Former president Barack Obama isn't just spending his post-presidency free time talking to Wall Street or hosting leadership summits. On Monday, he hopped on a conference call with hundreds of young people across the country to talk about the importance of coding.

Barack Obama tweet

Over 1,000 students, educators and advocates were on the line for a call organized by the Computer Science (CS) for All Consortium.

While the goal of today's "National Briefing" call was to detail updates on CSforAll, Obama dialed in as a guest to "crash the party" and surprise the listeners.

tweet

"As I've always said, this country is at its best when we lift each other up and make sure that we're extending opportunity to everybody," Obama said on the call.

"I strongly believe every child has to have the opportunity to learn this critical skill," Obama said. "We are inundated with technology and I don't want our young people to just be consumers, I want them to be producers of this technology and to understand it, to feel like they're controlling it, as opposed to it controlling them."

The call is in line with President Obama's post-presidency goal of cultivating the next generation of leaders, CNBC Make It has learned. Here are some of Obama's quotes that listeners shared on Twitter:

tweet

tweet

tweet

During his January 2016 State of the Union Address, Obama launched the CSforAll initiative as a way to provide funding to states and schools to close the digital gap.

"In the new economy, computer science isn't an optional skill, it's a basic skill," Obama said in a video following his address.