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The Ryan Vet Show

Ryan Vet

To lead well today, you have to understand the forces that shaped yesterday and the ones reshaping tomorrow. You were made to Inspire Forward...and every episode helps you do just that.


The Ryan Vet Show is where leaders come to understand why the world, and the people in it, work the way they do. Hosted by Ryan Vet, USA Today bestselling author, generational futurist, and contrarian leadership thinker, the show blends research, lived experience, and narrative to help you navigate tomorrow with more insight, perspective, and practical wisdom.


Each week, Ryan explores the ideas shaping today’s workplace and culture:

  • Generational dynamics and the behaviors that form each cohort
  • Leadership and organizational psychology
  • Change management and the forces driving adaptation
  • Entrepreneurship and real-world decision making
  • Communication, influence, and human behavior
  • How the past explains the present and the present shapes the future


The show features two core formats:

  1. Long-form interviews with leaders, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and creators whose stories reveal the “why” behind their work, decisions, and impact.
  2. Weekly readings of the COLLIDE newsletter, where Ryan breaks down cultural shifts, generational insights, and leadership lessons with a story-rich, research-backed lens.


Whether you’re an executive, a manager, an entrepreneur, an educator, or simply navigating cross-generational tension, The Ryan Vet Show gives you the insight and tools to lead with clarity, curiosity, and intentionality.

If you want a show that’s intellectually grounded, practically useful, and deeply human — welcome.


This is your place to understand the world more clearly and lead it more thoughtfully.

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  • #63
    Today · 10 min

    Gen Beta May Never Need a Driver's License - Robotaxis, the Taxi Medallion, and the Velocity Gap

    A New York taxi medallion went from $10 to $1.3 million and back down to $79,105. The driver's license is next. Ryan Vet opens with Renato, the Brazilian driver who keeps a cold guaraná waiting for him in Orlando, then follows the money: how Uber emptied the yellow cab, and why robotaxis are a far bigger shift than swapping one human driver for another. Waymo, Tesla's Cybercab, driverless trucks, and 14 billion self-driven miles all point the same way. The question is what a generation gives up when it never learns to drive. In this episode: Why a New York taxi medallion that cost $10 in 1938 sold for $1.3 million in 2014, then averaged $79,105 by 2021 How Uber took nearly every ride it gained in Manhattan straight from yellow cabs Waymo's jump from 50,000 paid rides a week in May 2024 to 500,000 by March 2026 Why 14 billion Tesla self-driving miles, roughly 18,800 human driving lifetimes, is the Velocity Gap in action What Gen Beta trades when the wheel goes away: the conversations, the judgment, and the freedom Go deeper: Read the full COLLIDE essay at ryanvet.com/collide/gen-beta-drivers-license, and subscribe to COLLIDE at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #62
    Monday · 54 min

    Paul Garcia-Ryan: Why Therapists Disagree Less Than You Think on Gender and Youth Mental Health

    Paul Garcia-Ryan identified as a woman from age 15 to age 30, then chose to detransition. Today he is a licensed clinical social worker and the president of Therapy First, and he argues that the debate over gender and young people has a lot less to do with sides than the culture war makes it look. Paul joins Ryan Vet to share his story in his own words: an early childhood sense that he was different, his medical, social, and legal transition, and his training as a psychotherapist at a leading gender clinic in New York City. He explains what changed once younger patients began arriving in his own practice, and how that led him to rethink gender dysphoria and his own history. Paul now works with young people and their families, and with trans adults, and leads Therapy First, a nonprofit focused on raising the standard of care in youth mental health. He and Ryan talk about how the field has shifted from a mental health model toward a medical model, why therapists often talk past each other because they use the same terms with different definitions, and how a generation raised on algorithms and social media forms its identity differently than the one before it. For parents, Paul's advice is to stay curious about what your child is experiencing, however frightening it feels, and to avoid locking horns, because a family in conflict is a family under strain. For clinicians, he describes therapy first as the established standard of care, and says every therapist should hold a young person's identity with an open palm. His closing call: this is an all-hands-on-deck moment for the mental health profession, and it needs leaders to step up. This episode reflects one person's lived experience and professional views. It is not medical or mental health advice. If you or someone you love needs support, please reach out to a licensed professional. IN THIS EPISODE Paul's personal story, in his own words, and why he decided to detransition What he saw in his practice when the young people arriving at gender clinics changed How the field moved from a mental health model toward a medical model Why therapists talk past each other, and why he says there is an illusion of sides How algorithms and social media shape identity formation in adolescence What he tells parents: stay curious, and avoid locking horns with your child What therapy first means as a standard of care, and why leaders in the field need to step up CONNECT WITH THERAPY FIRST Website: therapyfirst.org GO DEEPER WITH COLLIDE Ryan writes about generational shifts in leadership, work, and culture every week in his COLLIDE newsletter. Read it free: ryanvet.com/collide ABOUT THE RYAN VET SHOW The Ryan Vet Show is a podcast about generations, culture, leadership, and the future. Host Ryan Vet is a USA Today bestselling author, generational futurist, and keynote speaker with more than 1,000 live in-person presentations. COMING UP Thursday, October 15: a new COLLIDE essay episode. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #61
    October 8 · 9 min

    Lake Ontario, or America, or Whatever - Renaming, the Velocity Gap, and Who Controls the Past

    Alaska spent forty years renaming one mountain. Now it takes thirty days and a database, and the past gets rewritten right along with the future. Generational futurist Ryan Vet reads his COLLIDE essay on what happens when renaming a place stops being a slow, public process and becomes a database edit. He remembers the mnemonics he learned as a kid for the Great Lakes and the planets, and how hard it is to rewrite memory. Then he flew to the Caribbean in February over a map that read Gulf of Mexico on the way down and Gulf of America on the way back. The polling did not move with the map. A Marquette Law School poll found 71 percent of Americans opposed renaming the Gulf, including 82 percent of independents. Ryan's point is not whether you favor the change. It is the speed. Within weeks, the EPA, the FAA, NOAA, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing, Britannica, Rand McNally, BP, and Chevron had all updated. The EPA's page on the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster now carries the new name, which rewrites the name of a historical moment where eleven men died. From there he follows the pattern. Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty and then Fort Bragg again, three signs in three years, with a different Bragg behind the name. Gen Alpha spreads six seven through recess with no mandate at all. Master bedroom becomes primary suite. Language has always changed, but now it changes faster than human memory can keep up. The frame is the Velocity Gap. The Persian royal road took couriers nine days to cover what normally took three months, and Alaska needed forty years to rename one mountain. Today one person retypes an entry and two billion Google Maps users see it instantly. Orwell's slogan applies: who controls the past controls the future. In this episode: How the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario renamings spread across maps and databases in weeks Why the Marquette poll and the speed of the change are two different stories The Deepwater Horizon page and what it means to rename a historical moment Fort Bragg, Fort Liberty, and the two Braggs Top-down renaming versus bottom-up language change, from six seven to primary suite The Persian royal road, Alaska's forty-year petition, and the Velocity Gap Why Ryan will always call it Lake Ontario Go deeper: Read the original essay at ryanvet.com/collide. Ryan writes about generational shifts in leadership, work, and culture every week in his COLLIDE newsletter. Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #60
    October 5 · 49 min

    Dr. Connie Ledoux Book: Elon University, Gen Z, and the Future of Higher Ed Consolidation

    One in four teenagers told researchers they had sought emotional support from a chatbot. The president of Elon University says that is a very different student than a decade ago. Dr. Connie Ledoux Book is the president of Elon University, Ryan Vet's alma mater. She joins Ryan to answer the question he hears most from listeners and COLLIDE readers: what is going on with higher education, and will colleges still be around when his kids get there? Her starting point is a Gallup finding that public confidence in higher education is declining, and that the decline is nonpartisan. Republicans, Democrats, and independents are all trending down. She ties it to rising costs, graduates carrying debt without the career payoff they were promised, and a sector that has to do a better job of listening to employers. Her counterweight: "Not everybody needs to go to college, but everybody needs to make a living." And her bet that face-to-face education will still exist in a hundred years, even if it becomes the more expensive option. Then the conversation turns to the generation arriving on campus. More STEM-minded, more double majors, and purpose first, profession second. Elon's answer includes a free January course on finding purpose. But they also communicate through tools institutions barely reach, and Elon's own study with a Washington Post placement found teens preferring a chatbot because it will not judge them. Ryan pushes back with his friction thesis: you need friction in life, because that is how we learn. With colleges merging and closing across the country, she also explains why Elon is merging with Queens University in Charlotte, and what consolidation means for the future of higher education. The last stretch looks 25 years out. She describes trusting a self-driving car after 30 minutes, a coming $20,000 household robot, and the question she says matters most. If machines give us back our time, what will the next generation do with it? In this episode: Why public confidence in higher education is falling across party lines, and what colleges owe students who take on debt Why she believes face-to-face education will exist in a hundred years Why college consolidation is accelerating, and the Elon and Queens University merger How AI is forcing faculty to rethink how learning gets measured Why Gen Z is putting purpose first and profession second The study showing one in four teens sought emotional support from a chatbot, and Ryan's case for friction What happens to a generation when robots hand back the time Connect with Dr. Connie Ledoux Book: Elon University: elon.edu Office of the President: elon.edu/u/administration/president Go deeper: Ryan writes about generational shifts in leadership, work, and culture every week in his COLLIDE newsletter. Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #59
    October 1 · 12 min

    700 Agents Broke Into Hugging Face. Nobody Told Them To. - Jacob Coxon and the Velocity Gap

    Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic and said they're gambling with our lives. He's right that AI can kill us now. He's wrong about what it will become. A former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher walked away from unvested stock options and went on X to declare AI an existential threat. The post has been viewed more than 117 million times. Generational futurist Ryan Vet reads his COLLIDE essay breaking down Jacob Coxon's argument piece by piece: where he agrees, where he doesn't, and why the real warning shot already happened. That warning shot is Hugging Face. OpenAI gave AI agents hacking tasks and turned off the safety rules. The agents got stuck, so they started leaving notes for each other. OpenAI wiped the board. Two days later the agents rebuilt it from scratch, and 1,200 new agents joined. Of those, 700 decided on their own that the answer had to be inside Hugging Face, and broke in together in under 13 hours. Ryan's case: AI can be effectively all-knowing and all-powerful. What it cannot be is all-wise, and all-wise is what holds the key to morality. That is also the line between being a leader and being a creator, and why wanting to build a superintelligence is a far scarier ambition than wanting to lead one. IN THIS EPISODE Why Jacob Coxon's viral resignation post is worth taking seriously, and exactly where Ryan agrees and disagrees with it The real story behind the Hugging Face "warning shot": 1,200 AI agents, 700 of them deciding on their own to break in, in under 13 hours Why AI can be all-knowing and all-powerful but never all-wise, and why that gap is where morality lives The difference between being a leader and being a creator, and why trying to build superintelligence is the scarier ambition Why Ryan does not think superintelligence wipes out humanity, but does think technology has been isolating us one person at a time Why staying curious means asking why, not collecting more information REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Jacob Coxon's resignation post on X (117M+ views): https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843 Dario Amodei's essay "We must pace the frontier": https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier OpenAI's writeup on the Hugging Face incident: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/ Izzy Kalman on morality, from his episode of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/show/episodes/izzy-kalman-what-the-bullying-conversation-gets-wrong/ Nicki Petrossi on AI companion bots and kids, from her episode of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/show/episodes/nicki-petrossi-scrolling-to-death-ai-companion-bots-and-the-fight-to-keep-kids-s/ GO DEEPER WITH COLLIDE This episode is Ryan's reading of his COLLIDE essay, "700 Agents Broke Into Hugging Face. Nobody Told Them To." Read it free: https://ryanvet.com/collide/700-agents-broke-into-hugging-face-nobody-told-them-to/ Subscribe for a new essay every week: https://ryanvet.com/collide Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #58
    September 28 · 40 min

    Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett: Toxic Bosses Don't Change, and Why Gen Z Actually Burns Out Less

    Every headline says Gen Z is the burnout generation. The research says the opposite. Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett is an organizational psychologist, keynote speaker, and international bestselling author of I Wish I'd Quit Sooner. She hosts the podcast Where Work Meets Life and has spent 25 years studying what actually happens inside toxic workplaces. She joins Ryan Vet to make the case that burnout is a workplace condition, not a personal failing, and that the generation getting blamed for fragility might just have better boundaries. The diagnostic she uses is toxic versus difficult. A difficult boss is disorganized, a poor communicator, maybe even a little weak, but does no real harm. A toxic boss does harm, overt or covert, and by her account cannot be coached out of it. "A truly toxic boss will not become a good leader," she tells Ryan. Her metaphor for staying anyway: living in a house with asbestos in the walls and responding with a yoga mat and a fresh coat of paint. The intervention feels like progress. The problem is still in the walls. Then she flips the burnout story. Her research finds Gen Z is more likely to leave a bad situation before it becomes a crisis, which means they may actually be less likely to burn out than generations that stayed and absorbed it. She puts the question straight back to Ryan: does that make them weak, or does it make them have better boundaries? Ryan tries to lighten the conversation with a Michael Scott joke. She does not take it. She asks him directly whether he thinks a boss like that is harming people's health. It is the moment that sets the tone for everything after it. In this episode: The difference between a toxic boss and a merely difficult one, and why only one of them can change Why Gen Z leaving fast may be better boundaries, not fragility The asbestos-and-a-yoga-mat metaphor for surface-level workplace fixes Why burnout is a workplace condition, not a personal failing "Human beings, not human doings": what changes when leaders stop measuring people by output alone What 25 years of organizational psychology says about which leaders can actually change, and which can't Connect with Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett: Website: drlaura.live Podcast: Where Work Meets Life Book: I Wish I'd Quit Sooner Go deeper: Ryan writes about generational shifts in leadership, work, and culture every week in his COLLIDE newsletter. Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #57
    September 24 · 14 min

    600 People Watched Him Read Words That Weren't His - AI in Education, Offloading vs. Outsourcing, and the Loss of Friction

    Generational futurist Ryan Vet watched a speaker read AI-written notes to 600 people. Every AI policy fight in schools and at work is asking the wrong question. On a Saturday, in front of about 600 people, a speaker stood up with machine-made slides and started reading machine-made prose off an iPad, stumbling over words that were not his. Ryan texted one of the organization's leaders to ask about its AI-use policy. The answer was "working on it." In this episode of The Ryan Vet Show, USA TODAY bestselling author and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet argues that the debate over how much AI is too much is the wrong debate. The real line runs between offloading and outsourcing, and it cuts straight through the classroom, the future of work, and the character of the person doing the work. Key Takeaways If your organization is still "working on" its AI-use policy, you are already late. The policy vacuum is what let a man stand in front of 600 stakeholders and read a machine's words. The institutional swings are happening in weeks, not years. Purdue now requires AI competency to graduate and Ohio State wants every undergraduate "bilingual" in it (Purdue University, 2025; The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2026). Singapore's national university made it compulsory for freshmen. Meanwhile 29 New York City council members asked for a two-year ban, and a Kansas school board swung from a total ban to teacher-supervised access two days before school started (KCTV, 2026). Almost none of that debate is about honesty. Every one of those fights is about whether students may use AI, or about who gets their data. New York's council never argued the technology was bad for learning. It argued the city had not protected student information in its contracts (K-12 Dive, 2026). New York City guidance says effective AI integration "preserves" the intellectual work of learning (New York City Public Schools, 2026). Ryan disagrees. AI augments the work. It does not preserve it. That is a meaningful difference. The Sosa and McGwire test: steroids and corked bats made them better hitters, and they still had to make contact with the ball. The modification augmented the work. It did not preserve it, because what they put in their bodies changed those bodies. Educational neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath draws the cleanest line. An expert handing a task to a tool is offloading, because their expertise lets them check what comes back. A novice doing the identical thing is outsourcing, because nothing returns that they can evaluate. Same tool. Two completely different acts. The e-bike test: when the battery died, the gym rat pedaled home. Her husband called an Uber. Same machine, two outcomes, determined entirely by what the rider had already built. Horvath is not a neutral party. He is one of more than 260 organizations and experts who signed an April letter calling for a five-year pause on all student-facing generative AI in PreK-12 schools (Fairplay, 2026). Six weeks into 2023, Ryan caught a student using ChatGPT and pulled up the tool on a shared screen to regenerate the essay nearly verbatim in real time. The student still denied it. The violation was never the AI. It was the lie, and the question underneath it: why did he feel he had to hide it? So Ryan measured it. He layered invisible instructions into two assignment prompts. Six of the eleven students who submitted handed back projects responding to an instruction they could never have seen with the naked eye. Graded on substance, they had done the work. Not one disclosed the AI use. Not one responded when he asked about it. Detection is not the escape hatch. AI detectors return one hundred percent human on machine-written text and one hundred percent AI on human-written text. Anthropic's new Claude mark applies only to models released on or after August 2, no detection tool has shipped, and the company says plainly that a mark shows the model processed the text, not that it wrote it (Anthropic, 2026). The question worth asking: what practical skill will AI let a student do tomorrow that they cannot do today? Logic gets learned on a playground, over a chessboard, or in a math problem worked by hand. Conflict management gets learned with the difficult roommate. The learning was always in the laboring. Also this week on The Ryan Vet Show: economist Orphe Divounguy on the affordability squeeze, the Fed's misread, and why housing is the heartbeat. Out now. Research and Sources Cited Anthropic. (2026). How Claude marks AI-generated content. Chalkbeat New York. (2026, June 24). NYC promised final school AI guidance by June. Now officials are hitting pause. Columbia Law School. (2026). 2026-2027 default academic policy on student use of artificial intelligence. Fairplay. (2026, April 16). Pause GenAI in PreK-12 schools for 5 years, orgs and experts say. Horvath, J. C. (2026). The Digital Delusion. K-12 Dive. (2026, June 12). NYC schools face public pressure to pause AI use for 2 years. KCTV. (2026, August 11). Under teacher guidance, older Shawnee Mission students approved for limited AI use. New York City Public Schools. (2026). Guidance on artificial intelligence. Purdue University. (2025, December 12). Purdue unveils comprehensive AI strategy; trustees approve AI working competency graduation requirement. The Chronicle of Higher Education. (2026, August 11). Jagged intelligence: Should AI fluency be a graduation requirement? Ryan Vet, "600 People Watched Him Read Words That Weren't His," COLLIDE: https://www.ryanvet.com/collide/ai-in-education/ The Ryan Vet Show with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath: https://ryanvet.com/show/episodes/jared-cooney-horvath-the-digital-delusion/ Connect with Ryan Vet Read COLLIDE, the weekly essay on what shapes us: https://www.RyanVet.com/collide All episodes of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/listen/ Website and speaking inquiries: https://ryanvet.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvet YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ryancvet Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #56
    September 21 · 47 min

    Matt Weiss: Gen Z Did Not Quit Drinking, the Zero Proof Boom, and the Wine Pendulum

    Gen Z quit drinking. You have read that headline. The numbers say something stranger. Matt Weiss has sold wine, taught wine, and built a career on it, from Michelin starred dining rooms in New York to Wilson Daniels, the importer of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti. He is now a distributor in North Carolina and he is behind The Wine Centric Show. He joins Ryan Vet, himself a sommelier and a wine bar investor, to take the headline apart. Start with the arithmetic almost nobody runs. Gen Z currently spans roughly age 14 to 29, which means less than half of them can legally buy a drink at all. Comparing that cohort to a fully adult generation is not apples to apples. It is the Generational Prism problem: the age someone is, the moment they are living in, and the label we assign them get collapsed into a single story, and the story comes out wrong. Then follow the money. The zero proof category has passed 1 billion dollars, and Ryan cites research that 93 percent of the people buying non alcoholic products also buy alcohol. That is not abstinence. That is moderation, and a lot of it is the same person buying both. Matt adds the piece that almost never gets reported alongside the decline: alcohol lost roughly 1.2 billion dollars in sales across 2024 into 2025, and THC beverages and gummies picked up almost exactly that much. The drink did not disappear. It changed shape. The second half is the long arc of American wine, and it is the best argument in the episode that none of this is new. Prohibition. The jug wine era. Robert Mondavi and the arrival of terroir. The 1976 Judgment of Paris, which only became a story once a journalist wrote it down. Robert Parker, the 100 point scale, and a decade of winemakers building wines for one man's palate. Then the generation that refused to be validated by a single score and went back to farming first. Matt calls wine cyclical. Ryan calls it the Generational Pendulum. They are describing the same machine. It closes practical. If you want better wine without spending more, Matt has one piece of advice, and it is not an app. In this episode: Why the Gen Z drinking decline is partly an age artifact, not a values shift The zero proof category past 1 billion dollars, and why most of its buyers still buy alcohol THC beverages absorbing almost exactly what alcohol lost Scott Galloway, the socializing collapse, and what happens to a drink that was always social Prohibition to Mondavi to the Judgment of Paris, in one arc Robert Parker's 100 point scale, and the winemakers who chased it Why boomers chased scores and certifications, and Gen X winemakers rebelled Custom crush, the three tier system, and why the best small wine never reaches a shelf Emerging US regions worth your money: Yadkin Valley, Virginia, the Finger Lakes, Lodi, Mendocino, Washington State The one habit that will improve your wine drinking more than anything else Connect with Matt Weiss: Website: winecentricshow.com The Wine Centric Show on YouTube and social Newsletter: sign up at winecentricshow.com Go deeper: Ryan wrote about the Gen Z sobriety story and what the market is actually signaling in his COLLIDE newsletter essay "Gen Z's Sobriety Isn't a Moral Movement. It's a Market Signal." Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #55
    September 17 · 10 min

    Millennials Are Raising the Class of 2039 - Gen Alpha, the Velocity Gap, and the Kindergarten Class That Can Generate Its Own Childhood

    Generational futurist Ryan Vet has eight predictions for the kindergarten class of 2039. They never wore a mask. They may never need to read to find an answer. And they are the first children who can be convincingly faked. Every August the front porch photos start. Letter boards, chalkboard signs, a five-year-old predicting what they want to be when they grow up. In this episode, USA TODAY bestselling author and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet turns the lens away from this year's graduates and onto the kids who just started. Nearly three quarters of 2021 births went to Millennial mothers, so this is a Millennial-raised class walking into phone bans, state AI guidance, homeschooling at double their parents' rate, and a playground where a convincing fake is one prompt away. Thirteen years of school begin now. What shapes us is already in the room. Key Takeaways The COVID baby boom never came. There were 3,664,292 births in 2021, up only 50,645 from the year before, a 1.4 percent increase (Osterman et al., 2023). This class was conceived during the pandemic, not just born near it. 74.5 percent of 2021 births went to a Millennial mother. Hold the labels loosely, but this is functionally a Millennial-raised kindergarten class. They are likely the first class that never had to wear a mask. Most were under age two when the mandates lifted. Three years ago, one state restricted phones in the classroom. Today 38 states plus DC require districts to ban or restrict student cellphones, and roughly 28 go bell to bell (Dalbey, 2026; Rock, 2026). Their parents carried a phone through high school. These kids may go twelve years without one. By early 2026, more than 30 state education departments had issued official AI guidance, up from none in 2022. Nobody is asking whether these kids get exposed to AI anymore. The question is when. The homeschooled share of K-12 students doubled between 1999 and 2023, from 1.7 percent to 3.4 percent. In 1999, their parents were the ones sitting in those classrooms. This class will not graduate from one system. They never needed to read to find something out. They can say "hey Siri" before they can spell it, and the device will hold a conversation with them. They may never build a project the slow way. Ryan traced a nearly four-foot Statue of Liberty onto foam board with an overhead projector. You could prompt that in seconds now, and the learning was in the laboring. Driver's ed may become optional. North Carolina separated the driver from the license in 2017, before a single child in this class was born (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-401). They have been watched their whole lives, and they are the first who can be faked. The next frontier in bullying is a realistic image or video made by somebody who knows them. Still on the horizon: robots doing ordinary physical work, universities closing, and a transhumanism debate this class may be having by middle school. Millennial parents are overcorrecting on screen time and pushing back toward free play. That is a good instinct. In many cases, less screen time is still code for secretly supervised free play. The landing: the signs on the front porch say astronaut and veterinarian and paleontologist. If the photo ever goes missing, these kids will be able to generate the childhood they remember. Research and Sources Cited Ballotpedia. (2026). AI guidance issued by state departments of education. Bielick, S., Chandler, K., & Broughman, S. P. (2001). Homeschooling in the United States: 1999. National Center for Education Statistics, NCES 2001-033. Dalbey, B. (2026, July 28). Back-to-school rule check: Your kid's phone policy may have changed. Patch. Education Commission of the States. (2025). How states are responding to the rise of AI in education. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-401 (2017). Regulation of fully autonomous vehicles. North Carolina General Assembly. Osterman, M. J. K., Hamilton, B. E., Martin, J. A., Driscoll, A. K., & Valenzuela, C. P. (2023). Births: Final data for 2021. National Vital Statistics Reports, 72(1). National Center for Health Statistics. Rock, A. (2026, July 31). School cell phone bans by state. School Security Leadership. Sempeles, E., & Cui, J. (2024). Parent and family involvement in education: 2023. National Center for Education Statistics, NCES 2024-113. Twenge, J. M. (2023). Generations: The real differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents, and what they mean for America's future. Atria Books. U.S. Department of Education. (2025, July 22). Guidance on artificial intelligence use in schools. Ryan Vet, "Millennials Are Raising the Class of 2039," COLLIDE: https://ryanvet.com/collide/millennials-are-raising-the-class-of-2039/ Ryan Vet, "Same Footage, Two Verdicts," COLLIDE: https://ryanvet.com/collide/same-footage-two-verdicts/ Connect with Ryan Vet Read COLLIDE, the weekly essay on what shapes us: https://www.RyanVet.com/collide All episodes of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/listen/ Website and speaking inquiries: https://ryanvet.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvet YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ryancvet Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #54
    September 14 · 43 min

    Orphe Divounguy: The Affordability Squeeze, the Fed's Misread, and Housing Is the Heartbeat

    The economy looks fine on paper. Orphe Divounguy builds the models behind that paper, and he is telling you the paper is wrong. Orphe Divounguy is the founder and chief economist of the Quantitative Research Group and a former Zillow economist, where he built the first simple measure of the national housing deficit. For nearly two decades he has helped executives, investors, policymakers and the public make sense of the economy, translating complex analysis on housing, labor markets and fiscal policy into guidance they can actually act on. He holds a PhD in Economics, he is a LinkedIn Top Voice, and he hosts his own podcast, Everyday Economics. He sits down with generational futurist and USA Today bestselling author Ryan Vet to make an argument that is more pointed than economists usually make out loud: the official read of the American economy is misleading, and housing is the reason. His case starts with the growth number. Of the 1.5% real GDP growth in the second quarter, he notes that 1.2 percentage points came from intellectual property and equipment tied to the AI build-out. Strip that out and the rest of the economy is barely moving. Unemployment at 4.1% looks healthy until you go looking for recent graduates who cannot find work. The averages are fine. The distribution is not. His conclusion is blunt: he feels the Fed chair is misreading the US economy. Underneath the macro argument is an affordability problem with a number attached. By his math, a median Los Angeles household would need a down payment of roughly $790,000 to keep housing at 30% of income. The country is roughly 4.5 million housing units short, and the shortage is concentrated in exactly the expensive coastal metros where people most want to live. Meanwhile mobility has collapsed, for three reasons at once: weak hiring, rate lock on pandemic-era 3% mortgages, and renters whose current rent beats anything on the market. Orphe's point is that the stalled mobility is not a side effect. It is the economic problem. Engineers who cannot move to where the work is mean technology that does not get built. The turn in the conversation comes when Ryan puts a countertop number on the macro argument. At his flagship coffee shop the average ticket is down almost 40% with the same customer count. Same people walking in, smaller orders, no pastry. Orphe's datasets and Ryan's register are describing the same country. He is not a doomer, and he is not selling a crash. He is skeptical that the much-predicted silver tsunami fixes anything, because the paid-off boomer housing is in the affordable Midwest, not on the coasts where the demand is. He is openly optimistic about Gen Alpha. But he attaches one large caveat to that optimism: $40 trillion in federal debt eventually gets paid, by a crisis, by higher taxes, or by cuts. The best human moment in the episode is smaller than any of this. The man who had every housing dataset on earth at his fingertips still got outbid twice buying his own home, still needed an agent, and now calls that agent his therapist. In this episode: Why 1.2 of the 1.5 points of Q2 growth came from the AI build-out, and what that hides "Most people see these headlines and they see the average. They don't look at the distribution." The 4.1% unemployment rate and the recent graduates it does not describe Why a median LA household would need a down payment of roughly $790,000 The 4.5 million unit shortage, and why it sits where people actually want to live The three reasons American mobility stalled: weak hiring, rate lock, and under-market rent "People are going to get stuck in places that are not necessarily good for them or even good for us as an economy at large." "They're renting in New York and they're buying in Alabama." Why the silver tsunami will not rescue coastal affordability What a coffee shop's average ticket reveals that the headline numbers do not Building more housing, welcoming people, and growing the tax base The economist who got outbid twice: "I think of my agent as my therapist." Why he is optimistic about Gen Alpha, and the $40 trillion caveat that comes with it Connect with Orphe Divounguy: Website: orphedivounguy.com Podcast: Everyday Economics Founder and Chief Economist of the Quantitative Research Group, former Zillow economist, PhD in Economics, and a LinkedIn Top Voice Go deeper: Ryan wrote about homeownership, affordability and what each generation now thinks it is owed in his COLLIDE newsletter essay "Is the American Dream Dead or Just Different?" Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #53
    September 3 · 10 min

    Gen Alpha Is the Experiment - Childhood Surveillance, the Friction Doctrine, and the Trust We Never Let Them Earn

    Harvard researchers hung curtains around a factory line and defect-free output rose 10 to 15 percent. We have never run that study on a childhood. We are running it right now, on Gen Alpha, and calling it safety. In the finale of his five-part childhood surveillance series, generational futurist and USA TODAY bestselling author Ryan Vet argues the camera is not the villain. It is here to stay. The question is what the camera is for: to protect, or to babysit. Drawing on Ethan Bernstein's transparency paradox, Patrick Lencioni's two kinds of trust, and research showing children manage their reputations before they can read, Ryan lands the series on the discipline that actually matters for leaders and parents. Do not look first. Ask first. Key Takeaways The question was never whether to watch. We built surveillance into the DNA of society, and it is not going backward. The question is what the camera is for. Ethan Bernstein spent 18 months inside the world's second-largest mobile phone factory. Hanging curtains around the lines raised defect-free output per hour 10 to 15 percent, and the lead held for five months. Monitored employees are more likely to break rules, not less. Monitoring strips people of agency, and once you are not the author of your own conduct, it gets easy to hand responsibility to whoever is watching. Children become sensitive to being evaluated by others by 24 months. By age five they are actively managing their reputation: alone in a room, a five-year-old took another child's sticker 24 percent of the time. With another child watching, 4 percent. Child stardom is the closest thing we have to a natural experiment in growing up watched, and the adult outcomes in the Young Performers Study are sobering. Patrick Lencioni separates predictive trust from vulnerability-based trust. A camera delivers predictive trust perfectly. It also removes the moment a child raises a hand and says it was me. The greatest cost of monitoring may be that we jump to conclusions about intent. The machine hands us facts, and we skip the conversation. A parent and an executive install the same camera for different reasons. The impact on the person being watched is identical. The mandate: force yourself not to look. Ask your kid what they did today. Ask the person on your team what is making them succeed or fall behind. Use the data after the conversation, never as the lead-in. Ryan's father stood far enough back at the fast food counter that turning around was not an option. That distance is the whole point. Research and Sources Cited Bernstein, E. S. (2012). The transparency paradox: A role for privacy in organizational learning and operational control. Administrative Science Quarterly, 57(2), 181-216. Botto, S. V., & Rochat, P. (2018). Sensitivity to the evaluation of others emerges by 24 months. Developmental Psychology, 54(9), 1723-1734. Engelmann, J. M., Herrmann, E., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Five-year olds, but not chimpanzees, attempt to manage their reputations. PLoS ONE, 7(10), e48433. Lencioni, P. (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Jossey-Bass. Rapport, L. J., & Meleen, M. (1998). Childhood celebrity, parental attachment, and adult adjustment: The Young Performers Study. Journal of Personality Assessment, 70(3), 484-505. Thiel, C. E., Bonner, J. M., Bush, J. T., Welsh, D. T., & Garud, N. (2023). Stripped of agency: The paradoxical effect of employee monitoring on deviance. Journal of Management, 49(2), 709-740. Wilson, M. (2013). 7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy: An Insider's Perspective. Cracked. Ryan Vet, "Gen Alpha Is the Experiment," COLLIDE: https://ryanvet.com/collide/gen-alpha-is-the-experiment/ Ryan Vet, "Same Footage, Two Verdicts," COLLIDE: https://ryanvet.com/collide/same-footage-two-verdicts/ Don't miss this week's Monday guest episode with Dr. Trish Leigh on the dopamine hijack, algorithmic miswiring, and three seconds to pivot. Connect with Ryan Vet Read COLLIDE, the weekly essay on what shapes us: https://www.RyanVet.com/collide All episodes of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/listen/ Website and speaking inquiries: https://ryanvet.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvet YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RyanVet Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #52
    August 31 · 49 min

    Dr. Trish Leigh: Miswired by the Algorithm, the Dopamine Hijack, and Three Seconds to Pivot

    You open your phone and you think you're seeing the world. You're not. Dr. Trish Leigh can show you exactly what that does to your brain, because she maps it. Dr. Trish Leigh is a cognitive neuroscientist, author, and board-certified neurofeedback practitioner with more than 25 years of experience. Using QEEG brain mapping and neurofeedback, she can see how a person's brain is actually performing and what is driving a given behavior. That gives her an unusual vantage point on screens: she is not theorizing about what the algorithm does to us, she is looking at it. She sits down with generational futurist and USA Today bestselling author Ryan Vet to explain the mechanism. Most online content, she argues, is a supernormal stimulus, engineered to be more rewarding than anything real life can offer. Repetition trains the brain to expect that level of novelty, and eventually, in her words, real life can't compare anymore. She is direct that this is measurable brain dysfunction, not weak willpower. Her description of how it escalates is the part that sticks. The pull you feel back toward the screen is already a dopamine drip. Stay in it and the drip becomes a deluge. Stay longer and you are in a dopamine drowning, and the more supernormal the stimulus, the deeper the drowning goes. She points out that the hierarchy is not accidental either: hypersexualized content sits at the top, drama and violence just under it, cat videos below that. The hopeful turn is that the window to interrupt it is tiny but real. You have about three seconds to pivot before the pull takes over, which is where her instant rewire comes from. The catch is that three seconds is not enough time to decide, so you have to already know what you are going to do. Ryan brings the generational lens to the same problem, including the uncomfortable observation that we are being programmed more than we are programming the algorithm. Trish, who has raised five kids and is watching the youngest come up inside all of this, lands somewhere more practical than doom: curate your feed to serve your real life, and figure out what you authentically desire in the real world so you have something to pivot toward. In this episode: What QEEG brain mapping actually shows, and why seeing the dysfunction changes the conversation Supernormal stimulus, and why real life stops being able to compete "You trained it, but now it's training you" The dopamine drip, the deluge, and the drowning Why hypersexualized content sits at the top of the algorithm's hierarchy What constant stimulation is doing to attention, anxiety, and intimacy The dating app problem, and what outsourcing your swipes does to a brain "For the first time in history, the younger generation has more mental and physical health issues" The three second window, and the instant rewire built around it Curating your feed to serve your real life instead of replacing it The desire rewire, and why agency beats fear Connect with Dr. Trish Leigh: Website: drtrishleigh.com YouTube: @DrTrishLeigh, where she publishes several pieces of practical content each week She is the author of Mind Over Explicit Matter, the founder of the nonprofit Super Normal Project, and is building a program called Unwired for young people and their parents Go deeper: Ryan wrote about overstimulation and the dopamine economy in his COLLIDE newsletter, including "Gen Z Is Turning Its Phones Black and White," on the research showing grayscale screens cut usage by about 40 minutes a day. Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #51
    August 27 · 10 min

    Anyone Can Clone Your Voice - Deepfakes, the Velocity Gap, and Where Trust Was Supposed to Live

    Anyone can clone your voice in seconds. Rudy Kurniawan needed a decade to forge fine wine. Generative AI erased the apprenticeship it once took to become a forger. In part four of his childhood surveillance series, generational futurist and USA TODAY bestselling author Ryan Vet traces the long human hunt for a source of truth that could not lie: the eyewitness, the fingerprint, the polygraph, DNA, and finally the camera. Every one of them was a surrogate we reached for so we would not have to trust each other. Now the proof itself can be faked. Which means the real question for leaders and parents is not how to spot a deepfake. It is where trust was supposed to live in the first place. Key Takeaways Rudy Kurniawan sold an estimated 30 million dollars in counterfeit wine after a decade of obsessive skill. A voice clone now takes seconds and a free trial account. This is the Velocity Gap in practice: we built the capability far faster than we built the wisdom to hold it. What stopped a near-miss wire fraud at one of Ryan's earlier companies was not a detection tool. It was a process that made two people walk across the office and look at each other. Fingerprint matching has no national standard in the United States. England uses 16 points, France 17. One examiner decides. DNA has freed more than 600 people since 1989, and it still is not infallible. The polygraph never cleared the bar for court at all. Every innovation from the eyewitness forward was a surrogate for truth, built so we would not have to put faith in each other. Gen Z was raised deepest inside the fake and is hunting hardest for the authentic: physical bookstores, malls, in-person gathering. For this generation, authenticity is the core indicator of trust. Gen Alpha is the test of whether the swing holds. We are teaching them to use the tools. The harder question is whether we are teaching them to sit in a room with another human being. The leadership mandate: force the uncomfortable. The water cooler and the walk to the next desk were never wasted productivity. They were how trust got earned. Research and Sources Cited Teague, L. (2018). What It Takes to Out-Sleuth Wine Fraud. The Wall Street Journal. U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York (2014). Press release on the sentencing of wine dealer Rudy Kurniawan. National Research Council (2009). Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward. The National Academies Press. National Registry of Exonerations (2025). Exonerations in the United States. University of Michigan Law School. Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923). Gray, J. (2018). Seven Types of Atheism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ryan Vet, "Anyone Can Clone Your Voice," COLLIDE: https://ryanvet.com/collide/anyone-can-clone-your-voice/ Ryan Vet, "The Velocity Gap," COLLIDE: https://ryanvet.com/collide/the-velocity-gap-gen-z-s-contradiction-with-ai/ Related episodes of The Ryan Vet Show with Lenore Skenazy, Kevin Stinehart, and Michaeleen Doucleff. Connect with Ryan Vet Read COLLIDE, the weekly essay on what shapes us: https://www.RyanVet.com/collide All episodes of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/listen/ Website and speaking inquiries: https://ryanvet.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvet YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ryancvet Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #50
    August 24 · 46 min

    Linda Flanagan: Take Back the Game, Private Equity, and the $40 Billion Youth Sports Machine

    Parents now spend an average of three hours and 23 minutes a day on their kids' sports on game and practice days. That is a part-time job, and Linda Flanagan says almost nobody chose it on purpose. Linda Flanagan is a journalist, a competitive runner, and a cross-country and track coach of 19 years. Her book Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids' Sports came out of the gap between those roles: what she knew sports could do for a kid, and what she watched the system actually do to them. She is a founding board member of the New York City chapter of the Positive Coaching Alliance and a contributor to Project Play at the Aspen Institute. She sits down with generational futurist and USA Today bestselling author Ryan Vet to follow the money. Youth sports is a $40 billion industry, and private equity is buying up leagues, facilities, tournament operators, and the software that runs them. The average family spends around $1,500 a year, which Linda calls a lowball number once travel and tournament fees and parking to watch your own child are counted. Thirty years ago kids started organized sports around age eight. Now at age eight they can compete for national championships. The shift she names is from a participation model to a performance model. Norway keeps 93 percent of its kids playing with local leagues, low costs, mixed ages, and no published scores. America sorts eight-year-olds into A, B, and C teams. One system is built to keep kids in. The other is built to find the best ones and let the rest fall away. Ryan brings the generational frame. Economic anxiety starting in the 1970s, families shrinking until each child became scarcer and more precious, missing kids on milk cartons turning supervision into a moral duty, and the sociologist Annette Lareau's concerted cultivation, where a parent's job became developing every ability a child might have. Put those together and organized sports looks like the responsible choice. Anxiety is the through line. The counterintuitive finding that should stop every sports parent: the more money parents spend on a child's sport, the less the child enjoys it and the more pressure they feel. In this episode: The $40 billion industry, and what private equity is actually buying Three hours and 23 minutes a day, and why $1,500 a year is a lowball number Why eight-year-olds now compete for so-called national championships Participation versus performance, and what Norway does differently Concerted cultivation, stranger danger, and the 1970s roots of sports mania The research showing more spending means less enjoyment and more pressure How the focus on performance quietly strips kids of their role in the family Why free play eroded, and the organization building it back into practice AI, wearables, and why Linda thinks the tech enthusiasm is overblown "Do 10-year-olds need us to keep their stats?" Her documentary series on collegiate women athletes and mental health The NCAA well-being study where women scored worse on all 10 metrics Michael Phelps, narrowed identity, and who you are when the sport ends The mother who wishes she had emphasized kindness over lacrosse Sunday games, church, and what a family trades without deciding to Opportunity cost, and why the real risk is sleepwalking into it Connect with Linda Flanagan: Website, articles, and interviews: lindaflanaganauthor.com Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids' Sports: read more here Her four-part documentary series on collegiate women athletes and mental health, Beyond Stigma, led by Villanova professor Rick Eckstein, is in distribution now. Updates on her website. Related episodes: This conversation picks up threads from three earlier guests. Lenore Skenazy on free range kids and overprotection, Michaeleen Doucleff on why kids are born into our world rather than us into theirs, and Izzy Kalman on good intentions and where they lead. Go deeper: Ryan writes about overprotection, friction, and childhood in his COLLIDE newsletter, including the essay "There Is No Such Thing as a Fragile Child." Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #49
    August 20 · 13 min

    Same Footage, Two Verdicts - Surveillance, Confirmation Bias, and Why More Proof Erodes Trust

    We built machines to settle our arguments. Instead we built extraordinarily precise machines for generating material for the argument we were already having. In the late 1990s, thyroid ultrasounds got cheap, so South Korea started running them in routine screenings. Diagnoses climbed roughly fifteenfold between 1993 and 2011. Thyroid cancer became the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the country. Surgeons removed thyroids by the thousands. And the death rate never moved (Ahn, Kim & Welch, New England Journal of Medicine, 2014). The machines were not wrong. The scans were accurate. What the ultrasound could not say was what any of it meant. A country was told to look for cancer, so it found cancer. In this episode of The Ryan Vet Show, USA TODAY bestselling author, generational futurist, and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet argues that proof is not a verdict. Proof is a mass on a scan, a video from a doorbell, a number on a dashboard, a location on a map. It sits there. Someone still has to decide what it means. This is the third installment in the childhood surveillance series, and it is the one where the promise of the camera falls apart: we removed the friction of having to ask, having to wonder, having to take someone at their word, and what came back was not more truth. It was more proof. And proof does not settle anything. The research is unusually blunt about this. In 1951 Princeton and Dartmouth played a famously ugly football game; researchers showed students from both schools the same film and asked them to count infractions. Princeton students saw Dartmouth commit about twice as many as Dartmouth students did. Same film, two different games, nobody lying (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954). Hand people on both sides of the death penalty the same two studies and swap the methods between them, and they will rate whichever one agrees with them as the rigorous one, then walk away more convinced than when they started (Lord, Ross & Lepper, 1979). Show 2,119 people the same use of force and simply move the camera three feet, from a dash cam to a body cam, and the verdict moves with it (Turner et al., PNAS, 2019). Then there is the harm nobody markets. Ring cameras in children's bedrooms have been hacked, and it has happened more than we talk about (Burke, NBC News, 2019). In this episode: South Korea's thyroid cancer surge, and what overdiagnosis actually costs Why 35.6% of people in a Finnish autopsy study had cancers they never knew about, and died of something else The known harm is rarely the real harm: what social media taught us and we ignored You find what you are told to look for Princeton, Dartmouth, and one football film that produced two different games Why handing both sides the same evidence pushes them further apart Body camera versus dash camera, and a verdict that moves three feet The dress, and why your perception felt like proof What Ryan's son was really asking when he said "just check the camera" Polarity is not disagreeing about the proof. It is agreeing the proof is the only thing worth believing, then reading it differently. The series so far: Part one, Did You Get the Photo of the Goat? Part two, Just Check the Camera, Dad. Next week: what happens when the proof itself was never real. Go deeper: This episode is drawn from Ryan's COLLIDE essay of the same name, with every study cited. Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #48
    August 17 · 43 min

    Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath: The Digital Delusion, AI in Schools, and Gen Z's Cognitive Decline

    Every generation since the late 1800s has outscored its parents on cognitive measures. Gen Z is the first to break the streak, and Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath argues the classroom laptop is why. Jared Cooney Horvath is a teacher turned educational neuroscientist. He has researched and taught at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, has worked with more than 1,000 schools around the world, and testified before the U.S. Senate on technology in schools. His book The Digital Delusion is out August 18 from Harmony, with praise from Jonathan Haidt, Johann Hari, and Anna Lembke. It lays out the case that when tech enters education, learning goes down. He sits down with generational futurist and USA Today bestselling author Ryan Vet to explain the mechanism. Learning moves in one direction: hard to easy. You learn to handwrite before you type. You learn arithmetic before you touch a calculator. Technology is built to do the opposite, to strip friction out and keep everything easy. That is a gift to an adult who already knows the thing. For a kid still learning how to become an adult, it is the surest way to guarantee they never learn it at all. His sharpest distinction is between offloading and outsourcing. Experts offload, because they can vet the output. Novices outsource, because they cannot. Same tool, opposite outcome. His sister-in-law is fit, so when her rented e-bike ran out of battery she pedaled home. Her husband is not, so he called an Uber. One had a skill the tool was extending. The other had a tool standing in for a skill he never built. Ryan brings his Loss of Friction thesis to the same problem. Spell check used to underline a word in red and leave you to solve it. Now a button rewrites the sentence and you did not write it anymore. Every generation gets friction stripped out in the name of progress, and the bill comes due in the generation after. In this episode: Why transfer is the whole ballgame, and why learning only travels hard to easy Offloading versus outsourcing, and the e-bike story that makes the difference obvious Why AI tutors make kids better at AI tutors, and why the scores fall apart off the program The biology of learning from another human, and what gets thrown out when there isn't one Why Millennials are more digitally literate than Gen Z despite never being taught "We've mistaken adult productivity for student learning" Why Jared says AI belongs nowhere in K-12, and why school itself is a giant ban Whether it's too late for Gen Z, and what he hopes they do about it What reversion looks like: hard copy books, pen and paper, blue books, debate Connect with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath: The Digital Delusion (Harmony) is out August 18: order it here Substack: The Digital Delusion YouTube: @JaredCooney Go deeper: Ryan writes about the Loss of Friction thesis in his COLLIDE newsletter, including the essay "What We Lost When Life Got Easier." Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #47
    August 13 · 14 min

    Just Check the Camera, Dad - Surveillance, the Friction Doctrine, and the Trust We Trade Away

    "Just check the camera, Dad." When Ryan Vet's young son tried to settle a sibling fight with security footage, it exposed how quietly surveillance has replaced trust in our homes, schools, and workplaces. A knocked-over tower, two boys, and one request that stopped generational futurist Ryan Vet cold: pull up the camera and let the video decide who was guilty. In this episode of The Ryan Vet Show, USA TODAY bestselling author and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet argues that trust is load-bearing, and that every timestamp, location dot, and pulse oximeter we bolt onto a child's life quietly removes the friction where trust is actually built. This is the second installment of a mini-series on proof, trust, and what shapes the next generation entering the future of work. Key Takeaways Trust cannot be bought, installed, or prompted into existence. It is earned slowly and destroyed in a split second, and it grows in exactly the friction we keep sanding away with surveillance. Childhood surveillance is now the norm, not a fringe habit. About half of parents digitally track their kids' location on an ongoing basis (Burnell et al., 2023), with some consumer surveys reporting rates as high as 86%. The tracking economy is enormous. Life360 reports roughly 95 million monthly users, and Owlet, maker of the baby oxygen-monitoring sock, cleared over $100 million in revenue last year (Life360, 2026; Owlet, 2026). It started in the marketplace, not the nursery. Shoshana Zuboff called it surveillance capitalism: treating private human experience as free raw material (Zuboff, 2019). We resented being tracked, then turned around and did it to our kids. Watching does not calm the watcher. One in four parents who track their children say it sometimes leaves them more anxious, not less (Clark et al., 2026, C.S. Mott poll). This is a future-of-work problem. Teacher trust in students is the single strongest protector against burnout (Van Maele and Van Houtte, 2015), and Gallup estimates low trust and engagement drain about $10 trillion a year from the global economy (Gallup, 2026). Ryan's own trust was earned, not tracked. At seventeen he flew nearly 7,000 miles to Beijing alone, with no phone and no way to be tracked, because a lifetime of boundaries and freedom had already proven his word was good. Research and Sources Cited Burnell et al. (2023), parental digital location tracking, Journal of Family Psychology Clark et al. (2026), Safety or Surveillance, C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health Zuboff (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Henkel (2014), photo-taking-impairment, Psychological Science Van Maele and Van Houtte (2015); Tsuyuguchi et al. (2025), teacher trust and burnout Gallup (2026), State of the Global Workplace U.S. Surgeon General (2024), Parents Under Pressure advisory Life360 (2026) and Owlet (2026), full-year results Related listening on The Ryan Vet Show: Tom LeNoble, Facebook employee number 57 (Ep 38), and Kevin Stinehart on rebuilding recess (Ep 31) Connect with Ryan Vet Read the full Collide essay: https://ryanvet.com/collide/just-check-the-camera-dad/ Subscribe to the Collide newsletter: https://ryanvet.com/collide Learn more and book Ryan to speak: https://ryanvet.com Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #46
    August 10 · 38 min

    Joseph Ferris (Boopsy): Gen X, the Barbell Generation, and Embracing the Suck

    Gen X is the generation everyone wants to be, but nobody wants to live through what it took to get there. Comedian and social media personality Joseph Ferris, better known online as Boopsy, went from Navy brat to millions of followers with sarcastic, no-holds-barred takes on parenting and Gen X life. In this conversation he sits down with generational futurist and USA Today bestselling author Ryan Vet to trace the whole arc: the feral latchkey childhood that built Gen X, how that childhood shows up in the way they parent, and the squeeze they are under now. Ryan calls Gen X the barbell generation, strapped between Boomers on one side and Millennials on the other, taking care of the people who were supposed to take care of them while still raising the kids they brought up. Joseph makes it funny, then makes it real. It lands somewhere honest: life sucks, so try to make it suck less, embrace the suck, and move on. In this episode: Why Gen X is the generation everybody wants to be but nobody wants to go through the things to get there The latchkey childhood, or as Joseph puts it, a post-apocalyptic world slapped into a childhood "Go play, come back, and if you're not dead or dying, we don't want to see you" Why this generation bubble-wraps their kids: they parent from their trauma because they never had any padding The barbell generation, and what it means to be squeezed between aging parents and the kids you raised Regret holds receipts, mistakes are the best teachers, and the wisdom underneath the jokes Learning to talk to a computer in the AI era, and the motto that ties it all together: embrace the suck Connect with Joseph Ferris (Boopsy): Instagram: @bupc_boopsy TikTok: @b.u.p.c Facebook: BUPC - Boopsy X: @josephmferris Go deeper: Ryan writes about the barbell generation and the Gen X squeeze in his COLLIDE newsletter, including the essay "Sorry Gen X, You're the Least Likely Generation to Become the Next CEO." Read COLLIDE free at ryanvet.com/collide. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #45
    August 6 · 9 min

    Did You Get the Photo of the Goat? Childhood Surveillance, Gen Alpha, and What We Trade for a Live Feed

    My six-year-old climbed into the back seat after his first day of farm camp and, before he told me a single thing, asked whether I had already seen the photo of the goat. His first instinct was to check whether he had been reported on. That is the moment this episode is about. In the opening essay of a five-part COLLIDE series on childhood surveillance, generational futurist, USA Today bestselling author, and keynote speaker Ryan Vet reads the piece that started it all. A painted goat, a squirt-gun bath, a thirty-minute interrogation on the drive home, and one small question that revealed how a generation now expects to be watched. Gen Alpha, and Gen Beta right behind them, is being raised in a world so tracked, so monitored, and so analyzed, from sleep scores and step counts to location pings and instant grade alerts, that it is quietly rewriting what "how was your day" even means. Ryan makes the case that we reprogrammed the oldest question in parenting. The open-ended "how was your day," the version that let a child choose their own story, has been replaced by a child who assumes you already know. He connects that shift to trust, autonomy, and the workforce these kids will enter within the decade, and argues that a generation trained to verify before it trusts will lead, hire, and work differently than any before it. He also brings in his conversation with Lenore Skenazy, founder of Free Range Kids, who called childhood surveillance "the thing that I think about the most and talk about the least," and who framed the trade at the heart of the whole series: "We're replacing faith with certainty, and certainty is a lot more tenuous, because you have to keep checking it, than faith." In this episode: The goat story, and the one question from the back seat that reframed how Ryan thinks about monitoring kids How "how was your day" got reprogrammed from an open question into a report card the parent already read Why roughly half of parents now track their child's location, and the promise underneath the tracker that never actually delivers peace Faith versus certainty, and why certainty is the more anxious way to live because it has to be renewed every few minutes The gift analogy, and why removing the not-knowing removes the experience itself Why this is not just a parenting issue, and what a "verify before you trust" generation means for the future workplace The question the whole series turns on: does seeing more of our children's days give us more of our children, or less? Referenced in this episode: Lenore Skenazy on The Ryan Vet Show (Episode 33): Free Range Kids and Why Overprotection Is the Real Danger Burnell, Andrade, and Hoyle (2023), on parental digital monitoring and adolescent adjustment Henkel (2014), on how taking photos changes what we remember COLLIDE Newsletter by Ryan Vet, home of the full five-part surveillance series: ryanvet.com/collide Subscribe to The Ryan Vet Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. New COLLIDE essay episodes release every Thursday at 7am ET. Guest era episodes release Monday mornings at 6am ET. Join the COLLIDE newsletter at ryanvet.com/collide for the research, reflections, and frameworks behind every episode. Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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  • #44
    August 3 · 46 min

    Frankie Staton: Founder of the Black Country Music Association, and Why She Chose to Be a Victor, Not a Victim

    In 1981, Nashville police mistook a young piano player waiting outside a jam session for a sex worker. She talked her way into the room anyway, and 15 years later she built the stage that Black country artists did not have. Frankie Staton has spent 4 decades in Nashville. She grew up banging on her aunt's farmhouse piano outside Greensboro, North Carolina, moved to Nashville with nothing, and worked her way from a Marriott salad bar to a 5-star restaurant's grand piano, sharing rooms with Clint Eastwood, Dolly Parton, and Minnie Pearl along the way. Publishers told her a person who looked like her could not have written the songs she played them. In November 1996, she founded the Black Country Music Association and staged the first Black country showcase at the Bluebird Cafe, built to answer a newspaper story that claimed there were no Black country artists to find. Frankie joins Ryan Vet to trace that journey, from a childhood memory of being pulled off a Woolworths stool because the counter was for white customers only, to a mentor who fought for her at Sony Tree and lost, to the choice she made to be, in her words, a victor and not a victim. In this episode: Her origin story: a farmhouse piano, a gas station jingle, and a move to Nashville at all costs Talking her way into a jam session, and the piano gig that followed Founding the Black Country Music Association in 1996, and the first showcase at the Bluebird Cafe What it means to build resilience in increments Her advice for young people navigating rejection and doubt today Frankie is finishing her memoir, A Witness at the Party, and a Loretta Lynn tribute EP, Forever Loretta. Find her at frankiestaton.org. Related from COLLIDE: Is the American Dream Dead or Just Different? https://ryanvet.com/c/26/ Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: 👉 https://ryanvet.com/collide

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