Pod Save America - 2020: Tim Ryan on the working class and yoga

Episode Date: April 30, 2019

Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan sits down with Dan Pfeiffer at Crooked HQ in Los Angeles to discuss his economic agenda, how Democrats can retake the Midwest and his passion for mindfulness.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. We're coming to you with yet another interview in our endless series of interviews with Democratic presidential candidates. This time you'll hear a conversation I had with Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan. We talked about health care, the economy, how Democrats can win the Midwest. We even talked about yoga, which is a passion of his, believe it or not. Here's the conversation. Congressman Tim Ryan, welcome to Pod Save America. Thanks for having me. All right, let's start by giving you an opportunity to introduce yourself to our listeners. What led you to a career in politics?

I played a lot of sports growing up, and I was a quarterback and kind of always in a leadership position. I was in a fraternity. I was the president of the fraternity. Looks familiar in this room. I was in a fraternity. I was the president of the fraternity. Looks familiar in this room. And so I came from an area in Northeast Ohio where a lot of my friends left. The economy wasn't doing well and people were leaving. They go to school, go to college and leave. And I wanted to do something about it. So my career in politics really started about and I wanted to do something about it. So my career in politics really started about downtown redevelopment. Like what are the next generation, what's the next generation of jobs that are going to become available? And I can go back to my first palm card I made, and on it was renovate the Robbins Theater. And it was an old theater in the downtown,

and we just had no quality of life for young people. So it really started from how do we rebuild this community? And so you're running for president. That's a long way from the palm cart with the Robin's Theater on it. It always starts on a palm cart somewhere. When you got in this race, there were at least a dozen other people already in the race. You had liberals, moderates, people from the coast, people from the Midwest, a number of your colleagues in the House of Representatives. What did you see in the field that you thought was lacking that you thought you were uniquely qualified to bring to this race? I think two things.

One, connect to voters we lost just from a sheer political standpoint. The country's really divided. I don't think most people like that. And I think I can really help pull the country back together. I know these voters, they voted for me. They voted, some of them voted for Donald Trump. We're in a battleground state and all that. We're in a battleground state and all that. The second thing was I really believe that I understand deeply because of where I come from, the old economy, what's happened. One of the biggest calls I get to my congressional office is around pensions, like just the insecurity that has come from really a 40-year collapse and a failure for us to really rebuild. I understand that. And through that experience, I really studied and understand, I think, where we need to go in the new economy. And, you know, around electric vehicles, around AI, around additive manufacturing. I'll just give you one example. In the late 1970s, when Youngstown Sheet and Tube closed, my father-in-law actually worked there. The technology in the steel mills was pre-World War I. The steel industry basically

put their head in the sand. They were afraid. They didn't want to change. They were still making some money. And then the bottom fell out. I think we're in a very similar position today. You know, you hear a lot of stories and read a lot of stories about artificial intelligence and job loss and the future of work and what's the economy going to look like. I think we've got to make a decision that we are going to embrace these technologies. We're going to grab them and we're going to try to dominate them. And we're going to infuse them into every industry we possibly can, ramp up productivity and cut the worker in on the deal. I mean, the other alternative we already experienced in places like Youngstown,

we're still suffering the consequences from the fear that had everybody's head in the ground. You know, we have politicians, Democrats on Pod Save America all the time, who are very good at diagnosing the challenges that communities like yours are facing, automation, globalization, et cetera. What we often struggle to get to elicit from Democrats is a big, bold answer to that challenge. What is Tim Ryan's big idea to deal with these two forces of automation and globalization that are going nowhere? What's the thing we actually do that is very different than what we are doing now? We create a national industrial policy

around dominating these industries, around dominating electric vehicles. There's one to two million today. There's going to be 30 million by 2030. We need to dominate that industry. And we need to have, I have a bill that creates a chief manufacturing officer in the United States to just drive this.

The president should be driving it. This was, frustrates me a lot about the president. He came in, he campaigned, and then he didn't do anything. Like he got these voters. He talked about steel mills and coal mines. He got these voters, some of them to vote for him, but he has no plan. And what I would do is sit down with the big three and the Department of Energy and the Department of Transportation and Venture Capital and say, how do we dominate electric vehicles? How do we dominate the batteries?

How do we dominate the charging stations? How do we dominate solar? How do we dominate wind? How do we dominate AI? And put a plan together. I mean, this is what China does. It's a little bit easier there, obviously, because of their governmental structure. It's actually a lot easier. But we have got to solve this problem because right now,

China dominates 40% of the electric vehicle market. They dominate 60% of the solar panel market. So I think an industrial policy is first and foremost on the agenda, because if we don't get the economic piece right, everything else is going to be harder to do. A lot of things you're talking about here, whether it's electric cars, solar, wind, etc., is also part of climate policy in this country. How does your idea here dovetail with the Green New Deal? Is that something you support? Yeah, I mean, I support a Green New Deal. I love the fact that we're all having this conversation. I mean, as a presidential candidate, I can't go into an interview where someone doesn't ask me about the Green New Deal. And I absolutely love

it because it is such a pressing problem. I think we've got to make sure that we do it the right way. I talk about it like I just talked about, like we didn't even talk about the environment there, right? Industrial policy around what? Wind, solar, electric vehicles. I think that's how we make this argument that this is a job creator for us. We should be leading with this is our opportunity through a Green New Deal to rebuild the middle class. That's how we get there with all of these new technologies. Do I take from that that for the voters in your district in Ohio, you believe that discussing this in a climate framework is a net political negative? Yeah. I mean, a lot of people don't have the luxury of making it six steps down to, I'm really concerned about the environment. I mean, they get up and they're worried about paying their bills. I mean, we just had another announcement. We lost a General Motors last shift of a General Motors facility in my district that used to have 16,000 workers,

and we just lost the last 1,700 about a month ago. And just on Saturday, we had a transportation company, Falcon Transport, lost 800 jobs. They got an email at 8 o'clock on Saturday night saying, don't show up for work. Those people don't have the luxury of worrying about sea levels rising. I mean, I'm sorry to say it that way, but they don't. They have kids in school. They have a mortgage that now they lost their job. Their health care isn't as good as it should be. And, you know, shit's bad for them.

It's real bad. And so if we come to them as a party and we don't first and foremost acknowledge this struggle that they are facing today, like how am I going to pay my mortgage next month? I mean May is coming up, right? So how are we going to pay it? I mean, that's what they're asking themselves. That's scary. And if we don't meet them where they are on that issue and have a plan for how we're going to get out of this mess, then they're not going to vote for us. Ohio is a state that Barack Obama won twice. Yeah. Close, but pretty decisive victories. The good old days. The good old days, yes.

Your district is one that Democrats have mostly won, but I think Trump won it this time. Hillary won it with 51. So closer than it's been, right? The President of Obama won it with 62 or 63. Right, so a huge, huge change there. Yeah, yeah. What has changed, you know, as we look at what's happened in Ohio since 2012, what has led to that change? Is it a change in Ohio or is it a change in the Democratic Party?

A little bit of both. I think we got off of the economic message that just went at people like, we're the party to help you with the problems that I just discussed. Like, we're the ones who are going to help you with health care. We're the ones who are going to help you with your job, wages. And President Trump is very skillful. I mean, he came into the Mahoning Valley, which is the area I represent in Northeast Ohio, and he said Bill Clinton passed NAFTA. Now, most of the job loss today is from automation, but the people who lost their jobs in my area over the years, they literally moved like factories over the border in Mexico and started shipping the product back. My cousin Donnie had his last

act at Delphi, which was a supplier for General Motors, was to unbolt the machine from the factory floor, put it in a box and ship it to China. I mean, workers would leave Warren, Ohio, go to Mexico, train workers and come back. So when Trump came in and said NAFTA and her husband passed it, that was a very effective line. But the trade thing speaks to the inequality. It speaks to wage stagnation. It speaks to economic insecurity. Trade is now, unfortunately in the country, that's what people hear. And Trump came in and stole that message from Democrats and was very effective. You know, that is now, unfortunately, in the country. That's what people hear. And Trump came in and stole that message from Democrats and was very effective. whether it is a message problem or a policy problem on Democrats' behalf. Because Hillary Clinton's policy, economic policies, were no different,

and even in some cases more populous than some of Barack Obama's in 2012. Yet, is the Democratic Party having trouble explaining the policies it has, or does it need new policies to win back constituents like yours? I think it's both. You know, I really do. I think it's both. I think people don't trust either party, at least like middle of the road people or moderate Democrats. Maybe it is an independent voters and they didn't trust Democrats and they didn't trust Republicans and they saw Trump as an independent. He was using the Republican Party, but he was an independent. And he was talking about raising taxes on rich people and expanding Medicare. And, you know, he was going to do every he had a populist agenda. And so I think people after years and years and years of frustration and stagnation,

they gave him a shot because they saw him as an independent. He was rich and he had a plane. So, I mean, I mean, maybe he can help us get rich, you know, or at least get out of this mess that we're in. And so they gave him a chance. But I think this election is going to be about ideas. I just I think people are rightfully cynical, rightfully just confused about really what's going on. You on, he stole those voters. So that's why I'm trying to talk in very specific terms. I think electric vehicles is a really specific way to go. And you show people how it's growing. It relates to American manufacturing. It's a new industry. I don't, you know, I used to say this back in my district, like, I don't want to get my community chasing the last

best thing. And that's basically what Trump did. Like, I used to campaign on telling people, like, when I was 29 years old, like, look, the steel mills aren't coming back. And if they do, they're not going to have 20,000 people in them. So we've got to shift our mindset to get in front of the next wave that's coming. And so now I'm basically applying that approach to the national effort here. And you look at additive manufacturing growing, you know, 3D printing. In fact, we landed the first center that President Obama put together, a manufacturing innovation center around additive is in downtown Youngstown. Three to five million jobs are going to be grown in additive manufacturing in the next 10 years. Solar and wind growing at 25 to 30 percent a year. Electric vehicles, we're going

to make 30 million. So how do we position not just Youngstown or Akron in my district, but how do we position the United States of America to dominate these industries and then have incentives in the tax code and policies in the government to steer that growth into communities of color, communities that have been left behind in old coal, old steel, old auto, old rubber, Gary, Indiana. I mean, you look at some of these towns, they've been wiped out. That's ridiculous in the United States of America today. And when you look at the fact that 80% of venture capital goes to three states, California, New York, and Massachusetts, 9% less go to women and less than 2% go to people of color. So our policies need to change so we can start drive, like dominate these industries,

ramp up productivity, ramp up growth, and then steer through an industrial policy, the growth to these communities that did a hell of a lot for America for a long time. When we were sending money out west to do the central Arizona project and get water into the desert and grow out the west, that money was coming from the Akron rubber industry. That was coming from the Youngstown steel industry, that western PA coal industry. And so how do we have policies that steer that growth back to some of those communities? How would you incentivize that? There are reasons that the venture capital funding is in these three places, right? And so there needs to be something to encourage them to do that. So I guess two questions would be,

how do you incentivize the movement of investment out of the coastal states into places like Youngstown? And it's industrial policy, but also what you're hinting at is a massive investment, right, of spending of money. Have you thought about how much it would cost to achieve this and how you'd pay for it or would you pay for it? Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, at some point you have to pay for it. I think you do it through the tax code. I think you have Ray Dalio's writing about this double bottom line and triple bottom line where it's not just about your profit, but it's also about some social good.

tax code and incentives through corporate tax and other tax incentives on how to not just be about shareholders with your company, but be about stakeholders, which is also the communities. It also means the workers and how do you incentivize that. The opportunity zones, which are a component of the tax bill, probably the only really positive component of the tax bill in which you create neighborhoods. Governors have done tracks in certain cities about investments. And then there's an opportunity fund where people can put private investment, capital gains into a fund that can be used in these opportunity zones. So you're actually trying to get some wealth out of the hands of the concentrated wealth in the 1% or 10%, get it into these funds that can then reinvest in these communities. But we also need

a massive urban Marshall plan. We have to clean these communities up. They have thousands and thousands of dilapidated homes. In Youngstown, I know we have 3,000 or 4,000. In Gary, Indiana, they have 6,000. Those got to come down. We've got to have a huge making sure we get high-speed internet into these communities. We've got to renovate the downtowns. We've got to renovate the Robbins Theater across the country so that you create a sense of place. You need riverwalks. You need amphitheaters. You need a big, bold vision for how we're going to redo our communities so that young people can come back to those communities. So as these tech companies, maybe they do start in Silicon Valley, but we did a thing, and I think we need to figure out how to institutionalize this in the Department of

Commerce. Ro Khanna and I took a busload of venture capitalists, about 13 of them, in our first trip we called the Comeback Cities Tour, and we put them on a bus, and Bloomberg helped us. We did Youngstown, Akron, Detroit, Flint, and South Bend. We went over to see Mayor Pete. This was, well, a couple years ago. We have innovation happening in these towns. We have entrepreneurship. We just don't have venture capital.

We don't have the money that can help ramp this up. And so having a Department of Commerce that's incentivizing and helping, you're trying to knit the country back together. And what was really interesting about it is that the venture capitalists were fascinated with what people were thinking about and what problems we were thinking about in Youngstown as opposed to Mountain View. It was a total different mindset. And so they saw it as an opportunity. Wait a minute, I can be the first one into the Midwest and someone was doing an RV rental, like an RV timeshare, right? No one in Mountain View riding around in an RV. But someone said, I want to talk to you after. I love when that's like Shark Tank. It's like, oh, we're talking. It was like that.

And we did that. And we went down south. And we did that in South Carolina and Georgia and North Carolina. We're doing another one. We're going to Pittsburgh and Columbus and Youngstown. But those are the kind of innovative ideas we need. So you set the table in these communities with the investment. You incentivize through the tax code.

And then I don't have all the answers. I'm going to sit down with a bunch of smart people and say, how do we do this? I'm the investment. You incentivize through the tax code. And then, you know, I don't have all the answers. I'm going to sit down with a bunch of smart people and say, how do we do this? I'm the president. I'm going to drive this fricking thing. I'm going to drive it. I am going to walk into the Oval Office every morning and think about the people in Youngstown, Ohio, and how do we make it better for them and the communities like them? So give me the venture capital community. Give me, you know, and I think they'll show up to the meeting. And let's put a plan together on how we resuscitate these communities. You know, there's sort of a couple different ways of looking at this, right?

They're like a traditional sort of post-Clinton Democratic policy idea is we're going to use the tax code to incentivize behavior, right? And that's something that President Obama tried to do a lot. And it's often just mixed results, right? And that's something that President Obama tried to do a lot. And it's often just mixed results, right? You either get unintended consequences or people don't actually do it, or businesses will find ways to both take advantage of the tax code and still do what they were going to do anyway. Another option is simply straight New Deal-style federal investment. Is that something you would consider too too, as sort of a – Yeah.

It could be your Midwestern Marshall Plan, if you will, or something. Yeah, yeah. Like a large public works program or something else to put money in the pockets of – not put it directly in people's pockets, but for a job to have a surge in quality, well-paying jobs with livable wages in the Midwest. Yeah, yes. But I think you got to do both. I mean, I don't think we have the luxury today of doing one or the other. We literally need to rebuild because of years of not doing it. So you look at combined sewer in these towns, they have an EPA mandate for a billion dollars.

Where are they going to get a billion dollars? And if they raise rates on their local community users, they're going to drive everybody out of the city. So we have got to go in as the federal level and I think rebuild these communities, clean them up, as I said, Riverwalk Amphitheater, broadband. So then you put every town, small, mid-sized town, on the menu for growth. And so that's the public side. And what we have today, it's like it's either all government or free market, right? Cut taxes and trickle down or a centralized government thing. The reality of it is you need public-private partnerships. You need the opportunity zones. You need the tax code. But they're not going to invest in areas that don't have like the clean pipes to clean the water or parks or river walks and,

you know, cool places and cleaning up these rivers. So it's got to be both. It just has to be. If you talk about the challenge of economic insecurity for American families in Ohio and across the country, where does healthcare fit into that conversation? And how do you think about the next step post Affordable Care Act? I think we have to change the entire conversation around healthcare. And I'll tell you, you know, I've been on the Medicare for All bill since 2007. I tell the new people in Congress I was on it before it was cool. Okay. So like, I think it having an access to some public option, which we tried to do, and just we could not get it through the Senate is essential. We've got to have it. It's good for entrepreneurship. It's good for innovation. It's a social justice issue. It's

for the working class. We've got to do that. We're having the wrong conversation, though, because when you look at the money we're spending on healthcare today, we spend two and a half times as much as every other industrialized country on healthcare and we get the worst results. Now, that's stupid. I mean, anyway, no easy way to say that. And when you look at the fact that 75% of healthcare costs today come from chronic diseases that are largely preventable. Okay? 75% of our healthcare costs come from chronic diseases that are largely preventable, which means we need to have a national conversation, not around healthcare necessarily, because we have to take care of the pharmaceutical industries and all that. I think we're all in agreement on that, especially in the Democratic primary. We need to have a national conversation around health and we need to have a national conversation around food and agriculture and the rates of diabetes today. We have almost half the country, almost half the adults in America have either diabetes or prediabetes. And type 2 diabetes is actually reversible. And there's companies now that are actually paying their, John Hancock, for example, they're

running this vitality program where they actually give their clients 50 bucks to buy healthy food. And because we're seeing results of if you just change your diet, you will reverse your diabetes. And a diabetic costs the healthcare system 2.3 times as much as a non-diabetic. So what do we, this is 75% of our costs. We've got to talk about health and we've got to talk about what we're feeding our kids in our schools. And we can't be pumping them up with additive sugar and highly processed food. They're also in the Medicaid program,

right? So we're paying for them to have food at school. And I went to a school a few months back. It had chocolate milk and Rice Krispie treat for breakfast. Now, I'm from outside of Youngstown. I'm not a prude, right? I drink Miller Lite and watch the Cleveland Browns, and I eat chicken wings. But all I'm saying is, like, 80% of the time, we've got to be doing it right. And we certainly shouldn't be pumping our kids full of additive sugar. It was like 80 grams of sugar. It's maybe 60 or 80 grams. But a lot. A lot of sugar. For this little precious little kid, this is our kid. It's not somebody else's kid. It's our kid. This is our kid in this school, and we're doing this to them. We're diminishing their cognitive ability. We're setting them on a trajectory to get diabetes,

and then we're paying for that too. And then we're going to pay for their healthcare when they're on the Medicaid program, because a lot of these schools, many of these kids are on the Medicaid program. Then we're going to pay in the healthcare system. And you wonder why the American taxpayer is like, I don't trust any of you people. These systems are all broken. And until you fix them, I don't want to pay any more in taxes because they're all broke. And so that's the conversation we need to have around healthcare because that's where the money is. Is the challenge in healthcare though, ultimately that it's a for-profit industry in this country, that everyone's trying to make money on it? Well, yeah. And the system

set up is a disease care system. It's a sick care system. It's not a preventative care system. So part of what we have to do really is reverse the incentives today. The incentives now are, if you get sick, you get taken care of, and the doctor will get paid, and the hospital will get paid, and the health insurance companies will get paid, and everybody gets paid. How do we reverse this idea to incentivize doctors to keep us healthy? How do we incentivize patients? Like I was telling you about this vitality program, right? You start giving patients refunds and rebates for doing things right, you start giving doctors refunds and rebates for helping people get healthy, you're going to begin to shift that system. And that's

the transformational piece of healthcare reform that has to happen, or this whole thing is not going to work. I don't care if it's single payer, public option, individual care, be for service, out of pocket, however you want to say it, it's not going to work. Literally in 15 years, the average American is going to be paying more for healthcare or as much in healthcare as they are for their own salary. 15 years. You brought up food policy. I know this is a passion of yours. When I worked in the White House, Mrs. Obama was leading on this. And we got a lot of blowback from Republicans and even some Democrats about efforts to get kids eating healthier in school, calorie counts on menus, sodium advisories from the FDA. You know, a lot of that comes from legislators and people in the Midwest. Like, how do you sell healthy eating to your constituents? Well, we literally stand on Michelle Obama's shoulders. I mean, she took

the hit, you know, early on, and she was right. And I think the science and the evidence is bearing it out that she was way ahead of her time. And I was there in Congress watching all this go down. And things have changed. I mean, the science is in. Industry is changing. People are investing into healthier foods. They're investing into shifting the market. You notice now when you go into a grocery store, you see a lot more organics. That's one example. So I think things really are shifting. The other tragedy that's happening now is what's happening in rural America. I mean, farmers haven't made a profit in five years. And so I think we need to go there.

We need to have, and I will, and we're going to have an aggressive campaign in rural America and say, look, this hasn't worked out for you. Both the old system around food, the way the president handles the tariffs and everything else, these guys are hurting. One of the highest suicide rates in the country is the American farmer. I mean, that says it all. And so I want to invite the farmers in to be a part of the solution. And how do we make sure they can transition out of the old industrial farming,

row crops, growing stuff that never really ends up as food. You don't really eat it. Like 99% of corn, you don't eat. It goes to feed. it goes to high fructose corn syrup same with soy it goes in the soy oil corn corn oil wheat wheat oil and and the products that we eat that are highly processed that are making us sick let's invite the farmers in and tell them you're gonna make more money under me than you are under president trump we're going to help break the monopoly that is exists now in rural america so by inviting them in, teachers talking about this, I think the American public now knows more than ever before. And I'm at the Milken Institute here in LA. There are big time donors, philanthropists, Milken himself, others, CEO of Whole Foods.

They know this is where it's going. Even someone from Cargill was testifying, not testifying, Congress speak, right? She was on a panel and she was saying that even their company is really starting to move because they're seeing the market begin to move. And that's significant. And this is an issue for me, and it's an issue for a lot of people. So I mean, I'm inviting people into this conversation, timryanforamerica.com. If you're interested, if you think that this is like the way we need to go, because we need that outside push that I don't think Mrs. Obama had. But if you look out, you go on websites, you go on Twitter, there is a significant amount of people that are really energized around the food issue.

And they sit out politics because they think we're so stupid because they're like, you guys are talking about health care and health care costs. No one's talking about food. And I'm giving them an opportunity to do that. I'm going to go back to trade policy for a second because obviously, as you pointed out, an issue that Trump was able to weaponize to win elections, talking about NAFTA. What is a thoughtful, progressive trade policy that Democrats should be running on? I believe, having voted against almost every trade agreement that has been out there, I believe that it is important now for us to figure out a trade policy where we can actually start integrating our economies, especially with the countries in Asia, because China is on the

move. They are aggressive. They are building islands in the South China Sea. They are signing long-term raw material contracts in Africa. They have a base in Djibouti now. They're building another one. They have this Belt Road Initiative. I would encourage all of your listeners to go out and really look at what China is doing. I saw a map the other day. It had a rail line from northeast China to Rotterdam. They're going after it.

You know, oil and gas gas the ports in these countries and so we have got to have a trade regime where we are really figuring out how we integrate with vietnam with deeper with japan because japan is kind of flirting with with china now a little bit um in some of these other pacific rim countries we have to figure out how we at the same time protect the American worker. And I think that if you do this at the same time, the electric vehicle, all the other stuff we talked about, if we don't have the American family gaining in wage, gaining in economic security, we're never going to pass any trade agreement for anything. And so that's got to be the focus. But we do have to combat China with some of our economic policies. And that's a reality we have to face. When you talk about a trade regime that takes on

China, marshalling other Asian countries like Vietnam, that sounds to me a lot like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that President Obama was putting together. Are you saying that a President Tim Ryan would try to build on that to get us back involved? Like, what is different from what President Tim Ryan would do than President Barack Obama was doing? Well, I think we need to make sure that the labor protections are there. We're going through this now with, like like the revamp of NAFTA. It's like, well, we've got some labor protection protections that are in there, but there's no enforcement provisions. that our workers are taken care of. I want to make sure that the environment is taken care of, that we have balanced policies on those. We're not going to solve the climate change issue by ourselves. So we need to make sure we have partners and really set the standards there.

The reality is, though, if we don't do something, like China is, like these countries are starting to move towards China economically. That's a very, very dangerous proposition. So this is going to take a lot of work. I mean, it's going to take a lot of us to get together and sit down, really, how do we figure this thing out? And if we don't, China is going to continue to be on the move. So we've got to get it right. But if it's not right for the American worker, then it's not going to work for us anyway. The other debate that is happening in Washington is about the Mueller report.

Do you believe that... It reminded me of law school. It was brutal. I thought it was kind of a snappy narrative. Do you believe that Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses? I do. I think he obstructed justice. Yeah, I do. I think on multiple occasions. I mean, the most clear was when the legal counsel said, whatever you do, Mr. President, don't talk to Jeff Sessions. And the phrase was obstruction. Like we're worried about obstruction. That was the word they used. And two days later, he's at Mar-a-Lago like, hey, come on over here. I want to talk to you. And it's clear. How do you think your House Democratic majority should

proceed now? I think we're doing it the right way. I think I have a lot of confidence in Jerry Nadler. I've known him my entire career. I have confidence in Speaker Pelosi. I think we are going down the right track. We have these hearings. To the extent we can have Mueller testify, people from the administration testify, it's got to be live and the American people need to see what's going on. That's critically important because all of these other testimonies happen behind the scenes. And so nobody really kind of knows what's going on. And again, you're, you're trying to talk to the person in Youngstown, Ohio, who just lost their job or is dealing with taking their kids to school. And, you know, it's like back and forth

between divorced parents. I mean, the stuff that people go through, they're not really paying attention. So having a, a real thoughtful approach of how we get this information out to the American people, I think is critically important. And then let's see where it goes. And if we got to go down that road, then we have to. But again, we know the Senate's not going to take it up. Like there's no way Mitch McConnell's going to like take up, you know, or pass anyway, convict him. And, you know, I mean, we'reict him. And, you know, I mean, we're already struggling with the subpoenas. I mean, I think there's an emerging constitutional crisis happening here. Do you think there is value, whether historically or morally or

constitutionally, in if Trump committed impeachable offenses, having the House impeach him, even if we know that he was not going to be removed in the Senate, is that important to send a message that conduct like this will not be allowed to pass? Or is it a potentially a waste of time and resources to do that if you know what the end result is going to be? Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I go back and forth, to be quite honest with you. You know, because we do too. It's a constant topic on the podcast. Yeah. It's really, I mean, it's hard because impeachment is a political decision. I mean, that's why it's in Congress. So it's political. So weighing the political context for our party and the election is important. And to see Trump running around in six months saying the Senate said I'm exonerated,

you know, and then wasting six months not talking about what have you done about General Motors in Northeast Ohio? What have you done about electric vehicles? What have you done about, you know, lifting people up in this economy? Because he's running around, you know, talking about how great the economy is. We need to be talking about how great it is not for so many people. And that would really derail any message of like, he's not, he didn't deliver for you, which is what I'm saying. Like he did not, he made these promises. I heard him. He was in Ohio and he told people not to sell their house. And that was just months ago. And we're losing jobs left and right now. And we will get completely off of that message. And then that worker in

Youngstown at Falcon Transport is going to say, these guys aren't talking about me. It's all this politics and everything else. So I go back and forth. But at this point, I'm leaning like, let's let Chairman Nadler do his thing. When we think about pulling together a coalition that can get us to 270, we have to do two things, right? This is just the pure math of living in an electoral college system is we have to win back those voters, the people who voted for you and voted for Trump in 16, people voted for Barack Obama and voted for Trump. But we also have to engage the more than 4 million Obama voters who didn't turn out. How do you think about the balance between exciting progressive Democrats that get involved in the process and winning over so-called moderates in states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania? Big aspirational vision for the country.

Pennsylvania. Big aspirational vision for the country, you know, the dominating these industries, setting the country right, reforming education, focusing on getting healthy and vibrant in the country. Like, let's go. We are in a competition with China right now that no one in America is really talking about. It's a centerpiece of what I talk about, but we're not having this conversation. And I'm telling you, this is the dominating politic happening today is our relationship with our competition with China. Even, you know, like that all makes sense, like in a vacuum of this is the things that are going to come out of my mouth as a candidate to voters. But that's not how elections work, as you know. And so if you are our Democratic nominee, you're saying, we're going to talk about the economy, we're going to talk about the economy. And Trump is out there. He's probably got a nickname for you. And he's screaming about immigration, countries being invaded by MS-13.

What is your theory for engaging with Trump to make sure your message does not get lost? It's going to be a united country versus a divided country. And I think emotionally right now, the entire country is completely frustrated with how divided we are. And they know that the president intentionally tries to divide us. That's his goal with everything he does. And it can be, you know, LeBron James and Maxine Waters or John McCain and, you know, Barbara Bush. It's immigration, divide, divide, divide, divide. It has caused so much anxiety in our country. And I want to know what the national stress level is right now. I was in Iowa and some gentleman in the back of the room said, I have PTS, post-Trump syndrome. He said, we're exhausted out here. They are exhausted with the division. And what I'm going to present is like, look,

yeah, you're right. You know what? We can have a 10-point plan on this and a 10-point plan on that. If we're not united with a leader who actually wants to respect everyone, wants to bring everybody together, has won Trump voters and watched them go to Trump. And I've been watching the gridlock almost my entire career. Going back, I got in right after the Iraq war. I've seen this going on and I'm tired of it. And so my pledge is we're going to come together as a country. We're going to take the temperature down. We're going to respect each other. We're going to care about each other. Doesn't mean we're always going to agree. And we're going to have fights. And I'm Irish. I say, like, the old Irish saying, is this a private

fight or can anyone get into it? Like, I'm down with it. I'm down with the political, you know, brass knuckles. Fine. But we've got to come together. The challenge of unity is it's a two-way street, right? Barack Obama ran around the country in 2008 with a very unifying message. He won a massive victory by modern standards, 53% of the vote, also picking up states that Democrats have not won since in a century. And before he's even sworn in, John Boehner says he's not going to work with him on saving the economy. And Mitch McConnell says his top priority is defeating Barack Obama. How can you as president succeed where President Obama failed in uniting the country? Because Trump may be gone. He may be back at Mar-a-Lago. He might be in prison. Who knows?

But Mitch McConnell's very likely to still be there. And all the forces that created Trump are still there. So how do you bridge that gap where others haven't been able to? real action items that we're talking about around electric vehicles, around food is medicine and getting healthy and changing the incentives, around social and emotional learning in the schools and seeing all the benefits of how that works of increased test scores and all of this stuff by actually taking care of the trauma that our kids are experiencing every day. our kids are experiencing every day. When we talk in specifics, those issues are crossing party lines. Like if you look at talking about health, that's not a political, that's not like, what side are you on? Like we're going to get healthy as a country and we're going to incentivize doctors and patients to get rebates and refunds for getting healthy. Is that Democrat or Republican? I mean, nobody knows. Sounds smart to

me. Same with social and emotional learning. It's backed by the Brookings Institution. It's backed by the American Enterprise Institute. It has bipartisan support. You talk about helping vets. We're doing a lot around trying to heal vets through alternative treatments like yoga and meditation and acupuncture. there's Democrats and Republicans. I mean, one of my best vet supporters is a Republican. So by campaigning on these specific issues around the economy, is an electric vehicle, is that Democrat or Republican? You know, I mean, we're losing auto jobs. This is the next generation coming. So point is, talk about specifics. I think it's going to be a lot like 92 in the sense that, you know, like Carville used to say, you got to explain it to them.

You know, like explain to people what your specific plan is. And then when you get elected, it is a mandate of sorts. And then, you know, you may have some advantage, not that you're going to pass the whole agenda, but you're going to have the support of the American people. This is obviously a very crowded field with whatever it is, 20 people running now, everyone from vice president to a mayor to members of Congress. And let's say folks are listening to this and they're very interested in what you're saying. They like your proposals. They like your proposals. They like your message. And then they discover that up until a few years ago, a Democratic campaign president

was someone who defined themselves as pro-life and was a member of the NRA. Why should that not give progressive Democratic voters pause about Tim Ryan? I think progressives are open-minded. They make decisions based on evidence and experience. And my experience, you know, I came into Congress as a Catholic school kid from Northeast Ohio. My position on abortion, you know, was something I quite frankly didn't consider a whole lot. I was a pro-life member. I started working with Rosa Delora, who was a pro-choice member. I started working with NARAL on trying to increase access to birth control and contraception.

And through that process, I, for the first time in my life, met women who had abortions and who had very complicated circumstances that they went through. And you can see that my position slowly through committee votes and everything over the course of my career started to change. And it got to the point where I just was going to change. And I wrote an op-ed in the Akron Beacon Journal. And, you know, it was one of those things. Like if you don't trust me on it, like there's nothing I can do, but it was an, an honest evolution because of, I met people and you can talk to like people at NARAL now and they will tell you like, Tim was very open-minded. We worked with him really well. We had an honest dialogue,

even when I was a pro-life person, like we were trying to figure out how we solve a problem. And they were very open-hearted and I was open-hearted and things just kind of went down that direction to where I couldn't think, I did not think that the government should be between a woman and her doctor. And the same thing happened with the NRA in which, you know, after watching these terrible school shootings, that it changed me. I mean, it just, you know, after watching these terrible, uh, school shootings that it changed me. I mean, it just, I hope, I think it like it affected everybody in the country and to just watch the NRA not even want to try to be a part of the solution on anything. Like they didn't even want to have a conversation. And that to me was offensive. I gave all my NRA money back to the gun control groups and said, you know, I'm done.

I mean, this is – and again, you can see my votes evolve slowly over time in my committee where people try to put riders on bills for these different things. And again, it's like, look, I mean, all I can tell people is a progressive is like, I met people, I learned things, I watched, my heart was affected by what I saw and who I met. And I changed my position, knowing that there would be people saying, oh, he's just, you know, changing his position. So would you campaign on gun safety proposals? Yeah, I have. I mean, I have been.

I think it's an important component. But I will say this. We're talking about social and emotional learning in the schools. I think we've got to start playing offense. I mean, yeah, of course we need an assault weapons ban and background check and Charleston loophole and all of that. But we need to play offense. And when you look at 90% of the kids who do

school shootings actually come from the school or actually in the school. And 70% of those kids say that they felt bullied, they felt traumatized, they felt isolated. And what the social and emotional learning programs do is they really try to connect the kids to each other and build that support system, connect them to the teacher, connect them to the community. And so when the people that evaluated Sandy Hook, they came out with three top three proposals as to how to prevent this from ever happening again. And it was the gun control issues, it was mental health. And it was the gun control issues. It was mental health and it was social and emotional learning. That's what they discovered can best

prevent this from happening in the future. So let's start playing offense in America. I mean, I guess if there's one theme that I'm really going to push, it's like, why do we sit back and accept this idea that we're just surviving? You know, we want to thrive. We want our kids to thrive. We want our communities to thrive. And let's play offense. Like, we know social and emotional learning works.

Let's do it. We know that a small tweak in some of our diet and getting coached by our doctors and rewarding them, that works. Let's go. Let's do it. We know yoga and mindfulness and these things help veterans heal and get off taking 15 prescription drugs a day. What are we waiting for? We know there's going to be 30 million electric vehicles. We know additives growing at 25 to 30% a year. What are we doing?

Every candidate who comes through Pod Save America here has written a book, and those books are almost all the same. They vary in writing ability and storytelling, but they're memoirs or they're bios or slash campaign plans, slash policy platforms. You wrote a book long before our presidential campaign. It's not. It's very different than all these other books, and it's about mindfulness, which I think would catch a lot of people by surprise who've listened to this interview or look at your bio, and it's like, Tim Ryan, Cleveland Browns, chicken wings, Miller Lite, and he's writing about yoga. I'd like to know how you got involved in that, how it became such a passion for you, and would you be our first yogi president?

Yeah, probably. Yeah, so I told you I went to Catholic school. I had a priest, Father Crumley, who was very involved in my Catholic school. I went to John F. Kennedy High School in Warren, Ohio. And he taught me centering prayer. And centering prayer is an old Catholic meditation technique that the Catholic monks used a thousand years ago. And I loved it. It was like, you know, quiet time, great for your head and all that other stuff. And then I also knew about Phil Jackson. I was a,

you know, athlete growing up. So Phil Jackson, the coach of the Chicago Bulls, dating myself, right? And it's not LeBron and Kobe. It's like Michael Jordan. Phil Jackson taught meditation yoga to his players, and they obviously performed at very, very high levels. And I thought, Catholic priest is a great guy, and Phil Jackson, my favorite coach, there's got to be something here. And it sent me on a journey to really explore different kinds of meditation over the course of my life. And right after President Obama got elected in 08, I was getting to the point where I was almost burnt out. I mean, I had been in Congress now six, seven years, traveling Ohio, campaigning with everybody. We had taken the majority back in 06. And I went on a five-day retreat right after

the election. And it was more and more silence over the course of that retreat. And to the point at the end, there was 36 hours of silence. And it was basically you try to follow your breath. Your mind will go to the past and the future. And you try to bring it back to your breath. And what happens is your stress level goes down because you're thinking about the present moment as opposed to being anxious about the past or the future, which is all it is. It's stress, like what I say stupid last week to somebody, my wife, my kid, whatever. And what do I worry about in the future? And so I had a really profound experience of how powerful the present moment is and how you can actually cultivate being in the zone like an old athlete.

I'm thinking like this is like being in the zone. Like you can be in flow and you can actually get your mind in that state. And I'm years and years away from having ever been an athlete. And I immediately thought, boy, these vets coming back could really use this. I immediately thought, boy, these vets coming back could really use this. You know, I thought that this would be great for our healthcare system because stress is such a killer. You know, it causes inflammation and inflammation causes high blood pressure and heart disease and all this other stuff. And, um, and our school kids, like I just thought my, your, your focus, your concentration level goes like, you can really – it's like sharpening a blade.

You can really become super sharp, which like you see Tom Brady. You see LeBron James. You see Kobe Bryant. It's like how do they get that way? I mean they do these practices. So I became a very passionate advocate for it because it's cheap and there's no side effects and it can have tremendous benefits for people that I hope people will try it. You know, I'm not, I don't like really push it down anybody's throat, but I do, I do say that it can be very, very beneficial. And so I became a very passionate advocate for it.

And I do some hot yoga too, a little beat up athlete's body. Hot yoga makes me feel good. Last question. You have a choice. You, Tim Ryan, can win the 2020 election or the Cleveland Browns can win the Super Bowl? Oh, my God. That is an unfair, totally unfair question. It would be close, but I would take being president.

Okay. Well, I hope you don't have to run for re-election. Yeah. No, it's been great. But we're excited about the Browns this year. It's like finally we got some game. Yeah, you have high expectations now. We're keeping them moderated.

We don't want to get nutty. But, yeah, we're excited. You trade for a couple of flamboyant wide receivers from New York, and you might not work out that way. Yeah, yeah. Well, fortunately they're friends. Landry and Odell are old friends, so hopefully. And Baker, he's a grinder.

I mean, he's great. He's like there 7 in the morning. He's like going. So we're really excited about it. And I'm excited about the opportunity to be here. I'm big fans of you guys. And, you know, I'm excited about trying to build something. I mean, I think people over the course of this interview can really see that I'm trying to talk about things differently.

I'm trying to change the conversation, you know, and definitely want to invite people to come to TimRyanForAmerica.com and try to, you know, be a part of what I think can be a really big shift in the country. And I'm excited about it. All right, Congressman Tim Ryan, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save America. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Outro Music Bye.