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 over 100 jobs through Workday's hiring system between 2017 and 2024. He was rejected every single time. According to Workday's own court filings, he wasn't the only one. The software has processed 1.1 billion rejections. One point one billion.

A federal judge ruled in May 2025 that Workday isn't just a software vendor in this situation. The court found them to be an "agent" of the employer, which means they can be sued directly for how their tools screen, score, and reject candidates. That's the first time a federal court has said that about an AI company. The "we just make the tool" defense is gone.

Juan and Kate break down the three-step AI hiring pipeline most applicants never see, how a 1:50 a.m. rejection timestamp became a federal court exhibit, and why the underlying legal theory has actually been on the books since 1971. The law didn't change. It just finally caught up.

If you're over 40 and you've been applying to jobs at Fortune 500 companies since 2020, you may be eligible to join the collective action. The opt-in deadline was March 7, 2026. It's already passed.

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 Meta's Internal Memo: Every Keystroke, No Opt-Out

0:36 What Meta Says This Is Actually For

2:07 8,000 Layoffs, Zero Opt-Out, Two Memos

3:24 Meta Already Lied About the Smart Glasses. Why Believe Them Now?

4:17 Why EU Employees 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 The CTO Quote That Confirms the Automation Plan

7:36 OpenAI Did It Too. This Is an Industry Strategy.

8:22 Who Is Doing the Labor of the AI Era (And Who Profits)

9:23 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

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, and why OpenAI's only clean exit was to shut it all down before going public.

👉 Was Disney lucky, or just smart enough not to have paid yet?

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 OpenAI Shut Down Sora Six Months After Launch

01:07 What Sora Actually Was

02:35 Was Sora Ever About Entertainment or Just Data?

03:07 The Compute Crisis: $5 Billion a Year

04:10 The Deepfake Problem OpenAI Couldn't Control

04:47 Brian Cranston and SAG-AFTRA Pushed Back

06:04 Sora Made $2.1 Million. OpenAI Spent $5 Billion.

06:15 Why OpenAI Needed to Clean House Before the IPO

08:01 Disney's Billion-Dollar Bet on a Dead Product

09:48 Disney's New CEO Inherited a Deal He Never Liked

11:06 We Called This — Here Are the Receipts

13:15 OpenAI's Only Way Out Is Government Contracts

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 during

COVID, Zuckerberg claiming AI saves money while committing $65 billion to AI infrastructure, and the copycat effect where one high-profile announcement triggers a wave of CEOs rushing to say the same thing before their next earnings call.

Plus: what happens when tokens become part of your job offer and your company starts tracking how many prompts you run. That leaderboard is also a layoff list.

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 AI Layoffs 2026: The Story They Want You to Believe

00:40 Sam Altman Called It AI-Washing (Then Changed His Mind)

01:32 Jack Dorsey, Block, and the Pandemic Headcount Trick

02:40 The Most-Quoted AI Researcher Says "No One Knows Anything"

03:25 Why Saying "AI Did It" Makes Your Stock Pop

04:45 The Copycat Effect: One CEO Pulls the Trigger for All

05:58 Andrew Yang Named This: The AI Layoff Contagion

06:48 Zuckerberg Saves Money by Spending $65B on AI

07:27 Employee Morale Doesn't Show Up on the Balance Sheet

08:52 Congrats, You Survived the Layoff. Now Do Everyone's Job.

10:02 Digg Came Back. AI Bots Killed It in Weeks.

10:37 The Future of Work: One Person = One Team?

13:08 The Token Economy and the End of Cheap AI

14:26 Tokens Are the New Benefits

15:10 If Your Company Tracks Your AI Use, Layoffs Are Next