Free trade was never actually free? That's the case Katherine Tai, Joe Biden's former U.S. Trade Representative, brings Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales this week.

For decades, the economic consensus treated free trade as an engine for cheaper goods and faster growth. But, Tai argues, this system actually relies on ignored externalities, allowing multinational corporations to reap the benefits of zero regulation while workers and the environment absorb the costs.

Zingales goes further, arguing the whole system isn't free trade at all, but something he calls “captured trade”. So who exactly is that trade free for and what exactly is it free from? Tai walks through the hidden machinery most people never see, and what she calls a plan for a worker-centered trade policy.

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Corporations are people in the eyes of the law. But how did that happen, and why does it hand them rights you don't have?

UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, author of "We the Corporations", traces a 200-year campaign by business to win the constitutional rights of human beings. Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales press him on what Zingales calls an incredible trick. Corporations insist they're separate from their owners when that shields owners from blame, then argue they're like people when they want to spend on elections or dodge a rule.

Winkler traces how the Fourteenth Amendment, written after the Civil War to protect the newly freed, became a tool for railroads and banks instead. He even describes a lawyer who, by his account, lied to the Supreme Court, producing a journal he claimed proved the amendment was meant for corporations.

Zingales pushes on what comes next: could AI itself qualify for legal personhood, and would that shield big tech from blame? When we ask Winkler for a shred of hope that the long arc doesn't simply keep favoring business, the answer is far shorter and blunter than expected.

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How does a free, decentralized, volunteer-run encyclopedia produce something more trusted than nearly any for-profit institution?

Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean sit down with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to explore how the platform organizes global knowledge.

The conversation unpacks how Wikipedia governs itself without a central authority, why consensus beats voting, and what the deliberate vagueness of its rules actually protects against.

But is artificial intelligence a looming threat to this system? Wales questions whether these new technologies can actually verify truth without the human feedback loops that correct traditional platforms.

Can the community-driven approach of Wikipedia teach the broader business world how to survive an era of deep digital skepticism? Tune in to discover if spontaneous human order is truly the ultimate defense against an automated future.

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