Slop World Podcast

Uber told its engineers to use AI as hard as they could and built an internal leaderboard ranking teams by usage. By April the company had burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget, four months into the year.
Now every employee is capped at $1,500 a month per coding tool. The trigger was Uber's own CTO, who reportedly ran up $1,200 in tokens during a single two-hour internal demo. Some individual engineers were spending up to $2,000 a month. Uber's stock dipped about 3% the day the cap was reported.
We walk through what agentic coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor cost when you run them at full speed, why the leaderboard was the mechanism that caused the blowout, and what Uber's president Andrew Macdonald admitted on the Rapid Response podcast when asked to connect the spend to customer benefit. His answer: that link is not there yet. Roughly 10% of Uber's code is now built by AI agents, and the company still can't draw a line from usage to output.
This is not only a coding problem. Microsoft is raising rates on its agentic Copilot tools, and every lab that subsidized your habit is starting to hand you the bill. Juan and Kate close with three things to do about it: assume costs rise near term, put governance in place today, and train your people on picking the right model for the task instead of firing the most expensive one at everything.
Tokenmaxxing, an internal dashboard replacing the leaderboard, and a company that wanted this to pay off more than almost anyone. So where is the return on investment?
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 Uber Burned a Year of AI Budget in 4 Months
00:38 What Uber Gave Its Engineers: Cursor and Claude Code
01:57 The Leaderboard That Turned AI Into a Competition
03:13 The $1,500 Cap, the Dashboard, and the Stock Dip
06:10 Who AI Coding Tools Actually Benefit Most
08:09 Microsoft Copilot Raises Prices: It's Not Just Coding
10:19 Tokenmaxxing and the Education Gap
12:03 Three Ways to Get Your AI Costs Under Control
13:47 Sometimes the Best Tool Is Your Own Brain

A $3 million AI chatbot for LA's public schools lasted 90 days. This week, the superintendent who championed it resigned, four months after the FBI raided his home and office. The company behind the bot faked its revenue by more than 300x, and the fraud reaches all the way to the top of the district. Juan and Kate follow the money.

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 LAUSD's Superintendent Just Resigned. Here's Why.
02:16 Is AI Bad for Schools—or Just This One?
03:55 How LAUSD's $3 Million AI Deal Collapsed
06:04 Who Is Joanna Smith-Griffin?
07:26 $3.7 Million on Paper. $11,000 in the Bank.
09:26 Why Innovative Beat Safe at LAUSD
10:59 Zero Research. Zero Accountability.

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

88% of companies now use AI to screen resumes. A University of Maryland study ran 2,200 real pre-ChatGPT resumes through GPT-4o, Gemini, and Claude and found AI screening tools prefer AI-written applications 82% of the time. The job market is now an AI reading an AI, and the humans in between are getting filtered out.
Juan sits down with Jess from Artificial Insanity to go through the receipts. Entry-level roles in tech, legal, HR, and accounting are down nearly 50% since 2024. Anthropic's own research shows workers aged 22 to 25 are measurably less likely to get hired into AI-exposed jobs. A California class action is suing AI hiring software to force applicant tracking systems to disclose their scoring criteria. And 67% of HR leaders say AI applications have made hiring slower and more fraudulent, not faster or fairer.
The workaround companies landed on? Referrals. Alumni networks. Ivy League pedigree. A gatekeeping system that was supposed to be dead is back, now running on top of the one that was supposed to replace it.
Can you still outsmart AI hiring, or is the game already over?

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