Remembering Martin Schaedel
A few years back, I went to a party in LA with Neil Strauss, during the time that he was writing the book "The Game," which is all about picking up women. We were with the group of pickup artists detailed in the book, watching them work; one of the pickup artists went up to a girl and asked her, "do you want to go and get weird?"
My friend Sean Parker, who was with us, exclaimed with satisfaction, "I love that! 'Do you want to go and get weird' ... What a perfect way to describe the situation!" And it was true -- it was an utterly honest, accurate description; and it took a certain type of utterly honest, semi-crazy person to say it.
I remember going to a party in New York with Martin Schaedel a few months ago, wherein he went up to a girl, said hi to her by her first name, and then asked her why she wasn't wearing her engagement ring or accompanied by her fiancée. When the red-faced, astonished girl asked how he had known all of this, Martin deadpanned and said, "well, I ran a background check on you last week." Needless to say, I burst out laughing. Here, my friends, was a guy who liked to get weird.
In our industry, as in most industries, we constantly celebrate the in-your-face, out-in-public superstars and pundits. We fail to celebrate people such as Martin. They aren't looking for massive fame or acceptance; rather, they just want to do interesting stuff and live an interesting life. They are the true hackers -- hacking not only through code and business, but through the very way they lead their lives.
This is what I enjoyed the most about Martin, and what I hope this community should take away from his ever-too-short existence -- that you can do it all in an entirely different way. In fact, you can live such an insanely global, social, real-time existence that even those who meet you in person question whether you are really the person who is standing before them (mainly because they are so caught up in the standard model that they can't imagine such an enormously successful deviation). It really saddens me to know that he is gone; the full story of this amazing guy and his amazingly improbable life will forever be incomplete, told only in bits and pieces.
Hack your life.