Former President Barack Obama, in conversation with historian and author Heather Cox Richardson, at The Connecticut Forum on June 17, 2025.

BARACK OBAMA: If we’re going to fix all these other problems-if we’re going to deal with climate change effectively, if we’re going to deal with this AI revolution in a smart way, if we’re going to address economic inequality-it is going to start with a reaffirmation of our ability to work collectively together. If we don’t do that, then the other stuff is not going to get solved. HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: So one of the things you didn’t mention about the accumulation of money into certain hands after the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the former Soviet republics and so on was the degree to which people who made that money took over the political systems to weight everything in their own favor. And one of the things that I think is interesting about cell phones, for example-I think you’re absolutely right that people can now look at their cell phones and say, “Why don’t I live like that?” And it seems to me that in many ways they are a tool to push back against that loaded world, if you will, that has been so skewed toward a very small group of people. And we’re really seeing that push come to shove right now under this particular administration. BARACK OBAMA: It could be. Look, technologies are tools. But they’re also-they’re also… I don’t want to stretch the analogy too far, but they’re also operating systems. They kind of move you in certain directions. I was jokingly talking about books previously, but books are an interesting technology because they force you to focus and concentrate your attention over a certain period of time. And that encourages you to consider a bunch of factors, and to think about complexity, and to reason things out. It creates certain habits of the mind. Tweets do something different.

You can see the whole discussion here:
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