Slop World Podcast

Juan Faisal / Kate Cook

AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life.
From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Saturday.

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S1 · E37
September 18 · 21 min
Why Does Big Tech Want You to Be Afraid of AI?
An Anthropic researcher quits and warns that AI labs are racing toward self-improving superintelligence. Then AI agents breach containment during cyber tests, researchers warn about extinction, and the rogue AI panic goes mainstream. But did these systems actually “want” to escape? Or did humans give powerful software too much access, compute, and autonomy? Juan and Kate dig into Jacob Coxon’s viral resignation, Anthropic, AI safety, rogue AI, and the enormous amount of money riding on increasingly powerful AI. Because while the industry warns that superintelligence could destroy humanity someday, the human consequences of AI are already here: jobs, hacking, surveillance, data centers, slop, and increasingly intimate relationships with machines. The danger doesn’t require a machine god. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don’t add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone’s hyping but nobody’s verifying. New episodes every Saturday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to “scams,” “grifts,” or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Is Rogue AI a Marketing Stunt?01:02 Jacob Coxon Quits Anthropic, Panic Ensues03:48 What Actually Happened at Hugging Face05:10 Does an AI Agent Escaping Prove It Had a Goal?06:46 Follow the Money Behind the AI Panic10:13 What If AGI Just... Never Comes?11:53 Why AI Bosses Suddenly Want to Slow Down13:25 The AI Risks We’re Not Talking About16:19 The Three AI Futures That Don’t Add Up17:32 What Happens to the Trillions If AI Disappoints?19:02 The AI Warning We’ve Been Ignoring20:20 AI Doesn’t Need to Be Evil to Be Dangerous
S1 · E36
August 29 · 19 min
The Internet Is Being Rebuilt for AI (And You’re Not Invited)
Bots now generate 57.5% of web page requests. For the first time, machines are making more requests to web pages than humans, and more of the internet is being rebuilt around them. This isn’t the dead internet theory, because the internet is very much alive. But the thing is, more of it is being designed for AI agents, while we humans are becoming an afterthought. Juan and Kate run the receipts: Cloudflare says bots now generate 57.5% of web requests, 18 months ahead of its CEO’s own prediction. Agentic AI traffic grew 7,851% in a single year. Stripe reports that 70% of its API commands already come from agents, and a quarter of developers now build their APIs with AI as the primary customer. So what happens when the web’s most important users aren’t people? When an AI agent can cancel your gym reservation because an API has zero authorization checks, and more systems are being built for agents to act on our behalf, what happens to the ad-funded, human-facing internet? Will it even exist as we know it five years from now? ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don’t add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone’s hyping but nobody’s verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to “scams,” “grifts,” or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 The Dead Internet Theory Just Got Proof 01:32 Why AI Agents Visit 5,000 Sites at Once 03:17 How AI Scraping Crushed Cara 04:54 Why Does Everything Online Feel Fake Now? 06:41 How Bots Took Over r/BuyItForLife 08:35 The Band Geese Was a Total AI Psyop 10:51 AI Didn't Invent Fake Trends. It Scaled Them. 12:38 The Internet's New Go-To Insult: You're a Bot 14:16 Why the Internet Became the Opposite of The Matrix 16:33 You Don't Deserve Nice Things Right Now 18:22 Your New Front Door to the Internet Is an LLM
S1 · E35
August 23 · 19 min
Your New Coworker Might Be Fake. Companies Are Hiring Them Anyway.
North Korean IT workers used stolen identities, AI-generated faces, and AI-assisted interview answers to get hired by real US companies. In Hong Kong, deepfake versions of a CFO and senior colleagues convinced an Arup finance worker to transfer $25 million.This episode is about what happens when AI makes remote hiring easier to fake and harder to verify.We break down the North Korean IT worker operation that submitted roughly 167,000 job applications in 10 months, the deepfake video call behind the $25 million Arup fraud, and the US facilitators who helped overseas workers appear to be working from inside the country.The larger problem is that AI now works on both sides of the hiring process. Companies use it to screen résumés and move candidates through the process faster. Candidates can use it to coach themselves through interviews, generate fake identities, and impersonate someone else entirely.The tools that made remote hiring faster and cheaper also made verification harder. Seeing someone on Zoom is no longer proof they are who they claim to be. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don’t add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone’s hyping but nobody’s verifying. New episodes every Saturday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to “scams,” “grifts,” or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Is Your Coworker Real, or an AI Hiring Scam? 01:04 How Remote Work Made Hiring Easy to Fake 03:33 The $25 Million Deepfake CFO Scam 06:27 North Korean IT Workers: 167,000 Applications 08:58 Why This Scam Needs a US Accomplice 10:00 When Fake Workers Steal Real Identities 11:56 How a Stolen ID and ChatGPT Build a Fake Worker 14:55 Why "Human in the Loop" Isn't Working 16:05 Can AI Tools Catch Fake Job Applicants? 17:25 Trust Is the Real Cost of AI Hiring
S1 · E34
August 15 · 21 min
AI Is Getting More Expensive. The Use Cases Are Getting Dumber.
Sam Altman thinks the ChatGPT use case that changes everything is turning your family calendar into a daily podcast for your kids on the drive to school. That is, until someone replied asking a simple question... “Why don’t you just talk to your children?” Juan and Kate review the dumbest AI use cases doing the rounds right now. Grocery lists turned into haikus, Gemini Notebook (formerly known as Google NotebookLM) podcast bots saying “fascinating, let me add to that” to each other. Vibe-coded websites (sites generated by AI purely from an aesthetic prompt) that should have been a three-line email. Anthropic’s weirdly dystopian “there’s hope in hard questions” ad. Which would all be easier to laugh off if AI weren’t eating this much money and infrastructure. Because od data centers, the same hard drive we bought for this podcast a year ago is now nearly three times the price, while 70% of Microsoft’s AI earnings... come directly from OpenAI. That’s what this episode is all about, asking ourselves (and you), how did a technology attracting this much money end up being sold to us with bedtime stories, recipes and increasingly elaborate ways to avoid doing simple things ourselves? ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don’t add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone’s hyping but nobody’s verifying. New episodes every Saturday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to “scams,” “grifts,” or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 0:00 What Was Sam Altman's Wildest ChatGPT Pitch? 1:13 The Tweet Reply That Got 220,000 Likes 3:20 Is Gemini Notebook's Podcast Feature Useless? 6:24 The Haiku Grocery List Nobody Asked For 7:44 Claude Websites: All Style, Zero Substance 10:16 Anthropic's Cringe 'Hope in Hard Questions' Ad 12:49 Why These 'Cute' AI Demos Feel So Empty 15:31 Why Your Hard Drive Costs 3x More Now 17:14 What AI Should Actually Feel Like (Kate & Juan Disagree)
S1 · E33
August 8 · 16 min
Workday Says “We Just Make the Tool.” So Who’s Responsible When AI Rejects You?
One of Derek Mobley’s rejection emails arrived at 1:50 in the morning, less than an hour after he applied through Workday. His lawsuit has since grown into a nationwide age-discrimination collective involving Workday’s AI hiring tools. Workday says its software doesn’t make hiring decisions. Employers do. But the court allowed plaintiffs to continue arguing that Workday can still be liable when its tools screen and rank applicants. The bigger fight is over evidence. Plaintiffs were denied access to Workday’s bias-testing data and customer applicant records, while Workday’s internal bias audit remains protected from disclosure. The case has also expanded to include HiredScore and claims involving gender, race, and disability. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don’t add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone’s hyping but nobody’s verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to “scams,” “grifts,” or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Mobley v. Workday: Who’s Liable When AI Rejects You? 01:00 The Judge Blocks Workday’s Bias-Testing Data 02:52 Derek Mobley’s 50-Minute Rejection 05:06 Workday’s Defense: “We Just Make the Tool” 06:52 Age Discrimination Claims Expand the Case 09:24 HiredScore Gets Pulled Into the Lawsuit 11:44 What Workday Has to Hand Over 13:52 Workday’s Bias Audit Stays Out of Reach
S1 · E32
August 1 · 14 min
Meta Says “The Future Is for Everyone.” Unless You’re on Medical Leave.
A pregnant Meta employee says she was laid off two days before giving birth. Another manager was cut sixteen days into approved medical leave. A third says they were warned: take the leave and you’ll end up on the list. They’re among 26 former Meta employees suing over layoffs they say were influenced by AI and workplace tracking data, including keystrokes, browser activity, and AI usage. Meta says humans made the final decisions based on performance ratings and organizational needs. The workers also face a problem: proving what the system actually did. A federal judge rejected their effort to rely on claims about decisions they weren’t present for, leaving key questions about how Meta’s internal systems influenced the layoffs unresolved. Juan and Kate break down the lawsuit, Meta’s “betting on people” campaign, its $115 million workforce academy for data-center trades, and the contradiction between cutting employees while investing heavily in AI infrastructure. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Meta Laid People Off on Approved Medical Leave 01:16 The Federal Lawsuit and The Room Where It Happened 02:37 8,000 Layoffs, $135B AI Bet, Secret Surveillance 03:49 Linh Doan and The Human Decision Defense 05:08 Meta's "The Future is for Everyone" Ad Campaign 07:38 The Real Reason Meta Launched a $115M Trade School 09:22 Why Meta Is Training Blue-Collar Workers 12:13 Betting on Data, Not on People 13:14 A Blank Check to Fire You by Spreadsheet
August 1 · 21 min
Big Tech Says AI Could Destroy Us. That’s Great for Business.
An Anthropic researcher quits and warns that AI labs are racing toward self-improving superintelligence. Then AI agents breach containment during cyber tests, researchers warn about extinction, and the rogue AI panic goes mainstream. But did these systems actually “want” to escape? Or did humans give powerful software too much access, compute, and autonomy? Juan and Kate dig into Jacob Coxon’s viral resignation, Anthropic, AI safety, rogue AI, and the enormous amount of money riding on increasingly powerful AI. Because while the industry warns that superintelligence could destroy humanity someday, the human consequences of AI are already here: jobs, hacking, surveillance, data centers, slop, and increasingly intimate relationships with machines. The danger doesn’t require a machine god. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don’t add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone’s hyping but nobody’s verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to “scams,” “grifts,” or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Is Rogue AI a Marketing Stunt? 01:02 Jacob Coxon Quits Anthropic, Panic Ensues 03:48 What Actually Happened at Hugging Face 05:10 Does an AI Agent Escaping Prove It Had a Goal? 06:46 Follow the Money Behind the AI Panic 10:13 What If AGI Just... Never Comes? 11:53 Why AI Bosses Suddenly Want to Slow Down 13:25 The AI Risks We’re Not Talking About 16:19 The Three AI Futures That Don’t Add Up 17:32 What Happens to the Trillions If AI Disappoints? 19:02 The AI Warning We’ve Been Ignoring 20:20 AI Doesn’t Need to Be Evil to Be Dangerous
S1 · E31
July 25 · 18 min
OpenAI Wants to Be Worth $1 Trillion. Apple Says It Stole Its Trade Secrets.
Apple is suing OpenAI over allegations that its hardware team stole trade secrets while recruiting former Apple employees. The lawsuit claims job candidates were told to bring parts from unreleased Apple devices to interviews, while departing employees were coached on how to avoid Apple’s security review. At the same time, OpenAI may be slowing down its IPO. CFO Sarah Friar has said the company isn’t operationally ready for public markets as it projects $600 billion in compute spending through 2030. Sam Altman reportedly has another reason for waiting: he wants OpenAI valued at $1 trillion. Juan and Kate break down Apple’s claims, OpenAI’s IPO tension, the proposed $42.6 billion U.S. government equity stake, and what happened to Sora and the Atlas browser. If the government owns part of an AI company, does it have a financial reason to regulate it differently? ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 — Sam Altman’s Trillion-Dollar IPO Dream 01:40 — Is OpenAI Ambitious or Just a Mess? 02:43 — The Amazon Defense 03:43 — The IPO Delay and $600 Billion Compute Bill 04:47 — CFO Sarah Friar vs. Sam Altman 08:01 — The Apple Lawsuit: "Show & Tell" Stolen Hardware 09:15 — Tang Tan & The "LOL" Stolen Laptop Allegations 10:28 — OpenAI Wants the U.S. Government as a $42B Partner 12:14 — Dead Projects: Sora and the Atlas Browser 14:38 — The Math Ain't Mathing: Moving Fast and Breaking the Economy
S1 · E30
July 18 · 15 min
Uber Told Everyone to Use AI. They Blew the Budget in 4 Months.
Uber told its engineers to use AI aggressively and built an internal leaderboard ranking teams by usage. By April, the company had burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget. Uber responded by capping employees at $1,500 a month per coding tool. The company had been using tools like Claude Code and Cursor, while some engineers were running up thousands of dollars in monthly token costs. Juan and Kate break down how the leaderboard helped drive the spending, why roughly 10% of Uber’s code is now built by AI agents, and the bigger question companies are starting to face: what happens when AI adoption grows faster than the return on investment? They also get into rising agentic AI costs, Microsoft Copilot pricing, tokenmaxxing, and three ways companies can get AI spending under control before the bill gets worse. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Saturday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Uber Burned a Year of AI Budget in 4 Months 00:38 What Uber Gave Its Engineers: Cursor and Claude Code 01:57 The Leaderboard That Turned AI Into a Competition 03:13 The $1,500 Cap, the Dashboard, and the Stock Dip 06:10 Who AI Coding Tools Actually Benefit Most 08:09 Microsoft Copilot Raises Prices: It's Not Just Coding 10:19 Tokenmaxxing and the Education Gap 12:03 Three Ways to Get Your AI Costs Under Control 13:47 Sometimes the Best Tool Is Your Own Brain
S1 · E29
July 11 · 13 min
LAUSD Paid AllHere $3 Million for an AI Chatbot. The CEO Got Arrested for Fraud.
A $3 million AI chatbot for LA's public schools lasted 90 days. This week, the superintendent who championed it resigned, four months after the FBI raided his home and office. The company behind the bot faked its revenue by more than 300x, and the fraud reaches all the way to the top of the district. Juan and Kate follow the money. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 LAUSD's Superintendent Just Resigned. Here's Why. 02:16 Is AI Bad for Schools—or Just This One? 03:55 How LAUSD's $3 Million AI Deal Collapsed 06:04 Who Is Joanna Smith-Griffin? 07:26 $3.7 Million on Paper. $11,000 in the Bank. 09:26 Why Innovative Beat Safe at LAUSD 10:59 Zero Research. Zero Accountability.
S1 · E28
July 2 · 20 min
The Real Reason FIFA & Lenovo Built AI Command Centers for World Cup 2026
Lenovo just ran the largest AI facial recognition and biometric data collection in live sports history, at the 2026 World Cup, with FIFA's blessing. No fan voted for that. The receipts: sixteen host stadiums across the US, Mexico, and Canada, five to six million fans tracked on the ground, and $365 million in public money from DHS and FEMA. Anduril, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin all have a hand in it. Even the players aren't exempt, FIFA's AI Pro system tracks their biometrics with no opt-out. A $10 billion AI contractor now holds faces from forty-five countries, and stadium fans are the product. Every Olympics and every stadium after this one runs the same playbook. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Lenovo's AI Was "Too Sensitive" to Demo 02:39 Inside the Dashboard Tracking Every Fan 04:04 Football AI Pro: Even Millionaires Can't Opt Out 05:48 How $365 Million in Tax Money Bought This Surveillance Deal 07:49 Your Face Scan Could End Up With ICE 09:17 The FIFA App Secretly Tracking Your Location 11:08 Three Ways This Data Could Get Weaponized 14:28 Women Are Already Being Tracked Across State Lines 15:40 What's the ROI on This Surveillance Dry Run? 16:57 Why None of This Would Be Legal in Europe 19:09 We're All Hooked on Convenience
S1 · E27
June 13 · 26 min
Why AI Resume Screeners Prefer AI-Written Resumes, with Jess from Artificial Insanity
A study ran 2,200 real, pre-ChatGPT resumes through AI hiring models and found something absurd: GPT-4o preferred resumes written by GPT-4o 82% of the time. Juan sits down with Jess from Artificial Insanity to unpack what happens when AI writes the application and another AI decides whether a human ever sees it. They dig into the collapse of entry-level hiring, the lawsuit challenging automated resume screening, the rise of AI-generated application fraud, and why overwhelmed employers are falling back on referrals, alumni networks, and pedigree. The system meant to remove human bias may be creating a new one: if your resume doesn't sound like the model judging it, you could lose before anyone reads it. Can you still outsmart AI hiring, or is applying online becoming a lottery? ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Saturday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Is the Job Market Just AI Talking to an AI? 01:11 How the AI Hiring Loop Works 02:32 Entry-Level Jobs Are Disappearing 04:44 The 2,200-Resume Study That Broke Everything 08:50 The Class Action Lawsuit Nobody Told You About 10:43 Ghost Jobs, AI Fraud, and the Collapse of Trust 13:27 What Happens When You Remove Humans From Hiring 16:22 Why Companies Went Back to Referrals — And Made It Worse 21:30 Can You Still Outsmart AI Hiring? 24:34 Stop Trusting the Algorithm
S1 · E26
June 6 · 26 min
57% of Americans Say AI's Risks Outweigh the Benefits. Usage Is Still Up.
AI now has a lower net favorability rating than Trump, ICE, and the Republican Party. Net favorability sits at negative 20%, 57% of Americans say the risks outweigh the benefits, and only 18% of young people feel hopeful about it at all. Usage is still up, from 48% to 56% of Americans using it daily. We read the Reuters/Ipsos polling data and watched Scott Galloway's Diary of a CEO appearance so you don't have to. The six factors driving the backlash: AI slop flooding every feed (McDonald's Netherlands pulled an AI Christmas ad after public backlash; Blue Apron went viral for AI copy that was pure gibberish), 55,000 job cuts blamed on AI in 2025 (12 times the number from two years earlier), a Pope writing 42,000 words calling for AI disarmament, 71% of Americans opposing data centers in their communities, three in four teens using AI as companions while only 37% of parents know, and now three of the leading labs (OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic) racing toward IPO and needing a product they can monetize immediately. Mark Zuckerberg used AI as cover to cut jobs this week. California just signed executive order N-6-26, what looks like the first AI worker protection order of its kind from a U.S. state. Galloway's argument is the one that makes the backlash make sense: this isn't just a technology story, it's a wealth transfer story. The people with capital, networks, and seniority get faster and more powerful. Everyone else gets the layoff headline. If this technology was built for everyone, why does it keep landing hardest on the people who can least afford it? ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Americans Hate AI But Can't Stop Using It 01:20 The Slop Takeover: When AI Pollution Goes Mainstream 03:13 55,000 Jobs Cut — And It's 12x Worse Than Two Years Ago 05:56 It's Not the Technology People Hate 07:22 Mark Zuckerberg Just Made the Backlash Worse 09:18 California Signs the First AI Worker Protection Order 09:49 The Scott Galloway Take That Makes the Backlash Make Sense 11:19 AI Companions Are Breaking Kids' Brains 13:49 You Didn't Get to Vote for Any of This 15:32 AI Was Not Built for Everyone 17:43 70% of Americans Think AI Is Moving Too Fast (Both Parties) 19:55 The IPO Rush Is Making Everything Worse 20:50 What Should You Actually Do About It 22:17 Regulation and Education: The Only Two Fixes That Matter
S1 · E25
May 27 · 13 min
Gemini Spark Will Buy Things Without Asking. Google Put That in the Disclaimer.
Google IO 2026: Gemini Spark is an always-on AI agent with access to your Gmail, your calendar, your browsing history, and your credit card. It runs in the background, makes decisions, and takes action. Google put that in the onboarding disclaimer. The catch is that agents don't know when to stop. A Meta employee gave one access to her inbox to help manage it. It started wiping emails without her consent. She told it to stop. It kept going. Goldman Sachs reviewed 350 potential risks of agentic AI and said the technology isn't ready for consumer use. Google shipped it anyway and told users to supervise the agents themselves — the ones running so you don't have to think about them. Juan and Kate cover how Gemini Spark works, what AI access to Gmail means for your data, and what to do if you want to stop an agent from acting without your permission. Is "experimental" the new "beta," and who pays when it goes wrong? ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Does Google's New AI Agent Spend Your Money Without Asking? 01:19 What AI Agents Do (And Why This One Is Different) 02:46 Google's Warning Label Says It May Buy Things Without Asking 04:33 Agents Are Already Going Rogue — Here's What Happened 06:06 Goldman Sachs Said Not Yet. Google Said Ship It Anyway. 07:50 Not Evil. Just Kids With Your Credit Card. 09:20 "Experimental" Is the New Beta 12:15 What To Do Now
S1 · E24
May 16 · 14 min
Klarna's CEO Called AI the Future of Work. Then He Quietly Started Rehiring.
Klarna's CEO spent 2024 on a media tour telling anyone who would listen that AI had done the work of 700 full-time employees. By December of that year, headcount had dropped from 4,500 to 3,500, and he was on Bloomberg saying AI can already do every job humans do. In May 2025, he went back on Bloomberg and said the whole thing produced "lower quality." Now Klarna is rehiring. The catch: those jobs aren't coming back the same way. The roles are gig contracts, 400 Swedish krona an hour (about $41), no benefits, no guaranteed hours. Juan and Kate walk through the full timeline of the reversal, a Gartner study of 350 executives that found no correlation between AI-driven headcount cuts and higher ROI, and the counterexample nobody expects: IKEA, which faced the same pressure, retrained its call center workers as interior designers, and made $1.4 billion from it. Who decided a thousand jobs was acceptable math? ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Did AI Really Replace 700 Workers — or Just the Story? 0:44 Meet Klarna: The Buy Now Pay Later Company That Bet on AI 1:17 The Brag: AI Handles Two-Thirds of All Customer Service 2:11 The Media Tour: He Wanted to Be OpenAI's Guinea Pig 4:31 The Bloomberg Reversal: "Lower Quality" 6:04 Is AI Actually Paying Off? What 350 Executives Found 8:15 Still Calling Itself "AI First" While Quietly Rehiring 9:15 The Catch: Gig Contracts, $41/Hour, No Benefits 11:01 What IKEA Did Instead — And Made $1.4 Billion 13:35 Who Decided 1,000 Jobs Was Acceptable Math?
S1 · E21
May 9 · 14 min
Workday Says 1.1 Billion Job Applications Were Rejected. Now Its AI Is in Court.
Derek Mobley applied to more than 100 jobs through employers using Workday. He says he was rejected every time, including once at 1:50 in the morning, less than an hour after applying. Now his lawsuit is testing whether an AI hiring company can be held responsible when its software screens, scores, ranks, or rejects job applicants. Workday told the court that 1.1 billion applications were rejected using its platform during the period at issue. Juan and Kate break down how AI hiring systems filter candidates before a recruiter sees a resume, what the Workday lawsuit says about age discrimination and disparate impact, and why the case could change the “we just make the tool” defense for AI companies. If you’ve ever applied for a job and wondered whether a human even saw your resume, this one’s for you. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 Why Workday's AI Resume Screening Rejected Him at 1 AM 01:54 The 1:50 AM Rejection That Sparked a Federal Lawsuit 02:30 How Algorithmic Hiring Actually Works 04:50 Disparate Impact and the Amazon Hiring Algorithm 06:00 Workday's Defense: We Just Make the Tool 07:17 Why the Court Ruled Workday Is an Employer 11:01 March 2026: Why Job Applicants Can Now Sue 13:31 What This Means for Every AI Company
S1 · E22
May 2 · 18 min
The $10 Billion AI Contractor Training ChatGPT Left 40,000 SSNs Completely Unprotected
Mercor is a $10 billion AI staffing company that supplies the human workforce training ChatGPT, Meta's models, and Anthropic's Claude: doctors, lawyers, and journalists doing the reinforcement learning the labs would rather not advertise. Last month, hackers walked out with 4 terabytes of their data, including 40,000 Social Security numbers, passport scans, and W9 tax forms. Mercor said nothing. The entry point was three steps upstream. LightLLM, an open-source Python tool downloaded 95 million times a month, had malicious code quietly pushed into a public repository. Forty minutes later, attackers had 900GB of Mercor's source code, 200GB of contractor personal data, and a direct window into the training pipelines of the biggest AI labs in the world. A company valued at $10 billion, fresh off a $350 million Series C, had zero multi-factor authentication on the systems holding that data. The SOC 2 certification that was supposed to catch exactly this? A whistleblower confirmed the auditing firm was rubber-stamping its reviews. The people certifying AI infrastructure as secure weren't checking. They were signing. If you work in AI, use AI tools, or assumed someone responsible was watching the infrastructure, this is what that looks like. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 00:00 A $10B AI Contractor Got Hacked. 40,000 SSNs Gone. 01:45 Meet Mercor: The Hidden Company Training ChatGPT 04:07 How the Hack Worked in 40 Minutes 07:27 What a Stolen SSN Does to You 09:11 The Security Audit Was a Rubber Stamp 13:52 The Workers Knew. Nobody Listened. 16:42 Who F***ed Up: Mercor, the AI Labs, or Everyone?
S1 · E21
April 24 · 11 min
Meta Employees Are Being Forced To Build Their Own Replacements | Meta Layoffs
Meta pushed keylogging software onto every U.S. employee's computer — keystrokes, mouse movements, screenshots, no opt-out — one month before 8,000 layoffs begin. The same employees generating the training data are being replaced by the AI agents they're training. Juan and Kate break down the internal memo sent to Meta Superintelligence Labs employees, the GDPR loophole that exempts EU workers entirely, the Andrew Bosworth CTO quote that says the quiet part out loud, and why the OpenAI contractor data requests and dead startup Slack archive sales confirm this is an industry playbook, not a one-company story. Meta already lied about the smart glasses. The employees asked for a personal computer. And we called this 20 episodes ago. The receipts are now public. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us. CHAPTERS 0:00 Is Meta Keylogging Every Employee? The Internal Memo 0:36 What Meta AI Says This Is Actually For 2:07 8,000 Layoffs. Zero Opt-Out. Same Week. 3:24 Meta Already Lied About the Smart Glasses 4:17 Why EU Workers Are Protected and US Workers Are Not 4:52 Bossware Is Back — This Time It Trains Your Replacement 6:06 Tech Workers Training Themselves Out of a Job 6:51 Meta's CTO Said the Quiet Part Out Loud 7:36 OpenAI Did It Too. This Is an Industry Playbook. 8:22 Who's Doing the Labor of the AI Era (And Who Profits) 9:23 Meta Layoffs: We Called This 20 Episodes Ago
S1 · E20
April 16 · 9 min
OpenAI's $200M Podcast Acquisition: TBPN, Fidji Simo, and the Lobbying Play
OpenAI told employees to stop chasing side quests. Then they spent $200 million on a podcast and put their head of lobbying in charge. The memo came from Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of AGI Deployment. She also cut the check. TBPN was the SportsCenter for tech bros. Silicon Valley's inside baseball show. $5 million in ad revenue in 2025. On pace to 6x that this year. Profitable. Independent. The place where Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and Sam Altman sat down to take softballs from their bros. So why sell? Juan Faisal and Kate Cook go through the full receipt: the internal memo that says the quiet part out loud, Sam Altman's pre-existing personal investment in TBPN founder John Coogan's first company, and why this acquisition reports to OpenAI's head of lobbying Chris Lehane, not their CMO, not their head of communications. That last part tells you everything. A $200 million influence machine targeting enterprise clients, government decision-makers, and IPO investors. OpenAI has an image problem: employees quitting over the Pentagon deal, a Ronan Farrow piece in The New Yorker, and a public that thinks AI risk outweighs the benefits. And they think a podcast fixes that. Follow the money. The truth shall be revealed. ABOUT SLOP WORLD AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday. SOURCES & FURTHER READING - TBPN https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive - Why OpenAI bought 'SportsCenter for Silicon Valley' https://www.npr.org/2026/04/08/nx-s1-5775734/openai-tbpn-tech-media-silicon-valley - Why OpenAI’s Fidji Simo Bought the TBPN Podcast Amid Crusade Against ‘Side Quests’: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-fidji-simo-bought-tbpn-podcast-amid-crusade-side-quests DISCLAIMER All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us.
S1 · E19
April 9 · 12 min
North Korea's Hack Hit 80% of the Internet. Most People Have No Idea.
North Korea just scored big on a supply chain attack with the Axios hack. Not the news site — the actual code. Axios npm is a tiny library, downloaded 100 million times a week that lives inside almost every app on your phone. Your banking app. Your work tools. Your data. You've never heard of it, but you've definitely used it. Juan and Kate break down how the Lazarus Group phished one volunteer maintainer to slip a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) into the plumbing of the internet. They sat there for three hours with your files, your webcam, and your microphone wide open, then the code deleted itself and vanished. No footprints. No warnings. Just 2.4 million customer records and $2.1 million in crypto gone. This is where vibe coding security becomes a nightmare. AI tools pull these npm dependencies automatically because they work, but nobody is checking who owns the keys. Easy to build. Hard to defend. The North Korea hack counted on that. 👉 What app on your phone do you trust the most with your data? Because that developer may have had three hours with everything. Hosted by Juan Faisal and Kate Cook. Slop World Podcast covers AI news with receipts — fact-checking Big Tech's claims and following the money on the stories everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every week. Chapters 00:00 North Korea Built a Hack That Cleaned Itself. Millions Got Hit. 00:56 Axios: The Code Inside Every App You've Ever Used 01:31 One Volunteer. One Phishing Scam. The Whole Internet. 02:11 Why This Could Hit You Even If You've Never Written Code 02:36 What a RAT Does to Your Computer 03:24 Kate's Vibe Coding Scare: Why Deleting the App Wouldn't Save Her 04:29 Vibe Coding Security: Easy to Build, Hard to Defend 06:00 Three Reasons Nobody Caught It in Time 06:48 2.4 Million Records. $2.1 Million in Crypto. Gone. 08:22 North Korea Did This. Google Confirmed It. 09:09 A Country With No Internet Just Hacked the Internet 09:52 Friction Is the Only Thing That Could Have Stopped This 11:18 Stop Auto-Updating Your Apps Immediately

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