For the

early Chinese, no one doubts that there's a Dao.

No one doubts that there's a way, and it's a normatively valued way.

It's the right way to live.

So this is a kind of baseline shared belief that no one seriously questions.

And so the debates then are just about how do you get in touch with the Tao? Do you have things inside you that help you or do you not? Do you need help from the outside? What's life going to look like when you're following the Tao? For the Confucians, it's clear that the purpose of life is to become a gentleman or an achieved person, a moral person.

And everyone knows that you do that by following the ancient Zhou rituals and cultivating yourself with ritual and studying the classics.

But I'm wondering, are there lessons that we can take there that can help us deal with some of the anxieties that we're feeling in the modern world with trying to find and maximize our kind of more proximal purpose

Mm

... or, you know, being on as a comic or an actor or something like that.

Um, the problem with that is you can't, you can't force spontaneity.

If you try to try- if you try not to try, it's not gonna work.

It's gonna backfire.

And that's actually because you're activating the part of your brain you wanna shut down, which is the prefrontal cortex, which is kind of the center of trying, if you wanna think about it that way.

Um, and you know, my previous work, I looked at these early Chinese philosophers who had various strategies for kind of getting around this paradox by giving you breathing exercises or giving you these ritual scripts to follow, kind of in a way distracting you from the mental problem, the mental paradox.

Mm.

But first, how did you come to be interested in Chinese philosophy and how did that pivot into an interest in the history of alcohol?

Yeah, that's a good question.

My colleagues are wondering about the alcohol book as well.

I got into Chinese philosophy as an undergraduate.

I just had read some Taoist texts in translation and thought it was kind of cool.

I started studying Chinese and just step-by-step got into it.

I found it much more appealing than Western philosophy as a kind of late teen, early 20-year-old, and I still do.

How do you replicate that safety mechanism today?

But first, how did you come to be interested in, uh, Chinese philosophy, and how did that pivot into an interest in the history of alcohol?

Yeah, that's a good question.

[laughs] My colleagues are wondering about the alcohol book as well.

Um, I got into Chinese philosophy as an undergraduate.

I just had read some Taoist texts in translation and thought it was kinda cool and, um, started studying Chinese and just step by step got into it.

Um, I found it much more appealing than Western philosophy as a kinda late teen or early twenty-year-old and, and I still do.

So, um, [clears throat] there's actually a pretty-- So my colleagues in my philosophy department are baffled that I wrote a book on the history of alcohol, but it, it actually grows pretty, uh, directly out of my previous work.

And so isn't the wiser thing to sort of focus on the other half of the equation, to focus on the health problems, the, uh, you know, all the ways in which it can be addictive and problematic? So how, how do you think about that, that cautionary, what the cautionary mindset would, would dictate?

And you've told us how there's the link between this spontaneity, your 2014 book, and then your interest in the question of alcohol and, What kind of reaction did you get from the academic community when you pitched this book? And how did your approach to this subject matter differ from your normal academic writing?

Yeah, so my colleagues were pretty baffled that I wrote a book on alcohol.

So yeah, but again, it's directly connected to my earlier work on spontaneity.

It's also directly connected, the other main link with my earlier work, you mentioned that cognitive science of religion is one of the areas I work in.

I've done a lot of work on essentially the problem of religion.

So we take for granted that everywhere we look throughout history across the world, people are worshiping invisible beings, sacrificing valuable things to them, cutting off the skin of their penis, tattooing themselves, building these enormous monuments.

And it should puzzle us more than it does that people do this stuff.

No, you need