Lessons - How Technology Will Make Death Optional Within Decades | Zoltan Istvan - Futurist & Presidential Candidate

In this lessons episode, discover the bold world of transhumanism and the quest to radically extend human life through science and technology. Learn how synthetic organs, gene editing, and mind uploading challenge the limits of mortality, explore why religious and societal beliefs spark controversy around life extension and understand how redefining aging as a disease could unlock major government investment in longevity research. For people that have never heard of transhumanism ever, what does that actually mean? Is it disease prevention? Is it like neural ink? What is it? Sure, well transhumanism is just a social movement and it has a fun it's a funny name. It's just an umbrella term for a lot of different things like cryonics, immortality, life extension, singularity thinking. Whatever it is, it's just a term that covers a huge movement of scientists and normal people that are pushing to use science and technology to radically extend the human being's life. Now how would we do that? Well most people die from organ failure. So for example, one of the transhuman's greatest cause is working on synthetic organs and 3D bio printing them and there have been huge movements and it's not just you know synthetic organs could be pigs organs, you know which the big giant company in Florida is dealing with that. There's so many different ways of extending life but the point is transhumanists want to stop death through science. Now the other methods are you know genetic editing for example trying to adjust yourself so they don't age. There's a little thing called the telmerase at the very end of the you know DNA and if you could eliminate that like the jellyfish you could live perhaps hundreds of years longer. So there are transhumanists working on that and then it gets a little bit more science fictiony where it's kind of like some people are working on uploading your mind and I just heard Peter Diamandus yesterday a big you know the ex-price founder. He said within five years we're going to be uploading our minds. Okay five years this is crazy uploading my so this is another form of not dying. So it's across the board we don't know which one's going to work but what we do know is that there's now hundreds of billions of dollars especially in Silicon Valley where I live that are pushing towards overcoming biological death and when you have that much money involved in something I think there's going to be success. I was listening to a couple podcasts and one of the hosts mentioned your views were controversial. I don't understand how now that I understand what transhumanism is how living longer and extending life span and keeping people healthier what's controversial about that? Sure well you know you would think upfront nothing is controversial about it but what really is is we live in a very religious dominated country about 80% of the United States believes in an afterlife and believes in some type of God and around the world it's even higher around 85% so the point is that if you believe in those things then you have to wonder why should humans take the power of immortality or indefinite life spans I'm not sure immortality. No you know most transhumanists don't say we're going to live forever we just like to think we're going to live 100 200 years 300 years we might be able to control when we die and if we die that's really the goal of it and I think that is controversial to the natural state of things so if you are a religious person and you hear somebody saying oh we're going to overcome death and you think well wait a sec the whole dichotomy of a religion is that you live you live a good life and therefore you go to heaven and you're judged by God and it's everything's okay but if you eliminate that need of the judgment and of God then where does I even leave religion and that's where the controversy in my opinion arises from some other people just to be fair other people say well death is needed in human evolution in order that new things will spawn and that's actually a good point it's very hard to argue against that the problem though is that even if death is needed to spawn new ideas I still don't want to die and I'm not sure that I need to die in order for others to feel like there's some kind of new spring always happening I certainly don't want my kids to die just because I'm supposed to make way for other people I think you know humans can maybe find other ways to be creative and spawn new beginnings I agree with that I love your opinion on is the government doing any sort of job in terms of longevity or quality of life I feel not to the degree they should I feel like we have a sick care system not a health care system and maybe that's why you ran for president but just talk to me about sort of the current state of what the U.S. government doesn't matter which party Democrat Republican what do they feel about longevity sure well let me just say you know when I ran for office and still the number one goal I would say of most transhumanists and longevity activists is to characterize aging as a disease for the government the United States government governments around the world to say that aging is a disease because if all the Sun we say that aging is a disease it will be treated like cancer like Alzheimer's like diabetes and also huge amounts of NIH and other types of funding will go into it but right now no one wants to say for those religious reasons we talked about before that aging is the disease and I couldn't agree with you more you know what is the point of living to 100 years if the last 15 years your life is really in pain and most 85 year old and plus people it really is dramatically hard so we do need to invest so I think you know the government has not invested enough and I come from a little bit of a libertarian bias with my like to like let you know that the people do what they want to do and hands off from the government type of thing it's not a party or a political affiliation anything like that it's just more you know I think I believe in people and entrepreneurs doing thing and not the government the government holding them back or putting on regulations but at the same time I think since the government has such deep pockets it would be very useful if they would stimulate entrepreneurship and people around the world trying to start businesses that would defeat aging but in order to do so you're going to have to characterize that and designate that as a disease specifically like you would cancer treat aging like cancer if we do that the game will change right now the amount of money flowing into aging related you know anti aging stuff is very minimal in the millions but if all the sudden we treated it like cancer we would be putting billions into it and immediately probably within five to seven years you would see a big impact in the everyday Americans life I think it's so important what the concept of of a more biological freedom what is that concept and why is it so important sure morphological freedom is this idea that you should be able to do with your body whatever you want to do no one should be able to stand in the way of that and of course if you're doing some of your body that is interfering with someone else's body that's a whole different thing but morphological freedom says as long as you're not interfering something else or anyone else you should be able to do with your body what you want so for example I have a chip implant in my hand but in various states across the United States even this chip implant which is just kind of an elective party trick I can go to I can trade Bitcoin with it or something I can I hold my information it has a credit card and you know things like that you can sometimes scan it send text messages with it but in certain states it's illegal you would think it's illegal yes yes it's illegal and and so I wrote a piece for the New York Times on this because all the states are saying well should we allow people to recreationally put in chips inside their body even if it's just for fun and party tricks and the answer was yes we shouldn't allow people to do that because we don't let them have freedom with their bodies so this is something that goes against the morphological freedom concept and you know generally speaking transhumanists are a little bit on the edge they're like biohackers you know they're fringe they're putting stuff in their body they're trying out new things we're trying to see what works and we don't want to be stopped by the government saying no you can't do that you know if we're not hurting somebody else we would like to write the experiment with our bodies that's interesting what do you I mean so you're an entrepreneur you've built some businesses but also are these businesses sort of focused on transhumanism on optimizing the human body I heard that you had a winery but there's like a a new tropic component to this this wine as well so so when you think about how you live your life talking about the businesses you build but also talking about personally like how do you live your life as a transhumanist sure well you know the the ironic thing is that I have built a lot of businesses but they have not really had much to do with transhumanism so far transhumanism has been this thing because I wrote my novel the transhumanist wager about 10 years ago it became a bestseller and then through that I formed the the transhumanist party and ran for office for the you know for the US presidency and that you know just got lucky the media took off with it said oh we have a science candidate running for president all of a sudden I sort of became semi-famous because of that but my businesses were kind of boring you know I was working for national geographic I was getting maybe you know six seven thousand dollars for every three four five weeks I was away but it was coming all in cash and I didn't really know what to do with it and at the time my father was sick I was you know helping to pay some of the bills for him in Oregon and so I said well maybe I'll start investing some in real estate up there since real estate was quite a bit cheaper than it was in California where I live now and I started buying fixed ruppers and then on the office days when I didn't have a sign mincer you know I'd be home for two months at a time I'd fix those houses up I'd always had a good knack of tools because of my sales trip and then I flipped them and very quickly I am asked to almost 20 properties and you know before the the crash in 2008 I sold the majority of it because I realized things were kind of out of hand too good to be true and I you didn't you you you timed it right I timed it very right and I got very lucky and and and then I joined a band with a friend which is one of the reasons I sold the ironic part the band didn't succeed I played guitar the band didn't succeed but I had quite a bit of money in here I was sitting in my young in my early thirties as you know as I a multi-millionaire and and what should I do with my life now and this is when I I wrote this book the transumist wager and and that sort of launched my career as a public persona I guess going around speaking talking about transhumanism now though I have started to invest in vineyards through a company called Zoltanish fund vineyards and wineries so we have a vineyard in Appavali as well as a winery we have a vineyard in Mendoza Argentina the first one I bought and then we all have one in Bordeaux France a nice big giant one in a winery there a little chateau and you know it's all combined under one company and while we're we're our goal with that is to actually put transhumanist drugs called neutropics these are brain drugs that supposedly make you smarter some of my Berkeley PhD people friends have helped me out with it I get to be honest I'm not sure drinking wine even with this makes you smarter but we're working on it's wishful thinking it's wishful we're trying to get there so no off you know yeah so there's no question here your cognitive abilities are a little bit better I think but we haven't we haven't actually come to this solution yet where you drink wine it becomes super smart though we're working on it but this is the new company that I've been working on and we won some awards last year with our Malbec and Cabernet Savion and so it's my newest company and we'll see where it goes I'll send you a bottle one of these days when we have something that works thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one