Curing Age-Related Diseases w Epigenetic Medicines | Lada Nuzhna, General Control

Summary

Lada Nuzhna, founder and CEO of General Control, discusses her journey from physics to aging research and her company’s mission to develop epigenetic medicines for age-related diseases. The interview takes place in the California redwoods, a symbolic setting given the thousand-year-old trees surrounding them.

Lada explains how epigenetics allows cells with identical DNA to become entirely different cell types, and how nature uses epigenetic mechanisms to reset cellular age during reproduction. She describes the competitive landscape of biotech, emphasizing how Chinese companies can go from idea to human clinical data in less than four years with minimal funding, forcing US companies to rethink their strategies. Her personal story is remarkable - growing up in eastern Ukraine where war started in 2014, living alone from age 14, teaching herself biology, and navigating immigration to build a company tackling one of the hardest problems in science.

Highlights

”The future is this crazy exciting party and I won’t be part of it”

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“I’m not a person who naturally feels FOMO - I can miss a thousand parties and never notice. But that was the first time I truly felt FOMO for the future because I realized the future is this crazy exciting party and I won’t be part of it.” — Lada Nuzhna, 1:41

”ioBiotech went from idea to human data in less than 4 years by going to China”

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“ioBiotech sold to AstraZeneca for like a billion. They went from idea to human data in less than 4 years - an insane timeline. They went to China. Now you have to ask yourself: how am I competitive with a 9-person Chinese team?” — Lada Nuzhna, 0:08

”There’s a graveyard of companies that raised $200 million and never pushed a drug to clinic”

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“There is a graveyard of companies that raised $200 million, spent six years developing something, and never pushed a drug to clinic. China can do that with a few million dollars and a few people.” — Lada Nuzhna, 22:19

”60% of National Institute of Aging funding goes to Alzheimer’s alone”

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“60% of National Institute of Aging funding goes to Alzheimer’s alone. If you want to work on aging broadly, you effectively have to work on Alzheimer’s to get funded. Government funding is completely broken for this space.” — Lada Nuzhna, 8:21

”No kid is born 30 years old even from old parents - nature resets cellular age”

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“No kid is born being 30 years old even if conceived by parents who were 30. Everyone’s born with eggs and sperm that age for decades before conception. Somehow babies are not old even though they appear from old cells. Nature knows how to reset this.” — Lada Nuzhna, 5:42

”I live life like a video game - optimizing for the most interesting outcome”

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“My internal experience of life feels like I’m living in a video game. I just try to optimize for the most interesting outcome at any given point. Every big risk I’ve taken has paid off. People don’t take enough risks.” — Lada Nuzhna, 1:06:02

Key Points

• FOMO About the Future (0:56) - Lada first felt FOMO when realizing many physics questions she wanted to answer wouldn’t be solved in her lifetime, inspiring her shift to longevity research

• Physics to Biology Transition (1:04) - Started in physics wanting to answer fundamental questions like reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity, then pivoted to biology around 2020-2021

• Epigenetic Reprogramming Explained (4:47) - Every cell has the same DNA but different cell types; epigenome encodes which genes express; it’s the only known way nature resets cellular age

• Yamanaka Factors (6:12) - Four proteins discovered by Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka that can turn cells into induced pluripotent stem cells with younger epigenetic age

• Starting Impetus Grants (7:47) - Before starting General Control, Lada ran Impetus Grants giving over $10 million to early-stage aging research with 2-week response times vs. government’s 7-12 months

• Broken Government Funding (8:21) - 60% of National Institute of Aging funding goes to Alzheimer’s alone; if you want to work on aging broadly, you effectively have to work on Alzheimer’s to get funded

• Crypto and Saudi Arabia Funding (8:55) - First check from Juan Benet (Filecoin); raised from crypto investors and Saudi sources to fund unconventional aging research

• Founding General Control (13:29) - Building therapeutic modalities to target multifactorial diseases of aging; can rewrite gene expression permanently rather than requiring daily pills

• One-and-Done vs. Chronic Treatment (15:12) - Epigenetic editors can permanently suppress cholesterol production instead of taking statins for life

• Targeting Disease vs. Aging (16:39) - Company focuses on disease indication first because it’s easier to run clinical trials; can’t yet directly run trials for “aging”

• GLP-1s and Aging (17:45) - Eli Lilly testing GLP-1s in Alzheimer’s trials; may become first de facto aging drugs through roundabout approval path

• Why There’s a Graveyard of Biotech Startups (22:19) - Companies that raised $200M and spent 6 years developing science but never pushed a drug to clinic; China can do equivalent work with a few million

• ioBiotech Case Study (22:47) - European company raised less than $15M, went from idea to human data in under 4 years by going to China, sold to AstraZeneca for $1 billion

• China’s Speed Advantage (23:35) - Investors previously funding Boston/Silicon Valley biotech now going to China; US companies must compete with 9-person Chinese teams stamping out drugs

• Growing Up in Ukraine (27:07) - War started for eastern Ukraine in 2014; school got shelled; lived alone since age 14; hometown is now “almost non-existent” after Russian takeover

• Bob Swanson & Genentech (34:15) - Role model was 27-year-old VC without PhD who read a cloning paper, convinced academic Herbert Boyer to start Genentech despite criticism

• Executing Quickly with Long Feedback Loops (37:49) - Knew clinical strategy from day one; what takes others years of data to figure out, they determined before raising first round

• Engineering Risk vs. Scientific Risk (38:45) - Prefers engineering risk (can you make molecule work) over scientific risk (will targeting protein cure disease); latter requires billions in capital

• Why Mice Studies Are Misleading (43:16) - Mice don’t get Alzheimer’s; you artificially induce it then “cure” it; mice die of cancer not heart attacks; fundamental mismatch with human disease

• Arguing with Vendors (47:36) - Can’t make cells grow faster, so negotiates aggressively on timelines and costs; considers this her “talent”

• US Biotech Complacency (48:42) - US companies not rushing to develop drugs for patients; spending too much time optimizing technology; obsessing over slightly better IP from Stanford or MIT

• Longevity Escape Velocity (51:13) - Worst case: linear progress solving cardiovascular disease adds a few years; best case: discover unknown unknowns that multiply drug discovery speed

• Being Self-Taught in Bio (53:07) - Dropped out of college; college bio is taught like history with memorization; practical drug development doesn’t require knowing all organelles

• Learning by Doing (54:15) - Modern education is like accumulating tools in garage but never fixing the car; better to start doing and backpropagate to needed knowledge

• Living 200-300 Years (56:22) - Longer horizons enable different project types; would get PhDs in completely new fields; makes people more ambitious

• Journey to the United States (1:01:17) - Applied to 10 colleges, 9 rejected; never been to English-speaking country; learned English studying for SATs; recorded classes to re-listen later

• Risk Taking (1:06:02) - Lives life like a video game optimizing for most interesting outcomes; every big risk taken has paid off; people don’t take enough risks

Mentions

Companies

• General Control (0:32) - Lada’s company engineering epigenetic medicines for age-related diseases
• ioBiotech (22:47) - European company went from idea to human data in <4 years, sold to AstraZeneca for ~$1B
• AstraZeneca (23:05) - Acquired ioBiotech and using their human data for US trials
• Genentech (34:15) - Role model company; birthplace of biotech industry in Bay Area
• Eli Lilly (17:55) - Testing GLP-1s in Alzheimer’s trials; bought gene editor for permanent cholesterol lowering
• Impetus Grants (7:47) - Lada’s prior grant program giving $10M+ to aging research
• Loyal (19:48) - Celine Halioua’s company running first aging trial for dogs
• Kleiner Perkins (34:32) - VC firm where Bob Swanson worked before getting fired and starting Genentech
• National Institute of Aging (8:21) - 60% of their funding goes to Alzheimer’s alone

Products & Technologies

• Yamanaka Factors (6:12) - Four proteins that can reset cell age
• CRISPR (42:12) - Gene editing technology; companies spent years optimizing without clinical strategy
• GLP-1s (17:45) - Weight loss drugs potentially becoming first aging drugs; 300+ GLP-1 companies in China
• Statins (15:12) - Daily cholesterol medication that could be replaced by one-time gene edit
• Sanger Sequencing (4:12) - Old technology that made Human Genome Project take decades and billions

People

• Lada Nuzhna (0:27) - Founder & CEO of General Control
• Shinya Yamanaka (6:12) - Nobel Prize winner who discovered epigenetic reprogramming factors
• Juan Benet (9:08) - Filecoin founder; first investor in Impetus Grants
• Bob Swanson (34:15) - Founder of Genentech; fired from Kleiner at 27, no PhD, became biotech pioneer
• Herbert Boyer (34:48) - Academic who co-founded Genentech with Swanson
• Stanley Cohen (34:42) - Co-author of cloning paper that inspired Genentech
• John Maraganore (34:27) - Founder of Alnylam; another biotech role model
• Celine Halioua (19:48) - Founder of Loyal, running first aging trial for dogs
• Elon Musk (20:30) - Doesn’t believe in longevity but building Neuralink for brain uploading
• David Sinclair (20:38) - Argued with Elon about longevity on Twitter
• Stephen Hawking (1:00:02) - Lived productive life with ALS and even had a mistress

Surprising Quotes

“I’m not a person who naturally feels FOMO like I can miss a thousand parties and never notice but that was the first time I truly felt FOMO for the future because I realized that the future is this crazy exciting party and I won’t be part of it.” — 1:41

“No kid is born being 30 years old even if it’s conceived by parents who were 30 years old. Everyone who’s born is given a set of eggs and sperm cells at their birth that age for several decades before they conceive a baby. Somehow babies are not old even though they somehow appear from the old cells.” — 5:42

“China can do that with a few million dollars and a few people. There is a graveyard of companies that raised $200 million spent six years developing something and never developed a drug and pushed it to the clinic.” — 22:35

“There is no age at which you’re like, even if you’re the person who doesn’t believe in immortality or limited to 100, there is no day you wake up someone asks you are you ready to die today? The answer is not today ever.” — 21:02

“I think my internal experience of life is like it feels like I’m living in a video game. So I just try to optimize for the most interesting outcome at any given point in time.” — 1:06:15

Transcript

0:08 There is this very interesting company that I followed called ioBiotech. They sold to AstraZeneca for like a billion, European company very small. They went from the idea to human data in like less than 4 years which is an insane timeline. The way they did it is they went to China. The investors that used to fund biotech companies in Boston or Silicon Valley are now going to China and so you have to ask yourself how am I competitive with a 9-person Chinese team.

0:27 This is Lada Nuzhna and she is the founder and CEO of General Control. Do you want to just start off with why are we here in the redwoods? Well, you invited me here. We drove 2 hours to Redwoods. While we were driving here, I did realize there was a little bit of symbolism to this and that trees around us are close to thousand years old. And I was like, oh, there is a connection here. The interview is about aging.

0:58 What got you inspired about aging in the first place? I didn’t start in biology. Since my early childhood was hellbent on sort of doing physics and figuring out secrets of the universe, answering like very fundamental questions about like why are we here? What was there before anything? Can we reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity? And I think at some point when I was in college I had like a list of running questions that I was like I want to spend my career answering those and realized that many of them are many Nobel prizes away from being answered and probably won’t be answered within my lifetime.

1:41 It was sort of like I’m not a person who naturally feels FOMO like I can miss a thousand parties and never notice but that was the first time I truly felt FOMO for the future because I realized that the future is this like crazy exciting party and I won’t be part of it. And that was the moment I was like okay can I stay here for longer?

2:12 I didn’t know that aging was like a real space because I think I googled it for the first time when I was a kid just like can we live forever and there was something about telomeres that popped up which is like that theory of aging by now but back then that was like the only answer. And then I started looking at the space again around 2020-2021 and realized that there’s actually a lot of work being done, it’s still very early stage but at least there are real labs in academia working on those things.

2:55 If telomeres don’t work, what kind of path did you decide to go down? Telomeres do work biologically, but it’s not the answer for why we age. I think the answer is there are thousands of reasons and a messy house can be messy in multiple ways. So there isn’t necessarily a cause of aging. It’s just that evolution never - we never evolved to live 200 years. There is no reason to keep us around for that long once we’ve reproduced and have an offspring that can carry on our genes.

3:42 I spent a few years just funding early stage research and got to see a lot of science happening across academia. My favorite area of research has always been tools and new ways of measuring and editing biology partially because I realized just looking at the history of biotechnology, those were the biggest multipliers of progress in bio. It’s not studying just one protein that might be causing the disease. It’s figuring out how to measure thousands of them at the same time.

4:12 I think it’s especially obvious when you look at something like Human Genome Project where we spent several decades and billions of dollars trying to sequence one human genome. One human. And they would publish every few years like it’s almost complete now. And you’re like why is it taking so long? It’s because we were using Sanger and Shotgun sequencing and now we can sequence multiple human genomes per day and spend like a few hundred bucks doing that.

4:47 Every cell in your body has essentially the same DNA. If I took your neuron cell and say your liver cell and compare the DNA of the two, just a sequence, there would be no difference. You wouldn’t be able to tell which cell is which. And it’s interesting because the same DNA somehow manages to produce completely different cell types. What makes them different is the epigenome. The epigenome encodes which genes express in particular cell. It also encodes how your cell develops over time.

5:42 Epigenetics is one of the only ways we know that nature can reset the age of a cell. One example that is interesting to think about is no kid is born being 30 years old even if it’s conceived by parents who were 30 years old. Everyone who’s born is given a set of eggs and sperm cells at their birth that age for several decades before they conceive a baby. Somehow babies are not old even though they somehow appear from the old cells. The way it happens is through epigenetic layer. Nature figures out how to reset the age of the cell when it gives rise to a new embryo.

6:12 A few people figured it out a few decades ago. There was famous scientist Nobel Prize winner now Shinya Yamanaka who was trying to figure out the factors that makes a cell reset its own age that are now called Yamanaka factors. There’s just four proteins that if you express them in a cell turn it into induced pluripotent stem cell that somehow if you compare its epigenetic age is much younger than the cell it was derived from.

7:08 Most of the medicine today works with downstream processes of the cells. Most of the drugs that you go to CVS and grab off the shelf tweak the proteins very transiently and you have to take them every day to keep having the same effect. Epigenetics - you can write a certain program into the cell at epigenetic layer and your daughter cells would keep having the same program. The exciting thing about the epigenome is that it allows you to permanently alter the state of the cell and go to something that feels more like a cure and less like a chronic treatment.

7:47 Before this I did Impetus Grants. I didn’t immediately jump into starting a company. I doled out a whole bunch of money and tried to support a bunch of projects. I don’t think I was ever a person who optimized for starting a company. I know that’s sort of like the meme of Silicon Valley, but I actually resisted the meme for a while because I had this idea that aging is the most important thing I can be working on and I want to do whatever I need to do to solve it.

8:21 When I started it wasn’t clear to me that the company is a way to go. Back then it was clear that the aging field especially the crazy ideas are just not getting enough funding. If you look at the National Institute of Aging, 60% of their funding goes towards Alzheimer’s. Literally just one disease. And we know that if we were to cure Alzheimer’s, we wouldn’t cure aging. So it’s just like broken incentive structure. If you want to be working on aging, you have to be working on Alzheimer’s or you just don’t get funding.

8:55 You basically raised it from a bunch of crypto people. I love that. Crypto, Saudi Arabia. How did you get them interested? Just reach out. The first check in was from Juan Benet who’s like a true visionary in the space of medicines. After we gave out the first round of funding, about $10 million, it was easier to go out and say look at all the things we’ve done.

9:35 Obviously we heard a lot of positive feedback from academics who would otherwise spend years trying to write their own grant. It’s kind of sad because you are trained as a scientist to go and do cool science and then you go and start your own lab and you’re like well actually 70% of your time right now is writing 70-page grants. You basically spend your entire life optimizing for being a good researcher and then the actual success or failure is just being able to raise money.

10:15 I just submitted my first governmental grant recently and it was very like I was like I’m never doing this again. I’ll take on any dilution to never experience this process again. We made the process much easier. It was like two-pager, two-week response time. What’s the typical response time? About 70 pages. Depending on the grant, it can be anywhere from 7 months to 12 months response time. And after you get a response, it will take even more time to get the actual funding.

13:29 We are essentially developing therapeutic modalities that would make it easier to target multifactorial diseases of aging. The problem with many existing therapeutic modalities is that at best we can do bispecific antibodies and target two proteins at the same time that are still extracellular. We really can’t do anything if thousand proteins are dysregulated. Once you get to a certain age you don’t just have one disease like diabetes - it’s like this cascade and you have to take like 15 pills every day.

15:12 There is early preclinical work on some epigenetic editors that can permanently suppress your cholesterol. So instead of taking years of statins to keep your LDL cholesterol low, you can just do one and done suppression of a gene that degrades your LDL receptor and you never get heart attacks.

17:45 The interesting thing about targeting disease versus targeting aging is that at least you can run a clinical trial for that. With aging, we technically haven’t figured out how to run a clinical trial. The best we can do right now is what people are doing with GLP-1s where we know caloric restriction extends lifespan. Eli Lilly is now releasing a trial testing GLP-1s in Alzheimer’s which is like how’s this related, you’re just losing weight.

19:48 There are a few companies targeting aging. One of them is Celine Halioua working on Loyal. She is building out that path with FDA to run the first aging trial for dogs. They might even have the data come out soon. But she would tell you herself that they probably wouldn’t be able to do it with gene therapy because gene therapy has all kinds of question marks.

20:30 How long would you want to live? There’s this weird dynamic where I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone that was well adjusted and had they were waking up in the morning and working on something that they genuinely cared about and they ever wanted to die. Does Elon want to die? Elon doesn’t believe in longevity. He was arguing with David Sinclair at some point on Twitter. But if you look at his actions - he’s trying to create super intelligence and make it so you can upload your brain into a computer through Neuralink.

21:02 There is no age at which you’re like even if you’re the person who doesn’t believe in immortality or limited to 100. There is no day you wake up someone asks you are you ready to die today? The answer is not today ever.

22:19 It is impossible to be building a big-headed biotech company at this time because of how fast and nimble China is. It just doesn’t make sense financially for any VC to put money into US biotech companies that raise $200 million. Before we got started, there was a whole graveyard of companies that were just raising absurd amounts of money and spending a lot of time on science.

22:47 There is this very interesting company I followed for a few years called ioBiotech. Sold to AstraZeneca earlier this year for about a billion. European company very small. They raised less than $15 million, very tiny company and with that money they went from the idea to human data in less than four years which is an insane timeline. The way they did it is they went to China.

23:35 Many of the investors that used to fund biotech companies in Boston or Silicon Valley are now going to China and so you have to ask yourself how am I competitive with the 9-person Chinese teams that are stamping out drugs. I think people used to cope with this by saying well at least US is innovative, China is still uninformed, China can’t be creative. I don’t think it’s true at all. We are now starting to see absolutely new science come out of Chinese labs that’s never been published in the US before.

24:52 There are 300 GLP-1 companies out there in China. They’re just slightly better versions of GLP-1s. Starting a GLP-1 company now is sort of a biotech version of a vibes app. You can actually be working on a deep tech biotech complicated company and still be doing meaningless things - things that have little counterfactual impact.

27:07 I think my childhood in Ukraine was probably different from other childhoods in Ukraine because I did grow up in the eastern Ukraine. For many people war started 2022, for us war started back in 2014. It introduced enough good chaos in my life such that I got detached from the routine and normal childhood pretty early on. I was living alone since I was 14.

28:02 When the war started my school got shelled the very same year and I was living in a small hometown so there were no schools left. It wasn’t a rubble but it was not operational for basically a whole time after that. They never reopened it. Right now my hometown is a rubble. It was taken over by Russia I think 2024 in February. For a long time it was a gray zone right at the border where most of the battles happened.

34:15 The two people that I would probably look up to the most is Bob Swanson, founder of Genentech, and John Maraganore, founder of Alnylam. Both of them worked on thematically something similar to what I’m trying to do which is develop a therapeutic modality. In case of Genentech that was the first recombinant proteins. Bob Swanson was working at Kleiner Perkins as a VC, didn’t have a PhD, but then there were no biotech VCs, no biotech companies.

34:48 He gets fired from his job at Kleiner Perkins right around the age of 26-27. So by the age of 27 he hasn’t done truly much. And then he comes across this paper from Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer on cloning - this idea of can we take a particular protein and make many copies of it at scale in bacteria. He comes across this paper and he’s like holy shit this is a big deal. This will be big.

35:42 He calls Herbert Boyer who doesn’t want to talk to him. He’s like we should start a company around this. Nobody by that company existed before that. They got a lot of criticism back then because it was considered bad taste for pure academics and scientists to try to make money from their science. They didn’t raise a lot of money, but their execution speed was insane. Bob Swanson wasn’t a PhD. He was just some dude who got fired from his job and then read the paper.

37:49 I think you need to know the direction you’re going with from the get-go. Many people start with a new technology like CRISPR that just works without knowing where to apply it. Before we started, we already knew the direction that will take this technology was super clear. I think that saved us probably years because by the time we were raising our first round, we really heard feedback that what you guys figured out early on is what many people figure out like once they have years of data.

38:45 I generally split the risk in building biotech company into engineering and scientific. I would always prefer the engineering risk to scientific risk. The question with scientific risk is the unknown unknown like if I target this protein will it cure this disease - I never want to take that type of risk. None of the bestselling drugs of all time were trying to do truly new biology - they usually targeted proteins that had years of papers published around it.

43:16 Testing science in the wrong model is a pitfall. Doesn’t matter that you cured Alzheimer’s in mice because mice doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. You create an artificial model where you overexpress toxic proteins from human in mouse brain and pretend that it’s Alzheimer’s. No, it’s thousands of things at the same time. One protein will never recapitulate it. Mice largely die of cancer. They don’t die of heart attacks.

47:36 Biology is annoying. It’s the worst discipline for an impatient person to be in because you just can’t make your cells grow faster. There’s like a limit to how many times cells divide per unit of time. Same with vendors. I’m known as a person who could just like very good at arguing with them. I think it’s kind of like my talent.

48:42 What does complacency look like? Not rushing to develop a drug for your patients. Spending too much time optimizing the technology. CRISPR companies especially have been guilty of that - “look we have a better CRISPR than that other company” - why does it matter if your drug is not in the patient doing the thing. A lot of it was obsession with slightly better IP from Stanford or MIT.

51:13 I’ve been thinking about longevity escape velocity - how can I basically live for an extra day every 24 hours. I think there’s a best case and worst case scenario. Worst case is linear progress. We don’t discover any new things and we just continue to develop drugs very slowly. I think in that case we are probably close to solving cardiovascular disease.

52:08 In Japan people don’t die of heart attacks. Just healthier food, healthier lifestyle. They die of cancer and other things but their lifespan is much higher than in the US. I think the mean is close to 80 years. So the worst case scenario is we just solve cardiovascular disease and extend lifespan by a few more years. Best case scenario is acceleration or us just stumbling upon some unknown unknowns that multiply the speed at which we discover new drugs.

53:07 I ended up dropping out of college, so I never got a proper bio degree, which I think is good because the way bio is taught in college is just a horrific experience that is tailored to premed students who just obsess over doing their anki cards but not actually understanding the science. In my day-to-day work I never think about all the organelles that human cells have. If you ask the most legendary drug developers to name organelles, no one can do it. It’s not consequential for developing a drug.

54:15 I think of modern day education is like having a garage where your objective is to fix a car, but instead of fixing the car, you just spend decades trying to accumulate the tools to get slightly better at fixing the car. Eventually you have all these hammers and screwdrivers and eventually decades later you actually get to fixing the car and all of a sudden your tools are rusty because you actually don’t know how to do the thing.

56:22 In a world where we’re living 200 years or longer, if you live on such a long horizon the types of projects you take on are completely different. Eventually suddenly you start getting a PhD that actually takes 15-20 years because it’s so complicated and in a completely new field of science. Being able to live that long will just make people more ambitious.

57:25 I’m the type of person who would rather fail spectacularly than succeed conventionally. I want each next decade of my life to be crazier than the one before. Each new project that I take on to be more risky and more intense than the previous one.

1:01:17 Finding my way here and then finding my way to building the company that I’m building was quite isolating at times. I couldn’t even find people around me who have ever been to America or been outside of my small hometown in Eastern Ukraine. I applied to 10 colleges and 9 of them rejected me. There was one response left. I was like if everyone rejected me this one will definitely reject me because it was one of my top choices.

1:03:12 Do you feel like things are going to be okay? Still don’t feel that way. Still feel like any day things might fail and I might end up on the street, but what’s the worst case scenario? If I’m alive, everything’s okay. It was tough for many years even here because just the learning curve of new culture and new language. I literally learned English by studying for SATs which I don’t recommend anyone does. It was a horrible experience.

1:04:25 I arrived here and I’ve never been to English-speaking country before and suddenly I’m surrounded by a bunch of smart kids and have to go to classes and pretend like you’re learning. I had a lot of embarrassing moments not knowing English properly. I had to record my classes my first year in college on audio so that I can listen to it after. I just couldn’t understand stuff on the fly.

1:05:28 Every time I come up with something new to try, my parents are like this is a crazy idea. I got to college here and they’re like oh wow she made it. And then a few years later I’m like I’m actually dropping out. And they’re like this is an insane idea what are you doing? They’re still very much worried. My mom’s like have you discovered something today? And I’m like not yet, not quite. We might discover something new every few months but it’s definitely not on a daily timeline.

1:06:15 I think my internal experience of life is like it feels like I’m living in a video game. So I just try to optimize for the most interesting outcome at any given point in time. My sense of risk is still there but it’s slightly muted. I keep doing crazy things and I never regretted it. Every big risk I’ve taken in my life always paid out. People don’t take enough risks and the outcomes are never as bad as they seem.