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

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 and 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 mail at econtalk.org.

We'd love to hear from you. Today is October 27th, 2025, and my guest is journalist and author Sam Kinionis. He was 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.

Well, it's great to be back with you, Russ. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure talking with you. This is a very unusual book. I I enjoyed it a great deal.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (61 minutes, 10,212 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.