If you're new to our show and liked this episode, let us suggest a couple of our other recent stories you might enjoy -- check out "I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life", "The Talented Ms. Goldiee" and "Why Did ICE Lock Up This Pro-Trump Reporter?"

Last week, host Brian Reed interviewed former MAGA influencer and the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, Ashley St. Clair, in front of a live audience in New York. After they walked off stage, St. Clair laid into Brian over the questions he asked. She then demanded that we not release the interview publicly and asked to speak to our lawyers.

Here is that interview, uncut.

In it, St. Clair talks to Brian about her landmark lawsuit against xAI, the artificial intelligence company behind Grok, which generated millions of sexually explicit deep fake images of her and other women. xAI is owned by St. Clair’s ex, Elon Musk, and Brian asks her to share stories and insights from her relationship with Musk to help people understand his erratic and offensive behavior. Brian also asks St. Clair about her years as a major figure inside the right-wing propaganda machine. It's those questions that seemed to bother her most. 

Find video highlights of the live interview on our new Instagram account – @questionverything.podcast. The full video is available at our Substack. 

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. The live taping was presented by OnAirFest.

Our fact-checker reviewed this live, unedited conversation. We were not able to independently verify St. Clair’s remark that Musk’s devices were seized during French authorities’ search of X’s offices. Likewise with St. Clair’s recollection that she saw a Grok-generated image of a 4-year-old girl in a Bluey microprint bikini, and her claim that immigrants were getting on planes with boarding passes that didn’t have any name on them. We reached out to Musk and xAI for comment, but they did not reply.

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Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian grip on Hungary became a model for the American right. He hollowed out the country’s democracy and turned much of the media into a government megaphone. Then a small newsroom called Direkt36 exposed a plot against the opposition party involving a mysterious political operative, a young IT worker, a raid on a boat in the Danube and a whistleblowing police captain. A few weeks later, Orbán was ousted from power in a landslide election. 

Sean Cole reports on the investigation, called the Hungarian Watergate, and what it shows about why an independent press still matters. 

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

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While we’re heads down working on a bunch of great new episodes, we’re sharing the first episode of the new season of Drilled.

In it, award-winning climate journalist Amy Westervelt exposes how Republican corn ethanol mogul Bruce Rastetter sold "sustainable aviation fuel" to world leaders from North Dakota to Brazil. The problem is, his “clean energy” project does nothing to help climate change. 

Drilled: Carbon Cowboys follows the land grabs, pipelines, and political power stopping real progress from being made.

Find Drilled wherever you get podcasts, or at pushkin.fm/plus.

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The Freedom of the Press Foundation just filed an ethics complaint against Florida Judge Jeffrey Kuntz, who has been nominated by President Trump for a lifetime federal court appointment. They want him stripped of his gavel and his law license.

Why? Judge Kuntz was one of the judges who ruled in Trump’s favor in his peculiar defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board. The Freedom of the Press Foundation claims the judge handed Trump this victory while, behind the scenes, he was seeking a nomination from the Trump administration for a federal judgeship.

While Judge Kuntz’s nomination is being considered by the Senate, we revisit an episode we first aired in February 2025 about this strange lawsuit against the organization behind journalism’s most prestigious award. 

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

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If you're new to our show and liked this episode, may we suggest a couple of our other recent stories you might enjoy? Check out "I Was 11 When Instagram Took Over My Life", "The Talented Ms. Goldiee" and "Why Did ICE Lock Up This Pro-Trump Reporter?"

Like millions of others, Gordon Pennycook’s older brother has leapt down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, and Gordon says he’s tried to change his brother’s mind, without success. Which tracks, if you’ve ever debated a conspiracy theorist — it can feel impossible to pull them back to reality. 

If anyone was qualified to convince his brother, though, it’s Gordon, who’s a psychology professor at Cornell University where he studies why people believe things that aren’t true. So Gordon wanted to put this question to the test: Is it actually the case that conspiracy theorists rarely change their minds? He and a team of researchers ran an experiment using an AI chatbot to rebut people’s theories. And the results were very surprising. In fact, they ended up changing Gordon’s mind about conspiracy theories, and the people who believe them. 

Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll share the Debunkbot from Gordon’s study, where you can test out your own beliefs.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. 

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Gordon Pennycook, Cornell University, Associate Professor, Dorothy and Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow

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According to the fact-checking company NewsGuard, Claude has been a very reliable and accurate chatbot. But in the last month or so, users have started complaining that it seemed to be getting slower, stupider, and less trustworthy. So NewsGuard AI analyst Isis Blachez ran a test on Claude, to see if it is actually getting worse. And running this test revealed a whole new iteration of Russian disinformation campaigns, designed for the AI-era, that are evolving by the second specifically to coerce chatbots into deceiving us. 

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

Guests: 

Isis Blachez, analyst for AI and France at NewsGuard

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The first episode of a special series from On The Media’s Micah Loewinger about how a seemingly benign and important agency, FEMA, has become the subject of some of the wildest conspiracy theories.

FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is supposed to keep Americans safe from wildfires, hurricanes, and nuclear disasters. So why has it become so profoundly distrusted and maligned, to the point that President Trump has now threatened to totally dismantle the agency?

It turns out the agency has kept a number of secrets from the public over the course of its history – and that has led to the paranoia that’s proving an existential threat to FEMA today.

Thanks to “On The Media” for sharing this episode with us. You can listen to the rest of this series, “American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA”, over the next several weeks on the radio show or on podcast apps.

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

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In recent days, we learned that Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University grad student who was snatched off the street by masked ICE agents last year and locked up for more than a month, has had enough of America, and moved home to Turkey. The U.S. government had continued to threaten her with legal proceedings and deportation, even after releasing her from detention. 

Dr. Öztürk’s “crime?” Co-authoring an op-ed in the student newspaper advocating for Palestinian rights. 

A year ago this week, while Rümeysa Öztürk was being held without charge in a Louisiana ICE facility and her case was drawing national condemnation, Question Everything co-hosted an urgent live event at Tufts with The Tufts Daily, which had published Dr. Öztürk’s op-ed. That episode has just received a Webby Award for Best News & Politics podcast episode.

Student journalists Arghya Thallapragada and Ellora Onion-De and Question Everything host Brian Reed were joined by former editor-in-chief of the Washington Post and Boston Globe Marty Baron, First Amendment lawyer Robert Bertsche, one of Dr. Öztürk’s ACLU attorneys Carol Rose, and senior politics reporter at The Intercept, Akela Lacey, to wrestle in real time with the gravity of what it meant for the U.S. government to jail a student for writing a political opinion in the student newspaper. In the wake of ICE surges in American cities and more retaliation against journalists by the administration, the conversation takes on new, perhaps even more disturbing meaning, a year later. 

This episode originally ran on May 1st, 2025.

Read the Op-ed Dr. Öztürk and others wrote that ran in The Tufts Daily a year ago in March, and see the Tufts Daily’s recent retrospective of their coverage of Dr. Öztürk’s case.

Watch the video of federal agents in plainclothes, forcing Rümeysa Öztürk into an SUV on March 25, 2025.

Quick thing: In our discussion Carol Rose says the ACLU has filed 100 legal actions in President Trump’s first 100 days. The specific count on those was actually higher: the ACLU filed 110 legal actions in the Trump administration’s first 100 days.

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

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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."

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

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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.

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

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This episode originally aired on March 27th, 2025.