And I'm All right, a little bit of American history on the front end here. Some of you are going to know this like the back of your hand. Some of you from other parts of the world, I don't

expect you to know American history, and you know, so we'll fill in the gaps here a little bit.

Abraham Lincoln, he's a pretty famous one. If you ask someone who isn't an American to name an American president,

other than the recent ones, that's one of the ones along with Washington, they're probably

gonna know. Because he's the guy who presided over the American Civil War fought in the 1860s between if you

look at a map of the United States now what would basically be the northeast

quadrant of the country versus the southeast quadrant of the country.

In the end, the North won, and Lincoln was trying to figure out that,

all right, how do we put all of this country back together?

Civil Wars are real tough.

And he decides that it's not a time for fighting anymore, it's a time for healing.

He takes a very conciliatory tone, and he's initiating policies that are going to make it possible for the South to come back

with a degree of dignity and hopefully patch things up. But before he could implement all of that,

Lincoln got shot. He was watching a play called Our American

Cousins. The only reason I've ever even heard of that play, so I can't imagine it was

even a very good play. He was there at Ford's Theater and D.C. he got shot

by a guy named John Wilkes Booth who was a southern

sympathizer and Lincoln died shortly thereafter across the street where he was

receiving care. So now you got a chaos situation, you got a succession issue because, well, who's president now?

In our country, the vice president takes over.

But in our country, vice presidentialicks aren't really done with excellence in mind.

No president is thinking, oh man, I really would want this person to be president if I died.

...