1 00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:07,000 Downloaded from YTS.MX 2 00:00:02,903 --> 00:00:04,471 This whole notion that the black family 3 00:00:04,471 --> 00:00:07,207 has always been disintegrating, that is nonsense. 4 00:00:07,207 --> 00:00:08,942 His studies go up to 1925. 5 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:13,000 Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX 6 00:00:08,942 --> 00:00:11,311 The great bulk of black families were intact 7 00:00:11,311 --> 00:00:13,513 two-parent families up through 1925 8 00:00:13,513 --> 00:00:16,016 and going all the way back through the era of slavery. 9 00:00:16,016 --> 00:00:18,285 So it is now only within our own time 10 00:00:18,285 --> 00:00:21,221 that we suddenly see this inevitable tragedy 11 00:00:21,221 --> 00:00:24,124 which the welfare system says it's going to rush in to solve. 12 00:00:24,124 --> 00:00:26,827 It's been 40 years since the show aired, 13 00:00:26,827 --> 00:00:30,130 and Thomas Sowell's writings continue to illuminate. 14 00:00:30,130 --> 00:00:33,233 Whether the topic is race, crime, immigration, 15 00:00:33,233 --> 00:00:35,702 or so many other subjects, his scholarship 16 00:00:35,702 --> 00:00:37,204 remains as relevant as ever. 17 00:00:37,204 --> 00:00:39,273 Racists may prefer one race to another, 18 00:00:39,273 --> 00:00:41,508 but they prefer themselves to everybody else. 19 00:00:41,508 --> 00:00:43,911 Thomas Sowell is a trained economist. 20 00:00:43,911 --> 00:00:46,346 He's a sociologist who has written books 21 00:00:46,346 --> 00:00:48,615 about virtually every culture that's ever existed. 22 00:00:48,615 --> 00:00:50,217 He is a photographer. 23 00:00:50,217 --> 00:00:54,721 He is America's greatest contemporary living philosopher. 24 00:00:54,721 --> 00:00:56,256 I'm Jason Riley. 25 00:00:56,256 --> 00:00:58,025 I'm a journalist and author. 26 00:00:58,025 --> 00:00:59,493 For more than two decades, 27 00:00:59,493 --> 00:01:03,163 I have closely studied the life and work of Thomas Sowell. 28 00:01:03,163 --> 00:01:07,501 His story is both fascinating and illuminating. 29 00:01:07,501 --> 00:01:10,470 Tom makes a very, very good point that general principles 30 00:01:10,470 --> 00:01:14,107 affect everybody, whether they're black, brown, or purple. 31 00:01:14,107 --> 00:01:18,245 Tom is fearless not just in advancing unpopular opinions, 32 00:01:18,245 --> 00:01:21,148 but in venturing into areas of scholarship 33 00:01:21,148 --> 00:01:23,317 that had been untrodden. 34 00:01:23,317 --> 00:01:25,218 Tom Sowell is known for his views 35 00:01:25,218 --> 00:01:29,122 on economics, history, race, and politics. 36 00:01:29,122 --> 00:01:31,024 But I've also discovered some lesser-known 37 00:01:31,024 --> 00:01:33,460 aspects of his life -- 38 00:01:33,460 --> 00:01:36,730 his research and his writings about late-talking children, 39 00:01:36,730 --> 00:01:38,532 and the fact that he is a highly regarded 40 00:01:38,532 --> 00:01:41,702 world-traveling photographer. 41 00:01:41,702 --> 00:01:45,205 Over the next hour, we'll examine the life and career 42 00:01:45,205 --> 00:01:47,074 of Dr. Thomas Sowell, 43 00:01:47,074 --> 00:01:49,142 how he rose from humble beginnings 44 00:01:49,142 --> 00:01:51,044 to attend and teach at some of the nation's 45 00:01:51,044 --> 00:01:52,879 leading institutions 46 00:01:52,879 --> 00:01:55,916 and became one of our foremost social commentators. 47 00:01:55,916 --> 00:01:59,019 You were a Marxist at one time in your life. 48 00:01:59,019 --> 00:02:00,821 What was your wake-up to what was wrong 49 00:02:00,821 --> 00:02:02,055 with that line of thinking? 50 00:02:02,055 --> 00:02:03,290 Uh, facts. 51 00:02:03,290 --> 00:02:05,425 You're about to meet one of the greatest minds 52 00:02:05,425 --> 00:02:07,260 of the past half-century. 53 00:02:07,260 --> 00:02:16,903 [ music ] 54 00:02:19,072 --> 00:02:20,140 Funding for this program 55 00:02:20,140 --> 00:02:22,442 has been provided by... 56 00:02:35,255 --> 00:02:37,524 [ music ] 57 00:02:37,524 --> 00:02:39,926 Because I was a Marxist at the time, 58 00:02:39,926 --> 00:02:41,995 and they were appalled, and I thought -- 59 00:02:41,995 --> 00:02:44,431 you know, they have very high intellectual standards, 60 00:02:44,431 --> 00:02:49,302 and I'm not going to find ideological soul mates. 61 00:02:49,302 --> 00:02:51,705 I was still a Marxist. 62 00:02:51,705 --> 00:02:53,440 I took a summer job in the government, 63 00:02:53,440 --> 00:02:56,510 got an intern in economics. 64 00:02:56,510 --> 00:02:58,945 And it was seeing the government from the inside 65 00:02:58,945 --> 00:03:01,081 that turned me around. 66 00:03:01,081 --> 00:03:02,482 The vision of the left, 67 00:03:02,482 --> 00:03:04,251 and I think many conservatives underestimate this, 68 00:03:04,251 --> 00:03:08,288 is really a more attractive vision in itself. 69 00:03:08,288 --> 00:03:10,490 The only reason for not believing in it 70 00:03:10,490 --> 00:03:12,459 is that it doesn't work. 71 00:03:12,459 --> 00:03:14,895 But you don't see that at the outset 72 00:03:14,895 --> 00:03:17,397 if all you're looking at is just a theory. 73 00:03:17,397 --> 00:03:19,966 If the world were the way the left conceives it to be, 74 00:03:19,966 --> 00:03:21,368 it would be a better world 75 00:03:21,368 --> 00:03:23,336 than the way the right conceives it to be. 76 00:03:23,336 --> 00:03:26,073 It just happens that the world is not that way. 77 00:03:26,073 --> 00:03:27,808 For me, Thomas Sowell 78 00:03:27,808 --> 00:03:29,609 is that rarest of species -- 79 00:03:29,609 --> 00:03:31,611 and honest intellectual. 80 00:03:31,611 --> 00:03:32,946 He's spent a career 81 00:03:32,946 --> 00:03:36,016 putting truth above popularity. 82 00:03:36,016 --> 00:03:38,018 He's explored the answers to questions 83 00:03:38,018 --> 00:03:40,754 others were afraid to even ask. 84 00:03:40,754 --> 00:03:43,256 He's followed the facts where they lead 85 00:03:43,256 --> 00:03:45,025 and accepted the findings, 86 00:03:45,025 --> 00:03:48,161 however unpopular or politically incorrect. 87 00:03:48,161 --> 00:03:50,263 Thomas Sowell fervently stands 88 00:03:50,263 --> 00:03:53,100 by his well-researched beliefs, 89 00:03:53,100 --> 00:03:55,402 and he does not hesitate to let someone know 90 00:03:55,402 --> 00:03:58,705 if he thinks they're wrong. 91 00:03:58,705 --> 00:04:01,308 I've spent dozens of hours interviewing Tom 92 00:04:01,308 --> 00:04:03,677 and hundreds more selecting stories 93 00:04:03,677 --> 00:04:06,279 he's told over the years to others 94 00:04:06,279 --> 00:04:10,016 to help us understand what makes Thomas Sowell unique. 95 00:04:10,016 --> 00:04:14,254 [ music ] 96 00:04:14,254 --> 00:04:16,823 Sowell's body of work is quite vast. 97 00:04:16,823 --> 00:04:19,593 It's covered everything from economics and history 98 00:04:19,593 --> 00:04:22,262 to culture, migration, and racial inequality. 99 00:04:22,262 --> 00:04:25,499 The main thing that he's done, in my opinion, 100 00:04:25,499 --> 00:04:27,434 is to cause people to rethink their assumptions 101 00:04:27,434 --> 00:04:29,569 about all sorts of things. 102 00:04:29,569 --> 00:04:30,971 Not just economics, 103 00:04:30,971 --> 00:04:33,573 but about race, about politics, 104 00:04:33,573 --> 00:04:36,676 about how we get along. 105 00:04:36,676 --> 00:04:38,512 Tom is absolutely fearless. 106 00:04:38,512 --> 00:04:40,413 I mean, he's forceful in his opinions. 107 00:04:40,413 --> 00:04:43,116 He will not compromise any of his opinions 108 00:04:43,116 --> 00:04:47,020 for the sake of social politeness. 109 00:04:47,020 --> 00:04:49,956 How do you take the measure of a man, 110 00:04:49,956 --> 00:04:52,692 especially if he's someone who's impacted our thinking 111 00:04:52,692 --> 00:04:57,164 about politics and economics for more than half a century? 112 00:04:57,164 --> 00:05:01,334 Do you do it through his deeds or influence? 113 00:05:01,334 --> 00:05:05,105 Or by what he says or writes? 114 00:05:05,105 --> 00:05:07,274 Perhaps Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 115 00:05:07,274 --> 00:05:08,542 said it best -- 116 00:05:08,542 --> 00:05:10,677 "The ultimate measure of a man 117 00:05:10,677 --> 00:05:11,912 is not where he stands 118 00:05:11,912 --> 00:05:15,582 in moments of comfort and convenience, 119 00:05:15,582 --> 00:05:20,187 but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." 120 00:05:20,187 --> 00:05:23,423 The media -- the television and the print media, 121 00:05:23,423 --> 00:05:24,858 they've wised up. 122 00:05:24,858 --> 00:05:26,560 You can't argue with Tom, 123 00:05:26,560 --> 00:05:29,729 so you might as well hide what he's doing. 124 00:05:29,729 --> 00:05:31,431 And that's what they're doing. 125 00:05:31,431 --> 00:05:34,000 They're just ignoring what he's written 126 00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:37,704 because there's no way that they can argue with Tom Sowell. 127 00:05:37,704 --> 00:05:41,174 [ music ] 128 00:05:41,174 --> 00:05:44,511 What distinguishes Thomas Sowell's scholarship? 129 00:05:44,511 --> 00:05:47,447 First, intellectual honesty -- asking the right questions, 130 00:05:47,447 --> 00:05:49,015 gathering the relevant data, 131 00:05:49,015 --> 00:05:51,851 and following the facts to their logical conclusion, 132 00:05:51,851 --> 00:05:55,655 even if that conclusion turns out to be unpopular. 133 00:05:55,655 --> 00:05:58,391 Second, the importance of incentives 134 00:05:58,391 --> 00:05:59,893 and the reality of trade-offs 135 00:05:59,893 --> 00:06:02,462 in addressing our social problems. 136 00:06:02,462 --> 00:06:04,931 Third, the belief that a group's upward mobility 137 00:06:04,931 --> 00:06:09,169 derives primarily from its development of human capital. 138 00:06:09,169 --> 00:06:11,972 And finally, Sowell has an abiding respect 139 00:06:11,972 --> 00:06:15,542 for social processes and existing institutions 140 00:06:15,542 --> 00:06:18,311 and the role they play in decision-making. 141 00:06:18,311 --> 00:06:20,614 So where do Tom Sowell's ideas come from? 142 00:06:20,614 --> 00:06:23,450 What formed the foundation of a man who would go on 143 00:06:23,450 --> 00:06:26,920 to become one of the country's foremost public intellectuals? 144 00:06:26,920 --> 00:06:28,355 That story began 145 00:06:28,355 --> 00:06:30,690 600 miles to the south of Midtown Manhattan 146 00:06:30,690 --> 00:06:32,525 more than eight decades ago. 147 00:06:32,525 --> 00:06:39,032 [ music ] 148 00:06:39,032 --> 00:06:41,935 Thomas Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, 149 00:06:41,935 --> 00:06:44,738 on June 30, 1930. 150 00:06:46,706 --> 00:06:50,477 The Great Depression was just getting underway, 151 00:06:50,477 --> 00:06:53,246 and like many blacks in the South at the time, 152 00:06:53,246 --> 00:06:56,716 his family had no electricity, 153 00:06:56,716 --> 00:06:58,652 no central heating, 154 00:06:58,652 --> 00:07:01,921 and no hot running water. 155 00:07:01,921 --> 00:07:04,658 Sowell's father died before Tom was born 156 00:07:06,526 --> 00:07:09,562 and his mother, a maid, died in childbirth 157 00:07:09,562 --> 00:07:11,464 just a few years later. 158 00:07:13,199 --> 00:07:15,135 He was adopted by his great aunt 159 00:07:15,135 --> 00:07:18,872 and raised by her and her two daughters. 160 00:07:18,872 --> 00:07:21,074 So he was raised by three women. 161 00:07:21,074 --> 00:07:23,877 My whole career would not have been possible 162 00:07:23,877 --> 00:07:26,379 without the particular family in which I was raised, 163 00:07:26,379 --> 00:07:28,982 which was not composed of educated people. 164 00:07:28,982 --> 00:07:31,284 I mean, nobody in that family had ever graduated 165 00:07:31,284 --> 00:07:32,686 from high school, 166 00:07:32,686 --> 00:07:35,322 and most had not graduated from grade school. 167 00:07:35,322 --> 00:07:37,057 But they were interested in education 168 00:07:37,057 --> 00:07:38,925 and they were interested in me. 169 00:07:40,794 --> 00:07:46,032 Tom was raised by a great aunt and her adult children. 170 00:07:46,032 --> 00:07:47,667 The family moved to New York City's 171 00:07:47,667 --> 00:07:49,869 Harlem neighborhood, 172 00:07:49,869 --> 00:07:52,839 a migration that exposed him to better schools 173 00:07:52,839 --> 00:07:55,342 and more opportunities than were available to blacks 174 00:07:55,342 --> 00:07:56,910 in the segregated South. 175 00:07:59,045 --> 00:08:01,514 "My great fear is that a black child 176 00:08:01,514 --> 00:08:04,417 growing up in Harlem today will not have as good a chance 177 00:08:04,417 --> 00:08:06,986 to rise as people of my generation did, 178 00:08:06,986 --> 00:08:08,922 simply because they will not receive 179 00:08:08,922 --> 00:08:11,624 as solid an education, in an era 180 00:08:11,624 --> 00:08:14,661 when such an education is even more important." 181 00:08:14,661 --> 00:08:20,734 [ music ] 182 00:08:20,734 --> 00:08:27,240 [ music ] 183 00:08:27,240 --> 00:08:29,109 When Thomas Sowell was 8 years old, 184 00:08:29,109 --> 00:08:31,177 his family moved from North Carolina 185 00:08:31,177 --> 00:08:33,380 to New York City, and settled here, 186 00:08:33,380 --> 00:08:35,382 at 720 St. Nicholas Avenue 187 00:08:35,382 --> 00:08:37,217 in the neighborhood of Harlem. 188 00:08:37,217 --> 00:08:40,453 [ music ] 189 00:08:40,453 --> 00:08:41,755 The building looks pretty much the same 190 00:08:41,755 --> 00:08:43,823 as it did more than 80 years ago 191 00:08:43,823 --> 00:08:45,158 when the Sowells moved in. 192 00:08:45,158 --> 00:08:50,663 [ music ] 193 00:08:50,663 --> 00:08:52,532 Young Tommy, as he was called, 194 00:08:52,532 --> 00:08:54,267 ventured out into a big city 195 00:08:54,267 --> 00:08:55,902 for the very first time. 196 00:08:55,902 --> 00:08:57,470 He rode double-decker buses 197 00:08:57,470 --> 00:09:00,840 and learned to cross busy streets all by himself. 198 00:09:00,840 --> 00:09:02,242 [ Train wheels clacking ] 199 00:09:02,242 --> 00:09:04,711 We were much poorer than the people in Harlem 200 00:09:04,711 --> 00:09:07,247 or most anywhere else today. 201 00:09:07,247 --> 00:09:09,783 It was my last year or two at home 202 00:09:09,783 --> 00:09:12,218 that we finally had a telephone. 203 00:09:12,218 --> 00:09:16,089 We had a radio. We never had a television. 204 00:09:16,089 --> 00:09:17,424 But in another sense, 205 00:09:17,424 --> 00:09:20,060 in the sense of the things you need to get ahead, 206 00:09:20,060 --> 00:09:24,731 I was enormously more fortunate than most black kids today. 207 00:09:27,600 --> 00:09:29,269 While coming of age in Harlem, 208 00:09:29,269 --> 00:09:32,038 Sowell discovered the magic of education, 209 00:09:32,038 --> 00:09:34,307 thanks to family friend named Eddie Mapp. 210 00:09:34,307 --> 00:09:36,142 [ Children shout playfully ] 211 00:09:36,142 --> 00:09:39,679 [ music ] 212 00:09:39,679 --> 00:09:41,514 In Harlem, there was a kid named Eddie 213 00:09:41,514 --> 00:09:43,149 that members of the family had run into 214 00:09:43,149 --> 00:09:45,285 before I ever arrived from North Carolina. 215 00:09:45,285 --> 00:09:49,689 [ music ] 216 00:09:49,689 --> 00:09:51,825 He came from a highly educated family, 217 00:09:51,825 --> 00:09:55,195 and they immediately saw the implications 218 00:09:55,195 --> 00:09:58,631 if they could get him to mentor me. 219 00:09:58,631 --> 00:10:04,270 [ music ] 220 00:10:04,270 --> 00:10:07,907 Eddie brought Tom here, to the Harlem Public Library, 221 00:10:07,907 --> 00:10:10,210 taught him how to find books that interested him, 222 00:10:10,210 --> 00:10:12,178 taught him how to check them out. 223 00:10:12,178 --> 00:10:13,680 And I saw all these books, 224 00:10:13,680 --> 00:10:15,148 and I had no idea why we were there 225 00:10:15,148 --> 00:10:16,850 when I don't have any money to buy one book. 226 00:10:16,850 --> 00:10:18,885 And so, what am I gonna do with all these, you know, 227 00:10:18,885 --> 00:10:21,154 hundreds of books up on the shelf? 228 00:10:21,154 --> 00:10:24,791 [ music ] 229 00:10:24,791 --> 00:10:27,360 Crossing the threshold to this new world 230 00:10:27,360 --> 00:10:29,062 was the first step on a path 231 00:10:29,062 --> 00:10:32,065 Young Tommy might not otherwise have taken. 232 00:10:32,065 --> 00:10:35,301 And he very patiently walked me through the whole thing. 233 00:10:35,301 --> 00:10:39,005 And again, I was very reluctant to take out a library card 234 00:10:39,005 --> 00:10:41,241 'cause I didn't know what all this is about, 235 00:10:41,241 --> 00:10:42,842 but he talked me into it, 236 00:10:42,842 --> 00:10:44,777 then I borrowed a couple of books. 237 00:10:44,777 --> 00:10:47,080 And really, had I not encountered him, 238 00:10:47,080 --> 00:10:48,615 the entire rest of the story 239 00:10:48,615 --> 00:10:50,550 could not have been the way it was. 240 00:10:50,550 --> 00:10:51,918 I mean, at some point I would have learned 241 00:10:51,918 --> 00:10:54,787 what a public library was, but by that point, 242 00:10:54,787 --> 00:10:57,223 it would be too late. 243 00:10:57,223 --> 00:10:59,425 When you start getting in the habit of reading 244 00:10:59,425 --> 00:11:02,395 when you're eight years old, that's a different ball game 245 00:11:02,395 --> 00:11:04,297 than if you had to wait till you're a teenager, 246 00:11:04,297 --> 00:11:06,099 and it's too late now. 247 00:11:07,734 --> 00:11:10,503 Thanks to that same friend, Eddie, 248 00:11:10,503 --> 00:11:13,540 a young Tom Sowell was pointed in the right direction 249 00:11:13,540 --> 00:11:16,242 regarding his schooling. 250 00:11:16,242 --> 00:11:19,879 The grade school he attended in Harlem was a good one. 251 00:11:19,879 --> 00:11:22,248 But when it came time for junior high school, 252 00:11:22,248 --> 00:11:26,619 the one in Tom's neighborhood was not so great. 253 00:11:26,619 --> 00:11:28,688 When I finished elementary school, 254 00:11:28,688 --> 00:11:30,823 and they assigned me to a junior high school 255 00:11:30,823 --> 00:11:32,859 in a very bad neighborhood, 256 00:11:32,859 --> 00:11:36,296 he told me that you can get transferred. 257 00:11:36,296 --> 00:11:39,299 And I got transferred to a much better school. 258 00:11:39,299 --> 00:11:42,035 Had I gone to that other school, again, 259 00:11:42,035 --> 00:11:45,505 the story would have been entirely different. 260 00:11:45,505 --> 00:11:49,108 He would become a firm believer in allowing parents 261 00:11:49,108 --> 00:11:53,046 to choose the best school possible for their children, 262 00:11:53,046 --> 00:11:56,549 whether it be private schools, religious schools, 263 00:11:56,549 --> 00:12:00,353 or even the option that sparks intense debate among lawmakers 264 00:12:00,353 --> 00:12:03,356 and educators today -- charter schools. 265 00:12:03,356 --> 00:12:09,829 [ music ] 266 00:12:09,829 --> 00:12:12,865 "There are few things more dishonorable 267 00:12:12,865 --> 00:12:14,400 than misleading the young." 268 00:12:14,400 --> 00:12:17,570 The abysmal quality of education 269 00:12:17,570 --> 00:12:19,806 available in the ghettos today 270 00:12:19,806 --> 00:12:22,742 is one that I really don't think 271 00:12:22,742 --> 00:12:26,012 the worst possible private school could match. 272 00:12:26,012 --> 00:12:30,717 40 years ago, I received a far better education in Harlem 273 00:12:30,717 --> 00:12:33,152 than the people who are living in Harlem today 274 00:12:33,152 --> 00:12:35,421 have available to them. 275 00:12:35,421 --> 00:12:38,658 [ music ] 276 00:12:38,658 --> 00:12:41,194 It's 8:00 a.m. at the Success Academy school 277 00:12:41,194 --> 00:12:43,363 in Harlem, New York. 278 00:12:43,363 --> 00:12:47,333 This is a charter school, an example of educational choice 279 00:12:47,333 --> 00:12:49,402 for people trying to better themselves 280 00:12:49,402 --> 00:12:52,105 despite the circumstances they were born into. 281 00:12:52,105 --> 00:12:55,475 For Tom, this is education done right. 282 00:12:55,475 --> 00:12:58,878 Professor Sowell has been a leader in supporting 283 00:12:58,878 --> 00:13:03,616 all forms of school choice, and I very fundamentally agree 284 00:13:03,616 --> 00:13:07,553 that we need more choices, not fewer. 285 00:13:07,553 --> 00:13:09,822 I think we particularly need that 286 00:13:09,822 --> 00:13:13,159 for our most vulnerable populations. 287 00:13:13,159 --> 00:13:15,662 Back in 1978, when there was a push 288 00:13:15,662 --> 00:13:18,865 for a voucher scheme, the "New Republic" objected. 289 00:13:18,865 --> 00:13:20,933 In their words, "The least educated, 290 00:13:20,933 --> 00:13:24,170 the least ambitious, and the least aware 291 00:13:24,170 --> 00:13:28,007 would be left in the public schools." 292 00:13:28,007 --> 00:13:30,009 Professor Sowell grew up in Harlem. 293 00:13:30,009 --> 00:13:33,713 I grew up in Harlem, and the schools there 294 00:13:33,713 --> 00:13:37,483 have been a disaster for half a century. 295 00:13:37,483 --> 00:13:39,952 And so you have generations of kids 296 00:13:39,952 --> 00:13:44,757 who have not gotten the education that they deserve 297 00:13:44,757 --> 00:13:46,826 and are entitled to. 298 00:13:46,826 --> 00:13:48,428 [ music ] 299 00:13:48,428 --> 00:13:52,165 Charter schools are public, tuition-free schools 300 00:13:52,165 --> 00:13:54,934 that are open to all students, 301 00:13:54,934 --> 00:13:57,070 and able to operate independently 302 00:13:57,070 --> 00:13:59,539 from the traditional school district. 303 00:13:59,539 --> 00:14:01,974 They are given the autonomy 304 00:14:01,974 --> 00:14:06,646 to design a curriculum tailored to the needs of their students. 305 00:14:06,646 --> 00:14:09,582 But they must also meet academic standards 306 00:14:09,582 --> 00:14:13,286 set by state and local officials. 307 00:14:13,286 --> 00:14:15,722 Unlike traditional public schools, however, 308 00:14:15,722 --> 00:14:18,057 charter schools that don't meet these standards 309 00:14:18,057 --> 00:14:19,892 can actually be shut down. 310 00:14:23,996 --> 00:14:26,933 With respect to education, Tom would say 311 00:14:26,933 --> 00:14:28,901 it doesn't make any difference how much money 312 00:14:28,901 --> 00:14:30,103 you put into education, 313 00:14:30,103 --> 00:14:31,771 but if there are not some basic factors 314 00:14:31,771 --> 00:14:33,773 that you must take into account, 315 00:14:33,773 --> 00:14:36,542 that is, in order for a kid to get a good education, 316 00:14:36,542 --> 00:14:39,512 somebody must make him go to bed on time. 317 00:14:39,512 --> 00:14:41,848 Somebody must make him do his homework. 318 00:14:41,848 --> 00:14:44,016 Somebody must make him mind the teacher. 319 00:14:44,016 --> 00:14:46,018 Somebody has to get him up in the morning. 320 00:14:46,018 --> 00:14:48,187 And if those things are not done, 321 00:14:48,187 --> 00:14:50,790 I don't care how much money you put into education, 322 00:14:50,790 --> 00:14:53,760 you're not going to get very good results. 323 00:14:53,760 --> 00:14:57,096 And that is precisely what we see. 324 00:14:57,096 --> 00:15:00,666 For decades, Sowell has been a strong supporter of charters 325 00:15:00,666 --> 00:15:02,935 and other education options for families 326 00:15:02,935 --> 00:15:05,471 trapped in underperforming schools. 327 00:15:05,471 --> 00:15:08,674 There are, as you've said, many blacks today 328 00:15:08,674 --> 00:15:10,109 who are still being given 329 00:15:10,109 --> 00:15:11,711 totally inadequate education... Yes. 330 00:15:11,711 --> 00:15:14,647 ...and cannot be expected to get very far for that reason. 331 00:15:14,647 --> 00:15:16,582 What would be your remedy for that? 332 00:15:16,582 --> 00:15:18,818 I would allow their parents 333 00:15:18,818 --> 00:15:20,620 to have a choice of where to send them to school, 334 00:15:20,620 --> 00:15:22,421 whether that choice is called a voucher scheme, 335 00:15:22,421 --> 00:15:24,757 open enrollment, tuition tax credit, 336 00:15:24,757 --> 00:15:27,026 any kind of scheme of that sort 337 00:15:27,026 --> 00:15:29,395 that would put that power in the hands of their parents, 338 00:15:29,395 --> 00:15:30,830 mainly because that would mean that 339 00:15:30,830 --> 00:15:33,166 the schools would have to be responsive to them. 340 00:15:33,166 --> 00:15:35,134 As it is now, the school is a monopoly. 341 00:15:35,134 --> 00:15:36,869 They need not be responsive. 342 00:15:36,869 --> 00:15:40,973 It is hard for me to understand what harm is going to be done 343 00:15:40,973 --> 00:15:43,242 by allowing parents to have a choice 344 00:15:43,242 --> 00:15:46,179 as compared to having self-interested bureaucrats 345 00:15:46,179 --> 00:15:47,547 have a monopoly. 346 00:15:47,547 --> 00:15:50,216 "The things that they thought were going to help, 347 00:15:50,216 --> 00:15:51,884 did not help. 348 00:15:51,884 --> 00:15:55,154 And in many cases made things much worse." 349 00:15:55,154 --> 00:15:58,291 [ music ] 350 00:15:58,291 --> 00:16:00,860 Thomas Sowell is a very private person... 351 00:16:00,860 --> 00:16:02,695 [ music ] 352 00:16:02,695 --> 00:16:06,966 ...despite having so much of his work put before the public. 353 00:16:06,966 --> 00:16:09,001 He's reluctant to give interviews, 354 00:16:09,001 --> 00:16:11,270 and has been known to make journalists wait years 355 00:16:11,270 --> 00:16:15,107 before sitting down to talk about his life and work. 356 00:16:15,107 --> 00:16:17,577 But a colleague of mine took the time to get Tom 357 00:16:17,577 --> 00:16:19,445 to appear on his show. 358 00:16:19,445 --> 00:16:21,914 I'm Dave Rubin. I'm the host of "The Rubin Report." 359 00:16:21,914 --> 00:16:24,951 Set's right back behind me here in my home. 360 00:16:24,951 --> 00:16:28,120 I do a long-form interview show. 361 00:16:28,120 --> 00:16:29,388 Everybody was saying, 362 00:16:29,388 --> 00:16:30,756 you've got to talk to Thomas Sowell. 363 00:16:30,756 --> 00:16:32,258 You've got to talk to Thomas Sowell. 364 00:16:32,258 --> 00:16:35,995 And we tried for about three or four years to hunt him down. 365 00:16:35,995 --> 00:16:38,798 And finally we were able to interview him. 366 00:16:38,798 --> 00:16:40,833 One of the things that I found out that was 367 00:16:40,833 --> 00:16:42,134 sort of amazing about your history, 368 00:16:42,134 --> 00:16:44,003 you briefly mentioned it right before we started; 369 00:16:44,003 --> 00:16:45,404 you were a Marxist 370 00:16:45,404 --> 00:16:47,940 at one time in your life. 371 00:16:47,940 --> 00:16:51,244 Most people will find this hard to believe, but it is true. 372 00:16:51,244 --> 00:16:54,046 But it's not that unusual. 373 00:16:54,046 --> 00:16:59,118 Most of the leading conservative thinkers of our time 374 00:16:59,118 --> 00:17:00,620 did not start off as conservative. 375 00:17:00,620 --> 00:17:04,323 You've got a couple like Bill Buckley and George Will. 376 00:17:04,323 --> 00:17:07,260 But I mean, Milton Friedman was a liberal and a Keynesian. 377 00:17:07,260 --> 00:17:09,528 Ronald Reagan was so far left, 378 00:17:09,528 --> 00:17:11,797 at one point the FBI was following him. 379 00:17:11,797 --> 00:17:13,299 Do you remember sort of what you were thinking, 380 00:17:13,299 --> 00:17:16,602 what appealed to you at that time about Marxism? 381 00:17:16,602 --> 00:17:22,275 Yes. I mean, there was no alternative being discussed. 382 00:17:22,275 --> 00:17:25,378 I treated my interview with him as Thomas Sowell 101. 383 00:17:25,378 --> 00:17:28,347 I wanted it to be for the new generation of young people 384 00:17:28,347 --> 00:17:30,983 who watch YouTube, who listen to podcasts. 385 00:17:30,983 --> 00:17:33,452 My first job was as a Western Union messenger. 386 00:17:33,452 --> 00:17:35,321 [ music ] 387 00:17:35,321 --> 00:17:37,356 I would take the Fifth Avenue bus. 388 00:17:37,356 --> 00:17:38,791 It would go all the way up Fifth Avenue 389 00:17:38,791 --> 00:17:41,027 past all these Lord & Taylor 390 00:17:41,027 --> 00:17:43,429 and all these fancy places. 391 00:17:43,429 --> 00:17:46,132 And then across 57th Street. 392 00:17:47,400 --> 00:17:49,435 Down Riverside Drive. 393 00:17:49,435 --> 00:17:52,405 And then, as I came across this long viaduct 394 00:17:52,405 --> 00:17:54,373 that turned into 135th Street, 395 00:17:54,373 --> 00:17:56,842 suddenly, there were the tenements, 396 00:17:56,842 --> 00:17:59,378 [ music ] 397 00:17:59,378 --> 00:18:01,380 and I'd wonder, why is this? 398 00:18:02,415 --> 00:18:04,116 It's so different. 399 00:18:06,185 --> 00:18:10,723 And nothing in the schools or most of the books 400 00:18:10,723 --> 00:18:13,059 seemed to deal with that, and Marx dealt with that. 401 00:18:13,059 --> 00:18:14,794 There's an absolutely beautiful moment 402 00:18:14,794 --> 00:18:17,029 where I ask him about his own political evolution. 403 00:18:17,029 --> 00:18:19,131 So then what was your wake-up to what was wrong 404 00:18:19,131 --> 00:18:20,299 with that line of thinking? 405 00:18:20,299 --> 00:18:21,567 Uh, facts. 406 00:18:21,567 --> 00:18:22,969 [ Laughs ] 407 00:18:22,969 --> 00:18:24,203 I love that moment. 408 00:18:24,203 --> 00:18:25,905 I mean, I knew the second he did it, 409 00:18:25,905 --> 00:18:29,909 I was like, we got our clip. That's as good as it gets. 410 00:18:29,909 --> 00:18:33,546 And it gets to, what does this man care about most? 411 00:18:33,546 --> 00:18:36,248 Does he care about how he feels about things? 412 00:18:36,248 --> 00:18:40,086 How he wants the world to be? Or how is the world as it is? 413 00:18:40,086 --> 00:18:42,221 Because that's what he's saying, "I care about facts." 414 00:18:42,221 --> 00:18:44,357 The world is a certain way, and now, 415 00:18:44,357 --> 00:18:45,858 using that as the baseline, 416 00:18:45,858 --> 00:18:48,761 we can try to figure out how to make things better. 417 00:18:48,761 --> 00:18:53,432 [ music ] 418 00:18:53,432 --> 00:18:57,536 Drafted in 1951, Tom joined the Marines, 419 00:18:57,536 --> 00:19:00,906 where he taught pistol shooting and took photographs. 420 00:19:00,906 --> 00:19:03,976 [ Patriotic music plays ] 421 00:19:03,976 --> 00:19:08,881 [ music ] 422 00:19:08,881 --> 00:19:10,783 In fact, Sowell was part 423 00:19:10,783 --> 00:19:13,953 of the Marine Corps Combat Camera Division. 424 00:19:13,953 --> 00:19:15,654 Combat Camera is responsible 425 00:19:15,654 --> 00:19:19,291 for the historical documentation. 426 00:19:19,291 --> 00:19:23,729 It may not necessarily make it out to the local paper, 427 00:19:23,729 --> 00:19:25,398 but somewhere down the line, 428 00:19:25,398 --> 00:19:28,067 someone might be able to pull up an image 429 00:19:28,067 --> 00:19:33,973 and say, okay, this happened during this timeframe. 430 00:19:33,973 --> 00:19:37,043 The imagery is used as good reference to anything 431 00:19:37,043 --> 00:19:38,411 we may need in the future 432 00:19:38,411 --> 00:19:40,680 or something that's happening right now. 433 00:19:40,680 --> 00:19:43,582 [ Camera shutter clicking ] 434 00:19:43,582 --> 00:19:47,853 [ music ] 435 00:19:47,853 --> 00:19:51,290 Although Thomas Sowell left the Marines long ago, 436 00:19:51,290 --> 00:19:52,925 his legacy lives on today 437 00:19:52,925 --> 00:19:55,528 with some members of the Combat Camera Corps, 438 00:19:55,528 --> 00:19:59,665 who as young men discovered Sowell's work. 439 00:19:59,665 --> 00:20:02,401 When I was a young person, I used to like to 440 00:20:02,401 --> 00:20:03,903 stay home from school occasionally, 441 00:20:03,903 --> 00:20:06,338 liked to play hooky or pretend I was sick and stay home. 442 00:20:06,338 --> 00:20:08,507 But unlike most kids who'd, you know, cut class 443 00:20:08,507 --> 00:20:10,710 and do whatever, I would watch videos of Thomas Sowell 444 00:20:10,710 --> 00:20:12,878 on Milton Friedman's show "Free To Choose," 445 00:20:12,878 --> 00:20:14,113 and he would just wipe the floor 446 00:20:14,113 --> 00:20:15,581 with people from the other side of the aisle 447 00:20:15,581 --> 00:20:17,116 that didn't seem to know what they were talking about. 448 00:20:17,116 --> 00:20:18,851 These were very smart people, but Thomas Sowell 449 00:20:18,851 --> 00:20:20,920 is so much smarter and so much more intelligent 450 00:20:20,920 --> 00:20:23,189 and so much more articulate 451 00:20:23,189 --> 00:20:24,990 that he would just make them seem like bumbling idiots, 452 00:20:24,990 --> 00:20:26,525 and I just thought that was awesome. 453 00:20:26,525 --> 00:20:28,727 When the private sector fails to create jobs 454 00:20:28,727 --> 00:20:30,596 at a fast enough rate, 455 00:20:30,596 --> 00:20:33,199 you find that people are unemployed 456 00:20:33,199 --> 00:20:35,968 and drift into needing help. 457 00:20:35,968 --> 00:20:38,170 I think it is overly broad to say 458 00:20:38,170 --> 00:20:40,706 that we turn people into helpless children. 459 00:20:40,706 --> 00:20:42,108 I don't remember talking to anyone who's ever 460 00:20:42,108 --> 00:20:43,609 been on welfare who didn't think 461 00:20:43,609 --> 00:20:45,244 they were being treated like children 462 00:20:45,244 --> 00:20:46,879 while they were on it. 463 00:20:48,714 --> 00:20:50,649 [ Ticking ] [ Soft music playing ] 464 00:20:50,649 --> 00:20:52,718 The lessons Sowell learned in the Marines 465 00:20:52,718 --> 00:20:55,688 would stay with him for the rest of his life, 466 00:20:55,688 --> 00:20:58,491 especially his love of photography, 467 00:20:58,491 --> 00:21:01,093 which would become Tom's artistic outlet 468 00:21:01,093 --> 00:21:04,430 while he pursued a life filled with studying facts and data. 469 00:21:04,430 --> 00:21:08,834 [ music ] 470 00:21:08,834 --> 00:21:10,736 Photography did have connections 471 00:21:10,736 --> 00:21:14,540 to his vision of reality. 472 00:21:14,540 --> 00:21:17,743 [ music ] 473 00:21:17,743 --> 00:21:20,112 Tom once commented to me that to be a photographer, 474 00:21:20,112 --> 00:21:23,582 you have to master trade-offs. 475 00:21:23,582 --> 00:21:25,584 All of the little adjustments that you fiddle with 476 00:21:25,584 --> 00:21:27,286 in the camera never involve 477 00:21:27,286 --> 00:21:30,022 making everything better or everything worse. 478 00:21:30,022 --> 00:21:31,857 It's a matter of trading one thing off to another. 479 00:21:31,857 --> 00:21:34,793 If you close down the diaphragm, 480 00:21:34,793 --> 00:21:39,532 then you get lots and lots of stuff in focus near to far. 481 00:21:39,532 --> 00:21:41,000 On the other hand, you're cutting down 482 00:21:41,000 --> 00:21:42,535 the amount of light. 483 00:21:42,535 --> 00:21:45,204 And a theme in Tom's work on society 484 00:21:45,204 --> 00:21:47,506 is that all policies involve trade-offs. 485 00:21:47,506 --> 00:21:51,443 And Tom often loses patience at people with sweeping visions. 486 00:21:51,443 --> 00:21:53,078 Here's how we can improve society. 487 00:21:53,078 --> 00:21:55,181 Here's a solution to a problem. 488 00:21:55,181 --> 00:21:58,083 And Tom points out in his political writings 489 00:21:58,083 --> 00:22:01,487 there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. 490 00:22:01,487 --> 00:22:02,955 Just like photography. 491 00:22:02,955 --> 00:22:05,324 [ music ] 492 00:22:06,625 --> 00:22:15,234 [ music ] 493 00:22:15,234 --> 00:22:17,736 The University of Chicago is hallowed ground 494 00:22:17,736 --> 00:22:19,338 for Thomas Sowell. 495 00:22:19,338 --> 00:22:21,207 Here is where some of the most influential 496 00:22:21,207 --> 00:22:24,543 economic philosophies of modern times were formed. 497 00:22:24,543 --> 00:22:27,546 It's called The Chicago School of Economics. 498 00:22:27,546 --> 00:22:30,883 And it's where Tom would be mentored by intellectual giants 499 00:22:30,883 --> 00:22:34,687 like George Stigler and Milton Friedman, 500 00:22:34,687 --> 00:22:39,158 both of whom would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. 501 00:22:39,158 --> 00:22:45,097 I was a graduate student here from 1960 to '64. 502 00:22:45,097 --> 00:22:47,700 The thing I learned as a graduate student 503 00:22:47,700 --> 00:22:51,003 was economics is straightforward 504 00:22:51,003 --> 00:22:55,474 and simple when you grasp its underlying logic, 505 00:22:55,474 --> 00:22:58,410 and secondly, that logic can be applied 506 00:22:58,410 --> 00:23:00,246 seriously to understand 507 00:23:00,246 --> 00:23:03,382 many different things about the world. 508 00:23:05,150 --> 00:23:06,919 At Chicago, if it was true, 509 00:23:06,919 --> 00:23:09,154 it was true because you could prove it was true. 510 00:23:09,154 --> 00:23:10,589 It was true because you had the evidence, 511 00:23:10,589 --> 00:23:12,625 you had the logic and so forth. 512 00:23:12,625 --> 00:23:14,593 They explored the specific ways 513 00:23:14,593 --> 00:23:17,863 in which the market does and doesn't work. 514 00:23:17,863 --> 00:23:21,433 The idea, you know, that people are rational on the whole 515 00:23:21,433 --> 00:23:23,769 and that if you allow those people to operate 516 00:23:23,769 --> 00:23:27,139 in the marketplace, you will generally get better results. 517 00:23:28,374 --> 00:23:30,876 [ Students chattering ] 518 00:23:30,876 --> 00:23:34,446 [ music ] 519 00:23:34,446 --> 00:23:37,049 The Chicago School of Economics is where Tom says 520 00:23:37,049 --> 00:23:39,451 he understood the importance of discipline 521 00:23:39,451 --> 00:23:41,353 and the importance of getting hard data. 522 00:23:41,353 --> 00:23:44,189 In fact, he talks more positively about his experience 523 00:23:44,189 --> 00:23:45,958 at University of Chicago than at Harvard, 524 00:23:45,958 --> 00:23:47,960 where he says a lot of people, in his opinion, 525 00:23:47,960 --> 00:23:49,161 went on emotion. 526 00:23:49,161 --> 00:23:50,863 Tom was a Marxist when he took a course 527 00:23:50,863 --> 00:23:53,899 with Milton Friedman, and at the end of the course, 528 00:23:53,899 --> 00:23:55,301 he remained a Marxist. 529 00:23:55,301 --> 00:23:56,969 But what he appreciated was that 530 00:23:56,969 --> 00:23:58,304 at the University of Chicago, 531 00:23:58,304 --> 00:24:01,040 economics was a full-contact sport 532 00:24:01,040 --> 00:24:03,842 where you had to defend your position rigorously, 533 00:24:03,842 --> 00:24:05,878 otherwise you got wasted. 534 00:24:05,878 --> 00:24:08,347 And so at least Tom Sowell said he came out understanding 535 00:24:08,347 --> 00:24:10,249 the importance of hard data. 536 00:24:10,249 --> 00:24:14,687 I was still a Marxist after taking Milton Friedman's course. 537 00:24:14,687 --> 00:24:16,422 But I -- Did you -- 538 00:24:16,422 --> 00:24:18,157 But one summer in the government 539 00:24:18,157 --> 00:24:19,591 was enough to let me say, 540 00:24:19,591 --> 00:24:22,127 now, this -- government is really not the answer. 541 00:24:22,127 --> 00:24:23,762 I mean, that is... [ Laughs ] 542 00:24:23,762 --> 00:24:25,264 Milton Friedman didn't cure you, 543 00:24:25,264 --> 00:24:26,265 but the federal government did. 544 00:24:26,265 --> 00:24:26,965 The federal government did. 545 00:24:26,965 --> 00:24:29,268 Never say the federal government doesn't do anything. 546 00:24:29,268 --> 00:24:33,272 [ music ] 547 00:24:33,272 --> 00:24:35,407 My first professional job, 548 00:24:35,407 --> 00:24:39,611 I was a summer intern at the U.S. Department of Labor. 549 00:24:39,611 --> 00:24:41,947 One of my biggest concerns was about minimum wages. 550 00:24:41,947 --> 00:24:43,449 At first, I thought, well, this is good 551 00:24:43,449 --> 00:24:44,717 because all these people are poor 552 00:24:44,717 --> 00:24:46,819 and they'll get a little higher income, 553 00:24:46,819 --> 00:24:48,954 and so that'll be helpful. 554 00:24:48,954 --> 00:24:51,357 And then as I studied economics, 555 00:24:51,357 --> 00:24:52,891 I began to see, well, there's a downside. 556 00:24:52,891 --> 00:24:54,393 They may lose their jobs completely. 557 00:24:54,393 --> 00:24:57,129 So that is that. 558 00:24:57,129 --> 00:24:58,697 When I was at the Labor Department, 559 00:24:58,697 --> 00:25:00,866 I tried to talk about that to them 560 00:25:00,866 --> 00:25:03,702 and eventually I came up with some test of it. 561 00:25:03,702 --> 00:25:05,838 And when I came up with how we might test this, 562 00:25:05,838 --> 00:25:07,539 I was waiting to hear congratulations, 563 00:25:07,539 --> 00:25:09,608 you see, that I had this, and I could see these people 564 00:25:09,608 --> 00:25:12,144 were stunned, they said, oh, this idiot has stumbled 565 00:25:12,144 --> 00:25:13,812 on something that will ruin us all. 566 00:25:13,812 --> 00:25:16,548 [ music ] 567 00:25:16,548 --> 00:25:18,517 And I realized the U.S. Department of Labor 568 00:25:18,517 --> 00:25:21,186 had its own agenda and interests, 569 00:25:21,186 --> 00:25:23,155 and that did not necessarily mean 570 00:25:23,155 --> 00:25:25,624 that whether poor people lost their jobs for minimum wage 571 00:25:25,624 --> 00:25:28,494 or got higher pay was their highest priority. 572 00:25:28,494 --> 00:25:30,662 [ music ] 573 00:25:30,662 --> 00:25:32,898 Tom Sowell looked at the data, and the data found that 574 00:25:32,898 --> 00:25:36,969 minimum wage hikes cause people who are unskilled to lose jobs. 575 00:25:36,969 --> 00:25:38,504 He found out that people in the government 576 00:25:38,504 --> 00:25:40,739 didn't give a rip whether or not it worked or didn't work. 577 00:25:40,739 --> 00:25:42,775 They were simply implementing the policy. 578 00:25:42,775 --> 00:25:44,943 And that's what shocked him and caused him 579 00:25:44,943 --> 00:25:46,612 to begin to rethink lots of his assumptions. 580 00:25:46,612 --> 00:25:48,614 So it wasn't academia that caused him 581 00:25:48,614 --> 00:25:49,882 to become more conservative. 582 00:25:49,882 --> 00:25:52,117 It was real life working for the government. 583 00:25:52,117 --> 00:25:54,119 [ music ] 584 00:25:54,119 --> 00:25:55,854 I was now beginning to understand things 585 00:25:55,854 --> 00:25:57,389 that I hadn't understood before. 586 00:25:57,389 --> 00:26:00,359 [ music ] 587 00:26:00,359 --> 00:26:04,630 Tom, they said, got his PhD here in 1968. 588 00:26:04,630 --> 00:26:09,935 He actually taught in the years leading up to that at Cornell, 589 00:26:09,935 --> 00:26:11,737 which feeds back also to this 590 00:26:11,737 --> 00:26:14,706 just tumultuous times in the 1960s 591 00:26:14,706 --> 00:26:18,043 in the country. Huge demonstrations at Cornell 592 00:26:18,043 --> 00:26:21,180 actually shut down the university for some time. 593 00:26:21,180 --> 00:26:24,149 [ music ] 594 00:26:24,149 --> 00:26:30,122 In 1965, Thomas Sowell took a teaching position at Cornell. 595 00:26:30,122 --> 00:26:33,258 Like many other colleges, it became a focal point 596 00:26:33,258 --> 00:26:35,694 for anti-war and anti-discrimination 597 00:26:35,694 --> 00:26:39,031 protests and demonstrations. 598 00:26:39,031 --> 00:26:43,101 When armed black students took over a building on campus, 599 00:26:43,101 --> 00:26:47,239 Sowell had little sympathy for school administrators. 600 00:26:47,239 --> 00:26:50,309 Blacks had been recruited to Cornell under lower standards 601 00:26:50,309 --> 00:26:54,079 to diversify the student body, and Sowell observed 602 00:26:54,079 --> 00:26:56,949 that many of these same students were now causing trouble 603 00:26:56,949 --> 00:26:59,117 and feeding racial divisions. 604 00:26:59,117 --> 00:27:02,654 For Sowell, it was an example of the unintended consequences 605 00:27:02,654 --> 00:27:04,990 of affirmative action. 606 00:27:04,990 --> 00:27:07,192 Tom's tenure at Cornell 607 00:27:07,192 --> 00:27:10,128 had a very profound impact on him, 608 00:27:10,128 --> 00:27:12,498 particularly surrounding the campus protests. 609 00:27:12,498 --> 00:27:17,236 I think it left a very, very bitter taste in his mouth. 610 00:27:17,236 --> 00:27:19,838 Yes, I think it did. 611 00:27:19,838 --> 00:27:23,475 He discovered that many black students at Cornell, 612 00:27:23,475 --> 00:27:27,179 their SAT scores were above the average 613 00:27:27,179 --> 00:27:29,314 but they are having problems at Cornell. 614 00:27:29,314 --> 00:27:31,950 And that's when he first came up with the idea 615 00:27:31,950 --> 00:27:33,919 of people being mismatched. 616 00:27:33,919 --> 00:27:37,823 That is, black students who would do very well 617 00:27:37,823 --> 00:27:39,825 at other schools, 618 00:27:39,825 --> 00:27:42,828 but were recruited in the name of affirmative action 619 00:27:42,828 --> 00:27:46,265 to schools where they were in over their heads. 620 00:27:46,265 --> 00:27:48,367 The average black student at MIT 621 00:27:48,367 --> 00:27:52,137 is in the bottom 10% of MIT students in math. 622 00:27:52,137 --> 00:27:55,807 But he is in the top 90% of all American students in math. 623 00:27:55,807 --> 00:27:59,211 Something like 1/4 of all the black students going to MIT 624 00:27:59,211 --> 00:28:00,646 do not graduate. 625 00:28:00,646 --> 00:28:02,381 You're talking about a pool of people 626 00:28:02,381 --> 00:28:04,883 whom you are artificially turning into failures 627 00:28:04,883 --> 00:28:07,252 by mismatching them with the school. 628 00:28:09,521 --> 00:28:11,957 Tom had moved to UCLA 629 00:28:11,957 --> 00:28:15,360 to escape the turmoil at Cornell, 630 00:28:15,360 --> 00:28:19,131 and then jumped into the turmoil at UCLA. 631 00:28:19,131 --> 00:28:23,035 I was sitting in my office at UCLA one day 632 00:28:23,035 --> 00:28:26,638 when the Black Student Association Delegation 633 00:28:26,638 --> 00:28:29,141 marched into his office. 634 00:28:29,141 --> 00:28:32,644 I heard all of this. 635 00:28:32,644 --> 00:28:35,948 And one of them said, "Well, how you doing, brother?" 636 00:28:35,948 --> 00:28:37,382 Tom... 637 00:28:38,917 --> 00:28:40,586 "Just a minute. 638 00:28:40,586 --> 00:28:43,288 I am not your brother. 639 00:28:43,288 --> 00:28:45,190 I am Mr. Sowell, 640 00:28:45,190 --> 00:28:47,826 and you will address me that way." 641 00:28:50,529 --> 00:28:54,166 Boy, was that a shock to those folks. 642 00:28:54,166 --> 00:28:59,004 Here was their natural ally laying down the law. 643 00:28:59,004 --> 00:29:00,939 "You're going to treat me 644 00:29:00,939 --> 00:29:03,075 the way I'm going to treat you 645 00:29:03,075 --> 00:29:06,378 as another human being face-to-face, 646 00:29:06,378 --> 00:29:08,580 and if you don't like that, you can leave." 647 00:29:08,580 --> 00:29:10,515 [ music ] 648 00:29:10,515 --> 00:29:15,687 I first met Tom in 1969 when I was a student at UCLA. 649 00:29:15,687 --> 00:29:17,489 I just walked in his office one day 650 00:29:17,489 --> 00:29:19,925 and I said that, "I understand that 651 00:29:19,925 --> 00:29:24,997 you and I have similar ideas on matters of economics." 652 00:29:24,997 --> 00:29:27,599 And we started talk from there. 653 00:29:27,599 --> 00:29:29,701 You and Sowell used to joke about how few 654 00:29:29,701 --> 00:29:31,970 black conservatives there were in the country 655 00:29:31,970 --> 00:29:34,106 back in the '70s and '80s. 656 00:29:34,106 --> 00:29:37,309 Has much changed since then, and what was it like back then? 657 00:29:37,309 --> 00:29:40,278 There were relatively few blacks that we knew of 658 00:29:40,278 --> 00:29:43,715 that were kind of free-market, limited government. 659 00:29:43,715 --> 00:29:46,585 It was Bill Buckley who made the suggestion 660 00:29:46,585 --> 00:29:48,654 that the EPA does not allow 661 00:29:48,654 --> 00:29:52,457 Tom Sowell and I had to fly on one plane together 662 00:29:52,457 --> 00:29:55,427 because we're an endangered species. 663 00:29:58,196 --> 00:30:00,399 Tom's done something in his career 664 00:30:00,399 --> 00:30:02,901 that one of his mentors, Milton Friedman, 665 00:30:02,901 --> 00:30:04,569 felt was important to do also, 666 00:30:04,569 --> 00:30:07,673 and that is share his knowledge of economics 667 00:30:07,673 --> 00:30:10,575 with non-economists, with non-intellectuals. 668 00:30:10,575 --> 00:30:12,811 The true test of whether someone understands 669 00:30:12,811 --> 00:30:16,281 a subject -- the true test comes when he can explain it 670 00:30:16,281 --> 00:30:19,818 to someone who does not know a darn thing about it. 671 00:30:19,818 --> 00:30:23,221 And Tom has the gift of being able to do that, 672 00:30:23,221 --> 00:30:27,459 to be able to explain potentially complex ideas 673 00:30:27,459 --> 00:30:31,229 in economics to the ordinary person. 674 00:30:31,229 --> 00:30:33,699 I haven't been able to find a single country in the world 675 00:30:33,699 --> 00:30:35,534 where the policies that are being advocated for blacks 676 00:30:35,534 --> 00:30:38,570 in the United States have lifted any people out of poverty. 677 00:30:38,570 --> 00:30:40,806 I've seen many examples around the world of people 678 00:30:40,806 --> 00:30:43,008 who began in poverty and ended in affluence. 679 00:30:43,008 --> 00:30:46,578 Not one of them has followed any pattern at all 680 00:30:46,578 --> 00:30:50,449 like what is being advocated for blacks in the United States. 681 00:30:50,449 --> 00:30:52,084 Many groups have remained in poverty 682 00:30:52,084 --> 00:30:56,321 for a very long time trying to follow those patterns. 683 00:30:56,321 --> 00:30:58,790 At one time, black Americans did not have 684 00:30:58,790 --> 00:31:01,760 the constitutional guarantees as everybody else. 685 00:31:01,760 --> 00:31:04,396 Now we do, but because the civil rights struggle 686 00:31:04,396 --> 00:31:07,866 is over and won, and we're not facing the kind of 687 00:31:07,866 --> 00:31:10,235 gross racial discrimination of the past 688 00:31:10,235 --> 00:31:13,305 does not mean that there are not major problems. 689 00:31:13,305 --> 00:31:15,173 I'm fairly sure that Tom would say 690 00:31:15,173 --> 00:31:18,310 that the 75% rate 691 00:31:18,310 --> 00:31:23,415 of illegitimacy among blacks is a devastating problem, 692 00:31:23,415 --> 00:31:25,016 but it's not a racial problem. 693 00:31:25,016 --> 00:31:27,252 It's not a legacy of slavery. 694 00:31:27,252 --> 00:31:30,756 The crime that -- I believe Tom would say as well -- 695 00:31:30,756 --> 00:31:33,125 that the crime we see in many black communities 696 00:31:33,125 --> 00:31:35,060 is a devastating problem, 697 00:31:35,060 --> 00:31:37,963 but it has nothing to do with racial discrimination. 698 00:31:37,963 --> 00:31:40,365 "If you have always believed that everyone should play 699 00:31:40,365 --> 00:31:41,600 by the same rules 700 00:31:41,600 --> 00:31:43,769 and be judged by the same standards, 701 00:31:43,769 --> 00:31:46,438 that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, 702 00:31:46,438 --> 00:31:49,741 a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today." 703 00:31:49,741 --> 00:31:53,378 [ music ] 704 00:31:53,378 --> 00:31:56,414 Thomas Sowell may be an intellectual, 705 00:31:56,414 --> 00:31:57,949 but it would be a mistake 706 00:31:57,949 --> 00:32:01,086 to believe that only academics and economists 707 00:32:01,086 --> 00:32:03,255 believe in what Tom has to say. 708 00:32:03,255 --> 00:32:04,823 I've never heard, never damaged 709 00:32:04,823 --> 00:32:06,758 I am most certainly handed single... 710 00:32:06,758 --> 00:32:08,693 In a small recording studio 711 00:32:08,693 --> 00:32:13,565 just outside of downtown Dallas, a young rapper hones his craft. 712 00:32:13,565 --> 00:32:16,101 It feels good to be back in his booth 713 00:32:16,101 --> 00:32:17,435 And shout out to you 714 00:32:17,435 --> 00:32:19,337 You backin' me then you backin' the truth 715 00:32:19,337 --> 00:32:21,773 You actually knew, and I ain't have to tell you 716 00:32:21,773 --> 00:32:23,308 So sit back, let it soothe... 717 00:32:23,308 --> 00:32:24,643 [ Continues rapping ] 718 00:32:24,643 --> 00:32:27,679 Eric July is a man on a mission. 719 00:32:27,679 --> 00:32:30,549 Handed singly, top tier, meaning you not... 720 00:32:30,549 --> 00:32:33,518 Eric is out to make great music 721 00:32:33,518 --> 00:32:37,055 and to educate people like himself about his hero. 722 00:32:37,055 --> 00:32:39,024 And I'm something like a great howl 723 00:32:39,024 --> 00:32:40,392 Anywhere Thomas Sowell is, 724 00:32:40,392 --> 00:32:42,561 he's the smartest person in the room. 725 00:32:42,561 --> 00:32:45,397 [ Rap metal music playing ] 726 00:32:45,397 --> 00:32:47,399 I would most definitely just tell him 727 00:32:47,399 --> 00:32:50,569 that he's been my biggest inspiration, hands down. 728 00:32:50,569 --> 00:32:52,437 I see you standing with your hand out 729 00:32:52,437 --> 00:32:54,139 What you sayin' now and are you hearin this? 730 00:32:54,139 --> 00:32:55,540 You need to look at your affiliates. 731 00:32:55,540 --> 00:32:59,344 Eric fronts the rap metal band BackWordz, 732 00:32:59,344 --> 00:33:02,314 and uses his music to get a message across 733 00:33:02,314 --> 00:33:04,349 with politically charged lyrics, 734 00:33:04,349 --> 00:33:07,552 many of them inspired by Thomas Sowell. 735 00:33:07,552 --> 00:33:10,589 He has emerged as an influential young voice 736 00:33:10,589 --> 00:33:13,892 who is outspoken in his support for individual freedom 737 00:33:13,892 --> 00:33:15,493 and less government intervention. 738 00:33:15,493 --> 00:33:17,596 [ Rapping indistinctly ] 739 00:33:17,596 --> 00:33:19,831 You see somebody like Sowell who has been doing 740 00:33:19,831 --> 00:33:21,333 what he has been doing, getting out there 741 00:33:21,333 --> 00:33:23,468 and speaking what he has been speaking, 742 00:33:23,468 --> 00:33:26,805 overcoming the odds that he had to certainly overcome, 743 00:33:26,805 --> 00:33:29,641 and his growth, 744 00:33:29,641 --> 00:33:33,578 and you also feel like you can conquer the world. 745 00:33:33,578 --> 00:33:36,214 It just goes to show from a generational standpoint 746 00:33:36,214 --> 00:33:41,953 how he's been able to influence somebody, you know, like me. 747 00:33:41,953 --> 00:33:45,223 People are probably tired of hearing me talk about it 748 00:33:45,223 --> 00:33:47,626 because I'm always referencing Thomas Sowell. 749 00:33:47,626 --> 00:33:50,195 People ask me, "Well, you used to be this. 750 00:33:50,195 --> 00:33:51,529 What happened?" 751 00:33:51,529 --> 00:33:53,498 I'm like, well, that enlightenment period, 752 00:33:53,498 --> 00:33:55,000 it had to do with Thomas Sowell. 753 00:33:57,335 --> 00:33:59,537 Most people have not recognized the fact 754 00:33:59,537 --> 00:34:01,573 that if you go back into the '20s... 755 00:34:03,909 --> 00:34:06,278 ...you find that married couple families 756 00:34:06,278 --> 00:34:09,814 were much more prevalent among blacks then than today. 757 00:34:12,050 --> 00:34:13,885 As late as 1930, blacks had lower 758 00:34:13,885 --> 00:34:15,720 unemployment rates than whites. 759 00:34:15,720 --> 00:34:17,956 So all these things that we complain about 760 00:34:17,956 --> 00:34:20,692 and attribute to the era of slavery, 761 00:34:20,692 --> 00:34:22,560 those things should have been worse in the past 762 00:34:22,560 --> 00:34:24,229 than in the present, but in fact, 763 00:34:24,229 --> 00:34:25,997 they're worse in the present than in the past. 764 00:34:25,997 --> 00:34:27,732 And I think if you want to look for a turning point, 765 00:34:27,732 --> 00:34:29,434 it would be since the 1960s. 766 00:34:29,434 --> 00:34:31,369 [ Indistinct conversations ] 767 00:34:31,369 --> 00:34:33,171 And what happened in the 1960s? 768 00:34:33,171 --> 00:34:36,574 [ music ] 769 00:34:36,574 --> 00:34:39,110 You began to have not only the welfare state, 770 00:34:39,110 --> 00:34:42,814 you began to have the mind-set that goes with the welfare state 771 00:34:42,814 --> 00:34:45,550 so that there was no stigma any longer attached, 772 00:34:45,550 --> 00:34:47,452 for example, to being on relief 773 00:34:47,452 --> 00:34:50,055 or welfare. 774 00:34:50,055 --> 00:34:53,658 Those types are welfarism and how they have affected 775 00:34:53,658 --> 00:34:56,561 black, you know, communities and black families, 776 00:34:56,561 --> 00:34:57,596 it's tough. 777 00:34:57,596 --> 00:35:00,799 It's a hard pill to swallow. 778 00:35:00,799 --> 00:35:04,703 Just how welfarism does incentivize people to fail. 779 00:35:04,703 --> 00:35:07,973 It's the state saying that, so as long as you fail, 780 00:35:07,973 --> 00:35:10,241 you know, you'll get this money. 781 00:35:10,241 --> 00:35:12,444 You'll get this money, we'll take care of you, 782 00:35:12,444 --> 00:35:13,979 housing, whatever you need. 783 00:35:13,979 --> 00:35:15,914 But the minute you get above this line, 784 00:35:15,914 --> 00:35:18,550 you know, the minute you get, you see this amount of success, 785 00:35:18,550 --> 00:35:20,218 we're going to strip it all away from you. 786 00:35:20,218 --> 00:35:23,221 [ Children shouting playfully ] 787 00:35:23,221 --> 00:35:28,226 [ music ] 788 00:35:28,226 --> 00:35:36,601 [ music ] 789 00:35:36,601 --> 00:35:39,304 In 1980, Thomas Sowell came here 790 00:35:39,304 --> 00:35:42,374 the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. 791 00:35:42,374 --> 00:35:45,844 Upon accepting the offer, his teaching days were over. 792 00:35:45,844 --> 00:35:47,679 [ music ] 793 00:35:47,679 --> 00:35:50,382 Thousands of students would miss out on having 794 00:35:50,382 --> 00:35:52,650 Professor Sowell as a teacher, 795 00:35:52,650 --> 00:35:55,420 but millions of intellectually curious readers 796 00:35:55,420 --> 00:35:57,856 would benefit from Thomas Sowell's work here. 797 00:35:57,856 --> 00:36:00,025 [ music ] 798 00:36:00,025 --> 00:36:03,328 I don't think Tom Sowell ever really liked being a teacher. 799 00:36:03,328 --> 00:36:06,197 I don't think I ever like standing in front of people 800 00:36:06,197 --> 00:36:08,900 and being a professor. 801 00:36:08,900 --> 00:36:10,702 When Hoover offered him the opportunity 802 00:36:10,702 --> 00:36:13,738 to basically pay him to be Tom Sowell, 803 00:36:13,738 --> 00:36:16,141 he took it, and he can write what he wants to write 804 00:36:16,141 --> 00:36:19,010 when he wants to write, as much or as little, 805 00:36:19,010 --> 00:36:20,979 but he's always been very, very productive. 806 00:36:20,979 --> 00:36:23,715 And I think the independence and the freedom is what he liked. 807 00:36:25,517 --> 00:36:27,786 So you're good friends with Thomas Sowell. 808 00:36:27,786 --> 00:36:28,286 Yeah. 809 00:36:28,286 --> 00:36:29,387 Have been for a while. 810 00:36:29,387 --> 00:36:30,822 How would you describe Tom to someone 811 00:36:30,822 --> 00:36:32,457 who's never met him before? 812 00:36:32,457 --> 00:36:34,759 I'd say Tom is an empiricist. 813 00:36:34,759 --> 00:36:38,997 And by that, I mean Tom looks at evidence 814 00:36:38,997 --> 00:36:41,599 and then he makes a diagnosis 815 00:36:41,599 --> 00:36:46,071 and then he offers a therapy for the perceived problem. 816 00:36:46,071 --> 00:36:49,674 And then he offers a prognosis, and he's not interested as much, 817 00:36:49,674 --> 00:36:53,611 if at all, on how people interpret that 818 00:36:53,611 --> 00:36:55,080 or what are the ramifications 819 00:36:55,080 --> 00:36:58,850 in contemporary political terms of his argument. 820 00:36:58,850 --> 00:37:01,086 You point out that depending on 821 00:37:01,086 --> 00:37:02,754 where you come from in a foreign country 822 00:37:02,754 --> 00:37:04,622 also makes a considerable difference 823 00:37:04,622 --> 00:37:06,991 because you carry your ethos on your back, don't you? 824 00:37:06,991 --> 00:37:08,493 Yes, that if you look at the Chinese 825 00:37:08,493 --> 00:37:13,298 who came to the United States, let's say, before World War II, 826 00:37:13,298 --> 00:37:16,000 a very large percentage of those came from one district 827 00:37:16,000 --> 00:37:18,503 in one province in Southern China. 828 00:37:18,503 --> 00:37:20,171 The people who have come in since World War II 829 00:37:20,171 --> 00:37:22,207 have largely not come from that same area. 830 00:37:22,207 --> 00:37:24,509 They've come in with a different set of experiences 831 00:37:24,509 --> 00:37:26,277 and backgrounds and values. 832 00:37:26,277 --> 00:37:28,480 Many of them are the poverty-stricken Chinese 833 00:37:28,480 --> 00:37:31,149 that you see in the Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco 834 00:37:31,149 --> 00:37:34,085 working the very long hours, getting the very low pay, 835 00:37:34,085 --> 00:37:36,020 living in the slums, packed into the rooms, 836 00:37:36,020 --> 00:37:38,723 you know, several people to a room and so on, 837 00:37:38,723 --> 00:37:40,525 again, it would be hard to make the argument 838 00:37:40,525 --> 00:37:42,026 that this is simply a matter of the way 839 00:37:42,026 --> 00:37:43,328 the American employer sees it. 840 00:37:43,328 --> 00:37:45,630 The American employer is probably totally unaware 841 00:37:45,630 --> 00:37:47,565 that there are two different kinds of Chinese. 842 00:37:47,565 --> 00:37:48,967 It's only the people who work with the data 843 00:37:48,967 --> 00:37:50,869 who make those separations. 844 00:37:50,869 --> 00:37:53,271 "It takes considerable knowledge 845 00:37:53,271 --> 00:37:56,341 just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." 846 00:37:56,341 --> 00:37:59,611 [ music ] 847 00:37:59,611 --> 00:38:02,580 Thomas Sowell may be an academic by training, 848 00:38:02,580 --> 00:38:06,684 but he is not one to rely solely on books. 849 00:38:06,684 --> 00:38:09,053 To gather material for his extensive writings 850 00:38:09,053 --> 00:38:11,823 on culture and migrations, for example, 851 00:38:11,823 --> 00:38:13,892 he became a boots-on- the-ground researcher 852 00:38:13,892 --> 00:38:16,294 who traveled the world. 853 00:38:16,294 --> 00:38:17,962 As an amateur photographer, 854 00:38:17,962 --> 00:38:20,799 he often documented these trips through the lens of his camera. 855 00:38:20,799 --> 00:38:23,935 [ Camera shutter clicking ] 856 00:38:23,935 --> 00:38:28,773 [ music ] 857 00:38:28,773 --> 00:38:30,675 His purpose was to try and understand 858 00:38:30,675 --> 00:38:32,710 the role of cultural differences 859 00:38:32,710 --> 00:38:35,580 both within nations and between them, 860 00:38:35,580 --> 00:38:38,249 and not only today, but throughout history. 861 00:38:38,249 --> 00:38:39,617 [ Camera shutter clicks ] 862 00:38:39,617 --> 00:38:42,320 [ music ] 863 00:38:42,320 --> 00:38:44,822 Sowell's travels led to pioneering studies 864 00:38:44,822 --> 00:38:46,991 and several books that detail 865 00:38:46,991 --> 00:38:49,327 the cultural patterns and development 866 00:38:49,327 --> 00:38:51,696 of different groups around the world. 867 00:38:51,696 --> 00:38:53,398 He went around the world and analyzed 868 00:38:53,398 --> 00:38:56,201 virtually every culture present and past 869 00:38:56,201 --> 00:38:58,203 to find out their strengths and weaknesses -- 870 00:38:58,203 --> 00:39:00,972 why some survived, why some perished. 871 00:39:00,972 --> 00:39:03,341 One of Tom's discoveries was that 872 00:39:03,341 --> 00:39:06,211 much about the fate of different human civilizations 873 00:39:06,211 --> 00:39:11,583 and cultures can be explained ultimately by their geography. 874 00:39:11,583 --> 00:39:13,918 Too often the influence of geography on wealth 875 00:39:13,918 --> 00:39:17,689 is thought of narrowly, in terms of natural resources 876 00:39:17,689 --> 00:39:19,591 that translate directly into wealth, 877 00:39:19,591 --> 00:39:23,194 such as oil in the Middle East or gold in South Africa. 878 00:39:23,194 --> 00:39:25,330 But important as such differences are, 879 00:39:25,330 --> 00:39:26,698 geography influences 880 00:39:26,698 --> 00:39:29,133 even more profound cultural differences 881 00:39:29,133 --> 00:39:31,936 among the peoples themselves. 882 00:39:31,936 --> 00:39:35,640 Why did Europe conquer Africa instead of vice versa? 883 00:39:35,640 --> 00:39:39,477 Well, there are a number of ways in which civilizations 884 00:39:39,477 --> 00:39:43,248 become complex, primarily through the aggregation 885 00:39:43,248 --> 00:39:46,618 and exchange of ideas. 886 00:39:46,618 --> 00:39:48,553 Sophisticated cultures are ones that sit 887 00:39:48,553 --> 00:39:50,121 in the middle of a catchment area 888 00:39:50,121 --> 00:39:53,858 where innovations from other cultures can be aggregated 889 00:39:53,858 --> 00:39:55,893 and kind of greatest hits collections, 890 00:39:55,893 --> 00:39:58,596 and so geography that allows movement of people 891 00:39:58,596 --> 00:40:01,532 and ideas with rivers, 892 00:40:01,532 --> 00:40:05,436 with highways, intersections of highways, port cities 893 00:40:05,436 --> 00:40:09,507 tend to become more culturally sophisticated. 894 00:40:09,507 --> 00:40:11,075 A lot of his research, as you mentioned, 895 00:40:11,075 --> 00:40:14,045 has focused on why some groups excel 896 00:40:14,045 --> 00:40:15,813 and others do not. 897 00:40:15,813 --> 00:40:19,717 But that curiosity is not necessarily appreciated 898 00:40:19,717 --> 00:40:21,919 by a lot of people 899 00:40:21,919 --> 00:40:26,457 who seem to to approach it from the standpoint 900 00:40:26,457 --> 00:40:29,394 that if a culture isn't rising, 901 00:40:29,394 --> 00:40:30,762 it's someone else's fault. 902 00:40:30,762 --> 00:40:31,362 Yes. 903 00:40:31,362 --> 00:40:34,599 Someone else is keeping them down, or, you know, 904 00:40:34,599 --> 00:40:38,369 if America is up here, it is at the expense of this group 905 00:40:38,369 --> 00:40:40,605 or this country or this region. 906 00:40:40,605 --> 00:40:42,907 He doesn't take that approach. 907 00:40:42,907 --> 00:40:46,477 What Tom did when he talked about comparative cultures, 908 00:40:46,477 --> 00:40:51,449 he went to this quite narrow and unheralded group of scholars 909 00:40:51,449 --> 00:40:53,384 that talked about economics, 910 00:40:53,384 --> 00:40:55,053 and then he took that data, 911 00:40:55,053 --> 00:40:58,122 superimposed it onto history questions. 912 00:40:58,122 --> 00:41:00,325 So when people who were critical of Tom would say, 913 00:41:00,325 --> 00:41:03,027 "Well, he hasn't read this particular historical work," 914 00:41:03,027 --> 00:41:07,265 or, "He wasn't quite appreciative of this great novel 915 00:41:07,265 --> 00:41:09,067 or this great history or this." 916 00:41:09,067 --> 00:41:11,235 They didn't understand that what he lost 917 00:41:11,235 --> 00:41:13,905 as being an economic historian, 918 00:41:13,905 --> 00:41:16,841 he gained in really trying to explain 919 00:41:16,841 --> 00:41:19,110 how cultures were successful 920 00:41:19,110 --> 00:41:21,479 or how much dominance they had in trade 921 00:41:21,479 --> 00:41:22,980 by actually looking at economics. 922 00:41:22,980 --> 00:41:24,215 And most historians, you know, 923 00:41:24,215 --> 00:41:26,784 they think that economics is a dismal science, 924 00:41:26,784 --> 00:41:29,420 and they're not trained to do that. 925 00:41:29,420 --> 00:41:32,557 "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: 926 00:41:32,557 --> 00:41:35,393 there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy 927 00:41:35,393 --> 00:41:38,296 all those who want it. 928 00:41:38,296 --> 00:41:40,465 The first lesson of politics 929 00:41:40,465 --> 00:41:43,701 is to disregard the first lesson of economics." 930 00:41:43,701 --> 00:41:50,274 [ music ] 931 00:41:50,274 --> 00:41:54,445 I wanted to explore how Sowell’s concepts on free markets have 932 00:41:54,445 --> 00:41:57,315 influenced business leaders today. 933 00:41:57,315 --> 00:42:02,754 A perfect example can be found in Salt Lake City, Utah, at Overstock.com. 934 00:42:02,754 --> 00:42:10,962 One of the most successful online retailers in the world. 935 00:42:10,962 --> 00:42:15,767 Aaron Hunsaker, an Overstock employee, has been heavily influenced 936 00:42:15,767 --> 00:42:18,503 by Thomas Sowell’s ideas. 937 00:42:18,503 --> 00:42:24,142 He credits much it’s success to the free-market economic principles 938 00:42:24,142 --> 00:42:26,411 championed by Thomas Sowell. 939 00:42:26,411 --> 00:42:32,049 I discovered Thomas Sowell like every good thinker discovers things in the 940 00:42:32,049 --> 00:42:36,921 modern-day, on YouTube. 941 00:42:36,921 --> 00:42:40,792 I was watching a Milton Friedman video, and I see Thomas Sowell 942 00:42:40,792 --> 00:42:45,797 speaking with Milton Friedman, and I was like, wow, this guy 943 00:42:45,797 --> 00:42:47,265 is really, really smart. 944 00:42:47,265 --> 00:42:54,305 And he gave a real rigorous, as rigorous as you could be on TV, but a 945 00:42:54,305 --> 00:42:57,809 real rigorous answer to a question, and I really appreciated that. 946 00:42:57,809 --> 00:43:01,279 And I just kind of went down the YouTube wormhole with Thomas Sowell, 947 00:43:01,279 --> 00:43:05,750 and then I saw that he’d written like, you know, ten or a thousand books or 948 00:43:05,750 --> 00:43:08,052 something like that, he has tons of books. 949 00:43:08,052 --> 00:43:14,892 And I just started to explore him, and the more I explored Thomas Sowell, he 950 00:43:14,892 --> 00:43:22,200 talked a lot about incentives in institutions, government institutions. 951 00:43:27,071 --> 00:43:30,475 I come from kind of a punk rock hardcore background, and I had an 952 00:43:30,475 --> 00:43:37,815 incentive to be more left and angry because it makes better music. 953 00:43:37,815 --> 00:43:41,385 You don't hear a whole lot of music about, oh, well, if I work really 954 00:43:41,385 --> 00:43:44,755 hard, and we base it off meritocracy, things will be great. 955 00:43:44,755 --> 00:43:52,830 But upon kind of digging into Thomas Sowell’s thought process, I realized 956 00:43:52,830 --> 00:43:58,936 that it is far more punk rock to base things off of individual 957 00:43:58,936 --> 00:44:00,171 freedoms and thought. 958 00:44:00,171 --> 00:44:05,510 I see him as someone who has constantly strived to be consistent. 959 00:44:05,510 --> 00:44:10,681 And to those that want to be consistent, you have to study 960 00:44:10,681 --> 00:44:13,918 geography; you have to study history; you have to study political 961 00:44:13,918 --> 00:44:18,956 philosophy; you have to study journalism; you have to study all of 962 00:44:18,956 --> 00:44:26,197 these subjects as a whole and see how you can put together a view that makes 963 00:44:26,197 --> 00:44:28,900 them consistent with each other. 964 00:44:28,900 --> 00:44:32,703 That’s why I think Thomas Sowell is so well-versed and such 965 00:44:32,703 --> 00:44:35,039 a Renaissance man. 966 00:44:37,008 --> 00:44:39,610 I grew up in an era when people, particularly blacks, 967 00:44:39,610 --> 00:44:41,579 were a lot poorer than today, 968 00:44:41,579 --> 00:44:44,181 faced a lot more discrimination than today, 969 00:44:44,181 --> 00:44:45,917 and in which the teenage pregnancy rate 970 00:44:45,917 --> 00:44:48,219 was a lot lower than today. 971 00:44:48,219 --> 00:44:50,288 I don't believe there is a predestined amount 972 00:44:50,288 --> 00:44:51,689 of teenage pregnancy, 973 00:44:51,689 --> 00:44:53,958 a predestined amount of husband desertion. 974 00:44:53,958 --> 00:44:55,726 Gutman has done a study of the black family 975 00:44:55,726 --> 00:44:57,895 showing that this whole notion that the black family 976 00:44:57,895 --> 00:45:01,098 has always been disintegrating, that is nonsense. 977 00:45:01,098 --> 00:45:02,700 "Some things are believed 978 00:45:02,700 --> 00:45:05,336 because they are demonstrably true, 979 00:45:05,336 --> 00:45:07,405 but many other things are believed 980 00:45:07,405 --> 00:45:10,441 simply because they have been asserted repeatedly." 981 00:45:10,441 --> 00:45:11,943 [ music ] 982 00:45:11,943 --> 00:45:15,780 In the 1990s, Sowell took up a new area of research 983 00:45:15,780 --> 00:45:18,683 the phenomenon of late-talking children. 984 00:45:18,683 --> 00:45:21,319 For Tom, it was personal. 985 00:45:21,319 --> 00:45:23,955 I met Tom Sowell through language. 986 00:45:23,955 --> 00:45:26,691 I am a cognitive scientist. I study language. 987 00:45:26,691 --> 00:45:28,259 I wrote a book on language, 988 00:45:28,259 --> 00:45:31,495 and I got a letter out of the blue from Professor Sowell. 989 00:45:31,495 --> 00:45:32,964 His son was a late talker, 990 00:45:32,964 --> 00:45:36,000 but contrary to some of the diagnosis 991 00:45:36,000 --> 00:45:38,502 that he got from so-called experts, 992 00:45:38,502 --> 00:45:42,440 he didn't believe that his son was retarded or autistic, 993 00:45:42,440 --> 00:45:44,809 just that his language was late in developing. 994 00:45:44,809 --> 00:45:46,744 He just did not talk. 995 00:45:46,744 --> 00:45:49,080 This meshed with my own understanding 996 00:45:49,080 --> 00:45:50,748 of the relationship between language and thought, 997 00:45:50,748 --> 00:45:53,651 namely they're not the same thing. 998 00:45:53,651 --> 00:45:57,488 So I wrote to Tom saying, "Your intuition about your son 999 00:45:57,488 --> 00:46:00,424 is consistent with my understanding." 1000 00:46:00,424 --> 00:46:02,927 Tom Sowell sought out answers. 1001 00:46:02,927 --> 00:46:07,231 Eventually, his son John not only began to speak, 1002 00:46:07,231 --> 00:46:08,866 but to excel. 1003 00:46:08,866 --> 00:46:11,602 Sowell wrote about this remarkable journey 1004 00:46:11,602 --> 00:46:15,606 in his landmark book, "Late-Talking Children." 1005 00:46:15,606 --> 00:46:17,608 Tom discovered that there was a syndrome, 1006 00:46:17,608 --> 00:46:21,579 that many famous scientists, engineers, mathematicians 1007 00:46:21,579 --> 00:46:25,316 would also have acute spatial ability 1008 00:46:25,316 --> 00:46:27,351 and numerical ability, 1009 00:46:27,351 --> 00:46:31,155 but were late in developing the ability to speak. 1010 00:46:31,155 --> 00:46:35,126 One of those impacted was Los Angeles-based writer 1011 00:46:35,126 --> 00:46:38,729 Jennifer Van Laar, whose own young son, Sam, 1012 00:46:38,729 --> 00:46:41,165 wasn't talking at all. 1013 00:46:41,165 --> 00:46:42,967 When Sam was about 18 months old, 1014 00:46:42,967 --> 00:46:44,702 he wasn't really talking. 1015 00:46:44,702 --> 00:46:46,604 He -- just babbling. 1016 00:46:46,604 --> 00:46:50,608 No word that we could make out to be an English word. 1017 00:46:50,608 --> 00:46:54,879 So I started looking online and saw late-talking children, 1018 00:46:54,879 --> 00:46:57,148 and then Dr. Thomas Sowell, and said, 1019 00:46:57,148 --> 00:47:00,084 oh, I definitely want to read what he has to say 1020 00:47:00,084 --> 00:47:03,120 because I respect him as an intellectual. 1021 00:47:05,022 --> 00:47:06,424 I had already noticed in Sam 1022 00:47:06,424 --> 00:47:10,161 that he would build different block towers 1023 00:47:10,161 --> 00:47:12,596 with different patterns repeating over and over. 1024 00:47:12,596 --> 00:47:16,400 He would have movies that he just loved watching 1025 00:47:16,400 --> 00:47:19,770 over and over, and one of them was "Charlotte's Web." 1026 00:47:19,770 --> 00:47:21,339 Another one was "Shrek." 1027 00:47:21,339 --> 00:47:24,742 And so I would come and find ABC blocks on the floor 1028 00:47:24,742 --> 00:47:27,978 or on the refrigerator spelling out -- 1029 00:47:27,978 --> 00:47:30,414 and he'd even write out "Lucasfilm." 1030 00:47:30,414 --> 00:47:31,882 [ Laughs ] 1031 00:47:31,882 --> 00:47:36,220 Which is pretty big for a three-year-old to be able to do. 1032 00:47:36,220 --> 00:47:40,191 So the fact that Sowell's book talked about bright children, 1033 00:47:40,191 --> 00:47:41,592 I thought, I don't think he's dumb. 1034 00:47:41,592 --> 00:47:42,993 Let's look into this. 1035 00:47:42,993 --> 00:47:49,300 So went to go see Dr. Camarata, to get an evaluation. 1036 00:47:49,300 --> 00:47:53,771 And they gave us a full plan of what we could do to help him 1037 00:47:53,771 --> 00:47:56,607 to be able to acquire language and be successful in school. 1038 00:47:56,607 --> 00:47:58,109 [ music ] 1039 00:47:58,109 --> 00:48:02,146 When Sam started piano and he had been so advanced 1040 00:48:02,146 --> 00:48:03,814 in that first year, at the end of the year 1041 00:48:03,814 --> 00:48:06,450 they had a recital, and he still wasn't talking 1042 00:48:06,450 --> 00:48:08,719 in more than one sentence, 1043 00:48:08,719 --> 00:48:12,289 maybe two, but he got up and he introduced his piece, 1044 00:48:12,289 --> 00:48:14,525 and it was "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." 1045 00:48:14,525 --> 00:48:19,330 [ "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" playing ] 1046 00:48:19,330 --> 00:48:20,698 It made me cry. 1047 00:48:20,698 --> 00:48:25,169 [ music ] 1048 00:48:25,169 --> 00:48:27,138 I sent the video of that to the Camaratas 1049 00:48:27,138 --> 00:48:30,408 and said how proud I was of him and thanked them for the help 1050 00:48:30,408 --> 00:48:32,143 they had given us, and they asked 1051 00:48:32,143 --> 00:48:33,811 if they could send it to Dr. Sowell. 1052 00:48:33,811 --> 00:48:36,614 [ music ] 1053 00:48:36,614 --> 00:48:39,417 Said, go ahead, and then they e-mailed back 1054 00:48:39,417 --> 00:48:40,951 and said that Sowell had really loved 1055 00:48:40,951 --> 00:48:43,320 watching the video of Sam. 1056 00:48:43,320 --> 00:48:47,224 [ music ] 1057 00:48:47,224 --> 00:48:49,293 [ Song ends ] 1058 00:48:49,293 --> 00:48:50,728 [ Applause ] 1059 00:48:50,728 --> 00:48:53,864 Just the fact that he would care about this five-year-old 1060 00:48:53,864 --> 00:48:57,935 said a lot to me about who he sees himself as. 1061 00:48:57,935 --> 00:49:00,905 "The course of history is determined 1062 00:49:00,905 --> 00:49:03,908 by what people do with their opportunities." 1063 00:49:03,908 --> 00:49:06,343 [ music ] 1064 00:49:06,343 --> 00:49:07,912 Sowell has written a great deal 1065 00:49:07,912 --> 00:49:09,980 about the importance of human capital 1066 00:49:09,980 --> 00:49:11,582 in a group's advancement. 1067 00:49:11,582 --> 00:49:13,217 The development of skills and habits 1068 00:49:13,217 --> 00:49:16,554 and attitudes in advancing a group economically. 1069 00:49:16,554 --> 00:49:18,722 And a good example of what he's talking about 1070 00:49:18,722 --> 00:49:21,158 can be found on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan 1071 00:49:21,158 --> 00:49:22,960 at the Steinway piano company. 1072 00:49:22,960 --> 00:49:25,629 [ Playing classical piece ] 1073 00:49:25,629 --> 00:49:32,870 [ music ] 1074 00:49:32,870 --> 00:49:35,773 President and CEO Ron Losby 1075 00:49:35,773 --> 00:49:38,709 explains how the history of Steinway 1076 00:49:38,709 --> 00:49:42,413 aligns with Thomas Sowell's theories. 1077 00:49:42,413 --> 00:49:46,550 We still follow the tenet that Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg 1078 00:49:46,550 --> 00:49:48,385 started the company with, 1079 00:49:48,385 --> 00:49:51,589 and that is to build the best piano possible. 1080 00:49:51,589 --> 00:49:53,591 They were living in Seesen 1081 00:49:53,591 --> 00:49:56,493 in the Harz Mountain area of Northern Germany. 1082 00:49:56,493 --> 00:49:59,763 At that time, there was a lot of political upheaval in Germany, 1083 00:49:59,763 --> 00:50:01,632 and they had the guild system. 1084 00:50:01,632 --> 00:50:04,935 I think you would call it the apprentice system today. 1085 00:50:04,935 --> 00:50:06,704 And it had really strict rules. 1086 00:50:06,704 --> 00:50:10,341 And Heinrich was just so full of ideas 1087 00:50:10,341 --> 00:50:13,177 on how to build the best piano that he possibly could 1088 00:50:13,177 --> 00:50:16,280 that he was impatient, and he didn't want to wait 1089 00:50:16,280 --> 00:50:20,384 until he graduated from this system. 1090 00:50:20,384 --> 00:50:24,688 On his own, Heinrich created a few pianos. 1091 00:50:24,688 --> 00:50:27,691 And while they were favorably received, 1092 00:50:27,691 --> 00:50:30,561 the economic restrictions in Germany at the time 1093 00:50:30,561 --> 00:50:33,397 made him realize that if he was to succeed, 1094 00:50:33,397 --> 00:50:35,666 he would have to take his skills elsewhere. 1095 00:50:35,666 --> 00:50:39,069 [ music ] 1096 00:50:39,069 --> 00:50:40,471 It gave him the impetus 1097 00:50:40,471 --> 00:50:43,474 to come to the New World, New York City, 1098 00:50:43,474 --> 00:50:44,742 where there was less restriction, 1099 00:50:44,742 --> 00:50:46,710 there was less, you know, regulation. 1100 00:50:46,710 --> 00:50:48,913 [ music ] 1101 00:50:48,913 --> 00:50:52,082 Heinrich changed the family's last name 1102 00:50:52,082 --> 00:50:56,320 to the more American-sounding Steinway. 1103 00:50:56,320 --> 00:50:59,189 They created an instrument that within 10 years, 1104 00:50:59,189 --> 00:51:01,659 they became the most successful, most profitable, 1105 00:51:01,659 --> 00:51:05,262 the best piano company built in America. 1106 00:51:05,262 --> 00:51:06,730 Very often people talk 1107 00:51:06,730 --> 00:51:11,669 as if some group has taken control of some industry 1108 00:51:11,669 --> 00:51:13,904 and they wonder, how did that happen? 1109 00:51:13,904 --> 00:51:16,707 And in most cases, they created the industry. 1110 00:51:16,707 --> 00:51:19,343 The industry didn't exist before they got there. 1111 00:51:19,343 --> 00:51:21,946 That's how they took control of it. 1112 00:51:21,946 --> 00:51:26,216 [ music ] 1113 00:51:26,216 --> 00:51:29,653 Heinrich's decision to relocate to America 1114 00:51:29,653 --> 00:51:34,491 is a good example of one of Thomas Sowells core beliefs -- 1115 00:51:34,491 --> 00:51:37,895 that individuals carry with them their skills 1116 00:51:37,895 --> 00:51:40,664 no matter where they go, and can succeed 1117 00:51:40,664 --> 00:51:42,099 if permitted to do so 1118 00:51:42,099 --> 00:51:44,702 without cumbersome government regulations. 1119 00:51:47,738 --> 00:51:51,375 "It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread 1120 00:51:51,375 --> 00:51:53,577 among a multitude of hypocrites." 1121 00:51:53,577 --> 00:51:56,747 [ music ] 1122 00:51:56,747 --> 00:51:58,549 Listen to this list. 1123 00:51:58,549 --> 00:52:02,152 "The Thomas Sowell Reader," 2011. 1124 00:52:02,152 --> 00:52:05,589 "Intellectuals and Race," 2013. 1125 00:52:05,589 --> 00:52:07,358 A new edition of your classic work 1126 00:52:07,358 --> 00:52:10,461 "Basic Economics," in 2014. 1127 00:52:10,461 --> 00:52:14,732 "Wealth, Poverty and Politics," 2015. 1128 00:52:14,732 --> 00:52:18,669 And now, 2018, "Discrimination and Disparities." 1129 00:52:18,669 --> 00:52:20,304 And do you know what I just did? 1130 00:52:20,304 --> 00:52:22,873 I just listed the books you've published 1131 00:52:22,873 --> 00:52:24,842 since turning 80. 1132 00:52:24,842 --> 00:52:26,143 [ Laughs ] 1133 00:52:26,143 --> 00:52:31,548 [ music ] 1134 00:52:31,548 --> 00:52:34,118 Thomas Sowell's essays and weekly columns 1135 00:52:34,118 --> 00:52:38,288 have appeared in more than 300 newspapers and periodicals, 1136 00:52:38,288 --> 00:52:40,991 including "The New York Times," "The Wall Street Journal," 1137 00:52:40,991 --> 00:52:43,494 "Forbes," and "Fortune" magazines. 1138 00:52:43,494 --> 00:52:46,363 While many found Sowell's empirically based arguments 1139 00:52:46,363 --> 00:52:50,234 insightful, oftentimes they created a backlash, 1140 00:52:50,234 --> 00:52:52,703 especially among those in academia. 1141 00:52:54,571 --> 00:52:56,306 You once told me that Tom's not interested 1142 00:52:56,306 --> 00:52:58,709 in making people happy or angry. 1143 00:52:58,709 --> 00:53:01,979 He's interested in telling people what the data show. 1144 00:53:01,979 --> 00:53:05,582 What the data shows, and he is counter -- 1145 00:53:05,582 --> 00:53:07,217 He can be a contrarian in the sense 1146 00:53:07,217 --> 00:53:11,188 that often areas that are unpopular 1147 00:53:11,188 --> 00:53:14,825 or they're plagued with false knowledge or misconceptions, 1148 00:53:14,825 --> 00:53:16,360 he gravitates toward those 1149 00:53:16,360 --> 00:53:17,895 because that intrigues him to see 1150 00:53:17,895 --> 00:53:20,764 if that's actually the popular opinion, is actually true. 1151 00:53:20,764 --> 00:53:23,300 And often it's not he finds it's not. 1152 00:53:23,300 --> 00:53:26,303 And then the results tend to bother people 1153 00:53:26,303 --> 00:53:29,373 that he's so dispassionate about it. 1154 00:53:29,373 --> 00:53:32,609 And then, as an African-American intellectual, 1155 00:53:32,609 --> 00:53:34,678 he is supposed to fit a preconceived 1156 00:53:34,678 --> 00:53:37,681 intellectual, academic, ideological position, 1157 00:53:37,681 --> 00:53:40,517 and it's not that he doesn't, he's just on interested in it. 1158 00:53:40,517 --> 00:53:42,286 He doesn't make friends or enemies 1159 00:53:42,286 --> 00:53:47,925 based on tribal considerations or popular consensus. 1160 00:53:47,925 --> 00:53:50,727 On December 27, 2016, 1161 00:53:50,727 --> 00:53:53,931 Thomas Sowell published his weekly newspaper column. 1162 00:53:53,931 --> 00:53:57,468 I'd read his column for decades and always look forward to it, 1163 00:53:57,468 --> 00:53:59,236 but this one was different. 1164 00:53:59,236 --> 00:54:01,338 Thomas Sowell was saying goodbye. 1165 00:54:01,338 --> 00:54:02,873 [ music ] 1166 00:54:02,873 --> 00:54:05,442 Within minutes, the internet lit up 1167 00:54:05,442 --> 00:54:07,644 with thousands of comments 1168 00:54:07,644 --> 00:54:11,682 about Tom retiring from writing his column. 1169 00:54:11,682 --> 00:54:14,351 most of the postings were along the lines of, 1170 00:54:14,351 --> 00:54:15,819 Say it isn't so. 1171 00:54:15,819 --> 00:54:19,890 [ music ] 1172 00:54:19,890 --> 00:54:21,358 I did that after spending some time 1173 00:54:21,358 --> 00:54:24,194 in Yosemite with a couple of photo buddies, 1174 00:54:24,194 --> 00:54:26,296 and I realized that in those four days 1175 00:54:26,296 --> 00:54:28,866 we hadn't watched a single news program. 1176 00:54:28,866 --> 00:54:31,268 We hadn't seen a single newspaper. 1177 00:54:31,268 --> 00:54:33,370 I said, this is the life. 1178 00:54:33,370 --> 00:54:35,072 I don't need to be watching -- 1179 00:54:35,072 --> 00:54:37,074 Because most of the foolish things 1180 00:54:37,074 --> 00:54:38,876 that are said on these programs 1181 00:54:38,876 --> 00:54:41,879 were said 20 and 30 and 40 years ago 1182 00:54:41,879 --> 00:54:45,082 and refuted 20 and 30 and 40 years ago. 1183 00:54:45,082 --> 00:54:47,684 By you quite often. 1184 00:54:47,684 --> 00:54:50,621 But you're happier when you're not reading the news. 1185 00:54:50,621 --> 00:54:51,488 Absolutely. 1186 00:54:51,488 --> 00:54:52,356 But at the same time, 1187 00:54:52,356 --> 00:54:54,591 you're also happier when you're working on a book. 1188 00:54:54,591 --> 00:54:58,529 Yes, when I can go out there and get the hard data 1189 00:54:58,529 --> 00:55:01,465 and find out what's really happening. 1190 00:55:01,465 --> 00:55:04,902 In dozens of books and numerous television appearances 1191 00:55:04,902 --> 00:55:06,970 and thousands of columns, 1192 00:55:06,970 --> 00:55:10,574 Sowell has championed his philosophy of free markets 1193 00:55:10,574 --> 00:55:12,442 and personal responsibility, 1194 00:55:12,442 --> 00:55:15,746 while weathering the storms of challenge and controversy. 1195 00:55:15,746 --> 00:55:19,016 Sowell has spent his adult life proudly sharing 1196 00:55:19,016 --> 00:55:22,119 his political and economic beliefs. 1197 00:55:22,119 --> 00:55:25,989 For some, he's a clear thinker full of common sense. 1198 00:55:25,989 --> 00:55:28,258 Others say he lacks empathy. 1199 00:55:28,258 --> 00:55:30,594 What no one can doubt is the courage 1200 00:55:30,594 --> 00:55:33,530 of this maverick intellectual. 1201 00:55:33,530 --> 00:55:37,734 If you could offer one sentence of counsel to some sophomore 1202 00:55:37,734 --> 00:55:39,570 or junior who's watching this today... 1203 00:55:39,570 --> 00:55:42,873 It's not over till it's over, as Yogi Berra said. 1204 00:55:42,873 --> 00:55:45,142 And I would say to this young person, 1205 00:55:45,142 --> 00:55:47,711 if we, through some miracle, get through this, 1206 00:55:47,711 --> 00:55:50,847 please take to heart the lesson of what happens 1207 00:55:50,847 --> 00:55:55,452 when you vote on the basis of rhetoric and symbolism 1208 00:55:55,452 --> 00:55:57,621 instead of using your mind. 1209 00:55:57,621 --> 00:55:59,289 It doesn't matter how smart you are 1210 00:55:59,289 --> 00:56:01,158 unless you stop and think. 1211 00:56:03,894 --> 00:56:05,896 In your early days at Harvard, 1212 00:56:05,896 --> 00:56:07,631 you were either going to make it or not going to make it, 1213 00:56:07,631 --> 00:56:10,467 and you shut yourself up and made yourself make it. 1214 00:56:10,467 --> 00:56:13,070 Many people in trying to insulate young people 1215 00:56:13,070 --> 00:56:14,771 from adversity, insulate them 1216 00:56:14,771 --> 00:56:16,673 from the things that give them strength. 1217 00:56:32,256 --> 00:56:33,490 Funding for this program 1218 00:56:33,490 --> 00:56:34,958 has been provided by...