Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

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 astonishing path from Smallville fame to NXIVM’s inner circle—and her effort to rebuild a life in the wreckage. Through raw interviews with those who knew her before, during, and after NXIVM, the show dives deep into the gray zones of influence, accountability, and redemption. And how we as a society treat women who have done bad things, often fueled by social media. In this episode, Allison Mack heads to court to be sentenced. When the judge hands down his sentence—three years in federal prison—Allison must begin to unravel the beliefs she once evangelized, parsing what was true and what was manipulation.  You can find Allison After NXIVM here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 both need and lack true hobbies that are not about weight loss, productivity, or caregiving. Jo and Jackie talk about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, why yoga and Pilates usually don’t count as hobbies, how play boosts wellbeing, and the idea of “psychological richness” that comes from trying new things. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 food writing from dull and mundane to a delicious art form. The way we write about food today is largely due to Clementine, the roving reporter who taught herself to fly a plane so she could report on every aspect of food across the country and around the world. Afterwards, hear Jo’s conversation with Yasmin Khan, the best-selling food writer whose books on middle eastern cooking, The Saffron Tales and Zaitoun, expertly carry on Clementine’s legacy.   Listen to more episodes of Fierce here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 cracks, and what it means when the people building social media are also parents trying to keep their own kids safe online. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 podcast maker (“Yay, capitalism”), and Esme Shaller, a clinical psychologist and professor at UCSF whose middle school daughters are currently reading The Babysitters Club, join the conversation. Together, they explore how My So-Called Life captured the confusion and loneliness of being fifteen, why its portrayal of parents feels so different through adult eyes, and how it laid the groundwork for every coming-of-age show that followed. It’s a love letter to the nineties—a time before phones, when friendship was analog, music was everything, and watching a boy lean against a locker could still break your heart. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Period, joins the show to unpack how an entire generation is redefining what it means to age. The conversation moves from sleepless nights and hormonal chaos to the deeper stuff—mental health, careers, sex, friendship, and the ways the medical system continues to fail women. With humor and clarity, Lauren explains what perimenopause actually is, why most doctors aren’t trained to recognize it, and how millennial and Gen X women are demanding better care, better research, and better conversations. This isn’t the end of anything—it’s the start of women taking ownership of their bodies and rewriting the story of midlife. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 every woman should know to actually grow wealth. Steph shares how losing everything after her marriage ended became the catalyst for her financial awakening — and why owning your money is the ultimate rebellion against tradwife culture. Buy Steph's book Fly here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 what it looks like to stop performing motherhood and start living it, why burnout is really a form of self-abandonment, and how to find authenticity in a system designed to make women disappear. Follow Vanessa on Instagram here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 chat about the upcoming Adriatic Writers Conference in Croatia that I am co-organizing which is changing the game for authors by teaching both the craft and the commerce of writing. If you’ve ever dreamed about getting your book into the world, this is your roadmap to how it actually happens. Apply for a spot at the Adriatic Writer's Conference in Spring 2026 here. Find more of Kristin's work here. Find Lidija's tips for what to ask an agent here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 hears her father’s voice for the first time. That discovery sends her on a cross-country journey through the Midwest and the American South—from honky-tonk bars to the Grand Ole Opry—to uncover who her father was, and what his life (and his music) meant. Listen to more of Pitch Party here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 doing to our relationships, our sex lives, and our ability to feel joy. Jo and Nick join her for a brutally honest conversation about how to break the habit, rebuild intimacy, and reclaim the parts of life that can’t be lived through a screen. Learn more about Thekla's work here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Vanessa Grigoriadis on her new show So Your Parents Are Old for a crossover episode about what happens when the people who raised you suddenly need you to raise them. We get honest about the third shift—the invisible labor of caring for everyone at once—about guilt, burnout, and what it means to have zero minutes left to spare. If you want to subscribe to So Your Parents Are Old you can do it here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 man. My best girlfriend Jackie Cascarano of Juno Women's Collective and I dig into why Taylor and Travis’s relationship is such a powerful example for young women, and why it’s time to stop calling every woman who wants marriage and kids a tradwife, as if wanting those things somehow cancels out your feminism. We also get into the fragile male ego, the madness of Bama Rush, and the weird ways social media keeps shaping what it means to be a woman right now. Read the WSJ story about Bama Rush here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 beauty and the violence, the humor and the heartbreak — to see what still holds true after all these years. This episode is about how family becomes material, how humor masks survival, and how writing it all down can both preserve and transform the people we come from. Next of Kin is out now. Grab your copy here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 without dying of overhead, the brutal realities of book margins, how I’m curating a tiny but mighty selection, and why the magic is the experience as much as the sale. This episode is my love letter to community, discovery, and saying yes before I feel ready. Part two is coming. Visit Bluebird here. Find their clothing new arrivals here. (Use our code TRADWIFE20) Follow Bluebird on Instagram here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 that wasn’t working, and fell in love again—this time, with a woman who gets it. We also unpack how social media’s tradwife aesthetic gaslights women into unpaid labor, why “having it all” is still a rigged game, and what it means to finally take ownership of your time, money, and happiness. Get a copy of Having it All here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 magnetic, self-doubting yet endlessly stylish. We explore why her aesthetic still defines generations of women, how her personal struggles shaped her art, why she continues to haunt our cultural imagination and the surprising ways Birkin’s legacy speaks directly to our influencer-saturated world today. Get your copy of It Girl here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 like, how contracts and covers happen, and how a thousand book clubs powered word of mouth. About the Northern California Writers Retreat: a juried fiction retreat held four times a year in Carmel Valley. Each session brings together 18 writers, literary agents, an editor, and an author in residence for an intensive, practical immersion in the craft and business of publishing. Founded and directed by Heather Lazar, the retreat blends hands-on editorial guidance with real-world industry access. Applications are open until November 7. I’ll serve as author in residence for the third session, April 8–12. Listen to more episodes of Book Journey here. Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 millennials and Gen Z are craving the decade that gave us dial-up internet, landlines, and the last gasp of an unplugged childhood. From malls to music videos, beauty trends to sitcoms like Friends (and even the new series Osadid and Friends), the nineties are everywhere right now. Maybe that is not just nostalgia. Maybe it is the medicine we need for our current screen burnout. Read Glynnis's piece on why we are doomed to keep reliving the nineties here. (Gift Link) Join our newsletter community here. ORDER EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices