Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - August 21, 2025


Instagram Made Me Feel Like a Bad Mom — So I Started a Podcast

Topics
shoppable lives on Instagram
Attainable Over Aspirational： How Kate Strickler of Naptime Kitchen Keeps It Real Why Dads Get a Medal and Moms Get Judged—Parenting Double-Standards and Back to School

Episode Stats


Length

38 minutes

Words per minute

155.15

Word count

5,934

Sentence count

375

Harmful content

Misogyny

61

sentences flagged

Toxicity

23

sentences flagged

Hate speech

35

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 hey y'all joe here and welcome to under the influence i'm i'm up in the catskills at the
00:00:13.860 cabin it's raining you can probably hear it the kids might come in any second but they did just
00:00:19.120 run out five minutes ago to chase a bear and my first reaction was i feel really sorry for that
00:00:26.860 bear. I do. I do. Today's episode is actually a rerun. Five years ago, I recorded the very first
00:00:36.240 episode of Under the Influence, and I recorded it in my closet, wedged between a toddler and a baby
00:00:44.720 who refused to sleep. I was exhausted and leaking milk, and for the past few months, I had been
00:00:51.300 scrolling Instagram and wondering desperately why my life didn't look like the linen-clad
00:00:55.880 perfection of the moms in my feed. And that was what made me want to start this crazy project.
00:01:02.460 Because I felt a lot of guilt and shame that my life wasn't perfect, that my baby didn't sleep,
00:01:08.340 that I was covered in poop and pee, and my house was a mess, I couldn't put away my laundry.
00:01:12.280 I mean, even right now, my kids are screaming. They're screaming. And Nick is carrying one of
00:01:17.340 them under his arm like a football to get the hell out of this house. And so I spent six months
00:01:21.800 reporting, and then I started recording in my closet. And I wanted to rerun that first episode
00:01:26.960 today, because in five years, the world of influencing has changed so freaking much. And I
00:01:32.840 also know we have a lot of new listeners here who may not have heard the first episode. But things
00:01:38.020 were different five years ago. When I first started reporting on this, mom influencing really
00:01:42.840 was still treated like fluff. It was not treated like a business. Even back then, it was a multi 0.95
00:01:48.720 billion dollar business created by women for women that was never covered in the business 0.96
00:01:53.840 section. Now fast forward to today, influencing has definitely infiltrated every aspect of our 1.00
00:02:00.340 culture, but it's still not taken seriously by the business pages of traditional media. It's not.
00:02:06.660 It's not. Even though social media culture has changed not only how we shop, but how we think
00:02:11.480 about politics, gender roles, and even morality. Five years ago, we were just starting to ask
00:02:17.760 questions about why our scroll on social media mattered. Today, I think a lot of us realize
00:02:22.380 that our attention is a commodity. It is. It's a commodity that is capitalized on every single
00:02:27.660 day. But the one thing that hasn't changed is the mission of this podcast. It's always been
00:02:34.160 about pulling back the curtain on industries and ideologies that tell women who we should be.
00:02:39.220 It's always been about asking what's really being sold to us when we scroll, when we read,
00:02:45.600 and when we listen. This first episode that you're about to listen to, it feels almost quaint now.
00:02:52.440 It really does. But I gotta say, it is also the blueprint for everything that we've created
00:02:57.500 together in the past five years. We will continue to follow the money, we will continue to ask
00:03:02.800 uncomfortable questions, and we will refuse to dismiss women's culture as trivial. So in honor
00:03:09.160 of five years of Under the Influence, let's rewind to the very beginning. Here's where it all started.
00:03:15.600 Episode 1, A More Perfect Mother.
00:03:35.740 I want to tell you about my nightly routine.
00:03:39.780 My husband Nick is asleep next to me.
00:03:42.520 That man passes out every night like a bear fatted up on salmon.
00:03:47.220 My kids, a couple of tiny terrorists, are finally asleep.
00:03:52.920 I always know better, but my hand reaches for my phone and I start scrolling and scrolling through pictures.
00:04:01.040 Seconds later, I'm immersed in a completely different world.
00:04:04.320 I can picture myself on an Australian beach
00:04:12.360 with a bohemian tribe of mom friends.
00:04:15.680 All of us wear matching earth-tone linen dresses.
00:04:18.560 We're drinking out of stainless steel wine tumblers.
00:04:23.320 Our gang of feral but so chic children run barefoot on the sand.
00:04:28.020 And our scruffy, yet independently wealthy,
00:04:30.600 husbands surf the easygoing waves.
00:04:34.320 next scroll
00:04:38.000 now I'm inside the house 0.75
00:04:43.860 the clean white house
00:04:46.340 with kids who don't seem at all like terrorists
00:04:48.160 they're all dressed in adorable little
00:04:50.280 striped long john pajamas that make them look like
00:04:52.360 Keebler elves or suburban
00:04:54.200 garden gnomes they snuggle 0.70
00:04:56.220 together beneath pearly white sheets
00:04:58.000 One last scroll
00:05:04.760 We're in New York
00:05:07.780 A pre-war loft apartment with the cheeriest yellow upright piano you've ever seen
00:05:13.100 Kids are laughing and singing
00:05:15.640 They're dyeing Easter eggs and crafting from found materials
00:05:22.820 Like empty toilet paper rolls
00:05:24.360 There's a farmer's market
00:05:26.620 but so much arugula.
00:05:34.160 This is not my life.
00:05:36.940 It's not my friends' lives either.
00:05:38.960 These are the lives of mom influencers on Instagram
00:05:41.380 who I have never met,
00:05:43.920 but who I followed on a random night
00:05:45.440 exactly like this one when I couldn't sleep.
00:05:48.100 And yeah, it is a little creepy
00:05:50.660 to watch someone you've never met in person 0.99
00:05:52.340 snuggling in their bed with their Keebler elf children,
00:05:55.440 Especially while you're in your own bed.
00:06:01.560 How long have you been looking at Instagram tonight?
00:06:06.220 Five minutes.
00:06:08.160 That's a lie.
00:06:09.320 Yeah, more like 55.
00:06:10.820 According to the screen tracker app on my phone, I was on Instagram for three hours last night. 0.97
00:06:21.660 You are an addict, my boss.
00:06:23.480 What am I addicted to? 1.00
00:06:24.680 kitchens? Instagram. Oh, let me go shoot up some of this Instagram. That's my husband, Nick. He
00:06:33.020 doesn't use Instagram and he's not totally wrong. That is time that I could have been reading,
00:06:39.460 sleeping, having sex with my husband, or writing the great American novel, which is actually my 0.85
00:06:45.580 job. But I can't stop scrolling and scrolling and looking at these picture-perfect images of 0.77
00:06:52.400 motherhood. That could be me if I were just a little more organized, a little more creative,
00:06:58.980 a little less exhausted. If I had a little bit more money, if I were just a little bit better.
00:07:08.520 I like watching mom influencers. I like it because in my desperate moments holding a
00:07:14.460 screaming baby in the middle of the night, or when my toddler draws what looks exactly like 0.97
00:07:19.160 a penis on the wall in permanent marker, I can see another way to be a mom. A way that seems 0.98
00:07:25.360 beautiful. And if not beautiful, at least clean and penis-free. The pictures on these Instagram 0.98
00:07:32.040 accounts feel like both a path to, and the promise of, this kind of life.
00:07:38.940 One night about a year ago, I realized something. I had a toddler spread-eagled in the middle of my
00:07:44.660 bed and a baby with her head nuzzled right in my armpit. I was covered in just a little bit of
00:07:50.160 breast milk, a fair amount of pee. And that's when I realized that I could, with just one click,
00:07:57.180 purchase what I needed to be like these women in the pictures. Through their tags and links and
00:08:03.120 the swipe ups, I could buy their lacy nursing bra, their long flowing dresses, their sustainable
00:08:08.140 cloth napkins and bamboo forks for toddlers that are very, very good for the earth. I realized
00:08:14.620 that all of these seemingly perfect mothers on social media,
00:08:18.380 they were all trying to sell me something. 0.92
00:08:21.360 I didn't need to create my own perfect life.
00:08:24.260 I could buy theirs.
00:08:26.160 And I did. 1.00
00:08:27.400 I just got introduced to the Teeny Mix-It,
00:08:29.860 which is a portable blender.
00:08:31.340 I just wanted to thank OXO for sending me
00:08:34.640 the amazing box of toys.
00:08:37.780 Most of them aren't just toys, full stock.
00:08:40.600 God, oh, and a whisk, a whisk, a whisk.
00:08:43.360 Oh, my God.
00:08:44.620 This revelation, it changed everything about how I looked at Instagram.
00:08:50.760 I was no longer Dorothy, dazzled by Oz.
00:08:53.940 I'd pulled back the curtain.
00:08:55.600 And I began to see it for the business that it is.
00:09:00.480 Brands are going to bring in more than $10 billion from Instagram this year.
00:09:04.640 $15 billion by 2022.
00:09:07.720 It's a multi-billion dollar industry.
00:09:10.160 Advertisers and marketers are just increasing more and more of their budgets.
00:09:14.160 to the influencer space, to Instagram specifically.
00:09:18.520 Viral Nation gets 50 to 100 emails a week
00:09:21.760 from people who want to become influencers
00:09:23.700 and how they're willing to do anything in the world
00:09:26.140 necessary to become an influencer
00:09:27.760 and they'll dedicate 24 hours a day they won't sleep.
00:09:30.420 People got to hustle, right?
00:09:31.640 They're trying to be entrepreneurs on Instagram.
00:09:34.600 They're trying to build their brand.
00:09:35.860 They're trying to market to an audience
00:09:38.080 and they are showing you things
00:09:40.560 that they have been paid to show you.
00:09:42.100 Instagram. It's an influencer's world, and we're just scrolling through it.
00:09:49.780 This is an eight-part series about the multi-billion dollar mom-influencing industrial
00:09:54.280 complex, an industry dominated by women and consumed by women that's largely been ignored 0.74
00:09:59.560 by the mainstream media. Why? Well, it's a woman thing. If this were an industry run by men, 0.85
00:10:08.320 it would be covered over and over again in the business section, not the style section. 0.99
00:10:14.300 Who are these women? Why are they doing this? Are their lives really as perfect as they seem? 1.00
00:10:20.940 And how do they make money? We'll find out. I'm Jo Piazza, and you're Under the Influence.
00:10:28.920 welcome to chapter one a more perfect mother
00:10:41.500 i never thought that i would be making a podcast about instagram
00:10:46.760 for the past few years i've been trying to get off social media but then i got pregnant for
00:10:52.620 the second time in three years at a little girl named b and b did not sleep and wouldn't take a
00:10:58.420 bottle, so I really didn't sleep. I got back on Instagram because I was lonely, and it was the
00:11:05.960 one thing I could do with one hand with a baby attached to my nipple. I stayed because it's 0.97
00:11:13.000 addictive. Before I had my adorable little terrorists, I pictured motherhood completely
00:11:19.460 differently. I imagined myself making baby food from scratch, delightful playdates with other new
00:11:25.400 moms that involved a lot of wine, wearing my baby to meetings with my book agent like a little
00:11:30.140 capuchin monkey. Yeah, those dreams were fucking cute. Most days, I feel like I'm failing at 0.99
00:11:40.940 pretty much everything. So maybe it's a good thing that there's an entire industry that makes
00:11:45.380 us feel like we can just buy our way out of our perceived failings as mothers. But who are these
00:11:51.780 women making me feel both better and worse about my own life depending on the day. I think of an 1.00
00:11:59.100 influencer as someone who earns money from collaborating with brands to make social media
00:12:06.040 content and it's someone who pays attention to their audience you know is working on carefully
00:12:11.040 cultivating an audience on social media to earn income. Meet Emily Hund. I'm a research fellow
00:12:18.600 with the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication at the
00:12:24.120 University of Pennsylvania. And I study social media influencers. Emily was one of the first
00:12:30.760 people I talked to when I was trying to report out how influencing works. At first, I was kind
00:12:36.300 of blown away that this is a topic that academics are seriously tackling these days. There's a lot
00:12:41.580 of disagreement even among, you know, the people involved about who counts as an influencer. A lot
00:12:47.000 of marketers that I've talked to describe it as a blend of art and science when they're trying to
00:12:52.500 figure out who an influencer is, like who counts. The word influencer in terms of social media was
00:12:58.180 actually made an official word in the English language in 2019. Merriam-Webster officially
00:13:03.780 says it is a quote, person who is able to generate interest in something such as a consumer product
00:13:09.180 by posting it on social media. Legally, according to an article from the American Bar Association,
00:13:15.740 An influencer is any person with credibility who can influence the opinions or purchase
00:13:20.280 decisions of others.
00:13:21.540 So the shoppable life on Instagram is this idea that we're presenting our lifestyles
00:13:27.060 in images and in Instagram stories, and that they can be merchandised and monetized pretty
00:13:33.140 seamlessly.
00:13:34.480 Social media platforms, especially Instagram, have enabled shoppability to reach a new height
00:13:40.720 and, you know, sort of become what its proponents like always hoped it would be.
00:13:46.540 Lifestyles that can be merchandised and monetized.
00:13:50.540 Lives that can be monetized.
00:13:53.300 Let's sit with that for a minute.
00:13:58.360 None of this is actually new to me.
00:14:01.100 I was a celebrity journalist for the better part of the 2000s,
00:14:04.160 and I wrote an entire book on how celebrities make money.
00:14:07.460 It's called Celebrity Inc.
00:14:08.940 Back in 2009, I reported on how Charlie Sheen got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars
00:14:13.900 to tweet for internships.com.
00:14:15.740 how Brad and Angelina made money off their baby pictures and how Jessica Simpson got paid to lose
00:14:20.880 weight. I learned real early on in my career to follow the money. So let's follow the influencer
00:14:26.760 money for a minute. Let's do a little bit of math. There are plenty of aspiring influencers who lose
00:14:33.840 money. They spend more money trying to be an influencer than they bring in. On the flip side
00:14:38.460 of that, plenty of women have found themselves in the very comfortable position of making between 1.00
00:14:43.140 $50,000 and $75,000 a year by monetizing their Instagrams. That is more than the average teacher's 1.00
00:14:50.240 salary. Some women even make so much money that their husbands are quitting their own jobs to 1.00
00:14:56.200 manage their wives' Instagram brands. These are called Instagram husbands, and we will meet them
00:15:01.600 in a later episode. Now, there are also a small handful of mom influencers who have become
00:15:08.400 millionaires. But it's more interesting if we break this down by post. There is a baseline
00:15:15.520 formula for how much an influencer gets paid for a single post. It's about $100 per 10,000 followers.
00:15:23.080 $100 per 10,000. That means the top influencers, influencers with a half a million followers,
00:15:30.180 can make $5,000 for a single Instagram post.
00:15:34.560 For one picture.
00:15:37.100 Most influencers post at a rate of once a day.
00:15:40.180 That's the recommended sweet spot.
00:15:42.660 So even if only half of those posts are sponsored,
00:15:45.240 that comes out to a salary of $910,000 a year.
00:15:49.760 Just under a cool million.
00:15:52.480 Admittedly, those kinds of influencers are rare.
00:15:55.680 Much less rare are influencers
00:15:57.100 with about a quarter of a million followers,
00:15:58.960 250,000. By the $100 per 10,000 follower metric, they could stand to make about $450,000 a year.
00:16:08.760 That salary is very close to the top 1% of income earners in America.
00:16:14.540 The rest of us are just the bottom 99%.
00:16:28.960 my Instagram addiction and my mom influencer consumption, all of that is just feeding this
00:16:35.100 beast. I started talking about all of this with my fellow magazine writer, Glynis McNichol.
00:16:41.900 You're going to hear from her a lot in this podcast. She's my most trusted editor and a
00:16:47.220 sounding board for everything that I write, but she's also an objective bystander to the mom
00:16:51.900 influencing world. She doesn't have kids and she doesn't follow any of these women on Instagram. 1.00
00:16:56.780 Because of that, she probably doesn't have the same kind of Stockholm syndrome that I have.
00:17:01.420 We talk a couple nights a week, usually when I'm hiding in my bathroom,
00:17:05.480 trying to get very important things done, like shaving the bottom half of my legs.
00:17:09.800 And I recently confessed to her that Nick and I were at war over my Instagram habit.
00:17:14.520 I got chastised yet again for scrolling the Instagram.
00:17:17.940 Nick was just like, no, he's just like, Jesus Christ.
00:17:20.600 He's like, how much time have you spent on that, on that thing?
00:17:22.880 He, I think he actually genuinely believes I'm addicted to Instagram.
00:17:26.760 I think it's true.
00:17:27.720 I think we all are.
00:17:28.800 But I also feel like it's totally normal.
00:17:30.860 I feel like every woman that I know is just scrolling Instagram before they go to sleep
00:17:34.720 to try to move their broken soul.
00:17:37.100 Oh, completely.
00:17:38.700 I write down my goals for the week.
00:17:40.460 And my number one goal is don't look at your computer before bed.
00:17:43.920 And every night I'm in bed, scrolling, watching The Office, trying not to watch The Daily
00:17:49.900 Show, looking at Twitter.
00:17:51.120 Like, it's terrible.
00:17:51.840 No wonder I have insomnia.
00:17:52.960 I mean, not Nick, but most men are looking at their phones and they're just looking at porn.
00:17:58.740 We look at Instagram and most men are just looking at porn.
00:18:03.060 It's a pastime. And I also, I just want to give a shout out to the women who look at porn before
00:18:07.740 bed. I think there's plenty of women who look at porn before bed. What's interesting to me though, 1.00
00:18:12.500 is once you realize the numbers and you realize that so many people are doing it and that so much
00:18:18.940 money is being generated from it then it's fascinating that we are leaving like such a huge
00:18:27.960 portion of media not discussed essentially or that it sort of operates in the shadows
00:18:35.440 well the question is are you talking about instagram right now or porn i think we have
00:18:40.000 a shifting acceptance or grading system of what is acceptable to whom at what time and it's not
00:18:50.860 a surprise that the things that appeal to women and bring them comfort or relief or satisfaction
00:18:58.660 are largely considered a waste of time and a frivolous addiction
00:19:04.320 i can't and nor i shouldn't be able to sit there on the couch and just thumb through porn and be
00:19:12.220 like hey honey i'm just looking at porn but you can do that with the with the lifestyle porn
00:19:17.680 right there's zero negative stigma around it around its consumption and i wanted to just
00:19:22.920 lend a little bit of that stigma from porn onto this lifestyle porn i wanted people to just think
00:19:28.640 about it differently. That is Mike Thayer. Mike's a blogger and an author who lives in Utah.
00:19:36.860 In 2017, he wrote a blog post that compared mom influencing posts on Instagram to porn.
00:19:44.600 And like porn, this industry generates billions of dollars in profits.
00:19:49.520 And like porn, the question of who's earning that money feels a little shady and secretive.
00:19:55.780 And a lot of the time, I feel like some of the women with these influencer accounts are performing motherhood for their audience.
00:20:04.580 I came up with this article that I published called Utah Lifestyle Porn Capital of the World.
00:20:09.580 I thought it would hit a nerve, and it definitely did.
00:20:12.840 One of the things I thought was interesting was not just the presence of people from my religion and my community.
00:20:21.780 And when I say community, I mean like my high school, but the prevalence.
00:20:26.820 When Mike talks about his community, he's talking about his Mormon community,
00:20:31.040 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
00:20:34.180 They weren't just present in the mommy blogging community, but they like dominated it.
00:20:37.820 They were like some of the most successful people, and there are a lot of them.
00:20:40.660 So I thought that was weird.
00:20:42.700 You know, I come from a religion that espouses the importance of charity and humility and to avoid vanity.
00:20:50.000 And so all of this stuff came together.
00:20:51.300 I was like, okay, it's curated for maximum allure and addiction.
00:20:54.800 It gives people feelings of inadequacy.
00:20:57.380 I was like, where have I heard all this stuff before?
00:20:59.480 Oh, yeah, I've heard it in church about porn. 0.81
00:21:02.680 I was like, this is porn.
00:21:05.120 Is it strange and a little uncomfortable for a man to have an opinion about sites run by women and mostly targeted to women?
00:21:12.540 Is it fair?
00:21:14.460 Well, Mike says his main concern was the effect these Instagram accounts would have on the women in his family.
00:21:20.120 The thought that my daughters or my wife or my 20-some-odd nieces, I come from Utah, would feel inadequate about their beauty or their style or their future spouses for a second because of something they saw on some influencer's Instagram post, it makes me physically ill.
00:21:41.600 Now that I say my daughter is 13 and a lot more influenced than she was, you know, back when I wrote this article, I'm terrified of it.
00:21:48.960 Absolutely terrified.
00:21:50.580 Dads being terrified for their daughters is nothing new.
00:21:54.160 60 years ago, dads were terrified that just watching Elvis on TV would get their daughters
00:21:58.520 pregnant.
00:21:59.600 But given how popular this content is, I understand his concern. 0.96
00:22:03.760 And he's got a point.
00:22:05.340 I clearly have a different life than Mike.
00:22:08.660 But when I started to examine my Instagram feed like a journalist instead of a fan, I 0.98
00:22:13.720 realized that more than half of the mom influencers that I follow on Instagram are Mormon women
00:22:17.800 or are former members of the LDS Church.
00:22:21.060 These include Love Taza, Hey Natalie Jean, and Design Mom.
00:22:26.900 When we come back, we're going to explore how the Mormon moms 0.99
00:22:30.420 became patient zero of the mom-influencing industrial complex. 0.90
00:22:42.440 So Mormon mommy bloggers were actually among the first mommy bloggers. 0.65
00:22:46.040 they preceded almost everybody else. That's Catherine Jeezer Morton. She's a PhD candidate
00:22:51.920 in sociology at Concordia University, and she studies, of all things, mom influencers.
00:22:58.320 So Mormon moms are encouraged to keep a lot of records of their family's growth and, you know, 0.73
00:23:05.320 just milestones and all that scrapbooking type thing. So there was always a practice within
00:23:10.440 Mormon domesticity of like taking pictures and making these special documents. So blogging was
00:23:17.200 really like a natural next step when blogs became accessible. Like Mormon moms were like, sweet, 1.00
00:23:23.120 we're going to blog now. So that's how they started. It was an outgrowth of existing practices
00:23:27.220 that the community had. Certain corners of the internet refer to the Mormon mom blogging and
00:23:32.180 influencing community by the nickname the blogger knackle. And it has been encouraged from on high. 0.88
00:23:41.020 Let's rewind a little bit to April 6th, 1830.
00:23:45.820 This is when members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
00:23:49.100 believed that the Lord gave a command to one of their founders, Joseph Smith.
00:23:54.320 Behold, there shall be a record kept among you.
00:23:58.440 Now fast forward.
00:24:00.500 A 2007 commencement address to the graduating class of Brigham Young's Hawaii campus.
00:24:05.740 It's by church elder M. Russell Ballard.
00:24:08.520 He's the acting president of the Mormon Church's Quorum of Twelve Apostles.
00:24:13.160 May I ask you to join the conversation by participating on the internet,
00:24:19.460 particularly the new media, to share the gospel.
00:24:23.320 Most of you already know that if you have access to the internet,
00:24:27.320 you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true. 1.00
00:24:34.220 I think a lot of these moms are like,
00:24:36.220 okay, well, I'll just tone down the religious dimension so that, you know, I appeal to more
00:24:39.640 people. Because people were there for the aesthetic. They loved the kind of, I guess, the cuteness.
00:24:47.440 Mormon mom influencers look better than me. They look way happier and brighter and more energetic
00:24:53.780 than I do. They don't look exhausted. Maybe it's because they had their kids so young and did not
00:25:00.040 suffer from the same decades of drinking and smoking before having their children.
00:25:03.600 Their hair is bouncy. Their skin's shiny. My pores are still clogged with the nicotine from
00:25:10.020 all the cigarettes that I smoked from age 19 to 29. I will never, ever, ever look as perfect
00:25:18.200 as a Mormon mom influencer. It helps to be a young mom, right, in terms of the visuals. And so
00:25:25.100 it really requires this discipline, this kind of incredibly rigorous discipline,
00:25:32.100 this kind of social discipline that I think is like, I just, it blows my mind. 1.00
00:25:37.400 Part of me freaking loves the Mormon mommy escapism. 1.00
00:25:40.580 The picture-perfect lives filled with DIY crafts and nut-free pastries. 1.00
00:25:45.800 True story, my son's school took a picture of a chocolate bar in his lunch the other day
00:25:49.720 with the caption, is this a nut?
00:25:52.540 It was a nut.
00:25:53.920 It's a nut-free school.
00:25:55.360 And I failed at lunch. 0.99
00:25:56.500 the mormon mom's lives look so much less messy and complicated than mine 0.78
00:26:04.420 they seem to have the one thing that i want more of 0.55
00:26:08.080 time they seem to be able to enjoy motherhood with three times the kids that i have
00:26:15.700 and maybe that's because the mormon church places a value on motherhood a value on motherhood and
00:26:22.040 the domestic arts that does not exist at all within my social circle, my peer group. They've
00:26:29.520 told me that my career and professional success are way more important than anything I'd ever
00:26:35.860 do in my home. Being a mom and being a good mom are like an underappreciated side hustle in my
00:26:43.080 world. Maybe that's why I'm so attracted to the Mormon mom accounts. And I am not the only one. 1.00
00:26:49.860 women who were raised in the church of jesus christ of latter saints we come from a long
00:26:55.200 line of homemakers and women who are brilliant and creative and intuitive and so many of us
00:27:02.900 grew up as the children of stay-at-home moms who did things really well they used all of the
00:27:08.880 intelligence that many other women were putting into the workforce and all the creativity and did
00:27:13.840 in their home and created some really incredible traditions and systems that really are successful
00:27:20.500 and inspirational. That's Brooke Romney. She is not related to the other Mormon Romney.
00:27:26.340 She's a mom, a blogger, and an influencer. The kinds of images that Brooke and her friends post
00:27:32.440 are inspirational to me and also to the millions of other women who follow their accounts.
00:27:38.160 I can't turn away from women with five, six, seven, eight children.
00:27:42.600 I want to know everything about them. 1.00
00:27:44.560 Their life hacks for keeping a clean house. 0.97
00:27:46.540 And who made your bed?
00:27:48.720 Yeah, can you show me how?
00:27:51.160 Taking long trips with a basketball team of kids,
00:27:54.120 cooking dinner for three different stages of toddlers.
00:27:56.820 Chocolate peanut butter cup oatmeal.
00:27:58.700 I eat this almost every day.
00:27:59.760 It's from the winter meal plan.
00:28:01.580 Looking at their perfection can be inspiring.
00:28:04.120 because if they can do it with eight kids then I could definitely do it with two. Today I am
00:28:10.520 talking to you about summertime is more than screens finding a happy balance with your tweens
00:28:15.740 and teens. I thought that I could share how our family composts I thought it could be helpful I
00:28:21.140 always want to be helpful. I think it started as, you know, these are some things that really work
00:28:34.840 well for our family. And then like any smart capitalist, they use that as a springboard
00:28:41.320 for making money. And they had a great idea and a following and then turned it into a profit.
00:28:48.060 I think we should be celebrating the fact that these women are creating incredible content
00:28:52.060 with hundreds of thousands of followers, and they're being paid for doing a job well done. 1.00
00:28:59.180 Content creation is serious business. And you know that to create something that's worthy of people
00:29:03.980 coming back to or even stopping their scroll takes a lot of talent. And so I do think that
00:29:10.100 women should be paid for doing things that add value to other people's lives. 0.99
00:29:13.740 they're essentially benefiting profiting off the unpaid labor of motherhood it's fucking brilliant 0.94
00:29:21.720 but that idea that is where we start to get to the really interesting part of this world 0.98
00:29:27.520 yes consumers like me are being manipulated by ads that prey on my insecurities as a crappy mother
00:29:34.720 but this is also an industry that allows women to thrive that allows mothers to thrive 0.99
00:29:40.680 that allows mothers to make money, to support their families, 1.00
00:29:45.000 to empower themselves in a world that doesn't do a goddamn thing 1.00
00:29:49.240 to help women do that. 0.96
00:29:51.260 I didn't coin that idea. 1.00
00:29:53.940 The expectations on women are just out of control. 1.00
00:30:00.060 We're doing three hours more childcare a week in our lives 0.78
00:30:05.020 and we're also working more and we're also working full-time.
00:30:09.560 That very passionate woman, that is Liz Lenz.
00:30:13.640 She is one of the most astute social commentators
00:30:16.320 and writers on motherhood of our time.
00:30:18.800 I'm giving her that title.
00:30:20.380 She also started out as a mommy blogger 1.00
00:30:22.180 because it was the only media job she could get
00:30:24.400 while raising her kids in Iowa.
00:30:26.680 Now she does a lot of other things,
00:30:28.360 including writing articles for very fancy magazines
00:30:30.760 and writing books. 1.00
00:30:32.200 But Liz did write a piece about mommy bloggers 0.79
00:30:34.180 for Topic Magazine where she said, 1.00
00:30:35.820 quote,
00:30:37.100 finding your brand has become a punchline,
00:30:39.660 but it's also a way to profit off 1.00
00:30:41.400 the exhausting unpaid labor of motherhood. 1.00
00:30:44.560 I called her to talk about that, 1.00
00:30:46.660 about how hard most mothers are working 0.99
00:30:48.460 and not getting paid for it. 1.00
00:30:50.720 So no wonder women break and say, 1.00
00:30:53.700 you know what, peace out on this. 0.95
00:30:55.280 I'm going to take my kids to the park,
00:30:57.540 take a couple pictures of it
00:30:59.200 and earn some money that way. 1.00
00:31:00.980 A woman who can make money, 1.00
00:31:03.080 who can innovate and find a way 1.00
00:31:05.520 to make money gets power and gets freedom in a way that is so primal and so necessary.
00:31:15.260 Studies show women are working more than they ever have before, earning, well, until the pandemic,
00:31:22.080 earning more than they had before, and doing more child care than women did in the 70s. 0.77
00:31:30.120 and so you create a system built on the unpaid labor of women because that's what it boils down 1.00
00:31:37.520 to we rely on the unpaid labor of women to fill in the gaps when we won't pay for parental leave 0.99
00:31:43.960 after a woman has a baby where we won't help with child care where companies will not invest in that 0.92
00:31:51.760 on any sort of level and now we strip women down to their bare parts and we're realizing that we 1.00
00:31:58.620 built our society on this unpaid labor and then when they scream and snap and say fuck you I'm 1.00
00:32:06.340 gonna make money by getting sponsored by huggies and snuggle my baby on the couch and that that's 0.99
00:32:13.280 also doing it wrong too you know it's just like we are women and everything we do is wrong you're 0.99
00:32:19.680 fucked either way that's what I keep telling people like the reality is have a baby don't 0.99
00:32:24.620 have a baby. Give me or don't give me. Do whatever you want. Like you're fucked anyway. So decide 1.00
00:32:29.540 which way you want to get fucked. We just figured out a way to make this podcast go viral where it 0.99
00:32:35.960 will get no advertisers. I feel like advertisers will at first be nervous. Totally nervous. Yeah.
00:32:46.340 But then once they see the impact, we'll be totally on board and then exploit you for all you're worth.
00:32:55.120 That's how capitalism works.
00:32:56.460 Oh, and that's all I want.
00:32:57.420 I just want to be exploited for all that I'm worth.
00:33:06.660 Even amidst a global pandemic, the influencing industry is only expected to grow more lucrative.
00:33:12.640 There's 100% growth in the mom-influencing category year over year.
00:33:17.900 As my college career counselor would have told me a lot of years ago,
00:33:22.880 it's a good job in a growth industry.
00:33:27.040 I would like a good job just about now.
00:33:31.760 Steady jobs feel way harder to come by these days,
00:33:35.740 even when you have a really successful career behind you.
00:33:39.480 I used to make magazines and websites.
00:33:42.000 than I used to write for magazines and websites.
00:33:45.160 That kind of content has been decimated in the past 10 years.
00:33:49.320 In order for me to make what a mid-tier influencer makes on a single post,
00:33:53.520 I'd have to write about a half dozen thousand word articles for a website of a magazine.
00:33:59.540 90% of writers that I know are scrambling to figure out what the hell they should do next.
00:34:05.380 Some of them are becoming doulas or Uber drivers.
00:34:09.340 This right here is the very definition of precarity.
00:34:13.420 Here's Emily Hund again.
00:34:15.960 In this time where jobs and careers are less certain than they once were,
00:34:22.100 personal branding has emerged as an answer to that.
00:34:25.580 If you can cultivate this public brand and sort of sell yourself to the world, you'll be okay.
00:34:34.060 In a country that's stripped away nearly all of our safety nets,
00:34:37.280 even as jobs are lost by the millions,
00:34:40.080 most people are trying to figure out how to survive,
00:34:43.180 especially working mothers. 1.00
00:34:46.000 And especially right now.
00:34:47.620 According to a study from Pew Trusts, 0.99
00:34:49.480 women are three times as likely to lose their jobs
00:34:51.500 than men because of the pandemic.
00:34:53.520 Hearing that reminds me how throughout history, 0.82
00:34:55.460 women have consistently been set up for failure. 0.98
00:35:03.500 As I dug into the research for this podcast, 1.00
00:35:05.680 I started to think that maybe I could also do this.
00:35:11.920 Not in the maybe I could be a Jeopardy champion or a marathon runner
00:35:15.640 or a contestant on the British Bake Off kind of way,
00:35:18.320 but a serious maybe this could be my job kind of way.
00:35:22.860 To be honest, I'm starting to feel a little irrelevant
00:35:26.000 in a world where relevance is increasingly determined by likes.
00:35:31.060 And the world of influencing is more than a little dazzling.
00:35:35.680 I keep thinking about something Brooke Romney said to me 0.99
00:35:38.420 about why the Mormon mommy bloggers deserve to make all the money that they make. 1.00
00:35:43.060 Content creation is serious business, and you know that. 1.00
00:35:45.780 And so I do think that women should be paid. 1.00
00:35:48.980 Women's work's been devalued since the beginning of women.
00:35:52.220 And I absolutely do think that these women should be paid 1.00
00:35:55.740 for doing things that add value to people's lives. 1.00
00:35:58.560 But what's the value they're adding?
00:36:01.140 And why can't we turn away from them? 1.00
00:36:03.580 who are these women really behind their filters what are their lives actually like 1.00
00:36:10.200 and if this is the future of content the natural progression of glossy magazines
00:36:15.560 is it possible that this is exactly what I should be trying to do next so is this the end of the
00:36:22.580 story do you feel like your curiosity has been satisfied no Glynis not even a little bit this
00:36:29.260 is just the beginning. I'm going to report the hell out of it. I find that very shocking, Joe
00:36:36.140 Piazza, author of many books, editor of many magazines, host of many podcasts.
00:36:43.540 And I'm good at making content. I can report this and I can also try it out because to me,
00:36:48.940 being an influencer seems like a pretty low bar for content creation. I don't need to research
00:36:54.360 a 10,000 word article. I don't need to do 10 interviews. I'm just going to take a picture
00:36:59.200 and write a caption. Famous last words. I think anytime we think something is easy money, it's
00:37:04.340 the answer is think again. But we're going to find out because you have very cute kids. You
00:37:09.700 influence me every day. You influence me too. As I attempt to cross over from purchaser to seller,
00:37:19.640 we'll find out if I can be paid to try to be a more perfect mother.
00:37:24.360 under the influence is reported and hosted by me joe piazza our story editor is glynnis
00:37:39.420 mcnichol emily marinoff is our producer we had production assistance from mary do
00:37:44.840 and sound design from emily marinoff jessica kreinchich and julian willer our theme and
00:37:50.880 additional music was composed by jessica kreinchich additional research conducted by jocelyn
00:37:56.320 sears julian weller is also our consulting producer and manga shetikador is our executive
00:38:02.560 producer huge huge special thanks to morgan jones of the deseret news for all of her insights into
00:38:08.940 the mormon mom blogging community and to hamilton lighthouser who is the voice of joseph smith in
00:38:14.220 this episode.