At the Brink with Erica Brinker

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.

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.

Anna Roisman walked into our studio as Joan Rivers and didn’t break character. It is, by a wide margin, the most entertaining opening in the history of this show.

Before the impressions, before the Kardashian sketches, before she hosted 500 live shows for up to half a million viewers a night on an Emmy-nominated game show, Anna was a theater kid from Philly whose parents partied more than she did. She knew she wanted to perform before she knew the word for the job. There was never a backup plan because there was nothing to back up to.

When she got laid off from her day job at a venture capital firm, she did the only thing that made sense to her: she started a live comedy show from her couch called The Unemployed Show. The only rule was that guests had to be unemployed. She prank-called her old boss on air. She took job interviews live on camera. She ran an awards ceremony for Most Unemployed Dad.

In this conversation, Anna talks about why she was the serious kid in a wild family, what the creator economy actually looks like from the inside, how she enters a room as anyone from Joan Rivers to Kris Jenner, and why patience is the only piece of career advice worth giving.

This episode is different from the rest. It’s funny. Very funny. You’re welcome.

Executive Producer: Sara Glassman

Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast

Follow Anna Roisman: @AnnaRoisman everywhere

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.

Dr. Sima Yakoby Epstein was 13 years old when a head-on collision broke her face. She was sitting in the middle seat with no seatbelt. When she looked in the rearview mirror, all she saw was blood. Her first instinct was to turn to her mother and ask if she was okay.

Her parents were Georgian immigrants who didn’t speak the language and couldn’t navigate the medical system. They went to the local dentist because he was the only one they could afford. What followed was years of surgeries, root canals, crowns and implants. As a teenager, Sima wouldn’t smile. She had what she describes as Dracula teeth. She was embarrassed and sad.

Then she met an orthodontist who looked like Santa Claus. He never commented on how she looked. What he said instead was: great things will come from you. Those five words changed the trajectory of her life. Today she is a double Penn graduate, a former Cornell surgical resident, a former NYU professor and the founder of OrthoNu. She became the person on the other side of the chair.

In this conversation, Sima talks about growing up in the projects in Queens, her father’s 14-year journey from checker cab driver to fleet owner, her mother who was one semester short of becoming a doctor, losing both parents, and why she decided to stop waiting for someone else to build what patients actually needed.

Executive Producer: Sara Glassman

Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast

Follow Dr. Sima: Instagram @simayakobyepstein | Website: orthonu.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.

Alexia Bertsatos left Greece at 18 with almost nothing. She studied architecture and interior design in London, pivoted to real estate during the 2008 crash, moved to Arizona for graduate school and met the man she would marry. She became a stay-at-home mom and spent nine years caught between guilt about not working and guilt about not being with her kids enough.

When the marriage ended, Alexia had no professional track record in the United States, two children under eight and a divorce she didn’t see coming. She had to figure out bills, careers and identity all at once. In this conversation, she talks about what starting over actually looks like when you’ve done it three times in three countries, why she chose not to be the victim of her own story and what her kids were watching the whole time.

Executive Producer: Sara Glassman

Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcast

Follow Alexia: Instagram @realestate.by.alexia | Website: alexiabertsatos.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.

On an ordinary afternoon in March 2022, Melody Orak got a phone call that split her life in two. Her eight-year-old daughter Elilai had a bone tumor. What the doctors said would be 12 rounds of chemotherapy became 28. Then 33 consecutive days of radiation. Then nine months of fighting a disease that still treats children with protocols developed in 1956.

In this episode, Melody sits down with Erica Brinker to talk about what it actually takes to hold everything together when your child’s life hangs in the balance: the impossible choices made for an eight-year-old, the moment she shaved her own head, the day Elilai’s body said it couldn’t take any more, and the bittersweet reality of remission three years later.

Plus: the hype song that gets Elilai through middle school, why scan anxiety is real, and a toast you won’t forget.

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.