Elon Musk’s Sick Breeding Plan

Summary

Bulwark Takes: Elon Musk’s Sick Breeding Plan
Release Date: April 17, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Bulwark Takes, hosted by The Bulwark, the team delves into a sensational and controversial exposé from The Wall Street Journal titled "Elon Musk’s Sick Breeding Plan." Hosted by Ryan Seacrest and featuring discussions with JVL and contributor Andrew Egger, the episode unpacks the intricate and troubling aspects of Elon Musk's personal life, particularly focusing on his approach to family formation and his interactions with multiple partners.

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Elon Musk’s Expansive Family Dynamics

The conversation kicks off with JVL introducing the core revelation from the Wall Street Journal piece: Elon Musk is publicly known to have at least 14 children with four women, but sources suggest the number could be significantly higher.

Notable Quote:
JVL [02:18]: "Musk has at least 14 children with four women. But multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk's children is much higher than publicly known."

Ryan Seacrest expresses amazement at the sheer scale and complexity of Musk's family life, noting the unprecedented nature of such a personal arrangement in the public eye.

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Legal Agreements and NDAs: Controlling the Narrative

A significant portion of the discussion centers around the legal maneuvers Musk employs to maintain privacy and control over his personal affairs. JVL reveals that Ashley Sinclair, a current partner embroiled in a lawsuit with Musk, became pregnant through Musk’s advances on Twitter. Once pregnant, Sinclair was approached by Musk's fixer, Burchell, who offered her a financial package in exchange for strict non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

Notable Quotes:
JVL [04:40]: "He can say whatever he wants, though, about you. And if you say something bad about him or violate the terms of the NDA in any way, you then have to repay the 15 million lump sum."

Ryan Seacrest [05:18]: "Some of it appears to be taking place in like, it's open and shut. It's on paper. It's in this agreement. There also appear to be a number of sort of penumbral, unwritten rules about being the mother of one of Elon Musk's children."

These agreements not only include financial compensation but also stringent conditions such as maintaining confidentiality about the child's parentage and refraining from speaking ill of Musk. The episode critically examines the ethical implications of using wealth to enforce silence and control over personal narratives.

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Musk’s Vision of Natalism: Creating a ‘Legion’ of High IQ Offspring

The discussion shifts to Musk's underlying motivations, revealing his belief that civilization is threatened by declining birth rates. Musk's solution, as presented in the exposé, is to increase the population with children he deems to have high intelligence, referring to his offspring as a “legion.”

Notable Quotes:
Musk [07:00]: "In Musk's dark view of the world, civilization is under threat because of a declining population. He's driven to correct this historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence."

Ryan Seacrest [07:27]: "In Musk's dark view of the world, civilization is under threat because of a declining population. ... he wants to be Attila the Hun and he wants to sire 7% of like the children in Eurasia."

The hosts discuss Musk's alarming perspective, highlighting his plans to use surrogates to rapidly increase his progeny, reflecting a quasi-fanatical approach to population control and genetic lineage.

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Manipulative Social Media Tactics: Grooming and Exploitation

Elon Musk's use of social media as a means to connect with and potentially manipulate women into fathering his children is a central theme. The episode details how Musk engages with users on platforms like Twitter (now rebranded as X), often boosting lesser-known influencers and then soliciting them directly for his personal agenda.

Notable Quotes:
Ryan Seacrest [10:22]: "Sometimes he interacts through direct messages, some of whom he eventually solicits to have his babies, according to people who have viewed the messages."

JVL [10:55]: "She [a woman] is getting 21k a month from Twitter until she declines to get impregnated by him, at which point he turns off her monetization."

This manipulation is framed as a form of grooming, where Musk leverages his platform and financial incentives to exert control over individuals, leaving them financially dependent and silenced once they resist his advances.

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Pronatalism and Its Societal Implications

Andrew Egger, a guest and author on natalism, contributes to the discussion by differentiating between genuine pronatalism—rooted in personal desire for large families—and the more coercive, ideologically driven forms exemplified by Musk. He underscores that while many large families arise from genuine affection and personal circumstances, Musk's approach is deeply intertwined with an extremist ideology aimed at societal engineering.

Notable Quotes:
Andrew Egger [25:23]: "There is nothing a government can give you to make up for how hard it is. ... have some sympathies in that direction as far as, like, declining worldwide birth rates ..."

JVL [23:39]: "If you know what I mean. Exactly, exactly."

The conversation broadens to critique the unrealistic expectations placed on individuals to have more children through policy measures, emphasizing that true natalism cannot be mandated or economically incentivized without respecting personal autonomy and genuine family desires.

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Ethical and Moral Reflections

Throughout the episode, the hosts grapple with the moral quandaries posed by Musk's actions. They reflect on the broader implications of a tycoon using wealth and influence to manage personal relationships and procreate on a large scale.

Notable Quotes:
JVL [13:55]: "Straight because this guy, who is going to have, you know, 15% of all the babies who are born here on out, keeps picking all of these unstable crazy women to contribute half of the genetic material for these people."

Ryan Seacrest [17:46]: "This is such a weird, like, this is such a bizarrely, I don't know if common is the right word ..."

The hosts express concern over the potential long-term societal impacts of Musk's breeding plans, questioning the ethical boundaries of such endeavors and the psychological well-being of those involved.

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Concluding Insights

In wrapping up, the hosts distinguish between normative large families built on love and extremist pronatalist agendas that strip personal agency. They argue that policies should focus on enabling desired family sizes rather than coercing increased birth rates, citing global examples where state-led natalist policies have failed to produce the intended outcomes.

Notable Quotes:
Andrew Egger [26:57]: "Because people realize, yeah, I'm not going to do this unless I want to."

Ryan Seacrest [25:58]: "... declining worldwide birth rates ... just because they're sort of decadent and are like, well, you know, I'm enjoying my tree."

The episode concludes with a cautionary note on the allure of using wealth and influence to dictate personal aspects of life, emphasizing the importance of maintaining ethical standards and respecting individual autonomy in family planning.

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Final Thoughts

"Elon Musk’s Sick Breeding Plan" serves as a critical examination of how immense wealth and social influence can be leveraged to pursue personal agendas at the expense of ethical considerations and individual freedoms. Through a detailed analysis of Musk's personal life as reported by The Wall Street Journal, Bulwark Takes encourages listeners to reflect on the broader societal implications of such unchecked power dynamics and the importance of safeguarding personal autonomy against manipulative influences.

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Notable Resources Mentioned:

• The Wall Street Journal Exposé: "Elon Musk’s Sick Breeding Plan"
• Bulwark Takes Podcast Episode
• Contributions by Andrew Egger, Author on Natalism

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This summary captures the essence of the podcast episode, providing a comprehensive overview of the discussions surrounding Elon Musk’s controversial family planning strategies, their ethical implications, and the broader societal context of pronatalism.

Transcript

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[JVL]

Everyone, I'm JVL here with my colleague Andrew Egger of the Bulwark. The Wall Street Journal today has a big expose on Elon Musk's baby mama drama, his harem drama. It is full of some of the craziest shit you have ever seen Andrew. I have printed it out I holding it printed out right here highlighted and annotated for us to go through. But I want to start you out with something from like paragraph six. Musk has at least 14 children with four women. But multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk's children is much higher than publicly known.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Yeah, you know this thing's a journey. I don't know how I know we're going to talk about this. I don't know how this video is going to go. I don't know where we're going to end up. If you people haven't read this piece, like, like your jaw is on the floor by like word 200. And then it just goes on for a thousand words more. I don't remember how long it is exactly more than that, a couple thousand words more. And it just gets crazier and crazier.

[JVL]

So the, the primary source is Ashley Sinclair, who is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Musk over all of this. I want to set things up a little bit for people. So Sinclair caught Musk's fancy, or rather her womb did, on Twitter, where he began approaching her and he slid into her DMs, as the kids say, and invited her out to Twitter headquarters and invited her onto his plane. And then she tells us about the first time they had sex. It was in New York, I think. And then like at one point they're, they're on a trip together and she's like, I'm ovulating. And he's like, I'm paraphrasing that part.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Paraphrasing a very small amount, like not very much.

[JVL]

Very small amount. The point is, once she's knocked up, Musk has a fixer, a Winston Wolf style fellow whose last name is virtual. And this guy's primary job seems to be taking care of Musk's problems. So he quarterbacked the $250 million that Musk gave to the Trump campaign and he takes care of the baby mamas. And what he does is he goes to Sinclair and says, you can have $15 million in a lump sum and then $100,000 a month until the kid is 21 in exchange for just a few things. Gotta sign an NDA. You can never say any. You can never reveal the parentage of the child. You cannot speak ill of Elon Musk. He can say whatever he wants, though, about you. And if you say something bad about him or violate the terms of the NDA in any way, you then have to repay the 15 miles lump sum.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Yeah. Just to dwell on a couple more specific things of this agreement that is signed there. Some of it appears to be taking place in like, it's open and shut. It's on paper. It's in this agreement. There also appear to be a number of sort of penumbral, unwritten rules about being the mother of one of Elon Musk's children. Where Ashley St. Clair starts to get into trouble, according to this feature, is that she went out and she hired her own lawyer as she was about to give birth to this baby. That in the mind of Elon Musk, is a real. No, no, it seems so.

[JVL]

Hold on, I. I'm gonna find this. I'm gonna. Boy, this is. Stand by with me. One of the things that Burl tells Sinclair, he. He offers her some advice. His boss is a very big hearted, kind and generous person, but he has a different side. When a mother of his child goes, quote, the legal route in these discussions, quote, that always, always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise. Yeah, you know, we don't gotta involve the lawyers in this. Ah.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Can we, can we back up just a little bit? Like I said, one more, one more, one more.

[JVL]

Burchell described Musk's expectations to St. Clair. Quote, Privacy and confidentiality is the top of the list. In every aspect of his life, every aspect and his entire world is set up to be like a meritocracy benefits flow. He said when people do good work, which he means keeping their traps shut.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Their traps shut and their wombs productive.

[JVL]

Can you fairly characterize somebody who tweets 300 times a day to be obsessed with privacy and confidentiality?

[Ryan Seacrest]

No. The important thing is that everybody is very confidential about Elon Musk. All this stuff flows one direction, right? I mean, let's back up a little bit. People kind of know this stuff, but, like, we've all known for a long time that Elon has this interesting and unique perspective on family formation. Right. He has a lot of children with a lot of women. Some, but not all of which have taken place with via ivs.

[JVL]

Can we call it family formation?

[Ryan Seacrest]

That's a good point.

[JVL]

Families.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Human. New human creation. Well, actually, he has his own term for it. Here's another random line from the piece. In Musk's dark view of the world, civilization is under threat because of a declining population. He's driven to correct this historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence. Musk refers to his offspring as. As a, quote, legion. During St. Clair's pregnancy, Musk suggested they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. Quote, to reach legion level, before the apocalypse, he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by the Wall Street Journal, we will need to use surrogates. So that is an excellent point. Not family so much as his legion of high iq.

[JVL]

That is a horrible thing that a well adjusted human being who does not at all have insane problems would say.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Yeah, well, how do you even talk about, like, should we just keep reading? Should we just do like, like more quotes? Like, what? This is the most insane. I said it already. You gotta go read this thing. Because, like, it's, it's all laid out in the Wall Street Journal kind of prose and it's all very understated, but the lunacy just drips off of every paragraph.

[JVL]

But not just lunacy. There's also some other stuff. Another thing they. This is actually brilliantly done by the Journal. They bring up a conference in which Musk was talking about the importance of natalism and pronatalism and how he says, you know, I encourage. Yeah, I have a lot of kids and I encourage others to have a lot of kids. Here's the Wall Street Journal. Separately, Musk has said he is concerned about what he called third world countries having higher birth rates. So for Elon, it's not really natalism, it's like muskism. He wants to be Attila the Hun and he wants to sire 7% of like the children in Eurasia.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, some of it is just sort of garden variety racism. Like the part that you just mentioned is like, you know, that kind of people are having all the babies and our kind of people are having not enough babies, and that's a problem. And you run into that kind of thing, unfortunately, all the time in these sort of pronatalist spaces. It's kind of a weird thing because, like, I think you and I both are like, have some sympathies in that direction as far as like, declining worldwide birth rates and things like that are concerned, but not so much in that sort of racial titration kind of way. But then the other thing with Elon is like, it's not just like, you know, the brown folks are having too many kids and the white folks are having too few. I mean, he obviously sees himself as not just like meritorious because he's a white guy. He himself is this, in his own mind, this sort of Ubermensch type figure who, like you say, needs to be siring as many, as many children as humanly possible. Can we just do a couple more things about him personally? Just because, like, I know we're bouncing off.

[JVL]

We're doing this for three hours, buddy.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Oh, my gosh. Okay, so here's a couple more. This is another quote while Musk posts sometimes dozens of times a day on X about right wing politics or his companies. Among Other things on his mind. He often interacts with lesser known users. He replies to them, and sometimes interacts through direct messages, some of whom he eventually solicits to have his babies, according to people who have viewed the messages. This is just a thing Elon does. He sees your tweets. He. He's like, oh, those are some interesting tweets. I like what I'm seeing in the profile picture.

[JVL]

Is there a name for that kind of engagement? Like the engagement where somebody says, may I impregnate you?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Are you looking for grooming or are you looking for something a little bit more specific?

[JVL]

No, I think grooming is probably the right word, isn't it?

[Ryan Seacrest]

And like, as the guy who owns the company that he now pays users to get good engagement on and all that sorts of things. The. The story goes through one particular example of a girl who he followed and boosted up and helped her become an influencer and then started hitting up in the DMs. I mean, this is all really astonishingly.

[JVL]

She'S getting 21k a month from Twitter until she declines to get impregnated by him, at which point he turns off her monetization.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Right. Yeah. No, the whole thing is so strange. I mean, Elon has very famously. He's had a couple of. He's been married a couple of times. He has a lot of children with his first wife. I don't think any with his second. I could be wrong about that. I don't remember. But then has obviously had a sequence of kind of high profile girlfriends. There's this woman, I forget, I'm blanking on her name right now who's like an executive at Neuralink. She's discussed.

[JVL]

Zinnia is her name Zilly Zillis?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Yeah, yeah. And then obviously the singer Grimes was involved with him for a time. So let me just do one more chunk because this is maybe the thing that my jaw was on the ground hardest for Burchill. This is the. Okay. Also, let's talk about real quick about him. He is such an interesting figure because the story kind of lays him out a little bit. And he's just sort of like a happily married, personally very kind of restrained, family oriented Mormon father who does all this work for Elon professionally. Who are these people anyway? Burchell, that guy was involved in acquiring the property for a compound in Austin where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences. Neuralink executive Shivan Zillis lives. She does live. She lives there in that gated Community with their children, and Musk comes and goes. Musk also attempted to get Grimes to move to the compound, but she refused. Similarly, he tried to get St. Clair to spend some time in Austin, quote, with our kid Legion, according to a text he sent her. And this. I mean, this is just. This is just a window into his world, right? I mean, just the. What do you even say about it? What do you say about it? Jbl, you do some riffing.

[JVL]

I want to bring up what, to me was the single. The two funniest pieces of this entire essay. The first is where Burchell, the fixer, is describing to Ashley St. Clair the importance of NDAs Non Disclosure Agreements. He says, we've been through way too many issues where to not sign some agreement. It has turned out badly, he says, because, quote, we have dealt with some very unstable, mentally unstable people. So, first of all, if Elon Musk is repeatedly dealing with mentally unstable people in the course of having all these children, and you're talking to his lawyer, does that maybe set off some alarm bells for you? Second of all, yeah. Mr. Burchell, perhaps you've heard this expression, like, you get up and you meet an asshole. You met an asshole. You meet two assholes, you met two assholes. But if all day long all you meet are assholes, you're the asshole. Your client is the mentally unstable person. That's the. The reason you have NDAs is because your client is the unstable person. I'm just.

[Ryan Seacrest]

I'm just a little concerned that this guy, who is going to have, you know, 15% of all the babies who are born here on out, keeps picking all of these unstable crazy women to contribute half of the genetic material for these people. You know, like, that does not really bode well for the future stability of the population.

[JVL]

So. But here's the other part. So St. Clair was engaged in this relationship with Musk while he was having his court fight with Grimes. And here we have. Sinclair had a front row seat to the custody battle since she was dating Musk at the time. And he updated her on the deliberations. A year later, she was in her own fight with Musk. There is a part of me, a very small part of me, I call him bad jvl, who looks at this, and instead of seeing a young woman who's maybe made some bad choices, who is being preyed upon by this man with an insane amount of money, who's using his money as a weapon to try to silence her and impose his will on the child they have together, which is all very contemptible, and I feel very bad for Ashley Sinclair because of that. But Bad JVL looks at this and says, I'm so sorry you sat there watching him do this to somebody else who was already like mother number 17, and you thought, yeah, I'm sure this time will be different.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Yeah, you know, I think Bad JVL gets enough of a workout these days. You should put him back in the box for this one particular story, this one particular woman. And here's why. I think that because Ashley St. Clair, there's a reason this story hasn't come out before, and it is because Elon Musk is doling out money to these women hand over fist. I mean, you mentioned that sum earlier. $15 million lump sum, and then $100,000 a month in perpetuity until the child hits. Did you say 21? I think so. That's a big chunk of change. Revocable. If she becomes vengeful and goes public, and I guess she has the story kind of dribbles it out how it kind of. It was a small reduction in that at a time as she took more and more public actions, but now she's just throwing open the books to a Wall Street Journal reporter, giving us this look that we never would have gotten otherwise.

[JVL]

And I'm grateful.

[Ryan Seacrest]

At this moment, I'm tempted to be. You know what? Like, don't look at gift horse in the mouth. Three cheers for Ashley Sinclair and everything she does and says and thinks. Because this is a crazy story, and I'm glad we got it.

[JVL]

When somebody, you know, the worst person, you know, just made a great point, I will say. Well, the. The. Another thing that really struck me from this is one of the reasons Sinclair didn't sign the deal was in addition to the NDA portion of it, there was no provision of support should the child become gravely ill, and there was no trust fund or life insurance for if Musk died before the kid was 21.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Right. Right.

[JVL]

That seems to me to be if you are worth $500 billion and you are not willing to write into this a trust fund for the kid when your lifestyle is already not especially conducive to a long actuarial timeline. Get what I'm picking up there?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Mm.

[JVL]

Yeah. Like, that's weird and punitive, and I wouldn't have signed that either if I had been her.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Yeah. Yeah. And it really does speak to what the money's for. Right. I mean, obviously, the point here is not that you are concerned with setting your child, who you brought into the world deliberately up for future success. The money goes to facilitating your not having to think about the child now in the present.

[JVL]

Go away money. It's not, not set you up money. It's not take care of you money, it's go away money.

[Ryan Seacrest]

This is such a weird, like, this is such a bizarrely, I don't know if, I don't know if common is the right word because there's really only a few examples that can come to mind. But you bump into this mindset weirdly often in these like tech futurist, pronatalist spaces. Who is that like Silicon Valley couple who's constantly getting profiled?

[JVL]

No, they're in New York. They're, they're, they're in New York State and I know exactly who you mean. They're like weirdos. He's a Silicon Valley type.

[Ryan Seacrest]

She's, she like ran for, ran for state government in Pennsylvania or something at some point.

[JVL]

Yeah, maybe they're in Pennsylvania, not New York.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Yeah, but they have like a similar vibe where, where it's, and it's very like, it's not just like, like personal strangeness. They almost have like an ideology developed around it where like parenting is not part of this thing at all. No, like, like what matters is just, it's, it's quantity. It's industrial scale production of high functioning human embryos in terms with like really good genetic material. Yeah, right.

[JVL]

If you know what I mean.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Exactly, exactly.

[JVL]

So here's what I would like to. I'd like to talk a little bit seriously about this with you, Andrew. So I wrote, as many of our viewers do not know, a book on natalism many years ago. I am something of natalist myself in that the low fertility stuff seems like a problem. I've written extensively about it. And one thing that I noticed in the course of all of my research and writing the book and then talking about it was that most of the people concerned with that stuff are weird. I mean, I'm not weird. I'm totally normal. But most of the people on both sides, like, you know, like Margaret Sanger, the godmother of a fairy godmother of abortion in America, was, was motivated largely by eugenics and racism. And Elon Musk, who wants to populate the world with children who carry his own genetic code, is, seems to have some racialist leanings somewhere buried deep down in there. And, and yet I, in my real life, I got four kids and I know a lot of people. You know, I'm Catholic, I live up in the greater New York City area. I am friends with a lot of families who have 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 kids. That is a thing which is vaguely uncommon, but, like, not so uncommon that you don't see three of those families every day. And, and I know them and I'm friendly with them, and none of them are like weirdo pronatalists. Like, they, they are very normal people. Most of them, like, they got a lot of kids because they happen to get meat their. Their spouse early and get married young. And most of them also just really like kids. Like, you know, their disposition is just like. You know, there's some people who, who most people like kids fine. Some people, like, really like kids. They just enjoy being around them. For none of them is it like a project. All. All of them are, like, deeply involved in their children's lives. And so I think the median, like, person actually having a bunch of kids is nothing like these freak shows.

[Ryan Seacrest]

But at the same time, you know, there are people who have big families because they like children, and particularly they like their own children, and they want their own children to, like, grow up with a lot of siblings and have a happy, healthy family life at home and things like that. They're not. They're not birthing kids as foot soldiers into some greater cultural war. They're trying to fight.

[JVL]

Sorry, they don't call their kids a legion. That's the craziest outsourcing. Like, they're not writing checks that they don't have to see them. These are the people. Again, this is just anecdote, but I do know a lot of people like this. And, you know, people who drive the sprinter vans because they got 12 kids. And these people are, by and large, not universally, but by and large, they're the ones volunteering for the sports team and, you know, to help coach. And they're always around, like, just being helpful parents. Like, they're not. It's not like they're viewing the. The. The kids as a scoreboard.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Right.

[JVL]

You know.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Right, right. Yeah. And there's. There's so many strains of this stuff. Right? I mean, like, like, there's. There's different religious, you know, considerations that come into this. Obviously, like, you know, different. Different church groups have different views on, like, you know, family planning and birth control at all. There's like, a strange Protestant. Honestly, there is. We've been talking all about kind of like the foot soldier mentality of, like, the crypto. This, this, like, weirdly more like atheistic and futuristic type of pronatalism. But. But there's A similar thing that you do sometimes see in kind of like certain kinds of like Protestant, like charismatic Protestant, like the Quiverful movement, which is also very much about like raising up the next generation of, of kind of freedom fighters for the Lord and things like that. So I mean, and they're all kind of lumped together and then you just again have like the out and out racists and great replacement types and they're all kind of together now under this one policy banner of pronatalism, which is like, and I guess, I guess you can kind of do that when you do, I guess all have the same policy goal, which is that people should be having more babies and you should facilitate that in terms of tax policy and things like that. Right? I mean, in terms of U.S. people.

[JVL]

You want to have more babies, having more babies, right? That, that is the, the key to. Right. You know, if it's all of a sudden you're talking about those same people who, when I was researching this, who would talk about, you know, how terrible was birth rates, they would then in the same breath be like, and of course, these Hispanic immigrants, they're having so many babies, they breed like rabbits. I'd be like, what? What? And which again, just factually, there are all sorts of like, interesting things about the dynamic, the fertility dynamics of immigrants to the United States. But one of the most interesting things is that among Hispanic immigrants, they regress to the mean, like within one generation in America. But the big spoiler in all of this is that people like Elon, the joke's on you because there ain't nothing you can do at the policy level to make people have more kids. People have been trying since the time of Caesar Augustus to get people to have more kids. There is a huge history of pronatalism. This is not something that was discovered yesterday. And the, the evidence on it is pretty remarkable that if there is a policy lever you can use to get people to have more kids, nobody has found it yet. And this is, you know, like China's going through this right now. They revoked their one child policy. They're now desperately trying to get people to have kids. It's not working. Go to places like Singapore where they hand out baby bonuses and give preferential housing and admissions to the best schools to people who have a second kid or a third kid not working. It's because people aren't stupid. Having kids is really, really hard. There is nothing a government can give you to make up for how hard it is. And so people realize, yeah, I'm not going to do this unless I want to.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Yeah, yeah.

[JVL]

You can't drag them into it.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Well, and unless I want to. I think that is kind of like, yes, you can talk about how, like, there really just aren't policy levers here. The reason I'm like, kind of. I consider myself sort of sympathetic to pronatalism or whatever, is because I do think it is a pretty good symptom of just sort of civilizational decay when you have basically across the board, people are reluctant to put themselves forward into the future because they think the world's going to shit or just because they're sort of decadent and are like, well, you know, I. I'm enjoying my tree.

[JVL]

Expensive, right? Because, you know, capitalism doesn't really value workers having kids. It just values the value of workers. Right. I mean, there's a lot of. A lot of reasons. And I would say the one takeaway I tried to get to in my book with people is that convincing people to have kids is a non starter. It never works. All you can do from the policy perspective is try to make it so that people can achieve the family sizes they want. That's it. And in America, that actually is a big problem. We have. Our fertility rate is about 1.75 right now, but our aspirational fertility rate, meaning the number of kids people say they want in a perfect world, is closer to 2.35. And so you could work around the policy levers to try to figure out, okay, so what are the obstacles that are preventing people from getting where they want to go? And are there policies you can do to help people get where they want to go, but you can't?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Car seat safety. The car seat regulations, man, they're too. They're too oppressive. JD Vance has it right on that. We just had our third kid and it's, it was a little bit of.

[JVL]

A reach because I'm the guy who literally wrote that.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Okay, yeah, yeah. All right.

[JVL]

God help me, I have so much to answer for. Andrew. All right, can we, can we wrap.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Around for one last second? We've been doing all the.

[JVL]

Because I have to go pick my kids up from school.

[Ryan Seacrest]

We've been doing all the abstract stuff. Go read this goddamn Wall Street Journal piece about how insane Elon Musk on a personal level is with all the women in his life, and God help.

[Bridget]

Us all, step into the world of power, loyalty and luck.

[Ryan Seacrest]

I'm going to make him an offer.

[Bridget]

He can't refuse with family. Cannolis and spins mean everything. Now you want to get mixed up in the family business. Introducing the [e-mail] test your luck in the shadowy world of the Godfather slots.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Someday I will call upon you to do a service for me.

[Bridget]

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[JVL]

Prohibited by law 21/ terms and conditions.

[Healthcare Provider]

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[LifeMD Representative]

A lot of products say they're clean, but what does that really mean? At Ritual we have very high standards for what clean really means. Like for our best selling Essential Prenatal Multivitamin, which is heavy metal tested clean label project certified and GMO free. It features key mom to baby ingredients like folate for neural tube support, choline for baby's brain development and omega 3 for brain and vision support. But our high standards don't stop there. All of the ingredients in our Essential Prenatal Multivitamin are sourced through our made traceable supply chain, so it's clear where they come from and why they're there. Because clean isn't clean enough, especially during pregnancy Shop ritual for the support you deserve. With 25% [e-mail] prenatal these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.