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
53episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Why Tim Cook's Apple Era Is Over — And What Comes Next
Apr 2100:08:41Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comPaid 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 in the world: 1.4 million square feet, 5,000 employees, 3.3 million hats a year. By 1986, the company was bankrupt. Stetson didn’t lose to a bet…
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Why Are Social Media's Effects So Hard to Study? Because Only the Companies Can Truly Do It.
Apr 2000:08:36Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comA 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 settle the question.That data does exist, however. It’s just inside Meta’s servers. NYU researchers have now catalogued 35 internal Meta stud…
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How America Built an AI Kill Chain (with Katrina Manson)
Apr 1700:27:23Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comJournalist 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 book, Project Maven, is the definitive account of how Silicon Valley's "ship it and fix it later" culture collided with the business of war. We t…
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Mythos Latest: The AI That Escaped Its Own Cage
Apr 1600:05:50Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comAnthropic'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 a researcher while he was at lunch. Anthropic's response: form a private consortium of eleven corporations to manage the fallout. No independ…
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An A.I. Doomsday Machine...and the Private Club That Has It
Apr 800:07:43Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comAnthropic 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 emailed a researcher who was eating a sandwich in a park.A decade ago, when scientists mutated bird flu to be transmissible between mammals, the g…
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From Popular Science to Substack: Baratunde & Jacob Ward Compare Notes
Apr 700:50:19Tap 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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Tech Companies Already Know When You've Had Enough
Apr 100:08:27Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comThe 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 documents revealed in discovery are doing something no regulator, economist, or congressional hearing has managed to do: they’re letting us re…
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Everything I Said on Six TV Networks Yesterday
Mar 2600:04:38Tap to summarizeYesterday 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 exploitation on its platforms. Two verdicts in two days.I spent the day going from network to network talking about what this means, and the short version is: this is the end of social media as we know it, and the end of childhood as we’ve accepted it.The long version is in the reel above, which pulls from my appearances on CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, PBS NewsHour, ABC Australia, and the BBC. Here’s what I kept coming back to across all of them:The legal theory is new and enormous. This verdict isn’t about what people post. It isn’t even about the algorithm. It’s about the design of the platform itself — like buttons, interest bucketing, the architecture of compulsive use. A jury of 12 people understood that, and held two of the largest companies on Earth responsible for it.We’ve always blamed the addict. Not anymore. We live in a country that blames people for their own addiction, their own obesity, their own bad choices. This jury looked at the design circumstances instead and said: no more. That is a fundamental shift in how America thinks about behavioral harm.The money is about to get very real. $6 million for one plaintiff sounds small for a trillion-dollar company. But there are 350 family cases in the pipeline. 250 school districts. I did the math on air — if you use even the modest $1800-per-teenager judgment from New Mexico across all pending cases, you’re looking at $40 billion. Make it $6 million per, and you’re in a whole new world. And Meta’s insurers just won the right to stop covering them.The internal documents are devastating. Discovery gave us the kind of material a reporter works her whole life to access. The jury saw how these companies talk about kids when they think no one’s listening. It is extraordinary.I’ve been reporting on this subject for more than a decade — through The Loop, through the PBS documentary series Hacking Your Mind, through years of covering these companies up close. Yesterday felt like the moment the rest of the country caught up to what a lot of us have been seeing for a long time.Watch the full reel above. And if you’re not yet a subscriber, this is the kind of coverage The Rip Current exists to deliver.I've spent more than a decade reporting on how platforms shape behavior for profit. The Rip Current is where that reporting lives — investigations, analysis, and the stuff I can't say on TV. Subscribe now. 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 Verdict That Could End Social Media as We Know It (with Nita Farahany)
Mar 2600:12:09Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.comWhen 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 do the whole thing again. Because for the two of us — two members of a relatively small group of folks who’ve argued for years that choices can be powerfully guided by technology, and that the law has to adapt to that reality — this was a very, very big deal.A California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for the harm done to a teenager whose compulsive social media use — driven, the plaintiffs argued, by deliberately addictive design — was a substantial factor in her mental health crisis. Meta took 70% of the liability. YouTube, which has largely flown under the radar, and has long insisted it’s not even a social media platform, took 30%. The jury awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and another $3 million in punitive damages. But as Nita points out, the damages can be much, much larger, for an obscure reason that’s been under-reported.
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The Era of Unaccountable Design Is Over
Mar 2600:10:26Tap to summarizeMy 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 Angeles jury found both Meta and YouTube liable Wednesday for designing platforms that addicted a young woman starting in childhood and contributed to her depression and suicidal thoughts. The jury awarded $3 million in compensatory damages — 70% from Meta, 30% from YouTube — and found that both companies acted with malice, meaning punitive damages are still to come. It’s the first time a jury has held social media companies responsible for addictive design — and it came just one day after a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect children from sexual predators on its platforms. Two verdicts, two states, two legal theories, and the same company found liable in both. More than 1,600 lawsuits are in the pipeline behind this one.I consider this the equivalent of the moment we determined that cigarettes cause cancer, or that cars need seat belts. The whole thesis of The Loop — that we don’t make our own choices most of the time, and that the companies who’ve figured that out are using it to shape behavior at scale — just played out in a courtroom. The jury looked at a plaintiff with a difficult home life and real vulnerabilities, and instead of deciding those vulnerabilities were her problem, decided they shouldn’t be an open playground for a corporation. That’s a fundamental shift. The architecture of choice I’ve been writing about — in this case and in the New Mexico trial — is no longer a faultless landscape of opportunity. It’s something American law can now put a price on. I break it all down in this video. 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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