Confucius had a front-row seat to one of the messiest love triangles in ancient Chinese history. A prince so beautiful the Duke didn't care he was sleeping with his wife. A priest so smooth-tongued he reshuffled a military alliance's pecking order with nothing but genealogical trivia. These were the people getting ahead — and Confucius was not amused.

In this twelfth episode, host Elliott Bernstein tackles passages 1.3 and 6.16 — a general warning about people whose words and manners aim to please, and a specific lament naming real people whose charm earned them power their character didn't deserve. After being forced out of his home state, Confucius landed in 衛 and watched style win over substance at every turn. He eventually told the Duke he'd never studied military tactics and left the next day.

Along the way: why 佞 (glibness) and 仁 (human-heartedness) are structural near-twins that mean opposite things, the Rollins Band lyrics that open the episode, a father-son war kicked off by a failed assassination attempt, and why "it sure is difficult to get by in today's world" was fifteen years of frustration distilled into a single sentence.