I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

You know, I actually left academia to be home with my children, meaning I got my doctorate

and then did not take a postdoc position and eventually that led to me returning to acting

because I was running out of health insurance. That's the truth that I ended up on this, you know,

the most popular comedy in America by accident.

That's Mayam Biolic and the popular comedy she mentioned is of course the Big Bang Theory.

Today Mayam is everywhere, her own channel on YouTube, a podcast devoted to mental health

issues, a new sitcom entitled Call Me Cat and an upcoming movie she wrote and directed

starring Candace Bergen and Dustin Hoffman. And of course when she was in academia she got a

PhD in neuroscience so we had a lot to talk about. This is going to be so much fun to talk

because we, I think we have a lot in common. We're both actors, we're both right, both

interested in science and your middle name is Chia, right?

Yes.

My wife, our lean's middle name is Chia. That's lovely. In that nice? Yes.

And when she calls me from the other room I say, was will still Chia, that's what I say

to my children, but not with the father of my, do you do they call you Chia, no they call

me monola. You speak by the way a lot of languages don't you?

Yeah, well I was raised with Yiddish. It's been a minute since I've had to speak it fluently

but that was my mom a lesson as we say. And I was also raised with Hebrew just, you know,

I grew up in a practicing Jewish home but I learned Spanish in school and kind of kept

it up. And then in college I got my minor in Hebrew and Jewish studies which involved

two years of Hebrew, both conversational and biblical and then I did a year of Yiddish

...