What was that? Jeez Sleepy Joe,
that’s Freddy Fazbear. That sound means he’s getting closer to the office.
Why can’t we just leave this pizza place? Can’t we just get some ice cream?
Because Joe, that’s the whole point of the game. You can’t leave. That’s what makes it scary.
Guys, Can you keep it down? I need to concentrate. Jeez, MatPat, you’re using a lot of power! You
wouldn’t last one minute playing 20/20 mode, which I totally beat on my first try by the way.
Donald you’re so full of it, you probably died during the Night One phone call. But MatPat,
you should be checking cams more to make sure Foxy stays in Pirate’s Cove.
Mr. President, you might know about foreign policy, but Five Nights At Freddys,
it's kind of my territory. Sit back. Watch how the master does it.
Wow, you suck at this game. Seriously!
Good thing you don’t have a Let’s Play channel.
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game theory. The Uncle Sam of the Internet that wants
you to subscribe for memey videos that no one in their right mind would ask for.
And woo boy do we have a weird episode for you today. Lately, I've been gorging myself
on the latest trend to strike the Internet. U.S. Presidents Playing Video games. I don't know if
this one's reached your corner of the internet yet, but we now have ourselves videos of Obama,
Trump and Biden all getting on a Discord call together to put aside their political
differences and just enjoy a round of Minecraft with the boys. Ah, kinda.
Obviously, these aren't real presidents checking their K/D ratios. Instead,
these are creators taking voice clips of previous presidents and feeding them into
A.I. text-to-speech software and A.I. voice filters so they can then make the
president say whatever they want them to say. So naturally, the Internet did the only logical
thing you would do with that sort of power. They turned them into gamers. They’ve played
Mario Party. They've debated Smash Tier Lists. They've even argued about the FNAF timeline.
This is kind of making me regret not inviting President Biden to our recent live FNAF Talk
Back. I would have loved to hear his thoughts on the recent IDs Fantasy video. Anyway,
my recommended tab has been filled to the brim of my Abe Lincoln stovepipe hat with
this sort of stuff. And personally, I am all about it, and after losing days of my life to
binging these videos, naturally that dumb side of my theory brain started to kick into gear.
I couldn't help but wonder, what if the real presidents actually played these games? And
more importantly, who would actually be the best? And I'm not just talking about the modern three
that we see kicking around these videos. I'm talking about all the presidents, all 45 of the
past U.S. executives in chief. And for those of you heading down to the comments right now
to say that Biden is the 46th president, clearly you've forgotten about president Cleveland who was
elected to two non-consecutive terms, thereby making him both our 22nd and 24th President.
Thus, Biden is only the 45th person to ever be U.S. president. That is the first of many little
history nuggets that we'll be exploring in this episode, dear Theorists. So let's fire up our
time machines, hop on to the Discord with the boys and whip out those gamer headsets. It’s time to
inaugurate our first ever gamer in chief. So, to start off with, how exactly
are we going to settle this one? Almost all of our presidents were born
way before the invention of TVs and computers, let alone video games. In fact, only Barack Obama
was born after the creation of the first video game. And this is what that one looked like.
So not exactly fertile ground for our potential POTUS players. That being said,
the presidents were pretty talented people. I mean, they ascended to the highest office
in the land to become leader of the free world. They're obviously going to be good at some stuff.
Right? But which of the traits are actually going to help them become the kings of Kong,
the sultans of Smash, the… maestros of Mario? Well, let's just go through some
of the skills that we know make good gamers and then look through the historical records
to see if any of our presidents can fit the mold of the most elitest of gamers.
Fortunately for us, there's been a huge surge of research into what actually makes the best gamers.
Finally, we're getting ourselves some scientific recognition. And one of the key things that
studies have pointed to is raw intelligence. With so many players playing video games these days,
there's a collective desire to find out the most elaborate and efficient strategies. That
means that the amount of information you have to juggle at once is higher than ever before.
I mean, it feels like you kind of need a Ph.D. in Pokemon battling just to be
able to play versus battles online, let alone competing in real life tournaments
Were… Were those even words? Whatever they were, a study from the University of York did end up
showing a strong correlation between players who are best at MOBA games like League of Legends and
Dota II and how they performed on IQ tests. With the most skilled players having the
highest IQ scores. So if the top gamers are the ones with the highest IQs. Which
of our American presidents is ready to pull off those big brained plays? Enter Keith Simonton,
a professor out of UC Davis who published a study back in 2006 in the Journal of Political
Psychology, where he attempted to calculate IQ and other traits of all the presidents
from George Washington to George W Bush. He did this by analyzing their speeches
and other public records. It's not like he could go out and give Millard Fillmore an
IQ test or anything. Some of the presidents that occupied his top spots probably aren't
too surprising. You've got Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration of Independence,
John F Kennedy, who was able to read 1200 words per minute, which is five times the human average,
and Franklin Pierce, a president that none of us remember, but who had himself a pretty
solid memory considering he memorized his entire 3300 word inaugural address by heart.
To give you some context, a typical Game Theory script is about 3500 words. So this guy has got
Rosalina is Peach’s Daughter Theory on lock. All that being said, though, standing alone at the
top of the IQ leaderboard with a skull shattering IQ of 175, it's our sixth president, John Quincy
Adams, 175 IQ is higher than one of the most notable smart men in history, Mr. Albert Einstein.
So, you know, if you put JQA into the MOBA arena, he's going to stomp on the competition. But
obviously IQ isn't the be all, end all here. The study even acknowledges this. While players with
the highest IQ scores were the best at MOBAs like league legends and Dota. There wasn't a
strong correlation between intellect and more action based games like first person shooters.
While MOBAs rely on memory and strategic decisions. First person shooters have a
focus on speed and target accuracy and if our gamer president is going to dominate the entire
gaming scene, he's going to need a little of both. And knowing that one skill that is
useful for a wide variety of games is reaction time. Your typical gamer has a reaction time
somewhere between 300 and 500 milliseconds. But professional gamers, the top echelon of
the gaming world, they have themselves some superhuman reflexes. They top out
with reaction times under 200 milliseconds. That 10th of a second difference. There is literally
the blink of an eye. And while that might not sound like much, that gap can end up being the
difference between getting the clutch kill and getting demoted to Silver 5 in Overwatch again.
Now, we've talked on this channel before about how age can affect your reaction time. Research
has been done that shows your reaction times peak in your early to mid twenties and then
starts to slowly drop off as you get older, considering you can't even become president
until you're 35, it means that all of our options are outside of their prime.
Younger presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, JFK and Bill Clinton might have a better shot,
but none of them are going to be ideal. So do we have any other evidence of presidents
demonstrating S-tier reaction times? I mean, I guess there was that one time
that George W Bush dodged not just one, but two shoes that were thrown at him by
an Iraqi journalist during a speech in 2008. That was pretty impressive. Not only did he
dodge attacks from the local footlocker, he then had the gamer instincts to identify their size.
That being said, if you're looking for something a little more legitimate than dodging
some Air Jordans, then just call for Daddy. Bush's daddy to be specific. George H.W. Bush was a pilot
during World War II, flying a General Motors TBM Avenger during the war. A plane that could
reach speeds of 276 miles per hour or 123 meters a second. In that blink of an eye, 100 milliseconds,
he'd have traveled 40 feet, 12 meters. That's the length of a full sized school bus, which
could be fatal if he doesn't react fast enough. But he managed to fly over 58 combat missions,
including earning the distinguished Flying Cross after surviving a dangerous mission that
left most of the other pilots that went out dead. All in all, it means that once Pappy Bush gets a
hold of that controller, there's no stopping him. But if I had to bet 20 bucks on which president
would be the best when it came to reaction time, well, I'd bet on Mr. 20 himself. Bloody
bloody Andrew Jackson. Because what's faster than a speeding plane? A speeding bullet.
Jackson was never too afraid to line up against anyone who crossed him in a
good old fashioned duel. Now, these weren't the quick draws that you see in old Western movies,
but instead tended to follow either British or French rules. Opponents would either stand
opposite each other, guns pointed, and then fire when the signal was given, or they would
stand back to back and take a set amount of pieces before turning and firing. A la Hamilton
or more recently, John Wick 4. Regardless, both required you to be able to react quickly
while also having incredible accuracy. Now we don't know for sure which of these types
of duels Jackson participated in, but some estimates suggest that he survived over 100,
which means that his reaction time had to be pretty spot on. Now, of course, video
games aren't just about hitting the buttons the quickest. Daphne Vavelier, Professor of brain and
cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, showed that gamers performed significantly better
on tests of attention, speed, accuracy, vision and, most importantly of all, multitasking
when compared to their non-gamer peers. Games nowadays are demanding more and more of our
attentional resources and requiring us to split it among various different tasks and objectives.
Long gone are the Atari days where you just had a little triangle shooting asteroids.
Whether it's analyzing your opponent's moves in Smash or juggling 50 different animatronic
attack patterns and Custom Night. A true gamer needs to be able to manage multiple
things at once in order to win. So who among our presidential players has demonstrated
some high level multitasking abilities? Well, there's always President Lyndon Johnson,
who used to have meetings while sitting on the toilet with the door open in front of his staff.
I guess that's a type of multitasking. All of these men are just the worst,
aren't they? There are also other, more normal examples, like John F Kennedy, who would draw
little sailboats during intense meetings, which is a little concerning to think about,
like, was he doodling catamarans during the Cuban missile crisis, although I guess he got the job
done, so we can't really fault him on that one. But it's one thing to be able to do two tasks
that involve different areas of the brain. It's another to be able to do two tasks that
involve the same part of the brain, which is exactly what Bill Clinton would do. He
would have himself some serious political conversations with advisors while also
solving the New York Times crossword puzzle. I mean, it's pretty hard to do two things that
both require language processing, the wires are going to get easily crossed,
which thereby makes what Billy C did that much more impressive. In a video game,
Clinton would be able to take in everything that's going on, but still have the brainpower to start
trash talking the competition. And speaking of. I think we can all agree, even if science
doesn't reflect it. Trash talk? an essential part of that gamer experience.
If presidents of Nintendo need to trash talk to be the best,
well then presidents of America need to do the same. And let's be honest with ourselves. Most
presidential campaigns at this point are just chances for them to trash talk each other.
And when it comes to the absolute king of trash talk, there's no one else to choose
but William Henry Harrison. During the election of 1840, Harrison and his VP pick, John Tyler,
were running to unseat President Martin Van Buren. Harrison's campaign released
a 12 verse diss track that I.. ah… Let Me just play a little clip of it.
Yeah, this guy was dropping bars way before Lin-Manuel Miranda.
It’s no surprise with sick beats like that, they did end up beating little Van Buren.
And then Harrison died a month into office after catching pneumonia. But hey, now at least he can
be remembered for more than just shortest tenure in office. Outside of trash talk,
there's also some other oddball skills here. Herbert Hoover, today mostly known for his
botched response to the Great Depression and the Hoover Dam, was the original Minecraft streamer.
I mean, prior to being president, he got rich as a mining scout and engineer,
just had a sixth sense for finding gold. This man would have had a full enchanted gold armor
set before you put down your first crafting table. And the last thing that I got to call
out here is that no matter how good you are as a gamer, eventually you're going to fail.
But what's important is having the determination to get back up. And there's one president I think
demonstrates this better than anyone because he literally got back up after being shot. On October
14th, 1912, while campaigning to become president, Teddy Roosevelt was shot while giving a speech.
The bullet went through his glasses case, his 50 page speech, and then lodged itself in his chest.
Not only did he survive, he was like, “eh, I suppose I'm not coughing up blood or anything,
so I'm probably okay.” And he went on to finish the dang speech. If that's not gamer
determination, I don't know what is. The problem is all these fun facts and pieces
of scientific research are interesting, but I still feel no closer to figuring out the answer.
There isn't really a one size fits all approach when it comes to finding our
best gamer president. There are some skills that may be suited to one game or another,
but no one is truly the best at all of them. So maybe I've been looking at the question
all wrong. Maybe the gamer president isn't the best in the single category,
but is consistently good across all of the board with the most well-rounded stats across
all the things that we just talked about. And during my research there was one guy
that absolutely fit the bill. The gamer energy runs deep with this one. It runs
so deep that his great grandson is actually the inventor of Magic: The Gathering, the OG
trading card game, the undisputed ultimate gamer president would have to be drum roll, please.
President Garfield. No, not that one. James Garfield, the 20th president of the United States.
But yeah, even his name is a meme. Fun fact, by the way,
the lasagna loving feline came afterwards, actually named after the creator's grandfather,
who himself was named after President Garfield. Now, not only is this man rocking out the gamer
beard, James Garfield was smart. Like really smart, boasting around 150 IQ,
ranking him in the top ten of presidents and also puts him on par with inventor Thomas Edison.
Sure, it's not Einstein levels, but that's still pretty dang solid. Plus,
he proved his nerdiness beyond just raw IQ. During Garfield's nine terms in Congress,
he developed a proof for the Pythagorean theorem using trapezoids. This wasn't just a fun little
back of the napkin calculation either. He had it published in the New England Journal of Education,
and he did it while shooting the breeze with his colleagues in the Congressional Cafeteria.
Intelligence, thy name is Garfield. He was also quadrilingual, able to speak English, German,
Greek and Latin. And it gets even cooler than that. He was ambidextrous, meaning that he was
good at using both his right and his left hands. To show off his bi-hand-ular prowess. He would
ask his guests to give him a question that he'd then write his answer to in Latin with one hand,
and in Greek with the other hand at the same time. If that isn't an incredible show of both hand-eye
coordination and multitasking, I don't know what is. His reaction times also weren't something to
be overlooked. He, like many of our presidents, served in the military during part of his life
and actually fought in a few high powered battles during the American Civil War. While there doesn't
seem to be any record of his actual skills with a gun, the fact that he not only helped win the
Battle of Shiloh, the bloodiest of the war, but also walked away completely uninjured,
shows that he must have had some level of skill when it came to firing his own weapon
and avoiding others. Or, you know, maybe just in the corner and camped the whole time, which again,
that's a very valid gamer skill that works for a lot of people. But to top it all off, there are
two things about Garfield that I'm sure a lot of you hashtag gamers out there can relate to.
While he was certainly born before the invention of the video game. He was not unfamiliar with late
night gaming sessions. Turns out he was an avid chess player, and it was said that the president,
quote, enjoyed the game to the utmost, but had to deny himself even this pleasure when it repeatedly
carried him into late hours of the night. If Doritos and Mountain Dew had been invented
for this guy, I'm sure he would have been chowing down on those too, like a true gamer. Secondly,
he proved himself to have an ability to win in unconventional ways. Sometimes he wasn't even
trying to, case in point the way he actually became president. During the election of 1880
Garfield, then a lowly congressman cranking out mathematical proofs, went to the Republican
National Convention to give a speech in support of fellow Ohioan and Secretary of State John Sherman.
However, the party couldn't find a majority consensus between Sherman, former President
Ulysses S Grant and Senator James Blaine of Maine. The party did 35 rounds of voting
before they decided on a compromise, picking Garfield, who wasn't even running. Garfield
just straight up amogus’d way into the White House. Kinda sus if you ask me. But
hey, in the world of gaming, a win is a win. So there you have it friendos, President James
Garfield. You, sir, have been formally recognized and placed in the most powerful seat in all of
the Internet. But before we send you in to destroy Biden, Trump and Obama in their next
match of Tetris, please raise your right hand and repeat after me. I do solemnly swear that I will
faithfully execute the Office of Gamer and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and
defend the Constitution of Internet memes. Wait, Garfield doesn't have himself an AI
voice synthesis? Get on that, boys. This man demands your respect. All hail to the Chief.
The Master Chief. But hey!
Matpat, why didn’t I get a mention? Because you’re not a winner Joe.
Then why wasn’t I mentioned, I’m also a winner Shut up Richard, people only know
who you are because of Futurama. You wanna go Barack? I’ll beat you in anything!
Bully! Sounds like we’ve got a good old fashioned game of digital fisticuffs.
and I have just the game for you guys to duke it out in, the sponsor for today's episode WARPATH.
Now, we've talked a lot about random facts of history, but it's one thing to talk about it.
It's another thing to actually experience it. And with WARPATH,
you can do exactly that. Take part in battles throughout history, all revived with new modern
real time strategy gameplay that feels like it's catered directly to you, the gamer, or honestly,
to me as a history buff. If you don't know my son, Ollie is actually a bit of a vehicle enthusiast.
He loves going to car shows and seeing how all the engines work.
So inevitably I had to learn a lot about different kinds of planes, jeeps, tanks,
and now I get to actually put that knowledge to good use. With nine types of units in over 200
types of military equipment, there are so many ways to approach each situation, and I for one,
am ready for it. Ha! Nerd!
Joke's on you there Nixon, because I won't be the only one benefiting from my vast knowledge
of World War II planes. Warpath offers a really fun and cohesive multiplayer
mode so I can strategize with others from around the world in real time rather than
trying to take on an entire army by myself. Don’t worry Matpat, With my confidence in our
armed forces, with your unbounding determination, we will gain the inevitable triumph.
And If you guys really want to see who's the best, Warpath is holding an online
event called “Be a Top Commander” to celebrate the PC release of the game.
I’m literally the commander of that war, this will be a cake walk!
You wanna bet, hotshot? Hey guys, let's keep it to the
game battlefield. All right? If you go to the link in the description and download the game
for free on iOS, Android or PC, you not only get to take part in this massive competition,
you can also win yourself in-game rewards and physical cash. Cash money in your pocket. Put
those Benjamins in your bank. Benjamin, who was not a president, by the way. And that's
not just me talking to these AI presidents, but also to all of you watching this video at home.
All of you have a chance to win these awesome prizes and show the world that it's not just about
brute force but also brute smarts. So download the game using the link in the description. start
strategizing and climb those rankings to be in for a chance to win that huge cash prize. Let's
show everyone what a theorist can really do. I’ll see you on the battlefield soldier.
But in the meantime remember, it's all just a theory. A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching.