Ben Sasse Shares the ‘Clarity’ His Cancer Diagnosis Gave Him During Frank Talk on NYT Podcast

Photo via Ben Sasse on Facebook.

Former Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) shared his thoughts about the “clarity” he had earned from his cancer diagnosis last year during a frank one-hour discussion on The New York Times podcast, Interesting Times.

Sasse, 54, represented Nebraska in the U.S. Senate from 2015 until 2023, when he left to serve as the president of the University of Florida, a position he held until he stepped down in July 2024, citing his wife Melissa Sasse’s “recent epilepsy diagnosis and a new batch of memory issues.”

Last December, he broke the news that he had Stage IV pancreatic cancer in posts on his Facebook and X accounts, writing, “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”

“Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do,” he continued, writing about how he knew it would be hard but he was determined that he was “not going down without a fight” and was inspired by his faith, family, and friends. Since then, Sasse has launched his own podcast with Chris Stirewalt, Not Dead Yet, and has made multiple other media appearances to talk about his experiences.

During Sasse’s interview with Ross Douthat for the Times podcast, he revealed that his cancer had already spread by the time of his diagnosis and was in multiple areas of his body, and that the oral cancer treatments he had received had caused bleeding and disrupted his skin growth, leaving him with visible facial scarring.

Screenshot via The New York Times.

In an article titled “How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying: The former senator wants to heal the America he’s leaving behind,” the Times shared the video of Sasse’s chat with Douthat along with a transcript.

Sasse joked that his podcast title was because he was a Monty Python fan and had been “looking to do I.P. theft” on the infamous “Not Dead Yet” scene from the British comedy troupe’s movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He told Douthat that he originally got his diagnosis after he was experiencing “a ton of back pain” while training for a triathlon, and went to the doctor, eventually getting a referral to a GI specialist, who did some scans and then called him with the tough news that his torso was “chock-full of tumors.”

The former senator said he was told from the beginning of this diagnosis that it was “pancreatic cancer — Stage 4, already metastasized. They told me right away on Day 1, ‘This is not operable, you’re way post-surgical.'”

Over the next few days he would learn that he actually had “five forms of cancer: lymphoma, vascular, lung cancer, bad liver cancer and pancreatic cancer, where it originated. So, it was pretty clear that we’re dealing with a short number of months left to live.”

The doctors said his diagnosis was “a definite death sentence, but there are some clinical trials that could extend life a little bit,” said Sasse, and after some more testing, he was “admitted to a clinical trial at M.D. Anderson Houston, and we’re delivering super poison to my tumors and trying to beat the hell out of them.”

The drug he is on is “a nasty drug,” said Sasse, which “causes crazy stuff like my body can’t grow skin and so I bleed all out of a whole bunch of parts of me that shouldn’t be bleeding.”

“Yeah. You look terrible,” Douthat replied.

“Thank you,” said Sasse.

“How do you feel?” Douthat asked.

“I feel better than I deserve,” said Sasse.

Sasse described his pain the day of the interview as a four out of ten, an improvement from the eight it had been previously, but said the burning feeling on his face and skin was “nuclear.”

In another noteworthy segment, Sasse shared how the treatments were significantly shrinking his tumors, but that did not change his terminal diagnosis, and yet he was hopeful it would both give him more time and help researchers find better treatments for future pancreatic cancer patients.

Sasse talked at length about his political career and how he had ended up crosswise with his own party as the GOP shifted with President Donald Trump’s rise, describing himself as very conservative policy-wise but more moderate “on a dispositional and tonal level” because he “didn’t spend time going on the angriest tribal media channels to say that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.” and other conspiracy theories that “became a really important marker for people to say, ‘I really dislike those other people.'”

“By the end of 2015, I was a little bit in trouble with my party at home for not hating Democrats enough,” said Sasse. “And I was like, ‘But I don’t. There are 330 million Americans.'”

He bemoaned the struggle for “normie” politicians to get traction in the current media environment dominated by both sides trying to “find some nut job” among the opposition party to attack, which results in a “delusional othering of the rest of your community,” but still expressed hope that people “will figure out how to have discussions in spite of all of the noise of social media chaos, of a lot of lying and a lot of screaming, and just a whole lot of conspiracy stupid all across the continuum,” and “how to tune out more of the fan service crazy that says only bad people are at the other end of the continuum.”

Watch the full episode here.

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