Given the news of the day, we reached out to Bill Gilbreth, the prominent attorney who served both as a prosecutor during the Watergate hearings, and as a defense attorney for several organized crime figures. Talk about "intersectionality." We also talk about sending federal Border Patrol troops into Portland and other cities, the showdown between protestors, mayors and President Trump.
Bill grew up in the Fresno area where he was an often-truant student who dropped out of high school to ride the rails and also attempted to join Castro's revolution in Cuba. When presented an opportunity to complete his education, he made the most of it, eventually graduating from Harvard Law School after a stint as a physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. He remembers most fondly his years working in the office of the 2nd District of New York federal court under the aegis of the legendary Bob Morgenthau. He also still maintains a close friendship with former fellow colleague, Lawrence Tribe, who still teaches at Harvard and who is among America's foremost public intellectuals.
We also talk about the lessons of the past, particularly the pivotal post-pandemic election of 1920, Abraham Lincoln's evolving attitudes toward slavery and equality, and whether Lincoln or FDR was our best president. Bill has also been studying the key astronomers in the Copernican Revolution such as Tycho Brahe and Galileo. Einstein comes up, as well, who was a poor student but used connections to get a job at the Swiss patent office, where he spent his off-time creating the field of physics as we know it today. In 1905, he published four papers that changed the world forever, including the general theory of relativity and photoelectric effects that won him the Nobel Prize.
That's not to mention many other jobs Bill Gilbreth has had, including being past president of the Rotary Club of Ojai. Bill is also such a dedicated yoga practitioner that he can go directly from a crow pose into a headstand.
We did not talk about the 3rd Punic War, the advent of 5G or the KKK.
