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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Is underrated because, first of all, he's the best shooter in the history of a really important game. And second of all, he's a guy who got KD to come to the team by saying, I think Durant said there'll be too many, not enough shots for both of us. And Curry said, I don't care. I'm a point guard. I want my team to win. I mean, the low ego on that guy is breathtakingly important. And right now in our superstar culture, we think you're supposed to do what you've always done, which is put up the kind of numbers he put up. And he wanted his team to win, and he was a contributor. I think he's a special, special guy.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether you're really primarily a teacher or whether you're primarily a researcher. So I want a real pluralization of these forms.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now let's measure them based on both cost effectiveness and educational efficacy or effectiveness. As you'd expect, that all online is the cheapest, hybrid is middle, and all in person is the most expensive. But counterintuitively, at least to me, hybrid was the most educationally effective, then all in person, then all online. Well, why is that? Turns out what the hybrid gets you is it gets you high frequency, low-stakes quizzing, where individual students are disaggregated and professors figure out what students are bottlenecked on what things. You still have an interpersonal relationship. You have a place to go to have the tutorial, which will free you from your bottleneck, but it turned out the IT added lots and lots of value. I don't think you're going to get to that kind of differentiation by program type through the traditional model of just more and more administration and all faculty being treated the same way.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To brag, look how great we are. We have a 40. Turns out there's some data on this, and the student experience at 40 to 1 and 30 to 1 is just not different at all. Because 40 to 1 is well beyond a seminar feel. And so there are five nerds that talk all the time in a 40-to-one class or in a 330 to 1 class. And in both cases, the feedback loop of the professor so that she or he understands what students are learning or not is not well represented by the five kids who talk all the time. And so we started looking at what if you had all online delivery of accounting classes, all in-person or hybrid?”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we have nearly enough forms of higher education in the US. I think we pretend that we have one model of higher ed. We actually have a handful of models, but we need dozens and scores of different types of institutions. So first of all, I think we should recognize that the teaching mission of a liberal arts college and the research mission of a large university are really, really different things. And we should admit that. Different faculty have really different strengths and weaknesses, and we should admit that. One of the things that I learned, and this is not directly on your point of administrative cost, but there's sort of an adjacency here. The college that I took over had accounting as it's, I think, fourth largest major. And we used to brag at this liberal arts college that happened to have a pretty strong set of business programs, and accounting in particular was large.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other economic disruptions when you had technological substitution creating push from the farm and pull to the city, that wasn't one 45-year-old farmer laying down his tools or her tools and moving to the city. It was 55 and 60 year olds recognizing that they're 15 and 20-year-old kids were not going to have the same life they had and they were going to leave and go to the city. We're going to have intra-generational work disruptions and a shortening duration of jobs forevermore. And that's new. And in the sharing economy is a place where you find people that are actually thinking about that.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partly, again, I have little kids and I want them to suffer. And so I take them with me to work on the farm or on a ranch. But it's pretty easy in Nebraska to figure out ways to do ag labor. It's tough to find ways to work with people who have modern knowledge economy jobs and learn from them. And so that's why I want to play on the sharing economy to learn a lot more about it. And I think people understand that we're going through a massive disruption in the nature of work. This is unprecedented in human history to have people who are going to be 40 and 45 and 50 and 55 and get disintermediated not only out of their job and out of their firm, but out of their whole industry. That's never happened before. Bill Gates' way of talking about it is this is the first massive intra-generational economic disruption.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People like to know in advance before they get the charge when you're picking up people after the football game or after tailgating. It's amazing how frank they'll be if all of a sudden they find they have their senator as their driver for nine minutes and they'll tell you what they're worried about. I tend to view voters very similarly to the way I thought about who my audience should be when I was writing a dissertation which is assume that the people you're writing for are a lot smarter than you are, but that they know nothing about your topic, right? I think it's a useful way to think about complicated policy discussions. Assume that the voters are a lot smarter than we are, that they're wise, but that they're not immersed in the detail day to day. And so you need to figure out how to telescope in and out at the level of detail you want to talk about. And I'm very fascinated by work. I think it's a fundamental anchor of human identity. And I, instead of just doing town halls with my constituents, I like to work with people. So I do lots of agle.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Uber Well, I mean, first of all, I've tended to drive around Nebraska football games. And so I'm often letting people know that it turns out Uber has $150 surcharge if you vomit in the back of a car. That's a market mechanism. You still got high ratings. That's right.”
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 currently have an argument with Senate Ethics Committee, so I'm kind of on suspension from Uber. But my Uber writing, by the way, is outstanding. It's a 10,000. People tell me it's the best Uber rating anyone has ever had.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One million people in Syria on the eve of their civil war today, about 11 million of 21 million people have been displaced from their homes, half beyond the borders and half basically amassed on their northern and southern borders. Jordan is always in danger of falling right now because of the pressures of the Syrian refugee crisis into their country. King Abdullah will tell you that there are lots of local communities, lots of school districts in Jordan that have more Syrian kids than Jordanian kids in their schools. Think about what that would be like in the communities where you live if all of a sudden you had a majority of kids from a different country. So that's really why Israel becomes a stop-off point on that. There's a lot more we could unpack. I think the reason I reference it in the book is because of the 17-year-old kid serving in the IDF running missile installations.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Countries, and we act like there are 200 countries in the world that are really similar. There are about 140 countries on the globe that have a monopoly on violence within their borders. And there are about 60 places that are more like Libya or Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan, where there really isn't a monopoly on violence with the government. And so that distinction that most Americans learned after 9-11 between al-Qaeda and the Taliban is operative in lots of places in the world. We were not attacked on 9-11 by the Taliban. We were attacked by Al-Qaeda. But Al-Qaeda is only possible because the Taliban didn't really control their territory. And in these ungoverned spaces, organizations that are not states but can have a global reach emerge. I think we need a strategy for how we think about all these places. We don't have a strategy for Syria right now. The biggest humanitarian, the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.”
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'm mostly, I mean, Israel is a place that believes in human rights and the rule of law and a whole bunch of things that a lot of their neighbors don't believe in. And so when I'm going to visit troops at different places, Israel's just a place that we end up stopping coming and going and have meetings with the prime minister and other folks in the parliament. So I'm not there for reasons related to religion in public life. I'm there because I don't think we have a national security strategy for an age of cyber and jihad where if you're like we are when we teach our kids about the world or we're talking about something on the global stage and a new country's name comes up, we get out of globe and you spin it around and we make our kids find the country we're talking about and look at their neighbors and think about who their trading partners are, think a little bit about the culture and the history and the geography. But one of the downsides of that is you look at a globe and it has borders around 200.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It turns out Ohio and Jordan are really similar. I want to be sure I understand what we're working on in terms of developing a national.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're more fun than I am. Your kids are different ages than mine. Yeah, mine are 15, 13, and 6. So when I travel, I travel almost exclusively for national security reasons. And when we have as many troops deployed as we do in the Midwest, and I serve on the armed services committee, I'd say Midwest, that's where I'm from. And we have as many troops deployed in the Middle East as we have. I feel three.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that's why I go. I think I go because, again, one of five people who's never been a politician before in the Senate, I've been there two and a half years, and so I do a lot of congressional delegation trips. I've got little kids and I want to be with them as much as I can. I go because it's...”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the religious components were to a political ideology, because I don't think we made a choice about ideology in the 2016 cycle. I think we sort of made a choice that was about a lot of folks saying, burn the place down and let's just see what happens, because I don't like the direction we're headed now.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cycle on the Republican side as partly legacy of a 2012 moment where Mitt Romney had difficulty closing the deal because of the way Ron Paul was able to stick around. And so the party changed a bunch of the rules so there would be easier consolidation. Why do I say all that? I say that because I think that you have to understand the 2016 primary as one thing on the Republican side and the Republican Party is too vacuous of what we stand for right now. And so it was ripe for a hostile takeover. That happened. And then you ended up with what was perceived as a binary choice for a lot of voters between two candidates that were not viewed as very trustworthy. And so then you end up with a general election choice that is not a big vision choice. And so I don't know how you would go the next level down and talk in great detail.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why are you a Democrat? Something like 70% of the people begin by talking about why the other party is so much worse than your party, right? So these parties don't know what they stand for, and they surely can't communicate it, and they definitely can't communicate it in a constructive, positive, winsome way. And so that's the starting point for the election cycle of 2016. And so I think both parties were ripe for a hostile takeover. And if you think about 17 candidates in the Republican primary, you went a long way into that cycle before the president, now president's numbers ever got anywhere near 40. And at that same point, Bernie Sanders is getting 45% of the Democratic vote, and he's not a Democrat, right? So both parties were very ripe for hostile takeover. And then I think you have to understand some of what happened in the 20s.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really A bit. I don't know that there's any way we could do justice to a question that beg in under a couple of hours, but maybe just a few big glosses. I think that both of these political parties are almost completely intellectually exhausted. I don't think either party can articulate a vision for America that's five or ten years future looking right now. So when you ask the American people, do you identify more with the Republican Party or the Democratic Party? And if you don't give them the option to say none of the above, 46% of people still interrupt to say none of the above. That's stunning, right? So basically there are 29% Democrat leaning, 25% Republican leaning, and 46% refuse to answer your question. If you're of the party of Lincoln, as I am, that's really scary because our 25% are lots and lots older than the Democrats 29%. And then when you ask, you drill down on the 54% who are willing to answer and you say, and why are you Republican?”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And before you leave that, I just want to say, because a lot of the stuff that we might talk about later tonight, I think the 1960s still produce a hangover for almost every fight we have today. And if you think about the long 1960s, it is amazing. There have only been four truly gigantic landslides in the history of presidential politics in America, defining a big landslide as somebody winning more than 60% of the popular vote. That's only happened four times in U.S. history, but two of them were LBJ in 64 and the Nixon in 72. That swing in eight years from a landslide one way to a landslide the other is really amazing and you can only understand that if you understand how disruptive the 1960s were in community after community across the US.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“declared illegal in America. There was actually no such effort. There was no Madeleine Murray O'Hare. The FCC was never considering making religious In American life in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, that's really quite interesting and was scary to lots and lots of people. And I personally have no interest in prayer to the unknown God in schools in the 1960s. For theological reasons, particular commitments that I have, abstractions about that don't interest me very much, but I have lots of sympathy for why people thought forces well beyond their control were making decisions that affected the local. And so I think the realignment that ultimately came to full fruit in 1980 has lots of variables that we have to understand against the backdrop of international understandings of the Cold War brought home to local communities in the U.S.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our present moment and how we got to this place by understanding that in the Cold War, grassroots America looked at Soviet communist expansionism as a threat not just because of centrally planned economics, but because of a fear that Soviet atheism was going to be enforced in certain kinds of ways that might expand into the world and ultimately forcibly secularize lots of different institutions in American life. And so, for instance, one of the chapters in my thesis is about a letter writing campaign to the FCC in the 1960s and 1970s that is arguably the largest letter writing campaign in the history of the English language that almost nobody knows anything about. More than 30 million people, Americans, wrote letters to the FCC to protest the fact that Madeleine Murray O'Hare was going to get religious broadcasting to claim”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, thank you for giving me lots of room to knock. I wrote on the realignment of domestic politics 1950 to 1980 in light of the Cold War. The title is something like The Anti-Madeleine Majority named for Madeleine Marie O'Hare. Secular left religious right and the rise of Reagan's America. I think the realignment of social conservatives and a lot of old Democrats into the Republican Party, particularly in the South and in the Midwest, had many, many factors that drove it. And if you listen to academic historians, usually the story is very quickly reducible to one factor and one factor alone, and that's backlash against the civil rights movement. And I think there's a whole bunch of structural and personal racism in America that needs to be confronted and some of the realignment does relate to backlash of civil rights movement. But the story is actually lots more complicated than that. And I don't think we've done a good job of understanding”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like every grad student, I wrote a 520 page dissertation because I didn't have time to write a 220 page dissertation. That thing is woefully under edited. Sorry, brother.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sort of mixed on the Turner thesis, but the idea of a frontier, I think David Brooks has done some really interesting stuff talking about the way Americans have historically looked to the future in ways that there's clearly a transition happening right now where there's enough worry that we have a lot of looking to the past. The way we talk about deindustrialization is a pretty good example. The vast majority of transformation of industrial economy jobs is because of technology. And we're pretending it's because of trade because it's easier to come up with a way to try to demonize somebody. So I worry that there's not enough looking to the future. We need a lot more shared vision about what those big opportunities of things we can build together are.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here I could tap this guy named Tyler Cowan, who has an interesting new book about a lot of our SAP dynamism at the present moment. And so I think the absence of a clearly defined set of strategic choices around an ex-frontier is one of the things that leads to a real worry about declining ambition for lots of folks.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, I don't think we're thinking about the exurbanization of America as a reclustering around 100 to 250 towns in the country or cities, but that's really a lot of what's happening right now. So there's no wisdom there, but there's analytics because you can see a lot of places in Nebraska that are rapidly going to shrink when this generation dies.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much they're shrinking because we're unable to account for the age migration inside the county. In most of our counties, again, 70 plus of 93 that are shrinking, the county seat is actually growing. So think about that. The county shrinking, but the county seat is growing. What's really happening is 6570 and 75-year-old farmers are moving to the town where they go out to dinner or where they play golf or where the assisted living facilities are because they're going to age and they're going to retire in the community they're from. But technological substitution for labor on these farms is that we're getting, I live in the breadbasket of the world, we're getting more and more ag productivity out of these counties than ever before in human history, but with rapidly diminishing labor inputs. And so I don't think we've given much thought at all to what it looks like to think about these towns when you go from being a class B or Class C school to being a place that might not have many kids at all.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have 750,000 basically in Metro, Omaha. We have 250,000 in Lincoln and a few small towns that it's swallowing up. And the vast majority of the rest of the state is essentially built along a spine on I80 or on the Platte River, where you have 25,000 person towns that are where the meat packing plant is, where the truck dealership is, where the tractor dealership is, where the grain elevator is, right? So there's a regional hospital in most of these 25,000 person towns. That's basically the scale. And then all the other places are much, much smaller. So the third largest city in Nebraska, we often joke, is the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Football Stadium on Game Day, where we have 95,000 people. But you fall from there to we have a 40,000 person town, then a bunch of 25,000, and then these communities under 5,000. The vast majority of counties in Nebraska right now are rapidly shrinking, but we don't understand how”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to long ago before I was a politician. I'm one of five people in the Senate who's never been a politician before. I've never run for anything until I did this. And I used to feel really free to just say whatever I thought, even when I thought it was witty, regardless if it would get me in trouble. And I used to joke that we have 93 counties in Nebraska and 12 of them have people. It turns out people from the other 81 counties don't like that kind of joke. But I'm from one of those places. And I think it's kind of fun to think you're from a place that has 80 head of cattle per person. But when you parse Nebraska's 1.9 million people”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, whether or not it's a Year or not, and the culture. Is really different than most. Legislative bodies. Across the US. There are 99 of them. We have one, and”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just think we should let Tyler monologue for a while. This is good stuff, but I don't think I'm going to add a lot of value here. Just keep going”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'd have to define both progressive and ordinary, but I think your list, just the fact that they're Missouri dependent and we're not Iowa dependent means we win.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a kid, the joke was if you go back to Kansas, you have to set your watch back 24 hours, 24 years. I run the joke. My dad is going to be so disappointed. I didn't know you were going to ask that. I have no idea what the difference is. They have a lot of wheat. We don't have a lot of wheat.”
2017-06-28 · Conversations with Tyler · Ben Sasse on the Space between Nebraska and Neverland (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source