Advertise on podcast: Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

Ask Jo anything this week. We've got a grab bag of audience questions and completely unfiltered responses to things like: What’s the biggest lie women are being sold right now? Can you actually “have it all”? How do you stop feeling like you’re failing every day? How does it feel to be in your 40s (body, confidence, not giving a f*) How often do you get Botox? What’s it like bringing a kid on a work trip? What do you love about being an author? What do you hate about being an author (marketing, preorders, all of it)? How close are you to quitting social media? What does “enough” look like financially? Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 co-founder of Silent Book Club, a global movement that started with one exhausted mom who just wanted to read a single uninterrupted chapter and somehow turned into thousands of chapters in more than 60 countries. We chat about why reading in public started to feel weirdly indulgent, how phones became the more “acceptable” way to check out, and why focusing on a book will actually bring us back to ourselves. There’s also detours into late-stage capitalism, wealth inequality, and why women keep finding themselves fixing broken systems on their own. Raises hand. Me, me, me. Check out everything Silent Book Club here. Discover their reading retreats here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 your brain, improve sleep, and help you think more clearly. We also get into kids, screen time, and why the way they're living now isn’t setting them for happiness. Please listen to this one outside. Grab a copy of John La Puma's Indoor Epidemic here. Find Dr. John here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 fentanyl (after sending a text to her drug connection asking for the "Michael Jackson drugs") and then wrote a children’s book about grief after he died. Jo talks with author and Folklore bookstore owner Lindsey Leavitt, who lives in Midway and walks her through the entire thing from the house to the lore to all the completely bananas details. Find all of Lindsey's books here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist from Folklore here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 also moving backwards? From the rise of the manosphere to tradwife thirst traps to the slow-drip messaging around birth control, we break down how conservative ideas have been seeded, scaled, and sold to a generation that was supposed to be more progressive than the ones before it. We also get into why the right is winning the culture war online, what progressives are getting wrong about influence and messaging, and how algorithms are shaping belief systems, relationships, and even who people date. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 influencer-driven “healing” economy, where the same patterns of coercion and manipulation keep showing up. Learn more about Star here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Get Jen's book here! Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 colliding with the expectations we’ve all absorbed. Libby shares the moment she realized she couldn’t keep doing it all, the years of carrying everything for everyone, and how that eventually turned into a massive online community of women admitting the status quo isn’t working. We get into: the mental load and invisible labor no one accounts for the myth of the “good mom” and why it’s so hard to shake why loving your kids isn’t the same as having the capacity to care for them what it actually looks like to start setting boundaries why saying no feels so uncomfortable at first Order Libby's book Honest Motherhood here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 cancellation of The Bachelorette after the Taylor Frankie Paul scandal and the difference between what audiences say they want and what corporations can actually tolerate. Is the cancellation of the Bachelorette the best thing that could actually happen to taylor? Then there’s the Justin Timberlake DUI footage, which was supposed to be damaging and somehow makes him more relatable. We're also chatting as longtime entertainment reporters and good friends about how gossip is anthropology, sociology and modern storytelling that can actually be good for you! Subscribe to Celebrity Intelligence here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 bathroom floor, and how that breakdown led her to build a different framework for ambition and success. We get into burnout, misalignment, why five-year plans can keep us stuck, and why there has to be a third way for women who want meaningful work, a real life, and something more honest than either extreme. Plus: how Megan’s “directional living” framework helped a young bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez find her path. Get Megan's book Directional Living here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 to revive the corpse of the Bachelor franchise. Also the bigger thing that is driving me insane, which is how fast women get shut down for being messy or angry while men just keep on… going. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 and partners need to stop treating birth like a side quest and start showing up from day one. Dr. Lincoln’s new book, The Birth Book, is the guide we all wish we’d had sooner. Order The Birth Book here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 into a political ecosystem that shifts peoples' politics and shapes culture. We talk about the anti-birth-control messaging spreading through MAHA and wellness spaces, the money gap between right-wing and progressive media, why the left keeps talking mostly to itself, and what has to change before the midterms. Read Emily's piece on the influencer economy here. Follow Emily here. Buy Democracy in Retrograde here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 even a total stranger who reveals how he regrets his decision to have a child. Listen to more of Creation Myth here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 storytelling engines on television, how producers turn a chaos machine into narratives and contestants into characters characters, and why reality TV was basically the beta test for the influencer economy we’re living in now. Order Stephen's book Escape here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER The Parisian Heist here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices