8/24/26: Insane MAGA Linked Plot In Bolivia, Silicon Valley Panics Over Wealth Tax

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you hear the new episode of the Hey Jonas Podcasts? We are at D23, so we'll see who stops by. The cast of Frozen stopped by. Kristen Bell, Josh Gad, and Adina Menzel. I auditioned for Frozen. What? For Kristoff. They said okay. What are you going to be singing today? I said I don't know. That must have been why you didn't get it. That was you probably won. Plus, Jon Stamos, Jason from Star Wars, and more. And I guess I can share that. 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So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, add free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. So we have a truly unbelievable scandal unfolding in South America and to help us walk through it in a moment will be a drop-sized Latin American bureau chief, Jose Luis Granados Seja. It began recently on a street side where there was a, actually footage captured of two hitmen walking up to Nadia Bayer, who turns out to be the girlfriend of Fernando Serimedo, who is a top right-wing kind of Latin American political operative and the business partner of Brad Parscale, who is a former campaign manager for, I believe, the 2016 Trump campaign, is that right, Emily? Yep. And is now a registered foreign agent for the state of Israel and has been working for Miele in a whole bunch of other-- 2020 campaign. A whole bunch of other right-wing figures throughout South America. And so Nadia is allegedly pregnant with Serimedo's child, and let's roll D4 here. You see two delivery guys dressed as delivery people, and we're going to blur this out because this is going to be a little bit shocking. One of them, if you're just listening to this, walks up and you can probably tell through the blurred footage there, tries to shoot her dead on the street. Now it turns out that she survived this assassination attempt. And so she's now in the hospital, or she was in the hospital, you can put up D2 and starts to just completely-- so she's giving an interview here from her hospital bed. It just starts to completely unravel this kind of empire of dirty tricks that has been running. She's saying that these are some of her claims that he's been taking $800,000 a month from Miele in Argentina, that he was bribing, using violence and bribes throughout a lot of his other operations. So this gets so much wilder. But let's bring in Jose Luis now to walk us through some of this. Jose Luis, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Always good to be here. Yeah, it's crazy stuff here. So let's walk us through this. So let's put up D1. And I don't know if you can see these on the screen here. Here's a photo of Sarah Meadow. Who's he with here, and what does this tell us? Who is Sarah Meadow, and why is this such a big deal in Latin America? Absolutely. So here we see him with Javier Negre, who's actually a key political operator as well. He comes from Spain. He is the co-founder together with Sadie Meadow, and I don't want to call it a news outlet, because it's more of a disinformation outlet called la de recha diario or the daily right-wing outlet. And essentially, you kind of, in a lot of ways, thumbs up what these two men are doing in Latin America and helps answer the question that I think a lot of people have been asking is, why have we been seeing this right-wing trend in the region? And part of it, not exclusively so, but a big part of it is precisely this. It's the way that these individuals, people like Sadie Meadow, how to, in a sense, bring that kind of US consultancy system, those culture wars into Latin American political campaigns, really kind of polarize the electorate, and obviously deliver victories to right-wing leaders. Sadie Meadow, in particular, is interesting because, you know, according to the biographies I was reading about him, he was kind of a nobody. He was a taxi driver. He was somebody who was not involved in political affairs. He was a bit somebody who's always kind of chasing the latest con. He had to describe his activity, and he managed to really rise to prominence with none other than Javier Miele. So Javier Miele, before he even met Sadie Meadow, was always kind of a provocateur, always using really kind of aggressive language and making fun of the left, and, you know, he's the one who started with this whole soul of those, which means left-wing, but it's kind of, you know, in a just respectful way. And these two gentlemen joined forces to really kind of drive these kind of new campaigns in Latin America we're seeing, where they polarized the electorate, but really kind of run very negative kind of advertising, really negative kind of messaging to make it seem like not so much voting for the right-wing candidate, but voting against his opponent. And that has been incredibly successful throughout the region. Obviously, the case of Miele, he becomes president and actually helps even position him better. But since then, he's kind of gone on to do far more work. And obviously, in this most recent incident, what we've seen is him deeply involved, in Bolivian politics. We have to remember, in Bolivia, there was a coup that essentially overturned the election that saw Ebo Morales elected, then we saw this interim right-wing government come in, and then the legitimate election happens, as they rules, but it ends up splitting the mass, the ruling movement towards socialism party there. And again, there we see the way that his political machine operates. Using bot farms, using kind of really aggressive misogynist language, going after the mass, going after the left in Bolivia, and essentially handling the presidency to Rodrigo Paz, and where he becomes, according to Rodrigo Paz's own vice president, a key advisor, apparently having an office near the president's office as well. So, you know, we've seen some efforts now because of this scandal, people trying to kind of distance themselves from him, although Miele seems to seem to suggest that there's a larger conspiracy at play, that's not actually what's happening here. But we see Baz actually take position and talk about how he wants to accompany the survivor and all of this, but certainly this was somebody who was very, very well connected to key right-wing leaders here in Latin America, and was, you know, successful in being able to deliver power to the right-wing in many countries, and I think helps expose precisely what's been happening in the region, which is that I think a lot of countries are new to this kind of campaigning, this kind of political operator, and haven't quite figured out what to do in response to him, and that's why he's been able to gain so much ground in such a short amount of time, although with this scandal, obviously, that looks to have come to an end. Yes, well, we should get into more of the details of exactly what happened right, because this is insane. Yeah, let's roll D3 while we have it. This is Terry Meadow in the elevator, and you can describe for us what's going on here. This is an elevator, and then he happens to be then surrounded by a ton of reporters. He pulls up his hood, and you can hear him. He's just kind of stuck in the elevator, and he just starts sobbing. Let's roll D3. Yeah, and that went on for a painfully long amount of time, so burn you with a little bit of it there. Once described by the economist, by the way, not that long ago, is Maga's man in Latin America. That's a late December story. As he won some award recently, and on stage, he said I wanted to thank, he switches to English to say I want to thank Brad Parscalei, my partner here. So what is the relationship here between Maga and this movement, which is now being, you know, it's not unraveling, unraveling, but we're learning a lot about what it's kind of. under ground tactics have been. Yeah, Pascal and Sadie Meivo are business partners. They have a consultancy firm together. And what appears to be is that Pascal, who has a lot of experience and likewise in the United States finding these issues that can really divide the electorate, building the digital infrastructure to kind of be able to identify it, to figure out what are the issues that they can exploit, where the regions, where they think they can best make ground. And this is precisely the model that Sadie Meivo has brought into Latin America. And so it's the same kind of logic of trying to split the electorate, drive these polarizing issues. And there, as Wes said, it's not the left wing calling him this, it's the economist saying he's mag as man in Latin America. Now the survivor of this attack, this assassination attempt should be clear that the justice system in Bolivia is so confident about the situation that they have gone ahead and arrested him in connection with this. There's been some leaked texts as well that say that kind of explicitly saying we need to get rid of her or she's going to cost trouble for us. So obviously, we need to let justice play out. But clearly, there is a link here. It was his romantic partner, allegedly carrying his child. She said a lot of also outlandish allegations that I think require more investigation suggesting that he's tied to US intelligence agencies. I mean, there hasn't been any more evidence of that besides that. But certainly, his connections to the US political ecosystem are very much there through Brad Postgal. And as building and expanding this method of winning elections in Latin America and working with these regional actors, as we know, this, the United States is far more interested in Latin America than it was in the more recent past, really kind of trying to push candidates in the region that were favorable to US interests. We saw it in Honduras. We saw it obviously in Argentina. We've seen it now in Bolivia and Colombia as well. Now, he's directly connected to a couple of these. But it shows that it's the same kind of logic. And whether or not he's tied to US intelligence agencies is yet to be determined. But it certainly shows that there is a connection here with US foreign and policy interests and these right-wing actors. And the way that they have been operating in the region and the success that they've been having in terms of actually being able to live her power to allies of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. Brad par scale has interestingly become somewhat of a punchline on the right here in DC just in recent months because he's not really that connected to Trump himself or even this White House. He was the digital media manager in the 2016 campaign and the campaign manager in 2020. It had a personal meltdown breakdown. And since Ryan, you've covered this, he's mostly been working for Israel. He has massive contracts with Israel. And I wonder then if this is, Jose, if this is playing out in Latin American politics in a way where Israel's connection to Brad par scale has become salient to the conversation, to the coverage about what the heck is going on. I mean, it's easy to make a connection between par scale and Trump. It just, like, if we're wondering whether he would be operating on behalf of the Trump White House, my guess would be no. I mean, people say he has close to zero contact with Trump. If any at all, it's not like he's close to Suzy Wiles or anybody in the White House. It's all very strange, so help us parse this a little more. Sure. I mean, certainly, Israel is as interested in penetrating into Latin American politics. It's a region where there is a lot of sympathy for the Palestinian people, for the Palestinian cause. You know, there's a lot of progressive leaderships in the region that actually openly advocated in favor of the Palestinian resistance, for example. So we know Israel is interested as well. So I wouldn't put that, you know, beyond them to be interested to try to find different ways to gain ground, as they have, actually, quite successful in some ways. In the case of Venezuela, for example, which used to be kind of, you know, the standard bearer for the solidarity with Palestine after the earthquake there, and actually after the earthquake in Columbia, they sent teams, and that really seemed to open up the door. So there's definitely an interest of Israel in Latin American politics. You'll know there's, like, you'll know there's much better than I do, but going back to the '80s and the Contras and the Sandinistas, the arms and drug trafficking. I mean, Iran Contra, for example, it's like not. I imagine entirely past history. I would imagine some of that is still on the table. Oh, certainly. When it comes to their spying software, that is a major product here of interest to governments. Both left and right wing, interestingly enough, and of course, the weapons treatments. You know, the recently there was an article in Nakhla talking about how Mexico, of all countries, is one of the biggest buyers of Israeli weapons. It happens mostly at the state level. It's not necessarily the federal government, but it shows there's also commercial business interests. But to go back to your question in terms of how close is he to MAGA, I think it's what's interesting is that you have these kinds of personalities, like City Middle, like Pascal, where they can kind of, you know, have one point, be in the spotlight, and be the person that everybody wants to be connected to and have all kinds of leather, and then suddenly evaporates. In a lot of ways, there's a parallel here in the City of Meadows story, where somebody who had accumulated a lot of power and a lot of influence, who had apparently they graded his homes and found stacks and stacks of both the local currency and US dollars. So clearly, he's moving money around. This is somebody who had power and influence. Suddenly, it evaporates because they're essentially, you know, in a lot of ways, the same logic of conment, trying to figure out how, you know, to get the good connection, to get to be well placed. You know, City Meadows is interesting in particular as well, because he was the personal advisor, quote, unquote. This is the way he's been described. To Rodrigo Paz. Now, Rodrigo Paz wasn't really his man in the Bolivian election. He tends to work with more right wing candidates, but Paz turned out to be kind of the figure that other forces could rally upon or rally around. And so we see that, you know, they're chasing power. They're chasing the interests. They're chasing their ability to get that contract. There's a lot of now allegations as a result of these rates floating around, around illegal enrichment, or illegal funds being, you know, how did he get his hands on all of this money? These people are clearly being motivated by also these interests, of making themselves wealthy and powerful. But it comes at a price, because I think there's one key thing about the story that people need to appreciate outside of Latin America, which is that part of the reason we've also seen the rise of these right wing governments in the region has been precisely around kind of, not socially conservative, but kind of social questions. The sense that the people in power should be honest. They should be good brokers. They should have the interest of the population at heart and actually put them into interest. And some of the scandals of left wing governments have actually played into this, of them feeling like, well, these people are just there. They claim to be progressive. They claim to be there in the interest of the population, but really when they're in power, they act the same. And so this moral high ground that they tried to position themselves as these right wing candidates and subsequently these right wing presidents has, I think, in a lot of ways, the starting to diminish precisely because of scandals like this. I mean, this is extraordinary. I mean, it's somebody who clearly was very well positioned, very, very powerful, probably as a result of that felt like he enjoyed a degree of impunity that he didn't actually realize. I mean, how does that make sense? How does it make sense to go after your romantic partners, apparently carrying your child in such a brazen way, get caught on video and think that it wasn't going to catch up to you? Right? So they were operating with a sense of impunity, but that's starting to collapse precisely because these are not honest brokers. These are not people who are actually going to follow through on their campaign promises of actually bringing well-being to the population. Again, we see the echoes of this, also, you know, of US policy in or drums policy in the United States, right? Where they promise certain things, people expect them, and when those expectations are dashed, then we see kind of the house of cards start to fall apart. That's the case, I think, in some ways with Pascal. And it's certainly the case here with Sadie Mido. And I think it's going to have really important regional reverberations. Actually anecdotally, people are already mentioning that they see far less bots in their responses on social media, because apparently this guy was largely running most of them, and actually feeding this kind of anger and hate machine on social media. And now we see that kind of disappear. And I think because these are now being shown to be con men, then they're not going to be as effective. And I think people are also going to think twice about trusting somebody who's associated with figures who are willing to allegedly assassinate their partner. Yeah, a good way to lose the moral high ground is to hire a hitman to assassinate your pregnant mistress. Gustavo Petro in Colombia was commenting on some of this bot farm activity as well. We can put up a D5 here. He's saying in Colombia during the election, 500,000 bots were active to spread lies about Ivancepeta and about me. And then links this network to this guy who's now in jail. In Bolivia, and there's footage of one of these bot farms that's been circulating. And Pascal is almost certainly operating bot operations on behalf of Israel. Yeah, pretty much everybody watching this has probably gotten a text literally from Israel. Yeah, saying like, I don't know if you're getting them in Mexico, Jose Luis, but in the US, everybody's getting these texts saying, hey, let's let's talk about the US Israel relationship and she's like, what? And it's a part-scale operation. These kinds of bot operations seem to be, for whatever reason, even either more prominent or more aggressive in Latin America than in the US. Of course, in the US, we have plenty. But if you talk a little bit about the way that they do play into the politics of Latin American, it seems like there's a distinction in the scale of it that happens. there, as opposed to here. Oh, absolutely. And I think we can actually go back to even sort of the more recent elections all the way back to Bolsonaro. Without these WhatsApp channels that were distributing this false information, disinformation, I don't think he wins that presidency. It's been a very successful instrument in the rise of the right wing in the region. And it's precisely that. I think, first of all, there has to be an appreciation that a lot of people are who are online, who are very online, tend to become from more middle class and upward sectors. And so there are a lot more receptive, this kinds of communications. I think one difference that we've seen in Mexico is that on the one hand, there's always been an emphasis really, really heavy emphasis on kind of communication coming directly from the presidency. We know we have these daily morning press conferences formally by former president Lopez Obrador and now with Gravia Scheimum. So there's a great emphasis on that. But the difference is that there's a lot more work happening in the territory, right? Like directly with the population. And so I think in some ways, if you want to see why, in a case like Mexico, there's been an exception that they haven't gone down the right wing trend, even during that election year, where it seemed like all incumbents were being turfed. Mexico was, again, the exception. I think a lot of it's because they kind of operate outside of this online ecosystem. But those that are heavily influenced by it, like the case of Colombia, for example, we see the consequences of it. It is a very effective tool. And like you well said, it's very aggressive. It is something where they spend extraordinary amounts of money to be able to basically inundate social media. I mean, if you go on Twitter, on X, and you look at some of the replies, if you mention certain people, right, there's always kind of if you mention Israel, if you mention former president Felipe Calderón, if you mention Alito Moreno, who's one of the opposition leaders here, you'll see that they'll start to kind of pop up inside of your replies. And it's because it's very much clearly one of the strategies that has been successful, because it relies on distributing in a very efficient way this disinformation, where people are led to believe certain things that don't accurately reflect the reality inside of a given country. And it is extraordinarily effective. And I think it's a perfectly effective in Latin America, because there's already an existing polarization. So we're talking about these more recent elections where they win by less than one percentage point. In the case of Peru, you know, of Keiko Fujimori won because of the vote abroad, not necessarily because of the vote inside of Peru, for example, we see this denunciation from Petro in the case of Colombia, who's pointing to finger precisely at all of this kind of interference. So we see that this is really effective in terms of being able to provide just enough to get them over the edge and to be able to to win. In fact, well, these foreign influence campaigns, I think, have become such an issue that here in Mexico, they're actually discussing right now the possibility of actually making foreign interference one of the reasons why an election can be annulled. So we're seeing this case after case of seeing this kind of influence that it's gotten to the degree where elections in the future may no longer actually count because of the level of foreign interference seeing precisely because how effective it actually can be in dividing the electorate and creating these wedge issues and making it so that the right wing, even where the slimmest of margins is able to win. Fastening stuff. And sometimes these are the contingencies on which kind of historical events begin to change, that had the Hitman been successful, we wouldn't be learning all of the things that she's spilling now. And we'll see where this takes us. Jose Luis Gradoz, say how thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced, but these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with the Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. 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Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out. You're not hired just to fill time into space. You're hired to fill the space with you. You have something in your guts, you go with it. And Sean Johnson recalled the moment she realized her now husband Andrew was the one. He was just so unapologetically himself, and knew nothing of Hollywood. He hadn't been on a plane before without his family. It was so pure. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So actually a major press freedom victory out of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. James O'Keefe has won a reversal of a verdict that went against him previously and put up E1 here. This is the case. O'Keefe first democracy partners. So this is kind of an interesting one for me to cover because I actually know a whole and like a lot of the people involved on the democracy partners side. I do not like it all. James O'Keefe's political project that he's engaged in throughout his career, particularly the kind of deceptive destruction of Acorn from almost 20 years ago at this point. Geez, was it? Yeah. 2007 or anything like that. Yeah, but we're separating all of that aside because this is a case about press freedom and what is allowed under the First Amendment. And so what happened here is in 2016, O'Keefe sent some undercover journalists and we're going to call them journalists. So I'm going to be like, he's not a journalist. First of all, it doesn't matter because all citizens have the protection of the First Amendment, whether you're a journalist or not. But he's gathering information and he's publishing it. I don't have to like the information that he publishes. It still makes it journalism. So he sends an undercover journalist into this bar and he catches, and what they do is they say provocative things and then try to get democratic operatives to agree with those provocative things. It worked fantastically with this one guy, a foe ball, I believe his name was. The old fed tactics basically. Yeah, so he goes in and the guy says, basically, you know what we should do? He's like, he's like, the guy that funds my left wing organization hates voter ID because he loves it when illegal immigrants vote for Democrats. And so what we should do is we should bust in a bunch of illegal immigrants into Wisconsin and have them vote. And it's idiotic democratic operative. It's like, that's a brilliant idea. Let's do that. And the guy even says, he's like, have you worked with Bob Kramer at Democracy Partners? Maybe he'd be interested in something like this. Like, oh my god. So he keeps got this footage. Then he sends a fake intern into this firm Democracy Partners. And the intern goes in with, you know, filming everything. And the firm does basically no, doesn't ask for ID, does no due diligence. The young woman works there for eight days, then abruptly quits. And they publish this video that includes some footage from inside the office, but mostly it's relying on footage from the bar. Immediately the firm gets it's contracts are cut from, you know, AFSCME was a major client of theirs. They lose that. It's a giant mess for this firm. Yeah. Because in the footage, they're also making kind of grandiose claims, like, oh, yeah, we're working very closer with Hillary. And the other thing the guy says in the bar, he and another guy. they say that like, oh, they're paying homeless people to go to Trump rallies and instigate violence there. Like, you know, say, you know, just get under the skin of Trump people wear a plan parenthood shirt. Do anything you can to like get them to then be aggressive towards you and then film that. Yeah. And so then the firm suffers all of these consequences. They sue. They win at the district court level. A jury finds in their favor and says that because there was fraud and deception involved in the way they got it, that the First Amendment doesn't apply. Luckily for O'Keefe, his trial attorney made a motion right before it went to the jury saying this, as a matter of law, as a matter of First Amendment, this should be thrown out. And the judge said, we're going to put that aside. Put that motion aside. We're going to let the jury decide that jury finds for democracy partners. And first, it's like $120,000 for the to pay them back for the contracts. But then buried underneath that, if they can prove this this kind of torsious fraud, this like that, the intern had violated her fiduciary duty that she had to the organization. Then O'Keefe would owe legal fees as well, which from when I would, I talked to O'Keefe and his lawyer yesterday, and that would have been well over a million dollars if they would have gotten a hit with that. And so the appeals court, which is the three judges were two Democrats and one Republican. All three of them basically sided with O'Keefe. There was one dissent, but it was a dissent in small part. They would have just narrowed the amount of money, they would have, it was mostly a victory for O'Keefe from all three. So I don't think they're going to appeal because if you get two Democrats, they're mostly siding with them. Like you're not going to do much better either with the whole appeals court or with the Supreme Court. But what they effectively said is that you can lie to somebody in a bar, say that you're a Democratic operative, say whatever you want in a bar. Like your first amendment allows you to lie. And if you then trick that person into saying incriminating things in public, then that's fair game. And you can publish that, and that's first amendment protected activity. The court is, the opinion is much more confusing and unclear about whether or not going into the office is kosher. It leaves it kind of open. The way I read it was that you can't possibly trespassing at that point. Well, there's a higher level of fraud. The fraud is going on for longer. They never made her sign in NDA. They said they would, but then they never gave it to her. Yeah. That was a mistake on their part. So they made a lot of mistakes. Had they not made, they would have been more protected. So basically, you got to make your interns sign contracts. Yeah. And then if you do that, then it's going to be harder for them to get away with that makes sense. But they leave it a little bit gray. But they completely, in my reading, protect the right to go into a bar. Now, Mark Zaid or Zaid, Democratic lawyer is still suing O'Keefe on behalf of some of the people who went on dates with his operatives. And he said, and I asked him online about this, he said, no, we're still going forward because this says you can't commit fraud. You can't deceptively obtain this information. That's not what it says. So I'm not a lawyer, he is. But my reading of his ruling here is that those cases are screwed too. I mean, we'll find out. But like this seems to set the president that that the dates are fine. And just to back up, when you were explaining this, I think part of the important point is about precedent and how legally judges attorneys could read into deceptive practices, what may be perfectly acceptable journalistic behavior. And I don't think that a lot of what James O'Keefe does is acceptable from like ethical practices of journalism. Legally, though, we have to have what we do be covered as broadly as humanly possible. Because when people try to shut down free speech, they rely on narrowing those definitions of things like what's deceptive. So you could easily find a journalist. And in the art or in the in the act of totally normal journalistic information gathering, say, well, that was deceptive. So that's why you have to have a very broad protection for what constitutes as journalism. Because it's then weaponized if it's not broad enough. And so, well, I think journalists hold themselves to the standard that you generally tell people you're trying to get information out of that you're a journalist. You identify yourself as a journalist. If you're in a crowd, if you're at a protest, if you're at a riot, unless your life is in danger, say you identify yourself as a journalist, even when it's hard. That's part of the standards that you hold yourself to formally at news organizations. Those are legal standards. Right. Exactly. But you could see how you say you're working on a story about one thing. And someone says, well, it's deceptive because you didn't narrowly describe exactly what the story was about, which is like what people do all the time all the time. It's going to be a great story for you. And if you're smart as a like a person in government, you know that's what happens. And nobody's forcing you to say anything. And nobody was forcing them to say absolutely anything. They said it of their own volition. Yeah. And so to Mark Zad's point, here's on page 19 of the ruling, this is why I think that his reading of this is incorrect. So the ruling says it's basically saying that it's going to allow the bar footage because, quote, there was no trespass. All of the foeval conversations were held in public locations. There was no theft of confidential business information. Everything that foeval said in these conversations, he said willingly. And although the defendants Lord foeval into these meetings based on an elaborate web of lies, Bob Kramer does not claim that conduct amounted to fraud. And so the so in other words, in this case, they were able to lie to get foeval to come to the meeting and to spill the beans on or not beans like made up beans. He doesn't have any project of bringing people into his cons and he's open to it. Now they say, they say separately, though, applying this principle, we agree with Bob Kramer that the First Amendment does not protect the video segments that O'Keefe procured through Moss's fraud, Moss is the intern, the fake intern. Namely, the portions of the video that show Moss inside democracy partners, speaking with Kramer and his staff, Moss obtained that footage by subterfuge and the jury found that her conduct amounted to fraud. So they were lying on the jury who said that it was fraudulent the way that they got the intern into the office, but it was not fraudulent the way that they got him into the bar. And just because he lied doesn't mean you're committing fraud. These are very different things. And then their footnote is they say it is generally true that for a lie to constitute fraud, a tangible harm must follow. It is undisputed that Moss's lies at least partly contributed to Kramer's harm. In other words, AFSCME had said one of the reasons they cut ties with the firm was because of their embarrassing lack of vetting of their intern. And so they're saying it wasn't just the story itself because the story itself is protected first amendment activity. It was this embarrassing fact that, wait a minute, you're just letting any random O'Keefe plant come into your firm without checking ID and then you're just sending them to DNC headquarters. To them, they were like that is a problem for us. And so we're cutting ties. And that is the result of her fraud. So anyways, gets a little complicated, but that's where they seem to be drawing the line. Yeah, this is a really interesting case and it's not getting a lot of attention, but it's worth I think appreciating the broadening of what constitutes as deceptive because that can be weaponized. Yep. Speaking of, by the way, speaking of undercover operations, we can put E3 on the screen. This is you may have heard like NBC News and other places had these big headlines. NBC's was FBI thwarts and alleged ISIS-inspired plot to bomb New York capital. This 35-year-old woman named Jessica Bowie in New York, converted to Islam, I think they say five years ago. And if you read the federal complaint, you find out. And actually, if you read the NBC News story, you have to get almost the bottom of the article to find this out. Quote, one of the confidential sources working for the FBI gave Bowie $200 to purchase bomb-making material materials, which she is alleged to have done August 5th at a home depot. She then gave the items to the confidential sources when she met them in the days that followed. So between August 5th and I think the arrest on August 19th, this is all really recent. This person who they were encouraging, I mean, we'll see more in this trial because I imagine more of what the confidential human sources were saying came out. I went through the complaint, we just put it up on the screen. You can see some of this is like, they're not putting even everything in the complaint, obviously, but you can see that the confidential human sources are egging this person along. They literally gave the full list of necessary ingredients to create a bomb and started explaining how to do it. It gave $200 to go to this Home Depot and then for over a week between August 5th and the ultimate arrest, this person who absolutely appears to have they appear to have the goods pledged support to ISIS has all of this information on how to make a bomb. They've gone through the plans about the Albany State Capitol and Albany. They've gone through all of this and this person isn't arrested after they gave them, they apparently took the bomb making materials, but there's a week where you've given this person the necessary information for how to make a bomb for arrest. I mean, it's just in all of the headlines say things like FBI Thwarts alleged ISIS-inspired plot to bomb New York Capitol, which again should read FBI Thwarts and alleged FBI-inspired plot to bomb New York Capitol. So it didn't want to let that one go without anything. Yeah, appreciate that. It's a classic of the genre, a classic of the genre. Yes, indeed. FBI's on it. We've got Gabriel Zuckman standing by Ryan. We do indeed. Let's get to it. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. You just remember this low-taunting voice next to my ear saying, "Shut up, don't say anything." Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with the Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're a four-year page or equally important to your personality, welcome home. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hota Kotby, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hota Kotby. If you know me, you know I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover those things together through meaningful conversations with fascinating people. You have something in your guts. You go with it. He was just so unapologetically himself and knew nothing of Hollywood. It was so pure. Listen to Joy 101 with Hota Kotby on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Recently on the all-in podcast, Chamath Palpatia said he'd identified who the villains are in this story. And it's him and his buddies. Let's roll this. Bill Kinballi has completely lost what made it great. It was a place for weirdos, for people at the fringes, for people that really were idealistic. And it has become something that's far from that now. It is the equivalent of what Harvard used to be. It's a credentialing place. It's a place you come to to say, "Oh, I came to Silicon Valley. I worked at a startup. I got into YC. When we came, we used to aspire to meet the Bill Campbell's of the World, Mike Moritz's, John Doors. Those folks are gone. We used to aspire to work for Steve Jobs. He's not here. And in that breach, all we have done is focused on making money in every single way that we can. Hand over fist. And I think again, there's nothing wrong with that except now is a point where we need to do a better job of acknowledging it and trying to do a little bit better. And every time we don't, and we're given a chance to be better and we're not the hatred builds. The animus, as you said, David builds. And that's what we're seeing now. We're extremely excited to bring on our next guest, perhaps the foremost scholar on wealth inequality, who doubles as an advocate for doing away with the very thing he studies. In France, he's both vilified and celebrated as the father of what's known as the Zookman tax. A 2% tax that applies to people worth more than 100 million euros. Now, before Professor Gabriel Zookman joins us, let's do a quick 101 of the problem. Now, we all know that we're living in an era where the very rich are getting richer at a much faster pace than at any time certainly in the last 100 years. We don't even need charts or graphs for that. We can all just look around. I've been reporting on this trend now since the beginning of my journalism career, which began in the run-up to the great financial crisis. What I've come to realize, though, is that we in the media have not done a good enough job of explaining why this wealth inequality that's getting so out of whack matters. We haven't explained how it directly comes out of your pocket. We've talked about how it's wrong for the rich to have more power than everybody else and to be able to buy elections. But that misses the more immediate problem that the super rich are getting rich by making you actively poorer. Now, here's how to understand that. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the rich were pushing to massively lower taxes on themselves, deregulate the economy and make it legal to move capital easily across borders in search of the cheapest labor. They relied on a few metaphors like trickle-down economics and a rising tide lifts all boats. But after the rich got their wins, a not-surprising thing happened, the tide stopped lifting. Since 2000, Western economies have grown at an average of one to two percent. That's it. The amount of the economy owned by the super rich, meanwhile, has grown many, many times more than that. Gabriel Zuckman has dedicated his life to studying that phenomenon. So in a moment, we can get some detail from him on what we know about the scale of this incredible divergence. But to suffice it to say, it's been absolutely huge. So think about it. If their wealth has gotten many times bigger over the past 25 years, and wealth overall has barely grown, where did their wealth come from? It came from you, of course. Now, to understand this better, think about our economy as holding three different kinds of wealth. Public wealth, normal people's wealth, and the wealth of the super rich. Public wealth is some of the obvious things, like schools or hospitals or apartments or land owned directly by the public. When the public owns the schools and the buildings themselves, it's much cheaper for members of the public to go there. Wealth owned by normal people is obvious too. We're talking about home ownership, retirement assets, pensions, cars, that sort of thing. Every year that the wealth of the super rich grows faster than everybody else's, they have to do something with that extra money that they now have. Because they're too rich to be able to spend it buying new stuff, they buy assets, they buy houses, which drives up the cost of housing, they buy stocks, which drives up the price of the stock market, and they buy companies directly, as we've seen with the rise of the private equity industry, then they loot those companies, sell off the parts, have the company file for bankruptcy, and take the money in the pension fund to pay themselves off for their trouble. A normal company that once made, say, paper products or sold toys and support in an economy, working for normal people in a small town, is wiped out, and the money flows to the top. Now the people at the top have even more money, and now they have to buy more assets, you see how this goes. What you might notice, though, is that things haven't gotten as bad as quickly as you might think. People haven't gone immediately from middle class to abject poverty. That's because while the very rich have been buying up everybody's assets, leaving everyone owning nothing, they've swapped that out for loans. In the run up to the financial crisis, the super rich loaded up American homeowners with enormous amounts of debt. When they could no longer pay that debt, the government bailed out the super rich but took the homes from tens of millions of people. During COVID, we shut the economy down, borrowed a historic amount of money, and then effectively gave that money to the top.1%, minting more new billionaires than at any time in history. Trump's new AI policy has directed hundreds of billions in borrowed money to the AI industry, money that is again flowing straight to the top. The money we are borrowing increasingly comes from the very rich who are now charging even higher interest rates. We're now paying more interest on our debt than we are on the Pentagon month over month. That means that every month we are transferring billions of dollars from the public directly to the 1%. Who are then using those billions to buy more and more assets, pricing you out of being able to own anything. So now we have sold off most of the public assets and the assets held by normal people are dwindling. What we're left with is the government heavily in debt, normal people drowning in debt too, and all of us owing that money to the super rich. Now is the time it's getting dangerous. The rich don't need to be as gentle with us as they did before because we don't really have anything anymore that they want or we don't have much at least. There's a YouTube channel in the UK that's done a terrific job of mainstreaming all of these ideas and it's called Gary's economics and the homework assignment for people watching. Breaking points now is to switch over to Gary's economics. Go find a couple of the videos that make sense to you. Watch those and watch several until you fully grasp what's at stake here. He does a very good job of putting the choices we face quite simply. If we want to fund our growing deficits, the money has to come from somewhere. Either we have to raise taxes on the super rich, raise taxes on the middle class and the upper middle class, or we have to all get poor by slashing the government, which would raise your cost of education, housing, healthcare, and so on. Now I know what some of you might be thinking. No, there's a fourth option. We can end the stupid wars, stop funding Israel, and stop wasting money on stupid things. Great, yes. If you watch this program regularly, both Emily and I will immediately agree with doing all of that. End the wars, cut the waste, jail the fraudsters, but even if you cut the entire Pentagon and lock up every fake Medicaid riff-off in Miami, that still won't do it because the gap is too wide and you haven't fixed the problem we identified at the top. The primary problem is that the speed with which the rich are gobbling up resources is faster than anything else and it is swallowing up everything. We have to reverse that trend. The rich have to start giving back some of their wealth to normal people rather than the other way around. The only way to do this is to tax their wealth. When I was 14 years old I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I just remember this low-taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up. Don't say anything. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced but these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their stories about what it takes to make it out alive listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for-you-page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's Park Book Club, Park Group Chat for Thought Daughters, Pop Culture Obsessives and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm gonna have to look up this story. I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You go with it. It was so pure. Listen to Joy 101 with Hota Kotby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So joining us all to discuss this is Professor Zookman himself, Professor Gamer Zookman. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So wanted to start by getting your action to Jamath's assessment there. That Silicon Valley has basically kind of been destroyed by the pursuit of greed. As you've been involved in so many of the debates both in Europe and the United States over how to respond to this kind of yawning wealth inequality. What are you noticing change? Yeah, I think I share that assessment. And indeed you see it today with the reaction of the most Silicon Valley billionaires to Proposition 40, the California billionaire tax that's going to be on the ballot in California in November where they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to defeat what would be a very modest one-time tax of 5% on the wealth of California billionaires, frankly a rounding error in their wealth which has grown by more than 200% just another couple of years. I think this is really indeed illustrative of how Silicon Valley has changed over the last couple of decades, let's say. And one of the big criticisms of the wealth tax that obviously you're familiar with because you've received those criticism many times I've read you from a Forbes contributor here who specifically is writing about you and uses the example of the UK to say the UK is an example where the recent policies of the Tories and Labor have allegedly scared all the billionaires off to either Milan or Dubai which is something that the chamas of the world say would certainly happen in California. It's been leveled at Zara Mamdani in New York City. What's your response to the argument that everyone's just going to believe? First that the empirical evidence is not consistent with that view. So of course if you tag the super rich some of them are going to try to relocate to some low tax states but the academic literature is very clear in finding that those relocation responses are quite small. And number two and that's what's more important in my view is that this migration of high net worth individuals it's not a lot of nature like gravity. It's a policy choice. So you can structure taxes in such a way that there's not going to be an opportunity a possibility to avoid the tax by moving to some low tax state. So for instance in the case of the California billionaire tax. It's a one-time tax that would be owed by billionaires who lived in California who were resident of California as of January 1st of 2026. So it's just too late to move. You cannot avoid the billionaire tax if it passes in November by relocating to another state. Now if you think about the wealth tax at the national level if the US had a federal wealth tax the US taxes it citizens based on their citizenship. Meaning if you move to another country you still have to pay federal taxes as if you were still living in the US. And I think this is something that many European countries should emulate, perhaps not exactly the US system, perhaps some variation over it, they could say for instance, if you've lived for a long time in the UK and now you move to Dubai, then you have to keep paying taxes in the UK for 10 or 20 years. We can debate the details, but what is important is the idea that this out migration, it's a policy choice, it's not a law of nature. And so you recently published a book, we need to tax billionaires. And in it, you address one of the objections that people have to wealth tax, which is that it's just too complicated. And the kind of wealth is just, is a different beast than income. Income is obvious, company pays you a wage. But if your wage is $100 and the tax is $15, you owe $15 of that $100, quite simple. Whereas wealth exists largely in assets, whether there are equities which are rising in value and having good sold or paintings, you bought a Hunter Biden painting for $100,000, and now it's worth a million dollars. So add that to your net wealth. And they say, it's too complicated for us to do that. Now Representative Rokana, who represents Silicon Valley, has recently presented a solution to some of the billionaires in it in a back-and-forth on Twitter. He said, well, we can value your wealth. Let's say it comes to a billion dollars. We can, the government can make you a non-recourse loan, which you can use to pay the tax. If your wealth then declines, you don't owe that money back with the government just eats it. But the government then takes a two percent share, takes two percent of the shares, and you could securitize them or you could create some other product, financial product. So as you've been involved in this for so long, and you were fighting for the Zookman tax, as they call it, in France, what are the mechanisms that you've come up with or that policy makers have come up with to overcome this objection that this is all just too complicated? You know these arguments found very similar to the arguments that the opponents of the progressive income tax were making modern century or go at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, when the West, other countries at roughly the same time created their income tax. And one of the main arguments of the openness was to say that income is just too complicated to measure and to define what counts as revenue, what counts as an allowed expense that you can deduct from your income. And look, we know the end of that story. We created the income tax. It's a big success. Overall, it has some limitations, especially for the super rich, which is why we need on top of the income tax, the wealth tax for the super rich. But by and large, it has worked pretty well. And the reason for that is that elementary, when you create a tax, you always create much more than a tax. You create accounting standards. You create norms. You create an administration to enforce the tax. So that those difficulties, which some of, in some cases, exist. You know, I don't want to minimize that. But precisely by creating the tax, you create tools and solutions to those problems. So for instance, how do you value paintings? You might say, well, it's very complicated. No, it's not. If you have a very valuable painting, if you have a Picasso, it has an insurance value. And so you can use those insurance values. You can tax administration could ask insurers to report those values to the tax authority. So there are lots of practical solutions that to make progress, we need to stop somewhere. In a win one state, hope for it will be California in November, to do it first and to demonstrate, by example, that those problems have solutions. One of the concerns coming from the right that I would have is does it create a worse, more crony system? If you have, like, let me just ask for your response to that. Like, dude, is there a concern? Because my preference would be something like a flat tax, to close the loopholes, raise revenue that way. But obviously, there are problems with that approach, too. Nothing's perfect. On the other hand, if we do a one-time tax like this, it does seem like the system will still-- really wealthy people will still find ways to game the system. So how are you thinking about the possibilities of further cronyism or worsening, exacerbating that problem that already obviously exists? I think that, number one, in the ideal tax system, you have an income tax, you have inheritance or estate tax or meritocratic reasons. And you also have a wealth tax for the super rich, just because for them, the income tax is not enough. When you're extremely wealthy, it's just very easy to organize your wealth, such that it's wealth will generate no very little taxable income. And that's how you end up in situations where people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Larry Page, in some years, they report no very any taxable income and they don't pay income tax. And this problem has been long understood, including by economists in the US. One interesting element is, for instance, in the late 1940s, there was a commission by US economists to advise the new Japanese government after World War II on how to build their tax system. For new democracies starting from ground zero after World War II, how should the tax system look like? And this is the shoot commission with people like William Vickray who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. And what this said is, they said, look, there should be a highly progressive income tax, just like in the US at the time, with top modular income tax rate of 80%, 90%. But also on top of this, there has to be a tax based on wealth, just because on the super rich, wealth is a much better indicator of their ability to pay taxes than income, which is very easy to manipulate. So that's why you need a wealth tax. And California billionaire tax, it's one time tax. So don't get me wrong. That's not enough, no one thinks that you can-- no one believes that you can fix any structural problem just with a one time tax. But the reason it's so important is because it would be the first ever tax on billionaire wealth enacted anywhere in the world. And it could have a massive ripple effect just by demonstrating that, look, the billionaires, they don't have to-- we don't have to accept that they are bound to live in their own parallel society for your tax, which in the current situation, we can actually address that issue very completely with the wealth tax. So one of the other objections that I've heard-- and this is-- I don't know if this is from the left or the right-- one would be that a wealth tax that ends up forcing the 0.1% to sell assets to pay this tax ends up then pushing down asset values. And so the government ends up not really actually getting anything. All they do is reduce the amount of paper wealth that exists in the world. And it's just ends up being some paperwork. And a parallel argument is that, OK, even if they do end up extracting some of that wealth, it ends up being inflationary because the super-rich have a maximum amount of wealth that they can actually consume at any given moment. And if you take some of that and spread it around the middle class, they're going to actually consume it, which then drives up prices and has a similar effect of just kind of moving paper around. What's the reaction? What's the response to criticism? I'm just like I'm fine. I think the revenue from the wealth tax, in the case of California, 90% of the revenue would go to health care, would go to making sure that people don't lose access to Medicaid, which will otherwise happen because of the cuts that were introduced by the 1D Beautiful Bill Act. And there would not be an inflationary effect, but quite the opposite, you know, if those cuts go as planned, what's going to happen is that not only millions of people are going to lose their health insurance, but also premiums for private health insurance are likely to increase. And so if you get $100 billion or so to protect Medicaid, you would prevent that increase in health insurance premiums. That's California, but what about on a more market? That's what California says. So more broadly, so on the first point, and more broadly, no beyond California, the point is that the government, of course, is not going to redistribute the revenues from the wealth [BLANK_AUDIO] to consumers across the board is going to use the money to fund what is the true and dry of economic growth, which is access to education, high quality education for all, access to healthcare, public infrastructure, which if you take a broad view of history. And I think it's one of the main lessons frankly of economic history. This is these investments, public investments in those things, education, health and infrastructure, that have been the core and drying of modern economic growth that has allowed productivity to be multiplied by the factor of 10 over the last century. So it's not going to be inflationary, it's just going to allow us collectively to continue the rise in well-being and productivity and prosperity that has characterized the past century writ large. Now, on the first issue of the effect on asset prices, I think this is a common objection, but I think there's a misunderstanding because what determines asset prices, on a mentality is the future income streams that are going to be generated by those assets, right? So what fundamentally determines the market value of a company is whether people believe that this company is going to make out of profit or not in the future. This has nothing to do with how much tax the shareholders of this company are going to have to pay. And so if some billionaires must sell some shares to pay the tax, you know, that's fine. Other people are going to buy. And because the tax itself doesn't affect the profitability, the prospect is of the underlying company, it has no reason to affect its market value. - Any other objections? - I don't think we can solve any other objections. It's so interesting and just really appreciate you walking us through it. - Yeah, last thing for me, what did you learn from the fight in France that could be applied to the UK? - The California case is interesting. I don't know if how closely you've filed the details of this because the funding is supposed to go to this Medicaid situation in California. And it was pushed by a kind of local SEIU, not even the statewide SEIU, which is the nurses union. There's a lot of intramural fighting among the California left. The teachers are in particular, are very angry that the money's not going to education. And without the support of the teachers, the measure looks like it's going to be in trouble. There's a good chance that it ends up losing, not because the public is against the concept of it, but because there's so much infighting over what to do with the revenue that comes from it. Meanwhile, I'm curious. And also, I think it needs to be national. Doing it state by state just doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. But what did you learn in France from the failed fight there? What is the, what is the prospect for it there and elsewhere going forward in the UK or anywhere else? Oh, I think in France it's going to come back pretty soon in the discussion. So in France, the national assembly in February last year adopted a 2% minimum tax on wealth for people with more than 100 million euros, roughly a million dollars in net wealth, which was the proposal that I had developed for the G20 year before and that I summarized in my book, we need to tax billionaires. And it was blocked by the very conservative Senate, but what was really striking is that there have been many polls conducted in France that show an enormous popular support for this measure. So we're talking about 80 to 90% of the population in favor of such a proposal. These are numbers that you don't see anywhere for any other kind of social or economy on great policy or reform. And so there's just a huge disconnect between the popular demand and what elected representatives are deciding at the moment and I don't think it's going to last forever. I think it will end up passing and whether it's going to take a few months, a few years, it's difficult to know. There are lots of parallels again with the income tax, which was a big fight at the beginning of the 20th century. In many countries, it took years between the first votes in parliament and the eventual enactment of the progressive income tax. But in the end, it succeeded. And this brings me to California and why I'm much more optimistic and enthusiastic. I think that the new on Prop 40, on the California billionaire tax because even though it's just one state, all right? I think it would pay the way eventually for a national federal wealth tax. And the reason there are good reasons to believe so far at these two reasons. Number one is that this is how it has played out historically with the income tax, which first started at the state level. Wisconsin famously in 1911 was the first state to create a progressive income tax. And it greatly fascinated the creation of the federal income tax in 1913. And second is that California is often at the vengal of broader national policy changes in 1978 famously California passed 2013, which kept property prices, property taxes, sorry, and which was kind of a harbinger of the Reagan revolution that would triumph a few years later at the national level. And so I think that for all people who generally want to have a federal, aggressive wealth tax in the US at the national level, it's very important that this would put the California billionaire tax because frankly, it's our best shot at starting the process, at launching the process that eventually would deliver these federal wealth tax. Well, yeah, I couldn't agree more with that at least. And you're targeting Emily's heart by bringing up Wisconsin there. So they did lead the way on the income tax in it. - Very progressive history. - And it is interesting that a lot of the arguments made at the time against the progressive income tax are now being wheeled again. - Which I still agree with. - Of course, of course. Professor Zuckman, thank you so much for joining us. - Thanks for having me. - Thank you. - All right, that'll do it for today. Emily, you sold? - You know, those segments are sometimes hard for me because I get the calculations. Like as you were laying out, it's true. You get rid of the Pentagon, all of that. It still doesn't do enough. There's a moral question of taxation though that I just don't agree with the left on. And that's why I like flat tax. I'm not genuinely not in favor of progressive income taxation. But on top of all of that, you said, it's funny because we have to start dealing with the top. I agree we also have to start dealing with the top. Then we have some problems in the programs themselves too, because most of the spending is Medicare, health, social security. - Well, I'll have all week to convince you, although you're here till Wednesday, is that right? - Saga's gonna jump in on Wednesday. - Okay. - But yeah, no, I thought that was so. I mean, he is one of the leaders of the entire thing. And your point about state versus national, I think is really important too, because in a place like America, you would just, like South Dakota is basically its own Cayman Islands right now. - Yes, indeed. - You could just go somewhere. Anyway. - All right, well, we will both be here tomorrow. - And we've got this discussion. - We will. We've got plenty to talk about because of Besson's presser and Canada and all of that. So there'll be plenty of economic stuff to go on tomorrow. We're gonna jump into the AMA right now, which you can get breakingpoints.com. That's how you get access to the AMAs we're doing in three months right now. And it's the show gets to a low-late today. That was the first day of school-- - First day of school. So we're a little, a little bit late, first day of DCPS. - Yeah, get the kids out, yeah. - Gotta get the picture of the first day of school picture. - Yeah. - You gotta do it. - All right, I got another one. (upbeat music) - I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. 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