The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

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From Popular Science to Substack: Baratunde & Jacob Ward Compare Notes
A recording from Jacob Ward and Life With Machines's live video
 • Jacob Ward and Life With Machines
50:19
Live today at 2:40pm PT with Baratunde Thurston from Life With Machines
We're chopping up all the latest AI news and existential anxiety. Tune in!
 • Jacob Ward
Can Sam Altman Be Trusted?
The New Yorker finally got inside OpenAI. What they found explains a lot about the 13-page manifesto that dropped the same day, and about the small…
 • Jacob Ward
15:26
Sam Altman Would Like to Change the Subject
The day reporters published a 1.5-year investigation into Sam Altman’s honesty, his company, OpenAI, published a manifesto about saving the world…
 • Jacob Ward
AI That Promised Privacy May Have Been Sending Your Conversations to Meta and Google
A new lawsuit against Perplexity AI asks an old question in a new way: if you’re not paying, what exactly are you?
 • Jacob Ward
Transcript: They Already Know When You've Had Enough
The social media verdicts didn't just produce a judgment. They produced a guide to knowing the difference between healthy and unhealthy tech use — one…
 • Jacob Ward
Tech Companies Already Know When You've Had Enough
The social media verdicts show we don't need to draw the line between healthy and unhealthy tech use: the companies have done it for us already.
 • Jacob Ward
16:53

March 2026

Everything I Said on Six TV Networks Yesterday
Yesterday a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for addicting kids by design. I was on CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, PBS NewsHour, Australian ABC, and the BBC…
 • Jacob Ward
4:37
Transcript: The Verdict That Could End Social Media as We Know It (with Nita Farahany)
A conversation with Duke Law's Nita Farahany about the landmark verdict that found Meta and YouTube damaged a teenager's mental health crisis — and what…
 • Jacob Ward
The Verdict That Could End Social Media as We Know It (with Nita Farahany)
Nita Farahany breaks down the L.A. and New Mexico verdicts, and how, after years of trying to articulate the dangers of manipulative design, a jury has…
 • Jacob Ward and Nita Farahany
24:17
The Era of Unaccountable Design Is Over
A Los Angeles jury just found Meta and YouTube liable for engineering addiction in a child. Combined with yesterday's $375 million verdict in New…
 • Jacob Ward
10:25
Transcript: The Era of Unaccountable Design Is Over
A jury just found Meta and YouTube liable for engineering addiction. I've been reporting on this for years. Here's what it means — and the story of a…
 • Jacob Ward
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