Sam, thanks so much for joining me here on the Mark Devine show today.

Super stoked to have you. How are you, sir?

Doing well. Glad to be here. And thanks for having me on.

Yeah, no, it's a pleasure. I'm really excited to talk to you. But before we started, we were talking about you being in New Haven, Connecticut, sitting in a classroom at Yale. Here we are two weeks, you know, two weeks-ish before the presidential election. Yeah. And I want to talk about, like, the state of anxiety in our schools and our nation, you know, and, you know, what is your kind of

take on the level of anxiety and fear and kind of how that's playing into psychological issues

that really seems to be ballooning in this country? Yeah, well, the rates of depression and anxiety

and most forms of mental illness have unfortunately gone up quite a bit, really for the last 10 years.

And there's likely a lot of factors that are driving that.

One does seem to be this, especially at places like where I am now at,

you know, the university, almost an existential dread.

Lots of factors play into that.

Right.

Polarization and politics and society broadly doesn't, definitely doesn't help with that.

Yeah, I don't even know where to begin to unpack that.

It's surprising that it's been going on for over 10 years, though, right?

It seems like it really accelerated with COVID.

And, you know, I think ultimately fear has to do with a loss of sense of control.

And I say that word sense deliberately because I don't think anyone

really has control over anything besides ultimately how they perceive the world and how they

react. And that's if they do a little bit of work, right? Yeah. So the sense of lack of control

has been slipping away because the narratives have been, you know,

the narratives of what it meant to be, you know, human and what it means to be like saying

...