Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

Bobbi Brown started Bobbi Brown Cosmetics out of her garage while pregnant in 1990. Four and a half years in, Estée Lauder called and said we want to buy you, and she said okay, mostly because she did not really know what a brand was yet. She stayed on for 22 years as an employee of the company that owned her own name. When she finally left, she still had four and a half years left on a non-compete, which meant she was legally not allowed to make a single beauty product. So she renovated a hotel, sold vitamins at Walmart, did an eyeglass line, and then launched Jones Road in October 2020, one week before the presidential election, when everyone told her she was out of her mind.

Bobbi is a force of nature and her memoir Still Bobbi: Lessons on Building a Beautiful Life is a book club must read.

We talk about the lab screwup that turned into Miracle Balm, what she does instead of Botox and which laser she will never touch again, why the phrase anti-aging makes no sense to her, and what 38 years of marriage plus running a company with your husband actually looks like.

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Today we're sharing an episode from another podcast I think you'll enjoy: The Global Story from the BBC.

The question they’re tackling is a great one: Did Emily Ruin Paris?
Whether you love Emily in Paris, hate-watch it, or just can't escape it, there's no denying it's had a huge impact. The show has turned cafés, streets and neighbourhoods into tourist hotspots, and even won praise from French President Emmanuel Macron for putting France in the global spotlight.
But what happens when a TV show becomes so popular that it starts changing a city in real life? Are all those new visitors a blessing... or a headache for the people who actually live there?

In this episode, co-hosts Asma Khalid and Tristan Redman - who lives in Paris himself - dig into what’s been named the "Emily effect”, and explore the surprising ways TV shows and movies can shape how we see places, sell places, and sometimes transform them altogether.

Have a listen, and if you enjoy it, search for The Global Story wherever you get your podcasts - every day they cover one big story at the intersection between America and the world.

Here's Did Emily Ruin Paris? from The Global Story. Listen to more at https://link.mgln.ai/Influence-TGS

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Why are smart, progressive, left-voting women are still watching tradwife content? Even after the trend has peaked?

Author Claire Swinarski has also written a tradwife novel entitled The Supper Club Saints. Today we're chatting about how Yesteryear became such a phenomenon and whether the book's success is really about giving women a socially acceptable place to put their rage. We also get into why the girlboss-versus-tradwife binary is failing everybody.

Claire's new novel is The Supper Club Saints. Find her at claireswinarski.com.

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Dr. Tracy Shevell is an OBGYN who has spent 25 years in women's intimate spaces, and she has watched the system fail women over and over. Her goal is to help women get them better care by telling them how to work within a broken system.

Tracy tells us the exact phrasing to use going to the doctor or walking into an emergency room, and why describing your symptoms honestly and expecting the system to respond correctly is not always the best strategy. She talks about why many OBGYNs are not trained to treat menopause, what is genuinely changing in endometriosis research right now, and the maternity care deserts spreading across most of the country.

Her first book, Labor and Deliverance: Reclaiming the Healing in Women's Health, is out January 26. It's nine patient stories plus the decade she spent being dismissed by other doctors while working as one herself.

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Dolly Parton died on Tuesday at 80, and she may have been the last thing Americans agreed on. We're replaying this episode in her honor. Our conversation with Will Bonfiglio, the WashU lecturer behind a wildly popular college course on Dolly, is about how the country icon became a cultural unifier across politics, class, gender, and generations. From Dollywood to "9 to 5" to her million-dollar vaccine donation, this is a conversation about kindness, capitalism, and why Dolly Parton was an uber influencer in the best possible way.

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The United States is basically the only country in the world without paid family and medical leave, and we are not okay with it. This week, Dawn Huckelbridge of the Paid Leave for All campaign joins us to break down what paid leave actually is (no, FMLA doesn't count), who it's really for (everyone — parents, the sandwich generation, gig workers, you), and why it's a winning issue with 91% of Americans behind it. We bust the biggest myths, including the lie that it hurts small businesses, celebrate the wins in 42 states and DC, and talk about why paternity leave might help fix the male loneliness crisis. Plus: raising boys in the age of the manosphere, AI anxiety, and exactly how to hold your elected officials' feet to the fire.

Learn more about Paid Leave for All here.

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This week on Under the Influence Sunday Nice Things, we have a book rec you will LOVE. Jennifer Herrera’s Siren Says, a magical, sexy, gloriously witchy novel about embracing your power and finding your confidence as a woman. We have a quick chat with Jennifer about the ancient story that inspired the book, botanical magic, the wisdom women pass down through generations, and why so many of our myths about powerful women have been lost or overlooked. Plus, spell jars, the power of belief, and why we could all use a little more magic and sparkle right now. If you love Practical Magic, fierce women, gentle men, plant magic, mythology, and a delicious escape from the dumpster fire of the news, add this one to your fall reading list.

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For years we've been laughing at tradwives.

We've mocked the prairie dresses, the sourdough starters, the "submit to your husband" content, and the endless parade of blonde influencers telling women to embrace traditional femininity.

Meanwhile, conservative women have been building one of the most effective political movements in modern American history.

Today's guest, sociologist Katie Gaddini, spent nearly a decade embedded with Christian conservative women across the country. What she found challenges almost everything we think we know about who these women are and how they wield power.

We chat about the influencer ecosystem shaping political beliefs, the pageant-to-politics pipeline, why appearance can be a political strategy, and why reducing conservative women to tradwives may be blinding us to what's actually happening.

Because while everyone was busy making fun of the aesthetic, these women were building institutions, winning elections, shaping culture, and changing the country.

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What happens when good girls grow up and stop apologizing?

For generations, women have been rewarded for being agreeable, being accommodating and being grateful for what they have instead of asking for more.

And yet many women reach a certain age and find themselves less interested in being nice.

Our guest is comedian, storyteller, and longtime public radio host Ophira Eisenberg, whose new comedy special is called I Used To Be Nicer. We're chatting about the cultural expectations placed on women, the pressure to be endlessly grateful, and why so many of us are pushing back against the idea that being pleasant should be our highest calling.

Find Ophira here.

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For years, women have been told that success means being chosen. Chosen by a partner. Chosen for the promotion. Chosen by everyone except ourselves.

This week we're joined by Sabrina Bendory, author of The Feminine Code, for a conversation about self-worth, attachment styles, toxic relationships, and the ways women are conditioned to over-give, over-accommodate, and lose themselves in pursuit of love and validation.

We talk about why so many smart, successful women stay in unhealthy relationships, what Sabrina calls "light" and "dark" feminine energy, the mother wound, people-pleasing, and how childhood experiences shape the way we show up in adult relationships.

Along the way, we unpack anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, why emotionally unavailable people can feel so magnetic, and what it actually takes to build healthy relationships without abandoning yourself in the process.

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