Historically High - Benjamin Franklin

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

Benjamin Franklin was born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as one of 17 children. The future Founding Father became his brother's printing assistance at 12, in a form of familial slavery before escaping to Philadelphia. He got his first taste of the motherland during a trip to England in his teens. He loved the Empire, as was as loyal a subject as they came. Returning to the colonies he become wealthy running his own printing company before becoming a diplomat. Being sent back and forth to England to represent the concerns of the colonists. It was around this time he started to see the growing divide between those in the UK and those in the Americas. He fought for unity until there was no other option, and when it came time he chose the revolution. During the American War of Independence Ben Franklin was instrumental in gaining the support of France both in funding and manpower without either of which we wouldn't have won. He's the only with his name on the Declaration of Independence, The Treaty of Paris in which Britain recognized America as its own nation, and the United States Constitution. The Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hear ye, hear you. This is, uh, yeah, I don't think have we talked Founding Daddies? Founding Fathers. Fathers. There's only one founding daddy. I feel like this is founding Daddy.

It's him. It's him for more than one reason. Benjamin Franklin. This guy had quite a career, I got to say. Just he lived maybe three different lives, would you say, in one lifetime? Yes. And not saying like he lived three different like lives, as in like he had three different families or anything like that.

Well, the things that he did could have comprised somebody's very accomplished life. Yeah. And he did it three times over basically in three different facets. His first act as a printer that made him independently wealthy and able to do what he want, transitions into his second life of being this weird quasi kind of inventor, finder outer kind of person? We don't really know as far as what we're taught in school or just, you know, general history, anything really about Ben's life under the age of 45. We hear about the whole key thing, and that happens, I think, when he's 47, it's always depicted in pictures of him as like a real old man. And then the kid is like a very young kid when in actuality. He's like 46, 47. And his son is 21. But everything that we have really know about him or were normally taught happened after that when he went to go basically argue on behalf of the colonies at that point in London. When he came back,

American Revolution, his time over in France, and then when he comes back to help with like the declaration, the Constitution, all that kind of stuff, there's 47 years of history about how he even got himself into the position to be the guy that called on for all that stuff. Yeah, he's the one founding father that you can point to and say, hey, where were you during the American Revolution? And he's like, England, France, not on the continent that the,

continent that the fighting is happening on, but I am a revolutionary hero. He's the only hero that didn't have to be in the same continent to be able to be a hero. So somebody, what was the episode I was listening to? It might have been a documentary. It might have been a PBS one actually. But one of the professors that was talking

put it in a sense that George Washington is kind of that guy that is, he's the first American. Wouldn't you think of kind of about that first president everything. And the reason is because when you see George Washington, it reminds you, and you know your history, it reminds you of like, oh, the plucky upstart colonists, like beat off England and everything with both hands, and, you know, one, their independence. The reason that that's not Ben Franklin is because when you look at what Ben Franklin actually did and his contribution to

everything, it's still going to tie back to be like, yeah, oh, that's right, we wouldn't have won that without the French. And so there's this version of it that is completely like, hey, it was all, you know, George Washington. And you can't view despite probably should have being in, or should have, what am I trying to say, a person that should be in that number one founding father American progenitor role should be Benjamin Franklin. Well, I think it hurts Ben Franklin's stats against the founding fathers when he could be the grandfather of some of these other founding fathers.

He was so damn old. That's true. Like, it's, that's not the guy you want leading the continental army. He's the founding godfather is what he is. Pretty much. Yeah. Okay. Before we get too far into it, remember everybody, uh, Patreon.com slash historically high.

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We love adding new people into the Cush College here. We can't forget. Also, as progenitors of the Cush College, I am Professor Adam. Professor Chris has been tickling those ear hairs with that smooth, seductive voice of his. Yeah, when my mouth gets super dry and him. All right, well, without making you guys wait, let's get into the founding godfather himself, Benjamin Franklin.

I didn't get his middle name, but I saw you wrote down. It was really Jermaine? No, he didn't have a middle name. God damn it. Fuck. He didn't have one, so I had to throw it in there, and I just feel like Benjamin, Germain, Franklin sounds awesome. I'm also pretty high in Goldblow right now, so.

You know what? We can stick with it. I don't think Ben and mine. Ben was a bit of a leg puller himself. BJF? Yep. Born January 17th, 706. to Josiah and Abaya, Franklin, in Boston on Milk Street.

Josiah was born in England in 1657, married his first wife, Anne in 1677. They immigrated to Boston in 1883. So this is how the family goes from England to Boston, because at this point in time, we're not talking about in America, we're talking about a loosely affiliated group of colonies that don't really hate each other, but also aren't really. cool with each other. It's not Boston, Massachusetts. It's Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony.

And Josiah specialized in two things. He made two things. He made candles and he made love. Because this man had 17 children. Was it 10 with the first and seven with the other or vice versa? Flip them. Flip them. So seven with the first, 10 with the second.

Ben is the 15th of 17 kids. He's the eighth and final son. The 10th and final son. Or 10th and final son. He's the eighth one with him and his second wife. How do you have seven? I'm sorry, this is ridiculous. I understand wanting to like populate the colonies.

Ridiculous. And this was, okay, so he's born 15 years after the Salem Witch trials. It's not long ago. No. No. It was such a wild time back then because they immigrate to Boston in 1683. his wife ends up dying in, I believe...

Childbirth? I don't think it was childbirth. I think it was shortly after... Did her stuff just fall out after that many kids? She dies in 1689. He then meets and marries Abaya in that exact same year.

He said that she was a very chaste, virtuous young woman. Fuck off. Who, I mean, 10 kids is so fast to be able to get those out. But if you think about it, If they get married in 1677 and she ends up passing away in 1689, that's what, 12 years, so seven kids in 12 years? No, the second one you said was 10.

Yeah, the first one, though. If they got married in 1677, his first wife, and she dies in 1689, that's seven kids, what, seven times nine is 56? She spent 56 months pregnant. That's a long time. That's horrible. A long, long time. And then to buy him, 10 more children. That is so many children to be having.

Do you think he just picked him out by looking at their hips? Maybe. You're breeding stock. He had the first seven kids. He had a built-in daycare already. He had daycare workers with the first seven. He's looking to field his own militia, essentially. And he could have.

We'll talk about Boston at a point in time here. When Ben gets to Boston, there's 6,000 people in Boston. He had 17 kids in his family. There's no way were there like a hundred families in Boston? When he gets to Philadelphia. Or Philadelphia. Yeah. Yeah. How many

So many questions. We did get very stone before this, but so many questions already out of the gate. First of all, I understand light candles are the only source of light. This is pre-electricity, all that kind of stuff. That's going to come into play here in the episode. But I mean, how many candles

do you have to be making to support? like 17 kids. They said that the family was like a middle to upper class, not upper class, but like a middle class family. And did you see how they make the candles? Just the vats of like animal fat, and it's just the rack that holds by the wick.

It holds them, and they just dip it, and then they let it cool. And then they dip it, and they let it cool. And that's what Ben is doing as kind of an apprentice growing up to his father. He's like, I want you in the family business. That's not a Boston accent, so that's New York. But he's basically just like, great. I just have to be around hot animal fat all day long for the rest of my life.

It's a stinky proposition to have to be dealing with that. I mean, does it get better or worse? Because he was a fabric dyer when he was in England. And then he's an animal fat candelier when he's in Boston? I'll take the dye. Yeah. I mean, the smell is probably better, but the dyes back then would probably kill you pretty quick. That's fair.

They weren't using berries to die shit, I'm sure. Ben was a very studious boy, though. He had an appetite for reading. His family said that he was kind of the ringleader of the boys in the family. So being the youngest, it's funny to hear that he was kind of the mischievous one. But it's a good thing that he read a lot because his family had like two years worth of money for schooling for him. He ends up attending Boston Latin school. And part of this is his parents think that it's like,

a tribute to the church. I believe they were Presbyterian to put at least one of their boys into the priesthood. Unfortunately, the last boy that they haven't been is very rambunctious. He's very outspoken. You guys are either going to need to let me off the hook on this or have another boy. Yeah. Because it ain't going to be me. And the body was like, you're off.

You're done. We're good. You don't need to do this. So apparently they sent him to this Latin school when he was eight because his schooling ends at 10 years old. And like he said, evident pretty early on that he's not meant for the clergy. This is a situation where he's like, well, if you're not in, if you're not in school, son, you're going to need to get a job. So I get that you're not wanting to do the whole candle maker thing. So we'll have you start apprenticing for your brother James so he can

teach you the printing trade. And not only you're just going to apprentice for him, but you're basically going to be forced to sign into legally indentured servitude for your brother for nine years so you can learn this trade. And that was at 12, from 10 to 12, when his school ended, that's when he was the candle maker. Okay. So I'm sure when it came time to working for his brother in the printing shop, he's like, yeah, I'm ready to get out of here.

Yeah, and then his brother beats the shit out of him in the printing shop. I didn't put this together until now, but they said that right around the time that Big Ben was getting ready for his first voyage across the pond. He said that he was a pretty heavy vegetarian. Didn't eat a lot of meat. You think two years in the animal fat candle making factory kind of cured him of wanting to eat meat?

Maybe at that point in his life, because I do know when he gets older, he's got a problem with food. Yeah. I would imagine it took a few years to shake off coming in and just smelling like animal fat 24-7. Yeah, because it's not just, you're not just coming in and it's liquid.

You're going out and getting the chunks of animal fat, having to render them down and do all the shit to skim all the stuff off the top or whatever it is. So you have, because they're not just melting it down and then just be like, candles in. You got to like strain that shit and everything. He's probably not doing a lot of the dipping.

He's doing a lot of the shit work. I could see why he was a vegetarian for a time in his life. He shook that off, though, for sure. Yes. So he's an indentured servitude to his brother. And I don't know why they did this. it was something to make sure people didn't like waste time learning a trade and then like bail like a few years later and then you had to start all over again with an apprentice it still is insane that they're making ben do this to his brother and this thing was intended to last or was intended to last until he was 21 so luckily well not so much for james but for ben when um ben was 15 james founds the uh the new england new england current not current as in C-U-R-R-E-N-T.

It's spelled C-O-U-R-A-N-T, which is it supposed to be the same meaning, just a different spelling? This is probably like a color-color thing where the Brits throw the U in color. I like it. Let's go with that. So, starting when he's 16,

Ben gets this outlet that he's been kind of looking for because, again, you said he likes to read. He's really studious. Now, being in a print shop, he has access to all of the, these books. So from the age of 12 doing this, he's reading all these books, and he starts submitting essays to this newspaper, sliding them under the door when he's probably living upstairs, technically, or something, under the pen name of Silence Do Good, who is a middle-aged, newly

widowed woman, and is sending in her opinions of the day in a way that it is a middle-aged woman writing this. And I know that it sounds like, yeah, it should sound like that. It's a 16-year-old boy writing believably as a middle-aged widowed woman about like the events of the day. Ben didn't have a choice though, because his brother wouldn't let him write anything to put into the papers. So he had to try to hide under this silence do-good pen name. And he gets very popular, very quick. His brother was because I think he kind of exceeded pretty quickly his brother's capabilities

and he's still the apprentice but when he starts basically being like, no, you should do it this way or he's writing even better. His brothers is the one with the name on the letterhead. Yeah. He's not going to let Ben submit something that's better than anything that he's posting

in his own paper or whatnot. Like he's got to find a way around this and yeah, writing as a middle age woman in Boston. Middle age Boston woman. That is getting responses into the paper saying that there are men that would marry silence. And other contributors. And other contributors that are having their stuff printer, like, this is good. This woman's good. And it's this mystery around Boston. Like, who's this woman? Yeah, it turns out this woman's Benjamin Franklin. Ben had a very interesting kind of profound way that he

would go through. And he talks about this. in his autobiography. But basically he would read the equivalent of like an article or a paper or something like that. And he would pull out certain points that he wanted to try to remember. Then he would put that article away. He'd set it down for a week. He would come back to those certain points that he wanted to hit. And he would try to write a persuasive article using those same points.

And then he would go back and set it next to the article that he had just read and try to see if he could figure out almost not how to copy that language, but he could copy the writing style. Gotcha. So he was training himself at a pretty young age to be able to write in a very flowery. Like prose. He had different types of prose that he could write in. Is that the right word for that? No idea. He knew how to copy writing styles. And it's interesting, I don't know if maybe he had read some older lady literature or something like that. He heard his mother talking about just this stuff. She complained about me.

I was like, I'm just going to log that in. Yeah, they kept wondering why she, silence was pregnant every other letter. She had 10 kids. She was grumpy. She had a lot to complain about. He wrote 14 letters in all and that got, you know, submitted and put into the paper. He ends up eventually getting found out. And James was pissed when it happens.

But can't really get pissed off because he's got trouble with the law. James does. And ends up going. to jail over insulting the colonial government. Twice. Yeah, the first time. While he was in there the first time,

Ben took over the print shop, but it was still in James's name. So Ben was basically running the show, but learning how to run a print shop, which he was even more successful than James was, but then James gets arrested again in 1723 for mocking religion

and the clergy. And at that point, they're like, you can kind of complain about the government definitely can't complain about the church you're banned from publishing and so as a loophole he secretly cancels Ben's indentured contract

and then puts the printing company under Ben's name which means and then signs of do another contract and then but I don't think the other contract could have held up right I have no idea how indentured servant contracts

worked, but he wanted to keep him around because it was very clear at this point that James couldn't keep publishing his own work. No. He was very bad at writing these things. I don't think he told Ben that he had canceled. I don't know Ben knew enough about that whole indentured thing to basically know that in order for him to have his name put on the print shop, he couldn't be an apprentice. I just don't think that's something James told him.

He's just like, your name's on it now, but you're still definitely an indentured servitude. I did indentured servitude's a very interesting thought to me I don't like it obviously just because it doesn't sound good but it's a family member I don't like it at all but it's the weirdest concept that it's a family member

yeah Colonial America's fucked up man it is after a couple beatings that Ben took from James as well as just basically saving James's ass on a pretty regular basis Ben's had enough of a shit

Ben knows that he still has, I believe it was like four years left on this indentured servitude contract that he had signed. He ends up selling a lot of his books, a lot of his own personal effects, and ends up jumping a ship leaving Boston. In order to board this ship, he tells the ship's captain that he has gotten a woman pregnant, gotten a girl pregnant, and that her friends are going to force him into a marriage that he doesn't want to have in order to not have a bastard child. I know how that goes, kid, welcome aboard. He's like, yeah, that checks out. That's why I'm a captain. Yeah.

That's why a captain this ship is to run from my baby mama's. This ship ends up taking him from Boston all the way down to New York City. As he lands in New York, he becomes friends with a printer there named William Bradford. Bradford, who doesn't have a spot in his print shop. He's the only printer in New York City. This, it's so weird to me to think that there was just like at a time, one printer in all of New York City. That's nuts, right. Bradford doesn't have a spot in his print shop, but he says, oh, well, I do have a son named Andrew that lives in Philadelphia.

He just opened up a print shop there. I'm sure he would have a position for a junior printer for you. So, Ben keeps the tour going into Philadelphia, and Bradford doesn't have a position for him. Him and Bradford get in this very interesting rivalry because not only is Andrew Bradford, I forgot his newspaper, he reads a printer. He also becomes the Postmaster General for Pennsylvania at this point in time too. So he has a leg up in the news printing business because as a postmaster, he's the one seeing all the letters and the news first. I can also make sure that my periodicals have priority and are the ones that are pushed out for delivery or for people subscribing to it.

Yeah. Yeah, I'll only disseminate my paper. definitely can't enrich yourself in that position. Bit of a conflict of interest for sure. He did find work with a competitor named Samuel Kimer, though. Printer ended up working for the local government. Ben keeps kind of falling into these good situations, but it's not that he falls into them.

At a very young age, he talks about in his autobiography, how his father would always invite people over for dinner. Now, I can't imagine how many people sat at this table for dinner with all of the children and why you would want to voluntarily go over and hang out with this guy. Can you pass the peas? What? Josiah, there's nine children at the table.

Could you maybe wrap it up or pull out of her or something? Just get this fixed. But he said that he was always really enthralled by the conversation. He loved hearing adults talk and grown-ups talk about the times of the day. So just because he grew up with that, he was a very personable boy. I think they also, like, presented, like, arguments or talking points that they also wanted, like, the kids to get it on. Yeah. To get them just used to having oratory skills, basically.

Oh, and so much of this, it reminds me, like, when we were talking about Vesuvius and the town. Oh, the other town? Not Herculane. Pompeii, yes. And how they found all those frescoes on the wall. And we learned that the frescoes on the wall serve two purposes. They look great and they were awesome decoration. But at the same time, you would go over to these people's houses and you would have discussions about the frescoes on the wall and kind of get into this little, this, what does it mean?

Who are these people? All that kind of stuff. Well, he's doing her from behind. Yeah. So it's, you know. It was their form of entertainment. And fast forward all the way up to the, what, 18th century at this point in time, still no TV. Still no other entertainment.

Newspaper is how you get your information and how you get your, yeah. But you're also, you're reliant on conversation. Yeah. And that's what makes Ben such a good conversationalist, enough to where he actually ends up meeting the governor of Pennsylvania, Sir William Keith. And Sir William Keith is taken by this boy. He believes that he should be starting his own print shop. And he says, I will write you a letter back to your children or back to your parent's son. I will excuse you from running away from your brother.

And I will urge them to purchase you a printing press. and some typeface on the double so you can start your own print shop. Saying that is just a really weird series of events. So, and sorry, right before that. So when he first gets there, that's when he meets Deborah Reed.

Oh, yeah. So he ends up meeting Deborah Reed, who will end up becoming Deborah Franklin, but meets her, like, kind of right when he gets into Philadelphia, starts working at a couple of print shops, and then through working at the print shop, it's just a weird thing to say,

while he was working at the print shop, that's like saying while he was working at Kinkos. He met the governor. He ends up meeting the governor who sees his work ethic, talks to him a little bit, sees that this is a very talented young man, and then the governor is just like, listen, you should open up your own print shop.

I'm going to give you a piece of paper here. You're going to go to London. You're going to go ahead and buy some printing. You are going to go sale for a month to go buy some printing equipment. I'm going to give you my credit card. And then you're going to sail back with said printing equipment for two months, and then you're going to set up shop here.

And he's just like, you're the governor, man. Of course I'm going to do that. Of course I believe that you're good for that. Did you see anything about his first night in Philadelphia? His time Philadelphia is fascinated. Did you see anything about his first day in Philadelphia? Wasn't he just like on the docks like broke? So he gets off the boat.

He had, it was like a piece of copper and then like some sort of a Dutch coin. and he said that he gave the piece of copper to the people on the boat for bringing him to New York who weren't going to charge him because he helped row some of the way to New York from Boston. He gets into town, he uses the whatever the Dutch coin was, to buy three rolls of bread.

And then as he's walking down the street, he just sees all of these people walking in one single directions. I was like, well, fuck, I guess if everybody's going that way, I'll follow him. they file into this church and it's a Quaker church and they do like silent prayers and all that kind of stuff so he sits down on this pew and sees everybody around him with their heads down saying these prayers Ben just falls asleep

Ben just passes out inside of this Quaker church yeah and he said that he knew when it was time to leave the church when the service was over because somebody shook him awake and told him to get out of there so his first like introduction to Boston is just walking into this church, following this group of people, and then just passing out while everybody's having a church service. He had a long boat ride, man.

He had a row. He did for sure. So yeah, his letter to his parents doesn't get answered. William says, well, if they're not going to fund you, I will fund you. Go down to the docks, jump on a boat, head over to England. The day comes, and Ben's like, no letter. What am I supposed to do with this? I don't have a letter of credit.

I don't know anything else. Everything will work itself out on the boat. He says, get on the boat. I will send you a letter on the boat. You will check the boat's mail. And there will be these two letters. A couple days go by on the boat. He goes up to the captain.

He goes, hey, I need to check out the mail. I have a letter coming from the governor, William Keith. Everybody starts laughing. And he's like, what's so funny? And they go, the governor of Pennsylvania did not write you a letter. I can promise you that. William Keith has never made a promise to anybody that he's kept. And the letters aren't there.

But it's here's the thing it the unbelievable thing isn't that like yeah sure kid you got a letter from the governor No it's no the governor is so Well known as a dude that doesn't keep his word and just says shit that there's not a letter and we know that There's there's no choice or there's no chance at this point so there's gonna be no introduction when he gets to England or gets to London To get this printing equipment no line of credit no nothing. Oh and prior to this is you were talking about. I heard this a couple times.

I heard a story about him walking on the street and seeing Debra. I also heard that his landlord in Philadelphia was a woman

who had Debra as a daughter. He has this penchant for dating landlady's daughters. Him and Deborah were pretty close

to get married though. You know, they'd like about these landlady's daughters. They keep getting younger.

I keep getting older and they stay the same age. They were planning on getting married. but her mother, Deborah's mother, had just recently lost her husband and Ben's plans for a future

included going over to London and getting a printer and typeface, bringing it back over. Listen, Mrs. Reed, it's fine. The governor told me he's going to do it. She's like, don't tell me what the governor told you. The governor said a lot of things. The governor's full of shit, dude. So they end up not getting married.

Deborah leads a pretty wild life while Ben's gone. on his journey he ends up meeting this friend named James Ralph and he also meets another Quaker merchant named Thomas Denham and Denham is kind of the guy who fully explains to Ben that Governor Keith is just a seven-layer dipshit as they land in England him and James Ralph become pretty fast friends

James isn't able to find a job but Franklin ends up finding work in a print shop as a typesetter they end up kind of living off of Ben's salary having the time of their lives in London. This is a kid who's coming from the colonies who, I mean, arguably Boston, New York City, Philadelphia. If you say any of those three cities now, you're like, holy shit, you've been to big cities. Yeah. But now he's going from those big cities, quote unquote, to London. He's going to the center of the motherland, father home, whatever you want to call it.

I was trying to kind of think about this. So this is at a point when there are a few generations, I think, that have been born within, you know, maybe one generation, two generations that have been born in the new world. Ooh, isn't it like 1620? So. A century's worth? Almost. What do they consider a generation? 20 years, 30 years?

Yeah, back then, a generation could have been 15 years. Let's go four generations just for, okay. So there are people that. are only, they've only ever known many people that have only ever known the colonies. They've never been to the place that is, the place that technically owns and that like all of these other people around you's families have come from. Yeah. I don't know. That's very weird for me to think about because I don't get that concept. That's like in, in the states, that's like saying my whole family's from this state and then we moved over to this other state. And you're like,

but I can pretty easily go visit that other state if I needed to. Yeah. This is a monthly long sea voyage that's not free and it's not exactly super I mean it's safer at this point but still a lot of shit can happen and you're like an 18 year old kid that you're now getting to go to the city

that you've heard about of just being the pinnacle of the empire and of civilization and you just show up and you're kind of broke but you're just like holy shit I'm here in London we're gonna party that's yeah

That's what I'm saying because that's what they ended up doing. He ends up getting a job. Surprise, surprise. He uses his skills as a printer. And that's the other thing, too. This is a pretty, you know, sought after skill set. So he's able to find work at these places when he goes over. Well, the wild thing, too, is it's not like he was trained.

He just worked in print shops in the colonies, which there were a handful of. And then went back to London where there's probably hundreds of these print shops. Welcome to the league, kid. Yeah. Welcome to the bigs. And you're great. James was escaping the new world and the colonies from his wife and his family

and decided to start over James had ended up taken up with a woman in London and it turns out that Ben took a liking to her as well And one day... Different James than his brother. Yeah, James Ralph. Okay.

This is, I will call him Ralph because Ralph's just a fun name to say. King Ralph. Ralph had started dating this girl And one day, Ben came over to get a hold of Ralph and Ralph wasn't there. And Ben realized that he had an opening for this woman and he ended up trying to make a move on her. Thought he had an opening for this woman. He tried to make a move on her.

That ends up just ending in sad rejection where him and Ralph end up splitting. But the friendship that he made on the boat along with Ralph was Thomas Denham. And Denham was a hell of a businessman. in. He was a very, very good worker. He instilled a lot of these core values inside of Ben because he saw just how successful denim was. Ben gets this work as a typesetter. And I still, for some reason, I didn't Google this enough. But I believe a typesetter is the man who actually sets the plates of the letters into the typeset. Yeah, I mean that, yeah, I think those, because the typesetter now in an actual typewriter, yes, they still exist, is the thing that just like clicks up and hits the, or whatever you want to say. That's got to be.

There used to be a manual types that are just like there was a manual loom or weaver or something like that. Or sower, now it's a sewing machine. But yeah, there was somebody that was like had to build the tiny little metal slide. And that's why when you look at an old newspaper, some of the letters are kind of staggered. and everything because nothing was a perfect fit because all of this stuff is little metal pieces that are having to be handcrafted and you just have to slide them

into the things, then slide the page under because I wonder how many those you could get on one sheet, probably not a ton. Or was it just a flat against the plate and then pull back? Yeah, I don't know. We didn't look into 18th century type setting enough.

I guess no one was at the point when they had to have the big rod and you had to pull it and press the thing down really hard. But I would imagine you're probably bright that it was on the flat and then you would paint ink over it and then you would take the paper smash it down on it and god and then then to hang each page to dry an arduous job if you have a thousand words on the front page and you have to put in whatever six seven thousand letters oh my god think of you fucked up everybody's gonna know everybody's gonna know everybody's gonna know

So it's a very, very important job, and he does really, really well at this. Denham was headed back to Philadelphia. Ben was right around this time of return. He spent two years. Is that how long the first voyage was? Yeah, he wasn't over there for long, but he ends up kind of coming back with this renewed purpose of saying, I kind of messed around for the few years that I was there and everything. I sewed my wild oats all over town.

and he kind of is factoring when he gets back. He's like, what am I going to do when I get back? And this is when he first writes down his like, how many virtues is it? 12. 12 virtues. It starts out as 12. Yeah. Well, part of this is because he sees the way that Denham leaves.

Denham says, hey, I'll loan you the money to head back to Philadelphia. When you get back, I would like to hire you as my clerk, shopkeeper, bookkeeper. But before we go, come to this dinner. and all of these creditors that Denham had lined up in England show up to this dinner. And Denham has this way of thanking everybody where he goes, everybody lift up your plates. And underneath everybody's plates, there's envelopes with all of the money that Denham owed all of these creditors paid back in full.

Such a baller move. Yeah. Because you're basically all of these people are showing up. And at first you're thinking, there's a lot of people here. He owes money to a lot of people. But then it's like a way of just like success busting all over. everybody when you're just like everyone at the same time witness that I'm paying you all back

at the same time and I owe none of you any money anymore. This is Oprah saying look under your chairs. Yes. But he starts to get all these different virtues just from what he's learned and it starts out as 12. It will grow to 13 with kind of one final. These aren't earth shattering, innovative virtues or anything. He's just trying to make a list of how he wants to kind of go about living his life. They refer to temperance. I'm not going to read them all because there's 12 of them.

Temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, which is hilarious. And finally, he ends up coming back and he shares these virtues with one of his Quaker friends. He did just read all of them. The actual

like, the meanings behind to each one of them because they were all pretty insane. With our powers combined, we are Captain Virtue. Yep. And he gets back to Philadelphia. He's sharing this list of virtues that he finds with a Quaker friend, and he goes, you forgot one, Ben. Ben goes, what is it?

And he goes, humility. He goes, ah, yes, humility will be my third and virtue. Yeah, I'll add that in later. But he also kept this kind of crazy little notebook where each week he would try to work on one of these different virtues, and he would basically chart all this. And I told you as we were studying this week, Ben feels a little bit like a tryhard.

I do believe, though, that probably comes from us looking at all of his writings and him probably having some belief in his life that none of this was ever going to see the light of day. So his own personal writings kind of made him come off as a little bit of a tryhard, but again, this was him writing for his own purpose. This wasn't him writing for the world to see.

His dirty writing is so good. The writings that he does when he's in France are so good. Well, that's silence. That's probably silence do good. Oh, no, no, no. This has been writing to all of the women of like the French court and French aristocracy and everything. These women were silent, one of these women were silences age. So he's like, what would silence want for the dirty talk?

What would get silence off? Oh, yeah. How would I seduce silence do good? As they come back to Philadelphia, like I say, he ends up going to work for denim. They return in 1726, so Ben is 20-ish years old at this point in time. And he begins to crave this kind of salon atmosphere that he encountered in England inside of these coffee shops. And he starts to put together this group that he created a group of like-minded artisans and trademen who hope to improve themselves while they improve their community. he witnesses the enlightenment in all of these coffee shops in London.

He sees all of these people. And the enlightenment is basically where the shift was kind of put from solely a focus on divine creation, all that kind of stuff. Divine answers for all the tough questions where it was more of a logic, science, all that stuff could start being explained in manners where there was a logical reason for things. People were just, they were, you had the Protestant Reformation that had happened. You had Martin Luther come in, and people were turning away from the church for the answers to all of the worldly things. Because those fucking Borgias. Well, that and Henry. But yeah.

So all of a sudden, Ben is like, I want to kind of introduce and see if I can bring. Because the Enlightenment has to travel. Because remember French, like the Italian Enlightenment and everything like that happens at different times. It kind of works its way up. And he forms this Junto to basically try to. recreate this enlightenment-esque, like, feeling or part of society that he really, like, latched onto in England. I would say it's a pretty interesting mix because it's not just artisans.

It's tradesmen. So it's, you have to assume that this isn't just, like, philosophical debate. These are, like, blue-collar tradesmen in there who are probably discussing their craft and how they want to improve their businesses. it's not only just where you get together and ask why, it's kind of a conglomeration of skills that can be passed to, and again, to improve their community. Like a practical enlightenment.

Yeah. Yeah. Not so much like an intellectual enlightenment as an actual practical enlightenment. Well, one of the problems that the Junto faced were books were pretty scarce, and they were also very, very expensive. And so if you're talking about, well, Voltaire said this and this reading In 90% of rooms like

We don't own Voltaire You know how hard it is You found that book in England motherfucker I was gonna It's only a listen The third person in the room Has read that book Like it's only made its way around

And so he's having to pass out his books And just like to different people Yeah so since books were scarce They all agreed to start pooling their books together They pooled their money together To buy books that they could put in a common place and this would end up giving birth to something called the library company of Philadelphia. It was chartered in 1731 by Ben himself.

This is the first public for rent book library in the Americas. Yeah. Which is insane to think about that like at some point the thought was just like, we should have a place where we just have all the books people could possibly read because I mean that would be good for education for everybody. And we'll just like charge them a rental fee. and then we'll use that rental fee to buy more copies and more different books. Or, yeah, replace the ones if something happens to them.

And we'll charge late fees. He invented the library and the late fee all at the exact same time. But if you're trying to build this Junto and you're trying to build a smarter society, if everybody's drawing from the same pool of knowledge with these books, it's going to be a lot easier to have these conversations. You're going to get people that read the same passage and have a different outlook on it. It just spurs more conversation. It's like you're waiting for your friend to finish a TV series that you recommended.

And you're like, just finish this when you fucking talk about it. Are you done yet? I just want to ask what you think of the ending. But it's so crazy. Ben gets credited with so much stuff. And on the inventing side that we're going to talk about a little bit later, it's great, it's awesome, it's fantastic. Ben is a pretty brilliant mind.

But there's a lot of works that Ben does for, the community that really stand out in my mind is something where Ben's just a, he's a loving, caring person. He cares more about the many than he does just about educating the few. Yeah. 1728, he sets up a printing house in partnership with a guy named Hugh Meredith, and in 1929 becomes the publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette in Philadelphia. They had to set this up because denim died. did not leave a single thing to try to help Ben out. So when you say he pairs up with Meredith,

they end up buying the newspaper that he had worked for before from, from Samuel Kimer, who was going out of business. The newspaper wasn't doing well. Did you see its name? It had like a 13 word name. You're spending all of your advertising space on just the name of the paper.

They had typesetters that were blowing out shoulders just trying to set up the number. name on the paper. It was like the discovery of science and all this other stuff and then it was like the Philadelphia or the Pennsylvania Gazette. Yeah. So you cut that down to the Pennsylvania Gazette and him and Meredith get into business

and they turn this all around and they turn this all around because it gives Ben this outlet for all these various grievances that he has with all of these local issues. He finally has a way to instead of sitting in this honto, this salon and talking about all this stuff, he has a way to reach

the masses with all of his beliefs, all of his grievances, all his problems. I wonder if he was a little concerned about maybe bad-mouthing anybody after what happened to his brother. But also, he's in a different city. I don't necessarily know if it was against, like, the government or that kind of stuff, but he wrote it in such a way. And here's the thing, too, he was such a, you know, much more talented writer than his brother. His brother is probably just like, you'll fuck the church. And that's how it read. I'm not saying exactly. But in comparison to how Ben could put it in a satirical form or something like that, it could be much more well read or better, you know, worded that it

doesn't come off just so blatantly obvious. And they talked about how- Tongue and cheeks type stuff. Yeah. They talked about how great of a writer Ben is. I listened to three hours of his autobiography, and it's too flowery for me. Like, when we were trying to figure out Shakespeare and stuff like that and read that, it's the same way.

but I like the fact that when he writes the dirty shit when he's in France, he does it in such a flowery way, but like very mischievous and everything, but it's so clear what he's saying. Yeah. Yeah, he's not coming out and saying that he wants to lick the hole, but he's strongly...

And then they say you should multiply. And I've offered many times to show you how to do that. 30 boy. Along with this paper, plan that they go with with the Pennsylvania Gazette 1732 and this is just jumping head a little bit for this little blurb here

he publishes the first German newspaper in America di Philadelphia Zintong and this would only last a year because there were like four other German papers that went online in Pennsylvania

it turns out that just because he knows how to say the Philadelphia Gazette in German doesn't mean that he's going to reach the German people. Oh, look who the new boy is in the German news game. See, he gets wiped out within a year on this German kind of paper, but it's also pretty interesting. Like the fact that that's what he reaches out for.

Like, like, a huge German population. Yeah. But he's looking at the population of purchasers. He's like, we should provide something for all these Germans. He came into a market that was already flooded. Yeah. Well, I think they all started after him, and they were just so much better. He had the first and then the four came and they all were actually German.

You're using too much humor. We Germans don't get it. We don't laugh. We are very serious people. This is also where he starts to kind of understand that his public image is very important as well. But not to have an image of like austerity, but to have an image of like a hard worker and more of kind of just the normal guy. So he could just hire someone and he has the means to do it for this. this, you know, print shopper this newspaper to go and get like the supplies and the paper and all that

kind of stuff and just bring it to the shop. But he is, um, purposely seen going and getting it. They said the wheel barrel that he had that he would just walk down the street with. He'd always be wearing his leather apron. He would never oil the wheel of the wheel barrel. So it would make a squeaking sound so we would draw attention. And people would be like, there's that Franklin boy. Like, look at him. It's just an industrial side. And because he did this and he was constantly being seen by all these other businesses that he walked past. He got deals on like where books would go ahead and do their printing and things like that. And he ends up getting selected to actually print the currency for Pennsylvania.

It sounds like a tryhard move again. But at the same time, it works. Yeah, but you're not going to oil the wheel. He's hustling. You're not going to oil the wheel on your wheelbarrow. Come on. Just so you get to squeak in the love. You know why I like it?

Because it's like little clever shit like that. Sure, he's a tryhard, but he's not being like in your feet. face about it. He's like, if I don't oil this, people will turn and look and see me doing this. He's still doing the work. Yeah, he's not happy about it. No, but he understands that he's putting in the work. It's the image that he's putting forward. Yeah, you're right. It's extremely successful. It's very successful and it leads the Philadelphia Gazette or the, yeah, the Philadelphia Gazette, I believe. Yeah, not the Pennsylvania. But it leads to this bigger business. It leads to kind of where, William...

It was the Pennsylvania Gazette. You had it right. Yeah. Oh, is it Pennsylvania or Philadelphia Gazette? It's the Pennsylvania Gazette. God damn. It was in Philadelphia. That's why it's confusing.

They're so, so close to each other. He's working with the government. I don't know if Keith is still in power at this point in time, but I wonder if he ran into the governor Keith again. He's like, hey, fucker. Nope, that guy only gets away for line for so long, not giving backing up his promises.

He'll think he's still in power there. but he has to get everything in order. He begins to rekindle this romance with Debbie in 1830. 1730. 1730. Jesus. I wrote 19 stuff so often during research for this. In the time that Ben went away and kind of made himself into a person,

Debbie had married this man named John Rogers. And John Rogers was just a lifetime loser. He stole her dowry. He ran up a bunch of other debt with that. enough so that he stole a slave and fled to the British West Indies. He ran to Barbados with the dowry. I'm not laughing because that's not funny. That's horrible.

It's horrible. But because that happened, Debbie was available for bed when he came back. Well, I think this wasn't as uncommon because the guy that they bought the paper from, Khyman, he took the money from the paper and didn't pay any of his debtors. and just fled to Barbados too. So that was like the back door out of Philadelphia. He was like, well, if I run up enough debt, I can just flee to Barbados.

I just have to have enough money. It's like this you want to Nihull off of like, yeah, it's the place you go off of Shawshank. We always talk about this. There's so much of the stuff back there where it's like, everybody could be a killer back then because all you had to do was kill somebody and then just move like three towns away.

Yeah. And there's is like. And Barbados sounds fucking awesome. Yeah. Yeah. You're really going to be bummed about jumping ship out of Philadelphia. I just need to steal enough money to get myself set up in Barbados. So he ends up, which is because she's technically still married to him because they don't know if he's dead or not.

They have to be common law married in 1730. Biggamy, man. Biggamy is a crime. I know it is. But what I'm saying is it's not even to where they can be like, he abandons her. Yeah. And leaves him they're like, but you're still married. She's like, the fuck!

He's got a bunch of debts. He stole the slave and he ran away and worked. going to still... But we don't know he's dead. So you're still technically married. The weird part about that too is they got common law married and bigamy was against the law. So bigamy was against the law in a religious sense, but

not a common law sense. I mean, they mentioned it during every podcast. Yeah, no, I think it's right, but that just shows you how strong of an influence the church had was the church couldn't recognize two marriages. But we'll common law marry you. Yeah.

there's a surprise in this common law marriage too there is a surprise in this common law marriage real quick before i get at the surprise um this was also around the time because it was 1730 when they got common law married 1730 to 1731 this is when ben is initiated into the freemasons and just to kind of knock out his freemason stuff because it's not going to be a huge focal point that's on the next board okay oh i was just going to say what he became and where oh that's also at the point where they do the hazing thing I forgot about, okay, I will hold off on that for a second of them. Okay. Yes, February 20th, 1970. Benji had an illegitimate son named William who nobody knows who the mother is or anything, but he ends up acknowledging and he lives with Debbie and himself. She is not nice to him.

No. William born February 22nd, 1736. Debbie married September 1st, 1730, wait, 1730, not 1736. Debbie married September 1st, 1730. So what? He's seven months old when Ben and Debbie get married. Yeah. There's no way to try to play it off that this is like impregnated, got married.

You know, there's always going to be theories about stuff. Part of it is that they, it was actually might have been Debbie's or something like that. I don't know how the timing would have worked out at his exact age, but that because he had to acknowledge it. was better for that kid to be a natural or illegitimate kid than to be considered a bastard or something like that. I'm not sure how that goes. But the fact that she was not nice to him makes me think he was sticking it in some other lady. Yeah, well, that and William was just kind of a bastard. William is a bastard man.

Yes, but listen, you're saying because of how he becomes an adult and what he does, I'm sure he was a nice kid. This woman was just mean to a kid. They had two children amongst themselves. Francis, who died at age four of smallpox. This haunts been for most of his life because apparently there was a smallpox inoculation and he just kept putting it off and never gave it to his son. Yeah, this haunts him for the rest of his life. And I don't, the grief that you would feel for that has got to be insane.

There are some other kind of theories because we're going to talk about it later in life. He's away from home a lot. he's away from home when Debbie gets ill and everything. And there's been some talk about the potential that these delays that he was having, whether they be legit or, you know, incorrect, that he blamed Debbie for some reason for putting off the inoculation or something of that nature. I don't know if that's true or not. I don't know if that's just simply tied to the fact that he was away from home a lot and everything like that.

Or if there is, you know, it could go either way. Yeah, at the end of the day, Ben could still try to figure out some time to jab his baby with a needle. Well, and at the, exactly. And at the same time, the letters that they write back to each other back and forth don't sound like two people who, or from Ben, anyway, from someone wanting to try to stay away from somebody. No. Just somebody that has a duty that's just like, it's a fucking, he gets tunnel vision. And until something is complete, until something is done, nothing else exists. Well, they were always very cold.

cordial in their letters. They seem to care about each other at least somewhat. They also had Sarah, who was their daughter. She would end up living, outliving Ben, thankfully, and not dying of, not getting inoculated. Yeah, like you said, Debbie just wasn't good to William. She raised him as her own, but she raised him in a way to where he probably didn't want to be raised that way as her own, because she just picked on him. Well, yeah, like she, she raised him instead of raised him as her own, she raised him like she wanted him disowned. Yeah, she never came out and was like,

you're not my kid, though, I don't. Maybe, I don't know. Oh, yeah, I'm sure at some point that that was mentioned, because he was recognized. He wasn't, like, claimed as Debbie's kid. So I think there was probably a lot of, a lot of animosity there. It was kind of around 1932, I believe, or a little bit after.

He begins publishing this thing called Poor Richard's Alman. 1732. We're real bad at this. Before we get into Richard, let's get to this. Let's go to the bathroom, take a bathroom break, and then let's jump into the Masonic stuff? Okay. Well, hello. Listen, while we head to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content.

I mean, come on, you deserve it. If you want to keep up with this, our main source of social media is going to be our Instagram, which is Historically High Pod, P-O-D. You can also head over to its Twitter, it's X, it's Twitter, come on, at historically high, and that's high, H-I-like, high. If you have any recommendations, you want to get to us, just want to reach out and say hello, you can hit us up on our email at Historically High Podcast, H-I-E-E-L-E-A-H-E. G-H podcast at gmail.com. All right. And with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. All right.

Ben and the Freemasons. That might be one of my favorite episodes that we've done. I really, really enjoyed doing the Freemasons. And this is just another founding father. The founding daddy was himself a Freemason. The reason that he begins his journey with the Freemasons is because he writes an article about the secret of names. of the Freemasons. He was courting them kind of. I know. And I think he knew how to get their attention.

So he was basically, because he wrote it once he was in or out of the Freemasons. He wrote it before. This was how they got into contact. That's what I'm saying. So he basically is like, I want to be a Freemason. I feel like I don't know who is a Freemason, but I think if I write about the Freemasons, the Freemasons will approach me. And then once they talk to me, they're going to see how awesome I am. They're going to want me to be a Freemason. So yeah, February 1731 Ben's initiated into the Freemasonry at St. John's Lodge

in Philly. This essay that he ends up writing afterwards is called the secret nature of the Mason. So this is after he becomes a Mason to be able to write about kind of not necessarily

how the masons operate but just about how secret their organization is. Yeah. And it draws a lot of eyes to the masons and this is a pretty good play by the masons as well because ben's establishing himself as the preeminent newspaper out of the like two newspapers that are competing in pennsylvania at the time well and i mean his rise during like his time with the free because he's a freemason for

the rest of his life yeah but i mean 30 to 31 i think that's when he's initiated into it somewhere in that range becomes a grandmaster in 1734 so three years maybe four sounds like maybe they pushed him. I do think, but he also, and I think we talked about this, like the tunnel vision thing when he had something in front of him, he just went for it.

And he loved reading. And here's the other thing. At this time, how many degrees do you think it took you to get to Groundmaster? Because wasn't this at a time when there were only a certain number degrees? I think it was like 16 or 32, 35.

I thought there were more added on. We're going to have to kind of go back and look at that. But Grandmaster 19, or sorry, I see that I just did it, 1734, then serves as the secretary of the St. John's Lodge in Philly from 35 to 38. So, I mean, he's really active with the Freemasons during that time frame. And then again, he's always a Freemason for the rest of his life.

Yeah, the same year that he becomes Grand Master, he prints the first Masonic book printed in America called the Constitutions of the Freemasons. So he's not only adding to the stature of the Freemasons, but they also now have a publisher that they can print to start handing out to other masons. That's a good point. Pretty good deal they got going there. 1736, Ben Franklin creates the Union Fire Company, one of the first volunteer fire companies in America. He also, in that same year, prints this new anti-counterfeiting type currency

for New Jersey. So now he's not only doing the currency in Pennsylvania, he's also doing the currency for New Jersey. So he's spreading out his work to these other colonies. He was a major advocate for the use of paper money, which is kind of funny because we ended up throwing Ben Franklin on the $100 bill, of course, but we also ended up making a Ben Franklin 50 cent piece. So he was an advocate for paper money.

We're like, yeah, fuck it. We'll give him the $100 bill, but we also want to put him on a coin too. I want to be on a piece of currency that people will roll up one day and snort cocaine through. Yeah. I mean, you can do that with any paper currency, but, you know, at least show them in some respect. Use a hundred-de-fifty. Fifty-first, hundred-second, and it's just the sheer volume of it can only touch so many hands as opposed to like a $1 bill. They can go through a billion hands. Oh, God. What do they say percentage-wise, like $100 bills have cocaine residue? It's like 98% of of all paper currency.

Really? Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot that has cocaine residue. Only in America, baby. Yep. Yep. Thank you, South America. 1743,

he founds the American philosophical society to help scientific men discuss their discoveries and theories. He just continues to add to the greater good of the population.

You have a volunteer fire company to go save houses that are primarily all just made of wood. These are basically cities full of stacked up tinder one next to the other. Well, do you remember what the method was for firefighting? Wasn't it, uh, brigade lines or? No, it was we don't fight the fire of the building that's actually on fire. We just make sure that the buildings next to it don't burn down. Because if a lightning strike had occurred and it had set that house on fire,

Someone in that house had sinned, and that's why God struck the house with lightning and caused the fire. We're not going to put out that fire because that would be going against the will of... I'm being serious when I tell you this. We're going against the will of God because he wanted that house to burn down. We just have to make sure the ones next to it don't. Tough deal. Tough deal to not be able to. What'd you do, Johnson?

What'd you do to piss God off? You guys have buckets of water. Just throw it on the fuck. Not you sin. It's still. so small. It's just the roof. I called you guys 30 seconds ago. Come on. He's, yeah, like I say, he's lining up these accolades. He gets the American Philosophical Society, which is still around today. From 1743 to today, they're still putting out publications.

1744 during King George's War, which was a part of the French and Indian Wars, Ben ends up raising a militia named the association for general defense because the city of Philadelphia just didn't care. They just didn't take any action. And this is, again, if you've gone back, listen to the episode on King Phillips War. This one's King George's War.

King George. Oh, wait. What was King? King Phillips War was the one that happened. No, no, I know that was King Phillips. Oh, that happened much earlier. Yeah, King George's, that was Massachusetts Bay Colony. that was the Narragansett

Yes, what was King George's War King George's War was a part of the French and Indian War Oh, gotcha, okay So it was one of those skirmishes that happened Okay Which we haven't covered the French and Indian War We haven't covered the seven years war We'll get to them for sure

But I mean he covers what? Like 50 cannons? He buys like 50 cannons Which is crazy that you were just like Hey guys You just show with 50 cannons It was probably the easiest thing to teach people how to use to?

Because you're not to cite it. Doing that wrong is very costly. It is, but to cite in a cannon, you're not trying to get a pinpoint aim with a rifle or anything like that. And it's enough of a bluster to just keep people at a distance. Not they're using balls, man.

Oh, Grapeshot, yeah. No, even just regular cannon balls. Like, if you're not using Grape shot, Grape shot is what came out as the little balls that would get a shotgun. But if you're firing out a cannon ball, you have to, be accurate, but it's not the same as trying to cite it in.

Correct. But at the same time, remember with those cannons, the impact and the cannons would slide back. Yeah. You would then have to move it back up and then try to kind of aim it again where you were trying to go. So there was aiming every single time. If you ran out of cannon balls, did you just have to go retrieve them if you were like training or practicing?

I think that was probably something that, or they maybe used like ones that were carved out of like stones. So they were. Oh, like dumb. me's almost. Easier to like replace. Yeah, I'm sure steel cannon balls were probably pretty expensive back then, just based upon

their usage. 1747, we have been at the age of 42 being so successful in the printing game that he could go ahead and retire from the printing business. He still retains ownership.

This is kind of a crazy little fast. We're by 1753, eight of the 15 English language newspapers in the colonies were published either by him or by his partners. So there was 15 different newspapers in the colonies, either owned or partners with eight of the 15 of them. He's, yeah, he's, he's creating and like, I don't want to say an industry, he's supporting an industry or a large portion of it, but he is also then able at that point to, his writings are still being put in these different one. So if he writes an article, he is good enough to where he's like, I'm going to send this to all my printing companies, my publishers, they're going to send it out. And this is one of the

reasons to, before he even goes over the second time to London, this guy is, aside from, like, royalty or having done some crazy, like, historical event or anything like that, this guy's like an international celebrity at some point. And a celebrity just kind of rises. Like, people over in France know of like poor Richard's Almanac. Mm-hmm. And as his prominence is rising within the colonies... We forgot to talk about that. We'll jump back to poor Richard's almanac.

Yeah, so like just stuff like that. But as his like prominence is rising, it's because people are reading these articles and being like, who's... Oh, it's another article. Did you guys see the new Ben Franklin article? Or did you see the new Ben Franklin pamphlet? New Ben Frank dropped.

That new BF drop? He was kind of like the... At that point in time, he was the William Randolph Hearst of printing in America. There was just 15 different outlets. Except there's probably shit you would want to read. It wasn't just like, hippies are bad. Don't smoke weed.

Yeah, we forgot to talk about porridge his almanac. Porridge's almanac's a very interesting piece. Obviously, his name wasn't Richard and he wasn't poor. Oh, poor Dick's Almanac. He produces this almanac that was an annual publication from 1732 to 1758. And not only is it filled with their traditional almanac stuff like calendars and weather patterns, and the phases of the moon, but then he also starts adding in entertainment.

Like, he's packing in entertainment value to this otherwise kind of boring piece of literature that really only farmers would buy. And you start to get all of these letters. There's some goofy shit where he takes a letter in from a quote-unquote reader. And basically, he says that poor Richard

is able to give him a definitive death date on when he's going to die. And all it is is just correspondence that Ben's writing in between himself. This is like our... This is totally not like our announcement video for Believe, where it's totally not asking ourselves questions. No, those reporters were here in the studio with us.

Completely legitimate real people. But he's providing this yearly entertainment. Between those years, I think it said that he averaged about 10,000 book sales a year. It's a hell of a lot of almanacs to sell. Yeah. And there were other almanacs out too This wasn't like the first came in town

But it was the first one where he was putting all of his little isms and like Little quotes and stories and little drawings and stuff like that And if you're looking at two different almanacs They're gonna have the same information historically for like weather things like that But then if you're like but this one's got like it's basically like being like But this one's got the Ben Franklin funnies in it Like I want the I want the Franklin funnies This is when they put cartoons and newspapers.

Yes. Everybody wanted them. It came out once a year. So you were unbated breath for the next 364 if you bought it the day that came out. You talked about that shit for the next three months. Oh, you guys remember that story in the almanac? You also get all of these little turns of phrase. This felt so Shakespearean to me.

And he didn't make up all these little turns of phrases or anything like that. But like you get early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. All these aphorisms, I think is what you would call them. to where you get this stuff permeating the culture to where you would hear somebody else say something like that in public be like, poor Richard's Almanac. Yeah. I heard that one too.

I got that edition. It's a great addition. Oh, Ben Franklin! Also, what he threw out, I think one of my favorite ones was the similarities between guests and fish as they both start to smell after three days. Yeah, yeah. Um, 1936, he actually creates the Union Fire Company. Yeah, we talked about that.

Union Fire Company, the volunteer fire company. Oh, sorry, I thought you were talking about. Did you already talk about the hospital? Not yet. Hospital is... Hey, guy. Coming up? Hey, guy.

I'm kind of stoned. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. 1748, I believe the hospital. Yeah, the hospital's after that. 1748, he gets selected as a Philadelphia councilman. 1749, he becomes a justice of the peace. Did you talk about the...

See, I'm lost. Did you talk about the new currency that he creates for New Jersey with the anti-counterfeiting? Yeah. Oh, my God. Where were you? I'm sorry. I was reading something. We covered that, because not only is he printing the currency for Philadelphia, or for Pennsylvania,

and now he's moved into New Jersey. the anti-counterfeit technology we talked about that's why we're into him being a councilman I don't know why he wants to become a justice of the peace like all justice of peace is do is marry people right maybe it was something different possibly because when you say a justice of the peace that's technically

no because they only use that when you're in front of a judge when you're at a wedding where someone's just been ordained by the church of the Bob's bargain car lot or whatever it was, whatever you can do online, that person's not a justice of the piece. No. But a justice of the piece is the legal when you go in and have to sign the documents and shit, right?

Yeah, so maybe it's a specific title. Is this like how the blacksmith was the dentist, probably? Like the printer was a justice of the piece, probably? I don't know. I think this feels like a civic position more so than a private business. It's a judicial officer or public official who presides over a local court of limited jurisdiction. Often handling minor civil cases, small claims misdemeanor, traffic violations. They often serve as a lay judge, yada, yada, yada.

Oh, he would love that then if he's just solving neighborly disputes. Oh, God, yes. He would be in on that for sure. All right, that makes sense. Just being able to hand out his little isms at it to the criminals and the people on trial. You know what that Ben Franklin character says? early to bed early to rise. Uh, 1751, he's elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly.

In that same year, as you were talking about him and a physician, uh, shit, forgot to write his name. Thomas Bond. Thomas Bond. Establish the Pennsylvania Hospital, the first hospital of the colonies. That's pretty fucking good. That's pretty fucking scary, dude. Yeah.

We are in 1750, the 1750s. When did we land? 1620. This is the first hospital in the colonies. Yeah, 130 years, first hospital. It seems like we might have been wasting some time doing some other shit. 1752, he organizes the Philadelphia contributor, Jesus Christ, contribution ship, which is the colony's first homeowners insurance company.

What the hell? They had a homeowner's insurance company like three years after they finally got their first. Houses are getting struck by lightning left and right, man. They're burning down. Here's the other thing, too. You needed the insurance because if your house caught fire, the house wasn't getting put out. Your house was going to burn down because God wanted it to. Interestingly enough.

It didn't cover natural disasters or acts of God. Actually not, acts of God, for sure. It definitely, that's where we get the claws. Acts of God. That's what happened. If you didn't get struck by lightning and it was just a regular fire, we'll give me the insurance. but if you got struck by lightning, that's with you and God. We have a strict no lightning policy.

Part of the reason why he could have been doing this, though, was in 1752, as you were talking about earlier, this is when we get the image, this iconic image of Ben and William flying their kite after Ben does all of this research. He sees, he's like a traveling, like, slide of hand guy that's doing all these electric sort of tricks. What it sounds like to me is it's something

where you see the rays in the tubes like the long light bulb looking things. This sounds like the first Tesla to me. It kind of does, but it sounds like the thing where it's a combination of, yeah, it sounds like you know when you put your hands on the thing and it does the little beams that go out to your hands on it, like that except you wouldn't put your hand on it.

It would just have the bolts or the arcs of electricity going up the glass. But he looks at this and being just somebody that's curious just naturally, he's just like, I gotta know how that works. After he gets into electricity, he starts to kind of put some things together in his head about lightning. And for some reason, he writes down this list of at least 12 similarities between lightning and electricity. I don't know why he couldn't do more.

Maybe he was leaving it open-ended because people could add on to beyond the 12 that he had found. But like, what are you, okay, so what 12 things are you writing down? He's like, okay, I noticed that both of them are kind of squiggly lines. and he ends up finding out and wasn't it always thought or did you always think this or maybe it was just me that lightning struck the kite and that's what electrified the key

and that's how... I think that's how it's depicted in the pictures that we saw. Okay. What actually happens is as he's flying this during a lightning storm, it doesn't get struck by lightning. He notices the, or the yarn or whatever it is, the rope that they're using

because it's wound, starts to kind of like stand. up like hairs on your arm do when you get goosebumps and he's like oh shit the static is building up and he goes and he basically kind of like touches the key or gets close to it with his knuckle and it arcs and he's like lightning is just static electricity he's like it built up and as it built up it went to the thing that was conductive and then as i put my hand to it i was the ground for and it arked off and this is just this blows the fucking mind of the world it's tough because if you really go by how we've always

kind of thought of the story, had Ben's kite been hit by lightning, we would have had, instead of Franklin Barbecue in Texas, we'd had Franklin Barbecue in Philadelphia because it would have killed the shit out of him. Well, hold on a second. It depends because who went up and wrapped,

who was holding the kite when he went up and wrapped the key. You think he was holding on to William's hand just in case? Williams 21 during this time as well. William's not the little kid, but at the same time, What if like he's like, okay, you got the guy in William's like, yeah, I got it. And he lets go of it to go wrap the key and the lightning hits at that moment. It kills William.

It could have saved him from some future heartache that William's going to cause. Yeah. I just crazy how it starts to put this stuff together. And again, he's kind of looked at as the first guy. I believe there was somebody over in Germany that was kind of in this field at the same time figuring out lightning. But as he's figuring out lightning and electricity, comes up with the idea for lightning rods. He's testing like blunt steel rods to see how they work.

He was testing out blunts and then saw lightning hit a house and figured out there was supposed to be a steel rod. He's like, oh, man, I wonder if I could build something to capture the lightning. I want to ride the lightning. He comes up with the idea for lightning rods. He also figures out positive and negative. He puts a better name on them. Okay.

because there was some kind of Latin word where he's like, we can just call it positive and negative charges. He also figures out conductive materials and non-conductive materials. So there was an instance in which, because he would do these little, what am I trying to say, like demonstrations for people, where they would all get in a circle and hold hands, and he would touch an electrified device that he used through, I think like building up static electricity with a wheel

or something that would rub against it. You've done this in high school, right? Did what? Were you locked hands and shuffled around the room and then you had somebody walk over and touch the doorknob? No. Oh, yeah. We did it with an electric fence,

like cattle field and everything. But the last person was the one that got the shit. Yeah. But he would have people in a circle and he would basically, when he jolted himself or whoever was doing that, the whole group would go, huh and you kind of see him do that that had to be the craziest sensation no one had ever felt

anything like that before one time while he was winding it up he forgot he was holding one side of it and went to touch something and knocked his ass on to the floor well we're not too far away removed from the witch trials no and this dude's playing with electricity like that that seems a little but he's a man yeah fair well there were men that were killed for being witches too i think were there Yeah, that one guy that got crushed by the... Crushed by the weight? Oh, okay. Giles Corey, you got crushed by the weight.

Okay, but Ben's rich. Yeah, true. He's rich at this point. But you can't say that it's not a coincidence that he organizes the first homeowner's insurance right in the same year that he does the lightning experiment. It feels like maybe it's... Every homeowner's insurance policy comes with a free lightning rod.

But he determines that it's not... like a lightning rod that you can put like a metal ball at the top or anything like that. It has to be almost like a pointed object to be able to attract the lightning. You would then mount that on the roof and run a cable down alongside of it. The cable would run into the ground, creating the ground for disbursement of the electricity. But this was huge because not only was this something that took off in the colonies for like churches and the stuff that was the taller things in the town that would get struck more often, he ends up going over when he eventually does make it overseas.

and they're either already installed lightning rods because they've heard of his study or he's recommending to these people that they do and they're like, oh yeah, that makes sense, let's do that. He actually, after he does what he, after he does the experiment, he writes letters to a couple friends that he had made over in England

and they were brought in front of the Royal Society and the Royal Society actually duplicated the experiment to see. How? It was a mock-up, right? It was some weird mock-up. Yeah, because I imagine they, wouldn't just go fly a kite with a key out. Just in case he was wrong, like, just in case

this was some sort of sick prank. You know how he could do that thing where he would turn the wheel and then you could get an object close enough to another one in the middle? And you would see the arc and it would just do the crack. I wonder if they did an experiment where they had a pointed one and a run one, a blunt one. And got it closer and saw which one it was attracted to the most. He's like, see? It's attracted to the point

one of the most. You got to be pretty excited that Ben did this, right? Because without this happening, Marty doesn't go ahead and head back in the Dolorian. Because doesn't the lightning hit the clock tower, but it hits the lightning rod on the clock tower? Yeah, but it's weird because the lightning rod on the clock tower

that they install has like a ball in it, but then it's got all the little thing sticking out the side. So, hmm, I'm wondering if that's accurate now. Still no lightning rod. I don't know if... No time travel. Oh, what is it?

8.21 gigawatts? 8.21 gigawatts. Where are we at? We are in... 1753. Yeah, he's appointed the Deputy Postmaster General of British North America, which is a huge deal.

That's British North America. And in... Also, wasn't this him taking the place of that one dude? Yeah, you know who's higher up on the pecking order than the Postmaster General of Pennsylvania? The Postmaster General of British North America. Yeah. So Bradford kind of loses his monopoly on this.

I'm going to figure this out and figure that out. Also, as he's the deputy postmaster of the Americas or of North America, he's able to start introducing news from other colonies to all of his papers. Yeah. So he's able to disseminate that information. And along with becoming this postmaster general, he actually does a few good things. A few good things that you could point to that the post office is done. I understand that that's not a phrase that can really be said much anymore.

but he starts to reform the shit out of the postal system. He establishes Knight Rider from Philadelphia at Night Rider, from Philadelphia to New York City to be able to get letters between those two cities within 24 hours of delivery. Like he was that fast to be able to make that happen. Buddy, we just, Janeis Khan had that shit figured out too. I know, but guess what? He was smarter than we were.

Okay. He had figured this stuff out before that. He also didn't have to figure out the fact that. that what they used to do to send mail from like North Carolina, South Carolina up to New York. It used to have to travel all the way back to Britain on a ship. Oh, shit. And then get sort, yes, and then get sorted out and brought to New York. So he was able to create these shipping lanes along the seaboard.

Can you understand how much more reliable mail had to be at that point? Not just from a timing perspective. How much mail was lost just in like ships getting sunk? Uh-huh. Sorry. Don't know what happened to your letter. Yeah. Have you gotten my letter yet?

No, when did you send it four months ago? I actually had time to come up and see you to see. That was what I was writing to you about. It was permission to come see your family. Just insane how much he was able to fix all of this stuff. And he introduces weekly mail delivery and especially delivery just strictly two houses. So this isn't like a P.O. box situation.

He's doing mail delivery two houses. It's he's able to not only connect this country via newspaper, he's able to start connecting this country via like intimate trans. I don't know what the word was I was going for there. Communication. Yes, there you go. Intimate communication between just two people. I was going to say mailification. Mailification works too.

This also gives him a huge opportunity to say, wouldn't you guys like to receive the Pennsylvania Gazette? along with your mail? Or wouldn't you like to receive one of my other 13 affiliate newspapers or anything? We deliver now. No paper boy yet, but we got a mail line.

Oh, I bet they did have paper boys. You think? Maybe that was how we figured out how to do the mail service to the home. It might have been more of a paper man, but there was still paper delivery. Yeah, true. It just continues the hits

on making society better. In 1755, Ben forms the, College of Philadelphia, which becomes the University of Pennsylvania. This is where Penn it comes from. It was Ben Franklin's own doing. Ben made pen? Ben made pen. And prior to this, it was like there was Harvard and Boston and there was Yale and New York. Like this wasn't, there weren't a lot of colleges around to be able to. But there wasn't one in Philly. So he makes one. He's like, hey, you know what's not here? A library. Let's make a library. You know what else is in here? A college. Let's make a college. You know what's not anywhere? A hospital. Let's make a hospital.

he's kind of Londonifying Philadelphia with all of these different things he's bringing them into the age of what London was correct he's adding the things that he saw that London had that just seemed like they should be common sense things to have and so he's really advancing as far as like a society he's fast forwarding them as much as he can he's doing a damn good job he's looking and doing the right things to be able to push forward you know what it's also crazy. If people don't know about Ben Franklin, no idea he's doing any of this stuff. It's just like, oh, when did he do the kite thing? And then when does he go over and when is he in France? Yeah, we're still talking about things that

Ben is less famous for doing than what he does later on in life. I'm also wondering, too, aside from the kite thing, if you were just like, tell me about Ben Franklin, it would be kite and writing the declaration or the Constitution. I don't think it's even them knowing that he was

in France. Yeah, probably not. He's just a founding father. They don't even know he's a founding daddy either, probably. 1754, he ends up heading a delegation to the Albany Congress, along with six other British colonies, and they're there to discuss the relationships

with Native Americans and the defenses against these French incursions from Canada. He gains inspiration from the Iroquois Confederacy, where these different tribes, these different bands had connected all together to create this Confederacy. And we have pretty much 13 independent colonies to where he's looking at. He's like, well, if they can do it, if the savages can do it, his words, not mine.

Yes. Then we can do it. Oh, you son of a bitch. As Europeans. This is where you get that first kind of political satire cartoon of the Joyner Die, the Serpent that's cut up into the different sections. And then labeled as the states and everything. Yeah.

So when we see it so much with the revolutionary war and everything, that was just the copy of join or die from this point in time during the Albany Congress when he writes it. Yeah. He proposed this plan for union of the colonies, but it just, it wasn't adopted. He was Ben Franklin. He was a big deal. He held a lot of sway in Philadelphia and in Pennsylvania.

But when you get together with all the colonies, he's still not the big fish. There wasn't a unifying cause for the colonies. All of the colonies were under British rule, but they each did different things. Except for Pennsylvania, though, mostly. Yeah, but they each did different things, but they each liked the way they did different things.

So they weren't willing to change the different things or try to compromise with each other because they didn't have a reason to. The British ground was just concerned about, like, hey, you guys are subjects of, you know, of England or whatever. and as long as you just keep sending us the good shit that you're getting from the colonies, we're good with that.

Are we 1957? 1757? 17. Jesus, yes, 1757. Oh, we got to talk about this man's achievements because he just begins racking him up. The achievements in electricity are able to get him honorary degrees in the arts from Harvard and Yale, in 1757, he's given an honorary master's degree of arts from William and Mary. So you have another college, which a little bit interesting because he had actually written a few satire pieces about Harvard and about who they cater to and the rich elites and all this kind of stuff. You want to have Ben Franklin as what you can consider an alumnus though.

Yeah, but again, we're entering try hard territory when he was ripping them down before and they're like, hey, do we want to give you a degree? Yale and them being a try hard. You're offering, listen, the guy writes like a shit piece on you or is making fun of you, and you're offering him a degree. Of course he's going to be like, yeah, I'll come take your guy's degree from you. I don't have to do anything. It's an honorary degree. It's just another feather in my cap.

Yeah, he runs him down and they're like, hey, you want to agree. Don't try to bring Ben down. 1756. Shit, I guess that was before that. He organizes the Pennsylvania military, which is just another huge advancement. 1757, this is when Ben takes his second trip to England as well. Yeah, so 1757, he is actually sent to England by the Pennsylvania Assembly as a colonial agent to protest against the political influence of the Penn family, who are the namesakes to, dun, dun, dun, Pennsylvania. So the Penn family had not been paying taxes.

Is that correct? They owned still a very, very large portion of Pennsylvania. But they were stationed except for, I think, some family member who was in the colonies. The main family or whoever was actually in charge, the figurehead of the family was back in London because I'm not going to live in the colonies. That's just where I get my money from. But because of the land owned and everything, there were still taxes to be paid that could be used. that could be used in the colonies. So regardless if he was paying taxes on his shit

that he owned in London, that money that's being paid to the British crown is then able to be used and they're not sending any of that over to the colonies. The guy was basically utilizing the land but not paying any taxes that could be used by the colonies, right? Yeah, just they were elitist British people. William Penn had gone to the trouble

of creating Pennsylvania, basically like a Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and giving them all of this authority to be able to make and create laws in Pennsylvania. But as members of the Penn family, they believe that they couldn't be forced to follow those laws because they sat above the House of Representatives that were making them. Correct. And as the Penn family is pushing back against that and saying, well, that's cool.

you guys can bring all of these different suggestions to us, but ultimately were the decision makers, Ben's throwing it back in their face and saying, your father, William Penn, gave us this power. They're like, well, Daddy ain't around anymore. Sorry. Wasn't his power to give. Yep.

New business, new management at this point. This trip was supposed to be pretty quick. He ends up spending five years in London. And during these five years, he brought over William. they kind of go in like this search for their ancestry. Yeah, they travel all around. They find out where they're from. I do think this is when he takes a trip across.

It's either this is, yeah, it is this trip. He takes a trip across the channel and he goes over to Germany. Like they take a little vacation basically around Europe at this point. Well, he's got to go around a little bit and, you know, collect some love from all these people that already know about Ben Franklin because of the scientific advancements. People want to see him. Yeah. Ben Franklin's a man that's in demand. You're the Kai guy. You're the key guy. As a man that's in demand, Ben begins to find himself in the company of his landlady Margaret Stevenson and maybe also in the company of her daughter, Polly. Ben's, again, Ben, Ben,

Ben has a pension for this. He writes that one of his virtues is chastity, but he can't seem to control that silver tongue wit enough to be able to stop attracting all these women. Do you think that Ben wants to flirt with all these women? God, you think I want to be charming. You think I want all these women and their daughters just throwing themselves at me. It's disgusting. That's the thing about Ben.

Was it wasn't like somebody, a woman looked at Ben and like, God damn, I got to have me a slice of that. But if she looked at him, he went, Ben Franklin. Yeah. She was like, oh, my God. Here's the thing, too. As soon as you open mouth and started talking, he was more eloquent and charming than anybody else in the room.

He was this, he was also like, to the people in London and everything, someone from the colonies was probably a little bit of like... Exotic. Yeah, it was kind of exotic, like a kind of like a ruffian and everything. They might have had an accent at that point. Yeah. Or might have lost the accent at that point. while he was in London

he would occasionally attend these things meetings of the Hellfire Club and no not the one from Stranger Things, not the one from X-Men this is the Hellfire club that would perform mock religious rituals would engage in excessive revelry

and debauchery sex workers were referred to as nuns and a library of pornographic materials was also available Now, not to say that Ben partook in any of this, because history claims that Ben was just simply a laid-back observer. Wasn't this in Ireland? Or Scotland?

I think this was in London. Because I could have sworn we talked about this during one of the histories of. I know we'd gotten an email about it, I'm pretty sure, about this Hellfire Club. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was in London. Okay. Because the guys would dress up like in monk robes and everything. Hmm. Hey, it sounded like a pretty wild place.

This doesn't sound like Scottish people or Irish people doing this. This is fuck up Anglo people. People in London with too much time doing this stuff. Another secret society, though. Another place that Ben can be like, yeah, I got in. They let me in. Now, the entire time that he's also coming over here, he's not trying to do this, anything against like the Crown

or technically parliament or anything. thing like that. He loves them. Exactly. He is so pro-emire. He thinks what's good for the British Empire, it's good for the Americas. What's good for the Americas is good for the British Empire. He right now sees no, nothing that's going to separate these two.

Not to change course again. Montpelier Hill near Dublin, Ireland is famous for the ruins of the 18th century Hellfire Club Hunting Lodge that was built on a prehistoric barracks. burial site leading to numerous ghost stories and legends of a cult activity. So they had a hunting lodge in Ireland that they would go stay at and just do all of this debauchery out there in the field. I'm sure they also had locations in London. They were in London. Oh, okay.

Like I said, this was their hunting lodge. That's where they went out. This is where they went out to party outside of town. That's where they went to go do the real crazy shit that they couldn't risk getting caught in London. Yeah. Okay. Back to his time in England. So yeah, so he's completely just all on board.

He loves the monarchy. He loves the empire and everything. And he's simply there to talk to this aristocrat, you know, of the Penn family to basically shore up what's going on and bring his grievances also to put him. Hey, this guy's not paying his taxes. Well, this guy also happened to. I don't know if he was in parliament, but he had a lot of friends because again, he lives there. He's part of that higher class of society. and they're basically like, get out of here.

So he's starting to also see that parliament isn't exactly the super honorable institution that he wants them to be. But he's in though. He's still hook, line and sinker for the crown. And there's points in time when he's over there to when he starts talking to the Penn family. He says, you know that the crown would be fine

taking this in is another royal colony, right? You understand that the only reason that you're allowed to own Pennsylvania is because England is okay with you owning Pennsylvania. Like there start to be these veiled threats towards a Penn family that if they don't play ball, he could talk the crown into going over and taking it for themselves. Yeah. And turning them into, I guess, another vassal. But it's, it turns out to where the pens finally agree to,

to a little bit of taxation, excuse me, but also, like, nowhere near what anybody else is paying, and their payments are never really on time. It's just kind of a when we think about it, we'll get you guys that kind of tax money. After those five years are up, he ends up returning.

I believe that would have been... 1764s when he comes back to Pennsylvania is elected speaker of the Pennsylvania House. Pretty fast. That was like a, he got back, they elected him speaker of the house. He got shit done. They sent him over there to talk to the Penn family.

He got at least it somewhat complete. And so, yeah, he comes back in there, like, let's keep this guy rolling. For a minute. Yeah. Because he gets elected May 1764 and ends up losing his seat in October after these anti-proprietary party

members who are pro pen who don't want any sort of taxation on the pens don't believe that and also don't want English rule are basically able to garner enough votes to be able to push him out completely. So what does he do at that point? Well, he is dispatched back to England once again. He continues the pen fight. Oh, this was the other part of that that we missed. 1763. William is appointed the colonial governor of New Jersey. Okay. So that's right. You have William stepping in, not as a member of the colonies, but under British control, New Jersey.

Such a crazy position for this guy to find him in. And it goes to show like the kind of, I don't know if it's persuasion or poll or fame or whatever it is that Ben Franklin has because he's able to take. basically an illegitimate child who is from and born in the colonies and put them into and get them to be put into a position that is normally reserved by people, military officers, people who are part of the aristocracy going over to the colonies. The governor of the New Jersey area is, that's a huge freaking deal. Yeah. It also goes to show you how died in the wall of Ben Franklin.

was. Yeah. Ben Franklin wanted to be, he wanted the colonies to be a part of England. He felt that they were the crown jewel in all of England's holdings. Because what was the alternative at that point? Yeah. Like there was never an example of anything being an alternative. And there was never an example of any of these colonies failing.

And so in his eyes, he's just like, everything is going to work. There was never even a concept of being like, what would we do without the British Empire? There was never even a reason to think about that. Yeah, what would you need a reason for? Everything's working out just fine. And that kind of indoctrination turned Will into enough of a pro-England person that they just went ahead and made him governor. That blows me away that that's as far as it goes.

So, yeah, William gets appointed governor in New Jersey. Of course, Ben goes back to England and continues this fight with the Penn family trying to get somewhere. 1765. Stamp Act. comes into play. Talked about this during the Declaration of Independence or the Revolution. Okay. Yeah.

I think this was the first episode of the Revolutionary War II parter. But the Stamp Act is something that Ben Franklin looks at. He's like, not bad. Yeah. Don't hate this. We were already kind of kicking around a possible idea of doing this to raise taxes back home. And it's a good thing that he did not do it back home because this is not even implemented by him. He has nothing to do with it, but he's going to have enough say to where once this stamp act goes into effect, you have to have these representatives that are going to be basically the stamp distributors in these areas, in these states, and in these larger areas.

And once it goes into effect, he recommends his friend John Hughes, not the movie guy. Yeah. To the post of stamp distributor in Pennsylvania. basically making everybody think that he supported the Stamp Act. And this completely blows up in Ben Franklin's face because the people back in the colonies are like, fuck this. This is where taxation without representation starts becoming a thing because the Stamp Act affects any printed materials that are coming in. So anything coming on paper, playing cards, all that kind of stuff is going to require these stamps that's going to require.

that's going to require this additional tax to be charged. Who would be the biggest beneficiary of a need to sell paper? A publisher, you think? Yeah. A newspaper man? Yeah. So when he hears this thing that's like, we're going to do this stamp act, he's just like, well, I mean, worse things could happen to me.

So, yeah, let's go with that. Bad things happen to John Hughes. John Hughes got his ass kicked. Yes, they had gotten like an effigy of him and like burned it in front of his shop. Pretty bad deal for John Hughes. Also not a great deal for Debbie because they end up going to Franklin's house in Philadelphia and basically start rioting around the house looking to burn it down. I'm sure Debbie was inside looking for her homeowner's insurance to see if this is covered.

This fucking lightning water isn't going to save us from this. She ends up putting in a call and getting some people to show up with some guns and basically kind of like barricades the house. Yeah. But they successfully defend the house. They do. They hold off the mob. And then you have Ben who realizes from all of these letters that he's getting back home about how poorly this is going, he ends up testifying during these House of Commons proceedings. And their questioning is along the lines of, do you think the colonies are going to take this well?

And Ben says, no. Based on what I've heard, not well. think they asked him 134 different questions regarding the reaction of the colonies to this. And like you said, a lot of them were on the lines of just what the escalation would be. So like, how are they taking it? Not well. Do you think they're going to get violent? And he's like, I mean, no.

But at the same time, this is provocation. Like, why would you guys even do this? Well, along this question. I got to go back. Yeah. I got to live there. along this question they say do you think there will be violence and he says no and they say do you think this would be a situation that if we sent the army over to enforce this it would happen and he goes but why would you send an army to fight unarmed individuals your own people yeah and they go well in case it happens he goes i believe at that point in time there would be you would be met with force you would turn them into somebody who would create this problem and they actually listen to Ben.

They end up repealing this. Unfortunately, they repeal it and then throw in the Townsendax, or Townsendax, which was way worse and did not go over well. But this is kind of the first little crack in the armor that Ben Cesar's like, oh, I don't really know quite if they have our best interest at heart. Along those lines again, we missed 1762. He receives an honorary doctorate from Oxford. So now he is Dr. Ben Franklin.

We have Dr. Ben. And he also, I think, received one from University of Edinburgh. Possibly. And I think something else. So he was knocking him out pretty much wherever he was going. Kind of the turning point where Ben starts to kind of see the corruption, not just the corruption, but the unfair treatment of who just wanted to be treated equally. as British subjects because that's what they were over in the colonies. They wanted the same type of representation and treatment

that people that were already in England were receiving. And Parliament determined that the American colonists should share the cost of the French and Indian War with a tax levy on him. Now, don't disagree. No, no, no. But... Yeah, I'm just saying, from at this point in time,

my thoughts are this isn't the craziest thing for English. to do. Correct. If it was just that, would be different if all of the work would have been done shipping everybody over there from Britain to fight in this war. Now, Franklin's argument is that America had already contributed heavily to the defense. They'd outfitted

and paid 250,000 soldiers to fight France. That was as many as Great Britain itself had actually sent, and they spent millions from the American treasuries to do so. So in his opinion, they had already paid for their share of it and are basically, Britain

wanting to then double dip and tax them for it in addition to that. Do you think that when they were calling bullshit on this, Ben pulled out a receipt for the 50 cannons that he bought? And he walks up and he slaps it down. He goes, this came out of my own money. Yeah. I was never reimbursed for this. Should I send you? Should I tax you for this shit?

So there was a wild argument. Did you hear his Germany argument? Mm-mm. Holy shit. So his Germany argument was brilliant because, as we know, through the monarchy of, episodes, Germany or Germans were the ones that came over with William the Conqueror and kind of set up England. He asked them if he felt like it would be fair for the British people to send a one to

two percent tax to the Germanic people for all of the times that the Germanic people protected them against England. Yeah. And England's like, don't like that argument. Bad argument. No, that doesn't sound good to us. but it's just his sort of Socratic method of breaking things down to just the base level of you got us to the Americas, now you're taxing us. Germany got you to England and created your culture.

So do you in turn owe Germany for all the times that they protected you as a proto society? No, we're not talking about that. We're talking about us. That was a thousand years ago, man. Give us a break. Um, 1772 Franklin actually obtained these letters from the governor and the lieutenant governor of the province of Massachusetts Bay that were proving that they had encouraged the crown to crack down on these Bostonians who had been protesting and all of this stuff due to like the Stamp Act, the Townsend Act, all of this. So you have the people actually from those cities, right into the king being like these people are getting out of control. You need to do something about it and send in some troops.

Well, if we know anything of Boston history from this point in time, Governor Tom Hutchinson of Massachusetts Bay had written a letter like you say for crackdown on Bostonians. March 5th, 1770, you have the Boston Massacre that started because there were Bostonians that were throwing snowballs at the soldiers who ended up killing five colonists. This looks pretty interesting to Ben because now, he's seeing these letters asking for help along with what happened during the Boston Massacre.

And he starts putting two and two together. He doesn't want to be the only one that holds this information. No. So what do you do? Ben sends these letters back to North America, back to the colonies. And they're leaked into the Boston Gazette in 1773, which basically causes this huge political shitstorm in Massachusetts. And raises a bunch of questions in England about how the... colonists got this information.

Now, they're able to deduce that there's only so many sources that this information was privy to and where it could have come from. But now, Ben. Oh, no, they know it's Ben. They held somebody else on trial for disseminating these letters. They eventually find out. He admits it. Oh, does he? Yeah, he sees that somebody's about to take the blame for his crime.

That's right. And then that's when they drag him into the cockpit. Yep. Yeah. Okay, so go ahead. God damn it got me again. Along those lines, December 16th, 1773, you had the Boston Tea Party, which of course is going to royally piss off everybody in London at this point.

January 29th, 1774, Big Pan gets called into the cockpit, and he goes in front of something called the Privy Council. No, why did they call it the cockpit? Because I figure all of parliament's a cockpit, right? because there weren't any women in there, and it was just a dick measuring contest between old dudes. They called the cockpit because this is where Henry the 8th, the famous Henry the 8th, used to watch cockfights.

Quite literally, the room in which Henry the 8th used to watch cockfights. Apparently they liked that it was in the round and it had elevated seating where they could grill people. I wonder if this was also like a sign of, because they just basically pull him in there and just berate his ass and basically cast him out And part of me also thinks that the location of this is chosen due to the disrespect, possibly you've been like, this is where the king used to watch just, you know, fucking cockfights. Where he used to watch chickens tear each other apart.

And so there's almost a disrespect to bring you into a room that I don't know, serves, they used to serve that low of a function, like a societal function that was kind of like looked down upon, that this is where we're going to basically strip you of all of your, not like. honor, but basically of your dignity or attempt to do it at least. I think all those words are correct because you have the solicitor general, this guy named Alexander Wedderburn, was a Scotsman that just tore into him. And then you have everybody else on the Privy Council in the round just basically acting like a Jerry Springer audience and reacting to everything that Wedderburn says. And from kind of what everybody could gather, Ben went into the cockpit as a loyalist and Ben left the cockpit as an American.

Yeah. As a revolutionary. This is the turning point when he realizes that they aren't looked at as this crown of the English empire. They're second class citizens. They're looked down upon by the naturalized people in England. And they're looked upon as not just subjects of the crown, but almost as a form of subjects of just the normal British or English people.

Ben never forgets his time in the cockpit Ben Ben gets his revenge a little bit later on He doesn't end up returning to Philly Until March of 1775 Which is a real bummer Because in December 19th of 1774 While he was gone His wife, Debra dies of a stroke

He's informed of a letter He doesn't go back He misses the funeral and everything I'm sure Because the letter took forever to get there And it still would have taken a month For him to get back He had received letters that she was ill and everything like that. I don't know if he just didn't know the severity of it.

Again, this guy gets tunnel vision. Not sure if he didn't know if he could get back in time or anything like that. But this was something that I felt like, you know, in a weird way, like maybe he couldn't run away from until a certain point. And then once he realized there was nothing left for him in London to do, he makes that determination to go home. Yeah. Absolutely.

Even prior to that, you have the shots at Lexington and Concord to get fired off April 19, 1775. He comes home to the kickoff of the American Revolution, because, like, he comes home and the first Continental Congress had already occurred while he was in England.

How wild is that? I know, right? They did all this stuff without Ben, but then again, I guess you think we're still not talking. Ben, at this point, in time his rose to the level of stardom where he's the agent to England for like six or seven colonies. So he is well known by people and other colonies. But this was such a matter of importance that they're like, fuck it. We can't wait for Ben to get back. He leaves when he's gone for this. This is a five-year period he's gone for. I think it was like 10. Okay, that's right. The first one.

Okay. Yeah. So he ends up going there. And as he leaves, he is rah, raw, go, go England. He comes back and he's walking off the boat. I want to imagine that there's a bunch of like the revolutionary like people and they're just like, what's the deal? And he's like, fuck them, we're going independent. Everyone's like,

huzzah, you're going to go ahead and be our unanimous choice for the Pennsylvania delegate to the Second Continental Congress. So like, he's off the boat and they're like, Second Continental Congress, you're our guy. Get it done. They're not

quite sure where Ben's loyalties lie at this point in time until he gets off the boat. And there's a couple British soldiers standing in port and Ben just grabs his nuts and he thrust towards him. They're like, oh shit. Ben's full us. Yeah. Ben's on our side now. Yeah, it was that fast.

He gets back. Hey, Tommy's. Fuck you. Your lobsters. Gives him a cross chop. Fucking gets off the boat. He gets back. March 17th.

Big Ben's back in town, bitches. Suck on this. March 1775. The second Continental Congress kicks off May 10th, 1775. So he's home for March, April, and then May. He's just right into it with all these guys. And again, this comes the weird point in time where this is the first time that we have the founding fathers, the first time that George Washington and Ben Franklin are in a room together.

The first time that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin are meeting are happening at this Second Continental Congress. So for as important as the first one is, the second one, I believe, is kind of where everything flows together. And they decide that it's time to write this Declaration of Independence. Now, at this point, he's, like, temporarily disabled by gout. This is due to his lifestyle where he's not getting a ton of exercise. He likes to fill it with the ladies. He likes to, you know, partake of delectable foods that probably aren't the best for him as a drink.

Yes. It's, you get what's called. uric acid that comes from any sort of organ meats, I believe it's like kind of a lot of iron. Yeah. And then all this uriatic acid and these crystals start to form in soft flesh. So it happens down in his foot. And it basically, I mean, is a portly man already.

Then I got a bad case of the gout. Again, this is going back to the Navy beans that we did during the bonus episode. To have a bum wheel for this guy's not good. So they actually, you know, he doesn't attend a lot of the meetings, but he ends up coming in making just really several small but very important changes to the draft

that's sent him by Thomas Jefferson. He gets appointed to the Committee of the Five. Yes, that's right. Is what they were called to draft it. And his changes weren't monumental, but we haven't really talked about Ben's religious views because he was very simple in his beliefs.

He was most notably, something called a deist. And a deist is just somebody who believes in a divine creator, but then he believed that once the creation was made, it was kind of like he took a step back. He didn't interfere in daily life. His thought process is best summed up when he was explaining to somebody why he was pro-lightening rod, basically. And they're like, you realize that using that lightning rod is an affront to God because you're essentially saying you're trying to prevent God's divine justice from happening and everything. He's like, yeah, but it fucking hails outside. And we don't just stand out in it. We go in and we built roofs and shelters to do this. So shouldn't we all be

just standing out in the hail if that's supposed to be some type of like divine occurrence or anything like that? And he's like, yeah, fuck you. Install the lightning rod. Get up on that roof. Uh-huh. Why don't you be the lightning rod? You smell like some sort of a pervert. You get on that roof. You pay for this. You know what? I'm revoking your homeowner's insurance.

Policy canceled. So his little changes are instead of using more of a traditionally religious language, he changes things to we believe these truths to be self-evident. Instead of us being basically divinely granted these rights, all these rights are just common sense. Everybody should be able to look at this and it should just be common sense to everybody. Hey, idiot.

At the signing, he's also credited with the signature line of we all need to hang together or we will surely be hung separately. As this was basically them, like we talked about in the declaration episode, they were signing the death warrant because if this didn't go well, if the revolution didn't happen...

Oh, I could be very sure. sure that we're all going to hang separately. Yeah. Everybody's going down for this. He's not around for too much longer after that because June 1776, we have July 4th, 1776 is when the Declaration of Independence is signed. October 26, 1776, Ben gets sent off to France. Ben sent there for diplomatic reasons.

His grandson, who is also illegitimate from William. Yes. Ben's illegitimate son's illegitimate son William, middle name Temple Franklin. They end up just calling him Temple. He serves as Ben's secretary when he goes to France. Now, when he had taken William with him to London, yes, there had been some ladies of the night. I don't know if they were like a father-son tag team type situation that was going on for bonding. But same type of deal happened with William.

He has a kid. and now Ben is basically taking him and raising him as his kid. This was prior to the Eiffel Tower being built, so there couldn't have been a Franklin Eiffel Tower being... No, that was the London Bridge or something like they felt in the London Bridge or something like that. Yeah. The Franklin London Bridge over there? Yeah.

Hilariously, though, he puts the kid up for adoption in England. He ends up getting adopted in England. William goes back to the United States, or goes back to the colonies, and then as Ben is coming back, he pulls him up out of his adopted family. He's like, I'm taking you back. He's like, what are you doing? Yeah, you're coming with me, kid.

I fucked up with the first one. Now I'm going to have to try to fix it on this second one. He said that when they came back after he brought him back to In. or brought him back to the colonies, that that was the first time William had met him was he came back down to meet his father once they returned. It's also really crazy to think about. So when he sails for France,

If they were intercepted by a British warship or anything like that, he would have been arrested. So they had to like end up leaving in the middle of the night. It was this clandestine mission. It wasn't even been going over there as a representative of the Continental Congress or anything. He was supposed to basically play it off like he was there kind of in a private citizen type capacity and try to work his way into the good graces of the French royal court and of the king. to try to get help for the Americans in the American Revolution.

And boy, did he blend in. Oh, my God. It's a very scary thought, though. Just as you said that, I just realized it, it's pretty fucking hard to get to France without driving right by England. Yeah, but they did have... But they also did have France and Spain

were on the same side, so you could have a lot of access to get down there to go Spain and then go in that way instead of trying to hit the north of France or go through... Braulter and hit like the south of France. I'm not sure how he ended up getting there. But as he's selected, I kind of wonder what the selection process was to be like, so who

wants to go over and be our ambassador to France? Ben's like, listen, I don't have my wife's gone. I don't have anything here. And honestly, I'm charming as shit. I'm famous over there already. Because that's technically one of the things as well. There had to be a reason for an American representative to be there. Ben was already famous over there. So when he came up over there, wearing this fur cap that he was wearing because he had caught something on the way over there and he had some like sores on his head or something like that he was wearing it to cover him up the french just eat this shit up and they're like this is the rustic like new world man but he was also this weird folksy frontier philosopher to them and they just ate the shit up because he was very

much not like, this was still a time when they're powdering themselves and it's men wearing, you know, the royal tights and everything like that in court. They're wearing wigs. And they're wearing wigs. And did you know that the reason why all of those French women and the men have that one black dot that they add to themselves? That's fake. Usually when they're dressed up in all their white makeup and everything like that, like Maria and Twinette times, they would have a black dot that was supposed to look like a beauty mark or a birth mark. That was from when like pox were a thing. Oh.

And it was when they used to wear those to cover up like scars and everything. I guess I had never thought about it after Marilyn Monroe. But hers was an actual beauty mark. Yeah. This used to be a way to cover up like pock marks. Oh, so this wasn't a sign of beauty. This was just a way to cover up the paw. Correct.

But then it became associated with that because that's how like people like the aristocracy used to cover up those marks. So you'd always have like one of those. Well, let's not get Ben's story twisted here because Ben wasn't a frontiersman. Ben wasn't an outdoorsman. Ben picked up this cap as he had gone up to Canada to try to get them recruited onto the revolutionary side. Because it was cold as shit. And then he just had it with him because he wasn't sure if it was going to be cold in France. He ends up having to send back an order to Canada and be like, you've got to send me more of these like raccoon hats.

Yep. Yeah. So this was Ben showing up and all the first. French people being like, holy shit, the stereotypes are true. A bed's like, yeah, we're all frontiersmen over there. It's like, show me to show up in a fucking cowboy. And that's what American looks like. Never mind that I live in downtown Philadelphia.

But he was like insanely well-spoken to smart. So it was this weird thing where they're just like, you look like you should be a yokel, but you're insanely entertaining. All the women love you. You're this old kind of pervert dude who's sitting on all these young, women and the reason that they love that in France was that there was this thing that the French called amorous friendship and basically this is all these relationships are is just heavy flirting super intimate letters and then like public displays of affection affection

that almost never led to actual sex it was this the perception of just like there was a thing about kissing necks and everything because you didn't want to kiss their face because the makeup might come off. So he's like, French women would always have you just kiss their necks or allow me to always kiss their necks. Is this where the term polyamory gets its

start amorous relationships? It means multiple. Amorous has to mean something about... Multiple amorous relationships. Yeah. Also, they just stopped the makeup at the face. They weren't trying to powder, but I guess it wasn't as prominent or heavy

around the neck and everything. And if it's going to get messed up, you can at least disguise it kind of around your neck. And they were probably wearing the big-ass collars in case he was sucking neck closer to the boobs and stuff like that. Yeah, Big Ben was giving out a lot of hickies in France, I bet. Oh, yeah. He was a hicky king.

Ben, the hicky man is what they called him probably. He had a friend there that, you know, had heard about him and everything that allowed him to stay in like his summer home in this Parisian suburb called Passie. He was getting a lot of pussy and Passie, I'm guessing. And, yeah, this New World Genius, this rustic guy ends up coming in. He's flirting with all of these women. and from the outside, it looks like he is just doing fuck all and just having the time of his life. But he's not there as a representative of this new country. He has to first get in with like the ambassador or not the ambassador.

I'm trying to remember what the guy's title would have been. Louis XVIth, Maria Antoinette fucking loved this guy. Oh yeah, once he finally got into me, but you can't just walk in me like, I'm Ben Franklin. I think he did. I think he was that famous. He had to establish, I think, a relationship with the guy that was going to be like the ambassador. And then he got him in to actually meet with the court. And once, but again, once he met with the court, it's this guy coming in that doesn't look anything like them that doesn't dress anything like them.

He'd like to assimilate a little bit. But he just loved the fact that they had already heard about him. He was on snuff boxes. He was on like China. He was on plates and everything. They had Ben Franklin memorabilia. already there. Pretty big deal.

And France at this point too, again, Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake type time frame. France is not doing well. They've spent a lot of money because they're always fucking fighting with England. And there's a general sense of just like kind of despair in France

and a huge portion of the population is living in like abject poverty. They just lost Canada to England. Oh, that's right. So they already have an axe to grind against England, the coffers are empty. And it's not so much. Ben's floating by on personality.

He's crushing it. But the biggest problem with what Ben is trying to get accomplished in France is, the Revolutionary Army is not putting up, or the Continental Army, is not putting up any sort of a fight that's giving the French any belief that they should be backing them. They're losing quite a bit to what the British are doing. So as they're losing, Ben's over there saying, hey, if you guys just throw us a little bit of money,

you know, send some stuff far away, we can turn this thing around. We can end up beating Britain. Aren't you still angry about them taking parts of, or your part of Canada? Shouldn't you still be pissed off and want to do that? And the French Royal Courts, look at them, like, you guys haven't won at all.

So we're just going to give you money and give you resources and you're going to continue to get your ass kicked and we're going to potentially lose to England again. We're going to give you money when we don't really have any money to give out right now. Yeah, there was just so much going against Ben That is until October 1777 It was the French foreign minister

Name was Charles Gravier Oh And so he was the one that it dealt with him Because he was the foreign minister He had to get in good with him This is the guy that when John Adams ended up showing up John Adams was telling this guy

How the French should be fighting and everything And he was like I'm only dealing with Ben Franklin from now on And then goes to Ben Gives him John's letters in his life Like, I want you to send these back to your guys as Congress because I want John Adams out of here. He shouldn't be here. He doesn't understand.

He doesn't have your cashet. John Adams was apparently just a fucking wet blanket in these places. He was extremely smart, very shrewd diplomat. He wanted the best for, you know, American and everything. But he had no clue how to deal with the French. And when he ended up showing up, he's looking to Ben Franklin, hanging out with all these with. and basically going to all these salons and these dinner parties and everything.

He's like, you're not doing any work. And Franklin's just looking at him and been like, I'm doing all the fucking work. You think this gets taken care of in court? No. No, this is, I'm working the ground level and all this. You don't come asking favors. You have to make them like you and want to give you favors.

Do you think I want to drink all this French wine and French all these French women? No, but I have to do this to save our country. I'm old. You think this does it? and just tire me out all the time. Do you know how much energy it takes to be a 70-year-old sexual dynamo? There was a woman that was half his age.

I can't remember if it was this junior musician, or sorry, this musician that was 38 years old. I got you. Okay. You're speaking of the married Anne-Louise Brion. I believe so. Or no, no, no. Yes.

Yes, yes, yes. They had a pretty decent relationship. They would meet up, what, twice a week, once or twice a week, to have tea and just talking everything like that? And like you said, she was a composer. She was somebody who was a deep thinker that could have these conversations with Ben. Ben floated the idea a couple times for her to leave her husband and run off with him. She ultimately kind of put her foot down and they had a bit of just basically a close friendship to where she considered him a father figure because she was half his age. He still wrote some pretty...

Yeah. Pretty dicey things to her. There's this... The reason that we call him the founding daddy and not the founding father is because that relationship that he had back in England was Stevenson who had the daughter, Polly.

Polly would call him daddy as well. Anne Louise ended up also calling him daddy. So he collected this daddy moniker throughout his time over in Europe because he was, kind of an older father figure while still just being a full-blown pervert at the same time.

So he collected this well. He also had this French woman. She was a widow. She owned a salon, not the hair salon, but an area to talk. She ran a boarding house. Her name was Anne Catherine de Lingville. Don't know how to say that in French.

LingVe. She was 60, so they were a lot closer in age. and Ben Franklin proposed to this woman on three different occasions. Yeah, she had 18 cats, right? She had a lot of cats. She had a lot of cats. I'm dead serious.

I think it noted that she had 18 cats. Yeah. Ben was trying to catch up one cat per proposal, I think, at that point in time. She wanted to maintain her independence and she was like, sorry, sorry, sweetheart. Yeah, that's the crazy thing about it is it wasn't that he wasn't charming and that she didn't want to do it. She just didn't want to get back with another husband. She didn't want the shackles of a husband on her. Both these women seem like pretty cool broads for sure.

To get back to his kind of main reasoning there, October 1777, the Confederate or the, Jesus, the Continental Army, not the Confederate Army, we don't want to talk about their wins. The Continental Army wins at Saratoga and confidence is boosted. It's boosted enough that he ends up signing this critical military alliance February 6, 1778 with France. Now, when he goes to sign this partnership, he shows up in this gray coat. And the last time that he wore this gray coat is when he was in the cockpit getting berated in England. So he's like, the last time I wore this, I was being berated by a bunch of ass hats and wigs in England. Now I'm using it to sign this thing that's hopefully going to help us beat England. One other last thing about John Adams.

So John Adams had famously remarked that while he's, he's famously remarked that while he's, he had to learn French from textbooks. Franklin learned French from the pillow talk of his French mistresses, which I mean immersion. That's how you're going to learn it the best. Yeah. We're not going to learn it from textbooks. I wonder if there were any like turns of phrase or anything like that

that he just used in common everyday French conversations. They're like, what the fuck? Are you trying to bang me right now? Yeah. Are you flirting with me, sir? He's like, no, I'm just trying to order breakfast. Yeah. He's like, Ben taught me this.

So, yeah, as Ben was in. instrumental in gathering French support and everything like that. John ends up being sent to, I want to say it was Holland, so he doesn't mess up the deal. And it's trying to basically, they're like, can you go just talk to the Dutch to see if they can give us some money to? Before John gets there, he had these two envoy members. And I think this is kind of why John immediately, he's like, he's fucking around. These two other envoy members, Silas Dean and Arthur Lee. both felt the exact same way.

They were both over there trying to aid Ben and getting all of this relief. And while they were getting shut down, trying to speak to all these members of the French aristocracy, they kept looking like, where's Ben? Why is he not pounding the pavement with us too? And so when John Adam shows up and he speaks to, I believe Silas Dean ends up getting sent away, it must have been Arthur Lee speaking to John Adams John kind of gets the run down

and he's like oh he's fucking around we're hosed this isn't going to happen that they would talk about is the fact that the women that he was hanging out with were the wives of all of these

like military officers these higher standing guys in society and they would be coming back and telling them stories that Bennett told them not the pervy shit or anything like that but the stuff that he told them about American against Britain and everything, and he was doing this to try to get his name in their ears and try to get them to be on the side of like,

yeah, we should go ahead and put a little pressure to help the Americans. And his way of slow playing it was that, listen, I can't order them to go do this stuff. They have to find their own way to it or they're not going to put resources into it. So I made it out to be like helping us is definitely going to go ahead and get payback against Britain. It's going to make them weaker.

why don't you maybe go down and start raiding in the Caribbean? And so the French showed up, they didn't just show up to the continental United States to start helping out the Revolutionary Army. They first went down and were just basically besieging like the British colonial holdings that were down in the Caribbean, trying to take those first and foremost. They eventually worked their way up and started helping out in the Revolutionary War. But it was some time before they did that. And it got to the point too where Congress kind of sent some information or sent some letters to Franklin.

It was like, hey, we don't feel like you're doing a super great job. We don't think you're being assertive enough or aggressive enough in trying to do these negotiations. And he just sends them back a letter. And he's like, you know what? Guys, I'm tired. I'm getting old here and everything like that. Go ahead and send me a replacement. And as soon as he sent this letter, Congress was just like, you know what?

We'll shut the fuck up. because you're the only one that can probably do this in this scenario and we'll just go ahead and back down. Just to point to some of Ben's achievements at this time, too, he'd already secured over $2 million in direct loans from France and then also received an additional $6 million in Leveras. I don't know what the fuck that was. Yeah, Levera. Just in a gift. So nothing that they were going to have to repay the French. that was what he was getting to supply the troops with uniforms to supply their pay, ammo, weapons, all that shit.

Not only was he getting this money, he was then having to make connections within France to buy all this stuff, to buy boots, to buy uniforms, to buy weapons, and then coordinate shipments to actually get that stuff over. He was doing a shit ton of work. I wonder if it pissed Ben off even more when he realized that the first. French were just planning on going down and raiding the Caribbean and he saw the British response to the pressure that that put on them because then he not only realizes that a the colonies aren't on level or on par with what they think the English are but then they realize that he's also playing basically third fiddle because all of those moneymakers down in the Caribbean are doing much better business for the British than the colonies are.

The colonies, you're getting shit from the colonies, but most of the stuff that you're getting from the colonies are just excess of what you're doing in England. Yeah. When you go down to the Caribbean and you talk about the sugar and everything else that they're importing from those islands, those are the moneymakers. Those are the ones that make England go because that's where they're getting all their money from. And he does some stuff to try to get light a fire into the French because they haven't technically signed like a, he wants them to sign an agreement of friendship and trade a mutual. support, basically asking them that when they sign this, they are recognizing this as the United States of America. Having one of the largest, one of the largest two superpowers in the world giving essentially credibility and acknowledging that you or your own country is huge on the world stage.

They haven't signed this yet. And so, Ben, and there's still representatives of the British government in Paris that are like at the embassy. There's still this weird, you know, diplomacy going on between these two countries. And so there are people that Ben Franklin can meet with that are representatives of the crown. And he basically gets himself, puts himself in a situation where he is seen going and meeting with representatives from the British crown and making it seem like they're working on some type of negotiation or partnership to basically let the French know, hey, this opportunity you have to weaken the British by helping us separate from them can be slipping away because

we might be in the middle of a reconciliation here. He basically tells the British representative, hey, this shit's not going anywhere. The guy gets pissed off and everything. But the intent is to get the French to get off their asses. And when he comes back and speaks to this foreign minister, he's like, so what is it that you're wanting? What is it that we can do to try to kind of get this? He's like, I just want that agreement of friendship and trade and for our, you know, us to basically have an agreement that we are mutual allies. And part of that being is that you'll help us in war. And he's like, let's go ahead and get this thing drawn up. The French didn't know the extent of communication going on between Ben and England because as a part of this newly formed colonial French team.

the French were supposed to be in on all these negotiations too. So Ben was holding his hand out to the French and taking their money well, writing letters to the Brits trying to get this all squared away. I think partially knowing that the French weren't going to want the Brits. He was doing it to go the French into kind of like, yeah, getting a move on. Didn't want them to just have the British capitulate because this is also really good for the French. because as they're down there, raiding in the Caribbean and attacking all these English strongholds down there, that's not going to the colonies.

That's not going to the newly formed U.S. And at least they're on the correct side of the Atlantic Ocean to help out. Yeah. They just need that final push to be like, why don't you guys just go ahead and start selling North and help out the Americans? Yep. The revolutionary war is only helping France gain a stronger foothold in the Caribbean.

Yep. They're trying to get the Brits out there out of there. And they're like, okay, well, you guys keep fighting. We talked about during Louisiana purchase, they're having New Orleans and everything like that. They're basically saying if you help us kick them out, you guys are going to have access to all this stuff and not have to worry about the Brits messing with you.

It was mutually beneficial for sure. And I don't know how accurate this number is because it sounds insane for the times. But it says that financial and military support during that period is estimated at over 1.1.1. billion libra but also if you calculate in

all of the stuff that they're doing in the Caribbean and all of that fighting I suppose that's probably where that monetary A lot of that is going to be benefiting most of all France yeah yeah it's not like they're sending that stuff they're capturing back up to the Americans are like this stuff's going directly back to Paris we'll call this

part of your loan payment I guess just letting us have this stuff Battle of Yorktown 1781 finally kind of cripples the British war efforts in the colonies. Envoy members, like I say, weren't really impressed with what Ben was doing. John Adams shows up. The French are wholly unimpressed with what John Adams is doing.

September 3rd, 1783, so we have basically two years of the construction of this Treaty of Paris, with Ben Franklin being kind of the main representative for, all of the interests of the colonies. He's writing back. He's getting information from them, but at the same time, ultimately bends the decision maker for everything that goes into the Treaty of Paris. In the Treaty of Paris, but the agreement that is reached with the Brits, Paris is cut out of that. Yeah.

So. So, and that was one of the big conditions is the French were like, we're fighting this war against the British with you when it comes down to the negotiation table. We want to also be there to make sure we're going to get ours. well these two other guys i believe it was john adams and john jay we're like no we're not that's going to go and compromise our position of giving up too much to the french we're going to have to pay them back for this we're not going to put ourselves behold into another monarchy and put ourselves underneath them so we're going to make our agreement with the british

the british and the french can make whatever decision that they want to make between themselves and then we'll have our current standing you know treaty and everything with the french that we signed as this partnership and trade thing. And basically, Ben Franklin is left kind of to explain to the French what's going on. It has to explain to this foreign minister and say like, listen, man, I'm sorry. Like these other, I had to go ahead and back these guys because they're in the,

you know, the Continental Congress with me and everything. We have to go with this type of negotiation because this is what's been voted on to go ahead and do. but I hope you know that we're still going to honor our agreements to France as far as like our partnership, our trade and repaying back everything.

There's no reason that we can't all get along still. Yeah, except for the French, I think they might have had an axe to grind. They just didn't know it yet because we're talking, the Treaty of Paris gets signed 1783. French Revolution begins to start kicking off in 1789. So six years after the colonies just shook off their imperial powers, you have a king who backed a colony to shake off a king, then going through that kind of a revolution within his own country in less than a decade.

Okay. It is so self-fulfilling what happens here, just like you said. the money that was lent to the Americans to overthrow the king bankrupted France and caused such a situation that they then saw that throwing overthrowing a king was possible because they just backed that and now they're in a position where they have to do the same thing so basically yeah it was a self-fulfilling prophecy where louis ended up causing his own revolution bad outcome for the French

did not see that one coming no no the writing I think was pretty much on the wall she told them they could eat cake 1785 Ben's pretty much had his time he writes back to Congress asking for them to send a replacement over he's 79 at this time right

I think so pretty fucking old the dick the gout's getting worse the dick has stopped working like you used to he's drank too much wine, he's had too much beef, he's got the gout keeps flaring up even more, he's got to get home. He has to see, he, they won, we won, and he hasn't been able to see it yet. And he's got to get over there. It would have been so fucking tragic had he not, like, the only thing more tragic than him, like dying in France would have been him on a boat going to the Americas and sinking. Yeah. Also, Thomas Jefferson,

goes over to replace Ben Franklin in France. So that would mean that Thomas Jefferson is the envoy over in France when the French Revolution happens. Thomas had to have been sitting in his house one day looking at what's going on. He's like, what the fuck did Ben do over here?

Yeah. What did Ben drop in? Ben dropped this in my lap. Ben had to have heard rumblings of what was going on. That's why he wouldn't leave. He had to get the fuck out of there, right? Yeah. Yeah, he was Thomas Jefferson for sure had to go home, but he's like, god damn, dude.

This is what we did. This was the whole thing. Like, do you think the king was looking at Thomas Jefferson? Be like, you guys got to send soldiers over. And he was like, I'll go check. Ben was such a dealmaker that he killed two kings essentially. Yeah. Just a wild turn of events.

October 18th, 1785, Ben freshly home, ends up being elected the president of Pennsylvania. There was a board that I guess it was a death. delegates or whoever was in power at that point in time, unanimously votes him in his president. He also gets reelected. I believe they're one-year terms. He gets reelected, I believe, two other times. So some people might be asking, Adam, what the fuck you talk about? President of Pennsylvania, we all fought together.

We won the war as the colonies to become the United States. But at this point, although the states were united, there was no singular national government. That's what they still had to figure out that. It wasn't done during the Second Continental Congress. That was just the decision to declare the independence. So now all of a sudden, you have to create a national government. And before you can do that, you have presidents of these individual states. You have representatives coming in to this basically, what would I say, like a convention.

Constitutional Convention. Yes, there we go. Constitutional Convention to create what are going to be the bylaws and the type of government this country. is going to operate. Where are you going to hold a constitutional convention? Philly! Yep. Big Ben hosts it in 1787. He's also elected as a delegate.

You guys come to Philly. We just created these new things called cheese steaks. You're all going to love them. Sam Adams is going to bring the beers. We get that Bostonian bee in here. I'm going to need somebody from the Carolinas to bring a pimento cheese. We're going to have a whole spread here. We're going to just gnaw this whole entire time.

And Franklin plays a very similar role that he played in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence where he just kind of sits back and watches everything. And really all he is is kind of the cooler head to try to bring in the idea of them sharing this democracy together. He is the guy that is like the old sage that has all of this knowledge that was in so many, he was in the court in England he was in the court in France he saw he came up in very heavily loyal British

colonies and now he and he has to get carried in because he's you know having trouble walking everything I feel like he's just this guy that while all these younger guys are arguing back and forth with each other at some point someone just goes shut the fuck up

Ben what do you think and he's like I don't know what the fuck is both You got some good points, but maybe we should compromise and do some of this stuff. And they're like, yeah, I guess we should do that. Yeah, he was the compromiser, basically. He was the great facilitator within this, I think, this continental convention. Well, and of course, after going through the Albany conference in his pitch to try to unify the colonies back then. I told you we should.

Oh, what's this? The plan that I wrote 15 to 20 years ago? Weird. You all remember my snake drawing, right? Yeah, we could try to maybe run the Albany conference plan and see what goes on. And they do, I mean, they come out of it with a document that's still supposedly living and breathing today. When asked, there was a woman outside, I don't remember who she was, she asked Ben as he was walking out, well, being carried out. Can I do the woman and then you answer it?

Yeah. Okay, you walk out. Oh, Ben wasn't walking. Ben is carrying. There we go. Mr. Franklin, Mr. Franklin, what type of government are we going to run? A republic, madam, if you can keep it. Hurrah.

He always had these words of not necessarily affirmation, but something that would stick, something that would put a little extra panache on what he was talking about. some of the last kind of business that he's involved in before his health takes a turn is the abolitionist movement Yep, he serves as actually the president of the continental abolitionist movement or something like that

The guy owns slaves, he ran slave advertisements in his newspapers and everything But again, the biggest thing I take away from Ben Franklin I'm not making excuses or anything Is that I feel like this guy throughout his intent entire life is just constantly reinventing himself or adapting to the things going around him. And he's constantly growing. He doesn't get to a point in age where he's not willing to look back at himself and say, I think I was wrong in that kind of stuff. But instead of just saying I'm wrong,

fuck it, I'm going to try to use my remaining resources in time to try to affect some change. So he is a huge proponent. The last legislation that he puts in front of Congress is about the abolishment of slavery. Of course, he gets shot down at that point. But it's still him trying to do something up until the point when he really can't do anything. Because throughout his entire life, the biggest, I guess, not virtue, but kind of always the driving force. Even going back from when he was kind of like Cotton Mather was one of his mentors and everything was just this thought. Same guy from the Salem Witch Trials. Same guy from the same witch trials.

Strangely enough was to always try to do something better. or always tried to do some good for man. And he saw this. And I want to say one of his, I don't know if it was the seal for the abolitionist movement or anything like that, but it said, am I not a man or a human? Am I not your brother? And so he basically was like some of his last writings were talking about,

how can any of us claim to be free when men are also like in bondage and servitude? How can we claim to be on the, it wasn't so much the right side of history, but how can we claim to, to stand for liberty if we allow this to happen. Well, you can almost hang him up a little bit and say, why did this take him to have to write this after the Constitution was signed? He was a part of the drafting party of the Constitution. Why didn't he abolish slavery then?

Wasn't up to him, though. And that's what it comes down to is when he writes his letter and it gets shot down immediately. Had he pushed for that to be in the Constitution, We may have never come to a conclusion and had a constitution. It was already so dicey enough to get all of these guys to agree to these common conditions as it was. That was going to be kind of a non-no-go scenario. That would have turned so many people out. And at that point, the priority was getting everybody on the same page.

And again, this is where like the great compromise, the great, again, this thing is a great experiment. It wasn't perfect. I can't remember exactly what the terminology that he used was. but he was talking about, he's like, this isn't perfect. He's like this, but I don't know if we could have done any better than this, and I think it's as close to perfect as we were able to get. Yeah, and had it continued to evolve, had it stayed the living, breathing document,

which it did for a matter of time, it seemed to have slowed down and not been really respected. Adhered to as of late? Yeah, but the Constitution was something that had to have. And had he tried to throw up this opposition and it never came down, I mean, it would have not been advantageous to the colonies. He was the only one to sign both the Declaration of Independence, the treaty with England for the surrender and for recognition of the United States, and also the Constitution, the only one to sign all three. pretty big deal and never was the fucking president

but we know why yes because Ben Franklin has the resume to be an all-time president but the problem was he was twice the age of everybody else that he was in the last couple years of his life at this point

had he been when all this went down had he been an ambassador to France at 50 years old and came back yeah I think the race between him and the decision between him and George Washington would have been something we learned a lot more about. And he, had he not beaten Washington, he would have been the second president. Yes, 100%. Hands down. There's no question about that. April 17th, 1790, Ben ends up passing

away in his home in Philadelphia. They called it a pluratic attack. I believe it was he had like a I want to use the term Bubo, but a growth in his lung that it had exploded. I want to say he was sitting there writing a spicy as fuck letter to some one of his French medams and he was just getting hot and heavy

and it just got him too excited and his heart gave out. No, he, well, I, probably, maybe. So he's speaking to his daughter and she tells him to turn over in the bed so he can breathe

better because he's having trouble breathing. He turns red and he looks at her and he goes, do you know how hard it is for a dying man to move to his other side? He's still letting her. Just so matter of fact and glaring. Yeah. He's on his way out. He's like, lady, I'm dying.

Do you think I care how much I'm breathing right now? I'm trying not to breathe anymore. This is painful shit. Yeah. He keeps plugging his nose and holding his breath. Do you know how hard it is to get? to 84 at this time in the world? I would say getting to 84 now's an accomplishment.

Yeah. 84 in 1790s, incredible. And living in France for like five years or like, what was it, nine years before that, where you're just like eating whatever you want, having the most occulent shit ever. Yeah. Crossing the ocean a handful of times in a lifetime feels pretty dicey. But somehow he did it. There were 20,000 people that attended his feet.

funeral. He was buried at Christchurch in Philadelphia next to Debbie. Pretty cool little aside. They had the leader of every faith that was available in Philadelphia come up and basically give their blessings at his casket. Everybody wanted a piece of Ben. I think that's also a thing where it goes to show how many people would want to try to claim him or to show that they were down with B.F. Um, his grave, interestingly enough, on his grave, he specified that all he wanted was simple words. Uh, Benjamin and Deborah Franklin on that. He did have an epitaph on the wall. And this is some creepy foreshadowing. But in 1728, at the age of 22, he wrote his own epitaph. It says, the body of B. Franklin printer, because that's, he was the common man. So he was Ben Franklin printer whenever he wrote this.

Hey. Or whenever he wrote his name. Yeah. Like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding lies here. Food for worms. But the work shall not be wholly lost for it will, as he believed, appear once more in new and more perfect edition corrected and amended by the author. So that sounds like we're speaking a little bit of reincarnation, maybe. Or his ideas would never die.

They would simply be redone or nude and everything. that is such a perfect summation of a guy who seemed to he cared about himself there's no question that Ben cared about himself and his own delicacies we didn't even talk and I know it's going back but he didn't exactly you know going back we didn't touch on William and I know it's kind of late to do that and everything like that but with his son when he first came back before well I mean again there was second continental Congress war was already happening he went and spoke to his son and tried to get his son over onto the side of the Americans. And his son was just 100% all in on the British side.

And that was the last time they had ever really communicated with each other after they had separated. I believe that his son William was actually arrested and held prisoner for a period of time. Got out, tried to actually cause and stir up some more British shit and try to get some like guerrilla warfare type stuff going during the revolution. and then eventually had to, after getting arrested again, had to end up fleeing back to Britain and lived in London. He died in London. And he ended up dying in London. But, yeah, Ben didn't leave him anything in his will.

I think he might have left him like a little bit of a useless plot of land or something like that over in the United States that he knew he would never come to. But, yeah, maybe somebody that was more understanding and kinder to those outside of his. family than he was to those people inside of it. It's kind of a fucking bummer too, because the only reason William was such an ardent supporter of the Crown in England is because of the way that Ben Franklin brought him up. He hyped it up so much that, you know, he couldn't get away from drinking the British Kool-Aid. Yeah, and he ended up dying in London.

So, as we talked about before, Ben, Ben had himself a list of inventions, and this is a fun one to go out on. Hilariously enough, 1717, he would have been 11 years old at the time. Ben says that he created swim fins. He's trapped a couple pieces of wood to his feet. He also used to really enjoy, of course, because we know about the kite story. He also used to, he was basically like the first wind surfer because he threw a kite up into the air. He climbed out into this lake and just let the wind pull him along the lake.

Yeah. He's had himself a little kind of water skiing. Did you know that most people like 80, 85% of the people in the colonies couldn't swim? And so like teaching yourself to swim was a huge deal. It was also why you didn't want to be convicted or being a witch or accused to be in a witch. That's true. He's like, I got to prepare because at some point I'm going to plan on doing some really crazy shit and people are going to think I'm using sorcery. Electricity.

Yeah. Toss me in the water, please. In 1741, he created something called the Franklin Stove. This was a massive invention. This was a stove that he was able to basically create like a steel skeleton to to be able to conduct a lot of that heat. Really, no stoves used to just be stone fireplaces. He basically is just like, I'm just going to put metal kind of on the inside of it and make a metal box.

That's going to be very conductive to heat. So it's going to burn much more efficiently. You're not going to lose as much heat. And it's going to be able to use less fuel. It had to be shit, man. Masonry back then because a stone fireplace puts out a lot of heat. Yeah, but I'm also guessing, too, that with a stone fireplace, it's a very large chimney that goes up, but a lot of heat just gets out.

When you can heat up that metal and maybe keep it going out a smaller hole, you're creating a lot more ambient heat. I don't know. I'm not Benjamin Franklin. Obviously, it was a hit, though. Kicking smoke out better, yeah. I could definitely see that for sure. 1950s, he made improvements to street lamps.

he was able to basically create a situation that would allow the smoke to vent out because these were all literally lamps. These weren't light bulbs. He created this idea of using four glass panels with gaps at the tops and the bottoms to let the smoke out because eventually the smoke would fill and then the light. It would be black. Yeah, it would get sitting everything on the inside. Well, it would be worthless. 1750, of course we get the lightning rod. Big deal there. 1752, I want to know how he came up with this.

He invents basically the first flexible catheter. That's got to be a need. Because, again, the hospital and everything like that. But at a certain point, is that something that he has to invent out of a self-necessity? Maybe. I'm sticking this hard ass tube up my pee hole. I need something flexible that's easier. But what do you make that out of?

I don't know. I don't know either. Some type of like animal bladder or something. Yeah. Yeah, actually that's probably lambskin type material, maybe something like that. Yeah. Pag intestines or some shit. Also, who do you test that on?

Yourself. 100%. Nobody else is signing up to get something shoved up their people. You want to put that ad? Yeah, he had the paper to put the ad out, but no one's responding to it. Wanted somebody that'll let me stick something up their dick. Guess I just better do this myself. Six shillings.

You would think that he would have wanted to have, invented these before he invented the flexible catheter and to some extent these were around I think it was just maybe his idea to place them together but in 1784 it creates bifocals Yeah so I need to be able to look up

And see far away but when I look down at the tube in my dick I need to be able to see it up close To make sure I'm getting it in there all right I need an intipent look at where I'm sticking this thing 1760s he created a carriage odometer That seems kind of nuts to put an odometer on your carriage to How many miles on this still

girl. Yeah, to tell how far you went. Can you take the carriage in reverse to make it to wind it down? Some Ferris Bueller's day off. Yeah. He's running the miles off of the carriages to sell them for more. We just hook the horses up backwards and then we just have him run that way. 1762 he creates a glass harmonica. Don't know where in the hell he would have come up with this invention. Oh, I got you on this one. Okay. Okay. He saw, uh, you know the thing that people will do will they fill different cups with water and then they'll run their fingers around the outside. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. he really liked that but he couldn't do it enough

so what he did is he's like well instead of making your fingers go around the glass I'm going to make the glass go around your fingers so it was this thing that was basically looked like it was on a dowel and it was these glass basically this big piece of blown glass of all different sizes that you could just run your finger

and move your finger and then because it was rotating it would make the sounds as you just placed your finger on different ones and then you got a wet finger I'm assuming yeah just constantly spit on your fingers or you just constantly have water on it or something yeah but i saw someone playing it it's pretty fucking cool looking i they're so cool to listen to it looks like the craziest bong you would ever see yeah yep yeah hopefully he tried it hopefully he what do you think some of the

ideas came what do you think he got crazy let's go fly kind of lightning storm kind of this key to it just stone to the bejieze out there with it come on william william i know this is going to sound crazy listen listen the uracoy are great for two things the fact that they were able to all join together, and they have the best peyote. This being a late in life invention, I can't help but think that this is maybe his greatest invention for old age. In 1786, he created the long arm grabber. Yes, the gopher. Yes. He was the original inventor of the gopher because he got tired of climbing up and down the ladder in his library. He's like, fuck it. If I just create something really long with a grip at the end of it

that I can pull a book down. Everybody has been at their grandparent. parents' house and has seen the gopher. Yeah. And they were. They're affecting. Absolutely affected. Unless your child gets a hold of him and then just breaks the shit out of it. Yeah. We had one for a very long time. And whenever my dad would fall asleep on the couch, I would always get the grabber out and I'd pinch his nose and wake him up.

He hated that. But Ben lived such an incredible life. Like we talked about in the beginning, this was a guy who lived three lives. He lived, he built himself up. and made himself a wealthy man in the print business to be able to go into these inventions and kind of start doing good for the community. And then when the time came and when his number was called, he was able to step up and be a revolutionary hero.

You'd have to do like Ben Franklin, entrepreneur, revolutionary lover. Yeah, and then you throw in the lover throughout the entirety of that lifetime. Yeah. The guys, he's got a lot of miles. on his own woman that he loved, but many that enjoyed his company. And his penis. He had a bit of a bondish tendency.

Yeah. I wonder, you know how FDR nicknamed it Jumbo? Yeah, not FDR. FDR. You named his wheelchair? No, no, who named it Jumbo? The guy after Kennedy. Jesus Christ.

Oh, God. Woodrow Wilson? No. No. Oh my God How is this happening? This is what happens when we're almost three hours in. Anyway, but

you got to imagine that Ben had some type of flowery nickname for his member, right? Little Ben. Yeah. Big Ben, actually. Lyndon B. Johnson. Lyndon B. Johnson, that's who had jumbo. But yeah.

Dude, this guy is, like I think this guy is the OG founding father, he is, I mean, you had Washington that led the army that, you know, served as the first president, but so much of the stuff that led to all of that happening, so much of the contribution that led to the declaration, the constitution, getting French support, it cannot be stated enough how important Benjamin Franklin was, not just politically, but just to the development of the country as a whole. most important founding father of the revolution. Hands down.

Because Washington could have fought to his heart's content. He could have given his life for this country. We don't win the Revolutionary War without Franklin getting that money and the much-needed supplies to that. Washington also couldn't write the Constitution. Washington couldn't write the Declaration of Independence. Had you left it up to just Benjamin Franklin, he could have written those documents himself.

They wouldn't have been the same. No. But he could have written those documents. Yeah. he he was necessary for the country's founding he's also one of the ones that had the idea to do the representative government where it was going to be the house would have representation based upon the number and the population of people and then the senate would have it based upon equal representation by the number of states and there were a lot of guys that weren't on board with

this because they thought it should be population representation throughout the whole thing and he was like well what if the house has access or has the final say on all spending and funds and they're like, okay, yeah, that, he, he was able to wheel and deal and figure out a way to do this to where he was able to get everyone to compromise and come to this agreement. So the great facilitator, the founding daddy, the founding godfather, whatever you want to call him, Benjamin Franklin is just an amazing individual. Yeah, his, his ability to learn and soak in knowledge. I don't know if it's out yet, but we had a Patreon episode. on Socrates. And his use of the Socratic method and just understanding, he makes a few references in his

autobiography about spending time with Jesus and Socrates. He held them both in such high regard. And his methods of being able to get people to compromise and work together. And as we talked about with Socrates, one of the prevailing reasons why I didn't write anything down was because he needed to be able to have the conversation. to do what he did. And Franklin, his biggest strength was being able to have a conversation. And have the aspect of writing that stuff down, too. So it was almost like he had a skill set that Socrates didn't have modern-day fucking Socrates too.

Yep. He moved along philosophy quite a bit. That's one of those things where it's like, who would you like to have dinner with? Think of sitting Socrates and Ben Franklin down together. And Socrates would just be like, oh, shit, you took my stuff and approved upon it. Bravo. You figured out how to write it down. Yeah, exactly.

All right, man, you got anything else? Only that I'm a little bum that we started with Ben and the Founding Fathers. It's all downhill from here. Yeah. But at the same time, it's such a fun episode. Yeah. Ben will be the bar that all these guys have to measure up against now. High watermark for sure. All right, everyone. Thanks for joining us this week. We've got you next time. Peace.