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June 20, 2023 - Know More News - Adam Green
01:16:06
Ted Kaczynski & Technological Slavery | Know More News w/ Adam Green feat. David Skrbina PhD
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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to No More News.
I am your host, Adam Green.
It is Monday, June 19th, 2023.
And we've got a great show for you guys today.
The Uni Bomber, Ted Kaczynski, died last week by suicide in prison.
And I have joining me a world expert on Ted Kaczynski.
He has been on the show many times.
He's been on the show recently.
He is Dr. David Scurbina, Ph.D., philosophy professor, expert in the dangers of technology, as well as, of course, the Jesus hoax is usually the topic we talk about.
So we're doing a change of pace.
He's got the book Technological Slavery, The Collected Writings of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Uni Bomber.
He was his pen pal for years, exchanged many letters trying to understand his philosophy about technology.
It's going to be a good one.
Appreciate you all for being here.
Let us know any questions you have in the super chats.
And Dr. Scribina, thanks for coming back.
How are you doing?
Yeah, doing good, Adam.
Thanks for having me back.
Glad to talk about it.
Of course.
Well, when I heard the news, and you know, it's big news.
He's a very divisive figure.
He's, I think everybody can acknowledge he was almost like a mad genius in a way.
There's a lot of people online that are almost glorifying his ideas, not what he did, but they have reverence for him.
And of course, I had to email you immediately to get you on because you are, you wrote the book on Ted Kaczynski, one of the books, one of the top books.
So I'm happy to have you here for you to share your thoughts with everybody.
You really are a wealth of wisdom.
And you told me that you talked to mainstream media, reached out to you for some questions.
I'm curious, what did they ask you?
What did you tell them?
And have they printed it yet?
Yeah.
So some good questions.
I guess just first to just quickly clarify that there's two books by Ted himself.
So Technological Slavery is really by Ted.
It's his book.
He wrote it.
I wrote the introduction.
So I've contributed a piece to it.
And there's a large chunk of that book, which is his letters to me.
So about a quarter of that book is actually responses to letters that I sent him.
He lists them letters to David Scribina.
He's got the dates and everything.
So we can talk a little bit later about how that came to be.
But I just want to be clear, it's not my book.
It's Ted's book, Technological Slavery.
Ted also wrote a second book called Anti-Tech Revolution, which is a slightly more technical piece.
Came out five or six years ago now, which is also quite an interesting work.
Tech Slavery has been reissued as a volume one because apparently there will be a volume two.
It could be some years yet down the road.
I don't know how that's going to play out, but I think we can look forward to a third book, basically the second volume.
Is this something that he wrote in prison or before he went to prison and somebody has like the manuscript and they're just waiting to release it?
How's that work?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, right.
He wrote, well, he wrote basically all of technological slavery and anti-tech revolution in prison.
He was working, I was helping at first, and then we got Sam set up with a dedicated publisher by the name of Fitchin Madison.
So they've been working with him.
They have, yes, an unpublished manuscript basically in rough form.
I don't know what stage it's in, but I know there's enough material there to publish a second volume.
So that should be coming out in a year or two.
I think it will take a while.
There's still a lot of issues to resolve.
There's some legal copyright issues and so forth that are still outstanding.
But once those get resolved, the book should appear.
Who gets the proceeds from these books?
Do you know?
Is it his estate or something?
Well, that's a good, because that's a good question.
I mean, Ted didn't explicitly said he did not want to get any proceeds because he technically owed, I don't know what it was, $15 million, I think, to his victims.
It's a victims fund, of which he's really paid nothing because he had nothing and he was sort of more or less bankrupt, had zero cash.
So any money that came into Ted's possession would immediately go to this victims fund.
And Ted did not want to see that happen.
So he explicitly stated in his book contract that he gets no compensation for his books.
I don't get any compensation for his books.
So the publisher is basically running it on kind of a non-profit basis.
The book is actually quite cheap, and I think he's just covering his costs and trying to get it out there in as much volume as possible to get people thinking.
So he hadn't, even until his last days, he never had any remorse for the victims.
And who was it that he was targeting and why?
Well, right.
I mean, no remorse.
I mean, he's really convinced of his strategy.
I mean, at first it was sort of random people.
Then he sort of focused later on the technology industry.
His stated reason was that he had to become notorious to gain the power or the leverage to get the manifesto published in a high visibility venue, which he did in the Washington Post.
So it's not like he, I mean, that wasn't really part of the overall strategy.
He never recommended that anybody else do this.
He never suggested that people go around sending mailbombs.
It was kind of a unique situation for him that he felt was necessary, which turned out to be correct.
He had sufficient leverage that he could basically blackmail the federal government into publishing his full manifesto.
Doesn't that seem like did he try to get his ideas out there?
Like he could have gone on podcasts.
He could have wrote a book.
He could have reached out to professors like you.
Like, why did he do such drastic measures?
Sure.
Well, this was, you know, back in the early 90s.
So there was really no functional internet back then.
So no podcasts, no social media, nothing like that.
It was really just traditional options at that point.
It was, you know, publish it in a journal, maybe publish as a small book.
And that was, you know, maybe contribute to a conference somewhere.
But, you know, Ted knew, and he was right, that, you know, even if he got it published in some mainstream, you know, philosophy of technology journal or something, you know, it would have been read by 10 or 20 people and then forgotten.
So his point was not to publish, not just to get a credential.
He didn't care about that.
He wanted to make an impact on society for the better.
I mean, he's saying, look, you know, technology is crushing us and we need to do something about it.
So the standard options just weren't going to work.
He knew that would have no real effect.
So he had to go big and try to get the real visibility that allowed him to get his message in front of a lot of people.
And he was willing to...
No, I've seen nothing says he was interested in getting caught.
He didn't want to stop sending the mailbombs, and that was part of the deal with the federal government.
If they would publish the manifesto, which they did, he would agree to stop sending the mailbombs.
And, you know, we don't really know what would happen because it didn't play out, right?
He might have just faded into the woodwork and we might never have heard from him again.
We don't know.
Of course, it turns out that six months after he did publish it, his brother, David, recognized the style of writing and basically turned his brother into the FBI, and that's how he got it.
That's interesting.
How he got apprehended, yeah.
So we don't really know what would have happened.
But there was a deal that there would be no more bombings if they published the manifesto.
And I have every reason to believe he would have held to his word.
There's no reason to think otherwise.
So, how many letters, and how long of a how long was the period of time that you guys were sending letters back and forth, and how many were there?
Yeah, in my case, there were many, well over 150 letters I have from him currently.
Do you still have them all?
You could probably sell those.
He's like the most infamous serial killer ever or in modern American history, maybe.
Those could be worth a lot of money.
I suppose it's kind of like a neat collector said, I don't know.
I mean, I'm not going to sell it.
Maybe somebody down the road in my family does.
I don't know.
But I mean, I would like to publish them because they are really very interesting.
There's just a whole series of correspondences which would make a really interesting book.
And I hope to pursue that at some point.
But the letters go back to like 2003.
This is when I was early in my teaching career.
I was building up material to teach a philosophy of technology class.
I was going to include the manifesto, but I had some questions.
It had been several years since he'd been in prison.
The media said nothing about him whatsoever.
So I basically took it on my own initiative to write directly to him in the prison.
I had never done that before, didn't know how it was going to work, didn't expect an answer, actually.
But about three or four weeks later, he gave me a nice long handwritten reply to all my questions.
And that kicked off a long series over several years.
I mean, it went on for eight or nine or ten years, I think, till the last letter where we exchanged letters back and forth.
So it was really an interesting dialogue for sure.
Ten years.
Wow, that's amazing.
Do you know, was there anybody else that had like a pen pal relationship with him that you know of?
Well, yeah, he corresponded with a lot of people.
I know certainly early on he mentioned that there's really nobody of substance he could really talk, serious issues with.
I think he felt like I was maybe one of the few or maybe the only that was willing to talk seriously about the problems of technology.
Other people had silly questions about his upbringing or his mother or what he thought about his brother.
And I mean, just stuff that he thought was trivial or stupid.
He wanted to talk about technology.
So I think there were very few people over the long term that he felt were able to really press hard into the issues.
And I'm sure I was one of the few who could do that.
And your correspondence focus only on his technology ideas, right?
Not the crimes, not his upbringing, not anything like that.
No, absolutely.
That was made clear from day one.
I said, you know, I said, I'm sure you have an interesting life story.
And, you know, I'm sure you have issues with your family, but I don't want to hear about that.
I just want to talk about technology.
And that's exactly what he wanted to do.
So that was the perfect lead-in, and that's pretty much all we did.
I mean, there were other issues that came up.
Of course, we talked about items in the news.
We talked a lot about when we were trying to get the book published early on, it was, you know, there was a lot of just technical details, you know, bureaucratic stuff and who to contact and how to work contracts and so forth.
So there was a lot of practical stuff.
But basically, it was technology or his work or getting his stuff published.
Got it.
And I'm curious because, you know, there's lots of theories about him.
Like, I guess this part isn't even a theory.
It says that he was in the, so he was a genius, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't know, 155 or 160 IQ, really, really high, yeah.
And he went to Harvard and was involved with like MKUltra experiments.
It says here, psychological torment and humiliation.
Do you think this, I mean, it's almost obvious that this led him to do the things that he did.
Yeah, actually, I think not.
Really?
I mean, right.
I mean, part of the, well, okay, so part of the thing is he went to Harvard at age 16.
So he was, you know, precocious, obviously, probably maybe emotionally, you know, not really prepared.
Certainly intellectually, he was ready for it.
And I don't know how he got into this little study, but it was really far less nefarious than I think people are making out.
There were studies that were common at the time, as far as I know, funded by the U.S. military establishment, that they wanted to put people, students, under stress, under psychological duress, and kind of test them and see how they would respond to things.
And I've seen a transcript of one where Ted was interacting with one of these questioners, and they would basically get the student to tell him about his personal views about something.
I forget what the topic was.
And then the guy starts attacking him.
Like, well, that's a stupid view, you know, and you must be an idiot.
Why do you think that?
You know, you don't know what you're talking about.
I mean, just deliberately being abusive to try to back the student into a wall and then see how they respond.
Do they respond emotionally?
Do they give intellectual arguments?
Do they just sort of shut down?
Do they start crying?
So, I mean, it was a relatively mild sort of thing, probably kind of thing that you and I have put up before multiple times, and we've had critics, you know, confront us.
So it was not like they strapped something on his head and they put him in an isolation chamber and held him there for three weeks.
I mean, it was nothing that was so extreme that it would have wouldn't have left any lasting mark except maybe to increase his distrust of authorities.
So I can imagine that had something to do with it.
But in terms of, you know, like turning him evil or some kind of crazy thing, I'm sure that had nothing to do with it.
The reason that theory comes up is because some people out there in the world are really anxious to find an excuse why Ted did what he did.
And they just cannot fathom the idea that somebody might be completely rational and sane and yet find technology to be so problematic that they would go to the extremes that he went to.
They can't believe that.
So they think, well, it must have been something else.
Maybe his mother dropped him on his head when he was one, or maybe he had a fever of 130 when he was little, or maybe it was MK Ultra, you know, brainwashed him or something.
They make all kinds of stupid excuses to explain away why he did what he did, rather than confronting the likely truth, which is he had very strong rational arguments.
He was very committed to his cause, and he took all available action To press his points.
Yeah, I'm not surprised by that, that they want to scapegoat something else to avoid the actual issues that he was so thought were so important.
And, you know, it reminds me so much, like trying to take out, to take out scientists that are leading to dangerous technology.
That's like the plot of Terminator, right?
They go back in time, or they try to stop the scientist that's creating the whatever, Cyberdyne, Skynet technology.
Skynet, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's an old science fiction, you know, plot.
It goes back years, right, in books and movies and so forth.
I mean, you know, we tend to laugh at it, like, it's kind of silly, you know, these Terminator movies or whatever.
But I mean, unfortunately, they're not actually that far from the truth or the possible truth.
It could be coming a lot sooner than we think.
So it's interesting.
All the dangers that Ted had worried about when he wrote in the early 90s, all those still exist.
And now there's a whole bunch of new additional dangers that he didn't really know of or wasn't aware of at the time that we can add on top of all the existing dangers.
And now we face, you know, literally dozens of scenarios of technological catastrophe, any of which could be realized in the next, you know, 10, 20, 30 years.
So it's really sort of a frightening situation.
So did his warnings and his fears fall on deaf ears and they have played out exactly like he thought he would?
Has he been vindicated with his warnings?
Yeah, I would say absolutely he's been vindicated.
But it was kind of really interesting how the media handled all this stuff.
You know, when he was on trial, which was basically from mid-96 to mid-97, took about a whole year.
You know, then there's lots of media coverage and they're talking about what he did and the crimes and how horrible it was.
They show the victims and all this kind of stuff.
And then he's convicted and sent to jail.
And then boom, the media's done.
We don't want to talk about him anymore.
We don't want to talk about what he wrote.
We don't want to talk about the problems of technology.
We don't want to talk about any of that stuff.
Just dropped it.
Cold.
Even when his first book came out.
I mean, so I did a lot of work.
I helped him, you know, prepared.
I was actually kind of one of the stimuli to get the book going in the first place, helped him find the initial publisher, wrote the introduction.
You know, now this book is coming out.
You showed the picture of it with the bomb on the cover, right?
This was in 2010.
And, you know, and here's the book by Ted, the first book by the most famous terrorist in U.S. history.
He writes and publishes a book with a bomb on the cover.
My name is on the cover because I wrote the introduction to the book.
I think it's going to be a big splash in the media.
I mean, it's a famous thing, right?
A terrorist writes a whole book.
It's published.
It's available out there for people to buy.
So I'm kind of sitting back, and the same with the publisher, a Farrell House publisher, a small, sort of a renegade publisher out in the West Coast.
Adam Parfrey was the head guy there.
And we were sort of like thinking, well, there's going to be sort of a media storm once this thing comes out.
And the book got released, you know, and we heard like nothing.
It was like you could hear crickets chirping.
Nothing.
Blackout.
Media blackout.
Media blackout.
No stories, no reviews, no interviews, no requests, nothing.
Just nothing.
So that was really impressive to me.
I mean, I didn't really know what to expect, but to see that happen was really astounding that the media collectively was able to decide we are not going to talk about this.
Nobody's going to talk about it.
I think I ended up having like one interview with, I was The Guardian, the UK or something.
It was a British paper that talked to me for a little bit.
They did a story too.
There was like one little kind of renegade radio station out in Oregon that I talked to one time, but it was like nothing.
It was ridiculous.
Absolutely nothing.
So it was really astonishing how well the media can coordinate to stifle the issues that it does not want to talk about.
And this was a case study in sort of media censorship.
Well, I'm not surprised because a lot of the big tech establishment is definitely funding the media and in cahoots with the media.
And I think it speaks volumes, the fact that they all turned a blind eye to this.
It reminds me a lot of one of your other books, The Jesus Hoax, another topic that nobody wants to cover.
Yeah, it's funny how it's, you know, similar stories.
I mean, you start to see patterns after a while when you deal with these topics, right?
Similar story, maybe even similar sort of actors at the top.
I wouldn't be surprised if sort of some of the same players were involved to kind of help stifle these discussions of things that they just don't want, they don't want discussed, don't want to debate it, don't want it out there.
So, yeah, absolutely.
Well, it does have 1,100 reviews and four and a half stars.
It looks like the grassroots support of it is good.
I've saw lots of people online talking about how he was right, how he was a genius.
Not that he was right in what he did, how he approached it, but just his ideas were right.
He also, people admire him for his views on leftism, liberalism, feminism, issues like that as well.
Yeah, Ted was anti-woke before anybody was even woke.
It was kind of interesting when you go back and read now in light of how we're talking about things.
Yeah, he was definitely already on board, you know, 25 years ago.
So it's kind of interesting.
And I want to get more back to his thoughts on the woke.
I was finding some interesting quotes that were quite powerful.
But one last question, just kind of on the backstory.
You said you stopped the letters in 2010.
Why did they stop?
And in the last 10, 13 years, there's been so much advances in technology.
You'd think that this would be like the most interesting letters of all in the recent years with the tech the way it's going.
Right.
Well, he was involved.
I mean, he was still communicating.
He was mostly directly with his publisher, right?
So for a long time, I was the go-between, and he had to work through me because he really didn't have anybody else he could work with.
Once we got this out that Fitch and Madison set about in Phoenix area, then Ted could work directly with him.
So he was working with him on the anti-tech revolution book, for example.
So that one came out in that period of time that focused on sort of revolutionary processes and what it means to conduct a revolution and so forth.
Not so much on the specific issues.
There might be, I don't really even know what's in volume two.
There may be some more relevant discussions on current topics, like whether it's social media or cell phones or surveillance state or maybe AI.
I don't really know what's in this volume too.
But that's coming along.
The other thing that sort of inhibited things in the last years is that Ted was ill, right?
So I mean, this was why he, about two years ago, he was diagnosed with cancer.
Offhand, I don't know what kind, but it was sufficiently severe that they moved him from Colorado to a medical, prison medical facility in North Carolina.
And he was there the whole last, almost a couple of years, I think, since he's been there, getting treatment of various kinds.
There were things that he should have been treated for, and apparently he wasn't.
So, you know, we're sort of worried about the quality of the treatment that he was getting there.
We still don't actually know the cause of death.
It seems the cancer was serious, but it didn't seem like it was imminent.
So it's a little bit of a surprise for those of us who've been following him that he suddenly sort of died.
So it said he commits suicide.
Yeah, what do you think about that?
Suicide does not fit the profile for Ted.
He had a lot of things going on.
He had things he wanted done.
He was not through yet with his work.
So it just seems highly unusual.
Maybe he got Epstein, is what you're saying.
Well, okay, that's, I mean, that doesn't seem likely either, right?
Because, I mean, they had 25 years to, you know, to get to Ted.
If somebody decides they're going to squelch him like they did with Epstein, they had, you know, just years and years to do it.
It would have been stupid to even do that now.
So I think that's not likely.
The suicide's not likely.
Probably it was some medical condition that just flared up or came up relatively quickly and then was either not treated properly or maybe couldn't be treated.
I don't know.
Maybe we'll find out at some point.
So could you summarize for us what his main thesis was about the dangers of tech?
Yeah, basically, and a lot of his ideas, I mean, they've been around for a long time.
They go back to predecessors, in particular, this fellow, Jacques El, who wrote a book called The Technological Society, which is a really interesting book, quite fascinating, a little bit kind of technical, but for those who are interested, it definitely is a must-read.
It was written in 1954 in French, published in English in 1964.
And that was a stimulus for me personally, sort of when I became tech critical way back in the early 80s.
It was a key stimulus for Ted, I know, as well.
He's mentioned that in several letters.
But so there we have Jacquel, Technological Society.
Yeah, absolutely kind of a key work to be read if anybody is serious about learning about the problems of technology.
But that was part of your curriculum, too, in the classes you taught, I'm sure.
Yeah, so I took selected excerpts.
It was too much for one class for the whole book, but excerpts from that book for sure.
Chapter two is key.
If somebody wants to just kind of pinpoint, read chapter two of Elul's book, and you will get the whole story of technological determinism.
And what is that?
Yeah, go ahead.
Can you explain that?
Yeah.
Right.
Well, I mean, the basic story is that technology is kind of an integrated phenomenon.
It's a holistic, integrated phenomenon that functions together more or less autonomously, progresses more or less according to its own laws and rules, and is more or less out of human control.
Now, we tend to think that because we've done the inventing and we run the devices that we feel like we're in control, but that's actually kind of an illusion.
There's lots of good arguments that says, really, in any kind of real sense, we really are not in control of this process at all, that it's really kind of pressing ahead no matter what any one person or group of persons or even how powerful people think.
The process still moves itself along.
Ted's main thesis was: look, you know, people recognize that there's problems, but they think, well, look, we can always reform the system.
If there's a problem, we'll isolate the problem, we'll come up with a fix, we'll fix the problem, and then everything will be okay.
So that's basically a reform strategy.
We'll find the problems, we'll patch them up, and then we'll move ahead.
The problem is that it really never works.
In the long run, that never works.
Those fixes usually are superficial, temporary fixes.
Sometimes the fixes introduce new problems that were not anticipated.
In any case, the system can produce problems far faster than we can tackle and fix them.
So the whole reform strategy is doomed to failure.
This is sort of a key conclusion that Ted draws in the manifesto.
So the only alternative, if you don't like being crushed by technology, which is where it's heading, is you have to undermine the whole system.
You basically have to take a revolutionary strategy, which says we're going to undermine the whole system.
We're going to blow it all up in some sense, try to collapse the system or try to make its collapse happen sooner.
And that, he said, was the only way that we can really save ourselves from this monstrosity.
And it's a very logical argument.
It's a sound argument, and there's very good points in its favor.
It's just that nobody wants to really talk about it.
So we're stuck with just superficial reform actions and no one wants to deal with the fundamental issues at hand.
It's interesting because you always hear about people warning that the AI is going to become sentient and take over and wage war against humans.
But these guys have been talking about a long time that the machines are essentially already out of our control and it's rolling down the hill and we can't really stop it at this point.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's really kind of interesting.
You know, I've written myself a couple of books.
One of them, did she mention, was Metaphysics of Technology, which was my philosophical analysis of the book.
So that one's available on Amazon.
It was published by Rutledge in 2015.
But there's another book which might be interesting for your listeners, and that's an anthology of historical critiques.
So there's my book, Metaphysics of Technology.
I edited a second book called Confronting Technology, which is also available on Amazon.
And it's a reader of historical critiques of people throughout past decades and past centuries, going back to the ancient Greeks, who were expressing concerns and fears about the technology of their time.
It's really kind of striking when you look at the long history how many prominent thinkers were really attacking the development of technology.
They understood how serious it was, how dangerous it was.
One of the most interesting ones was this British writer, Samuel Butler, who was writing in the 1860s.
And he's seeing the emergence of power machines like power or steam shovels.
And he can see that these things pose a threat, not just to the guys who used to be the manual shovel diggers who are losing their jobs to this machine, but he can see that the machines were more powerful.
They were self-driving because they had this energy source and that they were evolving rapidly, such that they were kind of like a new order of life on the planet.
And Butler said, you know, this is in 1860.
These things are going to, you know, destroy us.
We have to declare war against the machines.
We need to smash them all now before it's too late.
I mean, this is really astonishing in 1860.
So really kind of a fascinating history.
It goes into the early 1900s, and you got people like Nietzsche and Whitehead.
And George Orwell wrote a great book called The Road to Wigan Pier, and he's really attacking the machine society they lived in in the 1930s.
So there's really a long, interesting history of taking extreme action.
I mean, even through people like Herbert Marcuse in the 70s and Ivan Illich and Louis Mumford, they all kind of said the same thing.
Look, we got to dismantle this mega machine or, you know, or it's going to be like a doomsday scenario.
So a lot of people understood it.
It's not a unique thesis, and it's not a new thesis.
It's been around for a long time.
When I think off the top of my head, and I haven't read these books, technology isn't something that I've given a lot of thought about, but like some of the dangers could be pollution, centralized control.
Like I think of technology, in my lifetime, the big technology has been computers and the internet and social media.
And I see widespread disinformation and algorithms are controlling people.
There's censorship, centralized control, addiction.
I'm definitely addicted to my smartphone and social media and these things.
It's like rewiring our brains, making us dumber.
What are some of the other threats that I may have missed that people can, you know, like bullet points that people should be worrying about, like what our future holds the way things are going?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, there's a whole, right, there's different categories of disaster scenarios.
I mean, you can just look at the military for one, right?
So the military is pressing ahead, all kinds of advanced, advanced, deadly technology.
So they're making killer autonomous drones that can fly around on their own and kill people.
They're working on robot systems because they want to make robot soldiers who are agile and who can climb and run and deliver deadly payloads and can operate autonomously so they don't have to follow orders.
They're working on self-repairing systems, which leads very quickly to self-building systems.
So where these machines can first repair themselves on the fly if they get wounded out there in nature.
And maybe they can build more of themselves.
They can replicate through their own initiative if they have materials and energy source at hand.
So I mean, you know, these are like, you know, just you can even imagine the horrendous possibilities when you're building, you know, deliberately killing machines that have these kind of capabilities.
You know, there's a whole whole host of problems dealing with like laboratory experiments and mistakes.
You know, we're working with nanoparticles, so extremely small size, you know, molecular size devices, chemicals, products, and machines.
They're making nano-scale machines that can reproduce.
So if you have little molecular size machines that can make more of themselves or somehow reproduce, and if they can do that out in nature, you know, the fresh air and the sunshine and water and whatever else they might need, you know, then there's crazy scenarios where these things just multiply like by the trillions.
And they just, you know, just by multiplying, they just swamp the planet.
They could cover everything.
They could, you know, destroy all plant life.
They could suck up all the oxygen.
I mean, it's just like really these kind of nightmare scenarios that are becoming increasingly technically possible.
So, I mean, you know, it's got nothing to do with just extra pollution, you know, making us kind of sick.
And, you know, global warming, which is a technological problem at root because it's technological, technological societies produce global warming, produce climate change.
Pandemics, the COVID pandemic was a technological crisis because you had probably created in a lab, certainly studied in a lab, maybe escaped from a lab, maybe was a bioweapon.
All those are technological scenarios, right?
The thing traveled around the world in a high-speed jet plane, which isn't possible without a high-tech transportation system.
The cure for this pandemic was a high-tech experimental mRNA vaccine, which we all got experimented on by the millions.
So from A to Z, front to start, you know, COVID pandemic was a technological disaster.
Now, that one only killed, what was it, a few million people worldwide.
I forgot the statistics.
So that was sort of a drop in the bucket.
But, you know, the next pandemic might not be so nice, and it could be, you know, hundreds of millions, or it could be billion.
We don't know, you know, but it's guaranteed to be a sort of a technological disaster.
So, I mean, you could write a whole book on just the technological disaster scenarios that we're facing in the coming years.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that reminds me of a bunch more.
Like with technology everywhere, there's way more surveillance and spying.
There's AI, dragnets, data bulk gathering.
So they can write kind of, you know, societal control, cultural engineering through technology.
There's genetic editing, people playing God.
There's going to be all types of repercussions for that.
So the negatives outweigh the benefits, is what you're saying.
We don't die.
We get enslaved by the system.
That was one of Ted's points, right?
It's so demeaning, and it's really functionally enslaving to people, even if there's none of these disaster scenarios and we don't get wiped out by killer robots.
The system just becomes oppressive, this oppressive, heavy system, surveillance, monitoring, being dictated, being manipulated, all that stuff.
That's like a nightmare in itself.
Even if we all sort of survive, it's such an undignified and enslaved existence.
Ted was saying, well, look, you'd rather die than put up with that.
So, you know, that's, again, another whole round of disastrous futures that we potentially are facing.
And another one of my big concerns is technological control, centralized control, because it's just going to be like elites, billionaires that have monopolies, right, on all of the top technology.
And that's going to almost make them like, in a way, superhumans control, like almost like gods controlling everybody else.
Right?
Well, exactly right.
I mean, that's where these things came from.
They were sort of control and information and database sources for the wealthy and the powerful because they wanted more information and more power and control.
The question is whether they've created a kind of Frankenstein monster that now they cannot control and it's going to consume them along with everyone else.
So we still don't know which way this little thing is going to go.
Is it going to sort of stay manageable for the foreseeable future and then it will just be the powerful elite who are using it against us or does it really spin out of their control and then all everything's open and we don't know what's going to happen.
We got a couple super chats in.
We'll get to those and then I want to Talk to you about Kabbalah and technology and a certain agenda that some messianic fanatics have.
No more news.
Interesting spelling says, I rarely catch you live.
It's great.
I caught David twice.
Thank you both.
Yes, we all appreciate David giving us so much of his time and his sharing his knowledge.
Anto anti-monotheism is the way says love it when Dr. Skurbina comes on.
Always bringing raw ideas and information.
Can't believe the disinformation fake patriot.
Stu Peters stole your 9-11 compilation clip and posted it without credit.
In his, to be fair, somebody else probably took it from him and he didn't even know he got it from me.
That's been other people have reposted that.
And Johnny 5 says, can you ask David if Bill Gates really has a robot mosquito factory somewhere in South America?
And if so, could he explain why someone would do that?
I think robot micro, what are they called?
Micro drones, genetic editing drones, like that's nanobots.
That's not conspiracy.
That's like a, they're open about that, right?
They're working on it.
I don't know about robot mosquitoes.
I know they are genetically engineering mosquitoes to try to become sterile and then to breed with the real mosquitoes and cause them to be sterile and to kind of wipe out mosquitoes.
At least that's the story that they're telling us, right?
Because that's an easy one to sell because everybody hates mosquitoes, right?
So, okay, if Bill Gates can wipe out all mosquitoes, then, you know, nobody cares, right?
But the problem is, I hate mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes are proof that God is not real.
Why would he create mosquitoes?
There you go, right.
It's like got to be the devil.
But, you know, the same tools that allow you to genetically manipulate mosquitoes doesn't stop there, right?
Now you're messing with other life forms, other insects.
Now you're doing things that make a profit, you know, and then you're using things because you think you can control it.
And then you release some bioengineered organism out in nature and some crazy thing happens you never thought of.
And then you get these bizarre sort of side effects.
So, yeah, God knows what Bill Gates is working on, but even in the best scenarios, and they always paint these things in the best scenarios.
These guys are ultimate humanitarians.
Now, we're doing it for human well-being.
We're doing it for your health.
We're doing it to save the planet.
But these potent technologies are really so dangerous and have so many multiple uses that we can't even begin to play out the disaster scenarios that are coming from these things.
Info channel says, Adam trying to spread the word about an insight I had posted response thread to one of your teeth.
It tweets, teets.
It didn't get traction.
Think spike protein vaccine are a kind of spike-killing ritual.
Gotta Paul Revere this.
I think you touched on that, the mRNA editing and how it was completely untested and they made them mandatory and released them.
That's definitely a huge technological concern.
And I don't even think that's that might not even be technology just getting out of people's hands.
That could be, you know, there could be nefarious.
Of course, there's going to be nefarious uses of technology.
They'll put out the problem so that they could sell you the solution, too.
So there's like technology on both sides screwing people.
What do you think about that?
Any more about the vaccine?
Thank you for the 50, Chris Jade.
Awesome.
Yeah, well, you're right.
I mean, they produce problems and then they produce solutions and they sell you the problem and then they sell you the solution.
So that's kind of a nice way to do business, you know.
But if we're too stupid to go along with that, then that's on us, right?
So we're trying to hopefully try to get people to kind of think critically about the whole system, which is really what they will not talk about.
They don't want you to think about that.
They don't want you to look at the large systemic issues because that's a loser for them and they have no response to these questions.
So, you know, reminds me of what poor Robert Kennedy trying to get a debate with the vaccines and no one will talk to him, right?
It makes me so angry, these people.
We're not going to debate you.
We don't want to give you credibility.
They're such cowards, man, these people.
You don't want to debate.
Just call anybody that disagrees with you a conspiracy theorist and then act like you're too good to debate them.
Like, this is the oldest trick in the book, man.
These people are such frauds.
Okay, this is what I wanted to get into.
The little bit of topic that I wanted to cover.
This is a book that I read, The Secret Doctrine of the Guione of Vilna.
He's one of the most famous Kabbalah rabbis in Judaism from the 1700s.
And it says here, Hal Kator, this is their messianic agenda, the messianic role of science and technology.
This requires everyone, especially rabbis and Torah scholars, to familiarize themselves with the new sciences in order to understand the Kabbalah and the secrets of the Talmudic Agadah.
And then it says, Torah's blueprint for the redemption process.
They cite the Zohar in the 600th year of the sixth millennium, which is 1840 CE.
That's about the time of the Industrial Revolution.
The gates of wisdom above, Kabbalah, together with the wellsprings of wisdom below, science, will be opened up and the world will prepare to usher in the seventh millennium, which is coming in like 200 years, according to the Hebrew calendar.
This is symbolized by a man who begins preparation for ushering in the Sabbath on the afternoon of the sixth day.
And they also believe before the messianic age, this is the birth pangs of the Moshiach.
So we're going to see more painful contractions, chaos intensifying, wars, famines, dangerous technology, plagues, all types of that kind of stuff.
And then a couple more excerpts.
The doctrine that science and technology play a prophetic and mystical role alongside the ancient mystical teachings of Judaism, and that this synthesis depends upon the Jewish nation being re-centered in a rebuilt Jerusalem.
Again, he wrote this in the 1700s.
They accomplished that, right?
And now Israel is a rising tech power in the world.
This is their Kabbalah agenda.
Who's going to call me a conspiracy theorist?
I'm reading right from the top rabbi.
It says, sanctification of God's name in the eyes of the nations of the Goyam via the unification of scientific wisdom together with the esoteric wisdom of Israel.
I've played a clip before that all of these like astrophysicists and scientists are like, oh, the Kabbalah predicted string theory and black holes and the Big Bang.
They're trying to credit Kabbalah.
They're like, it's amazing that it knew all of these things.
Highly suspect.
And sanctification of God's name is also through military victories of Israel during the final battles of Gog and Magog, which they believe is end times wars between Islam and Christianity and even Russia and the West, they believe.
One more.
The teachings of the teachings of the Kabbalah themselves are the very source of Israel's ascendancy and the means through which Israel can achieve the most elevated status.
This is the intention of the verse to grant you ascendancy beyond all the nations.
The Gentiles, this is the Best part, okay?
The Gentiles would be able to understand the wisdom of our Torah from its simple literal meaning alone, but not the secret esoteric meanings.
They already do this themselves by simply studying the written Bible.
And then it says, if on the other hand, the verse is referring to the wisdom of the Torah that is hidden in the depths of its Kabbalistic mysteries.
Behold, they will never fully know or comprehend this, their esoteric mystical secrets.
And then it says, She is your wisdom.
Okay, hold on.
The question is, therefore, how and under what circumstances will the Gentiles recognize this wisdom of Israel as stated in the verse, she is your wisdom and your understanding in the eyes of the nations.
Now, the best part right here.
First, the Gentiles will recognize Israel's superior wisdom in the natural sciences.
Then they will realize that this wisdom is derived from the esoteric secrets of the wisdom of the Torah.
Only then will this verse be fulfilled.
She is your wisdom, your understanding in the eyes of the nations.
And this will grant you ascendancy above all the nations he has made for praise, fame, and glory.
And again, the verse, the Zohar, the 600th year, Kabbalah, and science will usher in and prepare the world for the seventh millennium.
What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, well, that's really interesting.
I didn't know anything about the book until you just showed it.
So it's, yeah, really, that's kind of a fascinating statement from the 1700s, I guess.
Is that what you said?
Yeah.
So that's, yeah, it's kind of a remarkable statement considering relatively primitive state of science at that time.
It was early in the process.
That would have been the early phases of the Industrial Revolution.
I don't know where that rabbi lived when he wrote that, but obviously he could see these things coming and he could see that that was kind of a source of wealth and power.
So he wanted to get on the right side of that one for sure.
And that was probably a good call on his part, I guess.
But it also makes me think of the present day, right?
So I'm thinking about even sort of the Jewish role in the U.S. in the high-tech industry.
So I don't know, Adam, if you've considered that or looked at that, but it's really kind of impressive, right?
Who's on top of these technological institutions?
I made a little, just a little short list, the ones that came to mind.
You got Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.
You got Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google.
You've got Larry Ellison and Saffric Katz at Oracle.
You got Michael Dell Adel Computer.
You got Susan Noj Siki at YouTube.
And you got Adam Mossari at Instagram.
Sam Altman is open AI also.
And now exactly.
Now you got Sam Altman who shows up with this open AI.
He's big in this AI thing that's coming along.
So it's really kind of impressive, right, what these guys are doing.
They're really in these leading positions on several major aspects of the technological system.
So maybe they're taking your Kabbalah claims there to heart.
And they're really viewing this as some kind of messianic mission on their part to run these things.
Heal the world.
That's their goal, right?
They want to supposedly heal the world, is what they claim.
Also, a lot of the top vaccine makers as well.
And it's not my opinion.
You can go to Jerusalem Post.
The CDC, you could go through, you know, right, the vaccine makers.
Yeah, exactly.
We could add those guys to the list as well.
You know, don't call me a conspiracy theorist.
Just read the headline from Jerusalem Post.
And actually, one of the top guys from Moderna talks about how he's a Talmudic.
He's an Israeli.
I can't remember his name, Zach something, and how the Talmud influenced him and stuff.
Zuckerberg said the same thing.
He talked about how his Judaism influences him to create things and connect people and blah, blah, blah.
But yeah, the Guayona Vilna born in 1720, Guyon just means genius.
They believed he was a top genius in Kabbalah.
And where was it?
Lithuania, I think.
Yeah, Lithuania is where he was.
And now just news out today, Intel will build a new factory, most advanced new factory in Israel worth $25 billion.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said, calling it the largest ever international investment in the country.
So Intel inside now means Israel inside.
And the brains of the computers are coming from the center of the world, Jerusalem, right?
Just like the Kabbalist called for.
That's a recipe for disaster right there, right?
Let these guys have the ability to control these key chip productions.
So that's, I don't know who the hell is making decisions at Intel, but that's ridiculous.
And here's from Chabad.
From golems to AI, can humanoids be Jewish?
Just interesting that they're trying to even think about stuff like that, right?
There was the Chabad AI chatbot Chabad rabbi that I took for a spin, and it was shocking the pill pull levels on how it was able to obfuscate the truth about what they believe.
But I still managed to get it to admit some pretty treacherous things, like that the Ten Commandments prohibits the worship of any other gods besides the God of Israel.
This is their main goal, is the whole world worshiping their God, the God that chose them.
That's the ultimate goal.
And the role of the non-Jews or Goyim in the world to come is to fulfill the seven Noahide laws, to basically acknowledge their God that chose them and serve them and not question, blaspheme their God, their books, their sages.
And one other point.
Oh, wait.
Shoot.
Oh, yeah, they're over here that I wanted to add.
Here is Netanyahu's tweeting out.
He has a whole thread about just recently, June 5th, like two weeks ago, he talks about he had a long conversation with Elon Musk, and he said they talked about the opportunities and dangers of artificial intelligence.
Look at what he says here.
Second, Musk expressed his view that Israel could become a significant global player in the field.
I am certain that this is true and we will do it, he says.
And it says, Netanyahu convened a limited ministerial forum on national cyber defense and AI.
Netanyahu has been very clear that this is his agenda for Israel to dominate the world in technology.
He says cyber is the real realm of power, and they are accomplishing this largely with America helping them do this, almost using our technology, using our binational agreements and stuff.
He says, quote, we are currently starting to advance regulation in the area of cyber defense and will combine the worlds of AI, which is gaining significant momentum.
So I think it's pretty clear who is spearheading this, right?
Sam Altman as well.
What else do I have here?
One more.
In the coming days, I intend to convene policy teams to discuss a national artificial intelligence policy in both the civilian and the security spheres.
Just as we turned Israel into a global cyber power, we will also do so in artificial intelligence.
So there you go.
People that think they're chosen by God to have all the world worship their God wants to dominate in tech, and they are doing so.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, well, obviously, that's a recipe for disaster in itself, right?
So you've got basically a renegade state, a criminal state, you know, that suddenly has a leading role in these very potent technologies.
They already have nuclear weapons, which is bad enough.
Stolen nuclear weapons.
They won't sign the proliferation agreements.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, you know, you can see why this goes back even like 100 years.
People were saying, thinkers were saying, you know, these Jews want their own state.
This was back when they had the first Zionist Jews in the late 1800s, you know.
And they said, how dangerous would that be to let these people have their own state?
You know, then there's people saying it would be, I mean, H.G. Wells and, you know, or Orwell and Mark Twain.
And these, they were saying, like, that would be like a disaster if these people got their own state because they could kind of see what would be coming, you know, and now it's being realized.
And these guys are going to have, you know, all kinds of potent technologies at their disposal.
And, you know, they're sort of a law unto themselves and the international criminal state, you know, and then they're going to do whatever they want and no one's going to hold them accountable.
So that's highly problematic that you have a state that can exist that can do that kind of thing, right?
Here's a quote from absolutely.
I agree.
Here's from 2014.
So just to show that this has been the long-term plan, Netanyahu says, there should be a sort of UN for the internet, a coalition of the leading companies in the cyber world.
And in my opinion, Israel is the most advanced.
So you don't have to speculate on what their agenda is.
It's to dominate the world with technology.
And their prophecies also call for the destruction of EDOM, which the ultra-Orthodox and Kabbalah believe is Western civilization, Europe, and America.
That is necessary for them to commence in their messianic age.
So, such a dangerous threat that everybody's scared to talk about.
Almost everybody's scared to talk about.
Well, again, that could be a driving factor why they don't want to talk about the issue even now.
They don't want to talk about technology now.
I was going to mention, you know, you said at the beginning, you asked about when I was contacted when Ted died here last week.
It's interesting because the media know who I am.
It was within one hour of Ted dying that I had emails from the AP and the UPI asking for statements or interviews.
So, you know, they didn't do background research.
They knew who I was.
They immediately went to me.
And when I talked to them, they were just fishing for secret information.
Like I had some inside info that I was going to impart to them.
And I didn't really have anything to offer them.
But I said, well, but let's talk about the problem of technology because that's really the issue.
That's what drove Ted to do what he did.
And that's what threatens us all.
And then it's like, zoop, no, no, we don't want to talk about that.
Technology?
Oh, no, no, no, we don't want to talk about that in any way.
So, you know, as soon as I brought that up and said, that's what we kind of need to talk about, nope, they shut things down and that was it.
So it's, you know, it's really striking what they want to talk about, what they don't want to talk about, and what threatens their larger goals.
And that's, you know, plays right into what we were just saying.
It's amazing.
They've ignored you all these years when the book came out.
Did they never do any mainstream media?
Usually they go in, you know, this is good content.
This gets good ratings.
This gets lots of viewers when you go in and interview famous prisoners in jail.
They never wanted to go do that in here, give him a microphone to share his concerns, huh?
Yeah, no.
I mean, it would have been a natural selling point and big story and ratings and all that.
You know, there were some things that had gone in on recent years where they were starting to, you know, starting to talk a little bit about Ted.
Probably the biggest thing that I was involved in was the Netflix series Unibomber in his own words.
And that came out a couple of years ago.
I was interviewed.
They paid to have me drive up to Toronto, and I did about two hours of interview in an old warehouse in a full-blown film studio that they had there.
I got to watch that.
You're in a Netflix documentary, huh?
So I'm in Netflix.
I mean, it's a four-part episode, and I'm in parts three and four.
There's not a lot there.
I mean, it's only a few minutes in total, but I'm in it.
Did they represent you fairly in that?
What's that?
Did they represent you fairly or did they do any deceptive editing or anything sneaky?
No, I mean, what they included was what I had said, and they didn't really miss.
Yeah, there it is right there.
They didn't misrepresent it.
But the point was, I gave them so much interesting information.
We talked for two hours on camera.
And we were talking about Ted's background and the problems of technology and where we're heading and all these dangers and all the stuff that we've been talking about in this show.
The philosophical dangers, the philosophical kind of analysis of what's going on.
A lot of good stuff.
And they cut it down to just a few minutes of just the sort of the most benign stuff that I said.
I mean, it wasn't misrepresenting it, but they left out enough material.
They could have made two more episodes with just the material that they had for me that was there.
And they didn't use it.
Didn't want to talk about it.
Didn't really want to talk about the technology.
We'll just sort of mention in passing.
I squeaked in a couple of comments that ended up in the final Netflix show.
But, I mean, just really amazing.
They had all this good material, and they just weren't going to use it.
And it wasn't going to show up in that story.
Period.
So who did you say, AP and somebody else?
Do they contact you right away when the news broke that he was dead?
So they knew who you were.
The New York Times.
The New York Times and the AP.
Within an hour, I had emails.
Practically as soon as I knew about it, they knew about it and they contacted me.
So they knew who to get to.
And, you know, again, if they were interested in the actual substance, and I threw it out to both of them.
I said, well, let's talk about the situation with technology.
Let's talk about the contest.
Let's talk about these risks.
AI is a hot topic now.
It's a perfect context.
Let's talk about that and the threats.
And then we'll put that in light of Ted's thesis.
And we'll do that.
We'll debate it.
If you want somebody on this side, get them on there and I'll debate them.
I'm happy to do that.
No, don't want to talk about it.
Don't want to debate it.
Thanks, but no thanks.
And that was where they left it.
I kind of get the feeling that their angle on covering TED is to make people that are concerned about the dangers of tech look like insane murderers.
Is that kind of the way that they cover it?
Yeah, of course, right?
They don't want to give any credence to the anti-tech view.
They'll call you a Luddite, right?
Some kind of crazy old name, or they'll sort of paint you as a conspiracy theorist or someone who's just a crank or just doesn't really know what you're talking about.
Paranoid.
They'll say you're paranoid or something.
Yeah, right, whatever, right, exactly.
So again, and you and I have seen this kind of in other related topics.
This is typical tactics they will use when they want to slander critics of views that they don't want to talk about.
And they'll just do polemics against you and use straw man arguments and all this typical stuff that they use over and over.
And then they'll just censor you when they can't come up with anything else.
And that's how they deal with all these issues.
I was pissed off the New York Times.
I mean, I almost said to their face, I mean, like, you wonder why you guys have a credibility problem.
Why nobody believes you?
Why you don't even get to the real issues?
Because you won't even talk about the real freaking issues that are here.
And here's a perfect time to do it, right?
Ted's gone.
For years, their excuse was, well, we don't want to give him satisfaction, you know, and he's a terrorist, so we don't want to give him a platform for his work, right?
But he's gone.
He's gone.
So now we can talk about it, right?
No, no, they still don't want to talk about it.
So it's really, really kind of eye-opening how worthless these media institutions are, that they won't even raise the issues in any shape or form.
And New York Times and the AP, they didn't publish any of your quotes from the interview at all.
They didn't want to use any of it, huh?
I've been looking.
I've been looking for Scribina and Univarmer looking for some quotes.
I have yet to find something.
Maybe something showed up in the last day or so, but I checked for the first few days.
I did not find anything.
I think, you know, I think they find out pretty quickly that Scribina doesn't give them the kind of story that they want.
And I'm not sure they really want to route people to Scribina because they're not going to get the kind of views that they want to hear about.
So they better just actually not talk about him at all.
I think they're figuring that one out.
I agree.
I agree.
And that leads me to the next question.
Is there like a kind of approved favorite spokesperson, other expert out there that focuses on Ted that the media does, like the media darling that they do like to always cite and promote?
No, that's their problem, is they're hurting for somebody who can sort of be the other side of this thing, right?
So there's a couple of anti-tech critics, you know, in the Netflix thing, they talked to this guy, John Zerzan, who's a kind of a kind of a goofball, anti-tech philosopher, sort of a guy who doesn't really write any coherent works.
He's out on the West Coast.
They talk to him, and he had some sort of semi-positive things to say about it.
I'm sensing some anti-West Coast sentiments here, okay?
I take offense to that.
I don't know.
Maybe that's just a coincidence.
I don't want to bash everybody on the West Coast.
But the point was that these filmmakers, and these guys who do the stories, they can't find anybody.
I mean, there's me, and I'm willing to give them a sort of a nice, lucid defense of the arguments, but they don't really want that.
And so they're looking for a safe defense that doesn't go very far, doesn't talk about serious things, and they don't really find it.
They can't find it.
There's really nobody out there that they can go to.
So they're really hurting to give a balanced story on Ted.
Okay, a couple more super chats here, and then I want to finish up asking with what you think the solution is to turn the tide and the trajectory that we're on.
How can we stop the direction that the tech takeover is taking?
But first, Church of Anorexia Vigana says, interesting name.
Can you mention how all the job people have Mac addresses?
You can use a third-party Bluetooth scanner and spot them all.
Them are already being tracked.
I don't know anything about that.
I'm sorry.
Saltwater Amalachite sounds a little wacky too, to be honest, but they can already track you with your phones.
They can track you with your heat signatures, I believe.
They got people tracked.
I don't think they need to do that.
Saltwater, plus, Bluetooth only goes not very far.
So that doesn't sound right.
But thanks for the donation.
Saltwater Amalachite says they are going to try to convince you that they can interpret natural law through the Torah.
It's all BS.
Thanks, fellas.
Keep up the killer work.
Appreciate you, Saltwater, Amalaki.
And yes, I thought this was an excellent discussion.
I always love talking with Dr. Scurbina.
So the solution.
What do people need to take away?
What needs to be our attitude?
What can we change the path that we're on?
Is there a problem?
Well, that's a really, really tough one, right?
So I guess, you know, there's different levels of what to do.
So I guess the obvious thing is to start with yourself, right?
And your private sphere or your family sphere, right?
Maybe you got a spouse or kids, right?
So probably you want to protect yourself as much as possible, you know.
And I try to unplug from as much stuff as I possibly can.
Obviously, I'm doing podcasts and other things.
But, you know, I got a borrowed cell phone, which I never use.
I'm not on social media.
You know, I try to minimize my time on email.
I mean, I try to do that thing.
We were raising two daughters in our family.
Kept them way miles away from tech for as long as humanly possible in this society to kind of keep them as safe as possible.
But there's larger sort of issues that you want to show people that you really cannot stop this process.
It's not really under our control in a real sense.
The dangers are extreme and they're multiplying.
I mean, it really leads to kind of really radical solutions, which is something borderline what Ted said, which is deconstruct or dismantle or destroy the system now while we think we still have some kind of control.
I've talked about myself in my own writings about going, taking a long-term deconstructive process where we spend maybe 80 or 100 years, maybe aim for the end of this century, and just kind of really back ourselves away from the brink and just kind of extract these most dangerous technologies from the world,
from society, and remember, relearn how to live without them, which we obviously did for many years, and just try to back ourselves away from the brink.
And if we can sort of get the other sort of world powers to agree and just kind of go slowly, carefully, step by step, I think that kind of thing can work.
But the problem is there's no real collective motive for that because they don't understand the dangers.
So what it's going to take is some kind of near catastrophe that's clearly a technological disaster that's so bad that maybe tens of millions of people die, but not so bad that 8 billion people die and we're all gone.
So a kind of a near disaster, horrendous in scale, but enough to really slap people awake and they're going to then make them say, good God, that can never happen again.
And then maybe then we'll start to get serious and we'll start to take these ideas seriously and we'll roll things back.
But the paths to that happening are really pretty bleak and pretty slim.
And you just sort of hope, the other option that Ted was saying is, the technological system might just collapse of its own accord.
No matter what we think and what we want, there's so many instabilities in there.
Humans are unstable.
The global ecosystem is unstable.
Food systems could collapse and God knows what could happen.
The system could just collapse of its own accord.
And you hate to sort of hope for something like that happening because that could be rapid and catastrophic and leads to lots of massive death in very short term.
It doesn't have to be that way.
We could do it very slowly and rationally.
But if we're not rational enough, then we get what we deserve.
And if the system collapses and billions of people die, then we get what we deserve.
So basically, kind of try to slow down, educate ourselves, have more skepticism on the dangers, take our foot off the gas, slam the brakes, maybe.
We really could have nuclear weapons, bio-warfare, chemicals being leaked everywhere and poisoning us.
So much to worry about.
You know, I forgot there was a debate recently with two figures in Alt Media.
It's JFG.
He's a Frenchman scientist.
He was debating with Keith Woods, who is an Irish online commentator, and they were debating the ideas of Ted.
A friend suggested that I get you in contact with them to do a panel or another discussion or something, which I think would be really good.
People would like to see that.
I think they know a lot more about it than me, so it could give you more stimulating discussion there.
Sure, that'd be great.
Love to do it.
Also, I passed your name along to modern-day debates to see if anybody was if they could get you on to debate the Jesus hoax and didn't hear back from them, unfortunately.
But let's see, 115.
Can we just go also?
I wanted to, one more thing.
I know your letters didn't cover this topic, but what were some of Ted's ideas about leftism and liberalism, feminism?
Yeah, sure.
That's, I mean, that's an early part of the manifesto.
So if people have read the manifesto, you definitely should read it if you haven't.
A big chunk of the beginning, I mean, like a third of the manifesto is dealing with these kind of issues.
Problems with leftism, over-socialization, the power process, how people do surrogate activities, just kind of time-killing hobbies instead of real things.
Basically, Ted says, you know, people who are liberal leftists are over-socialized in the sense that they're worried ultimately about human well-being and human life and sort of, you know, all life is sort of sacred in some sense.
And that leftists will not really follow through on the implications of a revolution because they'll realize it's going to cause at least near-term human suffering.
And then they won't like that.
And they're going to back off and they're going to, you know, pull out or they're going to undermine our revolutionary process.
So Ted said basically leftists are sort of cowards and they're weak and they just sort of want near-term happiness at the expense of long-term massive suffering and maybe even catastrophe.
And they're just too weak-minded to kind of see where things are going.
And he says these are kind of the worst kind of people to associate with.
You don't want to deal with them.
You don't want them in your anti-tech movement because they're going to cause nothing but trouble.
So yeah, there's interesting lessons for there from the early 90s, which is well before a lot of people were talking about these things.
Well, I don't think anybody can disagree that he was definitely a visionary on some of these topics.
One of the things about the solution that came to mind, too, is like the concern that if we can't really individually, maybe on some levels, we can individually not be scrolling all day, not letting our kids get addicted to technology, not having Amazon microphones listening to everything in our home and all that.
But if we as a country decide like, okay, we're going to have laws.
We're not going to go after these more advanced technologies.
Unless we have the whole world stopping it, there will be other countries that do do it.
And then that will give them a technological advancements and advantage over us.
And then we could be technologically enslaved.
So it's almost like an arms race that you almost have to do it.
Otherwise, you're going to be enslaved by the people that do.
Is that a concern you thought about?
That's absolutely right.
I mean, that's one of these arguments where you'll talk to even people like Ray Kurzweil, who's a big gung-ho pro-tech guy, and he thinks it's going to do fantastic things to have virtual reality and nano particles running around in your brain and so forth.
And then, you know, when you talk about even trying to do any limits, he says, well, we can't do that because then the Chinese and the Russians and God knows who will pass us up and then they'll use it to their advantage and they might overpower us.
So it always comes down to the same argument, right?
It doesn't really matter what the situation is.
There's this nice little phrase I love that we hear from Kurzweil and some other people.
And it's that we have no choice.
And so they'll chase all over all day the argument.
At the end of the line, at the end of the line, it's like, but we have no choice.
And that's really this thesis called technological determinism, which says this process is driving forward.
It's dragging us along and we have no choice.
So don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
We're being sucked along by this thing.
We can barely steer it, let alone do anything about it.
And sort of like literally for competitive reasons and profit and power and all these things.
Yeah, we have no choice.
And that's maybe the most depressing lesson that we can learn from this thing at all, is that we're really being sucked down a black hole.
And we have a very small window of time, if at all, to do anything about it.
And that kind of supports the idea that Ted had that this is a machine that we can't stop in a way.
That's another element of it of why it can't be stopped.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a process that's rolling along in its own way.
And yeah, like I say, that goes back to a lul Whitehead said the same thing in 1925.
We've unleashed a process that we cannot stop.
I mean, these guys have known it for 100 years, literally 100 years, that this process is rolling along.
It's going to get worse.
We can't stop it.
And, you know, people just blinded their eyes to it and didn't want to talk about it.
Didn't want to hear about it.
And there's a fair chance it's going to end in a disaster.
Right.
I know it looks like it's almost inevitable that our future is going to be a sci-fi dystopian world, even worse than we can imagine, which is why I appreciate you so much for you covering these things.
And of course, the Jesus hoax as well.
This is a very engaging discussion.
Appreciate everybody for the donations and the support.
I can't wait to see what everybody has to say in the comments.
And why don't you give a final words and a plug your website where everybody can find all your work, your books, and all that.
So, yeah, so I had, thanks.
I have a personal website, davidscribina.com, so you can see most of my works there.
Again, the two key works here are metaphysics of technology, which is a philosophical analysis and a critique of technology, and then this confronting technology book, which is kind of interesting historical reader, which basically I was using as a textbook when I was teaching my course.
So yeah, there's material out there.
People are interested.
If you want to sort of be knowledgeable, you got to know your history.
You kind of got to know where people have staked out claims.
And so people are concerned.
That's a key step, right?
Kind of know the thinkers.
There's my website.
Know the history.
And yeah, get educated.
That's kind of the first thing for a lot of people.
All right.
Well, I really enjoyed the discussion.
I thought it was very powerful.
I think people are going to enjoy it.
They always enjoy you.
It was a nice change of pace because we usually talk about the Jesus hoax and religion.
I just had you on like twice in the last month or so, two months to discuss Jesus hoax.
I'll definitely get you back on again pretty soon to talk about that if you're interested.
And appreciate everybody for watching.
Support the channel.
Subscribestar, Odyssey donations.
Much love to everybody.
Yeah, John Garata says, What happened to Paper Jesus?
His audio Odyssey channel is missing as well.
Did he quit or something?
I don't know.
I will give him a call.
I wasn't aware of that.
He got banned from Twitter.
And the chat just went down in Odyssey, but it's back up apparently.
I'll reach out to Paper Jesus.
I'm hoping he's all right.
And love you all.
Appreciate you, Dr. Scurbina.
And I will see you guys all again very soon.
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