The binary logic running your device and the framework behind today's most effective psychological therapies were both engineered by a man in a tunic on a painted porch in ancient Athens. This episode bypasses the ice-bath internet version of Stoicism to examine the original system as an interlocking operating system for the mind. It begins with Zeno of Citium founding the school around 300 BCE at the Stoa Poikile in the middle of the Agora rather than in a walled garden, and explains why a philosophy built on universal reason, or logos, had to be lived out in public.

The hosts work through the three inseparable disciplines. In logic, Chrysippus built propositional if-then and either-or architecture and used paradoxes like the heap of sand to train minds against vague boundaries, aiming at katalepsis, or true comprehension of impressions. I ...