The case against free will

The Pentagon has spent years building AI tools to help identify targets, speed up battlefield decisions, and make war more “efficient.” What started as an effort to analyze drone footage has grown into something bigger and much more unsettling. Sean talks with Bloomberg’s Katrina ...  Show more

Back in 2015, before President Donald Trump, before January 6, before all the craziness of the last decade, Matt Yglesias made a blunt prediction: American democracy is doomed. Guest host Zack Beauchamp talks with Matt about what that argument got right, what it missed, and why t ...  Show more

Yascha Mounk and Robert Sapolsky debate whether there is free will and if it would matter if there weren't. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist and primatologist, is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor and professor of biology, neurology and neurosurgery at Stanford Universi ...  Show more

Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurobiology at at Stanford University, and the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. He is the author of "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will." He joins to discuss the case against free will, and its societa ...

Is there a quantum reason we could have free will? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice explore the concept of free will and predetermination with neuroscientist, biologist, and author of Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will, Robert Sapolsky. 

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I have been a fan of Robert Sapolsky’s for a long time. He is a creative force, with wide ranging knowledge, from primatology to neuroscience, and he is also a wonderful expositor of science. His previous book, Behave, was a wide ranging exploration of human behavior, at its best ...  Show more