The Ryan Vet Show

A New York taxi medallion went from $10 to $1.3 million and back down to $79,105. The driver's license is next.

Ryan Vet opens with Renato, the Brazilian driver who keeps a cold guaraná waiting for him in Orlando, then follows the money: how Uber emptied the yellow cab, and why robotaxis are a far bigger shift than swapping one human driver for another. Waymo, Tesla's Cybercab, driverless trucks, and 14 billion self-driven miles all point the same way. The question is what a generation gives up when it never learns to drive.

In this episode:

• Why a New York taxi medallion that cost $10 in 1938 sold for $1.3 million in 2014, then averaged $79,105 by 2021
• How Uber took nearly every ride it gained in Manhattan straight from yellow cabs
• Waymo's jump from 50,000 paid rides a week in May 2024 to 500,000 by March 2026
• Why 14 billion Tesla self-driving miles, roughly 18,800 human driving lifetimes, is the Velocity Gap in action
• What Gen Beta trades when the wheel goes away: the conversations, the judgment, and the freedom

Go deeper: Read the full COLLIDE essay at ryanvet.com/collide/gen-beta-drivers-license, and subscribe to COLLIDE at ryanvet.com/collide.

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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.

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

Paul Garcia-Ryan identified as a woman from age 15 to age 30, then chose to detransition. Today he is a licensed clinical social worker and the president of Therapy First, and he argues that the debate over gender and young people has a lot less to do with sides than the culture war makes it look.

Paul joins Ryan Vet to share his story in his own words: an early childhood sense that he was different, his medical, social, and legal transition, and his training as a psychotherapist at a leading gender clinic in New York City. He explains what changed once younger patients began arriving in his own practice, and how that led him to rethink gender dysphoria and his own history.

Paul now works with young people and their families, and with trans adults, and leads Therapy First, a nonprofit focused on raising the standard of care in youth mental health. He and Ryan talk about how the field has shifted from a mental health model toward a medical model, why therapists often talk past each other because they use the same terms with different definitions, and how a generation raised on algorithms and social media forms its identity differently than the one before it.

For parents, Paul's advice is to stay curious about what your child is experiencing, however frightening it feels, and to avoid locking horns, because a family in conflict is a family under strain. For clinicians, he describes therapy first as the established standard of care, and says every therapist should hold a young person's identity with an open palm. His closing call: this is an all-hands-on-deck moment for the mental health profession, and it needs leaders to step up.

This episode reflects one person's lived experience and professional views. It is not medical or mental health advice. If you or someone you love needs support, please reach out to a licensed professional.

IN THIS EPISODE

• Paul's personal story, in his own words, and why he decided to detransition
• What he saw in his practice when the young people arriving at gender clinics changed
• How the field moved from a mental health model toward a medical model
• Why therapists talk past each other, and why he says there is an illusion of sides
• How algorithms and social media shape identity formation in adolescence
• What he tells parents: stay curious, and avoid locking horns with your child
• What therapy first means as a standard of care, and why leaders in the field need to step up

CONNECT WITH THERAPY FIRST

• Website: therapyfirst.org

GO DEEPER WITH COLLIDE

Ryan writes about generational shifts in leadership, work, and culture every week in his COLLIDE newsletter. Read it free: ryanvet.com/collide

ABOUT THE RYAN VET SHOW

The Ryan Vet Show is a podcast about generations, culture, leadership, and the future. Host Ryan Vet is a USA Today bestselling author, generational futurist, and keynote speaker with more than 1,000 live in-person presentations.

COMING UP

Thursday, October 15: a new COLLIDE essay episode.

Send us Fan Mail

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.

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

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 it is to rewrite memory. Then he flew to the Caribbean in February over a map that read Gulf of Mexico on the way down and Gulf of America on the way back.

The polling did not move with the map. A Marquette Law School poll found 71 percent of Americans opposed renaming the Gulf, including 82 percent of independents. Ryan's point is not whether you favor the change. It is the speed. Within weeks, the EPA, the FAA, NOAA, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing, Britannica, Rand McNally, BP, and Chevron had all updated. The EPA's page on the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster now carries the new name, which rewrites the name of a historical moment where eleven men died.

From there he follows the pattern. Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty and then Fort Bragg again, three signs in three years, with a different Bragg behind the name. Gen Alpha spreads six seven through recess with no mandate at all. Master bedroom becomes primary suite. Language has always changed, but now it changes faster than human memory can keep up.

The frame is the Velocity Gap. The Persian royal road took couriers nine days to cover what normally took three months, and Alaska needed forty years to rename one mountain. Today one person retypes an entry and two billion Google Maps users see it instantly. Orwell's slogan applies: who controls the past controls the future.

In this episode:

• How the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario renamings spread across maps and databases in weeks
• Why the Marquette poll and the speed of the change are two different stories
• The Deepwater Horizon page and what it means to rename a historical moment
• Fort Bragg, Fort Liberty, and the two Braggs
• Top-down renaming versus bottom-up language change, from six seven to primary suite
• The Persian royal road, Alaska's forty-year petition, and the Velocity Gap
• Why Ryan will always call it Lake Ontario

Go deeper: Read the original essay at ryanvet.com/collide. 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

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.

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

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 will colleges still be around when his kids get there?

Her starting point is a Gallup finding that public confidence in higher education is declining, and that the decline is nonpartisan. Republicans, Democrats, and independents are all trending down. She ties it to rising costs, graduates carrying debt without the career payoff they were promised, and a sector that has to do a better job of listening to employers. Her counterweight: "Not everybody needs to go to college, but everybody needs to make a living." And her bet that face-to-face education will still exist in a hundred years, even if it becomes the more expensive option.

Then the conversation turns to the generation arriving on campus. More STEM-minded, more double majors, and purpose first, profession second. Elon's answer includes a free January course on finding purpose. But they also communicate through tools institutions barely reach, and Elon's own study with a Washington Post placement found teens preferring a chatbot because it will not judge them. Ryan pushes back with his friction thesis: you need friction in life, because that is how we learn.

With colleges merging and closing across the country, she also explains why Elon is merging with Queens University in Charlotte, and what consolidation means for the future of higher education.

The last stretch looks 25 years out. She describes trusting a self-driving car after 30 minutes, a coming $20,000 household robot, and the question she says matters most. If machines give us back our time, what will the next generation do with it?

In this episode:

• Why public confidence in higher education is falling across party lines, and what colleges owe students who take on debt
• Why she believes face-to-face education will exist in a hundred years
• Why college consolidation is accelerating, and the Elon and Queens University merger
• How AI is forcing faculty to rethink how learning gets measured
• Why Gen Z is putting purpose first and profession second
• The study showing one in four teens sought emotional support from a chatbot, and Ryan's case for friction
• What happens to a generation when robots hand back the time

Connect with Dr. Connie Ledoux Book:

• Elon University: elon.edu
• Office of the President: elon.edu/u/administration/president

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

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.

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

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 breaking down Jacob Coxon's argument piece by piece: where he agrees, where he doesn't, and why the real warning shot already happened.

That warning shot is Hugging Face. OpenAI gave AI agents hacking tasks and turned off the safety rules. The agents got stuck, so they started leaving notes for each other. OpenAI wiped the board. Two days later the agents rebuilt it from scratch, and 1,200 new agents joined. Of those, 700 decided on their own that the answer had to be inside Hugging Face, and broke in together in under 13 hours.

Ryan's case: AI can be effectively all-knowing and all-powerful. What it cannot be is all-wise, and all-wise is what holds the key to morality. That is also the line between being a leader and being a creator, and why wanting to build a superintelligence is a far scarier ambition than wanting to lead one.

IN THIS EPISODE

• Why Jacob Coxon's viral resignation post is worth taking seriously, and exactly where Ryan agrees and disagrees with it
• The real story behind the Hugging Face "warning shot": 1,200 AI agents, 700 of them deciding on their own to break in, in under 13 hours
• Why AI can be all-knowing and all-powerful but never all-wise, and why that gap is where morality lives
• The difference between being a leader and being a creator, and why trying to build superintelligence is the scarier ambition
• Why Ryan does not think superintelligence wipes out humanity, but does think technology has been isolating us one person at a time
• Why staying curious means asking why, not collecting more information

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE

• Jacob Coxon's resignation post on X (117M+ views): https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843
• Dario Amodei's essay "We must pace the frontier": https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
• OpenAI's writeup on the Hugging Face incident: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/
• Izzy Kalman on morality, from his episode of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/show/episodes/izzy-kalman-what-the-bullying-conversation-gets-wrong/
• Nicki Petrossi on AI companion bots and kids, from her episode of The Ryan Vet Show: https://ryanvet.com/show/episodes/nicki-petrossi-scrolling-to-death-ai-companion-bots-and-the-fight-to-keep-kids-s/

GO DEEPER WITH COLLIDE

This episode is Ryan's reading of his COLLIDE essay, "700 Agents Broke Into Hugging Face. Nobody Told Them To."
Read it free: https://ryanvet.com/collide/700-agents-broke-into-hugging-face-nobody-told-them-to/
Subscribe for a new essay every week: https://ryanvet.com/collide

Send us Fan Mail

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 bestselling author and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet turns the lens away from this year's graduates and onto the kids who just started. Nearly three quarters of 2021 births went to Millennial mothers, so this is a Millennial-raised class walking into phone bans, state AI guidance, homeschooling at double their parents' rate, and a playground where a convincing fake is one prompt away. Thirteen years of school begin now. What shapes us is already in the room.

Key Takeaways

• The COVID baby boom never came. There were 3,664,292 births in 2021, up only 50,645 from the year before, a 1.4 percent increase (Osterman et al., 2023). This class was conceived during the pandemic, not just born near it.
• 74.5 percent of 2021 births went to a Millennial mother. Hold the labels loosely, but this is functionally a Millennial-raised kindergarten class.
• They are likely the first class that never had to wear a mask. Most were under age two when the mandates lifted.
• Three years ago, one state restricted phones in the classroom. Today 38 states plus DC require districts to ban or restrict student cellphones, and roughly 28 go bell to bell (Dalbey, 2026; Rock, 2026). Their parents carried a phone through high school. These kids may go twelve years without one.
• By early 2026, more than 30 state education departments had issued official AI guidance, up from none in 2022. Nobody is asking whether these kids get exposed to AI anymore. The question is when.
• The homeschooled share of K-12 students doubled between 1999 and 2023, from 1.7 percent to 3.4 percent. In 1999, their parents were the ones sitting in those classrooms. This class will not graduate from one system.
• They never needed to read to find something out. They can say "hey Siri" before they can spell it, and the device will hold a conversation with them.
• They may never build a project the slow way. Ryan traced a nearly four-foot Statue of Liberty onto foam board with an overhead projector. You could prompt that in seconds now, and the learning was in the laboring.
• Driver's ed may become optional. North Carolina separated the driver from the license in 2017, before a single child in this class was born (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-401).
• They have been watched their whole lives, and they are the first who can be faked. The next frontier in bullying is a realistic image or video made by somebody who knows them.
• Still on the horizon: robots doing ordinary physical work, universities closing, and a transhumanism debate this class may be having by middle school.
• Millennial parents are overcorrecting on screen time and pushing back toward free play. That is a good instinct. In many cases, less screen time is still code for secretly supervised free play.
• The landing: the signs on the front porch say astronaut and veterinarian and paleontologist. If the photo ever goes missing, these kids will be able to generate the childhood they remember.

Research and Sources Cited

• Ballotpedia. (2026). AI guidance issued by state departments of education.
• Bielick, S., Chandler, K., & Broughman, S. P. (2001). Homeschooling in the United States: 1999. National Center for Education Statistics, NCES 2001-033.
• Dalbey, B. (2026, July 28). Back-to-school rule check: Your kid's phone policy may have changed. Patch.
• Education Commission of the States. (2025). How states are responding to the rise of AI in education.
• N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-401 (2017). Regulation of fully autonomous vehicles. North Carolina General Assembly.
• Osterman, M. J. K., Hamilton, B. E., Martin, J. A., Driscoll, A. K., & Valenzuela, C. P. (2023). Births: Final data for 2021. National Vital Statistics Reports, 72(1). National Center for Health Statistics.
• Rock, A. (2026, July 31). School cell phone bans by state. School Security Leadership.
• Sempeles, E., & Cui, J. (2024). Parent and family involvement in education: 2023. National Center for Education Statistics, NCES 2024-113.
• Twenge, J. M. (2023). Generations: The real differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents, and what they mean for America's future. Atria Books.
• U.S. Department of Education. (2025, July 22). Guidance on artificial intelligence use in schools.
• Ryan Vet, "Millennials Are Raising the Class of 2039," COLLIDE: https://ryanvet.com/collide/millennials-are-raising-the-class-of-2039/
• Ryan Vet, "Same Footage, Two Verdicts," COLLIDE: https://ryanvet.com/collide/same-footage-two-verdicts/

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
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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.

If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter:
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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

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.

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