One problem we face in our culture is that Ballerina Farm has ten million followers and counting. Another is that too few people who know what Ballerina Farm is also know what socialism is and vice versa. This divide must be bridged for political transformation to become possible. And that’s what we’re here to attempt today.

[Laughing] It’s honestly true though.

You both come from conservative backgrounds. What worldview did you inherit? When did you realize something was wrong with it?

I grew up in a small Catholic conservative town in Northern Kentucky, outside Cincinnati, in a Fox News household. I went to Catholic school my whole life. My view of the world basically upheld all these principles of neoliberal meritocracy: If you work hard, if you make the right choices, you’ll live a good life. And not only that, but that’s all it takes to live a good life. It was a very individualist mindset. I saw my own successes as affirming that worldview, when really they should have been a sign that — as the only child of two college-educated middle-class people who put me in private school — I was exactly who the system is set up to elevate.

I’m from Massachusetts, which is mostly liberal, but I was in an upper-class bubble that was largely conservative. Both the Democrats and Republicans I knew practiced a politics of absence. I would occasionally hear adults talking at a dinner party, but not about things I thought were relevant for my life. In middle school, I remember saying, “I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” and all my friends being like, “Oh, me as well.”

Where did you get that idea?

I don’t know! I don’t think I understood what politics were. I thought of politics as basically just arguing over a couple of issues, namely taxes and gay people. I thought that until I was like twenty-five honestly.

That’s 100 percent what I thought too.

You could be forgiven for thinking that. Think about what’s really riling people up at the moment. If you throw in immigrants, then I do think you have the trifecta of political discourse post-1990.

I grew up in the same bubble as Caro. We did not feel like our lives were political. We were heterosexual white women in upper-class or upper-middle-class families. The biggest thing that would’ve determined us becoming political sooner would’ve been Roe v. Wade, but no one was worried about that. It seemed like nothing was going on in the news that pertained to my freedom or my rights — nothing that would’ve triggered a political awakening the way that younger women might experience it now.

So you both left these environments to go to big state schools, where you both rushed sororities. That seems consistent: Greek life is very conservative-coded.

I went to the University of Alabama and knew long before enrolling that I wanted to be in a sorority. I viewed it as a natural extension of my adolescence at a private all-girls school.

Very quickly, I became aware of the hierarchy of the different houses. You wanted to be in one of the good ones because that would give you status. Like a third of students in Alabama participate in Greek life, and the pledge classes are huge, so it’s not a super-exclusive club. But they can get really expensive, and the idea that you could buy your way into one of the better ones, if you could be accepted, really appealed to eighteen-year-old me.

The thing that really sticks out to me about my time there, beyond the Reagan-Bush T-shirt and all the right-wing-coded memorabilia —

Reagan-Bush T-shirt? You’re gonna have to explain.

There was a company that made fratty T-shirts that weren’t actually affiliated with any specific Greek organization, which people would wear to day parties or around campus. I had a T-shirt from that company that has the 1984 campaign logo for Reagan-Bush.

I loved this T-shirt because it signaled in-group belonging. But I frankly didn’t really know who Ronald Reagan was. I had a college boyfriend from Birmingham whose dad was like, “Ronald Reagan was the best president we’ve ever had.” I think my parents felt the same way. So I kind of thought, Oh yeah, he’s that president everyone liked.

It was a time when I think my chief concern above all else was being perceived as popular and pretty. I wanted to go to the right parties. I wanted to be thought of as attractive. I wanted to have a boyfriend in a good fraternity. Very superficial, shallow concerns. That was how you gained social capital as a woman in that environment.

I just can’t emphasize enough how much the things that I valued in general, but also in myself, were so different back then. It was very clear to me that the way women gained power was by being beautiful and well-liked.

I totally agree with Katie’s analysis of sororities. The only difference here is that when I rushed at the University of Virginia, I didn’t get in!

So instead of reinforcing that social capital, I just became super mad. That festered in me for a really long time until I figured out where to channel it. It was the first time that I didn’t get into the in-group, and I knew that the in-group was where you should be. It was just an instinctual, smooth-brain defense mechanism to be like, “Well then, fuck these chicks obviously.” It wasn’t until later that I started to really understand that the things I was angry at are foundational to our country and are connected to but go well beyond sororities.

Fast-forward to when I’m twenty-five or twenty-six, my husband was in advertising at the time, and I was in media. We had a lot of frustrations, and I think we both felt backed into a corner, but neither of us had access to a bridge. The main moment I remember was when my husband and I watched the movie Captain Fantastic, and a character name-checked Noam Chomsky, and we were like, “Who the hell is Noam Chomsky?” That movie was the bridge genuinely. It’s about a man who’s raising his kids outside of capitalist society, and we fell in love with the family portrayed in it. Our lives changed after that. We both left our industries and lived in an Airstream.

My husband read all of Noam Chomsky’s books and radicalized very quickly, and then so did I. He found Jacobin almost immediately, and we have been print subscribers for four years now. We have a whole stack of them. I will admit I was not reading them cover to cover until frankly this summer, but he was all the time.

You don’t even realize how much the shape of your conversation changes until it moves into a different container, and you’re using different words all the time. Jacobin was instrumental in that, in changing my environment without my even realizing it. Now both of us are a part of it. And now, Katie and I are changing other people’s environments by using the tools that we have gained from places like Jacobin.

Thank you, Caro. That answer justified the last eight years of my life.

Seriously, all the hot chicks at UVA that I wanted to be friends with and wasn’t because they were in sororities — a good amount of them are obsessed with my podcast. They’re all little socialists now. The conversion rate of Republican girls who voted Mitt Romney and are now interested in Jacobin is 100 percent with Diabolical Lies.

Isn’t Captain Fantastic about a large family that you just kind of love to spend time with? You were lucky you got intercepted by Captain Fantastic and not Ballerina Farm.

Yeah, actually though. I could have gone either way. I saw a tweet recently saying there are two options: tradwife or girlboss. And someone was like, “What’s the third option?” And the person was like, “Marxist.” Yes, the third option is Marxist. But that word is not acceptable, and that option is not usually available to people.

To many women, it looks like the options are either hustle under capitalism’s rules or relax into traditional gender roles. Did you see that dichotomy presenting itself in your personal life?

Yes, actually. I went to grad school to become a writer, and suddenly everyone was talking about how, as a woman, you can’t have children and be a writer. It’s the biggest conversation in writing: whether it’s possible and what it means to be an artist who is also a mother.

I started to have a lot of anxiety. Like, do I want a family? Yes, I do want kids. So am I just gonna be the mom? What would happen to my ambition? I was thinking, There is no way that this will not impact me more than my husband, and I’m also pursuing a career that is notoriously impossible. I was having very personal feelings bumping up against this thing. The reason I don’t have a child right now is because I was not going to have a kid before I sold a book. That’s how real it is for me.

Katie, I know that after the University of Alabama you worked for Southwest Airlines in Dallas and at some point started a personal finance podcast called Money with Katie. At what point did you start to realize something was wrong with the worldview you inherited?

A bit of a seed was planted when I started working full-time. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my job or my company, because I actually loved both of those things, but I felt very trapped by the structure of the forty-hour workweek and working for a paycheck. That sense of being trapped by adulthood caused me to become interested in the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement.

I remember there was one specific day walking into work, and it was very hot outside already because it was in Dallas in the summer. It was midweek, and I was hobbling across the parking lot in my little heels with all my stuff, carting crap into the building for the day. And I remember just thinking, Oh my God, I have to do this every day for the next forty years of my life. I can’t do that.

It really genuinely freaked me out. So I started looking online for how people deal with this existentially. How do you cope with this endless expanse of time? Is there another option? Very quickly, I found the FIRE movement, which basically said, “Look, you can buy your own freedom. All you have to do is be very frugal. You have to invest as much money as you can. Here’s the math of how you can determine when you can live on your investments — and then you’re free.”

It sounds like FIRE was a liberatory philosophy that gelled with your worldview at the time, not too far afield from your idea of independent success. It was just applying that mentality to breaking out by getting personally rich.

Yes, it was like, here’s a way that you can individually take steps that will allow you to opt out of this system that everyone else has to participate in. I became obsessed with personal finance as a means by which one can free themselves from the status quo. That was what got me to start Money with Katie. I was like, Why isn’t anyone else talking about this? Why are all these young women I know spending all their money at bars and Sephora? It was an evangelization project. I wanted to tell as many people about this as possible.

But as Money with Katie grew, I was hearing all these things from people like, “I wanna be FIRE, but my childcare is $4,000 a month,” or, “I would like to be FIRE, but I have $800 a month in student loan payments, and I only make $40,000 as a teacher.” That very quickly made me realize, Oh, this actually isn’t a simple solution. Some people already have kids; some people aren’t working in marketing for a Fortune 500 company and can’t just pivot to tech and make more money.

Then it started to occur to me that the concept of FIRE itself didn’t really scale. If everybody achieved it, that would mean nobody was working and everyone was living off the stock market. But if no one is working, then what happens to the stock market? It didn’t make sense. The system wouldn’t work if too many people achieved that kind of freedom.

Was all of this a 2021–22 era phenomenon for you?

Yes.

Yeah, for me too.

The first time I shared a Jacobin article in the Money with Katie newsletter was in 2022. For a long time, I was really annoyed with the orthodoxy in personal finance that you needed to own your own home. I was like, guys, the math just doesn’t make sense. There was some Jacobin article about the housing crisis, and I remember being like, yeah, this really gets it. Finally something is actually making sense.

And I remember the audio guy who used to run podcasting at Morning Brew Slacks me and is like, “Dude, you’re linking Jacobin in a Morning Brew newsletter?” And I was like, “Why? What’s weird about that?” I didn’t know what the implication or connotation was. I had no idea it had a socialist affiliation. It just seemed completely reasonable to me.

Our whole culture does a very good job of making you think this is all you can have. That’s why it’s so cool to have these moments when you realize there are so many other ways to think about the world. It’s exciting. It’s like you’re a horse learning how to run for the first time.

Caro, you said something in our election recap episode that stuck with me so much that I repeated it on Money with Katie, which is the difference between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders will say, “Billionaires shouldn’t exist.” Donald Trump will make you feel like you could become a billionaire.

If only the woke cultural elites and undeserving affirmative-action hires weren’t standing in your way.

Right, like he’s gonna get rid of all those problematic DEI hires and immigrants and whoever else, and then things are gonna be great for you. You don’t need any other help. You’re just being held back by them. If he can just get them out of the way, you’ll be fine.

That’s also the subtext of Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about how masculine aggression has been scrubbed from the corporate world to adverse effect. The message is basically that if you are a man, you have the raw material to be like me, a billionaire, and what’s standing in your way is that they’ve sissified these companies. We’re gonna clear that effeminate nonsense out so that your natural masculinity can shine and take you right to the top, baby.

This is related to the tradwife messaging too, the idea that we’ve erred as a society by shoehorning women into traditionally masculine roles. Which reminds me of the name Diabolical Lies — can you explain the origin?

“Diabolical lies” is a reference to a commencement speech by Kansas City Chiefs football player Harrison Butker. He said, “I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you.” His point was basically that feminism is a lie. Feminism, particularly women working outside the home, is the reason that women are unhappy now. Things used to be good, but progress has made them bad, and we need to go backward. So when we were talking about a name, it occurred to us that the real “diabolical lies” are capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

The Right is pointing to the downsides of living in capitalism and mistaking it for feminism. This is easy to do, because we live in an increasingly complex world and one in which there is rampant inequality and things do feel unnecessarily hard. So they’re presenting a very rose-colored-glasses version of a time that never actually existed, a very ahistorical account of how the world used to be, in order to shift the conversation away from criticizing capitalism.

It works because nobody remembers what it was actually like. You don’t know unless you go and talk to your grandmother and ask, “What was it like not having a bank account? What was it like not being able to leave the house unless grandpa said you could?” I don’t think those conversations are really happening, and in that vacuum, the New Right has monopolized the conversation. And I can see why that narrative would be appealing to someone who feels like the way we’re doing things today is not tenable — especially if you have no imagination for another way that something could be.

I am pretty shaken by the amount of supposedly left or liberal writers who are ceding ground to them by playing into the whole pronatalist thing. Why are we having the conversation on their terms? Why are we taking for granted that the birth rate panic is legit when it’s clear that the entire premise is that society is in trouble because women are doing something wrong?

The Right wants us to blame feminism for society’s problems instead of capitalism. And as long as we are unwilling to acknowledge the capitalism of it all, we’re just gonna keep getting pulled further right.

How does what you’re doing fit into the overall landscape of women’s media?

One of our biggest inspirations for this podcast is a podcast called If Books Could Kill. It’s a podcast that’s about airport books, but it’s really about bad, dangerous ideas that have come out of neoliberalism over the last forty years or so. Airport books are just the vehicle by which they explore that.

I kind of think that we stumbled into a similar dynamic or structure talking about pop culture zeitgeisty things like Taylor Swift’s filler or Ballerina Farm. These are kind of a Trojan horse for talking about the politics behind these aesthetics and what they mean about where we’re headed. I wouldn’t say our podcast is women’s pop culture, but maybe a women’s podcast about issues that are popular in the culture but that’s actually about anti-capitalism.

I worked in media for eight years. There are so many founders who will do interviews for female-forward media companies and say things like, “Because women care about lip gloss and politics!” But then, they still create content that assumes that women are dumb. Your content completely invalidates the argument you just made because you just published something that would be considered too dumb for a male audience.

I think that what we’re doing is really good, and I can’t believe that there’s no one else where we are. I have so many female friends who are hilarious and smart. Why don’t they all have podcasts like ours? But I think that sarcasm is so male-coded that even the women I know who are sarcastic in private would not think that you can do that in a public way. I think that their tone would change while recording.

I say all of this because I think we’re coming from a place of believing that women are multifaceted and wanting to treat them like they’re smart. The only media that I can think of that even remotely treats women like they’re smart is so Wall Street–pilled. For women to talk like they’re smart usually means to talk like they’re men, but it’s so finance-bro-y, and it feels like it’s pretending.

Yeah, it feels like you’re wearing someone’s bigger shoes. Caro, I’ve never thought about that.

Don’t overthink it now.

I do think that there’s a difference in the personality that I bring to what you and I do and what I do on the Money with Katie show. And it does feel very different.

This is what I like about the show. Your dynamic feels very organic. It replicates the experience of actually talking to smart, funny women in one’s personal life.

Speaking of which, I was talking to a friend over the weekend about tradwife influencers, and we were discussing the difficulty of housekeeping in a consumerist culture where clutter is endemic and everyone is overworked. We were musing about how many women have probably started on cleaning hacks TikTok and ended up going down a tradwife rabbit hole that ends in renouncing feminism — when really all they wanted was more cabinet space.

These influencers are incredibly effective at intercepting people along the way, and that’s partly because they’re incentivized to. I don’t think we talk nearly enough about the extent to which they’re doing it to make money. They’re exploiting people’s desire for a way out and making money at the same time as they’re pushing this ideology. And you just can’t make as much money selling a Marxist vision —

Tell me about it. Sorry, go on.

What I find genuinely insidious about the tradwife trend is the extent to which it co-opts anti-capitalist language in order to make their project look like a legitimate resistance to something.

If you follow this content a lot, you’ll see that the way they talk about it is, “I’m not doing the hustle-culture girlboss thing, I’m doing the soft-girl slow life thing. I’m living outside of the system, opting out of capitalism. Women were never meant to work outside the house anyway.”

They’re conflating working for money outside your home with capitalism writ large and claiming to reject both. But that’s so obviously wrong. Everyone from Friedrich Engels to Milton Friedman understands that unpaid domestic labor in the home is ideal for capitalism. What better way to get surplus value from someone’s labor than for your laborer to have a whole other human who’s doing all the work of sustaining them for free? So the notion that you’re opting out of the system by staying at home to do free housework is just asinine.

In a way, they’re also playing off women’s feelings of disconnection and alienation, which is ironic because second-wave feminism produced entire treatises about how crushingly isolating being a housewife was. But the Right is offering this as a sort of antidote to the loneliness and sterility of modern life.

They say they want to engender interdependence, but it’s a very specific kind of interdependence: dependence of child on woman, woman on man, man on God.

It’s the umbrella.

When instead we need to expand the way that we think about what it means to be dependent on others and what it means to live interconnected with one another.

I think J. D. Vance was explicitly trying to guard against alternative visions of interdependence when he said that the country is being run by “childless cat ladies” who have no stake in the future of society. Wasn’t he saying there is only one way for us to be connected to each other, especially for women?

Note the fact that when Vance is talking about these unfulfilled career women who work eighty hours a week at a desk in McKinsey and how that’s such an empty life, he never references his own experiences working in venture capital or other high-powered environments. He’s talking about what his wife Usha literally did before she had kids. He often outright refers to her experiences, and never his own, when he’s talking about how meaningless and purposeless that type of life is.

I think that’s about as clear as it gets. He thinks the meaning of a woman’s life is to have children. He doesn’t think of women as full people. He thinks of women as mothers, potential mothers, and nonmothers.

The other thing about “childless cat ladies” is that it’s a really effective way to get women to keep being foot soldiers for this whole ideology because it appeals to our most powerful emotional instinct, which is avoiding shame.

Katie said something once that changed my life, which is that when you become a feminist, you begin to hear things about yourself that are the things you fear most. You’re ugly. You’re whiny. You’re pathetic. You’re undesirable to men.

And compressed in “childless cat ladies” is not just the notion of being undesirable to men. It’s the horrifying notion of being an object of pity to other women, superior women. That’s such a strong motivator and is so intimately connected to women’s shame.

When I tap into my Alabama sorority-girl past life, I would’ve been terrified to be identified in that way. Someone indirectly calling me ugly would have been devastating, because how you achieve status and power and safety in conservative circles as a woman is by being desirable and beautiful. And part of that is being perceived as being maternal and wanting a family.

However, I think the backlash to that comment was a feminist cultural moment that didn’t get quite enough credit.

I think this is like a PhD thesis for another time, but it was pretty interesting that the dominoes were J. D. Vance saying “childless cat ladies,” Taylor Swift owning that as a deeply hot cis white woman, and then Elon Musk saying he wanted to impregnate her. What an interesting little back-and-forth we had. Really captures the contemporary power struggle.

Yes, that was really creepy. But still, after Vance said that, so many women were like, “Oh, you’re such a loser.” And the strength of that reaction is getting lost in the fray. Trump won — it sucks. But he won by a very, very small margin. I do think that there has been a huge shift of women casting aside the historical shame associated with stepping outside of traditional patriarchal values.

The Right can pass a lot of damaging policies, but I think spiritually and culturally, it’s going to be very hard for them to shake out what has happened over several generations. Yes, they won the election, but I don’t know that Vance was as effective in striking fear into women’s hearts as that phrase would’ve been six years ago.

On the one hand, you have Vance shaming childless women, and on the other, you have Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm documenting her tradwife fairy tale on Instagram.

Right, but the bottom line is that it’s hard to be a parent in America, and there’s no amount of Hannah Neeleman content that is going to make that not true. So unless they actually start changing real shit about the way that being a parent in America works, they’ve got nothing.

And here’s the cool thing: I think that at any given moment, everything could change if 5 percent more women in America became 15 percent more angry about maternity leave.kat

American women are overburdened and spread too thin. But there’s some opportunity in the fact that women are bumping against the power structures and asking, “Well, what the fuck do I do?” Women who are in that position are inherently more open to alternative explanations, for better and worse.

I think this is why you’ve seen such a big boost in the wellness-girly-to-MAGA pipeline via RFK Jr and the Make America Healthy Again thing. Women want explanations. We want alternative worldviews that can make this make sense and will promise us a better future.

There is an openness there that I find encouraging. Women are extremely powerful in shaping culture. And for every woman accepting the Right’s explanations, there are many more women looking for answers in better places. When I think about the women who listen to our show, I don’t think you put that genie back in the bottle.