Do you actually have free will?
It seems obvious. You decide what to eat. You decide where to go. You decide whether to stay or leave. You decide to stand up, pick up your phone, build a business, enter a relationship, or change the direction of your life.
But look closer.
Before the decision appeared, did you decide to have the impulse that produced it? Before the thought appeared, did you choose the thought? Before you chose what you wanted, did you choose the desire itself?
In this episode of The Alpha Male Coach Podcast, Kevin takes the investigation into free will, control, and manifestation beneath philosophy and into direct experience. Rather than offering another belief about whether human beings possess free will, he asks you to look for the one who supposedly possesses it.
The inquiry begins with an extraordinarily simple experiment: sit still, and whenever you decide, stand up.
Then investigate.
What actually initiated the movement?
Did thought command the body? Did an impulse arise first? Did you decide when the decision would occur? And if you decided to decide, what caused that decision?
From there, the investigation moves into the neuroscience of voluntary action, the spontaneous appearance of thought, conditioning, desire, fear, responsibility, and our deeply rooted assumption that somewhere inside the body exists an independent controller directing the course of life.
But the episode doesn't conclude that free will exists - or that it doesn't.
Both conclusions may simply become new beliefs.
Instead, Kevin asks a more fundamental question:
Can you find the chooser?
This changes the investigation of control completely.
Perhaps what we call control is actually influence. You can plant a seed, water the soil, and provide sunlight - but can you command the seed to grow? You can build a business, train your body, pursue a relationship, and make decisions - but can you control all the conditions determining the outcome?
And if you cannot, what exactly does it mean to say, I am in control?
This inquiry eventually reaches manifestation itself. If manifestation means creating the future you desire, where did the desire originate? Desire emerges from what is known and projects it into the future: I want this to happen. Fear performs the opposite movement: I don't want that to happen.
Standing between them is the imagined controller attempting to guarantee one future while preventing another.
Perhaps manifestation isn't something an individual does to life.
Perhaps what we call the individual is itself part of life's manifestation.
This episode ultimately leaves free will, determinism, control, and manifestation behind to investigate the assumption beneath all four:
Who is the “I”?
Not your name.
Not your history.
Not your body.
Not your thoughts.
Not your desires, fears, memories, beliefs, or identity.
When everything you can observe is put aside, can you actually locate the separate person who claims ownership of it all?
Maybe the deepest question isn't whether the prisoner has free will.
Maybe it's whether there was ever a prisoner at all.
