Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Maugh.

All right, here we are in over to him.

To make this a little brief, gotta get to last night.

I'm not kidding.

John, how do you think today's mainstream media would treat Abraham Lincoln if he was our current president?

Well, I mean, it's a great question. Look, his media hated him.

He was disrespected widely. I don't think he probably would have been elected right now.

He told a lot of jokes that were deeply inappropriate. People got pissed off at him.

But that was a tool, right? He's spoken parables. He's trying to reach people where they were.

Lincoln was a huge consumer of media. He was obsessed with newspapers, but he got a lot of grief.

And we forget that. You know, we forget how many people hated Lincoln at the time.

He did the difficult things, and we could still learn a hell of a lot of them.

How tall was he?

Six four.

In that year, that must have been almost like being a seven footer.

Yeah. Right?

And he wore a stoke pipe hat to highlight it, too. He hung a lantern on it.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, that probably would have gotten elected just that.

Yeah.

Don't they always go for the tall guy?

...