Since his departure from the White House, Barack Obama has cultivated something of a Jupiterian postpresidency. Maintaining a deliberately removed public image and mostly preferring to publish playlists or hang out with celebrities, the former president has made only a few select interventions into politics — and has mostly refrained from speaking about current events directly. For that reason, it’s pretty rare these days to hear Obama speak candidly, and the results can prove both interesting and revealing when he does.

That’s very much the case vis-à-vis the freshly published transcript of an off-the-record conversation between Obama and reporters that took place on January 17, 2017 — exactly three days before the inauguration of Donald Trump. Obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by investigative journalist Jason Leopold and published by Bloomberg last Friday, the conversation, which took place in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, is billed “Remarks by the President in Roundtable with Progressive Columnists.” For a number of reasons, it’s a fascinating document, both in terms of what’s contained and also what isn’t.

In many places, Obama’s remarks unsurprisingly read like those of a typical US president. Chelsea Manning (whose sentence he commuted), for instance, is described as “a young person [who] did significant damage because they hadn’t thought through sort of the approach that that young person took” and “deserved punishment.” Elsewhere he speaks at length about the difficulties of health care reform and complains to the assembled journalists about getting insufficient credit for cutting the federal deficit: