Slop World Podcast

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 leaderboa...

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 mak...

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,...

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-genera...

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 dr...

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 kep...

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. Th...

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 perio...

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 upstr...

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 Boswor...

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, an...

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 Acce...

OpenAI shut down Sora six months after launch. The numbers tell the whole story: $5 billion in annual compute costs, $2.1 million in lifetime revenue, a deepfake crisis no guardrail could contain, and an IPO clock that made

shutting it down the only rational move.

Juan and Kate break down the full collapse — the Disney deal that evaporated before a single dollar changed hands, the celebrity lawsuits, the SAG-AFTRA pushback, an...

160 official layoff filings. Zero cited AI. So why is every CEO suddenly blaming it?

Researchers reviewed 160 NY State layoff filings — Amazon, Goldman Sachs, all of them — and not one cited AI as the reason. The real drivers: pandemic over-hiring, rising interest rates, and a stock market that rewards the framing.

Juan and Kate follow the paper trail: Jack Dorsey cutting half of Block's workforce after tripling headcount...

Grammarly built AI clones of Stephen King, Carl Sagan, and hundreds of journalists, then charged users $12 a month for "expert writing feedback" from those clones. Not one of those writers consented, was paid, or was even told their name and voice were being sold. Some tested their own AI clones and found them giving advice bad enough to damage their professional reputations. The company's response: email us to be removed from some...

Alpha School charges up to $75,000 a year for an AI-first education where kids do their core academics in two hours a day. Leaked documents show employees flagged AI-generated lessons with broken questions, were told to use personal emails while scraping sites like Khan Academy, and monitored students through webcams at home.

Behind the school is Joe Liemandt, a billionaire whose companies built software to track workers. MacKenzie ...