Jan. 24, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| We just celebrated Martin Luther King's birthday. | ||
| A man who is associated with colorblindness. | ||
| Judge me by the content of my character, not the color of my skin. | ||
| That is what the civil rights movement used to be about. | ||
| Today, the civil rights movement is about Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Not all lives. | ||
| black lives, say it, or I'm coming after you. | ||
| We've turned the king sensibility on its head. | ||
| I mean, that's where we are as a country, and that's where the left is as a country. | ||
| And I don't think that Joe Biden feels he can oppose that and succeed politically in | ||
| the Democratic Party. | ||
| So I think he's doing what he feels he needs to do. | ||
| He needed a black woman as a running mate. | ||
| So he found a black woman to run. | ||
| And I think he's checking off the boxes in terms of race and gender and sexual orientation | ||
| right down the list, because that is what today's left demands. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, | ||
| a Wall Street Journal columnist and author of the upcoming book, "Maverick," | ||
| a biography of Thomas Sowell, Jason Reilly, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I am glad to have you here. | ||
| I thought this would be the right week to have you on, not only because the doc is coming out, but obviously Monday was MLK Day, there's a lot going on in the world, and I've been following what you do and what the Manhattan Institute does for quite some time, so I'm looking forward to the chat. | ||
| For the people that don't have any idea who you are, who is Jason Reilly and why is he on the Rubin Report? | ||
| Well, I'm a journalist. | ||
| I've been affiliated with the Wall Street Journal for about a quarter century now, and I write a political column for them, a weekly column mostly about urban issues, crime, immigration, race, economics, and so forth. | ||
| And I'm also, like you, a big fan of Thomas Sowell. | ||
| And I've written a few books over the years, and my most recent one Yeah, so the book is coming out actually on May 25th and we'll put the pre-order link below. | ||
| that a documentary film on his life that I narrate is also being released. | ||
| Yeah, so the book is coming out actually on May 25th and we'll put the pre-order link below. | ||
| The doc is actually coming out this weekend on some public TV stations and then streaming services | ||
| and all that good stuff. | ||
| And obviously, I know that you know how much Thomas Sowell has affected me | ||
| and I'm actually honored to be in the doc and you use some of the footage from our interview | ||
| that we did up at Stanford. | ||
| But, you know, you just hit on a bunch of the hot topic stuff of the day. | ||
| And as we're taping this today, it is Joe Biden's inauguration, but you mentioned you talk about crime, immigration, urban issues, things like that. | ||
| And as a Wall Street Journal guy, my audience can probably put together that you lean somewhat right. | ||
| Are you hopeful? | ||
| Are you worried? | ||
| What do you feel about the incoming administration right now on the issues that you care about? | ||
| I care about how divided we are as a country right now, and I'm hoping that Joe Biden can lower the volume a little bit. | ||
| I think that's gotten... | ||
| Gotten way out of hand, as we saw is what happened at the Capitol earlier this month. | ||
| So I'm hoping that that's a priority of his. | ||
| And maybe he'll be able to do that. | ||
| I'm encouraged by some of the things he's done so far. | ||
| Some of his cabinet picks, I think, have been quite moderate in comparison to what we could have had. | ||
| We don't have a Secretary Warren at Treasury or a Secretary Bernie Sanders running the Labor Department. | ||
| So I am hopeful there with some of his choices that he's made. | ||
| On the other hand, I'm quite disturbed that The direction of the Democratic Party in recent years, with the rise of the progressives, the sort of woke left disturbs me, the Black Lives Matter movement types disturb me. | ||
| And the fact of the matter is that Joe Biden is the head of a party that's moved quite a bit to the left since the last time he was in the White House. | ||
| And while he's a guy who I think has spent a career trying to find the center of the | ||
| Democratic Party and stay right there, the fact is the party itself has moved left. | ||
| And so I think we're -- I fear we're going to get a lot more of the identity politics | ||
| that we had under President Obama. | ||
| And that worries me because he left office with race relations in pretty, pretty bad | ||
| shape. | ||
| I think they continue to sour under President Trump, but they were already pretty bad when Trump got into office as a result of what happened under Obama. | ||
| And I'm fearful that Biden and his adherence to identity politics and so forth will keep us going in that direction, unfortunately. | ||
| Yeah, are you kind of surprised how much Biden has embraced identity politics? | ||
| Because as you're pointing out, he's not actually, we think, or at least his history is not one of the sort of really far left, you know, the Bernie Elizabeth Warrens. | ||
| It is more of a centrist. | ||
| But it's pretty clear that, you know, he's saying, OK, well, we got Pete Buttigieg, so we have a gay transportation secretary and we got a trans, I think, assistant health secretary or deputy health secretary. | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| He cares if you have gay people or trans people and black people and all of these things. | ||
| That's wonderful, but of course you want qualification. | ||
| Are you surprised he's doing or do you think he's just doing a certain amount of placating them to then get back to the center? | ||
| That would be music to my ears, but I fear that energy that you're talking about. | ||
| Yeah, I think he feels he has to do it. | ||
| That this is where the party is. | ||
| And if anything, it's gotten worse in recent years. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| We just celebrated Martin Luther King's birthday. | ||
| A man who is associated with colorblindness. | ||
| Judge me by the content of my character, not the color of my skin. | ||
| That is what the Civil Rights Movement used to be about. | ||
| Today, the Civil Rights Movement is about Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Not all lives. | ||
| black lives, say it, or I'm coming after you. | ||
| We've turned the king sensibility on its head. | ||
| I mean, that's where we are as a country, and that's where the left is as a country. | ||
| And I don't think that Joe Biden feels he can oppose that and succeed politically in | ||
| the Democratic Party. | ||
| So I think he's doing what he feels he needs to do. | ||
| He needed a black woman as a running mate. | ||
| So he found a black woman to run. | ||
| And I think he's checking off the boxes in terms of race and gender and sexual orientation right down the list because that is what today's left demands. | ||
| That's, it's very bizarre. | ||
| I've asked this of a few other people that I've had on the show, but are you shocked at the way these seemingly bad ideas have taken a hold of so many of our institutions and our political elite and our media institutions and everything else? | ||
| I am, I'm quite concerned. | ||
| And there's so little pushback. | ||
| Even on the left, they're canceling each other. | ||
| If you don't toe the line on certain issues, everyone from a Steven Pinker to an Andrew Sullivan, you are not allowed to step out of line over there or the mob will come after you. | ||
| And I find it extremely disturbing. | ||
| I don't think that it's helpful in terms of addressing real issues in society. | ||
| It keeps us at each other's throat. | ||
| But this is how the Democratic Party wins votes. | ||
| This is how they gen up their base. | ||
| And what we're going through right now with the critical race theory, | ||
| I mean, I'm old enough to remember when this stuff started, | ||
| back in the '70s and '80s in particular, but it was sort of limited to academia. | ||
| And now it's spilled over into the mainstream and we're talking about unconscious bias | ||
| and these ridiculous diversity training programs and demanding the self-abasement of whites | ||
| and to acknowledge their privilege and all the rest. | ||
| I think this is horrible. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you, and unfortunately is the key word there. | ||
| So you mentioned just sort of generally the state of race relations, that they got worse under Obama, you feel they got worse under Trump, and now here we are with this new ideology that seemingly will only make it worse. | ||
| When you say got worse, How do you actually define that? | ||
| Because I find when I, the limited amount that I've traveled in the last year because of COVID, but from talking to my audience and hearing what people are saying, and when I do get to travel, I think most people don't really care about race. | ||
| I don't think people really care about sexuality. | ||
| I certainly don't think they care about gender. | ||
| I think Americans Probably something like 80% of them are kind of live and let live. | ||
| They just don't know it exactly. | ||
| It's not the messaging they get. | ||
| How do you actually grade sort of, okay, it got worse under Obama or it got worse under Trump? | ||
| Well, I'm basing that on polling data. | ||
| A Gallup poll asked this question every few years. | ||
| Do you think race relations have improved or have worsened? | ||
| And when Obama left office in 2015, or 2016, I should say, that poll answer showed that race relations were at their lowest point since the early 90s. | ||
| So they had really, really tapered off, and they didn't improve much under Trump, at least in terms of how people were responding to that question. | ||
| Now, there could be something in the way the question is asked, framed or something, and maybe anecdotally it's easy to counter that notion. | ||
| I mean, if intermarriage rates are up, You know, if things like that are going on, if there's less segregation in residential housing and so forth, that would all point in the opposite direction. | ||
| So it may be a way of how the question is framed, but I'm basing it on the polling data that I've read. | ||
| Yeah, and then at the same time, we see interesting things like, I think it was black female support, I think doubled for Trump than four years prior. | ||
| We saw the Blexit movement. | ||
| We did see some markers that things are kind of changing, but I sense now it could all be for naught. | ||
| I think we saw some indications that there's no reason for the Republican Party to give up on the minority vote. | ||
| Trump improved his performance among blacks, especially among Hispanic voters. | ||
| And I think that had a lot to do with his focus on reopening the economy. | ||
| People forget how bad things were, particularly for black men under Obama in terms of employment. | ||
| The black unemployment rate did not fall below double digits until the seventh year of the Obama presidency. | ||
| So things were very bad for a very long time. | ||
| And then under Trump, we see record low unemployment rates, record low poverty rates. | ||
| We see the wages rising for the least skilled workers. | ||
| At the fastest rate of all workers. | ||
| Things were going quite well pre-COVID in terms of the economy. | ||
| And COVID really shut all that down. | ||
| And I think Trump's focus on reopening and getting people back to work is one reason he improved his numbers among minorities. | ||
| Yeah, so before we jump into the doc and Thomas Sowell and all that, let's do a little bit on the right side of things. | ||
| I think a lot of people that are watching this probably agreeing with your assessment of what's going on on the left. | ||
| What do you make of what's going on on the right right now? | ||
| Do you think Trump is gonna lead some sort of patriot party now? | ||
| What happens to establishment Republicans? | ||
| Can they reconcile all of this stuff? | ||
| Well, who knows what Donald Trump is going to do. | ||
| I've stopped trying to guess about his intentions. | ||
| It may be limited in what he can do, depending on how this impeachment process plays out. | ||
| I guess Mitch McConnell has made some comments that lead some to believe that he would vote for conviction. | ||
| And others say that if he does, others will follow suit. | ||
| And if the Senate convicts him in a way that prevents him from running for office again, then that could quash efforts going forward. | ||
| I guess he could still have influence in terms of Yeah, it does seem like, you know, the quote-unquote swamp is sort of ready to just circle and expunge him, but what do you do with those 74 million people? | ||
| the nail in the coffin on that. | ||
| Yeah, it does seem like the quote unquote swamp is sort of ready to just circle and expunge him. | ||
| But what do you do with those 74 million people? | ||
| I guess that's really the question. | ||
| Well, yeah, he's got his followers. | ||
| We don't know what will happen with them. | ||
| Some of them were people that were not politically active at all. | ||
| He made them come out and participate in politics for the first time. | ||
| So could they go back to being inactive again? | ||
| A lot of them, and the left doesn't like to acknowledge this, but a lot of them were former Obama voters that he won in 2016 and held on to in 2020. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what will become of those voters without Trump? | ||
| But yes, the Republican Party is worried about losing some of those Trump voters. | ||
| But I also think, and I don't know how they compare in terms of numbers, But I can say there are also a fair number of Republicans, like my wife for instance, who could never bring herself to support Donald Trump. | ||
| She didn't like the way he talked about women or demean the war record of military heroes and so forth. | ||
| So she did not support Republicans while he was in office. | ||
| But she's perfectly ready to go back to supporting Republican presidential candidates now. | ||
| So I don't know how representative she is of people out there. | ||
| Who knows how this will play out, but I think it's clear that the country may have been tired of Donald Trump, but they voted for divided government. | ||
| They shrunk the Democrats' lead in the House. | ||
| We have a 50-50 Senate. | ||
| So the country is not throwing out republicanism with Donald Trump. | ||
| And I think that's something Biden should keep in mind as he goes forward governing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, in my humble opinion, if he goes down the identity politics route that it seems like he's going down, they're gonna get crushed even harder in two years, which probably would be good to balance things out. | ||
| Well, I think Obama made this mistake when he came into office, and maybe Joe Biden will learn from it, but I think they saw George W. Bush with very low approval ratings going out of office, and they interpreted that as a mandate for a far-left agenda. | ||
| So they passed the stimulus package that didn't do much, and then they turned their attention to reforming, transforming the healthcare system in this country in a highly partisan fashion. And it turned out to be hugely unpopular. They | ||
| lost in time, both houses of Congress, the Democrats did, and it turned out to be a disaster. And | ||
| it'll be interesting to know if Biden interprets Trump's unpopularity with a mandate for | ||
| moving forward with a progressive agenda. I don't think people voted for him for a | ||
| progressive agenda. | ||
| So we'll see if Joe Biden learned anything from the last time he was in the White House. | ||
| Yeah, that I guess is the tension. | ||
| It's like, yeah, he wants to, or maybe in the past would have been more center. | ||
| The energy's over here and just sort of how far can that push and pull go? | ||
| All right, so let's talk about the doc and Thomas Sowell. | ||
| First off, when did you become aware of the work of Thomas Sowell? | ||
| How did this whole project come together? | ||
| Oh, well, I first became aware of Thomas Sowell when I was in college in the early 1990s. | ||
| I worked for my college paper. | ||
| And I was having a conversation about Affirmative Action with one of my colleagues on the school paper. | ||
| And another person walked over and said, you sound like Tom Saul. | ||
| And I said, Tom who? | ||
| And I had no idea who he was. | ||
| The person wrote down the name of a book. | ||
| I went and checked it out of the school library that evening | ||
| and read it in one sitting and spent the weekend reading everything else that the library had by Thomas Sowell | ||
| and I was hooked. | ||
| And so he really had a big impact on my sort of intellectual development since college. | ||
| But I was already leaning more conservative by the time I discovered Thomas Sowell, | ||
| which is, I found out later, is not at all uncommon. | ||
| I mean, by the time Clarence Thomas discovered Thomas Sowell, his reaction was, wow, | ||
| there's someone else out there who thinks like me. | ||
| Walter Williams, who recently passed away, had the exact same experience. | ||
| They were friends for 50 years. | ||
| And when they first met, Walter Williams was already Walter Williams. | ||
| So you hear this time and again. | ||
| People have found their way to Thomas Sowell, but he hasn't necessarily led them to believe what they now believe. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So as a guy that write in a book about him or wrote a book about him that's upcoming and did the doc and everything, you must be just like over the moon that he's had this resurgence, this renaissance with young people. | ||
| Because when I interviewed him, I mean, the amount of emails that we got and handwritten letters and Facebook messages and the whole thing saying this man transformed My life. | ||
| And in many ways, for me, you know, people always say to me, Dave, it seems like you've changed so much politically. | ||
| And I always say, well, actually, I'm mostly the same. | ||
| Economics is where I changed. | ||
| It's just, that's the one. | ||
| Like, I don't deny it, right? | ||
| But the other stuff is pretty much there and was always there. | ||
| But economics is the one that really changed. | ||
| And it was because of Thomas Sowell. | ||
| It was happening before that interview. | ||
| But to me, that moment, that was it. | ||
| That pretty much was it. | ||
| And I am thrilled that a younger generation of people are interested in Seoul, because what he has written over the years is as relevant today as ever. | ||
| He was writing about social justice issues 30 and 40 years ago. | ||
| uh... and and and and and and he's still right about about these things in fact it is amazing | ||
| how long he has been so right about so many issues uh... you can go back and read personal letters that he | ||
| wrote in the nineteen sixties to people | ||
| about how he thought the civil rights movement was gonna end | ||
| uh... it's it's it's really really amazing uh... how his prescience in that | ||
| in that regard but in so in terms of of of me personally | ||
| uh... discovering so that's what happened back in college in terms of the film | ||
| uh... uh... why i said so the book i i i I've known Saul for about 15, 20 years, and I've been pressuring him to let me do this biography for some time. | ||
| And I knew I could do it without him. | ||
| He said I could do it without him, but I wanted his cooperation. | ||
| I didn't think a lot of other people would talk to me if I didn't have his blessing to do it. | ||
| And he finally gave in and let me start writing it. | ||
| So I started on it about five years ago. | ||
| Four years ago, I got interrupted by someone else to write another book about another issue, so I put the Soul Book aside, and then I got back to it about 2018, and the result will be out in the spring. | ||
| When the people at the Free to Choose Network, and they're the ones who produced the documentary, learned about the book, They came to me and asked me if I would be interested in narrating a documentary film that they were putting together. | ||
| And Soul had a long history with the Free to Choose Network through Milton Friedman, one of his mentors, who did a series for Free to Choose on public television back in the early 1980s. | ||
| And Soul participated in Milton Friedman's show. | ||
| And so they wanted to do a documentary on Soul. | ||
| They asked me if I was interested in being a narrator and helping in developing the film. | ||
| And that's how that got started. | ||
| Yeah, there's a moment, I think when I was interviewed, I mentioned this moment, I don't know if it made it into the doc, but I'm sure you'll appreciate this, when I finished the interview with him and I had tweeted out right before, you know, I'm about to sit down with Thomas Sowell, you know, if he's influenced you in any way, send me a message and maybe I can read a couple to him. | ||
| And I got, I mean, I got hundreds, if not thousands of tweets. | ||
| And I said to him at the end, I said, Dr. Stoll, I tweeted out that I'm sitting down with you and I just got so many of these great messages, if you wanna take a look, and I kinda showed him my phone, and he goes with that great voice, he goes, young man, I've been doing this for a long time. | ||
| And I just thought it was the perfect response, like truly the perfect response, getting to what you're saying, that the things that he was talking about 30, 40 years ago, They're relevant and feel new to us now, but this has been a long slog for this guy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it has been. | ||
| And there's a lot of people think that Tom is on Twitter because there's a fan site. | ||
| And it's run by a millennial who's never met Tom. | ||
| It's not an authorized site. | ||
| And all this guy does is tweet quotes from past Soul columns and books. | ||
| That's it. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| There's no added commentary to them. | ||
| He just takes these quotes and tweets them out and has hundreds of thousands of followers, which would be amazing for anyone, but especially for someone who's not on social media like Thomas Sowell is. | ||
| Yeah, no, it really, that account, I mean, it's at Thomas Sowell, and for a long time I thought it was some sort of official account, but every time, they tweet out a meme or just a quote, whatever it is, and it's like, if he wrote that yesterday, you'd be going, man, this guy knows what's up, and then of course you find out, oh no, he wrote that, you know, in 1969 or something like that. | ||
| Well, people, what's amazing, and this speaks to your comment about how long Sowell has been doing this. | ||
| You know, people often say to me, after I give a speech or write something in the paper, oh, you must be very brave to write something like that. | ||
| And it's really usually if I write something contrarian about race or an issue like that. | ||
| And I don't think there's anything particularly brave about it. | ||
| I think of soul as I mean, he's been doing this for a long time, well before there was a Fox News, well before there was social media support, or talk radio people that had his back and that sort of thing. | ||
| He was just out there writing this stuff, and he was doing it largely alone, and without the support that many conservatives, particularly black conservatives, today have. | ||
| So, that's bravery in my book. | ||
| What kind of support do you think black conservatives have now? | ||
| Because I think you could probably argue it both ways. | ||
| On one hand, there is now some defense of black conservatives. | ||
| I have many black conservative friends. | ||
| There's more out there, obviously. | ||
| But on the other hand, I'm not going to have to tell you all the things that you guys get called. | ||
| And I don't even want to see them because YouTube will delete the video. | ||
| That comes with the territory. | ||
| Yes, the name-calling has always been there, but there's far more support. | ||
| I mean, I'll put it this way, the way Thomas put it. | ||
| Back in the 1980s, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams made a pact never to fly together. | ||
| Because if the plane went down, it would be the end of black conservatism in America. | ||
| So we're a long way from that today. | ||
| And just the support I get. | ||
| A few years ago, I was invited to speak at a college campus, and then I was disinvited to speak. | ||
| I wrote a column about it. | ||
| I went on television and talked about it. | ||
| The president of the university was bombarded with complaints from graduates and even some students at the school for disinviting me. | ||
| They reversed course and re-invited me. | ||
| That sort of thing, I don't know that Tom would have ever had that kind of support 30 or 40 years ago. | ||
| But that's what's out there today for black conservatives, yeah. | ||
| Do you find that his evolution, as I talked to him about, and we had this great viral clip where I said, you know, how did your political evolution happen? | ||
|
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And you know, he just paused, facts, you know, it's just facts. | |
| That was what caused him to go from, you know, a Marxist in essence to a libertarian. | ||
| It seems like it's happening to an awful lot of people right now. | ||
| It's not something that the media is gonna talk about, but it seems like a lot of young people are getting it. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe we talk to different young people. | ||
| When I see the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the way she talks about how billionaires should be banned, that sort of thing tells me something else might be going on. | ||
| You know, part of it might have to do with the experience. | ||
| I mean, if you're a young person today and your idea of how an economy should be growing or what the employment should look like in this country was the Obama years, or shortly thereafter, you know, that's That's your experience, and maybe you're thinking capitalism isn't all that great of a thing, if this is all it can do. | ||
| So maybe you have a skewed sense of capitalism, and maybe that's where people like AOC come from in terms of how they view free market economics. | ||
| Republicans and conservative intellectuals in general, I think, need to do a better job of communicating these ideas to young people. | ||
| I think, in a large sense, they're losing that fight. | ||
| Now, young people typically are more left of center, as Tom was, when he was younger. | ||
| And then they grow up, they grow out of it. | ||
| Experience teaches them that another way is better. | ||
| But I do think that Republicans, in particular, need to do a better job of communicating some of these ideas Yeah, it's funny, because I hear a lot about young people waking up to it, so that's my own sort of world there, but of course, the counterbalance is the popularity of AOC. | ||
| And Tom has spent a career trying to explain these ideas. | ||
| I mean, his best-selling book, he's known a lot of people for his writings on race, but his best-selling book is basic economics. | ||
| Which is essentially an economics textbook without any graphs and equations in it. | ||
| And he takes great pride in explaining economics to non-economists and everyday people in plain English. | ||
| He thinks it's a very important thing to do. | ||
| It's one of the things he learned from Milton Friedman, who spent his career after leaving academia as a public intellectual, who spent a lot of time explaining economics to non-intellectuals on college campuses and elsewhere. | ||
| And so Tom has taken great pride in doing that throughout his career. | ||
| And sometimes in the academy, that isn't exactly rewarded, it's looked down on. | ||
| Why are you writing about, you know, for the general public instead of for your peers? | ||
| But Tom thinks that that is the proper role of a public intellectual. | ||
| Yeah, and look, as we watch public education kind of crumble, it's like we need those voices | ||
| that are gonna be willing to do it. | ||
| In knowing him, did you ever get a sense, you know, obviously he wrote mostly and cared mostly about economics, but there is a lot of racial stuff there. | ||
| Do you think that that was just a byproduct of the fact that he was black, so he kind of was sort of pinned into it, or do you think he really wanted to talk about that stuff? | ||
| I remember in our interview trying to ask that question in a way that, That didn't seem pandering or something. | ||
| No, he reluctantly came to writing about race. | ||
| And that's one of the more interesting aspects of his background. | ||
| Tom could have spent his career writing about his first love, which was economics and the history of economics and the history of ideas. | ||
| That is his specialty. | ||
| He was an expert on Marx. | ||
| He's an expert on the classical liberals from, you know, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mills and so forth. | ||
| That was Tom's first love, writing about those guys. | ||
| And that's what he spent the beginning of his career doing. | ||
| And he was good at it. | ||
| I mean, he won high praise from his peers. | ||
| And he could have stayed in that lane and led a very fruitful life, teaching and writing about economics. | ||
| He turned to writing about race, as he puts it, out of a sense of duty. | ||
| He said, because there are things that need to be said. | ||
| And the way he put it is, too many other people have the good sense not to say them. | ||
| But they need to be said and someone's got to do it. | ||
| And that is why he turned his attention to race. | ||
| And he had a pretty formative experience, I think, when he was at Cornell in the late 60s, which is when the rioting occurred on campus. | ||
| And he was there at the time. | ||
| He was a professor of economics at Cornell. | ||
| And I think that made quite an impression on him, on where things were headed, not just on campus, but off campus as well, in terms of race in this country. | ||
| And I think it led ultimately to him leaving academia and joining the Hoover Institution, which is a think tank at Stanford. | ||
| And also led to him writing more about racial issues, which is something he turned his attention to in the 70s and 80s. | ||
| Do you have a sense of how he's feeling about the state of the world right now? | ||
| I know in the last year or so, obviously because of COVID, he wasn't doing many interviews. | ||
| We tried to get up there and then we just couldn't coordinate it with so many things. | ||
| He's 91, is that right? 91? | ||
| He's 90. | ||
| So he's 90 years old. | ||
| He'll be 91 this year in June. | ||
| I mean, for 90, he is unbelievably spry and everything else, but obviously isn't doing as many appearances. | ||
| I think he was on Mark Levin's show not too long ago. | ||
| Do you get a sense of where he's at, sort of, in the politics of the day? | ||
| I don't have a good sense. | ||
| We've communicated by email a few times over the past six months or so, but not a whole lot since COVID. | ||
| He did publish a book last year, a brand new book on charter schools, and he did some interviews for that book, so he's still working. | ||
| I mean, he retired his column a few years ago, but he's still writing books or updating editions of old books and so forth. | ||
| And I've seen him in a few interviews. | ||
| You mentioned The Mark Levin Show. | ||
| He's done some other shows as well, and I've seen some of those interviews. | ||
| But I don't get a sense of where he is, how he's thinking about what's going on now. | ||
| I will say that his general default position is extreme pessimism. | ||
| About the way the world is headed, so I doubt anything that's happened in the past year or so has changed that. | ||
| Yeah, I have a bad feeling you're right on that one. | ||
| How was it for you, personally, to get to know one of your heroes? | ||
| You know, they always say, don't meet your heroes, because it's always going to be a letdown one way or another. | ||
| How was the whole experience for you? | ||
| It was a pure joy to spend several years delving into uh... the intellectual life of of console and his getting inside his head uh... uh... reading uh... trying to read everything he's ever read and he's written so much on so many issues and uh... he's just so knowledgeable and and uh... you know he several times uh... i found myself what will try to write the book uh... | ||
| trying to explain something more clearly than he had already explained it | ||
| and what he had written and and and it was uh... | ||
| it was a came across that time and time again but but it was it was a real real | ||
| thrill uh... to to and i was i was very happy that he allowed me to to to to do the book or or gave me | ||
| the green light it's not an authorized biography by any sense he didn't get | ||
| to see anything uh... that i've written before it was published | ||
| uh... but he did cooperate he did sit for several long interviews | ||
| uh... over the years and uh... and uh... and i was i was just very very very | ||
| grateful for for for that and i am uh... | ||
| uh... it's something i'm i'm glad i did I hope, you know, at some point I think a real serious scholar of economics is going to have to delve into Tom's work and really get into the weeds, which is something a little above my pay grade because I'm just a journalist. | ||
| But I hope I produce something that's readable. | ||
| I have no doubt that you have. | ||
| What about on the personal side? | ||
| Because I think sometimes, especially for younger people, you see these clips on YouTube of these people, or you see them in the box on Fox or CNN, and you kind of almost don't think they're real people. | ||
| They're just these things that exist. | ||
| They're almost like cartoon characters of themselves in a way. | ||
| What did you learn about just the way he's wired, or his temperament, or just interesting on the personal side? | ||
| Because I don't know that people know much of anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'll start with that. | |
| I use a story in the book to try and explain Tom's personality, and I use a joke from an old movie. | ||
| There's an old movie called Sabrina starring Harrison Ford that came out, I think, in the 90s sometime. | ||
| And the love interest in the movie Harrison Ford plays this very curmudgeonly industrialist, and the family has a longtime chauffeur, and the daughter of the chauffeur falls for Harrison Ford's character. | ||
| And she goes to her dad one day and she says, Dad, what was Harrison Ford like when he was younger? | ||
| And her father looks at her and says, shorter. | ||
| I think I got the idea. | ||
| And it's a way of just saying, Tom Sowell has been Tom Sowell for a very, very, very long time. | ||
| And if you go back and read or talk to him about, you know, arguments he would have for people when he was in grade school or high school, very much like the arguments he has with people today. | ||
| He's someone who has been a Sort of ready for intellectual combat. | ||
| It seems like since the day he was born. | ||
| He is a very serious person. | ||
| He doesn't suffer fools. | ||
| But he's also a very generous person, a very kind person. | ||
| And I got that from a lot of people I interviewed. | ||
| Tom would go to bat with them. | ||
| They came to him with a problem, whether it was a colleague, a student, someone like that. | ||
| Tom was willing to go to bat for them. | ||
| And so that side of him also came through. | ||
| But he's always been a very intellectually curious person and someone who was pretty | ||
| confident of his abilities. | ||
| And he's a former Marine, which might surprise a lot of people because he's also a bit of | ||
| a loner. | ||
| He's not much of a team player. | ||
| And I don't think those attributes work very well in the military. | ||
| And I know for a fact he made it through. | ||
| I know for a fact he's not much of a techie because we were trying to get Skype on his computer so we could do it during COVID, but he didn't wanna download it. | ||
| And then we were gonna literally deliver a computer to his door that he would have just had to open, but a whole other situation. | ||
| You know, one of the other- He's not a people person in that sense. | ||
| He's worked from home for a long, a long time. | ||
| He has an office. | ||
| You know, it's so interesting because right now when we all talk about the sort of lack of discourse and the lack of sort of honest public debate, and it was like for years he was debating all sorts of people on Firing Line, all these other shows and public events and all of that, and I would guess that I'm sure he loves the writing that he's still doing, but I'm guessing he misses probably some level of that, the public sparring with some of the people. | ||
| I guess so, but like you said, he's 90 years old. | ||
| He's been doing it for a long time. | ||
| I think he's set his piece more than a few dozen times. | ||
| He doesn't need that last knockout. | ||
| He doesn't need that last round. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I remember asking him after he retired the column, we were having dinner and I said, do you miss being able to get things off your chest? | ||
| And he said, no, there's nothing left on my chest. | ||
| I think he, you know, Solt put a lot of thought and time into his work. | ||
| And that required, you know, doing your homework and staying up on current events and so forth. | ||
| And I think not having to do that anymore. | ||
| I mean, he mentioned right before he retired his column, or decided to retire it, that he had gone on a sort of photo safari with a group of friends. | ||
| He's an amateur photographer and a very good one, and has been for a long time. | ||
| And he and a few buddies went on a photo outing, a multiple-day one, and they didn't have any access to radio or TV for a few days. | ||
| He recalled how pleasant that experience was, and he's already well into his 80s, and he said, you know, I think I'm ready to tune out of the day-to-day. | ||
| And so I think he's probably enjoying it. | ||
| I mean, like I said, he's still doing the books and staying active intellectually on that front, but I don't think he misses probably churning out that column or two every week. | ||
| Yeah, you'll probably appreciate this. | ||
| When we sat down at Stanford, his guys said, he's got 45 minutes. | ||
| He doesn't want to sit there for makeup. | ||
| It's like when he gets in, sit down, start, 45 minutes. | ||
| So I was very aware. | ||
| I did not want to take one extra minute of his time. | ||
| And when we hit 45, I ended it. | ||
| And he looked at me the second the camera went off, and he goes, is that all? | ||
| I think he said, is that all? | ||
| We just started, or something to that effect. | ||
| And I thought, man, if I would have known that, I would have kept going, but I wanted to be respectful of, you know, that he's busy and all of those things. | ||
| Well, listen, I am super psyched, obviously, to watch the doc, and I'm honored to be part of it, and I can't wait to get the book as well. | ||
| Is there anything else that you'd want people to know before they partake in the doc or pick up the book? | ||
| No, I think you've covered it. | ||
| I think both the book and the documentary is a nice introduction to Thomas Sowell. | ||
| And then I hope people, I hope I whet their appetite and they go read more of him. | ||
| Because like I said, and like you said, he's been right for a long time and his stuff is as relevant today as it's ever been. | ||
| So we'll see what happens. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Well, Jason, I'm glad we finally got to talk. | ||
| And should we send people to your Twitter? | ||
| Should we send them to your Twitter? | ||
| Oh, that's fine. | ||
| You can send people to Twitter. | ||
| Is it just Jason Reilly? | ||
| No, there's a letter in there somewhere, right? | ||
| It's at Jason Reilly WSJ. | ||
| WSJ, that's it. | ||
| Okay, I knew it was in there somewhere. | ||
| All right, well, it was a pleasure to have you on. | ||
| I can't wait to see the doc, and I'll talk to you soon. | ||
| Take care. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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