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

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

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Summary

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

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.5	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is October 27th, 2025, and my guest is journalist and author Sam Cignoness.
0:43.2	He was last here in October of 2021, talking about his book, The Least of Us.
0:49.5	Our topic for today is his latest book, The Perfect Tubah, Forging Fulfillment from the Basehorn,
0:56.7	Band, and Hard Work. Sam, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:01.4	Well, it's great to be back with you, Russ. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure
1:05.0	talking with you. This is a very unusual book. I enjoyed it a great deal. I have to confess, I walked into the reading of it
1:14.0	without, I would say, let's just say no knowledge. It's not quite true, but it's close enough.
1:20.3	No knowledge of tubas, very little knowledge of band. But of course, those are the frame of the book.
1:27.6	The book is also about some other things.
1:29.8	So tell us what the book's about, and how did it happen?
1:33.3	How did you get into writing a book about tubas and band?
1:36.9	Well, you were very much like I was.
1:41.3	I do not play the tuba.
1:43.4	I was never in marching band. I knew zero about the tuba when I started
1:48.5	this. I wrote a couple of stories. At one point, this, the, the, that came upon, that was at the L.A.
1:55.4	Times, there was this report that the tubas were being stolen from the high schools predominantly in the Mexican
	...

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