Mutha Life

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...

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 int...

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 entre...

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 baptize...

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...

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...

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...

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 f...

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 run...

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 N...

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 t...

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 wh...

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 t...

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 parenti...

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...

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...

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 telli...

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, bec...

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...

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 fo...

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...

'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...

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 kitc...

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 know...

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 t...