A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

- Trump ranked as worst president https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/20/presidents-ranking-trump-biden-list?

- George W Bush the worst president ever https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/george-w-bush-the-worst-president-in-history-192899/

- The Secretary Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive

Engineering Podcast, brought to you by Aleph Insights and

produced by me, Fraser McGruer. On this podcast, we take a look

at a wide range of topics, and today, we'll be asking the

question, Is Donald Trump the worst president ever?

It's been a while since I've seen you. It's very nice to see

you again. Here we go, right? Nick, Donald Trump, worst

president ever, yeah.

Well, as you know, we don't, we're not a political

podcast. We don't have an opinion about whether Donald

Trump is any good. But according to the famously unbiased source,

the guardian in 2024 mind you. So discussing his first term,

Donald Trump finished 45th and bottom of a list ranking US

presidents by greatness. And I think his list was compiled by a

bunch of, again, famously unbiased academics and people

like that. Yeah, probably from Harvard, yeah, that kind of

thing. So according to them, here's but let me tell you what

the Rolling Stone magazine said in 2006 George W Bush, the worst

president in history. Many historians are now wondering

whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst

president in all of American history. So, and I recall, I

still remember the 80s, when I recall my parents and their

right on friends talking about Ronald Reagan and how utterly

dreadful he was compared to the great presidents of the past and

so well, the question is, how do we make sure we're not just sort

of being biassed by recent events. And, you know, how can

we tell if, if our judgement that something it seems uniquely

bad, is actually correct, but, but just before we tackle that

sort of general question, just looking at presidential ratings,

which actually is something relatively objective, in the

sense that they're just measures of you know what is? What's the

average approval rating of every president during the course of

their term? Donald Trump is, in fact, lowest, well, at least of

all presidents since the 1950s and Kate, would you like to

guess who's top? It's quite an easy one. I think Obama. No no,

it's going to be Obama's mid, mid range, Roosevelt, Abraham

Lincoln, no, is since the fifth, oh, sorry, since the 50s. Oh,

Abraham Lincoln, then not those 50s. Since the 50s. I think this

is quite easy, if you think about probably it's somewhere

never got a chance, really. Yeah, Kennedy's at the top by a

long, long shout, and then it's Dwight Eisenhower, remarkably,

George H W Bush, I suspect, yeah, and so, but so according

to that right, according just looking at the ratings, average

ratings for their term, and sorry, was that Trump did come

lower. Sorry, did you say that's average approval ratings during

Yeah, so in other words, you said, average out their approval

throughout their term, and and just looking at that number,

Trump's at the bottom, and Kennedy is very much at the top,

bit of an outliner outlier. So, so there we are. So it is. Can

we therefore conclude that Donald Trump is indeed going to

go down in history as the worst president ever.

Okay, so I mean, one of the things I think of,

first of all, is how useful are ratings in terms of an actual

judgement, because opinions change about people over time.

That's the first sort of thing that I think of. But anyway,

it's not me answering this, it's you guys. So where do we start

with this? Chris, what are your thoughts? What have

you got on this? Well, I think there's a specific

issue with with Donald Trump, and the perception of Donald

Trump, which is one of the reasons why Donald Trump is

viewed as a bad president. And that's really like if you look

at his phraseology, it's kind of at the level of a a playground

child. His eloquence is very low, and I think that's what a

lot of people would say they talk about the weave, and is

really him being pretty inarticulate and and not trying

to hide that fact. And I think so for a lot of people, I think

there's this sort of connection, maybe a dubious connection,

between eloquence and intelligence and ability to

lead, and I think Donald Trump is uniquely bad at that,

whereas, if you look at his antithesis, somebody like Obama,

exactly, Obama was highly eloquent and viewed by lots of

the intelligentsia as Being an excellent president. So I think

this, there's this conflation going on between ability to

articulate oneself and ability to preside.

Yeah, I think there's an interesting thing

there about, you know, can intelligent, clever people be

wrong? Unthinkable.

Yeah. And well, and also it does. How much does that

actually matter when you're being a president? Because the

thing is, I think what people miss, well, particularly kind

of, you know, anti, anti Trump, people miss, is that, yeah, he

isn't very eloquent, but he's very good at kind of reading the

room. I mean, there's something quite impressive about him, and

the way that he, he kind of manages a crowd. And, you know,

I'm not saying any of that is conscious. I mean, I suspect

it's just a sort of accident or something that he has learned to

do, but he's good at something when it comes to well, and if

you look at his what it isn't is, is spinning an excellent off

the cuff phrase. I mean, you can't really imagine him

delivering a speech

and about his sort of his debate performance in the

original set of primaries and then against Hillary Clinton,

when he was, you know, elected for his first term. There, there

are some very sort of famous asides that he, that he makes,

that are considered to be kind of quick, quick with but they

are. They are not. They're not high Brower sides, you know,

they're,

they're and, I mean, that's all of a piece with him,

and his appeal in general, yeah, is what you'd expect. Yeah,

yeah. And I think, you know, there's something Republican

presidents are supposed to be hokey, you know, they're

supposed to be kind of common, the common man, I know, yeah,

that's sort of so you get your you know, Bush was the same,

Reagan was the same. You know, they're not meant to come out

with intellectual things that sound like you're a history

professor from Harvard. That's the job of Democrat presidents,

isn't it? So that's right, but, but anyway, I mean, look, I

think, I think the problem we really want to talk about is,

how do we know how much of that is our immediate investment in

the kind of low recent local political situation? So how much

of the reaction that people have to Trump and their judgement

that he's the worst president ever, how much of that is is

based on some on a kind of objective judgement of the kind

that you might be able to have about a 19th century president,

and how much of it is merely recency, you know, that's,

that's, that's really the question I think we want to look

at because, you know, this is, this crops up all the time,

right? You this common pattern of, I come along and say that

here is something that's kind of uniquely bad and terrible and

needs to be dealt with. And then, you know, the flip side of

that argument is, well, people have said that in the past. It's

what they said about George W Bush, what they said about

Reagan, you know, or I come along and say, Look, you know,

global warming is going to destroy the world. And you go,

Well, that's what they said about acid rain and global

cooling and the population. Why should we listen Yeah, why

should we listen to you? And so we have this, this common

pattern that you get of this is uniquely bad and terrible, and

we've got to do something about it versus but uniquely bad and

terrible things, according to people like you, happen all the

time. So one side is saying, you know, you're being alarmist, and

the other side is saying you're being complacent. And how do we

make sure? Because you know people are wrong. Intelligent

people are wrong. You know, you think of like the Yeah, Paul

Ehrlich's Population Bomb, 1968 well now you know. And now, of

course, everyone's being alarmist about population

collapse. So how do we, how do we know whether we should be

scared of something, or whether we should say, Yes, this is

actually uniquely terrible, versus how much are we going to

go, Well, you know what? In the morning, it'll look different.

So let's say that we, that a lot of people in the US think that

Donald Trump is this kind of, you know, once in a lifetime,

threat to democracy, to democratic institutions, and you

know, he's going to impose martial law on the US. He's

going to try and run for a third term. It's going to become his

personal dictatorship. It does seem to be trying. So that's

what a lot of people perceive, you know, and well, but

obviously, you know. And so the question is, Well, should we do

something about that? How much should should we believe that

that's true? And therefore, how much should we, you know,

resist? How much effort should we put into resisting that which

is not dissimilar from, you know, this question of, well,

what do we how much effort should we put into preventing

climate change, because, you know, yeah, well, this is all

doom and gloom, but at the same time, that's what they said

about, you know, the ozone layer, and that seems to have

fixed itself, admittedly, thanks to human intervention. But, you

know, you get the idea it's like, okay, well, how do I know

how alarmed to be when it's of kind of battle between the

alarmists and the complacentists in general. Is there a general

pattern of better thought that we should use to try and solve

that problem?

Yeah, and I think there's a, I think there's a

second sort of factor about judgement to do with judging

things in your own time, and that. It's not only that you you

get these, these emotional you know, when you're judging things

in your own time, you are affected by them, and so you

have an emotional response to them. So it's easier to be

objective about something that's 100 years ago than it is

something today, right? But I think also that the second

factor that means time is a factor when, when, sort of

considering whether something's good or bad, is that, over the

course of that time, what is good or bad changes according

to, you know, cultural standards. So, you know, you

take somebody like Washington, who you know, is still perceived

to be a great president, obviously, but you bring in

factors like slave ownership, or, you know, other sort of

positions that he took that are now totally unpalatable because

of the shift of what is considered to be, you know,

okay, by today's standards, what's what's good by today's

standards as a president, is partially subjective. There are

certain things where you can say, yes, okay,

I feel like not owning slaves is probably a

right, probably something that some of the voters are going to

look for. Yeah, right, exactly,

which also beggars the question how the

Confederacy won the war right? The end of civil war, let's say

yeah. And let's say there were, had they won? Yeah, right. Let's

say that. So you ended up with two Americas. Let's say in the

South. I'm guessing that Abraham Lincoln would probably be

thought of being a bad president, probably. I think he

is, in some ways, some but that's what ties into this

thing. I'm sort of labouring the point there, really. But you

know, the context changes.

Yeah, yeah. So, so I guess what I'm saying is, not,

not only do we have to aim off for the emotional aspect of the

near term versus the longer term in the past, there's also a

change in values that occurs, which then, you know, you assess

things differently.

So that's helps us with this sort of ratings,

real time ratings, as it were, that sort of helps answer that

sort

of question. But it also, I mean, it suggests that

it's not dissimilar to that question of like, would you, you

know, would you take a pill that changed your your preferences

and made you, you know, want to desert your family, and you run

off with a supermodel and you know. And then you actually, you

might just, you know, you might enjoy that if you took that

pill, you wouldn't, then care that you've done that, but you

now do care about that. And so like, let's say someone observes

that. Well, if we, if we leave Trump running, and he runs for

another two terms, you know, we will all start to accept that

America looks like Trump's America, and kids will grow up

and think it's normal, and people will stop caring about

they'll go, yeah, I remember when we had those annoying

democratic institutions that were slowing everything down

and, like, really getting in the way and gumming up our ability

to govern properly, you know. So you might observe that, well,

we, you know, we, we actually won't care in the future as much

as we think we care now. So perhaps that's that, you know,

that's an argument in favour of the complacency people is that,

well, you know, even though, actually, yes, us now care about

this, us in the future will just accept it well. And I suppose

you can make a similar argument. I think some economists have

made the same argument about about global warming. It's like,

well, we actually will just adapt to it. And, yeah, it'll be

a bit chaotic to begin with, but in 100 years time, you know,

it'll just be hotter, and we'll have, will have got

used to it, yeah, we're quite growing our grapes

in in Surrey, yeah.

But, I mean, there's a, there's a parallel,

I'm not a sort of Stark here, but, you know, famously terrible

Roman leader Julius Caesar, obviously changed the foundation

of of the Republic, you know, and subsequent to that, while

people complained about the sort of erosion of democratic

institutions, arguably, you know, Rome's power grew after

that. But nobody looks back. And really, you know, when you think

of Caesar, 90% of people don't think about what he did to Roman

institutions. Do they close out the territory

confident and the and this sort of the the getting

used to the normalisation of the new bad. Kind of assumes that

there is a continuum of bad, bad scale you can slide Exactly.

There might be things like global warming and other and

catastrophic, you know, not necessarily, but sort of

systemic changes in government and things can actually be a

sort of threshold beyond which change happens very much more

rapidly. So it might be. That when you're plumbing the depths

of the bottom, you sort of fall off a cliff, rather than just

keep finding new depths of it, yeah, so it

might be that the barrel is five times deeper than

you thought.

Yeah. You suddenly fall off a shelf down

into a

cloth, a cliff, yeah, under a barrel, yeah?

So, you know, so it might be that Trump's seeming

efforts to dissolve the institutions of democracy, if

he, if he succeeds, means that they can't, you can't, then

climb back out of that anymore. And global warming gets to a

point where the the the Gulf Stream shuts off, and we're

stuck in a localised Ice Age in the north in North Europe,

Northern Europe. So there's like, it's yeah, it's not.

Things aren't continuous, yeah, in complex systems,

we are. So where are we with this? At the moment,

we've,

well, we haven't mentioned the secretary problem,

which is not dissimilar to this kind of thing, where you're

trying to form some judgement or adopt some strategy of sort of

trying to work out you don't know how good or bad things can

get, and you're trying to work out how you know good or bad.

The current situation is, say, Yeah, and you haven't you know

that you've only got a limited sample. Well the so the

secretary problem, the idea is you've got to choose a secretary

for a number of candidates. You, let's say, you know, there's

going to be 100 candidates. You're going to see them all,

one off the other, and you can tell how good they are when they

walk in and and your job is to work out, or at least, maximise

your chances of choosing the best one. And it turns out, the

strat, the optimal strategy with this is to sample. Just treat

the first 30 as a sample against which you then, you then sort of

use that as a baseline, and you then pick the next person who

walks in, who's better than the best person from that sample.

And if that doesn't happen, well, you fluffed it. But the

thing is that that strategy turns out to be mathematically

optimal, so I think the analogy here is, well, actually, you

know, we should, you we should use the past, to some extent, as

a sample, and then make our judgments based on that sample.

How, how do you measure, though, and how do you

know that what you're measuring is the right stuff?

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the problem. You can't

really apply it to the real world, where there's no sort of

finite, it's not like there's some finite number of samples,

but you should think in terms of, well, we've got a kind of,

there's a certain amount of information we're getting, you

know, and then there's, and then there's a, you know, a certain

amount of action that we perhaps want to apply. So, you know,

there's every, everything that happens, gives you. Gives is

valuable for for information purposes. Let's put it that way.

So on one hand, you might think, well, we don't know if Trump is

uniquely bad or whether it can get worse. Let's let it run for

a bit. Let's give him another five terms, and we'll see what

happens. And then we'll have some really good information

about how bad things can get, and then we'll know what to do

next time. But obviously, at the same time, you might think,

well, well, we don't really want to pay the potential cost of

doing that like it's not worth we think this actually might be

particularly terrible, and so we are going to try and put a stop

to it now. So I'm just, I'm just saying that, you know, it is,

there is a bit of both going on, and the amount of effort you

might think, well, the amount of effort we put into stopping it.

Put in stopping him, you know, actually maybe ought to be

proportional to how bad he really is. And we don't know

actually how bad he really is, because, you know, there could

be someone a lot worse down the line. And then we'll really want

to say, No, this one really is bad, you know, the the actual

Hitler turns up, you know, and, and then you think, Well, no, we

now, we, you know, now it really is this guy makes, you know,

compared to this guy, it makes Trump look like Bush compared to

Trump. Yeah, I mean, what I mean? It makes

me think, sort of everyone's sitting there,

sort of wondering about Hitler, and going, No, this is this? Is

it actually, this is as bad as it gets. Maybe they were wrong.

Maybe there could be someone worse than Hitler. I don't know,

but I guess the advantage of having had someone

like Hitler, yeah, is that other countries have, like, your

sample, and you've got a baseline of what really, really

bad looks like.

That does look so bad, yeah,

yeah, something to avoid. Yeah, it's good. So he

did us a favour, really. I mean, he was the sort of the sort of

bad secretary, yeah. And now we well, but in a sense that's

true, right? I mean, in a sense it is true that is useful to

have this historical comparison. I mean, at the time we stopped

Hitler right at Munich, if we'd have actually deterred him from

doing it, there could well have been a worse Hitler, because we

wouldn't have had Hitler. We would have had all the same

technology as we've got, you know, today, but we wouldn't

have had a Hitler to kind of switch on our, you know, Hitler

detection algorithm.

Because, I think, you know, certainly anecdotally

sending out. At the time, there was disbelief in in France,

Germany, sorry, France, UK and America, about the activities,

the sort of the genocidal activities of Stalin and Hitler

that like, surely, nobody would actually ever do that, but only

when presented with hard evidence. So they go, my God,

these people are sorry.

So we're saying Stalin was bad as well, right?

Stalin was, I thought they were on opposite sides, therefore he

wasn't great.

I got to rethink this whole stuff. Yeah. So, so I

think, and I think that is true in general, in terms of actually

being able to get people to do things, a prediction isn't often

enough. So, I mean, you know that, as I said, like, I don't

think it's reasonable to have expected us to declare war on

Hitler after he invaded Czechoslovakia, for example,

like we wouldn't have had the support for it. It would have

looked like, you know, the UK was being the aggressive one.

You know, people were able to make excuses, and then it's

like, even after Poland, well, there's still kind of a sense

of, it's not really our business, you know, but you but

you can't. There's some point at which you can't act before it's

got worse, because people won't believe that it's not too bad,

just until it does exactly. Yeah, I wonder as well. It just

feels like a very perennial

problem, yeah, but there's so the question of

whether or not something can get worse, whether or not leaders

can get worse, and what the theoretical minimum quality

worst is, the absolute worst president is, and where, where

the current President sits on that, that scale is one thing.

So you know, you can say, right? Well, let's assume the best

president is here and the worst president is here,

theoretically. And you know Trump's about in the middle,

right of the of the full scale of presidential terribleness,

badiosity. Your badiosity? Exactly. That's interesting. But

you might decide there's some level at which you don't want to

go below anyway, regardless of how much further there is to go.

You know, it might be like you set, you know, a height, like

they used to have height limits for the police, for example, you

know, you've got to be over five foot 10 to be in the police. We

know there's people a lot shorter than that, but, you

know, that's where we're drawing our line for this, this quality.

You've got a rubber rugby tackle, a six foot four, right?

Robber, exactly. Yeah, you can't be three foot four. No, no. So,

so, yeah. So I So, I think that the point is is not, how much

worse could it get, but what is an acceptable standard to

perform this role?

Yeah, and, and, I mean, I get, I suppose part of

the problem is that we form our view about what the distribution

of standards should be based on historical experience, right? So

we, we don't, we don't really come free with a kind of sense

of, Well, that's the absolute line in the sand. I mean, as you

said, you know the debate about slavery, which these days we

would consider to be very much you know, the line of where what

was acceptable in 1850 is absolutely miles away from the

discourse about what's acceptable now, right? But at

the time, you know, as far as they were concerned, actually,

there were kind of all these positions in between which kind

of involved actually owning slaves being okay, yeah. And so

how do we know? I mean, the idea, then, that you might get

to a situation where it was owning slaves was as

preposterous as we think it is, would have seemed ridiculous

then. So, you know, we we might think, well, we've got our

sliding scale of badness, and you know, Trump is skating at

just where that line is. But who knows, another 100 years, we

might look back and go, God, I wish we could get Trump back.

That guy was amazing, yeah, you know.

Or things might, things might generally improve,

such that we think drum is a lot worse than we currently think he

is. Yeah, a

couple of things, yeah. We actually need

to sort of draw us to a conclusion reasonably soon. But

this sort of feels, I don't know if you're familiar with the

concept. This is something called the Aleph and and it sort

of this feels surprisingly familiar to other sort of things

that we've talked about, like, how do we know when change is

happening, for example, but I just wanted to sort of make that

observation, we do found, yeah, is quite profound. Thank you.

Now we do need to sort of move towards a conclusion. What do we

got? What do you want to finish off?

I've got a well, I've got a number. Okay, so is Trump?

Is Trump? Like, well, just we've only got average approval

ratings for his first term. And as I said, of all the

presidential terms since the 50s, that he is the lowest 41.1

right, just to check. So when we say average,

is it taking average over that term, but across all sorts of

different kind of points? Calling sources and,

okay, sorry, no, it's Gallup. So Assistant survey that

they would, I, I would guess that, you know, every month or

something, throughout the throughout the you know that the

term they are then just taking the average, because, of course,

it always starts out high and falls Yeah. So, you know, there

are other measures you could look at, like approval after a

certain amount of time or whatever. But this is quite

it'll do, is what I'm saying. And if you is kind of, they're

roughly, they're not, but not far off a kind of normal

distribution. And if you take, if you assume it's a normal

distribution, and that each time we draw a presidential approval

rating from this distribution, Trump is sort of roughly at the

10% point right? So 41.1 as an approval rating is, is, sort of

cuts, is above about 10% of presidents. You could, you could

have, if so, if that's true, it means that he's one in a 40 year

level of badness. Okay, yeah. So basically, you know, in other

words, every 10 presidents, you get one as bad or worse than

Trump, purely, and by bad or worse I mean purely in terms of

average approval, right? And in fact, lo and behold, if you look

at the his approval at the beginning of this term, 2025 it

was actually higher than his approval at the beginning of

2016

Ryan, believe that. And I think this is a sort of

key factor in in that that form of measurement of average

approval rating over the term, if you take somebody like Joe

Biden, actually the second lowest, right, okay, so, but I

would imagine that at the point at which it was apparent that

he, you know, he had sort of advanced dementia, or whatever,

that his, his, you know that that sort of six or 12 month

period towards the end of his presidency, I can only imagine

his approval ratings were, were very low at that point and and

that he was deemed, you know, if you're a terrible president for

let's say you start A nuclear war, or you're or like Nixon,

yeah, you know, you eat one lousy foot. They call you a

cannibal, right? Exactly at that point. You may have been

perfectly mediocre throughout the rest of your presidency, but

if you do one really terrible thing, right, in the last you

know, the dog days of your your incumbency, you could be the

worst, the worst president, yeah.

I mean, I think if you if, if you imagine having a

president who actually has dementia for one quarter of his

term, I think you might say, well, you know, that's not

great, yeah. That's not what we kind of ideally would have,

yeah. So, you know, I think it seems for that period, they were

the worst president, well, ever been? Yeah, yeah.

Possibly, I got a question finish off, but just

before we do, it makes me wonder, like, if you were living

in an autocracy that you know I you would still be having these

same debates. Let's say if you were allowed to right, which you

wouldn't. But let's say you're in the People's Republic of

China. Wouldn't publish them. Yeah, you wouldn't publish them.

You wouldn't talk to them about it. You huddle quietly in a cup

and talk about it, but you'd still be talking about leaders

that are better or worse than others. Yeah, I don't know.

It's because, and of course, approval rating in

that context is less important. It's not like approval doesn't

count in autocracies, because, you know, revolutions topple

them, yeah, you get killed exactly, but, but it is less

immediate. And, you know, actually approval is, is, is

quite a fickle thing, right? And so that's why, perhaps the

retrospective judgement about presidents is different, because

you actually can then look at things like what their record

was, what did they achieve? You know, large infrastructure

projects that might be massively unpopular at the time suddenly

turned out to have been a really good idea. I mean,

it makes me think that I wonder if it will

always be the case that people be looking at stuff and

wondering, Is that good or bad?

Well, there's something to that's, you know, to chew on.

I'll let

you, you know, let that one sit with you. I've

got a question. I want to keep it on you, as presidents,

actually, and I was wondering if there are some precedents which

are kind of more or less universally viewed as being bad,

not good. But are there any of those presidents that you've got

kind of a sneaking regard for? You think, actually, there was

bits and pieces they did. I rather like about them. So

Peter, go for

it, yeah. So Richard Nixon wasn't very well

liked. Did some bad things. Wasn't pretty popular, but was,

yeah, it was that. Middle of the table, turns out, in middle of

the table. But yeah, he Yeah. Famously, was impeached for

trying to rig the election, which is a bit of a no, a bit of

a no go area in the United States. Well, he resigned in the

end there, he did, yeah, yeah, but did some pretty decent

things. So he ended the Vietnam war,

peace with honour. Yeah, Vietnam. He, he

opened relations with China. Debatable.

China thing is very Yeah, go, yeah, quite

a big deal. So paved the way for globalisation

in the last part of the 20th century, which has uplifted the

standards of life for many, many around the world, environmental

protection, civil rights, Native American self determination and

lowering the voting age plus space exploration, the

continuing the Apollo missions throughout his tenure. Yeah.

Okay, so some big things

good old Nixon.

I also, what I also really like about Nixon is that

he had a chip on his shoulder, and that he railed against the

sort of liberal intellectualism, and he hated that sort of clique

of ivy league, sort of Kennedy type, right? Exactly. So

personality wise, I'm much more on his side as a bit of an

outsider, not a not a terribly naturally popular man. I

thought, yeah,

yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's some

good points there.

Chris Nick, well, I I'd like to put in a word for

LBJ, you still mind go, yeah. Keep going, yeah. Well, he

mainly because he was obsessed with his balls. I'm not

interested in the he was always going on. It was apparently used

to ring up his tailor and moan about the fact that his

testicles weren't sitting comfortably, and like, where,

where his knob should be, and stuff. But he used to get,

apparently used to get his genitals out, to to sort of

deliberately intimidate people and things. I mean, I just feel

like that's not I feel like, if

Donald's not used enough, I feel like,

if Donald Trump did that in a way, nobody would be,

nobody would be. I actually think it would raise an eyebrow,

even if Donald, like Donald Trump, has done incredibly

outrageous things, I still think he got his, he got his genitals

out. It would make the news.

I think you're probably right. Yes, I wonder if

it made the news at the time

with LBJ, though I doubt it was no biography, yeah,

yeah, yeah.

We've done everyone. We have done Chris.

Oh, sorry. Chris,

yeah, well, Nixon would have been my shout. But I

also have a, have a strong, sort of soft spot for George W Bush.

I think he was just an extreme, like in terms of presidents that

actually do what they think needs to be, needs to be done.

You know, act on the basis of integrity. I felt he did.

Whether he got things right or not is another matter, but I

felt like he's one of the few presidents you can look back on

that didn't feel like a bit of a shyster. And he also did a lot

in terms of tackling HIV and AIDS in, you know, across Sub

Saharan Africa. So, I think, and he came up with the that

immortal line, didn't he about the problem with the French, as

they have no word for entrepreneur, which I think is,

is just such a brilliant quote.

So,

so George W Bush, yeah, no. Good shout. Good

shout, yeah, I shan't bother because LBJ was mine for the

same reasons. Yeah. All right, lovely. Let's stop there. You've

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