I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy.

I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a living.

And even I sometimes get overwhelmed trying to keep up with it all and stay safe in the process.

On the podcast, Terms of Service, we can explore how to experiment with these new tools

without getting played by them. Listen to CNN's Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.

April 15th is not exactly a national holiday, but once a year, it does tend to unite Americans around our loathing for taxes.

The most famous tax protest in our history, the Boston Tea Party helped set the stage for

the War of Independence.

Except, we tend to remember it wrong. Did you know those tea-dumping patriots were furious not about a tax hike, but a tax cut? From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. It's true, the demonstrators

who threw tea into Boston Harbor were angry

that the British government lowered the taxes on tea in an effort to prop up the British East India

Company. And the colonists did not want to quit paying taxes altogether. They just wanted to quit

sending their money across the Atlantic to an imperial power that didn't seem to care much

what they wanted or needed. Having studied this history, my guest believes taxation is actually

an essential component of any functional democracy, and she notes that our sense of ourselves

as a tax-hating society is kind of a myth. Vanessa S. Williamson is a senior fellow at Brookings. Her book is The Price of Democracy, the Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History. Vanessa, welcome to think.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I have been misinformed about the Boston Tea Party my whole life. I would have bet a hundred boxes of Earl Grey that the

colonists were upset, that taxes were going to make their tea more expensive. Beyond

what I just mentioned, what do we need to know about the actual story?

Yeah, so the mechanics and artists of Boston, they did exactly what you were told,

right? They put on costumes,

some dressed as Mohawk Indians, others put on women's gowns, and they covered their faces in soot,

...