Martin Varsavsky on fertility problems, birth rate decline, gene editing and humanity's future.

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Hi everyone, I'm Sabrina Halper, an investor at Hoff Capital, a venture fund based in New York City. And you are listening to Tomorrow Talk, the podcast where I bring on individuals who are defining what tomorrow will look like. Take a second to subscribe. I am so, so excited to have Martin Varsovsky on the show today. Martine has started five unicorn companies across renewable energy, telecom and healthcare and recently has devoted decade towards building some of the most interesting fertility companies. And I'm so, so honored to have you on the show. Thank you Martine for being here today.

I'm very happy to be here.

I got you in your one day in New York, so this is awesome. This was originally inspired from my last interview with Delian from Founders Fund. When I asked him about which area of technology he thought would be the most interesting and impactful next, he pointed to fertility and he pointed to you as a person that was doing a lot of the most interesting things there.

So thanks Dalian.

This is very exciting. I think, you know, just to start off, you've started companies really across sectors in such a unique way. I'm curious, like what was the catalyst to spend so much of your time, energy resources in fertility?

Well, it started like other things in my life as a personal problem. I love children. I have seven children myself from ages 6 to 33. So a wide range. When I had my older kids, everything worked well. When I had my younger kids, things didn't work well. And we struggled through infertility, Nina and I. It was really at the waiting room of fertility clinics in the States, in Miami actually, that I had the idea for the first fertility company, Prelude Fertility, which is now the largest group of fertility clinics in the US and then I just went on, on a vertical that related a lot to my education because I'm kind of a failed doctor. I did Pre MEd at NYU and I was going to be a doctor and I diverted to become an entrepreneur.

It turned out all right.

Yeah, no, I manage a lot of doctors, but yeah, I love medicine, but I did a lot of other things. But the last years that I've been devoting mostly to this field and also some to renewable energy. It's a personal quest. It was my daughter Mia, who now is 12, who was born out of IVF and the subsequent children and the egg freezing that my wife went through and the last child we had, which Ben who seeks, which was through egg freezing, sperm freezing, genetically tested embryos, the whole. Uh. So, so yeah, yeah, it's that we, we practice what we now Preach.

I think we hear this term infertility a lot. But, like, what is infertility? Is it an increasing issue? Like, why? What are the main causes? What are the trends?

Well, the. Let's say fertility. What is fertility? And what is infertility? Right. So first, fertility means for us to start a family when you're ready, to have a healthy baby when you're ready, that is fertility. And infertility is the inability to achieve such objective, meaning you want to have a baby and you can't. Okay? So there's medical definitions of infertility, which is you try to make a baby having sex and you fail over a year. Then, for example, insurance companies first want you to try to make a baby having sex, and over 35, you can try six months, and if you don't achieve, that's infertility. So there's technical, legal, practical definitions of what infertility is. And so, in my opinion, it's interesting because when I raised the funds for Prelude, I used to start my meetings with investors by saying a phrase that sounded kind of funny, but had there was a meaning to that phrase. And the phrase was, sex is great, but not to make babies. Okay? And a lot of people associate sex with making babies, even though, by the way, in the 60s, the pill was invented and sex was decoupled from procreation. But somehow people still think sex is great to make babies. And the truth is, sex is not great to make babies in the thirties and forties. And now families are getting started mostly in the thirties and 40s. And in the thirties and 40ties, there is an incredible failure rate at trying to make babies having sex, or something called secondary infertility, which is you have the first child, and then you cannot have a second child or a subsequent child. And so what's happening now, the reason why we're so infertile as a society and why fertility rates are collapsing around the developed world, in usa, in Europe, in. In the Far east, in China, the population is imploding in Korea, in Japan. And it's because. Mainly because people want to have babies when it's too late for our biology.

You've said this term before that I really like where it's like our biology and our society are no longer aligned. And I think that's kind of the core of the issue. But beyond people having babies later, do you also believe that there's, like, environmental effects that are affecting our fertility? I read this study that said sperm count has increasingly been going down in men.

Well, the phrase I like to Use, by the way, is that we decoupled our biology from our psychology. Right? For example, now we have the first generation of women that spend more time in menopause than fertile. And there's. We kind of. We decoupled our evolution from who we are. Now we decouple our biology from our psychology. And I like to say that my companies bring them back together. Okay, now going back to your other question of environmental factors, my belief that's not the case. My belief is teenagers, when they have sex, they get pregnant. In any environment, you know, whether it's a one and a half degree climate change, whether it's air pollution, whether it's plastics in the ocean, whether there's a loss of biodiversity, they have sex and they get pregnant. So it's not about the environment, it's about the age at which we're trying to have children.

So, okay, going kind of deeper into this concept of trends and what demographics amongst countries are looking like today, I think there's these, like, two different narratives and two different camps. I would say one camp of people are encouraging people, usually for environmental reasons, to have less children because they believe that our planet cannot sustain a growing population. And then I would say in the other camp, you have people like Elon Musk who are encouraging people to have more children because we have declining birth rates. And that's really bad for society for all sorts of reasons. In terms of taking care of older generations, jobs fueling basically innovation and a flourishing economy. I am biased towards the second camp. I'm assuming you are as well. How do you think about those sort of those narratives which are kind of at odds with each other?

Well, let's say in the early 2000s, I listened to Al Gore and I was very inspired by the threat of climate change. And I built the Olia Renobables and a renewable energy company in Spain that we sold for 1.1 billion and it's been recently sold for over 2 billion. And it's a huge industry, renewables. I've seen such an evolution in renewables that my personal feelings about climate change, surprisingly, as opposed to the rest of a lot of people who will be listening to these. I'm less worried about climate change than I used to be, mainly because of the incredible amount of money we're investing in renewables, electrification, new nuclear, new forms of nuclear. I think the awareness of climate change is so big that we're finally taking action, and I'm optimistic about that. Also with catastrophic weather events, I think we get more of them, but we're incredibly good at avoiding death. And very few people die of catastrophic weather events. Like it's in. I think it's 60,000 a year in the world, by the way. 7 million die of air pollution. And there are other environmental issues that kill many more people. Or there's the pandemic that killed 18 million people. So I believe it's very sad when people say they don't want to have babies because of climate change. And I'm like, we're fixing climate change, but you'll never have babies. Right. And once you make the decision to have them, it's going to be hard to catch up. Right. So I'm more in the camp that fertility rates are collapsing and that we in the United States, in Europe, and in the Far east and in many places, and that we have to realize that that society needs to. Your show is called Tomorrow Talk. There's no tomorrow if we don't have babies. That's as simple as that.

I completely agree with you. I also think a sort of similarly sad narrative or stance is that, like, the world is getting too complex and it's a hard life to bring a child into. And I actually feel that things are getting better by so many metrics than they have been in history. If you actually look at the statistics and when you look at why there are declining birth rates in so many of these nations, like in Europe, Europe and China, even in the US to some extent. Like, what are the main reasons, in your opinion?

Well, it's a. It's kind of like when. When you can have children, you don't want them, and when you want them, you cannot have them. It's kind of. That's the simplest explanation. It's why people don't want children, is that they want to party, they want to have a good time, they want to date a lot of people, they want to build their careers, they want to do a lot of other things. And by the time they say, okay, now I'm ready to have a child, then their bodies don't work. But for that, we're at Inception Prelude. Inception is the name of the corporation and Prelude the clinics. At Inception Prelude we're the largest providers of egg freezing in the United States. In North America, egg freezing is a way to deal with this problem because it greatly increases the chances of having babies in the 40s and 50s. But I think the main reason why fertility rates decline is really that the willingness to have them comes too late in life.

Yeah. When you look at the data, it seems like these two things are at odds, like a society that's like highly developed, has like an advanced economy, people have a lot of choice and opportunity and then basically birth rate. And so when you think about how to design a society where those things are aligned, if you had basically complete control over like us or like Europe spending, what would you put in place?

Well, I think democracies are great. I'm all for democracies, but I think democracies have a failing in the area of children. Okay. Why? Because children don't vote. Children, babies don't vote. Kindergarten, they don't vote. Primary school kids don't vote. You will see that when children grow to the age where they can vote, life gets better for them. For example, in Europe, universities are free, but kindergartens are not free. Because at universities people vote. Right. So one idea would be to give a custodian vote to parents. And if parents had custodian votes for their children, I think a lot of these problems would go away very quickly. The opposite is true of retired people. So for example, in America, every retired person, every person over the age of 65 has a type of medical insurance, Medicare, that is pretty similar to the medicine there is in Europe and in every other developed nation. It's kind of like if you make it to 65 and you haven't died before, your medical problems are over in terms of access to medicine, not your medical problems. So access to medicine is over. Well, why? Because that demographic votes like crazy. They vote more and they vote more than young people. Right. So democracy is biased towards giving more benefits to people who are, who are older. So for example, France, which has the highest birth rate in Europe, is the only country in Europe that has this system called Lacreche. And La Creche is like a place where six month old babies are taken care of by the state. And if you can have someone take care of your baby and you go to work, then you're more likely to have babies. Right. And France, the birth rate in France is higher than in all the countries around France, in my opinion. Just because of that.

Yeah. I feel like if there was more of those types of programs, people wouldn't need to choose completely between like advancing your career and like being able to have children simultaneously. And then there's also the route. I believe Israel subsidizes ivf. Yes, most governments don't. And egg freezing. Most governments don't. In America, there's a good amount of tech companies and other companies that are starting to include egg freezing in their health insurance plans. Do you have any strong call to action, to companies or governments, or do you believe that it should be kind of on the individual to plan for those things?

No, it's complicated because I spoke before about decoupling your biology and your psychology. But there's another decoupling that's happening in our society, which is when you're fertile, you're poor, and when you're ready and wealthy because you've made money in your 30s and 40s, you're infertile. Right. So there's almost a decoupling of finance. Right. And it's very difficult to ask your 45 year old self to finance your, I don't know, 35 year old or 25 year old. It's also you don't have the money for it because at 25, women are at the lowest money earning of their career. So there's a lot of things that are fundamentally wrong. I believe that government should invest in these because if you're a government, you should think, what am I doing as a government? And what you're doing is you are creating taxpayers. Governments are your shareholders for life. Government is, they own, for example, if you do well in Life, they own 50% of you and your income for the rest of your life and they own 27% of your capital gains or whatever. So if governments think long term, they should invest in their people because the people are their shares, they own shares in you. And so I think they should invest in creating more people because that's more taxpayers. They should invest in educating them because that's taxpayers that will pay more taxes. Right. So yeah, I think it's almost selfish for governments to do this. It's not only that it makes sense for society because with the fertility rate now dropping so much in the United States, without immigration, we don't have a future here and same in Europe and so on. So I think there's a lot of things that can be done that make a lot of sense when you analyze them over 50 years, even though they're hard to understand for three years.

Yeah. One more question on this sort of like inner country dynamic. I think one thing I noticed, I during college went abroad to Paris for four months and every day for about a month there was protests to argue for the French government to legalize surrogacy versus I would say most protests surrounding the fertility space that I saw when I was in California were more around like abortion rights. So it's like the spectrum is like very different. I think where Europe versus America is and what they're thinking about. You have Worked and existed in both continents. Like, what's sort of the main difference in how people think about these issues and which issues are contentious or actually very different?

Yeah, I do see the realities of Europe and the US very much because I spend my whole adult life between Europe and usa and I can say the concerns are very different. I think America is great at solving problems that nobody else has solved anywhere in the world. It's amazing. It solves the most intricate problems and then the problems that everyone else has solved, like education, healthcare, policing, judicial reform. America sucks at solving the most easy to solve problems. And that's something that always baffles me. Like how can America be so great at coming up with incredible innovations and so bad at providing medicines for the whole population and medical care for the population and college education for the population and all these things that are so common in Europe. Public transportation, trains. Like why. Why America can't do any of these things I'll never understand. So the concerns are very different. The concerns in Europe in my opinion are many times reasonable and the concerns in America are many times, in my opinion, unreasonable. So why can this country that is so great at entrepreneurship be so bad at social issues? Hard to understand, but that's the reality. So in terms of, for example, abortion, America went from one extreme to the next before they say, oh, abortion anytime. Well, that's kind of crazy. In Europe we always had term limits, but term limits are 15 weeks, 17 weeks. So there's abortion, but with a term limit. Right. Why did America have no term limits and now no abortion in Texas and Florida and so on, which is terrible. And then women can choose. Why? Why is it one extreme to the next? But I think America should have abortion with term limits, like in Europe. I don't know, it's. These things are not so complicated and it's hard to understand this difference.

I heard you speak on a podcast once about sort of like there are these like anti science communities in both places. Can you just speak on that for a second?

What I see is that Europe is mostly a secular continent. Like in most of Europe, most Europeans do not attend church and most of them do not believe in a personal God. And most Americans believe in a personal God and most Americans pray. And most Americans attend some kind of church, although that's declining too, but not the same way. And so. But they both have significant anti science sectors, but they're very different. The European anti science people are hippies. I don't know how to say. It's like an inheritance of a movement from the 60s in which they believe all sorts of things that are just not true, but believe them very strongly. I don't know. I have German friends who when Fukushima happened, they bought metal nets, like anti malaria mosquito nets, but made of metal, and they put them on their beds in Germany to protect themselves from the radiation in Fukushima, which I find absolutely lunatic behavior. But I'm talking about people that are otherwise normal. And so the anti science of Europe is kind of like the hippie style, but the anti science of America is very much driven by religion and religious beliefs. And. And that is also quite limiting and confusing. Right. Overall, Europe is more pro science. America has amazing science, but the people who do science in America many times have to defend themselves in ways they don't have to defend themselves in Europe.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, sort of the role of religion in America. But I actually think you have all these other belief systems that replace religion and a lot of those actually might be anti science in their own way, like wellness and things like that. At the same time, I feel like the pandemic was a very interesting test case where maybe like what I would say a lot of people struck back against sort of the medical community afterwards was like there was a lack of transparency and nuance for the people that are struggling to have kids, whether it's their first child or second child or third child. What do you think would need to happen to decrease the cost of that by like an order of magnitude? Is it government subsidies or is it just more companies being built in the space?

Well, there's a number of things people don't know about fertility that maybe I'll share with you that are very surprising. For example, many people are unaware that women can bear children throughout their life. Almost that the uterus keeps working, that what does not work is the eggs. Right. I heard once the fertility doctor used the analogy of the oven and the bread and said the oven works, the bread doesn't work. Right. I don't know if it's a good analogy, but it kind of explains that. So it's easier to get a 55 year old women pregnant with donor eggs than a 38 year old woman pregnant with her own eggs. Okay. That is shocking to people. People believe that getting a 55 year old woman pregnant is impossible. And it's actually pretty easy with donor eggs. It's not the core of what we do. The core of what we do is getting women in their 30s and 40s pregnant. But I'm using an extreme example to explain, I mean, egg Freezing is like donating to your future self. But if you don't have the eggs of when you were young, you can use donor eggs. And donor eggs are extremely effective. So you could say, well, it's not my genetics, and you could argue that, or it's my partner's genetics, my partner's sperm, not my genetics. And I can see the concern. But I think many people adopt, and if the alternative is to go childless, I think it's a great alternative to use donor eggs. And donor eggs is the only fertility treatment, again, something people don't know, that comes with baby or your money back guarantee. Well, IVF is a treatment that maybe 40% success rate on a first try. Donor eggs works incredibly well.

Yeah. At what age would you encourage people to get their eggs frozen? And why does that in some circles, like kind of a controversial thing to tell young people to do?

Well, I think any, any time under 35 is likely to give good results. And after from 35 to 40, you need to freeze maybe three cycles to get the same results that at 30, with one cycle. I, I think that egg freezing is something that is gaining tremendous acceptance. Like, we were pioneers in these, and now it's growing and growing and growing, particularly the large cities. So women are quite aware of these and they were not aware of this in 2016 when we started. So I'm pretty happy with the level of awareness of what it can do. But I also think that it's sometimes hard financially on young people. So that's why sometimes future grandparents pay for these because they're more aware. I've seen many cases where you have a child, just one child. Families were only able to have one child. And so when the, when the daughter reaches a certain age, they say, look, we were only able to have you. We never had any more children. If you want to freeze your eggs, we'll pay for it. And so that. And corporations are also freezing eggs.

It's almost like there's this concept of a college fund that like your parents put together over time, if they can afford it. Right. Maybe there's also like an egg freezing fund. You know, if you.

Yeah, I think, I think it's. It's something that parents do for their children also to become grandparents. But it's also something that is somewhat difficult. It's two weeks of discomfort to achieve these. I'm not saying so. My companies are also working on making these easier. This goes on the question that you had of how to make it easier for society. So one is to address cause the other One is to address discomfort. The other one also is to increase efficacy. So a company that I started called Overture is involved in robotizing the embryology lab to increase success rates and to decrease costs. So I'm very involved in all the pain points in order for people to have a healthy baby when they're ready. I'm also involved in a company that is developing a new type of incubator. Were very premature babies or babies that weigh one pound and that now normally die or have tremendous negative consequences in life. So we're working on this company also in the States that it's kind of in stealth mode. So I don't want to speak much more about it. But what I can say is we're working on an incubator that works more like a uterus, meaning that the baby would go into this artificial uterus with an artificial umbilical cord and an artificial amniotic fluid and a heart and lung machine. And so the baby would go into an environment that's not like an incubator, because an incubator forces a very premature baby to breathe, and their lungs are not developed, and that's how they die, or they have enormous problems. So I'm working on all the points that bring you to having a healthy baby when you're ready.

I really want to get into everything in the world of gene editing, embryo selection, all of that. There's a lot of really exciting ideas there. Some controversial decisions that I think governments are gonna be coming in on in the next decade. I guess to just give the audience, like, a sort of good baseline. Embryo selection is legal. It's happening often. And CRISPR using gene editing of embryos is not. Can you just explain kind of like the difference and why one is legal, one is illegal?

Well, embryo selection has been legal in the United States for many years. It's not legal everywhere. It's not legal in Germany, for example, where they have the Nazi past and are very concerned about anything that looks to them like eugenics. But I don't think it's eugenics. I think what we do now in our clinics, and certainly it's totally legal in the States, is we help people balance families. Let's say they have three boys, they want a girl, they have three girls, they want a boy, whatever. The gender selection is one thing we do, and that's one of the. For embryo selection, then you can do embryo selection to try to select the embryos that are more likely to implant. And one of our companies, Overture, is coming up with a new type of technology that doesn't even involve a biopsy of the trophectoderm, meaning you don't need to take cells away from the embryo as people do now with pgt. And that's called metabolomic embryo testing at Overture, and we're working on that. Embryo selection can be done for gender, can be done for the most likely embryo that gives you a baby, and it also can done. And now we get into the situations that are more complicated for avoiding illnesses that's not so controversial. I mean, I think anyone who knows of an illness that will kill a child at the age of three will say, no, please give me another embryo, the one that doesn't have that illness. So there's two types of illnesses in general that are genetic. They're called monogenic and multigenic. So monogenic examples are like thalassemia, sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, whatever. There's like a thousand of them. And in monogenic illnesses, it is not so difficult if both parents are carriers. And that is done, by the way, through another type of testing that's called parental carrier screening. So when you date, you can show your date, your 23, me, whatever, and you'll discover that if you have similar mutations, then you should go to an IVF clinic. And then you have 25% chance of having a baby with a horrible illness. But you also have 75% chance of not having a baby that has this horrible illness. But if you risk it having sex, it's like a Russian roulette. But if you do it in an IVF clinic, it's not a Russian roulette. You know where the bullet is, and you go for the ones that don't have the bullet. So you get the embryos that are healthy and you have a healthy baby now. Now let's go to your thorniest and hardest issue to answer, which is CRISPR. CRISPR Cas9 is a technology that was developed in an unusual way, and it's actually a mechanism that bacteria use to defend themselves against viruses. Then there was Dona and Charpentier who came up with it, and they won the Nobel Prize for. They realized that, that you could transfer this mechanism because in the end, life is very interesting how much we have in common with bacteria. This mechanism that was used for bacteria to defend themselves against virus is basically an incredibly precise way of editing one gene. We have 20,000, 20 somewhat thousand genes, I think, and we can edit them. We can edit them with CRISPR. So there was one doctor who did this, Dr. He in China, and these Babies were born edited. So he wanted to prove that the babies were born, that this could be done in humans. And actually it worked in humans. It seemed to have worked very well, except that doctor, he ended up in jail. But now he's out. But the story of CRISPR is very complicated in my view. Why? Because most illnesses are not monogenic, they're multigenic. And even in monogenic illnesses, we don't know what changing one gene can do. You could avoid something and you could then come up with other things. And because let's say you have an illness like thalassemia, you can choose the embryos that don't have thalassemia. So why do you need to edit an embryo away from thalassemia, which could be more dangerous when all you need to do is select the embryos that don't have it. Right. So that's monogenic. And then a multigenic illness is. It's so complex because then you will need to apply CRISPR to all these genes. We don't even understand. We don't understand the genes that make certain intelligence, for example. And if you're trying to maximize intelligence and you're editing 20 different genes and I mean you may end up with a horrible medical situation.

Where are we today with sort of mapping out the genes associated with like IQ or intelligence? We don't know yet.

Well, there are companies like Orchid that with nor the founder who's a friend and there's people who. So there's people working on multigenic embryo selection. Okay, that's kind of okay. You have a collection of embryos and you can kind of point out to the chances, greater chances that certain embryos will be more intelligent. Let's say you look for genes associated with intelligence and all that. Me personally, I am focusing avoiding illness, let's say I'm not focusing making smarter babies. I'm focusing making babies that are healthy and, and that live a healthy life. Right. But some parents like to, I mean just like they send their kids to Math tutors for 20 years or I don't know, like they say, look, and especially my Asian friends, because that's a cultural thing. I think my Asian friends are very much in favor of this type of embryo selection over my European friends. So I guess it's also cultural.

Say in a couple decades they have done more tests on crispr, probably on animals and they are pretty confident that there would not be long term effects. Do you kind of see this thing happening where like designer babies will be legal in some countries and not others and there's kind of going to be this like, arbitrage opportunity, similar to what happens in like, with like, people going to Spain from France to have a surrogate.

Yeah, they go to Spain for not the surrogate, but the egg donation. But still, your point is totally. I see your point and you're right. And okay, so to me, the nation that is most likely to engage in CRISPR to improve humankind is China. But that's not because they're especially, I don't know, competitive or it's because at least when I talk to any Chinese friend that I've spoken to, what they say is, of course I want an advantage for my children. They don't have any problem. But it's interesting because they call themselves communists, but really it's the country where people are more open about not being communist, meaning about winning and beating others. So culturally there will be much more acceptance in a place like China for doing editing of babies. Just like there's a lot of acceptance for using any kind of enhancement in sports. So, yeah, the cultural attitudes of a Judeo Christian society versus the Chinese society may lead us to a gene race. Let's call it a gene race. But yeah, I do believe that less people in Western societies are accepting of these. And that may create in the not so distant future a difference between societies that are accepting of gene editing of humans and societies that are not accepting. I also have to say that in this conversation between AI and humans and whether AI is going to turn out to make us pets, which, by the way, in a conversation I had with Elon Musk, he said, pets don't have such a bad life. And I laughed about that. And I think he was right. I mean, my two pets, Whiskey and Simba, have a great life. But anyway, if AI turns us into pets, and you could say, well, genetically edited people could turn the rest of the people into pets or whatever, these differences create a potential for disparity. Huge disparities in success between machines and humans and between humans and humans.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because you're speaking of Elon and their work with neuralink. I think there's multiple ways that we get to these genetically enhanced humans, and one is actually not through our genes, but it could be through AI chips in our brain or bionic limbs. So yeah, there's like two different routes. How likely is it that humans might speciate in the next 500 years? Which means, like, we evolve into multiple species based off of the idea of, like, we're basically creating, like, man made evolution in a Pretty quick time frame. And then assuming that on a whole those populations, like don't inter procreate.

Okay, first let me say that I believe that evolution as we know it doesn't work in humans anymore.

Okay, explain.

Genghis Khan supposedly slept with I don't know how many women and spread his genes throughout Asia and Europe. And like, there was a time when a Genghis Khan could change the nature of humanity by having an incredible amount of children in a world in which people are having very few children, less than two children. Because in the end, how does genetic work? It's like we have an inventory of genes, and then there's a random mutation in the copying of these genes in which when DNA replicates, it makes a mistake. And then these mistakes, which happen at random when they're most of them are detrimental, but the ones that are beneficial result in an individual of that species. And then this gene pool becomes dominant because they're doing so well. But if we live in societies with a welfare state, everybody has two kids. No matter what you have, they're not going to have 100,000 kids. And so humanity, because of society and because of everything, has kind of killed the possibility of evolution to work. Because if the most successful don't have more babies, I don't see how the math of evolution works.

Wait, so that idea of like, we stop using certain muscles or parts of our brain, and so even if it's not like one person's gene is multiplying more than others, it's like our societal behavior as a whole starts leaning towards certain genes versus others.

But no. Well, let's put it this way. I believe in what Mendel and Darwin and everybody who came after that discovered with genetics. And I believe that genetics only works insofar as there's mutations. Then of course, there's epigenetics, and that complicates things, which is methylation. And it is not true that nothing that happens to you during life changes your genes, because epigenetics shows that some things, especially also during pregnancy and so on, can have an effect in what happens. And there may be some inherited traits that come through epigenetics, but not the ones you mentioned. But I do believe that the second part of your question, meaning that could there be speciation because of a human effort to alter the genome through CRISPR and CRISPR like technologies? And then the answer for sure is yes, we could create significant changes in the human race if we wanted to, that we can start. We could start doing this today. And in fact, there's companies that are doing this on animals, right? Of course, we've been doing this on animals over the years. Like how come dogs can show themselves up in shapes that are from, you know, 30 centimeters to a meter and 1.2 meters, or what is. What is like 1ft to 4ft? Dogs or things like that? That's because of us. We've been next to dogs and we got these wolves and we turn them into all these things that. The lap dogs and guard dogs and toy poodles. So we can do that on dogs even. We could do that even before crispr. Right? Crispr and techniques like that are kind of the same that we've been doing to dogs or to cats or to plant. Every plant that's close to us.

Yeah.

The edible plants, everything we eat, we've changed. I mean, if you think about some.

Stat, like, I could be wrong, but it's almost like 40% of plants are already genetically modified. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's everywhere.

Yes. I mean, if you take an aerial picture of Iowa, you would say, well, Iowa is all the corn fields, everything. We've created that. Right. Iowa was not like that a thousand years ago. So we can completely modify the biologic genetic landscape of the planet, and we can do that to ourselves. Whether we should do that to ourselves is another question. I don't think so, but we can certainly do it.

Yeah. My personal belief is once we can do it, it will be happening. Right. I think there's a chance that it could already be happening now in certain places, more than we know. Like everyone knows when it happened in China four years ago, but that's a possibility, right?

Well, the reason why I don't think it's happening now is not because people wouldn't try, but I really honestly believe we don't know how to. It's a math problem. Just like evolution is a math problem. Genetic modification of humans is a math problem. Math in the sense that you look at the amount of genes we have and when you look at the combinations, the possible combinations, so the math of these, it almost becomes a cryptographic problem to try to genetically modify humans. It's like another type of cryptography, but it is a code that we have a very hard time understanding. So without full understanding of genetics, genomics, it's difficult to successfully make humans, unless you want to go after a monogenic trait. But that's not going to make a superhuman. That's going to fix that problem.

So we're just not there yet in terms of Being able to map all the genes that might be associated with intelligence, I think. Is height similarly complex? Actually, to edit, my guess would be.

That height is considerably simpler than other. Well, there's other things. The color of the eyes. So that we could select four. But also there's another issue with embryo selection and embryo modification, that they're the two very different things. In embryo selection, you can only select the amount of embryos you got. So even a super fertile woman who gives you, I don't know, 24 eggs in an egg retrieval at 25, she will make maybe eight embryos. So then you have, let's say eight embryos. You have a population of eight to embryo select. Obviously with CRISPR, you don't have that problem. You can have one embryo and you can do a lot of modifications on that embryo. So one way to have a ton of embryos would be to have artificial eggs. Because sperm, we have a lot, right? Every now a man feels lonely and masturbates. There is an incredible amount of sperm. Sperm. We're not out of sperm, we're out of eggs. There's an incredible disparity when we talk about gender balance and everything. One of the biggest gender difference is the availability of sperm versus the availability of eggs. And that's because eggs, when you think about it, do 99% of the work involving reproduction, because a sperm, and nobody would agree with its definition, but I'll say it anyway, it's like a virus on an egg in the sense that a sperm is only genetic information, which is what viruses are, and an egg is everything. Meaning that the egg, the. Each egg has the energy to make an embryo. For example, the eggs are the only ones with mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of the cells. Mitochondria have ATP and they give power to the cell. And so the women bring all the power, all the energy, everything that's needed to make an embryo, and the men bring genetic information, and that's it. And so it's not surprising that there should be many more sperm than eggs, because just like there are many more viruses than bacteria and there's many more bacteria than people and whatever. And so if we could make an unlimited number of eggs through.

In vitro gametogenesis, right? Like that's. If that succeeds, then that would essentially offer us that.

Well, then you would have an incredible amount of embryos and then you would have a lot of choices for embryo selection.

I see.

And that is not inconceivable. Yeah, that's not inconceivable.

People Are working on it, like conception. So hopefully that works out. That would be amazing.

Yeah, I think it will be achieved in the next few years. The other problem is, will the FDA allow you to make humans that way? That doesn't look very likely, which I think is. I think it should be allowed, provided that you first make embryos, embryos that pass genetic testing that look healthy and so on. But that's going to be another issue, the regulation on these. But I think, yes, if you have a lot of eggs, you can have a lot of embryos. You can have a lot of embryo selection. In my opinion, that's a good thing for other reasons. It's a good reason to fight infertility, is a good reason. You could also possibly have make eggs. A man could make eggs. You could have gay couples have biological babies, both biological babies. And that would be very nice for a gay couple. So I see other benefits than making a better, smarter human race.

Totally. Looking forward, what do you think the average process of having a baby will look like? Like, do you think it will be in the minority to conceive a baby naturally through sex?

Well, I think the future is kind of what happened to me between my first child and my seventh child. Technology got better and better and I got older and I think I used my sperm that was frozen from before because men are huge contributors to mental illness and men are fertile for much longer than women. But we have more chance of producing babies with severe mental illness as we grow older. So for men should freeze their sperm. Our last child was born out of frozen eggs and frozen sperm. As I mentioned, genetically tested embryos also because when you have a seventh child, you want to, you know, you're only happy as your saddest child. And so I wanted to go on being happy. Ben makes us super happy. And I appreciate, by the way, my last youngest children, I play football with them and I kayak with them and I bike with them. And I like, I'm so happy with them. It's interesting as you grow older, how much you enjoy, especially after having seen your older children grow up and leave home. And you know, by the time a child is 18, you've probably seen 90% of the time you're ever going to spend with them, you already spent. And so I'm so happy that I went on having kids. And I think technology is the future and the way Ben was born, the way Mia was born is the future.

Yeah, I think that's an amazing thing. I saw a really sad graph that basically showed like the amount of time you spend with your parents over your life and there's like a significant drop off. So it's good to keep that in mind. I just want to ask you, like, kind of quick questions about a few, like, futuristic technologies that are peripheral to this space. And just like quickly tell me if you think it's gonna happen. Not gonna happen. 100 years away or two years away. Male birth control.

Oh, yes. I'm an investor in a company called Contraline that is working on a reversible vasectomy. And I hope, really it look promising.

Wow, that would be super cool. Longevity space, growing organs. Is that an idea that's exciting to you for longevity?

I cannot give you, by the way, a very short answer. Is that okay?

Yeah, that's okay.

A longer answer. Because everybody has their own understanding of.

There's a lot of discussion about longevity.

Right. I have again, my own theories about longevity, which are not the same as Piter Attias or other people. And I may be wrong, but this is what I think about longevity. I think we're programmed to grow old and die and we can do things like what Peter Attia recommends in his book Outlive, which I just read, which are fine. And I think those things will increase health span but not lifespan. Meaning you're not going to live up to 150, but you're going to live hopefully up to 100 in better shape. Well, people in Spain, where I live, live five years longer than people in America. And I think that's mostly because of socialization, diet and so on. People in Spain, by the way, live an incredible amount longer without chronic illness. Like in America, people get chronic illness much Sooner. That's because 17% of people in Spain are obese and 43% of people in America are obese and so on. So this is complicated, but I think if we want to make a real breakthrough in longevity, meaning people living to be 300 looking like they're 25. I think that people could get to live to 300 looking like they're 25, but only with genetic innovations or genetic part. So that doesn't mean you need to change your genes to modify all your genes, but it could be done either through CRISPR or modification of genes. But it can also be done through gene expression, meaning you can change the expression of these genes even during the time people are alive. So DNA makes rna, RNA makes protein, and proteins are like sort of the building blocks of life. You don't only need to interfere at DNA. For example, the COVID vaccine interfered at the level of RNA in the smartest way. It was an incredible, incredible discovery. With messenger rna, I think we could also intervene with the aging. With messenger rna, we could start intervening with things that. That cause aging to happen. And so I believe that we could have interventions with longevity, but I believe they're not going to be anything involving our food, exercise.

Yeah. So some of the projects around gene therapy are probably interesting to you. I just want to spend the last few minutes asking you about your broader entrepreneurial history, because being able to create so many successful companies across sectors is incredibly unique. I'm curious, like, how you personally think about company building. I think people have different philosophies. Some people want to spend a decade on one company. Some people view themselves more as people that basically are at the point of inception of the ideas and can build an amazing team around it.

Well, I. This is more towards the end of the podcast and it's the thank you moment here. I'd like to thank all the other people who helped me build these companies and who are probably much better than me at managing them. For example, DJ Farnsworth, who manages Inception, which is the corporation that has the Prelude clinics, and is my partner. I'm chairman, he's CEO. Without dj, this wouldn't have happened. Or Dina, who manages Gamito, or Hans, who manages Overture. So I'm tend to be. Well, tend to be. No, I am the founders CEO of these companies. I was the founder CEO of Prelude, of Overture, Gamito and quite a few other companies. But I am not very good at managing large groups of people. I'm not so organized. I am not as good as they are. All my companies, by the way, start out of one company called Jazia. And I am the founder CEO. So I'm not an investor when people say, well, but are you just an investor? No, I am the CEO of these companies for a few years, but I don't know how to scale them without the help of these other people who are amazing. So part of my success in company building is working with amazing people who helped me and I thank them. And without them, I wouldn't have built my companies. Miguel Salis and others that I can think of throughout my life. So what I do is I kind of have this vision of the future, which I've been pretty good at that.

Okay, and where do you think that stems from? Like over decades. How do you think about staying at the forefront of what's next and what needs to be built? And what's interesting.

Yeah, I have a hard time Explaining these. Why is it that I have such clear ideas about where the future is going? Look at this company where I lost 50 million of my own money and 150 million. The only company where I lost a lot of money was the first cloud computing company in Europe and one of the first cloud computing companies in the world called einsteinhet. I lost $200 million, $50 million of my own. But cloud computing is huge. I didn't make a mistake about cloud computing. I made the mistake with the timing.

You're too right.

Because in the early woes, nobody was going for cloud computing. Everybody liked their PCs, everybody loved their PCs. And it sounds so ridiculous now. Everything is in the cloud, aws, Azure, whatever. So I was never wrong about how the future was going to look like. But in the case of cloud computing, it just wasn't with me. So I don't know where these maybe, because I read a lot, speak to a lot of smart people, study a lot, spend my time imagining the future. And I also thought, by the way, that as I grew older, I would kind of lose this connection with the future. I don't know, I thought young people imagine the future better than older people, but it's not happening. I keep having these ideas about where the world is going. And I keep having, for example, one project I'm working on right now. It's kind of like a plan B for humanity. And so this is just a project. I don't have a company about this, but I'd like to maybe turn it into a company or I have to think out. But basically one of the issues with the IVF industry is that by trying to. By trying to have babies, people have a lot of leftover eggs. There's a lot of eggs that will never be used in IVF clinics. And embryos and sperm store frozen. I do think humanity has serious dangers, maybe less so. Climate change, as I said before, I think we're tackling that. But I'm more concerned about pandemics. I was always concerned about pandemic before this pandemic. I think we could have pandemics that leave people sterile. I think some viruses leave people sterile. And like mumps or nuclear war. I think nuclear war is a real danger with crazy people like Putin and with 6,000 nuclear warheads.

Egg and the sperm or the embryos and put them in a capsule.

No, put them underground.

Yeah.

And so I think that I think we should store, we should make it national interest to store all the. All the genetic tissue we now have in case there is nuclear War, or in case there's a pandemic, or in case there is a reversal of infertility. I am working on something like this. And I also been in conversations with Elon Musk about space colonization with embryos. Obviously conceptual with the parents of the embryo, but I think if you want to send a million people to Mars, 990,000 of them should come as embryos. Like, it's very difficult to physically send so many people at the cost of one person. You could send the 100,000 or 200,000 or half a million embryos. So I'm always thinking about these things. I don't know. It's an obsession of mine. My dad was a Harvard trained astrophysicist that built radio telescopes. And I grew up talking to my dad when I was maybe 6, 7 or 8 about life in the universe and the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation. And so it comes in the family. I don't know, we just were born this way.

Okay, I have five super quick popcorn questions, which means they're just quick, random assorted questions for you. Okay, the first one is, every. A lot of founders like Elon have a dream to go to space. Do you?

No.

No. If you could have dinner with anyone dead or alive, who would it be?

Einstein.

If you could spend one year of your life in a specific year in the future or a specific year in the past, what would it be?

Well, we'll choose the future for sure. And it would be, I don't know, the year 3000.

Like the Jonas Brothers song.

It's a good song.

Okay, and then my last question for you is, what is your. Do you have a niche, curiosity or obsession as of lately? Like one really random or specific thing you've been thinking a lot about?

Well, I've been thinking a lot about quantum physics and how quantum physics to me is it's kind of like magic supported by math. And so if you look at the math, it kind of makes sense. But when you look at, like, entanglement, for example, and that two particles that were at some point connected and they're so far apart, something happens to one immediately happens to the other that is, you know, a thousand light years away, how the hell can that happen? Do things travel more faster than the speed of light? Quantum physics is something that I'm not involved with quantum physics, but it's kind of like I'm just baffled by it. And I read about it and I think philosophy. If today you want to study philosophy, you have to study quantum physics, which is obviously so hard. But yeah. So I'm pretty obsessed with that. And look at that and try to. And then another thing that has nothing to do with this, but I really like is the history of science. And I'm reading a book right now of the history of surgery. Like, and exactly the history of surgery, like how surgery was developed. Like, I'm, I'm interested in the history of science. Yeah, those things.

Well, that is it. Martine, thank you so, so much for spending the time to be on the show because that was such an interesting conversation, a lot that I'm thinking about and I know the audience will love it. So I really, really appreciate it. And I will link all of his socials below so you guys can follow along on his journey and all the amazing and companies that he is working on. Thank you.

Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.