Zoltan Istvan - Transhumanist

Full transcript: Zoltan Istvan on London Real

6:07 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Zoltan Istvan, who is the founder and 2016 US presidential candidate of the transhumanist party, a political organization dedicated to putting science, health and technology at the forefront of American politics. Zoltan, you’ve explored over 100 countries, many as a journalist for the National Geographic Channel. You write for Wired UK Psychology Today and Vice’s Motherboard.

6:49 Welcome finally to London Real. Thanks so much for having me Brian. I appreciate it. Now it’s great to have you on. I’ve been watching you and over the last year, you had a fantastic show on Joe Rogan. I hear now that you’ve just broken out on Good Mythical Morning. My stepdaughter will now be super excited about that. You’re running for president this year. You know, so many exciting things happening. I want to jump in and really talk about transhumanism because I don’t think everyone understands it, including myself. But there was something that you wrote to me kind of in our pre-interview and always gives me ideas about people. And I think it might tell people a little bit more about you. And I was wondering if you could tell me about that time in Vietnam when you were over there for the National Geographic Channel. And you said you almost stepped on a land mine. And you said for four years you’ve been covering conflict zones and you just finally got tired with almost dying. And when I read that, I was just like, I kind of, I felt like I can kind of understand what you meant. And you said that that really changed you. You went home to America and you really started kind of on this journey of yours, I think, for transhumanism. Can you walk me through kind of what that happened and if that did influence what you’re doing now? Sure, sure. So I have, you know, always been interested in science fiction and transhumanism actually since I’ve been in college. But I think

8:04 Like a lot of other people, I was just not pursuing it as necessarily something of either a career or pursuing it full, you know, with my whole heart. Later in my late 20s, I had been working with the National Geographic Channel. One of the stories I was doing, well, I’d been doing actually a lot of conflict zone stories. Pakistan and India, the war there was one of the… Kashmir, you covered that war.

8:26 Yeah, and there was, I saw a lot of bad stuff really, you know, I got home and left some pretty heavy scars on me. But a story after that I was doing was in Vietnam where on bomb diggers, and there’s an entire, maybe 10 or 20,000 farmers who have given up farming and they now collect unexploded bombs that America dropped 30, 40 years ago, 50 years ago on the country, and they sell the metal. The problem is that most of the work is in the demilitarized zone where there’s a ton of landmines, and it’s an incredibly dangerous work. As a result, you know, you have about a 10 or 15% chance of losing a leg or losing your life by being blown up from a landmine over a period of a couple years of doing this type of work, very high risk work. So I was there filming this story for the National Geographic Channel, and after one week of filming the story, I was just totally a bundle of nerves, because you can’t cover this story and not worry about yourself stepping on landmines. And on one of the final days that I was filming, my guide from behind me came, pushed and tackled me down to the ground and said, look, look, and you know, lo and behold, in the ground, there was this half buried black object, and we looked very carefully and determined that it was a landmine as the guide had thought.

9:39 And I, it was just after four years of covering a lot of conflict zones and after a week of just worrying about landmines, that I was sort of just through with anything dangerous. And I was also through with this idea of dying. And that’s when I really, like if kind of a philosophical bomb went off in my head, where I thought I need to do something about this problem of dying, I need to actually help the transhumanism movement. The main goal of transhumanism, or the primary goal, is to overcome death, is to overcome suffering, and you know, through science and technology. So I thought about it, and I, after that story, I went home and began writing my novel, The Transhumanist Wager, which took a whole four years to write. And once it came out, the book did really well, and it launched my career as a futurist, and especially as a transhumanist. Wow, that’s quite a story. Is it, is it, I hear a lot of people that cover conflicts, you know, they do it as a rush. Is it kind of a young man’s game? Is it exciting and exploration? Is that kind of how you got into that?

10:37 Yes, that’s definitely it. I got to be honest, though, I think major media sends young people to conflict zones to prove themselves in the journalism world. And I think if you look, ask a lot of journalists that are trying to work themselves up the ladder, they have to be in some type of conflict zone to sort of make a reputation for themselves. It’s sort of a, you know, earn your badge type of thing. But the rush was one thing, and I enjoyed what I was doing. But, you know, as I got older, and I, you know, got crossed into my 30s, started having longer term girlfriends and relationships, you know, I wasn’t so keen on going to war zones anymore, or covering those kinds of conflict. I was getting older thinking, you know, I really don’t want to get hurt. I don’t want to lose a leg, or, you know, a bunch of limbs.

11:27 And so, you know, even if there was something really exciting about it, and sometimes I do dream of going back and covering a great war zone. I mean, that would be wonderful in this in the sense of it’s real journalism. But I don’t know, it’s certainly not something you can do for the rest of your life, and also try to be a part of a family or, you know, just the normal society because it’s incredible. It takes its toll. And the things you see, the rape victims you interview, I mean, in this my cashmere story, I made a documentary called Ponds of Paradise, which was recently acquired by The Age, an Australian company, and a third of the people I interviewed out of like 30 cried or wept. And I thought that’s too much, you know, you can’t have so many people weeping. That’s a tragedy. And so it’s the kind of thing, like I think a lot of people don’t realize with journalists, like how heavy it is also for the journalists.

12:21 Yeah, Amber Lyon, who was on Robyn as well, who’s gone on to set up Reset Knee, which is a whole fantastic website, you know, dedicated to psychedelics. But she used to cover a lot of conflict zones. And she realized that she took on a lot of that anxiety and pain. And when she finally got it out, she realized that she had PTSD symptoms from covering wars. And it’s just something you don’t think about, you don’t realize that the journalists take it all on themselves.

12:47 Yeah, no, I definitely had those symptoms, I would get back and it would take me two to three weeks to adjust. My girlfriends would be like, what’s wrong, you know, and they just didn’t get it’s just too much. You know, but then you get over it, and I you know, you kind of go on. And but so there are elements of it that are really brilliant in terms of it’s exciting. And you’re at you know, mostly, I think what journalists are trying to do, at least I was trying to do was like my documentary was on a humanitarian documentary, it was on essentially on refugees. And unfortunately, the refugees have some of the worst stories to be told, which is why they’re refugees. So, so it’s, it’s wonderful work to be helping them, but it definitely takes its psychological toll.

13:31 Right. So I understand that you want to get out of there and go and leave a safe life at home. And then when you’re saying, well, now I really want to live forever. And then that might be one of the tenets of transhumanism, I’m guessing that’s when most people say, Okay, what was that? So because people don’t necessarily understand or even accept the fact that we might be able to live forever. And for me, that’s the main thing about transhumanism, which is different than other things. Can you kind of describe that idea? Sure, you know, so I just like to say transhumanism is an international social movement of people trying to use science and technology to radically modify or improve the human body and improve the human experience. And that could range from anything from bionic hearts to artificial limbs, to cranial implants, to driverless cars, on mobile phones. Yeah, it depends on how you look at it. I mean, some people will say transhumanism was the first time a primate picked up a rock and made an axe out of it, or a hammer. But you know, I like to think of transhumanism more in terms of the radical science that we’re just encroaching upon in our lives and in civilization right now. But certainly an iPhone, I mean, if you look back in five years, how dramatic it’s in some smartphones, what it’s done to society, it’s very transhumanist. And I think the one thing, you know, I’d have your audience

14:56 Know is that the primary goal of transhumanism is to try to overcome biological death. And there’s a number of methods to do that. You can do that through either, for example, 3D printing new organs, organ failure being one of the main reasons people die, you can change your genetic structure and try to make it so you can stop aging, or you can maybe even do, you know, pretty science fictiony things like upload yourself into a machine. There’s a number of methods that transhumanists are approaching this problem of death. But, you know, they’re all ways to try to essentially make it so that we don’t have to die, kind of going back to even my Vietnam experience, which is just everyone at some point, all transhumanists at some point have had a revelation saying, wow, life is so wonderful, or life is so important to me that I want to find a way to preserve that life. It freaks a lot of people out. I’m sure religious people come to you, all sorts of other spiritual people come to you. They say, you know, death is not the end. It’s part of the process, you know. What do you say? Do you have arguments for all these different angles that hit you? Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think when you’re talking about religious people, that’s such a large conundrum that transhumanists have because, first off, most of the world is still quite religious. In America especially, you know, 85% of the people are religious. It means that they

16:22 Are not worried about dying as much because they’re just going to die and go meet their maker and, you know, have a perfect life. I’m an atheist. I’ve openly been one for a long time. Always have been? Not always. I had a Catholic upbringing and even went to Catholic school.

16:37 I actually became an atheist after I read the Bible when I was 18 years old. I cited, at one point, to read the Bible cover to cover and the moment I closed the very last page, I just was done because I just was too crazy, too much violence, too many insane things happening. I take it as wonderful literature but I did not believe in God after that. And so, didn’t believe in God or didn’t believe in the book? I didn’t believe in God. I just didn’t because I didn’t really have any other belief. But to be honest with you, I do sort of believe that there might be something else out there and this is a little bit crazy thinking but I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t another super intelligence and artificial intelligence that at some point in the 13.8 billion years that the universe has existed hasn’t come and evolved and created, you know, other types of worlds or other types of frameworks. I’ve written about this recently where I’m kind of a believer that with almost two billion planets out there that are habitable potentially, at least according to scientists, there’s a very strong chance other civilizations have existed or are existing right now. And it would be not a large, you know, a large step to say that they have already developed further than us. And we’re very close to developing a super intelligence. We’re only 50 years away probably from developing an artificial intelligence that is maybe 10,000 times smarter than us.

18:04 If we choose to go through with it. Do you believe it’s 50? I always felt like maybe we’ve always thought it was 50 years away, like, you know, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, if you look back in history, like everyone thinks we’re always there. I mean, it does feel like we’re 50 now, but are we? So, you know, I’m an optimist and I could be wrong. But a lot more experts these days are saying that that’s I think the big difference is that artificial intelligence, the whole technology field was quite small. 50 years ago, the amount of technologists on the planet was not that many. Now you have entire, you know, you have hundreds of millions of engineers.

18:38 And I think a lot of them are suggesting that we’re pretty close to it. It may not be 50, might be 100. But either way, on a kind of a chronological scale of evolutionary development, we’re at the very, very end. And that presents, you know, I think other civilizations had they, if they exist, would also have been, you know, at some point there and could it easily be way ahead of us. So when you talk about my atheism, it’s not a pure atheism. I don’t think any atheist can say they absolutely no for a fact God doesn’t exist. I just like to do that because I like to say I’m an atheist because from a historical context, I feel that religion has damaged the species, has held back science. The reason we’re not all living indefinitely now is because we broadly live in an anti-science culture, especially in America. That’s why you had, for example, George W. Bush stopped stem cell funding for seven, eight years. You know, I consider that a tragedy or this is why you have, for example, the Pope saying a condom usage in Africa is wrong or sinful. And then you have literally millions of people dying. The old Pope, the new Pope is for it, right? No, the old he he’s not as against it, but he still hasn’t come out 100% and said, this is okay. So there are problems that we really need someone to stand up and say, well, if it’s in the best interest of longevity, if it’s in the best interest of health, then it’s in the best interest of the people. Okay, that’s something we have.

20:03 If we have a new world that we’re going to in 50 years, whether it could be this kind of entity that is this artificial intelligence entity, are you kind of saying with your presidential run that our current political structure isn’t ready for that isn’t ready to handle it much like with George Bush, he wasn’t able to embrace the technology that would save us. Is that kind of why you’re running? Yeah, 100%. You know, as I’ve explained to people before, I’m not going to win this time around. And, you know, there’s virtually no chance of that unless, you know, a couple of billionaires put some money behind me right now. Is that okay to say your followers? No, no, I’m not. I don’t want to lie to anyone because I have too many journalists covering me and I have to remain, you know, realistic. And it’s a money machine.

20:50 It’s so sad. It’s very upsetting. But yes, my platform is very much to try to change the national conversation, to get other people, including the one, the potential politicians who are going to win the presidency, to talk about designer babies, to talk about how is the military going to handle artificial intelligence? How are we going to handle it if Russia gets artificial intelligence first? To talk about the what are we going to do with social security, not because we’re running out of money, but because everybody’s going to live to 150 and beyond over the next 20 or 30 years. These are incredibly important concepts and very few people are addressing them. In fact, right now I’m writing an article for Vice on the idea of marriage and living indefinitely. Will people want to get married if they know their marriage is now for potentially 10,000 years? It’s a lot different than let’s say the historical average, which is like 25 or 27 years, assuming no tragedy occurs in the marriage. The whole set of structures that we have institutionalized are going to be changing. And it’s very important that governments and politicians start addressing them, but they’re not because they’re such thorny topics. We’re never going to get Hillary Clinton to discuss designer babies because it’s just too dangerous of a topic. And should she say something the wrong way, her entire campaign could go the wrong way.

22:14 Sure. You see that with the NRA. I mean, you see Obama tries to breach it every now and then. Now he’s given up, it seems. He said, you know, you see these major tragedies. It seems obvious to do this, but you know, if you even begin to say something about the gun lobby, you’re politically dead. So people don’t. Is it analogous to what you’re talking about?

22:34 100%. So this is the key is because I’m quite certain I’m not going to win, I have the luxury of being honest. And this is a true luxury in politics that you can actually come out and say something not based on whether you’re going to win or lose, but based on what you think is the truth and what and using reason to determine that truth. And so I’m just trying to interject some stuff into the national conversation. And through my national columns, I’m likely able to do that. And a lot of those ideas are catching on, not necessarily changing the way people believe, but saying, wow, there really is something different. If we do have artificial wounds to give birth in 20 years time, which we probably will, how does that change the abortion picture? Because it actually makes the Democrats will go one side and the conservatives go the other side. And it actually makes them go on opposite sides for a little bit. It’s a very interesting dilemma.

23:26 And here we’ve had a 50 year history or a 40 year history of the abortion debate. So you can see how radical technology is going to be changing politics and some of the core institutions that countries around the world have. You know, what I find fascinating about you is quite frankly, the media attention you’re getting recently. Now we’ve had guests in the past. We’ve had Aubrey de Grey here speaking about his ideas as far as age. You know, we’ve had Jason Silva here talking about singularity. But you know, Jason gets more exposure for the brain games and less for the singularity. And for a lot of people that come on here, they talk about their concepts, but they’re not embraced. You seem to be getting embraced, whether it’s vice following you on the presidential tour, or like I said earlier, a Good Mythical Morning, you know, talking about you, which really opens you up to big audiences. Why? Why? Why do you think people are reaching out and talking about issues that a couple of years ago, you really, you might be getting no press coverage? Well, I think there’s a twofold reason. The first reason is that it’s actually right now that I think a lot of people are realizing how incredibly important technology and science is. We’re at a moment just in the last two years when transhumanism has emerged, because it’s actually a realistic topic to discuss. So that’s one thing. And I think the, you know,

24:41 The second reason is, has a lot to do with my past, having been a journalist for National Geographic, and also, I worked with the New York Times for a number of years as well, doing what we call New York Times Syndicate National Geographic Service articles. And it gave me, I think, a lot of credibility, because I’ve been with, you know, some of the two of the top media companies as a journalist who’s kind of been a stickler in facts. And it enabled me to sort of walk into a lot of these other large media companies and raise a voice and have that voice be something that could be trusted. And I think that’s very important, because you’re talking about concepts that are, half the people think are totally wacky, and the other half are like, hmm, is this, is this for real? And if it is for real, it’s very important. And so it’s hard to convince people, but once you convince them, I think they all realize that, wow, we probably all better be talking about this stuff. Is there any, like, two or three topics that you think really bring it to people’s consciousness? I mean, when I think about an iPhone, and the fact that people have it on their bodies at all times, and are holding against their head, when I see a movie like her, and just see humans interacting with an OS that seems to be a human like being, I mean, those really bring it home for me. Is it other pieces that really got people’s attention more than others? Well, you know, everyone likes the far out concepts, just from like,

26:03 You know, looking at a media perspective, artificial, robotic, you know, artificial limbs that are tied to your brain, or exoskeleton suits, or, you know, even just, for example, driverless cars were, for example, you’re not going to have any more drunk driving accidents. Those are all amazing topics. But I think the one topic that really hits people is the ones that matter to them today. And the one I speak a lot about is robotic hearts, because heart disease runs in my own family, my father, who’s still alive, but has had three heart attacks. And I think, you know, cardiovascular disease being the number one killer in America and around the world. So when you talk about robotic hearts, I think a lot of people listen. And they listen because it’s actually something that they think, wow, if it means living an extra 20 years, it’s something I might electively do at some point in the future, too. And we are already having robotic hearts put in people, and France has done a few of them now. And it’s something that I’ve advocated for with my campaign, saying, you know, for example, had I would I be elected president, I would, you know, put a huge amount of money, maybe a billion dollars into it, and just say, let us develop a robotic heart, let us eliminate cardiovascular disease from the public. Because if we can do that, you can control diabetes a lot more, you can you can make people more active, you can make

27:21 Them live longer, it helps all the other organs out. There’s an amazing amount of things you can do. And then it gets wacky, too. You know, you can control your robotic heart with your iPhone. So if you want to sleep, you can tone it down a little to sleep better or meditate. Or if you want to have crazy sex, you can speed it up. You know, the the ideas of what you can do with some of these robotic organs is amazing. And I think a lot of people like that kind of topic, and it really resonates with them. I think with heart disease, it affects people today, you know, so it affects their life or someone they love. So I can see them latching on. You know, I find that I need to get away from technology more these days. I find that I get so enveloped in it. Maybe it’s because, you know, we broadcast everything and transfer all the knowledge on social media platforms. But I find when I actually get away and can get away from the Twitter feed and the phone, that I feel more human. And so I want to ask you, if that’s the way I feel, do I really want to go somewhere where my phone is controlling my heart? So, you know, that is the question. And I agree with you, because sometimes I have too much technology myself. And you can talk about it all day long, but sometimes it’s just nice to sit back and look at the ocean and you know, and that’s it.

28:33 But you know, I think when you actually look at the health benefits and you realize that it’s not just an alternative of stepping away from it, it’s really a matter of living longer. If you can guarantee yourself an extra 25 years your life or 30% of your life, then it becomes something very meaningful, something that one can be almost obsessive about, because it’s that much more life. And I think that’s really the hook of transhumanism is that you’re giving people life, you’re giving them better health so they can do more things, that they can enjoy their families, they don’t have to watch, you know, think, oh, I’m dying now from some disease and my, you know, grandchildren are just three or four years old. These are the kinds of things that transhumanism actually is doing for people. And it’s one of the reasons, it’s one of the reasons I think it’s catching on is because everyone’s starting to say, yeah, transhumanism is a good thing. It’s not a religious thing. It’s not even a philosophical thing. It’s as one of our advisors at the transhumanist party said the other day, she said, it’s common sense.

29:33 Transhumanism is just plain common sense. It’s interesting. And a lot of people say people use, you know, religion and those kind of pieces to control people and to keep things from developing in the future. And I’m just thinking if there isn’t a transhumanist party, if it is a money controlled or religious controlled, you know, government, does that keep the things you’re talking about from happening? Does that keep those robotic cards from being developed or keep the stem cell research from happening? Or would we evolve anyways without a transhumanist party? Well, I think the transhumanist party is one of the very first steps of legitimizing the transhumanist movement, not legitimizing it in sense of a movement, but adding that political element that really has some teeth. And that’s what’s important. I mean, I’m not a big fan of attorneys, but you do need transhumanist attorneys so that we can present a bill of cyborg rights.

30:27 We can take, you know, when a government, for example, you know, says no more to stem cells, we can go back there and say, but by not doing so, you’re actually taking people’s lives in a very literal sense. You’re stopping their health and therefore that lessens their lives. And it hurts. It hurts their families and it hurts society. It hurts the economy. If you can prove those things and you have a real good argument for saying that, well, transhumanist technology is always in the best interest of its people. And I think this is what’s really important to me, especially when you’re talking about the United States Congress is at this moment, 100% religious.

31:05 There, as far as I know, there’s not one atheist declared atheist in the United States government right now. You couldn’t get elected now. Yeah. Neither in the Supreme Court, and of course, not in the presidency. So what do you talk about separation of, you know, church and state, but if 100% are religious and ultimately believe in an afterlife in some God in the sky, then of course they’re controlling, you know, the science that’s going out. And of course, they’re not pushing for the science that should be, you know, coming through the pipeline and keeping us indefinitely alive. And I also worry that, you know, with the advent of artificial intelligence, maybe we’re going to have people convert artificial intelligence or something like that too, which then just propagates this entire idea of, you know, religious indoctrination again and again. I mean, I can guard artificial intelligence into being religious. Yeah. So I’ve written an article about this for Gizmodo work. There are people out there that want to, once robots become smart enough, use them as pastors and use them as and teach them that the blood of Christ is the only way to get the salvation. What’s wrong with that? Well, I think there’s a lot wrong with it. I think it’s historically, but you want to embrace the technology, but they can’t use it for their means. It’s not that they can’t use it. You know, of course I would allow them to, the

32:24 Transhumous party welcomes religious people. But I try to say that you have to remain reasonable because technology was developed through reason, through the kind of the rationality in our minds. So we need to stick with that. And that means you can’t bring 2000 year old baggage just because it means something to you feeling wise. You need to step beyond this leap of faith idea and say, well, two plus two equals four. And if you can convince me of that, then that’s a whole different story, something rational. But, you know, we ask that people with their faith try to be reasonable about it if they’re going to bring it into the transhumanism movement. What’s it like running for president? Can you just give me a few of the nuts and bolts? Everyone wants to know.

33:06 Do you get a secret service detail or do you have to have a certain poll numbers? How do you fund it? Your tour bus, where is it going to be going? I’m curious more than anything. Sure. Well, I got to be honest, it’s incredibly easy to declare you’re running for president.

33:19 You file with the FEC, you know, Federal Elections Commission, and it’s literally can be all done online. The problem is really the financing. It’s incredibly nitpicky. There’s like 130 page booklet you got to learn. And so you don’t do any of the rules wrong.

33:36 Regarding financing, currently, I actually haven’t been taking any money so far for my own presidential campaign. I have been directing all money so far to the party. And part of the reason is that I’ve been funding my own campaign and I have enough resources to do so. I used to have a real estate business and I sold it. And so I’m luckily able to do a lot of the campaign without reaching out to other donors so far. If I was to make a real run to try to, you know, take votes away, it would take, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. So that’s out of my range.

34:12 Unfortunately, it’s sort of a, I’m against the way the system is set up in America. Only the rich can ultimately win the presidency and only through the Republican or Democratic, you know, parties. So I’m trying to make a bit of a stand by saying that I’m not going to do it their way. I’m going to do it my way where I just use my own resources and I use my own media talents to reach out and say, hey, let’s vote someone, you know, a middle class person that is just normal and he doesn’t belong and have his hands in any pockets. There’s no lobbyist influencing me whatsoever. In fact, the only thing I’m influenced in is to make people live longer and to make myself live longer. So that’s been the main premise of my campaign. But our bus tour is scheduled to, hopefully we’re a little bit late because we’ve had so much attention to the campaign that I’ve been a little bit overwhelmed, frankly. We had been planning to start in the middle of July. I think it’s going to be pushed to the very end of July.

35:10 We are buying a bus and we’re going to be touring all year round. It’s not just a bus tour to go to events. It’s a bus tour to go to places, to protest, to start some conflicts, to cause controversy. We’re going to, you know, we have a whole set agenda of rolling out places and trying to be a bit of a nuisance because I think the American system, to some extent, especially electing its president, is broken. And we want to make sure that our bus rolls in front of the Capitol building and we, maybe with a bunch of robots, walk up the steps of the Capitol building and deliver a cyborg bill of rights. And I, you know, I want to make sure it’s a scene.

35:49 I want it to be a scene because I think what’s happening is we don’t have even the basics of these kinds of things in place. We don’t even have the basics of the kind of designer baby technology, even though, you know, as you probably read two months ago, China has now developed all the, what most of the technology to do designer babies. We don’t have infrastructure or legal stuff in place. I was recently interviewed and the person was writing an article on on a woman who had been raped in virtual reality. And I asked, well, what did she go to the authorities? And she said she did, but the authorities said, well, we don’t even have legal laws defining that yet. So this is the kind of thing that transhumous party in my campaign is trying to establish. We’re trying to go where no one has gone before and start establishing the very basic principles of the new transhumous age upon us.

36:37 Ideas and virtual reality, cyborg rights. What does it mean to live in deathly? Will people still end up having children if they know they’re going to live a thousand years? Maybe they won’t have children for the first 500 years. Well, that will change global population.

36:50 How can we make sure we use green technology to actually restore the planet back to upper steam condition? These are the kinds of things we’re really trying to push. It’s not social security. It’s not taxes. It’s not the other stuff, foreign policy that Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush are talking about. We’re talking about unique stuff that I think a lot of people have never heard about. It’s fascinating. And do those, say you’re elected this year, I mean, next year, what would you focus on right away? Would it be those topics, cyborg bill rights, these kinds of things? And where does the foreign policy in the military-industrial complex and taxation come about in transhumanism? Well, you know, I’ve increasingly developed a real comprehensive plan because I have been asked a lot of questions like, what would you do in the first 100 days in office? To begin with, I think I probably wouldn’t change that much immediately because I think it would be such a dramatic shift for the country to have somebody, a transhumanist in there with what many people consider rather crazy ideas.

37:48 But I think the most important thing I would try to say is, I’m here for the citizens’ health. That’s what I’m here for, your health. What is it that we can do to make the average citizens’ health better, the average citizen to live longer? So the very first thing I would start doing is start looking at the military where we spend 20% of America’s GDP and say, do we really need to spend 20% on military when we only spend 2% on science in America? That’s the discrepancy. So I would like to bring that down to something like 10% on the military and 10% on science, which would be a five-fold increase for science, medicine, life extension science. Instead of a military-industrial complex, how about a medical or a scientific industrial complex? I also advocate for free education both at the preschool level and at the college level. In fact, I am endorsing a policy of mandatory college. Part of the reason I am endorsing a policy of mandatory college is because the people that are starting to go to college today are not just going to be living to 85 like we’re living. They’re easily going to be living to 120.

38:54 So at some point, we’re going to have to raise the level of education. You can’t just have, you know, when the education standards were built in America, it was done in the 1960s when people were living 60 to 60 and 70. Now they’re living to almost 90. Soon they’re going to be living to 120, but education levels haven’t increased. They should increase as society is longer.

39:14 It’s a bigger investment and it pays off in a longer period. So these are some of the ideas I would like to push through the system. We can create an educational industrial complex, too. We would have to build new colleges, build new schools, new preschools, let every kid start school at age two. The more education, the better for society because we’re getting to an era when robots are going to be taking most of the jobs probably over the next 20 years. And so what are people going to do? Well, one thing I know for sure is that when people are more educated, they tend to find things to do. I’m not saying they’re going to have new jobs, but maybe they’ll be artists. Maybe they’ll all want to do podcasts.

39:49 Maybe they’ll, you know, they’ll want to promote transhumanism like me. Whatever it is that they want to do, they’re going to have passion and, you know, the kind of, I think, educational background behind them to help them. And I think that’s a great thing. And so, you know, education is one of the main things we’re pushing as well as putting a huge amount more funding into medicine, science, and technology for the American citizenry’s help. Isn’t healthcare already just 18% of GDP or something absolutely ridiculous with a large part of that going in at the end of someone’s life? I mean, you know, you’re talking about, you know, Obamacare has talked a lot about we’re in the UK, we don’t hear it all. But is there something really wrong with the current way government treats medicine?

40:32 Yes. And when I talk about, you know, putting money into health, I don’t mean putting into healthcare. I think healthcare is sort of like bandaid care is what I often call it, because that’s basically what a lot of the healthcare is doing is they’re not actually trying to, for example, with my father, who’s had three heart attacks, and he’s had, you know, veins all over his legs put in here in his arms, and, you know, mismatched all over. They’re trying to keep him alive. And I want to eliminate the cardiovascular disease problem.

41:01 That’s his problem. And you can only do that with better, brand new parts, you can’t just keep exchanging things. And every, you know, three months, he has a new problem, and he has to go back in. So I am advocating for a system, not necessarily of healthcare, but a kind of a cure care, where instead of giving bandaids, you actually wipe out entire problems. You know, one of the things it’s like, it’s a little bit sad that last year we went through the Ebola scare.

41:28 We can easily wipe Ebola off the planet. We’ve already wiped huge amounts of diseases, not necessarily off the planet, but to a point when they just don’t affect society as they do. You know, it’s brokalosis. I mean, there’s a lot of polio, there’s a lot of these things that over the last hundred years, we’ve done a very good job of eradicating. We need to do the same thing with other diseases like Ebola. We shouldn’t have these in SARS. We shouldn’t have these things come up and, you know, go through the media and scare everyone.

41:55 You’re saying we can wipe that out if we just spent 100 million or spent the concentrated effort on that. Absolutely. I think in fact, I think 100 million would easily wipe out Ebola. And the reason we don’t is because we just don’t want to dedicate the resources. We want to write all the articles and freak out about it, but that money goes somewhere else. Yeah, it goes.

42:10 Even Bill Gates isn’t getting that money ready. Yeah, it goes to the trillions of dollars we spend on healthcare, on bandaid care. You know what I mean? And this is not necessarily the best way to actually move society forward. The best way is a complete revamp of the system.

42:26 I call all this baggage culture because it seems like every generation just says, well, we didn’t make that much progress, but let’s go a little bit forward, except they’re always going on top of the problems they already have and still carrying those problems with them. And sometimes you really just got to revamp the entire system and say, okay, let’s sweep everything away and let’s start anew. For example, you know, the tax code, it’s like, you know, we have millions of employees working on dealing with this crazy American tax code.

42:54 Instead of just having a simple flat tax, everyone pays the same thing. Please don’t bother me with any more. Everyone does the same thing. That’s what a democracy is about. Instead of a gazillion loopholes. And that may not be what Wall Street wants to hear.

43:08 It may not be with a lot of even the poor people want to hear because they, many of them don’t pay taxes, but it’s the fair thing to do. And I think a lot of people just are forgetting that we can also go back to a very fair society where everything is really straightforward. It doesn’t have to be as complex as that. Like I was saying, there’s a 130 page book on presidential finances. And it was part of the reason I said, I don’t even want to take any money because I can’t stay within every little single rule that takes a team of accountants to make sure you do it right. And I thought, well, a third party doesn’t have a team of accountants. They barely even have a team of officers. And so again, it’s so like the system’s entirely stacked up. So only the very wealthiest, the two parties we have in America can actually play the game. And it needs to be completely swept away and restarted from the beginning and let leaders emerge without it being through the hands of lobbyists. Let leaders emerge without it being based on the dollar sign. Let them emerge because they have characters in charisma to lead the country forward. One thing is for sure, you look like a president. You can’t disagree with that. Well, thank you. I mean, you’re the counterculture guy, the transhumanist. Where are the dreadlocks? Where are the tattoos? Where’s all that? You look like you could come out of Congress yourself. You know what they said on Good Mythical

44:29 Morning was, I look like a golfer. I was thinking Larry Hamilton, the surfer. Oh, yes, yes. So you get asked that a lot. Well, yeah, I do. And I get asked, you know, what kind of pills do I do?

44:41 And where are my chips? And I’m actually one of my on one of my film projects, I’m going to get shipped on my Buffs tour. But yeah, I mean, I think what’s happening is a larger amount of transhumanists are actually not as fringe as we as maybe it once seemed. And I’m happy to be, you know, kind of a normal guy, have a business. I’m married, I have kids, I change diapers. I mean, I do the do it all. And I’m happy to, you know, transhumanism is becoming more mainstream. And just it now it’s like it goes all the way across the spectrum. I just recently wrote an LGBT article, a very, you know, the transhumanist movement and the party is very pro LGBT. We’re quite happy with the with the gay marriage approval by the Supreme Court. But we’re all across the board. It doesn’t matter where it is. In fact, we have some transhumous who want to become fish. And that’s exactly correct. But I just happen to be, you know, someone who’s just a normal guy and really just don’t want to die and love technology. But some of the hard times I have with transhumanism is I don’t feel like I can dig my teeth into your platform, as in I can’t be like, okay, they believe in this, this and this. And so like you said, there’s a it’s very broad, it feels sometimes be too broad to me. Oh, it is. And you know, that’s been one of the reasons why the transhumanist movement, which has been here for 30 years, has not grown as far as it has. And part of the reason

46:04 Is that there are so many there’s anarcho capitalist, there’s libertarians, there’s the socialist libertarians, I mean, there’s the leftist the rightist, it’s a faction group. And until and which is one of the reasons why I made the transhumous party totally centric. Yeah, I subscribed to quite a few libertarian ideas myself, with some leftist leaning things. But I formed the transhumous party to be all encompassing so that people could just say, well, whatever it is that you believe in, as long as you’re not doing harm to someone else, please join us. We’re centric. You know, it’s not politics, it’s centric. And I know a lot of people complain about what you’re talking about, we’re trying to hone it in. But you know, when you talk about what technology is doing to the species, it’s such a broad topic. You know, it’s hard to actually say, you know, because between the transhumanist, there’s a whole bunch of subsets, you have the biohackers, you have the Singular Terrians, you have the cry, the cryonics people, you know, you have the techno libertarians, they’re more interested in their libertarianism than transhumanism. And then you have a whole bunch of other sub little groups. And and then just people who call themselves futurists who subscribe to some transhumous ideas. So it’s all across the board. And yet it’s always this techno optimist message, which is, hey, technology is something that we should be optimistic about.

47:25 Yeah, no, I understand what you’re saying. It’s just hard for me to sometimes I have guests on the show, and they talk to me about a great idea. But it’s so broad that I can’t dig in. And it feels like sometimes they don’t want to put their line in the sand, because they don’t know yet. And so then we talk about it. And we never talk about it again, the topic. And so when I hear what you’re talking about with transhumanism, a lot of it makes sense. When you say cyborg rights, and stem cell and robotic stuff, and let’s cure these diseases. And I’m like, okay, that’s a platform that I can either agree or disagree. But without that, I feel like it’s hard for me to either be pro or against, because it’s too big. Yeah, no, yeah, I totally understand. It is funny, even in the community, there is so much, you know, I hate to say this on air, but there is so much arguing going on constantly. And it’s so difficult to get all the groups to agree. And, you know, the transhumanist movement itself from the transhumanist association, which then became kind of humanity plus, as it went through a transformation, and some groups broke off in Italy, and some groups broke off in Russia, you know, it’s been over the last 20 years, there’s been a huge amount of what I would say sort of infighting or arguments inside the community as people have tried to form it. And it’s only recently that it sort of emerged as this national or international known thing where

48:50 It reflects a broader sense of technology moving forward and dramatically affecting the species. I’m really happy about that, because when I first, you know, when I first released my book, a lot of people were still even weary of the word transhumanism, you know, they were just like, oh, so that’s not, that word’s just not going to work with society. They combined it too much with transgenderism or what are trans, some other trans word. But what’s happened, of course, is all these trans words have become more popular as people have lessened any of their hostility towards it. You know, for example, the transgender movement in the last five years has made major strides. And so as a result, transhumanism, which is not related necessarily in any way to that, has also made strides in terms of what the mean, what the word means in people’s minds. And most importantly, is that media is using it as a simple way, a simple and efficient way to describe a kind of a techno optimistic version of technology affecting humankind. And that’s why I’m really excited about so many of the speeches I’ve been getting lately is because big companies and big media places are saying, fine, let’s talk about transhumanism as a way to explain a lot about technology, because technology without transhumanism is just like, you know, oh, using a computer.

50:09 But technology, when you talk about transhumanism is how does that computer affect your overall health, your overall well being, right? Let’s put some ideas in place, some rules in place before it gets out of control. Of course, of course. How are you received in Europe? I mean, obviously, because you know, we’re in London. I’m an American, but I haven’t been there for 13 years, I always forget that there’s such a religious right there. And I always forget what it’s like, I always forget how conservative American acts, how, what’s the word I was, how puritan it is.

50:40 And when you get over to Europe, and when you get here in London, but when you get over to France, then it’s, you know, it’s completely different idea of what they accept about people and how people exist. How are you received here? So I am received in Europe, in my opinion, far better than America. And, you know, not to bash American anyway, but Europe is ahead when it comes to quite a few of its social leanings, quite a few of its philosophical perspectives.

51:09 There’s a lot less religiosity here in this continent. There’s a lot less, they’re just closer to understanding community. They’re closer to understanding, you know, I think the EU, at least the essence of it of trying to work together is a much, a realistic attempt at something that is beautiful in a way, I think eventually all will probably have one global government, maybe 30 years down the road. It’s flawed, but it does force people to collaborate. Of course. And collaboration is really important when you’re talking about potentially what is best for humanity, or at least what seems best. I’m not saying it actually is best, but on a kind of noble level, it seems very noble. And I think in America, we have huge divides. You can see it in the racial conflicts. You can see it in the gender conflicts. You can see it in what a big thing legalizing gay marriage was, you know, I was happy that we legalized gay marriage, of course, but I’ve explained to people, maybe we shouldn’t emphasize marriage so much. Why are we so fixated on marriage? Well, it’s in the Bible, you know, the yoke of Jesus. You know, we can have a single mom can have a wonderful child, a single dad can have a wonderful family. We don’t need to emphasize we can have community things that help out.

52:25 We don’t have to be so fixated that just like we were 100 years ago, that it has to be this way. And we have to have the legal bounds. We all have to follow down that path. We can break some of the institutions. And I’m just writing an article on this. Great point. I didn’t think about it.

52:41 And I’ve explained this, you know, that I’m thrilled that we actually now have gay marriage. It was a big symbolic step. But I’m just not sure of what people are fighting for was really the real fight. The real fight was to not be discriminated against in any way, not to take one of their own institutions and bring it into our own perspective. And so I think the next battle is going to be getting over some of these things. You know, I’m pretty sure that marriage won’t last through the century, because when people start uploading themselves, and we have the nanotechnology, the ability to change our genders on demand, potentially in 50 years, or, you know, people want to do it just for a year, whatever things are going to change dramatically. I told my wife the other day, I said, you know, if you if a robotic arm comes onto the market, and it’s better than my arm, I’m going to electively get it. Because I like the idea of upgrading myself. Well, she wasn’t thrilled with that. She said, Well, I don’t know if I want a husband who has a robotic arm, it’s cold. I’m like, well, probably have a heater, I’ll probably feel nice. But that’s not the point.

53:45 The point is something may not work with it. But this shows some of the different elements of how marriage and how changing society because of technology may not adapt to these old institutions, maybe we’ll have something other than marriage, maybe we’ll have other types of commitments that are less formal. And, you know, don’t, don’t drag 50%, or 40% of the population through divorce, where finances get affected, and all these other things. So I’m, you know, I’m, it’s transhumanism, not just about, you know, technology affecting us and our bodies, it’s also about changing some of the social institutions that might be holding us back, or might just might not be useful anymore, in such a way, I’m not trying to change everything, I’m not trying to say, let’s do away with it. But it shouldn’t be scorned upon to say, I’m never going to get married, and I’m just going to pursue my career and my passion for the rest of my life.

54:38 But in America, that’s that would be weird to say that. I’m with you on challenging marriage all the way. You just mentioned uploading yourself, which is kind of one of the tenants or one of the ideas of transhumanism that you could one day upload yourself maybe to the cloud and then exist in that cloud. You know, the older I get, the more I finally realize that I’m, that my brain is more connected to my body than I ever thought it was. When I was younger, it was all about my body taking my brain where the brain wanted to go. But through just living longer and being around, I feel that there is a major important feedback loop with my body, and my brain and my body aging and how my brain needs to change. And so the concept of uploading myself, for me, seems crazy. It seems unrealistic. I’m sure you hear people say that. What do you tell people? Yeah, no. In fact, I was just at the Verge three or four days ago, and I got kind of beat up by the science editor because she was saying the same thing. And she was saying you really need the body, so the mind uploading concept may not work. But you know, my argument is that you probably able to simulate what the body is like and add those algorithms to your virtual mind in whatever computer. So it’s something that we’ll be able to simulate so that you’ll still feel you have it, or if the consciousness really needs the body, it’s something that can also be created inside the machine to resemble exactly what it was like,

56:02 If it’s really that necessary. But I bring up that argument because that is an important argument, and the person that was telling it to me was a pretty experienced scientist. I’m a big fan of the mind uploading concept. I think the idea of it’s so brilliant. I also think it’s probably not something we’re going to do, like we’re just going to upload and let our body go to hell. We’re probably going to upload and have two of us. And that’s what I like too. The idea is that it’s not just one Zoltan, it’s two Zolts. Or a 30 year old version and a 35 year old version.

56:32 Yeah, you know, I mean, wouldn’t you want a second Brian, at least in some computer, especially if you have a cranial implant in your… The backup. Yeah, well, in your human self, you can talk to your artificial self all the time. It’ll be like, Brian, I think you should go left here. It’s going to be shorter to go that way. It would be interesting if I could consult my 10 year old self and my 15 and 20 year old self every year and be like, what do you guys think?

56:53 My 10 year old self would be like, whatever, I want to do this, the 20 year old and the 30 year old. You know, in a weird way, I’m getting snapshots of people here that in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years time, your kids will watch. And they’ll be like, oh, that’s what dad was like in 2015 when he was running for president. And in a weird way, we’re not getting an interactive piece, but we’re getting a snapshot of you. And so that’s interesting. Yeah, no, no, totally. I’m, I actually, I know people think it’s really weird to have two of your own selves out there, but I think they would probably work pretty closely for the best interest of the other. And in fact, when I had brought this up with the editors, the Verge, one guy said the obvious thing, which is like, well, I’ll form an army of myself then. And of course, probably people would do that. You know, you’d have entire construction teams of yourselves. But anyways, that’s pretty far fetched and crazy. But I think the idea of uploading yourself and having a second self is really an interesting concept. And I think I would love to philosophically have it, ask myself questions, have something watching over me, it’d be like Lincoln saying about the angels on your shoulder, you know, you’d have somebody watching over you all the time. And so I’m a big fan of those developing technologies, I would like to have a cranial implant that is always connected to something that is helping me with my moral decisions, something that is helping

58:11 Me with my philosophical decisions, just helping me. The beauty of being human is making those mistakes. Making those mistakes, yes. Right? No, you’ve heard that argument before. No, it’s true.

58:19 Or your body failing at a tragic moment, or someone getting hit by lightning, or having a massive coronary and it reminds us that we’re mortal, and then we make changes, and we actually take care of the kids as opposed to worrying about our career. You know, I mean, these are all engineered into the human equation, aren’t they? And you’re talking about engineering those things out. Yeah, it’s true. I worry too about losing this sense of mistakes, but I mean, society, history, civilization, evolution is a process of doing away with the excess or the bad stuff. The randomness of life. Yeah. And organizing it and becoming more perfect, or more, at least from a survivability point of view. And I think that’s kind of where we’re also going as human beings. Eventually, we won’t, you know, eventually we’ll have all parts of our physicality covered. I won’t sweat. I won’t make mistakes when I say mispronunciations. You know, I just wrote an article on this saying that eventually we’re going to have a lot of reality be edited for us, and these typos that we have in reality, through either cranial implants or… Like the spell check of talking. Exactly. You know, everyone’s a newscaster now. Yeah, exactly. You’ll never make a mistake, you know. And this is something that probably going to make somebody a billion dollars if they can invent such a thing, but also will be very useful, you know. I mean, just imagine going out in the first date and

59:45 Always being able to say the perfect thing and, you know, remember something from Shakespeare. You know, there will be no first dates because they would have already gone out with the previous version. Yeah, yeah, it’s true. I mean, yeah, you’re right there. No, but what I’m finding fascinating is that, look, let’s be honest, these things are going to happen, just like spell check has happened. And so now, if anyone ever sends me an email that has a spelling error, it’s an IQ test more than a spell check test. And so, like, we’re going to get there with all these technologies. So I guess we might as well have some processes in place and be ready for it when it does. I guess that’s kind of what you’re saying. The other thing I thought of when we were just talking there is that we’ll all be uploaded and we’ll all be having these conversations and some hard drive that’s in Nevada, you know, run by Google. And that’ll be the future of our species and the more I’ll be in this hard drive continuing. It seems like a sad existence.

1:00:34 It does. But think inside that hard drive, you will see and do things you’ve never even imagined before. Your computational power would be 10,000 times a million times more than what it is now. We might have senses we never even understood in a digital environment. Will that make my human experience better? Aren’t I ignoring all my senses now?

1:00:56 Well, I mean, the camera’s on. You know, human might end up being like we see an ant now, you know, I mean, we’ll look at a human experience and be, wow, that was that was so trivial when when we could have so much more when we now live in, you know, kind of four dimensional realities with, I don’t know, 200 senses that all combining all at once, you know, and then we’re tied to other people hive mind concepts where we can hear each other’s thoughts and it can get really crazy really quickly. But the thing is, it’s very complex. It might be very, very beautiful. It might be more beautiful than anything we’ve ever seen. And we look back and think, well, wow, the human being wasn’t a very beautiful creature. It wasn’t very complex creature. And I think complexity is something that we are sort of heading towards no matter what happens. And I believe in a lot of beauty and complexity. I think that’s really what I’m kind of after is how when you talk about reality, our reality right now is just kind of the mechanisms in our brain, our billion cells.

1:01:58 But what if we have 20 trillion cells or 20 trillion connectors? Our realities could be that much more complex, that much more great, that much more complex, we can get lost, you know, in just our minds. I mean, we already do, but we can get even, you know, in a real world, we could find the entire universe in our head. So there’s a lot of places we can go. And that’s one of the things why I’m so excited about transhumanism is because the whole thing is just getting better and better. It’s not going to become, oh, he’s a cold machine now. No, being a cold machine is not at all the way to look at it. It’s looking at it like that machine now has, you know, 10,000 times the complexity and possibilities of the human brain. And who knows how much smarter and more intelligence, more complex, the poetry, the music, the, you know, any kind of thing, just the exercise, surfing, whatever kind of sport, that thing’s going to be able to do it a lot better than we can do it. And it might even enjoy it more. So I’m looking forward to those futures. There’s some people that don’t like you out there. Alex Jones doesn’t like you.

1:03:05 Some people say you’re teaching children that dying is bad. And some people say we’re not ready to merge with technology. Death isn’t wrong. What do you say? But you write articles that confront these people. I was reading an article about debunking transhumanism and I realized you wrote it. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. Alex Jones and all those people, you know, the conspiracy theorists love bashing my work and they, it shows up like almost weekly now, or, you know, in their, they’re, they generally attack it from a Abrahamic or Judeo-Christian viewpoint, even if they’re not necessarily pushing that angle. So naturally they don’t want to die because they feel there’s a maker. They also feel that the elite are using transhumanism to leave the rest of people behind and that inequality is going to grow until there’s massive revolutions and only the one percenters rule everybody. I don’t know. I don’t subscribe to that at all.

1:04:04 I think the new wave of entrepreneurs, the Mark Zuckerberg’s, the Bill Gates, the LMS, these are very social people and I think if anything they’re much better than the the robber barons of yesteryear. They’re the kind of people like, if Mark Zuckerberg does something that’s not humanitarian, let’s say, or democratic, people are going to leave Facebook and his company dies. So the way social media is set up is the rich have to be supportive of transhumanism for the people and that’s one of the main conspiracy theories is that the rich, the build-emergs, are going to use transhumanism to become gods and leave everyone else. But the cell phone is a very good example. Everyone in the world has cell phones, even in mud hut villages in Africa, they don’t have roads yet. There’s profit in it. Yes, well sure, but profit is a good incentive, especially if it’s guided by some type of, you know, democratic morals and I think it usually is. That’s getting better and better. I mean, according to the World Bank, virtually every avenue of life, mortality rates, longer lifespans, jobs, prosperity is improving and it’s improving generally because of science and technology. The vaccination rates for homeless children around the world are up thousands of percent in the last 20 years because of technology and science.

1:05:21 So I think the world’s getting better. I don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theorists at all. In fact, I think they’re just selling commercials. You might actually be right on that one. Let me ask you about living forever. We had Dr. Aubrey de Grey here and he said, Brian, aging is a disease.

1:05:37 It’s not natural. It can be fixed. I don’t know if I agree with him. Do you? Yes. So first, let me say Aubrey de Grey is one of our advisors on the Transhumanist Party.

1:05:49 And I agree with him. I think, I totally think that we need to treat aging as a disease. That’s the truth because when you look back a thousand years from now and you’ve realized that we stopped aging 900 years ago, you’re going to say, well, why didn’t they stop it before if they wanted to live? And especially as people, I think the reason we don’t treat aging as a disease now is because we live in a Judeo-Christian framework which says that you’re born, you get baptized, you belong to Jesus or whatever it is and then you all of a sudden you die and you meet the maker. That’s a nice story but a lot of other people say, well, you’re born and then you die and then your offspring go on but what if you didn’t have to die? Why can’t we change that story?

1:06:37 Why can’t we teach kids that it’s okay to not want to die? That’s okay to want to live forever and to have no other reason to do it other than you like life? Why can’t we say aging is a disease? There’s no proof that it’s not. I actually think aging is a disease. I think death is a tragedy. So I think when we figure out how to change it and really aging is just a matter of stopping the genes from and the cells from dying, we’re going to say, well, yeah, see, we cured it. I was telling Aubrey when he was here, it sets off so many alarm bells in people’s heads when you say aging isn’t natural because like you say, whether we are religious or not, we’ve been told through the way everyone reacts to the whole concept of getting older that it’s normal and it’s natural and it’s what you have to live this as a human. So even if you didn’t grow up in a religious household, everyone has these influences like you said and so everyone thinks it’s you have to die. And so that’s why I think it’s hard to get people to get over the hump. But I’m even recognizing that about my own brain is that I probably have these gut reactions to it that aren’t correct. I think the big word you said there was natural and when I think of transhumanism, I don’t even believe in the word natural. I’m not even sure what that means.

1:07:55 There’s nothing natural about transhumanism. It’s just we’re animals that want to use tools to improve our lives and maybe that’s the only thing that’s natural. I mean, from an evolutionary point of view, but even that’s not necessarily natural. I just think it’s evolution to want to live better and longer. It seems like the most straightforward common sense thing I can kind of put together. But I do understand when you talk about aging being a disease, it’s like ching-ching, whoa, flag up. That sounds so weird. But this is one of the main goals of the transhumanist community is to convince people to look at aging differently, to look at it and say this is not what you think it is. This is a mathematical scientific problem that can be fixed.

1:08:39 And once we fixed it, you’re all going to say that same thing. If you had to boil down everything in transhumanism, that is probably the leader, right? If you can get that one concept of people that we want to be able to live as long as possible or forever, that starts the conversation. Yeah, it’s the number one goal of my campaign. It’s the number one goal of transhumanism.

1:08:59 Yeah, it’s the number one. Yeah, I mean, it’s built around that. Can you tell us the three laws of transhumanism? Yeah, sure. The first one is you want to protect your life and do whatever is necessary to protect that life. The second one is that you want to achieve as much power as possible. And the third one is that you want to protect the rest of the universe.

1:09:26 So if you look at the three laws, you want to always make sure you’re alive. You always want to strive for more power. And then you want the rest to sort of for humanity, you want to protect people. You know, that’s the breakdown that I have of transhumanism. Now, I don’t apply that necessarily in my campaign, because it’s not a very good political strategy. But I wrote that those three laws as a way to describe how kind of a very aggressive activist transhumanist, or even better looking at how a machine might think about its existence once it was intelligent enough to be cognizant of itself. Right. There’s a method behind your madness of that being a formula. Yeah, it’s something that almost can be iterated with the computer at each step.

1:10:10 It’s like Asimov’s robotic laws protect people, except this is done to protect the robots or protect the machine or protect the entity itself. Right. Cyborg rights. Yeah, exactly. That’s a fascinating concept. Is it true when you were 21, you put yourself on a boat with 500 books and started sailing around the world? Yes, yes. 100 percent. Okay. Yes. I was just curious.

1:10:31 That’s a little interesting. That’s a little strange. What was the 21-year-old Zoltan like? I think he was off the slay dragons, someone once told me that. I think a lot of young people are off to do that. You’re not sure what you want to do with your world. I was somewhat being raised a Catholic and also kind of going through that phase where I said I read the Bible cover to cover. I wasn’t really sure where I stood as an atheist. I wanted to explore the world. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do as a career. I’d studied philosophy and I wanted to challenge myself. I also wanted to carry books. A lot of people say, well, why was it for the sailing? It wasn’t for the sailing.

1:11:15 I was going to go with a backpack, but I couldn’t fit 500 books in a backpack. I was going to go with a car, but the car got stuck at the borders or at the sea. I thought, well, the ocean was the best way to go around the world and to see everything. You went four years or a few years? I was actually seven years. On a boat? Yeah, on a boat. My boat is currently in Greece. That same boat? That same boat. Halfway through my trip, I bought a bigger boat because I started on a six-meter boat and then I went to an eight-meter boat. There’s pictures of you going by Papua New Guinea and when the volcano’s on and all these adventures. What did you learn from being on a boat with books for seven years? I’ve got to be honest. I think the books were more important to me than anything I ever saw on the boat. I think a lot of people find that very strange, but it’s true that the books and the literature I read really had an impact because when you sit on a boat and you read all day long, you really soak in what you’re reading about.

1:12:15 I thought the things I saw, for example, discovered a bush tribe when I was in Vanuatu that I would later go back and cover for National Geographic Channel. I was apparently the first Caucasian person to ever have been that far into the highlands and to visit a set of tribes in that area. In Papua New Guinea? This was in Vanuatu. In the island of Esprit do Santo. National Geographic did a video on it and everything. Then I had, for example, a pirate attack off the coast of Yemen where I hid my girlfriend deep inside the bilge of the boat and four men came and pulled up alongside. I think they were very disappointed when they saw my boat. I think they were in the books because it was a very small boat. Their boat was quite a bit bigger. On their radar from land, I think they were military because they had camouflage on and everything and they demanded money and gas and pointed their guns and tied up and then left. I think they left laughing thinking, what kind of crazy guy is sailing on a sea? This is one I had in my small boat, which is only 25 feet at the time of Pearson Commander Sloop.

1:13:25 The high seas, that’s pretty crazy. Yeah, yeah. We were right about to enter into the Red Sea. I had incidents like that. Discovery later did a recreation of that entire episode, which was really funny to recreate really harrowing events on another topic. I’ve had a lot of really amazing experiences because of the sailing. Later, I ended up using the boat as a base for my National Geographic articles, which was fascinating because then I could go places and I really had a real reason for sailing outside of reading.

1:14:00 Wow, that’s fascinating. You talked about some of these islands. We had Jared Diamond here, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel. He said, a famous quote from the episode, he said, Brian, once you’ve been to Papua New Guinea, the rest of the world is boring. Yes, I spent about six weeks of my life in Papua New Guinea. I went all the way through the highlands. Papua New Guinea is a really insane place. There are people that, for example, if you kill, accidentally hit someone on the road with your car and kill someone’s son, the family will then come up and demand your own son’s life. That kind of tribal stuff happens even in the modern age there. It bypasses a lot of the legal systems because there are so many tribes there. It’s really very crazy stuff. Papua New Guinea is some of the scariest places I’ve ever been, just because they really are operating on a very tribal level.

1:14:57 Right. Yes, some of the stories we talk about, and from the book and from in person. Sure. But it’s fascinating also because apparently it’s a great look at what we might have been at one point. It’s interesting to see how they just work on a very different level. Do you have a Miss National Geographic and being a journalist? Yes, I do. What would happen is I would end up first off, I pitched only the stories that I wanted to do. That was great because I wasn’t assigned stories. I would pitch stories. I would always pick cool stories. For example, I would do the witches market in Bolivia or I would do something on Ken Dome in Uruguay, which is a beating of African drums. But that type of music has been a way to unite the whites and the blacks in Uruguay. It’s really hit the younger generation. But yes, I missed that because I would go for two or three weeks, dive into a subject, interview everyone, and then finally write an article and oftentimes film a webcast. Or I work for National Geographic today where on occasion I would also do a television episode on my activities. As a 20-year-old, that couldn’t have been a more fun lifestyle. Well, you can create that kind of meaning and pitch that kind of pieces.

1:16:14 It was at the age when the camera, the mini-DV had just come into Vogue and you could finally bring mini-DV onto broadcast television. It started changing the world of journalism because the camera sizes went from there to this. All of a sudden you could be a solo video journalist and produce quality content. Which was what, 10 years ago? About 15? Yes, about 15 years ago.

1:16:36 It’s really kind of continued because now even half the cameras are still quite small. Right. So yeah, so you miss it a little bit, not too much. Yeah, not too much. I have a family. It would be impossible to even imagine going away for three weeks anymore to do a story. I’ve got a couple questions from our YouTube video we put up, so I’m going to hit you with these. Just put your opinion on Bitcoin. Does that weave into transhumanism or doesn’t it? So we support Bitcoin. We take Bitcoin on our website. And yes, it definitely relates to transhumanism. First off, I think a lot of people associate transhumanism with some type of libertarianism. So from that point of perspective, Bitcoin works really well with the transhumanist movement. But more importantly, it’s very important to find alternative sources of currency and means of dealing with capital.

1:17:25 The reason it’s important is because if we have a giant crash of the world economies because of either something the federal reserve did or something China bought too much gold or whatever, it’s nice to have alternative currencies that might be anonymous, that might actually hold up while the rest of the world falls apart. And money is not just money. Money can upgrade itself. Money can become a better form of money. And maybe that’s what Bitcoin will be in 20 years.

1:17:52 Okay. All right. How would transhumanists go about preventing the possibility of people abusing technology, turning humans in control, collecting brainwash, enabling implanted chips that could brainwash humans? I’m sure you get this a lot. What do you say? So, you know, I just, there’s a lot of surveillance issues with transhumanism that are coming out recently because people getting more and more, you hear about more and more people getting chips.

1:18:17 There are now half a million people around the world that have chips in their head. And I think NBC has reported that potentially within the next 10 years, maybe upwards of even 50% of Americans will have some sort of chip. Half a million people have a chip in their head. Half a million people have a chip in their head. Like a location chip? No. Most of those are cochlear implants for hearing. So, you know, at this point, deafness exists, of course, if you want it, but many people can not be deaf anymore if you put the cochlear implant.

1:18:44 So it ties into your nerve and your nerve. And it’s got a power source for life. And it just kind of works in there. Or is it powered? It’s powered. I’m not sure. I think you do have to replace it, but it’s like, it’s right here. It’s kind of underneath your hair and it connects into the nerve. And so, you know, it connects to the brain. So people call that a cranial implant.

1:19:03 Although that’s, you know, a little bit the real ones that are the ones they’ve kind of announced the last few years are for the epileptic patients and Alzheimer’s patients and some of the the real cranial implants that are just like right here, right on top. But I think we’re gonna, I’ve told people before that the most important industry of transhumanism in the future is going to be security. If you want a job, a real good job that’s going to need people for a long time, you need to be in security because cyber threats with chips inside our skin and, you know, attached to our head are going to be such a massive problem in the future that we’re going to have to deal with it by having the best, you know, security where possible. And it’s a field that’s developing. So I can’t even give you the good news on it yet. Who knows if we’re going to be hacking people’s robotic hearts, we’re going to need to find ways around that. And it’s a definite, legitimate concern about transhumanism right now. One of the very few that I have.

1:19:56 Okay, very interesting. How can you win the election in 2020? Or how could you get 5% of the vote? What are some of the steps that realistically have to happen? Obviously, the funding needs to happen.

1:20:06 But what needs to happen, in your opinion, to get that funding? So the technology has to keep improving at the pace it’s going. That what’s happening right now is the reason the 2016 campaign is working so well is because people realize transhumanism is here, the age has begun. But by 2020, the age is going to be much more pronounced. Everybody is going to be like, wow, we really are beginning to have transhumanism in our lives.

1:20:30 The time is on your side here. Yes. The longer you go, the stronger the party is going to get naturally. So and then the second thing we need, perhaps most importantly, is we really need some big donors to come on board. If, you know, for example, if Peter Thiel came to me and said, I want to give you a billion dollars to run or something like that, that would change my perception of not taking donations.

1:20:49 Then I would say it’s worth it. But you already gave all his money to Aubrey. But, you know, we’re hoping to get some other real big people on board eventually. And if they did, maybe we’d have the funds to put together the kind of campaign that can compete on the national level with the Democrats and the Republicans. But it’s going to take two things at once.

1:21:09 It’s going to take the younger generation saying we want this type of new politics. We want, you know, run what we would call a real time democracy where you can vote on your phone. You know, there are a lot of different things that the younger generation wants. And then we need the funders to come on board and to compete against, you know, the Mitt Romney’s and those type of budget and the Jeb Bush budgets. We just need those type of things. Those two things could give me a realistic chance.

1:21:36 OK. We’re both in our 40s. But you said the future of this party is for the millennials, probably even the post-millennials. I don’t know what you call them, but probably teenagers, probably teenagers, really, which is probably why you get, you know, great penetration on motherboard. Good Mythical Morning, another great, you know, example at this point in this filming, you’re getting hundreds of thousands of views there. Talk to me a little bit about that demographic and why is it them and how do you communicate to them?

1:22:07 So historically, the younger generation has always been at the forefront of whatever is revolutionary, whatever is exciting, whatever’s changed. I mean, that’s I think it’s built into them biologically there to leave the nest and go out and sniff around and find something better. And that’s what transhumanism is really. I think that’s why transhumanism is growing faster in the in the young demographic people in college and people just out of college than in any other demographic by a long shot. I mean, 10 times faster. And they they see what’s happening.

1:22:38 They’re not kind of bogged down with religious ideas. They’re increasingly atheistic or increasingly just not concerned, apathetic with religion. And so transhumanism fits naturally from plus they’re built, they’re glued to their iPhones or glued to their virtual reality headsets or glued to gaming. They’re already a part of the transhumanist age, whether they’ve even philosophically accepted it or not. So that’s the other thing. They’re just naturally there.

1:23:05 Okay. So again, that’s on your side as well. Oh, yeah. And that’s why it’s so important. Now, I target them all day long is because one day in 10 years, they’re going to be like, oh, it’s the same guy. Right. But the thing is, is that as long as I live forever, though, that doesn’t help you. So you really need the older people to die. And then the younger people who live there’s our catch 22. The Congress that is, you know, still very religious and not very transhumanistic is we’re making them live longer with our technology.

1:23:30 This is a strange conundrum on 30. You thought about it when you let late at night when you have a scotch on your own. But like the conundrum is is that the reason we’ve made progress throughout the millennium is because the older generations died out. New ideas have come in. One of your new ideas is the old generation doesn’t die out. So does that put us in a stagnation?

1:23:50 Yes, it does to some extent. But what I think is going to happen is that younger and younger people are taking positions of power more and more than Mark Zuckerberg’s and LMS that are young are starting to emerge as leaders. And you’re going to see that even in a government level, where I think presidents we eventually going to get a 30 something year old president I bet. Okay. All right. I see what you mean. And for you for 2020, just to finish up on that, really a key investor would be good. Maybe a young key investor, maybe a technological entrepreneur could even be really helpful for an initial push, it would help you with your funding, make it simpler and maybe get a snowball effect. 100%. I think one steps on many others will step on. We have our first Microsoft event coming up here in about three weeks.

1:24:34 It’s great to that Microsoft even having me to speak on campus and speaking at the World Bank as well in August. This is crazy. Yeah, yeah. There’s some things like legitimacy things that are happening that are really helping out. World Bank, Microsoft. Can you talk about why you’re here in the UK? I mean, sure. I’m here. I’m giving, I’m the opening keynote speaker at the Financial Times Camp, AlphaVille event tomorrow. Financial Times is the Wall Street Journal of Europe. Some consider it as important as a publication, maybe slightly older school and older school than the Wall Street Journal. Non-Lupit Murdoch owned to have someone like you as a keynote speaker is a huge statement. I’m totally honored. I couldn’t be more excited to be here to give that speech. And it’s about transhumanism. They want to hear about transhumanism.

1:25:18 That’s the title of the speech. This is very interesting to know. So, I’ll turn a couple of questions for you. I always ask people on the show because usually the reason someone’s here is because they’ve had some success in getting their message across or in things that they’ve done. And I just wanted to ask you a couple things of how you kind of got to where you are. And I was wondering, is there any one thing that you remember changing about your routine at some point in your life that really kind of raised your game like a step change? Like when I started doing this or I stopped doing this.

1:25:50 You know that he has. So, Zoltan, I always ask people that come here a few questions at the end.

1:26:18 I’m actually going to give you a slightly different spin, which this will become aware of. But I always ask if you could make a phone call to that 20-year-old Zoltan. We talked about him earlier. The one that’s about to go on his big journey on the boat, the journey that almost stopped before it got started, you know, when your boat wasn’t going anywhere. You know, if you could give some advice to that young man, knowing what you know now about yourself and about the party and transhumanism, what would you tell him?

1:26:43 Oh, this is so easy. Don’t take love so seriously. I know that sounds horrible, but it’s exactly the case. I’ve been one of those passionate Hungarians that took romance way too seriously in my youth, and I think I wasted a huge amount of my time. I’m not sure it actually added that much to my own sense of self or own sense of identity. I just think when you actually get married, a lot of the passion is not there in that same crazy romantic way. It becomes very functional, raise kids, and your love is somehow deeper because it’s this larger bond. But I wasted, I think, in my opinion, a lot of time like, you know, just being way too passionate about some of the romances I went through and as opposed to, I think, working on things career-wise or on my future or on things like that. So I would encourage, you know, my 20-year-old self to pull away from some of the excessively romantic relationships and not worry so much about heartbreak. Again, I was thinking the uploaded version, we can just engineer all that out.

1:27:55 Yeah, exactly. And again, back to my point, though, you know, such beautiful things are created by hopeless romantics. Yes, yes. Including your journey, which brought you here. Yes, no, of course. Oh, the Catch-22, yes. I know. The second part of that question, which I’ve never asked anyone here, and I’m going to start asking you, what advice would the 150-year-old Zoltan give to you now?

1:28:20 I think the first thing in my top of my head, he would say, is work harder if you want this 150-year-old to exist. Work harder. I mean, I work really hard. I’m already like pretty stressed out and pretty maxed. But I would say even work harder than that. Take it very seriously because it is your life on the line that you’re talking about. And if I don’t make, my dad had his first heart attack at age 51 and I’m 42 and he’s now had three and he’s about 70. I’m coming to the age when, from genetic reasons, I might start having some serious health issues in five, ten years. I need to take it very seriously because nobody may be there when I have a heart attack. And wouldn’t that be a shame after all I’m done to have my life end because I had not reached a certain level of immortality or a certain level of biological, indefinite lifespan because of my not working hard enough. So I’d say work harder.

1:29:19 He always works so hard? Yes, I think so. Why do you work so hard? I’m just not a big fan of hobbies. I’m a fan of working. Whatever I do, I like to do it really well. I would like to be the best at it. And it’s not the best at it over others. I just want to be as good as I can be at it.

1:29:41 And this time is really different because the thing I’m working at is not, you can’t lose this game. You lose this game, you lose forever. So this is a game you must win at. You must achieve indefinite lifespan. Right, for you and everyone else. For my kids especially, for my wife, for my family. I mean for the world, it’s a tragedy that 150,000 people die a day.

1:30:05 You’re Hungarian, were you born there? Were you born in America? Were your parents both born in Hungary? I was born in America, in Redondo Beach. Both my parents were born there and even my sister was born there. So I just missed the cutoff. They escaped illegally in 1968.

1:30:21 Redondo Beach, you look like a volleyball player, a beach volleyball player. Two more parts of that advice question. What’s the best advice you ever received?

1:30:36 Listen to your heart, not your fears. So I think that’s a really good piece of advice. Like at times, you must be beyond even your reason. And it’s not you’re going beyond your reason so much, but you must not let your fears dictate your outcome of life. If you have a passion and that’s what your passion is, you need to pursue it. And if something is standing in the way, you may just need to set that aside and just say, I’m going to dive headfirst. It’s okay.

1:31:10 Whatever happens. Diving headfirst is more important than the fear. So important. I’ve been confronting a lot of my fears lately when it comes to a lot of our expansion here. And it’s funny for a lot of people think they’re fearless. A lot of people think that the fears don’t control them. But looking back at my last couple of years, they controlled a lot of the things that I didn’t do. And so just as General Patton once said, you should guard against being too conservative because life is short unless you get your act together. And we need to, you know, always go full out there. Last question to the 20 year old listening to us. And based on your demographic, there’s a lot of them. What do they do if they want to become like you, you know, to become a major figure in a major movements to become as prolific as you? You know, how do they grow up and be like Zoltan? Well, I think the first thing is as they go through college, don’t study something that you think is going to make money 30 years down the road, especially when robots are going to make do a better job than you. Study something like whatever you want. For example, I study philosophy having no idea what that would take me.

1:32:19 That’s very important because if you start from an early age to pursue the path of your passion, you’re going to end up being someone who pursues your passion all the time. And pursuing your passion, I think is perhaps the most important thing we can all do. The second thing I would say from just a logistical point of view, don’t worry about hitting home runs. Everyone wants to hit home runs. Everyone always asks, how can I write the best-selling book right off the time? Well, most people don’t start off with best-selling books. Most people write a book, two books, three books, and then the fourth one starts being popular. You have to hit base hits consistently.

1:32:53 And if you keep hitting them consistently, the home runs will come in between. And that’s how you move forward. So don’t set your, you know, your sights for the stars if you can reach something like the moon and then jump off later. You have to be realistic. So between those two things, I think that’s what I would definitely say. It’s great advice. I get to spend time with people like yourself that have accomplished so many things. And a lot of people watch this.

1:33:20 And they ask me, well, how can I be this? You know, how can I be a member of parliament? How can I be an actor? How can I be CEO of a billion-dollar company? And all these people, they put in so much groundwork that no one ever sees behind the scenes. You know, they, I hate to say the word, but they paid their dues. They hit the base hits, like you said, they hit the base hit every week for four years, eight years, 10 years. And then you happen to see the tip of the iceberg that floats up. And then it goes back down. And then they keep hitting the base hits. Yeah, totally. Everyone always says, well, why are you getting so much media attention? I tried to say, partially because I’ve written, you know, dozens and dozens of articles for National Geographic. And every single one, if it had one factual error, I would have been fired for. That kind of like learning the trade of media is something that every editor knows that they can sort of count on. And it’s very important that people realize that I’ve been a journalist now for 20 years. Yeah, you know, it’s, that’s a long time to write articles, to look at things, to do things. And with that comes trust from people that, you know, or have their own jobs on the line. So yeah, I couldn’t emphasize enough that people need to, there’s so much groundwork that goes into becoming successful. Most people when they see success, they don’t see that. They just say, oh, he

1:34:34 Successfully got so lucky. It’s not like that at all. I think most people earn their keep and they fight for it from years and years back. You write a lot. Do you encourage people to do the same?

1:34:46 It’s just right. Yes. I encourage people to start blogs, even if it’s only going to five people, do it because the more they write, the better. Learning the English language is so critical for communication skills and the subtleties of how you need to behave. And it’s absolutely critical.

1:35:00 So yeah, writing is a fantastic tool. And of course, reading. Read as much as you can if you have the time. Right. And reading helps your writing, and writing helps your reading.

1:35:07 Oh yeah. And then when you get in front of someone, you can communicate your ideas and all of a sudden the communication is what sells the job. Until it’s automated. Until it’s automated. And then the robot’s better. Sultan, I’m a very humble guy, but I will say that this is the best interview you’ve ever done. It’s really nice to see your personality shine here because a lot of people hear a bit about you and see you here. And I think they make a lot of assumptions about you and about the movement. And like I said, when I couldn’t grasp at certain platforms, I was like, ah, but now I understand a lot more of what you’re talking about. So thanks for coming here and telling us more about yourself, the party. I think your journey is just as important as your future when it comes to this stuff. And I love the fact that you’re running for president. You could have easily not, but that was probably a fear that you just went through. And I think it’s paying you dividends already. Indeed. Well, thank you so much for having me. I’ve had a great time and you’ve asked some awesome questions. I appreciate that.

1:36:07 Good. I hope so. I hope it’s always a good way to just kind of feel people out and give you the chance to respond to a lot of things. Because a lot of times you can’t address the critics as easily unless people ask you those questions. No, of course. And asking the right questions is definitely half the game. If people want to support transhumanism, support you.

1:36:25 I always ask, what is one simple thing they can do to do that? It could be something that’s not associated with you or the party they can do locally, or is it something they can do to let people know? What is that one thing? If you want to support transhumanism, I suggest one thing. Write to your local media and say, hey, do your local newspaper or your local television station and say, there’s this movement called transhumanism. Why don’t you send out a reporter to find out a little bit more about it and do a story on it? That’s the very best thing. I ask every single volunteer at the transhumanist party to do that. I say send 10 emails out a week to local media, not major media. We’ve been approaching major media forever, to local media so that people all over the world will learn about it. And that’s a way to get them thinking about technology and how it can improve their health. I’m just thinking right now, 100 years from now, this will be on YouTube still, and that the people will be watching it, 100 years and they’ll be like, look at those guys. They were already talking about something that’s a reality, or there was the young Zoltan before he got elected. I love the fact we’re grabbing the snapshot. It’s almost slightly transhumanistic. So thanks so much. We say at London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you all and yours stay in touch and hold the best.

1:37:34 Thank you so much, Brian. I appreciate it.