Ben Sasse on Faith, Family, and Facing Death

Six months into a stage-four pancreatic cancer diagnosis that gave him 90 days to live, Ben Sasse sits down with EconTalk's Russ Roberts for a conversation that refuses easy comfort. The former U. S. senator and University of Florida president is candid about his physical challenges but the heart of this exchange is elsewhere: what actually matters when time is short. Sasse reflects on faith and mortality, the "shattering of idols" like his own workaholism, and his pride in his marriage. Along the way he offers sharp diagnoses of Congress's abdication of responsibility, the crisis inside American universities, and a republic distracted by the "digital casino" in its pocket. Funny, unflinching, and deeply human, it closes with a meditation on raging against the dying of the light while walking with your head bowed.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is July 3, 2026, and my guest is former U.S. Senator and former President of the University of Florida, Ben Sasse. Ben, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Good to be with you, my friend. I'm a listener, and so it's an honor to be invited on.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Privilege to have you as a guest. Let's start briefly with a thumbnail about your health situation. Tell listeners about your diagnosis and where you are right now, because people care.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm happy to spend time on whatever you want. Cancer is one of my least favorite topics, but we'll do the mix as you prefer. Next week, or at the end of this weekend, I will be six months and three weeks since being told I only had 90 days to live. So I'm on borrowed time. We all are in a sense, but we're with three kids ranging from 15 to 25. Every extra bonus week, month, dinner, 4th of July to blow some stuff up for freedom feels like a pretty great blessing. So my wife and my shorthand is, after a terrible diagnosis, we'd say there are currently two small bads and one

• 1:44Speaker 01

  pretty dang good. So I have pancreatic cancer that had metastasized to five other systems. I presented as far along, stage four. Pancreatic is 87% death rate overall, but 97% death rate within 12 months if you're stage four, and I was advanced stage four. So to be pushed on seven months when you had 90 days to live is pretty great, and that's because of the really wonderful experience of being on deracin-ras, this new miracle drug out of UCSF and a few other places that's a RAS inhibitor. If you're 80-something, pancreatic cancer might be environmental. If you're 50-something like I am, it's almost always a genetic mutation. 89% of people have a RAS mutation. And so this new drug, there

• 2:28Speaker 01

  hadn't been good news in pancreatic cancer in 40 years. This new drug essentially tries to inhibit the RAS mutations, ability to toggle the on-off switch is the wrong way. The great news is my tumors are down over 80% right now. The bad news is, it's probably not going to be a cure for me because I presented so far along and so metastasized, but this drug is going to be super interesting over the next two to 10 years. My two rough byproducts right now of a really aggressive dose of chemo are real hard time growing skin and hair. And so my root follicles on my head are all kind of tingly and falling out and

• 3:09Speaker 01

  bleeding all the time. So my scalp is real bloody mess, but I have an amazing dermatological oncology team at MD Anderson. We're making a little bit of progress. I used to have the same problem on my face. We've largely resolved that, and I'm super nauseous. So I puke four or five times a day. So if I need to pause our Econ Talks, it's not because I'm ducking your question.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  No problem. It's unusual request for guests, but I'm here for you, Ben, obviously. It's interesting. You said you're going to blow up some stuff for freedom. Pride in America is, as it is in many Western countries, controversial. And it's interesting to me, I know it was a one-liner, but the thing you chose to emphasize was freedom. Say something about those two things, the pride and the freedom.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  I mean, on pride, very briefly, as a Reagan fan, it's my obligation to cite him a lot. Freedom is always only one generation away from extinction. And so if you believe in this unbelievable constitutional system, you need to teach it. You need to pass it along. It doesn't happen in the bloodstream. It has to be taught. America is an idea. It's more than that, but it's certainly not less than that. And we haven't done it. And since the 1960s, in some ways, we had all sorts of important advances racially in the civil rights movement, but then we had all these other problems. And we basically just had a late 60s to mid 70s quiet phase of let's not scream at each other so much, but let's

• 4:44Speaker 01

  definitely not do basic civics. And so it's not surprising that our kids don't know it. You and I have in common, having been college presidents, and I remember the first time I became a college president, 2009, 10, I read a bunch of data about 18 to 25-year-olds, and it was crazy. Like, things are much worse now, nearly 20 years later, but something like 41% of kids thought the First Amendment was dangerous because you might use your freedom to say something that hurts somebody else's feelings. It's kind of the whole point of America is that words are not violence, and we protect each other from violence so you can debate with words. And so I think part of our problem is we haven't done civics.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Another big part of our problem is capitalism is so wonderfully productive and effective, best economic system the world's ever known, as you know far better than I, but we are so rich, median, middle-class Americans, richest people any time and place in all of human history, and affluenza has got a lot of downsides, a lot of drug side effects to it. And I think we're very distracted and very confused, and we don't know a lot of necessity. And so people don't know what it would be like to not really have freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, write a protest. So you asked why emphasize freedom. I'll stop there. I think religious liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, these

• 6:08Speaker 01

  things are core to souls. Souls can't be compelled. And so I think America's political system comports the best with human dignity.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  You mentioned you identified, the way you described, I think was an unbelievable constitutional system. And we have the same system today that we had 10 years ago, 20 years ago. You can debate at some point, it was, there were tweaks and changes, but the overall system hasn't changed. It's a republic, and it's a constitutional republic, and it has an electoral college. And some of those features are non-negotiable, meaning without a constitutional amendment, there's going to be an electoral college. A lot of people don't like it. But what I've noticed over the last 25 years or so, and at least it seems to me, and you have a much better window on this, many of what Lord Moulton

• 7:02Speaker 00

  called the unenforceable pieces of that system that we used to be obedient to, the norms that limited what you could do, have eroded. And executive power, long before Trump started to expand, it's decades old. And I'm curious if you agree with that as a serious problem, in particular, given the extraordinary system. A lot of that system was held together by these norms, by what was expected of politicians, and what was not acceptable, and what was considered gauche or expedient. And I think a lot of those have fallen away. Do you agree

• 7:47Speaker 00

  with me?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  I do. I think executive overreach is a problem, but it's a reactive problem. The far bigger problem, in my view, is legislative underreach, which set up this moment. And so I was running for office. I've never run for anything before in my life till running for the Senate. I was 41, it was 2013, and I kind of get drafted into the open Senate race in Nebraska. And so President Obama is in his second term, and I started thinking a lot about pen and phone kind of theories, nonsensical stuff that President Obama said that, you know, President Obama, or President Trump now essentially says, hold my beer.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Those things happen partly because the public is so impatient, understandably impatient about the legislature to tackle big problems. We don't have an entitlement state that makes any mathematical sense at all, and most people aren't paying attention. But to the degree people pay attention, you know, there's new monetary theory nettiness on the far left, and maybe some people in the post-liberal right now echo the same silly math. But mostly, when people pay attention, they know, holy crap, our entitlement state's going to bankrupt us. What are we going to do? We used to have 16 workers per retiree. We're on our way to two and a half workers per retiree. We got to figure this out. And the legislature doesn't do anything. And so I think the problems of social media and the digital revolution,

• 9:11Speaker 01

  awesome in many ways, but I'm sure we'll talk about some of the problems, they came to the legislature early, and the legislature became performative early on and stopped doing real work. And so I think the executive understandably fills that vacuum, not defensively, but understandably.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  So you've been very critical.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Actually, can I say one more tiny on that?

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Um, I still teach occasionally. Lord willing, I might teach again this fall if I get bonus months.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  I think it's a useful exercise when you're deep in reading one period to just do a small thought experiment. What's most different to them if they were transported to our age? And so, you know, tomorrow being before the July, it's worth lingering in the 1770s or 1780s once in a while. And if you're in Philadelphia, 1787, and they came to today, obviously, they'd be stunned by our material, our jess and by technological revolutions. But I think they'd also be stunned at an anthropological level by politicians that aren't jealous of their prerogatives. Like to be in the legislature and not want to legislate, that's weird.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  And we, we definitely have a legislature that doesn't really want to legislate. I ran part of the transition project for Mitt Romney in two, the summer of 2012. If he had won the White House, what would, how would he structure his team? And so I interviewed every living chief of staff from the White House at that point. And one of the things that I heard that just kind of stunned me was I would ask a basic sort of strategy consultant question, what did you think it was going to be like? And when you got in there three or six months in, what, what most stunned you? And in both parties, they said something similar. I can't believe when a senior member of the legislature, a senior senator, a committee

• 11:06Speaker 01

  chairman of my own party, comes to us and asks us to do by executive order, things that are popular and that they have the power to do. And they asked to do it by, they asked us to do it by executive order instead of legislation. And I said, that is weird. Why would that be? And he said, a senior senator told me one time as a Democratic chief of staff, a senior senator of my own party said, it's like this, if it's a 70, 30 issue, I'd still kind of rather not vote on it because the 70% are going to get the outcome they want if we do it by executive order. And if I'm lobbying you to do it, I get to tell all the key grass tops back in my state that I was lobbying you to do it, and now it's going to happen. So the 70 is basically going to be happy, but the 30% is going to be pissed off either way. Why should they be pissed at me? Let's let them be pissed at you and nameless bureaucrat.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  That's weird. The founders wouldn't be able to make sense of that.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great thought experiment. I think the other part of it, of course, is the extension and growth of the administrative state, which I see also as part of the abdication of responsibility by the legislative branch. And it's, um, it's basically, uh, it's what you said. It's a performative, embracing of the performative. It's a shirking of responsibility. And that's a norm. It's just a different norm than we usually think of. I mean, you're there to make the country better. And that's a little naive for me to say that. I'm a big public choice fan, but at least you should tell yourself that. But somewhere along the line, we got out of that habit. I don't know why.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Agreed all around. I mean, we, I've said a bunch of pessimistic things so far, so let's at least do a thumbs up for something. The originalism movement on the court over the last, you know, couple of decades, and in particular, a lot of the nominees who, you know, are associated with the Fed Soc movement. But there is a healthy thing happening, you know, post Chevron to roll back some of these delegations of authority to nameless, faceless bureaucrats. And again, they're not bureaucrats by and large, aren't bad people. I think Weber's distinction between entrepreneurial managers and bureaucratic managers, a bureaucratic manager is supposed to sustain an institution. An entrepreneurial manager is shifting resources and doing new things.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  But we want in our system, the people who do new things to be accountable to voters and to be fireable. And so I think that this delegation of authorities to the administrative state, Obamacare is, you know, kind of the mathematically most egregious example. In the law, there are like 1,200, either explicit or inferred places where it says dot, dot, dot, the executive branch shall finish the law. Obamacare says it will be illegal to offer a health insurance policy that doesn't meet an essential minimum benefits care package. What's that? Does it include in vitro? Does it include hair plugs? Somebody's got to vote on that. And they just decided, let's not vote on any of that because it'll expose us to things that are unpopular and it'll be complicated.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  So how about we just legislate in a way that says people inside HHS bureaucracy, they'll make all the decisions about the essential minimum benefits package. Well, then why have a legislature?

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. And of course they'll say if pressed, well, but they're the experts. But that's not really the right point because the whole essential challenge of any policy like that is getting the trade offs right, which is not an expertise issue. It's a values issue and a responsibility issue.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Great, great. I mean, that, that, what a great sentence because we do have a major problem in a world, the great world of ubiquitous information has tons of upsides.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  But one of it means is expertise domains will shrink because more people have access to this information. And your point about expertise is not a way to just bumper sticker shirk responsibility for hard trade off choices.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you could pass one piece of legislation, what would it be? And has the answer to that question changed over time for you?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Wow, that's really good. Um, and I, it's so simple. It should have been something I've thought a lot about and I don't, I don't think I have. So let me, let me nibble around the edges and root to a big answer. First day in office, January 3rd, I think, 2015, I introduced a term, a constitutional amendment for term limits on senators. That's not the most important thing, but it's what I went with first because as a believer in the George Washington Cincinnatus tradition, I think a professional ambitious class to go to Washington, the center of the world and stay forever. I'm saying center of the world cynically. For Dodge County, Nebraska, zip code 68025 on the north banks of the Platte River where

• 15:40Speaker 01

  I sit today, that's the center of the world, brother. I think a two term limit on the Senate would mean a much healthier institution. And actually, if I could just amend the constitution straight up, I might do one 10 or 12 year term. They'd still be staggered so that the Senate would be a continuing body. But people to serve in the, the founders had a vision of a mixed system and there is supposed to be a temporary aristocratic element, at least in terms of your insulation from public opinion in one part of the legislature. The House is supposed to be a populist body. That'd be pretty important. A short term one I do this summer is I just make sure that the Congress doesn't pass this ridiculous idea of mandating cameras in the Supreme Court, which I think will

• 16:22Speaker 01

  be so obviously disastrous within 18 months. There's no transparency problem in the Supreme Court right now. Pen and pat are allowed everywhere. We get audio, but if you put cameras in there, it's going to be a platform for jackassery on Instagram and Tik Tok, the same way the legislature is. There's a reason why no hearings work, except for intel in the Congress. And that's because intel, we don't have cameras. So there's no reason for people to act like a douchebag pretending they know everything with a five minute self aggrandizing speech that maybe has a question at the end. In the Senate Intel Committee, you say, hey, Director Burns, if the CCP is doing this, I don't understand how that makes sense. What's up? You know, like the question is, I'm confused about this apparent contradiction.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  What senator would ever say that in public if it becomes a soundbite that they look stupid? And so you got to get reelected. Anyway, that's, that's a short term one. But I, I think probably my two biggest bundles, and I don't have precise legislation for you, but I'll just name categories are, um, one, we have to fix our entitlements. Bankrupting the next generation is unfair. And right now, most of the public still thinks of government like it's the military with a few social safety net programs. The FISC is actually Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, social security, interest on the debt. That's more than 70% of spending. And then less than 30% is half and half national security and non-defense discretionary.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  You can't spend two thirds of all your money on entitlements that are on autopilot when we've got, you know, wonderful life expanding health technologies and growing life expectancy in most categories. So we need, we need to fix the entitlement state. And then I think we also should be grappling with the question of what mid-career job disruption looks like. This is a lot less money. But I think as a free trader, both trade mitigation logic and job disruption at age 35, 40, 45, 50, those programs should be transferring money in a way that's actually successful at getting mid-career people realigned with economic needs. Not just if you're 45 and you become unemployed, you're likely to be unemployed forever and

• 18:31Speaker 01

  now you're just on the dole. So it's a subset of entitlements, but I think economic and job retraining stuff is going to be particularly important in the AI revolution.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Uh, you said 70% was those things you made a list. I'm not checking you while we're talking.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Please do.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  I'm curious. You, you still pay attention. You're not, you're not a senator.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  You keep up, right?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  I mostly keep up on intel stuff. I'm worried about the long-term, you know, uh, civilizational race around tech with the CCP, but I, I keep up a little bit. I write for the Wall Street Journal occasionally.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Let's shift gears. You started your career in education at a small college. I forgot the name of it.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Midland University. It used to be called Midland Lutheran College.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  How many students?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  When I got there, 600. When we left, we'd almost tripled it. The denominator was small, but we were one of the fastest growing schools in America.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  What was, what'd you learn from that experience? And what was different when you got to the University of Florida, besides everything?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Okay, two, maybe two things I learned. One is my grandpa, my dad was a football, high school football coach, but he was the first person in our family to ever go to college. His dad came back from World War II, never, you know, had a day of education after age 18, worked his way up at this college and became the executive vice president. He basically ran everything except the faculty side of the institution, but he himself was not a college grad. And this little, local, rural, religious college was, is such a Tocquevillean, grass top sense of what community looks like, that I just, I've always loved Tocqueville, but I feel like when he talks about going from DC, which isn't the center

• 20:30Speaker 01

  of the world, to Tocqueville, to the, I think there were 25 states at that time, he goes to 17 state capitals, and finds that not only is the center of American life not politics in DC, it's also not even politics locally, it's entrepreneurial projects, not just for profit, but entrepreneurial things. And so I always say in speeches, it's the Rotary Club. The Rotary Club didn't exist in the 1830s and 40s, but it's the Rotary Club. Midland Lutheran College is that. So one, it's just a, a community institution. I love the place. Go Warriors. Number two, 18 to 22 year olds are so different now than 35 or 40 years, 35 years ago, when I was graduating high school. This is not an old man, terminal

• 21:12Speaker 01

  diagnosis, standing on my lawn screaming at the kids, get off my lawn. It just is, we're so dang rich because of consumer capitalism, that 18 year olds, by and large, in America, have never worked yet. And that, for human history passed for millennia, until 35 years ago, would just blow anybody's mind. In, you know, during the American Revolution still, I think the number is 30% of all labor on farms in America was supplied by people under 14 years old, right? Like, it's a lot. And 18 year olds had already learned to work, and then they went to school. And for you, as president of a college, you know this,

• 21:57Speaker 01

  that a student who is ambitious about their curiosity, that they want to figure out how to better themselves to serve, they want to thank God's thoughts after them, they want to wrestle with the good, the true, and the beautiful, that's a completely different student than one that's in grade 13. And by and large, our 18 and 19 year olds are still kind of in grade school. They're passive, they're on receive mode, they're indoors, sitting still all the time. That's not what college and university is supposed to be like. It's not the free for all of a library. A school is different than a library, but it's still supposed to be a place where the student's curiosity is propelling them forward, and then they're availing themselves to great books and lectures and professors and mentors

• 22:41Speaker 01

  and wisdom. And I think right now, college has become a delayed adolescence project, and we need to do better. I won't do your University of Florida question, small versus big yet, because you need to, you need to talk again. Morphine brain, didn't mean to monologue at you like that.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  No, no, keep going. It must have, I mean, I've never been a college administrator until I came here, in Jerusalem, to Shalom College. And it's an exhilarating entrepreneurial experience.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  I actually asked Quad what I could have done better in my career. This is after it gave, somebody sent me a congratulatory note, and based on AI. And I, and one of the things it said was, why'd you waste your time being the president of a college with your last job? And I thought, well, you don't know much about this college, you don't know much about Israel, and you don't, it's a different thing. But I get it. I get the reflex to, to look down on college administrators. I certainly did before I became a president. So I have learned an immense amount about management, leadership, education, and I

• 23:53Speaker 00

  can't imagine going to a mega institution like a state college of the size of Florida. So tell me something.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's, let's set the stage with what, how big a mega institution is, because it's gigantic. So University of Florida, fifth largest school in the country, but it's both flagship and land grant. So it is, it is Texas and Texas A&M, or Michigan and Michigan State, or UVA and Vatech in the same school. Florida State is the historic women's college. So, and now it's got, you know, broad and, and some really wonderful programs as well. But people often assume Florida State was the egg school. Florida is both the egg school and the flagship. So that means we have locations in all 67 counties in Florida, and at the mothership in Gainesville, the main campus. We have about 85,000 people, because we've got a hospital system with between 20 and 26,000

• 24:49Speaker 01

  folks at any given moment. Our instructional faculty, let me pause to get this number right. Oh, man, morphine stinks. You said I still keep up. I used to be really good at photographic memory about.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  There's a lot of them. There's a lot of them. It's okay.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Well, it's, I, I think the number is 6,300. The, the paper that we submit to the accreditors every year, how many people taught a class at the University of Florida last year? It's north of 6,000 people taught classes at Florida, you know, 42,000 undergrads, 19,000 grad students, et cetera. But 6,300 professors. Here's one of the core problems with the, the, the American university, with the English training college model and the German research bench model, is a glorious wedding if it has been intentionally managed. And what's happened is there's been so much money thrown at it by the federal government

• 25:48Speaker 01

  over the last 50 or 60 years, that it will absorb those resources and do a lot of stupid things. So most faculty are supposedly teaching, doing research, and having some service component that they're measured on, I'm putting that in scare quotes, because it rarely, rarely happens at most institutions. At, at our university, I think we have about 1.3 billion in total research. A smaller share of that is externally sponsored dollars that had to be won by competition, but 1.3 billion dollars. On paper, a faculty member is supposed to teach a 3-3 load. You teach three classes fall, three classes spring, unless you get

• 26:29Speaker 01

  research leave. And our median professor of those 6,300 folks is on majority research leave, about 60%. So the modal faculty teaching experience is somewhere between a 1-1 and a 1-2. You're getting 60% research leave. But if you rank order those 1.3 billion dollars, about 80 professors account for more than 95% of the dollars. So 1.5% of the faculty, this is not an 80-20 rule, this is a 95 to 1 rule. About 1% of the faculty are principal investigators or research team leads, and they're accounting for 95% of the research. Well, when you do the tail of that curve, it means by you, the time

• 27:12Speaker 01

  you get to Professor 3150, the median professor, there is no research output. And yet, they're still on majority research leave. And so you've got people who are quite retired, to the tune of 60% of their paycheck coming for so-called research output, where there is no research output. And so if you, you look at a lot of the crisis of what's wrong in the humanities and the social sciences, it's faux research, because essentially, a union mindset has absorbed the, the sort of political activism to say, well, you got to do important stuff, and so we're going to call this stuff that you believe in, all fine and good to believe lots of stuff, we all have lots of avocations, but we're going

• 27:53Speaker 01

  to call that research or service, when it might just be activism on the public payroll. That problem is a giant problem for universities, and AI's disruption is going to be helpful, because there's lots of things that aren't really important, that are being publicly subsidized, and the public's upset about it.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm just thinking about, I mean, those things are all disturbing, of course, but, you know, when I came here, my first goal was to improve the teaching quality of the college. And it was already quite good, but my view was, it could be better, of course. It was my analysis, but it could always be better. And how do we, how do we get there from here? And I don't think.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  A University of Florida can think about that. It's not a viable question, partly because of that research money, right? Because nobody is compensated, honored, rewarded for great teaching. In fact, it might be just totally ignored in my experience in research institutions.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. The former president of the University of Chicago had the great line. We pretend that universities are coherent organizations. There are like seven different large corporate structures all thrown together. And at the end of the day, the health system, if you have one, and at Florida, our budget, nine and a half billion, about 65% of the money is spread across six campuses with 11 different hospital systems. About 65% of the money is that. And so the University of Chicago used to joke, they would say 97% of our financial exposure is the health system. And I have about 3% control or competence to be running a giant health operation.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  And so education on the side is itself going to be a 25 to 30% enterprise. And then in that athletics, and I say this as the son of a coach and former, I was on the wrestling team in college and, you know, the second most important religion in my life is Nebraska football. So I love college athletics, but a University of Texas or Ohio State at 330 million, down to a power four school median at maybe, you know, 150 million dollars per year, those are big enterprises and they're important, but it's a teeny fraction of the educational enterprise of a major institution. And yet, most board members and most donors are most interested in that thing, which is

• 30:20Speaker 01

  this side project that's just co-branded as junior professional sports, professional football played on Saturday instead of Sunday. And so you end up with this shared governance problem, which is massive. The accreditors say, your institution to have access to federal dollars, Perkins loans, Stafford loans, Pell Grants, research dollars, you have to have shared governance. What does shared governance mean? What it should mean is the faculty and the board slash administration together wrestle with what the curriculum is and all non-curricular things, athletics, fundraising, physical plant, lobbying the state legislature for money, that should be on the board and the president and the administration.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Instead, what happens is shared governance usually means almost everything is shared between faculty and board, even things where a committee of faculty is not going to be competent to manage physical plant planning. And curriculum is given over to the faculty entirely and maybe just the faculty senate, which is the activist subset of, on average, it's not true of everybody who's on a faculty senate, but on average, the faculty senate is the most activist, non-productive subset of the humanities and social sciences faculty. STEM faculty by and large don't want to do anything with faculty senate because they got research projects with deadlines. And so the curriculum is unmanaged. And the way you know the curriculum is unmanaged is both by how incoherent it is.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Who would say, as the father of a 17 becoming 18 year old, oh, I want to hand my kids over to, and then go read the curriculum of your school? Most schools require 120 hours to graduate. It's three thirds. It's a little over a third your major. It's about a third the core curriculum and it's a tick under a third electives. The core curriculum should be the most important part of the school. And at most places, you would say, I would, my kid has 45 to 48 months of quasi-leisure to get exposed to great ideas in the world? Are these the most important books they can read? Hell, no. And there's nobody who would even make the case that it is. The second way you know it's unmanaged is if somebody retires in a department with

• 32:31Speaker 01

  declining enrollment, anthropology, sociology, does the faculty of that department have the right to appoint the replacement for the retiring professor on their own? Or is there any deliberative process about whether or not that faculty line should be moved somewhere else? That almost never happens and that would happen everywhere in an institution that was malmanaged.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Last question, education. And you can-

• 32:56Speaker 01

  I could ask you a few as well because you're running, you're doing a really interesting project. I want to hear about curriculum and how you, how you get great talent to teach because I know you do. I'm a fan of what you're building.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Well, maybe after we finish. But I appreciate the sentiment.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Thank you for agreeing to come on my podcast. That's what I just heard.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Just curious about how your day goes as a small college president versus a large college president in terms of duties, responsibilities? Is it insanely different?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. And here I'll head nod to, I assume where we're going theologically at some point as Ecclesiastes, vanity after vanity is chasing after the whirlwind, life is but a breath. I am a recovering workaholic and not just because I have a terminal diagnosis. About three or four years ago, I realized that there's a lot in my soul that's pretty unhealthy because I'm, I was a working machine and I could generate a lot of output and, you know, way too much salve for aches was in the escape of produce more, work harder. I am boxer, it is animal farm, let's roll.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  So I have kept a timesheet on myself since I was in kind of middle school or high school, you know, 15 minute increments forever, including all my workouts and sleep and whatever. And it not a healthy thing, but I, I know the answer to your question because I, I mapped it.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Again, it's, it's a kind of a sicko answer. I was on paper, a small college president for five years, but I was one and a half years on leave, for half on leave while I was doing the primary for my senate campaign in 2014. So three and a half years of full-time grinding work. It's a real job where outcome, the small college presidency, where outcomes are going to be obvious. We were in an enrollment crisis. They had missed payroll four times over the year before I arrived. They ultimately always got faculty and staff, the money to make sure people didn't miss their mortgage payments, but it wasn't necessarily on payday. And so we had to build a real institution that was going to be accountable to the commitments we had made.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  And I named the project Big Scribner because there's a tiny little town up the river from here called Scribner where there was a bank that had some revolving debt. And I ultimately said, there are like five dominos to restructure this college. We're going to need to restructure our syndicated bank debt. We're going to need to make a bunch of bondholders take a haircut. We're going to need to retire a bunch of faculty members that teach in departments that don't have schools anymore, students anymore. We're going to need to raise a bunch of new money, et cetera. There are sort of two categories of new money, some new donors and some community foundation money where stuff was escrowed. And I essentially went in and said, it's the 131st year of this college, but we need to view it as year one as well. It is a, it is a Tokvillian project. We need to build this institution.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  We need to serve the students of our community in Omaha, over half of Nebraskans live in metro Omaha, and that's an hour from here. And so that's where we were mostly recruiting kids. And so we built a project that had very clear metrics, like what would it look like at an enrollment level and at a budget level to be successful? And we were. I get too much credit for it. I'm good at building a team. I'm not Midas. I didn't deserve all the credit, but I put together the right group of people. Fast forward to, you go to a big university, the job is more than 70% ceremonial. Shake hands and, you know, a head of state, head of government distinction in a European government, the president's job is mostly to be at the right event.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  So you could say that that has a fundraising component, but a lot of the fundraising is not concretely tied to a specific, you know, pillar of the capital campaign. And so there's, there's a lot about both jobs that's super important, but we're going to need our large institutions to reform themselves to persuade the public that they're good stewards of 15 to 25 year olds' time in a world where job disruption is going to be forevermore. And therefore, there's never been a civilization that really created lifelong learners. We're going to have to do that both on the merits because it's the right thing to do for virtue and culation and curiosity, but we're also going to need to do it because economic viability for a household is going to require 35 and 45 year olds to be able to get retrained and nobody's ever done that at scale.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're in for interesting times. I want to shift gears and talk about religion.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  Talk about your faith, if you're comfortable in this moment and how it's been affected by your diagnosis.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I am self-consciously Christian and believe the Heidelberg catechism structure of what are the, what are the three things you need to know to live and die in the joy of this comfort? That my only hope is in a grand trade where I get to bring the sin and, and the Messiah gets to bring the forgiveness and I get to, I get to hand off all of my brokenness and I get imputed righteousness. Those three things are guilt, grace, and gratitude.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  How big is my law breaking? What does it look like to have access to forgiveness? And then how should we then live in light of it? I'm blessed to have had a worldview that's been settled, you know, probably since my teens or early twenties. But it's definitely different to be looking at a terminal diagnosis. But I've had a lot of peace about the fact that on December 14th, Doc said to me, Ben Sasse's torso is chock full of tumors and you're not long for this world.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Death sucks, but it is, it is a blessing to be able to view it as the final enemy, not as the ultimate word. It's the, the last bad thing. So I'm, I'm going through stuff that's not fun.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Treatment is a little easier than I thought, but I still puke many times a day and bleed out my head all the time. As you and I were talking before the show started, I have a RAS inhibitor drug that makes it really hard to grow skin. And so the downsides of my chemo are smaller than, you know, the carpet bombing chemo of five or 25 years ago. But it's still, you know, I changed a blood saturated pillowcase on my bed three times in the night last night. So that's not a lot of fun, but it is a, it is a truth injection about the fact that we're finite and we're mortals and it will shadow, shatter the idols of things like my workaholism past.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  Did your faith fluctuate in the past? And is it stronger now?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  It fluctuated in the sense that I grew up in a Christian home. I'm from rural Nebraska. I grew up just a couple of miles from where we're recording this right now. And I grew up in the Lutheran church and in college and, you know, taking time off to live on trains in college for a while. I read a lot of theology and wrestled through stuff, but it didn't ever really have any grand period of doubt. Just got more theologically serious and more serious about understanding what I believed and why. And every, every Sunday for decades, getting the chance to assemble for corporate worship and get on your knees and tell the

• 40:41Speaker 01

  truth about my sin is a blessing. So that, that hasn't fluctuated. I would say there's something different about the last six and a half months, which is when death is nearer, it definitely crowds out a lot of the distraction. There's sort of a truth serum about what do you, what do you really believe? And lots of small things seem bizarre. Like I knew in public life that reading the comments section of something online was dumb, but I would still occasionally do it. You know, like, I mean, I was in intel. And so I know most of this crap is bots, right? Like the, a huge, I think the public doesn't really

• 41:22Speaker 01

  get this. A huge share of the comments on something like X aren't real. They're, they're generated by foreign intel services that want us to hate each other. In fall of 2017, when there was an open senate seat in Mississippi and President Trump stands up at a rally and he says, you know, what do people in Mississippi like? I think maybe racism. So why don't I talk about Colin Kaepernick? That son of a bitch who won't stand for the anthem. Colin Kaepernick wasn't in the league when that speech was made. There are 1,500 NFL players. Six of them are kneeling and Kaepernick isn't one of them. And over the course of the next four days, American discourse is taken over by hashtag stand for the anthem

• 42:05Speaker 01

  and hashtag take an NFL, the two sides of the fight. It's an important debate at one level, but like it's, it's ludicrous. It's like a cartoon that our, our public discourse for four days was dominated by the two sides of this debate. And both sides were more than 70% Russian bots. And all of a sudden, all of us are drinking this crap. And so I know that to be true, but I still might've read the comments section during a reelection campaign in 2019 or 2020. Today, I could not care less about that. I mean, I care about it for civic health. I want people to not be distracted by it. But I would never think, oh, this bot says Ben Sasse is an insider asshole who embezzled a bunch of money. And

• 42:47Speaker 01

  I was like, well, thank you, St. Petersburg. Bot Farm, somebody just got 17 cents.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Do you, do you get angry at God?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  No, I, I, I, I read the law, you know, from the early church to then medieval church and early Lutheranism and then Calvinism and beyond, which is sort of my convictional community. I call myself a Lutero Calvinist. Our numbering of the decalogue changes. But table one, no other gods, no images, not taking God's name lightly and the Sabbath. And then, and then table two, honor your father and mother, which is really all authorities.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  And adultery and murder and stealing and false witness and covetousness. I look at those 10 laws and I'm like, holy crap. That's a, that's a straight edge. And I am crooked stuff. Really? I don't, I don't look at the gap between the law, the righteous law and my unrighteousness and say, oh, something's wrong with the law. I'm like, crap, that that's wrong in me. I, in my conscience, I know that I'm guilty. And so Paul, in the letter to the Romans, chapter seven says, that which I want to do, I do not do. And

• 44:21Speaker 01

  that which I do, I do not want to do. I'm like that, that broken Augustinian Pauline anthropology, that, that's me. And I, I want to be righteous and I'm, I always fail. And so I'm, I'm not mad at God. I'm, I'm sort of mad at me.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  So I get that as a Jew. I, I get it. And I, I would also, I would just add that disappointingly large number of the frustrations that I experience in life, what we would call annoyances, not a, not a terminal diagnosis, but things going wrong every day. Things go wrong. They're not the what you want. And I can get annoyed with those. And I recognize in some dimension, not at the time, always, but I recognize later, that's just my self-centeredness that I deserve better. And ultimately, I'm kind of angry at God for not giving me more

• 45:22Speaker 00

  of what I deserve. That's the flip side of, of what the generous thing you just mentioned. And I look at myself in that, in those moments and say, I think about Anne Lamott, who said, you know, God's name is not me. That's, that's where I want to head. Not me. I'm not the center. I'm just a small thing. And that's easy to say when we're talking about delivery that goes awry and a dinner that gets spoiled or whatever it is. But when you're given your fate, it's hard. I would, I would think it would be hard to take it well. So if you

• 46:06Speaker 00

  really are, I was gonna say, God bless you. I mean, I think that's an extraordinary achievement.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Thanks, but I want to view it as the language of gift in, to be clear, death is terrible. I don't want to whitewash it at all. But I mentioned Ecclesiastes earlier. I think it is useful to view it as a big screaming, a flashing sign of truth about our finitude and our mortality. And your point about God's name is not Russ Roberts or Ben Sasse. Knowing that is a tiny, tiny step toward wisdom. And it's like the paradox of so much of lived

• 46:54Speaker 01

  experience, which is that we're relational beings, right? And I, I want to flourish. I want to be happy. I want joy and short-term pleasure. But I want longer term, more than short term. But even the longer term, I know that an uncertain path to it is pursuing it. And a much more certain path is self-denial and dying to self and trying to serve, right? Like if, if in my marriage, my aspiration is my happiness, I'm going to be unhappy. If my aspiration is my wife's happiness, I got a pretty good shot at being happy. And it feels like that might be a writ small portrait of relationship with the divine

• 47:39Speaker 01

  as well, in that we're not meant to be on the throne.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, that's a great insight. Do you pray?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  I do.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  And what is your prayer practice? And do you believe in petitionary prayer? And how has your health situation affected your prayer?

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, great, great question. Both corporately and individually. So at corporate, you know, at church on Sunday, but in our family, we pray aloud, ideally twice a day, almost always once a day. So if, if not at the evening meal, if we're not assembled, then before bed, but sometimes morning as well. But individually, I try to use the structure of adoration, confession, Thanksgiving supplication. If I start with petitionary prayer and supplication, I'm pretty soon talking way too much about Ben. So I think trying to work a little bit through both the communicable and incommunicable attributes of God is a pretty good way, great

• 48:41Speaker 01

  way to do the adoration. Like I, if I'm just on communicable attributes, God is patient and long-suffering. Ben should be patient and long-suffering. And man, am I short, impatient and not long-suffering. That's important and it's one of my failings. But a bigger one is, you know, reflecting on the eternality, omnipotence, omniscience of God. And none of those are characteristics that are communicable to me. So I think the adoration is a key piece that sets the stage for me properly confessing my sin. And then I try to do thanks to a certain degree before supplication. The one thing that's changed

• 49:22Speaker 01

  a lot over these six and a half months is Tim Keller, who was a Presbyterian pastor in New York City, who, you know, ironically died of pancreatic cancer three years ago, was in my denomination. And I knew Tim relatively well. And he said something really profound in his declining year or two. He didn't present at stage four like mine, but you know, he was still pretty clearly going to die. He said, I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never wish pancreatic cancer on anyone. But paradoxically, I also would never want to go back to a stage in life where I didn't know the power of pancreatic cancer prayer. And I didn't

• 50:05Speaker 01

  have any idea what the heck that meant. And then I became symptomatic. So I was, I was symptomatic in just a little before Halloween and I wasn't diagnosed till mid-December. So I had about seven weeks of some pretty extraordinary pain because my cancer has metastasized from the pancreas to five other systems, liver as farthest along, but I got lymphoma and lung cancer, et cetera. And my soon-to-be med school daughter always corrects me, you don't have lung cancer. You have pancreatic cancer that is now also resident in your lungs. So it's a different thing. The, the molecule is pancreatic cancer, but it's in all these other systems. I had really weird pain all along the front of my rib

• 50:50Speaker 01

  cage that would radiate. I would get this piercing pain in the mid-spine and then it would radiate all over my torso, you know, down to scrotum and up to chest, but around the front of my rib cage.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  I would just have this incredible pain, like when you're a little kid and you get, you know, a soccer ball or a punch to the gut and you think for about 20 seconds, you're gonna die. And I would have that the majority of my waking hours, but it would radiate from my spine. And it turned out I have a tumor that is not technically in my spine, but presses against it. And so now that I'm on a lot of morphine and I'm on draxinrasiv, this amazing drug, which has shrunk my tumors so much, I'm in so much less pain, April, May, June, for the July of 2026 than in November 2025. But to your prayer point, I was in so much pain and I didn't know why, that I was spending

• 51:48Speaker 01

  almost all night, every night on the floor in my shower and sort of removed the, you know, temperature control so that you could make it way hotter than you're supposed to make your water in your house. And I was just running that hot water in the center of my spine to try to take away this pain and we had not been able to diagnose what was wrong at first. And in that time, I would cry out to God, asking for relief from the pain, but also, you know, reflecting honestly on the fact that, hey, if I got a terminal cancer diagnosis and I'm cured from cancer, it doesn't change the fact that this, you know, 53 year old is still at 83 or 93 headed for the same fate. And so, standing before

• 52:29Speaker 01

  the fact that we all have a terminal diagnosis, changed my ability to self delude and to distract with any this worldly performance or output. And you realize we stand naked before a holy God and relationship is the only thing that ultimately matters. Relationship with those we love as well. But I mean, it's relationship to God first.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  It seems to me, and I don't know if this is generally true, but it just seems to me that we try not to think about death. And when we get a scare, we get afraid. We don't get more thoughtful. We get afraid and we just want a doctor to say it's fine. And then we go back to ignoring death because we want to. And, you know, I think people vary in how much they think about it. Certainly as you get older, you think about it more inevitably. It does concentrate the mind wonderfully, as Samuel Johnson said. Are

• 53:38Speaker 00

  you, is there fear in all of that? Or is it just that your daily life, obviously there's sadness, there's, but I assume there's also a lot more intensity. I assume every day has a different texture than it had seven months ago. Is that, is that true?

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Partly, yes. I, I wouldn't say that there's more fear about the relationship to God. I definitely feel, fear is a little bit strong, but let's go with 55% of fear, but not wanting to be a pansy ass during the final stages. I mean, it's pretty obvious that pancreatic cancers, actual death weeks are really ugly. And so, I want to be able to play the man during that phase. I want my kids to see me honorable and able to engage them. Again, I'm not a complete stoic about it. I'm not eschewing all morphine, but I

• 54:43Speaker 01

  choose most days to take way less morphine than my 55 milligram diagnosis or prescription because 55 milligrams has me high as a kite and I'm either asleep or incoherent. And so, you know, I'm, I'm in a small bit of pain right now, but it's because I want to be able to talk to you at speed. So, I know that the actual process of death is gonna be a part of life that isn't fun, but that suffering can build perseverance. Perseverance can build character and character can build hope, to quote Romans 5. But I think what's,

• 55:26Speaker 01

  what's clearly true about our mortality is that we have an unbelievable capacity to delude ourselves and pretend it isn't so. And it's definitely on a spectrum more true of me today than when I was in great pain six months ago, right? I, I can have a short term fight, bicker, bickering with my wife about something today, but I couldn't have done six months ago because life just felt too short. And I think there, there's a real wisdom in contemplating our death as a way to then also get back to living. Like, I think, I think the thing that makes the day to day valuable is that it sits in light

• 56:11Speaker 01

  of eternity and we're doing these things out of gratitude and love and service, but not because we're stupid enough to believe we're actually building a storehouse that's gonna be big enough as a store of labor or grain, that it doesn't just get us through a bad harvest and a really long cold winter, but that we think we're, we're transcending our mortality. I, I know you, with your dual geography, you've thought a lot about the worldviews of Silicon Valley over the years. I've done a bunch of board work in Silicon Valley over the years. I don't mean this to be disrespectful, but I, I think it's just mind blowing that Ray Kurzweil's stupidest ideas are treated as if they're sophisticated, that humans are gonna upload our consciousness into the internet and become

• 56:53Speaker 01

  indifferent to our own mortality. The singularity is, we will transcend corporal bodily existence and become, you know, abstract idea. That's nuts. Like, both are, spirit and body are both true, but the, the purpose of these digital tools is to supplement embodied place-based existence, not to supplant them. And the place where you break bread with people, the place where you get on your knees and worship, the place where you make babies, or more generically, the place where you, you hug the people you love, we are bodily. And there has to be some reckoning with the question of, do we think, you know, from dust to dust

• 57:38Speaker 01

  means that's all there is? It's hard for me to understand how you could live in a coherent way if someone thought this was the end.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  There's an old saying, which I've always loved, no one on their deathbed wished they'd spent more time at the office. And certainly, when you're on your deathbed or when you just start getting older, you reflect on your life and what things you're proud of, what things you're not proud of. What are you most proud of lately? Has it changed when you were 10 years ago, when you'd look back on what you'd achieved? You've had a rather special life, right? You've, you've done things that, I won't include the university president, but you've done things that, that people marvel at and, and you were not a, a cipher or a pawn in that game. You were a player as a member of the Senate and you

• 58:31Speaker 00

  influenced thought and people still think about what you think about and talk about. Is that on the list? What, what's on the list?

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Thanks. That was too generous, but thank you. I definitely love to work. So don't hear this as a minimization of work, but you're right. The things on my deathbed that I think about, that I'm proudest of are, I have an unbelievable friendship with Melissa Jane MacLeod, not Melissa MacLeod, sass. 33 years of friendship, 31 years of marriage. And man, it's, it's an amazing thing. And we produced three kids together that are sinners and broken and look in all sorts of horrible, stupid ways like their

• 59:21Speaker 01

  dad. I don't mean just, you know, the ugliness of, of physical visage, but I mean, their sort of proto workaholism, their grinder achiever culture, which is wonderful, but also too much. One of my kids, we jokingly say, man, in a family of type As, kid X makes all three of us look like potheads. The hell's wrong with you, Sisyphus? But I'm really proud of, of my kids and the fact that they love to work and serve. So, the, the things that I think I still contemplate are not achievement based, they're relationships.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  But I like, I like to work hard and to your point.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  I mean, not trying to take it precisely to religion and theology, but I think the Sabbath is an incredibly useful institution. In the Christian tradition, where we've flipped it to day one from day seven, there's even a little more poetry about it because it means that the indicative precedes the imperative, acceptance precedes high expectations. You live the weak out of gratitude, not to attain standing. But regardless of whether we put the Sabbath at day one or day seven, it's a day where you cease your striving because

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  at the end of the day, I can't do it. I can't achieve enough. I can never build a big enough storehouse. I can never make myself immortal. I can't keep the planets in their orbits. When I was in grad school, I'm a historian by training, and when I was in grad school, I was in New Haven from 1998 to 2003, four, and there were still all these books around from the 70s in the psychohistory moment where basically Freud had so dominated many academic categories that to be a historian, the assumption was you had to be able to do psychoanalysis of anybody who you were studying. And I thought it was just nutty. And I asked a couple of my professors, how the hell did this happen? And they said, well, it's crazy. Like, the idea that Martin Luther wasn't really wrestling with theological

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  ideas, but he was just super constipated, then he had to explain it away. And that became the Tower Doctrine at the Diet of Worms. That stuff was overwrought. But I had a professor say, Skip Stout was his name, John Butler was another guy who made a similar point. Skip said, you know, Ben, at the end of the day, we're all still kind of 70% who we were as 10-year-olds. And psychohistory was getting at a little bit of that. It's not 99%, but it also isn't 29%. We're 70% who we were when we were 10-year-olds. And I think it's really helpful to think of ourselves as people who want to know and

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  be known. We want to be accepted. And we want and need a well-done, good and faithful servant blessing. We want a daddy who welcomes us and accepts us and takes us up in his arms. And I think that aspirational sense can play out in really good work, but it can also become super deformed in lots of kinds of addiction because we're trying to make a name for ourselves.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. It's a beautiful thing you said about your marriage. I think until you've been married a while, what you said probably doesn't make any sense. So I'll just leave it there. I think those of us who have been married a while do get it. And the thing I would just, I think about my kids, I don't know if this speaks to you, but my kids are not my legacy. They're me. And they don't want to hear that. That's not comforting to them. It's horrifying. Just like I don't want to hear on my father and my mother. A lot of times I'm comforted by that, too. But the immortality that we

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  can have as humans in this world, outside of divine or faith, the divine or faith, is, you know, it's nature and nurture that we pass on, and it persists after we go, and it persists after they go. It's all one very long chain. I'm sure, like you said, it's almost unavoidable when you see your both flaws and your strengths in your kids. And you realize, it's not, oh, I influence them. They're just, they're a piece of you in a different form to me.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  So, so well said.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  My kids aren't listening. It'll just ruin their day, but...

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  You got big and broad enough listenership that I'm sure they get recycled back to them all the time. My oldest kid turns 25 next week, and it blows my mind. I mean, you know, it's like all the country music lyrics, "Three chords and the truth," and you can never, "An old man can never tell a young man how fast it goes," but, you know, "The days are long and the years are short" is so obviously true about parenting. And you never know when you're doing a thing for the last time. The last time that you read a book aloud to a little kid and they fall asleep. My, excuse me, that's not supposed

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  to happen. I've been wrestling with death for, you know, over half a year now. I'm not supposed to get teared up talking about my kids. We need to blow some stuff up for freedom again so I can keep it together.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  If you can't cry over reading your book to your kid, there's something wrong with you. So, I'm tearing up, and it's, again, it's the same thing. It's immortal, that feeling. You have it forever. It's just an amazing thing, as precious as it can be.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  She's a second lieutenant in the Air Force, and she gets here in a few hours. Oklahoma, Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma, seven hours south of here. And she passed a checkride yesterday, you know, jet flying in formation. And I'm like, there's a lot of decline in the US government over the years, but these idiots that are allowing my toddler to fly a jet 10 feet off somebody else's wings? Like, somebody needs to check their wisdom because she's two. She cannot be flying a jet next to another jet.

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  That's incredible. That's just incredible. Let's, kind of a segue. I was going to ask you, so it kind of fits in. What are your reading habits? What are you reading these, right now, if anything? And if you're on Murphy, and I'm sure it's hard to read, but when you're not on Murphy, and it's hard to read in 2026. I'm constantly distracted by a thousand different things. I'm just curious what your reading practice is and if it's changed over time, and if it's changed in these last few months.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Thanks. Great question. At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I think I, on Amazon a couple days ago, just ordered Benjamin Todd's 80,000 Hours, or whatever it is, "Make 80,000 Hours Count Again," because I heard it on Econ Talk. I read a lot of theology, and have for decades, so it's not just because of this. Some of that we read aloud at our house. I mentioned the Heidelberg Catechism. I've recently been rereading Zacharias Zinnis' 1563 Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism. That's the grace gratitude stuff I was saying

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  earlier. I read a lot of intel, so I think we are in a fascinating moment in these new tools. And I think 100 years from now, when people look back on our moment, they're not talking about our politics. They're going to talk about the fact that we were living through a technological revolution that created an economic revolution, which undermined or flattened time and space. And we got to figure out how you build community in light of that. And I think of myself on the continuum between the accelerationist side, Mark Andreessen is a friend, but I think a lot of his stuff is way too simple for my taste. On the other

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  hand, the safety of school is nutty. Like, the idea that you're going to regulate these tools and a bureaucracy in Washington is going to do anything other than slow us down so the CCP wins all the races. That's crazy. My sense is, if you're wondering, does the digital revolution bring heaven or hell? The right answer is yes. It's going to bring all the human stuff faster, cheaper, more ubiquitous. And there's a lot of human stuff that's broken, and we're going to get more of that. And there's a lot of human stuff that's great, and we're going to get more of that. And right now, we don't know how to manage that and net it out. So I'm thinking a lot about the digital revolution in general. There aren't really many book-length things that we can read to keep up with the

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  pace of frontier models. So even though I don't like social media very much, a lot of the digital revolution generic stuff comes from, you know, long-form posts on X. The subset of that that I'm particularly interested in is the race with the CCP. And I think that, you know, the future of the geopolitical order is going to be either US/western-led, free trade, open navigation of the seaways, transparent contracts, rule of law, respect for human rights and dignity, or it's going to be CCP and vassal state, centralized totalitarianism. And it's pretty obvious which of these needs to win, in my view, but we don't have much vision to try to bring along our populace. We're, you

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  know, 23% of global GDP, we, the United States, are 23% of global GDP at less than 4% of the population. Americans need to understand this moment, and I don't think we're doing it very well because we're distracted with the digital casino in our pocket. So I'm thinking a lot about the national security implications of the digital revolution, but I care a lot about the future of work as well. I wish I had more, time isn't the right word, but I wish I had the sequestered categories of time to read a little more fiction. But I don't, I don't really read any fiction right now. I just started reading Marie Sandoz's Old Jewels, which is a biography of her father as a Swiss dude who became a frontier pioneer

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  farmer in Nebraska in the 1880s. And that's extraordinary. So it's fiction-like, but it's historical biography.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  I meant to ask you this before, and I don't want to miss it.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Religion in the West is in tremendous decline, particularly in Europe, but Christianity in Europe. And in the United States, there's pockets of rebirth. But it just strikes me that most of what we worship in America is something else. Rock stars. And I watched a clip of Bruce Springsteen. I'm a fan. And he comes off the stage and he wanders into the crowd. And they treat him like a god. They reach out their hand to him. And he's

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  glowing like a god. He's bestowing grace on them by looking at them. And they react accordingly. And a similar thing, which is not exactly the same, but if you think about a rock concert as a communal form of worship, I don't know if you're watching the World Cup at all, but the joy that countries, the fans of foreign nations coming to America and being embraced, and them enjoying and being proud of their team, singing like hymns, right? Singing "Country Roads," which I'm sorry that that's the song they chose. I would have preferred something else. I don't hate the song, but it's not my first choice.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  American fans, 80,000 people singing that song, tens of thousands of Scots singing "The Flower of Scotland" or "Lachlomen." And it's so moving to me. And it taps into, I think, our religious consciousness. But it's not religion. I mean, it's not theology. It's not divine. It's something else. It's the same impulse to be part of something larger than yourself, with a group of other people, belong, and be joyful. And just, what are your thoughts on that?

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Well, first off, brother, I'm glad we're going another hour, because there are four giant threads in there.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  We're not going another hour, because the sun's going to set in Jerusalem and I have to get home.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Oh, that's right. You have a very precise Sabbatarian deadline. Let's tease out a couple of things there, because there's a lot of meat. First of all, head nod to the College World Series at the TDA Meritred Park, 41 miles from where we now sit. West Virginia, along with Troy State, were the two of the eight schools that made it. The College World Series has been in Omaha for 77 consecutive years. And it is the best amateur sporting event in America. So first of all, a commercial to anybody who's never been to Field of Dreams. It's a 64-team tournament, and the last eight teams come to Omaha for 11 days. And it is glorious. This year, Troy and West Virginia were two of the eight teams.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  They were the only two who'd never been here before. Oklahoma beat North Carolina for the national championship. But West Virginia was here, and their fans captured Omaha with "Country Roads." So first of all, I'm kind of a Gordon Gee fan to begin with, you know, as a college president. Gordon, in his mid-80s now, has been president of Vanderbilt, Brown, Colorado, Ohio State, West Virginia, Ohio State another time, West Virginia another time. He spent like, all of his life as a university president somewhere. Fascinating guy. But he's West Virginia's mascot to me, even though he could not do an Appalachian banjo fight in a bar

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  for the life of him, that four-foot-tall Mormon. So "Country Roads" is amazing, but I think it gets at something bigger, which is your point. In the Book of Ephesians, Paul says what characterizes Christians? It's four things. One, spirit of gratitude. Two, not thinking of yourself more highly than you are, or more highly than those around you. Three, singing constantly. And four, singing communally constantly. That's a weird thing. Like, what are four things that characterize you? And two of the four are singing? And a third one is the impulse to sing, gratitude. So I think you're right. There is less formal

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  thought-out theology among us than decades past. But functionally, humans are always worshiping something. Money, sex, power, fame, me, me, me. And your Springsteen example is good. It might be worth laying it next to laying, lying. My Gomari and wife will slap me. Alan Jackson concerts, or like a U2 concert, because they're different things that happen. But I think stadium concerts are really interesting. In general, enthusiastic, passionate crowds scare me, except for at football games. Like, I understand the Aristotelian catharsis that happens in tribe around a football game. But in general, giant crowds

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  scare me. I think the mob is a danger that should always be resisted. But I remember being at a U2 concert one time, 10 or 15 years ago. Bono had not yet come on stage, but it was clear that it was going to happen soon. And the 85-ish thousand people, the crowd is pulsating, waiting for the Messiah. Come and redeem us. And there is such a difference. You know, I've been to Springsteen as well. But I don't mean to slap him, but it does feel self-referential in a way that doesn't help the crowd lower their expectations to

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  something that's true and reachable. That ecstatic religious experience that says, "I, the performer, might be God," way less healthy in my mind than what an Alan Jackson does, where he turns that nostalgic impulse toward a communal event, back on people, so that their experience can go with him. I'm not saying, "Way down south on the Chattahoochee, never knew how much that muddy water meant to me." I'm not meaning it's the most important thing that can ever happen. But I'm taking my kids skiing this afternoon. And our experience on the water can be universalized to other people's communal family experiences. And

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  I think you want to take that euphoria of crowds down to something this worldly, or reflect on what it might say about our souls that we aspire to it, as opposed to pretend that catharsis is at the end of a Springsteen concert. Because what always ends up happening is he sits down on an amplifier and gives a political speech. Well, shit, that's anticlimactic.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  Well, that's recent. I know from earlier days when he was just mainly joyous. But I understand. That's a different issue, for sure. I'm going to close. I didn't warn you about this, so I'm just going to do it anyway. And I don't know if I'll get through it without tears, but I'm going to try. When I thought about having this opportunity to interview, which I'm deeply grateful for, and it's been an incredible privilege, I thought about this Dylan Thomas poem. "Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their ends, no dark is right. Because their words had forked no lightning, they do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, and learned too late, they grieved it on its way. Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who

• 1:18:36Speaker 00

  see with blinding sight. Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and begay. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. And you, my Father, there on the sad height, curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light." And I just think you're an incredible inspiration. I know you strive to be a humble man. I had this wonderful conversation with Lou Burgess. One of the parts of it, we're talking about

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  the Benedictine monks, and their lesson of walk with your head bowed down. And I feel like you're a man who tries to walk with your head bowed down while you still rage against the dying of the light. So I salute you.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Thank you. I can't beat that poem. It has been an honor to be with you. Yes, death is a wicked enemy, and we should not accept easily the dying. I know that the end of pancreatic cancer, they often use the language of, people take to the bed, and their will is just gone. And they don't care to fight it anymore. Their abdomen freezes up, and nothing works anymore. I want to fight that for as long as possible. And yet, there is a wisdom in numbering our days. And so I'm very grateful for you, both what

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  you said about singing in general, and then giving us deep, meaningful words to close on. Grateful for you, Russ.

• 1:20:27Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Ben Sasse. And thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Happy Sabbath, my friend.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:20:44Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast, and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.