Episodes

Dec. 3, 2025

Standard Deviation EP5: Damage Done

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 ...
424
Dec. 1, 2025

The Good Cancer Club Sucks: Chelsea J. Smith

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 drop...
423
Nov. 24, 2025

The Nicest Bus in Cancer: Julia Stalder

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...
Nov. 19, 2025

Standard Deviation EP4: The Gamble

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...
422
Nov. 17, 2025

Reenactments, Rants, and Really F*cked Up Insurance

EPISODE DESCRIPTION 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 i...
421
Nov. 10, 2025

Oy Vey! It's Libby Amber Shayo

EPISODE DESCRIPTION: 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....
Nov. 5, 2025

Standard Deviation EP3: The Weight

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 he...
420
Nov. 3, 2025

Stand By She: Allison Applebaum

EPISODE DESCRIPTION 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 sa...
419
Oct. 27, 2025

Sick Days Not Included: Rebecca V. Nellis

EPISODE DESCRIPTION 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 Pr...
418
Oct. 20, 2025

GenX Therapy With Sally Wolf

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 me...
Oct. 15, 2025

Standard Deviation EP2: Domino Effect

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 sh...
417
Oct. 13, 2025

Family Reach: The Charity America Forced Into Existence

Carla Tardiff 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 m...
416
Oct. 6, 2025

The Genes of Wrath: Jennifer J. Brown

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...
Oct. 1, 2025

Introducing Standard Deviation EP1: The Impossible Climb

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, ...
415
Sept. 29, 2025

Sorry, Your Awareness Campaign is Showing

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, non...
414
Sept. 22, 2025

The Uncensored, Unapologetic Olivia Battinelli

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, ...
413
Sept. 15, 2025

Miss Diagnosed: Sophie Sargent

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 otherwi...
Sept. 8, 2025

Building Tools, Not Excuses: Rethinking Healthcare with Marc Elia

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 clin...
Sept. 1, 2025

LEAD EP5: Redemption

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. ...
Aug. 25, 2025

LEAD EP4: The Long Haul

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 A...
Aug. 18, 2025

LEAD EP3: Fraying at the Edges

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...
Aug. 11, 2025

LEAD EP2 : Stop the Spiral

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 N...
Aug. 4, 2025

LEAD EP1: The Monster in the Walls

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 Pet...
412
July 28, 2025

Meet My Grief: Notes from an Orphaned Teen

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...