Gambling is infiltrating American life. Ads for online sportsbooks are everywhere. Prediction markets – which are not legally considered gambling – now allow betting on everything from the unemployment numbers, to the war in Iran, to how many times Elon Musk will tweet this week. Lots of news outlets are getting in on the action: CNN, CNBC, the AP, and others are partnering with prediction markets to use their stats in coverage. What could go wrong? 

On today’s show, we’re joined by three journalists who cover gambling and prediction markets to answer that question. They tell stories about how gambling has already transformed sports, the unsettling ways betting seems like it’s already influencing the news and politics, and the not-so-crazy arguments for how it could lead to better informed citizens. 

Also: hours after we posted this episode, federal authorities charged a soldier -- Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke -- with being the mystery bettor we talk about in the show, who made $400,000 on Polymarket by trading on the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. When asked about it, President Trump said, "The whole world unfortunately has become somewhat of a casino."

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It’s easy to get frustrated with the charade reporters are supposed to keep up, where they pretend they don’t have opinions or feelings or any kind of human thoughts about a story they’re reporting. Plenty of journalists have been trying to break out of that charade. But the decision to do that: it can be a fraught one, with real implications. 

This week, we’re re-upping a story we first ran last year about journalist Dana Ballout. Dana struggled with this personal-professional dilemma while investigating a story about Hassan Diab — a sociology professor who’s living as a free man in Canada, yet is convicted of a terrible crime in France. Dana and her co-host, Alex Atack, open up about their reporting on the series The Copernic Affair, and why Dana ultimately cut her own opinions out of the show, even though her co-host and editors wanted to include them. 

This also prompts Brian to revisit his own experience dropping the charade in a previous podcast he made for The New York Times and Serial: The Trojan Horse Affair. 

You can check out The Copernic Affair wherever you get your podcasts or at https://www.canadaland.com/shows/the-copernic-affair/.

Same with The Trojan Horse Affair –  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/podcasts/trojan-horse-affair.

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This episode originally aired on March 27th, 2025.

Taylor Little was 11 years old when they lied about their age to sign up for Instagram. Now, 13 years later, they’re one of thousands of people suing the company, accusing Instagram of purposely addicting them as a child and driving them to years of mental health struggles. 

Taylor takes Brian inside their dark and twisted experience with the app. They say it all started with a suggestion Instagram sent them to visit an account they didn’t follow, which they developed a morbid fascination with.

Who bears responsibility for what happened to Taylor? Is it Instagram? The users who posted the content that consumed them? Their mom? 

Today’s show deals with issues of self harm and suicide. If you or someone you know are struggling with these issues, call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988. 

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Taylor Little, plaintiff in social media trial

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In the span of two days, juries handed down landmark verdicts against Meta and Google. In New Mexico, a jury ordered Meta to pay the state $375 million for failing to protect young people from predators on Instagram. And in Los Angeles, a jury found that Meta and Google knowingly designed social media platforms that addicted a young girl, causing depression, body dysmorphia, and self-harm. 

But as listeners to this show might wonder – isn't suing social media companies supposed to be impossible, because of Section 230?

Brian talks to co-lead counsel in LA, Mariana McConnell, about how they pulled off the win, what this huge verdict means for the internet, and the internal Meta document that said, “Young ones are the best ones.” 

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter – we’ll be sharing Brian’s extended interview with Mariana McConnell there. 

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Mariana McConnell, plaintiff's co-lead counsel 

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Brian sits down with expert fact-checker Sofia Rubinson who spends hours every day tracking lies online, and together they dissect a single lie that’s been rocketing around the world to millions of people, affecting the way people think about the war in Iran — including the world’s biggest podcaster. 

Sofia says the AI deepfakes she’s seen consume the internet in just the last few weeks make her worried that we’ve entered a dangerous new phase of disinformation. 

Watch the video of Benjamin Netanyahu featured in this episode, which NewsGuard confirmed to be real.

You can sign up for NewsGuard’s Reality Check newsletter here. And here’s our Question Everything newsletter.

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. 

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Sofia Rubinson, senior editor of Reality Check for NewsGuard

If you’re interested in Fabric by Gerber Life go to https://meetfabric.com/QUESTION and apply today, risk-free.

Locked up, alone, accused of being a spy, reporter Jeremy Loffredo has to defend the fact that he’s a journalist. To the Israeli courts. And then…to our reporter. 

This is part two of our two-part series about Jeremy Loffredo, who in October 2024 became the first American journalist arrested by Israel. This story won Best Reporting at the 2026 Ambie Awards, which is why we’re sharing it again now.

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

This episode originally aired January 30th, 2025.

Part one of a special, two-part series, about Jeremy Loffredo, the first American journalist ever arrested by Israel, and the questions that were raised about not only Israel, but the outlet Jeremy worked for, once our team started looking into his story. We’re re-airing these episodes because they won Best Reporting from the Podcast Academy, at the 2026 Ambie Awards. 

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

This episode originally aired January 15th, 2025.

News recently broke that Paramount, which is newly controlled by David Ellison and his billionaire dad Larry Ellison, won the bid to buy Warner-Brothers Discovery, after aggressively squeezing out Netflix. 

As Trump himself has said, the Ellisons are “friends of mine…big supporters of mine, and they’ll do the right thing.”

Is the “right thing” squashing critical coverage of the president? Doing stories he’s more inclined to like? The Ellisons already own CBS News, through Paramount; now they’re about to own CNN. Larry Ellison also has a new ownership stake in TikTok, via a deal anointed by Trump.

Is this what experts call “media capture?” Is the U.S. in it, right now? 

In this conversation we first ran in October 2025, after the Ellisons took control of Paramount, foreign correspondent Natalia Antelava explains the insidious implications of media capture from her experience living and reporting in captured countries around the world. 

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This episode originally aired October 30th, 2025.

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When a promising young freelancer pitched a good story to his magazine, editor Nicholas Hune-Brown was ready to assign it. But as he looked more closely at the pitch and the writer’s bylines across the internet, Nicholas began to realize maybe this writer wasn’t who she seemed.

A version of Nick’s story first appeared in The Local – you can read it here.

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After journalist Mario Guevara was arrested while covering an anti-ICE protest, ICE moved him into their detention. As his lawyers and the ACLU tried to get Mario free, ICE argued again and again that he shouldn’t be let out, because his journalism made him too dangerous. 

Mario was behind bars for 111 days. Then deported to El Salvador.

If you’re wondering where the hell the first amendment is in all this, so are we! 

In the second episode in our special two-part series about Mario Guevara, we look into how the federal government targeted and detained a reporter, and ultimately fast-tracked his deportation–his first amendment rights be damned.

Please take 5 minutes to fill out this survey about Question Everything – it’ll help us know who’s listening and what you want from us! Thank you. 

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Sign up for our Substack newsletter, where we’ve been covering the big landmark lawsuits against social media companies for harming people with their products. 

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This episode has been updated to reflect the fact that the news outlet Mario did an interview with from El Salvador was not Fox News -- it was a local Fox affiliate in Atlanta.