What This Week Revealed About Power

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Episode: What This Week Revealed About Power
Date: May 15, 2026
Host: George Hahn, Scott Galloway
Produced by: Vox Media Podcast Network

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Overview

This episode dives into critical shifts occurring in business, technology, and geopolitics. The team unpacks how AI is rapidly transforming the workforce—not just replacing workers, but redefining the value of management. They examine data on declining cognitive skills and question whether AI is making us smarter or lazier. The show also breaks down the evolving balance of power between the U.S. and China, specifically around Trump’s diplomatic visit to Beijing, the leverage game over critical minerals, and the ongoing impact of the Iran conflict. The episode closes with a lighter reel of outtakes from Scott Galloway.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. AI’s New Wave: Beyond Replacing Workers

[01:25 – 03:13]

• Companies are moving from using AI as a “copilot” to restructuring entire organizations around it. Adjacent to layoffs, the real question becomes: do we need fewer managers, not just fewer workers?
• Ed Elson notes major layoffs at Coinbase, PayPal, and Block, all justified by shifts toward AI-powered structures:
  • Coinbase cut 14% of staff, citing AI’s impact.
  • PayPal plans a 20% workforce reduction over 2-3 years.
  • Block cut 40% of its workforce for similar reasons.
• Jack Dorsey (on Block layoffs):

  “Most companies using AI today are giving everyone a copilot, which makes the existing structure work slightly better… We're after something different, a company built as an intelligence with no need for a permanent middle management layer.” (02:34)

2. Is AI Making Us Dumber?

[03:13 – 06:22]

• Cal Newport warns of “cognitive fitness” decline, tying AI to diminishing brain power:
  • Social media already weakened attention spans.
  • AI threatens to erode skills like writing and deep work.

  • “If AI does in fact significantly reduce the amount of writing we do ... I do think we're going to see a continued diminishment of our intelligence that began with highly distracting phones about 10 years ago.” (03:49)

• Derek Thompson questions the depth of understanding AI summaries provide:

  > “When you ask artificial intelligence to summarize an article… do you understand that article as well as if you had read it? Of course not… Even there, you're engaging at such a shallow level… that I'm not sure you really understand to which degree they agree and disagree with each other.” (04:44)
  

• George Hahn references new Stanford data showing U.S. students performing a full grade lower in reading than in 2015 in a third of school districts.

3. The Nuance of AI Use: Strengthener or Crutch?

[06:22 – 07:45]

• Scott Galloway discusses a major study by Harvard, Wharton, MIT Sloan & BCG:
  • For tasks inside AI’s capability, workers using AI did 12% more tasks, 25% faster, at 40% higher quality.
  • For creative/judgment-based tasks, AI users were 19% less likely to create correct solutions.

  • “The issue is the brain that does less over time becomes a brain that can do less anyways… The difference in every single one of these studies comes down to the same variable. Who is doing the thinking.” (06:22)

  • “Avoiding AI is likely not an option. The question is how you use it... Are you using it in a way that makes you stronger or weaker? And whether you're honest enough with yourself to know the difference.” (07:39)

4. Shifting Geopolitical Power: The US–China Dance

[09:17 – 13:26]

• Trump’s Beijing Visit: This marks a reversal, with the U.S. coming to China amid trade and mineral disputes.

• James King (veteran China analyst):

  > “Trump is going to Beijing to rectify some of the problems that he himself created… this is the first summit in US China history where the Chinese president has the upper hand and Trump is going there asking, you know, rather than the other way around.” (09:34)
  

• Sarah Longwell unpacks China’s manipulation of Trump:

  > “China has Trump's number and has for a while… they know that if they just flatter Trump that he won't do anything to them.” (11:12)
  

  -
  > “In real time, China seeks to fill that [superpower] vacuum. And… they will flatter him and then they will eat his lunch along the way.” (12:08)

• Scott Galloway: Contrasts China’s “tolerance for pain” with America’s:

  > “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… fascist. Their tolerance for pain and their willingness to subject their citizenry to pain isn't just a different universe than us.” (12:37)
  

5. Economic Pressure Points: Iran and the Cost of War

[13:26 – 15:17]

• George Hahn: Notes the U.S. is scrambling for oil while China buys cheap Iranian reserves.
• Justin Wolfers (economist):
  • Markets drop whenever the President seems belligerent on Iran, and rise when he appears more diplomatic.
  • Oil prices up 60–70% due to the war; U.S. stocks are 5–6% lower as a result.

  • “We can look every single time that the president has been more belligerent and pushed into the war, markets have fallen literally as he speaks… if you want to extrapolate… US stocks are about 6% lower than they would otherwise be… as a result of this war.” (14:19)

  • “Although Pentagon officials claim that $25 billion has been spent on the war in Iran, many experts… say the actual cost is much higher.” (15:17)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Jack Dorsey on AI organizations (02:34):

  "We're after something different, a company built as an intelligence with no need for a permanent middle management layer."

• Cal Newport (03:49):

  "I do think we're going to see a continued diminishment of our intelligence that began with highly distracting phones about 10 years ago."

• Scott Galloway on AI and human cognition (07:39):

  "Avoiding AI is likely not an option. The question is how you use it. Are you using it in a way that makes you stronger or weaker? And whether you're honest enough with yourself to know the difference."

• James King on US-China power shift (09:34):

  "This is the first summit in US China history where the Chinese president has the upper hand and Trump is going there asking, you know, rather than the other way around."

• Sarah Longwell on China and Trump (11:12):

  "China has Trump's number and has for a while… they will flatter him and then they will eat his lunch along the way."

• Scott Galloway on China’s resilience (12:37):

  "Their tolerance for pain and their willingness to subject their citizenry to pain isn't just a different universe than us."

Outtakes – The Softer Side of Prof G

[15:48 – 16:51]

Lighthearted, irreverent banter from Scott Galloway, showing his signature mix of self-deprecation and performance:

• “You think it's easy being mediocre looking? I think it's super easy to be fucking ugly. Like, I could be ugly. So easy. I just lean into the ugly.” (15:48)

• On fatherly instincts and bear encounters:

  “If I got mauled by a bear, that would be not a bad way from a brand standpoint for me to go, right? … Oh, didn't you hear? He got mauled by a bear in Aspen. I think that makes for a great headline.” (15:58)

• To his team:

  “I'll make all of you stars… You're swimming in the tank with, like, the original Shamu. Like, he's a little bit tortured, but, oh my God, can he perform on command, right?” (16:53)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• AI Restructuring & Layoffs: 01:25 – 03:49
• Cognitive Impact of AI: 03:49 – 06:22
• Studies on AI Productivity: 06:22 – 07:45
• US-China Summit Analysis: 09:17 – 13:26
• Economic Fallout from Iran Conflict: 13:26 – 15:17
• Prof G Outtakes: 15:48 – 16:51

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Tone and Language

The episode balances incisive analysis, urgent warnings about the changing landscape, and Galloway's trademark irreverence. It covers serious cultural and geopolitical issues while retaining moments of humor and blunt self-reflection.

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Summary

This episode explores how AI is forcing both companies and individuals to confront tough questions about value, productivity, and intelligence—and how global power is quietly shifting eastward. The hosts weigh both the promise and peril of emerging technology, while candidly evaluating America’s place in a changing world order. The show’s mix of high-level analysis and personality makes these takeaways memorable and accessible for listeners.

Transcript

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[George Hahn]

Welcome to the first episode of the week from Propg 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 trade offs. 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, longtime 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 Will AI replace workers? This week, Silicon Valley started asking something else. What if companies need fewer managers, too? On Monday's Prof. G Markets, Ed Elson broke down how companies including Coinbase, PayPal and Block are already restructuring around AI.

[Ed Elson]

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 work slightly better without changing it. We're after something different, a company built as an intelligence with no need for a permanent middle management layer.

[George Hahn]

Jack Dorsey said this after Block, the company that owns Square Cash app and Afterpay Co. 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 Prof. G Markets, Cal Newport and Derek Thompson discussed whether AI is quietly weakening our cognitive abilities.

[Cal Newport]

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 conceptualize 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. And 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.

[Derek Thompson]

When you ask artificial intelligence to summarize an article or to 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?

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Of course not.

[Derek Thompson]

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 10 minutes at a time. And that is a skill that leads over time to the ability to make those sort of deep connections that I think are the basis of all true insightful thinking.

[George Hahn]

Want 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 ten 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 Prof. G deep dive some weeks ago.

[Scott Galloway]

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's 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 in a way that makes you stronger or weaker? And whether you're honest enough with yourself to know the difference.

[George Hahn]

We'll be right back after the break.

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[George Hahn]

welcome back. This week, Trump flew to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping for the first time since 2017. On Thursday's Prof. G Markets, James King, who has been covering US China summits since the 1980s, said, this one stands apart.

[James King]

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 US put 145% tariffs on Chinese exports at one point last year, Chinese exports of the US and then after China said that it was gonna 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 tariffs are back 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 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 US China history where the Chinese president has the upper hand and Trump is going there asking, you know, rather than the other way around.

[George Hahn]

And on Tuesday's raging moderates, Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, explained why China has no reason to give Trump much of anything.

[Sarah Longwell]

Look, I think that China has Trump's number and has for a while. Like they, they are, you know, they're, 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 fight. Flatter Trump. This is what Xi knows. If you flatter Trump and you pat him on the head and you roll out the red carpet, that Trump just will kind of cave for you. In 2017, when the last time he was there, people still had sort of Trump's Mad Men theory of politics. The other world leaders did too. 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, what they're 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, they're, 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 was 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.

[George Hahn]

Scott spoke about this on Thursday's Raging Moderates.

[Scott Galloway]

If I'm Xi, 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 fascist. 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.

[George Hahn]

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 Americans financial situations were motivating him to close a deal with Iran.

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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 motivates.

[George Hahn]

On Wednesday's Prof. G Markets Ed spoke with economist Justin Wolfers about what the Iran war is actually costing us.

[Justin Wolfers]

We can look every single time that the president has been more belligerent and pushed into the war. Markets have 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% decrease rise in oil prices multiplied by minus 0.9, and you can say that US stocks are about 6% lower than they would otherwise be at 6.3% as a result of this war. This says that US stocks are 5 percentage points lower as a result of the President's aggression so far.

[George Hahn]

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.

[Scott Galloway]

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 easy. 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 him 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 dysfunction? Oh, didn't you hear? He got mauled by a bear in Aspen. I think that makes for a great headline. Ooh, Daddy, Hello.

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Fuego.

[Scott Galloway]

Que de san fuego son el pero. 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. I need you guys to work harder.

Work harder.

Incredible. That was both provocative, politically incorrect in a very moving, dramatic way. I'm just gonna make all of you stars. I'm gonna make all of you stars. You're gonna be like, oh, we worked at Prop G. You're hired. You're swimming in the tank with, like, 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.

[George Hahn]

We'll be back next Friday with a fresh edition of the week from Propg Media, breaking down what mattered and what it all means. Until then, we'll see you around the Prof. G universe.

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