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
December 25, 2025 • 42 mins
What does friendship actually look like in the messy middle parts of midlife, when time is scarce, energy is finite, and relationships have to earn their place?
This episode with journalist Anya Kamenetz explores how friendships change in your forties, why many people feel lonelier even as they crave deeper connection, and what it really takes to build rich, sustaining friendships as an adult.
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December 23, 2025 • 39 mins
Traveling with kids is not a vacation. It’s work. It’s labor. It’s also one of my absolute favorite things to do. In this episode I talk about how we actually make it happen as a family, from taking my “lumpy babies” to Sicily to hauling three kids through London while one of them pukes all over an Uber and then immediately asks for sushi.
I’m joined by my family travel guru, writer and travel journalist Regan Stephens, founder of...
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December 21, 2025 • 47 mins
Today I'm dropping an interview that I did with the Love-ly podcast into our feed.
This week on Love-ly, Mehak sits down with bestselling author, journalist, and podcaster Jo Piazza, widely considered one of America’s sharpest observers of women, motherhood, and the influencer economy. Together, they unpack the increasingly visible and controversial world of “trad wives”—women who embrace and promote full-time homemaking on socia...
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December 18, 2025 • 34 mins
The trad wife trend has finally hit its ceiling. After years of algorithm-friendly homemaking, the movement is showing the cracks in its seams. The performance is shifting. The ambition underneath is no longer hiding and that reveal says everything about where the culture is headed next.
Brands like Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith are now openly embracing the CEO role instead of pretending domestic perfection happens without childc...
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December 16, 2025 • 41 mins
Holiday joy is supposed to feel cozy and magical. Instead, a lot of women spend December simmering with quiet (or not so quiet) rage. Let's dig into why the holidays can feel especially brutal for women in midlife, and what our hormones, our brains, and the unpaid mental load of the season have to do with it.
Her guest is Dr. Kim Einhorn, an OB GYN and founder of the MP Collective, a personalized menopause and perimenopause practi...
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December 14, 2025 • 43 mins
In light of the news about Australia's social media ban for teenagers we are resurfacing an episode with a young creator.
This is a deep dive into the world of a 16-year-old TikTok star who wants to change the industry as we know it and ensure that the next 20 billionaires are females under 25. Sloane Price is wildly ambitious in ways I couldn't have imagined possible when I was a teenager. And today we're talking about her busin...
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December 11, 2025 • 36 mins
Australia just became the first country in the world to ban social media for anyone under sixteen. It’s a sweeping, messy and imperfect law. But it's also one of the first real attempts to hold tech companies accountable for the impact their platforms have on kids. We dig into what the ban actually does, why it matters even with all its flaws, and what the early backlash from teenagers and tech companies reveals.
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December 9, 2025 • 45 mins
Quite Literally Books is doing something rare in publishing. They are bringing back books by American women who were once widely read, widely praised, and then quietly erased from the literary conversation. These writers were bestsellers a hundred years ago. They were reviewed by the major outlets. They shaped cultural debates. And then, because the canon was built and maintained mostly by men, their work disappeared from classroom...
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December 7, 2025 • 59 mins
This week we’re bringing back one of my favorite episodes because it has only become more relevant. On the surface, it is a story about “bad nanny” posts in mom groups. Underneath, it is a story about money, power, and the invisible labor that holds up our entire childcare system.
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December 4, 2025 • 53 mins
What happens when a thriller writer discovers her novels have been quietly fed into AI without her consent and decides to fight back. In this episode, Jo digs in with Andrea Bartz, author of The Last Ferry Out and Reese pick We Were Never Here, to unpack how pirated books ended up inside massive AI training datasets, what it was like to be deposed and to face down an AI giant, and how that fight led to a proposed 1.5 billion dollar...
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December 2, 2025 • 45 mins
W're told that motherhood is supposed to feel natural, fulfilling and instinctive. If it does not, our culture tells you the problem is you. Jo and licensed psychotherapist Vanessa Bennett, author of The Motherhood Myth, are here to rip that story to shreds.
They trace how impossible standards for mothers were built, from the Virgin Mary as manufactured ideal to helicopter parenting and the avalanche of parenting advice on social...
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November 27, 2025 • 27 mins
This episode dives into the joy of planning a trip, because there really should be a German word for the absolute delight that the anticipation of travel brings you. Perhaps also one for the thrill of getting great recommendations.
Jo is in London with her entire crew and she taps into one of her most trusted tastemakers to build some ideal itineraries—a proper Sunday roast, the best pubs, where to walk when the weather turns, the...
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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.
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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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