Three YouTube stars interviewed President Barack Obama live at the White House on Thursday in a presidential bid to expose a younger audience to Obama’s latest policy proposals, especially ones he talked about during his State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Obama sat down with GloZell Green, Bethany Mota and Hank Green for a Q&A on the issues they find most important — and to bring a millennial touch to the Oval Office.
Hank Green, one of two stars of the Vlog Brothers YouTube channel, was up first.
He asked Obama to explain everything from marijuana’s legal weirdness in the U.S. to whether America has anything left to sanction in North Korea, but you could argue that his most poignant question was about drone strikes.
Green wanted to know whether drones strikes, which have been one of America’s predominant tools in its war on terrorism under Obama, would be considered a misused technology by the president’s successors.
“I think it’s entirely legitimate to say that as technologies develop, we need to step back and say ‘do we have a legal framework and a set of controls on it?’” Obama said. “It’s something that we take very seriously, and I would argue that today’s technologies enable us to defend ourselves causing less damage to communities than they’ve done in the past.”
GloZell Green
GloZell’s interview was rolling along pretty much fine right until the end, when she accidentally called Michelle Obama the president’s “first wife.”
The YouTube comedian also said Fidel Castro, the former president of Cuba, put the “dick in dictatorship,” so let’s just say her interview was a little, erm, less measured than Hank Green’s.
GloZell did ask about bridging distrust between white police officers and black men, telling the president that she cut the hoods off her husband’s hoodies over fears he would walk outside and get shot by someone in law enforcement.
Obama prefaced his answer by saying the vast majority of police officers do their jobs well, but said that bias still exists, especially when officers are making split-second decisions.
“A lot of the way to solve this is to improve training so people can be aware of their biases ahead of time,” Obama said.
Bethany Mota
Mota, 19, asked about a range of issues as well, including Obama’s plans to make college more affordable.
Obama called college “the best investment you can make,” but let’s get to the fun part: the lightning round.
Mota tossed a few questions to Obama from her viewers and, let’s be real, they’re some of the questions everyone wants to ask every president.