Barack Obama finally reveals what he’s doing next

Former US president Barack Obama has given his first post-presidency speech and outlined his plans for the future.

Obama spoke at the University of Chicago to a packed audience and while he spoke about the current political climate, he stopped short of mentioning his replacement, Donald Trump.

“On the back end now of my presidency, now that it’s completed, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what is the most important thing I can do for my next job?” he said.

“What I’m convinced of is that — although there are all kinds of issues that I care about and all kinds of issues that I intend to work on — the single most important thing I can do is to help in any way I can prepare the next generation of leadership to take up the baton and to take their own crack at changing the world.”

While Trump has been a fierce critic of the media throughout his short term, Obama had his own criticism of the press, saying because of the changing nature of news, people were only listening to information they already agreed with.

“We confront a whole range of challenges … all those problems are serious, they’re daunting, but they’re not insoluble,” Obama said.

“Special interests dominate the debates in Washington in ways that don’t match up with what the broad majority of Americans feel.

“Because of changes in the media, we now have a situation in which everybody’s listening to people who already agree with them and are further and further reinforcing their own realities to the neglect of a common reality that allows us to have a healthy debate and then try to find common ground and actually move solutions forward.

“What I said in 2004 that there were no red states or blue states there were United States of America, that was an aspirational comment. And it’s one, by the way, that I still believe in the sense that when you talk to individuals one on one there’s a lot more that people have in common than divides them.

“But obviously it’s not true when it comes to our politics and civic life, and maybe more pernicious is the fact that people just aren’t involved. They get cynical and they give up. And as a consequence we have some of the lowest voting rates of any advanced democracy and low participation rates then translate into a further gap between who’s governing us and what we believe.”

What do you think of Barack Obama’s speech? Do you think he was a good president?