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Michelle Obama officially launched her eponymous podcast on Wednesday. The inaugural episode of the Spotify and Higher Ground Productions’ podcast starred none other than the former first lady’s husband, Barack Obama . During their first-ever publicized one-on-one conversation, the Becoming author revealed one of the reasons she fell in love with the former president of the United States. “You know that at the core of everything you have done politically, what I know about you as a person and one of the reasons why I feel in love with you is,” she began before Barack interrupted his wife to note “it wasn’t just my looks.”
“You’re cute you know, but no,” Michelle, 56, said. “One of the reasons I fell in love with you is because you are guided by the principle that we are each other’s brother’s and sister’s keepers. And that’s how I was raised.” She added, “I can say that my family, my neighborhood, my notions of community growing up shaped that view, and shaped the choices that I made in life as I felt your experiences shape yours.”
Michelle and Barack tied the knot in 1992 and share two daughters together—Malia, 22, and Sasha, 19. On The Michelle Obama Podcast, the couple spoke about raising their children. “When it comes to fathers raising their girls, I do think that the average father today does believe that their girl can be anything she wants to be and they are delivering those messages around the dinner table,” Michelle said. The podcast host acknowledged that there is a different way of parenting. “We delivered those messages at the dinner table but we didn’t take them to the board room. We didn’t change our workplaces; we didn’t change things outside the home,” she shared. “We didn’t institutionalize the values that we’d been teaching this generation of kids. So now, they are growing up. They are leaving the dinner table and they are going out into the world and going, ‘The world doesn’t look like what I was taught back at home.’”
Barack pointed out that young people are “more idealistic now” than when he was growing up. “The difference though is that idealism that they feel as if they can channel it outside of governmental structures and outside of politics,” he said. “The problem is, again we’re getting a pretty good lesson in this right now, there’s some things we just can’t do by ourselves or even groups of us can do by ourselves. As general proposition: we can’t build infrastructure by ourselves, we can’t deal with a pandemic by ourselves.”
Towards the end of the episode, the proud dad of two expressed his hope to leave behind a world for his daughters where everybody respects each other. “When you and I think about what’s the inheritance that we would like to leave Malia and Sasha, more than anything what it would be is that they are living in a country that respects everybody and looks after everybody,” Barack said. “Celebrates and sees everybody. Cause we know that if we’re not around, that those girls are in a society like that. They’ll be fine.”