How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying

22:55I am way too idealistic about what I believe in America to be a very good dealmaker. And if I had to do over again, I would be a little more pragmatic realist about some of the dealmaking needs. But big picture, you said, what did I learn?

23:11Ross Douthat:Well, just just pause there. When you got into the Senate, every senator gives a maiden speech. And you waited a year. You waited a year. Right. Which was itself, I think, an example of what the Ben Sasse brand was at that moment. Just just tell listeners and viewers what you said in that speech. Roughly. 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.

23:59The 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 nut picking 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.

24:41It 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.

25:16But 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.

25:50And 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. And I said, we should actually start to tell the truth about what will look like to have institutional recovery in the Senate.

26:25Ross Douthat:But what would it look 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?

27:00Well, 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 want 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.

27:44It'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.

28:24And I was like, but I don't like there are 330 million Americans.

28:28Ross Douthat:What was just what was a concrete example of that that like I didn't I just pissed about? I didn't spend time going on the angriest tribal media channels to say that Obama, you know, wasn't born in the U.S. Right. Like the the conspiracy theory versions of stuff became a really important marker for people to say, I really dislike those other people. And it's like, what I care about is the Ronald Reagan impulse to say freedom is never more than one 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.

29:08Like our civics experience is in collapse. And at this point, I would talk about what was happening on college campuses, much worse in the decades since. But at that point, there was some polling that showed just over 35 % 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.

29:45They have universal rights. Like we need to celebrate the American civic tradition together. And we weren't doing any of that. But I was in trouble with some of my voters for not being angry enough about something Barack Obama had just done. But to your point.

30:02Ross Douthat:But so 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. 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.

30:50New York Times obviously still has millions and millions of daily consumers. You don't have to flatter us. But there aren't. We have weird, you know, weird subscribers too. I believe I think there's a ton of fan service that happens in The New York Times. 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.

31:30When we went from four channels to 500 channels, it seemed pretty great. When we go from 500 channels to 2 ,000 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.

32:02And 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. And it does create a delusional othering of the rest of your community.

32:43But it also takes the whole middle and said, these freaks are not people you should really pay attention to.

33:11Ross Douthat:This podcast is supported by MidiHealth. Are you in midlife feeling dismissed and unheard by the healthcare system? You're not alone. For too long, women's midlife health issues have been trivialized and ignored. It's time for a change. It's time for Midi. Midi is the only women's telehealth brand covered by major insurance companies, making expert care accessible and affordable. Midi's clinicians provide one-on-one consultations where they truly listen to your unique needs, offering data-driven solutions tailored for you. At Midi, you'll feel seen, heard, and prioritized. Visit joinmidi.com to book your insurance-covered virtual visit.

33:44Ross Douthat:That's joinmidi.com. Midi, the care women deserve. Hi, I'm Solana Pine. I'm the director of video at The New York Times. For years, my team has made videos that bring you closer to big news moments. videos by Times journalists that have the expertise to help you understand what's going on. Now we're bringing those videos to you in the Watch tab in the New York Times app. It's a dedicated video feed where you know you can trust what you're seeing. All the videos there are free for anyone to watch. You don't have to be a subscriber. Download the New York Times app to start watching.

34:30Ross Douthat:So this seems like, though, for politicians, for the next would-be Ben Sasse, the next high-minded, civic-minded senator, this seems like a pretty pessimistic description. So is there some concrete response to this from politicians? Well, I do think in Nebraska, I think you could do a long term version of what I did for 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. The voters did like me because I was a dad first. I was a husband. I was a Christian. I was a Husker sports addict.

35:17I 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 fisk, 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.

36:00Again, 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 can happen if you don't click this link by tomorrow.

36:44We've figured out how to deal with a lot of that kind of fraud on your digital devices. A lot of the so-called content is also fraudulent nonsense. And people are going to figure out how to tune out more of the fan service crazy that says only bad people are at the other end of the continuum. Now, there's some crazy people everywhere.

37:01Ross Douthat:But people. Always have been. But people do not just sort of the extreme. I mean, there is a horrible way in which people like that. Like, it's not just people are dopamine hits. Right. Well, it's dopamine hits. But also, you know, there's a famous C.S. Lewis quote, right, about the man who, you know, reads the newspaper and learns that his enemies overseas have committed atrocities. And then he reads another story that says, actually, maybe there were fewer atrocities committed. Right. And there's part of him that sort of disappointed. It's disappointed. Right. And there is some way in which people respond to the idea that their enemies are even worse than they imagined before.

37:46Ross Douthat:Right. I mean, I've watched this happen just with the Jeffrey Epstein stuff, where as a conservative, I lived for a long time with people on the right who were obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein. And I have my own sort of moderate conspiracy theories about it. But then as soon as as soon as it became about Donald Trump, there was this flip that happened. And suddenly, I had all of these liberal friends for whom it was like this, this story was amazing. They'd never thought about it before. But now it was occupying all this brain space because it became a way to think that the other side was bad. And I feel like there's an element of that where it's just such a part of human nature, that it's, it's challenging to deal with.

38:33Ross Douthat:Um, why didn't you stick around? If you thought there, 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? It's a little weird to say when you've just gotten an actual terminal diagnosis, but I will confess that I've always felt 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, uh, graduate out and go two thirds empty nester while you were commuting every week and you still have another kid left with you.

39:19Um, 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 re-election, et cetera. But ultimately, I left the Senate for the opportunity to help steer the University of Florida for a time.

39:45Ross Douthat: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? 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 at the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs in the aughts.

40:25And 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...

40:42Ross Douthat:Well, but I assume their departmental rival was getting the extra foot of glass. If I was losing a foot, but you were losing two feet, fine. But not if I lose and you gain. 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 gotta do home leaving. You gotta do family formation. You gotta do first job. You gotta 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.

41:33But we need to build new institutions in that space. And that was appealing.

41:36Ross Douthat:Tell 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. So lots of people deserve credit for the founding of the Hamilton Center, became Hamilton School, will eventually be some form of Hamilton College.

42:19I 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 Research 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.

43:07And 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 wanted to speak to eight or 10 or 17 other ideological activists, that liberal arts colleges, and I say this as a historian, 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.

43:50But 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.

44:25The answer is not to hate on the liberal arts, which is to recover the liberal arts.

44:30Ross 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, right? The liberal arts are all just sort of socialist 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.

45:10Ross Douthat:Correct. Right. So how do you how do you persuade conservatives that they need to be invested in these institutions? 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've 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?

45:48Because 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, etc. 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.

46:26Ross Douthat:Do you think you can get buy-in for that project from people who aren't conservatives or conservative sympathizers within academia? Well, I'll give you an example. When we at Hamilton, when I got there, I think Hamilton had so many, I mean, thousands of applicants and lots of them were Ivy League liberals, professors who taught in, you know, the most prestigious universities in big departments. and they would quietly reach out like, you know, something scandalous. Do you think I would be considered if I applied for a job at Hamilton? And they had the idea that had been repeated by some lazy media that Hamilton was a conservative project.

47:11Hamilton wasn't a conservative project. Well, it was a liberal arts project.

47:14Ross Douthat:Wait, but it was a conservative political project, right? Just in the sense that the people who wanted it the most, like the instigators and originators of the idea, some of them were classical liberals. You know, plenty of them didn't vote for Donald Trump, but it was still clearly a kind of right-coded, conservative-coded project, right? I'm not—I agree with you. If you love Shakespeare, does that make you a conservative? I mean, under certain current academic conditions, that is coded as conservative. And the people, if the people, I mean, you were in charge, right? You were a Republican senator brought in to be president of the University of Florida.

47:55Ross Douthat:I'm just saying, like, I'm not disagreeing with you that that this perspective and approach should be able to bring in people who are not conservative. I'm just saying it is part of part of the challenge. It's a political litmus test for hiring for anybody in any of those disciplines. Right. I'm just saying part of the challenge is that, you know, if you're in a red state, then it's sometimes it's coming out of, you know, Republican policymaking in the state legislature and so on. Right. Like there is the ideological element is there. And it's sort of what you're trying to transcend. Right. Fair, but I think the 101 question is, what is the best use of 45 months of an 18 to 22 year old's time?

48:36Why would we compel people to do anything? It better dang well benefit them and benefit the broader society in terms of the economic output they're going to produce. But more importantly, the civic engagement that they're going to be able to have and the love of neighbor and the engagement with, you know, a republic, a small, small R republic of pluralists who say we don't want a polity that's based on power. We want a whole bunch of people who want to flourish and thrive and build great things in their community. And that requires you to be acquainted with some of the wonderful ideas and with beauty in the past.

49:18And most of that is way more interesting than anything that is political. Yeah.

49:23Ross Douthat: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.

50:04Ross Douthat: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. What do you think? Well said.

50:42In my pre-cancer life where you sometimes 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 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.

51:34And 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.

52:21Economics 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.

53:09These tools are going to probably be pretty great for the majority of people. I think they're going to be disastrous.

53:15Ross Douthat:What 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 % and hell for 80%, what's the path up for the 80 %? communities that can do um shared deferred gratification that can say self-discipline self-restraint um self-control 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 What are your loves? We have to think deeply about rank ordered loves. And I don't think we do that right now.

54:11And I think our, 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.

54:34Ross Douthat:I, in my, uh, meaning the young don't encounter the old and vice versa, actually. Exactly. I, 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, um, 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, indoors, sitting still, passive, mother may I, and only around people with their same birth year.

55:20One 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. Um, and they deserve the benefits of 80 year old wisdom. And by the way, 80 year olds deserve the benefits of the reward of seeing 16 year old vitality again. What are the things I think the digital revolution does is it takes our generational segregation and puts it on speed and we lose lots of wisdom.

55:53We 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.

56:35Ross Douthat:Let's talk about your loves, your little platoons. I've never had a cancer diagnosis. I was very ill a while, you know, five, seven, ten years ago. And early on in that, I had a bunch of phantom heart attacks where, you know, I went to the emergency room and I would think briefly that I was going to die. And what was striking in those moments was actually how little I was personally afraid of my own mortality and how much fear I had about my family and my kids. Your kids are older now than mine were then. Two of them are grown or as grown, you know, as grown as young people can be. Right. But just tell me how you're thinking about your relationship to them and your own family life in the shadow of death.

57:24I 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, to live is Christ, to die is gain. And death is terrible. We should never sugarcoat it. 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 in the in the final moments excuse me you're doing okay right now 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.

59:00But in, in my tradition in Christianity, the, 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 what 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 this there is not a maverick molecule in the universe.

59:46But 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 a real heaviness about that. Um, 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.

1:00:18Ross Douthat:Can I ask how you think your kids are processing the experience? They have a great mom and they are theologically rooted and their hope is in Jesus. And they, all three are doing really well. My girls are 22 and 24. And I know that our conversations are the true and accurate conversations. My 14-year-old son is gritty enough and tough enough that I think even if he wasn't doing well, he could probably fake it. So I don't fully know, so I covet prayers on that, but he seems to be doing well. 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 Sasse 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?

1:01:17Happy 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 Sunday worship every morning forever, but man, am I tempted by 1245 or 130 in the afternoon to, to get back to work or to an addictive level level work about the NFL. Um, boy, I would treat, um, 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.

1:02:00there 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, um, 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.

1:02:40Boy, I wish we lived down the block from my folks.

1:02:44Ross Douthat:One of my recent guests was Bart Ehrman, uh, who's new Testament scholar, well known, uh, 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? not to be the guy who just beats the odds, but to be the miracle story.

1:03:30Ross Douthat:God hasn't answered those prayers yet. Are you angry at God ever? No. 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 is a benefit because it is a winnowing. I'm filled with dross. And this suffering is not salvific, but it's sanctifying. And I'm grateful for it. Tim Keller, who I know you knew, who's in my denomination, a Presbyterian pastor in New York who also died of pancreatic cancer, said, I hate pancreatic cancer.

1:04:28I 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. I can't keep the orbits, the planets in orbit. I can't even grow skin on my face.

1:05:12Ross Douthat:For 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?

1:05:38Let's read the book of Romans together. In Romans 1, where Paul's essentially laying out the catechetical argument for the structure of Christianity against a Jewish messianic hopeful backdrop, he says in chapter 1, 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.

1:06:28Cancer sucks, but I'm pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.

1:06:37Ross Douthat:Do you think you're ready to die? Do you feel ready? I don't feel ready, but to whom would I go? 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, the water into wine miracle at the feast. How amazing is it that Jesus first, um, first miracle is a big ass party. Let's drink more together. Um, but he says, you can't keep the children from me. And we're told that we get to approach the almighty. We call him daddy. Abba father. That's pretty glorious. And I know that that's what I need.

1:07:36Ben, sorry.

1:07:39Ross Douthat:Happy to get him to open up a can of kids? You got me at the end. Got me. Ben Sass, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me.

1:08:09Ross Douthat:Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlain, and Emily Holsneck. Jordana Hochman is our executive producer and editor. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Afim Shapiro. Audience strategy and operations by Shannon Busta, Christina Samulewski, Andrea Batanzos, and Emma Kelbeck. Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Alison Brusek, Marina King, Jan Kobel, and Mike Puretz. And our director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.

1:08:55Thank you.