The smartphone in your pocket is, in Richard Stallman's words, a "portable surveillance and tracking device." That's the paradox at the heart of this episode: the entire digital world runs on foundations he built, yet he refuses to participate in most of what it has become. We dig into the life, mind, and uncompromising philosophy of Richard M. Stallman, the brilliant and famously stubborn father of the free software movement.

We trace his beginnings at the MIT AI Lab, where he sat alone cloning an entire company's proprietary software output to protect a community he believed was being dismantled. We unpack the GPL, his masterstroke of copyleft licensing that legally outmaneuvered no less than Steve Jobs when NeXT tried to keep the Objective-C front end private (Stallman's lawyers told him the courts would call the maneuver subterfu ...