Pod Save America - 2020: John Hickenlooper on brewing beer and winning purple states

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper talks with Jon Favreau about his life as a brewpub owner, his strategy for winning over Republicans, his plans to combat climate change and deal with automation, and what it’s like to govern in times of tragedy and crisis.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. The next candidate in our series of presidential candidate interviews is Jon Hickenlooper. He came to Cricket headquarters this week. He and I sat down. He's the former two-term governor of Colorado. Before that, he was the mayor of Denver. And we had a great conversation about how he thinks we can get stuff done in Washington. We talked about immigration. We talked about the Green New Deal.

We talked about some of the gun safety measures he enacted while he was governor of Colorado. It's a great interview. So check it out. This is Governor John Hickenlooper. Check it out. This is Governor John Hickenlooper. All right. I'm here with former Governor John Hickenlooper, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. Governor, welcome to Pod Save America. Glad to be on. Thanks so much for having me back. I want to start with a question that we, some version of which we ask all the different candidates. I want to start with a question that we, some version of which we ask all the different candidates.

So you are a moderate former governor, mayor, small business owner from a Western state. You look out at this gigantic field of Democratic candidates, and there are actually other moderates, other former governors, former mayors, former small business owners, people from Western states. What was it when you were looking at the field and thinking about running that made you think something is missing in this field? I should run for president. This is my time to run. Well, if you look at it, there's only one other mayor. That's true. And he certainly wasn't a governor. Right. And there's only one-

I guess Booker was a former mayor. Former mayor. So that's true. But he wasn't a governor. Right. That's true. And he certainly wasn't a governor. Right. And there's only one. I guess Booker was a former mayor. Former mayor. So that's true. But he wasn't a governor. Right. That's true. So two mayors, but they weren't governors. And in a funny way, I feel like I'm the one person that actually has spent my life both in small business,

but my life as eight years as a mayor, eight years as a governor. But my life is eight years as a mayor, eight years as a governor. My job was to bring people together who often were at odds in conflict and figure out how to get them to put down their weapons and then get stuff done. And I looked at the whole field. And in a funny way, I looked at it almost everyone else. And you can, as you interview each one, you can ask whether, I mean, I feel like I never ran for student council. I wasn't involved in student politics. I didn't want that power. You didn't run until you were almost 50 years old. Yeah, I was 49 years old when I ran for Denver mayor. It was the first time I ever ran for anything. And I feel that, you know how in kids in elementary school,

you know, chat books or school books that they have. They have like three different images. Which one doesn't look like the others? Yeah. I feel like that within all the presidential candidates. I'm the one guy that in small business, you know, I started our restaurant and then worked with all the other restaurant owners to change and transform a whole neighborhood of Denver,

what they call now Lodo, back then it was lower downtown. We got everyone to buy pint glasses together. And you opened a brew pub, right? Yeah. It was a restaurant that brews its own beer. We were, I think, the 10th brew pub in North America. Okay. And so we opened it, but we used it as a community organizing tool to build community.

And then we did them in a bunch of other cities like Omaha and Des Moines, Rapid City, South Dakota, always historic buildings in abandoned parts of downtown, always trying to create community. And then I went and when I ran for mayor, I got all the suburban mayors to work together. And we did, you know, Fast Tracks, the largest transit initiative in the history of the country. And then when I was governor, you know, I went out to the, I got the environmental community to sit down with the oil and gas industry. And we created, you know, these regulations, methane, to stop the flaring and venting of methane, which is, you know, methane's 25, 40 times worse than CO2 in terms of climate

change. I mean, each of these are just example after example of where I kind of felt like I was there to take people from where they were and move them to a different place where they could hear each other better and they could actually work together, which, again, I realize the cynicism that's out there today. I listen to Podcast America. I'm not a stranger to the challenges that we face in all this. But at a certain point, we have to be able, if we're really going to address not just universal coverage, but making sure that we can control the inflationary spiral of healthcare costs or deal with climate change, right? I mean, within, what, 10 years or 12 years of irreversible damage, somebody somehow has got to bring people together. Yeah. Well, I mean, so you've clearly had a lot of success working with Republicans in Colorado and with people who disagree with you in Colorado.

In D.C., of course, I was in the Obama White House for eight years and watched Republicans block every single policy that President Obama proposed, even moderate policies, even free market policies, tax cuts, you name it. tax cuts, you name it. What leads you to believe that you will have more success than Obama did working with D.C. Republicans? Well, it's hard, if I'm going to be bluntly honest, it's hard to think I have so much admiration for President Obama. It's hard to say, well, I can do this, what he didn't. And I, you know, I look at someone like mitch mcconnell when he came in and said that he would do everything humanly possible within his power to make sure that that as president barack obama had no successes yeah i mean that verges on that's treasonous right i mean that's someone who's an elected official saying that they want to work against the common good of Americans.

Again, I'm not saying that I can do anything with Mitch McConnell. I saw that you had said that you would have a drink with him when you got to D.C. What would you say during the drinks? I would reach out to him because you have to reach out, and you have to go to their turf, and as much just to show all their followers that you're paying the respect to the system. But then you sit down and you try and figure out where is their self-interest and how can you find some way to work towards some level of common ground. And again, you know, when we had after the Aurora movie theater shooting, we decided we were, first we put 30 million bucks into mental health stuff, but then we decided to take on universal background checks. That process, I mean, we could not get the NRA to compromise at all. They would, I mean, they barely talked to us,

but in the end we just had to muscle it through. And sometimes you just have to do that. But again and again, you know, when I got elected mayor of Denver in 2003, my predecessor, Wellington Webb, who was a great American mayor, I mean, really one of the great mayors of the 20th century, he could not be in the same room with the mayor of Aurora. They hated each other. One or the other would walk out. They couldn't talk to each other. And Denver hated Aurora. Aurora hated Denver. That was the sense. And when I first ran for mayor, I said, I'm going to I believe Denver will never be a great city without great suburbs. And everyone said, you can't say that. Denver hates the suburbs.

But the bottom line was the the politicians hated each other. The citizens didn't. And when I got elected, I went out to the mayor of Aurora, and I actually sat down and spent an hour in his office. I didn't make him come to me. And I just kept asking him, so what do you really need? And how can we make this work? And if we did a light rail system, how could it really work for Aurora? And what things would we have to change from that rough draft of a plan of a year ago?

And, you know, if you listen hard enough, this is a trick you learn in the bar business, right? Having all those brew pubs and dealing with cranky, irate customers. Sometimes they're completely wrong, but boy, you don't want them to leave when they're really ticked off because they'll go out and trash your reputation. You won't hear about it until it's way too late. And so you learn to repeat back exactly their words when they're really angry. I know it sounds silly, because politics is probably a different universe,

but I did do this with a bunch of the mayors, not the mayor of Aurora, but several of the other mayors I went and visited too, because they get so angry at me. And you just repeat back the words to make sure they feel heard, that they feel validated. And it's funny, at least with me, when you say back, when someone says something to you that's really angry, there are certain body rhythms or your

chemistry that changes and you kind of close down. I think sometimes you don't really hear people. And when you repeat back their same words, you suddenly kind of hear them in a different sense. You actually really hear them maybe. In the restaurant business, we'd say, oh, so the waiter dropped soup on your lap. Oh, and the waiter wasn't looking where he was going. I hear, oh, and yes, the soup was very hot. And it validates them hearing it. When you say it, it moves you in a different place. And you get to that point where you just have an inkling of trust. And again, I'm not saying that this would work with Mitch McConnell, but something's got to work with somebody. Well, I mean, I guess what I've come to realize is that the problem with politics, in Washington at least, is less a clash of personalities and more a clash of sort of incentives.

Like, you know, Obama didn't have a great relationship with Mitch McConnell. He did have a pretty good relationship with John boehner and i remember boehner saying i want to do immigration reform let's let's figure this out together and they had this plan they were going to do it and then you know eric canter loses in virginia and boehner comes to obama and he goes i really want i like you i want to do this but my caucus is a bunch of people in districts that are 90 plus percent white. They don't want to do immigration reform. And if I push it, I'm going to be ousted as speaker.

So that's that. And it's like, there's no amount of golf that Baker and Obama could have played that would have changed that dynamic. And so I wonder for the next Democratic president, like how you think about passing a legislative agenda and how you think about power and power dynamics in this situation. Well, you know, power, and you're right, the dynamics surrounding power are a function of, you know, certain core elements of being human, right? So there's that sense of insecurity that pretty much everybody has somewhere. There's that sense of wanting to belong to a tribe and have some sense of safety by being part of that group. You've got to align, utilize those various kind of emotional values and attach them to positions where people feel

they're getting some advantage. And it is, I think, one of the most complicated things in life. But also, you know, in business or in politics, it's always a question about trying to hear clearly what the person really wants. I can't tell you how many times that, you know, once you get a little bit of trust between people, then you can finally collaborate. Without that, you can't collaborate at all. I tell our staff for years, we collaborate at the speed of trust. And there's really nothing, I mean, trust only comes from hard work. You've got to take the effort and really listen and demonstrate that you hear people, that you have some respect for them, you care about them, and you're going to strike out. Someone like Mitch McConnell is just not going to,

but then you have to look for somebody else. And how can you find, I think immigration, especially right now, is such a perfect place because I saw the labor data came out a few weeks ago where we now have 7.2 million jobs unfilled and 6.3 million people looking. So we don't even have as many people looking for work as we have job openings. And the main reason, more than half those jobs aren't filled because we don't have the skills. Well, we need more people right now. We left vegetables and fruits, agricultural produce that couldn't be harvested by machines. It went unharvested last year, California, Colorado, all across the country, because we didn't have the right labor. If we can't address right now immigration and say,

listen, let's go after all this stuff and let's deal with the issue of refugees at the border, let's get an ID system that works, let's make sure we have the right visas and figure out what the right pathway to citizenship is and somehow make sure that we go to those states where people are worried that the immigrants are going to take their job and show them that actually our economy in a very real way is based upon having more immigrants. If we can't do it now, we're never going to do it. What would your top legislative priority as president be? You know, that's, I mean, you look at things like climate change that are such an imperative. I look at automation and artificial intelligence, what that's going to do in the workplace and turn it upside down. But I think in terms of what people feel the greatest urgency about, it's healthcare. That's the one thing in Iowa, New Hampshire, when I'm in South Carolina, people are so fearful of what's going to come next and so distrustful of Trump and the Republican Party that they're going to.

It's not just preexisting conditions. It's not just coverage. They can't afford the coverage they've got. And so I think you have to do them all kind of together in a funny way. The artificial intelligence and automation is tied into health care, which all kind of play a significant role in how we address climate change. But I think health care is probably at the center of it all just because it is the emotional core of so many Americans right now. What would you do on health care? You're for a public option? Yeah, I think that I'm very cautious about, you know, if you're going to go Medicare for All and doing it all one swipe.

Right. You're telling 150 million people, you know, and I realize that half of them or maybe even more than half of them don't like their private insurance. Even if it is through their workplace, they'd like to get rid of it and have something else. But the other half, you know, trust it and don't want to lose it. At least in this country, we traditionally don't take something away from people. We're very careful. President Obama was very careful to try and make sure and reassure people in every way that he could as we did the Affordable Care Act. I think that same reassurance is necessary now. However, you need a public option, right? We got in Colorado, we did this bipartisan. Right.

We expanded Medicaid. We got to almost 100% coverage, almost 95% coverage. And if we had a public option, and they're going to get a public option, I think, this year, we did a lot of the foundation work. So maybe that's Medicare. Maybe it's Medicare Advantage or some combination of best practices for the two. Maybe part of it could even be expanding Medicaid, who qualifies for Medicaid on the other side of the spectrum. But either way, let's just say, for the sake of argument, we're going to have a public option of Medicare and people go to it. And as more people go into Medicare, it becomes even more efficient and the quality improves and more people want Medicare.

And then all of a sudden, everyone wants to leave their private insurance and they flood into Medicare. Then we end up with a single payer, it might take us 10 years, but we end up with a single payer, might take us 10 years, but we end up with a single payer through evolution rather than revolution. And I think that's traditionally the way things occur in these kinds of transformations in America. And do you think that's the best way also, as you mentioned, to bring costs down in the system? Because obviously it's not just coverage. First of all, there's a tremendous amount of cost in the system, but there's also deductibles that people can't pay. There's long-term care that's not kicking in.

How do you deal with all the sort of extraneous costs that people are grappling with in health insurance and health care? And that all, you're right, the aggregation, the accumulation of the worry and anxiety around all these costs is what's, I think, driving people nuts. I think it's a big part of why we're seeing an epidemic of depression and all kinds of mental health challenges across the country. First, let me just say, I think you have to start every discussion as that healthcare is a right and not a privilege. And in 1973, when I was a student at this little college in Connecticut,

I helped a friend start a community health center, which now is still in business, has over 200 locations in Connecticut. But their basic argument was life, healthcare is a right, not a principle. I wrote a letter to the Middletown Press editor saying that, you know, in 1978. I think that was when Elizabeth Warren

was still a Republican. I'm just kidding. That's just a minor, soft-hearted joke. Anyway, you look at all the places that these costs swing into play. So why is it that people in America pay 30 times more for insulin than someone in Canada? Clearly, we've got to regulate the pharmaceutical industry. We've got to make sure we have more access to generics. We've got to be able both at Medicare, but as as groups in the country, be able to compete for better prices for pharmaceuticals. That's a significant cost. We also need transparency. That's probably a bigger place of savings. Every clinic, every hospital, they'll tell you that it's too complex. The possible variations in needs and services provided make it impossible to predict what a tonsillectomy would cost for their kid.

That's nonsense. Walk into Walmart. You got 130,000, you know, digits and widgets, and with sizes and colors, you probably got 400,000 SKUs. They can tell you the cost of every one. And once you can provide people a genuine, on their handheld device, their cell phone, they can look and see where they can get a high-quality, get stitches removed from their kid's arm or get a tonsillectomy for their kid, whatever. They can see not only what the overall cost is but what their copay is. They can see not only what the overall cost is but what their copay is. Then you begin to harness the leverage that an open market allows you to get to. So those are obvious places right off the bat where we can save.

More importantly, our problem is we've made healthcare into a business. And like any business, it goes where the money is. So it's only natural to suspect that we're going to get more scans, more blood tests, more everything, because that's how the industry pays for things. Quantity and not quality. Yeah, there's no way that... We should shift the system so the healthcare system gets compensated for keeping us well. And that's why we're huge in Colorado. We pushed outdoor recreation so strongly. And I think I'm pushing, trying to get outdoor recreation to get more integrated into urban areas

and get more people outside and provide an incentive for kids just to get their faces out of the, you know, I've got a 16-year-old son. His face is always in a screen. He'll hate me for saying that. But mine too. It's a problem. It is. me for saying that. Mine too. It's a problem.

It is. But anyway, that is that preventative of A, getting people to lead healthier lifestyles of their own choice, but really giving them the incentives and making it attractive is a big part of getting to a place where we have a system that we can begin to contemplate. How do we reward the system for keeping us healthy? Let's talk about climate change. You wrote an op-ed that said that the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey sets us up for failure. How do you think we should reach the goal of net zero global emissions by 2050, which is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says.

And I share 1,000% the sense of urgency that the Green New Deal communicates, and I've celebrated for that. I think the problem, I think we've got to be laser-focused on climate change. And I look at that, especially the federal jobs guarantee, that that would get caught up in Congress. And you can imagine the battles that will take place. And even if the legislation got passed, the implementation would require almost certainly judicial challenges. Everything would gum down the process. I look at how we're going to address climate change.

And we know already, we know that things like electricity, transportation, buildings, we know that there are ways that society as a whole can save money by doing the right things. We're closing two coal plants in Colorado right now, replacing the coal-fired electrical generation plants with wind, solar, and batteries. No natural gas at all. And the monthly electric bill for all those consumers is going to go down. That's when the market begins to change. And some things like agriculture and large-scale manufacturing is still – we don't quite have the final solutions there. But we need to be laser-focused on everything, on how do we get the recharging stations necessary for rapid recharging of electric vehicles everywhere. And in real time, we took our Volkswagen diesel settlement money and put it towards recharging stations.

And then we kind of snuck around and convinced Governor Herbert in Utah that he should do it so drivers could get out to California. And then we got Governor Bullock in Montana to do it. And we got, you know, kind of went around. And then I went to Governor Matt Mead, who's one of my favorite mayors. But, you know, Wyoming's a pretty big coal state pretty good oil and gas state yeah and I went to Matt and said you know you don't want people to drive around Wyoming to get to Yellowstone Park do you he laughed but the next day he said yeah we'll start we'll build it we'll be part of the network as well yeah in the end we got all 10 western states you know five republican five

democrat to all agree that they want to be part of that network that's the kind of integrated work that gets it done in the United States. But as you point out, then we've got to go globally. What we do in the United States is never going to be the final solution or the best solution for climate change. It's got to be global. Well, so Beto O'Rourke this week released a plan that basically is in line with the targets set by the Green New Deal resolution, but doesn't

have some of the economic proposals that you were talking about, like the federal job guarantee. Is that something you think we should pursue? I guess my big question here is, like in a normal time, we could like experiment with all these different sort of renewable energy, clean energy investments and incentives. Basically, they're telling us within 10 years, if we don't have a mass mobilization in this country within 10 years, totally transform this economy and probably do more even than the rest of the world since we're bigger emitters, then we're going to have just devastation from climate change

that we're not going to be able to come back from. So because of the situation we're in, would you be willing to sort of take, you know, really significant steps, huge public investment of the scale that would, you know, get us to the solutions and the right technology in time, would transition the economy in time? Like, what do you think about that? I agree wholeheartedly. And I think it's got to be, the trick though, we are so polarized. And again,, this is I get back to why I'm running for president. We are so divided. I mean, we're as divided as probably any time since the Civil War. And if we're really going to address climate change in a meaningful way, we've got to figure out how do we get everybody working on their own home or everyone focused on what they can do and supporting at a national level those big steps that you're describing. And, you know, I think that's doable. I think it's going to take a different approach than just using the, you know, the stick. You're going to need a little bit of a carrot in there as well to make sure people,

you know, they see their own self-interest, their benefit from fixing this. And they've got to be, they've got to understand and buy into that issue of the damage that will be irreversible if we don't get this done in the next 10 or 12 years. I think the one thing that is, has been missing that people haven't talked about a lot, has been missing that people haven't talked about a lot. That last year, Charles Koch said to the AF, the Americans for Prosperity, that they were no longer going to fund climate deniers.

That was shocking. I saw it got picked up in one news place. But that's, and now Exxon, all the major oil companies are saying they're no longer going to deny it. That allows us, this is a window where we can really mobilize public sentiment, right? Lincoln's old thing with public sentiment, nothing can fail without it, nothing can succeed. Now is the time to really mold public sentiment. Yeah. You released a new trade policy today. Your communications director said that the Democratic Party has really struggled to respond to Trump's trade policy. Why do you think that is?

And why do you think the last trade agreement that was negotiated by a Democrat, Barack Obama, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was sort of divided the party? sort of divided the party. Yeah. Well, that trade has always been a tricky issue in the Democratic Party for a variety of reasons that I don't have to drag out on your show. I do think that we're seeing in a compelling way right now how misguided President Trump's policies are. And if you, I mean, you don't have to spend very much time in Iowa to run into a soybean farmer. One of the agricultural auditors in the state of Iowa told us that a typical soybean farmer would need eight consecutive good years to get back to where they were two years ago. Wow. And the level, when you look at the projections for bankruptcies in farms all across the country, there are going to, high probability, you're going to see a dramatic increase even in the next 12 months. A lot of that's just tariff war.

And it's not just the agricultural community. We have a bunch of manufacturing companies that are based on bringing components together from all different places. And where do they finally get assembled? What is the final place of manufacture? Some of these automobiles go back and forth between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, back and forth, back and forth. There is, if we really want to lift up the middle class and have it expand instead of shrinking,

if we want to make sure that our American form of business provides, again, a ladder so that people at the bottom can grab ahold of that ladder and pull themselves up. I think trade has to be part of it. We just have to figure out how do we get trade in such a way that we protect in all countries that are part of any agreement, that we protect workplace safety, workers' rights, protection of the environment. I mean, you go down that list of the basic items that we need in an agreement that they can be fair and they can be enforced. But some form of trade is going to allow us the resources to deal with our healthcare situation, to deal with climate change. And those trade agreements lay the foundation for, I mean, again, as we've already said, what we do around climate change in this

country is never going to be enough. We have to have the world working together, and that comes from relationships. And you want to use trade agreements to sort of, and you want to put climate targets in the trade agreement. Yeah, I think you have to have climate targets in the agreement. But all the, just all the negotiations, right? We used to believe in diplomacy, right? After World War II, our greatest generation created all these strategic alliances because they didn't ever want to see a world war. They had seen firsthand just how awful that kind of carnage and the destruction in a world war could be. And now it sounds like, well, we're going to take a little more risk towards that. We don't care so much. The beauty about the trade agreements, what started out as strategic

agreements ended up helping for trade. I think that collaborative ability is almost like a muscle that the people, as they begin to work together towards one goal, can work together towards another goal. And some of the issues like pandemics, like Ebola, we have to have everyone working together, nuclear proliferation. And think about cybersecurity. We have to figure out a way that as a world, we are working together to make sure that we are not at risk and vulnerable to the cyber terrorists. Yeah. You had the experience of being unemployed for some time in your 30s, and then you've also had the experience of going on to become a very successful business owner. How have those experiences shaped your views of economic policy?

Here I am unemployed again. You know that- Going for a very big job though. When I became a geologist and one of my interns a couple of years ago told me that they are convinced I am the first professional geologist ever to get elected governor in the history of America. Seems like a safe bet. Yeah. Well, I think it seems to be true. I know for a fact that I'm the first brewer since Sam Adams in 1792 to get elected governor. But I think when I came out to Colorado, originally in the late 70s, I moved out permanently in 81, I thought I'd be a geologist for the rest of my life. And then the you know, the markets changed and commodity prices tanked.

And our company and many other companies got sold and consolidated. And literally thousands, probably more than 10,000 geologists lost their jobs. So no one was hiring. I lost not just my job, but my profession. And, you know, the story I sometimes tell is that at first you have your natural resilience that most people learn through the early years of their life. And, you know, my mom was widowed twice before she was 40, and she told us, you know, that you can't control what life throws at you, but you can control how you respond to it. Does it make you better or worse? So I felt pretty good.

But after about, I don't know, six, eight, maybe 10 months of being out of work, you begin to see a different person in the mirror. And you don't have the same framework of confidence that you had. And just that little bit of self-doubt, I found myself having to really work hard to change my attitude. And by this time, we had the notion we thought we might start this wild thing called a brew pub, right? And no one knew what a brew pub was. I mean, like most entrepreneurial opportunities, there's a vacuum because no one's ever seen it. I mean, I couldn't get my own mother to invest.

It was just – It was hard. And having that doubt in my mind about my own career and was I a failure? Was it my fault that all these geologists got laid off, or at least that I had chosen to be one of these geologists, and now I didn't have a career? I think that's a lot of what went through the minds of so many of the people that voted for Donald Trump, right, in the 80s and 90s. And it wasn't just all outsourcing, right? That's what the anti-trade people said. A lot of it was automation that eliminated a lot of those jobs. But regardless of where we did it, I mean, it was government malpractice.

We did a terrible job of retraining people and giving them tools to create their own new future. And if we do that again, we're going to see the same thing from automation and artificial intelligence. The whole our professional world is going to get turned upside down. Whole professions are going to disappear. We need to get out ahead of this. And we've got a partnership with Microsoft now called skillful.com. Just rudimentary so far, but it'll allow people, kids of all ages, to acquire a profile of skills. But more importantly, hopefully we'll be able to get to predicting three, four, five years out which professions are likely to be at risk and not threaten or scare people, but just say, hey, here are the skills you already have. If you go on to skillful.com, these are new professions. Click on a profession, see which skills you have that are

useful, what skills you might be missing, what you need to acquire, and where you can get them and what it would cost. And that's the part I think that we need to make those skills essentially free for people that can't afford them. It should be a sliding scale, but just like a community health center, they've got to be free if you don't have the money and let people, I mean, what I learned from being laid off was the anxiety and the frustration that I saw, especially in a lot of my friends. It was so disruptive. See, I didn't have kids. I didn't have a family to support. There was much less pressure on me than almost everyone else I knew. And I think if we can get people trained and get those skills before their

career, their life is at risk, you eliminate that anxiety to a large extent. So we're talking at a time of very low unemployment, the economy's growing, and yet, you know, Federal Reserve found last year that 40% of Americans couldn't pay a $400 bill if there was an emergency expense. What do we do for all the people who are working, but they still can't afford a basic middle class lifestyle? Sure. And I think, you know, the statistic that's even worse than that one is that 80% of the families in America today are having a hard time pretty much every month balancing their household budget. At the end of every month, they can't make ends meet. That's not America. And so obviously, I think raising the minimum wage and maybe in certain

places it goes faster than others and maybe big cities where it's really more expensive to live like New York or or maybe San Francisco. Maybe you haven't even hired them. Fifteen dollar minimum wage. But you tie it in some way to the cost of living. But but there's much more to it than that. I mean, this our system used to be when I was a kid. to be, when I was a kid, our economic system was a place where, you know, not just the middle class, but people in the bottom of the economic ladder, they could find both security and opportunity just by working and working hard and playing by the rules. And that's clearly not the case anymore. And, you know, part of it is, and these are not evil people, I'm not demonizing, but there are 81,000 trade associations out there, right? The Sand and Gravel Providers of America, the Bridge Builders of America, the Restaurant Association here or there. All these trade associations have a lobbyist.

And again, I'm not against lobbyists, right? They're hardworking and representing the associations they work for, but their job is to find another opportunity, a retained earnings or a tax break that their business can get. Well, all those breaks that have accumulated over all these years have added up. And the other statistic, and then I won't say any more statistics, I promise, because I know what good radio is and it's not statistics. We love statistics. statistics, I promise, because I know what good radio is and it's not statistics. We love statistics. Yeah. You like humor more than statistics. But sometimes they're relevant.

And I think from 1946 to 1980 when Reagan got elected, basically adjusted for inflation, every American doubled their income. That's an amazing statistic. The only people that didn't were at the very top of the economic ladder. They're very wealthy. Their income only went up about 80%. But they started out so much higher that they still were doing great. And then there was, obviously, government was bad, trickle-down economics. This is all going to benefit everyone else more and more and more. If you go from 1980 to the present day, 50% of Americans are making less now than they were before. That's staggering. I mean, how clearly do you want to demonstrate that our system is broken? So a lot of those things that the lobbying community created

over many, many years, a lot of them are loopholes. I think we should go in and address them and just try and make it a level playing field as much as humanly possible. Make sure that people get paid a fair wage for a fair day's work. And make sure that companies pay. I don't know if you saw the thing the other day that there are 60 – oh, one more statistic. Sorry. This is the last one, I swear. I'll tell yours. Oh, one more statistic.

Sorry. This is the last one, I swear. I'll tell yours. 60 Fortune 500 companies are paying no taxes for last year, and that's double the number before Trump's tax cut. I mean, so all of a sudden now we've got more. He said he was going to get rid of all the loopholes and we're going to lower their taxes, but they'd pay more taxes. Right. Well, somehow that doesn't seem to have happened. You know, I haven't heard much of an outroar.

Would you get rid of the Trump tax cuts, the tax cut that was passed by the Republican Congress? Certainly I would look at, I thought that we needed to reduce the corporate tax cut a little bit, somewhat, probably somewhere between where it is now and where it was there. I certainly would have tried to take the money and put it towards something like infrastructure. You know, some of that savings really dedicated towards transportation, broadband. You know, Colorado is going to be, by the end of 2020, will be the first state in America to have broadband in every city and town. Wow. Yeah, we're very proud of that. So we want our share back when the federal government back and doles out the money for broadband for everybody.

So, you know, you made this great case about how sort of the middle class has been hollowed out. And obviously, you know, Republican policies, tax cuts for the rich, not much for everyone else. Democrats have, you know, been pushing for universal health care, skills training, living wage, all the stuff you talked about. We've been pushing for universal health care, skills training, living wage, all the stuff you talked about. And yet we've seen this sort of exodus from the party of white working class, non-college educated voters. We've maintained, you know, African-American working class voters, Latino working class voters. But the white voters have been leaving. And some people might say it helped tip the election to Trump in 2016. How do you view this? Are these voters we should be getting back or is there racial and cultural resentment there that we can't get back? How do you see this?

in the large generalities within what you're describing. But, you know, at least in Colorado, and I think across the country, there are opportunities. And part of it is, you know, looking at how do we bring together the people that feel left behind? And oftentimes it's not just black people, Latino people. A lot of those rural white workers in small towns and in rural parts of our states feel tremendously left behind. Part of why we push broadband in all parts of Colorado is we made a commitment.

When I first got elected, we were 40th in job creation. I said, well, we're going to be pro-business, the most pro-business state, but with the highest ethical standards, the highest environmental standards. And part of that goal was to make sure we lifted up the entire economy, but we didn't leave the rural parts behind. And so we all, last year, U.S. News and World Report ranked us for the second year in a row as the number one economy in America. So we went from 40th in job creation to the number one economy. But we're going to have, this year, I think we're going to have the number one rural economy or one of the top rural economies. And I've got a bunch of mostly Republican farmers out on the Eastern Plains that send me emails and texts saying, you got to run for president. And they want to come campaign with me in Iowa and say,

here's what Hickenlooper did in Colorado. Here's what he could do in Iowa. Imagine what he could do for the country. And I think that's providing tools like skills training, making sure that every small town has broadband. We provided tax incentives, and not that many businesses or entrepreneurs took part of it. But if you go and start a business in a rural part of Colorado, for the first four years, not only does your business, but also none of your employees pay any taxes of any kind to the state of Colorado. Four years. So again, I think it's 800 jobs or 1,000 jobs we've created. But if you're in a town with 1,600 people or 2,000 people, and it's been getting smaller, and people are leaving harder for the grocery store to stay in business, and suddenly you've got 20 new workers at a new business or 30.

The feeling that someone cares and that there's hope and that there's a future, I think it's powerful. And I think there are ways to do that all across America. You mentioned Aurora earlier. In the wake of that shooting, you took on the NRA. You were able to pass universal background checks, bans on high capacity ammo. And this was with one of the houses was Republican, right, in Colorado? No, no. At that time, we had a one vote majority in the Senate. What lessons do you take from passing gun safety measures in Colorado that we might be able to apply to the country? Well, you know, the one thing I hadn't thought through was the power of local statistics. And

the funny story, my son Teddy at that time was in fifth grade. And I made the mistake of complaining to him when I got home because it was just a battle at the state capitol. And he looked at me, he goes, Dad, what do you do all day at work that's so hard? Make decisions. He goes, dad, get the facts, make a decision, check next. I said, well, Teddy, it's not that easy. Dad, get the facts, make a decision, check next. He goes, every day I've got to go to school and learn something completely new that I didn't even know existed the day before. If I don't get it perfect, the next day is misery because everything's based on the day before. You know, after five minutes, I said, Teddy, you're right.

Fifth grade is harder than being governor. But the next day I went in, I went in and I got the statistics. We had the national statistics for gun safety and universal background checks, but we hadn't gotten the local statistics. And even though every Republican business person I knew was in favor of universal background checks, the Republican Party, largely because of the NRA, wouldn't give an inch. And the NRA wouldn't compromise. And based after my talk with Teddy, I went and we got the local statistics. And in Colorado, just five and a half million people, there were 38 people. This is in 2012, so the year before this legislative session. There were 38 people convicted of homicide who tried to buy a gun and we stopped them. We were getting to 50% of all the

gun purchases, which is what most states get to, and we wanted to get to 100%. And the Republicans said, well, crooks aren't stupid. Well, we went through 133 people convicted of sexual assault tried to buy a gun and we stopped them. There were 1,300 people convicted of felony assault tried to buy a gun and we stopped them. Went through, there were over 1,300 people convicted of felony assault tried to buy a gun and we stopped them. There were over 3,000 people convicted of felony assault and 140 people when they came to pick up their new gun, we arrested them for an outstanding warrant for a violent crime. So when you take those local statistics, let me just say, once we laid those out, a bunch of the Republican legislators said, I'm not going to try and repeal this. So even when they came back, they repealed two Democrats, two of the state senators.

So the Republicans got the majority back in the state Senate. But those statistics are so powerful locally. And I think we've got to go all across the country and get the local statistics in front of the lawmakers and get them into the local media. So that, I mean, national statistics are powerful, but it's not quite the same as thinking about who's living down the road and who's trying to buy a gun who might do harm to your family. In addition to the tragedy in Aurora, I read that in your first term as governor, you attended more than 50 funerals, whether it was a natural disaster or a shooting like Aurora. Did that change you? Did that give you a new perspective on grief? I know it did for President Obama and all the, you know, funerals that he spoke at and attended after all the shootings that occurred when he was in the White House. Yeah. I don't think it could help but change you.

And I felt it was a blessing that he came. You know, we had the Waldo Canyon fire in the late spring of 2012. And then we had the shooting in the Aurora Movie Theater in July of 2012. And the president generously came out both times to console the people with losses. And he has a gift. I mean, I thought it was a gift and asked him after we met with all the surviving family members of the 12 deceased victims of the Aurora shooting. He was so,

it was almost beyond words to describe, but he was one with those families. He knew just, and he could stand with them for, it felt like minutes, but it was, you know, at least 10 seconds without saying something and then know exactly who to embrace. And he changed their, I've heard several of those people come and later tell me that he transformed something that was the worst experience in their life. It was still the worst experience, but he transformed it in a way that somehow they came out – that his ability to connect with them transformed the experience in a positive way. Still the worst experience of their lives. And I asked him, I said, how do you do that? How do you have that talent? He says, it's not a talent. It's a craft. And once you've done it again and again and again, you begin to get a real sense of what it is people need and how different people express that need. And it's true. You do get better and you realize,

you know, I mentioned my mom, her first husband died at the end of World War II. And she had two kids. He died in a freak accident. He was a pilot in Europe. And he came back to the United States and the day before he was going to get discharged, he died in a freak accident.

And then she met my dad and she had two kids already and she had two more kids. I was the baby. And then he got intestinal cancer after they'd been married about six years, I think. Yeah, maybe seven years. And he died just after I turned eight. And my mom was so stoic. And she really told us, no one's going to create joy for you. You've got to take responsibility for yourselves. And you'll never be able to control what life throws at you. But you can control how, really, whether it does make you better or worse, stronger or weaker. And I think in a funny way, when you go to that many funerals, as I did in those first four years, it was, and I'm not sure it was really 50.

At one point, that's what we thought. I went back and tried to check it. And I think we counted 34. It was a lot. It felt like, I can't tell you. And so often, it's interesting. And I was sitting with the parents of a young soldier who died in Iraq and had gone to his funeral.

And there was a reception afterwards. And several of these families have stayed friends of mine to this day. And we're just sort of talking. And these kids, it was amazing. The best looking kid, the one all his friends loved, the one who wanted to volunteer and serve and protect his country. his country. And as we were talking, it just came out that sometimes God takes the very best to make the rest of us realize how valuable and how precious not just life is, but how much we

love each other. And we're all just sitting there crying at the same time. I mean, obviously, Donald Trump has not played the role of consular in chief or any sort of, you know, national leader. And while, you know, as president, you can do a lot of good by passing a lot of policies, there's also seems to be a role to play in bringing the country together and sort of being a moral leader. How do you see that role, especially in the wake of a Trump presidency? Well, I mean, never has common decency been in such short supply. And, you know, when Trump was running and he began to get traction and, you know, I can't remember feeling more anxiety around a political wave. And my biggest fear right from the beginning was that all the young people in America

look to the president for their moral compass. And how do you define common decency? What are the lessons, whether you call them Aesop's fables or from the Bible or the Koran? Wherever you get your moral compass, the president has to somehow illuminate those values, as President Obama did, as I think President George W. Bush did. President Trump is the opposite. He seems determined to take any opportunity to divide people as he possibly can. And if that process of division, that action that divides us, if that results in somebody being bitterly heartbroken or feeling more pain, being bitterly heartbroken or feeling more pain, he seems to embrace that rather than have any level of empathy. I haven't felt anything that he said as, and I'm not putting this as an

attack, I haven't felt he's expressed real empathy. He said empathetic type words, but not in a context, not with a tone, not in a way that I've ever recognized as real empathy. Governor Hickenlooper, thank you so much for joining us. Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much. And good luck out there in the campaign trail. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. Bye.