Diabolical Lies - April 27, 2025


Katie & Caro Shoot the Shit: Bonus April Grab Bag


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

186.59

Word count

2,270

Sentence count

96

Harmful content

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.880 Okay, go live.
00:00:03.860 We're doing it live. 1.00
00:00:05.140 Fucking things suck! 1.00
00:00:06.420 They're just like, I feel like I'm looking at one of those computer screens in like a movie where there's like a million faces because I can see you. 1.00
00:00:14.140 Or the mirror where it's like the infinity mirror.
00:00:17.280 I know, dude.
00:00:18.500 It's brutal.
00:00:19.500 Okay, so this looks like it's connecting.
00:00:21.980 Let's see if this goes through.
00:00:23.800 And we are live.
00:00:25.820 Okay, perfect.
00:00:27.240 Woo-hoo!
00:00:28.640 Woo-hoo!
00:00:29.200 Ooh, happy, happy, happy times.
00:00:31.920 Happy Wednesday.
00:00:33.060 We're trying to record with our podcasting equipment
00:00:35.100 and it just took like all of our combined brain cells
00:00:37.700 to have two, like,
00:00:39.000 because you have to have your computer to do the recording,
00:00:41.880 but then you have to be,
00:00:43.480 Substacks makes it such that you have to record on a phone.
00:00:47.380 So there's a lot of technology taking place right now.
00:00:50.180 I wish I could take a picture of this.
00:00:52.840 Okay, thank you guys for joining.
00:00:55.000 So as we did the last time,
00:00:56.560 we figured I have all the questions in front of me.
00:00:59.200 that you guys sent in the chat obviously feel free to send things in the comments as well
00:01:04.600 but we are just going to go through and like free ball and have a casual conversation about a couple
00:01:12.160 things that we uh you guys about like the state of democracy except not the state of democracy i
00:01:18.740 think we talked earlier today and we were like do we want to talk about that or do we want to make
00:01:23.620 this a little bit lighter what are we feeling okay i'm going to start out carol i'm going to
00:01:28.480 ask you a question. Okay. If we had guests on Diabolical Lies, who would your dream guest be?
00:01:38.500 I feel like I can say this on a live. I'm talking to Liz Brunig on Friday, and I'm
00:01:43.880 pretty fucking pumped about that. So I think she would be a cool person for us to talk to
00:01:48.680 on the podcast. Or Alex Earle.
00:01:51.200 caro has changed her mind on this outline for this upcoming paid episode three times
00:01:59.500 every every single day over the past week she texted me it was okay i actually we're doing
00:02:03.100 something different now now it's this this has been my my least decisive project this has been
00:02:09.020 my least decisive episode um outline yet have we announced what this one is yet do you want to talk
00:02:13.920 about it no because i feel i feel like it's related to the question what is the one topic
00:02:20.040 you want to cover, but you have not yet due to self-preservation. I feel like that's maybe this
00:02:25.700 for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was working, I was like 10 pages into an outline on why Alex
00:02:31.740 Earl is a feminist icon. And like, I'm being totally fucking sincere. I am, I love her. But 0.91
00:02:41.200 then I was just like, I don't want to, I don't know. I just wasn't feeling right. And so now
00:02:45.400 I'm working on an outline about the case for a leftist pronatalism. So that's going to be spicy.
00:02:53.120 Very caliente. I know. I know. Well, so it's funny because, yes, we don't bring guests on
00:02:58.660 the show, but have you done interviews before for your research? Have you actually spoken with
00:03:04.740 people for the show before? I don't think so. I mean, I've done email interviews. I've spoken
00:03:09.240 to a few people, but not like this because I've already done a few interviews for this.
00:03:12.220 so wait did you record any of them or was it just totally background um I recorded them on
00:03:17.600 background but it was like confirmed that they were not gonna be so I wouldn't share them or
00:03:22.040 anything but I did I did yeah oh my god you guys are gonna die it's just truly it's a paid it's a
00:03:28.220 paid up she has taken a hard left turn on this one and I am I'm so excited I think I'm excited
00:03:34.000 because and maybe we can talk a little bit about how we make the show but um and there was a
00:03:39.060 question about how do you do the outlines and how do you do the research how to decide what books to
00:03:42.780 read but we did talk about that a lot last time so I don't want to talk about that too much this
00:03:46.600 time yeah but I do think it's funny that I feel like this happens a lot with your episodes where
00:03:52.920 like you'll pick a topic and I will think that you're going to go in one direction with it
00:03:57.160 and then you end up going somewhere completely different and you end up changing my mind and
00:04:02.780 I feel like that's what's going to happen this time you always make me feel a little basic with
00:04:08.100 my takes because I mean yeah we'll see we'll see it's gonna be it's gonna be spicy it's gonna be
00:04:13.600 a spicy conversation for sure yes okay all right let's see what else we've got here on the business
00:04:20.020 side obviously we just announced our redistribution plan and we got a question about the logistical
00:04:28.040 challenges of setting up kind of a charitable aspect of a business and we had talked about
00:04:34.060 that on the episode a little bit or like alluded to the fact that it took us a little bit to figure
00:04:38.340 out and part of the reason that it took us a second is because I was thinking like having
00:04:43.480 run a business before it's just like a single member LLC I was thinking that donations would
00:04:48.960 function like business expenses where it's just kind of like a write-off where it's almost like
00:04:54.200 the income didn't happen like you just take it in and then give it away but the weird thing about
00:04:59.720 the way that ours is structured is that because it's a 50-50 partnership, and I think this will
00:05:05.000 be relevant for anybody who's like, if you are, you know, co-founding something with somebody,
00:05:09.660 if you have a 50-50 partnership, the accountant that Caro has been working with who is helping
00:05:14.440 us out. What up, Martin? What up, Marty? This is a pass-through entity, which basically means
00:05:20.580 all the income that comes in, the IRS basically looks at it and assigns 50% to my personal income
00:05:27.080 tax return and 50% to Caro's personal income tax return, which means because of the way
00:05:33.420 charitable itemization works, you can't itemize or you don't get any benefit from itemizing
00:05:39.240 donations unless you're donating more than $30,000 per year.
00:05:43.420 Otherwise, it's less than the standard deduction and so you wouldn't itemize.
00:05:47.680 So for a second, we were kind of like, okay, how do we like structure the books on the
00:05:52.620 back end if we're having to personally pay income tax on money we are donating. We're like, we don't
00:05:59.200 even have the money, right? Does that make sense? Like, we're using our own income to pay income
00:06:03.760 tax on money that we are giving away. So I think the- I still don't understand this. I just nod
00:06:08.900 and smile while you say this. The workaround is we both have to donate more than $30,000 per year.
00:06:16.940 So, like, as long as Diabolical Lies gives more than $60,000 this year, which I think we will, I'm almost certain we will, then it's kind of neutral.
00:06:27.800 It's not really a tax break, but it doesn't create a bigger tax bill the way that we were worried it might.
00:06:33.340 So, anyway, that was the logistical challenge.
00:06:36.500 Someone's just asking right now if we would ever donate that money to mutual aid, and we actually just realized that we had $8,000 left over to donate, and we are giving that to mutual aid in Gaza.
00:06:46.080 Yes. So actually, if anyone else is interested, Amanda Holden, who is dumpster doggy on Instagram, has been doing phenomenal work getting money into Gaza. Because from what I've learned a little bit in trying to do this, it's actually quite difficult. Venmo will block it or like you'll try to get money in and it won't go through. It's a mess.
00:07:08.740 but she somehow has figured out a way to do this
00:07:11.760 and has been collecting donations for months now.
00:07:14.920 And I think she just collected like 15,000.
00:07:17.460 So we were texting her earlier today.
00:07:19.620 And so we're going to give the rest of this like Q1 bulk
00:07:22.700 mutual aid directly to families in Gaza.
00:07:25.960 So yes, I'm glad that you brought that up.
00:07:27.980 And yes, we are doing that.
00:07:29.880 Caro, anything on the list that you really want to talk about?
00:07:33.220 I liked all the questions. 0.85
00:07:34.860 So just shoot them at me, baby.
00:07:36.440 just let you let you run let you run train on this wait what is 0.99
00:07:41.820 okay it's funny to hear katie talking about caro making her feel her arguments are basic
00:07:48.760 because that's mike's entire experience okay and then alexandra says she listened to the
00:07:53.420 capitalism episode three times thank you um that's amazing i really appreciate i've been really 0.77
00:07:59.980 happy with the kind of response to that one because that was a fucking challenge for me
00:08:05.740 and I was doing it while I was moving across the country. 0.96
00:08:09.420 So like I was kind of panicking
00:08:11.640 that I wasn't going to finish it in time,
00:08:13.100 but we got there.
00:08:14.680 Okay, I'm going to throw a curve ball
00:08:16.380 because no one technically asked about this
00:08:18.940 or like actually I'm going to use a question
00:08:20.320 that someone did ask to tangent
00:08:21.660 into something that I want to talk about anyway.
00:08:24.100 Somebody said,
00:08:24.640 what are your thoughts on social media
00:08:26.460 given the hard rightward shift of tech founders?
00:08:31.480 And we both just finished.
00:08:34.400 Did you finish it actually, Carol?
00:08:35.740 Oh, I finished it big time.
00:08:37.560 Okay. We both just read Careless People. Has anyone else read Careless People? The memoir
00:08:42.840 by Sarah Wynne Williams, former director of global public policy at Meta.
00:08:48.020 Immaculate book cover. That is an immaculate book cover with the shark and with the Facebook blue.
00:08:54.100 That is a very well done book cover. I spend a lot of time thinking about book covers right now.
00:08:57.660 And like someone put a lot of work into that thing.
00:09:00.120 Yeah. What I just haven't been able to stop thinking about when that book is,
00:09:03.240 I feel like I typically, I don't want to say like expect the best from people, but I think I like typically will give people the benefit of the doubt. And what was so shocking to me about reading that book was the sheer callousness and just complete disregard for the consequences of the platform, like especially the Myanmar example. 1.00
00:09:24.860 Yeah, just the like that they just genuinely didn't care and like didn't devote any resources to the fact that there was an ongoing genocide in that country that was like basically being facilitated by people on Facebook.
00:09:39.380 And so I think it's definitely given me a maybe darker or maybe more chilling sense for just how devoid of ideology beyond, like, making money that a lot of these people have.
00:09:57.960 Kara, you did a couple TikToks a couple weeks ago
00:09:59.880 on Jonathan Haidt and the Anxious Generation
00:10:02.820 and, like, that whole thing.
00:10:04.660 But I do think that I am starting to come around 0.99
00:10:08.100 to the fact that this shit needs to be regulated 0.99
00:10:10.360 so, so much more than it is. 0.99
00:10:14.000 Because it basically isn't right now.
00:10:16.440 And I know that Meta is in a,
00:10:18.540 I think it's an FTC trial currently.
00:10:21.240 Yeah.
00:10:21.620 For, like, it to maybe be broken up.
00:10:23.400 Like, an antitrust.
00:10:24.120 Google is also in a trial.
00:10:25.800 an antitrust trial it seems like there's some movement there but yeah I don't know guys I feel
00:10:31.740 really torn about even like using Instagram I basically didn't post on it for like a month
00:10:37.880 because I just kept feeling so gross about using it and it's really weird when your job is to
00:10:44.880 create media there is a feeling that you need to be using it to share and connect with people and
00:10:51.000 promote your work and talk about what you're doing. But I think my dream life is one that
00:10:56.680 does not involve any meta products at all. I think that what I really liked about
00:11:03.100 Careless People, and it's inherent in the title, is that I think that we often ascribe a level of
00:11:09.780 intention and narrative that does not exist with these stories. And that is something that I think
00:11:16.040 I see often on the liberal side is being like this architecture, and it is very complex, but
00:11:21.580 the way that humans function, some of the most horrific events throughout history are just the
00:11:27.640 result of people doing their day's work and then their day's work and being like, well, how are we
00:11:33.860 going to deal with this today and today and today? And so it's the carelessness of it as opposed to
00:11:40.360 evil people or mean people. I think that that is what I loved about the book is showing just
00:11:46.200 the extent to which it's like every single crisis that she moves through anecdotal or not anecdotal
00:11:52.460 she moves through with a lot of data is basically showing how there isn't some big grand plan more
00:11:57.840 or less. You see them really being very reactive to moments as they happen of like, well, how do
00:12:04.480 we deal with this right now? What are we going to, are you going to send out this? And then maybe
00:12:07.180 they have like a long eight-hour conversation on a plane ride.