More than half a million people are currently homeless in the United States. It's a crisis that extends beyond California and is trending upwards in other states, too. Most jurisdictions in the US have no right to shelter, and the right to have a home at all is not a guarantee. But just across the border, Canada recognizes the right to adequate housing as a fundamental human right affirmed in international law. In this episode, we speak with Canadian lawyer Leilani Farha, the former Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, about how we ended up with a homelessness crisis and what remedies should look like. Leilani is also Global Director of The Shift, a housing initiative.

Animals suffer at the hands of humans every day. Not just in factory farms, but also in our homes, where pets don’t receive enough attention or exercise, and in our oceans, where humans disrupt their habitats and ecosystems. To what extent should animals have rights? In this special episode, we speak to world-leading philosopher Martha Nussbaum, professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and author of Justice for Animals. Nussbaum expands her theory into why politics and law should redirect our ethical responsibilities towards animals.

Artificial intelligence is all around us—it listens to us, even watches us, and waits for our daily demands. From Alexa to Siri, to Sophia, the social humanoid robot, AIs want to be our companions (at least, the companies who build them want us to think so). However, some people fear that the more sentient AIs become, the more they will have to be treated with basic rights. Do AIs deserve rights? And if they do, what would those rights entail? In this episode, Tom and Claudia imagine a not-so-distant future where AIs have rights, what those rights could look like, and whether or not this would play out like a dystopian sci-fi novel. They get a myriad of perspectives from Andrew Stout, a robot software engineer; Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago; Aziz Huq, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago; and Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed A.I. Research Institute.

Sixty-one million adults in the United States live with a disability — that's one in four adults, a staggering number when you consider how widespread ableism is. In a society that largely operates without adequate infrastructure, accommodations, and services for disabled people, what does the right to equal opportunity look like? In this episode, Tom and Claudia explore this question through the perspectives of three disabled individuals. Michael Stein is the executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, Elsa Sjunneson is a deafblind disability rights activist and science fiction writer, and Stephen Hallett is the Project Manager of the East Asia Disability Rights Project. Together, they help paint a picture of what it would really mean to take the rights of those with disabilities seriously.

While borders have the ability to divide countries both politically and socially, wealth drives an even bigger wedge between us. How do we make sense of the fact that the wealthiest country in the world, the United States, borders one of the poorest countries: Mexico? Despite efforts to mitigate this, global wealth inequality still appears to be growing. According to the World Inequality Report, the poorest half of the global population owns just 2% of the total global wealth. In this episode of Entitled, Claudia and Tom learn some of the ways we could fix global wealth inequality. They speak with one of the world’s leading economists focused on inequality, Branko Milanović; University of Chicago economics and political science professor James Robinson; and Rebekah Smith, executive director of Labor Mobility Partnerships.