I'm Isaac Devere. Welcome to Off Message.

Today's guest, Nebraska Senator Ben Sass.

He's also the author of The Vanishing American Adult, a new book that just came out.

The subtitle is Our Coming of Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance.

After college, before I got into journalism, got a master's degree at the University of Chicago.

It was not in journalism.

In fact, as maybe you can tell from my work, never took a journalism class in my life.

I studied American intellectual history.

I wrote a master's thesis about Henry David Thoreau and Ben Franklin and their autobiographies

and their different concepts of what it meant to be an American.

It had almost nothing to do with politics or with journalism, except for this.

One of the speakers at the graduate student-wide orientation was a state

senator who taught on the law school faculty named Barack Obama as the fall of 2002.

So he had just lost the congressional race two years before.

Nobody really cared who he was and did not really think much of the fact that he was talking to us.

I do remember that speech.

It was a decent speech.

I at one point, when Obama was already president, said to him that he had spoken to us.

And he was really confused by

this. Uh, basically, uh, I've talked to a couple of people who work closely with him since.

And anything that happened before that Democratic convention speech in, in 2004, when he

became a superstar, uh, is just like a different planet to him. But he wanted to know what did he be talked about.

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