Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary

Dr. MaryAnn Wilbur trained her whole life to care for patients, then left medicine behind when it became a machine that punished empathy and rewarded throughput. She didn’t burn out. She got out. A gynecologic oncologist, public health researcher, and no-bullshit single mom, MaryAnn walked straight off the cliff her career breadcrumbed her to—and lived to write the book.

In this episode, we talk about what happens when doctors are forced to choose between their ethics and their employment, why medicine now operates like a low-resource war zone, and how the system breaks the very peop...

Episode 5 of Standard Deviation with Oliver Bogler on the Out of Patients podcast feed pulls you straight into the story of Dr Ethan Moitra, a psychologist who fights for LGBTQ mental health while the system throws every obstacle it can find at him.

Ethan built a study that tracked how COVID 19 tore through an already vulnerable community. He secured an NIH grant. He built a team. He reached 180 participants. Then he opened an email on a Saturday and learned that Washington had erased his work with one sentence about taxpayer priorities. The funding vanished. The timeline collapsed...

Chelsea J. Smith walks into a studio and suddenly I feel like a smurf. She’s six-foot-three of sharp humor, dancer’s poise, and radioactive charm. A working actor and thyroid cancer survivor, Chelsea is the kind of guest who laughs while dropping truth bombs about what it means to be told you’re “lucky” to have the “good cancer.” We talk about turning trauma into art, how Shakespeare saved her sanity during the pandemic, and why bartending might be the best acting class money can’t buy. She drops the polite bullshit, dismantles survivor guilt with punchline precision, and reminds ever...

When Julia Stalder heard the words ductal carcinoma in situ, she was told she had the “best kind of breast cancer.” Which is like saying you got hit by the nicest bus. Julia’s a lawyer turned mediator who now runs DCIS Understood, a new nonprofit born out of her own diagnosis. Instead of panicking and letting the system chew her up, she asked questions the industry would rather avoid. Why do women lose breasts for conditions that may never become invasive? Why is prostate cancer allowed patience while breast cancer gets the knife? We talked about doctors’ fear of uncer...

Dr. Rachel Gatlin entered neuroscience with curiosity and optimism. Then came chaos. She started her PhD at the University of Utah in March 2020—right as the world shut down. Her lab barely existed. Her advisor was on leave. Her project focused on isolation stress in mice, and then every human on earth became her control group. Rachel fought through supply shortages, grant freezes, and the brutal postdoc job market that treats scientists like disposable parts. When her first offer vanished under a hiring freeze, she doubled down, rewrote her plan, and won her own NIH training grant. Her story is...

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Before she was raising millions to preserve fertility for cancer patients, Tracy Weiss was filming reenactments in her apartment for the Maury Povich Show using her grandmother’s china. Her origin story includes Jerry Springer, cervical cancer, and a full-body allergic reaction to bullshit. Now, she’s Executive Director of The Chick Mission, where she weaponizes sarcasm, spreadsheets, and the rage of every woman who’s ever been told “you’re fine” while actively bleeding out in a one-stall office bathroom.

We get into all of it. The diagnosis. The misdiagnosis. The second opinion that...

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Libby Amber Shayo didn’t just survive the pandemic—she branded it. Armed with a bun, a New York accent, and enough generational trauma to sell out a two-drink-minimum crowd, she turned her Jewish mom impressions into the viral sensation known as Sheryl Cohen. What started as one-off TikToks became a career in full technicolor: stand-up, sketch, podcasting, and Jewish community building.

We covered everything. Jew camp lore. COVID courtship. Hannah Montana. Holocaust comedy. Dating app postmortems. And the raw, relentless grief that comes with being Jewish online in 2025. Libby’s alter ego lets h...

When the system kills a $2.4 million study on Black maternal health with one Friday afternoon email, the message is loud and clear: stop asking questions that make power uncomfortable. Dr. Jaime Slaughter-Acey, an epidemiologist at UNC, built a groundbreaking project called LIFE-2 to uncover how racism and stress shape the biology of pregnancy. It was science rooted in community, humanity, and truth. Then NIH pulled the plug, calling her work “DEI.” Jaime didn’t quit. She fought back, turning her grief into art and her outrage into action. This episode is about the cost of integrity, the politics of scienc...

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Allison Applebaum was supposed to become a concert pianist. She chose ballet instead. Then 9/11 hit, and she ran straight into a psych ward—on purpose. What followed was one of the most quietly revolutionary acts in modern medicine: founding the country’s first mental health clinic for caregivers. Because the system had decided that if you love someone dying, you don’t get care. You get to wait in the hallway.

She’s a clinical psychologist. A former dancer. A daughter who sat next to her dad—legendary arranger of Stand By Me—through ever...

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Rebecca V. Nellis never meant to run a nonprofit. She just never left. Twenty years later, she’s still helming Cancer and Careers after a Craigslist maternity-leave temp job turned into a lifelong mission.

In this 60-minute doubleheader, we cover everything from theater nerdom and improv rules for surviving bureaucracy, to hanging up on Jon Bon Jovi, to navigating cancer while working—or working while surviving cancer. Same thing.

Rebecca’s path is part Second City, part Prague hostel, part Upper East Side grant writer, and somehow all of that makes perfec...

Sally Wolf is back in the studio and this time we left cancer at the door. She turned 50, brought a 1993 Newsday valedictorian article as a prop, and sat down with me for a half hour of pure Gen X therapy. We dug into VHS tracking, Red Dawn paranoia, Michael J. Fox, Bette Midler, and how growing up with no helmets and playgrounds built over concrete somehow didn’t kill us.

We laughed about being Jewish kids in the suburbs, the crushes we had on thirty-year-olds playing teenagers, and what it means to hit 50 with your humor intact. Th...

Dr. Nikki Maphis didn’t just lose a grant. She lost a lifeline. An early-career Alzheimer’s researcher driven by her grandmother’s diagnosis, Nikki poured years into her work—only to watch it vanish when the NIH’s MOSAIC program got axed overnight. Her application wasn’t rejected. It was deleted. No feedback. No score. Just gone.

In this episode, Oliver Bogler pulls back the curtain on what happens when politics and science collide and promising scientists get crushed in the crossfire. Nikki shares how she’s fighting to stay in the field, teaching the next generation, an...

Carla Tardif has spent 17 years as the CEO of Family Reach, a nonprofit that shouldn’t have to exist but absolutely does—because in America, cancer comes with a price tag your insurance doesn’t cover.

We talk about shame, fear, burnout, Wegmans, Syracuse, celebrity telethons, and the godforsaken reality of choosing between food and treatment. Carla’s a lifer in this fight, holding the line between humanity and bureaucracy, between data and decency. She’s also sharp as hell, deeply funny, and more purpose-driven than half of Congress on a good day.

This episode is about t...

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

We sat down...

This episode of Standard Deviation features Oliver Bogler in conversation with Dr Na Zhao, a cancer biologist caught in the crossfire of science, politics, and survival. Na’s life reads like a brutal lab experiment in persistence.

She grew up in China, lost her mother and aunt to breast cancer before she turned twelve, then came to the United States to chase science as both an immigrant and a survivor’s daughter. She worked two decades to reach the brink of independence as a cancer researcher, only to watch offers and grants vanish in the political chaos of 2...

Katie Henry has seen some things. From nonprofit bootstraps to Big Pharma boardrooms, she’s been inside the machine—and still believes we can fix it. We go deep on her winding road from folding sweaters at J.Crew to launching a vibrator-based advocacy campaign that accidentally changed the sexual health narrative in breast cancer.

Katie doesn’t pull punches. She’s a born problem solver with zero tolerance for pink fluff and performative empathy. We talk survivor semantics, band camp trauma, nonprofit burnout, and why “Didi” is the grandparent alter ego you never saw coming.

She’s Murp...

What happens when you hand a mic to the most extroverted, uncensored Gen Z career coach in New York? You get Olivia Battinelli—adjunct professor, student advisor, mentor, speaker, and unfiltered truth-teller on everything from invisible illness to resume crimes.

We talked about growing up Jewish-Italian in Westchester, surviving the Big Four’s corporate Kool-Aid, and quitting a job after 7 months because the shower goals weren’t working out. She runs NYU Steinhardt’s internship program by day, roasts Takis and “rate my professor” trolls by night, and somehow makes room for maple syrup takes, career coaching, and a boyfri...

Sophie Sargent walked into the studio already owning the mic. A pandemic-era media rebel raised in New Hampshire, trained in Homeland Security (yep), and shaped by rejection, she’s built a career out of DM’ing her way into rooms and then owning them. At 25, she’s juggling chronic illness, chronic overachievement, and a generation that gets dismissed before it even speaks.

We talk Lyme disease, Lyme denial, and the healthcare gaslighting that comes when you “look fine” but your body says otherwise. We dive into rejection as a career accelerant, mental health as content porn, and what it me...

This episode is sponsored by Invivyd, Inc.

Marc Elia is a biotech investor, the Chairman of the Board at Invivyd, and a Long COVID patient who decided to challenge the system while still stuck inside it. He’s not here for corporate platitudes, regulatory shoulder shrugs, or vaccine-era gaslighting. This is not a conversation about politics, but it's about power and choice and the right to receive care and treatment no matter your condition.

In this episode, we cover everything from broken clinical pathways to meme coins and the eternal shame of being old enough to...

After years of carrying the weight of lead, Shannon and Cooper find a path out from under the darkness and into the sunlight.

LEAD: how this story ends is up to us is an audio docudrama series that tells the true story of one child, his mysterious lead poisoning, and his mother's unwavering fight to keep him safe. A true story written by Shannon Burkett. Directed by Alan Taylor. Starring Merritt Wever, Alessandro Nivola, Cynthia Nixon, and Cooper Burkett.

Lead was produced by Shannon Burkett. Co-produced by Jenny Maguire. Featuring Amy Acker, Tom Butler, Dennis...

The deficits from the lead poisoning continue to intensify, Shannon channels her anger and grief into holding the people who hurt her son responsible.

LEAD how this story ends is up to us is a true story written and produced by Shannon Burkett. Co-produced by Jenny Maguire. Directed by Alan Taylor. Starring Merritt Wever, Alessandro Nivola, Cynthia Nixon, and Cooper Burkett.

EP4 features Eboni Booth, Sasha Eden, Kevin Kane, April Matthis, Alysia Reiner, and Mandy Siegfried. Casting by Alaine Alldaffer and Lisa Donadio. Music by Peter Salett. Sound Design by Andy Kris. Recording Engineer Krissopher...

The effects of the neurotoxin are taking their toll on Cooper as Shannon desperately tries to navigate the severity of their new reality.

LEAD how this story ends is up to us is a true story written and produced by Shannon Burkett. Co-produced by Jenny Maguire. Directed by Alan Taylor. Starring Merritt Wever, Alessandro Nivola, Cynthia Nixon, and Cooper Burkett.

E43 features Jenny Maguire, JD Mollison, Laith Nakli, Deirdre O’Connell, Carolyn Baeumler, Zach Shaffer, and Monique Woodley. Casting by Alaine Alldaffer and Lisa Donadio. Music by Peter Salett. Sound Design by Andy Kris. Recording En...

As the lead wreaks havoc on Cooper's development, Shannon searches for answers. Desperate to get a handle on what was happening to her son, she grabs onto a lifeboat - nursing school. Andy tries to piece together the past to make sense of the present.

LEAD how this story ends is up to us is a true story written and produced by Shannon Burkett. Co-produced by Jenny Maguire. Directed by Alan Taylor. Starring Merritt Wever, Alessandro Nivola, Cynthia Nixon, and Cooper Burkett

EP2 features Keith Nobbs and Frank Wood. Music by Peter Salett. Sound Design...

A mysterious dust fills a young family’s apartment. The truth begins to unravel when the mother gets a call from the pediatrician - the monster deep within the walls has been unleashed. 

LEAD how this story ends is up to us is a true story written and produced by Shannon Burkett. Co-produced by Jenny Maguire. Directed by Alan Taylor. Starring Merritt Wever, Alessandro Nivola, Cynthia Nixon, and Cooper Burkett.  

EP1 features Zak Orth, Jenny Maguire, Daphne Gaines, and Micheal Gaston. Music by Peter Salett. Sound Design by Andy Kris. Recording Engineer Krissopher Chevannes. Casting by Al...

Lexi Silver is 15 years old. She lost both of her parents before she turned 11. That should tell you enough—but it doesn’t. Because Lexi isn’t here for your pity. She’s not a sob story. She’s not a trauma statistic. She’s a writer, an advocate, and one of the most emotionally intelligent people you’ll ever hear speak into a microphone.

In this episode, Lexi breaks down what grief actually feels like when you’re a kid and the adults around you just don’t get it. She talks about losing her mom on Christmas morni...

Michelle Andrews built a career inside the pharma machine long before anyone knew what “DTC” meant. She helped launch Rituxan and watched Allegra commercials teach America how to ask for pills by name. Then she landed in the cancer fun house herself, stage 4 breast cancer, and learned exactly how hollow all the “journey” slide decks feel when you’re the one circling the drain.

We talk about what happens when the insider becomes the customer, why pill organizers and wheat field brochures still piss her off, and how she fired doctors who couldn’t handle her will to live. You...

Dr. Anne Marie Morse walks into the studio like a one-woman Jersey Broadway show and leaves behind the best damn TED Talk you’ve never heard. She’s a neurologist, sleep medicine doc, narcolepsy expert, founder of D.A.M.M. Good Sleep, and full-time myth buster in a white coat. We talk about why sleep isn’t a luxury, why your mattress does matter, and how melatonin is the new Flintstones vitamin with a marketing budget. We unpack the BS around sleep hygiene, blow up the medical gaslighting around “disorders,” and dig into how a former aspiring butterfly became one...

Gigi Robinson grew up with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a disease that turns your joints into overcooked spaghetti. Instead of letting it sideline her, she built a career out of telling the truth about invisible illness. We talk about what it takes to grow up faster than you should, why chronic illness is the worst unpaid internship, and how she turned her story into a business. You’ll hear about her days schlepping to physical therapy before sunrise, documenting the sterile absurdity of waiting rooms, and finding purpose in the mess. Gigi’s not interested in pity or polished narratives. She want...

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If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a Bronx-born pediatric nurse with stage 4 colon cancer survives, raises a kid, becomes a policy shark, and fights like hell for the ignored, meet Vanessa Ghigliotty. She’s not inspirational. She’s a bulldozer. We go way back—like pre-Stupid Cancer back—when there was no “young adult cancer movement,” just a handful of pissed-off survivors building something out of nothing. This episode is personal. Vanessa and I built the plane while flying it. She fought to be heard, showed up in chemo dragging her kid to IEP meetings...

Risa Arin doesn’t just talk about health literacy. She built the damn platform. As founder and CEO of XpertPatient.com (yes, expert with no E), Risa’s taking a wrecking ball to how cancer education is delivered. A Cornell alum, cancer caregiver, and ex-agency insider who once sold Doritos to teens, she now applies that same marketing muscle to helping patients actually understand the garbage fire that is our healthcare system. We talk about why she left the “complacent social safety” of agency life, how her mom unknowingly used her own site during treatment, what it’s like to pitch c...

Dr. Jamie Wells is back—and this time, she brought a book. We cover everything from biomedical design screwups to the glorified billing software known as the EHR. Jamie's new book, A Clinical Lens on Pediatric Engineering, is a masterclass in what happens when you stop treating kids like small, drunk adults and start designing medicine around actual human factors. We talk about AI in pediatric radiology, why drug repurposing might save lives faster than biotech IPOs, and the absurdity of thinking one-size-fits-all in healthcare still works.

Jamie’s a former physician, a health policy disruptor, a bioe...

Erica Campbell walked away from corporate life, took a hard left from the British Embassy, and found her calling writing checks for families nobody else sees. As Executive Director of Pinky Swear Foundation, she doesn’t waste time on fluff. Her team pays rent, fills gas tanks, and gives sick kids' parents the one thing they don’t have—time. Then, breast cancer hit her. She became the patient. Wrote a book about it. Didn’t sugarcoat a damn thing. We talk about parking fees, grief, nonprofit burnout, and how the hell you decide which families get help and which do...

Allyson with a Y. Ocean with two Ls. And zero chill when it comes to changing the face of cancer care. Dr. Allyson Ocean has been quietly—loudly—at the center of every major cancer breakthrough, nonprofit board, and science-backed gut punch you didn’t know you needed to hear. In this episode, she joins me in-studio for a conversation two decades in the making. We talk twin life, genetics, mitochondrial disease, and why she skipped the Doublemint Twins commercial but still ended up as one of the most recognizable forces in oncology. We cover her nonprofit hits, from Michae...

Sponsored by Invivyd, Inc.

Nobody wants to hear about COVID-19 anymore. Especially not cancer patients. But if you’ve got a suppressed immune system thanks to chemo, radiation, stem cell transplants—or any of the other alphabet soup in your chart—then no, it’s not over. It never was. While everyone else is getting sweaty at music festivals, you’re still dodging a virus that could knock you flat.

In this episode, Matthew Zachary and Matt Toresco say the quiet part out loud: many immunocompromised people may not even know they have options beyond vaccines...

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Lisa Shufro is the storyteller’s storyteller. A musician turned innovation strategist, TEDMed curator, and unapologetic truth-teller, Lisa doesn’t just craft narratives—she engineers constellations out of chaos. We go way back to the early TEDMed days, where she taught doctors, scientists, and technocrats how not to bore an audience to death. In this episode, we talk about how storytelling in healthcare has been weaponized, misunderstood, misused, and still holds the power to change lives—if done right. Lisa challenges the idea that storytelling should be persuasive and instead argues it should be connective. We get i...

What happens when you blend the soul of Mr. Rogers, the boldness of RuPaul, and just a pinch of Carrie Bradshaw? You get Sally Wolf.

She’s a Harvard and Stanford powerhouse who ditched corporate media to help people actually flourish at work and in life—because cancer kicked her ass and she kicked it back, with a pole dance routine on Netflix for good measure.

In this episode, we unpack what it means to live (really live) with metastatic breast cancer. We talk about the toxic PR machine behind "pink ribbon" cancer, how the heal...

Episode Description

Audra Moran is the President and CEO of OCRA—Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance—which means she spends her days doing things most of us wouldn’t survive five minutes doing: merging nonprofits, leading national patient support programs, funding lifesaving research, surviving pharma grant hell, and trying to reach every woman in America who might be slipping through the cracks. We talk about her time working with the Helen Keller National Center (yes, she knows finger spelling), her accidental journey into cancer nonprofit leadership, the weirdness of dermoid cysts, the ridiculousness of writing grants, and the absolu...

Christine Verini is a pharmacist by training, a nonprofit CEO by title, and an unapologetic empath by design. She now leads CancerCare, one of the oldest, least-known, and most impactful organizations in the country that actually helps real cancer patients deal with the practical garbage no one likes to talk about—like paying rent, affording a ride to chemo, or feeding their kids.

We talk about her career pivot from industry to impact, what it's like trying to scale empathy without losing your soul, and the daily gut-punch of knowing there are millions of people who still ha...

Jennifer Finkelstein is not here for your pity, your pinkwashed slogans, or your performative awareness campaigns. She’s a 20-year young adult breast cancer survivor who turned trauma into a blueprint for action and built 5 Under 40, a no-BS nonprofit supporting women diagnosed with breast cancer under 40.

In this episode, we go full Gen X therapy session—from SNL nostalgia and cold caps to the absurdity of finding out you have cancer while looking for the remote. Jen drops real talk about founding a nonprofit when nothing existed for her age group, why mental health support isn’t option...

What happens when a black belt, sword-slinging fitness icon gets cancer—twice? She picks up a camera and dares the universe to test her again.

Ilaria Montagnani is not your average anything. She’s been building strong bodies (and stronger minds) for over 30 years as the founder of Powerstrike. She’s part Jane Fonda, part Uma Thurman, and very much the action hero you wish was your personal trainer.

In this episode, we talk about what happens when everything you built your life on—movement, strength, purpose—gets sideswiped by disease. Twice. Ilaria opens up about diag...