Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the true life podcast. I hope everybody is having a beautiful day. I got an incredible show for you right now. I think everyone here is going to enjoy this show. It's going to be a fast one, but it's going to be in depth. And so let me just jump right into the deep end with both feet. Imagine a world where the boundaries of human experience and existence are stretched beyond what we once deemed immovable. A world where mortality itself becomes negotiable. Joining us today is Zoltan Istvan, a modern-day voyager whose life and work echo the cosmic curiosity of Arthur C. Clarke, the systemic ingenuity of Buckminster Fuller, the metaphysical introspections of Schopenhauer, the fearless scope of Frank Herbert's world, and the reality-bending visions of Philip K. Dick. At twenty-one, Zoltan set sail alone to explore the globe, carrying with him a library filled with the ideas of philosophers and futurists who, like him, refused to settle for the known. He has since journeyed through war zones, pioneered extreme sports, and founded the Transhumanist Party, all in pursuit of a human potential that defies the limits of flesh, mortality, and time. In the Transhumanist Wager, Zoltan presents a radical vision of a future where science and technology drive us toward immortality. His quest stands at the edge of the unknown, beckoning us to consider whether we are ready to confront not only the limits of the body, but also the limits of the psyche. Jung reminded us that the psyche holds not only light but shadow, that within us exists a collective unconscious that binds us to the most ancient fears, our deepest archetypes, and our uncharted potential. For Zoltan, does this transhumanist dream risk, as Jung warned, cutting us off from the shadowy depths that make us human, severing us from the ancient truths with lie within? Or does this dream embody Fuller's vision of humanity as designer, consciously evolving to face, even integrate these shadows in a new epoch of awareness? Zoltan, thank you so much for being here today. I hope you're having a beautiful day. How are you? I'm doing good. Thanks so much for having me. I know our time is limited, so I'm going to jump right in here. Here's a kind of questions that I've narrowed down here. If, as Schopenhauer suggested, the world we experience is but a representation shaped by our will, what happens to will itself in a future where technology may extend life indefinitely and reshape consciousness? Well, I think will is a very challenging question. The real question is, does will even exist? And of course, I'm just finishing my graduate degree at University of Oxford in the philosophy department, and we could go have an entire podcast and maybe twenty four hours just on that topic alone. But let's just say for argument's sake that it does exist, that we are in control of our destiny. We're sailing our own ship. I think, you know, No matter how dramatic technology becomes, there'll probably still be something inside us that is ourselves. You know, the I, the personality, the ego that go down to whatever it is you want to call it, but something that represents your own vision. And I think that will ultimately spur decisions no matter how far technology goes. I, you know, because if something else is spurring all your decisions, it's not really you anymore. And that's not the path that either transhumanism wants to go down or myself. I want to retain me. In fact, I'd like me to last as long as possible through science and technology. We want, you know, transhumance don't want to die. But we also don't want to die in some kind of sense where we have no will left. So I think and I hope technology will never overcome that. If it does, I wouldn't don't know if I'd really ever consider it me anymore. What about the question like no one even really knows what happens when you die? Like maybe you're just transmutation. Maybe you're just like becoming a new form the same way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. So like would technology just prolong that caterpillar stage? Well, it's hard to know. And I think that's one of the big challenges. Imagine if transhumanists fought their whole lives and hundreds of thousands of years, whatever, to try to live indefinitely. And all of a sudden, you miss out on the greatest thing that's ever been because it's the afterlife that you really wanted to get to. And wouldn't that be the great irony of the world? And so I think, you know, even in my novel, The Transhuman Wager, the main character, Jethro Nights, goes out and purposely kills himself, knowing that cryonics will one day bring him back. He wants to discover what death is just to make sure of this exact problem. Because, you know, life is wonderful, but it's also kind of hard. You know, I mean, here we are aging. We can die from cancer. Sometimes we lose loved ones. I mean, it's not the easiest path. And maybe there is an afterlife. Whatever you believe in that, whether it's a Judeo-Christian one or some other type of spiritual one, And you bypass it by being a transhumanist and just trying to stay alive in this one. So that would be a huge error. But I think we'll probably have people that journey once we can bring back people to, you know, from death. Well, people that go there and discover that kind of like people went to the new lands with sailboats, came back and said, hey, let's go start a country there. So I think the same thing will happen in transhumanism. I know that there's a lot of speculation on as you grow older, you grow wiser. I've spoken to some people in palliative care who have this sort of discovering. Not that they're coming up with new ideas, but they're taking off all these ideas of who they used to be and finding a way to live a life that's They forgive themselves or they realize like, man, I'm more than these labels put on me. Do you think that if we have the ability to live like two hundred or three hundred years or maybe indefinitely that we get away from these insights that you have towards the end of death? Yeah, I mean, I think a huge amount changes if you know you can live indefinitely. I think first off, you know, number one is that you would be a lot less afraid to do new things. You'd probably paraglide and jump out of airplanes and surf five hundred foot waves. I mean, if you knew that there was a technology or some type of way of always bringing you back, there's a couple of great science fiction movies out there on these ideas. Then you would live a much more adventurous life. But at the same time, you know, I think there's much more than just how you live is the philosophical approach to it. I think if you philosophically knew that you weren't going to die for hundreds of years or maybe you're indefinitely, you might approach it differently. You might not have children. You know, you might... not necessarily want to dedicate your life to a nine to five job in the beginning, you know, starting from age twenty two and up or eighteen and up in some cases, whatever, you know, I mean, that that might suck. So you might want to say, you know, I want to travel the world. I want to go. And if you're space travel, I want to go out to space and all these things that might be here in the future. So I think, you know, it would fundamentally change our philosophical outlook on life, especially in terms of family. You know, I have two daughters, but the idea of being responsible for my two daughters for thousands and thousands of years, well, of course, I want to do that. That's a much bigger responsibility than just till they're eighteen and a little bit after, you know, I mean, there's just these ideas that would challenge it if you could live indefinitely. And I think It's a very interesting philosophical world to consider on its own. A number of PhDs have been written on it recently because we're starting to get to that point when maybe in the next fifteen, twenty, thirty years this could be a real possibility and it will change society. Yeah, sometimes I often wonder, like, it seems to me there's this race between, like, biology and technology. Like, on some level, it seems like maybe biology, like no tropics, or maybe, like, biology, if we figure it out, has the way in which we can live a better life longer. But sometimes technology might have that answer. Are these two competing forces? Are these forces working together? You know, so that's a fantastic question. It's really hard to know the answer to that. It was, you know, probably technology would be the way that we would live indefinitely through AI and things like that. But the problem is now that AI and chat GPT is here, we're all a little bit scared. I'm just not ready to put my mind into a machine and say it's Zoltan. I much rather have stem cells and genetic editing and something like that that kind of takes me back to when I was not fifty one, but maybe forty or something like that and that and retain exactly who I am. So the idea of uploading, which was a huge challenge. way of thinking about immortality for many futurists and transhumants for a long time has taken a step back now that we're actually into the AI age and we've seen how scary AI can be. I mean, the idea that you can just go on to chat GBT and say, you know, print me out a you know, eighty thousand word Ph.D. on transhumanism. And it's excellent, perhaps better than I could write. This is scary stuff. And that's just this year. This thing is growing like, you know, thousands of percent, you know, every year. So it could be dramatically smarter than this in just a few years. And whether I want to take my brain, which is complex, but maybe not nearly as complex as an AI brain is going to be, and merge those, who knows? I might just get left behind. The AI might say, wow, your flesh, your biology is feeble. So right now, there seems to be a push from many people in the transhumanist community and life extension community to say, What we actually are after is immortality in our flesh. Now, it doesn't mean we're not going to look at technological ways of living indefinitely. I certainly like the idea of being, you know, having my mind connected to AI and maybe increasing my IQ to a million points instead of the, you know, hundred or whatever it is. You know, so I think that, you know, I embrace that, but it's also... scary and so I think there's been a push back against technological immortality much more rather let's just be biological human beings and see how far we can go it's really well said it makes me think about you know when I think about science it kind of gives me the sort of relationship between science and spirituality on some level and those two things are coming together like what what's your take on spirituality Well, you know, spirituality is kind of what somebody makes of it. So while I'm a non-religious person, quite secular, I do think spirituality is often, in my opinion, the furthest reaches of what technology is that we can comprehend. So for example, in transhumanism, one of the great concepts is called the singularity. The singularity is when all machine intelligence AIs become so smart that our brains can no longer even understand how smart they are. And, you know, some people say that the singularity could be here in as quick as ten, twenty years. So spirituality to me would then be the singularity because it's way beyond my comprehension. So I think spirituality is something that tends to be, at least to transhumanists, on the very frontiers of where science and technology are, but we don't necessarily understand. Now, I understand, like, you know, maybe my wife or something has a very different interpretation of it. For her, spirituality might be something that in the here and now, how my biological body deals with, you know, my life, happiness, kindness towards others. But I tend to think of, you know, anything spirituality-oriented as something that I just don't understand, something a bit, you know, Mystical and majestic. Mystical and majestic. Those are beautiful words, and they do describe the ineffable. And I can't help – sometimes when I think of the singularity, I think of like a hardcore psychedelic trip when you touch upon this idea that is ineffable. Like you can see it. You can almost smell it, and you can almost touch it. And maybe for a moment you can touch it, but you can't bring it back with you. What's your take on our ability to – What is your take on awareness? It seems that as we grow more wiser or we have a relationship with technology, we become more aware of the world around us. Do you think that we're having an evolving awareness and transhumanism and biology are all part of that? Well, I definitely think we're having a wake up in awareness. The problem, though, with it is that a lot of the new technological innovation has been happening with AI and the human awareness is being left out of that picture. And that is what is, I think, scary to a lot of people. We may have, you know, transhumance may have been pushing AI for the last twenty, thirty years. But all of a sudden, now that's here, we realize it's so much smarter than us. It's leaving us behind. When you have a machine that can, you know, Okay, it's not necessarily thinking yet, but I mean, some of my, you know, some of the phone calls I'm getting are telling me in Silicon Valley, they're starting to play with AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, and AI that's as smart as humans. And of course, if you look at just the timeline of AI, it's just... exploding upwards in a J curve. And so it's really only five to ten years out that it might be way smarter than this. So when you talk about having five bodily senses like the human being does, or you're talking about having a hundred billion neurons like our brains have, AI is going to have dramatically more than that. It might have a million. It might have trillions and trillions upon trillions connections that it's able to compute in a single second, making our sense of awareness almost comparable to like an ant or maybe a golden retriever puppy. And this is... One of the big dangers is that human awareness is changing because of technology, but I don't think our brains have fundamentally changed in an evolutionary way very much in the last, you know, a hundred thousand or maybe I guess, twenty thousand years. But the technology we've created, the intelligence that it is starting to understand is changing. And so our real goal to achieve new types of awareness is we have to somehow make that jump into that technological age where our brains can also be part of that You know, insane processing power that the AI intelligence is very soon to discover. Now, again, as we mentioned earlier, that's scary and dangerous. But if we're talking about explorers of awareness, that's where I want to be because I want to have more than five human senses. I want to have a million if that's what it's going to take to really feel the universe, to understand the universe. Yeah. And it's interesting to think about like a computer or AI that it thinks so quickly. I think it probably is not the right word, but it's able to process so quickly. It does seem like a lifetime. Our thought process probably seems like a lifetime to that particular AI. And if that's the case, maybe if we just become more aware of time, we can almost live forever in the hundred years we're given. Is that too far out there? No, no, no, I totally get it. There's some great movies about this as well, you know, and books. You know, time is really what you make of it. And, you know, an eternity, for some people, can last one second, or very close to it. Yeah. So... And I think, of course, most people, at least most scientists, would say, when you die, if there's no afterlife, then time ceases to exist in a conscious way. Maybe your biology becomes dust or whatever. So, I mean, in that sense, eternity does happen. But I think the point of the story is that... we could interpret time differently. And actually, as a way to sometimes make myself maybe more spiritual, more happy, I do try to think of time differently. The problem, though, is that I have kids. And kids has really put forth this idea that your time is coming to an end as I grow older and I get out of bed and it's harder. I'm, you know, turning fifty and I can't run the same speed I used to as well as my kids go from these little tiny things that were just, you know, eighteen inches tall to all the sun now being, you know, almost six feet tall. That's something that's changed or at least it's really hard to take a more spiritual approach to time when you're watching these things grow so quick. But I agree with you. Maybe interpretation of time would be really interesting to ask an artificial intelligence. How do you feel about time? I'm going to write that down. That's a good point. I should have a whole meeting with ChatGPT about this. Zoltan, you've done a lot of really amazing stuff in the short time that you've been here. But what are, in your opinion, some of the things you're most proud of? Well, you know, I'm really proud of a lot of the journalism work I did. I began my career at National Geographic. And, you know, it was almost a dream come true that for five years I got to spend, you know, right after college, you know, I think, twenty three, twenty four. I got to go to many different countries. I think I covered around seventy countries and work for National Geographic and just write articles. And, you know, I had an amazing amount of experiences from covering war zones and between India and Pakistan and Kashmir to, you know, covering shamans in Paraguay to doing a lot of environmental issues like this gold digging destroy the environment and animal stuff. And so that was, you know, some of the most proud stuff that I guess when I look back at my National Geographic articles, I feel a lot of pride. But I'm really happy that I have emerged as kind of a public voice in the transhumanist movement. I feel like now I'm really doing something in the sense that I'm trying to teach people that we can use science to live longer, that death, for me at least, is a very sad thing. I'm not saying we all don't want to die, but what I'd like to convince people of is that we want to control the specter of death. We want to control it so that if we choose to die, it's on our terms, not through cancer, not through it's totally cold outside, or not through we didn't have water enough, or whatever disease it is. I mean, there's a million ways people can die, but I think it's the human right and there's something we should strive for to control the specter of how we die, when we die, and if we die at all, given how much hardship and pain it often causes, not only for ourselves, but for all those around us that love us. Man, that that's deep. Like I, I can see it. We've, it seems like in the Western world, especially we've taken the dignity out of dying. You know what I mean? Like for me, I had my grandmother hooked up to this machine and you go and visit her and there's words like palliative care and pal means to hide. And like, it just seems like we're on some level, we're just running full speed away from the thing that might free us. Is that too crazy? No, no, no, no. I think palliative care is something else. I agree. I think if you know you're going to die, you probably maybe don't want to be hooked up to machines. But I think if you're my age and you want to dedicate your energy and resources to trying to overcome death so you never end up in palliative care, that's a very different thing. But I think if it comes to somebody like my mom, who's also very aged and probably will die in the next few years just given her genes, I don't know if I want to see her at the very end. you know, tied to all these machines and, you know, comatose with drugs and this and that, there may be better methods than that. And in fact, I've been a supporter of euthanasia as a result of that, that people can control that in their own terms. That said, that doesn't mean that I'm advocating in any way for death. It just means advocating for a good death versus something where maybe It's so bizarre. They try to keep you alive the extra few days. And that may be okay if you have a chance of recovering. But if you have no chance of recovering, I'm not sure keeping someone alive a few days, then I think having a good death is a better plan. Yeah, that's well said. It's interesting. We start thinking about longevity and intelligence and drugs on some level. There's a whole suite of drugs called no tropics that I'm a big fan of. I have played around with some novel peptides and some some HGH and some things like that. And I've found them to be very incredible in a lot of ways. What's your take on no tropics? Well, yeah, so I deal with nootropics quite a bit because here I'm actually sitting in my winery in Napa Valley at the moment, but doing a lot of construction. We're trying to be one of the very first people that create a transhuman wine, wine that is embedded with nootropics. And basically, you get a little bit smarter from drinking the red wine. And maybe white wine eventually too. We've had some limited success on these ideas. I have some friends with PhDs from Berkeley and they had been giving me some stuff that we've been trying to make these concoctions. I think the more drugs you take, at least experiment with, the better. And I've been a big... proponent of psychedelics, a big proponent of drugs. I mean, that's what transhumanism is. It's not just technology. It's really anything from the natural world that can enhance your life. We're really about enhancement. It doesn't matter what form it comes in. And we just want to make the human being live better, live longer, happier, and just be a stronger entity. And if that is drugs, you know, that's fantastic. And so I've been a big proponent of trying to do that. And here I am in Napa Valley at the moment trying to do that with my own wine. That sounds amazing to me. I don't want to let the genie out of the bottle or give away the secret sauce, but does the alcohol pose a problem to break down those drugs, or how does that work? So the problem we've had is that the taste is changing. So you take a pretty good tasting wine and make it a little bit funny. And so that's been the challenge. And the bigger challenge is that it takes sometimes months to discover this stuff because you kind of have to wait for it to be bottled and this and that. And we're a very small operation. at this point it's not even commercial it's really just uh trying to get it okay we have a commercial operation argentina but it's it doesn't make money it's like so it just it takes a long time and and it's not just for us nootropics to make you smarter we're actually trying to put different types of drugs in uh more you know that might make you live better make you live longer other people are doing this too you know they've had marijuana infused wine and various infused types of things. So it's a huge new market. And I think you were having a lot of fun with it. But imagine if you could have a, you know, get a little tipsy on wine and still be able to drive just as successfully or take a math test. And that's been one of our goals is to have those best of both worlds. When I read back to some of the Eleusinian mysteries, I don't remember reading about anybody talking about the taste. You know what I mean? Here's this transformative place. It kind of sounds like that's on some level. You could be having a new Eleusinian mystery, like an initiation on some level. Maybe that's the evolution of drinking wine or something like that. Is that too crazy? Yeah. No, no, no. I mean, you know, this kind of goes back to some of the National Geographic stories I did with shamans where you go on a journey and you have to go on a journey. You have to have a pilgrimage. And if the pilgrimage is where you reach your adulthood life or something, it doesn't have to be adulthood. It just has to be a revelation of some sort where you evolve into a stronger being. And I think, you know, something like that could arrive. And I've been all about moments like that, revelations, epiphanies, journeys that change you. I think that's you know, very important throughout one's life to search for those moments and, and, and, and take advantage of them when they come, because it's, you know, the older you get, I feel like there's less and less of these moments when you can really, uh, maybe it's because our brain has become too fixed and we're a little too, you know, hardheaded, but where you can still find ways to expand your consciousness, expand who you are and go in a new direction. That might be the best one for you. Um, so I think, you know, the wine aims to maybe bring some of that down and, you know, uh, I know you've talked to people with psychedelics and stuff like that. There's all sorts of transformations and journeys people can go on. And maybe we'll find the perfect substance one day that all of humanity will take as sort of a right, a right through life. Yeah, man. You know, it's interesting that you say that because we could look at a rite of passage, not only with like a new elusis with the nootropic wines, but also transhumanism. Maybe that's a rite of passage. Maybe that's us moving through the birth canal into something bigger and better. Well, it absolutely is. And I've said this to people forever. I think you have to take yourself back a second. Just leave whatever you think you know and say, wait a sec. OK, the Earth is probably a billion and a half years old or something of that sort, a little bit. At least asteroids came together and whatnot. And the universe itself could be billions, maybe five billion, fifteen billion. Who knows? I mean, it's hard to know what people say. But the point of the story is that, however it is, we're just little dots on this graph of the time, of how we even got here. And if we look forward, we tend to look back a lot and say, OK, where did we come from, the apes, and this and that. But what we should actually be looking and saying, where are we going? And people say, oh, we're going to become artificial intelligence. But they forget that artificial intelligence is probably just a ten or fifteen year process. After that becomes something completely different. And I've termed this in an article for The Guardian called The Omnipotence, where we eventually become probably fragmented pieces of consciousness that just float around. the universe we are part of the universe that is conscious maybe the universe itself is is a way of being conscious we just have never understood it because as we talked about earlier our brains only have a hundred billion neurons it's not enough to figure out what's really going on but you know there are some big ideas but what I definitely say is that transhumanism is just a small segment where we leave the biological flesh, or at least we leave this human biological flesh behind to become something much grander. And I think that's the journey that I really am excited about and wanna be on because I don't wanna get left behind. I wanna be here to say, wow, I can't believe that happened to us as a species. I love it. I love it, man. The half hour went by like it was two minutes old and I'm so thankful to get to hang out with you. But before we land this plane, where can people find you? What do you have coming up and what are you excited about? Sure. Well, what do I have coming up? I have a couple of amazing speeches. Some I can't talk about yet because they're real fun and stuff, but I'll be back at Oxford very soon discussing stuff on the kind of Olympics where people use enhanced drugs and things like that. And I will be also... There's been a biography that came out of my work called Transhuman Citizen written by Dr. Ben Murnane. Thankfully, it's won a few awards. So we have a big speech next May in New York City as we accept an award for best biography for that. And I worked with this author. The author himself has a has a kind of a genetic disease where he's terminal. He's kind of been dying his whole life and will probably die very early as a result. But he wrote a book on my life extension work. So we have this very interesting dynamic juxtaposition between Ben and I. And that comes out in the biography Transhuman Citizen, Zoltan Isvan's Hunt for Immortality. So I'm dealing a lot with that book at the moment. And, you know, if you just want to go to my website, ZoltanIsvan.com, that's where a lot of my stuff is, where you can just Google. There have been a lot of fun interviews. that I've done throughout the years. But I think the big question everyone's been asking is do I have any political ambitions at the moment? And the idea, since I did run for president a few times, right now I don't have anything in the works, but it's always on my mind as I'm looking at the field and seeing what's happened. But I run as a science candidate. I run entirely on the scientific method and transhumanism and getting people to live a lot better and longer. That's my main thing. I'm not into the other political side of things. It's really well said. And I thank you for being here today. I can't wait to learn more. Check out these books. And with everybody, anybody within the sound of our voice, please go down to the show notes. Check out what Zoltan has. Check out his website. Check out these new books. Reach out to him. He's got a million awesome things in the pipeline. So hang on briefly afterwards, Zoltan. But to everybody within the sound of my voice, I hope you have a beautiful day. And that's all we got, ladies and gentlemen. Aloha.