Mutha Life

Episode 114. Today we are hanging out with Ellie Knaus, creator of the much beloved parenting podcast Atomic Moms and writer/producer of new Indie comedy 'Let's Have Kids', for her first recorded conversation since stepping away from the mic back in December 2020. Ellie co-wrote and produced the new film Let's Have Kids with her husband Adam Sztykiel (who directed it), starring Mary Steenburgen in a role Ellie says is loosely inspired by her own mother, plus Karen Gillan, Zoe Chao and Amanda Crew and so many more. We get into Ellie's blended, "two Thanksgivings" childhood in Houston, the uncanny...

Episode 113. Nothing more chic or classy than archival Bette Bentley, founder of Skimpies, recorded back when it was Bette's first ever podcast interview. We follow Bette's path from theater kid in Houston to comedy writer and producer working with Will Ferrell's Funny or Die team, through a cross-country move to Minnesota, a double mastectomy, and the moment she decided her next chapter would be a 'strapless' underwear company solving a problem nobody else wanted to touch. Since this episode first aired, Skimpies has grown from Bette hand-delivering product to ten Venmo subscribers into an enterprise, including a deal on...

Episode 112. Kari sits down with Jordana Edelstein, host of The Diet Diaries and a body image coach who spent over a decade deep in disordered eating before turning her own mess into her message. They trace it all: getting bullied over her nose in middle school, a PCOS diagnosis in college that kicked off a cycle of crash diets and binge eating, a mom whose face would tell her she'd gained weight before a word was said, and the slow, hard-won shift into the work she does now helping women (mostly in their 30s through 60s) stop treating food...

Episode 111. Kari recaps a wild few weeks: back-to-back kid birthday parties, hosting a big dinner, and finally hitting her limit (cold and all). She unpacks the "plastic plates vs. glass plates" framework she's using to figure out what's actually okay to let drop as a parent, and the lesson she learned throwing an IRL meetup with Dr. Aegean Chan of More Than Nine: hire the help. Then she gets into it: why she loves being a mom and hates "the mom space," the Pete Davidson comments about female creators and what they reveal about how society values women's work...

EPISODE 110. Actor Luke Cook (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) sits down to talk about growing up the youngest of five in a Presbyterian family in Sydney, the panic attacks that hit right as his career and his relationship with his now-wife Kara both took off, and why he's packing up his family of five and moving to Australia's Gold Coast (they're already there and loving it). We get into the entrepreneurial side of his life, the conundrum of being both "hot and funny" in Hollywood, and what division of labor (and your sex life) really looks like raising three boys...

EPISODE 109. It's Archival Erin Lim Rhodes. Erin is the golf and wrestling-loving host of E!'s "The Rundown," and long before that, a broadcast journalism grad who moved to Singapore with $500 and a hunch. We get into growing up the "peacekeeper" middle child of a Filipino father and multi-generational Mexican LA mother, meeting her husband through prolonged eye contact at church (he later baptized her), a pregnancy timed almost too perfectly for her producers' comfort, and the postpartum depression that hit after a rocky breastfeeding wean. Also: how golf became her hobby and her belated Disney adult conversion. More...

EPISODE 108. 

Two years ago, Brittany Ishibashi sat in this chair and told me she was only taking jobs close to home, two or three days at most, because she couldn't picture being away from her kids. This week she's back, and she just spent a year in Austin playing Joy, wife to Woody Harrelson's character, in Apple TV's Brothers, opposite Matthew McConaughey and Holland Taylor.

We get into what it actually took to say yes: loosening her grip on the house, letting her husband run things his way, being seen as more than someone's mom, a...

EPISODE 107. It's a solo episode babyyyyy. We're back in the school year swing, and I'm ramping up to my first ever Mutha Life in real life event, plus some incremental facelift changes to the show you may have noticed. Also: a tribute to my favorite ever camp counselor, a rant about skincare ads applied to fruit, a nostalgia detour into the white pages and yellow pages, and a genuine ask for your thoughts on tin can phones and smartwatches. Then, a new segment: Parent Conversations in Pop Culture, covering Michelle Obama's refreshingly honest take on not missing the baby...

Alyssa Tucker built Live From Snack Time into a beloved platform for the brilliant, hilarious things kids say, and along the way went through three miscarriages, years of IVF, and ultimately had one of her children via surrogacy while she carried the other almost simultaneously. We talk about the parts of an infertility story that rarely get airtime once the "happy ending" arrives: the trauma that can live in the body years later, how people process loss completely differently, breastfeeding a baby you didn't carry, and how Alyssa and her husband are explaining surrogacy to her now three-year-old TWIBLINGS.<...

An archival re-release. Whitney Wagner Hartley spent her twenties and early thirties as a working commercial model in LA, then pivoted to skincare and wellness content on Instagram, and then, after the last election, into unapologetically political commentary that's cost her brand deals but built her a devoted following. We get into her "Marked Safe" initiative (tracking which brands are quietly funding disinformation), growing up the tomboy eldest daughter of two lifelong activists, meeting her husband as a kid in Idaho over a shared ice cream cone, becoming a mom during the pandemic, and raising a socially aware son...

Kelly is a feeding therapist and speech pathologist who spent years on a multidisciplinary feeding team at a hospital, working alongside occupational therapists, dieticians, and psychologists to treat kids with severe feeding aversions and ARFID. She was a selective eater herself growing up, something she hid from her own mother for over a decade before finally asking for help at 17. Today she runs a feeding therapy practice and offers courses for families trying to make sense of their kid's relationship with food.  I asked Kelly every question I have had pent up inside about selective eater kids, the internet o...

It's been a busy couple of weeks. This one's a bit of everything: shitty sleep once your kids are "sleep trained," what I actually did with the Lion's Gate portal, an honest check-in on the goals I set after my London trip, and the real headline: what two and a half weeks of borrowing my 14-year-old nephew taught me about parenting, boundaries, and whether three kids is in my future (SPOILER ITS NOT).

Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com

Instagram: @mutha.life 

Produced by: Mutha Life

Music b...

Angela Nissel has lived several lives: co-founder of OkayPlayer with Questlove, author of The Broke Diaries, longtime TV writer and executive producer on Scrubs, Ginny & Georgia, Mixed-ish, and The Last O.G. We talk about being pushed out of the community she built, the complicated relationship with her mother that shaped her latest book Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom's Dead, caretaking her mom through the final month of her life, and how she fell in love with a WWE Hall of Famer through a dog-fostering account on Twitter. This one covers grief, race, comedy writers' rooms, and the...

An archival re-release, going all the way back to episode two of the pod. Queensylvia Akuchie is an NAACP-nominated costume designer with over 20 years in the industry, the first costume designer for the Oprah Winfrey Network, and the woman behind the wardrobe on hit show Bel-Air. She's worked with Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, Ben Affleck, and Tyler Perry, and she's done it all while raising her daughter Simi on her own. We talk about walking away from a law degree her Nigerian immigrant parents expected, cold emailing her way into the industry, being the only Black woman...

We made it to 100 episodes, and there was only one way to celebrate: bringing on the two friends who inspired this whole project in the first place. Jenna and Becca and I met in a Brooklyn apartment building through our dogs (yes, a hairball that looked like a piece of poop is genuinely how Jenna and I bonded), and years, weddings, miscarriages, a pandemic, and five kids later, we're still in it together. We get into how we built a friendship without ever merging our friend groups, what it actually looks like to divide labor across three very different...

Kurt Braunohler is a prolific comedian, writer, actor, and co-host of the podcast That's Bananas. His stand-up has been featured on The Tonight Show, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Conan, and The Late Late Show with James Corden, and he had a supporting role in The Big Sick. He grew up an only child in Asbury Park, New Jersey, raised almost entirely by his single mom, a pediatric nurse whose parenting philosophy came down to unconditional love. Now that he's up to bat raising his own two kids with his wife Lauren, he's not wasting a second of it.<...

This week it's just me recapping and reflecting how I am trying to keep the London-solo travel trip spark alive in my every day life - doing fun stuff by myself, doing fun stuff with my family (the definition of fun, being MINE), and taking care of myself while also being mindful of how everyone else responds to that. We talk about my new jewelry addiction, parasocial relationships that I want to take to the next level, and how we should all BUCKLE up for the 1-0-0 Episode coming quick and fast - and one that I am...

Cat Wood grew up working class in Yorkshire, found her own way into Oxford, and spent years quietly working out why she related to the world differently than everyone around her. She was diagnosed autistic after her son's diagnosis led her to look in the mirror. Now she's raising two kids with PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance), a nervous system driven form of autism where traditional boundaries and consequences do more harm than good. We talk about what it actually looks like to parent without demands, the moment she scrapped every rule in the house, and why she wants her...

This week from the archive: the wonderful Zach Brooks. Zach grew up in Miami eating Tuesday and Thursday dinners out with his dad after his parents split up, rotating through the food court at Dadeland Mall, a Chinese restaurant called Hua Xing, and the one Korean restaurant in downtown Miami that turned out to be serving Korean Chinese food. His dad made him try kimchi at eight years old by telling him it was the worst thing he'd ever eat and that was exactly why he should try it. It worked.

Zach went on to start Midtown...

Chad Wolf grew up in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, on a dirt road outside of Charleston, in a double wide trailer with a Pentecostal Holiness church on Sundays and a shipyard worker dad who apparently did classified things on nuclear submarines that he can only now talk about. He came to LA at 20, lied his way into an internship for Diane Warren, ended up living in a Swedish musician's house, became friends with Max Martin, and made a record (with a platinum single) that got played at weddings and on The Hills and in rom-coms for a decade.

It's a podcast first: A parent doing an IRL interview with us…while breastfeeding the entire time. AND SHE REMAINED COHERENT?! That's heroic stuff, in my book. Not to mention, there was a toddler with a tummy ache and grandpa as backup in tow downstairs. The level of composure was just…very elite. Luckily I got to spend an hour with Emily Beyda - novelist, journalist, writer of the wildly popular KCRW newsletter Backseat Babies - and find out where all this zen master energy comes from. And let me tell you - the breastfeeding while interview matches the back...

When we first hung out with Vanessa Dew, co-founder of Health-Ade Kombucha, about a year and a half ago, she was figuring out what life looked like after selling her business baby. She was navigating purpose and parenthood in a new chapter, finding ways to support her community after the LA fires, and quietly letting go of any need to feel relevant just for the sake of it (ahem, the inspiration for this week's episode title).

Since we last spoke, she has been keeping very busy. Traveling loads with her family. Being in her feelings about a...

Celebrity and Personal Stylist Liza Lieberman grew up as the only child of a fashion industry powerhouse, a mom who traveled the world designing clothes and built everything herself from scratch. She was also the kid climbing trees and winning track meets with her dad, until she lost him at 14. Her parents were both larger than life figures in her childhood that would go on to shape so much about how she's chosen to live, love, parent and work.

She went into finance like her mom wanted, lived in London, fell in love, found her way to...

'Oh what are you listening to?' 'Who me? Oh it's ARCHIVAL SARA TAN.'

Glossangeles' Sara Tan's ep is back and it's taking on a whole new listen this time around. When this episode first aired, my daughter was 1.5. She's now 2.5 going on 13, and already laying out her outfits, begging for nail polish, and asking about every product I put on my face. Turns out this conversation was more relevant than ever.

We talk about building a career with intention, navigating beauty culture as a parent, what it means to interview Rihanna and Hailey...

Amanda Chantal Bacon founded Moon Juice in 2011. Now, fifteen years and a Target launch later, she's in what might be her most interesting chapter: handing over the operational reins so she can get back to dreaming and spending more time with her kids. In this conversation, we talk about growing up in downtown NYC with a famously cool and unconventional mom, finding her footing in fine dining kitchens, opening Moon Juice and literally birthing a human at the same time, doing early motherhood and early entrepreneurship simultaneously as a single mom, her two very different birth experiences, the BioCharger...

This MUTHA's Day episode explores the complexity and contradictions of motherhood across different life stages. Kari returned from a week in London with a major realization about the finite window of motherhood and the gap between what mothers 'should' want and what they actually want. Through listener voices and personal reflection, this episode examines the tension between needing space and knowing that time with your kids is fleeting. The centerpiece is a meditation on a Banksy statue about how convictions can block your vision. It's a metaphor for the principles of motherhood that keep mothers marching forward, even when...

We're going back into the archive for this one: and the timing feels right. When I sat down with Chris Gayomali - when the pod was a baby, EPISODE 4 - in the fall of 2024, he was freelancing, deep in his Muay Thai era, and raising a toddler in New York City who was already turning his nose up at cruise ship pizza. He was also building serious momentum with Heavies, his much loved Substack about the practical and occasionally bizarre sides of health and wellness.

Since then: he's become Head of Editorial at SSENSE (elite cool kid...

Lee Shaner, aka Intuition, is a rapper and podcaster who has been making music for over two decades. His album Leave a Mark went viral earlier this year when a song he made for his son hit over a million views - a song he almost didn't post because he thought he looked fat in the video.

This one goes deep. We talk about growing up in North Pole, Alaska, watching his dad develop early onset Alzheimer's at 55, 10 years of sobriety, SSRIs, male friendship after 40, and what it means to be the more paternal parent in your...

A solo catch-up that covers a lot of ground - and somehow ties it all together. Kari comes back to the mic after a few weeks of life coming at her fast: grief, strep throat, solo-parenting, a teacher strike scare, and a spring break in the wilds of North Tampa. This one's for the OGs.

Along the way: traveling with kids when one of them wakes up covered in vomit the morning of your flight, why letting your partner skip a trip might be the best thing for your marriage, the unexpected physical toll of a full-on...

Today we are hanging out in the closet with Irene Lovett, an interior designer based in the San Fernando Valley and a first-generation Mexican-American who has built a career turning other people's spaces into a true reflection of who they are.

We follow Irene from a 997-square-foot childhood home in Sylmar - the daughter of immigrant parents, a restaurant worker dad and a housekeeper mom - all the way to running her own interior design business with her work being featured on Netflix's hit show, Nobody Wants This, HGTV, Good Housekeeping, the Wall Street Journal and more.<...

Brian Mazza is a serial entrepreneur and an efficiency junkie. He's the founder of High Performance Life Time (HPLT) training - a health & wellness platform focused on building community through their programs, including their popular offsite retreats. He has founded restaurants, clothing brands, helped to launch globally recognized brands for others AND he's the vice president of Brand Performance for Life Time Fitness. He's been on the cover of Men's Health Magazine TWICE and has been featured in Men's Fitness, GQ, Esquire, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal among others. He's the Director of the U9/U10 P...

Katie Drummond is the Global Editorial Director of Wired - aka the boss of the whole operation - it's the tech-focused publication that she's taken from a niche read to bastion of breaking news and mainstream reporting in the few years she's been there. She's not only transformed the publication, but she's transformed how a media landscape - terrified to piss off people in power - can still do its job with integrity. People want what they're reporting on: From their coverage of artificial intelligence to the War In Iran, the ties between tech companies and ICE, breaking news...

This was a real jackpot conversation for all of us. We got to talk women with ADHD, women's health, all things sex later in life, hormones, how to clock if you're in perimenopause and everything in between with the GOAT: Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz. Dr. Suzanne is a fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She's Board certified in integrative and holistic medicine, holds a Clinical Ayurvedic Specialist degree, is the Chief Medical Correspondent for The Drew Barrymore Show anddddddd is the author of Menopause Bootcamp. She's the Chief Clinical Officer at Monarch, which you'll hear more about...

This month's solo pod covers a lot of ground - both from my own brain and in response to listener questions, from mahjong to my luteal phase, from sex drive to potty training, from grief to joy, consider this a smorgasbord of the inside of my brain. Make sure you drop comments to respond to the many questions I ask YOU in the episode and share with a friend. LET'S GAB.

Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com 

Instagram: @mutha.life

Produced by: Mutha Life, Music by: Ronen Landa 

Undies, bidets, diapers, oh my! Let's hang with Miki Agrawal. She is a serial entrepreneur - founding companies like THINX, period underwear, Tushy, the seemingly now ubiquitous Bidet company, and most recently Hiro Technolgoies - a disposable diaper revolutionizing the market with a fast-decomposing product that promises to reduce landfill waste caused by traditional diapers dramatically. We talk about growing up in Canada to immigrant parents, being an identical twin (but identifying as a youngest), finding an approach to co-parenting with her ex-husband, founding a range of companies that tackle how we take care of our bodies in a...

We are continuing our look back into the archive with an episode from a year ago with the inimitable Lisa Weinbaum. A discussion that started on the pod - reconnecting with someone I always looked up to as a kid - and hasn't stopped yet. Since recording that original episode, Lisa and I have volunteered at her beloved Baby2Baby together. We have hung out by the beach forging a new connection in adulthood, and have not stopped texting - the true love language of our time. This curated re-release is a bit more produced than the last one...

This week's guest is Lillian Tung, co-founder of FUR. If you haven't already heard of the viral company, Fur is a beauty and hair care brand for the whole body - first grabbing headlines with their FUR OIL - specifically designed for pubic hair and skin. From the brains of childhood best friends to the shelves of Ulta, to talking about PUBIC HAIR on Shark Tank, this brand has taken the beauty world by storm - creating a new market segment, becoming an instant fan favorite of aestheticians the world over.

This conversation covered so much that...

Trigger warning: Grief, loss, death of a parent

In this week's solo pod, Kari gives an update on the unexpected turn life took in the days leading up to her 40th birthday. This isn't a funny one, or a silly one, or a general episode. It's a deeply personal slice of life at a horrible moment in life. The Mutha Life community has become one of support, comfort, encouragement and above all, love, and so with this ep, we are going out on a vulnerable limb. Be kind to each other. Tell people you love them.

Come revisit this beautiful episode from the archive with me. In this episode, we talk to Emmy-nominated documentary producer, Tracy Aftergood. Tracy talks candidly about her career trajectory, the tragic loss of her best friend, her mom, at an early age, and the work she does to show up for herself, so she can show up for her kids and her relationship.

Instagram: @mutha.life
Show notes: muthalife.substack.com 
Produced by: Mutha Life 
Music by: Ronen Landa, https://ronenlanda.com/ 

SCALPEL! Dr. Ira Savetsky, New York based celeb plastic surgeon, is on the pod today. We cover a lot of ground - from growing up in a very religious Jewish community in Long Island and not being super enthused by school to taking an insanely arduous and rigorous path to being one of the rising stars in his field in the US today. We talk about how to figure out if plastic surgery is right for you, how he and his wife Lizzy run their busy lives and talk to their kids about all that's messy and complicated, and...