All right, so many things. Let's start with the BuzzFeed story that President Trump asked Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about their plans for building a Trump Tower in Russia. Russia, I say.

Now here is the context. Number one, BuzzFeed is not a credible source. That could be just the end of the story, right? I could just say a source which we know is not credible has a story. Should I even tell you the story? Would it even matter once I've said it's not a credible source and it's anonymous sources? Hey, it's anonymous sources. So the first thing you need to know about it is that it doesn't have any credibility.

The second thing you need to know about it is that they're leaving out, when I've been watching the reporting on it this morning, and I think both sides are leaving out the most important point. Here's the most important point about that story that's being left out. Now remember, the whole narrative is that maybe Russia had something on Trump and that they were working together and they were colluding and maybe Trump was trying to make some money off this being president deal.

But this story, they're leaving out the biggest question, which is, is there any question that this project would have gone forward had the president, actually had the candidate Trump, been elected president? Obviously no. Can you in any of your greatest imaginary powers, if you put your full powers of imagination on this, can you imagine that had the president become elected, as he did, that they would have gone ahead with building a Trump Tower in Russia? There's not even the slightest chance of that.

So the big part of the context is missing. Is that this was always about what if I don't get elected? Now if he doesn't get elected, he has no power whatsoever. And that's the scenario in which a Russian project makes sense. Who's saying that? If you don't tell your viewers, hey, here's the most important thing you need to know, is that this was the backup plan. This is the Trump Tower plan that only could have gone forward if he had no power to do anything that Russia wanted. He was just a business person who lost an election and obviously wouldn't be running again at his age probably.

So if you leave that out of the story, what the hell do you have? Oh, you have this BuzzFeed non-credible story, which would also suggest that there's somebody associated with the Mueller investigation who's leaking. Maybe everything else is leaked, but why would this be the one thing that's leaking?

And let me ask you this. If BuzzFeed has a source that can tell them the details of what Cohen and Trump allegedly said, and by the way it's just going to come down to he said she said, even if the reporting is accurate in the sense that Cohen claims this has happened, this still doesn't mean anything. It doesn't have any legal jeopardy. There's no real risk here except a PR one of course.

So if BuzzFeed has a source this good that they're getting that level of detail about a top secret Mueller investigation, wouldn't BuzzFeed also know by now, with this excellent source, wouldn't they know by now if Mueller has anything on Trump? Think about it. Could BuzzFeed even do this story and have a real source that knows this level of detail about what conversation happened and yet not know that Mueller does or does not have something powerful on Trump himself?

I think the BuzzFeed story you have to see it as strong evidence, it's not proof but strong evidence, that Mueller doesn't have anything on him that would have a legal or serious implication.

All right, so that's the first thing. We of course have to talk about President Trump canceling Nancy Pelosi's flight. But I feel like it happened yesterday after I Periscoped and so much has been said about it I feel like I'd just be retreading what other people said. I will simply say that the Democrats' attack that it's childish, I don't know that that's so good of an attack because it kind of highlights that Pelosi was being childish with canceling, or I guess postponing, the State of the Union. So I don't think you're really on strong ground if you say what she did was perfectly reasonable and what he did was childish.

To me it seems like they very cleverly just matched her level of childishness, which you kind of have to do because you have to give that mutually assured destruction thing. Where if you go off script, meaning you do something that's nonstandard politics, we're going to go off script as much as you want to go off script.

One of the superpowers that Trump always employs and is very powerful, it's powerful persuasion, is to essentially frame him as the person who does this: that however far off the path you're willing to go, he's going to go with you there. There's no point at which you can count on the president to stay in the channel. That's his superpower.

So if Pelosi says, ah, I think you'll stay in the channel, I'm going to go over here a little bit out of bounds and see if I can attack him out of bounds with this postponing the State of the Union, and what does Trump do? He goes, you want to play out of bounds? I love out of bounds. I live out of bounds. Out of bounds is my home court. Let's go out of bounds. How's your flight, Nancy?

So it feels like the type of attack, when I say attack I mean political attack, by postponing the State of the Union, it feels like the sort of thing that maybe they thought was a good idea when they tried it but it can't possibly work with this particular president because he's just going to go further out of bounds than you. And you can rely on that, right? That's sort of his brand.

So I don't think there's anything you can say about the canceled flight except that it was hilarious. It totally matched her childishness. He didn't go first, which would have felt different really. He didn't go first. And plus, as I mentioned yesterday, it opens up the possibility that they've released the Kraken. And now if Trump doesn't have to do a State of the Union in front of this boring crowd sitting on their hands, or at least half of them, he can maybe do something more interesting. Or he can just do it later. So he has more options now than he had before and some of them are better than the original options.

CNN ran a very negative article on Beto O'Rourke today on their website. What does that mean? Because remember CNN gets to decide whose article runs and who doesn't. I don't know if they assign articles in every case. Sometimes they probably do, or suggest articles. But in any case CNN gets to decide what's on their site and what isn't. And they have decided that a very negative article about Beto, saying that he's only getting this much attention because he's a white male, boom.

So CNN is clearly trying to clear the field for someone. Now if I had to guess, probably Kamala Harris. So if you see CNN start to pick off the weaker players in the field, or more important the stronger players, to get, you know, maybe they don't need to pick off the weak ones, right, but they probably need to pick off the ones that are in the hunt, the people who are in the top five. So you should expect to see a negative Bernie article, a negative Biden article, a negative Beto article. We've seen a negative article about Tulsi Gabbard. And so every time you see a negative article about another Democrat you should know that whoever is in charge of our thinking is eliminating these choices so that we don't have to consider them all.

There was a Wall Street Journal article by Kimberly Strassel saying that Bruce Ohr, FBI agent Bruce Ohr, did tell the FBI that the so-called dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and that it was not necessarily reliable because it came from an unreliable source and had not been vetted. It's the sort of story when I see it and I think to myself, wait, is that new? Is that new news? Right? So somebody beat me to it. It's old news and this whole thing is starting to look like Groundhog Day. Every new story feels like we've already heard it even if there's something new. It just feels like the same story over and over again.

And in this case it seems to me the way reality is shaping up here as we're learning more and more is that the FBI started an investigation without having strong evidence. Now the people on the right are saying there it is, there's proof that the FBI is crooked and there's a deep state because they started an investigation without solid evidence. I don't feel like that's a rational attack. Here's why. And it's the concept of expected value.

Expected value, do you know how that's calculated in economics and business? There's a thing called expected value where you say if there's a 1% chance that this decision will cost us a trillion dollars, then the value of the decision or the risk is 1% times a trillion. If there's a 10% chance you will earn $100 with this investment, the expected value is 10% times 100 or $10, right? So if you have lots of decisions, that's how you decide which ones to go with. You multiply the odds of it happening times the dollar amount if it happens, whether it's plus or minus. You still do the calculation.

Now let's say the FBI has two different potential cases. One of the potential cases is that there's suspicion that somebody is committing some kind of a normal federal crime across state lines and somebody brings them information which is not credible. So the crime is not that big, the alleged crime, and the information that it happened is not that credible. The FBI might say, all right, we don't really have anything here. If you could bring me something that's credible then maybe we'll open an investigation because there's not much to gain with this small crime. We're not going to put a ton of resources on something that doesn't even have solid evidence.

But suppose you're talking about an allegation that the president of the United States is a Russian mole. What's that worth if it's true? Trillions, your life, the future of the planet, the nature of the country. It's the biggest possible potential problem. When they had this information, which they knew came from the Clinton campaign and they knew it was not credible, but there was a lot of it. There was a lot of it and it came through somebody they knew, it came through somebody they'd worked with before who had not lied to them before. Now that's not credible information still, even though the person who brought it they thought was credible. They knew who he was working for and therefore it was not credible.

But if there's any chance that this claim is true, it's an enormous cost. So if you're the FBI and your job is to do your job to protect the country and somebody brings you a very small chance that something very big might be happening, do you open an investigation and at least see if you can find that there is some evidence? And I think that's defensible. Meaning that if the FBI's explanation of all this is yeah, we did not have credible information but this isn't like any other case because the stakes were so high and it was so important to get an answer soon, you couldn't wait. If any of this was true you just couldn't wait. That's pretty reasonable to me.

All right, and I know you hate this when I act reasonable because I know most of you have an opinion and it's sort of solid. But if you're telling me the FBI looked into it because it was a gigantic potential risk and the evidence was terrible but you just sort of got to look into it, that's not crazy and it's not not doing your job.

And yeah, I see somebody's mentioning the FISA thing and the FISA thing maybe didn't have all the information in it, etc. But keep in mind if the scenario is that the FBI thought there might actually be something to this then the rest is paperwork, right? So the entire claim rests mostly on intention.

Somebody says you're missing it or taking it out of context. You can give me a reason. Tell me what I'm missing and or what context I left out. Let me give you here's the context that I think addresses your context. If you believe that something is right and you're doing the right thing then everything you do feels right to you. I mean it's basic confirmation bias. So if you're saying well what about this other thing and what about this text they found, what about these other things, keep in mind that once you've decided that there's a deep state you will of course see lots of evidence of it. If you had decided there's not a deep state you would of course see lots of evidence that you were right.

So the fact that you say wait you have to look at all the things, that's not a solid thinking because it wouldn't matter what big complicated thing you're looking at, whether it's climate change or Russiagate or anything in politics. Whatever opinion you have is going to be surrounded with confirmation bias. In other words if you're totally wrong your opinion will be mostly confirmation bias. And if you're totally right, in other words you have the right theory, you might have the right theory and you're still surrounded by confirmation bias even though you're right. So there might be one right thing and all the rest of the evidence you say see, see, look at all this other evidence, probably confirmation bias because that's the way the brain is wired.

All right, enough on that.