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 cohortLeadership and organizational psychologyChange management and the forces driving adaptationEntrepreneurship and real-world decision makingCommunication, influence, and human behaviorHow the past explains the present and the present shapes the future The show features two core formats: Long-form interviews with leaders, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and creators whose stories reveal the “why” behind their work, decisions, and impact.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.

  1. 5d ago ·  Video

    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/collideAll episodes of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/listen/Website and speaking inquiries: https://ryanvet.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvetYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RyanVetSend us Fan Mail About Ryan VetRyan 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 InsightsIf 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

  2. Aug 31 ·  Video

    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 conversationSupernormal 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 drowningWhy hypersexualized content sits at the top of the algorithm's hierarchyWhat constant stimulation is doing to attention, anxiety, and intimacyThe 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 itCurating your feed to serve your real life instead of replacing itThe desire rewire, and why agency beats fear Connect with Dr. Trish Leigh: Website: drtrishleigh.comYouTube: @DrTrishLeigh, where she publishes several pieces of practical content each weekShe 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 VetRyan 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 InsightsIf 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

  3. Aug 27 ·  Video

    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/collideAll episodes of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/listen/Website and speaking inquiries: https://ryanvet.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvetYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ryancvetSend us Fan Mail About Ryan VetRyan 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 InsightsIf 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

  4. Aug 24 ·  Video

    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 buyingThree hours and 23 minutes a day, and why $1,500 a year is a lowball numberWhy eight-year-olds now compete for so-called national championshipsParticipation versus performance, and what Norway does differentlyConcerted cultivation, stranger danger, and the 1970s roots of sports maniaThe research showing more spending means less enjoyment and more pressureHow the focus on performance quietly strips kids of their role in the familyWhy free play eroded, and the organization building it back into practiceAI, 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 healthThe NCAA well-being study where women scored worse on all 10 metricsMichael Phelps, narrowed identity, and who you are when the sport endsThe mother who wishes she had emphasized kindness over lacrosseSunday games, church, and what a family trades without deciding toOpportunity cost, and why the real risk is sleepwalking into itConnect with Linda Flanagan: Website, articles, and interviews: lindaflanaganauthor.comTake Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids' Sports: read more hereHer 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 VetRyan 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 InsightsIf 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

  5. Aug 20 ·  Video

    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 costsWhy 35.6% of people in a Finnish autopsy study had cancers they never knew about, and died of something elseThe known harm is rarely the real harm: what social media taught us and we ignoredYou find what you are told to look forPrinceton, Dartmouth, and one football film that produced two different gamesWhy handing both sides the same evidence pushes them further apartBody camera versus dash camera, and a verdict that moves three feetThe dress, and why your perception felt like proofWhat 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 VetRyan 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 InsightsIf 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

  6. Aug 17 ·  Video

    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 easyOffloading versus outsourcing, and the e-bike story that makes the difference obviousWhy AI tutors make kids better at AI tutors, and why the scores fall apart off the programThe biology of learning from another human, and what gets thrown out when there isn't oneWhy 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 banWhether it's too late for Gen Z, and what he hopes they do about itWhat reversion looks like: hard copy books, pen and paper, blue books, debateConnect with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath: The Digital Delusion (Harmony) is out August 18: order it hereSubstack: The Digital DelusionYouTube: @JaredCooneyGo 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 VetRyan 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 InsightsIf 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

  7. Aug 13 ·  Video

    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 PsychologyClark et al. (2026), Safety or Surveillance, C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's HealthZuboff (2019), The Age of Surveillance CapitalismHenkel (2014), photo-taking-impairment, Psychological ScienceVan Maele and Van Houtte (2015); Tsuyuguchi et al. (2025), teacher trust and burnoutGallup (2026), State of the Global WorkplaceU.S. Surgeon General (2024), Parents Under Pressure advisoryLife360 (2026) and Owlet (2026), full-year resultsRelated 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/collideLearn more and book Ryan to speak: https://ryanvet.comSend us Fan Mail About Ryan VetRyan 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 InsightsIf 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

  8. Aug 10 ·  Video

    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 thereThe 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 paddingThe barbell generation, and what it means to be squeezed between aging parents and the kids you raisedRegret holds receipts, mistakes are the best teachers, and the wisdom underneath the jokesLearning to talk to a computer in the AI era, and the motto that ties it all together: embrace the suckConnect with Joseph Ferris (Boopsy): Instagram: @bupc_boopsyTikTok: @b.u.p.cFacebook: BUPC - BoopsyX: @josephmferrisGo 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 VetRyan 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 InsightsIf 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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3.9
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About

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 cohortLeadership and organizational psychologyChange management and the forces driving adaptationEntrepreneurship and real-world decision makingCommunication, influence, and human behaviorHow the past explains the present and the present shapes the future The show features two core formats: Long-form interviews with leaders, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and creators whose stories reveal the “why” behind their work, decisions, and impact.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.

Information

  • Creator
    Ryan Vet
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    53
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Ryan Vet Show
  • Show Website
    The Ryan Vet Show