The Perfect Tuba: How Band, Grit, and Community Build a Better Life (with Sam Quinones)

Journalist and author Sam Quinones talks about his newest book, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Brass Horn, Band, and Hard Work with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Known for his reporting on the opioid crisis, Quinones turns to a more uplifting subject--the world of tuba players and high school marching bands. What begins as curiosity about an unusual instrument evolves into a moving exploration of how discipline, community, and devotion to craft can restore meaning and purpose in people's lives.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is October 27, 2025, and my guest is journalist and author Sam Kinyonas. He was

• 0:43Speaker 00

  last here in October of 2021, talking about his book, The Least of Us. Our topic for today is his latest book, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Basshorn, Band, and Hard Work. Sam, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Well, it's great to be back with you, Russ. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure talking with you.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  This is a very unusual book. I enjoyed it a great deal. I have to confess, I walked into the reading of it without, I would say, let's just say, no knowledge. It's not quite true, but it's close enough. No knowledge of tubas, very little knowledge of band. But of course, those are the frame of the book. The book is also about some other things. So tell us what the book's about, and how did it happen? How did you get into writing a book about tubas as a band?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Well, you were very much like I was. I do not play the tuba. I was never in marching band. I knew zero about the tuba. When I started this, I wrote a couple of stories. At one point, there came upon, that was at the LA Times, there was this report that tubas were being stolen from the high schools, predominantly in the Mexican areas. And I, I knew why. It's because the tuba had become this huge instrument in Mexican LA. Very, very important. I grew up in Southern California. It was a guitar back then. Now it's the tuba.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Took over. And, uh, and the reason for that is, is, is varied, but it has a lot to do with Mexican immigrants wanting to show how well they've done. And so they hire bands with tubas and big brass, golden things and just gorgeous stuff. And because of this popularity of the tuba in that area, you were getting lots of tubas stolen. So I wrote two stories in a month, two front page stories of the LA Times, uh, in a month, uh, about tubas in Los, in Los Angeles. And from then on,

• 2:48Speaker 01

  I just began to interview tuba players and I could not tell you why, Russ. I mean, I was, uh, in the middle of these books right here, the Dreamland book, which is about the opioid epidemic. I was just getting going on that. And I, I just kept on interviewing tuba players, but mostly I think it was because I found, and these were not just Mexican tuba players, this is all, all sorts. Um, there, there were people who, who, who did it because they truly loved it. Right? They truly loved it. They were not, there was no promise of wealth or fame. I mean, you could not name a tuba player. Um, you know, I couldn't at the time. And I just kept on interviewing them without any point, really. It was just kind of random stuff,

• 3:29Speaker 01

  but with the faith that I had learned from my journalism career, that if you stick with people who are doing something productive and positive from, uh, from, uh, with their lives, um, they, they, they will generate great stories. And so I kept on doing it as I wrote, Dreamland about the opioid epidemic and OxyContin and, and all that. And then The Least of Us, which was about the Mexican trafficking world and switching to fentanyl and methamphetamine. And these were all very grim things. And then, after those books were done, my agents, I was, I said, I'm, I kinda can't write anymore about this extraordinarily grim topic of, you know, it's really about people looking for happiness from something they buy.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  And, and I felt that, um, and she said, you said, see what you, what book you might be able to write about that tuba project that you had told me so much about. And so that kind of, That's what got me into it without again knowing a thing about really the horn or certainly not how to play it.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Uh, do you play any kind of instrument?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  I play the guitar. I grew up in the seventies in Southern California, man. Half my friends played the guitar. Everybody played the guitar. And those days are over. We used to have like five or six guitar shots within a three, four mile radius of my house, you know. Those days are gone for sure. And, and so now I, I, I don't, I, I love music. I've listened to all forms of music all my life. And, um, and so this just, I just kind of got into this. But then see, what, what, what really got me going was I began to find, you know, I wanted to work, find a path away from writing about addiction. And what, what really started

• 5:13Speaker 01

  me down that path were these beautiful, beautiful stories. As a journalist, I was very attracted to the amazing stories of liberation, really. The tuba in its, in its essence is about liberation. It's about, um, it, it starts first, I think with, um, the great Bill Bell. Bill Bell was the, the greatest tuba player of his time, worked for the New York Philharmonic. And his importance is that he had recorded the first solo tuba record ever.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  There aren't so many. There aren't that many. There aren't that many still.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  There, there were none at that time. There's, there are many more now, but there were none at that time. And he, he was, uh, but what most struck me was that all the tuba players, the young kids at the time in the mid sixties, as this record began to percolate out, um, they were all alone with their tuba and directors who didn't understand their instrument and what they could do with it. And they listened to Bill Bell show them. A brand, brand new world liberated their horn in their own minds. I talked to many guys who were, for whom this, this was a case very much like when jazz players heard Charlie, Charlie Parker for the first time, where rock guitar players heard Jimi Hendrix.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  All these tuba players hearing Bill Bell, all of a sudden lifted the blinders, you know? And then a few years after that, there was the, the event that I call Tuba Woodstock, which was the first conclave of all, of the tuba nation essentially at, at Indiana University in 1973, where hundreds of tuba players were convened, uh, the, of an enormous symposium at the university. And it's for virtually every one of them, it was the very first time they'd seen more than like four or five tuba players in one place. They realized they were part of some large, beautiful nation that's created this kind of tuba consciousness

• 7:21Speaker 01

  and began what was also then the Tuba Civil Rights Movement, which was to say, we are worth more than just being at the back of the band, playing Oompa and quarter notes and whole notes, you know?

• 7:32Speaker 00

  I, I just add that Indiana University has a storied music department. So it wasn't a, a weird little corner of rural America. It was a, it was a sign of recognition. Um, let's back up a minute. I discovered from reading your book, two important facts. The tuba was invented in 1835, which is late in the world of human beings. Uh, the trumpet's thousands of years old in some fashion. Uh, the French horn is hundreds and hundreds of years old. I think I read it was start, it came from the late 16th century. So the tuba comes along, which plays deeper notes, more bends, longer, more tubing. And it's

• 8:17Speaker 00

  invented in 1835 and there are three kinds. Tell us about the three kinds.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Well, there's the, there's, I guess what I like about this story is that there are

• 8:32Speaker 01

  The truth is tubas come in as many kinds as there are almost as human beings. And by that, I mean in different keys, there's C, there's double B flat, there's E flat, there's F. There's, um, some of them are enormous and very wide. Some of them are very small. There's the euphonium, which is the tenor tuba. There's eventually the sousaphone, which John Philip Sousa invents, which is the marching band that wraps around you. And then there's of course, the concert tuba, which goes with the bell going up facing skyward. But what I loved about it was that there's no, this, the, there's, the tuba is not done being tinkered with.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  You're still loving, I still love the idea that, that it's, they're still trying to figure out how to make it better. And now with worldwide competition, particularly lately, the Chinese. There's been all kinds of new, um, better approaches, different approaches to, to, to the tuba. But just generally speaking, it went from very low, like in the twenties and so on, and thirties.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Quality horns, um, to what are now quite, quite majestic and, and able to channel the virtuosity of players. Uh, much more easily. So that's what I, that's, that's what I've found to be fascinating about holding.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  So I, I have to confess, if you'd asked me, what is a tuba, I would have said a sousaphone. The marching band version, which is like a big giant circle that you wear on your shoulder. The, the tubing is still, is that in front of you?

• 10:13Speaker 00

  I think tragically or not, uh, orchestral tubas, if, if you think about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. And you write about one of their legendary tuba players, Arnold Jacobs. A lot of us don't see that physically because they tend to be in the back. And if you'd said, what is that? Well, from a distance, well, it looks like a French horn, but it's not round. It's a little more oblong. Oh, that's an orchestral tuba evidently. But a lot of us think of. The tuba as the susaphone, as you write about quite a bit, its role in marching bands, which is enormous. It also, and you write at the same time about virtuosity outside of the marching band structure in all kinds of different settings. But I want to come

• 10:57Speaker 00

  back to your point about how this book was a counterpoint to your opioid interests, writing about that. And I want to read, I want to read a quote. Yes. And then I want to challenge, challenge it a bit. You say, quote, "I had embarked on all this wanting to write about something very different from the topic that consumed my previous dozen years. By the end, though, I realized the tuba was actually not as far from the issue of drug addiction as I had imagined. Or better put, the tuba is so far away, it's the mirror opposite of addiction. Drug addiction is obedience to a substance, forsaking all else in the lonesome pursuit of immediate gratification from something

• 11:41Speaker 00

  you buy. It is the final expression of our consumer culture's empty promise that we could find happiness from a product that is for sale. An opioid overdose shuts down the respiratory system, stifling breath and life itself. The tuba requires nurturing that precious breath. It's about finding purpose from the wonder of sound you've learned to create yourself and from which you forge a sense of fulfillment, which cannot be purchased other than by hard work, preparation, and persistence, collaborating with others, and the love of it all. Call it the tuba approach to life. No one ever got rich or famous playing

• 12:21Speaker 00

  the tuba, no internet adulation, no stadium shows, no posse, only an unnoticed, middle-class life of nurturing your abilities. But that's why it's a sane thing. It's pairing life to what we need, not what we're told to want and incessantly demand." End of quote. I want to slightly disagree with that because Okay. Because when, when I read the book, and the book has portraits of many serious players and lots of high school students, and in a minute we'll shift gears, we'll talk about band, because it's a huge part of the book and it's extremely interesting. But a lot of the people who, who play tuba, or who teach tuba, are a little bit, I'll

• 13:06Speaker 00

  call them

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Quirky.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  They're a little bit off the beaten track. And at one point, you ask, do they, are they attracted to tuba because they're quirky? Or does tuba playing make them quirky? Which is an unanswerable question. But what I want to suggest, and this is my slight disagreement.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  They strike the reader as obsessive, most of them. They are driven, at least the ones you've chosen to portray. They don't take the tuba the way I played the guitar, and maybe you, which is, this is fun. I can get a little better at it. And it's, it fulfills some of my fantasies about music. Every once in a while, I make something that's somewhat beautiful. I used to be able to finger pick, and that was really, you know, very gratifying. But I wasn't a serious musician. These folks aren't just serious musicians. They spent long periods of time, often making a single note. And they're, and it's a virtue.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  And they spend many days on tone and incredibly intense things. And these are not professionals, the ones I'm talking about. They strike me as a little bit obsessive. And it's also where I agree with you, and I want to see if you agree with this assessment. Their obsessiveness is what saves them. In the case of addiction to opioids, it destroys them. Addiction to tuba saves them. And it is different, obviously, in many, many ways. But there is an obsessive quality in addiction that I feel they both have. Is that fair?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  I agree, that's, that's true. I would say that there's a big difference, though. And that is that, well, first of all, think about how people come to the tuba. It's almost always in band. You cannot really play the tuba before you're 12 or 13 years old. You don't have the lung power. So it's really in band.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  It's physically large, too.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, um, and it's frequently people who don't wanna play the two, they never even, somebody never even heard of the two, but before they take it up, they are late for band class, first day of seventh grade. That's how they, and every, all the other instruments are taken. I mean, really, that's a very common, common story. However, and, and frequently, there's the kids maybe at the lower end of the social pecking order in high school. Remember, we're talking about high school band here. And, and but, but through time, many people drop it, obviously, as they drop, many people drop all kinds of instruments. But the ones who stick with it, what I've found kind of in common, they share, is this feeling like through the tuba, they began to understand something about themselves. It was almost like it showed them

• 15:52Speaker 01

  their own capabilities, when all around them were their peers telling them they were probably worth nothing.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Right? And, and when you find that, that is, if, if you find something that says you are worth something and you are capable, that is, in my view, people would come up to me and go, ask me one of my previous two books, how do I keep my kids away from drugs? And really, it's, it's finding that feeling that you are worth something through an, a, another endeavor that doesn't have to do with drugs. It's, it's, it could be anything. In this case, it was for so many people, it was the tuba. And so, it does breathe this kind of feeling like, all of a sudden, I'm worth something. And that is a powerful, powerful, I would say narcotic, but that's not really, let's find a different word.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's, it's, it's this feeling of, I can do something. And then, when you wanna do something, when you, so you can do something, you wanna do it more. And it breeds that. And plus, then you're around people. And in the band world, the tuba player is kind of... You know, you cannot have a good band without a good tuba section, tuba player or tuba section. It just doesn't happen. And so you really come to believe in yourself and see yourself as capable. And, and then that's extraordinary. Again, the tuba is about liberation. It's about freeing yourself to see all that you are capable of. Drugs are very different. Drugs are enslaving.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  They narrow your world, or addiction in general, narrows your world into like, this is all you can do, all you find interesting. And, and so I would say this is really the big difference here. And, and it's a, it's a very, now, a lot of kids don't go on to, to continue to play tuba, but what they learn playing the tuba, they carry with them. Attitudes, habits, et cetera, that help them throughout, throughout their, their lives.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  And self-respect, which is really what you're talking about, I think, at the heart of this. There's another word I want to introduce that I don't think you talk about it explicitly much, but, you know, reading your book, I found myself going to YouTube and occasionally to Spotify to try to listen to tuba playing at various kinds. You might want to, I encourage you to create a playlist of your favorite music that comes up in the book or the players. And other than The Flight of the Bumblebee, which is a famous, roughly minute-long solo many people may have heard, typically played by trumpet or violin, written by Rimsky-Korsakov, you can find a tuba player playing it at high speed. And it's kind of a shtick.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  It's not, I wouldn't call it inspiring. It's interesting. It's charming in a certain way. But the point I want to make is that tuba players don't get to solo, generally. They may have a note or two, they may be audible in the background as the equivalent of a bass in a jazz band, but they're really part of an ensemble. And you matter as a tuba player, and you write about this a lot, and you try to find the words, and it's, of course, it's an, it's an ineffable.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Feeling that a great tuba player, playing a great tuba, physically majestic sounding tuba, doesn't just produce a great tone, the way I say a Whitmer Salas sounds on the trumpet. I love Whitmer Salas playing alone on the trumpet. He's also great in a band. But a tuba player is doing this strange thing, uniting everybody else. And I think that's part of what the meaningfulness of it that you're getting at. It's not just you've mastered something, which is a huge issue for all human beings, is to master something. And to do it at a young age is a really an incredible gift.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  But to do it, master something that enables other people to join in is a very special thing, it seems.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Well, I agree with you. That's one of the things that first connected me up strangely to these other two books I'd written about drug addiction, because drug addiction is really based on the shredding of community. It's all about your own isolation. You find yourself only caring about other people to the extent that they can help you find your drugs. And here I found the tuba was the community enhancer, right? Everybody feels so much like they're doing better when you have a good tuba player and a good horn to play with it. You know, and so to me, that's absolutely what goes on. And on the contrary, frequently tuba players begin to believe that, well, I actually lead

• 20:42Speaker 01

  the band, because all we need to do to prove that is if I play a little bit out of tone, the whole band falls apart. You know, but that's a whole other story.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  But it's very much, you know, I said a bass in a jazz band. A bass is something in general that unless you're paying attention, you do not necessarily hear. There are pieces, obviously, in some bands that have extraordinary bass lines or bass players. But in general, the bass is doing something, again, ineffable, hard to put into words. And again, this thing you write about very poetically of how a tuba can do this, if it's a high enough quality, both physical instrument and player is really, is really very cool. Let's talk about band in a small town, which a lot of the book...

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Is writing about these extraordinary towns in Texas, tiny towns, 10,000 people or so, who are competing against Dallas and Houston and others in band competitions. And in these tiny towns, a savior comes to town, like the music man, who happened to have been a fraud, but is redeemed by the end of the musical. A savior comes to town and takes a bunch of people who on the surface appear to be without any talent. They're just eager and transforms them. So, talk about that.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  And what, that's really an extraordinary human thing, which is part of, I think, the inspiration and charm of your book, is that phenomenon is just an incredible thing.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I agree, and I'm so happy you brought up these stories because I was only gonna write about tuba players, and then I began to realize that band directors are like tuba players, but on a big scale. That's why one of them said, you know, "We're not doing this for wealth or fame. We do it, put in unbelievable hours." I've never seen people work so many hours as these band directors in these small towns. And, and, uh, and why? Because what motivates them is they see the lights go on in the eyes of their kids, frequently because that's what happened to them when they were in 10th grade, or a freshman in college, or whenever. It wasn't, and the story I think mostly you're referring to, although there were two great stories of this kind, that was the story of Al Cortinas.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Al Cortinas was himself saved by being able to attend a small college where he majored in musical education, became a band director in the Rio Grande Valley, the area you're talking about, the Rio Grande Valley, along the border with Texas, along the Rio Grande, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, the last 100 miles or so was the Rio Grande Valley, almost entirely Hispanic, 98% Hispanic, or something like does many of, just from Mexico, many of them Mexican-American. But what they, the kids as a rule, share is that they can barely afford their instruments. They in no way can afford musical instruct, musical lessons. And so, Al Cortinas, teaching in the Rio Grande Valley for a number of years.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Develop some ideas, but he, um, about how, excuse me, about how to change that. And he realized it's essential because at the time he's doing this, the drug cartels are really growing big and they are attracting a lot of these young kids. Lots of easy money, fancy cars and all the rest. And at the same time, Texas band direct, band, uh, competition is, is becoming like football. So you, you compete and a band wins, someone comes in second, third, fourth, fourth place. And he realized that he would, if he didn't improve the quality of his bands, his bands would never be able to compete up, uh, across the state.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  And also a lot of his kids would be lost then to these drug cartels. Uh, he gets the opportunity to put his ideas into practice when he's hired at the Roma, Texas High School, Roma High School in Roma, Texas, which is a town, as you say, 11,000, um, almost entirely Hispanic. And the ideas that he has is in order to nurture the kids who he sees has in, have amazing talent that are being let gone to waste, um, just as his was about to years ago when he was a kid. He says, what we need to do, he convinces the board and the superintendent that what they need to do is hire 10 band directors, one for each instrument and each band director

• 25:22Speaker 01

  will take kids who play, say the clarinet, for example, and teach clarinet all the way through kids to 12th, to 12th grade. And so kids will move to sixth, seventh, they not with the same teacher, same with the French horn, same with percussion, same with tuba, same, you know? And, and in this way, he believes, um, years of, of band directing convinced him of this, that you will not lose these kids along the way. This was what was happening by eighth, ninth grade, they begin to fade away. It's still, will still happen, but when, what the Cortina system came to Roma, Texas, Roma had barely had a band. It was really kind of just a social scene where kids met, met and monkeyed around. And all of a sudden, over the next several years, as these sixth graders became seventh,

• 26:06Speaker 01

  eighth, ninth, and the whole school got better, all of a sudden, you begin to see Roma, Texas.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Competing with, yes, the suburban bands from Dallas, from Austin, from Houston. The first time they ever went to finals, they, the state finals where they're competing, there's like 250 bands in their class and it's down to 12 finalists. Many of them are from very wealthy suburbs of Austin or Dallas.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  With all kinds of private music lessons as a result, and these guys are getting this, you know, in bulk.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  That's what one guy told me, you know, we're competing with this kids who get their lessons, who are taught by the symphonies of Texas. And we're not going to stop until we burst our way through there. And Roma, Texas, to this day, has never come in first. However, however, it has shown, I don't think it matters either. It shows the beauty of band. I was interviewing lots of these band kids. The first time they ever went to finals was 2003 and four, that's that whole season. And now, so it's 20 years later, I'm interviewing them and they're all doing wonderfully well. They all have these prosperous, happy families, good jobs.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Many of them are not in music, some of them are band directors again. Al Cortinas, Al Cortinas has 81 students who are now band directors, somewhere in the, in the Rio Grande Valley. It's a remarkable idea, but most of his kids did not go on to that. They go on to solid, middle-class lives because band teaches the values that sustain community. That's, that's, that's the, that's the raw, the beautiful, natural resource that is marching band in America. It's unlike any other public education, public music education system in the world, according to people I've talked to about this.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an incredible thing. It's actually, you know, I teared up reading about, I don't remember if it was Roma or the neighboring. Lopez that comes back into town and is greeted by an entourage of police cars and the contrast between their simple life, which is unadorned by wealth and luxury and walking into this, the San Antonio indoor stadium that probably seats, I don't know, 60,000 and it's mostly empty for this competition. It must have been extraordinarily, but it's intimidating either way. But the point, the point I want to emphasize here, which I think

• 28:57Speaker 00

  is quite extraordinary, is that these are not kids who auditioned for band and got chosen because they were gifted. They just signed up and it's a, unless, tell me if I'm wrong, it's just a cross section of the people who were interested in learning how to play something. They didn't, it's not like they said, oh, I, you know, I, I've been great on the violin, now I'll join marching band. They've never done anything musical in their life other than enjoy music. Is that correct?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  That is correct. And that is absolutely correct. And it's also a little bit their parents saying, you know, you do this because there's nothing else. Or, um, you know, you do this, you're kind of chubby, you don't run fast, you're not fast enough for the football team, the basketball team and, and all that. And, and what's amazing is that this took hold after that, in the Rio Grande Valley. And so, um, and so bands all across the, there are many, many, many small towns. I can't even count them all. There are many. And each one has their own school district and so everyone has a band now. And remarkable thing, there's this thing called tuba Christmas that they, every, every December that people

• 30:12Speaker 01

  come together and play. Tuba Christmas in the Rio Grande Valley is very different than tuba Christmas in anywhere else in the United States because it's almost entirely kids 18 and under who are still in high school. Across the country, people play the tuba, give it up, but still keep their tubas and they bring it out to play tuba Christmas. But in the Rio Grande Valley, people do not have money to hold on to a very expensive tuba for the rest of their lives, for the luxury of playing it once a year, so on. So all the people who play tuba Christmas are 18 and under. And

• 30:45Speaker 01

  There are hundreds of tuba players. Now, I went, I went the post-COVID 23, 2023, the 50th anniversary of Tuba Christmas, and it was, there was 350 tuba players, all driven to the McAllen, Texas Performing Arts Center by their band directors, by the way, by their tuba instructors and so on. But before COVID, before COVID, they had, they had 650 tuba players. And what that means is that people see that, and they understand the threat of

• 31:26Speaker 01

  not being in something will take up so much of your time and channel your energies, because the drug cartels are right there. There is no mistaking who these people are and what they're about. And so people are like, my kids are gonna be in band. And they let those teachers, it's not, none of those coddling. One teacher, one parent said, you know, parents come to me and say, don't you mind, do you mind your kids be out there working in the rain and marching? And I said, no, because that's how they get to where they are. If it was lightning, I'd say, okay, but everything else, I'm fine with it, you know?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's extraordinary American story, and it, it reminds, I want to, I want to come back to this question of average ability. But I first want to make a side note, which you don't write about in the book, and there are many reasons you might, you chose not to, but most of the players and most of the teachers are men.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  And most of the victims of opioid addiction, correct me if I'm wrong, are men. And

• 32:28Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  There's an issue in America, a lot of people have started to think about it, write about it, that the, the boys and young men of America are having a tough time. I don't, I don't want to speculate, quote, whose fault that is, whether it's anybody's fault. Let's put that to the side. But what struck me about this is that for so many of these, either physically struggling because they're overweight, or they're bullied because they're different, for so many of these young men, this is a lifeline. It's not just, ah, something fun to do, and it gives you a life purpose, and, and it builds discipline and character. It's, it's a lifeline.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I could not agree more. And it's also the antithesis, the answer to all that we have allowed to develop in our country, in my opinion, through, you know, social media apps and pornography and gambling and video games and porn, and you kind of go on, and junk food and hyperpotent marijuana, and on, on, on, and on, and on. All of this is, this is what one guy was telling me, one band director said, you know all that stuff that you wrote about in The Least of Us, some dreamland? The answers to it are right here. And it's when I began, when he told me that, I began to think of this book in a bigger way.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  You know, it's about providing, and what is, what, how do I think about it? The extraordinary importance of insisting on hard work. That's why it's in the subtitle, of perseverance, of quiet focus, as you say, of training kids early on with just one note. You know, this leads to very well-adjusted, frequently well-adjusted anyway, kids who do well in school, who love what they do, and who go on because they've been trained in certain values that, again, sustain community and sustain strong, I'd say, strong businesses.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  They sustain strong personal, personal lives, churches, and all the rest. You get from band, this enormous impact that is encountering all the things that I think afflict many people, but certainly young men, as you rightly say, I think. You get away from the easy, the kickback, the immediate gratification, which is what drugs are all about, but so is, you know, smartphones, TikTok, and so is all the other, the other stuff. And, and again, there was this story, I don't know if it's true or not, could be apocryphal,

• 35:19Speaker 01

  but, you know, band directors ask... How'd your band do this year? You know, the end of the year. How'd your band do this year? And the band director goes, you know, too soon to tell. Ask me in 10 years. Because bands about winning later. It's really the idea that you when one can come in first and second, that's fine, but it's really not about that.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  So there's this great, great quote. I forget who said in the book. It's not important because it's, it's, uh, it's depth is transcends, uh, it transcends whoever said it. And the wording is not particularly clever or witty, but it's, you know, someone has asked, how did you get this ragtag group of kids who didn't have any experience to get to the finals? And, and he says, quote, "There are no secrets. You just work hard." And I want to dig deeper into that because, um, you know, there are schools that have chosen other things. Sports is one example. Uh, there's schools that have had incredibly, uh, incredible success with

• 36:19Speaker 00

  their chess team. You know, the, the kids are not, quote, "super high IQ." They might be brighter than average, but they're not like geniuses. So I want to focus on this crazy idea, uh, that it's possible merely through hard work, merely through devotion to achieve greatness. And, and I want to emphasize, again, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but when, when these small high schools come in second or win or just come into the finals, it's not like people feel sorry for them. And they say, oh, well, they're poor and they come from a tiny school. So let's cut off some slack. Their playing's not very

• 36:59Speaker 00

  good, but no, their playing is good. It just, it takes a long time. And I, I want to, uh, I want to choose, I want to look at a, a recent quote from, um, Andre Karpathy. I don't know how to pronounce his last name correctly, but you know, he's a, uh, AI, artificial intelligence, uh, person.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Extraordinary thinker. He says in a recent post on Twitter, on X, "Agency is more important than intelligence." He says, quote, "I had this intuitively wrong for decades. I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment media obsession with IQ, etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10 times agency?" And then he quotes, it appears, as far as I can tell from the post, he quotes Grok. He asked Grok, "What is agency?" And Grok's answer is kind of extraordinary.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Quote, "Agency is a personality trait refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It's about being proactive rather than reactive. Someone with high agency doesn't just let life happen to them. They shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one's path." And I read this as I was finishing your book, and I thought, that's exactly the gift that these band directors give these unexceptional on the surface, because in terms of the equivalent here of intelligence would be, say, musical ability, perfect pitch,

• 38:47Speaker 00

  dexterity with their fingers, ability to make tones with their great lungs, to sustain a note. These kids don't have that. Instead, they have to make up for it with agency, and that's a gift that lasts a lifetime.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  And I think, yes, and thank you for another very thoughtful question. To me, this is an essential part of this book, I hope, I think, and also an essential part of why band is so important. Talent is overrated. Some people are enormously talented right from the get-go, and that's wonderful, and you should nurture them, but talent is overrated, hard work, which is just another way of saying agency, according to your fellow there.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  To me, that is where you come to, but you have to build that. You have to nurture that. You have to teach kids, particularly nowadays, how you find

• 39:46Speaker 01

  The benefits that they will find by hard work, by channeling that, that developing agency, and I think there are many ways of doing this. I chose tuba playing in the band. I'm sure you could write another book about chess in high schools, without a doubt. But to me, I love the idea about band and tuba playing because nobody pays any attention. They get no props. They're not famous. And yet, and we all hear all these like, I would say platitudes almost now about the importance of sports and teaching life lessons. And I played sports in high school, and I buy some of that. I don't think it's wrong. However,

• 40:29Speaker 01

  during this book, I began to realize, you know, the people, the kids who are learning the most precious lessons, the kids who are learning, who are putting this into practice, and then going on in life to put these ideas and these values into practice, or the kids up in the bleachers, playing for the athletes down on the field. That's where you find, and any, any board of education, any superintendent now, I believe, would be committing almost education malpractice, to be cutting the budget constantly for those endeavors. You are getting such enormous bang for the buck, in terms of just human impact, and getting

• 41:11Speaker 01

  beyond the idea that in order to be good, to be valued, you must be talented from the get-go.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  And I've made fun of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hour thesis. We're not going to debate whether he really said it, or what he meant by it, because there's been a lot of, to me, uninteresting back and forth about that. But the interesting claim is that hard work can bring mastery. And I have always believed that that's not true in certain areas. That, you know, there's, I don't care how hard I work at basketball, I'm 5'6", I'm not going to be a great basketball player. It'll take a lot more than 10,000 hours. But in today's Econ Talk episode that you haven't heard yet, and our listeners will have heard by the

• 42:00Speaker 00

  time this comes out, I have an interview with David Bassis, who argues that mathematics, anybody can really get good at it. And that, I've always hated those kind of...

• 42:14Speaker 00

  What I've always thought of as rose colored glasses. Oh yeah, we're all, we're all equal. There's, there's no exceptionality. Skill's not that important. But I think that's, that's, that's silly. But, but what's not silly is that sufficient devotion makes up for a lot. In the case of, of math, he's even arguing something doesn't take thousands, thousands of hours. It takes a different way of thinking about what math really is. But in this case, you know, if you had told me that people have trouble detecting that they're playing poorly, which some of your successful superstars have trouble with. I would have said, nah, that's, that's, that's in a movie. That's not.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  So I think it's really, um, it's a heartwarming lesson in so many ways. But it's also clear it's a lot more than 10,000 hours, probably for a lot of these kids. They devote an enormous part of their waking hours to succeeding.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  And, and this is the, again, the beauty of band because it is very inclusive.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  That term is overused today, I think, but, but in, in band, it's absolutely, it's absolutely true. All you need really is the desire to do, to play better and to march better and to work with others. And, and work hard with others.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  And, um, and so, uh, and, and also you don't face any, most of the time you don't face any life mangling injuries as a result, as a result of it. And, and, and so what's beautiful though is, is I, I find is to find people who were in band once. And, and they will tell you, all you do is scratch them a little bit. Oh, you were in band? Would you play? How'd you like it? I was talking with a judge, federal judge, West Virginia. Oh man, I played trombone in band. How'd you like it? It changed my life. I mean, you hear this. It's not, it's not uncommon to hear this stuff, you know? And he didn't want to be a trombone player, or maybe he did, but he didn't become one.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  But it, and one of the, one of the beautiful images I love about the tuba. Is the tuba is a little bit like a folk saint. So you may know, I lived in Mexico for many years and I've written a lot about Mexican immigration and my first two books are about Mexico. And so the idea of folk saints, of your own saint to kind of watch over you as you go through life. Many tuba players, for many tuba players, the tuba is a folk saint in that it teaches them all these, these really, really important lessons in life. Again, hard work, attention to detail, focus, perseverance through failure, all of these things. It just frequently cannot give you the, the, the professional economic sustenance

• 45:03Speaker 01

  for a real happy, happy life. So people leave it behind. But many times I hear this, it's like what I learned from the tuba stays with me. It's like the tuba is watching over me, even though I can't, I never, I, I, I'm not playing it and, and, and I always dreamed that I could. That's why so many people have tubas in their, in their basement and play tuba Christmas. It's because they thought one day they wanted to and then it never, it never, it never happened, but the tuba is still there watching over them.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  But it's like sports in that way, you know, sports, uh, high school sports has a very powerful little impact on people who, who do it at a even modestly high level. Um, as you point out, there aren't a lot of tuba jobs. Um, there's a limited number of symphony orchestras. Uh, for a long time, uh, Disney World hired a lot of tubas and band members, but they cut back. And that's a very interesting part of the book, the role that Orlando plays in tuba culture. I'll

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Encouraging stuff, right?

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, encourage readers, listeners to read the book. But, um, there aren't a lot of professional sports jobs either. And, and young men and women dream of athletic success and inevitably, most of them are going to have to be disappointed. So

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  They have to have a wistfulness. Knowing that that dream, which they did have for a while perhaps, is not going to come true and cherish what they get out of it. But as you point out, which I love this line, unlike football, band is really about winning later. And that's your quote about, I'll see how my band turns out in 10 years. But of course, it's also true for great football coaches. They understand that most of their charges will not have a career in the NFL, won't get a Division One scholarship even. And whatever they do for them that's good comes from those times in high school.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  But it's also, you know, I think frequently, those are the lucky ones.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Those are the ones who say, I'm not as, I can't be this great basketball player, whatever, football player, but I can use what I learned in doing the sport to be a success and happy and content and frankly fulfilled. This is a very important word to me. It's after writing about addiction, where people looking for blasts of pleasure, I've come to understand fulfillment as being the more, the deeper thing that we are, we are, we are looking for. And happiness doesn't quite get there, in my opinion. So you're looking for that fulfillment. It's, it's, yeah. The difference with band is just so

• 47:46Speaker 01

  many more kids can be in band than can play football or basketball, certainly for that matter. It's, it's a way of saying, we want all of you to be part of this beautiful experience of working hard and competing and relying on each other. It's not just for the athletes, it's for you too. And it gives me chills. I get chills right now talking to you about this, Russ, saying it's such a beautiful, beautiful thing. And again, of course, so opposite from the addiction to dope and everything else we addicted to in our culture that I was writing about in the, in the previous two books. It just is, anyway, it makes me kind of almost like get,

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Romantic and carried away. What can I tell you?

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a quote which I'd never heard, but evidently it's a well-known saying. A musician is someone who puts a $5,000 instrument in a $500 car to get to a $50 gig. And of course, most musicians are, they might wish it otherwise, but they're not playing for the $50. And they, they might prefer it to be more than that, obviously for their playing, but they play for the love of it. And that they can still play at all, as, as many musicians find sufficiently rewarding, fulfilling.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  No, I think that's, that's why tuba Christmas continues to be this huge thing. Huge thing all across the country with hundreds of tuba players in Kansas City, Dallas, New York was where it started. But down in McAllen, Texas too. I mean, you've got all these people, you know, all across the country who hold on to their tubas.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  And people in, in a different way, who hold on to their memories of band. Um, I'm trying to come, come up with, there's a pipe dream of mine, but at some point I'd like to come up with some kind of tally of what percentage of Americans were at one point in band. You know, I mean, I think you may be talking about 20% of the country at some point. I don't, I don't know if that's true at all, of course, but it, it seems to me such an important part of people's lives that you would never know until you dig down into their conversation with them. And then all of a sudden you say, oh yeah, they played piccolo or oh yeah, I played trombone. And, and you begin to see how important this endeavor is

• 50:11Speaker 01

  to creating happy lives, contented, fulfilled lives. But also I believe that they bring essential, you learn in band, essential elements, elements essential to, to, to sustaining, um, uh, uh, community, you know, and in a, in a, in a, in a broader sense and.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  That was, I can tell you all of this, I also find this beautiful because as a journalist, two years ago, I would have had nothing like this to say to you about this project. I didn't know what the project was about. And I just said, I know that if I push on into the lives of people who are doing something because they love it, that I'm going to find some amazing stories. I knew that from past experiences, as a reporter for many years. And this just proved it doubly so. It just was a beautiful experience that on and on and on, these bizarre stories of

• 51:13Speaker 01

  people just doing something, you know, Jim Self, great, great tuba teacher and USC retired, built a, built a, an enormous practice hall on top of his house, 38 feet long, long enough to contain the longest, the longest sound wave of the lowest register tuba, which is 36, 36 foot long sound wave. You know, why? Because he wanted to liberate, he was, again, as part of liberation is what you find, it liberates so many people. I was tired of playing in practice rooms at USC, they're 10 by 10, built for trumpets.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  So he builds this enormous, beautiful hall, I've been in three times, it's just incredible. And because he wants to free up this gorgeous sound that he can create, and he's never been anything less than in love with this beautiful sound that he learned to create when, you know, as a kid back in his, in his teen years.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  So I'm going to pick a strange analogy here.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  Some people know a little bit about wine, the beverage, and they

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Drink it at some level of seriousness or not. Some people just say, I know what I like. I like this wine. I don't know anything about it. But other people go into it quite deeply and learn about different regions and the terroir, the soil that the grapes were grown in and so on and so on. And it becomes a, I think for many people, a deeply enriching experience. And it's part of dining, which is an important human, eating is a human incredibly important human ritual and so on. So, music, I would argue, is another incredibly important human ritual. And I'm curious, a lot of the book, which we haven't talked about, and you know, I think

• 53:12Speaker 00

  you have to read about to really appreciate it, a lot of the book is devoted to the actual title of the perfect tuba. It's about the physical manufacturing challenge of improving the sound that the instrument makes. And most people have heard of Estrada Arias. They understand that there are these legendary violins that have a unique tone that can never be perfectly recreated, or at least it feels that way. And similarly, in the tuba world, there are these two legendary tubas that people have tried to replicate in some of the book, but not a large part, but not a small part, is about that. But here's my question for you.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  You're not a horn player. You're not a serious musician. You're a casual musician, I think, as I am.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  But I love music, and I suspect you do too, or you wouldn't have written this book.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Right, I do.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  So, I'm curious, you're in that hall, that crazy thing that this guy built on top of his house. You've heard a lot of bands in the course of writing this book. Obviously, and this is the wine part, among aficionados, there are certain tones and...

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Sonic effects that move them deeply as professionals. You're not a professional. Did you get, could you yourself taste, capture any of that? When you were listening to tuba players, could you say, oh, that, that brightness is exactly right? Or that, you know, again, it's also like winemaking, there's all these, this language and jargon around it and inner language, insider language. And did you get that?

• 54:59Speaker 01

  That is such a great question. I don't think I did. Honestly, I don't think I did. I think what I, what I, where I found the most like profound feelings was in interviews with tuba players. Usually not, my method of working is I don't do any, almost any interviews for just once for an hour. It's numerous interviews and I, it depends on the person and on the story, how many those are, you know? But it was coming to some of the ideas that we've been

• 55:37Speaker 01

  talking about is where I began to feel like elevated. You remember perhaps the first story in the book, Willie, little Willie Clark at the time, sixth grade, feels he's playing the big B flat note in the sound of Star Trek and he's taking the band and they're lifting off and he's doing it himself and he can't even believe it. And oh my God, that note stayed with Willie Clark. He just retired at 55 from the Air Force ceremonial band. You know, talking, talking with people who have felt these kinds of things and getting them to talk about it, particularly tuba players, because no one ever thought anyone

• 56:20Speaker 01

  would ask them about these experiences. And when I start calling people around, they're like, looking at their phone, like, who the hell are you, man? But, you know, God bless them, every one of them, that many people wanted to talk about this once they realized I was not a, some con artist, you know? And so I guess where I, where, in answer to your question, it's a beautiful question. I would say that it's true.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Understanding these new ideas that I began to sense the same exhilaration, perhaps that they felt, that Willie Clark felt in sixth grade, which is the first time he ever felt anything like this, he told me. And others throughout the book have similar moments of just beautiful elevation and agency, feeling like this is what they created. And again, I get back to the theme of liberation, tuba is about liberation, it's about freeing yourself of other, of the constraints that you would put on your instrument and yourself, and others would put on your instrument and yourself. And so I guess that's how I would answer it, is that I remember being completely captivated by this project.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  About, within about four or five months, I had been doing interviews with tuba players for 10 years, on and off, without much focus, without much, you know, attempt to kind of narrow the idea down. And then all of a sudden, I really began to get into it, and I began to think, "Oh my God. Oh my goodness, this is, this is more profound and beautiful than anything I could possibly imagine." And I finished the book thinking that for sure, and that this was exactly the kind of book I should have been written, the best sequel to a book about OxyContin and heroin. There we go, there we go.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  And then another book about fentanyl and methamphetamine is a book about band directors and tuba players. I mean, sometimes you just, you feel like, "I'm just not worthy for the beauty of this profession sometimes, I'm not..." It's so gorgeous, it's so fantastic what you can learn, and what you can see if, if you dig in. That does not mean me playing. I tried one time to play one of those perfect tubas, and it sounds like, very much like when your stomach's growling, you haven't eaten for a while, that's the noise that I made on my damn thing. So there's, I don't want to, I don't want to repeat that disgraceful performance, but

• 58:55Speaker 01

  it's this beauty of finding people who no one has ever interviewed, you know, and no one has ever paid any attention to.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  A few interviews and they realized, oh, this guy's serious. That first phone call, he was, he was not kidding. You know, and all this, and this is what happened. I interviewed many people numerous times. Poor Al Cortinas down in, in Roma, Texas. That guy interviewed, oh, man, 10, 12 times, you know? Bob Carpenter, one of those guys who's trying to recreate. And Tom Trees, both of those guys to try to recreate The Perfect Tuba and down in Orlando, Florida. Those poor guys, they've been interviewed by me so many times. But that's how you get. Again, I learned kind of what the lessons of bands, right? Focus, perseverance, collaboration with others. Anyway, I get a little excited about this stuff, but, but it, it's so beautiful.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  It, it's just so beautiful and, and, and I was just so lucky to be able to do these, these stories. I'm not kidding.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Sam Kinianis. His book is The Perfect Tuba. Sam, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  As always, Russ, just a wonderful time talking with you. Thank you very much.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.