Everyone Is Lying to You: The Trad Wife Industrial Complex

[00:01:25] Phillip: Alright. Welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast that covers the intersection of culture and commerce. Today, we are gonna cover, I think, influencer culture, a little murder mystery, maybe some Trad Wives. And Jo Piazza knows a little bit about all of those worlds inside and out. She hosts the acclaimed Under the Influence Podcast. It's a new subscription of mine, and maybe it should be yours too. She pens sharp pieces for all of your favorite publications, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and writes bestsellers. And the newest, "Everyone is Lying to You" drops on July 15. Jo, welcome to Future Commerce.

[00:02:01] Jo: Hi. Thanks so much for having me. That was a great introduction. I want you to just, like, follow me around and introduce me to people all the time.

[00:02:07] Phillip: Thank you. Alicia, you're a fan. I'm a new fan. Jo, we're kind of covering the speed too. I think Trad Wives is the subject of your new book. What's so fascinating about Trad Wives?

[00:02:24] Jo: Oh my god. What isn't so fascinating about Trad Wives? So I cover the world of influencer media on Under the Influence, and I've been doing it for about five years. Since then, I've watched this multi billion dollar industry grow and morph and change. And about a year ago, I started seeing these Trad Wives in my feed. They're these women who are "domestic goddesses." They're always in these long flowy dresses. They have about nine children. They're often somewhere vaguely out west and running around a chicken coop barefoot, which by the way, if you're a person who has chickens, you would never walk through a chicken coop barefoot. It is disgusting in there. They kind of like, they're promoting this very idyllic nostalgia for a world that never really existed. And they're called Trad Wives because they adhere to very "traditional values" of a woman should stay at home, she should not be in the workplace, the man should be the main breadwinner, and they're also selling you a ton of crap. And so a lot of these women have millions of followers. They're selling you their high protein flour. They're running these massive businesses while also telling you that women shouldn't be working and earning money.

[00:03:48] Phillip: And that's, I think, a really great setup for the kind of thing that we cover a lot of. Tell us a little bit about your background. And you sort of have a background in journalism and investigative journalism to some degree.

[00:04:02] Jo: Yeah. I mean, I've covered everything under the sun. I started out in newspapers when print newspapers were still the main place that you would get your daily news right around 2000. And I thought that I would be working in print newspapers for my entire life. I started out at The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and then I watched the internet pretty much completely blow up the world of media. And I moved into magazines, digital, social. I was at Yahoo for a while. I helped them launch their digital travel magazine. And then I got into podcasting about ten years ago. So I've watched my own career morph in ways that I never thought it would. I really thought when I graduated college and I graduated in 2002, I would work at one or two places for my entire journalism career. I had no idea that I would have a new kind of job, not even a new job, but a new kind of job almost every year. And it's exciting and also a little bit scary and nerve wracking, to be honest.

[00:05:13] Phillip: Is there a I mean, a new job every year... What about journalism gives you a leg up in writing fiction? And I mean, we're looking at two very different extremes of your career from the beginning to the end here. This isn't your fiction book.

[00:05:32] Jo: Yeah.

[00:05:32] Phillip: So how long have you been writing fiction and what parts of your professional career inform this new arc of your career?

[00:05:42] Jo: Yeah. I've been writing fiction for about ten years now. And I do approach all of my fiction the same way that I approach my reporting. I report the hell out of every everything. I interview experts. I dig into archives. I dig into data. That's the way I really start to form stories and also to get excited about it. I like to build a fictional world that feels a lot like our reality and our real world. And I've been interviewing influencers, like I said, for five years on the podcast. I've been going to these influencer conferences. In the book, there's an influencer conference called MomBomb, which a lot of the stuff that happens at MomBomb is very funny, but it's also all stuff that I saw happen in real life at these influencer conferences. And one of the things that I think is so interesting about the world of influencers is I also covered both politicians and celebrities for a long time. I started my career as a gossip columnist because it was the only job I could get and still stay in New York City. I knew nothing about celebrities. And all of a sudden, was going to all these red carpet events and parties and movie premieres. And I think it's such a good training ground to do any other kind of writing because you're getting people to talk to you that don't really want to talk to you. And then I moved on to covering politicians from celebrities, which and then, you know, the line between politician and celebrity got completely blurred in the past ten years. I used to cover Donald Trump when I was at the gossip column. He'd call me all the time if we wrote anything nasty about his hair. It was just like personally call me to tell me that he was not wearing a hairpiece. But covering politicians and celebrities ended up being really fertile ground to then be covering influencers because they're very charismatic. They're the new celebrities. I actually get crazy when people are like, "Oh, the new media, the social media." And I'm like, "It's not new." Like social media is media. It's here to stay. More people are consuming these videos of influencers on their phone than are watching any TV show at a given time. It is so influential. And so I think that all of that journalism really prepped me to be covering influencers and then to write about influencers as fictional characters.

[00:08:07] Alicia: Yeah. So you've recognized the pattern, Jo, and how our behaviors were evolving and how influencers were essentially becoming the new celebrities. In many ways, they're more impactful than celebrities in this day and age.

[00:08:20] Jo: They are. Yeah.

[00:08:22] Alicia: I'm curious, as you started to dig into this space, and as you started to unpack who's doing what and what pockets of communities are being formed. I'm curious, did you have any moments where you were aligning that research with your own personal behaviors? Because I know one thing that I feel and experience as someone who covers this space is I'm like, "Oh, I fell victim to that. I fell into the trap. I bought the thing they said so." So how did you align your own personal behaviors to identify possible paths and areas to cover?

[00:08:59] Jo: Girl, I'm constantly falling prey to influencers selling me stuff. Every day. And would think that I would be so immune to it by now, and I'm not. I'm not at all. It's really hard. Okay? They're really good at what they do. Well, I started Under the Influence because I had just had a baby five years ago, and that baby did not sleep through the night. So I was up holding her pretty much all night. And my only appendage that was free was my thumb. So I'm scrolling Instagram. And that's when I started being served influencer content. I was looking at all of these picture perfect moms and they were all trying to sell me something. So I bought the sleep course, I bought the organic swaddle, I bought the baby food, I was buying all of it. And that's what made me so fascinated about this kind of marketing because I was like, "Oh my gosh, I bought all these things that I didn't even realize I was being sold to."

[00:09:55] Phillip: Wow.

[00:09:56] Jo: And it's gotten so much better now than it was five years ago. I mean, just so much more professional than it was five years ago. So I'm constantly falling prey to it. What I don't fall prey to is like the shame and guilt. Because I felt a lot of that in the beginning. When you're following a lot of these women online, you're like, "Oh my gosh, their life is perfect. Why is my life not perfect?" And now I know, and this is where the title of "Everyone is Lying to You" came from, that everyone is actually lying to you. They're creating a magazine, they're creating a TV show. Most of this is not their real life. And so when you look at it like it's actually media and not like a glimpse into someone's window, I think then you can let go of some of the guilt and the shame, but you're still going to buy the shit.

[00:10:40] Alicia: I think that's a really important call out because I've noticed too that the influencer landscape tends to fall into these different pockets, or I guess you could say like watering holes, right? There are the mommy influencers, there are the wellness influencers, there are the beauty influencers, the fashion influencers, and then all of their content ladders around some sort of, in marketing it's called a pain point, right? But it's really a deep seated insecurity.

[00:11:10] Jo: It's a deep seated insecurity, yep.

[00:11:12] Alicia: Or a problem. That's really how the messages and the curation is formulated, which I guess I would love your take on this because what I find ironic about it is the big selling point of influencer marketing from the brand perspective is, oh, these people are authentic and they're transparent. Was there a particular tipping point where you noticed this really shift towards more editorialized, more picture perfect, as you indicated versus that more like raw and direct approach? I mean, I still see it once in a while, but definitely not as much.

[00:11:48] Jo: You don't see it as much. Because brands don't want it. They genuinely think that it doesn't sell. The brands want something glossy and photoshopped and beautiful. They still want the kind of like magazine editorial content that they would get, but they want it on Instagram. And so, we saw the evolution of the mommy blog, which was really raw and honest and started coming up in the early 2000s to this mom female influencer ecosystem. And Instagram was created essentially to be a magazine. The founders said, they're like, "We want it to be Vogue in the palm of your hand. We want it to look aesthetically pleasing." They never wanted it to include those raw, real images of life. They want it to include a filtered version of life, hence the filters. And so, yeah, now we are seeing all of these picture perfect lives. One of the things that I realized while I was writing "Everyone is Lying to You" in my reporting is that you can now rent entire houses for your influencer content. So you can rent out a house with the beautiful kitchen, the pristine countertops. You can even rent a bathroom. It's beautiful for your getting ready with me routine. And then shoot all of your content in it for one day. It's not your actual freaking house, but no one knows.

[00:13:07] Alicia: Wow.

[00:13:07] Jo: And so I have a whole plot point in the book where there's actually a shadow house in the main influencer's house where she has one half of the house that is just for the influencer content, and then the other half is her actual real messy real life house. And you would think that it's satire and that it's far fetched. But at these influencing conferences, I actually met people who were renting out like Airbnb's for influencer houses.

[00:13:31] Phillip: It's funny. This went around in the the male influencer space for a little while, especially there's a particular type of a male influencer that likes to show off expensive cars and watches.

[00:13:49] Jo: Mmhmm

[00:13:50] Phillip: But the thing about guys is they like to out each other about this. And so they, you know, they would like track it down and be like, "Oh, I know where you rented that or I know who's watch you rented or borrowed," because guys are particularly catty about things like this.

[00:14:04] Jo: I love guys being catty. It's one of my favorite things.

[00:14:08] Phillip: {laughter} When you're talking about pain points, Alicia, what I find really interesting about Trad Wives is that this seems like an emergent pain point and this is like a factor of modernity, in that we all experience this feeling. It's like latent feeling of, I don't know what Svetlana Boym might have called like nostalgia or painful nostalgia. We all have this feeling that maybe the Trad Wife aesthetic is trying to soothe. We yearn for some simpler time or we yearn for some simpler feeling. And even tech companies are trying to sell something to you to solve it. You know what solves your tech addiction is more tech.

[00:14:52] Jo: More tech. Yeah.

[00:14:52] Phillip: Here's a minimal phone now. You need to just buy one more thing and that'll solve your problems. And that's what I find so fascinating about Trad Wife content is that they seem to be creating a new solution to a problem that people sense they have, but couldn't put a finger on. What is your take on that?

[00:15:15] Jo: Absolutely is the thing. I mean, a lot of the Trad Wife content is so appealing because there has been so much burnout, particularly for women. My generation, I'm 44 years old, we were told to lean in, we were told to be girl bosses, we were told to hustle. And we did it in a world where we had no support system, where corporations were terrible to women and mothers. And so of course everyone was burning out. And this Trad Wife lifestyle seems like the antidote to that in a lot of ways. And they're really capitalizing on those pain points. And a lot of the things that you're seeing are like, "Were you burnt out by the nine to five hustle? Just stay home, quit your job, garden, homeschool your kids. Oh, by the way, let me also sell you my gardening clogs and my egg gathering apron because if you just buy this, then this is going to soothe all of your burnout." So yeah, I mean, I think it absolutely is tapping into something that all people, but especially women and especially mothers are feeling right now, this burnout, this being stretched too thin. And maybe the answer is to check out, but check out "and also buy all of these things from us."

[00:17:42] Phillip: I'm not gonna put you on the spot, Jo, but...

[00:17:46] Jo: You can always put me on the spot.

[00:17:47] Phillip: Did you have a parent that stayed home in your house?

[00:17:52] Jo: I did not. No. No. Both my parents worked. I was just classic eighties, nineties latch key kid. Essentially, my babysitter was Oprah and Phil Donahue. I'd come home, I'd watch TV, and then I'd go out and run around our neighborhood until it got dark and then I'd eat a TV dinner. And mean, also, I'm a full time working parent. I'm lucky enough that I work from home. So I do get to take the time off to do things at my kid's school and be with them. But I have a full time childcare too.

[00:18:24] Phillip: Right.

[00:18:24] Jo: And my kids are in school and I could not do any of this without that level of support. So I can imagine that if I were going back into an office, I worked in media corporations for a long time, that I would feel excessive amounts of burnout. I remember watching the women that were older than me trying to juggle it all, trying to manage it all, and they were exhausted. So I completely get it. The problem is in the messaging. We can't have women checking out of the workforce, full stop. The majority of American families can't support a family on one income. And I always say, the funniest thing about the Trad Wives is they're encouraging all of these women to quit their jobs and rely on a man. I'm like, "Where are all these rich men that just want to make enough money to support a family?" The average male income is something around $60,000 and the average American household spends $70,000. So the math does not add up in this equation. And I think it's really dangerous to tell women to give up agency of their lives. And I unpack that a lot and try to flip it on its head in "Everyone is Lying to You." You see the influencers, first off, you see like the reality of their lives. I love that you brought up authenticity because I have one influencer character in the book and she opens her chapter by saying, "There's a right way to be authentic and a wrong way to be authentic." And the right way to be authentic on social media is to share just like a little bit of your trauma, never let them see you cry. Never have messy mascara. It's faux authenticity is what it is.

[00:20:12] Phillip: Are there particular figures that were interesting or archetypes for you in your research for "Everyone is Lying to You?" Who stands out in this movement? I know Hannah Neeleman comes to mind, you know, but are there others that aren't such household names? Who are some archetypal people?

[00:20:37] Jo: Yeah. I mean, Hannah Neeleman always comes to mind. In fact, I'm getting a lot of questions. They're like, "Is this book based on on Hannah Neeleman?" And I'm like, "No. It's not based on any one person." But, you know, Nora Smith, of course, she's one of the big ones.

[00:20:51] Phillip: Sure.

[00:20:51] Jo: A woman named Brooke Ray Bold, who talks about running her household of I think four or five boys like a business. And then, you know, the algorithm serves me so many of these women on a regular basis without me honestly even searching for them at this point. I mean, also it is funny because we were talking about mom stuff and being sold the shame around the pain point. I'm now kind of out of it because I don't have a newborn anymore. So now I'm just being sold protein influencers, like women in their 40s...

[00:21:26] Alicia: Oh, me too. I think we have the same algorithm.

[00:21:29] Jo: I think we have the same algorithm. It's like, "These four things will melt your belly fat." And I'm like, "Nothing is going to melt my belly fat except for Ozempic. Okay? I'm well aware of that." And yeah, so it's really funny the kinds of influencers that I'm being served right now. It's all Trad Wives and all protein moms.

[00:21:48] Alicia: So going to your point about the algorithm, because it does have this way of evolving and kind of bringing us down these rabbit holes based on all these little clues, I guess, we drop in our behaviors. I'm sure that's an interesting process for you as a journalist because you are so deeply rooted in research all the time. I know I find myself down paths I did not expect. Did you find yourself going down a similar journey while writing this book? Maybe you had an idea for a character or a plot point, but you ultimately went down a completely different direction because of that research process or maybe what the algorithm told you to do.

[00:22:30] Jo: Oh yeah. No, I mean, time. I went deep into henfluencing unexpectedly. Suddenly one hen influencer led to another hen influencer. And suddenly, all I was seeing on my feed were chickens. And henfluencing is such a massive, massive space. Again, think it's like this nostalgia for a different time, simpler time when really having chickens kind of sucks. Like my friends that have chickens are like, "This is really hard chickens are jerks. And they're filthy and disgusting." But the hen influencing space was so deep that I created a henfluencer character in the book. And then also an aspiring henfluencer character who's just like, "I just know if I could break into chickens that would be my big break."

[00:23:22] Phillip: {laughter} The henfluencing is the portmanteau I didn't know I needed today. Thank you very much.

[00:23:28] Jo: Yeah.

[00:23:29] Phillip: I'm sure that nobody really looks at this as making money. I'm sure somebody out there is trying to justify, trying to justify, am I going to make out in the end by making bread at home or having eggs at home? I have a family member who will probably see this at some point, so I'll tread lightly. But they have chickens. And, you know, I've I've seen them have to build a really stout coop because, you know, you've got coyotes and all the other things.

[00:24:01] Jo: Yeah.

[00:24:01] Phillip: The amount of inputs definitely, I don't think outweigh the outputs because, well, guess, well, the cost of eggs. The cost of eggs keeps going up. Maybe they'll make out in the end, but that's a very, very expensive coop they've had to build. But I think that a lot of this is just, I think people are just looking for something different. I think people want to feel like they belong to a different tribe because there's a lot of the same out there these days. And I don't know. Have you quantified how many people are really into this as sort of like a subculture? Is this a real... Is this a counterculture, or is it large enough to be considered a subculture at this point?

[00:24:41] Jo: Oh, I think it's large enough to be a subculture at this point. I definitely do. And you're so right. What you never see on the henfluencing accounts is, first off, all of the chicken shit. But then also, you never see the aftermath of when a bear pulls the door off the coop and eats all the chickens, which is what happened to my friend Sarah's chickens last year. Now she has to have this electric fence, which is not pretty at all, which you never see in any of these henfluencers' images. You don't see they bait the fence with peanut butter so the bear touches its nose to it and then gets afraid of the fence. You never see any of that. But I do think that people are now getting into it in a very calculated way. In the very beginning, I do think there were some accounts that are like, "You know what? I just like bread. I like baking bread, and I'm going to bake some bread and I'm going to show some pictures of it." But now people are like, "Oh, wow, you can make money off baking this bread." So there's definitely a kind of structure and a rhythm to what people are doing and featuring in order to grow their audience so that they can sell you more things.

[00:25:47] Phillip: I mean, that's what it's all about, right?

[00:25:51] Jo: That's what it's all about. I mean, it's pure economics at this point. And I mean, frankly, you know, I say this to we're all brands. We're all trying to create something online. I'm very honest about this. I want people to buy my damn books. And so that means I have to post on social media. I have to go and see what is doing well, what is going to get me eyeballs because being a full time book marketer for my books is exhausting.

[00:26:21] Phillip: Yep.

[00:26:21] Jo: But honestly, social media is how I sell way more books than traditional media these days. I could get a feature in Vogue, it's not going to sell any books. You know, but I get one viral post, and it'll sell a thousand. It's just how this works these days.

[00:26:35] Phillip: So you're making such a great point because the type of person that listens to this is somebody who sees an influencer as a channel.

[00:26:50] Jo: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:51] Phillip: When you're looking at that, so they've reaped a ton of benefit out of influencer culture, if you will. And I think that there's definitely duality there. I think that the real ones know, and people who are tapped into this are the real ones. They'll say it's a double edged sword. We are creating the problem at the same time as we're reaping the benefits from it. So what benefits are there in the influencer ecosystem that can be had? Or what can we do to offset the negative points?

[00:27:19] Jo: Well, I mean, I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. When I started covering influencers, they weren't being covered well by mainstream media. I still think they're not being covered well, particularly female influencers. A lot of male influencers are referred to as entrepreneurs and female influencers are like "momfluencers." It's a lot of the work is dismissed and it is work and it is labor. And I think it is pretty incredible that women have been able to create their own businesses and make their own money outside of the traditional corporate system in ways that has allowed them to have more flexibility to raise their children. I think it's great that women can much more easily become entrepreneurs just by using this little device you can hold in your hand. I actually see no future where any of this is getting better, to be honest, or ways that we can mitigate some of the bad things about influencing. I think it's going to get a lot worse and a lot weirder real soon because we're already seeing AI move into the influencing space. There's entirely AI generated influencers. A lot of influencers are using AI to generate their content, to write their captions, to find the things that are going to go viral, that's just gonna get crazier and crazier. And it's also the algorithm is getting better and better at targeting directly to you as an individual. So I don't really know what we can do to mitigate the madness of all this except, you know, embrace it and then get off our damn phones. It's really funny because since I cover this space and then also I have to do a lot of influencer like things to sell the book, I don't consume social media like a normal human. So my best friend lives down in Nashville, Tennessee. And she's like, "You never comment on my posts. Marina had a cheer off the other day and you didn't like it." And I'm like, "I don't look at social media like you do." I'm not scrolling. I also don't get served my friends' content. I go in, I look for what I'm looking for, I post, I get out, I turn it off. But the times that I get sucked in, it's when I'm hungover or really tired and then I'm starting the endless scroll. I think we have to try to limit ourselves. It's each individual saying, "Okay, I'm not going to do this endless scroll anymore." And also teaching kids not to get onto it in the place.

[00:31:54] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:31:54] Jo: And teaching them media literacy from a very, very early age. I mean, I think that we should be teaching media literacy in schools right now, starting in kindergarten. Like my kids are very media savvy about like, what is YouTube? Who owns YouTube and who benefits from YouTube? And what actual news look like? So yeah, I don't this is kind of like a rambling sad answer, but I think it's just like personal responsibility is the only thing we can do to mitigate the damage.

[00:32:24] Phillip: Very, very on brand for Future Commerce answer, by the way, though. It's a bit of a jam with our audience. I have to agree, though. And I would say too, for all the problems that Florida has, and there are myriad problems, probably infinite. The one thing that Florida public schools have done very well in my experience is that starting in third grade, my children started receiving media literacy training. And Florida Public Schools teaches children to spot disinformation starting in third grade. And they teach them to spot sensationalist headlines. They teach them to spot clickbait. They teach them to spot... And I tell you, that is an unbelievable godsend because my kids are very adept already at being able to look at something and they start asking out loud, "What are they trying to make me feel?" And that is an unbelievable skill to have in the modern age.

[00:33:28] Jo: Yeah. That's great. Oh my god. I had no idea that Florida did that. I love that for Florida.

[00:33:33] Phillip: Yeah. It's probably the only thing to love. {laughter} This is a question. We're sort of touching and butting up against a topic of maybe detox to some degree. Are there any recovering Trad Wives?

[00:33:47] Jo: Oh my god. Yeah. So many. So many.

[00:33:49] Phillip: Yeah. Is that a topic that you get into in the book at all? Is is this something to maybe unpack? Because I think that that might be its own weird type of content itself that could be exploited.

[00:34:01] Jo: Yes and yes and yes, it has been. It has been. Yeah, there are a lot of women because if you are actually a woman in a "traditional marriage" where you have totally checked out of the workforce, where you have, you know, handed over all financial decisions to your husband, there are many, many, many ways that can go badly. And so there's a whole genre of recovering Trad Wives of women who have escaped the Trad Wife lifestyle. And that's actually one of the major plot points of the book. It's the evolution of a traditional wife, you know, kind of just like wrapped up in a crazy thriller plot of how she's trying to break free from this lifestyle and still own her own media brand. And it has become a very interesting and also viable subgenre of content on social media, the women escaping the Trad Wife lifestyle, because everyone loves a controversy.

[00:35:01] Phillip: And you need a plot arc. I mean, you can't just... We already did the one thing. You gotta do the other thing now. {laughter}

[00:35:08] Jo: I know. Well, and with a lot of these women, if you think about plot arcs for these influencers' lives, and I wrote about reality television for a long time. I wrote this book about twelve, fifteen years ago called "Celebrity Inc, How Famous People Make Money." And it was like really the early days of celebrity branding. I mean, when I wrote the book, Charlie Sheen had just been paid for the celebrity tweet. The Kardashians were literally just coming up. And I had a whole chapter on reality stars that really, really maps well onto influencers. They have to keep creating arcs for themselves in their lives. And one of the ways to do that are marriages and babies. And there's a reason that these influencers have so many damn kids, it's because it gives them a new boost of content every time they have a pregnancy or have a baby.

[00:35:59] Alicia: Well, and then that's a possible content offshoot. Right? Like as the kids get older, maybe they start creating their own content, which is an entirely different landscape and also a bit more disturbing as we get into kidfluencing.

[00:36:10] Jo: Totally. But we saw that with the rise of the Kardashians, right? I mean, they're like, it's such a great business model, you had the four core members, and then all of a sudden, you had this entire universe of Kardashian/Jenners all over the place.

[00:36:24] Alicia: I was just gonna jump in here around the point of this just getting bigger and weirder and, you know, a bit more disturbing. I do wanna go back to the point around kidinfluencers for a lit a bit because that space is starting to get some legislative attention. But maybe this is the pessimist in me. I feel like there is like too much money to be made in this space for people to actually care. And I'm curious because you cover this space so holistically and you speak to so many experts and creators as well, recovering Trad Wives even. Do you think this space, in particular kidfluencing, has so many negative repercussions that it does have the chance to maybe get on a better, possibly cleaner track? Or am I rightfully being pessimistic that there's just too much money to be made made there?

[00:37:18] Jo: There's just too much money to be made there. I mean, we are going to see like, there is some legislation now around kid influencing. None of it is really going to hold much weight at all because there's just I mean, it's a major, major market and we're just going to see it get bigger and bigger as more and more kids also are using this content and using this technology earlier and earlier. And when you talk to some of the kid influencers, there is a whole generation of kid influencers who really didn't have a choice but to be in their parents' content. But now you also have generation of kid influencers who are coming up saying, "This is what I want to do. I'm going to start my own business." They're like seven, eight year olds. I mean, my son.

[00:38:02] Phillip: Right.

[00:38:02] Jo: He loves the Mark Rober physics YouTube videos. I love me some Mark Rober.

[00:38:09] Alicia: Our sons should talk.

[00:38:10] Jo: Yeah. And so we that's like one of the few things we let him watch on YouTube. But then there was a a Mark Rober, Mr. Beast crossover, and I'm like, "I don't like the Mr. Beast for you." So we're like, "We don't go down that rabbit hole." But I got him one of the Mark Rober approved Domino sets. I was very influenced to buy it. Like the tip over Domino's. And Charlie was like, "We should start a Domino YouTube channel, man." He's like, "We can make so much money." And I'm like, "You're seven? And also, yes. Let's do that."

[00:38:41] Phillip: {laughter}

[00:38:42] Jo: So, yeah, I mean, I just think it's going to get more and more out of hand. But I think also, kids these days are pretty smart and savvy, and they also have agency, right? And they see the fact that this is the future, that influencer is a viable job. And that going forward, everyone does kind of have to be their own brand. I mean, my dentist is really good at social media. And they're like, "I never thought I'd have to... I'm a freaking dentist, right?" But they're like, "If we want to attract new clients, this is what I to do. I have to be a dentist brand on Instagram." And I think all for better or worse, that's the direction that we're all moving in.

[00:39:20] Phillip: When I grew up, it was like people who had access to the internet and people who didn't, Right? And then I grew up without a computer in my home and had friends who had computers and they had the Internet, and if I wanted to use the Internet or a computer, I had to go over to a friend's house. And we're the same age, Jo. So I felt like I was at a loss. I was at a deficit because of that. And it also feels like there's definitely a savvy or some sort of like a savvy that some kids have where maybe if you're growing up around it, you have an innate ability, I don't I wanna say like a sense to like, if you grow up around having been made into a content brand all the time.

[00:40:09] Jo: Mhmm.

[00:40:09] Phillip: I don't know. I feel like you shield a kid too much from the world of content and maybe, I don't wanna say you're doing them a disservice, but if that's the economy, if that's the economy of the future, maybe you're taking that away from them. I don't know if are we holding them back? For me, that's a question, right? So I have that struggle in my house. My kids have a twenty minute time limit on their phones and that's it. They're 13 and 14. And I don't think they like that very much.

[00:40:38] Jo: No. They probably don't like that at all.

[00:40:40] Phillip: {laughter} But to some degree, I'm like how much is too much? How much is the right amount? I don't know. But I feel like just enough to at least be acquainted with what's going on in the world, so that they don't feel like I did, which is like no access to anything.

[00:40:57] Jo: I think that there's ways of doing it. Every kid is different too. I mean, I have a seven year old, a five year old, and a two year old. And I look at my seven year old and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, you could completely handle social media. You could definitely choose what is good, what is wrong, what is right. You're not going to go down some weird rabbit hole, you're great." But I look at my five year old daughter and I'm like, "Social media will fuck you up. You have the kind of personality that all of a sudden, you're going to be on skinny talk and restricting calories or something." So when I think it's kid by kid, and then also, yes, because technology and the phones are their future, they need to know how to use them in like really savvy ways. I'm a parent who, we watch a lot of TV in our house, my son has a computer because he wants to play chess with his friend in Israel. So I'm trying to be really matter of fact and teach them as we go along. And I think there's a lot of parents who don't do that, to be honest, who are just like, "Oh my God, the phone is terrible for my kids." And I'm like, "Well, how often are you on the phone with them looking at what they're looking at, explaining things to them?" Because, yeah, this is just how they're going to live in the world. You can't totally shield them from that. I remember growing up, I had a lot of friends whose parents didn't have a TV in the house, right? And I'm like, they turned out a little weird. I'm not going to lie to you.

[00:42:20] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:42:20] Jo: Those are the kids that were a little off. And you know, meanwhile, like I said, I was probably watching four to five hours a day, and I think I'm fine. I'm relatively okay. So...

[00:42:30] Phillip: You've done pretty well for yourself. I think you're okay.

[00:42:32] Alicia: Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:42:32] Jo: I've done alright. Yeah.

[00:42:33] Alicia: The one thing I do wanna ask you about, specifically regarding the Trad Wife movement, is I have noticed a lot more satirical accounts.

[00:42:45] Jo: Oh, so many. I got some this morning. That was great.

[00:42:48] Alicia: Yeah. I'm curious about that because I think it relates to this idea of media literacy and like being able to truly read the room because I'm astounded by how many people like do not get it. They think that it's like an actual true Trad Wife creator. So I'm curious like what you think this emergence of a new sub sector of Trad Wives means? Will it make things more confusing? Do you think it's a good way to poke fun at it? And is it going to be an area of growth?

[00:43:21] Jo: I think that once, you know, something has reached the point where it's being satirized, you know that it's like really permeated culture. And so yeah, I've seen a rise of Trad Wife satire accounts just in the past six months, and people send them to me all the time. I do think it's a great way of achieving media literacy. When we can laugh at something, that's a really great way to kind of pick it apart and dissect it and not get so sucked into it. It is funny because I'm seeing a lot of husbands participating in these Trad Wife satire accounts. Because in real Trad Wife accounts, you barely ever see the husband. He's like some far off cipher in a field somewhere that you just see like a shadow of. But yeah, in the comedic accounts, you see a lot of them. I do think we're going to keep seeing it. I mean, it's going to be really interesting to see where the Trad Wife stuff goes. I wanted to get this book out as fast as possible. I wrote it last summer, and I wrote it in three months.

[00:44:23] Phillip: Wow.

[00:44:24] Jo: The publishing industry typically takes two years to publish a book. I was like, "Nope. It has to come out next summer. We don't know what this movement is going to look like in two years." And so they did. They moved fast. We got like a nine month publishing schedule, which is very fast for them because it's constantly evolving. We're constantly seeing new things pop out of it. And the Trad Wives of today are going to look very different from the Trad Wives of tomorrow. Even talking about Hannah Neeleman, who's the CEO of the Ballerina Farm account. I like to make that distinction when I'm talking too. I don't like to call her Ballerina Farm. She is the person creating the content for this. She's really evolved in her messaging. In the early days, she was in interviews and stuff, just being like, "I'm just a mom and just a wife, just raising my kids here." And now in the interview, she's taking a much more active role. She is saying that she is actually running a business. And so I think that that evolution is really refreshing. We're going to see more of it. And I think that'll be really exciting to see.

[00:45:36] Phillip: Well, this has been phenomenal. Jo, I think I might have to read this book.

[00:45:42] Jo: Oh, you're gonna love this book. It's so fun.

[00:45:44] Alicia: I can't wait. It's going to be so good.

[00:45:45] Phillip: I love it. I think fiction is an incredible way to get through. I think business nonfiction has had its place, but I think fiction is a great way to really land something emotionally with people and really resonates some deep truths. I can't wait to read this. I think people should too. We'll link it up, and I'm assuming Amazon is the right place to get it.

[00:46:09] Jo: Get it. Yeah. Amazon, all the places. It's so funny because people send me their receipts, so I can give them subscriptions to my Substack and stuff like that. And people are always apologizing for buying it from Amazon. I'm like, "95% of you are gonna buy it from Amazon. Just get the orders in, people. Just get the orders in."

[00:46:26] Phillip: That's July 15 the book lands, and it's "Everyone is Lying to You." Jo Piazza, we'll have to have you back.

[00:46:34] Jo: I'll come back anytime. This is so fun.

[00:46:36] Phillip: What's the next thing that you're gonna take down? Do you do you have something in mind?

[00:46:40] Jo: I mean, have about nine things in mind at all times. I just gave three book ideas to my editor, Maya, and I'm waiting to see what she comes back with.

[00:46:53] Phillip: That's so exciting. Well, good luck. Good luck on everything. And thank you so much for joining us.

[00:46:57] Jo: Thanks so much. This is great.

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