Adam Smith is invoked daily as the champion of unregulated self-interest, yet the historical record shows a very different man: an absent-minded Scottish philosopher who once wandered into a tanning pit, drank tea made with bread and butter, and wrote his first bestseller about empathy. This episode reconstructs Smith's real life, from his birth in Kirkcaldy in 1723 and a brief childhood abduction to his thriving years at the University of Glasgow under Francis Hutcheson and his miserable time at Oxford, where being punished for reading David Hume taught him a foundational lesson about incentives.

We follow Smith through The Theory of Moral Sentiments and its impartial spectator, his grand tour of Europe as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch, his encounters with Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, and the physiocrats, and the 1776 publication of The W ...