At the Brink with Erica Brinker

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...

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 students reported it. A girl was expelled for speaking up. Nothing changed. In this episode, Hilary sits dow...

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 conference and discovered that an entire world of investing — private funds, syndications, commercial a...

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 stopped meaning anything. In this episode, Ashlie sits down with Erica Brinker to talk about living with dep...

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, advocates. They have built companies, broken barriers, survived the unthinkable and reinvented themselves o...