Slop World Podcast

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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.

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