Ryan Vet on the Generational Pendulum, AI Acceleration, and Putting Friction Back into Childhood

[00:00:03] Hi, I'm Dr. Russell Thackeray and welcome to Resilience Unravelled, a podcast with new ideas, new thoughts, and new thinking about resilience. Guests with remarkable stories, products and services that can really power up your own mindset and resilience. You can also go to our site for more information, to ask questions, or to access some of our resources at resilienceunravelled.com. Let's get started.

[00:00:31] Hello and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. And sometimes it's my joy to welcome people who have very complicated names and I have to spend a good half an hour rehearsing them, practicing, going back and forth. Today is Ephraim Ebstein. What about that? What sort of brilliant name is that? Your parents are very considerate with a name like Ryan and a surname like Vet, I should say. So hi Ryan, how are you? Doing well Russell, how are you?

[00:00:59] Good, good. Tell us a little bit about yourself and that intriguing name. So my intriguing name, you said they were doing me a favor. I'm not sure. Vet at the end of the alphabet in school is always a challenge. You're the last to get picked. And Ryan being in the second half. But several generations ago, two generations ago, my family came over to the United States and they dropped a couple letters in the name. I'm not sure if it was clerical error or if it was choice. The family folklore gets a little blurry depending on who you ask. But that is that is where the name ended up.

[00:01:28] Was there an extra E and I in there at some place? Supposedly at one point there's an H, a couple extra Ts, an E on the end. So we're not exactly fully sure of the story, but depends on who you ask. Having a glamorous past like that is fantastic for your backstories as an international podcasting and futurology expert. That's amazing, isn't it? It is. It's fun. It's always fun having the stories. You have to know where you've come if you're going to look at where we're going. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, but that's interesting. Let's get into that in a bit. Just give us a bit about your background.

[00:01:57] Yeah, my background is unusual, but it is it makes sense where I am today. It started with a lemonade stand like many kids do. And that accidentally skyrocketed into a multinational marketing company, which we don't even have the time to tackle how that happened and led me into the venture capital world for about 20 years.

[00:02:16] And all throughout there, I enjoyed writing, speaking and understanding why people do what they do, because it is often confusing and perplexing why people make the decisions they make, why they choose the careers that they choose and just different aspects throughout life.

[00:02:31] So in 2021, had the opportunity to exit one of the startups I was in and I exited the VC world altogether and decided that I was going to spend my time researching, writing and speaking on the future and where we've been, where we're going. And so it's been really exciting, especially back in the day in 2009 and 10, I was doing some artificial intelligence.

[00:02:53] So it's really interesting how now everyone's talking about something that was common in Silicon Valley boardrooms back then. And now it's commonplace today. So now I spend my time helping leaders overcome friction and how to stay relevant in a changing world. Tons to go on there. Yeah. I know what you mean about the past. I was working at the Royal Society 25 years ago and they're talking about large language models in those days and people are going as if they were mad, but that's how you create the future.

[00:03:21] It's almost as it's almost as myth, isn't it? That the future sort of happens by accident. Let me ask you, do you think it's constructed the future or do you think it does happen by accident? I think the future happens because of what's happened in the past. Absolutely. And you see, do you take the view that before we get into the depth of this, because I was going to ask you all the stuff about that there, but let's just go into it.

[00:03:43] Do you see this idea of historical cycle repeating? So it's possible to predict the future because, for example, we saw what happened after Spanish flu when we saw the chaos and such in the political upheaval and the lurch towards polarization politics. You're nodding. I'm very pleased to see that. But you think those cycles do reoccur?

[00:04:01] Absolutely. One of the big frameworks that I use is what I call the generational pendulum, and it covers basically seven aspects of society that if you go through any history, whether that's recent history or go back to the Byzantine Empire, you can see these same seven levers that are causing a swing of momentum forward or backwards. And the levers are quite simply religion, education, sex and gender, politics, economics, communication and technology, the things you're not supposed to talk about at work.

[00:04:30] But those are the things that drive, have driven society. And there's four phases that they fall into at any point in time, and I call it the teenager. First, they experience it, they hear it, and then they challenge the way it's been, they challenge the status quo. Then they overcorrect, and at some point they recalibrate, and the recalibrate is the new normal. It doesn't go back to the way it was ever. A pendulum doesn't land exactly where it started. It starts a new place, like the teenager.

[00:04:55] You tell them they can't do something, they're going to challenge it. They're going to go way the opposite direction overcorrect, and at some point as they grow up, they recalibrate. Yes. So interesting about pendulums, there is a force that makes a pendulum work. So what's the force that drives this pendulum? I think it's those seven levers. So those are the seven things that accelerate that pendulum moving and swing throughout history and throughout culture. Yeah. But do you see a speeding up with that pendulum, or is there a, because that's what seems to be happening, doesn't it? It is as if that thing's shifting faster and faster.

[00:05:24] Not only is it shifting faster and faster, I completely agree. I think it's multiple forces all acting on it at the same time. A lot of times you can just look at one of those elements going back and forth, or maybe two. Sometimes they're interconnected. But when all seven are moving very quickly, and basically the half-life of these events happening around us, whether it's artificial intelligence or anything else, you're seeing mass adaptation. Like rewind to social media, which by about 2012, 2013, most of the Western developed world had social media, more than half.

[00:05:54] And you then fast forward to AI, that took social media seven years. It took AI about two to three months, depending on exactly what you're looking at when we're talking about generative AI. And yes, it's accelerating faster. And we always try to do these things to remove friction in society and in culture. But in so doing, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And sometimes we see it quickly. And sometimes it takes us years or even decades to understand what that opposite reaction is. I'm just trying to remember your list of seven. So I'll come back to them in a minute.

[00:06:24] There must be some which have changed dominance, though, over that period of time. So you mentioned religion was the first one you're now talking about. And did you say sex and gender? So one would imagine those who've had different levels of influence or force or whatever the word might be over the course of time. Do those seven reassert themselves? Do they bubble up in different directions? How does that work? Yeah, they often sometimes they collide, sometimes they move in tandem. But if you were to look, let's just use an example from American history for a brief moment.

[00:06:53] If you go back and you look at the sexual revolution of the 60s and the 70s, a lot of that came in several of those facets. One, religion, we saw a pretty steep change in the religious landscape in the United States from primarily Protestant or Catholic to many other religions entering. So that's how one pendulum started to swing. At the same time, you see a big economic force driving it and education. So those are the two E's in that that seven pendulum. Education was becoming more available to women and more commonplace.

[00:07:23] Simultaneously, the technology of the birth control pill getting FDA approval. All those things started happening. So, yes, they those things absolutely intersect. And when those forces come together, those seven come together, you're going to see a rapid acceleration of something swinging back and forth. And that ultimately the output of that, if you will, redefined sex, gender, family life in culture. And that wasn't just isolated to the United States, but we can see that ripple effect across the globe.

[00:07:49] And again, so forgive my pedantry, but what's quite interesting, looking at your country before we look anywhere else in the world, you've actually got the emergence of two sides of the pendulum working at the same time, haven't you? Because you've got lots of liberalism and sex and gender, and you've got extreme traditionalism. You've got the same thing going on with religion, haven't you? You've got Christian nationalism and you've got atheism and the rise of that going on. So it sounds to me like both sides of the pendulum exist at the same time now, which actually doesn't the point of a pendulum mean that one side disappears as the other side starts?

[00:08:18] Yeah, that's an interesting thought. And that's part of when you look at society as a whole, what you're seeing is those four phases. So society is experiencing two things, equal and opposite reactions, right? And they challenge it. So that's where you get the two sides coming together. And that second phase of the pendulum is you have those extreme sides. And then finally, you have the overcorrection where one side effectively wins, if you will. And then that recalibration is when there's some new equilibrium somewhere in the middle. So the pendulum swing between two extremes at any point in time.

[00:08:47] Call it liberal, call it conservative, call it whatever you left, whatever you want to put on either side. And it's swinging between those two. And then it recalibrates in the middle with a new normal. So where does things like climate fit into this and environmentalism? And such like, because, just ask that question. Because actually, we see the effects of the planet being quite severely disabled at the moment. And almost arguably, the rise of AI is actually fueling that, where fewer and fewer people get the massive effects.

[00:09:17] And the mass of the population now experience the negative side of that. So I'm just interested that's not in your seven. Technology would be. So technology would talk to the AI piece. And then politics is wide-reaching. So you'd have, not that the Earth is political itself, but you often find that in a political umbrella. So that's where I would lump some of that. But as far as looking at climate change, let's talk about Gen Z in particular. Very fascinating. With a living paradox, right?

[00:09:45] You've got this, what I call the velocity gap. It's that time between where something starts, call it AI, and where morality catches up and the impacts of it. So you have the vast majority of Gen Z right now saying that they're using artificial intelligence in their daily life. And yet, the same vast majority of Gen Z is saying that they care about the planet worldwide. Worldwide.

[00:10:08] And so you've got this weird juxtaposition because University of California, Riverside just came out with a study last fall that said every time you have about a 10 chat exchange, nothing deep, no deep research, just with chat GPT or any LLM, you're, it's like pouring out a 500 milliliter water bottle. So just that's how much energy and cooling you need just to write those 10 exchange and that prompt and that dialogue. And so you're seeing Gen Z live in this paradox right now where they fiercely care about the planet.

[00:10:37] Many of them have, Pew Research came out with an interesting study, and I don't have the exact statistic off the top of my head, but how many of them have invested financially into climate change and caring about doing something good for the environment. And at the same time, they're still using AI, the second generation using AI more than any other. So it's really interesting to look at that juxtaposition in real time. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it?

[00:11:01] One would suspect that either there's mass hypocrisy, which is possible, or this goes back to your education thing. And also you'll see the effects of decision-making being quite slow in human beings because there's a difference between the global and the local, isn't there? Is that what matters to me versus the sort of slow impact of what happens to the world in itself? That's interesting. I wonder whether you see the, I didn't get all seven when you whip through them first of all, like just catching up each time you mention one.

[00:11:29] But where's the impact of human psychology, human physiology, the sort of human dynamic in your seven? Yeah, I think that's the reaction of the seven, right? And it's where the humans, that's where human influence comes in the middle. So how do they experience something? How do they challenge that? How do they then overcorrect? Because that's normally what we do. Think about the first time you're driving a car. If there's an obstacle, the very first time you see that obstacle, you're going to swerve.

[00:11:56] But eventually you're going to learn that swerving is not the best way to keep your car on the road. And then ultimately you recalibrate. So the human psychology, and that's why cycles recalibrate. History, there's nothing new under the sun. You go back through every single era in all of world history. And the same general themes repeat itself over and over. And now technology would be the one that's changed the most. Because if you go very far back, you don't have written language. And I would say that's one of the earliest forms of technology is the written word.

[00:12:24] And then obviously being able to duplicate that and information access. And that's really what we've always pursued is information and understanding. Purpose being meaning. And we've tried to do that for eons. Yeah, which is interesting, isn't it? Because writing was arguably created to deal with the effects of trade. Because it was a way of calibrating literally what was going on in trade. We think of Mesopotamian artifacts, such like. So one would almost see that trade as almost even older than that.

[00:12:53] And I'm just wondering about the juxtaposition of trade. So before I get lost in the past, let's come back to the future. So given we know about the past to a certain extent, and I totally agree with you, this sort of idea of cycles and the speeding up of it and such like. So where does that imply the future might be heading? Yeah, I think the biggest risk and one of the things I try to look at is children turning into teens in their most formative years.

[00:13:19] So really 11 to 14 is where you see some of the most profound decisions made. A lot of teenagers or preteens and how that impacts them for the rest of their life. So right now you're looking at both Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Gen Alpha turned 13 this year. And so that's, we're not even talking, having that conversation yet. But I think when you zoom out and think about these generations who are going to be shaping our society in the next 20 to 30 years as they move into the workforce. And you've got baby boomers that are aging out, retiring out and moving out of the workforce.

[00:13:49] There's still about 13% globally left in the workforce. But beyond that, we're seeing a huge decline as they move towards retirement. I think what we see in the future with these generations is really a lack of critical thought. A lack of curiosity. Because they've always had access to all information that they've ever wanted an answer to all the time. If they wanted to know the weather, they just asked their S-I-R-I. I'm not going to say it otherwise everyone's device listening to this will light up. I've made that mistake before. But they'll call that out and all of a sudden they've got a robot friend telling them the weather

[00:14:18] and what they should wear. The decision making, the curiosity is just totally taken out of normal human experience. It's directions. Gen Z, Gen Alpha. Most millennials don't even know how to navigate with a paper map or use a compass. And we laugh at those things but then take it back to 1978 when Spellcheck came around. When Spellcheck first came around, it was just a red underline. And we all remember that squiggly line. And that was all it was. It didn't tell you what the word should be. It just said this word's not in our dictionary. And then you added grammar into that. Then you added suggestions into that.

[00:14:54] That's incorrect. But it's also your grammar and sentence structure. And now your voice, tone, and style don't match the rest of your writing. The whole rhetoric school that most people go through in grade school has been stripped away from learning. And now they're being handed information and access at a very young age when they haven't even learned how to make the basic building blocks of decision making. And I think that's a huge risk that we see in the coming generations. I agree with you, actually. And I think it's part of the problem with resilience, isn't it?

[00:15:22] Because actually what we see is that lack of curiosity, that lack of critical thinking, that lack of experiential learning is the issue, isn't it? And normally when you get a deficit on one side of it, which is maybe intelligence, it's made up for by something else on the other side. But it's very hard to see what that other thing is at the moment, is it? Maybe it's not emerged or maybe we just have a net deficit with technology at the moment. I think where we're going there, I think it is.

[00:15:49] I was speaking last week and I always get reviews afterwards. The associations always hand me what people said. And my favorite review to date in over a thousand live presentations was, he's terrifying, but funny. And I was like, that's a real compliment and just a real state on where we are in society. As I'm trying to give facts and be helpful to build our businesses better for tomorrow, to lead our teams, families, communities better for tomorrow. The reality is there's a lot of things that we don't know.

[00:16:16] And the generations that we're raising up right now are living in a world that if we don't start to correct now, it's going to be too late. We we're becoming the one and zero of a machine. Their decision making is becoming one and zero. There's not critical thinking. And when you dissect how even LLMs are made, it's still basically ones and zeros, much more complex. And I'm way oversimplifying. But now we're programming generations to think like machines. And we seem to have lost that.

[00:16:40] We seem to have lost that old fashioned idea of the original Greek idea of what a mentor was, which is that older, wiser sage council. And the point of having that sage council was they would slow you down. They would make you think they would actually, they would challenge the modernity of ideas. And often the modernity of ideas is brilliant, but it needs challenging to make, to building on that shoulders of giants idea. Because now we just, you look at some of the sort of flawed ideas, which are, so for example, looking at Starlink launching hundreds and hundreds of satellites into space.

[00:17:10] It doesn't take much thinking about to see the issues with that approach. Right. And already you're seeing satellites having real problems because of the Starlink satellites degrading, falling apart, crashing into the atmosphere. Space junk, yeah. Yeah. At what point is Starlink actually becoming able to launch its own space rubbish? And I think that that's the velocity gap that I was talking about a minute ago. It seems like a good idea.

[00:17:34] I think everyone could say the concept of being able to get internet access anywhere in the world and in the air and anywhere at any point in time is a good idea. And I think, but it's one of the repercussions of pursuing that idea, especially when you don't have boundaries. And I think that's what's really interesting in today's society too. You think about anyone that's created things. Go to Jobs, for example, Steve Jobs. He had to refine and really work on his projects. And I'll never forget reading Walter Isaacson's biography of him.

[00:18:04] And it opens fairly early, one of the early chapters, spoiler alert, with Steve Jobs and his dad. And Steve Jobs having to go around the backside of the fence to putty the holes and Steve asking why. And it was because every single detail matters. And even if you can't see it, you know that you could have done a better job. And I think about that friction that Steve Jobs had to endure then. And then he obviously did the same thing with Apple. They would build the form of a beautiful machine first and then go tell the team, make a battery and chips fit inside of this because this is the way we do it.

[00:18:34] But he had almost unlimited money. Apple being one of the wealthiest cash-rich companies. Everyone else had friction. Everyone else had a hard time creating things. Now you and I could spend the same amount of time and could have built an app by speaking to Cloud Code. Yeah. And so that friction is removed. Yeah. But that doesn't mean the product's better. It just means it's quicker. And I think this is the sort of slop argument, isn't it? Yeah. And there's tons of great products. I use AI a tremendous amount in certain ways.

[00:19:03] And there's other ways I will not use it. But I think it goes back to your Starlink example that before there was great friction to launch something into space or to create a program or a product. But now a teenager in the palm of their hand on their 6.7-inch glass screen can create out of nothing. And there isn't that force slowing us down. I think what's going to happen is Starlink's obviously a much wealthier, much more complicated example.

[00:19:28] But I think that the creation and deployment of things that we're not considering the long-term implications could be very devastating as well. It's interesting, isn't it? Because you look at the concept behind your idea. And if you think of repeating cycles, you actually think that the need for consumption will inevitably outweigh the ability of the planet or whatever else to decide. But I'm always very taken with Wally being very pursuant on the subject.

[00:19:54] And what the late-stage capitalism nearly always leads to is war and conflicts. And I know we're taking a very white, heteronormative sort of American view of our discussion here. We're not looking at other parts of the world. But I suspect that the other parts of the world are pretty similar. But there will be a war to end all wars. This has to happen, isn't it? Looking at what's happened in the past. Do you think that's the purpose of you, American political factions at the moment, that they've figured this out and they're going to be first to the party?

[00:20:23] I am not nearly wise enough to speak about why they're doing what they're doing. I don't think they know particularly. Yeah. Yeah. But I will say, I think, again, if you go through history, there have been wars that have ended. And I often think, and this has been debunked by several researchers, that there was a single fire that destroyed the library in Alexandria. And 400,000 plus scrolls removed. And some people say, yes, it happened. Others just say it happened in different parts and it was just poorly kept.

[00:20:50] But the reality is that moment in history, well, ancient history, had so much knowledge and information kept in that one space. And it was at war that it was lost. And I think at some point, war is a great reset for humankind. And I do think there are going to be battles. I think one of the battles that we're not talking about is the battle of the mind. And I think that is a war that we are losing and it's actively happening around us right now.

[00:21:20] And we're not having that conversation. I'm sure there will be physical wars too. But I think the way we look at drone purchases and who's purchasing drones and the way that's changing, we're removing the friction from violence. And that is a very scary place to be when you can be sitting thousands and thousands of miles away and controlling something that is eliminating cities and altering someone's life. And you go home at night. You don't even need a shower. You're in air conditioning drinking your Coke. And it's just a really, it's a really scary thought.

[00:21:50] And more to the point, you cannot want to get a fair $700 in your shed one night and then start launching them yourself. That's not beyond the purpose of this. That's quite interesting. So in a way, there's quite a lot of reason to be quite pessimistic about the future. There is. There's a lot of hopeful things too. I know we've gone to the dark side. But yeah, there is a lot of unknown. And I think with how fast technology is moving, we're at a point in history where computers and energy, which have been the two limiting powers, right?

[00:22:20] If you look, we could have in the Pascaline calculator in the 1800s was a mechanical version of outputting something really complicated. Then you had Boolean algebra shortly thereafter, 1600s and Boolean algebra in the 1800s. And fast forward to when we're talking about neural networks in the 1930s and then artificial intelligence in the 1950s. This is not new. These concepts are not new. We just for the first time have the energy and the cooling power fast enough to work on chips and computers that can actually do it.

[00:22:47] And so now that we're here, things are going to move very quickly. And we're even seeing total development teams being outrun by the very tools that they created. And I don't think robots are going to take over the world. They can't in and of themselves unless they're told to do so. And that's where I think there are enough bad actors out there that that could be a reality. It's interesting because I'm thinking back to I listen to your view of AI and the technology and such.

[00:23:11] And I'm just thinking the guests we had last week, forgive me, I'm really bad with names, talking about because they're an organization that runs AI programs and saying how stupid they are actually. And there's not as much threat as people talk about. And it keeps falling over. And there's a sort of gradual erosion in the intelligence of AI because actually AI is feeding on itself and getting stupid and stupid. And it's already getting to that point where it's like the serpent eating its own tail. It's starting to believe its own hype.

[00:23:39] And I think that's something that's quite interesting there, isn't it? Because actually, by its very nature, AI doesn't create anything new. It's actually the extrapolation of what already exists. I mean, but it can't be more than a hopster kippin and Joe Matilda does create things that are new, one would assume. I do think it's going to be hard for it to create something completely new. It's just not the way it's designed. Now it can ideate on itself over and over again to generate something that can feel new.

[00:24:03] But even if you look at generative images, which are probably, in my opinion, or even videos, the largest example of creating something out of nothing, you're still seeing that every element in pixel there, whether it's clothing on a person and a zit on a face, is taken from some other pixel somewhere else in the Internet. So I do think it is going to be a long time before it creates something new completely of its own. I think we're very far from that.

[00:24:30] And to the stupider point, I think, I don't know if you saw a couple weeks ago in Malaysia, a Gen Z retirement home opened, allegedly. And this story went viral on TikTok first. And so many news outlets who are using AI to write what I call second or third tier AI stories started writing about this. And if you start tracking all of these news articles across the world, you're seeing the founder's backstory developed and his issue with his parents. And all of this starts building on itself.

[00:24:58] And if you look at the timestamps on them, they're just a couple hours after the previous article with just a little bit more information. The whole TikTok post was originally fake. So now you have all these credible news stories. And many of the news outlets have since deleted them. Thankfully, I grabbed some screenshots before they went away. But you had AI run amok saying, hey, there's this Gen Z retirement home. It went viral. They had people taking money and deposits on social media for this Gen Z retirement home that doesn't even exist. And it just it happened within hours. And it was all AI slot.

[00:25:28] It was just feeding on itself. And this goes back to talk about sex and gender. We had this debate in the gender world around the person that identifies as a cat. And that was all over the news. And that was just completely fake at the same time. And then we had how you identify as a gunship and all this sort of fatuous nonsense that sort of spews out. I mean, people do talk rubbish, don't they? And the thing is, if there's some total of us talking rubbish as computers are even stupider, that's not a bad thing. Maybe we want to avoid critical thinking. Otherwise, AI will start thinking critically as well.

[00:25:57] You said you we said we're into the dog place and such. What are the reasons for hope then? I think we do have tools that are limiting friction and can allow people to work less, spend more time with loved ones. If you go look at any social psychology reports. But you need money to do that, don't you? And this is the sort of myth of the affluent, the affluent measure market, isn't it? But you do need resources.

[00:26:23] And I think I think some of the wealthiest people on the horizon are going to be and we're already seeing this are your tradespeople, those that are doing manual labor. And the jobs, the job market there is devoid of people willing to work in those spaces. And yet those are the one things that we're very far from any sort of robot or humanoid taking over. Not that they can't someday, but we're not close to that right now. Being able to a plumber with 50 years of experience coming to your house can hear how your water is dripping and know exactly what's wrong.

[00:26:51] And a humanoid robot is not going to be able to do that for eons to come. So I think you're going to see that. And I think the promise of social media was to bring us together. And what we found was it was more isolating because you're posting for the likes. You're posting for the comments. You get offended if someone doesn't like your post. And now you have a beef with someone that you didn't even sit in a room with. It was just a fascinating and vicious cycle. And now we're starting to see countries around the world take action to protect teenagers in particular from that while their minds are still developing on how social interactions work.

[00:27:22] And so I'm hoping and my hope is that same movement we're seeing with social media and smartphone bans or restrictions in schools and all that. I hope we see that much sooner with artificial intelligence. So that way the kinks can get worked out of it and people can work more diligently. And then I think you're seeing this younger generation, particularly those starting in university right now, are moving more towards trades or skill-based learning or apprenticeships, which brings in mentorships, which brings in the Greek philosophers sitting around and having people at their feet.

[00:27:51] I think if we can move back to that model and then have that assisted with technology, I think there's a lot of hope. But the question is, is this generation of parents and this generation of leaders and policymakers, are they going to actually employ those things to put friction back into childhood and raise the next generation? Or is it going to be so frictionless that we raise a generation that thinks ones and zeros just like a machine and can't critically think?

[00:28:14] I'm really encouraged by what you said there, because I was going to talk to you about putting friction back in the market through regulation and ask your views on the social media challenges. And I really genuinely believe what you said there around the banning social media and gaming as well, I have to say, that's just as destructive. Yeah. I think it's a really important thing because there used to be a thing probably before your time. I remember, I don't know, was it Microsoft or Dell or one of the big things? It used to have something called the state's antitrust legislation.

[00:28:41] So when it used to have a monopoly developing, there was a law that actually stopped those monopolies and actually companies were ripped asunder and such like. And I remember the fuss and who are anti-competitive behaviour and such like. And that seems to have all gone. It's astonishing to me that you can have people who have corporate, $1 trillion corporate valuations based on nothing really, no revenue, just on the pretense of revenue.

[00:29:04] And you don't see this concept of splitting companies, that regulatory environment, that you can't be trusted to look after yourself. So someone has to put friction in the marketplace because the friction by itself is actually sometimes just learning, isn't it? It is. The basic human experiences that make us human. Think of one of my good friends. He came, emigrated from Cuba. And he did not speak a word of English when he touched foot on American soil.

[00:29:31] And the only reason he was able to go on to the next grade and fifth grade was because he had the wherewithal to copy the prompt down letter by letter. He knew how to write. He knew Spanish, but he didn't know English. And so he wrote letter by letter. And that was enough to, he got enough points to move on to the next grade as he learned English. And I think that human experience and his success since then and what he's been able to accomplish since then, there's just that grit that when you have experiences like that, it really shapes and forms you.

[00:29:58] But unfortunately, we've worked so hard at baby proofing a house. That term's only taken off since the 90s. Not that parents before the 90s didn't care that their kids weren't safe, but you have this whole new, even the word parenting didn't really become a common word until the 70s. Before that, it was child rearing. And you just look at the evolution of even the linguistics that we use and how we view children. We talk about raising children. No, we're raising adults. They already, they're pretty good at being kids. They already know how to say mine.

[00:30:26] They already know how to say, no, we need to raise adults. It doesn't mean strip them of childhood experiences. It means put childhood experiences back in so that they are prepared for life when they're on their own. And we do have a society now, which is Coddles to such an extent that I'm looking at you and I've been really pleased to take this the wrong way. But I'm looking at you with, at your age, having values and beliefs that people my age seem to have. And we see ourselves as being old fashioned. But you're seeing yourself as being innovative, thinking like a 60 year old.

[00:30:56] So what the heck's going on here? What's wrong with me? That idea of learning through experience, when you fall over and you bang your head, you don't tend to fall over and bang your head again. But if you wrap yourselves up in cotton wool, you never learn to fall over and pick yourself up again. You never learn that resilience. And friction based learning is the human, it is actually the nature of human experience, isn't it? It is. It is why we, it is why we exist. And it's what gives us purpose.

[00:31:21] You look at these younger generations taking friction out of love, which is probably one of the best and most painful things that exists. But if you take the friction out of love by swiping left and swiping right, going on a date and not committing, you're taking out the pain. And now... Knowing how to commit. We've de-skilled ourselves in any form of social interaction, haven't we? Absolutely. Absolutely. And now that a third are dating or having an intimate relationship with some sort of LLM or chat GPT, one third.

[00:31:50] One out of every three people under 34. Yeah. Worldwide. Particularly Japan, I think, isn't it? Isn't it Japanese? Oh, the statistics in Japan are even higher. Males in particular in Japan. Yeah. And there is something interesting about the breakdown of social fabric around males, isn't there? And you've got these, you've got these, the return to the trad wife and this idea of very traditional relationships where the man wills a roost and women are not allowed to vote in a household.

[00:32:16] And this is what I was thinking about, this return to a very masculinized society, because actually that's what technology enabled really, isn't it? And it's hard to understand why. Maybe it's just because actually the people that have lost the most are white cishet blokes. Yeah. So you're saying technology is enabling your return to a masculine society? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, to a traditional masculine society, yeah. I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on that. I don't disagree, but I...

[00:32:45] Go on, feel free to disagree. Start there. I would love to know. Okay, so you think technology is enabling that return to male society, male-dominated society, if you will? Yeah. That's interesting. I think... Look at how many of the richest people in Silicon Valley are male. Oh, absolutely. I do 100% agree with that, where you have... You're engineers. Everybody with the seats of power is all male. And then at the bottom of the end of the market, you've got a lot of what I think you call them white-collar or blue-collar, I don't know what you call them over there.

[00:33:14] But you've got a lot of disenfranchised people who are also males, aren't they? Because actually the old technology has gone with, and the new technology hasn't replaced it. And yeah, actually what we're saying here is that those people will be thriving again in 25 years' time. The blue-collar workers or the manual laborers? Manual laborers. I agree with that. I think what's interesting, and this is a contrarian take, so I'll put it out there without my opinion on it.

[00:33:38] But if you look at the 60s, late 50s and early 60s, there are several advertisements that Maytag and some of the others put out as the washing machine and dishwasher came. And they were to empower women, which was extremely revolutionary in that era to say that they were empowering women. But they were empowering women not to go to the workforce, to be better mothers and spend more time with their kids. And what you saw was, along with some of the other things that happened right there, it did enable.

[00:34:03] So technology enabled, I would say, to some extent, equality in some respects. And then it also created a new disparity, a socioeconomic disparity that became starker with technology. So I think technology is a double-edged sword, and I think it works both ways. So I do think it empowered and enabled some to work that wanted to work and previously were stuck to a traditional gender role. At the same time, those without access to certain technologies got pushed further and further down into a lower class system,

[00:34:32] while others accelerated, effectively eliminating the middle. Yeah. Fascinating. Once we get into sex and gender, I find it fascinating watching American, consuming American popular culture, because it is all about the destroying of women's rights. You'll watch a programme like, I don't know, I'm trying to think of a popular one. Oh, terrible one, Last Man Standing. The woman starts as a scientist and ends up as a primary school teacher, because that's their proper role.

[00:35:01] And there's this absolute, and of course, it's the religious thing coming in as well. But this comes back to, and I suppose I'm just burbling now, but this comes back to this friction thing. This comes back to education. And you can almost see the lack of critical thinking at large, can't you? And perhaps that's why we do rush back to old ideas. We've got terribly poor electoral systems in the West, haven't we?

[00:35:30] Yours is bad, so I'll talk about ours more. There's something wrong with ours? My God, yours is in a terrible state. It's arguable whether we actually have democracies. If the definition of a democracy is that we are going to have a vote, you know, if Russia and China both have a vote, the fact doesn't matter, which might happen in your midterms, and it's increasingly happening here. That's a real challenge for us, isn't it? And I think one of the things that we value is democracy and this idea of having a view and having a voice and such like.

[00:35:57] And actually, I think the ones and areas that are taking that away from us, and we haven't realized. We just don't understand it. We can't see it, can we? And that's why we feel so disenfranchised in the world. Yeah, we feel like we have control. There's an interesting study that Jonathan Haidt did, and I greatly respect his work. Just an incredible researcher. But he, at a nursing home or a senior living facility, took two floors. On one floor, they gave people plants and a movie night. On the other floor, they allowed people to pick the plant and pick the night of the movie.

[00:36:26] But if they kept the plant, they had to water it and take care of it themselves, whereas the top floor is watered by maintenance. And the level of happiness and involvement from the perceived control was unbelievable. And it's almost like, what kind of social experiment are we in? Even in a democracy, you bring up countries that allegedly have democracy and people get to vote, but they don't have the opinion. You do see and you do question policies and other things put in place to basically stymie votes. How does that impact the control dynamic?

[00:36:53] Ryan, I've just noticed the time, and I've been very selfish. I've kept you far too long, and I haven't been respectful of your time. How do people find out more about you? You mentioned some books, and I went on Amazon, and I found all sorts of strange things around teaching kids the hidden power of kindness and care for others. Is this you, or do you have something around futurology? Yeah, great question. So I have, you can find the Ryan Vet Show, which is, I every week have futurology and talk about the future.

[00:37:23] My newsletter, Collide, which you can access from my website at ryanvet.com. Every week, about a 2,000-word essay doing a deep dive in research on where we've been, where we're going. So you can check me out there. I do have a book around generations called Cracking the Millennial Code. And then another one's coming out in 2027 that will be really around this idea on friction. And I'm excited to share that with the world. But you don't have a traditional book on Amazon? I do.

[00:37:49] Yeah, so I've got Speak Gooder, which is a USA Today bestseller. And that one's actually on public speaking. And big backstory there, but you can check out the book on why that one came out. Then Cracking the Millennial Code, which is also a book available on Amazon 2019. And then an audiobook available for those. And then the children's book is one that I wrote for my son. So that was a When He Turned Five. And I'll be writing one for each of my kids when they turn five. Got it. Okay.

[00:38:18] Thank you for spending time with us today, Ryan. It's been an absolute joy. Thank you for sharing information. And it's very strange that I can't wrap my head around that, our age disparity. And we're agreeing on so much. I can't decide if that's because I'm shaking and grooving along with the youngsters or because actually I've been right all my life. What's going on? Let's go with you've been right all your life. Yeah, let's do that. Thank you for spending time with us today. Thanks, Russell. Take care. You too. Take care.

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