The Ryan Vet Show

Content warning: this episode discusses online harms to children, including suicide, self-harm, and online predation. Listener discretion is advised. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 in the US to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Nicki Petrossi spent years managing social media for tech companies and their executives. Then she started learning how bad the internet ha...

On July 4, 1776, fifty-six men who agreed on almost nothing signed the Declaration of Independence anyway. Two hundred fifty years later, we have forgotten how they did it. Generational futurist, USA TODAY bestselling author, and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet marks America's 250th anniversary by walking back into the Pennsylvania State House on Chestnut Street. The signers ranged in...

What happens when you trade a fast-rising San Francisco startup job for a one-way ticket to Casablanca and no plan past three nights in a hostel? Weh'yee Barkon found out. He joins Ryan Vet, a friend of more than two decades, to talk about the digital nomad life, rediscovering his roots, and building businesses across Africa. Weh'yee was employee number seven at a fast-growing electronic...

The Wizard of Oz taught a generation to gasp when the world turned to color. Now Gen Z is deliberately turning its phones back to black and white. Generational futurist, USA TODAY bestselling author, and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet starts with a viral photo, two rows of cars sixty years apart, captioned "America is losing its color," and goes looking for the numbers. What he f...

We convinced ourselves that childhood is more dangerous than ever, right as crime hit historic lows. Lenore Skenazy, founder of Free Range Kids and president of Let Grow, joins The Ryan Vet Show to explain why overprotection became the actual threat, and how to give kids their independence back. In 2008, Lenore Skenazy let her nine year old ride the New York City subway home alone. He had begged f...

We didn't raise a fragile generation. We renamed discomfort as danger, then removed the very experiences that make kids strong. The contrarian case for why there is no such thing as a fragile child. Generational futurist, USA Today bestselling author, and keynote speaker Ryan Vet makes a contrarian case: there is no such thing as a fragile child. Kids learn to walk by falling. They are built...

We engineered the friction out of childhood, then acted surprised when kids could not handle it. Kevin Stinehart, the third grade teacher and play advocate featured in chapter 11 of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, joins The Ryan Vet Show to make the case that play is not a want. It is a developmental need. Kevin Stinehart teaches third grade at Central Academy of the Arts in Pickens...

The hardest part of modern motherhood isn't the work. It's that we now do it alone. The work was always going to be hard. The village was the part we could have kept. Generational futurist, USA Today bestselling author, and keynote speaker Ryan Vet starts at a high school production of Peter Pan, with the image of a mother lying on a windowsill, waiting fifty years for her son to come ho...

The affordability math from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s is broken. Mike Schneider, founder of Acre Homes and longtime real estate operator, joins The Ryan Vet Show to walk through what actually happened to home ownership in America, and what comes next. Mike Schneider has spent the last decade and a half rebuilding the math of home ownership. He co-founded First in 2012, using machine learning and AI...

What if everything we know about modern parenting is wrong? NPR global health correspondent and bestselling author Michaeleen Doucleff joins The Ryan Vet Show for the first guest episode of year two, on Hunt, Gather, Parent, Dopamine Kids, and what parents actually have power to change. Michaeleen Doucleff spent nearly 12 years as a global health correspondent at NPR, covering infectious disease o...

The American Dream isn't dead. It's been redefined. And the generation rewriting it isn't asking permission. Generational futurist, USA Today bestselling author, and keynote speaker Ryan Vet traces the rise, the reality check, and the reframing of the most powerful idea in modern American identity. From historian James Truslow Adams coining "the American Dream" in 1931 to...

What shapes us? And where are we going? This is the Start Here episode of The Ryan Vet Show, the line in the sand between the essays that built this podcast and the conversations that will define what comes next. Generational futurist, USA Today bestselling author, and keynote speaker Ryan Vet introduces the next chapter of The Ryan Vet Show, a podcast about generations, culture, leadership, and t...

The most digital generation is going back to the mall. Generational futurist Ryan Vet explains why Gen Z's IRL revival is a leadership signal. Ryan Vet, generational futurist, expert in generations, and AI keynote speaker, unpacks the resurgence of physical retail, the Generational Pendulum, and what Gen Z's return to malls, bookstores, and coffee shops reveals about how this generation...

The Class of 2026 is the loneliest generation ever to walk across a graduation stage, and the workforce is not ready for them. Generational futurist Ryan Vet, an expert in generations and AI keynote speaker, unpacks why the college Class of 2026 is unlike any cohort before it. They are the first traditional graduating class whose entire college experience was shaped by generative AI, whose adolesc...

At Coachella 2026, Justin Bieber walked on stage, sat down at a MacBook, and started playing YouTube videos of his twelve-year-old self. Millennials in the crowd wiped away tears. Generational futurist Ryan Vet unpacks why that Coachella moment is a cultural mirror for an entire generation. Bieber sold his 290-song back catalog to Hipgnosis Songs Capital, a fund backed by Blackstone, for a reporte...

We are the most digitally connected society in human history. We are also, by every measure, the loneliest. The U.S. Surgeon General compared loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The loneliest adults are not in nursing homes. They are in their twenties and thirties. Generational futurist Ryan Vet unpacks the research behind Gen Z's loneliness epidemic, why it began in childhood and not...

Disagreement used to cost you something. Today, it costs nothing — and that's the problem. The Berlin Wall is remembered for what it built. But what it really destroyed was the middle: the shared space where people could disagree, stay in the room, and finish the conversation. Today, an invisible wall made of algorithms, labels, and distrust has done the same thing. In this episode, generatio...

Generational futurist Ryan Vet cuts through the Easter headlines: Gen Z isn't experiencing a religious revival — the data reveals something far more nuanced, and far more important for leaders and parents to understand. Every spring, mainstream media runs the same story: Gen Z is returning to church. But applying the Composition Effect and the Generational Prism, what's actually happenin...

Poor communication costs U.S. businesses $1.2 trillion annually, but what if the deepest barrier across generations isn't how we talk, but whether we trust the person talking? In this episode, Ryan unpacks why the biggest breakdown in cross-generational communication isn't about texting versus calling or shorthand versus formality. Drawing on interpersonal attraction studies, misinformat...

The first Gen Alpha teenagers have arrived. What does turning 13 look like for a generation born into AI, pandemics, and a world that generates whatever you ask for? In this episode of the Collide podcast, generational futurist and USA TODAY bestselling author Ryan Vet uses his Generational Prism framework to examine what age 13 looked like across four generations, from Gen X in the arcades of 197...

What do washing machines, smartphones, and artificial intelligence have in common? They were all designed to make life easier. But they may have also changed the human experience in ways we didn’t anticipate. In this episode, Ryan Vet explores the concept of the Velocity Gap, the growing distance between how fast technology advances and how slowly we understand its impact on our lives. From househ...

What happens when technology moves faster than our morality? In this episode of The Ryan Vet Show, futurist, entrepreneur, and USA TODAY bestselling author Ryan Vet explores a powerful idea he calls The Velocity Gap — the space between technological acceleration and society’s ability to understand its consequences. Throughout history, innovation has repeatedly outpaced reflection. Cigarettes were...

A viral story recently circulated online about a “Gen Z retirement home” in Malaysia — a quiet sanctuary where burned-out young adults can unplug, eat communal meals, and live in structured solitude for a few hundred dollars a month. It sounds bizarre. Retirement homes are supposed to be for Boomers , not 25-year-olds. But the deeper story reveals something profound about the world Gen Z grew up i...

In this episode of The Ryan Vet Show, generational futurist Ryan Vet explores how communication frequency has become the new transparency — especially for Gen Z. Raised entirely inside algorithm-driven platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, Gen Z has been conditioned to associate repetition with credibility. This episode breaks down: The psychology behind the Illusory Truth Effect Why Gen...

Love didn’t disappear. It got upgraded. In this episode of The Ryan Vet Show , Ryan takes you on a generational journey through how we quietly rewrote the meaning of love — from duty and lifelong commitment… to choice and chemistry… to “love is love,” chronic dating, and now even emotional bonds with AI. Valentine’s Day is no longer just about roses and romance. It’s become a cultural mirror, reve...