Welcome to the kickoff of Season 2 of the Cali Sober Mom Podcast! In this inaugural episode, hosts Monica Olano and Britney Brown introduce listeners to the expanded format and exciting changes coming this season. Monica shares the story behind the rebrand from "Mommy's New Medicine" to "Cali Sober Mom" and emphasizes the podcast’s mission to explore the intersection of motherhood, mental health, technology, and cannabis. Listeners get to know co-host Britney Brown, Monica’s business partner and the creative force behind Imperfect Inspiration. Together, they dive into their personal journeys, discussing how ADHD, mental health, and addiction have shaped their lives and parenting styles. Key topics covered include: The concept of "Cali Sober" and its application in everyday life. The crucial roles of cannabis in managing mental health. Their unique paths through motherhood, from infertility to adoption and foster care. Bridging their different experiences to form a dynamic partnership aimed at educating and advocating for cannabis and mental health awareness. Monica and Britney also talk about the importance of education in cannabis legislation, mental health, and destigmatizing discussions around both. They tease some of the fun and informative segments to look forward to, including a possible "political corner" for quick legislative updates. Join Monica and Britney as they bring their unique voices and expertise together to help listeners navigate the complexities of modern parenting with a Cali Sober twist. Don't forget to check the show notes for links to Brittany's TikTok, Imperfect Inspiration, and more. Tune in and get ready for an enlightening and entertaining season ahead!
Welcome to the kickoff of Season 2 of the Cali Sober Mom Podcast! In this inaugural episode, hosts Monica Olano and Britney Brown introduce listeners to the expanded format and exciting changes coming this season. Monica shares the story behind the rebrand from "Mommy's New Medicine" to "Cali Sober Mom" and emphasizes the podcast’s mission to explore the intersection of motherhood, mental health, technology, and cannabis.
Want more of Monica and Britney - here's where to find us!
Monica Olano [00:00:05]:
Welcome to the pioneering podcast at the intersection of motherhood, mental health technology, and cannabis. It's Callie Sober mom. Here are your hosts, Monica Olano and Brittany Brown.
Monica Olano [00:00:18]:
Welcome to, I guess, season two, but kind of season one.
Britney Brown [00:00:25]:
No, we're calling it season two.
Monica Olano [00:00:27]:
We are calling it season two.
Britney Brown [00:00:28]:
It's done. We're calling it season two.
Monica Olano [00:00:30]:
Well, then you are at season two. Episode one. Callie Sober Confidential.
Britney Brown [00:00:34]:
Do, do, do do.
Monica Olano [00:00:36]:
If you hear somebody else, and if you've always been curious why, I often say we.
Britney Brown [00:00:43]:
There are, in fact, two of us.
Monica Olano [00:00:46]:
There are. So season two, we will have miss Brittany Brown, who is my business partner and Callie's sober mom.
Britney Brown [00:00:56]:
So if you actually have been a listener, was on the podcast. I own a different company called Imperfect Inspiration, and we started kind of doing stuff together. And as Monica figured out that she wanted to branch out further and do more advocacy and do more reaching out and have more branding, those are all things I do. So she asked if I would come on with her as she switched from mommy's new medicine to Cali's upper moment.
Monica Olano [00:01:25]:
I tell everyone, you're the visual yin to my yang because people don't believe me when I say this. I cannot see visually. I think you have now learned it because you have worked with me enough to know that I can see something and say, yes, that looks good. But if you tell me to imagine or visualize, I cannot put it together. So me in front of canva should be a YouTube series. It is a disaster. So Britney yings my yang, so if anything ever looks beautiful, you're like, that's a really cool graphic. My premise is there.
Monica Olano [00:02:00]:
My ideas, my thoughts, my dreams. But Britney makes it pretty for us. And Britney is a legend in her own right, not just someone on my podcast or my visual yin and yang. She created an entire world to destigmatize to make you feel comfortable talking about it, to just own who you are. For the ADHD women and mom world, she has over 600,000 followers on TikTok, y'all. When I reached out to her to be on my podcast, I thought she was just gonna ignore it. And I didn't even reach out at her first to be on my podcast. I was like, oh, shit.
Monica Olano [00:02:38]:
This girl I knew from high school is doing this, and I didn't even know it, but it overlaps. She wouldn't even remember me, but here we are. So she's amazing. If you have not followed her on imperfect inspiration, we will link to all of that in the show notes. Brittany is also a Cali sober mom herself.
Britney Brown [00:02:57]:
I'm a Cali semi sober mom, so I didn't have the same background that Monica did. She struggled with addiction and a couple of other things with alcoholism, and I didn't have that realm necessarily. Mine was a lot more mental health based and so alcohol was nothing. Typically a very good idea for me with a lot of the meds that I take and a whole bunch of other things. Cannabis has provided a completely different option for me as far as choosing a more chill route with parenting and a more chill affect just in general.
Monica Olano [00:03:35]:
Are we calling it?
Britney Brown [00:03:36]:
We're calling it a mild parenting. I don't know if it's gentle, but it's like, like Johnson and Johnson mild soap. Like, yeah, that shit still stings, but it's not gonna hurt you for real.
Monica Olano [00:03:51]:
Not gonna sting as bad, but it's really still full of chemicals. What I gather you learned how to cause. We both have ADHD that finally got diagnosed as adults and I'm realizing in my alcohol struggles and my late ADHD diagnosis is that my dopamine came in one of two ways during those pivotal growth teenage years. And I we're seeing it now where I love to learn about everything. If something doesn't make sense, I'm going to find out why, I'm going to find out where the bottleneck is and I'm just going to keep going. And usually that means questioning establishment, questioning tried and true procedures. And that didn't go well. In my teenage years, folks in power did not like that because I wasn't being bad, I wasn't breaking rules.
Monica Olano [00:04:40]:
I just had very valid points. They didn't want to hear the. So I found out really quick to be quiet and work around it and I chased my dopamine via alcohol. But Britney seems like she got her dopamine in more creative sources. But we're still dopamine chasers nonetheless.
Britney Brown [00:04:58]:
Yeah, we definitely did it in different.
Monica Olano [00:05:00]:
Ways, but we definitely, definitely did it in different ways, but cool life stories. So in case you don't know, Britney and I also, we led separate twenties and thirties. Basically what I did in my twenties was worked enough to party and have fun and meet new people in different areas of life. I moved around the country a little bit, have friends all over the country, and a relationship was never something like that I was working towards or wanted to be in or probably just didn't find the right one. And I traveled the world by myself. I did some things, got an MBA at 30, and then I met my husband and then I had kids, and so mine was a little bit different, but Britney's was really cool because she got to go international and let her tell about that.
Britney Brown [00:05:48]:
Yeah, mine was a little bit of a different world. So I went to college. I took kind of a gap year, mostly because I was burned out from being a near valedictorian and just, like, doing all of the things. And literally, my counselor was like, what are you going to go do? And I was like, nothing. I can't. I'm so tired. I can't do anything. We should have been the first sign.
Britney Brown [00:06:12]:
Don't get me started. I actually have a super great TikTok. Off track. That is about how the best Disney princesses all have signs of neurodivergence. We'll talk about that in a whole other time. So I went to college and went to design school and studied abroad, which was incredible, and got to do that and then ended up meeting my husband the final year of school and just decided to leave and go live with him. So he was in the military. He still is in the military.
Britney Brown [00:06:45]:
And he was stationed in Texas. So I moved down there, which was super neat. I lived in Fort Hood, so it was about 45 minutes from Austin.
Monica Olano [00:06:56]:
Okay. I guess I never knew the Texas aspect.
Britney Brown [00:06:59]:
I did. But we moved to Germany for three years after that and then moved back to the us and ended up, we had, for a while, been trying to have babies, and that did not pan out. So we ended up fostering and then adopting our oldest, Kate, who was four at the time. EB was nine months. And then I found out I was pregnant about two months later. And then a month after that, we found out their biomom had another baby. So I went from my 29th birthday with no kids to my 30th birthday with four. It's the fastest way I could tell that story.
Monica Olano [00:07:37]:
Driving right now. You did hear that. Please pull over.
Britney Brown [00:07:41]:
I'm so sorry. Please take a short break. It was as traumatic as it sounds.
Monica Olano [00:07:46]:
Yes.
Britney Brown [00:07:47]:
So it is one of the areas that Monica and I kind of bond because I didn't have a, you know, technically twins, but I had two little boys that were five months apart and then a little girl who was 14 months older than the five month old. So dope, dope, dope.
Monica Olano [00:08:05]:
But Brittany's threw in. How old are your kids now?
Britney Brown [00:08:07]:
Oh, they're big now. Thank God.
Monica Olano [00:08:09]:
Like, I get to see you, which is so cool. But you know where I've been.
Britney Brown [00:08:13]:
I do.
Monica Olano [00:08:14]:
And what I love about you is, like, you're just there, like, whatever you're not trying to be like, you need to do this. You should really do this. Have you considered this? And I love that. Like, I can just come on and say, last night was a shit show. We went to toddler beds. You laugh, we move on because you know it'll get better. And you don't preach advice at me, which I love. So thank you.
Britney Brown [00:08:33]:
I will tell you if there's something that I think you haven't, like, thought of because sometimes that is the best solution because I didn't find it out until three months after the toddler beds were having. You know what I mean? So we do have that interaction too, which is super nice. And there's a lot of times where something very corporate will happen in my world. And I chat with you about that because I have literally not been a corporate human my entire life. I have no 401k. I've been an artist my entire life. So sometimes when something weird happens in business, we have to talk about it.
Monica Olano [00:09:06]:
Yeah. Meanwhile, I have like three or 4401 k's that I've been spending three years now trying to merge together. But ADHD, whatever. But what blows my mind, really, what blows my mind the most is like, how parallel of lives that we lived while being completely opposite.
Britney Brown [00:09:28]:
We're very different.
Monica Olano [00:09:29]:
So Brittany and I were high school locker partners.
Britney Brown [00:09:34]:
Assigned. Like, we didn't pick them.
Monica Olano [00:09:36]:
Also, apparently having a high school locker partner is not a normal thing. When I tell people this.
Britney Brown [00:09:42]:
Welcome to Des Moines Public Schools.
Monica Olano [00:09:44]:
Wait, you had a locker? First they're like, you had a locker partner? Which they're shocked by. And then they ask me, we didn't get to pick them. They were just assigned.
Britney Brown [00:09:54]:
Okay. But we also went to the second biggest high school in the state. There were a lot of kids in this school, so it was huge.
Monica Olano [00:10:00]:
2000, 2500 when we went. And then it grew from there and they had to break it up. But so you would think, okay, locker partners, like, you know each other. But no, like, it was a huge school. We had different schedules, we had different groups of friends, different interests. So I honestly don't know if, like, we ever talked, literally, it would have.
Britney Brown [00:10:20]:
Been like, oh, hey. And that's pretty much it.
Monica Olano [00:10:23]:
Like, not to say nothing memorable, but, like, you're the same. So I don't take offense to it. And then we both did very well in school with going very little. You were almost valedictorian. I graduated as a sophomore in college with credits. And I went to school one day a week, folks. I worked the system, so we were parallel. There then you went for design.
Monica Olano [00:10:45]:
I went for actuarial science. I was a statistics math major.
Britney Brown [00:10:50]:
I literally couldn't think of anything I'd rather do less.
Monica Olano [00:10:54]:
Everyone thought was going to graduate in three years. Go run the corporate world. Right? I was burned out too, but I didn't even know burnout was a thing. Apparently they make you go to school in college. Why can't. That's a whole other story, too. No, but then I bounced around a little bit. I went from Florida State back to Iowa, out to California.
Monica Olano [00:11:16]:
Bounced around. Was about to graduate from University of northern Iowa with an accounting and finance degree. And my boyfriend at the time had just finished his master's, got a job in New Orleans, and he was like, you're miserable. Why don't you come with me? And so, similar to how you left your last year of school, which I didn't even know, I just, after a year down here, decided, ooh, New Orleans is kind of my vibe. I don't want to go to Pittsburgh, and I don't want to be married at 21. And then we just created these worlds. Like, you went way amazing in the design world, and then I just fell into corporate America. I don't want to sound conceited, but anything I do, I do well.
Britney Brown [00:11:56]:
I won't do it if I won't do it well, nor will you.
Monica Olano [00:11:58]:
And I am the first person that's going to find an inefficiency and not bitch about it. It say, oh, here's a time waste. Why don't I learn this skill? It'll fill this gap for you, and then you can get here. And that always made me wildly successful in the corporate world, and then we both went through infertility, not knowing it. My corporate life gave me $100,000 worth of free fertility treatments, which is insane. And I end up with these three babies in 18 months. You went the foster and the adoption route and ended up with four kids in one year.
Britney Brown [00:12:34]:
We do have a lot of them.
Monica Olano [00:12:36]:
Like, I think the world knew. So it kind of merged us in high school, but not, and then it said, go, go, go. I'm a big believer now, and things happen for a reason. And then life literally came and was like, all right, bitches, it's go time. You have both perfected. Not perfect. We're never gonna be perfect.
Britney Brown [00:12:55]:
But you honed. We certainly endeavored into it.
Monica Olano [00:12:58]:
Yes. And you guys are ready to do something, and for both of us, that means helping.
Britney Brown [00:13:05]:
It does.
Monica Olano [00:13:05]:
I don't want to go make a ton of money for somebody else anymore. Like, if they're doing something cool, let me help you do that. But I want to take all this knowledge and these skills and all these things that I have and apply it to something that can help other people.
Britney Brown [00:13:17]:
I agree entirely.
Monica Olano [00:13:19]:
You already did that in the ADHD world. So we're going to take your knowledge of those platforms and how to do those things with my knowledge of how to navigate the corporate business asshole world.
Britney Brown [00:13:33]:
Yep.
Monica Olano [00:13:33]:
And we're gonna do something. The cannabis and hemp space, because you may be now using hemp or cannabis, and you may have always used it. I don't know. That's really not the point. But right now, we're at a very pivotal juncture in what the US is gonna do with that, and it's really a time to stand up and say, we want it to be for the consumer, not special interest. And the only way to do that is to educate ourselves. So it's so much more than walking into a smoke shop or a dispensary or ordering something online. There's so much education here that has been held from us for a number of years and a plethora of reasons, and that's my monologue of what this is going to be.
Monica Olano [00:14:21]:
Brittany and I are going to bring our experiences in. We're going to have fun with it. I'm going to have fun. If I'm not having fun, I'm probably gonna stop the recording, to be honest with you.
Britney Brown [00:14:30]:
Also, Monica, I have purple hair. How can I not have fun? My favorite thing is looking at the two of us. I do hope we post this on YouTube so you guys can see. But I have, like, weird, unhinged shit on my shelves. There's a crown just here. And Monica looks like she's stepped out of Martha Stewart's house. She's got, like, this light pink cardigan button up, and I have, like, unhinged looking art life.
Monica Olano [00:14:55]:
And the record, though, for the record, $1.75 at Costco. That's right. When they put the little asterisk, they were clearing out, so I bought in every color. But it was before I lost all my weight. From not drinking? No, but that's cute.
Britney Brown [00:15:09]:
That slouchy style is cute. This is, like, a two xl, and I'm a medium. This is, like.
Monica Olano [00:15:14]:
It's epic.
Britney Brown [00:15:15]:
It's what the youths are doing.
Monica Olano [00:15:16]:
Most of what you see behind me. I went to the thrift shop. Good.
Britney Brown [00:15:20]:
That's how it should be.
Monica Olano [00:15:21]:
I actually have no idea what I'm doing, so I threw it on there, and I did that on purpose because I knew Brittany would see it, and Brittany would be like, we need to make that better.
Britney Brown [00:15:29]:
Well, I did think it in my head, but I didn't say it out loud.
Monica Olano [00:15:34]:
You don't think I knew exactly what I was doing? That's what I learned in corporate America. If you go to someone, you're like, hey, I need you to do this. Then they see it as another task on their plate. Like, oh, this person needs me. But I genuinely tried. It's not that I faked trying. This is as good as I can do visually.
Britney Brown [00:15:53]:
And you know what? It's a really solid star.
Monica Olano [00:15:56]:
I knew if I got there, you would look at it and be like, I got you, girl. I got you.
Britney Brown [00:16:01]:
I do. I already can see all the levels that need to shift. It's fine. We're doing great.
Monica Olano [00:16:05]:
So that's how Brittany and I balance each other out. So you'll hear and see that we are gonna bring education and fun.
Britney Brown [00:16:12]:
Whatever, Monica. Why don't we tell them what our major cornerstones are? Cause we want you guys to understand the cool parts that we bring to you. So, education is a huge component, cannabis and legislative education, because there are two very specific parts of that. Monica is a really incredible advocate for the cannabis industry, and what's really cool about that for us is that it puts us in line with a bunch of other really neat people doing really cool things. So we're able to make connections with different brands and different flavors, different types of products, all kinds of things. And that puts us in a really unique middleman situation, because we're able to find all this stuff for you guys and also be involved in some of the advocacy that's happening at the same time.
Monica Olano [00:17:01]:
So thank you. You're welcome. Elevator pitch way better than I ever will.
Britney Brown [00:17:06]:
Another big thing that both of us really believe in is mental health on the whole. And that's something that we'll both touch on a lot. And that's actually probably the biggest piece that ties both of our original companies together, because they were both rooted in giving people other options and reality of what mental health as a mom in corporate millennial America looks like.
Monica Olano [00:17:31]:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Another thing for me that's really big is, yes, the education, the advocacy, but also the education of the brain and how it works, because for so long, I felt that there was so much stigma and there was something wrong with me and that I couldn't handle this, or there was this willpower. And the more I'm learning is, the more systems were set up in place to disenfranchise myself, to disenfranchise others. And we're all disenfranchised in different ways, that we're all fighting these individual battles. But when you start connecting those battles, you realize that they're all coming from very similar places, and that by dividing, we're not able to unify together. So it might seem like sometimes that our topics not are all over the place, but you might not think, well, why would that be on a cannabis podcast?
Britney Brown [00:18:27]:
How does that tie in?
Monica Olano [00:18:29]:
How does that tie in? But we are going to bring that all together, and we're also not a cannabis podcast. That's really where I struggled in the first season, is because I thought I had to be all things cannabis, and I'm not. Cannabis is a small aspect of my life, but it's a very shiny object in the room right now. But there's so much more that's going to go into that with the alcohol, the chemicals, big pharma, big food. But cannabis and hemp, when we start learning about it as an agricultural commodity, is in everything we touch and can actually unify and bring us together.
Britney Brown [00:19:07]:
Absolutely.
Monica Olano [00:19:08]:
We are really gonna have some fun stuff. And every once in a while, I even made it on my note, because Brittany will tell you this about me, is, I'm gonna wanna go hard on stuff all the time. And that's fun for most people. That's fun in my brain. Cause that's where my dopamine's coming from. But you don't give a fuck about everything I give. It's true. I'm gonna try and save the overly technical, overly legislative, overly advocate, and try to condense those big messages into one episode, maybe every four or five weeks, and we'll give you a heads up on that.
Britney Brown [00:19:46]:
I also think that we could potentially do, like, a political corner. Monica and I set a three minute timer, and you can tell us everything about the politics of it, but you have to say it in three minutes or less.
Monica Olano [00:19:59]:
Oh, my gosh. I love this.
Britney Brown [00:20:00]:
Should we try it? Not right now. I'm not ready.
Monica Olano [00:20:04]:
I'm like, can we go? Can we go? Can we go now?
Britney Brown [00:20:06]:
Can we do a nap?
Monica Olano [00:20:07]:
And as Brittany mentioned, all of this is gonna be for naught if it's not something you wanna hear and you wanna listen to. So the reviews are there for a reason. Folks, like, tell us good, bad, if you like something, you wanna know more about something, or if you have questions.
Britney Brown [00:20:24]:
About something, if there's something that you've struggled to understand, or there is a stigma around something really specific that you want us to talk about. We would love to be a pain in the ass. We love questioning everyone. We'll do that.
Monica Olano [00:20:39]:
I keep getting, and it is the very first question I'm answering in the newsletter, which is going out today. So if you've not signed up for that, go to the website, hit subscribe. They still censor us on social media, which is a joke. So if you want real stuff and not me having to say garden and put a cute little face with it, that's where it'll be. But the number one question I'm asked is, how much cannabis did you have while you were quitting alcohol? That is one question that comes all the time. So I'm answering it in there. I'm going to keep a Q and a section in our newsletter for that. But then we'll also deep, deep dive here.
Monica Olano [00:21:18]:
So send them in another one. People want to know, what do your in laws think? What do people in your neighborhood think? So we're going to dive into all of those. But also, Brittany and I can't be the experts on everything.
Britney Brown [00:21:30]:
And we're not.
Monica Olano [00:21:31]:
We're not. We are conduits.
Britney Brown [00:21:33]:
Conduits.
Monica Olano [00:21:34]:
We know the experts, and we'll bring them to you in a bite size piece so you don't have to watch 80 hours of their knowledge to get the fact that you wanted to know. We will do all of that. We'll bring them on to fine tune any of the other questions or messages that we don't know.
Britney Brown [00:21:53]:
Absolutely.
Monica Olano [00:21:54]:
That's what we're going to do. We're going to link everything in the show notes. So we cannot thank you enough for listening to episode one. I think you get a feel for who we are and how it's going to be.
Britney Brown [00:22:06]:
It's bedlam, you guys, I'm so sorry. It's just who we are.
Monica Olano [00:22:10]:
We're fine tuning our schedules so we might start biweekly to be honest with ourselves about what we can commit to. And then once we find out how you're liking it, what you want to know, what frequency we will adjust as needed. So keep you posted, but we will be in touch.
Britney Brown [00:22:29]:
We hope you guys have an incredible start to the school year. I know that both sets of our babies just came back. We sincerely hope you moms that are listening are enjoying your much more leisurely mornings.
Monica Olano [00:22:42]:
For all of you with a little bit of freedom and a little bit of routine back in your life.
Britney Brown [00:22:46]:
Take a breath.
Monica Olano [00:22:47]:
Yes.
Britney Brown [00:22:48]:
Take a nap.
Monica Olano [00:22:49]:
Take a gummy. Take a gummy.
Britney Brown [00:22:53]:
Awesome. We'll see you soon.
Monica Olano [00:22:55]:
Thanks for listening to Callie's sober mom. Don't miss an episode. Follow our show for free on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're consuming the show right now. And let's keep the conversation going between episodes. Connect with us on social. Just search cali sober Madden.