Music was never meant to be made alone, and Chad Gerber says the technology we keep building is quietly pushing us there.

Chad Gerber is a guitarist, songwriter, and entrepreneur who started flying out to Miami at 17 to play on other artists' projects, and he has toured and worked in studios ever since. He joins Ryan Vet to talk about what technology has done to the music industry, from Napster and iTunes to Suno and AI-generated tracks.

Chad is not against the tools. His concern is what gets lost when a song is made without a second person in the room. Ryan and Chad talk about why listeners now expect every vocal to be pitch perfect, why the finished recording has lost its value, and why Chad thinks artists will be pushed back toward live music and local scenes. They also get into the loneliness of an on-demand, algorithm-fed world, and why learning a hard instrument still matters when a machine can hand you a track.

Chad also describes Melusine, the virtual studio he built so musicians in different countries can play together in real time, and the question behind everything he is building: how do we connect instead of isolate?

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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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In researching for my next book, I stumbled across a note I had written: "Serial Killers and the Sexual Revolution."

Generational futurist Ryan Vet reads his COLLIDE essay, a behind-the-scenes look at how he chases down a generational idea to see if it is viable or just interesting. He starts with five names (Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dennis Rader, and Gary Ridgway), a hypothesis that Boomers or the Silent Generation would be the deadliest, and data that turns out to be mostly circumstantial. The Radford University Serial Killer Information Center (2016) counts 72 U.S. serial killers beginning in the 1950s, 768 in the 1980s, and 371 in the 2000s.

In this episode:

• Five killers born within eight years of each other, and why that is more coincidence than cause
• What JFK's assassination, live television, and the sexual revolution do and do not prove
• The tenfold rise and the fall by half in serial killers by decade
• Why DNA databases may have helped drive the decline (Doleac, 2017)
• Lenore Skenazy on why the fear outlasted the killers
• How to use the Generational Prism before you label an entire generation

Go deeper: Read the full COLLIDE essay at ryanvet.com/collide/which-generation-is-most-likely-to-be-a-serial-killer, and subscribe to COLLIDE 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

Chris Ruden was born with a limb difference and hid it for more than seventeen years. What did the real damage, he says, was not what other people said. It was that he believed them.

Chris is an amputee, a world record holding powerlifter, and a professional speaker on culture and change. A video of him taking his glove off reached seven million views and led to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's Titan Games. Today he delivers keynotes around the world, helping organizations build cultures people brag about. He joins Ryan Vet for a conversation that starts personal and ends up being about how leaders think.

The first half is the story. A childhood label he accepted as fact, years of keeping his hand in his pocket, a powerlifting career that ended in a world record pulled one-handed, and the day he stopped hiding.

The second half is what he teaches now: radical curiosity. Certainty gets mistaken for competence, especially the higher up you go. Teams run on legacy narratives because they always have. His test is not "does it work?" but "is it optimal?" And his sharpest version of the question: does your company have thirty years of experience, or one year of experience repeated thirty times?

The bridge between the two halves is that he did the same thing to himself. He collapsed a difference into a defect, then spent years confirming it.

In this episode

• Why the label you accept does more damage than the insult that delivered it
• How a one-handed powerlifter ended up on Titan Games
• Why different gets collapsed into weird, and what that costs us
• Certainty is not competency, and how legacy narratives run teams
• The question that replaces "does it work?"
• Thirty years of experience, or one year repeated thirty times
• Curiosity as a muscle that atrophies when you stop using it
• Why AI output is only as good as the questions you put in

Connect with Chris Ruden

• Website: chrisruden.com

Go deeper with COLLIDE

Ryan's free weekly newsletter on generations, culture, and the future: 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