Elon Musk’s No Good Very Bad Week

Updates from DOGE, Tesla, and his legion of children

During a late lunch, I scrolled Substack and came across this note:

If we were friends, I would text it to Elon Musk with same, tbh and hope that he’d respond with something like: omg the pressure is insane and really getting to me. And then I could say, you know, what if you just, like, stepped back a little? Maybe it’s all too much? Maybe you could just, idk, resign from your businesses and get out of government and quietly live on a supercool island with your 14+ kiddos and all of your money? 🤷‍♀️🏝️👶👶👶👶👶👶👶👶👶👶👶🏝️🕺🤷‍♀️

Elon and I are not pals, but I think the pressure of believing he’s destined for greatness is getting to him. The results of DOGE aren’t what he promised. I can’t imagine that they’re what he expected. Today, Sarah and I talk about what he has and hasn’t done during his government foray. And then we discuss all those kiddos and the strange alliances gathering around natalism. - Beth

P.S. outside of politics preview:

Topics Discussed

• Updates on DOGE’s Work

• Profit Decline and Panic at Tesla

• Elon Musk’s Children and the Pronatalist Movement

• Outside of Politics: Tracking Your Teenagers

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

• Join us for our 10th Birthday Celebration

DOGE and Its Effects

• Musk says he can cut $2 trillion from budget at Trump rally (Fortune)

• Tracking Efforts to Shrink the Size of the Federal Workforce: March 2025 Update (The Unseen and The Unsaid)

• Tracking Trump Administration Litigation (Lawfare)

• DOGE’s Only Public Ledger Is Riddled With Mistakes (The New York Times)

• Elon Musk Lowers DOGE's Estimated Savings — Again (Business Insider)

• DOGE: Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE Savings Tracker)

• DOGE Is Far Short of Its Goal, and Still Overstating Its Progress (The New York Times)

• How Much Money Is DOGE Saving Taxpayers? (American Enterprise Institute - AEI)

• Tracking federal expenditures in real time (Brookings)

• Quinnipiac Poll on Economic Worries

• DOGE Fell Short on Spending Cuts: Now Congress Must Lead (CATO)

• What Polls Say About DOGE and Elon Musk (The New York Times)

• Bird flu poses growing risk to people as pathogen spreads, scientists warn (60 Minutes)

• 100 days of DOGE: lots of chaos, not so much efficiency (Reuters / Yahoo News)

Elon’s Other Issues

• Tesla’s Global Vehicle Deliveries Sank 13% in First Quarter (The Wall Street Journal)

• They Criticized Musk on X. Then Their Reach Collapsed. (The New York Times)

• The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers (The Wall Street Journal)

Trump and the Pronatalists

• Births: Provisional Data for 2024 (National Vital Statistics System)

• White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children (The New York Times)

• All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior (HarperCollins)

The Commodification of Children

Show Credits

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Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:11] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics where we take a different approach to the news. Today, we're begrudgingly talking about Elon Musk but only because we feel like he's running out of road in lots of areas of his life and we don't want to miss an opportunity to celebrate that and discuss it. So we're going to talk about Elon that also overlaps with a conversation we wanted to revisit about pronatalism. If you don't know what pronatalism is, good for you. It's a movement dedicated to all of us having more babies. And yes, it's giving Handmaid's Tale. Outside of Politics, we're going to continue a conversation we started on Tuesday about baby monitors. And by popular demand, we are going to move on and talk about tracking our children, spouses, friends, family.

Beth [00:00:59] Being tracked by them, which I don't enjoy. But before we do all of that, we'd like to remind you of our 10th birthday celebration coming up in July in Cincinnati. We're so excited. In-person tickets are completely sold out. There are a few tickets left for the after party. So if you didn't get tickets to the live show, but you want to come hang out, the after-party is going to be fantastic. Come hang out. Yeah, we're going to have a cake. And if you can't be in Cincinnati in July, virtual tickets are still available. You can join the celebration in real time and even participate in the celebration with a virtual ticket. You can also watch the recording later if you'd like to, but we're going to be looking at how our lives and our listeners' lives and the world have changed over 10 years. There are going to be some treats, there's going to be trivia. It's just going to be so much fun. So those virtual tickets are going quickly. Head to pantsuitpoliticshow.com or the link in our show notes to get yours right away. It's going to such a special night. We would love for you to be there with us.

Sarah [00:01:56] Before we start, one more thing, we did want to give you a heads up that we are making bonus episodes every week over on Substack. This week, good thing I can cuss again, we're talking about Joe Biden and whether or not he lost the 2024 election for Democrats. Beth's been reading, at an enormous personal sacrifice, several of the 2024 Election Books. So she's given me a rundown on the books. We're processing Joe, Kamala, Democrats, what they got wrong, Trump, how that campaign was different, what they got right. So go check that out. The first 15 minutes are free so you can see what you think and join us over on Substack. Up next, let's talk about Elon. Beth, it seemed important that we check in on Elon to me.

Beth [00:02:56] I thought you never wanted to talk about Elon again.

Sarah [00:02:58] I don't, but he does not allow that.

Beth [00:03:01] That's true.

Sarah [00:03:01] He does not allow that by the way he currently lives his life. And since we last talked about Elon, there has been quite a bit happening with DOGE, with his businesses, with his personal life, which he doesn't want anyone to talk about ever. And so we thought we would just check in a little bit with our co-president.

Beth [00:03:22] This is sometimes what happens when you don't want anyone to talk about your personal life ever. That's all people want to talk about.

Sarah [00:03:29] Everyone seems to have forgotten about the Barbra Streisand effect, which is the more you try to silence people, the more they want to talk about it.

Beth [00:03:35] Correct. And when you have stories about reaching out to women you've never met through DMs on a social media platform that you own and monetize, that story's going to come out. What kind of hubris is it that tells you that that isn't going to come up?

Sarah [00:03:53] Don't skip ahead to the sexy parts, we have to start with DOGE.

Beth [00:03:56] The hubris is relevant though, right?

Sarah [00:03:58] Fair enough.

Beth [00:03:59] The hubris is the story.

Sarah [00:04:01] Okay, listen, I want to just give the summary from The Cato Institute. This is not Pod Save America, this not The Cato institute. It's very, very libertarian. They're going to love government cutting, okay? But this is their summary. Back in October, Elon Musk set the spending cut target at $2 trillion. That was quickly walked back to $1 trillion. Over the last few months, DOGE has had some modest successes, eliminating billions of dollars in government contracts and shrinking the federal workforce by 12,000 personnel on net. Net, 12,00 people. Okay. At the same time, DOGE just suffered several major legal setbacks and self-imposed embarrassing blunders. The cumulative result, Elon lowered DOGE's estimated savings, again, this time down to $150 billion. And unfortunately, even that $150 billion is optimistic. Itemized, verifiable cuts, those with receipts, sit at just 63 billion. So not $2 trillion.

Beth [00:05:11] Sixty three billion is a lot of money. It is a lot of money. To regular people, I'm not going to try to tell anyone that $63 billion is not a lot money. I did read a report from Reuters this morning that said people who are studying this closely think DOGE will end up costing money on the other side because they are making such a mess of everything. And they had individual stories from agencies. For example, the Social Security administration has sent some people who are working at very high levels-- lawyers, people at the highest levels, have been deployed to regional offices because they've gotten rid of so many claims’ processors. Those folks get there, they don't know how to process the claims. That hasn't been their job. And so the wait times are up for everyone. And in the long run, they think it's possible that DOGE will end up being a net cost instead of a net savings.

Sarah [00:06:07] Wow! I don't know. I feel like maybe we said this from the beginning, but just hearing it play out in reality is quite the come down. Well, and the fundamental issue here is DOGE and the entire instability created by the Trump administration, particularly through tariff policy, which I understand Elon is pretty opposed to. I'm not trying to saddle Elon with the tariff policy. But in combination, what it's doing is raising our borrowing cost. So you're not going to get to a half a percentage point additional interest paid by the United States government, $63 billion at a time, okay? This is a lot of money we're paying in interest on our debt, and it's going up, not down. So he would actually have to be doing that $2 trillion successfully to gain on the additional borrowing costs we're paying right now.

Beth [00:07:09] And they would have to keep this effort up. He has talked about this as effectively being done in May. That's not going to get anywhere near what we need, to your point, to actually get to something like a balanced budget. And he has fired the people whose jobs are to stay in place and do those things. They're getting rid of inspectors general, they're getting, there's a whole team of people in the Pentagon who will find like $100 billion in waste in a single project. That team has been eliminated. So the folks who were doing the long-term work on government efficiency have been taken out of the picture in favor of this short-term work on "government-efficiency" that keeps causing as much trouble as it saves. And so I think these experts are right that ultimately this is a failure. We were told two things at one time that were contradictory. You had people defending this saying they're going to measure twice and cut once. But you also had him standing on stage with a chainsaw. And the chainsaw is how this has gone down. And it's just not working.

Sarah [00:08:19] Well, and here's the thing. Every American, I think, even those who work in the federal government would say there is bloat in the bureaucracy.

Beth [00:08:29] A hundred percent.

Sarah [00:08:29] A lot of that due to risk aversion. No one wants to end up on the news or a 2020 report or a Wall Street Journal deep dive on not completing the process, not checking all the boxes. And so that created this culture of fear around being creative, doing anything outside this strict process, which I think is a problem. But what has Elon done? Elon has created an enormous barrier to anyone who wants to do this level of cutting in the future. Because he has created a massive amount of institutional memory around what a mess it is to fire people, cut positions that it ends up costing you more money, that people can't do things, that something's going to get missed. God help us if one of those things is the bird flu. I read a truly terrifying report, there's a big 60 minutes report on the bird flu and how the people that are supposed to be preventing this got fired. So not only have you failed this time, what you've done is create this truly intractable institutional memory about what a disaster it is when you even try to do this. So you've not only failed at your job, you've made the next time somebody wants to do this damn near impossible.

Beth [00:10:09] Well, and this will be tied up in the court system for years, too. There's so many lawsuits related to the work that DOGE has done. I would love to see someone itemizing the cost to the Department of Justice of defending DOGE's actions in court over the years. But simple things, so a story that jumped out at me from this Reuters report, there was a scientist in the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health who needed some dry ice to preserve urine samples, okay? And usually that scientist would take his credit card from the government down to the grocery store and buy the dry ice and bring it back. About $200. Well, one of the things DOGE has done is take tons of people's government credit cards away from them or reduced the spending limit on them to $1. So now it's a process to get someone to approve this kind of expense, okay? And so they go through this process. They have to go to a colleague in another regional office and the dry ice has to be shipped. And so there's the shipping cost plus the time. All these places where they go, we're just doing common sense things. No, the common sense thing is for the scientists to run to the grocery store and get the dry ice, right? But they haven't studied what they're working on enough to think through those issues. And so I think he has, in addition to making it hard for people who want to do this work in the future, just depleted his own reputation as a problem solver.

Sarah [00:11:40] Well, and that's what it shows up in the polling. When respondents of some public polls are asked whether they approve or disapprove of DOGE, as many as 60% of respondents express negative sentiment. And 63% are concerned about DOGE's access to personal data. So that's just DOGE. Because he's linked himself so closely, when you see his personal polling, oh my God, the negatives skyrocket. And it's not just Democrats, he's lost basically anyone who identifies as independent and not a small amount of Republicans who are now negative on Elon.

Beth [00:12:19] Which is a fit, because this could have been a home run. When they started this, it could have been a homerun. There is enough to talk about. They could have done this carefully and diligently. And Elon could have come out the other side with people ready to change the constitution to make him president someday. And he has blown it in every respect here.

Sarah [00:12:43] Well, and I think that has expanded to his political impact inside the Republican party as well, because he's not just racking up losses with regards to DOGE. One of the things that I think truly got my attention-- it definitely got Ezra Klein's attention, he talks about it nonstop-- is how all these Republicans, particularly in the House, were just terrified to cross him because he basically said, "I'll come in and pour money into any primary to defeat you." So it was like this endless bank account for Donald Trump's revenge tour against members of his own party. And people were really scared until Wisconsin, where Elon spent $25 million to try to win this Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and lost handedly. Did this weird rally where the candidate didn't even join him. He didn't talk about Wisconsin that much. Talked about all kinds of weird stuff, what we'll get to later. And I think it just poked a real hole and people saw that he was a political liability. And that's what the Wisconsin Democratic Party saw. Their strategy was, we don't talk Donald Trump, we talk about Elon Musk. And people don't like Elon Musk

Beth [00:13:58] Now, I do want to caution Democrats that that strategy will run out. That cannot be the strategy for the next four years. I hear some people talk about like that's how we're going to win all future elections. No, can we please learn that making someone, anyone, a villain is not enough to make us a hero. We've got to learn that lesson. Focus on other things. Do it where it works, but it cannot be the only tool in the toolbox. I worry about overplaying this hand. Because now the Republican Party is like, Elon, how about going back to the wings instead of being on center stage? They are kind of scooching him along and he seems to be accepting it because of the business pressure that's on him, too.

Sarah [00:14:41] Well, and politically, it's not even just the Wisconsin Supreme Court case. There was the moment where it looked like he was going to get a Department of Defense briefing. And then everybody was like, absolutely not. Even Donald Trump. The reporting this week is he got in a screaming fight with Scott Bessent about the head of the IRS who lasted two days and was supposedly Elon's pick. And then Scott Bessent came in, pitched a fit. Now Scott Bessent's guy is the new acting commissioner of the IRS. And so I think ever one (the reporting I read) within the court of Donald Trump is over and frustrated with Elon Musk.

Beth [00:15:16] And we saw this coming, too. We talked about how these cabinet department heads are going to want to have their kingdoms. And Elon cannot stop intruding on everyone's kingdoms. I think the optics of him standing over cabinet members at that meeting started to lay the groundwork for people to undermine him and advocate for him to take a secondary role. So it's going to be really interesting to see-- he has mentioned that he thinks he needs to stay involved maybe once a month so that this work can continue and the fraud and the abuse doesn't creep back into government. But I think that that's just a threat. The more you read about Elon Musk, the more you see that he operates through threats and he operates by using his bank account as a weapon and his ability to control the flow of money to other people. And so I think that Donald Trump is going to regret having made this bargain with him. Either that or Elon's really going to regret it because he's going to lose even more than he's already lost in the process.

Sarah [00:16:18] Yes. This is the reporting that really sparked our can we finally dance on Elon Musk's grave? Because we have in the past and it didn't turn out so well, but the reporting out from Tesla this week is rough. Their vehicle deliveries were down about 13% from a year earlier. And some of this is, the lineup is stale. They don't have a lot new to offer at Tesla and they're getting their lunch handed to them by China. Particularly when you talk about global deliveries, not here in the United States. But then you get the quarterly profits and the reporting this week is that Tesla's quarterly profits fell by 70%. And a lot of this is the fallout from the Tesla protests. Because here's the thing, let's say that you want to buy a Tesla, and you actually don't give a crap about Elon's politics, you just want to buy a Tesla; do you want drive through a line of angry protestors to purchase a car? To pay a lot of money for a vehicle and then worry about this vehicle you paid a lot money for maybe getting keyed? Or people assuming things about you because of the car. You don't have to be someone who hates Elon or even has an opinion about Elon. It really will trickle out in a major way.

Beth [00:17:47] And, look, that needs to stop. That is so counterproductive, too. If you're working on the democratic brand and you've got this sense going back to 2020 that Democrats in service of their politics are lawless, don't respect property rights, there's no sense of order, that is counterproductive, too. I think just the persona of Elon being so closely attached to the vehicle is a discourager right now. I think these are good cars. I might have bought one this year, but for what Elon is doing, it's terrible. And he has committed the cardinal sin as to this business. It's not only that he's so polarizing. That might have been a successful strategy for him, right? A lot of people have bought Cybertrucks because they're into Elon and they like him and they want to put out in the world, these are my politics. Fine. It's not only the politics side and the polarization, it's also that he's doing the worst thing you can do as a business leader. He is totally distracted, but still in place as an obstacle. How could they be launching new products? How could they be doing new things? How could they be improving what they have or making any kind of bold strokes? Because they still have to deal with him and he's not engaged. That alone is enough to really kill a business, especially a business in the stage of its life cycle that Tesla's in.

Sarah [00:19:12] Yeah, and there was that moment when he combined the AI company and Twitter, and I was like, dang, how'd he get that accomplished? But I just think we're running out of road (pun intended) or he's running out a road. There's only so many hours in a day, I don't care how late you stay up. And if you're worried about a Wisconsin seat, you're trying to run DOGE, you're working at space, you're working on AI, you're still posting on X 15, 20 times a day, you got all these legions of kids you got to manage, which we'll get to in a second...

Beth [00:19:47] You're doing Starlink deals with countries all across the world in active combat situations.

Sarah [00:19:54] And also you're getting into Twitter feuds and then going after, shutting down Laura Loomer's Twitter account because the New York Times has all this reporting about people get into it with Elon and then all of a sudden they're following, which they monetize, falls off a cliff. Mr. bastion of free speech. Remember that? This is going to be the Public Square. Everything was going to be open and allowed. It's going to be great. Except for that's not what happened. It's just Elon's personal playgrounds. He makes you; he breaks you. That's what Twitter is, that's what X is. The one I found most horrifying was the reporting in the Wall Street Journal piece about his legions of children where a woman who turned him down to be a surrogate then found her following falling off a cliff. That is some Handmaid's Tale level bullshit. They don't want to have your baby, and so all of a sudden their Twitter following takes a hit? What is happening?

Beth [00:21:02] And this is why we need to step back from him being in charge of anything important. The sum of his choices is, at this point in his life, what does he have around him that he does not have through coercion? And that's sad and awful. And for his own soul and for the good of the country, I just think it's time for him to have a little break. I think he needs like a spa vacation. Lord knows he can afford whatever he wants to restore himself. And I think that that's where he needs to head right now.

Sarah [00:21:39] Well, he's not. Let's get into what he is pursuing. And apparently some spare time he is still cobbling together, which is producing legions of children and what that says about the pro-Natalist movement currently influencing the Trump administration. So the Wall Street Journal did have this piece about Elon and his legion. This is the term he uses to refer to his offspring. We know that he has at least 14 children, but after reading this article I think 14 is probably a vast underestimation.

Beth [00:22:23] Real low.

Sarah [00:22:25] Yeah. Because he offers people like $15 million and then $100,000 a month if they accept his sperm and do some sort of sperm donation IVF. Now Ashley St. Clair, who's at the center of this piece, they were actually dating. So this child was produced through actual sexual intercourse. Why am I out here talking about-- gross. Okay, but this is where we're at. He has so much influence inside the administration. We have to spend time talking about him rolling into people's DMs and offering his sperm. And the fact that he thinks having a vaginal birth reduces your brain size, what the actual heck? That's the reporting; it's that Ashley St. Clair said he really wanted her to have a C-section because he thought it shrunk your brain size. Babe.

Beth [00:23:13] So many things. So I knew from a lot of reading about him that he was very pro-natalist. And I had heard from an actual human who I know about him contacting women, lots of women, asking them to have his babies. I don't even know what to call them because it's not what you typically think of a surrogacy, right? That's where there's this relationship and you need someone else to carry the baby to come into the family. But I don't know how he thinks of this as family. He wants all these people to live in sort of a compound together. But there is constant what the Wall Street Journal quotes someone as describing as harem drama. For all the money sloshing around, this is an incredibly impoverished view of family and of what it means to be a parent to a child. And how on earth he could be actively involved and engaged with all of these children and their mothers and teach them anything about being a person in the world? I do not know.

Sarah [00:24:23] I think you accurately described it as close to polygamy. It starts to sound a lot like polygamy. He is maintaining relationships with previous mothers. That's what I picked up from this reporting. Is that he still sort of has personal relationships with more than one of these women at a time. He exerts an enormous amount of control once he's on the scene. Listen, hats off to Ashley St. Clair because this lady fought. This lady fought and was like, uh-uh. No, my kid's not going to be a secret. And I will try to fight you with all this money and I will take it to the streets. And I'll tell people and I'll go to the Wall Street Journal. Going up against his fixer who's threatening her. And you got to have some major, major balls to take on the wealthiest man in the world as he is rising to the ranks of political power, sitting all next to the president and the Oval Office and take this on, like, props to her and these reporters.

Beth [00:25:33] And Grimes, too. Grimes has really fought for her children in a way that's been, I think personally, extremely expensive and difficult for her. But she's tried. What I just want to think about is the fact that this is his situation. And I think hats off to the Wall Street Journal for exposing this. Because I think the Wall Street Journal doing this reporting is kind of putting it to the pro-family movement and saying, seriously? Seriously, this is the coalition? There is no difference in your belief that America needs more children, but those children need to be brought up in loving families, and this guy who just wants to create as many copies of his own DNA as he possibly can? You're really willing to work together on this?

Sarah [00:26:23] Well, here's the thing, as we look at this through the lens of the pro-natalist movement, Elon is in some ways a perfect representative because when you scratch at it, there's a lot that's pretty gross. In this reporting they talk about that he says what he's really concerned about is third world countries "having higher birth rates than the U.S." And that he really wants educated people to have more children. So what this pro-natalist movement is really about the right type of people "having more kids". It's giving Victoria in White Lotus. Decent people. We want decent people to be having more kids. Even though I would not call this behavior under any rubric decent. But I think this is part and parcel of this movement. And that's why often the pure pro-natalists, the Simone and Malcolm Collins, the techno optimists adopting this type of outlook on what is absolutely a declining birth rate, okay? The birth rate is declining globally. There's very few places, Africa being one of them, where the birth rates are not going down. This is why this group gets in real conflict with conservative Christians who are prioritizing a different type of pro-family policy, particularly when it comes to IVF. They have some big problems with IVF. Then you have the Trump administration saying we want to make IVF as available as humanly possible. All the reporting is that they're working on a big executive order. Trump said he wanted to be the fertilization president. First of all, gross, gross, gross. But there's lots of real conflict when you put some of these groups together in a room.

Beth [00:28:24] And so the administration is considering what policy levers they have to make Trump the fertilization president, I guess. And one of those proposals is to give $5,000 cash to every American mother after delivery. And I have been reading about this thinking through the line from Reagan to Trump and the sort of welfare queen stereotype that so many people in the party trafficked in, and how on earth this policy isn't any way aligned with what they actually want to do. As you said, I think what they actually want is for a certain kind of person to have more children. And $5,000 to have more children doesn't begin to cover the cost of raising a child. So if money is the barrier, $5,000 isn't going to break the barrier for you. And if money isn't the barrier $5,000 is not going to change your mind. I don't understand in what world this policy achieves anything.

Sarah [00:29:33] It reminds me of one of my most favorite moments on reality TV of all time, which is Teen Mom. Actually, it was 16 and Pregnant at the time. My favorite couple is the couple who gave their baby up for adoption. And he's getting into it with his dad, and the parents of this teenage couple wanted them to try to raise this baby. And the dad says, "Son, all a baby needs is love." And the teenager goes, "No dad, that is not all the baby needs- is love." My husband and I quote it all the time. Because the other thing they're considering, which is in complete contrast with this $5,000 baby bonus, is reserving 30% of Fulbright scholars. Which I think they just deported some Fulbright’s scholars. So you're probably going to need some sort of motivation to be a part of this program since you're harassing the people currently in it. Is to reserve 30% of those scholarships for people who are married or have children. So that's where you get the glimmer of, like, but we want a certain kind of person. Or apparently Simone Collins, this famous couple, we'll put the link in the show notes. We've talked about this famous article of this couple and their pro-natalist movement and all the kids they're having. We won't go all the way down the Simone and Malcolm Collins road again. But she proposed that you get a medal of freedom, like a special medal for all mothers who have over six children. That was her proposal.

Beth [00:30:52] Okay. But again, who is not having children today who is going to go, well, that'll do it. I will put my body on the line and upend my entire life and add a person under my care and responsibility for that. If you are making decisions that way, you should not be having more children.

Sarah [00:31:14] It just doesn't matter. Guys, everyone has tried this. Countries have tried the stick approach where they're like forcing people basically to have more kids. They have tried that carrot approach. I love the liberals who roll into the comments on Facebook and say people aren't having more kids because of daycare and maybe if you support-- yes, that's true. But also European countries who have social safety nets we would dream about also have declining birth rates. They give a year to the mother, a year to the father, subsidized daycare, nationalized healthcare. They have it all and it doesn't matter. The birth rates fall. You know why people used to have a lot of kids? Because they would die on you. So that's just a fundamental aspect of like we have improved the human condition. My great, great grandmother had like 11 children and buried 10 of them.

[00:32:10] We just have to get over this to a certain extent. Y'all need to spend all your effort and energy thinking about how we build a social safety net and maintain it and build an economy and maintain growth. I guess robots are going to do half the job. Y'all are the techno optimists. So maybe we won't need that many people to begin with. But countries have tried it all. It doesn't work. It just doesn't because I think there's just something very complex that happens. I don't think it's all individualized. I think that there is something complex that happens sociologically and culturally around what type of lives people want to live, how much they want to dedicate to parenting, that people are having kids later in life. I don't think you're going to convince people to start having kids at like 16 or 18, which is how people ended up having just mathematically 10 to 11 children. You got to start a lot earlier. There's no policy solution to that. Like, just let it go.

Beth [00:33:11] Another reason people used to have a lot of kids is to do tasks, farm labor, that kind of thing. Our cultural attitude about what a child represents in a family has changed just profoundly from that. They are now the job, not the helper with the job.

Sarah [00:33:29] It's the quote I use all the time from Jennifer Senior's All Joy and No Fun. Kids are now economically worthless, but emotionally priceless.

Beth [00:33:39] And, look, some of the pro-natalists, especially the techno-optimists, want to change the culture around parenting too and say, no, we're over-parenting, they don't need that much. That's probably where Elon Musk would fall, right? Like, yeah, I got plenty of time because kids really don't that much. That's a hard turn and it's also really inconsistent with some of other people in this tent with you who are saying, no actually, what you need to be is the trad wife who attends to their every need, but that's your mission in life, to raise all these kids. And either way, that feels like it's swimming hard against the cultural tide to me, to try to convince people that we need to go back to kids just raising themselves and being hired help. Or we need go to our modern version of parenting where women are even more to all these kids than we are today.

Sarah [00:34:26] Yeah, it's interesting. We did have that viral moment during the campaign where remember that woman on the panel who was like, "I don't want to work all the time. I want to be out on the farm milking cows and taking care of babies like ballerina farm with a baby on my hip." So I think when you get into parenting and particularly femininity and motherhood, there's too much going on for one show. That's for one thing. But to the Elon Musk of it all, and to even that techno-optimist, and a little bit to the conservative Christian, I was struck when I was reading the Wall Street Journal article that Sinclair reports that Elon Musk says to her only the paranoid survive. And the reason that pinged for me is I just read a piece about the anti-competitive trial against Meta, where on the stand Mark Zuckerberg said the exact same thing. Only the paranoid survive. And I thought, "How's that working, guys?" How's that? He was trying to defend his what I would call anti-competitive practices of purchasing apps that were making a run for Facebook's platform. And he's like, only the paranoid survive.

[00:35:54] But I think you see that so much with Elon that that approach that's what we're coming to with all these trials. Now the government's recommending we break up Google. Meta is on trial. Amazon's about to be on trial for anti-competitive practices. We're all re-examining this worldview that informed so much of not just our economy under these companies, but also our attention. The attention economy that they were running. And seeing them articulate their worldview as only the paranoid survive, and particularly seeing how it runs out of road personally for people like Elon Musk, I feel like right now I just want to put him in a chair and be like, "Okay, is the paranoia still serving you? Is it still serving you?" And you read that over and over again with Zuckerberg and careless people. Like there's this truly wild story she tells about Mark Zuckerberg wanting to have another kid because they also wanted a couple kids and worried about Zika and how they spent millions of Facebook's dollars building this protected space because he had to go to this economic forum where there was some Zika. But when his paranoia bumps up against wanting to seem as important, he leaves the space to go talk to Obama. But this paranoia which just forecloses any self-awareness, you just see it play out so often with these guys.

Beth [00:37:26] I think the reason that Mark Zuckerberg, at least, has that sense of the paranoid survive around his products is he recognizes that he is always up against culture and that what people are interested in and what they're feeling in terms of the products that they use is pretty fickle and changes all the time. That is the same reason that pro-natalism policy fails because what you're up against is culture. It goes deeper than a $5,000 baby bonus or the possibility of a Fulbright scholarship or menstrual education, which is another thing that's being floated from the federal government. No, thank you. I would like a lot more menstrual education in the world, but not from the Federal Government. I would like to have a conversation about where the Constitution puts that on the list of the things that the Federal government is responsible for. Give me a break.

Sarah [00:38:14] Wouldn't that be rich, though? They decide there's no right to privacy with regards to abortion, but yes, we definitely want Elon Musk and DOGE and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out there educating people on their menstrual cycles. Cool, cool, cool.

Beth [00:38:31] I don't know if we need more babies or not. I understand that with existing structures, declining birth rates are a problem. I understand when you look at programs like social security, having people live longer and fewer babies being born, and your deaths exceeding your births, I understand if that's a problem. I think that we could probably get creative and rebuild some of these systems to adapt to our new reality. So I'm not fully on the train of this is a civilization threatening challenge anyway, but let me assume that I am. If I really genuinely believe that people need to have more children, I need to people out there with lots of children who live a life that looks attractive to people in this cultural moment. And nothing that I have seen from either the very, very conservative Christian side of this movement to the techno-optimist side is a life that I want to emulate. And that's the problem. I love, love, loved being a mom. But when I think about the reality of my life, adding a third child has no appeal to me whatsoever. And I'm surrounded by lots of people with three children who were doing it masterfully. To think about four, five, six, seven, and what that would mean for my life and my body, I don't see those examples out there. But that's what they've got to figure out. If they really believe this is important, they've got to change the culture around this, not just the policies.

Sarah [00:39:58] Look, the reason that Handmaid's Tale is such a classic and so affecting and still powerful, years after it was written and has been turned into a very successful television show, it's not because there aren't enough babies. It's because people want them and they can't have them. And that is a problem. That's a problem! There's a scene I remember in the first season where it got me so hard-- I have not watched any more of Handmaid's Tale, it just scares me too much-- where I think they bring Mexico in and they're trying to basically make Mexico overlook all the abuses and they bring in the babies and the Mexican delegation is so entranced by the babies because they can't have any. And I thought, "Yeah, that's exactly what would happen." That's exactly, what would happen if people want babies and they can't have babies. That a real energy source. That's kindling waiting to catch fire. Not because there's not enough. Obviously, there's a Venn diagram there, but these people want them and they can't have them. And that to me It's not that I don't think the demographic problem is a problem, I just think it's where humanity's heading.

[00:41:18] And I'm not really sure there's much you can do about it. I just don't think people are going to go back to having five, six kids. I mean, my parents were both one of four. Not a single one of those eight children had more than three. And only my dad had three out of the eight. It's just for a lot of reasons, like I said, that are too complex to solve with one policy solution that you're not going to get at. But I am concerned for people who want to have kids and feel like they can't afford them. They're not going to have four. But if they want one or two and that's too hard, or they want and they can't have them because of infertility issues, that is something I want to focus on. I'll tell you right now, the Maha movement, they're getting behind this. They're saying we want to address the root causes of infertility instead of just fixing it on the back end with IVF. I'm not disinterested in that conversation.

Beth [00:42:11] I just don't trust them to figure it out in a way that's real.

Sarah [00:42:13] I don't trust them to fix it. But I do think that there is conversation to be had. I do want more medical research into why women suffer with endometriosis because that's suffering whether you want to have kids or not. I'm interested in all that. I'm in interested in either physically why people are struggling with infertility, economically why they feel like they can't afford kids. Those are the questions we want to answer. Because if people are just opting out because it seems so hard or because the cultural message is that it's too hard, that's something we can get at. I'm not sure it'll still solve our demographic problem, but it is a problem worth addressing for sure. But that's not what they're doing. It's certainly not what Elon cares about.

Beth [00:42:58] And I'm not going to never say never. Trends can reverse. I could imagine a world where AI comes on so forcefully that it both frees up a lot of time for us and makes us really interested in human things again. And it could be that we have a generation that decides having big families is what they want for themselves. I'm going to say that I know where the human trend is going from here. I am saying right now, if you are in the near term just trying to get more babies in the United States-- which seems to be what JD Vance, at least, has articulated he wants. He has said, "I just want more American babies." Okay, good luck with that. I do not think that that has a short-term policy solution.

Sarah [00:43:48] Yeah, I agree. I look forward to hearing from everyone out there in the audience, their insights into their own personal experience. This is obviously a very personal topic for people about when and how many kids, and if you have any kids. And so I just don't trust the Collins and Elon Musk to lead us in that conversation, but I do look forward to hearing it from our community. Well, speaking of parenting, Beth, on Tuesday, we had a conversation about leaving babies in hotel rooms and or on cruises and or in your own house under the watchful eye of a baby monitor. That led to lots of people asking us how we felt about tracking the find my iPhone life 360 of it all as your kids get older.

Beth [00:44:43] Well, let me tell you a story. Chad and I were running some errands with awareness that one of our daughters was having kind of a tough day. And that daughter loves nothing on this earth more than she loves mozzarella sticks from Sonic. And so Chad says, how about we surprise her? Let's pick up some mozzarella sticks and take them home to her. I get a text message as we are waiting on the mozzarella sticks, "How could you go to Sonic without me?" I said, "We're just out running errands, we'll be home soon." "You're at Sonic, I can see it." I said, "Stop stalking me." And I got home and I was so mad that I didn't even want to give her the mozzarella sticks.

Sarah [00:45:31] Yeah, I'd have thrown them out. I'd been like, no more mozzarella sticks for you.

Beth [00:45:35] She had them and said she was sorry. But I said, "Stop tracking me. We were in touch. There was no reason for you to. Look, how am I supposed to surprise you anymore? Like, how are we supposed to-- this is totally unnecessary." And she's like, "Well, Ellen was worried and Ellen was hungry." I was like, no. No.

Sarah [00:45:55] Yeah, right. Sell it somewhere else, sister.

Beth [00:45:59] Sell it somewhere else. But this is my problem. And I don't want to do that to her, honestly. I want to have a relationship of trust. She's not driving yet. I may eat my words. I don' know what I'll do when she's driving. But right now I never look for her location because I feel like we are in communication. What else do we need? We can contact each other and I can see her face on my screen in 10 seconds flat. I like the ability when I have misplaced my headphones to ping them through Find My iPhone, but the tracking to me is just dystopian. I just don't like it at all.

Sarah [00:46:38] So obviously because my youngest son has type one diabetes, I have a very extreme manifestation of this. And I will tell you that it is not always positive. It should sound like that I can see Felix's blood sugar every five minutes as a miraculous technological breakthrough. There was one night that I know his blood sugar was fine all night long, and we got woken up five or six times by the tech failing. And I thought, this is it. This wrong. It's not even the diabetes, it's the tech. And you will hear from adult diabetics that since Dexcom, these continuous glucose monitors have come on the scene because they're not very old. Stacey Sims, who's sort of one of my diabetic mom mentors, she had a baby and no Dexcom for years with type one diabetes. You got to think for decades people had diabetic kids who they didn't know what their blood sugar was most of the time. And look, of course, that was dangerous. Kids had lows and they died from them. But damn sometimes I don't wonder if it's burning us all out. Because it is an extreme manifestation of tracking, right? And sometimes those extreme examples can offer us some insight. Not always with the edge cases as we talked about on Tuesday, but sometimes, right?

[00:48:06] And sometimes I think, I know we have better control because we know his blood sugar every five minutes. And there are systems that basically can function as a pancreas because it's getting this constant feedback in ways that have dramatically improved diabetic health. But it does make you paranoid. It can show you what that sort of extreme tracking can produce in a human psyche. My husband checks it way more than every five minutes even though he knows he knows that it's not going to give any new number. That being said, I have life360 on Griffin's phone. I barely ever check it. I find it most helpful when we're traveling as a group like with my parents because instead of texting me like where are you, how far are you, and like doing that or worrying about texting with somebody while they're driving, I can just see like here's where they are. They'll be home. They'll be at the hotel room or whatever. That's where I find it a really useful technology. And Amos does not have a cell phone yet. So he has an AirTag in his backpack because maybe I lost him a couple of times. Obviously, I found him. He's still here. But I did absolutely lose him.

[00:49:12] I was never worried he was in danger because I'm always like just turn a circle and find someone with a cell-phone, but I didn't know where he was and I couldn't find him. I had some logical guesses, but so now he has a AirTag that I use occasionally to figure out where he is in between like piano lessons or whatever. But I know that from the diabetes experience, it's just so easy to start it becomes a habit just checking, checking, checking. And now have you heard these reports that the teenagers share their locations with their friends so then they know automatically people are hanging out without them? I'm like, no, no, no. I think Snapchat has this, too. It's becoming more of a crutch for people in a way that it can be really detrimental I think.

Beth [00:49:59] Well, I want to say explicitly what I hope is implicit in this conversation, which is this is not for me a moral judgment. It is a personal preference. And these are tools that I think are useful in some circumstances and then can be not useful in other circumstances. I think people heard some moral judgment about parents who are anxious about their kids in our last conversation that for me is not there. If you don't want to leave your kid with the baby monitor, go right ahead and stay with them. I have no judgment of you. I'm just asking for that to be returned. I'm asking for people to not see me as neglectful because I have made a different choice.

Sarah [00:50:35] Guys, let me just say, I get way too many calls from my kids' elementary schools to ever be judgmental about anything comparing other people's parenting techniques. You know what I'm saying? It's like in leadership. They're not calling for leadership awards. Do you understand what I am saying, Beth? That's not the calls I'm getting.

Beth [00:50:53] Well, none of us know what we're doing, right? We're all doing it for the first time. We're just out here learning. We're doing our very best. I worry about the message that all problems are solved through technology and monitoring. I worry about that message for my kids. For myself, even the tools that I find useful, I recognize I need a break from. I wear an Oura ring like you've been wearing for several years now, and I really like it, but there are times when I put it in rest mode not even because I'm sick, but because I just need a break from checking the damn thing. There are days when I don't need to know how many steps I've climbed. There are days where I don't need to know what my resting heart rate looks like. There are times when I just need to be as a person in the world. And I want to give that sense to my kids. That the most times you get to just be as a personal in the world.

[00:51:44] We do AirTags when we're on vacation, we're going to be in big crowds of people, we'll put an AirTag in like a belt bag or something like that. It's a tool that's useful, but I don't want that to always be their context. That we're always hypervigilant about risks. We're always concerned that we'll get separated and you won't be able to think through how to find me and I won't able to think through how find you even though, again, we're all carrying supercomputers around, too. I just want us to give each other the grace and space occasionally-- most of the time, actually, 99% of the times, the grace and the space to trust that we are communicating well. We trust each other. We have a plan. And we don't need the pocket big brother solving these problems for us.

Sarah [00:52:33] Well, my concern is that it gives us and our kids the idea that we can control everything. The struggle of my life has been releasing the idea of control, particularly the struggle of motherhood. I get emails all the time where people are like the chaos lottery is so helpful for me, because that was the lesson I had to learn. You cannot be a good enough person. You cannot be a smart enough person who invests in all the right tools and foresees all the rights threats and protect you and your children from all harm. It is not realistic. Bad things are going to happen to you and bad things are going to happen to your kids, period. That is what life contains. I wish I could tell you something different, but I cannot. And sometimes maybe they were things that we could have prevented. Maybe we got caught that one time we let our guard down and something bad happens to ourselves or our kids. That is also the reality because no one can be 100% vigilant 100% of the time. Doesn't mean you don't love your kids.

[00:53:53] That's something that Nicholas and I had to really come to with diabetes. That's a reality I have to live with. Even with the Dexcom, even without the alarms, something could happen and Felix could have a low and all the right or wrong, as this case could be, situations could align themselves. I think all the time about that Pulitzer Prize winning piece about the people whose kids died inside hot cars. And this one woman, it was like 16 different things aligned. She wasn't the one who took him. Her cell phone was broken. The lady called the wrong-- it was literally eight different things had to align and her child died. Means she didn't love her child? You just have to accept sometimes that bad things can happen. And if you put this pressure on yourself through all these amazing tools, if you accept the lie that these companies sell us to make money, which is if you use our products correctly, bad things won't happen to you, that's a lie they tell us to make money.

[00:54:59] Not that they're not useful tools, but tools fail. Chaos reigns. Then you are going to be so shattered if something bad happens, which it inevitably will. That's what the conversation around death with dignity was for me. It's just scratching at the idea of what are we telling people who can't avoid the suffering, which is you didn't try hard enough to avoid it? That's what this techno-optimist, this world we've been living in has sold us. That you can maximize everything and protect yourself from discomfort. And so I think all these sort of threads are coming together with me with the pro-natalism and the death with dignity and the tracking and the baby monitoring. That's a lie. That's a lie that these companies that are on trial for anti-competitive practices have sold us, is that the technology will prevent you from discomfort and suffering. And that's not true.

Beth [00:56:10] And that if it doesn't, what's the harm? But there is a harm. Like you said, if I look at the risk assessment for my daughters in their generally safe home, in this generally safe community, in our generally safe state and nation, even with all the problems, for the most part, the greater risk is them seeing their friends hanging out with them and becoming obsessed with that; than them getting into some kind of situation where me being able to spot their location actually saves them from harm, right? The harm that I'm putting in their pocket is bigger than the harm that's out there. And I'm really trying to grapple with that in all these spaces, too. The harm to my own psyche of monitoring myself in every way constantly is real. It has upside, too. It's a tool. How am I using the tool for my benefit? And where is the tool taking something from me and how do I arrive at the best calculus for myself under the circumstances?

Sarah [00:57:15] I love talking about all this calculus with you, Beth, and with our audience. I'm sure this will be a lively comment thread as the one was on Tuesday, as the was on Friday. So I look forward to that. Thank you for joining us. Make sure you go over to Substack where you can engage with this lively crew and comment on the show post. We'll have another episode on Tuesday. And until then, have the best weekend available to you.