#6 Governor John Hickenlooper on His Life in Beer and Politics
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 629 Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2016
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of The Road to Now, we speak with Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper about his new memoir The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics and the ways that his peculiar & fascinating life interact with the greater history of our country. Gov. Hickenlooper shares his family history, which he traces back to the earliest settlers of the Pennsylvania colony in the 1680s, and talks about a wide variety of fascinating topics including the urban/rural split in Colorado, the Grateful Dead, and his friendship with Kurt Vonnegut. Gov. Hickenlooper also talks about his years as a geologist, working in real estate, opening Denver's first brew pub, and the value that comes from hanging a light on one's weaknesses in the pursuit of excellence. We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed our time with Gov. Hickenlooper. Hosted by Ben Sawyer and Bob Crawford. Recorded June 15, 2016 in the Colorado State Capitol Building in Denver, CO.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up, on the road to now. |
| 0:02.0 | Honest to gosh, every time I give the book to someone and they take it away, I wince. |
| 0:08.0 | Because I know that there's four or five things, six things in there that I really, you know, probably should have left out. |
| 0:16.0 | But, you know, when I worked with this with Max Potter, who was my old speechwriter, and he helped really frame it and did a great deal in the writing. |
| 0:24.6 | And he said, you know, every single elected official, all they give us is a sanitized, |
| 0:29.6 | whitewashed version of their life, and you never feel like you know people. |
| 0:33.6 | Why don't you be the one person to go out there and warts and all, let them see what it's |
| 0:38.1 | like to be a real human being and talk about it. Most people are more in the middle and they |
| 0:43.1 | want to, you know, they want to see things function. And they're sick of seeing big corporations |
| 0:48.3 | get breaks. They're, I think they're frustrated. Many people that were, that are in the middle class or were in the middle class, |
| 0:56.0 | they feel like government is there to help the rich or help the very poor, and everyone else gets forgotten about. |
| 1:02.0 | Three weeks later, the phone rings in my office and the voice says, hi, as John Hickenlooper there, and I said, |
| 1:07.0 | see, he goes, ha, this is Kurt Vonnegut. I've been looking forward to |
| 1:11.4 | talking to you, but before we talk about beer, maybe you can tell me what happened to my good |
| 1:15.6 | friend from Cornell, John Hicken, John Hickenlooper, you have the same name. And I just, there's this |
| 1:20.6 | long pause. I didn't know what to say. I mean, I lost, I couldn't catch my breath. And I said, well, that was my father. |
| 1:28.3 | He died in 1960. |
| 1:30.3 | And Kurt said something along the lines of, oh, what a tragedy. |
| 1:33.3 | He was such a kind and funny person and really enjoyed him. |
| 1:38.3 | I'm Bob Crawford, and I'm Ben Sawyer. |
| 1:40.3 | And this is the road to now, and we are on the road, in a taxi cab heading back from downtown Denver to our lovely abode near the airport. |
| 1:49.0 | We're here with our cab driver. |
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