The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Gabriel Perez has run Donald Trump’s teleprompter since 2016. According to CFTC investigators, he spent months betting on Kalshi’s “Mentions” market on which words and phrases Trump would use in his own speeches, and made more than $100,000 doing it. He’s now in settlement talks with regulators, on unpaid leave from the White House (where the president’s own stock trades in companies he’s directly influencing is arguably a much deeper form of lever-pulling than anything Perez managed).
Every prediction market scandal before this one was an insider-trading scam, trading on information the rest of the bettors didn’t have: a soldier with classified intel, a Google employee with search data, congressional candidates betting on their own races. Perez operates the device that produces the very words he bet on. Here’s where the world of prediction markets begins to resemble the dangerous world of sports betting, and where reality gets distorted.
Full argument, sourcing, and the sports-betting precedent for what happens next at TheRipCurrent.com

AI will do to our ability to make decisions what GPS did to our sense of direction. That's the argument I made four years ago in The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back. I thought I was at least a few years early. ChatGPT arrived 9 months later.Here I break down the book for you, because its findings keep coming back in new forms with each week's news. Your brain runs on shortcuts — what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called System 1, the fast-thinking brain that drives your car, picks your lunch, and carries you through the day on autopilot. (System 2, your slow-thinking brain, is for the rare moments of caution, creativity, and mindfulness when you fully engage your decision-making abilities.) That autopilot kept our ancestors alive. It makes moving through our day so, so much easier. But it's also at the root of prejudice, bad choices with money, and political and financial manipulation. It's also the exact vulnerability that a system built to make your choices for you is perfectly suited to exploit, because your brain is wired to hand off effort wherever it can.The cost is already showing up. A UC Berkeley professor recently told me he spends most of his courses trying to convince freshmen that there's a real difference between reading a book and reading a chatbot's summary of one. Intake psychiatrists are quietly inventing codes for patients who arrive believing a chatbot's claim that they're Jesus, or a king.So I make the case for cognitive friction — for what one federal judge calls "weak perfection": the idea that a harder, slower process is what keeps a mind strong. Entering a guilty plea is a pain, yes, but that's a good thing, because that choice is permanent, and will change your life — and a system that makes the decision frictionless takes away your chance to put your best thinking into it.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) just introduced the Sectoral AI Governance Act, a bill that would let federal agencies enforce existing laws — on housing, hiring, disability rights, benefits — when an algorithm is the one making the decision. It creates no new crimes. It's what she calls a "minimum viable product."I sat down with her to push on the hard parts: why the bill leans on agency power at the exact moment the Trump administration is stripping it and suing states over their AI laws; what it means that a $140 million super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI's president, and a Palantir co-founder is spending to beat candidates who back regulation; and why she keeps comparing AI to the early days of commercial aviation.We get into the evidentiary trap that makes algorithmic discrimination so hard to prove, her four-level map for governing AI, her fear of an AI "Fukushima," and her blunt fallback if Congress does nothing: the states.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

In 1602, Dutch merchants invented the stock market — and built it so no one who bought in could ever get their money back. Today, that same machine lists on the Nasdaq as SPCX.SpaceX just raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history — nearly triple the previous record. But strip away the size and look at what a share actually buys: no vote that can change anything, money the company keeps permanently, and one man holding 82% of the decisions. That structure wasn't invented by Elon Musk. It was invented four hundred years ago by a company that ran a private army, signed treaties with kings, and secured its monopoly through massacre.This is the story of the Dutch East India Company — the world's first IPO — and what it tells us about the machine being offered to the public today.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

SpaceX goes public this Friday in what could be the largest IPO in the history of capitalism. But before you invest — or find out your 401(k) already has — there's something you should understand about what you're actually buying.Elon Musk's S-1 filing gives him 85.1% of the voting power in the combined SpaceX/xAI company. That means your money goes in, his rules stay permanent.

This isn't a quirk of one founder's ego — it's the fullest expression yet of a two-decade market structure that Google started in 2004, that Meta and Snap refined, and that SpaceX is now applying to a company whose customers include NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and governments fighting active wars.

In this video: the fourth rocket that shouldn't have worked. The profitable cash machine that became the wallet for a money-losing AI race. The compensation package that pays Musk out only if he colonizes Mars. The Danish pension fund and the S&P 500 committee that said no. And the man I watched in a federal courtroom in Oakland — not defending a business decision, but defending his place in history.

A few weeks ago I covered the Musk v. Altman federal trial from the courthouse. What I saw there changed how I read this IPO. The full written analysis — with sourcing, further reading, and everything I couldn't fit here — is at TheRipCurrent.com.