By: AIF Staff
Earlier this Spring, American Idea Foundation President and former House Speaker Paul Ryan served as the keynote speaker for Oklahoma University’s 2024 Presidential Lecture Series. While on campus, Ryan spoke with local media outlets, met with students, and was a featured guest on Conversations with the President, a podcast hosted by OU President Joseph Harroz Jr..
In the podcast interview, Speaker Ryan discussed his experiences as the leader of the legislative branch from 2015-2019. He shared advice for students, talked about transitioning out of politics and pursuing other meaningful vocational efforts, and detailed how current OU students and recent graduates can positively impact their communities. Excerpts of the podcast, edited lightly for clarity, follow. Listen to the full interview by clicking here.
Ryan offers advice to OU students
“Scale new learning curves, that is a key piece of advice. Always be hungry for learning. Always be hungry for knowledge. And whatever you do, have a good attitude.
I tell this to my kids; I tell this to our interns and new staffers. If you’re coming out of college, you’re bright, ambitious, and I assume you’re hardworking. These are things you must have and often are taken for granted. The difference-maker is: Do you have a good attitude? Are you hungry and is there no task beneath you?
The knock on this current young generation who are coming out of college is they feel “entitled.” They feel like they should automatically arrive at success because they saw it on TV and this should automatically happen for them. The people who think like that are not going to do as well as those who are hungry and ambitious, who have a good attitude and have humility. Oklahomans have humility… so you’re already off to a good start! Lastly, I would say that you have two ears and one mouth, so use them in that proportion.”
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“The best advice is put the phone down, get out of the social media mediums, and do what you can to grow civil society, which is the space between ourselves and our government, where we live our lives and where we actually relate to each other. Do whatever you can to try and bring civility back to our spaces through your interactions. Get to know and be friends with people who are not like you, that’s really important.”
Ryan on a possible “third act” to his career
“The third career is either to become the Ambassador to Ireland when I’m in my 70s, because I’m an Irish Catholic guy, or to do some [more] public service. I’m not saying I want to run for anything, but just another round of public service after doing business and philanthropy.”
Ryan on the biggest changes in American politics
“It’s deinstitutionalized in a lot of ways. I hate saying this. I mean, I spent 25 years in the Capitol building, 5 as a staffer and 20 as a Member. I have such a deep affection for the institution.
The quickest way to describe it is: 10 years ago, the people that came to Congress were Tom Cole-types, Stephanie Bice-types. These were policy people who wanted to go do policy things, who wanted to effect change. They wanted to pass legislation. They wanted to make a difference. They wanted to represent their constituents and do what the Founders intended.
But what happened in this new digital age that we are in, which started about 10-12 years ago, is we have a new wing of both political parties that are ascendent. I call them the entertainment wings of the party. These people have realized they can come to Congress and get famous really fast. If they’re provocative, if they’re entertaining, if they can be good on social media or on cable news, they can build themselves into a household name.
In the old days, if you wanted to succeed in politics, you had to be good at legislating…. It was a meritocracy that you scaled, and the unit of measurement was policy and persuasion. That’s not how the entertainment wing works. Their units of measurement are entertainment and provocation….
This has brought a new crop of people to Congress who are not there to play the team sport of legislating and compromise, negotiating and advancing principles. It’s brought a new crop of people who are there to be famous, to entertain, and that means they have to one-up the last person who did the same thing. It’s why voting against rules – and I know that’s an inside baseball thing – is now an ordinary thing, but it was unheard of when I was there just five years ago. The motion to vacate, which was there for just extreme circumstances, is [now] done because someone doesn’t like a bill that came to the floor which a majority of Congress supported. You see a degradation of the standards and I’d say the quality [of representation]. It’s a bit of deinstitutionalization.”
Ryan on foreign threats to democracy
“Our adversaries are definitely out to undermine us. Our adversaries – China, Russia, Iran, and a little bit North Korea, though they aren’t as good at it – are trying to do two things. They are trying to demonstrate to the world that their form of government – tyranny, autocracy, dictatorships – is better than democracy. Their form of government is faster. It’s leaner and meaner where one guy makes a decision and things get done. I think that’s wrong, and I think they’re wrong, but they want to prove that.
The other thing they want to prove is they’re trying to get us to hate each other inside of our countries. They’re trying to hyperpolarize America and democracy so that it renders itself incapable of solving big problems. They want to get us so wrapped around the axel, so conflicted and polarized that we can’t reach consensus and make decisions to solve our problems, to put our best face forward, to defend our national security, to grow our economies. They believe that we will relativize ourselves into self-immolation in the 21st century because of this massive polarization….
The whole debate about TikTok is a good example where they are trying to, from the outside, stir up the public. “Russian bots” is a phrase we use all the time, the Russians have entire buildings full of people whose goal is to inject poison into our public discourse online and get us stirred up and hating each other.
We’re doing a pretty good job on our own, but they are adding accelerant to it. It’s clearly an attempt by illiberal regimes to try and show that democracy doesn’t have the stuff that it takes. Now, at the end of the day, I think we’re going to win this thing. I think the advancement that comes with innovation, free enterprise, private property rights means we’re going to lead on technology. We are going to win the race on quantum computing and win the race on AI, so long as we don’t regulate it to death, and I think we’re going to win at the end of day but it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
Ryan on the journey to being Speaker of the House
“After we lost the 2012 race when I ran with Mitt [Romney] for Vice President, I went back to being the Budget Committee Chair. I wrote all of our budgets back in those days. My goal was really to become the Chair of the Ways and Means Committee which oversees the issues I’m very passionate about: poverty issues, entitlement reform, tax reform, trade, welfare reform. So, I achieved that and in early 2015, I became the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
I reached the goal that I had set for myself in Congress to work on those issues that fell within the Committee’s jurisdiction and then, this may sound a little familiar, a House Freedom Caucus member filed a motion to vacate against John Boehner. If that sounds a little familiar it’s because it’s happening again now, in real time. It happened recently with Kevin McCarthy and so, John Boehner, under that circumstance… he decided to leave and the next person in line, and this will sound a little familiar as well, was Kevin McCarthy. I was nominating Kevin [for Speaker in October 2015] and I was supporting him to do the job. It turned out he didn’t have the votes for it, and I became the consensus candidate.
I got drafted into the job. The good thing about my particular situation was I was able to set the terms for taking the job. [I told my colleagues that] I’ll do this, if two things happen: 1) We have an agenda that we compile that’s based on our principles, we run on that agenda and take it to the country so that if we win, we earn the right to put int in place. I wanted mine to be a substance-driven Speakership and a policy-driven Congress, not fighting about politics but fighting for policy. And 2) I had a young family and I wanted to be home on weekends. The Speaker is expected to raise all the money for [House Republicans] and it’s a big on-the-road job. I wanted to be home on weekends and I learned that it was very difficult to do that. I was basically on the road in Wisconsin on Saturdays, on the road every other weekday, and I was basically home on Sundays.
At the end of the day, why I just did two terms as Speaker and I didn’t want to do any more is because I had kids in high school, who I was only seeing on Sunday. If you have high school kids, you want to get to know them and for them to get to know you before they’re off to college and on with life.
I’m a Catholic. We do guilt really well and I was just feeling very guilty about not being around for them. We had a tremendously successful session that last session – criminal justice reform, tax reform, opioids, the cancer moonshot, all those things got done. I felt like that was a good note to retire on so I retired in the beginning of 2019.”
To watch or listen to Speaker Ryan’s speech at the University of Oklahoma, click here.