At the Brink with Erica Brinker

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 GlassmanFollow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastFollow Anna Roisman: @AnnaRoisman everywherewww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 GlassmanFollow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastFollow Dr. Sima: Instagram @simayakobyepstein | Website: orthonu.comwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 GlassmanFollow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastFollow Alexia: Instagram @realestate.by.alexia | Website: alexiabertsatos.comwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 GlassmanFollow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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, modeling and teaching Pilates at $23 a class), got fired from the club, and then built a career in wellness that she never planned but couldn’t stop building.In this conversation, Johanna talks about what her ballet teacher taught her about effort and excuses, the moment she realized she could just show up and be taken care of, teaching Pilates inside a women’s prison through the nonprofit 300 Letters, how Peloton DM’d her during the darkest stretch of her infertility journey, what it means to be a stepmom to a child she met at four, and why she told both Peloton and Lululemon upfront: this is who I am and none of it is going to change.She also shares where she is in her IVF journey and the stigma around infertility in Black and brown communities, and closes with her signature toast: here’s to doing no harm and taking no shit.Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastFollow Johanna: Instagram @junglejohanna | Peloton: Johanna RicouzExecutive producer: Sara Glassmanwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 everything. Each time, the system treated it as kids being kids.When threats followed Tristan to a second school and a group of kids showed up at their house, Rick made the hardest decision of his life: he sent his son to Europe to live with his mother, because it was the only place he felt safe.What Rick didn’t know was that the group targeting his son was part of a loosely connected network of 40 to 90 teenagers across 16 schools in the East Valley. They called themselves the Gilbert Goons. They recorded their beatings, uploaded them to a Snapchat channel called Pound Town, and operated with near-total impunity. In October 2023, they beat a boy named Preston Lord and left him to die in the street.Katey McPherson is a former school administrator turned youth advocate who had been tracking the violence before most people knew the name. Together with Rick and hundreds of other parents, she helped organize the Upstanders, a community group that crowdsourced evidence, pressured local government and ultimately helped pass Preston’s Law, an Arizona statute that created a new felony category for swarming attacks.In this conversation, Rick and Katey talk about what the system looks like from the inside when it fails, what it took to make a community listen and what Rick’s family is still living with today.Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com

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 center. He was placed alongside people being treated for drug addiction and sexual disorders. He was 13 years old. He figured out what he needed to say to get out, went home, got a girlfriend, and performed being straight for the next three years.What Joey didn’t know until years later was the story of his Uncle George. George was his grandfather’s brother, a man who spoke five languages but stuttered and shuffled when he walked. The family said he’d been hit in the head during his medical residency. At George’s funeral, Joey learned the truth: George had been caught in bed with another man in the 1940s, and his own mother had him lobotomized.In this conversation, Joey talks about what it’s like to grow up performing faith while hiding yourself, the moment a woman walked down the aisle and confronted his pastor, how a chance encounter at a Circle K at 16 changed his life, and what 30 years with his partner Fredrik have taught him about love, forgiveness and building a life on your own terms.Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastwww.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.comExecutive producer: Sara Glassman

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 soul that forced her to stop running and turn around. She has now been working as a professional spiritual medium for nearly two decades, with thousands of readings behind her and features in The New York Times, Forbes, Goop and InStyle.In this conversation, Erika explains what actually happens during a reading, why she calls herself “just a straw,” how spirit guides work on their own timeline (not ours), what she has learned about grief from sitting with hundreds of grieving parents, and why she will never tell someone that everything happens for a reason.She also talks about religion and mediumship, the celebrities who won’t let her use their names, the reading that led a woman to her mom’s neighbor and a job, and what she would tell her terrified seven-year-old self.Follow At the Brink: Instagram @at.the.brink.media | YouTube @AtTheBrinkPodcastFollow Erika Gabriel: Instagram @spiritualmediumerika | Podcast: You Are Not AloneExecutive producer: Sara Glassman www.atthebrinkmedia.com | hello@atthebrinkmedia.com