Like many of today’s biggest pop stars, Ariana Grade got her start in children’s television. In 2009, the 16-year-old Grande started her stint as Cat Valentine on the Nickelodeon sitcom Victorious and then on the spinoff show Sam & Cat. By the time the latter show ended in 2014, Grande was well on her way to megastardom, a month away from releasing her breakout sophomore album My Everything. This year, the Max documentary Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV shed light on sexual harassment and toxic bullshit that was apparently happening behind the scenes at Nickelodeon for many years. Grande did not appear in the doc, but she talks about her experiences in a new interview.

Quiet On Set is primarily focused on longtime Nickelodeon figure Dan Schneider, who was, among other things, the creator of both Victorious and Sam And Cat. A recent supercut shows a lot of potentially-inappropriate stuff that Ariana Grande was made to do in her time on Nickelodeon. Today, Grande appeared on the actor Penn Badgley’s podcast Podcrushed. (Badgley plays Grande’s love interest in her new video for “The Boy Is Mine.”)

During the show, Grande and Badgley talk about their shared past as teenage actors. Grande says that those Nickelodeon shows were a hugely exciting opportunity for her and that she’s got great memories from the experience. She continues:

Obviously, my relationship to [child acting] has and is currently and has been changing. I’m reprocessing a lot of what the experience was like. I think that the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting. I think there should be therapists. I think there should be parents allowed to be wherever they want to be — not only on kids’ sets. If anyone wants to do this or music or anything, the level of exposure that it means to be on TV or to do music with a major label or whatever, there should be in the contract something about therapy is mandatory twice a week or thrice a week or something like that.

I was actually talking to Max Martin about this the other day because he was always such an amazing person to talk to about the stressful parts of what I was experiencing, and he was just amazing. But a lot of people don’t have the support that they need to get through performing at that level at such a young age, but also dealing with some of the things that the survivors who have come forward. There’s not a word for how devastating that is to hear about. So I think the environment just needs to be made a lot safer all around.

When one of the show’s cohosts brings up the different ways that adults often mistreat children in the film industry, Grande says more about it without bringing up the documentary:

It’s really taking advantage of how much it means for the young performer to get a laugh from video village, like, “Oh shit, I’m doing something great! This is funny! This is good!”… Speaking specifically about our show, I think that’s something that we were convinced was, like, the cool thing about us. We pushed the envelope with our humor, and the innuendos were — were were told, convinced as well, that it was the cool differentiation.

I don’t know. It all happened so quickly. And now, looking back on some of the clips, I’m like, “That’s… damn, really?” It’s what you think about if I had a daughter…

The things that weren’t approved for the network were snuck onto our website or whatever it was. That is another discovery. Going into it, I guess I’m upset. But towards the end, my mom was allowed to come to set. [A co-host asks, “She wasn’t allowed to come to set?”] When we were younger, they were allowed to come to run-throughs sometimes — things like that, occasionally. But yeah, towards the end, she was there a little more, and we’ve been talking a lot about this recently.

As the conversation progresses, Ariana Grande cries a little bit. You can watch it below.