Ben Sasse reflects on life, parenting, future of country in Ruthless interview

Former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse delivered a heartfelt reflection on his life, parenting, and politics to the Ruthless Podcast in an exclusive interview released Tuesday morning. 

"Death sucks, but I'm not really scared," Sasse told the Fellas. "People are surprised by the answer. And I’m like, well, I guess I’ll talk for a little while."

Sasse was diagnosed with metastatic stage-four pancreatic cancer in December. Throughout the interview, Sasse emphasized the importance of being rooted.

"We have funeral plots in Arlington, Nebraska, 14 miles east of our house along the river in Dodge County, Nebraska," Sasse said. "I don’t want my family to ever give that up."

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Sasse’s career has taken him across the country and, at times, away from his family for extended periods of time. Receiving degrees from Harvard and Yale, he worked as a management consultant before coming back to academia. 

After serving as the president of Midland University, Sasse was first elected to the Senate in 2014.  Sasse resigned from his seat in 2023 to become the President of the University of Florida. 

In the interview, podcast co-host Comfortably Smug, himself a recent father, cited a recent op-ed by Sasse’s daughter and asked for parenting advice.

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"I recently just had a son," Smug mentioned. "How did you manage to raise such self-actualized individuals? She said the line that opened with where instead of asking them, like, ‘how was your day?’ You asked them, ‘who did you serve?’ This makes an individual more outward-looking and trying to be a contributor to their community and their friends rather than being a consumer."

The Nebraskan responded by emphasizing the importance of unconditional love and the importance of teaching your children the values of hard work and service to others. 

"Your parental goal should be for them to know unconditional love, and then in response to live a life of gratitude, where there are some expectations around them," Sasse responded. "And so she says in her piece that she knows she has unconditional love from us, and that we expect her to grit and grind through it and go and serve other people, not be narcissistically obsessed with herself."

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The conversation also touched on how technology has changed family life, the economy, and American politics. 

"You'd be sitting in Republican Senate lunch, and dudes are scrolling through social media reading comments on Twitter, on their press releases," Sasse said. "I'm like, you know, those are mostly Russian bots. They're mostly not even real… Like if you’ve got eight digits that come at the end of your name, that's not Cynthia from Norfolk, Nebraska. But now I just couldn't care less about the tribal stupid [things] that people might yell about."

Podcast co-host Josh Holmes detailed how many of Sasse’s former colleagues in the body have appreciated his perspective over the last couple of months. 

"I talked to a number of your old colleagues in the Senate over the last couple of months who are just deeply appreciative of the time you’ve taken to share wisdom in this particular part of life," Holmes told Sasse.

Sasse has authored two books on this intersection of parenting and the future of the country: "Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal" and "The Vanishing American Adult."

Since his diagnosis, Sasse has also launched the Not Dead Yet Podcast.