Piercing Wizard Podcast

The Piercing Wizard Podcast is a working professional's show about professional body piercing. Ryan Ouellette hosts, a piercer with 20 years of experience who travels teaching technique and safety classes and belongs to the Association of Professional Piercers. Lola Slider co-hosts and frequently drives the episode, introducing guests, running the reminders, and occasionally taking the whole show solo with Ryan as the guest. The format is elastic. A classic episode is a piercer interview, one person's route into the trade told at length. Number 272 traces a career that started on the front desk, and the conversation makes a case for it: learn disinfection, sterilization, jewelry ordering, phone work, accurate pricing, aftercare and troubleshooting before you learn anything else, and the career lasts longer. Other episodes pair two topics, like the effect artificial intelligence is having on the modern piercing industry alongside a follow-up on the gold piercing model and whether it holds up. There are Ask-Us-Anything rounds and year-end recaps. Industry governance gets real airtime as well, with association board election results reported and congratulations passed around to the people elected. Episode 271 marks 25 years of Ryan's shop and rewinds to the early days, an intense apprenticeship, downtime in 2000, and a small storefront where the rent left room to breathe. The show also does not pretend to be polished. Hosts pause to correct the name of a host shop mid-outro, then unpause. One episode circles the discomfort of hearing yourself back, and a host confesses to leading every thought with a filler phrase dozens of times per recording. Travel provides its own material. A Florida seminar trip yields raccoons, a deer with a missing foot, vultures at the roadside, a great many alligators, and a puppy that turns up dragging a leash. Cold opens borrow sword-and-sorcery voiceover and groundhog forecasts before the standard introduction arrives. Practical business runs underneath everything: seminar dates and remaining seats at host studios in Tallahassee and Fort Myers, a Patreon tier carrying on-demand video content, a webinar on bevel theory. It is a small industry talking to itself, which is exactly its value. Newcomers get a map of what the job actually involves beyond the piercing itself, and veterans get colleagues arguing about jewelry economics, association politics and where the trade goes next. The pace is unhurried, the digressions are frequent and the expertise is never in doubt.