We call it the Mean Girls episode. Christina King's first note is that she does not really believe in mean girls. She believes in mean behavior, which is different and actually more useful to know.

In this conversation, Christina walks through what healthy friendships actually look like for teen girls, where closeness tips into enmeshment, and what is really going on when social aggression shows up in middle school. She explains why the fastest route to social inclusion is sometimes exclusion, how girls use cruelty to climb a social ladder they did not build, and why the same behavior looks different depending on whether it is relational or social in nature.

She also gives parents and teens practical tools: the TALK acronym for navigating conflict, the three C's (curiosity, connection, correction, in that order), and the front stage and backstage framework for understanding why you have to earn your way into the real version of someone before they let you in.

The digital piece gets its own section. Texts, social media, phone calls, the AIM era that Asha and Keshiia both survived. Christina's bottom line: when in doubt, put the phone down. A conflict that is escalating over text almost always gets worse before it gets better. Face to face is almost always the move.

And the hardest thing she tells parents: the way to protect your kid is by giving them the skills to protect themselves. Going scorched earth on Katie is not one of those skills.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 167 Part 3 of 3 — Teen Mental Health Awareness

Resources: NAMI.org | Call or text 988 @christinakingtherapy

Erin McCarthy's career path goes: Harvard, McKinsey, woodworking apprenticeship in Belgium, sustainable furniture company in LA, Ruggable, professional volleyball in Norway, and now Chief of Staff at Coreviva. She is the first to tell you it looks a little chaotic from the outside. But she has also learned to trust the through-line: she kept going until she found work that actually means something to her every single day.

In this episode, Asha and Erin talk about what it actually means to be a Chief of Staff, how that role looks different at every company, and why Coreviva, a preventative healthcare company with the most comprehensive full body MRI on the market, is the place she finally landed and did not want to leave. Asha shares that she has had a Coreviva scan herself and brought her own mom in, and they talk about what it really means to be proactive about your health rather than reactive.

They also go back. Erin grew up in Manhattan Beach, was a self-described leprechaun at her first soccer practice, lost a little of her fearlessness in middle school when the popular girls stopped including her without any notice, and found her way back through volleyball, drama class, and a Harvard roommate situation that required her to go out on a limb and tell people she wanted to stay with them.

Asha also shares that she had thyroid cancer in 2018. It is part of why she cares so deeply about proactive health and why this episode matters to her personally.

The quality Erin named at the end: her body, and learning to love it. Her mom always told her she would. She finally does.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 166 Learn more about Coreviva: coreviva.com

Jodie McCollum learned Mahjong in 2023 at a friend's house in Dallas. She came back to Orange County, taught a neighbor group as a dare, walked away from that first class completely invigorated, and thought: I wonder if there is a demand for this.

There was. Within a year she had taught 175 classes, reached 2,000 students, built a team of nine, and started expanding to San Diego, LA, and potentially London.

In this conversation, Jodie talks about what it took to build Mahjong OC from a Friday afternoon game into a real business, how her corporate HR and marketing background all came back to her at once after years on a shelf, and why she thinks Mahjong is having a moment not because it is trendy but because it gives women exactly what they actually need: a room, a game, a reason to stay, and a conversation that happens on its own without any pressure.

She also talks about growing up across three countries, what it felt like to land in American high school at thirteen with a New Zealand accent and no friends, and how the girl who coped by keeping her world small ended up building one of the fastest growing community businesses in Orange County.

The detail that ties everything together: she was once the new person in a room full of strangers who all knew each other. She never forgot what that felt like. Now she makes sure nobody leaves her tables feeling that way.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 164

Two women. One supplement company. Zero plan to become best friends.

Jewel Zimmer and Taylor Lamb co-founded Juna out of a simple frustration: neither of them could find what they actually needed. Jewel healed her postpartum experience through amino acids after conventional approaches left her without answers. Taylor spent three years with terrible gut health, acne, and depression before she did her own research and discovered that plants were the thing nobody had thought to suggest. When they met through mutual contacts in the marketing world, the connection was obvious. The company followed.

In this conversation, Jewel and Taylor talk about the science and philosophy behind Juna, what it actually means to build from the root cause up rather than chasing symptoms, and why they believe plants carry something synthetics simply cannot.

They also go back. Jewel grew up in a small mountain town in British Columbia that never felt like hers, moved to Europe at thirteen when her parents sold the house on a whim, and moved out on her own at sixteen because she needed out. She found her way to culinary school, then to some of the best kitchens in the world, then to cannabis, then to Juna. Taylor was diagnosed with ADHD in school, rebelled her way through high school in all the ways that look bad on a report card and excellent in retrospect, built her graphic design and brand skills one gig at a time, and became one of the most respected brand builders in the women's wellness space.

The doctor who diagnosed Taylor told her parents not to worry. Most CEOs have this, he said. She'll be fine.

He was right.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 162

Content note: This episode includes brief discussion of a history of amenorrhea and a stress fracture connected to undereating during the guest's teenage ballet years. It is discussed as a resolved part of her past. If this is something you are navigating, support is available through the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline.

Jacquelyn Umof trained as a professional ballet dancer before a fractured tibia at seventeen ended that chapter of her life. Her mom signed her up for a Pilates class to get her out of the house. She got certified at seventeen, walked into a USC gym with zero teaching experience, and asked for a job anyway. That is basically how she has done everything since.

In this conversation, Jacquelyn talks about building Bar Definition from a beach camera and thirty videos into a real business, the years of bootstrapping before she would let herself spend real money on ads, and the moment her now-husband convinced her to make one good ad instead of a post every single day. She talks about collecting certifications not because she needed all of them, but because she didn't have a fitness degree and wanted to feel sure of what she was teaching.

She also goes deep into motherhood: a genuinely painful pregnancy connected to hypermobility, a three hour home birth she calls the hardest and best thing she has ever done, and the recalibration of her relationship with her body and her time that came after. She talks honestly about the pressure to look a certain way after having a baby, and her decision to prioritize breastfeeding over getting her body back faster.

And she goes back to seventeen year old Jacquelyn: quiet, introverted, more comfortable expressing herself through movement than words, competing only with herself, never her sister. The tibia fracture that looked like an ending turned out to be the beginning of everything she has built since.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 161

Resources: National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline

No guest this week. Just us.

We have been thinking a lot about the difference between vulnerability as connection and vulnerability as performance. About what it means to go through something hard in an era when everyone has a camera and a comment section and the cultural message is that sharing equals healing.

We do not think that is always true.

In this episode, Asha and Keshiia talk about what it actually looks like to process something hard without putting it on display. The value of cocooning. The small group of two or three people who get access to the raw version. The difference between being honest that you are going through something and live-streaming the middle of it. The way oversharing while you are still in it can actually slow the processing down, not speed it up.

We are both going through things right now that we are not naming here. That is intentional. It is also the whole point.

For anyone who is in something hard and feels the pressure to perform it publicly before they have processed it privately — this one is for you.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode [#1160]

Alec Treffers started What Alec Eats as a question, not a strategy. She was a freshman at Arizona State, had just blown out her knee playing Division I volleyball, and was quietly developing an eating disorder she had no name for and no plans to talk about. She started posting food on Instagram because she wondered if falling back in love with cooking might help her fall back in love with food. It did. Eventually it became her career.

In this conversation, Alec talks about the injury that changed everything: the athletic identity that got ripped away in a day, the months in a soft cast watching her leg muscle deteriorate, the mental weight of rehabbing a knee when you do not know if you will ever play again. She talks about how orthorexia developed in that void — the need to control something when everything else felt out of control — and how Instagram became an unlikely path back.

She also walks through the career timeline honestly: seven years in corporate PR including Taco Bell, getting laid off in COVID, giving herself six months to make real money from content creation, and the moment she called it a business and never looked back.

She talks about counting macros as a second healing — how the woman who once tried to survive on Special K red berries ended up eating over 2200 calories a day and finally trusting her body. And she ends with the trait she has carried since childhood that she once found annoying and now understands completely: attention to detail. The kid who color-coordinated her crayons is the one who makes the content that other people cannot stop watching.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 159

Shannon McLaren did not set out to become an interior designer. She set out to be in fashion. She studied business in London, worked at Stella McCartney, moved back to LA to become a celebrity stylist, and spent years working for Petra Flannery — her most formative mentor — learning how to run a small team, stay proactive, and never say die.

Then she accidentally flipped a house. Someone asked who staged it. She said she did. And that was that.

In this conversation, Shannon talks about what it actually looks like to build a design practice from staging to studio to retail, why her sweet spot is twelve clients and four or five in active construction, and what it means to design for how people live rather than how it photographs. She talks about the through-line from styling to interiors that she did not see coming: the same skills, the same brief, the same instinct for the unexpected mix.

She also goes back to the girl she was: an only child rearranging her room in the middle of the night so she could sleep, drawing floor plans at thirteen on the shores of Lake Washington because it was just fun, transitioning from middle-class Orange County to living down the road from Bill Gates and figuring out how to show up somewhere new.

And she ends with the quality she now cherishes that nobody would have told her to keep: her impulsiveness. The gut that fires before the brain catches up. The instinct she did not know was the whole thing.

🎙️ Meet Bridget | Season 6, Episode 158