The Ryan Vet Show

Music was never meant to be made alone, and Chad Gerber says the technology we keep building is quietly pushing us there. Chad Gerber is a guitarist, songwriter, and entrepreneur who started flying out to Miami at 17 to play on other artists' projects, and he has toured and worked in studios ever since. He joins Ryan Vet to talk about what technology has done to the music industry, from Napst...

In researching for my next book, I stumbled across a note I had written: "Serial Killers and the Sexual Revolution." Generational futurist Ryan Vet reads his COLLIDE essay, a behind-the-scenes look at how he chases down a generational idea to see if it is viable or just interesting. He starts with five names (Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dennis Rader, and Gary Ridgway), a...

Chris Ruden was born with a limb difference and hid it for more than seventeen years. What did the real damage, he says, was not what other people said. It was that he believed them. Chris is an amputee, a world record holding powerlifter, and a professional speaker on culture and change. A video of him taking his glove off reached seven million views and led to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson...

Nearly every line I wrote about millennials is now being said about Gen Z. An organization wanted a few dozen copies of Cracking the Millennial Code, the book Ryan Vet wrote in 2019. He hadn't opened it in seven years. This week he reads it again, finds that it described the Generational Pendulum before it had a name, and explains what a new printing, with bonus digital resources and a full w...

Will Gen Z show up to vote in the 2026 midterms? Caroline Welles, a Democratic organizer, and Marc Lotter, a Republican communications strategist, join Ryan Vet for a conversation across the aisle about how each generation votes, why young voters are so hard to reach, and what they would tell the generation that cannot vote yet. Welles is the executive director of The First Ask and the former Dire...

One employee worked two jobs at once. The company's answer was to rebuild how everyone worked. In 1995, nearly 250,000 people were evacuated from the Dutch river country as the Rhine, the Waal, and the Meuse swelled toward the dikes. Eight-year-old Carina Verbeek was one of them. Ryan Vet follows what the Netherlands did next: three centuries of raising the walls, then Room for the River, the...

Dr. Brian Ralph spent 32 years in higher education, nine of them as a university president. His biggest worry about AI is not cheating. It is that people are losing the ability to be curious about each other. Dr. Ralph joins Ryan Vet to talk about the students he watched arrive on campus, from millennials to Gen Z, and the generation that is coming next. Gen Alpha could be tutored by AI from the s...

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, driverles...

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 differe...

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...

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 w...

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 b...

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 burno...

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...

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 in...

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 bestsel...

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 p...

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...

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 actua...

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,...

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...

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....

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 1,00...

"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...

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...