At the Brink with Erica Brinker

Erica Brinker

At the Brink is a podcast about the inflection points that define a life and career. The pivots no one saw coming. The decisions made under pressure. The stories people rarely tell out loud. Each episode is a conversation with a leader, founder, artist, parent or advocate who has lived through a moment that changed everything — and chose to talk about what actually happened. Not because those stories are easy. Because they are real. At the Brink explores reinvention, resilience and the defining moments that reshape who we become. Hosted by Erica Brinker. This show began as something personal. When her son Luca died suddenly at four months old, everything reorganized. What she found in the years that followed was that the people who looked the most composed were often carrying the most. At the Brink exists because those conversations deserve a stage. Business inquiries and guest bookings: hello@atthebrinkmedia.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 17h ago ·  Bonus Video

    Unplugged: Gap Is Cool Again (But Not for Us), Brand Mashups, Passed Over at 42 and our 9/11 Stories

    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 | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com 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: hello@atthebrinkmedia.com Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Unplugged: Gap Is Cool Again (But Not for Us), Brand Mashups, Passed Over at 42 and our 9/11 Stories
  2. 2d ago ·  Video

    She Fought the System for Her Husband. Then She Had to Save Herself. | Karina Zuniga

    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 | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com 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: hello@atthebrinkmedia.com Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    She Fought the System for Her Husband. Then She Had to Save Herself. | Karina Zuniga
  3. Sep 4 ·  Bonus Video

    Unplugged: Getting Snatched, PSL Party Poopers, Daisy Chain Flower Power and Glorious Gloria

    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 | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com 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: hello@atthebrinkmedia.com Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Unplugged: Getting Snatched, PSL Party Poopers, Daisy Chain Flower Power and Glorious Gloria
  4. Sep 2 ·  Video

    She Ran a $4 Billion Business. She Couldn’t Walk to a Podium. | Becky Sidelinger

    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 | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com 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: hello@atthebrinkmedia.com Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    She Ran a $4 Billion Business. She Couldn’t Walk to a Podium. | Becky Sidelinger
  5. Aug 28 ·  Bonus Video

    Unplugged: Good Good Grief, Cabbage and Dolly Forever

    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 | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com 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: hello@atthebrinkmedia.com Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Unplugged: Good Good Grief, Cabbage and Dolly Forever
  6. Aug 26 ·  Video

    From a Mining Town to Manhattan | Moonah Ellison

    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 | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com 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: hello@atthebrinkmedia.com Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    From a Mining Town to Manhattan | Moonah Ellison
  7. Aug 19

    The Freckle That Became Cancer | Jessica Harris

    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 | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com 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: hello@atthebrinkmedia.com Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Freckle That Became Cancer | Jessica Harris
  8. Aug 12

    When Her Voice Failed Her | Elsa Arend

    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 | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com 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: hello@atthebrinkmedia.com Instagram: @at.the.brink.media Executive producer | Sara Glassman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    When Her Voice Failed Her | Elsa Arend
4.6
out of 5
38 Ratings

About

At the Brink is a podcast about the inflection points that define a life and career. The pivots no one saw coming. The decisions made under pressure. The stories people rarely tell out loud. Each episode is a conversation with a leader, founder, artist, parent or advocate who has lived through a moment that changed everything — and chose to talk about what actually happened. Not because those stories are easy. Because they are real. At the Brink explores reinvention, resilience and the defining moments that reshape who we become. Hosted by Erica Brinker. This show began as something personal. When her son Luca died suddenly at four months old, everything reorganized. What she found in the years that followed was that the people who looked the most composed were often carrying the most. At the Brink exists because those conversations deserve a stage. Business inquiries and guest bookings: hello@atthebrinkmedia.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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