PODCAST · technology
The Rip Current
by Jacob Ward
We're in the invisible grip of technology, politics, and our own weirdness. We gotta get better at seeing it. Hosted by veteran journalist Jacob Ward (correspondent for Al Jazeera, PBS, NBC News, and CNN), The Rip Current is your guide to spotting the hidden forces at work in our lives and getting across them safely. Each week we speak to experts in the stuff you didn't know was having an impact on your life, from venture capital to racism to the tried-and-true tactics of bullies, and teach you how to see The Rip Current before it sweeps you out to sea. Read more at TheRipCurrent.com! www.theripcurrent.com
Episodes
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Trump Says AI Companies Will Police Themselves Under “Morally Binding” Agreement
I’m currently in Amsterdam to speak at a pair of events — TechSummit this week and World Summit AI next week — and I’m learning that being a European correspondent for American networks is brutal night-shift work. I landed at 9am local time this morning, stayed awake by biking around in the sun,...
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Comparing Notes: Meta Trial Verdict w/ Jacob Ward
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
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The Terrifying Things Claude Can Do
The public resignation of Jacob Coxon — who told the world his industry is “gambling with our lives” — buried two other chilling warnings from inside the AI industry this week. The first is “An Alien Mind,” an essay OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published on September 6, in which he...
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“They Are At The Whim of The President”
The story of MapQuest refusing to rename a lake isn’t about MapQuest. It’s about Big Tech, and whether we can rely on its principles. On Anderson Cooper 360 last night, anchor Jim Sciutto asked me whether Google and Apple’s decision to rename Lake Ontario per the president’s wishes was a matter…
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“We Were Gonna Win.” So Why Did the States Settle with Meta? I Asked Colorado’s Attorney General.
By now you know how I felt about it. When I heard, seven days into the Meta trial, that the company would be allowed to settle with the States, I was astounded. “They did what?” I shouted at my phone first thing that morning. For one thing, it was clear in even those first few days in court that...
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"Maybe He'll Listen to the CEOs Who Are About to Get This in the Throat"
Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey has spent a career worrying about the twin threat of debt and valuations. On Monday, in the Financial Stability Board’s letter to the G20’s finance ministers and central bank governors, Bailey says a new horror has moved to the front of his nightmares: “For...
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Inside the Meta Settlement: $16.7 Billion, No Fault, and a Clause That Saves Meta $5 Billion.
Meta Platforms settled with 51 state and territorial attorneys general at 6am PT this morning — about an hour after I’d published a vast think piece about what I thought the next six weeks could hold, dang it. It ended the trial taking place in front of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland one...
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Meta Trial Day 2: If Zuckerberg Wanted it Done, It Would Be Done
Day two of the multistate trial against Meta in federal court in Oakland, where 29 state attorneys general are asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to reach inside the company and change how Instagram and Facebook work. Arturo Bejar — former head of engineering for Facebook’s protection group…
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The Meta Trial: How Zuck Will Fight Back
Reader note: I’m making these installments free for everyone, as I consider this trial to be a matter of crucial public interest. Still, support the work! Become a paid subscriber to get tech coverage no one else sees, and to keep me on the beat. Meta’s opening statement in Oakland was delivered…
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The Meta Trial: The States Say “We Have the Evidence”
Reader note: I’m making these installments free for everyone, as I consider this trial to be a matter of crucial public interest. Still, support the work! Become a paid subscriber to get tech coverage no one else sees, and to keep me on the beat. I’m outside the federal courthouse in Oakland…
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Inside Meta's Biggest Case Yet
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Meta goes to trial in Oakland tomorrow, and this one works differently from the two it already lost. Twenty-nine state attorneys general are trying claims that Facebook and Instagram collected personal data from...
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Zuckerberg's Biggest Trial Yet
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com A.I. Disclosure: I use LLM technology to help with research, fact-checking, document summaries, editing, and rewrites. I’m trying to use it responsibly, but I’m learning as I go. You can read my full ethics...
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Why AI Must Confess Now
In 1937, a Texas school exploded because natural gas has no smell — nobody could detect the leak until it killed nearly 300 people, most of them children. Within weeks, Texas passed the first law forcing gas companies to add an odor. That fix, mercaptan, is still the reason your kitchen reeks of...
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Here Come AI Romance Scams
In 2022 I interviewed a young Nigerian man outside Lagos who’d spent years working as a romance scammer, grinding one target at a time until he finally convinced a lonely widow to send him more than $200,000. The lesson of that story was never about technology. For criminals like him, the biggest...
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"You Did It Before You Considered Whether You Should"
I do a lot of hits these days as a contributor to CNN, but I don’t post most of them — you’re getting the raw thinking here as a subscriber. But every so often the conversation produces some nice, new moments, and this interview with Elex Michaelson last night felt like one of those. Thanks, as...
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Let Us Make A.I. Nudes If We Want, Say Elon Musk's xAI Lawyers
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Minnesota’s HF 1606 takes effect this weekend. It is the first law in the country to target the companies that build “nudification” tools rather than the users who operate them, with civil penalties of $500,000…
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Here's Where Prediction Markets Go Wrong
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Gabriel Perez has run Donald Trump’s teleprompter since 2016. According to CFTC investigators, he spent months betting on Kalshi’s “Mentions” market on which words and phrases Trump would use in his own speeches,...
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Revisiting "The Loop"
I’ve been on a very lovely summer break, thanks to you. Your patience allowed me time with my family camping, roaming New York City in apocalyptic heat, and squiring a kid to a national tournament. I appreciate you sticking with me. Let’s get back to it.Four years ago (damn it, I think this means…
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The Fight to Protect You Against AI (with Rep Sara Jacobs)
Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) just introduced the Sectoral AI Governance Act, a bill that would let federal agencies enforce existing laws — on housing, hiring, disability rights, benefits — when an algorithm is the one making the decision. It creates no new crimes. It’s what she calls a “minimum…
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The Lightphone Takes Your Choices Away...to Give You More Freedom (with Joe Hollier)
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Joe Hollier was 24 when he started building a phone designed to do almost nothing. Calls. Texts. Alarm. Music, maybe. Directions if you needed them. That was the list. The Light Phone launched on Kickstarter in…
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Comparing Notes with Jacob Ward
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
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The Pope Slams Silicon Valley
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Yesterday the Vatican published Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical and the Catholic Church’s official moral teaching on AI. I woke up at 5am to read it, and it’s remarkable. It names algorithmic...
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Musk Lost in Court. But Who Won, Exactly?
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com A jury in Oakland took ninety minutes Monday morning to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. The verdict didn’t touch the substantive questions — whether Altman lied to co-founders, whether…
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The CEOs Who Flew to China and Got Nothing
Trump brought a dozen of America's most powerful CEOs to Beijing this week — Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and others — to meet with Xi Jinping. The optics were big. The results were not. And the whole experience was presumably a nightmare for Trump's emotional-support CEOs.Here's why: these...
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Sam Altman Under Oath
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com I watched Sam Altman testified yesterday in the Musk v. OpenAI trial in Oakland — his first and possibly only day on the stand. Within two minutes of cross-examination, Musk’s attorney Stephen Molo was asking him...
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Sam Altman's Own Hero Calls Him a Liar. Now He Faces a Jury.
Read what Altman’s colleagues and cofounders say about his pattern of dishonesty in this morning’s piece, free for everyone. Ilya Sutskever — the AI researcher who helped build OpenAI and is widely credited with turning the transformer model into ChatGPT — took the stand on Monday and confirmed...
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Jake on CNN: The White House Reverses Course on A.I. Regulation
The end of David Sacks’s time as White House AI Czar seems to be the end of the administration’s hands-off policies when it comes to the technology. As Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles take Sacks’s place, suddenly the administration is talking…
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Musk vs Altman: What I've Seen So Far
I believe the Musk vs Altman case tells us all something important about the goals and tactics of tech billionaires, and especially those pushing A.I. at the moment, so I’m giving this one out for free. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to get this kind of analysis throughout the week. I’ve…
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Juicy A.I. Billionaire Drama Exposed
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Jury selection began on Monday in Oakland in Musk v. Altman — the trial that could determine the future of OpenAI, one of the most powerful companies ever built. But the most important story so far isn’t the legal...
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Nine People in Oakland Hold More Power Over A.I. Than Congress
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Congress has held hearings on AI. No legislation. The FTC has investigated AI companies. No binding rules. The California AG reviewed OpenAI’s conversion from nonprofit to for-profit and signed off. The only...
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Why U.S. Spies Are Using Banned A.I.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com The U.S. military spent thirty years weaving GPS into everything it does. Navigation, precision weapons, supply chains — all of it ran through the same satellite signal. The older skills, map and compass, dead...
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Why Tim Cook's Apple Era Is Over — And What Comes Next
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Paid subscribers can read the full analysis here. In 1925, thousands of Stetson Corporation employees gathered in a Philadelphia factory auditorium for their Christmas celebration. It was the largest hat factory…
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Why Are Social Media's Effects So Hard to Study? Because Only the Companies Can Truly Do It.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com A new Pew survey and a viral Stanford study are being used to suggest social media barely harms teenagers. The numbers in both are smaller than the headlines suggest — and neither has access to the data that would...
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How America Built an AI Kill Chain (with Katrina Manson)
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Journalist Katrina Manson spent years inside the classified and not-so-classified world of U.S. military AI — interviewing the colonels, the defense tech founders, and the ethicists watching it all unfold. Her…
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Mythos Latest: The AI That Escaped Its Own Cage
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Anthropic's new AI model — Claude Mythos — didn't just find undetected security flaws in major systems. It started writing its own attacks, chaining them together, and broke out of its own testing sandbox to email…
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An A.I. Doomsday Machine...and the Private Club That Has It
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Anthropic just released Claude Mythos Preview — a cybersecurity AI so dangerous, the company won’t let the public touch it. It broke out of its own sandbox. It found a 27-year-old undetected vulnerability. It...
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From Popular Science to Substack: Baratunde & Jacob Ward Compare Notes
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
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Tech Companies Already Know When You've Had Enough
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com The social media addiction verdicts in Los Angeles and New Mexico aren’t just legal milestones — they’re the first time a jury has been allowed to see what these companies knew and when they knew it. The internal...
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Everything I Said on Six TV Networks Yesterday
Yesterday a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for the design choices that addicted a young user and damaged her mental health. It is the first verdict of its kind. Hours earlier, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for concealing what it knew about child sexual...
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The Verdict That Could End Social Media as We Know It (with Nita Farahany)
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com When the Los Angeles jury came back with its landmark verdict Wednesday, I had just finished a 30-minute interview with Nita Farahany about the New Mexico verdict a day earlier. Then the news dropped and we had to...
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The Era of Unaccountable Design Is Over
My work is typically reserved for paying subscribers, but this verdict, like the one in New Mexico yesterday, is such an important story, and such a historic moment, that I’m making The Rip Current free this week. If you find it compelling, please consider becoming a paid subscriber: A Los…
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🚨 BREAKING: Meta just lost.
A New Mexico jury just found Meta liable for endangering children on its platforms — $375 million in civil penalties. The jury deliberated for less than a day. This is the first social media case to reach a verdict. Behind it sit more than 1,600 lawsuits waiting for exactly this signal. A…
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Is America Ready for "Behavioral Harm"?
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Two juries are deliberating right now over something that could reshape how American justice works. In Los Angeles, jurors have been at it for over a week, deciding whether Meta and YouTube are liable for…
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The AI Industry Got What It Wanted Today...Again
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com The White House handed Congress its long-awaited AI legislative framework today, and I’ll be honest with you: I went surfing this morning because I felt confident I knew what was going to be in it. Everything…
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Hollywood Is Pulling Up the Drawbridge
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Val Kilmer died in 2025 — but he’s appearing in a new film anyway, resurrected by AI with his family’s blessing. The story of how it happened is surprisingly moving. The story of what it means for everyone who…
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The Poison Is Back.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com The overwhelming smell of gasoline hit me from the parking lot. It’s a horrific smell anyway — volatile organic compounds like propane, butane, pentane, hexane, ethane, and benzene vaporize as soon as they hit…
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DHS Has a Surveillance Shopping List. You're On It.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com A group of hackers has released a massive database from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Industry Partnership, and it reveals the full scope of the AI surveillance apparatus being assembled on...
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Did Meta Connect Children to Predators? (with A.G. Raúl Torrez)
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com As I write this, closing arguments are underway in the California case against Meta and YouTube, one of two bellwether trials that could determine whether thousands of families can hold social media companies...
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The Attack on Those Who Say No to Tech
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Read the full written analysis here: The Trump administration declared Anthropic — maker of the Claude AI — a national security supply chain risk, cutting the company off from federal contracts and signaling to...
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A Silicon Valley Congressman Faces the Shifting Sands of AI
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com You’re about to watch a lawmaker’s thinking shift in real time — and in public. When I first talked to Silicon Valley Congressman Sam Liccardo in February, he was making a very Silicon Valley-friendly argument: we...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
We're in the invisible grip of technology, politics, and our own weirdness. We gotta get better at seeing it. Hosted by veteran journalist Jacob Ward (correspondent for Al Jazeera, PBS, NBC News, and CNN), The Rip Current is your guide to spotting the hidden forces at work in our lives and getting across them safely. Each week we speak to experts in the stuff you didn't know was having an impact on your life, from venture capital to racism to the tried-and-true tactics of bullies, and teach you how to see The Rip Current before it sweeps you out to sea. Read more at TheRipCurrent.com!
www.theripcurrent.com
HOSTED BY
Jacob Ward
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Rip Current have?
The Rip Current currently has 125 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Rip Current about?
We're in the invisible grip of technology, politics, and our own weirdness. We gotta get better at seeing it. Hosted by veteran journalist Jacob Ward (correspondent for Al Jazeera, PBS, NBC News, and CNN), The Rip Current is your guide to spotting the hidden forces at work in our lives and getting...
How often does The Rip Current release new episodes?
The Rip Current publishes regularly with 125 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to The Rip Current?
You can listen to The Rip Current on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Rip Current?
The Rip Current is created and hosted by Jacob Ward.
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