At the Brink with Erica Brinker
by 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: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" rel="noopener
Episodes
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Behind Netflix’s Trust Me: The False Prophet | Dr. Christine Marie
Warning: This episode includes discussion of child sexual abuse, cult abuse and human trafficking. When Dr. Christine Marie told police that a self-declared prophet in Short Creek was calling young girls his wives, they told her it was hearsay. They needed evidence. So she and her husband,...
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You Can See Everything Spoiler Support Group: Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Doc | Unplugged
Spoiler alert, in the most literal sense: if you haven’t seen You Can See Everything, stop here, go see it and come back. We’ll wait. It’s three hours. Bring snacks. We saw everything. We understood nothing. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim spent the last 34 days before Elizabeth Holmes went to...
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Unplugged: Poppi Fizzles, Reese's Hello Sunshine Rises, Perimenopause Ploys, Victoria's Secret Slop and Tacos Fix Everything
Eleven. That’s how many Signal Awards At the Brink won this week, and someone on LinkedIn says 11 is a portal number. Erica Brinker and Sara Glassman will take it, and they thank every listener who confirmed an email to vote. Then two founder stories that run in opposite directions. PepsiCo…
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From Foster Care to New York City | Lisa Miller
Warning: This episode includes discussion of suicidal ideation and a suicide attempt. Lisa Miller was born in Detroit to a mother living with addiction. Before she was 10, she and her two older brothers had been through what she calls the year of hell with their biological father, in rural...
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Unplugged: Kelly Gives Brooklyn the Bird, Shane & Pete Make Our Shit List
Erica came to record straight from a Sombr concert. No sleep. Full energy. She introduces her newest creation: Things on My Shit List. The holiday season is here and she’s not ready. What she is ready for: opinions. First on the list: Shane Gillis, who used his third SNL hosting gig to take aim…
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Triple Negative and She Never Stopped Working | Stacy Woods
Stacy Woods spent 28 years at Mondelez building brands most of us have in our pantry — Oreo, Chips Ahoy, Ritz, Sour Patch Kids. She led strategy and operations, raised two kids and never stopped moving. When she left, she kept going: VP at McCain Foods, then VP at Leslie’s Pools. She was 60 days...
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Unplugged: Amazon Knows, NYC Lines, Bring Back Dinner and Posh Spice Finally Profits
This week opens on a serious note. The Cornell sexual assault case is unfolding in real time — a former student is suing seven fraternity members and the university, and Cornell's own survey found that 35% of undergraduate women reported non-consensual sexual contact since arriving on campus. In...
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Four Diagnoses in Nine Months. He’s Still at the Brink. | Merrick Walter
Merrick Walter grew up surfing and skating in Los Angeles, swam breaststroke in college, studied Russian, got recruited by the CIA (and said no), earned an MBA from Thunderbird and built a career in international education across multiple countries and continents. He was the kind of person who...
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Unplugged: Watch Out Oprah, Eyepatchgate, Taylor’s $40 Tank and Madonna at 68
We’re popping champagne because At the Brink is a finalist in eight Signal Award categories. We’re up against Oprah, Anderson Cooper, Monica Lewinsky and Rachel Martin. We are the underdogs and we need your vote. Shamelessly. Also this week: return to office is pushing women out of the workplace...
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A Miscarriage on Her Wedding Day. Cancer on Their Vacation. Then She Adopted. | Caralyn Brace
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…
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Unplugged: Interview Icks, Walmart's Glow Up, Your Prom Date Is Back and Tofu Won
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...
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Two Miscarriages. Every Test Normal. Nobody Believed Her. | Ryan Larson
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...
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Unplugged: Sydney Sweeps, iPhone Duo Dual, No Love for Lying and Champagne Stockpiling
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...
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The Heart Attack She Almost Ignored | Colleen Mahoney
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...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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The Promise He Kept for His Father | Brady Wald
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…
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Her First Clients Were Sex Trafficking Survivors. She Removed Their Brands. | Brandie Heredia
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...
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She Got Fired. Now She Makes Millions of People Laugh for a Living. | Anna Roisman
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…
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She Broke Her Face at 13. An Orthodontist Changed Her Life. | Dr. Sima
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...
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She Started from Zero in Three Countries. Then She Did It Again After Divorce. | Alexia Bertsatos
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…
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Her Daughter Was 8. The Doctor Said Cancer. | Melody Orak
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...
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She Got Sober, Got Divorced, Got Fired. Then Peloton Called. | Johanna Ricouz
Most people know Johanna Ricouz as one of the newest Pilates instructors on Peloton, the one with the tattoos, the nails, the hip hop and the mouth. What they don’t know is what it took to get there. Johanna grew up in New Jersey, trained as a classical ballet dancer at an all-Black school…
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His Son Was Beaten Three Times. The System Called It Bullying. | Rick Kuehner & Katey McPherson
Rick Kuehner is a Navy veteran and single father who moved to Gilbert, Arizona, because it was rated the second safest city in America. His son Tristan was a competitive swimmer, a good-looking kid with a nice car. Starting in his freshman year, Tristan was beaten at a bus stop, attacked in a...
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He Came Out at 13. They Sent Him Away. | Joey O’Donnell
Joey O’Donnell grew up in central Phoenix, raised by his Pentecostal minister grandparents. They built over 30 churches across the valley. They ran food banks. They took in every kid in the neighborhood. They were, by every measure, people of deep and active faith. When Joey came out at 13, they...
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She Sees Dead People. This Is What They Say. | Erika Gabriel
Erika Gabriel was seven years old when she started telling her parents about a little boy she could sense in their new house. They assumed it was an imaginary friend. Then they found out a child had actually drowned on the property. For years Erika tried to outrun what she was. She studied…
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She Lost Her Son. Then She Built This. | Erica Brinker
Every episode of At the Brink begins with someone else’s story. This one is different. This is the story behind the show. Erica Brinker lost her four-month-old son Luca to SIDS in December 2015. In the aftermath, the people closest to her went quiet. Friends stopped calling. Her own mother never...
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Too Feminine to Run? Now She Does Extreme Triathlons. | Jennifer Vollmann
Jennifer Vollmann gave up a career running a global education nonprofit to become a stay-at-home mom. She loved her daughter. She also had no idea who she was anymore. The play dates, the dinner parties where everyone talked about their jobs, the loneliness — she was disappearing into a life…
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She Kept His Secret for 20 Years | Hilary Simon
When Hilary Simon was 14, her parents sent her to an all-girls boarding school in the Berkshires to keep her safe. Instead, she was groomed and abused by a history teacher who had been doing it for over a decade before she arrived — and would continue for years after. The school knew. Other...
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She Was #1 in the World — Then Walked Away | Ashlie Molstad
Ashlie Molstad went from a corporate desk at Nike to becoming the #1 Beachbody coach in the world — twice. She went viral in 2016 for a body-positive photo that landed her in People magazine and on CNN. But at the top of her game, she felt empty. The goals she’d spent her whole life chasing…
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The Secret the Wealthy Won’t Tell You | Tari Thomas
Tari Thomas spent 15 years building a real estate portfolio while working in corporate America at Fortune 100 companies. She bought her first house at 24, scaled to multiple properties across states, survived the Great Recession and built a co-living business from scratch. Then she walked into a...
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At the Brink with Erica Brinker Trailer
The moments that change everything. At the Brink is a premium podcast hosted by Erica Brinker about the inflection points that define a life. The decisions made under pressure. The pivots no one saw coming. The stories we rarely tell out loud. Leaders, founders, executives, artists, parents,...
About this show
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: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" rel="noopener
Hosted by
Erica Brinker