Speaker 1: During the COVID crisis, and when I was hanging around
Speaker 1: Elon Mosque, I was in an airless, windowless conference room
Speaker 1: down in Bokachika, Texas and Star Base, and of course
Speaker 1: nobody was wearing masks because they were all accolytes of
Speaker 1: the mosque. But one of the things I did is
Speaker 1: i'd sneak into the conference room sometimes and make sure
Speaker 1: the vent fan was always on. I wasn't very sure
Speaker 1: about cloth masks or anything else, but I knew if
Speaker 1: you were with a group of people in a room,
Speaker 1: you should make sure the windows are open, because that's
Speaker 1: what Franklin taught us. There's a really amusing scene where
Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin is traveling with John Adams to meet with
Speaker 1: a British emmissary to see if they can avert the revolution,
Speaker 1: and Adams and Franklin have to share a room at
Speaker 1: an end, and Adams has a cold, and Franklin keeps
Speaker 1: opening the window and Adams says, no, no, shut the window.
Speaker 2: I have a cold.
Speaker 1: And Franklin explains his theory of colds and airborne organisms,
Speaker 1: and Adams, who's not a very funny fellow, writes in
Speaker 1: his journal. Franklin droned on and on until I finally
Speaker 1: fell asleep and the window was left open. And indeed,
Speaker 1: Franklin doesn't catch the cold. Walter, welcome, Thank you very much, Evan.
Speaker 1: Great to be with you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great to talk to you.
Speaker 3: I am very excited to talk about mister Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 3: Doctor Benjamin Doctorlyn, Yes Franklin. Even though it's not exactly
Speaker 3: an Urn doctorate, he got many honorary ones and loved
Speaker 3: the title. The proper respect should be showed, respect must
Speaker 3: be paid. Over the past year, I had an ongoing
Speaker 3: conversation with the famed biographer Walter Isaacson about writing about
Speaker 3: research and of course, about the subjects themselves. You may
Speaker 3: have heard the first part of our conversation in a
Speaker 3: Musk when we talked about his experience studying the controversial
Speaker 3: tech mogul. Some of the things we discussed, both about
Speaker 3: innovation and about the state of our polarized politics. Maybe
Speaker 3: want to reach back into the past and look at
Speaker 3: some of Walter's historical subjects. So we turned to a
Speaker 3: figure that Walter can't stop thinking about, Benjamin Franklin, a
Speaker 3: man who straddled the worlds of science, media, and government
Speaker 3: in America's turbulent founding era, to see if he could
Speaker 3: help us make sense of today's turbulent times. Where were
Speaker 3: you in your life when you decided that you were
Speaker 3: going to pursue a biography of Franklin and what was
Speaker 3: about him that sort of grabbed you.
Speaker 1: I came to Benjamin Franklin having written about Henry Kissinger
Speaker 1: and foreign policy. Kissinger was very much a raal politique realist,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to look at the roots of that
Speaker 1: tension between realism and idealism in American foreign policy, and
Speaker 1: it takes you back to Benjamin Franklin. He is both
Speaker 1: the ultimate realist and the ultimate idealist. So I thought, wow,
Speaker 1: I should go back and do Benjamin Franklin. But then
Speaker 1: the second thing that struck me is that his balance
Speaker 1: of power, diplomacy, and the checks and balances, all the
Speaker 1: things he did derived from his science.
Speaker 3: It wasn't easy for someone like Franklin, who had limited means,
Speaker 3: to transition seamlessly from printing to science to politics, and excel.
Speaker 2: In all three.
Speaker 3: This remarkable versatility became the foundation of Franklin's and during
Speaker 3: Influence I was especially interested to learn about Franklin the scientists.
Speaker 3: It's the part of the my new least well, or
Speaker 3: at least not beyond the idea that he discovered electricity.
Speaker 3: More on that in a bit, And Isaacson tells me
Speaker 3: it's his scientific curiosity and exploration that lays the groundwork
Speaker 3: for some of his most important work as a founding father.
Speaker 3: For Franklin, being a scientist was not a profession or
Speaker 3: a strict field of study. It was a state of
Speaker 3: mind driven by curiosity and a tendency towards self directed learning.
Speaker 3: And of course there was still so much to discover.
Speaker 2: Nowadays.
Speaker 1: In our generation you had people who were great humanist, great,
Speaker 1: but they would tell, oh, I can't do physics, I
Speaker 1: can't do man, you know, I don't do any of that.
Speaker 1: But he or his younger friend Jefferson would have thought
Speaker 1: you were a philistine if you did keep up with science. Well,
Speaker 1: does reconnect it for Benjamin Franklin, somebody whose experimental nature,
Speaker 1: whose search for evidence informed everything he did. So that
Speaker 1: made me you want to write about all the facets
Speaker 1: of Benjamin Franklin, the scientists, Benjamin Franklin, the entrepreneur, Benjamin Franklin,
Speaker 1: the business person who creates a media Empire, Benjamin Franklin,
Speaker 1: the diplomat. All of this wove together, and I felt, nowadays, boy,
Speaker 1: we really need Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 2: So that's why I immersed myself.
Speaker 1: At that time, you felt we need Benjamin and all
Speaker 1: the more so today I want.
Speaker 3: To go all the way back, start at the beginning,
Speaker 3: and try to figure out how he became one of
Speaker 3: the foremost scientists of his age.
Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin was the tenth son of a Puritan immigrant
Speaker 1: to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and as a tenth son,
Speaker 1: he was going to be his father's tithe to the Lord.
Speaker 1: His father was going to send him to Harvard to
Speaker 1: study to be a minister, and Franklin wasn't exactly cut
Speaker 1: for the cloth.
Speaker 2: At some point, they were.
Speaker 1: Assaulting the provisions for the winter, and he said to
Speaker 1: his father, why don't we just say grace over him
Speaker 1: right now? We get it done for the entire the
Speaker 1: next few months. And so his father realized, well, that
Speaker 1: would be a waste of money to send him to
Speaker 1: become a minister. He was always a spunky lad, and
Speaker 1: he loved to think of himself as a leader among
Speaker 1: the boys. He was the one who led the other
Speaker 1: kids to stealing rocks so they could build a dam
Speaker 1: in the Boston Harbor where they could swim, and he
Speaker 1: invented ways to do swimming, including paddles and flippers.
Speaker 3: Franklin becomes an autodidact, less by choice than by the
Speaker 3: fact that his dad decides that this particular son is
Speaker 3: probably not worth the investment of a Harvard education.
Speaker 1: He becomes a person always curious. He read about everything
Speaker 1: from history to science. He watches how whirlwinds form. He
Speaker 1: eventually discovers how storms move up the coast because he's
Speaker 1: interested in a kneeclipse that is happening. So it's that
Speaker 1: insatiable curiosity I think was almost created when he was
Speaker 1: denied the right to go to college. So he gets
Speaker 1: his hunger for teaching himself and.
Speaker 3: This sort of ability to see the world in a
Speaker 3: way that you feel you can figure it out if
Speaker 3: you see something around you. In Benjamin Franklin, it prompted
Speaker 3: an idea that he could solve it, that he could
Speaker 3: understand something that maybe hadn't been understood.
Speaker 1: This was the gift of the scientific revolution that had
Speaker 1: occurred just before Franklin's time, which is the universe wasn't
Speaker 1: just a total mystery. There were things you could figure
Speaker 1: out about it. How storms moved, how eclipses happened. Now
Speaker 1: that seems pretty obvious, but you have to remember before
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment, we thought wisdom was received as opposed to
Speaker 1: let's figure out nature. And so Franklin becomes the pioneer
Speaker 1: of the Enlightenment in America. Unlike Newton Galileo, he doesn't
Speaker 1: have a lot of math. He doesn't do the theories.
Speaker 1: But as he says, as a practical person, you don't
Speaker 1: need to know the theory of gravity to know that
Speaker 1: if you let go of a piece of crockery, it'll
Speaker 1: fall to the floor and break. Among the things Franklin
Speaker 1: studied as an experimentalist and a tinker is just simple phenomenon,
Speaker 1: the lightning rod being the most famous. But then how
Speaker 1: does dark cloth absorb heat better than light cloth? And
Speaker 1: he did experiments where he put black pieces of cloth
Speaker 1: on snow and then lighter pieces of cloth and measured
Speaker 1: which would melt the snow underneath faster.
Speaker 3: It almost sounds like something you would do in the
Speaker 3: eighth grade or even elementary school science project. And the
Speaker 3: idea that at the time he could conceive these experiments
Speaker 3: and just do them on his own. He could just
Speaker 3: execute them and make a discovery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we had great theorists right before from Fanklin who
Speaker 1: understood the nature of light and heat. But then you
Speaker 1: have Franklin doing experiments we all did. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: a light piece of cloth and a dark one, what's
Speaker 1: going to get warmer? But what Franklin does is he
Speaker 1: always looked for practical ways to use that your clothes
Speaker 1: in summer should be light and in winter should be dark.
Speaker 1: He also tinkered and created a wood burning stove we
Speaker 1: now call the Franklin stove, and it was about the
Speaker 1: simple thing of how do you get more heat into
Speaker 1: the room with less smoke. And these type of things
Speaker 1: may seem mundane compared to Newton figuring out a theory
Speaker 1: of gravity, but in our daily lives having clean burning stoves,
Speaker 1: bifocal glasses, understanding the heat absorption of cloth, a urinary
Speaker 1: Catherine when his brother was having a urinary tract disease,
Speaker 1: Franklin is able to make it flexible, easy to insert.
Speaker 2: And this is just his way of using both.
Speaker 1: Science and ingenuity to create new technology, which is what
Speaker 1: we try to do in our modern age.
Speaker 2: When we come back.
Speaker 3: Franklin's scientific discoveries make him an international celebrity, and we'll
Speaker 3: even dig into that rumor about Franklin wanting to bump
Speaker 3: the bald Eagle and make the humble Turkey America's official bird.
Speaker 3: There's this story of Benjamin Franklin and his ingenuity that
Speaker 3: every school kid knows. It involves a man in long socks,
Speaker 3: a kite, a key, and a lightning storm. But it
Speaker 3: isn't just his discovery of electricity and conductivity that makes
Speaker 3: this moment special. As with all franklin scientific explorations, it
Speaker 3: led to something practical, an invention that saved countless lives.
Speaker 2: I asked Walter about that.
Speaker 3: I did not realize how famous he became just from
Speaker 3: the lightning rod, particularly in France, and it's sort of
Speaker 3: foreshadowing for later what he's able to do diplomatically for
Speaker 3: the New America. A lot of it is derived from
Speaker 3: this fame that he's accrued because he invented the lightning rod.
Speaker 1: It's kind of odd, but up until then people believed
Speaker 1: they were bolts from heaven and an expression of God's will,
Speaker 1: and they would consecrate the bells of churches to water
Speaker 1: off the lightning, but even the most religiously faithful were
Speaker 1: likely to have noticed that it was not very effective.
Speaker 1: Lightning kept hitting church peoples. In Germany. During one period
Speaker 1: thirty five years, three hundred and eighty six churches were struck,
Speaker 1: and in venice like three thousand people were killed when
Speaker 1: tons of gun powder had been stored in the church
Speaker 1: and it was hit. Franklin later wrote to John Winthrop,
Speaker 1: who was a Harvard professor, and he wrote, the lightning
Speaker 1: seems to strike steeples of choice just as the bells
Speaker 1: are ringing. One would think we might now try some
Speaker 1: other trick to ward it off.
Speaker 2: Benjamin Franklin again.
Speaker 1: His electricity experiments when a showman came down from Boston
Speaker 1: who was doing static electricity, you know, rubbing a glass
Speaker 1: with cloth and then making little sparks. What Franklin does
Speaker 1: is he mixes this sort of fun you have with
Speaker 1: a parl trick using static electricity with theories from reading
Speaker 1: the other great scientists of the time. In the journal
Speaker 1: that Franklin kept for his experiments, he noted in seventeen
Speaker 1: forty nine that there were some similarities between electrical sparks
Speaker 1: and lightning, and being the type of bookkeeper he was,
Speaker 1: he listed twelve of them. They both give light, they
Speaker 1: have the same color, the crooked direction of swift motion,
Speaker 1: the sulfur of smell. Very Franklin like. He puts his
Speaker 1: rallying cry at the bottom of the notebook page, let
Speaker 1: the experiment be made. You know, great theorists like Newton
Speaker 1: had noticed the apparent connection between lightning and electricity, but
Speaker 1: nobody had written, let the experiment be made.
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: So Franklin lays out a methodical test for figuring out
Speaker 1: exactly what lightning is, and it's a rather complicated thing.
Speaker 1: He describes how you would make an electrical stand that's
Speaker 1: grounded but has an iron rod that's connected to the earth,
Speaker 1: and how many feet And he also discovered that pointed
Speaker 1: pieces of metal attract sparks better than rounded pieces. So
Speaker 1: he does all of these very specific descriptions of how
Speaker 1: to do the experiment, and it's done actually in France
Speaker 1: first before he has a chance to erect all the
Speaker 1: apparatus in Philadelphia.
Speaker 3: But even though he wasn't there to do the experiment,
Speaker 3: he becomes famous for having designed the experiment.
Speaker 1: Absolutely the King of France has read about Franklin's proposed experiments,
Speaker 1: and the King asks people in France to try to
Speaker 1: carry them out, and these are known as Franklin's experiments.
Speaker 3: And then what happens when he finally arrives in France.
Speaker 1: When he arrives in France, he is known as the
Speaker 1: great scientist who tamed lightning, and so he's enormously famous.
Speaker 1: Crowds turn out in Brittany when he lands. They carry
Speaker 1: him to the steps of the academy when he gets
Speaker 1: to Paris so that he can hug Voltaire. He also
Speaker 1: is a good public relations guy. And so Franklin, who
Speaker 1: had hardly ever been to the backwoods and lives in Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: Boston and London his whole life. Where's a fur cap
Speaker 1: he had gotten during one trip to Canada and pretends
Speaker 1: to be the back wood sage and scientists, and they
Speaker 1: were veeram and the women start wearing their hair and
Speaker 1: what was called the coiffor la la Franklin, which is
Speaker 1: their hair done up as if it's a fur cap
Speaker 1: on their heads.
Speaker 3: It's wild to think of them as such a celebrity.
Speaker 3: And then you realize at this point his popularity is
Speaker 3: just from the lightning rod, even though he also invented
Speaker 3: or goes on to invent so many other things. But
Speaker 3: my question is, why didn't you patent the lightning rod?
Speaker 2: I mean, it.
Speaker 3: Feels obvious for a man like Franklin, a successful business owner,
Speaker 3: if he'd just taken a percentage on every rod, his
Speaker 3: descendants could still live off that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he talks about how much it could have made
Speaker 1: had he patented the lightning rod idea or patent in
Speaker 1: the stove. But he always felt that it was part
Speaker 1: of your civic duty to be inventive, and that we
Speaker 1: gained so much from previous inventions that we should be
Speaker 1: happy to put things back in the river of history.
Speaker 1: So his experiments that come to the conclusion of the
Speaker 1: single fluid theory of electricity, the invention of batteries in
Speaker 1: which you can store electricity, the invention of lightning rods
Speaker 1: so you can draw electricity from the clouds, those are
Speaker 1: the most important experimental discoveries of his era. But he
Speaker 1: just wants to say, what use is it. At one point,
Speaker 1: after a season of electricity experiments, he said, we discovered
Speaker 1: all sorts of things, but we hadn't figured out what
Speaker 1: the use of it would be and so they draw
Speaker 1: a lot of electricity stored in batteries and then use
Speaker 1: the shocks to kill turkeys. And he said they were
Speaker 1: uncommonly tender, And so we Southerners like to think he's
Speaker 1: the inventor of the first fried turkey.
Speaker 3: Hold on, speaking of turkeys. What to quickly address this
Speaker 3: rumor that you hear periodically around Thanksgiving that Ben Franklin
Speaker 3: wanted the turkey as America's national birdd instead of the
Speaker 3: bald eagle.
Speaker 1: I think he thought the bald eagle was too proud,
Speaker 1: And it was in one of his writings where he
Speaker 1: didn't want there to be an aristocracy called the Cincinnatis Club,
Speaker 1: people who had started with Washington were supposed to be part.
Speaker 1: He said, no, no, we're not trying to do that. And
Speaker 1: he then does this little divergence where he doesn't want
Speaker 1: the eagle to be the symbol of un I say,
Speaker 1: it's should be the turkey, because the turkey reminds us,
Speaker 1: you know, we're a little bit silly. We shouldn't take
Speaker 1: ourselves too seriously, and he does this pay on to
Speaker 1: the turkey. I'm much more practical, and I don't know
Speaker 1: He just thought we shouldn't get too grand, we should
Speaker 1: poke fun at our pretensions.
Speaker 3: We're going to take a quick break, but when we
Speaker 3: come back, we'll look at how Franklin's scientific inquiry bled
Speaker 3: into all parts of his life, including how he managed
Speaker 3: to keep a cool head while helping found it in nation.
Speaker 3: One of the things about Ben Franklin is that being
Speaker 3: a scientist it is foundational. It shapes him as a
Speaker 3: person and spills into all his different interests, but he's
Speaker 3: always kind of doing it on the side. When does
Speaker 3: it really become a focus for him?
Speaker 1: By age forty two, he had probably become the most
Speaker 1: successful self made person in the colonies. He had not
Speaker 1: only created print shops, but he enfranchised them up and
Speaker 1: down the coast. He had helped create a colonial postal
Speaker 1: system to tie these print shops together. He created Poor Richard,
Speaker 1: and he created newspapers, and so this makes him very successful.
Speaker 1: But at that point he wants to change his life
Speaker 1: a bit, and so he retires, partly so that he
Speaker 1: become more of a civic citizen, even more than he
Speaker 1: had been before, but also somebody who was interested in
Speaker 1: everything from the sparks of electricity and lightning to diplomacy.
Speaker 3: What do you think it was about his outlook on
Speaker 3: life that caused him to have this almost like sense
Speaker 3: of fun and scientific adventure about exploring all of these
Speaker 3: different areas.
Speaker 1: There are very few people in history who really have
Speaker 1: a hunger to learn everything possible about everything that you
Speaker 1: could know. I mean, that's certainly true of Leonardo da Vinci.
Speaker 1: It was everything from a musician to a mathematician, to
Speaker 1: an artist to an engineer. It was true of maybe Aristotle. Well,
Speaker 1: it's definitely true of Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 3: And he must have had an innate ability to not
Speaker 3: be concerned about being wrong or being called a dabbler.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that if somebody called him a dabbler an amateur,
Speaker 1: he would take it as a compliment. He really loved
Speaker 1: being ingenious and trying to be interested in everything, and
Speaker 1: I think he thought if he were blinder and too focused,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't be able to be as creative or as imaginative.
Speaker 1: He also just loved science for its own sake, the
Speaker 1: fascination of experiments, and that included when he's in France
Speaker 1: after the Revolution, he's helping fund the first flights of
Speaker 1: hot air balloons, just because he's totally fascinated. When a
Speaker 1: spectator asked, what is the use of these new balloons?
Speaker 1: What are they good for? Franklin said, what is the
Speaker 1: use of a newborn baby. Franklin realized that curiosity for
Speaker 1: its own sake, we may not know what it will
Speaker 1: grow into, but we should always expect that things will
Speaker 1: grow and they'll become useful.
Speaker 3: But he didn't lose the rest of his life on it. Experiments.
Speaker 3: He just did experiments while he was doing everything else.
Speaker 1: Even when he's in England trying to negotiate for the
Speaker 1: colonies and prevent the revolution, he's still pursuing scientific inquiries.
Speaker 1: It's his hobby. So he helped put the lightning rods on
Speaker 1: Saint Paul's cathedral. That's where he does his theories of
Speaker 1: the common cold. That's where he does theories of exercise,
Speaker 1: where he sees how much heat you're generating when you
Speaker 1: do different types of exercises, and sort of comes up
Speaker 1: with this notion of what we now called calories. He
Speaker 1: looked into lead poisoning why the oceans were salty. He
Speaker 1: actually got.
Speaker 2: That one wrong.
Speaker 1: But even inventing things like musical instruments.
Speaker 3: You mentioned in being wrong. That's another aspect of it
Speaker 3: is it's not just about making discoveries and proving things,
Speaker 3: but it's about this sort of iteration and revision and
Speaker 3: evolution where you might get it wrong, but then you've
Speaker 3: still moved scientific knowledge forward.
Speaker 1: He liked testing things out and being open to evidence.
Speaker 1: The basic scientific method which Franklin embraced, which is to
Speaker 1: have a theory, figure out a way you can test it,
Speaker 1: then revise your theory based on the evidence you get.
Speaker 1: That scientific method sounds so simple to us, it's so obvious.
Speaker 1: He got a theory, test it, and by the way,
Speaker 1: if the evidence comes back, figure out a new theory.
Speaker 1: And that notion helps him understand how science intersects with
Speaker 1: public policy. One of the things we don't do very
Speaker 1: well is let people change their minds. We always say, well,
Speaker 1: you flip flopped, or you change your mind. Well, Franklin
Speaker 1: often evolved. He evolved on slavery, he evolved on immigration.
Speaker 1: And having that open mind in which you're willing to
Speaker 1: accept new evidence and revise your opinions. That's the essence
Speaker 1: of the scientific method. But it's also the essence of democracy.
Speaker 3: And for someone who is so detail orient to. He
Speaker 3: seemed to push the notion of imperfection, that imperfection needed
Speaker 3: to be allowed in the Constitution. It's sort of funny
Speaker 3: to think about today when there's so much reverence for
Speaker 3: the founding fathers. So they've written the perfect documents, and
Speaker 3: those documents need to be respected letter by letter and
Speaker 3: word by word. But he seemed to have a notion
Speaker 3: of we're not going to achieve perfection.
Speaker 1: His closing speech in the Constitutional Convention is really a
Speaker 1: document that everybody should read. He was the oldest person
Speaker 1: by far at the Convention, twice as old as the
Speaker 1: average member, and he says, I confess that I do
Speaker 1: not entirely approve this Constitution at present. But he said,
Speaker 1: the older I get, the more I realize that I'm
Speaker 1: wrong at times, and which seems like an imperfection to me. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe it's the right way to do it. And so
Speaker 1: he says, I endorse this Constitution with all of its
Speaker 1: perhaps flaws, because I'm not sure now that they are flaws,
Speaker 1: or that we could get something more perfect came out
Speaker 1: of human hands.
Speaker 3: And of course there were cases where he was right,
Speaker 3: and one of them is the Gulf Stream. Can you
Speaker 3: walk us through how you figure that out.
Speaker 1: Even as he's traveling across the ocean coming back to
Speaker 1: Philadelphia in seventeen seventy five, for instance, there he is
Speaker 1: standing on the deck of the boat with his grandson
Speaker 1: Temple and hearing that it takes longer to get back
Speaker 1: to America than it does to get to Europe. And
Speaker 1: he's going, why is that? Why is that? And so
Speaker 1: he measures, with his grandson helping him, the temperature of
Speaker 1: the water. And he's devised a barrel that has a
Speaker 1: flap to it that he can open so he can
Speaker 1: take the temperature at different depths to see how deep
Speaker 1: the Gulf stream is.
Speaker 3: And something that is now confirmed by satellites that match
Speaker 3: up to a picture that he created just by lowering
Speaker 3: barrels into the water.
Speaker 2: It's extraordinary.
Speaker 1: If you see the chart he makes, it's remarkably similar
Speaker 1: to the one that's now on the NASA web site.
Speaker 1: In fact, the NASA website reprints a picture of Benjamin
Speaker 1: Franklin's chart. Franklin was a great believer in the future.
Speaker 1: In his will, he set up to trust funds for
Speaker 1: aspiring entrepreneurs like himself, one in Boston and one in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: The revolving loan fund in Philadelphia was particularly interesting because
Speaker 1: it accrued just as the way he said it did,
Speaker 1: and two centuries after his death, the fund had reached
Speaker 1: more than two million dollars, and at one point it
Speaker 1: was used by kids in inner city Philadelphia to make
Speaker 1: electric go kart type things to race in one of
Speaker 1: these solar races. So I love the idea of the
Speaker 1: person who help us harness electricity also having a loan
Speaker 1: fund of people doing it in the twenty first century.
Speaker 3: And was there a tiny bit of ego in it
Speaker 3: too that his name was sort of carry along with
Speaker 3: those he couldn't have known maybe how big his name
Speaker 3: would continue to be anyway.
Speaker 2: Oh, I think he knew.
Speaker 3: Franklin was someone who cared deeply about the legacy he
Speaker 3: would leave not only as a scientist and a civic leader,
Speaker 3: but also as a man with some pretty big regrets
Speaker 3: of a.
Speaker 2: More personal nature.
Speaker 3: Next time on on Benjamin Franklin, we dive into Franklin's
Speaker 3: early life. He was a printer, a businessman, and a rebel.
Speaker 1: Franklin has a very complicated family life, and throughout his
Speaker 1: life he had kept this ledger of errors. He had
Speaker 1: made and how he had regnified and mistake number one
Speaker 1: in his ledger book was running Away from his brother.
Speaker 3: This show is based on the writing and research of
Speaker 3: Walter Isaacson. So stood by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed
Speaker 3: and sound designed by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our
Speaker 3: consulting producer. Lizzie Jacobs, Who's our editor. Social media by
Speaker 3: Dara Potts.
Speaker 2: This show was.
Speaker 3: Engineered at CDMU Studios from iHeart Podcasts. The executive producers
Speaker 3: are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was
Speaker 3: executive produced by Mangeshetigador, with an assist from Oz Walishan
Speaker 3: Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Amanda Urban, Bob Pittman,
Speaker 3: conel Byrne, Will Pearson, Nikki Etoor, Carrie Lieberman, Nathan Otuski
Speaker 3: and Ali Gavin And If you like podcasts about inventions
Speaker 3: what they mean for humanity, check out my other show
Speaker 3: shell Game, about how it created an AI clone and
Speaker 3: set it loose on the world. It's at shell Game
Speaker 3: dot co. And for more shows from Kaleletoscope, be sure
Speaker 3: to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for listening