That’s not the message I took away from what he said. What I got is that people should have diverse role models because if everyone is just like you, you don’t learn empathy. He had someone who would correct him when he was wrong in a kind way, and that person happened to be gay. That experience helped him learn empathy and kindness.
As a straight white guy, I also feel that I’ve benefited from getting to know queer folk on a personal level - that that experience helped me understand and appreciate diversity, even for people from groups that I haven’t yet gotten to know personally. I get to know someone who’s, say, trans, and get at least a little exposure to what their experience of life is and how it’s differed from mine. It makes me work that empathy muscle, so it’s more developed when I met the next person whose experience is different from mine.
That doesn’t mean that those people have some responsibility for educating me or teaching me anything. It just means that my exposure to people from different walks of life is useful for my own personal growth.
Podcasts tend to be pretty conversational. I’m sure Obama didn’t put the thought into the comment that he puts into his speeches, where every word and every sentence is crafted. I just took it to mean that he had this diversity of experience with people he looked up to, and that helped him grow as a person. I personally didn’t have a lot of people growing up that I thought of as role models (not that my life was in any way bad, just that I didn’t tend to relate to people that way). So maybe the way I took it was slightly different than he meant it because of the differences in our experience of growing up, or maybe he was just trying to equate exposure to diverse people with the development of empathy, and did so in the way it worked him him. Hard to say.