Slop World Podcast

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?

Workday's AI Rejected 1.1 Billion Applications. A Federal Court Said That Might Be Illegal.

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

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?

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

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.