The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Home
Podcast
Notes
Ethics Statement
Archive
About
The Fight to Protect You Against AI (with Rep Sara Jacobs)
Right now, AI is deciding all sorts of things about your life — and no federal agency is truly overseeing it. What would it take to protect you?
 • Jacob Ward
25:40
AI's Bad Night in Seoul
This morning's tech selloff began in Korea, where investors seem to have noticed that the most valuable companies on earth depend on a handful of…
 • Jacob Ward
History’s Biggest IPOs, and What Each One Was Really Selling
SpaceX now tops a very strange list of offerings — a country’s oil, a legal workaround, a bailout resold as a fresh start — and together they map the…
 • Jacob Ward
The World’s First IPO Has a Warning for the World’s Biggest
SpaceX’s $75 billion debut is part of a speculation machine the Dutch built in 1602 — money the company never gives back, a founder no shareholder can…
 • Jacob Ward
The Lightphone Takes Your Choices Away...to Give You More Freedom (with Joe Hollier)
As Americans come to grips with phone addiction — and juries start punishing the companies that push it — the Lightphone is selling you less, for $299…
 • Jacob Ward
44:23
The SpaceX IPO: Your Money, Musk's Kingdom
On Friday, it could become the largest IPO ever, and Elon Musk gets 85.1% of the voting power in the world's first sovereign company. Now we find out…
 • Jacob Ward
The Fog of Going Public
Anthropic and OpenAI are now heading toward trillion-dollar IPOs. Both companies once said the use of AI in war was out of bounds, but military…
 • Jacob Ward
In DC, the OpenAI CEO Must Tell Three Stories at Once
Sam Altman arrives in Washington with terrible publicity, a state lawsuit against him personally, increasingly hostile lawmakers, and the need to show…
 • Jacob Ward
Learn These Words. You're Going to Need Them.
Six terms from cultures that have survived far worse than A.I. layoffs — including one that might just point to a way out.
 • Jacob Ward

May 2026

© 2026 Jacob Ward · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture