"Time is Money": How Ben Franklin's Sayings Created American Capitalism and Grind Culture

0:00Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs. And best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash iHeartRadio.

0:38That's O-D-O-O dot com slash iHeartRadio.

0:48Pushkit. Too quick? No, it was perfect. Pushkit. Stop. You got it. This episode is presented by Odoo.

1:07Before Benjamin Franklin, whatever, flew a kite in a thunderstorm, before he edited the Declaration of Independence, before he met with kings, he was mainly two things. One, a successful businessman, and two, the best-selling writer in what would soon become the United States of America. And these two things, being a bestselling writer and being a successful businessman, they were actually related because at the time most writing was religious or philosophical. It was very high minded. But Benjamin Franklin's writing was was not like this at all. It was the writing of a businessman. It was practical, on the ground advice.

1:47We call it mass market for a mass market. We call it self-help. Right. We call it financial self-help because what he wrote about was how to make money. Ben Franklin basically invented this American genre of the business self-help book. And on top of that, more importantly, he created a new way to think about work. He created this American value system and gave us the language to live in the industrial age. I'm Jacob Goldstein. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Business History. A show about the history of business. And today, we are starting a series. Not two episodes. I can't even say not one, because that wouldn't be a series.

2:30Three! Your favorite number. And we're calling it American Genius. Genius. As a part of a celebration of America 250, baby. We are telling the stories, not necessarily of business people, as we've done on this program. We are telling the stories of writers, three writers who changed the way we think about business and money in America. And we're starting with Ben Franklin, who was there at the jump. And, you know, he did real work as a scientist, was a father of our country. But that is not what we are here to talk about today. Today on the show, Benjamin Franklin, businessman and writer. There's a reason he's on The 100.

3:10All about the Benjamin's baby. I was afraid you were going to say that. In 1788, when Benjamin Franklin, no middle name, was 82 years old, he wrote his last will and testament. Robert Smith, give us the first six words. My bifocals. Invented by Ben Franklin, of course. I, Benjamin Franklin, of Philadelphia, comma, printer, comma, printer. At this moment, Ben Franklin was the governor, sort of governor-ish of Pennsylvania. He was a world-famous scientist. He'd been U.S. minister to France during the American Revolution. But he starts with his job, printer, which in the context of this historical moment is a baller move.

3:52People at this time did not identify themselves by their jobs, at least people of the status of Benjamin Franklin. Gentlemen didn't work, right? Work was for the lower classes. And so here is Franklin, who, you know, could be a gentleman at this point if he wanted to, but he is owning his identity as a tradesman. And in this will and testament, which is a piece of writing, he is already starting to create this new value system for America where your trade is your identity, where you take pride in your work, where we admire self-made people, which is the opposite of the way it worked at the time.

4:30You didn't want to be self-made. You wanted to be born to a family of old money. And Franklin truly was self-made. His father was a Puritan who came to Boston and worked as a Chandler. Job you don't hear about so much anymore, making candles out of tallow, out of animal fat. A hard, dirty, smelly job. Jacob knows this because for a Planet Money episode, Jacob actually ordered beef fat and made his own candles at home. Smells very bad. Takes a long time. And the candles aren't very nice, at least if I'm making them. So this is the family Ben Franklin is born into. He is not particularly religious.

5:08And he doesn't want to be a Chandler. And he threatens to run off to sea, like one of his older brothers had done. But that brother had died at sea. And so Ben Franklin's dad talked him into becoming an apprentice with another older brother, a brother named James. And James was a printer in Boston. And being an apprentice was was a formal legal thing at the time. And in fact, 12 year old Ben Franklin signed a legal binding contract promising to work for his brother until he was 21 years old and went to work as a printer's apprentice. Wow, with your brothers. Like, sign the contract, dude. Yeah.

5:47And printer at the time meant something quite different than it means today. You know, today, I hear printer, and I think of Kinko's, which is probably showing my age. But remember, Kinko's was a big deal. I spent a lot of time at Kinko's 25 years ago. You get the bond paper for your resume, and like, it has the watermark, and like, so thick, so luxurious. Goldstein resume, 03, final, final, really final. Anyway, in the 1700s, printer was sort of more like we think of publisher today. You know, like Ben's brother James, like a lot of printers, published his own newspaper. It was called the New England Current.

6:26And in fact, in April of 1722, Ben had been a printing for a few years. He's 16 years old. He sneaks off after hours, disguises his handwriting, and starts submitting articles to his brother's paper under the pseudonym Silence Duguid. No way. Silence Duguid? Silence Duguid. A very pseudonym. I mean, at the time, people did often write under pseudonyms. Did his brother know? No, his brother didn't know. And his brother loved the articles. So Silence Duguid is this widow from the Massachusetts countryside who's kind of plain-spoken, plain-thinking, poking fun at the higher classes. Being written by a teenage boy.

7:16Being written by a teenage boy. And there's one in particular I think that's worth looking at for a minute. Robert, give us this, a paragraph. It's from an article where Silence Do Good is making fun of Boston's Harvard boys. They learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely and enter a room genteely, which might as well be acquired at a dancing school. And from thence, they return after abundance of trouble and charge as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited. There's only like a handful of universities in the United States at this time. It's before there was a United States.

7:53There's only like five universities and they already hate Harvard. Yes. Well, Ben Franklin in particular does, right, because he is a brilliant young man who only has two years of formal schooling and is never going to get more. He's not going to Harvard. So he has a kind of a chip on his shoulder, perhaps, right, some class resentment. And one other thing that's worth mentioning here is Harvard is a religious school. It's essentially a seminary, right? And Franklin is going to go on in his life to create what will become the University of Pennsylvania, which is a very different kind of college, right?

8:29Not a religious school, but a school to train students for practical jobs in, you know, business and government. Very much in keeping with his practical, get your hands dirty in the world persona. He's pulling one over on his brother, but he's learning how to triangulate all these different parts of what will be American society by using humor and being clever. Yes, he is very witty. And that becomes sort of core to his identity as a writer, as we'll see. So these articles do well. He writes them for a few months and then stops because he thinks his brother is on to him, basically. Silence do good.

9:04And ultimately, he decides he can't bear serving out this apprenticeship, in part because his brother actually beats him physically, which, you know, was more common at the time. But Franklin didn't like it. He's bound by law to keep working for his brother, but he decides he's going to break the law and he flees. He's going to flee Boston. He has a friend book him a passage on a ship to New York. His cover story, he was a boy who had an intrigue with a girl of bad character. Hmm. Whose character was bad? Yeah. So he gets to New York. He can't find work in New York. And a printer there tells him to go look for work in Philadelphia.

9:41You know, at the time, even getting from New York to Philadelphia is a journey. It takes him several days to get there. First, he sleeps in an open boat in New York Harbor. And then he goes, you know, goes ashore in New Jersey and sleeps in some old lady's house there the next night. And eventually he finds some people in a rowboat going down the Delaware River to Philadelphia. And he gets in and they row through the night and they get kind of lost. But, you know, it's a river. You can't get that lost. And at eight o 'clock in the morning, I believe it's Sunday morning, they row up to the wharf in Philadelphia.

10:16The Philadelphia is going to be the center of the revolution. It's going to be the city where Franklin makes his fortune. And so there is this moment that he memorializes later in his autobiography itself, an important piece of his writing. this moment when he makes his landing in Philadelphia. Robert, give it to us. I was dirty from my journey. My pockets were stuffed out with shirts and stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging. I was fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest. I was very hungry, and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper.

10:51He's a poor man at 8 a.m. on the docks of Philadelphia. And, you know, he's writing this much later in his life, consciously creating this image of himself. And I do want to emphasize how unusual this model is at the time, this self-made man myth, because you don't want to be self-made. It's low class to be self-made. You know, this idea that we have today is the opposite. Right. And it comes from Franklin. Today, there is the derisive term nepo-baiting. Well, exactly right. And these days, if you are a billionaire, you had better have a Benjamin Franklin story about starting in a garage, coming up with the idea from nothing.

11:35And here is Benjamin Franklin inventing it right before our eyes. So he's in Philadelphia and there are two printers already working in town. He gets a job with one of them who basically sucks, is just bad at running a business, doesn't know what he's doing. And in a few years, Franklin sets up his own shop, initially with a partner. The partner's dad bankrolls the business. A few years later, Franklin buys the partner out. I, Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, printer. Here he is, working for himself. He's got his business. And in 1733, when he's not yet 30 years old, he finds the formula that's going to make him rich.

12:18He publishes the first edition of Poor Richard's Almanac. Do we know who Poor Richard is? It's like Silence Do Good. It's Richard Saunders. It's a character he makes up, a plain homespun man who, you know, knows the basic earthy truths of the world. So let's talk about almanacs for a minute. Oh, I love almanacs. Love an almanac. An amazing business model, right? Because you got to buy one every year. There's an almanac for the year. We should describe this. An almanac, it's like a calendar, but it has predictions for the weather and planting seasons. It tells you when the sun is going to come up, how long the days are, which is super important.

12:54It tells you when holidays are and Saints' Days and all these things you might want to know. I noticed from looking back to Poor Richard's almanacs that it's always like, the third year since leap year. Okay, good to know. Thanks for reminding us. So it's a good business because they sell them every year. It's a bad business because everybody sells them. It's not a secret that it's a good business. So it's a commodity, right? And one of the great themes of business history, the show and the history itself, is that commodity businesses are terrible businesses to be in. Because there's all this competition.

13:30They drive down the price. That's the only thing you can compete on. And you're just not going to make any money. American businesses love being a monopoly, hate being a commodity. Yeah, so if you're in a commodity business, you want to differentiate your product. And Franklin, to differentiate his product, to make it a premium brand instead of a commodity, creates this character, creates Poor Richard. And Poor Richard writes these little aphorisms in the margins of the almanac. And we've actually got a page. And it says in this, by the way, that this is for Philadelphia, but it will serve all the eastern seaboard down to the south.

14:09Uh-huh, uh-huh. Right, because I suppose some of the details would vary by geography, right? Yeah, yeah. And so you look at this page, and it's an incredible amount of information jammed in. It's one page, and the days and the month are laid out in two columns. I have to say, I'm looking at something more than 200 years ago, right? But it kind of nails the weather a little bit. I guess the weather hasn't changed that much in New York City over 200 years. So there's cloudy, wet weather and perhaps thunder or high winds. Check, check, check and check. Nailed it. But then again, it's like a horoscope that says like an interesting person will cross your path.

14:46This is every almanac so far, right? The thing that makes Poor Richard's different, the thing that sets it apart, is jammed in over there in the right hand column where it's like talking about the phases of the moon and stuff. Jammed in there in italics are these aphorisms. And in fact, there's one here in late May in this 1833 almanac we're reading. Read it to us. The poor have little, beggars none, the rich too much, enough, not one. Pretty good. I know. 200 years later, that's still pretty good. You could scrawl that on a wall somewhere and people would be like, yeah, dude. Yeah. Put it on your TikTok, just TikTok.

15:26Think of just like the ocean. These aphorisms are going to distinguish the book and they're going to become part of the American vernacular, maybe part of the American psyche. You know them already. Read some of them. Yeah. And think about it, by the way. In an almanac, everyone's kind of checking the same day at the same time. And if you have poor Richards, everyone's sort of reading the same inspirational quote at the same time. So when you go down to the tavern. The water cooler TV show. Yeah. And when you go down to the tavern and it looks like the proprietor of the tavern is stressed out, you say, no gains without pains.

16:02It's one of the aphorisms. God helps those who help themselves. I just feel like everyone knows this, right? He who multiplies riches multiplies care. More money, more problems, we say today. Necessity never made a good bargain. Subtler but smart. I feel like these are all just things dad said. Yeah. Would you persuade? Speak of interest, not of reason. I love this one for, like, convincing people on social media, right? Don't tell them why you're right. Tell them how you're going to help them. Early to bed, early to rise. Do I even need to finish this one? You do not. We are all wise to it. Now, I should say that most of the aphorisms, including this one, already existed in some form or another, right?

16:44Franklin didn't make them up. He didn't claim to have made them up. He said he took them from elsewhere. But a lot of them he sharpened, he edited, he punched them up. There's this Walter Isaacson biography of Ben Franklin. Good biography. And he has some nice examples of how Franklin did this. So, for example, there was an English aphorism that went, fresh fish and newcom guests smell, but they are three days old. And Franklin the printer, by the way, he has to fit this in such a tiny little space. He rewrites it as fish and visitors stink in three days. That's a great edit. It's a great edit.

17:24People must have guffawed. People must have guffawed. Okay, another one. The original version, three may keep a secret if two of them are away. Franklin had notes. He made it, three may keep a secret if two of them are dead. Very good. So Poor Richard's is a bestseller. It's the bestseller. It sells more copies than anything but the Bible. And now Ben Franklin is on his way. Give me one more aphorism before the ad break, Robert Smith. You know, there are only two things inevitable in life, death and going to the ad break.

18:10running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project one app for accounting another for inventory another for sales and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together, from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash iHeartRadio.

18:49That's O-D-O-O dot com slash iHeartRadio.

19:03We're back from the ad, and Ben Franklin is doing great. He's selling tons of copies of Poor Richard. He does this thing where when he's got good promising employees, he sends them off to other cities to start their own print shops, stakes them, gets a share in the profits. It's like he's an incubator, a little print shop VC. And in 1748, when he is 42 years old, Ben Franklin makes a deal with the foreman of his print shop. The foreman will take over the business, Franklin will retire and get half of the profits for the next 18 years. 42 years old and retired. Living the dream. This is the dream.

19:43He'd be huge on Reddit right now. He'd be huge on Reddit. And, you know, he's going to invent bifocals. He's going to be a founding father. He's going to fly a kite in a lightning storm and make fundamental discoveries about the nature of electricity. And I should also mention that as a wealthy man, Ben Franklin will buy at least seven enslaved people who will work for him as household servants over the course of the next several decades. Although at the end of his life, Franklin will become president of the Philadelphia Abolition Society and will petition Congress to abolish slavery unsuccessfully.

20:16He will also keep writing for the rest of his life. Poor Richards keeps coming out every year, even after he hands over the business. It is a cash cow, after all. Until finally, in 1757, Ben Franklin decides that's enough of poor Richard. He's dispensed all the wisdom he has. That's it. There's no more aphorisms. Shut it down. 1750, it's going to be the last ever poor Richard's almanac and a big retirement tour. How are we going to know what the weather in New York City in May is going to be? You're going to have to guess. Cloudy. And by this time, he's already Benjamin Franklin, American statesman.

20:53He gets on a ship to England. He's going to go petition some people in England about a fight over taxes, of course, what people are always fighting over. But his ship, it gets stalled. It has to anchor just off the New Jersey shore for a couple of weeks because there's a French squadron nearby and the captain's afraid they're going to get captured by the French. So here's Ben Franklin stuck on a ship. He pulls out his quill and he starts writing. And what he writes is going to become the most widely reprinted work about economics for the next 250 years. This is before Adam Smith. But of course, Adam Smith wrote like five volumes of economics.

21:34The most influential. You're asking why wasn't Adam Smith? Adam Smith was not a bestseller the way he was. Having tried to read Wealth of Nations. You can see why it wasn't a bestseller. It was not a bestseller. It's a little dense. Yeah. So what Franklin writes is a much easier read than Wealth of Nations. It's basically Poor Richard's Greatest Hits. It's a Greatest Hits album. The best aphorisms from over the past decades. And this time, the aphorisms are not going to be sprinkled throughout the tied charts and the horoscope entries. they'll be published as an introduction right at the beginning of this final almanac.

22:09And, you know, the way he puts them together, it becomes this guide to living. And crucially for our purposes, it becomes a guide to business, a guide to making and keeping money. Which is super interesting at the time, because you imagine that for hundreds of years, there was no guide to living other than the Bible. There was a moral guide, but you expected to do the same job as your father. You didn't expect to make more money. You expected to just get by. So having someone give you advice about how to climb the ladder and be successful wouldn't have even tracked. But we're seeing the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and a society where people are changing.

22:52They are rapidly becoming richer in the colonies, and they're about to set their own destiny. Yes, yes. Franklin is coming along at this profound transformation in economic history, right? This is the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It hasn't even come to the U.S. yet. And he is writing to meet this moment. So there's a couple pieces of his writing that we're going to talk about in detail. This is the first of the two. So let's talk about it. This piece of writing is, of course, written in the voice of poor Richard, but the opening is classic Ben Franklin. Give it to us. I have heard that nothing gives an author so great pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors.

23:32This pleasure I have seldom enjoyed. Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Well played. A little Toastmaster speech. Okay, so right. So self-deprecation, fine. But then look at the pivot in the next paragraph. I concluded at length that the people were the best judges of my merit, for they buy my works. Yeah, sure, I didn't get a great review in the New York Times, but I'm top of the bestseller list, baby. It's kind of a radical notion to be like, I am proud of the fact that I sold a bunch of copies. Ben Franklin, man of the people, right? It's very man of the people. Poor Richard, man of the people.

24:07And then gets a little bit kind of Russian dolly. Poor Richard tells a story, right? Franklin's writing. Poor Richard's telling the story. Poor Richard says, I went to this auction. And everybody's standing around before the auction starts. And they ask this old man named Father Abraham what he thought about taxes. To be clear, Father Abraham's another made-up character. Everything's made up. Ben Franklin is a real guy. Everybody else is made up. And in response to this question about taxes, Father Abraham gives this talk, which is kind of a sermon. But it's not about religion. It's about work and money.