Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary
Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary
Matthew Zachary is the healthcare policy love child of Jon Stewart, Howard Stern, Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Seinfeld. He has 19 years of receipts to prove it. Editorially independent. Answerable to no one. What started as The Stupid Cancer Show in 2007 became Out of Patients. The first online health podcast in America, predating the medium itself. Zachary survived brain cancer at 21, built the young adult cancer movement from scratch, and spent two decades channeling patient rage into something the system never saw coming. Now he is marching into Washington. Out of Patients goes where the comfortable shows will not. Politics. Healthcare policy. Economics. Institutional accountability. Consumer protection. The forces shaping what 330 million Americans can access, afford, and survive. Battle-scarred patients. Exhausted caregivers. Rare insiders brave enough to name what is killing us. And the occasional elected official about to find out what an organized patient constituency actually looks like. This is the show that started the conversation America is still not ready to finish.
Oct. 6, 2025

The Genes of Wrath: Jennifer J. Brown

The Genes of Wrath: Jennifer J. Brown

Jennifer J. Brown is a scientist, a writer, and a mother who never got the luxury of separating those roles. Her memoir When the Baby Is Not OK: Hopes & Genes is a punch to the gut of polite society and a medical system that expects parents to smile through trauma. She wrote it because she had to. Because the people who gave her the diagnosis didn’t give her the truth. Because a Harvard-educated geneticist with two daughters born with PKU still couldn’t get a straight answer from the very system she trained in.

We sat down in the studio to talk about the unbearable loneliness of rare disease parenting, the disconnect between medical knowledge and human connection, and what it means to weaponize science against silence. She talks about bias in the NICU, the failure of healthcare communication, and why “resilience” is a lazy word. Her daughters are grown now. One’s a playwright. One’s an artist. And Jennifer is still raising hell.

This is a conversation about control, trauma, survival, and rewriting the script when the world hands you someone else’s lines.

Bring tissues. Then bring receipts.


RELATED LINKS

• When the Baby Is Not OK (Book)

• Jennifer’s Website

• Jennifer on LinkedIn


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