Hi, I'm Zivie Owens. Thanks for listening and watching another episode of Totally Booked

with Zivie, a daily podcast and live show where I talk to authors all the time about

their fabulous books and where you get to meet authors who may be your favorites and are as

yet undiscovered. Today Today we are so excited to welcome

Shannon Watts, whose book Fired Up, How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at any age

is what we're talking about today. Here's a little bit about Shannon. Shannon Watts is the founder of

Mom's Demand Action, the largest grassroots group fighting gun violence in the U.S.

Known as the summoner of a women's audacity. She has been named one of Times 100 most

influential people, a Forbes 50 over 50 changemaker, and a glamour,

woman of the year. I always feel like so insecure reading all these bios. I'm like, what am I

doing? I'm like 49 under, anyway, she recently organized the largest Zoom gathering in history,

mobilizing more than 200,000 voters

and raising over $11 million in support of Kamala Harris' 2024 presidential campaign.

Watts is an active board member of Emerge America, one of the nation's leading organizations

for recruiting and training women to run for office. So today we're talking about Fired

Up. Welcome, Shannon. Thank you so much. Thank you. I am so thrilled to be here. Fabulous. Okay. Fired

Up. Tell us about your book. So I, as you said, led's to Man Action for 11 years. I was a full-time

volunteer. Before that, I had a career in corporate communications. And at the end of my tenure at

Mom's to Man Action, I decided to step back after we managed to pass the first federal gun safety

legislation and generation. I knew that my tenure would be finite. I didn't want to do it

forever. I wanted to hand over the baton to someone with new energy and new ideas. And I thought I'd

take a year-long break. And I was running on a treadmill one night when I got a call from Maria Shriver.

...