What Did Benjamin Franklin's Junto Do With Friends Every Friday?

On Friday evenings in the late 1720s, a dozen or so Philadelphians gathered, first in a tavern and later in a house, and one of them read a list of questions aloud. The man holding the list was a young printer named Benjamin Franklin. The club was called the Junto, from the Spanish word for a council or assembly, and it is one of the earliest well-known examples of friends meeting on purpose to make each other better.

So what did the Junto do each Friday? It answered a fixed set of questions, took turns introducing topics for debate, and asked what each member needed from the others. You can copy that in an evening with about eight friends, and the playbook below is how I would do it.

Where did the Junto come from?

Franklin’s Autobiography dates the club to the autumn of 1727, when he formed “most of my ingenious acquaintance” into a club for mutual improvement. Its members were working people: printers, a surveyor, a cabinetmaker, a clerk, a shoemaker. The identity of the twelfth founder stayed unclear for centuries. Reports say a Penn State historian, George Boudreau, settled it in 2007, naming the shoemaker John Jones Jr., though I could not trace the original publication of that finding.

The rules were plain. Each member in turn brought forward questions on morals, politics or natural philosophy for the group to discuss. Every three months each member also wrote an essay on any subject and read it out. Debates were to be conducted, in Franklin’s words, “in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory.” Direct contradiction and dogmatic wording earned small fines. Franklin himself had trained himself away from words like “certainly” and “undoubtedly,” favoring “I conceive” or “I imagine.”

The list of standing questions, about two dozen of them in the version printed in modern editions, is the part worth stealing. They ask about reading, trade, civic news, health, reputation and, most usefully, about each other. One of them, as Franklin phrased it, asked whether there is “any man whose friendship you want, and which the Junto or any of them, can procure for you.” Another asked what benefits you had recently received from someone not present.

The club also did lasting work. Some members went on to help found the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Philosophical Society traces its roots to the Junto. Friends who ask each other pointed questions on a schedule, it turns out, tend to start things.

How do you run a Junto-style meetup today?

Here is the format I would use. It is an adaptation, not a reconstruction, and where a question below is changed from Franklin’s, I say so.

Who should be in it, and how often should it meet?

Six to ten people, and I would pick monthly. Franklin’s group met weekly, but his friends lived in the same small city. If you want to think about who deserves one of those seats, the Dunbar layers are a decent filter, and a friendship audit will show you who you already see often enough to make this work.

Fix the date a year ahead. The most reliable friend meetups are the ones that never need to be scheduled again, a point made well in this piece on standing plans. Rotate the host so the hosting effort, and the chair’s authority, move around.

What is the “what did you do this month” round?

Franklin’s club did not have one in this form, so this part is mine. Start each meeting with three minutes per person: what I did, what stalled, what I will do before next time. The host keeps time. Follow the same instinct as a monthly money review like the kakeibo questions, where asking the same few things every month matters more than the answers on any one night.

The round is where a friends club earns its keep. Saying a plan out loud to seven people is a small commitment, and being asked about it next month is the follow-through.

Which standing questions should you ask?

Read four to six aloud at every meeting. These are my adaptations, with the Franklin original in mind:

1. What have you read, watched or heard lately that the rest of us should know about? (adapted from his question about the author you last read)
2. Who have you seen thriving lately, and what do you think they did? (adapted from his question about citizens who prospered)
3. What went wrong for you or someone you know this month, and what is the lesson? (adapted from his question about a citizen who failed in business)
4. Is there anyone whose friendship or advice you want, and can anyone here help? (close to his original on friendship)
5. What benefit have you received lately from someone who is not here? (nearly verbatim)
6. Is there anything about how this club runs that you would change? (adapted from his closing question about the Junto’s own customs)

If you are building a wider circle of advisers, the idea overlaps with a personal board of directors, except here the board is also your friends and they drink your coffee.

What rules of debate keep it friendly?

Borrow Franklin’s. Argue to find out what is true. Hold back absolute phrasing, so “I think” and “it looks to me like” replace “obviously.” Ask a question before you contradict. If you want a deeper read on the man’s habit of asking for favors from rivals, there is a post on the Ben Franklin effect. Skip his fines unless your group finds them funny. A jar for a dollar each time someone says “literally” works.

Where does a Junto-style meetup go wrong?

It goes wrong when the question round turns into a performance review. A friend admits a lagging project, three people offer advice nobody asked for, and next month that friend finds a reason to be busy. Franklin’s club had a built-in correction, which was that its questions were about help offered as much as problems confessed. Mirror that. Let people choose which questions to answer, give a pass without comment, and cap advice to what the person asks for.

The other common failure is quieter: the club stops meeting after two months because the date drifted. Attendance holds up when everyone knows the date is fixed and missing it is slightly embarrassing. If the follow-up you promised is an early-morning one, such as a Saturday run, DontSnooze asks for a short video to prove you are up and sends a random camera-roll photo to friends you chose if you miss.

What does a Junto evening look like in practice?

A plausible two hours, for eight people: 15 minutes of arrival and food, 25 minutes for the what-did-you-do round, 45 minutes on the standing questions and one topic someone brought, 15 minutes of debate on that topic, and 15 minutes for each person’s ask and offer. For other things to do once the evenings are rolling, ranked low-effort friend activities pair well with the club as an off-night.

Stay realistic about what you are copying. Franklin’s Junto filled a gap in a young city with few institutions, and your friends have group chats and a calendar app. What carries over is the structure: the same time, the same questions, the same expectation that each person arrives with something to report. That structure made a group of tradesmen into a source of libraries and learned societies, and it will probably make your group of friends better at the ordinary business of knowing one another.