Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary
Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary
Matthew Zachary is the healthcare policy love child of Jon Stewart, Howard Stern, Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Seinfeld. He has 19 years of receipts to prove it. Editorially independent. Answerable to no one. What started as The Stupid Cancer Show in 2007 became Out of Patients. The first online health podcast in America, predating the medium itself. Zachary survived brain cancer at 21, built the young adult cancer movement from scratch, and spent two decades channeling patient rage into something the system never saw coming. Now he is marching into Washington. Out of Patients goes where the comfortable shows will not. Politics. Healthcare policy. Economics. Institutional accountability. Consumer protection. The forces shaping what 330 million Americans can access, afford, and survive. Battle-scarred patients. Exhausted caregivers. Rare insiders brave enough to name what is killing us. And the occasional elected official about to find out what an organized patient constituency actually looks like. This is the show that started the conversation America is still not ready to finish.
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Oct. 1, 2025

Introducing Standard Deviation EP1: The Impossible Climb

Introducing Standard Deviation EP1: The Impossible Climb
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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 2025.

Oliver brings her story into sharp focus, tracing the impossible climb toward a tenure-track position and the human cost of a system that pulls the ladder up just as people like Na reach for it. This conversation pulls back the curtain on the NIH funding crisis, the toll on early-career scientists, and what happens when personal tragedy fuels professional ambition.

Listeners will walk away with a raw sense of how fragile the future of cancer research really is, and why people like Na refuse to stop climbing.


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