I've moved nine times before eighth grade. Different states, different schools, different rules for how you're supposed to act and who you're allowed to be. I used to think this was just bad luck. Now I think it's the reason I can't stop asking questions about why people build the worlds they build. You learn things when you're always the new kid. Not the things they teach in school — more like, why does this town feel completely different from the one I came from even though they're only two hours apart? What history did this place absorb that nobody bothered to explain to me? Why do some communities pull together when things get hard and others just fall apart? I didn't have language for it back then. I just knew I was paying attention to something that most people around me weren't. That's what eventually pushed me to start reaching out to leaders, advocates, and change-makers across different industries and countries and ask them how they actually created impact in their communities. Over 1,500 conversations. I turned them into a published book called 33 Journeys. I didn't plan for it to be an anthropological project. I just wanted to understand something. Looking back, that's exactly what it was. Political science hit differently. I was sitting in the Minnesota Senate chamber getting ready to testify on legislation that would affect 290,000 students and I remember thinking — this room, these rules, this specific arrangement of people and power, this is the thing that stands between a real problem and a real solution. That's not abstract to me. My committee on the Minnesota Youth Council had spent months building the argument. The bill passed. I've never thought about politics the same way since. It keeps going. Last week, after speaking at Teach For America's Choose the Twin Cities event, their Managing Director emailed me personally and asked the Minnesota Youth Council to co-sign a coalition letter to state legislators on teacher licensure reform. That email is what political science actually looks like outside of a textbook — somebody asking you to show up and use what you know. I think what history keeps teaching me through all of this is pretty simple: the people who actually change things are the ones who understand how the present got built. Not because they're nostalgic about the past. Just because they refuse to be surprised by it. The patterns are there if you look. Ryan sounds like someone who looked. Someone who loved the argument not to win it but because he actually wanted to figure something out. I understand that. Some of my best moments have been in rooms where nobody expected me to have anything worth saying — a Senate hearing, a policy meeting, a Rotary Club in Minnesota where I was trying to raise money for a water tank in India — and I had to make the case anyway. That feeling of having to earn the room is something history taught me to expect. And political science taught me it's worth it.