After four months away, one of the most useless women to befoul our screens is back.
And brace yourselves: She’s here to help. Ostensibly.
Yes, the insufferable Hoda Kotb — recipient of a month-long send-off from NBC’s ‘Today’ show in January, having announced that her two small daughters needed her — has re-entered the chat.
Guess school runs and suburban life have moved down the priority list. We’re back on the cover of People magazine, and that’s what’s important!
Here’s what Hoda’s up to now: Selling joy.
Yes, something you cannot buy, own, or possess for great lengths of time. There’s a difference between happiness, contentment and joy — but don’t ask Hoda about that, because as we saw in footage shot in her own home, she possesses bookshelves without books.
After four months away, one of the most useless women to befoul our screens is back. (Pictured: Hoda Kotb at the ‘Today’ show in March, 2025).
The insufferable Hoda Kotb – recipient of a month-long send-off from NBC’s ‘Today’ show in January, having announced that her two small daughters needed her – has re-entered the chat. (Pictured: Hoda on the right with Today Show hosts Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin).
Guess school runs and suburban life have moved down the priority list. We’re back on the cover of People magazine, and that’s what’s important! (Pictured: Hoda Kotb with her daughters Haley Joy and Hope Catherine).
This is not a person, in my opinion, to be giving life advice. But Hoda, like so many female wellness and self-help gurus before her, will not let a lack of scholarship or expertise stop her.
Introducing, to great fanfare, the 60-year-old Hoda’s new enterprise: ‘Joy 101.’
Shades of Kamala. And that didn’t work out so well.
We’ve got more than a little Meghan Markle in here too: Hoda, like our Duchess of Despair and Endless Grievance, is now a female founder — or ‘flounder’, which feels more accurate.
Floundering around, looking for some kind of perch from which to generate publicity, cultural relevance, and a healthy profit margin by selling other women stuff we just can’t buy.
Literally.
In Meghan’s case, that’s actual merch from her ‘As Ever’ website — which, she just told Fast Company, may or may not be replenished.
Unto the breach steps one Hoda Kotb, whose real reason for leaving her ‘Today’ show gig may have been a reported pay cut from her $20 million per year salary.
After all, if Hoda really had left to spend time with her two small daughters, ages 6 and 8 — shot with her for the People mag cover, which feels gratuitous — well, one would think that’s what she’d be doing.
Also gratuitous: Suddenly revealing that her daughter, Hope, has Type 1 diabetes, on ‘Today’ and in the pages of ‘People.’
Perhaps that’s something Hope would not like the world to know.
We’ve got more than a little Meghan Markle in here too: Hoda, like our Duchess of Despair and Endless Grievance, is now a female founder – or ‘flounder’, which feels more accurate. (Pictured: Meghan Markle at the 2025 TIME 100 Summit).
If Hoda really had left the Today Show to spend time with her two small daughters, ages 6 and 8 – shot with her for the People mag cover 2022 edition pictured), which feels gratuitous – well, one would think that’s what she’d be doing.
But, like Meghan, Hoda’s out there selling, and the children — well, they humanize her, I suppose.
So back Hoda comes to the ‘Today’ show couch, greeted with smiles and tears and proclamations of what a big family they all are — Hoda, who was elevated to co-host after original star Matt Lauer was accused of rape.
Cuddly, so cuddly. Truly, network morning television is a cancer, and this kind of synthetic over-emoting is malignant.
‘Something was missing from my overall wellness’, Hoda proclaimed.
Do tell. A nation is riveted.
‘You get to sit at the feet of the masters,’ Hoda said of her time at ‘Today,’ and so she has ‘curated’ — ugh, that word — a list of geniuses she met there, such as Maria Shriver and Joanna Gaines.
Mensa this is not.
‘Joy 101,’ Hoda said, is ‘more than just an app.’
What else is it? No idea.
Off she went to the fourth hour of ‘Today,’ which she used to co-host with the equally insufferable Jenna Bush Hager.
These two teared up like Hoda had just been released from years-long captivity by Hamas.
Jenna: ‘To be in this new chapter . . . it feels like right now you’re living in a truth that feels so illuminating.’
Hoda: ‘You and I have been on the exact same path.’
These are empty words spoken by people who clearly think they sound smart. Enlightened. Wise.
Hoda Kotb’s app retails for $16.99 per month or $99 annually. All she can — or will — tell us is that in the 16 weeks she’s been in retirement, she has learned about breath work, prayer, and meditation.
‘I thought,’ Hoda said, that ‘people who meditated just had free time.’
THEY DO.
‘I became a seeker,’ she continued. ‘Someone who is looking, looking, looking. The wave I’m riding right now is magical for me’.
WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS ACTUALLY MEAN?
Hoda also used her NBC airtime to dismiss the rumors — which I’ve always believed were planted by her — that she was the #1 choice to replace Kelly Clarkson in daytime talk.
With this most cynical endeavor — building a business from the ground up, freed by her daughters, she says, who are already sick of her (because small kids just love absent parents) — Hoda joins the ranks of self-help snake-oil saleswomen like Mel Robbins, Jamie Kern Lima, Elizabeth Gilbert and Glennon Doyle, to name just a few.
And that’s not including actresses with zero medical expertise who are selling themselves as experts in menopause (Naomi Watts and her Stripes product line), sexual wellness (Kourtney Kardashian Barker and her horny goat weed gummies); nutrition (Kate Hudson and her supplement line); and Gwyneth Paltrow, with her Goop wellness line that still sells the jade egg she falsely asserted could level out hormonal imbalances and regulate menstrual periods — claims that cost Goop $145,000 in civil penalties in a settlement with the state of California.
Indeed: it’s a murderer’s row of hustlers that Hoda now joins.
And that’s not including actresses with zero medical expertise who are selling themselves as experts in menopause, nutrition and sexual wellness – like Kourtney Kardashian Barker and her horny goat weed gummies. (Pictured: Kourtney touting her Lemme supplements).
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop wellness line is still selling the jade egg she falsely asserted could level out hormonal imbalances and regulate menstrual periods. (Pictured: Gwyneth at a Goop event).
Cost of entry is speaking loads of gibberish — something Hoda’s been doing since assuming the ‘Today’ co-host chair, admittedly — and promising regular, hardworking moms and women out there that she has all the answers, even if she can’t specifically tell you what those answers are.
Oh — and you should trust her to tell the truth, even though she swore she was stepping back for the sake of her children. Hoda had a full-on entourage with her on the ‘Today’ show set, but she never, ever mentions whether she has help at home.
I think we all know the answer to that.
But here she is now, to help all of us. Consider this lesson learned during her brief sabbatical, one that helped spark ‘Joy 101’:
‘I didn’t know’, Hoda said, ‘that when you quiet the noise around you, you can think’.
Call it Joy 101 for dummies. Maybe Kamala will be her first client.