The Ryan Vet Show

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...

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...