Barack Obama gets candid with Hasan Minhaj about his end-of-year lists, mental health and dreams in the White House

“I do,” Obama immediately responds. “I am so glad that I had this opportunity. People believe the books and movies, but the playlists, they somehow think…and this somehow coming from young people like you. Somehow y’all think you invented rock and roll. You invented hip-hop. And so, the fact that my lists are, you know, pretty incredible, people seem to think, ‘Well he must have had some 20-year-old intern who was figuring out this latest cut.’ No man, it’s on my iPad right now,” he explains.

Minhaj asks sceptically, “You have ‘Life is Good’ by SiR featuring Scribz Riley on your iPad?” Obama exclaims, “Yes, I do!”

The comedian further quizzes Obama again, asking the former President, “Give me the plotline for ‘Afterlives’ by Abdulrazak Gurnah,” which made to his 2022 list.

Replying to this, Obama says, “Look here’s the bottom line of my playlists, and my book lists and my movie lists: I am very scrupulous about making sure this is stuff I actually like.” Adding, he explains, “I will confess that there are times on the playlists, on the music playlists, where I will get suggestions because it’s not like I got time to be listening to music all the time. So typically, at the end of the year what happens is folks will be like, ‘Man, you need to listen to this. This is good.’ But unless I’m actually listening to it, watching it, reading it, I won’t put it on there.”

I always enjoy sharing my end of year music playlist with all of you — and this year we heard a lot of great songs. Here are some of my favorites.

Are there any songs or artists I should check out? pic.twitter.com/qkwm4UOzMD

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 23, 2022

Minhaj even teases Obama by asking him what would happen if he didn’t choose his wife’s book, The Light We Carry, as one of his favourite books of 2022. To which, Obama responds with a laugh, “Well that would be foolish, because we share a bank account.”

The host of the Netflix show Patriot Act also tackles deeper questions, including asking Obama if he was depressed amid all the current events: the overturning of Roe v. Wade, book bans, multiple mass shootings and climate change. “There is no way the ‘Hope’ and the ‘Change’ guy does not feel depressed,” Minhaj says. “You are too smart not to feel depressed. You’re too intelligent.”

Obama responds by saying that there are times when he does feel depressed because “when you see an entire school terrified because a gunman is walking in with weapons of war, if your heart’s not breaking then something’s wrong with you.”

He also shares that climate change is another worry of his with record forest fires and says that “we’re not moving as fast as we need to” to fight climate change. However, he adds that he tries to put things into perspective and the key is “not to be blind to the genuine challenges and threats that are in front of us” but also think about how far we have come as humanity.

Obama also lists big events like World War I, World War II and the Great Depression while saying that these moments are significantly worse than this. “You grew up and, in some ways, I grew up in this anomalous stretch of time in which even though bad things were happening, for the most part, the trajectory of humanity was things were getting better,” Obama tells Minhaj. “We’re becoming less racist and less sexist and less homophobic and better educated and healthier…”

The former President also reveals a strange recurring dream he had while in the White House. “I did have dreams where I wasn’t president–and they were some of my happiest dreams,” he tells Minhaj.

He described dreams where he could just walk into a bodega and get an iced coffee. “I’d sit on a bench and suddenly I realised that nobody recognises me,” he recalled. “And that’s the only thing that happened in the dream: I’d just be sitting there, chill. And I felt like I won the lottery.”

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