In the interview, Obama explained that his daughters "were very much in organizer mode," adding that they all of their participation was based "on their own initiative."
He explained, "I didn't have to give them a lot of advice because they had a very clear sense of what was right and what was wrong and (of) their own agency and the power of their voice and the need to participate."
He continued, "Malia and Sasha found their own ways to get involved with the demonstrations and activism that you saw with young people this summer, without any prompting from Michelle and myself, on their own initiative."
The former president added, "They didn't do it in a way where they were looking for limelight."
"Their attitude was — we've seen something wrong and we want to fix it, and we think we can fix it. And we understand that it's not gonna take just a day or a week or one march to fix it. But we're in it for the long haul," he explained.
Obama also said that he took a backseat to his daughters' activist plans.
He explained, "I think a couple of times they asked for sort of very specific suggestions about what would be the best way to communicate X or what would be the most useful thing that, if we were mobilizing a whole bunch of friends, to have an impact, what should we be doing?"
"But they didn't need to be encouraged," he insisted.