Candid Convo: Brooke Baldwin: Leaving Behind Hustle Culture

I'm so excited to share our conversation. Her experience reminds me so much of my own as she grappled with the emotions, the disappointments, and the general life changes that happened during her career.

At age forty four, I have changed basically every single thing in my life. And also the angel number four four four is something that I see a lot. It's sort of for me. I see it as a divine wink, and I wanted to honor that by putting it on my somewhere on my forearm. Did you find the tattoo artist yet? Like the I have sign I have. I reached out to a good girlfriend of mine. She's got some like wicked cool tattoos. I don't know anything about

tattoo artists. I just know I want to like go to the shop and like maybe I should drink some tequila on the rocks and like have a whole conversation. I want him to be like have a gruff voice and be called like Mitch or something and give me this tattoo. So it's somewhere on Broadway, somewhere in the city. I love that it's here in New York because this

is like feels like my home home. And I'm going to sit with him and figure out how exactly where exactly, But I'm just going to do it, like it's time, yeah to do you have any Yeah? I do.

what we do. Just to be the first person to show off your tattoos, to show off my four four four, Oh my gosh, yes, we'd be like it's like twenty three degrees in New York when we're walking around like a tank top, just like I want.

What Not to Wear? And I love her in her rocking like silver Fox, you know, streaking her hair and who she has become and how she has come home to herself like I fell to her as well, and so like between there are some extraordinary women, a who exists, be who exists in the city, and just to be able to bump around with them and then to meet you, you know, it's so exciting. I know, I really am so excited to have met you.

to become this reporter I work in. You know, there are two hundred TV markets, one being here in New York City, two hundred being like a small town Alaska, and I land in like one hundred and ninety two in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I eventually, you know, worked my way up. But it's never it's never a guarantee you know that you're going to land anywhere, let alone you know, have a dream job, whether it's a network news gig or a cable news network. The point being like, for

so many years, we claw, we grind, we hustle. In my case, I literally squatted in an empty office and somehow talk security at the CNN center in Atlanta to just keep letting me in the door. I scribbled my name on a post it. I put it on this office that I claimed. I don't know how I had the hubrist to claim it the way I did, but for two years, essentially I had this office and at the end of that, you know, chapter of my career in TV journalism to leave to know how hard I

had climbed and scraped and posted it. That's the part like I don't talk about this a lot, but on my last day at CNN, I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I pulled out my journal and I journaled to my younger self and I needed to promise her, like I'm weeping in my apartment in no Lda, weeping telling her don't be disappointed in me. I know we work so hard, but just hang in there. I'm gonna make you proud again. But at that point, it had just gotten into a space where I knew

I needed to find dream, a new dream. But it's that like we worked so hard to get there. How do I tell my twenty one, twenty two, twenty three, twenty four all the way to like my thirty year old self, we got to go, we got to move on, We've got to pivot.

something good and you're moving forward. I mean, I had my partner saying to me my Netflix show came out and all of a sudden, like I don't know, one of the first couple of days, it was like number two most stream shows on Netflix, and I'm walking over this bridge and Tribeca and I start to weep because something feels disjointed in me because I'm like I think subconsciously, I'm like, wait, so I just like get this call from Netflix, I get this job, I do the thing,

I do it well, we're rewarded for it. But where was my blood? Sweat and tears? Like something's not what's wrong? What's wrong? And I had this moment and he had to like put his arms around me and say, that doesn't always mean success anymore for you, like that chapter of your life. God bless you for doing all of that to get to where you worked and then have this launching point to do all these other things. But like, fuck that, we don't need to do that anymore. Hallelujah.

and I felt it so much. And then when I was launching this season of the show, I was able to launch it on the Nasdaq closing bell, which by the way, they gave us like thirty six hours to prepare for.

Day parade when I was in the fifth grade. You know, if I had ever thought that one day I would have my face on a billboard in Times Square, like what and that you did it, and that we were both texting because it wasn't just about the billboard, obviously it's cool, but we were both texting about how we were both on network morning shows surrounding the launch of the podcast the season and for me, the launch of my Netflix show and that for me, it was showing

up on television even more just like you know, I love Brene Brown so much, talk so much about armor, you know, just like showing up and being seen instead of showing up with all the armor and literally all the like CNN Shillac like loved all of my glam squad, like love your sisters. But it was just a lot of armor, physical and intangible that I brought with me each and every day to do that show and to cover those stories and the tragedy and the bullshit in

Washington and everything else. So to finally sit and do television with all those layers peeled away, and I know you thought, well the same. You know, you weren't talking about politics and the Democratic Party and the election, you know, you were talking about you. It was crazy. It was very surreal, surreal.

I remember sitting on that beautiful set, all like perfectly quaffed with my fancy clothes and my red soled shoes and looking out at the skyline and in between you know, amazing guests that I'm talking to, but you know, talking

about that other White House a lot. And I remember having a moment like where I just allowed myself to think, wow, Like it's almost like when you're in a relationship and you've been in a relationship for a really long time, you've evolved and changed, and maybe they've evolved and changed and you're not in the same place anymore. But you're trying so hard to fit the puzzle pieces, but it

just isn't maybe fully fitting. And you know, I had tried to do all this work on the side, this women's series, and I wrote my book Huddle Through, obviously not a slow news period, and that was my own soul work, right, But eventually I just knew, sitting in that commercial break, dazing out the window in between segments, like is this making me happy the way it used to? And I do. I still have that like warm feeling in my belly still to do all of this because

it's a calling, you know. I felt called to journalism. I felt called and I still feel called to telling the truth. But the way in which we covered news changed, and I also, you know, started speaking up a bit more about what I wanted to cover how I wanted to cover it. I was a big I'll own this like I for a many years. I think part of it is growing up as a woman in the South wanted was told not to be big for your breches. Yes, you can be anything you want to be, but also

like color in the lines. And I did that. I was a really good girl. I was a really good girl for a lot of years and I said I said yes a lot, and it got me really far pretty fast. And then eventually I embedded myself in writing this book, Huddle, which is about the collective power of women,

and so on the weekend. So it was like this crazy juxtaposition of like covering the Molar investigation and all these mostly dudes in Washington with me on the weekend, sitting in sacred spaces with black judges in Texas and bad ass former veteran now turned freshman congress women or teachers or you know the Megan or Pinos and the Sue Birds of the world, or some of the women,

the black women who started Black Lives Matter. Anyway, I'm sitting with these women and I'm like realizing, wait, these you don't always have to say yes you don't always have to be a good girl. You can speak the fuck up and when you feel that it's right and not color in the lines. And so so I came back through that experience speaking up a little bit more

at CNN. And I don't think that I will never know what the truth is in all of that, But it was sort of this confluence of me realizing it wasn't my dream job anymore and CNN probably not appreciating that I wasn't willing to do all the things every day the way that maybe some other people weren't doing them. And it came to a point where I left.

why guys and ties in Washington story? You know, this wasn't every person's story. And so to be able to sit and speak to you know, in the early part of the pandemic, I remember interviewing this woman who lost her mother in the hospital and at the time we were like, we couldn't understand how she couldn't go see and hold her mother's hand in the hospital. And you know, the nurse is so lovely that she's facetiming the daughter and literally watching and holding her mother's hand as she passes,

as she watches through FaceTime. So I think that actually, I think a lot of this may sound bizarre to say, like a lot of us have of endurance, like emotional endurance and covering. You know, I think of all the like mass shootings, the school shootings, the natural disasters. I actually wouldn't say I was burnt out. I was out

of alignment with what the news was becoming. I think there's an important difference there, and I part of me still may want to jump back in at some point, But it was how I think cable news was covering that administration, how we were being told to cover it. I felt that I lost a lot of my editorial power that I had gained through the years, and it felt much more like a machine every half hour, hit this, this, and this every half hour, and the shows weren't as

distinguished and differentiated from one another. And I felt that my voice. I felt that I felt more like a mouthpiece than a voice. And I was finding my voice as I was coming to that realization. And so I want to exist in my own space, even though I may not be, you know, as successful if you're looking at my bank account as I had been then. But I want to hold on to my voice and grow it. And I want to be in a space where I'm in alignment with myself and my soul and what I'm

doing and being control of the stories I'm telling. Yeah, even though that means saying yes to certain things and saying no to others. Well, I think it can sometimes

be hard to appreciate the difference in coverage change. I remember, even just as a Democratic strategist, as a commentator at first, when Trump was in a campaign, so they would generally match me up with a Republican strategist how the segments would work, and the Republican strategists pre Trump had generally worked in Republican administrations or held some position of power.

The surrogates that were coming up for the Trump administration were basically just people that supported Trump, and so when you guys would have us on in segments, I would talk about what had happened in previous elections or campaigns, and they would just kind of say what they thought, and so I found that kind of insulting. But I slowly realized CNN had more Trump surrogates than I think any other network. Is generally how we were paired.

Trump's line. And they felt their line at Fox News that they were following their audience, like their audience had preferred Trump. But so they needed strategists that preferred Trump, and I started to think, what am I doing here? Like if I'm not even having any kind of strategic conversation with someone on the other side, then I'm obviously not following their audience.

to have a takedown, and so what would happen? Let me, let me narrate as you're annoyed, like with the in the double box. In the Brady box, it is Kate Cable News, right, so it'd be me in the middle with you and fill in the blank, you know, Trump person. They would want you guys to fight, right that That is, in my opinion, terrible television because no one actually gets a cogent thought out. It's just people talking over each other, which is also really hard for me as a host

to you know, you're essentially the referee. Sometimes it can be incredibly effective, and I can understand why we did it when one way, because you can't just have a one sided, you know, piece about what's happening politically in the country. But the way in which some of these folks would fight, and then ultimately you would want to have you know that up Let's say the segment up on CNN dot Com. You'd want to have it up

on Twitter. You would want to have then the like sort of like fire the embers lit on Twitter so that people would go and find the segment. And you know, I can imagine from that other person's perspective, you know, they probably weren't as known they were trying to get followers, and maybe from a cable producer perspective, they want that fight on Twitter because they want people to click on the segment. They're like, oh wait, who is this person?

Oh wait, let me backtrack and find the segment that led to this fighting whether you know. But at the end of the day, like, I'm just all about this is such a cliche word these days, but I'm so about like authenticity, like y'all, let's just keep it real, yeah, you know, and so much of that is just so it's fake, it's bullshit. I'm literally allergic to it. So when I found myself sitting in the middle of it, and sometimes it was fascinating, but sometimes even I would

just be like, what am I doing here? How is this furthering anyone's education on X subjects? Yeah?

what happened happened. Shame on us. This is the media for not calling it, not seeing it. And then twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, I really got to start covering more women, which really like soothed my soul, but also you know, just yeah, it was a long time. Yeah, it was a long time. It was a long time. It was hard.

was with me, and we all go. I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I wanted to go to the Empire State Building and climb to the tip top. Don't know why. I love that building. It's my favorite building in all of New York City. I think I just felt that I knew I was on the precipice of this new chapter. I had no freaking clue what I was going to do. All these people were like, Okay, no, Brooke, but really, what are you leaving for? Why are you going? What is your job

that you're not telling us? And I was like, no, for real, I have no idea, and I needed to sit at the top of the Empire State Building and I think, just have like a centered moment of here I am. There's all this blank space ahead of me, and to just like recalibrate, you know, I was my job and who do I want to be? Who am I? What is coming home to myself? And that was then the beginning of my most ginormous pivot of my life. Okay, so you pivoted professionally and also at the same time

you pivoted personally. Yeah, how related were those two? Let's see as I So I got married in twenty eighteen, which was when we met. Our first year of dating was twenty sixteen. So if you can imagine, you know, he's living in London. I'm in New York City. I'm covering this insane election. I'm like, do you want to meet me in New Hampshire, Iowa or Miami. We take our first vacation in Asia. My feet don't hit the ground. It was like the most incredible, most insane year of

my professional and personal life. I fell madly in love with this person. We get married twenty eighteen. I feel like I hit the lottery he is, you know, I thought it was marrying James Bond and he's an amazing, brilliant soul. He moves to America, we move in together in Soho, and therein sort of starts my what am

I doing with my life? My professional life sort of churn right, And so maybe there was a little voice early in like, listen, my job was number one, Like I didn't I didn't work that hard for all that many those many years to like I was just like, what's happening, What's happening within me? What's happening with this industry? And so that was my most sort of predominant concern. I think under the surface was starting to assess, like, all right, state of my marriage, state of my marriage.

COVID hits, everything got really quiet. I love that. I think it was a Glennon Doyle once said something like, it's like when COVID hit, it was like we were all these snow globes, and in normal life, the snow is like wsh and wushing all around and we are allowed to be weren't distracted by everything. COVID hits, snow hits the ground and you're just sort of stuck there. In the center is this figurine like, Oh who am I? What's happening? Who am I married to? Do I like

my job? Do I like myself? Do I like my friends? You know, we went through all of this, and I think in that quiet I started wonder, I started to reassess. I started really doing like deep excavation work within myself, which then only got exacerbated once I left SANN in twenty twenty one. And that was the beginning so interesting, all these like major sort of like points on a grid. And by twenty twenty one, in April, I leave SANN and I go on this deep, deep dive into myself.

I deepen my spiritual practice. I go on retreats, I do all the things, I read all the books, just trying to like find solid ground. Who am I? I'm just Brooke. I'm not Brooke Baldwin from CNN. And in that time, I think that's when our paths really diverged. And I think that I was changing. I know I was changing, and I ultimately really wanted him to join me on my path, and I think he was plenty happy on his. And in the end, what I learned

from CNN having maybe stayed in something. I don't know if I overstayed or the way in which I left wasn't entirely lovely experience, and I didn't want that for my marriage. And so I went to the Hoffmann Institute. Have you heard of this place? Only that I listened to your podcast with them, but I don't know about it. I went to this place in Petaluma, California, and I

wouldn't say it changed my life. I changed my life, but there's a lot of work around parenting patterns from your childhood, all this like deep, deep work you do. And as a result of that, this thing happened while I was there, and I realized it was time for me to love and let my husband go. And I don't recommend divorce to the faint of heart. Is it is it's coming home and telling him I love you, but I need to let you go is the hardest

thing I've ever done in my life. But I am also every day so proud that I found the strength to do it. And that is how I got there. And I know that what happened this may sound bizarre to connect it to you about what happened with me and CNN and falling out of alignment and overstaying in that sense taught me not to do that in my marriage. I could have easily hung in. And I mean, we don't have kids. We didn't have kids, so I understand like people women who men who stay in for the

sake of the kids. I get that. But because we didn't have kids, I think it made it easier for me to just take a deep, profound assessment of the stay of my marriage and my life and my dreams and happiness and his and make that call and know that I needed to move on. When you were doing all of that spiritual work, what do you think you were looking for? Like was it sort of like a big funnel and you were just looking for an idea

to cling on to. Were you looking for like an archetype of self to say, yes, this is the new me. Like I wasn't sure what I was looking for, So I'm so curious how you were thinking. That's such a great question. I remember when I left CNN, you asked me if I remember where I woke up the next morning. Here's what I remember, Like right afterwards, we went to the Caribbean. We went to the British Version Islands for three weeks and I just like soaked up the sun and drank a lot of rum and like let my

hair be curly and wild. And realized halfway through that the like hanging out on the beach drinking umbrella drinks like was not going to do the doo. And so I remember texting my friend Taran Tumy, who's the founder of the class, and I was like, Yo, tt, I feel like there's more for me to look into and myself in my life, and can you please help me

point me toward something? And she she did, and I went on this retreat with her in Sedona that summer, and she really kind of became a sort of spiritual sherpa for me and they and the way that she jokes to this day like she didn't know how much I really wasn't aware of her didn't know, and I think I didn't know it was like blank slate ahead

of me. I just knew that I felt that for the last handful of years I was not I keep coming back to in alignment, like I'm trying to figure out how else to say it, Like my insides didn't match my outsides, Like I love myself as a little girl but somewhere along the line, like I deviated from this path of who who I was and how I showed up, and instead I feel like I started showing up trying to be the person that other people or my boss or my producer wanted me to be. And

I did that to myself. Nobody did that to me. I did that to myself, and so I knew that I needed to read the books and be around the people who thought these bigger things, who were open to you know, God, sore spirit whatever you want to call it, like the spiritual Advisor I know calls it like Elmo, like whatever you want to call it. I just knew I wanted to like almost like be my journalistic self and soak up like how these people existed, how they

moved through the world. I was fascinated because I knew I wanted some of that, and I think through that experience, my biggest what I I needed to learn was to have faith. And I don't mean that in like an overtly like I'm not a super religious person, but I needed to learn to just like let the fuck go. Like for me, I think of always. Somebody was telling me this the other day, like I'm always so anticipatory, like I'm like, Okay, what's the next thing. I'm gonna

rush to this thing. I'm I'm gonna get out ahead of this thing. And it's because I'm in fear, right, I think that I can control the thing by getting ahead of it, or being prepared or being the good girl,

whatever it is. And I had to learn to sit still, to get quiet, to like clean my internal mirror, to listen to my inner knowing, to listen to that little voice that we all have to like get to know her again, to get to know that light, little little Brookie, like the little girl within me who early on knew right from wrong, knew what she wanted, knew what she was about. I needed to find her again, That's what it was. And in finding her again, we have conversations

every day. No, So in finding her again, I now feel that I can be in faith and know that even though I don't have any answers to or any real security, you know, professionally moving forward, I know that like in the end, it's going to be okay. Does that make sense? That makes total sense, Scott, I was actually talking with so much of it makes sense. But I think, you know, I started this show truly because

I needed advice for myself. I needed people to tell me that they had gone through something, and I needed to hear examples so that I could see examples of how to move forward.

tried drinking water, drinking water. Tweakers start there, drinking water, meditating, putting your phone on, do not disturb, face down on your bedside table, prayer, just even closing your eyes and breathing.

even like living in this city alone. I remember my trainer being like be be, like you got to start saying no, you know, but I just couldn't. I just said yes to everything, and I had to learn how to say no. I had to stop the spin, the spin of everything coming at us so quickly, whether it's social media, whether it's people who we love or maybe we don't love who keep texting us? People pulling on us schedules, were kids, whatever it is. I had to find a way to like stop the spin because I

could feel it, you know, in my body. I was like walking crooked. I like had the best chiropractor because I would see him all the time. We became fast friends because my neck was one way, and then like it was affecting my spinal whatever, and then my eyeballs, and then I was like light sensitive and I'm sitting under lights every day. And then oh, by the way, like I'm on the floor like because my back is out, and you know, your body, you know, Besil vander Kolk,

like your body keeps a score. It's so true. Like it was all manifesting in my body, and so I needed like this was like a nine to one to one situation. I had to figure out, like what the fuck was wrong with my body? And so I started going within. So when I was you know, still very much at CNN and the swirl, I that's when I started meditating.

all at once? You know, like I was ready, it was more difficult to sit back and just pause to take you know, as my friend Jen says her, you know she took the sacred pause. I was taking my sacred pause. I mean, I'd been working for twenty plus years. I had taken two two week vacations in twenty years, one to climb out Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and wanted to get married. And that was it. That was it, Like we are all are hustlers, and so I took a

big old pause. And then I remember I the summer after I left CNN, I booked myself a one way ticket to Los Angeles and I took what I referred to as my wisdom tour. All the people who I had interviewed or places or things that I was interested in. I just called people up and wanted a meeting. Like in LA It's very like, let's take a meeting. So I was like, let's take a meeting. It's not lunch or breakfast, it's let's take a meeting. So I took a lot of meetings and filled my brain with information.

And then at the time, too was still like working off of you know, Huddle, my book and doing a lot of speaking for Huddle, which was awesome, you know, and being able to post pandemic, being able to show up in ballrooms and talk to women in person is like one of my absolute favorite things to do. And then I actually had come up with this idea for a TV series, an unscripted TV series, and had was working with a like an a squad production company, and

we developed this whole thing. I threw all of myself in it in twenty twenty two and got turned down by everyone I pitched it too, which was earth shattering. And by the end of twenty twenty two, I was like with Stacy London and Jill Lindsay and Christine Joy standing in Temple Bar, like weeping into my champagne and wondering like I was like ringing in another new year and not totally knowing what I was going to be doing.

And then got the Netflix call and that was awesome, but like, how like how get what was the call? Who called my calls? My agent at the time gave me an email heads up that Netflix was looking for journalists former journalists to host some of their unscripted shows. And I was kind of like, okay, that's cool, that's interesting. I remember, you know, god rest Is Sully was such a bad ass. Anthony Bourdaine. I remember when Tony Bourdin was doing so much work for us a CNN. He

started taking me under his wing. We had coffees. You know. I was interested in this unscripted television in the series Space, and so I was like, cool, cool, cool, I'm in, I'm down. I'll take a zoom. Absolutely, And so then I had my first zoom with Netflix. It was Rich and Annie. They work in casting at Netflix. And you know, there's actually something really amazing. By getting turned down so many times and it being like nearly the holidays, I just had like zero fucks. I sat on the zoom.

I put my hair on the top of my head. I was like, I'm putting on I'm like powdering my nose and putting some sheer lip gloss on, and that's what we're going to call it a day, and the two of them just sort of spoke to me and we talked about They were very like vague around what the show would be. I think they just wanted to like see what I was, like, Was I like serious news anchor lady or did I know how to be myself?

And I told them crazy stories of being in the field, you know, as a correspondent, and you know, I was like, listen, like being in reality sheet TV is not totally dissimilar to being you know, thrust into a crazy scene and having to find your way, find your story. And so I had no idea, Like I finished the zoom and I was like, I don't know if I'm ever going to hear from them again. And then that led to another zoom with the showrunner who used to work in news.

So we sort of had this shorthand which led to another zoom when I was celebrating my brother's fortieth birthday in the Bahamas and I was like, y'all, just a second for that cocktail. I'm gonna go sit in this. I'ma sit in my hotel room and take the zoom with like this top executive in Netflix, and you know, had this whole conversation with him again got off into twenty twenty two. Had no idea, but.

made it really clear and I would say this. I would actually like say the silently to myself whenever, whether it was a zoom or a meeting I would take mostly in Los Angeles. I'd just be like, let me be my most, be let me like shine my brightest in this meeting. And you know what, like if they don't like who they see, which is my total, full big self, then like cool, they've done me a favor.

Like I'll know you know, and I'm not no longer going to try to be who mold myself where the things as I think the person wants me to be. It's just exhausting and I'm over that. So I just knew that I showed up as myself, and you know, I was excited, but also like what could I be getting myself into? I didn't totally know. And then you know, I got the call like two days before I went to Hoffman when I was in northern California after the holidays.

And then I went in like turned over my electronics for seven days and then like worked on myself and all the things within me, and then you know, came out and was ready to like prep for the show.

That's how I came to see it. Yeah.

as to what the show the trust is about. And then I fly to the Dominican Republic where we shot it. I want to say like something like March. First, I think I had been given more or less baseball cards of the contestants, maybe within the last week or two, which is you know, I'm used to like waking up and finding out what I'm covering for the day of the morning of, so this is like plenty of lead time. This is also not you know, Prime Minister. This is a human who wants to win a bunch of money.

So it's like a different, you know, different challenge and then I really just kind of like win into it. Not fully blindly, but I think one of the things I actually really what made me good at my job or anyone doing live television is you have to be able to pivot live. You have to be able to like zigzag. And so when we would have these challenges on the show, I was able to, like, as we used to say, throw out the rundown, we would we could zig zag, yeah, roll with it, And did you

have to film like all night long? Like it looked very dark? It was dark A lot we would we would have so so that was the hardest part for me, by the way, staying up all night. It wasn't no, it wasn't all night, but they would be they would say, Okay, Brook, we need you. This is all so new for me. Like they were like, okay, we need you to come to set at nine, ten eleven in the morning. We're going to shoot v We're going to shoot like a

daytime challenge and then a night time trust ceremony. But then it would be like a lot of downtime in between.

But I would have to stay, you know, nearby, so I would roll up I had, like you know, I would get all done and then it was a lot of hurry up and wait, and then the brains behind the show would come and find me and be like, all right, Brook today, here's what we're going to be doing, and this is more or less what you're going to relate to the contestants, and this is what we're interested in, but we have no idea how it's going to go.

And I was like, okay, cool, cool cool. So then I would show up and you know, they would yell, we would I would see the contestants, I got to know them, and we would finish like I think the latest day was probably like midnight, maybe just maybe midnight, So it wasn't crazy, but it was a lot of like concentrated shooting for I want to say, like twenty one days. It was like no days off. Yeah, work, work, work, and then peace out. But so you did get to

know them. You're saying like did you have interactions with them off camera? Like how much did you know there was a lot of like backroom dealing going on, Like how much did you know about that? Like what do you mean backroom dealing of the contestants with one another? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

it's a great question. I only saw them when I went to set, like I met them as the audience met them on camera, you know, or when I would see them for a challenge, the cameras would be rolling, and then when it would we would have time to maybe break for something else, you know. I would chat with him briefly, but really I tried to stay agnostic and out of it so that I could come in and genuinely be objective. And I mean it's hard to like not have favorites once you sort of see how

how they are, just even on camera. Really, I got to know them in our back and forth, so that the trust ceremonies, you know, on the cliff, because we would chat for quite a while. But I didn't know a lot of what was happening in the house. In fact, like I when I watched the show with everyone else, I saw a fan, I saw a lot of things. I didn't even know what was happening in the house, which is super wild, and like it made me love

and not love like some people even more, you know. Yeah, but if you were shooting for twenty one days and you were trying to keep a little distance from the contestants.

was amazing. I'm great like by myself, you know, like put me by the pool if I've got to like kick it for two hours, you know, like I won't have my makeup melt off. But it was it was great. So do you feel like this is the new book, like now you are the strategy show host? Yes and no. I think that this is one of my lanes. I think that I have like a full spectrum of Okay, I can totally host reality TV. And when I say that,

like asterisk footnote. I want to do like smart, strategic, you know, sort of reality that's you know, I'm interested in humanity and how people like wrestle with things like greed or trust or what or I mean I said to Netflix, like, I don't know if I want to host like a dating show, but yes, I would totally do that because it was so fun and I missed fun. I missed smiling on TV. My mom used to text me at CNN and she'd be like, are you smiling today?

And I'm like, Mom, that's the pandemic and like people are, no, I'm not. So my mom was really happy to watch this trust, which she has watched two times now. And then you know, I've got other things that I'm up to. So it's nice to be able to like check various boxes of my own interests. So it's not just one thing like I want to be a multi hyphen it what is one low that you thought, I'm not sure I'm going to get out of this, But now in.

So I move into my childhood bedroom. Okay, wow, and then I move in with my cheating boyfriend because that is the best option of all three at the time. Oh my god, there's so much more of that story. But that could be for the for uh should that be like our part two? This would be part two. That to be part two. I feel like it's part two. But that was pretty that was pretty low, like I

was when it rains a purse, you know. I ended up like working two days a week as CNN International overnights, living with the cheater, just wondering like what had happened with my life? Yeah? Not good? Oh my god, Well, Brooke, I can't wait for part two. Thank you Thank you so much for joining us, Thank you.