Late last year, former Sen. Ben Sasse was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given three to four months to live. Now, he's on "extended time" — and he wants to spend some of his remaining time talking about "bigger stuff."
In an interview with "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley and a town hall hosted by CBS News, the Nebraska Republican said Congress is consumed by "reductionistic tribalism" and isn't spending enough time on large-scale problems — especially the massive disruptions that he believes will be wrought by artificial intelligence.
Sasse also explained why he believes he owes his extra time on earth to "providence, prayer and a miracle drug." And he argued more Americans should have access to the types of experimental treatments that he credits with extending his life.
"Congress is not wrestling with big or important questions"
A Nebraska native with a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, Sasse ran for the Senate in 2014. He won reelection after clashing with President Trump, but then, two years later, Sasse resigned from Congress to become president of the University of Florida.
Asked why he left elected office, Sasse called the Senate "very, very unproductive." He said he was in Washington, D.C., for much of the week, missing time with his wife and three kids in Nebraska, while lawmakers weren't accomplishing much.
"We didn't do real things. And it felt like the opportunity cost was really high," he said.
Right now, Sasse told Pelley that "Congress doesn't talk about any of those kind of most fundamental issues," chief among them the way that AI could change the economy and how people work.
"Neither of these parties really have very big or good ideas about 2030 or 2050, at a national security level, at a future of work level, at an institution-building level," he said. "The Congress is not wrestling with big or important questions right now."
Much of the blame, Sasse believes, is linked to the fact that politicians have an incentive to appeal to a narrow niche, a problem accentuated by social media.
"It doesn't encourage a lot of humility. It doesn't encourage someone saying, 'You know what, I used to believe this, but I listened to somebody else, and I realized I was wrong, and I've learned this new thing,' he said. "There's no audience for that."
Sasse believes the House should be much, much larger — 2,000 lawmakers instead of 435, which would mean individual members would represent fewer people. And he thinks the Senate should be more productive and more focused on addressing major questions, rather than day-to-day theatrics.
"The Senate needs to be less like Instagram. The Senate needs to be more deliberative. And that means less smack-down nonsense," he said.
He suggested the U.S. is nearing an inflection point: "In 2040, or 2050, or 2060 does the republic survive? I suspect yes, and I would bet yes. But it's not a 90/10 bet."
"A republic actually requires people who do deliberative, long-form discourse, learning, humility and community building," he said. "We're not doing that right now."
Sasse told Pelley he's "optimistic and pessimistic about the complexities of human nature."
"But I am optimistic about what a free people and a republic can build if they start with the 'little platoons' of their family, their extended kin network, their neighborhood, their workplace, and their place of worship," he said.
AI is "glorious and horrific at the same time"
Asked what big issues Congress is missing, Sasse immediately offered up the AI revolution, which he called "both glorious and horrific at the same time."
"What the digital revolution does is it accelerates almost everything about the human experience," Sasse predicted. "Anything that can be reduced to a series of steps, which is most economic activity, is going to be routinized and become really, really cheap, really fast, and really ubiquitous."
On one level, Sasse believes, AI could launch an era of "ubiquitous abundance," with no shortages of cheap, high-quality goods. "I don't know if it's three years from now or 13 years from now, but we're all going to have a robot that builds robots for us."
But it will create upheaval and uncertainty as many jobs are replaced by technology.
"It's pretty scary to not know what you're going to do to add value for your neighbor 10 or 25 years from now," Sasse said. "We've never lived in a world where 22-year-olds couldn't assume that the work they did they would be able to do until death or retirement. And we're never going to have that world again."
Sasse on "right to try" rules
Sasse is grappling with stage-four pancreatic cancer that has metastasized, he said, leaving him with lung cancer, vascular cancer, liver cancer and lymphoma.
He has been taking an experimental oral medication for pancreatic cancer called daraxonrasib, which works by inhibiting a protein that can cause cells to grow excessively, leading to tumors.
The maker of daraxonrasib, Revolution Medicines, reported strong results from the drug's phase three trial earlier this month. Patients who took daraxonrasib survived by a median of 13.2 months, compared to 6.7 months with chemotherapy.
During CBS News' town hall, Sasse heard from another person with cancer who has credited his early-stage medical treatment for giving him more time with his family.
Mike Hugo, 37, said he was diagnosed four years ago with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer that can lead to death within months rather than years. Hugo said he participated in a clinical trial for a medical device called Optune.
Hugo's daughters were 5 and 7 years old when he was first diagnosed, and are now 9 and 11. His treatment has allowed him to go to "two daddy-daughter dances that no one said I would ever make," he said.
Hugo asked Sasse about why relatively few people can access those types of treatments, despite a 2018 federal "right to try" law — cosponsored by Sasse — designed to make it easier for patients with life-threatening illnesses to take not-yet-approved drugs in some circumstances. (Critics argue that "right to try" rules could weaken patient protections, and programs are already in place to help terminally ill patients access investigational drugs.)
Sasse said that law was amended in Congress to make it stricter than initially planned. He said he'd like to "decentralize a lot more of those decisions to individuals, patients and their care providers, rather than one-size-fits-all rules at the FDA."
He noted that tens of thousands of Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer annually, and it has a "tiny" survival rate.
"The best way to make a dent in that is more experiments," he said. "And so I would love a world where on the [question of] how much risk are you willing to endure to get access to a new trial or to allow our greatest scientific minds and researchers to experiment, I'd like to open up the dial quite a bit and let a lot more people get access to these drugs."
"Providence, prayer and a miracle drug"
Sasse publicly revealed his diagnosis in late December of last year, writing in a jarring social media post that he's "gonna die."
In the weeks leading up to his diagnosis, Sasse told CBS News, he dealt with serious pain. He described showering at night with the water turned up as hot as possible, "trying to scald my back to try to make the throbbing of what turned out to be tumors pushing on my spine cease."
He said he's now in a lot less pain, in part due to morphine, and he credits the drug daraxonrasib with shrinking his tumor volume by 76% over the last four months.
At the time of his diagnosis, he was told his life expectancy was three to four months — a timeframe he has narrowly surpassed.
"So maybe I'm going to crank and live a year instead of a handful of months, and I'd feel incredibly blessed," said Sasse.
Asked what changed, he attributed it to "providence, prayer and a miracle drug."
Sasse, who is deeply committed to his Christian faith, said he has prayed for a miracle, but it's "not my biggest prayer."
"We're all mortal. We're all on the clock. We're all going to be pushing up daisies eventually, and I think wisdom requires us to grapple with our death and our finitude early," he said.
He also suggested that his diagnosis has made him more cognizant of his own finiteness.
"Death is wicked. Death is evil. Death is not how it's supposed to be," he said. "But it's a touch of grace because it forces me to tell the truth."
He continued: "And the lie I want to tell myself is that I'm the center of everything. And I'm going to be around forever. And I can work harder, and store up enough, that I can atone for my own brokenness. I can't."
Sasse on leaving behind his family
Sasse and his wife Melissa have been married for 31 years. He said they will "be apart for a time," but "she's tough and gritty and theologically rooted, and she's going to be fine."
They have two adult daughters, ages 24 and 22, along with their "providential surprise," a 14-year-old son. Asked how he is processing leaving his family behind, Sasse described some of the milestones in his children's lives that he will likely miss.
"I want to walk [my daughters] down the aisle when they get married," he said. "That's not likely to be. That's not the math on my time card."
He said his teenage son is also "going to be fine," and will have "other wise men and women to put a hand on his shoulder."
"But I'm super bummed to not be there at 16 and 18 and 20 years old in his life," he said. "I want to give him more advice than he wants, and I want to put my arm on his shoulder, that arm on his shoulders to get taller."
Sasse's parting wish for the U.S.
Pelley asked Sasse whether he has a "parting wish" for the country.
"I think we need to have more deliberation about our mortality and our finitude to therefore get back to wisdom about what living a life of gratitude looks like," he said.
He added: "I'd like a lot more dinner tables to turn off the devices, put them out of the room, pour a big glass of wine, break bread together, and wrestle with some really grand questions about what you're building for your family and your next generation."
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