Thank you so much for joining me today.

My pleasure.

The book, your book, The Worm at the Core, is fascinating, thought-provoking.

It really got me excited because it's something that I've always thought about, the worm at the core,

what drives, what is the fundamental most foundational driver for human consciousness?

And like I just showed you that clip from Westworld, I always thought it was sex.

But it seems like from what you've studied, it's more likely the fear of death yes so so we don't have to be

simple-minded i think sexuality it is a rather large determinant of human activity but yeah if we're

looking for just an overarching explanatory concept about what is it that drives us.

Yeah, then I'm going to cast my vote for the idea that, as a Scottish dude said,

I think it's Alexander Smith in the 1860s. It is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. And so I babble in my

classes. I'm like, okay, you know, we're going to study psychology. And then I break it up. It's

psyche and ology. And of course, everyone knows ology is the study of. And then I'm like, well,

what's psyche? And most students, like I would have,

they say, oh, that's mind. And that is how we think of it today. But Aristotle coined the term

psyche. And in the original ancient Greek, it's soul. And he defined soul as the essence of a body that is infused with life.

All right. Now that, I don't know about you, but I'm like, shit, I don't know what you're talking about.

I need English. Yeah, I need English, por favor. And then he says, okay, let me give you some examples. If an axe were alive,

the soul of an axe would be to chop. And if you could pluck your eyeball out of your head

and it was still functioning, well, he says, okay, the soul of an eyeball is to see. The soul of a grasshopper is to hop.

So that raises the question, what's the soul of a human being?

And the answer depends on who you ask.

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