Five years ago, I was a new mom recording a podcast in my closet, wedged between a toddler and a baby who wouldn’t sleep. For the past few months I had been exhausted, leaking milk, hating my husband and endlessly scrolling Instagram, wondering why my messy, chaotic life didn’t look like the linen-clad perfection of the moms in my feed. So I decided to start reporting on the world of mom influencers. That reporting turned into a revelation. Those “perfect mothers” weren’t just moms, they were marketers. They weren’t just sharing their lives, they were selling them.

That was the start of this podcast. At the time, mom influencing was still dismissed as fluff. Now it’s a multi-billion dollar industry shaping how we shop, vote, and even think about gender roles. But the mission of Under the Influence has never changed. It has always been to pull back the curtain on the industries and ideologies that tell women who we should be, and to ask what’s really being sold when we scroll.

So in celebration of our five-year anniversary, we’re rerunning the very first episode, A More Perfect Mother, the blueprint for everything we’ve built together.

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