Tulsi Gabbard

I just was like, I had my friends and I'm good.

And so the idea of, you know, I hated cameras.

My dad with his little like, you know, home movie camera.

I literally ran away from the camera at every chance I got.

And so the idea of giving a speech or going on TV or any of that stuff, it literally never crossed my mind.

The other really formative experience was, and really I can only attribute this to God, is I was probably 11 or 12 years old, and I had this realization, and I remember just sitting in this room, I was by myself, and I had this realization that...

life is very short and I knew I had this powerful feeling of knowing in a visceral way that, you know, I could die at any time.

And so the idea of like, oh, well, you know, you've got your whole life ahead of you.

I didn't feel that way because I didn't know.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

And what came with that was a sense of, I need to make the most of the time that I have.

And so the normal kind of, you know, I was, I guess I was mature for my age.

And I think that played a huge role in that, in wanting to do something positive with my life and the time that I had and not like dick around and waste time.

And so what drove me to eventually look into public service and political office was

There's a few things, but one that really showed me how change was possible in our government was there was a big landfill developer that wanted to build a landfill over one of our major water aquifers on the island of Oahu.

It provided water, clean drinking water, for about a third of the population of approximately a million people.

I was a teenager, I was like 16, 17 at the time, maybe 18.

Even I knew that that was a bad idea, that if you build a landfill over a water aquifer, the possibility of that leaching through and contaminating our groundwater would create a massive crisis.

Because we're the most remote island chain in the world.