Meet Zoltan, the presidential candidate who drives a coffin

"I had been working for National Geographic, travelling, doing all these fun things and then all of a sudden, I nearly stood on a land mine in Vietnam," Zoltan Istvan tells me, as we sit in the lobby of a hotel just a few minutes walk from the White House.

"My guide tackles me, throws me down, and saves my life. It was then that I decided that it was time to really dedicate myself to stopping death - stopping death for me, and stopping death for my loved ones."

So goes the dramatic origin story of one of the most unusual candidates in the 2016 race to be president of the United States.

Amid the rolling election coverage, the social media jabs between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, and the debate sparring of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Istvan has been staging a rather unusual campaign as a third party candidate. This writer, philosopher and futurist is running for the Transhumanist Party, a movement that believes technology has the power to transform the human mind and body.

Transhumanists dream of achieving immortality and physical perfection through futuristic technologies like mind uploading, cyborg body augmentation, and genetic manipulation; they want us to evolve into a race of post-human super-beings.

While the other presidential candidates are claiming they know best how to deal with Iran, the economy, and immigration, Istvan is trying to appeal to the US electorate with more ambitious goals. He wants to eradicate death, and for everyone in America to live forever.

Istvan is currently touring the US in what he calls the "Immortality Bus": an old school bus converted to look like a huge coffin on wheels and paid for by an online crowdfunding campaign.

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