Welcome to a Thanksgiving special episode of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast, episode

that has absolutely nothing to do with Thanksgiving, at least not directly. I suppose by the

end of it, we may all be wildly thankful that we were born in the last 100 years rather than before

that. But instead of talking about Thanksgiving, or even what we are grateful for,

I wanted to talk today about time travel. So I have with me, Dan McLaughlin, Luther Abel,

and Mark Wright, all of National Review, and in the same spirit as we interrogated what would happen if one were the last

man on earth, we're going to think about what would happen if you went back in time. And the first

question that I want to pose, and I will start here with Dan, is how far back in time do you think you would have to

go back before your knowledge, your modern knowledge, knowledge that you have accrued since

your own birth and your own time would become useless, and you would essentially be no better

advantaged than anyone else around you.

I mean, the knowledge I have today is barely useful as it is.

You know, I mean, my technical knowledge is extremely limited.

So what I know today is law, politics, and history. I mean, I would give you my

actual, professionally as a lawyer, I think I would be largely completely useless if you put me

back before about the 1930s when there's a dramatic overhaul in federal and state civil procedure and federal state relations in the law

and a whole lot of other things that would make it difficult even to practice law in a...

No, but it would still be useful, right? I mean, if you were parachuted into, say, 17th century England,

obviously there would be facts that you didn't know, but that legal training would still be useful as a framework. The skills you've developed would still be useful.

I think the methods of thinking would be useful. That's going to be useful in any period of time,

except for the fact that, you know, the odds are if you parachuted me into 17th century England, I'd probably just be farming dirt and not making much use of being trained as a lawyer.

But in all seriousness, I mean, you know, the law is pretty specialized.

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