Factually! with Adam Conover - Free Will Does Not Exist with Robert Sapolsky

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

Does free will truly exist, or are we merely sophisticated meat machines running our biochemical programming with sentience as a byproduct? Stanford University neurologist Robert Sapolsky, having extensively studied the topic, asserts that not only is free will a myth but also that our insistence on its reality adversely affects the world we inhabit. In this episode, Adam speaks with Dr. Sapolsky about how choice is an illusion and the impact this has on our society, from workplace meritocracies to criminal justice reform. Find Dr. Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself. Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today direct from Bokksu. And look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie.

We've got a dolce. I don't I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh, my gosh. This one is I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope. It's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato chips made with rice flour, providing a lighter texture and satisfying crunch. Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You got to get one of these for themselves and get this for the

month of March. Bokksu has a limited edition cherry blossom box and 12 month subscribers get a free kimono style robe and get this while you're wearing your new duds, learning fascinating things about your tasty snacks. You can also rest assured that you have helped to support small family run businesses in Japan because Bokksu works with 200 plus small makers to get their snacks delivered straight to your door. So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Boxu.com.

Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, if you were ever 15 years old, or if you've ever gotten way too high, or both, you might have wondered whether free will really exists, right? I mean, if your brain is just meat that controls your body, and that meat is the product of a long chain of physical processes that obey physical laws, well, do you really choose to do anything? I mean, how could you?

Look at being a baby. During those first few months of life, which we know have a profound impact on who you become, can you do anything to influence the environment that you're born into? Do we really choose who we become or what we choose to do? Or do both nature and nurture decide for us, not to mention the influence the society we're brought up in and the chemicals that are coursing through our bloodstreams? Do we choose to do anything at all? But at the same time, it definitely seems to us like we are making decisions about this or that constantly. And in fact, a huge amount of our society and our legal system is based around the idea that we do make choices.

So if we were to abandon the notion of free will, well, what would that even entail? What would it mean to do so? Well, if you are into this line of thinking, I have good news for you. That is what today's episode is all about. Our guest today is not a philosopher, but he's a brilliant neuroscientist who has a new book out that goes deep into the argument for why we do not, I repeat, do not, in his view, have free will. You can agree or disagree with his conclusions, but I think you're going to be challenged and intrigued by where this conversation goes. But before we get into it, I just wanna remind you

that if you wanna support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad-free. Please go to patreon.com slash Adam Conover to support the show if you choose or do not choose to do so. And if you love stand-up comedy,

just wanna remind you I am on tour. Come see me in Portland, Maine, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Nashville, Philadelphia. Oh, there's many more I'm sure I forgot. So head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. I'd love to see you there. And now let's get to today's guest. His name is Robert Sapolsky, and he's a biologist and neuroscientist at Stanford. He's a MacArthur Genius Grant winner, and he's the author of a new book called Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will. Now, I want to warn you that there's quite a bit of background noise in Robert's end of the conversation that we did not have control over, just like he argues we do not have control over

our own actions. But you know what? I know you're going to love this conversation. So let's get to this interview with Robert Sapolsky. Robert, thank you so much for being on the show. Well, thanks for having me on. This should be fun. I think it's going to be really fun. You have a new book out. The topic is, as soon as I saw it, I knew we had to have you on the show. You argue that there is no such thing as free will or that we don't have it. Tell me a little bit about your background and your work and how you came to that conclusion and what that means. Well, let's see. I'm a professorial type and I sort of have divided my time between being a neuroscientist,

you know, studying neurons and genes and neurons and things of that sort, and a primatologist sort of for more than 30 years, I oscillated back and forth between my lab at Stanford and studying wild baboons in a national park in East Africa. Wow. And this sort of kind of understanding kind of what humans are about from these two very different perspectives.

And I think just, you know, actually, I'm about to lie and make this seem much cleaner as a result of all that I've learned. I realized that there's no free will. I was 14 when I decided there's no free will whatsoever. And all that I've been doing since then is getting like stupid little factoids to back it up. I find that very refreshing that, because I think so many thinkers argue that, hey, I came to my conclusions by, you know, rational argumentation and finding evidence

and came to it that way. But so often we have a sort of, I don't know, orientation towards the world that we don't know why we felt that way. And then we collect evidence to back it up. And I don't think that necessarily makes it less valid. It's that's how human knowledge works a lot of ways. So I love that you fess up to it right at the time. Oh, okay. It was under this fierce interrogation that you broke me. Well, so, but I mean, you're, you're a neuroscientist. You have studied the human brain, I assume,

to a large degree. Free will is something that we all experience ourselves as having, or at least I certainly do. And so what does it mean to not have it? And what's some of the strongest evidence that you found that you feel we don't? Well, I think by now it just seems sort of self-evident to me when you kind of understand what makes us the people who we are. And it's just this, you know, cumulative array of things we had no control over. I mean, maybe the best place to start is to examine when people feel like they've got free will sort of most definitively. And we all have this, and we all have this sense of agency. You're making a decision. You're choosing, you know, chocolate versus vanilla ice cream, or you're choosing whether to execute someone or not, or one of those choice type things.

And you make a choice, you form an intent. And at that point, our intuitions are very limited. All we want to know at that point, if we're going to feel like we're free agents is, yeah, are we consciously aware we have the intent to do whatever? Do we have a pretty good sense of what the consequences are going to be? And most of all, do we know we don't have to do this? We've got alternatives. This is not coerced. We're acting as free agents and this is what we do with our intent. And where I think the whole business of there being no free will comes in is once you recognize that's a ridiculous place to start. Because that's like asking somebody to tell you how they feel about a book after all they've done is read the last three pages of the book. Because it's totally wrong to decide it

begins and ends with the question of, well, yeah, did you form that intent? And what you're not asking is, where did that intent come from? How did you become the sort of person who would have that intent? And that's where all the stuff we had no control over whatsoever comes in, because you're asking what happened a second ago and an hour ago and a century ago and so on with your brain, environments, genes, hormones, culture, all of that, that made you the sort of person who would have that intent at that point. And when you take those pieces apart, there's not an inch anywhere there to shoehorn in a notion of free will. So what you're talking about is a certain form of physical determinism, right? The name of your book is Determined. So I assume that you use that word quite a lot in the

book, that our choices are determined by things that happened to us in the past uh can you i assume you have some examples of this um okay uh well let's see i'm i'm looking at you in this beautiful multi-colored screen and seeing your your delightful sort of i see that as a pseudo plaid shirt perhaps this is a salute to your scottish ancestors or whatever um but I appreciate the compliment. Okay, I meant that way. And I see some books in the background. And what goes into saying, so how did you become the sort of person who'd be sitting here doing this right now?

The skills that went into it, the degree of like social extroversion that makes you capable of doing that. The fact that presumably those aren't real books and they're just like some green screen background and you've decided. These are real books. Yeah. Let's see you take one off the shelf. I'll take it off right now. These are books by past guests on the show. This is Kim Kelly's book, Fight Like Hell. And tell you what, if your publisher sends a copy of your book to us,

it'll go on the shelf as well. Cause that's, uh, that's our little thing we do here is we like to put the past guest books up, but that's, that's neither here nor there. Okay. So how do you become the sort of person where those are the books that you've read? Those are the books you would want to let people know that you've read. Yeah. You know, how, how this wind up being who you are and when dissecting it, like from the shirt you chose to the profession you chose to your values, to your intuitions, to your reflexes, all of that, like you had no control over it. Yeah. It's very true. Uh, that, uh, um, you, so much about who we become in terms of our identities and the choices we might make are determined by where we grew up, our genetics, all those sorts of things.

And I think so many of us have had the experience of noticing that a choice we made was simultaneously made by a lot of other people in our same income bracket or same background. Or, you know, when I was, I remember distinctly when I was 26 years old, I was taking improv classes in New York and I really liked Chuck Taylor's all-star sneakers. I remember looking around those, the other, the improv class that I was in and going like seven out of 10 people in this class are wearing Chuck Taylor's, you know, like that's not, that's not like, Oh, I had the idea. Oh, that's a cool shoe. Right. There's something, there's a combination of marketing and background and the values that we all hold. And the fact that, you know, that improv class was a lot of, a lot of white kids who had my same sort of background in college education.

And I was similar to in a lot of other ways. And so we've all had that experience of being less unique than we thought we were uh and you knew for certain that the odds were very much against you doing that and being dressed that way if you had been born in the middle of like mozambique instead yeah yeah oh absolutely none of this is by chance uh But I think though, again, and just talking about this phenomenologically, that's me using my bachelor's in philosophy to pull that word out. And I'm coming at you with this bachelor's, Robert, is you're tussling with a guy

who has a BA from Bard College, all right? So a pretty serious liberal arts education, four years. I read half of Kant, okay years. I read half of Kant. OK, so I read half of the critique of pure reason. And I think I I got I wrote a I wrote a senior project, senior thesis on the mind body problem. And I got an A minus. So that's what I'm coming at you with in this interview. I know. Pretty serious stuff. I wish they had warned me. I wish they had warned me. I wish I knew why I got a minus, frankly.

I don't know where I worked pretty hard on that damn thing. But so phenomenologically, in terms of our lived experience, right, we have this feeling of I can't decide what to do or, you know, should I go left or should I go right? OK, I have to make a choice, you know, in the same way that we have the experience of consciousness. We have, you know, the experience of pain. It, it feels like, it feels like a thing, right. To do it. And we know that our, that our, uh, that our choices are influenced, right. By all of these factors. I don't think anybody would deny that.

Um, and in fact, our society and our legal system includes some allowance for that, that, hey, if you had a rough upbringing or, you know, if you were, you know, if you did something for a reason that's out of your control, but we still have an intuition that, you know, something is happening to make choices that comes from within us. And so how do you account for that feeling? And I know that you say that that's the end of the long process, but even when it is, well, isn't that feeling evidence that we're making a choice? No, but it's certainly evidence that we feel like we're making a choice and that it's tangible. And in terms of why that should be the case, it also feels reassuring and calming and self-defining. And we kind of crave that.

I mean, sort of all sorts of evolutionary biologists have thought about how if you're going to have a species that is smart as we are, the only way you could like go about surviving where we're the species that knows that at some point, each of our hearts are going to stop beating. Oh my God, the only way we could have pulled off that sort of smarts is to have also evolved an enormous capacity for self-deception and rationalizing and putting your head in the sand. And all you need to do is appreciate a biological disease of people who fail with self-deception, major depression. And you see that doesn't do great things for you. Yeah, we're really good at saying things like, wow, I earned that. I really deserve this corner office. I worked hard. I got here.

Yes, our sense of entitlement is built around these distortions that we have anything to do with the good outcomes and that they had anything to do with the bad outcomes and that were justified to slather praise and blame all over the place when it makes no sense at all. Yeah. I completely agree with all the social arguments you make. What I'm trying to drill down into is like the, you know, the moment that we make the smallest choices, right? I have a pen in my hand. I have a piece of paper, right? Am I going to write an X or an O on the piece of paper? Uh, I'll write an O, right? I, I, I made a choice to, to write an X or an O, right?

Neurologically, what's happening in, you know, what happens at that moment? And in what way is that choice determined? Okay. Well, I think the best way to frame that is, you know, some neurons and they stick you in a brain scanner and there's some fairly predictable places that will have activated just before you made that decision. And, you know, some boring places telling your finger to do this instead of that, but some pretty exciting places having to do with your values and your sense of yourself and decision all of that but what you're really asking is okay what made that brain do that just now and it turns out that that's sort of a whole sort of hierarchy of questions um what was going on in your environment in the previous minutes that made you more or less likely to do something and i don't know about x's and o's but there's a

huge literature showing that people's behavior has changed if they're tired if they're hungry if they're stressed if they're sleep deprived if they're in pain and that and that will change the outcome but you're also asking well what did your hormone levels this morning have to do with you making that decision? Because they will have influenced how readily you perceive a facial expression to be threatening, how quickly you make a decision, how good you are at gratification post-pandemic. But you're also asking, well, what about the previous months? And if I've gone through trauma, if I have found love, if I have found God, this has changed your brain. And I don't mean in like some abstracts. Like you will have neurons that are there now that wouldn't have been there if you hadn't have had that experience.

And your brain will work differently. And then, you know, adolescence and childhood and amazingly fetal life. Like, what was going on when you made that incredibly free-willish decision as to what womb you were going to spend nine months in had an enormous amount to do with what sort of brain you wound up with. And from there, we're back to genes. And then even to something as bizarre as like

what sort of culture were your ancestors inventing parentheses what kind of ecosystems were they living in because that had something to do with it how does this play out because like whether your ancestors 500 years ago were farmers or shepherds or hunter-gatherers or desert dwellers will have influenced how your mother was mothering you within minutes of birth. Yes. And thus how you were wiring up your brain. And when you look at it, wow, why did I do what I just did, either like drawing an O or an X or like voting for a libertarian

or an anarchist or a choosing vanilla or chocolate it's all the outcome of everything from a second before to a million years before and when you look at all those pieces like a key thing is this is not a punch line of when you look at all these different disciplines collectively, they're all one discipline. If you talk about genes, you're talking about the evolution of them over billions of years. If you're talking about genes, you're talking about your childhood and the epigenetic regulation of those genes. If you're talking about genes, you're talking about the proteins they specified in your brain 20 minutes ago. It's all one continuous arc of biology interacting with environment. And when you look at how that works,

there's no place in there in which you could shoehorn in the fairy dust that's required for invoking free will at that point. So it sounds like what you're talking about is like a very, very materialist, physicalist view of the mind that, you know, the mind is a physical object that very complex. The brain is a physical object, a very complex physical object is influenced by all of the other physical events that have ever happened in the universe according to physical laws that have brought it to this moment um and that as a result it's it's in some way determined right uh that that the actions are determined that there isn't another sort of stuff that is brain stuff or that is mind stuff that can like interact with it right which is the sort of dualist view is that It seems like you're interacting with that in your argument. Exactly. And when the going gets tough, all of us, including me, when the going gets tough in certain ways, we fall back on this total dichotomous, false dichotomy intuition that, yeah, there's all this brain cell biology yuck going on up there,

brain cell biology yuck going on up there. But there's a you, there's a you that somehow is separate of that. It's in your brain, but it's not of your brain. And it could sit there and, you know, it could keep track of like news headlines about science and check with your neurons now and then to see what they're saying. But at the end, there's a you that's separate of that, which constitutes a free agent. And there's no you in you that's separate of that, which constitutes a free agent. And there's no you in there that's separate of it. It is, as you said, it's like materialism from start to finish. And every single version of how you could admit, like, there's such a thing as science and molecules and stuff like that, but yet somehow there's still room for free will.

Every single version of arguing for that somehow is arguing for a little person in there that's made of stuff that the universe doesn't recognize. Yeah. And that's the dualist view that like, hold on, there's, there's mind stuff. That's a different kind of stuff. And that's my consciousness and that's my dreams and my thoughts and et cetera. And that exists in a separate universe, a separate dimension from meat stuff and space and all of these sort of physically extended things. And they must interact, right? Because my mind must control my body. And I mean, this stuff, this is literally what I wrote my dumb ass senior thesis about in 2004, uh, that, that I, but, but this is, you're bringing me back to my college days here.

These are fun things to think about. And many philosophers have, have, uh, argued about whether that's the case or whether the mind really is the body. Um, and both of those views have like really big problems with them that are very difficult to resolve. But I am with you that I think the more sensible explanation is that the mind is the brain, is the body, is the physical world. And we have to reckon with that. And one of the things that problematizes is the question

of free will. And so I guess I want to poke at you a little bit, but first I want to find out some of the consequences of your, of your argument first. So what, if we accept the argument that all of our actions are predetermined by our biography, by our genetics, by what happened to us earlier in the day, and literally just by physics, right. Just by, uh, you know, what, which, which path the electrical impulses go down. Right. In in our brain. What if we really accepted that idea, how would our society change or how would you think we should just treat each other differently? Well, the only possible conclusions are ones that put me utterly out of the lunatic fringe of this.

are ones that put me utterly out on the lunatic fringe of this. I love it. Yeah, I'm very, very extreme with this. But the only place you could take all of this is that blame and punishment make no sense, and praise and reward make no sense. And like stodgy constructs, like the criminal justice system or meritocracies make no sense at all because none of us have earned anything. None of us have done anything that we actually had control over. All we are is more or less the sum of the biology over which we had no control and its interaction with environment over which we had no control. And if you really take that to its logical extreme, all you could conclude is that none of us deserve any more consideration of our needs.

None of us are entitled to anything more than any other person out there because we didn't earn it. There's no person on earth whose needs deserve less consideration than your own, because all of us are nothing more or less than the outcome of this stuff. Yeah, try that one on for size, but that's the only logical thing you can do. And sort of the corollary of that is hating somebody for what they've done makes as little sense as hating a virus because it turns out to be good at screwing up your lungs or like it makes no sense at all we are biological machines and we're weird ones because we could know that we're biological machines and what that winds up doing is you've got to conclude

that like we're running a world where we treat some people way better than average for reasons they had nothing to do with, and where we treat other people way worse for reasons. And that not only do we do that, but then we pontificate afterward about how this is a just world and people get what they deserve. And people have earned nothing and people are entitled to nothing because there's no me in there that's separate of all that deterministic stuff. What an incredible thesis. And there are so many pieces of it that I want to pull apart. First of all, I kind of personally believe as a fundamental ethical principle that no one's needs are more important than anyone else's, despite what they may or may not have done.

I think for me, that's one way to express just human rights, right? That all people, regardless of action, do the same consideration to some degree. That said, yes, our society on a mass scale rewards some and punishes others and often does so because of the choices that they make or the choices that we believe them to have made. And sometimes there's a lot of us who believe that that is unfair, right? That a lot of people are punished for things that are outside of their control. But, you know, based on racism is a great example, right? Like, you know, institutionalized racism that people are punished with having a worse life or are treated worse, despite the fact that, you know, actually what's happening is they were born under worse conditions

that have been treated worse their entire lives and had adverse outcomes as a result. And now we blame those adverse outcomes on them, right? That's being aware of racism is being aware of that dynamic and saying those people, we will not hold them responsible. We will instead try to change the conditions under which they live, right? However, even someone who has that commitment, as I do, might sit on a jury and end up in a hearing an argument delivered by a prosecutor saying, despite all of that, this this person's horrible, you know, upbringing and all the bad things that happened to them. And they had fetal alcohol syndrome and they you know, they had all these bad outcomes and all these bad outcomes, uh, uh, they

had all these bad conditions that led to who they are at the same time, this person at the very last moment, they had a choice. They could have done a, or they could have done B. Um, and they chose to do B and here's an example of someone who had the exact same upbringing, but they chose to do a. And so in this case, we can sort of drill down to this person's action. And, uh, uh, you know, we have to make a decision on the based on that. You think we should not you think even at that moment, we should not judge that person one way or another.

We should say, ah, that person's actions were still biologically determined by the electrical impulses inside of their brain. Absolutely, because it's that same issue again. inside of their brain absolutely because it's that same issue again how did they become that sort of person who would make that decision at that point and that they had no control over the whole notion of well okay we could find exceptions to people who grew up in the same dire circumstances and they turned out to be mother theresa or whatever um what that's tapping into is sort of this a second great temptation to fall into free will belief the first one again being it feels so real when i decide to choose like rocky road over jerry garcia ice cream or whatever it's so tangible in the moment where did that intent come from the second one is when you look at the exceptions,

and the exceptions just lead us into this like morass of free will belief. Because, you know, most people are reasonable. They're willing to admit that there's all sorts of stuff we had no control over. How tall we are, what our memory span is like, if we have perfect pitch, if our leg muscle makeup of twitch fibers make us a good sprinter or a marathon or a good couch potato, all of us can accept that. And yeah, that's the stuff we were given. That's the stuff we were gifted or cursed with. That's the stuff, yeah, we had no control no control over but oh what you do with those attributes that's the realm where we're supposedly free do we show tenacity do we show gumption and backbone do we start off with every possible advantage and then squander it with self-indulgence this is this like false dichotomy that like our biological attributes are stuff we had no control over. But what we do with it, that's the measure of us as individual agents with free will. And, you know, being at a crossroads and making the right decision or making the dumb ass impulsive one is made of the exact same biology as is your eye colors it's made of

it's a it's a much more complicated interesting type but it's made of the same stuff okay here's here's an example which like should have people rioting at the barricades when they when they really think about it by the time a kid is five years old, the socioeconomic status of their parents is a significant predictor of their stress hormone levels in their bloodstream. Yes. When nothing stressful is happening. Big surprise, the lower the SES of your parents, the higher the average stress hormone levels. What's one of the interesting things that those stress hormones are doing at that stage of life? They're impairing the development of one of the most interesting parts of to be born into already is influencing the thickness of your frontal cortex.

It's metabolic rate, how good it is at doing the harder thing when it's the right thing to do. Take like a five-year-old and say, wow, if you could sit here with this marshmallow in front of you for the next three minutes and resist eating it, we'll give you two marshmallows. And how long a kid can hold out is a function of how thick their frontal cortex is at that point. And that's already being shaped by what family you were born into, because that's going to have been determining the stress hormone levels you were having, which have a major role in how well your frontal cortex developed. By age five, you're already screwed by that. There was a study published last year that makes this one look like nothing. This was using some neuroimaging techniques that are like cutting edge, where you can get some neuroimaging info

from a fetus's brain while it's still inside mom. And what is that one showing? You can't get the resolution. You can't get even on a newborn or whatever, but you look at a fetus and already the socioeconomic status of the mother is having an impact on brain size you're not even born yet and you can already be three steps behind in this race because the stuff that you had no control over and unlike what some philosophers say which is like bad luck and good luck sort of even out over time no all society does is amplify what you're handed at that point. And like, oh my, a fetus? This is already happening?

Your fetal environment can cause a 20-fold change in your likelihood of having adult onset diabetes by the time you're 60 years old, can cause a 20-fold change in the likelihood of you having schizophrenia by age 20 or so, like that's already happening in fetal life. All that's happening thereafter is just stuff that just reinforces it further. I completely, uh, first of all, it's a mind blowing set of, uh, uh, not statistics, but, uh, it's a mind, mind blowing piece of evidence, not statistics, but it's a mind-blowing piece of evidence that in support of your point, especially in terms of the social consequences of your point,

and I feel entirely on the same page with you about that. I think those sort of social claims that you're making about how much of our behavior is truly biologically, socially, genetically determined is inarguable and extremely powerful to be presented with when we're thinking about how we judge other people. It's the sort of stronger philosophical claims you make that I want to keep picking out a little bit, because it occurs to me, you say that, well, we shouldn't be mad at, you know, other people for the choices that they make,

or we shouldn't judge the other people for the choices that we make. But then I sit here and go, there's kind of a facile response to this, but well, if I get mad, that was also predetermined by all of my genetics and et cetera, right? The fact that we as a society and as a group of brains have come up with these systems of judgment based on what you might call the illusion of free will that's also all determined and so i might ask you why write a book about it robert like if you feel that we shouldn't get mad at that child then why should you get mad at everybody else for making the judgment about the child right or why should you try to influence their behavior at all i i it's a little bit facile but maybe it'll get us to an interesting point here.

It's not facile in the slightest, because this is like another domain that has to be dealt with, which is this completely erroneous belief that if we don't have free will, it means nothing can change. No change can happen. And that's the most ridiculous thing on earth because unbelievably dramatic changes in people and societies for better or worse, blah, blah, all of that. But where the mistake comes in is the belief that we choose to change. We don't. We are changed by circumstance. And the way in which we are changed is a function of the sort of person we became going into experiencing that circumstance. For example, two people go into a movie and it's like some inspirational tearjerker about

something or other. And one person comes out changed by the experience. They say, wow, that was so inspirational. Tomorrow, I'm going to go volunteer in a soup kitchen for the homeless. And the second person comes out and says, oh my God, what a crappy, manipulative, shitty screenplay. I can't believe the contempt they show for us, feeling that they could manipulate us with that. And I hated the cinematography, by the way. And I'm so offended the movie theater is willing to show stuff like that. And I am changed now as a result of this.

Tomorrow, I am going to go arson this theater. Whoa. I love this example. These are two very divergent outcomes. Very divergent outcomes. And you better know it was not by chance if three minutes before entering that movie, you had found out the entire history, genomes, cultural upbringing, and like tautness of underwear of that person that day, if you had all that information beforehand, you'd be able to know who's going to come out volunteering in the suit kitchen and who's going

to come out making death threats against the cinematographer now. How did you wind up being the sort of person that that's the way you would be changed by the circumstance? And it's exactly that case. And thus, what's going on here, maybe somebody listening to this, who has had an upbringing where they already are reflective, and presumably they are if they're listening to something like this, and they already maybe have the, you know, self-confidence that they're willing to say, oh, I was wrong about this. And maybe as a result of this, four and a half neurons are now working differently in their brain than it was yesterday. And as a result, they have a different attitude towards people. That's what's going on.

Maybe someone will read your book and they will be similarly changed. Maybe some judge somewhere will have some change occur to them because they were in a particular receptive state that they did not have control over, dah, dah, dah. Okay. I understand that. And I understand why I think this is an argument. This is not an argument to not, to never do anything. This is an argument that when you, when you do things, you are not choosing them or you do not have free will in the sense that we often think. I guess what it comes to is what we're getting close to here is is what is your definition of free will? Like the the the picture that you've drawn so far for us is that we're all biological machines. I really like that metaphor. We're all biological machines that are sort of moving around like animatronic puppets, right? With some kind of programming and the puppets all interact and they all bounce off of each other and what

happens, you know, in the environment, very complex machines. And then what inside of us, there's this consciousness that believes itself to be making choices, but it is not. In fact, it's an epiphenomenon, um, a, uh, you know, a, a, uh, something that is happening that has no causal relationship with, uh, the physical things that are bouncing around, or, I mean, how do you, how do you characterize, uh, in your worldview, you know, the experience of conscious free will that so many people would say that they have? Um, It's false. It's very simple. It's one that we have a tremendous psychological investment in believing in because it's pretty damn unnerving to think it isn't there. And like that, that opens up the possibility of this like deep existential malaise. Oh my God, I'm a machine. What does that

mean? And that's like a whole other level of, oh my God, are you just going to let murderers running around free on the streets? Or, oh my God, did I not really deserve my CEO salary kind of thing? Yeah. It's a very, very strong pull. And it's one that we assume gives us a locus of control. And it's a good, what it mostly is, is a rationalization for holding people responsible for things they had no control over or feeling entitled and full of yourself for things you had no control over either and yeah this is this is really quite destructive i mean god help me for saying this in terms of like wokeness and stuff. But, you know, arguing that there's no free will is, and here I cringe, is a social justice issue.

Because all that we've done for centuries and centuries is learn that, oh, there's realms in which people actually did not have a responsibility, and it's not okay to hold them responsible for that. Whoa, we figured out at some point that the old lady with no teeth at the edge of the village who no one talks to doesn't actually control the weather. She's not a witch. It doesn't work that way. And thus, we shouldn't burn her at the stake. It's a better world that we figured out free will has nothing to do with the weather, and we don't burn people to stakes anymore. It's a very good thing that we figured out that some kids have trouble learning to read

because there's something screwy in the microarchitecture of one layer of their cortex, and they reverse looped letters letters and they have dyslexia. And not only is it a better world because we now know something about how to teach them how to learn and then this challenge, but we also don't raise them to think of themselves as like lazy and unmotivated in the world. It's a better world that we realized that flipping letters around is something we have no control over. It's a better world that we've learned something about the genetics of obesity. And these are not cases of people with no self-control who secretly hate themselves and eat themselves into hatred of their...

hate themselves and eat themselves into hatred of their... Yeah, you can have a screwed up gene for a receptor for a satiation hormone in the brain. And in every one of these steps, like not only hasn't the roof caved in that we don't burn people with a stake anymore. Oh my God, society will fall apart. It becomes a better world, a more humane world. This is not like a terrifying prospect of people realizing that they're nothing more or less than the outcome of their luck. All it could do is make this be a better place to live because that's what happens every single time we make I really, again, agree with the social consequences of your argument so much and the sort of ethical argument that you're making. And that I really do believe fundamentally we are always better served if when thinking about other people's actions, we think about the causes that that person had no control over. And we think about how do we alleviate those causes and how do we care for the person? How do we, you know, help the person, you know, be better, right? Or in some way, right? How do we, thinking about them

that way rather than in a punitive way, I think almost always behooves us in society. Now, a lot of people disagree with that. That's just my sort of ethical orientation and my emotional orientation towards other people. But I just want, I want to keep drilling down on the definition of free will because, you know, in terms of, look, it's not something that I'm by any means an expert in, in terms of philosophy, but there are other definitions of free will out there other than, hey, your mind stuff has a causal effect on the physical universe. Right. I don't believe I agree with you. I don't believe that there that there is some other dimension of mind that can like spookily influence matter. I think that's very hard to understand, but, um, you know, there are folks out there who call themselves compatibilists, right. Who believe that, uh, free will is compatible with determinism. And I would imagine the argument would go something like that. Uh, well, first of all,

that free will can mean different things, you know, that, that, uh, for instance, uh, there's a difference. Actually, I have a little quote here that my, my producer prepared for me that I really like that, um, you know, failing to save a drowning child because you were tied up is not the same as failing to save a drowning child because you were determined neurologically not to think about them. Right. Um, one is an excuse. The other is a cause for condemnation. Like there, do you see any difference between those cases or did they seem like equally determined? Is there an equal lack of free will in there for you? Because for some folks, it is, you know, kind of a nice heartwarming NPR liberal agenda to all of this would be to have room for edge cases. Okay, this person did

some horrible crime, but they had a massive car accident shortly before that destroyed their frontal cortex and they couldn't regulate their behavior. And in maybe half the states in this country, and less so in the more Neanderthal-ish corners, but in about half the states, that could be viewed as a mitigating factor. Oh, they had limited control. There was involutional stuff. There was organic damage, all of that going on. And most reasonable people would say, yeah, that's a special case. Yeah, the person was tied up.

That's why they couldn't go and save the kid. And those are cases where we reach that because it's easy to see where the free will was lacking because of that massive car accident. And what we find so, so much harder is to look at anybody and their actions. And instead of seeing one single massive event that did it, they tied you up, your frontal cortex was destroyed. Instead, there's a hundred gazillion tiny little silk threads that made you who you are. And it is so much harder to imagine that all of those collectively have the same force as tying up somebody with rope or destroying their frontal cortex in a car accident. It's just a much, much harder intellectual task because it's very hard to make sense of distributed causality. who's responsible for this is so much

easier to answer than what are all the different things that are responsible for this and courts themselves have been like wrestling with issues of like statistical guilt forever this is the ultimate one because it's a gazillion different things that contribute to something that as formative as someone tying you up with rope and a lot of them we haven't even learned how they work yet and most of them we're not aware of and you know it's much harder okay so here's here's the definition of free will that i would give given this and this is one that offends the hell out of compatibilists. In fact, I know literally I last week I had a debate with this philosopher, Daniel Dennett.

Oh, I was first. I read him in college 20 years ago and I always enjoyed him very much. So I was going to bring him up later. So that's very fascinating to me. I would love to hear about this. Okay. He's like the most visible, witty, influential, well-published, best-selling, compatibilist philosopher out there. And in the course of this debate, this was for some BBC thing that I was terrified about, but I got out of it alive because he can be an intimidating guy. And I sort of, in effect, ran this definition of free will by him. And he used the words daft and deplorable. And here was the definition.

And what some other compatibilist philosophers have instead done is frame it as like a dirty trick and a gut punch and a low blow and setting the bar too high, which is show me a behavior that has just occurred and show me the brain produced that behavior completely independent of that brain's hormonal history and sensory history and genetic history and childhood history and every single thing else. Show me that that brain operated independent of its history. And if you could show me that, you've just demonstrated free will. And it's not possible because that brain and us were nothing more or less than our history that brought us to that moment over which we had no control, blah, blah, history matters.

And someone like Dennett, who I was indirectly quoting before saying, you know, good luck and bad luck even out over time. And this is something he has written in a gazillion different articles and YouTube talks of his. And in his view, as such, you could ignore a person's history. All we are is our history. The past isn't past. The past is what has made us this at the moment. Thus, the only definition of free will could be is show me a brain that was an uncaused cause where you could have changed everything that happened from a second before to a million years before. And that brain would have done the same thing. It was acting freely.

And we can't do that. Okay. This is so fascinating. And I'm so glad you talked to him. And I was going to represent what I thought he might say to some of your arguments based on my reading of his writing like 20 years ago, but you've spoken to him recently, so I won't actually frame it that way. Um, here, but here's, here's my response to you saying that, because I do think that that is a, what you've proposed is like a defensible

definition of free will. Um, and it's one that's consistent and it leads to all of your conclusions. However, to me, it seems different than our folk understanding of free will. When I, to me, our folk under, like our daily understanding of free will is literally my personal experience of having made a choice. It's me having written the X and the O.

And so that's what, you know, I think when people click on this YouTube video or this podcast episode that's titled, you know, free will doesn't exist, that's what they're looking to find out what you think about. Wait, you mean what I think I'm doing all the time doesn't exist? And so to me, I think a definition of free will that satisfies that, you know, folk understanding and is still compatible with most of your argument is that free, what we experience as free will simply is the biologically determined brain going through the process that you're talking about of, you know, eventually writing the X or

the O. What I was really influenced by when I read Dennett again, 20 years ago is, and this is my dumb, dumb, you know, summary of what I think I remember. Right. But this is what stuck with me is is, you know, what I was really fascinated by was the hard problem of consciousness. How is it the case that the mind, my experience, which doesn't seem like a physical thing at all, it seems like some sort of, you know, it's a phenomenological world that I inhabit, you know. How is that the same as a physical brain that I can observe from the outside or that I can see? So I'm going to take a photo of it and show it to me or they can show me the, you know, the scan of my brain and all the neurons firing. I'll look at that. That's nothing like my experience of being the brain. That's sort of the hard problem of consciousness. How are these two things one? Right. And what I've basically come to accept is, I don't know. It just fucking is man. Like, like, like me being conscious, right. Is the brain existing? That's all it is. And I just

have to fucking accept it. Right. Um, and we can, and you know, I've talked to folks like, um, uh, I've talked to philosophers who, who, you know, believe in a form of dualism, and I disagree with them. I'm like, no, the two things are just the same, and I know it seems incompatible to my human brain, but that is actually the case. And I think Dennett has this example of any decision-making apparatus, like a brain, you could say might in some way, right? That even an animal or a thermostat might be conscious in some way, in the same way that we are. We don't have access to what that consciousness is like, but if we accept that consciousness simply is the brain, then we have to accept that. And so my thesis would be, well, could free will, my experience of free will, not just be, hey, that is – there is a moment in the brain where the neuron could go one way or the other, right, where the brain is doing the final calculation of do I write the X or do I write the O. And that's what my experience of free will is.

And posed that way, I'm like, well, doesn't the problem sort of dissipate a little bit? It's a little bit softer of a claim than than what you're. I don't know. What do you make of all of the nonsense I just said? I disagree. I disagree completely. I love it. Tell me why.

Because you allowed yourself to have a crutch in there with the word seems it seems as if it seems as and what that is relying on is our intuitions are right. And intuitions are pretty regularly not right at all. I challenged him with this one, which is if he and I were sitting there five centuries ago, and we were both the same reflective people with a respect for thought and critical thinking, all of that. And we were sitting there, the odds were pretty good. Both of us would think it was intuitively obvious that some people are simply meant to be slaves, that they're incapable of taking care of themselves. It's in fact kind of a good deed to take them into slavery because you're going to feed them and all of that. And that would have just seemed intuitively obvious.

And it doesn't seem intuitively obvious anymore. Intuition is a moving target. And what seems intuitively obvious to us right now is very different from a century ago. It was intuitively obvious that it's okay to have five-year-olds work to death in textile factories in the Industrial Revolution. It was intuitively obvious to us about 50 years ago that schizophrenia is caused by mothers with all sorts of Freudian bile who secretly hated their child. All of these things were intuitively obvious. And then we learned, oh, that particular intuition turns out to be completely misplaced intuition is a very very poor litmus test for deciding how to go about doing the world

because we could now reflect on how disastrous some things that seemed intuitively obvious back when. And at one point, it was a declarative, cognitive challenge to think through that maybe some people aren't meant to be slaves. And thanks to that sort of pioneering declarative process, it's now intuitively obvious to us that like, oh, slavery is not a good thing. Oh, burning people at the stake is not a good thing. Like pioneering declarative deconstructing of that stuff made it possible for us in our place and time now to say, oh, well, it's intuitively obvious that the sun doesn't rotate around the earth. And yeah, here we are. And instead, what we're running on now are the intuitions that we haven't dissected yet. I do want to acknowledge, I think it's too often, we believe too often that at, you know, times where slavery was far more institutionalized than it was today, there were folks at the time who understood that not everybody should be slaves and that there are a lot of folks who understood that and did it anyway.

And then, you know, used to back justification. that and did it anyway, and then, you know, used to back justification. And, you know, the, the, it's one of those odd things where we think of ourselves as being more, being smarter now, whereas actually we were smart then, we just weren't necessarily doing the right thing. But that's, you know, sort of more discussion of slavery than of anything else. What I mean, though, is, you know, I, I agree with you about all of the social consequences of this. But when I'm talking about the seeming, that's the part that I'm trying to explain. You know, it's not that I have an intuition about the seeming and the seeming must be true. I'm saying I have, you know, phenomenologically something that must be explained, which is my experience, right, of making the choice.

And can't my, when we're talking about what is the definition of free will, can't my experience of free will be compatible with the determinism? Because what I am experiencing is the determined nature of reality, right? Like, I don't think that, to me, I disagree with you less than you seem to think, perhaps, because it's if you define free will as strongly as you do, then like I agree with the I agree that the free will that you as you define it does not exist. you, as you define it, uh, does not exist. But I don't think I agree that that is what we always mean when we say free will. Um, and it's not the version of free will that I'm necessarily most interested in. Um, to me, to me, it seems like the thing that you're grappling with is simply the hard problem of consciousness, you know, uh, like made manifest, right? It's just part of the, like there's a strange contradiction at the heart of materialism, right? If you believe that the only world that exists is the physical world, that world behaves according to physical laws.

And, you know, the mental world is, doesn't really exist. It's, you know, you are simply experiencing being a physical object, then that's what free will is. But it doesn't mean it doesn't really exist, it's, you know, you are simply experiencing being a physical object, then that's what free will is. But it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It means that when I say I have free will, that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about my brain as a, you know, biological computer that is, you know, subject to all these stimuli, but is still doing something that is different than other brains might do given that circumstance. Does that make any sense? Or are we talking past each other a little bit? No, I'm not going to let you get away with that because that's not free will.

That's your perception of free will in that moment. will that's your perception of free will in that moment and that's an emergent property of like all this complexity that makes up our brains 30 second parenthetic note if there's anybody out there who's about to say oh the physical basis of the universe what about quantum indeterminacy that's where free will comes from that makes no sense at all and it doesn't work that way. Close parentheses. But anyway, back to, you know, there's somebody out there who's listening to this right now, who is saying, I am finding this to be very interesting and compelling. And I'm listening to this attentively because I value stuff like this. I'm a reflective sort of person, and that's why I'm taking this all in. And I've chosen to sort of focus in on this. And they would not be doing that if they had not introduced caffeine into their nervous system an hour ago. Yes. Yeah. We're biological machines. And the challenge challenge is we could know that and we can do

self-deceptive things about it. And not only are we machines that generate feelings, but they can feel such real feelings that they feel as if they were real and are the products of something other than the machineness. But that's who we are. Yeah. I guess to really drill down my mild objection to your point. And I, and I really, I'm out over my skis here again. I have a bachelor's man. Okay. So please thank you for even engaging in this argument with me because I'm no Daniel Dennett and I'm sure, uh, you know, I, I, uh, I wouldn't want to debate him either. But to me, again, if I were to say to someone, hey, I'm conscious, how could that be the same thing as meat stuff? Right. I wouldn't say, well, you're not conscious. Consciousness doesn't exist.

I would say it's the same thing. You're talking about the same thing. And that's like the strange philosophical mystery at the heart of materialism that we all have to reckon with. And so why does that same answer not work for you in terms of talking about free will? If I rather than say it doesn't exist, no, the feeling that you have a free will is actually biological determinism happening, right? And I can follow along with you about all of your conclusions about how we should give grace

and be less judgmental towards other people and reorient our criminal justice system in order to account for some of these ideas as best we can. I agree with you about all those conclusions. It's just a matter of saying to the individual person, rather than it doesn't exist, free will as you experience

it simply is your brain going through all of the processes that you're talking about and adding up all of those previous things. Because that helps me solve all of the, or it helps me come to some conclusion about these hard philosophical problems in a way that's a little bit more satisfying to me personally. Yeah. And it's satisfying because it helps you solve hard problems. It doesn't necessarily give you a correct solution, but it's a comforting one. It's a comforting one for those of us who are trying to figure out, should I feel entitled or not by the fact that I'm like articulate and like got enough protein in my diet when i was a kid and all of that and thus kind of have it together and can

function pretty well by society's standards and like you know have a job and then all this was yeah there's a pretty strong comfort that comes at that point from deciding that there was an agency that was independent of all of this stuff. And it's actually like orthogonal to perpendicular to the question of consciousness. perpendicular to the question of consciousness. Consciousness, which panics me. Every decade, I force myself to read a review of the neuroscientists who are trying to explain consciousness. And I come away so relieved because the conclusion is they really haven't made any progress in the last 10 years. And I don't understand what they're arguing. That like, I haven't missed the boat here it's it is the problem not only philosophically but neurobiologically as well but you can prove that you have no free will

when you consciously say i am not going to have like chocolate ice cream right now because i'm very conscious that it's only five months till bathing suit season or whatever. Yeah, that was one read through with consciousness. Or it could be one that has nothing to do with consciousness. It's because the genetics of my taste receptors in my tongue make chocolate ice cream taste like, you know, rancid rotten eggs or something. You know, in one case, you made a choice that was mediated by conscious awareness. And in another case, not at all. But it doesn't matter in either case whether it was a conscious one or not.

Where did you get the consciousness and the values to care about that is five months from bathing suit season or some such thing? In either case, it's still a you that became you as a result of all this prior stuff and the alternative is for people like us absolutely comforting because things have worked out pretty well for us like you know we've we've got all our teeth we weren't done in by warlords who burned down our village when we were little. We had an acceptable level of toxins in our drinking water. Our parents did nice things, and it turned out okay for us. And thus, we have the most to lose out of the worldview that there's no free will. out of the world view that there's no free will. If you don't panic by that, it means we're one of the lucky ones for most people. That's fabulous news.

You know, it's so funny because you, every, every time I put this to you, you sort of go to a, again, a social argument that I, that I, again,

agree with and, and emotionally and want to be drawn towards. And then I go back to, wait, I'm trying to make a fine philosophical distinction. And I realize maybe that distinction doesn't matter to you as much as I think it should. And that makes me wonder, maybe I'm wrong. I find it very provocative talking to you. I hope Daniel Dennett did as well. I'm a little bit curious that, you know, I got the sense that your book has made a lot of philosophers very mad or at least very consternated and a lot of sputtering and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, maybe a little bit of gatekeeping or, you know, fence erecting

like, oh, he hasn't read all of our books. So how, how, how dare he? Um, and I'm just a little bit curious coming from, you mentioned, uh, neuroscientists have not made a lot of progress on consciousness. Neither have philosophers, right? Uh, consciousness continues to be like one of the stickiest wickets, uh, of, uh, philosophy generally. Again, my conclusion is just that, hey, it's a mystery. Like our puny human minds cannot grapple with it in the way that we want it to. But these things are the same thing, right? But I always find it fascinating to see neuros out here, what has your experience been interacting with the philosophical discourse on this topic from your own background? What do you think that philosophy misses or fails to acknowledge in these conversations? Okay, this is going to sound like a total jerk. Please, please.

Okay, just to be snarky and all. What they fail to acknowledge is philosophy really doesn't have a whole lot to say about this. If it decides it could be completely free from understanding us as biological organisms. Oh my God, hegemony. This guy says that the problem is philosophers think philosophy is worth paying attention to. No, there's some, you know, what there's actually been surveys, 90% of philosophers view themselves as free will compatibilists. And there's a handful of philosophers out there and they're really interesting people. And they're my, my diaper baby brothers at arm sort of thing who are in fact

there is no free will they're philosophical incompatibilist and the rest of philosophers hate them and despise them and are afraid of them and i can and they're in a vast minority you know philosophers are thinking about pume philosophers are thinking about are there are there problems that by definition are unknowable and there's a philosophy whatever the hell they're thinking about but you know look at what happens when you futz with brain chemistry and a person is not the same person anymore. And when you look at all those little like silk threads that made us who we are at this moment, you know, philosophy is great, but this is ultimately an issue of biology

interacting with environment. Developmental psychologists have a hell of a lot to say about this. Philosophers, not so much. Well, and that is sort of the problem of philosophy is how much does it influence or interact with the world that we live in? And how much is it trying to, for instance, simply explain our experience of consciousness and free will in some way that is trying to find some internal consistency, whereas one might not exist and, you know, the world will keep spinning. Whereas you're making the argument that,

you know, we should actually treat each other differently as a result of your conclusions, which, although interestingly enough, we can't treat each other differently because we don't have free will no but hopefully they've been changed by like listening to this that's yes that's the whole point yeah um like you go to a restaurant and you eat a meal and just by chance you happen to spend the entire night throwing up you're going to be changed by it. You're not going to want to eat that meal again. And that's like this primitive reptilian level on which we are changed by experience without having to invoke free will. It's just a fancier version of it here. So how do you hope that people will be changed by this conversation? If you could, uh, uh, you know, just in their daily lives, right.

Um, uh, is there, is there a basic way that we can, apart from reforming, you know, the criminal justice system and et cetera, like what is the, what is the daily takeaway for you? How do you live your life differently? Um, having this information is maybe a good way to phrase this. Well, maybe since you very rudely phrased it that way, 99% of the time, I'm a flaming hypocrite. Because it's hard to function this way. I get pissed off at people if someone says, ooh, nice shirt you're wearing. I'll, for a few seconds, feel like I'm a better human than average and that I've somehow earned that compliment. It's really hard. It's very hard. But again, it's not really hard at

this point to accept that witches don't exist and that some people are not meant to be slaves. Whoa, we got brought up so that those ones are easy, but it's still really hard not to think someone who's just done something appalling, that there's some sort of virtue and punishment and retribution in and of itself that's separate of that. Or if you've just helped the old lady cross the street, that somehow you should feel good about it. You should feel good about yourself if that makes you more likely to do it in the future, but not because that isn't an earned entity in and of itself. Yeah, this is incredibly hard.

And all of my reflexes are ones of the person of my place and time, which is to have like a very like solid, comfortable reliance on the sense of free will. Yeah. Did your dogs have the option not to start barking extremely loudly just at that moment? Or are they biologically determined as well? They're compatibilists

and they wanted to drown me off. Robert, it's been so incredible talking to you. You're so provocative and you're also making me resolve to have Daniel Dennett on the show sometime, not just to argue with you, but because I find these topics so fascinating. I'm so grateful for you for coming on. The book is called Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will. You can pick up a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com books, if you're listening.

Robert, where else can people find you and find your work? Oh, I don't know. There's a bunch of YouTube lectures of mine that Stanford has posted. I've had no social media presence whatsoever, but my young adult kids who are horrified by that apparently have made something for me where I now have a site or something. And that is the extent of my knowledge of it. But you know, at your neighborhood grocer, the book is available, that kind of thing. Go pick it up at your neighborhood grocer and go look for the website that Robert's kids made. Robert, thank you so much for coming on. I really had a blast talking to you. Good. Likewise. Thanks for having me on. Even though neither of us could have done otherwise.

Exactly. Well, thank you once again to Robert for coming on the show. If you enjoyed that interview, and I know you did because you had no choice in the matter, pick up Robert's book at factuallypod.com slash books. When you do so, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support the show directly, please support us on Patreon. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name at the end of the podcast and put it in the credits of every one of my video monologues. This week, I want to thank Sean Rubin, Robbie Wilson, Tracy

Adams, Jason Lefebvre, Alex Babinski, Brennan Peterman, Ultrazar, Busy B, and Josh Davies. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. If you want to come see me live doing stand-up comedy in a city near you, Portland, Maine, Atlanta, Chicago, Nashville, New York, Philly, Boston, a bunch of others, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. I want to thank my producers, Sam Rodman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making this show possible. And I'll see you next week with a brand new episode of Factually. Thank you so much for being here.