YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Sasse

lines on the record: 85
first: 2017-06-28
most recent: 2017-06-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Of my soul and the deep problems of my mortality could maybe just be solved if I could vanquish those other really bad people from the field. That's not true. And we're going to have to, as a people, develop the maturity and the habits of empathy creation. And that requires going other times and places, both physically and in a literary sense.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think one of the fundamental challenges of the moment we're at is that I think we believe that the digital moment will necessarily expose us to more and more diverse things. And I think what's actually going to happen is that we're going to become more and more siloed. And I think there's a real danger of tribalism in being able to at the moment that media is going to disintermediate. We're not going to have big common channels anymore. We're going to have more and more niche channels. It will be possible to surround yourself only with people who already believe what you believe. And in that world where you can create echo chambers, and when advertisers and marketers and Russians are going to try to surround you with echo chambers to only believe what you already believe, it's not going to be easy to develop empathy. It's going to be really easy to demonize the other and come to believe that the deep problems”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that you can't possibly become a really good parent without developing empathy. I don't know that you have to have clear cognitive categories to do it. There are lots and lots of people who are good parents who are empathetic, who maybe couldn't reflect on it. But since you're asking the question for people who are advice seeking, I think you need to self-consciously think about the cultivation of empathy and the travel point that you asked is another way of thinking about that is why it's important to become well read. Because when you go into books and you go to different kinds of stories, and obviously, you know, you've just written a really important nonfiction book and this is a nonfiction book. But one of the reasons why it's critically important for our teens to read fiction is they need to be transported to other times and places. They need to actually be able to see through the lenses of other protagonists.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, how about we talk afterwards and I'll give you the rest of my thought that is more directly connected to our primary selection process right now because I don't think I'll be able to get from that more technical answer to this synthetic helpful place to close. I think Tyler just gave me the hook is what really happened. He did it delicately, but I think he said a lot longer. Shut him off, turn off the mics. We're out of here.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are hollowed out, and I don't think politics can fix any of that stuff. So one thing we misunderstand is that our political problems are downstream from a cultural and an economic moment. A second thing, though, that I think we misunderstand is I don't think we've fully grappled, and I mean to say this delicately or humbly it sounds kind of harsh, especially as we're almost wrapping up. But I think we have a massive human capital problem in our politics in that I've worked in nine or ten sectors because I've done a lot of crisis and turnaround stuff. And I think we don't have the right kind of people serving right now. The vast majority of people in politics are kind and well-meaning, but you wouldn't pick them to lead lots of institutions through times of crisis right now. There's not a lot of leadership in our politics. That's not a commentary on any specific individual, but I think the biggest long-term thought most national politicians have right now is their own re-election moment. And that's not long enough.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it might take half a century or a century, and it's going to be really painful and disruptive as we go through this time. I think there's a fundamental crisis of loneliness in our time that we don't know how to think about. The average American had 3.2 friends in 1990. I mean, Aristotelian friends, people that, when you're happy, they feel happy, and when you're sad, they hurt, not because they choose it, but just because they love you, right? The way we parent. When my daughters or my son, when they hurt, I don't make a choice to hurt. I just hurt. I love them. The average American had over three friends 25 years ago has about 1.8 friends today, a having in 25 years. 40% of Americans have no confidence. I think we just can't make sense of how bad that A hurts and how much people are projecting onto politics, a hope that we could solve deep crises of the soul and of local community as neighborhoods and mediating institutions.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then let's figure out a way to save the fourth minute to say something that goes back to this shared experience of parenting, because it's a really important question, but I don't really want to finish on politics. So I will try not to use up all the time, and then I'll let Tyler give us some way to close. I can only speak about it from my experience because I'm new to this. And so I have not taken sort of an academic analytic look at the change in candidate selection over decades. I don't really know. I would want to consult with academics who've actually studied it with data. But pardon me, I do think that one of the things we misunderstand about our politics, maybe I have two things that I think we misunderstand about our politics. One, I think most of our political problems are downstream from culture. And I think we keep acting like...”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. But we have these animals in our life and they really do bring you carcass all the time. And it's happened for years and years in my life, but I'm still surprised every day when I go outside and there's a new dead animal on the stoop. And there's some dogger cat that brought it as a gift to me. That's 30% of my Twitter.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For people who are Doing something big, and I'm not yet. So I just, I'm learning how to try to have a public conversation about stuff that I think matters. But basically, my audience on Twitter is just like 20 buddies of mine, right? It's like, it's my college roommates and it's my dad. And I'm just telling stories about how ridiculous it is that my six-year-old just lost a shoe in the capital. And we're down a shoe today. And it's going to be rough to get through the whole day with that half an inch difference between the bottom of your foot and the other shoe when you're only this tall. It's going to cause some disruption. And I'm also, we live out in the country and we have a lot of animals. Summer Rs and some are just around our property. And there's that great farm debate about if you put out food and you know that some animals are recurring, they're coming back and now you're kind of feeding them. Do you allow your kids to name the animals? Because that's the threshold where it becomes a pet. And I don't want to admit that I own all these things.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at Ben Sass is just me. It's my personal account. It's not a governance thing. I have a press office that's at Sensas. But at Bensass is just me. And I'm a commuting dad. And so my material is really the fact that I've usually got a six or a 13 or a 15 year old traveling with me. And we're on the road and it feels like just our version of Digital Era Huck Finn. So I think I'm the only commuting dad in the Senate. We live in Nebraska and I come here every week, Monday to Friday. And most weeks I bring one of my three kids with me. I get home on Friday afternoon and my wife tells me which kid annoyed her most last week and they become my date for the next week. And most of the Twitter material is just that. And again, there's a tiny little bit of unum. I mean, I don't have that many Twitter followers, but whatever, 160,000 or something like that. And that's small.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Body and on generations without saying that sex has purposes. And there aren't two and there aren't 92. There are basically three purposes to sex, right? Sex is a covenant initiation and renewal ceremony. Sex gives you a different kind of knowledge of someone. You form a kind of bond with someone that's different than just a random person on the street. Sex matters. Sex is for procreation and sex is for pleasure. And there really isn't much more to it than that. And yet those three things should be differentiated because it's not just another contact sport. And I don't think it's helpful to have teenagers not know that sex matters and yet you can kind of understand it. Like, you know, when you're old and you look back on your sexuality, I bet most people are going to think it was basically reducible to those three kinds of categories. So I felt like I had to talk about it a little bit, but I wanted to duck the...”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to be drawn into culture wars anywhere in this book. Ken Burns has the great phrase that right now we have a whole lot of pluribus and very, very little unum. If you think of what Ken Burns' work is about, jazz and baseball and civil war and Lewis and Clark and the Dust Bowl and his new project about to come out on Vietnam, one of the things that he's trying to do is give us a common canon. He's trying to give us some shared experiences so the things we can agree on before we get to policy fights because policy and legislative fights, they just aren't big enough to form your tribe around. It's really, really lame to think that these parties are that interesting. And so I want more things that we can unite around as a people before we get to meaningful and often important policy fights. But if you're going to think about those things we can unite around, I don't want to get sucked right back into 1960s echoes of the culture war. And yet I didn't feel like I could do justice to a chapter on the”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrated. But if you think of the distinction between childhood and adulthood as dependency and then ultimately becoming independent, why adolescence is a glorious gift? As you transition from dependent childhood to independent adulthood. But it's impossible to not understand, and Rousseau obviously clearly understands that a whole bunch of the anxiety of this moment and the fact that your body goes from being a kid to being somebody who's able to reproduce, you got to have not just the apron strings moment of your six-year-old where you kind of realize you can be away from mom for six or ten or 12 hours a day and not die, but you actually have an emotional cutting of the strings with your parents that you can go from your family of origin to a family of your creation and choice and procreation. That adolescent transition stage is highly wrapped up in sexuality, right? And I don't think you can think meaningfully about generations without thinking a little bit about procreation. And so even though I 100% wanted to avoid sex, because I just think we don't have enough commonality and I didn't.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A plural marketplace after the printing press that then creates a First Amendment culture of free speech press assembly, et cetera. So those are the five chapters. The intergenerational chapter for a while I framed as discover the body. And really what I mean by that is that kind of dependency of youth and then ultimately the dependency again of your declining years and an awareness and honesty about mortality so much of unhealthy utopian status projects in the world are driven by a denial of mortality. Like we are mortal. You are going to die. You have limited options with your life. And you want to think a lot about redeeming the time. Healthy people think about how can I get more of the crap out of my life that I'm never going to look back and say, oh, I'm glad I wasted time trying to consume that frivolous fad for a time. No commentary on fidget spinners here.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The intergenerational chapter. So, again, the five constructive chapters are about self-consciously developing a work ethic. They're about limited consumption. It's sort of a soft apology for Stoicism. They're about intergenerationalism. They're about learning to travel. And they're about becoming actually literate, not just functionally literate, but repetitively liberate, literate, habitually literate. I think it was Twain, I can't remember for certain, but I think it was Twain who said the man who chooses not to read has no advantage over the man who cannot read. And right now, we live in a society of people who are decreasingly repetitively literate. The average American reads 19 minutes a day and it's age correlated. Older folks are reading quite a bit more than 19 minutes and younger folks much less than 19 minutes. And I think Gutenberg is the true father of America. I think the sine quinon of America is mass literacy, which led to competitive ideas, healthy challenges to authority.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not having any honest discussions about the entitlement crisis, right? We're not having any discussions about what it looks like to think about a world where 40 and 45 and 50-year-olds are disrupted from their jobs. And so we're not talking about big policy. We're not talking about anything that's five and ten years future-oriented. So how can we blame academics for not knowing how to help us facilitate those kinds of conversations? Because it would be stupid for academic programs in a university setting and professional schools to try to remake themselves, to come deal with the legislative small ball issue of next Tuesday. And that's really all we're dealing with most of the time right now.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big things obviously there are some on the horizon, and I'm not trying to lead us down a path of going there, but by and large, in the last four or five months, we're having policy discussions that have a sort of right to left continuum, but they're about really, really small things. We're not having any conversation about what it looks like to have a national security strategy for the age of cyber and jihad. Again, we're 28 years past the end of the Cold War, and we still think about national security primarily as nation-state actors and primarily by traditional war-making means when lots of the targets of cyber attacks in the future are going to be civil society, not governmental, and a lot of the attacking entities are going to be non-state actors, not just state actors.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Academic disciplines or humanities, for example. But I really can't blame the policy schools for that fundamentally because I think the bigger problem is that we don't know how to have a big agenda setting conversation about what policies we should be fighting over. I think, again, I'm happy that we're not talking about the president at all tonight. That's not one of the purposes of our discussion. But one of the things that I find strange from a whole bunch of folks on the left who are really critical of me is they say you're worried about declining norms and you're worried about X, Y, and Z and you've been critical of the president about this, that, or the other thing, or you're concerned about declining public trust. But look at your voting record. You end up voting with Trump 95% of the time or whatever they say. What's weird about that critique is it sort of just assumes that we're voting on important things. And that's not true, right? I mean, we're not having legislative discussions about”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I do, so I taught at the Lyndon Johnson School Public Policy School at the University of Texas for a handful of years. And I think one of the things that policy schools, business schools, law schools are trying to do well, but aren't as good at it as, say, med schools are, is integrate the fact that there's both theoretical and classroom learning and there's experiential learning. And we haven't figured out in most professional schools how to create apprenticeship models where you cycle through different aspects of what doing this kind of work will actually look like. And so there are ways that there are tighter feedback loops at a med school than there are going to be at a policy school. So there are things that I don't think we've thought nearly enough about ways that professional school models should diverge from traditional theoretical”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You didn't make a choice. There was no job choice. Job choice, I mean, some people were called to the clergy and, you know, law emerged as a kind of formal profession about 200 years ago, and there were a few traveling salesmen and some witch doctors as sort of early medicine. But by and large, it isn't until industrialization, 150-ish years ago, that you have job choice. That's new. In our policy discussions are decades behind in thinking about what needs to come next. And so I think some of this move toward socialism might just be a security seeking that's sort of an understandable response to the uncertainty of what it's going to mean to be disrupted at 40 and 45 and 50.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just not understanding that that means prohibiting a lot of private transactions that the two individuals involved in the transaction would like to make seemingly not necessarily with huge externalities. I'm not sure how closely connected that is to the experience of growing up divorced from labor, but I do think we need to recognize how unique it is to live at a time where the vast majority of our teens are growing up without having any meaningful work experience. And that has never happened before in human history. Hunter-gatherers and farmers, again, I mean historic farming from 10,000 years ago until industrialization, not the modern sort of high-tech ag economics of today. But historic agriculture was like being a hunter-gatherer in that you just inherited the calling of mom and dad and grandma and grandpa, right? It wasn't.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, thanks. Important question. The Sanders moment obviously led a lot of people to start doing some new analysis about this. And it's kind of amazing. And don't quote me on this precise stat because I'm sort of doing it from memory here and it's not something I've cited in public before. But I think I have a reference to something related to it in the book. I think it's something like 42% of millennials think that socialism is the most just economic system, and yet only 14% of millennials can identify what socialism is as an economic structure. So roughly three times as many think they're pro-socialism as have any real idea what it means because lots of what it means, some of it of course sounds great about egalitarian economics and there's lots of that that we can debate and find ourselves on a continuum not sort of a truly binary choice on some aspects of who owns what tools in a civilization but some of it”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then from that, we build a government that exists to secure those rights. But government's just a tool. The animating principle is this idea of universal human dignity. And it's intoxicating. And we don't celebrate it enough.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the American idea. I mean, fundamentally, we are blessed to live in an extraordinary nation where in 1787 there was sort of a near miraculous stew of ideas that came together to clarify in the drafting of the Constitution this belief in universal human dignity. We actually believe that 320 million Americans, well, we actually believe 7.2 billion people on the globe, but our primary responsibility as a government is to these three hundred and twenty million people. We believe that people are created with dignity and their rights don't come to them from government. It isn't the benevolence of government that grants you the right to free speech, assembly, religion, press, protest, or redress of grievances. We believe that these rights are inalienable. That's an unbelievable idea.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of my life, well, I think I spent my 30th year well. Well, it depends on whether or not I was pulling on oars for some cause that's bigger than me and doing it in a way that I didn't care who got the credit. And I want people on a team who, in that kind of Aristotelian sense, distinguish between deliberation, decision, and action such that you have a team of people who want to fight really hard when you're deliberating among strategic choices. You want people who really are not bashful about trying to lay out pros and cons of both their position and everybody else's position in the room and fight really, really hard. But then finally, when you pull the trigger and make a decision, I want people on a team who don't remember what side they fought for because this was the decision we made. And once we made this decision, we're going this way. And nobody's going to get credit because it was originally their idea or get blamed because it wasn't their idea. We want it to succeed because we're on a team. And that sort of big cause.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the only two talents I have from a work standpoint are I'm pretty good at sussing out when a strategic vision is missing and building a menu of choices about what strategic choices we should be making. What do we need to decide for this corporation, this small business, this not-for-profit, this college? And the second is, I think I'm decent at team building. And the reason for that is I only hire people who are big cause, low ego. And that pairing is hard to find. Great to be smart, and of course, there's a minimum threshold of how smart people need to be. But fundamentally what I want is people who want to be a part of a cause that's bigger than themselves. And they want to do something that matters. They're sort of always asking that deathbed-like question. When I'm, you know, if I get the cancer diagnosis at 50 or in my old age at 85, when I look back”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was amazing. Immediately every mom around the table said, oh yeah, that's it. If there's 11 or a 13 or a 15 or a 17 or a 19-year-old boy and you'd think he could take care of a one-year-old for 90 minutes and not have the kid die, he's mature. If not, he's immature.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to help teach my son as it pulls them out of the narcissistic experience of being thirteen or fifteen. He needs them. They matter and they learn about their own learning by doing that. One last point. When I was a college president, we used to host these sort of dinners for donors at our house. We would do these kind of rolling salons of eight and ten and 12 people all the time. And one of the questions that my wife and I started to ask people, and it was fun. If you were talking to a 45-year-old or an 85-year-old, how do you recognize whether or not a kid or a grandkid is mature? And one time we were hosting this party, and this woman said, oh, that's easy. For a boy, I know for sure. If a boy is old enough that I would trust him to be alone with my baby for 90 minutes, such that he might have to change a diaper during the time he's there, he's a man. And if he's not, he's still a child.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks. And it isn't just the older. I think I want to underscore your point, Tyler. It isn't just 13 year olds being around 60 and 75 year olds, though it should be that because the pattern of life is you start needing diapers and you end up needing diapers, right? I mean, we ultimately become dependent again. And that means there are a whole bunch of people that need us, that they need our help. And our kids shouldn't live the narcissistic 13-year-old consumer experience of thinking there's this sort of fountain of youth, and if only they could consume more, they'll be happy. All the data shows that that doesn't actually make you happy. And so there are older people who need us, but there are also younger people who need us. And it is a really good way to sort of get outside your own education to think about how you pass along education. I do think there's a benefit to our family structure providentially just happens to be 15-year-old girl, 13-year-old girl, big gap, providential surprise son. And it is a gift for my daughters that they have.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Morning, or whatever day you begin your work day or work week, do I think anybody needs me? If you think that, if your work matters to somebody, if you have a meaningful way to contribute to your neighbor, you're basically going to be happy. And if you don't have that, you're almost certainly not going to be happy. And right now, we're raising our teens, segregated from work, and therefore segregated from any clear sense that they're needed now or going to be needed in the future. And that ends up feeling a lot like cotton candy. It's pretty Peter Pan-like and pretty miserable.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this book, he's not. I would not be blaming millennials. I would be blaming we parents and grandparents that we're not helping think with our kids about the fact that we're not celebrating scar tissue with them. And scar tissue is the foundation of future character. And they are able to persevere and they need to develop a work ethic and they just happen to live at the richest time and place in human history. And so they live in a life. They live a life that's almost entirely separated from productive work environments. And that's never been the case of anybody who's ever grown up before that they didn't grow up around work. Well, one of the most basic things that makes you happy in life is thinking that you're needed. My work, our work is needed. Not does my back hurt at the end of the day or not do I think I get paid enough money or not as there's some annoying person three cubicles away who talks too loudly on his or her phone. But when I leave home on Monday,”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kids, they are hyper hyper age segregated. And as the father of 15 and 13 year old girls, I get that the pure slight of a 13 or a 15-year-old girl really hurts. But it's not really enduring if you have any wisdom, right? If your 13-year-old knows 60-year-olds and 75-year-olds and they've been through a lot of life experience, another 13 or 15-year-old girl saying something trite and mean to you, it's water off a duck's back if you have any perspective. And I don't think we're serving our kids very well by allowing them to live these hyper-age segregated lives. And I think that's closely connected to the core driver of, I think, our perpetual adolescence category, which is that our kids don't know the distinction in their belly. They don't feel the distinction between production and consumption. They know sort of aging through grades in school as their kind of productive work time. And then the rest of life is just different forms of consumption. That's really unsatisfying, and it's really unfair to them. Again, this book is not a blame-laying book, but if I were laying blame-”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you brought people from 300 years ago or 3,000 years ago to live among us now, if you drop them out of a time machine, I think the first thing that would stun them is just simply our material abundance and our tools and especially our digital tools, right? We have more built stuff than anybody in human history by huge magnitudes. And so I don't think you could possibly arrive here and not first be surprised by our material abundance. But I think if those folks stayed with us for a while, 30 days later, that would wear off. And I think the thing that would be most striking to people from other times and places living among us is how age segregated we live. It is a really, really weird thing to allow our 17-year-olds to believe that the world is mostly made up of 17-year-olds, right? It's strange. It's not healthy, and it's not true. And that's the way we raise our”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We ate really, really well because that was the beginning of the trip. And all of these shucksters who were trying to take your money would think that I was a German tourist in Prague for the weekend because the Germans would use Prague as their playground at this point. And so people would come up to me constantly, like just very surreptitiously showing you currency in their hand. It was illegal to be a private money changer, but all these people would just come up to me all the time and in German ask me if I wanted to change money. And I hadn't expected to feel in a place like Prague that there were folks that had this constant immediate east-west line having created Eastern Europe as kind of a playground for Western Europeans. But I was mistaken as a German all the time.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the summer, again, I was in Prague the beginning summer, and the winter was the train travel, so maybe I didn't budget well. So the beginning summer, I might have lived kind of high on the hog. And then at the end, I had no lodging for a couple of months. But in it better.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Prague is incredible because it wasn't bombed out. And we were there, this is two and a half years after the fall of the wall in Berlin. And I'm from a part of Nebraska where when I was a kid, parts of Nebraska, I live again about an hour outside Omaha and parts of our state are Hispanicizing rapidly. We have a lot of first generation immigration. But when I was a kid, the town that I'm from was basically 100% German, the big cultural divide in town is German Catholic versus German Lutheran. That sounds pretty tough. I never thought of myself as potentially looking German because everybody where I lived sort of looked like I looked. And when I was in Prague for the summer of 1992, Prague and Slovak republics were going to split in November. So it was four months later.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To live for those two months, which basically meant we had a backpack where you'd have peanut butter, jelly, and mustard. And then you would buy baguettes, whatever town you got to. We'd buy water and we'd buy bread. And we didn't have any money that we were going to be able to pay for lodging. So we quickly realized that whenever you wanted to be in a town for two or more days or some European city, you'd pick a town that was a 12-hour train ride away as the way that you would be able to sleep. And so you would batch towns. You would be in a city, if you wanted to be in city A for a few days and city B, you go A, B, A, B, so that every night you can take a 10 to 12 hour overnight train as a way to sleep indoors. And we did that for months. It was great.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was in Prague for the summer of 1992, and then I did a junior year abroad at Oxford in the fall of 1992, and then December, January, early February probably, two-ish months, I bought a Eurail pass. Back then you could buy, I think it was $600 for 60 days, limitless train ticket to anywhere in Europe. And a buddy of mine and I went and did that for 60 days living on the trains in Europe in the middle of winter. And we had no money. Like our $660 was all we had. And we budgeted, I think it was $6 a day.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kibbosh on how wild and sort of remote and primitive we thought we were because when they were kids, they used to go up into the northern woods of Canada fishing. And it was just a bunch of high school and college boys from Nebraska who would load in a car and drive up into Canada and literally they had canoes, sleeping bags. They had fishing tackle. They had fishing poles and they had a few cans of beans and a can opener as their emergency plan for if they didn't catch enough food, how they would live. And they would just go to remote Canada. And they would talk without any analytical categories to explain it. But they would talk about how they first understood social relationships and they first understood the little farm town that they were from and I'm from because they could contrast it with being at a place where there was nothing built. And I don't think we're helping our kids right now understand the need.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I understood English at all. And I think that's what travel is. This is not the Grand European tour for rich kids. This is about going 10 miles from your own home and spending time with people in another neighborhood. Or this is about going from the built environment where our kids are almost exclusively being raised and going and living in nature for a while. And I think you acquire eyes to see where you're from the first time. And this is something that I first came to see as a little kid. I live in the same farm dependent town in Nebraska, one of these 25,000 person towns that I grew up in. And when I was a little kid, we would go fishing in Minnesota and we didn't have any money. My dad was a high school teacher and a football and wrestling coach. And we would go stay at this rustic cabin that my uncle had in Minnesota and we'd go fishing. And I thought I was in the middle of nowhere. I thought this was the greatest thing in the world to go fishing with my dad and my uncle and my cousins. And my dad and my uncle always sort of”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a fish can't explain to you what water is like because he's never been out of water. And I don't think you can really understand where you're from until you go somewhere else and see a different form of social organization. And so this book is built, the first third is sort of stage setting about this new thing called perpetual adolescence. And the last two thirds is five habits that I think we should want our kids to acquire as they come of age. And one is learning how to have the eyes to see which come from travel. And it's very akin to why you learn a foreign language. I mean, you may be learning a foreign language because you're going to need to use it. But even if you never use your Spanish or your French or your Latin, it was still really good to go through the process of having to learn a new language and think about its grammatical structure and other vocabulary from yours because now for the first time you can see your own language. It wasn't until I started to learn Spanish.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Peter Pan is killing people. And he doesn't really care. He doesn't remember their names. It's a really dystopian thing. Perpetual adolescence is the bad thing. Adolescence is special. We need to figure out how to use adolescence. It's a means to an end. So that's what the book's about. And I am an Augustinian in my sort of anthropology.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is 100% not about politics, and it's 99% not about policy, the little bit that's about policy is that we need to uncouple schooling and education in our mind so we can pluralize the tools. School's one kind of tool. We need lots of kind of tools in our education. So it is not about politics or policy, but it's about this distinction between adolescence, which is a really special thing, and I'll get back to Emil quickly. And perpetual adolescence, which I think is really dangerous. And we're drifting into a place where almost all of our kids are being sort of not shepherded through adolescence, and therefore they're drifting into perpetual adolescence, and they're ending up stranded. And Neverland in Peter Pan is a dystopian hell, right? I mean, Neverland is not a good place. You don't want to get to the place where you're physically an adult and you have no moral sense. You have no awareness of history. You have no interest in the future.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some guy on Twitter a couple days ago sent me an apology because he bought my book Planning to Hate Read It. Which is a term I've never heard of, but he wanted to hate read my book. And then he said he read the vanishing American adult. And he said it wasn't what he thought it was going to be, which was he thought it was going to be some old man screaming, get off my lawn, which is just not what the book's about. It's a constructive project that our kids are being raised.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that people long to go on pilgrimage and sometimes it's for theological reasons and sometimes they're just kind of aroused.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When that opera was at sure as so to the drought of March hath pierced it in the rota and bothered every vine and switched liqueur of which Vertu and Gendrin is the flur I didn't know you were going to do that”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean the speech that she gave on the Senate floor when McCarthyism was just being tolerated, it's a really special speech. Everybody should go back and read it. I mean, it was a courageous move for anybody to make, but for a woman to make at that time in that place. And she was a Republican, right?”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's good. I mean, the truth is underrated, but I think just as a thinker, he's so underrated. I don't want people to start in this 500th anniversary of the Dorrit Wittenberg. I don't want people to read him through political lenses because this guy's going through an existential crisis where he actually believes that there's a law and that he's a lawbreaker and he's scared to death about eternity. So he's not motivated by politics, but in an instrumental sense figuring out how to navigate politics, he's underrated.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think we have to say underrated because nobody's reading it today. So, if they don't know that they're missing a lot.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comedian. All of a sudden, I thought you were going to be a comedian and begging the question to his critics. Oh, no. His physical humor is still, like every dad everywhere aspires to be able to make the faces he makes to get your kids to laugh. So he's underrated as a comedian. Turns out most of the people who've worked with him say that he's maybe a complicated guy.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source