Ryan is an aspiring underachiever. He’s worked for NASA, planned and conducted his own scientific research at the CDC, and served as a foreign affairs analyst/speechwriter in the British Parliament; he’s founded four companies and he’s published peer-reviewed scholarship in fancy-pants journals across two separate academic disciplines. All this misguided, insecure early-life ambition mostly just taught him how disappointing and anticlimactic status-driven accomplishments can be. (His words.)

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