April 8, 2025 • 46 mins
Social media has become an essential part of our daily lives, from sports figures to parenting influencers. In this episode, bestselling author, podcast host of Under the Influence, and mom of three, Jo Piazza, shares her unique perspective on the powerful business women behind some of our favorite (and sometimes least favorite) social media accounts. Jo pulls back the curtain on the media empires these influencers have built, revealing their secrets. She also reflects on the best parenting advice she ever received from an unlikely source—a random man at Home Depot. Plus, she makes a case to Anya and Madison about why they should have a third baby.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey everyone, I'm Madison Packer.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I'm a recently retired pro hockey VET, a founding member
of the National Women's Hockey League, a pillar in the PHF,
and an inaugural member of the PWHL Sirens.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
And I'm Anypacker, also a former pro hockey player, also
founding member of the National Women's Hockey League. But today
I'm a full Madison Packer.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Stand.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Anya and I met through hockey, then we got married,
and now we're moms to two awesome toddlers, ages two
and four.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
And on our new podcast, These Packs Puck, we're opening
up about the chaos of our daily lives, between the
juggle of being athletes, raising children and all the messiness
in between.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey, Anya, what's up, pack How are we doing today?
I'm good? How you doing good?
Speaker 4 (00:44):
Good? Hanging in there?
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yep, kids are at school houses, quiet, dog is sleeping.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
All was good?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Oh I was gonna say all is good.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Well, I'm excited because today we're going to talk about
a hockey hot take that I'm currently and probably forever
will be upset.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
So you want to get into a little hot, spicy
take here.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Hoty hot take.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
My hot take is I think that there needs to
be more diversity, and for me, I'm thinking gender diversity
on the benches of NHL rosters. From a coaching perspective,
Jess Campbell is currently coaching at the Seattle Crack and
she's the first woman to do it. I'm blown away
that it's taken this long, but what it adds to
(01:32):
the team, from dimension, from visibility for girls in sport,
all of the reasons. I fully ship Jess Campbell and
women being on the bench in an NHL game.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, And I think it's maybe funny isn't the right word,
but ironic or frustrating that we're even having to have
the conversation like how insecure are you as a man?
Everyone has to work for what they get, but we
have it is like proven with data that it's easy
to walk in a room as a white man and
get a job than anyone else in the world. And
(02:05):
here you have this athlete who had a phenomenal career
as a player now has found success as a coach
early in her career, and all people want to do
is point out that she's too young, this, that, and
the other, like who cares one? Two? How do you
ever get an opportunity if no one is ever willing
to give you one or take a chance on you.
And she got the opportunity, and she's done an amazing
(02:25):
job with it. So why don't we shut up about
the fact that she's a woman, Stop pointing out how
she looks and this, that and the other. Like she's
owning the narrative for sure. And I'm sure there's times
where she goes home and it has to chuck her
phone or hide.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
It, like people are horrible.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, And I just think that it's it's so disappointing that,
like we're even having to have the conversation still.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
So I think it's funny because I kind of disagree
with you at some points and I agree with you
at others, but I love what Jess is doing. So
Lauriel just did this national ad campaign where they showcase
Jess getting ready, having the pressure, right, having a full like,
having a beat, getting to the game, and displaying her feminine,
(03:05):
divine energy in the most powerful way, which is managing
the bench, you know, doing all the things that have
nothing to do with gender. Right, her gender doesn't make
her more or less competent in the world of hockey.
So for that reason, I'm one hundred percent behind it.
But what it also does is it provides a different
level of all of these other intangibles, like you know,
(03:28):
you call them hard skills and soft skills. What she
brings is just different than any other coach because she
is the first female to ever do it right, like
her empathy, her compassion, her care, Like they're all just
going to be different because women innately are different than men.
And you kind of see it like biosemuand makes this
higher because of the market that it's happening in.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Arms are wrapped around this person.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Like, yes, there's online hate, but like let's just ignore
like the basement trolls because do we care about their opinion?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
No, we don't.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
But also, like you know, you just see her doing
more and pushing more barriers. We talked a couple weeks
ago about fashion in sports and like you know, wearing
the hat and rocking up in sneakers and not showcasing
like your real why. I mean, like Jess is doing
some different things from the perspective of a coach.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, and I think I mean it's no surprise, like right,
I mean, we're shocked, No, McKinsey and Company did a
study a few years ago, right, and it's backed by
data provable that companies with female leaders have higher success
rates in organization function and financial performance. Full stop. That
is proven with data. And so is she the CEO? No,
(04:40):
but she's a coach, she's a woman in leadership. Why
we have to defend that. Why we have to push
out ads to amplify that, Why we have to like
stand tall and have signs and have these people's backs
when they get into these positions. How about we just
meet them at the door with a little respect. Why
does the door have to open because of laundry list
of excuses as to why she got the job? Who
can She got the job and she's crushing it. And
(05:03):
in my opinion, she was perfectly qualified. She played at
a high level, she thinks the game at a high level.
She went overseas and had success. There's not a single
person in the world who can look at that woman
and call her unqualified, underprepared. That it's just not true, right,
And if you think that, then you don't know the game.
To push back on your point, The trolls don't matter, sure,
but it emboldens other people right to say those things,
(05:26):
to believe those things. I know for a fact that
you have decision makers within these men's sports organizations and
leagues who think that women shouldn't have jobs because they
don't do the job right or whatever, and it just
isn't true, Like gender has absolutely nothing to do with
your ability to do a job, full stop.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
But I also think that it's funny because it's also
like she very much in interviews will say, I'm not
just trying to fit in. I'm not just trying to
be one of the guys. I'm okay with my femininity,
I'm okay with what I bring. I'm just trying to
be myself authentically, And there is not enough of that narrative.
(06:08):
Go back to twenty fourteen and you have Becky Hammond.
The Spurs hire her as a coach, and like the
world sets a blaze a woman coaching in the NBA,
and it was to everybody's like shock in awe she
found success. I mean, how could she ever possibly do
such a thing right? But like in that space, you
have Greg Popovich who hires her, and later on in
(06:29):
life she goes on to acknowledge him. She's giving this
big speech and it just I think it actually just
went viral. But she's giving this big speech and she says,
the character and care and concern that you put into
the hiring empowered me every day, and you text me
all the time, just be you. And I think, like, right,
So you put Papovich, you put Bills, now, you put
these men in these positions to make the right higher
(06:52):
hiring on authenticity, hiring on skills, hiring on you know, competencies,
and it happens to be the to incredibly intelligent women
that go on to have a great level of success.
So my point in all of this hot take is
why is it the first I'm kind of with you,
Why are we still talking about this?
Speaker 1 (07:12):
But we are.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
This is the world that we're in in the world
of hockey, right, where women constantly are ostracized and made
to feel less than a shining example of what we
can do when given the right opportunity.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Yeah, and I think that the thing that I think
is most ironic, right, is that we don't make a
big deal at all of men coaching in women's leagues
and in theory it's the same. Or are we just
all that disrespectful of women that we think that men
are just inherently better because right, like, if it's truly
a fit in like, you know, women coaching men, then
(07:46):
why are we perfectly like comfortable with men always coaching women.
And I think that that's the way we need to
start thinking about it, like the best coaches should coach.
And also players respond differently to email coaches versus male coaches,
Like there's a benefit, a huge benefit to having both
on your bench. Yeah, And I think the crack and
are right for doing it.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
That's where we have to be is diversity brings ideas,
and ideas bring change. We talk about it in every
perspective that we can on what needs to change in
hockey to continue to up level. This is a beautiful change.
I love it. I love the content, I love the suits,
I love the get ready with me, I tried her ponytail.
It looks far less attractive on me than it does
(08:28):
on her, but I'm totally into it. I love all
the things, and for all the reasons that Jess Campbell
is having success on one hundred thousand levels, I'm excited
to watch her continue to show women that there's other
ways into hockey. There's other ways to find success, and
why is she the first? Let's not let her be
the last. Let's continue to prop her up because that
(08:51):
is incredible. While I'm on this high and I'm so
loving everything about Jess Campbell, what's going on in hockey,
I have to tell you, I slept a full eight
hours last night, so the check in is going to
go very well for me.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
How are you feeling? I'm good. I'm like a like
a ninety two. It's tough to get me below eighty
when I'm down in Florida though, so like a ninety two.
Only Whylan came in my bed last night. No, Harlan,
he didn't pee through his night dipe, so woke up
with dry sheets, And honestly, that's a win, like I
(09:35):
was just but that's all that goes well for me
in a day. It's a good day. A win is
a win, my dude.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Like, no, peeing through a diaper is truly amazing. I
don't understand, like, I don't think that there's gonna be
a time where he's done with the night diaper.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
That's just my like gut feeling. Is he gonna be
thirty with a night diaper on? Probably? Sorry to his
future partner. If he's thirty with a night diaper, I
love you, babe, but he's still sleeping in our house.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
That boy will be eating a bab if he's an
H at that point, Like you know how he sleeps
like an H between us right now he is, like
you know, he's getting pretty tall. Actually, like right now
we're at the ends of the bed with this age.
But this boy is gonna be massive because he's wearing
a seven T and he's four and a half. And
it's freaking me out. That being said, I like I said,
slapt eight hours. I feel amazing. I woke up, I
(10:21):
felt refreshed, I did my face routine, put all my
lotions on. I'm with you. I'm like an eighty five.
I feel great. Solid, solid, can't take me down.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
We're trying a new pizza place with your dad later. Ooh,
your mom, I could go for peace. Your mom left
to go out of town today, so it's just your
dad and I with the kids. So your mom went
to the store and bought a bunch of Trader Joe
stuff for us to make for dinner in an effort
to be helpful and kind. And we're going to ignore
all of it, and of course your dad goes, oh,
do you want to order from the crust tonight? It's
(10:54):
not saying no, it feels dangerous. That's one hundred percent
what my dad does.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
He waits till she leaves and then held the like
order a bunch of carry out, and then she comes
back and then he makes whatever she's left aside.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
That's actually very funny. Maybe I'll get pizza tonight too.
Maybe again, I'm so hyped up.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
We just talked all about women that are changing our
specific industry and what that looks like for us. But Maddie,
who we talk to next.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Our next guest, is also obsessed with the ways that
women are underestimated in male dominated spaces, but like you said,
in a very different industry than ours, which is cool.
We're going to talk to Joe Piazza, who is a journalist,
a podcaster, a novelist. Basically she does all the things,
but her specific area of expertise is mom influencers and
(11:40):
mom content on the Internet and how it's changing what's
true what's not true at that part, and she's gonna
tell us all the secrets of the Internet, and who knows,
maybe teach us a thing or two about what we're
doing right, what we're doing wrong. She's a seasoned mom
of a lot of rascals as she calls them. So
excited to chat with her, and let's get into it.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Hi, Joe, Hi, it's nice to have you. Welcome to
these pas puck.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
Yeah, which is really hard to say, guys.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
We wanted it to be as close to a word
flub as possible.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Yeah it is.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Don't make me say it. Okay, Well, I'm excited to
have you. I am one part of these pas puck
and my wife Madison is with us. But if you
could do a quick intro of yourself, we would love
to introduce you to our audience, tell us all the things.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Yeah. So I am Jip Piazza. I'm a longtime podcaster.
I've been making the Under the Influence podcast for about
five years now, which started as a deep dive into
the world of momfluencing on social media, but it's really
turned into a place for women to talk about how
hard it is to be a woman and a mother
(13:10):
in the world. So we have on thought leaders, influencers
pretty much anyone that I think is interesting and is
going to help me improve my life and the podcast
is twice a week. I love it. So that was
kind of my day job. And then I am also
an author. I write novels and my latest one was
The Sicilian Inheritance. It is coming out in paperback right now.
(13:32):
It is a twisty turney murder mystery set in Sicily.
And my new one is a tradwife murder mystery called
Everyone Is Lying to You, which comes out in July.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
That sounds like it's right up my alley.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I was gonna say, Murder and Women is my wife's life.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
Murder and Women, you were going to love Everyone is
Lying to You?
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Awesome, that's on Furbig. Well we were going to get
into all of that, and so for us, just so
we know, most of our guests have some connection to
how your connection is unknown. Do you have any connection
to hockey? Are you a fan? Did you play anything
like that? I have never played hockey in my life,
but welcome, thank you, thank you. But I am a
(14:12):
big Flyers fan, okay, because I live I live in Philadelphia,
you know, and we live and die by our sports teams.
So I love the Flyers.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
I'm a massive gritty our mascot Stan And in fact
I did this awesome interview years ago where I interviewed
the women who created and marketed Gritty, and it was
an all women team that did it, and so I
got to follow Gritty around the arena and yeah, it
was pretty great. So when I'm actually taking my son
to his first hockey game, I think, next week I
(14:44):
have to look at calendar.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
What is time? I have no idea, it doesn't exist.
I'm obsessed with that.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Also because Gritty is hilarious, and like, Gritty is a
gateway to the flyers, which I am from Boston, So
I loathe your flyers, but I love how much you
love your flyers, which is amazing. So really funny, that's obvious,
Like colors in mascot are usually like a really good
gateway into caring, which Gritty's hilarious.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
Totally.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
So you talked about podcasting and I want to kind
of like figure out a little bit about that. Under
the Influence covers all things social media influencing, mom influencing.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
I like that you said that, what kind of like
put you on that thread.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
So when I had my second baby, my first daughter,
I have three. I have a seven year old, a
five year old, and a two year old. And when
I had my daughter five years ago, she didn't sleep
at night and she was super collicky, and so I
would say up all night holding her, and the only
appendage that I had free was my thumb. So I
was scrolling and scrolling and scrolling social media. And this
(15:44):
was the early days of mom influencing on Instagram. Everything
has changed since then, but I was being served these
gorgeous images of beautiful women with their beautiful kids in
their pristine white houses yep, or running through fields with chickens,
and they were all trying to sell me something. They're
all trying to sell me organic baby food or non
(16:06):
flammable swaddles made out of goat hair. And I just
became fascinated with this world and I decided I wanted
to report on it. So that's how Under the Influence
was born, and the first two seasons are really a deep,
deep dive into the world of mom influencing. How it
was created. I thought that I was going to be
(16:27):
pulling back the curtain on this, you know, I wanted
to actually wanted to see is everyone just lying to me?
And some people are that is the truth. But what
I also discovered is that it is a multi billion
dollar business created by women for women that has mostly
been ignored by mainstream media for a very long time
because it was created by women for women, And so
(16:49):
it became something so much bigger than I had expected
and also something so much more interesting because I wasn't
looking at these women as entrepreneurs. I wasn't looking at
this as a business. And while there is a lot
of grift involved, and there's a lot of BS involved,
and there's a lot of accounts that make us feel
(17:09):
too much guilt and shame about being a perfectly averaged mother,
which I am, I'm like the most perfectly okay mom
that there is very highly mediocre and okay with it.
You know, there's also a lot to commend it. And
in a world where it is very hard to be
a mom and also to have a career and to
(17:31):
have an ambitious career, influencing is a way for women
to support their families. So we told that side of
it too, And now we've evolved to talk about social
media and all of the ways that it impacts us
as moms, because parenting in the age of social media
is so weird and fraught. We were never meant to
watch how other people parent online. It is I mean,
(17:53):
it just it makes my brain explode on a daily basis.
So we still talk about all of that, but we're
also talking about, you know, how hard it is to
be a woman in the world these days.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
I love all of that. I think all of that
is so humanizing.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
One.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Two. Like you always say, like, no one puts a
bad day on Instagram, but like that's the reality, right,
And to your point, like you're scrolling through all of
this stuff and it's like, well, should I be doing this?
Should I be doing that? What's real? What is it?
But what do you think is the most surprising thing
that you learned, Like in the early seasons of doing this,
but what's the most surprising thing or what took you
by most surprised?
Speaker 4 (18:27):
Yeah, of course. So in the early days, one of
the things that I did was total stunt journalism. So
the early episodes of Under the Influence, I actually tried
to be a mom influencer. I tried to monetize my account.
And also the first thing that I learned and this
blew me away. I feel like people know this now
but did not know it back then, is that none
(18:48):
of these pictures of these videos were being taken in
real time, right, So these women were hiring photographers and
videographers to shoot an entire month of content for them
in a single day. So I actually hired a professional
photographer to try to do this, to try to create
all this content in my family, and my entire family
(19:11):
completely opted out after two hours. Everyone was in tears.
Everyone was like, we don't like this. Stop telling us
like what we have to do in these pictures. I
don't want to change my clothes fourteen times, and I
was just shut down right then. And there being a
mom influencer, being one who succeeds, being one who actually
(19:32):
makes money, and a small percentage of them can make
a living from it, and people are trying to become
influencers every day. I would say maybe ten percent of
people are earning a living wage. Of the people who
are trying, but I'm the ones who succeed. They're essentially
running a media empire. And that's the way I wasn't
thinking about it. And it kind of changed everything for
(19:52):
me because I worked in magazines for a long time.
I know if they work. I wouldn't let a magazine
make me feel bad about myself, Like I wouldn't read
Parenting and be like, their kitchen is so clean. I'd
be like, this is a magazine, of course it's clean.
And that's kind of the way we have to look
at social media and influencers. All of this is staged.
They're creating a show for you, and if we look
(20:15):
at it like that, maybe we can just enjoy it
instead of experiencing all of this mom guilt and shame
about their perfect lunches or they're ridiculously clean all white
houses that aren't covered in handprints all over the walls,
which mine absolutely are.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
I love that you say that, like people have to
recognize that it is actually a magazine because I felt
so frequently. I'm like, like, right now, our four year old,
he is pushing the limit. Baby, he is kicking our ass. Oh,
he's kicking our ass.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
It's really the worst.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Yeah, he's killing us. And like a normal quote quote
normal technology infused mom, I'm like, what do I do
about this? My kid is kicking my ass and I'm
like I can't find anything because no one wants to
talk about it, no one wants to be real or
it's like get on his level, say I understand you
don't feel well, and he's like, I'm gonna punch you
in the face, and I get it. Yeah, So it's like,
(21:07):
you know, like we clutch to these things and we
don't necessarily recognize that it isn't always applicable and it
is always real. So like, first of all, thank you
for humanizing that, because even I find myself like hating
myself with like a yell, like in the mirror, crying
hate myself totally, like it's gonna happen and I'm not perfect.
So when you go through that, you kind of like
unpack some of that because right now, mental health is
(21:27):
the biggest thing impacting all of us on a daily basis.
And I would Maddie and I dovetail it and always say, well,
it's social media, right, because that's what's exposing it. How
much of that mom influencer is probably not telling the
whole story and then not being genuine and causing some
of this unrest in the momming world.
Speaker 4 (21:47):
I don't think anyone is telling the whole story. I
mean in the same way that even when you go
have coffee with some of your best friends in the
entire world, there's some things you're not gonna tell them,
like you're not gonna say I'd off my husband's head
last night because he didn't put down the toilet seat
at three in the morning, and then I fell in
the toilet when I went to the bathroom at three
thirty in the morning. Like, there's some things we just
(22:08):
like pick and choose to share, and it's the same
for anyone who is online. But there is definitely a
percentage of people who are blatantly lying, I mean, just
just to perform the way that the algorithm wants, you know,
they see what is trending and they move towards that.
And then a lot of people who are also claiming
(22:29):
to be experts. This was the most dangerous thing that
I found when I first started digging into this, the
amount of people who claim to be experts in something
that like dealing with a child. They might have a
couple initials after their name. You'll never find out what
they mean, but they seem legit, especially two in the
(22:50):
morning when you haven't slept in three days, and the
advice that they're giving is either just kind of bogus,
but it can also lead towards the dangerous I totally
bought some of their like let me send you my
PDF with my tips when I was so desperate in
the middle of the night. And the fact is most people,
if they're trying to sell you something online, you should
(23:13):
be skeptical. You should ask your questions and do your
due diligence. It's just too much information too. I mean,
I love what you said about your mom, because my
mom too. She was like, yeah, I didn't have an ultrasound.
I didn't even know what gender you were. And I'm like, yeah,
of course she didn't. This also a generation that smoked
a pack of cools a day and who was finished
with the car.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
So she's like, I didn't wear a seatbelt when you
were pregnant, so.
Speaker 4 (23:33):
Exactly, yeah, and I'm not of course she didn't. But yeah,
it's it's just too much advice. I'm so sorry you
have a four year old, because no one talks enough
about how four is the worst age, Like there is
this myth that two is awful to the Terrible twos,
two's awesome. I have a two year old right now,
and I keep saying that I think the Terrible twos
(23:54):
were coined by a man who was never around his
four year old and thought they were too. Two is awesome.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
He's so cute.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
Who's so cute? And like and they're just like learning things.
Four is a hellscape of doom, okay, and I'm just
getting out of it with my my fury. Aild has
just turned five. She's finally turning the corner. But there
was so much googling that I was doing when she
was four and me being like is this normal?
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (24:20):
Did I break this too?
Speaker 1 (24:22):
What did I do to this kid?
Speaker 4 (24:24):
What did I do to this kid to make it
like that? And then they turned the corner at five?
Their brains are just becoming brain.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Yeah, we always have to remind ourselves, right, Like Madison,
I will get in this, like I swear, we get
the ick with the kids. We'll be like, Waylan's doing
this really horrible thing where he's lying, where he's doing
this thing where like today he stole something from a store. No,
he really just wanted it, right, Like he really wanted
it and he heard no wanted it and he greasy
fingered it out of the store. And now Madison has
to turn around and apologize for a little thief. But
(24:54):
it's not that way, right, Like, so we have to
come to these things with a little bit of grace
for these kids, because I.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Think they really are just doing the best they can.
But four stinks.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
Four stinks. Yeah. No, my four year old stole some
shit too. Yeah, she definitely definitely stole some candy. There
was some gum, there was a toy once at the
cash register. And the best thing is actually, in each
of those instances, when I went back and returned it,
the cashier was like always like a retiree in their
like sixties or seventies, and they're just like, no, sweat,
I don't even know why you came back. They're like, it's.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Fine, you could have just had it at that point.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
Yeah. Yeah, They're like really, don't worry about it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
I do love that my wife is saying that two
is great, though, because I will say I have been
mind blown at how you can have so we use
the same donor for both of our kids. My wife
carried both her egg for both, so genetically they are identical. Okay,
how you can have something so identical raised the same way,
everything right so wildly different, Like whalan was great until
(25:50):
about four. Harlan took her diaper off a week ago
and pooped on the floor. Yeah, she's a pistol. I'll
remind you of that on you because that's terrible. Like
her her phase, like Waalen was never like this hit too.
But our daughter is like I can't keep up, I said, Donnya.
I'm like, I need we need to get like two
more people here to help me on a daily basis
because I can't turn my back for a second.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
You know, it is really funny because once I hit
the third baby, and our third baby was kind of
a bonus surprise baby we went to we went to
an Elton John concert in North Dakota and came home
with a positive pregnancy test. Yeah, but with her, I'm
like the most chill I could possibly be because I'm like,
I've seen all of it with both of you. Because
my first and my second are completely different from each other.
(26:33):
They're like pull our opposites and so now anything she
does and she's a diaper taker off or too. So
in the middle of the night she now takes the
bipro off and puts her pants back on, so we
don't even know. We don't even know until we get
in there in the morning.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Surprise with that, you know, you kind of references when
we talked about it, but like the content has changed too.
I think the other thing is like maybe people are
being a little bit more real today than they were
back in the day. But you've now seen it through
multiple kids, Like you're now on Kid three. You've seen
it through multiple kids. You've experienced it in multiple different
(27:08):
capacities and covered it extremely closely. How is the mom
fluencing changed?
Speaker 4 (27:15):
Has it the mom fluencing has one hundred percent changed?
I mean, I think well, and I know the data
backs this up. Our eyeballs are more on screens than
they are any other form of media at this point,
and that's different from five years ago. We're definitely spending
more time on the scroll on both Instagram and TikTok
(27:37):
than we are reading books or watching TV shows, And
so it's not social media anymore. It's just media. It
is the dominant form.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Of media now.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
I think that the influencers and the content creators have
gotten so much savvier, right, and the tools are better.
All of it looks so much more professional. It is
much easier to seamlessly. Weaven selling link click to buy
was so clunky five years ago when we were first
doing the under the Influence podcast. It was very difficult
to set up and then very difficult for people to access,
(28:09):
and now it is just pure seamless shopping in the
middle of the night the other night, and I don't
buy that many clothes for my girls because we have
a lot of bigger girls in our neighborhood, and so
they passed them all down. Like I have tupperwares filled
with girls clothes up to the age of ten. But
I just had this moment of weakness where I bought
matching Mini Boden and Boden Sun dresses with little Sicilian lemons.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
All over them and sounds gutto.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
I mean, we're going to look amazing, so it's clearly
worth it. But like I do think that it's easier
than ever for us to be sold to. I will say,
I think we're starting to see a little bit of
a shift where some women are taking more agency over
talking about the things that are real and that are difficult,
(28:57):
similar to what we saw and this was before I
had kids, but the early mom bloggers, you know, with
the Scary Mommy and those blogs where they really talked
about how hard motherhood was. We're seeing some of that.
But then on the other side of the spectrum, we
do see an intense inundation of like quote unquote domestic bliss.
(29:18):
These women who are having five to nine children, who
are homeschooling them, and who are also cooking three course
meals and baking soured oh bread every day, a lot
of which is very performative and probably not their real life.
One of the things that I discovered fairly recently, actually
at an influencing conference, and I love this tidbit so
(29:38):
much it becomes an entire plot point in my influencer
Murder mystery is that a lot of people will rent
influencer houses to film and take photos of their content in.
So it's not their real kitchen. It's not their real
kitchen that they're doing all of their baking videos in.
It's not their real bathroom that they do their morning
or nighttime makeup routines in. And you can always tell
(30:00):
if there's no toilet because like usually if you were
to put the phone on the counter, you would see
a toilet somewhere, right, you would in my bathroom.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
But the lens you've been in the seat would be up, yes,
it would be up.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
And yeah, that's just another part of like the unreality
of it.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
And I think it's so good to call attention to that,
right because the point being it's good to be influenced
by things, and it's good to have inspiration and be inspired.
But like reality is reality, and just no one's life
is that perfect. Like for me, I grew up in
a house so clean you could literally lick the floor.
Now I'm learning, well, yeah, my mom had like a
bunch of people to help and cleaning ladies and this,
(30:36):
that and the other. Like we're just two people trying
to figure it out with our kids here there and everywhere.
There's handprints everywhere, Like reality and your perception of it
are often very different things. So I love that you
shared that with us, and in that spirit, I want
to keep going because you're just so well versed in
everything and you're a mom of three, which I'm trying
to convince Anie to have one more maybe, but you
wear all kinds of hats besides taking care of your family.
(30:59):
And we talked a little bit offline beforehand about the
technology component to kids, and so we want to spend
a little bit of time maybe picking your brain a
little bit. What is the deal with technology? In kids,
and why is it like you've just given them a
whole Hershey's factory after you take the iPad away? And
is it bad? Right? Because you get looks from parents
that are like, really, you're giving your I mean, I'm
an iPad parent, right, You're really you're giving your kid
(31:19):
the iPad? But like, do you think it's bad?
Speaker 4 (31:21):
I don't know. I don't.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Actually.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
I'm also a kid of the eighties who grew up
watching a lot of television. Okay, like a lot.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I think we all watched a lot of TV.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
I was home alone. I was like a latch key
kid by the time I was like eight nine years old,
and Phil Donahue and Oprah were my babysitters. So and
I'm fine. I'm perfectly fine, you know. I think screen,
like the iPads are a little bit different, and the
way that the media is presented. The thing that I
don't love about it is how on demand it is.
It's that they can have anything they want, any time
(31:55):
they want, whereas for us it was like, no, this
is on right now, and this is what you will watch,
as opposed to just kind of feeding into that dopamine
head of like I can have anything I could have
nineteen episodes of Bluwei right now, and that's fine. And
so you know, for us, we're just like everything in
moderation or we try, right, we try, we mess it up,
(32:18):
and then we like try to go back and fix it.
I will give my kids a screen in a car
or on a plane for nine hours at a clip. Okay,
I'm not going to parents in a closed space without
a screen, And you know, I could care less who
judges me for that at this point. Also, in restaurants,
if we are trying to have a meal, we will
(32:38):
always try to like get through as much of the
meal as we possibly can. And the second that they
start like losing the plot, where like have a little
bit of screen.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Time, my friend, Yes, we would like to eat what
we've ordered.
Speaker 4 (32:52):
We'd like to eat what we ordered. And I think
if you're the parent that is like thinking in those terms,
you're already a good parent. You're already parent. Well, like
if you're concerned about how this is happening, in my
biggest concern right now, and I could care less about
the Bluey and like the Gabby's doll House. So the
Gabby's Doll House is so annoying. I find Bluey a
delight though delight, I mean, whoever is writing Bluey is
(33:14):
just a genius. I would date both Bandit and Chili
Healer like. I'm like, both of you are great, like
wonderful parents. Yeah, and my biggest concern for my seven
year old is YouTube.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
Yes, that's a scary one. YouTube really does freak us out.
Speaker 4 (33:31):
Freaks me the heck out. He just got his first computer,
which there's no way around it because they use him
in school. Now, okay, like some of his homework is
on the computer. He needed his own laptop. We have
all the parental controls on it. We try not to
let him wash YouTube. But there's one thing that he
loves so much which I also cannot recommend enough. I
(33:52):
love it. It is Mark Rober. Have you guys entered
the Mark Rober phase yet?
Speaker 1 (33:57):
No?
Speaker 4 (33:57):
Oh gosh. He is a former NASA engineer who worked
on the Mars Rover and now he does physics videos
for kids, cool explaining physics in a cool, fun way.
He has this box that he sends kids every month
called crunch Labs, where they build something like they build
a catapult, or like they built like a movie thing.
(34:18):
And a robot. It's wild. His videos are awesome, and
I will let my seven year old boy watch them
all day long. I don't want them watching anything else
on YouTube, and the videos will then will then just
move into things that are not kid friendly. I don't
think mister Beast is kid friendly, but they roll into
Mister Beast videos and so dealing with YouTube is the
(34:39):
worst thing that I've had to do in terms of screens.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
And you can't download the content and then play it elsewhere.
Because our kids are big Danny Go fans, they'll do
like the dances and the activities, and like in my mind,
I'm like, yeah, you're getting screen time, but you're moving.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
So I'm all in on the Danny Go.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
I love Danny Go, but I can't download it and
then stop it from looping into some person in some
random corner of the universe playing a game or a
toy that they then want exactly. And then my kids
have access to the Alexa, so they'll say, Alexa, order
hot Wheels cars, and guess what shows up at the
house tomorrow, Hot wheels cars. And we're kind of the
(35:15):
same way, like technology and moderation is what we are
comfortable with. We don't want to go down the pathway
of like our kids only write in calligraphy, that doesn't happen, right,
like they play on an iPad.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
It's gonna be fine. We're all going to move on
from that.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
But like, how and where do you find that? Like
is it just giving yourself grace? Is it just knowing
that it's gonna be okay? Like, because we don't really
see that in any other format on social media, right,
it is really the like we have chickens, we make bread,
we blah blah blah, And that's not always the reality, right.
It might be we got through twenty minutes of dinner
(35:48):
and then we hit the iPads and everyone ate their meal.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Nobody cried, and then we got in the car.
Speaker 4 (35:52):
And that's life. And that's what we're never going to
see on social media because it's not sexy. It's there
people do, but the algorithm doesn't love it as much
as it loves nine times pregnant bellies and running through
the fields with the chickens. We just don't see the normal, mundane.
This is how I got through my day, and it's
one of the things that I try to talk about
(36:14):
as much as I can on Under the Influence, and
I've got a substack that's called over the Influence, where
I posted my very unesthetic morning routine, okay, which is like,
I don't wake up at five point thirty in the
morning before my children to go work out. I wake
up when they show up in my room on my lap,
breathing in my face, and barely get dressed before walking
(36:37):
out the door, often at school drop off in my pajamas.
But it's just like, no one really wants to post that,
because even if we're not influencers, everyone just has this
inclination to post the good or the extraordinary as opposed
to this is how I made it through my day.
The dangerous part about that is it Instagram makes us
(36:59):
feel like we're peering into someone's reality, and not just
someone but our friends, because it's interspersed with pictures of
our friends babies and they're vacations, so we feel like
it's very voyeuristic and not staged, and then that feels
like it's real life. I mean, one of the things
that I've been trying to do more and more of
is inviting my friends over to my house and not
(37:22):
bothering to clean it up.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Just being like this, it's a mess.
Speaker 4 (37:26):
It's a mess, like this is my real bedroom, this
is my real kitchen, because I don't think we see
enough of each other's realities right now.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
I fully agree.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
I'm obsessed with Nicki Unplugged. Do you know Nicki Marie
on social media? No, you've got to follow her. She's
a Boston girly, so she's like from the inside of
my heart. Someone will post a video that's like them
dulled up to the nines to go to drop off,
and then it's her with like a bun, two coffee cups,
one ugg boots, brown, one's blonde like sweats. She like
very much humanizes momming and so like when you can
(37:57):
find folks like that that really are doing a great job.
I'm so obsessed with shits podcast, NII Unplugged, and this
is a plug for Nicki Unplugged. But she's hilarious and
she's real.
Speaker 4 (38:06):
I'm excited. I'm gonna download all of it right now.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Yeah, you've got to follow her. She's amazing in everything
(38:29):
that you just said. I think that a part of it,
at least for me, and I think a lot of
moms and dads too. But when we're a two mom household.
Like you become a parent, you become so hyper focused
on taking care of these little things that you forget
to take care of yourself. And a huge part of
having kids, obviously, is the relationship that brought you together
to start that family. And you've also made a few
podcasts about relationships, Right Committed, where you've interviewed married couples
(38:51):
and She Wants More, which is about why women have affairs,
which is sandless and fun. But in making both of
those shows, what have you learned about how to maintain
a stable, loving relationship And do you have any advice
to us as we weather the storm of crazy kids
and you know, two and four just kind of getting
through that.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
Yeah, I mean, I think just giving yourself as much
grace as possible and giving your partner as much grace
as possible. And I don't think that the partner part
of it was something that I saw until our third baby.
I think I was really frustrated with my husband a
lot of the time, and maybe I didn't realize. I'm like, oh,
it's just as hard as it is for him, probably
(39:30):
more so because he is a man than it is
for me. And also then making space for your relationship
as much as possible. It's so funny because with my
first baby, I felt so terribly guilty about leaving him,
and now I just love leaving my children so much.
I'm going to Amsterdam with my husband in four hours.
It's a research trip for a book, but also just
(39:52):
so we can have a four day trip to Amsterdam together.
And the kids are going to be fine. They're with
one of their caregivers and my mother, and they're also
in school and surrounded by people who love them. And
we finally, in the past two years started making space
for our relationship and prioritizing that as much as we
prioritize being parents. And I think that it has just
(40:12):
made all of the difference. And I'm not even just
saying date nights because like sometimes I don't want to
go to a bar, Like I'm like, oh, so, what
we just did is we finally.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Put a TV in our bedroom.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
We did not have a TV in our bedroom before,
so that we can have sneaky date nights in our
room and the kids can be downstairs with the babysitter
and we can just sort of take out upstairs and
binge watch TV. And have like a lazy person's date night.
And I think we're actually we're getting along better and
we're just dealing with it a lot better now. And
also we literally ask for all of the help. Like
(40:44):
we moved home to Philadelphia to be close to my
mom so she is in and out of our house
all of the time. We also moved to Philly because
it's way cheaper than New York and San Francisco, so
we're can afford to have a bigger house, and we
have an a pair who lives with us. So we
ask for and take literally all of the help so
that we can still be fully formed human beings. And
(41:06):
I think that the kids are happier for it too,
because when we're happier, we're like yelling less and we're
like at them and at each other and at ourselves.
And so I think we've reached this point where we're
just a lot happier as parents because we do give
ourselves grace and we're a little less worried. I think
that is a function of having a third baby and
seeing that the first two are fine, that they ended
(41:28):
up like they're doing.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Okay, Stop saying that, stop saying we should a third.
Speaker 4 (41:34):
You should do it. You should have a third baby, Okay,
Like Nick did not think that he wanted a third baby, Okay,
but I was also like, if you really don't want one, fine,
your body, your choice, dude, But you then get av
sect to me, yeah, like I'm not I'm not staying
on the pill. And so he didn't get a sectomy
and I got a third baby, and he agrees. She
(41:54):
is the best of all of them. Like she is
just she's a delight, She's like a great a day,
and three is not harder than two because we already
have two.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Yeah, and it's hard.
Speaker 4 (42:04):
It's hard to have multiple children. And so we're just like,
I think you got really used to it. Best guest
we've ever had. The award goes to you.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Well, I will be canceling this entire interview and it's
all getting deleted. I'm obsessed with everything you said, and
I feel like it actually kind of like answered our
final question. But I do want to just underscore something
really quickly. You did say your body your choice, so
I just like I wanted to infuse that in here, Maddie,
just so that we can I can't wait for you
to be pregnant baby, you're going to look beautiful.
Speaker 4 (42:33):
No one wants that.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
At the end of every single podcast, we ask a
question and it's what kind of advice have you received
as a parent that has been foundational for you? And
then like the caveat to that is like, you mean,
no one told it to you and you had to
discover it. But what could you give to Maddie and
I so that we can upskill in that parenting format,
like what do you wish you heard or what have
(42:54):
you heard that's really like changed your life.
Speaker 4 (42:57):
My favorite advice came to me from an old man
in hum Depot when I was pregnant with my first baby,
and he saw that I was pregnant and like all
old men, had a lot of thoughts, and so he
wrote down on a little like hum Depot pad, take
a trip when the baby is three months old, because
they won't be able to move and they won't have
(43:18):
any opinions. And then he really pushed the boundaries and
told me to make whoopee with my husband before going
out on date night because you're always tired and full
of food when you get home.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
I think all pieces of advice mostly the train YouTube
is quite interesting, were you.
Speaker 4 (43:38):
Like all gems. I still have that he actually.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Didn't even work at home depot. Just to be clear,
that was just a random.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
Dude, random dude that likes to talk to pregnant women.
This is eight years ago. Creepy old men are allowed
to talk to us then. And then you know the
advice that like I would bestow on you, it's similar
to what I just said. Although I will tell you
that I have heard the doing before date night from
other people now after having kids, and I'm like, it
is gold.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
Yeah, that's a good Joe.
Speaker 4 (44:04):
So like, have the babysitter take them into the playground,
even if it's just makeing out time.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah, makeout and then go make.
Speaker 4 (44:10):
Out and then go because you get home you're a
little tipsy, you're tired. That one is really gold. But
also just like to try and I'm really embracing this
right now too. I'm trying to go with the flow
a lot more because everything with these kids is a
season and it changes and it does not last forever.
(44:30):
I'm able to let things go a lot more than
I used to. But also the fact is, when you're
in the thick of it, it does suck and like,
I think acknowledging that is really really important because this
is hard. Parenting is hard. Parenting in the world that
we live in right now is hard, and so yeah,
give ourselves as much grace as possible because I think
we're all doing a good job.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
This has been incredible. Thank you so much for sharing everything.
I'm excited for your books to come out this summer.
We're definitely going to check them out. Thank you. This
has been deeply entertaining for the both of us and
I I know our audience is gonna love it. So
thank you, and we're gonna take those pointers moving forward,
maybe some of them, maybe not all of them.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
Matt, he's just excited to make out before the date.
We're gonna go make out now, go and make out now.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
I know. I'm excited to go to Amsterdam to make out,
to make out.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
In Amsterdam, and then you go to dinner.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
We'll make out with our closet high from our babysitter.
Right now, you make out in Amsterdam and we'll see.
Speaker 4 (45:24):
How it's actually kind of hot. Yeah that's how I
think you Yeah, yeah, exactly. Bye, guys, thanks so much
for having me.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
Thank you, Joe, thank you.
Speaker 3 (45:35):
And that's all we have today. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
I'm On Your Packer and I'm Madison Packer and this
is These Packs Puck.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
These Packs Puck is a production of iHeart Women's Sports
in Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
It's hosted by US Madison and On Your Packer. Emily
Maronoff is our awesome senior producer and story editor. We
were mixed and mastered by Mary do.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Our executive producers are Jennifer Bassett, Jesse Katz, and Ally Perry.
Hey everyone, I'm Madison Packer.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I'm a recently retired pro hockey VET, a founding member
of the National Women's Hockey League, a pillar in the PHF,
and an inaugural member of the PWHL Sirens.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
And I'm Anypacker, also a former pro hockey player, also
founding member of the National Women's Hockey League. But today
I'm a full Madison Packer.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Stand.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Anya and I met through hockey, then we got married,
and now we're moms to two awesome toddlers, ages two
and four.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
And on our new podcast, These Packs Puck, we're opening
up about the chaos of our daily lives, between the
juggle of being athletes, raising children and all the messiness
in between.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey, Anya, what's up, pack How are we doing today?
I'm good? How you doing good?
Speaker 4 (00:44):
Good? Hanging in there?
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yep, kids are at school houses, quiet, dog is sleeping.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
All was good?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Oh I was gonna say all is good.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Well, I'm excited because today we're going to talk about
a hockey hot take that I'm currently and probably forever
will be upset.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
So you want to get into a little hot, spicy
take here.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Hoty hot take.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
My hot take is I think that there needs to
be more diversity, and for me, I'm thinking gender diversity
on the benches of NHL rosters. From a coaching perspective,
Jess Campbell is currently coaching at the Seattle Crack and
she's the first woman to do it. I'm blown away
that it's taken this long, but what it adds to
(01:32):
the team, from dimension, from visibility for girls in sport,
all of the reasons. I fully ship Jess Campbell and
women being on the bench in an NHL game.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, And I think it's maybe funny isn't the right word,
but ironic or frustrating that we're even having to have
the conversation like how insecure are you as a man?
Everyone has to work for what they get, but we
have it is like proven with data that it's easy
to walk in a room as a white man and
get a job than anyone else in the world. And
(02:05):
here you have this athlete who had a phenomenal career
as a player now has found success as a coach
early in her career, and all people want to do
is point out that she's too young, this, that, and
the other, like who cares one? Two? How do you
ever get an opportunity if no one is ever willing
to give you one or take a chance on you.
And she got the opportunity, and she's done an amazing
(02:25):
job with it. So why don't we shut up about
the fact that she's a woman, Stop pointing out how
she looks and this, that and the other. Like she's
owning the narrative for sure. And I'm sure there's times
where she goes home and it has to chuck her
phone or hide.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
It, like people are horrible.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, And I just think that it's it's so disappointing that,
like we're even having to have the conversation still.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
So I think it's funny because I kind of disagree
with you at some points and I agree with you
at others, but I love what Jess is doing. So
Lauriel just did this national ad campaign where they showcase
Jess getting ready, having the pressure, right, having a full like,
having a beat, getting to the game, and displaying her feminine,
(03:05):
divine energy in the most powerful way, which is managing
the bench, you know, doing all the things that have
nothing to do with gender. Right, her gender doesn't make
her more or less competent in the world of hockey.
So for that reason, I'm one hundred percent behind it.
But what it also does is it provides a different
level of all of these other intangibles, like you know,
(03:28):
you call them hard skills and soft skills. What she
brings is just different than any other coach because she
is the first female to ever do it right, like
her empathy, her compassion, her care, Like they're all just
going to be different because women innately are different than men.
And you kind of see it like biosemuand makes this
higher because of the market that it's happening in.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Arms are wrapped around this person.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Like, yes, there's online hate, but like let's just ignore
like the basement trolls because do we care about their opinion?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
No, we don't.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
But also, like you know, you just see her doing
more and pushing more barriers. We talked a couple weeks
ago about fashion in sports and like you know, wearing
the hat and rocking up in sneakers and not showcasing
like your real why. I mean, like Jess is doing
some different things from the perspective of a coach.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, and I think I mean it's no surprise, like right,
I mean, we're shocked, No, McKinsey and Company did a
study a few years ago, right, and it's backed by
data provable that companies with female leaders have higher success
rates in organization function and financial performance. Full stop. That
is proven with data. And so is she the CEO? No,
(04:40):
but she's a coach, she's a woman in leadership. Why
we have to defend that. Why we have to push
out ads to amplify that, Why we have to like
stand tall and have signs and have these people's backs
when they get into these positions. How about we just
meet them at the door with a little respect. Why
does the door have to open because of laundry list
of excuses as to why she got the job? Who
can She got the job and she's crushing it. And
(05:03):
in my opinion, she was perfectly qualified. She played at
a high level, she thinks the game at a high level.
She went overseas and had success. There's not a single
person in the world who can look at that woman
and call her unqualified, underprepared. That it's just not true, right,
And if you think that, then you don't know the game.
To push back on your point, The trolls don't matter, sure,
but it emboldens other people right to say those things,
(05:26):
to believe those things. I know for a fact that
you have decision makers within these men's sports organizations and
leagues who think that women shouldn't have jobs because they
don't do the job right or whatever, and it just
isn't true, Like gender has absolutely nothing to do with
your ability to do a job, full stop.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
But I also think that it's funny because it's also
like she very much in interviews will say, I'm not
just trying to fit in. I'm not just trying to
be one of the guys. I'm okay with my femininity,
I'm okay with what I bring. I'm just trying to
be myself authentically, And there is not enough of that narrative.
(06:08):
Go back to twenty fourteen and you have Becky Hammond.
The Spurs hire her as a coach, and like the
world sets a blaze a woman coaching in the NBA,
and it was to everybody's like shock in awe she
found success. I mean, how could she ever possibly do
such a thing right? But like in that space, you
have Greg Popovich who hires her, and later on in
(06:29):
life she goes on to acknowledge him. She's giving this
big speech and it just I think it actually just
went viral. But she's giving this big speech and she says,
the character and care and concern that you put into
the hiring empowered me every day, and you text me
all the time, just be you. And I think, like, right,
So you put Papovich, you put Bills, now, you put
these men in these positions to make the right higher
(06:52):
hiring on authenticity, hiring on skills, hiring on you know, competencies,
and it happens to be the to incredibly intelligent women
that go on to have a great level of success.
So my point in all of this hot take is
why is it the first I'm kind of with you,
Why are we still talking about this?
Speaker 1 (07:12):
But we are.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
This is the world that we're in in the world
of hockey, right, where women constantly are ostracized and made
to feel less than a shining example of what we
can do when given the right opportunity.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Yeah, and I think that the thing that I think
is most ironic, right, is that we don't make a
big deal at all of men coaching in women's leagues
and in theory it's the same. Or are we just
all that disrespectful of women that we think that men
are just inherently better because right, like, if it's truly
a fit in like, you know, women coaching men, then
(07:46):
why are we perfectly like comfortable with men always coaching women.
And I think that that's the way we need to
start thinking about it, like the best coaches should coach.
And also players respond differently to email coaches versus male coaches,
Like there's a benefit, a huge benefit to having both
on your bench. Yeah, And I think the crack and
are right for doing it.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
That's where we have to be is diversity brings ideas,
and ideas bring change. We talk about it in every
perspective that we can on what needs to change in
hockey to continue to up level. This is a beautiful change.
I love it. I love the content, I love the suits,
I love the get ready with me, I tried her ponytail.
It looks far less attractive on me than it does
(08:28):
on her, but I'm totally into it. I love all
the things, and for all the reasons that Jess Campbell
is having success on one hundred thousand levels, I'm excited
to watch her continue to show women that there's other
ways into hockey. There's other ways to find success, and
why is she the first? Let's not let her be
the last. Let's continue to prop her up because that
(08:51):
is incredible. While I'm on this high and I'm so
loving everything about Jess Campbell, what's going on in hockey,
I have to tell you, I slept a full eight
hours last night, so the check in is going to
go very well for me.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
How are you feeling? I'm good. I'm like a like
a ninety two. It's tough to get me below eighty
when I'm down in Florida though, so like a ninety two.
Only Whylan came in my bed last night. No, Harlan,
he didn't pee through his night dipe, so woke up
with dry sheets, And honestly, that's a win, like I
(09:35):
was just but that's all that goes well for me
in a day. It's a good day. A win is
a win, my dude.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Like, no, peeing through a diaper is truly amazing. I
don't understand, like, I don't think that there's gonna be
a time where he's done with the night diaper.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
That's just my like gut feeling. Is he gonna be
thirty with a night diaper on? Probably? Sorry to his
future partner. If he's thirty with a night diaper, I
love you, babe, but he's still sleeping in our house.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
That boy will be eating a bab if he's an
H at that point, Like you know how he sleeps
like an H between us right now he is, like
you know, he's getting pretty tall. Actually, like right now
we're at the ends of the bed with this age.
But this boy is gonna be massive because he's wearing
a seven T and he's four and a half. And
it's freaking me out. That being said, I like I said,
slapt eight hours. I feel amazing. I woke up, I
(10:21):
felt refreshed, I did my face routine, put all my
lotions on. I'm with you. I'm like an eighty five.
I feel great. Solid, solid, can't take me down.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
We're trying a new pizza place with your dad later. Ooh,
your mom, I could go for peace. Your mom left
to go out of town today, so it's just your
dad and I with the kids. So your mom went
to the store and bought a bunch of Trader Joe
stuff for us to make for dinner in an effort
to be helpful and kind. And we're going to ignore
all of it, and of course your dad goes, oh,
do you want to order from the crust tonight? It's
(10:54):
not saying no, it feels dangerous. That's one hundred percent
what my dad does.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
He waits till she leaves and then held the like
order a bunch of carry out, and then she comes
back and then he makes whatever she's left aside.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
That's actually very funny. Maybe I'll get pizza tonight too.
Maybe again, I'm so hyped up.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
We just talked all about women that are changing our
specific industry and what that looks like for us. But Maddie,
who we talk to next.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Our next guest, is also obsessed with the ways that
women are underestimated in male dominated spaces, but like you said,
in a very different industry than ours, which is cool.
We're going to talk to Joe Piazza, who is a journalist,
a podcaster, a novelist. Basically she does all the things,
but her specific area of expertise is mom influencers and
(11:40):
mom content on the Internet and how it's changing what's
true what's not true at that part, and she's gonna
tell us all the secrets of the Internet, and who knows,
maybe teach us a thing or two about what we're
doing right, what we're doing wrong. She's a seasoned mom
of a lot of rascals as she calls them. So
excited to chat with her, and let's get into it.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Hi, Joe, Hi, it's nice to have you. Welcome to
these pas puck.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
Yeah, which is really hard to say, guys.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
We wanted it to be as close to a word
flub as possible.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Yeah it is.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Don't make me say it. Okay, Well, I'm excited to
have you. I am one part of these pas puck
and my wife Madison is with us. But if you
could do a quick intro of yourself, we would love
to introduce you to our audience, tell us all the things.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Yeah. So I am Jip Piazza. I'm a longtime podcaster.
I've been making the Under the Influence podcast for about
five years now, which started as a deep dive into
the world of momfluencing on social media, but it's really
turned into a place for women to talk about how
hard it is to be a woman and a mother
(13:10):
in the world. So we have on thought leaders, influencers
pretty much anyone that I think is interesting and is
going to help me improve my life and the podcast
is twice a week. I love it. So that was
kind of my day job. And then I am also
an author. I write novels and my latest one was
The Sicilian Inheritance. It is coming out in paperback right now.
(13:32):
It is a twisty turney murder mystery set in Sicily.
And my new one is a tradwife murder mystery called
Everyone Is Lying to You, which comes out in July.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
That sounds like it's right up my alley.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I was gonna say, Murder and Women is my wife's life.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
Murder and Women, you were going to love Everyone is
Lying to You?
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Awesome, that's on Furbig. Well we were going to get
into all of that, and so for us, just so
we know, most of our guests have some connection to
how your connection is unknown. Do you have any connection
to hockey? Are you a fan? Did you play anything
like that? I have never played hockey in my life,
but welcome, thank you, thank you. But I am a
(14:12):
big Flyers fan, okay, because I live I live in Philadelphia,
you know, and we live and die by our sports teams.
So I love the Flyers.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
I'm a massive gritty our mascot Stan And in fact
I did this awesome interview years ago where I interviewed
the women who created and marketed Gritty, and it was
an all women team that did it, and so I
got to follow Gritty around the arena and yeah, it
was pretty great. So when I'm actually taking my son
to his first hockey game, I think, next week I
(14:44):
have to look at calendar.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
What is time? I have no idea, it doesn't exist.
I'm obsessed with that.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Also because Gritty is hilarious, and like, Gritty is a
gateway to the flyers, which I am from Boston, So
I loathe your flyers, but I love how much you
love your flyers, which is amazing. So really funny, that's obvious,
Like colors in mascot are usually like a really good
gateway into caring, which Gritty's hilarious.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
Totally.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
So you talked about podcasting and I want to kind
of like figure out a little bit about that. Under
the Influence covers all things social media influencing, mom influencing.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
I like that you said that, what kind of like
put you on that thread.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
So when I had my second baby, my first daughter,
I have three. I have a seven year old, a
five year old, and a two year old. And when
I had my daughter five years ago, she didn't sleep
at night and she was super collicky, and so I
would say up all night holding her, and the only
appendage that I had free was my thumb. So I
was scrolling and scrolling and scrolling social media. And this
(15:44):
was the early days of mom influencing on Instagram. Everything
has changed since then, but I was being served these
gorgeous images of beautiful women with their beautiful kids in
their pristine white houses yep, or running through fields with chickens,
and they were all trying to sell me something. They're
all trying to sell me organic baby food or non
(16:06):
flammable swaddles made out of goat hair. And I just
became fascinated with this world and I decided I wanted
to report on it. So that's how Under the Influence
was born, and the first two seasons are really a deep,
deep dive into the world of mom influencing. How it
was created. I thought that I was going to be
(16:27):
pulling back the curtain on this, you know, I wanted
to actually wanted to see is everyone just lying to me?
And some people are that is the truth. But what
I also discovered is that it is a multi billion
dollar business created by women for women that has mostly
been ignored by mainstream media for a very long time
because it was created by women for women, And so
(16:49):
it became something so much bigger than I had expected
and also something so much more interesting because I wasn't
looking at these women as entrepreneurs. I wasn't looking at
this as a business. And while there is a lot
of grift involved, and there's a lot of BS involved,
and there's a lot of accounts that make us feel
(17:09):
too much guilt and shame about being a perfectly averaged mother,
which I am, I'm like the most perfectly okay mom
that there is very highly mediocre and okay with it.
You know, there's also a lot to commend it. And
in a world where it is very hard to be
a mom and also to have a career and to
(17:31):
have an ambitious career, influencing is a way for women
to support their families. So we told that side of
it too, And now we've evolved to talk about social
media and all of the ways that it impacts us
as moms, because parenting in the age of social media
is so weird and fraught. We were never meant to
watch how other people parent online. It is I mean,
(17:53):
it just it makes my brain explode on a daily basis.
So we still talk about all of that, but we're
also talking about, you know, how hard it is to
be a woman in the world these days.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
I love all of that. I think all of that
is so humanizing.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
One.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Two. Like you always say, like, no one puts a
bad day on Instagram, but like that's the reality, right,
And to your point, like you're scrolling through all of
this stuff and it's like, well, should I be doing this?
Should I be doing that? What's real? What is it?
But what do you think is the most surprising thing
that you learned, Like in the early seasons of doing this,
but what's the most surprising thing or what took you
by most surprised?
Speaker 4 (18:27):
Yeah, of course. So in the early days, one of
the things that I did was total stunt journalism. So
the early episodes of Under the Influence, I actually tried
to be a mom influencer. I tried to monetize my account.
And also the first thing that I learned and this
blew me away. I feel like people know this now
but did not know it back then, is that none
(18:48):
of these pictures of these videos were being taken in
real time, right, So these women were hiring photographers and
videographers to shoot an entire month of content for them
in a single day. So I actually hired a professional
photographer to try to do this, to try to create
all this content in my family, and my entire family
(19:11):
completely opted out after two hours. Everyone was in tears.
Everyone was like, we don't like this. Stop telling us
like what we have to do in these pictures. I
don't want to change my clothes fourteen times, and I
was just shut down right then. And there being a
mom influencer, being one who succeeds, being one who actually
(19:32):
makes money, and a small percentage of them can make
a living from it, and people are trying to become
influencers every day. I would say maybe ten percent of
people are earning a living wage. Of the people who
are trying, but I'm the ones who succeed. They're essentially
running a media empire. And that's the way I wasn't
thinking about it. And it kind of changed everything for
(19:52):
me because I worked in magazines for a long time.
I know if they work. I wouldn't let a magazine
make me feel bad about myself, Like I wouldn't read
Parenting and be like, their kitchen is so clean. I'd
be like, this is a magazine, of course it's clean.
And that's kind of the way we have to look
at social media and influencers. All of this is staged.
They're creating a show for you, and if we look
(20:15):
at it like that, maybe we can just enjoy it
instead of experiencing all of this mom guilt and shame
about their perfect lunches or they're ridiculously clean all white
houses that aren't covered in handprints all over the walls,
which mine absolutely are.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
I love that you say that, like people have to
recognize that it is actually a magazine because I felt
so frequently. I'm like, like, right now, our four year old,
he is pushing the limit. Baby, he is kicking our ass. Oh,
he's kicking our ass.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
It's really the worst.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Yeah, he's killing us. And like a normal quote quote
normal technology infused mom, I'm like, what do I do
about this? My kid is kicking my ass and I'm
like I can't find anything because no one wants to
talk about it, no one wants to be real or
it's like get on his level, say I understand you
don't feel well, and he's like, I'm gonna punch you
in the face, and I get it. Yeah, So it's like,
(21:07):
you know, like we clutch to these things and we
don't necessarily recognize that it isn't always applicable and it
is always real. So like, first of all, thank you
for humanizing that, because even I find myself like hating
myself with like a yell, like in the mirror, crying
hate myself totally, like it's gonna happen and I'm not perfect.
So when you go through that, you kind of like
unpack some of that because right now, mental health is
(21:27):
the biggest thing impacting all of us on a daily basis.
And I would Maddie and I dovetail it and always say, well,
it's social media, right, because that's what's exposing it. How
much of that mom influencer is probably not telling the
whole story and then not being genuine and causing some
of this unrest in the momming world.
Speaker 4 (21:47):
I don't think anyone is telling the whole story. I
mean in the same way that even when you go
have coffee with some of your best friends in the
entire world, there's some things you're not gonna tell them,
like you're not gonna say I'd off my husband's head
last night because he didn't put down the toilet seat
at three in the morning, and then I fell in
the toilet when I went to the bathroom at three
thirty in the morning. Like, there's some things we just
(22:08):
like pick and choose to share, and it's the same
for anyone who is online. But there is definitely a
percentage of people who are blatantly lying, I mean, just
just to perform the way that the algorithm wants, you know,
they see what is trending and they move towards that.
And then a lot of people who are also claiming
(22:29):
to be experts. This was the most dangerous thing that
I found when I first started digging into this, the
amount of people who claim to be experts in something
that like dealing with a child. They might have a
couple initials after their name. You'll never find out what
they mean, but they seem legit, especially two in the
(22:50):
morning when you haven't slept in three days, and the
advice that they're giving is either just kind of bogus,
but it can also lead towards the dangerous I totally
bought some of their like let me send you my
PDF with my tips when I was so desperate in
the middle of the night. And the fact is most people,
if they're trying to sell you something online, you should
(23:13):
be skeptical. You should ask your questions and do your
due diligence. It's just too much information too. I mean,
I love what you said about your mom, because my
mom too. She was like, yeah, I didn't have an ultrasound.
I didn't even know what gender you were. And I'm like, yeah,
of course she didn't. This also a generation that smoked
a pack of cools a day and who was finished
with the car.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
So she's like, I didn't wear a seatbelt when you
were pregnant, so.
Speaker 4 (23:33):
Exactly, yeah, and I'm not of course she didn't. But yeah,
it's it's just too much advice. I'm so sorry you
have a four year old, because no one talks enough
about how four is the worst age, Like there is
this myth that two is awful to the Terrible twos,
two's awesome. I have a two year old right now,
and I keep saying that I think the Terrible twos
(23:54):
were coined by a man who was never around his
four year old and thought they were too. Two is awesome.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
He's so cute.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
Who's so cute? And like and they're just like learning things.
Four is a hellscape of doom, okay, and I'm just
getting out of it with my my fury. Aild has
just turned five. She's finally turning the corner. But there
was so much googling that I was doing when she
was four and me being like is this normal?
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (24:20):
Did I break this too?
Speaker 1 (24:22):
What did I do to this kid?
Speaker 4 (24:24):
What did I do to this kid to make it
like that? And then they turned the corner at five?
Their brains are just becoming brain.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Yeah, we always have to remind ourselves, right, Like Madison,
I will get in this, like I swear, we get
the ick with the kids. We'll be like, Waylan's doing
this really horrible thing where he's lying, where he's doing
this thing where like today he stole something from a store. No,
he really just wanted it, right, Like he really wanted
it and he heard no wanted it and he greasy
fingered it out of the store. And now Madison has
to turn around and apologize for a little thief. But
(24:54):
it's not that way, right, Like, so we have to
come to these things with a little bit of grace
for these kids, because I.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Think they really are just doing the best they can.
But four stinks.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
Four stinks. Yeah. No, my four year old stole some
shit too. Yeah, she definitely definitely stole some candy. There
was some gum, there was a toy once at the
cash register. And the best thing is actually, in each
of those instances, when I went back and returned it,
the cashier was like always like a retiree in their
like sixties or seventies, and they're just like, no, sweat,
I don't even know why you came back. They're like, it's.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Fine, you could have just had it at that point.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
Yeah. Yeah, They're like really, don't worry about it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
I do love that my wife is saying that two
is great, though, because I will say I have been
mind blown at how you can have so we use
the same donor for both of our kids. My wife
carried both her egg for both, so genetically they are identical. Okay,
how you can have something so identical raised the same way,
everything right so wildly different, Like whalan was great until
(25:50):
about four. Harlan took her diaper off a week ago
and pooped on the floor. Yeah, she's a pistol. I'll
remind you of that on you because that's terrible. Like
her her phase, like Waalen was never like this hit too.
But our daughter is like I can't keep up, I said, Donnya.
I'm like, I need we need to get like two
more people here to help me on a daily basis
because I can't turn my back for a second.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
You know, it is really funny because once I hit
the third baby, and our third baby was kind of
a bonus surprise baby we went to we went to
an Elton John concert in North Dakota and came home
with a positive pregnancy test. Yeah, but with her, I'm
like the most chill I could possibly be because I'm like,
I've seen all of it with both of you. Because
my first and my second are completely different from each other.
(26:33):
They're like pull our opposites and so now anything she
does and she's a diaper taker off or too. So
in the middle of the night she now takes the
bipro off and puts her pants back on, so we
don't even know. We don't even know until we get
in there in the morning.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Surprise with that, you know, you kind of references when
we talked about it, but like the content has changed too.
I think the other thing is like maybe people are
being a little bit more real today than they were
back in the day. But you've now seen it through
multiple kids, Like you're now on Kid three. You've seen
it through multiple kids. You've experienced it in multiple different
(27:08):
capacities and covered it extremely closely. How is the mom
fluencing changed?
Speaker 4 (27:15):
Has it the mom fluencing has one hundred percent changed?
I mean, I think well, and I know the data
backs this up. Our eyeballs are more on screens than
they are any other form of media at this point,
and that's different from five years ago. We're definitely spending
more time on the scroll on both Instagram and TikTok
(27:37):
than we are reading books or watching TV shows, And
so it's not social media anymore. It's just media. It
is the dominant form.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Of media now.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
I think that the influencers and the content creators have
gotten so much savvier, right, and the tools are better.
All of it looks so much more professional. It is
much easier to seamlessly. Weaven selling link click to buy
was so clunky five years ago when we were first
doing the under the Influence podcast. It was very difficult
to set up and then very difficult for people to access,
(28:09):
and now it is just pure seamless shopping in the
middle of the night the other night, and I don't
buy that many clothes for my girls because we have
a lot of bigger girls in our neighborhood, and so
they passed them all down. Like I have tupperwares filled
with girls clothes up to the age of ten. But
I just had this moment of weakness where I bought
matching Mini Boden and Boden Sun dresses with little Sicilian lemons.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
All over them and sounds gutto.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
I mean, we're going to look amazing, so it's clearly
worth it. But like I do think that it's easier
than ever for us to be sold to. I will say,
I think we're starting to see a little bit of
a shift where some women are taking more agency over
talking about the things that are real and that are difficult,
(28:57):
similar to what we saw and this was before I
had kids, but the early mom bloggers, you know, with
the Scary Mommy and those blogs where they really talked
about how hard motherhood was. We're seeing some of that.
But then on the other side of the spectrum, we
do see an intense inundation of like quote unquote domestic bliss.
(29:18):
These women who are having five to nine children, who
are homeschooling them, and who are also cooking three course
meals and baking soured oh bread every day, a lot
of which is very performative and probably not their real life.
One of the things that I discovered fairly recently, actually
at an influencing conference, and I love this tidbit so
(29:38):
much it becomes an entire plot point in my influencer
Murder mystery is that a lot of people will rent
influencer houses to film and take photos of their content in.
So it's not their real kitchen. It's not their real
kitchen that they're doing all of their baking videos in.
It's not their real bathroom that they do their morning
or nighttime makeup routines in. And you can always tell
(30:00):
if there's no toilet because like usually if you were
to put the phone on the counter, you would see
a toilet somewhere, right, you would in my bathroom.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
But the lens you've been in the seat would be up, yes,
it would be up.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
And yeah, that's just another part of like the unreality
of it.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
And I think it's so good to call attention to that,
right because the point being it's good to be influenced
by things, and it's good to have inspiration and be inspired.
But like reality is reality, and just no one's life
is that perfect. Like for me, I grew up in
a house so clean you could literally lick the floor.
Now I'm learning, well, yeah, my mom had like a
bunch of people to help and cleaning ladies and this,
(30:36):
that and the other. Like we're just two people trying
to figure it out with our kids here there and everywhere.
There's handprints everywhere, Like reality and your perception of it
are often very different things. So I love that you
shared that with us, and in that spirit, I want
to keep going because you're just so well versed in
everything and you're a mom of three, which I'm trying
to convince Anie to have one more maybe, but you
wear all kinds of hats besides taking care of your family.
(30:59):
And we talked a little bit offline beforehand about the
technology component to kids, and so we want to spend
a little bit of time maybe picking your brain a
little bit. What is the deal with technology? In kids,
and why is it like you've just given them a
whole Hershey's factory after you take the iPad away? And
is it bad? Right? Because you get looks from parents
that are like, really, you're giving your I mean, I'm
an iPad parent, right, You're really you're giving your kid
(31:19):
the iPad? But like, do you think it's bad?
Speaker 4 (31:21):
I don't know. I don't.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Actually.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
I'm also a kid of the eighties who grew up
watching a lot of television. Okay, like a lot.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I think we all watched a lot of TV.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
I was home alone. I was like a latch key
kid by the time I was like eight nine years old,
and Phil Donahue and Oprah were my babysitters. So and
I'm fine. I'm perfectly fine, you know. I think screen,
like the iPads are a little bit different, and the
way that the media is presented. The thing that I
don't love about it is how on demand it is.
It's that they can have anything they want, any time
(31:55):
they want, whereas for us it was like, no, this
is on right now, and this is what you will watch,
as opposed to just kind of feeding into that dopamine
head of like I can have anything I could have
nineteen episodes of Bluwei right now, and that's fine. And
so you know, for us, we're just like everything in
moderation or we try, right, we try, we mess it up,
(32:18):
and then we like try to go back and fix it.
I will give my kids a screen in a car
or on a plane for nine hours at a clip. Okay,
I'm not going to parents in a closed space without
a screen, And you know, I could care less who
judges me for that at this point. Also, in restaurants,
if we are trying to have a meal, we will
(32:38):
always try to like get through as much of the
meal as we possibly can. And the second that they
start like losing the plot, where like have a little
bit of screen.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Time, my friend, Yes, we would like to eat what
we've ordered.
Speaker 4 (32:52):
We'd like to eat what we ordered. And I think
if you're the parent that is like thinking in those terms,
you're already a good parent. You're already parent. Well, like
if you're concerned about how this is happening, in my
biggest concern right now, and I could care less about
the Bluey and like the Gabby's doll House. So the
Gabby's Doll House is so annoying. I find Bluey a
delight though delight, I mean, whoever is writing Bluey is
(33:14):
just a genius. I would date both Bandit and Chili
Healer like. I'm like, both of you are great, like
wonderful parents. Yeah, and my biggest concern for my seven
year old is YouTube.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
Yes, that's a scary one. YouTube really does freak us out.
Speaker 4 (33:31):
Freaks me the heck out. He just got his first computer,
which there's no way around it because they use him
in school. Now, okay, like some of his homework is
on the computer. He needed his own laptop. We have
all the parental controls on it. We try not to
let him wash YouTube. But there's one thing that he
loves so much which I also cannot recommend enough. I
(33:52):
love it. It is Mark Rober. Have you guys entered
the Mark Rober phase yet?
Speaker 1 (33:57):
No?
Speaker 4 (33:57):
Oh gosh. He is a former NASA engineer who worked
on the Mars Rover and now he does physics videos
for kids, cool explaining physics in a cool, fun way.
He has this box that he sends kids every month
called crunch Labs, where they build something like they build
a catapult, or like they built like a movie thing.
(34:18):
And a robot. It's wild. His videos are awesome, and
I will let my seven year old boy watch them
all day long. I don't want them watching anything else
on YouTube, and the videos will then will then just
move into things that are not kid friendly. I don't
think mister Beast is kid friendly, but they roll into
Mister Beast videos and so dealing with YouTube is the
(34:39):
worst thing that I've had to do in terms of screens.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
And you can't download the content and then play it elsewhere.
Because our kids are big Danny Go fans, they'll do
like the dances and the activities, and like in my mind,
I'm like, yeah, you're getting screen time, but you're moving.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
So I'm all in on the Danny Go.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
I love Danny Go, but I can't download it and
then stop it from looping into some person in some
random corner of the universe playing a game or a
toy that they then want exactly. And then my kids
have access to the Alexa, so they'll say, Alexa, order
hot Wheels cars, and guess what shows up at the
house tomorrow, Hot wheels cars. And we're kind of the
(35:15):
same way, like technology and moderation is what we are
comfortable with. We don't want to go down the pathway
of like our kids only write in calligraphy, that doesn't happen, right,
like they play on an iPad.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
It's gonna be fine. We're all going to move on
from that.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
But like, how and where do you find that? Like
is it just giving yourself grace? Is it just knowing
that it's gonna be okay? Like, because we don't really
see that in any other format on social media, right,
it is really the like we have chickens, we make bread,
we blah blah blah, And that's not always the reality, right.
It might be we got through twenty minutes of dinner
(35:48):
and then we hit the iPads and everyone ate their meal.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Nobody cried, and then we got in the car.
Speaker 4 (35:52):
And that's life. And that's what we're never going to
see on social media because it's not sexy. It's there
people do, but the algorithm doesn't love it as much
as it loves nine times pregnant bellies and running through
the fields with the chickens. We just don't see the normal, mundane.
This is how I got through my day, and it's
one of the things that I try to talk about
(36:14):
as much as I can on Under the Influence, and
I've got a substack that's called over the Influence, where
I posted my very unesthetic morning routine, okay, which is like,
I don't wake up at five point thirty in the
morning before my children to go work out. I wake
up when they show up in my room on my lap,
breathing in my face, and barely get dressed before walking
(36:37):
out the door, often at school drop off in my pajamas.
But it's just like, no one really wants to post that,
because even if we're not influencers, everyone just has this
inclination to post the good or the extraordinary as opposed
to this is how I made it through my day.
The dangerous part about that is it Instagram makes us
(36:59):
feel like we're peering into someone's reality, and not just
someone but our friends, because it's interspersed with pictures of
our friends babies and they're vacations, so we feel like
it's very voyeuristic and not staged, and then that feels
like it's real life. I mean, one of the things
that I've been trying to do more and more of
is inviting my friends over to my house and not
(37:22):
bothering to clean it up.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Just being like this, it's a mess.
Speaker 4 (37:26):
It's a mess, like this is my real bedroom, this
is my real kitchen, because I don't think we see
enough of each other's realities right now.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
I fully agree.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
I'm obsessed with Nicki Unplugged. Do you know Nicki Marie
on social media? No, you've got to follow her. She's
a Boston girly, so she's like from the inside of
my heart. Someone will post a video that's like them
dulled up to the nines to go to drop off,
and then it's her with like a bun, two coffee cups,
one ugg boots, brown, one's blonde like sweats. She like
very much humanizes momming and so like when you can
(37:57):
find folks like that that really are doing a great job.
I'm so obsessed with shits podcast, NII Unplugged, and this
is a plug for Nicki Unplugged. But she's hilarious and
she's real.
Speaker 4 (38:06):
I'm excited. I'm gonna download all of it right now.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Yeah, you've got to follow her. She's amazing in everything
(38:29):
that you just said. I think that a part of it,
at least for me, and I think a lot of
moms and dads too. But when we're a two mom household.
Like you become a parent, you become so hyper focused
on taking care of these little things that you forget
to take care of yourself. And a huge part of
having kids, obviously, is the relationship that brought you together
to start that family. And you've also made a few
podcasts about relationships, Right Committed, where you've interviewed married couples
(38:51):
and She Wants More, which is about why women have affairs,
which is sandless and fun. But in making both of
those shows, what have you learned about how to maintain
a stable, loving relationship And do you have any advice
to us as we weather the storm of crazy kids
and you know, two and four just kind of getting
through that.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
Yeah, I mean, I think just giving yourself as much
grace as possible and giving your partner as much grace
as possible. And I don't think that the partner part
of it was something that I saw until our third baby.
I think I was really frustrated with my husband a
lot of the time, and maybe I didn't realize. I'm like, oh,
it's just as hard as it is for him, probably
(39:30):
more so because he is a man than it is
for me. And also then making space for your relationship
as much as possible. It's so funny because with my
first baby, I felt so terribly guilty about leaving him,
and now I just love leaving my children so much.
I'm going to Amsterdam with my husband in four hours.
It's a research trip for a book, but also just
(39:52):
so we can have a four day trip to Amsterdam together.
And the kids are going to be fine. They're with
one of their caregivers and my mother, and they're also
in school and surrounded by people who love them. And
we finally, in the past two years started making space
for our relationship and prioritizing that as much as we
prioritize being parents. And I think that it has just
(40:12):
made all of the difference. And I'm not even just
saying date nights because like sometimes I don't want to
go to a bar, Like I'm like, oh, so, what
we just did is we finally.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Put a TV in our bedroom.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
We did not have a TV in our bedroom before,
so that we can have sneaky date nights in our
room and the kids can be downstairs with the babysitter
and we can just sort of take out upstairs and
binge watch TV. And have like a lazy person's date night.
And I think we're actually we're getting along better and
we're just dealing with it a lot better now. And
also we literally ask for all of the help. Like
(40:44):
we moved home to Philadelphia to be close to my
mom so she is in and out of our house
all of the time. We also moved to Philly because
it's way cheaper than New York and San Francisco, so
we're can afford to have a bigger house, and we
have an a pair who lives with us. So we
ask for and take literally all of the help so
that we can still be fully formed human beings. And
(41:06):
I think that the kids are happier for it too,
because when we're happier, we're like yelling less and we're
like at them and at each other and at ourselves.
And so I think we've reached this point where we're
just a lot happier as parents because we do give
ourselves grace and we're a little less worried. I think
that is a function of having a third baby and
seeing that the first two are fine, that they ended
(41:28):
up like they're doing.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Okay, Stop saying that, stop saying we should a third.
Speaker 4 (41:34):
You should do it. You should have a third baby, Okay,
Like Nick did not think that he wanted a third baby, Okay,
but I was also like, if you really don't want one, fine,
your body, your choice, dude, But you then get av
sect to me, yeah, like I'm not I'm not staying
on the pill. And so he didn't get a sectomy
and I got a third baby, and he agrees. She
(41:54):
is the best of all of them. Like she is
just she's a delight, She's like a great a day,
and three is not harder than two because we already
have two.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Yeah, and it's hard.
Speaker 4 (42:04):
It's hard to have multiple children. And so we're just like,
I think you got really used to it. Best guest
we've ever had. The award goes to you.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Well, I will be canceling this entire interview and it's
all getting deleted. I'm obsessed with everything you said, and
I feel like it actually kind of like answered our
final question. But I do want to just underscore something
really quickly. You did say your body your choice, so
I just like I wanted to infuse that in here, Maddie,
just so that we can I can't wait for you
to be pregnant baby, you're going to look beautiful.
Speaker 4 (42:33):
No one wants that.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
At the end of every single podcast, we ask a
question and it's what kind of advice have you received
as a parent that has been foundational for you? And
then like the caveat to that is like, you mean,
no one told it to you and you had to
discover it. But what could you give to Maddie and
I so that we can upskill in that parenting format,
like what do you wish you heard or what have
(42:54):
you heard that's really like changed your life.
Speaker 4 (42:57):
My favorite advice came to me from an old man
in hum Depot when I was pregnant with my first baby,
and he saw that I was pregnant and like all
old men, had a lot of thoughts, and so he
wrote down on a little like hum Depot pad, take
a trip when the baby is three months old, because
they won't be able to move and they won't have
(43:18):
any opinions. And then he really pushed the boundaries and
told me to make whoopee with my husband before going
out on date night because you're always tired and full
of food when you get home.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
I think all pieces of advice mostly the train YouTube
is quite interesting, were you.
Speaker 4 (43:38):
Like all gems. I still have that he actually.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Didn't even work at home depot. Just to be clear,
that was just a random.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
Dude, random dude that likes to talk to pregnant women.
This is eight years ago. Creepy old men are allowed
to talk to us then. And then you know the
advice that like I would bestow on you, it's similar
to what I just said. Although I will tell you
that I have heard the doing before date night from
other people now after having kids, and I'm like, it
is gold.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
Yeah, that's a good Joe.
Speaker 4 (44:04):
So like, have the babysitter take them into the playground,
even if it's just makeing out time.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah, makeout and then go make.
Speaker 4 (44:10):
Out and then go because you get home you're a
little tipsy, you're tired. That one is really gold. But
also just like to try and I'm really embracing this
right now too. I'm trying to go with the flow
a lot more because everything with these kids is a
season and it changes and it does not last forever.
(44:30):
I'm able to let things go a lot more than
I used to. But also the fact is, when you're
in the thick of it, it does suck and like,
I think acknowledging that is really really important because this
is hard. Parenting is hard. Parenting in the world that
we live in right now is hard, and so yeah,
give ourselves as much grace as possible because I think
we're all doing a good job.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
This has been incredible. Thank you so much for sharing everything.
I'm excited for your books to come out this summer.
We're definitely going to check them out. Thank you. This
has been deeply entertaining for the both of us and
I I know our audience is gonna love it. So
thank you, and we're gonna take those pointers moving forward,
maybe some of them, maybe not all of them.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
Matt, he's just excited to make out before the date.
We're gonna go make out now, go and make out now.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
I know. I'm excited to go to Amsterdam to make out,
to make out.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
In Amsterdam, and then you go to dinner.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
We'll make out with our closet high from our babysitter.
Right now, you make out in Amsterdam and we'll see.
Speaker 4 (45:24):
How it's actually kind of hot. Yeah that's how I
think you Yeah, yeah, exactly. Bye, guys, thanks so much
for having me.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
Thank you, Joe, thank you.
Speaker 3 (45:35):
And that's all we have today. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
I'm On Your Packer and I'm Madison Packer and this
is These Packs Puck.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
These Packs Puck is a production of iHeart Women's Sports
in Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
It's hosted by US Madison and On Your Packer. Emily
Maronoff is our awesome senior producer and story editor. We
were mixed and mastered by Mary do.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Our executive producers are Jennifer Bassett, Jesse Katz, and Ally Perry.
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