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.

Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary

Recent Episodes

460
Oct. 19, 2026

[BEST OF OOP] Ben Unger

In a wooded campground cabin in the early 2000s, 19 year old Ben Unger stood in the doorway and watched 20 naked men form a circle around a crying teenager. A counselor held up two tangerines and shouted, “These are your balls.” The exercise claimed to cure same sex attraction by forcing young men to “reclaim” their masculinity from overbearing mothers. Phones had been confiscated. Parents had paid thousands of dollars. Religion supplied the script. Pseudoscience supplied the props. Ben had gro
459
Oct. 12, 2026

[BEST OF OOP] Jessica J. Federer

Jessica Federer built her career inside the rooms where science, money, and power collide. As the first female Chief Digital Officer at Bayer, she helped steer a 120,000 person global company through the rise of digital medicine while confronting a harder truth: women were excluded from U.S. clinical trials until 1993. In this conversation, she explains how decades of “first in man” research shaped drug development, why women experience side effects at nearly 2x the rate of men, and how guidanc
458
Oct. 5, 2026

[BEST OF OOP] Eugene Manley, Jr., PhD

Dr Eugene Manley grew up in Detroit in the 1980s cycling through emergency rooms 20 to 30 times a year with asthma and anaphylaxis while hospital staff talked past his family and buried them in paperwork they could not decode. He responded by earning a BS in mechanical engineering an MS in biomedical engineering and a PhD in molecular biology cell biology and biochemistry. Along the way he tore his ACL training for a jiu jitsu black belt worked 86 straight days in a lab during his doctorate and

Recent Blog Posts

Sept. 22, 2026

Out of Patients EP456: Fitz Happens: The Marvelous Fitz Koehler

SHE WENT FROM CINNABON TO KICKBOXING TO CANCER. AND SHE'S STILL STANDING. Fitz Koehler spent decades teaching people how to get fit. Then cancer showed up to test every lesson she ever taught. Spoiler: she passed. This woman worked at Cinna…
Sept. 9, 2026

Out of Patients EP455: SurgeON: Dr. Jeremy Heffner

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE SYSTEM YOU SERVED LEAVES YOU ON THE FLOORDr. Jeremy Heffner spent 20 years on the front lines of trauma surgery. He ran a hospital's COVID response. He saved hundreds of lives. Then the system broke him.When he needed residenti…
July 28, 2026

Out of Patients EP4534: Your Benefits May Vary: Rebecca Bloom

🚨NEW EPISODE 🚨 Rebecca Bloom spent years inside one of the least sexy but most consequential corners of American healthcare. Employee benefits law. Executive compensation. HR policy. The part of the machine where cancer quietly turns into paperwork…

About the Host

Matthew Zachary Profile Photo
Matthew Zachary

Producer

Matthew Zachary invented healthcare podcasting before podcasting was a thing. In 2007, fresh off building Stupid Cancer, he grabbed a mic, launched The Stupid Cancer Show, and started broadcasting patient stories on internet talk radio when everyone else was still writing blogs.

19 years and 2000+ episodes later, Out of Patients is still the most unfiltered healthcare show anywhere.

Matthew does not do softball interviews. Brain cancer at 21 taught him that time is finite and bullshit is expensive. He gets guests to say things they would never tell Congress. CEOs admit what is broken. Patients name what actually hurts. Scientists explain what industry does not want you to know. The conversations other shows will not touch because of sponsor concerns or political correctness.

What makes him different: he has been on both sides of the mic. Featured in documentaries. Keynoted hundreds of conferences. Published in The Hill. Now marching into Washington with a national patient constituency behind him.

But he has also been the guy puking from radiation, fighting insurance denials, and watching friends die from paperwork.

That dual perspective creates interviews you will not hear anywhere else. He knows which questions make power squirm because he has asked them from hospital beds and boardrooms both.

No pre-approved questions. No PR handlers. No seven-minute segments. Just real conversations with people brave enough to tell the truth about American healthcare.

Still the show where whistleblowers go first. Still the show Mark Cuban reposts when he wants to understand what patients actually think. Still asking the questions that make everyone uncomfortable.

Because comfortable conversations do not fix broken systems.

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