My latest interview another guest who contains multitudes—biotech investor/musician/web surfer extraordinaire, D.A. Wallach. Full description included , but check out some of my favorite quotes below for a taste of the episode! I hope you enjoy.
Listen 🎧🎼: Dialectic Ep. 15: D.A. Wallach - Serendipity & Systems
D.A. Wallach (Website, X, Substack, Spotify) is an investor, musician, writer, and polymath. Today he co-runs Time BioVentures, backing frontier life-science and healthcare startups. Before that, he was an investor in in SpaceX, Spotify, Emulate, Beam Therapeutics, and Ripple, among others, and toured the globe as half of Chester French. He also released music as a solo artist and was Spotify’s first Artist-in-Residence.
Our conversation moves from engineered serendipity—the art of a well-aimed cold email & surfing the web—to complexity science, the Santa Fe Institute, and what better systems might look like. We dive into markets and medicine: investing with a creative mindset; timing in biotech including CRISPR and GLP-1s; and the tension between free-market innovation and healthcare as a human right. D.A. unpacks how incentives shape everything from venture bubbles to hospital billing and how LLMs might move us closer to a universal standard of care.
In the back half we talk creativity, beauty, art, and performance. We discuss whether AI makes us lazy or amplifies originality, DA's many lives across art, tech, and business, and end on his plea for artists to reclaim their throne of "cool". I hope you're inspired by D.A's combination of curiosity and depth and are reminded that you don't have to stay in one lane, regardless of how impressive it might be.
Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
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Quote Highlights:
Serendipity via web surfing:
“And I really don't like conferences. I, I'm very uncomfortable at conferences. And the internet, though, is like the biggest conference ever. You know? Like, everyone is on it, and you can go and find, yeah, you can go find out what Jackson is into or... You know, I mean, increasingly as people have been public, you see what they post. You see what they're thinking. So, at least to me, there's, there's such a great opportunity that affords you to only connect with the people who you already know you're curious about. If you're just totally open-ended and you go, ‘Okay, I have the internet at my fingertips. I'm just gonna go trawl the internet for interesting people, interesting stuff,’ I mean, that's still kinda my favorite activity in a way.”
Capitalism vs socialism tension in healthcare thinking:
“I think the socialist part of it is just a question of who pays for healthcare. And so my strong commitment there is that, let's all insure each other. When we're born, we have no idea how sick or healthy we're gonna be throughout our lives. One thing that we do know is we're all born effectively disabled and dependent, and most of us in the later years of our life are disabled and dependent. And so... And, and no one gets out alive. So, I think it's wise and ethical decision for us to socialize the costs of taking care of each other.”
How LLMs may improve patient agency and care in medicine:
“ But the LLMs are increasingly, you know, outperforming real physicians in not only medical knowledge provision, but also in bedside manner. And so we are without exaggeration, truly in the early innings of the era of AI doctors free, high quality medical knowledge for every person on earth. This is, I think, without question, you know, maybe the biggest thing that's ever happened in medicine from the time that it started.”
Against earliness in biotech:
“As an investor in new drugs, your goal is to mitigate as many of the risks as possible and to kind of isolate what's the bet you're making. Got it. You know, the more that the bet you're making can be isolated to one, it's narrow question the better, because then you just need to be right or wrong about that.”
Elon on great VCs:
“ Elon's not talking about his investors very much. He's not, and by the way, when I was starting my firm, he and I had dinner and I said, I said, look, I wanna start a firm. Tell me from all of your great experience, like with investors, whatever, like, what, what do you need from investors? What makes a great investor? And he was like, money. I mean, he was like, not being—I forget exactly what he said—but he was like, not being annoying.”
David Krakauer on natural intelligence
“David Krakauer, who runs the Santa Fe Institute always makes this point that complexity science can sort of be thought of as the exploration of designed systems. And so evolution can be thought of as a design process. Now that doesn't necessarily demand that there be a designer.”
On AI music and what its like to Herbie Hancock on a Piano
“Someone like Herbie Hancock can basically say anything in music. He has so many tools in his toolkit. I think there's that spectrum among creators, which is basically, how vast are your powers? And the point I'm making is that
having Suno to, you know, be able to generate songs for you is really cool, but it, it's giving you what feel like a lot of powers, but for you to really, for you to do what Herbie Hancock does, you would need to program Suno.”
Fame
“ In the past, people used to get famous and and they couldn't undo it. And now everyone is competing for attention. So intensely that anyone who's famous you can be almost certain, really wants to be famous. Because it requires so much work to be famous today. And to stay famous, you, you have to fight for mind share relentlessly.”
The decline of artists’ culture cachet
“ Now I, I almost find myself more favoring the art side of things, not in my own day-to-day life. I mean, now I run an investment firm and I have a job and it's high stakes, it's other people's money and take that seriously. But if I have to think about where the world's gone and where I think the energy needs to be kind of corrected, it, it seems that art and artists have become super uncool in a very tragic way. You'd like, go to stuff in LA and it would just be all of these like, musicians kissing ass to some billionaire. And it's like, "Wait, wait, wait like... this seems backwards."
People
You know, like, I think relationships are the only valuable thing. So, I think if you, if you don't think of relationships instrumentally, but as the end. And you go, ‘Okay, I'm gonna choose what I do professionally based on who that leads me to spend time with.’”
LA’s open-mindedness and fantasy
“LA—I think—is the most open-minded city, maybe in the world? LA is a place where crazy people from all over the world come here. And then, the city doesn't really have a culture. So, what ends up happening is every person creates and then inhabits their own fantasy world.”
Timestamps
(0:11) Curiosity, Serendipity, and the Power of Cold Emails
(6:03) Web Surfing & D.A's Potential One-Man Show
(10:10) Learning to Go Deep: Explore vs. Exploit
(16:00) Complexity Science, EO Wilson
(26:02) What Makes Santa Fe Institute Special?
(29:55) Complex and Bureaucratic Systems: How do you design a good system? And how do you change entrenched systems?
(37:08) D.A's Attraction to Markets and the Fed Challenge
(42:01) What Makes a Good Investor?
(45:13) Creativity in Investing, Index Funds, Elon's Take on a Great VC, and Venture Capital's Real Customer
(55:28) What Makes for Commercially Successful Creatives: Doing
(1:02:06) Gene Editing & CRISPR, What "Early" Means in Biotech, and Isolating the Bet You're Making
(1:09:30) GLP-1, Slow Burn Technological Innovation, FOMO, and Bubbles
(1:15:31) Healthcare Incentives: The Tension between Free Market Capitalism and Healthcare as a Right
(1:21:35) Patient Agency, LLMs, and Shifting Away from Paternalistic Doctors
(1:25:44) Progress Toward a "Universal Standard of Care"
(1:29:40) Artificial vs. Natural Intelligence
(1:35:14) Should We Limit Technological Progress? D.A's Response to Alarm-Sounding: Focus on Today's Real Problems & Solutions
(1:40:15) How Do You Keep Technology from Making You Creatively Lazy?
(1:49:20) Performance, Fame, and Authenticity
(1:57:09) Beauty As the Primary Motivation
(2:02:59) Multiple Lives, Art vs. Tech & Business, and D.A's Plea for the Artists to Revolt
(2:10:46) What Would D.A. Not Stop Doing for $1B?
(2:12:23) Lightning Round: Anonymity, Tyler the Creator, Pharrell
(2:16:46) African Studies at Harvard
(2:18:50) Favorite Jazz Album
(2:20:23) Finding New Music
(2:21:50) LA: The Most Open-Minded City
(2:23:58) What He Hopes to Teach His Young Daughter
Key Links (all links available here)
D.A. - Glowing (Official Music Video) - Directed by Tyler, the Creator
D.A. Wallach Writes a New Chapter - Damien Chazelle for Interview Magazine by
Zero Toll Medicine - D.A. Wallach
Modern Medicine Demands A Universal Standard of Care - D.A. Wallach
"Streaming Medicine" by D.A. Wallach at Fortune Brainstorm Health
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