Elect Me If You Want to Live Forever

As much of the Election 2016 debate centers around Hillary Clinton's Mexican food selections and tipping choices, another candidate—a fringy one, but a candidate nonetheless—is campaigning on the idea that you, human, don't ever have to die.

Zoltan Istvan is a regular contributor to Motherboard, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and he wants to remove his own arms and replace them with stronger, robotic ones. He's also running for president.

On this week's podcast, we meet Zoltan and talk about all things transhumanism and immortality. We haven't exactly been beating around the bush with this week's Goodbye, Meatbags! theme, but on this episode of Radio Motherboard, we tackle the idea that our bodies are terribly limiting; and we talk at length with a guy who has fully bought into the idea that technological advances can not only extend our lives, but can perhaps help us conquer death.

Lots of Zoltan's ideas are incredibly radical—but others, like the idea that a small portion of the national budget should be used to research cancer cures, sound like common sense.

Zoltan's interview is bookended with two conversations with Motherboard staffers: First up, managing editor Adrianne Jeffries and supervising producer Chris O'Coin join me for a talk about what transhumanism is and some of the inherent problems—both scientific and moral—with living forever. Then we talk to Zoltan, and we wrap things up with a behind-the-scenes look at Inhuman Kind, Motherboard's newest full-length documentary. I talk with Chris and Brian Anderson, our features editor, about the state of artificially intelligent, DARPA-funded humanoid robots and why we shouldn't expect to see them on the battlefield anytime soon.

Podcasting is still a new endeavor for us, so please forgive us if we're a bit rough around the edges. Consider this the official relaunch of the show, which will now be available to Motherboard Premium members Thursday afternoons and will be posted on the full site every Friday morning. As always, I'd love to hear what you guys thought about the episode and about the podcast in general. Send me a shout at jason.koebler@vice.com or review us on iTunes or Soundcloud, or just comment here.

And one quick last thing—the podcast is now sponsored by Casper Mattresses, which allows us to take a bit more time with this thing every week. Check them out if you're sick of your sleep sitch—if you use code VICE, you'll get $50 off any order.

Goodbye, Meatbags is a series on Motherboard about the waning relevance of the human physical form. Follow along here.