Dr. N.R. Luke

It surprises me that people wonder "What happened to Elon Musk?" when it seems self-evident to me... so here's the most condensed explanation I can manage (while also anticipating/addressing objections from a certain crowd): Circa 2022/23 (Elon likely knew before the public did), Elon's son was swept up by the transgender contagion. Parents who've had this experience know it is indescribably traumatic at multiple levels and for multiple reasons, not least of which is: You know your child in a way that they cannot and do not know themselves. Now, before the non-parents start arguing with that claim, let me explain what I mean and why this is true. The key understanding is: as a parent, you've observed your child from a time before they could even observe themselves -- literally. -From the ages of 0 until 2, you don't even have an ego to act as a self-observer (babies do not differentiate "self" from "other"). -From the ages of 3-7, your self-observation is rudimentary at best, with limited ability to self-reflect (see: Piaget's preoperational stage). -From the ages of 8-11, your self-observation is improving, but still quite basic and largely dependent on environmental feedback. -From the ages of 12-25 (typically), you're (finally!) "really getting to know yourself," mapping your internal world, and crystalizing some form of self-image. (more on this shortly) -But the thing is, your parents (if they're observant) have already been doing that for more than a decade. Because we all reveal who we are in countless little ways. And your parents literally had a ~12+ year head start on you. Plus your parents have the benefit of a much wider "30,000 foot view" perspective on your life -- including sibling dynamics, peer influences, parental expectations, cultural influences, etc. This broader perspective allows parents to interpret the child's behaviors in ways that the child cannot yet comprehend. (For example, a parent might notice that a child's shyness is situational (e.g., around strangers) rather than a fixed trait, while the child may not yet have the self-awareness to make this distinction and may wrongly believe themselves to be "shy.") Research on temperament (e.g., Thomas and Chess) suggests that children exhibit stable behavioral traits from infancy. Observant parents can identify these traits early on, giving them a solid "head start" in understanding their child's identity. Parents (obviously) also have a much broader range of human experience in general than their children do. Now, the key understanding about all this: During that final stage (ages 12-25), some individuals experience identity confusion. This is a perfectly normal occurrence -- but that confusion makes those individuals susceptible to being subsumed by things like cults and radical ideologies, which purport to offer solutions to that confusion. So, if you're a parent who's been observing your child for 15 (or more) years, you have a unique experience-based intuition for when something your child says or does is likely emanating from their core self... or is instead coming from a more superficial, external influence. All that to say: In 2023, Elon's son publicly came out as "trans." This would have gutted Elon at an incredibly deep emotional and instinctual level. And Elon would be in the unique position to judge (with high accuracy) whether his child's feeling was "genuine" or not -- because kids with true gender dysphoria display very early signs (ages 2-4). They don't suddenly become gender dysphoric in their teens. But they do very much get swept up into social fads in their teens. They also get swept into ideologies that pretend to have answers to the aching confusion that comes with that development stage. Elon obviously knows his child better than we do, and he determined that this "feeling" his child was professing was not aligned with his child's true and best self. The trouble is, the unique nature of the trans ideology is that it's a call to action -- specifically, it calls its adherents to DESTROY "the old you." If that's a false call to action, then "destroying the old you" is simply self-destruction. There is nothing noble about it -- it is merely self-harm inspired by a destructive ideology. So, in 2022-23, Elon is dealing with this ideology not in an abstract "what do you care?" way, but at the ground level. The enemy is inside the gates. And he's watching it destroy his child. As a parent, when one of your children is being harmed, you immediately and desperately search for the source of that harm, so you can stop your children from continuing to be harmed. Elon then correctly identified the source of harm to his child, which he dubbed "the woke mind virus." He later said, "The woke mind virus killed my son." So he has since vowed to destroy it the way it destroyed his child, and the children of others. He sees it for what it is: Not just "an idea," but an idea with very real and destructive consequences. That is likely the biggest factor, if not the sole factor, in "why" Elon is who he is today.

@einexile @ThrillaRilla369 For example, have you heard this? Dunno how Bono's voice seems to get better with age... and this is naked, live. The pre-chorus is amazing: youtube.com/watch?v=BdVIJN…

@einexile @ThrillaRilla369 Agreed. I barely listened to No Line on the Horizon and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (though that does have a few good ones). Songs of Innocence and Experience is probably their best "new era." It was a mistake for them to abandon the Edge's iconic "wall of sound."

An album that has no bad songs on it and can be listened all the way through. I’ll go first: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon 🌑

@ShellPaw @Milkmeray So it's a gay thing? 😂

@_LukeCSkywalker @Milkmeray “Fruchtige Senf” means “fruity mustard”

i just found out my American friend doesn't know what hotdog sauce is. It literally has an american flag on the bottle of hotdog sauces wdym they don't have it and never heard of it? Germany just made that shit up!???😭😭 HUHHH

@JonnyTwoBucks @Milkmeray I never said I personally put ketchup on hot dogs. I normally don't. But I understand people who do.

@_LukeCSkywalker @Milkmeray You’re putting ketchup on hotdogs and trying to call other people deranged?

@speedbuggy16v @Jere_Memez @klara_sjo Yeah, the funny thing is, my wife is a genuine knockout. But she often rates women who are far less attractive as being "gorgeous" and thinks I'm "just flattering her" when I tell her she's much prettier than they are. But I'd rather that than she be arrogant/stuck up, so 🤷‍♂️

@_LukeCSkywalker @Jere_Memez @klara_sjo Now that is weird, women are usually far more vicious when rating each other.

Did he spend his money well?

@choppertaur @Milkmeray Baked beans are borderline (franks and beans!) but potato salad is an abomination and you should pressure your state representatives to ban it. 😂

@_LukeCSkywalker @Milkmeray We have a hot dog place where I live and my favorite dog they sell has potato salad and baked beans on it, lmao

@SycamorePilot @CNviolations If I see someone driving around with caulking on their roof and I have even the SLIGHTEST SUSPICION that they're filming, I'm gonna be like "f-- them" and say nothing. 😂

@_LukeCSkywalker @CNviolations No one is going to stop helping people over this lol

This cracked me up 😂

@Rothmus I don't remember who said it, but the weird part about being GenX is that you constantly have to explain to everyone older AND younger than you that everything you see on the internet is horsesh*t.

Democrats in every age group continue to trust the mainstream media far more than independents and conservatives of the same age. The worst offenders are of course the Boomers. I think they believe the media because they want to believe it. The coverage consistently reinforces their political biases. It’s a media bias issue, not a trust issue.

@Buttberrypie @Milkmeray Also deranged. 😂

@_LukeCSkywalker @Milkmeray Can’t forget pickle relish.

Republicans: "We want to save America by requiring an ID and proof-of-citizenship to vote, only counting American citizens in the census, deporting people who shouldn't be here, and drawing districts based on population size. Democrats: "We want to save America by removing every election integrity law, giving every illegal alien amnesty, packing the Supreme Court, giving ourselves racially gerrymandered districts, and imprisoning our political opponents.

@xwanyex Uh oh. What happened? Did the commies find you? They can be pretty obnoxious.

Britain living in a fantasy world where it's still a high-trust society. Because this "let's all lay down our arms together" thing doesn't work unless everyone does it in unison. Sorry, Britain, that ship has sailed. Time to adjust.

@elonmusk @multiplanet1 I dunno, it sounds pretty cool. I think you should build one. Also, the post was clearly written by GPT.

@multiplanet1 Not true

There is a room inside SpaceX that fewer than 20 people have ever entered. It has no official name. Employees call it the Vault. There are no windows. One door. No phones allowed inside. No laptops. No recording devices. A Faraday cage built into the walls blocks all wireless signals. What happens inside that room has shaped more of the modern world than most people will ever know. This is where Musk makes his actual decisions. Not in board meetings. Not on Twitter. Not in the public interviews where he says provocative things and the media argues about whether he's a genius or a villain. Those are theater. Necessary theater, but theater. The real decisions happen in a room with no signal, no recording, and no audience. Every major SpaceX milestone was decided there first. The decision to attempt landing a rocket on a drone ship. The decision to build Starship out of steel instead of carbon fiber when every engineer said steel was outdated. The decision to build Starlink. The decision to bid on military contracts that Boeing and Lockheed had monopolized for decades. Each of these decisions looked insane from the outside. Each one was the product of hours in a room with no noise. Musk has talked about this principle indirectly. Never naming the room. But describing why it exists. He said the quality of a decision is inversely proportional to the number of people in the room when it's made. He said most CEOs make their worst decisions in meetings and their best decisions alone. The room is his technology for being alone. In a world where every thought is interrupted by notifications, every strategy session has 15 people with competing agendas, and every CEO is performing confidence for an audience, Musk built a physical space where none of that exists. No signal means no interruption. No phones means no distraction. No audience means no performance. No recording means no self-censorship. What remains when you strip all of that away is the only thing that matters for decision making. The actual problem and your actual thinking about it. Most people have never experienced this. They think they've thought deeply about something. They haven't. They've thought about it between notifications. They've thought about it while performing thinking for an audience of colleagues. True thought requires the absence of everything except the thought itself. I don't have a Faraday cage. But I started creating my own version. Two hours per day. Phone in another room. No laptop. Just a notebook and the problem. The first week felt almost physically painful. My brain kept reaching for stimulation that wasn't there. Phantom phone checks. The urge to quickly look something up that was actually the urge to escape the discomfort of uninterrupted thought. By week three the quality of my thinking changed in ways I can measure. Solutions appeared that never surfaced during normal screen-filled days. Connections between ideas formed that couldn't form when attention was fragmented across 30 browser tabs. Most people live at 5% signal and 95% noise. They make every decision inside that noise and wonder why the decisions are mediocre. Musk built a physical space that inverts the ratio. 95% signal. 5% noise. The decisions that come from that environment are categorically different from anything the noise produces. You don't need a Faraday cage. You need two hours, a closed door, and the discipline to leave your phone in another room. The best decision you'll ever make will come from the quietest room you've ever sat in. The rockets are impressive. The room that decided to build them is the actual invention.

Map of where the cast members in Nolan's Odyssey are from (shown in gray).

@eigenrobot Are they calling Cookie Monster a coward???

chat is this real

@Jere_Memez @klara_sjo Amusingly, my wife is the exact opposite with other women and consistently OVERRATES them. Her: "She's gorgeous!" Me: "Babe, she's like a 5 at best."

@_LukeCSkywalker @klara_sjo Exactly the same. I've never been able to guess right.

@Restrictfootage Situational awareness: zero. Does she not have peripheral vision? Is she partially blind and didn't realize she was bumping the psycho guy?

Women kept bumping man with her cart repeatedly and then this happened....

Despite 3 years of progress, AI is still worse than me at stuff I understand, but unfathomably brilliant outside my area of expertise. Wonder why this is