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March 25, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:52
The Season Of Miracles? | Ep. 979
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Republicans and Democrats put together the largest spending bill in the history of the world.
President Trump suggests reopening the American economy by Easter, and new data emerges suggesting some good news on coronavirus.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN Podcasts.
Protect your data from prying eyes at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
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Okay, so a lot of big news happening in the world of coronavirus, which is the only news on planet Earth at this point, obviously.
The biggest news, of course, is that very, very late last night, like early morning, the White House and Congress did strike a deal To deliver $2 trillion in government relief to a nation increasingly under lockdown, according to the New York Times, that $2 trillion in relief is only part of the spending here.
The fact is that this, which is the biggest, it's not a bailout, but the biggest spending plan in the history of the world.
I mean, not just the United States, in the history of the world, is only part of the deal here.
The Treasury is also floating about $4 trillion in spending with regard to buying up commercial paper, buying up bank loans, and all of the rest.
So what exactly is in this giant rescue bill?
Well, a lot.
A lot.
So according to, first of all, I think it's important to note here that Nancy Pelosi to the last minute was insisting that her holding this thing up over the weekend was a good idea.
Hey, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, she was on TV yesterday suggesting that the bill should have been held up over environmental concerns, of all things.
And great legislative leadership here from Nancy Pelosi.
Basically, we end up with, effectively, a very, very close cousin to the deal that was rejected several times on Monday by the Democrats.
Here was Nancy Pelosi, just before the passage of this deal, insisting the deal had to include environmental protections.
Because I don't know about you, but when the entire world economy is on the brink of complete and utter disaster, the thing I am worried most about is forcing airlines I do think that there is a whole concern in our country that if we're giving tens of billions of dollars to the airlines that we could at least have a shared value about what happens to the environment.
That is an excuse, not a reason for Senator McConnell to go forward.
Some of the other issues, like not fully extending family medical leave, not funding food stamps, I hope that will all change in the next few hours.
But they're issues that are central to the well-being of America's families.
Okay, I mean, priorities, priorities.
The fact that this person was described as a legislative mastermind over the last year is insane to me.
A person who surrendered to the squad and then proceeded to run a botched impeachment attempt and then, for no reason at all, held up a rescue package.
By the way, it was the prospect of the passage of that rescue package that led to the single greatest jump in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average yesterday.
It jumped over 2,000 points.
Well, right now, at this hour, we're still waiting for Nancy Pelosi's go-ahead.
She said that the new bipartisan agreement, quote, takes us a long way.
She's still gumming up the works at least a little bit, but this thing appears to be a foregone conclusion at this point.
So what exactly is in this thing?
and legislative text of the agreement to determine a course of action.
So she's still gumming up the works at least a little bit, but this thing appears to be a foregone conclusion at this point.
So what exactly is in this thing?
Well, there are a bunch of major spending provisions.
Obviously, the New York Times has a rundown of some of the big provisions.
They said the government will send direct payments to taxpayers.
Lawmakers have agreed to provide $1,200 in direct payments to taxpayers with incomes up to $75,000 per year.
By the way, it's an insane provision.
The Democrats basically made it that if you make over $75,000 per year, you're going to have to pay that back to the government.
So the government destroyed your job.
The government destroyed your business.
And now the government's going to sign you a check with the proviso that you have to pay it back if you make more than $75,000 per year.
By the way, those are the people who make $75,000 per year.
Who are probably, in the long term, going to be hit the hardest.
Not because they're the ones making the least money, obviously.
They're people who are making less money.
But because those are the ones who are going to see the greatest gap between what they were making and what they are currently making.
Namely, the difference between $100,000 and zero.
As opposed to a person who's already on food stamps or welfare, or a person who's already on unemployment, or a person whose salary may drop from $60,000 to $35,000.
If you drop from $75,000 to zero, that is actually a bigger drop.
If you drop from $75,000 to zero, that is actually a bigger drop.
Now, again, that doesn't mean that poor people don't deserve the money.
People who are poor do deserve the money.
But the point is, the people who are running the businesses are the people who are hiring the poor people.
And a lot of those people are now being floated basically zero-interest loans that are non-forgivable, according to the federal government.
Let's put it this way.
If the Republicans had proposed this, everybody would be up in arms.
Democrats proposed it.
So, of course, it's no big deal at all.
Families would receive $500 per child in an attempt to create a safety net for people whose jobs and businesses are affected by the pandemic.
By the way, you get no money.
None, if you earn more than $99,000 a year.
So, you get $1,200 in direct payments, up to $75,000 if you earned $75,000 last year.
Which, by the way, that's not what you're earning this year, not in this economy.
So, means testing this stuff is very bizarre, okay?
And ending for people who earn more than $99,000 a year at all.
So, if you earned $100,000, you and your spouse, then presumably, you make nothing.
You go home with zero.
Unemployment benefits do grow substantially.
They go to many more Americans.
Lawmakers agreed to a significant expansion of unemployment benefits that would extend jobless insurance by 13 weeks and include a four-month enhancement of benefits.
That is not a grave change from over the weekend.
Over the weekend, the Republicans were already proposing three months of extension of jobless insurance and enhancement of benefits.
It has moved up by one month.
Democrats wanted it to be six months.
Really, Democrats wanted it to be permanent.
The program was broadened to include freelancers, furloughed employees, and gig workers, such as Uber drivers.
So, you know, those people need to make money as well, obviously.
It's going to be kind of hard to tamp down exactly how much money those people were making in the first place.
Small business will receive emergency loans, but only if they keep their workers.
So if you're a small business and you're preparing for the future and you're saying to yourself, okay, we're not going to have the same customer base two months from now that we do now, which is obviously true.
Then you have to keep your workers in order to receive the loan in the first place, which again is a bizarre situation because it just means mass layoffs in two months.
Instead of everybody being laid off right now and then receiving unemployment benefits and then being rehired as appropriate, instead we are now forcing companies to continue to pay their employees who will then be hired at the first moment that that is available.
The bill provides federally guaranteed loans available at community banks to small businesses that pledge to not lay off their workers.
The loans would be available during an emergency period ending June 30th, And we'll be forgiven if the employer continues to pay workers for the duration of the crisis, but it's unclear exactly how the duration of the crisis is defined exactly.
Senator Rubio worked with Democrats to create this program.
He said the goal is to keep employees connected to their employers so that people aren't just having to stay home and aren't just feeling the stress of being laid off, but the uncertainty of whether they'll even have a job to go back to.
But this doesn't alleviate that because, again, the minute that all of these restrictions are off and we go back to the world in somewhat regular fashion, those jobs are not going to exist anymore.
I mean, let's be real about this.
If you're in the cruise line industry and you're taking a bailout to keep all of your cruise line employees employed over the next two months, do you really think those people are going to be employed in month three?
The answer of course is no, they're not going to be employed in month three, because at that point, I mean, they're gonna get fired, right?
I mean, the cruise industry is gonna go the way of the dodo bird, at least for several years here.
Distressed companies can receive government bailouts.
They're not bailouts, guys.
If you shut down a company and then you pay the company, that's not a bailout.
But, distressed companies can receive government money with strings attached.
Loans for distressed companies would come from a $425 billion fund controlled by the Federal Reserve.
An additional $75 billion would be available for industry-specific loans, including to airlines and hotels.
By the way, that was sort of pretty much what was in the weekend bill that Democrats were whining about.
The creation of the Federal Reserve Fund was one of the chief sticking points in negotiations because people were worried about the 2008 Wall Street bailout.
Democrats pressed for immediate disclosure of recipients and stronger oversight, including installing an inspector general and congressionally appointed board to monitor it, which, again, I don't have any problem with.
Companies that benefit could not engage in stock buybacks while receiving government assistance, and for an additional year after that, Okay, I have a question about the additional year after that.
It's one thing to say no stock buybacks because we're trying to keep people employed right now.
If you're worried about the stock market, you idiots, you're going to need companies to buy back their own stock if they feel that their stock is undervalued.
That's all a stock buyback is.
If your company is being undervalued on the open market and you wish to regain more control of your company, one of the things that you're going to have to do is buy back stock.
Okay, so question.
Particularly in a situation where the stock market is falling precipitously.
You want 401ks to go back up.
You're going to need Amazon to be able to buy back its own stock.
Democrats also secured a provision ensuring that Trump's family businesses or those of any other senior government officials cannot receive loan money through the fund.
Okay, so question.
Why are Trump's employees worse than other employees?
It is one thing if he's getting exorbitant money.
I mean, we're going to see that through disclosure rules, but I'm just wondering why Trump is being singled out this way.
Or, by the way, anybody else who's employed by a business that is connected to one of the senators or congresspeople.
There are a lot of employees who are working for businesses that are tangentially connected to members of Congress.
Okay, hospitals would receive aid.
The agreement includes $100 billion for hospitals and healthcare systems across the nation.
And that, of course, was going to be in the bill already.
We're going to get to more of what was in the bill.
Also, we're going to get to the latest on coronavirus.
Generally, there is some good news, possibly.
There's also some bad news because this is the situation in which we now live.
There is no real good news until we get our arms around this thing.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
First, let's talk about keeping your home safe right now.
So, I have heard news recently that lots of local law enforcement agencies are just letting people out of jail.
Like, they're seriously afraid of coronavirus, and so they are letting people out of jail who have committed crimes.
And those people are wandering around And many of them will go back to committing crimes.
Wouldn't it be good for you to protect your property at this time?
Especially since you are probably on your property.
It's good to know what's happening on your property.
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Okay, so the Senate is also poised to approve Some $350 billion in loans to small business in an effort to keep Americans on payrolls.
A major challenge in the negotiations was that $500 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Treasury Secretary will have the authority to directly lend a slice of those funds, so not much changed over the weekend.
It was just that Nancy Pelosi held this thing up for basically no reason, because we're always going to tack on more spending after this.
Meanwhile, in other financial news, U.S.
three-month Treasuries have now dipped below zero.
We now have negative interest rates on three-month Treasury bonds, which is to say that the demand for Bonds in the short term is extraordinarily high.
Also, the Federal Reserve is currently attempting to push banks to lend.
The way they do that is basically by charging banks to stow their money with the Federal Reserve.
They're telling them, don't stow your money here, right?
Go lend it out.
The problem is, I mean, beyond the obvious, which is making sure that people who are already in hock because of the current shutdown don't get foreclosed upon, don't have their loans recalled.
Aside from that, who's lending money to start a business at this point?
Who's gonna start a business in this climate?
I mean, very, very difficult to imagine a lot of people who are looking to take out new loans from banks to start a business, for example.
The problem right now is that the underlying economic issue is, in fact, the virus itself, and that is not going to be healed.
So, the government has done, at this point, basically what it appears it can do to hold everything in place for the moment.
Now the question becomes, what's the next step?
How do we get out of all of this?
How do we move beyond what is going on right now?
And key to that question is going to be how fast we get our arms around coronavirus itself.
There is an open debate that is breaking out right now about just how deadly COVID-19 is.
And that open debate is worth having because, again, the data that we have are insufficient.
And we have to determine exactly what the risk levels are so we can determine exactly how fast people can go to work, how fast we can transition from a sort of Chinese lockdown style to South Korean style with heavy testing and people working.
If they are healthy, how fast we can get a test that is available to check your antibodies to see if you already had coronavirus and now you're immune to the virus itself.
And so, bottom line is that we are short on data.
As data comes in, then we are going to know more about how fast we can get people back to work at this point.
As I said, there may be some good news, and there may not be some good news, and we just don't know at this point.
So, for the sort of pessimistic view on how deadly this virus is, there's a professor in Britain named Hugh Montgomery, and he put out a viral video explaining how deadly coronavirus is.
This professor is an intensive care specialist based in London.
Here is how he explained how deadly the pandemic could be.
Normal flu, if I get that, I'm going to infect on average about 1.3, 1.4 people, OK?
If there was such a division.
Yeah.
And if those 1.3, 1.4 people gave it to the next lot, that's the second time it gets passed on.
By the time that's happened ten times, I've been responsible for about 14, 1, 4 cases of flu.
This coronavirus is very, very infectious, so every person passes it to three.
Now, that doesn't sound like much of a difference, but if each of those three passes it to three, and that happens at 10 layers, I have been responsible for infecting 59,000 people.
Okay, so the question is, number one, the infection rate?
And the second question is, what is the death rate?
So in order to determine the death rate, the question is not how many people have died versus how many people have tested positive.
The question is how many people have died compared to how many people have it.
And that's a question we just don't know the answer to at this point.
And the reason that we don't know the answer to that at this point is because so many people are asymptomatic, have had coronavirus, and then moved beyond coronavirus, may already be immune to coronavirus.
There are a couple of articles today that talk specifically about this question.
One is from an Oxford study.
There's an Oxford study that just came out.
So everybody has been citing a different study, the Imperial College study from Britain, that suggests there'd be like 2.2 million deaths in the United States if we just allowed everybody to run out and associate with one another.
There's another study that has now come out, modeling by researchers at the University of Oxford.
And the team at Oxford's Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease Lab says that half of the UK may have already been infected with coronavirus.
Okay, well that would actually be good news.
Everybody's freaking out, oh my god, that's great.
No, that would be good news, because the number of dead people compared with the number of people in ICUs, compared with the number of people who have it in Britain, would then be a much, much smaller number.
The death rates would look, if this were the case, the death rates in Britain would look more like the flu, and less like the sort of 1.3% death rate that we're seeing in the United States or the 10% death rate that we are seeing in Italy.
In Italy, if the modeling is confirmed in follow-up studies, this is according to New York Magazine, that would mean fewer than 0.01% of those infected require hospital treatment, with a majority showing very minor symptoms or none at all.
According to this modeling, the coronavirus arrived in mid-January at the latest and spread undetected for over a month before the first cases were confirmed.
Based on a susceptibility-infected recovery model, a commonly used estimate in epidemiology, with data from case and death reports in the UK and Italy, the researchers determined that the initial herd immunity strategy of the UK government actually could have been sound.
Meaning they were saying, let everybody out, let everybody infect each other, then we have herd immunity.
I'm surprised there's been such unqualified acceptance of the imperial model, said lead researcher Sunetra Gupta, referring to an academic report predicting up to 250,000 people in Britain could be killed if the government maintained its plan to suppress the virus but not get rid of it completely.
As of Monday, 87 people in the UK had died from coronavirus out of a total of 90,436 tests, some 8,000 were positive.
The Oxford team is now working with researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Kent to begin antibody testing as soon as this week.
Once there's antibody testing, we're going to know whether a lot of people have had this and are already immune, which is going to be an enormous, enormous change to the data.
This will allow us to know exactly how dangerous this virus is because we are operating.
We're flying blind a little bit as to how dangerous the virus is based on people who go in for tests are the people most likely to have symptoms.
People most likely to have symptoms are the people most likely to go to the ICU.
People who go to the ICU are the people most likely to die.
So you have this very, very filtered system where the only people who are testing positive are the ones who are going in for the test.
But this is asymptomatic, so it's possible a huge percentage of people have this.
This is not the only article on this topic today, and this would be hopeful news.
What you want right now is lots of people to have already had this and not even known, right?
That is best case scenario.
Tons of people already have it, already walking around with it, are already immune, and we didn't even know about it.
That'd be best case scenario.
We're going to get to more Possible good news on coronavirus in just one second.
Because these economic problems, they're not going to be healed, right?
We can hold place.
We can tread water for the moment.
We can't do it forever, right?
We can't have the Fed floating negative interest rates forever without the dollar being completely undermined and people starting to lose faith in the full faith and credit of the United States.
There has to be an underlying economy for people to borrow on the back of.
Otherwise, you basically have governments just borrowing from each other.
And that right there is essentially a Ponzi scheme.
Okay, we're going to get to more of the possible good news in just one second.
Let us talk about the fact that if there's something wrong with your car, you probably want to order parts online instead of going into a store.
Right now, those stores are probably not even opening.
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Okay, so, as I say, it's not just the Oxford study suggesting that there may be tons and tons and tons of people out there who have this thing and don't even know it.
There are two doctors, professors of medicine at Stanford.
One, his name is Aaron Ben-David, and another one is Jay Bhattacharya.
And they have a piece in the Wall Street Journal called, Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?
They say fear of COVID-19 is based on high estimated case fatality rate.
2% to 4% of people with confirmed COVID-19 have died, according to the WHO and others.
So, if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, 2 million to 4 million could die.
We believe that estimate is deeply flawed.
The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths, from identified positive cases, right?
This is what I've been saying right here.
The question is not how many people die over how many people have been tested positive.
The question is how many people die Over how many people have this thing period or have had it in the last couple of months.
The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited.
It could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills 2 million people.
The number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases, then the true fatality rate is much lower.
That's not only plausible, but likely, say these two professors of medicine at Stanford.
Population samples from China, Italy, Iceland, and the U.S.
provide relevant evidence.
On or around January 31st, countries sent planes to evacuate citizens from Wuhan, China.
When those planes landed, the passengers were tested for COVID-19 and quarantined.
After 14 days, the percentage who tested positive was 0.9%.
If this was the prevalence in the Greater Wuhan area on January 31st, then with a population of about 20 million, Greater Wuhan had 178,000 infections, about 30-fold more than the number of reported cases.
They're saying that the people who are flying, let's say that those people are representative of the general Wuhan population.
By the way, it is likely that that is actually under-representative of the generalized Wuhan population, because those are the people who can afford to leave the country and come back to other countries.
The fatality rate, according to these stats, would be 10-fold lower than the estimates based on reported cases.
Next, the northeastern Italian town of Vaux, near the provincial capital of Padua.
On March 6th, all 3,300 people in Vaux were tested.
90 were positive.
That's a prevalence of 2.7%.
If you apply that prevalence to the whole province, which has about a million people, which had 198 reported cases, that means there were actually 26,000 infections at the time.
That's more than 130-fold the number of actual reported cases.
Since Italy's case fatality rate of 8% is estimated using confirmed cases, the real fatality rate would not be 8%, it would be 0.06%, which is actually lower than the flu fatality rate.
The flu fatality rate is 0.1%.
In Iceland, Decode Genetics is working with the government to perform widespread testing, say these columnists for the Wall Street Journal and professors of medicine at Stanford.
In a sample of nearly 2,000 entirely asymptomatic people, researchers estimated disease prevalence of just over 1%.
Iceland's first case was reported on February 28th, weeks behind the U.S.
It's plausible that the proportion of the U.S.
population that has been infected is double, triple, even 10 times as high as the estimates from Iceland.
That also implies a dramatically lower fatality rate.
They say the best, albeit very weak evidence in the U.S. comes from the NBA.
Between March 11th and 19th, a substantial number of NBA players and teams received testing.
By March 19th, 10 out of 450 rostered players were positive.
Since not everyone was tested, that represents a lower bound on the prevalence of 2.2%, meaning 10 out of the 450 rostered players were positive.
We're positive, but it probably is a much larger number.
The NBA isn't a representative population.
Contact among players may have facilitated transmission, but we have to extend the lower bound assumption to cities with NBA teams like Memphis or something.
We get 990,000 infections in the United States.
The number of cases reported in the U.S.
was 13,677, 72-fold lower.
These numbers imply a fatality rate from COVID-19 orders of magnitude smaller than it appears.
So how can we reconcile these estimates with epidemiological models, say these columnists?
First, the test used to identify cases doesn't catch people who are infected and recovered, because it's not an antibody test.
Second, testing rates were woefully low for a long time and typically reserved for the severely ill.
Together, these facts imply that the confirmed cases are likely orders of magnitude less than the true number of infections.
Epidemiological modelers haven't adequately adapted their estimates to account for these factors at all.
They say the epidemic started in China sometime in November or December.
The first confirmed U.S.
cases included a person who traveled from Wuhan January 15th.
It's likely the virus was here before that because tens of thousands of people were traveling from Wuhan to the United States in December.
Existing evidence says that this thing is really, really transmissible.
An epidemic seed on January 1st implies that by March 9th, about 6 million people in the United States would have been infected.
As of March 23rd, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.
If 6 million cases is accurate, that's a mortality rate of 0.01%, which is one-tenth the mortality rate of the flu.
This doesn't mean that COVID-19 is a non-issue.
It could be overwhelmed.
You could have 20,000 to 40,000 deaths.
But that sort of epidemic is far less severe problem than one that kills around 2 million.
It means higher infection rate, but also much lower death rate.
And you end up with numbers that actually do look like the American flu, according to these comments.
Now, again, the data here are insufficient.
We just don't know whether this is true or not.
But everyone, literally everyone is saying there are many more infected people than have been tested.
I mean, that is perfectly obvious.
There are many, many more infected people than have been tested.
The antibody tests are not ready.
So what that would suggest is that it's quite possible you've already had coronavirus and you got over it.
Or you had it and never knew you had it.
Or you had it, you didn't know you had it, and now you're fine.
Right?
In other words, the number of people who are dying or ending up in the ICU compared to the actual number, not the tested number, the actual number of people who have had coronavirus, is actually an extraordinarily low percentage.
That is a serious possibility.
So we're going to wait for more data on that.
As I say, I don't know.
The hardest three words to say in the English language.
I don't know.
You don't know.
Nobody knows.
And to pretend that we absolutely know the death rates is just, it's ridiculous because we don't.
Okay, we don't.
So for anybody who is out there saying this thing is significantly more deadly than the flu and we know it for certain, Okay, we know for certain that it's overwhelming the healthcare system in Italy.
We know it's overwhelming the healthcare system in Spain.
We know it's a risk to overwhelm the healthcare system in New York.
We do not know the actual death rate of this virus right now.
Now, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be panicked, or it doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned at the very least.
It does mean that when all the information comes out, it's going to be fascinating to see what exactly the actual death and infection rates were of this particular disease.
Okay, we're gonna give you some more good news in just one second.
This isn't possible good news.
This is actual, actual good news.
We're gonna get to that in just one second.
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Okay, another piece of good news.
The Washington Post is reporting that the coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population.
Very good news.
Heavy mutations in coronavirus would mean that a vaccine developed would not actually be supremely effective because it's moved on to a different strain.
Scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen's genetic code say that this thing is not mutating significantly.
That relative stability suggests the virus is less likely to become more or less dangerous as it spreads and represents encouraging news for researchers hoping to create a long-lasting vaccine.
All viruses do evolve over time, but this thing seems to be a dumb virus in the sense it is not acquiring information all that fast.
The new coronavirus has proofreading machinery and that reduces the error rate and thus the pace of mutation.
It looks pretty much the same everywhere, and thus it is not adapting to local populations and becoming more and more deadly.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19, is similar to coronaviruses that circulate naturally in bats.
It probably jumped through a pangolin, which people have been eating.
Don't eat the damned bats and pangolins.
That is not culturally insensitive, you idiots.
Just don't do it.
I don't care if you're white, green, or blue.
Do not eat the damned pangolins.
How many times do we have to do this?
My God.
Scientists are now studying more than a thousand different samples of the virus.
Peter Thielen, a molecular geneticist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who's been studying the virus, told the Washington Post, there are only about four to ten genetic differences between the strains that have infected people in the U.S.
and the original virus that spread in Wuhan.
So that is very good news.
And other piece of good news, the FDA is now accelerating a lot of the treatments that are becoming available to the general public, which is good.
I mean, there are a lot of people who literally need treatment, like right now, who are being treated with ventilators who are in grave condition and they need treatment right now.
The FDA has begun to allow doctors to treat some patients with the blood plasma of patients who have recovered from coronavirus-caused COVID-19 disease.
Their treatment must be approved on a case-by-case basis.
Patients have to meet certain conditions according to the FDA.
The treatment is considered investigational based on the possibility that convalescent plasma, a portion of whole blood from recovered victims, may contain antibodies to the virus that may be effective against the infections.
So if you have the same blood type and the person has recovered from coronavirus, you grab some of their blood, put it in your body.
Now their blood is carrying the antibodies to fight off the infection is the idea.
The agency stressed, convalescent plasma has not been shown to be effective in every disease studied.
The plan is for clinical studies of the procedure to begin.
One of the hard things about clinical studies in the midst of a pandemic is that clinical studies generally require a, a, a, compare a, a population, a control population, a population that is not going to get the treatment.
How many people are going to volunteer to be part of a study where they're the control population?
If you're in serious trouble, the last thing you want to be is part of the control population.
You want the treatment.
The agency said it's taking this unusual early step because of the rapidly rising numbers of coronavirus patients and deaths in the United States.
Blood plasma must be collected only from people who are eligible otherwise to give blood.
So, hopefully new treatments coming about.
Meanwhile, we're hearing more and more cases of prominent people with coronavirus.
There's a basketball player named Carl Anthony Towns.
His mom apparently is on a ventilator now.
And we know that there is a person who works for the New York Times who passed away yesterday of coronavirus.
There was also a famous Broadway playwright who passed away.
He was 81.
He was in poor condition already.
Prince Charles has tested positive for coronavirus.
He'd been experiencing mild symptoms for days.
Otherwise, he has remained in good health, according to a statement released by the Prince's official residence.
The Duchess of Cornwall has been tested but does not have the virus.
That would be referring to Prince Charles' wife.
Both are now self-isolating in their home in Scotland.
It's not clear exactly when he caught it or how he caught it, but prominent people are going to get this thing.
And most of these prominent people are recovering, right?
I mean, the vast majority, like Tom Hanks and his wife, recovered.
Prince Charles will likely recover.
That is some good news.
And again, that goes back to what are the actual death rates here versus sort of the assumptions we're making about tests done versus the number of people who actually die from that.
Now, meanwhile, this does not mean that you can't overwhelm the system.
Two things can be true at once.
One, the death rate is a lot lower than we think it is.
And two, there are so many cases that the system gets overwhelmed anyway.
Right?
If the death rate is the same as the flu, 0.1%, but you're getting five times as many people who are getting the disease, that means the system can easily be overwhelmed.
That's what you're seeing in Spain and Italy.
Spain has now surpassed China's death toll from the new coronavirus, according to the Wall Street Journal.
India has implemented the world's most extensive stay-at-home order Wednesday.
1.3 billion people locked down in India.
I don't even know how you're going to enforce that because so many people there are gravely impoverished.
How do they even get food?
Absolutely unclear.
Health officials in Spain reported 738 fatalities from COVID-19, the pneumonia-like illness caused by the virus, which is the steepest daily increase on a national death toll that has risen to 3,434, surpassing China's.
Italy is leading by leaps and bounds.
They've got almost 7,000 reported deaths in Italy.
And again, they have very high mortality rate from identified cases.
And as I keep repeating over, I'm gonna keep repeating it because it makes a difference to you as an individual.
Your chances of life after acquiring coronavirus by pretty much all available data are a lot better than the percentages you're seeing in the press, simply because the only percentages available based on available data are the ones based on testing, and testing is not sufficient at this point.
Here in the United States, we currently stand at 802 confirmed deaths from coronavirus out of 55,243 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States.
Meanwhile, in New York, there's been a lot of concern about an astronomical surge.
The White House is expressing growing alarm about the coronavirus outbreak in New York City, advising people who have passed through or left the city to place themselves in 14-day quarantine.
Dr. Deborah Birx pointed this out.
She says, and so did Anthony Fauci, they said anyone who leaves New York should be self-quarantined for 14 days at this point.
You got to treat New York like it's basically an epicenter of the disease.
Here are Drs.
Birx and Fauci talking about self-quarantining.
To everyone who has left New York over the last few days, because of the rate of the number of cases, you may have been exposed before you left New York.
And I think, like Governor DeSantos has put out today, everybody who was in New York should be self-quarantining for the next 14 days to ensure that the virus doesn't spread to others, no matter where they have gone, whether it's Florida, North Carolina, Okay, so obviously New York City has trouble.
We are starting to see... I mean, New York, again, by the numbers, is indeed an epicenter of this virus.
If New York were a country, I believe it'd be number five on the list of places in which deaths have occurred thanks to coronavirus at this point.
With that said, obviously Andrew Cuomo is livid about this.
He says, we haven't flattened the curve.
Everybody keeps going out.
We got to stop this thing.
Here is the governor of New York.
Flatten the curve, flatten the curve.
We haven't flattened the curve and the curve is actually increasing.
That means the number of hospital beds, which is at 53,000 beds, 3,000 ICU beds.
53,000 beds, 3,000 ICU beds.
The anticipated need now for the height of the curve is 140,000 hospital beds and approximately 40,000 intensive care unit beds.
I am.
Cuomo also says, you know, when the federal government says they're sending us 400 ventilators, and that's true.
Apparently they're sending more than that, but 400 ventilators is what Mike Pence has said.
He says we need 30,000 ventilators here.
Here's Cuomo complaining about the lack of ventilators being provided by the federal government.
FEMA is sending us 400 ventilators.
These are on the news this morning.
We are sending 400 ventilators to New York.
400 ventilators?
I need 30,000 ventilators.
You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators?
What are we going to do with 400 ventilators when we need 30,000 ventilators?
You're missing the magnitude of the problem, and the problem is defined by the magnitude.
Okay, I just have one question.
So the media have been treating Cuomo as though his leadership has been absolutely stellar in New York.
I'm just wondering what exactly the leadership has constituted that is vastly different from, say, Gavin Newsom in California.
The only difference is that Gavin Newsom hasn't been widely complaining about President Trump over and over and over.
The New York Times has an article that says how Cuomo, once on the sidelines, became the politician of the moment.
With his coronavirus briefings, Governor Andrew Cuomo has emerged as an authoritative voice in the crisis.
I have a question.
Why?
Like, really, serious question.
Why?
Like, his pressers are informative.
I don't know that they're any more informative than the White House's pressers.
All it seems to me is that the media are very happy that Cuomo keeps yelling at the White House.
But I'm just wondering, like, he's the governor of a state.
Does he think that President Trump just snaps his fingers and then the ventilators magically appear?
It's a source of grave irritation to me when members of the media suggest that if only we just did what Cuomo said, if we just nationalized the factories, that overnight Ford, which produces cars, would start producing hundreds of thousands of ventilators.
If only that magic man, Andrew Cuomo, were in control of the government and used the power of the federal government.
Ventilators would magically begin appearing pop out of nowhere using the Star Trek replicator in New York City hospitals.
That's not the way any of this works.
And the fact that Cuomo is shouting about this and asking for more things and that Trump is giving them as they come in.
I mean, this is why you see even Cuomo will basically say this, right?
He on the one hand, he'll say, what are they bragging about 400 ventilators?
We need more.
And then he'll be like, and yes, they also give us everything we need.
They're literally video of him talking about like, whenever we talk with the feds, they basically give us what we ask for so far as they are capable of doing.
So my question is, why exactly is Cuomo being hailed as the quote-unquote politician of the moment?
Like, why?
According to the New York Times, the governor repeatedly assailed the federal response as slow, inefficient, and inadequate, far more aggressively than he had before.
Cuomo was once considered a bit player on the national stage, an abrasive presence who made his share of enemies among his Democratic Party peers.
But now, he is emerging as the party's most prominent voice in a time of crisis.
His briefings, articulate, consistent, often tinged with empathy, have become must-see television.
So basically, you like how he is on TV, and thus he is an authoritative voice, and thus he is a great leader.
I'm unaware of how his leadership has radically changed things in New York any differently, again, than Gavin Newsom, my idiot governor here in California, has radically changed things.
Because he hasn't.
I'm sorry, he has not.
And he is saying things and he is doing what any normal governor would do under the circumstances, which is you try to get the resources to your state.
But complaining about President Trump is not a strategy, nor is it something that fixes things.
It is not.
And I guess there's this bizarre notion in the media that Trump has like a bunch of ventilators stored in the back room of the White House.
And Trump is saying to Cuomo, well, if you're just nice to me, I'll release the ventilators.
And Cuomo's like, I'm not going to be nice to you.
I'm not going to do that.
I mean, no, that's not what's going on here, guys.
We're trying to marshal the resources.
And Cuomo yelling about it ain't going to change anything.
Meanwhile, in New York, some New York City doctors are saying we're already at the breaking point in terms of the number of ICU beds available, in terms of the number of ventilators available.
It is certainly true.
I asked my doctor wife this yesterday.
It is certainly true that if Hospitals around the country were prepared for a pandemic.
They would have had a lot more ventilators on hand, but nobody had ever really thought that a pandemic like this was going to come.
I mean, it is a sort of black swan event.
Here's a New York City doctor explaining we're already at the breaking point in New York City.
The reality is that what we're seeing right now in our emergency rooms is dire.
Last week when I went to work, we talked about the one or two patients amongst the dozens of others that might have been a COVID, a coronavirus patient.
This week in my shift yesterday, nearly every single patient that I took care of was coronavirus and many of them extremely severe.
Many were put on breathing tubes, many decompensated quite quickly.
There is a very different air this week than there was last week and Quite honestly, you know, think about the fact that our first New York City case was on March 1st.
That's just over three weeks ago.
To think that we'll be in any place to lift these restrictionary measures by Easter in just, you know, in two or three weeks, for me, seems completely magical thinking.
Okay, so there obviously is a lot of alarm in New York City.
There should be a lot of alarm in New York City.
And again, I don't know how that, like, makes Cuomo a great leader or anything, but everybody's doing their best.
Look, we're all muddling through, and that's basically the theme here.
Now, President Trump, for his part, he is saying, listen, at a certain point here, we're going to have to think about how we open up the economy again, because we cannot do this interminably.
And people were getting very angry at Trump yesterday about this.
How could Trump say this sort of stuff?
How could Trump talk about reopening the economy when we haven't even reached the peak yet?
And the answer is, you have to talk about it before we reach the peak.
We have to have some metric of how we go back to work.
That metric has to be established.
Now, that does not mean, I've been saying this for a long time, that does not mean a date's certain.
It doesn't mean you say, we're all going back to work May 1st.
We don't have the data for that yet.
What we do need is a formula from the federal government for exactly what boxes need to be checked so that we can start going back to work.
We're gonna get to this in just one second.
You know, the strategy of how we go back to work and how we make all of this happen.
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You should head on over to dailywire.com and check it out.
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All the other hosts have done live streams over at dailywire.com.
I did one on Monday.
It was great fun.
I literally sat here in a short-sleeved shirt.
I know they exist.
I wear them.
And played some music for y'all, y'all.
And we all hung out together, took some questions.
It was a lot of fun.
All Access Live is a lot more laid back than our Normal programming.
It's less focused on bringing you news and information.
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Okay, so President Trump yesterday was getting himself in supposed hot water for suggesting that we have to reopen the economy at some point now.
Now listen, President Trump uses his Twitter in, I just repeat, very, very dumb ways.
The president today tweeted this out about Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney tested negative for coronavirus and Trump tweeted out, This is really great news.
I'm so happy I can barely speak.
He may have been a terrible presidential candidate and an even worse U.S.
Senator, but he is a rhino and I like him a lot.
Really?
Really?
Presidential leadership right there.
Solid stuff.
Shut down the Twitter!
Shut it down!
Okay?
It's not helpful.
It's just not helpful at all.
But, with that said, did President Trump do anything wrong when he suggested that he wants us to go back to work?
That he would like to see an end to this thing?
No.
I mean, I think that that makes perfect sense.
President Trump said yesterday that shutting everything down is one of the most difficult decisions he's ever made.
Well, it should be.
It's the most consequential economic decision in the history of mankind.
So I would assume it's one of the most difficult decisions he's ever made.
Here's President Trump yesterday.
A few people walk into the Oval Office and say, sir, we have to close up the country.
I said, what are you talking about?
And that, Mr. President, Must have been a very difficult thing to accept.
One of the most difficult decisions I've ever made because I knew that when you do it, as soon as you do it, you're going to drop.
I mean, they're talking about 20 or 25 points of GDP.
Nobody's ever heard of 25 points.
If we went down a point, that's a big deal.
Now, all of a sudden, you're basically turning off the country.
I said, this has never been done before.
What are you talking about?
Okay, and then President Trump says that he would love to be ready to go by Easter.
And this was the one that got everybody crazy, is that he said, by Easter, I would love to see us back out and working.
That'd be by April 12th.
Now, some people were saying, he's saying a date's certain.
It's a date.
Listen, do I think it's smart for the president to actually put a date on the calendar?
I don't think it's actually smart for the president to do that because either we hit the date or we don't hit the date.
If we don't hit the date, then the suggestion is going to be that Trump blew it.
And if we do hit the date, then the suggestion is going to be that Trump accelerated beyond what the evidence showed.
You know, saying that this is a matter of weeks, not months, which he said on Monday, I thought I was all in favor of that.
Him saying weeks, not months, I think is good.
Him saying a date certain or at least suggesting even a date really isn't a date certain.
But suggesting a date, I think, sets up an unrealistic expectation.
But here is President Trump saying he'd love to be ready to go by Easter.
I'd love to have it open by Easter.
OK, I would love to have it open by Easter.
I will tell you that right now.
I would love to have that.
It's such an important day for other reasons, but I'll make it an important day for this too.
I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.
Okay, he was getting all sorts of flack for this.
And he was asked specifically about, you know, whether this is realistic or not.
And it was more about, like, what he feels, because President Trump just says things.
But when he says that we could lose more people to a recession than to coronavirus and people lose their minds about this, he says we could see mass suicides, we could see...
Renewed opioid epidemic.
There is, you know, some evidence to show that depressed economic circumstances do lead to poorer life outcomes.
So when President Trump says we'll lose more people to the recession than to coronavirus, we don't know.
Well, honestly, we don't.
But to pretend that there are not real life consequences to the greatest economic downturn in the history of mankind would be obviously foolhardy.
Here is Trump saying, obviously, we're going to need to come up with a solution here.
We'll lose.
Otherwise, we're going to lose a lot of people, on the other hand, to a failing economy.
You're going to lose a number of people to the flu.
But you're going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression.
You're going to lose people.
You're going to have suicides by the thousands.
You're going to have all sorts of things happen.
You're going to have instability.
You can't just come in and say, let's close up the United States of America, the biggest, the most successful country in the world by far.
Okay, so these are serious concerns.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked about this, and he said, like, what's the evidence for Easter?
And Fauci gave the right answer, which is, we don't have evidence for Easter, he's just being aspirational, which is obviously true, right?
Trump is just saying, I'd love to have it open by Easter, but Trump says a lot of stuff.
Here's Dr. Anthony Fauci sort of softening the blow a little bit.
It's a back and forth.
The president clearly listens.
I mean, he has this aspirational goal of hoping that we might be able to do it by a certain date.
We talked to him about that.
We say we need to be flexible.
He realizes that and he accepts that.
I mean, he doesn't want to give up his aspirational goal, but he's flexible enough to say, OK, let's look at it on a day by day basis.
We say and we will give him data to inform the decision.
By the way, what Fauci is saying right there gives the lie to the entire Democratic line, which is that Trump's leadership is terrible and that he is unsafe.
Joe Biden has been pitching that, right?
Joe Biden, who can't string a sentence together at this point.
Joe Biden, yesterday, he was on TV saying that Trump should start listening to the experts and stop talking.
There is Fauci literally saying he's listening to us, and he is trying to give hope to the American people.
And here is Joe Biden saying he should listen to the experts at peanut butter.
He should stop talking and start listening to the medical experts.
You talk about having an economic crisis.
You run an economic crisis.
Watch this spike.
Watch the number of dead go up.
Watch the number of people who, in fact, connect with this virus.
When are you going to be able to open the economy?
Look, we all want the economy to open as rapidly as possible.
The way to do that is let's take care of the medical side of this immediately.
One of the things, he's not responsible for the coronavirus, but he's responsible for the delay in taking the actions that need to be taken as far back as January.
Okay, well, here's the bottom line.
He's dealing with all that, and we should try and set up a formula.
Now, the next responsibility of the government, obviously, is to set up that formula.
How many beds do we need?
How many ventilators?
We're only going to know that once we have better data via testing.
When are those tests going to be available?
According to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, we should have 75,000 tests a day ready to go by the end of next week, which is going to make a rather large difference in terms of our data.
By the way, when you talk about expertise, Joe Biden, You should at least know where to cough.
And when you're corrected about where to cough, you should take it seriously.
Joe Biden was on with Jake Tapper yesterday, and he coughed into his hand, and Jake Tapper had to correct him on the proper coughing technique.
I've not talked to any individual.
Excuse me.
You know, you're supposed to cough into your elbow.
I don't know, sir.
I learned that actually covering your White House.
No, actually that's true, but fortunately I'm alone in my home, but that's okay.
I agree.
You're right.
It's kind of old school to do it with your hand.
Do it into your elbow.
You're supposed to do it.
Okay, there he is listening to the experts, Joe Biden.
Okay, meanwhile, right now, what we are finding is that the, so the expectation at the beginning of the day is that the House was simply going to pass this thing, right?
The House was going to pass this bipartisan bill that was negotiated by the Democrats.
It was.
Chuck Schumer was the lead negotiator on it over the weekend.
Nancy Pelosi ain't gonna vote on it today.
She's going to hold it up another day.
Brilliant negotiation strategy from Nancy Pelosi.
We're in the middle of a global pandemic and an economic meltdown in which literally millions of people are going to lose their job.
And Nancy Pelosi is holding this thing up again today.
That is the latest news.
Seriously.
I mean, I don't know what she thinks her strategy here is.
Also, apparently Andrew Cuomo was ripping into the Senate bill.
He said it was a drop in the bucket compared to the need.
And he's ripping Schumer by implication.
The House will not pass the coronavirus bill today, according to Chad Pergram, who is reporting over at Fox News.
Already gaveled in, gaveled out of pro forma session.
Senior sources say House will not meet again later today.
Acting with all the alacrity necessary in the midst of a global pandemic.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
Playing politics at this point?
Playing politics?
Just insane.
Insane.
So, something will pass in the next couple of days, but everybody should keep in mind, you know, when we go through the list of errors that happen in the midst of all of this, the list of political failures that happen in the midst of all this, yes, The Trump administration is going to come in for some criticism over lack of testing and ventilator production early on.
By the way, if Trump had said, we need a global lockdown in January, Democrats would have said that he's an actual dictator.
So let's just keep that in mind, right?
The counterfactual where Trump says, we need to ramp up production and we need to shut everything down, go home for two weeks.
Does anyone really think that in the beginning of February, when all the media were proclaiming that this was not actually that grave of a threat, including the folks over at Vox.com, do you think anybody would have gone along with that?
With that said, that was a failure.
Now, we are experiencing the failure that attends to a Democratic Party that is much more driven by pleasing its radical base On environmental issues than on saving the economy.
Okay, time for a thing that I like and then we'll do a quick thing that I hate.
So, things that I like.
As you all know, we're really grateful for our sponsors here over at dailywire.com.
One of our chief sponsors is Birchgold.
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Goldman Sachs is actually encouraging people to diversify into gold.
I had a chance to sit down late last week with a spokesperson for Birchgold and here is what that sounded like.
Folks, today for Things I Like, one of the things that I like are our sponsors here at the Ben Shapiro Show.
Obviously, in chaotic times, we rely a lot on our sponsors, and we ask that you patronize our sponsors.
But the folks over at Birchgold Group are some of the most trustworthy people I know, and they are very trustworthy, obviously, when it comes to diversification and putting some of your money into precious metals.
Joining us on the line is Philip Patrick, precious metals specialist for Birchgold Group.
Phil, thanks so much for joining the show.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me, Ben.
Thank you.
So let's start off with a quick market analysis.
Obviously, the coronavirus has absolutely tanked the market.
That's not a shock.
It's an exogenous shock to the market.
Plus, the governments around the world are basically shutting down nearly every business.
People are being told to stay home.
But are there underlying market fundamentals that we should have been concerned about even before this with regard to the economy?
The answer is yes and you and I have discussed this I think in the past but you know that the issues that we have today in the markets I think certainly predate the coronavirus.
We've been at the longest bull run in market history and we've been there for really the last 10 months or so.
So I think Timing for a while now has suggested corrections on the cards.
The bubble really, I would say, has been fueled over the last 11 years really by policy, right?
Low interest rates, pumping money through the markets, through quantitative easing, corporate buybacks at the highest levels in history.
What I will say about the coronavirus is, look, if you'd asked me at the beginning of the year when I felt the markets would correct, my feeling was later in the year, right?
Third or fourth quarter.
What I think it's done is acted as a black swan, if you will, this unforeseen event and essentially become a catalyst.
I think it's pulled the timeframes forward and I think ultimately exacerbated the issue.
And for me, this is really, really important.
I think what's happened is we've turned from a financial crisis to an economic crisis.
2008 was clearly a financial crisis, right?
And what happened?
The government stimulated, right?
Pumped money through the markets, dropped interest rates, and it ultimately pulled us out.
We've tried that today.
I mean, the Fed just pumped a ton of money through the markets.
Biggest rate cut since 2008.
It had no effect.
The market kept spiraling down.
This has really become an economic crisis, and I think it's fairly obvious, right?
You left your house in 2008.
People were spending.
They were in bars and coffee shops and restaurants.
Today it's a ghost town here in the United States and globally.
That significantly exacerbates the issue, right?
Millions of jobs are at risk.
People not spending.
It creates a major, major issue.
We're sitting with Phil Patrick.
Title is Precious Metals Specialist for Birch Gold Group.
So, Phil, where do you think stocks go from here?
There's sort of a consensus that the bottom has not been found yet.
Although, who the hell knows?
Because I thought the bottom was at 23,000.
Now it's been dropping below 20,000.
It's bouncing around 1,500, 2,000 points a day.
It's really difficult to tell where the bottom of the market is and to tell people to buy stock in a volatile market is always a difficult thing.
So, where do you think the stock market is going?
Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head.
It's very, very difficult to predict because, quite frankly, we haven't been in this territory at least for a hundred years, I would say.
So, it's tough to predict.
What I can say is just looking at things, this could potentially be the tip of the iceberg.
We look at the 2008 crash, right?
Back then, at its high point, the Dow dropped 50%.
We're down today roughly from the highs about 30%.
So what that tells me is this matches what we saw back in 2008.
There's potentially another 20% downside.
My concern, however, is this could be, and we sort of addressed this a moment ago, but it could be much, much worse than 2008.
And something I look at, and I think I've mentioned before on the show, is cyclically adjusted PE ratios, price-to-earnings ratios.
Even with the downside that we've seen, the cyclically adjusted price-to-earning ratio is roughly about 23 today.
The historical average sits at about 16.
What that means is if we just go to an average multiple in the markets, it puts us down 31% from where we are today, and that's just an average.
In theory, depending on how bad this gets, how long it takes us to get out of this, it could be much, much worse.
And to reiterate a point, What tools do we have available?
We've shot our bullets and they're not working.
We don't have the same tools to pull us out like we did back in 08.
Will this be a three to five year recovery like we saw back in 08?
Or will it be a 25 year recovery like we saw during the Great Depression?
The answer is nobody knows, but it doesn't look good.
So, Phil, where do you see gold prices going from here?
Conversely, obviously, as the market sinks, a lot of people have been looking for safe haven in gold.
Where do you see the gold price going?
Look, um...
Right now, I think pricing is still relatively low, right?
Everyone looks shorter term, but I think you've got to pull it back.
Gold today in the $1,400 range.
Back in 2011, so after the OA crash, gold and silver went on a bull run and they hit their peaks in 2011.
Gold back then was trading close to, it was in the high, mid to high $1,900 range.
We're at $1,400 today, or in the $1,400 range.
We're at $1,400 today or in the $1,400 range.
Silver today in the $12 range, it was $48 back then.
The point being, we're significantly down from our all-time highs.
There's a lot of value there.
Citigroup are one that have predicted gold could hit $2,000 an ounce as soon as the next 12 months.
It feels like we're heading towards that.
I think we've got a long way to go from here.
So with all of the chaos, what exactly have been the last two weeks at Birch Gold Group?
I have to imagine that it's been rather chaotic.
Yeah, that's the perfect word.
Chaotic, to say the least.
Look, as a company, given the climate, we've had our best month on record and we're already there and we're not even at the end of the month.
Just from an individual standpoint, it's absolutely crazy.
The ones I feel sorry for are the processors in our IRA department.
They're non-stop, And actually, we're hitting the other end.
Fidelity, Charles Schwab, the companies that we're helping to roll funds over from, their hold times are an hour and a half right now.
So I think a lot of people are sort of – I think it's craziness all over.
It's not just us.
The big institutions are getting hit.
People are trying to pull their money out.
It's rough, but I can't complain.
Well, we really appreciate your time.
Philip Patrick, Birch Gold Group.
He's a precious metals specialist.
As you know, Birch Gold is a sponsor of the program.
Make no bones about that.
They're the people I would trust with precious metals investing.
I'm not somebody who says liquidate all of your stock holdings, but if you've got money lying around, you're looking to invest, you would want to diversify, it would have been good to do so, you know, a couple of months ago.
Text Ben to 474747 today.
See how simple and straightforward these moves can be before you get all of your questions answered.
Phil, thanks so much for your time.
Thank you for having me.
Thanks, Ben.
All righty.
So we have run out of time on today's show, but we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content, including apparently the L.A.
Sheriff has ordered gun stores closed as non-essential businesses while they're releasing people from jail.
So good news happening out there.
Great governance happening across the country.
We'll bring you all of the updates a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
If not, then we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Associate producer Katie Swinnerton.
Edited by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
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