(audience cheering and applauding) - You can keep clapping, right? We can do that a little while longer. (audience cheering and applauding) - Hello, Chicago! (audience cheering) - How great was Esperanza? What were you doing at 15? - I wasn't doing that. (audience laughing) I misspent my youth.
(Dave laughing) And whenever I'm in these groups, it reminds that I was yeah. (audience laughing) We won't go into all the details. - Esperanza and the students
from around the country wrote a book of letters to you. Did you ever see this? And it was called Thanks and
Have Fun Running the Country. (Barack laughing) It was published. All the letters came out in the few weeks after you got elected, and they were so excited
that they couldn't hold back. And they wrote this book and it was published, some of it was excerpted in the New York Times Op-Ed page. And I told the kids, of course, the president's
gonna read your words. - I did. - And they fully believed it, but we didn't have proof until one day we saw a photograph of you on the tarmac near Air Force One, and it was a widely disseminated photo because you had dropped your BlackBerry. It exploded into 12 pieces. But in your hand was the Times Op-Ed page that they were their letters to you. - [Barack] You see? - And then when we told the kids, we saw, the president read your letters. They said, "Duh. "Of course he's gonna
read my letters to him. "That's why he's president. "He has to pay attention." So.
- They're right. - Well, can we talk first about the theme of this year's summit? It came out of a resident line in a speech of yours in 2008, where you said that we may have different stories, but we hold uncommon hopes. I mean, we hold common hopes. And how do we reconcile
that at a time like this, which feels so divided? - Well, first of all, it is wonderful to see all of you. I've been watching backstage, and just the passion, the eloquence, the skills and fierce intelligence
that's been on display has been remarkable. And I always come, sometimes I think that I set up this foundation just so I can hang out
with cool people like you. (audience laughing) It just gives me an excuse every once in a while,
if I get discouraged, then I say, well, you know what? I'll have a summit and then, (audience laughing) and meet all these amazing young people and then I'll feel better. And it worked. So I could not be
prouder of all your work. And in fact, I am paying attention to what you do consistently. One way to answer this
is maybe to think about me first coming to Chicago 32 years ago now. And I drove up Lake Shore Drive. Well, I drove over the skyway. I'd only been to Chicago once when I did a big summer tour with my grandmother and my mom and my baby sister, who at that time was two, and I was 11. The only thing I remembered about Chicago was we went to the Field Museum, and there were these
shrunken heads in there, which when you're 11, a 11-year-old boy, you're just like I cannot believe that they actually have shrunken heads. Like they were actually, they had brought 'em back as is. (Dave laughing) Which I just thought was odd, I mean. Anyway, that's the only thing I remember. (audience laughing) I also remember that
they had a covered pool, which made no sense, 'cause in Hawaii, you
don't cover your pool, 'cause I wasn't here during the winter so it didn't make sense to me. (Dave laughing) Anyway, I get here and my job as this young, green organizer, was to work with communities that had been devastated by steel plant closings and communities that were being ravaged by rapid racial turnover, part of it deliberately set off by the real estate industry, 'cause what would happen would be they would go around to white neighborhoods in Chicago and they'd say black people are moving in here and your property values are
gonna go down real quick, so you better leave. We're willing to give you this price right now. And so, folks would sell
at a fire sale price, and then they'd jack up and sell it to the African
American community. And the turnover was very rapid. Michelle's community is one of them. You can see her, she still has her class pictures from like when she was in first grade, second grade, third grade. And you can see each year, what starts off as a integrated classroom become entirely African American. And so I'm raring to go. And I am intent on changing the world an I've been inspired
by civil rights figures like John Lewis and Bob Moses and Diane Nash, and I'm gonna lead the revolution. And the person who had hired me said, "The only thing you're going
to do for the first month "is you're gonna go around "and meet people and ask
them about their stories. "And you're gonna sit there and listen. "And at the end of the month, "I want you to tell me
about the people you met." I said, "Well, that doesn't
make any sense to me." But I did it. And during the course of that month, I was meeting with aging Irish priests who had seen their parishes devastated, and I was meeting with
single African American moms who were worried about violence and their kids getting into gangs. And I was meeting with a wide range of people. And what you started
learning over time was that everybody had a story. Everybody's story was sacred in the sense that there was an essence to them, and their parents and their grandparents and how they thought about their world and what values motivated them. And it turned out if you
listened closely enough, in fact, if you just ask, people could tell you something really profound
about their lives and the world that they had grown up in. And when you listen to
enough of these stories, you started seeing all
these weird connections and how they overlapped and recurring themes. And the reason the exercise was so powerful was number one, by having those conversations, you found at the end of that conversation that you had a different
relationship with that person than if you had just gone in and said I wanna talk to you about the gang problem or the housing
problem or what have you. You had a sense of something shared. But the second thing you
suddenly realized was there's actually a community here. It's just nobody knows it. And it changed the nature of my job, which is to, what I realized my job actually was to get people to just recognize each other and how they were linked together. And if I could do that effectively, then I now had the power, the collective power to actually get the alderman to clean up a vacant lot or to get the police to be more responsive or to get the schools to
have after school programs. So I guess the idea of each of us having very
unique, specific stories, but that if we bother
listening to each other, that those stories merge and blend, and that there's a
community to be unearthed. It's already there. I learned very early on and it served me all the way through the presidency. I think the reason we don't
see that or feel that now is because it does require you to listen to others, and the way now our media is structured and the way we get information and the way we see each other is there are all these filters, right? And it's very hard to get
through those filters. So part of my job as president, part of my job now, part of your job now, presumably is to be able to get, to wipe the windshield with all the stuff that's on there so that people can see clearly. And that's hard to do because there's, not only is it inherently
difficult sometimes to see people who look different or have different stories, come from different places, but it's also hard when
you have entire industries that are built and designed to make people think they're different, and that they're set against each other and that their interests automatically conflict. - Well, there's that
great Dave Isay quote. He started StoryCorps. "Listening is an act of love." And I feel that any time you sit down and give somebody couple
hours of your time just to listen. And any story that you assume you know is complicated in the
most beautiful way, right? We published a book
called High Rise Stories about residents of Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor homes. Growing up here and all of you that grew up here, you know you're told things in the media about it, but when you actually listen for five, six hours and let somebody shape their narrative and own it and then have it published exactly right, it's a whole different thing. And all of those stories, whoops, were radically different
than the ones we were told in these short bits in the media. But I want to go back to this time of, well, division, and also sort of this question of citizen. What are our responsibilities
and powers as citizens? And you went from community
organizer to president, and now back to private citizen. And do you see power in a different way? Your famous line was that
the most important office is that of the citizen. But then there's barriers
to civic engagement. I mean, how do you make people feel like full participants in their societies or democracies? - Well, that's part of what everybody here is trying to figure out, right? Here's the interesting thing that happens when you're president or when you go through the experience of being president. (audience laughing) So. So you start off, you're community organizer and you're struggling to try to get people to recognize each other's common interests and you're trying to get some project done in a small community and you start thinking, okay, you know what? This alderman's a knucklehead and they're resistant to
doing the right thing. And so I need to get more knowledge, more power, more influence so that I can really have an impact. And so you go to the state legislature and you look around and you say, well, these jamokes, I mean, (audience laughing) not all of 'em, but I'm just saying, you start getting that sense of this is just like dealing
with the alderman, right? So, no, I gotta do something different. So you, then you go to the U.S. Senate and you're looking around, and they're like, aw man. (audience laughing and applauding) And then when you're president, you're sitting in these
international meetings. And it's like the G20 and you got all these world leaders. And it's the same people. (audience laughing) Which is really interesting. Same dynamics. It's just that there's a bigger spotlight, that there's a bigger stage. But I'm only partly joking about that. The nature of human dynamics does not change from level to level, which is why I've been
quoted saying this sometimes. Most of what you need to learn, you can actually just
read Dr. Seuss, right? Because there's the
story of the Sneetches. And like people, the Sneetches have the ones with stars think that they're better than the ones who don't have stars, and they got an attitude and (audience laughing) there's the Lorax who's trying to tell people, don't cut down the trees 'cause then the fish are gonna die, right? (audience laughing) I mean, it's all pretty much there. (audience laughing) And the reason. (audience applauding)
No, no, no. The reason this is important, there's a serious point here, I think we make the mistake
of thinking oftentimes that the venue or the status of particular institutions or the levels that you're at, that somehow things
work differently there. Well, they don't, alright? One way to think about power is that there is a way of thinking about power that's very hierarchical, alright? And it basically says you got room for one person on top and then it's a pyramid and it descends and then you got the folks at the bottom who really got no say. And then there's a model that says, well, that it's a little,
hopefully, more of a circle, in which we all contribute something, we all have a voice. Doesn't mean that there's
no order involved, but it means that to the extent that some have more authority to make decisions than others, it's been earned. There's consent. It's not by virtue of power, alright? Or it's not just by virtue of force or I'm bigger than you so you gotta do what I say or I got more money than you so you gotta do what I say. But rather, it's because everybody agrees that somehow, I'm giving
voice to or articulating or weaving together our common aspirations. Now for most of human history, the hierarchies were very firm, very set and it was what it was. If you were on the losing
end of some conquest, if you were a woman in
a patriarchal society, if you were a peasant, if you were broke, then those things were set. And one way to imagine and understand human progress is that over time, the folks who were at the bottom started realizing, huh, I've got power, I've got skills, I've got a voice, right? And then over time, we develop this frustrating and difficult, but considerable improvement over the old ways called democracy, in which the starting premise was everybody has a voice, everybody is equal under the law, and we understand that it didn't
actually work that way. But just by virtue of that concept, it's a radical concept. And here in the United States and in other countries as well, but certainly over the course of 2 1/2 centuries here, interrupted by a Civil War, we fought to make that real. And what that means is that
our central experiment is based on the idea that each of us has power and that we win that
power through consent. And if I can persuade you that I'm speaking on your behalf, that I'm representing your interests, that I am committed to a common vision, a shared story, then I have a certain number of followers and then we try to figure out how to make all that work together. So now again, that's
the idealized version. And there's always been blocks and barriers and hurdles and hypocrisy, and undergirding it has been violence in all sorts of ways. And yet, the story itself is one that has been powerful and has moved the world, has changed the world. And so, the question now becomes do we in fact use that power? And then, and how do we exercise it and at what levels? And a part of the premise of the summit is that there are all
kinds of different ways to use that power. Dave, when you write and then you created 826, and you have somebody like Esperanza who's coming in and telling her story, that's an exercise of power. That's a voice that has
not been heard before. When Janelle sings some songs that surprise people and challenge people, that's an exercise of power. When some of the participants who've been on the stage discuss how they're gonna
get young women involved in STEM education, who previously have been locked out, that's an exercise of power. So there are a lot of different forms. Ultimately, though, I do think that the institutions that regulate our lives in all kinds of ways, that those are real. You can't wish them away. And so there has to be some element of your voices and your power that translates into
where is tax money going and how's the state, where does it build roads and schools, and is it actually doing something to make sure the trees don't get cut down, like the Lorax's warning? And has the criminal justice system read The Sneetches book to make sure that they're not targeting folks who don't have stars on their bellies? And so that all requires, then, a joining
together of power. The one thing that I learned very early on and there are very few exceptions, maybe you can argue Picasso or Einstein or Mozart, John Coltrane. Maybe there are a handful of folks whose power is so unique and fierce and blazes that they almost don't need an institutional framework for it to dazzle, to have impact. But even then, right? I mean, Picasso had to
have a bunch of patrons who were willing to finance his work and museums that were
willing to show his work. And Shakespeare had to have somebody who could put on a show, and they had to sell tickets. And so the point is is that there are few endeavors, human endeavors that are worthwhile that you can do by yourself. And ultimately, it's dependent
on, it's supported by a community. So I guess the answer to your question is if you want, the way power works at every level, at the United Nations
or in your neighborhood, is do you have a community that stands behind what you stand for? And if you do, you'll have more power. And if you don't, you won't. - Well, that's, you had power after
leaving the presidency. Your foundation, your goals after presidency could be a lot of things. You could have aligned yourself
with one specific cause, but instead, the focus
of the foundation is creating and fostering and supporting a new global class of leaders. How did you come to that? How'd you settle on that as your? - Well, why did you decide to set up 826 instead of just holing away
and writing some more books? - I-- - 'Cause you're expending some time working with young people who might end up being writers. Writing is hard, man. So, I know right now. I'm in the middle of writing.
- Yeah. How's that going, by the way? - It's just brutal. (audience laughing) I'm just sitting there, I type two words. (audience laughing) Delete them. (audience laughing) - So when can we expect this book? - You know what? Michelle's out there. You can go buy her book right now. (audience cheering and applauding) This is causing some
strain in our marriage. (audience laughing) The fact that she is
finished and I am not. (audience laughing) She's all got her feet up, so like, so, how's it going? (audience laughing) Anyway,
(audience laughing) why did you decide to do what you do? - Writing is incredibly
lonely and sedentary, and my mom was a teacher and my sister was a teacher, and so a lot of my friends were teachers and they said they needed
more humans in the classroom. They needed more one-on-one attention, especially for English language learners. And so we just created an army of tutors that could serve that purpose. But what we all found was that the joy that we got out of it far exceeded whatever we put in. And so, and it's just like being in the Marriott these last few days. It's electricity in every room. And so that's why we created the International
Congress of Youth Voices, putting people together and just watching the sparks fly. So, anyway, you gotta answer that question. - Well, you just answered the question. (Dave laughing) I wanted to see the sparks fly. I think some may have
heard me say this, but one thing you do learn in this journey that I took is that most of the
problems that we confront in the world do not exist because we don't
have good solutions to them. I mean, we don't have
perfect solutions to 'em, but most of the time, the truth is, we actually know how to teach kids in an excellent school. And there is, in every city in America, I can't speak for the entire world, but in every city in America, you go to the poorest community, and you'll find one amazing school. Yeah, it's got like a 98% graduation rate and everybody's in the chess club and they put on plays. And the question is, well, why doesn't it scale up? Why is it this one school works, why can't we have 50 schools in that same city that work? I can tell you right now how to, without spending huge amounts of money, increase agricultural yields in Sub-Saharan Africa fourfold. Yeah, you go to my father's village, where my father was born. And you have these, some of the folks who are from Africa here can confirm this, you'll have these cornfields. Like they got like one
little droopy cornstalk for every like three steps. And well, why is that? If these countries can
all feed themselves, what is it that's going on? Well, it's because maybe there's a civil war going on there. Maybe the farmers aren't
getting fair prices for their grain, and so there's no incentive structures for them to get it to market and to improve agricultural yields because it's not gonna make
that much of a difference. With respect to the schools, it's because the human
dynamics of the school board and the teachers union and taxpayers, says it's not that
important for us to have 50 great schools. Just one's enough. The point is is that what prevents us from
implementing most of the things that we would probably collectively agree would make the world better is not an absence of technical solutions. It's because there are humans involved, and the dynamics of the society. Do we really care about these kids? Because maybe we don't. They look a little bit different than us. And maybe we don't wanna upend
the social structure entirely and we haven't had a real
conversation about that. In a place like Africa, have we really resolved ethnic differences that
arose out of colonial lines? And are we still making excuses for why we can't get our act together today? And our children suffer for it. Those are the things that block us. I mean, there are few exceptions. Climate change, we're gonna have to come up
with some new technologies to solve the problem
as much as we need to. Although even on something like that, right now, I could take off the shelf existing technologies. We could reduce carbon
emissions by let's say 30% without any, it's not like we'd all
have to go back to caves and live off fire. We could have electricity and smartphones and all that stuff, which would buy us probably
another 20, 30 years for that technological
breakthrough that's necessary. The reason we don't do it is because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues. (audience laughing) I mean, we are fraught with stuff. And so if that's the case, then the single most important thing that we have to invest in is not all, and look, I'm a huge supporter of science and technological research and social science and evidence-based learning and all that good stuff. People call me Spock for a reason. I believe in reason and logic and all these enlightenment values. But the thing that really we have to invest in is people. We gotta get people to figure
out how they work together (audience applauding) in a, how do we get people to work together in a cooperative, thoughtful, constructive way? And that's where you all come in. And by the way, it is something that can be taught, not perfectly, because we're never gonna
get completely rid of all of our stuff, but we can improve. There are certain ways of thinking about how we organize ourselves and how our society organizes ourselves and how we communicate and how work together that lead to better outcomes, that lead us to a better place. And that's what I wanted
to invest in because I think that the payoff there ends up being much higher. - I met one of the attendees, John Talia. He's at Arizona State University.
- Where's John? - Where is he? There he is.
- Hey, John. (audience applauding and cheering) - So, John's at ASU,
(audience cheering) but he's from Ghana originally. And we had dinner last night. We were talking about, he's starting a project back
in his hometown in Ghana, an agricultural project. And we were talking about scale. How do you start on a very small scale? You don't have to think
about 10 years from now. You don't have to think about raising a million dollars. But starting on a small scale, showing progress, working it incrementally, showing impact in the community and going from there. Can you talk to all these
young activists about like not being succumb to their first setbacks, knowing that it's gonna be a long process, and that something doesn't
have to be global overnight to have an impact that's meaningful? - Yeah, I mean one of the mistakes I think we all make, and I made it, is to think that this is easy and to believe that societies change in accordance with our timetables. And the example I always use because I think it underscores the nature of the work ahead for all of you is just the civil rights movement
here in the United States, which I'm most familiar with. So, the Civil War is fought. I won't even go pre-Civil War. Just start in the Civil War, in which you have the post-Civil War constitutional amendments, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments, which ends slavery and declare that everyone is entitled to
equal protection under the law. And it takes 100 years essentially, from the time of
those civil rights amendments for that principle even to be affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States. And that requires a movement that didn't start, by the
way, in Birmingham or Selma, but started with Ida B. Wells trying to stop people from getting lynched and it started with (audience applauding) Charles Hamilton Houston's crafting elaborate legal strategies that they're working case by case, state by state until they're
finding the optimal case that they might take to the Supreme Court. And in the interim, it is requiring activists
in small communities all throughout the South
and the North who are just fighting what looks
like a local fight, but one that is part of the mosaic of this broader pattern that's emerging. Alright, so then you get the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. You get the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And it then takes another decade and a half for that to actually
start realizing itself in African American voting
rights in the South, approximating what the general
population's voting rates are and elected officials being elected. And we're still in that battle. And you've now just gone through four, five, six, seven generations. Now that can seem exhausting and depressing. But in the scope of human history, it's actually kinda shocking because the truth of the matter is is that you can't find a lot of other examples in human history where a minority group that was that subjugated has made as much progress and survived and thrived in some cases, and frankly, put its entire stamp on the culture (audience applauding) under such circumstances. And look. I mean, when you look at what has happened with LGBT rights, it's happened even faster. I'm not, this is always a dangerous thing when you say I'm not that old to this room, but I'm
not that old, people. But look, the idea of being openly gay when I was in high school was, that wasn't on the agenda. And in the span of my lifetime, that transformation has been extraordinary, right? So the point is that, and one of the things I always tell the folks who work with me is you have to maintain two seemingly contradictory
ideas in your head at the same time. One is you should be
extraordinarily impatient about the injustices and nonsense and foolishness
that you see around you. And you should be finding opportunities at every juncture to challenge those things. And you have to, at the same time, keep in your mind that societies are these incredibly complex organic things that you don't turn switches on. Right? They evolve and they shift and they change and they move in unexpected ways. And sometimes, you're gonna go forward for a good period of time, and then, you're gonna slip back and you're gonna take a detour. And I was talking to a
friend of mine backstage who, ya know, this is a
conversation I often have around here lately, which is they're feeling depressed about where's the course of the country and the world going. And what I had to remind him is, look, this is what happens in societies. We get the New Deal and everybody's feeling pretty good unless you're a Japanese person who got interned after Pearl Harbor or unless you're one of
the black domestic workers who were excluded from Social Security because the Dixiecrats legislated that you and agricultural workers couldn't participate in Social Security. I'd say you didn't feel as
good about the New Deal. Now, does that erase the extraordinary
achievement of the New Deal and Social Security and the start of Medicare and the modern welfare
state in the United States? No, it doesn't negate it. But it does mean it wasn't a straight path. It was a sideways path and moved like a crab through, you know? (audience laughing)
But hopefully, you're going forward. That maybe is not the
most elegant image, but. (audience laughing) I think I stole that from Ralph Ellison. I think he talks about how history moves sideways. We got some authors in the room. You guys can fact check that. (audience laughing) - We gotta talk about Chicago. - [Barack] Yes, we do. (audience cheering) - First of all, are Khalil Mack's Bears going to the Super Bowl?
(audience cheering) - You know what? The Bears look pretty good,
(audience cheering) but that's a whole 'nother conversation. Now, I mean, there's some Arizona people, so don't even talk about
your football team right now. (audience laughing) Go ahead, what else have we got? - Well, you've said that
your story was only possible in Chicago. Why come back to the South Side where you started? And I wanna say, first of all, I saw your last speech at UIC, and I met, I interviewed maybe 50 people. Everybody was competing for how far back they went with you. (Barack laughing) First campaign. I met a woman last night, Pat Debonnett. Where's she? - Hey Pat.
- There you are. She, 77 years old. - Hey Pat. - And goes back with you (audience applauding and cheering) to Roseland. - [Barack] Absolutely. - And there's a sense of
continuity in your life about making everybody that you've known in all these stages of
your life is still here. - Yeah. - And Pat told me a
million stories last night. So tell me about you and Chicago and why this is all happening here. - Well, I don't see how I could
build a presidential center anywhere else. This is the place where
I found my calling, found my voice, started my political career. Most importantly, this is the place that produced my wife and produced my (audience cheering and applauding) children. So some of it is just
personal connections. I mean, this is not where I grew up, but this is where I discovered who I was, alright? This is where all the different strands of me that I'd been wrestling with all my life cohered, alright? And I emerged from here a whole person as opposed to pieces of a person. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean, I just mean that young people, part of the nature of being young is you got all these parts that are kinda, I mean, it's like suddenly you're a foot taller. And well, how does that work? And your voice gets deeper and you try on different poses and do I look cute here? (audience laughing) You know what I'm talking about. I mean, that's part of
becoming who you are if you're lucky. And this is what forged me. It forced me to ask a bunch of questions about what's fundamentally important to me and what do I want to commit myself to and what do I believe? What are those parts of myself that are most essential and that I'm willing
to risk everything for? That's where I began to figure this out. I came here a boy. I left here a man. So that was important. But beyond me, Chicago is this extraordinary
laboratory because it is, I believe, the
quintessentially American city. And that's no insult to any other cities. But New York, which I love, L.A., I love. There are cities around the country from Austin to Seattle that
are extraordinary cities, but Chicago is sorta where the trains meet and you've got East and
West and North and South. Demographically, the state of Illinois actually approximate the United States better than any other state in the country in terms of its ethnic and religious and racial mix. Here in Chicago, you've got, Chicago has the second
largest Polish community in the world. I mean, after Warsaw, this is like the second largest collection of Polish people, which is... You go up to Devon Avenue and it's just Indian folks everywhere. And then you go to Pilsen, Little Village, and it's an entire, right? So you have the world is converging here in this powerful, amazing way. And then you have an
African American community that represents the Great Migration from South to North. And this is where you started seeing the blues and jazz and Chess Records and rock and roll. And you started seeing black politics emerge on a national level that you had not seen before with people like Ralph Metcalfe and Congressman Dawson and then Harold Washington, who in turn, inspired people like me and Jesse Jackson to run for president. And you had black businesses like Ebony and Jet and Soft Sheen, which you know, ladies, those of you who (audience laughing) are concerned about
your haircare products, that's where this got started, so. And what's also true is that here, you see all the pathologies and contradictions of America: segregation and violence and extraordinary wealth just smack-dab next to extraordinary poverty. And so it forces you to see who we are in all our glory, but also, all our warts. So, I love Chicago. But more importantly, I
think that it gives us a place to tell this larger
story that I'm describing. And it's not unique to Chicago. It's just that it is a place that I'm familiar with, that Michelle and I know very well and that we owe a great debt to, but it's also one that I think speaks to the larger story and contest of ideas that exists around the world. What does it mean for ordinary people to try to mobilize for a better life? And how do they interact
with older forms of power that try to crush their spirits and crush their voices and divide them and how do we work through that? How do we make an economy that doesn't just work for some, but works for everybody? All those challenges that everybody here, whether
you're from Bulgaria or Tucson or Mali. - [Audience Member] Yeah! (Barack and audience laughing) - You know, that's here. And so it becomes a great place to tell that story, but also to convene and gather people to examine how we can get beyond it. - Well, this gathering is just about over, and we're just about out of time, but when everybody goes
back to Tucson and Bulgaria and Mali, (audience laughing and applauding) what message do you wanna
send them home with? - Look, everybody here
is just doing great. (audience laughing) No, no, I mean, I'm serious about this. The thing that inspires
me every time I come to these gatherings, whether it's the full
gatherings that we've had these last two years or the conversations that I
had with your counterparts wherever I traveled around the world, is that this generation behind us is smarter, more sophisticated, more tolerant, more welcoming, more innovative, more creative certainly than I was. I mean, I'll go ahead and
speak for my whole generation. I think you all are ahead of the curve. And you're no less idealistic. In some ways, you're more idealistic. And you feel a greater
sense of urgency about wrongs that need to be righted. You're also coming of age at a time when the existing social and institutional
arrangements of our society have broken down in many ways. And the new ones have not risen up yet. So, it is important for
workers to have a voice. In the United States right now, the labor movement represents around 7% of the private sector workforce. So it's up to somebody to reimagine what does a 21st century workers' organization look like and give it voice. We have corporations that are extraordinarily
innovative and powerful and are producing more wealth at a faster clip than any time in human history, with great benefits to all of us. And yet, these institutional arrangements, I think everyone recognizes have concentrated wealth so
much in the hands of a few and are increasingly leaving so many other people insecure that it's not a stable system or one that is likely to produce fulfilling, happy lives for people unless we make some modifications. And that's gonna be up to some
people out here to do that. We have schools that don't teach as well as they should. We've got governments that don't listen and don't work. We have media that seem to attract people's attention, whose business model is built on addicting them to this ADD, constant scattering of your attention, but they don't actually allow you to reflect and understand the forces that
are shaping your lives. And it's gonna be up to
you to figure out how to refashion those institutions so they work. And that is a big project and it is a heavy burden, but what a joyous burden that is. What an exciting thing to be a part of to figure that out, 'cause imagine if you were just born into a place that worked. What would you be doing with yourself? (audience laughing) But to have this grand adventure where you literally can
remake the world right now because it badly needs remaking. (audience applauding) And to be able to do that grounded in values that maybe you couldn't even have accessed a thousand years ago or 500 years ago or 150 years ago, but when I say that the world needs remaking, I do want to leave you
with the thought that there has been progress. It is not inevitable, but it is there. And I've said this to people before. If you had to be born at any moment in human history, and you didn't know ahead of time whether you were gonna be black, white, Asian, Latino, that you didn't know
whether you were gonna be, what country you were from or you're male or female
or gay or straight, and you just said, well, you're blind. You're behind a veil. When do you wanna be born? You'd choose now. Or maybe two years ago, but. (audience laughing and cheering) So. I'm teasing. That was a joke. But the point, I'll see, but the point I'm making, the point I'm making is that that is as a consequence of all that work that was done. That was done by not just the famous people, not just the politicians. It wasn't just Gandhi and Mandela and Dr. King and Gloria Steinem. It was this process of ordinary people feeling like this isn't right and I want more room to breathe. I want more say in how I'm raising my kid. I want to feel as if the world is fair. And they fought for that space and it produced this bumpy, but upward trajectory. And it's not inevitable. It can go down. I mean, if you were living in Vienna in the 1920s, it would have been hard to imagine what would happen just 15 years later, 20 years later. And then suddenly, 60 million people are
dead around the world and the Holocaust has happened and buildings, all of Europe is in rubble. Right, so things can go backwards, but if you guys are working the way I think you're gonna be working, then they're gonna go forward instead. Alright? - Can we thank--
- Thanks everybody. - President Barack Obama? (audience cheering and applauding) (upbeat music) (audience cheering)
