Overcoming Death with Science - with Zoltan Istvan, Author of "The Transhumanist Wager"

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:04) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Zoltan, author of the book The Transhumanist Wager, and they discuss Zoltan's goal of overcoming death with science, how people are merging themselves with technology to gain new abilities, and Zoltan's previous presidential campaign for the Transhumanist Party. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:31) Here

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:00:31) we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) This is the Modern CTO podcast. I'm super excited, but I wanted to start with a base understanding of what is transhumanism and how do you define it?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:00:51) Well, sure. You know, transhumanism is a social movement of people that want to use science and technology to radically modify the human being and also to modify the human experience. And they do that with all sorts of wild technologies. Can be exoskeleton technology, can be brain implants. It can even be considered something like driverless cars. But whatever it is, it's really putting technology inside ourselves and trying to make us so that our lives are better and that we almost become like superhumans. That's really what the movement's about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) So when did you first even come across this movement?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:01:23) I came across this movement in science fiction books growing up. The movement is really about kind of a primary cause, at least at this moment. Maybe later in the future it'll be different, but transhumanism's number one goal is to try to overcome death with science. And while that sounds a little far-fetched, the reality is there's now hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into this field to do that. So when I was working at National Geographic, I had a very close call with a landmine in Vietnam. That really got me thinking about, wow, if I had died, that would have been the end. What can I do about it? And transhumanism is this movement that's out there of all these great scientists. So when I discovered the movement, I just stuck with it and wrote books about it, wrote essays about it, and joined it because there's just so many people out there. And I try to do my best to support it, and hopefully one day we'll become something quite a bit different and stronger than we are today as far as humans go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:14) How do they gather? Do they have an annual conference or something?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:02:18) So it's very much a decentralized movement. There's conferences all over. There are many of them. Some are annual. Some come every ten years. There are different universities that specialize in it. Like right now I'm at the University of Oxford, and there are a ton of transhumanists in the philosophy department. But it's really all around the world. And then there's people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg that are dedicating money to both robots, and Mark Zuckerberg's dedicating money to eliminating all disease. There's just all these people that are involved. So it's very much all over the place, but I would say ground zero is Silicon Valley.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:52) Yeah, they are doing a lot. I mean, Kurzweil has been talking about going into a computer forever, and I guess that's kind of transhumanistic, right?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:02:59) Yeah, yeah. I mean, Ray Kurzweil is kind of one of the grandfathers of the movement and specifically speaks about AI and the singularity. You know, he's another Silicon Valley person, Google engineer. So I would say half of Google are probably transhumanist when you go to a place like Silicon Valley. And maybe they don't say it out loud like, "Hey, I'm a transhumanist," but they are working on technologies to make the human being a different entity in hopefully twenty or thirty or forty years, and that's really a primary goal of theirs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:29) What's the difference between a non-transhumanist and a transhumanist?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:03:34) Well, a transhumanist is somebody who embraces science in order to take their body to the next level. They're going to be willing to accept whatever kinds of technologies there are in the future and implement them in their lives. But I think someone who's a non-transhumanist, generally quite religious people are going to say, no, I don't want that. Like, I don't want an implant, or I don't want to get into a driverless vehicle, or I don't want an exoskeleton suit to climb Mount Everest because it'll help me do it. There are people that are going to be what we call Luddites. They're anti-technology. It doesn't mean they don't use technology, but they're just not going to use it to upgrade themselves. That's really the difference between transhumanist and non-transhumanist. We want to use technology to upgrade ourselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:18) Okay. Would you be transhumanist if you're just cool with the movement?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:04:22) Well, you know, definitely. And I think, I've got to be honest, I think 80% of transhumanists don't call themselves transhumanists. They think the word's a little bit funny. But, you know, the word is just the word. What's really important is whether you actually embrace science and say to yourself, you know what, I would support a group of researchers that are putting brain implants in people to make them better. Or I would support someone who lost an arm in a war and now they have a robotic arm. I mean, that is transhumanism. That's really where a lot of people love transhumanism, is when the movement helps out the disabled community. But, you know, it goes further than that. It goes into things like what Elon Musk is talking about with this company, Neuralink. You know, they're going to try to put brain implants in people so that we can commune directly with artificial intelligence, and hopefully our brains become more intelligent, more sophisticated as a process. Well, that's a pretty big leap to transhumanism, but that's really where we're going and what we think the movement's all about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:17) Yeah. I like how Musk describes it too. Actually, we're getting a new bathroom put into the studio, so my contractor was here doing some work yesterday and we were talking about technology. And I was bringing up the story of when Elon Musk was just saying that we're all cyborgs. It's just we have really low bandwidth, really low data transfer rate because we have to think about it, go type it into a machine, see the result, and then process it. Where if you reduce that down to milliseconds and we don't have to do a physical act, we just have to think about it and then we have the answer—I mean, with the chip in our head, then that's cyborgs, right?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:05:51) Yeah. I mean, I think his analogy that we are all cyborgs already is true. I mean, the brain, in my opinion, is a machine. Even though it's biological, certainly there's ways to understand it. There's ways to deduce how it works. And eventually there's going to be ways to improve it by mixing it with silicon and ones and zeros, computers, quantum technologies, things like that. So I think, you know, when you talk about what the human being is, people like to think of the human being as special, that our consciousness is something that can't be replicated. And right now it's been very difficult to understand consciousness entirely. But I think most scientists would agree that no matter what you say, it's still just signals inside the brain that are communicating with neurons, billions of them. And if we can replicate that—and we will be able to replicate that—I mean, the supercomputers of today are already doing trillions of calculations per second. There's no question that here in ten, twenty, thirty years, we are going to build a machine that's smarter than the human being. It may not be smarter in the sense that we know it, but certainly from a computational perspective, it's going to overwhelm what our own brains can do. And eventually, I mean, that's just twenty, thirty years down the road. You go fifty or a hundred years down the road, barring some kind of nuclear war or an asteroid hitting planet Earth, I mean, we have a chance of supercomputers becoming thousands and thousands of times smarter than human beings. And when that happens and we have the right software to kind of make those things sentient, wow. I mean, it's sort of—I don't want to say it's game over for the human species, but we're certainly going to become lesser intelligent levels than these machines that we create. So hopefully, you know, with people like Elon Musk out there working on them, we'll merge with them. But if we don't, there's no question that we're going to be outgunned by AI and whatever else comes after AI.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:34) Have you ever entertained the thought that what if ultimately we are computers and this is just one stage of our evolution?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:07:43) Well, you know, there's a lot of good arguments. Actually, one of my latest papers at the University of Oxford deals with AI and the simulation theory. And there is this possibility that we are something that's already either existed or exists in the mind of a computer. You know, it's very difficult actually to prove that you're not inside some kind of simulation. So it's very possible that in the future, we will discover that not only are we in a simulation, but it's probably a much bigger simulation than we ever could have realized. That there are just multiple dimensions to it, more parallel universes. And again, don't get thrown off. Just because the machine is biological doesn't mean it's not a machine. It still operates with determinism. It still operates in a very mathematical function, and that's really what's important when we consider these kinds of ideas. But I wouldn't be surprised if we find ourselves as part of a species that's part of some much grander plan. Now I'm kind of secular and I tend to take a kind of non-religious perspective, but that doesn't mean that I can't believe that there are other things out there. I just don't know if it's in some formal trajectory like the Judeo-Christian framework. It's probably much more like we are living just the simulation among millions and millions of other simulations amongst millions and millions of other simulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:57) Yeah. I grew up Christian. When I was in my twenties, I started researching different religions and trying to figure out my thoughts on that, like most people do in their twenties. And one of the things that I came across was it looked like from the outside view of me looking at all of them, it looked like all of these people were feeling this sort of spiritual connection, and they were trying to figure out a rule set to follow to maximize that spiritual connection. And so in my mind, that was a huge, I guess, moment for me. But what do you think about that thought?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:09:29) Well, first off, I was raised a Catholic. I even went to Catholic school, so I have a real formal background in a type of Christian religion. And I was a believer for a long time until I was about 18 or 19, and I actually read the Bible from cover to cover. And I realized that I still love the Gospel. I still think some of the truths of Jesus and the kindness he showed is really wonderful, and I try to carry that in my life. I just don't know if this formal framework of God could be real. It's just, you know, you can just as much make a convincing argument that we already are—we have an AI god living in the simulation or some alien god or something like that. So I think what's important though is really not so much the framework we create, but how we apply the truths in our lives to the people we live with and to the job we do on planet Earth. You know, whatever it is we're trying to overcome. For me, that's much more important than this outstanding or overwhelming framework for what God or spirituality is. I think just one's daily life, their actions, that stands for everything. And later, if we get to an afterlife or if there's no afterlife, you know, hopefully our deeds will prove good. But who knows?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:37) No, that's cool. I think about these things a lot. One of the things I think technology will help us find—you mentioned it earlier—but you will notice that there is a large part of the religious community that is sort of against this technology, and they always call it playing God. I see it differently because even under their perspective, simply because God made us right in his image, and we're doing actions that we're driven towards, and we're all driven towards them across countries and cultures without even having to interact with each other. We're all driven towards these things. And I think that that alone is an argument for being able to continue to do it. I mean, look, in the Bible, what does it say? Like the Lord's Prayer, to make it on earth like it is in heaven. So the idea that God didn't give us this technology to go do that is crazy. Like, we clearly have this technology. We're advancing it. We're doing it. We're making life much better here on Earth with this technology. So I'm very for it, but I also agree that it is the whole scalpel analogy where you can either do good with it or bad with it.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:11:41) Well, yeah. I mean, I think ultimately when you're talking about transhumanism, you're talking about a movement that's very humanitarian. The main goal of the movement is to make people so that they don't have to die and lose loved ones or go through extreme suffering. We want to cure all disease. So at the core, it's a really wonderful movement, very humanitarian. I think, you know, when it becomes challenging for other people is when we talk about kind of the idea of wanting to become godlike. And that's where, you know, I think a lot of Christians and religious people get offended and think it's too selfish. But I think, you know, if you look at Christianity as a whole, it kind of wanted us to become godlike too. When you merge with Jesus and things like that, that's a way of becoming godlike. So I think, you know, transhumanism is aiming for those things, and there are some really amazing technologies that are going to be in the future that could allow us to do all that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:30) Have you ever done any studying around—and you sort of mentioned it earlier as well—like, if you look at society as a broad, right, we're really okay with drilling holes in people's skulls and putting neurotransmitters in there if they can't walk, right? They're a quadriplegic, to help them get to walk or to help them with certain things. Or if it's life-threatening or painful or difficult, the average person on the street seems to be like, yeah, okay, that's cool. But the moment you start talking about, I can run a seven-minute mile and I want to do this genetic modification through CRISPR so I can run a three-minute mile, people are like, no way, you're playing God, you can't do that. What have you studied that at all?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:13:11) You know, I haven't studied that directly, but I can just tell you that I have a feeling that there's a lot of correlation between closed-mindedness and those who don't want to embrace transhumanism. I find it that those who are really stuck on fundamentalism end up not wanting to embrace radical technologies in their lives. I think a lot of it also has to do with age. I mean, even if you're religious and Christian, if you're a young person, you tend to embrace technology. I have two young daughters, 11 and eight years old, and they were using YouTube before they were 12 of age. And even if they do end up being Christian for some reason sometime in the future, they're still going to love technology. So really, I think a lot of it has to do with, A, whether you're closed-minded and just keep that. Like, it's very difficult for my mother, for example, to embrace transhumanism because she's 76 years old and it's totally new to her. But I think it'll be a lot easier for a younger generation to embrace virtual reality, which they kind of grew up with already and being an intimate part of that, even if it doesn't necessarily go with their overall religious values or overall cultural values. Because technology for them was kind of a natural step when they were growing up. So it's not just about whether you accept it. It has a lot to do with your age and also kind of your upbringing. If you grow up in a country where using the internet daily and having a cell phone in your pocket at the age of 10 is normal, you're going to end up being very tech-imbued.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:36) Yeah, no, 100%. There is definitely a correlation between your open-mindedness—I'm 34. I've got a four-year-old, a three-year-old, and one on the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:46) But I started noticing myself being less receptive to new ideas and being like, what? One of the kids did, like, you know, whereas before I was always like, you're old, and this is what's happening to people who would say that. And I was really curious. The reason why I asked you if you studied this at all was because I was really curious if there's some sort of explanation for, like, the evolutionary reason why we would be less interested in new ideas as we get older.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:15:11) You know, that's a great question. And it's funny too because someone like my father who recently passed away, you may have seen in the movie Immortality or Bust. You know, he was kind of a secular person. But at the end of his life, even though he wanted to live longer and he liked transhumanism, at the end of his life, he was just kind of like, I don't want to be here. He had too many heart attacks. He was kind of overweight. He couldn't walk to the mailbox, so he was kind of ready to check out. And I think a lot of where you are in life, you know, has to do with how you're going to react to the transhumanism movement and to seeking out living dramatically longer. You know? So it's kind of where you are and who you are as for why these things happen. And so I think I don't know any of the studies behind it, but that just makes sense to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:55) Yeah. I mean, that makes sense too as they get older because they're more okay with death because the experiences that we all have in common as humans is that we're born, and as of today, we die. Right? So the body, as far as evolution goes, and adapting to its environment, has gotten extraordinarily good at dying. And I started looking into this when I was about 11, 12 years old, and I got hit by a car that was going like 60 miles an hour. And I was dragged under the car, and then I was in a wheelchair for a year, and I had to go through the process of learning how to walk again. And the odd thing about that is at the moment of, like, getting hit by the car, that flash thing absolutely happened, but it's not exactly the way you would see it when they represent it in, like, the cinematic sense. It's more akin to, like, a dream where it's, like, very brief, but it's long. But I was really interested in that because I felt, like, a feeling of euphoria as it sort of, like, scanned several of my memories as I went to the ground. So I started researching to better understand that, and I was like, well, it's not like near-death experiences. It kind of is, but, like, a lot of the people have muddied that water with, like, they've added some crazier stuff to it, then I'm like, I'm more interested as a nerd in, like, what's the reason behind this? And what I drew from my limited research was our bodies are just really adept at dying because it's something that we have a lot of experience with from an evolutionary standpoint.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:17:17) Yeah. I mean, you know, after near-death and after death experiences, and there's even, you know, some studies recently when people have died. Maybe they can even hear family members up to 24 hours after and 48 hours after. Some studies have said potentially because you see brain activity. Whether that's true or not is very difficult to tell. And even recently, they've done some amazing experiments at Yale University right now. They're reanimating pigs' brains that are dead just by putting electro signals back into them, and you can see that their consciousness is similar to their consciousness when they were alive on the brain scan. So, I mean, it's very possible a lot of these things happen as you go through a near-death or a real death experience. I mean, so the line of death, of course, is changing too. You know? I mean, it used to be that someone died and they were just dead and their heart was gone. But now it's like there's brain dead, there's real truly dead, there's you can't bring him back dead. There's all these different types of death things. So I think, you know, that's a very interesting field. Transhumanists love that field too because we're all interested in cryonics and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:19) So when you go and you do these interviews, what are some of the questions that you get a lot from people who have, like, no clue what transhumanism is and maybe some questions from people that are more closed-minded?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:18:32) Well, I've campaigned quite broadly for transhumanism before and during presidential campaigns and whatnot. When I talk to someone who doesn't know much about it, I really try to say that the first thing the movement is trying to do is really help the disabled community. Because when you take a soldier who's lost an arm and now they can no longer grab a beer, like, that's a real bummer, obviously, in their lives. Doesn't matter who the soldier is, you know. And the transhumanist community is the one putting on these robotic arms that tie into your neural system that allow you to then grab that beer and, again, have a normal life or at least close to normal life. And that's really where I think transhumanism wins, you know, people that love it. It's really when we start talking about some of the bigger questionable things like merging with artificial intelligence, and then you have Hollywood. You know? When was the last time you saw a positive transhumanist movie? It doesn't really exist because it's just not very exciting to watch. So you have to kind of counter all these different things. And I think, eventually, we get to a point when people can hopefully see the difference between the good and the sort of science fiction sketchy. You have to separate it for them and say, look, life's not all Hollywood. And radical technology doesn't just move overnight. It's not like we're going to become cyborgs immediately.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:42) Right. It takes time. That's why I like things like, you know, Ready Player One. And when you see the media start to imagine this stuff, it really helps make it easier for people to imagine it because they can think about the movie.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:19:56) Yeah. Yeah. Ready Player One's a great idea of transhumanism because it actually is a little bit positive. But it shows, like, always a battle. And, honestly, there isn't much battle. I used to think there's a big giant war coming between Christians and transhumanists, but I no longer really think that. I think Christians will probably embrace transhumanism as a way to get closer to what they believe God is and the people they love. So there's a lot of crossovers now between even that. So I think it's really just people mellowing out with their use of technology and seeing it not as some great breakthrough or some life-changing thing, but just as the natural course of how they adopt in a 100-year lifespan and maybe longer, hopefully.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:34) Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, I'm Christian, and there's a huge spectrum of Christianity too. And there's many different styles, but I predominantly go to, like, a nondenominational church. I was like, this is definitely the place to hang out and spend some time because it aligned with, like, my personal values as well.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:20:55) Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And I feel like, you know, I want to tell you about one specific technology that transhumanists believe in. It's kind of on the frontier of everything. It's called quantum archaeology. But it's this idea that you can reverse engineer certain subatomic parts of matter. So let's say wherever you're sitting or we're sitting ten minutes ago, we could use a supercomputer to reverse engineer it. Now 3D bioprinting has come so far that we can also 3D bioprint out versions of you. Now not yet, but in 50 years, we'll be able to 3D bioprint out a complete version of you as you were ten minutes ago, so long as we could use a supercomputer to get a blueprint of your subatomic matter sitting in that chair. Now this is really interesting because it means it's not time travel. It's the idea that you can go back though in points in time and get the blueprint of that person and then reprint them out as they were, and maybe you can do it an hour before death. Now this is what transhumanists call technological resurrection or quantum archaeology, but it's also what a lot of Christians would call the second coming of Jesus. So there is a whole group of transhumanists, and again, I'm not saying this is crap because there are Christian transhumanists too, don't mind you, plenty of them. And they think that actually it's transhumanism that's going to bring these technologies to Jesus when he comes back so that he can reconstitute a huge amount of the population that was good and maybe believed in proper values. Anyways, I just tell you about it because it shows you kind of the frontiers of where transhumanism is going. It even becomes difficult to die because people will want to be able to bring you back at some point in the future. Now, as a science-minded person, I'm not telling you this technology exists yet or is even plausible. People are still working on it. There may never be enough computational power in the universe to do it. But it looks like if you take a J-curve of how fast the microprocessor is going, it does seem like we will be able to get computers that are far faster than some subatomic things, in such that we can recreate those subatomic things and then 3D print them out. And the point I'm trying to say, though, is that it is possible that humans in 100 or 1,000 years might have access to technological resurrection. So we could bring back your great-great-great-grandparents, you know, or something like that, and bring back anyone you wanted.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:05) Yeah. I love it. You have books out. Right? Where can people buy your books?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:23:10) Well, first off, I've just published the last of a box collection on Amazon. It's called the Zoltan Istvan Futures Collection. So you can go and look at any of those books, and that's really interesting. I do have The Transhumanist Wager, which is kind of my more famous book. And it's really interesting because The Transhumanist Wager is actually about Christians versus transhumanism. And it's funny because ten years ago when I wrote the book, I was, like, thinking, oh, that was the conflict. And now I'm realizing that there's much more of a union behind it. I'm actually writing a sequel that'll probably bridge a lot of those ideas together. But you can find The Transhumanist Wager on Amazon and other places. And, of course, watch the documentary, Immortality or Bust. You can find it on Amazon Prime. It's all about my 2016 presidential campaign where I drove a giant coffin bus across the country. It was really fun. We had transhumanists from all over the United States jump on board, and a really bizarre trip.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:02) Oh, yeah. I watched it this morning. I thought it was so cool. When you were going and visiting the places, you got something injected into your hand. Correct? An RFID chip or something?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:24:11) Yeah. I got a small implant injected, and it can do, like, funny things like open my front door, can start a car, can hold Bitcoin, can do stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:20) That's awesome. So I had actually done a couple of interviews on this, I think, about two years ago, and I had someone that had a documentary on Amazon where they went around and visited all these people that had done these body modifications. But people are regularly cutting open their bodies and putting things inside of it.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:24:39) Of course. Of course. And, you know, and it's funny because I think more and more, we're going to have artificial things put inside ourselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:46) Yeah. And, again, it's funny because, like, we sit here and I say, oh, it's really weird when you watch that video and they're in someone's house type deal or, like, at some tattoo type place and they get, you know, a sensor put into their skin that can tell their body temperature. We think that's super weird. But when it's done for, like, diabetes or some heart reason or, like, we don't think that's weird at all.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:25:08) Yeah. Yeah. I know. And I think that's one of the problems is there's this elective versus kind of, like, medical condition type thing. And I think transhumanists want to do a lot of elective stuff, and that's where a lot of people get upset about, is, like, oh, you electively put in a microchip into your hand. Well, now you're like, it's number of the beast and stuff. And I'm like, well, it's not that different than electively putting in an artificial hip that somehow has some kind of chip monitoring system for your blood levels. You know? But, you know, I think just people sort of have to get over what they're afraid of and just accept that the future involves technology inside our bodies, and we'll all be healthier for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:43) Absolutely. So what is your most popular book?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:25:45) Well, The Transhumanist Wager is a novel I wrote in 2013, and it went on to do really well, become a bestseller and all that. And it introduced transhumanism, the movement, into activism. So up until that point, transhumanism didn't really have an activist side of the movement. It had a lot of great scientists, a lot of great academics, but the book is really about the cultural side of movement. You know, like, we like to think of transhumanism sort of like environmentalism. You know, environmentalism 25 years ago was kind of an unknown movement, and now it's multi-billion person movement that controls politics and everything else. Well, we think transhumanism is on a similar trajectory, but it needs, like, young people to be activists. Like, when during the presidential campaign, we would go out and we would demonstrate on the streets, or we would go out and meet people, hand out flyers. Before this book, there really hadn't been anything like that. So this book introduced a lot of the community to what it means to be an activist in the transhumanist world, to go out and convince people that we need to use science to upgrade ourselves, to go out and convince people that dying is truly an awful thing if you don't believe in an afterlife. And so that's really what the book The Transhumanist Wager is about, although it's a fictional novel that a lot of people have compared to Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. For good or bad, I don't know if that's really the case, but that's what a lot of the commentary has been about, except it's set in the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:03) All right. Great. And people can buy that on Amazon?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:27:06) Yeah. Yeah. The Transhumanist Wager on Amazon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:08) Nice. And then so you, that's your, like, older one that's more popular, and your newer one is a collection of seven books?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:27:14) Yeah. So the newest one is a collection of seven books called the Zoltan Istvan Futures Collection. What happened is after the novel, I was given a platform many places. I began writing at the New York Times opinion sections, began writing. I had a column, I had a column at Huffington Post, at Psychology Today. And so I wrote about 225 essays over seven years. And then the Zoltan Istvan Futures Collection is a collection of all those essays, but re-edited, readapted, and looking at it from a new perspective, as well as a box set so you can see how kind of my thinking has unfolded. You can see me go from being kind of a hardheaded atheist to somebody a bit more spiritual and maybe open-minded. And the essays try to show that in the chronology of the seven books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:57) Oh, okay. That's pretty cool. I want to talk a little bit about you as a person. One of the things that my production team said, they said, you're going to love this guy. He invented volcano boarding, and he sailed around the world. Dude, I know you probably get asked this, like, all the time. That's why I didn't want to, like, bring it up at the beginning of the interview. But can you tell me real quick about a couple of the cool things that you've done in your life?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:28:21) Sure. Well, you know, just to start out, I was very lucky out of college. I got a job at the National Geographic Channel right as that channel was launching. So I was one of, like, 70 journalists. And it was also right when the mini DV camera came out.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:28:34) So instead of being a professional journalist with a giant camera on your shoulders, you now can go out into the jungle and capture with this tiny little camera high quality footage, broadcast quality footage. It really changed the industry twenty years ago. And so I became a journalist at National Geographic and started going all around the world. I visited 70 countries for them, filming all sorts of amazing cultural, environmental, and I actually started off as a war zone correspondent for them. So I did a lot of conflict zone stuff.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:28:59) And one of the stories I did was volcano boarding in Vanuatu, which I had known about before because I had been sailing there six years prior. So this time I took my snowboard to National Geographic. We filmed it all for them, and it came out on their channel, and it just kind of blew up as a brand new extreme sport. It went viral and all these other things. You can still watch it on YouTube, and it's now practiced around the world at all the different volcanoes that are there.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:29:21) So volcano boarding was a fun sport that I, you know, I guess I was the very first person that had either invented it or at least caught it on film.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:28) Do you do it while the volcano is erupting?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:29:31) Yes. Well, I mean, that's the thing. You can do it both ways. But in Vanuatu and other places around the world, what makes it extreme is the volcano's erupting behind you and it's shooting out molten lava, and those molten lava bombs are landing all around you. And so, for example, in the volcano that I did it in, Vanuatu, there are a bunch of gravestones for people that have died from just being hit by the volcano molten lava.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:29:53) Because you don't see it. You're standing on the side of the edge, and all of a sudden something goes through you. This is a giant volcano shooting out all the time. And you think it's like big molten lava shooting up, but it's actually tiny little bullets sometimes that just melt right through you. And so that's sort of what happened in that very first time, and that's what makes it really dangerous.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:30:10) You're avoiding these things. I probably wouldn't do it anymore now that I have kids.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:14) Right. My life changed a lot when I had kids. Now is there anything that the transhumanist popular ones like you and some of the others disagree on, or is it a pretty simple mission?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:30:25) Well, I think the religious aspect of transhumanism is what a lot of people disagree with, and that's because there are Christian transhumanists, Buddhist transhumanists, or atheist transhumanists. And so everybody has kind of a different take. And I also think people differentiate on how they want to achieve indefinite lifespans. Some people want to upload themselves. Other people want to use stem cell technology.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:30:46) Some people want to replace all their organs with 3D created organs and things like that. So it's really a difference of opinion. But I think most people are pretty united in the single cause, which is let's use transhumanism to better ourselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:02) Yeah. And I was reading you have, there's some laws, the three laws of transhumanism.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:31:07) Well, you know, there are the three laws of transhumanism. There's also a transhumanist bill of rights. I won't go into them all because a lot of people actually don't like so much kind of verbiage and regulation in the movement. Like I said, people like to keep it decentralized. But everybody has created something different. And the main thing about the three laws of transhumanism, for example, is that you are just trying to become all powerful.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:31:30) But the problem is at what point does seeking all power overwhelm your desire to help humanity? And that's where a lot of transhumanists might disagree with something like the three laws of transhumanism or, you know, even the transhumanist bill of rights, which is trying to give cyborgs and future AI, artificial intelligences, their own rights, rights that might be comparable to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:53) Yeah. Those are all amazingly tough questions, right? That'll change as we gain more and more knowledge about everything. I mean, technology allowing us to get more information to make better decisions is something that's changing all the time, right? Because there's the argument before you have the data, and then there's the argument after you have the data. And for me, I just think that it's fascinating because there's a lot of tension and misunderstanding and things that happen through these processes as we get new technology and can get new information.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:32:24) Yeah. Yeah. And I wrote for the New York Times a really interesting piece for them on artificial wombs. You know, there's people that are for abortion, against abortion, and then there are people like myself who are saying, well, maybe there's a third way. Maybe we can have artificial wombs, things that already, they're already being tested in hospitals right now, not on humans yet, but on different animals and whatnot.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:32:42) And they're having success. You know, instead of aborting a child, you might be able to just transfer that child into an artificial womb and then have it up for adoption. So transhumanism always tries to bring in these different types of technologies to make the world a better place and offer more options and, you know, whatever's out on the table.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:00) I love it. What is morphological freedom?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:33:03) Morphological freedom is this idea that you should have the right to do with your body whatever you want to do. And it's kind of perhaps the most important, or at least one of the most important ideas of transhumanism, is that you shouldn't be able to regulate how we want to improve ourselves. So if we want to become cyber gods, then let us do it. That sounds easier said than done, but that's kind of the core base of a lot of transhumanist mindset, is that we want the right to be able to modify ourselves and use technology to enhance ourselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:31) I get it. And do you think that it should be no strings attached? Should three year olds be able to make decisions about their modifications?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:33:42) No. No. I mean, I think, you know, up until 18, probably parents should be able to control that stuff or even the state. I'm not a fan of the state controlling anything. But certainly, when it comes to children, you need some kind of laws in place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:54) Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely fascinating after having kids and really being able to see, like, oh, this is the maturity of a, I've only gotten to age four, right? Because that's how old my daughter is. But being able to watch that happen, I'm like, I totally get now why parents are responsible in a legal way. Like, if you're not taking care of your kids, you know, you can have issues because they really depend on you for everything.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:34:20) Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so funny when people talk to me about, you know, their dreams and their lives, this and that. But unless you've had kids, they don't really realize, like, as soon as you have kids, the world changes. And even the transhumanist changes because then, for example, one of my daughters wants to marry our four foot robot.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:34:36) And then you're like, well, yeah, that's fun. But, you know, maybe in the future, that'll actually be a reality. And then I wrote a piece about that. How would I actually feel? It's one thing to talk transhumanism to everybody. It's another thing to think my daughter's going to marry a robot twenty five years into the future. Can I handle that? And by not handling that, am I a jerk? I mean, there are all these strange questions because what if she wants to do that? What if the robot's more sophisticated than human beings?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:34:59) This could be a real possibility. And yet something in my biology says, well, that's twisting my brain too much. And yet I also want to be open minded enough to say, well, who knows what the future holds? And, yeah, these are some of the pressing questions that we might all have to answer someday, those of us who have children.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:16) Oh, yeah. It's such an interesting conversation I'm finding that we're having because, you know, I do a lot of interviews, right? And your topic has to be one of the broadest reaching topics I've ever had. I'm noticing all these different areas. How do you keep up with it all?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:35:33) Well, I think it's hard, but you just have to always focus on the science. And, you know, I mean, a lot of technologies comes down to the growth of the microprocessor, back to Moore's law. So you can apply AI, you can apply bionics, you can apply 3D bioprinting, stem cell technology, genetic editing, everything to wherever it is. But I'm a big believer in the scientific method. I just think, basically, you apply the scientific method to any problem, including all social problems.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:35:58) Now it doesn't always work perfectly. Don't get me wrong. But if you can use reason and logic and work out things and say, well, this doesn't work or this works, that's the best way to approach life and also to approach social dilemmas. This is exactly how I approach abortion issues. I, you know, I realize that there are people on both sides, and they've been fighting for years. Nobody's happy. No one's ever going to compromise. Is there a third way? Yes. There is a third way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:22) I love it. I love it. What is the craziest piece of technology that you've ever seen someone put into their body?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:36:28) Well, I've seen people try to do genetic editing so that they can, so they basically splice plant DNA and inject it into themselves so that they can go out into the sun and photosynthesize, and therefore, they can not have to eat. Now no one has had success with this, but there are plenty of universities that are actually experimenting a little bit with this. The reason is that there is global hunger and all these other things. And if you could figure out a way to get humans to photosynthesize, we could stop a lot of children from starving to death. And they're still not sure what the numbers are anymore, but there are at least hundreds of children starving to death around the world every single day still.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:37:03) And so if we could figure out a way to splice plant DNA into our bodies and be able to photosynthesize, we would be able to get a free lunch per se. And so I have seen transhumanists actually administer this into their bodies. Now none of it has worked, at least not that we know of, and things don't seem to be too compatible yet. But this gives you kind of a long term idea of what transhumanists are trying to do and some of the wildest things they're experimenting with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:27) Are there any organisms with blood cells or hearts that can photosynthesize as their primary source of energy?

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:37:34) I actually don't know the answer to your question. I'm certainly not an expert on this type of science. I've just seen it done when I was on my presidential campaign. I was introduced to it, and I thought, oh my god, that is bizarre. And, wow, talk about fixing the world. Like, here we have food shortages. We're worried about Ukraine not having enough wheat and all this. But all of a sudden, we can photosynthesize.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:37:52) We don't need, you know, there's a whole bunch of different things, ways out that technology might actually save the human species or make us thrive just because we have invented our way out of it. So I don't know enough about the science, but it's certainly an amazing possibility someday.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:08) Yeah. Well, I mean, as a human, first of all, I love it. I think that'd be super cool, awesome, super interesting, right? But I was trying to figure out why did they think this would work, right? Like, is there an animal that's doing it, and they're like, oh, I can get that animal gene and splice it in, or are they literally just trying to splice the plant gene into...

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:38:26) They're actually using genetic editing techniques already, so I think they have modified variations of plant things, you know, in order to put it in them. And they're just, I think it's early experimentation. And I gotta say, hey, just so you know, a lot of the transhumanists are guys with tons of earrings, tons of tattoos. Maybe they're just wild and crazy and they have no chance of success.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:38:44) But that's kind of what makes it a very fun and exciting movement, is that there is a lot of biohackers out there doing really weird things. Now most of it's probably not going to work and most of it's going to need the resources of major universities and academic centers and companies, but I love to see a lot of these biohackers go out in the fringe and do some of these crazy things. Who knows what'll work?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:04) Oh, yeah. It reminds me of when I was learning how to program. I was just pressing things into the computer, seeing what happened and learning and playing with the code and didn't know what I was doing, but I could see it. I could see the code and I could play with the code, and then eventually, I could pick up on some patterns, and I feel like we're just infants in our understanding of our own DNA. So it'll be cool as we unlock this stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:24) All right. Well, great, man. I hope you keep pushing forward. I'm grateful that you get to spend your time doing this. I think you're a fascinating person, so thank you so much, man.

(Zoltan Istvan at 00:39:32) Yeah. No. This is awesome. It's a great conversation, and I, you know, I'm glad we talked on some of the religious ideas as well because I feel like, especially probably your podcast community might be more open to hearing some of these ideas and then being like, maybe transhumanism isn't that bad. And that's when I think, you know, I've succeeded at what I'm trying to do, which is unify people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:52) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.