Kian Sadeghi's videos and podcasts
This week
Great to join @PeterDiamandis at the Abundance Longevity Summit this weekend to talk about the future of human reproduction and the ideas behind my new book, Evolution by Genetic Optimization.
Earlier this month
Excited to be a part of @PeterDiamandis’ Abundance Longevity trip this month for a deep dive into longevity and health optimization.
September 2026
The implication of this lackluster technology meeting a widespread parental misunderstanding is profound. Above all, there is tremendous human suffering. An estimated 300 million people worldwide live with a rare disease, and approximately 72 percent of rare diseases are genetic. Many of these diseases are hereditary. That means on the order of 150–200 million people worldwide live with a genetic disease that could have been entirely prevented.
Medicine has become so accustomed to treating genetic disease after the fact that we scarcely question the premise itself. Instead of addressing the source of the problem, the scientists running this project would rather treat a baby, a child, with a lifetime of surgery, drugs, and therapies after they are born with a disease. And that’s if the parents are “lucky.”
Accordingly, one of the most important decisions that determines the genetics of your baby is actually the selection of your partner. The reason for this is simple. You and your partner set what is possible, the outcome space, for your children.
Human beings cannot transcend evolution any more than we can transcend gravity. But neither are we passive observers. Just as airplanes do not abolish gravity but instead harness an understanding of its laws, genomic technology may allow us to exercise greater agency over the evolutionary forces that shape us. These tools allow us to pursue objectives beyond the one evolution has always optimized for: reproductive success. By this I mean, traits are not principally favored because they make us healthier, happier, smarter, or longer-lived, but because they help our genes persist from one generation to the next.
Let’s set the record straight. There’s two ways for parents to reduce the risk of common diseases in their future baby. The first is by choosing not to pass down what is known as “high-penetrant” (high-impact) disease variants. Not every couple will have such markers, but for those who do they can be very important, for the parent and baby.
What many do not know is that chronic conditions are actually quite genetic as well. Alzheimer’s, diabetes, certain cancers, and certain heart diseases, are 50-80 percent heritable. Something like Alzheimer’s is sometimes estimated to have as strong a genetic component as height. That is to say, it’s almost all genetic in origin.
I had incorrectly assumed genetic optimization (GO) hinged on genetic engineering.
This ability to create multiple embryos raised a remarkable possibility. If many embryos could be created outside the body, could they also be genetically examined for diseases or even sex before being transferred into the uterus?
Another thing on AI. There is no such thing as a single-optimization measure in a complex system that doesn't lead to some sort of negative to disastrous outcome (see evolution and capitalism as two examples).
What I find so fascinating about this whole AI conversation — including this book "Superintelligence" — is it all goes back to "well, how do we make humans smarter given we are made of atoms" and then "oh genetic optimization" which usually then ends up in some idea of genetic engineering (which is not necessary at all to make people smarter as I spend 30,000 words explaining in my book).
Great technologies are surprisingly inductive. What makes technology “great” is its ability to represent and, therefore, manipulate many seemingly different things through the same underlying language or principle.
What people imagine genetic engineering could one day do, is already possible today at any IVF clinic near you. The age of genetic optimization has begun.
I felt increasingly divorced from the origins of Nucleus and the ten years I had spent enamored with genetics: experimenting with CRISPR as a teenager, studying the history of genetic science, obsessing over statistical genetics, watching the cost of sequencing collapse, and even imagining a new kind of human evolution. There seemed to be a greater and greater chasm between what was in my heart and what was being reported.
When I went to Penn, I began to be influenced by this guy named Paul Graham whose essays I started reading. Graham is one of the godfathers of contemporary Silicon Valley thought, who espouses precise yet substantive ways on how to found and run a startup. His essays revolve around software and programming. As I read them, I began realizing that the logistics of starting a gene editingcompany — not exactly a software company — would not be easy at all. I ruminated on how one could go about doing it, or whether it made sense to start a more trivial company that wasn’t rooted in biotech.
Today, I’m excited to publish the book Evolution by Genetic Optimization, a 35,000 word, 100+ page piece on the new mechanism for directed human evolution.
August 2026
Today, we’re excited to announce a co-marketing partnership with @legacy, the largest male fertility clinic in America.