 Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host Alex Icarus. Today we welcome Dr. Shiva Ayudure to Skeptico. Very interesting show. I'm really looking forward to it. You know, any way you look at it Dr. Shiva is a brilliant guy, accomplished guy. Really his story is the embodiment of what we still think of as the American dreams. Slums of Mumbai. Member of a crippling Indian caste system that we often forget still holds a lot of sway in Indian society today. Outlawed, but you know, hopefully we'll have a little bit of time to talk about that. But somehow, the guy that you see on the screen and that we're talking about, he has the right stuff, I heard that in your high school math, you completed all the high school math courses by the time you were 12 years old. Graduated when you were 14. That's basically right, right? Yeah, I mean I created the first email system when I was 14. My high school didn't have any more math classes to give me, so I ended up going to NYU in a special computer science program. And what we know is email today is what I created as a 14 year old kid before I came to MIT. Yeah, talk about the email thing in a minute. That kind of picks at me a little bit, so we'll talk about that. But you go on, you get multiple degrees from MIT, like you just mentioned, including a Ph.D. You get a Fulbright scholarship. You start these businesses just an incredible life story. In 2020, you ran for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. And you did eventually lose, and I want to talk about whether Trump did a rug pull on you on that thing, or just how you felt about that situation. You lost to Whitey Whitemire who went on to lose 2-1 to the Democrat who it was really a locked up Democratic thing to begin with, but you kind of fought the good fight. And along the way, you just take on all these nuclear issues that you're not afraid to take on. Vaccines, voter fraud, you're out there really early on saying that just the super straight forward, like why are we forcing people to take these vaccines? Beyond questioning how efficacious they are, or how safe they are, you're also asking just the basic question that got lost in that of from a political standpoint, you know, why are we being forced to do that? So just as a way of kind of wrapping up this intro, because we are going to have to kind of talk about a lot of different things, you kind of take on everybody in sometimes in a way that agitates some people. I mean, you take on people that we wouldn't expect you to take on as a kind of guy who ran for the United States Senate as a Republican. You're taking on Tucker Carlson. You're taking on James O'Keefe at Project Veritas. You're taking on Joe Rogan. Everybody is in your careers, and you've been coming down pretty hard on him. And now, lately, what we'll talk about is your latest thing, your movement TruthFreedomHealth.com So I'm just trying to lay out the whole playing field here. There's a lot to talk about. Super, super excited to have you on, Dr. Shiva. Thanks so much for being here. Great to be here. So I guess since you hit the email thing, let me push back on that. Like here's the objection that I have, and I think some other people have that we don't always hear. Dude, what you did is incredible. You're 14-year-old and you wrote an incredible program Inbox Outbox in 1981, a program for email. In the 1980s I was at the University of Arizona getting a PhD. I wrote the Artificial Intelligence Expert System. I went on to sell it to a bunch of Fortune 500 companies and then started an AI company. I would never say that I wrote the first PC-based expert system because there were other, it was out there in the thing and other people were doing it. I just saw it as a way to make money. You saw it as an assignment to say in 1980 that like there weren't any messaging systems. That's why I think people pushed back from the tech community saying, wait a minute, computer programmers don't call those really brilliant programs like the one that you wrote. They don't call it an invention. You don't have to worry about it, but do you get the pushback? No, I don't get the pushback because we're going to talk about a lot of things today because if a white guy did it, you wouldn't say that. Because they say Ray Tomlinson invented email and you don't have a problem with that. Let me get to the heart of this. I do have a problem with that. Let me get to the heart of this. By U.S. law, I can hit it in many, many different ways but hopefully you'll understand this and the importance of this at a very deep level. When Mozart wrote a symphony, do you question if he wrote it? What's going on? No, do you? I want to ask you. I don't know crap about music to begin with. Okay, so if the answer is no question, do you question though? Again, I'm trying to be straight up with you, Dr. Shiva. I don't know crap. You can speak a long monologue. You can speak a long monologue. Okay? So if you want to have a discussion, let's have a discussion. So I want to ask you, if when people say blah, blah, blah invented something, do you question that? Generally, yeah, I do because I'm kind of a skeptic co-counter person. All right. Here are the facts. You can go pick up Walter Isaacson's book which he wrote in the middle of the so-called fabricated controversy on who invented email. It was a 14-year-old brown-skinned Indian kid in Newark, New Jersey who invented a days-in-fact no controversy, except for people who want to fabricate a controversy. And that's a much, much deeper issue from the mind who runs Business Insider. When he came to know about it, Kevin said, you know, it's really fascinating about the stories, why is there even a controversy? And that's what the real story is. So here's a kid in 1978, by the way, who takes the entire inner-office mail system not just in-box out-box, but let's get it very specific because facts are very important and people tend to brush over them and it's inconvenient for them and even though sometimes they don't even know why it's inconvenient for them. The in-box, the out-box, the folders, the drafts, every single feature in that inner-office mail system, every single feature, attachments, registered mail, every single feature you see in modern email systems. Okay? Fact one. Wrote 50,000 lines of code in what was known as a scientific program called Portran. Had to write all the memory handlers. At a time when in December of 1977, which we found this about 20, 30 years later, a scumbag technical term David Crocker who later why did you bring up the inventor of email site? Because I brought up the Tecter site because I thought those guys from my perspective gave a pretty good account or pretty clear to you. You sued them for defamation. You lost. If you want me to talk about it, I can and we can have a discussion, about Tecter, a guy that we sued. And you lost. What's that? We didn't lose. No, we didn't. We won the Gawker lawsuit. This was a different lawsuit. It was an opinion loss. Did they pay you money? Gawker paid me $750,000 and your force removed three defamatory articles. It's interesting. You don't want to bring that up. Well, I wasn't aware of that. Did Tecter claims that you didn't have to pay you any money and they can still run. No, but they settled out of court because we were going to continue the lawsuit to an appeal and they were forced to put legs. But why don't you bring up the Gawker lawsuit that we won? I'm happy to do that. Do you want me to weigh that up? Look, you're bringing this up with the assumption because you don't want to listen to the facts. And the visceral reaction to that goes at a very deep issue that you don't want to talk about. And if you want to talk about that, we can have a discussion. But if you're going to bring up garbage, we should just end the interview. Well, that will always be your option here. But you're talking about being a skeptic, but you're not even allowing me to bring up the facts. I'm totally willing for you to bring up the facts. Let me know when you want me to talk or let me know if you want me to end the interview. But you haven't really addressed where I was coming from. Because you've already made an assumption. I'm going down the facts and you're bringing up a garbage thing to what we've won in federal court. In fact, in bankruptcy court. And you weren't even aware of that. Well, correct. I was not aware of the... But I am aware that they still have... I am aware that you sued them for defamation and they still have their article up there and their title is... You don't even know the background. They were forced to put up a link to the actual facts. So, you're going to have a conversation like this because I'm a scientist and an engineer. And you seem to just not want to have that conversation. Okay? So, if you want to have the conversation about who invented email and you want to get over potentially your own racism, we can have a discussion about that. And I want you to explore that. Are you willing to do that? Yeah, yeah, I'm willing to do that. I think that's such crazy... No, no, no, no, because I think you should be willing to explore that. I think when Dr. Isaacs in the middle of this controversy wrote the innovators of the digital revolution they're all white people. Are you aware of that? Yeah, I don't really like that. I think we should have a longer discussion about this, because doing tidbits like this is a disservice to you as a human being but also to your viewers. I take this very seriously because a 14-year-old brown-skinned Indian kid didn't that email. In fact, there's no controversy. And if you want to... The controversy... That's what I was trying to get across with. No, no, why didn't you actually listen to the person who was alive who was primary? And that's a disrespect that you're doing. You just wrote a computer program. What's the big deal? Invention of email. It's like, come on, dude. Let's have a good... When you want to become a mature human being and you want to have a conversation, we'll do that. But right now you're coming to it with presumptions and I find it interesting to call yourself skeptical. What it really means is that you have pre-defined agenda and a goal. But if you want to have a... Do you want to have an actual conversation go through the facts as a human being? Well, I did. I don't think you've responded to any of the things I wanted to have. Do you want to have a conversation as a human being about the actual facts? Yes or no? Do you want to respond to the points I've got? Yeah, that's right. That's the way you are. You're showing great arrogance and when I come back you're calling me arrogant. Do you want to have... Do you want to just leave... You want to have a conversation? No, no, no, no. Every human being should know about the invention of email and the fact that you said, well, I'm a computer programmer so you have unconscious incompetence and if you're willing to follow through the guy that's actually here... Why do I have unconscious incompetence because I'm a computer programmer? Because you don't know what you don't know. But why does a computer programmer make me have unconscious incompetence? Do you want to have an actual conversation? Do you just want to be called skeptical? Why do you call yourself skeptical? I kind of related it back to my personal experience. Why do you call yourself skeptical? You don't want to actually look at the facts. Because you're actually believed to be... I wrote the first AI-based expert system for... I would never call it an invention. I would never call it... I would never lead with... Because you didn't get an actual copyright because of the way software inventions are being characterized. So that means anyone who gets a patent, you don't call it, what do you consider an invention? Listen, if you want to go through the facts, we can. But if you don't, then I don't even think you should have the name skeptical because you're actually following the original narrative. I'm just saying as a professional as a professional computer programmer all the people I know they would never call... Well, you know what? You would never call what you did an invention. Listen, I think what you did is amazing. I don't think it diminishes what you did. You're coming with predefined and you don't want to listen to the person who's still alive. Typically, the inventor of something dies. You mean I don't want to listen? You don't even want to listen. You don't want to listen. You cut me off multiple times. You should go review this video. I'm going to review it. I'm going to edit it. Yeah. All right. So when you want to have a conversation let's do that and I'll be... We can do that. And if you want to talk about email we'll go through the whole thing. You say stuff like this all the time. You say with your systems theory which again, I think I'm smart enough to know You don't even know who I am. You say only 10 to 50 people in the whole world know about this. You just got the numbers. So you just make a live. I'll play the clip. We'll see. I'll play the clip. I don't think I got it down. Our movement is as profound as the discovery of fire. Okay, he dropped. The other one that I got that I really like is the lawsuit of the century. So he's gone. I didn't know if I wanted to go with the email thing right from the beginning. Right now I want to get this raw. It was the right move because we could have spent an hour on all this bullshit that I like and respect the guy about but this really got to the core of it. And man, the other thing is you never drop from interviews like this. I don't think. I don't think you look good but the only thing I'm going to add to this is I'm going to add a couple of those clips that I got just because he says I got a factual error. Let's see if I did or not. These are from Dr. Shiva Truth Freedom Health Podcast Episode 1166 that Shane, who is a listener of Skeptica, who helped me set up this interview really the one driving me to do this interview. I have to say I got halfway into kind of looking at Shiva and I was thinking of not doing the interview and I'm going to say this commitment that this is our journey shared and I love when people get involved in the show and help book guests and help research the guests. So I really wanted to follow through this and I'm glad that I did. Anyways, here are a couple of those clips. These concepts will lead you your own consciousness raising no different than those people starting to learn how to plow. Wait a minute. Let me make a plow and let me domesticate animals. We're in a world now the innovation has to come from within you and that is why Truth Freedom Health is such a profound movement because we have figured this out. Not only have we figured it out but we have it's not in some ivory tower. By the way when I just shared this concepts 10,000 people know system science but what I just shared with you maybe 15 to 50 people in the world know this. Okay, so that's the first one. Let's find this. What is it? Our movement is as profound as the invention of fire. Hold on. You have to raise your consciousness to understand this. We have to build community and we have to constantly be calling this stuff out way ahead of time way ahead and that's what we do and that is why our movement our movement everything we put together is as profound as the discovery of fire. Okay, enough. I didn't really want to turn into a hate fest but because I should decide coming Dr. Shiva you are welcome back anytime. I stick to what I said at the beginning you are truly a brilliant guy in a lot of ways and we're all complex. We all say all sorts of different stuff so hey, that's going to do it for this one.