Today, we’re going back to 108 AD, to a classroom in Greece, where one of the great Stoic philosophers is teaching his students more than just a love of wisdom. He wants to hand them a way to actually live it. We’re exploring the Discourses of Epictetus, a former slave turned philosopher, who’s about to stand in front of Rome’s wealthiest young men and tell them that if all they’re chasing is power, wealth, and fame, they don’t know the first thing about freedom.

Today we're going back to 399 BCE, to a jail cell in Athens, in the early hours before dawn, where Socrates is awaiting execution. His old friend has come to make one last attempt at persuading him to escape. What follows is one of the more fascinating debates about the role of civil disobedience, and about what we as citizens owe the place we call home. Join us as we discuss Plato’s great discourse, Crito.

We’ve built an entire social economy dedicated to making sure nobody ever has to be wrong again. Everything is algorithmically served to us, so we only hear from people we already agree with. Being wrong in public is just about the worst thing that can happen to us. So we never admit it, nobody changes their mind, and everyone just gets louder. Socrates went looking to be proven wrong. In fact, he turned it into a lifestyle. He walked up to the most confident men in Athens and asked them to explain themselves, and he didn’t give them a pass when their answers fell apart. And a jury executed him for it. But for Socrates, seeking truth, was the only thing worth living for.

We're going back to 441 BCE for one of the seven surviving plays of Sophocles. Now, nobody in recorded history ever said "you know what I need now? More ancient Greeks." But every so often you run into an argument people were having thousands of years ago that turns out to be the exact argument we're having today. This is one of those. Join us as we discuss Sophocles’ masterpiece, Antigone. We’re calling this one, “certainty is a false god…”