American prices are up 40% since January 2020 on Scott Galloway's figures, and most people's wages have not moved with them.
The AI debate this week was about whether the machines might end humanity. Galloway's objection is not that the risk is real or unreal, but that the people making the claim are selling shares while they make it.
"We monetize loneliness. And now we said, I know, let's monetize the end of the species."
Galloway teaches marketing at NYU's Stern School, runs Prof G Media, and invests privately — and spent part of this episode saying his own private portfolio has gone nowhere for two years.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 73 minutes of audio, 20 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 calls that matter.
🎙️ Hosts: Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and founder of Prof G Media, and Ed Elson, his co-host on Prof G Markets
📰 Published: 14 September 2026 on YouTube (Prof G Markets)
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 1 hr 13 min | ✅ Time saved: 53 min
Key Takeaways
Countries do not fall to invasion, they fall to inflation, and US prices are up 40% since January 2020
Corporate bankruptcies are up 12%, which Galloway calls the worst in over a decade
The proposed $5,000 dividend is a credit card that bills the recipient's child
He puts the cost at $1.35 trillion, on top of a $2 trillion deficit
The bond market is the one institution still pricing the debt honestly
Elson says long-dated Treasuries have just posted their worst decade in more than a century
If AI executives were personally liable, the safety problem would get solved quickly
"There is always a wizard behind the curtain"
Claiming a 10% chance of ending humanity while filing to go public is a sales tactic, not a warning
The argument that regulating AI would hand the race to China ignores that China regulates harder
Elson says its rules are 100 times stricter, and that 83% of Chinese say they are excited about AI against 33% of Americans who say they are not
AI capex needs revenue bigger than all of tech's current revenue to justify itself
Apple has never been first and has never needed to be
Galloway calls it the most profitable second mouse in history, and expects the foldable to outsell seven years of the entire category in 60 days
Both hosts expect Kevin Warsh to raise rates, with Kalshi above 60%
1. Oil, Inflation and Yields
Elson opened on the seventh month of the war with Iran: oil at $107 a barrel for the first time since May after the US destroyed five Iranian oil tankers, the 30-year Treasury yield at its highest level since 2007, record Labor Day gas prices and a record diesel price. He read out the price moves since the war began — corn up 16%, wheat up 23%, cotton 32%, rice 49%, diesel 57% — and asked for the macro picture.
Galloway's frame is that inflation, not invasion, is what ends countries. Being invaded is not what finishes them, he said: "They cease to exist because they go broke." The mechanism he gives is purchasing power falling until a country can no longer borrow
The size of the problem, in his numbers: "It's a 40% cumulative price increase since January of 2020." He said the majority of Americans have not had a 40% raise to match it
"American households have taken a pay cut that they did not vote for," he said
The tell he watches is not the consumer but the small business. "Corporate bankruptcy is up 12% which is the greatest in over a decade," he said, concentrated in small and medium-sized companies that cannot hedge floating-rate debt
Every price move is also a transfer, and he named both ends of it. Winners: homeowners in Odessa, Texas, where he said prices are up 77%, plus Exxon, Saudi Aramco and Chevron. Losers: "diesel dependent families, school buses, drive-throughs"
On the president trading oil stocks while running the policy: "And Trump trading oil stocks while overseeing the policy, you know, it's gone from a conflict of interest to a business model," Galloway said, putting the registered gains at almost $5 million during the war
His summary of the whole arrangement is "a regressive tax dressed up as a foreign policy story"
Elson's read of the bond market is that it has stopped listening to the Treasury. He said the 30-year hit 5.35% and the 10-year breached 4.9% even after Scott Bessent tripled the bond buyback program to $6 billion, and that the September rate-hike odds on Kalshi had gone from 15% in June to 65%
What he says the bond market is actually pricing is the debt itself: national debt past $40 trillion, this year's deficit on track for $2 trillion, and $1.25 trillion a year in interest payments — more than the country spends on national defense
2. The $5,000 Dividend
Elson played a clip of the president promising a $5,000 dividend to every American adult if Republicans hold both chambers at the midterms.
Galloway's first objection is arithmetic: "A bribe to vote Republican at the midterms, which would cost the United States $1.35 trillion, which we would add onto our existing $2 trillion deficit."
His second is that the money is aimed at the wrong people. He said if any group needs a one-time payment it is children under 18, who are excluded from the proposal and 15% of whom live in poverty, against 10% of adults
"It's just unacceptable that one in seven kids and one in five households have food insecure kids," he said
The analogy he built for it is a loan disguised as a gift. A preloaded $5,000 credit card where, if you spend a dollar of it, "when your kid is 18, he or she is saddled with $13,000 in non-negotiable, non-dischargeable debt that stays with them the rest of their lives"
He spread the blame across both parties and back through four decades. From George Washington to George Bush, $7 trillion of deficits; from George Bush to Trump, another $33 trillion. On his numbers Republicans have added 2.8% of GDP a year to the debt and Democrats 2.1%
His complaint about the Democrats is that none of them will show the math. He said no candidate has put up a chart saying what comes in, what goes out and how it closes, and listed the pieces he would want in one: leveling capital gains with ordinary income, funding the IRS to go after the $750 billion tax gap, closing loopholes and givebacks, tightening Medicaid eligibility and means-testing social security
He does not exempt the electorate: "It doesn't appear that the American public is ready for an adult conversation around responsible fiscal management," he said, after arguing that voters keep rewarding the promise of war and tax cuts at once
3. Forever Inflation
Elson pushed back on where the blame sits and then made the episode's largest call.
His defense of the public is that they were sold a false prospectus. He said fiscal conservatism was part of Trump's platform, that the promise to balance the budget drew the loudest applause in the congressional address, and that the opposite happened
Where he does blame voters is for continuing to believe it: "At a certain point, you need to be keeping track of these things and keeping score"
The evidence he points to is the debt market: "Take a look at US Treasuries, which by the way, long-dated US Treasuries have now posted their worst decade in more than a hundred years."
The Fed has now missed its own target for longer than at any time in four decades. He said inflation has been above 2% for five and a half years — "That is the longest continuous stretch of more than 2% inflation in 40 years" — and that the period above target equals 5% of the Fed's entire existence
The call: "I think it is time to start reckoning with this possibility of forever inflation." He put the range at 3, 4 or 5% for a sustained period, on the grounds that the policy response is to spend and to buy back bonds, which he says makes the problem worse
What it means for a portfolio, in his view, is that bonds stop working. He said yields would have to rise enormously to compensate — "So bond investing as we know it, I think the game has changed" — and that equities are the only asset class being rewarded
4. The Case for Bonds
Galloway took the other side, and it is the one point in the episode where the two hosts genuinely disagree.
His argument is that credit is finally paying for the risk. A healthy corporate bond at a 6, 7 or 8% return is "not serious money" but not bad, and credit "has real teeth" in a way equity does not
The mandate he is managing to is defensive: "my investment strategy right now is not to get rich, it's to not get poor."
He used Apple as the example of a balance sheet that pays its coupons — unless things get "unimaginably real" there, he said, it is hard to imagine the company lacking the assets and cash flow to pay interest on its bonds
He disclosed that this is not his natural habitat. "I have never been a big debt investor. I don't understand it. I've never been interested in it. I've always deluded myself into thinking I can outperform," he said, before concluding that a mixed portfolio of stocks and bonds still makes sense
The winners list he read from the oil move: Shell up 27%, Exxon Mobil 34%, Chevron 37%, home prices up 2% nationally against 77% in Odessa, and the railroads — Canadian Pacific Kansas City up 21%, Union Pacific 23%, CSX up 34%
5. Diesel in the Grocery Bill
Elson's contribution to the inflation section was a set of second-order effects, and it is the most concrete material in the episode.
"15 to 30% of grocery costs are diesel fuel," he said — groceries are heavy and the vehicle that brought them is diesel-powered
The school-bus chain is already breaking. He said 90% of the nation's school buses run on diesel, 40% of school districts are consolidating bus routes and 20% are limiting non-required trips, including field trips
His line on it: "Think about this $100 oil is going to start reducing the number of field trips that kids take"
The drive-through arithmetic is small per day and large per year. He said a $1 increase in gas prices means roughly six fewer customers a day at the average drive-through, which for a location doing 300 transactions a day is about $22,000 in lost annual sales
The energy story is also relocating data centers. He cited a large data center investment in Finland, chosen because the country has its own renewable energy and is cold, and said the AI market has gone from chasing GPUs to chasing climate
Galloway's coda was that compute is the new energy, with a caveat — you still need the energy to run the compute
6. The 10% Extinction Claim
The AI segment opened on a former Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who resigned publicly and said neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is acting responsibly, and on alignment science lead Evan Hubinger, who endorsed him and put the chance of AI killing all humans at greater than 10% within the decade. Elson said the original post passed 100 million views, and played Coxon's CNN appearance.
Galloway's first move was to separate the two questions, the existential risk and the IPO, and then to take the claim at face value to see where it leads
If the claim is true, the company cannot also be a listing candidate: "We wouldn't let Oppenheimer form an LLC, raise money from Andreessen Horowitz, and go public," he said. "We wouldn't let Oppenheimer reach out to bankers from JPMorgan"
He said he believes the companies are earnest in wanting rules, and called the absence of them a failure of the administration
Elson's objection is that he has heard the warning before. He listed the viral blog post at the start of the year predicting an imminent job apocalypse, and Dario Amodei putting civilizational destruction at 25%, and said the pattern is that the claim gets walked back after the headlines
What he says is different this time is who said it. A former employee is a whistleblower; the current alignment science lead endorsing it is "a corporate communication," which he argues changes the legal posture
His proposed response is process, not commentary: "Now we need to hand the company a subpoena," show the documentation and the evidence — and if it turns out to be hype before a listing, he said the conversation becomes one about securities fraud and public deception
7. Who Is Liable for the Bots
Galloway's central argument is that treating models as autonomous is a way of removing people from the chain of responsibility. "Atoms don't decide to run into each other and release energy," he said — someone builds the bomb, someone drops it
The story he tells to make the point is from his time as president of UCLA's inter-fraternity council. Asked to stop the music at midnight during rush week, he said he had no leverage; the campus police arrested the fraternity presidents at 12:01 a.m., and the next night it was quiet at midnight
"There is always a wizard behind the curtain," he said
Applied to AI, the lever is personal liability. He said that if Sam Altman were told he is liable for anything these systems do, and executives started going to jail for IP theft or harm, "I would bet they'll figure out a way to plant narcs and detectives as some of these bots hanging out by the water cooler"
"If these things can be trained to jump the lab and go and find ways to hack into other organizations, they can be trained to narc," he said
His precedents are from outside technology: the San Francisco dog owner convicted of manslaughter after her pit bulls killed a neighbor, and parents held liable for unsecured firearms. The behavior changed once the liability did
The conclusion is that sentience talk is a legal strategy: he called it an excuse for companies to "run unfettered" with no tethering to social responsibility
8. The China Regulation Retort
Both hosts took apart the argument that America cannot regulate AI because China would then run ahead.
Elson's answer is that the premise is factually wrong: "China has some of the strictest AI regulations in the world. It's 100 times stricter than ours," he said, listing registration before creating AI-generated content, labeling requirements, ID laws for deepfake software and child-protection rules against virtual relationships
The polling runs the same way. He said "33% of Americans say they're not excited about AI and 83% of Chinese say they are excited about AI," and attributed the difference to China being strict rather than permissive
The analogy offered on the show was the airbag, that objecting to safety rules on competitiveness grounds is what American carmakers did over airbags and emissions standards — and that the industry ended up with both
Galloway wants a waiting period modeled on drug approval. He asked why there is no blue-ribbon panel and no 90-day hold in which the most talented people available try to make a new model produce a bioweapon before it reaches the market, noting a drug takes a decade to clear the FDA
He also said nobody in the administration has the domain expertise to have the conversation
His skepticism is structural rather than technical: "One of the things I still hold to is the you're most worried about does not happen," he said — planes into skyscrapers, a virus jumping the lab — and that the loudly anticipated catastrophe is the one that gets prepared for
Which brings him to the sentence the episode is named for. He said the country has monetized healthcare and "We monetize loneliness. And now we said, I know, let's monetize the end of the species," making the threat dramatic enough to signal the technology's power and create a hunger to invest
The pressure he wants applied is on one person. He said the responsibility lies with Anthropic and therefore with its chief executive, who has to explain what his employee meant; Elson added that Anthropic has been ceding ground on public perception and doubted a response would come
9. The AI Capex Math
Elson brought the numbers: Dealbook reporting that OpenAI projects $750 billion of compute spending through 2030, down from a figure closer to $1.4 trillion; OpenAI's Q2 revenue at $6.7 billion with quarter-on-quarter growth of only 18%; and its operating loss widening from $9.3 billion in Q1 to $12.3 billion in Q2.
Galloway's bear case is an order-of-magnitude problem. He said total AI revenue is somewhere around $150 to $200 billion while the capex implies the industry needs to get to two and a half trillion — bigger, on his reckoning, than the entire revenue of the technology sector
His historical comparison is infrastructure, not software — railroads, the electric grid, the internet: the technology survives and the valuations do not
"These valuations are going to have real volatility which is Latin for there's going to be an enormous correction," he said
The number that pulls him the other way is OpenAI's growth. He said its annual recurring revenue went from $9 billion to $65 billion in seven months, called it extraordinary, and allowed that with those gross margins the company could be worth $10 trillion
He was open about which way he leans and why. "I have more a bias towards being a bear and a bit more glass half empty kind of guy," he said, while adding that friends with access to the private numbers describe revenue that is staggering and shows no signs of slowing
Elson does not believe the profitability claim yet. He said Anthropic's stated adjusted operating profitability is unexplained, that it is not clear what adjustments are being made, and that the arguments made by the AI bears have been better supported than the arguments made by the bulls
10. What the S1 Must Show
Both hosts expect the filing itself to be engineered for machine summarization. The document will have been run through the language models thousands of times, Galloway said, so that when an AI distills it to bullet points the bullets flatter the valuation
What he will read it for is the gross margin, and his comparison is unflattering. "WeWork was growing really fast, but the faster it grew, the more money it lost," he said — the question is whether there is a tipping point where capex costs fall and margins rise because the product is sold into price-inelastic business demand
If that tipping point exists, the prize is enormous. He said that once these companies go profitable, at anything like current growth rates, they become the most profitable companies in history within a few years
Elson's test is disclosure rather than argument. If Anthropic really has operating profitability, he asked, why not show it — the companies are happy to publicize other numbers and silent on this one
The one thing already known about the filing is the market-size claim, which he took from the Wall Street Journal: a total addressable market of $30 trillion, against SpaceX's claim of $28.5 trillion, and roughly equal to the GDP of the United States
"That makes me think that what we might see in this S1 is a lot of massaging of numbers," he said
11. The Foldable iPhone
Apple's new chief executive John Ternus launched the foldable iPhone Duo. Elson set the specifications: $2,000 at the low end and more than $3,000 at the high end, the size of a passport, 80% larger than the iPhone 18.
Galloway's opening was a joke about the use case — that what others call multitasking he thinks of as ignoring two responsibilities at once, and that he likes being able to scroll and ignore his emails at the same time
His first serious point is about Tim Cook's ego rather than the product. The launch belongs to Cook's decisions, he said, and most chief executives would have stayed to make it their swan song rather than hand a new colleague an exciting announcement
The framework he applied comes from a former NYU colleague, Peter Golder: "Innovators almost always lose money." The first mover ends up with mud on their face and arrows in their back
Apple's actual position is the opposite of first. It was not first in MP3 players, laptops, touchscreens or smartphones, and foldable phones have existed for seven years: "But what Apple typically does is they are the world's best, most profitable second mouse in history, and that is they wait, they watch, they learn, and they come in and they make something more elegant, more utile, more aspirational"
His prediction is a category takeover in two months. "I think Apple is going to come in and sell more foldable phones in the first 60 days that have been sold in the last seven years across the entire market," he said
His answer to the price objection is that it replaces two devices, costing less than an iPhone plus a laptop, with the vision being that the buyer no longer needs the laptop
Elson is on the other side, and has been for a while. He said the device is too large and cumbersome, that Apple has called it the most transformational iPhone experience since the original, and that it does not persuade him
He has been wrong so far, and said so: Apple is up 19% year to date and 40% over the past year, against his bearish call
His valuation complaint is that the multiple is not supported by the spending: 36 times earnings against about 26 for the S&P, with capex of $11 billion against Alphabet's more than $200 billion. "I would be more bullish actually on building a data center than selling a foldable iPhone," he said
12. Ternus's Odds
Elson framed the succession: Ternus has taken over a $4.7 trillion company, the second most valuable in the world, following an operator and a visionary.
Galloway's answer on whether Ternus matches his predecessors was blunt — the odds are no — and the reason is the two people he follows rather than anything about him
Cook's record is the hardest part to follow. He said Cook added more shareholder value than any chief executive in history, taking Apple from a roughly $300 to $350 billion market capitalization to four or five trillion, putting him neck and neck with Jensen Huang
On Cook's conduct: "You just knew that you weren't going to find Tim Cook in the Epstein Files," though Galloway added that he ended up a little too obsequious to Trump
He brought in his own private-investment experience as the evidence for base rates. He said he has not made much money in privates over the last two years and has yet to see a founder with one big win raise for a second company and repeat it
His bull case for Apple is brand rather than product. He argued Apple is a luxury company rather than a technology one, that iOS is a signal about the owner rather than a set of features, and that the phone is wildly overpriced but the signal is worth it
He expects the foldable to sell heavily on that signaling alone
The long-run caution is that nobody stays on top. General Electric, Walmart and Saudi Aramco were each the most valuable company in the world; he said companies very rarely hold that position for more than a decade or two
Bonus Insights
Both hosts expect a rate rise. Galloway said Warsh has the protection of a 12-year appointment and that Powell proved the president cannot remove a Fed chair: "I think he would be hugely lauded in the marketplace if he raised rates." Elson said he thinks it happens too, but is tentative because the chair "likes to surprise people"
Galloway opened the show in London, said he was heading back to the West Coast on Sunday for his first regent meeting, and refused to be drawn on the trip — "Oh, Ed, I don't like to talk about that stuff"
The running joke of the episode was that AI companies get attention by predicting catastrophe. Elson suggested Apple try it — that Ternus should announce an 11% chance the folding phone destroys humanity — and Galloway agreed that is what real leadership looks like now
Galloway said he does not check his email anymore and that a call is the only way to reach him, then complained about Chuck Schumer texting him for $5
He asked his own team on the editorial call for a product review of the foldable, and said he tried to order one before discovering it does not ship for another two weeks
He also noted that his usual hardware skepticism was right once already: he called the mixed-reality headset ridiculous, and said this time he is cautiously optimistic
Galloway's bottom line is that the two defining stories of the moment — a fiscal position nobody will discuss honestly and an AI industry advertising its own danger on the way to an IPO — are the same story: institutions that have learned that catastrophe talk is cheaper than accountability, and a public that keeps buying it.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Anthropic and OpenAI (The two IPO candidates the episode is built around; the hosts want the S1 to settle whether either is profitable)
Apple (The foldable iPhone Duo at $2,000 to more than $3,000, John Ternus's first launch, and the company Galloway calls a luxury brand rather than a technology one)
Samsung (Has sold foldables for seven years; Galloway expects Apple to outsell the whole category's seven years in 60 days)
Kalshi (The prediction market both hosts use for the rate decision — 65% for a September hike, against 15% in June)
Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and Saudi Aramco (The energy winners from $100 oil, up 34%, 37% and 27% respectively on Galloway's list)
Union Pacific, CSX and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (The railroads, which he says win because they move freight more efficiently than diesel trucking)
Alphabet (The capex contrast with Apple — more than $200 billion against $11 billion)
SpaceX (Whose $28.5 trillion total addressable market claim Anthropic's reported $30 trillion would exceed)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Ed Zitron (The writer whose bear case on AI economics Elson says he finds the most compelling)
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