When Doug Johnson received a text that his friend of over a decade, Maxwell Azzarello, had died after setting himself on fire in New York City, he didn’t believe it.

“I was like, ‘No, you got the wrong person. I don’t know anybody that would do that,’” Johnson told NBC News.

Johnson did some research online out of curiosity, and that’s when he saw Azzarello’s face pop up in an article.

“Just immediately, chills up my spine, like, in total disbelief,” he said.

Azzarello set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial was taking place on Friday.

According to police, he walked into the center of the park where protesters were allowed across the street from the courthouse, opened a backpack and threw numerous pamphlets on the ground. He then pulled out a canister, poured a liquid accelerant on himself, lit himself on fire and then fell to the ground.

Azzarello, 37, later died of his injuries, leaving friends and strangers alike wondering what drove him to his actions.

Johnson, who was part of the same friend group as Azzarello in North Carolina, describes him as smart, funny, charismatic and the most intelligent human being he had ever met.

“I keep hearing on the news, you know, how he was a conspiracy theorist, an extremist — and obviously, you have to be extreme to do something like he did,” Johnson said. “But as far as the way the picture’s been painted of him so far, I feel like it’s a really inaccurate depiction of him.”

Selfless, but troubled

A glimpse at social media gives a small window into Azzarello’s thoughts. Multiple pictures of pamphlets entitled “Dips— Secrets of our Rotten World” and “The True History of the World,” were posted to his Facebook and Instagram, expressing anti-government views. In his pamphlets, he accused powerful people of running Ponzi schemes and warned of an imminent economic collapse and coup.

On Friday, a user on Substack going by the name M. Crosby — Crosby is Azzarello’s middle name — published a blog post where he wrote that he set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in New York City. The writer said that this “extreme act of protest is to draw attention to … an apocalyptic fascist world coup.”

Mary Pat Cooney, who worked with Azzarello nine years ago at the Liberty Hill Foundation, an L.A.-based social justice nonprofit, described him as a selfless person who was “always happy to help people” if they had a problem.

“He was highly intelligent, thoroughly dedicated, funny and kind — that’s the person that I remember,” Cooney said.

Azzarello attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated in 2009 with a B.A. in public policy and anthropology, according to a university spokesperson. He also earned his master’s degree in city and regional planning, with a major in urban planning and policy development from Rutgers University in New Brunswick in 2012.

“I swear, as far as history and politics and, you know, social studies, social matters, stuff like that, there wasn’t a topic that he wasn’t knowledgeable in,” Johnson, Azzarello’s friend from North Carolina, said. “And it was like the equivalent of me typing something into Google and then Max is spitting out the information to me, and he was accurate with it.”

But beyond Azzarello’s brilliance, he seemed to be troubled, according to his friends. Both Johnson and Cooney said Azzarello appeared to change after the death of his mother in April 2022.

Cooney, who kept in touch with Azzarello through Facebook, said the character of his posts became less good-natured after his mother’s death.

“In his previous posts, and all our communication — (he was) concerned, righteous, knowledgeable, a good-spirited guy,” Cooney said. “The guy that came a little later was a bit more of a ranter, had a different level of anger, and was expressing it in a — I don’t know what the right word is, but it was kind of like he was yelling at us to pay attention to him, rather than pleading his case and sharing it for the world.”

In August of last year, Azzarello posted a picture of grippy socks to his Facebook with the caption, “Three days in the psych ward and all I got were my new favorite socks.”

“I was handcuffed, shoved, and put into a psych ward,” Azzarello wrote toward the end of the caption. “I was given no information about why I was there until after my discharge. Though I committed no crime and was released upon my first evaluation, all background checks (like the ones for jobs) will show an incident with police officers that cannot be expunged (until we abolish the government, of course).”

It’s not clear what events took place before Azzarello said he was committed to the psych ward.

A string of arrests

Azzarello’s alleged stint in a psych ward seemed to precede a string of arrests in St. Augustine, Florida, where he lived before his death.

On Aug. 19, 2023, Azzarello was charged with criminal mischief when he allegedly threw a glass of wine at an autograph by former President Bill Clinton that was on a wall at the lobby of the Casa Monica Resort & Spa, according to a warrant affidavit from the St. Augustine Police Department.

Two days later, Azzarello allegedly returned to the resort and stood outside, where he stripped down to his underwear, yelled and cursed at customers, and was blasting music from a speaker, per an arrest report.

An officer who attempted to make contact with Azzarello said “he just began yelling and was not making any sense.” He was arrested for disturbing the peace. Azzarello was put on probation for this incident, which ended earlier this month.

Three days after that, Azzarello was arrested again for criminal mischief after he was seen on surveillance video allegedly vandalizing property belonging to a nonprofit in St. Johns County, including writing with permanent marker on one of their signs, court documents state. He was also seen climbing into the bed of someone’s pickup truck and going through their belongings, as well as removing a sign placed at a home by pest control warning them to keep pets and children off the lawn.

“Azzarello was misinterpreting the sign and was telling me that the pest control company was there to exterminate children and dogs,” an officer with the St. Augustine Police Department wrote in the arrest report.

Azzarello was also put on probation in connection with these incidents, which ended earlier this month.

His final moments

Two years after the death of his mother, Azzarello made his way to New York City where he self-immolated. It’s not clear why or when Azzarello came to the city, but NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said he arrived early last week and that family members were unaware that he was there.

When asked if he felt there was a reason Azzarello would self-immolate outside of the Trump trial, Johnson said Azzarello wasn’t specifically concerned about Trump, but would speak generally about the corruption of all politicians.

While struggling to understand why his friend would do this, Johnson hopes people don’t remember Azzarello just for his final moments.

“He deserves at least to be remembered for the good person that he was, the selfless person that he was, the charismatic, loving, giving person,” Johnson said. “All he wanted was better for people and it didn’t matter if he knew you or not. He wanted better for everyone.”

 If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

Todd Warnock/Getty Images

Todd Warnock/Getty Images

Well, I’m back. After a lengthy parental leave, when publication of the Planet Money newsletter decreased in frequency, I’m now working full-time and the newsletter will go back to being published weekly.

As always, I will continue to do my best to provide you with insights from the field of economics and keep you informed about what’s going on in the economy. And, don’t worry, this newsletter is not about to become all about babies. This week, however, it is. Now that I’m a working parent, I want to take just one brief moment to complain on behalf of all of us. Like millions of parents before me, I’ve discovered it’s hard to be productive when you’re sleep deprived.

There’s a ginormous mountain of studies that find that sleep deprivation is a serious drag on productivity. One recent study by economists Joan Costa-i-Font, Sarah Fleche, and Ricardo Pagan estimates that each additional hour of sleep per week increases the probability that a person is employed by 1.6 percentage points and increases a person’s weekly earnings by 3.4%.

Another study by economists Pedro Bessone and colleagues finds that it’s not necessarily just the quantity of sleep hours that matters for productivity, it’s also the quality of sleep. This checks out, personally.

The Modern Dilemma of Juggling Career and Kids

In some ways, the problem of sleep deprivation hurting productivity at work is a contemporary one. More than ever before, families have two parents who work outside the home. Historically, many women stayed at home and bore the brunt of baby-induced sleep deprivation. Today, more often than not, there are two drowsy parents who must go into work the next day and — not speaking from personal experience at all, ahem — may get into small tiffs at around 3 a.m. over whose turn it is to comfort or feed their crying baby.

Plus, thanks to efforts to combat Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) — which, we should note, seem to have been extraordinarily successful — parents are now instructed to avoid co-sleeping and to do things like put their babies to sleep on their backs as opposed to their bellies. While such measures have been found to reduce the risk of SIDS, they also may make it harder for many babies to sleep because many of them naturally want to sleep on their parents or their bellies.

Sleep Training

For today’s parents, there’s a tantalizing solution to the problem of sleepless babies: sleep training. For many, “sleep training” is a mere euphemism for the most infamous and controversial method: Cry It Out. Basically, you put your baby in a crib or bassinet in a separate room and don’t come back until the morning. If they cry, so be it. The idea is they will learn to self-soothe and become good sleepers.

Not all forms of sleep training are so severe, but most do involve some tolerance for crying and, because of this, many categorize most approaches broadly under the umbrella of “cry it out.”

In her bestselling book Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool, economist Emily Oster reviews the evidence on sleep training and concludes, “The bottom line is that there is simply a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting that ‘cry it out’ is an effective method of improving sleep.”

That said, sleep training is pretty hard, strategically, physically, and emotionally. That’s why there’s a whole cottage industry of high-paid sleep trainers, books, consultants, podcasts, influencers, and so on, who help parents with all this. Recognizing that sleeplessness is a problem for employees to be the most productive, companies like Meta (aka Facebook) have begun subsidizing the cost of sleep training coaching for their workers.

The Online War Over Sleep Training

Ever since we had a baby — and apparently started googling baby-related stuff — my wife and I have found our social media feeds to be jam-packed with baby-rearing and sleep training content.

For example, my wife was targeted with a post from a baby sleep consultancy called Taking Cara Babies that marketed their services to us (and our employers). “It’s true! Taking Cara Babies has a way your company can give you the gift of sleep (which will help you thrive as an employee). For more information to send to your boss or HR department, head to my stories or comment.”

It seemed pretty innocuous. But the most liked comment was the following: “Wish we had actual parental leave like the rest of the modern world so we weren’t forced to sleep train and get back to work like good little capitalists.”

It turns out this sentiment can be found across the internet, in comments, on sites like Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), and by influencers. There’s a large community of parents who disparage sleep training — and, in particular, any form of cry it out — as basically a cruel practice that sacrifices our babies’ well-being on the altar of capitalism.

Whole Mother Therapy, which provides online therapy to parents, for example, argues on their blog that “Sleep training is a symptom of capitalism—it cuts parents off from the natural attachment and nurturance that is essential for infant and baby development.”

“Sleep training is breaking your child’s mind and nervous system to fit into the productivity model capitalism requires,” tweeted an X user named ℍℝ.

But is not wanting to be really sleep deprived only driven by economic concerns? If I had the luxury of not working, I probably would still want to be well-slept. And aren’t there a whole bunch of countries that have capitalist economies — but, at the same time, robust safety nets — that give parents greater opportunity to stay home and be sleep-deprived without having to go into work? I’ll let you be the judge.

One of the biggest schools that opposes sleep training, or at least strategies that tolerate baby crying, is known as attachment parenting. This approach advises parents against letting babies cry on the grounds that crying is an expression of distress and that it’s unnatural and cruel to not do everything in our power to prevent it. I have friends who pursued attachment parenting. They not only refused to let their babies cry at night without intervention, but they also let their babies sleep in their beds (which, by the way, is not recommended by health experts for at least the first six months of your baby’s life). And let me tell you, years later, their kids are still interrupting their sleep. Not for us.

Emily Oster points out that sleep training has sizable benefits for parents. She cites a randomized controlled trial that found that mothers “were less likely to be depressed and more likely to have better physical health” months after sleep training their babies. “This finding is consistent across studies,” Oster continues. “Sleep-training methods consistently improve parental mental health; this includes less depression, higher marital satisfaction, and lower parenting stress.”

But what about the baby’s mental and physical health? In reviewing the literature, Oster finds no credible evidence that babies’ long-term well-being is impaired by sleep training. “Fundamentally, the argument against sleep training is theoretical,” Oster argues. She admits that it’d be better if we had more studies on this. “And yes, it is possible that if we had more data, we would find some small negative effects,” she admits. But, at the same time, she says, it’s also possible that, by promoting good sleep hygiene, sleep training could actually be a benefit to babies. She concludes that “You’ll have to make a choice about this without perfect data.”

As for us, we’ve pursued a strategy that you might call sleep training lite. Basically, when our baby cries in the night, we either feed him if it’s been a while since he’s eaten or we hold his hand and sing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star to him while he stays in his crib. Honestly, it worked really well between months 4 and 7. But recently, he started teething, and… well, we’re both really tired. Take that, capitalism.