Who was Jacob Bronowski? Tim The Lawyer talks to Armstrong & Getty

No soda? Yeah, I used to to. I used to, and time caught up with me. I'm off carbonated beverages. I'm a yeah, I been taking blue a gasket or something. Congratulations on the beard. End de soda. Before we get into the substance of our conversation with Tim about his fabulous new tome and other constitutional issues in America, do things number one, and I think this will be good

for you to hear. You know, those warnings like McDonald's pie, the hot apple pie that says content caution, content maybe hot, filing, maybe hot. And we've always asked, who are those four well, there for me for the second day in a row. I've gotten a brand new hot cup of coffee, gotten into a brief conversation with somebody, then swigged down an enormous mouthful and burnt my tongue in my mouth and and cried out in pain, fury, and humiliation. So those

warnings are for me. I sympathize man. I drew blood eating shrimp twice in a row a few weeks ago. It was how do you how do you manage to? I cut my hand with shrimp tails at two separate meals on two successive days, until there was blood running down my hand. How does somebody do that? I don't know, but I've never thought of prawns as a weapon. You're a lawyer. Why didn't just sue somebody? Second thing, do you agree with Jack and my interpretation of the Eighth Amendment.

It's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. If something is merely cruel or merely unusual, like being berated by clowns, that would be unusual. It's permitted under the Eighth Amnut. Okay, alright, so it's gonna be unusual, right, So listen, I have intentionally and it's taken some self control not looked up

the name Jacob Bronowski, Tim's latest book. And Tim is the author of a number of absolutely fabulous books about constitutional rights and property rights, and and fairly recently Frederick Douglass Self Made Man, which is just terrific about that great great American um. So when I saw your new book is the assent of Jacob Bronowski, I've never heard of this human in my life. I intentionally did not look it up. It sounds like a Coen Brothers character. Who who is this human? And why did you take

your valuable time to write a boy? I was looking for a subject that absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with law, And so I'm speaking today later today at noon, I'm speaking to the Federal Society about my new book and I the assignment is to find some way to relate it to law, which is going to be very challenging. But no, so you need to sub I you considered most as lack, but you decided that well, his name

is almost as exotic. Jacob Arknowski was a scientist and philosopher who lived from eight to nineteen seventy four, and those few people who remember him still today will remember him for his classic nineteen seventy three television miniseries The Ascent of Man, which aired on PBS. And it's this lavish thirteen hour documentary on the history of science. And I I watched it when I was in college, and

I got interested in in Bernofsky himself. And it turned out that he was a fascinating person who knew everybody or was involved with everything interesting that happened in the twentieth century. He was the head of the British mission sent to assess the effects of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was best friends with Leois Allard, who invented the atomic bomb, but also with Samuel Beckett, who was he The two of them wrote a book together.

He was friends with people like T. S. Eliott and Dylan Thomas. He co founded the sac Institute in Lahoya with Jonah sok. Held is a fascinating guy, he wrote. He wrote a radio play that it won the equivalent of an Emmy in nineteen fifty. He wrote an opera. He proved that Australia Epithecus afrikaanus is a human relative by using a sophisticated mathematical algorithm, because that was his that was his specialty. It was mathematics. And he revolutionized

the understanding of the eighteenth century poet William Blake. So he was one of these these Renaissance men who just was a fascinating figure. And I thought nobody's ever written a biography of him, so I should. Wow. It's interesting how some people want regularly when I'm reading history and I do it at all the time, he come across a story or a person and you think, how come I've never heard this? People? Some things just get lost

to history. Amazing people in amazing stories that just for whatever reason, don't make the The underdisgust and overdiscussed how much do we know about Marilyn Monroe his contemporary seriously compared compared to somebody Mickey Mantle for them, and Bernowski was a celebrity in his day. He was. He was a big enough name in Great Britain for twenty or thirty years that you know, taxi drivers would hail him

on the street. He's even mentioned in a Monty Python skit, The Exploding Penguin, when one character says to another, uh, you know, why is there a penguin on the Telly and the other says, who am I blood Dr Bloody

Brunowski because he was that well known. Wow, I was totally wasted on The problem was he died in August of seventy four, only months before his show aired in the United States, and so right when he was on the cusp of becoming a really famous figure in the United States, where he had lived for a decade, by that time, he was gone, and so he vanished from the scene, and everybody forgot about him. And I think

that's a real shame. So I thought, I decided. I decided to try and bring more interest to what he did and analyze his philosophical writing and his literary work and stuff. The problem was, he was involved in so many things and knew so many things that it took that it took a long time for me to learn enough about those things to be able to talk intelligently

about it. So I've been working on this book for twenty years since I was a senior in college, and it is finally done and finally published, and it's called The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski, and I hope you'll all buy. Speaking of getting published, was it difficult to go to somebody and say, I want to write about this person. They said, who can't you write about a founding father or something. Fortunately I found the publishers who who did remember who Bernofsky was and that that that worked out.

But yeah, there was some difficulty in that. Uh. A lot of the people that he knew are gone. Now. I did have the good fortune of interviewing some of them. M The coolest one was I got to have lunch with Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize in the nineteen fifties for discovering the structure of DNA, the only Nobel Prize wenter ever to buy me lunch, And that was that was by far the coolest part of the research. And did you find the old chap to be a

stimulating wonderfully? It was? This was this was while the O. J. Simpson trial was going on, and I asked him what he thought about people ignoring DNA evidence in trials. He said, he said, well, I guess you have to knew how the American legal system works. And he had so much scorn in his voice and he said the word legal. But I didn't mention that I was in law school at the time. Um, but he was. He was a wonderful,

wonderful gentleman. And he remember very distinctly on the way back from the restaurant him explaining to me the then newly discovered eyelis gene, which is the gene that if you knock it out, uh, the fruit fly or whatever will be born without eyes. And this is one of the oldest genes in the genome. It's called the hawks gene. It's been around since the dawn of evolutionary time. And it's the same gene that we have in our own bodies to control the development of eyes in the embryo.

So years later, I was reading a book about genetics and I ran across this, the discussion of the eilis gene. I thought, wait a minute, that Francis Crick himself explained that to me. That that's a really amazing experience in my life. But Crick and Bronowski were good friends. In fact, before his death, Krick was using the same office that Bernowski had used down at the Sauk Institute in San Diego.

This just flitted into my head. I'm like an eyed fruit fly in terms of our ability to pay attention. This just flitted into my head, what do you when you get up in the morning, what do you what do you check news wise, like for what's going on in the world, Like what's your first thing? Twitter? And then like, well, what how do you structure your feed? How many people do you follow? I followed quite a lot of people I don't remember, somewhere maybe a thousand

something like that. What tends to be at the top of the year? Listen they news publications or people? I yeah, people primarily in fact, just uh, just this morning, I was thinking of writing a tweet about what who I would recommend for the Nobel for the Pulitzer Prize if I were in charge of the of the Pulitzer Prize. And the three names are are John Ziegler Um, Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason, and Robbie Save at Recent The three of them are just are the real journalists that

are still working today. And of course Dan Walters. Since I'm in Sacramento, I need to mention the only remaining journalist in the state of California. Dan is legendary. He's amazing. He's one of the great clear eyed writers. I just wish, I just wish his articles would be three or four Times as long as they are. Did you read the transcript of what the editor there at the New York

Times said last week to his crowd. Yes, it's it's just incredible word that that might be the most important newspaper in the world, or at least formally was, and in the direction they're willing to go, it's it's troubling and expecting a newspaper that recently ran articles such as women in the Soviet Union had better sex under communism and the Soviet space program was better for women's equality.

Expecting a newspaper or even calling it a newspaper and when it runs articles like that, I think is excessive. I think The New York Times has clearly gone off the deep end into not just leftist partisanship, which you know is kind of expected in the media, but in the most extreme form of it. And the same is true of CNN. I mean, I love I love CNN, but it's like, day after day, it's just it's become partisan, uh enterprise. I can't stand of absurdity in my opinion.

I mean, it's just you can't even take it serious. And it's as bad for the left as it is for the right. Absolutely absolutely. Over time, of course it is going to be. And it's just it's it's surprising to me that people of that caliber. I assume you have to have, uh, you know, some pretty good credentials to end up being in the newsroom at the New York Times. I would hope, but I don't know. And and you're willing to abandon journalistic principles because you hate

Trump so much. It's so cheap and and and easy to do to make everything be about Donald Trump. I mean, I'm I'm everybody who follows me on Twitter knows my

views on the president. But the it's so easy to just make it a series of not even often not even accurate slams on the president, day after day after day, instead of the kind of sophisticated, in depth research and reporting that takes a lot of work and and is a is sometimes very frustrating when you're doing it, because you have to fact check everything twice in three times.

And when you see people who do it well, like the people I've mentioned Elizabeth Brown and Robbie Suave and John Ziegler, it's it's a testament to the continuing art form. There's no market for that eggs. Well, it does relate. It relates to Bronowski in the sense that I I think there's I think there are people out there who have a hunger for the kind of sophisticated, intelligent discussion.

It doesn't have to be eggheaded craziness, but but something that has some degree of smarts to it, is really good at not idiotic start. There is that too much to ask? Well, you believe in a self government? Do you think we've reached a point where we can't govern ourselves because there's not a hunger for people who take the time to figure out what's real, whether it fits with what you want it to be or not. Are

you talking about California or the nation? Okay, well, then you know, I don't think we've I don't think we've reached bottom there California. I don't know. I I honestly, I'm really impessimistic about the possibility of any kind of reform in California. I think California has gone so far in the direction of taking the easy, emotionalistic, sound good answer over hard realities and is so unwilling to face reality that I think it's going to be a long,

hard struggle before California is able to right itself. But you know, I'm a pessimistic person. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean you you you talked to Tom McClintock, and he'll always say, oh, California, there's no reason the world, the world, why California couldn't change tomorrow and become a you know, a livabole thriving economies. But I don't buy it. Why don't we? Why don't we? Talking about a couple of the big stories in the news today with Tim Sander

for Vice President for Litigation the Goldwater Institute. Is new book which sounds fascinating is The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski. More to come stay with us the Armstrong and Getty Show. You think we have something other than the law and owner family lawyers on we can do? Tim Sander first with us, Tim the Lawyer, Vice President for Litigation the Goldwater Institute. His new book is The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski somebody had had heard of but hadn't realized I'd

heard of because I was familiar with these sentiment. It sounds like absolutely a fascinating read about a fascinating guy. Um. But to talk about some of the things that are in the news right now again, though we are nationwide these days and happy to be Uh. Cal Unicornia continues to make news, including the idea of letting children vote, beginning with seventeen year olds. Now, I know my way around a sentence. I know some pretty words, but your

way better than me. What do you think of extending the vote to teenagers? Well, I a part of me says, let him, because the teenagers aren't gonna vote. I mean every year, it's the same thing. Every election is the same thing. It's rock the vote and get the get the young vote out, and they would go registered to vote and everything and and and especially the Democrats get very excited about all of this, and then then they don't show up to vote because they've got an other

things they're worried about. Um. But as you've said, and I think it's totally true, is that the effort to to round up people who are too young to know how the world works and get them to vote is very indicative of the worldview of those who are who

are behind that effort. It's precisely because leftist political philosophy is so emotionally appealing, but is in fact, Uh, both unworkable, and in the last analysis, immoral that the there's an effort to recruit people who have not had enough experience or education in the world to understand its shortcomings, because they'll inevitably vote for that, for that goal, that which makes them feel good. We got on the topic of being a pessimistic and I wonder how you're not pessimistic

with a lot of what's going on. But you said your your own book, uh touches on that. Yeah. Well. Ronofsky was living at a time during the rise of the hippie movement. He was very worried about the rise of the hippie movement because he thought it was a reactionary, anti technology, anti progress ideology that really threatened to undermine

the future of the West. Bernovski himself was actually a socialist, but he was one of those old fashioned, technologically technical, progressive kind of socialists, not not like a throwback anti technology type. And he was very worried about about this, and in fact he talked about it in in the last episode of The Ascent of Man. If you haven't seen this documentary, you really mut I think it's the best documentary everybody. It's It's available on DVD and you

can find yeah very much. So the costumes are litt funny because his envy three. But yeah, but absolutely And in the last episode, I mean almost the entire episode was filmed as a spontaneous one hour monologue by Bernofski because he was such a good speaker that he he could just talk to the camera and they would write down what he said. And that was the book version of the documentary because he was so interesting thing and he talks about this in the last episode and he says,

he says, I have it here. He says, I feel I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the West by a sense of a terrible loss of nerve and a retreat from knowledge into into what into zen Buddhism, into falsely profound questions about are we not just really animals at bottom, into extrasensory perception and mystery that do not lie along the line of what we are able to know if we devote ourselves to an

understanding of man. Roski is really worried about this, this backlash against science and reason that he saw beginning in the late sixties and that have taken over large parts of our society. Wow, that is that is great. So you can get a book version of the which is basically a transcript of the documentary. We want people to read your book. Yes, The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski available

where fine books are traded. Tim the Lawyer Tim Santavor, Vice President for Litigation the Goldwater Institute, a fan and co host favorite for many many moons, along with his delightful and brilliant bride. Good to talk to you, Tom, and I'll be talking about the book today in Sacramento, California. If you happen to be in town. Go to Tim the Lawyer dot com to find information about absolutely fantastic Big On Marshall's News Next, a couple of different polls

have come out today. We ought to take a look at, among other things, on The Armstrong and Getty Show.