• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, June 23, 2025

Last week, President Barack Obama walked onto the stage at the nonprofit Connecticut Forum and gave one of the clearest, most urgent reflections of his post-presidency. But it wasn’t a speech—it was a conversation that was houghtful, unscripted, and honest. He spoke with historian Heather Cox Richardson for over an hour, and what he said was a kind of blueprint for how to think about democracy, how to rebuild trust, and who’s going to do it.

Spoiler: It’s not himself. It’s not Congress. It’s not some AI-powered fact-checker. It’s us. And even more than that—it’s them: young people. That’s not a platitude. It’s a strategic handoff.

Obama didn’t come to bask in legacy. He came to warn, to inspire, to reframe what’s at stake. And for those of us working at the intersection of media, technology, and youth empowerment, what he said felt both clarifying and catalytic.

Obama didn’t mince words about the stakes: "Once facts are up for grabs, so is reality.” It’s a clean line, but a brutal one. He  that we’ve crossed from an era of misinformation into a fog of disinformation, where the goal isn’t to win the argument, but to destroy the idea that facts can even be trusted.

He named names: Vladimir Putin. Steve Bannon. Their strategy? Flood the zone. "You don’t have to convince people what you’re saying is true. You just have to flood the zone with so much [stuff] that people stop believing anything."

That’s where we are. And if your mission, like ours, is to protect truth and rebuild public trust, you know how destabilizing this is—especially for young people trying to form their understanding of the world. And when he said it plainly—"We need to separate facts from opinion. We want diversity of opinion—we don’t want diversity of facts"—it landed like a challenge to the entire media and tech industry.

"Our biggest challenge right now is, we need democracy and social cohesion and trust more than ever—andit's probably as weak as it's been since I've been alive."

Social Media Didn’t Just Fail—It Sold Out

Obama gave social media credit for its early promise. He talked about Meetup, digital organizing, and how the internet helped his campaign connect people across geography and race.

But then came the pivot: "The business model shifted… It turned out that the reptilian brain is attracted to anger, resentment, and conspiracy theories."

This wasn’t accidental. It was profitable. Once tech companies realized attention was the asset, and outrage the accelerant, the platforms leaned into division. Not neutrality, nor accuracy. That’s not a policy flaw—it’s an operating system problem. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to change.

The Collision of Cultures Is Personal, Global—and Designed

Here’s the moment that hit hardest for me: Obama described visiting rural Kenya in 1987. No plumbing. No electricity. But by 2012? "You have people who are subsistence farmers looking at the Kardashians.” It got a laugh in the room, but the weight of that story is enormous.

In one generation, a farmer who lives on a few dollars a day is holding a phone that shows him private jets, luxury brands, curated bodies, and global fame. It’s not just aspirational—it’s disorienting. It’s the collision of cultures happening in real time, through a screen.

The trend is not limited to Kenya. That same cultural collision is happening in American classrooms, on TikTok, on college campuses. It produces whiplash. And backlash. It also fuels identity anxiety. Obama tied all of it together. “People started seeing how different others were living, and that’s an assault on their identity and their status.”

This is core to the future of truth. When the global flow of information outpaces people’s sense of belonging, of trust, of control, something breaks. And the fix isn’t to slow down the tech. It’s to redesign the values that shape it.

Young People Aren’t Waiting—They’re Building

One of the most aligned parts of the conversation was Obama’s focus on youth leadership—not as mascots or tokens, but as builders.

He talked about young doctors in Appalachia, human rights lawyers in Eastern Europe, organizers who never set foot in elite institutions—and yet, are designing new realities.

Obama didn’t just affirm the importance of how to reclaim time and attention from toxic apps. "This isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s about the choices you make—in your institution, your neighborhood, your business.” And when he added, "The most important office in a democracy is not president—it’s citizen," you could feel the shift. Responsibility doesn’t trickle down—it rises up.

Progress Takes a Coalition of Change Agents

Here’s where he turned the spotlight back on his own side: "Be impatient with injustice. Stay outraged at cruelty. But remember: Progress comes through addition, not subtraction.” In other words: coalitions, not purity tests. You don’t need to agree with someone on every issue to work together. “A former Army colonel, a young Black woman with a nose ring, and a mom with a stroller walk into a church basement—that’s how we win.” The room laughed. But he was dead serious.

This message should be pinned in every Slack room and design doc. If we’re going to rebuild trust, we have to stop seeing ideological agreement as a precondition for collaboration. That’s especially true in the digital space, where algorithms have trained us to filter, block, and attack instead of relate, negotiate, and build.

While Obama has talked about these things in the past, his carefully woven narrative now has a sharper, more urgent subtext. Truth isn't just an academic construct—it's core to our democracy and our society. And young people aren't just sensing that—they're acting on it. They're building tools for truth that demand more than praise or protection. They require us—the so-called grownups—to embrace their builder spirit. They need us, but let’s be honest: We need them more.

You can watch the full Obama talk at the  Connecticut Forum here.