00:00:00.000out my window from my office. What you should be seeing, instead of this whiteout conditions,
00:00:07.640you should be seeing the town and a ridgeline and some hills, but instead you see nothing but smoke.
00:00:18.600That's right, nothing but smoke. Let me close the blinds in here and that's what happens if I go
00:00:27.020outside. Now, it's 110 degrees out there today, or it will be, same as yesterday. The air quality
00:00:34.620is unbreathable and if I stay inside, I'm going to get the COVID. Everything's great, everything's
00:00:48.220great. If you don't mind, 110 degrees, rolling blackouts, a little bit of COVID, and of course
00:00:58.000you can't breathe the air and your house might burn down. But other than that, it's looking good.
00:01:06.060So if I could, I hate to start out all negative, so let me put a positive spin on this. As I just
00:01:12.420tweeted, there are really only two places in California that are dangerous. I don't think
00:01:18.580you can say that about a lot of places, but in the entire state of California, only two dangerous
00:01:24.880places. Those two places are indoors and outdoors. If you can stay away from either being indoors
00:01:34.020or outdoors, you'll be safe in California. And the other thing that'll make you safe is the
00:01:41.060simultaneous sip and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein,
00:01:44.480a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee
00:01:50.640and join you now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine to the end of the day. The thing
00:01:55.960that makes everything better, except maybe California. It's called the simultaneous sip and
00:02:01.660happens to go. Yeah, I can feel the temperatures starting to ease. There's a low pressure system
00:02:12.200coming in from the east. Yeah, I think things are getting better. Somebody says, it sounds awful.
00:02:19.180Why do you stay? Well, have you ever been anywhere else? I don't like to brag, but it is, it is just
00:02:31.940the truth. I think this is just objective, objectively speaking. If you like good weather and you like
00:02:38.800other stuff, California used to be like way up here compared to the second best place. If you like
00:02:47.680weather and, you know, a fairly open society kind of situation, lots of resources. But that was then.
00:02:57.360Now, I would say that that gap between California as a place to live and the second best place,
00:03:05.460it's a lot, a lot of a gap got closed, but it's still just marginally better than a lot of other
00:03:13.940places. Because if you move out of California, you might have to experience a thing called winter
00:03:19.660or a thing called bugs. We've got bugs, but not many of them. Have you ever been in Florida during
00:03:31.000the summer? It's a little muggy, a little bit muggy. They got some bugs. We don't have that.
00:03:36.900So, you can take 40% off of the goodness of living in California, and I think that's kind
00:03:45.780of where we're at. I would say that California is approximately 40% worse, all things considered
00:03:53.660from taxes to forest fires and everything else. Probably 40% worse than it used to be, and
00:04:02.040still competitive. That's just the truth. But it won't be that way much longer. Here's an
00:04:11.420interesting factoid, a dog that's not barking. Do you remember how often I was on the news or
00:04:18.440news-related channels in 2016? It was quite a bit. In 2016, I had a contrarian view that Trump would
00:04:28.940win. Many of you had the same view, but among the people who actually said things out loud in public,
00:04:35.640I was in the group that were kind of rare because I was saying he's definitely going to win.
00:04:42.060Now, I'm still the same person. I might be even arguably more interesting now because I've spent
00:04:50.640enough time talking about politics that I'm less of a freak show and maybe have something to say.
00:04:56.240I have no interest from any of the news outlets except for, you know, I'll get a Breitbart radio or
00:05:06.400Breitbart actually still has interest and Fox will occasionally have me on. But absolutely nobody
00:05:14.780on the left is interested. Just complete lack of interest. And it might be because of what I would say.
00:05:23.160They don't want their, I don't think they want their audience who's sort of locked into their
00:05:29.540little news silo to hear anybody from the other silo who has anything to say. So it's interesting to me
00:05:38.520that there's no interest in me. Now that I've been proven right more than wrong, you think there would
00:05:45.400be more interest, don't you? All right, let's check in on the Biden riots. Hashtag Biden riots.
00:05:53.160That hashtag is doing pretty well, by the way. Still, still zooming. And I guess we had some big
00:05:59.420games in Rochester and Portland. If you have not yet seen any of the humorous videos from not last
00:06:07.860night, but the night before, of the Antifa guy or Black Lives Matter, I can't tell, who got his feet
00:06:15.700caught on fire in a Molotov cocktail situation of his own doing, I guess, or somebody else's. And he started
00:06:23.560doing what looked like a funny dance to put it out. It wasn't funny if it was you who had their feet on
00:06:29.500fire. But if you're just watching it, it was kind of funny. I hate to admit that. It doesn't speak
00:06:38.860well of me, does it? But you're in the same boat. You laughed when you saw it. I can see you. I can see
00:06:47.340you. You're smiling right now. You know that was funny. Tragic. Well, funny. And it's been put to
00:06:57.520music by a number of clever people. If you haven't heard all of the different musical tracks, some of them
00:07:06.020are really good. And I think they were all funny. But I want to point this out as a humor tip, so that you'll
00:07:13.180be smarter after you're done with this Periscope on how to write humor. Now, some people put to music songs that
00:07:23.000had fire in the lyrics. Like, was it Johnny Cash, who has a song called Ring of Fire? So it's very
00:07:32.760funny to hear Johnny Cash singing, you know, ring of fire, and seeing the guy dancing with his feet on fire.
00:07:39.240But that was not, and then there was also a Michael Jackson, a thriller, where they, they play the guy with the, the, the feet on fire. They play it in reverse. So it looks like he's moonwalking, moonwalking with flaming feet. And they play that to Michael Jackson's, I think it's Thriller. It was Thriller.
00:08:06.240Or smooth criminal or something. I don't know. It was one of those. So that was pretty funny. But the funniest one by far was Footloose.
00:08:16.520If you haven't seen the one, you should Google it. Just, you know, Google Antifa and Footloose and feet on fire, it'll probably come up.
00:08:25.400And what's funny about Footloose is that the, the mood and tone of the song Footloose is, is happy and free. And it's sort of like a celebration of life and freedom and, and all that.
00:08:41.940And it's, it's, it's being put to, put to a guy whose feet are on fire.
00:08:49.020So here's your, here's your humor lesson of the day.
00:08:53.600Humor, or the, the laugh reflex, happens when your brain can't process two things that don't fit together.
00:09:02.500So if you can create a joke where you've put two things together that sort of fit in a, in a pseudo language, pseudo logic way, but your brain knows they don't go together, that your brain will just laugh because it's two things that don't belong together.
00:09:18.660Now, once you see that rule, it becomes a lot easier to, to write humor or to know that you've written it correctly.
00:09:25.540Because anytime you can make two things that don't fit together, fit together with a pseudo logic, people get that reflex and go, ah, and they laugh at it.
00:09:37.240So listening to the happy Footloose song while the guy's dancing with his legs on fire, it shouldn't, it shouldn't be funny, but it is.
00:09:48.660All right, speaking of funny, a man in France, I think this was on the Fox News site or CNN, I can't remember which one, but a man in France was injured Friday after he blew up part of his home while trying to kill a fly with an electric swatter.
00:10:08.140Again, tragic. There's nothing funny about somebody blowing up their home unless they did it by using an electric fly swatter.
00:10:19.160So the man was, the man was in his 80s, he was about to eat dinner and he saw this fly, so he took out his electric fly swatter.
00:10:29.360I don't know what makes it electric, I guess it shocks the fly.
00:10:32.880You would think that hitting the fly with a fly swatter would do enough, but no, he's got to add like an electric shocker to his fly swatter to really get the job done.
00:10:41.780But he was unaware that a gas canister was leaking from the home, so as soon as he swatted the fly, his house blew up, which is not funny.
00:10:55.640I'm laughing at a different joke that I thought of at the same time.
00:11:00.760I don't know what's wrong with you. If you're laughing at this joke, this is a tragedy.
00:11:05.340I think he was uninjured. I don't know how he blew up half of his home and was uninjured, but that's the good news.
00:11:12.300All right. So while you were sleeping, the COVID-19 epidemic was solved.
00:11:21.440What? You don't believe it? No, it was. It's all solved now.
00:11:27.100So I might have a little bit of hyperbole in that statement, just a little bit, but listen to my evidence.
00:11:33.940So yesterday or this morning, I guess we saw the result of a randomized clinical trial, also known as the good stuff.
00:11:44.680We're not talking about observational study where you just look at things that already happened.
00:11:50.200We're talking about randomized, where they did a controlled experiment where they randomly created two groups of people who were hospitalized but not yet in the ICU, and they gave them vitamin D.
00:12:06.360Now, they also had hydroxychloroquine and zinc, which was part of their standard treatment for all of them.
00:12:12.960So everybody who got treated was already on hydroxychloroquine and zinc.
00:12:18.620Where is this, you might ask? Not the United States, surely.
00:14:18.640It is enough to get a statistically meaningful result, especially when the result is so different.
00:14:26.260If the result had been closer, and you could just say, well, mathematically, there's a difference, but it's only 76 people, that's when you'd say, ah, it's only 76 people.
00:14:59.700So, it is not 100% confirmed, but, and also there were some questions about whether the two randomized groups were truly as random as they could have been,
00:15:15.620because there were a few more obese people in the group that didn't get the D3.
00:15:20.180So, but even if you were to correct for all of those differences, it's still an overwhelming advantage that was shown in the study, if it holds to be true.
00:15:32.280Now, at the same time, and by coincidence, there was another study, an observational study.
00:15:40.160Now, the observational study is not the good kind, so it's not like the first kind I talked about, which is the gold standard kind,
00:15:47.820just needed more people. That's, that's its main problem.
00:15:53.100But the observational study, an Israeli group did this, and they also found a strong, strong correlation between how well people handle the COVID and how much vitamin D they have in them.
00:16:09.700So, it found that if you had vitamin D levels that were near normal, you did well.