Episodes

[HIATUS] The Cancer Mavericks EP3: The Navigator and the Negotiator
3
Aug. 17, 2026

[HIATUS] The Cancer Mavericks EP3: The Navigator and the Negotiator

In 1967, breast surgeon Dr. Harold P. Freeman arrived at Harlem Hospital expecting to treat cancer. Instead, he confronted a healthcare system where poverty, racism, lack of insurance, and institutional barriers often determined who lived long enough to receive treatment. Patients frequently arrived with advanced disease, not because medicine lacked answers, but because access to care had failed them. This episode explores how cancer survivorship expanded beyond medical breakthroughs to include...
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[BONUS] Subject Matter: Four Teenagers Built a Play From Scratch
Aug. 16, 2026

[BONUS] Subject Matter: Four Teenagers Built a Play From Scratch

Welcome to a very, very, very special bonus episode of Out of Patients, and one unlike anything published on this feed before. For nearly 20 years, Matthew Zachary has handed these microphones to patients, caregivers, doctors, advocates, troublemakers, and people with something worth saying. This time, he handed them to his daughter. Hannah Greenzweig grew up around this show, and now she has commandeered the studio with 3 of her wonderfully creative high school friends to talk about something t...
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Standard Deviation S2 E6: Margins of Error (Series Finale)
Aug. 12, 2026

Standard Deviation S2 E6: Margins of Error (Series Finale)

A man is struck by a car on the streets of Los Angeles. In the emergency department, a CT scan ordered to look for traumatic injuries reveals something nobody expected: a mass in his colon. Days later, sitting across from Dr. Belinda Waltman, he calls the accident “a blessing in disguise.” Then he changes the subject. He is less worried about cancer than about whether he can afford to miss another day of work. In this season finale of Standard Deviation, host Dr. Oliver Bogler explores what hap...
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[HIATUS] The Cancer Mavericks EP2: You’re Cured, Good Luck
2
Aug. 10, 2026

[HIATUS] The Cancer Mavericks EP2: You’re Cured, Good Luck

In 1986, 23 survivors, physicians, nurses, attorneys, and community organizers gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a weekend that would permanently change the language and politics of cancer. Working late into the night, they debated not only strategy, but identity, ultimately declaring that from the moment of diagnosis, every person with cancer is a survivor. This episode traces the social and political forces that gave birth to the modern cancer survivorship movement. As advances in earl...
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[HIATUS] The Cancer Mavericks EP1: The Big C Wasn’t Always on TV
1
Aug. 5, 2026

[HIATUS] The Cancer Mavericks EP1: The Big C Wasn’t Always on TV

In 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, transforming cancer research with an unprecedented federal investment and launching what became known as the War on Cancer. The legislation did not emerge from scientific discovery alone. It was the culmination of decades of relentless advocacy by researchers, philanthropists, journalists, and patients who believed cancer demanded the same national commitment that had put astronauts on the Moon. This episode traces the origins of ...
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[HIATUS] The Cancer Mavericks Goes to Hollywood (With My Mom)
Aug. 3, 2026

[HIATUS] The Cancer Mavericks Goes to Hollywood (With My Mom)

Long before cancer survivors organized into a movement, Hollywood had already shaped how Americans understood the disease. Films rarely used the word “cancer,” physicians often withheld diagnoses from patients, and the people who survived were almost nowhere to be found on screen. Recorded before The Cancer Mavericks: A History of Survivorship became a documentary series, this bonus conversation explores where the project first began. Matthew Zachary sits down with his mother, Roz Greenzweig, a...
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Your Benefits May Vary: Rebecca Bloom
454
July 27, 2026

Your Benefits May Vary: Rebecca Bloom

Rebecca Bloom is a former employee benefits and executive compensation attorney who spent more than 25 years helping women navigate cancer, work, insurance, disability coverage, and financial survival. She is the founder and author of When Women Get Sick, a book built from decades inside the legal, workplace, and patient advocacy systems most people only discover after diagnosis. Bloom started in Big Law at Simpson Thacher handling employee benefits and compensation work she originally chose ...
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Mission, Margin, and the Women Left Waiting: Vasanta Pundarika
453
July 20, 2026

Mission, Margin, and the Women Left Waiting: Vasanta Pundarika

Vasanta Pundarika built her career inside healthcare investment banking before launching Lotuspring, an advisory firm focused on women’s health and behavioral health. She spent nearly 20 years advising healthcare systems, treatment providers, and growth stage companies on mergers, financing, and operational strategy while watching the industry repeatedly misunderstand the people it claimed to serve. The conversation starts unexpectedly with anthropology, bread, and language. Vasanta explains ...
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You Shouldn’t Need AI to Survive Cancer: Brad Power
452
July 13, 2026

You Shouldn’t Need AI to Survive Cancer: Brad Power

Brad Power spent years advising major corporations on systems design, process engineering, and decision making before lymphoma shoved him into the patient side of American healthcare. Instead of accepting the experience at face value, he started reverse engineering the machinery around cancer itself. Brad is the founder of Cancer Patient Lab and Open Cancer AI, two projects built around a blunt reality most patients discover too late: the healthcare system rewards people who know how to na...
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Standard Deviation S2 E5: Pitch Imperfect
July 8, 2026

Standard Deviation S2 E5: Pitch Imperfect

By the time the paper hit version 71, Dr. Nirosha Murugan had already done the hard part. The data were real. The experiment had worked. A team of researchers had used a wearable bioreactor to trigger limb regeneration in frogs, a result with obvious implications for regenerative medicine. But the science still wasn’t getting over the line. The problem wasn’t the work. It was the translation. On this episode of Standard Deviation, host Oliver Bogler talks with Dr. Nirosha Murugan, a biophysicis...
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The Doctor Will Leave You Now: Jessica Peatross
451
July 6, 2026

The Doctor Will Leave You Now: Jessica Peatross

Dr. Jess Peatross trained in conventional medicine and worked as a hospitalist before she started questioning why so many chronically ill patients kept getting worse inside the healthcare system she trusted. Her perspective carries weight because she spent years following every protocol exactly as taught before walking away from hospital medicine entirely. Raised in Huntington, West Virginia during the opioid crisis, she entered medicine believing the system existed to heal people. Instead, s...
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The Patient Wears Prada: Farla Efros
450
June 29, 2026

The Patient Wears Prada: Farla Efros

Farla Efros is a senior retail executive and former CEO who built and sold companies before facing her own breast cancer diagnosis. She brings that same operational mindset into a healthcare system that expects patients to manage complexity while they are at their most vulnerable. She was on a client call in Spain when the diagnosis came through. A clear mammogram had missed it. An MRI caught it. Within hours, she was ordering binders, building a plan, and structuring her treatment like a ...
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Coding the Invisible: Emily Mendenhall
449
June 22, 2026

Coding the Invisible: Emily Mendenhall

In 2020, Emily Mendenhall drove from Washington, DC to Okoboji, Iowa, a town of 800 that swells to 200,000 every summer, and walked into a pandemic that looked nothing like the one dominating national headlines. Inside gas stations and bars, masks marked you as an outsider. In one stop, a man told her family they would not be served if they kept theirs on. Her 6 year old daughter cried, confused. Mendenhall, a medical anthropologist at Georgetown University, did what she always does. She s...
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Jace Beats Cancer
448
June 15, 2026

Jace Beats Cancer

At 25, Jace Yawnick was building a career in health and wellness sales, chasing growth, status, and the usual young adult fantasy of getting somewhere fast. Then his body stopped cooperating. Fatigue turned into chemotherapy. The diagnosis was primary mediastinal B cell non Hodgkin lymphoma, and the rest of his life split into before and after. Now in remission, he talks about cancer the way people actually live it, not the way nonprofits package it. He gets into survivorship, mental healt...
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Standard Deviation S2 E4: The Invisible Load
June 10, 2026

Standard Deviation S2 E4: The Invisible Load

At 20 years old, newly arrived from Puerto Rico and trying to build a future in science, Benjamin Suarez Jimenez found himself sitting in front of two senior faculty members accused of plagiarism. He knew the material. He had done the work. His mistake came from failing to cite class notes during an exam because nobody had told him that was expected. In a matter of minutes, he watched what felt like his entire career flash before him. On this episode of Standard Deviation, host Oliver Bogler ex...
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Taco Thursday Meets Broken Healthcare: Dr. Sarah Matt
447
June 8, 2026

Taco Thursday Meets Broken Healthcare: Dr. Sarah Matt

Dr. Sarah Matt trained as a burn surgeon, working in a field where patients arrive with catastrophic injuries and survival depends on speed, skill, and resources. She left the bedside after confronting a limit that medicine does not like to admit. One physician can only see so many people in a day. The system surrounding those patients decides the rest. She moved into health technology, held leadership roles in startups, and built global infrastructure at Oracle to scale care across populations....
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The Chernobyl Kid in a White Coat: Dr. Yan Leyfman
446
June 1, 2026

The Chernobyl Kid in a White Coat: Dr. Yan Leyfman

In the late 1980s, a child exposed to fallout from the Chernobyl disaster lay in a hospital bed while doctors told his family there were no clear answers and no reliable path forward. Decades later, that same child, Yan Leyfman, walks into exam rooms as a hematology oncology fellow, expected to deliver clarity inside a system that still runs on delay, uncertainty, and institutional self preservation. This episode traces the throughline from early life shaped by radiation exposure and hospice le...
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MZ LIVE at Merkin Concert Hall: 30 Years After Cancer
May 28, 2026

MZ LIVE at Merkin Concert Hall: 30 Years After Cancer

Matthew Zachary is a brain cancer survivor, healthcare advocate, founder of Stupid Cancer and We the Patients, and host of Out of Patients. In April 2026, he returned to the stage at Merkin Hall near Lincoln Center for his first solo public piano concert in almost 22 years while launching his debut book, We the Patients: Understanding, Navigating, and Surviving America’s Healthcare Nightmare. What unfolded became far larger than a concert. Over 2 hours, survivors, clinicians, advocates, nonpro...
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Fatal to Relentless: Kathy Giusti
445
May 25, 2026

Fatal to Relentless: Kathy Giusti

In December 1996, a 37 year old pharmaceutical executive sat in a Borders bookstore reading medical textbooks on the floor, trying to understand a disease she had never heard of. Multiple myeloma carried a three year prognosis. Her daughter was 18 months old. Her father had just died of cancer. Within weeks, she pushed her doctors to say the quiet part clearly. This would likely end her life before her child entered kindergarten. Kathy Giusti refused to accept passive survival. She built a...
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Discharge Instructions Not Included: Shlomit Liberty
444
May 18, 2026

Discharge Instructions Not Included: Shlomit Liberty

At 19, Shlomit woke up unable to speak. The right side of her body went numb. An emergency room sent her home and called it stress. That moment did not end in a diagnosis that changed policy or triggered reform. It sent her into a decade long pursuit of understanding how the brain fails language and how the healthcare system fails patients who cannot advocate for themselves. Shlomit trained as a speech language pathologist and spent years inside acute care hospitals and ICUs, performing en...
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Standard Deviation S2 E3: The Hidden Curriculum
May 13, 2026

Standard Deviation S2 E3: The Hidden Curriculum

In 2020, developmental biologist Dr. Crystal Rogers drove the country roads outside Davis, California crying between grant rejections, wondering whether she was about to lose her lab, her career, and the scientific future she had spent years building. She had already done what academia tells young scientists to do. She earned the credentials. She landed a faculty position at UC Davis. She built a lab. Then the real test began. On this episode of Standard Deviation, Dr. Oliver Bogler examines th...
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Nun, Done, and Uninsured: Katy Talento
443
May 11, 2026

Nun, Done, and Uninsured: Katy Talento

In 2008, Katy Talento walked away from Capitol Hill and into a Catholic convent. Within a year, she walked out. Within another decade, she sat inside the White House shaping health policy. Somewhere in between, she got labeled “infertile” after a single cycle of testing and spent years believing it. That label stuck. The pain that came before it never got investigated. Doctors offered birth control and moved on. No one asked why her body was struggling. No one followed the thread. Talento ...
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Faith, Fraud, and Finding Himself: Ben Unger
442
May 4, 2026

Faith, Fraud, and Finding Himself: Ben Unger

In a wooded campground cabin in the early 2000s, 19 year old Ben Unger stood in the doorway and watched 20 naked men form a circle around a crying teenager. A counselor held up two tangerines and shouted, “These are your balls.” The exercise claimed to cure same sex attraction by forcing young men to “reclaim” their masculinity from overbearing mothers. Phones had been confiscated. Parents had paid thousands of dollars. Religion supplied the script. Pseudoscience supplied the props. Ben ha...
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Defender Energy: Drew Flugstad-Clarke
441
April 27, 2026

Defender Energy: Drew Flugstad-Clarke

Drew Flugstad-Clarke never planned to work in brain cancer. She planned to play Division I soccer at Georgetown. She planned to paint. She even tried investment banking, answering emails at 4am in a cubicle that never slept. Then in June 2022 her father, Jim, was diagnosed with glioblastoma at 57. He died 1 day shy of 7 months later, just before his 58th birthday. His symptoms began with emotion, not seizures. A steady HR executive suddenly cried. His golf game slipped. By the time he entered th...
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