Advertise on podcast: At the Brink with Erica Brinker

Caralyn Brace never planned to have children. It wasn’t something she actively didn’t want. It just wasn’t something she aspired to. Then she met the right person at the right time and everything changed. They got pregnant fast. On their wedding day — a small backyard ceremony with immediate family — Caralyn was bleeding heavily. She knew what was happening. Any woman who has miscarried knows. She took the medication that was supposed to stop it. It didn’t stop. She finished the ceremony, walked upstairs, and then came back down and cut the cake. Six months later, on vacation, her husband became violently ill. He couldn’t leave the hotel room. At the resort bar, Caralyn met a woman who turned out to be an adoption attorney. Over the next few days, that stranger taught her everything about how adoption in this country actually works. They came home. Within a week, her husband was diagnosed with stage 3B colon cancer. What followed was sperm banking before chemotherapy, adoption paperwork filed during treatment and an open adoption with a birth mother who had Type 1 diabetes. They knew the risk. They chose to walk toward it. Their daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 at age five. In this conversation, Caralyn talks about what it means to keep choosing forward when every chapter comes with a new crisis, what the day-to-day of Type 1 really looks like and the moment on the oncology ward when she decided she could handle it. Executive Producer: Sara Glassman Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media |YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Erica is in Vegas watching the sunrise over the strip because she lost the will to rage at 8PM. Martha Stewart was on stage at her trade show. Snoop was not. This week: Target launched a comeback campaign and we were bored. Meanwhile three people told Erica their cute outfit was from Walmart. Ann Taylor is also trying and also boring. Donatella Versace is 71 and thriving at Revolve. Then we got into interview icks — the iced coffee debate that hit the Today show (we're fine with it), bringing a parent to an interview (we are not fine with it, and Erica once rescinded an offer over it), the coffee cup test (mind games), and the no-makeup question that opened a real conversation about gender bias in hiring. Gossip Girl this week: a woman in Boston is spiraling about her 30th high school reunion because the guy who dumped her before prom is now divorced and DMing her. She has a trainer and two dresses. We told her to bring the husband. Also: tofu beat every protein on the planet in a Cambridge study (cheddar cheese came in last), and Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo of Giggly Squad just signed a $140M deal with Sirius XM. They record in the same studio we do. We're giggling with them. Production notes: Sara wishes she had her haircut before the filming of this episode.Erica knows that the sun sets in the evening and rises in the morning. Whatever you say on a podcast in Vegas, stays in Vegas? This week's guest: Ryan Larson on her IVF journey and the misdiagnoses that almost derailed it. Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ryan Larson got married at 29 with a timeline in her head. Two kids, maybe three. From the day she and her husband started trying to the day her daughter was born, it was three years. She got pregnant quickly and lost it early. She got pregnant again, and that is where it came apart. Bleeding one night in San Francisco, she went to the hospital. They did an ultrasound, told her there was a heartbeat and sent her home. There was no baby on the scan. She had miscarried weeks earlier, and nobody caught it until she found a doctor who would look properly. What followed was retained tissue, a fever she could not break, multiple procedures, a move back across the country to find care she could trust, and a full round of testing where every single result came back normal. She was 31. In this conversation Ryan talks about what it takes to get a doctor to listen, the question her husband started asking in every appointment, the parts of IVF nobody warns you about, and the ultrasound she walked into expecting the worst. Executive Producer: Sara Glassman Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sydney Sweeney got naked for a gambling app and everyone has an opinion. Ours might be unpopular: she has equity in the company, she came up with the creative and she knew exactly what her assets are worth. Stop tearing women down! We do love what the female athletes did in response though — it gave them a platform they might not have had otherwise. Win-win? Also this week: the iPhone Duo is $2,000 and Sara can't decide, Dyson made a toothbrush with a camera in it ($499), the Eight Sleep Pod might change your life but then you can never sleep in a hotel again, a Gossip Girl from a 46-year-old whose friends typed 39 on her Hinge profile over margaritas and now she's on date three with a man who thinks she was born in 1987, champagne prices are going up because France is too hot (stock up now), Priyanka Jain just raised $59 million for women's health research (women weren't required in federal studies until 1993), and Sara and Erica answer: what are you finally done apologizing for? On At the Brink: Colleen Mahoney. She had a heart attack while conducting a meeting. Her story is one you need to hear. Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Colleen Mahoney has spent more than two decades at the top of corporate marketing and commercial leadership — nineteen years at Honeywell across aerospace and building technologies, then renewables, and now specialty chemicals. She is the person who drives results and gets things done, a self-described workaholic and perfectionist. A few years ago, in Atlanta, in her early 40s, she had a heart attack. The warning signs did not look like the textbook. She felt a throbbing pain the night before and told herself it was stress and travel. The next morning she drove her daughter to school and ran a staff meeting before she finally went to the hospital, where doctors told her she was in the middle of a heart attack with a heart rate over 206. As she puts it, she ignored it the way so many women do. In this episode Colleen talks with Erica about what her body was trying to say and what she decided to actually hear — dismantling the perfectionism, learning that 50 percent of good is often good enough, and finally asking for help. She also talks leadership, switching industries, raising a daughter in a digital age, and the company she started a little over a year ago. It is a conversation about what changes when your body interrupts a life you were too busy to stop. Executive Producer: Sara Glassman Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast Follow Colleen Mahoney: ckmarketsolutions.com  www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gap is cool again but apparently not for us. Gen X holds a quarter of household wealth and they're chasing Gen Z with Katseye collabs. So we played a round of brand mashups to fix this ourselves: Salt & Peppa for perimenopause telehealth, Caboodles x Tumi, Keds x Golden Goose, Lisa Frank x Le Creuset (instant bestseller) and Zima x High Noon (hard pass). Also this week: Ina Garten's new podcast and the fake Martha rivalry (stop pitting women against women), a Gossip Girl from a woman who was passed over for a 33-year-old after 11 years at her company, Blandine L'Hirondel breaking records on the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, and a Say the Thing that got real — on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 we both shared where we were that morning. Also out this week: Karina Zuniga. A military wife who fought the VA when they told her husband to man up. Her story is one you need to hear. Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode contains frank discussion of PTSD, veteran mental health and loss. Karina Zuniga was born and raised in Mexico. She met Billy, an American veteran, in Los Cabos. They fell in love over books and conversation. After September 11, Billy re-enlisted. Karina left everything — her country, her career, her family — to follow him to Arizona. Billy came home from Afghanistan with shrapnel in his head, a destroyed knee and severe PTSD. What followed was years of episodes so intense he thought their backyard was a combat zone. He told Karina: I know I’m here. I just can’t get out. When he went to his chain of command begging for help, they told him to man up. Karina became his advocate — driving across states to visit him in rehab centers, learning what oxycodone was, watching him cycle through pills that went up, pills that went down and pills that were supposed to keep him in the middle. Eventually she had to make the hardest decision of her life: leave the marriage to save herself. Billy died in his sleep on September 11, 2017. In this conversation, Karina talks about what it means to love someone through trauma the system won’t treat, what advocacy actually looks like from the inside and how she found herself again after losing the person she fought hardest to save. Executive Producer: Sara Glassman Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Good Good update: the CEO left, the president left, Dick's dropped the products. Then we got into Tarte's "Snatch Stick" campaign — they sent creators boxes with their own photos marked up for plastic surgery to sell a $26 contour stick. It met its sales targets. We're buying one anyway because we're doing an experiment for the people. Also this week: Trust Me on Netflix (five stars, obsessed, don't make us go to Reddit for recommendations), pumpkin spice is losing to matcha in 29 states, a Gossip Girl about a husband who won't stop calling his wife's profitable business a "hobby," a tribute to Gloria Steinem (who never passed the torch — she lit other people's), Blandine L'Hirondel breaking 22 hours on the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, and a new segment called Say the Thing where Erica pulled a card and Sara immediately passed. Enjoy the mini-tantrum that followed. Also out this week: Becky Sidelinger. Three decades in the most powerful rooms in manufacturing. Her story is raw, honest and one you need to hear. Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Becky Sidelinger has spent over three decades running some of the largest industrial businesses in the world. GE, Honeywell, Flex. She went from being the only woman in her electrical engineering class to president of a $4 billion global segment. She’s been to 42 countries. She’s done town halls for 800 people. And by every external measure, she commands a room. What nobody knew was that for the past three years, she’d been having panic attacks every time she stood up to speak. On stages. On conference calls. On a call with Condoleezza Rice’s consulting firm where all she had to do was introduce herself. She shook uncontrollably. Her heart raced. She couldn’t breathe. She had no idea what was happening. The trigger wasn’t one thing. It was 40 years of things: a mother who judged everything she said, a first husband who was threatened by how smart she was, a second husband who nearly died on a ventilator for six weeks, and an HR leader who told her to stop talking about her personal life at work. The accumulation broke something open. In this conversation, Becky talks about the hard hat line she got at 21, what it cost to care too much in a world that called it a weakness, the moment she lost herself and the presentation that helped her find her voice again. She came to At the Brink without her beta blocker. This is the first time she’s saying most of this out loud. Executive Producer: Sara Glassman Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast Follow Becky Sidelinger: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/becky-sidelinger www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Erica and Sara are off script. This is At the Brink Unplugged — no guest, no interview, just two women talking about what happened this week. In this episode: the Good Good x Callaway ad that never should have aired (and the non-apology that made it worse), a segment called Gossip Girl where an anonymous listener asks if she was right or just organized, the case for cabbage being the vegetable of 2026, a quick-fire safe conflict round (pineapple on pizza, the thumbs up emoji, reclining on airplanes), Erica's countdown to 50, a shout out to Yano Ba and the Women in Auto program in Sierra Leone, a moment for Dolly, and the Dyson Airwrap situation that cost Erica $700 she'll never get back. At the Brink | Unplugged with Erica Brinker and Sara Glassman New Unplugged episodes drop weekly alongside the regular At the Brink interviews. Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Moonah Ellison grew up in a small mining town in the north of England. Today she is the publisher and co-founder of New York Moves magazine and moves through rooms full of Fortune 500 leaders. The distance between those two worlds is the whole story, and it began on a bathroom floor. She was miserable in a job that gave her no room to make noise — all passion and vision, none of the authority. Her husband told her New York was the only place for her. She went, slept with cockroaches on the floor and made friends out of strangers, then launched an interactive-media company and, in 2003, a magazine built to talk to women without talking down to them. In this episode Moonah tells Erica how she got past every gatekeeper, why she bet on talent like Ryan Reynolds before anyone knew the name, and why she believes so fiercely in showing up in person. She also talks about 21st Century Power Women, the coffee table book marking 20 years of celebrating the leaders she has championed. It is a conversation about reinvention, nerve and refusing to take no. Executive Producer: Sara Glassman Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast Follow Moonah Ellison: New York Moves — newyorkmoves.com | Instagram @nymovesmagazine | MovesNexus — movesnexus.com | LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/moonah-ellison www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jessica Harris is a wife, a mother of two daughters and a science teacher. She is also the woman behind Mindset Momma. For eight years, doctors watched a freckle in the back of her eye. In 2019 it became ocular melanoma — a rare cancer that would cost her the sight in that eye and put her through surgery and seven days in isolation with a lead patch, radioactive and alone. She was grieving at the same time. Her father, in the end stage of alcoholism, died seven days before her surgery. In this episode she talks with Erica about how she held both at once — the healing and the grieving — using what she calls healthy compartmentalization, and why, as a science teacher, research became a source of power rather than fear. Then came the second brink. Last year an explosion sparked a fire that tore through her home while she was there alone, her husband away and her daughters out of the house. Jessica talks about that night, the community that showed up, and the reframe she lives by now: I get to, instead of I have to. It is a conversation about rebuilding — and about the spirit that led her daughters to bling out her eye patch in the middle of it all. Executive Producer: Sara Glassman Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast Follow Jessica Harris: Mindset Momma — mindsetmomma.com  www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elsa Arend was a marketing executive with the title, the team and the reputation to match. Then, in front of a thousand people at an Ogilvy meeting in New York, she stood up to speak and nothing came out. No words. A colleague ran a water bottle up to the stage. That silence was the start of everything. The diagnosis was a rare vocal cord disorder with no cure. But the deeper problem was burnout — the kind that hides inside ambition and calls itself personality. Elsa tried a sabbatical. She tried stepping down. The symptoms kept coming back, because rest alone was never the fix. In this episode she takes Erica back through the unraveling: the insomnia, the hair falling out, the version of herself she had to grieve. She talks about the coach who helped her see her own blind spots, the calling she heard in her driveway, and the method she now teaches ambitious women — small pattern disruptions, nervous-system regulation and the truth underneath overwork. It is a story about voice, in every sense — losing it, and finding a truer one. Executive Producer: Sara Glassman Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast Follow Elsa Arend: Instagram @elsa.arend | elsaarend.com www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brady Wald was raised by two educators in North Dakota — a father who taught for 37 years and a mother who taught kindergarten for 34. He followed them into schools and has spent 25 years there himself, most of it in leadership. Then his father visited one of his Arizona schools, sat in his office for a day, and told him he had to start writing about the work. Not long after, his dad died unexpectedly. That conversation became The Principal Diaries, Brady’s first book — 15 years in the making, finished after the one person who asked for it was gone. In this episode he takes Erica through the whole arc: the upbringing, the mission, and a health crisis 12 years ago that nearly stopped him, when his body was, in his words, eating itself from the inside out. Brady talks about what 25 years in schools actually looks like from the inside — why relationships have to come before learning, why he redesigned the principal’s office to feel like anything but one, and why he will fight to keep recess, art and music in the building. It is a conversation about education, grief and the kind of legacy that gets built one day at a time. Executive Producer: Sara Glassman Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast Follow Brady Wald: One Lucky Principal - sites.google.com/view/oneluckyprincipal | The Principal Diaries (book) | Instagram @oneluckyprincipal www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brandie Heredia spent 15 years in emergency and trauma rooms. She was good at it. But she was also burning out. Then a nonprofit recruited her to help remove branding tattoos from women who had been sex trafficked — tattoos their pimps had put on their faces and bodies to keep them from running away. That work became the foundation of Unmarked Beauty and Wellness, the practice she built from a small salon suite into a facility she now owns. Along the way she went through a divorce, became a single mom, remarried, brought her husband into the business (after initially refusing his help), went back to school to become a nurse practitioner and added hormone therapy to her practice because she kept seeing women’s symptoms go untreated. In this conversation, Brandie talks about what the ER does to you, how the name Unmarked came from the women she was helping heal, the business mistakes she made early on, what working with her husband almost cost their marriage and why she still does pro-bono scar removal through the Cynosure Cares program. Executive Producer: Sara Glassman Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast Follow Brandie Heredia: Instagram @brandiesmiles | Website: unmarkedbeautyandwellness.com www.atthebrinkmedia.com | [email protected] Here you go: At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker featuring raw, intimate conversations about defining moments — the question at the show's core: was there a moment when your story split into a before and after? New episodes every Wednesday. Website: www.atthebrinkmedia.com Email: [email protected] Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.