D.A. Wallach: music, medicine, cancer screening, and disruptive technologies

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
This podcast, I'll be speaking with my good friend, DA. Wallach. I've known DA for maybe five years now, maybe four, I can't recall, but he is truly a Renaissance man. I have been accused of being a Renaissance man on occasion, but I am not. DA however, is. And if you look up Renaissance man in the dictionary, I think you'll just see his picture with his curly hair sitting there. He is a recording artist, a songwriter, an investor, an essayist. He was discovered while an undergrad at Harvard by Pharrell among others who signed him to a deal. He went on to become one half of the band Chester French. They released three full length albums and he also has a solo album called Time Machine, which was released in 2016 We'll link to all of that stuff. Well, with Chester French, they toured with a number of legendary bands and artists such as Lady Gaga, Weezer, and perhaps my favorite of them all, Blink 182
Beyond music, however, D.A.'s sort of in a class of his own in terms of his intellectual curiosity and his ability to assimilate information that seems so far outside of his area of expertise. In fact, some of the most interesting discussions I remember ever having with DA is sort of what prompted this podcast. I remember one day he came over, he was passing through San Diego on his way down from LA, came by and we were sitting out at a park on the swings having a discussion about liquid biopsies.
And I was thinking to myself, how is it that I'm sitting here with this guy, my buddy who's a musician and a very good investor, having this discussion about liquid biopsies at a level of detail that I don't get to have with pretty much anybody else outside of people who are knee deep in this field. And that was sort of when it clicked in my mind. I was like, you know, DA would be a great guy to have on the podcast. He's advised a number of startup companies, including SpaceX, Dr. On Demand, Ripple, Emulate. And of course, he was an artist in residence for Spotify. And we talked actually quite a bit about Spotify on this episode for anyone who's kind of interested in how it came to be. The other things that we talk about, of course, is his background in music and his start. My daughter is a great drummer for a little kid, and I've always been interested in how one can continue to encourage kids to be involved in music. And we talk about some fun times that we've had when he's been over and has jammed with her. We talk a lot about cancer screening, which anybody who's kind of ever heard me talk about this stuff privately, I really think that when it comes to the major metabolic diseases, cardiovascular disease and the other atherosclerotic diseases, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, the big tool that is really missing is these liquid biopsies. By the time cancer becomes visible, on an imaging study, you can make the case you've lost the war.
I don't know that that's true, but I do believe that if we can catch these things when they are not yet fully determined to be cancers, based on either looking at a DNA signature, an RNA signature or even a protein signature, that we might have a shot.
We also get into some really kind of nerdy stuff that I think is very important for anybody thinking about screening, such as positive predictive value, negative predictive value, sensitivity and specificity. And we'll link to some information here that we use internally in our practice to help patients navigate that. So if you're interested in music, if you're interested in liquid biopsies, cancer prevention, general cancer screening, and just interested in listening to a really smart dude who seems to know a lot about a lot of things and can speak very articulately about them, I think you'll really enjoy this podcast. You'll be able to find the show notes for this at peterattiamd.com forward slash podcast. And we'll link to a lot of the stuff that we talk about that will hopefully allow those of you who are interested to follow up and learn a little bit more. So without further delay, here is my conversation with the amazing DA. Wallach.