Iosif Gershteyn; CEO of ImmuVia, a BioTech Company Focusing on Hard-To-Treat Cancers

About this episode

Vance interviews Iosif Gershteyn, CEO/co-founder of ImmuVia (a biotech developing bispecific antibody cancer therapies that trigger cancer cells' own apoptosis pathway), in a deliberately wide-ranging conversation Vance frames upfront as unusually deliberate and pause-filled. Iosif's background: born in the Soviet Union (his physicist father imprisoned for organizing protests, freed via hunger strike), immigrated to Boston at age three, grew up as a "third culture kid" absorbing both Russian literary tradition and American pop culture, studied econ/psych/finance at Brandeis, became disillusioned with neoclassical economics' circular axioms (incentives, utility maximization), studied theater direction in Moscow (learning embodied, non-linear craft — "take up as much space as you can" with no logical answer), and fell deeply into Rene Girard's mimetic theory, which plunged him into "disillusionment, detachment, and dysthymia" before he and Vance work through Girard's scapegoat mechanism, its Christian subversion/perversion into modern victim-culture, and Vance's own mob-violence experience in Kenya. The conversation moves into ImmuVia's science (in detail: apoptosis-triggering bispecific antibodies vs. small-molecule chemo vs. ADCs vs. CAR-T), his specific 18-month-to-clinical-trials / 6-to-8-year-to-market timeline, his view that Alzheimer's/dementia will be the "dragon of the 22nd century" after cancer, and closes with meditations on consciousness (his one experience of general anesthesia as true non-experience), self-awareness as potentially incompatible with peak performance (via David Foster Wallace on tennis prodigy Tracy Austin, the bodybuilding memoir "Muscle," and Zorba the Greek), and cross-cultural framing of money/relationships (Western strict separation of "business" and "personal" vs. more fluid Eastern framings).

Key moments

• ~2%: Cold open distinguishing "Soviet Russia" from modern Russia as different countries/cultures, not just different eras.
• ~10%: Father's imprisonment and hunger-strike release for anti-Soviet protest organizing.
• ~26-28%: Deconstruction of neoclassical economics as circular ("an incentive is something that gets you to do something") and radically reductive once you strip away all but money/time as "resource allocation."
• ~40-46%: Full Girardian mimetic-desire/scapegoat framework, including Vance's own account of witnessing mob violence in Kenya and how Girard explained it retroactively, plus the Christianity-subverted-into-victim-culture argument.
• ~53%: The ImmuVia science explainer — small molecules vs. biologics/ADCs vs. CAR-T vs. their apoptosis-triggering bispecific antibody approach.
• ~59-60%: Explicit timeline prediction — 18 months to clinical trials (funding permitting), 3 years for phase 1/2, another 2 years regulatory, "so let's say six to eight years until it can come onto the market."
• ~63%: "The dragon of the 21st century is cancer, but the dragon of the 22nd century is dementia and Alzheimer's."
• ~68-70%: Theater school "take up as much space" exercise and the three-minute eye-contact perception exercise (spending three minutes finding someone hideous, then three minutes finding them beautiful) as a lesson in constructed perception.
• ~78%: Mike Tyson tangent — Iosif reframes Tyson's self-attribution of likability to drugs as a misattribution; it's his transformed way-of-being that's likable, not the substances themselves.

Notable quotes

“Instead of a drug part that kills the cancer cell, we turn on the suicide pathway of the cell... we found a way to turn on that mechanism, so we target the cancer cells and then we turn on their natural death system.”

“That resentment ultimately leads to such a large amount of envy and repressed anger that it needs an outlet and therefore a scapegoat is found. And that scapegoat is usually killed either physically or symbolically.”

“You look into the eyes of the person for about three minutes... how ugly and stupid they are. By the end of the three minutes they will become the most hideous, dead-eyed, off-putting person in the world. Then you spend three minutes seeing how this is the most wonderful, beautiful, caring, kind real person you've ever seen.”