Basketball in the Last 60 Seconds: Ben Sasse on Mortality, Meaning, and the Future of America

- What matters, what really matters on Uncommon Knowledge today? Ben Sasse. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Benjamin Eric Sasse. Grew up in Plainville, Nebraska. Population today of about 1,250. Earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard and a doctorate in history at Yale. He represented Nebraska in the United States Senate from 2014 until 2023 when he became president of the University of Florida, a role in which he served until the middle of 2024. This past December, Ben SaaS posted an announcement on X quote. This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I'll cut to the chase. Last week I was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Senator Sass has now begun treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Ben, you've begun treatment. You've also taken up a position at the American Enterprise Institute here in Washington. You are here in Washington for a friend's wedding. You're recording a podcast instead of withdrawing from the world, you are throwing all that you have left into it. How come?

- Well, first of all, my friend Peter, good to be with you. Thank you for having me. I, let's be clear, I would like to be throwing a lot more energy at it and I'm withdrawn a lot 'cause I sleep like 15 or 16 hours a day. So I'll just acknowledge the embarrassment of how unproductive I am. But I'm on a lot

- Of morphine. You just had a piece, piece in the Wall Street Journal three days ago.

- I, it, it was written on morphine and I think you can see that it's a drug adult piece. This is the Super Bowl party as the basis for American Civics going forward. I mean we, we'll talk about big stuff and we will talk about hopefully some gallows humor. We, our family is getting through a lot of this. When you get a already metastasized cancer diagnosis that says you have cancer and five kinds of organs already, you, you, you tend to be a little more honest and blunt. So hopefully we can make

- Jokes too. Can I just ask right there, pancreatic cancer, it seems to be the, this is the layman's crudest possible understanding, but it doesn't get diagnosed until late. That's right. Why? So?

- It's got more than a 97% death rate and I got a worse than average diagnosis because your pancreas isn't very important. And so oncologists often joke that cancer is a stealthy disease. It's a real, and it tries to find ways to hurt you bad and it can hide and linger in the pancreas. 'cause you don't need your pancreas very much. We need some digestive juices out of it, but if it's not functioning, most people don't have any immediate big problem. So a layman histor historian and business strategy guy and want to be football coach. I have no biological training whatsoever, but I'm a nerd. So I've been going to school on this. The reason that I'm understanding that pancreatic cancer is so fatal is because you're almost never diagnosed with your pancreatic cancer because of its symptoms. You're diagnosed because it's already metastasized to other organs.

- I

- See. So I have bad liver cancer, I have vascular stuff, I have a lot of tumors in my spine. So just acknowledging the socially awkward ways that I might sit and move and talk at times. 'cause I got a lot of pain from tumors in my spine. But the pancreas is a, a super fatal kind of cancer. But it also means that it's the places where they're throwing our scientific experts in community are throwing some of the most interesting brains at the problem of what does it look like to do immunotherapy differently? What does it look like to do really aggressive chemo? So I'm bad enough along that I'm way post-surgical, which is in a way a blessing. You wouldn't want to be at the precipice of, ah, it's probably of no use to have you have this big surgery to take out this one tumor. But let's do it anyway. I'm so full of tumors. You're not gonna do surgery to take out one tumor here or there so we can focus on other stuff. So I'm in a clinical trial at MD Anderson that is about, chemo is just a socially polite way to say poisoning. How do you get the maximum amount of poison delivered to your cancer tumors without also killing and poisoning yourself? And so I'm in a really aggressive chemo trial and pancreatic cancer tends to be a pretty interesting field if you're a nerd. And I'm gonna be a nerd along the side through this process. Okay,

- He, here's from the, your update of January 9th. Let me close with prayer requests and one of the requests that you pose that I will be able to borrow the old puritan phrase to redeem the time. Alright, we have two puzzles there. One is that Ben Sasse is a man of 2026. He is Harvard and Yale and a business consultant and is hip and with it as any anybody can be. We know that stuff's not true, but let's go prayer. What are you talking about? Prayer in the year 2026.

- I'm with Paul when he says to live is Christ, to die is gain. Obviously death is a wicked thief. I don't want it to happen. But we're mortals and it seems like it's not sophisticated or modern or naive to pretend we're not mortals. It's true. And so you gotta grapple with big questions. And this is not news to me that I had numbered days. It just became a more precise number. We all numbered days.

- We all have numbered days, which is why you have been so much on my mind ever since posting this because of course nobody gets outta here alive. Which brings me to the next question. Redeem the time. That sounds wonderful, but I want to know quite what you mean. It sounds like kind of thing that we should all be trying to do every day anyway, but don't, what do you mean by it?

- Yeah, I, I have a, a podcast that's gonna be launched in a couple of weeks that I'd been deliberating with some buddies on for seven years and multiple times let the perfect to be the enemy of the good. And we never got it off the off the ground. And then we decided in October to do it. And then in December when I was diagnosed, we decided to still do it. We just changed the name to Monty Python's famous, not dead yet. If you're not dead yet, you may as well redeem the time. But that isn't just me, it's all your listeners too. Redeem the time in my theology means it is a great blessing to be able to live a life of gratitude to God by doing stuff that tries to benefit your neighbor. It is a blessing to get to be co-creators, but we don't build any storehouses that last the things that matter and endure our human souls and things way bigger than any of my projects. That doesn't mean we should, we, we should be neither triumphalist nor despairing, right? Like no, nothing we build is gonna last. But that doesn't mean nothing matters. The chance to love your neighbor and serve is a, is a blessing. And that's what, that's what the puritans meant by redeem the time I was given 90 days to live in mid-December. I got into this clinical trial. It's really aggressive. We'll live a lot longer than 90 days, but don't know how many months that is. But whether you have 90 days or 12 months or 12 years or 75 years left to live, we're all gonna be pushing up daisies. And so it, it seems like trying to figure out what the important things are, what the eternal questions you need to wrestle through what it looks like to see the relationship between sin and death and a broken world. And yet the chance to hug on my wife this morning and to to love my kids and to reflect on some important questions with my friend Peter. Those are pretty good ways to redeem the time.

- Okay. This is not in your nature, but looking back, you devoted almost a decade to politics worthwhile.

- Theoretically. Absolutely. There is, there is no doubt that a framework for ordered liberty is necessary. Power and coercion and restraint of evil are not the center of anybody's loves or they shouldn't be. The worldview is pretty distorted if politics can become the central thing. And yet because the world is broken, it's important work. And I truly believe that those of us who get the chance to grow up in America, the constitutional system, the Constitution is the most important political document ever written. Political documents aren't the most important documents, but the oath, political documents, the Constitution is amazing because it says that government is not the author or the source of our rights. We have our rights from God via nature, pre governmentally and government is just a shared project. It's a secular project to secure those rights and pass 'em on to the next generation. So government in general is important. Let's have one or two. Cheers for politics. Neither zero nor three. Maybe a way to think about the historic divide on the American political continuum is the right side. Conservatives used to be one cheer folks and Democrats used to be two, two cheer folks. But they're both legitimate American positions 'cause they're neither zero pretending the world isn't broken. Or three, a statism that pretends power and coercion could be the center of your worldview. So theoretically, absolutely much longer set of questions about whether 2014 to 2023 were a very fruitful time in American life. And at 2040 or 2050, will we look back and say that we were in the process of preserving important stuff and building important stuff? Or were we kind of going through a weird I'll stop and give you the floor back. No, no, no. But I i, I do think it's highly likely at some point in the future when America has either declined or hopefully reformed itself. One of the things we're gonna think we did is we figured out how to do politics in an era of disintermediated conversation. We don't have a lot of shared facts. We have gazillions of people screaming all the time on the internet and we pretend they're representative. They're not at all representative. The loudest people have the ridiculous, the most ridiculously outside voice in American life. And it used to just be the left, the far left that had a bunch of people who were post constitutional or postliberal as in post classically liberal. Now we have a bunch of people at the right end of the spectrum that are also post constitutional or postliberal. I don't think those people are representative of America. But we don't know how to have a conversation right now. 'cause we give all the voice to the loudest angriest people. Most people aren't that angry.

- What about the Senate? You gave a big part of your life to the Senate. We're just a few blocks from the chamber where there are a lot of men up there. Men and women who remember you fondly as a colleague. Here's here's you, this is, I'm gonna quote you from your appearance last year with Andrew Roberts on his podcast when I was running for office in 2013 and 2014, having never run for anything before in my life. I would talk constantly about executive or judicial overreach. And those are big problems, no doubt. But the much bigger problem is legislative under reach. I think the founders would be stunned to find the branches that aren't jealous of their prerogative are the house and Senate. Congress is incredibly weak and dysfunctional. What can they do about it? What can we do about it?

- Yeah. So I, I stand by all that. I think the f let's let's say something first about if the founders could be transported two and a half centuries into the future and observe this, how they might reflect on it. But then your question, what can we do about it? The founders believed you needed to divide government's power over and over and over and over because if men were angels, you wouldn't need government. And if governors were angels, you wouldn't need checks on power. But because we're sinners, because we're broken, because we're selfish, we do need government. But we need the governors to also be constrained. And so they, they divided over and over just great civics, right? Private sectors more important than the public sector of the public sector. What happens closest to the people is more important. State and locals are more important than what happens way off in Washington DC of what happens in Washington DC Let's divide power three ways. We'll have a legisl article one legislature, article two, executive branch. Article three judiciary. There are kind of co-equal branches, but the legislature is the preeminent branch. So let's divide them as well. Let's divide the legislature between the house and the Senate and let's have the Senate, which is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the world with all these anti majoritarian constraints. So government can only act over the course of years. You gotta be able to get through a congress. A congress means meeting every two years in the house. But the Senate is a perpetual body where your, your six year term, so only one third of the people are turning over every two years, supposed to be really hard to do stuff. They did that because they assumed the people who would serve there would want to do stuff. They thought the three branches would be jealous for their prerogatives and they'd be ambitious for power. And so you do a ton of stuff. And so you need to constrain government. Super strange that the legislature mostly, and there are lots of good people there. And so even some people that I'm gonna criticize their behavior, I won't by, not by name, but it's, it's they're caught in a system where we have a big collective action problem where most of the people in the legislature really just wish they were TikTok stars. And so what they're trying to do is find a platform to grandstand. They don't really wanna do stuff legislatively. And so we don't pass anything over the course of a given two year congress. About 11,000 pieces of legislation will be introduced on average about 380 pass. So three and a half percent, half of that, three and a half percent are post office naming bills, right? So we're passing like 1.6, 1.7, 1.8% of legislation that's introduced in the last 44 years. I think there's only been a budget that has spent more than a third of the public's dollars on an appropriated normal process four times in 44 years. That's why we go through this BS every September 28, 29, 30. Oh my gosh, the government's gonna shut down. What should we do? Should we fund the government at 0% of last year or at 102% of last year across every program? What idiot would do that? No household, no business, no not-for-profit would say I should spend $0 next year or every single dollar I spent last year was really well spent. Let's spend just a little bit more in all those categories. That's what we do every year with a continuing resolution. 'cause they don't actually pass any budgets and the, the Congress is filled with folks who are so desperate to keep that job that they don't wanna do anything that upsets anybody. So nobody takes any risk. And why don't we just figure out a way to do, how do we do a quick take to say it was the other party's side that nothing happened when both sides are pretty happy to do nothing,

- Right?

- And say the other side is the reason why. So what do we do about it? You gotta elect different kind of people. People who are super skeptical of politics now, people who've spent their whole life trying to get to Washington, but people who view it kind of cincinnatus style or George Washington style as I gotta serve for a term. But man, I want to get back to Mount Vernon. I wanna get back to my vineyard and my family and my grandkids. I do not wanna move to Washington DC for the rest of my life. We have a debate about term limits. But the more interesting thing would be if the voters self-consciously only wanted to elect people who kind of wanted to self term limit because they didn't wanna be here forever. Weirdos want to be here forever, right?

- Higher education. Another nonpolitical topic. Well, years to years to earn your doctorate at Yale. Four years as president of Midland Universities, small Lutheran College in Fremont, Nebraska. Then your time as president of the University of Florida. Add this all up and I get you devoted about a decade of your life to higher education. Again, from the perspective of your current situation worthwhile. Were those years well, well spent? What seems more, I guess what I'm getting at is now that you hear the clock ticking, what seems more valuable and what seems less value valuable than it did before the diagnosis?

- I'll make a joke, I'll make a joke. I'll say a really serious thing and then I'll try to answer your question. The joke is, my dream job was

- Only you. Only then

- Only you. My dream job was to be a graduate assistant and eventually become an offen, a part of the offensive staff at the University of Nebraska football program. And I should have pursued that directly. 'cause I'm annoying and relentless. And if I'd have really gone for it, I'd be a football coach today like my dad was. And I think that would've been a better choice. But anyway, the really big point you hear when the clock is ticking not to go, you know, full cats in the cradle. But you know, I just wanna say man to man, human to human, parent to parent in front of your audience. Like the workaholism in my soul is something I've repented of to my family, but I just, I'm happy to, not happy, I'm embarrassed but comforted to say publicly, what a mistake in my twenties and thirties to be so focused on a lot of work ambition that I just made way too many stupid decisions to be on the road. Too many nights per month and per year. And so if I had it to do over again, I would think a lot more intentionally about how to be more ambitious in my household and to take the Lord's day and the Sabbath more seriously than all the ways I was a workaholic for decades. I was repenting of this and reforming the process well before of the metastasized cancer diagnosis. But I, I just, you know, wish in my twenties and thirties I'd have done a little better job at balance on work home

- To, to bring up, bring our listeners along In your twenties and thirties you got this doctorate at Yale and then instead of going directly into academia, you became a business consultant and you were on the road constantly. And that lasted for some years, didn't it? Yeah, I didn't. And then you went to Midland, then you or to Midland University and became president there, correct?

- Yeah, I had two, two work paths. ISI could see, sorry, wave of nausea. I could see that the digital revolution was gonna disrupt almost every vertical, like almost all sectors were gonna get disrupted. And Max Weber has the great distinction between entrepreneurial and bureaucratic management. Bureaucratic has a negative connotation for lots of legitimate reasons, but in one sense, bureaucratic just means maintaining or sustaining institutions that we have that are important. Entrepreneurial from the French shifter of resources is making changes in your strategy or what you're doing. So I did, I did strategy consulting, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey and Company Private Equity. But I also was a nerd and I wanted to read books in common with people. So I got a PhD in American History, not 'cause I ever planned to be an academic, but just 'cause I wanted to read books, which I didn't wanna write a dissertation really, but I wanted to go read a couple hundred books together around a seminar table with people. And so for a while in my life I kind of had two full-time jobs. I was on an academic path as a grad student and junior instructor at Yale, and then later taught at the University of Texas in Austin. And I was also doing strategy consulting on the side. So for a a decade and a half I kind of worked two jobs and friends I have who've been road warriors kind of have the theory that if you're away less than seven nights a month, things can still work pretty well at home. If you're away 8, 9, 10 nights a month or more, that becomes two or three nights a week, it's too much. And I regularly traveled more than seven or 10 nights a month and I, so I have a lot of regret about that. So the point I was just making is you were comparing one job calling with another job

- Calling. Yes, yes.

- The bigger set of, you know, solomonic ain't the right word, but 53-year-old. But on your deathbed 53-year-old wisdom I have is work home balance matters a lot. Have a thick community be from a place we bought cemetery plots early in life. I've known for a long time where I was gonna be buried in St. Paul Lutheran Church Road in Arlington, Nebraska over the Elkhorn River is death is terrible, but the cemetery is beautiful. We've known the rootedness of where our family convenes for all the holidays, but we didn't spend enough hours every month doing that. So I have regret about that. To your question, academia versus politics. Politics matters. But in my nine years in politics, a little more, if you count living on a campaign bus for a year and a half, I was always willing to say what I believed to voters, even if it might make me unpopular. I have the weird claim to fame of being by far the highest vote getter in the history of Nebraska. And also by far the most sanctioned person in the history of Nebraska. My guess is second or third most sanctioned person in Nebraska has been sanctioned by their party three or four or five times, 63 times state parties in Nebraska, conven to condemn me for not being aligned with President Trump on issue X or whatever. 63 times I I had, I have 63 centuries

- I had, I had noticed some of those stories, but not 63

- Of. But what's crazy, I don't mean this to be self-serving. This is my point about a bell curve distribution. Most of America is center right? And they want politics to do a limited number of things. Do it well, get its job done and stop pretending you want to be Hollywood. Washington is, is Hollywood for ugly people. Shut up, do your service and get off the stage. And regular folks liked my approach to politics and so I'm glad for the ways that we went and said normy things. Go to more town halls, but roll your eyes. Don't pretend that politics is the center of the world. The center of the world is where you're raising your kids. It's where you worship, it's where you go to work next to somebody on the line for decades or or on the farm next door. And so politics is really important, but right now we're going through a phase where our politics is so politic, attainment where a very small number of people are paying attention, but those people are making it the center of their life. They're overrepresented. We need a lot more normies to come back in and engage in politics a little bit. And so if I were gonna do more politics, I would want to, back then, I would wanna make that case more aggressively. That we need to resist the weirdo ification of politics, which is what happens when Twitter and Instagram capture a political score. We, we know that only 14% of Americans are paying attention to politics on a daily basis. And only 29% pay attention at all. 71% are disengaged. We gotta get

- Those 71 50

- People and the 60th and the 40th percentile person to engage in politics a little bit higher. Ed has more import because we're going through a phase of having help, 15 to 18 to 21 to 24 year olds prepare for life. Both, both work vocational, so paid vocational stuff and the rest of life, not just once, but for a world where we're gonna have disruption over and over and over and over.

- Okay, so you spent a, a year and some months as president of the University of Florida. One of the things that you did was bring your old friend, as I recall you, you were close friends, you got your Yale doctorates in history together. You brought your old friend Will in Boden to the University of Florida and put him at the, what was it called? The Hamilton School. Hamilton School. And started moving, reforming, showing the way the two of you believed a modern American university should. Look, things have happened to you. Will is now provost at the University of Texas, which is a much bigger operation than Hamilton was. He's serious about reform. Can it be done? He can it be done.

- He has a good team and a good project. So Jim Davis, president of University of Texas, the, the Board of Regents at Texas, the, the political leadership have done a lot of things to set the table. And given will a really interesting platform and project will is provost and executive vice president of UT and they're trying to reform the curriculum in ways that need to be reformed. If you look at what's happened with majors students to selection of majors, right? Over the last 40 or 50 years, four decades in a row, students have migrated from the humanities and the liberal arts into the STEM disciplines. And at a level of prevocational stuff that is probably the right choice for lots of people to be making as a rational job seeking strategy. But having the luxury of going to a great American university for four years is about more than just pre-vocational stuff. It's about a chance to prepare for citizenship and life as well to to fall in love with the good and the true and the beautiful and to prepare for your job and for your third job. In some industry that doesn't even exist now, 20 years from now, it makes sense for students to be migrating toward quantitative disciplines or toward digital revolution and STEM disciplines. That doesn't mean the humanities and liberal arts don't matter, but what's happened at most universities is the people, not all of them, and they're not all that, they're not all bad folks. Even those that are advocating for a strategy that I don't support. But there are a lot of people who've niche unified their disciplines and the humanities and the liberal arts in ways that are not about big questions. They're not about goodness, truth or beauty and they're not about preparing people for any work. They're just about ideological capture of a lot of stupid little niches. To write a dissertation read by dozens tops, and then have forced demand through the curriculum. There's no reason to do that. There's no reason the taxpayers of the state of Texas or the state of Nebraska or the state of Florida should subsidize somebody to teach in a discipline that isn't wrestling with big questions and isn't preparing people for work. And so one of the things that will is doing that I think is really beautiful is asking some fundamental questions about what does it look like to have compulsion in the core? Why do we have core classes? It better be because you're preparing people for work or life or you're wrestling with big questions that lead to research outcomes that benefit the broader public. And if that's not the case, then we ought to not give people forced demand. And so will is rethinking a lot of things or will in his, his leadership and their faculty are thinking rethinking things about what the curriculum is for. And that's exciting.

- Okay, so we're coming up on our 250th anniversary July 4th, 2026. We'll make it 250 years since that declaration was first published. You said a moment ago, we're going through a phase when everybody in Congress wants to be on TikTok. When the wrong kinds of people are paying far the, you call it the weirdos are paying far too much attention to politics. But what struck me was that you called it a phase a moment ago. You used the same the word phase once again in connection with universities that this ideological capture of the great universities. And when we know that you love the country and you love the practice of politics because you spent a decade of your young life at it. And we know that you love university life and you love the life of the mind because you spent a decade at that as well. Do you feel confident that we can get through these phases or tell us the truth? This is a moment when you have nothing to lose and nothing to prove. Tell us the truth. Is the country simply in a long-term permanent decline? And do we all just need to make our accommodation with this collapse that's taking place around us and return all our attention to our homes and our churches and the little schools that are small enough for us to manage?

- Well, you you, you framed your question about three different ways. So at the very tail you choose, I went long-winded on the last two or three answers. So I'm not beating up the question, I just don't want to run away from the very last end and imply that the small platoons are less important. So first of all, I do think the places where you raise your kids and the places where you're breaking bread every night and where you worship and where you work, I do think those are the most important places, not the least important places, but I know you mean both and and so do I. And so at the level of big national callings, maybe there's an institutional component to the way to think about it and there's an intention span component for how to think about it. We definitely gonna have to build new institutions, right? This, this is analogous to 1870 to 1920. Mass urbanization, immigration and industrialization changed American life in ways that people assumed the polity of New England town greens couldn't go on if you have big cities. And from 1870 to 1890 cities were pretty terrible. There wasn't really a reason to wanna move to a city and raise your kids there. There were factories pulling economic activity there and technological development on the farm meant we didn't need as many people working on the farm. So you had push off the farm and you had pulled to the cities, but the cities weren't a great place. From 1870 to 1890 by 19 10, 19 15, 19 20 cities can be a great place to raise a family. There were urban ethnic neighborhoods that had a density of community tok, vian thickness around them in the cities that was similar to what we used to know on the New England town. Green and America was gonna go on again, even though in 1875 you didn't know if America would go on. We have a similar problem today except much bigger, the agrarian to industrial phase, that transition is much smaller than the industrial to, what do we call this? The knowledge economy. The digital economy, the it economy. Sociologists call it the post-industrial economy, which is another way of saying we don't know what the hell it is. We had agrarian, we had, we had hunter gatherers, nomads, we had agrarianism, we had industrialization, and now we have post industrialization. 'cause we don't know what it's, so your question is where do we go from here? We don't know, but 50 or 75 or a hundred years from now, when you look back at our moment, you are gonna, we're mostly not gonna talk about our politics. We're gonna believe we were living through a technological revolution that created economic and cultural revolutions that way. Downstream from that had political consequences. Politics can't possibly fix this. It's a tale being wagged by technology, culture and economics. But America only works if people are deliberative, if people are thoughtful, if people say, my neighbor, my soul matters, my kids' soul matter but matters. But my neighbor's soul matters too. So I, I wanna have a polity that works, but I know that you can't compel a soul. So power isn't the main thing. Our loves are the main thing. What is what George Washington Lincoln later built upon it. But Washington silver frame with the golden apple politics is just the frame. The center of the frame can't be power or coercion or compulsion. It's your loves, it's your affections, it's your your passion projects, it's your pursuits. And right now, why I call it a phase is because Americans don't read anymore. This is not some 53-year-old, hey, you're on your deathbed. So act 90, what's the matter with kids today? Why can't they be like we were perfect in every way? It's not a get off my lawn speech. It's not something that people said in 1940 and 1960 and 1980. Literally we don't read anymore. Like we, we have the data. The vast majority of Americans won't come anywhere near reading a book in, in the year 2026. And so the, the shortening of our attention spans to digital clips and shorts. It, it doesn't work for a deliberative republic that is anti majoritarian that says, I believe in freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, protest, or redress of grievances. Because these things are about souls. And souls are more important than things that can just be governed by power. And so I'll stop with this, but if we succeed, it will be because we learned how to be deliberative despite having these awesome, these digital tools can be awesome, but they can also be a hellscape. Like people ask me all the time when I was still on the speaker circuit, is the digital revolution gonna bring heaven or is the digital revolution gonna bring hell yes. The only right answer is it's gonna bring everything humans do faster. The good stuff more of it faster, the bad stuff, more of it faster. But you would never think that the digital revolution would cause a collapse in sex. But we know it's happening. There's almost no sex in America. There's less premarital sex, there's less marital sex, there's less extramarital sex. The only increase in sex is like there's some 70-year-old rich dudes who have Viagra, who have a tick more sex. But in general there's a crap ton less sex everywhere in American life. And it's because a porn revolution has made it way easier for people to be satisfied, not really, but to be short term satisfied without having to go through all the work of having communion in relationship with another human who's annoying. And so like sex is great and the digital revolution has created something that has made us all bored by sex. That's weird. You told me to Yola so I'll just put it out

- There. Yes, no, no. Yola Cynthia Ozi and Cynthia Ozi is 97 years old. This is some famous novelist, very wise woman, someone who lived through the depression, the second world war, the protests and riots and stagflation of the 1970s. And this is what Cynthia o said in a recent interview. This is my last question about the country,

- And then we'll do more on

- Sex on you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Then we'll get to the sex show. Would you plea, you know, you were, I thought you might be a little bit subdued. Not a bit of it. Zero,

- Zero attention span problems.

- Ah,

- Alright.

- So I wanna know if you have an answer to her. This is Cynthia Oza, this wise 97-year-old woman in a recent interview. This is a good country. It's a great country. And now it's disintegrating. How do you answer that?

- Well, president Reagan had the line that in a republic you're always only one generation away from the extinction of freedom because it can't go forward in the bloodstream in a republic. The people have to believe it and therefore you have to pass it on. We're a creole nation to say that government isn't the author or source of our rights. That is a, it's true, but it, it is a weird thing in human history to believe that nations haven't believed that they've believed things about their tribe. And you know, maybe the people right next door to them were not thought to be truly evil, but they sure as heck couldn't be trusted. And so government was just about power. We believe this crazy credle thing, which is universal human dignity. People are created with dignity, they're endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. Among these are life and liberty, but also the right to pursue happiness even in ways that I don't agree with. Freedom of religion is a crazy interesting thing because all religionists, even if we disagree with each other, agree against the the status that you can't compel souls. And so I wanna defend somebody else's religious liberty even if I don't agree with their theology. Because I think the freedom to wrestle with ideas includes the right and freedom to publish those ideas. It includes the right and freedom to assemble for worship. And so if you believe those cradle things about human dignity, you have to pass them on. And your nonna Nigerian is definitely right that we've not been doing any of that. We haven't done basic civics for a really long time. This is not a, a digital revolution problem. The digital revolution just intensifies our distraction. But in some ways America becomes the global preeminent power. During World War ii, we have an amazing run in the immediate post-war period. And by the 1960s we get into kind of an adolescent crisis as a nation. And we have so much affluence, we're so rich that we end up in culture wars. Some of it is super important culture wars about finishing the Civil rights movement and undoing Jim Crow. But a lot of what happens in the late sixties is just licentiousness as well. And we go through a period of the seventies where it feels like America might be coming apart. And in the eighties we get our stuff back together. But not really because we reaffirm all the cradle cradle stuff. We're just in an existential crisis in the Cold War and we have a great leader and Reagan leads us out of it. And our economy triumphs and our politics and geopolitics triumph. And so America becomes the, the leader of the world again in the 1980s the way we had been in the 1940s. And it brings a temporary American deante about our culture war of the sixties. But one of the things we decided to do is say, well, let's all just be really materialistic together. And as long as everybody's getting rich, maybe we don't really need to affirm these cradle things. And so I think we're 50 ish, 60 years into not having done the cradle transmission that a small R Republic requires. And the digital revolution makes it a lot easier to both distract ourselves with abundance, which turns out to be like, you know, the sugar high of Vegas. It might be fun for a weekend, it might be great for the opening weekend of March Madness, but you don't really wanna live in a casino. And a lot of our culture has just said, well, if we all just live in a casino, maybe we don't have to wrestle through any of the big questions. And then on top of that, we created a digital revolution where it says, you don't even have to know your neighbors. You can just create an ideological little echo chamber around you and you can believe that whatever weird stuff believe you could just believe with a couple dozen other people and they'll self affirm you. And we don't have to do national American civic stuff together. We gotta do that stuff together.

- So what you're saying, this is from your book, the Vanishing American Adult Material Abundance can make us freer and less dependent, but simultaneously more lonely and isolated. It is very difficult for a rich republic to remain virtuous. And here's a recent quotation from Elon Musk and he's talking about the emergence of AI and robotics. I'm quoting Elon Musk AI and robots will make everyone wealthier than the richest person on earth. Okay, so what you're saying, I think I wanna sum up my understanding of what you're saying and then you correct it. What you're saying is we are moving very quickly into a period of such abundance that our own individual choices, the question of free will. The question of what will we choose to do will be more important than it has ever been because abundance taken care of will have education. If you want to get yourself educated, you'll have computers to, you'll be able to be educated better than kings were educated. But Aristotle tutored, Alexander the Great Aristotle doesn't know all that is available to students today. And we could choose to become a nation that in effect sits in the basement playing video games and watching porn. Or we can choose to what, what is what, what does the proper, what is the aspirational ch choice? What can we as a nation aspire to at the other end of this? What ought we to hope that it looks like,

- I'm glad we have another hour together. 'cause we can do freedom from freedom to, we can do knowledge and slash virtues versus character. We can do inculcating a work ethic. There's a lot about Ethan, Elon that I like. I don't know him well, but there's a lot about him that I like. There's a lot about his worldview that's just so ridiculously immature. At the end of the day, freedom from certain kinds of constraint is really important, but it's to get to the freedom. Two questions at the end of the day, we haven't been short of knowledge for a really long time. I wish we had more knowledge about how to cure pancreatic cancer. There are lots of subcategories of knowledge we need more of. But at the end of the day, when you're thinking about raising a 12 or a 14 or a 16-year-old, is the problem that you think they're not gonna have enough money or that they're not gonna have enough work ethic? I'm only worried about the second question there, there, there aren't material constraints in the world. Ultimately, we got 8 billion people in the world today. There are about 800 million objectively poor people. It's about 10% of the globe. 200 years ago, there were only 800 million people on earth. And about 797 million were objectively poor. Right? 99% of people were poor today, 10% of people are poor. The the constraint in the world is not that there's not enough resources, it's that we don't have enough character. It, we don't, we don't do self constraint, self-restraint, self-discipline, self-control well enough. And so what I care about is my kids. And if I were around to be able to see 'em, my grandkids and your listeners' kids and grandkids growing up where they say, I want to glorify God and enjoy 'em forever. I want to serve. I wanna love my neighbor. I wanna learn to die to self. I wanna learn to do things that are the right things to do even when they're hard and they don't feel good right now, we've already had a, a limitless internet for 30 years. We've, since the mid 1990s, we've had an ability for every kid to get access to all the information that exists on the internet. Well, we know that great inflation is much higher in the Ivy League and at all of our universities, but objective scores on the SAT are down substantially. So obviously that's an easily false viable proposition that having access to more stuff will lead to better outcomes. The problem is humans don't have the right habits. We're broken and we're selfish. And I want to, I need to die to self and I need to learn to love my neighbor. And that includes my wife and three kids who I love more than anybody on earth. But I'm selfish in my behavior with them today knowing I'm dying soon. And these people are awesome. Of course, I'm a selfish jackass to some neighbor and let alone some anonymous neighbor a couple of miles away. So the idea that the digital, the the, the digital revolution is gonna make us the richest people anytime and place in human history. But we're already that we're the richest people anytime in place in human history. That is not the problem you should be solving for. The problem you should be solving for is the fact that we're all mortals, we're all selfish, and we'd like to have thicker community and better loves. And that is not gonna be solved by being richer. And I say this as a zealously right-wing defender of the market. Cap market capitalism is the best system that's ever existed. It doesn't mean it's a really good religion.

- From a note you sent to a few friends about the way you had to break the news to your family, we focused on what it means to be adopted by a God who is sovereign and for whom there is no maverick molecule or surprise to our steady rock. Father God is sovereign even over every molecule. Has that become harder or easier to believe

- The same? I I'm not, there's never been a piece of me that has doubted the question, is God surprised by the fact that Ben SAS's torso is chock full of tumors? That would be a, the guy who'd be surprised by it is way too small to be interesting. God is not surprised by the fact that I'm gonna die, but we're all gonna die. And the question is, what's the use use of that phase? Tim Keller, Presbyterian pastor I used to know in New York who died of pancreatic cancer two years ago, maybe three years now. He, he fought through pancreatic cancer for two and a half years. And the, the, the death rate in the first 12 months is super high. So him lasting two and a half years was big. And Tim told a group of folks, he said, I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never want pancreatic cancer to exist. But I also wouldn't go back, wouldn't want to go back to a phase in my life where I hadn't known the prayer of pancreatic cancer,

- Prayer

- Of pancreatic cancer. I, I, I I don't want to, I don't wanna get too serious. And we've, we've done a lot of politics and theology and Elon's sort of weird jukebox life. I I I won't get, I won't get too serious on you, but I've been diagnosed for seven weeks for about two months before that. It was obvious that something was really wrong in my body and we couldn't figure out what it was. But now I'm, as I mentioned, I'm on a ton of morphine and so it takes away a lot of the pain from the tumors that are in, in and around my spine. But for the period before I started on the morphine, I was, I was having a rough go of it. The desperation of that pain, the regrets I've had to wrestle through in the time of realizing that I wish I had served my wife and kids better. I wish there were things in their character that were farther along. And the stuff that's, you can see that man, that's clunky behavior. You look a lot like your dad When you feel those regrets when, when you are just bored. It sounds big to me. And I definitely don't wanna do that. But at sleeping 15 or 16 hours a day right now, 'cause of all the drugs that I'm on, there's just a lot of time in a hospital bed or convalescing when you get outta the hospital every week I'm in and outta the hospital every week. I'm just bored outta my mind. And those, which is a question about recognizing the futility of my efforts. Like there was a time when I wasn't as bored 'cause I could delude myself into believing my projects were gonna build a storehouse that lasted that self-importance, the regrets about love and service and the, the pain, all those lead you to pray in a different way because you have to acknowledge your finitude in a way that just, there's just a hell of a lot less for bullshit.

- So can you, I wouldn't do this if you weren't a friend and I also wouldn't do it if you weren't you, but I think you'll be able to, you may be able to answer the question. There's a bit in the Bible actually. It's the shortest verse in the entire Bible. So you already know where I'm going with this and I've always wondered about it. So here we are. Jesus arrives at the tomb of Lazarus, his friend who has just died. And in a moment he's going to raise Lazarus from the dead. And by the way, Martha Lazarus's sister comes running up and says, if you had gotten here a couple of days earlier, he would never have died. And so, but then we have Jesus wept the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. So he knows that we suffer and he suffers through it. What is the point? It's still constructed to permit us to suffer. Why? This is the problem of pain. I know that it is, it's such a permanent problem. I know that every philosopher and every junior philosopher has always addressed it so that it seems, you can't talk about it without sounding trite, but it bothers me.

- It feels real to talk about it right now. When I'm having a, a radiating set of pain out of a tumor in my spine, it's pain is real. So it seems like the first thing humans should do is acknowledge that a lot is broken in this world. The existence of death is surely not the way it's supposed to be. So Jesus weeping, what a gift of all the story's amazing. The whole, the whole Lazarus story and his sister's weirdly narcissistic behavior. That's us, right? Like we we're, we're we're dying in the story too. We're many of the characters, but we're definitely that egotistical, self-absorbed. Jesus, why didn't you do it the way I want you to do it? But to our point about short attention spans, first, let's just go back and read that story and a dozen adjacent stories. The Bible is so rich and we spend so little time reading it together. Jesus weeps there and he knows that he's gonna raise Lazarus five minutes later. So it's an amazing story because he is acknowledging that death is terrible and yet death doesn't win. The Christian phrase in Christian literature for years has been to call death the last enemy. Jesus swept two words, last enemy, two words, pretty great. Death is a wicked thief. It's an enemy, but it's pretty great that it's the last enemy. All all the stuff that I regret for having been an inadequate husband and son and father and friend and worker, truth teller, all the stuff that I've been weak on, I'm gonna be freed from all of that. Death is the last enemy.

- Alright? Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. You're a far better human being than I am. That's bs. But I can just, this morning I was reading something about somebody I knew 40 years ago and I thought that son of a bitch is. So I, I thought I'm carrying grudges from four. Do you find yourself far

- Just to push back at the idea that I'm a better person than you? Here's how big of a douche I am. I wanna know who the guy was and hear the story. Okay, keep going.

- You'll know who he is. And I'll tell you later, do you find yourself able to let go of people have done nasty things to you and po you, I mean you in the, in your political life, you write that you receive death threats and people threw things on you. People behave badly to you, but are you able to let certain things go?

- I'm wrestling through it there. The healthy thing for me is that every time there's somebody I don't wanna forgive for something. My wife has been really good at reminding me there's a log in your own eye, the passage, you know, but it fits in almost every instance. She's like, let's parse what that person did wrong to you that you want to still be polishing your little grievance. She's like, I got some things you did that are analogous and worse. I I I'm not earning my forgiveness by forgiving, but I do wanna forgive because I've been forgiven. So there, there's still some people I'm wrestling through it on. But so,

- So that's And do you feel

- Forgiven? Yeah, you do feel it, it's real to you. To whom else would I go? Like there's no, there's nothing in, in Christian theology proper, there's a distinction between imputation and atonement. Atonement is taking away our sins, but imputation is getting credit for all the righteous stuff I never did. And I, I never did anything that's righteous enough. I never did anything that wasn't tainted by selfishness. I love my wife more than anything. And yet at times when I've asked a question of her both to have her feel heard and loved and respected, but also because I kind of hope she'll flip that question to me and I'm ready to talk again. Enough about you. More about me. Like everything we do is still selfish. It's tainted. And so it isn't just being forgiven, it's knowing that I need the imputed

- Righteousness of Christ. Last question. You wrote an update. You published an update on, on January 9th in which you got off a line. I don't wanna trade places with you, I really don't wanna trade places with you, but I wish I'd written this line myself. That's how good it is. You can play a lot of basketball in the last 60 seconds. What do you still wanna get done?

- This has been fun. Thank you for having me. Good to see you. I, my girls are 24 and 22 and our wonderful providential surprise is a decade younger. So our boy is only 14. And when you get a precise date on how soon you're gonna die, you, I went through the question of if I can fight to get into a clinical trial, and a lot of what'll happen in that hospital's gonna be kind of nasty. Why do you really want to do it? And I felt a duty to try to get into a clinical trial and to fight to live a little while longer chiefly because I have a young kid still at home and he needs a dad to slap him upside the head a little bit longer and, and give him some advice and wrestle through some questions and help him recognize that he's gonna need to be a man earlier than those of us who were blessed to have a dad in our lives a lot longer did. So I wanna be a good dad for longer. But there's also some stuff that you'd like to find a way to write about and talk about a little bit. I'm not self important and thinking I have any great insights, but it is a luxury to hold moderately to the things of this world, to want to shatter the temptation to make this worldly projects idols, but also to not be despondent and resigned. It seems to me the right way to approach most of culture building and institutional preservation is as a one or two cheers. Moderate. And if there's some questions I can reflect on in those areas as we, as a community and as a people get through the digital revolution and have to build new kinds of institutions, it, bill Gates has the line. Every revolution that's ever come before has been intergenerational. What we're living through right now really might be the first intragenerational revolution ever. If, if you think about industrialization, I know we're wrapping, but if you think about our 1870 point, it wasn't a 30-year-old farmer and his wife saying, we can't farm anymore. We have to move to the city. It was a 30-year-old guy in gal realizing that their eight and 7-year-old kids weren't gonna farm that land. They were gonna have to move to the city. It really did have a generational 20 year gap. We're going through something where the marginal cost of quantification is really gonna fall either to zero or so. Close to zero. We're not gonna bother metering it anymore. So Elon's point, we're gonna be the richest people. Anytime and place in human history is another way of saying anything that can be reduced to a series of steps we're probably gonna reduce to a series of steps. It's probably gonna become free and ubiquitous. We're probably all gonna have a robot working for us that builds other robots that's both awesome and horrible at the same time. It's awesome at the level of solving problems. It's horrible at the fact that humans are made to solve problems and we need to figure out how to do meaningful stuff with our time. Consumption isn't enough. We're meant to be workers and producers and wrestling through those questions a little bit with some friends seems like a a useful way to spend some weeks or months.

- You are in clinical trials at MD Anderson. You are also writing for the new Wall Street Journal newsletter, free expression. And your podcast is going to launch when? Next month. Next month. And it will be called not dead yet. Alright. You sent around a couple days before Christmas. You sent to some friends a poem called Ring Out Wild Bells. It comes from Tenons, much longer work in Memoria in which Tenon reflects on the death of his young friend, Arthur Hallam, at the age of 22. And the poem you sent to your friends is a meditation on New Year's Eve. Would you close our conversation by reading a few stanza?

- Ah, this is fun. Death is evil, but death doesn't get the final word. Ring out wild bells to the wild sky. The flying cloud, the frosty light. The year is dying in the night. Ring out wild bells and let him die. Ring out the grief that SAPs the mind. For those that hear, we see no more ring out. The feud of rich and poor ring in redress to all mankind. Wring out the want, the care, the sin, the faithless coldness of the times wring out. Wring out my mournful rhymes, but wr the fuller menstrual in wr out old shapes of foul disease wr out the narrowing lust of gold wr out the thousand wars of old WR. In the thousand years of peace wring in the valiant man and free the larger heart. The kindlier hand wr out the darkness of the land wring in the Christ. That is to be

- Benjamin Eric Sasse. Thank you. Thanks brother for uncommon knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox News. I am Peter Robinson. You basket. You got me choked up. You in Tennessee. I wanted to, that was

- Fun. Thank you for thinking of that. I hadn't thought of that.