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 GlassmanFollow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media |YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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hit the Today show (we're fine with it), bringing a parent to an interview (we are not fine with it, and Erica once rescinded an offer over it), the coffee cup test (mind games), and the no-makeup question that opened a real conversation about gender bias in hiring.Gossip Girl this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 @AtTheBrinkPodcastwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 @AtTheBrinkPodcastwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 GlassmanFollow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastFollow Colleen Mahoney: ckmarketsolutions.com www.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 @AtTheBrinkPodcastwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 GlassmanFollow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 @AtTheBrinkPodcastwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 GlassmanFollow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastFollow Becky Sidelinger: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/becky-sidelingerwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com