David Hogg: The Successes of Tim Walz

Ken Harbaugh:

It's Ken Harbaugh, and I've got some bittersweet news to share. Mostly sweet. We are saying goodbye here at Burn the Boats. It's been an incredible run, starting with Evergreen Podcasts right here in Cleveland and growing into this, a great show with a great team and an amazing audience.

We've talked to senators and astronauts, activists and survivors, and I hope I have helped tell their stories with the compassion and integrity they deserve.

Most of the credit, however, goes to you for making this show so successful. I'll still be around. I'm hosting two other shows on Evergreen, Warriors in their Own Words and the Medal of Honor podcast. Please check those out. And you'll still find me over on the MeidasTouch Network doing commentaries about the news of the day.

I'll drop a couple updates into this feed in the coming weeks and maybe some bonus shows, but for now, I want all of you to know how grateful I am to have shared this journey with you. Thank you, and I will see you soon.

David Hogg:

I think when we say anything about Trump and say that's automatically applicable to everybody that supports him. Of course, I think that there's a lot of awful things, but the truth of the matter is if just calling people names and things like that is going to end this, if it was going to change this conversation, I wouldn't be talking to you right now.

And I think what Governor Walz has done is really done an excellent job of being able to meet people where they're at.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast where experts and change makers share their thoughts on the most pressing issues of the day.

My guest today is David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland shooting, and a leader in the fight to end gun violence. We had him on the show last year to talk about common sense gun reforms and his activism there, and I've brought him back today to talk about the Harris-Walz ticket and mobilizing young voters. David, welcome back to Burn the Boats.

David Hogg:

Thanks for having me, Ken. Always a pleasure to be here.

Ken Harbaugh:

You were pulling for Governor Walz long before most people thought he was the guy, but it turned out to be such an inspired choice. Did you expect this, did you have any idea how well he would do not just with Dem voters, but with the broader American public?

David Hogg:

I think I did. I was in Omaha, Nebraska last year when I met Governor Walz for the first time. And I had only heard about the work he had done on free school lunches previously. But when I saw him speak at the State Democratic Convention here, I'm actually in Omaha right now, coincidentally. But I was so moved by how he spoke.

And more than anything, I think what really inspired me was how he represented what I think, true masculinity looks like, a healthy form of masculinity that isn't predicated on putting other people's down to lift yourself up, on dividing others, on hating others based off of their race, sex identity or sexual orientation.

But based off of a tolerance of other people and building others up by helping your community. He's been a teacher, he's been a veteran, and he is just a down to earth guy. And even though he has the experience as a politician, he doesn't come off as a politician.

And I just love the story of him growing up in a town of 400 people in Butte, Nebraska, with a graduating class of 24, where half of his graduating class were his cousins. And I just thought he was a hilarious guy.

And I think the two most important things that any leader can have are a sense of authenticity and a sense of humor. And he has both of those. He's just a football coach and more than that, he's a dad. And that is really what comes through.

Ken Harbaugh:

You have been trying to tell us this for months, and I think a lot more people should have listened to you. But I am just now making the connection between his appeal to an authentic, developed, mature sense of masculinity and the alternative which you and your classmates experienced at Parkland, which an entire generation, your generation, is experiencing at the wrong end of weapons of war.

Young men in particular buying into these toxic notions. You wrote this on Twitter, and it gets right to the point, “Tim Walz is the definition of what healthy masculinity looks like. Real men don't put others down, they lift others up. Real men don't serve themselves. They serve their communities. Real men bring people together. They don't divide them for their own personal gain.”

And it feels like your entire political experience has been in an era where masculinity is about tearing others down, about chest thumping. And in the extreme case about grabbing a gun and hoping it makes you look bigger. And Tim Walz is the antithesis of that.

David Hogg:

Yeah, he is. And I think it's a really important conversation for us to be having as a party. We are a big tent as the Democratic Party, but we have to acknowledge the fact that we have been losing a lot of young men.

And this isn't just the U.S., this is happening around the world where we're seeing gender polarization, where we see a lot of younger women going to the left and a lot of younger men going to the right, especially since COVID.

And I want to make one thing clear. I don't think the enemy here is masculinity itself. I think the enemy here is the unhealthy version of masculinity that men have been sold for centuries that tells them that they have to be lone wolves, that they have to put other people down, that they have to hurt other people in order to be a man.

And what we're doing here, I think, is talking about what really healthy masculinity looks like and acknowledging the fact that there are a lot of young men in particular that need help out there. We have a growing suicide problem amongst men in this country. We have a growing loneliness epidemic.

And it's not to say that men have to be the center of the conversation always by any means, but I think there is a conversation that does still need to be had. And in the Democratic Party, I think there's a real acknowledgement of that, especially from what we've seen with the White Dudes for Harris call that we had, where we had the original dude on there from The Big Lebowski, one of my favorite movies.

And it's about redefining it in a really healthy way that doesn't say that you should be ashamed to be a man. That's not what we're saying at all. It's to say we need to acknowledge the harmful past that has happened. That's been often a result of really unhealthy masculinity that's been sold to our society in order to do things ironically, to make men fit into a mold, so it's easy to sell things to them.

For women, a lot of the time it's things like makeup and other things like that, but for men it's guns, it's violence, it's war, it's things like that. And I'm sure some amount of that is just human nature.

But at the same time, we're living in a modern society and we need to realize if you're just constantly being sold something over and over and over and over again and you're being told to act like everybody else where you're told to be alone, you're told to buy a gun, you're told to do all these other things, that actually in some ways is one of the least manly things that you could do because you're just conforming to what society wants you to do instead of being who you are.

And I think that takes real bravery a lot of the time to just be yourself. And it's hard because it doesn't fit necessarily the stereotype of what we think of as a strong man and stuff like that, but it's about being your authentic self in the first place.

And in some ways, I think that takes a lot of bravery for people to have, especially men that are not comfortable talking about their feelings, that are not comfortable being anything outside of the box of what the media has traditionally considered to men because we've grown up this whole time all of our lives seeing these different versions of it.

But the same example of what it means to be a man. People like James Bond around a gun. People in war movies, people like that.

And I think that there's a certain place, obviously, for us to be strong, but it's also about caring about other people. I think young men have been taken advantage of a lot, especially since COVID, where they've been told that in order for you to be a man, you need to hate somebody else. You need to blame somebody else rather than really acknowledge the work that you have to do yourself because That's really what it is most of the time.

And I think so often it's really hard for people to acknowledge that it's not anybody else's fault, but it's their own. For example, I think a lot of these young men go down this right-wing path after they've been rejected by a young woman that they were interested in, for example. And they just start hating them over and over again because it's much easier for people to hate somebody else than acknowledge their own personal flaws, or the fact that maybe that just wasn't the person for them.

And I think what Tim Walz does is he offers a really compelling and healthy example of what it looks like to be a good man, to serve your community, to do the right thing and just be a normal dude in the first place.

You could still be on the side of the road, and he could help you fix your radiator or fix your car engine or whatever it is. But he also could help you fix your democracy. And I think there's something really beautiful about that.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'd love to see J.D. Vance, and I think you made this observation already. J.D. Vance and Tim Walz in a oil changing competition. Can't wait to see them on the debate stage together.

You talk about young men being drawn into these extremist movements. They experience some personal rejection or trauma in their lives, and then they're served up an ad like the AR-15 Man Card ad.

And the point I'm trying to make is it's not just human nature, this cultural proclivity for toxic masculinity, it's marketing, it's money, it's greed. And no wonder so many young men in particular are drawn to this.

But you described Tim Walz as America's dad, and I would love to go a little deeper on that, because I love that framing. And I think you've already partly answered the question, but it's in my notes, so I'm going to ask anyway, that isn't in any way patronizing for voters of your generation. Is it the VP as the father figure that has real appeal?

David Hogg:

No, I think it has real appeal. And that's one of the reasons I was pushing for Governor Walz so much, because young people want the same thing that a lot of older people want. They want somebody who delivers, but they also want somebody who's authentic, that they feel like they could get a beer with if they're old enough.

And in the case of Governor Walz, what we saw was somebody who's repeatedly delivered in as the governor of Minnesota, despite having a one seat majority, he has consistently delivered on the progressive agenda.

Whether that's keeping kids fed in school, whether that's passing gun laws, whether that's helping to protect reproductive rights, whether that's protecting LGBT people and so much more. And he's done that with a one seat majority.

Frankly, we've seen Minnesota do a lot more, in my view, than a lot of democratic legislatures that have had Democratic majorities for years. And it's because they don't feel like they really need to do anything because they know that they are just going to stay in power indefinitely because it's a Democratic state that they're in.

And I think in the case of Governor Walz, what I liked the most about him was his phrase where he says, you don't gain political capital to bank it and save it.

Ken Harbaugh:

You spend it, you use it.

David Hogg:

Yeah, exactly. You gain political capital to spend it and use it to improve people's lives. And that's what we've seen Governor Walz do over and over again. And we've seen an evolution too, of his views on guns.

I have to mention, and I hope you guys are able … that you include this, part of the reason why I was able to do so much around Governor Walz is because I had great friends working with me. I had Linnea Stanton who used to work in March for Our Lives in the early days and is from Minnesota herself.

And that was helping to find old videos from 2018 of the governor talking about renouncing the NRA. I had people like my friend Perry, who was one of the other regional directors of March for Our Lives way back in 2018 that was helping me too.

And I had my girlfriend doing a lot of the posts too on the Walz War room as we called it, on our Twitter account, just constantly putting out content about him out there.

And I've gotten a lot of people saying like, “Oh wow, how did you do this? How did you know about the governor and everything? And how did you help build momentum around him?” And the truth of the matter is, I couldn't have done it without them. I wish I'd been able to tell more people about the work that they did in making this possible.

But to come back to the question, no, I don't think that Governor Walz being seen as America's dad hurts him at all. I think it helps him. And the reason why is because he represents, I wish I was brilliant enough to have thought up what I'm about to say myself, but I'm not.

I forget who it was, it was somebody on Twitter that said this, but they were so right that “Tim Walz is so powerful because he represents, the dad that millions of Americans would have had Fox News and the right-wing spin machine not taken them from them.”

Where they're now buying into all these conspiracy theories and all this other BS and he represents again, what healthy masculinity looks like. What it looks like to just be a caring father, to acknowledge you're not going to be totally in touch at times with all the latest trends or whatever, but you just lean into it.

And to me, that was one of the biggest endorsements that I saw was his own relationship with his daughter Hope. And the reality is that you can't fake — a 17-year-old person like Hope was in a lot of those videos. You can't get a teenage girl to fake how she really feels about their parents.

Because it comes through and it's very obvious. And the fact that she has such a good relationship with her dad was one of the biggest, if not the biggest endorsement in my book to me because it shows what a good person he is.

Ken Harbaugh:

Yeah. As a father of two teenage girls, I can vouch for that. And I want to play this video. You know the one I'm cutting to, of Tim Walz and Hope at the Minnesota State Fair.

So, David, that's Governor Walz in a nutshell, I guess, the fatherly side of him, but he's also a badass. I mean, he brings both pieces of the masculinity equation. Former command sergeant, major governor of a divided state.

And as you've said, he's gotten stuff done. At Leaders We Deserve, what are your top priorities? You mentioned a couple reproductive rights, common sense gun reform. What are you hoping for from an incoming, fingers crossed Harris-Walz Administration?

David Hogg:

I think the thing that I'm hoping for is a sea change in how our country views its politics. And what I mean by that is the past eight years American politics have been defined by hatred, division and fear.

And we still could go down that path, make no mistakes about it. These polls, they could easily be wrong. We saw that in 2016 and we can't let that ever happen again. We have to make sure we get out and vote.

But word of fork in the road in this election where on one side we reject becoming a multiracial democracy. And by we, I don't actually mean the American people because of the American people broadly speaking, are largely supportive of that. We know that from seeing the popular vote and how it went in 2016, how it went in 2020, how it's likely going to go in ‘24.

By we, I mean what our government represents, which is disproportionately many areas that don't have nearly as many people where we don't have a proportional system of government. And we may go down a path where we reject, even though the vast majority of people support being a multiracial democracy, because of the way that our government is structured, we may go down a path where we reject being a multiracial democracy.

We turn our greatest assets as a country into our greatest weaknesses because of our own hatred and xenophobia as well.

Personally, I think the immigrants that come here that are risking their lives to come to the United States, many of them being young people, being children, even under the age of 10 at times, when they come here and they don't speak any English and they're risking their lives to come here, I think that person in many ways is more American than you or I are, Ken.

Ken Harbaugh:

Me too.

David Hogg:

Because they're coming here risking everything. And immigrants are not antithetical to the United States. Immigrants are the United States. Unless you're Native American, you're the product of immigrants in this country, period. This country does not exist without immigrants.

In that fork in the road, we either reject being a multiracial democracy, or we embrace it, and we embrace it through embracing a politics of joy, of compassion and justice, where we acknowledge that while our country has many flaws in its past, that's part of what — Donald Trump goes out there and says, make America great again over and over and over and over again.

And I think we need to acknowledge who is he really talking about making a great for, because it hasn't always been great for many people in this country, whether that's black and brown people, whether that's women or others.

But if there's one thing that I realized where I was just working on this election last week across Wisconsin, all across Western Wisconsin, and I'm looking out at all the prairies and the corn fields and the cows and everything.

And I was thinking about that phrase that Trump keeps saying, make America great again. And you know what I realized, talking to the blue-collar workers that are at the core of these democratic parties in Portage County, in Wisconsin, or whether that's in La Crosse or anywhere else, is that America already is great. We are.

We are one of the most innovative and powerful countries ever in human history. And in order to keep that going, we cannot embrace a politics of hatred. We cannot embrace a politics of xenophobia and divisiveness. We have to embrace a politics of joy.

And I think that's what people are craving. And why I was pushing so hard for Governor Walz is because he represents a politics of joy. A politics of hope, but not a politics of delusion. And I think that there's a fine line where people think that hope is a delusion.

And I understand that, I've oftentimes not been hopeful in this work, but I realize that the reason why we were able to change things after Parkland is not because we listened to the pundits on CNN or the pollsters or the other people who said it was impossible.

The reason we were able to change things after Parkland with Fred Guttenberg, with Manny Oliver, with so many of my classmates is because we had the one thing that so many people didn't, which was the audacity to hope and believe it was possible.

And so often in this country, what prevents us from accomplishing so many incredible things isn't whether or not it's actually possible. It's whether or not we believe it's possible.

And I think what Governor Walz does, what Kamala Harris does, as a woman who started out in San Francisco as a prosecutor, as the product of immigrants. And somebody who started out in a town of 400 in Butte, Nebraska.

And worked his way up, served his country as a teacher, served his country as a veteran, and now is serving his country in public office, the fact that those two people can come together and serve our country to help move it forward at the highest level of leadership, that's one of the most goddamn American things I've ever seen. And it makes me so fucking proud to be an American. Because that is the magic of America.

The fact that you can take somebody from a super rural area like Butte, Nebraska, and also somebody from a place as metropolitan as San Francisco, and instead of hating each other, they work together toward the common goal of helping build a better country for everybody. That's the politics of hope that I want to embrace.

And it's realistic too because Governor Walz knows, as he said, that hope is not a plan. That we have to be realistic and focus on what we can get done. But we have to keep it alive. And that's what he does. And that's what I think Kamala Harris does as well.

That's the politics that I want to have as a politics of joy. Not a politics of insulting other people. N the politics of making fun of people or spreading just gross — saying terrible things because of the color of somebody's skin, or because they're a woman.

And the beauty of this election in many ways, not only is … maybe not the beauty, but the thing that is hilarious to me is the one thing that Donald Trump needs to do to win is the one thing he can't do, which is stop insulting people and actually focus on the policies and getting things done. Because he can't do that.

He's too much of a raging narcissist and just a bully to do that. And you know what you need when you have a bully, a teacher.

Ken Harbaugh:

That's great. You use the phrase see change hopefully to describe what might be in store for American politics. Meanwhile, the political pundit class is writing about the honeymoon period because that's how you used to write about politics.

But I think it may ignore (again, fingers crossed), a shifting reality that after the better part of a decade of the most divisive politics we've experienced since the Civil War, certainly since the mid and late 60s, we have a campaign that is built on a different vision for America.

And I think Americans are here for it. They are sick and tired of what they've been served by MAGA and Trump and his minions. And if your generation is able to carry the day and we're able to pass the torch, I think it fundamentally changes American politics for decades.

I'm probably just restating what you said, but are you that hopeful? Like could we pull off a real sea change in American politics?

David Hogg:

Things don't just happen on their own. After Parkland, U.S. changing gun laws, having the largest student protest in American history, having millions of students walk out of their school, millions more march with us, tens of thousands registered to vote with us and more, that doesn't happen on its own. That takes blood, sweat, and tears. And millions and millions of man hours putting in the work to create change.

And I don't want people to think that this change is just naturally going to come. It's not. But hope is the first step to creating it, believing that it's possible and seeing that vision for the future of our country.

And if there's anything that I've learned from studying history throughout college, it's that great generations are not born. They're made by awful circumstances because generations step up and meet those circumstances.

The generation that defeated the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese when they were growing up, there was so many awful headlines as there always is with every generation saying, “Oh my God, these kids are reading comic books too much. They're not like the other generations; we're just screwed and nothing's ever going to get better.”

But then that generation stepped up to the plate and became the greatest generation. And I think no matter what challenges a generation faces, it finds its leaders. And I think that's what I'm trying to do with Leaders We Deserve, is we are trying to go out there.

And to give you some context, Ken, I started Leaders We Deserve because I worked on Congressman Maxwell Frost's race. I actually hired Maxwell at March for Our Lives when I was a freshman in college from my dorm room. And he was our national organizing director.

And a few years later he told me he wanted to run for Congress. I helped him raise about $400,000 in his first two quarters. And despite what other everybody said, he ended up winning amazingly, becoming the youngest member of Congress, the first Gen Z person in Congress, and the first of many members of March for our Lives in Congress.

And the hope that he's brought our generation and how down to earth he is just as a normal person, a normal guy has been amazing, but we need more of him. And that's when I teamed up with his campaign manager, Kevin Lata, to create Leaders We Deserve.

Because the fact that you need to raise $400,000 to have a chance at running for Congress is insane. But it is the reality that we live in.

One of the things I looked at when I was starting Leaders We Deserve is like, how true is this? How much does it really matter that we have young people starting politics? And what blew me away was the ages of the most successful presidents that we've had throughout American history.

So, Abraham Lincoln was 25 when he was first elected to the Illinois State House. FDR was 28 when he was first elected to the New York State Assembly. LBJ was 28 when he was first elected to Congress and Biden, I know this is hard for many younger viewers to believe he was 29 when he was first elected to the U.S. Senate.

And it makes sense. If you start when you're young, you gain the relationships, you learn how to play the game and you know how to get things done, you just do because you gain that experience.

And what I wanted to do with Leaders We Deserve was not only to build that future of the Democratic Party in our government, to have really effective leaders that are effective because they start when they're young, because they gain that experience, because they know how to play that game.

But also, to provide a guardrail, I guess you could say, against what I perceive to be the greatest threat to American democracy, which is not Donald Trump. It's the hopelessness, the apathy that is out there. The loneliness that I think so many are feeling that is causing people like Donald Trump to become so powerful.

Because we have created a system unfortunately where people have lost faith that their government can do anything right. We've created a self-fulfilling prophecy in this country over the past 40 years since Ronald Reagan that says that government can't ever do anything right.

And then we elect people that say that government can't work, that then prove government can't work and then keep reelecting those same people over and over and over again. They're called Republicans.

And what I'm trying to do here is elect people that actually can get things done, that can deliver for the people and help to give them that hope because we're in a vicious cycle of that cynicism. If we don't believe things are going to get better, we're going to vote. We're not going to vote as much; we're going to have worse leaders.

And then those worst leaders are going to do worse things, which then make us believe that things won't get better. And it just goes and goes and goes until it guts the middle class. It destroys unions and it benefits only the 1% really.

And what I'm trying to do here is massively invest in 20 to 30 of the best young people I can find this election cycle in state legislatures and Congress, but mainly state legislatures, to invest in them so heavily that our generation doesn't lose hope, doesn't lose that faith because they see people there that are fighting for them that understand what it's like to go through a school shooter drill. That understand what it's like to fear not knowing whether or not you're going to survive math class today or die from climate change tomorrow.

And bring them into office to fight for that change. And we've already seen incredible results. Our first elected candidate, Nadarius Clark, secured a one seat majority for Democrats in the Virginia State legislature as the candidate who was running in the most competitive race in Virginia. He won by 800 votes.

We gave him a hundred thousand dollars. We worked with him on a day-to-day basis on messaging, comms, everything like that. And I went down there and knocked doors for him, did his large phone bank and everything.

And because of those 800 voters that voted him into office, I got to see him as the head of the Firearms and Public Safety Committee. Republicans brought up a bill to arm teachers and I got to see him kill that bill on the spot because of the one seat majority that Democrats secured in that legislature.

But what was really remarkable, far more than that, Ken, was the bipartisanship that he was able to bring to the legislature around gun violence. Nadarius introduced a bill to offer tax credits for gun safes and gun locks to gun owners.

And in this committee hearing, he says, “Alright, if you agree with this, stand up because this is the last bill and we're all about to leave if you don't agree with it, stay seated so that we don't need to have a whole hearing about this.” Because he assumed it was going to get a lot of white support.

Everybody in the room stands up. The NRA, even the people that are more extreme than the NRA, myself, everybody stands up. It passes through the house; it passes through the Senate and it gets signed into law by the Republican governor.

And even though that's not as big as I would like, that's a hell of a lot better than doing nothing because we know most school shooters get their guns from their parents' household. We know that we have a growing problem with youth suicide.

So, we are getting action despite so many people believing that it's not possible even with a Republican governor. And that was only possible because of the one seat that Nadarius secured.

And that's what we're doing right now in this election. We're like working in a lot of swing states in swing districts to help elect young people and give young people, other young people to vote for. And the way that we do that is we massively fund their campaigns.

We contribute to their campaigns. We do polling of the campaigns. We advise them on a day-to-day basis on how are they doing messaging if they need help with their campaign manager, if they need help with anything, we’re there to support them. And I show up in their districts to help turn out voters for them.

And we've already seen the results. We're on track right now to elect the youngest person ever in Georgia State history. His name's Bryce Berry. He is 22-year-old, seventh grade algebra teacher.

We just elected the youngest person to the Texas State Senate. Her name's Molly Cook. We spent $300,000 on that race. I went and knocked a ton of doors for her in the Houston heat and she won by just 62 votes, becoming the youngest member of the Texas State Senate and just won her primary again. So, she'll be there for the next four years.

And we're on track to like the youngest person in Ohio currently. And we have a whole lot more races around the country that we're working on in very important states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and even some more red ones, ones in the south like Tennessee, ones like Arkansas and others. Because we want to make sure that we don't lose faith in any state or write any state off because every state needs some form of leadership.

Ken Harbaugh:

Can you name drop the Ohio candidate? We'll put a link to the page in the show notes.

David Hogg:

Christine Cockley is her name. I was out there in Columbus in spring and I went through all four versions of Ohio Spring working on her election. And she won. She'll also be the second Jewish woman ever elected to the Ohio State legislature as well.

Ken Harbaugh:

Awesome. Do you have any personal advice on how to maintain this hopeful outlook? As someone who has been on the receiving end of the most vile and threatening comments, as someone who has lost friends because of the climate of toxic masculinity and the prevalence of guns, you somehow believe in America's future.

You referenced Fred Guttenberg. If anybody has a right to be cynical and not hopeful, it's someone who lost his daughter in a school shooting, yet Fred is hopeful for America's future. How do you do that? And what advice do you have to others?

David Hogg:

I think one, it is the fact that I don't have a choice. If I want to believe that change is possible, if I want to end gun violence, I have to believe it's possible. And some days honestly, it ebbs and flows. Sometimes I don't feel like it's going to be possible. But I keep fighting and I keep going.

And it's because I'm not just doing this because — it's not a matter of whether or not people say it's possible. It's a matter of making it possible. Because I think hope is not something where it's just like, if we just do nothing and we sit around and wait like it's going to change.

What hope for me means is that it doesn't matter what other people say is possible. I'm going to fucking make it possible because we have to. Every other country has addressed this issue. There's no reason why our country can't be the same.

And honestly, what's helped me the most (obviously besides my incredible friends, my incredible girlfriend, my family, my sister, and so many great mentors), is talking to the people that hate me the most. That has been a lot of it.

And what I mean by that is I do that in person sometimes. When I was in college, I got so tired of … obviously college is a big bubble. It's a big liberal bubble. And I'm really appreciative. I like being around people obviously that agree with me, but I know that they don't need to have their minds changed.

The job of an activist isn't to be comfortable, it's to force yourself to do uncomfortable things to make the impossible possible. And as a result, what I did in college is I joined the shooting club because I grew up shooting guns. My dad's a veteran and a former FBI agent. I first shot guns when I was in fourth grade.

And I wanted to go and talk to the people who were the most likely to disagree with me. And one day I was in a shooting competition and it was against, it was against Yale, MIT, the Coast Guard Academy, the Naval Academy, and West Point, and a few other schools. Thankfully we had our asses kicked. I'd be very concerned if we didn't.

West Point was amazing to watch in skeet and trap shooting. It was mesmerizing. Because they don't miss and I'm in the middle of this competition and the head of this club comes over to me, and the coach from our team who didn't coach us very much because it's just like an intramural kind of thing. Very casual.

And he comes over to me and this guy's like six three. He's like a walking refrigerator. And he's like, “What's your name?” And mind you, I have a 12 gauge shotgun cracked over my shoulder. And I say, “David” and I look at his phone and he is holding up my Wikipedia page on his phone.

And he says, “David, what?” And I'm like, “David Hogg.” And then he's like, “What are you doing here? Aren't you here to take everybody's guns? Aren't you some big anti-gun guy? And all this other stuff?”

And I'm like, “I'm here for the shooting competition.” And also, I got kind of defensive because he was so angry, and I thought I was about to be kicked out. And I was like, fuck, I'm halfway through this competition and I want to make sure I get through it.

And I said to him, “Look, part of the reason I'm here right now is because I think you probably assumed some things about me that are not entirely accurate. And I think I probably, maybe even, I assumed some things about you that are not entirely accurate.

And frankly, I know that neither of us want school shootings to continue or gun violence to continue, but what's not going to change that is just debating it or not talking to each other.”

So, I'm here one, for the shooting competition because I like shooting stuff and watching clay pigeons blow up in the air. It's fun. But two, I'm here to have conversations with people like you. Now I know that you probably don't agree with banning guns like the AR-15, for example, but you probably do support more mental health funding for the two thirds of gun deaths that are suicides.

And they're like, “Well, yeah, of course.” I said, “Well, great, awesome, then we agree on that. Now we can either continue to try to debate this as has been done for the past 30 years, or you can help me become a better shot. Which do you want to do?”

And then we went over, and I blew, I don't even know how many of the clay pigeons I blew, but I basically nailed all of them and it was in part because of the advice that they gave me and everything.

And when you're giving somebody that you think is super anti-gun advice on how to shoot a 12-gauge shotgun to blow of a clay pigeon, and they're nailing every one of them, it's kind of hard to fear them and say that they're here to take away your guns. Especially when you're a walking refrigerator. And I'm two dimensional.

So, those conversations have given me a lot of hope because I don't see the people that say awful things to me online so much as people that hate me anymore, as much as I see them as people that I haven't had a chance to talk to yet.

And I think that there's a real chance to make progress on this issue in a authentic real way by having conversations with just normal people about it. Because we really aren't nearly as divided as I think we believe we are.

I know we aren't as divided on this as we believe we are. Part of it comes down to the way that the media has framed this issue where they say, Republicans are only going to talk about why somebody pulls the trigger to kill somebody else. And Democrats are only going to talk about how they got the gun.

And the truth of the matter is we need to talk about both, but we need to be careful. It doesn't mean that we should be using mental illness as a scapegoat when the shooter in El Paso, Texas, for example, is a self-declared white supremacist that went into that Walmart to go and murder Mexican Americans because of the color of their skin and their nationality or their ancestry.

Hatred is not a mental illness, but we can acknowledge that while also acknowledging that we need to address the two thirds of gun death that are suicides. We need to address the mental health crisis that men are going through in this country.

And we need to fund those programs and do everything we can to have a full conversation about this. Because as much as I care about preventing what happened in Parkland from ever happening again, I don't want what happens every single day in America to happen ever again, including gun suicides.

And I know that we can make progress on that. And in order to do that, it's just going to take having a real conversation with people. And that's part of the reason why I'm so excited about Governor Walz is because he's ran so many times.

His district in 2016, his congressional district voted 15 points for Trump, but he still won. And it's because he knows how to talk to people and have a real conversation with them. And that is what we need more of in our government, is people that can have those tough conversations and realize a lot of the time they aren't tough.

People just don't feel heard, and they feel disrespected and condescended and talked down to, I'm not here to do that. I'm here to have a conversation and I'm here to figure out what we can do to make progress on this.

And that's why I'm really excited about this ticket because I know Governor Walz, he knows that the people that support Trump, we all have people in our families, most of us do that have supported Trump, distant relatives, other people like that.

We know that they're not terrible people. We know that they want a lot of the same things that we want, but I think for too long it's been hard for us as a party to separate the leader from his followers.

And I think when we say anything about Trump and say that's automatically applicable to everybody that supports him, of course I think that there's a lot of awful things. But the truth of the matter is if just calling people names and things like that is going to end this, if it was going to change this conversation, I wouldn't be talking to you right now.

And I think what Governor Walz has done is really done an excellent job of being able to meet people where they're at and have a real conversation about yeah, we have some differences in values. Some people may not want kids to be fed in school because they think that that's government overreach, but in our case, we just think that's good government.

That helps middle-class, working-class people and everybody because then you don't have to freak out about packing your kids' lunch to school which is super annoying for most parents because they're trying to do two or three jobs at the same time.

And that's what brings me hope. It's just that I think you can have a real conversation with people. And that's what we need more of in this country is to acknowledge that we have differences but figure out what we can't agree on and work on that because there are real people suffering in the meantime.

Like we saw with the PACT Act when that was sunk in such a petty way because of Republican spite, even though it's to support our veterans. And some of the best people I've met in the past six years were people I met outside of the U.S. Senate that were protesting after the Republicans sunk that bill and did get it successfully passed.

And now that bill is helping my dad because he has early onset Parkinson's Disease, very likely potentially because of jet fuel exposure as a helicopter pilot in the Navy. That bill because of the expansion of its benefits, at least from my understanding of it, it has the potential to basically save my family financially because of the enormous costs of my father's healthcare had that bill not passed.

Ken Harbaugh:

If memory serves, David, you actually were part of the fire watch, that group of veterans outside the Senate. Thank you. I feel like we can be allies to each other in many ways. I never imagined I'd be talking to a 20 something year old who had our backs as veterans and helped get that over the line. Thank you so much. Thanks for bringing the real conversation to Burn the Boats. Let's do this more often.

David Hogg:

Sounds good. Thanks Ken.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

For updates and more, follow us on Twitter at Team_Harbaugh. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to rate and review.

Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia and David Moss.

I'm Ken Harbaugh and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.

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