Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/2/23: Major Breakthrough in Air Energy, Feinstein Confused In Senate, Vacation Prices Skyrocket, The View Defends Kamala World Salad, Joe Rogan Laughs At Rainbow Truck Outrage, Beyond The Headlines Scientific Consensus w/ James Li

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

This week we discuss a groundbreaking scientific invention of turning air into energy, Dianne Feinstein confused over Kamala Harris' role in the Senate, the price of Vacations for Americans at record highs, The View defending Kamala's word salad responses as "Lawyer Talk", Joe Rogan makes fun of conservatives upset over a Rainbow Truck ad, and James Li brings a new "Beyond The Headlines" segment on the flaws of Scientific Consensus.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. So we have a big potential breakthrough in clean energy technology. This was reported out by the Washington Post based on a new paper and some development here. Take a look at this. They say scientists find ways to make energy from air using nearly any material. Let me read from this report because otherwise I will butcher the breakthrough here. They say nearly any material can be used to turn the energy in air humidity into electricity. Scientists found in a discovery that could lead to continuously

producing clean energy with little pollution. That research, which was published in a paper in Advanced Materials, builds on 2020 work that first showed energy could be pulled from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria. The new study shows nearly any material such as wood or silicon can be used as long as it can be smashed into small particles and remade with microscopic pores. There are many questions about how to scale the product. That is the primary sort of impediment here. The device itself is really super tiny, size of a fingernail, thinner than a single hair. It's dotted with tiny holes known as nanopores. They have a diameter smaller than

100 nanometers or less than a thousandth of the width of a strand of human hair. And what they envision is that you could have roughly a billion of these things, which are called air gens, stacked to be about the size of a refrigerator. And that could produce enough energy to at least partially power a home in, they say, ideal conditions. They imagine because you can use any material and because it's so small, it could be in the paint, in the walls. This is all, I understand, to be a ways off, but still exciting when you have this kind of possibility, when you have this type of research that is being undertaken with at least some sliver of a chance

that it could completely transform the way that we do energy production. I'm both excited and also skeptical, if that makes sense. I think that's fair. Just because it's one of those where it's like, yeah, it definitely sounds. I remember at one point I lived in Texas near Houston. I met a guy who had a system which pulled moisture out of the air because it's so humid in Houston for water. And I remember like, oh, that's cool. And then it turned out it was like thousands of dollars

and it didn't generate that much water. And also it used a lot of electricity to get such, so I was like, oh, well, is this really that much better? No, so you need economies of scale and all that. That said, I mean, the idea basically that this thing is basically the size, what, of a refrigerator, and it could produce a kilowatt and power a home in ideal conditions, I mean, that sounds fantastic.

Like, if that's something that could genuinely be pulled off. So the only thing I just don't really understand is how any material can be used to turn the energy and air humidity into electricity. I don't understand how every material is able to basically pull off this conversion power. I guess it's more the nature of the holes in the material versus what the material itself is.

They say the tiny holes allow the water in the air, so the humidity in the air, to pass through in a way that creates a charge imbalance in the upper and lower parts of the device, effectively creating a battery that runs continuously. We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air, said one of the authors and a UMass engineering graduate student. So I guess the reason you can use anything is because it's less about whether it's wood or metal or plastic or paint or whatever it is, and more about the design of how these tiny, tiny holes are inserted into the way out of my depth here, guys, but that's what I'm understanding from the article.

Sounds cool? Yeah, I don't really get it. It sounds cool. It sounds like you can just stick a thing anywhere and you can just get limitless power, which would be awesome because it would open up basically everybody to be off the grid. I mean, imagine it's in the paint in the walls.

Yeah, it'd be amazing. And powers your whole house. That's like three world stuff. For me, i don't want to be on the grid i don't like the grid i don't like to be connected to uh society and civilization so would you have to be on the grid for that oh i don't i don't think so it sounds like you could be the power it could sit in your house and it could generate it for your or the very least it would be a lot easier the current like way to get off the grid is basically i I mean, it's not impossible. It just costs a lot of money. And it's prohibitive for people who don't necessarily want to. So this seems like it would make it more available and easier and also open up huge swaths of territory, which are much harder to populate because you would have access. If you combine this with a

Starlink, I mean, you really just, you opened up huge swaths, not only the country, the whole world. I like that idea. I think it whole world. I like that idea. I like that idea, yeah. Imagine not having to deal with oil politics and all of the like disaster and war that that causes. Imagine, you know, being able to reverse the impact of climate change. Imagine having energy that is really, really cheap,

practically free. I mean, that would be an incredible world to live in. So we'll keep our fingers crossed and keep an eye on these little developments. Have some new reporting for you all about exactly how Senator Dianne Feinstein's office is operating here and the depth of her confusion at just the basic functions of the Senate. This continues to be just sad and enraging story as this is a woman who's supposedly representing millions of constituents in California and is clearly unable to do or even understand the basic functions of her job. So put this up

on the screen. This is based on some reporting. There's a report in New York Times and also a report in the LA Times that had some of these details. They say Feinstein expressed confusion over Kamala Harris presiding over the Senate. Here's a quote from these details. They say Feinstein expressed confusion over Kamala Harris presiding over the Senate. Here's a quote from the article. They say, at times, Feinstein has expressed confusion about the basics of how the Senate functions. When Vice President Kamala Harris was presiding over the chamber last year, in one of many instances in which she was called upon to cast a tie-breaking vote, Ms. Feinstein expressed confusion, according to a person who witnessed the scene, asking her colleagues, what is she doing here? Staff members have been overheard

explaining to her that she cannot leave yet because there are more votes to come. They also talk about how the Capitol Police and the Senate Sergeant at Arms have gone to great lengths to keep Ms. Feinstein shielded from photographers and reporters helping to create a bubble around her as aides run interference on her behalf. Yeah, the exact same. That's really what's happening is the aides and the sergeant of arms. So her confusion and her senility at this point is like well established. We all know it. What's happening behind the scenes is that her aides are using the Capitol police to shield her both from reporters. For example, I recently saw and heard about an incident where

the Capitol Police was like, keep back. You got to give her some space. They were demanding reporters be like 25 feet away from her. She doesn't need 25 feet to get into a wheelchair. All right, five feet, fine. But really, what are they doing? They don't want her to answer, ask any questions, be answered, answering any questions or ask any questions. Same with why her aides are constantly around her. They tell her how to vote. This has been reported over and over and over again. She apparently didn't know who Tim Scott was, you know, confused him for Raphael Warnock. And Tim Scott was like, geez, okay. And like walked away. It's like, there's so many incidents like this that it's almost reporting about her senility is now like not even the point. It's just all about how powerful people are coming together to protect her from any scrutiny.

And to use her for their own ends. It's very clear here now the reason why Pelosi has been her greatest ally is because she's trying to get Adam Schiff into the Senate seat. And it goes to these like behind the scenes Senate political machinations. Governor Gavin Newsom of California said if he was going to appoint someone to the seat, it would be a black woman. Nancy Pelosi doesn't want it to be Barbara Lee. She wants Adam Schiff to get that seat. And if Barbara Lee gets appointed, she is a black woman that, you know,

would fit the bill for what Gavin Newsom has said. Then if you're an incumbent, it's very hard to dislodge that person. So the whole idea is for Pelosi to try to prop up Feinstein to run out the clock so that she can get her favored, like terrible candidate into the Senate. So those are the political machinations that are going on behind the scenes. It's grotesque that they're using this ailing woman as a prop in their own political plans and designs. I think the other part of this, though, Sabra, that's interesting is, you know, our friend here, Ken Klippenstein, really kicked a hornet's nest when he went after the staff who are enabling and have for years now enabled and hid from the public the reality of Senator Feinstein's condition. And there are a lot of details being reported now. that he sort of forced the issue into the public sphere. And it became embarrassing for them that

there had been no coverage and no discussion of the way that this whole thing was architected and the way this whole thing was enabled. So I think he did a real service by pushing them to do the reporting that should have been done years ago about the fact that, you know, she's barely there. She's even just before a vote, they're handing her a piece of paper to know what to vote at times. She's reading from scripts that they give her about how she even records her votes. The the office is functioning as much as it possibly can without any say so from her. These are not people who are elected. Right. She is the elected representative. And so, you know, I think some scrutiny on how this is all going down, not only for her, but other instances, which we will undoubtedly face in the future too, is incredibly warranted. No, it's incredibly stupid. The entire, the, just the way that they protected them for so long, you're right in that Ken actually did kind of force the hands on the staff. But even then, we don't know fully the inside details and there's obvious reporting to be done about how back and how far along this

goes. And still none of it, you know, is revealed to the public. And it's just such a disgrace. The most populous state in the whole country. And they want to drag her for two more years while doing this just to prevent Adam Schiff from not getting the nomination. What I want to know is who knew what when she was standing for reelection last time? Yes. Great question. That's the real question. Because she had a challenger. The California Democratic Party was behind that challenger. Obama, Pelosi and co come over the top to rescue her. What was it apparent at the time? Very possible. Very possible, given that reporting we do have about how many questions and, you know,

the really deteriorated condition she's in at this point. So we would love to see some more reporting in that regard as well. Vacation inflation. That's what a lot of people are seeing as they start their summer holiday plans. Going to put this up there on the screen. The Boston Herald actually did a good job of compiling it all together. So in effect, basically every single aspect of your vacation is going to be a lot more expensive if you are lucky enough to even be able to afford one. Number one, airline tickets are 16% more expensive than they were last year, and last year they were more expensive than the year before that and the year before that.

Hotel rooms, dining out, and even a trip to the movies have all went up in price. Annual inflation is technically only 4.9%, just to give everybody an idea of how much things have gone up. Hotels are at 7% up. Dining out is 8%. Movies and concerts are up 7%. Sports tickets are up 3%. Alcohol has actually increased by 3%. And outdoor supplies is up by 11%. But the actual flights right now, where actually on international flights in particular, European flights from the United States are at the highest level they have been in modern history because so many Americans did not travel in 2020, 2021, 2022. Some have cash burning a hole in their pocket. Some are just like, I got to get

out of here. I want to go on some sort of vacation. So obviously that pushes the price to sky high levels. And also we're not the only country that is traveling. Well, I actually visited Paris almost two years ago now, and it was empty compared to what it normally was. And one of the reasons that they told me is like, oh yeah, it's because China is completely closed. Well, guess what? China's not closed anymore. So, you know, we're not the only people who like going to Europe. The Chinese, the South Koreans, many of the Asian countries, which were closed for the last two years are also coming, which means that hotel prices and services and tours and all of that are much more expensive. So it's just like the last thing, leisure is like the last thing that everybody needs to be more expensive. And it's arguably one of the most expensive things right now going on

in the economy. Yeah. And another piece of this that we've talked about from the beginning, which was considered like some crank theory originally, was that companies see the specter of inflation and they raise prices because they can. And now that this has become like thoroughly undeniable, New York Times actually has a new report out. Companies push prices higher, protecting profits but adding to inflation. The prices of oil, transportation, food ingredients, and other raw materials

have fallen in recent months as the shock stemming from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have faded. Yet many big businesses have continued raising prices at a rapid clip. Some of the world's biggest companies have said they do not plan to change course, will continue increasing prices or keep them at elevated levels for the foreseeable future. That strategy has cushioned corporate profits and it could keep inflation robust, contributing

to the very pressures used to justify surging prices. So you see the loop that they're pointing to here. Once you have a little bit of inflation, companies can justify hiking prices. That increases inflation again, which then justifies them hiking prices or keeping them elevated even more. So even though your prices are super high, they're actually paying lower costs now that some of the supply chain shocks and other things have shaken out of the economy. And then the other part of this that's devastating is if you if you still have these high levels of inflation, guess what the Federal Reserve is going to feel like they have to do? They're going to have to hike interest rates again and crush you and crush your family's ability to actually go on vacation or engage in any sort of leisure activities. So it's really a horrific cycle that we are in. And, you know, it's it was insane that even as these corporate bosses were admitting on their earnings call that this is what we're doing, that the mainstream press and a lot of woman was planning her daughter's birthday trip to disney world i mean i'm not saying everybody has a right to go to disney world but that's also like that seems like the most low entry vacation or at least it should be right everybody should be okay go to disney world well expensive

yeah well that's the issue though is that it turns out that the prices now have gone so high that she thought even by planning a year in advance, now her husband and her son have to stay back. It's like, okay, well. That's so sad. Yeah, it's one of those like, okay, well, nobody has a ride to go. But I mean, that's sad. That's one of those like family memories

that's just not gonna exist now because of cost that would have had been planned. Now, you know, it's not gonna kill them by not having it, but that's one of those things that makes life nice. And you can go and read so many examples of this. People are driving more miles than they ever have before for vacation. They are unable to afford many things. Disney is a good example. From what I've heard, they've basically costified the entire thing. So it's like, you used to be able to pay a fast pass or whatever, and you got to jump all the lines. Now you have an app and you can pay,

and you can only do two. And if you want to do more, you have to pay even more. And it's just one of those where they milk you for every dollar they possibly can. I posted something yesterday. You just went through this.

I'm going through it as well, where wedding costs are astronomically higher. DJs are up 25% from 2019 to 2022. Makeup artists up 20. Flowers up 20. Wedding dress up 19. Hairstylist up 18. Photographer up eight.

Catering per head up seven. Venue up seven. Wedding cake up two. The only thing is apparently decreases groom's attire, which I guess given our current sectorial standards. That's funny. Makes sense. I mean, I'm not mad about like the people, like the hairstylists and makeup artists, whatever,

getting a little bit more. I'm not mad about that. But yeah, like the wedding dress does not cost more to make. No. The venue is not more expensive than it was pre-COVID. Exactly. So I actually know somebody who's getting married who are using the same as somebody who got married before.

And in the three-year period, the price with the same vendors and all that is 40% higher. Wow. The exact same. The exact same people. And they're like, what do you mean this is higher?

And they're like, yeah, it is what it is. You gonna go somewhere else? And they're like, no, I'm not. So it's just one of those where it's like everywhere. It's all big industry. Yes, big business.

Wedding thing is big business. These people are printing money. And like you said, I'm not mad at anybody individually, but overall, we, we're the ones who are getting hit and everyone's like, oh, just don't do it anyways. I'm like, yeah, tell that to the family members who all have an opinion. Okay. So that's a whole lot of discussion. Yes, it is. So the ladies of The View took to debating the capabilities of our current vice president, Kamala Harris.

Well noted that Kamala is maybe not always the best at articulating herself, can often like repeat herself in a strange way or try to wax poetic on topic when she really should be straightforward. School buses. There's a lot that's going on there. And I think it's kind of undeniable. But nevertheless, the ladies of The View will do their best to deny the manifest reality. Take a listen to this exchange and how it went. The significance of the passage of time, right?

The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time. We gotta take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are, because you have been forced to have to take it seriously. During Women's History Month, we celebrate and we honor the women who made history throughout history.

She's reading a prompter. If she's reading a prompter, they need to immediately fix that. You are the vice president of the United States. The administration and the president are responsible for protecting her. Well, I would add that as a lawyer, you're generally told when you're speaking that you speak in threes because that's what people remember. So if you're going to talk about a car, you talk about the car, the red car, the fast red car. So I think what you just saw. But you don't use the definition in the word in the definition.

So the latest excuse apparently is this is how lawyers talk. This is how she's trained to speak as a lawyer. Emily, what do you think of that one? This is like what Sagar and I sound like trying to defend Ron DeSantis. It's hilarious because you can tell Sunny Hostin clearly cares more about the emails in her inbox from Kamala Harris's team than what like normal people think of what she's saying. Yeah. That was for an audience of one, Kamala Harris and her office. The thing that bothers me actually the most about these clips, there was a whole exchange here. Of course, I didn't even play this part because it's so tired at this point. It's, oh, it's,

there's no problem with Kamala. It's just racism and sexism. It's like, you can acknowledge the very real reality of racism and sexism, but also be like, this particular black woman also has not done a very good job. And, you know, the American public has really not responded to her for, you know, a host of reasons outside of just her race and her gender. I didn't even play that part

because it's so tired at this point. But her co-host, Sunny's co-host there, they're so nervous in challenging her because they're so terrified that they'll be called a racist. And they don't want to be pegged as a racist. So all of the pushback of what is really, really obvious to any normal person just watching her try to operate in a political space, it becomes super tepid, super nervous. And they just like instantly capitulate to whatever Sonny has to say about it. Even when she says something as silly as like, well, this is just how lawyers talk. This is how you're trained to talk as a lawyer. It's like, come on,

where did you come up with that? It's amazing. Can I use the phrase circle jerk? Yes, indeed. Because that's what the media and political classes at this point, it's just them like building each other up because they're really afraid to do the alternative. Actually, this is this is going to sound like a hard pivot, but the New York Times criticism of the Little Mermaid movie that went viral because it complained there wasn't enough kink in it, even if the definition of the word was not. I didn't see any of this. So you are not on right wing. But what I would say is that the actual complaint of the culture critic at the New York Times is that the Little Mermaid movie was so hampered by trying to check off every diversity box that the creativity was lost and that the fun of it was lost. you lose capability, when you are, when you lose capability, creativity, all these things, when you care more about, like,

checking off these boxes than you do about, there are plenty of women, there are plenty of men, black, white, that could do Kamala Harris' job so much better than Kamala Harris.

She just was, for the purpose of Joe Biden having what his team thought would be this electoral advantage, which, in a way is kind of racist because they're using her to be to their electoral advantage. It's insulting. And they're the same thing with the women of The View. They can't give her honest feedback and

honest criticism, which is how she gets insulated from any criticism that could possibly make her better at her job. We're all worse off for having this elite circle jerk in our media and our political class. The joke jokes on them though because Now they have set this person up I mean the amount of leaks that have come out of her office It's very clear that the Biden team that I think her own team recognizes that she has become this political liability Yeah But they can't get out of it because you can't put aside the nation's first black president, black female president. And so and this is also part of why, even though Biden is old and ailing and, you know,

people are very, very nervous about his ability to win reelection. Like it was never a real question mark over whether they would lean into making him the nominee again, because they have this Kamala Harris problem sitting right there. And they know, like, as difficult as Biden's chances might be, hers will be so much worse. And even, okay, so let's say that Joe Biden is able to get reelected. They're still going to have this issue hanging over them because she has been, you know, propped up as the chosen one. I just would point out to your point about it being kind of racist to just assume like, oh, she's a black woman, so black women will vote for her. In the primary, that wasn't true.

I mean, she didn't do particularly well with voters of color. Actually, the two candidates that did best with voters of color were, you know, the old white guys, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. So, you know, the very simplistic narratives about her are obviously very disingenuous. Like I said, the thing I enjoy or loathe, I guess, the most is they're so nervous about pushing back on Sunny, pushing back on any of the, like, whatever is the prevailing wisdom on The View. It's amusing to watch. But I did enjoy this new entry of actually the problem is that she was trained to talk like a lawyer. Like there aren't a million other lawyers in D.C. and, you know, in political offices around the country that manage to not speak in this bizarre way.

It's really crystal 40 chess. It's actually that Kamala Harris is too smart for the average member of the public. So smart, in fact, that she sounds like an idiot. We're just not. We just can't compete on that level. No, it's... We just can't really wrap our head around it. But by the way, that's why these cable channels and the news offerings at places like ABC Sunday shows

are starting to plummet because people would rather watch an honest conversation like this one than one where somebody is bending over backwards and engaging in these mental partisan gymnastics to defend somebody that is objectively bad at her job. Joe Rogan had some really interesting comments about a very online backlash to an old Ford ad, and it's interesting for a number of reasons, but let's roll the clip so you can decide for

yourself right off the bat here. So someone said something, oh, it's the gay raptor because it's interesting for a number of reasons, but let's roll the clip so you can decide for yourself right off the bat here. So someone said something, oh, it's the gay Raptor because it's the smaller Raptor. Some fucking moron. True, he was right. It's the gay Raptor. They actually painted it in gay colors.

It's big gay out there. The very gay Raptor. Cool. No one's not going to buy Raptors. Shut the fuck up. Yeah, Raptors are cool. They're the shit. They're the shit.

Yeah. I had one of those. Okay, so that was from Friday's edition of Rogan's podcast. He said that Ford did a, quote, gay commercial for the Raptor truck line Yeah, I had one of those. Okay, so that was from Friday's edition of Rogan's podcast. He said that Ford did a, quote, gay commercial for their Raptor truck line. And while the, quote, very gay Raptor debuted in 2021, the ad was resurfaced. I'm reading from Mediaite here, following the fallout from Bud Light's partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. And so because all of these sort of corporate pride ads were making their way around the Internet, the Ford one made its way around the Internet because Ford has a brand not entirely dissimilar from Bud Light, which is sort of mass palatability, also really popular in middle America.

I just bought a Ford myself. I used Ford, but that is to say they last. But this is what isn't that there isn't that a tagline Ford built to last built Ford tough. That's the one. Sure. Whatever. Anyway. We're not sponsored by Ford. I also am a Ford consumer though, because they're, you know, union American made. So I have, I have an F-150, which is a relative of the Raptor. It's like a less fancy version of the Raptor, I think is my understanding of this. Yeah. I don't really, can you explain, I don't really understand what happened here. How did this, How did this very gay Raptor thing come about? It looks cool. It's like rainbow painted, basically. Yeah. So that's the add-in question,

is it's one of those like really typical kind of corporate pride commercials, but it's interesting to people because you have this Ford Raptor, and I drove an F-150 growing up too. I love those trucks. They are fantastic. The Raptors are really cool. But it is in pride colors. And it's a couple of years old because but what people thought, because that's one of the things on Twitter is you can just take something without any context and start circulating it. And people are going to think the Ford ad is new, that they doubled down after the Bud Light and Target stuff. And that's like important context to why this started snowballing. Because if you just see it and you don't realize

it's a couple of years old, it looks like Ford is ignoring all of the sort of cultural warnings and boycotts where people say they just want their products to be apolitical. They don't want to feel like, actually we talked about this earlier in today's show, that there's this like very visceral feeling of my team or your team, you're with us or you're against us, you're with average Americans or you're with the elites. It looked like Ford, out of context, was doubling down on the pride campaign in light of what happened to Bud Light and Target, but it wasn't a new ad. I mean, here's the thing for me as a leftist.

None of these companies are my ally in anything. Even if they, you know, find it like financially beneficial to posture as being like gay allies or whatever. Everyone knows before the majority opinion shifted on that issue, they weren't going to say a freaking word about gay marriage or gay people or whatever unless they had some sort of a marketing angle. So let me just put that out there. I am under no illusion that these companies are my friend or my ally on literally any issue. But, you know, you made the comment about conservatives were under the impression that this was like Bud Light, that this was, you know, sort of mainstream palatability company. I just looked up the numbers. Support for gay marriage is 71% in America.

See, that's what's... So it's like leaning into pride, which is why all these companies have done it, like, doing their pride campaigns, painting the truck the rainbow colors and having it drive in a pride parade or whatever. It's because it has been a mainstream, acceptable, 70-plus percent support issue. So this is where, again, I come to, like, you know putting obviously like I wildly disagree with the reaction backlash to any of this. Not that I even care that much because it's just virtue signaling anyway. But the intense backlash to the progress that's been made in the LGBTQ movement. I also think that it's very dangerous for conservatives politically because part of why they did so they so underperformed, I should say, in 2022 was because they were effectively painted as extremists. Now, that was predominantly around

abortion and around stop the steal. But you're getting yourself out on another 25% issue here when it comes to aggressive pushback against even the most basic basic tenets of, you know, support for gay rights. And that's what's so interesting about the pride question in general that we have seen, for instance, like I think about like average parents who we talked about this again earlier in today's show, like voted for Glenn Youngkin. I bet a majority of them, even though they voted for a Republican governor, are supportive of gay marriage. Youngkin is probably supportive of gay marriage. I actually don't know where he stands on that. I would guess that he's supportive of it. Yeah. But people have come to see pride. And there have been a lot of, I think, trenchant analyses by leftists over the last couple of years

about how specifically the T part of the LGBTQ question and specifically the way that it's become associated with kids. Republicans, and we've talked about this before, that has been a really effective line of attack. And it's very interesting to see how some of those analyses are being proven, I think, correct by the boycotts of Bud Light and Target, specifically because pride is coming to be associated with that. And people see corporations going all in on pride as them necessarily going all in on LGBT, Dilla Mulvaney, et cetera, et cetera. And that is fascinating to me because, like you said, that number is, it's a 70% plus issue that support gay marriage.

I mean, Rogan has this sort of baked in, Kyle always says this, I'm stealing from him, like normie instinct. Yeah. So when his guest was the one who brought up like, oh, G.C. Ford with this pride stuff, he's like, this is bullshit. Like nobody's going to not buy their truck because of this. That's true. And because he has, I mean, on this issue, he has this sort of like normie instinct. And so similar to abortion, you know, I do think that when Republicans are talking about these tricky, genuinely tricky issues around kids and age of transition and what that process looks like and, you know, how you navigate this and what the rules and guidelines are, etc., then they're on stronger political footing. But even there, you know, this election cycle was supposed to be the

one where that issue was really determinative. And there were a lot of Republican candidates, not just Ron DeSantis, who I think won in Florida for a host of, you know, that, but a host of reasons. But there were a lot of Republicans across the country who really leaned into those issues. And it didn't amount to, didn't amount to much because I don't think it felt really super relevant to people's lives. You know, there wasn't some in their school. This wasn't really a live issue. This wasn't something they were grappling with in a big way in out over a two-year-old Ford Pride commercial that is no, you know, like is no threat to anyone. I think you, I think they have already crossed the Rubicon

to being dramatically against where public opinion is on this issue. I mean, even on issues of like adults transitioning, the public is overwhelmingly in support of like people just living their lives and doing what they want to do. And I think where that gets tricky. So I would actually reverse it. I would say it was like a Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, popular in rural areas, but sort of toxic in suburban areas. It was like the stop the steal stuff that didn't feel relevant to people's lives and made it much more difficult for Republicans to message on issues in the way that Glenn Youngkin did. And it made it like impossible. Like you can't be Glenn Youngkin if you're also a little Doug Mastriano and you're a little stop this deal,

because we're suburban voters are interested in what you say about like, you know, not affecting children and taking like what DeSantis has tried to do in Florida schools with mixed results. That stuff I think is appealing to normie parents. But I think they're not interested if you're selling it with stop the steal packaging or like fringe MAGA packaging. I think that's where it and abortion makes that tough, too. Like abortion brings it down, like would bring a Glenn Youngkin down. That's where people are just like, hold on. I'm either not voting. I'm going to vote for a Democrat because I'm going to go vote for John Fetterman. I'm going to go vote for someone else because that's a little too far.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, there's just it's I think the strongest polling issue for Republicans on trans issues is around this question of like women's sports. Right. Where you have a majority who say, no, I think it, you know, whatever, however you feel about that issue. But also, you know, usually it's Democrats that will fixate on these issues that are really side periphery issues. So now you have Republican legislatures passing whole laws in their states that apply to like literally one kid in the whole state, you know? And so, okay, you are technically winning on the issue

in terms of public sentiment, but are swing voters voting on this issue? Like how relevant are they feeling it to be to their lives? So even on the strongest issue, I think it's a losing proposition. I think we saw that in 2022. And then when you expand it to like a freak out over anything that has anything to do with gay people, it seems to me you are dramatically on the wrong side of that issue. And that's increasingly where this has gone. It's so similar to the conversation we had about Ted Cruz's Uganda tweet being controversial with people like Jenna Ellis, specifically because I think that's the, it's an impossible balance for Republicans to strike, for them to be normie, sort of anti-woke enough to bring in the normie, like, young voters without then also being for, like, a six-week abortion ban and, you know,

like you said, like, getting into transitions for adults, etc. So, like, I do think some of this stuff appeals to swing voters, but you have to bring them in with other things. It can't be this paired with stop this deal, paired with six week abortion bans in the way that Republicans have been going about it, because that is it is toxic. It's the anti-woke mind virus. That's what I said in that segment. And that's really what it is. So just like with people who are woke, the American public is going to be on board with you like, hey, everybody should be equal and treated equal under the law. And like, let's have civil rights. And people are like, yes, we're on board with that. And then when it's like, let's, you know, cancel and censor and have these like

authoritarian tactics in service of it, or let's go really far and like, you know, cancel you if you're even like vaguely say the wrong thing on an issue that is difficult. People are like, no, we're not on board with that. And it's sort of a similar thing that has happened on the right in terms of, you know, people may have been with them on step one of this progression. But by the time you get to step 100 today, you've lost them. Yeah, just as we wrap up, it reminds me of what Camille Paglia said in I think it was 2017. She had a really interesting point, which is to the to the question of overreach, like the Obama administration. Obama finally comes out in support of gay marriage. Biden does it first, which never forget that was hilarious. But he

feels like he has the wind at his back. And his Department of Education overreaches with the authoritarian tactic of sending a dear colleague letter that totally changed and overstepped every school's ability to sort of work out these issues on their own and said sex and gender identity had to be conflated in Title IX, which led to a lot of the sports backlash. And Polly has said, she was like, that's when I knew Hillary Clinton was going to lose, when that became a campaign issue. And that is before I think we saw Republicans take some of the stuff and run with it in the way they have by 2023. And so the overreach on Democrats, Republicans are not being careful enough to prevent overreach when they're pushing back on the Dem overreach,

which is sort of interesting because the Dem overreach is exactly what they're reacting to. Right. It's a vicious cycle. Everybody gets captured by their fringe, way-too-online base. That's true. I think that's where we are. The scientific consensus.

Strong scientific consensus. The overwhelming, near-unanimous scientific consensus. What happened here? This is the problem with the consensus. The consensus. But what should matter. They don't matter. What matters is the consensus.

What is it with our seemingly blind obsession with scientific consensus? And is it a good thing? Hand washing. It's just about the first thing we hear from doctors nowadays as one of, if not the best way to remove germs, avoid getting sick, and prevent the spread of germs to others. But as some of you might already know, handwashing was not always scientific consensus. In medicine in particular, it's very surprising that there was so much resistance to the idea of hand washing. In the mid-19th century, Ignace Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, was working in a Vienna hospital where he observed a situation where healthy women would go into the hospital to have a baby

and almost one out of every five died from childbed fever, compared to a significantly lower mortality rate in the adjacent midwife-led ward. Intrigued by this disparity, Semmelweis noticed that doctors and medical students often went from performing autopsies in one part of the hospital to delivering babies in the ward next door without washing their hands. He hypothesized that hand washing could prevent the transmission of harmful germs, and when he implemented a strict hand washing policy among doctors and physicians at his hospital, And the members of the medical community were extremely grateful for the contributions of Dr. Semmelweis.

And we all know now to wash our hands is what I wish I could say, but that's not how this story ends. You know, if you try to go against authority and convention, you can run into and make some enemies. And enemies he made. The medical community, doctors, felt that their professional status was being challenged, undermined, and instead of instituting changes, they launched a full-scale smear campaign against Semmelweis, spreading false rumors about his credibility and sanity until he was discredited and ultimately exiled from his profession entirely.

And after a nervous breakdown in 1865, he was committed to an asylum where he died a pariah at the age of 47. I tell this story not as an attack against the medical community as a whole, or to say that contrarian viewpoints are always more valid than the scientific consensus, but rather to highlight the alarming parallels and the flawed ways in which I think the modern have to start by talking about the series of social experiments conducted by psychologist Solomon Ash in the 1950s, in which a volunteer is told that he's taking part in a visual perception test. But what he doesn't know is that the experiment is actually about group conformity and that the other participants are all actors. The experiment you will be taking part in today involves the perception of line length. Your task will be simply to look at the line here on the left and indicate which of the three lines

on the right is equal to it in length. The actors have all been told to match the wrong lines and the volunteer, the real subject, will be monitored to see if he gives the correct answer or if he goes along with the opinion of the group and gives the wrong answer. Three. Three. Three. Three.

Three. Over the course of the trials, on average, about one-third of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials, and about 75% of participants conformed at least once. The ASH experiment has been repeated many times, and the results have been supported again and again. We will conform to the group, again, we're very social creatures. We're very much aware of what the people around us think.

We want to be liked. We don't want to be seen to rock the boat. So we will go along with the group, even if we don't believe what people are saying. I don't know what I would have done. I really like to say that I'd be that rogue maverick, but I don't know. I'm human after all. But I imagine a scenario where each of those participants are scientists and the three lines represent a possible result of a research study meant to validate or invalidate the efficacy of, say, a new drug, except this time around, everyone has been paid and strongly incentivized to pick a specific line. That's how modern science, specifically a lot of pharmaceutical research trials, arrives at consensus. Vinay Prasad, a practicing hematologist, oncologist, and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and friend of the show, talks about the perverse incentives that have infected the scientific community.

The problem isn't that we don't know what are the right ways to answer the questions. We do know the right ways, but the system has flawed incentives, which is that the more you can get people to believe your thing is helping people, the more you can make money. The National Institutes of Health, the NIH, is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. Its purported mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability. But to Prasad's point, it was revealed by Adam Andrzejewski of

Open the Books, a public watchdog group, that NIH leadership and 2,400 of its scientists have collected $1.4 billion worth of secret third-party royalties from pharmaceutical companies and other for-profit enterprises over the past 12 years. Every single one of those individual third-party royalty payments has the appearance of a conflict of interest. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the highest paid federal bureaucrat, received 23 royalty payments over that period of time.

Francis Collins, NIH director from 2009 to 2021, received 14 payments. Clifford Lane, Fauci's deputy at the NIAID, received eight payments. But as it currently stands, the NIH has defied the Federal Freedom of Information Act law, so we actually don't know who the royalty payments are from and how much was paid. You've been asking you and you refuse to answer whether anybody on the vaccine committees gets royalties from the pharmaceutical companies. I asked you last time and what was your response? We don't have to tell you. We've demanded them through Freedom of Information Act. And what have you said? We're not going to tell

you. Andrzejewski calls it a conflict of interest. Rand Paul implied pretty much outright corruption. I would call it a crime. Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, Comirity, was developed from technology licensed from the NIH, which means that NIH researchers who supposedly work on behalf of the people in search of scientific truth can actually personally profit from the sale of that product. NIH is receiving tens of millions of dollars from Pfizer on those royalty payments. Perhaps not coincidentally, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, a former Harvard Medical School professor warned that a careful reading of the protocols used in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine trials revealed that the trials were designed to succeed from the start, which would likely overstate their effectiveness, and that these protocols seem designed to get a drug on the market sooner rather than later on a timeline arguably based more on politics than public health. In 2022, Pfizer generated nearly $38 billion in revenue from the sale of

its COVID-19 vaccine, which is almost 40% of the company's total revenue. And now if we can try to set aside the vaccine culture wars for a second, I hope you can see the dangers here. Foundationally, through the ASH experiments, we understand the human desire to socially conform, but layered on top of that, we have also legalized and legitimized a system which consensus is established and enforced in the scientific community through a series of lucrative yet secret financial arrangements completely hidden from the public. And if that doesn't do it, there are now laws on the books that actually forbids doctors to share information that is, quote, contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus, a real law that was signed by Governor Newsom in California and went into effect January 1st of this year. So what is the solution?

We've demanded them through Freedom of Information Act. And what have you said? We're not going to tell you. But I tell you this, when we get in charge, we're going to change the rules and you will have to divulge where you get your royalties from, from what companies. And if anybody on the committee has a conflict of interest, we're going to learn about it. I promise you that. To me, transparency in public health should be a bipartisan issue. So I challenge Senator Rand Paul and his colleagues, if you are willing to engage in political theater with Dr. Fauci,

back it up with action, more than just a sternly worded letter. No, I'm talking about actual legislative change, demanding transparency of payments between the public and private sector and independence between public-serving scientists and profit-maximizing corporations. If not, the only possible outcome is a continued erosion in public trust and confidence in what they are calling scientific consensus, which according to Pew Research has dropped precipitously since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. Just a few weeks ago, President Joe Biden announced his new pick to head the NIH, Dr.

Monica Bertagnoli. And perhaps not surprising at this point, according to disclosures filed with Open Payments, she received $247 million in research funding from Pfizer from 2016 to 2021, which should raise major red flags about whether she would be able to serve the public independently. So honestly, my problem is not with science or the scientific method or even the value of scientific consensus. My problem is with the degree in which I see scientific consensus being corrupted by opaque financial arrangements hidden from the public

and then enforced through laws and statutes that forbids doctors and scientists from challenging consensus. So I'd implore everyone to seriously consider the long-term dangers presented by a scientific consensus that has seemingly been bought and paid for. My name is James Lee. Thank you for watching Breaking Points Beyond the Headlines. What are your thoughts and opinions? Please share in the comments below.

Also, if you are curious and want other stories like this, please check out my YouTube channel, 5149 with James Lee. The link will be in the description below. Also, if you are curious and want other stories like this, please check out my YouTube channel, 5149 with James Lee. The link will be in the description below. Of course, keep on tuning into Breaking Points, and thank you for your time today. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast,

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