Season 7, Episode 3 (#194):

Jim Infantino (08:39.426)
Hmm. Well we're gonna talk about a gentleman who lived a long time ago just way back when he was just a lowercase G in the seventeen hundreds. When was he born? I should yeah. Ben Benjamin Franklin.

Lionel (08:47.776)
In a magical land.

Lionel (08:57.118)
What, Benjamin? What's lowercase g? Where'd the letter G come from?

Jim Infantino (09:04.834)
Gangster. He was like a little gangster when he was when he was growing up in Boston. Yeah. And he was. He was a troublemaker.

Lionel (09:06.74)
okay. He was he was an interesting man, but let's answer your question, Benjamin Franklin. so Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706 in Boston.

Jim Infantino (09:17.805)
Yeah.

Jim Infantino (09:25.516)
Right. So right after the roaring sixteen hundreds.

Lionel (09:30.152)
Right, the The Flapper era.

Jim Infantino (09:34.176)
A wild time was being had.

Lionel (09:36.184)
The piece of Hanover. anyway. yeah, so I read a book. and I have my notes here. Where are my notes? I have my notes. I read a book called The First American by by H. W. Brands, published in 2010. it's a very exhausting book.

Jim Infantino (09:40.343)
Yeah.

Jim Infantino (10:00.056)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (10:03.456)
it's not really the first book you should read about Benjamin Franklin. you probably want something a little more accessible, and you've got to be like a real Ben Franklin fanboy, and even then. I mean, it's a good book. I mean, the guy's not messing around. He goes in real deep, he gives you lots of quotes. Sometimes the quotes are a little too long, in my opinion, but the the it gives you a lot of detail. And what you realize is you don't know anything about Benjamin Franklin.

and you know, you think well, the funniest thing is the one thing I think about is the the the the usual suspects. The greatest trick the devil pulled off was convincing everybody he didn't exist. And the greatest trick that Ben Franklin pulled off was that I would submit, I'm putting it on the line here, I would submit he was easily the most important person for the American Revolution.

Jim Infantino (10:34.882)
And there's a reason.

Jim Infantino (10:45.259)
Right, right.

Jim Infantino (10:58.51)
Absolutely. He won the the American Revolution. And we can we can we can fight about it, but but that's I mean, it's not the narrative that gets told because he was n

Lionel (11:08.972)
He was never elected president. He didn't lead an army. and he cultivated this folksy, harmless exterior. And to a large degree, he was. He wasn't a fighter, at least not physically, but he wasn't a fighter, he wasn't and and he just he cultivated a very, very specific image that was unbelievably successful. but when you read this book.

Jim Infantino (11:13.442)
Yeah, he wasn't a general.

Lionel (11:37.526)
You know, shards of it you know, because shards of it you've been taught in school, but you really get a deep sense, and I could go on forever about this, but why not I instead of me just vacuuming sucking all the oxygen out of the cubicle here, why don't you tell me some th is there anything you wanna get off your mind first before I uncap the silos?

Jim Infantino (12:00.31)
Yeah. Okay. No. you know it's funny, I was taking a walk today and I was like I was thinking about our last episode and I was arguing with you in my head about about how the just going back briefly about the we were talking about the AI the AI structure and the hugging face. And and I was always saying why, why? So I have to listen to these a couple of times.

Lionel (12:01.462)
Well, go ahead.

Jim Infantino (12:29.206)
These episodes before they go out when I'm editing them and stuff like that. And I was like, so I was like, why why did they do this? And you're like, there's a reason why they do that. They want to hack nation states. And I thought a lot about that today, just to kind of rehash one thing. And I was I was thinking, no, you know, ultimately, no. It yeah, I understand why they'd think they'd they'd think this would be a good idea, but it would be a terrible idea to try to hack a nation state.

With an LLM getting prompts in a loop with a with a harness that had the tools to do the hacking. Because the LLM will try anything. And if you're a hacker, if you're a good hacker, you don't try anything and everything. Because that tips off who you're attacking. You do it stealthfully. So there's skill. Has nothing to do with Ben Frank, but you said, you said, is there anything you want to get off your chest?

Lionel (13:08.16)
It'll do anything.

Lionel (13:16.332)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, hop what does this have to do with penis? No you're just Okay, okay, okay. This is it on Ben

Jim Infantino (13:26.026)
And this is what I wanted to get off my just fuming all day. No, so I watched the PBS documentary. It's a three and a half hour long documentary on Benjamin Franklin. It came out in 2010, around the same time as the book that you read. And it was exhaustive and really interesting. But I bet the information I got is different from the inf and your your information is probably more complete. But I learned a whole lot of things that I didn't know that really blew me away about the guy. I can't remember all of them.

Lionel (13:53.528)
Like what? Pick one.

Jim Infantino (13:55.593)
I mean he was it was absolute total genius. I think about the people that we call geniuses today, and they are t they are imbeciles compared to Benjamin Franklin. What

Lionel (14:01.644)
Yes.

Lionel (14:05.25)
Yeah.

Lionel (14:09.836)
He's a once a once in a hundred years, once in two hundred years kind of person. And it's not just him. He was really lucky to be born in the exact in like an ideal place where somebody with his kind of his temperament and his capabilities could flourish. You know, he could have stayed New York. He could have stayed New York, but he went to Philly.

Jim Infantino (14:12.771)
Yeah.

Jim Infantino (14:27.65)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Jim Infantino (14:32.952)
Well let's t let's talk about his upbringing because my understanding was that his and I I I might have missed some of the beginning of the documentary, but I thought that he was I thought that he grew up in Boston. He did grow up in Boston, right? Like his up to teenage years and then what, the family moved to New York? No, they stayed so tr a tradesman, yeah.

Lionel (14:45.91)
He did. He grew up in Boston. Yeah. Nope. Family never moved. What happened was it was like eleven kids it was a lot of kids and his father, basically what Ben Franklin had to do was he was I think his father apprenticed him to his older brother, who was a printer.

Jim Infantino (15:05.952)
As a as a sh a chandler, like a candle maker, was that right?

Lionel (15:11.896)
I don't know, but he was a pro but eventually I think he was apprentice he was apprentice to his brother. And this did not go over well because according to the guy who wrote the book, everybody knew that Benjamin had a lot more going than his brother. and so what the book emphasizes is that Benjamin Franklin chafed. He chafed under the the theocratic rule of Boston, which he

Jim Infantino (15:20.778)
No. No.

Jim Infantino (15:39.134)
Mm-hmm. Puritan town. Yeah. No.

Lionel (15:40.822)
And he knew them. He knew Cotton Mather. I've you know, probably probably munching a name, but he knew these people.

Jim Infantino (15:46.285)
This is shortly I'm sorry I keep interrupting because it's exciting topic. He it's sh it's not that so I'm fascinated by the period between it started with the hanging of Mary Dyer in 1660, and then the Salem witch trials and the change from a more lenient puritanical church in Boston to a much stricter puritanical church that happened during Mary Dyer's term there or

Lionel (15:49.74)
Go, go, go.

Lionel (16:04.738)
Right.

Jim Infantino (16:15.938)
when she was going to that to the South Church here in Boston. And they just became nightmarish. And you can kind of trace that route of misogyny that went from the sixteen, you know, Mary Dyer to sixteen ninety two in Salem, where the you know more women and men were accused of witchcraft and Satanism and were persecuted and

And along comes Ben Franklin four years. No, sorry, ten years after that, one decade after all that business. So you can, you know, you can just imagine what this town was like. It it it just must have been stifling. And add on top of that, the 1600s sense still we're sort of probably delayed from Europe at that point. still this sense is that the class you're born into is the class you stay in, you know.

Lionel (16:50.892)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Infantino (17:12.674)
Th there is no possibility of moving up. I don't believe that Ben Franklin went to Boston Latin School. although it was around at that time. I don't know where he went to school or if he went to school.

Lionel (17:12.792)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (17:20.93)
I don't know. But I looked up on I looked up on the internet here. He didn't know Cotton Mather. In fact, he knew him very well. and they spoke.

Jim Infantino (17:26.835)
Mm-hmm. Right. E they debated a little bit, which is

Lionel (17:32.012)
Yeah, well, they they interacted face to face a couple of times. But the big story is that of course the famous story, which anybody can read, which I think is a fabulous story, which is also done in National Treasure, a film which I love. You've never seen Nicolas Cage in National Treasure? Good God, man. You you need to

Jim Infantino (17:35.854)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Infantino (17:48.07)
okay. Never seen those.

I don't think so, no, I know I haven't.

It's a it's a good film? Okay.

Lionel (17:58.73)
It's it's a blast. It's a you're you're probably gonna cringe at it. I I've I find it 'cause I find it an incredibly effective film for teaching revolutionary history. you'll see. You i it's hard to explain. is my mic freezing out or am I crispy? Okay.

Jim Infantino (18:10.462)
All right, all right.

Mm, no, no. I think you look o it seem levels seem to be okay, I think. Yeah.

Lionel (18:18.914)
Okay. but the key thing is that he a as you can tell in in which is very, very accurately reflected in National Treasure, the first sign that Benjamin Franklin comes from another frickin' galaxy is that he's apprentice to his brother, who's he's apprenticed at one point to his brother who's a printer and runs a newspaper. And his brother and Ben's really stifled by this at the age of thirteen.

He writes a whole series of anonymous letters to the magazine under the pen name of Silence Doo Good. And the Silence Do Good letters have become unbelievably famous. and they f they figure significantly in Nash the movie National Treasure. And it's a really great thing. But that's the th that's when you realize this is not like a normal human being. Like when you're 13, you don't write

Jim Infantino (18:54.343)
right.

Lionel (19:12.522)
really well composed letters to your brother's newspaper pretending to be somebody he's pretending to be a middle aged Boston housewife at the time.

Jim Infantino (19:22.328)
Yeah, that's right. And apparently was really was really good at it. my mic is too hot. My mic is way too hot. Hold on a second.

Lionel (19:30.858)
It was crisping a little bit, like when you're getting excited about telling me I was wrong about AI.

Jim Infantino (19:34.03)
Yeah.

I think let me bring it down. No, I'm turning it up. Bring it down. Down a little bit. Down, down a little bit. There we go. Yeah, I'm still I'm still hitting the red button.

Lionel (19:41.056)
Yeah, that sounds that sounds great.

So he does that, he does silence too good, and then he basically flees Boston because he wants to get out of the indentured contract. He basically breaches the contract with his brother, the apprenticeship contract with his brother, because he doesn't like his brother. He doesn't like him being indentured. He doesn't like Boston. Although what's very interesting is that as a young man, he did what a lot of young men did in that time, is he would walk down to Boston Harbor and he'd be he'd be seduced by all the sailing ships in the harbor.

And there's lots of guys saying, Hey, you can go sailing today if you want to. And like Ben Franklin went on a ship and his father came down to the harbor and basically dragged his ass off a boat, which in fact I think Ben Franklin had to do with one of his sons too. Like it's a recurring theme throughout the book that people just go down to the they go down to the dock, they go down to the port and they jump on a boat, they somewhere. Anyway, so he goes so so I I'll pause because I just I I don't want to repeat the entire book, but the fascinating go ahead.

Jim Infantino (20:17.805)
Right.

Jim Infantino (20:28.714)
Interesting.

Jim Infantino (20:33.187)
Yeah.

Jim Infantino (20:40.396)
Well as a you know, I mean he's he's he's looking to advance himself. I mean he's looking to kind of get out of that tradesman, you know, the the not tradesman, like a you know, the apprenticeship lifestyle. He wanted to get out of Boston and he wanna he also didn't want to be stuck in his father's business under his brother for the rest of his life, you know, yeah.

Lionel (20:51.288)
Well, he wants to get out Boston. He

In his family. Yeah. And his brother. Right. But the key thing is that he masters an amazing technology of the time, which is the printing press. So he knows how to print, he knows how to run a printing press, and he's an author. And what's more interesting is that printing presses back then did a lot of like job work, like stationary and printing up invitations and and people came to them with books. But if you want to be very successful as a printer,

Jim Infantino (21:05.506)
Yes. Yep.

Lionel (21:25.142)
You started a newspaper. You started your own newspaper. It's really weird. We don't think about this nowadays, but that's how it started out. So he Yeah. He goes to New York and he tries to get a job in New York, can't, but talks to one of the guys who runs one of the two printing houses and and the guy who runs the two and what Frankl finds out is that the Dutch in New York.

Jim Infantino (21:30.732)
Yeah. Well it's like a website, you know. Except it takes a little longer.

Mm-hmm.

Lionel (21:51.51)
You know, the the the the wealthy burgers in New York have no interest in like books, you know, in like having that many books. Like Boston, you have all the universities a center of learning, so you have lots of printing houses. But in New York, everybody's just like, we're just here to make money, so move along. But he meets this guy who runs one of the two printing houses in in New York City and he says, Hey, I I don't have a job for you, but my son just opened up a shop in Philadelphia and a lot's going on in Philly, so why don't you go down to Philly? And he goes down to Philly and he gets there with like nothing in his pockets, like he is

Jim Infantino (21:57.272)
Right.

Jim Infantino (22:16.002)
Yeah.

Jim Infantino (22:20.504)
Pablo coins. Yeah. Yeah.

Lionel (22:21.612)
He's dead out of money. And, you know, and so, and then, and then begins the rise. You know, he's he finally sets up, he starts with somebody, he climbs the ladder. but the thing is, is that there's all the achievements, and you can read about all the achievements he did in Philadelphia. He basically created the civic culture of Philadelphia in the 1700s single handedly. He he and his junta, not single handedly.

Jim Infantino (22:46.208)
Yeah. It was like the Peter Stuyvesant. Yeah.

Lionel (22:50.636)
The other great thing about him was that he was a collaborator. He wasn't a lone wolf. He was very good working with people and farming things out and taking a backseat and letting other people proceed ahead of him. And so he hit ran this thing called the junta in Philadelphia and they start and he started the volunte the first volunteer fire department in America because he saw it in England and he traveled the other key thing about Franklin is that he traveled enormously between London and Philadelphia.

Jim Infantino (23:19.756)
Yep. He was a royalist, I should say. In the beginning he was a royalist.

Lionel (23:20.32)
We'll get to that later. He was

He was the postmaster general appointed by the King of England for thirty years. He ran the colonial post system for the King of England. he was but

Jim Infantino (23:28.906)
Yep. Yep.

Jim Infantino (23:34.881)
Yep. So f fire so f the basically our modern what what you know, the legacy one legacy, the fire department. The second one, the post office. What else has he got? And the printing well, he didn't invent the printing press, but he but he did the the idea that he started by writing in the voice of another of a of of another person. That he started kind of like I mean you know, like a

Lionel (23:44.822)
Yeah. Right. The printing press. So he no, but he knows how to print.

Lionel (24:03.656)
There's poor Richard.

Jim Infantino (24:04.854)
Like yeah, like a dear so and so kind of a you know not not not a dear Abbey, but yeah, sort of

Lionel (24:07.66)
Yeah. Miss Lonely Hearts. Yeah, dear Abby. And they're not seeking advice, but you're writing you're not writing as a thirteen year old boy in Boston. You're writing as like a thirty-year-old housewife in Boston with a very with a very particular I mean, he's just out there and he's got all these ideas about how you should live your life and he's very, very insistent that everybody should know how to swim. He's very athletic. He the the mother never sleeps. Never sleeps.

Jim Infantino (24:21.41)
Which is crazy.

Jim Infantino (24:25.912)
Yeah.

Jim Infantino (24:32.706)
Yes. Nobody was swimming back then.

Lionel (24:37.772)
and we could go on and on, but he turns Boston around. But what I find most fascinating, one of the things I really find most fascinating about him, the things the things I find most fascinating, is he runs the post office, which becomes critical later on. He runs the post office. That's the first thing. Second thing, he was the most widely known American in the world in the 1700s.

Jim Infantino (24:50.764)
Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Lionel (25:04.944)
Because he was a very successful scientist and he published well. He was loved in England. He was a member of the Royal Society, or the Royal Institute, I always, or maybe both. He spent, he lived in London for like 18 years. He wanted to be a he wanted his wife to move to London to be with him. And his wife said, Screw you. I'm staying here where the cheesesteaks are. You can come back here. And yeah.

Jim Infantino (25:11.448)
Right. Yep.

Jim Infantino (25:28.088)
Yeah. The hoagies.

Lionel (25:32.712)
What kind of cheesesteaks do they have there in London? And and he he spent 18 years in London. He wanted to be part of the crown. but he was incredibly well connected. He knew Hume. He knew he met Voltaire. he met the crown heads of Europe. He traveled all over Europe. Every Joseph Priestley was a good friend of his. Joseph Priestley is considered sort of the forefather of chemistry.

Jim Infantino (25:50.445)
Yeah.

Lionel (26:02.486)
He knew all these people all throughout Europe. He was widely connected with everybody. The French knew him, the English knew him. He was a a global celebrity. and so it's really amazing that go ahead.

Jim Infantino (26:17.176)
Well, one of the just to add a little something in the middle there, he was fascinated with experimentation. So, you know, the s the way the story always goes is goofy Ben Franklin went out with a key on his kite. Well, that's not how it happened at all. He had been experimenting with electricity in his offices where he was like I guess he was printing things, but he also had a little lab set up and he was experimenting with static electricity.

And I there were electric charges somehow that he that he generated, but he had the idea that if that's how electricity worked in his rooms, that that was how lightning worked, that it was the same thing but bigger. And so he did devise an experiment with a key, but also with a a bottle of some kind. He was able to like a Leiden jar. Yeah.

Lionel (27:06.892)
A line a line jar, which is the what they had for like batteries of s it's not really a battery, it's basically I think it's a big capacitor. I don't know. But yeah.

Jim Infantino (27:13.869)
Right.

Jim Infantino (27:17.324)
Yeah. And so the charge went from the key to the capacitor. when the when the kite got hit, of course, it was a wire that conducted the electricity. And that's where he can he confirmed his theory that it's all the same stuff. And that that was what I mean, then he was like the modern day Prometheus all of a sudden. I mean, that was really sensational. This it was this before then, everyone thought, well, lightning just is caused by the gods or by God or Zeus or, you know.

That it was something of a heavenly realm and and and just the powers of nature and there's no really no way to understand something like that. And and Franklin was like, No.

Lionel (27:52.62)
Which plays into a really important narrative. And we're going to get that, which is the the American narrative. I think it's really important. Let's let's put that on the bike rack for a second. The whole thing about electricity is not the gods, it's just science. So the thing is, is that he is incredibly well known by everybody. and the other interesting thing is that he's engaged in this long fight against the proprietors.

Jim Infantino (27:58.735)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lionel (28:21.41)
So Pennsylvania, unlike other colonies, was the sole property of the Penn family. And they were known as the proprietors. The problem is all the land that they retained, all the land that they hadn't sold off to other people was tax free. And so they had enormous tracts of land and they had enormous power, but they didn't exercise any power. They weren't really involved. You know, the the feeling the book gives is that they there's a lot of tension between them.

Jim Infantino (28:28.039)
Right, right.

Lionel (28:49.28)
And the locally elected assembly. So understand that the Penns own Pennsylvania because of a royal grant from England across the sea, whereas the local the local committee is of locally elected people. And there's this and it's sort of a miniature American revolution taking place in like the 1740s and 1750s. And Franklin's right at the forefront. In fact, one of the reasons why Franklin goes to London and spends a lot of time there is that they have a lawsuit against the Pens.

And they have to go to England to get it adjudicated, and he has to he has to sit there and spend years there nursing this this case through the court system and all that kind of stuff. So you it's just like everything he did was preparing for the big moment. Like he knew how to run a printing press, he knew how to run a post system, he knew how to he knew how to make friends and wow his enemies and make friends and influence people.

He was a universally known person. He knew what it was to fight, fight the man, you know, to fight an appointed power. He knew how to do that. He had all this stuff in one person. So when the moment came, and there's a key moment, and the book begins with this moment where he does something stupid because Ben Franklin is not an angel. he does dumb things. He's a troll. He's basically an intranet troll.

Jim Infantino (29:55.83)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Infantino (30:13.318)
yeah.

Lionel (30:17.6)
Except the internet is the printing press. Yeah. He wrote under assumed names. He he he launched very, you know, very confrontational things under assumed names and blah blah blah. And then he screwed up, which is he found these letters that the British appointed governor, Hutchinson of Boston, of Massachusetts, the governor of Massachusetts, these private letters that he was writing with some that he was exchanging with somebody else.

Jim Infantino (30:17.888)
Yeah. He he r he ran a blog, you know at thirteen. Yep.

Jim Infantino (30:42.252)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (30:47.202)
Where they're talking very frankly about we gotta keep we gotta keep these people down. Cause this is we're already sort of in like the outskirts of the revolution when you have like the the the the Stamp Act and all those taxes that are starting to get people pissed off. And the governor the governor Hutchinson says in these confidential letters, we gotta we gotta keep these people under control, you know, and you know, a little crack of the whip wouldn't hurt anybody. And Franklin print

Jim Infantino (30:59.885)
Right.

Jim Infantino (31:10.061)
Right.

Jim Infantino (31:14.146)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (31:16.618)
surreptitiously gives this to somebody else to print and it causes this huge fur. And eventually it's found out that he gave it, that it was Franklin who did that. And Franklin's in London at the time. And the Brits go nuts. And they call him in and they basically for four hours they just they just basically lambassed him for an extraordinary amount of time. They just verbally abuse him for a long time. And that changes him that's the turning point for him. At that point,

Jim Infantino (31:31.682)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Infantino (31:42.541)
He he was he was called what to the privy council. It was like it it he knew what was coming. J just by the just by the just by the the organization of the British government that he was called to talk to. He knew it was like, I'm gonna go get lambasted by a bunch of frat boys, basically, you know, who all went to public school and yeah, who went to Oxford. and and

Lionel (31:51.832)
he knew, yeah.

Lionel (32:03.01)
This is not gonna go well for me.

Jim Infantino (32:11.906)
But also near around this time, he had supported, publicly supported the Stamp Act because he felt that it was just a small thing and that, you know, it was his king. And back in Pennsylvania, he had no idea that people were like they were batshit about that. And and his I think his wife had to write him and say, listen, you need to, you need to maybe change your stance on the on the Stamp Act because it seems like a small thing there. It's not a small thing here.

Lionel (32:41.047)
Yeah.

Jim Infantino (32:41.49)
And yeah, people were fed up. He did not really understand the the level of dissent that was happening in the United States. He was spending a lot of time in England, he was an Englishman, and it was the combination of understanding what was happening, the culture of the US of the colonies, and his kind of tearing down in Parliament or in the Privy Council, whatever it was.

that radicalized him and he was like, yeah, huh, fuck this.

Lionel (33:13.942)
Yeah. Yeah. And this is I'm not I'm not welcome here. I've been living a dream. I'm not part of the I'm not in I'm not in the club. Never will be. And this is a different and we're going and so the the and this sort of bleeds into the other book I want to talk about, which is The Man Who Lost America. But the key thing is that Ben Franklin then when the revolution starts, he's a key architect of

Jim Infantino (33:23.64)
Yes, right. Yeah.

Lionel (33:42.056)
Of the Declaration of Independence. You know Jefferson writes Declaration of Independence and writes, we we hold it we hold these truths to be sacred, that all men are created equal. And Benjamin Franklin, from what I understand, said, Why don't we change that to we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal? And got that edited.

Jim Infantino (34:00.28)
Right.

Lionel (34:05.238)
And he was friendly with Jefferson, so that's an important thing. But then the key thing is when the when the battles actually join and they need to get help from France, Franklin goes across the water. and again, there's all kinds of experiences that he has, like as part of the Pennsylvania government, he often has to he's often sent on these fact-finding missions where he has to talk to the Indian tribes.

Jim Infantino (34:18.798)
That's right.

Lionel (34:27.8)
He has to talk to the Native Americans or he has to go investigate this and invest he's like the he's like the fixer. He's like he's you know, what's you know Michael the that movie. He's the fixer that they send to everything. And so they send him to France. And the French just love him to pieces. He's the he's the most famous American. He's most he's one of the most famous people in the world. Go ahead.

Jim Infantino (34:43.395)
Yeah, that yeah.

Jim Infantino (34:47.178)
He he shows up in a beaver skin hat, I think. Yeah, or a s a fur a fur hat, which they you know, at the time you think about it, they're all they're like, you know, they're painting their face, everybody's wearing makeup and wigs, and you know, this is the height of of Louis the 16th, and it's like I mean, they look at him like, look at this wild man from the West, you know. I I want to have dinner with him. Yeah.

Lionel (34:53.494)
Yeah. The heck. They love.

Lionel (35:10.188)
Yeah, he must have he must look like the girl with the dragon tattoo. I mean, it's just like whoa, dude. You may show up with a cock ring and a mohawk.

Jim Infantino (35:15.31)
But he knew what he was doing because that's not how he dressed in the States. He was you when he dressed in England, he dressed the way the Englishmen did. But when he went to France, he dressed like a rugged American, you know, and they ate it up.

Lionel (35:23.565)
Right.

Lionel (35:27.66)
Yep. And and you know, if it wasn't for France, you know

Jim Infantino (35:33.113)
Well, that's it. That's why he won won the Revolutionary War. And it's why we don't talk about it because it was France, it was his negotiating over what, a decade? The the treaty with France that that really turned the tide and made England say, okay, forget it. I mean, we want to give it all to to George Washington, who certainly did his bit, but but it's not included in the story that Ben Franklin had a really changed the tide.

By bringing in another nation.

Lionel (36:03.2)
And his personality and his life story and the fact that electricity came, that's all the same. You know, there's no gods and there's no noble stuff. It's just it's just su it's just the world. It's all there, just like poor Richard Zoltmanac. also the he's in a great American voice. I mean, you can definitely see a straight line from the way he talks to Abraham Lincoln. It's folksy, it's a lot of funny stories.

Jim Infantino (36:31.022)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (36:32.682)
It's very gentle. It's not confrontational. It's much more much more sly and much more just sort of like make people laugh kind of stuff. But it's it's an American voice. and he was America to a lot of people in England and a lot of people in France. Benjamin Franklin was America, and he set the tone for what America was, which was energetic, does everything.

Nothing is you know, everything is fair game. it's folksy, there's no class differences, it's humble, it's kind of funny. and the greatest trick that yeah.

Jim Infantino (37:14.648)
Char charismatic. I mean, charismatic. He flirt he flirted with young women, both in the United in the colonies and in in France. we don't know whether, you know, he was inappropriate. He did love his wife. unfortunately, he he was he couldn't come back. Well, but he he wasn't, he was ordered by the Congress to stay in France and get the deal done. It's terri yeah, terribly sad. Yeah.

Lionel (37:30.306)
He abandoned her basically. Yep. Yeah.

It's kind of sad. Like his wife died and he wasn't there and he knew she was going to die and he didn't come back. So he's not an angel. He's not an angel. But he's a pretty frickin' impressive person. And it's hard to see the American, you could see the American Revolution happening. It's hard to see it being one with i it without him, it would have been radically different, how the whole thing turned out, I think.

Jim Infantino (37:43.648)
Nope. Nope.

Jim Infantino (38:05.102)
yeah, yeah, yeah. I know w it would have slogged on for many more years without France entering the war. The British would not have given up. Yeah, yeah.

Lionel (38:11.768)
Yeah, or maybe just never happened at all. You know, it's just it it's hard to tell, but the key thing was that he sort of gave and that sort of leads into this whole thing about the other book that I read, which was The Men Who Lost America. Where's my notes? The Men Who Lost America by Andrew Shaughnessy, twenty thirteen. And it's a book that I've always wanted to read about, which is the British side of the American Revolution.

Jim Infantino (38:26.509)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Infantino (38:40.802)
Mm. Mm hmm. Yeah. George three. Yeah.

Lionel (38:41.496)
Like what were they thinking and what was going on over there? and one of the key things that the author says is that they lost the war when the Declaration of Independence said we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Because at that point, when those words came out, it meant we don't have a disagreement. We're on fundamentally different paths. Like

Jim Infantino (39:06.999)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Lionel (39:10.878)
America has a mission now. America is on a different trajectory. And it's actually it's an experiment with a founding principle. And we're going left, and you're going right. And that's the end of it. And the the interesting thing that Oshke says that nobody really figured this out. Like the Brits didn't really see it. Some did, but nobody really figured it out that.

Jim Infantino (39:25.944)
Yeah.

Lionel (39:40.598)
The war was lost in seventeen seventy six. Well, yeah.

Jim Infantino (39:44.249)
Like right away. Well, it's interesting that phrase, because there was, I do remember something from the documentary about how Franklin and Cotton Mather actually had theocratic discussions. And Franklin was raised, you know, devoutly religious and was so for a while until there was some discussion about nature with Cotton Mather that changed him, in which, you know, I think it was said to him that there are mysteries that we can't know.

And Franklin was like, I don't agree with that. And it sort of started him on this path to, I don't know if he ever became officially a deist, but he certainly, given given his attitude and given kind of the way he worked, was no longer like a Catholic or a you know, a yeah, congreg yeah. Well, yeah, Puritan, yeah.

Lionel (40:34.36)
Congregationalist, which is probably what he was raised as in Boston at that time.

Jim Infantino (40:42.482)
I mean, he lost his religion in sort of this secular, so because his life did become very secular, and because he did ultimately believe that the people could have a government without a king, and that the people could that the people could look after themselves in in a democratic fashion. And he argued, he argued fervently for that. I mean, terribly sad.

Lionel (41:09.676)
And that's why the that's why the dispute with the proprietors I think is so important. It's like a training ground. I'm it's like I I I hate you haven't seen Dark City in a long time, right?

Jim Infantino (41:14.541)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Infantino (41:23.328)
I just saw it last night. I saw it last night. yeah, Keith for Keith for Sutherland is is just amazing in that. And he is always out of breath and it's a little annoying, but it's really good. yeah. No. I I

Lionel (41:25.9)
And the what did you think?

Lionel (41:33.782)
He talks like Peter Lori and this we Yeah.

Lionel (41:44.418)
But you know the thing where he puts the memories in Murdoch's head, he says, You have to remember these because they're gonna be a time we're gonna need all these memories that I'm giving you. I'm teaching you when you're five years old, I'm teaching you when you're ten years old, I'm teaching you when you're eighteen years old, you have to remember this. And to me, that's like Benjamin Franklin. It's like you have to remember this because you fought against the proprietors and you wrote the silence two good letters and you did the experiment with the kite, and you did this and you did that and you did this and you ran a post office, and all these things are gonna come together.

Jim Infantino (41:47.212)
Yes, yeah. Yeah.

Jim Infantino (41:54.403)
Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Lionel (42:13.428)
All these roads are gonna meet in seventeen seventy-six and they're gonna and America's gonna meet every single one of those. And they did. And he set the first postal system for the for the new Continental Congress, and he helped write the Declaration of Independence and he helped do this and he helped do that. And it's just it's such a I'm sorry, I I sort of steamrolled over what you were trying to say, but I just think it's wonderful.

Jim Infantino (42:33.58)
Well, no, even even the volunteer fire department, because the the the thinking behind it was that the the fire brigade would show up and they would let the house burn, but protect the houses around it. And he said, No, if we have people from the community actually who are invested in these homes, they will try and save the homes that are burning. And and so you know, the the whole idea really is interestingly it's anti-royalist from the beginning, but he doesn't become an anti-royalist until

Until they piss him off. And then he gets the ultimate revenge by going to France and wooing all the women and drinking and partying like crazy. And everyone loves him and very slowly unclasping the king's hand from around the purse, which ends up actually ruining Louis Louis XVI because the Congress decides they're never going to really pay him back. And the revolution is right around the corner. So all the all the seeds he planted in France.

Lionel (43:22.722)
Yes, it does.

Jim Infantino (43:31.426)
you know, that were like a real hit at the parties ended up putting most of those people's necks on the chopping block.

Lionel (43:36.472)
they knew. They knew Louis XV was not happy about Benjamin Franklin. He was like, because Benjamin Franklin was friends with Beaumarchais, who wrote the Barbara Seville and was it Barbara Seville and the two famous operas, the the Figaro, you know, you know that Figaro the the two great Mozart operas, the Barbara Seville and whatever. Sorry, I'm blanking.

But these are revolutionary ide just like you saw you saw Amadeus, right? Hey, you remember that great scene where it's the great it's Frederick the Great the the Frederick the Great of of Prussia and they've told they've told Mozart that he can't do his Barber of Seville, written by Beau Marchais, because the Frederick's sister, Marie Antoinette, tells him it's a piece of revolutionary crap.

Jim Infantino (44:07.798)
Yes, yes, yes.

Lionel (44:30.974)
And and Mozart says, your sire, it it doesn't begin with a revolution. My opera doesn't begin with a mob, it begins with a man measuring his bedroom to see how big a a a wedding bed he can fit inside of it. It's such a beautiful scene. It's such a great scene. But that's what was going on in Europe. And Louis the Sixteenth was right to be concerned, and he was right to say

Jim Infantino (44:31.0)
Yeah.

Lionel (44:56.172)
This is a revolution. And and when he hung out with Beaumarchais, it really rang alarm bells. Like Louis the Sixteenth and the whole court clamped down and said, Dude, what are you doing? And he had to back off a little bit. It's very interesting what's going on here.

Jim Infantino (45:06.124)
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It was amazing that he was able to accomplish that. And and to think about it, it's like you you can just imagine him writing a letter to some of the people who insulted him in in parliament and saying, Maybe you should have been a little nicer to me, you know. because it it it started it's it's it started with them, you know, insulting him.

Lionel (45:27.478)
His ready is fabulous. His writing is fabulous.

Jim Infantino (45:35.928)
Basically, you know, calling him in to be insulted.

Lionel (45:36.214)
Right. And when you read his stuff, he's such a smooth writer. He's such a and it's it's not fussy. It's not ornate. It's it's a little intricate because the what he's trying to do is he's trying to slip in a real jab at you. So he has to make it complex enough that you have to spend like three tenths of a second like parsing the phrases apart and saying

Jim Infantino (45:51.8)
Yeah.

Lionel (46:02.468)
he's telling me to go fuck myself. okay. Yeah, but by that time the the you know, just in that three tenths of a second you've lost some of your anger. And he's so clever about phrasing these things. Anyway, I'll pause there.

Jim Infantino (46:04.972)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Infantino (46:13.292)
And also, I mean, he was able to get support for for the Congress largely because he was threatening to leave. I mean, John Adams was over there just stepping all over his coat, you know, he was he was just making a mess of things. And and Ben Franklin had kind of tuned everything up like clockwork, you know, to eventually spit out the money. And John Adams just kind of like.

came over and wrecked it all. And she was like, Okay, I'm going. I gotta go. And all of the noble people of France were like, No, you can't go. You can't go. What what can we do? Yeah. Yeah it's brilliant.

Lionel (46:45.772)
Right. Yeah, it's brilliant. And he hangs out with all the intellectuals. He hangs out with Voltaire. Britain takes his son to meet Voltaire and asks Voltaire to place his hands upon his son and bless him, which caused him a lot of problems. A lot of people were pissed off about that one. But all in all, I think I'm not sure that the First American is the best book, but if you don't know Ben Franklin, you know

Jim Infantino (47:01.954)
Hmm, hmm.

Lionel (47:15.148)
Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln. You know, like Abraham Lincoln was such a good writer, it's ridiculous. He's one of the few guys who can make me cry. I mean, don't even don't even mention the words Gettysburg Address, or I'll start weeping. it's such an exquisite piece of writing. And and Franklin is too. If you read Franklin's stuff, it's really amazing how good he is. But anyway, the Men Who Lost America, which is the British side of it.

Jim Infantino (47:25.026)
Right. Right.

Jim Infantino (47:30.923)
Right, right, right.

Jim Infantino (47:42.178)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lionel (47:45.462)
And again, sort of like the first American, the book, it's not a great book to begin with. it's really literally about the men. Each chapter is about a different person. Lord North, chapter one, you know, chapter, or probably probably King George III, Lord North, Gakaka, Johnny Burgoyne, Cornwallis, the the the the brothers. I forget their names right now. but it presumes a lot of

Jim Infantino (47:58.157)
Hm.

Lionel (48:15.544)
Preliminary knowledge. So you can't really go into this book unless you understand a lot of things, which I really don't. I understand like 40%, but not a hundred percent. And what you really want to understand is how does the British government work? Because it doesn't work like the American government at all. It's completely different. It's a parliamentary system, it's and I still don't understand it. and you have to understand what England was going through and what the world was going through in like the forty or fifty years leading up to the American.

Jim Infantino (48:21.293)
Right.

Jim Infantino (48:28.876)
Right. No.

Lionel (48:43.104)
Revolution because the American Revolution was part of a world war, an ongoing struggle between France and England to basically control the planet, and control trade routes and things like that. so if you don't really understand that, the book's kind of like and it's very detailed. It's like, you know, okay, Cornwall has had two sons, and the younger son went to this thing where he made friends with this person who is the cousin of.

Of the person who ran the committee on blah, it's like, okay, guys, guys, guys, guys, I d you're losing me here. But it's still a good book to read. It's just you're gonna if you don't have that kind of it's really a second book. It's like if you're already a pretty good scholar of the British government and British policy during the American Revolution, then it's a a good backup book. If you're reading it f as an amateur like me, it's kind of not as rewarding, but

Jim Infantino (49:15.288)
Tim.

Lionel (49:39.906)
There's some things that really stood out for me, which is that everybody knew this was a this was a bad idea. Everybody in England, virtually everybody in England knew this war could not be won. But the but the whole point is, what else are we gonna do? What's what's plan B? What are we gonna do?

Jim Infantino (50:01.088)
Well, I mean, we were j we were just a s a stop along the way to the Caribbean and to them. I mean, we were part of a big circle of trade and and manufacturing that was money making. I mean, we were a colony, right? So so it was when they when the French originally got into the fight, they didn't really aid the revolution. They were just fighting the British over, you know.

Yeah, I don't I don't know if they it was Jamaica or somewhere in Brazil, but they were yeah, Martinique. They were they were the Falklands. I mean they were they were going down to get to take over and get resources and sink the ships. And there's a lot of the pirating stories kind of comes out of that time. but but it wasn't until later that that Franklin actually said, No, we really actually need your help. We need your help advising on the battlefield. We need we need France. You know, if not boots on the ground, then we need to have

Lionel (50:34.038)
Martin. Yeah.

Jim Infantino (51:00.918)
your support in

Lionel (51:02.36)
Cause we need you. He needed the what he really needed was they needed Destag's fleet to prov 'cause the British always had this out where they could just get on their boats and sail away. They could take all their troops, load them on their boats, and go away. And what they really needed was they needed the French fleet to bottle up the boats, bottle up the British fleet so they couldn't get away, so they would have to fight. I mean, it's very interesting because that's the thing that drove the brothers and Burgoyne crazy.

Is that they always wanted Washington to stand and fight. He never did. He they he always, you know, they always melted away and he hated, and they the Brits hated that. They knew exactly what he was doing, and they knew ex they knew exactly why he was doing, and they knew that what Washington was doing was completely correct. They hated it. but in an interesting turn of fate, the Americans managed to do that on the British. You can't run away because the the British fleet is at the mouth of the Chesapeake and they'll stop.

Jim Infantino (51:36.662)
Mm.

Jim Infantino (51:57.014)
Right, right.

Jim Infantino (52:02.346)
Yeah. The French fleet. The French fleet. Yeah. Yeah. And they were also battling the Spaniards, I mean, and Portu I think Portugal and the Dutch. So there was yeah, there was a ton of stuff going on that had nothing to do with us whatsoever, except that it was just part of the you know, the Empire of the British Empire,

Lionel (52:02.703)
or whatever it was. The French fleet, yeah, the Mexican fleet, whatever.

Lionel (52:18.624)
Right. But they had no nobody had a playbook. Okay, so it's like it's like taking a ship from pirates. Okay, I nobody taught me how to do that. and it's like we have these colonies filled with people who are British citizens. I mean it's not like India.

Jim Infantino (52:30.826)
R exactly. Yeah.

Jim Infantino (52:39.2)
No, they're English. Yeah.

Lionel (52:40.79)
They're English. And so they don't want to play ball anymore. They want to be independent. Okay, do we have a three-ring binder about this situation? No, we we really don't. And everybody's like, Well, what do we do? And the problem is people come two two voices come forward. One voice is says says, kick the shit out of them. Because as soon as you, you know, at the first whiff of grape shot, they'll fall in line. And the second thing is like send peace.

Jim Infantino (52:50.038)
Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. No. Yeah.

Lionel (53:08.6)
Committees and let's talk to them and try to figure something out. Because we can't, the thing that everybody understood is that Britain could not allow this to go through because it would dent the empire. And they really used that word. Even Franklin, everybody understood that the British Empire was an idea. There's a really important concept, the British Empire. And that if the British didn't keep America in it, everybody said England will end up being a vassal state to America.

Jim Infantino (53:26.114)
Yeah, yeah.

Lionel (53:38.06)
They all knew this. They all back in seventeen fifty, they knew it. They said if we don't now it took you know, it took another two hundred years to come d you know, to get to the point now we're all vassal states. but that's a whole other dis different discussion.

Jim Infantino (53:39.436)
Mm, wow. Wow.

Jim Infantino (53:51.425)
Right. Well right. We'll be a vassal state to Canada when they join the European Union. But the the it's interesting too because it it kind of connects to this book that I really loved, and I forget the author, but it was called Coal, and it's just the history of coal and it focuses on the British Isles. And, you know, what happened to the British Isles basically was that yeah, you know, the the Romans came,

Lionel (53:56.352)
WHAT BE

Jim Infantino (54:19.17)
And there were the native people there. There weren't that many people. You know, eventually the population grew and they cut down all the trees, all the trees. And they had nothing to heat their houses with. So they were picking up sea coals on the shore in order to throw it. And then eventually they found you could dig for it. You know, and then the the mines and there's horrifying stories about that and rickets and coal smoke and yep.

Lionel (54:40.77)
And you have to pump water out of the mines 'cause the best mines were going the galleries went out underneath the ocean. So you need you need something to pump water out. I wonder what I can use to pump w there's this thing that eats coal and generates steam.

Jim Infantino (54:48.339)
yes, that's right.

Right. They would

Jim Infantino (54:55.166)
And you end up with the steam engine on and all of that. But when the when the British came to the colonies, right, which were really I mean, populated by the Dutch, some some Puritans, there was Jamestown, sort of but anybody who would have shown up from England would have looked and said, my god, there's infinite trees here. Infinite. We could never cut down all these trees.

Lionel (55:11.842)
French, yeah, parent's Spanish, French.

Jim Infantino (55:25.74)
And that just must have been like mu you know, pound signs in their eyes. dollar signs in their eyes, you know, immediately like the infinite riches here.

Lionel (55:33.773)
Yeah.

But you know what they didn't strangely enough, the thing they really cared about, what what fortunes were made of, sugar. And that's why they were willing, the France was willing to trade away all of Canada for like a couple of islands in the Caribbean.

Jim Infantino (55:42.355)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jim Infantino (55:52.673)
Right. For sugar. And and there's that rum cycle, the molasses, the molasses sugar cane from Jamaica, molasses in Boston, turned into rum and tobacco, yeah, it was huge.

Lionel (56:02.456)
And then tobacco and iodine or whatever they called it. But the the big thing was tobacco and sugar. Sugar sugar was the dough because sugar was calories.

Jim Infantino (56:14.802)
And and heavily connected with slavery. And interestingly, toward the end of his life after France, after he came back from France, Benjamin Franklin became an abolitionist. You know, none of the founding fathers were abolitionists. None of them were against slavery. Now, Franklin had owned slaves in his younger years in Pennsylvania, but towards the end of his life, he visited a school for for freed slaves.

Lionel (56:24.3)
Good man.

Jim Infantino (56:42.358)
And discovered they were just as intelligent as the English, and realized that it he could no longer put sugar in his tea made on a plantation run by slaves. Not run by slaves, but yeah, where slaves had had had been the workforce. And it radicalized him. It was like he looked at his he looked at the sugar that he was putting in his tea. And

Lionel (57:01.965)
Basic.

Jim Infantino (57:09.479)
this was a this was something that didn't catch on for another eighty years, right?

Lionel (57:14.594)
Yeah. they knew. They knew when they made the constitution, they knew this was going to be a problem. They knew. Everybody knew. Everybody knew. But anyway, that's another that's another conversation. and we didn't even get that far into the men who lost America. I I have a lot more to talk about. But I think Yeah. American Dharma.

Jim Infantino (57:25.866)
It is, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating guy.

Jim Infantino (57:32.096)
We can talk more about that. And we didn't we also didn't get into discussing the movie that we watched together when you were when you were visiting here. We watched a movie called American Dharma. Really horrifying film by Errol Morris, which in which he interviews Steve Bannon. And I think that's worthy maybe another conversation at another time.

Lionel (57:50.934)
Yep. So maybe we just we w next time if we do we have somebody planned for next episode?

Jim Infantino (57:56.781)
I don't I I keep waiting on my guests to say yes, so I'll I'll have to press them a little more. I'm really tied up in getting ready for the French festival. So it's it's chewing up a lot of my

Lionel (58:04.598)
Okay. Well good. Then we've already got a we've already got another episode in the camp, 'cause we can just continue with what we're talking about here. The Men Who Lost America. Continue that. We can talk about American Dharma and we can talk about Dark City because I wanna I wanna hear what you have to say about that. And maybe I'll maybe I'll watch Vice. 'Cause I think Vice is probably Vice

Jim Infantino (58:08.781)
Yeah.

Jim Infantino (58:12.513)
And a ma and American Dharma.

Jim Infantino (58:17.558)
No, great film.

You should really watch Vice. You you'll love you will love Vice. I think July Vice and American Dharma back to back are it's a really good pairing.

Lionel (58:30.402)
Cool. See you then.

Jim Infantino (58:32.578)
Very good, said