Welcome to the bully pulpit from the University of Southern California Center for the Political Future.

Our podcast brings together America's top politicians, journalists, academics, and strategists from across the political spectrum for discussions on hot button issues where we respect

each other and respected truth. We hope you enjoy these conversations.

Good afternoon. I'm Bob Shrum, the director of the Center for the Political Future at USC Dornside.

Today in our bully pulpit series, the last episode of this semester,

actually, we are welcoming Ben Rhodes to discuss his new book after the fall, being an American

in the world we've made. I'll leave time toward the end of this, 15 or 20 minutes, for audience

questions. Ben was Deputy National Security Advisor

for Strategic Communications and Speech Writing under President Obama. He co-hosts the widely popular

podcast, brilliantly named Pod Save the World. He is also a former fellow at the USC Dornside Center for the political future.

It was a privilege to have him with us and an extraordinary opportunity for our students.

So Ben, I'm going to jump right in with this. It's a fundamental question that you aim to answer in the book.

What do you think it means to be an American in what you

describe as a world gone wrong? Yeah, Bob, well, thanks. It's great to be with you. And I love that time

too. At the Center for the Political Future, I actually wrote a chunk of my book, teaching a class

on a tartarine as when I was there.

And the students really helped me think through some things.

You know, a central premise of the book, right, is I look at a period of history from the fall of the Berlin Wall, kind of the apex of America's sense of itself in the world to where

we are now.

So there's a couple of falls along the way.

And one of the things that I

kind of had to wrestle with is the degree to which we're kind of ingrained with the sense of

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