Meet the presidential hopeful who wants to end death

A former presidential candidate who believes a dramatic increase in science funding can help humans achieve biological immortality has told Newsweek he is considering a third White House run in 2028.

Zoltan Istvan ran as an independent candidate during the 2016 presidential election when he attracted widespread media attention for driving a bus modified to look like a coffin from San Francisco to Washington D.C., to illustrate his believe that death can be overcome.

In 2019 he challenged Trump for the Republican presidential nomination using the campaign motto “Upgrading America,” in what he admitted was primarily a stunt to increase conservative interest in his ideas.

Istvan is part of the global transhumanist movement of people who want to use emerging technology such as artificial intelligence to radically enhance human capabilities. Many transhumanists believe humans will eventually achieve biological immortality, meaning people will no longer die from illness or old age, and could potentially have their minds uploaded to computers and live virtually.

In an interview with Newsweek, Zoltan said he is planning to run as either governor or lieutenant governor of California in 2024, which “sets the stage” for a 2028 White House bid “depending on what’s happened with the presidency.” He previously ran for the California governor’s office in 2018 receiving just under 15,000 votes.

Istvan’s life and campaigning is explored in Transhumanist Citizen: Zoltan Istvan’s Hunt for Immortality, a book by Ben Murnane who was born in 1984 with a rare bone marrow disease that in 2008 came with an average life expectancy of 22-years, making his interest in life extension deeply personal. A copy of the book was provided to Newsweek ahead of publication.

Life extension is also very personal for Istvan, who explained: “I think transhumanism often requires, to really love it, really requires something happening to you. In my case it was almost stepping on a land mine when I was working for National Geographic in my 20s.”

Describing Istvan’s philosophy Murnane wrote: “In Zoltan’s view, the stakes for this moment in scientific time couldn’t be higher. We have the power to end all death—the power to live forever. Almost. We just need to keep pushing till we get it. Every 15 years that pass, another billion people are lost… Zoltan sees his activism as a battle to save all those lives.

“For Zoltan, the fact that we all die is a preventable tragedy, because of the possibilities of transhumanist science. Therefore, anybody who is not actively anti-death, who is not working today toward the goal of indefinite life—or at least open to the concept—is an aggressor against his life.

“If you actively work to hinder the transhumanist sciences, to prevent the goal of indefinite life—for example, you are a politician, and because of your religious beliefs you block funding for genetic research—you are guilty of involuntary manslaughter.”

According to Murnane such an underpinning justified Istvan’s attention-grabbing stunts, which have included imitating Protestant reformer Martin Luther by attempting to stick a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the U.S. Capitol Building and “infiltrating a megachurch to hand our atheist pamphlets.”

In 2013 Istvan published The Transhumanist Wager, a novel Murnane compares to Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic Atlas Shrugged, which ends in armed conflict between transhumanists seeking immortality and religious conservatives determined to stop them.

Istvan told Newsweek he has since tried to tame his anti-religious ideas in a bid to widen support for his movement, and upon the realization that “the age of AI is out there, whether you’re religious or not so we’d better try and make friends.”

To achieve biological immortality, Istvan wants to dramatically increase funding for scientific research, partly at the expense of the military, and remove any legislative barriers to people using emerging technology to augment their bodies.

Such is the importance of this work that, according to Murnane, Istvan believes that “whenever he takes time off … it means that more people will die.

“He needs to give all the time to this fight that he possibly can. Every hour that he doesn’t devote to the cause, more lives are lost.

“He speculates: What if 100 hours that he spent surfing last year had instead been dedicated to pushing the movement forward? Maybe those 100 hours of work could have resulted in death ending a few days earlier, and three million lives being saved. That’s the way he looks at it. He just needs enough time to save everyone.”

Asked how long he would personally like to live for, Istvan replied: “I can’t imagine a point where I would like to die. For me the answer’s indefinitely. I would like the ability to choose death if I wanted to but right now it’s mostly ‘hey, this is great.’

“I feel like more than ever people should be able to look out the window and say ‘wow—the world is so fascinating, we’re entering this incredible age and you have to die and not see it?’ That’s very sad. If there’s one thing I want to do it’s see what happens.”