Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

There's nothing I love more than quietly reading. I love it alone. I love it in groups. But I especially love doing it in public, with the rest of the world buzzing around me, all absorbed in their own little worlds. What if the antidote to burnout, loneliness, and the attention economy was… sitting in a room with strangers and reading quietly? This week, I’m talking to Guinevere de la Mare, the c...

We’ve become an indoor species and it is making us sick and burnt out. Today we're chatting with Dr. John La Puma about the indoor epidemic and what happens when we spend almost all of our time inside under artificial light and on screens. We break down what that’s doing to sleep, mood, and focus. Dr. La Puma explains how something as simple as stepping outside each day for 17 minutes can reset yo...

Jo’s new true crime obsession started with a trip to Midway, Utah. She was there for an event at Folklore bookstore and a visit to Ballerina Farm Dairy, and within about five minutes of driving around town someone pointed at a house and said, “that’s the murder house.” At which point she needed to know everything. This is the story of Kouri Richins, the Utah mom who poisoned her husband with fenta...

A third of Gen Z men think wives should obey their husbands. This generation of young men, ages 14 to 29, is getting more conservative by the day. How? Why? And can we reverse it? To figure it out, we talk with Gen Z strategist and creator ⁠Haley Lickstein⁠ about what the hell is going on with young men and how much of it is the internet’s fault. And what about the women? Are they fighting back or...

How does something marketed as healing, empowerment, and connection start to slide down the slippery slope of becoming a sex cult? That's just one part of Star Stone’s story inside OneTaste, the sexual wellness company built around “orgasmic meditation,” that sits right on that blurry line between wellness program and cult. Star takes us from the Bay Area wellness scene of the 2010s to today’s inf...

How do you make a move when you have no idea what comes next? Jen Shahade has spent her life inside the world of chess as a two-time U.S. women’s chess champion and the author of many books about chess including her latest Thinking Sideways, a book that uses chess as a way to think better, live better, and stop pretending we can plan ten moves ahead in a world that changes nineteen times a day. Ge...

We're often told or indoctrinated to believe motherhood is supposed to be magical, fulfilling, your highest calling, the thing that finally makes everything make sense. And yet so many women are quietly unraveling and filled with rage. This week we sit down with Libby Ward—the hilarious creator behind Diary of an Honest Mom, and author of Honest Motherhood—to talk about the reality of parenting co...

Time to do a deep dive into breaking celebrity news and what it’s revealing about our culture right now. Our guest is Dan Wakeford, a longtime force in entertainment journalism and one of the smartest editors to come out of the celebrity magazine era. He’s now launching a new newsletter, Celebrity Intelligence, built on real reporting, no rumor-chasing and no AI sludge. We dig into the cancellatio...

Why have women been told the only choices are girlboss or tradwife, lean in or opt out, burnout or retreat? We're chatting with author and coach Megan Hellerer about why that binary is so false and so seductive, especially for women who did everything “right” and still wound up exhausted, anxious, and unhappy. Megan shares how she went from Stanford to a dream job at Google to panic attacks on the...

An emergency episode is needed because the Bachelorette just got canceled before it even started and it's just so Secret Lives of Mormon Wives...... ABC pulled Taylor Frankie Paul’s entire season after a video resurfaced from a 2023 incident that was already public and very much part of her story on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. None of this is new and ABC knew exactly who they were casting to try...

The internet is full of terrible birth advice, and pregnant people are paying the price. This week, we’re joined by OB-GYN Dr. Jennifer Lincoln to bust the myths, misinformation, and guilt that swirl around labor, delivery, epidurals, C-sections, and motherhood online. We talk about why so many women go into birth wildly underprepared, why shame has become its own cottage industry, and why dads an...

The right did not accidentally win social media and the internet. They built an entire influencer machine, and the left is still acting like a few sponsored posts during election season might somehow be enough to compete in the attention economy. We're chatting with Emily Amick about how conservatives turned podcasts, wellness influencers, mommy bloggers, TikTok creators, and pop culture accounts...

You all loved hearing Helena DeGroot's episode about not having kids so I wanted to drop the first episode of her series Creation Myth here for you to listen to. The show explores what life's purpose looks like without having children. After the decision not to have kids ended her marriage, 40-year-old Helena grabs her mic to find out: did she make a mistake? We hear from friends and family, and e...

What’s harder: winningSurvivor or writing a novel? According to former Survivor runner-up Stephen Fishbach, it’s writingthe novel by a billion. In this episode we talk with Stephen about his sharp new thriller Escape, which pulls back the curtain on the reality TV machine and the people trying to control the story behind the scenes. We get into why Survivor is still one of the most powerful storyt...

Are you watching Love Story? This week we're chatting with our resident ’90s guru Glynnis MacNicol about Hulu’s depiction of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette's tragic romance and why that title feels either deeply ironic or just flat-out wrong. We talk about the mythology of John John and Carolyn , the downtown NYC glamour of it all, the slip dresses, the cigarettes (the sweet, sweet cigarette, and th...

What if you do not want kids, but everyone acts like you are making a mistake? This week, we’re talking with Helena DeGroot, creator of the podcast The Creation Myth, about choosing a child-free life in a culture that refuses to believe that choice can be valid. Helena knew early that she did not want children. Her husband said he was on the same page, until he was not. After years of pressure, th...

Content featuring sick, sad, or injured children usually performs best online. Let that sink in. That insane fact is just one of the unsettling realities journalist Fortesa Latifi uncovered while reporting her new book, Like, Follow, Subscribe, a deep dive into the world of kid influencers and the children growing up as brands. In this episode of Under the Influence, Latifi explores why vulnerable...

Motherhood makes history, but history keeps trying to erase mothers. In this episode of Under the Influence, feminist cultural historian Elinor Cleghorn discusses her new book A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering and unpacks how motherhood has been written and rewritten to strip women of agency. From ancient birth rituals and the long, maligned history of midwifery to the Vi...

Who was your gateway influencer? For us, it was Love Taza—Naomi Davis—the Juilliard-trained ballerina (yes, a different one) turned mommy blogger and social star who made New York City look like a candy-coated dream of red lipstick, tiny apartments, and five kids in technicolor. And then she disappeared. This week’s episode welcomes author Ali Hoff Kosik to talk about her new book Too Blessed to S...

Jo has been working on a brand new podcast about birth for the past year and she is so excited to share it with you all. Today we are sharing the very first episode of Birth with Babylist. In our first episode, we walk through what birth actually looks like, from early labor through delivery. We talk to experienced OB-GYNs and midwives as they break down the stages of labor, what’s normal, what’s...

Financial advice for parents usually lands in extremes, either panic-inducing warnings about how expensive kids are, or unrealistic frameworks that don’t account for how life actually unfolds. This week’s guests, Christy Shen and Bryce Leung became well-known after publishing Quit Like a Millionaire and retiring at 30 with over a million dollars invested, but their path started from a place of rea...

Close your eyes (not if you’re driving) and picture your old lady life. You wake up when you want. You wear glorious caftans. You’re strong and you’re rich because you built yourself a safety net. Today we’re chatting with Amanda Holden, the personal finance educator behind the new book How to Be a Rich Old Lady. We get into why women are trained to feel “bad at money,” how that keeps power in som...

In celebration of the Winter Olympics (the best thing to ever happen to Peacock) we are bringing back one of our favorite episodes of Committed with professional figure skaters Chris and Alexa Knierim.  These two shared the same dream when they fell in love and got married—get to the Olympics... together. They didn’t let broken bones or a mysterious illness get in their way. Their love story is ev...

Today’s episode is a grab bag — a hodgepodge of the stories people have been asking me about in my DMs for the past week. First up: the Ballerina Farm raw milk scandal. We break down the failed raw milk tests, the health concerns, and why the internet reacted with such gleeful ferocity. This isn’t really about unpasteurized dairy with cow poop bacteria in it. It’s about influencer perfection and t...

Moms drive the majority of household purchasing decisions. Recommendations from mom influencers outperform traditional ads. They even convert better than celebrity endorsements. And yet, they’re still treated like they should be grateful for a free product and an affiliate link. This week we talk with Chelsea Clark, founder and CEO of Momfluence, an influencer marketing agency built specifically a...