The Ryan Vet Show

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 cohort Leadership and organizational psychology Change management and the forces driving adaptation Entrepreneurship and real-world decision making Communication, influence,

The Ryan Vet Show is a society podcast hosted by Ryan Vet, with 57 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Ryan Vet hosts The Ryan Vet Show, a society show with 57 episodes published.

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  Episode #58

  Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett: Toxic Bosses Don't Change, and Why Gen Z Actually Burns Out Less

  Sep 28, 202641 min

  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 burnout is a workplace condition, not a personal failing, and that the generation getting blamed for fragility might just have better boundaries. The diagnostic she uses is toxic versus difficult. A difficult boss is disorganized, a poor communicator, maybe even a little weak, but does no real harm. A toxic boss does harm, overt or covert, and by her account cannot be coached out of it. "A truly toxic boss will not become a good leader," she tells Ryan. Her metaphor for staying anyway: living in a house with asbestos in the walls and responding with a yoga mat and a fresh coat of paint. The intervention feels like progress. The problem is still in the walls. Then she flips the burnout story. Her research finds Gen Z is more likely to leave a bad situation before it becomes a crisis, which means they may actually be less likely to burn out than generations that stayed and absorbed it. She puts the question straight back to Ryan: does that make them weak, or does it make them have better boundaries? Ryan tries to lighten the conversation with a Michael Scott joke. She does not take it. She asks him directly whether he thinks a boss like that is harming people's health. It is the moment that sets the tone for everything after it. In this episode: The difference between a toxic boss and a merely difficult one, and why only one of them can change Why Gen Z leaving fast may be better boundaries, not fragility The asbestos-and-a-yoga-mat metaphor for surface-level workplace fixes Why burnout is a workplace condition, not a personal failing "Human beings, not human doings": what changes when leaders stop measuring people by output alone What 25 years of organizational psychology says about which leaders can actually change, and which can't Connect with Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett: Website: drlaura.live Podcast: Where Work Meets Life Book: I Wish I'd Quit Sooner Go deeper: Ryan writes about generational shifts in leadership, work, and culture every week in his COLLIDE newsletter. Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide . Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan 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 Insights If 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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  Episode #57

  600 People Watched Him Read Words That Weren't His - AI in Education, Offloading vs. Outsourcing, and the Loss of Friction

  Sep 24, 202614 min

  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 about its AI-use policy. The answer was "working on it." In this episode of The Ryan Vet Show, USA TODAY bestselling author and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet argues that the debate over how much AI is too much is the wrong debate. The real line runs between offloading and outsourcing, and it cuts straight through the classroom, the future of work, and the character of the person doing the work. Key Takeaways If your organization is still "working on" its AI-use policy, you are already late. The policy vacuum is what let a man stand in front of 600 stakeholders and read a machine's words. The institutional swings are happening in weeks, not years. Purdue now requires AI competency to graduate and Ohio State wants every undergraduate "bilingual" in it (Purdue University, 2025; The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2026). Singapore's national university made it compulsory for freshmen. Meanwhile 29 New York City council members asked for a two-year ban, and a Kansas school board swung from a total ban to teacher-supervised access two days before school started (KCTV, 2026). Almost none of that debate is about honesty. Every one of those fights is about whether students may use AI, or about who gets their data. New York's council never argued the technology was bad for learning. It argued the city had not protected student information in its contracts (K-12 Dive, 2026). New York City guidance says effective AI integration "preserves" the intellectual work of learning (New York City Public Schools, 2026). Ryan disagrees. AI augments the work. It does not preserve it. That is a meaningful difference. The Sosa and McGwire test: steroids and corked bats made them better hitters, and they still had to make contact with the ball. The modification augmented the work. It did not preserve it, because what they put in their bodies changed those bodies. Educational neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath draws the cleanest line. An expert handing a task to a tool is offloading, because their expertise lets them check what comes back. A novice doing the identical thing is outsourcing, because nothing returns that they can evaluate. Same tool. Two completely different acts. The e-bike test: when the battery died, the gym rat pedaled home. Her husband called an Uber. Same machine, two outcomes, determined entirely by what the rider had already built. Horvath is not a neutral party. He is one of more than 260 organizations and experts who signed an April letter calling for a five-year pause on all student-facing generative AI in PreK-12 schools (Fairplay, 2026). Six weeks into 2023, Ryan caught a student using ChatGPT and pulled up the tool on a shared screen to regenerate the essay nearly verbatim in real time. The student still denied it. The violation was never the AI. It was the lie, and the question underneath it: why did he feel he had to hide it? So Ryan measured it. He layered invisible instructions into two assignment prompts. Six of the eleven students who submitted handed back projects responding to an instruction they could never have seen with the naked eye. Graded on substance, they had done the work. Not one disclosed the AI use. Not one responded when he asked about it. Detection is not the escape hatch. AI detectors return one hundred percent human on machine-written text and one hundred percent AI on human-written text. Anthropic's new Claude mark applies only to models released on or after August 2, no detection tool has shipped, and the company says plainly that a mark shows the model processed the text, not that it wrote it (Anthropic, 2026). The question worth asking: what practical skill will AI let a student do tomorrow that they cannot do today? Logic gets learned on a playground, over a chessboard, or in a math problem worked by hand. Conflict management gets learned with the difficult roommate. The learning was always in the laboring. Also this week on The Ryan Vet Show: economist Orphe Divounguy on the affordability squeeze, the Fed's misread, and why housing is the heartbeat. Out now. Research and Sources Cited Anthropic. (2026). How Claude marks AI-generated content. Chalkbeat New York. (2026, June 24). NYC promised final school AI guidance by June. Now officials are hitting pause. Columbia Law School. (2026). 2026-2027 default academic policy on student use of artificial intelligence. Fairplay. (2026, April 16). Pause GenAI in PreK-12 schools for 5 years, orgs and experts say. Horvath, J. C. (2026). The Digital Delusion. K-12 Dive. (2026, June 12). NYC schools face public pressure to pause AI use for 2 years. KCTV. (2026, August 11). Under teacher guidance, older Shawnee Mission students approved for limited AI use. New York City Public Schools. (2026). Guidance on artificial intelligence. Purdue University. (2025, December 12). Purdue unveils comprehensive AI strategy; trustees approve AI working competency graduation requirement. The Chronicle of Higher Education. (2026, August 11). Jagged intelligence: Should AI fluency be a graduation requirement? Ryan Vet, "600 People Watched Him Read Words That Weren't His," COLLIDE: https://www.ryanvet.com/collide/ai-in-education/ The Ryan Vet Show with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath: https://ryanvet.com/show/episodes/jared-cooney-horvath-the-digital-delusion/ Connect with Ryan Vet Read COLLIDE, the weekly essay on what shapes us: https://www.RyanVet.com/collide All episodes of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/listen/ Website and speaking inquiries: https://ryanvet.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvet YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ryancvet Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan 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 Insights If 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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  Episode #56

  Matt Weiss: Gen Z Did Not Quit Drinking, the Zero Proof Boom, and the Wine Pendulum

  Sep 21, 202647 min

  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 investor, to take the headline apart. Start with the arithmetic almost nobody runs. Gen Z currently spans roughly age 14 to 29, which means less than half of them can legally buy a drink at all. Comparing that cohort to a fully adult generation is not apples to apples. It is the Generational Prism problem: the age someone is, the moment they are living in, and the label we assign them get collapsed into a single story, and the story comes out wrong. Then follow the money. The zero proof category has passed 1 billion dollars, and Ryan cites research that 93 percent of the people buying non alcoholic products also buy alcohol. That is not abstinence. That is moderation, and a lot of it is the same person buying both. Matt adds the piece that almost never gets reported alongside the decline: alcohol lost roughly 1.2 billion dollars in sales across 2024 into 2025, and THC beverages and gummies picked up almost exactly that much. The drink did not disappear. It changed shape. The second half is the long arc of American wine, and it is the best argument in the episode that none of this is new. Prohibition. The jug wine era. Robert Mondavi and the arrival of terroir. The 1976 Judgment of Paris, which only became a story once a journalist wrote it down. Robert Parker, the 100 point scale, and a decade of winemakers building wines for one man's palate. Then the generation that refused to be validated by a single score and went back to farming first. Matt calls wine cyclical. Ryan calls it the Generational Pendulum. They are describing the same machine. It closes practical. If you want better wine without spending more, Matt has one piece of advice, and it is not an app. In this episode: Why the Gen Z drinking decline is partly an age artifact, not a values shift The zero proof category past 1 billion dollars, and why most of its buyers still buy alcohol THC beverages absorbing almost exactly what alcohol lost Scott Galloway, the socializing collapse, and what happens to a drink that was always social Prohibition to Mondavi to the Judgment of Paris, in one arc Robert Parker's 100 point scale, and the winemakers who chased it Why boomers chased scores and certifications, and Gen X winemakers rebelled Custom crush, the three tier system, and why the best small wine never reaches a shelf Emerging US regions worth your money: Yadkin Valley, Virginia, the Finger Lakes, Lodi, Mendocino, Washington State The one habit that will improve your wine drinking more than anything else Connect with Matt Weiss: Website: winecentricshow.com The Wine Centric Show on YouTube and social Newsletter: sign up at winecentricshow.com Go deeper: Ryan wrote about the Gen Z sobriety story and what the market is actually signaling in his COLLIDE newsletter essay "Gen Z's Sobriety Isn't a Moral Movement. It's a Market Signal." Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide . Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan 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 Insights If 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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  The Ryan Vet Show

  Orphe Divounguy: The Affordability Squeeze, the Fed's Misread, and Housing Is the Heartbeat

  Sep 14, 202643 min

  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 public make sense of the economy, translating complex analysis on housing, labor markets and fiscal policy into guidance they can actually act on. He holds a PhD in Economics, he is a LinkedIn Top Voice, and he hosts his own podcast, Everyday Economics. He sits down with generational futurist and USA Today bestselling author Ryan Vet to make an argument that is more pointed than economists usually make out loud: the official read of the American economy is misleading, and housing is the reason. His case starts with the growth number. Of the 1.5% real GDP growth in the second quarter, he notes that 1.2 percentage points came from intellectual property and equipment tied to the AI build-out. Strip that out and the rest of the economy is barely moving. Unemployment at 4.1% looks healthy until you go looking for recent graduates who cannot find work. The averages are fine. The distribution is not. His conclusion is blunt: he feels the Fed chair is misreading the US economy. Underneath the macro argument is an affordability problem with a number attached. By his math, a median Los Angeles household would need a down payment of roughly $790,000 to keep housing at 30% of income. The country is roughly 4.5 million housing units short, and the shortage is concentrated in exactly the expensive coastal metros where people most want to live. Meanwhile mobility has collapsed, for three reasons at once: weak hiring, rate lock on pandemic-era 3% mortgages, and renters whose current rent beats anything on the market. Orphe's point is that the stalled mobility is not a side effect. It is the economic problem. Engineers who cannot move to where the work is mean technology that does not get built. The turn in the conversation comes when Ryan puts a countertop number on the macro argument. At his flagship coffee shop the average ticket is down almost 40% with the same customer count. Same people walking in, smaller orders, no pastry. Orphe's datasets and Ryan's register are describing the same country. He is not a doomer, and he is not selling a crash. He is skeptical that the much-predicted silver tsunami fixes anything, because the paid-off boomer housing is in the affordable Midwest, not on the coasts where the demand is. He is openly optimistic about Gen Alpha. But he attaches one large caveat to that optimism: $40 trillion in federal debt eventually gets paid, by a crisis, by higher taxes, or by cuts. The best human moment in the episode is smaller than any of this. The man who had every housing dataset on earth at his fingertips still got outbid twice buying his own home, still needed an agent, and now calls that agent his therapist. In this episode: Why 1.2 of the 1.5 points of Q2 growth came from the AI build-out, and what that hides "Most people see these headlines and they see the average. They don't look at the distribution." The 4.1% unemployment rate and the recent graduates it does not describe Why a median LA household would need a down payment of roughly $790,000 The 4.5 million unit shortage, and why it sits where people actually want to live The three reasons American mobility stalled: weak hiring, rate lock, and under-market rent "People are going to get stuck in places that are not necessarily good for them or even good for us as an economy at large." "They're renting in New York and they're buying in Alabama." Why the silver tsunami will not rescue coastal affordability What a coffee shop's average ticket reveals that the headline numbers do not Building more housing, welcoming people, and growing the tax base The economist who got outbid twice: "I think of my agent as my therapist." Why he is optimistic about Gen Alpha, and the $40 trillion caveat that comes with it Connect with Orphe Divounguy: Website: orphedivounguy.com Podcast: Everyday Economics Founder and Chief Economist of the Quantitative Research Group, former Zillow economist, PhD in Economics, and a LinkedIn Top Voice Go deeper: Ryan wrote about homeownership, affordability and what each generation now thinks it is owed in his COLLIDE newsletter essay "Is the American Dream Dead or Just Different?" Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide . Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan 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 Insights If 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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  Episode #53

  Gen Alpha Is the Experiment - Childhood Surveillance, the Friction Doctrine, and the Trust We Never Let Them Earn

  Sep 3, 202610 min

  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/collide All episodes of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/listen/ Website and speaking inquiries: https://ryanvet.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvet YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RyanVet Send us Fan Mail About Ryan Vet Ryan 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 Insights If 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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