Hey everyone, I'm Ben Rhodes and you're listening to the first of a series of special episodes

for Crooked Conversations that we are calling the world as it is, stories from the Obama White

House. Clearly a bit of a contrast to today's White House. I was the deputy natural security

adviser to President Obama, which means I was in charge of his communications on farm policy,

speech writing on farm policy, and I also advised him on a number of issues, taking lead on things

like our secret negotiations with Cuba to normalize relations and our efforts to protect and secure

the Iran deal as it made its way through Congress. I recently wrote a memoir called The World As It Is

that came out earlier this summer, and I wanted to take a deeper dive into the backstory and some

of the issues and themes that I deal with in the book, which covers all 10 of my years with President

Obama through his campaign and his White House, and also brings in some of the people who were there

with me and worked closely with me, people some of whom you know well. So throughout the next month,

we'll be airing interviews that I did with Jen Socky about Russia, Bernadette Mehan about the Cuban

negotiations, and Tommy Vitor about how the Benghazi non-scandal was part of what led ultimately to

Trump. But today we're going to kick things off with a conversation I had with Cody Keenan and

John Favre. John and Cody were the two chief speech writers for all eight years of the Obama White House.

I was kind of their wingman as I took the lead on the farm policy and national security speeches.

So I wanted to start in on this topic of how do you write speeches for Barack Obama,

which on the one hand is a very exciting thing for a speech writer because he's obviously a great

speaker. But on the other hand, it can be a little daunting because the expectations are high.

In the book I describe kind of this strange sequence of events that pulled me into the Obama

campaign. I was essentially doing free work for them on farm policy, ended up getting pulled into a

debate prep with Obama where I was so nervous I could barely speak up when it was my turn to offer

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