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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The Opinions · The Silicon Valley Health Trend Making Doctors Nervous · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

Does it describe something fundamental to his biology which we don't understand, which we're choosing to describe by treating it as a matter of chance?

And theoretically, if we could know more about this cancer and this man and his history, would we be able to produce an end-of-one assessment of what will happen with a particular cancer treatment over time?

In other words, are we dealing with the irreducible...

epistemological mystery of the body?

Or is it conceivable that perhaps even in the relatively near future, data, better data, better screening, better information about genes and et cetera, we could put all that into some system and actually get

a reliable assessment of like, you know, when Rachel's going to die, you know, or whatever.

I hear you saying that, and I find that basically persuasive on an intuitive level.

I also then think about, you know, this is not the first time that we've been sold promises about what big data will do to us and improve our lives.

And I think about 23andMe, which told us that we were gonna not just learn about our ancestry, but also we're gonna learn a lot about

our health because of getting it analyzed in some centralized way.

Now here we are a decade or two later, we all spit into those tubes.

We got some information about where our families come from, which turns out not to be all that reliable.

The company went under and it's like, did we actually learn anything about our health from that?

And I understand that the future is big and we shouldn't always impose short timelines on promises and say, if they said it was going to happen in five years and it didn't happen by 10, that means it's a hopeless cause.

But I do wonder just in a really big picture, when we hear the AI leaders say casually, this is going to help us cure cancer or this will help us cure all disease.

I think to myself, how should we assess that claim in a world where data has improved medical treatment,

but not really solved anything quite yet.

And that's because there's... My wife is like sure that her dad was from India, which she definitely was not.

But I've also had a lot of people say to me they were just too early, overpromised, and then felt forced to come to market.

And if we fast forward 10 years, we're probably going to have something like Theranos that's quite useful.

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