ell, I saw a comment on Locals just now. There's somebody doing this who uses a cup and a saucer. Oh, a mug's not good enough for you? You got your cup and your saucer? All right, all right, all right. Well, someday maybe the rest of us will come up to your level. Saucers. Just imagine that someday, someday I will have a saucer.

Well, let's talk about the news. I would like to publicly congratulate Brian Stelter. As you know, he's leaving his position at CNN on Reliable Sources. I guess the ratings were not that good. But I would like to congratulate Brian Stelter for being the only person to ever leave CNN for a non-penis-related reason. So that feels like a step in the right direction.

Do you remember a story? It wasn't that long ago about this. There was a CEO named Dan Price, and he had decided that the lowest-paid person in his company would get a minimum of seventy thousand dollars. And so when he made that change, people said, "My God, you are amazing. You're amazing." And so for a long time he was hailed as a hero. But there seems to be a string of sexual assault charges against him.

Let me see if I can predict that that was going to happen. Famous, young, unusually good-looking CEO. I think he's single. What do you think is going to happen when a young, good-looking, powerful guy gets a lot of attention? I don't know. I feel like some sexual impropriety accusations are going to come out of that situation.

But what I say about him, Dan Price — and I don't mean this to be too cutting or too cruel — but Dan Price, you're no Brian Stelter. You're no Brian Stelter. Because he managed to go through an entire CNN career without any accusations of sexual impropriety. Now that could be either good or bad depending on your point of view, but let's say that it's good that he didn't do it.

I'm going to say this again because no matter how many times I say it, it can't be heard. I love this category of communication, sort of a little hobby of mine: things that can be said but they can't be heard. What would be an example of something you could say but nobody can hear? Lots of things. It's basically everything that doesn't agree with your opinion. I can say it all day long but you're not really going to hear it. It's going to change on the way in.

And here's one of those. The people on the left and the people on the right don't have much of a problem with each other. It's just the news. It's just the news. When I say "just," let's say 95 percent of it is the news telling you that you're mad at the other side and then highlighting the people who get the best zingers in on the other side and highlighting the people who are getting the best zingers from their own side.

When was the last time you had an actual unhealthy experience with just a regular person? And if you did, was the reason that you had an unpleasant experience because you could tell that that person had been hypnotized by the fake news? If you show me somebody who doesn't follow any news whatsoever — and I don't care what their political leaning is, I don't care how left they are — show me some hippie who doesn't own a television and hasn't watched the news in 20 years and I'll show you somebody I can get along with great. No problem at all.

You put me with a bunch of hippies, I love them. I love them. And they would probably like me too. We would have nothing to fight about. Then take the same group of people, roughly speaking, but they've been watching CNN and MSNBC for the last five years. I can't even be in the room with them.

So is there something wrong with the people or is there something wrong with the media? It's obvious. It's obviously the media. But the media is also in control of telling you what the problem is. So the people who are in control of telling you what the problem is are the problem. And that's our problem.

If the people who were causing the most problems would also point to themselves — which by the way sometimes they do, and Megyn Kelly does it all the time and Megyn Kelly is part of the news industry — but it will tell you right away that the news is part of the problem. So you can say it all day long but people don't hear it. What they hear is "my team good, other team bad." That's all they hear.

If you could convince people that the real problem was their believing of fake news, because that's mostly the problem — most of the problem is believing fake news. Here's what we need. We don't need fact checkers. I mean it's helpful. I don't mind having them, you know, as long as there's some on both sides and you can see both arguments. What we need is logic fixers.

Let me give you an example. Today yet again in the news there's a story that vitamin D seems to be highly correlated with good outcomes for people who have COVID. If you've got a low vitamin D level and you go into the hospital with COVID, it's probably grim. But if you had high vitamin D and you get COVID, even if you're hospitalized, it probably won't be that bad.

So what did most of you conclude? Do you remember in, I don't know, it was probably early in — I don't know what month it is, maybe some of you know what month in 2022, in the spring — did I say, "Hey, it looks like all the places that are having a bad time with COVID are coincidentally where they have low vitamin D"? Do you remember me saying that? I said, "Is it my imagination? All the people in all the places seems to be highly correlated with low vitamin D, right?"

But I wanted to believe that. How much do you think I want to believe that the very first thing I said — I think it was March, I said the first in May I did a long thread but I think it was way earlier that I noticed the correlation. If somebody has either a date on that I'd really like to know. But all right, consider my situation. I'm a public figure and I make predictions and assertions about reality. Don't you think I want to be right about that? Like how much do I want to be right that vitamin D was really the magic bullet all along? Right, because that would make me look smart. It would make me look smart. So I want that to be true.

But here's the problem. Every time a new study comes out they show correlation and they don't show causation. They suggest that the argument for causation is getting stronger but it isn't, because it's just more observational studies. It doesn't matter how many you do because the problem is that people who have poor health in general have low vitamin D. So if you notice that all the people with low vitamin D are dying, it's either telling you that vitamin D makes the difference or it's telling you that people in poor health often have low vitamin D. It doesn't mean it's the reason the people are having bad outcomes.

Now we do know that vitamin D is essential for your health. I think we know that. I mean I doubt that's going to change. So certainly vitamin D is helpful. We just don't know if these big numbers are really because of vitamin D or is just