 in the gentleman's party, and the chief executive of the five presidents party, Mr. Stolerov is an actuary, philosopher, science fiction analyst, scholar, amateur mathematician, composer, and editor-in-chief of the Rational Archival. A magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and habits, which Mr. Stolerov had published in team spaces and found in the chief. In December 2013, Mr. Stolerov published Debt is Wrong, an ambitious general book on life extension. Debt is wrong if you have an avatar and a paperback in little formats, and you also need to really download it in a TV format, in English, Russian, French, so it comes with his language. Woo! In 2014, Mr. Stolerov coordinated a successful power funding campaign to distribute over a thousand paperback copies of Debt is Wrong as kids and children throughout the world. So please don't be welcome, Mr. Gennady Stolerov. Hello, Jim. Yes, likewise, I'm very happy to be with you. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Yes. Great. Okay. Go ahead. Wonderful. Well, thank you, Ilana, for your introduction and thank you, Jim, for welcoming me here so kindly to People Unlimited. And Bill, I heard your introduction as well, along with your extremely informative presentation. Thank you for elaborating upon the emerging science and helping us distinguish between what is genuine science and what we should be a bit more skeptical about. And I, as the chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party, would like to talk to you about a new political approach that champions life extension and technological progress. As the Transhumanist Party, our goal is putting science, health, and technology at the forefront of American politics. And one aspect of my title slide that I would like to direct your attention to is the URL of our website, www.transhumanist-party.org. This is a new website that we have set up since I became chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Please visit it to find out about our latest endeavors and sign up to become members absolutely for free. Now, on the next slide, I will tell you a little bit about the history and background of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. It is about two and a quarter years old. It was founded by Zoltan Istvan on October 7th, 2014. Many of you know Zoltan or know of him. He is a world-renowned journalist. Yes, indeed. A great advocate for life extension. Author of a book called The Transhumanist Wager and Presidential Candidate in the 2016 elections. Now, as you may know, for any minor political party, ballot access is almost prohibitively difficult. One needs to get anywhere from a few thousand to a few million petition signatures to even make it onto the ballot of a given state. So in light of this unfortunate fact, Zoltan had to run as a write-in candidate in many states, but he did get quite a bit of enthusiastic support. I have members of my extended family who voted for him. I know some other individuals in the transhumanist movement who cast their ballots for Zoltan Istvan. But when he went into this campaign, he understood that as a minor party candidate he wasn't going to win the election. His goal was to achieve extensive media exposure for the ideas of life extension and transhumanism for promoting science and promoting emerging technologies. And he was quite successful in that aim. He got over 100 million page views for the content that he generated. And he understood that this campaign was just the beginning. He toured the country on his coffin-shaped immortality bus to remind us all of the grisly predicament of human mortality that unfortunately still afflicts so many individuals. A problem we urgently need to solve within our own lifetimes. And in order to perpetuate the movement, he decided to transform what had essentially been a campaign primarily driven by one individual, Zoltan, into a structure that could belong to the transhumanist and life extensionist movements as a whole. So on November 17, 2016, Zoltan stepped down from his role as chairman and he designated me the second chairman in the history of the transhumanist party. I've been tasked with creating the infrastructure for the transhumanist party. I have opened it up to membership for the first time with the aim of attracting members who will contribute their voices and their votes to our policy stances, our party structure. Eventually we will have a democratically elected set of officers and my hope as a transitional chairman is to create a party that will not depend on any one individual or on any small group of individuals that will continue and will be governed by its structures and mechanisms and potentially become a major political influence. So in order to do that, of course, we need more members. Membership is free. You can join at www.transhumanist-party.org. It is perhaps the easiest membership application any political party will provide. You will answer a few simple questions, give your name, your email address, let us know if you're eligible to vote in the United States and even if you're not, you will be welcomed as an allied member of our party and let us know whether you agree with our three core ideals which I will discuss a little bit later. So far we have now over 300 members and we have begun our internal voting which has been quite successful thus far. As the transhumanist party, we are trans-partisan. We are not limited by conventional political ideologies. We have members who identify as transhumanists but also consider themselves libertarians like myself or socialists like our director of social media, BJ Murphy who is doing an excellent job, Democrats, Republicans, centrists, apolitical transhumanists, at least they were apolitical until they got involved with us and transhumanists who wouldn't fit any of those descriptions. On the next slide, I will show you our distinguished set of advisors whom we have persuaded to offer us expert guidance in their subject areas of expertise. Of course, we have the eminent Dr. Bill Andrews as our biotechnology advisor. We have Dr. Aubrey de Grey, another amazing researcher and theoretician in the anti-aging field of the SENS Research Foundation. We have Dr. Joseph Carey, our medical advisor. We have Keith Camito, our crowdfunding advisor who runs Lifespan.io. It's a fundraising hub devoted solely for life extension-oriented research projects. So I would encourage you to take a look at that website. They have ongoing fundraisers almost continuously for small-scale research projects where an individual small donation can make the difference. We have Jose Portero with whom many of you are familiar, a great futurist and expert on many emerging technologies. We have Zach Field, our virtual reality advisor and expert in artificial intelligence who was a great panelist in our recent virtual discussion panel on artificial intelligence, the recording of which is available for free on YouTube. It's a two-hour discussion panel where I got to ask a lot of interesting questions of various AI experts, and we hope to have many more free online discussion panels on various areas of emerging technologies in the coming months. Zoltan Istvan, although he's not in a decision-making role anymore, has graciously agreed to stay on as our political and media advisor, share with us his expertise with regard to strategies that work for promoting the message of life extension. Newton Lee, author and educator, Rich Lee, famous biohacker, Miss Metaverse, who is a very eloquent speaker on emerging technologies, and a great expert in media, she also has an AI-related startup, Giovanni Santastazi, a neuroscientist, so we are, of course, continuing to seek experts who will lend us the benefit of their knowledge in the areas of technology that we seek to promote. And on the next slide, I will discuss our three core ideals. These three ideals are intended to illustrate areas that transhumanists and life extension advocates would have in common, so they're phrased in a very broad way, a way that transcends particular differences in political ideology. The first ideal is that the transhumanist party supports significant life extension achieved through the progress of science and technology. I'm sure you will all agree with that ideal, a significant life extension I would like to live indefinitely. I do not want to have any limit to the number of years that I want to enjoy this life. The second ideal is that the transhumanist party supports a cultural, societal, and political atmosphere informed and animated by reason, science, and secular values, because reason and science are what are going to bring us this world of radical abundance, indefinite life extension, and general prosperity and happiness. And of course secular values do not exclude religious individuals, they just mean that no particular religion should dictate government policy. Ideal three states that the transhumanist party supports efforts to use science, technology, and rational discourse to reduce and eliminate various existential risks to the human species. If we want to achieve this beneficent technological future we should also make sure we're not wiped out for instance in a nuclear war or due to an asteroid impact and we need to develop technologies that would prevent that. So on the next slide I provide an extensive list of examples of areas of emerging technologies that we support. And many of these technologies are on the cost of being realized either in the next few years or in the next few decades, but I do not believe that progress is automatic or inevitable. Emerging technologies need human beings to advocate them and to push them forward. And of course life extension, biotechnology, genetic engineering are areas we enthusiastically support along with nanotechnology. Nanotechnology has applications to medicine as well already. It's possible to use nanoparticles to deploy targeted doses of chemicals that enhance their cells but leave healthy cells alone. Artificial intelligence is making progress. It's beating human players in the game of Go and in poker and hopefully soon artificial intelligences will be powerful enough to solve the intractable problems that have played humans for millennia. Space colonization is important not just as a way of accessing more resources or more habitable but also as a safeguard in the event that a great existential calamity occurs on Earth so that humankind doesn't get wiped out if there's a super volcano eruption or major asteroid impact or nuclear war which we should definitely strive to avoid. Seasteading, the creation of modular floating communities on the oceans where little city blocks could connect to one another or disconnect and societies can form based on consent where people can experiment with political structures that might be difficult to implement on land. Vertical farming, think about growing vast amounts of food in skyscrapers to increase the amount of arable land. There are already startups that are experimenting with vertical farms. Economical alternative energy the cost of solar power is going down. Nevada, by the way, is an excellent state. It gets a lot of sun where solar panels can be deployed in mass. Geothermal energy is another area where Nevada is leading clean, cheap, safe nuclear power the next generation of nuclear reactors, thorium reactors for instance. Automation of production can bring about radical abundance supplying us with the necessities of life as well as some luxuries very cheaply if we embrace this idea that yes we should let the robots make our stuff for us. Autonomous and electric vehicles can save tens of thousands of lives in the United States alone and millions of lives throughout the world. The vast majority of automobile accidents are the result of human error and as we can see with the Tesla Model S which is the safest vehicle as per the US federal government's own safety tests that has ever existed just not having an internal combustion engine takes away from a lot of the risk of deadly accidents. Flying cars is a great method of alternative transport. There are already a few startups that are experimenting with prototypes augmented reality. Imagine if you're a scientist and you have augmented reality goggles on, you can sit at your desktop and you can see a virtual model of a prototype that you're working on and you can manipulate it. You can do experiments with it and it's still as if you're looking at it on your tabletop. There are already technologies that are emerging onto the consumer market for that encryption a great technology for protecting individual privacy technologies of the blockchain many of you are familiar with cryptocurrencies but blockchain has other uses besides that like smart contracts that can execute themselves or what are called distributed autonomous organizations, entire companies where the structure is configured in advance and one doesn't have to rely on fallible human beings to carry out the roles of those companies and ectogenesis, artificial wombs first of all can render the creation of new human beings a lot easier and a lot less traumatic and they can solve a lot of intractable social issues like the abortion issue today where both sides of valid points in my view and some irreconcilable conflicts given today's technology but with the future technology perhaps there won't need to be those kinds of conflicts. So on the next slide however I want to point out the political system as it exists today poses some obstacles as we've seen during the last election cycle there is some ugly political rhetoric out there and it reiterates centuries old fallacies that unfortunately appeal to the lowest common denominator. These are major fallacies like fear of technology or trade, taking people's jobs and people think technology is this nemesis rather than the bringer of radical abundance or radical life extension. There is an incessant us versus them mentality that pits some groups of people against others. Either you're on our team or you're the enemy which is a very counterproductive way of thinking. So we in the transhumanist party would like to see candidates who are thoughtful, creative and forward looking candidates who discuss not just the issues of the day but the future that we will face for decades and centuries to come. And we want a constructive discourse, a policy oriented discourse rather than one that is so short termist and range of the moment and traditionally we have this two party political system in the United States and in my view it poses the biggest barrier to this vision. And there are many little barriers comprising that big barrier. Ballot access laws that I mentioned that render it very difficult for even a very popular minor party candidate to get on to the balance. The Libertarian Party has been trying for 40 years and finally in 2016 being on all 50 states' ballots. But Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, Jill Stein of the Green Party, Zoltan Istvan of the Transhumanist Party didn't make it into the presidential debates because the two major parties, the Republicans and Democrats, control the commission on presidential debates. They control who gets to speak before this vast audience of American voters. There's non-inclusive polling where minor party candidates are often omitted. And then there's this pernicious wasted vote mentality that oh, if you don't vote for a winner or somebody likely to win then you're throwing your vote away. I say you're throwing your vote away if you vote for someone or something that you don't personally agree with. Because then, thank you, thank you, then if they win they don't represent you in any case. So by winning what do you get? This system does not represent the interests of genuine human well-being nor a constructive approach towards solving problems. On the next page I'll explain why the U.S. Transhumanist Party is a political party. The political arena is crucial for achieving widespread public acceptance of emerging technologies. And unfortunately most political rhetoric today is premised upon fear. We want to be the party of hope. We want to overcome this traditional dichotomy of left versus right because the true dichotomy in our era is between open and closed. You see here the portrait of a great futurist and proto-transhumanist FM, 2030, who wrote between the 1960s and the 1990s. He coined this distinction of upwing versus downwing. Another great distinction was made by Virginia Postural, a libertarian futurist who wrote The Future and Its Enemies in 1998. She characterized the opposition as dynamist versus stasis. So the open upwing, dynamist world view seeks progress and constructive change, seeks to overcome the limitations of the status quo, sees that there is a better way and doesn't just get stuck in the same institutions, the same ways of doing things. The stasis essentially want to freeze the status quo in place or they're afraid they think change will bring more problems than it will solve. So unfortunately there's still a relative vacuum in this open upwing, dynamist policy space that we seek to fill. And as a political party we have more flexibility with advocacy than say a non-profit organization would. We can actually make comments about specific candidates or specific legislation for instance and we will have occasion to do that in the future. And furthermore it's important to understand yes there exist institutional barriers to technological advancement say the excruciatingly long FDA approval process for new medicines and new medical treatments. But institutions are operated by human beings so human attitudes matter and if we can change human attitudes ultimately we can change institutions. Thank you. Thank you. Most people's attitudes have a certain status quo bias built into them. Their reactions toward technology are a function of what they're familiar with. See the unfortunate experience of Google Glass where there was a trial program it was very expensive and most people couldn't access it even if they had the money. So they became stigmatized when they went into coffee shops and restaurants wearing their Google Glass because most people thought this was some elitist technology that left them out. On the other hand they don't have that attitude toward mobile phones or laptops or desktop computers because they're ubiquitous. So as the transhumanist party we seek to broaden access to emerging technologies to as many people as possible. And mainstream politics neglects the role of emerging technologies even though their potential in shaping the possibilities of everyday life is so much greater than the real policy tweak here or there. So we need to raise that awareness and we need to combine our technological advocacy with supporting freedom, tolerance and cosmopolitanism. Ultimately a transhumanist world is going to be a hyper pluralist world where individuals have morphological freedom. Freedom to shape their bodies, shape their lives, make a wide variety of lifestyle choices and we need to be accepting of different choices that individuals will make using those emerging technologies. So on the next slide I'll discuss our first major accomplishment with the help of our members. Version 2.0 of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights. Version 1.0 was written by Zoltan at the conclusion of his immortality bus tour. He delivered it to the U.S. Capitol. It was this piece of paper with six original articles and there's a police officer waiting to arrest him. However, he was ultimately not arrested because he got a large number of reporters to film him doing this, to take pictures of him doing this and the police realized this is a peaceful innocuous act and it would be tremendously bad publicity to arrest an individual like Zoltan Istvan. So he succeeded in his goal of essentially putting this document very temporarily on the walls of the U.S. Capitol building. But he recommended to me that we open up this document to the members and see how they would improve it. And as a result, over the course of seven days in late December 2016, we conducted electronic voting among options that were suggested by the members using a rank preference method and this is important. We are the only political party in the U.S. that does rank preference voting with instant run-offs consistently. And what happens is you don't just vote for one option. You give a rank ordering of the options you favor. So you indicate your first option, your second preference, your third preference. And then if your first option doesn't win, if it gets eliminated, you still have an influence on subsequent rounds of voting. So now your second preference gets reassigned as the first. And that way, very unpopular choices don't win. And the choices that do win have some degree of support among more than just a plurality of voters. They will always have a good deal of support among a majority of voters. So on the next slide, I've excerpted some articles that are specific to life extension. And I encourage you to read this entire document. It has 25 articles, as well as an extensive preamble discussing what are the sentient entities to whom rights should apply. Because they won't just be humans in the coming decades. Perhaps sentient artificial intelligences or uplifted animals or humans that are so modified that we might not recognize them as biological humans from today's perspectives, but they will be rational sentient beings. And as article 3 states, they will be granted equal and total access to any universal rights to life in a future transhumanist society. And I wanted to also emphasize article 5, which renounces any coercive legal restrictions that would bar access to life extension and life expansion for sentient entities. Or article 6 that discusses classifying involuntary aging as a disease. And on the next slide, I'll highlight a few more articles. Again, I encourage you to read them in detail, but the freedom to conduct research, to experiment, to explore life, science, technology, medicine, and extraterrestrial realms to overcome the biological limitations of humanity. To establish legal safeguards to protect individual free choice. And while people may criticize what life extensionists pursue, they shouldn't be entitled to impose the force of law to enforce their criticisms or their particular vision of the world. On the next slide, I will also discuss an ongoing effort to shape the U.S. Transhumanist Party platform, which is article 3 of our Constitution. We've adopted the first five planks by a vote of our members in mid-January. And these planks in many ways supplement the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, although in the future we are going to have many more planks as well, covering as many areas of policy as we can. We are strong supporters of individual privacy. And we realize that technologies should be used to further individual privacy, not take it away. So we oppose mass surveillance or any sort of forced disclosure of the individual private sphere. On the other hand, if individuals do disclose something to the public, people are entitled to criticize it. We have their own opinions about it. Section 2 pertains to anti-bigotry. We are opposed to all forms of racism, nativism, xenophobia, and sexism. We oppose hostile discrimination based on national origin or skin color or birthplace. All of those attributes should be irrelevant in a future Transhumanist world. We should all strive to work together to conquer the great enemies of all human beings instead of dividing one another into tribes. And so, thank you. Thank you. I'm so glad that this message is so well received. I think at this time, more than ever, it needs to be emphasized. And on the next slide, we have three additional sections that we adopted recently. Section 3, on the benefits and risks of technologies. We support the vast majority of technologies. We recognize their benefits and regulate it. However, there are some technologies that can be tremendously destructive or invasive, like nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, mass surveillance systems, the backscatter X-ray machines that existed in many airports until 2013 that could be quite degrading, or the deliberate engineering of pathogens, resurrection of diseases that have been wiped out. We think genetic engineering should be devoted to causes that promote life, not causes that have the potential to destroy life. And while... And while we recognize we can't unlearn that knowledge, we insist that it be deployed only for peaceful and rights-respecting purposes. And along the lines of that, we support nuclear disarmament. In section 4, we recognize the dire... Thank you. We recognize the dire existential threat that nuclear weapons cause, including from accidents that nobody intended to occur. And if we want to live indefinitely, why have these giant engines of death that are waiting to be released at a few people's command that could endanger our potentially indefinite life spans? And in section 5, we support concerted research efforts to eradicate disease and illness that wreak havoc upon and cause death of sapient beings. We strongly advocate the increase and redirection of research funds to conduct research and experiments, to explore life, science, technology, medicine, and extraterrestrial realms to improve all sentient entities. So that ties together... Thank you. That ties together the goals that I've articulated throughout this presentation. On the last slide, I want to again direct you to our website and encourage you to navigate using this top menu bar to the become a member section which I've circled here. And that's where you access the membership application. We hope that you'll reach out to us. I have my email address here. If you have any questions, I'll also happily answer any questions you have right now. And once again, thank you very much for having me here this evening. I was very pleased to deliver these remarks. We've got time for a few questions. I actually have a question. I did not agree to hear you and thank you for updating us on what's going on in this party. So, did I understand you correctly to say that you're a social media person and you're a socialist? Yes. He's a democratic socialist. His name is B.J. Murphy. He's also a writer for Serious Wonder and he works with a lot of startups, but he supports what he calls a fully automated luxury communism, which essentially means the kind of abundance and freedom from poverty that the traditional communists and socialists envisioned except through technology, so that you don't have to take things away from people. You don't have to redistribute wealth. You just have so much productive potential that everybody gets a good standard of living and I think ultimately in a future society where technologies can bring about radical abundance, some of these old political distinctions like libertarian versus socialist versus centrist are going to blur. We're going to see a very interesting realignment. So, I wanted to ask you can you see any specific issues or candidates or I guess issues in local places where the transhumanist party can actually engage right now, because right because the platform is great. It sounds great to me. It's very, very far away from where the political compensation is right now, but are there any specific issues that you see as bridge issues where the transhumanist party can engage now and people around there? That's a great question. I think science advocacy is one of those bridge issues right now. We've seen for instance recently calls for a march of scientists in the news very similar to the women's marches that took place all around the country and actually my wife Wendy and I participated in the local women's march in Reno because again there are significant overlaps there between what we support and what the women's marches support in terms of morphological freedom. So, this advocacy of science, this realization that science is important and facts matter and only by understanding reality in this rigorous way through reason can we make actual progress and if somebody says that oh there are no facts or there are alternative facts, that's not the way to construct a future that actually works. So, I think there's a great potential there to bridge that gap and say, okay what happens if you take science to its logical conclusion? What happens if you take technology to its logical conclusion? We get transhumanism. Thank you so much for your praise to the public. Thank you so much for your praise to the public. Can you tell us that he is an author of a paper that is staring at an awful number of members. Who personally resides in Nevada? Yes, that's correct. Can you turn on some local activities if you see Nevada as a new background where the technology will be supported indirectly? Local activities in Nevada? Well, that's an interesting question. Right now we are We're actually building bridges with some other organizations in Nevada. For instance, we attended a county libertarian party convention in Washoe, county in Reno, and we talked to representatives of the libertarian party, the Green Party of Nevada. We're always interested in getting together for speaking engagements, discussions, including with people who have different perspectives from ours. As well as looking at any policies at the local level that might advance Nevada's place as a hub for emerging technologies, particularly Northern Nevada. You may be aware that the Gigafactory that Elon Musk is building is on the outskirts of Sparks, Nevada, and not too far from where I reside. I think Northern Nevada can become a great hub for transhumanists and life extensionists, in large part because the existing hub Silicon Valley is so expensive to reside in. We frankly have better infrastructure in the data. I would say, eventually, I hope to cultivate enough relationships to create a thriving intellectual community here, and that intellectual community can play a role in advancing the future. Thank you so much, Donnie. Great hearing you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.