Shiva Ayyadurai, Email Porgrammer |585|
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai… MIT PhD… ran for US Senate… email programmer.
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[00:00:03] Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Sakara. today. We welcome Dr. Shiva Aura to Skeptiko. Very interesting show. I’m really looking forward to it. Anyway, 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.
[00:00:36] Alex Tsakiris: 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.
[00:00:58] Alex Tsakiris: He goes to school. I, I heard that in your high s high school math, he 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.
[00:01:11] Shiva Ayyadurai: 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.
[00:01:20] Shiva Ayyadurai: And what we know is email today is what I created as a 14 year old kid before I came to m i t.
[00:01:25] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. , we’ll 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 m i t, like you just mentioned, including a PhD.
[00:01:37] Alex Tsakiris: You get a Fulbright scholarship, you start these businesses. Just an incredible life story. In 2020, you ran for the the US Senate in Massachusetts. And you did eventually lose. And I wanna talk about whether Trump did a rug pull on you on that thing or just how you felt about that situation.
[00:02:00] Alex Tsakiris: You lost to. Whitey White Meyer who went on to lose two to one, 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 kind of nuclear issues that you’re not afraid to take on vaccines, voter fraud.
[00:02:22] Alex Tsakiris: You’re out there really early on saying, Super straightforward. 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?
[00:02:43] Alex Tsakiris: So just as a way of kind of wrapping up this intro, because we are gonna 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. 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.
[00:03:07] Alex Tsakiris: You’re taking on Tucker Carlson, you’re taking on, , James O’Keefe at Project Veritas. You’re taking on Joe Rogan. , you know, e everybody is in your, your your crosshairs and you’ve been coming down pretty hard on them. And now lately what we’ll talk about is your, Your movement, truth freedom health.com.
[00:03:30] Alex Tsakiris: 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.
[00:03:40] Shiva Ayyadurai: Great to be here.
[00:03:42] Alex Tsakiris: 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.
[00:03:53] Alex Tsakiris: 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 artificial intelligence expert system.
[00:04:09] Alex Tsakiris: I went on to sell it to a bunch of Fortune 500 companies, , , and then started an ai. I would never say that I wrote the first PC based expert system cuz there were other, it was out there or in the thing and other people were doing it.
[00:04:24] Alex Tsakiris: 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 push back from the tech community saying, wait a minute, computer programmers don’t call.
[00:04:40] Alex Tsakiris: Those really brilliant programs like the one that you wrote, they don’t call it an invention. , you don’t have to agree with, but do you get the pushback?
[00:04:49] Shiva Ayyadurai: No, I don’t get the pushback because we’re gonna talk about a lot of things today because if a white guy did it, you wouldn’t say, Because they say, Ray Tomlinson invented email and you don’t have a problem with that.
[00:05:00] Shiva Ayyadurai: Let me get to the heart of this.
[00:05:01] Alex Tsakiris: I do have a problem with that.
[00:05:02] Shiva Ayyadurai: Well, no, no, no. Lemme get to the heart of this by US Law. I can hit it at many, many different ways. Um, but hopefully you’ll understand this and the importance of this at a very deep level. When Mozart wrote a symphonies, do you question if he.
[00:05:17] Shiva Ayyadurai: Let’s
[00:05:18] Alex Tsakiris: go on.
[00:05:19] Shiva Ayyadurai: No. Do you,
[00:05:20] Alex Tsakiris: I wanna ask you, I, I, I don’t know crap about, uh, music I,
[00:05:24] Shiva Ayyadurai: to begin with wanna ask you that. Okay? So it’s a yes or no question.
[00:05:29] Alex Tsakiris: Do you question though, again, I’m trying to be straight up with your Dr. Shiva. I don’t know. Crap. No, no, no. There’s a lot.
[00:05:37] Shiva Ayyadurai: Wait, wait. You just do a long monologue.
[00:05:39] Shiva Ayyadurai: Okay. So if you wanna have a discussion, let’s have a discuss. So I wanna ask you if, when people say blah, blah, blah, invented something, do you question that
[00:05:50] Alex Tsakiris: generally? Yeah, I do. Cause I’m kind of a Skeptiko kind of person. Alright,
[00:05:56] Shiva Ayyadurai: here are the facts. You can go pick up uh, Walter Isaacson’s book, which he wrote in the middle of the so-called fabricated controversy on who invented email.
[00:06:05] Shiva Ayyadurai: Cause when you look at the facts, it was a 14 year old brown-skinned Indian. In Newark, New Jersey who invented it. There’s in fact no controversy except for people who want to fabricate a controversy and, and that’s a much, much deeper issue. A friend of mine who runs Business Insider, when he came to know about it, Kevin said, you know what’s really fascinating about the story?
[00:06:25] Shiva Ayyadurai: 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 interoffice mail. , not just inbox outbox. So let’s get it very specific, cuz 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.
[00:06:54] Shiva Ayyadurai: The inbox, the outbox, the folders, the drafts, every single feature in that interoffice mail system. Every single future attachments, registered mail, every single feature you see in modern email. . Okay. Fact one wrote 50,000 lines of code in what was known as a scientific program called Portrait. 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.
[00:07:38] Shiva Ayyadurai: Later. Um, why don’t you bring up the inventor email site
[00:07:43] Alex Tsakiris: because I brought up the tech site cuz I thought these guys from my perspective gave a pretty good account were pretty clear to you. No, they gave you sued for def and we won.
[00:07:55] Shiva Ayyadurai: You lost. Okay. Listen, if you, if you want me to talk about it, I can and we can have a discussion.
[00:08:00] Shiva Ayyadurai: But if you’re gonna break up Tech Dirt, a guy that we. And you lost? What’s that? We didn’t lose. You lost? No, we didn’t. We won the Gawker lawsuit. This was a different lawsuit. It was an opinion lawsuit. Did, did they pay you money? Gawker paid me $750,000 And the Air Force removed three defamatory articles.
[00:08:19] Shiva Ayyadurai: And it’s interesting. You don’t wanna bring
[00:08:20] Alex Tsakiris: that up. Well, I wasn’t aware of that. Did Tector claims? Tector claims that you didn’t, that uh, they didn’t have to pay you any money and they can still run
[00:08:29] Shiva Ayyadurai: the No, no, no, but they settled out of court because we were gonna continue the lawsuit to an appeal and they were forced to put links.
[00:08:36] Shiva Ayyadurai: But why don’t you bring up the Gawker lawsuit that we
[00:08:39] Alex Tsakiris: won? I, I’m, I’m happy to do that. Do you want me to wait? But I’m
[00:08:43] Shiva Ayyadurai: saying, look, you’re bringing this up with the assumption because you don’t want listen to the. And the visceral reaction to that goes at a very deep issue that you don’t wanna talk about.
[00:08:55] Shiva Ayyadurai: And if you want to talk about that, we can have a discussion. But if you’re gonna bring up garbage, we should just end the interview.
[00:09:03] Alex Tsakiris: Well, it that, that will always be your option here
[00:09:07] Shiva Ayyadurai: is, but you’re talking about being a skeptic, but you’re not even allowing me to bring
[00:09:11] Alex Tsakiris: up the. I’m, I’m totally willing for you to bring up this, the facts.
[00:09:16] Alex Tsakiris: I mean, just lemme know. Lemme 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.
[00:09:24] Shiva Ayyadurai: No, you weren’t. No, because you’ve already made an assumption. I’m going down the facts and you’re bringing up a garbage thing. That what we won in federal court, in fact, in bankruptcy court, and you weren’t even aware of.
[00:09:36] Alex Tsakiris: Well correct. I was not aware of the right, but I’m aware that they still have, I am aware that you sued em for defamation and they still have their article up there and their
[00:09:45] Shiva Ayyadurai: title, wait, wait, wait. You don’t even know the background. They were forced to put up a link to the actual facts, so I’m not gonna have a conversation like this because I’m a scientist and an engineer and you seem to just not want to have that conversation.
[00:10:02] Shiva Ayyadurai: Okay. So if you wanna 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
[00:10:12] Alex Tsakiris: you willing to do that? Yeah. Yeah. I’m willing to do that. I think that’s, that’s such a crazy
[00:10:16] Shiva Ayyadurai: question. No, no, no, no.
[00:10:17] Shiva Ayyadurai: Because I think you should be willing to explore that because when Walter Isaacs in the middle of this controversy wrote, the innovators of the Digital Revolution, they’re all white people.
[00:10:27] Alex Tsakiris: Are you aware of. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t really like that. No,
[00:10:32] Shiva Ayyadurai: no. 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.
[00:10:41] Shiva Ayyadurai: I take this very seriously because a 14 year old brown-skinned Indian kid did invent email. In fact, there’s no controversy. And
[00:10:49] Alex Tsakiris: if you wanna controversy is human wrote the the controversy, and that’s what I was trying to get across with
[00:10:54] Shiva Ayyadurai: the No, no. Why don’t you actually listen to the person who’s alive.
[00:10:57] Shiva Ayyadurai: Who is primary, and that’s a disrespect that you’re
[00:11:00] Alex Tsakiris: doing right now. Just wrote a computer program. What’s the big deal? Oh, really? Mention of email. It’s like, okay, come on dude. Let’s
[00:11:07] Shiva Ayyadurai: have a good, let’s have a, how about this? When you wanna become a mature human being and you wanna have a conversation, we’ll do that.
[00:11:13] Shiva Ayyadurai: But right now you’re coming to it with presumptions, and I find it interesting. You call yourself Skeptiko. What it really means is that you have predefined agenda and a goal. But if you wanna have a con, do you wanna have an actual conversation? Go through the facts as a human.
[00:11:27] Alex Tsakiris: Well, I did. I don’t think you’ve responded to any
[00:11:30] Shiva Ayyadurai: of the things, but you wanna have a conversation as a human being about the actual facts, yes
[00:11:34] Alex Tsakiris: or no?
[00:11:34] Alex Tsakiris: Do you wanna point, do you want to respond to the points I’ve,
[00:11:37] Shiva Ayyadurai: yeah, that’s right. Cause that’s the way you are. You’re showing great arrogance and when I come back at, you’re calling me arrogant. Do
[00:11:45] Alex Tsakiris: you wanna have a conversation? Do you want, do you wanna
[00:11:46] Shiva Ayyadurai: just leave? Do you wanna have a conversation?
[00:11:49] Alex Tsakiris: Do you wanna leave?
[00:11:49] Alex Tsakiris: No, no, no,
[00:11:50] Shiva Ayyadurai: no. Talk about the Trump thing. 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
[00:12:04] Alex Tsakiris: actually why. Why do I have unconscious incompetence?
[00:12:08] Alex Tsakiris: I’m a computer. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. But, but why does a computer programmer make me have unconscious?
[00:12:15] Shiva Ayyadurai: You don’t have an actual conversation. Do you just wanna
[00:12:16] Alex Tsakiris: be called Skeptiko? And the why do that? I, I related it back to my why. You call
[00:12:23] Shiva Ayyadurai: yourself Skeptiko. You don’t wanna actually, facts
[00:12:27] Alex Tsakiris: actually believing wrote the first AI based.
[00:12:30] Alex Tsakiris: It’s not about you system. I thought you were gonna have a convers. I would never call it an invention. I would never call it, I would never lead with, I’m
[00:12:38] Shiva Ayyadurai: the guy who you have an actual copyright, which is the way software inventions are being characterized. So that means anyone who gets a patent, you don’t call.
[00:12:45] Shiva Ayyadurai: What do you consider an invention? Listen, if you wanna go through the facts, we can, but if you don’t, Then I don’t even think you should have the name Skeptiko, because you’re actually following the
[00:12:56] Alex Tsakiris: original narrative. I’m just saying Skeptiko professional com, com. As a professional computer programmer, all the people I know, they would never Oh, really?
[00:13:04] Alex Tsakiris: Call. Well, why’d you call Dr. Last? Well, you know what? You’ve never called what you did an invention. So really? Anyway, listen.
[00:13:12] Shiva Ayyadurai: Don’t wanna listen.
[00:13:13] Alex Tsakiris: You’re coming with think what you did. You’re not what did is amazing except I don’t think it dis, I don’t think it diminishes
[00:13:19] Shiva Ayyadurai: what you did. No. You know what?
[00:13:20] Shiva Ayyadurai: 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.
[00:13:27] Alex Tsakiris: You mean I don’t want to agree. You mean? I don’t wanna No, you don’t want, listen, you don’t even wanna listen the With what? What? No,
[00:13:33] Shiva Ayyadurai: you don’t want, listen, you cut me off multiple times.
[00:13:37] Shiva Ayyadurai: You should go review this video.
[00:13:39] Alex Tsakiris: I’m gonna review it. I’m gonna
[00:13:40] Shiva Ayyadurai: edit it. Yeah. All right. So when you wanna have a conversation, Let’s do that and I’ll be, we can do that. And if you wanna talk about email, we’ll go through the whole thing. If you wanna
[00:13:49] Alex Tsakiris: talk about, did you say stuff like this all the time?
[00:13:51] Alex Tsakiris: Like you, you say with your, with your systems theory, which again, I’m, I think I’m smart enough to know, you know what? You don’t even know who I am about systems theory. You say only 10 to 50 people in the whole world?
[00:14:03] Shiva Ayyadurai: No, I said 10,000 people. You just got the numbers on, so you just
[00:14:07] Alex Tsakiris: make a, I’ll play the, you just made a false statement.
[00:14:10] Alex Tsakiris: We’ll see. I’ll play the clip. I don’t think I got it down. I, our movement is as profound as the discovery of fire.
[00:14:20] Alex Tsakiris: Okay. He dropped the, the, the other one that I got that I really like is, oh, the lawsuit of the century. So he’s gone. You know, I didn’t know if I wanted to go with the email thing right from the beginning, but I think right now I want to get this raw. It was the right move cuz we could have spent an hour on all this bullshit that I like and respect the guy about.
[00:14:46] Alex Tsakiris: But , this really got to the core. And man, the other thing is you never drop from interviews like this, I don’t think. I think you just, I don’t think you look good, but he did. The only thing, the only thing I’m gonna add to this is I’m gonna add a couple of those, couple of those clips that I got just because he says, I got a factual layer.
[00:15:07] Alex Tsakiris: Let’s see if I did or not.
[00:15:09] Alex Tsakiris: . These are from Dr. Shiva truth, freedom health podcast. Episode one month, six, six. That Shane who is a listener of skeptical, who helped me set up this interview is really the one driving me to do this interview. I have to say
[00:15:24] Alex Tsakiris: I got halfway into kind of looking at Shiva. And I was thinking of not doing the interview, but I made this commitment that this is our journey shared.
[00:15:34] Alex Tsakiris: 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 with this and I’m glad that i did anyways, here are a couple of those clips
[00:15:46] Shiva Ayyadurai: These concepts will lead you your own consciousness raising. No different than those people starting to learn how to plow. Oh, wait a minute, let me make a plow and let me, let me domesticate animals. You see the innovation.
[00:15:59] Shiva Ayyadurai: We’re in a world now. The innovation has to come from within you, and that is why truth, freedom, and 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, what 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,
[00:16:26] Alex Tsakiris: .
[00:16:26] Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so that’s the first one. Let me see if I can find this. What is it? Our movement is as profound as the conventional fire. Hold on.
[00:16:37] Shiva Ayyadurai: 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’ve put together is as profound as a discovery of fire.
[00:16:57] Alex Tsakiris: Okay. Enough. I didn’t really want it to turn into a hate fest, but , I guess I should said coming.
[00:17:03] Alex Tsakiris: 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 gonna do it for this one.
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