Meet Bridget

Jane Adler is the kind of person who drops a confession on a dad at carpool pickup and then watches him call his wife from the parking lot. She doesn't do it on purpose — she's just wired that way. And this episode is proof that her wiring is, in fact, the point.

Asha and Jane have been friends long enough that they had to consciously save something for the pod. What came out of it: how Jane became a writer when she was calling Substack "cringe" at a travel writing conference in Mexico; why she refuses to monetize her sourdough even when people beg; and what actually happened when she spent six days at a therapy retreat called On Site — not the big-ticket traumas she went in expecting to unpack, but the small things that didn't happen. The things that turn out to still be living in you.

They get into middle child dynamics (Jane is the second of four, "number two of four, really the forgotten"), how the capability trap works — excel so much at not needing anything that you forget to figure out what you want — and the flamingo story she told her daughters to explain where she'd been.

Jane's closing answer: hypersensitivity. She was called a crybaby. Now she walks into any room and connects with anyone.

A conversation about writing, sourdough, therapy, signs from the universe, and the specific kind of humor that only comes from going through enough hard things.

Follow Jane: @janemcgadler | Jane Says on Substack

Follow Meet Bridget: @meetbridget

Dr. Tracy Tran is a board-certified pediatric dentist specializing in airway-focused functional dentistry, tongue tie releases, and craniofacial growth and development — and she came to this work the same way she seems to do everything: by following the question no one else wanted to answer.

This is a party episode. Asha and Keshiia are both here, and Asha brings something personal: Dr. Tran has worked with both of her daughters. Real outcomes, real results, and a lot of things her original pediatrician laughed off.

Together they get into why the mouth is the window to the whole face, why the years between zero and three matter more than most parents realize, and why removing premolars might solve the crowding problem while creating an airway problem twenty years later. Dr. Tran walks them through craniofacial development with props — the tongue as the soft tissue that shapes the entire face, the way expansion at three looks completely different than expansion at eight.

They also go deep on her: growing up as a middle child in a Vietnamese immigrant family in Michigan, the twin sister who was always the better student, the mom who told her not to announce she was in dental school until she actually finished, and the cumulative effect of mentors who showed up anyway. She talks about why she opened her own practice even though she never wanted one, the internal conflict of profiting from healthcare, and what it means to be booked until next April while worrying about the families who can't get in.

She's doing something that didn't exist before she made it. Come listen.

Afton Williams has spent twenty years doing makeup for some of the most photographed faces in Hollywood. She's never had an agent. She doesn't want a product line. And until fairly recently, she wasn't sure anyone could even tell her work was hers.

In this episode, Asha sits down with Afton — a celebrity makeup artist whose clients include Lainey Wilson, Sophia Bush, Millie Bobby Brown, and Julianne Hough — for a conversation that starts with the business of staying booked and ends somewhere much more honest: what it actually took to trust yourself in an industry that has no roadmap.

They cover the control freak who built a career on relationships instead of representation, the Alo Yoga gig that quietly shaped her entire aesthetic, and the Love Island moment that finally proved to Afton that she could do this — if only someone would give her the platform to try. They get into comparison and what it took to stop letting it run her, the work anxiety that required EMDR to untangle, and why COVID was the best thing that ever happened to her career.

And at the end: the quality she had as a teenager that she couldn't stand — her reflexive need to keep the peace — and how it quietly became the most important thing she does every single day.

Afton is honest, self-aware, funny, and disarmingly genuine. This one is warm and runs long and goes somewhere real.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 175

Follow Afton on IG: @afton

Whitney Rowley grew up in the shadow of a lot of greatness.

Her dad was drafted by the Chargers. Her sisters were junior Olympians in downhill skiing. Her grandfather (who drove her to the ski hill every Wednesday because the ski bus didn't take snowboarders) was later inducted into the ski hall of fame. And Whitney was on the bench, in right field, unable to serve over the net, just trying to keep up with her last name.

That experience is the root of everything @Rowley.Adventures stands for.

In this conversation, Keshiia sits down with Whitney and Cash Rowley, the mom and daughter duo behind @rowley.adventures, to talk about what it actually means to raise a confident kid when you spent most of your own childhood feeling like you weren't quite good enough. They cover the origin of "if you're scared, do it scared," the first viral moment that made them wonder if this could be a real thing, what it looks like to be married to the guy who runs 90% of the content creation, and the moment Whitney had to let go of her own fear to let Cash fly.

Cash, who is nine, joins the second half of the conversation. She just got back from Switzerland, where she did three jumps alongside Sean White. Her description of the experience: "scared but send."

This one is warm, unscripted, a little chaotic in the best way, and the most honest thing you'll hear about what it means to parent without pressure.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 174

Alexandra Taylor is the founder of A-Team Public Relations and Strategy Group in Newport Beach, co-founder of Civitas Prima, and the person Happy Dad called when they needed someone to trust with their brand. She spent twelve years on the publishing side of Modern Luxury Media learning how to sell value in a room before she went out on her own.

In this episode Alexandra and Asha talk about:

→ What PR actually is now — not press releases, but network and trust

→ Why Newport Beach is a hyperlocal ecosystem that the rest of the country watches

→ Twelve years at Modern Luxury and what publishing taught her that nothing else could

→ The Happy Dad story: how a brand finds you when your reputation does the work

→ What it costs to be the person clients trust with the thing they can't hand to anyone else

→ Civitas Prima: what she built for young people in OC and why it matters

→ Growing up riding horses in Newport Beach before it was cool

→ The Montana ranch, the deer jerky lunchbox, and the kids who thought it was weird

→ Competitive figure skating, club volleyball, and getting burned by mean girls

→ The report card line that never changed: talks too much, too bossy

→ Watch me

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 173

Follow Alexandra: @atay_pollyp | www.alexandrastaylor.com

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Follow Meet Bridget: @meetbridget | meetbridget.com

Franchesca Danino is the founder of Casa Bahdi, a semi-private body sculpting studio in Los Angeles. She uses lipo laser, cavitation, radio frequency, and EMS to help women with fat, loose skin, and muscle tone without surgery, injections, or weeks of recovery. She also takes the time to understand your lifestyle, your hormones, your history before she recommends anything. That combination of thoroughness and warmth, Keshiia said after her own session, is what makes the experience feel completely different from everything else in LA.

In this conversation, Keshiia and Franchesca talk about what it means to build a practice around this kind of intimate, personalized body work — how Franchesca reads a client the moment they walk in, why the sessions become therapy without anyone planning for it, and what it cost her to take all her savings and start something she had never done before.

They also go back. Franchesca grew up in Dallas with Soviet immigrant parents. Her mom is from Uzbekistan, her dad from Ukraine. She did not speak English when she started kindergarten. She grew up in a household where love was real but feelings were not always said out loud, and she spent years feeling like she was never quite good enough. She tried fashion. She tried skincare production. She kept learning and kept feeling empty. She discovered cavitation before her wedding, became obsessed, told everyone, and eventually took the leap.

Looking back at everything — the beauty knowledge from Eastern European culture, the years in skincare learning how products are made, the PCOS that led her to the treatment that changed her body — she said: this was screaming in my face the whole time. She just had to find her way to it.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 172

Content note: This episode includes open discussion of heroin and cocaine addiction and recovery, the death of Biet's infant daughter from SIDS, and multiple significant losses. Biet speaks about all of it from a place of healing and gratitude. If you are navigating addiction or grief: SAMHSA 1-800-662-4357 | Call or text 988.

Biet Simkin was asked to name her career in one phrase. She said magic. She said it immediately, and she meant it.

Asha first encountered Biet at an event through a mutual friend — an evening of women in a room, not talking much, making eye contact, understanding each other without words. She was so impacted by the space Biet created that she had to bring her on the show.

In this conversation, they talk about what it actually means to do the work that Biet does: holding space for people at the threshold of their own transformation, coaching the person who is moments away from blowing up the life they have built, and why her work is as effective as heroin without the repercussions. She says that plainly. She means it.

They also go back. Biet was born in Queens, New York, a month after her parents immigrated from Russia — conceived intentionally as a freedom child by a father who had cured himself of tuberculosis through yoga and fasting in the Russian woods. Her mother died of pancreatic cancer when she was six. She healed that grief with music and got signed to Sony at eighteen. At twenty-six she had a daughter who died four months later of SIDS. At twenty-eight she was a full-blown heroin addict when her father died. She has been sober for seventeen years.

This is not an episode about suffering. It is an episode about what is built from it.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 171

Michelle Penaloza is a poet. She is also a farmer, a substitute teacher in a small town in Northern California, a James Laughlin Award recipient, and someone who first read her work aloud in a high school classroom while she was grieving her father.

Her dad died when she was a teenager. The grief had no obvious outlet. A teacher made space for her in class, and she read. That was the beginning.

In this conversation, Keshiia and Michelle talk about the life of a poet, what the creative process actually looks like from gathering to the book in hand, and what it means to build a practice out of listening to the world and writing toward what you find. They also talk about growing up Filipino-American in Tennessee in the 1990s, where there was virtually no representation, where people mixed her up with other Asian students constantly, and where she ran for student council with a poster that turned that confusion into a joke on her own terms. The grief of her father's death, the history of Philippine colonialism, the experience of being the only brown dot in a room and wanting desperately to connect with people who could not quite figure out what to do with her.

Michelle's poetry does not separate any of these things. It holds them all.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode [#170]

MaKenna Bernardino, The Skullptress, is a body sculpting and lymphatic drainage practitioner who works in homes across LA and OC. With her table in tow and a backpack full of tools, she works with a singular philosophy: Your body is NOT working against you. Her job is to get stagnant bodies moving. She works with women of every body type, shape and size, bucking the common misconception that body sculpting is solely to "make skinny girls skinnier". Over the years, she has worked with countless women who have experienced major weight loss, post-operative clients, women in perimenopause, and women whose concerns have gone underappreciated or underwhelmingly overlooked. She meets people where they are.

A fellow Redding native (like Asha!), MaKenna spent much of her youth, fishing, hiking, snowboarding, and playing competitive soccer. To this day, it's still her happy place, heading back home to the mountains to decompress between awards seasons. It's the same place that helped her hone many of the skills through her teen experiences. From contracting mononucleosis and spending an entire summer bedridden to an eventual Hashimoto's Thyroiditis diagnosis, came years of self education and the continual pursuit of the understanding of her own body. This episode dives into MaKenna's journey, and how the body and the wellness she had to fight for eventually became the foundation of how she treats and cares for other women now. This one is warm, honest, and so so real.

If thyroid health or autoimmune disease is something you are navigating personally, your own advocacy matters. NAMI.org | Call or text 988 if you need additional support.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 169

Sabrina Chazen is the creator behind The Carpool Catwalk and the hashtag #samestyledifferentsize. She is a size-inclusive shopping expert who sits in the top one percent of creators on LTK and the top one hundred on Shop My. Her Instagram is a full-time job and her DMs are how she does most of the real work of it.

In this conversation, Sabrina and Asha talk about what it actually means to build a career around inclusive sizing, how the Carpool Catwalk got its name, and what Sabrina makes of the body positivity versus body neutrality conversation online and why she does not fully buy into either framing. Her position: two truths can exist at once. You can feel uncomfortable in your body and still wear the bathing suit. You can want to make changes and still go to Hawaii. You do not have to love your body every day. You also do not have to stop living.

She also goes back. Sabrina grew up in Newport Beach, played water polo, was genuinely happy as a teenager, and found as an adult that she has received more negative attention about her size than she ever did as a kid. She was thrown off a podcast once for saying that. The host wanted a story about being bullied for her weight. Sabrina said: my story was happy. That counts too.

She also talks about what she is learning right now through watching her daughter navigate middle school social dynamics, what loyalty means to her, and why she has never once, as the biggest gossip in Newport Harbor High School history, gone on the internet to talk about a stranger.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 168