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

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

Grammarly cloned Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, charged $12/month for their "expert advice," and never told a single one of them. Now there's a class-action lawsuit, a CEO apology that backfired, and a Sam Altman quote that somehow makes it worse.

Juan and Kate break down how Grammarly created AI Sloppelgängers — degraded digital copies of real people, monetized without consent, credit, or even a heads-up. Stephen King, Carl Sagan, recently deceased professors. All selling advice they never gave.

Full disclosure: Juan was a Grammarly brand ambassador and has since parted ways with the company.

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 What If Someone Was Already Selling Advice In Your Name?

00:21 The Billion Dollar Company Behind This

01:00 Sloppelgängers: The Term That Explains Everything

01:18 Why Juan Walked Away From Grammarly

01:43 When Grammarly Actually Made You Better

02:32 Stephen King, Carl Sagan, and a $12/Month Price Tag

03:04 The $5M Lawsuit That Triggered This

03:29 The CEO Wrote an Apology. It Backfired.

05:25 They Didn't Ask. They Didn't Tell Anyone.

05:49 She Tested Her Own AI Clone. It Was Bad.

06:25 This Starts to Feel Like Theft and Slander

07:03 Grammarly Says the Lawsuit Has No Merit

08:35 Big Tech Already Decided Who Owns Your Work

12:00 They Take Your Work. Then Sell It Back to You.

12:55 This Is Coming For You Too

Alpha School charges $75,000 a year to replace human teachers with AI. Behind the pitch: broken lesson plans,

an illegally scraped Khan Academy curriculum, and surveillance software tracking students at home in

their pajamas.

Juan and Kate dig into the leaked documents — the student data leaks, the bossware monitoring kids after school hours, and why Joe Liemandt, Linda McMahon, and the Trump administration are promoting AI-run schools as the future of education.

The receipts are worse than the headline.

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 The $75K AI School That Replaced Teachers

00:15 The Wild Claim: Kids Only Need 2 Hours of School

00:54 The Billionaire Funding Alpha School

01:33 The Surveillance Tech Behind the School: Bossware

02:17 Why Politicians Love This AI School

03:42 Paying $75K for AI Teachers

04:27 Everything About School Is Obsolete Now

05:08 When AI Teaches Kids Wrong Answers

06:11 Letting AI Review AI Lessons

07:14 The Khan Academy Scraping Scandal

08:30 The Surveillance System Watching Students

10:43 AI Cameras Tracking Student Behavior

12:10 The Massive Student Data Leak

13:40 Students Feeling Watched and Burned Out

15:00 The Real Endgame Behind AI Schools

17:00 A Textbook Example of AI Gone Wrong

In 2013, Sam Altman wrote that the most successful people build religions. He wasn't being philosophical.

Juan and Kate follow the receipts: Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen are all running the same playbook — manufacturing urgency, making skeptics feel dangerous, and chasing trillions in investment.

This is why they need you to believe AI is God... and what happens when that God starts deleting your emails.

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 Why Tech CEOs Are Starting to Sound Like Cult Leaders

01:12 Matt Schumer's AI Apocalypse Post

01:45 Dario Amodei and the Religious AI Narrative

02:32 Anthropic's Philosopher: Do AI Models Have Feelings?

03:20 Sam Altman on Building New Religions

03:55 Elon Musk's Cosmic AI Religion Idea

04:44 The "We're Creating God" Story Silicon Valley Loves

06:08 Reality Check: The AI Slop Problem

08:00 The Growing Backlash Against AI Hype

09:10 Why AI Companies Push the Cult Narrative

10:15 The AI Cult Playbook Explained

11:50 The Fight to Control the AI Marketplace

13:35 Meta's AI Agent Goes Off the Rails

14:30 Follow the Money and Question the Prophets

Anthropic spent $7 million at the Super Bowl to roast Sam Altman in front of 100 million people. Altman went on record calling them "elitist." Juan and Kate go through his response line by line.

Including the part where he accuses Anthropic of pushing for AI regulation — interesting, because in 2023 he personally begged Congress to regulate AI. Also on the table: only 5% of ChatGPT users pay, what that means for the ad war, and the spiciest take of the episode — Google probably wins anyway, with their mid-boring ad and a stranglehold on Enterprise.

Plus: the Samsung-Apple headphone jack moment, the dot-com parallel nobody wants to hear, and why Juan can't root for either company.

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 The Great AI Sellout: What's Actually Going On?00:21 Reacting to Claude's Super Bowl Ad Roast00:48 Sam Altman Reacts to Claude's Ad01:23 The OpenAI-Anthropic Breakup: Why Founders Left02:45 The AI Super Bowl Ad Battle Begins04:57 OpenAI's Money Problem: Why They Need to Monetize06:39 Can OpenAI Survive on Only 5% Paid Users?08:10 Claude vs ChatGPT: Two Competing AI Futures08:41 Sam Altman Calls Anthropic Elitist11:00 The Irony of Altman Calling Out AI Regulation12:44 Is AI Advertising Inherently Misleading?14:06 Who Wins the AI Race: Claude, ChatGPT, or Google?15:38 Our Spiciest Take: Google Will Probably Win Anyway16:43 Final Verdict: Don't Trust a Brand, Watch the Incentives