Zoltan Istvan

Immortality or Bust: The Trailblazing Transhumanist Movie

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In February of 2015, I saw an article announcing the presidential run of Zoltan Istvan under the newly formed United States Transhumanist Party. My interest was piqued and I reached out to him to ask how I could help. He suggested I make a film about his run which became a five-year journey culminating in today’s release of Immortality or Bust.

As a person who has been an avid follower of Singularity.FM and exponential technologies, I was very curious as to how the broader world would receive Zoltan and his unique ideas and approach. One of the biggest changes I have seen since I started the film is the widespread awareness of the term Transhumanism. It was a term I would always have to explain to anyone who asked about the movie I was making. Now, I think largely because of Zoltan’s efforts, I find people are familiar with the term and/or the ideas behind it. Or, because three cycles of Moore’s law has passed, they can feel the growth of technology in their personal lives more now than they did then.

What struck me right away about Zoltan Istvan was the fact he had absolutely no fear about biting off more than he could chew and did not care a bit about what people thought about him. His spirit was more than ready to be the standard-bearer for Transhumanism and the obstacles, slings, and arrows of doubt and opposition seemed to bounce right off him. Through sheer strength of will, he executed the Immortality Bus tour and bent the proclivities of the mainstream media to include his seemingly wacky ideas about the impact of technology on our present and future. His answer to changing labor landscape due to automation was universal basic income. It was an idea that not many were talking about and seemed completely out of the left-field at the time, but its adoption by the Yang Gang shows how quick technologies exponential growth can change our lives and opinions.

Ultimately Immortality or Bust became less about Zoltan himself and more him being a journeyman, a Sherpa, a guide through several disparate, but connected communities of believers in the almost godlike power of technology. While I had some awareness of biohacking, Alcor, People’s Unlimited, Terasem, The Venus Project, and The Church of Perpetual Live, to visit them all in a short period of time, and to put them all together on film helps to see the transhumanist movement as larger than the sum of its parts rather than some small fringe thought experiment that will be lost in the sands of time.

Zoltan’s journey has become almost historical and I am glad I was lucky enough to be there with a camera. From humble beginnings in Zoltan’s living room, The U.S. Transhumanist Party now a well organized and functioning political party. The Transhumanist Bill of Rights he read at the US Capital has been modified and adopted by the Transhumanist community at large and, I believe, will be remembered throughout time, as the moment when humans started to understand augmented and artificial life will need laws and protection as well as humans.

About the Author:

Daniel Sollinger is a life long filmmaker and the producer of over 50 independent feature films including documentaries Immortality or Bust and “Rhyme & Reason.”

Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan on His Presidential Campaign

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Zoltan Istvan is the first unashamedly and unabashedly openly transhumanist presidential candidate in the history of the United States. His political campaign, his Immortality Bus Tour and his book the Transhumanist Wager, have managed to get a huge amount of global media coverage and stir a debate. For good or for bad, much of that debate has been revolving not only around Istvan’s ideas but also around his personality and leadership style. With much of the criticism coming from within the wider transhumanist community itself. Whatever the case may be, when I heard that Istvan is visiting Toronto for WEST conference I thought that I can’t pass the opportunity to get him for an interview.

During our 86 min conversation with Zoltan Istvan we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: a personal update since our first interview when he says I contributed to launching his career; the details surrounding the founding and running of the Transhumanist Party and his presidential campaign; overcoming his libertarian bias to aim for the political center; guaranteed minimum income; living indefinitely and if there is something Zoltan will not do to accomplish it; the reappearing question of whether Istvan is Jethro Knights or not; his chances of winning the elections and the potential for jumping on the Democratic bandwagon; Teleological Egocentrical Functionalism; if and how fiction can influence a political movement; making a transhumanist TV show; difference between visibility and impact of scientists versus that of journalists/bloggers; getting money to fund science; the number of nuclear war-heads; why he doesn’t use his last name; the possibility of running for state or municipal elections; writing a book of non-fiction and a sequel to the Transhumanist Wager…

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation or become a patron on Patreon.

Who is Zoltan Istvan?

Bestselling visionary author Zoltan Istvan, an American-Hungarian, began a solo, multi-year sailing journey around the world at the age of 21. His main cargo was 500 handpicked books, mostly classics. He’s explored over 100 countries—many as a journalist for the National Geographic Channel—writing, filming, and appearing in dozens of television stories, articles, and webcasts.

His work has also been featured by The New York Times, Outside, Wired UK, Slate, Vice, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC Radio, CNN, CBS, RT, Fox News, the Travel Channel, and in much other media.

In addition to his award-winning coverage of the war in Kashmir, he gained worldwide attention for pioneering and popularizing the extreme sport of volcano boarding. Zoltan later became a director for the international conservation group WildAid, leading armed patrol units to stop the billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade in Southeast Asia.

Back in America, he started various successful businesses, from real estate development to film-making to viticulture, joining them under ZI Ventures. He is a philosophy and religious studies graduate of Columbia University and resides in San Francisco with his daughters and physician wife. Zoltan recently published The Transhumanist Wager, an award-winning fictional thriller describing philosopher Jethro Knights and his unwavering quest for immortality via science and technology. Zoltan writes futurist and transhumanist-themed blogs for The Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and Vice’s Motherboard. Zoltan is also founder of the Transhumanist Party and is early in the process of beginning a 2016 US presidential campaign.

Zoltan Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager Is A Choice We’ll All Have To Make

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While I personally loved the first half of The Transhumanist Wager and disliked much of the second, I am convinced that the novel is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of our civilization.

In my view, the novel is full of interesting and controversial contradictions. For example, on the one hand, Zoltan Istvan is a philosophically sophisticated author using elements from Plato’s Republic, Nietzsche’s Overman (Übermensch), Thomas Moore’s Utopia, Zen Buddhism, and other Eastern and Western philosophies. On the other hand, Zoltan has chosen to give us a kind of simplistic, Atlas Shrugged-style plot in its black-and-white depiction of an evil government and the lone hero who dares to stand up to it. Regardless of my personal views, however, I enjoyed reading the book and believe that it does a good job of mapping out the dangerous period that our civilization will have to navigate in the next several decades.

During my interview with Zoltan Istvan, we cover a variety of topics such as: what is the Transhumanist Wager; how and why he got interested in transhumanism; his protagonist Jethro Knights, and some autobiographical elements of the novel; the potential for conflict between transhumanists and anti-transhumanists; Ayn Rand, objectivism and their impact on the Transhumanist Wager; competition, human nature, and death; transhumanism and the technological singularity; the ideal state of Transhumania and the price we have to pay to accomplish it…

My favorite quote that I will take away from Zoltan Istvan is:

Morality is often defined by the amount of time we have left.

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation or become a patron on Patreon.

 

About the Author:

Zoltan_IstvanAt the age of 21, American-Hungarian Zoltan Istvan began a solo, multi-year sailing journey around the world. His main cargo was 500 handpicked books, mostly classics. He’s explored over 100 countries—many as a journalist for the National Geographic Channel—writing, filming, and appearing in dozens of television stories, articles, and webcasts.

His work has also been featured by The New York Times Syndicate, Outside, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC Radio, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, Animal Planet, and the Travel Channel. In addition to his award-winning coverage of the war in Kashmir, he gained worldwide attention for pioneering and popularizing the extreme sport of volcano boarding. Zoltan later became a director for the international conservation group WildAid, leading armed patrol units to stop the billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade in Southeast Asia. Back in America, he started various successful businesses, from real estate development to filmmaking to viticulture, joining them under ZI Ventures. He is a philosophy and religious studies graduate of Columbia University and resides in San Francisco with his daughter and physician wife.

 

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Death is Not Destiny: A Glimpse into The Transhumanist Wager

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The-Transhumanist-Wager“Death is not destiny. Death is neither inevitable nor natural,” says Jethro Knights, protagonist in my new philosophical thriller, The Transhumanist Wager.

What does Jethro mean? Death is not destiny? Death is neither inevitable nor natural?

It means, Jethro would say, that the most significant thing that has been happening to the human species is about to end.

The Transhumanist Wager tells the story of a man who will do anything to achieve immortality via science and technology. His main focus and drive in life is finding a way to live forever, even at the possible expense of what most people would call humanity.

When I set out to write The Transhumanist Wager four years ago, I did not intend it to become an edgy, controversial book. For much of my adult life, I have been a journalist covering environmental, wildlife, and human rights stories. My articles and television episodes—many for the National Geographic Channel—were welcomed in any culture and in any country. My stories were the type that a family could amicably discuss over the dinner table, or watch on television while happily cuddling together on a couch.

Perhaps it was the effect of the war zones I covered as a journalist, rising out of my subconscious, but The Transhumanist Wager soon took on much more contentious ideas of human endeavor and culture. For a human being, most conflict zones highlight a simple fact: Once presented with horror and death, one tends to quickly discover degrees of emotion and experience never imagined or thought possible before. For me and the difficult moments that I still vividly remember, those incidents gave me the powerful conviction that human life should be preserved indefinitely, at any cost.

Jethro Knights also realizes this early in his life, after almost stepping on a landmine in a war zone (which happened to me in Vietnam’s DMZ while filming a story on bomb diggers). The revelation for Jethro is so sharp, so penetrating, so intense that nothing will ever be the same for him again.

It is from this vantage point that The Transhumanist Wager was written. And it is from the landmine experience that Jethro discovers the mortality crisis not only in himself, but in every human being alive. That crisis takes on the form of a wager—a choice that every human must make in the 21st century: to die eventually; or to try to live indefinitely. And if we try to live indefinitely, then we should use every tool and resource of science and technology available to us, Jethro insists. And we should do it immediately.

This is the quintessential message of The Transhumanist Wager. A rational and scientific-minded society owes itself the strictest dedication to applying its resources and minds to overcoming that which has been the greatest downfall of our species: our mortality.

My novel presents the story of a human being who after years of struggling, years of anguish, years of tragic loss, fights on to achieve his own immortality—and in doing so, scores a victory for all of civilization.

 

About the Author:

Zoltan_IstvanAt the age of 21, American-Hungarian Zoltan Istvan began a solo, multi-year sailing journey around the world. His main cargo was 500 handpicked books, mostly classics. He’s explored over 100 countries—many as a journalist for the National Geographic Channel—writing, filming, and appearing in dozens of television stories, articles, and webcasts.

His work has also been featured by The New York Times Syndicate, Outside, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC Radio, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, Animal Planet, and the Travel Channel. In addition to his award-winning coverage of the war in Kashmir, he gained worldwide attention for pioneering and popularizing the extreme sport of volcano boarding. Zoltan later became a director for the international conservation group WildAid, leading armed patrol units to stop the billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade in Southeast Asia. Back in America, he started various successful businesses, from real estate development to filmmaking to viticulture, joining them under ZI Ventures. He is a philosophy and religious studies graduate of Columbia University and resides in San Francisco with his daughter and physician wife.

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