Mitch Daniels

Summary

Podcast Summary: Not Dead Yet – Mitch Daniels
Hosts: Ben Sasse & Chris Stirewalt | Guest: Mitch Daniels | Date: June 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Not Dead Yet features Mitch Daniels—former Indiana Governor and President of Purdue University—in a wide-ranging conversation about gratitude, grit, public service, higher education, and authentic leadership. Delving into both his career trajectory and philosophy of life, the discussion weaves together stories of personal growth, public administration, and reflections on what it means to “redeem the time.” The tone is wry, warm, and deeply curious, with the hosts blending earnest policy exploration with playful banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mitch Daniels’ Return to Purdue (12:17 – 17:19)

• Context: Daniels has just returned as interim president of Purdue after his successor was recruited away.
• Leadership Lesson: “Duty, honor, country and wasn't anything I'd planned but I'm delighted to step in…My primary goal is to help the board ensure that this, this temporary arrangement is as temporary as it can be.” (12:40, Daniels)
• Higher Ed Trends: Daniels and Sasse discuss the shifting landscape of university leadership and how “big name schools” are “recovering their sense of balance and proportion and genuine mission,” including renewed value on free speech and academic rigor.
• Daniels on Succession: Praises Mung Chiang, his successor, as “a five star recruitment” and sees his move to Northwestern as evidence of positive reform trends in American higher education. (14:38)

2. A “Customer Service” Approach to Governance (17:19 – 29:37)

• Policy Innovation: Daniels reformed Indiana government with efficiency as a core value: “If you can find it in the Yellow Pages, maybe government shouldn’t be trying to do it itself.” (22:07, Daniels)
• Results: Massive improvements to Indiana’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles, tax refund processing, and general state services became “not the be all and end all, but a prerequisite” for trust in deeper reforms. (24:40, Daniels)
• Measurement Mentality: “If you're not keeping score, you're just practicing.” (25:33, Daniels)

3. Authenticity in Politics & the Daniels “Bus” Campaign (29:17 – 36:19)

• Distinction: Daniels prefers “RV” over “bus”—stressing Indiana’s manufacturing leadership (29:19).
• Populism Done Right: Living on the road helped him counter stereotypes of being “corporate or country club,” building genuine, trust-based connections statewide.
• On Image: Daniels insists authenticity—not “image management”—matters. “If it had been an image, people would have seen through it.” (40:28, Daniels)
• Reality Show Origin Story: Reluctantly agreed to “Mitch TV,” a documentary-style series (43:51–45:12) that became a cult favorite and exemplified government transparency.

4. Higher Education: Ivy League Obsession & Land Grant Lessons (32:17 – 36:19)

• Elite Focus Critique: “If higher ed in America wasn't careful, didn't make itself more directly relevant… it could wind up the debutante cotillions of the 21st century.” (32:17, Daniels)
• Land-Grant Mission: Emphasizes opening doors to students from all backgrounds, providing “a rigorous and relevant education,” especially in STEM fields. (34:26, Daniels)
• Rigorous Standards: Purdue distanced itself from grade inflation trends and grew its undergraduate population significantly under Daniels.

5. Fiscal Discipline & The Entitlement Challenge (47:00 – 54:29)

• OMB Experience: As OMB Director, he gained a reputation (the “Blade”) for fiscal responsibility and budget cuts.
• Impatience with Inaction: “I became less and less patient over all the years with political class in both parties who have let this problem grow and now explode and we're going to pay the price.” (48:19, Daniels)
• Entitlement Crisis: Despite clear warnings (e.g., Simpson-Bowles), Congress persists in delay: “…maybe Congress won't act till there's a crisis. Well, I guess they were right.” (49:00, Daniels)
• Skepticism on Political Will: “Every time someone makes a good faith effort to even moderate the promises…they get their head chopped off.” (52:28, Daniels)

6. Family over Ambition: The Unrun Presidential Run (54:29 – 61:15)

• Media “Boomlet”: Daniels describes intense pressure to run for President, but consistently put family and state priorities first.
• On Not Running: “My glib way of saying this is that the, the Women's Caucus voted 5 to 0. And, you know, I said, in our family constitution there is no override provision. And anyway, that was the stopper.” (57:46, Daniels)
• Keeping Promises: Refused to break his 2008 pledge to Indiana voters that governor was “the only office I ever ran for or want to.” (60:54, Daniels)
• Reputation for Integrity: “I just wanted to be one of those guys who…had actually done what he said.” (61:16, Daniels)

7. The Future of Higher Ed in the Age of AI (62:40 – 64:45)

• Curriculum Integration: Daniels envisions Purdue marrying technological competence with liberal arts–ensuring graduates can “communicate and think and detect truth from falsehood in ways we've never been challenged to do.” (62:50, Daniels)
• Survival through Adaptation: Predicts only universities that provide both context (liberal arts) and tech skills will survive shifting educational landscapes: “Institutions of 10 years from now will have to look very different to deliver that proposition.” (64:45, Daniels)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Service & Duty:
  “Duty, honor, country and wasn't anything I'd planned but I'm delighted to step in and temporarily [lead Purdue again].” (12:40, Daniels)

• On Authentic Leadership:
  “The coolest thing that you can be in life is untroubled by the opinions of people who you don't care about. Right. Like the coolest thing that you can be in life is a person who is true to the person who God made you to be.” (18:10, Stirewald)

• On Measuring Success:
  “If you're not keeping score, you're just practicing.” (25:33, Daniels)

• On Political Stereotypes:
  “I just wasn't about to be typecast as some sort of…insensitive, you know, elitist.” (30:00, Daniels)

• On the Entitlement Crisis:
  “The entitlement monster has been staring us in the face. There's no mystery about it.” (52:28, Daniels)

• On Family First:
  “My glib way of saying this is the, the Women's Caucus voted 5 to 0. In our family constitution there is no override provision.” (57:46, Daniels)

• On Authenticity:
  “If it had been an image, people would have seen through it. I think eventually people would have been right maybe to suspect that at the outset, but I think eventually they came to understand. Well, you know, that's really…who this person is and what his first concern is.” (42:38, Daniels)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Mitch’s return to Purdue & Leadership Transition – 12:17–17:19
• Inventing Customer-Service Government, The Phonebook Test – 22:07–24:40
• BMV Reform & Metrics Culture – 24:40–29:37
• The Bus (RV), Campaign Populism, and Mitch TV – 29:17–45:12
• Elite vs. Land Grant Universities, Higher Ed Trends – 32:17–36:19
• Reflections on Image, Stereotypes, and TV Docuseries – 40:28–45:12
• Fiscal Responsibility, OMB, & Entitlement Debate – 47:00–54:29
• Presidential Boomlet, Family Decision, Keeping Promises – 54:29–61:16
• Vision for Purdue & Higher Ed in an AI World – 62:40–64:45

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Episode Highlights and Takeaways

• Authenticity is central: Both in public service and private life, Daniels’ formula for trust and good outcomes relies on authenticity, transparency, and putting people first.
• Competence builds credibility: Effective leadership requires tackling tangible, everyday problems (like the DMV) as groundwork for deeper, more controversial reforms.
• Higher ed is at a crossroads: Land-grant values of access, rigor, and relevance matter more than ever, particularly as AI and online options threaten traditional models.
• Integrity in politics is rare and precious: Daniels’ steadfast commitment to his word—especially on not running for higher office—serves as a model of public trust.
• Personal legacy over political ambition: Family and local impact ultimately outweighed national ambitions, underscoring a life lived with transparent priorities.
• A vision for the future: The episode closes with Daniels’ insight that higher education’s future rests in an evolving partnership between technical mastery and the wisdom and discernment provided by the liberal arts.

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For More:
Find the full “Mitch TV” campaign series on YouTube for a glimpse at Daniels’ unfiltered, on-the-road leadership style.

Transcript

[Mitch Daniels]

Foreign.

[Ben Sasse]

Hi, I'm Ben Sasse.

[Chris Stirewald]

And I'm Chris Stirewald.

[Ben Sasse]

And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but only some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.

[Chris Stirewald]

However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to

[Ben Sasse]

live a good life, one with meaning, love, and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.

[Chris Stirewald]

Man, I'll tell you what, Ben Sass. This. This one is, I don't want to say favorite, but if you made the dinner party list for me of the people who I'd want to talk to and pick their brain and I find interesting that I've known through my work and I've know and I've observed. Mitch Daniels is very, very high on that list for me. And so this is like, I always enjoy hanging out with you and enjoy these conversations, but this is one that I've looked forward to quite a lot.

[Ben Sasse]

I agree. And I've been thinking a lot about Mitch being on here and the range of stuff I want to ask him. But real quick, before we go there, we don't do a lot of news on this, but I think we need to answer a little bit of listener mail that we haven't paid attention to yet, which is, Chris Pratt's yearbook problem has apparently been solved. Our listeners thank you. Thank you. Thank you. My question.

[Chris Stirewald]

My question.

[Ben Sasse]

You. You get the credit, and the listeners get the credit. It turns out we have enough listeners in his little town, the high school that he grew up in, and people are trying to send the mana a yearbook or two. And so I'm very happy that his yearbook needs have been met.

[Chris Stirewald]

Yes. I don't need to see my yearbook. Somebody sent me a photo, one of probably very few photos of me in the Lindsley school yearbook, 1993 or 92. And it came to mind the other day because a friend of my wife sent her a picture of her and her beautiful friends on homecoming court. I think homecoming home. Homecoming court. And they're Orange county, California, early 1990s. Just beautiful. Stunning. And Jessica is the most beautiful of them all and looking all good. And then I was caused. I had caused them to go back and find that picture of me and my friend Eric Carter. I'm wearing a bow tie, slurping punch as slurping punch. And the caption says, chris Dal and Eric Carter sample the punch at homecoming dance. Nice.

[Ben Sasse]

So euphemistic. Why. Why were you wearing a bow tie at homecoming?

[Chris Stirewald]

Well, you. Because you have to wear a tie and you had to wear a long tie with your school uniform. So if you want to mix it up, if you want to be wacky, if you want to be chicken, Back tie. Kicking back tie. And it's not going to get in the punch. It's not going to dip down into the punch. I think I started wearing a bow tie. I owned my first bow tie in ninth grade. I think that's right. And what I learned about the bow tie is I like a bow tie. But you can't. But you can't be only bow tie. You have to limit your. You can't give in to the bow tie all the time because then you're just a bow tie guy and people say annoying things to you like, hey, where's the bow tie? So I have to limit myself to no more than one out of every four, three or four tie opportunities.

[Ben Sasse]

Rucker has never been mentioned on this pod. And the similarities and dissimilarities between the two of you. Sampling the punch on prom night in your bow ties would be a tough.

[Chris Stirewald]

It was boring punch.

[Ben Sasse]

It was.

[Chris Stirewald]

It was regular punch. I'm sorry to say. I'm sorry to tell you it was not enlivened, just boring.

[Mitch Daniels]

The.

[Chris Stirewald]

Just me, the president of the history club, enjoying some punch.

[Ben Sasse]

You. You had a history club in high school?

[Chris Stirewald]

Yeah, and I was the president.

[Mitch Daniels]

Duh.

[Chris Stirewald]

Duh. What do you think? Where. Where am I going to meet all the fly chicks? Where am I gonna. Where am I gonna carve my. My legend into the skies? Except for the history club, Maybe a little Model un. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Keeping it sexy.

[Ben Sasse]

I'm hurting for us. For you. Okay, back to Mitch. When I was in high school, I noticed that you didn't know your exact high school graduation year for a minute, which I think punch has legs.

[Chris Stirewald]

If it was homecoming, then it was the year before, and Eric Carter was a year ahead of me, so it would have had to have been my junior.

[Ben Sasse]

Where is Eric Carter now? We got to do a Catching up with Eric Carter segment.

[Chris Stirewald]

Where is Eric Carter with his smart looking long necktie? May I introduce Mitch Daniels now?

[Ben Sasse]

All right, but I want to talk about wisdom in general. But it'll follow your intro.

[Chris Stirewald]

Well, no, I mean, do you have something about wisdom in general that you'd like to say that would be even better in 1992?

[Ben Sasse]

3. I guess I'm junior in college by then, so maybe my naive youthful optimism about the generations above had started to be shattered. But when I was a kid, I kind of assumed that Every adult was wise. It was just they were not all polymaths, but they were. They may have had specialized knowledge, but they had general wisdom. And as you get older, it's sad to realize that most of them, then we become that generation. Most of us don't really have generalized wisdom, but Mitch still does. So like getting to interview Mitch. He's only, he's a couple years younger than my dad. My dad's 25 years older than I am. My mom's 22 years older. But Mitch is about my mom's age. But I still think of him whenever I get the chance to be around him as any topic I may need help on. Mitch can be a good uncle. And so it's fun, it's fun to get to talk to him here in public, given his polymathic ways. But why don't you introduce those?

[Chris Stirewald]

Okay. Mitchell Elias Daniels Jr. Was born in 1949 in Monagalia, Pennsylvania. But he was raised in Indiana. He went to Princeton undergrad, got his J.D. from Georgetown, worked for Dick Luger in the Senate. The legendary senator from Indiana then worked in the Reagan administration as the basically liaison to Congress in the second Reagan term. He went to the Hudson Institute. But then from there he did what a lot of people in government cannot do, not able to do. He got a job in the private sector. He went to Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company. And instead of just being a hood ornament and a lobbyist, he actually did

[Ben Sasse]

the thing and he rose to ran business units.

[Chris Stirewald]

Yeah, he, he was the senior vice president of corporate strategy and policy. But he was also the head of pharmaceutical for North America, which are big jobs at a big company. But then George W. Bush recruited him back into government and he was George W. Bush's OMB office Director of the Office of Management and Budget 2001-2003. You may know the answer to this. It is said that his nickname was the Blade for his strict focus on fiscal discipline and budget cuts. And he, as I'm sure you will get to hear, his political career after that, going on to be governor of Indiana where he scored massive success and won bipartisan respect. And then when he left that he became president of Purdue University 2013-2022. And he is now back or going to soon be back in that job. It has been announced for on an interim basis while they hunt for the successor to his successor.

[Ben Sasse]

I view him too much like an uncle to call him the Blade in one on one conversation. But he was a badass. And when he was OMB Director President Bush. That's when I got to know him. President Bush had so much confidence in him that when he made a budget decision, it was officially appealable to the President if you were a cabinet official. I'd worked for Attorney General Ashcroft on some intel sharing issues after 9 11. That's how I first got into the government. But later I worked for Levitt, long term longtime governor of Utah. In the 13 years that Mike was governor of Utah, seven of 13 years, Utah was rated the best governed state in the union. And that was at Health and Human Services. And Mike Levitt, like Mitch Daniels, a wise, generally a broad minded, big shouldered, genuinely wise person in lots and lots of domains. Levitt had this really interesting idea about trying to start health reform before we had any legislation to do it. And he wanted to create this federal advisory board and he got vetoed by the Blade. And Mitch basically wouldn't let Levitt spend money on it. And so Levitt delicately but properly allowed, decided to appeal it to W. And so it was the only time anybody had even tried to appeal a Mitch Daniels decision. And I remember Mike Lovett making his pitch to W. And afterwards the President turned and looked at him and said, you got. Because it was a FACA advisory committee that we were trying to set up.

[Chris Stirewald]

What's a, what's a faca?

[Ben Sasse]

A Federal Advisory Committee of some sort. But there's an act, so the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

[Chris Stirewald]

And I can't believe I've ever said that you don't have a great sense of humor. That's, that's crazy that I've ever, that I've ever asserted when you've got material like that in the bag. I can't, I can't believe I ever said that.

[Ben Sasse]

I'm sure that the way to say that joke is a lot tighter and faster absent morphine.

[Chris Stirewald]

Well, you can just use the crutch. That's fine. The. I, I don't think I've ever asked you that. I just want to quickly do before we get into Governor Daniels. What was it that made you go to work for the Justice Department? What was the decision tree that made you go from private life, lucrative life success track life, to go into the government? What was that?

[Ben Sasse]

Oh, we gotta duck that and get to Mitch. He's more interesting. But I was actually abd. I was finishing my dissertation at Yale at that point and it was, you know, the post 911 moment. And there was still an assumption that we had lots and lots more planes in the air to use the, the shorthand. Of mid morning September 11th. And we knew that FBI and CIA would often have uncorrelated data sets on people like Bin Laden. And post the church Commission of 1974, everybody in the intel community thought you couldn't share intel international to domestic and domestic to intel to international. Sorry. And there are lots of ways that you could solve that problem. Patriot act gave some levers to share intel on bad guys abroad. In my mind it was always a two by two of us citizens and foreigners, people currently located on US soil or abroad. And if you had intel on people like Bin Laden, but they had already moved into the United States, should CIA data be able to flow back to the FBI to go and roll these people up before they took planes out of the sky? Those were the kinds of problems I got to work on.

[Chris Stirewald]

Okay, cool. So you wanted to help.

[Ben Sasse]

I thought you know, a World Trade Center Tower 345 coming down wasn't the desired public good outcome. All right, all right, let's go to Mitch.

[Chris Stirewald]

All right, let's get into it.

[Ben Sasse]

Governor Daniels, President Daniels, Director Daniels, Citizen Daniels, everybody's favorite boilermaker. Mitch, thank you for doing this. We don't do bios when people are around, so we've already recorded that before you got on here, but we're delighted to have you. Thank you, Mitch.

[Mitch Daniels]

You know, I'm glad to be here.

[Ben Sasse]

Let's start with the fact that this podcast never makes news, but we have a very trending news topic among us. The the former longtime governor of Indiana, former longtime legendary president of Purdue is again the president of Purdue. Congrats on your new job. Tell us about it.

[Mitch Daniels]

I'm just stand by equipment. There was a rather a sudden change in Purdue circumstance. My excellent successor was recruited away by an another fine university and the board was stumped for for what to do. And as I told people at the time, I taught the four Daniels girls to always keep a spare tire in a trunk. And fortunately the board had learned the same lesson somewhere. So you know, duty, honor, country and wasn't anything I'd planned but I'm delighted to step in and temporarily and one of my, I guess my primary goal is to help the board ensure that this, this temporary arrangement is as temporary as it can be.

[Ben Sasse]

Well, there are a lot of us who hope it's not temporary because the last time you were president of a AAU institution for listeners who don't know the top 71 research institutions in the country gather on a regular basis to compare notes and there way too much group think in the AAU and when you were last president of Purdue you shook it up a lot. So some of us hope you'll stay for a while. But tell us top items on your agenda and then I'd also love to hear you reflect a little bit on Mung, who was your groomed successor. I know he was recruited to a number of other top universities over the last few years and nobody could dislodge him. And Northwestern finally came and pursued and pursued and pursued and he said yes, but it's kind of crazy because he's a really thoughtful, reasonable guy who wants to do long term, healthy reform stuff for the sector and no disparagement here, but 24 months ago I don't think Northwestern would have considered a guy as interesting as Mung because he would be viewed as potentially too disruptive. So both, what's your agenda going back to Purdue and what do you think Mung's range of possibilities are at Northwestern?

[Mitch Daniels]

Let's start with Mung. I always considered him a five star recruitment. It was nine years ago that I chased him and was, was excited when he agreed to leave Princeton's engineering department, come here and be the dean of ours where he led, I would say my principal strategic objective in coming to Purdue, which was to build us into an even stronger contributor to the nation's need for engineers, computer scientists, STEM talent and, and then I thought that marked him as just the ideal successor and I was thrilled when the board made, made him their choice. Now all those qualities meant that he was as you know, in demand all along. And part of the equation in making this move to Northwestern is that his wife Kay is a wonderful person who's a doctor and a medical researcher and she has set her career aside for quite a while and this opportunity they have, a medical school we don't offers each of them a new challenge. So I know that was one, one reason that he said yes here when he had said no in other places. Let's hope Ben. That and I believe that Northwestern's coming to him reflects a, a pattern. Maybe I'm being wishful, but I think I see a pattern of, of correction here in which a number of schools, big name schools, the kind we pay probably too much attention to, but since we do, they matter our are recovering their, their sense of balance and proportion and genuine mission. So I think of places like Dartmouth, we've seen shock of shocks. The Yale faculty, a committee there argue for a restoration of more diversity of thought, more protection of genuine free speech, all of that, you know, out in California of All places they've rediscovered the sat. We never gave it up at Purdue University. And so you see, I think some recovery of balance or maybe just common sense and maybe Northwestern is joining that small but I, I think detectable parade.

[Chris Stirewald]

Governor, you, you can probably guess at the division of labor between Ben and me on this, which is he is going to ask series of questions increasingly specific and abstruse about education policy. And I'm going to ask about you because I have been, I've been, I've been covering you since you ran for governor of Indiana in what, 04. How long ago?

[Mitch Daniels]

Yeah, 04.

[Chris Stirewald]

So you're weird. You're super weird. In politics it is because may maybe

[Mitch Daniels]

in other dimensions too, but keep going.

[Ben Sasse]

No, no doubt West Virginia speak in the hierarchy of adjectives. Weird is second highest.

[Chris Stirewald]

So weird is. Weird is pretty good because the, the coolest thing that you can be in life is untroubled by the opinions of people who you don't care about. Right. Like the coolest thing that you can be in life is a person who is true to the person who God

[Ben Sasse]

made you to be.

[Chris Stirewald]

That's. That is, that is my thesis. You go from Dick Luger's office to the Reagan administration. You become Mr. OMB, Mr. Green Eyeshade, Mr. This guy. You, you set the model for modern fiscal governance essentially in two presidential administration administrations and you do all of this stuff and then you decide, I'm going to go to Indiana. I'm going to go back to Indiana and I'm going to get into retail politics and I'm going to go out and get into a pretty, it's a pretty rotten business. Just sketch out for us, if you will indulge me in what happens that makes you want to do the first thing and then what makes you want to do the second thing.

[Mitch Daniels]

Let me amend slightly your chronology there. You, as many people have over time, you sort of skip the longest period I spent anywhere, which was back in Indiana after service to President Reagan, came home, went into business, was there happily for 15 years, more or less it was home where we raised the kids, where they lived. I never left Indiana. I commuted as best I could to the OMB job. So I, it was always clear that to me and the family and everybody that when that service was over, I'd be back doing something. And you know, I would just say that it was not entirely my idea. There were a lot of people who were very restless. Our state had been pretty stagnant in, in a variety of ways. Not energetically led or imaginatively led for quite a long time. And you know, the, back then there was, there was this thing called newspapers and the so called paper of record in Indiana, you know, had won a, an award of some kind for a big series which was named State of Decline. And it cataloged, you know, in various categories, economics, education, public services, infrastructure and so forth. And which was something a lot of people sensed. And so, you know, I was coming up to a change of life of some kind. I wasn't going to be going back to eli Lilly Co. And you know, people who were worried about that were casting about and they couldn't find anybody better. So they asked me and I fell for it.

[Ben Sasse]

You fell for it.

[Chris Stirewald]

Part of the legend of you is

[Ben Sasse]

talk about the bus. Talk about the bus.

[Chris Stirewald]

We'll talk about the bus. That's fine. Yes.

[Ben Sasse]

No, don't keep going. I just want to make sure we, we foreshadow. Continue.

[Chris Stirewald]

Chris, the, the part of the legend is that you. Yes. As a, a big company CEO and OMB guy, this guy, that you come in to an office where there hasn't been that kind of rigor and that kind of stuff. And you talked about doing a customer service approach to governance, things like making the DMV work, things like focusing on basic quality of life considerations for Indianans. Right. Is the government providing a good return on their tax investment? They're paying money as a consequence of living in Indiana. Are we serving them in the best way? Is it true that you had a phone book test?

[Mitch Daniels]

Well, yes. I think what you're referring to is I used to say to people, if you can find it in the Yellow Pages, maybe government, I shouldn't be trying to do it itself. Maybe if somebody's doing it, making a living doing it, which means people are freely voting with their dollars that they're doing a good job of it. Maybe we should. Somebody does something all day, every day, maybe they're better at it than we'd be. That was. So we competed a lot of state services. You know, what you're talking about was an important theme. I wouldn't call it the central organizing principle of what we were there to do. What we were there to do, and we can come back to this if you want, was to raise the disposable income of Hoosiers by creating a much more vital and, and receptive and inviting economic climate. But what you're talking about is very important. From the outset, I thought it was a down payment that government could demonstrate competence, demonstrate that, you know, the gang There's a gang that can shoot straight down there and that the dollar is currently being confiscated in from free people and taxation, you know, are being well spent. And so we did make a huge emphasis from the beginning. We, we brought in a completely new cast of characters because our, our team, our tribe had been out for 16 years. That was a big plus. We brought in people who were, many of whom had, were proven leaders and managers of, of enterprises and we were very determined to fix things large and small. Not as the be all and end all but as, as I say, a sort of a prerequisite, sort of a fundamental that, that we had to achieve. We. The one I've said many times, the one thing people may remember about those years we out of so many possibilities is that we fixed the bureau Motor Vehicles. We, we went all, we got all over that right away because everybody uses it and it was a laughing stock. And I felt if we could, if we could fix that and things like a Department of Revenue would be another good example that were very visible and, and touched a lot of. Touched essentially everybody that the people might listen to all our crackpot ideas about big reforms of you know, on, in bigger context.

[Chris Stirewald]

Ben Sasse is going to have a question for you about yield curves or something here momentary. He's got, he's going to have a very specific question for you very soon. But I would just point out that many governors who were similarly situated to you in let's say a 15 year period over this arc of big political change in the United States did one but didn't do the other. Right. They said we're going to implement tax cuts and we're going to deregulate, we're going to do, we're going to do all of this stuff. We're going to go. But then they didn't tend to their knitting right then they didn't say like. And also we're going to make sure that we are holding the public trust effectively and that people feel like they're experiencing a good value so now shut up.

[Mitch Daniels]

They forgot to chew gum, right?

[Chris Stirewald]

Yes, they have.

[Ben Sasse]

See, that's good.

[Mitch Daniels]

It's not hard. You know, actually I think that maybe the reason some people shy away from it is it doesn't make a lot of headlines unless you have a big breakthrough success. Like we had a couple. BMV was such a shock to people that you know, by the time I left office I had a dashboard on the desk and we were measuring things all the time. I learned doing business with Walmart a long time ago. If you're not keeping score, you're just practicing. So we measure in government. You have to, because accountability in a monopoly is not to come by. Yeah. So you have to implant it or transplant it, I always said. And so we measured everything. And by the time we left, for instance, I knew that a tax refund was coming back in like 11 days instead of three or four months. I knew that a person who went to the, to a licensed branch, if they had to go at all anymore because of computer improvements and so forth, was in and out in nine minutes and X seconds. And, you know, these, as I say, these things, first of all, it's a duty. You took their money, you better try to deliver the service well. And secondly, it, it built, I think, built some credibility for bigger, grander things of the kind you were talking about.

[Ben Sasse]

Chris is mean, and he says that when I ask questions only about our children and the future and whether we'll be economically dynamic, it's supposedly too narrow and nerdy. But anyway, we will get back there fast. I really would love to linger on DMV just because I have so many Indiana and friends who lament when they move to another state having to give up their driver's license. Because what you did at the DMV actually became a kind of badge of we Hoosiers are people who are efficient or state government and we elect common sense people, people in the Mitch Daniels line. So there's a lot to say on the, on the dmv, but en route back to higher ed and future of education, I do want to stay on the bus for a minute. So the, the Ben centric annoying version of this story is I'm a small college president. In 2013 in Nebraska, I'm getting recruited into the Senate race. I had had the privilege of getting to know you a tiny little bit in W's administration. And so I think I will call my friend Mitch. What year did you take over at Purdue? 12.

[Mitch Daniels]

January of 13. Yeah.

[Ben Sasse]

Okay. So it is May of 13. And I know my friend Mitch, the former governor of Indiana, who had lived on a bus during his whole campaign, is now a higher ed guy at the same time. I'm just going to call you up and get life advice about how you ran your campaign. And I can't get to you. And I'm like, what happened to Mitch? He used to be a man of the people. And you've got people running interference and it's because your chief of staff, I forget her name. Somebody on your team knows that I'm looking at running for office and you had taken some pledge to the Purdue board that you wouldn't be involved in politics anymore. And so I'm trying to get advice just on how to, like how do I economize owning and running a bus all day every day? Because I want to do the Mitch Daniels bus campaign and you won't give me any advice. So I picked this podcast. We picked this podcast topic because I got a few bones to pick with you.

[Mitch Daniels]

Well, I apologize for that. You know, I did take a, I always called it the vow of political celibacy because this was a public university that I was coming to serve and I just wouldn't be appropriate. And, and so I did abstain completely from anything active and that touched on partisan politics. It wouldn't have extended to private advice. And so sorry that somebody got.

[Ben Sasse]

I'm teasing, I'm teasing on the earring of grievances.

[Mitch Daniels]

Religious about my vow. But. No, I mean, but you had the right instinct. You didn't need any advice from me. I do have to, I gotta correct you, I'm sorry to say. It's not a bus, it's an RV. And I, I stress this because we make 70% or something of all of them here in our state.

[Ben Sasse]

So. Elkhart.

[Mitch Daniels]

Yeah, yeah. Around noa card Indiana and recreational vehicles is a, is a sector of the economy. We sort of dominate. And so it was, it was a Indiana built vehicle that we, that we drove the wheels off of. But no, you've been then and when you ran, it was a very, not that long ago, but it was a very different era in which people who wore the Republican uniform were as, as was mentioned a little earlier, suspect for being corporate or country club or not interested in or connected to ordinary people. And so, you know, to me it was pretty straightforward, especially for a no name, first time candidate. Go out there and prove that's not true. And I think after 16 months going to all the places that nobody bothered to go to for a long time, we got that, that we got that message across and I, and it meant a lot to me to, you know, contradict that stereotype. I mean, I'm a hillbilly, grew up in eastern Tennessee and Georgia before we moved to Indiana. And you know, I, I just wasn't about to be typecast as some sort of a insensitive, you know, elitist.

[Ben Sasse]

Yeah. My defense of living on and off a campaign bus, which was also an rv, it just became nicknamed in the Nebraska press the Bennebago. So we called it A bus as shorthand. There are good versions and there are bad versions of populism, and there are less bad versions of populism. But the Buckley joke that he'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard has a lot of wisdom to it. And when you're running for office, you sure as heck want to be learning from people where they live, not the subset of people that dominate yelling at town halls. And so you kind of got to get into every community. And if you want to be a family person during this, you want to take your kids on the road. For us, it was for 16 months living on and off the bus. It was the best way to get to know all 93 counties. But I will pivot to back to higher ed, despite Chris's slapping. You said earlier we pay too much attention to the Ivy League. I agree. A couple of thoughts, questions on that. One, why do we do that? Number two, will we still in 10 years. And a subset, number three, maybe. What do land grants in particular have to teach us about the future of higher ed?

[Mitch Daniels]

Great, great and very central questions. It's not completely unnatural that we pay so much attention to them. It is certainly true that the large numbers of people who wind up in leadership capacities in the country come out of those schools very disproportionate, whether you look Wall street or the Supreme Court or, you know, Congress, I suppose. Now, will we still in a few years. I think less so. I, you know, I, I believe it'd be appropriate if we paid less attention. You know, somebody wrote years ago now that if higher ed in America wasn't careful, didn't make itself more directly relevant to the lives and then the economic prospects of its customers, of its students, it could wind up the debutante cotillions of the 21st century. A place where, you know, a few sort of anachronistic family center kids, sort of a finishing school thing, but not one that was particularly useful or therefore attractive to larger and larger numbers of, of people. And I think we're seeing a little of that right now. And so I think higher ed needs to scramble to here and there, modify or reinvent itself. You've been a thought leader about that and we need more of, of you doing that. You know, the last question, land grant schools. I became very imbued with the land grant ethic after coming to Purdue. I probably didn't fully appreciate all the reasons why when I first got here, but it didn't take me long. So the the mission of opening the doors of higher ed to people of all stations in life, young people of all social and economic levels, of providing them with a rigorous and relevant education. We teach everything at Purdue University, but 70% of our students are studying a so called STEM discipline, which was, this was the assignment to higher ed by Abe Lincoln and his allies way back agriculture and the mechanic arts. Well, the mechanic arts no longer mean the new plow or steam engines. Now it means, you know, AI and the, and the hardware and software that produces it and so forth. And so, you know, to me it's a, was an incredibly fulfilling mission to try to pursue. We grew this school by 30% from 28 to 41,000 undergrads today. I think we preserved a relatively high degree of rigor in what we teach. Great inflation has happened, but not nearly like it has at schools you asked about earlier. By the way, there's another, that's another example of some of those more elite schools trying to come back reality, you know, when 90% of all the grades given are A's, you know, what's a, what's an A mean? So sorry for the length of this, but these are matters very close to my, to my heart. And I think that, and you're already seeing this, by the way, if you look at enrollment patterns, small, very expensive private schools are struggling in many cases. So not the Ivies with their bulletproof multi jillion dollar endowments, but below that level. And there is a migration in the direction of large publics if they're, if they're producing the quality product.

[Ben Sasse]

I want to let the mountaineer in here on this topic because he's going to brag about his, his old home Mountain mamas. Sorry, I was struggling to find an adjective for the baseball fans, but they're the only people in the super regionals on this call.

[Chris Stirewald]

Some of them are mountain mamas. Some of them are mountain mamas. That's fine. That's fine.

[Mitch Daniels]

You know, I, you know, we, we spent a lot of time in West Virginia. My wife and I and the family have a place over there and our friends over there talk about holler honeys.

[Ben Sasse]

I don't know if you're doing it right. We finish, we finish all of our shows with a hot take quick round on nicknames for West Virginia women. It's not, not widely understood when we invite the guests.

[Mitch Daniels]

Well, then.

[Chris Stirewald]

You forced my hand. You forced my hand. Ben says, I wasn't going to do this, but you forced my hand. I knew that you were originally born in Western Pennsylvania, somewhere in the Steel Valley, what we call the Steel Valley. I'm from Wheeling, West Virginia, and you came from there. But I didn't know that you lived in East Tennessee. And I didn't know you lived in North Georgia. And I didn't know that you had a claim for the whole hillbilly firewall from north to south.

[Mitch Daniels]

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I was only born in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, down the river from Pittsburgh because that was my mom's hometown. She wanted to hatch me in the, you know, hometown hospital with it. But my dad was already working in Atlanta.

[Chris Stirewald]

Okay.

[Mitch Daniels]

And we went down there as soon as I was big enough to travel. So I know the area well because we were back there all the Christmases. The big thing, driving, whether it was from Tennessee or from Indianapolis later, two lane roads and so forth, a long drive. But when we would get the Wheeling, we knew we were on the home stretch.

[Chris Stirewald]

That's right.

[Mitch Daniels]

It was a statue of a. Let me be modern here, Native American.

[Chris Stirewald]

Yes.

[Mitch Daniels]

Maybe it's still there. And when my sister and I, you know, in the backseat singing songs and naming cars as types as they went by, when we saw that statue, we knew we only had maybe an hour

[Chris Stirewald]

to go, if you follow. So I am not a Southerner. I am a border state human being. And I had, I lived almost all of my.

[Ben Sasse]

Look at this othering. So much othering.

[Chris Stirewald]

I, I have lived almost all of my life in walking distance of Route 40, right? Yeah, yeah. And my mother is from Indiana. I lived in St. Louis for a period of time. So this middle part, this middle, middle band of the country is you, right? This is you. You're that sort of. I don't know, I think of it as Yinzer Plus.

[Ben Sasse]

He goes by Yinzer Plus.

[Chris Stirewald]

But I think of it as being a culture that's pretty pragmatic and I think of it as a culture that's pretty, as the kids would say today, based. Right. It's. It's a. Forbids too much grandiosity and it's bland. It's blandness is sort of the appeal. Talk, if you will, a little bit about how you maintained your image and thought about your image. This is a weird thing for normal people to do when you cross the line and you're going to go into elective politics. Right. So you had, you had an image that was. You were known to the people of these administrations and you were known to the people on Capitol Hill and you were known in that stuff and obviously you were known in the business world. And a lot of that is forward facing, right? A lot of that is what shareholders and what boards think and all of that stuff. But talk about how you thought about. And I'm not going to accept the answer. I didn't think about it at all because that, no one could say that. But how did you think about the image that you were presenting in public when you made the transition to seeking elective office?

[Mitch Daniels]

I don't like the word image if it, if it implies that it's something artificial or something other than, you know, what a person really is right now. But I, but I already said that I thought it was important politically and I thought it was. It would be important if we got there in helping people understand why we were doing this in the first place. And the why we were doing this was to try to create a much better climate of upward mobility in the state. I said over and over, and I said it, you know, in Republican events especially, I said, you know, we're proud of all the people in this room who have succeeded. You know, bless you all. But our first concern is the people who are yet to succeed and how are we going to build, you know, make this place one in which that's much more likely. And so that, but defeating that political stereotype that I talked about, which our opponents, you know, quite naturally expected. That's what we be. And I wanted to confound that. But. But also to. Because the essence of why we were undertaking this adventure in the first place had to do much more with the people in those small towns and those inner cities, the people I spent 125 nights overnight in their homes and all that kind of thing. And so that it. When we arrived in office, hopefully people were ready for the kind of actions we recommended, many of which were very disruptive and change disorients people. You're talking about the culture of middle. Well, part of that culture is, is an innate conservatism. You know, let somebody else try it first. And in fact, if you read any history of Indiana and whatever else they write about, they'll say that, you know, we're stubborn about change.

[Chris Stirewald]

Except for with popcorn technology. The.

[Mitch Daniels]

Yes, that's like RVs, we dominate popcorn.

[Ben Sasse]

You're right.

[Mitch Daniels]

But so anyway, I hope that's responsive. But that's, that was all part, part of my thinking. But you. I didn't like, you know, I, if it had been an image, people would have seen through it. I think eventually people would have been right maybe to suspect that at the outset, but I think eventually they came to understand. Well, you know, that's really. That was really who this person is and what his first concern is.

[Chris Stirewald]

And. And I'll shut up. But that's. That's sort of what I was trying to get at is that for people in public life, whether it is in their church or at work or. Or if they're running for governor or whatever, the idea of creating a different self or a new self does not work. Right. The people will see through it. They will know if what you're presenting is phony.

[Mitch Daniels]

Yeah, well, it can work. We've seen. I think we've got a lot of phonies in politics, but I don't. More often than not, eventually, at least people see through it. Let me give you another example. Some friends of mine liked what we were doing rattling around the state and all these very interesting, quaint and picturesque places and wanted to make a reality show.

[Chris Stirewald]

Oh, boy.

[Mitch Daniels]

And you know, this is 2003. I said, what's a reality show? They had to educate me. But anyway, I let them do it very. With a lot of mystery.

[Chris Stirewald]

You did not.

[Mitch Daniels]

I did. I said, you can't spend much money because it's gonna bomb. It didn't bomb. It developed a cult following. And I said that you kept doing

[Ben Sasse]

it shirtless, which surprised everybody.

[Chris Stirewald]

It's a weird choice.

[Mitch Daniels]

Not white, but, you know, you. So anyway, we did it and then we did it again the next time. And I also told them, if anybody. The first time somebody says, what's that camera doing here? This is over. Because I don't want anybody to think this is a stunt.

[Chris Stirewald]

This right way.

[Mitch Daniels]

We're campaigning. No one ever, ever seemed to be put off by that. So in the end there, I think there were 26 half hour shows and they just picked days where it looked like we'd be going somewhere interesting. Whatever happened, happened. You see people argue with me. You see people call me names. You see, in the early ones, you see, people don't know who I am.

[Chris Stirewald]

I had never heard of this.

[Mitch Daniels]

Yeah, it's they. Mitch TV. They're out there on YouTube somewhere. There's some really funny moments. You know, I'm killing flies. We get lost. I mean. But we also ran into some phenomenally. Yeah. Interesting people.

[Chris Stirewald]

I've been to Terre Haute. I know.

[Mitch Daniels]

Oh, host a megalopolis compared to where a lot of these shows are.

[Ben Sasse]

Anyway, this is where we. This is where we spend 20 minutes on French Lick.

[Chris Stirewald]

There you go.

[Mitch Daniels]

Oh, you know, it's probably in there. But the, you know, the. You probably Won't find too many other campaigns where somebody's put a half an hour of often embarrassing videotape out there for the world to see. But I don't think people could watch, though. You mean if you were trying to put on an act, right? Create a, as you say, image. I mean, it would never have. You couldn't have maintained 100 and whatever that was. 30 hours of live television.

[Chris Stirewald]

That's fascinating, Chris.

[Ben Sasse]

Just in case you don't know, Terre Haute is a metropolis compared to Woodburn, and we're talking east of Fort Wayne on Highway 24.

[Chris Stirewald]

My grandmother went to school in Terre Haute. I don't want to hear, I don't want to hear a bunch of sass talk here. My Genevieve Hinton went to school in terre Haute at St. Mary of the woods, back when ships were made of wood and med were made of iron. Okay.

[Ben Sasse]

I, I, from my childhood boy days, have watched people puking inside turn two at the 500 every year. We didn't have enough money for seats on the outside of the track where you could actually see the cars coming. You had to do it with your neck where they were pretty much by you, by the. You heard them and then you had to swing your head. So I can do Indiana geography trivia with you. Obviously, Governor, you see that I'm in a rock fight with Chris to stay on higher ed and I keep losing, so I'll just admit that I'm losing for another minute. He asked a fair question about image management to the degree it was trying to advance a policy agenda where you had to be building trust with Indianans that you cared about the issues they cared about. I would love to know when you were running OMB for President Bush and had never sought elective office before, and I know that you and I both share deep personal affection for W. I think we both recognize him as a really good retail politician as well, which very few people fully understand. I've got to imagine when you were sounding the bell on entitlement reform way before everybody else, I don't know what our current number is 38 trillion or something, but I suspect you were the guy saying, Whoa, if 10 trillion becomes 12 trillion, we're screwed. Two questions. One, did you change in your first year or two as governor in terms of your patience for the electeds having to go slower on topics like entitlement reform that don't break through with the median citizen as much and be much more policy nerdy. But do you have a theory of why we haven't had a Failed treasury auction on a Tuesday morning yet refinancing T bills because I don't understand it. When I said if 10 becomes 12 trillion, that wasn't a soft criticism. I've always believed entitlement crisis was going to create a crisis for the general economy much sooner than it has. And I'd love to hear your theory and evolution on why we haven't had that failed auction yet. Two very different questions. Sorry, Morphine.

[Mitch Daniels]

No. I became less and less patient over all the years with political class in both parties who have let this problem grow and now explode and we're going to pay the price. We, we moved past the point at which we could, I think forestall something very, very severe and, but that people cynically have frequently said, well, Congress won't act till there's a crisis. Well, I guess they were right in this case anyway and we're going to get one. You know, I think maybe that experience, I probably would have been my instinct anyway. But you know, Indiana was dead broke when we got there and I was very impatient to make, to get behind, get that behind us as fast as possible. It, it took a year and a half, it was a little longer than I wanted. But no, we, it was one of those things for which we wanted credibility that we talked about earlier because we passed the leanest budget, basically froze everything or cut everything with one or two limited exceptions. And, and, and then went to work on both, first getting out of debt and then paying off the state's bills and getting solvent. You know, three years later, four years later, we had a AAA credit rating which only handful of states had. But no. So I mean, I think you have to be impatient about those things. If I said competent service is a down payment even prior to that, you know, being a good steward of the public's money, once again, the money you, you took from people, you better have a good reason for it and you better spend it well or not spend it at all. Now why have, why isn't the crisis already arrived? Yeah, I'm a little surprised too. But you know, Bismarck said that God looks out for drunks, idiots in the United States of America. And so far he has, he or she has, we have this, what's it called, exorbitant privilege I think is the term people have used of we for now are the world's currency, be very inconvenient for people and in terms of why they're still buying treasury bills when we owe 40 trillion, you know, best house in a slum neighborhood, basically. So, but that's no way to plan a future. And you know, where are we 15 years maybe and 25 maybe trillion dollars ago? Erskine Bowles.

[Ben Sasse]

Oh, here we go.

[Mitch Daniels]

The most predictable crisis in American history. And that's still the case even though it hasn't quite yet arrived.

[Chris Stirewald]

It would have been malpractice if we did not get a Simpson Bowles reference into this podcast. And this is therefore Ben has brought us to a great achievement. I will just point out on this point and ask for your concurrence if you do concur. I think politicians have forgotten and we don't do politics here, but I do think that politicians have forgotten that fiscal probity is appealing to voters. Right. The, the idea that tax cuts are popular and spending is popular is true. Right. You can just look at California and you can say when you give voters plebiscites and say do you want lower taxes? Yes. Do you want more spending? Yes. But we have evidence in Indiana and we have evidence in some other states and we certainly have evidence in America in the 1990s that there is a political benefit, that there is an upside here, that if you can demonstrate to voters that you care about debt, that you think that the government should live within its means, that if you think that it's important to be prudent, that there is a win bonus there for advancing those issues if you arrive at

[Mitch Daniels]

the destination of fiscal solvency and stability and solidity. But people like the view. But you can, you can have a Rhett on the way there and most often that happens. And you know, the entitlement monster has been staring us in the face. There's no mystery about it. The everybody in Congress under surely understands what we're, what the corner we've painted ourselves into there. But every time someone makes a good faith effort to even moderate the promises, the unkeepable promises that we've made, they get their head chopped off. And that's, that's just the reality. I think one day when the crunch comes and it is, this is rectified. I, I think you're probably right. People say oh well, we should have done that a long time ago, we're better off now. But no one yet has found a vocabulary for, for doing. I wrote a fairly sarcastic newspaper column a few years ago, having written a lot about this. I said okay, I give up. We have to adopt the, the, the populist rhetoric of today. I didn't use that term, you know, and, and, and argue to argue for entitlement reform. And, and you know, I, I sort of paraphrased a lot of what folks say these days. You wouldn't believe what those SOBs in Washington, they've been lying to you about, lying to you about your Medicare. And, you know, you think that the money's, you've been putting this money away. That's not true. You know, now that's not the way Ben Sasse practice public. You know, life is not the way I would or could I. And I said at the end of the piece, now, you know, that's not an appropriate way but to, to win this argument. But on the other hand, the appropriate ways have not sufficed.

[Chris Stirewald]

We're going to get you out of here on time, I promise. And I know Ben has another question or two that he is not going to resist or ask you or six. But I want to ask about the, the, the craze, the Mitch Daniels craze that took place in American politics. And it was, there's boomlets and then there's boomlets, right? And the intense speculation, the national focus, and you had every reporter from Politico and the New York Times and the Washington Post descending on you and talking to you, Is he going to run? Is he not going to run? Is he going to run? Is he not going to run? And it was, it is attributed to, I've heard it attributed to Franklin Roosevelt. But the line is about the presidency. Who would want it, but who could refuse it, right? That. It's that people. I'm talking to two such people right here, people who are like, well, I wouldn't want to run for that. But, gosh, if I had it right and I could do it, I've been in an administration. I know the good that I could do. It'd be awfully hard to walk away from that opportunity. You showed America the weird political class that I live in, the people who are obsessed with this stuff. You showed America pretty convincingly that you cared about your family more than you cared about the seeking of elective office. It was, it was so unexpected that people couldn't quite process it. Right? I felt like I understood it at the time because I was like, yeah, I get it. He loves his family. He made a promise to his family. He's not going to put them through this ordeal. And he's good. This is a person who knows who he is. But the general response of utter confusion. Say whatever you want about whatever part of that experience of having the whole national press corps breathing down your neck and down your family's neck and all of this pressure and all of this stuff, just talk about any part of that that you're willing to talk to us about.

[Ben Sasse]

And if I can add a footnote to the question, Mitch, are you 76?

[Mitch Daniels]

7.

[Ben Sasse]

77. I still, on a regular basis, have people, you know, they're checking on me for health stuff or whatever else, and they know I don't want to talk about politics, but when they pivot back and they talk about the next fight in the Republican Party for the direction of what argument you'd want to put out to 70 plus percent of the public, I still regularly have people ask me, do you think Mitch would do it? Would Mitch still run?

[Chris Stirewald]

Well, you're young by the standards of today.

[Ben Sasse]

Continue with Chris's thrust. But I'd love to know the closest you ever were to pulling the trigger, because I think people could put different years on a bingo chart and have really different theories of when you almost ran.

[Chris Stirewald]

Better question, I, I yield to the gentleman from Nebraska. That's a better question.

[Mitch Daniels]

Well, a couple things. A friend of mine at the time when I was thinking this over, said, you know, there's. You got a fundamental problem, this idea of running for president. I said, well, probably 30 or 40 of them, but which one are you talking about? And he said, you can live without it. Yeah, because I think pretty close. I think it's a reality of our time that you got to be, you know, you'd be all in. Doesn't even capture it. I mean, you got to be obsessive to. And it's worse now, but it was true then, you know, and so, yeah, I mean, my glib way of saying this is that the, the, the women's caucus voted 5 to 0. And, you know, I said, you know, I said, in our family constitution there is no override provision. And anyway, that was the stopper. And it wasn't, you know, the national press. Yeah, that was also. But, you know, the. I was, I was receiving, for reasons best known to them, all kinds of entreaties. You know, the people who descended, that paid attention, made attention, an impression on me were folks from various corners of the party. It was startling to me how broad the interest seemed to be. Maybe that reflected the scarcity of alternatives more than anything else. And I, you know, I really felt like there were a lot of people I was letting down by not doing it who really thought that we not only win, but change the direction of the country. And so that weighed on me a lot. There were other factors that nobody else but me cared about. And one of them Was that in the 2010 election? So I decided this in the first half of 2011 and you know, pulled out May or June that year. No, it didn't matter maybe to anybody else, but we had made a lot of effort, captured the Indiana General assembly or the half we didn't have, had the bigger majorities than the Republican party had ever had. And there were a lot of things I wanted to do still. Right to work. Repeal of the inheritance tax, you know, along education reform. Run the table on everything from school choice to collective bargaining and so forth. And if I had gone off running for president, none of that would have happened. People would have imputed every move I tried to make at home to, you know, I was playing to a national audience or, or if I'd been off in New Hampshire somewhere, maybe we wouldn't even have passed some of that. So it didn't again mattered a lot to me. One last thing I had said to the people of Indiana in 2008, I made it. It was the last ad of the campaign and I just stood in front of the camera and said, I got great news. This is the last time you'll ever see me in an ad like this as a governor is the only office I ever ran for or want to and you know, just hire us again and we'll give you four more years of the best service we can. And, and that meant it. You know, keeping that, keeping that, that pledge meant a lot to me. And people are so used to people's in politics, you know, reneging on things like that.

[Chris Stirewald]

Yeah.

[Mitch Daniels]

And I just wanted to be one of those guys who, you know, had actually done what he said. So all those things were in the mix but you know, the, the girls were the, were the stopper all by themselves.

[Ben Sasse]

All right, Chris is going to tell me we've gone on too long, so I'm only asking one higher ed question, but it has 14 subparts. Give us, give us a two minute cap. I know we're at time. If somehow the board persuaded you to sign up for another decade instead of this interim run. If you, if you. I know you're not going to do it and I know you don't want to do it and I know you've got the five women and a bunch of grandbabies who vetoed this. This. But let's pretend the commute started again and you were going to do a decade in West Lafayette. Higher ed. And the liberal arts. Sorry, AI. And the liberal arts. What's a, what's a five to ten year trajectory on what Purdue can do for the best Midwesterners with big brains and lots of engineering thirstiness. But you're going to prepare them for a world of AI. And Purdue's still going to have a core curriculum that includes the liberal arts. What's The Mitch Daniels 5 to 10 year vision in the age of AI for Purdue curriculum? Soup to nuts.

[Mitch Daniels]

Well, I know what you're getting at, and as always, you're right in the middle of the bullseye, in my opinion. So the, you know, we would try to. We would try, I think, to, to deliver on this, on the SAS prescription by which I, and I don't pretend to. To be confident of all these things or certainly not certain. But I do think, and Purdue's already headed this way, we will need to. If we're going to still be relevant, if people are still going to be coming here and paying for the experience in 10 years, we will have to be enabling them to use the technologies of the time. Goodness knows what those will be as well as anybody in the, in the marketplace. And I think of nearly equal importance, providing them with context and with a sense of history, an ability to communicate and think and detect truth from falsehood in ways we've never been challenged to do. All that sort of thing where the liberal arts come in. So, you know, I, I think all of higher ed, I think this is the central question among so many that the sector is facing. It'll. People have been predicting that disintermediation of higher ed for a long time. People thought just online education might do it. Well, not quite, but AI, you know, people, in 10 years could be decided, I don't need to go spend all that money and live somewhere I can learn everything I need to know by talking to this machine. And you know, I, I think that there will be a value proposition that, that survives that, but you'll have to. The institutions of 10 years from now will have to look very different to deliver that proposition.

[Chris Stirewald]

Governor, we're super grateful for all your time. You've been very generous with your time.

[Mitch Daniels]

Great to see you both. Thanks for having me.

[Chris Stirewald]

Heck yeah.

[Ben Sasse]

And we didn't even get near the fact that you have a vacant ad seat. And I'll be sending you a letter of application tomorrow.

[Mitch Daniels]

Sold.

[Chris Stirewald]

Thank you, Mitch.

[Ben Sasse]

Thank you, Mitch. Best wishes. Hello to your family.

[Mitch Daniels]

Same to you. Bye bye.

[Chris Stirewald]

All right, professor, what did we learn today?

[Ben Sasse]

I mean, that you and I were

[Mitch Daniels]

gonna have to fight.

[Ben Sasse]

That's what we learned. Why, like there's a whole higher ed podcast that didn't yet happen because you know I got stage fright every time you'd throw a rock at me when I tried to ask him something about the future. A really important sector, more important in the age of AI and it sucks right now and it could be made to work. But you don't want to ask Mitch, the most interesting guy about it. My bad.

[Chris Stirewald]

Well, you need a spin off podcast. You need a not dead yet yet where you do just deep three hour dives on policy questions.

[Ben Sasse]

Policy questions makes it sound too small. Like one of the things we didn't get to ask him is what just happened at Auburn where the board of trustees voted to dissolve the faculty senate and take curricular oversight to their themselves in its entire like the way a well governed university should work is that the president and the board run the non curricular things and the curriculum is done via shared governance in dialogue with the faculty. But instead of that being what happened, most non curricular things are president and board in dialogue with the faculty and the curriculum is basically 100% run by the faculty. And in particular, when you see this migration of majors, majors from humanities and liberal arts to STEM disciplines each decade, for five consecutive decades, we should, we should have a debate about what the humanities and liberal arts are for because I think they're more important than they've ever been. I just don't think very many universities are doing anything meaningful.

[Chris Stirewald]

So say what happened at Auburn? What? So explain this to me.

[Ben Sasse]

Okay, so what has been happening for a long time is you use. I'm doing air quotes here, shared governance for the president and board on one hand and the faculty committees and in particular the faculty senate on the other to decide what the curriculum is. If you think graduating requires 120 hours, that's roughly three thirds, three 40 hour chunks. Your major, your core and gen Ed requirements and your electives. The core and gen Ed requirements should be really important. Probably the most important part of what happens in your education. And right now the board and the president, the people accountable to the governor at a red state, at a public institution, red state publics are the ones doing some reform or to private the people accountable to your your donors and tradition and history about what the school's about. They should have a say, but they mostly have delegated it entirely to the faculty so that there's no broad oversight or debate or public accountability about what those core requirements are for. And so they're mostly vacuous at most schools now. And what happened at Auburn is the board voted this last 24 hours to take the authority back from the faculty and say we, the board are going to be responsible for the curriculum. In theory, I think this could be very, very healthy reform in practice. Is the board going to be able to execute on this? I don't know. It's going to be really interesting. And Mitch's perspective on it would have been interesting if you'd have let me ask him.

[Chris Stirewald]

But now don't, don't pin that on me. We're going to fight this is a new developing news question. So the concern is at public institutions particularly that there's the removal of a layer of buffer between the selection and the politics. Is that part of it?

[Ben Sasse]

I think that's a big part of it. I think boards are going to need to be interested in reform and in education and in curriculum broadly. You can't just have boards that want to go to football games and be at ribbon cuttings. We're going to need boards that want, that roll up their sleeves and take seriously the debates about what the curriculum is for. I think that should be in dialogue with the faculty. But I think at the end of the day, the boards and the president should be the ones accountable for it. And at most places they've delegated it entirely to faculty committees and not just to faculty committees, but to the most politically activist subset of the humanities faculty. So the Auburn move practically is probably really dangerous for Auburn. Theoretically we should have lots of things happening like this as parts of experiments, because we don't just want faculty senate. Not all faculty senates are weirdos, but most of them are dominated by weirdos. They shouldn't dom, they shouldn't dominate the curriculum unaccounted for. And that's what's happened at most places.

[Chris Stirewald]

And this is the means by which non political, I guess this is the o' Sullivan rule situation, which is

[Ben Sasse]

non

[Chris Stirewald]

political or putatively non political enterprises become politicized because the loudest people, the pushiest people, and then the other people say, look, I don't want to have a fight. I don't want a confrontation about this. Just, you know, if we're, if we're saving the gay whales, if we're what like these all sound like good things,

[Ben Sasse]

wasn't on my saving everybody, saving whales, all of all, we want to do good things.

[Chris Stirewald]

And I don't want to be the person that stands up in the meeting and yells back at you, stop talking about this unrelated thing. We have to keep the main thing the main thing. And then you get the drift. And I assume that that's a lot of fun to deal with as a college or university president.

[Ben Sasse]

Yeah, I mean, that well said. I mean the, the peak behind the curtain in the slop of higher education actual governance, is that most of the faculty who don't really have any demand, who don't have a big strong argument for why people should be taking their classes, try to use bureaucratic power to force demand into their shrinking subset of the curriculum. And faculty can't solve that because of the thing you just said, which is in my first 120 days at Florida, at a relatively similar experience when I first got to Midland, you know, over a decade and a half ago. But in my first 120 days at Florida, I did a couple hundred events, about half internal, about half external, and I kept notes that I had five times as many faculty members ask me to ignore the faculty senate as said anything to me like take the faculty senate seriously. And yet the faculty senate were the people who got elected because they were often running for election unopposed because normies don't want to go out there into an institution that's been totally politicized. And so if you believe like I do, that as IQ is commoditized is a little too simple a term, but we're all going to have external ability to make our RAM speed move a lot, lot faster going forward. The difference between 50, 65th and 95th percentile IQ is going to get smaller and smaller because everybody's going to have access to that. The EQ on IQ layer is going to be a huge part of what general wisdom looks like. How can more people feel like they're Mitch Daniels when they become 40, 50, 60 years old? That means the humanities need to be great. And the humanities aren't great at hardly any schools. And we should ask why are the humanities so crappy when the humanities themselves. Where are humanities classes? And why is humanity's curriculum so crappy when the humanities themselves are going to become more and more important? We're going to need a lot of wisdom in the governance process and faculty alone can't solve that.

[Chris Stirewald]

Okay. I promise we can have another guest to come on so you can go deep de and I'll just, I'll nod pleasantly in the background while you go deep on ed policy because I agree it's. It is truly worthwhile. Mitch Daniels, though, is too interesting.

[Ben Sasse]

Yeah.

[Chris Stirewald]

And he's led a too var. Too varied of a life to, to limit to one thing. My. He said so much good stuff and so much interesting stuff. But I want to, I want to ruminate for a second on Mitch tv. And I had forgotten about that entirely. But if you were to say, Chris, list the five politicians in America that you think are the least likely to have done a reality show on their campaigns, Mitch Daniels would have been very high up there. Right. He is the un. Thirstiest, the least. The. The. The A guy for whom the nickname the Blade is said like, kind of kidding, kind of not kidding. I would not have thought that he would have had a reality show, but he did. And if you go look at it, you will see it's pretty reality. Ee. Right. It's not. It's not fake. It's. It's seems pretty authentic. Talk to me about that challenge that I put to him because he was very uncomfortable when I said. I don't know whether I said Persona or oh, image. He bristled at the word image. It was a like. Ah, but, but we. The. The Vonnegut line is we are who we pretend to be. So we should be careful about what we pretend to be and talk. Just talk about that.

[Ben Sasse]

Well, first of all, only in the Midwest can you get Mitch tv your least likely five, as you put it, being real and being glorious. It has been on my to watch list for a long time. I saw a clip of a bit of it once upon a time, but I've never sat down and in a deliberate way watched it. But I think his bristle at image was totally fair because he was worried that it meant protean artifice.

[Mitch Daniels]

Right.

[Ben Sasse]

It meant faker who tries to look like you're something other than what you are. And he wanted to clarify. And I think what you're saying here is, is it's only useful to do image management, serving your audience if you're trying to make sure people get access to the highest priority stuff you're trying to be and work on. So the verbs and the nouns matter. You'd rather let the doing become the being than the being be foe. But I, I think you're right that Mitch was anxious about the term but pretty serious about the project and his, his DMV reform stuff. Stuff which again, for all of our listeners in Indiana and everybody who knows in Indiana and anyone who knows a Hoosier, this was a big deal to him to actually make government more efficient, to free up people's time to respect them.

[Chris Stirewald]

Yes. The. My father's version of Kurt Vonnegut's line was fake it till you make it if you want to be a good person. And this goes back to what we talked to McRaven about like, if you want to have self esteem, do estimable things, you want to be a good dad, act like one. You want to be a good husband, act like one. You want to be a good employee, you want to be a good Christian, you want to be a good neighbor, you want to be a good brother, act like those things, go and do it. You can think, you can act your way to good thinking, but you can't think your way to good acting. And I think in public life, and what I'm trying to squeeze out of you like blood out of a tortoise is you had to confront this, right? You had to confront the who am I? Who am I? Is the version of myself that I'm presenting to the public a close enough is, is there at least verisimilitude, right? Is the person that I'm that I'm introducing to Nebraskans who had never heard of you before and said, this is me. How did you think about that? How did you proceed into that?

[Ben Sasse]

That. Well, I am going to duck you because we're going to wrap. First of all, Von was a Hooer. So I think, I think he was so great poll there. I, I think what you're saying, I, I'll give you a philosophical summary and then I'll avoid the Ben piece. But I think you're saying the virtuous life has to be lived, not merely thought. And so for us, what it meant was we were policy conservatives, but tonal and dispositional moderates, partly because our family didn't think that politics was any near the center of our identity and or worldview. And this was a place to serve for a time. But since politics wasn't the center of our life, weirdos who want to make politics the center of their life, we wanted to make sure they didn't feel like we were like that and that people who were normies didn't think that we were addicted to politics. And so I had a time management problem of commuting to D.C. every week. And so when I wasn't in D.C. i was going to spend as much time with my family as I could, but I still needed to be learning from my constituents. So I took my kids on the road all the time. So I was able to do go big or go home in Nebraska because that's not just who we are, but that's who Nebraska was as a state. There's a conservative dispositionalism that's prior to conservative policy fighting. And if you're not obsessed with politics, then being Family people in public wasn't. It wasn't theater. It was time management. And so everybody in Nebraska who saw me from a Thursday night or a Friday afternoon to a Sunday night night was probably going to see me carrying a little kid on my shoulders, because that was my chance to get time with my kids. But I still needed to do parades and town halls and water stations at marathons.

[Chris Stirewald]

Okay, I will accept that. I will accept that. I'm. I will close with my. I think my favorite line from Governor Daniels, which he was talking about the ad that he cut for his reelection where he said, good news, you'll never have. He's funny. Where he said, good. Good news, you're never going to have to vote for me. I'll never appear on a ballot again. You get one more time, and you'll be done with me.

[Ben Sasse]

Cincinnatus.

[Chris Stirewald]

Yeah. And he said, I just wanted to be one of those guys who actually did the things that he said he was going to do. And, you know, like, that's it, right? That's. That's basically if we're talking about pillars of being a good man, living the good life, do the stuff that you say you're gonna do, like deliver.

[Ben Sasse]

You can talk about it or you can be it. And Mitch is a do it, be it guy. And I kind of hope there's a pulling a Cheney here. And he stays at Purdue for a long time. He's 77. He's way too dang early to retire.

[Chris Stirewald]

Let the man go home right as Harley. Eat popcorn, do whatever they do. I don't know, but let the man go home.

[Ben Sasse]

Let him. Let him serve people. You're the worst.

[Chris Stirewald]

Okay. All right, that is it for this week's episode. We hope you'll, like. Review and subscribe and tell a friend. Feel free to email us with your thoughts, corrections, questions, or whatever else is on your mind. You can write us at Sass and style. This podcast was produced by Scott Emergett with the help of our colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. The music is from Drew Holcomb and the neighbors. Thanks for listening and keep living the good life.

[Ben Sasse]

It.