But also don’t expect Obama, who blew up the tradition of former presidents deferring to successors this fall by campaigning against Trump as a threat to democracy, to back off.

Obama and Trump still haven’t spoken since the helicopter took the former president away after the inauguration, and the worst relationship in politics has only gotten worse. Obama’s exasperation at what’s coming out of Trump has spiked again and again. Trump’s bitterness at Obama hasn’t faded at all, and he’s bristled at the former president staying active. The Friday before the midterm elections, Obama was calling Trump a manipulative liar, and Trump was mocking the size of the crowds Obama was drawing. In an interview with Fox News recorded at the White House last Friday, Trump refused to even give Obama credit for killing Osama bin Laden.

Read: Barack Obama still doesn’t understand Donald Trump.

Throughout the past few years, Obama’s been returning to a thought that he says gives him hope—that if you had to choose any time and any place to be born, for all the problems, you would choose America.

Monday, he amended it: “You’d choose now—or maybe two years ago.”

He compared progress to a crab walk, pointing out that those who praise Franklin D. Roosevelt for the New Deal also have to reckon with internment camps and African Americans who were kept in subservient positions.

“One of the mistakes we all make, and I’ve made it, is to think that this is easy and to believe that societies change in accordance with our timetables,” Obama said.

Read: Barack Obama’s eulogy for John McCain

The former president launched the Obama Foundation as he left office last year around a vague vision of community organizing and empowerment to make the world a better place.

For months, neither he nor the people who worked for him had any idea what that was supposed to mean. When they gathered at this same Marriott Marquis last November, it was mostly feel-good group therapy, hallways in the hotel clogged with former aides and donors who’d flown in to O’Hare to convince themselves that the world outside wasn’t reality, or didn’t have to be. The stage was a procession of celebrities still looking for a little Obama sheen and the chance to take pictures of themselves in front of the old “O” sunrise logo. It was, essentially, an event built around having a concert that at one point featured Chance the Rapper and Lin-Manuel Miranda doing a duet from Hamilton.

The original plan for this year didn’t include another summit. Between the midterms and Michelle Obama’s book tour, Barack Obama’s advisers thought it would conflict and complicate what he was doing. But he insisted on it, and a very different kind of event came together. There were still stars, but of a different sort—swap in a talk by the author Zadie Smith for a panel headlined last year by Prince Harry. And there were still cheery TED Talk–style headset microphones up on stage. But this time they were mostly used by people who’d actually been part of the programs and sessions that the foundation has started to put together over the past year.