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

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Margaret and Robert conclude our Christmas episode and yet another year of this fucking podcast. 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  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hillary Burton Morgan here, and I'm excited to tell you about a new series I'm launching. It is the companion podcast to Sundance TV's True Crime Story. It couldn't happen here. Now on the TV show, we focus on small towns and the crimes that can rip them apart, and on this podcast, we will go even deeper into our cases and give you a unique insider perspective on how these stories are told. Come join us as we get curious and get involved. Listen to True Crime Story.

It couldn't happen here on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Cool, so media. Hey everybody, Robert here. It's the Christmas 2 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 overnight temperatures drop below freezing. Volunteers provide hot meals, blankets, and toys for children. They build shelters, even though the border patrol destroys them, and keep rebuilding them so that people have a place to sleep out in the freezing wind. Everyone there, including James, has spent a lot of their own money supporting this effort, and you can hear more about the efforts of volunteers over on it could happen here.

But your support would mean the world to James and the other people trying to help migrants over at the border, and of course, those migrants themselves. You can donate to this effort at GoFundMe. If you just type Yakumba, JACUMBA migrant camps, GoFundMe, Yakumba migrant camps, GoFundMe, you'll get it. Or you can use the link tinyurl.com slash border a gfm. That'll take you right to the fundraiser. So thank you. Thank you. Welcome back to Behind the Basterd.

Welcome back. Why are you doing your radio, boys? Super slam addition. Yeah, why are you doing this? Welcome back. What is the holidays? It's the morning podcast. Yeah, with Robert Evans.

Morning, Zoo with Robert Evans. And Sophie Lichterman and Margaret Killjoy. We're the Opie and Anthony of not having one of our people clearly be a sex pest. Wow. Wow. What an introduction. I think you might have saved the best one

for the end of the year. Great job, Robert. I went and do it. I actually, like, open and I remember them from when I was like, I can't write. They were big and I had been aware of a few of their sketches. I was never a regular listener. So I just, you know, I was aware they were a thing.

I was like, I wonder what happened to them? It feels like they should be a big thing in podcasts given where they were. I read up and I was like, oh, that's what happened to them. Oh my. As an end of the retreat, great job, Robert. Do that. I wasn't surprised.

It wasn't one of those things that you hear and you're like, oh my God, how could that have been going? I was like, yeah, that completely scans. When are we surprised by when people who have too much power abuse that power? Yeah, well particularly men and media, men and comedy. Right? Very close. Very close men and bands.

It's roughly the same thing. When one of them is not a sex pest. Yeah, we'd love to see this statistic by occupation. Yes. Anyway, we're back. We're continuing our series on Aaron Schwartz, one of the people who invented the Internet as we know it. And where we are right now, Aaron's in his early 20s, you know, less than a decade into

his career. He's been part of the creation of RSS. He's been part of the creation of the open library. He's one of the founders of Reddit. And he's helped part of the creation of the Open Library, he's one of the founders of Reddit, and he's helped to create the creative comments, right? If that is what you can say about your life at the end of 40 years of full-time work, you have had a full career, right? Aaron is like eight or nine, maybe less than a decade in, right? Just an astonishing CV, if you want to think of it that way. The next thing he's going to get on, after he bounces from bed, he goes to this thing,

he helps write the gorilla open access manifesto. Aaron returns to Cambridge Mass and he gets involved with a new project, public.resource.org, which want to do increase access to public legal documents. Court documents are collectively owned by all of us here in the old loss of status you need us, right? We, we, we own them all. None of them are property of a court of a lawyer or whatever, right? If it, if it's introduced to court, it's everybody's.

That is the way this shit works with very few exceptions. But that doesn't mean you can just get access to it for free, right? Theoretically, if you like go to a legal library, something you can get it, but like if you want to get it from the government, the government provides access to all this stuff that we all own via a system called PASER. And as a journalist, having used PASER, I can tell you it sucks boiling dog shit. It is a fucking horrible program. It's really badly coded.

It's very expensive to use if you're trying to get any meaningful amount of information. And this is a problem because this is access to stuff people need for their own legal cases, lawyers need to defend their clients, journalists need to report on things that involve the law. This is all critical part of engaging with the legal system and its paywalled effectively, right? And in fact, because of how expensive it is, the government was profiting at this point by about 150 million a year, off of the fees they caused. It's not insignificant.

And in addition to that, it's just a fucking nightmare to use. So the plan that this organization, Aaron doesn't found it, but he's like one of the first people on it. The plan that the public.resource.org has is we want to get journalists, lawyers, researchers, people who are using Paser and getting access to documents to send them to us, which is perfectly legal, right?

You get a document from Paser, it belongs to all of us, send it to us, and we will digitize it and put it online, right? And over time, we can collect as much of this stuff as possible in a place that's free to use and well-coded and searchable so that people can get better, like, right, very good idea. And again, absolutely 100% no legal problems with this plan, right? Well, I mean, it might piss people off. Yeah, it might piss people off, right?

Because the government's got a vig on this, but that doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong by having people do this. Right around this time though, the government has launched a project to allow, the idea was like we want to increase access to PASER files for free. And so a handful of libraries basically had access to PASER without using money. So you could go to those libraries, access documents, print them out if you wanted, right, or save them on a hard drive or whatever, right? Aaron writes some code for this organization to allow him to automate this process. So in very short order, he has downloaded 20% of the database

of all American legal filings, right? A lot of stuff. Again, not at all illegal. This is everybody's property. There's nothing that makes this at all, but the FBI gets on his ass, right? Because Pacer notices one guy is doing an awful lot of downloading. What's going on? And the Fed starts, they send a federal agent to his house to stalk him, to see if it's like his family's house. And he's eventually confronted by the FBI about the downloads, right? And they let him know like, yeah, we have been following you. There's a file on you. And again, Aaron has not done anything wrong. He has not done anything that there is any way this could be illegal, right? What do you think about? Well, how possibly could you be committing a crime by wanting to have more access to the law, right? What is the potential, but the feds be the feds and they come after him.

And again, it doesn't matter about law. Yeah, and I think they're also just like they don't know what's going on. And that's just, you know, if you're the FBI, you handle every problem by sending a federal agent out after somebody, right? Aaron doesn't get any trouble for this because he has, again, he's done nothing wrong, but this makes him very paranoid, right? And it makes him very angry because this is his first interaction with how fucking scary the feds are, right?

That like, they were surveilling my home. They have a file on me because I wanted to increase access that people have to the law. I want to do give people more access to the law and the law came out like, yeah, this fucks them up somewhat, right? Yeah. Not hard to understand why. Now, so you took a bunch of pictures of national parks and we're like, here's a bunch of free pictures of national parks and then the federal government was like, how dare

you take where you do this thing the thing that we all own. Yeah. So Aaron's on the government's radar now and unfortunately the fact that he has not done anything wrong is not a defense to the fed's continuing to look at you, right? And once you're on their radar, you tend to stay there. And I'm going to quote from Rolling Stone again. A year later, in September 2010, Schwartz connected a refurbished Acer laptop to MIT's terminal in building 16, a modernist glass

and concrete structure on the campus. Registered as a guest on the system he had used most of his life, he signed on to JStore, an online library of academic journals that universities pay yearly subscription fees of up to tens of thousands to access. Using a script he had built, not unlike the Pacer crawler, Schwartz began to download an extraordinary volume of articles. Over the course of the next three months, he found ways to circumvent attempts to block his connection, eventually hardwiring his laptop directly to the school's servers from a restricted utility closet. By January of 2011, he had downloaded nearly five million documents from JStore's database. Now, this is cool, and a reasonable person might say, what's

the big deal, right? Aaron is allowed to access this stuff. He is a Harvard fellow at this point, and MIT gives them access to their stuff. So he is allowed to go to MIT, use their JStore access, download as many files as he wants. That is not a crime. It is a violation of policy that I think the school probably could have chosen to like maybe press charge if they wanted to for going, but even then it's kind of, he didn't break in, it isn't like bust a lock, he just opens a closet, he's not supposed to be in and leaves a laptop they're hardwired in. It's, we could say sketchy. I'm not surprised that the school took an interest in this.

Yeah, but it's not, this is not. It's the kind of thing that they make you love about. Because they didn't think, they didn't think we need to make sure that someone who's free access doesn't download five million files. Right, right. And it is, depending on what he had intended to do with those files, it could be illegal.

A lot of those files are public resources. Yeah, copy, write free. There's stuff that is old enough that there's no copy, write it. A lot of those files are things he could have given out to whoever wanted, not all of them though. A lot of them are not. If he had chosen to digitize all of that and put it up for free, that would have been illegal.

I'm not saying it's wrong. I don't believe it is wrong, but that would have been a crime, right? Right. But he doesn't do that. He doesn't ever get to that point. And we don't know that that's what he intended to do. This is a very important point. What happens is that MIT notices what's going on,

that this laptop's been put here, someone's in here, somebody's downloading all these files. They put a hidden camera in the closet. The camera captures Swartz going in and changing out the hard drive, once it fills up to put a new one in. And they contact law enforcement, and he gets busted, right? There's a grand jury thing that's formed, and they, you know, the feds present evidence as to kind of like what is, is, you know, he's been doing, and he's going to end up getting indicted. And again, we don't know why Aaron one of those files. For one thing, it, you know, if the feds had really cared about, if the concern was actual criminality,

they would have waited to see if he was going to break the law. They did not. They come after him before that can ever happen. They are just trying to catch this kid because he's on their radar, right? Yeah. And they don't give a shit if he's doing anything. And again, I don't morally think it would have been wrong if he stole those, but that is illegal, right? That is a crime, right? But if they if they waited until he broke the law, then it would be the cat would be out of the bag and the files would all be uploaded. And so they wanted to stop him before he broke the law, which should be it would be morally it's morally long to the feds to stop someone before they break the law

out of a subject again. We don't know that he and I'm gonna explain why we don't know that he would have done that. I think they didn't want to wait in case he wasn't gonna break the law, right? I do that's kind of where I am. You know, I don't know we're talking directly. No, Tony, because he could have just had them in like, I want a database of this in case the laws change around it or whatever. Yes. And we'll talk with, there's a couple other things he could have been doing. What's important is that when he gets in trouble for this, he has not actually broken a law, right? The feds are going to argue he is, he has not actually yet done anything that is definitely criminal activity.

Yeah. Now, there are some theories as to why he might have wanted these files. By this point, Aaron has again had another shift in his interests. He is less interested actually at this point. A lot of us will say he's not really that big into copyright stuff at this point. He's moved on. He writes some stuff about this too, where he's like, that was an earlier point to me that's not my focus right now.

He has gotten obsessed with having an impact in politics using his knowledge of code and technology to further progressive politics, right? That is what Aaron is into right now. One of the things he is doing is actually it's a lot of it's kind of open-source journalism, right? He has just recently finished a massive project where he basically built a database of all of these publications of legal scholars and he used the algorithms he was crafting to comb through them to find connections between legal scholars who have been hired as consultants by various corporations and are receiving money from those corporations and then produce legal filings that become part of legal theory that

benefits those corporations. This is the kind of thing you can only do when you have a massive data set in your ability to build connections between the data, right? And as a result of this, he is able to prove that legal theory is being crafted for pay by capitalists who are using legal scholars in a way that is very fucked up to push changes in the laws, right? They are hiring these people, these people that independently publish stuff that is helping these companies, right? That's the kind of thing you have independently published stuff that is helping these companies, right? That's the kind of thing you have to have a huge data set to show, right?

That is something Aaron does. He proves this beyond a shadow of a fucking doubt. Not that that surprises anybody who listens to this show, but like, and that is a potential use of the files he was using that is in no way illegal. That makes so much sense. That's, this is kind of mind blowing because, because again, I only had the cliff notes version of Avarian's life.

And like, so I had the like, you know, download the share or whatever. And I like it then, but this is like, yeah, yeah, it is a good point. And like, yeah, that would have been heroic and illegal, which again, you and I, I don't give a shit morally that it's illegal. I think that would have been a perfectly ethical thing to do. But there's a very good chance based on what he was doing. He had absolutely no intent to carry out it. He was doing something else that's rad, but that was in no way illegal.

And he's also, he's real smart and he knows the feds are on him, which does make it seem less likely that he was specifically planning on breaking the law, especially breaking a law that like, because it took a long time, right? He was like going and replacing the hard drive and shit, right? And so, he knew that the feds were on him. So if he was like, oh, I gotta do this and get them up and it doesn't matter if I go down because I did it,

he would have done it a lot. He would have done that a lot faster maybe. I think so in here. One of the things Quinn Norton will say also is that like if he had been planning to do this big illegal thing, I knew a bunch of hackers. There were other ways to crack that data and get it that would not have

involved him personally doing it. This was a thing he knew the people to get involved with. There would have been a way, if that had been his plan. I do think based on what I have read based on what he was doing at this point, I think it's likely he had some sort of plan to analyze the data and use it for a project as opposed to he wanted to post it up, right? Again, I would have had no issue if he had of, I just, that's what seems most likely to me based on what he was doing, right? Oh, that's fascinating.

And as the, again, as the New Yorker notes, this was part of a pattern in his career. And I'm going to quote from that again. Five or six years ago, at an education and democracy meetup, he asked if anyone was going to be in Washington, DC and could pick up some files. He was compiling a report about the relation between candidates' wealth and their electoral success. And while successful candidates' financial disclosure records were available on the internet, unsuccessful candidates' records, while public were not online. If you wanted to see them, you were supposed to make paper copies in a library, but he wanted digital

files so he could analyze the data. Alec Resnick was planning to be in DC and volunteered for the task. Resnick spent a couple planning to be in DC and volunteered for the task. Resnick spent a couple of days in a library attempting to steal the files in digital form, got caught, lied about it, and was held there for most of the night by police. He wasn't put out by the experience. The police had been very nice about it, he said. Schwartz found the story endearing and hilarious, and he and Resnick became close friends. And so to the extent, again, if that's what Aaron was doing, he probably thought if I

get caught, that's the worst case scenario, right? You know, they are a little sketched out that take me into custody and then they find out I didn't have, I wasn't planning to do anything illegal with it, right? I have a right to this data and I have a right to do what I was doing with it. It was just kind of sketchy the way I went about it because I didn't want to ask, right? And that is, you know, you can say the safer thing to do would have been to have approached MIT and say, hey, I want to use your JSTOR to download a 10 million files to do this big large data analysis.

He had the right to do that. It probably would have worked. But you know, Aaron, right? Yeah, he's a new fast-and-break things person. And he has a bit of that to him, right? Yeah. And he's also kind of, he has enough of a child of privilege, he's not used to,

even probably with the feds after him. Maybe I don't know him, and I'm thinking, I think sure, but like, neither do I. That seems plausible based on what we do know about him, right? Yeah. So to do whatever work he had planned next, there's a very good chance he was looking at this as like, I need these massive data sets for some reason,

and I want to do an analysis on it, right? And that is again within his rights. I think it's unlikely he thought what he was doing was illegal or that if it was, it was the kind of thing that might get yelled at about a little slap on the wrist. He also doesn't think MIT is gonna have an issue with this because MIT is where a lot of hacker culture comes from.

The school has a history of like, people are allowed to kind of push some boundaries because that's what makes MIT famous. Right, it's totally. People who push boundaries. So it's not makes MIT famous, right? Yeah, totally. People who push boundaries, right? So it's not all going to work out that way. And to talk about how, before we talk about how it worked out, let's talk about some products that you can purchase using currency.

Which is like points. It is like point system. Of course, like points. It is the higher your point value, the more important you are. That's exactly how I feel. Gold points are worth more than paper. Yes. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. So the holidays can be a great time. A lot of us are focusing on getting gifts for our friends and family, but the holidays can be a great time. A lot of us are focusing on getting gifts for our friends and family, but the holidays can also bring up some really complicated and difficult emotions and feelings for all of us. So whether or not your family's giving gifts this holiday season,

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Hillary Burton Morgan here, and I am excited to share with you a new series I'm launching, a companion podcast, to my Passion project, Sundance TV's True Crime Story, it couldn't happen here. Now on the show, we focus on small towns and the crimes that can rip them apart. The cases we've covered have confused me and they have made me deeply question our judicial system.

What got me so excited about doing this podcast is that we have more time to really dig in. So you're gonna hear more information on these cases as well as never before heard interviews, and you'll get to go behind the scenes with me and the team and learn what it's like to make a show like this. Come join us as we get curious and get involved.

Listen to True Crime Story. It couldn't happen here on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 ****.

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 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back! So, you know, uh, yeah, Aaron probably did not think this was going to be an issue. Certainly didn't think that if it was, the school was going to have a serious problem with what he'd done. But the response to what was at the most, a minor in discretion by Aaron,

in terms of like not asking, going into that closet, was met with the legal equivalent of a nuclear, and I'm going to quote from a New Yorker again here. He was arrested after leaving the closet. The police took away his shoes and put him in a cell. Soon after his arrest, he returned the data he had taken. And J. Store considered the matter settled. MIT, however, cooperated with the prosecution, despite many efforts, internal and external to dissuade it. The prosecutors, Stephen Heyman, told Swartz's lawyer,

Elliott Peters, that if Schwartz pleaded guilty to all counts, he would spend six months in jail. If he lost a trial, it would be much worse. He said the value of what was taken from J. Stor was $2 million. And under the sentence and guidelines, that would equate to a sentence in the neighborhood of seven years, Peter says. And I said, what he took from J. Stor

wasn't worth anything. It was a bunch of like the 1942 edition of Journal of Botany. The idea that Aaron should be sentenced the same way as someone who tries to beat someone out of $2 million in a security fraud scam, someone who steals money from people. And you know, that is a reasonable thing to be angry about.

And Aaron, by the way, he will claim, I see no reason to doubt this, that he is like physically abused by the police during his arrest. During one of his arrests, that seems very likely, no one in the cops. The situation Aaron now found himself in was deliberately

bewildering in vague. You have to remember that. As Tim McVeigh said, the only language the federal government understands is force, right? And when they charge you with a crime like this, their tactic is shock and awe, the vast majority of federal prosecution succeed. So any intelligent defendant knows

this. And when the federal prosecutors and whatnot say, Hey, if you plea guilty, you get six months, if not, we're going to push for the maximum sentence. And it's this many fucking gonzo as years. Yeah. A lot of people, most people take the plea, even innocent people, right? That's part of why their conviction so get a lot of innocent people plead guilty because it's like, well, they're offering me three months, six months, and that's better than the possibility of 20 years, even if I mean, right, especially with something like this. Yeah, because you're not in, you're not putting anyone else at risk if you plead out, you know, like you're not like, you're not fucking over anyone else's cases. It ends with me. I can handle that much time, right? Aaron does not want to do this. For one thing, he's innocent, hard to, hard, hard not to see why. He's also not a compromised guy. He

hasn't had too much in his life, right? He doesn't feel like that. His life has not provided, his life thus far, one of the things his life thus far is not prepared him for is the kind of no-win scenario that the federal government can trap you in, right? Yeah. He's not just not a thing, anything that he's dealt with has given him sort of training in. Yeah. Another issue is that the best plea deal he could possibly get, and there's some debate as to whether or not he was even likely to get much of a plea deal, that kind of goes back and forth, but the best possible plea deal he could have gotten would have still left him with a felony record.

And right, at this point Aaron is like, I want to work in politics. I want to change the political system as an activist. I want to maybe work at the White House, right? I have that potential. I have those connections. I could be in the White House helping to shape tech policy in a way that helps people

can't work at the White House with a fucking felony, right? That may be changing soon, right? But at this point in time, that's how he sees this is what he says to Quinn Norton, right? I can't work at the White House with the, I can't, I can't take this plea deal because it'll lock me out of this thing that I want. And again, it's part of like Aaron is not a compromise or he can't compromise this current dream of his, right? Even though maybe that's the thing that guarantees he suffers the least, right?

And that would end this horrible legal process, you know? Now it's worth noting that today, I see this on Twitter, every time stuff about Aaron Schwartz comes up, right? Every time the anniversary of his death comes around, all that stuff, that J-Store hounded him in prosecution to his death. I don't think that's accurate. I'm not saying they don't deserve some blame. I don't even like J-Store, right? Like, there's a lot that's bad about

that. But they are as soon as he gives the files back. They're like, we consider this done. We have no desire to prosecute him, right? They do not push to prosecute him, right? This is a decision. MIT is a part of this. MIT is part of his, why he can, he suffers from this. And largely, it's federal prosecutors, right? Even local prosecutors who have the option of charging with some stuff are uninterested in pursuing the matter. And part because I think they're like, well, this is MIT, right? This is like what we do here, tech, like this kid hasn't done anything really that bad. If we wanted to, we could fuck him over. Like that doesn't help us as fucking,

you know, Cambridge, Massachusetts, right? Yeah. Like we don't benefit from hurting this guy who's a tech genius. That doesn't, you know, I'm not saying they're altruists here, but it is the feds who decide this needs to move, right? Yeah. And that, as far as I can tell, that is the primary blame here in terms of why this keeps

being a fucking thing. I wonder why the motivation is it because he's a progressive, is it like we're going to talk about that. Oh, okay, cool. Maybe I'm not going to say none of, I'm not going to say there aren't multiple things that factor into it, but I think the actual reason is so much satire and more banal than that, as is often the case with terror, evil. We talk about, this is a case, we talk about Joseph Mangala, who is reputation in pop

cultures. He was just this insane mad scientist carrying out these nightmare experiments because of his sick mind. The reality is there were a lot of errant scientific beliefs, scientists and doctors who were highly placed in the medical establishment at the time needed access to human test subjects that they couldn't get through willing test subjects. He had access to human beings and he wanted to help his career. He wanted to set himself up for a scientific career. So he did that, right?

That's why Mangle did what he did. He wasn't just like some sadist who was getting off on it, right? That was really not the evidence for that. He was doing, he was just the kind of person who didn't care what he had to do to further his career and to like build a career firm. That's what's behind this. Right, so as far as I can tell. Someone wants to land a big fish case.

That is, yep, yep. Cool. A lot of what's happening here, the federal government is at this point in the middle of its second great crackdown on so-called hackers, right? Some of this is because anonymous, the digital activist collective online has spooked the olds at this point, right?

There's a lot of, you know, it's a sexy thing that like you can scare people on Fox News about, right, these hacker gangs and shit, and a prosecutor can make a name for themselves by going after cybercrime, right? Steven Heyman is the prosecutor here, and he takes the case to a grand jury who indicts Aaron on four felony counts, including wire fraud and computer fraud. Nine more felony counts are added later.

Aaron could have faced 30 years in prison, you know, or more. Yeah. I think up to 50 is possible, but like very good chance, like at least like 10 years and probably, you know, the serious potential for more had he been convicted. Yeah. Much of the prosecution's arguments had to do with the fact that Aaron had shielded his face with a bike helmet when he walked past a security camera, right? Carmen Ortiz, the US attorney for Massachusetts and Obama appointee,

compared what Aaron had done to robbery, saying stealing is stealing, whether he use a computer command or a crowbar. Now, it's not, that's fucking nonsense, because if you use a crowbar to break into a store and steal shit, right? And if whatever opinions about the ethics of that, but you have damaged something,

you've damaged the storefront, taken assets. People have to replace those assets. There is a there is a harm to that business. Right? I'm not making a moral judgment about this, but there's a harm. If you download files from J store and you have them on your hard drive and you have legal access to those files for free, you haven't heard J store. They're not out anything, right? And like, they still have the, he didn't delete them, he didn't hack in and delete them from their servers, you know? Yeah, like stealing is when you take something

from someone and then they no longer have it. That is that, yes. That is how I define stealing is when you take something and then the other person no longer has. I agree. A legal copying can be a crime and it can, and you can material, you can monetarily damage someone. If you, if you pirate someone else's shit

and then you start selling it, you might make money instead of the other person. Or if they have people have access to it for free and you don't get paid, you can argue there's a harm there. Now I don't think that's how it actually works out. But you're not taking the files from someone. Exactly. It is not like using a crowbar because you use a crowbar to break things.

And he has not broken anything, right? He did not hack his way into the system, right? He had access to it, you know? The fact that this logic is nonsense and the fact that Aaron, again, there's no proof he had intended to contravene the law in any way. You know, that's what I would say what you would say, but you know, what matters is what the feds are trying to say. And this unfortunately is where Quinn Norton comes into the story again. Okay. Now again, Quinn is a journalist who's beat at this point,

heavily focuses on the hacker community and that corner of digital culture. She and Aaron had an on-again, off-again relationship for years, and she was a major part of his emotional support system after he got arrested and charged. Her close relationship with him and her history writing about hackers makes her a target for the feds. And one of the things I don't really understand about her is she's working with these people

who are very much in danger, right? And who are very much breaking the law, right? Some of the people she reports on are not people who stay within the lines the way Aaron had his whole life. Now, making a judgment that's just the truth, she has dog shit op-sex. She will admit that by the way. Her op-sex not shit, but for one thing, she takes as a habit notes on basically every conversation she ever has and stores them on her computer, along with interviews and

stuff with sources, which is not a good idea, right? Really dangerous. So when this happens, the feds start looking into her and Quinn realizes this is happening as if they get my laptop, not only am I potentially in some danger, because I don't know, maybe she had been into some shit, or it doesn't even matter if she had, right? Because the feds are going after Aaron

and he hasn't broke up. But also all of her sources are in danger if they get this laptop. That's a bad situation to be in, very scary situation to be in as a journalist. And I have some sympathy for that. She's also a single mother and man, if you know anything about the feds and they love single moms. Yeah.

Nothing against that, but that's a weak point because they can come after you and say, you know, they don't even have to say it, they know if you're looking into them, well, that you could lose your kid. You could be away for years, you can miss their whole life, right? And you're that, if you're single parent, single dad too, you're like, it is a thing,

it's the same way, like the feds go after addicts, right? It's an easy way to get some charges on someone in an easy way to try to roll someone, right? It's just the way they work. I'm absolutely not making moral judgment here. It's one of the reasons why the try to roll someone, right? It's just the way they work. I'm absolutely not making moral judgment here. It's one of the reasons why the system is so scary, right? Because these are not vulnerabilities that mean, you're not a bad person for being vulnerable to this.

It's understandable that you'd be vulnerable. You have a person to take care of, you know? Right, but fortunately, she put her laptop hard drive into a microwave and they didn't get it. Unfortunately, that is not where this goes. So the secret service and for a variety of complicated reasons that have a lot to do with 9-11, they are the feds who wind up investigating this, right?

Okay. That's because of me and your state, your state, your character, fraud, shit, you know, it's just, it's a thing, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah, in part because wire fraud and stuff, like that, anyway, it's the secret service that is, that are the feds coming out in this particular case. They show up at her door.

She invites them into talk. Never ever do this. Yeah, the fan. When herself, she has written an article in the New Yorker and was like, this was a horrible mistake that I made. You should never ever do this. Terrible mistake. The logic she's acting under, I'm not defending this, this was a horrible mistake that I made. You should never ever do this terrible mistake. The logic she's acting under, I'm not defending this because this was a horrible decision.

The logic that she says she was acting under is, I haven't committed a crime. If I can explain that to them, maybe they'll go away, right? Now, the kind of feds who do this job who go door to door to people have an understanding of how to be an interviewer. A major strategy, anyone who does that job will tell you is to leave your... And this is the truth for journalists, too. What matters most is keeping your subject talking, right? You do whatever you can to keep them talking, because the more you get from them, the higher the chance, they're going to say something. You can take advantage of it. They

might... Yeah. ...to a crime. They also, if you're a federal agent, they can lie to you, right? And it doesn't matter if it's... You're lying about something that's not illegal, you're a federal agent, I can lie to you, right? And it doesn't matter if you're lying about something that's not illegal, lying to a federal agent's a fucking crime. If they're interviewing you about, you know, a case, right? You can get people on that and then you have a thing to hold over their head, you have a thing to get them to roll on, right? Yeah. So, she talks to these guys, right?

Bad thing to do, bad idea, don't do this. The conversation ends with them saying you have been subpoenaed and commanded to go to a grand jury. She lawyers up. She doesn't have a, she's very not rich, does not have much money. And unfortunately, the lawyer, she get one of them's a firm former prosecutor. They are not good lawyers to have in this situation. They urge her to comply with all of the requests the feds make, right? Most lawyers, or I know too much about grandiers. Most lawyers will push you to. Yes. Yes. This is not uncommon.

The situation she is in is not an uncommon one. I'm not saying that to defend the choices she makes. This is just not a weird situation. The end result of all this is what is called a profit letter, right? This is where the prosecutor says, we will give you immunity. It's usually like, we'll give you immunity for a day, basically, we'll give you, you know, potentially we can extend this. You can have this conversation where basically nothing can hurt you.

And if we find out you have information we want, then we won't keep fucking with you, right? Yeah. That's more or less the offer, right? When she talks this through to some extent with Aaron, it's unclear to me exactly how much he knows about what she's doing at this point in time, she decides to do this. And again, her logic is,

I am not aware that Aaron has broken the law in any way, and I have not broken the law in any way. What could this hurt if I answer their questions and they know I don't know anything? But all this ends. And this is also one of the only circumstances where if she had remained silent, she there are many systems by which you could go to jail

without having committed a crime in civil contempt. Yes. So like, she is risking something if she decides to talk, which is a fucking scary situation for her. No way around that. Every other country with grand juries, I think all of them abolished it. It comes from Old British law. And everyone else is like, oh, this is a clear, this clearly leads to abuse of power.

Let's get rid of it. The US was like, nah, we like it. This is why we like it. So she does this, has this conversation, it's gonna turn out to be another bad decision. And again, she's in the position, a lot of people are in this where you give them, because you haven't done anything,

and you don't think your friend has, you give them a lot of information. And unfortunately, she says exactly the wrong thing, which is she mentions, at one point, the existence of the Gorilla Open Access manifesto and that Aaron had been one of the people who worked on it. Uh-huh. That includes lines saying what people should do is gain access to this paywalled stuff that they have legal access to and put it up online for free. And so now you have a conspiracy case.

Exactly. Because I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, this point because the feds aren't dumb, right? That's one of the things you have to understand about these people. Yeah. Not dumb. Often lazy, and it's lazy that they didn't know about this, right? Because it's just not a secret, right? Yeah, I know, right? Not hard to find out that Aaron had been one of the people who worked on this thing. Yeah.

They just, especially at that point, there's a lot less people who were feds who know the internet, you know? Yeah. Some, they're not good at finding this stuff, right? Once she mentions that this thing that is public knowledge, right? They're like, bam, we got a case, right? This is, this is, this is evidence that we can argue in court is intent. He has intended to distribute, right?

So intent to commit a crime, right? Again, the reality as far as we can tell, Aaron seems to have moved on from that as a central issue in his life. He's kind of flighty about this stuff. You know, we don't fully, we'll never fully know what he intended to do with it, but the reality didn't matter. The feds had the argument, the ammo they needed to make a case, and that's what they're going to do, right?

Her involvement in all of this is among the most controversial parts of it. Many who were close to Aaron will say that she snitched on him. Certainly not. I see why people say that, not an unjust interpretation. For his part, Aaron is furious. He also doesn't stop being close with her, right? Furious that people are calling her a snitch or furious at her. No, furious at her, right, for what he's done.

Yeah. He also seems to have forgiven her. At some point, I don't know the guy. That's what people who know them will say. They continue to be close, I think, for the remainder of his life. I'm not going to say any more about that or make a more kind of judgmental stance there. Obviously, a number of people close to them both have. That's totally fair.

I'm trying to just present the facts of what happened and as much as I can. So that's the situation here. And again, they are going to remain close for the remainder of Aaron's life, which is not going to be a long time. But it is going to include one fairly substantial achievement. And we are going to talk about that when we come back after some ads. Yay.

when we come back after some ads. Yay! story, it couldn't happen here. Now on the show, we've focused on small towns and the crimes that can rip them apart. The cases we've covered have confused me and they have made me deeply question our judicial system. What got me so excited about doing this podcast is that we have more time to really dig in. So you're going to hear more information on these cases as well as never before heard interviews and you'll get to go behind the scenes with me and the team and learn what it's like to make a show like this. Come join us as we get curious and get involved. Listen to True Crime Story. It couldn't happen here on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Catherine Nicolai, and you might know me from the bedtime story podcast, Nothing Much Happens. I'm an architect of Kozy, 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. And we're back! So Margaret, one more good thing to talk about. On October 26th, 2011, Representative Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, introduced the

Stop Online Pyrracy Act into Congress. This act, written at the behest of Hollywood Studios, would have basically given the government freedom to block access to websites that included any copyrighted material. It was draconian in scope and enforcement and would have essentially killed the internet as we know it. The bill was widely supported by all of the people with money and it was initially expected to pass without comment, right? Yeah. This was supposed to happen and not be a big fight, right?

Aaron Schwartz, who by this point is fighting in secret, most people who know him do not know that he is being charged, right? Do not know that he is this is ongoing. Oh, shit. Okay. He is keeping a lot of that secret for a while, right? Which is a make some sense if you're if you're facing kind of any kind of conspiracy shit, you know, like not. Yes.

Not bringing other people under risk. But you don't want to talk about your case and he's trying to do. He's trying to affect political change he's dealing with serious people in politics and want him to know that he's dealing with this right yeah so shortly after sopa gets introduced he has a meeting with senator lehi with his office not with the senator himself and a guy at senator lehi's office named Aaron Cooper Cooper is today a contributor to the federalist society. I don't like him. He served at this point as chief counsel for intellectual property in any trust law to lay he.

And Cooper listens to Aaron's arguments for why sopa was a bad idea. Aaron's friend Peter Ecker's later claimed quote, Aaron Cooper replied, oh yes, but what you don't understand is that copyright and copyright enforcement is more important than the internet. Sure, you've got this internet thing, but actually this thing is more important. And it doesn't matter if things break or need to be reorganized. The priority of this country is going to be making sure that files cannot be shared, songs cannot be copied, movies cannot be copied, and we'll break things if that's the easiest way to do it.

We're going to have to do it, right? This makes Aaron angry. Yeah. Not hard to see why. So he found an organization with his friend David Segel called Demand Progress, right? Today, Demand Progress is still in existence. It is a 501C4 that supports internet freedom, civil liberties, all that good stuff. They oppose attempts to crack down on whistleblowers and the like. And their first big fight is stopping Sopa. Now, a lot of people are involved in this battle. I don't want to do a thing that sometimes gets done and make it out like Aaron is the

lone hero who holds back the tide of corporate blood suckers trying to kill the internet. But he does play a very massive role in the fight against Soapa. He is one of the people who organizes the response to this attempt to pass this law. And part of why he is so important is that he understands, before most people do, how do you use the internet and harness the power of a crowd to turn it against the enemy, to stop bad things from happening? And to do this in a way that matters more than just

making people angry on social media, right? Yeah. He is successful, ultimately, in this. Demand progress is still around, still influential. One of the things that can claim to be one of Aaron's many gifts to the world and Soapa is stopped, right? Aaron plays a major role in stopping this.

That is kind of the last big thing that he accomplished. That fucking rules. I remember when Soapa was up. I mean, it felt like for a while as like every couple of years, they were like, here's this new thing that will completely, because they wanted so desperately to trash the open internet. Yeah. Yeah. And eventually it did get trash, but not that way.

I know. It didn't inciduate us that way, instead of the... Yeah. Yeah. But that's a story for another day. Yeah. For a regular... So bastards. Yeah. Kind of the capstone of Aaron's career and public life. And unfortunately, you know, his success in every other field of endeavor did not protect him ultimately from the long arm of the law. Yeah. The prosecution against him rolled forward inevitable as the tide and cruel as a hurricane wind. This gets him in a lot of press attention. It's sexy because going after hackers is sexy. The whole reason why he's on board to go after Aaron is because he's

politically ambitious. And he wants, you know, to campaign on bringing down these scary young hacker kids who scared old people. I'm going to quote from a write up and see that here. Alex Stamos, who did the who the defense had planned to call as an expert witness on computer intrusion said, I know a criminal hack when I see it. And Aaron's downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail. Law professor Tim Wu added that Ortiz's legal authority to take down shorts was shaky after a federal appeal score ruling last year. There is then a very good chance that had the case gone to court. Aaron would have been found innocent. And when he does make public what he's doing, a lot of people rally around him.

They start trying to support him, help him go through this. Aaron kind of hates this because again, he hates asking people for help. He hates being dependent. He hates people talking about him. Right, this is miserable for him. It fuxxed with a lot of stuff that just he's always kind of struggled with. And it, I think it's pretty close to a guarantee that he would have been found innocent or if he had been convicted, it would have been overturned before too terribly long.

Not that that's not a lot to deal with. But this is, he just can't handle this, right? Not only is the dealing with this incredibly stressful, his money is all gone. It's been eaten up by the legal fees, right? Yeah. Which is more stress, more dependency, and he has recurrent health issues, right? And kind of after he wakes up feeling bad one morning, can't get out of bed, his girlfriend at the time, can't get him to get up. She leaves for the day to do her stuff. And while she's gone, he hangs himself on January 11, 2013. It's, you know, again, as is always the case with suicide, the only thing going on here

is not the prosecution. His ongoing depression, which is influenced and brought on by his physical means, is a part of this. It's part of his mindset. It affects him. The stuff's going on in his head and how it relates to all this affects this. But fundamentally, I don't think anyone who knows him denies that the prosecution against him

was ultimately why he takes his own life. That's why this happens. And that's, just like, I don't think stealing shit from J. Stort to put it up online would have been a moral in my book. That's murder in my book. Yeah. It's at in my book. Yeah. It's at least the equivalent of drunk driving, right?

The legal equivalent of that. Yeah, totally. It's man's slaughter. Yeah, man's slaughter maybe. Yeah. And it's the we don't care. It's reckless and danger, but actually killing someone with it.

It's like, it's drunkenly killing someone with your car. If you were trying to build a career is like the best drunk driver in the country. Right? That's how we should life go. Yeah. That's kind of what's going on. Yeah, I don't know.

We're to compare it to that, but we need some levity, I guess. Now, as a side note here, couple of side notes. On January 9th, two days before he took his own life, J Store made its archives of more than 1200 journals free to the public in part due to the backlash when people found out why Aaron was in trouble. Yeah. Recently, last, earlier this year, the Biden administration made some changes to massively increase access to a lot of scientific papers and whatnot that were publicly funded. A lot of

that has to do with activism that has, has occurred by Aaron's friends and the result of his death. You know, there have been a number of there's also a website that exists right now. If you want to get access to studies, academic papers, chapters from textbooks in a lot of cases, any kind of not just science, but like a lot of history and stuff, publications, a lot of politics, that are pay walled, that you don't normally have access to, find either what's called the D.O.Y., which is the number that lists those kind of publications, or just the link to the pay-wall publication, and type SyHub into Google, and go to a website called SyHub, and it more often than not will return you a free version of that paper,

that it has access to. It's not clear to me if they're breaking the law or not, but you you a free version of that paper that it has access to. It's not clear to me if they're breaking the law or not, but you're able to do that. It's fine. I use it all the fucking time and it's dope. Very much is part of his legacy. I'm sure the people, whoever they are who make SiHub would agree with that. Yeah.

Couple of things to note here. One of them is that the role that MIT played in this. As I noted, J-Store, they're certainly not an angel here, but they seemed to do about as early as they could have said, we have no desire in this being prosecutable. Yeah, yeah. Well, they probably didn't want the heat either, you know? They didn't want the, yeah, sure. Again, I'm not saying this because they're good guys, right? Yeah, but still, whatever. They didn't do the bad and whatever they're motivated to do the bad. They did not, MIT did, again, I think most of this

is on the prosecutors, MIT does some of the bad here, right? And Robert Schwartz, Aaron's father is a consultant to the MIT lab, right? He asks MIT to aid in getting the charges dropped or helping Aaron secure a plea deal. This is, people get angry at MIT, especially after and suicide and so MIT makes a report about this. Robert Schwartz later tells Wired, the report makes clear that MIT was not neutral, but they

should not—was not neutral, but they should not have been neutral. They should have advocated on Aaron's behalf because the law under which he was charged was wrong. Lawrence Lessig, who we talked about earlier, would later say this, neutrality, which is what MIT claims, is one of those empty words that somehow has achieved sacred and conflict text-free acceptance like transparency.

But there are obviously plenty of contexts in which to be neutral is simply to be wrong. For example, this context, the point through a port makes in criticizing the prosecutors is that they were at minimum negligent and not recognizing that under MIT's open access policies, Erin's access was likely not unauthorized. MIT knew something here that had minimum

could have cut short a prosecution, and which it turns out could also have saved someone's life. Neutrality does not justify failing to pick up the phone and telling the prosecutor, hey, in fact, his access was authorized. Yeah. It is also worth noting that the law that Aaron was prosecuted under under the computer fraud

and abuse act was in remains an absolutely draconian piece of legislation that gives the federal government the freedom to go fucking ape shit on people if they feel like a computer was probably used to commit a crime. A bill, known colloquially as Aaron's law was introduced to amend the CFA in 2013. It did not pass into law, but the parameters that it was based around continue to be influential in the fight to limit the power of the federal government to do this kind of shit. And that is where the story ends. Yeah. He's cool. I've, I'm really excited to get to learn this stuff because I mean,

I've actually been, he's been on my like, I'm my like big master list of cool people to cool stuff to eventually get to. And I'm really excited to get to learn this because I've always wanted to know more. I've always been like, I know some people who knew him and I've always been influenced by that era of internet optimism. Like a lot of the sci-fi I was reading,

like I mean, I love Cory Doctro, for example. You know, and a lot of this like, hey, we can do, this could have been beautiful, you know? And like, maybe it can be beautiful again. And like holding on to that feels really important to me. And Aaron Schwartz is such an important part of all of that. Unfortunately, in that way, we're like, you know, kind of as a martyr to it. And I didn't know, as I, there's so much that I didn't know about it. And it's like also the chronic illness thing.

I think that it's something that people don't talk about enough, because people don't know how to talk about it. I don't really know how to talk about it, but the way that chronic pain and stuff like that influences people's decisions. And making people particularly susceptible to, well, I mean, it's the same as when trolls try and drive people to suicide, really. Yeah, same playbook in a lot of ways. Yeah. A much more powerful version of the same playbook, like. Yeah, same playbook in a lot of ways.

Yeah. A much more powerful version of the same playbook at least. Yeah. Well, I thought Santa Claus was gonna be completely different. I thought Santa Claus was Finland, I thought Santa, but it turns out that was Linus, the hacker, died the hacker. Yeah, try to make a Linus tour. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, make it a little bit more difficult. Yeah, I get where you're going.

Where you're going? Yeah, no, Santa Claus, younger and did even more stuff than just reindeer. Yeah, that's right. That's pretty cool. That's what's to know about Sam. Matt, do you have a plugable for us? Oh, I do.

I actually run a bunch of podcasts. You will be listeners. You will be shocked to know that one of the guests on this podcast also has a podcast, but I have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff comes out every Monday and Wednesday in which I talk about cool people who did cool stuff in which I often use academic articles. And I also have a podcast on, well, they're all on Coolzone Media, but the Coolzone Media Book Club comes out every Sunday on both the cool people did cool stuff feed

and it could happen here feed. And that's where I read fiction to you. And if you want to hear me read you a story, then that is a place you can go, because like, I'm not comparing myself to Santa Claus or Aaron in this case, but I also write fiction. So you can hear my novellas and stuff there and Robert also writes fiction. I do, I do. I'll have my second novel out soon, theoretically. All right everybody, that's the podcast. Go to hell, I love you.

Behind the bastards is a production of CoolZone Media. From more from CoolZone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hillary Burton Morgan here and I'm excited to tell you about a new series I'm launching. It is the companion podcast to Sundance TV's True Crime Story. It couldn't happen here. Now on the TV show, we focus on small towns and the crimes that can rip them apart and on this podcast, we will go even deeper into our cases and give you a unique insider perspective on how these stories are told. Come join us as we get curious and get involved.

Listen to True Crime Story. It couldn't happen here on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 mosque. 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.