lives of David Bowie. Every episode of the 11 part audio event tells the story of one of his iconic personas. Together, these faces form an intimate portrait of one of the 20th century's most influential figures. So who was David Bowie? Tune in to.

Off the record to find out. The series premieres on January 18th. Listen and follow on the I Heart Radio Apple podcast wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Twenty twenty was a year for many of racial reckoning. It was the year when people of all ages took to the streets, black and white alike, and said, we need to change the way the police deal with people in this country, predominantly black people in this country. It was an interesting time as well, because, I mean, your presidency, as you know better than anyone and people thought, well, that is it.

We're now in a post-racial utopia. Barack Obama is in the White House. We have half black, half whites, all black. Good times. Let's have a good one. And then people saw that there was still a lot of work to be done.

Let's talk a little bit about the movement as you see it. The problem I have with headline sometimes is like people take things out of context, et cetera. But some activists criticize you for saying they've got to be careful of snappy slogans like defund the police because it loses people. But I wonder, do you think that the slogan is off? Is is the thing that makes people for or against you? Or do you think people are just going to be for or against you?

And then the slogan doesn't really mean as much. And what I mean by that is like like Donald Trump's Make America great again. It's not a it's not a very divisive slogan. If you look at it on the face of it, that's a great slogan. Why would anyone not want to make America great again? But the subtext is something else. When you're thinking of that as someone who's great at slogans, by the way, I mean, yes, we can it snappy.

It works.

Although as I said in the book, I actually thought it was corny.

I didn't I didn't like very much when when my team came up with it. And then they went to ask Michele and Michele said, no, it's not corny, it's fine. So clearly, she had a better political brain than I did on this. I'm glad you actually brought this up, because you know, what's been fascinating while I've been on this book tour is, you know, people have asked me what's my source of optimism? And uniformly, what I have said is nothing made me more optimistic during a very difficult year than the activism that we saw in the wake of George Floyds Murder and Black Lives Matter.

And I have consistently believed that their courage. Activisms, media savvy, strategic resolve far exceeds anything that I could have done it at their age and I think has shifted the conversation in ways that I would not have even imagined a couple of years ago. So throughout this slew of compliments, I then said, well, what do you think about the particular slogan, defund the police? And I said, well, that particular slogan, I think the concern is that there may be potential allies out there that you lose.

And the issue always is.

How do you get enough people to support your cause that you can actually institutionalize it and translate it into laws, right structures and so forth? Or two or three writers who I admire who wrote Obama's making it a mission to chastise Black Lives Matter? And you know what? Hold on a second.

I just spent the whole summer complimenting them. What are you talking about?

The reason it caught attention, I suspect, is there were some in the Democratic Party who suggested the reason we didn't do better in the congressional elections this time was because of this phrase. And I think that people assumed that somehow I was making an argument that that's why we didn't get, you know, a bigger Democratic majority.

That actually was not the point I was making. I was making a very particular point around. If we, in fact, want to translate the the.

The very legitimate belief that how we do policing needs to change and that if there is, for example, a homeless guy ranting and railing in the middle of the street. Sending a. A mental health worker. Rather than an armed, untrained police officer, to deal with that person might be a better outcome for all of us and make us safer. Right, that if we describe that to. Not just white folks, but let's say Michelle's mom. That makes sense to them.

But if we say defund the police, not just white folks, but Michelle's mom might say, if I'm getting robbed, who am I going to call and is somebody going to show up? Right. So the issue here becomes, you know, at any given time, how are we translating and using language not to make people more comfortable, quote unquote? Right. Because that's always a strain. And historically, the concern in these debates is also as often or are we just trying to make white people comfortable rather than speaking truth to power?

Right. That's the framework. We tend to think about these things, right? Yeah. The issue to me is not making them comfortable. It is. Can we be precise with our language enough that people who might be. Persuaded around that particular issue to make a particular change that gets a particular result that we want, what's the best way for us to describe that?

And you're basically saying is we should workshop all of our slogans with Michelle? That's what I say. That probably would be wise. It would probably work. But but I want to go back to something you said earlier, which I think is really important. And I and I said this in the wake of some of this criticism, I said, look, part of this is also everybody has different roles to play. An activist, a movement leader is is going to provide a prophetic voice and speak certain truths that somebody who is going to be elected into office will not be able to say.

I reread James Baldwin's a fire next time this summer. How is it that something written 50 years ago? Fifty five years ago. Yeah, yeah.

Applies directly to today. Right. Despite everything that's happened. To me, that is as serious and as honest a a portrayal of the the the gaping wound of race in America.

But of course, James Baldwin can be elected to the US Senate or unlikely that he would want to be the mayor of a city who's responsible for figuring out how do I deal with the police union. Right. That's somebody else's role. And and all these roles are important.

And so, you know, why do you think if I may interrupt, why do you think, though, that Republicans or right wingers now do that? That's that's something that I've struggled to to to understand. You see, now, even in this election, I mean, some of the Republicans who are running were Kuhnen supporters and they were going, we're running. And this is what and some of them were winning. Some of them are so extreme and they're winning.

And so I sometimes wonder if if there's this this isn't just a political thing in America where if you if you're in the Republican Party, you can be completely bombastic in what you believe in.

And then as a Democrat, you're trying to tow the line between centrist and and and left leaning.

Well, because I think, in fact, the Republican Party is the minority party in this country. The only reason that it doesn't look like they're the minority party is because of structures like the US Senate and the Electoral College that don't render them the majority party. So so they have certain built-In advantages around power, given their population distribution and how our government works. But the truth of the matter is, is that 60 percent of the people are occupying what I would consider a more reality based universe.

And those are the those are the constituents we're speaking to. And that is a more diverse group. You know, I describe in the book the first time I go to the to the Republican House caucus to speak to them. And I think there was an Asian guy or gal and maybe a couple of Hispanics, and that was it. It is much more homogeneous, which means that, yes, they have to do less work, but it also.

Means that they are they can talk to themselves. And as a consequence of the way our democracy, our republic is structured, they don't have to appeal to as broad of a base. That's not fair. But, you know, I at least would prefer not having the progressives model ourselves out of our model ourselves on the current Republican Party, that doesn't feel like a good strategy to me to get the outcomes that we want.

Let's talk a little bit about let's loosen things up. Let's unbutton one of those one one of those buttons on the shirt.

As someone who I consider to be one of the best deliverers of jokes and and roasts, are you going to be more careful going forward about who you are? And I say this because you roasted Donald Trump, who ran for president. You roasted Kanye West. He ran for president. So I don't know if you've noticed, but you have an ability to inspire people to run for the highest office in the land with some of the jokes that you tell about them.

Well, I should I should roast people, people I admire more. I'll start roasting you. Who knows? Although you were born here. So.

Yeah, but look, I was in the department.

Who knows?

Before I let you go, I wanted to know one last thing, and that is being president of the United States is arguably the toughest job in the world when you transition back to professional life. I wonder what that is like, because unlike you, I don't have that power, I've never been able to, like, just change a thing in the world or do something about it. But now, in many ways, you are like me in that you see the thing on the TV and then you get angry or sad, but you cannot really do anything about it.

And so I wonder to as as former President Barack Obama, have you have you transitioned into that completely or do you find different ways to try and fix the problems that you see in the world?

Well, first of all, I'm not anything like you. I still have a lot of clout. So let's just be clear. Come on, man. Look, I want you to have it in perspective.

I was hoping you I was hoping you just let that one slide. I was hoping you'd just be like, yeah, you know, in many ways.

Look, the truth is that. I I did not have those kinds of withdrawals, and I know that there are people who I know who've had them when they leave public life and very visibly, you know, they want to get back on stage. Yeah, Michelle and I, that's something we share. We feel good about the work we did. We don't feel anxiety about not being the center of attention. We get frustrated like I think citizens around the world and here in the country do when we see something unjust or unfair.

And yes, the goal, I think, for us is to find new ways to have that same impact, understanding that we'll never have the exact same impact as you have office.

But, you know, a lot of the work around the foundation is, you know, you said create a lot of Obama's. I'm not sure that's the goal. But to, you know, if 10 years, 20 years down the road, there are a thousand ten thousand one hundred thousand young people who are now moving into positions of authority and power and in some ways have been shaped by our example in a positive way. Yeah, that that's the legacy that may exceed anything that we did while we were in in our formal positions.

And and that feels pretty good. Well, I can talk to you for hours, but luckily I have a 700 page book to answer the rest of my questions. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for taking the time. And yeah. Thank you for being you, Mr.. Mr. President or Bizzle. Thank you for joining me on The Daily Show.

We'll do it again after. The Daily Show with Criminal Lawyers edition once The Daily Show weeknights at 11:00, 10:00 Central on Comedy Central and the Comedy Central and watch full episodes and videos at The Daily Show Dotcom. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to The Daily Show on YouTube for exclusive content and more. To some, he Ziggy Stardust, to others, the thin white Duke or Major Tom, but who is David Bowie really? To answer that will have to go off the record, off the record as a new music biography podcast.

Every season profiles one legendary artist. To start, we'll explore the faces of David Bowie. Each episode tells the story of one of his iconic personas. Together, they form an intimate portrait of the complex cultural giant.

Off the Record premieres January 18th. Listen and follow on the I Heart radio app Apple podcasts wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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