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Mark Wulfe:
From The Aasgaard Company Studios in beautiful Wichita Falls, Texas... From the finest mind in the modern fitness industry... The one true voice in the strength and conditioning profession... The most important podcasts on the internet.... Ladies and gentlemen! Starting Strength Radio.

Mark Rippetoe:
Welcome to Starting Strength Radio. It's Friday. It's not Saturday. It's not Monday. It's not Tuesday. Wednesday, Thursday. It is Friday. And Friday is the day that Starting Strength Radio brings you the cutting edge in all matters strength training, social, sexual, alcoholic, and everything else of any interest whatsoever.

Mark Rippetoe:
And we are here today with our friend Matt Briggs. William M Briggs is the statistician of the stars. Those of you that are on the internet have seen him and read his material with interest because the man is good at this. He is an excellent explainer. And he's... A lot of people realize this and he's linked to from all over the internet. And we're happy that he is with us today.

Mark Rippetoe:
Briggs, thank you for being here.

William M Briggs:
Oh, thanks for having me.

Mark Rippetoe:
We are going to talk about covid-19 today in the presence of an expert on the statistics. The actual data, the actual data, not the bullshit that you have been delivered on the broadcast networks and over most of the internet. We're going to talk about the actual data and the actual data tells a completely different story than you are familiar with.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it is extremely important that you understand this because your actions should be governed by the logic and analysis. And without the data, you cannot perform the analysis, even if you are logical. The data are extremely crucial. The data have been withheld from you because in my opinion, there is an agenda in operation here and this will, of course, get us defunded from YouTube for this episode won't it?

[off-camera]:
Probably.

Mark Rippetoe:
Probably will. Hey, we got all kind of money. We got lots and lots of money. So we don't the...we don't need it. But I wish they'd leave it up so people would would learn.

[off-camera]:
They'll leave it up, we just won't get paid for it.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, well, that's fine. As long as I leave it up it's fine with me.

Mark Rippetoe:
Before we get started... You guys. Get this, OK. This is Briggs' new book written in association with Douglas Axe and Jay Richards. The Price of Panic. It is on Amazon right now. And a lot of the stuff we're going to talk about today is written down for you here in the book. And my advice to you is to place an order for it right now and have it with you and read it and let all this stuff sink in because it's terribly critical that you deprogram yourself.

Mark Rippetoe:
Briggs, what exactly the hell is happening around us? Because it's difficult to organize. It's difficult for a logical person. A person likes for things to fit into a logical framework to to look at what is going on around us right now and not go completely insane because of the irrationality of every single action that has been taken by every level of government at every step of this process that started back in February to right this minute. It doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it just it's just I know you're under as much stress as everybody else is, you know, you get up every day and you go outside and you see people riding down the street by themselves with a mask on on a motorcycle. You see people in cars by themselves with a mask on. You see all of this insane, illogical, irrational shit taking place. And it just, you know, it just challenges your ability to to to remain, you know, out of jail. What what the hell is happening here?

William M Briggs:
You see people running, jogging on the East River - the East River is a very popular thing to jog on. It's a sunny, beautiful, warm day. These people are young, 30s, fit, seemingly, and they got masks On. In the heat. Jogging. It's just it's beyond belief. And they see someone like me coming because I'm not going to wear a mask.

Mark Rippetoe:
I'm not going to wear one. I don't own one.

William M Briggs:
Because they don't want to be infected. They're sure the air is permeated.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's like this. Yes. They they think that that the virus is wafting through the air like smoke.

William M Briggs:
That's it. That's exactly what it is. It's out in New York City at the beginning of this April when it was at its peak and people were dying like they do every year of flu and other seasonal diseases, mainly pneumonia. Masks weren't that big a deal. People were wearing them, but not very many. Now, now...

Mark Rippetoe:
Now that it's over.

William M Briggs:
Dropped to zero, almost zero. And the entire state. Ninety five percent or more are wearing masks.

William M Briggs:
Now, it's true. The godmother, the governor of New York, has mandated their use in buildings and all this kind of thing. But there's no reason to be doing this when you're sitting... Like you say, they're driving down the street in a motorcycle, they're driving in their car. They got the windows up and they're wearing a mask. They're walking on a beautiful sunny... The air...

William M Briggs:
Listen, the air is germicidal. Healthy, fresh air is going to kill germs. The sun kills germs.

Mark Rippetoe:
UV kills germs.

William M Briggs:
Listen... Let me ask every... I want to we're going to probably talk about this many times. I want to ask all your listeners. They already know the answer and you and I talked about this the other day. Why is it that every year, right about starting at this this date until February, March, do we get a peak in flu and pneumonia deaths? Whereas in the summer they drop off to nothing?

William M Briggs:
Now, everybody knows the answer to this. That's because in the in the winter months, we all cram each other in these self-enforced voluntary lockdowns.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right.

William M Briggs:
Spreading the disease amongst ourselves. And unfortunately, people get it. They get the flu and they develop pneumonia. A lot of people, a lot of people die from this every single year. Even if we have vaccines, we've had vaccines for half a century now, that's not stopping flu deaths.

William M Briggs:
But let me ask this question... So we know that this is the case. And then that spring, of course, people start to get back outside, they get out into the sunshine, and these diseases drop off but never fade away. They just drop off. So what was the "solution?" I'll put that in air quotes. What was the "solution" the government hit upon to stop the spread of the coronadoom?

Mark Rippetoe:
To keep us all trapped inside with each other so we could transmit it to each other so that we wouldn't transmit it to each other.

William M Briggs:
That's exactly it. It's just absolute insanity.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's insane. The whole thing is completely insane.

William M Briggs:
If you had, in the old days, if you got, you know, on the high seas.. We were talking about the O'Brien Aubury Maturin novels. You have a ship that's infected with Yellow Fever and you have an isolated, isolated, perfectly isolatable vessel that you can keep off into the water and the virus is raging through. Back then, there was no inoculations for for the yellow fever. And of course, it makes perfectly eminent sense to keep those people absolutely isolated from the rest of the population.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right.

William M Briggs:
But in a lockdown, you can't do that. You have to have... People are still going out to the grocery store. They're going to do whatever the government deems are, quote unquote, essential businesses. So people are still mixing.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, and you know, and the to the to look at the thing conversely, if you were on a ship at sea and there were no diseases on the ship and there were no inputs from external to the vessel, the ship was fine. You've got thousands and thousands of miles of saltwater around you and there's no no vector for anything to get aboard the ship. And all of those guys stayed healthy.

Mark Rippetoe:
Hell, it was it was rather uncommon to have an infected wound in a situation like this out there in the ocean. And people just... but what do we do, you know, in in in response to this ridiculous this ridiculous little flu virus, Corona 19? We we decided that everybody that was sick, and especially in the state of New York, everybody who was infirm, had to be exposed to the coronavirus by having active cases pumped into the nursing homes and killed, what, ten thousand people You know.

William M Briggs:
The latest estimate, yeah.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. Ten thousand people. Andrew Cuomo is actually a mass murderer, but he'll never do a.. he'll never see the inside of a jail for that, because that's not what we do here in the United States. We don't put our political class in prison. We used to hang them. You know, in a more in a more gentle society, we hung them, that's what lampposts were for, you know. But now now we have to just sit here and take this.

William M Briggs:
This lockdown, the WHO the World Health Organization, just by coincidence, released this major report last year in 2019 before this pandemic hit. And they... Because we get these pandemics every 10 to 20 years. All right. We get them routinely. There.. We had 2009, the swine flu...

Mark Rippetoe:
Its normal.

William M Briggs:
Which killed maybe up to six hundred thousand people worldwide, but no panic. We had the bird flu before that. We had the Hong Kong flu back in 67, 68 that killed about the same number of people they are saying the Coronadoom killed right now, a million. And in fifty seven we had the Asian flu, which killed about two million people. And that was at a time when there was about a third fewer people across the globe. So that was much a deadlier killer.

Mark Rippetoe:
Much.

William M Briggs:
But no lockdowns, no panic, no no unreasoning, irrational rush to stop anybody from dying. I think that's the... if there's any one thing that happened here is that the public, driven by media with these asinine headlines.. Panic! The people panic that they demanded the government do something. And what better message to give the government than they're needed. That they need to actually go out there and start making up these new rules and restrictions.

William M Briggs:
And they jumped at it. They jumped at it. And once they did that, they could not admit that it was wrong. And they're going to stick with this kind of stuff.

Mark Rippetoe:
So they're staying by their story there's no doubt.

William M Briggs:
Exactly, there's... Nobody's going to pay a price for this.

Mark Rippetoe:
No, no, no. That's doesn't occur in 2020.

William M Briggs:
So we want to we want to stop this from happening a second time. But unfortunately, it looks like we're entering phase two of the panic right now. And the reason we're entering phase two of the panic is testing.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes, I was listening to... I saw a lecture this morning by Michael Yeadon. Dr. Yeadon from the UK. You probably have have talked to him about this. And he made the point, the very good point, that the natural history of any virus is detailed on a graph of what's called a Gompertz curve.

Mark Rippetoe:
And that under... Especially coronaviruses that don't mutate very quickly, there is no such thing as a second wave. It doesn't occur, it's biologically impossible. Yet we are creating what the media and the government are referring to as a second wave by testing testing.

Mark Rippetoe:
So let's go let's let's get... This is really a terribly critical thing here, that the government and the media have created quite a bit of terror here. And people who are afraid will give the government power that they wouldn't, under normal circumstances cede to the government. And what is going on right now is that the government is manufacturing fear and promising at the same time to protect us through their actions. In other words, through making us do what they want us to do, which, you know, are interpreted as their actions. And as a result of that, we are supposed to all become safer if we just cower in fear under our kitchen tables with our masks on and plastic bags.

Mark Rippetoe:
And... this not only ignores the fact - and this is a separate issue, we really need to talk about that, that this disease is just not that deadly - but that the case rate that we are now supposed to be afraid of, not the death rate, but the case rate is being manufactured by the testing rate. And I'd like for you to discuss that at length, because this is... People have to understand the case rate is is this is a what what do you mean by the term case? What do they mean by the term "case"?

William M Briggs:
Before 2020, every medical professional knew the difference between an infection and a case. An infection was a person like yourself who may have gotten a cold or something like this, just an infection, that did not require treatment or hospitalization. The patient, the person with the infection never went to the doctor and sought treatment. Most common colds are like this. Most small infections are just that way. They're infections.

William M Briggs:
We used to speak of an infection fatality rate. Those are the people who got the bug and who succumbed. But it was always an estimate because we never really knew the exact number of infected because these people were just not showing up at the doctor's.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's right.

William M Briggs:
A case was a person who did need either hospitalization or required some kind of a treatment. And we would speak of case fatality rates. These are necessarily higher than infection fatality rates because these are the sick people. These are the people who are showing up and really need treatment. Of course, that's going to be higher.

Mark Rippetoe:
The people we have identified as being sick.

William M Briggs:
Absolutely.

Mark Rippetoe:
We see signs and they have symptoms and they are recognized to be infected.

William M Briggs:
Yeah, that's right. So the media can't distinguish these two at all. They mix up infections and cases and everybody just follows suit with this. And the government took up that mantle.

William M Briggs:
Because when you hear "case," when you hear on the radio or TV or something like this, all you hear, there's been 10 new cases on some football team or whatever. You think, oh, my God, these people are on their way to being hooked up to a ventilator. They must be, you know, that's the only images that you're presented with. That's absolute nonsense.

Mark Rippetoe:
Ten cases in twenty three year old professional athletes result in how many deaths? Exactly how many deaths?

William M Briggs:
Very small symptoms on this. There's a large number of people, particularly the young, who are asymptomatic or have very minor symptoms. I myself had, back in March, I had for like not even quite a day. I had a scratchy throat. Right, OK, fine, whatever. But it's not it's nothing to worry about for most people. We've already seen that.

William M Briggs:
Now, bbut what this means is this. Back in April, there were a large number of people dying, both from caused by the government lockdowns and from this new disease, it's true. Mostly elderly people who are very ill were dying. We'll talk about that. But testing, testing had nowhere moved to the general population. It was just those people presenting at hospitals and the exceptionally nervous who showed up to be tested.

Mark Rippetoe:
Mm hmm.

William M Briggs:
Testing has since ramped up. Up.

Mark Rippetoe:
Testing is an industry now.

William M Briggs:
Over a million tests a day now, a million tests a day. And deaths have dropped down. They're never going to go to zero. OK, that's one thing we'll talk about too.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's an interesting thing about human life, isn't it?

William M Briggs:
Yeah.

William M Briggs:
But testing is over a million a day now. And this PCR test, which is the most widely used thing, is very sensitive. It's reporting a lot of infections which the media are calling cases. And a lot of these are either past infections, indications of other coronavirus. The coronavirus causes the common cold. This particular one is a mutation of it and it causes deadlier diseases in some. This is picking up very small asymptomatic cases. And then a lot of cases it's picking up no case at all.

Mark Rippetoe:
No, it's picking up little fragments of the virus.

William M Briggs:
No, not even that. It's picking up nothing and calling them viruses.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right.

William M Briggs:
There is one study I saw about one to four percent false positive rate. That doesn't sound bad. All right. The test is good if it's 90 percent accurate.

William M Briggs:
But when you're doing a million tests and you have a small prevalence of the disease, you're going to have thousands and thousands of people a day who are falsely labeled as being infected or cases.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I want to talk about this in in some detail, because people don't understand the statistical issue here. That is the that that arises from a false positive rate.

Mark Rippetoe:
Without going into a lot of detail, the polymerase chain reaction test was developed by Kary Mullis back in the in the 80s. And it's very, very good at amplifying a little tiny, tiny, tiny nano quantities of substances that are available in a sample so that we can identify their presence. But if you run a PCR test and you repeat the test through 40 cycles, for example, the thing starts showing you shit that's not necessarily there. And this is just this is this is... The PCR test is very, very important for lots of lots of things. But used under these circumstances, it throws a bunch of shit data out.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now we all know what a false positive test is, but if you've got a false positive test rate of one percent, you've got a problem. And I want you to explain to the layperson exactly why that would be, because this is it's important to understand this.

William M Briggs:
Obviously, obviously, if you're doing a million tests... Now without getting into the math, it depends on the actual prevalence of the disease in the population. And by now, a lot of us had been infected. We're reaching herd immunity. So active infections are probably pretty low. So there is a bit of math involving the actual prevalence and the false positive rate. But it's easy enough to see. If you're saying from one to four percent of the sample that you're doing have the disease and they really don't and you're testing well over a million a day, you're going to end up with thousands, thousands of people who are said to have the disease and do not.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, ten to forty thousand people, you said had the disease, don't actually have the disease.

William M Briggs:
That... It's not like these people are actually being then treated. You never hear this part in the media. All you hear is the number of positive tests which they're calling, falsely, cases. And so you think something's happening with those people.

William M Briggs:
This is not the case at all. Many of these people are going - a lot of people are being tested daily and they're all included into this thing. It depends on which job they have and this kind of thing. There's lots and lots of people. There's people who are already infected, known to be infected, genuinely have the disease at some low level, and they're being tested multiple times. Which is rational if you're in the hospital and you want to check the progress of this. But they're being included in these totals.

Mark Rippetoe:
Every one, every time they're tested, they're counted as a new case! The same person!

William M Briggs:
Some people are trying to be careful about this, but the media is not trying to be careful about this. They're trying to do anything they can to juice this panic along because it gets them eyeballs and that sells them ads and that's all they really care about. Plus, they want to be seen as important and influential. That's that's no small thing either.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right. So if you've got a even a small rate of false positives - and every test is going to generate some false positives - but under normal circumstances, we don't make policy based on false positives. But in this particular case, we have. We've made public health policy based on false policy, false positives.

Mark Rippetoe:
So if you're false, positive rate is one to four percent and you've conducted a million tests, you generate a tremendous number of cases that aren't actually cases. And then you and then you make policy based on that and...

Mark Rippetoe:
I mean, if you want to go through in under a normal, you know, disease situation under which everybody's behaving rationally and stuff, and you want to conduct a bunch of tests to do some epidemiology and stuff on this, I don't guess it's a problem. But if you are locking down the entire population of a state as a result of what you call an increasing, a spiking case rate, which is 100 percent the fault of the testing rate, not the infections, then this is a giant problem that no one has ever had to deal with before.

William M Briggs:
Exactly.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I I can't I can't impress upon people how...

William M Briggs:
So why don't people... Medical professionals know these facts.

Mark Rippetoe:
Sure they do.

William M Briggs:
So what do they do? They emphasize the other side of things. If there's false positives, there can, of course, be false negatives. These are times people have an infection, but the test didn't pick it up. Now, this is true. There is about the same percentage rate of false negatives to these tests. But so they based policy on the better safe than sorry rule, which is, of course, the absolute dumbest thing you could do.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's how you destroy an economy.

William M Briggs:
Right. And these false negatives are. That's true. They're they're they're false negatives. These people have the infection, but they're not sick. All right.

William M Briggs:
If you're going into the hospital and you're gasping for breath and you've got a temperature of one hundred and three or four or something like this. And you lost your taste of smell, but somehow the test comes back and says, sorry, you don't have disease, they're not going to kick you out.

Mark Rippetoe:
They don't send you home! You're sick!

William M Briggs:
Tests that are missing the people who are healthy or just have a bare, asymptomatic infection, the younger people who have no comorbidities and stuff. So they're making policy based on that and not on the harmful false positives. It's that it's absolutely inverted from normal from normal procedure.

William M Briggs:
Because, I mean, we wrote in the book, I went through a flu scenario: Imagine if we imagine if you started hearing these numbers in October. We had so many new cases, so many new cases they're building every day and then the deaths are being reported more and more deaths and oh, my God, the people are going to panic. And we could just juice this panic just by reporting the normal flu deaths.

William M Briggs:
At 2017-2018 about, depending on how you count, one hundred and eighty to two hundred thousand people - one hundred and eighty to two hundred thousand people. Americans. Died of flu and subsequent pneumonia.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right and here we are with supposedly two hundred and twenty thousand deaths from Corona 19 Coronavirus 19 from covid-19, which is the same thing is the flu. It's exactly the same thing.

William M Briggs:
It's a different bug and everything.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's a different bug, but in terms of the of the of the mortality, it's the same exact thing. There's not it's not it's the differences are trivial. People are dead. A whole bunch of people are dead. But every year in the United States 2.9 To three million people die. In terms of the population percentage, this is a little bit less than one percent of the population every year in the United States dies. That's what happens. But we have now decided that because someone might get sick, we have to take all these bizarre, extraordinary steps to prevent from happening, that which is going to happen anyway. Right?

Mark Rippetoe:
And, you know, it's...

William M Briggs:
Listen, between every week of every year, all the time, without any possibility of stopping it, of all the weekly deaths, five to 12 percent are flu and pneumonia. It peaks, of course, in the winter and goes down to five percent or so in the summer. It doesn't disappear. It never disappears.

William M Briggs:
This coronavirus, like all the other coronavirus, is never going to disappear. It's just going to be added to the mix of all of these things that are out there and kill some us.

Mark Rippetoe:
That kill people. Things kill people. Right?

William M Briggs:
We've adopted a zero death policy, zero tolerance policy on deaths, and it's never going to happen.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, it is interesting, isn't it, that we seem to be reluctant to understand that we are undertaking a war on death that cannot be won any more than a war on poverty, a war on stupidity, a war on sex. Some things can't be won with a war. And this is one of them.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, if you want to if you want to prevent death, what the hell are you going to have to do? Well, you're going to have to make everybody stay at home, never leave their house. And you're going to have to drop the speed limit to five miles an hour for those necessary vehicles that are driving around, patrolling the streets for people outside without wearing masks on to five miles an hour.

Mark Rippetoe:
Speed limit are an excellent an excellent analogy here, they're very, very useful. When when the national speed limit was 55 miles an hour back during the Nixon administration. And finally, the only logical thing that Bill Clinton ever did was raise the speed limit, eliminate the national fifty five miles an hour speed limit, and I'll drink beer with him for that. All right. You know, I mean, he didn't do everything wrong.

Mark Rippetoe:
But we have decided, at that point we decided, that even though we know that for every five miles an hour speed limit is increased, there will be a certain measurable number of additional deaths associated with a higher rate of speed. And there are there are highways in the United States - there's 85 mile an hour speed limit for a section of interstate 10 out in West Texas where there's nobody there and the road is straight. Eighty five miles an hour.

Mark Rippetoe:
Because as a as a society, we have decided that the convenience of rapid transit and and saving time on the highway is... We have done a risk assessment, you know, risk/benefit analysis on it and have decided that, yeah for out there 85 miles an hour is fine. 75 miles an hour is just fine. Fifty five miles an hour costs us too much in time and money. And that is directly balanced against lives.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yet nobody goes apeshit when you suggest that me driving eighty eighty miles an hour down the highway, isn't that necessarily that big a deal? Right? But... T

William M Briggs:
The number of deaths, I think it's like 800 roughly on average. 800, I believe that's correct, a week die and traffic fatalities in the United States. And we're below that level of the coronadoom deaths or attributed deaths. And that's at least when they die in a traffic accident we know that it was the car crash that killed them.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, you see the brains and the blood and the broken bones and the fragments of hair and teeth and shit. And you know that the impact actually killed you. Whereas death data in Corona?

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, let's talk about that, because that's a precious little thing, isn't it?

William M Briggs:
It's a mess.

William M Briggs:
Now, look... So you have a here's a typical patient I saw the charts on. Eighty two year old black woman Alzheimer's, CAD - coronary artery disease - and diabetes. And also she had the Coronadoom and died.

William M Briggs:
Ok, so what's what do you put on the death certificate? Tou got to put something. You've got to put Alzheimer's. You're going to put CAD. What are you going to put? Diabetes? Or are you going to put something that's going to get the hospital a little bit extra money? Because they're being paid for it.

Mark Rippetoe:
Because they're being paid for those death notices.

William M Briggs:
Well you got to put something. And it's true that without the coronavirus, this woman probably would have lived a couple of more months. Possibly.

William M Briggs:
So this woman... What we see here, it doesn't... You look at whatever age bracket you want, the risk of dying from the coronavirus, the population fatality ratio you never hear reported. That's the only one to be of interest to everybody. You take all the number of people alive in an age bucket, you take the number of people who died from whatever cause, coronavirus included. You divide those numbers. And it's extraordinarily low until you get into about, it depends but about 75, 70 years old.

William M Briggs:
And what we have discovered this year is an amazing fact: Old people die at higher rates than young people.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it's fascinating, isn't it? What a revelation.

William M Briggs:
No matter what age you're in, you still have at least ten times more chance of dying from something other than the coronavirus. Even these elderly people. Even the eighty five plus year olds, still have a 10 times higher rate of dying from something else.

William M Briggs:
So this is we have a huge problem now of deciding whether people are dying with or from this disease. Now, the CDC earlier in the year did a study in which they discovered only six percent, six percent of the figure you're hearing of the number of deaths, died of the coronavirus exclusively. Six percent.

Mark Rippetoe:
Six percent of two hundred and twenty thousand is... That's about 6000 people, right? Seven thousand people, something to that effect?

William M Briggs:
No, double that.

Mark Rippetoe:
So 12000 people.

William M Briggs:
Yeah. All right. So but in all...

Mark Rippetoe:
You're the statistician, thank God.

William M Briggs:
That's right. That's close enough.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah.

William M Briggs:
But these were all elderly people, very elderly people. And it's sad and everything, and I'm sorry, but, you know, we can't eliminate death.

Mark Rippetoe:
Do you know do you happen to know right off the top of your head what the average age of death from coronavirus is?

William M Briggs:
It's something like 74, something.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's the average age of death. And what is the average mortality, the average age of death in the U.S. population?

William M Briggs:
Oh, I don't know that it's it's up around the same thing. It's not exactly the same, but pretty close.

Mark Rippetoe:
They're essentially the same number.

William M Briggs:
Essentially the same number. And and the reason is this is because... In that same CDC study, ninety six percent of ninety four percent of those people had, on average about two to three comorbidity -serious comorbidities - like cancer, like COPD, like asthma, Type 2. These people were sick people.

Mark Rippetoe:
These are people who are dying anyway.

William M Briggs:
In nursing homes, the toll in nursing homes was, of course, tremendous, terrible. But you got to remember nursing home the fatality rate of the exit from nursing homes is pretty high. You know, it's a it's a terrible thing and everything, but this is not unexpected, OK?

William M Briggs:
It's still the case that if you're young, say, less than 60 and you don't have all these comorbidities, you're absolutely under extremely tiny risk, extremely tiny. You have a much higher risk. I guess it was under 18, you have like a six hundred times more chance, 600 times higher chance of dying from something else.

Mark Rippetoe:
From a car wreck.

William M Briggs:
Car wreck, anything.

Mark Rippetoe:
But you don't give your keys to your mother, do you?

William M Briggs:
Suicide is bigger. And suicides have gone up. They've doubled in some places because of these lockdowns. People lost their businesses. They lost their livelihoods. They've lost hope. They buy into this panic stuff. Suicides are up everywhere, not just here.

Mark Rippetoe:
And all over the world.

William M Briggs:
All over the place where they thought these lockdowns were a good idea against all evidence. And not just that. It's not just that. It's very difficult to tease all these statistics out, but the number of other deaths are also up.

William M Briggs:
We have we have in our book we have some examples of people who have... For instance, a woman had a stroke. She knew that she was probably having a stroke, but did not want to go to the hospital because she was terrified she'd go there and get the Doom and die. So she died.

Mark Rippetoe:
And so she died. She was terrified of dying. And so she died.

William M Briggs:
Exactly.

William M Briggs:
There's so many missed diagnoses because people aren't going to get their cancer screenings and stuff. You know what hospitals themselves are - theire governance anyway - are playing into this. I heard on the radio two days ago... They said in Pennsylvania, don't go to the hospital. We're expecting there to be overwhelmed again with the second wave. It's coming upon us soon. So stay away.

Mark Rippetoe:
Stay away from the hospital. But I... But I can't feel my right side. I can't feel my right side. Well, you know, you don't want to get the covid. You know, it sounds like you may be having some neurological problems, but just rest. Right, because you don't want to get the covid. Wonder how many melanomas went undiagnosed during the previous six months?

William M Briggs:
We ahve an estimate of that, but it's going to take... that's going to take a couple of years to get those. This is the benefit they have. They can do all this stuff now and by the time we discover all these numbers, you know, because we need the data and we need time to get that data, although we have some preliminary... The CDC also has preliminary estimates.

William M Briggs:
It looks like, at least from the CDC preliminary estimates, 20 to 30 thousand deaths caused by the reaction, not by the coronavirus itself, but caused by the reaction.

Mark Rippetoe:
Of governments to the corona.

William M Briggs:
The government's action. Yes, you'll hear a lot of people saying, well, our business is down this year because of the coronavirus or so... No, it's not because of the coronavirus. It's because of the government actions to the virus.

William M Briggs:
Coronavirus itself is not causing anything. It's causing some people at the end of their lives to make a slightly early exit. That's true. But these people are not in general working class... I mean, they're not out there and working at this point in their lives. And so it's had very little effect on the economy as far as that goes.

William M Briggs:
And I don't want to sound cold and callous when we talk about the economy. In the book, we say, look, the economy means food. The economy is how you get your dinner. It's how you feed yourself and how you close your family. It's how you house yourself.

Mark Rippetoe:
The economy is us interacting with each other. That's all it is. And it's extremely important since we are social animals. You know, we're not hunter gatherers and we have an economy. And if that economy can't function, then it comes out of our asses. It just does. That's that you cannot restrict human behavior to things that the government likes because governments are notoriously inept at analyzing data, as you have seen.

Mark Rippetoe:
And if when governments try to start micromanaging economies, what you get is Venezuela. OK, you get Venezuela. And nobody wants to be in Venezuela, certainly not me. Right.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, the death data, we... I get the impression that the death data are so so skewed in the direction of being useful to the government and that the the methods by which they've skewed it are so, so insidious that the death data is... It doesn't tell us a damn thing, really does it? What are the mechanisms by which these people are screwing this data up?

William M Briggs:
The whole dying with versus dying of is the biggest thing. I mean, if you have it on your death certificate if you have it in your system. This is also causing an increase in hospitalizations. Because if you go in there to have your toe fungus scraped off and they give you the coronavirus test, you're going to be listed as

Mark Rippetoe:
A case.

William M Briggs:
Exactly. So, you know, it's all these protocols. You got to understand. People... it's it's difficult to describe, but hospitals develop these protocols, which are more or less fixed procedures that have to be followed, especially when you get all the government involved in these kinds of things.

William M Briggs:
So someone comes in and they all get the test. And if it's positive, regardless of whether it's an infection or not, you're sent into some kind of a pipeline. All right. And so, you know, you get repeated tests and all this kind of stuff.

William M Briggs:
So backing out the numbers of real infections, real deaths, real hospitalizations of this thing. It's going to be difficult and it's going to have to be done on a hospital by hospital basis long after all this stuff is over.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's almost as though... It's almost as though they designed it that way, Briggs. A cynical person, would say that this whole system has been designed to manufacture a big number and... You know, the interesting thing about that number is that even at their best, with their best efforts, they've only been able to come up with two hundred and twenty thousand people as of when we're talking today that are dead from from the coronavirus, as they say. We know it's a it's, you know, six percent of that. But two hundred and twenty thousand is that's a big number. That's a six digit number. That's like twice the population of Wichita Falls. That's a whole bunch of dead people. Right? That's a lot of dead people!

Mark Rippetoe:
And because people do not understand numbers. The general population is it is effectively innumerate, they don't understand the effect of numbers. Two hundred and twenty thousand is what percentage of a population of 330 million? It's far less than one percent and it's you know, you have to look at it, you know...

William M Briggs:
50, 60 thousand people die every week of other causes.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right.

William M Briggs:
And so this is still minuscule. And it's gone down. It's gone down. I just posted the latest CDC numbers yesterday. It's decreasing, decreasing, decreasing. Except for a caveat which we have to talk about the disappearing flu. We have to warn people about this.

Mark Rippetoe:
That is an interesting problem, yes, let's talk about that.

William M Briggs:
It's decreasing steadily. There's no reason to reinvigorate this panic right now except political reasons. Because they're panicked because of all this increasing testing, the elections coming up.

William M Briggs:
It's it's a curiosity that it's only these so-called blue states that are getting everybody back into lockdown mode, trying to make them nervous about going out to and the mixing of populations and vote and so forth.

Mark Rippetoe:
That may backfire. That might backfire. .

William M Briggs:
They're doing it.

William M Briggs:
So we do have to talk about this disappearing flu. I've been warning people for about a month. I got suspicious because the CDC has all kinds of data. They collected this weekly data for years, for years. Every week, how many people die of the flu? How many die of the pneumonia? How many die from all these other causes?

William M Briggs:
And three or four weeks ago, they stopped collecting it in their normal manner. It disappeared.

Mark Rippetoe:
I saw that announcement that said that this year the CDC will not be collecting flu death data.

William M Briggs:
Yes.

Mark Rippetoe:
What?

William M Briggs:
And not just them. Not just them. I did, I have some numbers up, if people want to go and see on my website from the WHO - the World Health Organization. They have a global flu tracking system. And they've been running this for years too.

William M Briggs:
And it makes sense to do this because you want to know what strains of the flu are being passed around. There's about eight strains that they that they check.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right, so that you can formulate the vaccine correctly.

William M Briggs:
So exactly. But of course, that vaccine is a whole other question that we'll leave aside.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, it's not good.

William M Briggs:
Since the past about three months, there's been... It hasn't dropped to exactly zero, but in the single digits. There's no flu being reported from any of these agencies. Flu has, in essence, disappeared. They did last week I think they did three or four thousand tests, the CDC reported, of which only they found one positive. One.

Mark Rippetoe:
One.

William M Briggs:
This was just last week. It's nuts.

Mark Rippetoe:
What is what in the hell explains that?

William M Briggs:
Here's what's the problem is. Flu is not going away.

Mark Rippetoe:
Of course, not.

William M Briggs:
The coronavirus isn't battling with the flu virus and winning it. That's not what happens. What's happening is they've forgotten to test for it. You go into the hospital now, they're not going to test you for flu. They're going to... if you've got shortness of breath on this guy they're going to test you for the coronadoom.

Mark Rippetoe:
Because flu test doesn't make them any money.

William M Briggs:
It's sensitive, you're going to get you're going to get a lot of positives for people who are having flu. And that doesn't... OK, so what, they're still getting treated and all this kind of stuff, but here there's two dangers.

William M Briggs:
The first is they're going to use the ordinary flu numbers and their ineptitude to continue to juice this panic. In other words, the natural flu numbers, which just start rising at this point in time every year are going to be mistaken for the coronavirus numbers in a lot of instances. And we're going to say, oh, my God, look what's happening. And and because of that, they're going to start saying something like this.

William M Briggs:
You guys listen for this. You heard it here. First, they're going to say, oh, no, now the coronavirus is attacking the young. We've had more young people dying all of a sudden from the coronavirus, they're going to say, because the flu does kill the young. The flu is a very deadly disease in the young. So it's something to watch out for. And it's because of these mistakes.

William M Briggs:
That's a prediction. I'm not saying it's going to happen everywhere or it's planned or anything like this, but we have so much ineptitude, so much self blindness and confirmation bias going on. That that's going to happen. It'll get straightened out eventually, eventually, but not until after it's caused tremendous harm.

Mark Rippetoe:
Briggs, the hospital's getting paid for covid-19 tests and they're not getting paid for flu tests.

William M Briggs:
Well, now, I mean, depends on the locality because every state has their own, and metropolitan area has different flu reporting guidelines and criteria and so forth. So that's that's complicated. However, what's what seems to be absolutely, positively clear is they're just not making the tests.

Mark Rippetoe:
They're just not doing them.

William M Briggs:
They're opting for the covid testing or the corona virus test instead.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, that's fascinating, that's fascinating. I have heard that a positive coronavirus test in a hospital situation is worth about nineteen thousand dollars to the hospital. And I've also heard that a coronavirus ICU admission is worth thirty nine thousand dollars to the hospital.

Mark Rippetoe:
If you've got the flu and you've got covid-19. And I only test you for covid-19, then I don't get a positive flu test and I do get either I do get either 20 or 40 thousand dollars. Could that be skewing this data?

William M Briggs:
So it's probably... Absolutely. It's absolutely an extreme possibility. It's not that the doctors are doing it, you understand. They're still treating these patients.

Mark Rippetoe:
No, it's the hospital administrators.

William M Briggs:
They're following their protocols and they're saying, OK, did the tests come up positive for the doom? And yes, they put it into their system. And then later down the line when the administrators get hold of this data and it comes billing time and all that kind of stuff, that's where the magic happens.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right.

William M Briggs:
So it's not a simple kind of a thing, but it's obviously political. All right. It's extremely political.

William M Briggs:
And I've thought I must sound like a raving lunatic to your audience because...

Mark Rippetoe:
Any sane person at this point does, Briggs, any sane person sounds like a raving lunatic right now.

William M Briggs:
We threw away everything we knew about viruses and epidemiology starting in 2020 that I can't believe. People who know better are starting to say the most idiotic things they know can't be right. These are responsible people connected with government who heretofore had made somewhat sensible statements and now they're siding with the panic side of the equation no matter what happens.

Mark Rippetoe:
They have certainly agreed to be irresponsible, haven't they?

William M Briggs:
That's it. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's it's this. Look, you have to make decisions. That's understandable. But every time you bring up the decisions other countries have made and these facts about epidemiology or just viruses in general, they they somehow become deaf and blind.

William M Briggs:
You point to Sweden. Everybody points to Sweden. Sweden of course, famously did not have a lockdown. They did not have mask mandates and they did fine. They probably have herd immunity now. They haven't had any deaths or one or two deaths. They haven't also they haven't been testing like mad.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right, and you could still go get lunch, can't you?

William M Briggs:
You could still go get... Everything is open. I mean, they had a few minor you know, if we just had what Sweden had nobody would have said a word. We would have just, you know, whatever.

William M Briggs:
Japan did even better. They did about ten times as good as Sweden. And they didn't have a lockdown. But we somehow don't hear about Japan. They got a population that's much, much larger than Sweden's. Why don't we hear about Japan?

William M Briggs:
We don't hear about Taiwan. Taiwan did fine. They got by 30 million people, many more than Sweden. They had eight deaths, eight.

Mark Rippetoe:
Eight.

William M Briggs:
No lockdown. They had 8 coronavirus deaths and they also not testing like crazy. They didn't freak out. There's many countries like this. OK. And so you ask our government officials, what about Sweden? What about Japan? What about Taiwan? What about Vietnam? What about these countries that all did fine and didn't do what we're doing? And they say, what are you trying to do, kill people?

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. I'm trying to ask you a reasonable question and you won't answer it because it doesn't suit your agenda.

William M Briggs:
That's exactly what it is. Because it's this zero tolerance policy, because our politicians have figured that every death that occurs is going to be blamed on somebody, not the virus, it's going to be blamed on some person. Because this life could have been saved if somebody had done something. That's that's that's our whole country. We've been sliding into that for years.

Mark Rippetoe:
That that's been that's been the habit of a politician. You know, somebody has got to do something! even if it doesn't make any fucking sense.

William M Briggs:
So they can say that they did. Now if it happens, they'll say, I did everything in my power to stop it. They don't care about you. They don't care about the citizens. They care about their own reputation.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's right.

William M Briggs:
They care about their own career, their own riches. They're self aggrandizing SOBs, a lot of these guys. And they're just doing this because for themselves, for themselves alone. When they should know better.

William M Briggs:
And that's why I get so riled up about all this kind of stuff, because to throw away everything we have known for 100 years to do this is... well, it's upsetting.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, let's get you even more riled up and talk about masks. Masks are an interesting phenomenon. I'm assuming that mask manufacturers are doing pretty well these days.

Mark Rippetoe:
We just got back from Denver and a seminar in Denver. And the damnedest thing we noticed up there is there was essentially 100 percent mask compliance.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, you don't see that here in North Texas. You know, there's a bunch of people wearing them. But there there's probably, you know, 10, 15 percent of us are walking around without any masks. And nobody says a word to us. It's just they don't you know, I have I have yet to have anybody say anything to me, to my face about this.

Mark Rippetoe:
In contrast, I tend to laugh at especially men who are wearing masks. And because of the of what we're about to discuss, that I know and they apparently don't know. And I tend to laugh at them. And when I do laugh at them, I mean, I look right at 'em and laugh at 'em.

Mark Rippetoe:
And, you know what they do? They avert their eyes. That's what they do. They turn their eyes because they know they're being stupid and afraid. They're afraid and they're just doing as they're told. A mask is a badge of obedience for you people.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, if if if you people that are watching this podcast have not investigated what masks can and cannot do and you're wearing one anyway, than you are being intellectually lazy. Because what you think a mask is doing is not what a mask is doing. And yet this mass hysteria has has gripped society all over the world and everyone is wearing the mask.

Mark Rippetoe:
Just wear the damn mask, right? How about No. No, I'm not going to wear the mask.

Mark Rippetoe:
And Briggs knows about masks. You know, he's written about this before and let's talk about this right now, because I think it's terribly important. There are some people who really, honestly believe that they need to wear a mask. But what does a mask do? What does a mask not do? And what are the studies that show that masks don't do anything being... What's happening to those studies?

William M Briggs:
Yeah. So first of all, you're absolutely right about these people. A lot of the guys are out there, they're wearing this stuff. They're not scared of catching the bug, but they're scared of not fitting in.

Mark Rippetoe:
You and I don't mind being thought of as assholes. OK. That that's the fact. And the fact is that what our what we are perceived as we walk into a store and we don't have a mask on, everybody else in the store looks at us and says, look at that asshole.

Mark Rippetoe:
I don't care. I don't care. You don't care. But lots and lots and lots of people do care about being... Not that they're afraid, but that you're supposed to wear the mask and the mask might as well have a sign on the front of it that says, I do what I'm told. And that's that's what the mask is. It's a symbol of obedience. It's not a public health measure.

William M Briggs:
And it's become a political question too, obviously.

Mark Rippetoe:
In fact.

William M Briggs:
So here's the thing. Look, I'll sound like Joe Biden for a second. Here, here. Here is the thing. Come on, man. It's not like scientists have never thought about maybe... do masks even work? Have they ever studied this before? It's like it's a brand new question.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, masks have been... Dentists have been wearing masks for decades. People in the hospital have been wearing masks for decades. I mean, since the germ theory of disease was was first articulated, people have been wearing masks because there's a reason to do it under some circumstances.

William M Briggs:
Rare.

Mark Rippetoe:
Rare circumstances.

William M Briggs:
And they have to and they and are special circumstances. We'll talk about that.

William M Briggs:
100 years ago, the Spanish flu hit the world, as most people know. Killed maybe up to 50 million people. Estimates vary. It's not like we haven't thought about this question before. We actually had in some areas of the country back then, mask mandates.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes.

William M Briggs:
San Francisco and I think Philly and a couple of other places. People were being chased down by the cops for flaunting that law back then too. But there were immediate studies done on right after it. And there's a paper I have it linked on my site. And the guys looked at this, look at the infection rate of the people who wore a mask and didn't wear a mask and said, you know, I guess we discovered that masks don't have any utility.

William M Briggs:
And so that wasn't the first study that found that mask in the general mask usage in the general public to slow a spread don't work. There's a big paper that came out in March or May I forget what, this year. It's called a meta analysis. And what this is, is a compilation of other studies that have studied the similar thing.

William M Briggs:
So this guy named Chao and a bunch of other people listed a dozen, 14 different studies that had looked at the efficiency of masks at stopping the spread of viruses. And they just...

Mark Rippetoe:
Not coronavirus, but various other viruses. Respiratory diseases.

William M Briggs:
And they discovered, doesn't work. It's just as good as wearing no mask whatsoever.

William M Briggs:
So and that's not the only there's there's dozens of other studies that have looked at the same thing. At the very best, it's ambiguous, but most papers say, no, it doesn't work.

William M Briggs:
And not only that, not only that, there's a study that came out in 2015 and the British Medical Journal, they looked at people who were infecting themselves through the use of masks. They looked at cloth masks, these homemade masks a lot of people favor the black ones because I don't know why people are always switching to these black ones. Maybe they think it looks sexy...

Mark Rippetoe:
Because they're bad ass man. With a skull on it. That's what you want to mask with the skull or teeth or something, you know.

William M Briggs:
These cloth masks... what they did is they looked and they discovered lo... The people wearing these were recirculating the viruses back. The virus got in all right, because there's a vapor shield when you're breathing on the inside and the viruses that you might have breathed right back out are trapped in there and your reinfecting yourselves. Not just with the coronavirus, but other viruses as well.

Mark Rippetoe:
And with bacteria, as well.

William M Briggs:
There are. There's staph, there's acne, there's other kinds of diseases.

William M Briggs:
But so do you bring this stuff up to people who are mandating the mask and what do they say? You're a criminal if you don't wear a mask. That's what they say. You're going to have to pay a fine. It's a crime. A crime! A misdemeanor like it is for stealing or I don't even know... simple assault or something like this with not wearing a mask is now a crime. Even though we have all of this evidence that say masks in the general public don't work.

William M Briggs:
Now, where do masks work? Well, a surgeon has a very special kind of mask that the surgeon is extremely careful not to touch during his surgery. That mask is to prevent him from snotting into the patient or from particles of fluid, blood and whatnot, getting up into his system. That's what that mask does, and that's all it does.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's in the OR.

William M Briggs:
You wear these crappy little masks - that's either the cloth mask which are terrible or you wear these paper things that are the biggest sellers because they're cheap and you got to follow these laws, people think. I don't. But you put them on. No one wears them perfectly properly and they say right on the box. This has been pointed out dozens of times too. They say right out of the box, not designed to prevent transmission of any disease.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right.

William M Briggs:
But it doesn't matter.

Mark Rippetoe:
But we're you're having to wear them to prevent transmission of any disease. Even though the box says it doesn't do that. But you have to do it anyway because you are expected to obey.

William M Briggs:
Now, even the fabulous Fauci was out back in March saying don't wear masks. It's silly for people in the United States to wear masks. This is not going to work.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's the last correct thing he said.

William M Briggs:
Now he's saying you're going to have to wear a mask til 2022, the end of 22. And he also said no handshakes forever. We're going to have to stop shaking hands forever.

William M Briggs:
This is science? This guy is a gross opportunist who flip flops more than I can imagine.

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, God.

William M Briggs:
He rides the... Whatever he thinks the public wants to hear, he's out there saying. And somehow we're only supposed to listen to him and no other doctors? No other medical professionals?

Mark Rippetoe:
Briggs, do you remember back in the late 90s? Back in the late 90s, when the vaunted Dr. Anthony Fauci told everybody that would listen to him, that by 1992 AIDS would affect 22 million people in the general population. I clearly remember that clearly remember that.

Mark Rippetoe:
I was a young man and I was extremely concerned about this because of my activities at the time. And it was it was on everyone's mind. Here is this guy who is apparently an expert on disease transmission telling us what that everybody was going to fucking die.

Mark Rippetoe:
And to eighty nine came around and 90 came around in 91 and 92 and everybody's not dead. And at no point did Anthony Fauci call a press conference and say, you know, you know, I was wrong about that. It just it just went away.

Mark Rippetoe:
And every single time this guy opens his mouth about anything, I am reminded of that period in American history when Anthony Fauci attempted to manipulate the behavior of the population of the United States.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, what is this guy? How does he get off on this? You know, that's a lot of power. And I think the man is evil and I think he just wants to... You know, it would be it would not surprise me if Anthony Fauci issued a directive: you know what everybody needs to do? Everybody needs, every morning what you need to do before you leave for work. What you need to do is let all the air out of the tires of your car and air them back up. And and you have to do this because it's for your own safety, because the tires work better. And you won't have a wreck. So I want everybody right now to go out and let all the air out of their tires and then air 'em backup.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, that's going to mean, of course, that you have to have a compressor and we recommend the you know, the brand. What's that brand they sell at Lowe's? Something cable. He'll have a sponsor seat of the brand, a compressor you want you to buy. But but you've got...

Mark Rippetoe:
Nothing like nothing would surprise me. Nothing would surprise me. These people are marketing bullshit. They are bullshit salesman. And he doesn't have the slightest idea what the hell he's talking about. And I'm telling you, epidemiologists - like climate scientists - we should call them modelists because they're not scientists. They're not scientists.

William M Briggs:
You know you know more of what you speak when you say that. So that is an excellent summary of exactly what's going on.

William M Briggs:
Now, of course, with AIDS that just like the coronadoom, was very political. Back then, you remember they said everybody had a chance of getting it because... They had to say that only a certain risky behavior could spread this was politically incorrect. They had to say everybody was going to get it.

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, yes, it was. That was the that was the dawn of the...

William M Briggs:
panic scare about that. Absolutely everywhere people remember the water faucets they shut off in the schools and things like this because they didn't want you to touch the water faucets?

Mark Rippetoe:
Because of AIDS.

William M Briggs:
So yeah, it happened.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. Oh, I remember. Yes, it was this just absolute insanity, you know.

William M Briggs:
They've forgotten that, But we go through these phases. And this is just as political.

William M Briggs:
But when you say modelers, that's exactly right. That's a brilliant phrase, which I'm going to steal.

Mark Rippetoe:
Modelists. They're not scientists. They're modelists.

Mark Rippetoe:
They they put together... All these people have put together this bullshit model. It's a mathematical model. It wouldn't even be possible unless we had computers because you couldn't have put the model together back in the 1920s because there wasn't any way to run the model. But now that we have computers and we we put together these bullshit models without any concern for the fact that all of these systems are so thoroughly multivariate that you don't... Not only do you not have all of the variables accounted for, but you don't know what all of the variables are.

Mark Rippetoe:
And yet you run these models and public policies being made on the basis of an incomplete model. It never, ever predicts anything. They never predict anything correctly.

William M Briggs:
I don't predict accurately. Yes.

William M Briggs:
Let me tell you, this is this is brilliant. This is brilliant. Because there are two things here. One was England's got their own Fauci by the name of Andrew Ferguson.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes.

William M Briggs:
Who is a modelist.

Mark Rippetoe:
Neil Ferguson. Neil Ferguson.

William M Briggs:
Yes, excuse me. Neil Ferguson.

Mark Rippetoe:
Let's not get his name wrong. We wouldn't want to be wrong like he was.

William M Briggs:
Then we get his name wrong. This guy.

William M Briggs:
He has made so many mistakes. We go through on the book, every one of them, every single panic from the the the mad cow disease, the bird flu...

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, God. He was responsible for the BSE thing. Oh, my God.

William M Briggs:
He was... it was his models that predicted tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths for each of these diseases. And it was his model that drove the initial panic to the coronavirus. He had in his model. He didn't even recognize it. He didn't even recognize it because of the way they split the model out. And it's complicated technical kind of details, which I won't say. But in essence, it said more people are going to die of the coronavirus by the middle of this year - they were having in America one hundred and fifty thousand people die a day.

William M Briggs:
They said two million dead in the United States. That's a lot of people. How do you get two million people? Well, you're going to have to have tens of thousands dying every day.

Mark Rippetoe:
Every single day.

William M Briggs:
Think about it. They just stuck this in their model.

William M Briggs:
Now, just last week, The New York Times was touting this new study that said, look, it's in Nature magazine. Oh, well, stand back. It says a new model proves masks work.

William M Briggs:
Now, I'm going to let all your listeners in on a secret, which I think, Mark, you already know. No model does anything except what it's told. And I'll rephrase it. Every model says exactly what it is told to say.

William M Briggs:
So what these guys did in their mask model is they built a model that predicted the number of deaths. And they ran that forward. And then they said, I'm going to assume that masks work. And then they repredicted the number of deaths, which were lower. And then they looked and said, look, masks work because the number of dead are lower.

William M Briggs:
And it's reported as a discovery. It's reported as a discovery that masks work because the number of deaths are lower. But they started with that opinion.

William M Briggs:
This is every model that you ever it's... Even the good models, even the good models. All models only say what they're told to say. A good model makes good predictions, predicts accurately, but it does exactly what it's told. A bad model also does what it's told and makes horrible predictions.

William M Briggs:
But I say, you know, you can't be fired for being wrong in the right direction. All of these models are wrong in the right direction. And that what I mean by the right direction is they're in the direction that the government wants.

Mark Rippetoe:
Because that's who's paying their salaries.

William M Briggs:
Absolutely. Yes.

Mark Rippetoe:
That's who's paying for them. And if you do what you're told, you generate data that show what we wanted to say. You be a good boy and a good girl and wear your masks, then everything will be just fine.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right, it's just it's I don't know, I mean, we're in a we're in a situation here that makes Alex Jones look not so fucking crazy.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, we are in a situation here where a cynical person might say, you know, what I'm seeing here is like evidence for, you know, the new world order and the Bilderbergers and the Trilateral Commission and the various conspiracy theories, because...

Mark Rippetoe:
Had this situation being in operation only in the United States you might be able to say, yeah, the CDC fucked this thing up, Anthony Fauci fucked this thing up, you know. And had it just been the United States and the UK. Yeah, Neil Ferguson fucked this up. And Anthony Fauci, fuck this up. But everywhere in the world, the same mass hysteria is taking place.

Mark Rippetoe:
There is absolutely no reason to wear a mask under hardly any circumstances, certainly not in a grocery store. Certainly not riding your bicycle down the sidewalk by yourself in the sun. There is no mask... There's no reason why 18 year old girl is wearing a mask. She can't get sick. She can't transmit it to anybody. That's true.

Mark Rippetoe:
I mean, look at the data that this asymptomatic trans transmission thing. That's bullshit too. Yet everybody agrees that they're going to behave a certain way. Everyone agrees.

Mark Rippetoe:
People all over Europe, people all over Asia, people all over Africa, people in South America. Everyone all over the world is behaving like a fool.

Mark Rippetoe:
People all over the world have decided to comply. They've decided to do as they are told, because even if they have got some reservations about the logic of this behavior, about the science behind it, even if they know damn good and well that 16 year old kids do not either transmit nor contract this disease, they're going to make their kids wear the mass. They are going to wear the mask themselves. It's a symbol of obedience.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now a cynical person would say that this whole I mean, over and above the over and above the the the the disease statistics, because I don't I don't know about you, but it occurred to me about six months ago that this was not about a virus. None of this is about a virus. This is about something else. And I don't know what the hell else. And I don't know who. I don't know why. And that's the most disturbing thing of all to me. So honestly, do you think something else is going on here or do you think this is adequately explained by stupidity?

William M Briggs:
Stupidity is never to be discounted, but think of it. Think of it this way. We all read these books like The Extraordinary Delusions, Madness of Crowds, things like this. And we all read these examples where in the past people have gone insane, a mass mass groups of people have gone insane. We always laugh and think, that's silly. I would never make those mistakes.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right.

William M Briggs:
But yet here we are in the midst of one of these panics.

William M Briggs:
Now, what happened is we don't even need to have an active conspiracy per se. Not that I'm discounting that with with the WHO and Chinese money or anything like that, but we have we have people, two kinds of people of similar mindsets that are all playing off each other. The first is the regular public and the public panic. And they spread this panic through the social media, which is now global and instantaneous.

William M Briggs:
We document too at least ten times, if not 100 times or more. Bigger phenomena than it was in 2009. Everybody carries around these tracking devices, you know, your cell phones to let the government know where you are at all times. So we know what's going on. People are spreading every bit of news and they were spreading everything instantly.

William M Briggs:
Every new death that was reported initially, every new case. And everybody pasted them everywhere. And everybody talked about got themselves worked out into a tizzy. And they started believing this Chinese propaganda that came out. You see a guy walking down the street, he collapses. Oh, my God, that's going to happen to us.

William M Briggs:
Did we ever have anybody walk down the street to have a heart attack and die? Yeah, it happens.

Mark Rippetoe:
It does occur.

William M Briggs:
Though, that that's stuff. That was one thing.

William M Briggs:
The other is this the bureaucratic mindset, the management mindset, the people who were just itching for something to take control as much as they could. They knew they had this rabble under them, the deplorables the the people who didn't know quite what's good for them, but really didn't have a good hook to get them to do what we needed them to do. And now they have it with this.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes, they do.

William M Briggs:
The World Economic Forum just today tweeted out, here's what to do for meetings, to stay happy in the second lockdown or words to that effect. They have a picture of these two people enjoying their enslavement, grinning at the camera, the World Economic Forum. Now, what are they getting out of this? I mean, a lot of...

Mark Rippetoe:
That's an interesting question, isn't it?

William M Briggs:
What happened? It's indisputable. Now, is it planned or not? Indisputable - the big tech companies all made a ton of money off of this. Amazon got really wealthy. All these online businesses got wealthy. The middle class money is being sucked away. We've spent quite literally trillions with a T. on this so far.

William M Briggs:
And where is that money going to come from? It's got to come from somewhere. They don't have it collected now for a... They've got to get it eventually so they're not hurting. Some of the people at the top are hurting. But the big oligarchs, the big tech, the big people who got all these things, they're doing fine.

William M Briggs:
And, you know, so do we need a conspiracy or do we need similar mindsets? Yeah, I'm sure there's people are getting on the phone and talking to each other saying, you know, here's what we got to do. It doesn't need to be backroom deals, people wearing robes to be that kind of conspiracy, but can be all these people getting together and agreeing.

William M Briggs:
I mean, that's why they just had up Capitol Hill today or was it yesterday? I think it was today. The the Google guy and Twitter and Facebook being grilled about their censoring this. And this, like you said at the beginning, they might censor this. They have often censored - they've already censored some of our videos on this right now.

Mark Rippetoe:
Sure.

William M Briggs:
You got blue haired hippo censor sitting behind a screen who thinks she knows anything about medicine. We can't have this possibly being out there because it's not science.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's misinformation. Do you see? Misinformation. How she knows that remains to be seen.

William M Briggs:
It is a conspiracy in the sense that all these people think alike and they can't be talked out of their unreasoning attitude. And so how do we get out of this? How do we get out of this panic? Because it seems we're determined now to go back into the second wave of the panic.

Mark Rippetoe:
The goddamn, Brigss, I don't know, man.

William M Briggs:
This has got to be something else to distract us. How did we get out of the AIDS panic?Just the time went on and people forgot.

Mark Rippetoe:
It just wore off, you know, it just wore off. But there will be people... I get the impression that there will be. All to as a result of this, who for the rest of their lives, every time they leave their house, they'll do it with a mask on. That's my impression. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't know. I mean, you have to understand that God, I hate to say this, but I've said it before, and I might as well go ahead and remind everybody the average IQ in the United States is 105. That's just the case, right, and people can't be expected to understand all of the things that we understand, people are scientifically illiterate, people are innumerate, and the poor things are being told by people they perceive to be in positions of authority that you're going to have to wear the mask, you'll wear the mask. Do it for other people, do it for yourself. Wear the mask.

Mark Rippetoe:
How does how does the whole of society fight that off?

William M Briggs:
We've got to do it one person at a time, one person at a time. Say, look, just calm yourself. Look it up. Look at the number of actual deaths every day. See, they've gone to zero. What are you worried about? Don't listen to the media.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, but the cases! The cases! The cases!

William M Briggs:
Don't know that the media lies to us now, by now. I mean, the media. Haven't we learned from 2016, at least until now, that the media is a very interested source pushing their own line and... It's beyond imagination that we don't know how to deal with the media at this point. But, yeah, you're right. There's a lot of people who slavishly follow it and all they know is what they get from their television. That's it. And they believe it.

Mark Rippetoe:
And they believe every syllable of what they're told. You realize this is the damnedest thing I've ever I've ever seen. This how bad the media is. Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed last Monday night. Did you know that NBC "News" did not mention that as a part of their newscast? A confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice was omitted from the newscast on NBC.

William M Briggs:
That would be an excellent point - there are two kinds of lies, commission and omission. Their biggest lies are by far omission and leave out any possible good news. Anything that they perceive the other side is going to usedfor their benefit - the side of truth and reality.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right, right, right. The actual death rate. I've been using a statistic for six months now that I just invented because I didn't see it anywhere else... The rate of death of covid-19 in a population group. Right. What is the population of the state of Texas? It's you know, 29 million or whatever. And how many people in the state of Texas have died of covid-19? And do that little division and come up with a percent of the population of Texas has died of covid-19. And it's always point... It's zero point a bunch of zeroes and three right.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, to you and I, that means important things. But people don't understand those numbers. People don't understand those numbers. And the media take advantage of the fact that people don't understand those numbers and they lie to us by omission. They lie to us by omission is what they're doing.

Mark Rippetoe:
And you know, I can't say enough bad shit about the media, you know. You may think that the that the the politics of this country are all fucked up right now, and I freely admit that they are. But how did they get that way? With the media. The media created the problem. They created the problem.

William M Briggs:
That's exactly right. They leave out whatever they don't want you to hear. And it didn't happen. They';; tell you the number of coronavirus deaths and that's all they'll tell you. They don't tell you that 10 to 600 times more people died of other things. It just doesn't appear.

Mark Rippetoe:
And then they'll just omit the fact that people aren't dying anymore. And they'll just talk about cases. The case rate is spiking, the case rate is spiking! No, the testing rate is spiking. But try to explain that to somebody. You know, it's hard for them to understand poor little things. And it just... You manufacture cases with testing. You know It's, you know, testing saves lives, testing saves... You say that enough and they'll just... Well, I guess it does, you know, testing. You want to know, you know. You want to know things and know one things is good. Right?

William M Briggs:
I get yelled at all the time on Twitter, on the blog. What? You're trying to kill people, Briggs. What are you doing? I know that... They don't know what they're talking about and I feel sorry for these people. They just buy into this stuff and they get so angry when they meet a dissenting voice. As if I'm in power. I have no power. I have no authority. I'm a I'm a one man shop. I'm in charge of nobody or nothing. I can't make any decisions for anybody.

William M Briggs:
And all I try to do is tell you, here's what I see the official numbers are saying. All right. And even that is deemed to be censorable.

Mark Rippetoe:
Or murderous.

William M Briggs:
Yeah.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, you're murdering people by telling them the truth. Right. Now, isn't that an interesting situation to be in where the truth murders people?

William M Briggs:
Interesting.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's an interesting situation.

William M Briggs:
I wave my arms around and scream like an idiot because I don't know how to get this across to people that they don't need to be panicking. Just calm yourselves. Looking around. Just I tell you what, maybe this is a good exercise for people. Look at yourself. Look at the people to the left, you to the right of you and your family. Everything OK? Everybody seem to be OK. Don't listen to a friend of a friend of a friend stories and everything. But doesn't it look OK right about where you are?

Mark Rippetoe:
Right.

William M Briggs:
And then have, you know, confirm it that way. One thing at a time. It's not that bad. It's not that bad.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, eventually it will soak in that, you know, look, there aren't piles of bodies. We were told there'd be piles of bodies. There are no piles of bodies. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
Most people in the United States don't know anybody that's died of corona, of covid-19. Most people don't know anyone personally that have died of covid-19 because not that many have. Now, back in 1918, everybody knew somebody that was dead of the Spanish flu. Everybody, because that was a pandemic. This is not. This is the flu. It's not the flu, but it's the flu, if you understand what I mean.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the, you know, podcast like this, you know, all we can do is just tell you. All we can do is tell you the truth and ask you to please stop talking and think for a minute when you start babbling nonsense about everybody, the case rate and people are dying and all this other shit that you don't know anything about.

Mark Rippetoe:
Stop talking. Learn. Rethink your actions. Calm down. Take off the mask. Have a normal relationship with the people around you. Get back to work. Don't be afraid all the time. And have a ball or two about you, OK?

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, have some courage to be thought of as an asshole if that's what's necessary. I... Believe me, I know it's not the end of the world.

Mark Rippetoe:
So Briggs, I sure do appreciate you being with us today. We'll talk again before it's over with. And I want to I want to thank you for for making the time to be with us. And you guys, here's the book, Amazon.com, The Price of Panic. It's it's timely. It's important. Buy it.

Mark Rippetoe:
Thank you, sir. Appreciate your being here.

William M Briggs:
I thank you for putting up with my ravings.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, you're... You're you may have noticed that I'm raving harder than you are.

William M Briggs:
I really do appreciate getting the word out.

Mark Rippetoe:
Sure, Briggs. Absolutely. And we'll see you next week at Starting Strength Radio.

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