David Wallace-Wells
speaker
599 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 12 Aug
David Wallace-Wells’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Yeah, I mean, it reminds me a little bit of some of the conversation around mental health and diagnostic inflation.
The idea that once we have supplied the public with knowledge about what constitutes depression or anxiety, once we've lowered the taboos against those diagnoses, probably that's all to the good.
But there are also some people who would have thought of themselves as healthy previously, who now understand themselves as struggling or mentally ill.
And the effect that that has on their lives is ambiguous, obviously.
So there's a lot of stuff going on here.
There's a kind of a sociological story about the sorts of people who are drawn to this.
Why are people drawn to these, you know, measures of self-optimization?
And why are they starting to see their body in terms of data which can be extracted?
Also, to what extent is that really a phenomenon of, you know, achievement culture among the well-off versus something that might be extended profitably through the rest of the population?
There's that whole bucket, like the kind of cartoon Brian Johnson, like, I'm going to, you know...
Brian Johnson is, I mean, it's amazing.
He's a tech entrepreneur who has devoted himself to the pursuit of longevity and maybe even living forever.
And he started out as a, like...
cartoon character who everybody was comfortable mocking for being so outlandishly committed to self-monitoring, self-optimization at the expense of all other human pleasure.
But he's, I think, in the last year sort of become lovable as a completely unapologetic embodiment of something that I guess
so many more of us are doing anyway.
And like, we're glad that he's doing it in a cartoonish way, so uninhibited, so maybe so that we could feel better doing it in a slightly more neurotic way ourselves.
But even, I mean, pulling back from the N of 1 problem, you know, I struggle to understand how to make sense of statistics at the population level, too.
Like, if I'm reading about, you know, my father's cancer or whatever, or I'm talking to his doctor, and his doctor's like, this person has a 20% chance of surviving this year, I'm wondering to myself, does that 20% describe...
A matter of chance?
Showing 221–240 of 599 · page 12 of 30
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