Celine (00:00.142)
rescue dog going everywhere.

Ben Miller (00:01.792)
Okay, so we're live as you clean up the number two, the poop that your dog just made on the ground right before we started recording.

Celine (00:05.272)
Yeah.

Celine (00:09.176)
Yes, in an office that isn't even mine. Yeah.

Ben Miller (00:14.03)
no! Wait, this is the evidence.

Celine (00:32.718)
Yeah, you're lucky you're cute. You're lucky you're cute.

Ben Miller (00:54.754)
Take your time.

Celine (01:01.41)
Have you missed Christian before?

Ben Miller (01:03.502)
I can't, you're pretty far away.

Celine (01:07.202)
Have you met squishy? Okay Squish, come here. Come here. Come on.

Ben Miller (01:08.779)
No.

All right, let's see. Let's see, yeah.

Celine (01:18.616)
So this is squishy.

Ben Miller (01:20.497)
wow, cute.

Celine (01:24.588)
Big ass Rottweiler. Like 85 pounds, 80 pounds. She was pretty skinny when I adopted her, so she's still gaining weight. And she just lost a couple pounds from that giant poop. So, my God, that was so bad. that was, that was traumatizing.

Ben Miller (01:26.766)
Amazing how much she way

So 85, nice.

Ben Miller (01:36.119)
Yeah.

Ben Miller (01:41.122)
Hahaha

Ben Miller (01:46.744)
This is the best opening to a podcast ever.

Celine (01:50.919)
I have to admit getting a young, I've always only adopted senior dogs. Cause it's like symbiotic, right? Like they want a nice place to sleep and have their like golden years. I want a dog that isn't gonna need to be walked 10 times a day. And I got co-opted into adopting a young dog for first time in my life. And it has definitely delayed me having kids.

Ben Miller (02:11.47)
Mm-hmm.

Hahaha

Celine (02:15.63)
because, my God, they're gonna poop, I have to clean up on a daily basis. If you're gonna pee, I have to clean up on a daily basis. Training a dog, not easy. All my senior dogs came pre-trained. So, she's gotten better, but she did for a long time. Yeah. And everybody else within a half a mile radius, yeah. I know, especially in San Francisco, in like condo land, it's like not good.

Ben Miller (02:27.374)
Did she wake you up in the middle of the night?

Ben Miller (02:37.838)
Great.

Ben Miller (02:42.542)
Yeah.

Celine (02:43.202)
But no, she's actually doing really well. Like she sleeps on her own and her her crate now and everything. But I can never create it. I've never created a dog in my life. But you had to create trainer because otherwise you wake up every morning to. Disaster. So I'm on I'm on a journey. This is way harder than building a company. I think I think it might be at least for me.

Ben Miller (02:48.577)
you created her? No.

Ben Miller (02:59.094)
Yeah, yeah, wow, okay.

Ben Miller (03:06.543)
No way. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, Celine, welcome to Onward.

Celine (03:17.908)
I'm happy to be here.

Ben Miller (03:19.828)
Okay, wow. So then that was a great intro to have you explain to people what is loyal.

Celine (03:28.974)
So Loyal is a biotech company developing drugs to extend dog lifespan. So we're trying to get the first drug FDA approved for lifespan extension itself. So just more healthier time with the dog you love.

Ben Miller (03:44.834)
Yep, a pill that makes dogs live longer and healthier sounds like magic.

Celine (03:51.79)
Yeah, it does, isn't it?

Ben Miller (03:55.606)
I saw it go viral on Twitter the last couple days.

Celine (04:00.108)
Yeah, I don't know what triggered that. We didn't do anything. We just started going viral. This happens like once a quarter.

Ben Miller (04:04.331)
Yeah, you start going viral. And people start asking the questions that I've been wondering all along, which is when do people just start taking it illegally? Do you just start taking it? They're like, this makes my dog live longer and healthier. I'm going to take it. Tell them why not to do that, Celine. Bad idea.

Celine (04:20.846)
No comment. So dog biology is interesting. It's like both very similar and also quite different.

from human biology. One of my favorite drug programs, not that I have no favorite children, but one of my favorite ones is working on the biological reason why we think big dogs age faster and die sooner. So why my cutie-rahtie squishy only has an expected lifespan of 10 to 12 years while a chihuahua can live for 18 years. That's especially irrelevant to humans. I'm not living double the lifespan of basketball players.

Ben Miller (04:59.533)
Really? thought, I actually thought that like big people did like live shorter lives than small people.

Celine (04:59.975)
short for context.

Celine (05:06.988)
So you definitely get some variants, especially at the extremes, right? So if you're like very, very large, but it's really more that there's some diseases that can lead to this like gigantism and that definitely can shorten lifespan if untreated. But like generally speaking, like in dogs, it's actually very strong predictive effect. Like with each incremental pound, their expected lifespan goes down some fraction. In humans, you don't get that.

Ben Miller (05:35.757)
So, okay, so how does it work? I know you have Loyal 2 and I don't know about Loyal 1 or Loy 1, Loy 2. So how does this technology work?

Celine (05:47.127)
Yeah, so we've kind of two primary categories of drugs we're working on. One is for large drug lifespan extension, which we just talked about. And then the second is for dogs of almost all sizes. So includes smaller breed dogs. And they work in similar but different ways. So the big dog short lifespan drug at a high level, the kind of insight that, to be clear, predates loyal and is actually an independent scientific insight is that

the proteins that are activated when a dog is in puberty. So when a puppy is born, they start growing very, very rapidly. Actually, you know, kind of fun fact is that most puppies are born approximately the same size, regardless of what breed of dog they are. But it's just that these large breed dogs just like double so much faster. Like they're just like growing at such a high rate during that pubescent period. And that's driven in part by these hormones called growth hormones. So there's these little like peptides that circulate in your blood.

blood and they bind to your cells and they say grow divide grow divide right they tell the cells basically like turnover and like split and grow so you can get that larger organism that's super normal right it happens in us and during puberty it happens in every organism basically

Ben Miller (06:53.708)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (07:02.958)
But what happens in big dogs is that once the dog is fully grown, that pathway, those peptides, don't actually turn off. So big dogs still have really, really high levels of these growth hormones circulating in their body, saying grow, divide. And that's actually the hypothesis that it's accelerating their rate of aging. So you can actually see mechanistically, like we've done studies in dogs showing that metabolically and in other ways, that these big dogs are just aging at a faster rate, at a cellular level. And so what the drug does is it inhibits the production of these peptides

Ben Miller (07:28.781)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (07:32.912)
once the dog is fully grown so that the dog is still large, but it's just hopefully aging at a slower rate.

Ben Miller (07:42.413)
That's very intuitive and I feel like I can understand that one. So then how does the other one work?

Celine (07:46.04)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (07:51.631)
So the other one is targeting the biology, actually the most well replicated way to extend lifespan in literally any organism from like a yeast and a worm and a fly all the way up to primates is caloric restriction. So basically just reducing the amount of calories that that animal takes.

And there's a lot of theories about how caloric restriction works, but at a high level, what's thought to happen is that when you calorically restrict, your body becomes more metabolically sensitive and more metabolically efficient. And so that then has downstream positive consequences on rate of aging, age-related disease development, and therefore the organism lives longer.

However, nobody wants to colloquially restrict themselves. And crucially, people really don't want to colloquially restrict their dogs. There's a lot of actually really funny anecdotes about the failures of colloquial restriction, even weight loss in dogs. And so what the second category of drug does is it activates the downstream biological pathways that are activated when you colloquially restrict or when a dog colloquially restricts to

Ben Miller (08:43.233)
You

Ben Miller (08:48.759)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (09:03.19)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (09:06.98)
emulate the benefit you get from caloric restriction. It's called caloric restriction mimetic without having the necessity of weight loss or appetite suppression or generally eating less. Which again, in humans, appetite suppression is actually great. That's why like GLP-1s, people love it. In dogs, it's actually not. People really don't want appetite suppression.

Ben Miller (09:28.171)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (09:29.0)
And it does two broad things, the drug. One is that it improves metabolic sensitivity. So basically, your dog eats something, the ability of the body to use those nutrients efficiently and not have an inefficient nutrient process.

Ben Miller (09:43.778)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (09:44.503)
And the second is fat tissue function. when you see, older people will have a redistribution of fat in their body. So you'll see they'll be really skinny in their arms and their legs, and then they'll have a really big belly. That's not drinking too many beers, although that could certainly contribute. That's actually an phenotype. It's a mechanism of aging. Happens in dogs,

And so it helps reverse that kind fat tissue dysfunction that you see in dogs to extend their healthy lifespan. And so that's something that's not size specific. So basically any dog mechanistically should be able to benefit from that.

Ben Miller (10:27.756)
I'm having so much fun hearing you explain how this thing works. I have some idea what you're talking about. I do want to, I don't want to go too far into the exactly how the mechanism works, but I'm maybe offline. Um, I remember learning. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, maybe on the, on the backend of this, we'll go a little bit more into the technical so I don't lose people too early. Uh, but I'm interested, but okay. So let's, let's talk about why this is so exciting because you are.

Celine (10:34.583)
Yeah

Celine (10:42.124)
Always happy, always happy too, yeah, it's really fun.

Ben Miller (10:57.322)
two steps out of three through the FDA process, like you're, you're on your way to being the first longevity drug ever FDA approved. That seems like a huge deal to me. Yeah. Yeah. No, was, I was on some podcasts and I was like, you know, we're like, think about it. have AI, have space rockets and we have longevity drugs. Like we're living in the future.

Celine (11:10.446)
Seems like a huge deal to me too.

Celine (11:24.44)
I know, I know. Actually my team saw that podcast and posted it in our Slack channel. Yeah, they were like, we love Ben. It was really, I meant to send it to you. It was really cute. Yeah.

Ben Miller (11:29.548)
good, okay. it, somebody does. It's so cool. I mean it's so cool what guys are doing. Anyway, so, okay, so help explain why this is such a big deal.

Celine (11:45.443)
So drugs and medicines are classically developed for a disease. And disease is actually a human classification on very complex biological processes, so things like arthritis, dementia, cancer, the flu. These are all diseases. And so medicines are.

develop to take a person or a dog or a cat from the sick state back into a healthier state or slow the rate of that disease. And so what happens is that that can be really effective for things like, I don't know, strep throat, right? There you take antibiotic, you go right back to normal.

The problem with a lot of diseases of age, so things like cognitive decline, dementia, many forms of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, is that it's very, very difficult to treat these diseases because while you might become symptomatic with cancer, maybe at stage two or stage three, depending on the type of cancer and a lot of other conditionals, it's often been developing for a decade plus before.

Ben Miller (12:31.585)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (12:53.324)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (12:54.006)
And so it's very difficult for a drug or for a medicine or a doctor to undo it properly. So that's where you kind of get that long, slow, painful decline that we all kind of take as inevitable. And so what's really special about what we're trying to do is that we're not trying to develop drugs against any one specific disease itself. What we're trying to do is broadly keep a relatively healthy, in our case, dog, healthier longer.

So we're trying to broadly prevent or reduce risk or reduce severity of diseases, but we're not targeting cancer. We're not targeting arthritis. We're not targeting anything specifically. We're just targeting broadly the mechanisms by which an organism breaks down over time.

Ben Miller (13:31.028)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (13:37.279)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (13:37.614)
that leads to disease in the future so that we can push off that disease. And that seems like really natural. Obviously, it's better to never develop cancer than it is to develop cancer. And then even if you theoretically can cure it, it's still fucking terrible. But it's actually never been a class of medicine before. It's never been considered that you could develop a drug just to keep somebody healthy or longer.

without them having anything overtly wrong with them in the first place. That's really been the domain of supplements and questionable science and questionable interventions. And so it was a really big challenge of ours in the early days. And actually, the early kill point of loyal was just, could we create a regulatory path for a drug like this?

Ben Miller (14:26.132)
Yeah, yeah. There's so many fun strings to pull on that one because I've heard you say this and so wild how the system isn't designed to encourage building a longevity drug for people. You know, there's all these systemic failures around incentives and regulatory dynamics and the costs. And so do you expand on that for people? Because it's so wild that the

Celine (14:43.041)
Yeah.

Ben Miller (14:54.93)
thing people would want most were not incentivizing getting built.

Celine (15:00.917)
Yeah, so before I worked on dog drugs or human longevity, before I worked on human longevity, was actually like the health economics of preventative medicine in humans. And.

It's very difficult to develop preventative medicines for in humans for reasons that don't actually have to do with the biology. Like, Loyal has not invented any of the science that we're translating and bringing to the clinic and hopefully bringing to market. We have validated it. We've, you know, turned it into a drug and all of these things, right? But, you know, we didn't discover some magical pathway that controls the rate of aging that nobody ever knew about. it's not, wasn't, it's really more of like a translational and a clinical effort.

Ben Miller (15:38.688)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (15:42.464)
And so all of that science could exist in and does exist for humans also. It is an established biological truth. to create a longevity drug...

the logistics and the operations are extremely difficult, right? So if I gave you a drug to extend your lifespan, how do know it's working? How do I know what diseases you would or wouldn't have gotten?

Maybe you don't live any longer, but maybe you would have had some terrible disease and that drug prevented that. Or maybe it didn't work, but then you get hit by a bus. Or also, who's just going to pay for that? What health insurance company is going to pay for that? OK, you're on some preventative medicine to delay your onset of cancer 30 years from now.

But that insurance company isn't benefiting from that financially. It's Medicare or Medicaid or whoever your late life insurance company is. Americans switch insurance companies almost every two years on average.

it's we're in a much more like reactive healthcare system which like is both suboptimal and makes sense from just like a human psychology POV but the interesting thing with dogs is that you don't have that problem right I call each like dog human relationship a micro single-payer health care system because I care about squishy's health today personally but also financially and I care about squishy's health five years from now and ten years from now

Celine (17:21.941)
Right? And it's all cash pay. So there's no other party involved except for me and the veterinarian and the dog. Right? And so I'm willing to invest in something like better dog food, supplementation, eventually loyal to keep my dog healthy longer because...

Ben Miller (17:27.689)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (17:39.912)
I'm incentivized in all of these ways. And the feedback loop is short enough that I also am like, see the delta, right? I see that my dog, I will know in a period of time that my dog is doing better, is not doing better, right? You can see aging in a dog in a way that you don't really see it in humans as overtly. And so.

It is interesting, like I didn't realize this going in, how much of like the drugs that get developed or don't get developed has to do with the logistics and economic incentives almost more than it has to do with science. Although to be clear, the science is very difficult also.

Ben Miller (18:16.393)
Yeah, that's so depressing. But luckily loyal because you have a plan. Yeah, well, you have a plan. You have a plan within the plan.

Celine (18:22.113)
least our dogs aren't gonna have to deal with this, yeah.

I do have a plan within the plan. We have a master plan, in fact. Yeah, so the thesis of the company is like, obviously, first and foremost, we're getting drugs approved for lifespan extension in dogs. I absolutely adore dogs. And if we only extend dog lifespan, like, I'm pretty happy, honestly. And from a financial perspective, it's obviously a fantastic outcome. And the kind of unofficial tagline of the company is save the dogs, save the world.

Ben Miller (18:30.1)
Yes.

Celine (18:55.081)
And the idea is that if we can extend dog lifespan, we can take the biological insights, the team, and candidly, the revenue, from this to fund the development of human longevity drugs. let's say Loyal makes, I don't know, we have hundreds of millions a year of free cash flow in 10 years or five years or whatever from these programs.

Suddenly you're not beholden to what like a biotech investor thinks is a good economic bet or not. You're just beholden to what you want to do, right? What you think is the best like shepherding of that capital. And so we're going to have the opportunity to.

have a team that is world class in lifespan extension and the first in lifespan extension and longevity. We'll have all the context from how to do it in dogs, which dogs are the best model of human aging. So if we can do it in a dog, it's not one to one, but it's pretty correlative. And we're going to have the capital to take those types of moon shots.

And obviously like that loyal master plan is very unique, but that kind of broader idea of do something ambitious and like a smaller subset and then use that to fund the next moonshot and then the next moonshot is how a lot of these deep tech companies are built, right? Tesla is like the classic example of like doing the roadster. The roadster was like small market, high cost that funded then the model S and the model X, you know, much more mass market, but still like a high end car than that funded the model three. And then they're going down from there all the way to like, you know, as accessible as possible. And it's the same thing.

Ben Miller (20:24.427)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Celine (20:27.183)
was loyal, right? Very different company, but the same thing of each criminal step teaches you something and funds the next step.

Ben Miller (20:35.539)
Yeah, I mean, it's so many follow up questions. Let me just go with one I deal with most. So I think a lot of CEOs of public companies would say, actually, it's not that easy, even when you're big and have lots of cash flow, to not do what the investors want. And the public markets might punish you if you're not driving short term yield and short term growth. Like, how do you think about

Celine (20:55.842)
Hmm.

Ben Miller (21:03.753)
I know this is very speculative, it's sort of a, it's a broader challenge for, again, how markets work and how incentives drive outcomes. How do you think about that?

Celine (21:12.449)
Yeah, that's funny. It's actually been we've talked about a lot, like the board level of.

Ben Miller (21:17.769)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (21:19.229)
Should we stay private? we go public? Biotech companies often go public pre-approval. we're obviously well-valued in the private markets, but I think we would actually be valued much more in the public markets. If you just did a discounted cash flow on loyal, the value today is much higher than the valuation of our most recent round. Because it's like, we know we're going to get the knock on wood.

Ben Miller (21:24.203)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (21:45.662)
FDA willing, we have the major keys to get the approval, right? We just need the CMC. So there's a timeline risk. And it's a timeline question. unless you're fucking incompetent, small molecule drugs don't fail on CMC. They fail on safety and efficacy, right? Which are both.

Ben Miller (22:05.736)
Okay. man. My compliance team is going to have a heart attack from this section, but yeah, just why don't you explain the three steps that had to, you have to take to take a drug to, you know, to market.

Celine (22:18.849)
Yeah, so broadly to be able to get a, so a drug cannot be sold for dog or humans unless the FDA independently says that we believe this drug is safe and effective and you're able to manufacture it consistently at scale. And so how you prove that it's and effective varies from human to dog, but at a high level you have to show that it's like.

rigorously safe over time, including at higher doses than you intend to do. We got that safety approval at the end of last year. And that one was actually, I would say, probably the least sexy of the approvals, the most important of the approvals, in my opinion. Because we're giving, if this drug's a fully approved for lifespan extension,

we're giving relatively healthy dogs who don't have anything wrong with them an intervention to keep them theoretically healthy longer. There's almost no tolerance or side effects, right? It's like GLP ones. It's like the flu vaccine. It's like, you know, things like that, right? It needs to be basically as safe as milk.

Ben Miller (23:22.569)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (23:23.679)
for the general population. And so we earned that safety approval with an absolute crap ton of data that makes me extremely confident that we are gonna do no harm, right? The second thing was that, okay, does it work? And I can go into more details on like the regulatory path if it's interesting, but at a high level.

The people tend to think like, because it's a dog, the FDA pathway and FDA regulation is lower. And that's actually not true. Like the standards are extremely high in veterinary FDA, just like in human FDA, but the paths are different. So we basically are able to launch with a reasonable expectation of the drug's gonna do what we say it's gonna do. And then we have to show it definitively works within five years from that conditional approval. And so we've earned that reasonable expectation, which basically just looks at a lot of things, but it looks at

aging in a shorter period of time. So let's think about like, you know, about six months, you can see biological aging in a dog, does the drug impact that? It's a lot more than that, was like thousands of pages of data, but at a high level, and we got that approval last year also. So then the last thing we have to do to be able to bring this drug to market, in addition to running that full lifespan, the extension study, which we're running and is the largest veterinary clinical trial that's ever been run, is we have to get manufacturing approval.

And I like to describe where loyal is right now like the continue to Tesla metaphor is we're in our model three manufacturing year of hell Because it's actually very complicated to manufacture pharmaceuticals again It's all like existential technical risk, but it's extremely extremely Complicated like every pill has to be the exact same if you split it in half There has to be the same amount of drug in the left half and the right half if somebody in Florida keeps it on a shelf it has to look the same as if somebody in Alaska keeps on a

Ben Miller (24:53.748)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (25:11.447)
shelf, you have to quantify exactly what happens if like it gets into a you know a truck and the truck gets really really hot. It's so complicated. It's so unbelievably complicated. But it's all solvable and so that's that's where we are right now.

Ben Miller (25:20.586)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (25:26.93)
Yeah, hold on. wanted for my compliance team to say that future cash flows can be uncertain. You never know what's going to happen. So even though we're super confident, anything can happen. Take risks with returns. It's fine. I just want to make sure, you know, mean, like, whatever. There's so many things. There could be war. There could be. Yeah. Right.

Celine (25:43.533)
sorry, am I not supposed to say certain things? I didn't think about that.

Celine (25:51.832)
We have no idea how much money this drug's gonna make. Like we might be totally wrong. A, we might not execute. We cannot launch this drug unless the FDA gives us their blessing. Point blank period. I cannot sell this drug. Like we have never made a drip of revenue in six years. But also nobody's ever sold a longevity drug. So we don't actually know how much it's gonna make. And I think there's lots of reasons that like we're excited that this is gonna be a pretty, that people are gonna be really excited about this and want this for their dogs.

Ben Miller (26:18.631)
Yeah, exactly, exactly. was very balanced.

had you said something I thought was really interesting. for dog or so for veterinary FDA, you can actually launch the drug with a reasonable expectation of efficacy. And then five years later, after it's been in market for some amount of time, does you get another approval or what happens?

Celine (26:37.792)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (26:46.571)
Yeah, so basically you...

You can launch as this reason like notation, which is still a very high like data bar, but it's importantly, it's not definitive quantitative lifespan extension. So we have not proven definitive lifespan extension with our drug. We've shown what we believe is like health span improvement or quality of life improvement and like various downstream mechanisms that are, we believe are predictive of eventual lifespan extension and clinically relevant, but we haven't shown definitive lifespan extension. haven't shown like definitive, like global lifespan health span extension.

That study is really difficult and very long to run. So it's about 1300 dogs. We're going to follow them for four to eight years. 70 clinical sites across the US also run to very similar standard as a human clinical trial. And so we get conditionally approved, which is functionally the same minus, obviously, to say it's conditionally approved. to be clear that we haven't definitively shown lifespan extension. But most importantly, the FDA has the right

to pull us off market after five years if we don't definitively quantitatively show that yes, we are extending lifespan in the dogs in this clinical trial. And so we have that five year period from that conditional approval to show that.

Usually you start the study after you get the conditional approval where, I don't know, overeager children and started it sooner. In part because we also just wanted, we don't know how long a lifespan study needs to run in dogs and we're pretty sure it's gonna take more than five years. And so we didn't want to have regulatory issues with that. So anyhow, that study will run.

Celine (28:25.737)
Once it reads out, hopefully we show definitively that we're reducing mortality risk in the dogs. And then you convert to a full approval. So basically the full approval means that unless we find out in 20 years that the drug is giving the dog's elbow cancer, it stays on market permanently.

Ben Miller (28:41.641)
Not to get too far off topic, but I know there's talk about trying to reform the FDA process so that people who want to take the risk, they need to save their own lives or there's some like.

Celine (29:01.058)
Yeah.

Ben Miller (29:02.759)
people get some choice and be able to enter into studies where basically innovators can take more risk to try to cause more good? Is this sort of a model, what you were talking about here with how you did it with dogs, or are we talking about something totally different?

Celine (29:26.349)
It is. the one of the big why now is for loyal and why I started loyal was there's a new regulatory pathway that opened up in September of 2019. That was kind of that was called expanded conditional approval and it created this regulatory pathway for a drug to get conditional approval if it's for an unmet medical need or and a clinical trial is like very arduous. Right. The.

This exists, a variation of this exists in humans also.

But generally it's for, and I'm not an expert in human regulatory, but generally it's for diseases that are like imminently terminal, nothing exists to treat them. You know, the reward is higher than the risk because, you know, there's nothing anybody can do for that, that disease. And so something like Lifespan Extension are broadly keeping healthy people healthy longer, would never qualify for that, right? And it's only because of this new regulatory pathway in 2019

that dog longevity drugs qualified. And they did that because, I mean, I don't think they had in mind if people were going to develop longevity drugs. I do not think that was their thing. But they did that because they're like, OK, if we don't have a regular, my assumption is that they're kind of the regulator's hypothesis was that if we don't have a way for it to be reasonably possible economically for a company to develop a drug that's very ambitious.

It's just not gonna happen. It's not like they're gonna do it and spend more money. It's just not gonna happen. And it's totally true, right? Like nobody was going to develop a lifespan extension drug for dogs because nobody was gonna run a seven plus year clinical trial, the largest ever clinical trial, millions and millions and millions of dollars.

Celine (31:09.377)
to then maybe get it approved, maybe not also because drugs are hard and developing medicines is difficult. So they created this path where it became economically reasonable, which meant that I was unable to pitch Loyal in a way that said, hey, this is a drug. It's really hard. Don't get me wrong. It's still going to cost us a lot of money and take us a lot of time. But it's an amount of time that is reasonable from a venture ROI landscape, which was just not true if this conditional approval pathway didn't exist. So actually, think, especially if Loyal succeeds, but even if we fail,

I think it's like such a, this whole regulatory path was such a good example of how regulatory incentive design can facilitate innovation, because it was so causal. Like it's a one-to-one. If this pathway didn't exist, loyal wouldn't exist. October, 2019, I incorporated.

Ben Miller (31:50.621)
That's what I was wondering, yeah. So when did you found loyal again?

And that was after you saw that changed. Yeah. Wow.

Celine (31:59.949)
Yeah, that was like the last thing. Because I'd been working on the science. I wasn't trying to start a company, but I'd been working on the biology on the human side and then the dog side. I kind of thought it was an interesting idea. But this was the last piece that made it also a feasible business.

Ben Miller (32:15.88)
Yeah, I want to talk about your founding story because it's so fun. It's so good. It's like out of a storybook. But I want to do a different thing first. So I have this thing I like to do when I'm trying to reason through a complex world with lot of uncertainty is scenario planning.

Celine (32:20.525)
It is good, isn't it?

Ben Miller (32:35.496)
I do it a lot and there's this whole structured way to do scenario planning from this guy named Peter Schwartz who wrote this book called The Art of the Long View and he's famous because, well, probably not famous anymore, he used to be famous because it was a long time ago, because for doing these structured planning sessions with big companies and he did one with Shell in the 80s.

Celine (32:43.383)
Hmm.

Ben Miller (33:02.78)
And Shell then did the scenario planning, what if the Soviet Union fell? What if the Soviet Union collapsed? And nobody thought it was gonna happen. The CIA didn't think it was gonna happen. The US military, no one in the world thought it was gonna happen. But Shell did the scenario planning and they saw, they're like, man, if the Soviet Union collapsed, it would have these massive effects on the oil industry. And so as a result, they actually ended up planning for that contingency.

Celine (33:12.449)
Huh.

Celine (33:26.946)
Huh.

Ben Miller (33:32.698)
And then when it collapsed, Shell ended up making tens of billions of dollars because they were ready. They were the only one ready in the world. So it's a really fun, and I think super useful way to think about the many paths of the future.

Celine (33:38.593)
Huh.

Celine (33:49.355)
Huh, I just bought it. I'm excited, I never heard of it.

Ben Miller (33:50.985)
Okay, it's really good. actually, yeah, you know, I can actually just like, you know, name drop here, like I talked about this for a while. And one point, like Peter Schwartz tweeted at me saying, like, Hey, I heard you talking about my book. I replied like, Yeah, I'd love to connect. And then he just ghosted me.

Celine (34:03.766)
That's so cool!

Celine (34:08.198)
R.I.P. R.I.P. At least he kind of maybe knows who you are. That's cool.

Ben Miller (34:14.32)
Yeah, yeah, mean, he's got to be older than me by some good measure. I don't think so. But OK, anyways, no, no, no, let's move on. Yes, that's true. That's true. You need to get that thing FDA approved so I can give it to my dog.

Celine (34:19.446)
Yeah, but you're pretty young, Beth. Again, it's not saying that much.

How old are you? We're not doing that? We're not doing that? Okay, fine. I'm the longevity founder. Of course, I'm gonna ask how old you are.

Celine (34:37.289)
Yeah, you're gonna come back next time have a fully black beard not a single gray hair

Ben Miller (34:41.924)
yeah, God, I'm gonna be so ripped. Okay, so the structure scenario planning has this approach. So you have three things you do to kind of prepare your mind. One is a good scenario, but the good scenario is not a good scenario. It's actually almost always a linear extrapolation of the present into the future.

which is normally how people think, and probably what, you you guys have a business plan and you are executing against it, and you know, you don't expect it to go perfectly well, but you know, it's more or less like things go well according, you know, and you can extrapolate that out and you say, okay, this is like, has good outcomes. So that's scenario one, and it's normally where people live in their mind.

Celine (35:11.404)
Mmm, yeah, that's fair.

Celine (35:17.184)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (35:35.463)
And then scenario two is easy, but it's normally a bad scenario. Something bad happens. And then scenario three, this is the hard one. This is something that no one thought would happen happens. And that's the part where people just don't spend enough time thinking about the unexpected. And it's also the fun part. And so you sort of.

Celine (35:55.061)
Yeah. Yeah. It's like, could the world be? Yeah.

Ben Miller (36:01.03)
Yeah, like, okay, this is like, you know, and so I could throw some like, I could sort of stimulate your thinking on that one, like, okay, you know, anthropic launches, mythos, and then something else, and then something else. And now you're working with an AI and longevity and then the FD, I mean, there's you know, you could get a little out there, but I think it's like, the point of it is, know, Soviet Union can fall, you know, things can happen no one expects. And they usually do.

Celine (36:26.208)
Yep.

Ben Miller (36:27.848)
And that's where people are just bad because they're just obsessed with a linear extrapolation on the present into the future. Recency bias, whatever you want to call it. And so that's the scenario planning exercise. every time we have like, I I've been through COVID, I've been through like all those bad and some good scenarios and like, and you know, I always find if you're prepared, you perform.

Celine (36:33.312)
Interesting.

Celine (36:56.236)
Yeah, I really like that. I'm trying to think like, I struggle with this so much because I do think drug development is, and maybe this is linear extrapolation to your point, so think I'm gonna struggle to be eloquent here, but there's been so many times in drug development where like things, the world has changed rapidly and then it doesn't really change that much in.

in the biotech drug world, like software. Like obviously software is like we use Zoom, like we have like Gantt planning shit, right? But it hasn't like really fundamentally changed how drug development works, right? Like the industry is very slow, but it's also slow for good reasons, right? Like people are like, like AI is gonna change like.

Ben Miller (37:40.057)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Celine (37:45.111)
drug discovery and I'm like, I'm not really convinced. mean, it will eventually definitively it will eventually, but like all the like open AI like, it's gonna cure cancer in 10 years. It's like, I don't think we, don't understand cancer well enough, right? Like there's actually like really basic shit that we need to do in terms of like quantifying and understanding disease before an AI can do that. And AI is not gonna be able to do that because it.

Ben Miller (37:48.039)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (38:06.119)
Doesn't have the data sets, right? It just, yeah.

Celine (38:07.1)
Like how, right? You have to get, it doesn't have the data sets, right? It's not like Reddit where you can like parse it till the end of time and like learn English, right? And learn like human behavior and communication styles. Like that doesn't exist for biology. It's like so exponentially complex. It's actually like very mind bending when you think about like how many variables go into a certain drug working or not working for an individual patient.

Ben Miller (38:24.569)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Celine (38:37.598)
So we'll see how the world changes, it's something I've struggled with thinking about how to like prep loyal for it.

Ben Miller (38:37.83)
Yeah.

Ben Miller (38:44.879)
Let me see if I can like be a Sherpa here a little bit. like, so, so on the good scenario, walk through one, three and five years, like, maybe according to plan, you know, within some measure of, of obviously of anything that happened, like, okay, a from now, sometime in 2027 is your, products likely out to market just launching.

Celine (39:11.936)
Yeah, just launching, yeah.

Ben Miller (39:14.727)
And then three years later, millions of dogs around the country are taking it, living longer. You're like motherhood apple pie. You're like on the cover. Don't go down the cover of Fortune. That's the only thing that you don't want that. Yeah, that's the one that jinxes you. Forbes? can't remember. May was Forbes. One of the two. You gotta make sure. Oh, f***.

Celine (39:27.318)
Yeah

Celine (39:30.824)
Is Fortune that like bad one? Is that like where you get jinxed? I thought Forbes jinxes you. I was already on the Forbes cover.

Well, I I was on Forbes so we're fucked It was a horrific photo too I was so annoyed I was like come on guys like if people are gonna quote this photo Like I'd rather not be like a horrible one. Wait, let me look hot in my downfall

Ben Miller (39:44.731)
Damn it.

Ben Miller (39:53.736)
man, damn it. Oh yeah, totally, that's key. Uh-huh, oh okay. actually, well anyways, okay so, and then five years from now, if you have lots of cash flow and the company's very successful and it's widespread and the brand's really strong, you're already working on human, you want to be, you hope to be already working on human longevity.

Celine (39:57.837)
I know, I tried to get them to do it with me and my dog and they wouldn't do it.

Celine (40:19.916)
I think sooner than five years, but yeah, I mean really the only rate limiter to us and human laundry is gonna take way longer for obvious reasons, way harder, but much more expensive. But the biggest rate limiter honestly is just like balancing bandwidth. Like we're a really small team for the amount of programs and how close we are to market.

Ben Miller (40:26.055)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (40:37.66)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and you're going to get, you have to build an entire go-to-market business that's separate from the technology and the drug development.

Celine (40:47.996)
Exactly. you know, we're doing owned commercialization and own distribution. don't like you don't mean, GLP ones aside, you don't do that in pharma. And we're doing it in a very like cash minimizing way. Right. Like we're so it's it's difficult. We have a lot we have lot of to figure out next year. Then I'm excited.

Ben Miller (40:56.199)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (41:07.143)
Yeah, yeah, you're up to it. Okay, so let's do a bad scenario because I'm regulated, so I always have to, every time I say anything good, I always have to say something bad. That's like part of the magic of, that's just how you manage regulations. That's true, that's true. Okay, so bad, what's an example of something bad that could happen?

Celine (41:16.906)
Yeah. Otherwise the universe kicks you into nuts. Yeah.

Celine (41:27.978)
random adverse event in the STAY study that ends up being causal to the drug.

Ben Miller (41:33.477)
Yeah, that would be horrible.

Celine (41:34.9)
Yeah, that would be horrific.

Sorry, mean to stress you out. Sorry. We find out that there's some rare side effect of the drug that's happening. And we only found it after years of the dogs being on the drug and in our big clinical trial. And we end up having to pause or pull the drug.

Ben Miller (41:39.175)
Okay, no, no, say that, now say that in English.

Ben Miller (42:03.29)
Yeah, there's no way to modify the drug or something. yeah, that would be sucky because it's, because you, I mean, we'll get there, but it's not just about the company. You're trying to establish a category and even a super category. You're trying to, it's about dogs. Yeah. People, longevity, health. mean, it's, stakes are big.

Celine (42:20.992)
To trust.

Celine (42:26.91)
Stakes are big. mean, dogs are like people's children, right? In some ways, people are more willing to take risks in themselves than they are with their children and with their dogs. And so I never want to be responsible for something being in people's dogs that ends up hurting them, right? That'd be horrific.

Ben Miller (42:31.237)
Yeah.

Ben Miller (42:43.31)
Yeah. Yeah, no, for sure. So let me do unexpected. So I had an unexpected one and let me just give you an example of one that would be like, maybe this is not good, but this is like, I think the unexpected here actually is sort of asymmetrically good. That's what I'm hoping, I think, and this is my scenario. My scenario is...

You're working on like your next set of drugs for people and it turns out all these people have been taking it off, the people have been taking your dog drug off label, sort of illegally or whatever the right term is. And you didn't know that, nobody knows that. And it turns out that it has some sort of massive positive effect and like, or there's some massive unlocking of learning from it, like by accident, like a lot of times, like the whole, I don't know if this is true, but when Louis Brestor discovered

Celine (43:18.06)
you

Celine (43:33.43)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (43:37.881)
it was like an accident, like some sort of accident around this. then like that like speeds the path towards longevity drugs because it's like, it somehow like it shows the market and the world and the regulator something that would have been really hard and slow to do the normal way.

Celine (43:40.16)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (44:02.828)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (44:03.716)
I don't know if that's a good or bad scenario, but I could see that being unexpected.

Celine (44:10.092)
I think another unexpected could just be like massive regulatory change. like how, like so much of how we develop a drug is like human enforced and like human ethical and like societal norms of like what is considered the bar, what risks are not, like right now it's like very risk off. Like the origins of FDA are, it's a public health organization, right? It's risk little as possible first.

Ben Miller (44:24.55)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (44:38.54)
then benefit. And I do think we're seeing a little bit of a cultural shift. We'll see if it durates or not. I don't know if it is just like a MAGA thing or if this is like actually like the way society is thinking about medicine writ large is changing. But I think we are seeing a change in like the risk reward tolerances that people are willing to take. And therefore like

mean, there's been talk of like changing like the clinical trial norms, how much you have to prove before you do first in human dosing. I mean, honestly, even if we just brought it to the norms that we have in dogs, which to be clear is still very high, still very ethical, you know, that would massively accelerate human drug development. And that would change a lot of the regulatory capture that we have.

Ben Miller (45:21.734)
That's like, I...

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I think AI will do. I think it's a little... Yeah, mean, obviously anything can happen.

Celine (45:28.012)
Maybe. I think it's going to increase the top of the funnel a ton. But I don't know how much it's going to change.

the what actually goes into clinical development. Like I think we'll have like better drugs potentially. Or like it'll be fast. Like if we know that, like there's so many targets that we know if we hit them, good things happen, right? So I think we'll go faster from like, okay, we know we want to drug this target, but it's really hard to drug to like, okay, we have a drug for this target. Like that's gonna be less of an artisanal process. That'll definitely accelerate drug development. But like running a clinical trial and like,

Ben Miller (45:52.954)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Celine (46:08.757)
selecting right patients and having high quality data from that and all these things. I think software and AI, we're using AI assisted tools in-house to increase the operational probability of success of a study, which it is actually shocking how many studies fail from ops. It's my biggest fear for this study is the operational failure. It's not the biological failure at this point. So I think AI will have a huge impact on that.

I don't think it's gonna necessarily super change how we run a study though in the end. Unless the FDA changes.

Ben Miller (46:40.964)
Yeah, what I meant, I meant that. I meant that think AI is gonna change government, bureaucracy, just how people think about decision-making, even risk. Like just think, I'm optimistic that...

the best of world happens where you get, people get better at making decisions, they're not that good at making decisions, sometimes you're good at making decisions in a narrow sense about your thing, and then you're bad at things away from what you're focused on. So I think that I could, I believe that AI will actually improve generally how government functions. And so, and.

Celine (47:18.209)
Yeah.

That'd be great. I don't know if I'm as optimistic, but it'd be great. Yeah.

Ben Miller (47:23.462)
It's a low bar. It's a low bar. So, okay. Wait, before I, I don't want to run out time before I ask you this question. I want to ask you briefly about your founding story, but just, you know, you chose to, you had a lot of people who were interested in investing in, in Loyals last round. Loyal, I think Loyals is amazing. think you as a founder, I mean, it's amazing.

If you'll know your founding story, which hopefully they'll get to, it's awesome. You're quintessential entrepreneur. So why did you let Fundrise Innovation Fund into the round? Is there any benefit to having our 2 million investors as potential distribution channel? How did you think about that?

Celine (48:14.464)
Yeah, well, the part that was just you, Ben. Like, I really like you, and you're so genuinely excited about Loyal in a way that like...

Ben Miller (48:17.608)
yeah.

Celine (48:24.95)
Like, it's actually like, I think loyal is in five years or three years or whatever, be seen as like an overnight success. But I think like in this like pre overnight success phase, there's a lot, there's like a strong and mighty subset of people like you who are like, this is like so obviously amazing. And like, this is so obviously like where the world is going and like so cool. There was a large subset of VCs mostly who just like,

don't care. And like as a founder, it means so much when you meet people who care on an order of magnitude similar to how much I care. Right. I actually felt this most strongly in this round because, it was a good round and went quickly, blah, blah. But the vast majority of people were like basically like the vibe was this is cool, but AI. Like I'm not going to spend it like a single neuron on anything but AI because that is where

money is and that is where my partners care and I want like some of that DAG so I'm gonna go get that DAG right and fair and I'm like what the fuck like you know like this is you know the future is so much bigger and like the things that needed to be built are so much bigger and so anyhow you were never that way so that was a big part of it. I would say as far as like bringing in

The people, was actually something I wanted to do for a while and I was trying to figure out the right way to do it because the other group that really understands loyal, maybe this is just like a damnation on VCs, is the general public. Like we were talking earlier about how we've been going like super viral yesterday. I did literally nothing. Like we don't prompt these things when they occur. It just like somebody writes something and then people are like, my God, and they start sending photos at our dogs and everybody retweets it because it was cute dogs and it was a dude, right? It goes explosive. The average American, they have just human, I would say.

Ben Miller (50:14.533)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

You

Celine (50:21.909)
cares and is so obsessed with what we're doing and gets it. And I've always wanted to figure out a way to get them involved. In fact, it's like one of the top email categories I get. One is like get my dog in a trial. Two is give my dog the drug. Three is how can I invest? And so like I haven't been able and we haven't been able to like, you know, do like a community round yet or anything like that. But like what I learned about fundraise, I was like, this is perfect.

Ben Miller (50:25.349)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (50:49.517)
Right, I want, I don't know if and when we're gonna go public as like a IPO organization for all the things we were talking about earlier. And I think it's like fundamentally unfair that like a portion of the population that like gets into so into it doesn't have access to it. And it's only like the VC class that has access to it. So I was really excited to be able to do that and like bring people in. And of course I'm sure there's a lot of dog lovers and cat lovers in y'all's ranks.

Ben Miller (51:18.053)
Yeah. I mean, when you're ready to like get the megaphone, like I feel like our investor base will amplify you. Like it's nobody's business. I mean, they're just going to be so excited to tell everybody, you know, spread the word, buy it. mean, so I can't, I, I get it. You don't, don't, you're in San Francisco. And so normal people can't understand how venture capital industry players would normally work.

Celine (51:36.705)
Yeah.

Ben Miller (51:47.366)
Because it's so unintuitive that they wouldn't see what you're doing and just absolutely fall all over themselves. Like lately I've been like, I want to, I want to invest as much as we can in loyal. Like I, we sit around and we're like, okay, we can invest in like, you know, whatever. There's a few AI companies that are stunningly successful.

And we want to invest as much as you can in them. And then after that, like, is there any software company left standing after AI? Like, I don't know. And people will ask me like, what would you do? And I'm like, loyal. So loyal is like kind of company that is AI resistant, AI amplified.

Celine (52:17.773)
I don't know, honestly. I don't know.

Celine (52:25.419)
Yeah.

Celine (52:29.047)
We're so air, yeah, mean AI's not gonna be able to do this. Maybe one day, but not today, and not tomorrow. Also, so funny, I literally just got an email from Fortune. Their ears were burning.

Ben Miller (52:34.317)
Yeah, no.

No, it's...

Oh, run. I love fortune. I'm not trying to be knock on them, but it's a. Can't play. OK, OK, we're running out of time. Do you have another minute? OK, OK.

Celine (52:48.269)
I'll tell them no cover. No, I think they saw all the stuff yesterday and now they like want a bite of the pie. I can go, let me check my calendar quickly, but I think I can go a bit longer. Especially since I was, we lost like 10 minutes. Yeah, I can go for like another 10 or so.

Ben Miller (53:10.181)
Okay, okay, let me just get your founding story, because I just love, okay, let me just give you a few points I love for you to hit. I love that you were in the bottom 10 % of your, is it high school class? Yeah, bottom 10 % of high school class. I think you were fired multiple times from the longevity fund, from the fund. Yeah, like.

Celine (53:14.22)
Yes.

Celine (53:21.921)
Yeah.

Celine (53:30.957)
Phone to find, yeah, I was. But I was hired more times than I was fired. Crucially.

Ben Miller (53:35.453)
Yeah, you dropped out of your PhD program six months before finishing. I mean, you're just like out of a movie. It's the whatever that movie they made with Justin Timberlake, The Social Network. They're going to make a movie about you because it's so colorful.

Celine (53:42.689)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (53:49.057)
Yeah.

Celine (53:55.202)
There may or may not be a documentary coming out this summer. It's not just about me, but I am a big part of it.

Ben Miller (53:59.543)
Okay, okay, okay. So can you just tell your journey here?

Celine (54:05.907)
Yeah, so I'll give the highlight highlight reel.

So I grew up in Austin, Texas. I'm first generation American. First American in my family. My dad's German. My mom's Moroccan. They both immigrated to the US. And like very much not in this world. Like my mom's a teacher. My dad's in contracting. I didn't know anything about anything. But they instituted me with like a love of science and a love of animals. So we had like 15 cats, like four dogs. We like would rescue wild animals all the time and like rehab them. I've been vegetarian my entire life. Actually lot of people don't realize.

like how much of an animal person I am. Like people think I'm just like some like human longevity hack and like it kind of is but I actually like animals more than I like people. It's like the sneaky side story. So anyhow yeah it was a total like truant in high school. Literally skipped class every week. Like the sheriff came to my house one time because I wasn't showing up well enough. I was in the bottom 10 % of my class. I know right.

Ben Miller (54:42.66)
Mmm.

Ben Miller (55:01.785)
Ha ha ha!

You

Celine (55:06.141)
I could not get into college for any normal degree because my GPA was so shit, but I had basically perfect test scores. And so I ended up applying to the art school at UT Austin and getting a full ride for art. And then was like, fuck that, I don't wanna do art. I'm okay, but I'm not a prodigal art.

Ben Miller (55:26.85)
Yeah.

Celine (55:28.685)
person in any way, shape, form. And so I switched to neuroscience, which, fun fact, you're actually not allowed to do that anymore. You can't switch from the art school to neuroscience because, yeah, I never would have gotten into neuroscience, and they never would have given me a scholarship. And then, yeah, I kind of did this random walk of basically realizing that I wanted to work on

the lack of free will that we have as humans. And my thought at the time was that what drives our lack of free will, it's our bodies, it's disease, right? You can be living your life and then God forbid one day you get a brain cancer diagnosis and whatever you had planned for your life is done. And for so many of these diseases, you're, there's nothing anybody can actually do and just the realization that the adults in the room were actually like...

like unable to be like, were powerless against like these rogue cells just like really fucked me up. So anyhow, did this, I was like, oh, I'm be like a scientist, I'm gonna be a nurse, I'm gonna be a physician's assistant, I'm gonna be a doctor, right? I was just kind of like learning more about the world and how I was gonna work on this problem. I was gonna do med school, decided on to do med school last minute because I got offered to go to Oxford. Went to Oxford, was like, oh, I made it, like, know, kid who grew up with nothing, like now I'm at Oxford, PhD student.

Ben Miller (56:31.778)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Celine (56:47.129)
I had a terrible time at Oxford for downer reasons that I'm happy to get into that are interesting. And while I was there, I got really interested and had learned about venture capital and investors. I didn't know anything about investors. I didn't even know about investing in the stock market. And that there's these crazy people who would put money into scientific ideas because they thought that maybe one day they could be a new medicine for people. And I was like, wow, that's so cool. If you're an investor, you can...

Ben Miller (57:02.692)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (57:15.149)
with one unit of human energy facilitate, you know, in order of magnitude, more shots on goal for trying to help people, right? And trying to like reduce this like frailty that we have to disease, right? So I cold emailed this woman named Laura Deming who started the longevity fund. She like flew me out or I flew myself out, I should say to San Francisco. She gave me a drop off for the end of two weeks and was like, drop out of Oxford, join longevity fund.

Ben Miller (57:23.491)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (57:43.958)
I sobbed the entire flight back to Oxford and then kind of dropped out, but I kind of didn't. I just flew back and forth for two years. So was working for Laura and doing Oxford. And I had the idea for Loyal while I was at Longevity Fund. In the meantime, Laura was firing me multiple times and rehiring me, then firing me, then rehiring me. Again, long story, but like basically I didn't understand the world and had to learn the world. And Loyal happened because...

she had worked on this biology of worm aging and worm longevity, which turned out to be very relevant to big dog aging and big dog longevity. And so I just thought it was like funny. I was like, like there's this biological mechanism that, you know, can extend dog lifespan. Like, ha ha, I know how to extend a dog's lifespan. Like I'm gonna extend your dog's lifespan. And I would like awkwardly and autistically like make this joke to people. And I was at like a camping trip with a bunch of founders and VCs.

very SF and I was like joking about this and some VC there heard about it then told another VC who then ran into another VC at YC demo day I never went to YC but they were like at YC demo day YC will always be a part of the loyal story which is hilarious even though I got rejected like three times because it was like hey I'm at this girl working on dog longevity and he was like my god I have to meet this person

Ben Miller (58:41.71)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (59:04.661)
And long story short, they convinced me over like a six month period that like this was not only like an interesting scientific idea, but like actually a fantastic company and that I was the right person to build it. And I like it was founder market fit to like the nth degree. I never saw myself as founder. I never saw myself as a CEO. I thought my like life path was to facilitate, you know, 99th percentile people like Laura. But I thought this was such a overtly correct idea. And

I just, I don't know, I kind of felt like it was like predestined to be right and succeed. It just felt, don't know how to explain it. I just like knew it was right and I just knew it had to happen and I knew nobody else was gonna do it. And I knew I was uniquely suited to be like at the top, like one of the top founders for this type of company. Not for anything to be clear, but for this specific company, felt like I was like the basically is gonna do it again. Because of the longevity and the animal love and the arts and the consumer and all of that. And so I started it.

Ben Miller (59:38.66)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (01:00:01.173)
And that was about six years ago, and it's been like a long, hard fucking journey, but it's also been amazing. And I've never regretted it. Like, I want to do this for rest of my life.

Ben Miller (01:00:09.547)
I want you to too.

Celine (01:00:11.253)
I better, dude, if I don't have loyal, I don't know who I'm gonna be. It's so interwoven into who I am as a human. And it really is my life story in a company in many ways.

Ben Miller (01:00:14.273)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben Miller (01:00:23.587)
Yeah. Yeah. And you're young. mean, I just think over the next 10 years, like, Oh my God, can't even imagine what you're going to do next as part of the oil, hopefully. Um, so.

Celine (01:00:26.519)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (01:00:35.533)
It will. The only reason I would ever sell this company or anything like that would be because that's the only way to guarantee the drug makes it to patients and it's for whatever reason not going to make it in any other way. But this isn't an interim company to me. This isn't a stepping stone to doing what I really want to do. This is what I really want to do. And six years in, I don't have a better idea. If Loyal Disappear tomorrow, I would just restart.

Ben Miller (01:00:44.397)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (01:00:50.495)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Miller (01:01:01.446)
Mm-hmm.

Celine (01:01:01.643)
because it's like, I still think this is the best and right strategy to develop longevity drugs. I will hit you up and that valuation will be a lot more accessible. So maybe you guys should hope for it. No way, no.

Ben Miller (01:01:06.531)
And you better call me. No way. No way. We'll just, we'll, we'll just do the next round. mean, I just, I just think what you're doing is so fabulous. You're going to keep going. want to be, whatever little part we can to keep supporting you. Um, yeah, I want to bridge this gap between the public and private innovators. And, and, um, so anyways, it's been awesome. You're just so inspiring. I really appreciate it.

Celine (01:01:16.631)
Deal.

Celine (01:01:31.053)
Yeah.

Celine (01:01:36.193)
Thank you. Squishy is much better behaved now too. Now she's done pooping on the floor. She's like, that was hard work.

Ben Miller (01:01:40.131)
That was hard work pooping all over your floor. Yeah, exhausting. Well, onward.

Celine (01:01:46.775)
Yeah, diarrhea everywhere. Squish.

Celine (01:01:55.842)
Onward indeed.