4Ryl Talk

This week on 4RYL Talk, I’m sitting down with my cousin Kimmy we come from the same giant family but live on completely different planets.

I live at the beach in Florida. She lives on a 144-acre farm in Ohio. I spent COVID floating around the Bahamas on a boat. She spent part of it camping in a pasture waiting for cows to get “slimy” so they could be bred. We have very different politics, very different lifestyles, and apparently very different ideas about what constitutes a normal amount of money to spend on shampoo for a hog.

We go all the way back to growing up as two of 28 cousins, childhood trauma involving scorpions and playing doctor, Boone’s Farm at the family lake house, getting married young, working 25 years in respiratory care, raising farm kids, oil and gas literally running through your backyard, and why two people can disagree about some pretty big things without deciding they hate each other.

Then Kimmy introduces me to the completely foreign world of county fairs: $280 bags of feed, livestock glamour shots, buyer letters, $50 cow shampoo, showmanship, five-figure hog and one particularly dumb hog.

It’s funny, very unfiltered, and probably the best evidence that loving someone does not require agreeing with them... although apparently it requires bringing your own noodles to Thanksgiving.

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Cousins, technical difficulties & pig glamour shots
02:00 — Meet Kimmy: Two of 28 cousins
03:00 — The scorpion that started a lifelong phobia
04:15 — Who was little Kimmy?
07:10 — Same family, completely different childhoods
08:30 — Bahamas vs. breeding cows during COVID
10:30 — Growing up in a huge Ohio family
11:25 — Boone’s Farm & the family lake house
14:10 — Growing up working-class & getting married young
16:00 — 25 years in respiratory care
16:40 — Fourteen years on night shift & raising kids
18:40 — How different are we, really?
19:40 — Politics, oil, gas & understanding where people come from
23:00 — How we disagree without hating each other
26:25 — Welcome to county fair insanity
28:15 — The money behind showing livestock
29:00 — $50 cow shampoo & $280 pig feed
31:20 — How a pig can sell for thousands of dollars
33:30 — Is showing livestock actually profitable?
34:20 — Fair week: weigh-ins, showmanship & livestock everywhere
36:35 — What Kimmy would tell her younger self
37:45 — The Great Florida Thanksgiving Noodle Crisis
38:45 — What the next five years look like
40:00 — Why family needs to actually stay at your house
41:45 — Good luck at the fair

Apparently, the key to understanding my sister Kelly is knowing that she remembers her childhood as pretty great... right up until our little brother was born, she got psoriasis, and everything went to hell.

So that pretty much sets the tone for this episode.

Kelly and I grew up in the same house, but somehow have completely different versions of our childhood. We talk about why we hated each other, the time we trapped a scorpion under a glass because we thought it was an adorable little lobster, Dad stepping on her hand in his Jesus shoes, Mom’s failed Martha Stewart chocolate leaves, and the unfortunate realization that somewhere along the way... we became the adults.

And adulthood is weird.

Kelly spent 13 years in a career she loved, lost the job, turned down a six-figure opportunity because she didn't want to uproot her family, and is now trying to figure out what she actually wants her life to look like.

Which leads us into the stuff we probably weren't expecting to talk about: motherhood, money, careers, starting businesses, staying home with your kids, $5 strawberries, making your own laundry detergent, overconsumption, and whether the whole plan of going to college, getting a career, buying a house, having kids and retiring someday actually makes sense anymore.

There are also thrift-store victories, dead gardens, fridge cigarettes, a brief discussion about Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and an avocado peeler nobody asked for.

Basically, two sisters who once couldn't stand each other sit down 40-something years later and attempt to figure out adulthood.

Spoiler: we do not.

What happens when an occupational therapist and a neuroscientist turn their garage into a makeshift lab during COVID?

Apparently, you get Green Llama.

I sat down with co-founder Kay Baker to talk about how one random conversation about cleaning products turned into a growing sustainable cleaning company, complete with compostable packaging, refillable products, farmers markets, cold calls, a warehouse, and one slightly suspicious-looking garage lab they lovingly call “Breaking Good.”

We get into what it actually looks like to build a company from scratch when you have absolutely no idea what you're doing yet, why Kay says every new founder should find a mentor immediately, and the particular brand of crazy required to leave careers you love and bet on yourselves.

But what I loved most about this conversation was Kay's take on sustainability: progress over perfection.

Because trying to eliminate every piece of plastic, make every perfect purchase, and somehow live a flawless zero-waste life can make a person a little nuts. Instead, Green Llama is focused on making better choices, asking better questions, and improving as they go. Sometimes that means experimenting with trigger sprayers made from recycled wind turbine blades. Sometimes it means being on version four of compostable packaging.

And sometimes it means accepting that running a small business involves stopping mid-podcast because UPS is literally knocking on the warehouse door.

We also talk about working with your husband without making Green Llama the only thing you discuss at dinner, why llamas are surprisingly perfect sustainability mascots, the realities of growing into retail, and the unfinished children's llama story I am now publicly pressuring Kay and Matt to FINISH.

It's founder life in its natural habitat: smart ideas, organized chaos, a few shiny squirrels, and figuring it out as you go.

And yes, I'm still waiting for the “Breaking Good” photo shoot.

Check out Green Llama https://greenllamaclean.com/

Call Her Mommy

Meet Joce, 4RYL’s newest Curator, mom of three kids four and under, professional researcher of everything that enters her house, and the person who managed to record this entire episode while nursing a three-month-old.

Call Her Daddy? Around here its giving Mommy.

And considering Alex Cooper might be nursing a baby of her own on camera sometime soon, we feel like we’re just ahead of the curve.

In this episode, we get into what being a 4RYL Curator actually means and then promptly spiral into all the things that make trying to buy "better" completely exhausting. Deodorant. Mattresses. $40 baby shirts. Kids’ hair products. Toothbrushes. EWG. Yuka. And that special kind of rage you feel when the "clean" product you spent extra money on turns out to be not quite as clean as you thought.

Joce is postpartum. Christy is perimenopausal. So between the two of us, our hormones have apparently decided to approach life from opposite directions and meet somewhere in the middle to ruin our deodorant. It also means we’re shopping for completely different stages of life, which turns out to be a pretty great way to compare notes on what works, what doesn’t, and what suddenly stopped working because your body changed the rules without consulting you.

We also talk about the part that gets conveniently left out of a lot of these conversations: MONEY. Sure, we'd all love the perfect organic mattress, the beautiful non-toxic wardrobe, and the absolute best version of everything in our homes. We'd also like to pay our mortgages.

Because when Christy started looking at the existing "curator" space, she kept finding recommendations that didn't look anything like actual life. $300 dresses. Expensive must-haves. Beautiful people with beautiful homes casually linking things that would blow my budget before I made it through breakfast. Good for them, but where are the people who want better products and also have to look at the price tag?

That's the space we want 4RYL to fill.

Joce's philosophy is pretty simple: it doesn't have to be perfect. It needs to be better, actually work, and make sense for her family and her budget.

That's also exactly why 4RYL has Curators. We don't all have the same families, budgets, priorities, bodies, or reasons for buying something. We're going to disagree sometimes. GOOD.

No gatekeeping. No $300 dresses being casually tossed into a "must-have" list. No pretending real life has an unlimited wellness budget. Just real people trying things, doing the research, spending actual money, and reporting back.

And yes, there is breastfeeding during this episode.

Just Call her Mommy.

My teenage daughters somehow accumulated nearly 30 lip balms over the years, and this episode starts with one simple question: which ones are actually worth keeping and using?

Instead of buying products just for a review, we emptied the drawer, scanned what we already owned, and compared what the Yuka and EWG Healthy Living apps had to say. Then we compared those scores to what actually matters in real life: performance.

We talk about popular brands including Summer Fridays, Aquaphor, Byoma, EOS, Burt's Bees, Sun Bum, and Pure Good, plus why expensive doesn't always mean better, why clean ingredients aren't the whole story, and how founder stories can completely change the way you look at a product.

In this episode you'll learn:
• The difference between Yuka and EWG and when we use each app
• Why ingredient scores don't always predict performance
• Katie's top three favorite lip balms
• Why Aquaphor still earns a spot in our house
• The surprising story behind Pure Good's grass fed tallow lip balm
• How our family makes shopping decisions without getting overwhelmed

This isn't a "best lip balm" list. It's an honest look at how one family navigates ingredient labels, marketing claims, product performance, and the stories behind the brands.

If your bathroom drawer looks anything like ours, we'd love to know what's in it. Leave a comment with your favorite lip balm and let us know what brand Katie should try next.

Subscribe for honest product reviews, founder stories, ingredient deep dives, and practical conversations that make shopping a little easier.

I asked ChatGPT to write me a résumé... for being a mom.

I thought it would be funny.

Then it started listing executive leadership, strategic planning, conflict resolution, stakeholder management, budget oversight, event production and crisis management.

And I sat there thinking, "Well... crap. It's not wrong."

Because somewhere along the way, motherhood comes with a workload nobody really puts on paper. I’m not just talking about keeping tiny humans alive. I'm talking fundraisers, budgets, volunteer armies, school events, schedules, committees, learning five new software platforms and somehow being put in charge of the volunteer appreciation banquet... that the volunteers also have to plan.

The Mother Load.

In this episode, I talk about my years as a PTO president, how I accidentally turned volunteering into a full-time unpaid career, the fine art of being "volun-told," and how COVID eventually forced me to realize that somewhere in the middle of doing ALL THE THINGS, I had completely lost myself.

And yes, it's funny. Because motherhood is objectively ridiculous sometimes.

But underneath the laughs is something I think we need to start saying out loud: the work counts.

The skills are real. The leadership is real. The experience is real. The giant blank space on a traditional résumé? It wasn't actually blank.

So if you've ever looked at your résumé and wondered how you're supposed to explain the years you spent managing the Mother Load, pull up a chair.

We're putting that sh*t on the résumé.

This week on 4RYL Talk, Christy goes down a rabbit hole she absolutely did not intend to enter: toilet paper.

What started as some post-colonoscopy overthinking quickly became questions about PFAS, bleach, lint, recycled paper, what “soft” actually means, and why buying literally anything in 2026 requires a minor in chemistry.

There’s a black-shirt lint test. There are septic-safe experiments. There are crushed tissue boxes, bidet opinions, recycled toilet paper myths, and an unnecessary but somehow necessary amount of Seinfeld.

This isn’t about panicking over your toilet paper or pretending there’s one perfect answer. It’s about asking better questions about the boring, everyday products we use without thinking twice.

Turns out, the fluff may have been lying to us.

I launched the 4RYL website in the middle of absolute May chaos because apparently I enjoy making my own life harder.

Between my youngest daughter’s graduation, end-of-school madness, and approximately 400 open tabs, I decided it was time to just freaking launch.

Is the website finished? Nope. Is that intentional? Actually, yes.

This week on 4RYL Talk, I’m pulling back the curtain on what building something actually looks like. Not the polished founder version. The version where you spend 20 minutes debating where toilet paper belongs on a website, argue with ChatGPT about navigation categories, obsess over icons, and spend HOURS trying to make AI-generated images look less perfect because real people do not live in Pinterest pantries.

Meanwhile, the internet is screaming BUY NOW, brands seem to appear perfectly polished overnight, and everything feels like it needs to happen faster.

I want 4RYL to be something different. Slower. More intentional. Actually human. Human-reviewed. Human-built. Human-messy.

So the site is live. Some parts still make me cringe. Things will move. Things will change. I will undoubtedly find a typo immediately after publishing this episode.

But that’s kind of the point.

Businesses, websites, and big ideas don’t magically appear fully formed. They evolve in real time.

Sometimes you have to stop moving things three pixels to the left and just freaking launch already.

Someone on TikTok basically told me to put my money where my mouth is.

Fair.

I spend a lot of time talking about small businesses, great products that nobody can find, confusing websites, bad product descriptions, and all the little marketing decisions that can quietly kill a sale.

So instead of just talking about it, I decided to show you.

I picked a real small business, Homestead Collective, and started digging in. Website. Shopify. TikTok Shop. Product listings. Categories. Photography. All of it.

And we started with what I lovingly call the Ugly Baby Audit.

Because when you own a business, everything is your baby. You made it. You love it. You remember how hard you worked on it. Unfortunately, your customer does not care about any of that. They need to understand what you're selling, why they want it, and how to buy it without requiring a treasure map.

And THAT is where things get interesting.

In this episode, I'm showing what small-business marketing actually looks like when there isn't a giant team behind the curtain. TikTok rejects your product photos. Your website categories make sense to you and absolutely no one else. AI becomes your weirdly helpful coworker. And fixing one thing inevitably uncovers six more things that need fixing.

This isn't a makeover show where everything magically looks perfect at the end.

We're doing it in real time. We're probably going to screw some things up. We're going to change our minds. And you're going to get to see whether any of it actually works.

TikTok said prove it.

Okay. Challenge accepted.

4RYL Website

I can spend 20 minutes debating the value of a Costco chicken and, in the same afternoon, think about building a really big business.

Apparently, both of these things can live in the same brain.

This week on 4RYL Talk, we're talking about ambition, motherhood, money, mental load, and the completely ridiculous amount of math women seem to be doing in our heads at all times.

Am I spending too much? Am I working too much? Am I with my kids enough? Should I be making more money? Should I volunteer for that thing? Why is May 147 days long? And seriously, is the $10 chicken actually a better deal?

After listening to Emma Grede talk unapologetically about ambition, I started thinking about why so many women still feel like we need to explain ours.

Because I want more.

I want to build something big. I want to make money. I want to have an impact. I want to support small businesses and put money into the hands of real people doing really good work.

And I also want to be a present mom.

Those things shouldn't cancel each other out.

So this episode is less about finding balance and more about admitting that maybe balance is a ridiculous measuring stick in the first place.

You can question a $10 chicken, worry about the school calendar, build a business, want more money, love your kids fiercely, occasionally feel like you're failing at all of it, and still keep going.

Welcome to chicken math.