The Rise of AI Psychosis (with Morten Rand-Hendricksen)
AI is making people crazy. And I don’t mean in the sense that it’s driving tech observers like me crazy, with its reckless adoption path and dishonest marketing and screwy incentives. I mean it’s literally making otherwise reasonable people believe that their AI chatbots are lovers, or prisoners, or prophets of hidden wisdom. In this hourlong conversation with tech educator Morten Rand-Hendricksen (his TikTok and his YouTube are worth a follow), we try to surround the topic from two sides. Mine is the psychological and ideological side, which I used to frame the thesis of my book The Loop: How A.I. is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back. Morten’s is the bits and bytes that have been assembled to give the impression that this language-mirroring system has somehow developed reasoning, and a personality, and special insight into who you are. He does a tremendous job here explaining why this simulation of companionship is so thin, and so powerful, and so dangerous. And he has some real tactics to share for all of us in fighting back.
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Who Runs Mars? (with David Ariosto)
Are you ready to get in a tube built by billionaires and stay there for nine months? Ready to live in caves on the other side? And who is in charge of this dreary outpost anyway? In this episode of The Rip Current, David Ariosto, author of Open Space: From Earth to Eternity, the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos and host of the Space Minds podcast, joins Jake to explore the motivations behind private and state-funded space travel, the potential for settlements on the Moon and Mars, and the ethical implications of billionaire-led space enterprises. We talk about the fragility of the human body in space, the viability of actually governing space settlements, and the technological advancements driving the space industry. Who really holds the power in the final frontier?00:00 Introduction to Space Exploration00:30 The Rip Current: Big Invisible Forces00:32 The Leap of Faith in Space01:20 Guest Introduction: David Sto03:22 The Commercialization of Space05:57 Technological Advances and Market Potential13:41 Geopolitical Implications of Space Exploration21:50 Human vs. Robotic Space Missions34:24 Facing Death: The Mindset of Test Pilots35:52 Astronaut's Dream: Franklin Chang Diaz's Story37:56 Psychological Impact of Space Travel39:55 Billionaires in Space: Elon Musk and Beyond41:48 NASA's Changing Role in Space Exploration51:17 The Future of Space Colonization59:44 The Vastness of Space and Human Survival01:05:40 Conclusion: The Drive to Explore the Cosmos
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99% of Crypto is a Scam (with Molly White)
Molly White, renowned crypto skeptic and creator of 'Web3 is Going Just Great' has spent the last few years documenting the intricate web of scams, hacks, and enormous losses that pervade the cryptocurrency industry. Molly considers crypto a solution in search of a problem, and of course now it's creating new problems, not least direct digital bribery of the President. In this episode we get into the difference between the technology and the business of crypto, the outrageous corruption it’s making possible, and the unsettling parallels between the current AI hype and past crypto promises. For more of Molly White's work, subscribe to her newsletter Citation Needed!Also, as you’ll hear in this episode, I’m considering renaming this whole enterprise — the newsletter and the show — so I’m not hiding what I do behind a needlessly esoteric brand name. The new name I’m considering is the name of a book I’m working on, Great Ideas We Should Not Pursue. So fair warning you may see me roll out a whole new thing in the coming weeks, don’t panic when you see a new name in your feed!
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How to Be Two-Marshmallow Humans (with Aza Raskin)
Back in 2006, a young interface designer came up with the idea that rather than making people click to another page to continue reading, they should just get an endlessly reloading single page that goes on forever. That "infinite scroll" wound up being a centerpiece of the attention economy — it's how you can scroll mindlessly for hours without taking a break — and that young designer, Aza Raskin, became an activist fighting back against the industry he came up in.Today Raskin is the cofounder, with Tristan Harris, of The Center for Humane Technology, and he and Harris helped create the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which articulated the dangers of social media to the world. Now he's trying to do the same with A.I., and in this hourlong conversation he reveals the cultish enthusiasm, misplaced incentives, and truly catastrophic risks that the technology has brought into the world. He's a gifted communicator on the subject, and has made a new career inventing brilliant ways of bringing it across to the rest of us — you'll hear that here. (He and Harris also host Your Undivided Attention, a podcast on all of this.) We talk about the cult of endless growth that is Silicon Valley, why A.I. is different from anything that's come before it, and his hopes for creating some restraint in a world that he feels is accelerating out of control without it.
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How to Defeat Loneliness (with David Jay)
We’ve all experienced loneliness, but could you really describe what it is, and what it does to you, beyond the physical experience of isolation? Before this conversation, I couldn’t. But David Jay has taken the invisible, unnameable effects of loneliness and turned them into an actionable recipe for evaluating and improving friendship and community in our lives. (He explains it all in his 2024 book Relationality.) It sounds hokey — and he’s the first to admit that we’re doing a terrible job in society of quantifying the value of this stuff — but his work on the subject is quite rigorous, and the stakes are enormous: cultural disconnection, political authoritarianism, a mental and physical health crisis, and a deepening inability to fight our way out of all of it.The good news is he has real advice, and shares it with me here. Please enjoy, and if you like the episode I beg you: share it with someone else!
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.
Veteran journalist Jacob Ward has covered technology, science and business for NBC News, CNN, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and is the former Editor in Chief of Popular Science magazine.
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