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The Rip Current

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!

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  • 27 episodes
  • Avg 13 min
  • English

Episodes 27

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  • May 28 · 44 min

    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

  • May 26 · 11 min

    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 systems making decisions about credit, jobs, and welfare benefits. It names data extraction from poor countries as a new form of colonialism. …

  • May 19 · 5 min

    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 the nonprofit-to-profit conversion was a betrayal, whether the company “stole a charity,” as Musk alleged. The jury found Musk filed too late. …

  • May 16 · 19 min

    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 companies aren't trying to expand into China. They're trying to hold onto what they already have — and in most cases, they're losing it anyway. Tim Cook has built Apple's entire supply chain around China. Nvidia has gone from 95% AI chip market share in China to nearly zero. Musk is trying to sell Teslas in a country that views Starlink as a military threat.The world that made Silicon Valley possible — the open-market, borderless-money era that began when China joined the WTO in 2001 — is over. And no amount of diplomatic face time with Xi Jinping, or plane rides with Trump, is going to bring it back. Paid subscribers get early access to this and all my analysis, as well as written reports, including all the source documents. The Rip Current with Jacob Ward is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 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

  • May 13 · 6 min

    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 point-blank whether he tells lies to advance his business interests. Altman’s answers were careful to the point of being revealing: “I believe…

  • May 12 · 14 min

    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 under oath that he spent a year assembling a 52-page dossier on Sam Altman’s conduct, concluding that Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.” That testimony follows sworn statements from former CTO Mira Murati, former board member Helen Toner, and former board member Tasha McCauley — all describing the same pattern. Altman is expected to take the stand today with all of that hanging over him. But here’s the thing: none of that may actually matter for the outcome of this case. I break down what the jury is actually being asked to decide, why Musk’s legal hill is steeper than it looks, and what Sutskever’s extraordinary testimony reveals about the people building the most consequential technology in the world. 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

  • May 6 · 4 min

    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 about a “first-look” review process for new models from the big companies. I spoke with CNN’s Jim Sciutto about it from New York. 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

Showing 21–27 of 27 episodes