When Associate Justice to the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas first encountered Thomas Sowell’s work as a young law student, he rejected it.

Years later, at a pivotal moment in his life, he picked up Race and Economics. This time, the argument inside it quietly rearranges everything he thought he knew. Justice Thomas describes it as finding “water in the desert.”

That discovery would change the course of his thinking and begin a friendship with Sowell that lasted more than four-decades.

In the latest conversation from the Hoover Institution’s Thomas Sowell Legacy series, senior fellow Peter Robinson sits down with Justice Thomas for a deeply personal reflection on Sowell as a thinker, mentor, and friend, and the profound impact Sowell’s ideas had on his own life.

Thomas Sowell’s influence extends far beyond economics. His commitment to evidence, intellectual honesty, and independent thought has shaped generations of readers and thinkers.

Justice Thomas describes Sowell as a mentor and a model of intellectual courage: someone who would say exactly what he thought but never tell Thomas what he should think. Sowell instead challenged him to question assumptions, confront the evidence, and arrive at his own conclusions.

And that influence continues with a new generation.

As Justice Thomas observes, young people are discovering Sowell’s work for themselves and encountering ideas that make them stop, reconsider, and think more deeply.

For Thomas, that is the victory. Because Sowell’s legacy is not simply what he thought. It is the generations of thinkers he continues to challenge, inspire, and teach to think for themselves.