15: D.A. Wallach - Serendipity & Systems
Dialectic
Balancing Creativity and Commercialization
This chapter explores the tension between artistic expression and the demands of commercialization, emphasizing the need for a balance between creative passion and business acumen. Through discussions on authenticity, social validation, and personal experiences, it critiques the superficial engagement with popular culture compared to a deeper love for one's craft.
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.
Full episode transcript and all linked references available here.
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Timestamps:
- (0:04) Hampton
- (1:56) Intro to D.A.
- (3:29) Curiosity, Serendipity, and the Power of Cold Emails
- (9:21) Web Surfing & D.A.'s Potential One-Man Show
- (13:28) Learning to Go Deep: Explore vs. Exploit
- (19:18) Complexity Science, EO Wilson
- (29:20) What Makes Santa Fe Institute Special?
- (33:13) Complex and Bureaucratic Systems: How do you design a good system? And how do you change entrenched systems?
- (40:25) D.A.'s Attraction to Markets and the Fed Challenge
- (45:19) What Makes a Good Investor?
- (48:30) Creativity in Investing, Index Funds, Elon's Take on a Great VC, and Venture Capital's Real Customer
- (58:45) What Makes for Commercially Successful Creatives: Doing
- (1:05:24) Gene Editing & CRISPR, What "Early" Means in Biotech, and Isolating the Bet You're Making
- (1:12:48) GLP-1, Slow Burn Technological Innovation, FOMO, and Bubbles
- (1:18:49) Healthcare Incentives: The Tension between Free Market Capitalism and Healthcare as a Right
- (1:24:53) Patient Agency, LLMs, and Shifting Away from Paternalistic Doctors
- (1:29:02) Progress Toward a "Universal Standard of Care"
- (1:32:58) Artificial vs. Natural Intelligence
- (1:38:32) Should We Limit Technological Progress? D.A.'s Response to Alarm-Sounding: Focus on Today's Real Problems & Solutions
- (1:43:32) How Do You Keep Technology from Making You Creatively Lazy?
- (1:52:37) Performance, Fame, and Authenticity
- (2:00:27) Beauty As the Primary Motivation
- (2:06:17) Multiple Lives, Art vs. Tech & Business, and D.A.'s Plea for the Artists to Revolt
- (2:14:04) What Would D.A. Not Stop Doing for $1B?
- (2:15:41) Lightning Round: Anonymity, Tyler the Creator, Pharrell
- (2:20:04) African Studies at Harvard
- (2:22:08) Favorite Jazz Album
- (2:23:40) Finding New Music
- (2:25:08) LA: The Most Open-Minded City
- (2:27:16) What He Hopes to Teach His Young Daughter
Links (all available here)
- Zero Toll Medicine
- Modern Medicine Demands A Universal Standard of Care
- D.A. Live: "Feel" (Live From Capitol Studio B)
Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms.
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