Congressman Tim Ryan is our guest for Episode 38 of the Reboot Podcast. Tim is a special guy, and not just because he’s a congressman, and not just because he’s from Ohio – though that’s pretty great too – but because he’s committed to bringing heart, humanity, mindfulness and a long-term focus into a space that doesn’t always welcome it: government. In this conversation (originally recorded in November), Tim shares his journey to mindfulness, his ongoing practice in noticing his own inner conversation, and his commitment to mindfully planting seeds for the future and having the patience to watching them grow.

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“Yeah, you can be a congressman and have a nice title and feel very rewarded in your work and
at the same time, be tired and exhausted and feel like you are not doing enough.”
Welcome to the Reboot Podcast.
Hi, I'm Dan Putt; I’m a partner here at Reboot. When you stop to really notice, it's amazing how
active our inner dialogue is. What are you saying to yourself right now? Maybe you're hearing
the sound of my voice, kind of thinking, "Oh, all right, when do we get to Jerry?" Maybe you are
thinking about an email you just wrote or one that you need to write, or maybe you are thinking
about your ever-growing to-do list. I can just feel the anxiety welling up within you, or maybe
it's a bit of all of the above.
As I was listening to today's podcast, I was noticing how just even this morning, my inner voices
were in complete control and successful in pulling me out of the moment. There I was, with my
22-month-old daughter, full of energy while she sat at the breakfast table. She was singing and
playing and clapping her hands and asking me to play "happy-clappy hands" as she calls it. And I
was in my head, "Oh, how am I going to get that done today? Do I need to ask for help? Maybe I
need to check my next email." I could feel the voices almost speaking louder like they wanted to
drown out my daughter.
The most important conversation we have is with ourselves, so what are you saying right now?
Today, we have Congressman Tim Ryan on the podcast, in a conversation that was recorded
back in November. Tim is a special guy and not just because he is a Congressman, but because
he is committed to bringing heart, humanity, mindfulness and a long-term focus into a space that
doesn’t always welcome it, the government. He shares his journey to mindfulness with Jerry, his
ongoing practice, noticing his own inner conversation and his commitment to mindfully planting
sees for the future and having the patience to watch them grow.
**
A Reboot Circle is a hand-selected group of peers in matching roles, who meet in supportive,
Reboot coach facilitated sessions twice a month. We just recently started accepting applications
for new roles including head of product, CTO, people Ops and VP in marketing groups, and this
is for the very first time. So, what are these groups really like? We asked a current member to
share his experience with Reboot coach and facilitator, Andy Crissinger.
"Hi, my name is Bobby Brannigan; I'm co-founder and CEO at Mercato. One of the biggest
challenges that I have faced as an entrepreneur is in navigating the waters of solving hard
problems while under extreme stress. You can't be open and honest with everyone about your
business because you don’t want to scare people away, you don’t want to get people nervous
because that is going to affect their ability to do what they have to do. At the same time, there are
a not a lot of people that actually could related to these situations. So, having a group that you
could turn to is extremely beneficial, and allows you not only to spend more time thinking about
these issues and how to better solve them, but hearing yourself explain them out loud and getting
people to question different routes that you might think about taking and that kind of stuff is
invaluable. It's been great to have that group to really think in a much deeper sense, with people

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that are sharing the same challenge and they are really trying to grow and really get out of that
comfort zone just as I am. That's been really excellent for me."
So, who do you turn to? What if you had a community of peers who are committed to supporting
you in solving your greatest business challenges? A group that knows intimately the very
challenges you face every single day in your role, a group you knew you could always count on.
There is great power in knowing you are not alone. Learn more about Reboot Circles and apply
for a group in your role at reboot.io/circles.
**
"Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present." – Alan Watts.
Jerry Colonna: Hi Tim, it's really great to see you again, and it's been a long time since we
saw each other.
Tim Ryan: Yeah, good to see you.
Jerry: So, before we get started, you know, I'm excited about this, I haven’t said this to
you out loud, I'll say it to you now, you are a bit of a hero to me. Why don’t you
tell us who you are?
Tim: I'm Tim Ryan, I am a Congressman from Ohio, I've been in the United States
Congress for 13 years, and I have a wife and three beautiful kids and two pretty
cool dogs back in Ohio, and I spend three or four days of my week in
Washington, at the capital.
Jerry: Yeah, well, my sympathies for having to spend that much time in Washington.
Just kidding. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a bit of an
unusual thing, as I explained it to you before we went on the air and started
recording, most of the guests that we have on our podcast are entrepreneurs, and
you know every now and then we'll do an author and as I mentioned to you, a few
months back, our mutual friend and teacher Sharon Salzberg, the great Buddhist
teacher, was on and we had a delightful conversation really about mindfulness
and leadership and you know, that's what I was hoping to have a conversation
about with you, Tim. Folks probably are not aware, but we met, I guess, maybe
two years ago, really because of your commitment – you often speak about
mindfulness, I often speak about it in terms of meditation, but we met because of
your commitment to a kind of meditative awareness and mindfulness and practice.
Is that right?
Tim: Correct, yeah.
Jerry: And I remember a talk you gave at Wisdom2.0 right around the time of the – or it
was a conversation I think you had, right around the time that your book, A
Mindful Nation was released. So, I'm going to plug it; A Mindful Nation by

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Congressman Tim Ryan is a terrific book and it's really from where I sit, a kind of
call to action, and not just an exploration of mindfulness and leadership. Is that a
fair description of the book?
Tim: Yeah, no doubt about it that once you learn about it, learn the impact that it can
have, you know, you develop some kind of obligation to try to push it and
promote it and get it out because it can be so helpful.
Jerry: So that's one of the things I wanted to talk about, it was you know so many of the
guest, so many of the people that engage with the podcast are, in one form or
another, struggling and at this point after 30 or so episodes, people are used to me
talking about meditation and Buddhism, so I'm not going to apologize for that
anymore because I know that in my own struggles with depression, and in my
own struggles to find my own center that in addition to medication, in addition to
good therapy was – there was a relief that came when, after sticking with it for a
year or two, that I began to actually alter my relationship with my own feelings
and my own thoughts and so I'm a big proponent of exploration of mindfulness
generally and very specifically the role of mindfulness in leadership. And I'm
seeing you nod, I think you know what I'm talking about; is that right?
Tim: Absolutely. Essential.
Jerry: So tell me, and I've never heard this story, how did the heck did you start, because
none of us – very few of us grow up meditating.
Tim: Yeah, well, I grew up Catholic and –
Jerry: Guilty as well.
Tim: Yeah, and so a lot of my childhood was spent in and around the church, and I had
my grandparents who lived two blocks from me, and just growing up I remember
there were rosaries all over the house. I mean they were just around the bedpost,
you know my grandparents were always praying it; I would ride my bike down
their house in the summertime, the radio would be off, the TV would be off, and
they would be praying the rosary –
Jerry: Okay, I need to interrupt, so I need to ask a question –
Tim: Yeah.
Jerry: Did you grow up with the pictures of the Pope, Jesus and John F. Kennedy right
next to each other? I did.
Tim: Well, you weren’t alone there, that wasn’t necessarily in our house, but talk of the
first catholic president for sure and it was always religious talk around the house.
The church was the center of the community, but from a contemplative side, they

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prayed the rosary and I remember in high school, I went to a Catholic high school,
played sports and all that, and I remember, my coaches would go – and it wasn’t
just my grandmother at the rosary club, it was my grandfather too and then I
remember my coaches, in school there was a chapel, John F Kennedy High
School where I went, and I remember my coaches going into the chapel. They'd
ring the bell and I'd cross my coach in the hall and one day I looked down and he
was ducking into the chapel and I remember my other coach, an athletic director,
like going into the chapel in the middle of the school day, to say their prayers or
to mediate or whatever it was and I remember going to Mass and walking down
the aisle, and looking to the right and seeing one of the old, legendary, football
coaches in our area, praying the rosary. So the older I get and the more I look
back as to why did I think this was possibly okay for a congressman, athlete,
whatever, to like really embrace the practice the way I did and I think the more
I've been doing it, the more I looked back and reflect on it, it was I had some
really good role models who were my role models in sports and role models in
how you should act and behave, and that included some kind of quiet time in
prayer and reflection and meditation that they – I saw them participate in and not
be ashamed of. They did it in a very public way. And after high school, I had a
priest teach me a centering prayer, which is a Christian-based meditation, mantra-
style kind of prayer and then flirted – I always knew it helped me. I would do it
for two days and I wouldn’t do it for two months; I'd do it for a day, wouldn’t do
it for a year, but every time I did it, I knew – I tried the Deepak Chopra
meditations, the Wayne Dyer meditations, the centering prayer, the rosary, I mean
I've done it all and flirted with it for a good part of my adult life, and then I went
on a five-day retreat when I was about four or five years into my congressional
career. And I'm from Ohio, which is a very busy, political state, always big
elections that decide big things for the country, and I was in congress and I came
on the appropriations committee and kept getting more and more responsibility,
more and more fundraising was needed, and I was just – I wasn’t burn out, but I
was to the point where I knew, I was 35 at the time I said, I'm going to be burn
out by the time I am forty. There's no way I am going to be able to keep this pace
and not be burnt out. So, knowing that I like meditation and knowing that it
helped me, but I couldn’t quite develop the habit, I knew I had to do a retreat. I
had one or two-day retreats in different places and really enjoyed them, but I
knew I needed like a four or five or six-day retreat if I was going to build the daily
habit of doing it and so I found John Kabbat-Zinn on the internet, and he had – at
that point, he was doing what was called the Power of Mindfulness retreat up at
Manila and so I knew of him because a few years earlier he sent his book Coming
To Our Senses, to every member of Congress and I had read some of it, and
especially the part on the body politic, how our collective anxiety makes its way
into our body politic and rest and I really found it fascinating. So, when I saw he
was doing this, I said, I like this guy, and I just signed up. It started two days after
the November election in 2008, the Obama-John McCain election, and so I knew
had a week where I could probably sneak away and no one would know and I did
it. I spent five days in increasingly more periods of silence and it just blew the top

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of my head and changed the way I looked at the world, myself, my role in it and
it's been quite the journey ever since then.
Jerry: Wow, that's a great story. I want to thank you for a couple of reasons; one is,
linking it back to your experience of being a boy and watching your grandparents
brought back memories of my doing the same thing and you know, I had one set
of grandparents that I was closer to than the other, my mother's parents, and
growing up on Brooklyn, I had this very vivid image of my grandmother with her
stack of prayer cards every morning, saying the rosary, and as she got older and
older and more and more of her contemporaries passed away, she would say more
and more of the prayer cards. So she would start her day in a very contemplative,
spiritual way; what began with perhaps an hour and ended up being three hours,
and remembering that and recalling that memory, I think of my own daily
practice, which is I don’t really feel comfortable unless I start my day with, you
know, journaling and meditation. And the problem is it takes an hour-and-a-half
to two hours between when I wake up and I'm ready to start my day. And then the
second thing that it helped me understand is why I was drawn to Tibetan
Buddhism, which is highly ritualistic and reminds me a lot of the Catholic Church
and there's a comfort in those rituals. I often joke, it's like, I like men in big hats,
but there is a comfort in the ritual and that majestry of centuries old contemplative
practices, really regardless of the tradition that it is coming from, but really
associated with taking a moment and really pausing, and increasing a kind of
awareness. And I remember now, having heard your story of your really being
introduced to these modern practices by John Kabbat-Zinn, who is most famous
for books like 'Full Catastrophe Living' and 'Wherever You Are, There You Go' or
whatever it is, I'm mispronouncing it, but really for a secular approach to
mindfulness that is incredibly powerful.
Tim: Yeah.
Jerry: So, thank you for that and thank you for bringing that all in. I also was thinking
about your story about being in your thirties and looking at burn out and for me, a
lot of the listeners know that I was 38 when I hit another point of depression. I
should have been meditating the way you were just before; you know, I hit the –
consequence of that burnout at 38 and I was in the venture business, and really
ended up finding meditation as a practice as a consequence of walking away from
it all. So I relate to the tension point and I wonder if this feels resonant to you, you
know, you are at this sort of high, this pinnacle, here you are, a congressman,
relatively young, 35, and yet you felt the kind of burn out coming, you felt the
tension coming and the dissonance between being at a successful place and
feeling the need for something more is striking to me. I don’t know, does that
resonate with you?
Tim: Yeah, well, all indications and I see this a lot, all indications on the surface are
you know, you are happy, you are fine, "I'd love to trade places with that person,
they make this much money, they have this title," and it does help you to really

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understand because part of that understanding is being aware of suffering and
others, and no matter what it looks like, there's a good chance there's something
there. It's not as nice as it seems and everybody has – it's just a nature of being
human, everybody has these ups and downs, these struggles. No matter how good
things go, there is usually something else happening and that helped me not only
understand that that was happening in my own life, – I guess I was semi-aware
that I was going to be burn out, that's why I went, but did become aware of
holding both of these things in the same space where yeah, you could be a
Congressman and have a nice title and feel very rewarded in your work and at the
same time, be tired and exhausted and feel like you are not doing enough, or got
to take so much effort just to get a little something done. You can have both of
those going on at the same time, but to me, if you are not aware of both of those at
the same time, then you'll habitually put your attention on something as opposed
to have a choice of where you want it. Like this can be here, but I'm not going to
focus on it and I'm not going to ruminate on it, I'm not going to make it a bad
habit to just stay in that space. I can now – it's there, but I can choose to put my
attention on the other things that are going to help sustain me and that to me was
the real awareness of you can have the title and the glory, but at the same time
have this other stuff going on and everybody else has got other stuff going on and
so how do you – what do you choose to put your attention on, for me is the
ultimate awareness.
Jerry: You know, I have to be honest with you; in this moment, I'm really moved by
what you've just said because I realized I have been carrying a somewhat two-
dimensional view of who you are, not only – even though we have met and we
have talked before, but a two-dimensional view, because I see, I can't help but
have this label and even though I am looking over your shoulder in your office
and seeing pictures of gorgeous family, you know, I'm projecting on to you, a
label, 'Politician', 'Congressman', and what strikes me is when you said, when you
referenced to the suffering and the fact that people are suffering and I realized that
in my own myopic view, I was not – I was surprised, "Wait a minute, there's
somebody in the House of Congress who knows that veterans are suffering? That
people are homeless in the streets?" I mean, I'm both moved to a point of almost
tears and hardened and I am not going to put you on a pedestal, you're just a guy –
Tim: Just a guy.
Jerry: Just a guy who is working, but I think that we have hit upon something really
powerful which is that there is something very painful that happens when you sit
and pause and meditate, and that is you have opened yourself up to the fact that
there's suffering around us. Does that resonate?
Tim: Yeah, around us and inside of us, and the big thing for me at the end of the five-
day retreat, when I ended up in tears, was that you realize – of we talking about
your grandparents, your grandparents are gone and I thought experiencing a very
high level of awareness that you experience after being in silence for a number of

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days, but boy, how many moments I had with them where I was not there, I was
somewhere else and the chances are gone now. So, how do you both embrace that
– you cry or whatever because you miss them, but then now I have kids, now I
have dogs, now I have a wife, so as painful as that was, it's always that reminder
that you know, these moments are precious and so be there for them and I think
that again the choices that you have to make. You can get in a space where you
miss your grandparents or you miss people who aren’t with you any longer, which
I think fine and really healthy to do that, but it can't consume you. You have to
take the lesson, extract the lesson from that and help that increase your awareness
for the life you are living now and use that almost like a tool, a touchstone;
"Yeah, that sucked, I was stupid back then, I did stupid things, I was mindless,"
whatever but I'm not going to do that with my kid. I got a 17-month-old baby at
home and I just watch them and I'm with them, and you know, you get distracted
and sometimes, I'll get on my phone, like I'm babysitting.
Jerry: Yeah.
Tim: You can't call it babysitting because it's your own kid right?
Jerry: That's right.
Tim: I've gotten yelled for saying that, but I'm watching Brady and I'll have an email or
something, and he's doing really cute, and I get into my phone and then you know
I go from one email to take care of and you go down to the next one, and five or
ten minutes are by and I look up and he's the cutest little thing and I'm like, "What
am I fooling around with this stupid email for? This is not even relevant." You set
it down and you start paying attention again and it's just that constant – it's not a
struggle, but it's a constant, like, challenge really to stay in the moment that you
are living in.
Jerry: Absolutely. And I'm going to give you give you some affirmation about that; you
are not my congressman because I don’t live in your district, but you are still the
people's representative and dude, I need you to do what you just described. I need
you to be present for Brady, and the reason I need you to be present for Brady is
because then when you do what we've asked you to do, you'll do it with the
fullness and the authenticity of your heart because Brady will never be far from
your heart.
Tim: Right.
Jerry: So, and the reason I say that is because I viscerally felt – like I can experience it
too, I've got clients – there's a mean that we use when we get distracted at work,
and the mean is when we find ourselves distracted, then we chastise ourselves and
say, "Oh come on, did anybody die?" Well, the truth is, you are in Congress, yes,
people will die. And so the energy behind the anxiety makes a ton of sense and
how do I, as one of your constituents in a broad way, want you to go into that

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decision? With your full heart, with an awareness that there is a consequence to
every single one of the decisions that you all make, and that consequence has
meaning for me, for my children, for your children and your dogs and you wife,
for the people that we agree with, for the people that we don’t. I don’t mean to
slip into chastising, but it's sort of like I want to affirm that and support you on
that because I think you know, to go back to the point about John Kabbat-Zinn, so
much of what we do in the body politics is project our unresolved feelings and our
suffering and our anxieties on to each other, and then heaven forbid, we make law
and we solidify that.
Tim: Yeah.
Jerry: And I promise not to get too political, but we start to say "We are going to close
the doors to the country because we are afraid," not "We are going to examine the
process carefully and make sure that the people are safe" right?
Tim: Yeah, well, not to get political, but you bring the issue up that’s hot right now,
with everything that has happened in Paris, but there's just a high level of fear in
the country and so a week or two ago, we were presented with an opportunity to
deal with the refugees coming in and as soon as the issue was brought up, I mean,
it wasn’t five seconds and the President was going to veto – and I'm a Democrat,
the President was going to veto what the Republicans were going to do before he
even knew what the republicans were going to do –
Jerry: Right.
Tim: – and the Republican were calling the Democrats soft on terrorism or soft on
security before they even like understood the full process of how refugees come
into the country. And nobody budged from those two positions and again like we
were thrown in the middle of it and when the actual legislation came, it was kind
of what you said, why don’t we examine this process very carefully, given the
new circumstances, and let's see what it looks like and are there ways for us to
improve it and people to take responsibility for it. And so I found myself parting
ways with my own party and getting kicked around viciously on social media that
I hated refugees. I'm like, my great grandfather was an immigrant that came here
from Italy; like this is like – it's a ridiculous proposition, but to your point of like
especially I feel like, since I have a family and I have a son, I am totally
comfortable now with making decisions that I know are, with my own judgment,
are the best thing for the country, that I feel are the best thing for the country.
Now I may be wrong, but I can say, this is what I feel, this is what I think, this is
what I feel, this is how I am going to cast my vote, and let this chips fall where
they may because I'm just not going to get into the anxiety of trying to be a
pleaser. I just – you can't do it. You'll burn yourself out.
Jerry: You know, part of what comes to mind is, one of the podcast episodes was with a
dear friend and mentor in many ways, the writer, Parker Palmer and he likes to

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say that violence is what we do when we don’t know what to do with our
suffering.
Tim: Wow.
Jerry: Violence is what we do when we don’t know what to do with our suffering and
remembering that, as we talk through these issues, is really an important issue
because if we want to decrease the violence, if he's right and I suspect he is, then
if we want to decrease the violence in the world, we actually have to do
something about the suffering. And in a similar fashion, polarization and hardness
of feelings, which is the least intellectually sound way to debate important issues,
is what we do when we don’t know what to do with our fear. Now, there are
colleagues of yours, I'm sure, who are trying to please and are trying to govern by
polls and all that stuff, we leave their karma to themselves, but on every issue,
there are people who actually are heart-felt in their positions in their views, and
when Paris happens, who isn’t afraid? I happened to be driving in Bolder, and one
of the first thoughts that I had was, "Oh boy, thanks goodness I'm not in New
York." Then I thought of my children and then I said, "Oh thanks goodness my
children aren’t in New York" and then I thought, "Oh my god, there are people
that I love who are in New York." And this was all in the space of a nanosecond.
Tim: Yeah.
Jerry: And any reaction, any intellectual reaction I had, do this, do this, do this, do this,
unless I have the power of contemplation to pause and work with the feelings that
arise, it's not going to be the most intellectually sound decision that I make. It's
going to come from a place of not knowing what to do with my fear and suffering
and it's a kind of violence.
Tim: Yeah.
Jerry: Immediately saying yes, immediately saying no.
Tim: Yeah.
Jerry: Does this resonate?
Tim: Yeah, well, it's crazy because it just gets to that point where – and I tried to say
this during this discussion I had with my staff and everyone else in the interviews
I did after, it's okay to be afraid, it's do you like fear to control you? And does that
fear drive your decision-making? You know, if you are not afraid, then there's a
problem. You are the only one. If you are not afraid, you are the only one that's
not afraid and again, it gets to that choice, that choice that you have as to where
you put your attention, and if you have enough space to watch what you watch
kind of unfold in your own mind without really reacting too much to it. You
know, you'll probably reacted some, your body probably tensed up, whatnot, so

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on and so forth, but then what do you do with it? You know, you are grateful that
your kids aren’t in New York. You may have picked up the phone and called
them and just say, "I love you, I'm glad you are not in New York." I mean,
whatever, but you have a choice. I don’t know if you have met or talked with
Michael Gervais, who is the sports psychologist for the Seattle Seahawks, and he
does a bunch of athletes and he has a podcast and he has some clips on the
internet that I watched, and he said something in one of the clips that I watched,
the most important – and he uses this with all his athletes, "The most important
conversation you have is the conversation you have with yourself" and that is
what he tries to teach athletes. You know, if you are over a golf putt and if you are
going to say "I'm going to miss this," good chance you are going to miss it; or
"I'm afraid, I'm nervous, who's watching" you know, "My buddy bet me three
dollars that I'm going to miss the putt-" so, I've really try to adopt that since I've
heard it and use that with my own kids. It's like, what conversation are you having
with yourself? And that is a big indicator as to how you feel, what your outlook
on life is, what mood are you in and if I catch one of the kids in a grumpy mood, I
say, "What kind of conversation are you having with yourself now?" And they
may get irritated at the moment I say it, but I hope over time, it becomes a habit
of, "What am I thinking about right now and is it something I'm just making up?"
That's the thing in the five-day retreat that I really – it was like, I'm just making
this shit up.
Jerry: That's right.
Tim: What am I thinking about here? This is crazy! And in the retreat, you have to put
down your cell phone, you had to put down – you know, it wasn’t the computer,
you weren’t supposed to be reading, you weren’t supposed to be journaling or
anything like that, and so you sit there and you start watching your mind go from
"Why am I sitting here? My back hurts. Why am I sitting here? This is a waste of
time. I should be back home in Ohio, I'm losing votes right now, I could be at this
event; if I stay here this week, I'm going to lose thousands of votes and I'm
probably going to lose my job, you know and then what am I going to do?" And
you watch your mind go through this process of make-belief and you think, do I
do this all the time? No wonder I'm exhausted at the end of the day. I don’t even
know what I'm doing; I'm doing other stuff, but this is happening behind the
scenes and it's such a great awareness to say "Hey, what conversation are you
having with yourself and you have the power to change the inner dialogue."
Jerry: I think that's brilliant, that's absolutely brilliant and again, it – this kind of self-
awareness – you know, the line I often use is, "radical self-enquiry" and the
question I challenge a client to think about is, "What are you up to?" You are
right, I think we slip into that crazy mindset, but the other line that came to mind
was one quick thing, another thing from Parker who likes to say, you know,
quoting Socrates, "The unexamined life is not worth living" and then he adds,
"But if you choose to live your life in an unexamined way, don’t take a job that
involves people."

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Tim: That's good.
Jerry: And I think that's really the point. It's like there is our obligation to each other and
so last question and then we'll start to wrap, the application of this kind of a
mindset, so you and I might disagree in a particular issue in a trans-specific trade
agreement, I don’t even remember what it's called, or this agreement or that
agreement, but allowing the spaciousness for you to have your feelings, which
then inform your intellectual position, that kind of a position, it's easy, here we
are, we are both been on meditation retreats, what's it like being in a place where,
dare I say, there's a lot of fear? What’s it like trying to bring that kind of
mindfulness against the projection of anxiety into the body politics, what's that
like for you?
Tim: Well, I mean, the most difficult part is that you find that that fear is – it's
obviously blocking progress, but it has us spending so much energy in areas that
wont yield any benefits for everybody. Like, we have fights about stupid things
that don’t matter, they end up mattering because if you don’t deal with them, you
create problems and then you have to deal with them, like, we're going to shut the
government down, well, oh shit, now we got to deal with – what do we have to do
to not shut it down because if the government shuts down, although some people
think that it won't matter, it really does. So you spend all these moments and all
this energy trying to solve a problem that was self-inflicted. I mean, I played a lot
of sports growing up, and almost every one of my coaches would say, "I can
handle physical mistakes, but I can't handle mental errors, self-inflicted wounds."
You know, you kick the ball off your shoe when you are trying to dribble and
there's no defender around, you know, that kind of thing, unforced errors, and I
feel like the most frustrating part when you dealing with so much fear is we are
creating a lot of unforced errors that we have to spend a o of time and energy
cleaning up, and so that energy and creativity is not being spent in innovating the
system. The Democratic and the Republics and everybody are in agreement that
the government needs to be innovative, we are working off an old industrial
model, the way the government functions, it's not keeping up, it's not doing what
it needs to do to really function to create growth and share growth and all the rest.
You know, there's not enough energy left. We're worried about like shutting down
the government because we are running from fear and it leads to a lot of short-
term thinking, I guess, would be the most concise way of putting it. Like there's
no one – I don’t think there's many people in the private sector right now because
they are worried about next quarter's value, so you got the whole entire business
world worried about next quarter and you've got the entire political world worried
about the next election which is always just months away. And so there's really no
one saying, okay – I mean, can you imagine someone saying, "We're going to go
to the moon in the next ten years?" I mean first of all, everybody would say,
"Boy, that's a big waste of money, what are we going there for?" And the other
half would say, "What do you mean ten years? We got to wait ten years till we get
to the moon?" But that was a different – that was a World War II, depression era

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mindset of things take time. Like, you just – you make the investments, you work
hard and at some point it'll pop, which it did, because that formula works. You
plant a good seed with good intentions and it'll fertilize it and get it rolling and
tend to it and it pops. We don’t have that today and I think this immediate, you
know, culture of we want it right now is really killing it. I've got a bill that I want
to put a salad bar and a garden in every school. So, I want to do it because I think,
if we want to drive down healthcare costs, we got to re-teach people how to eat.
Your parents probably had a garden –
Jerry: Yeah.
Tim: – my grandparents had a garden – it wasn’t the best diet, but everything was fresh
and everything was pretty much homegrown and homemade.
Jerry: And don’t tell anybody, but they also made their own wine.
Tim: That's when the fun started. But to me, the health reasons, one reason to have the
garden in the school, but the other reason is, I think we really need to really re-
teach that concept that you plant the seed and you put dirt over it and you fertilize
it and you water it and you let the sun hit it, you tend to it and you know you let it
– it grows over time because in life – you want to go out and make money and get
a car, but you don’t want to get strapped with debts so the way to be successful is
make some early investments in yourself. Delay gratification, invest in your
education so over time, maybe you won't make as much money today, but over
time your earning potential will go up. We've got to re-teach it because we are in
the fast-food mentality, we are in the – you know, if you don’t like the channel,
click it, if you don’t like what's happening on the game, reset it and get going
again and that's not how the real world works. So, all this fear, all this short term
thinking, all this kind of fast food psychology mentality that we have today is
leading to a politics and I think, an economy that doesn’t have the best interest of
long-term, sustained, kind of growth that is really what is needed to reduce as
much suffering as possible that can be inflicted from the economic system and the
healthcare system that can go bankrupt and all the rest, because you are not
willing to make the big decisions that will have the best long-term prospects.
Jerry: You know, I'll link this back to my everyday clients; you know, I was working
with a young client yesterday, he's a 25-year-old CEO and you know, he lives in a
culture where, "Come on, it's been three years, how come your company is not
worth a billion?"
Tim: [Laughter]
Jerry: And you know, you laugh but you know thankfully, this whole notion of billion-
dollar valuations, and I don’t know if you've heard the term 'Unicorn' but that's
what we are referring to them, it's like you know, "Is your company a unicorn?"
And the irony is that the reason we called it a Unicorn is because it's a

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mythological creature. It doesn’t really exist. Yet because my company is not a
billion-dollar evaluation company, and I've been at it for four years, Uber is worth
40-45billion dollars now because they've been at it – for so long. It's another
extension of the same mindset that you have, which is, if you think about your
grandparents or you think about my grandparents, it's like they spend 30-40 years
building a business, building a life. They plant seeds and then five years from
now, they have vines that they take the grapes and they make wine from the
grapes after five years because it takes time to mature.
Tim: They buy a small house and add one room one year and three-four years later,
build another little room on and they'll close-in the patio one year, and you know,
it was more methodical and they enjoyed the process. I mean, they were Italian
and I don’t know, I think a lot of cultures do this, but it was – we took our time
and ate dinner. You know, it was about being together, it wasn’t about – the food
was obviously a part of it, but it was about the time together and the process you
know, and you hurry up and you get somewhere and then you forget how you
even got there and did you enjoy the process or did you have a heart attack once
you made a billion dollars because you were so stressed out or made yourself sick
over it.
Jerry: Or what was it that you actually ate?
Tim: Yeah.
Jerry: Did you even pay attention?
Tim: Right.
Jerry: It reminds me of that beautiful meditation practice of placing a grape in your
mouth and not chewing it, just letting it slowly dissolve, and it can take five
minutes.
Tim: Yeah.
Jerry: Or a raisin, more than a grape; well, Tim, it was a delight really connecting with
you and –
Tim: And it was great connecting with you too man.
Jerry: You know taking the time to do this and talk through these issues, I know it's a
little unexpected for people, and let's hope that that bill passes and I just want to
add my thanks to you. Your job is not easy, and there are sacrifices; my thanks to
your wife and your kids as well because you know, you are not home and I
appreciate that.
Tim: Yeah, thank you.

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Jerry: And you know, I may not always agree with the things that you do, but I agree
with the heart of why you do things and I'd rather have that representing me than
someone whom I agree with, but for the wrong reasons. Thank you for that, and it
was really a pleasure having you on.
Tim: Thanks, let's do it again.
Jerry: You got it.
Tim: All right.
**
So, that’s it for our conversation today. You know, a lot was covered in this episode from links,
to books, to quotes, to images; so we went ahead and compiled all that, and put it on our site at
Reboot.io/podcast. If you’d like to be a guest on the show, you can find out about that on our site
as well. I’m really grateful that you took the time to listen. If you enjoyed the show and you want
to get all the latest episodes as we release them, head over to iTunes and subscribe and while
you’re there, it would be great if you could leave us a review letting us know how the show
affected you. So, thank you again for listening, and I really look forward to future conversations
together.
[Singing]
“How long till my soul gets it right?
Did any human being ever reach that kind of light?
I call on the resting soul of Galileo,
King of night-vision, King of insight.”
[End of audio 0:47:43]
[End of transcript]