Tell me about Franklin reinventing himself.

himself.R- Franklin was, of course, uh, like, we, you know, like Madonna, the way every year she would h- have a new model of herself, Franklin kept on reinventing himself.

You know, this, in, in the, in the musical, we talk about Franklin, actually Poor Richard, as kind of a songwriter, you know, singer-songwriter in the, in the mode of Carol K- Carol K- you know, Carol King, where he was writing songs under a pseudonym.

Uh, and eventually he became famous himself under his real name, but it was the idea of that he was a writer, he was an inventor, he was a diplomat.

So of course, there were many shades of Franklin, but they can all be told in every way that he succeeded, it was in a rock and roll way.

He became larger than life.

He had a huge ego.

We of course will see you tomorrow at 6:00 AM Eastern for another new Morning Joe.

Let's talk about the list and why the magazine felt like this was the right moment to tell this story.

We're doing, John, we're doing the American dream across this whole year and the tenets of the American dream.

And we've done innovation as a tenant.

The idea of being a self-made American as a tenant.

But pluralism is also a tenant of the American dream.

And at the heart of pluralism is immigration.

We're a country of immigrants.

Randall, quick final word to

First of all, uh, tell us why you decided to step into this space and partner with Harris X, and then we'll go over some of the issues you covered.

Well, this is, you know, again, this is a time, this is a show that reveres American history.

I was an American history major.

We lost something in February when Gallup decided after 88 years they're not gonna track presidential approval, and i- i- they're asking the same questions with, with a, a, an evolving but s- consistent methodology.

It allowed us to compare presidents to presidents term, you know, term over term about issues.

And so again, we thought, uh, this has nothing to do with President Trump.

It has nothing to do with any one president.

Mm

[laughing]

But there's a disconnect going on right now because the world needs billionaires.

The world desperately needs billionaires.

If you look at countries that have billionaires, they tend to have all the things that we all love: progress, jobs, growth.

I mean, let's go to China.

At the beginning of this century, there were no Chinese billionaires on the Forbes list and almost five hundred million people living in extreme poverty.

Fast-forward twenty years, it's almost the opposite.

He's showing the Forbes top five billionaires in this order: Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.