Name: David Hogg Talks Life Before The Shooting
Uploaded: 2025-09-28T13:01:02.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'David Hogg Talks Life Before The Shooting' from TAFS Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-09-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'David Hogg Talks Life Before The Shooting' from TAFS Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-09-28. Transcript available.

I can't imagine what it would be like at 17 or 18 to be known, I don't know,
like how
did you handle that, like just like, just the, you know, like being a private
kid, you
know, what were you doing before that, cross country running?
In case you couldn't tell.
Did you, you were blazing up?
No, absolutely not.
You didn't blaze, what the hell?
I had, I was a serious athlete, I had to, and my dad was an FBI agent too, so.
Oh my god.
As you can imagine.
He was a narco?
Yeah.
No, no.
Did he go undercover?
He had in the past.
So your dad used to have different looks, he'd be like biker for six months?
No, he wasn't a biker, and I can talk about this now because he unfortunately-
He'd be like ISIS terror self for six months?
Well, no.
That'd be cool.
As you can imagine, a guy who was my father doesn't presumably fit in.
I don't know, I'm not, I don't, he's an actor, I mean he could play any role.
Yeah, he, when he started out in the FBI, his job was, he was, he would go
undercover
and dig through different people's trash.
He's a hobo.
Yeah, he would go undercover as a hobo.
He's a government hobo.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So your dad was an FBI agent, your mom was a teacher, right?
Yep.
Do you go to parties?
Did I go to parties?
Did you hit brew?
Not very often.
Didn't you have beers or blunts before, you were just a running kid?
I was a pretty big nerd, I would say that much.
Student government?
Absolutely not, not that big of a nerd.
Did you play gaming?
I did play a lot of Call of Duty and Modern Warfare, and I actually still do
play, I still
do play a good amount of Call of Duty, like on my phone.
And it's kind of hilarious because, you know, I'm sure I'm playing with a lot
of guys that
are further.
You play mobile.
Yeah, that are playing, you know, guys that I'm sure to some extent are to the
right of
me a lot of the time.
Yeah, yeah.
And I get pretty good and I'll get like first place and I'll get all these
likes and like
people following me stuff and they'll be like, this is great, whatever.
You just got beat by the hog.
Exactly.
And I'm just always laughing because I'm like, if only you knew, like, because
I can only
imagine how many of them were right players.
You want to beat them in Nazi zombies.
Yeah.
You want to cook them in Nazi zombies.
Yeah.
I played FIFA for a while, but it was just kids in like Saudi Arabia that were
11, just
beasting.
I could lose like 11-1.
Yeah.
And yeah, it really hurt my feelings.
And you didn't lock in?
I don't have the time, dude.
I'm 38.
I can't get back into video games.
I tried to.
I played Red Dead though.
Oh, really?
How was that?
I didn't.
You disappear from the world, right?
Mm-hmm.
You're like not in the world.
It's kind of crazy.
I'd like check my phone.
I thought it was like 9:45.
It'd be like 4:00 a.m.
Yeah.
It was amazing though.
It was one of the most special experiences of my life.
Hmm.
My girlfriend asked if she could play for a second and then she punched my
horse in the
face.
And I was like, can you just give it back to me?
What are you doing?
Right.
Let me play Cowboys.
Yeah, no, I can't.
I can't.
Yeah.
Oh, wait.
So you were just a nerd.
You were good.
You were like, were you in clubs or anything?
Yeah.
So like I helped start a drone racing team at my high school.
Drone racing?
Wow.
Yeah.
It is as nerdy as you imagine.
And the only woman that ever showed up to that was my sister when she had to as
a freshman
because I had to drive her home.
Oh, my God, dude.
So there was that.
And I was also in TV production.
And I think this is-
Oh, you did AV kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is, I think this is a really important component of the story that a
lot of people don't
know about what happened after Parkland, and I think part of the reason why it
went, things
happened the way that they did after the shooting, was our school had a pretty
good TV production
program, and we had a pretty advanced speech and debate program.
I did speech and debate.
So I was in speech and debate as well.
What did you do?
I did PF and extemp.
I did LD and ext, I did, I did extemp.
God, don't even get me started on the spreading in LD.
No, no, no, that's-
Did you spread a lot?
That policy is spreading, dude.
Well, LD does spreading too.
They think that they're gonna think we're some sort of nasty, nasty- Spreading
is that
you talk really fast.
Yeah, it's not-
It's not like-
Yeah.
It's not-
It's not Sharon Stone, okay?
Okay?
It's where you try to get as much evidence out, and he's wrong because it's
policy debate.
He's lying right now.
No, policy does it more.
LD is philosophical.
It's about you to give great speeches and stuff.
Regardless, there's more spreading.
You get too emotional.
LD that can happen than PF, typically.
What's PF?
Public forum.
Oh, you just said government.
That's like the government.
Mm-hmm.
Robert's Rules of Whatever Order.
Well, so, I don't know how much of that actually has to do with PF, but, in
terms of Robert's
Rules of Order, but the point I was getting at is that I really wanted to be a
broadcast journalist
when I was in high school.
Like, do the news.
Do the news.
Yeah, yeah.
I kind of wanted to be like a, I didn't know who this person was at the time,
but in hindsight,
I wanted to be like Mike Wallace, if you're familiar with him.
60 Minutes, yeah.
Kind of, yeah.
And the thing about Mike Wallace is like, he would just grill people.
Yeah.
And I really wanted to be a journalist that scared the hell out of really
powerful people.
Really?
That I saw as corrupt, inept, and some combination of just stupid, generally
speaking.
So, I would start making TV production content about, at a small scale, like in
my high school,
where we wouldn't have enough Spanish textbooks, but we had to have them for
our classes and
stuff.
So, I'd go and talk to the principal.
So, you'd grill the principal.
Exactly.
Right.
And then, all of a sudden, we'd have enough Spanish textbooks, right?
Really, it worked.
Yeah.
I mean, they responded to pressure.
She wasn't like, this hog is getting too big for his brishes.
I guess.
Yeah.
And, because of being in TV production and speech and debate, I had to argue
about guns prior to
the shooting.
I had to argue about universal background checks.
Your media trained also.
To some extent, because of TV production.
Yeah.
Right?
So, I knew how to talk on camera, and I knew the issues that I needed to talk
about.
So, when we went out there, myself and a lot of my other classmates, we sounded
unnaturally
good on camera, unnaturally good at knowing the policy issues, because our
public education
actually did its job.
Uh-huh.
But instead, people chose to believe that we worked for the FBI, or we worked
for some
government agency.
Uh-huh.
Because they find it more believable that we would work for some three-letter
agency than
the fact that our own education system could actually do its job.
Yeah.
And that's part of the reason why there were so many conspiracy theories that
happened
after the shooting.
For example, there was a clip where I was-
Yeah, they said you were a crisis actor.
Right.
And they would take clips of me where I was doing what I learned in TV
production, where
instinctually, sometimes if you want to redo a take or something, you count
down from
five, right?
I would do that.
And people would be like, "See, he's trained."
And it's like, to some extent, yeah, because of TV production, but not because
it's a massive
conspiracy.
Yeah, yeah.
You don't have to protect.
You don't have to-
No, but I think that's an important note.
I think it is, but you don't have to explain yourself.
You saw kids getting killed at your school, and you wanted to talk about it.
Well, so that's another note.
And you were good at talking about it because you were smart.
Well, a lot of our classmates saw all kinds of things, and our school, that I
think a
lot of people don't understand for context, too, is like, we're an outdoor
school.
You know, schools in the Northeast-
Yeah, I'm from the West Coast.
We had a lot of those.
Exactly.
So schools in the Northeast, they're all typically under one roof.
It's one building.
There's an open courtyard, right?
At our school, it's like 13 different buildings.
So I was in the building next to where the shooting happened.
My classmates and I, we heard gunshots echoing between the buildings, but we
didn't
end up seeing anybody, in terms of the students that I was immediately around,
die.
But a lot of our classmates didn't.
It's a huge high school.
It's 3,300 people when I was attending school.
And a janitor kept you, like, saved you from going to wards.
So I, that's one other thing, too, Adam.
I have never found that person since.
What do you mean?
How?
He worked at the school.
I know.
We gotta find this guy.
I thought I found him at an event a long time after the shooting.
Where'd he go?
I have no idea.
What the fuck?
I know.
That's so weird.
I know.
And I went up to the guy that I thought-
Did they fire him?
Where'd he go?
This is bugging me right now.
So, what Adam's getting at, for further context, so that people understand, as
the shooting
happened, I was exiting my classroom, because we initially thought it was, like,
a fire drill,
or, like, a potential, like, active shooter drill, or something like that.
As we're exiting our classroom, we go to, like, our evacuation zone, and all of
a sudden, a flood of students start going in the opposite direction of where I'm
going.
And, naturally, you start following those students.
As we're following those students, unbeknownst to us at the time, because you
don't know if there are multiple shooters.
You don't know if it's a drill.
You don't know.
You just hear bullets.
Yeah.
Like, you just hear gunshots, and, like, you don't know what's going on.
You don't know if there are bombs on campus.
You don't know anything.
Right?
And we were instinctually, I was instinctually, like, kind of following the
crowd.
And as we were running, I was actually running towards where the Fesham
building was, where the shooting was happening.
So it's total chaos.
And there was some kind of janitor that I've, when I went up to the person who
was--
Some kind of janitor.
You can't be saying it.
I think it was a janitor.
I don't know if it was a teacher.
You can't be saying it that way.
Some kind of janitor.
Somebody came out that was an adult and said, like, don't come this way.
He's over here.
He was a ghost?
I don't know.
Could have been, like, a bagger advance.
Could have been.
Wow.
They came out and said, like, don't come this way.
And as he said that, our culinary teacher opened up her classroom.
That was, like, the closest classroom to us.
And got about, in an incredible act of heroism, got about 60 or 70 students
into her classroom
in what felt like a matter of, like, 30 seconds.
Yeah.
Where I would spend the rest of the time in lockdown, obviously, after the
shooting.
And as we're there, you don't know, like, if you're about to die.
Kids are having panic attacks.
Kids are trying to be quiet.
I'm texting my sister, who's 14 years old at the time.
She's freaking out, understandably.
She was at the school as well.
Yeah.
She was, thank God, she was on the other side of the school, even though she
was a freshman.
She was in our TV production class.
Yeah.
So, I ended up interviewing my classmates, not just as a way of keeping myself
calm because
I didn't have anything else.
Like, you were on the news?
Kind of like we were, like, as a student journalist.
Like, I took out my phone and started interviewing them in case we did die.
In the middle of it?
Yeah.
Whoa.
Because...
Oh, like for your parents to see, like...
For whoever to see, in case something did happen.
As a document.
That there would be a record of, like, these kids saying, like, we need to do
something
about guns.
Ah.
Interesting.
And it was a way of me keeping myself calm in that moment, too, because I
remember my
dad talking about these types of things growing up, being an FBI agent about,
like, the necessity
of staying calm.
And I interviewed them and I asked them, "What do you think about, like, the NRA?
What do you think about, like, the fact that we're going through this and
everything?"
And thankfully that day, the classmates in my immediate vicinity and I made it
out.
But 17 of our classmates and teachers did it.
Yeah.
In the building right next door to us.
Yeah.
And did you, like, post, you posted it, like, while it was happening?
Not while it was happening.
I ended up, I think I ended up, this is, like, eight years ago now, Autumn, so
it's kind
of a blur, but I think what I ended up doing was I sent it first to our, I was
working for,
like, as, like, basically, whatever's lower than an intern, like, basically
that, for the
local paper at the time, I was very bad at my job.
And I sent it to, like, my producer person that was there.
Oh, like, to go on the...
To go on the news.
Yeah.
The news, yeah.
Yeah, fuck.
I mean, I'm sure that's, like, a way that you could distract yourself, right?
Kind of.
And focus on something else.

David Hogg Talks Life Before The Shooting

I can't imagine what it would be like at 17 or 18 to be known, I don't know,
like how
did you handle that, like just like, just the, you know, like being a private
kid, you
know, what were you doing before that, cross country running?
In case you couldn't tell.
Did you, you were blazing up?
No, absolutely not.
You didn't blaze, what the hell?
I had, I was a serious athlete, I had to, and my dad was an FBI agent too, so.
Oh my god.
As you can imagine.
He was a narco?
Yeah.
No, no.
Did he go undercover?
He had in the past.
So your dad used to have different looks, he'd be like biker for six months?
No, he wasn't a biker, and I can talk about this now because he unfortunately-
He'd be like ISIS terror self for six months?
Well, no.
That'd be cool.
As you can imagine, a guy who was my father doesn't presumably fit in.
I don't know, I'm not, I don't, he's an actor, I mean he could play any role.
Yeah, he, when he started out in the FBI, his job was, he was, he would go
undercover
and dig through different people's trash.
He's a hobo.
Yeah, he would go undercover as a hobo.
He's a government hobo.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So your dad was an FBI agent, your mom was a teacher, right?
Yep.
Do you go to parties?
Did I go to parties?
Did you hit brew?
Not very often.
Didn't you have beers or blunts before, you were just a running kid?
I was a pretty big nerd, I would say that much.
Student government?
Absolutely not, not that big of a nerd.
Did you play gaming?
I did play a lot of Call of Duty and Modern Warfare, and I actually still do
play, I still
do play a good amount of Call of Duty, like on my phone.
And it's kind of hilarious because, you know, I'm sure I'm playing with a lot
of guys that
are further.
You play mobile.
Yeah, that are playing, you know, guys that I'm sure to some extent are to the
right of
me a lot of the time.
Yeah, yeah.
And I get pretty good and I'll get like first place and I'll get all these
likes and like
people following me stuff and they'll be like, this is great, whatever.
You just got beat by the hog.
Exactly.
And I'm just always laughing because I'm like, if only you knew, like, because
I can only
imagine how many of them were right players.
You want to beat them in Nazi zombies.
Yeah.
You want to cook them in Nazi zombies.
Yeah.
I played FIFA for a while, but it was just kids in like Saudi Arabia that were
11, just
beasting.
I could lose like 11-1.
Yeah.
And yeah, it really hurt my feelings.
And you didn't lock in?
I don't have the time, dude.
I'm 38.
I can't get back into video games.
I tried to.
I played Red Dead though.
Oh, really?
How was that?
I didn't.
You disappear from the world, right?
Mm-hmm.
You're like not in the world.
It's kind of crazy.
I'd like check my phone.
I thought it was like 9:45.
It'd be like 4:00 a.m.
Yeah.
It was amazing though.
It was one of the most special experiences of my life.
Hmm.
My girlfriend asked if she could play for a second and then she punched my
horse in the
face.
And I was like, can you just give it back to me?
What are you doing?
Right.
Let me play Cowboys.
Yeah, no, I can't.
I can't.
Yeah.
Oh, wait.
So you were just a nerd.
You were good.
You were like, were you in clubs or anything?
Yeah.
So like I helped start a drone racing team at my high school.
Drone racing?
Wow.
Yeah.
It is as nerdy as you imagine.
And the only woman that ever showed up to that was my sister when she had to as
a freshman
because I had to drive her home.
Oh, my God, dude.
So there was that.
And I was also in TV production.
And I think this is-
Oh, you did AV kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is, I think this is a really important component of the story that a
lot of people don't
know about what happened after Parkland, and I think part of the reason why it
went, things
happened the way that they did after the shooting, was our school had a pretty
good TV production
program, and we had a pretty advanced speech and debate program.
I did speech and debate.
So I was in speech and debate as well.
What did you do?
I did PF and extemp.
I did LD and ext, I did, I did extemp.
God, don't even get me started on the spreading in LD.
No, no, no, that's-
Did you spread a lot?
That policy is spreading, dude.
Well, LD does spreading too.
They think that they're gonna think we're some sort of nasty, nasty- Spreading
is that
you talk really fast.
Yeah, it's not-
It's not like-
Yeah.
It's not-
It's not Sharon Stone, okay?
Okay?
It's where you try to get as much evidence out, and he's wrong because it's
policy debate.
He's lying right now.
No, policy does it more.
LD is philosophical.
It's about you to give great speeches and stuff.
Regardless, there's more spreading.
You get too emotional.
LD that can happen than PF, typically.
What's PF?
Public forum.
Oh, you just said government.
That's like the government.
Mm-hmm.
Robert's Rules of Whatever Order.
Well, so, I don't know how much of that actually has to do with PF, but, in
terms of Robert's
Rules of Order, but the point I was getting at is that I really wanted to be a
broadcast journalist
when I was in high school.
Like, do the news.
Do the news.
Yeah, yeah.
I kind of wanted to be like a, I didn't know who this person was at the time,
but in hindsight,
I wanted to be like Mike Wallace, if you're familiar with him.
60 Minutes, yeah.
Kind of, yeah.
And the thing about Mike Wallace is like, he would just grill people.
Yeah.
And I really wanted to be a journalist that scared the hell out of really
powerful people.
Really?
That I saw as corrupt, inept, and some combination of just stupid, generally
speaking.
So, I would start making TV production content about, at a small scale, like in
my high school,
where we wouldn't have enough Spanish textbooks, but we had to have them for
our classes and
stuff.
So, I'd go and talk to the principal.
So, you'd grill the principal.
Exactly.
Right.
And then, all of a sudden, we'd have enough Spanish textbooks, right?
Really, it worked.
Yeah.
I mean, they responded to pressure.
She wasn't like, this hog is getting too big for his brishes.
I guess.
Yeah.
And, because of being in TV production and speech and debate, I had to argue
about guns prior to
the shooting.
I had to argue about universal background checks.
Your media trained also.
To some extent, because of TV production.
Yeah.
Right?
So, I knew how to talk on camera, and I knew the issues that I needed to talk
about.
So, when we went out there, myself and a lot of my other classmates, we sounded
unnaturally
good on camera, unnaturally good at knowing the policy issues, because our
public education
actually did its job.
Uh-huh.
But instead, people chose to believe that we worked for the FBI, or we worked
for some
government agency.
Uh-huh.
Because they find it more believable that we would work for some three-letter
agency than
the fact that our own education system could actually do its job.
Yeah.
And that's part of the reason why there were so many conspiracy theories that
happened
after the shooting.
For example, there was a clip where I was-
Yeah, they said you were a crisis actor.
Right.
And they would take clips of me where I was doing what I learned in TV
production, where
instinctually, sometimes if you want to redo a take or something, you count
down from
five, right?
I would do that.
And people would be like, "See, he's trained."
And it's like, to some extent, yeah, because of TV production, but not because
it's a massive
conspiracy.
Yeah, yeah.
You don't have to protect.
You don't have to-
No, but I think that's an important note.
I think it is, but you don't have to explain yourself.
You saw kids getting killed at your school, and you wanted to talk about it.
Well, so that's another note.
And you were good at talking about it because you were smart.
Well, a lot of our classmates saw all kinds of things, and our school, that I
think a
lot of people don't understand for context, too, is like, we're an outdoor
school.
You know, schools in the Northeast-
Yeah, I'm from the West Coast.
We had a lot of those.
Exactly.
So schools in the Northeast, they're all typically under one roof.
It's one building.
There's an open courtyard, right?
At our school, it's like 13 different buildings.
So I was in the building next to where the shooting happened.
My classmates and I, we heard gunshots echoing between the buildings, but we
didn't
end up seeing anybody, in terms of the students that I was immediately around,
die.
But a lot of our classmates didn't.
It's a huge high school.
It's 3,300 people when I was attending school.
And a janitor kept you, like, saved you from going to wards.
So I, that's one other thing, too, Adam.
I have never found that person since.
What do you mean?
How?
He worked at the school.
I know.
We gotta find this guy.
I thought I found him at an event a long time after the shooting.
Where'd he go?
I have no idea.
What the fuck?
I know.
That's so weird.
I know.
And I went up to the guy that I thought-
Did they fire him?
Where'd he go?
This is bugging me right now.
So, what Adam's getting at, for further context, so that people understand, as
the shooting
happened, I was exiting my classroom, because we initially thought it was, like,
a fire drill,
or, like, a potential, like, active shooter drill, or something like that.
As we're exiting our classroom, we go to, like, our evacuation zone, and all of
a sudden, a flood of students start going in the opposite direction of where I'm
going.
And, naturally, you start following those students.
As we're following those students, unbeknownst to us at the time, because you
don't know if there are multiple shooters.
You don't know if it's a drill.
You don't know.
You just hear bullets.
Yeah.
Like, you just hear gunshots, and, like, you don't know what's going on.
You don't know if there are bombs on campus.
You don't know anything.
Right?
And we were instinctually, I was instinctually, like, kind of following the
crowd.
And as we were running, I was actually running towards where the Fesham
building was, where the shooting was happening.
So it's total chaos.
And there was some kind of janitor that I've, when I went up to the person who
was--
Some kind of janitor.
You can't be saying it.
I think it was a janitor.
I don't know if it was a teacher.
You can't be saying it that way.
Some kind of janitor.
Somebody came out that was an adult and said, like, don't come this way.
He's over here.
He was a ghost?
I don't know.
Could have been, like, a bagger advance.
Could have been.
Wow.
They came out and said, like, don't come this way.
And as he said that, our culinary teacher opened up her classroom.
That was, like, the closest classroom to us.
And got about, in an incredible act of heroism, got about 60 or 70 students
into her classroom
in what felt like a matter of, like, 30 seconds.
Yeah.
Where I would spend the rest of the time in lockdown, obviously, after the
shooting.
And as we're there, you don't know, like, if you're about to die.
Kids are having panic attacks.
Kids are trying to be quiet.
I'm texting my sister, who's 14 years old at the time.
She's freaking out, understandably.
She was at the school as well.
Yeah.
She was, thank God, she was on the other side of the school, even though she
was a freshman.
She was in our TV production class.
Yeah.
So, I ended up interviewing my classmates, not just as a way of keeping myself
calm because
I didn't have anything else.
Like, you were on the news?
Kind of like we were, like, as a student journalist.
Like, I took out my phone and started interviewing them in case we did die.
In the middle of it?
Yeah.
Whoa.
Because...
Oh, like for your parents to see, like...
For whoever to see, in case something did happen.
As a document.
That there would be a record of, like, these kids saying, like, we need to do
something
about guns.
Ah.
Interesting.
And it was a way of me keeping myself calm in that moment, too, because I
remember my
dad talking about these types of things growing up, being an FBI agent about,
like, the 