Behind the Bastards - Part One: Christmas Hero Episode: Aaron Swartz

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

Robert sits down with Margaret Killjoy to talk about Aaron Swartz, a tragic hero who helped build the open internet. (2 Part Series) CBP is detaining thousands of migrants, including children and the elderly, in the desert without food, water or shelter when overnight temperatures drop below freezing. Support the mutual aid groups helping them: tinyurl.com/borderaidgfm and/or https://www.gofundme.com/jacumba-migrant-camps Sources: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-dream https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-brilliant-life-and-tragic-death-of-aaronswartz-177191/ https://newrepublic.com/article/112485/aaron-swartz-profile-internet-will-never-save-you https://newrepublic.com/article/112418/aaron-swartz-suicide-why-he-broke-jstor-andmit https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/aaron-swartz-prosecutor-withheldevidence/317410/ https://archive.is/bGVpb https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/prosecutor-in-aaron-swartzhacking-case-comes-under-fire/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/31/aaron-swartz-mit-report-family-critical  https://archive.is/9IIBX https://archive.is/vmHXz  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social, emotional, networks. The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise. I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on musk. Join me, Evan Ratliffe, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tune in to the new podcast,

Stories from the Village of Nothing Much. Like Easy Listening, but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Catherine Nicolai and I'm an architect of COSI. Come spend some time where everyone is welcome and the default is kindness. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the village of nothing much. On the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A middle-aged electrician is murdered in a quiet Amsterdam suburb. The killing leads investigators into a web of drugs, money laundering, and state-sponsored assassinations that stretch us from Dublin to Dubai. At the center is a cocaine super cartel and a hidden economic war between democracies and dictatorships. It's the new season of the hip podcast from the financial times and pushkin industries, hot money, the new narcos. Listen to hot money, the new narcos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or whatever

you get your podcasts. Call zone media. Hey, everybody. Robert here. It's the Christmas II part, and every year we try to use our holiday episodes to do something good. This year, we're asking you to support the Mutual Aid project that James Stout over at It Could Happen Here has been a part of for nearly six months in a remote part of the US-Mexico border near Yacumba, California. While your hopefully warm and dry, the border patrol is detaining thousands of migrants, including children and the elderly, in the desert without food, water, or shelter, when

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We're normally, we talk about the very worst people in all of history, but once a year, one glorious day or week out of the year. Instead of talking about the worst people in all of history, we talk about some of the best people in all of history. And today, as our guest on this, this you'll tie it episode, our only returning Christmas episode guest, Margaret Killjoy, who talks about cool people who did cool stuff for a living. And a podcast of that name. Hey, you only cover Santa Claus, right? Yeah, yeah, we're getting into the, we're getting into the big man himself. Okay. Now, Magpie, how do you feel about Christmas? You Christmas person?

I am now, this is a recent transition. I decided that it makes sense that everyone wants together to celebrate the darkest time of the year. Yeah. And that whatever holiday people attach to it, as long as the core of it is, get together with people that you care about as The dark set the dark is here and the cold is coming

You know, yeah, yeah, I think that's a I tend to be more or less in agreement I enjoy celebrating the holiday. Yeah, that has nothing to do with the guy we're talking about today I'm a clause But it is it is you know Yeah Santa Claus. We are, we've all gone through in the period from the early 2000s to today, this really interesting moment, especially those of us, this kind of less of a case for people who have been radicals that entire time, but those of us who started from a more centrist, moderate, you know, liberal kind

of background, this period of like, wow, the internet is going to be this incredible tool for democracy and spreading knowledge. The tech industry, they're like this progressive force in a lot of ways in society. There's a bunch of things that are going to be made better by connecting people all over the world to, oh, not only does all this technology not work

the way that we thought it, and not only is it a lot more toxic, does it have more negative consequences for people's mental health, for the health of societies, but it increases the arsenal of authoritarians. And most of the people who are running the tech industry now want that, right, are fundamentally on the side of authoritarians. There's this kind of movement. The New York Times just did an article on it because that kind of the mainstream started to be aware of. Some to an extent of which it kind of came out of some of the effective altruist stuff

that's the effective accelerationist, right? EFF slash ACC is kind of how it'll be written along. The idea is like we need to accelerate without thinking of the consequences, you know, AI, effective AI, you know, and push it in every aspect of society. And it doesn't matter who it hurts. It doesn't matter what the consequences are because fundamentally this is what human beings need.

And these people are also getting into eugenics. A lot of these are the folks around Elon Musk. It's deeply reactionary in many ways. But it came out of, and a lot of some of the people who are involved in it, our folks who came out of in the early 2000s, the late 90s, you would have thought a lot differently of them, right? You would have thought that these people were, if not on the site of angels, then broadly speaking, part of a positive trend in our culture. And today, the hero we're talking about is a guy who's a personal hero of mine.

He was a dude who was too inextent on his side. I think I know it is, but yeah. Yeah, he was a dude who was too inextent on, you know, we don't know because of when he died, fundamentally where he would have ended up. Now, I don't think he would be in league with any of those guys. He's a guy I fundamentally view as a hero and his name was Aaron Schwartz. Yeah, I'm so excited. Yeah, spelled SWARTZ.

Aaron Hillel Schwartz was born on November 8th, 1986 in Highland Park, Chicago. He was the eldest of three brothers and in general, enjoyed about his privilege, not bringing as you can have and still do something useful with your life, right? He's not born like into crazy money because those people don't tend to do much, right? There's not an emerald mine in the picture.

Yeah, he's not an emerald miner, but his dad like founds a software firm. I don't think they're like hundreds of millions of dollars but I'm sure they have a million or more, in assets most of the time that he's around. They're doing very well, right? And because his dad's the founder of a software firm, his dad's a huge nerd, clearly a very smart guy.

And so from a very early age, there are computers in the Swartz house. And eventually Aaron and all of his brothers, he has two younger brothers, will have computers as kids in the late 80s, early 90s. That's very rare, right? I grew up, my dad was a very early adopter. So it was mine.

So we had computers in the 80s. And like, they cost like all of my dad's money, you know? Yeah. I was born late enough in the 80s. We certainly, if we had a computer in the late 80s, I don't think we did. But in the early 90s, we had, like, we had one of the ones that was pre-floppy disks, whatever those giant ones were. And like, you know, all it has, you just get green text

on a little screen, like we had one of those for a while. Oh, see, it's probably pretty hard to, sorry, never mind. I don't need to, my, yeah, we had all the like, my dad referred to it as a compact logable. It's a size of a briefcase, and it has a little green screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It does have a hard drive. It has an A in a B drive, but not a C drive, you know? Yeah, ancient technology. Yeah. Like not only does your phone have more computing power than, I don't know, may have existed in the country at that point. I don't fully know the answer to that. Like, like, fucking, your refrigerators have more power than those machines did, right?

Yeah. But I learned Q basic on it. Yeah. So, Aaron, by the time he's like three, he's using a computer. Yeah. You know, and by the time he's three or four, he's starting to understand how to actually make stuff from a very young age. He's six or seven when their home is wired for internet access.

So again, you're talking like 92. They're among the very first people to have home internet access. That is extremely uncommon in the early 90s. If you followed our stories of tech billionaires, guys like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, or you've done your own reading on Steve Jobs, we haven't covered yet, we will one of these days. I definitely do consider him a bastard,

although I have kind of more admiration for him as a, in terms of just his capabilities than those other guys. He is a terrible person. Don't get me wrong. Right. But in a world of mosques, he stands out like a shiony, ambitious stuff, right?

Yeah. Yeah. If you are familiar with those guys, you'll recognize that Aaron has a pretty similar upbringing. They all do come from that kind of background. They're kind of up a little class, but they're not super rich, right? But they are a lot have a lot more money than most people.

They have parents who, if their parents are not Tech nerds themselves understand the value of computers and get their kids access to those at a very early age, right? All of these things are he has the same background as most of our big tech founders do today, right? Broadly speaking, you know, he's gonna wind up being a very different person, but he does come from kind of the same starting position. One of the real differences with him. but he does come from kind of the same starting position. One of the real differences with him, all of these guys get kind of framed as, and I think probably believe of themselves as child geniuses.

None of them were. They're all smart, don't get me wrong. Jeff Bezos, smart guy, Bill Gates, smart guy, Steve Jobs, smart guy, none of them are geniuses, right? Steve Wozniak, I think, very fair to call that man a technical genius, like a once in a generation brain. None of these guys are technical geniuses. They're pretty smart.

They're pretty smart and they have enough insight to understand where things are going to go to take advantage of people who are geniuses. Aaron is a legitimate child genius. There is no argument with that statement that I have ever seen. For an idea of how intelligent he is, he teaches himself to read and his parents don't realize his done it. His mom realizes it when they have a sign on the fridge that's like clipped out of the newspaper that's like there's a free family entertainment thing nearby. And he asked his mom, hey, mom, what is? And he like reads the thing out. And she's like, what are you talking about? And he points to the fridge.

And she realizes that he's reading it at age three. She has no idea that he's learned, this is how she learns that he knows how to read. He's reading novels by the time he's in kindergarten. And likewise around the same time he teaches himself to read a little bit later, he teaches himself to code, you know, just a phenomenal mind by, again, have never heard any sort of debate on this question. Yeah. So obviously with the resources they have, realizing how fucking smart their kid is, his parents decide to send him to a private school for gifted children, which he attends through middle school.

He teaches himself to program pretty early on. His first project is a Sudoku puzzle game. At one point, just as like a thing for fun, he builds and programs an ATM machine like at a cardboard. And like, I don't know what he uses for the computer, but he gets access to some computer bits. He like makes an ATM machine. Hell yeah.

And he realizes early on that with code, he can make things that not only do adults not understand, but seem like magic to most of the adults around. Not as dad is dad knows how to code, obviously, but to most adults. And a side consequence of this is that from his early days, you know, he's not, I'm sure you and I, like, I was a precocious kid. I started reading by the time I was in first grade, I was reading novels, you know, I was reading adult novels when I was in third grade. I read faster and got onto that stuff faster than most people,

but that's the kind of thing, all of the adults around me, my family are big readers. I saw them reading big books and bigger books than me. So like I was doing a thing, I'm like, oh, I'm doing a thing that's kind of like the adults, but they are still doing that thing and they're doing it better. Air and it's doing a thing that's kind of like the adults, but they are still doing that thing and they're doing it better. Aaron is doing a thing adults can't comprehend.

Most adults can't comprehend coding, especially not on the level he is at. And that gives him a healthy respect for his own intellect and sometimes it gives him kind of an unhealthy respect for his own intellect. His younger brother has said, like, he was kind of a brat, right? Yeah. He was smarter than most people and he was smarter than most of the adults, right? And he could be a snotty of a brat, right? Yeah. He was smarter than most people. And he was smarter than most of the adults, right? And he could be a snotty brat about it, right? Like that's pretty inevitable when you've got a kid who's this smart.

They're going to go through that. It seems to have been a phase for him. This is not like, I don't think a lifelong thing for him. Most people say he was a very down-to-earth guy in most of his life. But he has his brat period. I think that's kind of inevitable when you're this smart. His parents were part of a reform synagogue, but when he was pretty young, their dad moved them to a Habad synagogue, which is a kind of Orthodox synagogue, fairly early on. But they're not,

Aaron doesn't find himself compelled by organized religion, and when he's pretty young, he tells his parents, I don't believe in God, and they let him drop out, right? They don't, they don't seem to have fought him on this, right? Um, not longer, not long after that, when he fit after he finishes the eighth grade, he's like, Hey, I don't want to keep going to high school. I want to drop out. So he drops out of the ninth grade. And his dad lets him do this because he's like, yeah, actually, I hated high school too. You know, I got bullied. Aaron gets bullied. He's mostly thin, but he's kind of like pudgy around the middle. He has some body image issues. And he's like, he's too smart.

And he kiddos that smart. It's kind of get bullied, right? He's a little bitty and he's weird. He's going to get bullied, you know? It's also inevitable. And he's like, I don't want to keep going to high school. I don't think I need this. So his dad, he gets to drop out and he starts taking college courses at a nearby college. And Aaron is his word. He is the kind of auto-died

act who has a he's got a wide-ranging series of interests and he's good at teaching himself things. And unlike a lot of tech, Wendirkins, he's not just obsessed with code. That's kind of his first love, but it's honestly, it's right up there with books. He would read kind of as a young adult upwards of a hundred books a year. And he very quickly gets interested in novels by guys like George Saunders, David Foster Wallace. These are kind of like some of his favorites. Where he comes up short, he's good at teaching himself

anything he's interested in. One of the problems he's gonna have that's kind of a lifelong thing for him is he can't focus on anything that's not really his top obsession at the moment, right? He doesn't have generally needed kind of long-term stay interested in a specific thing. He doesn't have a lot of discipline, right? And that lack of discipline is kind of mirrored with a basic lack of social skills that again, very much what you'd expect from a kid whose parents let him drop out of school to raise himself on the internet. One of his childhood

friends told an interviewer, he needed a couple years to be stuffed in a locker to get his social stuff together. And I think his friends being a little bit, you know, if facetious there. But I think the point is that it's not that being bullied is good, but the friction, experiencing friction and having to work through it with your peers is good. That is necessary, right?

You don't need to get beaten to shit out of you. But you do need friction. You need to be in situations where like, well, I don't like the people here, but we have to accomplish the thing together. That's necessary, you know, for optimal health, I think. I'm very glad I went to public school. Yeah. Same here. You know, like even though, yeah, like middle school was a hell nightmare that I mostly disassociated the entire time. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't like it, but I think it's broadly speaking, there's things you get out of that that are necessary, and Aaron's not gonna get some of that stuff. This is something that his family's kind of remarked on since.

So I'm not like, I'm not making this judgment on them. This is like based on stuff his family members have said. Right. He did not have, you know, he has a voracious appetite for knowledge, but he doesn't have as an appetite for like actual food, right? He is a famously picky eater. He preferred white and I think yellow foods and kind of he hated, he's the opposite of

Steve Jobs, he hated fruit. He like wouldn't eat fruit basically. Okay. And he pretty much didn't eat vegetables other than fried potatoes because basically a hundred percent of people will eat fried potatoes, right? Yeah, no, there's no, yeah. I don't know that I've ever met anyone who won't eat French fries.

That's what I'm saying. So, I'm for health reasons, obviously, but like, I don't know. All the picky eaters I know, like fries tend to be a thing there. I don't know, I'm sure there are people who don't, but that is like weird how many people are like, yeah, but I'll eat fries.

Yeah, like fried carbohydrates are tasty, and we are most people are hardwired to understand that. Yeah, yeah, it's the, like fried carbohydrates are tasty. And we are most people are hardwired to understand that. Yeah, yeah, it's the like you, I don't know, this is a tangent, but like when Europeans realized there were potatoes and what you could do with them, there was this sudden like, oh my God, this is what we've been, this is the real gold of El Dorado is fucking potatoes.

Totally. So it's still hard to imagine Europe without corn tomatoes or potatoes. Yeah, like it's it is. It's just turnips. Turnips and I don't know, drinking yourself and doing early grave. So Aaron, obviously he benefits from having a dad who's technically inclined. The two talked regularly about what the internet was likely to mean for the future. His dad later said, we were going online when the web was really in its infancy before there were graphical browsers. And very quickly, we both realized that this was something that was going to change everything. A number of people came to that realization, and many of them

went on to monetize the internet in ways that have contributed to a great deal of harm. Aaron's interests from beginning had a lot less to do with money and a lot to do with the sharing of information. In 1999 at age 12, he created the Info Network, a user generated in Cyclopedia. Wikipedia didn't launch until two years later, a fact that always seemed to, so again, when he's 12, he creates Wikipedia, right? Like, the same basic idea, it doesn't take off Wikipedia does. And that fact, kind of, you get the feeling it kind of peeps him a little bit. He would later tell an interviewer, it was basically Wikipedia, except long before Wikipedia

had launched, but I was in middle school at the time, so my site didn't make it into the New York Times. And that's kind of, and that's, he's probably right, right? Right? Yeah, totally. Yeah, now, Wikipedia got the early that's kind of, and that's, he's probably right, right? Right now, totally. And the media got the early interest, and that's why you've been thinking about it. It's something that was in the air, I guess, you know? Yeah, which is nothing against the Wikipedia.

I don't know, I'm not saying the Wikipedia people ripped Aaron's, like, ripped off a 12-year-old. But it shows you, it shows you not just how smart he is, but like where his mind is going in terms of what people can get out of the internet and should get out of the internet, right? And, yeah, you know, Wikipedia, not that there aren't some critiques of it, but like one of the very best things the internet's ever produced, one of the most important and useful things the internet's ever made.

And one of the only artifacts from this time, the time when the internet was going to make us more free instead of less free. Yes. And one of the only ones that has not, I don't think in any meaningful sense, because like Google is at one point a pretty wonderful tool and has a deeply corrupted and polluted. I don't feel like Wikipedia has. I'm very pro-Wiccapedia. Again, there's issues with it. That's a separate topic, but pretty wonderful contribution. So anyway, you know, the fact this, Aaron's Wikipedia does not take off, but it does earn him a significant degree of early recognition. He became a finalist for the R's Digit Apprise, which recognized young people who built valuable, non-commercial websites. He wins a thousand bucks for this,

and he wins a trip to MIT. Or for the first time, he meets some of the genius coders and engineers he admired in person. Now, Aaron had already started communicating online with some of the luminaries in his field. But meeting guys like Philip Greenspan, who developed one of the very first photo sharing sites and is kind of he's a pioneer in the concept of how digital communities are going to work.

He's a guy who his thinking lays a lot of the groundwork for what becomes social media. Aaron has his first conversations with this guy about the open source movement, which is popular among the nerds who are still the center of gravity in online technology. And he becomes entranced. He decides he wants to join the World Wide Web Consortium. Today, it's the main international standards organization for the internet. And he has turned down for joining, because he's 13 years old, right? Well, we don't let, you know, this is like,

yeah, we don't let 13 year olds in. They're not, I don't think they're trying to be shitty. They're just, yeah, it's a sensible rule for a kid who's not Aaron. Aaron refuses to take no for an answer. And I'm going to quote from a write up in the New Yorker here. Undaunted, he read through the rules of the consortium and found that every member was allowed to send a delegate. He looked through the lists to find somebody

who hadn't sent a delegate and he found one, the HTML writers guild. He emailed the group and asked if he could participate in a W3C work group as its delegate. And it had no objection. So he kind of finds a sideways way in, right as it's delegate and it had no objection. So he kind of finds a sideways way in, right? He hears there's a rule against this, he finds a way around it. You know, this is going to be a pattern in his life. This willingness, first off, an unwillingness to take no, for an answer, if he doesn't think there's a good reason for it. And second, an unwillingness to listen to rules that he thinks are stupid, right? That's going to

characterize a lot of his, his future. Another thing that's going to characterize his life from this point forward is an understanding that unpleasant aspects of life, specifically the bureaucracies that we all have to engage in, to some extent, to survive, can be avoided, right? And this is the thing that has positive and negative outcomes for him, right? His dad's going to later trace this attitude back to his upbringing and the decision he made to let Aaron drop out of school." This is his father. He also never learned to do anything that he didn't want to do. College is very important that you're forced to study stuff you're not interested in, but he hated the bureaucracy of it, the dumb rules, the pointless

assignments. He just rejected that. It was like getting him to eat vegetables. it was like getting him to eat vegetables. I wonder how much this is like father, self blaming, not to spoil anyone who has the, I only know the like cliff snows, kind of this man's story. I think it makes it based on his life. I think he's probably kind of accurately describing his son, right? Yeah.

This isn't a big track. His area accomplishes spoiler a lot of shit and the time that he's around. But I think this is fair. He is someone who's rarely gonna stick with a project for very long, and I think it is because, and he's also someone who, he kind of frees us up when he is sort of confronted with a lot of the realities bureaucracy, because he just doesn't have to,

he's most of his life able to get away from it, right? Yeah. And again, there's a lot of value in understanding. I run into this with some of my friends who kind of were more on the anarchist punk side of thing when you have to deal with the legal system and stuff because I've had a lot more dealings with it where it's like, there's just ways that you have to approach it to deal with it. The same thing with talking to when my close friends or whatever have an issue with like

a company, they need to get a refund or something. I know how to talk to representatives and shit to make things happen, right? I have learned that shit over the years. It's a skill. It's like when cops are messing with you and you have to shut the fuck up,

but you have to do it politely and respectfully. Yeah. There are ways to navigate every system of power and often the smartest thing to do is to navigate it rather than just fight every aspect of every turn. Yeah, there's this moment early on in the protest in Portland where you know we were filming some people getting arrested and the police said that they were going to arrest me and my media partner. There were a couple of protesters behind us and they're like you're're all under arrest. And I was like, what are we under arrest for? And he said, for curfew violation, because the mayor had put it a curfew. And so I was like, well, the mayor's curfew exempts media. We're, you know, press with badges and stuff on. And, you know, there's other people are trying to argue with the cops. And I just, you know, yelling at them. And I just

kind of keep engaging him in conversation. He's like, I don't care. I'm going to rest you. And finally, what I say is like, the mayor has said that we're exempt. Are you countermaning the mayor's orders? And his a switch flipped in his head. And not only did my partner and I not get arrested, but like, the protesters behind us did not. Because it was just like, yeah, you had to, you have to flip like it's just this understanding of how bureaucracy and the people who make up bureaucracy like function, right? Aaron's not gonna have a lot of that understanding, right? He builds, he does build a lot more of it later in his life,

but he starts out with less of it than I think, even a normal person does, because he's just, he's smart enough to get around it for so long. And he's also engaging in the adult world, because a lot of his intelligence levels are at adult levels, but maybe his like social and other understandings are not exactly as long as.

And the adults around him are all, and Cory Doctoro, who's a very friend of his from a very young age, we'll talk about this. Because Aaron is small and we'll talk about he's kind of sickly, the adults around him that he's quickly living in the world with are very protective of him. And I do think they're able to kind of shield him

from a lot of these sort of realities of dealing with the system, you know. So he doesn't, he doesn't build up some of those skills as early as he maybe otherwise would have. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of positive stuff happening for him and his early adolescence, a less positive thing that happens during this time is that when he's 12, so kind of the same year he makes his Wikipedia thing. He's diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. This may help to exchange, to explain some of his pickiness as an eater. Obviously, it's never a pleasant condition to deal with. Aaron seems to have particularly struggled. He would often lose days or entire weeks to have abdominal pains, so intense it would leave him curled up on the floor. He's always got this regular thing in his life where like sometimes he just won't be able to work

because he's got, he's in so much pain, you know. This is a regular thing he struggles with. That said, when he's able to work, he's so much smarter than most people that he still accomplishes much more than people who are not dealing with this kind of physical stuff or even accomplish. In August of 2000, Aaron finds himself on an email discussion thread for a group of programmers who are designing something called RSS, which stands for real simple syndication. It is a web feed that lets users build their own news aggregators, like pushing content from various sites into a single feed. And it's also, it's one of the back, like, like foundational technologies of the internet, every website you go to basically uses RSS to push, you know, and collect and stuff, the things that they're publishing on a regular basis, you know.

This is one of the most significant developments in the early internet, right? If you're thinking about the invention of electricity, it's almost like a power transformer, I think might be a good way to describe it. It is absolutely foundational to how the internet is used. Yeah. Yeah. So Aaron is going to be, and there's a whole team of people,

the other Sipomaer adults who are working on this, but he's going to be one of them, right? team of people, the other Siboma adults who are working on this, but he's going to be one of them, right? So he gets into this group. And again, it's just kind of the nerds that find themselves are working on this. They're all handling different parts of the project. And Aaron quickly becomes involved. And I think everyone who was there agrees, he contributed singing. It's not he did not invent RSS, right? A lot of people did. Right. But his contributions were substantial to this thing that is a fundamental undergirding of how the internet functions today, right?

And while this is happening, while he's working on this project, aspects of an ideology start to take shape in him, based on his interactions with these other people who are both coders and also hackers, right? Because at this period in the internet, the pretty much the same thing, right? All the people who are building these are also hackers, you know? Yeah. And I'm going to quote from an article in the new Republic.

This ethos carried its own ideology, the ideology of free flowing information or open access as it became known. A self-taught computer savant barely felt more helpless than when he was cut off from the websites and books he used to navigate the world. Without them, he couldn't learn what he needed to earn a living, much less invent some disruptive technology. I'd skipped college, says Kevin Burton, who first met Schwartz through the RSS group. The fact that I couldn't access materials available to college students was why open access was

always important to me. So Aaron is not a what did act so are a lot of these guys and he goes from just kind of like this is just how it I am and how I learn to thinking about this more long ideological lines, right? This is not just a thing for me, but this is a thing for other people, right? This is fundamental to allowing human beings to progress is making sure that information is accessible and open as much as possible. beings to progress is making sure that information is accessible and open as much as possible. If you go through enough recollections of Aaron during this period, people who were in this working group with him will note that he was again, he could be a little bit of a brat, right?

His questions are always good, but he could be kind of haughty, he could be kind of aggressive sometimes and how he asked them. He has a lot of this attitude, he doesn't understand what you're doing, so he's like, why are we doing this? Does this seem like the best thing to do? What about doing this? This is coming from a mix of genuine curiosity and he could be a little bit snotty, right?

Like he's a kid, you know? Yeah, yeah. And he also, he also, this is, you know, not entirely a negative thing. He fundamentally, he doesn't have kind of a baseline level of respect based on people having greater experience, right? Because he doesn't have this assumption that that means they know more than him. And often they don't, you know? Right.

Anyway, you know who does know more than all of us? The concept of potatoes? The potato, I mean, yes, the potatoes are wise indeed. But the sponsors of this podcast know more than anything. So listen to them and do whatever they tell you. Let them sprout in your mind like a potato in a dark drawer. Very true. Or literally don't.

When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure. That night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. What he got was a subject who also soared chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks. And when I sat down with Isaacs in five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all. They had Kansas spray paint, and they're just putting big axes on machines.

And it's almost like kids playing on the playground, just choose them up left, right, and center. And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it, getting the bars, done and excused being a total f***. But I want the reader to see it in action. My name is Evan Ratliff, and this is on Musk with Walter Isaacson.

Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to On Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much. Like easy listening, but perfection. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Catherine Nicolai, and you might know me from the bedtime story podcast, nothing much happens. I'm an architect of cozy, and I invite you to come spend some

time where everyone is welcome and kindness is the default. When you tune in, you'll hear stories about bakeries and walks in the woods. A favorite booth at the diner and a blustery autumn day. Cats and dogs and rescued goats and donkeys. Old houses, bookshops, beaches were kite fly and pretty stones are found. I have so many stories to tell you and they are all designed to help you feel good and feel connected to what is good in the world. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the village of nothing much

on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner, Rob called me, so let Addo Brein and ask me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award-winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. And on this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers. Well, ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president.

My dad, the 5JFK, screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us after the Cuban Missile Crisis. We'll reveal why Lee Harvey Oswald isn't who they said he was. I was under the impression that Lee was being trained for a specific operation, and will pull the curtain back on the cover-up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to Who Killed JFK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. your podcast. And we're back. So, you know, again, Aaron still a kid. And obviously while he could be kind of a little, maybe a little abrasive sometimes, that doesn't turn anyone off from working with him. And in fact, his collaborators who know him only from his kind of, not quite anonymous, but they don't know who he is, right, responses, are only put out because they do in-person meetings regularly for members of this group and he doesn't make any of the in-person meetings. I'm kind of as if this is a driving license.

He's crazy. Yeah, so I'm asking him like, hey man, like why don't you ever show up whenever we meet in person? He's like, well, I'd have to ask my parents because I'm 14 and then they're like, oh shit. I had a version that happened with Garrison when we started working with him. Right, we're like, oh shit. I had a version that happened with Garrison when we started working with him, right?

We were like, one of our mutual friends, like we had been hanging out with them after a horrible riot where we all nearly got arrested. And the next day, our friend texted me, and he's like, do you know that they're 17? He's like, no, in fact I did not. Oh shit, that's how you learned. Yeah, yeah.

I used to hitchhike with my friend who had a note from her parents being like, yes, I know what my daughter is doing. It's fine. At this point, you know, they start, he starts being able to show up in person more often. These people, I think Cory Doctra was on this list, recognized like real life.

And they're all blown away by like how smart this kid, how young. And again, they have this kind of, it's this mix of this feeling like we need to protect this kid. And also this kid is the fucking future, right? Yeah. And so he is kind of immediately ushered in and adopted almost by some of the most luminous names in technology, right? He meets and becomes to some extent a little bit of a protege of a guy named Tim

Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee is an MIT professor. He invented the World Wide Web. This is not one of those things when people say so and so invented this and it's like bullshit. It's like, well, they invented, you know, the World Wide Web is Tim Berners-Lee's invention. He created this, right? He, in a very literal sense, created this. Starting in 1989, he sketches out, he's working for SIRN at this point. And he, one of the things that SIRN, which is a big research institute, all these colleges, universities, they all have things that are versions of like what the internet is going to be, these electronic communications networks that allow them to communicate on campus, allow them to communicate with each other, them to communicate with each other and to some extent with other organizations.

But none of them are built around the same standard. So letting everything talk is a huge fucking mess. And Berners-Lee is like, we need a standard solution for how electronic communication is going to work. And he sketches out, he designs the worldwide web. That's literally the thing that he makes. Like he comes up with a plan for, it's going to be a global web of individual pages, each of which has their own address. They're all coded in HTML. And because they're

on the same standard, all of these websites and whatnot can communicate with each other. This is the foundation of everything that makes the modern internet possible. And when Berners-Lee creates this, he has this choice, which is, that's a patentable idea, right? He could have been the man with a patent for the internet. He makes a key decision he chooses not to. He decides, I am not going to have a patent on this so anybody can do this. Because it's one of the best episodes. I didn't want this going to have a patent on this. So anybody can do this.

Because he's like, I didn't want to be one of the bastards episode because he's definitely a cool dude, right? As far as I'm aware of. And as a because he makes this fundamental decision, he's kind of viewed as a saint within the open source movement in a lot of ways, right? Like not surprising, but it's also why he's not a household name, right? Yeah, ways, right? Like, not surprising, but it's also why he's not a household name, right? Yeah, he's also not a hat and he's not a minute worth more money than anyone else in the world could ever conceive of being worth. Yeah. Like, um, fortunately, there's that like thing where money only buys happiness up to like

70K a year and then it just levels up. So like, yeah, I'm sure it's up to 100K or whatever now. But yeah, oh, yeah, that makes sense. That was like 10 years ago. Yeah, Berners-Lee, you know, he chewed anyway, he meets Aaron early on and is so impressed. He basically endorses him as his heir, right? This is the kid who's going to like take the internet into the future. Like this is the future of all this stuff that we're working on, this really kind of utopian idea of what connecting the world is going to result in, right?

Yeah, so this guy, he's so impressed by Aaron, he basically like endorses him as like, this is my successor, right? This is going to be the guy who takes the internet into whatever it becomes in the future. That elevates Aaron immediately. It kind of, like immediately he's in the inner circle of people who are inventing the internet, which is definitely happening at this period of time. And Aaron

gets suddenly thrown into the tech conference circuit, where he is an object of Marvel among the mostly much older men who had helped to build the foundations of the internet. There's videos of this time of him, you know, speaking at conferences and stuff, and they tend to show Aaron who is absurdly small, almost, especially next to these grown men, giving pretty thoughtful and complex answers while men decades as seniors sit next to him on stage. At age 15, he sends an email to a guy named Lawrence Lesig. Lesig is a legal scholar who was an early prominent activist for what we call the open internet. And Lesig is in the process of inventing

something called the creative comments at this point, right? Lesig is the creator of the creative comments, which basically gives creators, you and I both use creative comments, right? So most people who make things that are cool. And it allows creators of all kinds of media, the ability to copy right their work in ways that allow for adaptation and distribution much more easily without involving, you know, a publisher or whatever, right? You don't have to have that. Like, you have this kind of ready-made kit for figuring out the rights status of your work and setting that up. So Aaron sends this guy an email and I'm going to quote from an article in Rolling Stone for what happens next.

Lawrence Lessick, now a professor at Harvard, gave Schwartz his first job, flying him out to San Francisco to write code for creative comments, a nonprofit that allows users to copyright their material in less restrictive ways. When the site celebrated its launch on December 16, 2002, Schwartz was invited to speak to the crowd of 600, which included internet luminaries like Cred newck, the founder of Craigslist.

So Aaron gets up. This is Lesick talking. So Aaron gets up. He's not even big enough to stand over the podium. And he explains what the architecture of the site is. And the audience is just amazed that this was a 15 year old kid. So he is, he helps to create creative comments. It's Lesick's idea.

He does the coding for it, right? So he is 15, two of the things that are fundamental underpinnings of the internet to this day. He's had a significant hand in making, RSS, and creative comments, 15 years old. Now it is worth noting that lessig is, at this point in time, like a lot of us, was not, you know, like a lot of people were at this period of time, one of the wild-eyed optimists of the internet, right? He is actually not someone who feels it's inevitable that the internet will lead us into a golden age of freedom.

As a legal scholar, he is well aware of the weapons available to the enemy and he knows that they are terrible in nature and in exhaustible, nearly in quantity. Which makes sense to create something like creative comments because it's an attempt to keep the internet on a decent track. Yes, exactly. And he's kind of critically, and again,

he'll have an influence on Aaron, but he is not one of these people. Unlike a lot of the people that Aaron is close to that are making stuff with him, he's not one of these people who views the internet as like this is all fundamentally gonna work out for us. He sees the dangers because he understands the fucking law. Lawrence had gotten famous in hacker circles for a book he wrote in 1999,

called Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. And again, he is a kind of definitely a visionary. His book argues that programmers are going to have more influence than laws on the development of the internet. And to explain kind of where his thinking is going and why it is relevant to us. Today, I want to read an extended quote from Noah Shiber writing for the new Republic, because it describes an extremely important moment in our early conceptions of the internet. Quote, The law could tell you who to associate with and who not to, but you could always ignore it. If, on the other hand, a programmer decided it should be impossible to connect with a

certain type of website, the average person had no way around it. The programmer was God. Suffice it to say, audiences were intrigued. In the late 90s, Lesick taught a class about the internet that was opened to both Harvard Law students and MIT engineers. Early in the term, he asked, how do you know if something you're doing is wrong? The Lawyer said that an action was wrong if it was against the law. The hacker said it was only wrong if you failed to accomplish it.

It was the most fundamental statement of the hacker ethos, and it seemed, and it teamed with idealism. If it were possible to increase human welfare through engineering, through delivering more social interaction or knowledge or happiness to more people, then it would be a moral not too. There was only one hitch, which less agutifully explained, but which often went unheated, the law would not be standing by idly. The belief had always been that lawyers can say what they want and will always have the technology to route around it, says Ben Adita, a programmer who worked with Lesick and Schwartz. To the hackers, the law was at best anachronistic, at worst arbitrary,

even cruel. Lessick was one of the first folks to say, you know the power that code has over the way people interact online, you would be foolish to think the law is not going to regulate it a deed of recalls. Kind of a key moment there. No, yeah, no, I'm just like thinking about it.

I'm like, I mean, one, it's like, I mean, it's all the movie hackers, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, one, it's like, I mean, it's all the movie hackers, right? Yeah. Like, I mean, obviously, it doesn't come from the movie hackers, the movie hackers is attempting to represent something. It was like a thing where like hackers,

sort of at the time, were like, what the fuck, and then hackers, like a couple of years later, was like, that rules, that's our fucking legacy. Yeah. But like this idea that, and also this idea that like, something is only wrong

if you fail to do it, right? A sketchy. And it's interesting. And you can see how it was often intended as a force for freedom 20 years ago, and is now that same concept is just like, let's see what else. Yeah, a lot of people who were hackers or at least who came out of the movement that came out of descended from that are now into this like dark enlightenment reactionary shit. They're talking race side like. Yeah. The there's a fork that is going to occur in this community and a lot of the people. Yeah. And

that is going to occur in this community and a lot of the people at. And what we're talking about, who we're talking about now, Aaron, is certainly on the side of the light side of that fork. Absolutely. And the fork, again, as a spoiler, you could, if you wanted to split the fork at his death when it occurs.

Yeah, that makes sense, honestly. And you would not be wrong to necessarily. Yeah. When you have the same like, but Indie media leads to Twitter leads to Elon Musk Twitter, you know, like, yep. Yeah. Exactly. At age 17, Aaron is accepted to Stanford for obvious reasons, not hard to see how that happens. Aaron is obviously brilliant. Anyone with IIS can see that he's going to change the world. And Stanford wants some of his shine for themselves, right? That is what they do.

That is how they make their bread. But as soon as Aaron arrives at the elite West Coast school, he sees it for the sham that it was. He writes at the time that Stanford is, quote, an idyllic little school in California where the sun is always shining and the grass is always green and the kids are always out getting a tan. After three days at Stanford, Aaron decides to attend a party. He kind of forces himself to go.

An article in the new Republic makes it seem like this was kind of an anthropological experiment by Aaron, more of that than an attempt to enjoy himself, quote. He merely wanted to document the mating rituals of the teenager, a species that alternatively mystified and horrified him. And my culture of vaguely technical people, people converse by sharing information through mutually beneficial discussion and debate. He wrote on his blog, but the teenager system is altogether different and wholly alien to them. He is frustrated by more than just a lack of social skills, erin is angry that Stanford required ID cards with RFID transmitters, which can be used to track students.

He hates the library because of how it's organized. He thinks it's inefficient. And I'm sure he's right about that. And he was disgusted by the hygiene levels at the shared student facilities like the Laundromat. As a consequence of this disillusionment, he spends most of his time in college hanging out with adults, particularly Lawrence Lesig and Friend of the Pod, Cory Doctoro.

Lesig is again the guy who funded Creative Commons and Cory is an activist and a wildly prolific author, very good author. They were in short good influences, but one also has to assume any 17-year-old who's hanging out with these guys and not their fellow teenagers, they're not going to get better at fitting in, right? Like, yeah, that's fair. Not that that's the most important thing, but you know, that's just the thing that's happening to him, right? And again, given some of the shit Stanford grads have recently been responsible for, might

have been for the best. That like this guy is worse influence, and not his fellow Stanford students. So this is not without stress though, right? The fact that he is he is adopted by welcomed in by all of these very accomplished adults is not a thing devoid of stress for him, right? The sheer odd confidence guys like Tim Berners-Lee and Lessig have for Schwartz is a lot that's a lot to put on the shoulders of a 17. Yeah. Right? Being told you're the future of the internet you're going to be critical in this thing that is we believe put on the shoulders of the 17. Right? Being told, you're the future of the internet. You're going to be critical in this thing that is, we believe necessary for the development of the human race to be told that before you're even 17, that's a lot to have on your

shoulders, right? Aaron has absolutely shown an appetite for this work, but that doesn't mean there's not a burden there, right? Lisa Reign, one of Lessex's aides, later told New Republic, with his intellect, we wanted to harness it for good instead of evil. I was worried that Microsoft would get a hold of him, which again, for these adults, not an unresouple thing to be concerned about, right? So I think, you know, all of this is based in a pretty wonderful amount of confidence

that even love these guys had for Aaron. Dr. Ougin has made the statement a couple of times that because in part because Aaron is so small, so vulnerable, you have this instinctive need to protect him. And this married with this intense faith in him, I think this led to a situation where Aaron felt a lot of personal responsibility for the future of the internet and people at a young age. And that's going to be difficult for him. That's going to be an added stress in his life. It is also worth noting here that Aaron is one of the most prolific bloggers of his generation. His need to create prose and work his thoughts and feelings out through the written word is a

strong, if not stronger, than his desire to code. And in fact, there will be a point in his life when he's like, I don't, I think I'm done with coding. I want to become an author. I would rather be like a middling author than a great coder. Like that's the thing he expresses at a point. That's real. Yeah. Did he write much fiction or anything like that? I guess we'll talk about that. He had a novel that he kind of repeatedly worked on that he never, I don't think he ever quite finished it. There's a book of his essays that's out. He's got, this is, again, you know, he's still a teenager as smart as he is.

So he's working a lot of shit out. And one of those things is he has this deep desire for privacy. All of his friends will say, he had a lot of issues sometimes with his friends knowing each other because he hated the idea that people would be talking about him. If he was positive, when he wasn't there,

like he just really had a gut revulsion of that. This was kind of ward in him with his need to publish every single thing that he thought on the internet under his name, right? This is a complicated thing for this kid to deal with. And I'm going to, I'm going to quote from Rolling Stone again here. On his blog, he had told this story about having a crush on this girl and stalking her at Lesick Recalls, not in a gross way. It was cute.

Anyway, he came to a reception at the law school where lessick was a professor. And I recount this during a conversation. He takes me aside and he goes, why would you do that? I said, what do you mean? He said, tell the secret. I said, secret, you blogged it.

He said, yeah, well, I blogged it, meaning I blogged it for the people who read my blog. I didn't blog it so the whole world would know. And he is dealing with an early version of what we're all going to deal with as the internet goes from this thing that only a few weirdos are on. Do this thing that everyone is on by default,

where he's like, less eggs like, well, you publish this, right? Why can't I talk about this? And he's like, well, I've published it for the internet, not for the real world. I'm very glad that I was an adult before social media and live journal and shit. Absolutely, Jesus.

Speaking of Jesus, by some products, Jesus will be having Jesus. When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure. That night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea.

What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks. And when I sat down with Isaacs in five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all. They had Kansas spray paint and they're just putting big axes on machines. And it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just choose them up left, right, and center. And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it. Getting the bars, done an excuse being a total ****.

But I want the reader to see it in action. My name is Evan Ratliffe and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to On Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much.

Like easy listening, but perfection. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Katherine Nicolai, and you might know me from the bedtime story podcast, nothing much happens. I'm an architect of Cozy, and I invite you to come spend some time where everyone is welcome and kindness is the default.

When you tune in, you'll hear stories about bakeries in the walks in the woods. A favorite booth at the diner and a blustery autumn day. Cats and dogs and rescued goats and donkeys. Old houses, bookshops, beaches were kite fly, and pretty stones are found. I have so many stories to tell you, and they are all designed to help you feel good

and feel connected to what is good in the world. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the village of nothing much on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner. Rob called me, so would Ado Bryan and asked me what I knew about this crime.

I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award-winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. And on this podcast, you're gonna hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers. Well, ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. My dad, 5JFK, screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us after the Cuban missile crisis.

We'll reveal why Lee Harvey Oswald isn't who they said he was. I was under the impression that Lee was being trained for a specific operation, and will pull the curtain back on the cover up. The American people need to know the truth. Listen to who killed JFK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So Aaron decides to leave Stanford.

He's there like a year and he decides to bounce. And that next summer, he gets approached by what's called Y Combinator. And Y Combinator is an incubator for tech founders, right? He had by this point come up with his own idea for a startup called Infogami. This was a kind of early social media application, but instead of centralizing users under one controlled hub, it would allow users to make their own websites, right? So instead of you can create your own account on this site and share stuff like you do on Instagram or whatever on this site, you create your own website. And it's your website.

I'm just creating a centralized set of tools for you to build your own websites, right? Okay. Your sports instincts here show how different he is from a lot of the other tech genius types coming because they're all thinking, how can I create a walled garden and plant people there? That is not at all what he's thinking. Now more of a massive guy than a Twitter guy. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely at least ideologically. Now that's not how this project is going to end up because, you know, he moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he starts working on this project with pretty feverish intensity.

While he's doing this, he's gonna intermittently struggle with his illness, this physical pain increasingly brings about bouts of depression that would render him unfunctional for weeks at a time. Still, on the days Aaron could work again, he's able to accomplish so much work that it all kind of shakes out well

in the long run. And eventually, Y Combinator pairs him with two other founders. Paradude's named Steve Huffman and Alexis O'Hanian, who were working on their own product, Reddit. Serena Williams has been. That's right. Yes, Serena Williams' has been. So they are, basically a lot of Aaron's ideas for infogame get folded into Reddit and you know, Reddit kind of has started to exist, but it doesn't work. It's it's buggy, it's unstable. It can't be adopted on any meaningful scale because it's like it's not good yet. Aaron comes in and he fixes all of the code, right? And so he becomes one of the founders of Reddit, which is of all of the big modern social media sites,

the closest to the old internet. Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. It's on the new one. And it's funny, because Reddit had this reputation of like being the incubator of bad ideas, but compared to everything that came after, Reddit's a little haven of like, like when I wanna look up a review of a product,

I type the thing and then Reddit, you know? Yeah, and if I have a problem, a technical issue, I need to fix something. Like I will find the answer on Reddit before I find it on Google these days, right? I mean, I use Google, but I type the question and Reddit on. Yeah, exactly. I find useful shit.

Like it is, for all of its flaws, still one of the best things on the internet. Yeah. So at this point, he is helping to invent Reddit. He has helped to invent RSS. He has helped to invent creative comments, right? 19 year old kid, you know, kind of virgin on, I think 20 at this point.

His contributions are undeniable, but for the other folks at Reddit, his co-founders, he becomes increasingly frustrating to work with. Because while when he's working, he gets a lot done, I think in total, he gets as much done as anyone. He has this habit of dropping out of contact for days, or even like a week or so at a time, and like hiding in his apartment.

And when he does it, he's just reading books non-stop, generally, or he's in too much pain to do much. But he doesn't, he's not good at communicating with the team about this stuff. So like, you know, that's, I don't think the pain to do much. But he doesn't, he's not good at communicating with the team about this stuff. So like, you know, that's, I don't think the Reddit guys are wrong. Like, yeah, it was kind of a frustration that he would just get a drop out and that we wouldn't know why. Right.

This is about the time he gets kind of disillusioned with coding. And a 2006 blog post he describes writing as his desired purpose in life. The good news for Aaron is that later that year, Konday Nast bought Reddit for $12 million, and Aaron receives an even chunk of the payout. We don't know how much he gets. He seems not to have told anyone specifically about it, probably somewhere a million or north of a million, right?

Yeah. It's enough money, especially back then, that he does not have to work. He would eventually have to make more money, right? You can't live generally, probably, off your whole life, for your whole life, off a million dollars, if you're not young, right? But that's enough money that he doesn't have to worry about money for quite a while, right? And it's also, I found this interesting New Yorker article that is kind of a more, a

bit of a more critical take on Aaron and his legacy than some of the others that talks. It's been a lot of time talking about how much he loves money, which I don't think is fair. It does quote him talking about, you know, he making some kind of bratty statements about, like, oh, you know, I lose that much money in my couch cushions or whatever and talk about how cool it is to have like money. And it kind of makes the claim that like, oh, yeah, Aaron loved money, which is not born out by the rest of his life. I think he just has a reaction that any

19 or 20 year old would when they suddenly have a million dollars, which is like, fuck that's dope. I don't have to do anything. I don't want to do anymore. Sick. Which I don't think is, I don't think that's all evidence of him being shallow. Who wouldn't feel that way, right? Also, like, when you live in capitalism, you're presented as if it is a video game with a point system and the measurement of the point system is money. And if you were a kid and you believe that, that makes sense, you got told that. But yet he also was doing all of this work

to specifically under, like the fact that is here as the person who didn't, he didn't lock shit up. You know, like, yeah. His life past this point is not going to be defined by him seeking out money, right? Like that's ultimately what I'll make the decision based on. Like I'm sure he was fucking thrilled. Who wouldn't be? Right, right.

Like that doesn't matter how much you hate capitalism. It's great to have enough money that you don't have to worry about money anymore. Yeah, totally. I'm a parent of house. There's the bees knees. Yeah. Yeah.

So Condon S buys it. They move shit over to like San Francisco, which I think is where their offices are. He stays on for a while, right? They make him move back west to work out of the office, which he hates. He hates working for, he hates the corporate environment. He just likes San Francisco. You know, it's not his place. It's not his kind of lifestyle, Right. He has a lot of issues

Adapting to this not surprising based on the guy we've known so far. Yeah He meets a woman while he's in San Francisco. She becomes his girlfriend a journalist named Quinn Wharton We will talk about Quinn Wharton later controversial figure to say the least She is a journalist who works with hackers. That's a lot of her reporting. She's also an anarchist That's how she described. I don't I don't know more about the tendency she subscribes you But that's how she she self describes and By this point according to Quinn who is very close with him at this this period

He's growing dissolutioned with his work on Reddit quote He wasn't sure if he had done a good thing. He began to see it as a way people wasted time. So he's got some issues with creating this thing. That's one of the first kind of Web 2.0 sort of foundations. This is also kind of going back and forth on this is part of what it's going to become another common pattern with Aaron, which is that he seems to regularly find himself racked with doubt over whether or not he'd accomplished anything of value in his life, right? This is a regular thing for him where he's like, I don't think I've ever made anything. I think some of that's just because everything he makes is his part of a team, right?

And he's not going to be one of these guys like fucking Zucker. And that's true of all of these guy, by the way, all of these tech luminaries. None of them make anything on the closest you get is maybe, um, wasniac, right? Who did legitimately sit down and a couple together, a personal computer, right? But like, none of these founders make anything on their own, you know, like that just simply doesn't happen. Right. And like Aaron understands that I think he feels kind of insecure about it.

But like Aaron is everyone who was a part of these projects is like, yeah, he was a big part of them. He did. Right. But he didn't invent the world wide web. Like his particular, like, right, less a guzagai, who he just invented the world wide web, right? Yeah. You know, Aaron seems to have kind of,

I don't think it's a constant thing for him because he also has these periods like, he can be a little braggie. I don't think I did it in a healthy way because he's accomplished a lot. I think it's just when he's sick, when he's hurting, when he's dealing with bouts of depression, this is a thing that comes up with him a lot.

Like, I don't think I've ever made anything of value. Right? It's irrational. That doesn't stop the thoughts from happening. I think so. Right, right. Exactly. And maybe that can help you if you deal with

imposter syndrome, knowing that, like, yeah, this guy who literally no one can deny his contributions to science and technology felt that way too. So yeah, again, he's struggling increasingly during this period. And the fact that he has to work at this office, he's in a place he doesn't really want to be contributes to that. I'm going to quote from Rolling Stone again. That Christmas, two months after he'd started working in Reddit, San Francisco office, Schwartz took a trip to Berlin to attend the Chaos Communication Congress, one of

the most popular hacker conventions in the world. On his way back home, he stopped in Cambridge for a visit when his lifelong stomach troubles asserted themselves, leaving him writhing and pain for several days. On January 18, 2007, he wrote a post on his blog titled A Moment Before Dying, which began, There is a moment, immediately before life becomes no longer worth living, when the world appears to slow down and all its myriad details suddenly become

brightly achingly apparent. Written as a short story in the third person, the post described a young man, Aaron, who had decided to kill himself. For Aaron, and this is him writing, that moment came after exactly one week of pain, seven days of searing, tormenting agony that poured forth from his belly. The post alarmed his Reddit partners. It was the first they had heard from him in weeks, and it appeared to be a suicide

note. Ohanian, one of the original founders called the local police department, and officers were dispatched to the apartment, just before they arrived, Schwartz snuck out this onto the street, and in the wake of the incident went to links to downplay at severity, changing the original post from Aaron to Alex, as if to make clear that suicide was not something the actual Aaron would ever seriously consider. So that's, you know, show you where his head is. That's worrying, right?

I'm not surprised. And was concerned by this. I mean, chronic illness is a... Under whatever. It's a mean, chronic illnesses. Yeah. Under whatever. It's a real mother fucker. Yeah. Now, this plus the fact that he had not been showing up to work for long periods of time

is going to be what precipitates a pretty rapid resignation from Reddit. And in short order, Aaron is a free agent again. His next project would be his most ambitious, the open library. Along with Brewster Call, Alexis Rosy, Anand Shepotthu, and Rebecca Malamud, Aaron embarked on a project to collect online digital copies of every book imaginable. The idea is every book will have a page to the

extent that's possible, the ones that are open source that are old enough will have full scans of the book that you can like search and read. The books that we don't have access to will at least have, you know, ideally we'll get a copy or that people could check out online or something, but we'll at least have a page for it that explains who wrote it, what it is, what's in it. And the online library is still around today. It's one of the most significant storehouses of knowledge in the history of the human race, right?

Aaron is foundational in creating the open library. He's one of the people who helps to found it. That's cool. He's only on that, I think, for like a year, maybe a little less, and he contributes significantly, and then he finds himself drawn in another direction, and kind of bounces. Some of this is because he gets frustrated

with the refusal of big libraries to share their catalogs, but as Karl, who's one of the founders later told Rolling Stone, Aaron floated. That's how he worked and you had to accept it. He didn't ask to get paid much. He really thought of himself as a volunteer for the world. That is what he does. He'll come into these projects. He'll help with the founding vision.

He'll help make them work. Then he's going to bounce and move on to the next thing. That's just who he is. That's how his brain works. That's how he's going to bounce, you know, and move on to the next thing. That's just who he is. That's how his brain works. That's how he's functional, right? And you know, calls that attitude is like, yeah, you know, it would have been nice to have him around for longer, but he did, he did his bit and he moved on and that's just Aaron. You just have to understand that. Well, that's the, he did a lot of action of him too. You know, that is, nice, we haven't had a lot of longer. But he did his bit.

He did his bit. So if you're keeping track, Aaron Schwartz, who is now at the start of his 20s, I think he's just now able to drink legally, has played a key role in developing RSS in the creation of Creative Commons, in the creation of Reddit, and in the creation of the Open Library. Now, what's most amazing to me about this guy is that at this point, he could have picked a lucrative job for himself literally anywhere in the tech industry. There was nowhere that would not have, that wouldn't have paid so much at hurt to get this guy, right?

He does not have any interest in that. His heart continually pulls him towards projects that serve a social good and make knowledge accessible to as many people as possible. That's not specifically his goal his entire career, but that's where he is right now. Yeah. In 2008, Aaron attends a retreat by the EIFL, the electronic information for libraries. It's a nonprofit that seeks to increase access to knowledge and developing economies around the world. The event, which is held at a former monastery in Italy, seems to have had a somewhat evangelical air to it. Airin is perhaps overtaken by the sense of techno optimism in the air, and it's not

hard to see why. This was the tail end of the Bush years, this long period of neocondominance that is eroding in the face of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, which is the most optimistic thing Americans had seen in politics in a generation at least. Late in the event, Aaron and an unknown number of co-writers put together a document known as the Gorilla Open Access Manifesto. A number of people contribute. It is unclear how many. It is unclear who they are.

Aaron's is the only name that winds up on the thing, right? And it includes some pretty spicy lines. It's just how it opens. Information is power, but like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage published over centuries and books and journals is increasingly being digitized and locked up

by a handful of private corporations. When I read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences, you'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed, Elvis, here. And the document points out one of the things that's happening here is a lot of these publishers, the information in them is maybe in a lot of cases open source. It's publicly funded studies. But unless you're able to get to one of the libraries that has it, you have to pay to get access to the documents that it's at.

You have to pay a service like JStore to get access to it. And Aaron's like, that's fucking bullshit. This is our information. And obviously the other stuff I think should be shared to, the document points out that open access, if successful, would only ensure ongoing access for future publications, while the total of published work up to the point that open access becomes a thing would remain locked up. The document decries this as too high a price to pay, and then asks rhetorically, what can we do about this?

Quote, those with access to these resources, students, librarians, scientists, you have been given a privilege, you get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out, but you need not, indeed morally, you cannot keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world, and you have, trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. So he is basically saying, what people are already doing, I have access to this stuff to their buddies, we need to do for the world. We need to do this to give access, particularly to people in the global south.

You do not have the infrastructure access to this stuff in the same way that people can kind of wangle their way into getting it in the United States and Europe. This is controversial among his colleagues at this conference. These are all people who believe in open access, but they are people who work within the system for legal, nonprofit organizations. Aaron is saying some hackership here, right?

What he is saying could be read as incitement to illegal activists. Which is good and positive. I totally agree. This is controversial among people who are like, we are working within the system and we see this is potentially kind of dangerous Now the fact this is controversial among them. It's not wildly different in tone from a lot of hacker

Pros that has come out in the 90s and early 2000s and you know eventually whatever hub up There is from this kind of passes and life goes on for a while and that's where we're gonna end for part one of this episode Magpie how you feeling? I feel great because I know that only positive things are coming in the future. And I really, the main thing that I know about is this open access stuff about Aaron Schwartz. And I, as someone who also has never, I've never had institutional access to this knowledge. And I do a lot of history research and things like that. So I've always been very appreciative of, I don't know how to phrase this carefully. I like open access. That's what I'll say.

And I think that it's an important thing. Like that, it is just actually true. And especially talking about it in terms of like how it impacts people in the global South. Like where you can't like, you know, I don't go to a fancy college, but I know some people go to fancy colleges. And so I just, I'm like, hey,

what do you think about this one thing, you know? Yep, so. Well, that's the podcast. We'll be back next week for the conclusion. Oh, oh, about Santa Claus. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. We've done so. Bye. Behind the bastards, the production of Cool Zone Media.

For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social, emotional, networks. The book launched a thousand hot takes so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise. I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on musk. Join me Evan Ratliffe for on musk with Walter

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