394. Shannon Watts with Brooke Baldwin: Fired Up

394. Shannon Watts with Brooke Baldwin: Fired Up

Author: Town Hall Seattle July 25, 2025 Duration: 44:58

From left to right: Headshots of Shannon Watts (with long brown hair) and Brooke Baldwin (with wavy chin-length blonde hair)

As founder of Moms Demand Action — the nation's largest grassroots movement against gun violence — author Shannon Watts has helped thousands of women find their voice and take action. In her new book, Fired Up, Watts outlines a practical and inspiring framework for reigniting purpose, confidence, and ambition. With real-life stories from women across generations and backgrounds, Fired Up offers tools to help readers identify what sparks them and live with greater intention and impact.

Watts seeks to challenge the negative narrative that many women hold, asserting that empowerment begins where expectations end. In a world that often pressures women to shrink themselves, choosing to embrace desire and step outside prescribed roles becomes a powerful, even radical, act.

Shannon Watts is the founder of Moms Demand Action, the nation's largest grassroots group fighting against gun violence. Known as the 'summoner of women's audacity,' she spent more than a decade leading one of the world's largest field experiments for mobilizing women. She has been named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People, a Forbes 50 over 50 Changemaker, and a Glamour Woman of the Year. She is an active board member of Emerge America, one of the nation's leading organizations for recruiting and training women to run for office. She is the author of the 2019 book Fight Like a Mother, and she writes regularly for Substack and outlets like The Washington PostElleTIME, and more.

Brooke Baldwin is a TV host, award-winning journalist and bestselling author. She writes a weekly Substack entitled "Unraveling, with Brooke Baldwin." It's inspired by her bombshell first person essay published in Vanity Fair entitled: "Leaving CNN Was How I Found My Voice." For more than a decade, Brooke anchored her own live daily news show on CNN and was renowned for her versatility, authenticity, and humanity at the news desk. After CNN, Brooke hosted a popular social experiment show on Netflix called The Trust. Brooke is the author of the bestselling book Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power, redefining the word 'huddle' to explore how women lean on one another to provide support, empowerment, inspiration, and the strength to enact meaningful change. Brooke now lives in Los Angeles after a ten-year run-in New York City. She is a proud graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


Recorded live from a historic venue in the Pacific Northwest, the Town Hall Seattle Civics Series podcast brings the stage to your headphones. Each episode captures a vital conversation from Town Hall Seattle's ongoing programming, where experts, activists, and thinkers grapple with the ideas shaping our collective life. You’ll hear historians reframe our past, legal scholars dissect constitutional questions, and community organizers explain the mechanics of emerging movements. This isn't just theoretical discussion; it's a direct engagement with the policies and cultural shifts that touch our neighborhoods and the wider world. Tuning in feels like finding a seat in a thoughtful, often provocative public forum. The series operates on a belief that an informed community is an empowered one, and this audio archive makes that process accessible to anyone, anywhere. By focusing on the substance of live civic dialogue, this podcast provides the context and depth often missing from daily headlines, fostering a deeper understanding of how society functions and changes.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Town Hall Seattle Civics Series
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