 The fact is, is that the economy after it had trough, shortly after Obama became president, it started picking up slowly, but we had a massive recovery period, which followed into Trump, but it doesn't seem that material conditions necessarily are what are really dictating the kind of vibe of the country or the vibe of particular generations. Absolutely. So Danny, this is one of the questions that I spent a lot of time on in the book. I spent a lot of time thinking about because it's a real mystery. The economy started to do a lot better after, especially after about 2011, it was a turning point and just, it just roared back. You know, the stock market came back, unemployment went very, very low. If you look at unemployment, say right before COVID, it's extremely low. Things are going very, very well. Median incomes were going up. Yet, that didn't really reflect the mood in the country. Some of that, as you mentioned politics, is because of Trump and that had some, you know, I think most people would agree a fairly negative impact on the national conversation and how divisive it was. But it's also kind of the fact that he was possible, you know, reflected massive, you know, what ties what, you know, absolutely. And so I think, and I think you have to look at that closely. And there were a few things that I found in doing the analyses for the book that I think go a long way toward explaining the rise of Trump and populism in general. So one example is it used to be that when you looked at, say, depression and happiness, and if you looked at it by social class, education, income, occupational prestige, things like that, for the silent generation, for example, there really wasn't a whole lot of difference for happiness and mental health depending on social class. And then that started to change. So I had a lot of grass in the book. And those lines diverge. They diverge starting with the boomers and then go from there where in more recent years you end up with a very big gap for happiness and depression by educational level and income. So people with a college education, for example, happiness has stayed fairly stable, levels of depression fairly stable among older people anyway. And then lower income, those who don't have a college education, big increases. So these diverging lines, it really suggests that for the segment of the country, working class, let's call them, huge amounts of dissatisfaction. And that explains Trump in a lot of ways. Can I just linger on this a little bit? You also point out something that's really fascinating that, well, as to backfill a little bit, and I'm genuinely obsessed with these kind of generational issues because my parents were born in 1923 and 1927. So technically in your schema, one is greatest generation, one is silent generation, but they are so, in my mind, so clearly part of the same generation in the experiences that they had, the attitudes that they formed. And so many different things go into that, but one of the things that is fascinating to me is that you show that it's really the baby boom generation when depression kicks in or when this kind of existential, I prefer to think of it as existential lengths. That's when it kicked in. My parents were not happy people, they were not wealthy people, they were not educated people, but they kind of expected life to suck. They would talk often about how, so they were born to immigrant families in the 20s, then the, and they were dealing with a bunch of shit then, then the depression hit, then World War II, my father served in World War II, at the end of the war, even after VJ day, he and my mother said, well, we just, we were glad the war was over, but we just expected our lives to be a flat line of kind of pretty shitty, a little bit better than subsistence level existence, but not much because their entire life had been kind of flat economically. And then something changed, you know. Do you think that this is actually a change in like, you know, the prevalence of this sort of existential angst, the prevalence of depression, things like that, or just a change in our cultural language around that? We know for sure that- But I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion about that. Yeah, and sorry to jump in, but yeah, we know for sure that that isn't it, because you also see the same trends in things like suicide and self-harm and so on. And the trends for those objectively measured behaviors are almost exactly the same as the trends and say reports of symptoms. And that's what we're talking about these things. It's not based on diagnoses. It's not based on people being more willing to talk about things publicly. It's anonymous surveys about symptoms, which most people don't even know are depression and these objectively measured behaviors. But the rise and the, I mean, the boomers among all the other firsts that they either were acclaimed to is they're the first massively unhappy cohort, right? Yes. And then Gen X also not great, a little bit better. Gen X was kind of flat, you know? I mean, so early on in their teen years, the suicide rate was way up for Gen X, but there may be other reasons for that. Cause that's one of the few places where the suicide statistics kind of diverged from some of the depression ones. But I mean, it's, if you look across all the generations, it's kind of a complex picture for the trends in mental health, the silent generation, actually a better mental health than the greatest generation before them, maybe because they didn't fight in World War II, didn't have the huge impact of the great depression. And then for boomers, it gets significantly worse, much more depression and unhappiness and suicide rates go up. Gen X kind of stays the course. I mean, a couple of surveys even looks a little better at least as adults when they were younger, not so much, a lot of unhappiness. And then millennials, very mixed picture for millennials for mental health as young people, a lot of things improved actually, happiness actually went up among teens, depression went down by a little bit, but as adults, not so much, depression starts to increase again. And then for Gen Z, that is a place where we have extremely consistent data across pretty much every survey and indicator that mental health got a lot worse for teens and young adults starting around 2012. See, I'm skeptical though, like what if earlier generations, I mean, they were dealing with the same level of mental health issues, they just dealt with it in different ways. Because there's some evidence that things like, attention to suicides can increase people's propensity to think that is the solution. Whereas, maybe you're depressed like 30 something or 40 something in the 1930s and you just like quietly drink yourself to that instead of necessarily taking your own life, like, I don't know. I don't think it necessarily, difference in suicide rates. I think if that were true, you would see a linear trend and it's not a linear trend, it goes in and out. So the silent generation actually had better mental health than the greatest before them from the data that you got. You wouldn't expect that curve if it was just, oh, the older generations are more stoic or something, but it was a curve. There is something odd going on where as America kind of like kicks free of material poverty or misery after World War II where everybody, you know, and there's disparities in wealth, but like the baseline, most people have housing, clothing, shelter, some level or access to education and dissatisfaction with life goes up. I mean, to me, it seems that it's, we have succeeded, you know, far beyond Abraham Maslow's greatest dreams of bumping up the hierarchy of needs. And it's like, oh yeah, the one thing that you need to do then is also invent meaning and significance on a daily basis. I mean, we're all existentialism, we're living in a world where all of those institutions that kind of channeled our energy or restricted our choices have started to fade because Gina, one of the, I think, great things in your book is about, and this goes back to at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution or the modern period, modernity, that people are more individualistic, people have more choices, and I hate to quote Spider-Man, but with great power comes great responsibility, right? Like we're all left having to make sense of our lives at a time when all the institutions that either did that for us or told us, shut up, don't think, just follow tradition, they're all kind of missing, right? Yeah, I mean, this began with the boomers and this is the dilemma that's still with us today. That was an excerpt from my interview with Liz Nolan-Brown of Reason and Jean Twenge, author most recently of Generations. If you wanna see another excerpt, go here. And if you wanna see the full conversation, go here. And make sure to come back every Thursday 1 p.m. Eastern time when Reason is talking to people with something very interesting to say that you definitely wanna hear.