Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

What if the best way to make friends as an adult is to go to summer camp? Think cozy cabins, excellent books, whitewater rafting, crafting, and hundreds of women who share yourn views and vibes. Jo talks with Mackenzie Newcomb, founder of the Bad Bitch Book Club, about how a book blog that turned into a 51,000-member community with reading retreats across the country.

Then, Jo talks with Kristen Vukovic, founder of the Adriatic Writers Conference, about the power of writing alongside other people. From finding breakthroughs in a manuscript to navigating a publishing industry being transformed by AI.

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We’re kicking off with a cover reveal! People magazine debuted the cover of The Last Ride, our new murder-for-hire thriller set at a high-end Wyoming dude ranch. Think Yellowstone meets White Lotus with the right amount of Dirty Dancing. It comes out July 6, and preorders are open now wherever books are sold.

Then we sit down with Katie Sturino, founder of Megababe, to talk about the two words women say way too often: “I’m fine.” Megababe’s research found that 96% of women say they’re fine when they aren’t at least once a week, and 81% will sit in physical discomfort for hours rather than complain. We get into why we feel so much pressure to be low-maintenance and agreeable, how to give someone an honest answer without trauma dumping, and why Katie chose to team up with Lancôme instead of picking a fight when the brand launched a campaign similar to hers. We also talk about why middle age is secretly the best age, the superpower of no longer giving the F’s, reinventing your life at any stage, self-tan hacks, and Megababe’s new Coldies cooling collar (which may or may not be making a cameo in The Last Ride).

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Work is broken for most of us. The modern office was built for men with stay-at-home wives. School lets out at 3, childcare costs a fortune, and we’ve all gone a little feral since the pandemic. But we’re also lonelier than ever, and we’re losing something real when we never see each other in person.

This week we talk with economist Natalia Emanuel, co-author of In Person, about why being together makes us smarter, more creative, and less miserable. We get into why we hate a Zoom (there’s brain science behind it), how young people are supposed to find mentors and make friends when they only see their coworkers on a screen, why the fight over remote versus in-office misses the point, and what a workplace built for actual humans, not shareholders, could look like.

Find the book at inpersonbook.com.

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What does it really take to ask for what you want—and actually get it? Jenny Wood, former Google executive and author of Wild Courage, breaks down why fear of judgment, failure, and uncertainty keep so many people stuck. This episode dives into the surprising science of ambition, why women are still penalized for being "bossy," how guilt and comparison steal more from us than failure ever could, and why being a little shameless might be the smartest move you make. Plus: what chasing a stranger off a subway platform can teach you about betting on yourself.

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This week we talk with Hillary Frank, the creator of The Longest Shortest Time, a podcast that got us through the miserable, sleepless, who-is-this-tiny-alien early days of motherhood.

Hillary has a new thriller out called Wedlocked, an original audiobook

that is Promising Young Woman meets Get Out. The protagonist, Zara is an instructor on Uplift, a fitness app that promises to lift your weights and your spirits, and she’s married to Ezzy, the app’s founder. (Do not mix work and pleasure, people. It never ends well.) Her job is to stay relentlessly peppy no matter how sore, sad, or furious she is. Then something shifts, and Zara starts feeling genuinely, wildly happy for the first time in forever. She also starts getting scary symptoms, suspects someone is stalking her, and has to deal with an ex who shows up and thinks her new bliss is seriously weird. We won’t spoil anything, but let’s just say her happiness probably isn’t coming from a good place.

We talk about why women are expected to smile through everything, from chronic pain to random dudes on the street telling is to smile to the Instagram algorithm that only promotes youth and beauty, and what it actually costs our bodies when we stuff down our anger.

Plus, we found out The Longest Shortest Time is back and now covering perimenopause and reproductive health!

Wedlocked is available wherever you get audiobooks, and that includes your library, y’all.

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What if moms were in charge? This week we sit down with Liuba Grechen Shirley, founder of Vote Mama, who ran for Congress in 2018 while nursing two toddlers and became the first woman to win federal approval to use campaign funds for childcare. That ruling changed how parents run for office, and the fight has since spread to 41 states and DC.

We talk about why there are more millionaires in Congress than moms of young kids, why childcare and paid leave are economic issues and not “women’s issues,” and what it actually takes for a regular person to run when the job is basically an unpaid two-year interview. Liuba shares stories from the trail, including a congressman who called her an “illegitimate constituent,” and introduces us to some of the incredible moms on the ballot this November. We also get into the very real safety threats women candidates face, the state legislators who earn more teaching classes at the Y than they do in office, and whether we should finally throw our own hat in the ring.

With 202 Vote Mama candidates on the ballot and less than three weeks until the midterms, this is your sign to check back in. Host a Moms’ Night Out (rage rooms encouraged) at votemama.org/ready, follow @votemamalobby on Instagram, and sign up to volunteer at votemama.org.

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We had a whole different episode planned, and then Shane Gillis stood up on SNL and called women who wear shorts to the gym whores. So we’re doing another emergency episode, and this time Nick Aster joins us to talk about why this matters so much right now. We get into what a joke like this on live network television tells young men in the wake of the Cornell Seven group text, why Dan Levy’s call for more men to speak up is exactly right, and why we think the most effective response isn’t just calling this misogyny but calling it what it is: sad, pathetic, and dumb. We also talk about raising a boy and two girls in a house full of ’80s comedies and boob jokes, how a MAGA-coded comedian getting this platform before the midterms feels like a distraction, and what a more nuanced conversation could look like. Plus, our rescue kitten Geoff makes his podcast debut, and we’re putting on our whore shorts and heading to the gym.

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Today we're talking about one of our favorite things in the world. BOOKS.

Lauren and Garri from The Everygirl Book Club join us to talk about how to build a more bookish life, even when you're juggling kids, work and everything else. We're talking about finding time to read, where to get great recommendations, why it's perfectly fine to abandon a book halfway through, and why audiobooks absolutely count as reading. Plus, the importance of always having a book handy, preferably in a pocket big enough to accommodate some cheese.

Then author and former book editor Christine Pride joins us to celebrate the release of our new novel, I Never Knew You at All. We talk about writing a book with your best friend (not always advisable!), the secrets we keep in marriages, what makes a book marketable, and what aspiring authors should know before trying to get published.

A little something for everyone who loves reading books, talking about books or dreaming of writing one.

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Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something and author of When We’re in Charge, joins us to talk about what the hell we can actually do when everything feels terrible. How do you run for local office? How much does it cost? Can you do it while working a full-time job? And what if you don’t want to run but still want to help?

We talk about why local races matter so much, why younger candidates may have a real advantage right now, where your time and money can actually make a difference, and why Amanda thinks we might actually win. Most importantly, what can each of us do right now to help make that happen?

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What if you're not having less sex because of perimenopause? What if you're just tired of your husband and the pile of dirty laundry on your bed? And while we're at it, how the hell is everyone on Instagram affording those vacations?

Our friend Lindsey Goldwert is here to talk about my two favorite taboo subjects: SEX AND MONEY.

Lindsey is the co-author of The Midlife Plot Twist and writes the excellent sex newsletter Dear Star 69. We talk about why perimenopause gets blamed for every sexual problem in middle age, why you might still be horny but not particularly interested in having sex when there's a mountain of dirty laundry on the bed, and why Lindsey thinks we should replace maintenance sex with maintenance intimacy. Because nothing says romance like a calendar invite for intercourse.

Then there's money. Why are we all convinced everyone else is richer than us? Why are we still measuring success by houses, marriages, children and retirement accounts? And what if your dream retirement doesn't involve golf or a condo in Florida but playing drums in an all-women band called Pelvic Ultrasound?

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