Under the Influence with Jo Piazza
Under the Influence is a deep dive into social media, a place haunted by aspirational marketing where it feels like every other person is a social media influencer trying to sell you something, all while posed in perfect houses that never seem to get messy. And behind this airbrushed perfection is money, so much money. Billions and billions of dollars. Journalist and mom Jo Piazza looks at how we got here, what it all means and how the commodification of every single aspect of our lives is driving everyone (but mostly women and mothers) a little insane.
Episodes
November 23, 2025 • 47 mins
You may think you know the NXIVM story. The secretive self-help empire. The sex cult headlines. The downfall of its leader, Keith Raniere. But the most famous woman at the center of the story has remained largely silent. Allison after NXIVM tells the story of Allison Mack: former Smallville actress, high-ranking NXIVM member, and convicted felon. With exclusive access following her release from prison, this series traces her astoni...
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November 20, 2025 • 46 mins
Do you actually have hobbies, or do you just have things that feel like self-improvement projects? In this episode, Jo kicks off an “Adventure Year” with her best friend Jackie, a grad student in positive psychology who went through a midlife crisis that left her feeling like a houseplant in the corner just watching everyone else enjoying their lives. Therapy, research, and a Mahjong class later, Jackie is obsessed with how women b...
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November 18, 2025 • 43 mins
The stories we tell about women matter. How we amplify and promote those stories matters. To that end we are considering how to resurrect a history series we did years ago about bad ass women that history has forgotten. We're dropping one of those episodes in your feed today. This is an episode of Fierce: Stories of Women Who Changed the World.
In this episode meet Clementine Paddleford, the forgotten food journalist who elevated...
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November 18, 2025 • 62 mins
Can parents ever really know what’s happening inside their kids’ phones? This episode takes a hard look at how Instagram says it’s protecting teens—and whether those promises hold up. Instagram’s Global Director of Public Policy, Tara Hopkins, explains the new “teen accounts,” parental supervision tools, and age verification systems. We also ask how these safety features actually work in practice, what still slips through the crack...
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November 13, 2025 • 49 mins
We’re heading back to 1994 for My So-Called Life episode three, “Guns and Gossip.” A gun goes off at school, rumors spread, and Angela Chase is caught between wanting to be seen and wanting to disappear. Pop culture historian Jennifer Keishin Armstrong (Seinfeldia, When Women Invented Television) joins the conversation to explore why the show still feels so real and what it taught us about identity, gender, and growing up.
Join ...
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November 11, 2025 • 55 mins
It’s been thirty years since My So-Called Life premiered—thirty years since Angela Chase fell for Jordan Catalano and quietly redefined what teenage angst looked like. This week, Under the Influence rewinds to 1994 for a nostalgic deep dive into the one-season show that changed how we saw adolescence, parents, and ourselves.
Emily Crandall, a political theorist with a PhD from CUNY who moonlights as an underemployed adjunct and po...
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November 6, 2025 • 45 mins
For decades, menopause has been treated like a medical afterthought—a punchline, a whisper, or something to “just get through.” But millennial women are starting to hit perimenopause, and we’re not going quietly. The hormones are unpredictable, the rage is real, and the information gap is staggering.
Psychotherapist and author Lauren Tetenbaum, who wrote Millennial Menopause: Preparing for Perimenopause, Menopause, and Life’s Next...
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November 4, 2025 • 50 mins
Tradwife influencers are selling women a dangerous fantasy — that dependence is aspirational. It’s not. In this episode, we dig into the real cost of giving up financial agency with Steph Wagner, National Director of Women & Wealth at Northern Trust and author of Fly: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom and Living a Life You Love.
We unpack why budgets fail, how a weekly money date can change your life, and the four principles ev...
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October 30, 2025 • 44 mins
Therapist, writer, and content creator Vanessa Spinarsky helps women untangle the cultural scripts that shape how we mother. Her viral message to “unf*ck your conditioning” has resonated with thousands of mothers who are tired of feeling like their worth depends on self-erasure.
This conversation dives into the myths of the “good mom,” the performance of control, and how social media keeps us dysregulated for profit. We talk about...
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October 28, 2025 • 49 mins
The publishing world can feel like an exclusive club: one where the rules are unwritten and the gatekeepers speak a different language. In this episode, we talk to novelist Kristin Vuković to break down what really happens behind the scenes of selling a book. From finding and querying a literary agent to surviving rejection, negotiating deals, and choosing the right publisher, we pull back the curtain on all the things.
We also ch...
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October 26, 2025 • 31 mins
Our friends at Tink Media and the Resonate Podcast Festival have launched something called Pitch Party—a brilliant idea that gives independent audio creators a place to share their podcast pilots with real listeners.
This week’s pilot, Heart Trouble, is a haunting and beautiful piece of storytelling. It begins when country radio DJ Sid Wood dies suddenly in 1987. Decades later, his daughter finds a box of old cassette tapes and ...
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October 23, 2025 • 46 mins
We spend nearly two months a year on social media. Two months!!!!That’s how much time the average person gives to an algorithm built to hijack their attention, flood their brain with dopamine, and quietly rewire how they connect, focus, and feel joy.
In this episode, clinical psychologist and addiction medicine expert Dr. Thekla Ross breaks down the science of how our phones became “sophisticated attention traps”—and what that’s d...
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October 21, 2025 • 55 mins
We talk a lot on this show about women doing too much. About the impossible math of modern life—motherhood, work, ambition, marriage, self-care, friendship—and then one day, another full-time job sneaks in: caregiving for your parents.
That’s where I am right now. Squarely in the sandwich generation. Raising three small kids and moving my own mom from the suburbs into the city.
This week, I’m joining the brilliant reporter Vane...
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October 19, 2025 • 37 mins
Taylor Swift isn’t a tradwife. She’s the opposite. She’s a woman who waited, who dated the douchebags, found herself, built an empire, and then finally chose a partner who celebrates her, supports her, and will never be her glass ceiling. That’s the story we should be talking about, the one that actually matters for young women. If you are a person who wants a partner, it is wonderful to wait for the right person and to find a good...
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October 16, 2025 • 55 mins
Every family runs on a kind of mythology — the stories we tell about who we are, where we come from, and what we’ve survived. For Gabrielle Hamilton, those stories fueled both her cooking and her writing.
The James Beard Award–winning chef behind Prune and the author of Blood, Bones & Butter has spent her life turning memory into art. In her new book, Next of Kin, she returns to the chaos and brilliance of her childhood — the beau...
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October 13, 2025 • 50 mins
I finally did the thing. After years of dreaming about a Philly bookstore, Nick and I bought a vintage trailer and christened it The Bookcase, a pop up mobile shop we’re rolling around the Catskills this winter. To figure out how any of this actually works, I called my friend Flannery of Bluebird Bookstop, whose own trailer grew into one of my favorite brick and mortar stores. We talk about why a trailer lets you test the market wi...
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October 9, 2025 • 43 mins
Wharton economist Corinne Low wrote a viral article for The Cut titled “This Economist Crunched the Numbers and Stopped Dating Men.”
Low, the author of the new book Having it All, is here to talk all about it. In this episode, we chat about the real economics of burnout, motherhood, and why gendered division of labor destroys intimacy. Corinne shares how she turned her own research into a blueprint for survival, left a marriage t...
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October 7, 2025 • 47 mins
Jane Birkin invented effortless cool before Instagram, before influencers, before French-girl chic was even a thing. But behind the Birkin bag and the famous love affairs was a woman battling depression, heartbreak, and the relentless pressure of being an icon.
Journalist Marisa Meltzer joins me to talk about her new book It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, which peels back the myth to reveal the real Birkin: fragile yet ...
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October 5, 2025 • 52 mins
Today we're dropping an episode of Book Journey into the feed, a behind-the-scenes podcast from editor and Northern California Writers Retreat director Heather Lazar about how writers become authors. This conversation follows Alka Joshi, international bestselling author of the Jaipur Trilogy from first pages to agent to editor to a breakout debut. You will hear how a voice becomes a manuscript, what a real revision process looks li...
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October 2, 2025 • 48 mins
We are living in peak nineties nostalgia. Everywhere you look there are slip dresses, scrunchies, bucket hats, even Tamagotchis making a comeback. But this revival is not just about clothes or hair accessories. It is about a collective longing for a pre-digital era, before we were glued to our phones and before algorithms decided what we should see, wear, and want.
In this episode of Under the Influence, we dig into why millennial...
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