Picture a 5th-century BCE thinker who preached loving strangers as much as your own family, then showed up at city gates with a trained paramilitary force to dismantle invading armies, and who also deduced the optics of the camera obscura along the way. This deep dive explores Mozi, the working-class master carpenter of China's Warring States period who rebelled against his Confucian education, condemned the aristocracy's ruinous years-long funerals, and applied a builder's pragmatism to society itself. The episode retells the Siege of Chu, in which Mozi walked ten days on shredded feet, defeated strategist Gongshu Ban in a tabletop war game using his belt as city walls, and revealed that 300 disciples already manned the walls of Song, then spent the night freezing outside the gates of the very city he had saved.

From there the hosts unpack ...