Turning Her Daughter’s Cancer Diagnosis Into Life Saving Buisnesses

[00:00:00] Tracy Ryan: And it was my first words out of my mouth, is my daughter going to die? And he said, you know, these tumors are usually survivable. In that split second, it was over, it was done. Life as I knew it was never going to be the same. Walking into a cancer ward where they’re bald, they’re skinny, they’re vomiting, there’s this yellow fluid coming from some of the 

bags. It was a parent’s absolute worst nightmare. I’ll be honest with you, Kevin. If it hadn’t been for cannabis, I don’t know if my child would have survived chemotherapy. 

[00:00:29] Kevin Rice: Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. Today I’m joined in person by Tracy Ryan, CEO and co founder of Ncore Biotherapeutics. She’s an entrepreneur, advocate and mother who refused to accept incurable as the final answer for her daughter. 

Subsequently, Tracy was recently named one of MSNBC’s most influential women in passion and purpose for 2026. Tracy’s journey into biotech didn’t start in a lab. It started as a mother fighting to save her daughter’s life. After Sophie was diagnosed with a brain tumor before her first birthday. What followed was years of chemotherapy, brain surgeries, hospital stays, and unimaginable uncertainty. But instead of retreating, Tracy leaned in. She built a cannabis based pediatric advocacy company, helped change how hospitals think about plant medicine, and eventually co founded a biotech company focused on natural killer cell immunotherapy. This is not just a conversation about science. It’s about resilience, navigating marriage under pressure, losing friends in the middle of a crisis. And how intuition, faith, and choosing meaning in the face of trauma are some of the only decisions we actually get to choose in the face of adversity. And ultimately, it’s about what happens when a mother decides she will not stop until she finds a better way. 

Welcome to CEOs and ABCs. Real stories from execs who lead at work and show up at home. Career moves, parenting, wins and fails, and everything in between. I’m your host, Kevin Rice. Here’s today’s episode. Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. My guest today is Tracy Ryan. Tracy, thank you so much for being here. 

[00:02:06] Tracy Ryan: Thank you so much for having me. It really is a pleasure. 

[00:02:08] Kevin Rice: Yeah, it’s great to see you and thank you for being our first guest in person. This is a big episode for us. 

[00:02:14] Tracy Ryan: I’m very excited. When you told me I was going to be the first one to be on camera, that was. That was quite special for me. So thank you for letting it be me. 

[00:02:21] Kevin Rice: Yeah. Well, let’s start off with just kind of a quick introduction and we’ll dive in from there. Yeah. 

[00:02:27] Tracy Ryan: My name is Tracy Ryan. As you know, I currently am the co founder and chief communications officer of a biotherapeutics company called Incor. 

This company is very, very special to me. I was not a scientific person. I haven’t had a science class since high school, which is the joke. 

But this all came from a deep need and passion to save my daughter’s life. 

She was sadly diagnosed with a low grade brain tumor at eight and a half months old. This, as you can imagine as a first time parent, was devastating to us. And I really truly sought out to do anything I could to try and save her. Especially when I found out that pediatric cancer research 

was severely underfunded by the government. 3.8% of, of all government funding at the time was going to research for kids.

So when I found out that therapies for my daughter had not been evolved in 40 years for the type of disease that she had and there was no research going on at the time, and that her disease was incurable, although it was traditionally survivable, something just innately clicked in me and said, this is why you’re here. 

You’ve got to do more. And that is what led me to starting the company that I now have today. 

[00:03:40] Kevin Rice: And I had the pleasure of meeting Sophie and she’s just such a like sweet, bright soul. I can’t imagine like the, the pain that you must have felt, you know, after finally becoming a mother and having your first daughter and then getting that sort of news. 

[00:03:55] Tracy Ryan: Yeah. You know, as I often think back on that day, because I talk about this story a lot and I reflect on what those feelings were in that moment and I went from having what I considered the perfect life. I had a husband I adored and adored me. He was my dreamboat man. I owned my own company. I had a media agency at the time doing marketing for huge brands like IBM, Paramount, Samsung, Rock and Roll Legends, rave DJs that were renowned all over the world. Beauty brands that had been around for 100 years or more and had a really successful company. And I had the most beautiful baby. I’d always wanted to be a mom. One of the main reasons I became an entrepreneur was so that I could balance my time between work and home and I could decide what my schedule is going to be so that I could, I could be there for my child. 

[00:04:49] Kevin Rice: Isn’t it funny that we have that idea that like I’m going To be an entrepreneur. And then I’ll have all this flexibility. And then you’re like, oh, wait a minute. I have no flexibility whatsoever. I’m working twice as hard as if I would have just gotten a job. 

[00:04:59] Tracy Ryan: Seven days a week, 12 hours a day. But I still, like, if I need to take my daughter to the hospital, there’s nobody to tell me, no, you’re gonna get fired if you do that. 

[00:05:10] Kevin Rice: And there should never be anybody to tell you that you’re gonna get fired if you take your daughter to the hospital. 

[00:05:14] Tracy Ryan: It happens a lot. I’ve watched it happen with so many of my friends lose their employment because they had a child that was hospital bound and had to be in for weeks at a time, sometimes months at a time. And they do, they get fired, they lose their job, they living in their cars, the Ronald McDonald House. And, you know, when I look back at when this actually transpired and how perfect my life was. 

This one phone call that we get from a doctor. And just to kind of give a little context, Sophie’s eye began shaking. 

And that’s how we first knew that something was weird. We didn’t know that there was anything wrong. It was just like, huh, what’s happening here? 

And I consulted a lot of my mommy friends. I had this Facebook group online. It was just like this amazing group of hundreds of women that would be there for each other in all hours of the night because we were all up nursing. And four, five, six o’ clock in the morning, if you needed to ask a question, there was always somebody awake to do it. And they said, go get it checked out. So through a series of doctor’s appointments, Monday was her regular baby doctor. 

Tuesday was her ophthalmologist. Wednesday we were seeing a neurologist. And they said, ah, you know, the chances of this being anything are very, very rare. But the ophthalmologist was a

new mom. She just had her own baby, and her spidey senses were going off. These mothers have this mom’s intuition. Yeah, it’s real. 

[00:06:36] Kevin Rice: Absolutely. 

[00:06:36] Tracy Ryan: Very real. And those mothers that don’t pay attention to it often pay the price. I’m one that has always paid attention to mine. 

Well, this mom had some sort of strong, strong pull. The ophthalmologist did. And she said, something’s up here. I just have this feeling, let’s just be safe. Let’s get her in an mri. And that Friday of the same week, there was an opening that happened. And by Sunday, we were getting a phone call. 

It was the day of The LA marathon. We were about to go to the Grove to take Sophie and meet up with my sister and my brother in law for the concerts they have in the park. There we go. Raised her there, listening to music every weekend. 

And she was sitting on the floor in this little baby high chair and I was feeding her mashed avocado. And the phone rang and it was her pediatrician. And he was like, Ms. Ryan, I don’t know how to tell you this, but what I’m going to say is going to change your and your husband’s life forever. And I stopped breathing. Like, I literally stopped breathing. 

And he said, we found something on the mri. 

There is a brain tumor in your daughter’s brain. It is so rare, I. I had to look it up on Google. It is traditionally survivable. And I was like, is my daughter going to. Well, before this, I said, is my daughter gonna die? And it was my first words out of my mouth. Is my daughter gonna die? And he said, you know, these tumors are usually survivable. And I said, well, what do we do? What’s the treatment? He said, chemotherapy. And that’s just when my entire life, everything I had worked so hard to achieve in both work and family and life and love, in that split second, it was over. It was done. Life as I knew it was never going to be the same. 

[00:08:12] Kevin Rice: Yeah. 

[00:08:13] Tracy Ryan: And he said, we’ve got an oncology appointment that we’ve set up for you at the hospital on Monday. 

You’ll need to take your daughter in and they’ll take it from there. 

So as you can imagine, I just. I crumbled. I crumbled. I couldn’t stop crying. I don’t think I changed my clothes for three days. I didn’t leave my couch. My laptop is on my lap the whole time, looking for anything, anything I can find to try and save my child. 

And you know, that first, that first appointment with the doctor was something. Walking into a cancer ward where there’s a room of recliners with all these little bitty children, some infants with their laying on their mother’s chest. They’re bald, they’re skinny, they’re vomiting. There’s this yellow fluid coming from some of the bags. 

It was a parent’s absolute worst nightmare. 

And to even have to go back and experience it again just to tell the story, it shakes me to my core every time. Because we, as parents, we imagine what this life is going to look like, and we imagine what raising a child is going to look like, and we’ll never know what that is?

Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s tough. 

But the one beautiful thing out of my daughter becoming sick is that the path we chose. 

We can now, with confidence and with science behind us, say that we’ve saved lives and that’s been the silver lining. And that is where I go to when I start having these really hard thoughts and these why me’s and, you know, hearing stories my best friends are always telling me about their beautiful, healthy daughters and winning their volleyball matches and, you know, getting dancer of the year and their dance recitals and all things that I did as a child. I was, you know, this crazy athlete, this crazy dancer and was in beauty pageants and was just like this, you know, I was always on stage. I was singing or performing and living and traveling. 

And my daughter will never be able to do any of that because of the seven years of solid chemotherapy that she had to go through. 

Thirteen surgeries, six on her brain, legal blindness, left hand side disability, brain damage. I mean, she’s. You’ve met her, she’s. To talk to her, you would think she’s a 20 year old, just superstar. You know, she’s so outgoing. 

[00:10:43] Kevin Rice: She adopted me as her big brother within five minutes of meeting me. 

[00:10:47] Tracy Ryan: Absolutely. But you know, she’s a remarkable child and I’ve learned so much from her. And this journey has made me the woman that I am today. And I’m very proud of who I’ve become. 

It has been walking through fire and literally barefoot over burning coals that I have learned the lessons that I’ve learned. It’s really helped me in business a lot too, because I’ve very much lived in a man’s world and I’ve been underestimated my entire life. People take one look at me and they’re like, oh, you know, like I was saying earlier, just move her over to the side. She’s just put her over here. She’ll be fine over here. But I’m not that person. 

I’m strong. I’m a fighter, I’m an intellectual. I’m a hustler. I believe I can do anything. So I do it even if I have to fail 15 times to get it right. I don’t believe in failure. I only believe in failing over and over and over again until you get it right. And that is success for me, is using those failures to get there. 

And it’s given me really thick skin because when you have to be faced with, with death as many times as we have, with the most precious thing on this earth to me, Then all the other stuff is just noise. 

Now that noise can get loud sometimes and I have to turn the volume down on it. And I have to remind myself of why I’m here, why I’m doing this, what got me here, and who I’m doing it for. 

[00:12:15] Kevin Rice: What do you think this whole experience is meant to teach you or you’re meant to do from it? 

[00:12:21] Tracy Ryan: That’s an easy one to answer. 

I consider myself very intuitive and I have, since I was 11 years old, just known things sometimes. And I’m sure that there’s a lot of people out there listening that have experienced this. I’m sure there’s even more that have not.

Because it doesn’t happen to everybody. Not everybody is tapped into that part of their subconscious. 

But I have what I call these knowings. And about 72 hours after Sophie was diagnosed, but I was sitting on the couch, you know, in my tear stained clothes, my lap’s on fire from the heat from my laptop. Cause I had not stopped doing this research. And I had this energy that came through the top of my head and out my fingers and toes. And I’ve met two other cancer moms, by the way, that had this exact same experience right before they thought their children were gonna die. 

My child wasn’t about to die, but I was looking for something. 

And so the universe provided. And what I heard was, Sophie’s going to be okay. She has a message and you’re simply her messenger. 

And I believe that that message is of healing and of hope. 

And within about 24 to 48 hours of that, we got connected by Ricki Lake, who is a former talk show host. I got connected to her through this crazy chain of events on social media. 

And the first post I put up was about what we’re going through. And it got shared by one of the women in the group. This doula saw this message reached out to my friend, was like, ricki Lake is producing this new documentary about medical cannabis and about pediatric cancer. Do you think that your friend would be open to talking to them about this? 

And I’ve always just been a very open person. I mean, I had my fun in college. I was a consumer of cannabis, I was a rave dj. You know, I played rave parties all over the Midwest and at nightclubs, but always loved cannabis because it always made me calm, it always made me happy, it made me very artistic at this point. 

[00:14:19] Kevin Rice: By the time you had gotten in touch with Ricki Lake about her documentary, had you already started can of Kids? 

[00:14:25] Tracy Ryan: No, no. It’s what led to canna kids. This was days after Sophie had been diagnosed. I was not using cannabis at all. My husband was very against it because I was a consumer when I met him. 

But then when this happened and Ricky came to us and she was like, look, I’ve started this documentary. I started it because of this little girl that had the same kind of brain tumor as your daughter, which. These brain tumors are extremely rare. They only equate for about 1% of all brain cancers in children and especially rare in infants. 

And she was like this. You know, this family’s moved away to an illegal state. I’ve lost touch with them. 

Would you be interested in learning more about this plant for your child? And I’m like, this sounds crazy. I mean, how do I get my daughter to smoke a joint? And she’s like, no, no, no. It’s an oil. 

It’s an extract from the plant. We have people that guide in dosing. They use this medicinally only. 

We wanna work with these people to do what’s called a titration plan, where you start very, very,

very low, so there’s not that psychoactivity. The baby’s not feel. 

And then you gently work up. And by the way, we’d like to film you. 

We’re making a documentary about this, and we would like for your family to be a part of it. And it was weird, Kevin, because, like, every time we would start talking about cannabis in the house, trying to make a decision if this was something we wanted to do, hummingbirds started showing up to the window, like, lots of them wild. 

And hummingbirds have always been like, this really kind of like one of my favorite creatures on the planet, hummingbirds and peacocks. I love them both because they’re just so colorful and pretty. And I love color because I’ve been an artist. And all these hummingbirds would just. And they would only show up when we would talk about cannabis. And then lights in the house started flickering. And then this toy started going off when I was talking about it, and I was like, wait a minute, this is weird. I’m gonna stop. I’m gonna come back in five minutes. I’m gonna stand over this toy, and I’m gonna say, okay, if you want me to use cannabis. And, like, I couldn’t even get the word canna out. 

Like, no one was moving, the house wasn’t budging. Just weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird stuff that was undeniable. 

[00:16:32] Kevin Rice: But you were open enough to see those signs 100%. 

[00:16:35] Tracy Ryan: A lot of people aren’t 100% they are right in front of your face. I mean, everyone has the ability to be guided if they will just open their eyes to it. If there’s a song that comes on the radio that makes you think of someone, pay attention to it. And so knowing this, I knew that cannabis was something that we had to really look into. 

And so we found all these research papers. And I was like, how is this this much science on a plant that tells us it’s this good for us and it’s helping with all of these conditions? And once was used medicinally for women when they were giving birth or for excruciating pain, or like, there’s all these things that back in the day when alcohol was illegal, they were studying cannabis in the scientific labs and they had to get special licenses for the alcohol so they could make the cannabis tinctures. The cannabis was legal. 

[00:17:30] Kevin Rice: Right. 

[00:17:30] Tracy Ryan: And this documentary opened me up to why this all happened, and the greed and the corruption and the power and Harry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst and, you know, all these things that they were doing to gain political power. And then also American Medical association came out against it and said, if you take this away from medical providers, we have nothing to replace it. 

But it was banned anyway and made a Schedule 1 narcotic, deeming it to have no medical benefit, deeming it to be as addictive as crystal meth. Cocaine is on a lower schedule than cannabis, but yet the government owns a patent for it as a neuroprotectant, which is a medical benefit, yet they have it as a Schedule 1, meaning it has no medical benefit. 

[00:18:14] Kevin Rice: So explain this. So the government has a patent on cannabis, using it as a neuropectant. 

[00:18:19] Tracy Ryan: Yeah.

[00:18:20] Kevin Rice: So what’s the. Like, what prevents it from being used more broadly than if, like, if the government has a patent, what are the implications of that? 

[00:18:30] Tracy Ryan: So the government set this as a Schedule 1 narcotic. You have Schedule 1, Schedule 2, Schedule 3, Schedule 1. In order to research or use this medicine, which is what I call it, you have to have very special license in which to do it, because even though they have a patent for it to be medicinal, they say it’s not medicinal, which is why they put on schedule one. They did that because Big Pharma, Big Alcohol, Big Tobacco, does not want cannabis coming in and replacing all of these things, because there is so much value to this plant. There is so much medicinal value. People can use cannabis versus going out and getting wasted, and then they’re not hungover the next day. And it actually boosts the immune system, it reduces inflammation in the body. It doesn’t. It doesn’t completely dehydrate you. It doesn’t shrink your brain like all these things that all these other drugs do. Cannabis doesn’t do that. And I’ve studied this, we’ve done research on it, we published on it at ucla proving that it repairs the immune system in cancer patients and then helps to fight cancer and has the ability to kill the stem cells of cancer that chemo and radiation can’t even see. 

[00:19:39] Kevin Rice: Wow. So it’s not just pain relief, it’s actually reversing. 

[00:19:43] Tracy Ryan: It’s mental health, it’s longevity, it’s prevention. I have watched Parkinson’s patients who’ve been on every medication you can imagine and still violently shaking, take cannabis and their shakes. Stop. I’ve watched Alzheimer’s patients get more clarity and their Alzheimer’s. Stop. Start to slow in the progress and for them to get function back. I have helped PTSD war vets get off 30 medications before that were ruining their lives. I’ve watched people with extreme anxiety who couldn’t go to a concert be in the pit front row at a U2 show. 

I have watched the most miraculous things with kids with epilepsy and seizures who were dying and being put into medically induced comas go seizure free for years as soon as they found the right formulation using the plant. The plant is so valuable and it replaces so many things that are 

in our cabinets at home and in our medicine bottles at our pharmacy and the health and wellness supplements that we take every day. And nobody wants to lose all that money. I mean, there’s this. This plant has been researched more than any plant on the planet today. 

[00:20:54] Kevin Rice: And so then you started a company. 

[00:20:56] Tracy Ryan: I did. 

[00:20:57] Kevin Rice: Around cannabis. 

[00:20:58] Tracy Ryan: I started using it in Sophie at nine months old. She took her first dose on camera. 

We then helped bring in. 

There was five families in total. The film ended up on Netflix for five years called Weed the People. 

It’s now on Prime, Gaia and Apple tv. 

I’m guessing you watched it. Maybe. 

And all of the children came in through us, except for the cute little black boy that had dapg. The

only child that didn’t survive. Dapg is a different beast. All the other children that we brought in were terminal. 

One of them wasn’t deemed terminal yet, but he was having the most horrific side effects from his treatment that they had ever seen. And they did not expect him to live. All three of those kids are still alive today. Two of them had no chance of survival. But, you know, this Film, you know, watching these, these, these kids survive using one of. One of them, specifically using our oil, that we had taken such meticulous care to develop and work with scientists and medical experts and looked at the research on how to do the blends and what was working for what and what terpenes activated what. 

And watching these people survive, I knew that all of these signs that I had gotten and this intuition that I had, had had put me on the path to help my daughter. And I’ll be honest with you, Kevin, if it hadn’t have been for cannabis, I don’t know if my child would have survived chemotherapy. 

Despite the fact that this type of tumor is a 90 to 95% survival rate. She was diagnosed as a baby. 

So it traditionally is far more aggressive. Hers was aggressive aggressive. I mean, it would hit these crazy growth spurts. And I mean, I’ll never forget when she was first diagnosed, we had a watch and wait period and thinking that the cannabis would hopefully help and stop it. And her eyes started shaking. So we got so excited, it stopped shaking. And so we got so excited thinking that it was working. And when they did an mri, it had doubled in size in like two and a half months. 

And they called me and on the phone told me that they needed to do a brain surgery. 

And I said, well, what happens if this tumor comes back and it’s. It’s not low grade. And they over the phone said, your daughter won’t live to see her second birthday. Just like they were saying any old sentence out of their mouth. 

I collapsed to the floor and immediately got vertigo so bad I couldn’t get out of bed for three days. 

And we had to endure the wait for this surgery. And her first brain surgery was three days before her first birthday. And she spent her first birthday recovering from it in the hospital. 

Low grade, but nonetheless ended up being very aggressive, which is why the seven years of chemotherapy. But cannabis, what it did for her in that time, truly, I believed, saved her, her body and her mind. 

Cannabis has this really beautiful way of blocking bad memories and nightmares, which is why it works so good with ptsd. War vets. So once a week for five weeks, we were in the hospital getting her pump full of poison that was making her vomit and her hair fall out. I mean, she was a baby. We had to sleep. We had to rotate every night sleeping because if we didn’t take a night off, we’d never sleep. So my husband would go one night and I’d go the next. 

But, you know, looking at what it did for her immune system. She got to the point where she didn’t have to start coming back for that fifth week to check her immune system. Her immune system stopped tanking and they couldn’t understand it. They’re like, we’ve never seen anything like this. She stopped needing blood transfusions. She needed blood transfusions. The first four months of her protocol, she stopped needing them. The body doesn’t just repair itself as you’re

getting pumped more and more and more and more full of poison. It just gets worse. It doesn’t get better. Sure, her bone marrow repaired itself. This happened many times on many different protocols. 

First 13 months in treatment, her tumor shrank by almost 90%. These aren’t tumors that respond well to chemotherapy. You can see shrinkage, but sometimes they never shrink at all. Hers almost completely went away. 

And it was only because this hospital really didn’t treat these types of tumors that they followed the textbook. And even though the brain tumor was shrinking on the last mri, meaning there was still activity in there, meaning that there were still cells to gobble up. Cause they were still dividing. Otherwise it would have been stable. They took her off the treatment anyway. And within six months, the whole tumor grew back. And now it had mutated, and now it had gotten stronger, and now it had adapted to the treatment. And that was the only break we got in like eight years of treatment was that six month break. 

So there was also these amazing things that would happen when she’d have a brain surgery. She’d have like an eight hour brain surgery, and she’d come out with no bruising and swelling on her face. And by the. As long as she got her cannabis and she got food on her stomach, she would feel fine. And the doctors are like, we don’t know what we’re seeing. She was supposed to be. 

[00:25:51] Kevin Rice: Did they just think it was like placebo? 

[00:25:52] Tracy Ryan: No, they believed it was the cannabis. They did okay, they did, because I brought them enough research and I dropped Ricky’s name, which helped that they too were like, this is miraculous. Don’t stop it. And this was 13 years ago. This was when cannabis was not this friendly. 

[00:26:08] Kevin Rice: I don’t even know if it was legalized in California at that point. It was okay. Yeah, we were doing like 2010 or something. 

[00:26:15] Tracy Ryan: I don’t remember exactly the year. I think it had been legal a little bit longer than that. I don’t know. I’d have to go back and look at that. But it was definitely legal. There were doctors clinics established where you could get cards. There were sure sure. 

[00:26:26] Kevin Rice: Yeah. There was. 

Medically legal. 

[00:26:29] Tracy Ryan: Medically legal. 

[00:26:29] Kevin Rice: I was thinking when. 

[00:26:30] Tracy Ryan: Oh, not recreationally legal. It was. Oh, no, no, no. [00:26:32] Kevin Rice: That was, what, like, 10 years ago? 

[00:26:33] Tracy Ryan: Oh, yeah. Like, if that. Yeah, it was only medically legal at this time. Definitely not recreational. Yeah, but just seeing, you know, what this plant had the power to do, it didn’t stop her tumor. Her tumor continued to be relentless, but it fixed so many other things. 

I mean, you took her off the Cannabis, she’d have 10 seizures a day. You put her on, she’d have

one every three to six months. And it was tiny. 

[00:26:55] Kevin Rice: Wow. 

[00:26:56] Tracy Ryan: So that’s what really led me to science. 

I started the Canna Kids company. I started working with. 

[00:27:03] Kevin Rice: Like, how did you even know how to start a cannabis company? Because up until then you had been running a creative agency, right? 

[00:27:09] Tracy Ryan: Well, I knew how to build a business and I knew how to run a team. 

Because when you have a creative agency and you’ve got 23 employees, we had another 50 between, you know, freelancers in Mexico and New York, and you’ve got, you know, 20, 30 projects going on at once. You know how to. You know how to run things. You figure it out really fast. 

[00:27:28] Kevin Rice: If you don’t, I feel like being in consulting or in the, like, agency space is like the best MBA you can get. 

[00:27:36] Tracy Ryan: It really is. 

[00:27:37] Kevin Rice: You learn so much and you have. 

[00:27:39] Tracy Ryan: To do it fast or you fail. But it’s through those failures that you also learn. So I’ve fallen on my face a lot, but I’m somebody who’s okay with that. 

And really, it’s the resilience you have to possess in order to be a successful entrepreneur, because you’re going to fail and you’re going to fail a lot. 

But it’s through those failures that that’s where you find what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do. And you learn that lesson and you don’t do it again. And then you build. 

[00:28:03] Kevin Rice: Yeah. I actually have a really random but kind of funny tangent is that when I was building my agency, our first client that was spending, like, six figures a month with us was actually a company called weedmaps. 

[00:28:16] Tracy Ryan: Oh, I know those guys. 

[00:28:18] Kevin Rice: Yeah. 

When we were starting our agency, the guy who founded it, Justin, he was doing freelance work and he started building weed maps. And then we started, like, helping him with the original WeedMap site. And so for the first, like, couple years of our company, if you walked around the office, all it was was developers building websites with cannabis on it. 

[00:28:39] Tracy Ryan: That’s amazing. 

[00:28:40] Kevin Rice: And we eventually like they were gonna buy us, but they were on the pink sheets so we didn’t wanna do that. And then they eventually like brought it all in house. But it was just this funny first couple years of our company was like all we did was build cannabis

related websites. 

[00:28:54] Tracy Ryan: Crazy. I’m sure you probably built some of my friends websites because I knew all the big players in the game. 

[00:29:00] Kevin Rice: Hi, Kevin here. If you’re enjoying this conversation and you know someone else who’s working to grow in their career while staying present at home, I’d really love it if you could share this episode with them. It’s one of the best ways you can help us and, and help more leaders build their careers in a way that they’re proud of without missing the moments that matter most. 

You must be so proud. I mean, you’ve been through so much. 

[00:29:23] Tracy Ryan: I forget, you know, when you’re in it, it’s weird because I’ll, you know, now with the immunotherapy company, I’m, I’m now out there doing these big speaking engagements again. It’s in a different audience, but the response is like, even better. It’s crazy. Like they don’t know what to do with this. And the response has been really incredible. And I forget what we’ve accomplished and I forget what we’ve done and I forget the impact that we’ve had because we’re so in the thick of it all the time. And it’s really, really easy to just forget anything other than what’s right in front of you. And our daughter, although she hasn’t been on chemotherapy since 2019, she still really struggles. 

She just got over a month in the bed from a horrible gut bacteria called sibo. From all the years of vomiting and her food not going down fast enough. And the food settles in the gut and then it builds bacteria because it doesn’t process fast enough. And she’s looked like she’s pregnant for 

the last four or five years. And dealing with that and dealing with the visual impairments and she’s got to have a terrible surgery on her leg. So we’re constantly in it, we’re constantly dealing with these side effects from the treatments. And you forget that there are people out there that are alive right now because you cared. And you forget that, you know, you’ve received a dozen messages from people who are suicidal that didn’t kill themselves because if your daughter could do it, they could do it. You forget about the babies that have been named after her because the family was so inspired by her journey that now their little girl’s name, Sophie too. Those are all the things that you just kind of leave behind because you’re so focused on surviving. 

And I’ve been building companies the entire time this has been going on. Like, I never stopped building businesses. I sold Can a Kids to start in core biotherapeutics. 

I went from cannabis, which is one of the hardest businesses to operate in the country, to pharma. Yeah. 

[00:31:13] Kevin Rice: Were you still running the creative agency when you started Cannokids? 

[00:31:16] Tracy Ryan: No. I ended up downsizing the creative agency and using much of that team to start can of Kids and my charity at the same time. 

And so a lot of those people moved over and they became the creative team for can of Kids or like my assistant moved into more of the making the products and labeling the bottles and the manufacturing process. Because we were very small scale at first. And when we started, you couldn’t legally manufacture cannabis. 

[00:31:44] Kevin Rice: Right.

[00:31:45] Tracy Ryan: It was still very much a gray zone where we could have what’s called a collective, where as long as we had a hundred patients signed up on a document that we served, then we could legally have what’s called a collective. But we couldn’t manufacture selling in stores. All the cannabis stores were still illegal at the time. If you got caught with it, you get arrested. You had to have a medical card. It was all very like, gray zone where we were operating legally, but we couldn’t have a bank and we couldn’t have money in it. And if we did, then we have to lie about what the kind of company was we were running or, you know, the feds would shut us down. 

It was wild. We had to have two separate sets of books for accounting. It was very difficult. And then it became a league, then it became legal, and then it got even harder because the taxation. 

[00:32:30] Kevin Rice: Right. Well, the government needs to get their piece of it. So I was actually thinking about that. 

When it was only legal medically, did that create any more credibility for cannabis as a therapeutic drug versus when it became recreational legal? Well, now it’s just something you do for fun. Did that actually hurt its credibility? 

[00:32:52] Tracy Ryan: I don’t know that it hurt its credibility, because then it gave a lot more people permission to use it and experience it and really see what all the buzz was about. 

I mean, the sales skyrocketed across the country for cannabis, and if anything, I believe it helped it, because now people that had been so demonized against it started to look at it at a different light because more people were using. 

[00:33:17] Kevin Rice: It, became more Normalized. Yeah. 

[00:33:19] Tracy Ryan: I mean, I can’t tell you how many moms that I know that literally will tell you to your face. I’m a better mother. I’m a better wife. 

[00:33:29] Kevin Rice: I am more better than drinking a bottle of wine. 

[00:33:32] Tracy Ryan: Exactly. Which is what they were doing. And guess what wine is. A depressant. Yeah. 

[00:33:35] Kevin Rice: Poison. 

[00:33:36] Tracy Ryan: Guess what wine does to your sleep. Guess what alcohol does to your sleep. 

[00:33:38] Kevin Rice: It’s terrible. 

[00:33:39] Tracy Ryan: And what happens when you don’t sleep? 

[00:33:41] Kevin Rice: I wear a whoop. 

[00:33:42] Tracy Ryan: Exactly. 

[00:33:42] Kevin Rice: I could literally see a huge difference in my sleep scores if I have a, you know, a beer or a glass of wine before bed. 

[00:33:50] Tracy Ryan: And guess what is heavily in alcohol? Sugar.

[00:33:53] Kevin Rice: Yes. 

[00:33:54] Tracy Ryan: Guess what sugar does to your body. Destroys your immune system. 

Oh, and let’s not forget the addictive part, which wrecks families and homes and takes away everything you’ve worked for, whereas I’ve never known. And I’m not saying people haven’t gotten addicted to cannabis. It happens. But I’ve. In all the thousands of people that I’ve ever known in my journeys around the world, I’ve never met one. 

I know it has happened, and I don’t want to discredit that. I do believe that those people probably just predominantly have a very addictive personality and they could get addicted to anything. I mean, people are addicted to chocolate and coffee more than they’re addicted to cannabis. There’s been science to prove that, Kevin, that coffee is more addictive. 

So I really do think that it’s helped open a lot of minds, especially in the pregnancy community, which may seem wild to you, but there was a woman who I knew and I worked with and I helped, and this was prior to it being more acceptable when using it during pregnancy, and it’s still not that acceptable. But there was a woman that was dying. She was vomiting so much while she was pregnant, she couldn’t keep fluids down. She was having to have. She actually ended up getting an IV bag sent home with her because we were doing that for my own daughter. And. And it gave her the idea to ask for fluids to be sent home where she could do drips at home. So that helped keep her hydrated. So she wasn’t spending all day every day in the hospital, but nothing was stopping her vomiting until cannabis. 

And then she started taking cannabis and the vomiting stopped, and she was able to eat, and her baby survived, and she survived. 

And so there became this whole underground community of pregnant women. 

And then one of the things that I always loved telling people on stage was about how breast milk has. Cannabinoids in it. 

Endocannabinoids. Our body has an endocannabinoid system that produces these endocannabinoids that are almost identical to cannabinoids in the cannabis plant. 

[00:35:47] Kevin Rice: You’re gonna have to explain this a little bit more to me because let. [00:35:51] Tracy Ryan: Me break it down for you. 

So there’s a system called the endocannabinoid system that runs all throughout the body, the brain, heart, organs. 

And this system helps regulate homeostasis. Homeostasis is keeping the body in perfect balance. 

It was the least studied system in the entire body until cannabis science became more well known. So what we have come to know over the years is that when your body is out of balance, or like with my company who works with natural killer cells, which I’ll also explain to you in layman’s terms, I’ve got a great little analogy for that one. 

When your natural killer cells or the generals in the marching army of your immune system become affected and they become weakened from stress, obesity, genetic factors,

environmental exposures, your body gets out of whack. This homeostasis becomes imbalanced and that’s when disease happens. Cannabis can help rebalance the body through the endocannabinoid system and can restate, reinstate homeostasis in the body, which then helps fight other diseases, including cancer and many other immune related issues. 

[00:36:58] Kevin Rice: How is this information not more publicly known? 

[00:37:01] Tracy Ryan: The government. 

The government buried it. And if you watch the documentary that we’re in, you remember there was that one part where there was a woman who was talking about how there used to be all these publications on cancer in these medical journals, and it used to be, I don’t know, several thousand or whatever, and now it’s like 300. They’ve been wiping them from the medical journals and removing them for many, many, many, many years. Because once again, cannabis would destroy so many industries, because it would replace them. Because there would be no need for all of these toxic remedies or people won’t drink alcohol as much. They won’t smoke cigarettes if they can have a joint, when a joint makes them feel good and cigarettes give them cancer. 

[00:37:44] Kevin Rice: Sure. 

[00:37:44] Tracy Ryan: You know what I mean? 

[00:37:45] Kevin Rice: So like pharmaceutical industries and lobbyists would have a very strong reason to suppress all of this information. 

[00:37:52] Tracy Ryan: And it’s been proven. 

This isn’t just some little conspiracy theory that I’ve come up with. It’s been. [00:37:57] Kevin Rice: Sorry, there’s a lot of conspiracy theories that I believe in nowadays. 

[00:37:59] Tracy Ryan: Yeah, well, because a lot of them are true. Not all of them. Trust me, there’s some wild ones out there, but this is one that was true. The government was hiding it from us. They didn’t want us to know about it. And if you see, even today we are in 2026 and all of this information is out there, it is still a Schedule 1 narcotic. Right. And they’re now trying to make some big moves on hemp and trying to take hemp away. We had the farm bill that made hemp legal across the nation. Well, they were trying to then take hemp away from people. I mean, it’s wild, but it’s because hemp is replacing so much stuff from a health and wellness standpoint. And nobody wants to lose money. It’s all greed and power, sadly. 

So this was the research that we’ve seen come since then has been absolutely undeniable, but yet we fight against it continuously. 

[00:38:55] Kevin Rice: Yeah. 

Now, you were building a cannabis company. 

You were a new mom and your daughter has a lot more needs than a typical child. And I know how much demand three boys is on me. I can’t imagine how you and your husband carried this. 

What was life like when you were building a company, taking care of your daughter, going to appointments?

[00:39:25] Tracy Ryan: It was brutal. 

We had this incredible nanny. Her name is Janine, she goes by Nini. Her and her and her wife Bella were God sends to us. Janine was supposed to start with us on Monday. Sophie was diagnosed on. It was either Saturday or Sunday, I think. I think it was. I think it was Saturday, actually. 

We called her on Sunday and we said, look, Sophie was just diagnosed with a brain tumor yesterday. She’s got to start chemotherapy. We understand if you don’t want this job. And she said, no, I’m in. I’m here for you. I’m going to be there no matter what you need. I’ll take her to her appointments. 

I’ll be there for you no matter what. And she became, I mean, her and her family and her daughter’s my goddaughter now. But Nene was an incredible rock for us because I was building this, this brand in the middle of it. Very demanding. I mean, you know what agency life is like. It’s very demanding. There is no punching out because every. 

[00:40:26] Kevin Rice: Not a nine to five. 

[00:40:27] Tracy Ryan: No, no, never. There’s always something going down somewhere. If you’re building a website, there’s always an iPhone app having a glitch or there’s always somebody that’s on a rush to meet a demand for a brand launch and you have to meet those demands or you lose the client. 

So it became this juggling act because whereas I had to be there for my company, I also couldn’t just send my infant to chemotherapy without her mother. 

So I’ve worked it out. 

Many of the appointments I was able to go to, but Nene would go with me, and she would be there if I’d have to take a phone call or if I’d, you know, have to whip my laptop out and do some work or, you know, if I couldn’t go at all. And. And she would go, and my husband would go, because my husband also worked for me at the agency. 

But it was. It was horrible. Like the first. The first, like first few months of her diagnosis. Every four to six weeks, we were hospitalized. 

It was dehydration, blood transfusions. 

It was roller coaster. She was so, so sick on that first protocol, on many of them. But the first protocol was especially, especially bad. The first and the last were two of the worst. 

My husband and I were not doing well at all. I mean, here we went from this wild, carefree life before we had Sophie, traveling, partying, skiing. 

We were literally like the core of the group of friends that we had. They all stayed at our house every weekend. I knew all the people in town because I worked in feature films and I knew a lot of people in Hollywood. And so I was getting all of our friends at the front of the lines for VIP at club nights. And I was the planner. We were the planner. We were the couple that was the planners. We set up every weekend. Everybody waited to hear from us what we were going to do, what exciting event were we going to be attending, what red carpet were we going to be on. And we went from that to being new parents, to being cancer parents.

And our friends turned on us to boot. 

One of three of my bridesmaids, unfortunately, one of them worked at CHLA for an eye doctor who calls these brain tumors. 

Because by definition, my daughter’s tumor is diagnosed as benign, which there is absolutely. I hate that word. Like, I don’t even like it coming out of my mouth. I hate it so bad. There is absolutely nothing benign about this tumor. It’s still a tumor, and it’s still in your brain. But she convinced my friends that it wasn’t actually cancer, even though every doctor, every oncologist she’s ever had calls it malignant, because if they don’t do anything, she’s going to die. She has to have chemotherapy. She has to have brain surgeries. 

Children with aggressive malignant cancer don’t go through seven years of treatment. 

My Daughter went through seven years of treatment on the same protocols, getting more brain surgeries, getting more hospital stays, on top of seizures, on top of blindness, on top of limb disabilities. I know tons of adults that had pediatric cancer that are totally normal today. My child will never be normal. She’ll never have a fully functioning body. 

But she convinced my friends that I was lying and that this benign tumor was an eye condition, because she Googled it, and that’s what Google told her. 

And so they all turned on me and started accusing me of turning my daughter into a sideshow circus. One of them I’d known since high school. 

I was there the day her baby was born. She was there the day my baby was born. We’d lived together. We’d been college roommates. Another one of them was my best guy friend that had practically lived with me during my single years. And he just looked at me one day and he’s like, I’m sorry. This is too much. I can’t do this. I can’t be your friend anymore. Literally told me he can’t be my friend anymore. 

[00:44:17] Kevin Rice: Is that because they just. Just don’t know how to, like. How to be there for you and how to, like, deal with something that’s so uncomfortable for them? 

[00:44:25] Tracy Ryan: I think they didn’t want to. Yeah, I think they didn’t want to have to. I was 35. 

They were all still out partying and clubbing and, you know, going to the hot spots on the weekends and being carefree. Being carefree. And this wasn’t carefree. 

And I thought it. I think it was really, really easy for them to believe the one girl that told him I was lying about my daughter’s condition because that got him off the hook. It made me the bad guy. And they didn’t have to stop their fun lives to now be a part of ours. I mean, these are people we never even had so much as a disagreement with. And you wouldn’t believe how many people that I know that families like mine that go through the exact same thing. There was something I shared on Facebook, just probably a week and a half ago, maybe that’s still on my page now. And it was this long story that this mother had written about how they’d been abandoned and what people were doing to them. And I shared it. And this is. I haven’t told this story much, but I’m telling it now. And I think it’s important for people to know that when families like ours go through stuff like this, the worst thing you can do to them is just Abandon them. You don’t have to be there for every single thing. But show up and help with the laundry once a month.

[00:45:39] Kevin Rice: Yeah. 

[00:45:40] Tracy Ryan: Show up with a meal, you know, show up and offer babysitting for a night to give the parents a break. 

But they all turned on me. And they all were very vicious in the words they said to me. They accused me of making up Sophie’s cancer diagnosis and that I was gonna kill real patients with my cannabis schemes and that the documentary was turning her into a sideshow. They. National Geographic started following us very early on with my photography. The photographer’s actually in town right now. I’m gonna see her this afternoon. And they’ve been following us for 12 years, and they were doing a documentary on us. And they literally contacted this woman and said, tracy’s lying. This isn’t real. Her daughter’s not really sick, and she’s trying to raise money for a house. I still live in an apartment today, Kevin, just so you know. 

So on top of of all of these things happening and losing my support system, losing my life as I knew it, losing myself as I knew it, losing the vision of being a parent, and now having no one else to take it out on but my husband, like, we just took everything out on each other. 

And I handled the trauma a lot differently. I started the Kanakids secret group on Facebook, which is how Cannon Kids originally started. 

I had this purpose. I was helping other children. I was helping other parents and families. 

He didn’t have that same outlet. We also just kind of processed trauma differently, so it drove a really big wedge in our marriage for a long time. 

I read two really amazing books that changed my perspective on everything. One of them was Loving what Is by Byron. Katie, have you read that? 

[00:47:25] Kevin Rice: I haven’t read that. I’ve read. 

[00:47:26] Tracy Ryan: Read it. 

[00:47:28] Kevin Rice: That’s where she covers, like, the work. 

[00:47:30] Tracy Ryan: Exactly the three questions that you ask yourself. 

And she had a profound experience that led her to this. Knowing when she was suicidal and sleeping on the floor because she didn’t think she deserved a bed. And she just had this download of information. And now she’s shared this knowledge all over the world. And you ask yourself these questions, am I the problem or are they the problem? And it’s how you go through the process. And I started looking at these things, and I’m like, yeah, I’ve been blaming my husband for a lot of stuff. He can’t change anymore. Like, he did that a long time ago, and I still beat him up over it. And I did that a long time. Ago, and he still beats me up over it. And if I want to be happy, I just have to change. Choose. And then the other one that I read was more spiritual in nature. It was God in the Afterlife by Dr. Jeffrey Long. And it was the largest sampling of near death experiences ever recorded, studied, and then published in a series. 

[00:48:21] Kevin Rice: I went down that path for a while. I read, like, dozens of near death experience books. Wild Anita Moorjani. 

[00:48:28] Tracy Ryan: So good.

And it was in those moments that I looked at my life and I thought about these knowings that I’d had. 

And I thought about the hummingbirds showing up and the toys going off and the lights flickering and the numbers that kept showing up. And I’m like, wait a minute. 

This is my soul’s calling. Yeah. Life is a boot camp. 

[00:48:49] Kevin Rice: Yeah. 

[00:48:50] Tracy Ryan: And we choose to come down here and we choose these. Either really easy lives or really hard lives, depending on what our soul needs to learn. And my God, I decided to pick a tough one. I picked a doozy. 

[00:49:04] Kevin Rice: You’re like, I’m gonna graduate fast. 

[00:49:07] Tracy Ryan: You know, I think that I’ve had a lot of lives. I do. I really do. I think that I’ve lived many lives in the past because of how easy it is for me to process trauma and how I move through things and how I see the world and how easy I let go. My husband calls me a robot lovingly, but he’s like, I just don’t know how you do it. Like, how is this not affecting you more? 

But I was able to really sink into that, into that purpose and into that belief that, okay, this is happening me. This is happening to me right now simply because it’s supposed to. Otherwise it wouldn’t have. Yeah, right. Like, if my life was supposed to be any different at all, it would be. It would be, and it wasn’t. 

So once I came to grips with that, and I still lose that grip sometimes, I was in my kitchen three days ago going, why did you pick this life? Tell me again, because this is grueling and I need a break right now. Bring me some love. 

Literally, I find myself just begging the universe for a chance to breathe. 

And then when I get it, I look back and I’m like, whoa, look at what I learned. And I survived that. 

I overcame that, and now I’m stronger for it. But, yeah, I chose a doozy. 

But these books helped me not only understand purpose and understand that there’s more and understand that, hey, maybe next time it will be easier. It also helped me settle into this belief that my Daughter and I signed up to this together, as did my husband. 

8.5 out of 10 marriages don’t survive a child with an illness, much less a chronic one. Let that sink in. 1.5 marriages out of 10. 1.5. 

So we are in that 1.5. We’ve been together almost 20 years now, and we’re so much better now. Like, we’ve overcome so much, and we’re happier again. Don’t get me wrong. 

We still have our.

Our rough spots that we have to go through. And then we’re like, okay, we need. Somebody needs counseling, sure as well. Somebody needs a therapist. Somebody needs an sri. Like, somebody needs something to get us over this. But we know how to fight for each other, and we know how to fight for our family, and we know how to fight for what we believe we deserve. 

And we do that with the lovingness in our hearts that we’re good people and that we’re not gonna step on other people to do it. We’re not gonna hurt other people to do it. We’re not gonna steal from other people to do it. 

Despite the fact that that continues to happen to me in my career and in my life and just really all around, I refuse to let the negativity pull me into it and change me for it because of this belief that I simply, really, truly am here to help shift how medicine is used, how patients are treated, and how we survive and we live and we thrive. But there’s a few things that I’ve really accepted. 

My scars are my stars. 

And through my pains and my injuries and my sufferings, there’s always a lesson if you look for it. And once I got through them, I would take the time necessary. And this is usually when I’m laying in bed at night. It’s the only quiet time I have in my entire day is when everyone’s asleep and I’m laying there. And I’ve got a creative mind. It’s really hard to shut it off. So I end up thinking a lot at night. It’s where I do my best work. And I’ll go back and I’ll relive these things and I’ll look at what happened and try to figure out why. What was the message here? What was the purpose of this? What was I supposed to learn from it? 

And I don’t wanna say 100% of the time, I figure it out, because sometimes I’m just like, you know, that. Just what did I get from that? It just really wasn’t necessary. It’s just another hiccup in life. 

But most often, most often, I find something profound that came from it. 

And that profoundness that I was able to sink my teeth into in that moment helped my soul evolve and helped me learn and help me grow as a person and as a being, as a consciousness. 

[00:53:21] Kevin Rice: Yeah. Everything that happens to you at the end of the day, it comes down to, like, the meaning you assign to it. So even a tragedy can be a really important step forward in life if you understand it for what it is and how it helped you learn and grow. 

[00:53:34] Tracy Ryan: Exactly, exactly. You know, that’s one of the things that I always tell people is take a look at what’s happened and try and figure out why. What was the lesson there? 

One of the things I always tell my daughter, too, is when things are really, really hard, I’m like, honey, one of these days you’re gonna look back and you’re going to. This is going to all seem so much smaller. This is a very small moment in a very long life. 

[00:53:58] Kevin Rice: Yeah. When you zoom out and you look at your life in its entirety, you start to notice periods and sections where you’re like, oh, like, now I understand. I mean, I’ve been through divorce. I’ve had, you know, companies like my company go down and back up, and, like, you just look back at all those periods, and it’s like one of my challenging, most challenging business experiences was doing a layoff. 

[00:54:22] Tracy Ryan: Right.

[00:54:22] Kevin Rice: But then right after that, we made all these. These major changes that basically, I mean, we grew 400 over the next few years. 

But in the moment, if I had just been like, in that moment, it was so painful and so difficult. 

But, yeah, it always really helps me, like, when I’m in one of those in struggle to just zoom out and remember, like, this is one point in time, and at some point, I’m going to learn something from this. 

[00:54:47] Tracy Ryan: Yeah. Because it feels so big when you’re in it. But if you can just stop and kind of recenter and be like, okay, this has only been going on for this amount of time, and I’ve been alive for this amount of time. 

It’s not always gonna be like this. And that’s what I tell Sophie is, baby, I know this is really hard right now, and it feels like the world’s about to end. 

It’s not always gonna be like this. It will get better, it will get easier, and then it’s gonna get hard again. 

And that’s the rollerbarg. 

[00:55:16] Kevin Rice: Is it hard to, like, continue to give that message if things aren’t Changing. 

[00:55:23] Tracy Ryan: Well, the messages are always hard to give regardless. Especially the fact that you have to give it at all is the hard part. 

But Soph is very wise to be as young as she is. 

She’s also. I think she might even be an older soul than me. And she is struggling. I’m not gonna sit here and lie and say she’s this bright, happy little girl anymore that she was for most of her life. Most of life. She was extremely resilient. Everything just kind of bounced off of her. But she was younger than. She wasn’t as self aware. She didn’t understand death like she does now. She wasn’t enduring bullying like she is now because she was in a middle school or, sorry, a grade school where it was small and she was beloved. And she’s super outgoing. 

Like, I can’t tell you the last three times we’ve gone to a mall in different parts of the area, 100% of the time, some little teenager walks up and like, is that Sophie? Oh, my God, your daughter’s so amazing. 

[00:56:16] Kevin Rice: Hi, Sophie. 

[00:56:17] Tracy Ryan: And these beautiful 13 and 14 and 15 and 16 year olds that my daughter just touches, and she’s like, oh, hey, girl. And she just knows everybody. She talks to everybody. She says hello to everybody. But she has severe anxiety and OCD. She was just diagnosed recently with mild PTSD and the fact that it’s mild after 13 years. She just had her sixth brain surgery last summer. Like, we’re not through this. We’re not done yet. And that was from hydrocephalus, from scar tissue from five previous brain surgeries. A fear we didn’t even know we needed to have. And she fainted in my arms in a bathroom at the Glendale Galleria. And I thought she was having a seizure, and I was just like, oh, my God, here we go. Here comes another brain surgery. Here comes more chemotherapy. And my life is flashing in front of my eyes again. 

So there’s always that hard stuff that we’re having to say it’s going to get easier.

And it does. Sometimes. 

We’ve had those incredible bright spots where we’ve had those long periods of health since 2019. Like, we’d have two years where everything was just good. And she was. She was growing and she was healthy and she wasn’t sick at all. And she didn’t have these gut issues she’s been dealing with. She didn’t have the hydrocephalus she was dealing with. Her vision was improving. You know, we were giving her the NK cells. She was our second patient for Encore, which Has been amazing because now I get to talk about her story and how her tumor is dying on our therapy when it didn’t die in five years on toxic. Five out of the seven years on toxic drugs. So we had these celebrations that we were doing and these trips that we were taking. 

We’ve only just recently gotten into this. Last year has been really, really, really, really rough. 

We had. My business partner that invented the science died. She had the brain surgery. She had the gut issues. We’ve had issues Going on with the company and trying to raise capital has been horrible. So we’ve been kind of in the thick of it for a bit, and it’s really started to weigh on my family to the point where we’re all like, okay, everyone’s going into therapy now. I’ve never. I haven’t done therapy in the 13 years that. For myself, personally, that we’ve been going through this. And now I’m like, I need somebody to talk to. This is too much. 

But I’m just. I’m by nature a positive person. 

That’s another reason why I really think this is why I’m here, is because I’m the way I’m hardwired. 

I see the silver linings when there are none. 

When those storm clouds are circling and there’s tornadoes dropping from the sky and there’s earthquakes under our feet, I’m like, oh, it’s coming. That rainbow’s just right over there. You just gotta give it a minute. I just have always had that innate ability to find the good and the bad. 

So for me, it’s a lot easier. For my husband, it’s a lot more difficult. Cause he has trauma that he suffers from and adhd. And you couple that with my daughter’s mental illnesses, and there’s a lot of balancing that has to happen. And I’m the center of it. I’m the referee. I’m the anchor. I’m the rock. And so I don’t get to break down a lot. 

And when Mommy does, that’s when it all falls apart. 

So I have to find other ways for me to work through it. And that is. I’ll tell you one thing I really love. Breath work is miraculous. I don’t do it nearly enough. 

[00:59:26] Kevin Rice: It’s like holotropic breath work. 

[00:59:28] Tracy Ryan: Oh, my God. Yeah, it’s the breaths. Until you, like, get the Klobster claw hands. And, you know, you’re not getting the. 

[00:59:35] Kevin Rice: Oxy, you can’t move your mouth, and. 

[00:59:37] Tracy Ryan: It’S locked up, but it’s like a Hundred therapy sessions in one session. Love breath work.

[00:59:42] Kevin Rice: Yeah. My first breath work session, I had a major release. Just tears streaming down my eyes. 

[00:59:46] Tracy Ryan: I couldn’t stop crying for an hour. I literally walked up. It was with, you know, the, the organization Summit that does the big huge conferences. 

They’re huge. They used to do massive in downtown la. They do them in Utah on the mountain summit. 

[00:59:58] Kevin Rice: Oh, is that like summit series? Yeah, where you like, climb the equivalent of Everest? 

[01:00:06] Tracy Ryan: No, no, this is. This is more like Patel in a way that we’re members of, where it’s these incredible speakers that come from all of these different segments of industry. And I mean, they’ll have everything from presidents to the CEO of Starbucks, to Eckhart Tolle, to, you know, all these incredible inspirational speakers that come and they do these huge summits and they do them. I think they’re still doing them in downtown la. They do a summit at sea. 

[01:00:29] Kevin Rice: Oh, I’ve heard. A summit at sea. 

[01:00:31] Tracy Ryan: Yeah. So, well, tell us a little bit. 

[01:00:33] Kevin Rice: About your current company and actually how did you, like, go from Canada kids to now a biotech company? 

[01:00:45] Tracy Ryan: Well, it all started with the lack of being able to figure out why cannabis wasn’t working in my daughter. 

And that’s what spawned my partnership with Dr. Daddy Mary at the Technion Institute in Israel, who is this world renowned cancer scientist that was studying cannabis for cancer and autism and epilepsy and all these wonderful things. And, um, we hadn’t found the formulation that was blocking the growth of Sophie’s tumor. It was helping in all these other ways, but for some reason, even though I was watching it work in all these other people that were way sicker than her, it wasn’t stopping her disease. So I had gotten the idea that I was next brain surgery Sophie had. I was going to get her live tissue, I was going to have it implanted into mice here in the United States, and then I was going to fly those mice to Israel. 

I’d already flown her brain tumor sample there before, but it wasn’t a live sample. It was dead, so they couldn’t recreate it. 

So another brain surgery was scheduled. And I had to fight the hospital. The hospital was not gonna give me the brain tissue. Their research hospital, they said, this is against our policies. And I’m like, I don’t care. 

So I went to a friend who sat on the board at ucla. He was a renowned doctor who was friends with the CEO at chla. And so I went to the CEO, the CEO went to legal, and the legal passed the word down, give this woman her brain tumor sample. We’re gonna let her have it. So I was the first parent in the hospital to get live brain tissue. We took that to CHLA or from CHLA to UCLA, where Dr. Anahid Jewett was that I had met, that had agreed to put this tissue into mice for me. We had National Geographic here photographing the whole thing. 

[01:02:25] Kevin Rice: Wow.

[01:02:25] Tracy Ryan: And the whole process. I’ve got pictures of Sophie’s tissue arriving at the lab and all these scientists standing around Dr. Jewett while they’re figuring out, like, the different reagents to use to suspend the tumor so they could cryopreserve some of it and implant it into the animal models and other. And grow it in the animal models. It was wild what I was able to accomplish in six weeks. It was the most extreme pressure of my life. But this is where the science was gonna happen. So Dr. Jewett agrees to do this work. But she was like, I wanna study your daughter’s immune system. You tell me these cannabis stories. You tell me these stories of your daughter. You tell me of these immune responses. I’m an immune research scientist. She was one of the foremost leading scientists in the world for natural killer cells. And I’ll tell you what those are in a minute. And she was like, I wanna understand what’s going on inside your daughter’s body. It’s like, fine, you can study her until the end of time. I’ve had people all over the world trying to figure this out. Help me. 

So she gets my daughter’s blood. And she was like, tracy. 

She calls me up, she’s like, I don’t understand what I’m seeing. And I’m bracing for impact. I’m like, oh, God, what’s wrong now? She said, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s good. 

She was like, your daughter has the immune system of a healthy adult, yet she’s on four chemotherapies, and she’s a child that should have an immature immune system. I don’t understand what I’m looking at. I need more patients. The mice are staying here. We’re gonna do research together. 

And it was like, wow. I mean, just full body. I felt like I was in body chills for days after that because now my path had shifted. And now I’m in my own backyard versus on the other side of the world in a very long flight away to where I couldn’t be hands on and involved. 

And then something really miraculous happened. It was something bad that something good came from the scoop of tumor. They Took out of my daughter’s brain. 

The way that they did it, they didn’t really go in and debulk it like they were supposed to. They’re just, like, kind of went in and took a scoop out the little area that they went through to remove the disease Sealed up and trapped fluid inside the empty hole and started forming a cyst. But there was this bulge that started to appear in her temple. Well, this was this cyst, so it had to be drained. And when we drained it, we took the fluid to Dr. Jude at UCLA, and she discovered she had zero natural killer cells in her brain. Yet from the neck down, they were performing unlike anything she’d seen in any cancer patient she’d ever studied in 30 years. 

[01:04:56] Kevin Rice: Okay, you’re gonna have to explain natural killer cells. Got it. 

[01:04:59] Tracy Ryan: So imagine an army, and an army has a general, and that general goes after and finds the enemy. And once it identifies the enemy, it recruits the soldiers in to attack and kill together. 

The general’s the natural killer cells. The army is your white blood cells. They are the main driver of your immune system that you’re born with, Called your innate immune system. You have an adaptive immune system. It adapts. When you get viruses like the common cold or the flu or what have you, it builds immunity to it. So your innate immune system Is the one that’s just always there. When you get your white blood cell count tested. That’s your lymphocytes, that’s your white blood cells, Your T cells, and your nk cells are the most known out of those two. 

So natural killer cells have this unique ability to be able to see that enemy without them having a

flag waving on top of them. Or surface receptor is what we call it in science. [01:05:56] Kevin Rice: Okay. 

[01:05:56] Tracy Ryan: So you’ve got just imagine this little ball with these little hairs sticking up on it, and they’re surface receptors. So I call those the white flags. 

The NKs don’t need a white flag to see a cancer cell, and a cancer cell does not have a white flag. 

So if you don’t have a natural killer cell system that’s functioning because it’s been broken down by obesity or genetic mutations or environmental factors or terrible sleep and diet, whatever it is, they’ve been weakened. Then your T cells and all your other lymphocytes that need that white flag, they can’t see the cancer anymore. 

I love to use the analogy of the Harry potter invisible cloak. 

[01:06:33] Kevin Rice: Great, right? I can use Harry potter all day. 

[01:06:36] Tracy Ryan: I know you, and I love Harry Potter. Both of our kids have had Harry Potter. Birthdays. So it’s amazing. So that’s the analogy that I use because I am also on top of the chief communications officer. I’m the patient liaison. I find the patients or the patients find me, and I do all of the initial telehealth with the patients because I get it. 

I know how to talk to them in a language they will understand. 

So that’s why I have all these little fun analogies. And they walk away from it feeling empowered and knowledgeable because somebody’s talked to them on their level in a way that they can get it. 

So natural killer cells, they are these amazing cells, and there’s not a lot of them. [01:07:13] Kevin Rice: So everybody’s born with them. 

[01:07:14] Tracy Ryan: Everybody’s born with them. Everybody has natural. They’re called primary natural killer cells when they’re from your own body. Okay. 

In science, when you’re working with immunotherapy, there’s two different types of immunotherapies that can be created using natural killer cells, or immune cells. Autologous, which means from the patient, or allogeneic, meaning from a healthy adult. 

Our cells are allogeneic. We take them from a healthy adult. 

Natural killer cells only comprise about 5 to 15% of all your white blood cells. So there’s not a lot of them in there. T cells are a lot more plentiful, which is why they’ve been studied so much more, and they’re easier to study. 

But T cells can’t see cancer cells. So they have to be mutated, they have to be modified. They’re. They need to be a perfect match with a patient. Or they can have what’s called a cytokine storm or graft versus Hostess is when your immune system starts to attack itself and it can kill you. It makes you really sick, and you end up in the hospital, and it can be very dangerous and very toxic.

NK cells are different. 

In case cells don’t need a perfect match. They don’t cause negative side effects. They don’t cause these reactions in the body. They don’t cause anything other than for you to feel better and be healthier and stronger and have more energy and inflammation go away. 

So when we learned that Sophie had no natural killer cells in her brain and Dr. Jewett had been working for over 30 years on a supercharged natural killer cell immunotherapy, in that moment, I believed I’d found the woman that could cure my daughter. 

And that was. 

[01:08:47] Kevin Rice: I mean, what did that feel like? 

[01:08:49] Tracy Ryan: You know, I’m a weird person. 

I’m weird in the way that I’ll get excited for a second, but then it’s like, okay, I’ve gotten to this step. Now I just have to get to the next one. Now the tumor has to be gone. Now I have to get the therapy available to her, and I have to get it in her, and then it has to work, and then I have to get it available for other people. So I’m not somebody who, like, I celebrate those milestones for a moment, and then I just move on. Which is why I don’t think about how we’ve affected people as much either, because I haven’t gotten to the mat. I’m not at the mountaintop yet. I’m climbing Mount Everest, and I’m about three quarters of the way up, and I have a little bit more of the mountain to climb before I get to the summit. And I can put that pole in the ground, but that is that pole that. That flag will not be there until my daughter is cured and until this is made available to people. 

[01:09:43] Kevin Rice: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I. I tell stories of when I was selling my company. I felt like I was at a summit. And what I realized was, like, I was. You used the word robot earlier. I was in robot mode for years. And so when I sold the company, it didn’t really land for me. Like, I. I didn’t really celebrate. I realized my actual summit was something more internal, something more purposeful. 

So I really resonate with just the way you’re describing, how you experienced what you’ve been through. 

[01:10:14] Tracy Ryan: Yeah. I mean, it’s been so rewarding and so punishing all in the same breath, but I’m built for it, oddly. 

And being a robot has served me. 

I will tell you, I’ve watched more children and adults pass away than anybody should ever have to witness in their entire lives. I mean, you know what it’s like to love a child. I mean, you’re like a super dad. You love those. I’ve seen you with those little boys. You love them so much, and you’re such a good dad to them. And to have to look at one of them and know I might have to live the rest of my life without them. 

How do I do that? 

How do I survive that? And I watch women and men do it every day, and it’s not. It’s not a pretty thing to watch. 

[01:11:00] Kevin Rice: Yeah.

[01:11:01] Tracy Ryan: So to do all that and overcome it while I’m also building these businesses has been, I think, a testament to my resilience. 

I’m not somebody who, like, pats Myself on the back for it, though. I think that I was given these gifts on purpose. Yeah, there’s not many people that. That can withstand what I can withstand. 

It’s innate to me. It’s inherent to me. It’s not something that I like. I mean, I’ve worked on myself. Most people can’t do that, and most people can’t adapt in the way that I’ve adapted. And I see these as gifts. And if these gifts were so graciously granted to me, then who am I to keep them for myself? That’s how I look at it. These gifts deserve to be used to make the world a better place, to make it a healthier place, and to make it a place that can be better for my daughter’s children. God willing, she’s able to birth them. If not, she’ll adopt. And when I first started the company with Dr. Jewett, who we sadly lost her last year to a. 

A terrible disease that was like losing a second mom. I was literally just crying yesterday thinking about her. But when I met her and she agreed to help me in the way that she did, and she had the compassion for me that she did, and she looked at me one day and she said, you know, I’ve been looking for somebody that I could trust with this therapy for a long time that I felt would do good by it and would give it the love and the passion, the support that it needed to make it to people. 

She was like, I think that person is you, and I want to partner with you. And that was one of those really incredible moments for me where I was like, okay, all of this suffering and all this hard work and me maintaining who I am as a person, I’ve always really prided myself on being an honest. I’m an honest person. So all of these things, through Encore, have been able to open up this opportunity for me to help people dying from cancer. 

So now we have the therapy, right? And we’ve. We’ve. We’ve got. We’ve licensed the patents, and Dr. Jewett has conducted the research, and she’s got this process, and we’re raising the capital, and I love raising. 

[01:13:01] Kevin Rice: And the capitals for clinical trials. 

[01:13:03] Tracy Ryan: The. The capital is for many things. So licensing patents, first and foremost, are very expensive. It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes yearly, sometimes millions, depending on how many patents you have. So you. You. When you have a patent, you secure it in the different countries in which you want to commercialize this, so that if you bring it there and you manufacture it there, you sell it there, people can’t steal it and rip it off. 

So we have multiple patents all over. We have, we have multiple patents and we have them protected all over the country or all over the world, I should say. 

And, and that’s very expensive. And then you have the staff and then you have the manufacturing. And a lot of times people go through FDA first and then they manufacture and then they treat patients. Well, we did it all backwards. 

We did the manufacturing first and now we’re treating patients. We’ve treated eight patients, we’ve given 21 infusions, about to treat the ninth. Sophie was patient number two. And we are watching this therapy do remarkable things where it is reversing incurable cancers with no negative adverse reactions. 

And the patients that show up sick, within hours to days, all their sickness is going away.

Their pain, their inflammation, their lack of being able to eat, their lack of being able to sleep, their energy to watch their grandkids or go out with their friends or cook a meal or clean their house. They’re getting the ability to do these things again. 

[01:14:26] Kevin Rice: So for anybody that’s watching this and wants to support and help in some way, how could somebody help? You know, you and your, your purpose and your mission? 

[01:14:36] Tracy Ryan: Well, there’s a few ways. 

Incor.com N K O R E Because natural killer cells are the core to wellness. That’s why how I came up with the name. So N as in Nancy K O R e dot com is our website. 

[01:14:48] Kevin Rice: We’ll put it in the show notes. 

[01:14:49] Tracy Ryan: Anybody who reaches out through the contact us form it directly comes to me because that’s where a lot of the patients come through. 

So you can reach me directly through the website anytime. We also have the charity savingsofie.org S O P H I E We welcomed donations. We took a really hard hit with the LA fires. We were producing this incredible ball called the Saving Sophie Hummingbird Ball. That was this Bridgerton, Bridgerton inspired event that we spent, you know, $25,000 on to produce. And then the LA fires happened and it was just dead. There was no way to do it. There was no way to raise money for it. People were suffering, they lost their homes. So we lost all that money. We would love donations to the charity which you have been so grateful to provide in the past. So thank you again for that. 

All that money goes to advanced research and to help families that need money for out of pocket care. Then we have our social media pages. Of course, you know LinkedIn, you can always find me Tracy Ryan, Sophie’s prayers for Sophie on Instagram and on Facebook. Those are the two 

biggest pages. We’re always looking for supporters of the charity. We’re always looking for, for investors. We’re looking for scientists and researchers who are, you know, doing incredible work in the field who want to join advisory board or who want to refer patients. We’re looking for people that we can help and guide. We’re filing for FDA approval later this year while we have our palliative care program going on in Cancun for a short time where we can help patients. 

So there’s, there’s. I’m a pretty easy person to find. 

[01:16:21] Kevin Rice: Amazing. 

Tracy, I just am so inspired by your story and inspired by when I got a chance to meet Sophie. 

It’s just, you know, you’ve, you’ve overcome so much and you’re such a strong, resilient woman, human person. I’m just. 

Thank you so much for joining the podcast. I really appreciate you supporting. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation, make sure to hit subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes. CEOs and ABCs is all about helping you grow in your career and show up at home. We have many more amazing guests coming up, so tap, follow and stay tuned.