Coming at you with our first ever bonus conversation for the public, in which we discuss the ongoing Starbucks Workers United strike taking place at hundreds of locations (and growing) all over the country right now. It’s also a conversation in which we offer a humble request of you this holiday season: Don’t go to Starbucks right now, if you can manage it.

If, for whatever reason, you do need to go to Starbucks right now, fine. This is not a game of purity tests! It’s a game of numbers. As such, consider cutting your usual order or frequency of visits in half. Get your kid the cake pop, but cut out your regular cappuccino, or take the venti to a tall, etc. Every dollar you withhold from this corporation during a sustained labor strike is going to hit them that much harder, and the potential ripple effect of a combined consumer and labor boycott on one of the largest food & beverage corporations in America is hard to overstate.

Other references & citations

* As of Monday, 3,800 baristas across 130 cities are holding the line

* Workers in 10 other countries (!) began protesting in support

* If you’re a Starbucks barista thinking about organizing your store, you can reach out here

* Starbucks Workers United national strike fund

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com/subscribe

First things first: Merch is here!

Get it now before it’s gone. We’re so proud of this limited edition drop of deeply diabolical merchandise. Items will ship in mid-January, and 33% of all net profits will go to Feeding America, a non-profit nationwide network of more than 200 food banks that feed more than 46 million people through food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, and other community-based agencies.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can access two exclusive pieces of DL swag by using your special password, which can be found in our merchandise announcement, or in the episode preceding this one in your audio feed.

I, Caro, usually to try to be witty for show notes but frankly there are too many resources to share for this episode so I’m going to organize them by the three major topics covered in this conversation and then leave it there, ya girl has been poring through met gala archives for days and she’s TIRED.

on the body positivity movement, aka that time period where we were all briefly “liberated” by the charitable and fierce activist work of, uh, corporate capture

First, you should read anything that Virginia Sole-Smith or Aubrey Gordon write on the topic (and here’s the column we quote from Gordon about being “body positive but”)

Now, onto the links.

The Guardian op-ed on the “end of body positivity” by fat columnist and writer Rose Stokes

Some useful historical information on the history of fat activism (generally speaking, the national association to advance fat acceptance (naafa) is a great org)

Vogue’s 2025 inclusivity report which lamented our drop in body positivity from, checks notes, 2% percent of models to 1.8% of models

Some helpful context for the real-world weight loss of glp-1 vs clinical trials

some evidence for just how often we undergo a culture-wide chicken little moment of running around screaming that “ultra thin body types” are “suddenly back in vogue” and “it’s a dangerous new trend”

* we were worrying about it in 2023

* …and also in 2022

* …and also in 2019

* oh and by the way, when we *did* have fat characters on the screen, we basically mocked the characters mercilessly for being fat, yay for body positivity!

* anyways yeah we were also talking about this in 2016

* and 2012

* and 2007

You get the point.

Oh also here’s an op-ed about michelle obama’s crusade against obesity that might complicate the narrative around conservatism equaling skinny culture

on the moral panic around eating disorders, featuring a series of fun facts caro learned on her intellectual rumspringa which thoroughly blew her mind

some recent studies on the potential inheritability of eating disorders

some background information on how men and fat people have been historically excluded from eating disorder research and recovery avenues

a historical explainer of anorexia (and here’s where I found the William Gull excerpt)

info on the high comorbidity between anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder

a deep dive on the “biopsychosocial” of it all in relation to eating disorders

and then a quick side door into the tressie-katie convo that truly rocked our worlds

as well as this incredible comment we received on our liv schmidt/skinnytok ep, in its entirety:

casual!

on the magical third door/leg stool: Rayne Fisher-Quann’s theory of being “womaned”

Here’s the full piece Fisher-Quann wrote for i-D Magazine

And the book I reference, Damned Whores & God’s Police, by Anne Summers

Here’s the JLaw NYT interview, as well as the Kristen Stewart NYT interview

That’s it, thanks for coming to the show, there will be no encore, etc etc etc-

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com

Feminist hysteria has replaced logic and reason in the American public discourse, or so says one Helen Andrews. Today, we dive into the logical underpinnings for this argument and conduct a close read of the source material, which does a genuinely impressive job of evading all manner of pesky contradictory data (women’s workforce participation declining since the year 2000, women making up less than 50% of corporate America even at the entry level, etc.) in order to mount an incredible argument: Wokeness is *sharply inhales through teeth* just chick stuff.

Consider this a corollary to our The Men Are Not All Right episode, in that the “Great Feminization” panic is yet another outgrowth of the thesis that governs all of American gender politics: Society is failing men, but women are failing society.

All references and citations in this episode can be found on the episode page at www.diabolicalliespod.com.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com

As a reminder, this is a bonus episode, which means (say it with us now) we didn’t try that hard <3

Thanks for everyone who showed up to our live AMA this week. We laughed, we cried, we read RFK’s “swallow” poem to Olivia Nuzzi and will never be the same.

A sampling of questions asked, and answered, in this conversation:

Earlier this month, Katie made a major announcement about her brand Money with Katie: In 2026, she will buy back her intellectual property rights and equity from Morning Brew, shutter the podcast for the indefinite future, take full ownership of the weekly newsletter, and return to her roots as a writer.

This is a massive decision, to say the least, with major financial and spiritual implications — and if I, Caro, may be so bold, it feels very Diabolical Lies-coded. When Katie made the announcement public, it served as an excuse for me to corner Katie into a conversation I’ve been wanting to have with her for a very long time.

So today we’re doing it. We’re diving into the full story of Money with Katie, featuring but not limited to:

* how Katie became involved with personal finance

* what it was like to build MWK from a side hustle to a seven-figure brand

* where her political deconstruction from a capitalist to a radical commie fits into this equation

* what it was like to kickstart another podcast while working sixty hour weeks

* how much fun it was to meet me, Caro, hee hee ho ho

* why she’s deciding to pivot at the exact moment when most people would double down on what’s “already working”

Next spring, we will do a similar episode about me related to my novelist career. As a reminder, we’re doing an live AMA/bonus ep/gigglefest on Substack on Monday, November 24, at 6 PM EST. Email questions to [email protected].

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com/subscribe

A “point, counterpoint”-style deep dive into the double-sided coin of “ethical consumption” and “ethical salesmanship” (or its alternative, “selling out”) under that little thing we call “capitalism,” sponsored by our treasured economic partners in the Saudi Royal Family.

“Is There REALLY No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism?” from Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty (2024)

“This feminist t-shirt isn’t actually made in a sweatshop” by Zing Tsjeng from Dazed (2014)

Karl Marx in America by Andrew Hartman (2025)

“Marxism Unmasked: From Delusion to Destruction,” a lecture series from 1952 by all-time neoliberal juggernaut Ludwig von Mises

“The Litter Myth” from “Throughline” by NPR (2019)

“A Beautiful If Evil Strategy” by Chris Rose from Plastic Pollution Coalition (2017)

“Leaked Audio Reveals How Coca-Cola Undermines Plastic Recycling Efforts” by Sharon Lerner from The Intercept (2019)

“What is Amazon Web Services?” by Melissa Eddy from The New York Times (2025)

“People Think Amazon Is an E-Commerce Company, but 74% of Its Profit Comes from This Instead” by Anthony Di Pizio for The Motley Fool (2024)

This video from Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism, about whether one’s identity as a consumer can ever be weaponized as an anti-capitalist tool

“Ethical Consumerism Isn’t Dead, It Just Needs Better Marketing” by Julie Irwin for Harvard Business Review (2015)

“The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility” by Aneel Karmani for Wall Street Journal (2010)

“Nirvana: Inside the Heart and Mind of Kurt Cobain” by Michael Azerrad for Rolling Stone (1992)

“Lived Through This,” an interview with Chuck Klosterman, by David Wallace-Wells for Vulture

“The Rise and Decline of the ‘Sellout’” by Franz Nicolay for Slate (2017)

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 110, in which he bemoans the need to do spon con so he can make a living as a writer

“In the 90s, We Worried About Nirvana ‘Selling Out.’ I Wish That Concept Still Made Sense,” by Dan Brooks for The Guardian (2023)

“How We Stopped Caring About Selling Out” and “Comedy’s Favorite Truth-Tellers are Playing Jester for the Saudi Prince” by Emily Topping for Current Affairs (2025)

“The Age of the Double Sell-Out” by W. David Marx (2025)

“I didn’t listen to a single Taylor Swift song on Spotify last year. She still made money off me.” by Chris A. Williams for The Philadelphia Inquirer (2024)

“It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Coverup” by Freddie deBoer (2025)

“Ha ha! Ha ha!” an infamous review of Trick Mirror by Lauren Oyler for London Review of Books (2020)

“The Journalist as Influencer: How We Sell Ourselves on Social Media” by Allegra Hobbs for The Guardian (2019)

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com

As with all bonus conversations, this episode breaks from the regular format of this show and operates instead like an homage to how it started—sending impassioned voice memos back and forth. Enjoy.

*snaps into character to method-act as Tyra Banks* We were all rooting for you.

Today’s conversation is a deep dive into the alliance between the neoliberal economic consensus and the social conservative movement in the late twentieth century—as told through the lens of a right-wing podcaster telling men they shouldn’t get married unless they’re capable of financially supporting a submissive wife and entire brood of children singlehandedly.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com

As promised, here’s a brief follow-up conversation on the Kirk of it all: one half news updates, and one half cultural analysis on the ongoing political fallout from Kirk’s murder.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com

Charlie Kirk “practiced politics the right way.”

He was “a controversial and polarizing figure, but that doesn’t matter.”

His “sort of dialogue is what universities are supposed to foster.”

In the wake of Kirk’s murder, these are the sentiments that have been echoed repeatedly in op-eds written for our nation’s most esteemed publications. For any writers, comedians, or civilians who have dared to suggest otherwise, the retribution has been swift.

We’re unpacking it all today in this two-part conversation: what actually happened in the last week, and what it means moving forward.

Oh, and if you’re reading this and would like to get Katie fired, please let me know. I, Caro, am Katie’s boss, and have been looking for a reason to fire her anyways. Please relay your complaints about her behavior to our designated reporting hotline, 1-800-PSY BTCH. (Please press 666 followed by the pound sign to reach my office extension line located in the inner hallways of the darkest area of the ninth circle of Hell).

Let’s get into it.