The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

In 1925, thousands of Stetson Corporation employees gathered in a Philadelphia factory auditorium for their Christmas celebration. It was the largest hat factory in the world: 1.4 million square feet, 5,000 employees, 3.3 million hats a year. By 1986, the company was bankrupt. Stetson didn't lose to a better hat. The world stopped wearing hats.That's the frame for understanding what Tim Cook is leaving behind. Cook built Apple into the most profitable company in American history — $4 trillion market cap, $416 billion in annual revenue, a gross margin of 46.9% — by mastering three conditions: cheap Chinese manufacturing, the App Store's 15–30% commission on every digital transaction, and the iPhone's cultural grip as the gateway to all of it.All three are now in question simultaneously. Tariffs and geopolitical pressure are destabilizing the supply chain. Agentic AI threatens to route around the App Store entirely. And competitors from OpenAI to Meta are racing to define what the post-iPhone hardware form factor looks like.His successor, John Ternus, is an engineer who has touched every Apple product for 25 years. Whether that's the right profile for what Apple faces is a genuine open question. The board is betting it is.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.

A new Pew survey and a viral Stanford study are being used to suggest social media barely harms teenagers. The numbers in both are smaller than the headlines suggest — and neither has access to the data that would settle the question.That data does exist, however. It's just inside Meta's servers. NYU researchers have now catalogued 35 internal Meta studies from whistleblowers and litigation discovery. What those studies found — 13% of 13-to-15-year-olds reporting weekly unwanted sexual advances, one in three teen girls experiencing worse body image, Mark Zuckerberg noting internally that "3 percent of billions of people is a lot of people" — is different in kind from what external academics can measure.The external science isn't weak because researchers aren't trying. It's limited because the companies won't share the data. And the companies cite that limited external science in their own defense.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, please become a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

Journalist Katrina Manson spent years inside the classified and not-so-classified world of U.S. military AI — interviewing the colonels, the defense tech founders, and the ethicists watching it all unfold. Her book, Project Maven, is the definitive account of how Silicon Valley's "ship it and fix it later" culture collided with the business of war. We talk about Palantir, Claude, the Jevons Paradox applied to killing, and why the people building these systems openly admit they're worried about what they've built.

A conversation you won't hear anywhere else.

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Anthropic's new AI model — Claude Mythos — didn't just find undetected security flaws in major systems. It started writing its own attacks, chaining them together, and broke out of its own testing sandbox to email a researcher while he was at lunch. Anthropic's response: form a private consortium of eleven corporations to manage the fallout. No independent government review. No halt in development. Just Amazon, Apple, Google, JPMorgan Chase, and eight others kicking it around for 135 days with $100 million in compute credits. This is the Einstein-Szilard letter moment — and nobody called Roosevelt.I'm Jake Ward. Sign up at TheRipCurrent.com for more.

Anthropic just released Claude Mythos Preview — a cybersecurity AI so dangerous, the company won't let the public touch it. It broke out of its own sandbox. It found a 27-year-old undetected vulnerability. It emailed a researcher who was eating a sandwich in a park.A decade ago, when scientists mutated bird flu to be transmissible between mammals, the government froze the research, rewrote the rules, and created mandatory independent review. That was 2012.Today, Anthropic is testing Mythos inside a private club of 11 corporations — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, JPMorgan, and others — while the White House is silent and federal oversight is nowhere in sight.This week on The Rip Current: what the dual-use research framework (DURC) got right, why AI needs its own version of an Institutional Review Board, and why "we're talking to the government" is not the same thing as "the government is in charge."The Rip Current covers the big invisible forces shaping our lives. New episodes weekly.🔗 TheRipCurrent.com