Happy New Year, everybody.

It is 2026 now, I guess.

This is a week where you take stock.

Think about what we've done, what we've learned, what we might have done differently.

And we've been doing a bit of that here at Question Everything.

We're incredibly able to look back now at dozens of episodes we've made,

which this fall have turned to focus in a lot of ways on how tech can influence and warp our understanding of the world of reality.

We've been looking at how Section 230 protects social media companies and others from lawsuits.

But we've also been hearing from whistleblowers, from people dealing with the worst of deep fakes and AI.

We've been trying to stay on top of one of the biggest stories of the year,

the Epstein story, and just generally trying to make sense of what's broken in our information

ecosystem and where it might be fixable.

And as I look back, I kept coming back to where the whole project began, our very first

episode.

That conversation set the tone for this whole show.

The idea that if we're going to question journalism, question the way we get information,

we have to start by questioning ourselves.

So to kick off the new year, we're sharing our first episode again.

It's a memorable and awkward

conversation I had with one of my toughest critics, someone who believed a story I put out

into the world was morally indefensible. If you're new to this show, this conversation set the

groundwork for why we started question everything and what we're still trying to do, even

...