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Hi, I'm Claire McClanahan, a producer here at Gen Z Media.

And in hot anticipation of season two of Young Ben Franklin, welcome to New York.

We have put together four short segments about scientist, inventor, founding father and star of our show, Mr. Benjamin Franklin.

And we are lucky enough to have with us a preeminent Ben Franklin expert, Dr. George Boudreau.

Let's start with who you are. Tell us who you are, Dr. Boudreau.

Well, I am a historian of 18th century Anglo-America and started off as a graduate student in Indiana and became interested in Benjamin Franklin as a teacher.

And I've been studying Franklin for about 33 years now. And as soon as I know everything, I'll stop, I suppose.

Well, what is it about Ben Franklin that intrigued you? What pulled you into history?

It seems like every major event of the 18th century, which is my specialty, somehow he interconnected with it.

Whether it was the Declaration of Independence or the creation of the American nation through our diplomacy with the French and others.

To the explosion of science that Franklin was improbably a part of, but he was this amateur who just got it. He grasped it.

Did he come from a highly educated family? What is part of his origin story that would have set him on that path?

Well, one of the odd things about Benjamin Franklin in looking at this era of people in history is that Franklin wrote his own story down.

He left us an autobiography that he very carefully never finished. The story he told us is sort of up from poverty.

I have to point out though that his family was not as poor as he liked to point out.

He's living in a big family that looks like they're all pretty well fed, but you know, but things that for them in their era like college were out of the question.

And of course the girls, including his favorite relative, his beloved baby sister Jane or Jenny as he often called her.

Girls were not given a formal education. Right. And it's interesting to compare the two of them because Jane marries a poor man and lives her life quite poor.

And Franklin at any step along the way. He could have failed. It could have all gone belly up, but he was really fortunate that the ways he invested his money and did things worked.

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