A look back at the five most-listened-to Capitalisn’t episodes from 2025.
1. Why This Nobel Economist Thinks Bitcoin Is Going to Zero, with Eugene Fama
In December 2024, Bitcoin, one of the earliest cryptocurrencies and undoubtedly the most famous, hit $2 trillion in market capitalization, bigger than Tesla, Meta, and Saudi Aramco. In this episode, Nobel Prize-winning economist and Chicago Booth finance professor Eugene Fama—widely considered the “Father of Modern Finance”—predicts it will go to zero within ten years.
2. Why Capitalism Stopped Working In Japan, with Takeo Hoshi
What lessons can Japan’s lost decades of economic stagnation and missed opportunities offer the United States and other developed economies? Bethany and Luigi are joined by Takeo Hoshi, professor of economics at the University of Tokyo and a leading expert on Japan’s financial system and economic stagnation. Together, they discuss Japan’s idiosyncrasies—from demographic decline to economic policy mismanagement—and the interplay of global factors such as populism, nativism, and dissatisfaction with capitalism. If the U.S. is indeed on the cusp of its own economic bubble driven by oversized capital investments in artificial intelligence and technology rather than consumer spending and wage growth, does it have the institutions and flexibility to avoid Japan’s fate?
3. Is Silicon Valley Turning Fascist?
Silicon Valley’s traditionally Democratic tech leaders are turning toward President Donald Trump, but are the reasons as straightforward as lower taxes and favorable regulations? Perhaps not, if we consider the influence of a convoluted political philosophy called the “Dark Enlightenment.” Washington and Silicon Valley power players, including Vice President JD Vance, Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, have all cited the philosophy’s ideas and one of its leading developers, Curtis Yarvin.
4. What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About AI, with Arvind Narayanan
Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan joins Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean to explain why he believes AI’s transformative impact is overstated. Drawing on his book AI Snake Oil, co-authored with Sayash Kapoor, Narayanan argues that capitalism’s incentives can distort technological progress, pushing hype faster than reality can deliver. They examine how deregulation, geopolitical competition, and private control over data shape the trajectory of AI’s development.
5. Why Trump Is Deregulating In The Wrong Way, with Sam Peltzman
Joining Bethany and Luigi to discuss President Donald Trump’s intensified commitment to deregulation and laissez-faire capitalism is Sam Peltzman, director emeritus of the Stigler Center and perhaps the leading expert on the economics of regulation. Together, the three of them chart a historical perspective on regulation, from Stigler’s ideas of regulatory capture to the unintended consequences of deregulatory efforts over time to today’s “chainsaw” approach to gutting federal agencies. To understand the costs and benefits of regulation, they discuss how federal agencies have recently intervened in markets, if the private sector could not have accomplished these interventions more efficiently, and if these interventions did more harm than good.
