Today I’m excited to announce my new book called And TODAY it’s FREE on Amazon (instead of $7.99). So please download a free copy! And share with a friend!

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Congratulations Director Daniel Sollinger! You can watch the film in the US on Amazon Prime now!

A former independent presidential hopeful is vexed at the COVID-19 vaccine at the moment, and for multiple reasons. That would be Zoltan Istvan, a self-described transhumanist candidate who was billed as the “cyborg who is running against President Trump” in press reports throughout 2020. The California hopeful — who ran in the Republican primary — based his campaign on a futuristic message of fusing radical technology with daily life under the motto “Upgrade America.”

Mr. Istvan recently looked into how long it would be before he got a COVID-19 vaccine.

“I took the New York Times’ ‘Find your Place’ in the vaccine line report, and I was near the bottom 15% of the timeline for getting the vaccine — meaning I’ll be nearly last,” Mr. Istvan wrote in an email to Inside the Beltway.

I’m really excited to announce my new book And today the Kindle ebook version is FREE instead of $7.99. Richard Dawkins has shared some of the essays in this book in his social media before. Please download a FREE copy and share with friends and family! It has some of my new work in it!

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Leading futurist Tracey Follows has written an article at Forbes on #transhumanism documentary IMMORTALITY OR BUST. Check it out!

Zoltan has a more radical idea of change than almost anything else you are seeing on your TV screens today but the mainstream media continue to miss him. That’s why it’s good to see he has made his own documentary film explaining to a broader audience what he’s doing, how it all works, and why they should be interested in transhumanism at all.

‘Immortality or Bust’, winner of the Breakout Award at the Raw Science Film Festival in Los Angeles, follows Zoltan on his 2 year campaign running for President of the US. The film starts by explaining his passion for this transhumanist cause and shows him building a custom-made Bluebird motorhome like his father drove when he was a kid, turning it into a mobile coffin to take him on his journey to Washington DC. There he is to deliver his Transhumanist Bill of Rights.

He enlists friends and family in his quest but we also see him travelling to meet unbelievers and skeptics too, putting his case for Transhumanism over traditional religion. At one point in the documentary he reminds us that atheists never bomb anyone. An important plank of his policy platform is to drastically reduce military funding and redistribute that investment into science. He makes a strong argument that we are living in a military-industrial complex that is out of date, whilst the war we should really be fighting, in this century, is the war on cancer.

He’s actually fighting a war on ageing. For at the heart of transhumainsm is the idea of life extension. As the title suggests, it is life extension that ties together the threads of the film. Those threads include a man on a mission to spread the word of Transhumanism, a U.S. Presidential candidate coming face to face with the religiosity of his nation, and a son whose father has had four heart attacks and whom he would love to protect so he can live forever. These three stories together depict Zoltan as the impossibly human face of Transhumanism.

Reason has done a great video and article on AI facial recognition, surveillance, etc, and combined it with fashion ideas. It’s created by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello. My interview (as well as others) show up throughout the 11 min video. This is really important watching for the coming future:

Privacy activists say we should be alarmed by the rise of automated facial recognition surveillance. Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan says it’s time to embrace the end of privacy as we know it.

Here’s the new IMMORTALITY OR BUST 2-min highlight video. The feature documentary will air on Amazon Prime/Video on June 23rd! Four years in the making, the award-winning film features celebrities, scientists & transhumanism activists along my Immortality Bus road trip. https://www.facebook.com/ZoltanGIstvan/videos/1497742500404615/ #ImmortalityOrBust

I have not been a supporter of an extended public quarantine or shut down, if any. There are a number of reasons why (governments steal liberty during such times; national debt increases and is used to the point of total socialism; inequality becomes permanent; etc), but in this letter below to everyone I want to talk specifically about why a quarantine is ultimately harming the life extension and #transhumanism movements. Don’t ever forget, we are in a race to save the lives of “everyone” right now with the plague of aging, not just those who might get #coronavirus.

Dear Fellow Humans.

If you believe in the life extension movement of trying to live indefinitely through science and technology, then you likely should not support the worldwide quarantine (at least don’t support it over 14 days in the West where we don’t have the ability to do it as efficiently as Asia). It’s horrible that so many lives will be lost by COVID-19, but in a worse-case scenario it’s likely 100 million people will die globally (mostly older people who have only a few years left to live due to their underlying medical conditions of aging — and who have likely been kept alive due to science and 21st Century medicine anyway). But the damage we could cause (and almost certainly are causing) with the quarantine and shut down to the US and global economy may cost the life extension movement and its scientific research possibly three to five years of progress — because the funding, projects, and jobs around the anti-aging industry will disappear for a notable time. The math shows that if we achieve indefinite lifespans for the human race by the year 2035 vs 2040, approximately 250 million lives will be spared and could then go on indefinitely. The aging math (or life hours) for any transhumanist shows that if we care about human life and longevity — about how long people alive today live — then we should not quarantine the world right now, but get the economy going again as a first priority so that we may fund the future of anti-aging science for the species. Some of us call this reasoning the Transhumanist Wager. For the sake of everyone alive today, it must be acknowledged that there is a dramatically larger percent gain (many thousands of percent) of overall life years for our species by not quarantining and shutting down the world. This is all a horrible scenario, and one I am terribly sad to share with you, but that doesn’t mean we should cower from facts. We owe our species the most courageous decision for its long-term longevity of all its living citizens.

Live long and prosper, Zoltan Istvan

*****

1-min C-SPAN video of why I’m running for President in 2020 against Donald Trump: https://www.facebook.com/ZoltanGIstvan/videos/208920663626290/ #UpgradingAmerica #Zoltan2020

I’m excited to share my new opinion piece on AI facial recognition and privacy for IEEE Spectrum:

The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.

Many people seem to regard facial-recognition software in much the same way they would a nest of spiders: They recognize, in some abstract way, that it probably has some benefits. But it still gives them the creeps.

It’s time for us to get over this squeamishness and embrace face recognition as the life-enhancing—indeed, life–saving—technology that it is. In many cities, closed-circuit cameras increasingly monitor streets, plazas, and parks around the clock. Meanwhile, the price of recognition software is decreasing, while its capabilities are increasing.

I welcome these trends. I want my 9-year-old daughter tracked while she walks alone to school. I want a face scanner at Starbucks to simply withdraw the payment for my coffee from my checking account. I want to board a plane without fumbling for a boarding pass. Most of all, I want murderers or terrorists recognized as they walk on a city street and before they can cause further mayhem.