Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, we are back and joining us.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Now our second senator from the great state of Colorado,
Senator Michael Bennett, has stopped by, and Senator, are you speaking?
I asked John Hickenloop or your cohort if he was speaking,
and he said, not this time.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Have you ever had the opportunity to.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Speak any And I'm not speaking at this one either.
I'm sure they found better people, but well, they're not.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Telling us, so I'm having to ask, and then they're
not giving us the scoop until very late in the evening,
same as the RNC, I might point out. So I
want to ask you. You were the first Senator to
say Joe Biden can't win.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
How difficult was that for you?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And what went into that decision to publicly say what
we were all thinking it was?
Speaker 3 (00:42):
It was difficult. It's not easy to go out there
and on a limb like that. But my assessment was
that there was no way he was going to win.
My assessment was that the Democrats were going to lose
the election in a landslide, that we were going to
lose the Senate, that we were going to.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Lose the House.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
And I feel really strongly about the direction of our country,
and I think all of us that care about it,
we might have different points of view about it and
what direction it should go, but I believe this is
a moral question, you know, an important moral question about
what the future of our country looks like. And so
(01:21):
I had said in a private meeting that I believed
that the president was going to lose, and it leaked
and CNN invited me to come on, and they said,
you know, we would say what you said in private,
and I said, of course I will, because I wasn't,
you know, trying to keep it a secret. I thought
it was important to say. And I mostly met the
(01:43):
test of my three daughters, which is, you know, their
view of the world is if you see something that's true,
you ought to say it's true, even if it's hard.
And the first day I felt, you know, it was rough,
and after that I felt like I'd satisfied their test.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Well, it certainly a sentence snowball barreling down the hill.
I mean, did you expect that? I mean, because I'm
sure you weren't trying to depose or dethrone the sitting president,
But I mean, did you imagine that a few weeks
later we would be talking about Canada, Kamala.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Harris, I didn't know what was going to happen. What
I was asking for at that moment was for President
Biden to evaluate the question, because he was the one
to make the decision. Nobody else could make the decision.
And when we had meetings as we did, you know,
with the Senate Democratic Caucus and the President's folks, and
I got up to speak, one of the things I
(02:36):
said to them was, we're asking the president to do
something no other president has ever done. We are asking
you his guys to have a conversation with him that
nobody will ever No one in our in this room
is ever going to have the kind of conversation we're
asking you to have with him.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
That's how serious this is.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
And I think much to President Biden's credit, he decided
that the country he was going to put the country's
interests ahead of his political ambitions and his interests.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
That's very rare. I mean, going back.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
To Roman times, it's hard to find elected leaders that
have been willing to do with Joe Biden.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
The th thank.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Eides of March is what you're talking about at the
Julius Caesar's end, and thank God that's not the case,
but it has been really interesting. If you asked, could
I imagine we would be here, I guess I didn't
know what was going to happen. And I think what
has happened is there is a in this hall, in
the Democratic Convention, we have coalesced around this ticket where
(03:45):
there is no division, there.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
Is tremendous excitement.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
And what I believe is that the American people broadly
want to turn the page on this politics of division.
I think they want to turn the page on the
Biden administration. I think they want to turn the page
even more so on Donald Trump. I don't think they
want Donald Trump to come back. And I think that
(04:09):
augus very well for Donald Trump being defeated in the
fall and Democrats winning the presidency.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
I'm going to ask you.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
A question about Vice President Harris and her relationship to
the Biden campaign. What's been striking to me over the
last few nights about speeches is, in some ways it
feels like the speeches have been running against the current
administration a little bit. I mean, there's been a lot
of talk about how people are struggling right now, and
(04:39):
these are all things that have happened under the watch
of the current president. Is that is that a difficult
sort of needle to thread? I mean, how do you
say I can make things better if you're already part
of the adminison.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
I'm so glad you asked me that question, because when
I look at this, you hear a lot of talk
in you know, democratic circles about how Donald Trump is
a threat to our democracy.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
And I actually believe that. I believe that is true.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
But I think he's I think of him much more
as a symptom of our problems than the cause of
our problems. I think the cause of our problems are
that if you look at the American economy today, the
bottom fifty percent of Americans have less wealth today than
they had when Ronald Reagan was president. The bottom fifty
percent of Americans own two percent of America's wealth and
(05:29):
the top ten percent of Americans own seventy five percent
of americans wealth. That's happened during democratic administrations and Republican administrations.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
It's happened over forty years.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
And you want to see a threat to democracy, it's
when people lose a sense of economic opportunity for themselves
and for their families. Think about I mean this, and
this is not a Bolshevik statement about.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Now you're going to say a different B word right there.
I was like, Wow, no, crazy, I.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Will say, but I feel that I do feel that
way about it because when you lose a sense of
upward mobility, when you lose a sense of opportunity, When
when when the economy grows and the only folks that
benefit are the wealthiest people, which is what's been happening
for the last forty years in America. That is when
(06:19):
you lose a democracy because somebody shows up and says,
I alone can fix it. You don't need a democracy.
You know, you should put a strong man in office
and expect the world to be corrupt and bankrupt. And
if you don't, you're kind of a sucker. That's not
the way I see the world. I want us to
build a capitalist economy again in America that when it grows, it.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
Grows for everybody where.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
The greatest invention besides democracy, this country has ever been
responsible for, I mean.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
Modern democracy.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Besides that is our middle class, and our middle class
has been shattered. So that's not something that happened during
the Biden administration. That's something that has happened since Ronald
Reagan began his trickle down experiment. That has happened since
the nineteen eighties when we decided to outsource everything to
(07:10):
Southeast Asia to China. That has happened since we made
higher education impossible for people to afford. It's happened since
kids graduating with a high school diploma no longer could
go and earn a living wage and could only earn
the minimum wage in our economy. It's happened since families
could not afford childcare so they can stay at work.
(07:35):
And it happens when you've got a healthcare system that's
costing our country twice as much as any other industrialized
country in the world, and yet we alone are paying
the highest prices in the world for drugs. We alone
have no ready access to mental health care. We have
a mental health epidemic in Colorado right now among young
(07:55):
people in.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Rural Colorado and urban Colorado.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
We do not have a healthcare system that can help
parents find help for their kids. So I'm not saying nothing.
I'm saying is saying that Kamala Harris is the solution
to all of that, or that the Democratic Party is
the solution to all that I think actually the test
is for our generation. The question is are we willing
to be the first generation of Americans to leave less
(08:21):
opportunity not more to our kids and our grandkids. That's
the test in front of America right now, whether you
are a Democrat or a Republican or an unaffiliated voter.
And my view is there is no way Donald Trump
is going to help us answer that question positively.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
I'm not a Trump fan, but I am a Trump voter.
I'm just letting you know.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
But the reason is is that and you talked about
our differences and how to solve or maybe that was
Hickling Lipert that said, let's talk about differences and solving
the problem. A lot of the things that you just
laid out. I absolutely agree with that these are horrible problems.
But when I look at it, I wonder how the
government regulatory structure that has been sort of abused and
used by larger corporations in order to create higher barriers
(09:04):
to entry for other people, those kind of things. So,
as a member of the Senate, what can you do
to sort of create a more free and open economy
to allow those people to flourish at whatever life.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
I think it's a very fair question.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
First of all, I think that you know, there is
no country in the world that's better situated than the
US on energy. It's one of the great and what
we should also nowithstanding that litany of stuff I just said,
we are still the richest country in the world by far,
and we have unbelievable energy resources, both in terms of
fossil fuels and non fossil fuels. Nobody who's better positioned
(09:40):
than we to transition to the to the to the
carbon free economy that we have that we have to
get to if we can figure out how to get
out of our own way. And part of that is
the regulatory question that you're talking about. Another example I'll
give you. Look, I used to be a school superintendent,
as you know, so this issue of mental health for
(10:01):
our kids is a big deal for me and Susan
and I have raised three daughters. In this social media environment,
we have allowed those guys Mark Zuckerberg and the rest
of these guys to basically strip mine our kids privacy,
the strip mine our kids data, to strip mine our
economic interest just because they can, and just because they're big. Nobody.
(10:23):
There has been no pushback from anybody in.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Washington, d C.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
And my view is we should put we need to
have a negotiation with those guys. Just like Teddy Roosevelt,
who by the way, was a Republican, as you know,
just like Teddy Roosevelt said, we should set up an
agency to regulate these guys that are drilling in places
where we didn't necessarily want them to drill. We need
to have somebody in Washington. I think it should be
(10:50):
a new agency that's taking on the economic concentration that
these social media and big tech and now AI companies represent. Otherwise,
they're just going to dominate our media, They're going to
dominate our politics, They're going to dominate our our civil
discourse in ways that that's the stuff we should be
worried about in terms of the future of our democracy.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
I don't disagree that that is a problem. I do
disagree that we need a new agency for anything. That's
no more agencies, no grade.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
I'll trade you pick some you don't want anymore.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
The irs, you can have that. Let's get rid of
the irs.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
Some that have outlived their usefulness.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
I don't agree that that's one, but pick some that
have outlived their usefulness because God knows.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
Once you create.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Something there, it never goes away. But the reality is,
if you think Congress is going to be able to
regulate these guys effectively, they don't even understand that the technology,
much less the speed at which it's changing. It'd be
like asking Congress to regulate our far, you know, to
approve drugs in the.
Speaker 4 (11:52):
United States, and we have no idea how to do
that either.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Senator Michael Bennett, I know you have another appointment. I
really appreciate you stopping buch talking. I appreciate it's nice
to see you you as well. I hope we'll do
this again on the radio. I'm just letting you know
you said that on the radio.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
People heard you.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
There you go, Thank you in secrets that Senator Michael
Bennett will be back right after that.
All right, we are back and joining us.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Now our second senator from the great state of Colorado,
Senator Michael Bennett, has stopped by, and Senator, are you speaking?
I asked John Hickenloop or your cohort if he was speaking,
and he said, not this time.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Have you ever had the opportunity to.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Speak any And I'm not speaking at this one either.
I'm sure they found better people, but well, they're not.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Telling us, so I'm having to ask, and then they're
not giving us the scoop until very late in the evening,
same as the RNC, I might point out. So I
want to ask you. You were the first Senator to
say Joe Biden can't win.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
How difficult was that for you?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And what went into that decision to publicly say what
we were all thinking it was?
Speaker 3 (00:42):
It was difficult. It's not easy to go out there
and on a limb like that. But my assessment was
that there was no way he was going to win.
My assessment was that the Democrats were going to lose
the election in a landslide, that we were going to
lose the Senate, that we were going to.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Lose the House.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
And I feel really strongly about the direction of our country,
and I think all of us that care about it,
we might have different points of view about it and
what direction it should go, but I believe this is
a moral question, you know, an important moral question about
what the future of our country looks like. And so
(01:21):
I had said in a private meeting that I believed
that the president was going to lose, and it leaked
and CNN invited me to come on, and they said,
you know, we would say what you said in private,
and I said, of course I will, because I wasn't,
you know, trying to keep it a secret. I thought
it was important to say. And I mostly met the
(01:43):
test of my three daughters, which is, you know, their
view of the world is if you see something that's true,
you ought to say it's true, even if it's hard.
And the first day I felt, you know, it was rough,
and after that I felt like I'd satisfied their test.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Well, it certainly a sentence snowball barreling down the hill.
I mean, did you expect that? I mean, because I'm
sure you weren't trying to depose or dethrone the sitting president,
But I mean, did you imagine that a few weeks
later we would be talking about Canada, Kamala.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Harris, I didn't know what was going to happen. What
I was asking for at that moment was for President
Biden to evaluate the question, because he was the one
to make the decision. Nobody else could make the decision.
And when we had meetings as we did, you know,
with the Senate Democratic Caucus and the President's folks, and
I got up to speak, one of the things I
(02:36):
said to them was, we're asking the president to do
something no other president has ever done. We are asking
you his guys to have a conversation with him that
nobody will ever No one in our in this room
is ever going to have the kind of conversation we're
asking you to have with him.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
That's how serious this is.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
And I think much to President Biden's credit, he decided
that the country he was going to put the country's
interests ahead of his political ambitions and his interests.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
That's very rare. I mean, going back.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
To Roman times, it's hard to find elected leaders that
have been willing to do with Joe Biden.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
The th thank.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Eides of March is what you're talking about at the
Julius Caesar's end, and thank God that's not the case,
but it has been really interesting. If you asked, could
I imagine we would be here, I guess I didn't
know what was going to happen. And I think what
has happened is there is a in this hall, in
the Democratic Convention, we have coalesced around this ticket where
(03:45):
there is no division, there.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
Is tremendous excitement.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
And what I believe is that the American people broadly
want to turn the page on this politics of division.
I think they want to turn the page on the
Biden administration. I think they want to turn the page
even more so on Donald Trump. I don't think they
want Donald Trump to come back. And I think that
(04:09):
augus very well for Donald Trump being defeated in the
fall and Democrats winning the presidency.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
I'm going to ask you.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
A question about Vice President Harris and her relationship to
the Biden campaign. What's been striking to me over the
last few nights about speeches is, in some ways it
feels like the speeches have been running against the current
administration a little bit. I mean, there's been a lot
of talk about how people are struggling right now, and
(04:39):
these are all things that have happened under the watch
of the current president. Is that is that a difficult
sort of needle to thread? I mean, how do you
say I can make things better if you're already part
of the adminison.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
I'm so glad you asked me that question, because when
I look at this, you hear a lot of talk
in you know, democratic circles about how Donald Trump is
a threat to our democracy.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
And I actually believe that. I believe that is true.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
But I think he's I think of him much more
as a symptom of our problems than the cause of
our problems. I think the cause of our problems are
that if you look at the American economy today, the
bottom fifty percent of Americans have less wealth today than
they had when Ronald Reagan was president. The bottom fifty
percent of Americans own two percent of America's wealth and
(05:29):
the top ten percent of Americans own seventy five percent
of americans wealth. That's happened during democratic administrations and Republican administrations.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
It's happened over forty years.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
And you want to see a threat to democracy, it's
when people lose a sense of economic opportunity for themselves
and for their families. Think about I mean this, and
this is not a Bolshevik statement about.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Now you're going to say a different B word right there.
I was like, Wow, no, crazy, I.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Will say, but I feel that I do feel that
way about it because when you lose a sense of
upward mobility, when you lose a sense of opportunity, When
when when the economy grows and the only folks that
benefit are the wealthiest people, which is what's been happening
for the last forty years in America. That is when
(06:19):
you lose a democracy because somebody shows up and says,
I alone can fix it. You don't need a democracy.
You know, you should put a strong man in office
and expect the world to be corrupt and bankrupt. And
if you don't, you're kind of a sucker. That's not
the way I see the world. I want us to
build a capitalist economy again in America that when it grows, it.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
Grows for everybody where.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
The greatest invention besides democracy, this country has ever been
responsible for, I mean.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
Modern democracy.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Besides that is our middle class, and our middle class
has been shattered. So that's not something that happened during
the Biden administration. That's something that has happened since Ronald
Reagan began his trickle down experiment. That has happened since
the nineteen eighties when we decided to outsource everything to
(07:10):
Southeast Asia to China. That has happened since we made
higher education impossible for people to afford. It's happened since
kids graduating with a high school diploma no longer could
go and earn a living wage and could only earn
the minimum wage in our economy. It's happened since families
could not afford childcare so they can stay at work.
(07:35):
And it happens when you've got a healthcare system that's
costing our country twice as much as any other industrialized
country in the world, and yet we alone are paying
the highest prices in the world for drugs. We alone
have no ready access to mental health care. We have
a mental health epidemic in Colorado right now among young
(07:55):
people in.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Rural Colorado and urban Colorado.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
We do not have a healthcare system that can help
parents find help for their kids. So I'm not saying nothing.
I'm saying is saying that Kamala Harris is the solution
to all of that, or that the Democratic Party is
the solution to all that I think actually the test
is for our generation. The question is are we willing
to be the first generation of Americans to leave less
(08:21):
opportunity not more to our kids and our grandkids. That's
the test in front of America right now, whether you
are a Democrat or a Republican or an unaffiliated voter.
And my view is there is no way Donald Trump
is going to help us answer that question positively.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
I'm not a Trump fan, but I am a Trump voter.
I'm just letting you know.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
But the reason is is that and you talked about
our differences and how to solve or maybe that was
Hickling Lipert that said, let's talk about differences and solving
the problem. A lot of the things that you just
laid out. I absolutely agree with that these are horrible problems.
But when I look at it, I wonder how the
government regulatory structure that has been sort of abused and
used by larger corporations in order to create higher barriers
(09:04):
to entry for other people, those kind of things. So,
as a member of the Senate, what can you do
to sort of create a more free and open economy
to allow those people to flourish at whatever life.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
I think it's a very fair question.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
First of all, I think that you know, there is
no country in the world that's better situated than the
US on energy. It's one of the great and what
we should also nowithstanding that litany of stuff I just said,
we are still the richest country in the world by far,
and we have unbelievable energy resources, both in terms of
fossil fuels and non fossil fuels. Nobody who's better positioned
(09:40):
than we to transition to the to the to the
carbon free economy that we have that we have to
get to if we can figure out how to get
out of our own way. And part of that is
the regulatory question that you're talking about. Another example I'll
give you. Look, I used to be a school superintendent,
as you know, so this issue of mental health for
(10:01):
our kids is a big deal for me and Susan
and I have raised three daughters. In this social media environment,
we have allowed those guys Mark Zuckerberg and the rest
of these guys to basically strip mine our kids privacy,
the strip mine our kids data, to strip mine our
economic interest just because they can, and just because they're big. Nobody.
(10:23):
There has been no pushback from anybody in.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Washington, d C.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
And my view is we should put we need to
have a negotiation with those guys. Just like Teddy Roosevelt,
who by the way, was a Republican, as you know,
just like Teddy Roosevelt said, we should set up an
agency to regulate these guys that are drilling in places
where we didn't necessarily want them to drill. We need
to have somebody in Washington. I think it should be
(10:50):
a new agency that's taking on the economic concentration that
these social media and big tech and now AI companies represent. Otherwise,
they're just going to dominate our media, They're going to
dominate our politics, They're going to dominate our our civil
discourse in ways that that's the stuff we should be
worried about in terms of the future of our democracy.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
I don't disagree that that is a problem. I do
disagree that we need a new agency for anything. That's
no more agencies, no grade.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
I'll trade you pick some you don't want anymore.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
The irs, you can have that. Let's get rid of
the irs.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
Some that have outlived their usefulness.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
I don't agree that that's one, but pick some that
have outlived their usefulness because God knows.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
Once you create.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Something there, it never goes away. But the reality is,
if you think Congress is going to be able to
regulate these guys effectively, they don't even understand that the technology,
much less the speed at which it's changing. It'd be
like asking Congress to regulate our far, you know, to
approve drugs in the.
Speaker 4 (11:52):
United States, and we have no idea how to do
that either.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Senator Michael Bennett, I know you have another appointment. I
really appreciate you stopping buch talking. I appreciate it's nice
to see you you as well. I hope we'll do
this again on the radio. I'm just letting you know
you said that on the radio.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
People heard you.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
There you go, Thank you in secrets that Senator Michael
Bennett will be back right after that.
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