The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - What This Week Revealed About Power

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

This week, the biggest stories all pointed to the same question: is America becoming more efficient — and more fragile at the same time? George Hahn unpacks the AI productivity boom, the growing cognitive tradeoffs of automation, China’s increasing leverage over the U.S., and the economic fallout from the Iran conflict. Got thoughts on The Week? Email us at [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week, unexplainant to me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics.

New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Unexplainable, the Black Plague didn't happen exactly how you'd think. Like, among other things, it wasn't just about rats. We can look at other kinds of mammals. Camels, it turns out, are pretty good plague transmitters. Camels! Sheep, potentially, as well.

Follow unexplainable wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Sue Bird here. This week on a touch more, I'm celebrating the start of the WMBA by breaking down what I saw an opening weekend. And we have NBC's one and only Maria Taylor to talk about her boundary-breaking career in sports journalism, the NBA playoffs, and her thoughts on which teams have the best chance of making the WMBA finals. Check out the latest episode of a touch more wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Welcome to the first episode of The Week from Prop G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, May 15th.

This week, the story was about the tradeoffs nobody wants to admit. AI is making companies more efficient, but potentially making workers less valuable. Inflation is rising again, just as Americans are running out of patience. And with Trump and Xi Jinping's summit underway, long-time China analysts are starting to wonder whether the balance of power has quietly shifted. Let's get into it. For the last two years, the conversation around AI has focused on one question. Will AI replace workers?

This week, Silicon Valley started asking something else. What if companies need fewer managers, too? On Monday's Profi markets, Ed Elson broke down how companies including Coinbase, PayPal, and Block are already restructuring around AI. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced plans to cut roughly 14% of staff last week, citing both market volatility and the speed at which AI is reshaping the business. PayPal made a similar move, saying it plans to reduce its workforce by 20% over the next two to three years because of AI. And perhaps the clearest expression of this new thinking came from Jack Dorsey, who said, quote, most companies using AI today are giving everyone a co-pilot, which makes the existing structure world. slightly better without changing it. We're off to something different, a company built as an

intelligence with no need for a permanent middle management layer. Jack Dorsey said this after Block, the company that owns Square, Cash App and After Pay, cut 4,000 employees in February. That's 40% of its workforce. And while tech executives talk about productivity gains, others are wondering what happens when people stop doing the actual thinking themselves? In other words, is AI making us stupid? On Tuesday's Prop G. Markets, Cal Newport and Derek Thompson discussed whether AI is quietly weakening our cognitive abilities. Well, I think AI has the real capacity to make us dumber. It's new enough and usage of it is still growing that we're not seeing the major effects yet, but I fear that we are going to see it. And the way I conceptualized this world of cognitive fitness is that social media and highly engaging tools on our phones started this trend.

It moved us away from more sustained concentrated activities through which we strengthen our brain. AI is now taking target on the other main cognitive activity that makes us stronger, which is writing. This is emerging as one of the major uses of this tool is to alleviate the strain you feel when you look at a blank page and have to fill that blank page. So if AI does, in fact, significantly reduce the amount of writing we do, whether it's super important or just a memo, I do think we're going to see a continued diminishment of our intelligence that began with highly distracting phones about 10 years ago. When you ask artificial intelligence to summarize an article, would you summarize a paper, or, God forbid, to summarize an entire book, do you understand that article, that paper or that book as well as if you had read it? Of course not. Okay, now maybe you could argue that, all right, well, I saved time because now, rather than read that one book, which might have taken me 10 hours, I can summarize 15 books, and that'll take me sort of 10 hours to process or something. Well, even there, you're engaging at such a shallow level with each book that I'm not sure you really understand the degree to which they agree and disagree with each other, but also what you're depriving yourself from the inability to read anything for more than five or ten minutes at a time.

And that is a skill that leads over time to the ability to make this sort of deep connections that I think are the basis of all true insightful thinking. to hear something shocking? According to new data released Wednesday by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, almost everywhere in America. In one in three school districts in the U.S., students are reading a full grade level lower than they were in 2015. This decline crosses socioeconomic, racial and geographic divides. What does Scott think? There's no free lunch.

He discussed this on a Proff G-plus deep dive some weeks ago. The issue is the brain that does less over time becomes a brain that can do less. Anyways, Harvard Business School, Wharton, MIT Sloan, and BCG ran one of the most rigorous, real-world experiments we have on this question. They gave 758 consultants a set of tasks, some inside AI. capable frontier, some outside of it. For tasks AI is good at, the results were extraordinary. Consultants using AI completed 12% more tasks, 25% faster, at 40% higher quality. For tasks outside AI's frontier, requiring judgment, contextual reasoning, real-world nuance, AI users were 19 percentage points less likely to produce correct solutions than those working without AI. Here's the takeaway.

None of this means AI is bad. The BCG consultants, using AI were dramatically more effective. A carefully designed AI tutor at Harvard produced learning gains more than double those of traditional instruction. The same technology, completely opposite outcomes. The difference in every single one of these studies comes down to the same variable. Who is doing the thinking? In sum, avoiding AI is likely not an option. The question is how you use it? Are you using it a way that makes you stronger or weaker? And whether you're honest enough with yourself to know the difference. We'll be right back after the break.

Hey, I'm Matt Bouchelle, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your 4U page. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called, That Sounds Like a Lot, as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning, you read through headlines, and you immediately think, oh, that sounds like a lot. I can't deal with all this. But guess what? I can deal with it. And I'm going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world. Then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying. Maybe an actor. They go, feminism has gone too far.

You go, why? Because the Sadie Hawkins dance happened? Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged sparing. I just got to hang out and try to do stuff. You're the one with a charmed life. Could be a politician. Basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs.

We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio, so yes, you can watch it on YouTube, or you can listen wherever you get your podcast. This is not the place to get the news, but it is the place to feel a little better. It sounds like a lot, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship

disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning, and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over.

Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole, Finance Edition. And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations, that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged, and I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real, when it comes to mixing relationships and finances,

someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you are rich BFF. Welcome back. This week, Trump flew to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping for the first time since 2017, on Thursday's Profi markets, James King, who has been covering U.S. China summits since the 1980s, said this one stands apart.

If I had to sum this up in one sentence, I would say that Trump is going to Beijing to rectify some of the problems that he himself created. As you rightly say, the U.S., the U.S. put 145 percent tariffs on Chinese exports. at one point last year, Chinese exports of the US. And then after China said that it was going to restrict exports of critical minerals, these are critical minerals that are needed to make US weapons, that are needed by all the big US tech companies to make the products that they sell, Trump then blinked. And now the terrorists are backed down to 47.5% on average. So to me, the key inflection point in this relationship, in this Trump administration's relationship with China, has been China's invocation of these critical mineral export sanctions on the US last October.

This is a patch-up work. This is an attempt to make nice to the Chinese. And this is why I was saying on the previous episode of China Decode, if you ask me, this is the first summit in U.S.-China history where the Chinese president has the upper hand and Trump is going there asking, you know, rather than the other way around. And on Tuesday's raging moderates, Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark, explained why China has no reason to give Trump much of anything. Look, I think that China has Trump's number and has for a while.

Like they are, you know, they're trade allies with Iran. They have, they are, they are helping Iran right now in this war. And I think they understand that as long as they flatter Trump, like this is what he knows. If you flatter Trump and you pat him on the head and you roll out the red carpet, that Trump just, well, kind of cave for you. In 2017, when the last time he was there, people still had sort of Trump's madman theory of politics. The other world leaders did do. This guy's really unpredictable. He could do crazy things.

But Xi's got him over a barrel now, right? Like what they're doing, in their best interest now is for America to be in a sort of long-simmering conflict with Iran while China becomes the world power. Because we are committing superpower suicide in real time. China seeks to fill that vacuum. And so they're helping Iran right now. and they know that if they just flatter Trump, that he won't do anything to them. You hear Trump there.

You can hear Trump's admiration for the fact that Xi rules his country with an iron fist. And so I just think they know how to play him and they will flatter him and then they will eat his lunch along the way. Scott spoke about this on Thursday's raging moderates. If I'm she, I just think every day this war goes on,

there's a small leakage of power and global currency from the United States to China. So you just have to look at their incentives. And my understanding is, while the free flow of energy has an impact on China, I don't even think they've tapped into their strategic reserves yet. I don't think they see an imminent threat. And also the difference is if China gets anywhere close to having an energy shortage, it'll immediately go to brownouts and 1.5 billion people will put up with it. If we ask consumers in America to turn off their lights at night, they call it, you know, they call it fashion. I mean, they just, their tolerance for pain and their willingness to subject their citizenry to pain isn't just a different universe than us.

Here's the thing about China's leverage. It comes back to Iran. Because the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, China has been buying cheap Iranian oil and building reserves while the rest of the world. scrambles. The U.S., meanwhile, is footing the bill. Our very own president had this to say when asked whether American's financial situations were motivating him to close a deal with Iran. Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.

That's all. That's the only thing that's money. On Wednesday's Profji markets, Ed spoke with economist Justin Wolfer's about what the Iran war is actually costing us. We can look every single time that the president has been more belligerent and pushed into the war. Markets are fallen, literally as he speaks. Every single time he steps back and looks like he might taco, markets rise. So that's markets saying they believe. They're acting as if they believe that Americans, large companies will be more profitable over the longer run if the president were to step back from the conflict rather than stepping into the conflict. We also know that the oil price is up about 60 or 70% over the course of the war.

And so if you want to extrapolate my negative 0.9 coefficient, that says you take the 70% rise in oil prices multiplied by minus 0.9. and you can say that U.S. stocks are about 6% lower than they would otherwise be at 6.3% as a result of this war, this says that U.S. stocks are 5 percentage points lower as a result of the president's aggression so far. And although Pentagon officials claim that $25 billion has been spent on the war in Iran, many experts, including Justin Wolfers, say the actual cost is much higher. And finally, after all that, something completely different. To close out our first edition of the week,

here are a few moments from the past few years that never quite made it to air. It's not easy. You think it's easy being mediocre looking? I think it's super easy to be fucking ugly. Like, I could be ugly so easily. I just lean into the ugly. I'm ready.

Daddy saw a baby bear today. A baby bear. And what did I do? I immediately wanted to give it my muffin. And that's, like, the worst thing you can do, supposedly. But he was so cute, and then I remembered, oh, that means that there's usually a mama bear. If I got mauled by a bear, that would be not a bad way from a brand standpoint for me to go, right? Oh, what happened to that crazy professor with erectile this function? Oh, didn't you hear it? He got

mauled by a bear in Aspen. I think that makes for a great headline. Oh, daddy. Hello, Fuego. Kinner sent Fuego. So in El Petto. And there's some people who are like that. They just start from how do they make the world a better place? I'm not one of those people. I wake up every morning and think, how can I make my life more awesome? You get to my age, you travel, you get sick. So I need a private plan. Need you guys to work harder. In crevably, that was both provocative, politically incorrect, in a very moving, dramatic way. I'm just going to make all of you stars. I'm going to make all of you stars. You're going to be like, oh, we work to Prop G, you, you're hired. You're swimming in the tank with the original Shamu.

Like, he's a little bit tortured, but oh my God, can he perform on command, right? But what a thrill for you to be in the splash zone for the initial show of Shamu. We'll be back next Friday with a fresh edition of the week from Prop G Media, breaking down what mattered and what it all means. Until then, we'll see you around the Prop G universe. Oh.