The Rip Current

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.America pioneered the advertising, product design, and behavioral science that has made addiction one of our nation’s biggest industries, after all. From gambling to opioids, America has always been great at getting customers hooked. And yet as a culture, we blame addiction not on the industries that invent these products and push these habits — but on the customers who fall into the trap.Now technology is inventing entirely new forms of addiction, from phone-based sports gambling to our dependence on sycophantic chatbots for company. Dr. Keith Humphreys is a psychiatrist at Stanford, a researcher at the Veterans’ Administration, and has worked for decades to understand drug and alcohol addiction, testifying before congress and working with state and federal officials to navigate the drug-infested waters we all find ourselves in at the moment. But he’s also deeply humane on the subject, and I find him both enlightening and very reassuring. Here’s hoping he helps you understand the difference between habit and addiction the way he’s helped me — have a look at his book Addiction: A Very Short Introduction, which I found fascinating — and whatever you’re grappling with, I hope you take some comfort from this episode. Thanks for listening. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

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 discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

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 discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

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 for an incredibly valuable book — which complements and completes one I'm working on just now about AI and democracy. I was lost without it, but now I'm found! Endless gratitudeMan did that turn my week around. His encouragement helped me get up the courage to launch The Rip Current, and when I started putting a podcast together here I invited him on, and this episode is the result.Thanks for listening to The Rip Current podcast! This episode is available immediately to paid subscribers, and free subscribers get it a week later. Send it to someone in your life who thinks about technology, democracy, or corruption.At the end of my time with NBC News I talked a lot about the notion of “future crimes.” I thought of these as the kinds of misdeeds, made possible by technology, that are clearly intolerable in a civilized society, but fall outside the current bounds of the law. So when people talk about being “originalist” when it comes to the law and legal precedent, it makes me nuts. The idea that the founding fathers should be expected to have known exactly what was coming in the grand American Experiment, much less what new technology would be doing to it today — well, to someone who has covered the unexpected consequences of innovation for all this time, that’s crazy.Lessig agrees, and his life exemplifies this idea. He’s the author of 13 books, which run the gamut from his early belief in the need to rewrite copyright to make culture as open as possible to his latest book, still in the works, that he told me will argue technology has put democracy, not to mention human society, into a terrible dilemma. I found him open and thoughtful, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

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 discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

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 theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

We’re in an upside-down moment, in which there seems to be no cost for lying and no respect for honesty. How did we get here? Jennifer Freyd can explain. Since the 1990s she’s been tracking the misbehavior of public figures and the ways that institutions unwittingly betray us. And in the process she discovered and revealed the secret, specific choreogra… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

The historian and author Andrew Ward, grew up on the South Side of Chicago and then in India before becoming a historian of colonialism and slavery. He’s also my Dad. I think he’s just the person to discuss the weird moment we’re in, when politicians are trying to erase slavery and racism from the national discussion just when we were starting to take s… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

This is the first episode of The Rip Current podcast. Each week I’m going to be interviewing experts in everything from venture capital to the economic impact of slavery to how bullies get the best of us. My first guest is Catherine Bracy, executive director of TechEquity, a nonprofit that examines the ways technology affects equity in areas like labor and housing. She's the author of the new book World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy, in which Bracy argues that the trouble with tech isn't the people, or the products. It's the money. Our conversation ranges from the ways founders are trained by VCs to lie about their companies to the "Blitz Scaling" of Washington to Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Era.For more on these topics, including a look at the VC mindset and where it leads, subscribe at TheRipCurrent.com! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

A beautifully designed bar of soap from Lisbon, Portugal had a lot to teach me about life under dictatorship. From the 1920s to the 1970s, the fascist regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar suppressed free expression, leading artists to pour their creative energies into what they could, including the politically acceptable decorative arts. For me, this bar of soap from Claus Porto - it's gorgeous, and you should buy one - is a symbol of how beauty and artistic distraction repackage themselves to survive oppression, and of how societies before us have leaned into decorative art when nothing else was acceptable. Let’s keep leaning into beauty, but let’s also be conscious of when we begin reshaping beauty to avoid offense, because it can be a symptom of deep national trouble. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe