I want to ask him how he’s so sure about these predictions and life expectancy figures, but right now I have a more pressing question: as president, how would he pay for all this?

“In America, we spend about four times the amount of money on prison systems than we do on education. We also spend approximately 10 times on bombs, war, and defence than we do on education,” he says. “We need to make the prison industry – I don't even call it ‘the prison system’, it’s an industry – we need to make it go away. I can think of nothing better than instead of keeping a bunch of people jailed, to spend a bunch of money on educating people. It may seem a little utopian, but it’s a pretty good argument when you look at it from a fiscal point [of view]. In fact, if we just even implement our system by about 20%, let’s just say 20% less prisoners, we’d be able to pay for all the colleges in the nation.”

These words could be coming from a mainstream politician – so where does the transhumanism part come in? But of course he’s not finished yet.

“If we use robots, drones and all sorts of types of technologies, we should be able to eliminate incarceration altogether at some point in the future. Meaning it would be much cheaper to have a drone follow somebody that is a criminal, especially if it’s the kind of low-level criminal which is filling our prisons. As opposed to feeding them and paying for a bunch of guards to watch them, have a drone follow them to work and make them work.”

As I continue to talk to Istvan it’s clear that there’s this repeating pattern to his views, an often unconventional mix of the liberal and conservative, the pragmatic and the frankly science fictional, the utopian and the slightly sinister. We’ve been discussing this on the way to the World Bank, where he’s giving a talk and appearing on the panel at Athgothon 2015, which calls itself an ‘innovation forum’ where attendees will learn to “build a start-up in three days” and “be guided by industry leaders on how to turn an innovative idea, a skill, or a passion into a commercially viable and socially impactful business”. It seems to be mainly students and recent graduates here, but it’s a very exclusive event – tickets cost in excess of $500. I’m only there for a few hours, but it mainly consists of networking opportunities and motivational speeches about how to be successful – there’s a lot of talk about how to be the next Uber or Facebook. It’s very much a platform for extolling that libertarian, Silicon Valley entrepreneurship philosophy that transhumanism is associated with, and as such I find myself feeling very cynical and more than a little uncomfortable. Istvan, on the other hand, seems to fit right in, and the attendees lap up what he has to say about the future of automation, robotics, and how they could all live forever in his technological utopia. Afterwards he asks me how I feel he did, if it went alright, and once again reveals that more endearing, slightly vulnerable side of himself.