YouSaid · the spoken record

John Hickenlooper

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2018-04-19
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2018-04-19
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  1. “Kid says joy and she goes exactly despair, joy, same sense, creates power. Then she said, what's the opposite of woe? And she kid in the back raised her hand and goes Giddy up. And it turns out that that is the opposite of all, right? It's a great political.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I did know that. We were having a hard time because I thought coming into this campaign, I was running against five lifetime politicians, all with the different constituencies that were, you know, one was a Latino former city auditor, an African-American who was a state senator. There was a city councilwoman who had invented the term soccer mom. All these people had constituencies and were a lot of people following them. So I started out at three or four percent of the polls and they were all at 12 to 16 percent. And we didn't get any traction. I mean, that's where the expression, the opposite of woe came from, was I would read this clipping to my young volunteers who were losing heart. I was about a professor of public speaking at the University of Wyoming about the importance of using opposites. Talk about the best of times. Talk about the agony, talk about the ecstasy. Words gained impact together. And she asked her class, what's the opposite of despair?”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And he'd run for Congress in 1984 as a moderate Democrat in a swing district and got crushed in the Reagan avalanche. And I said to him, so what's your advice to me is probably don't run unless I've got money because they pulled all the DCC, pulled all their support for his campaign. They pulled it out two months out. He didn't have a chance. And he said, no, no, that's not my advice at all. If you have a legitimate chance to run for high office, you'd be a fool not to do it because you'll meet people that you will never, ever meet in any other way. And this is a unique opportunity. And I came back and I kept meeting with people for a few months, but that became kind of one of my North Star that this is something really worth doing and trying to see if an elected official can come from small business and really make a difference.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Big firm. Well, he was a founder of Aramark, Ballard Sparr was where he came from. But anyway, he was great friends with David Cohen, who had been Mayor Rendell, Gavin Rendell's chief of staff. And so he set up a meeting for me with David Cohen, and then I went and spent the night with the Driscolls at their home. And Mr. Driscoll said to me,”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And I got excited. Actually, a guy in Philadelphia named Lee Driscoll, who had been one of the founders of, I'm trying to think of the name of the law, Ballard Sparr”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And within the space of 18 months, I went from someone who had never, ever considered running for office or thought about it. Again, think of those. Part of it was I got LASIC surgery, literally, and didn't have these glasses on my head, these huge, even with plastic lenses, they were so big, made look like my temples were indented into the side of my head. And suddenly I got lasic surgery. I didn't have glasses, and I felt like a different person. And all these people that knew me pretty well said, you should do this. You should go out and you would be a good mayor. And so I started going around visited mayors in other cities, visited a bunch of the mayors in the suburbs of Denver and found out why they hated the mayor of Denver and why the Denver Mayor hated them.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, there was this, and it's kind of funny. I was always the person, I mean, and the first five or six years, my partners and I, we worked 70 hours every week and many weeks, 80 hours. And the first six years we paid ourselves $24,000 to $26,000 a year, depending on how well we did, put everything back in the business, and then all of a sudden it took off. And I served on a bunch of nonprofit boards and committees. I knew a lot of people in the community and had a lot of these people's regular customers in the bar. And they often were saying that every city council member, every congressperson, every state legislator was a bum. They're bum, that bum, this bum. And I was the one kept saying, wait a second, this is America. They are us if we're not happy with who's representing us. We should get people in that will do it properly. And somehow I've never really figured out how, but somehow they turned that around.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It was my businesses, but also, again, a handful of other entrepreneurs. And we all had a vision, and we didn't want to have entertainment districts because we thought then you'd have a lot of bars. You'd have a lot of bars. There's too much competition. Everyone discounts their liquor. Kids come in and just drink too much, so the streets are noisy and loud. And we believe that getting people to live downtown in that neighborhood and eventually throughout Denver was the key when people can walk to work and live in a city and function more on a pedestrian level, then you don't have all the traffic jams and congestion that makes growth and economic success so problematic sometimes.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Life to kind of jostle us out of our complacency or where we're comfortable. And suddenly we end up in a place where we're going to be much more successful.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, lower downtown, the rent was one dollar per square foot per year, so essentially almost free. And it reflects that the community didn't value that part of the town at all. But there were four or five other entrepreneurs and people, and I didn't know I was an entrepreneur. If the price of oil hadn't collapsed, I'd still be a geologist. And yet once we finally opened the restaurant, the first day we walked in and the place was a hit right off the bat and big crowds. I knew I was going to be better at running that restaurant than I ever was a geologist. And it's funny. I mean, so many people have lost their jobs and been out of work for long periods of time. I think there's some point to trying to encourage them not to quit and to give them more opportunities and training and things. Because for many of us, we don't start out in the best place for us. We need sometimes the fits and tumbles of”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That's why I love being in an academic environment. But anyway, the... That indomitable my mother being this short, determined woman who'd gotten a full scholarship to Vassar College and had kind of made herself and raised four of us by herself, that kind of stuck. And once we opened the restaurant, we finally opened the restaurant in 1988, and it was an old warehouse in one of the”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “An identity in a very primal way, it's how we relate to our families and how our children and our loved ones in every sense. It was, again, a very challenging period, but also, again, I did, even when I get depressed about it, I did still for most of that time feel that I was going to come through it. And I felt that level of confidence even when I began to doubt myself, there was something in there that was, you know, again, my mother was, my mother was five foot. And both my sisters are like five one. We always would ask them.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I didn't have the confidence. I wasn't as sure. I always had this kind of rock ribbed confidence. And in a funny way, I always felt that if in times of real stress that my dad was there in spirit with me, and I began to wonder, I just began to doubt things I'd always taken as verbatim truth about who I was.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Can believe that just because I didn't know what the words pro forma meant. Anyway, that process, about nine months, and I do remember this, nine months or a year, I remember looking in the mirror and seeing a different person than I'd always seen.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, it's funny, I was out of work, and not only did our company lay everyone off, but everyone was. So there were no jobs. And I thought I was a pretty good geologist, evidently, maybe not quite so good. But I was out of work for about some bit into being unemployed. I came upon this idea of a brew pub. My brother lived in Berkeley, and I saw the third brew pub in North America had just opened, and the beer had more flavor, less carbonated. I said, I'd drive out of my way for this. I came back, and I'd never worked in a restaurant. I started talking to everyone about, here's this restaurant that brewed its own beer, how great it was. I was still looking for geology jobs. I was thinking about trying to be a writer. I had a friend who was a sitcom writer in Los Angeles. And so I was doing that. But overall, I mean, I was out of work for more than two years before we finally opened this brew pub. We finally did. I had to go to the library and get out our book on how to write a business plan.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And the one thing I remember that my takeaway was he pointed out that even all change involves loss and all loss must be mourned. But even change you want involves loss. But if you mourn that loss, the change can be good for you. And you have to recognize that and embrace it, which was a funny way of saying sort of what my mother had said, that no matter what life throws at you, you've got to make that.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, so I had five years as an exploration geologist and an exploration geologist takes what you see on the surface and tries to imagine what those, it's like a layer cake, right? It's how geologic rock gets formed. And that layer cake, when it goes underground, you sort of have to imagine what it looks like. And depending on the kind of topography underground is where oil and gas gets trapped. So it's very intellectually challenging. And I got to go to all these amazing beautiful parts of the western United States. But unfortunately, the price of oil collapsed in the early 1983-84. And our company had done great. We found a lot of oil. But by 1986, Occidental purchased the company just for the reserves, and they laid everyone off. So it was funny. In those days, they hired an industrial psychologist to come in and spend an hour with everyone.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I had the master's in geology, and Denver was one of the only cities where you could condemn and they were still hiring people.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “It's all wagon wheel, and I'd go out and do traverses every day in a different direction and come back to the base camp. That was two years. So in the end, I got through in nine and a half years to actually get a degree in literature and creative writing and then to come back and get a master's in geology. It's not terribly inefficient. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, once I found the geology, the hard part is I took a year doing chemistry and physics and calculus and basic geology. And I took the next year doing the graduate geology. And in between, I took a year off. So that's three years. Then I had to do two summers of research on my field. So I studied these volcanic rocks, this giant volcanic eruption that had taken place 45 million years ago just north of Yellowstone Park. So I had to spend two summers. This is a terrible duty, two summers in the most beautiful mountain landscape you could ever imagine. Take the east and the west boundaries of Yellowstone Park and take it ten miles up into the Absarica Mountains. And I go out there and I go out for two weeks at a time and never see another person other than my field assistant and just collect rocks and we'd camp, you know, make a center of like center of a spoke wheel.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Because I was a good athlete, a very serious soccer player, and I tested really high. And basically the rap on me was that I was lazy and I wouldn't work hard enough. Well, I think I had some modest ADHD to go along with the dyslexia, so I was always behind, and partly because I just didn't like school. So Wesleyan in those days would take on kids that were perceived as high potential kids who weren't performing up to their level.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I was a bad student, I was dyslexic, and they didn't know what dyslexia was back then. So all I knew was I was a very slow reader. I never got an A in high school. I got an A minus in physics in ninth grade, but that was it and didn't get any A's in college.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Huge part of which I was again if I saw some other kid wasn't hustling I'd yell at him I mean I was I think the best soccer player but I was no what I was never going to be captain no one was going to vote for me captain because I was just too driven during games and stuff David Groverman who was the captain of that bit of the soccer team would disagree and he would say he's much better and maybe he was better I won't argue the point but certainly that competitor shriek. I'm sure scholars are”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, I've worked very hard. I really consciously, when I got into business and I was running a restaurant, I realized this was a huge liability, just that it didn't hurt me as much in college. It didn't help me, but it didn't hurt me in high school and college. But that process of learning how to get people to like you, learning to get along with everyone is a very valuable thing to learn and it helped in sports that gave me, it showed in sports that I could, even though I wasn't the most talented, if I worked hard enough, I could make the varsity. And not only that our team could win the championship. If I worked hard enough, even though I couldn't hit a curveball, I learned how to throw a curveball and got to be a baseball pitcher. And our team, again, I played in the American Legions. We got the regional finals. My high school team won the championship. And that's a lesson that, you know, that's one of the things I love about sports. If anybody, if they were...”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I don't know. I mean, you know, maybe that's part of it. It certainly came from a very early age. I would go into rages about stuff all the time. I was always kind of.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And got to tell their stories. So I love sports and I was very, very competitive. I wasn't the greatest athlete, but ended up doing very well. But I was so intense and had a certain anger. It took me a long time to kind of work through.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “You know. Well, it's funny. I was a skinny kid and I was as the youngest of four, I was always agitating to get to go to school. So she sent me to school when I was four, a year early. So I was skinny anyway. I had really thick glasses. Imagine taking the bottom out of a Coke bottle, you know, putting them in glasses. That's how thick my glasses were. And I had, you know, I mean, I was a kid in third grade that got bullied by it. And that was the year my father passed away and was so sick. And obviously I wasn't aware at the time, but that You know, I was just trying to get kids to like me. And it turned out I was being a jerk, you know, really obnoxious. So I learned over those 10 years how to get along with people. And I studied it. I studied how to tell a joke. Because at the dinner table, I couldn't get a, I could never tell a joke or get a word in edgewise because my older brother, my old sister, were, I mean, it was open, you know, it was a feeding frenzy to see who got FaceTime at the table.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And so we became great friends. You can Google Hickenlipper and Vonnegut and you'll get a YouTube where he impersonates, he goes on and on and explains. He says, well, Hickenlooper, you're so charming and funny. I knew your father. He was just blah, just dull dishwater. And that's got to have bothered you. Now I can tell you the real truth. He was not your father. I am your father. He's on, you know, in this YouTube thing. Here's Kurt Vodding it with his hair up kind of wild saying, I am your father. But it was a gap, right? You end up finding these things out.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, well, and it's funny that, you know, through life, people keep coming into my life who knew my dad, right? So my dad in college was great friends with Kurt Vonnegan. And I read everything that Kurt Vonnegan ever read or wrote, read everything he ever wrote. And here I was 45 years old. And he was coming to Denver and wanted a special beer. He was doing an art show, silks screens. And so we made Kurtz Mile High Malt. And the first time he called me on the phone, he said, well, you can tell me what happened to John Hickenlipper, my great friend from Cornell. I said, well, that was my dad. I'm a junior.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And so my mother was very direct and she was never sad, but she was very firm that we had to recognize you can't control what life throws at you, but you can control whether it makes you stronger or weaker. You can control whether it takes away your joy and your pleasure. And she browbeat us in a general way, but maybe browbeats the wrong word, but whether it was sports or drama club or academics, she thought we all had to find our own joy and create our own lives. And whether it was whatever it was, the real joy was going to be in helping other people in building those relationships. And that turns out to be good advice, I think, for anybody.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, so he got sick when I was five and then passed away two and a half weeks after my eighth birthday. And it was a tough, in a funny way, it was hard because it was such a sad house. My father was an invariably funny guy. He thought if you could make a joke about something, it could never beat you. And he would constantly make jokes and love telling Shaggy Dog stories.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So again, my mother's family, my mother was the oldest of five daughters, my father the youngest of three sons, and my father wanted to get away from Cincinnati where his grandfather was this kind of big shot. His father, my grandfather was at the time the youngest Circuit Court of Appeals judge in that circuit. And my father just wanted to get away. So he moved to Philadelphia after the war, met my mother who was widowed, had two children, married her, had two more children, and then he got sick.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Andrew Hickeloper was in charge. He had 180 personnel with him soldiers, and they built all the bridges and all the pontoon, what they called corduroy bridges through all those swamps and rivers so that Sherman could continue marching. And so there's an old family picture of Andrew Hickenlooper sitting between Grant and Sherman and was well regarded and embraced by both of them. And yet Chernow somehow, I mean, if only he would have talked to me when he was writing that book, we have all the old diaries.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Andrew H He deserved in that book. It's so funny you look at it, and he was very modest guy, never sang his own, never tuted his own horn, and he went on then from Vicksburg, and Sherman requested him to come because in Sherman's march to the sea, people always think, wow, what an amazing feat. And what was so unique about Sherman's march to the sea was he had no supply line. He was going as fast as he could. So he had including soldiers and support. He had 15,000 soldiers, 3,000 support. So he had 18,000 people and horses, and they were foraging. So if they stopped for more than a day somewhere, they were like locusts. They would have eaten everything that could be eaten. They had to keep moving. Well, if you look at South Georgia, it is full of streams and marshes and floods.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “On the Vicksburg, where there was a siege, and Andrew Hickelber had the idea that they would dig tunnels under the redoubt, and he directed all that. He had about 200 people working for him. And these tunnels are eventually what blew up the redoubt, the fortification walls, and allowed them to win. And then, and he was, you know, I mean, he ended up being the second youngest general in U.S. military history, second only to Custer.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yeah, my father was from Cincinnati and much more recent arrivals to this country. And his grandfather, my great-grandfather, was Andrew Hickenlooper. And he at the Battle of Shiloh, he commanded, he was a captain and had an artillery unit with twelve artillery. And they basically defended the Confederate onslaught that allowed Grant to get across the river, regroup and counterattack the next morning, which kept us getting routed.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I mean, Don't forget the fact Anthony, his son Anthony, was the brewer, and then also became a mayor of Philadelphia when it was just a little teeny, just a village really. I mean, a very small town. And I thought that I didn't know that. I mean, here I was a brewer in Denver, became the mayor of Denver. I had no idea that that happened, you know, 11 generations before.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Yep, exactly. And very involved. He created the first city troop, which was when people talk about the Second Amendment and well-regulated militias, the Philadelphia First City Troop was the first militia. And Captain Sam was how he, again, my mother's family, they'd talk about Captain Sam, but us kids, I never knew anything about him and never, there was no conduit for us kids into that old family. So it was largely unknown to me until really just in the last five or ten years.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “The ones that brought my So my mother's family, I was raised outside Philadelphia with my mother's family, and they were an old, old, old Philadelphia family. My mother was twelfth generation Philadelphia, the Morris family. Yes. But it's funny. In the Great Depression, they lost whatever wealth they had was largely disappeared. And so we never really, I mean, we didn't belong to any private clubs. We didn't really get involved. There were a bunch of, my great-great-uncle would have a holiday party every year where there would be 150 people that were all either by blood or by marriage related to me. And my great-great-uncle would offer me, I think it was a quarter if I could name 50 people in that huge group. And it was hard. You know, I get to all my cousins and my aunts and uncles, and I was still only halfway there.”

    2018-04-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 235 - Gov. John Hickenlooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source