rick_erickson

#Builder #StrategyAdvisor #IoT #AI #Investor #BoardMember #Founder @Boonlogic @goAgosto (@Pythian) & @Weareskykit #Cyclist #Golf Father and Husband

[Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy]

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?

You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.

I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.

In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.

I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.

Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.

Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).

His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.

Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

What the? How are these numbers even possible?

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Impeach Newsom

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

This lays at the feet of all AI CEOs. We need to do better.

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

What the .... ? What is NY Thinking?

[@jason @Jason]

Ummm… what next, banning books that provide [ Checks notes ] .. answers.

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

@heygurisingh Is this happening universally across paid and contracted accounts universally. Meaning, if you have an enterprise agreement for Google Workplace or Anthropic executed in your enterprise are your prompts feeding the universal models? Our legal team says this privacy is protected.

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

We better buckle up. China is not only outpacing us with output, but is gearing up to stand up data centers at a faster pace.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Electricity output is the single best proxy for industrial capacity

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

Have deliberate mindful conversations with your kids about short form video binging.

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

Addiction to short-form videos reduces brain activity in the frontal lobe weakening the ability to focus.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

China added more solar capacity in 2025 than America has installed in its entire history.

That's the most important energy chart you'll see today.

And 2025 was also the first year when small-scale distributed solar pulled in more investments than utility-scale solar farms globally.

Considering that the U.S. has hundreds of GW stuck waiting for grid connections, the conditions are aligned to start putting solar + storage on every American home.

My research team put together a Deep Dive on solar, if you want the full breakdown.

Here’s the link: https://t.co/NppxPJDM1s

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

@pitdesi I agree if you only drive on roads, don’t have gear to haul and don’t want a multipurpose vehicle for many terrains. My R1T is the most capable truck I’ve ever owned, but I play in rocks, dirt, mud and snow.

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

@SawyerMerritt So basically a Tesla Model X from 10 years ago ?

[Jason Locasale @LocasaleLab]

I’m often asked why I’m supportive of RFK Jr. — usually with the implication that, as a scientist, I should know better. The answer is simple: he’s willing to challenge the status quo.

When universities or scientific associations issue sweeping health claims via press releases, the media acquiesces. But when RFK raises exploratory ideas — especially around diet, environment, and lifestyle, areas long neglected — it’s treated as blasphemy.

For the past 40 years, biomedical science sidelined nutrition and environmental factors in favor of genomics and pharmaceuticals derived from genetic factors. Asking whether better diets might improve mental health is long overdue.

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

Ok, now this makes perfect sense. Nice work San Fran, you just bankrupted yourself again!

[The Real Mike Rowe @mikeroweworks]

https://t.co/BEjgsIt0lT
I don’t want to pick a fight with those who genuinely believe that reparations are a good idea, although doing so is tempting, especially at 37,000 feet with nothing better to do. But I do think it’s important to point out that many of those who claim to support the logic of paying every eligible black person $5 million have refused to contribute a single penny to the cause. Consider the extraordinary virtue signaling coming out San Francisco this month.

Here’s the short version, in case the article is behind a paywall. An ordinance creating a reparations fund for Black residents in San Francisco has finally been signed into law, but the program lacks an identified source of funding. Mayor Daniel Lurie has stated that no city funds will be used, (even though he signed the law!) emphasizing the fund's reliance on private donations…none of which have been received.

In other words, no one who pushed this preposterous idea forward has pledged a penny toward its practical implementation. I refer specifically to the philanthropists on The San Francisco Board of Supervisors: The 11-member star chamber who unanimously approved the legislation on December 16, 2025. More specifically, I refer to Supervisors Chan, Chen, Dorsey, Fielder, Mahmood, Mandelman, Melgar, Sauter, Sherrill, Walton, and Wong.

The San Francisco Human Rights Commission is now tasked with overseeing this fund, which is intended to accept private donations to support recommendations from the African American Reparations Advisory Committee. Again - no many has been contributed. Not a penny. But the city has already spent approximately $217,000 on stipends for the reparations committee members who developed the proposal.

If you think the whole thing sounds merely crazy, consider the math. The major cost component of the proposal is the $5 million payment for each black citizen who is 18 years or older. The Census Bureau estimates there are 35,445 individuals who are 18 years or older, given the age distribution of the African American population. Eligibility for the $5 million payments is very broad so we can assume that all African Americans 18 years and older currently living in the city will be eligible for these payments. Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.

Again, I’m not sharing this to start a conversation about the wisdom or the folly of reparations. I’m sharing this to further illustrate the rank hypocrisy of our elected officials, and their endless desire to be celebrated by the people who voted them in. Today, those people are congratulating themselves for establishing a fund that absolutely no one is funding - including them.

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

Unreal and yet all we had to do is follow the $$.

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

@friedberg These topics & threads appear to be prompt influenced by humans who have an agenda, but I agree this provides a path for blinded malicious behavior by agents themselves. Interesting find.

[DJ Seo @djseo]

Hear from Sebastian, one of the first people in the UK with Neuralink, and our partners at University College London Hospitals (UCLH).

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

So good…

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

100% nailed this @mikeroweworks and understanding how to support how we train these skilled workers is key. We have a major deficit of workers and anyone who thinks robots are the answer are decades away. And you know what, these same workers will be needed to eventually help train, support and monitor future robots in development cycles and in the field.

[The Real Mike Rowe @mikeroweworks]

I couldn't make it to Davos this year, but I'm delighted to see that my message has. Here's an enlightening exchange between two of the most successful businessmen in the world, Jensen Huang and Larry Fink, regarding the impact of AI on skilled labor. I watched it lie this morning, as I waited for the coffee to kick in. https://t.co/vpxLETDQkK The entire clip is 30 minutes, but I've attached a short clip wherein Jensen, the CEO at NVDIA, talks about "the greatest infrastructure project in the history of mankind," and the opportunities for those entering the skilled trades today.

Obviously, our workforce is nowhere near ready for what's coming. In fact, we're not ready for what's already here. We're going to need to dramatically rethink the way we train the men and women who will build the infrastructure in question, and the speed with which we do so. I'm heartened and encouraged to see Silicon Valley at the table, along with the current administration, who seems determined to reinvigorate the skilled trades by whatever means necessary.

At this point, it's only a matter of national security...

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

This is how to drive down the cost of raw materials in your supply chain.

If your not excited about the positive environmental impact of NA energy independence, your not paying attention!

[Tesla North America @tesla_na]

Our Lithium Refinery ushers in energy independence for North America

Regionalized access to critical battery minerals brings jobs, cuts emissions & helps accelerate our mission

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

@mcuban 100% and I’m glad your exposing this Mark. The system is so convoluted and these costs just get buried in administrative hell.

[rick_erickson @rick_erickson]

Who thinks polymarket style predictions will provide better more accurate outcomes than the current sports betting app?

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

David Friedberg's forecast for 2026: Prediction markets become the news

“I think Polymarket's evolved from being kind of this one-off quirky prediction market to actually really providing insights into current events and the news in a way that none of us anticipated.”

“And I do expect that after the deal we saw with NYSE, that all of the exchanges, and we're already seeing this with Robinhood and Coinbase, and we should expect something from Nasdaq this year … but I do think that prediction markets could become not just markets, but also news.”

“And I think Polymarket’s just in such a position to have a breakout year.”