Episode 2006 Scott Adams： Lots Of Conspiracy Theories Confirmed This Year. Big Things Coming
Episode Stats
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Summary
A 17-year-old was able to hack into the guts of the world's most popular social media platform, and he did it with the help of a group of his friends. Elon Musk has a big problem, and the answer may surprise you.
Transcript
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of civilization. It's called
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coffee with Scott Adams and there's never been a finer moment. Would you like to take it up a
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everything better. It's called simultaneous sip. Go.
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End the Fed. I'm seeing somebody say, end the Fed. Well, I'd be in favor of that if I knew what it was.
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Does anybody know what the Federal Reserve does?
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I managed to get a degree in economics and walk away thinking, I'm not entirely sure what they do.
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Well, anyway, let's talk about some of the things in the news.
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I was seeing a tweet from Adam Townsend. He was sending people to his blog. Now, Adam Townsend is
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another strong follow on Twitter. If you're not following him, you're missing a lot of different
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stuff. There are some people on Twitter who tend to be boosters of things you've already seen, and
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they're good too. But Adam tends to have completely different takes on stuff. But in this case, I think
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this is something some of us saw but forgot. In 2020, there was a hack on Twitter. I kind of vaguely
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remember that. But here's a detail I did not know until I read Adam Townsend's blog that he tweeted at today.
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So apparently, Twitter was hacked by a 17-year-old and some friends. A 17-year-old. And if you wondered,
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how did he crack the security for Twitter? Because you know, Twitter's a major social platform,
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obviously. Obviously, they've got some pretty strong security going on there. So here's how the 17-year-old
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did it. He called some Twitter employees and said he was Twitter IT support, and he asked them for
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their passwords. That's not even the best part. That's not even the best part.
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Some of them actually gave their passwords over the phone.
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And that's not the best part. That's not the best part either. The best part is that average
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employees, you know, just, I think they were just average employees, gave their passwords.
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And that was enough to acquire God mode over the entire network. Apparently, you could have anybody's
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password if they were in engineering. And they gave you God mode over the entire network.
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Now, if you don't believe that's true, apparently there is testimony from somebody who was hired to
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look into the security. He testified to Congress. This guy named Mudge was his nickname. And apparently,
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anybody who worked in engineering had full access to Twitter's guts. All of the engineers could change
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Twitter. Do you remember long ago when I was speculating that Dorsey probably didn't know,
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that Jack Dorsey probably didn't know who was doing what with Twitter? Do you remember everybody
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laughed at me? Do you remember how you laughed? Oh, how you laughed. Come on. Dorsey knows exactly
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what's going on there. Nope. Nope. It turns out that every engineer could have changed the guts of
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Twitter. Had full access. And there's no log of changes. Did you hear that? All of the engineers could
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change the guts of Twitter. And there was no log of the changes. Those are confirmed facts from somebody
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whose job it was to look into that stuff. Now, did you know any of that? Did you know any of that?
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Somehow I missed all of that. But it's in the public record. It's not subject to speculation.
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And apparently, you know, Twitter is built in such a way that it's really hard to catch up and fix all
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the security problems. So Elon Musk has a big challenge, a technical challenge that's almost
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unimaginable in its complexity. But if anybody could sort it out, at least the right people are working
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on it. So that's good. Texas, Governor Abbott is making a clear call for universal school choice in
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Texas. And he wants something with education savings accounts, etc. The big story here is I don't think
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anything's going to stop it at this point. I believe that education will just enter the private sphere
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and the free market will make it work again. Now, there will definitely always be people in public
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schools, I think. But the public schools are going to have to do something different to, you know, to show
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that they can compete with private schools. But it's happening. It's happening. So it takes a while.
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But there's this positive trend. All right. Here's a macro theme.
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Every time I read a news story that's really good, like it gives me stuff I didn't know,
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and it's pointing to actually source material. And it tells a story that really gives me the full,
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rich context. And I finally understand a thing. Where did I see it? You tell me. I saw something with
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great context and really good sources. Where did I see it? Twitter threads by individuals who are
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really good at it. Why do we know the Twitter files? Because of people like Matt Taibbi, right?
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Individual citizens who look into stuff and find out. Well, why do we know as much as we do about,
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you know, the real situation with energy and homelessness and stuff like that? Michael Schellenberger.
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Michael Schellenberger is unambiguously, unambiguously the best, I guess you'd call him an
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individual who's doing journalism. For the most breadth of, you know, different important topics
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and the greatest, greatest depth of research. And there's another, and I'll talk about that in a
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minute. Kyle Becker. Do you follow Kyle Becker? Any of Kyle Becker's threads are better than the
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news that night. And it's not just that he's good. He's very good, by the way. You should follow him.
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But he's one of now, I would say, close to a dozen. There are maybe a dozen individuals who will do
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fairly frequent Twitter threads that are just far better than anything in the news. Now, some of it...
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So, let me read to you some of these, the things which we're finding. All right. This is from Kyle
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Becker's Twitter thread. And I've seen this before, but Kyle does a good job of putting it in a real
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clean package here. So, you all know Bob Woodward, right? So, Woodward and Bernstein were the two
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reporters for the Washington Post who broke the Watergate story. It was a story that brought down
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Nixon. And it was Nixon got some burglars to burglarize a Democrat office in the Watergate
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tower and got caught. And then that brought down Nixon. So, here's an interesting thing we find out
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about Bob Woodward, right? So, Bob Woodward, one of the two important people in this story.
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Interesting. This is from Kyle Becker's Twitter thread. Soon after leaving the Navy, Woodward was hired by
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the most powerful news outlet and given the biggest news story in the country. So, he wasn't a seasoned
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reporter, but he got a job at the most important news outlet or one of the two. And immediately
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was given one of the biggest, most important stories in the country. How did he get his sources
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for that? Well, the source for the Watergate stuff was the deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt,
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who also was known to run the FBI co-intel pro program, which was designed to discredit political
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actors and the federal agencies that they want to destroy, such as Richard Nixon.
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And by the way, there was a lawyer who was working on the staff of the Judiciary Committee during the
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Nixon inquiry. Do you know who that was? There was an attorney working on that. It was a Hillary Clinton.
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It was Hillary Clinton. And then Kyle sums it up this way. So he goes, so if you watch the deep state
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panic during the Trump years, the Russia hoax orchestrated by Hillary Clinton, two Trump impeachment
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hoaxes, January 6th charade, FBI Mar-a-Lago raid, and now the Biden classified document scandal,
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don't be surprised. They've been doing this for a very long time.
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It's all true. The Watergate was bullshit. Watergate was just an FBI deep state project to take
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Nixon out. Now, Nixon probably, you know, did it, in fact, authorize it, so he committed a crime.
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But my current belief, subject to, you know, I suppose I could change my mind later,
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but I always believed, until maybe a year or so ago, that Watergate was just what it looked like.
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Two intrepid reporters, you know, dug into it, got this scoop, took down the president.
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Turns out it was actually a deep state operation. The whole thing was bullshit. It was a deep state
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operation. And Hillary Clinton was right in the middle of it. And it's apparently what,
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it's just a pattern that they just do over and over again. They create hoaxes, and they have enough
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power in the media to sell them. Now, do you remember all the time that Bernstein became just
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a joke, because he would come on CNN and say that anything Trump did was worse than Watergate?
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And I thought to myself, how could this guy, who seems so dumb and so biased, have been one of the
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crack reporters that worked with Woodward? Because I thought, well, it must have been Woodward who was
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the smart one, because the other guy is obviously an idiot. Like, when you see him on TV, he's just,
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it looks like he's just working for a treat or something. It doesn't even look like there's a
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functioning brain going on there. And now when you see that there's, let's say, some interesting
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history to the other one, you can see that the two of them were just part of some deep state
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operation, apparently. Apparently. Now, it turns out that Trump is suing Woodward for $49 million
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for using Trump's audio tapes out of context. Apparently, Trump says he had only authorized the
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audio tapes for the purpose of writing the book, but when the audio tapes are shown on their own
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and out of context, because they always would be out of context, they're misleading and make him look
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bad. Now, I don't think he can win that case. Probably not. But it does show you that Woodward is
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sketchy. Because I do believe, without even hearing the audio tapes,
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I feel a high level of confidence with no knowledge that they're misleading and that they're designed
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to make Trump look bad. Do you have any doubt about that? Do you have any doubt about that? No.
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I don't think so. All right. Here's my take on the cartels and what's happening with fentanyl and all
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that stuff. Going to the whiteboard. So we're sort of in an interesting race here. So I would say if
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you look at the odds of going to war with the cartels, well, the more people who die of fentanyl
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and the fact that politicians on both sides, bipartisan, are both talking about it, the odds
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of war are going to go to 100% unless something intervenes. Would you agree? That if there's no
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other outside forces, the odds of war and direct attack of the cartels is 100%. Now, we're not there.
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We're probably down here. Probably down around, I don't know, 25%. But that will grow the more
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people who die from fentanyl and the more militaristic the cartels look. But the trouble
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is, one assumes that the cartels with their tens of billions of dollars are already buying up our
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politicians. Because why wouldn't they? What would stop them? Seriously, what would stop them?
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They know that the United States is going to come for them. The only way they can stop it, because they
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can't beat us militarily, is to stop us politically. So you don't think that they're already building an
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entire base of bought-off politicians? Now, they may be starting at the city level, you know, with like
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council people and stuff, and trying to like get control of them. And then later they become,
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you know, higher up in politics. So it could be what China's doing. You know, China would find a
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Eric Swalwell, and then they would say, you know, I think this person might get elected to higher
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office. So they make friends when he's still at the city level, right? You don't think the cartels are
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doing that? With tens of billions of dollars, their biggest mortal risk is not Mexico, because they
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already control Mexico. Their biggest risk is the United States. Do you think they're just waiting?
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Do you think the cartels are just waiting? Oh, we'll just keep making money, nothing will happen to us.
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No, they know we're coming for them. They know we're coming. So they've got to buy our politicians as
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quickly as possible. My estimate is we have three to five years. In three to five years, the cartels will
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effectively control our government. Because that's their only play. And there's no level of risk they
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wouldn't be willing to take to get that done. Am I right? There's no level of risk that they would
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walk away from. This is a mortal risk. This ends them completely. They have to buy their way to control
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the government. They have to. You don't think they know that? Of course they do. The mafia knows it.
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They already bought the government of Mexico. Do you think that they bought the entire government
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of Mexico and it never occurred to them, maybe buy a little bit of the government of the United States
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with their billions of dollars? They never thought of it? Of course they did. And of course they're doing
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it. And they're doing it as fast as they can. If we don't beat this window and take him out before
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they have too much control of the government, we'll never be able to do it.
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So when you see Dan Crenshaw say we should go in militarily, the one thing I can know for sure,
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no matter what else you want to criticize Crenshaw for, he's not been bought off. Would you agree?
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Clearly he hasn't been bought off because he's going after them. Likewise, there are a number of other
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people you could say have definitely not been bought off. Trump has definitely not been bought
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off. Yeah, you can call Crenshaw whatever you want. I'm not in that conversation. I'm just saying
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there are some people, at least on the Democrat side for sure, or I'm sorry, on the Republican side,
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and at least one Democrat, who have definitely not been bought off. Definitely not. But that's not
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going to last. You know, I don't believe that Biden, I mean, do you think Biden hasn't been bought off?
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Look at what Hunter's been doing, collecting money from other countries. You don't think
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that Hunter found a way to make some cartel money? I mean, I don't have any evidence to suggest he did.
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But wouldn't that be the most obvious place to get your money? And wouldn't it be the only thing to
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explain why Biden seems to be doing whatever the cartels want? Because he's not really taking the
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border seriously, and he's not taking the cartel seriously. He's not taking them even a little bit
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seriously. The evidence would strongly suggest that Biden's been compromised via Hunter. Now,
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here's the world we live in. I just gave you this whole long list of all the hoaxes. You've seen
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my list of, you know, over 20 hoaxes. And we know the pattern and how things are done. Shouldn't you
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assume, with no evidence whatsoever, just based on what you can see, that's not in question? It's not
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in question that Biden is doing a poor job of border security. There's no question about that.
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Some people think it's a preference, but there's no question about, you know, that a lot of people
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are coming across the border. You have to assume at this point that the cartels have some kind of
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leverage on Biden. Is that fair or unfair? Now, again, when you talk about a government,
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the government is guilty until they can prove through some kind of transparency that they're not
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guilty. They're not people. If it were, if we're people, they're innocent until proven guilty.
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If it's the government and they have a, a multi-decade pattern of being corrupt, which is well
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demonstrated from Watergate all the way to through, you know, Google and Twitter ringing the last election.
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So there's no question about whether this is a group of people who do corrupt things on a regular
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basis. Democrats. Now, I'm not, I'm not going to say that no Republicans done anything corrupt,
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right? But, but I'm just looking at this particular pattern. The Democrats have been running hoaxes and,
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and plans and ops against the American public for decades. And we know it. We're not guessing.
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We know it. So you have to assume that the only reason that Mexico is not being handled is that
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it's got to be, and I'm open to be proven wrong. But my assumption is, since it's obvious,
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assume the obvious. Assume the obvious. And by the way, that would be an amazing thing for Trump to say.
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Imagine this. You know, the cartels are trying to bribe American politicians. Would everybody say that's true?
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They would, right? You know, they are, at least at the local level. So here's something Trump could say.
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You know, the cartels are trying to bribe people. You know that there's no explanation for why Biden
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is doing so poorly on the border and against fentanyl. Assume the obvious.
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Just imagine Trump saying that. Assume it's exactly what it looks like.
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That's all he has to say. Just say, assume it's exactly what it looks like. And he's done. And walk away.
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Just say, here's the setup. Just assume it's exactly what you see and vote accordingly.
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You know, I'll take on the cartels. He isn't. And there's only one reason.
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There's only one reason. And his name is Hunter.
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Now, I don't have proof of it, but you don't need it.
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He's demonstrated that this is how they, that they've demonstrated that this is how they act.
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Just assume it's true. You don't even need evidence.
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This is so obviously, you know, the pattern that they follow.
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They're going to change the law so that they're not arresting anybody for heroin, cocaine, meth, fentanyl, or ecstasy.
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He said, all things considered, this is the better approach, in my opinion.
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Do you think it's a better approach to decriminalize all of those hard drugs?
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So I think dealing is probably still illegal, but ordinary possession would not be.
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The problem with this issue is that we have a binary brain.
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And the things we understand are, it's illegal, it's illegal, or it's not illegal, and then our brain stops.
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So since you've seen examples where legalizing things totally didn't work, and you only have two buckets, you only, oh, don't give me any nuance.
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So if you know that there definitely are examples where legalization totally failed, well, that's all you need to know.
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But of course, in the real world, how many different ways would there be to change the drug laws without screwing the pooch?
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Who knows if this is a small part of something bigger, or it's just one thing they're doing.
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Now, I do agree that putting these people in jail doesn't make any difference.
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I don't think that they go to jail, clean up, and then go on to leave good lives.
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But I also don't believe any data on anything anymore.
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So if you had data, I wouldn't believe it anyway.
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But it seems to me that if you put somebody in jail who had not otherwise been in jail,
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now they have a jail record on top of their addicts, even if they stopped.
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Just because you stop using, that doesn't make you not an addict.
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So it seems like you're taking one problem and turning it into two problems.
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One is you're a drug addict, and now you've got a criminal record.
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Do you know what I would do if I were a drug addict?
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I'd cleaned up, and then I tried to get a job with my criminal record, and I couldn't.
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I would sell drugs, because that would be my best career move.
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And I'm already living this risky life, and I take drugs to make me feel good.
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If I had a criminal record because of drugs, I would become a drug dealer.
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So I can see Elon Musk's point that taking somebody who's got one crushing problem in life
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and adding a second crushing problem, logically, that doesn't seem to be the right approach.
00:26:16.880
Now, suppose, suppose you legalized it so you'd at least remove the one crushing problem,
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but you did more about helping people have treatment or even living,
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maybe helping them live somewhere where they're away from the rest of the public.
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So you don't want to do what San Francisco did to create an actual physical zone
00:26:47.640
And let's put it right in the middle of our beautiful city that depends on, you know, tourism.
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but we're also going to legalize ketamine and mushrooms and other treatments.
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You want to hear something about rehab that I heard the other day?
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Apparently the government will pay for your rehab.
00:27:25.780
If you're poor, I'm not sure if it's Medicaid or whatever it is,
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but you know the government will pay to put you in Medicare if you don't have money, right?
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Now, I didn't know that either, but apparently...
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and we do give medical treatment to people who have medical problems, right?
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So here's what's happening, and I'm told this is widespread.
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A rehab will, of course, want people to go there,
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So there are body people, people who go out and find addicts,
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They go into rehab, and then the government pays the bill,
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And then the person who went in there, presumably,
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with no expectation that anybody will try to fix them.
00:29:07.040
so they can be the person you bring back in again.
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You know that they've said yes once to taking a check
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so they go and they pretend to be in rehab again.
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I'm sure there are also plenty of completely ethical rehab places.
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They have an incentive to pump the same addicts
00:29:49.860
Now, I'm also not aware of any rehab that works.
00:30:03.520
that there's some kind of support services for addicts.
00:30:13.840
So imagine if British Columbia did the following things.
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that there's a right way and a wrong way to do stuff.
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I think some European countries did free needles and stuff.
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So there are lots of bad ways to legalize drugs.
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Let's put yourself in the mind of an addict for a moment.
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So you're going to go to the worst place in the world
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Instead of taking the fentanyl and the cocaine,
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how would you like to try this thing called ketamine?
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but we're going to put you on some other awesome drugs.
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that you won't even need those other ones anymore.
00:32:32.320
Yeah, I've been hearing about this thing called ibogaine,
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We know that we know the drug intervention is very strong.
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very strong in terms of cure rates and fixing people.
00:33:16.920
and it might make me not even care about the ones I was doing,
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I mean, remember, you're already a drug addict.
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or ayahuasca or whatever they're going to use, DMT.
00:33:43.960
If you're still living in the world of two buckets,
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then legalizing looks like the worst thing anybody ever thought of
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And why don't we add that to the legalizing part?
00:34:32.960
into criminals for some purposes of our own, I guess.
00:34:40.000
All right, here's another great thread about Google.
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So, he would be one of the long Twitter threads
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So, it's that level of high-quality journalism, I guess,
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that's, you know, incontrovertible at this point.