Podcast profile
By Jacob Ward
The Rip Current covers the big, invisible forces carrying us out to sea, from tech to politics to greed to beauty to culture to human weirdness. The currents are strong, but with a little practice we can learn to spot them from the beach, and get across them safely.
Latest episode
22 min
Topics
Major technology platforms, companies, ecosystems, leadership, and competitive behavior.
Current technology products, companies, platforms, research, and industry developments.
Laws, regulation, antitrust, standards, and public policy governing technology.
Formats
Concise summaries of current developments and essential context.
Interpretation, opinion, debate, review, and analytical discussion.
Audience level
Accessible to an informed general listener without professional technology experience.
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Episodes shown — 10 of 25
The public resignation of Jacob Coxon — who told the world his industry is “gambling with our lives” — buried two other chilling warnings from inside the AI industry this week.
Why did Google and Apple change Lake Ontario to Lake America? And why did MapQuest decide not to? On August 27, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America."
By now you know how I felt about it. When I heard, seven days into the Meta trial, that the company would be allowed to settle with the States, I was astounded. “They did what?” I shouted at my phone first thing that morning.
Day two of the multistate trial against Meta in federal court in Oakland, where 29 state attorneys general are asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to reach inside the company and change how Instagram and Facebook work.
Meta's opening statement in Oakland was delivered by Paul Schmidt, a Covington & Burling partner who co-chairs the firm's product liability and mass torts practice. His track record includes trial wins for McKesson in the opioids litigation, Eli Lilly in the Cymbalta cases, and Hoffmann-La Roche in the Accutane trials.
I'm outside the federal courthouse in Oakland, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is hearing what may be the biggest legal threat Meta has ever faced — not just because of the dollar amount, but because a federal judge could order the company to fundamentally change how its products work.
Meta goes to trial in Oakland on Tuesday, August 18, and this one works differently from the two it already lost.
Next week the biggest social media trial yet opens in federal court in Oakland — a couple miles from my house — and I get to bike to the story instead of fly to it. Four state attorneys general (California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey) are trying to prove that Meta built Facebook and Instagram to addict kids.
In 1937, a Texas school exploded because natural gas has no smell — nobody could detect the leak until it killed nearly 300 people, most of them children. Within weeks, Texas passed the first law forcing gas companies to add an odor.
In 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.