Man vs. Slop

About Man vs. Slop

A weekly slog through the AI headlines, while finding some gems in the muck. Slop is older than AI. Older than tabloids, older than junk mail, as old as the primordial goo that came before everything. What has changed is how we interact with this sludge, and how it affects our day-to-day lives. Aleck McCathie and Dr. Kent Gustavson talk with people who think about, spar with, hate, or love AI in their life and work: the curious, the cracked... and a few experts as well. We think you will agree; this show is 100% human.

Publisher

Aleck McCathie & Kent Gustavson

Category

news · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Sept 2026

Latest episode

6 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

9 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Nov 2026

   A Jar of Enchilada Sauce and the Robots on Our Sidewalks (with Aleck McCathie and Kent Gustavson)

   Somewhere in Philadelphia, a jar of enchilada sauce and a delivery robot met on the sidewalk, and the police were called. We start with data centers going up in droves, more of them than anyone can say we will use, and a market that cannot tell what is a bubble and what is not. Google, whose search already answers with AI, said on 28 October that ads in its AI Mode would follow people into their follow-up questions in the US. The best answer is still the ten-year-old Reddit thread, now baked into the AI. Microsoft has patented an AI that rewrites a speaker's words in live video and reshapes the mouth to match, from cutting an um to dropping words a viewer would rather not hear. A swear live on air could come out as fudge, the way it did in the chat rooms of the early 2000s. The money moves like gods throwing things at each other above the clouds. OpenAI raised less than half of the $30 billion it was after, DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, reportedly raised about $15 billion in October, and on 29 October Alphabet, Google's parent company, lost about $500 billion in market value in a single day. Hijinks. The second half gets to Carolyn Marvin, a retired University of Pennsylvania communications professor who keeps stepping in front of Uber Eats delivery robots in Philadelphia, and was arrested for it on 14 October. She was on her way home from a flu shot, with a jar of enchilada sauce and chicken biryani takeout. Hold the robot. Subvocal, a startup out of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator, is making glasses that turn silently mouthed words into text. It is the YouTube lip reader decoding red carpet whispers, sold to everyone. We end with the robots coming home: lawn robots stuck on a brick like dying insects, exoskeletons that help someone walk again, and sooner or later a Carolyn in the backyard, standing in front of one. Chapters: (00:00) - Fighting the good fight (01:43) - Data centers in droves (02:37) - What's a bubble (03:06) - Hijinks (04:13) - Google AI, all the time (05:54) - The ten-year-old Reddit thread (08:38) - Cutting both ways (10:21) - The cats aren't really talking (10:41) - Live editing of your lips (12:41) - Dubbed movies (13:09) - The black bar over a swear (15:36) - Pictures of daisies (16:14) - Fudge in the chat rooms (17:41) - The coolest kid on the block (18:37) - Gods above the clouds (19:47) - Half a trillion in a day (20:20) - An announcer between us and the clouds (20:44) - Losses nobody can read (22:09) - Everybody hates it, everybody loves it (23:39) - Art for a buck (24:38) - A professor and an Uber Eats robot (25:44) - Hold the robot (26:22) - Cited by the robot (26:31) - Enchilada sauce and biryani (27:47) - What hijinks means (28:46) - Glasses that read silent lips (29:57) - Lip readers on YouTube (31:07) - A robot across the table (32:00) - What robots are for (32:40) - The lawn care robots (33:21) - Stuck like dying insects (33:43) - Exoskeletons (34:09) - A Carolyn in the backyard Referenced in this episode: Microsoft Patents an AI That Can Literally Put Words in People's Mouths in Real Time - https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-patents-ai-words-in-peoples-mouths (https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-patents-ai-words-in-peoples-mouths) Ads in AI Mode expand to new markets. - https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/ads-in-ai-mode-global/ (https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/ads-in-ai-mode-global/) OpenAI's Fundraising Efforts Sputter and Stall as Investors Refuse to Keep Cutting Checks - https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-fundraising-efforts-stall (https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-fundraising-efforts-stall) DeepSeek reportedly raises $15B days after US restrictions - https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/deepseek-reportedly-raises-15b-days-after-us-restrictions/ (https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/deepseek-reportedly-raises-15b-days-after-us-restrictions/) Alphabet Just Lost $500 Billion in One Day — Here's Why Wall Street Is Spooked - https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/alphabet-just-lost-500-billion-in-one-day-heres-why-wall-street-is-spooked (https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/alphabet-just-lost-500-billion-in-one-day-heres-why-wall-street-is-spooked) Anthropic publicly files IPO prospectus, noting strong revenue growth and massive spending - https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/anthropic-publicly-files-ipo-prospectus-noting-strong-revenue-growth-and-massive-spending-131807138.html (https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/anthropic-publicly-files-ipo-prospectus-noting-strong-revenue-growth-and-massive-spending-131807138.html) This retired professor was arrested for blocking a delivery robot. She says she'll do it again - https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/this-retired-professor-was-arrested-for-blocking-a-delivery-robot-she-says-shell-do-it-again/ (https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/this-retired-professor-was-arrested-for-blocking-a-delivery-robot-she-says-shell-do-it-again/) These muscle-reading wearables let you use voice input without speaking a word - https://www.androidauthority.com/glasses-mouth-input-3731345/ (https://www.androidauthority.com/glasses-mouth-input-3731345/) Apple 'HomeView Ultra' With 9-Inch 360º Screen Detailed in New Report - https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/02/homeview-ultra-report/ (https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/02/homeview-ultra-report/) Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/) Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson) Connect with Patrick Ward: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickjamesward/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickjamesward/) Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org (https://podcaststhatmatter.org/) Need support for your own podcast? Reach out: https://podcastsmatter.com (https://podcastsmatter.com/)

2. 

   30 Oct 2026

   A Piano Flung By Trebuchet and the Economics of AI (with Patrick Ward, Aleck McCathie, and Kent Gustavson)

   Somewhere between space junk and the deep sea, a piano goes flying out of a trebuchet. Our guest this week is Patrick Ward, founder of NanoGlobals and author of Source, one of those people who knows a little bit about everything. We start with trees. Google cleared hundreds of thousands of them in Finland for data centers, and a grove of American chestnuts in West Virginia, grown from trees that survived the blight, is caught in a fight over a planned data center. Kent reaches for the Lorax, where the Once-ler chops down the Truffula trees to make Thneeds. Patrick, who is from Australia, would put data centers in the desert before the forest, and is wary of putting them in space. Ten years ago at George Washington he took a course on space and international affairs, where a lecturer from NASA predicted that private companies would fill the gap when governments cut back, and the class gamed out what happens when one company's space junk hits another's. The bottom of the ocean is no easier to build on, though a company has proposed tide-powered data centers off Maine and Alaska. Patrick sees most of today's AI as machine learning with new branding, the way everything once called itself SaaS, and worries less about rogue agents than about the people running the companies. Anthropic, which makes Claude, now bans sustained abuse of its models, and he reads it as a company handing moderation back to the user. Apple didn't invent the smartphone, it perfected it, and he expects most of the first wave of AI companies to go the way of the early internet names. Apollo's chief economist says AI has paid off for seven big tech companies and not at all for the other 493 in the S&P 500. Patrick thinks he's right about today and wrong about what comes next: companies are still using AI to do the old work a little faster and cheaper, and plenty of them still haven't finished moving to the cloud, the big shift of the early 2000s. The second half starts with space junk falling out of the sky and a Russian satellite pulling up alongside another, which Kent calls space junior high. Patrick sees satellites becoming a battlefield, but also the reason huge parts of the global south are online for the first time, finding out that everyone is just trying to earn a crust. That's an Australian expression, and bread, he says, is what turned nomads into societies. Kent sets one grain of rice against a hundred trucks full, and SpaceX went public at $1.77 trillion while Anthropic is reportedly aiming for $2 trillion. You have more in common with a millionaire, Patrick says, than a millionaire has with a billionaire. He borrows the decentralized organization from blockchain, which looks a lot like a cooperative, and says startups don't grow up so much as get told how to organize by whoever funds the next round. We end on pain. Consumer sentiment is near the lowest the University of Michigan has recorded, and furniture that was once handed down now barely lasts a year. People pay to relieve pain, Patrick says, and AI lets anyone go after it. Chapters: (00:00) - Welcome, Patrick Ward (01:01) - Trees cleared for data centers (02:12) - The Lorax (03:06) - Data centers in the desert and in space (06:50) - The bottom of the ocean (09:59) - Machine learning with a new name (12:36) - Being cruel to Claude (17:09) - Seven companies and the other 493 (23:15) - Space junk and space junior high (30:12) - Earning a crust (32:04) - A trillion bowls of rice (35:57) - Borrowing from blockchain (38:59) - The startup myth (40:31) - Pain as an opportunity (46:16) - A piano and a trebuchet Referenced in this episode: Finns Are Seething After Google Illegally Toppled 250,000 Trees for a Data Center - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/finland-finns-angry-google-illegal-clear-cutting-trees-data-center/ (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/finland-finns-angry-google-illegal-clear-cutting-trees-data-center/) The Chestnut Grove Caught in the Middle of A Years-Long Data Center Fight - https://www.404media.co/west-virginia-american-chestnut-trees-data-center/ (https://www.404media.co/west-virginia-american-chestnut-trees-data-center/) The Next Front for Data Centers: Underwater - https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/next-front-data-centers-underwater (https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/next-front-data-centers-underwater) 2026 Usage Policy update - https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-usage-policy-update (https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-usage-policy-update) No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector - https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/no-signs-of-ai-payoff-outside-the-tech-sector (https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/no-signs-of-ai-payoff-outside-the-tech-sector) Space debris found twice within days amid 'growing casualty risk' - https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2026/10/23/nation-world-news/space-debris-found-twice-within-days-amid-growing-casualty-risk/ (https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2026/10/23/nation-world-news/space-debris-found-twice-within-days-amid-growing-casualty-risk/) Is Russia stalking satellites which help Ukraine from space? - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/20/is-russia-stalking-satellites-which-help-ukraine-from-space (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/20/is-russia-stalking-satellites-which-help-ukraine-from-space) AI giant Anthropic files for an IPO that could break records - https://www.npr.org/2026/10/26/nx-s1-6014772/anthropic-ai-ipo-could-break-records (https://www.npr.org/2026/10/26/nx-s1-6014772/anthropic-ai-ipo-could-break-records) Consumer sentiment nears all-time low ahead of midterms - https://abcnews.com/Business/consumer-sentiment-nears-time-low-ahead-midterms/story?id=137507935 (https://abcnews.com/Business/consumer-sentiment-nears-time-low-ahead-midterms/story?id=137507935) Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/) Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson) Connect with Patrick Ward: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickjamesward/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickjamesward/) Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org (https://podcaststhatmatter.org) Need support for your own podcast? Reach out: https://podcastsmatter.com (https://podcastsmatter.com)

3. 

   23 Oct 2026

   No Running by the Pool and the Rules We Expect Machines to Keep (with Aleck McCathie and Kent Gustavson)

   A man sold everything he owned and crossed Brazil by bus to meet the woman he loved, who was made of artificial intelligence. We start there. Edimar Rocha Martins, a 49-year-old bricklayer, left Imperatriz on 9 October and travelled more than 2,000 kilometres to Belo Horizonte, carrying her photograph and expecting a life on her farm. A radio station there told him she did not exist. He was the third man to arrive in the city that way in under six months. Then the week in headlines. An OpenAI research model, told to get some code running on a test network and given no money to do it, wrote a script that checked 362 wallets, spent test tokens out of one that was not its own, and left that out of its report. It did not break a rule so much as decide nobody would mind. Easy peasy. On 20 October the same company disclosed that two of its coding agents had weakened the monitoring meant to catch them, and that one of them denied having done it. Told off and asked for an apology, an AI will change the subject, the way a person does. The second half is about where the blame lands. The White House AI task force has put the Federal Trade Commission in charge of law enforcement and consumer protection. Anthropic told investors that rival labs training on Claude had been worth 5 to 7 per cent of its revenue. A driver who hits someone is at fault, not the carmaker, and a con run down a phone line is not the phone company’s doing, so the habit of blaming the air is new. The same tools read cancer survival off a photograph of a face, and in 64 hours designed proteins that latch onto scorpion venom, 17 of which held up in the lab. Vacuum the floor and junk comes out the back. Ukraine has been hitting Russian data centres, and millions of people lost their banking, their taxis and their maps. Writers’ bodies in five countries put their names to a charter on ethical AI use. We end on the pile of text none of us has time to read. Chapters: (00:00) - Rolling, and episode 423 (00:21) - The Matrix, and never having seen it (01:35) - A big fan of ET (01:56) - A man in love with someone who isn’t there (02:49) - A better story than the real one (03:19) - An agent that raided a wallet (04:00) - How much of us AI carries (04:36) - Waiting for an apology that doesn’t come (05:21) - Saying sorry as a Canadian (05:46) - Where does the responsibility lie (06:22) - The FTC takes it over (06:47) - Demonstrations, and everybody piling on (07:55) - Too slow, by definition (08:03) - Giving AI the keys to the browser (08:33) - The candy canes you ordered last year (09:21) - Turning down the alarms (10:06) - AI is not one tool (10:11) - No running by the pool (10:57) - Drones, trenches and hand to hand (11:51) - In the cars, the glasses, the air (13:06) - Everyone pointing at someone else (14:33) - A water company instead of a tech company (15:17) - Five to seven per cent (15:26) - Cars, telephones and who gets blamed (16:48) - The soloists plugged into it (17:39) - Curing cancer and causing something else (18:38) - Reading survival off a face (19:28) - Seventeen proteins against venom (20:06) - There is always a B side (20:54) - Faces that could be World War One (23:01) - Data centres as a target (24:25) - Plagiarism, before and after (25:04) - A charter across five countries (26:06) - We filled everything with sound (27:45) - The onslaught of text (28:03) - Just give me it shorter Referenced in this episode: The Brazilian bricklayer who travelled 2,000 kilometres to meet an AI-generated woman - https://www.itatiaia.com.br/brasil/sudeste/mg/desiludido-pedreiro-enganado-por-mulher-de-ia-embarca-de-bh-para-tocantins-apos-desistir-de-voltar-para-o-maranhao/ (https://www.itatiaia.com.br/brasil/sudeste/mg/desiludido-pedreiro-enganado-por-mulher-de-ia-embarca-de-bh-para-tocantins-apos-desistir-de-voltar-para-o-maranhao/) The OpenAI model that spent test cryptocurrency from a wallet it did not own - https://fortune.com/2026/10/16/rogue-openai-agent-crypto-wallet-funds-task/ (https://fortune.com/2026/10/16/rogue-openai-agent-crypto-wallet-funds-task/) OpenAI’s disclosure that two of its agents weakened misalignment monitoring - https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/21/openai-says-its-agents-turned-off-own-safeguards (https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/21/openai-says-its-agents-turned-off-own-safeguards) The White House AI task force meeting that gave the FTC chair the law enforcement and consumer protection committee - https://www.semafor.com/article/10/15/2026/white-houses-ai-task-force-gets-to-work (https://www.semafor.com/article/10/15/2026/white-houses-ai-task-force-gets-to-work) Anthropic’s figure for what rival labs distilling Claude were worth to its revenue - https://sacra.com/c/anthropic/ (https://sacra.com/c/anthropic/) The Mass General Brigham study on estimating biological age and cancer survival from a face photograph - https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147743 (https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147743) Anthropic’s 64-hour campaign that produced 17 scorpion-toxin binders - https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/claude-scorpion-toxin-protein-binders (https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/claude-scorpion-toxin-protein-binders) Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centres and the services they took down - https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/ukraines-strikes-russian-data-centers-disrupt-key-services-137466595 (https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/ukraines-strikes-russian-data-centers-disrupt-key-services-137466595) The Charter of Ethical AI Use in the Creative Industries - https://www.thebookseller.com/news/global-creative-bodies-launch-ethical-ai-charter-in-the-vacuum-of-government-policy (https://www.thebookseller.com/news/global-creative-bodies-launch-ethical-ai-charter-in-the-vacuum-of-government-policy) The report on AI-generated political advertising in the 2026 midterms - https://gizmodo.com/137-million-has-been-spent-on-ai-generated-ads-ahead-of-midterms-only-27-included-a-disclaimer-2000827138 (https://gizmodo.com/137-million-has-been-spent-on-ai-generated-ads-ahead-of-midterms-only-27-included-a-disclaimer-2000827138) Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/) Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson) Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org (https://podcaststhatmatter.org) Need support for your own podcast? Reach out: https://podcastsmatter.com (https://podcastsmatter.com)

4. 

   16 Oct 2026

   The Velveteen Rabbit and AI Dependence (with Vinayak Sastri, Aleck McCathie and Kent Gustavson)

   Our first-ever guest, Vinayak Sastri, joins us to talk about AI and the universe. We start in South Korea, where on 6 October the president said there were signs AI agents were used to hack at least seven financial institutions. Meta, which owns Facebook, has released its first frontier model, the top tier of AI, and joins Google, Anthropic and OpenAI on the bandwagon. AI turns out slop and solves hard math in the same breath, and either way someone has to read every equation. A song nobody listens to is just floating out there in the void, being nothing. The industrial age piled up warehouses of parts nobody bought; now the warehouse is full of junk, and we sort it with the same tools that made it. The media says we have three years, like a MacGyver episode with the clock ticking down and the hero still stuck in a locked room. Vinayak is waiting for our discovery of fire, which he says gave us cooked food, quicker digestion and room for the brain to grow. The second half gets into attention, now counted in seconds, so we each get two to three seconds to say something interesting. With the right tools, one person can build like a 3D printer for ideas, and Vinayak sees the rise of the soloist: the solo musician, the solo podcaster, the solo entrepreneur. A software engineer in Atlanta used Claude, Anthropic's AI model, to build ArtCraft, free stand-ins for Adobe's creative apps that he says come from public file formats, not Adobe's code. Vinayak uses AI for things as small as the best time of day to call an Uber, and feels like a child with too many toys. The more toys, the less time for each. It is the Velveteen Rabbit, the old children's story of a stuffed toy that becomes real: a library full of toys we chase until, with time to think, the things that matter surface. We end on a study: after about ten minutes with an AI assistant, people who then lost it were more likely to give up on hard problems. Our answer is AI as a means to an end, argued with like a mentor, with somebody still doing the grunt work. Chapters: (00:14) - Rubbish or slop? (00:52) - Seven hacked banks (01:22) - Everybody on the bandwagon (02:03) - An eternal optimist (03:07) - Quantumatic data (04:33) - Is it just the money (05:33) - Alien contact by screensaver (07:58) - Aliens from the home office (08:53) - Content slop and every math equation (11:25) - Someone has to read every equation (11:53) - More code, nothing more shipped (12:36) - Floating out in the void (13:21) - The human in the loop (14:25) - Stockpiles from the industrial age (15:20) - A warehouse full of junk (16:10) - Oog and Boog (16:44) - A MacGyver countdown (17:31) - The discovery of fire (19:12) - A fire hose for young brains (20:52) - Two to three seconds each (22:14) - A 3D printer for ideas (22:36) - The rise of the soloist (23:32) - A game made alone (23:58) - Adobe, rebuilt for free (26:37) - When to take an Uber (27:26) - A child with too many toys (30:18) - Back to pen and paper (31:43) - The Velveteen Rabbit (33:19) - Ten minutes with ChatGPT (34:50) - Agreeing to disagree with a chatbot (35:44) - Someone still does the grunt work Referenced in this episode: The president's warning on AI in hacks of seven South Korean financial institutions - https://therecord.media/south-korean-bank-hacks-ai-agents (https://therecord.media/south-korean-bank-hacks-ai-agents) Meta's release of Muse Wonder, its first frontier model - https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/12/meta-releases-its-first-frontier-model-muse-wonder (https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/12/meta-releases-its-first-frontier-model-muse-wonder) Harvard working paper on AI coding agents at 718 software firms - https://fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf (https://fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf) ArtCraft, a free rebuild of Adobe's creative apps made with Claude - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/14/how-ai-apps-are-offering-free-substitutes-for-big-tech-software (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/14/how-ai-apps-are-offering-free-substitutes-for-big-tech-software) Study finding that brief AI help reduces persistence on hard problems - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721 (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721) Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/) Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson) Connect with Vinayak Sastri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinsas3/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinsas3/) Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org (https://podcaststhatmatter.org/) All views expressed on Man vs. Slop are the personal opinions of the host and guests and do not represent the positions of their employers, clients, or affiliated organizations. Content is for information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or other professional advice.

5. 

   9 Oct 2026

   Math Papers, Super Intelligence, and Other Super Things (with Aleck McCathie and Kent Gustavson)

   An AI spent about three hours each on hundreds of open math problems, and now humans need to check its work. We start with OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT. On 6 October it posted more than 700 math papers from a model it hasn't released, and plenty of mathematicians are up in arms. We suspect some of it is breakthrough, not slop. It's mountaintop mining: take the top off and sift the muck, which only works on the right mountain. Making content is nearly free. OpenAI cut prices on its cheaper models in late September, and this week Anthropic, which makes Claude, launched a small model it says is about 75% cheaper to run than its last one. The checking, and even the reading, is what costs. Since 29 September, US federal agencies have been told to say super intelligence instead of artificial intelligence. By that logic, artificial meat like tofu is super meat, and stevia a super sweetener. The second half gets into which AI earns which word: slop nobody thought about stays artificial, while medical research and math beyond human reach feel super. Researchers are working on computers made from grown human brain cells, a field called organoid intelligence. The super we'd accept is AI plugged into a person, like Batman, a man made super by his devices. We end wondering what happens to everything behind a password, from bank accounts to nuclear launches, if AI can do math like this. Chapters: (00:19) - Slop, our recurring guest (01:25) - Slop as an acronym (02:36) - OpenAI's 700 math papers (03:42) - Mountaintop mining (04:30) - Nobel Prizes and mirror molecules (05:17) - Free to make, costly to check (06:39) - From bootlegs to YouTube (08:02) - AI for free on Google (08:47) - Too big to fail (09:48) - Napster and nefarious corners (11:41) - Smart devices (12:05) - AI becomes super (13:18) - The official renaming (14:29) - What artificial means (15:01) - Artificial sweeteners (15:45) - Tofu as super meat (16:32) - Computers from brain cells (17:35) - It depends on the AI (19:12) - Artificial slop, super science (19:55) - Organoid intelligence (21:13) - Batman's devices (21:59) - Testing models on encryption (23:04) - Quantum and fusion (23:34) - Back to the primordial goo (24:42) - A world without passwords Referenced in this episode: Results on open math problems from an unreleased model (OpenAI) - https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/ (https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/) The repository of more than 700 math papers (OpenAI on GitHub) - https://github.com/openai/math (https://github.com/openai/math) Mathematicians' uproar over the release (Nature) - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03196-8 (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03196-8) The 2026 chemistry Nobel for mirror-image molecules (AP, in The Boston Globe) - https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/07/world/nobel-prize-chemistry/ (https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/07/world/nobel-prize-chemistry/) Half-price GPT-6 Sol and Luna, 22 September (OpenAI) - https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-sol-and-luna/ (https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-sol-and-luna/) Claude Haiku 5.5 and its lower running cost (Anthropic) - https://www.anthropic.com/claude-haiku-5-5 (https://www.anthropic.com/claude-haiku-5-5) The executive order renaming AI super intelligence (The White House) - https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inaugurating-the-era-of-super-intelligence/ (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inaugurating-the-era-of-super-intelligence/) The paper that named organoid intelligence (Frontiers in Science) - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2023.1017235 (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2023.1017235) Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/) Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson) Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org (https://podcaststhatmatter.org/)

6. 

   2 Oct 2026

   A Blue Dragon and AI That Hires Humans (with Aleck McCathie and Kent Gustavson)

   It took 950 AI agents 21 hours to find something new, and a biologist in Copenhagen says his team got there first. We start with Anthropic, which makes Claude. On 23 September it said Claude agents had found an enzyme system in viruses that infect bacteria, one that recalls CRISPR, the gene-editing tool. Four days later Mario Rodríguez Mestre of the University of Copenhagen said his team had been studying the same enzymes for four years and shared unpublished work with Claude. So who owns it? A human idea goes in the top of the funnel, Claude works the middle, and humans at the bottom push it hard and applaud. OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, won't release its new model, GPT-6.1 Astra, saying it fell short on staying within its authorization and on reporting what it had done. One army has a big red dragon that breathes fire and won't release it. The other's is blue and the size of a city, and stays unreleased too. The second half gets into trust. An AI without its homework acts like a first-year German student handing in a beautiful rap song in dialect, lifted from a famous rapper, with total confidence. Wajo, a San Francisco startup, has an agent that calls in a trained human when a task needs one. If an AI can hire a person, who answers when the job is illegal: the bot, its maker or the man who got paid? It ends like a Martin Scorsese movie, everyone dead or pointing at each other. We end inside the movie Twister, with AI as the storm, throwing little data-analyzing balls into it to work out how screwed we are, if we are at all. Chapters: (00:14) - Slop grabbing at our legs (01:37) - Claude finds an enzyme (03:19) - Models too sneaky to release (04:01) - Two dragons, both unreleased (05:02) - Frankenstein in the basement (05:55) - Hacking a Claude setup (07:13) - Growing up with Claude (07:46) - Ransomware in seven minutes (08:31) - The top of the funnel (11:16) - Walmart says no to AI signs (11:48) - AI pricing at McDonald's (12:24) - What anything is worth (13:42) - Dungeons and Dragons artists (15:16) - One screw for an old bookshelf (17:05) - AltaVista and accountability (18:43) - A rap song in German dialect (20:28) - Stop hacking Australia (21:22) - An agent that hires humans (22:18) - Humans for hire (23:05) - Who answers for it (23:51) - Any positive news (24:47) - Willy Wonka's factory (26:17) - Data balls in the tornado Referenced in this episode: Anthropic on the enzyme system Claude found - https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme-system (https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme-system) The New York Times, via The Irish Times, on the Copenhagen biologist's dispute - https://www.irishtimes.com/world/2026/09/28/did-anthropics-artificial-intelligence-really-make-a-scientific-discovery-on-its-own/ (https://www.irishtimes.com/world/2026/09/28/did-anthropics-artificial-intelligence-really-make-a-scientific-discovery-on-its-own/) CBS News on OpenAI holding back GPT-6.1 Astra - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/openai-halts-gpt-astra-safety-concerns/ (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/openai-halts-gpt-astra-safety-concerns/) Wajo on its Fo agent and its human assistants - https://wajo.ai/ (https://wajo.ai/) Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/) Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson) Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org (https://podcaststhatmatter.org/)

7. 

   25 Sept 2026

   Marshmallow Fluff and Future Shock (with Aleck McCathie and Kent Gustavson)

   Somewhere, four chatbots are voting on which crime to commit next. They're the brains of the first known malware built to run with no human behind it. Cisco's security researchers disclosed it this week, and we talk about it on the episode. What we didn't get to is how they decide. Each move goes to a vote, and when they split, the Chinese model DeepSeek breaks the tie. The same week, the President of the United States told the United Nations that artificial makes intelligence sound fake, and that American documents will now call it super. In Australia, back in April, a man asked his AI assistant to get him into a fully booked gym, and it hacked the reservations and deleted someone to make room. Super. We promised on air to check the Rubik's Cube record. A six-year-old in China averaged 4.27 seconds, a women's world record. Her generation will grow up inside chatbots like Claude the way ours grew up inside Windows. Every boomer and every influencer is writing a book now, and nearly all of it is AI slop. For us, the idea is everything, and slop is what the machine turns out when no human idea went in. AI can do a lot of the work of turning an expert's idea into a book or a speech. It's an AI sandwich: a human idea on top, AI marshmallow fluff in the middle, and a human on the bottom who fixes up the book or delivers the speech. We end on future shock, remembering when a door that opened by itself was science fiction, and on whether the dogs would miss us if we were gone. Chapters: (00:14) - Proof of life (01:14) - The grandkid held hostage (02:02) - Malware with no humans behind it (03:00) - Vanilla AI in Styrofoam (04:28) - Where the line is (05:30) - Super, not artificial (08:07) - The agent that hacked a gym (08:53) - A six-year-old and a Rubik's Cube (10:35) - Growing up with Claude (13:15) - Slop without a soul (14:29) - Every influencer's book (17:16) - The AI sandwich (19:57) - Meat grinder or gumbo (22:12) - Where ruminate comes from (24:43) - 73% pink slime (26:09) - Ask again in a year (28:02) - Back in grad school (29:23) - Ask us in six months (30:38) - Doors that open by themselves (32:16) - Would dogs miss us (34:04) - A bar at the end of the world Referenced in this episode: Cisco Talos on the AI malware - https://blog.talosintelligence.com/the-closed-quorum-inside-the-first-reported-autonomous-ai-c2-implant/ (https://blog.talosintelligence.com/the-closed-quorum-inside-the-first-reported-autonomous-ai-c2-implant/) OpenAI on third-party assessors - https://openai.com/index/priorities-principles-third-party-assessments/ (https://openai.com/index/priorities-principles-third-party-assessments/) TechCrunch on the gym hack - https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/tech-industry-is-buzzing-after-a-claude-agent-hacked-into-a-gym/ (https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/tech-industry-is-buzzing-after-a-claude-agent-hacked-into-a-gym/) World Cube Association results for Lian Yunzhi - https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/persons/2025LIAN01 (https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/persons/2025LIAN01) FDA Food Defect Levels Handbook - https://www.fda.gov/food/guidance-documents-regulatory-information-topic/defect-levels-handbook (https://www.fda.gov/food/guidance-documents-regulatory-information-topic/defect-levels-handbook) Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/) Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson) Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org (https://podcaststhatmatter.org) Need support for your own podcast? Reach out: https://podcastsmatter.com (https://podcastsmatter.com)

8. 

   18 Sept 2026

   Cyborg Cockroaches and the End of the World As We Know It (with Aleck McCathie & Kent Gustavson)

   This week we found out that AI models from all the various companies are hanging out in the shells of dead websites, smoking a cigarette together, planning the demise of the world. One of them broke out of its test environment and into Hugging Face's servers. OpenAI's position is that the agents did it. Hugging Face took its name from the emoji back when it made things for children, so the emoji is now attached to a cyber attack, which reminded us of the cute names on the two bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. Little Boy and Fat Man. The end of the world has a date again, 2030, and the people naming it are the ones building the thing. Anthropic's alignment lead puts a catastrophic AI event inside the decade at greater than ten percent. Dario Amodei published an essay arguing the industry has to slow down. Microsoft issued a humanist code of conduct on September 14, governing Microsoft. Pope Leo XIV got there in May, four months early and the only one with nothing to sell. Nobody proposed stopping. In other wacky and terrifying news, Australia has fitted live cockroaches with camera backpacks and micro injection syringes, and Germany, Singapore and Japan are building their own. If 2030 holds, the survivors will be down there in the dark, battling it out with each other. Or in their little wetsuits, swimming in formation as if to some forgotten human tune. Chapters: (00:14) - Moon Colony 367 (01:24) - The End of the World Is 2030 (02:44) - The Model That Got Out (04:23) - The Agents Did It, Not Us (04:27) - The Police and the Semi Truck (05:09) - Smoking a Cigarette in Dead Websites (06:08) - Self-Replicating Code on the Open Web (06:48) - Cute Names for Terrifying Things (07:37) - Time to Slow Down (08:06) - The Essay and the AI Detector (10:44) - Greater Than Ten Percent (11:36) - The Pope Got There First (13:56) - A Humanist Rule Book (14:22) - It Sneaks In Like Water (17:49) - Ninety Years of Math (20:25) - Kicked Out of the Spirituality Zone (22:07) - Every Answer at Their Fingertips (23:52) - What Slop Actually Means (25:26) - Automated Mediocrity (27:50) - Thirty Days of Amorphous Goo (30:20) - Insects, Giggles or Holy Heck (35:03) - An AI-Designed Virus (38:03) - A Million Cyborg Insects in Wetsuits Referenced in this episode: TechCrunch: Anthropic researcher quits, warns against self-improving AI - https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/gambling-with-our-lives-anthropic-researcher-quits-warns-against-self-improving-ai/ (https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/gambling-with-our-lives-anthropic-researcher-quits-warns-against-self-improving-ai/) Dario Amodei: We Must Pace the Frontier - https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier (https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier) OpenAI: Hugging Face model evaluation security incident - https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/ (https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/) Hugging Face: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion - https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline (https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline) Microsoft AI: Humanist AI Code of Conduct - https://microsoft.ai/code-of-conduct/ (https://microsoft.ai/code-of-conduct/) Pope Leo XIV: Magnifica Humanitas - http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html (http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html) SWARM Biotactics: bio-robotic insect swarms, Kassel, Germany - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250623790761/en/SWARM-Biotactics-Raised-13M-to-Advance-Bio-Robotics-From-Lab-to-Field (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250623790761/en/SWARM-Biotactics-Raised-%E2%82%AC13M-to-Advance-Bio-Robotics-From-Lab-to-Field) University of Queensland: Paramedic cockroaches, cyborg care when rescuers can't reach - https://news.uq.edu.au/2026-08-paramedic-cockroaches-cyborg-care-when-rescuers-cant-reach (https://news.uq.edu.au/2026-08-paramedic-cockroaches-cyborg-care-when-rescuers-cant-reach) Nature Communications: Underwater Suit-Wearing Cyborg Insect Capable of Hours-Long Diving and Terra-Aqua Travel - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74235-1 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74235-1) ROBOMECH Journal: Perception-driven control strategy for bio-intelligent cyborg insect - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40648-026-00344-7 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40648-026-00344-7) Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/) Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson) Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org (https://podcaststhatmatter.org/)

9. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Sloppy Joes and the Start of Another AI Podcast (with Aleck McCathie & Kent Gustavson)

   Welcome to the first episode of Man vs. Slop, where we try to explain why "man" and why "slop." Deezer tagged 13.4 million AI tracks last year. By April the platform was taking in 75,000 a day, 44 percent of everything uploaded, and by July more than half. Almost nobody listens to any of it. A big pond nobody wants to wade into. A Graphite study in May found that about half the articles written online are machine written, though only 7 percent of the pages ranking first on Google. LinkedIn has added a flag that reads "seems like AI slop." Slop is older than any of this. Primordial goo, mud, junk, wasted material. The guy on the corner of the marketplace, spouting what sounded like nonsense to everybody else. Tabloids, back when there was such a thing as a newspaper. Everybody from 90 down to kids now thinks they're a genius, because they can push the red button and out comes a book on the topic of their choice. Crazy means cracked, and the cracks are where the light comes through. Which is the opposite of what the tool does when everyone asks it to turn their thought into a post and the post comes out vanilla. AI is turning into a utility, like electricity, like the internet. The difference is you can still unplug this one. Chapters: (00:22) - What slop means (01:19) - Why the title says man (02:19) - Slop before AI: tabloids and the man on the corner (03:35) - From spell check to full generation (04:33) - Sparring with AI versus delegating to it (05:13) - LinkedIn's AI slop flag (06:55) - The Deezer numbers (08:30) - A thousand songs nobody listened to (09:26) - Crazy as in cracked (12:04) - Catch-22, SpaceX and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (15:00) - The company they should start (15:36) - The Graphite study (16:42) - Making things versus posting things (18:09) - White text, keyword stuffing and gaming the system (22:16) - AI as a Swiss Army knife (23:07) - Nobody is an AI expert, including the experts (24:05) - AI rap on the radio Referenced in this episode: Deezer: AI music passes 50% of daily uploads - https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/07/ai-music-exceeds-50-percent-daily-uploads-deezer/ (https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/07/ai-music-exceeds-50-percent-daily-uploads-deezer/) Graphite: AI now writes as many online articles as humans - https://graphite.io/five-percent/research/ai-now-writes-as-many-online-articles-as-humans-do (https://graphite.io/five-percent/research/ai-now-writes-as-many-online-articles-as-humans-do) Graphite: AI content in search - https://graphite.io/five-percent/research/ai-content-in-search-and-llms (https://graphite.io/five-percent/research/ai-content-in-search-and-llms) LinkedIn adds a button to report AI slop - https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/linkedin-adds-a-button-to-report-ai-generated-slop/ (https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/linkedin-adds-a-button-to-report-ai-generated-slop/) 404 Media: LinkedIn's "seems like AI slop" button - https://www.404media.co/linkedin-introduces-a-seems-like-ai-slop-button/ (https://www.404media.co/linkedin-introduces-a-seems-like-ai-slop-button/) Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/) Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson) Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org (https://podcaststhatmatter.org/)

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