Instant Genius - Here’s why science says you do have free will

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

Did you really choose to listen to this podcast? Or was the decision just the product of neurons firing in your brain, used by biochemical reactions, governed by the laws of physics? Today, it’s become almost fashionable to chalk how we think and behave up to nothing more than the physical sum of our parts. But our guest in this episode is bucking that trend, arguing that we humans do have autonomy over our lives. Kevin Mitchell is an associate professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin and author of Free Agents – How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. He argues that free will isn’t just an illusion, and that evolution proves that we’re more than mere machines simply responding to the world around us. Will you choose to believe him? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals, because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing.

Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a little. deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Study and play.

Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller.

Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at aka.m.m.S. College PC. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio,

alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, the bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Each week, you'll hear from world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Tom Howarth, Trends editor at BBC Science Focus.

Did you really choose to listen to this podcast? Or was the decision just the product of neurons firing in your brain caused by biochemical reactions that are governed by the laws of physics? Today, it's become almost fashionable to talk how we think and behave up to nothing more than the physical sum of our parts. But our guest in this episode is bucking that trend, arguing that we humans do have autonomy over our own lives. Kevin Mitchell is a neuroscientist, an author of Free Agents, How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.

He argues that free will isn't just an illusion, and that evolution proves that we're more than mere machines simply responding to the world around us. Will you choose to believe him? So you've written a book, Free Agents, How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. We'll start with the basics. Can you define what we mean when we're talking about free will? Yeah, it sounds like the easiest place to start, and it's not at all. I think if we had a definition that everyone agreed on, we'd have solved this problem, you know, millennia ago, potentially. So there's a real issue that different people define it in different ways, and then they end up

kind of talking past each other, because in essence, the definition set different criteria for what would qualify as free will. So some people, for example, say, you only have free will, if your actions are free from the influence of any prior cause whatsoever, which is a hugely high bar, right? You're basically saying that we have to be somehow exempt from all the rest of the causal influences in the world ever in order to qualify. And it just inflates free will to such a level that no one could have it. You define it out of existence from the get-go. So I don't find that very useful. And then there's others who define it in a more operational way where really what they're interested in is,

protecting our sense of moral responsibility. The idea that we could praise or blame somebody or reward or punish them for things that they've done kind of hangs on the notion that they have some sort of free will. And that is an avenue where people kind of do a sort of motivated reasoning. It's like they want to defend moral responsibility and then they construct the arguments around the kind of free will worth wanting, as it's called, and how you could get to it. And I also don't find that to be a very satisfying endeavor. So really what I want to do is actually just point to something in the world, right? So just describe a phenomenon that we call free will and then dig into it a little bit and dig into the science and see how could that come about and what systems could

support it. And that phenomenon just is that we seem to make choices. We seem to control our actions. We are able to act for reasons. We're able to inspect those reasons and tell people about them. we can exercise some rational control over our behavior in a way that makes us causes of things in the world. Some things are up to us. That's the phenomenon that I think needs explaining. So the idea that we have free will, it's quite trendy nowadays for a lot of experts to kind of say that it's an illusion. Yeah. For some of the reasons you've just explained that nobody has free will, but you're kind of bucking that trend and saying that for certain reasons we do have free will. Before we get on to the arguments about why we might have free will, could you steal man the case against having that?

What are other experts and thinkers saying is the reason that we don't have autonomy? Sure. So there's a bunch of different kind of arguments or objections to the notion that we, ourselves, could be in charge of things. And a lot of it hangs on the notion of physicalism, that everything is made just out of physical stuff. and then, you know, how could it be that we ourselves have control because we're just made of physical stuff, right? But you can couch that argument at various levels. So some people like Robert Sapolsky, for example, as a behavioral neuroscientist, would say that our current psychology, the way our brain is currently configured, that entails all of our beliefs and desires and based on all our past experiences and our genetics and evolution and all of that, just configures our brains in such a way that whenever we encounter, or some scenario, we will, in a deterministic way, just do one thing. So it sees the whole complexity of the brain as a big stimulus response machine. And the argument is that the way it's configured right now just closes off so many possibilities

that even though you're thinking about what you want and what you believe in and so on, effectively, the neural machine is doing the job, right? And what that does is eliminate you from the picture. It says that your brain is making the decisions or that particular circuits in your brain are making the decisions. You're not doing anything. You kind of disappear from that picture and you're just being pushed around by your parts. So that's one objection and it's a strong objection. You know, it can't be dismissed easily.

It has to be grappled with. If you go a little bit lower, you're at the level of neural circuits where you're really saying, look, all this talk of beliefs and desires and cognition and mental states is all, very nice, but really, how could mental states do anything in a physical system? We know it's just neurons. We can look in the brain. Look, there they are. They're working. We can see them. We can intervene on them. We can control behavior in animals. And it feels like all the causes of what are going on are located at the level of neural circuits. We have a full explanation at that level. And it doesn't require or even allow any room for you as a self to be doing anything.

Again, it hints at this notion that you were kind of a ghost in the machine. Now, that's bad enough, right? We're down at the level of neural circuits. It's all a big deterministic machine, but it gets worse, right? The physicists stare into the existential abyss, and it's much deeper for them because they will say, okay, look, all those neural circuits, that's all nice. It's cute that you want to talk in that way. But really, we know what's really going on is just atoms and subatomic particles are obeying the laws of physics, which we know are completely deterministic. And therefore, there's no room for any other kinds of causes. It's just the laws of physics that are going to determine what happens because we're just made of physical stuff. So those are the sort of arguments. They're each strong in their way, but they're each also flawed.

Yeah, so from the physicist perspective, it's sort of almost the same as a ball rolling down a hill due to gravity. Yeah. We react because of the laws of physics. Yeah. Before we get onto some of the reasons why you think that those arguments are wrong, what would be some of the consequences of us not having free will? What does that mean for our existence, our place in the world? Yeah, it's a weird thing to think about this hypothetical scenario where everything is the way that we see. it, right? It's just that we don't really have free will and that's an illusion. And some people would say,

look, what does it matter? It's just an academic debate. We feel like we have free will. We go about feeling like we're making choices. Even if that's an illusion, it doesn't have any effect on anything. Other people would say, no, that's completely wrong. We have to take seriously this view that there's no free will, that we never have any shred of agency whatsoever, as Robert Sapolsky puts it. In any decision that we make were just completely determined meat puppets, basically. And if that were true, the implication is most obviously that our legal system and our justice system would be predicated on an illusion. And we should strip it away. So rather than blaming people for anything ever, we should just, well, I'm not exactly sure what the alternative is, but there's notions that,

you know, we shouldn't blame people, we shouldn't punish them, but maybe still we should quarantine them if they're a danger to others and just make kind of pragmatic decisions like that, but not hinged on any sense of moral responsibility, which is just a weird sort of scenario to envisage and not one that I would want to hang on a metaphysical argument that is quite undecided at the moment. So coming to sort of what you think then and what you've laid out in your book, why are those arguments wrong? In summary, why is it that we do have free will? Well, let's work in reverse order. So first of all, the idea that physics says everything is deterministic is just not correct. Physics doesn't say that. And I made a kind of a caricature of what physicists think,

because most physicists wouldn't actually think that everything is deterministic. And that's a kind of a bit of propaganda, maybe from some corners of physics, that isn't actually well-supported at all. We know it's not supported at the quantum level, where randomness is just an inherently fundamental part of what's going on. But it's also not supported at the so-called classical level of big things like you or me. You know, despite Newton's showing that the orbits of the planets were really predictable, you know, the orbits of the planets is the simplest system you can imagine, basically. It is predictable because it's a very linear system. It's just not very complex. Once you get to more complex things, like, say, the weather, it's really not predictable because the universe

itself just doesn't have enough information in it at any one point to predict every future state forever. So there's some scope there. This is the first hurdle to get over is that the future is open. Possibilities in a sense exist, where at least it's indefinite. So many things could happen. And then the question is, for an organism faced with a future like that, how does it control what happens? You don't have to ask where does the freedom come from because it comes for free. It's just baked into the nature of the universe. What you have to ask is where does the control come from? How does the organism make happen what it wants to happen? And basically the story of evolution, at least as it goes along the lineage that leads to animals and eventually, you know, on our lineage

to human beings, is a story of the increasing development and sophistication of control systems. That's what our nervous system is, is a control system. That's what each of our cells has. is a biochemical, physiological control system, which is basically trying to constrain the way that things go out of this huge sort of possibility space. It's trying to constrain that down to the possibilities that the organism wants to make happen in order to keep surviving, basically. And what about the argument that sort of these systems, you mentioned the weather, if we can extrapolate to that, that they're extremely complicated, but we could predict them in a deterministic way, if we had all the information, if you had a computer that was, you know,

complex enough to deal with the weather's complexity. Does the argument fall down on that? Well, it doesn't because, in fact, that's a totally idealized kind of scenario. And it's a sort of a promissory note, you know, where people say, okay, yeah, it's really complicated. We can't predict it. But that's a statement about us. That's a statement about the limits of our knowledge. It's not a statement about the system. Of course, the universe knows, you know, how everything will go. But there's a few arguments against that. One is a theoretical one, that the universe doesn't have enough space physically to contain infinite information at any point. So the information requires some physical space.

It can't be contained in a finite space. So for the universe to contain information about all its future states, it would have to be infinite information at every time point, which just isn't physically possible. But the other one is that actually there are really nice demonstrations where, so there are those, was one paper recently that looked trying to predict a three-body problem with three black holes. So three big gravitational elements that are sort of circling around each other. And they submitted this to what they called a gargantuan computer simulation, where they simulated the initial parameters out to 300 decimal places. And still, that wasn't enough to restrain the trajectory of the system to only a single

outcome. It still diverged over separate runs. And that was down to the level of what's called the plank scale, which is like the lowest physical bit of space that could possibly exist. So I think that's a nice empirical sort of demonstration that actually it's not just a statement about us. It's a statement that within the universe itself at any time point, there's a bit of indefiniteness to the parameters of every physical bit of the system. and that as you go through time and you play that system out, that indefiniteness leads to an opening of future possibilities. Well, we're really touching on all bits of science. I'm glad we managed to get some black holes into this discussion of free will.

Why not? Why not? Bringing it to biology then and sort of the focus of your book, you describe life as a self-organized system that is trying to stay that way. Could you expand on what that means? Yeah, I mean, I think that's really the, definition of the living system is, first of all, that it's a dynamical entity. So living systems persist through time, but they don't do it in the way that, say, a rock persist, which is by not changing, right? So a rocks persist because they don't do anything. We persist, and any living organism, even a single cell's bacterium, for example, keeps going because it keeps this pattern, this lively dynamical pattern of chemical reactions and things inside it going through time. Even though

the individual elements that make it up are being turned over all the time, right? So the physical stuff is in flux, but the pattern remains the same. And so what that means is that you will find, so imagine you had a bunch of bacteria that were organized in different ways, and some of them were very sort of self-reinforcing and stable, and they tended to allow the persistence of the organism of that pattern, and others were more precarious and unstable. Well, just over time, you'll see the ones that persist, right? They'll just be selected for because they keep on going. Now, the tricky thing is that the universe is not cooperating, right? So the universe, the second law of thermodynamics, says that things should just get disorganized, right? They should disperse,

everything should go to equilibrium. You shouldn't have these noticeable pockets of complexity. So in order to overcome that, what organisms have to do is take in energy, free energy in particular, and they have to use that to do work. So they have to, in a sense, try or strive to stay organized. And they're configured in such a way that they can do that, even when the universe is hostile and not cooperating. So we're almost in this constant battle against disorder. Absolutely. And you can see, you know, this is a bit morbid, but you can see how quickly the universe wins that battle when we stop doing the dynamic activities that are keeping us alive. So then how is it that we go from these sort of reactive forms of life, you know, bacteria

are able to react to the environment that they're in and end up with us as humans? And where does free will kind of fit into that? Yeah, it's a great question. And what I would say is what I want to start with is the idea of agency. So a more basal kind of idea than free will, which has a lot of philosophical baggage. So agency is just the power to do something. So it's what distinguishes is living things from non-living things, is that the living things are capable of acting in the world. So they're animated, they can act as causes

in the world, they're not just pushed around by everything else in the universe, they can push back. And that's true even of a simple thing like a bacterium. And, you referred to a bacterium as a reactive kind of system, which in a sense is true, they do react to different stimuli, and we know

a lot about the biochemical pathways that enable them to do that. But you can turn that on its head and see really what, you know, the bacterium is an endogenously active dynamical system that is trying to keep itself that way. That's accommodating to information, but in a highly integrated kind of a way. It's not just a set of isolated stimulus response control policies that are not in contact with each other, where you would say, you know, when a bacterium is exposed to a food source or high temperature or something like that, and it moves around that it's being pushed around by its

parts. It has to do integration in a holistic way, because lots of things are happening all at the same time, and it has to make a kind of a concerted integration of that information to derive the optimal behavior. So even the simple bacterium has a kind of endogenous agency to it that is more than just a set of independent stimulus response reflexes. When you get to more complicated things like multicellular organisms, they really face the same problem. that a single-cell organism does, which is to ask what's out in the world and what should I do about it? Because if they want to keep themselves going, under some environmental conditions, they may be in a good regime that is stable. But when the environment changes, like when they run out of food, for example, then they may have to do something else.

And that's something else maybe reconfiguring their biochemistry or it may be moving around in the world. And if they're moving around, then they want to know, well, where should I move? that means they need to know some information in order to mount an adaptive behavior that is, say, going towards a food source. So single-celled organisms have systems for that. They have sensors, that they have motors, and they have an internal system to integrate information. And of course, multicellular organisms do as well. And the system that they use is the nervous system. And the great thing about nervous systems, as they got more and more complex, is that you can not only pre-configure these kinds of

control policies, but you can also learn. Individuals can learn from their own experience. So it's not just evolution giving you a set of reasons for doing things. You can develop your own reasons by experience in the world. And when that took off, when that capacity arose during evolution, it just enabled that system to get more and more complex, adding more and more levels of decision making that could enable organisms to abstract more higher order information about things in the world, about events that have happened to them, about causal relations between things, and really build up an internal model of the way the world works and the way the self is in the world, and then use that to guide adaptive action.

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast.

Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital

precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing. The elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound, and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So one of the ideas that you speak of that we as humans have that perhaps other forms of life who may have agency don't have is this idea of metacognition, this ability to reason about the fact that we're reasoning, to think deeply on things. Could you explain what that

concept is and how that sort of weaves into this debate that we're having? Yeah, so this is a really crucial element of human cognition, and it's one that harkens back to this objection raised by people like Robert Zupolsky with Sam Harris, it goes back to Schopenhauer, which is a really crucial element of human cognition, and it's one. is that while it may be true that you can act on your beliefs and desires, you can do what you want for your reasons, what you can't do is decide what your reasons are. So there's an idea that we're just configured by all our past experiences and then we just act out that programming in any instant. But what metacognition gives us is exactly the ability to reason about our

reasons and to change our mind if we want to. And why that's so powerful is that we can, for example, multiple beliefs about things in the world, but maybe two of them are inconsistent with each other. And the parts of the brain that represent those two beliefs would never know that, unless there's another part of the brain that's looking down on both of them and saying, hey, are these consistent with each other or not? Or you might have different levels of confidence in your belief or certainty. And that's a useful bit of information to have when you're making a decision and guiding your behavior. So that's what this systems of metacognition are. It's not just that we represent represent ourselves and we represent the world, it's that we represent the systems that are doing

that representing. So it's this recursive looking back at your own processes of cognition that enables us to exert some top-down control on those processes. So for example, we can change our goals, right? So we can change our desires by deciding to do something at some point. So say I I decide to play a round of golf, I will have thereby decided to have the goal of, hitting the ball into the little cup, right? And that's going to inform my behavior at later moments. What that illustrates, I think, is something that's really important in this debate, which is to move away from this really simplistic, instantaneous view of how we behave. It's always couched as, you know, you can do A or B, and why did you decide A or B right now?

But, you know, I decided A because I was doing X, right? Because I had decided that in the past, And I made that decision or choice with a degree of freedom that then informs what I'm doing through time. So I think it's really important to see our behavior as a kind of a nested guidance of decisions that we make over different timeframes. And metacognition is a crucial part of being able to do that kind of planning and to exercise prioritization of different goals at different times. One of the reasons why, you know, perhaps a lot of people decide that free will, you know, we don't have it, is because from what you're saying, it kind of emerges, there's levels and there must be a cutoff point. Yeah. You know, where does this metacognition arise? A human's the only animals that have this? Or, you know, when you look at the brains of another animal, it's not too dissimilar from ours. I think there's probably not a hard cutoff. There are, you know, psychologists and neuroscientists, cognitive scientists have different. kind of terms for sub-elements of what we broadly call metacognition or what we broadly call the systems of behavioral control like executive function. And they can be things like working memory, planning, you know, switching between goals, being aware of your level of certainty of different

things and so on. So yeah, I think different animals have them to a different degree. I think maybe what distinguishes us is a level of introspection and imagination that comes along with that metacognition, which is this sort of self-contained mental world of ideas that we live in, really, that we inhabit. And that's a powerful sort of arena in which we can try out different ideas of what we might do, for example, and we can plan over a long period because we can imagine what would happen a year from now if I took some action today. So I think there are In a sense, differences in degree of those abilities as we get to the human lineage. Now, what's happened, though, in humans is that there's an extra step of evolution,

which is not just biological evolution. It's social evolution. It's cultural evolution. So we don't think alone, right? Because we develop systems of language that enable us to put labels on those ideas that we have in our minds and construct basically open-ended, infinite, string. of ideas together, right? We have this compositional language. It means we can entertain all kinds of thoughts that other animals just can't. And of course, we can communicate them to each other.

And then there's a power that emerges from that collective kind of cognition. And that for me is probably the real thing that has explained the transition, the power that we have as human species that's different from other organisms. I think it wasn't a biological switch. I think it was some gradual biological changes that enabled this cultural switch. So it's like an emergent property that has emerged from outside of us through the way that we interact. Yeah, I mean, it's emerged from the power of this collective kind of social enterprise, which is supported by the biological and neural machinery that we have. So really to hone in on this point then, because I guess it's one of the key points is,

is what you're saying, that humans are the only species, species on Earth with free will? Or is what you're saying that we just have a vastly high degree of it? Yeah, I mean, I think, again, if we just use the term agency instead of free will, then I would say there's a continuum, right? I think even bacteria, simplest organisms that we know of, have a degree of agency. They keep themselves going. They really are selves, in a sense. They're entities that have some causal power in the world. And as you go along, various evolutionary lineages, including ours, those powers of agency get greater and greater. What I mean by that is that we have a degree of autonomy, a kind of an insulation from every causal thing that's happening out in the

world because we're in control of things, because we can build our environment, because we can act on it and craft it and so on. So what we get in humans, though, is sort of the fullest expression of that agency in the sense that we not only can act for reasons, but we can reason about those reasons, and we really do have control. We really can want what we want. We can decide what we should do in a way that I think gets away from this reductive notion that we're just pre-programmed robots and nothing is up to us as integrated holistic selves. I think that's just a mistake.

So at the moment, we're the only entities on the planet capable of doing this kind of thing, but we soon might not be with the boom in artificial intelligence that's going on right now. If we manage to build an artificial general intelligence, would that sort of mechanistic nature call your arguments into question, or could we be doing a podcast in a few years' time where you're sat here arguing that that AGI has free will? Yeah, I think we could be in principle. I don't see any reason why not. And it's interesting, though, what you say, you know, the idea that if we've been

built a structure, or an entity, a system that has the kind of internal cognitive architecture that we have. So we build it on a model of our brain. It's taking an information. It's extracting sort of causal relations about it. It's acting on the world. It's learning from that experience. And it's really an entity that does things. Well, then I would say, of course, it has to have some mechanisms that support that. But it wouldn't mean that the mechanisms are what's doing it. If it's really a holistic integrative system, then you would say it's the system doing it. If it's deciding what to do based on all this information and the activity of all those neural circuits, then that just is the agent deciding what to do. And I think you could say the same thing about us, right? You know,

one of the arguments to come back to where we started from some neuroscientists is that every time we learn anything about the neuroscience, the neural circuits that support decision making or action selection or goal selection, a little bit of you disappears, right? It's not you making the decisions, it's the neural circuits making the decisions. And that's just a reductive mistake in my view. Just because the systems rely on some physical instantiation doesn't mean that's all they are. In the same way that the software programs running on my computer right now rely on the physical hardware of the computer, but that doesn't mean that they can be reduced to just electrons bouncing around. They're just supported by that.

So it's almost, yes, we might build an AGI, but evolution has built us and we can sort of have those same properties and that same autonomy. Yeah, I mean, I think evolution has shown us that you can build a conscious, intelligent entity out of physical stuff, right? Because that's what happened. That's what we are. The question is whether we now have the power to build something like that out of a different kind of physical stuff. And again, in principle, I don't see any reason why we couldn't. Just in practice, I don't think we're near to that because the current artificial systems aren't designed to do that kind of thing. But yeah, it's possible. So that was Kevin Mitchell, Associate Professor of Genetics

and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. To discover more about the topics we've discussed in this episode, check out his book, Free Agents, How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, which is on sale now. Thanks for listening to this episode Vincent Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and news agents up and down the country. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe via your preferred app, and why not write us a review? You can, of course, also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with all. Only the freshest items.

Then, review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes. So you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money.

Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.