Season 4 · Episode 2
Anjali
Roots, Resilience, and the Second Life After Leukemia
Meet Anjali, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at 78Health, a leukemia survivor, a polymath, and someone whose story found me through one of the more unlikely routes: a voice on Air Chat, a mixtape I made from it without asking, and Naval Ravikant somewhere in the middle of it. In this episode, Anjali traces her path from a first-generation immigrant childhood in the Bay Area, through more than two decades in tech, to a 2019 leukemia diagnosis that put her in the hospital for 80% of that year, reshaping how she thinks about a few things that came after. We get into her roots, her parents, the books that keep her grounded, the near-death experiences she describes as a soft light lullaby, and the company she's now building with her cofounders to fix the gaps in care she lived through. Expect honest reflections on faith, fear, the things people get wrong when someone they love is sick, and what it actually means to feel unafraid.
Core Ideas
- Roots are not where you were born, they're what you carry. Anjali says it's like being a moving tree.
- Why "why not me?" is a more useful question than "why me?" when life turns upside down.
- The single most important thing you can do for someone who is sick, and the one thing you should stop saying to them.
- How a single thread of purpose can pull you through 10 months of chemo when nothing else can.
- Reading as a mood, not a task, and why no book has to be finished.
- Building a healthtech company in a market where Amazon, Google, and OpenAI have just arrived, and what differentiates 78Health.
- The redefinition of health after illness: stop punishing your body for how someone makes you feel.
- Why the most essential skill nobody calls a skill is simply liking other people for no reason other than that they made it here too. Anjali says making an effort to see the best in others is a superpower.
Resources & References
- Connect: X
- Mixtapes with Anjali: an earlier track that sparked this conversation, and Dastaan, the latest one we recorded as an outcome of it. Both also on the music page.
- Company: 78Health, 78Health on LinkedIn, Primary on Apple Store, Primary on Google Play, Email: info@78health.com
- People: Naval Ravikant, James Pierce (Airchat), Swami Vivekananda, David Deutsch, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, Hermann Hesse, Paulo Coelho, Rumi, Genghis Khan, Brian Johnson (Blueprint), Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi, The Eagles, Neil Diamond, George Strait
- Places: Himachal Pradesh (India), San Francisco Bay Area (California), Chicago (USA), Minnesota (USA), Nashville (Tennessee)
- Books: The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, The 40 Rules of Love by Elif Shafak, The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin, Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
- Other References: Advaita Vedanta, Air Chat, Clubhouse, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), UCSF Medical Center, Fermi Paradox, Agentic AI, Primary app by 78Health, Petrichor (the word for the smell of wet earth)
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