A deepfake of the President hijacked a live stream that 30,000 people were watching. It took generational futurist Ryan Vet five seconds to realize it was fake. That five seconds is the whole problem.

On Father's Day, a stream-jacking deepfake interrupted the College World Series broadcast Ryan Vet was watching with his family, complete with a breaking-news chime, the President's voice, and a QR code asking viewers to send crypto. The unsettling part was not the scam. It was how convincing it was, and how the same suspicion is now aimed at everything real. In this episode of The Ryan Vet Show, generational futurist, USA TODAY bestselling author, and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet unpacks what he calls the credibility hedge: the reflex to dismiss the source instead of engaging with the substance, and what it costs us when skepticism stops being wisdom and starts becoming a cop-out.

Key Takeaways

• On Father's Day, a deepfake of the President stream-jacked a live College World Series broadcast in front of roughly 30,000 viewers. It took Ryan three to five seconds to know it was fake, and he teaches deepfake defense for a living.
• Trust is at a historic low. Nearly 7 in 10 people worry that institutional leaders are deliberately misleading the public, with the sharpest decline in national government and major news (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2026).
• The circle of trust is shrinking. Confidence is concentrating among the people closest to us, our coworkers, neighbors, and families, and pulling away from institutions.
• We have doubted reality before. Photoshop made us question photos. Instagram filters made us question beauty. One study of 18,000-plus "no filter" posts found about 12% had actually used a filter (Santarossa et al., 2017). Now AI makes us question almost everything.
• The credibility hedge: calling something "AI slop" often protects the skeptic more than it judges the content. "No filter" was a badge that proved a photo was real. "AI slop" is becoming the inverse badge that proves skepticism is real.
• Two forces from psychology drive it: epistemic vigilance, the constant calibration of who to trust (Sperber et al., 2010), and source derogation, attacking where something came from instead of what it actually said.
• What AI cannot replace is human direction. In one large organization, employees could recite the mission but not say where the company was going. Clear vision and clear leadership, one human to another, is what rebuilds trust.

Research and Sources Cited

• Edelman (2026), 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust amid insularity
• Sperber, Clement, Heintz, Mascaro, Mercier, Origgi, and Wilson (2010) on epistemic vigilance, in Mind and Language
• Santarossa, Coyne, and Woodruff (2017) on #nofilter images that actually used a filter
• Fransen, Smit, and Verlegh (2015) on strategies and motives for resistance to persuasion (source derogation)
• The Ritz-Carlton motto: "We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen"
• Ryan's AI course, From Human Hesitation to AI Acceleration, and his related essay The Velocity Gap: Gen Z's Contradiction with AI

Connect with Ryan Vet

• Read the full Collide essay: https://ryanvet.com/collide/is-this-ai/
• Subscribe to the Collide newsletter: https://ryanvet.com/collide
• Learn more and book Ryan to speak: https://ryanvet.com

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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

Everything you’ve been taught about bullying might be making it worse.

Izzy Kalman has been a school psychologist and psychotherapist since 1978 — and since the 1999 Columbine shooting, he’s been the anti-bullying movement’s most persistent critic. In this episode, he argues that a generation of “zero tolerance” policies, mandated by law, took the very things that escalate conflict and taught them as the right thing to do — training kids toward an external locus of control, fragility, and a victim mindset that follows them into adulthood, the workplace, and the college campus.

Then he does something rare on this show: he proves it live. Ryan and Izzy run the “insult game” — a real-time demonstration of how the Golden Rule works, not as a moral platitude, but as applied psychology rooted in our biological wiring for reciprocity.

In this conversation:

• Why the post-Columbine approach to bullying backfired
• Internal vs. external locus of control — and why it predicts a happy, successful life
• Resilience, fragility, and how good intentions weakened a generation
• The science of the Golden Rule and why we’re wired for reciprocity
• How to handle insults, cyberbullying, and conflict without anyone’s help
• Why “the bullies aren’t them — they’re us”

Guest: Israel “Izzy” Kalman, MS — director of Bullies to Buddies, creator of the Golden Rule System, author of Bullies to Buddies: How to Turn Your Enemies into Friends, and lead author of the Be Strong Resilience Program. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Good Morning America, and TEDx.

Learn more about Izzy:
Website: https://www.izzykalman.com
Psychology Today (Resilience to Bullying): https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/resilience-bullying

Connect with Ryan:
COLLIDE newsletter: https://ryanvet.com/collide
Website: https://ryanvet.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ryanvet
Instagram: https://instagram.com/theryanvetshow
Book Ryan to speak: https://ryanvet.com/generational-speaker

Chapters:
00:00 Cold open
00:36 Welcome — challenging the bullying orthodoxy
01:28 Columbine and the birth of the anti-bullying movement
08:28 Progressive philosophy and internal vs. external locus of control
11:55 Resilience vs. fragility: how we weakened a generation
12:48 Victim mindset, lawsuits, and “13 Reasons Why”
17:22 The science of the Golden Rule
21:14 Why we’re wired for reciprocity
22:31 The insult game (live demonstration)
30:10 The two illusions revealed
34:37 Comedy, cancel culture, and “making fun”
37:42 Social media and cyberbullying
41:41 “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
42:47 “The bullies aren’t them — they’re us”
44:37 Where to find Izzy Kalman

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