I hate to criticise him under these circumstances, and I'm going to leave out the more personal side of things, but: The impression I got was that he was playing up the "free will" angle to appeal to a popular audience, at the expense of the physics. Most academics with a book to sell do that to a certain extent, but I felt that he went past what's reasonable. I won't speculate as to whether that was insincerity as such or belief in his own hype.