Plenary Session - inactive due to federal service

Elon's 6 Engineers/ Unelected/ RFK Jr/ MMR vaccines/ DEI/ USAID and NIH funding complaints

February 19, 2025·23 min·1 clip

He proposes a NIH grant lottery instead of a 60-page study section.

1. Plenary Session examines Elon Musk's six-engineer DOGE team, RFK Jr.'s Samoa hearing, DEI, NIH grants, and FDA pain-drug review. 2. The lone host narrates the monologue, references a Sensible Medicine essay, and says his research team compared Samoa measles blame across medical journals and news articles. 3. The episode asks whether government spending, medical institutions, and university programs should be judged by measurable output instead of prestige, seniority, or procedural habit. 4. The host says Elon Musk identified six engineers and brought them into DOGE to cut USAID's reported $50 billion in global spending. 5. He says Wired Magazine criticized the engineers because they were all between 19 and 24 years old. 6. He highlights one Berkeley-trained coder who allegedly rewrote deleted code from memory and another who ranked first in an AI competition on an ancient scroll. 7. He argues that young computer scientists can find waste by counting which federal forms are never viewed and by locating the slowest step in a permitting chain. 8. He says the criticism that Elon Musk is 'unelected' misses the fact that presidents appoint thousands of unelected federal workers each year. 9. He says some USAID spending, including EcoHealth Alliance funding, former CIA operatives working on misinformation, and DEI programs in Guatemala or Sub-Saharan Africa, should be examined closely. 10. He notes that Bobby Kennedy Jr. was asked about Samoa during Senate hearings and says the measles outbreak followed a collapse in vaccination coverage. 11. He says two nurses killed two children in 2018, the government suspended the measles vaccine program, and vaccination rates fell from 70% to 30% before RFK Jr. arrived in 2019. 12. He describes a preprint that tracked how blame for Samoa shifted from nurses and government policy to RFK Jr. mainly in 2024 and 2025. 13. He says the hearings felt like a search for viral clips rather than a real attempt to understand policy thinking. 14. He says DEI started as a broad idea about diversity of opinion, race, and socioeconomic background, but became a scorecard that penalizes men, white people, and straight people. 15. He argues that current DEI systems often reward medical diagnoses and identity categories while ignoring poverty and the descendants of slaves. 16. He predicts universities will revive DEI more aggressively if political power shifts, and he suggests tying training modules to proof that they achieve stated goals. 17. He says NIH grant review is overloaded with 60-page or 80-page applications, retrospective chart reviews, and research that functions as a job program. 18. He proposes a $200 million experiment that compares the current study section against a modified lottery with short applications and then measures five- and seven-year outputs. 19. The tone is combative, fast-moving, and highly argumentative, with repeated references to Instagram clips, YouTube edits, and viral hearings. 20. Listeners interested in US health policy and federal bureaucracy will get the most out of it, while people wanting neutral reporting or back-and-forth debate may skip it.

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