Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

In this incredibly brave interview we speak with a woman who considers herself a former trad wife. She got married young and had kids young. Her husband convinced her to quit school, to stay home, to take care of the kids and to give up all agency when it came to their finances. When she wanted to leave the marriage she didn't have the education, work experience or resources to do it. But she made...

The postpartum period is a clusterf*ck dumpster fire of hell and do not let anyone tell you different. It is also magical and wonderful and life-changing and gorgeous. Many things can be true. This is all of my advice for how to survive the newborn period and a chat with the incredible Tara Clark of Modern Mom Probs who consistently makes me feel seen as a mother in a world that too often turns a...

Does the Internet fundamentally hate women? Social media platforms can be a battleground, often subjecting women to harsh criticism and verbal violence. And no one knows that better than tech reporter, author and general Internet bad ass Taylor Lorenz.  Taylor has been called a lot of things online. She has been lauded as one of the nation’s preeminent tech reporters for places like the New York T...

Mini bonus for anyone who needs a post holiday reminder that you're amazing and no one should tell you any different. Parenting advice influencers are ubiquitous these days. And they are spending thousands of dollars to boost their posts to get them in front of you so they can shame you into feeling like a crappy parent and then sell you their courses where they teach you to be your kids' therapis...

In our constant quest to stay connected, Instagram and other social media platforms have become staples of our daily lives. Yet, there is a growing counter-movement of folks who have chosen to break free from the shackles of these platforms, daring to live a life beyond the 'like' and 'follow' buttons. But what does life on the other side of social media look like? The writer, author and bad ass c...

Back in July, an Ohio plastic surgeon lost her medical license after the state medical board investigated her for live streaming operations on TikTok and causing harm to patients in the process. TikTok fans may know this doctor by the name Dr. Roxy. She gained millions of views and followers over the past few years by live streaming plastic surgeries from her office. Surgeries like liposuctions, i...

Jo has made a new podcast and here is a sneak peak of the first episode. From Jo Piazza and Doree Shafrir, the host of the hit podcast Forever 35 comes TOO MUCH MONEY. Too Much Money is a podcast that attempts to answer this question by telling stories about people who have more money than they know what to do with, and use it in ways that are sometimes foolish, often petty, and often ridiculous....

What are you afraid of? Today we are talking about fears and finances. Because our phones are listening to us all the time they can probably hear us when we voice these fears out loud. Jo has recently been served a bunch of financial influencers who want to sell her advice to be a millionaire in a $500 course. These finance charlatans are preying on all of our very real fears. Thankfully we were a...

I want to tell all of you moms out there something very important today. You are a good mom, a good parent, a good caretaker. You are good. You are good at taking care of your children.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Are trad wives happier than the rest of us? So many of the women I know who are bad-ass boss babes struggling to juggle it all—career, relevance, fulfillment, being a good mother, being good at work, being OK at being a wife—are really unhappy and anxious. I don’t believe in being submissive to your husband and I don’t particularly want to stay home and be the sole caregiver for my children and th...

Subscribe to the Over the Influence newsletter HERE for episode transcripts, bonus content and more of my ramblings about weird stuff on and off the Internet. And order your college roommate a copy of The Sicilian Inheritance to make up for that Pearl Jam CD you never returned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Order Devorah's Book HERE Subscribe to the Over the Influence newsletter HERE for episode transcripts, bonus content and more of my ramblings about weird stuff on and off the Internet. And order your college roommate a copy of The Sicilian Inheritance to make up for that Pearl Jam CD you never returned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A couple of years ago, Kelli Stuart was diagnosed with breast cancer after she went in for a routine mammogram and it did not go the way she expected. Once Kelli got her diagnosis she wanted to find one thing in her life that she could control. Like a lot of women that I know and love, Kelli is a doer and a fixer. She talked to all of the doctors and did the treatments that they recommended, but s...

A lot of parents are putting really gross shit of their kids online every single day. And millions of people are watching it. Millions! Millions. We are talking about poop blowouts and booger picking videos and vomit and pee and every possible bodily fluid you can imagine. Sarah Adams is the unfortunate recipient of many of these videos. Ever since Sarah started the anti-sharenting account, Mom Un...

You can read Minna's original piece in the New York Times here and buy Mom Rage here. As always, grab your Sicilian Inheritance often and early. I need to know how many cannolis to make for the launch! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Earlier this week we asked whether the "traditional wife" Lex Delarosa was trolling us with her Instagram account. So many of you were convinced that her content was satire. UTI is here to clear up the confusion once and for all. You'll have to listen to find out the answer. But what I can tell you is that this conversation veers off into so many different tangents, including the massive levels of...

Have you heard about #softgirls? They're young women who want to check out of hustle culture. Their greatest dream is to achieve nothing. She doesn't want to be a girl boss. In fact, a lot of them do not want to work for pay at all. She just wants to perfect her skincare regime and do all the Pilates. Are these women aspiring to be little more than trophy wives? Are they the gateway drug to #tradw...

Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe to Anne Helen Petersen's Substack Culture Study. Read her piece on #tradwives here. And listen to her podcast Work Appropriate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jessica Elefante used to be part of the problem. She was a brand strategist and marketer who created fake problems for us so we would buy things and do things. Because that is what brands and influencers do. They trick us into believing we need things to make our lives better. But now Jessica is a reformed BS artist and she wants to fix the problem. She wants to help us figure out how to stop the...

What will happen to all the kids having their lives made into content? How do they feel? Maybe they're fine, maybe they're miserable. It is so hard to know because most of them are still so young. But reporter Fortesa Latifi has done a deep dive into how influencer kids are feeling about their entire lives being broadcast online. She spoke to one young woman of an influencer who told her parents s...

What line do we cross when we post pictures of sick kids to social media and why does the Instagram algorithm and content machine seem to promote these kinds of images? I am not the only one who gets creeped out when I am served pictures and videos of other people’s sick kids in the hospital. The discomfort is very real. I need to talk through all of my feelings about posting sick kids on Instagra...

Feeding kids is hard. It doesn't matter if you have a sushi-loving toddler or one who eats three beige foods. There is judgement and stigma about everything and it is easy for moms to feel like they are constantly failing. Today we talk to author, podcaster and substacker Virginia Sole-Smith (author of Fat Talk and substacker of Burnt Toast) about how kid food influencers on social media can make...

The robots are coming for all of us. Companies like Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, are using books to train their AI machines without asking for permission. Jo did a search on The Atlantic's database of books that AI is using to train its robots to steal our livelihoods and found FIVE of her titles on there. We are now clearly living in the Matrix. It begs the question of what else are...

Munchausen by Proxy has gotten a lot of attention lately with Patricia Arquette's star turn in the series The Act. MBP refers to when a caregiver abuses a child by pretending they are ill in order to get attention for themselves. With the rise and prevalence of social media there are more and more cases of Munchausen by Proxy and Munchausen syndrome happening in the digital world. There are cases...

You can download all of the Infamous episodes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/its-the-future-and-everybody-is-thin/id1652941051?i=1000628712174 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices