Was Benjamin Franklin a fraud?

I'm Manny, I'm Noah.

This is Devin and this is no such thing show where we settle our dumb arguments in yours by actually doing the research. On today's episode, was Benjamin Franklin a fraud.

Founding father or frauding father?

Try that one. I'm gonna put that in there.

A fraudulent father?

I have no There's no no such thing, no such thing such, thank such, thank touch, thank so.

Today's episode was actually inspired by our previous episode we did last year. We did an episode titled Can You Change the Mind of Conspiracy Theorists, And as part of that we asked our listeners to call in with their favorite conspiracy theory that they believed. So as part of that process, we got a call from one of Manny's friends named Kelsey.

I think that Benjamin Franklin was a grifter with a great pr team. I live in Philadelphia, so his image is everywhere. To a degree I find suspicious. He's credited with inventing basically everything from electricity to buifocals to modern day fire insurance. And I don't believe that one little guy achieved all of this alone. He was never actually president, but was somehow always there as an advisor and Elon Musk kind of fraudster.

The ideas guy with a big check book.

I just feel like it's extremely possible that everyone hated him and he was a bad hang, but his reputation has been scrubbed clean. Wow.

I like that it's a bad hang. It's like everyone's hanging out with him. I feel like that he'd the opposite where he's probably a good hand, maybe not doing something.

Yeah, I would imagine a lot of people want it to be around him, you know, because of the reputation he had built, fraudulent or not.

Yeah, you know, well that was a very brief shirt, you know. So I called up Kelsey to hear more of her thoughts. So as she mentioned, one big thing to note is that Kelsey lives in Philadelphia, so she is definitely, I think, seeing more of Benjamin Franklin related things than we are. Because when we got this. I remember this, when you were editing this episode, Manny, it was like, I don't really think about Benjamin Franklin at all. Yeah, that was.

My thought too. I was like, how did you even come up with that? Like he's even talking about this guy?

Yeah, I had never thought about that theory before, so now I'm happy to hear more.

Well, we found out that you are on a group chat with Kelsey where she sends you photos every time she sees something Benjamin Franklin related. And I, you know, I spoke to her a couple of weeks ago. Now, so we have our own son of group chat because it's only two people. But she now sends me stuff that she comes across that are that are Benjamin and it is. It's a decent mount.

It's a lot.

If you're in Philadelphia, it seems like, you know, walking around you will run into a Benjamin Fine.

And this is only the stuff she's sending. You know, I'm imagining she's not sending every single Benjamin Franklin thing that she's coming across. So two things Kelsey wanted us to get to the bottom of. It's number one, why does it feel like Benjamin Franklin hasn't had a proper reckoning. So in twenty twenty, we were really examining historical figures.

And especially the presidents.

Yes, especially presidents. You know, Obama was being called the war criminal. We were talking a lot about Washington. So why wasn't Benjamin Franklin a part of that conversation. Yeah, and then she also wanted us to investigate just the scope of what he's been credited with inventing.

I think just like the huge, like broad brushstrokes of the things he's credited for coming up with or inventing feel like so categorically like all encompassing. Like I've just heard like he invented the concept of insurance and I'm like, what, like did any single person do that? And also like that that's like such a big claim. And then same with like firefighting, like modern firefighting, and like bifocals and electricity.

So after that episode aired where Kelsey you know, ripped apart Benjamin or Franklin, another friend at a pod, Rich was texting us because he's a big Benjamin frank was sensed well, which I didn't know. You know, Rich was so down for many.

No, but he's a history buff, but he was a proud American. He's a patriot.

He's a patriot, but Rich he was very upset. So Noah, you had a conversation with Rich just to find out why he was so irate. Yeah, you know.

Rich his main point was like, it's not fair to say, you know, Ben Franklin is basically what we would see as you know elon Musk today, he was actually kind of doing this stuff. Mainly he's pointing to his diplomacy.

In some sense, a fraud would put themselves in as you wouldn't be like, oh yeah, you go, how would you get here?

Especially he's not in the president, so it's like reason to just have this outside you know, outsider figure for lack of a better word, Yeah, to do this, like to trust that stuff with him, There's got to be something there.

I think the thing about Franklin that this caller seemed skeptical of was his celebrity. I mean, like the idea of a celebrity is kind of fairly modern, but in terms of the eighteenth century, he was as close to a celebrity as you could get. The thing is is that he used that to his causes benefit In some way, he was like a marketer of the American Revolution as much as he was a diplomat and a leading politician.

I don't know what more you could want them with gut.

Did he do some like flamboyant public image stuff, Yes, of course, but he was using that to his advantage.

He was an.

Interesting guy, I mean, like someone like John Adams, for example, people usually thought he was like boring, kind of goofy, annoying, but like with Franklin, people loved him.

And you can see easily how our two friends here their ideas are not as to each other, but you can also see some areas where they're not necessarily Like I think Kelsey's main gripe seems to be all the things attributed to him in terms of like innovation, I guess. And then you know, Rich isn't necessarily talking about that aspect of his life. He's just talking about how much of an integral role he played in kind of the founding of the country. I want to see how we can marry these two ideas.

Hmm.

Yeah, and the personality of it, I think is key too. That's definitely what led to him being iconic in the sense of being all over Philadelphia. Yeah, and then that also is what Rich is telling is what led to him being the one who trusted to kind of convince people to come to our side and that sort of thing. Yeah, you know, like you're saying, they might not be as at odds as we think as.

They think they think. So we are going to find out if Kelsey is right? Is Benjamin Franklin fraud? Or is rich right? Is he our greatest founding father? After the break, we'll find out does Benjamin Franklin actually suck?

O'm Manny Noah, and.

I am Devin. We are joined in the studio by doctor Claire Aubyn. Claire is a writer and historian at Yale. She also has her own podcast, which you may already know, called This Guy Sucked, which was named one of Apple Podcasts Best New Shows of twenty twenty five.

In some great company, How Along with You?

Yeah, that's literally how we know.

Each and we love this show because it's a show for haters, and we love the hate on this show. Claire, can you give us just your elevator pitch for This Guy Sucked?

Yeah?

So every week I bring in a new scholar, a new academic. Occasionally we have like a comedian or do a collaboration with someone else. But but I bring someone who is an expert on a person in to tell us why they don't like that person basically, and why make an argument for the audience for like they shouldn't like that person either. So we've spanned like a huge amount of historical time period. We talk about people who are very famous, people who are not famous but should

Also, yeah, that's good, which we'll get into.

We're familiar with the concept people who should be famous but aren't.

We're getting.

Us.

So unfortunately, you don't want to be the subject.

I will say, I would say, you know, come on, but that is actually in fact, what's happening.

All right, Claire. So to recap, we have you here because we chatted with two friends at a pod our, friend Kelsey who thinks Benjamin Franklin is a fraud. A friend Rich who thinks Benjamin Franklin is a national treasure maybe underrated. So we're going to hand off the episode to you at this point as our historian, to sort of break it down what's the truth about the Benjamin Franklin.

So part of this is a little bit complicated because the two arguments that he's a fraud and that he's important are not.

In opposition to one another.

So it was funny trying to figure out what the answer to this is, because like one could be a fraud and also important and like memorable at the same time, and like a contributor in some other way. And I think there are plenty of historical examples and living examples.

That we have of that.

So I think they're not actually arguing at cross purposes, Like they're not against each other in this. They just have different conceptions of why people remember him. But I did come up with what I see as the questions that they were asking. I tried to summarize their questions and find answers to them.

So questions are.

Like did he have haters in his day? Would he be taken more seriously if he had been president? Was he stealing credit from other people?

Like?

They asked a lot of I think really interesting questions that help us to figure out like how we think about celebrity and history and.

All kinds of stuff like that.

And then the one that I found really interesting is what are the bad things about him?

Yeah? There are some bad things about him.

You know, if we want to cancel him, will we pull up?

Yeah?

We shouldn't we talk about talk about his accomplishments. I feel like, yeah, maybe we start.

And then we get to this. Let's start what's real.

Yeah, well, what do you know about him as his accomplishments, Yeah.

Sure, discovering electricity, Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution.

Yes, he's at the Constitution.

Yeah, I didn't know.

That about the diplomat, like he was building around in France.

I talked to rich So yet he was crucial in getting the French alliance, which helped back us up during the American Wow.

Yeah, on the what is it the one bill?

Mm hmmm, yeah, pretty famously.

I've never seen all.

Of those.

Smaller bills, Penny, who's this?

Yeah, so most of these things at least have like a grain of truth for them. He definitely is, for example, instrumental in securing this French alliance. That's right, A lot of these things are true. He does work on electricity, but I will say.

Work on electric discovery.

Well. No.

So one of the things I find kind of interesting about this is the idea of like whether he was stealing credit from other people his inventions or not, because as a name, yeah, you know, the issue here is really just kind of like oversimplification. So no, he doesn't steal credit from people. But yes, his relationship to the things he invents and does and science are oversimplified. Sometimes he kind of fails to credit his collaborators on things in this sort of classic inventor scenario.

You know who does that current day?

This is not ready.

I don't think you think this person would come up in this conversation Travis Scott famously, he needs to pretend that he does everything by himself, to the point where when I worked at Genius the music company, we would do these series where we'd talk to the collaborators a big famous people. Right, it's hard to talk to the big famous people. It's easier to talk to a producer

Down, Yeah, for sure, also first time probably someone has brought up Travis Scott and Benjamin Franklin type of guy. So like breaking the ground every day, this is what podcasts are for. Yeah, but actually, yeah, that does fit in part because one of the issues around Franklin's legacy is that he gets credited with being the sole creator of things that are actually sort of transnational global ideas. So the idea of electricity and lightning being somehow related

We wouldn't figured it out there was that one guy.

Yeah, Like science is incremental, innovation is incremental. There's a sort of network of what we would call experimental philosophers and experimental scientists, although they're not really thinking of themselves as scientists necessarily at this moment, because all these things are kind of mixed together, Like you're a philosopher and a scientist and a doctor and whatever altogether, you're just engaging in sort of questions about the world and trying

Just not real or possible.

We know, for example, that the lightning rod is based in part on European theories around electricity and lightning.

There is a Czech.

Priest named Prokop Divish who is also working on grounded lightning rods at the same time. His grounded lightning rod happens about three years after Franklin's, but they're working with the same ideas. So that's not to say that he doesn't do these incredible things, but like he doesn't do them by himself, and he doesn't do them in a way that no one else is considering approaching them because science is also a very messy and very iterative process, Like you have to try things over and over and

Capable of it either.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it seems like he's benefited from essentially like the elementary school curriculum, right, Like the oversimplification happens because they're teaching this to kids, so he's getting a lot of credit from I mean, I didn't read a single thing about him after elementary school. I think so if I had, I guess the teachings would have been a little bit more nuanced.

I'm worried about your high school education, but but I do wonder how much it is is like you said, many like the over simplification, like teaching kids things, you know, like even like Rose Parks wasn't the first person, you know, to not get up. She also wasn't seated in the front of the bus. You know, like there's there's stuff like that. There's a nuance cell out of stuff that when you're a kid, it's like, you know, can just

Right, You're not going to tell the kid about all the other collaborators.

Yes, exactly, about Czech priests broke up division.

We didn't need to go to Prague and see whether.

I mean, and that's kind of generally a problem with how people understand historical figures, right, Like the real problem is once again the American education system. Unfortunately, in terms of how we like satisfying endings.

We like people who said satisfy curiosity.

We like people who we can hold up and say this is the guy, because history itself is a lot messier and more complicated than that, and it's harder.

To grapple with.

So these simplifications really benefit us in terms of our ability to understand things. They're often though not really that true or that real, and the issue is further down the line when you're like, ah, well, this is the thing I know about Benjamin Franklin and someone has to say, I guess, well, not so much.

That Kelsey's main gripe, aside from kind of the Philly centric angle and like the advertisement use, which is obviously way far. Afield was kind of like, how could this one guy do all this thing? Yeah, yeah, we're but to me, this is my simple explanations. I think about someone like da Vinci, like a renaissance man sort of thing.

Yeah, I mean, like fully, one hundred percent, it makes sense.

The way that we conceive of like sciences and the humanities or art as these separate categories is relatively recent. Like historically speaking, the man who is educated is educated in all of these fields, and they're not seen as necessarily separable. So you can say like, yes, I've learned history, Yes I've learned science or art or whatever.

But a person who.

Is educated as well rounded and interested in all of these things. So like what I mentioned before about this sort of philosopher or physicist whatever guy, that's very normal because that is part.

Of being educated and interested in the world.

The way that we've kind of siloed these things as totally separate is relatively recent, because now we've focus in on like becoming an expert in one single thing, becoming the person we in part because our approach to things like invention has narrowed further and further because we're getting we're progressing and.

Yeah, we're getting more admits.

Yeah, so you can be like, I do this one thing. So a lot of these things really benefit or draw from each other. So the Da Vinci Renaissance man style guy, it was a much more common person until recently, and like a thing that proves how good you are and how educated you are and how intelligent you are that you can engage with all these different things.

I feel like the similarity happens in like youth sports now right where back in the day, if you are athletic, you would play a bunch of different sports. Now they have like eight year olds that they're like, you're going to be a sock star. You're only playing soccer, do

When the later exactly, Okay, you're going to make a career.

It used to even more recently beyond that, using the sports childhood sports analogy. Being a three sport athlete used to be a type of person in the US, Like if you're a person who plays baseball, basketball, and football, you are a three sport athlete. Yeah, that's like that was a type of high school guy basically, and now we rarely see that because people are told to do just do one thing or be like maybe you should focus on your school work.

I'd only play ones.

But yeah, so even that is like us narrowing and arrowing and yeah, all of that is crazy too because it's like, hey, eight year old, yeah, I need you to prepare yourself for a.

Life of CTE.

Yeah yeah, starting now, starting now.

Ron James was famously a five star football recruit as well, maybe not maybe four or five stars I can't remember, but he definitely could have made a lot of money in football.

But he's a big athletic guy.

Yeah.

Yeah, some great highlight tapes on YouTube if you want to go back and check them out.

Why don't we pull him off right now.

To go back to your question some of the other things he's credited with.

So the bifocals.

One is good glasses existed, having different glasses also existed for for distance and for a close range vision. From what I understand, things like inventions are not necessarily my specialty. As his story, but from what I understand in the research they did for this, he kind of perfected an idea that had existed, that pre existed, or he he made a thing that people had been thinking about into a thing that existed.

If that makes sense, yeah, especially because we're like he invented the bifole. Well that's what great.

But if people are switching between two kinds of glasses, I feel certain someone said I wish these were one pair of you know, he.

Basically made like a scrub daddy.

He just put it like we got sponges. Yeah, a better version of this, you put your finger, that'd be perfect. Let me do it.

Let me get to be fair. I am a huge scrub daddy.

Oh yeah, I.

Have scrubed mommies too.

Are actually better? Can you guys give me the quick pitch on what squad actually is the benefit of these compared to another normal sponge.

I think there's better sponges. They're they're thicker, you know, sponges more I would say horizontal.

Yeah, so these are more they and the wetter they get, the softer they get. So they start out like kind of crispy in a way that's good for.

Your pants.

Yeah, and then they get softer so they're more workable, which is great, and have more crevices crevice options.

And the mommy has two sides.

Okay, like a hard side, like a scrubside.

Scrubside, and then like a more a softer sid try.

It out and we're not putting this in until they give us some money.

Yes, at the.

End of the episode sponsor us scrub daddy and mommy.

Some other things. And these are more like uh like infrastructural that came up were like the fire department, postal service speak to that, like how how important was Franklin to those being set up?

Fire brigades existed? Yeah, that was a long a long time, pretty famous before. And yeah, they did have fires and they did have community responses to.

Individual es.

Benjamin Franklin actually invented both fires and fires.

And the concept of insurance.

I don't know, I'm I also feel confident that that predated, at least to some extent, with all of these things we're looking at, like what we consider very obvious concepts now that he might have popularized or he might have formalized in some way. But again, like I don't necessarily think that these are things that we should be like.

That Rich says.

But one of the things he's annoyed at Ben Franklin for and writes in his diaries and in letters about as in John Adams is writing this, is that Franklin. Adams is writing that that Franklin, like is getting too much credit for stuff, and he feels frustrated that that he's been credited not just for inventions, but for like the whole revolution and for all of these ideas, and he feels frustrated that people are kind of laying all of this at Franklin's feet.

So this goes also to the did he have haters?

Yeah, when he was alive thing that there was already frustration while he was alive at how people were engaging in this like myth making around him.

Did John want some more credit? Was John like, hey, I'm doing some of this ship too, nobody's talking about me. Was that was that his real issue? Or was he just like all right enough?

This sounds like class the more classic kind of hating where it's like I'm tired of hearing about this guy.

Yeah, I think it's more of that. I don't think there's as much of John Adams being like it should have been me. But I do think he's like, Okay, there were a lot of us at the Constitutional Convention, hold on, but yeah, and even like Thomas Jefferson is also writing like, look, he can't be president because his temper is a little too he says.

I think he says he has a supple.

Temper, but that he's not suited did in terms of temperament to the difficulties of actual leadership.

I mean, there are people who are while he's alive, being like hold on, like we can't. This guy is not necessarily everything he's being held up to be.

So he did have haters, but how widespread was this hate. You know these people are right, you're saying righteous in your diaries. Are they saying this publicly or the just whispers behind the scenes.

I hate these guys. Yeah, that's different than the little people.

Not as much public hate.

It depends on what point in his life you're talking about. The British are really frustrated at him, for example, because they're like, man, you kind of mess this up for us.

Like the British are.

Like, you know, maybe wouldn't have succeeded, for example, if he didn't go to France and do this. So that's what we would consider sort of hating from someone who like lost a war.

I'd be pretty mad if I.

So that one is more understandable.

The people around him do have these frustrations, and a lot of them end up being.

Kind of frustrations around like is he a good employer?

The normal stuff, But there isn't like this widespread hate movement while he's alive, necessarily until you get to his late seventies. He dies in his mid eighties, but his late seventies is when he decides to take an abolitionist turn, and then people who are like, no, we like slavery

You know.

It's a pretty sobering thing, But it depends on who you consider a person when you're thinking about like what hating on someone is, who counts?

Can you walk us through his arc towards abolitionism.

Benjamin Franklin died in seventeen ninety. He takes this abolitionist turn, or starts thinking about it from what I can tell, in the early seventeen seventies, he moves fully into what we would call his abolitionist kind of phase. In I think seventeen eighty one, he becomes an open public abolitionist takes over control of this very public abolitionist group. He's doing all of these things in part because he's like,

In the North are starting to be like, maybe this isn't good.

So this is actually when the fault lines start to appear between who thinks slavery is an acceptable institution and who thinks it's not. But he yeah, he takes his weird turn, and we think around seventeen seventy two seventeen seventy five he starts thinking about it more and becomes open and public about it in the seventeen eighties, But before that, when he's asked to comment on slavery, he

Not super good.

Yeah.

The other thing I would add to the abolitionist thing is at the point that he becomes an abolitionist, he still has people who are enslaved living that he like owns, and he puts in his will that when he dies, that's when.

They can convenient and they.

Both, the two that he names and his will, both die before he does, so they die still enslaved.

Washington do something similar, Yes, mancific after this is kind of.

A classic thing. Actually that people who are classic.

As in like this is a common thing, a thing that happens when people are like abolition is good.

Not yet though, yeah wait until I'm gone.

Yeah, you can't do it, but the next generation might be equipped you. You You've lived too long like this. I'm too responsible for you. I'm not going to, for example, offer you your freedom and then pay for you to live a life of freedom and take care of you that way financially, which he absolutely could have done and other people did.

Instead. He was like, when I'm gone, you can go too.

It's what frustrates me so much about this kind of argument on the right, from like the Charlie Kirk types that like, you can't really blame the Confederacy that much because slavery was normal. It was like the norm, and they didn't know any better. But there is so much information that disproves that. The question we have to the guys who had the slaves, you can be free after I die, it's a clear indication that they knew what they were.

Doing, absolutely, And one of the questions we have to ask when that comes up, when someone says, oh, this was normal, it's like for who yeah, Because again, the calculus then is who's a person.

Yeah.

If the calculus is a.

Person who enslaves someone and someone who is enslaved, and we don't have the enslaved person's thoughts on the record, and we do have this person, we default to the person who says it was normal.

Yeah.

The person experiencing it does not think this is normal, yeah, right, Like.

It might even be normal on this on the basis of like a society, But it doesn't mean it was like default.

Fine, no, And also yeah, normal doesn't mean good or positive. Yeah, so it's a It is a really frustrating and kind of circular argument because it really just gets back to like, well, who do you consider a person? Whose thoughts do you care about, Whose feelings do you care about? Who matters here? You know, to bring John Adams up again, which I think is interesting to head off this this is normal. All the Founding Fathers had them argument. You know, who

Yeah.

Do we know if that was because of like historical happenstance or they had a position against it.

It depends on the person. Sometimes it's kind of both. Sometimes they like it doesn't make financial sense for me. They're expensive, right, Like not just in like to purchase, but the care and upkeeping another human being is expensive, and so some people couldn't really like afford this. And this is just using the sort of like really kind.

Of like.

Colds, But there's that some people did also have like a real moral ethical obligation where they felt like this was not right.

So those people count too. And I think it's interesting.

That when we think about Benjamin Franklin, we're like, look at all these amazing things he did. The seven people that he over the course of his life purchased sold.

At one point, one runs away.

From him in England and he goes on this quest to go find this man. Discovers that the man is in this other woman's house in England and is having a better time.

There basically, and he's like, okay, fine, I guess you can stay here. And he sells the man.

So again, this is not like he says, you're having a good time, I guess you can.

Stay because you're happy. He's like, so do you need to pay me.

In this scenario when you can stay in England? But yeah, I mean he he for almost his whole life makes money off of slavery and benefits enormously from enslaving people. So I think that should be part of the conversation when you think about if he's important or good or a fraud or whatever, and that goes to the what's bad about him?

That's mostly what's bad about Okay.

On our we're going to cancel Benjamin Franklin. The slave stuff pretty big.

It's a bad one.

It's up there.

Yeah, I'll speak for rich and say we don't support that.

Gary Nash, who's a historian who works on the American Revolution and works on like black and white relations during and after the American Revolution, says, like many other white colonists during the years leading up to the American Revolution, the Franklins grew to dislike slavery, but not so much as to sacrifice their investments. So they don't they don't like it, but they don't like it, like they still like it enough to change, yeah, to not risk some money.

Basically, yeah, so just like.

We won't do it again, and they do.

Do it again. Though.

You know what's interesting is they say, like, whoa, we don't want to do this, but if you have a kid, that kid's going to be going to become a slave too.

It's a really like it's a murky thing, and it's a thing that makes people really uncomfortable because you have to grapple with a whole lot of.

Other stuff about American history when you think about it.

Yeah, but yeah, that's my argument for the like what's about he also, you know, does the thing that quite that a lot of white colonists at this time do where he says we need to take the West indigenous peoples over there?

Who cares about them? He's not overtly like we hate them and should kill them. He just is like, we should take the West too.

We need more space, we need more people. The way that America is going to survive is by bringing as many people here as possible. And he's not, you know, alone in thinking this, and it's not specifically about wanting to, you know, cause the annihilation of this enormous group of people.

But he doesn't have a problem.

With it necessarily, so you can, I guess add that as another tick on the list.

Up next, what did Ben Franklin think about running for president and older women and farting.

All of that?

After the break?

Would he be taken more seriously, if he had been president, is.

Another ambitions to be to run for office.

No, he's eighty one at the Constitutional Convention old for context, George Washington is fifty five at this point my whole I know completely then.

And this was before eighty year olds were running for president.

At the time, ahead of his time.

If he yea also is is eighty like it's already old today, but back then that must be like.

It's like one hundred and twenty year old.

Yeah, yeah, I mean it's very ocean.

Yeah yeah, I mean he's not like, it's not like insane. There are plenty of eighty year olds that existed, fact that not as often as now because you could get dysentery pretty easily, you know, so like you could get taken out by all kinds of stuff at a garage, you know, like they didn't have penicillin.

Yeah right, some basic stuff.

Yeah, So I mean there is there is that.

Uh so he was in no shape to It wasn't like they passed over him. It's like, guys, I'm too old that I'm yeah, I'm not even in running.

It wasn't gonna that wasn't gonna happen that I don't think that was a real conversation that that people.

Were really were thinking about.

But yeah, it does reframe a lot of this stuff, and we think about, like he lived, you know, his whole life other than the stints in Europe, like in the US or what would become the US and he's eighty one when we get a constitution.

He was able to do all this stuff then, Yeah, you know, he had a lot of time.

That's part of this.

He's not president, so we can spend his time doing all kinds of going on side quests for his entire life you know then was not very quick. Yeah, yeah, he's he's like he has time to do a million other things because he doesn't.

Hold political office in the same way.

So he kind of has given this like guiding grandpa uncle role in a lot of this.

Well, yeah, he is Clinton.

Is un I'm basically curious, like what he was up to during the war, Oh.

All kinds of stuff he was in France, he was he was like being a diplomat and securing alliances.

Was he like busy with that or was this isn't also a time when he's like kind of doing all the inventions.

I think kind of simultaneously doing all of these things. But a lot of the inventions do.

Kind of pre date the constitutional conventions, and there's like between During the war, he's off getting alliances, meeting people, hanging out, yeah, and not fighting because he's seventy years the oldest.

Like these all feed.

Into each other though, right, because he's in France, he's meeting all these philosophers and scientists and whatever, and then he's getting ideas.

He's coming back.

He invents the Franklin stove, which is a stove that is kind of credited with, Like he's kinded with this new stove technique that, by the way, is immediately improved upon because it's.

Not that good. But he's still like is this guy who.

Step on Yeah?

Yeah, but yeah, like his his relationship to the war is more in like a support being in other places doing stuff, so he has time he even there kind of has timed it.

Dick around. Yeah, interestings to.

Who would we say is like the modern day equivalent of Benjamin Franklin diplomacy And.

Yeah, it depends on your idea of diplomacy because.

There are plenty of like tech billionaire guys Gates or something that who are all over the place doing all kinds of weird stuff.

Yeah, but he's not really doing diplomacy at least. Bill Gates has like the charities and stuff.

Elon skipped the diplomacy, says, he's just directly involved in the elections. Yeah, he's not really having conversations, just doing Yeah.

It is kind of weird to compare like Elon and Benjamin Franklin because we're like, Okay, well here's our idea of an inventor, like a.

Crazy inventor guy.

But because Benjamin Franklin does actually invent a bunch of stuff or like come up with stuff and do stuff.

And he also like does objectively help the.

Become a country rather than just be like, let's destroy everything and hire someone named big Balls to like take over. I don't know, but this does fit with Actually I said that we should talk about his milk thing. The inventors. Famous inventors are freaky guys is a long term problem in the US, and and Benjamin Franklin has a lot of like weird creepy.

Uncle stuff that he does and not not in like a not.

In like a scary way, but in like a like a you know, Elon and like the WIFEU stuff.

No, no, am I to online?

Yeah no, no, like he just loves the anime looking Yeah.

Yeah, Benjamin Franklin is like that a little bit.

Well, so who's the anime in Benjamin?

So he we have letters from him where he does a couple of things. So one of the things he's famous for is writing something called fart Proudly, which is proudly fart proudly, which uh. A fun thing about a lot of guys in the eighteenth century is they were they love talking about farting. So that's and that's something that ben Franklin is really into back then. He but yeah, he writes this thing that's for I think it's sort of like a science magazine, like to encourage young men

It's crazy, but.

Like we can find we have I think he's read no, no, he's talking literally yeah, but then he's saying do this and then you'll learn how to engage in scientific inquiry if you do this farting experiment. But like back then they were making fart jokes and being like, you know what teen teenage boys love is fart jokes, and he.

Was like yeah, and then time yeah.

And then the other real weird thing that we have from him, it's a letter that's known as Advice to a young Friend on mistresses, and it's telling this young friend. Uh, he's telling this young friend that having sexual urges, being horny is normal, and the way to solve it is by getting a wife.

And he says, you know they're hot when they're old too, like get a hot.

Old wife basically, and like it's you're kind of like okay, and but some of the things he writes about it are yeah, and I'm sorry to.

My parents who are probably gonna be listening to this.

The Wikipedia page on it literally says, whether serious or humorous, the letter is frankly sexual.

He says. He talks about things like.

The lower parts continuing to last as plump as ever, and says and as in the dark, all cats are gray.

The pleasure of corporal enjoyment with an old woman is at least equal and frequently superior, every knack being by practice, capable of improvements. Who says, the older she is, the better she is, the more practice she has is incredible. Isn't that incredible? So add that to the uncancellation.

Yes, supersedes slavery, and we're assuming by older woman. He's maybe, I mean back then, he could be talking about someone's twenty what is.

The eight.

I mean he has a wife, like, he has an old later on, Yeah, he's writing this to.

A young young like. He's saying, hey, I know.

You got to get an experience.

You can get a more experience, he says, he's just trying to pay through this.

Yeah, he's like, you're no, I mean, you have urges. You're a young man. Get a wife and the bonuses.

It just gets better.

It's all.

Cats are not take he.

Said, don't take advantage of her either, get married to her.

Yeah.

He's not saying just go out there and sleep with her, make her your wife.

And he's saying, this is the best way to fulfill all of these urges.

It's by being loyal to more experience. Yeah, I can't find nothing wrong with that's pretty good, absolutely good.

Yeah, I mean it's a it's a It is wild every pretty much every historic figure.

If you look hard enough, you're going to find something crazy.

I love the day So he wrote this. This is a letter he sent to his front man. If I send you off some ship like that, right after you read it read.

Letters, Hey, I don't know what to do, Like I'm dating Devin sends me that. Hey, listen, all cats are great in the friends.

It does have a very like uncle at a at like a barbecue.

Let me tell you something.

Yeah, look, you've been single for too long.

They wrote too much down back then, you know.

So I always wonder if it's going to be read by the public in the future, like I imagine in this case, the guy who received the letter, maybe his family after he died, gave it to a museum or something because they knew who he was from. I always wonder if the.

Audience, Yes, exactly, people were writing letters the way that people are like tweeting.

Yeah, because we would call it an epistolary culture.

So like letter writing culture, this is like how you get your thoughts up.

So people are saying thousands of letters to each other.

So this is something that you would just fire off like he was like, all right, I need to give someone advice.

He said at my young boy, you know, like he was on Twitter. Yeah, he's the guy's tweet now. Yeah, he's like, young, I'm a horny what should I do? And then Ben's adding him.

Wasn't the original tweet icon when you click to tweet something like a quills? Oh yeah, there's.

Continuity, historical continuity happening here.

Actually, we're all engaging in epistolary culture. Wow, at this moment in time.

If we still use Twitter, that's beautiful.

So I guess the last question we have is why isn't he today more scrutinized. You know, I like a lot of modern day figures, especially post twenty twenty. We were looking at everybody.

Jefferson, they got his.

We were going through all these people. Oh, y'all like him. They did this ship here.

Yeah, Jefferson really really got and he deserves to Jackson Jackson too.

Oh yeah, harder than ever.

Yeah, So why I don't remember us talking a lot about Benny during that time period? Why do you think that is?

Why?

Why do you have any memories of this?

And why did he get?

But yeah, my only guess is like because he's not a president, so only we mainly think of him. Of course we know this diplomacy and stuff from but I mean we think of the electricity thing as kind of the iconic stuff I feel like when you're a kid, right, and then you know he's involved in the other stuff, but we don't put that much importance because we don't see him like a George Washington was the leader.

Of the country.

Yeah, so I think the presidents obviously take you know, the first they're the top founder and then like the one b we got Ben Franklin, right, even though he's probably more famous than a few of those presidents really.

Yeah, and he wasn't like a general or something like that.

Yeah, So there's not any there's not like other stories about him in that way.

I don't know.

That's that's my only guess for why we haven't had that re examination. And then the only other association storry I'll keep going. Please, he's on one hundred dollars bills, so it's like all about the Benjamins. We'd like, like that's a cool, daool aspirational thing and just we like money, yeah cool, And.

He's all over filly and sunglasses.

Yeah, and Yeah, all our friends in Philly see him all the time.

Yeah.

I think there are two answers to this. So the first answer is basically what you've said. He's so fascinating. He does all this interesting stuff. He's all over the place, he has all these side quests, he's going to all these places doing interesting things, and he's doing this while not holding enormous formal state power.

So we don't tend to criticize people who we see as being like.

Helpers of the machine rather than the machine themselves. And like we love the kooky genius guy, Like that's archetype that we've been working with for a very very long time in a lot of different contexts. We know, the interesting genius dude, Like that's a that's if you like go in your head, climb into your head and think about this, Like you could probably come up with a ton of like wacky guys, Albert, Yeah, whacky guys who come up with stuff. They look funny, they send weird

That's the archetype of a guy.

And so people are like, okay, well we can just kind of box them away that way. Yeah, and so we don't need to scrutinize him because we're like, oh, he's a founding father, but he's eighty when he's doing it, and he's kind of he's kind of wacky and and so that's I think part of this. And then the other part is because we don't really scrutinize historical figures

They did really really bad stuff, not like daily level.

Everyone's kind of doing bad stuff, stuff like really egregiously bad things. But everybody who doesn't do that or doesn't do things that rise to that level, we often kind of leave them alone. So let me make you a pitch for a podcast. Yeah, Like, everything I'm saying here has been said before by much more knowledgeable people, like people who work on Franklin directly so I'm just reiterating

Dealing with right now.

There's a reason that like current modern state policy is about rewriting and erasing parts of the past that are uncomfortable, and specifically the parts that we have started to reckon with where we've started to be like, h at this at Monticello, for example, or at Mount Vernon. Let's have exhibits on the people who were enslaved and living here.

Let's have these in national parks.

Let's talk about the indigenous people that we've like booted off this land or killed or whatever.

Like.

Those are the things that people are trying to get rid of, in part because it makes you like think about the time that.

We're living in right now.

And so when we reassess people, it feels like like it creates a sense of discomfort. It can also create a sense of like satisfaction and relief when we reassess someone, to feel like someone is being written back into a narrative. But that often is at odds with the discomfort. You know, it's less satisfying to say this person was complicated, yeah,

But we like a one dimensional guy when we think about history.

So now, after all we've learned about Ben Franklin, we think it's important to bring it back to our original debaters, Rich and Kelsey. So we're gonna call him up and see how they feel about all this.

All right, So we are joined now by our two competing factions of the Ben Franklin legacy. Yeah, Kelsey and Rich from episode one. So we've now talked to our expert, We've talked to Claire. We have some information we want to share a few about good old Benjamin Franklin and then we want to get your reactions. But first of all, thank you guys for joining us, thank.

You for having us.

It's very serious, very tense.

I know.

It's palpable. Yeah, tension in the studio right now is it feels like I'm in court.

So we'd love to just get some general reactions thoughts, maybe starting with Rich.

Yeah, sure, So I think that in terms of the main question, was he overrated, underrated? Was he like legit for what he's known for. I think that, Yeah, there's a lot of mythology around him, around this idea of being a renaissance man. I think part of that is he was as close to a celebrity as you.

Had back then.

But I think that used that to his advantage. Yeah, basically the Kardashian of the founding Fathers. So I think I think he used that to his advantage for his diplomacy, especially with France. And I think that, like if we're talking about like the first like the premise of this debate, basically, I think that even if you just took his diplomacy with France, which helped bring them to the war, which ended up winning the war, for what became the US, I think that is enough for like to be considered

Yeah.

Another thing we realized was that your two points of view are not even necessarily in contrast with each other. Because Rich you just think he, you know, is adequately credited for the things he did in his life. Kelsey's just fucking annoyed at seeing him everywhere, So it's like they're not even necessarily in conscious Just your general thoughts.

Well, I'm it's nice to meet you, Rich, and I'm glad that moving forwards, friends, I was a little scared to learn that I had a potential nemesis out there in the universe around Benjamin Franklin. So that's really getting me. Uh yeah, No, I'm so excited about everything that we've learned through this exploration. I think that's something I'm reflecting on, is that this all tracks because I just kind of hate celebrities, so maybe that's kind of what I'm responding to.

Uh oh, yeah, the mad scientist.

Yeah, And I think I mean, it's really interesting to think about how my positionality and like where I exist in history just really complicates my ability to even fully understand that as like a norm, because I feel like I exist in like the hive mind era of like information sharing and discovery, and so the idea that like I kind of live by is like nothing is original, and we're all making everything together, and like the best

That was one of his strongest positions.

Actually he never waved on that.

Thing.

No such thing as a production of Kaleidoscope Content. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne and make Yes hot A Cadur. The show is created by Manny Fideo, Noah Friedman, and Devin Joseph. Themine credit song by Manny, mixing by Steve Bone. Our guest this week is Claire Aubyn. Check out her show This Guy Sucked and special thanks to our friends Rich and Kelsey. Visit No Such Thing dot show to subscribe to our newsletter for links to more research, and

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