The Ryan Vet Show

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...

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...

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...

The men who wrote the wisest fathers on television had survived a depression and a war. Their kids wrote the buffoons. Somewhere over the last half century, the American TV dad went from moral center to punchline. Erica Scharrer's analysis of sitcoms from 1980 to 2017 found fathers doing less of the real parenting over time and being played for fools more often. A 2024 Geena Davis Institute s...

Content warning: this episode discusses online harms to children, including child sexual abuse, trafficking, and the death of a child linked to a viral online challenge. Listener discretion is advised. To report suspected online exploitation of a child in the US, contact the Department of Homeland Security Know2Protect Tipline at 1-833-591-5669 or the CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org. Most of t...

A deepfake of the President hijacked a live stream that 30,000 people were watching. It took generational futurist Ryan Vet five seconds to realize it was fake. That five seconds is the whole problem. On Father's Day, a stream-jacking deepfake interrupted the College World Series broadcast Ryan Vet was watching with his family, complete with a breaking-news chime, the President's voice,...

Everything you’ve been taught about bullying might be making it worse. Izzy Kalman has been a school psychologist and psychotherapist since 1978 — and since the 1999 Columbine shooting, he’s been the anti-bullying movement’s most persistent critic. In this episode, he argues that a generation of “zero tolerance” policies, mandated by law, took the very things that escalate conflict and taught them...

The Class of 2026 didn't boo the future. They booed being told the future had already been decided for them. The strangest commencement season in memory, and the leadership lesson hiding inside it. Generational futurist, USA Today bestselling author, and keynote speaker Ryan Vet unpacks the commencement booing wave of 2026. A few weeks after he joked that every graduation speaker would inevit...

Tom LeNoble was employee number 57 at Facebook, recruited out of Palm, the Palm Pilot and Treo company, back when it was still "the Facebook" and still lived inside college networks. He was older than almost everyone in the building, the person Ryan calls the adult in the room, and he had a front row seat as a tiny unknown startup became one of the most powerful companies in the world. I...

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...