Airdate: Friday, September 18, 2026 at 10am

In the Massachusetts trial of Lindsay Clancy, one detail was not disputed in court: Clancy admitted to killing her three young children before attempting suicide in January 2023. But over the multi-week trial, Clancy’s defense argued she could not be held criminally responsible by reason of insanity, attributing her actions to postpartum psychosis. This case left a jury split and the public divided as it highlights major questions about insanity pleas, mental health care and similar cases involving postpartum psychosis. We’ll explore the complicated issue, and look at how it plays out here in California.

Guests:

• April Dembosky, health correspondent, KQED News, and author of the forthcoming book “Tell Me I’m Your Man: A Story of Love, Madness, and a Murder Trial”
• Dr. Nirmaljit Dhami, perinatal psychiatrist, El Camino Hospital, medical director of the Inpatient Perinatal Psychiatry Unit
• Michelle Oberman, Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law, Author of Mothers Who Kill Their Children

This episode discusses suicide. If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Airdate: Friday, September 18, 2026 at 9am

Last month, Ethel Caterham turned 117 in England making her the world’s oldest person. In his
new documentary “The Oldest Person In the World,” director Sam Green takes viewers through his decade-long journey across the globe to meet people like Caterham as they were bestowed with the “oldest living person” title. As humans are living longer and longer, the film explores our fascination with the “oldest person” and what it means to keep living well beyond the average lifespan. We’ll talk with Green about the people he met, the celebrity surrounding them, and his own personal journey that forced him to grapple with aging and longevity.

Guests:

• Sam Green, filmmaker of “The Oldest Person in the World”, directed “32 Sounds,” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller,” and “The Weather Underground,” among other documentaries

Airdate: Thursday, September 17, 2026 at 9am

What if you could create a color, one that no one had ever seen before? That’s what a team of UC Berkeley scientists set out to do, and in the process they found a new green — one so intense a camera could not capture it and a printer could not replicate it. How they did it and how their discovery may change what we know about color science and how the eye works are the subjects of a New Yorker article by Rivka Galchen, “What Would It Mean to See a New Color?” We talk to Austin Roorda and Ren Ng, the scientists behind the work, and Galchen.

Guests:

• Rivka Galchen, Contributor, The New Yorker Magazine – She wrote the article “What Would It Mean to See A New Color?”
• Ren Ng, professor, University of California Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
• Austin Roorda, professor, Optometry and Vision Science University of Waterloo, runs the Roorda Lab at UC Berkeley

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Maybe you’ve gotten into a debate about the dress, a meme from years ago on the internet, or whether a tennis ball is green or yellow, or whether something is red or pink. And in these debates, our own experiences feel undeniable. Of course a tennis ball is green. That’s because the colors we each see feel like reality, but they’re actually something more complex.

They do have a basic basis in physics — wavelengths of light and all that, you know — but the way they’re rendered to your conscious mind relies on our visual perception system, and that turns out to be much more variable between people than is commonly appreciated, as the research we’re going to hear about today will highlight.

So let’s get to it. This morning, we’re joined by Rivka Galchen, staff writer at The New Yorker. Her piece in The New Yorker is titled “What Would It Mean to See a New Color?” Welcome.

Rivka Galchen: Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: We’ve also got Austin Roorda, who’s a professor of optometry and vision science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He ran the Roorda Lab at Berkeley. Welcome.

Austin Roorda: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Alexis Madrigal: And we’ve got Ren Ng, who is an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. Welcome, Ren.

Ren Ng: Tickled pink to be here.

Alexis Madrigal: Let’s just get a little bit about your relationship to color here. Rivka, um… Do you actually have a favorite color?

Rivka Galchen: Oh, it’s obviously green.

Alexis Madrigal: Ah, but what kind of green?

Rivka Galchen: Yeah, sort of an emerald, not grass, a very synthetic kind of green. Who knows why? Who knows?

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, yeah, like Lego green. Is that what we’re talking about?

Rivka Galchen: Yeah, a sort of, you know, new T-shirt, 1984 green. Perfect.

Alexis Madrigal: Uh, Austin, how about you?

Austin Roorda: Well, I have to say, although you don’t believe me, one of the persons that saw it — that’s my new favorite color.

Alexis Madrigal: Okay, we’ll come back to that in a second. And Ren, what about you? Before you saw OLO, this new color, what would you say?

Ren Ng: As my children quiz me all the time and know, it is dark blue, ultramarine, navy, but my wife’s is teal.

Alexis Madrigal: Aha. And that actually does relate to this color, OLO. Let’s talk about how this research into this new color got started. Ren, I mean, talk to us a little bit about where this all came from, this idea of being able to get a new perception of color.

Ren Ng: For me, it started when I was starting to give lectures at UC Berkeley in computer graphics about color. We have a week on color. And I’d inherited slides from lots of other professors. This is what we do when we start to teach a new course.

And for me, color in my mind was much more simplistic. Kind of, you know, from the engineering perspective, kind of like RGB. You know, the color is in our displays. But there was a whole week on it. And this really befuddled me at first, but I tried to sort of get up to speed on why there was all this depth.

And one of the things I saw in there was a picture that Austin had made that showed a picture of the retina and all the individual cells on it, and also which color type, spectral type, of those cells they were. And in trying to think about that and to be able to lecture on that carefully, I wanted to understand that better.

So I looked into Austin’s work, and this is where this opportunity to show a new color opened up.

Alexis Madrigal: Austin, why don’t we use that as an opportunity to talk about how our eye perceives color? Could you give us like a little primer on that?

Austin Roorda: Sure. Okay, well, the human retina is comprised of cones and rods, and the rods are exquisitely sensitive to dim light, and the cones are what we use for our daylight vision.

And the cones come in, I’d always say, three flavors, sensitive to short, middle and long wavelengths, and that’s why we call them the S, M and L cones. But you might consider them as blue, green and red for a better understanding.

And so images that the optics of our eyes cast onto our retina are received by these three cones. There’s some processing of those signals that happens in the retina, but ultimately signals from the retinas go to the brain through the optic nerve.

Comparing the amount of L cone excitation versus M cone green excitation versus blue S cone excitation, we can sort of differentiate different spectra in the world. And the brain’s big job is to make sense of those sensory inputs that are getting sent to it from the eyeball and generate a percept of the color.

Alexis Madrigal: And also, you know, our brains are also expecting certain things too, right? Like when we look at something where we have a sense of what should be there in a lot of cases, right? Kind of tuned by just having been alive in the world.

Austin Roorda: Oh, exactly. And really all of our perception is what you might call an inference — our best guess of what’s in the world based on the sensory inputs that come in.

And we learn to do that as we develop, right? We refine our ability to perceive the world based on the brain learning those sensory inputs that come in. And so, in the end, it becomes almost immediate. We’re so good at it that as soon as the brain sees a sensory input that suggests that that shirt is red, we immediately generate a perception in our mind of a red shirt.

Alexis Madrigal: Well, and Ren, this is why this research got you, et cetera, because you’re like, well, what if you could generate a color that has not been seen before, right? Like, how would the brain process such a thing?

Ren Ng: That’s right. And the basis for it is something that’s well known to vision scientists, which is these three flavors of cone cells, the color-receptive cells in the retina, as Austin described.

The middle one, the M cone cell — they all respond to a broad set of wavelengths. They just have different peaks in wavelength that Austin described. But the middle one, the M cone cell, never gets stimulated by itself in normal vision.

And the reason for it is that its sensitivity overlap as a function of wavelength overlaps completely with the other two. So if there’s any wavelength of light that’s coming to your eye and is stimulating M cone cells, it will for sure also be stimulating the L and/or the S cone cells that are around it.

Austin’s research for his career has developed into a technology for seeing the eye, these cone cells individually on the retina in a living person’s eye, and to track its constant motion, and also to be able to stimulate individual cells.

And this, of course, presents a new possibility. If you can go onto the retinas with a laser — you know, tracking a scanning laser — and then stimulate individual cells very quickly, one can imagine a new thing which is simple to say: Now let’s just only visit the M cone cells and only stimulate them. And that never happens in the normal viewing of the world. What would that color look like?

Alexis Madrigal: Such a cool idea. We’re talking about the discovery of a new color or kind of a new experience of color. It’s called OLO, and we’re gonna get to what it is like in a little bit, what it might actually look like.

We are joined by Ren Ng, an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. We’ve got Austin Roorda, professor of optometry and vision science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. And we’ve got Rivka Galchen, who is a staff writer with The New Yorker. And, of course, she wrote about this new color, OLO.

We’d love to hear from you. Have you ever argued with someone about what color something was? You can give us a call, 866-733-6786, forum@kqed.org.

Airdate: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 at 9am

 A 16-year-old boy from San Francisco died in April from the city’s first confirmed overdose involving cychlorphine . The synthetic opioid is considered much more potent than fentanyl, which is already more potent than heroin and other opiates. It has killed dozens of people across the country since 2024. This week, San Francisco police announced they had arrested four suspects accused of supplying the deadly pills in the overdose case. We’ll talk about San Francisco’s  response so far, -and what the arrival of this deadly drug means for a city that has struggled with more than 4,000 drug overdose deaths since 2020.

Guests:

• Heather Knight, San Francisco bureau chief, New York Times – She wrote the recent story, “A Teen Autopsy Marks the Arrival of a Deadly Drug in San Francisco.”
• Daniel Tsai, director, Department of Public Health, San Francisco
• Daniel Ciccarone, professor of of Addiction Medicine, UCSF

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. For many years, San Francisco was a model of containing heroin overdoses. Then fentanyl and the pandemic sent overdose numbers spiraling out of control. While it wasn’t fentanyl’s potency alone that caused the surge of deaths, its properties did make overdoses harder to prevent.

Over the past couple of years, public health and public safety efforts have pushed down the numbers of people dying on our streets, which is why it was troubling to hear that there is a new, even more potent drug circulating in San Francisco. It’s called cyclorphine. In April, a 16-year-old boy was the city’s first confirmed overdose involving the drug.

And here to discuss what’s happening and how the city plans to keep tabs on the spread of the drug and other synthetic opioids like it, we’re joined by Heather Knight, San Francisco bureau chief for the New York Times. Of course, she wrote the recent story, “A Teen Autopsy Marks the Arrival of a Deadly Drug in San Francisco.” Welcome, Heather.

Heather Knight: Thank you.

Alexis Madrigal: We’ve also got Dan Tsai, director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Welcome, Dan.

Daniel Tsai: Thank you.

Alexis Madrigal: And we’ve got Daniel Ciccarone, who is professor of Family and Community Medicine and Addiction Medicine at UCSF. Good morning.

So, Heather, let’s just start with you. The San Francisco Department of Public Health reported this overdose on April 23rd, saying the tragedy marks the first time that cyclorphine, estimated to be 10 times more powerful than fentanyl and also undetectable by fentanyl strips, had been detected in San Francisco. That was almost six months ago, right? What’s the news that has come out recently about what happened?

Heather Knight: Right. So the city did warn that this drug was here and had killed someone, but didn’t say who it was or the circumstances. And I was able to figure that out. It was a 16-year-old boy named Dante LaCorte. He lived in Lower Nob Hill, and his mother found him dead in his bed the morning of April 7th. He’d just had an overdose. She tried to give him Narcan, it didn’t work, and he passed away.

Alexis Madrigal: Oh, man. And do we know if there have been any other reported deaths, or is that just the one so far?

Heather Knight: Just the one so far. Yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: Dan Tsai, can you tell us more about this drug? And, you know, just where did it come from? We call it new, but actually, you know, it was synthesized quite a while ago, right?

Daniel Tsai: Sure. So to understand cyclorphine and why we’re so concerned about this, it’s helpful to think back to where we are with fentanyl, a category of synthetic opioids that are even more potent than traditionally what folks were using with oxycodone and other products.

And as we’ve seen very much here in San Francisco and across the country, we’ve had a crisis where fentanyl, as many of us have said, has changed the game relative to how potent it is and, therefore, the approaches we’ve needed to think about from a care and treatment standpoint.

And in San Francisco, over the past few years, Heather, as you noted in your article, we’ve had over 4,000 people die of an overdose death, at a point over two people per day. And every single one of those deaths is unacceptable. It’s preventable.

What we see now with cyclorphine, a new category of synthetic opioids potentially 10 times more potent than fentanyl, of course, it’s a great cause for concern. Part of, I think, what the mayor said at a recent press conference in response to just, Heather, a very tragic story, family that you spoke with — thank you for profiling that — is to shout from the rooftops from a public health, public kind of advisory standpoint to make sure folks understand how potent these illicit drugs are.

And that the safest way, especially for parents — I’ve had a lot of parents ask about this — the safest way to protect your kids, or for someone using, is to not take any counterfeit pills, not to take illicit drugs, and that there is treatment, there are options to help folks be able to enter treatment if they are needing to use.

Alexis Madrigal: Daniel, I mean, from your perspective, you know, outside the city, but someone who has studied addiction medicine, how much of a difference does the particular opioid make? You know, like, how different is it to be addicted to heroin versus fentanyl? And, you know, I don’t know if anyone’s actually addicted to cyclorphine in our city right now, but potentially in the future.

Daniel Ciccarone: Um, it makes a huge difference. So these drugs vary by potency. So let’s compare, for example, pharmaceutical oxycodone with heroin. You’ve got 10x plus more potent, moving up to heroin. And that relates to how easy the drug enters the brain.

So that, one, gives you the overdose risk. The easier it enters the brain, the more likely — overdose might, a person might be pushed into an overdose. But the other is it can make that brain, that person, more dependent.

So now we go to fentanyl, which is 25 times more potent than heroin, so greater level of dependency if someone’s a regular consumer of it and greater risk for overdose.

Cyclorphine, we’re — and guesstimating — might be 10 times as potent as fentanyl, so we keep moving up a potency scale within this world of synthetic opioids.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, is there any upper limit? Like, is cyclorphine near the — I mean, at least my understanding around fentanyl is that one of the things that made it really tricky overdose-wise was that the effect of the high and there wasn’t a lot of room between getting high and dying, right? Like, within your body.

Daniel Ciccarone: That’s true. Is there an upper limit? There doesn’t seem to be a limit to what we call tolerance, the body’s ability to take in a standardized number of milligrams of a morphine molecule.

People have estimated that the average daily fentanyl user is consuming several thousand milligrams equivalent of morphine a day. That said, some people are surviving because of that tolerance, and some people, they’re not.

Alexis Madrigal: Dan, from the city’s perspective, how do you track when a drug like this is coming into the city? I mean, and I know you weren’t the director at that moment when fentanyl started to come into the city, but I think that’s what’s in a lot of people’s minds. It just kind of really did just sweep over the city.

So what are the ways we can know if cyclorphine is growing within the city borders?

Daniel Tsai: Sure. So I think the first piece is, obviously, Heather, as you reported, we saw that through the medical examiner data after someone had overdosed. That was an important signal.

I would say that is not a good way, from a public health standpoint, from a prevention standpoint, to understand what is happening.

We are working right now with Biobot, which is an entity of researchers and scientists that do wastewater testing. Many folks across the country used Biobot during COVID to really understand trends in COVID prevalence across the country with wastewater.

We’ve had some experience here in San Francisco. What we are working with them on, and I would say is rapidly under development at the moment, is being able to use wastewater to detect not just some of the substances that we know well now, like fentanyl and some of the other opioids, but actually to be able to detect cyclorphine and other what we call novel substances in the wastewater.

That is a complicated task. The team is actively working on that, but we are hoping, hoping, hoping the folks doing that research will have an assay available before long, and we will be able to use the wastewater to actually have a signal of: Is it actually being used in the city prior to seeing it in an overdose death?

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about San Francisco’s response so far to cyclorphine, what the arrival of the drug means. And, of course, we want to hear from you as well: 866-733-6786.

Airdate: Monday, September 14, 2026

California voters will decide this fall whether the state should impose a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires, with much of the revenue going toward health care amid federal funding cuts. Supporters say Proposition 40 could raise tens of billions of dollars while also helping to address the growing wealth inequality in the state. Opponents argue the tax could drive billionaires out of California, shrinking the state’s income tax base and ultimately costing more than it raises. We talk to two leading economists: Gabriel Zucman, who helped develop the measure, and Joshua Rauh, one of its most vocal critics, about whether the billionaire tax would help  California’s economy – or hurt it.

Guest:

• Gabriel Zucman, professor of economics, UC Berkeley; Paris School of Economics –  author of “We Need to Tax Billionaires”; helped develop Prop 40
• Joshua Rauh, economist and professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business – senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; opposes CA Prop 40

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum, I’m Alexis Madrigal. Proposition 40 is one of the most contentious and intriguing propositions of recent years. It’s a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires. It would raise a substantial amount of money, though there are questions about how much net revenue it could pour into state coffers, and those dollars would mostly be used to fund health care.

Our first guest is Gabriel Zucman. He is a UC Berkeley economist and author of the admirably straightforwardly named book, We Need to Tax Billionaires. He helped to develop the proposition. Welcome, Gabriel.

Gabriel Zucman: Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: Our second guest is Joshua Rauh, an economist and professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He authored a study about the potential effects of the wealth tax and has emerged as perhaps the leading economist voice opposing Prop 40. Welcome, Josh.

Joshua Rauh: Good to be on the show.

Alexis Madrigal: Okay, you guys ready? Ready to fight? Gabriel, let’s start with you. You did help develop this proposition. So let’s just start with the basics. What’s the measure do? Who’s subject to the tax, where does the money go?

Gabriel Zucman: So this would be a one-time tax on billionaires. Only people who have more than $1 billion of net wealth would be affected. We’re talking about roughly 250 people in California, mostly Silicon Valley tech billionaires who would have to pay a one-time tax equal to 5% of their wealth. For context, their wealth has grown by 170% since 2023, and they would have to pay just 5%.

We can expect about $100 billion in tax revenue for the state with this tax. Ninety percent of the money would go to health care. And California needs this money because the big budget bill that was passed last year by Congress has defunded Medicaid. And if nothing is done, two million people in California are going to lose their health insurance. The fraction of uninsured individuals will increase from 6% to 10%.

The California governor, Gavin Newsom, or the California legislature haven’t proposed any solution. So voters can solve this problem by themselves with Prop 40.

Alexis Madrigal: I’m curious, just like, is this for you primarily a fiscal measure about the state’s budget, or is it more of a moral one about the way that you think the state should be approaching billionaire wealth?

Gabriel Zucman: Well, it is a budget fiscal issue. There’s a major shortfall of revenue for Medicaid. And the question is, where do we find the money? Now you have essentially two big levers. There is the California income tax, and there is this potential wealth tax on billionaires.

What’s really important to understand is this. And when I first realized that, it blew my mind. If you look at the total wealth of California’s 250 billionaires, we’re talking about $2.3 trillion today. This is as big as the total income of all Californian families. Their total taxable income, AGI, is also $2.3 trillion.

So essentially, if you want to get $100 billion in revenue for the state, you can do it in two ways. Either with a 5% tax on the wealth of 250 billionaires or with an increase in the income tax of five percentage points for all Californian taxpayers.

Alexis Madrigal: And so, in answer to the question of why target wealth specifically rather than income, that’s where the money is. It represents this massive sum. But is it also that billionaires don’t have traditional income as their core component of how they make money?

Gabriel Zucman: True. The current tax system fails at taxing billionaires. This is true in California. This is true in the U.S. more broadly. This is all over the world. And the reason is that when you’re extremely rich, it’s very easy to organize your wealth such that this wealth will generate no or very little taxable income.

That’s how, in 2019, in 2022, in 2023, the two worthiest billionaires in California, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, essentially paid no income tax. They didn’t pay themselves any wage from Google. Google didn’t distribute any dividend. They didn’t sell shares in the company, so they didn’t realize any capital gains.

So their taxable income, what is subject to the income tax, was zero or close to zero, extremely low, so that no matter the rate that you apply to that income, you are not going to be able to make billionaires pay more tax just by changing the income tax. This is why the proper way to tax the super rich is with a tax directly on their wealth.

Alexis Madrigal: Josh, let’s bring you in here to a two-part question here. Do you agree that wealth concentration in billionaires is a problem generally? And then more specifically, do you agree that billionaire taxation is also a problem?

Joshua Rauh: Well, I’d like to begin with just the premise that you have to support anyone who votes for Prop 40, for the Billionaire Tax Act, has got to support — first, you have to believe that it will raise revenue, not lose revenue for the state. And I think this is one of the key points of difference between myself and Gabriel Zucman, which is that they say it will raise $100 billion for the state. We say it will lose $25 to $38 billion for this state.

And why the difference? It’s because of the losses to the state coffers that will be caused by these high-net-worth individuals who are leaving in response to the tax. The state won’t collect the wealth tax from the billionaires who have left in response to the tax, and it won’t collect any more income taxes from the billionaires who have left in response to the tax.

And so Dr. Zucman and his colleagues have assumed 10% losses when they arrived at their $100 billion estimate, but going through person by person, we find that public announcements have shown that already 30% of the wealth tax base has left. Half a trillion dollars of wealth has left California. So this is gonna lose money for the state government. Those people, their wealth isn’t gonna be collected by the Billionaire Tax Act, and their income taxes will no longer be collected.

Secondly, you have to believe, if you support this proposition, that on balance the tax will be good for the people of California. And that’s a different question from whether the tax is going to raise revenue or not. I mean, even if the tax were gonna raise revenue — and to be clear, our models say that this one will not — but that revenue has to be balanced against the damage to the economy that the tax will do.

So to take an example, a policy that brings in an extra dollar of revenue for the state but destroys 100,000 jobs, that would be a bad policy because you have to believe that the well-being the state can create with an extra dollar of revenue is so great as to offset the pain from losing the job.

So the billionaires who are leaving have created tens to hundreds of thousands of jobs in California, and while those jobs won’t go away overnight, if the founders are gone, the billionaire tax will accelerate the shift of jobs to other states that we’re already seeing. And it’s not just companies already here. If the wealth tax passes, then founders will increasingly choose one of the other emerging ecosystems around the U.S., Austin, Miami, Nashville. And already we have investors saying they won’t invest in startup companies in California if the founders are in California. Notably, Mark Cuban has said that.

So whether or not billionaire wealth concentration is a problem or not, whether you think that or not, that’s actually not relevant for what we should do on Prop 40. The question is, do you think it’s going to bring in money for the state? I do not think it will. And second, do you believe that on balance it will be good for the people of California? And I think given all the losses in economic activity we’re seeing here already as a result of this and what we will see if the billionaire tax passes, it will not be for the people of California.

Alexis Madrigal: That’s Josh Rauh, an economist and professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. We’re also joined by Gabriel Zucman, an economist and professor at Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics, helped to develop Prop 40.

We’d love to get your opinions on what you think about the tax. 866-733-6786, Forum at kqed.org. This is Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.

Josh, I want to stay with you here. What you’re saying is that even just the threat of this tax is causing people to leave and maybe hurting the dynamism of Silicon Valley. And at the same time, we’re experiencing this massive boom in San Francisco of AI company wealth creation and new jobs and businesses that are being created at the time. So it’s one factor, right, in the way where companies decide to locate.

Joshua Rauh: That’s correct. It’s one factor, and investors have been clear about what’s going to happen if the tax passes. You have to realize California companies, the amount of money they receive from venture capitalists from across the state, country and world is a staggering amount of money itself. It is $360 billion. That’s very comparable in a year to the amount of money that the government of California spends.

This ecosystem is fragile. We have people leaving. We have investors saying they’re not going to invest in California if this passes. And it’s interesting to consider the reason why people are saying they won’t invest in that if this passes. You know, Dr. Zucman and you in your intro were clear that this was gonna be a one-time tax. That’s how it’s pitched, but Dr. Zucman has admitted that it’s probably not going to be one time. In fact, I’ll quote from an interview he did on the Capital & Main website. He said, quote, “California could absolutely implement an annual wealth tax,” said Zucman. “This one-time tax is just the starting point of what it could be.”

And so now that he is admitting that, and people are starting to think, what happens if this wealth tax passes? Investors are beginning to think, wow, this could be really bad, and it could be very harmful to the economy.

The discussion has changed since the ballot proposition was made. “One time, one time, one time” kept being repeated, and now the tone of the architects has changed.

Alexis Madrigal: Gabriel, what do you think? On the one-time issue specifically.

Gabriel Zucman: So, a few things. So first of all, this line of reasoning on how the tax is going to hurt the economy is, of course, a very classic argument, which makes sense in the abstract, but you have to look at the numbers. And if you look, for instance, at the flow of venture capital funding —

Alexis Madrigal: I might actually cut you off here only because we’re gonna have to go to a break in a second, and I really want you to be able to get to the full set of numbers. You guys can go back and forth a little bit on this. So let me let me throw to a break.

Of course, we’re talking about Prop 40, California’s billionaire tax, with, you know, on the pro side, Gabriel Zucman, who helped design it, and Josh Rauh, who has authored a study about the potential effects of the wealth tax. Way back, more right after the break.

Airdate: Friday, September 11, 2026 at 9am

It’s been 25 years since the United States experienced the deadliest terrorist attack in our history on Sept. 11, 2001. The attacks profoundly changed our nation from how we view ourselves and treat first responders to how we balance national security and personal privacy. For many Americans, the attacks fractured our nation and created a stark before-and-after. But now, a quarter of a century later, close to a third of people in the U.S. were born after the twin towers fell, or were too young to retain any memories of it. Sept. 11 is morphing from a memory into history. We’ll talk about how the attacks reshaped our national psyche, identity and sense of security within our own borders and what we want younger generations to know about it.

Guests:

• Wajahat Ali, author, “Go Back to Where You Came From”; co-host, Democracy-ish podcast; writer, The Left Hook substack.
• Barbara Lee, mayor, Oakland; served as U.S congressmember representing parts of East Bay from 1998-2025
• Michael Mark Cohen, American and African American studies professor who teaches the course, History of the Present: The U.S. After 9/11, UC Berkeley
• Geraldine Baum, former New York correspondent and bureau chief, Los Angeles Times

Airdate: Friday, September 11, 2026 at 10am

Joan Baez’s iconic voice has matured over the decades, but the way she’s used it has remained consistent. As a rising folk music star in the 1960s, she performed at the March on Washington alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in California’s Carmel Valley. Now, she’s outspoken about the Trump administration. A musician, poet, author and activist, Baez is known for being idiosyncratic: Her latest act? Joining a circus in Alameda. We speak with Baez about the evolution of her voice and what she sees as artists’ role in activism.

Guest:

• Joan Baez, legendary singer, activist, author and cultural icon. Her honors include eight gold albums, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a Kennedy Center Honor, as well as numerous awards for her civil rights work. She’s performing in The Soiled Dove through Nov. 7.