From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.

How would you live if you knew when you were going to die?

When Ben Sasse announced his diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer last December,

he called it a death sentence.

But he noted that he'd had one before the cancer, too.

We all do.

SAS served the state of Nebraska in the U.S. Senate for eight years,

as a high-minded and, by his own account, sometimes ineffectual conservative.

Then he quit politics to become president of the University of Florida, pursuing a different model of civic reform.

Now he's facing mortality.

For SAS, the advance of his cancer has brought clarity,

sharpening his focus on his wife and three children and the God whom he expects

to shortly meet. At the same time, he's doing a lot of talking. He's running his own podcast,

entitled Not Dead Yet, and he's doing interviews like this one about what life is like on the threshold of the undiscovered country.

Ben Sasse, welcome to interesting times.

These are interesting times. Good to be with you, Ross.

I want to start with an important question, which is, why are we here?

And I don't mean why we're here in this physical location.

We're taping this in Austin, Texas.

And I also don't mean the cosmic question.

I think we'll get to that at the end.

But here taping this conversation, because people facing a terminal diagnosis have a lot of options, travel the world, scratch items off the bucket list, seek out obscure therapies in Western Tibet, just hunker down and spend time with their families. And this is not the first interview you've done. Let me put it this way. You've chosen

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