OpenAI told employees to stop chasing side quests. Then they spent $200 million on a podcast and put their head of lobbying in charge.

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