Welcome to Kibi on Liberty.

Clifton.

It's been too long.

It's good to catch up.

Likewise, man. How you doing, Matt?

Good. And I want to capture the conversation we were just having. Because I think it's an important life lesson and I hope an inspiration to young people trying to figure out what they want to do in your life. One of the things that I got from economics, the way that economists think about things, you're always thinking about the time value of whatever you're doing. And as you get older, you realize you have less and less time to accomplish the things that you want to accomplish. And when I was young and stupid, I thought that I was immortal. We all did. But over time, you realize that the clock is ticking, and you shouldn't waste your time doing things that are a waste of time. Suboptimal economists would say it. When I figured that out, I realized that I could accomplish a lot more because I was less risk averse to doing new things, to doing things that I didn't think I could do. And your mindset is in the same place.

Yeah, really recently as well. I crossed the 40 barrier a couple of years ago. Well, about a year and a half ago. And I was very depressed for a long time after that because I said, wow, half of my life is over, and what on earth have I done with it? And it's not as though I'm saying to you before, not as though I'm not accomplished or anything, but I just wonder how much, if I had taken my time more seriously and if I had taken a more long view of life, how much could I have? Could I have done? It's not just the time as well. What I've been discovering is it's the energy. I feel like there's never enough time in the day to do the things that I want to do. But on top of that, it's like I've been pretty physically active for most of my life. But there are definitely more and more points now where I'm like, I just want to sleep at, like, 09:00 p.m. I don't want to do anything else. And so I feel my energy and vitality. I'm looking at that and just injuries and these kinds of things.

So it just really makes you think about your own mortality in a way that I perhaps was naive about before.

Yeah, well, I'm definitely in the same boat when it comes to energy. I go to bed a lot earlier than I used to, but at the same time, I find the thing that gets me out of bed is projects that are challenging intellectually and physically and emotionally challenging to me, and that's the addiction that I have. I want to do a lot of stuff before I die, and I want to do things that I don't think I can do. And that seems like a great jumping off point to where you are right now. And I want to dig deeper into this, but your indiegogo for your project is on fire right now. And I want everybody watching this. Once you've heard about this, I want you to go there and invest in this project. But what are you doing right now?

Well, what I'm working on right now, thank you for asking. Matt, I'm so shocked.

That's a softball.

Yeah, totally. The softball. The softest of balls. I'm working on a solo play about Thomas Soul, the great economist, scholar, philosopher, all these know, just a little backstory. A couple of years ago off Broadway, there was this great one man show called Satchmo at the Waldorf that this wonderful actor named John Douglas Thompson did. And it was a one man play about Louis Armstrong. And it was so fantastic to watch this great actor transform not just into Louis Armstrong, but his manager and Miles Davis, as well as a couple of other characters. And it was really cool. A few years before that, there was a play called Thurgood that Lawrence Fishburne did. You can still watch it on Amazon prime. As a matter of fact, I think it was Emmy nominated, but Spike Lee performed it. But it was basically a one man show that Fishburne did about Thurgood Marshall. And way, way before that, the great James Earl Jones did a play back in 1977 called Robeson, which is a one man play about Paul Robeson. And I said to myself, well, who would make a great subject for a one person show that I could create on my own?

And this idea about a Thomas Soul show has been kicking around in my head for years now. And every time I mention it to people, they get so fired up about it, and they're like, oh, you have to do it. You have to do it. So finally, I just said, all right, well, let's see what happens. I'll set up this Indiegogo campaign, and I'll announce it on my social media, and we'll see what happens. And so I just decided to put this campaign up. And I said, I'll ask for about ten grand so that I can just take some time off and not worry about paying bills, so I can just do some research and try to develop a draft of the script. And that was almost a month ago. And now the indiegogo is sitting at $94,213 with 735 backers. So that's 942% of my original ask. So it's safe to say people are pretty excited about this idea.

Yeah. I want to get into Thomas Soul's life a bit and see where you are in your research. I'm not an expert, but I certainly have some understanding of his work and his thing that. I hope most of my viewers remember this from our last conversation. But the thing that's interesting about this is that you've come a long way since the last time we talked, which was about a year ago, and you were sort of at this precipice of having felt like you lost your career, that the career that you worked on as an actor and performer on Broadway. Let's remind people of that story before we get into this opportunity so that people realize that this isn't just some guy saying, I'm going to play Thomas soul. You have skills.

Yeah. Well, I do still feel that loss very keenly. So for those who don't know, I dedicated 20 years of my life to acting. I went to New York University's graduate acting program. I got my MFA from there. It's the top acting conservatory, in my opinion, in the country. Very selective. Only 2% of the applicants ever make it in the other two schools. Top schools being the Yale School of Drama, aka Jail, School of Trauma, and Juilliard, aka Jailyard. And I got my MFA in about 2009, right during the recession, which was a lot of fun. And I built up a resume just working across the country in our regional theater circuit, doing everything from shakespearean tragedy to musical comedy and winning accolades in each. In 2017 or so, after my agents began to beg me, just please, God, stay in New York, I began to build my credits off Broadway. So I was working in award winning shows like Carmen Jones, which starred two time Tony Award winner Anika Noni Rose. And then I moved into television, working on shows like NCIS, Los Angeles, or, excuse me, New Orleans, working with actors like Scott Bacula.

And so I'm a shy military brat, and I never imagined I would be working in the capacity that I was working in. But when I was about 17 years old, which Zoomers think is the Stone Age, apparently, or Jim Crow, I don't know, which. They seem to kind of mash all the time periods together. But I was just very encouraged early on. I had so many people who said, if you work hard, you can really be successful at this. This is at a time, by the way, where I'm told that the industry and the people in it are white supremacists. So it's just funny to have that contrast. But in 2020, even though things were finally blossoming and I put in all this time, made all these sacrifices, as we all do, to work at something significant, something great, I was like, it's all finally working out. I can finally get out of this shoebox apartment that I'm renting this room in, and I can live my life and get paid a lot of money to do something that I really enjoy and that I've developed a lot of proficiency at. And then the pandemic era hit th, and in 2021, the industry imposed these mandates that you have to take this injection, which for the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to as a vaccine.

And I said, well, I've already caught the disease, so why should I have to take this thing and the industry as a whole shut down, the theater, shut down for about two years. And I lost my manager, I lost my voiceover agent. All that momentum I built up just went away. And partly because I was very vocal about, we're doing this wrong. We're damaging these lockdowns are damaging our children and damaging the economy. The vaccine mandates are unethical. And I had a lot of complaints, and I was like, one of the few people in the entertainment industry at all who was very vocal about what was going on, certainly in the theater. And the tall nails always are the first ones to get hammered down. And so at this point, effectively, I'm Persona non grata. After all that time, to this day, I can't watch anything that's made or produced after the year 2020, I just, I get filled with, I mean, it's a visceral rage, a sense of self righteous indignation, I think. So I've had to kind of get over myself in that sense and move on and not be bogged down by the bitterness.

But that may be a process that takes years.

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Yeah, in different ways. Perhaps a lot of us have gone through this because as a libertarian economist, I assumed in March of 2020 that my community would be 100% committed, at least against lockdowns, at least against the obvious economic devastation that would happen if you shut down entire segments of the economy. And at the beginning, they were talking about telling everyone to stay home. And I thought that was impossibly evil in conception because people would literally start starving if we did such a crazy thing. And of course, we didn't shut everything down because we absolutely had to keep supply chains open for the laptop class so that those Uber Eats guys could come to their doors and feed them. But I kind of have a new set of friends post 2020 and a list of lost friends, but I suspect not nearly as dramatically as you have, because you were shut off from your entire world. And I get the bitterness, but out of this, perhaps, has become an opportunity. Your voice is Persona non grata in your old community, but you. You have built a brand as. As an outspoken voice for sanity amongst the new audience.

And that. That, to me, is an opportunity.

Well, it's really interesting. You know, I made a joke a few months ago that, you know, being purged from the entertainment industry has finally allowed me, given me permission to meet and befriend intelligent people. It's a bit of a broad statement. It's not entirely accurate, but it's interesting because I had an old Twitter account where I was like, hey, everyone, come and see the show that I'm in. I've just been casting this, that, and the third, and of course, no one cared about that. I also had an anonymous account where I gave my true opinions. But then 2020 came, and it wasn't just the pandemic stuff. It was also the social unrest, the racial unrest, and it just swept through the industry. And I said, I don't know what it is about me. I physically cannot shut up about this stuff. I see what's wrong and I have to say something. I have to say something because no one else was saying anything. And it's weird because people say, you're very courageous, you're very brave. I don't think of myself in that way, partly because I think a majority, if not the majority of people, agree with the things that I'm saying.

They're just too afraid to say them. And on top of all of that, I never set out to be any sort of. This isn't the word that you used, but to be any kind of spokesperson or any kind of activist or even any kind of brand. I call myself the accidental influencer, but I think things have gone so off the rails, and I think so many people feel a bit demoralized, especially in our cultural industries, our arts industries, that anyone who decides to stick their neck out and just say what they really think is sort of rewarded, I suppose. And I find it interesting that it's not gone unnoticed to me that ten years of laboring in the entertainment industry, I got no public traction. But now, after just three or four years of just saying the things that I think and saying them forcefully and with clarity, I've amassed this huge following. And then that leads into the excitement for the soul project as well. It still hasn't sunken in for me. I can't believe that it's real, and I don't know what the future holds and all these turns that I've taken, but it's certainly interesting.

And the last thing I'll say is that I was in New York recently, and the good news, that old community is dead, but there is the sort of underground, subterranean. I still have some ties to that community, and they kind of feed me insider tips and tell me about all the degradation going on. But I think listening to people's stories and how other young actors and comedians and musicians, how they were shut out of their own careers by these mandates, by these ridiculous and by politics, and they really gave me the sense just talking to them face to face of. Thank you so much for speaking out. And you really, really got me and my family through some very hard times, and you really helped us out a lot. And so I do take gratification in that. I didn't realize the kind of impact that I was having on people. So people, in the sense, are happy and excited that I'm speaking out for all the societal stuff. But I've really focused a lot of, lot more of my attention on what's happening in our arts industries, and people are really excited about that as well.

So it's not something I ever asked for. I just wanted to be an actor and live my life. But it seems that the universe, or whatever you might call it, had something else in store.

In a weird way, it's perfect timing and going back to the original concept of risk taking and not wasting time. Lockdowns came at a moment when technological disruption was breaking up the old top down institutions. Two of the remaining cartels were kind of the entertainment industrial complex, whether it be old Hollywood or Broadway, and politics itself, which is a very closed system and still wanting to run the world the old top down way. And you are just one of the guys that has exploited the fact that people want something different and that this is a classic definition of entrepreneurship, seeing around the corner of history, perhaps being forced into a situation that you didn't anticipate and saying, you know what? We can do something with this. And to me, that's exciting. I'm about to talk later today to my friends at angel studios, and they, in the same way, not because of lockdowns, but because of the Hollywood cartel wanting to spoon feed us only one type of story, only one narrative, only one set of values, they're seeing an opportunity to crowdsource something different. And I think this is the beginning of that process, not the end.

I want to go back to you and how you discovered Thomas soul, and I'll start by saying how I discovered you. I think I said this last time, but you had given a speech at the Mises Institute quite some time ago now, I suspect probably two years ago, and you had somehow become red pilled. You had done some research and discovered a different set of ideas, even crazy austrian economists and libertarians and that kind of stuff. Talk about that and tell us where Thomas soul fits into that discovery process.

Sure. Yeah. It was actually a very gradual process. I've been thinking about this a lot. It started in 2007 or eight, around thereabouts, and I was working at the Williamstown Theater festival up in the Berkshires, one of these prestigious sort of summer theater festivals. And I was still a student at the time, and I'm not going to get into what happened there, but it was a very sort of, for me, again, I was sort of a default leftist in a way, and it was a very, for me, a very racially charged environment, and there was justification for it, for my concerns. But I just made the decision at that point to say that to myself, that I'm not going to let my race determine, or I'm not going to use my race as a crutch or an excuse for the things that happen in my life. And if other people can't see me as a human being before they see me as a black man, be it some right wing Nazi or a far left progressive, if they can only see my skin color, my demographic, then that's their problem. It has nothing to do with me and my worth as a human being.

Then a couple of years after that, I went through this really terrible breakup, and just out of grad school and in New York City, no money, the recession was there. I couldn't buy a job, so I was working as a snack vendor at these Broadway shows. And on my break between shows, I would go to this borders bookstore, if people still remember what that is, near Madison Square Garden, which isn't there anymore, of course. And I found this book called no more Mr. Nice Guy. And it was the first unabashedly pro male book that I'd read. I'd internalized these ideas, as many, unfortunately many men do, that men are toxic, men are bad, women are superior, all these other things. And long story short, that book helped me stop apologizing for being a man. So if we're keeping track at this point, my racial politics, even though they weren't politics to me at the time, but my attitudes toward race and my attitudes towards sex and gender had shifted. And that was sort of the course. There's that classic analogy of if you're on a ship and you just go one degree off in another direction, you end up in a completely different, completely different place over time.

And so those two shifts were as far as race and sex were, or maybe masculinity is a more accurate term. Those were major shifts for me, and I began to feel like an outlier in the entertainment industry at that point, even then, although I will say that all the, we call it wokeness now, but that stuff was nowhere near as bad, even just ten years ago. So I made those shifts internally. And then around 2014, there was this weird kerfuffle online known as Gamergate, which no one really understands, and it's way too complicated to kind of summarize, but I learned from that, basically, I saw how this online controversy was being reported on versus what was actually happening, and I said, oh, my goodness, these people in the press, they're either willfully ignorant or they're lying. I saw how these journalists, these video game journalists, because that was what it was about, video games. And it's so bizarre, it's worthy of another podcast. But these journalists were gatekeeping. What stories were told and what weren't, they were controlling narratives. If you tried to ask any questions about what was going on, no matter how polite, no matter how courteous you were, no matter how logical, no matter how reasoned, they would shut you down.

They would smear you and try to destroy your character. If you happen to be a racial or a sexual minority or a woman who didn't go along with the, I guess, progressive narrative on this particular issue, they either ignored you or they just defamed you completely. So I saw all these things and I said, it just made me open my eyes. Wow. I mean, I already had a healthy distrust of the press and the media, but that event really, for me, was a catalyst for maybe an accelerant, so to speak, for my awakening. And at the same time, all of the Michael Brown stuff in Ferguson, Missouri was happening. And all the. Hands up, don't shoot. Hands up, don't shoot. And the Washington Post, of all outlets, did really great reporting. Just going over the physical evidence, forensic evidence. They had diagrams from the autopsy, from the medical examiner hired by the Brown family. There was no way that the hands up, don't shoot version of events was true. It just wasn't. And yet I kept seeing all these celebrities, all these politicians, all these journalists. Keep going. Hands up, don't shoot. And so that was a huge moment, I think, when the scales dropped from my eyes and, wow.

You know, we live in a world of. So in the ensuing know, I'd listened, know, I discovered online people like Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson and others. And I think just one night I stumbled onto this clip. I saw this thumbnail with this guy, this black guy with these big glasses and the most perfectly coffed afro I've ever seen. And I was like, who is this dude? And it was on the Bill Buckley show. And he's just completely destroying. I marveled at how this man, who I'd never heard of before, was so clinical and so clear in his dismantling of these typical left wing arguments that I've heard all my life. And what was even more striking was that he was making these arguments back in the immediately I was like, I need to know more about who this guy is because he's phenomenal. So that's how I discovered him just trolling around on YouTube, and he popped up in my feed.

So further down that rabbit hole. And I love to talk to someone old enough to remember bookstores, because perhaps we need to explain what that is to the younger generation. But which books did you devour either from Thomas Soul or other people in that sort of same stream?

The first soul book that I bought was black rednecks and white liberals. The title alone, I was like, that's interesting.

That's provocative, right?

Just a bit. Just a bit. And it completely changed how I see race and society and culture and it really opened my eyes to the idea that, I mean, it was just funny to read the sort of criticisms that I and many people have of, say, ghetto culture, black ghetto culture in America are the same kinds of things that these white northerners and Europeans were saying about these rednecks down south. And I said, wow, it's so fascinating how cultures can shift and change and affect each other. And you think about the great migration north in the early 20th century and this wave of migration of blacks who had been steeped in this sort of redneck culture. So it just really opened my eyes to a lot of things. And there was basic economics, which I'm only halfway through. I still got to get through it. But the first chapter, one or two chapters in that book just completely put me off of ever voting for any socialist or centrally planned. It made me so hyper aware of just the ridiculousness of the idea that there could be a centrally planned economy. And I think that book should be required reading for all high school students.

I said, if a dumb actor like me can understand this, and of course, Seoul wrote the book in order to be accessible to people. I said, if I can understand this, then everyone should be able to understand this. And so I think those were the two books for me that really set me off on this journey as far as how I view race and culture, how I view the economy. But then probably the most extraordinary book of his that I've read, and he himself says it's one of his most important books, is a conflict of visions. And that to me, is just a wonderful, wonderful elucidation of the ideological conflicts and political conflicts of our time. He does such a wonderful job, I think, defining these two sort of divergent social visions that he calls the restrained and unconstrained visions. And it just really illuminated for me, like, okay, this is why things are the way they are. It really made clear why the pandemic years worked out the way that they did. I mean, that book is like almost a manual, but just the way that he lays out all these different strata of society and how these ideas and the ideologies conflict with one another.

I don't know what it is about these kinds of pursuits or just these kinds of ideas, but that turns me on so much. But I just said, wow, this is so fascinating and so interesting. I've never seen things in this way before, and it's just so illuminating and very exciting. So that was sort of a long winded answer to your question. But, yeah, so black rednecks, white liberals, basic economics, conflict divisions at Kibion Liberty.

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Yeah, so you just said something that should have been obvious to me, but I never thought about it before because I'm working on a project looking at serious intellectuals, particularly in the austrian way of thinking about economics, that were not just intellectuals but popularizers, people that could translate complex ideas into common sense. And I need to add Thomas Sol to that list because he's a serious intellectual that deserves but will probably never be nominated for the Nobel Prize. But his particular skill is taking that substance and translating it into something that seems obvious to non economists. Like most people just don't process information the way that economists do. We're weirdos. We don't think about things in a normal way. And what's funny about that is we always quote Frederick Hayek on my show because I'm obsessed with his way of thinking about things. But when people will text me or message me on X and say, where do I start with Hayek? I always say, read Thomas Soul's book, Knowledge and Decisions, because Hayek is a famously dense author and English is not his first language. His insights are ultimately quite simple and profound. But it was Thomas Soul that, I think, translated that in a very consumable way.

I mean, it's still a very substantial book, but I always recommend knowledge and decisions. I think that book was introduced to me by one of my graduate school professors, Walter Williams, another rock star who was breaking boundaries. But I'm struck by the story of Thomas Soul is perhaps a metaphor for your own story. Growing up as some kind of a lefty, like Thomas Soul was a and I don't know if you've gotten a chance yet to read Brian Riley's book about Thomas Soul, but I recommend it because he'll give you some of the discovery process that Thomas Soul went through as a young man growing up in Jim Crow America, thinking he was a Marxist, finding marxist ideas persuasive. And somewhere along the way, he ended up at the University of Chicago, hearing from George Stigler and Milton Friedman in particular. But also, Frederick Hayek is going to the University of Chicago at the time, another guy named Gary Becker, another Nobel laureate. So he's steeped in these ideas and the one thing he has said in his mind is that he's going to let evidence and facts and logic dictate who he is. And eventually he went through this process of being a devout lefty to being something fundamentally different.

The story is not unlike yours.

Well, it's interesting. And again, that was one of the things that compelled me to him, especially at the time when I discovered him, because I was still in the throes of my own intellectual transformation and at the beginning of my own intellectual journey. But I love that. And I'm still researching his life. I have his memoirs and his letters as well. And I look forward to diving into those to kind of, kind of get an internal view of what he was experiencing during those times. But particularly for black Americans, there is a lot of social pressure within our, within our communities and within our neighborhoods to view things a certain way. And especially if you are, let me backtrack. It takes a lot of courage, a lot of stubbornness to push back on these ideas that have been sort of put into you from birth about racism and about society and know haves versus the have nots. And so just the idea that someone as smart as soul could study with someone like Milton Friedman and still come out of that a Marxist is really interesting to me. But it's endearing, because when he talks about in his interviews, he's like, Marxism.

And that whole sort of worldview really made the world make sense at that time in my life. And it really humanizes us or humanizes soul in a way, because he's looking around and seeing, why are some people living fabulously wealthy lives? And why are these other people just so, just completely poor? And so I just love the idea that he went through with this mindset all throughout his youth and then working for the government was when he was like, well, wait a minute. Something else has to go on here. But when I saw that journey of a shifting mindset, I said, that resonates with me so deeply, as you said, and just thinking forward to the play or what it might be, that in and of itself is a fascinating narrative journey. And as I was referencing just before, especially as a black man in this country, and I'm sure you see this, the same kind of thing, any sort of black person who diverges at all deviates at all from this. I'll call it a far left sort of vision of the world, as Seoul would say. They're just ridiculed. Just the other day, I don't know if you saw the tweet by what the guy's named Harry Sisson, this sort of paid Democrat operative, I suppose.

And there was that 90 Supreme Court decision to keep Trump on the ballot in Colorado. And he singled out Clarence Thomas and to insult him. And I said, dude, this is how you know. And I consider myself pretty liberal in a lot of ways still, but I can look at someone like Clarence Thomas and his life and what he's been through and recognize this is someone of a staggering intellect and toughness and smarts and knowledge. And I'm like, you know how effective he is because they've been trying to destroy him for three know. But it's guys like that or a Herman Kane or a mean, you see what happens, or Candace Owens. And it's not as though I share their politics, but it's just, it's, it's an example of the immense, immense social and societal pressure that is faced by anyone who decides to, by any black person, which I think is kind of insidious, that decides to push back against what they're told about how they should feel about white people or history and society. And so it's not just the economics or the sociopolitical pushback with Seoul. It's just the fact that he had the.

I don't know if I wanted to say just the courage, maybe the sense and the stubbornness to just say no. As you said, I'm going to follow the evidence and the facts and the data, and I'll form my conclusions and share them in that way, regardless of whatever happens. That story of personal transformation is great, but also the transformation in the midst of a torrent of resistance is even more remarkable.

I wonder, I don't know this, and maybe you have, maybe you've gotten deep enough in your research, but yeah, that you have to imagine that the stubbornness of being a black economist that was expected to embrace the status quo ideology, the status quo of not so much Marxism, but just any sort of patronizing authoritarianism, whatever the flavor might be, that was the dominant ideology today. And you wonder if it was harder then as kind of the first guy to go or fast forward today, where sort of woke ideology in my mind is like so profoundly racist because all it does is look at skin color or sexual identity or whatever those intersectional categories are. I don't know if it's harder today. It seems like it would have been harder then in a closed system where there wouldn't have been anyone to sort of know quietly or publicly. I got your back. I'm with you. Keep going. And at least today there's pushback. Harry Sisson got so much blowback for singling out the black guy that it was sort of glorious in its thing. And I don't imagine that Thomas soul ever got that encouragement. But maybe he didn't need it like that.

Stubbornness, maybe, is what protected.

You know, it's interesting, I opened his memoir, a personal Odyssey, just to a random page in the book. And there's this small anecdote where he talks about. He had a sociology professor who came into the class beaming about the passage of. Not passage, but the ScOtUs decision about Brown v. Board of Education. And his sociology professor was like, yes, this is great, yada, yada, yada. And I'm going to butcher the story horribly. But Sol, his response was like, well, this other court case passed like 50 years ago. Do we really think this is going to benefit us in the short term anytime soon? So I think in a way, he was kind of built different from the start. On top of speaking of wokeness, I call it white supremacy because a central tenet of the ideology, you know, is predicated on this idea that if you're a black person, just by, just by the circumstance of you being black, you are automatically oppressed and inferior to these white people who are so powerful and so omnipotent that they control your entire life. And even the people who aren't alive anymore still dictate your life. So it's a life where you're supposed to live your life being very angry at or afraid of white people.

I said, I'm not going to give anybody else that much power over me. I just can't do that. And yet this is what you want me to do. And yet you're calling. But you call me an Uncle Tom or whatever because I refuse to allow the opinions of white people to dictate what I do. It's so bizarre to me. But shoot, I went off on that rant, a tangent, but I don't know if someone like a soul, and I'll read more about this soon, but I don't know if he would have been as much of an outlier or if he would have needed that much of a network, because I think what's different about today, and yes, it's true that there is definitely a wider network and there's people who can put their ideas out there, we can connect with each other, people who are sort of, I guess, dissidents in that sense. But there's also been decades now, generations of this sort of left wing indoctrination and brainwashing in our public schools, through our media now through various algorithmic whatevers and avenues of this one idea that there is this one way to see the world, there is this one way to view things.

And I think it's done so much extraordinary damage to black America to ingest these, internalize these ideas about themselves and about their history. And I think it's interesting now, because Seoul is enjoying this sort of renaissance. I think there's these great channels that you can find on YouTube, these great videos of young black Americans who are watching and reacting to his lectures or his interviews. And they'll pause and they'll be like, wait a minute. He was asked that question about, I think it was Peter Robinson interviewing him. And he was like, what advice would you give to young black people today? In his typical economical sharpness, just said, get skills people will pay for. And these people just these young black folks just like, man. Facts. That makes sense. How come I never heard of this guy before? And these videos have, like, hundreds of thousands, even millions of views. And so it is interesting to see how towards, in the latter part of his life, Soul who's been fighting for decades and trying to get these ideas out there, it seems like he's having an impact. And I, and I think part of, I wonder if that's part of why you're seeing this split.

I don't know if you saw this report in the Financial Times a couple of weeks ago about the gender divide as far as politics, where men are either here, Canada, South Korea, London, they're either staying center politically or moving to the right while women are going just left, left. Of course, I'm pointing in the opposite directions, but in black America, the same thing is happening where black men are going more and more away from. I won't say that they're screaming towards the GOP, but they're definitely looking at Democrats like this, ain't it, bro? And I wonder if Soul is a part of that awakening.

Thank you for joining me today on.

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Yeah. His presence on TV, and again, this is unusual for an economist, someone that can explain simply profoundly complex ideas that should be simple economics should be about storytelling. But most economists sort of get bogged down in high theory trying to convince you that they're smarter than they are. So let's pivot to the creative process. Like, this is not an insubstantial challenge to take on, to represent Thomas Soul on the stage to the extent, as you can tell me what you think this looks like.

Well, it's difficult right now at the beginning. It's weird, because I'm very like the great producer Rick Rubin talks about how even though with all of his accomplishments and all of his obvious genius and brilliance, at the start of any creative process, you just don't know what the damn thing is going to be. And so there's a sense of anxiety and a sense of terror, almost like, how on earth? What is this? And so for me right now, the process is about I go back into my training as an actor, where I have to take almost a more detached look at Soul and just investigate his life. Like I would research any role. You ask yourself, who is this person? The fundamental questions, who is this person? What did they want? Or what do they want in their life? Aka, what's their objective or their motivation? As they used to say, why do they want it? What do they stand to lose if they don't get it? What's in their way? What's their background like? What was their education like, their family life like, what's their socioeconomic status? Where did they grow up? I had a teacher who once said that information is inspiration.

And so what you do is as an actor, you fill yourself up with whatever you're studying. So if you know Hamlet, and I'm going to read all around the role, I'm going to read what he says about himself. I'm going to read about what other people say about him. I'm going to say what the author says about him. And it's a detective process of finding clues. And I want to find a strong. Because it's not just about sharing his ideas or his story, because if it were just about, let's share his story, you could buy his biography or his memoirs, or you could go watch a documentary about it, or you can go to Wikipedia if you want to. So the real challenge is to create a piece of dynamic, compelling, exciting theater. That's the main purpose, the main goal, and it's about this central figure who is fascinating. And the challenge also becomes, which areas of his life do you want to focus on? But for me, I'm really interested in who is the man underneath the legend. We love his ideas and we love the impact that he's having. But what is it that drives this person?

And that's what you always ask yourself as an actor. You're always searching for. What is that thing that makes this person tick? What are their flaws? What are the things that make them angry? What are the things that make them sad? What are the things that they're afraid of? What are the sort of aspects of their lives that they might want to keep hidden? Because these are the things that really draw us into people. The vulnerabilities are what draw us into people and into characters. So it's a process of trying to figure out a investigate and explore for myself my interpretation of who Thomas Soul is. There's this concept of losing yourself in a role. Some would say you're finding yourself in the role. So it's a matter of finding what it is that I have in common with soul that I can personalize and bring to life in the way that only I can, while still embodying his essence and bringing that to the stage. How he speaks, his cadence, how he carries himself, these kinds of things. There's also the possibility. Know, I mentioned the Louis Armstrong show before. My particular skill set as an actor.

I call myself a character actor in a leading man's shell, which basically means that I'm very good at transforming into different. So, you know, maybe Friedrich Hayek might make an appearance in the show, maybe Milton Friedman might make an appearance in the show. Maybe Walter Williams might make an appearance in the also, you know, contrasting souls opinions and views with other black prominent voices from Malcolm X and MLK to Barack Obama. And they might appear in the show. And again, thinking about it from an audience perspective, and this kind of goes back into me as an artist entrepreneur. What would be fun for the audience, aka the consumers, to see? What would be exciting for them to watch and fun for them to watch. One of the amazing things about the Louis Armstrong show, this wonderful actor named John Douglas Thompson, he transformed not only know not just Louis Armstrong, but also Miles Davis. It was so cool. But also Armstrong's white manager. And of course, you can't just transform your race on stage, but it's the act of craft and imagination and technique, and the audience can suspend their disbelief and say, okay, I see what he's doing.

I know that it's not real, but it's so absorbing that I'm going to go along with it and it's going to be a part of the ride and journey of the show. So I don't know what it looks like, but there's a lot of possibilities to be had, and there's also the aspect of, do you want to put it to one act or two acts? What kind of magic can I create on stage? The progression of his life from him as a young man to him as an older man? In some of his more recent interviews I've listened to, I get a sense of anger from him, which I hadn't really a color that I didn't know that I would see at someone of his age. And it's interesting. So, I mean, just from a pure characterization standpoint, you see someone who, when he was younger, was very sharp. But now, even though he's still sharp, he's not quite as sharp. You know what I mean? There's these little kind of things you can kind of glom onto to help communicate the story to the audience of advanced age and where he is in his life.

So it's going to be a lot of work, a lot of detail work. But what I really am excited about is finding what is the archetype of this person. How can I tap into what Jung calls the collective unconscious with this particular piece? So it's really about not just the x axis of this happened, and this happened, then this happened and this happened. It's really about getting into the Y and the Z, the dimension of who this person is. And that, I think, is going to be the great journey and the great fun for the audience. But, yeah, it's going to be a hell of a lot of work, but it's going to be fun.

I mean, I suppose production in some sense, depends on your success in financing and raising capital. But I'm thinking, and this is not an apt comparison, but when I first saw your Indiegogo pitch, I was thinking of a play that I was obsessed with when I first saw it, all the way starring Brian Cranston. I don't know if you ever saw it.

The LBJ play?

Yeah, the LBJ play. And it's very different because it's not a one man play, although it centers around Cranston's portrayal of the very cynical, perhaps not very good guy LBJ. But let's talk about distribution, because this, as you say, is not necessarily something that would be done by the Broadway establishment.

How do you get to, you know.

I got a great line producer named Craig that we're trying to figure this stuff out. I mean, first we have to write the damn thing, so we don't want to put the card before the horse. But what I want to do, what I'm really looking forward to, is just touring the show around the country, because what you do, sort of like a stand up comedian, the audience is like the final character. They teach you how to do the show. And it's not until you get in front of audiences, live audiences, that you learn, where is the show sagging? Where is it funny? Where is it slow? Where is it boring? Could we cut this? Could we rearrange these scenes around for greater know? So the first leg, I guess, would be touring it and meeting America and presenting this play. And then what I want to do after that is to upload the piece online. Once it's been honed to, I won't say perfection, but as close as we can get, because you never get to perfection and artistic pursuit. But I want to upload it online. And, I mean, I've already had a few people reach out about distribution and filming and these kinds of things.

I don't know what the venue is going to be, but that is the major challenge is how do you get this out to people? And for me, right now, what that looks like is doing it for people around the country. And it's been so wonderful. The outpouring of excitement and support for people who've, you know, come out to my theater, know, come out to Michigan and come out to do it here, know, I don't know, Wyoming or, and so people want to see it, but then it's just a matter of do I upload it to my own x account? Do I put it on YouTube? Do I have a separate site for that because I want people to tune into it, or will I just have to build something new? I mean, there are theatrical streaming outlets, but for reasons that may be obvious to those who've been listening, I really don't want to associate with those in the mainstream sort of industry right now. But, yeah, it's a great question of how do you, and it's a learning process for me because as an artist, I think a lot of artists do this as well.

They really compartmentalize themselves and they just say, especially actors. I mean, actors are just dumb. I mean, there's no excuse for it, to be honest with you, but that's a whole other discussion and rant. But I have to learn about business, learn about marketing, learn about distribution, learn about sales, all these other things. And it's daunting and overwhelming. But at the end of the day, if I'm producing a show, it's these things that I have to know about. And it's great to have help, but I want to just focus on creating, but I don't know if I'll be able to just be able just to wear the hats of writer and actor. I got to do the producing aspect as well, and distribution as a part of that. So we don't know yet. But I'm confident that a really good answer will pop up in its place somehow, some way.

It's a very exciting, creative process. And I love the fact that you say I don't know because this is something that's never been done before, and you're doing it in a way that is quite new. And the cool thing about this is that we live for all of the top down authoritarians that want to tell us how to live our lives. We're living in a far more decentralized, democratized world. And everybody watching this and everybody that is passionate about the idea that we can change the culture upstream of politics, they can invest. And where do they invest, Duncan?

So you can go to www.soulplay.com. That's Sowell play you take you right to the website. Thank you very much to Tom woods for setting that up for me. He's been hugely instrumental in helping me get this off the ground. So, yeah, go to ww dot soulplay.com and you can donate as the time of this recording. There's still a few days left in the campaign, although, as I understand it, because the campaign has been so successful, it's one of the top campaigns in my category on Indiegogo right now. And as I understand it, I'll be able to keep collecting donations after the deadline has passed. So whenever you see this, head over to soulplay.com and you can donate. And just to go back really quickly to this idea of, like, I don't know, when I was in New York recently, it was really fascinating again, and heartening and a bit terrifying. But I had a lot of people message me who are looking at the progress of the campaign and saying, I am so freaking excited for you because what you're doing, Clifton, is you are forging a new path for us, and us being people who don't want to move in lockstep with the sort of zeitgeist right now, which you kind of have to be part of a cult in order if you want to have a viable career in the industry.

And so people are excited about what I'm doing in terms of forging a new path forward and perhaps creating a model for other independent artists to pursue to say, oh, wait a minute. I mean, musicians have been doing this for a long time anyway. I think outlets like Angel Studios are also showing the way as well that you mentioned before. It's difficult for theater performers. But I have ideas there as well because you got to be a part of the union. You got to kind of go along with whatever MSNBC says if you want to have a viable career. And I just think that's so stupid. I think it's so stupid that there's people who, they may not even be conservative or libertarian or whatever, but they just don't go along with, they might just not be Democrats, you know what I mean? But they feel like they can't say anything. These artists, highly accomplished, brilliant, wonderful people, hardworking, smart, who feel like they can't, you know what I mean? They can't express themselves freely. So there's a lot of excitement just about this idea. Know, Clifton, what you're doing is you are showing us a way forward.

And that is something that, again, I never asked for any of this. You know what I mean? I would have just been happy to do TV movies and Broadway Shakespeare musicals. I would have been fine. But like I said, I guess the universe had other plans for me and we'll see what the hell happens.

Okay. Clifton Duncan, thank you so much. And I look forward to talking to you once you get to the next step, whatever that is, and let us know if we can help.

Well, thanks, Matt. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

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