Podcast
The Rip Current
Hosted by Jacob Ward · EN
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
www.theripcurrent.com
51episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Here Come AI Romance Scams
4d ago00:09:50Tap to summarizeIn 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 cost was time.On July 31, OpenAI disclosed a scam operation run out of Poipet, Cambodia — a border town linked to forced labor and trafficking — where a cluster of ChatGPT accounts wrote the romance pitches, translated the messages, and handled the administration: shift tracking, handoff notes between managers, the immigration status of the workers being pressed into the job. OpenAI says it found out because WhatsApp tipped them off, not through its own detection.Bandwidth was the one thing holding scam crime back, and AI removes it. Meanwhile the transborder legal system built to prosecute fraud gets slower and harder to coordinate every year. This is what that gap looks like, and why the people supposed to stop it are already behind.Know anyone who’s been the victim of a romance scam? This post is free, feel free to share it with them. 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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"You Did It Before You Considered Whether You Should"
4d ago00:04:52Tap to summarizeI 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 always, for your support, and here’s more context on what we were discussing: 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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Let Us Make A.I. Nudes If We Want, Say Elon Musk's xAI Lawyers
1w ago00:01:01Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comMinnesota’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 each time a user generates a prohibited image. On Monday, Elon Musk’s xAI — now owned by SpaceX — sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison …
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Here's Where Prediction Markets Go Wrong
4w ago00:01:04Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comGabriel 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, and made more than $100,000 doing it. He’s now in settlement talks with regulators, on unpaid leave from the White House (where the president’…
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Revisiting "The Loop"
4w ago00:13:52Tap to summarizeI’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 I have to write a new book) I finished The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back. In it I posed the highly speculative thesis that commercial AI would fundamentally alter our ability to make good decisions, and not in a good way, because our brains are built to offload choices whenever and however we can, and because as my decades of time reporting on the tech industry has taught me, its incentives always drive it to amplifying our worst impulses.As a commenter on TikTok said to me the other day, “The only thing worse than being wrong is being early.” Amen, sister.The Loop was my effort to draw a line between the best and worst parts of being human, so we could sort out which ones we want to allow tech companies to amplify. This summary is free. Keep up with the rest of that fight by subscribing.I’ve been on a jag of speaking gigs — perhaps you’d like to book me yourself? — in which the book’s thesis is finding ever-more-receptive audiences, from boardrooms to professional organizations. Everyone seems to be feeling the malaise of using this stuff, and want to sort out the best way to resist it. So here I’ve broken down the basics of what I argued.Short version: Your brain runs on shortcuts — what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called System 1, the fast-thinking brain that drives your car, picks your lunch, and carries you through the day on autopilot. (System 2, your slow-thinking brain, is for the rare moments of caution, creativity, and mindfulness when you fully engage your decision-making abilities.) That autopilot kept our ancestors alive. It makes moving through our day a light load, cognitively speaking. But it's also at the root of prejudice, bad choices with money, and political and financial manipulation. It's also the exact vulnerability that a system built to make your choices for you is perfectly suited to exploit, because your brain is wired to hand off effort wherever it can.So I make the case for cognitive friction — for what one federal judge described to me as "weak perfection": the idea that a harder, slower process is what keeps a mind strong. Entering a guilty plea is a pain, yes, but that's a good thing, because that choice is permanent, and will change your life — and a system that makes the decision frictionless takes away your chance to put your best thinking into it. That’s the challenge we face in all walks of our cognitive lives from here on out. Let’s get ready to protect what’s important. 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 Fight to Protect You Against AI (with Rep Sara Jacobs)
Jun 2400:25:41Tap to summarizeRep. 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 viable product.”I sat down with her to push on the hard parts: why the bill leans on agency power at the exact moment the Trump administration is stripping it and suing states over their AI laws; what it means that a $140 million super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI’s president, and a Palantir co-founder is spending to beat candidates who back regulation; and why she keeps comparing AI to the early days of commercial aviation.We get into the evidentiary trap that makes algorithmic discrimination so hard to prove, her four-level map for governing AI, her fear of an AI “Fukushima,” and her blunt fallback if Congress does nothing: the states.Paid subscribers get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming one. 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 Lightphone Takes Your Choices Away...to Give You More Freedom (with Joe Hollier)
Jun 1000:00:30Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comJoe 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 2015 to a polarizing reaction: why would you pay for a phone that does less on purpose?Eleven years later, Hollier doesn’t have to answer that q…
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Comparing Notes with Jacob Ward
May 2800:44:36Tap to summarizeThis 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
May 2600:11:18Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comYesterday 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 systems making decisions about credit, jobs, and welfare benefits. It names data extraction from poor countries as a new form of colonialism. …
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Musk Lost in Court. But Who Won, Exactly?
May 1900:05:37Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comA 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 the nonprofit-to-profit conversion was a betrayal, whether the company “stole a charity,” as Musk alleged. The jury found Musk filed too late. …
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