The Rip Current

AI is about to create an epidemic of addiction in this country and around the world, according to Zachary Gidwitz, founder of OpenRecovery . Could it also be our best shot at fighting back? In this episode of The Rip Current, I discuss the growing issue of addiction in America and the potential for AI tools to combat it with Gidwitz. Together we get into the rise of various forms of addiction, fro...

My recent trip to Brazil happened to coincide with the trial of former president Jair Bolsonaro, and ever since I’ve been looking for the right person to explain how it is that a former military dictatorship is now the kind of democracy that actually brings a former leader to account. In this episode, Cristina Tardaguila, founder of the fact-checking organization Lupa , describes the rise and conv...

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, an AI ethicist and the head of Humane Intelligence , is sick of all this complaining. Not because there isn’t plenty to complain about — in this episode we unpack a host of horrors that AI and the companies who make it are foisting on all of us — but because she believes that the fatalism of AI criticism inadvertently empowers powerful corporations. Dr. Chowdhury, who has wor...

When I first came on his show, Andrew Keen took a dim view of my ideas about how we might fight back against the psychological effects of AI in my 2022 book The Loop , and to be honest: he was right. The “how to fight back” section of the book was thin, largely because I was hanging (and still hang) so much of my hopes on the idea that the courts will save us. So I asked him if he’d like to revisi...

AI ethics consultant Olivia Gambelin has been fighting to make her clients in Silicon Valley understand that good ethics are good business, and to make regulators in Europe see that good business can also have good ethics. It’s a tough gig. Gambelin, who advises both AI companies in Silicon Valley and regulators in Brussels, talks techno-solutionism, the challenges of implementing ethical AI pract...

TikTok is no different than any other social media company (it wants to serve you irresistible content by predicting your tastes algorithmically), and its processes aren't either (it threw spaghetti and money against the wall until it stuck). But its status as a Chinese company, the first globally successful Chinese media export, and a deeply powerful g… This is a public episode. If you'd like to...

AI is making people crazy. And I don’t mean in the sense that it’s driving tech observers like me crazy, with its reckless adoption path and dishonest marketing and screwy incentives. I mean it’s literally making otherwise reasonable people believe that their AI chatbots are lovers, or prisoners, or prophets of hidden wisdom. In this hourlong conversati… This is a public episode. If you'd like to...

Are you ready to get in a tube built by billionaires and stay there for nine months? Ready to live in caves on the other side? And who is in charge of this dreary outpost anyway? In this episode of The Rip Current, David Ariosto, author of Open Space: From Earth to Eternity, the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos and host of the Space Minds podcast, joins Jake to explore the motivations...

OpenAI described its newest model as a pocket full of PhDs, a cancer doula, and a eulogy writer. But behind the headlines are the enormous pressures building on this industry. Here’s a breakdown of what we learned today. 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

As you’ll hear in this episode, I’m considering renaming this whole enterprise — the newsletter and the show — so I’m not hiding what I do behind a needlessly esoteric brand name. The new name I’m considering is the name of a book I’m working on, Great Ideas We Should Not Pursue . So fair warning you may see me roll out a whole new thing in the coming we… This is a public episode. If you'd like to...

Programming note: My apologies to listeners for the weeklong break that I took last week, and the weeklong break I’ll be taking next week. We’ll be back in the saddle the week of July 28th. See you then! Back in 2006, a young interface designer came up with the idea that rather than making people click to another page to continue reading, they should ju… This is a public episode. If you'd like to...

We’ve all experienced loneliness, but could you really describe what it is, and what it does to you, beyond the physical experience of isolation? Before this conversation, I couldn’t. But David Jay has taken the invisible, unnameable effects of loneliness and turned them into an actionable recipe for evaluating and improving friendship and community in … This is a public episode. If you'd like to...

Adam Rogers is a science journalist and the author of two amazing books about how we experience the world. His second, Full Spectrum , is about color. But we're here to discuss his first, Proof: The Science of Booze . Not just booze, though — what it symbolizes about magic and alchemy and history and chaos, and why our relationship to it is so fraught and fun and terrible. Basically what I learned...

Trump's sudden, strange appeal took most political observers by surprise (it broke their necks, frankly), but not Bart Bonikowski. The NYU professor of politics and sociology has been looking at the global rise of populism for over a decade, along with the ideologies and forms of nationalism that help to explain why it's got us all in its grasp at the moment. We talk about the common causes of thi...

When I was writing my book The Loop , I was looking for experts in the ways we misunderstand one another, and several people pointed me at this week’s guest. He and I had an hourlong phone conversation, and while he undoubtedly doesn’t remember it (but is too polite to say so), for me it was a deeply formative experience. The Rip Current is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and...

Duke Professor of Law Nita Farahany has documented the growing industry of companies and devices that try to read your intentions, analyze your mind state, and generally get inside your brain. No, really: in her 2023 book The Battle for Your Brain she documents hundreds of instances in which everyone from employers to authoritarian regimes are hoping to use this stuff on us. And now she's looking...

In Estonia, on the day you’re born, you’re issued a digital ID that will follow you for the rest of your days. It identifies you at the hospital, at the police station, on your taxes, in court, at the morgue. On a recent episode of The Rip Current podcast , former Estonian president Toomas Ilves explained to me that this all-in-one system helped to root out what had been longstanding corruption un...

Paid subscribers to The Rip Current get an early look at this episode of the podcast. Thanks for supporting what we do! The Rip Current is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It used to be that being a tech journalist was about boosterism and gadgetry. Now it’s like reporting inside the Pentagon, if the Pentagon wer...

Paid subscribers to The Rip Current get an early look at this, the ninth episode of the podcast. Thank you for being part of what we do! The Rip Current is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Under its fourth president, Toomas Ilves, Estonia went from a struggling newly liberated democracy to one of the most technol...

I struggled with my own drinking habit for years, and I’m the kind of guy that has to be told to put the goddamn phone down — sometimes by the phone itself. So I think about addiction a great deal, and I find that everyone around me talks about their own habits in terms of addiction. And I decided to bring in an expert on addiction to define what it is, and where it’s headed in this country. Ameri...

When I was writing The Loop: How A.I. is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back , I asked everyone around me what I should be reading. My thesis was that we needed to immediately begin resisting the companies trying to sell us A.I., because they were likely to amplify the worst parts of being human, rather than the best parts. (And that’… This is a public episode. If you'd like to...

Before she was an associate professor at Georgetown and a cofounder of Stanford’s Internet Observatory, which measured the disinformation campaigns at work in multiple presidential elections, Renee DiResta was a new mom at home getting bombarded with anti-vaccine ads on Facebook. “Why are they hitting me with this stuff?” she wondered, and her efforts t… This is a public episode. If you'd like to...

When I was at a particularly despairing place about how quickly the world seemed to be doing exactly what I tried to warn against in my book The Loop: How AI is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back , I got an email out of the blue from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, an icon of my early life thinking about the Internet. We’d never met. Here’s what he wrote me: Thank you fo...

The public duels between celebrities like Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni aren’t just gossip fuel. They’re a vast business, one that’s also a thriving laboratory for experimenting with influence and public perception. Kat Tenbarge reports on these propaganda wars at Spitfire News , where she brings the dogged investigative techniques she honed at NBC New… This is a public episode. If you'd like to...

A special reading from the latest issue of The Rip Current , about the Trump tariffs, the the idiocy of the math, the effects he won’t see coming, and the reaction from CEOs, world leaders, and the markets. 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