The road stretches before you, but there's trouble ahead, stationary cars.

You're faced with the McDonald's side mission.

Do you, A, join the ever-growing cue, or B, take the next exit and treat yourself to a glorious Mackey's?

Detouring to McDonald's.

Start your side mission today.

Your book Existential Physics begins with a mental health warning.

Why did you put that in there?

Because I have gotten a lot of emails in response to what I've written and said about

the absence of free will. So I think

that we don't have free will. And it made me realize that some people find it hard to cope with.

And they asked me like, so what's the point of life if we don't have free will? To which I don't really have a good answer. So I wanted to put

this out, you know, at the beginning, and personally I found it very difficult. Like when I was a

student studied physics, so you get to the point where you're like, okay, so that's how everything

works.

Like, this is like fundamentally, this is what we're all made of, right, atoms and they do this

thing, and so where's the space for free will?

We can talk about this in more detail, but it's taken me some time to wrap my head around

it and get comfortable with it. So I wanted

people to know what they are getting into, basically. Yeah, I suppose there's an expectation

sometimes on physicists or indeed philosophers who come up with these crazy ideas, like free will

doesn't exist, or there's no such thing as ethics or questions

about God or whatnot. And then people come to them and say, oh, so what should we do in light of that information? And it's like, well, how should I know? I'm just here to diagnose a problem or tell you something I think is true. It's up to you to figure out how to deal with that. But do you recognize, I mean, in the areas you touch on as a physicist,

...