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...

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 —...

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 unexpect...

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 sma...

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....

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...

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 ha...

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 Eric...

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, started using drugs young, got married at 21, divorced at 25, got sober, worked three jobs (nightlife, model...

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 school bathroom and jumped by a group of strangers in an In-N-Out parking lot. Each time, Rick reported ev...

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 sent him to a facility in Texas they told him was a visit to cousins. It was a conversion therapy cente...

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 theater, moved to Los Angeles, searched through every religion she could find. Then came a dark night of the...

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 said Luca’s name, afraid it would ruin a good day. And Erica, who had spent her career performing capab...

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 she’d never wanted. Then she signed up for a triathlon at 35. She won her age group. Eight years later, she...