Intern: My question for you is one of leadership. . . . A true mark of leadership is learning from a failure….When has there been a moment in your career in politics or otherwise that you’ve been persuaded that one of your ideas or one of the things that you’ve done perhaps wasn’t the best idea and you’ve learned from that?

Speaker Ryan: I’ll give you two examples, I mentioned one in the speech which was I fell into the trap of thinking about “makers” and “takers” in the wrong way. About people who are struggling and for a moment need to be dependent on government who don’t want to be. So, I was callous and I oversimplified and I castigated people with a broad brush. That’s wrong. And there’s a lot of that happening in America today. I, myself, have made that mistake.

I think one of the policy examples of your question is, I’ve spent the last few years touring poor communities around America. Rural areas, inner cities, learning about just how people are trying to struggle with poverty. And one of the things that I learned was there are a lot of people who have been in prison, who committed crimes that were not violent crimes and who, once they have had that blight on their record and been imprisoned, their future is really bleak. And, in the 1990s, I came here in the late ‘90s, we, I think, overcompensated on some of our criminal-justice laws. I think we overcompensated on some of our laws where we had so many mandatory minimums and “three strikes you’re out” that we ended up putting people for long prison terms, which ends up ruining their life and hurting their communities where we could have had alternative means of incarceration, better means of actually dealing with the problem than basically destroying a person’s life.