The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Online culture was for years treated as a kid's beat, but Kat Tenbarge of Spitfire News has shown that the tactics and propaganda that are prototyped in the influencer world are now being used to manipulate us all.

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 News and Business Insider to bear on the professional fixers and manipulators that public figures pay to massage our opinion of them.

In this episode of The Rip Current, Tenbarge teaches us about the business of public opinion, and just how cost-effective — and in some cases cheap — it is to mess with your ideas about famous people and their behavior. We also dig into the conservative media machine’s strangely warm reception on Gavin Newsom’s podcast, and why accepted terms like “misogyny” or even “liar” are so hard to get on air.

(Also, if you listen closely you’ll hear the weird coincidence that connects this episode to last week’s conversation with Jennifer Freyd, who coined the term DARVO to describe the common misdirection tactics of accused wrong-doers.)

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…

How do public figures slip out of trouble? Using a time-honored tactic: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The scientist who discovered DARVO has a lot to teach us about the war on truth.

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 choreography by which people accused of bad things fight back, and described it with the acronym DARVO. And once you hear her explain it, you’ll start to see it everywhere.

Freyd and I were fellows together at Stanford University, where she taught me how to look for the denials, attacks, and victim reversals that have now become the daily language of American politics. Here she breaks down her personal experience of betrayal, her decades of research, and how all of it led her to create The Center for Institutional Courage, where she teaches companies, universities, and organizations how to protect, rather than betray, their people.

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 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!

Why are we in such a rush to forget the very thing that made our country what it is? And how do we teach that history to kids while preserving their pride in being American? I asked my Dad.

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. Years later he became my father. 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 stock of it.

I sat down with my Dad in his apartment to talk about his unusual childhood, photographing the Civil Rights movement, and how he fights off stupid arguments about DEI while preserving his sympathy for the arguers.

Andrew Ward is the author of 11 books, including The Slaves’ War, which tells the story of the civil war from the perspective of the very people it was fought over, and Dark Midnight When I Rise, the story of the singing group that introduced Black music to America.

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 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!

I spent the long weekend interviewing technologists at CFPB who left behind the chance to make big money in the private sector so they could work to protect you instead…and got fired for it. The written piece is here, but I wanted to share a few extra takeaways with paid subscribers, including the ridiculousness of accusing these folks of being inefficient, and the self-enrichment potential posed by Elon Musk and his people accessing their competitors’ data inside this agency. Thank you for being part of The Rip Current, and let me know in the chat what you think about the role of a regulator and whether they’re worth protecting. If you were in charge of CFPB, what would you have it looking into?

As ever, if you know someone you think would benefit from a look at the big, invisible forces pulling on us right now, please share or recommend my work — it goes an incredibly long way in helping me draw an audience. Again, I’m so grateful for your support.

This is a weekly audio digest of the latest content, exclusively for paid subscribers to The Rip Current.

This week I write about the jingoistic tech posturing we're going to suffer in the coming weeks, after new Chinese AI models tanked American companies' stocks, and about the current politics of casual destruction and the way profit incentives gobble up everything around them, including your time.