At the Brink with Erica Brinker

Erica's holiday lights are already up. (It's November. She's fine.) Sara covered Black Friday at the outlet malls for the Star Tribune once and gives it zero stars. Neither of us is standing in a line this year, but plenty of shoppers are heading back to stores. Then we played winner or loser with this year's retail headlines. Crumbl closed dozens of stores and bet on dirty soda. C...

Every wall was covered in crystals and a crystal chandelier hung overhead. On the floor in the corner of her boss's bathroom, Aisha Beau Frisbey was having the first panic attack of her life. Aisha spent 12 years in fashion PR. She went from unpaid internships hauling Gucci garment bags in four-inch heels to a $28,000 starting salary to the in-house director job she had worked toward the whole...

Pockets. That’s all Sara wants from her leggings, and it turns out Lululemon has bigger problems. Founder Chip Wilson started the Vancouver yoga brand in 1998, left the board in 2015 and is still one of its largest shareholders. After a long proxy fight, the company settled in May by seating two of his nominees, and this week it added a third director with his blessing: Tara Poseley, Lululemon’s c...

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, filmmaker Tolga Katas, became Samuel Bateman’s unofficial archivists, filming whenever he asked and turning t...

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 prison living in her house, and kept filming long after she left. We walked out of the theater with br...

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 bought Poppi last year for $1.95 billion, with up to $300 million more for the founders if the brand hit its...

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 Appalachian Virginia, then a group home and separate placements. She was eventually adopted, moved out at mid...

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 at women in gym clothes. Ego Nwodim responded with a gym selfie and “whore reporting for duty.” Dan Lev...

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 into the Leslie’s job when she found a golf ball-sized lump during a workout. The mammogram confirmed b...

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 Delhi, thousands of college students are marching over an alleged gang rape by men posing as police...

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 showed up to places, learned the language and found the Georgian restaurant nobody else knew about. In th...

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 (30% of companies now require five days on site and on-site job postings jumped from 65% to 87% this ye...

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...

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 in...

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 heartbe...

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 $2,00...

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 att...

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 podcas...

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...

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...

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 p...

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...

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...

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...

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 —...