Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

Latest Episodes:

Friend Breakups Will Stick With You Forever Jul 08, 2025

Show notes

We don’t have rituals for breaking up with friends. Romantic breakups come with scripts—we know how to mourn them, process them, even joke about them. But when a friendship falls apart, we’re left in a strange cultural vacuum.

I still think about the women I’ve lost as friends more than the men I’ve dated. I still stop myself from texting them, still wonder if they think about me, still carry the unresolved ache of the loss. Their absence haunts me in a way that lovers never have.

Why is this? Why don’t we talk about the grief of losing a close friend—especially another woman? Is it because we still undervalue platonic love, or because the intimacy of female friendship is too complicated and layered to fit into a clean narrative? And why do so many of us carry this particular heartbreak quietly, without naming it?

Our guest today is Susan Shapiro Barash, author of Estranged. Inspired by the emotional undercurrent of my new novel Everyone Is Lying To You, this conversation dives deep into why friendship breakups hit harder than romantic ones, the red-flag friendships to look out for, and why it's time to admit that not all friendships are meant to last forever.

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Sunday Nice Things: Mental Health Rewritten Jul 06, 2025

Show notes

Mental Health Rewritten, is a recently released nonfiction narrative podcast tackling stigma in mental health head on. Host Dominic Lawson and his guests are challenging narratives around sex, suicide, and cultural identity. Here's the first episode, which covers sex addiction and porn.

Listen to Mental Health Rewritten here.

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Out of F*cks to Give with Carla Sosenko Jul 03, 2025

Show notes

Carla Sosenko grew up with a rare vascular disorder, a body that didn’t conform and a deep love of fashion that helped her feel seen. In this intimate conversation, the author of the new memoir I'll Look So Good in a Coffin opens up about navigating shame, self-worth, and beauty standards in a culture obsessed with thinness. We talk about what it means to dress a body that defies expectations, how weight-loss drugs like semaglutide shift our internal narratives, and why turning forty might just be the best thing that ever happens to your self-esteem.

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She Turned Geology Into a Content Goldmine Jul 01, 2025

Show notes

There’s an influencer for everything—including the intersection of geology, volcanology, academia, and queer joy. This week, we are chatting with Denali (@dykanite), a PhD student and science communicator with nearly 300k Instagram followers whose viral posts make earth science funny, fierce, and deeply human. They dig into how a geology joke launched an entire platform, why science isn’t neutral, and what it means to be an openly queer researcher in a field still catching up to the moment. It’s smart, hilarious, and will totally change the way you look at rocks.

You can follow Denali on Instagram here.

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Sunday Nice Things: Fierce Jun 29, 2025

Show notes

Many years ago I made a podcast about the bad ass women left out of too many history books. Today I am dropping Fierce in your feed. This episode is about Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress.

Years before the United States ratified the 19th amendment, a woman from Montana had already infiltrated Capitol Hill. Jeannette Rankin rose through the ranks of the women’s suffrage movement, bringing an electric energy to every town she visited. Her activism earned her a place on the ballot in 1916, and she landed a seat as a congressional representative for Montana - the first woman to ever achieve this distinction in the United States. As a congressperson, Jeannette became an integral part of 20th century US history from voting against entering World War I, to battling for women’s suffrage on the floor of congress, to making herself known as a pacifist again during World War II and later, the Vietnam War.

You can binge all the episodes of Fierce here.

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All of Our Thoughts on Poop Cruise with Nick Aster Jun 28, 2025

Show notes

The number one show on Netflix right now is Poop Cruise. What happens when a Carnival cruise ship loses power in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and thousands of passengers are left with no food, no working toilets, and no way out? You get a poop cruise.

In this special episode we break down the gloriously grotesque Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, a surprisingly funny, bizarrely moving, and fully revolting story of what happens when modern luxury hits the fan. We talk poop bags, cruise ship class dynamics, soft American resilience, and why we’ll never look at a lasagna the same way again.

Come for the sewage, stay for the Soviet bartender, and leave with a renewed appreciation for land. And also, buy Jo’s new book Everyone Is Lying to You, which, unlike a Carnival cruise, will not make you pee in a shower.

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Real Talk on Weight Loss Drugs Jun 26, 2025

Show notes

We get real about weight loss drugs in this episode—no shame, no BS. Journalist Kara Baskin joins me to talk side effects, societal judgment, and the weird, wonderful, often infuriating experience of being a woman in a changing body. This isn’t about chasing skinny. It’s about reclaiming comfort, confidence, and control in a culture that tells us we can’t win either way.

Read Kara's work here.

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It’s Giving Junior Varsity Tradwife: The Viral Pipeline Grooming Gen Z Girls Jun 23, 2025

Show notes

This week, we're talking to journalist EJ Dickson of The Cut about what really happens at Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit, where thousands of Gen Z girls gather to hear influencers tell them the future is feminine, submissive, and off the grid. But here’s the twist: it doesn’t look extreme. It looks aspirational. It looks like a lifestyle brand.

We break down how the conservative movement is packaging traditional gender roles as empowerment, why this message is resonating with teenage girls, and how the left still hasn’t figured out how to compete with the fantasy. This is what the influencer pipeline looks like when it’s wearing a sundress.

Read E.J.'s piece on The Cut here.

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Sunday Nice Things: (RE) Committed Jun 22, 2025

Show notes

Today I am dropping an episode of my new mini-series (Re) Committed here. (Re) Committed dives into stories of love lost and found again when people least expect it. This series was inspired by Christine Pride's new novel, All the Men I've Loved Again, which is based on her own second chance romance when she fell in love with the same two men in her twenties and again in her forties. Today we hear Christine's story of how she fell for her college boyfriend and then a handsome young TV producer when she moved to New York City. How she lost touch with both as she built her own career and how she reconnected with the same men twenty years later during the pandemic and found true love with one of them.

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The PBS Kids Crisis: It’s Not Just About Sesame Street Jun 19, 2025

Show notes

What happens when the U.S. government slashes one-third of PBS Kids' funding? Shows get canceled. Summer camps disappear. The most vulnerable kids lose access to free, educational media. Today we're talking with Sara DeWitt of PBS Kids about what Trump's recent cut what that means for shows like Daniel Tiger and Molly of Denali, and why public media is still one of the most powerful tools we have to reach and teach all children—especially the ones algorithms forget.

Visit Protect My Public Media to find out how you can help.

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