Meet Zoltan

From formally speaking at various country’s Parliaments & Senates to appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast to consulting for the US Armed Forces to being a correspondent for The New York Times, Zoltan Istvan has created a plethora of ideas and policies that have transformed the way millions of people look at the future and humanity. For years he has been a leading voice in AI, politics, basic income, liberty, and ways to use technology to improve society. His futurist work has influenced world leaders and received hundreds of millions of views and numerous awards.

Born in Los Angeles, Zoltan's career began at National Geographic as a journalist. While slowly sailing around the world on his 28-foot sailboat, he wrote dozens of stories for them on topics like Paraguay's shamans, Cambodia's Killing Fields, and pirates in Indonesia. He also invented the extreme sport of volcano boarding in Vanuatu, a sport which debuted on the National Geographic Channel and is now done all over the world.

Zoltan was also a director at a major international animal organization, WildAid, aiming to stop wildlife poaching. Today, Zoltan has long lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where as a self-made entrepreneur he runs real estate projects, media enterprises, and vineyards in Mendoza, Argentina, Bordeaux, France, and Napa Valley, California. He's married to a career nonprofit physician, and they have two young daughters in public school. A national champion water polo player in his youth, Zoltan has undergraduate and graduate degrees in Philosophy and Ethics from Columbia University and the University of Oxford. He plays the guitar and piano, and is a longtime snowboarder, surfer, and sailor.

Zoltan created the Longevity Peace Prize at an XPRIZE Visioneering event and is the author of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, which Wired magazine published in full on its website. Zoltan's award-winning 2013 novel The Transhumanist Wager was a #1 bestseller in Philosophy and also a top 5 Amazon book. In 2019, a feature documentary called Immortality or Bust, which covers Zoltan's historic pro-longevity tour across America on the Immortality Bus, came out on Amazon Prime. In 2023, he published the Zoltan Istvan Furturist Collection, a seven-volume box set of his most popular opinion essays. An award-winning biography written by Dr. Ben Murnane titled Transhuman Citzen, Zoltan Istvan's Hunt for Immortality by Changemaker Books came out in June 2024.

Zoltan frequently speaks all over the world, as well as joins forums, debates and hosts events. Contact him with inquiries. If you’re a journalist and need immediate information or a quote, text or email him. He responds quickly.