Carla Tardif has been holding the system accountable longer than most of us have been able to pronounce “social determinants.” She runs Family Reach, a nonprofit built on one premise: cancer costs money. Real money. Like lose-your-home, …
Jennifer J. Brown didn’t write a memoir to make you feel better. She wrote one because she was drowning in a system that weaponizes politeness and punishes curiosity. Harvard-trained scientist. Mother of two daughters with a rare metabolic dis…
Katie Henry once handed out 500 vibrators at my cancer conference and accidentally rewrote the national conversation on sex after breast cancer. That’s not a metaphor. That’s a Tuesday in Katie Henry world. She’s a nonprofit bruis…
There’s a reason Olivia Battinelli runs NYU Steinhardt’s internship program, teaches interviewing strategies, and has her own career coaching business by 28. It’s because the world still churns out young professionals with zero ski…
Sophie Sargent did not need my approval, my microphone, or my nostalgia. She walked in with purpose, clarity, and chronic illness receipts. A 25-year-old media force raised in the Lyme-infested hills of New Hampshire, she’s already outpaced mo…
Lexi Silver is fifteen. She has buried both of her parents. She has sat through funerals most adults will never face. She writes about grief with the precision of a scalpel and the blunt force of a sledgehammer. And she does it without apolo…
Michelle Andrews has seen behind the curtain. She helped launch Rituxan in the 90s. She watched the very first pharma commercial hit TV. She’s built campaigns, wrangled strategy decks, and sat at the big-kid table in rooms where the patient wa…
Dr. Anne Marie Morse showed up to the studio like she was headlining her own off-Broadway neurology musical—and I mean that as a compliment. She’s a pediatric neurologist, sleep medicine badass, narcolepsy whisperer, and founder of DAMM …
Gigi Robinson walked into the studio, and within 60 seconds, I felt like the out-of-touch Gen Xer trying to program a VCR again. Which, frankly, is precisely why I wanted her on the show.She's a 27-year-old content creator, public speaker, rare dise…
Vanessa Ghigliotty doesn’t care if you feel uncomfortable. She never has. She fought stage 4 colon cancer while dragging her chemo bag into the Board of Education to demand a fair shot for her dyslexic son. She survived when the experts told h…
What happens when you take a jingle-obsessed Cornell grad, funnel her through agency life, add a cancer diagnosis to the family, and drop her in the middle of America’s broken healthcare mess? You get Risa Arin. Founder and CEO of XpertPatient…
Jamie Wells doesn’t fit into your LinkedIn boxes. Physician. Educator. Policy wonk. Bioethicist. Blockchain ambassador. Director of MIT’s RSI program. And now, author of A Clinical Lens on Pediatric Engineering. She’s the unicorn&r…
Erica Campbell is not your typical nonprofit CEO. She’s a Long Island theater kid turned British Embassy diplomat turned Midwest cancer-fighting powerhouse. She runs the Pinky Swear Foundation, a national org that helps families of kids with c…
Dr. Allyson Ocean stepped into the Out of Patients studio—and let’s just say, it was worth the 20-year wait. She’s a GI oncologist, yes. But she also co-founded more cancer nonprofits than most people can name, sits on the boards …
I’ve been chasing Lisa Shufro for almost a decade to come on Out of Patients. Why? Because she sees the healthcare-industrial complex for what it is—and has the guts, brains, and receipts to call it out with elegance and precision. Lisa…
Sally Wolf is the kind of person who makes you question what it means to actually live. She’s got all the things that usually impress LinkedIn: Harvard psych degree, two Stanford grad degrees, NBCUniversal pedigree, former corporate exec turn…
🚨NEW EPISODE ALERT 🚨 Let’s talk about what it actually takes to run a national cancer nonprofit in 2025. Four mergers. A team of 22. A lifetime of therapy in the form of board meetings, grant deadlines, and telling scared patients, “You…
Christine Verini is the CEO of CancerCare, but more importantly, she’s someone who actually gives a damn. She’s a pharmacist who ditched the corporate ladder to lead an 81-year-old organization that helps real cancer patients with the th…
Jennifer Finkelstein should come with a warning label: Highly Infectious Authenticity. If you don't know her, you will—and you’ll wonder how you survived cancerland without her kind of energy lighting a fire under you. Jennifer is a 20-y…
What happens when a world-class fitness icon and martial artist—someone who teaches sword training and trains like a damn machine—gets cancer not once, but twice? You get Ilaria Montagnani. Founder of Powerstrike. Creator of Stronger fo…
Helene M. Epstein is the kind of guest who makes you sit up, get angry, and pay attention. She’s been misdiagnosed, gaslit, ignored, and dismissed by the healthcare system more times than you want to count—and she turned all of that into…
Jonathan Wall and Jennifer (Kleeman) Wall lost their son, Zach. What they did next is the reason this episode matters. They turned unspeakable grief into something that helps other families navigating pediatric cancer. We talk about what Zach was li…
