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All Episodes

The Rip Current — 101 episodes

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Title
1

Sam Altman Under Oath

2

Sam Altman's Own Hero Calls Him a Liar. Now He Faces a Jury.

3

Jake on CNN: The White House Reverses Course on A.I. Regulation

4

Musk vs Altman: What I've Seen So Far

5

Juicy A.I. Billionaire Drama Exposed

6

Nine People in Oakland Hold More Power Over A.I. Than Congress

7

Why U.S. Spies Are Using Banned A.I.

8

Why Tim Cook's Apple Era Is Over — And What Comes Next

9

Why Are Social Media's Effects So Hard to Study? Because Only the Companies Can Truly Do It.

10

How America Built an AI Kill Chain (with Katrina Manson)

11

Mythos Latest: The AI That Escaped Its Own Cage

12

An A.I. Doomsday Machine...and the Private Club That Has It

13

From Popular Science to Substack: Baratunde & Jacob Ward Compare Notes

14

Tech Companies Already Know When You've Had Enough

15

Everything I Said on Six TV Networks Yesterday

16

The Verdict That Could End Social Media as We Know It (with Nita Farahany)

17

The Era of Unaccountable Design Is Over

18

🚨 BREAKING: Meta just lost.

19

Is America Ready for "Behavioral Harm"?

20

The AI Industry Got What It Wanted Today...Again

21

Hollywood Is Pulling Up the Drawbridge

22

The Poison Is Back.

23

DHS Has a Surveillance Shopping List. You're On It.

24

Did Meta Connect Children to Predators? (with A.G. Raúl Torrez)

25

The Attack on Those Who Say No to Tech

26

A Silicon Valley Congressman Faces the Shifting Sands of AI

27

Gaza was the Beta Test. Iran is the Product Launch.

28

I Went on CNN Tonight to Talk About the Anthropic Ban

29

What Anthropic Doesn't Want the Pentagon to Have

30

State of the Union: Tech Anxiety Edition

31

Jake on CNN: The Pentagon Just Told the World's Most Cautious AI Company to Stop Being Cautious

32

Anthropic's CEO Built an AI With Ethics. The Pentagon Just Told Him to Drop Them.

33

Big Tech Accountability is Having a Big February

34

Moral Panic or Public Health Crisis? A Real Debate About Kids and Screens

35

Zuckerberg Was Served at the Courthouse Door. Here's What That Means.

36

Zuckerberg Under Oath (and What I Couldn't Say on TV)

37

The Social Media Addiction Trial Explained

38

Social Media's Big Tobacco Moment

39

Why ICE Agents Wear Masks: Inside the Billion-Dollar Surveillance System Targeting Us All

40

AI Is Getting People Fired — Even Though It’s Not Ready

41

Big Tech Knew It Was Harming Kids — Newly Unsealed Documents Prove It

42

We're a Match Flare in an Infinite Darkness — And We're Wasting It Fighting Each Other

43

Wells Fargo Is Firing Thousands of Workers Because of AI — And Bank Tellers Are Unionizing for the First Time Ever

44

Davos Is Just a High School Reunion — And AI Companies are the Cool Kids

45

Robots Are Coming for Factory Jobs — and No One Voted on It

46

Humans are Tribal and Judgy, and AI is Exploiting It (with Yarrow Dunham)

47

Every Oil Empire Thinks This Time Will Be Different.

48

Why So Many People Hate AI — and Why 2026 Is the Breaking Point

49

Did Weed Just Escape the Culture War?

50

AI Has Us Lying to One Another (and It's Changing How We Think)

51

AI Data Centers Are Draining Our Resources — and Making Strange Political Allies

52

Jake on PBS: Is This the End of A.I. Laws?

53

AI Isn’t Just a Money Risk Anymore — It’s Bigger than That

54

Trump's Executive Order Gives the AI Industry What It Wants.

55

AI Is Even More Biased Than We Are: Mahzarin Banaji on the Disturbing Truth Behind LLMs

56

Australia Just Rebooted Childhood — And the World Is Watching

57

AI is Creating a ‘Hive Mind' — Scientists Just Proved It

58

Jake on CBS News: OpenAI's Fight to "Make It Irresistible"

59

OpenAI Declares "Code Red" — And Takes Aim at Your Brain

60

Big Tech Got Its Government Back

61

AI Distortion Is Here — And It’s Already Warping Us All

62

Insurers Are Backing Away From A.I.—and That Should Scare You More Than Any Sci-Fi Predictions

63

The Executive Order That Would End AI Regulation in America

64

When AI Stops Being About Jobs — and Starts Being About Us

65

The Great AI Overbuild: From Tulsa’s Empty Highways to Britain’s Railway Mania to Data Centers in Space

66

Mapping the AI Power Shift: Buffett’s Big Bet, Thiel’s Exit, Meta’s Language Play, and a Drunk Robot in Moscow

67

Is America Ready to Fight Big Tech? (with Sacha Haworth)

68

Can Journalism Survive? (With UC Berkeley Journalism Dean Michael Bolden)

69

BONUS EPISODE: Urgent Futures Podcast

70

AI Addiction is Coming (with Zachary Gidwitz)

71

Brazil is an Alternate Universe (with Cristina Tardaguila)

72

Is AI Pessimism Feeding the Powerful? (with Rumman Chowdhury)

73

Bonus Episode: Jake on Andrew Keen's Podcast

74

Can AI Be Ethical? (with Olivia Gambelin)

75

The War Over TikTok (with Emily Baker-White)

76

What is AI Psychosis? (with Morten Rand-Hendricksen)

77

T-Minus $67 Million per Launch (with David Ariosto)

78

What GPT-5 Really Represents

79

99% of Crypto is a Scam (with Molly White)

80

How to Be Two-Marshmallow Humans (with Aza Raskin)

81

How to Defeat Loneliness (with David Jay)

82

The Life and Death of Booze (with Adam Rogers)

83

The Trump Moment is Global (with Bart Bonikowski)

84

An Expert in Violence Explains the Path to Peace (with Lord John Alderdice)

85

The Battle for Your Brain (with Nita Farahany)

86

An All-American Surveillance System Is Coming

87

Why Tech People Hate Us Journalists (with Paris Martineau)

88

How to Kill Corruption With Technology (with President of Estonia Toomas Ilves)

89

Ep 08: Addiction in America (with Keith Humphreys)

90

Ep 07: Legitimacy is the Best You Can Hope For (with John Patty and Elizabeth Penn)

91

Ep 06: Renee DiResta on Our Invisible Rulers and Building a Credibility Counterculture

92

EP 05: Lawrence Lessig on Corruption, AI, and the Need to Rethink Everything

93

Ep 04: Kat Tenbarge on Misinformation, Media, and How Influencers Work You

94

Bonus Episode: The Tariff Hand Grenade

95

Ep 03: Jennifer Freyd on DARVO and the Language of Betrayal

96

Ep 02: Historian Andrew Ward on Slavery and DEI

97

The Rip Current Ep 01: Catherine Bracy on Venture Capital and How It's Eating the Economy

98

Unboxing Fascism

99

Breakdown: The Scams Headed Your Way

100

The Rip Current Weekly Debrief // Casual destruction and Chinese AI

101

Lessons from 10 Years of Wildfires