One CEO Blamed AI for Layoffs. Then They All Did.

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

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Episoder(34)

You Don’t Need AI for That: Sam Altman and the Dumbest AI Use Cases

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Workday’s AI Hiring Lawsuit Is Testing the “Just a Tool” Defense

One of Derek Mobley’s rejection emails arrived at 1:50 in the morning, less than an hour after he applied through Workday. His lawsuit has since grown into a nationwide age-discrimination collective i...

8 Aug 16min

Meta AI Layoff Lawsuit: Workers Can’t See How the Algorithm Was Used

A pregnant Meta employee says she was laid off two days before giving birth. Another manager was cut sixteen days into approved medical leave. A third says they were warned: take the leave and you’ll ...

1 Aug 14min

Apple Sues OpenAI as Sam Altman Chases a $1 Trillion Valuation

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25 Jul 18min

Uber Told Everyone to Use AI. They Blew the Budget in 4 Months.

Uber told its engineers to use AI aggressively and built an internal leaderboard ranking teams by usage. By April, the company had burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget.Uber responded by cap...

18 Jul 15min

LAUSD Paid AllHere $3 Million for an AI Chatbot. The CEO Got Arrested for Fraud.

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 b...

11 Jul 13min

The Real Reason FIFA & Lenovo Built AI Command Centers for World Cup 2026

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 st...

2 Jul 20min

Why AI Resume Screeners Prefer AI-Written Resumes, with Jess from Artificial Insanity

A study ran 2,200 real, pre-ChatGPT resumes through AI hiring models and found something absurd: GPT-4o preferred resumes written by GPT-4o 82% of the time.Juan sits down with Jess from Artificial Ins...

13 Jun 26min