 if we think about some of our family or friends or colleagues, we can definitely identify the selfish and we can definitely identify the altruistic. So how do we split the difference and what might be going on there in terms of our decision making? Yeah. Well, what I think is I think that we all have capacities of each within us and that there are certain frameworks that are going to help us to bring out one versus the other. There's a psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, you may have heard of him. He writes a lot. He's got a wonderful metaphor that I think is really instructive to this. So he has this metaphor that he calls the rider and the elephant. And that's how he describes human nature that we do have control, but we're kind of like the deliberate part of our decision making process like this person who's riding an elephant. And as long as the elephant doesn't desire of his own, we can tell the elephant which way to go. But if the elephant really wants to do something, we're kind of powerless to pull it back and rein it in the other way. So I think this is a really good metaphor for human nature because there are certain contexts in which that altruism is more likely to flourish and in other contexts in which jealousy or selfishness or something else tends to predominate. And so identifying those contexts I think is a really important kind of social goal and goal of social science. So free will is a highly debated topic, but at the same time it's kind of at the root of what we see is human beings. Intrinsically, the way we view each other, we see each other as free and autonomous beings and there's something about it that is just seems to be fundamental. A lot of philosophers and scientists have wrestled with this issue for a long time. There was a scientist, fairly well-known scientist, Roberts Palski who came out with a book in the fall of 2023 basically saying that, yeah, free will is just an illusion, blah, blah, blah. So I take this head on and I think there's good data to suggest that he is not quite right. I agree with him that there are lots of things that factor into the decisions that we make, but that doesn't mean that things are 100% determined beforehand. This conversation that we're having right now is not inevitable and it was not somehow pre-written or pre-ordained into the big bang. So happy to dig into kind of what evidence suggests that. The religious aspect of free will is certainly not determined either. Even within Christianity, there are those sects that believe that you're just going to live out God's plan and then there are those in certain sects of Christianity that are like, no, you do have free choice and free will and your actions are going to determine your result. So even in the religious aspect, it's certainly not. Correct. Correct. And I think what you're referring to probably dates back to John Calvin and this notion that whatever happens is God will and how can God be all powerful if we also have free choice and that sort of thing. So this book, as you've noted, there's a deep kind of religious implication to it. I mostly kind of shy away from delving into theology, but just trying to appeal to the sense that most people have that life has value and meaning and so forth and that there is some sort of higher purpose or higher power. What the science says, my interpretation of science are two things. And when you talk about free will, inevitably you have to come up to a kind of boring but necessary task of defining your terms. Because when we talk about free will, some people mean one thing, some people mean another thing. For me, at least, it's kind of built into the term itself that the free part that there are some actions that are not deterministically tied to the past and there's some wiggle room in the cause and effect relationship that is so important to how we often view the world. The other part is that the will part is that we can with our thoughts control our behaviors and our actions. And I think there's good scientific evidence that both of those propositions hold that behavior, even in relatively simple organisms, for instance, in one experiment, biologists have a leech and the leech can respond in one of two different ways to a stimulus. It can either swim or it can crawl. And they'll set up the experiment to where the conditions are exactly the same, but they can't predict is the leech going to swim or crawl. They'll do it. It's kind of a probabilistic thing. And they'll say, well, 60% in time, it'll do one thing, 40% it'll do another. They'll do experiments with other organisms like a worm or a cockroach, something like that. And there seems to be this unpredictability about it that no matter what, if you control the conditions exactly the same way, even with the same organism, it will behave in different ways. And so as you get to humans, it becomes more and more complex. But my logic is that, look, if these simple organisms behave in ways that are fundamentally indeterministic, do we really think that humans are going to be fully deterministic? And I think that's kind of a relatively straightforward conclusion that we're not deterministic.