![[WALK IT OFF EP2] ROCKS NEED ROCKS](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/695180f1fb7a0c3ff10aae14/1768450046054-K5QFPBYEZIE66NWG85HM/image-asset.jpeg)
[WALK IT OFF EP2] ROCKS NEED ROCKS
Daniel Garza had momentum. Acting roles, directing gigs, national tours lined up. Then anal cancer stopped everything. Radiation wrecked his body, stripped him of control, and left him in diapers, staring down despair. His partner, Christian Ramirez, carried him through the darkest nights, changed his wounds, fought hospitals, and paid the price with his own health. Christian still lives with permanent damage from caregiving, but he stayed anyway.
Together they talk with me about masculinity, sex, shame, friendship, and survival. They describe the friendships that vanished, the laughter that kept them alive, and the brutal reality of caregiving no one prepares you for. We get into survivor guilt, PTSD, and why even rocks need rocks. Daniel is now an actor, director, and comedian living with HIV. Christian continues to tell the unfiltered truth about what it takes to be a caregiver and stay whole. This episode gives voice to both sides of the cancer experience, the survivor and the one who stands guard.
RELATED LINKS
- Daniel Garza IMDb
- Daniel Garza on Instagram
- Daniel Garza on Facebook
- Christian Ramirez on LinkedIn
- Lilmesican Productions Inc (Daniel & Christian)
- Stupid Cancer
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![[WALK IT OFF EP1] MAN UP](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/695180f1fb7a0c3ff10aae14/1768450102238-3YPLEWUAVULAO3YHW1LL/image-asset.jpeg)
[WALK IT OFF EP1] MAN UP
Trevor Maxwell lived the archetype of masculinity in rural Maine. Big, strong, splitting wood, raising kids, and carrying the load. Then cancer ripped that script apart. In 2018 he was bedridden, emasculated, ashamed, and convinced his family would be better off without him. His wife refused to let him disappear. That moment forced Trevor to face his depression, get help, and rebuild himself. Out of that came Man Up To Cancer, now the largest community for men with cancer, a place where men stop pretending they are bulletproof and start being honest with each other.
Eric Charsky joins the conversation. A veteran with five cancers, forty-nine surgeries, and the scars to prove it, Eric lays out what happens when the military’s invincible mindset collides with mortality. Together, we talk masculinity, vulnerability, sex, shame, and survival. This episode is blunt, raw, and overdue.
RELATED LINKS
FEEDBACK
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Koby & Hannah's 2025 Holiday Podcast Spectacular
The most anticipated annual tradition on Out of Patients returns with the 2025 Holiday Podcast Spectacular starring Matthew's twins Koby and Hannah. Now 15 and a half and deep into sophomore year, the twins deliver another unfiltered year end recap that longtime listeners wait for every December. What began as a novelty in 2018 has become a time capsule of adolescence, parenting, and how fast childhood burns off.
This year’s recap covers real moments from 2025 A subway ride home with a bloodied face after running full speed into that tree that grows in Brooklyn. Broadway obsessions fueled by James Madison High School's Roundabout Youth Ensemble access, including Chess, & Juliet, Good Night and Good Luck, and Pirates of Penzance holding court on Broadway. A Disneylanmd trip where the Millennium Falcon triggered a full system reboot. A New York Auto Show pilgrimage capped by a Bugatti sighting. All the things.
The twins talk school pressure, AP classes, learner permit anxiety, pop culture fixation, musical theater devotion, and the strange clarity that comes with turning 15. The humor stays sharp, the details stay specific, and the passage of time stays undefeated.
This episode lands where the show works best: family, honesty, and letting young people speak for themselves.
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Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Jason Gilley
Jason Gilley walked into adulthood with a fastball, a college roster spot, and a head of curls that deserved its own agent. Cancer crashed that party and took him on a tour of chemo chairs, pediatric wards, metal taste, numb legs, PTSD, and the kind of late night panic that rewires a kid before he even knows who he is.
I sat with him in the studio and heard a story I know in my bones. He grew up fast. He learned how to stare down mortality at nineteen. He found anchors in baseball, therapy, and the strange friendships cancer hands you when it tears your plans apart.
He owns the fear and the humor without slogans or shortcuts. Listeners will meet a young man who refuses to let cancer shrink his world. He fights for the life he wants. He names the truth without apology. He reminds us that survivorship stays messy and sacred at the same time.
This conversation will stay with you.
RELATED LINKS
• Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
FEEDBACK
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Plan B
Dr. Marissa Russo trained to become a cancer biologist. She spent four years studying one of the deadliest brain tumors in adults and built her entire research career around a simple, urgent goal: open her own lab and improve the odds for patients with almost no shot at survival. In 2024 she applied for an F31 diversity grant through the NIH. The reviewers liked her work. Her resubmission was strong. Then the grant system started glitching. Dates vanished. Study sections disappeared. Emails went silent. When she finally reached a program officer, the message was clear: scrub the DEI language, withdraw, and resubmit. She rewrote the application in ten days. It failed. She had to start over. Again. This time with her identity erased.
Marissa left the lab. She found new purpose as a science communicator, working at STAT News through the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship. Her story captures what happens when talent collides with institutional sabotage. Not every scientist gets to choose a Plan B. She made hers count.
RELATED LINKS
FEEDBACK
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Otherwise Healthy with Scott Capozza
Scott Capozza and I could have been cloned in a bad lab experiment. Both diagnosed with cancer in our early twenties. Both raised on dial-up and mixtapes. Both now boy-girl twin dads with speech-therapist wives and a lifelong grudge against insurance companies. Scott is the first and only full-time oncology physical therapist at Yale New Haven Health, which means if he catches a cold, cancer rehab in Connecticut flatlines. He’s part of a small, stubborn tribe of providers who believe movement belongs in cancer care, not just after it. We talked about sperm banking in the nineties, marathon training during chemo, and what it means to be told you’re “otherwise healthy” when your lungs, ears, and fertility disagree. Scott’s proof that survivorship is not a finish line. It’s an endurance event with no medals, just perspective.
RELATED LINKS
- Scott Capozza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-capozza-a68873257
- Yale New Haven Health: https://www.ynhh.org
- Exercising Through Cancer: https://www.exercisingthroughcancer.com/team/scott-capozza-pt-mspt
- Profiles in Survivorship – Yale Medicine: https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/profiles-in-survivorship-scott-capozza
FEEDBACK
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Doctor No More: MaryAnn Wilbur
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 people it claims to elevate. We cover moral injury, medical gaslighting, and why she refused to lie on surgical charts just to boost hospital revenue.
Her escape plan? Tell the truth, organize the exodus, and build something that actually works. If you've ever wondered why your doctor disappeared, this is your answer. If you're a clinician hiding your own suffering, this is your permission slip.
RELATED LINKS
- MaryAnn Wilbur on LinkedIn
- Medicine Forward
- Clinician Burnout Foundation
- The Doctor Is No Longer In (Book)
- Suck It Up, Buttercup (Documentary)
FEEDBACK
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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 with one sentence about taxpayer priorities. The funding vanished. The timeline collapsed. His team scattered. Participants who trusted him sat in limbo.
A federal court eventually forced the government to reinstate the grant, but the damage stayed baked into the process. Ethan had to push through months of paperwork while his university kept the original deadline as if the shutdown had not happened. The system handed him a win that felt like a warning.
I brought Ethan on because his story shows how politics reaches into science and punishes the people who serve communities already carrying too much trauma. His honesty lands hard because he names the fear now spreading across academia and how young scientists question whether they can afford to care about the wrong population.
You will hear what this ordeal did to him, what it cost his team, and why he refuses to walk away.
RELATED LINKS
FEEDBACK
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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 drops the polite bullshit, dismantles survivor guilt with punchline precision, and reminds every listener that grace and rage can live in the same body. If you’ve ever been told to “walk it off” while your body betrayed you, this one hits close.
RELATED LINKS
• Artichokes and Grace – Book by Chelsea’s mother
FEEDBACK
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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 while breast cancer gets the knife? We talked about doctors’ fear of uncertainty, the epidemic of overtreatment, and what happens when you build a movement while still in the waiting room. Funny, fierce, unfiltered—this one sticks.
RELATED LINKS
FEEDBACK
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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 a hiring freeze, she doubled down, rewrote her plan, and won her own NIH training grant. Her story is about survival in the most literal sense—how to keep your brain intact when the system built to train you keeps collapsing.
RELATED LINKS
• Dr. Rachel Gatlin on LinkedIn
• Dr. Eric Nestler on Wikipedia
• News Coverage: Class of 2025 – PhD Students Redefine Priorities
FEEDBACK
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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 in a one-stall office bathroom.
We get into all of it. The diagnosis. The misdiagnosis. The second opinion that saved her life. Why fertility preservation is still a luxury item. Why half of oncologists still don’t mention it. And what it takes to turn permission to be pissed into a platform that actually pays for women’s futures.
This episode is blunt, hilarious, and very Jewish. There’s chopped liver, Carrie Bradshaw slander, and more than one “fuck you” to the status quo. You’ve been warned.
RELATED LINKS
- The Chick Mission
- Tracy Weiss on LinkedIn
- Fertility Preservation Interview (Dr. Aimee Podcast)
- Tracy’s Story in Authority Magazine
- NBC DFW Feature
- Stork’d Podcast Episode
- NuDetroit Profile
- Chick Mission 2024 Gala Recap
FEEDBACK
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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. Dating app postmortems. And the raw, relentless grief that comes with being Jewish online in 2025. Libby’s alter ego lets her say the quiet parts out loud, but the real Libby? She’s got receipts, range, and a righteous sense of purpose.
If you’re burnt out on algorithm-friendly “influencers,” meet a creator who actually stands for something. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t filter. And she damn well earned her platform.
This is the most Jewish episode I’ve ever recorded. And yes, there will be guilt.
RELATED LINKS
- Libby’s Website: https://libbyambershayo.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/libbyambershayo
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@libbyambershayo
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/libby-walker
- Schmuckboys Podcast: https://jewishjournal.com/podcasts/schmuckboys
- Forbes Feature: Modern Mrs. Maisel Vibes https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshweiss
- Medium Profile: https://medium.com/@libbyambershayo
FEEDBACK
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For guest suggestions or sponsorship, email podcast@matthewzachary.com.
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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 her grief into art and her outrage into action. This episode is about the cost of integrity, the politics of science, and what happens when researchers refuse to stay silent.
RELATED LINKS
FEEDBACK
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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 sat next to her dad—legendary arranger of Stand By Me—through every ER visit, hallway wait, and impossible choice. Now she’s training hospitals across the country to finally treat caregivers like patients. With names. With needs. With billing codes.
We talked about music, grief, psycho-oncology, the real cost of invisible labor, and why no one gives a shit about the person driving you to chemo. This one’s for the ones in the waiting room.
RELATED LINKS
- AllisonApplebaum.com
- Stand By Me – The Book
- The Elbaum Family Center for Caregiving at Mount Sinai
FEEDBACK
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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 Prague hostel, part Upper East Side grant writer, and somehow all of that makes perfect sense. She breaks down how theater kids become nonprofit lifers, how “sample sale feminism” helped shape a cancer rights org, and how you know when the work is finally worth staying for.
Also: Cleavon Little. Tap Dance Kid. 42 countries. And one extremely awkward moment involving a room full of women’s handbags and one very confused Matthew.
If you’ve ever had to hide your diagnosis to keep a job—or wanted to burn the whole HR system down—this one's for you.
RELATED LINKS
- Cancer and Careers
- Rebecca Nellis on LinkedIn
- 2024 Cancer and Careers Research Report
- Working with Cancer Pledge (Publicis)
- CEW Foundation
- I'm Not Rappaport – Broadway Info
FEEDBACK
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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 means to hit 50 with your humor intact. This episode is part nostalgia trip, part roast of our own generation, and part meditation on the privilege of being alive long enough to look back at it all. If you ever watched Different Strokes “very special episodes” or had a Family Ties lunchbox, this one’s for you.
RELATED LINKS
Cosmopolitan Essay: “What It’s Like to Have the ‘Good’ Cancer”
Oprah Daily: “Five Things I Wish Everyone Understood About My Metastatic Breast Cancer Diagnosis”
Allure Breast Cancer Photo Shoot
Tom Wilson’s “Stop Asking Me the Question” Song
FEEDBACK
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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 shares how she’s fighting to stay in the field, teaching the next generation, and rewriting her grant for a world where even the word “diversity” can get you blacklisted. The conversation is raw, human, and maddening—a reminder that the real “war on science” doesn’t happen in labs. It happens in inboxes.
RELATED LINKS:
• Dr. Nikki Maphis LinkedIn page
• Dr. Nikki Maphis’ page at the University of New Mexico
• Vanguard News Group coverage
• PNAS: Contribution of NIH funding to new drug approvals 2010–2016
FEEDBACK:
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Family Reach: The Charity America Forced Into Existence
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 the work no one wants to do, the stuff no one wants to say, and why staying angry might be the only way to stay sane.
Come for the laughs. Stay for the rage. And find out why Family Reach is the only adult in the room.
RELATED LINKS
- Family Reach
- Financial Resource Center
- Carla on LinkedIn
- Morgridge Foundation Profile
- Authority Magazine Interview
- Syracuse University Feature
FEEDBACK
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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 she trained in.
We sat down in the studio to talk about the unbearable loneliness of rare disease parenting, the disconnect between medical knowledge and human connection, and what it means to weaponize science against silence. She talks about bias in the NICU, the failure of healthcare communication, and why “resilience” is a lazy word. Her daughters are grown now. One’s a playwright. One’s an artist. And Jennifer is still raising hell.
This is a conversation about control, trauma, survival, and rewriting the script when the world hands you someone else’s lines.
Bring tissues. Then bring receipts.
RELATED LINKS
• When the Baby Is Not OK (Book)
FEEDBACK
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