Hello and welcome to five things. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, July 16, 2023.

Is America caught in a loop of extreme crises from the Great Recession to the COVID-19 pandemic

to extreme political polarization? The past 15 years have seen one crisis after another,

and with ongoing inflation, talk of a new recession, and the current housing crisis, the

hits keep coming. Author Neil Howe argues that America is experiencing an extended moment of

crisis. It is what he calls our dark winter season, or the fourth turning. Neil explains his

theory of the seasons of history and maps out what each season tells us about how and when America's

current crisis will end. In his book called, The Fourth Turning is here, out July 18. So when will

this dark winter of crisis finally end? You may not like his answer to that. Thank you for joining us,

Neil. Dana, I'm so glad to be here. So two key sets of parallels that set up part of the

framework for your book, both focus on seasons. And I want to start with seasons of time. I had a

game of thrones flashback when I read the words winter is here. How was our current season, the

fourth turning, AKA winter? How is that defined? Yeah, winter is here is an interesting phrase,

and actually it appeared as an ad for our book back in original book, The Fourth Turning,

back in 1997. In the 1997 version and in the current version of The Fourth Turning, we share

the basic paradigm that history moves through through seasons, modern history does. And we've had

now several centuries actually, you know, maybe five or six centuries of this in many modern nations

around the world. And the seasons are punctuated by crises that is to say winters is in good

way to sort of tighten it when you think about the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War 2,

and great depression and then on into where we are today. And these seasons, they last roughly

20 years, is that correct? Yeah, 20 or 25 years, depending on where you are in history.

So a current sign of the times is how disgruntled so many people seem to be, what you call the rise

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