And came for a particular type of freedom and had to Work Together for a first ethically diverse society, ethnic and religious and background diversity truly leads to creativity. It was that sort of bubbling mix there that allows philadelphia to become a place of great commerce, but also, a place of great middle class entreprene entrepreneursh entrepreneurship. Startup and innovation. Benjamin franklin eventually decides after being an apprentice to a printer there to start his own print shop. And goes over to england, buys the type and the found rips and stuff. Back then, philadelphia had i think 11 newspapers and he starts the 12th. It was really great in the days in which it was great competing voices and there were newspapers for the and he kans and for penn family and the propry tories and people loyal to the crown and ben franklin starts the first really independent newspaper, not affiliated with any faction but really being willing to poke fun at all factions and to stand up for what he called we the middling people, meaning the middle class people of philadelphia. And then he even starts a club, what he calls the Leather Apron Club in which they meet on fridays and its for people as he put it who wear leather aprons. He sometimes called it the gentile and a gather and a shopkeeper and artisans that got up early, opened the shop at 8 00, put on the aprons and knew how to create Small Businesses. His view was that Small Businesses and startups would be the backbone of a new economy. And indeed, one of the things that his group did is Leather Apron Club was they made a set of rules and maxims for how to be a good startup, entrepreneur and innovator. If you ever read his autobiography, you have seen the rules. He lists them there, you know, industry, honesty, frugality, diligence and hes kind of a geek. He makes a chart. He marks off how well he had done each week on conquering or mastering each one of the virtues. Puts a little blot by himself, by his name in the common place when he messes up on a virtue and erasing it to start over. He finally transfers the chart to a piece of slate. So he could wipe it clean each week. Have a clean slate as the saying goes. Which seems very american. You know . The notion every week you start off again and finally after a while hes ended up mastering all 12 of these virtues for a given week. Got each one of them right and he shows it off proudly to the members of the club and one of them says, you know, franklin, youre forgetting a virtue you might want to try. And franklin says, whens that . And the friend says, humility. You might want to try that one for a change. What i love about franklin is he admits, i was never very good at the virtue of humility. I never mastered it but i was very good, he says, at the pretense of humility. I learned to fake it very well. But heres the great genius of franklin. He says, and i learned that the pretense of humility was just as useful as the reality of humility. It made you listen to the people next to you. It made you hear what they were saying. It made you try to find the Common Ground and that was the essence of the middle class democracy we were trying to put together. That notion that appearances help shape reality, of course, comes from shakespeare, the mask turns into the man. Prince howl is henry the v. We become the mask we wear. But its sort of important because nowadays were probably not quite as concerned about looking right, making good appearances, trying to show that youre doing the right thing. But as franklin said, thats what helps inculcate a civil society. He actually believed deeply in the notion of a civil society. He started as soon as he got his newspaper going in his Leather Apron Club to use the club to create civic associations. Almost every month he invented one. A volunteer Fire Department. A library. The free library of philadelphia now for the so that everybody could share their books. An academy for the education of youth in philadelphia. Which is somebody up front here whos at a freshman at penn. It becomes the university of pennsylvania. A militia, a street sweeping corps, a night watch corps. And what he realizes is that people like to Work Together. He also realizes that humility or the pretense of humility is really important at getting people to collaborate. Whenever in his newspaper he had an idea for something he wanted to start, such as the library or the Fire Department or whatever, he would never propose it as an idea. He would always have it either be a letter somebody else proposes it or he would say, a friend of mine was talking and he proposes this idea. What do you think . And he was the first in Poor Richards almanac to sort of put forth the notion that its amazing what you can get done if you dont care about taking the credit for it. And so, he creates all of these associations. All of these collaborations. And he has a particular motto that he uses sometimes inscribes it on the wall of them which is the good we can do together exceeds the good we can do separately. Its that notion of collaboration and Civic Engagement as a society which is one of the things along with tolerance and inclusivity of people of diverse backgrounds that set america apart from every other society of that time. And so, he tries to do this notion of forming associations voluntarily. Tocqueville, of course, writes about this. Ive never been actually if i can admit it here, a big fan of tocqueville. I think he probably win it is award of the person who is most yoeted but least read, meaning everybody always quotes him. Yeah, do you remember what he, you know, actually said later on about that . Nobodys i think i was the only one because i had to read it in college. And i thought, wait a minute. Im not sure he quite gets it. He was a french wandering around america and he was baffled about the fact that americans form voluntary associations. That they do things like the Leather Apron Club or the voluntary Fire Department or barn raising or quilting bees. He said, because, theyre so individualistic. Theyre so frontier oriented that it does you know, it seems in conflict with this notion of association forming. I think ben franklin would not have seen any conflict and i think most true americans dont which is you can be individualistic, you can be pioneering, you can be an innovator, you can be a startup or entrepreneur but you also like in a voluntary way to form the type of associations that help us collaborate in business, in society, and in our civic lives. And that is what he mainly was able to do. When i wrote about the great innovators of the digital age, it occurred to me having looked especially at Benjamin Franklin that collaboration, this ability to Work Together, was the key to true entrepreneurship and great innovation. That flies in the face of what we sometimes teach about entrepreneurship and innovation. We make it seem like its the lone great inventer or whatever. And we biographers have that dirty little secret. We make it seem like its a guy or gal goes into a garage or a garret and they have a light bulb motion and innovation happens but thats not the way it actually works in real life. As you all know as you reflect on your own lives it comes from forming teams and teamwork. Its something our educational system is Getting Better at. I think herald is here and talking about the program she has putting together games and teaching kids how to Work Together on games. But what were learning both in schools and colleges and whatever is the importance of people being able to share thoughts, to Work Together, to collaborate. We used to do that, too, when i was in high school and college. But they had a name for it. They called it cheating. And now, i think we have to say, no. Thats how were training kids to succeed in the world. Take any of the great innovations of the digital age. You know, the internet, the computer, the all the great inventions of the digital age, but if you ask anybody who invented them with all due respect to al gore, theres no easy answer. Why . Because they were all done as collaborations. Having talked about penn a little bit, ill say, you know, the first computer was at the university of pennsylvania. Now, if you tried to be a romantic biographer you might pick john ananophusa who had a logical circuit. Some people say hes the inventer of the computer. You can find many people in history, people say that person should be given the most credit. The problem with that is that he was not a collaborator. He did things on his own. He didnt have a team around him. He used to whenever he had a problem get in the car and drive for hours. Sometimes all the way to the illinois border. I think partly to think but partly because you could buy alcohol by the drink in illinois and you couldnt in iowa so hes stop at a bar but once he got it all put together, he got called into the navy. Its 19 early 1940s and the computer gets sort of dismantled. It never quite worked. He couldnt get, you know, the systems, the circuit to actually work. And it was not until john milwaukeely, most people havent heard of him because he was something to bring people together. He was a Benjamin Franklin he went out to many places, new york worlds fair, to dartmouth, harvard, mit looking at people trying to make computers, he drove all the way to iowa and looked at the one that ananasoph was doing and caused a 17year patent dispute and wasnt stealing the ideas, it was clabl rating pg, bringing it together and goes back to penn and gets press eckert, a great engineer and mechanic whose grandfather invented the turkey taffy machine, gets the engineers to help put together, he gets six great phd women in math because before it was before we told women they couldnt do math and in the 1930s and the generation later and they did the programming for it. And it was a team of more than 100 people who end up creating the computer. Same with the internet. Its not done by, you know, one person doing it. It was trying to tie together all of these computers that were in Research Universities like iniak had started and the Defense Department wanted them to netWork Together and created a notion of a package switch network and then told the universities they had to Research Universities to figure out how to connect. And the Research Professors did what Research Professors do is delegated the it is a tock the graduate students so you had 30 graduate students who kind of hung out and met every now and then to figure out how to do the original protocols for the package switch networks. And since they didnt want it to be top down or handed down or anything like that, they wanted to be purely collaborative, they didnt know what to call these. They didnt want to call them rules or regulationless or even, you know, protocols. And so, what they eventually called them every time they came up with an idea of how to address a packet or how you put the address header in or recombine it, one of them got lost, theyd call it request for comment. That made it feel very collaborative. Rfc. Thats cool and particularly cool is that still how were inventing the internet. Its now up to number 7,000 or whatever it is. But its still being done in a collaborative way. And that was the sort of notion of a Benjamin Franklin which is bring people together in associations, the good we can do together exceeds what we can do separately. Same with microchips. One of my favorite stories about not wanting the credit is both bob noise and his team and would eventually becomes intel kree yaits the microchip and almost smul tanl youly at Texas Instruments by jack kill by and his team. You need a team to do it. You need a team that know surface state conducting, people who know the Quantum Mechanics of a surface state. You also need pole climbers that know how to amplify phone signal and put together on a team to do a microchip and the two teams do it. Noise dies before they give out the nobel prize so kill by gets the nobel prize and first thing he says is, you know, if noise were still alive he would be sharing this with me and when the presenter at, you know, the grand nobel prize ceremony said it is based on your invention, sir, that this entire digital revolution has come about, kill by comes up and begins by saying that reminds me of what the beaver said to the rabbit at the foot of the hoover dam. No, i didnt build it but its based on my idea. His whole point was weve got to share the credit. We have to be great at collaboration. Another lesson of bean j min franklin thats so important for the digital age is that period after hes become a successful publisher he decides to become a scientist. He decides to really try to learn science. We think of him sometimes as some doddering old dude flying a kite in the rain, you know, saying a penny saved is a penny earned. He wasnt that old and the electricity experiments that he was doing during that period in his 40s were the most important scientific theories and experiments of that era. The most important since newtons theory of gravity. The notion that electricity was a single fluent went from positive to negative, could be captured in a battery, all these words that he invented because he did that, the notion that you could then make a practical use of it. Lightning rod. Because up until then, they had stored gun powder soum times in churches because they were so afraid of lightning and lightning was just a horrible, you know, traffic dills that would happening over and over again. And but the lightning and they would consecrate the bells of the church so the lightning wouldnt strike but i think like 1,200 lightning strikes on churches the year he was doing his experiment and writes to a friend you would think we would try some other theory and comes up with the lightning rod and it was so great because he was somebody who loved both the theory and then implementing it like a great entrepreneur or an innovator. In fact, the first year of his electricity experiments, on the banks 069 riv s of the river in philadelphia, their doing all sorts of things, theyre creating electrical charges, collecting it in batteries, putting it on out wires and tricks and figuring out its not two different fluids but its a single fluid that goes from positive to well, negative to positive bah he signs arent exactly right. But so when he gets it all figured out he says the theory is great but we have yet to find practical yuls for it. He writhes his friend in london, the person who becomes his friend who we call franklin house there. Peter collinson. Hes lamenting they have the great theories but he said, you know, what use is a theory if you cant find practical utility for it . He even said of newton, its fine to know a theory of gravity but i dont need to know the full theory the know if i let go of my crockery it falls to the ground and breaks. I need to know how to put use to such theories and so at the end of their very first summer of electricity experiments, the only use they find of it is getting near thanksgiving, actually thanksgiving didnt really exist yet then but the harvest feast and they decided to kill the turkeys they were going to eat by shocking them with big jolts of electricity. Franklin writes the Peter Collinson that they were uncommonly tender. These turkeys. Those of us who are southerners and enlist the inventions of Benjamin Franklin like to put somewhere on the list, the invention of the fried turkey. But eventually, he comes up with a notion that, well, if you look at a spark of electricity and you look at a lightning bolt, he puts it in his joushl, all the comparisons that they snap like that, they make a sound. Theyre jagged. A sulfurous smell and then he says, okay, they seem to be the same. A spark and a lightning bolt and just writes at the bottom, let the experiment be made. Im writing about leonardody vin chi now and leonardo is one of the first people in history who instead of trying to take the wisdom of the ancients says i have azumi mistress experiment. He says let the experiment be made. Thats pretty obvious. Its not obvious these days but up until recent it was obvious that the Scientific Method is something you used and you had a theory and tested it and looked at data and refined the theory and that was the Scientific Method we got from the age of hook and galileo and the various and it starts to some extent with people like leonardo and the renaissance. For franklin, it ties into the whole concept of the enlightenme enlightenment, which is you have to understand science to understand society. That theres social sciences as well as Natural Sciences and if knew all the humanities and you knew greek and latin and whatever but you didnt try to keep up with science. Now a days we kind of say stem education, we have to do stem education. But with all due respect to most of you in this room because i see most of you are not High School Students its sort of we say our kids should learn stem but we kind of joke that were not very good in math or we dont know c from python or what java script is or how to do coding or anything like that. And to me i think Benjamin Franklin would have found that somewhat appalling that if you think somebody is a philistine because they dont know the difference between hamlet and macbeth, you should also feel theyre a philistine if they dont know the difference between a gene or chromosome or an integral and a differential equation. But we dont make as much effort sometimes to say science has a beauty. So thats why franklin both as an entrepreneur and as a social scientist as an enlightenment thinker really tried to make sure he understood everything about science. That he looked at botany, that he figured out the