Marc Maron's Final Podcast with Barack Obama

After more than 1,600 episodes over 16 years, American comedian Marc Maron released the last episode of his podcast this week. His last guest: Barack Obama – whom he had already interviewed once before.

I love Marc Maron, his humor, his conversations, and I'm going to be sad to see him stop. He was one of the first to launch this long format, back when podcasts weren't cool yet.

I found strong ideas in this conversation that echo what I've been thinking about lately. Here are a few things Obama said that stayed with me:

• In the end, you don't need to agree on everything to work with someone.
• Know what you really believe in. That's the starting point.
• The period after World War II wasn't perfect. But at least there was a shared story.
• You have to be tolerant of people. As long as they aren't actively trying to hurt you, you have to be tolerant.
• Sometimes you win and you're happy. Sometimes you lose and you step back for a while to lick your wounds before coming back. But nobody tries to destroy you because you lost.
• One of the requirements of liberal democracy is accepting partial wins, not just perfection. The only question is: is it going in the right direction?
• We're probably going to overshoot the 2-degree Celsius target. Because it's very hard for humans to change their main source of energy in a single generation. But we've made progress.

Learning to work with people we don't much like – or don't like at all – to pursue a bigger shared goal: that's what I'm thinking about right now.