E134: Ukraine counteroffensive, China tensions, COVID Patient Zero, RFK Jr reaction & more

On Taiwan, there's an election next year. And it looks like right now that the pro-China party might actually take power. Right now, the party that's in power is more of a pro-Western party. And the reason, I think, is that the Taiwanese are looking at what's going on in Ukraine and they're looking at the corpses of the Ukrainian youth pile up. And they're thinking maybe it's not such a great idea to be an American proxy state.

And I think underneath that, if I had to guess what he's trying to say about Taiwan indirectly, through his sale of TSMC is the odds are that we are not going to get into a land war over there, which means that that asset and its equity value is in danger and I don't want to own it. And I think that that's a very clinical summation of his rational action.

Well, it's not about being independent. It's how much longer will Taiwan have what they believe to be de facto protection from the United States. And I was told by one very influential Taiwanese family that they believe when the fifth chip fab comes online in Arizona, which I think is scheduled for 25 or 26, they intended to have most of their family members out of Taiwan at that period in time. Now, I think most Taiwanese don't envision this being, you know, a violent invasion of Taiwan. It's more of a take under in the same way that Hong Kong was.

It's us using our balance sheet to make sure that we get to energy independence. So this is actually a perfect role for government. It's shaping incentives so that capitalism can do its job. What this does for Ford is Ford has a partnership with SK. And so SK has a lot of capability in Korea, but they can bring that know-how now domestically onshore to the United States. You'll be hiring thousands of people, you'll be building battery factories. Ford needs batteries. Their forecast is they'll be selling two and a half million electric vehicles by 2026, 2027 So whatever Ford does, you can expect GM will also do.

Jobs, energy independence and less dependency on autocratic nations.

So Elon was basically a fluke. I mean, you get like a once in a generation entrepreneur who happened to be working on this EV problem, and he got that loan. If you're to take Elon out of that government portfolio, it all looks like Solyndra. So the question is, like, what is this portfolio going to look like? Is there really going to be another Elon in there? Because if not, there's going to be a lot of Solyndras.

Listen, while generally against industrial policy, I come down on Chamath's side. I think this is a once in a generation opportunity to reduce our national security risk profile and to achieve what is really a national security imperative, which is energy independence. It's not going to happen just according to the invisible hand of the market.

Look, we're friends with Elon, but we should acknowledge, there's a large number of people that are frankly a little bit turned off by him. And they've been very clear that they want an alternative to Tesla because they don't want to buy Tesla because they don't necessarily prefer him as a brand ambassador for their car. And the reality of life is that even if you're like maximally incredible, unless you find some clever way of creating a monopoly in which case you can be a douche or evil, you're only ever going to capture 30 plus 40 percent maybe of a market. Coke, Pepsi is a good example.

But we ran something through and we allowed it to be labeled a word that misappropriates what it is. It's not a vaccine. And the problem with that is that it now makes people mistrust the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. That's crazy. You shouldn't mistrust the MMR vaccine or DTaP. But because those things are lumped in with the same thing as a Covid vaccine that is at best 30 or 40 percent efficacious, we have these problems.

Why can't we have an authentic postmortem about the efficacy of the Covid vaccine without being shamed?

We were injected with an experimental mRNA treatment because we got hoodwinked by the media into thinking it would prevent us from ever getting Covid, which it did not do. Two months later, I got Delta variant.

So first of all, one of our friends who's an energy investor, we should beep his name before he was telling me that the energy subsidies that were in the, you know, misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, it is like the biggest bonanza of all time. He said that the energy sector is going crazy now trying to figure out how to exploit these incentives. And his view is that although I think it was supposed to cost about $350 billion, he thought that it would ultimately cost the government somewhere around a trillion.

Where it stands right now is that around 18 or 19 days into it, it has produced minimal gains. In fact, it's been somewhat of a disaster. It's hard to get conclusive estimates of personnel and material losses, but I think as many as a quarter of the tanks and armored vehicles have already been destroyed, and the casualties may be as high as around 10,000 out of an army that was trained up for this purpose of around 50,000.

Because on the one hand, if you take the Russia incident and the Ukraine War, what you saw was that there were ample numbers of off ramps that we chose, frankly, to not take so that we could engage our enemy in some long drawn out war on the hopes that it just depletes their resources. That's kind of rolling the dice, I think, in a very dangerous way.

So why hasn't Altimeter purchased any of this? Because the prices aren't low enough to induce me to get off the sidelines to purchase the shares.

And then the thing that has happened over the past year is that sales have been hit. Every software company that I know is re-forecasting down, it's so much harder to grow. Customers are consolidating vendors, sharpening their pencils. Seed expansion has been replaced with seed contraction.

Just real quickly, I would say there's a real appetite in the business community to be engaged. This idea that we're going to decouple the world and never have to deal with these folks is just a farce. ByteDance bought a billion dollars worth of NVIDIA chips announced this week.

And I've yet to meet a single parent who said to me, I care so much about this Ukraine situation, I would be willing to put my children in harm's way to fight for the defense of Europe. Okay, so those data points tell me at a very minimum, we need more of this discussion, more of this debate, not less.

So we are out of 155-millimeter artillery shells. We cannot produce enough. This is the crazy thing. We spent $800 billion a year plus on the Pentagon and our national defense. We're out of ammo. I mean, we must be getting so royally ripped off by the military industrial complex.

we have created a very dangerous revolving door between our most critical institutions and the largest industrial companies in the United States. And that revolving door creates all kinds of conflicts of interest. And those things get sorted out via revenue and dollars and profits.

There are 1,400 unicorns at the end of 2022, and 100% of them will likely do a down run. And if you said, what is the average that they're going to be down, it's over 50%.

And let's just say we can all agree out of all the companies, right? There's only one contender to Zuck getting fit, right? Getting that company fit, getting himself fit is Elon. 75, 80% of the people gone in product velocity is on fire at Twitter.

The revolution going on in this country, which is fantastic from my perspective, is that there is no longer a monopolistic control over the discussion. And that's why this podcast and this friendship and the conversation we all had here is resonating with people because they also want to hear all the different sides, because most people are capable, are way smarter than the elites on the coast think.

The mainstream media does not perform the function that you're describing anymore. They act as the bodyguard for the elite, for the establishment.

Not exactly true. They have actually done incredible reporting, but there is a group of them which is towing the party line because you have the New York Times and their expose on the Taxi Commission.