In this episode, Molly sits down with her longtime friend April Cornell, owner of Hidden Hand Tattoo in Seattle.

April has been a staple in the tattoo community for so many and has lived through illness, grief, reinvention, and loss. She’s run businesses through turmoil, lost her husband, raised children, and continued to show up for others as an artist, healer, and teacher. I was excited to discuss how she’s carried all of it with the clarity, steadiness and deep empathy that she seems to always maintain.

Our conversation is about intuition as a survival skill, about aging truly does give us wisdom and how experience refines you instead of hardening you if you let it. It’s a reflection on grief, creativity, listening to yourself, and why your 40s might not be a decline at all, but a threshold.

In this episode, Molly dives headfirst into a topic she’s wanted an excuse to explore for a long time: wolves. Sparked by reading American Wolf and going deep on the history of wolf eradication and reintroduction in the U.S., this conversation looks at how we got here and why the debate around wolves feels so charged.

Molly sits down with Francisco Santiago-Ávila, Science & Advocacy Director at Washington Wildlife First, to unpack wolves through the lens of science, ethics, and policy. Together they explore what actually happens when wolves return to an ecosystem, where common narratives around ranching, hunting, and conservation fall apart, and how decision-making around public lands often benefits powerful interests while pitting everyday stakeholders against one another.

This isn’t a conversation about picking sides or pretending coexistence is easy. Livestock losses are real. People’s livelihoods matter. But we’ve already seen what happens when wolves are erased entirely, and the consequences of that choice still shape our landscapes today.

This episode kicks off a broader series focused on asking better questions, talking to people with real stakes in the issue, and slowing the conversation down enough to actually understand what’s at play. Thoughtful, curious, and grounded in lived experience, this is a starting point, not a conclusion.

There are ages that pass. And there are ages that stay lodged inside of you. Everyone has them.

In this episode of The Outliers Project, Molly sits with Leslie Johansen Nack, author of Fourteen and Nineteen, to talk about what happens on how writing helped heal her.

Leslie's life was shaped early by instability, secrecy, and survival. Raised largely without a mother and under the authority of a charismatic, abusive father, she grew up in extreme isolation, first on a remote ranch in Northern California without electricity or running water, then aboard a sailboat where boundaries dissolved entirely. By her early teens, she was navigating oceans alone while living inside a reality she could not escape. Her memoirs, Fourteen and Nineteen, document specific years and lived experiences without softening them, refusing redemption arcs in favor of raw, real truth.

If you’ve ever felt like your life can’t be explained cleanly, this episode will feel familiar.

Dropping in three. In this episode of The Outliers Project, Molly sits down with Priscilla Cannon (formerly Levac), a pioneering professional snowboarder from the golden era of the sport who’s gone on to live multiple creative lives: founder of a women’s apparel brand, vegan chef, photographer, mother, and now a "hatter" behind Maven Hat Co, making custom, handmade hats.

She talks about what it really takes to choose freedom over comfort, how fear can coexist with bravery, and the loneliness that can come with success when your identity gets tied to staying “on top.” Priscilla shares how snowboarding helped save her as a young person, why she eventually stepped away, and how she now turns pain into art you can wear through slow, labored craft.

If you’ve been feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure what’s next, Priscilla’s advice is simple: quiet the noise, get into nature, and stay in your heart.

In this episode, Molly sits down with Rachel — someone she’s known for over twenty years — to explore what actually drives people like her. The wiring. The risk tolerance. The audacity. The weirdo energy that most of us tried to bury when we were young.

They talk about why outliers do what they do even when it doesn’t make sense on paper, why belonging often only appears after years of searching, and why the success we see from the outside is almost always built on 99 quiet failures no one talks about.

Rachel shares how Musicology Co. became more than a record store… it became a third space for misfits, musicians, and anyone looking for a place to land. She opens up about leadership loneliness, creative identity, the collapse of gatekeeping in culture, and why physical music is having a resurgence in a world obsessed with algorithmic surface-level art.

If you’ve ever felt out of place, underestimated, too ambitious, or too weird, this conversation is a mirror and a map.

This is what it looks like when someone refuses to shrink, builds something from scratch, and creates belonging where none existed.

In this episode of The Outliers Project, Molly Hawkins sits down with entrepreneur and systems thinker Johannes Ariens, whose career spans military contracting, hospitality, and now zero-emissions transportation. From transforming forgotten motels into outdoor community hubs with Loge Camps, to reimagining the RV industry through Routeline, to leading Range Zero Emissions mission toward electrified commercial transport, Johannes’s work reflects one core belief: sustainability only matters if it scales.

He shares how his upbringing on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula shaped his environmental conviction, the “inevitability thesis” behind his business decisions, and how to stay grounded when building for an uncertain future. This conversation explores timing, resilience, and what it really means to innovate with both purpose and practicality.

Role model to all women, mentor and CEO of Burton Snowboards, i have always admired Donna Carpenter and finally got a chance to sit down with her for a conversation to dissect the industry and discuss how we get more women into action sports.

In this episode of The Outliers Project, Molly Hawkins talks with Kim Woozy, founder of MAHFIA, about reshaping the action sports industry through visibility, equity, and storytelling. From early skate videos to leading diversity initiatives, Kim has championed women’s voices in spaces that long excluded them. She shares how representation isn’t just about inclusion—it’s about rewriting the narrative, building community, and making sure the next generation sees themselves in the story.

Quitting your job at 26, buying a house, and starting a snowboard company all within a couple months might be a recipe for disaster for most people, but Blue Montgomery has managed to make it work. As the founder and owner of Capita Snowboards, Blue has grown the company from a garage in West Seattle to where it is today. Now on the verge of releasing their newest team movie, Defenders of Awesome 2, Blue talks to Outliers about growing up a snowboarder in Iowa, releasing content in an increasingly digital world, and putting together a team that not only works well together, but respects each other.

As much as controversy can kill a company, it can also shine a positive spotlight on it. That’s what happened to Shaney Jo Darden’s Keep A Breast Foundation™, thanks to their “I Heart Boobies” bracelets. Since 2000, Keep A Breast has worked raise breast cancer awareness for a group who stereotypically tends to not think about those kinds of things: teenagers. Partnering with some of the biggest names in art and action sports, Keep A Breast has become one of the world’s leading youth-focused non-profits.