Ranking U.S. Presidents: Who Truly Deserves the Top Spot?

25:55We were in a time of war and depression, so people wanted things to continue. And his opponents were very weak candidates, but it basically became a constitutional amendment that no president can serve more than two terms because of Roosevelt trying to serve four terms. He ended up dying in his fourth term. let's not forget that at the beginning of world war ii basically in 1942 he made an executive order so again this was not something that was passed by congress he made an executive order that basically about 120 000 japanese americans should be put into camps so essentially put into mass big prisons these 120 000 japanese americans lost their homes they lost their careers they lost their jobs.

26:42Other than slavery, this is like one of the worst violations of civil liberties in U.S. history. By the way, a lot of people would argue that we weren't sure about the loyalty of many Japanese Americans. A lot of these Japanese Americans were even volunteering to go to the war for the U.S. But also, I will note, we did not do the same thing for Germans. It's not like anybody even thought about imprisoning Germans. It was only the Japanese Americans. And then, And finally, I want to deal with the New Deal, which one way that Roosevelt thought he could get us out of the Great Depression was by starting a lot of government programs to basically hire people.

27:18And this would reduce unemployment. But I don't necessarily fault him for thinking that. It makes sense. But people should understand that there's only so many dollars in the economy. And it's true that right now the U.S. is known for printing up a lot of money very quickly, like we did during COVID and in 2009. But in general, there's only so many dollars in the U.S. economy. And every dollar is either controlled by the private sector, like innovative and entrepreneurial businesses, or it's controlled by the government. And the government is not as efficient at allocating money as the private sector.

27:59If you're starting a company, you're very careful about how you spend money. You hire very high qualified people and you pay them appropriate salaries and you spend money carefully. You spend money on things that are valuable to your business so you can grow your business and so you can make a profit. The reason you want to make a profit is so you grow by hiring more people and buying more equipment and so on. So money spent by the private sector typically grows and grows the economy and you just have to compare the U.S. to the Soviet Union, the old Soviet Union from 1920 to 1990 to see the differences between a capitalist-run economy and a communist-run economy.

28:39So the more money that the government controls, the less efficiently it's allocated because the government doesn't necessarily care about the quality of the people that they hire. It doesn't necessarily care about the quality of the products they produce. And it doesn't necessarily care about the prices they charge for products. Also, Roosevelt, you know, in the New Deal insisted on high wages, which is great, but it made many privately run businesses go bankrupt because they couldn't pay these high wages, these minimum wage laws. So again, this is not an argument right now for minimum wage or not minimum wage.

29:16This is specifically applying to what happened in the 1930s during the Depression. And this happened under Hoover as well. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates during the Depression. Why would you do things that hurt the economy when the economy was already hurting? It's because people didn't really understand what economic policy does that much. But the other thing, Roosevelt did raise taxes to basically tax the rich with the idea to fund the new deal, which he thought was going to help the poor. But what ended up happening is when you raise taxes, the people who are most responsible for hiring other people, they basically went broke or they couldn't hire as many people.

29:57And again, I am not arguing for anything. This only applies to the depression in the 1930s, but it was a bad idea to raise rates in the middle of a depression because they transferred money from the private sector to the government. And we know that the private sector allocates money better than the government. So FDR, I think, not only as one of the grossest violations of civil liberties, not only increased the pain during the Depression and probably extended the Depression, but also we didn't enter World War II for a long time. World War II started a couple of years before we actually entered it.

30:34and it's unclear we really needed to be in World War II. That is a story much more complicated. I don't really know the answer. Perhaps I'll do a podcast later on this, but I only want to comment on things I know about. So I'm not saying the World War II, the U.S. involvement was Roosevelt's fault, but I think these other things, like trying to extend his power almost to like that of a permanent president or a king, the Japanese-American internment, and I think he was a net negative on the Great Depression. So I do not think he is number three. Number four on this list is Theodore Roosevelt. Number five is Dwight Eisenhower.

31:15I think those are much more complicated issues. But number six is Harry Truman. So number six, I have a problem with. A lot of people say Harry Truman was a great president and underrated. And here, again, David McCullough wrote a great biography of him. I think Truman does have a lot of great aspects of him. but he did get us into the Korean War. I think the Truman Doctrine, which is the idea that, hey, we're not gonna let communism spread anymore. I think the Truman Doctrine got the US into a lot of trouble, particularly when it was used to justify the Vietnam War. Again, it's a complicated issue, but I will note that these weren't wars declared by Congress.

31:55The real issue I have with Truman is that he dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. And I know this is a very complicated topic. So Truman's point was, is that he thought that if he did not drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then one million more U.S. lives would be lost in the attempt to take over Japan. Now, I will note that in all of World War II, in both the Pacific and Europe, 400 ,000 American lives were lost, nowhere close to a million, and that was several years of war. But I don't think a million people would have died taking over Japan unless Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened.

32:41So first off, Truman used, there would have been one million deaths if we didn't drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman used that later to justify why he did it. Even a lot of other officials said it would have been much lower. Another member of his cabinet said there would be around 250 ,000 deaths. Even that number, I think, is high. Dwight Eisenhower, who was the general of all the armies at the time, said the number would be much, much smaller. And part of the reason was Japan was already about to collapse. Don't forget, Japan is a small island. So we had surrounded Japan, and there was a naval and air blockade, so they couldn't get supplies.

33:22They couldn't move, really. Japan was about to collapse as a society in August of 1945, which is when we dropped these atomic bombs. And Russia, sensing Japan was gonna be so weak, Russia on August 6th, 1945, declared war against Japan and they were about to invade Japan. Japan would have surrendered. And part of Truman's worry was that he didn't want the Japanese to basically be taken over by Russia and be a communist country. He viewed communism as a threat to the US. probably correctly, but, you know, not correctly enough to justify dropping an atomic bomb. So again, I don't even think 100 ,000 lives would have been lost.

34:05Again, Japan was about to collapse anyway. And a lot of people think if we had just continued the aerial and naval blockade, Japan would have had to have surrendered. But even despite that, Russia was already on the border of Japan and was about to invade. So boom, there's no reason to think that a million lives would have been lost, not anywhere close to that. Second, these bombs were dropped on civilians. Typically in war, you try to limit the violence on civilians. So the deaths between Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we're talking about close to 200 ,000 to 250 ,000 deaths from those atomic bombs.

34:44And that's not even counting all the many people, maybe up to a million, who died from radiation related sicknesses. It's not to mention all the buildings collapsed and businesses destroyed. There's all these lost records. We don't really know how many people died. So the real reason that Truman dropped these bombs was because he didn't want the Russians to take over Japan. And maybe this is even more important, B, he wanted to simply show the world what the U.S. could do. It was like, oh my gosh, the U.S. has this new toy. Let's use it and get everybody scared. I mean, even a lot of the Los Alamos scientists, including Robert Oppenheimer, were skeptical about actually using the bomb because it was so dangerous.

35:31So I think there's a racism component here. Like, why not use the atomic bomb in Europe? Well, people in power viewed the Europeans more like themselves and the Japanese as the other. And so it felt like it made more sense to drop it on Japan, just like it made sense for them to put in prison camps, the Japanese Americans. So I think this was a horrible thing. And while you can't judge a presidency on just one thing, this was such a big, impactful thing on the entire 20th century that I fought Truman for it. I also don't like the Truman Doctrine that got us into Korea and then eventually was used to justify Vietnam.

36:12So I think he was a horrible president. I don't think he deserves to be ranked so high. People rank him high because they think he ended World War II. World War II was ending anyway. Europe had already collapsed and Japan was about to collapse. So World War II was not gonna go on much further. Sure, some more US soldiers' lives would have been impacted, but certainly not a million and certainly not even the 200 ,000 civilians that ended up dying in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So Truman does not deserve to be number six. He's much lower on the list.

36:59JFK is listed as number eight. Who knows? He was president for a thousand days. The Bay of Pigs was a horrible thing that happened under JFK. He flip-flopped a couple of times on different issues, including civil rights. A lot of the popularity of JFK, as discussed on a prior podcast, was from the fact that he was assassinated. Woodrow Wilson is number 11. This is probably the biggest mistake on this whole list. First off, in the last two years of his presidency, Woodrow Wilson, in 1919, had a stroke. His stroke incapacitated him, and his wife, Edith, and high-ranking members who even knew about his stroke refused to tell the public or even Congress that he was completely incapacitated.

37:43You ever see someone who had a stroke, a bad stroke, who basically is paralyzed and can't talk? That was Woodrow Wilson. He was not around after 1919. His wife essentially became president of the United States and this is unconstitutional. When you're incapacitated, your vice president takes over And what they did was horribly unconstitutional. But furthermore, Woodrow Wilson, at a time when the country was coming out of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Woodrow Wilson actually resegregated the government. So prior presidents had been integrating the government, having black workers and white workers working side by side in government jobs.

38:24But Wilson resegregated it, separating blacks and whites and saying that the races will get along better that way. And again, views about racism, people didn't really understand, but I'm not forgiving him for that. And I mean, he also, you know, he was known for watching movies about the Ku Klux Klan in the White House. Like he would have movies air for the first time in the White House that were favorable towards racism. Wilson also created, just like John Adams, the Espionage and Sedition Acts. So he basically made it illegal for people to dissent during World War I. And people who spoke out against the war would be imprisoned.

39:02And there were thousands of arrests, including Eugene Debs, who was a socialist candidate for president at that time. Eugene Debs spent time in jail for speaking out against the war. And so there was complete crackdown on anybody who was anti-war. And again, not only was Wilson against any kind of civil rights, he refused to stop lynchings in the South or he refused to push for voting rights among African-Americans. Also, one of the things that he tried most to achieve as president was to create a League of Nations, kind of like a predecessor to the United Nations. And he worked very hard for that, but was unsuccessful.

39:39So the thing he attempted most to do as president, he failed to do. And other areas of life where people were making progress, like civil liberties, he reversed. Also, one thing that a lot of people don't really know is that during Wilson's presidency, the 16th Amendment was ratified, the 16th Constitutional Amendment was ratified, which basically gave power to the federal government to impose an income tax. There was never an income tax before this. Well, there was during the Civil War, but it was only temporary. Lincoln created an income tax, but he got rid of it right after the Civil War. So Wilson was the first person to impose an income tax.

40:19And it's a very interesting lesson. Federal income taxes basically range from 1 % to 6%. So that seems very small. And very few people actually, since the income tax was progressive, meaning it depended on your income, the more income you made, the higher percentage income tax you had. And 6 % was the highest rate and 1 % was the lowest rate. Even though taxes seem very slow, this is a very interesting phenomenon, which is that this is the slippery slope phenomenon, which is that once you give somebody a power to do something, with the exception of Lincoln getting rid of the income tax, they're never going to really slow down.

40:55So it's very rare for presidents to cut taxes. And Wilson, just by starting an income tax, ultimately led like within 40 years, by the time of JFK, income taxes were almost as high. There were some taxes that were almost as high as 90%. So you have to be careful whenever you start taking things. Now, don't forget, the reason there had to be a constitutional amendment to allow the government to institute an income tax was because it wasn't in the Constitution. And you're, you know, in the Constitution, there's property rights. People have the right to their property. And if you take people's property, that's anti-constitutional.

41:33So property rights is almost foundational to the formation of the United States. And in fact, in 1895, the Supreme Court ruled against the federal government doing an income tax because they said it was unconstitutional. Hence, a constitutional amendment had to be created. Well, it was created, I believe it was ratified in 1913, but the very first tax was instituted by Woodrow Wilson under the encouragement of Woodrow Wilson. So for that alone, I would put him on the list of one of the worst presidents. I can't for the life of me understand why a group of historians has made him number 11 when he was basically racist, pro-war and against civil liberties.

42:15He didn't want women to vote, which he had to basically stop being president before women could vote. And he started the income tax. And plus he squashed free speech. So horrible president. These are kind of like my main disagreements with this list. Like when they list somebody, okay, they list Grover Cleveland as number 23. You list this as Grant as number 22. Jimmy Carter as number 26. And look, Jimmy Carter just recently passed away. He did some good things. You know, his making peace between Israel and Egypt was an amazing thing that he did. He negotiated with the Soviet Union to stop building nuclear weapons, although that had to be renegotiated many times.

42:59And he was generally considered to be a good guy. But I will say he was weak in terms of the Iranian hostage crisis and weak in terms of the coal miner strike. But this is neither here nor there. He probably deserves to be somewhere in the middle, maybe a little lower. I will say his post-presidency, many people consider him one of the best post-presidents for all the things he did post-presidency. I will say, though, for me, he is not because he is known for hugging the leaders of Hamas and saying that Hamas wanted a two-state solution. When it's in Hamas's founding documents, that they only wanted a one-state solution and they wanted, you know, all the Jews to die from the river to the seas in their founding document.

43:46So I think Carter was a bit naive on the foreign relations side. Also, under Carter, you know, he basically helped the Iranians get rid of the Shah of Iran and replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was, you know, still his form of government, a theocratic, extreme authoritarian government, is still running in Iran and is now the U.S.'s biggest enemy, that never would have happened if Jimmy Carter had not been president. So our biggest enemy was created by Jimmy Carter. So for that alone, 26 puts them right at the halfway mark. He probably is more like in the bottom 10. So some people might disagree.

44:26I welcome disagreement. You know, also there's some other areas where I disagree here. So Calvin Coolidge is ranked right after Jimmy Carter at number 27. But Coolidge, in my estimation, was one of the best presidents of the United States. So first off, I encourage everyone to read the book called Coolidge by Avani Shlaes. Also read her book, The Forgotten Man, which discusses the Depression. But Coolidge, I'll tell you a couple of things he did. First off, he cut taxes pretty heavily. So again, a lot of this is you have to understand the context. Like it's not always bad to lower taxes. It's not always bad to have higher taxes.

45:07It's not always bad to have tariffs. It's not always good to have tariffs. But for a long time, the U.S. made all of its money before there was income taxes. The U.S. made all of its money on tariffs. The U.S. in the 1800s and early 1900s wasn't the biggest consumer in the world the way it is now. Great Britain was the biggest consumer in the world. And so it made sense for us to have tariffs then because U.S. farmers and businesses, you know, whenever you have tariffs on the country, they're going to have tariffs back on you. And that hurts foreign trade. Well, we needed to export stuff because the U.S.

45:47wasn't the biggest consumer of goods. So a lot of American farmers and American businesses were hurt by tariffs. So one of the reasons for an income tax was to reduce the amount of money and revenues that the United States was generating from tariffs and instead get those revenues straight from the people. Now, whether you think that's fair or unfair, who knows, history will tell. But I personally think it's probably more or less unfair to take money directly from the people. But certainly the slippery slope is what became the worst problem, which is that taxes ended up being as high as they are now.

46:23That was the reason to have taxes, was to lower tariffs and get the money from taxes. Well, the U.S. started to be a lot wealthier after World War I. Europe was ravaged. It was because World War I that the U.S. became the most dominant country on the planet because the rest of the world was basically ravaged by a world war. And so once the U.S. was experiencing this wealth, it was no longer clear that we needed taxes to be raised. We can instead increase tariffs and reduce taxes. Coolidge not only severely cut taxes, but every day he would go into work and he would cut federal spending. He would end departments and groups that were no longer needed.

47:09He actually had several years during his term of a budget surplus. I think the next time that happened might've been during Clinton's administration almost 70 years or over 70 years later. So he had a very hands-off approach to government spending. And again, what I said earlier applies. Every dollar is either spent by the government, spent by the private sector, or spent by consumers. So again, the private sector is much more careful how it spends money. We know the U.S. government doesn't care how it spends money. Like, you know, I was watching the Senate hearings yesterday for Secretary of Defense, and one thing that came up was that the Pentagon can't even audit itself.

47:47Like$121 billion is unaccounted for. I can guarantee you that is a very rare thing in business for money to be unaccounted for because people go broke and then they can't hire people and then they can't build their business and they can't support their lifestyle. So private industry takes care of their money, which allows for more steady and measured growth and more innovation in the U.S. economy. It's just a better thing. So Coolidge every day, cutting government spending. Guess what happened? Consumer spending spiked. So an innovation spiked. Suddenly we had cars being sold, radios being sold, kitchen appliances being sold.

48:28And people could afford things like this for the first time in history. And it's because government didn't have the money. The U.S. consumer and private businesses had the money. So there was high growth in the economy. There was low unemployment. There was the highest level of prosperity basically of any country in the world. during Coolidge's term. And so it's a little unusual for this poll to say, oh, Coolidge was one of the worst presidents in history. Now, you could maybe say because of the prosperity, there was a speculative bubble in the markets, which ended up causing the markets to crash in 1929 after Coolidge's presidency and during Hoover's presidency.

49:10And this caused the Great Depression. But if you were to say that, you would be incorrect. So first off, the stock market was already correcting itself in 1929 when Hoover and then Roosevelt would do things like raise interest rates. And I know they didn't do it. The Federal Reserve did. Roosevelt shut down the banks for a few days, which caused many people to experience panic despite his speech of, you have nothing to fear but fear itself. Again, I already discussed how Roosevelt extended the depression. So Coolidge did not cause the depression. The 1920s was a period of the highest level of prosperity of any country in every, in any time on the planet.

49:50And also Coolidge was, he was the successor. He was the vice president under Warren G. Harding, who was elected in 1920. And Harding, who legitimately was one of the worst presidents, was completely brought down by scandal. He ended up dying. Probably he was poisoned by his wife or speculation. Everybody knew Warren Harding was a criminal and Coolidge set the tone for his honesty and his integrity. No one ever accused him of anything. And in fact, he hardly ever spoke. So there is a story where his son one time brought a college friend home for dinner at the White House and everybody's eating.

50:33Coolidge is not saying anything. And finally, the friend speaks up and says, you know, Mr. President, I made a bet with your son that you wouldn't speak more than two words. Coolidge looks up and says, you lose. And those are the only two words he spoke during that dinner. So he was known as silent cow. And he basically restored public trust and confidence in the presidency, something which to this day even is very rare. He was an extremely moral person. And he focused on basically one problem, which is how to reduce government spending alongside of reducing federal taxes so the consumer and private businesses could grow.

51:12So for me, Coolidge is in the top five.

51:29Now, another president that is way down the list. Let me this president is on the list. Okay. This president is number 14 on the list. James Knox Polk. I think he probably also should be in the top five. And again, you have to set aside certain moral considerations because basically all these presidents until Lincoln, almost all of them with the exception of, you know, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and maybe there's another, I don't know, but they all had slaves and it's horrible. These all were despicable people. even the best of these people are worse than the worst person you know right now.

52:06But just in terms of leadership, James Knox Polk, you can even argue, if you leave out Lincoln and George Washington, we're almost like mythical figures in U.S. presidency. James Knox Polk is probably the third best president in U.S. history. First off, most people don't even know who James Knox Polk is. You hardly learn about him in school. He was the 11th president of the United States. He served from 1845 to 1849. He was elected in 1844. And this was a tumultuous time in American history. But here's several great things about James Knox Polk. First off, he's the only president to promise when he was running for president, he said, I will only serve one term.

52:52Could you imagine any other president saying that? Now, a couple of presidents did only serve one term after this, but James Knox Polk was the first person to promise, I am only here to serve one term, which meant, why is this a good thing? It means that he's not gonna do things just to cater to the population to be popular so he could get reelected. He's gonna do exactly what he thinks is the right thing to do. And then whether it's popular or unpopular, he's gonna leave office, he promised. I will say he was the only president to promise this. There is another president who sort of promised this, Rutherford B.

53:27Hayes, who was elected in 1876. The only reason Rutherford B. Hayes promised this was because Rutherford B. Hayes, I've talked about this on a prior podcast, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 lost the popular vote and lost the electoral vote and then made shady deals in the House of Representatives to get the House of Representatives to elect him as president. This was the most criminal election in U.S. history and without a doubt. And so in order to kind of secure these shady deals that got him to be the presidency, he said, okay, okay, I know I'm a bad guy. I'm only going to serve one term, but I really want to be president.

54:04So he also promised and he lived up to his promise, but James Knox Polk did it for the right reasons. So I'm going to say James Knox Polk is the only president to promise to, and live up to the promise to serve only one term. He also said he has clear objectives for his presidency. He said he's going to reduce tariffs. He's going to start an independent treasury system. He's going to figure out the Northwest territory of the U.S. And he's going to acquire California and New Mexico from Mexico. So while he was president, he A, reduced tariffs. He passed something called the Walker Tariff in 1846, significantly reduced tariffs.

54:44Why was this important? Because remember what I said earlier, this was huge for the South and the West, where farmers and planters basically wanted to trade with other countries, but there were high tariffs all around, so they couldn't trade with other countries. So by reducing tariffs at this time, and again, this applies to this specific time where the U.S. wasn't the biggest consumer in the world, but it really wanted to be a bigger exporter to increase the wealth of the U.S. So it was a big battle. Tariff was the way the U.S. made money, but ultimately the Walker tariff passed and a lot of wealth was created among farmers in the South and the West and it increased the wealth of the United States.

55:28Second, in terms of territory, James Knox Polk wanted to expand the U.S. all the way to the ocean and as North as possible. So he basically negotiated the Argonne Treaty with Great Britain in 1846. He was able to get Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, all for free. He didn't pay anything for it. Sure, he said, we'll leave Canada alone. But at the time, we didn't really want Canada. Now maybe we do. I don't know. Well, when combined with Polk's other acquisitions, he did more to expand the United States than any other president. I'll go over the numbers in a second. And so with Mexico, he basically paid$25 million to get California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, parts of Wyoming.

56:17That was all part of Mexico. Now, the downside of this was there was a war between Mexico and America to get these things, but he did pay$25 million for it. The war was going to happen anyway. There was already a lot of fighting on the border. And, you know, the downside of all of this is that slavery was not resolved in these territories, which resulted in compromises for the next 10 years, which then resulted in the Civil War. But ultimately, it was a good thing that the U.S. expanded all the way to the West Coast. There's a reason why the U.S. has never been really attacked by another country, is that where would you attack it?

56:54The U.S. goes from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Yes, there's a border in the north with Canada and a border in the south with Mexico, But for the most part, these have been allies and friends of the U.S. So there's no real way to attack the U.S. And it's because James Knox Polk extended the U.S. borders from one ocean to the other. And in terms of the size, it's interesting to know the Louisiana Purchase, which Thomas Jefferson bought from France, was about 2 million square kilometers. But between Oregon and what we got from Mexico, we're talking a little over 2.2, 2.3 million square miles.

57:33And while Jefferson paid 15 million in 1803 prices for the Louisiana purchase, Polk spent the same amount of money. I'm assuming there was a little bit of inflation in 1848 for a much larger piece of territory. So again, people don't realize, yes, it's great that we got Louisiana and Thomas Jefferson is the well-known president, but James Knox Polk, who is not as well-known, has done more than any other president to expand the U.S., which ultimately kept the U.S. safe from foreign attack. So there's a lot more issues to cover. Of course, I could talk about every single president. And if you have questions after listening to this podcast, just tweet out the question to me on Twitter and I'll either respond there or we'll respond in another podcast.

58:22If you disagree with me on anything. I welcome disagreement. I am a student of all this. I love this stuff. And if you disagree with me and have good points, I will mention them on the podcast. I'll do a reprise of this one. And I'm certainly open to having my mind changed. But I would say where this list, again, this list is made by the best historians in the world. Where this list, I disagree with. They list Franklin Roosevelt as number three. They have Woodrow Wilson as number 11. So essentially including him almost in the top 10, the top 11 presidents. They have James Knox Polk, not in the top 10.

59:01They have Calvin Coolidge as one of the worst presidents. I mentioned this. They have FDR as one of the best. Probably the only thing I really agree with, they have James Buchanan as the worst. James Buchanan was the president right before the Civil War. Probably the Civil War was, tension was so high, probably it's because he was basically a useless president. They have Warren Harding near the bottom. That is appropriate. They have Jimmy Carter a little too high. They have Herbert Hoover too low. I don't really blame the full depression on him. And I'm not gonna say more about recent presidents.

59:33I have my own opinions. If other people wanna share their list of recent presidents with me, they can. So in summary, I would say my top four presidents are Lincoln, George Washington, James Knox Polk, Calvin Coolidge. And it's on the latter two that I greatly disagree with this list. And to be honest, I kind of think most or all the other presidents of the United States have been horrible people and horrible leaders. But I do disagree with this list saying Franklin Roosevelt is number three, Woodrow Wilson is number 11. Woodrow Wilson is one of the worst racists in the past 150 years as a president.

1:00:12And there's other things I disagree with, obviously, but I don't even know who I would say is fifth. I would just say again, Lincoln, Washington, James Knox Polk, Calvin Coolidge. I encourage people to disagree with me or ask questions. Thank you for listening to this. Let me know if you enjoy this type of podcast. You can find me on Twitter at J Altucher and enjoy.

1:00:39Thank you.