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How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

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  • How Ben Sasse Reached A Terminal Diagnosis Fast
    • Ben Sasse traced his diagnosis from back pain after training to scans that revealed stage 4 pancreatic cancer already spread across his torso.
    • He and Melissa rushed biopsies to labs, found two mutations, then flew to Sloan Kettering and MD Anderson before landing a clinical trial within two weeks. Transcript: Ross Douthat Just tell me a little bit about the diagnosis and how you ended up where you are right now. Ben Sasse So I just turned 54. And so you get into your 30s, 40s, and 50s. You’re like, how do I stay fit? And so I used to do a lot of sprint triathlons. And this fall, I’d been training for some short tries and I ended up with a ton of back pain. And I realized, Oh, maybe it’s stupid to be wearing the 45 pound weight vest all the time. Not just when you’re training for running events, but also on your bike. Cause it turns out that’s not the right posture to be wearing a lot of weight. And so I ended up late October, Halloween-ish, with a lot of back and abdominal pain. And I thought I just pulled some ab muscles from stupid forms of training. Ross Douthat But you hadn’t had any pain before this training. Ben Sasse Nothing until the last couple days of October. But over the course of November, I ended up in significant enough pain that I went to my executive doc at the University of Florida, and I said, something’s not right here. And we did a bunch of tests, couldn’t find anything. And they said, we’re going to refer you to a GI specialist. We’re going to figure out whether it’s undiagnosed celiac or lactose intolerance or something. And I said, I’m a farm kid by upbringing, not the toughest guy on earth, but I don’t have a cheese allergy. There’s something really, really wrong in my back. And so they sent me for full body scans on the morning of December 13 or 14. And they called me back 45 minutes later and you could just hear them hemming and hawing. And I said, stop beating around the bush. Like, give me a hard fact. And they started talking about, well, we don’t want to, we don’t want to be too premature. And there’s been so many changes in oncology care. And I’m like, dude, you have not told me I have cancer yet. And you’re talking to me about how great oncology care is. Ross Douthat We’ve had so many changes in oncology care is never, it’s never a phrase you want to hear. Ben Sasse From a person who clearly is not shooting straight. And I said, would you give me a hard fact? And he said, are you sure? And I said, yeah. He said, I’m going to pull, he was driving too. He said, I’m going to pull over off the side of the road. And he said, here’s a hard fact. Ben Sasse’s torso is chock full of tumors. I was like, okay, then you came in with the real stuff. So I, I have pancreatic cancer, stage four, already metastasized. They told me right away on day one, this is not operable. You’re way post-surgical. They told me over the course of the next couple of days that I already have five forms of cancer, lymphoma, vascular, lung cancer, bad liver cancer, and pancreatic where it originated. So it was pretty clear that we’re dealing with a short number of months left to live. What did they tell you to do? What was their advice? I said, uh, I believe we’re all on the clock. We’re all dying. So this is not the scariest thing to me. I’ve always known that we’re going to be pushing up daisies. Eventually this is more finite. And I have two kids out of the house. Our daughters are 24 22, but our providential surprise, our boy’s a decade younger. And I was immediately thinking about Melissa, my best friend of 33 years. And, uh, and Augustine is our son, but that’s theologically heavy for 14. It’s hard to shout at a baseball or football game. So we call him Breck. So I was thinking about Breck. And, uh, I said, how do I navigate this moment? I want the one-on you know, give me, give me oncology navigation. They said three broad categories. There’s radiation, there’s surgery, and there’s chemo. There’s chemo writ small and chemo writ large. Chemo writ large is, you know, carpet bombing your body’s ability to produce cells. Chemo writ small is what does it look like to try to do a targeted therapy and get on a clinical trial? You have a definite death sentence, but there are some clinical trials that could extend life a little bit. And I said, teach me how that works. And they said, you want to figure out where there’s a genetic mutation potentially. And so we did a bunch of procedures. We ended up with nine successful biopsies in the next couple of days. We sent them off to labs all over the country and we found two genetic mutations. And it turns out the two best places to do clinical trials around pancreatic are Memorial Sloan Kettering in the Upper East Side or MD Anderson in Houston. My wife and I flew to both places for 48 hours in the next six days and met all the docs and pounded on doors and said, teach us what we got to do to get in this automobile. And two weeks later, we were admitted to a clinical trial at MD Anderson Houston. (Time 0:04:22)
  • The Four Variable Algorithm Of Dying
    • Sasse’s hospice doctor framed dying from abdominal cancer as balancing four variables rather than chasing one symptom at a time.
    • Pain, nausea, diarrhea-constipation, and energy each have treatments, but every drug that eases one usually worsens the other three. Transcript: Ben Sasse So I have a really good hospice doc. I’m not dying right now, but I’m, you know, well in the category that you can be in those end-of months. And she’s spectacular. She’s just walking wisdom. And she said to me early on, when you’re dying of an abdominal disease, you’ve got an algorithm that’s managing four variables. You have tumor-driven pain. You have cancer and treatment-driven nausea. You’re managing a diarrhea to constipation continuum. And you’ve got energy and fatigue. She said, when you go talk to a doc, docs like to, especially those that don’t have the greatest bedside manner, they like to talk about their specialty, or they like to get you off the Issue you’re talking about so they can talk again. And she said, if you lead with any of your- I’ve never noticed that about our friends in the medical profession. She said, if you lead with any of your four problems, there is a drug for that. We can manage, medicine can manage any of those four problems, energy, undercarriage, nausea, or pain. But the problem is the drug will probably mess up the other three variables. And so you’ve got to figure out how you want to manage the variables. So I was in a ton of pain early on because I had some pancreatic tumors that were essentially pushing on my spinal column. And so liver and pancreas, rib cage in the front, and they’re pushing out the back into my spine. And I was on 55 milligrams of morphine as soon as diagnosed. And that’s nearby as a kite. And we drove down my pain a lot. But since then, the drug has shrunk the tumor so much that I could, I was willing to dial back up a little bit of pain to get a little bit of energy back and to be able to have a little more control Of my nausea, et cetera. (Time 0:10:29)
  • Why Dramatic Tumor Shrinkage Still Isn’t A Cure
    • Shrinking visible tumors does not mean stage 4 pancreatic cancer becomes curable once metastasis has already seeded the body.
    • Sasse uses the lawn image: even if six dandelions remain, neighboring yards full of seeds mean the next wave is already coming. Transcript: Ross Douthat The tumors are smaller right now? Ben Sasse Crazy smaller. My tumors this week are down 76% from December 29th. Tumor volume in my torso is down 76%. Ross Douthat So if they can knock tumor volume down 76%, why can’t they keep you alive for 20 years? Great question. And I have to keep answering this one from my mama. Yeah. Ben Sasse No, I can imagine that some people closer to you than I am have that question. The way it’s been explained to me, and I’m, I don’t know, squat about biology. But the way it’s been explained to me, you could look out at your lawn and say, there are only six dandelions out there. I could weed those. And they say, yes, but look at your neighbors to the North and to the South. Both of their yards are chock full of dandelions. Two or three or four mornings from now, that’s your yard. You’ve already seeded everything. And so even though my pancreas tumors look on the scans, like let’s get these before and after images blown up and put them on the wall. Um, they’ve already seeded so many other kinds of cancer that it’s probably just not something you can ever catch up on. Ross Douthat There’s too much whack-a Is there anyone who’s gotten better from stage four? Ben Sasse No. I have an unbelievable team. Shubham Pond and Bob Wolf are two of my main lead oncologists at MD Anderson and they’re rock stars. And they described their work as they’re up here with a little pickaxe on a giant Hoover Dam working on pancreatic cancer. And they get little cracks at the top. And sometimes little bits of water splash over. And there’s somebody else doing it 400 meters over. Another 300 meters over, there’s another team. And there’s somebody at Memorial Sloan Kettering working on it. And they said, someday, these cracks are going to go big. And they’re going to run together. And the dam will crash. But, you know, maybe 10 years. (Time 0:14:00)
  • Politics Is Downstream Of A Deeper Collapse
    • Sasse argues Congress looks broken less because of party rivalry alone than because politics is downstream of a wider technological and institutional upheaval.
    • Smartphones pull consciousness away from embodied local life, while senators mistake daily partisan noise for the central drama of the age. Transcript: Ross Douthat Every senator gives a maiden speech. And you just tell… I waited a year because it was the old tradition. You waited a year, right, which was itself, I think, an example of what the Ben Sasse brand was at that moment. Just tell listeners and viewers what you said in that speech, roughly. Ben Sasse I said the voters hate us all. The people despise us all. And why is this? Because we’re not doing our job. We’re not doing the primary things that the people sent us here to do. We’re not tackling the great national problems that worry our bosses at home. At the end of the day, this place, at that point, this is Thanksgiving of 2015, the tribalism of, you know, 2020 or even 2017 wasn’t as apparent in 2015, but it was bubbling up fast. And people involved in politics love to do nutpicking about the crazy people at the other end of the continuum that aren’t in their party. And there’s a lot of truth to that, but it’s a definite subordinate story in my mind to the big things that are really happening. And so I, in that speech, I just kind of wanted to contrast the idea that the public approval numbers for Congress bounced around between nine and 15%. When you ask people objectively, what do they think? They think everybody here is bad at the job. It isn’t that Republicans are right that Democrats stink and Democrats are right that Republicans stink. It’s that these institutions are not working very well at all. And so the historian in me says, 75 or 100 years from now, when you look back on our moment, we’re not going to talk about politics at all. What we’re going to talk about is the fact that we were living through a technological revolution that was creating economic and cultural upheaval. And we were living through institutional collapse and way, way, way, way, way below that. There’s a whole bunch of political institutions that are part of that institutional collapse. But what’s really happening is these super devices in our pockets, the largest tools any median individuals ever had access to in all of human history, allow our consciousness to leave The time and place where we actually live, the places where we break bread, the people who are living next door to us, the people that you can physically touch and hug, the small platoons Of real community. And we allow our consciousness to go really far away. And there are things that are awesome about the digital revolution. We’re the richest people anytime and place in all of human history, but there are also things that are horrific about this. And we don’t yet know how to navigate the economic and cultural and familial disruptions that are coming from this technology. And politicians act like, because they work in politics, that politics are the center of this. Politics barely matters for what we’re going through right now. And this institution is filled with blowhards. The Senate should be the world’s greatest deliberative body, was filled with blowhards that want to pretend whatever we’re screaming about in a partisan tribal way is really essential And central. And it’s a really peripheral thing almost every single day. (Time 0:23:14)
  • Why Civic Conservatism Angered His Own Party
    • Sasse says he won Nebraska broadly by pairing conservative policy views with a moderate civic style rooted in pluralism and constitutional restraint.
    • His real conflict with Republicans came not from voting left, but from refusing performative hatred and conspiracy-driven signaling against Democrats. Transcript: Ross Douthat Like? Because what you’ve just described is a narrative that makes politicians seem pretty small. And I’m sympathetic to that narrative. But I also write about politics for a living. I at least pretend to give advice to politicians. You just said before that maybe you were too idealistic and needed to think more about, you know, the nitty gritty of dealmaking. But is that the advice? Like what, after eight years in the Senate, say you were meeting someone who was just elected U.S. Senator from Nebraska, and you were giving them a couple of pieces of advice, what would you say? Ben Sasse Well, I don’t want to be parochial about this or self-serving, but I’ll go from my personal experience a tiny little bit. Again, Nebraska is only 2 million people. I don’t mean it’s generalizable and it would work as an electoral strategy in California, Texas, New York. But I got elected in November of 14. And again, I was 93 and 0 across 93 counties in Nebraska in that general, which means as a Republican, I won Omaha. I should define myself. At a policy level, I’m very conservative. At a dispositional and tonal level, I’m a moderate because I believe that American civics and the glories of being able to inherit a constitutional doctrine of anti-majoritarianism And restraints and a belief in pluralism. That stuff is so glorious. It’s so much more interesting and important than our policy differences about one versus two cheers for this level of government intervention in the economy or regulatory X, Y, or Z. So the policy fighting is so subordinate, in my mind, to the civic transmission obligations that we have, that I won the whole continuum in Nebraska from very far right to pretty center Left in all four of my elections, two primaries and two generals. And yet I was constantly condemned by my party. And it did start a little bit pre-Trump because I got elected in 14, took office in 15. And by the end of 15, I was a little bit in trouble with my party at home for not hating Democrats enough. And I was like, but I don’t. Like, there are 330 million Americans. Ross Douthat What was just, what was a concrete example of that, that the state party was pissed about? Ben Sasse I didn’t spend time going on the angriest tribal media channels to say that Obama, know, wasn’t born in the U.S., right? Like the conspiracy theory versions of stuff became a really important marker for people to say, I really dislike those other people. It was like, what I care about is the Ronald Reagan impulse to say freedom is never more than generation away from extinction. And you don’t pass it along in the bloodstream. You pass it along because we teach it. And we haven’t been teaching it since sometime between the late 60s and the early 80s. Like our civics experience is in collapse. And at this point, I would talk about what was happening on college campuses, much worse over the in the decade since. But at that point, there was some polling that showed just over 35 percent of American college kids thought the first amendment was dangerous because you might use your freedom of speech To say something that hurts somebody else’s feelings. The whole dang point of America, the point of America is that we lay down our weapons outside the tent and you go into the tent and you say, speech cannot be violence and violence is not A form of speech. What we believe here is that everybody is created in the image of God. They have universal rights. Like we need to celebrate the American civic tradition together. (Time 0:26:25)
  • Digital Media Rewards Tribal Fan Service
    • Sasse thinks digital media rewards narrow but deep audiences, destroying shared culture and encouraging outlets to flatter tribal consumers instead of challenge them.
    • With no common water-cooler world left, both sides profit by showcasing fringe enemies and teaching audiences to fear their neighbors. Transcript: Ross Douthat But to your point. Well, is the problem then that there’s sort of this widespread collapse of interest in or understanding of American civic values? Or is it primarily a problem where most people are still on board with those values? Hence, Ben Sasse can win liberal leaning Omaha while also winning deep Republican counties. But people who are sort of professionally, tribally engaged in politics are sort of tearing the country apart. Ben Sasse The weirdos are crowding everybody else out, right? I think the professional political activists and consumer class, those who allow it to become a core community are weird enough that almost all of our channels are narrow, but deep. New York times obviously still has millions and millions. Ross Douthat You don’t have to flatter us, but there aren’t, there, there aren’t, we have, we have weird, you know, I believe, uh, I think there’s a ton of fan service that happens in The New York Times. Ben Sasse But all of our outlets have an incentive to go narrow and deep because there isn’t any 60 percent audience that’s ever going to exist again. Post digital revolution. My analogous way of thinking about it as the son of a football coach is when we went from three channels to four channels in the 1980s, not Fox News, but Fox local, when we went from three To four channels, it was pretty great because it meant on Saturday afternoon, you got another football game. When we went from four channels to 500 channels, it seemed pretty great. When we go from 500 channels to 2000 channels, it’s pretty obvious that every individual can find something that they think they really want to watch. But it means tomorrow around the water cooler, you don’t have anything in common that anybody else watched together. I Love Lucy wasn’t important content, but it was shared content. And it meant that tomorrow morning, you had a whole bunch of topics you could go to with your neighbor or your coworker that was just shared cultural data. And we don’t have any of that anymore. And so in a world where everybody is incented to go narrow, but deep, there’s not a lot of need to call out BS and crazy on your own end of the continuum. There’s a ton of incentive for both political addicts on the right to find some nut job on the left who did or said something crazy. They’re all going to grab our guns. Or there’s some nut job on the left who wants to say everybody on the right wants to do this horrible thing to you because they found some idiot on Twitter or on a podcast who said that thing. And the problem with that kind of nut picking is it doesn’t ever solve a problem. (Time 0:30:00)
  • What A Non Apocalyptic Politician Should Sound Like
    • Sasse says normie politicians can still succeed by treating politics as a limited craft instead of promising apocalypse or salvation through legislation.
    • He sold voters on doing a few long-term jobs well, telling the truth, then getting off the stage rather than feeding political addiction. Transcript: Ross Douthat So this seems like, though, for for politicians, for the you know, the next the next would be Ben Sass, the next high minded, civic minded senator. This seems like a pretty pessimistic description. So is there some concrete response to this from politicians? Ben Sasse In Nebraska, I think you could do a long-term version of what I did for, you know, less than two terms, but two full election cycles, two primaries, two generals, which is despite the Fact that it looked like the most politically addicted people really, really disliked me. Like me because I was a dad first. I was a husband. I was a Christian. I was a Husker sports addict. I was talking about the technological disruptions to the nature of their work, but I never pretended there was a piece of legislation that the day after tomorrow, apocalypticism or Salvation is coming by legislative process. That’s bullshit. And I would never lie to my people like that. And they know it’s bullshit and they don’t want to be lied to. And so they’re like, why can’t politics do a small number of important long term things, tell the truth about the FISC, figure out what our national security priorities should be, do A small number of things, shut up and get off the stage. And I think normie politicians have an opportunity, at least in small enough electorates, where people can get to know who you are as a person. Again, I don’t know that this works if you got all the media markets of California, but I think it’s possible. Big picture, 15 years, 25 years from now, does the republic survive or not? I think it’s an open question, but I think we do. But if we survive, one thing that I’m nearly certain of is we will figure out how to have discussions in spite of all of the noise of social media chaos, of a lot of lying and a lot of screaming And just a whole lot of conspiracy stupid all across the continuum. There’s gonna be a lot more normies who show up and roll their eyes and say, yeah, grandma, I know you got a text that, you know, some terrible things are gonna happen if you don’t click This link by tomorrow. We’ve figured out how to deal with a lot of that kind of fraud on your digital devices. (Time 0:33:53)
  • Normie Politicians Can Win By Being Honest and Human
    • Ben Sasse says local politicians can succeed by showing they’re parents, spouses, faith members, and fans — authentic human identities voters recognize.
    • He rejects quick legislative promises or apocalyptic claims, calling them dishonest and politically toxic.
    • Voters prefer politicians who do a few important long-term things, tell the truth, and then step back.
    • This approach works better in small electorates where people can personally know candidates, less so across huge media markets.
    • He believes the republic can survive and will learn to have real discussions despite social media noise and conspiracy-driven chaos. Transcript: Ben Sasse In Nebraska, I think you could do a long-term version of what I did for, you know, less than two terms, but two full election cycles, two primaries, two generals, which is despite the Fact that it looked like the most politically addicted people really, really disliked me. Like me because I was a dad first. I was a husband. I was a Christian. I was a Husker sports addict. I was talking about the technological disruptions to the nature of their work, but I never pretended there was a piece of legislation that the day after tomorrow, apocalypticism or Salvation is coming by legislative process. That’s bullshit. And I would never lie to my people like that. And they know it’s bullshit and they don’t want to be lied to. And so they’re like, why can’t politics do a small number of important long term things, tell the truth about the FISC, figure out what our national security priorities should be, do A small number of things, shut up and get off the stage. And I think normie politicians have an opportunity, at least in small enough electorates, where people can get to know who you are as a person. Again, I don’t know that this works if you got all the media markets of California, but I think it’s possible. Big picture, 15 years, 25 years from now, does the republic survive or not? I think it’s an open question, but I think we do. But if we survive, one thing that I’m nearly certain of is we will figure out how to have discussions in spite of all of the noise of social media (Time 0:34:13)
  • Why Ben Sasse Left The Senate For Florida
    • Sasse left the Senate partly because he thought the institution was not tackling real problems while taking him away from his remaining years with family.
    • He moved to the University of Florida hoping higher education, despite its petty infighting, still offered a place to build formative institutions. Transcript: Ross Douthat Why didn’t you stick around? If you thought this model was workable, that you could have been reelected in spite of having the base of your party mad at you, why did you leave? Ben Sasse Mortality heavy on my shoulders. I’ve always thought time was short. And the Senate is a very, very, very important institution, has been in the past, and it will be again in the future, I’m relatively confident. But it doesn’t do anything right now. And so when you have kids, and you’ve watched two of the three of them graduate out and go two-thirds empty nester while you were commuting every week and you still have another kid left With you. And you just think it’s super unlikely that the Senate’s going to tackle any real stuff this year or next year or the year after that or the year after that. Like, why am I still doing this? And so I had been recruited for a few college presidencies and none of them seemed like the right fit. And I was in the process of running for reelection, et cetera. But ultimately I left the Senate for the opportunity to help steer the University of Florida for a time. Ross Douthat And, um, and was it great to leave politics for a world of friendliness, ideological comedy? Everybody loves higher education. I mean, this must have been a big relief, right? Ben Sasse To go. We are doing this interview. We’re recording in Austin and I was on faculty at the University of Texas at Austin from 2004 to 2009. And I remember the old quote, you know, it’s attributed to dozens of people, but one of them is Kissinger. Academic politics are the most brutal because the stakes are so small. I remember when I was on faculty, I’m a historian by training, but I taught Friendliness, at the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs in the aughts. And we were going through a building renovation and we had some faculty members basically chain themselves to the dean’s desk because one of them was going to go from 16 and a half feet Of window to 15 feet of window going to lose like 18 inches of window and it was well but their their i assume their departmental rival was getting exactly if i was losing a foot but you were Losing two feet fine but not if i lose and you gain um Academia is a total mess, obviously. And yet we need institutions to help people go from being 15 to 17 to 19 to 21. You got to do home leaving. You got to do family formation. You got to do first job. You got to do a ton of habit and character formation stuff. And higher education could be a really, really useful transitional institution. Right now, it enables lots of endlessly deferred adolescent behaviors and not enough rigor and not enough clarity about either research or teaching or character formation. But we need to build new institutions in that space. (Time 0:37:56)
  • The Right Response Is To Recover Liberal Arts
    • Sasse argues the answer to ideological capture in humanities is not abolishing liberal arts but rebuilding them around rigor, beauty, history, and civic formation.
    • He says students keep fleeing to STEM because core classes often feel narrow and activist-driven instead of answering why educated adults should read history or literature. Transcript: Ross Douthat Me just a little bit about the part of your job at Florida that was sort of connected to this larger effort by conservatives to kind of perform some kind of transformation of more liberal Academic institutions. You know, University of Florida started the Hamilton Center, right, which is one of these sort of institutes of civic thought, but that sort of double as places where people with moderate And right of center views can get hired. Just tell me how you think or what you think about that project. Ben Sasse So lots of people deserve credit for the founding of the Hamilton Center, became Hamilton School, will eventually be some form of Hamilton College. I think it’s worth backing up one step to one of the inherent tensions in the American Research University. The American Research University is a hybrid of an English teaching college model, Oxbridge, and a German institute model. And there’s a lot about that that’s great. One of the things that’s always a little under resolved is, are our research universities for preparing people for life or preparing people for jobs? The right answer should be yes, both. We should be preparing the mind and the character for all of the various vocations and callings in life, and also to be prepared for the first job, but also for the third job in an industry That doesn’t even exist yet and won’t for 15 or 20 years. And so we need a lot more rigor. We need a lot more both. And so many universities have had liberal arts colleges captured by ideological activists that really only want to speak to eight or 10 or 17 other ideological activists that liberal Arts colleges. And I say this as a story and I say this as somebody who loves the liberal arts have so obviously abdicated any responsibility for preparing a next generation that we’re now five consecutive Decades into higher ed in America, having students choose by major, voting with their feet to move from liberal arts majors to more STEM majors. Five consecutive decades, students migrating from liberal arts towards STEM disciplines. But the liberal arts, instead of then saying, well, let’s use the core curriculum as a way to prepare people for the rest of life, not just the jobs that they may have that may be in engineering Or health professions or whatever, getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And their power, the power of those faculties are increasingly just to compel students to take their classes through the core curriculum. But the classes aren’t very good. They aren’t very big. They aren’t very rigorous, but they aren’t big in terms of grand questions. They’re not trying to help people fall in love with the good, the true and the beautiful. The answer is not to hate on the liberal arts. The answer is to recover the liberal arts. Ross Douthat Right. Which is and just we’ll talk about the left in a sec, but there is a conservative temptation, I think, that you as a politician and academic, I’m sure, have seen to look at that story and Say, oh, we should just accelerate the process. Identity politics, you know, deconstructionist rot, and let’s just cut their budgets and just encourage people onto pure pre-professional vocational tracks. I feel like you see that from a lot from a certain kind of Republican politician. Burn it all down. Right. Is the impulse of a lot. Right. And just leave the business school standing. Correct. Right. So how do you, how do you persuade conservatives that they need to be invested in these institutions? Ben Sasse One of the ways is by building a better college of liberal arts, which is functionally what Hamilton is. And so you asked, what do I think of this project? There have been a lot of these schools. They’re very important as reform germs. But what you really want is to go much bigger and say, what does great history look like? Why is it that almost all the history books that show up on a New York Times bestseller list are written by people that are not practicing historians in academic departments? Because they want to write identity politics, narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow questions that aren’t ever going to be read by people. And you really want to ask questions about why does a generally educated American adult, citizen, neighbor, voter, lover, need to read history? What is the point of learning history? You’re not going to hear that argument in most history departments right now. And so what you’d like to see is great history, great literature, great love for music and the arts, et cetera. And those things are not being done in universities right now. By and large, let’s build better liberal arts colleges at the center of these institutions. (Time 0:41:00)
  • AI Will Magnify Human Agency And Addiction
    • Sasse sees AI as neither heaven nor hell by itself, but as human behavior at warp speed for both abundance and addiction.
    • The key split will be intentional users who harness near-free computing versus people who outsource attention and affection to algorithms. Transcript: Ross Douthat One, I mean, one thing that has made me maybe more optimistic about this kind of save the humanities project is actually watching left-wing academia react to artificial intelligence, Where part of the reaction, I think, is mistaken. I think there’s part of the reaction that underrates the technology and wants to say, you know, it’s not that important. It’s all fakery. It’s just Silicon Valley hype. I think that part is wrong. But there is also a reaction I’ve seen that is a kind of humanist reaction that is sort of trying to emphasize human exceptionalism, which has not been where I think parts of the academic Left have been. And it’s made me wonder whether, yeah, there is a kind of left-right humanist dialogue around, I mean, just the bigger question that I know you have thoughts on, because, you know, you Were talking earlier about sort of the technological challenge we’re living through, right? But where, you know, the question of just like, what is a human being? And what makes human beings distinct from a computer, a machine, these kind of things? Those seem like questions that are maybe get us out of current polarization a little bit. Ben Sasse What do you think? Well said. I, in my pre-cancer life where you sometimes, you know, dance for your dinner or raising money for a university and you’re asked to give generalist speeches on a lot of topics, It’s, You know, 90% of the time, somebody will ask you some version of the question, do you think AI is going to bring heaven or AI is going to bring hell? And the right answer is yes. AI is going to be human activity and behavior at warp speed for good and for ill. And a lot of the stuff that we’ve been good at, we’re going to get more of it faster, cheaper, and more broadly distributed. But a lot of what’s horrible about human addictions and distractions, we’re also going to get a lot more of it faster, cheaper, more ubiquitous. And I think the grand divide that is coming sociologically or demographically is not chiefly a class divide. I think the grand divide that’s coming is about intentionality and what you do with your affections and these super tools. The people who use the tools and get to capture the ability to drive marginal computing costs towards zero, right? We’re either going to make the quantification of routinizable tasks either actually free or so close to free that we won’t bother to meter it anymore. That’s going to be extraordinary. It’s going to be a transformation of the way economics has worked for human history past. Economics was a discipline about scarcity. Economics is going to become a discipline about ubiquitous abundance. Or your people who agree to outsource your attention and affections to somebody else’s algorithm. That’s hell. Who would have ever thought that we’d be living in a sex collapse? Less premarital sex, less extramarital sex, less marital sex, because people are so addicted to not just pornography proper, but just digital distraction from bodily goodness. That’s weird. And I think that the digital revolution that we’re going to live through is going to bring all of that at faster speed for a small number of people with lots of intentionality, lots of Habits and thick communities of accountability and Sabbaths. These tools are going to probably be pretty great for the majority of people. (Time 0:48:46)
  • Community And Self Restraint Beat The Algorithm
    • Sasse thinks the main defense against algorithmic capture is thick community that trains self-restraint, shared deferred gratification, and rightly ordered loves.
    • He ties this to restoring intergenerational life, arguing age-segregated institutions like modern schooling deprive the young of wisdom and the old of vitality. Transcript: Ross Douthat Do you try and give to the normal people in that scenario is it a different philosophy of life is it a religious vision like what if it’s an 80 20 scenario where it’s heaven for 20 percent And hell for 80 percent what’s the path up for the 80 percent communities that can do um shared deferred gratification that can say self-discipline self-restraint um self-control Ben Sasse Are the only antidotes to other constraint other discipline and others control. And so I think we want to think very, very intentionally about our affections. What are your loves? We have to think deeply about rank ordered loves. And I don’t think we do that right now. And I think our temptation to allow these tools to algorithmically tempt me into an eternal now, now, now, now, now, now slot machine of dopamine hits, super dangerous. We have been for 150 years tempted toward generational segregation, which loses wisdom in my- meaning the young don’t encounter the old and vice versa, actually. Ross Douthat Exactly. Ben Sasse I think that in my pantheon of American, you know, greats and villains, um, we radically underappreciate the downsides of John Dewey. I think John Dewey did many, many, many, many terrible things. And one of them was, say, well, the economy went from kind of craft work and agriculture to industrialized scale. We should make childhood on an industrialized scale. And we should institutionalize children for the vast majority of the time. Uh, indoors sitting still, um, passive mother, may I, and only around people with their same birth year. One of the least significant factors about life is people that just happen to have my same birth year, except when you’re 14 or 16, then it’s really terrible because our frontal lobes Aren’t done. And what a horrible thing to segregate 16 year olds only with 16 year olds. Those people are idiots. And they deserve the benefits of 80-year wisdom. And by the way, 80-year deserve the benefits of the reward of seeing 16-year vitality again. And puts it on speed and we lose lots of wisdom. We need a lot more communitarian thickness to get at some of these self-restraints and self-controls that can use the tools instead of being used by the tools. (Time 0:52:38)
  • Terminal Illness Clarified What He Misprioritized
    • Sasse says the diagnosis brought peace about his own death but acute regret over misprioritized time with his wife and children.
    • His Christian frame treats death as both an enemy and a defeated final enemy, which lets him hate it without despairing. Transcript: Ben Sasse I got my diagnosis in mid-December, and similar to when you were going through your health episodes, I was incredibly blessed to be quickly at peace. I kept hearing the Pauline phrase, um, to live as Christ, to die as gain. Um, and death is terrible. Uh, we should never sugarcoat it. Um, it is not how things are meant to be, but it is great that death can be called the final enemy. It’s an enemy, but it’s a final enemy. And there will then be no more tears. Um, I believe in the resurrection and I believe in a restoration of this world. And so I did not, um, feel great fear about my death. I didn’t want the pain I was going through. I didn’t want to be a pansy ass, um, you know, at the, in the, in the final moments, excuse me, you’re doing okay right now with that. I am doing so far. Oh, thank you. Uh, but I did immediately feel, um, regrets about a lot of misprioritization. You jokingly referred earlier to my podcast, which takes its line from Monty Python, not dead yet. Um, we’re all on the clock and I wanted to have prioritized better. And whether I really only had three or four months left, or if I get nine to 12 months left, I want to prioritize better from then. But in my tradition, in Christianity, the need for daily repentance is just a truth. I am broken. I leave undone those things which I ought to have done, and I do those things which I have not done, you know, at morphine. And there is no health in us. And I get to repent every day of both my sins of omission and commission. And yet, at a slightly bigger level, if you’re only going to get three or four months, you really want to get some of your affairs in order. And my boy was only 14 and I felt a heaviness. I knew that God wasn’t surprised by the diagnosis. Um, this, there is not a maverick molecule in the universe, but I didn’t like the idea of my 14 year old son, not having a dad around at 16. I didn’t like the idea of my daughters who are 22 and 24, um, not having their dad there to walk them down the aisle. And, um, I, I felt real heaviness about that. But I’ve continued to feel a peace about the fact that death is something that we should hate. We should call it a wicked thief. And yet it’s pretty good that you pass through the veil of tears one time, and then there will be no more tears. There will be no more cancer. (Time 0:57:18)
  • Protect Sabbaths Dinners And Family Proximity
    • Keep the Sabbath, protect family dinner from devices, and cut unnecessary travel before work habits harden into a life structure.
    • Sasse says seven hotel nights a month was already too many and wishes he had built thicker family life near parents and cousins. Transcript: Ross Douthat Just on the, you know, front of having something like this change how you think about your own priorities? Is there advice that you would give to someone who is, you know, the Ben Sass father of three at age 40 or age 35 when the kids are young and everything’s stressful and chaotic in light of Where you are now? Ben Sasse Happy to go fire hose on this one. Number one, honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. Man, I wish I’d treated the Lord’s day differently over the course of my life. I’ve always known it, believed in it and thought, you know, maybe next week we’ll get better at take. We’ve been at the Sunday worship every morning forever, but man, am I tempted by 1245 or 130 in the afternoon to get back to work or to an addictive level work about the NFL. Boy, I would treat Sabbaths differently and especially digital intrusions into the Sabbath. Dinner time is precious. Man, lock up your devices and keep them away from the table and prioritize that time. There is a limit to how many trips a month are really worth it. I lived a road warrior life for a long time, and I kind of had a rule of thumb that seven nights a month in a hotel was the ceiling. But boy, there’s a difference between seven and nine, and there’s a difference between seven and five, and I took way, way, way, way too many trips. That might be convicting for the man interviewing you, but go on, you know. Family compounds, like, man, have more cousins and figure out how to live thick with them. There’s so many times when we optimize around things that are not nearly as important as more family thickness. Boy, I wish we lived down the block from my folks. (Time 1:00:47)
  • Practical Ways to Prioritize Family When Life Is Short
    • Honor the Sabbath and keep it holy; Ben wishes he had treated the Lord’s Day differently and resisted returning to work early.
    • Protect family meals from digital intrusions: lock up devices and prioritize dinner time.
    • Limit travel: set a ceiling (Ben used seven hotel nights/month) and recognize even small increases erode family time.
    • Invest in thicker family ties—live closer to relatives and build family compounds or proximate cousins to deepen relationships.
    • Small logistical choices (Sabbath, phones, trips, proximity) compound into meaningful presence for your kids and spouse. Transcript: Ben Sasse Number one, honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. Man, I wish I’d treated the Lord’s day differently over the course of my life. I’ve always known it, believed in it and thought, you know, maybe next week we’ll get better at take. We’ve been at the Sunday worship every morning forever, but man, am I tempted by 1245 or 130 in the afternoon to get back to work or to an addictive level work about the NFL. Boy, I would treat Sabbaths differently and especially digital intrusions into the Sabbath. Dinner time is precious. Man, lock up your devices and keep them away from the table and prioritize that time. There is a limit to how many trips a month are really worth it. I lived a road warrior life for a long time, and I kind of had a rule of thumb that seven nights a month in a hotel was the ceiling. But boy, there’s a difference between seven and nine, and there’s a difference between seven and five, and I took way, way, way, way too many trips. That might be convicting for the man interviewing you, but go on, you know. Family compounds, like, man, have more cousins and figure out how to live thick with them. There’s so many times when we optimize around things that are not nearly as important as more family thickness. Boy, I wish we lived down the block from my folks. (Time 1:01:12)
  • Why He Does Not Rage At Unanswered Prayer
    • Sasse rejects anger at unanswered prayers because he does not want a sovereign God who simply ratifies his limited requests.
    • He calls cancer not salvific but sanctifying, echoing Tim Keller’s idea that pancreatic cancer teaches the prayer of human finitude. Transcript: Ross Douthat Ehrman, who’s a New Testament scholar, well known as a skeptic who was a Christian, was evangelical Christian for a time and lost his Christian faith. And in our conversation, he talked about the idea that he didn’t lose his faith because he decided that the Gospels weren’t historically reliable, though that was mostly what we argued About, right? But because of the problem of evil, of human suffering. And he specifically talked about unanswered prayers. And as, you know, I assume you’ve prayed for healing yes sir not to be you know not to be the guy who just beats the odds but to be the miracle story um god hasn’t answered those prayers yet Are you angry at god ever? No. Ben Sasse Not at all? No. I wouldn’t want a sovereign God to defer to all of my prayers with a yes, because I’m not omniscient. I don’t know what the weaving together of the tapestry of full redemption should look like, but I know going through the period of suffering that I’m going through, um, is a benefit because It is a winnowing. Um, I’m filled with dross and I, I, this suffering is not salvific, um, but it’s sanctifying and I’m grateful for it. Tim Keller, who I know you knew, um, uh, who’s in my denomination, a Presbyterian pastor in New York who also died of pancreatic cancer, said, I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never wish it on anyone, but I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer. Meaning I now in the midst of this disease, know much more the truth of my finitude than I ever let myself believe in the past, the hubristic nonsense that I was actually, you know, I believe In God and grateful and blessed, but I can build a storehouse that can be pretty deistically persuasive. My storehouse can have enough resources that I can operate without a need. But that’s not true. (Time 1:02:40)
  • Cancer Became A Rebuke To Self Idolatry
    • Asked what he would say to a nonbeliever, Sasse starts not with proofs but with conscience and the disorder of the self.
    • He says cancer became a stake against self-idolatry by exposing how little control he has over even his own skin. Transcript: Ross Douthat The listener or viewer who, whether for Ehrman’s reasons or others, doesn’t believe in God and finds your cosmic optimism admirable, but maybe thinks that you’re deluding yourself On the brink of actual finitude. What would you say to that person? Ben Sasse Let’s read the book of Romans together. Uh, in Romans one, where Paul’s essentially laying out. The catechetical argument for the structure of Christianity against a Jewish messianic hopeful backdrop. He says in, in chapter one, um, there are lots of intellectual arguments you can make against God, but you kind of have to start with a fundamental question about what do you do with this Moral issue of our own conscience? And does the individual in your hypothetical really start with the claim that things are right in your soul? Because I can’t relate to that. Things are not right in my soul. My soul thinks Ben should be God, and I want that to die. Cancer sucks, but I’m pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry. Ross Douthat Do you think you’re ready to die? Do you feel ready? I don’t feel ready, but to whom would I go? Ben Sasse I have confidence that when Jesus says to the disciples, he didn’t want to be identified as the Messiah yet, keep these crowds away. You know, don’t tell about the water into wine miracle at the feast. How amazing is it that Jesus first miracle is a big ass party. Let’s drink more together. But he says, you can’t keep the children from me. And we’re told that we get to approach the almighty. We get to approach the divine and call him daddy, Abba Father. That’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need. (Time 1:05:06)