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The Ryan Vet Show

The Ryan Vet Show

By: Ryan Vet
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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, and human behavior
  • How the past explains the present and the present shapes the future


The show features two core formats:

  1. Long-form interviews with leaders, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and creators whose stories reveal the “why” behind their work, decisions, and impact.
  2. 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.

© 2026 The Ryan Vet Show Economics Management Management & Leadership Personal Development Personal Success Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Kevin Stinehart: Rebuilding Recess and Why Play Is a Developmental Need, Not a Want

    Kevin Stinehart: Rebuilding Recess and Why Play Is a Developmental Need, Not a Want
    Jun 15 2026
    We engineered the friction out of childhood, then acted surprised when kids could not handle it. Kevin Stinehart, the third grade teacher and play advocate featured in chapter 11 of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, joins The Ryan Vet Show to make the case that play is not a want. It is a developmental need.Kevin Stinehart teaches third grade at Central Academy of the Arts in Pickens County, South Carolina. He is a District Teacher of the Year, a South Carolina State Teacher of the Year candidate, and a Golden Apple Award winner. He also founded his school's Let Grow Play Club, a before and after school program with no budget and no curriculum. He opens the playground and lets kids play. In this conversation with host Ryan Vet, Kevin walks through what happens when you give children back unstructured time, and why the results are anything but soft.The data is the part that stops people. Inside the Play Club, physical incidents dropped from about 65 in one year to 32 the next, cut by more than half. The school hit 100 percent parent approval on its report card, a number that almost never happens in public education. And Kevin reframes the behavior conversation entirely. A lot of what gets labeled a discipline problem, he argues, is really a design problem. The third grader who cannot sit still after an hour of math is not misbehaving. He is doing what a developing brain is wired to do inside a system that was never built around healthy child development.Ryan connects this directly to his Loss of Friction thesis. Every scraped knee, every argument with a friend, every game where the rules break down is a rep. That is where kids build the capacity to adapt. Remove the friction and you remove the practice. Kevin's fix is not expensive, it is a mindset shift: stop being the cruise director, start being the park ranger. As he puts it, he is not there to control the wildlife, he is there to cultivate what is already growing.The conversation closes on why this matters more now, not less. AI will do the fast, factual work faster than any human brain. The capacities built through play, creativity, adaptability, and self direction, are exactly the things that get more valuable from here. Play was never frivolous. It is how kids become capable.In this episode:Why protection can quietly turn into overprotection, and how to tell the differenceThe Let Grow Play Club model: no budget, no curriculum, just unstructured play before and after schoolThe data behind the club: physical incidents cut from about 65 to 32 in a single year, and 100 percent parent approval on the school report cardWhy a lot of behavior issues are not behavior issues at all, but a consequence of school systems not designed around healthy child developmentFinland's 45-15 model: 45 minutes of instruction, 15 minutes of recess, all day longThe American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation of 60 minutes of play a dayThe park ranger versus cruise director mindset for parents and teachersHow friction in play builds the capacities kids cannot learn any other wayWhy play and the skills it builds, creativity and adaptability, become more important in the age of AI, not lessWhat it means to treat play as a fundamental need rather than a reward to be earnedReferenced in this episode:The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (Kevin is featured in chapter 11)Let Grow: letgrow.orgCentral Academy of the Arts, Pickens County, South CarolinaFinland's 45-15 recess modelAmerican Academy of Pediatrics: 60 minutes of play a dayConnect with Ryan Vet:Website: ryanvet.comCOLLIDE Newsletter: ryanvet.com/collideLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryanvetInstagram: instagram.com/ryancvetBook Ryan as a Keynote Speaker: ryanvet.com/generational-speakerSubscribe to The Ryan Vet Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. The guest era continues every Monday at 6am ET. Next week: Lenore Skenazy, founder of Free Range Kids and president of Let Grow, on why we stopped trusting kids with independence and how to give it back. The COLLIDE essay podcast continues every Thursday at 7am ET.Send us Fan MailAbout 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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    38 mins
  • The Mothers Who Kept the Window Open: What We Lost When We Took Away the Village

    The Mothers Who Kept the Window Open: What We Lost When We Took Away the Village
    Jun 11 2026
    The hardest part of modern motherhood isn't the work. It's that we now do it alone. The work was always going to be hard. The village was the part we could have kept.Generational futurist, USA Today bestselling author, and keynote speaker Ryan Vet starts at a high school production of Peter Pan, with the image of a mother lying on a windowsill, waiting fifty years for her son to come home. That ache is old. The conditions around it are not. In this episode, Ryan traces what happened to motherhood across the last half-century and makes a quiet, data-backed case: mothering has always been hard, but a century of trying to make it easier has, in many ways, made it lonelier.For most of human history, mothers did not raise children alone. The work was distributed across siblings, aunts, grandparents, and neighbors, with a baby passed from one set of arms to the next. Ryan walks through what replaced that village: a child daycare industry now worth roughly $74.7 billion a year, early-care enrollment for three- and four-year-olds climbing from 9.5% in 1964 to 52.4% by 2011, and a $1.7 billion universal childcare plan announced in New York in 2026. When the family, church, and community leave the room, somebody has to fill the chair. Increasingly, that somebody is paid, scheduled, and unrelated to the family.Then he takes on the cost of being alone. A 2024 Ohio State University survey found 66% of parents say parenthood sometimes or frequently feels isolating and lonely, and 38% report no support at all. Postpartum depression diagnoses nearly doubled between 2010 and 2021, from 9.4% to 19.0%. The first mothers carrying both loneliness and PPD at scale are also the first cohort who came of age inside social media. And Ryan applies the Friction Doctrine to mothering: every tool we built to remove the difficulty, from fertility apps to delivery services to overnight monitors and milestone trackers, carried a quiet weight in return. We now have more information about our babies than any generation in history, and we have often mistaken that information for wisdom.In this episode:The Peter Pan windowsill image that reframes love, loss, and hope in motherhoodWhy mothering has always been hard, and why a century of making it "easier" made it lonelierWhat we lost when we traded the village for institutions, apps, and convenienceThe loneliness epidemic among parents, and why mothers report it most acutelyThe doubling of postpartum depression, and the first generation of mothers raised on social mediaThe Friction Doctrine, Mother's Edition: how every labor-saving tool carried a hidden costWhy we now have more data about our children than ever, and have mistaken data for wisdomMotherhood happening later and less often, and the question hidden inside the fertility declineWendy, the Lost Boys, and why children look for mothers even when they pretend not to need oneWhat it actually looks like to become part of someone else's villageReferenced in this episode:Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff (2021)The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, National Survey on the Loneliness Epidemic Among Parents (Gawlik et al., 2024)Trends in Postpartum Depression, JAMA Network Open (Bruno et al., 2024)Pew Research Center, survey on U.S. adults who don't have children (2024)CDC/NCHS, Births: Final Data for 2023 (2025)COLLIDE Newsletter by Ryan Vet: ryanvet.com/collideFull essay version of this episode: https://collide.ryanvet.com/p/the-mothers-who-kept-the-window-openConnect with Ryan Vet:Website: ryanvet.comCOLLIDE Newsletter: ryanvet.com/collideLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryanvetInstagram: instagram.com/ryancvetBook Ryan as a Keynote Speaker: ryanvet.com/generational-speakerSubscribe to The Ryan Vet Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. New COLLIDE essay episodes release every Thursday at 7am ET. Guest era episodes release Monday mornings at 6am ET. Join the COLLIDE newsletter at ryanvet.com/collide for the research, reflections, and frameworks behind every episode.Send us Fan MailAbout 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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    12 mins
  • Mike Schneider of Acre Homes: The Generational Housing Question, the Broken Affordability Math, and Shared Ownership

    Mike Schneider of Acre Homes: The Generational Housing Question, the Broken Affordability Math, and Shared Ownership
    Jun 8 2026
    The affordability math from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s is broken. Mike Schneider, founder of Acre Homes and longtime real estate operator, joins The Ryan Vet Show to walk through what actually happened to home ownership in America, and what comes next.Mike Schneider has spent the last decade and a half rebuilding the math of home ownership. He co-founded First in 2012, using machine learning and AI to predict who would sell their home, and sold that company. He is now the founder of Acre Homes, a shared appreciation model that lets people own without taking on a $670,000 mortgage. In this conversation with host Ryan Vet, two Durham millennials walk through how home ownership got this expensive, why blaming Wall Street is missing the real story, and what a generation of would-be buyers actually needs.The episode opens with the conversation that started this episode: Ryan spotted Mike walking down a Durham street wearing wired headphones. Two millennials, both Durham-based, both quietly recalibrating away from the trendy and back to the durable. That instinct, going analog, is showing up in housing too. Mike unpacks the three primary drivers of the affordability crisis (broken income-to-price math, delayed household formation, the disappearing starter home), the data on which generations are actually buying houses (Gen Z is outpacing millennials at age 28), and why the 50 or 60 year mortgage is a political move that does not solve the underlying problem.Then Mike walks through the shared ownership model. In the United Kingdom, Zillow's equivalent lets you filter for sale, for rent, or shared ownership. In the United States, that third option does not exist. Acre Homes is building it. Five percent down for fifty percent of the appreciation. No transaction costs on the front end. Lower total cost of ownership through what Mike calls the "Costco effect" of bundling debt, insurance, and operations across thousands of homes. Mike explains why two-thirds of Acre's customers are not first-time buyers (as expected) but previous homeowners who have lived the pain of buying and selling under the current model.The conversation closes on the data Mike thinks gets buried under the doom headlines. American home ownership is at 65 to 66 percent, higher than the 1980s. Eighty-three percent of Americans still prefer to own rather than rent (Lending Tree, October 2024). The country is between 1.5 and 5 million homes short on inventory. The American Dream is not dead. The math just needs new models.In this episode:Why the housing affordability math from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s is broken (the income-to-price multiple has gone from 2x to 6x or higher)The three primary drivers of the modern affordability crisis: broken math, delayed household formation, the disappearing starter homeWhy Gen Z at age 28 is outpacing millennials in home ownership (38 percent vs 36.8 percent), and what that says about the great financial crisis effectWhy blaming Wall Street is missing the real story (institutional investors bought less than 1.6 percent of homes)Why the 40, 50, and 60 year mortgage proposals are political moves, not solutionsHow shared ownership works in the UK and why the United States is behind on the modelThe Acre Homes model: 5 percent down, 50 percent of appreciation, no transaction costs on the front, lower total cost of ownershipWhy two-thirds of Acre's customers are previous homeowners, not first-time buyersThe transaction costs nobody talks about: why you walk across the threshold of your new $500,000 home already underwater until it appreciates 6 to 8 percentThe starter home problem: why we have built bigger homes and where the entry point disappearedThe data buried under the doom headlines: 65 to 66 percent home ownership rate, 83 percent of Americans prefer to own (Lending Tree, October 2024)Referenced in this episode:Acre Homes: acrehomes.comAziz Sundirji, economist focused on housing and household formationCharlie Munger's line: "The renter never washes the rental car"David Ogilvy on marketing: "Comfort the afflicted or afflict the comfortable"Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek ThompsonLending Tree study, October 2024: 83 percent of Americans prefer to own over rentConnect with Mike Schneider:Acre Homes: acrehomes.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mikeschneider3Connect with Ryan Vet:Website: ryanvet.comCOLLIDE Newsletter: ryanvet.com/collideLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryanvetInstagram: instagram.com/ryancvetBook Ryan as a Keynote Speaker: ryanvet.com/generational-speakerSubscribe to The Ryan Vet Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. The guest era continues every Monday at 6am ET. Next week: Kevin Stinehart, the elementary school teacher and play advocate featured in chapter 11 of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, on rebuilding play and recess inside the modern school system. The COLLIDE essay podcast continues every Thursday at 7am ET.Send us Fan MailAbout Ryan VetRyan Vet is a USA...
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    33 mins
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