The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

The Week: AI Is Getting Smarter. Are We?

September 11, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Week: AI Is Getting Smarter. Are We?

On this episode of The Prof G Pod, Scott Galloway and his team examine three distinct threads: whether AI is making us dumber, why Trump's trade war with Canada may be backfiring, and what a divorce attorney has learned about what actually keeps marriages together. The throughline is subtle but consistent — across technology, geopolitics, and personal relationships, the episode asks whether we are adapting intelligently to the forces reshaping our lives, or simply reacting.

AI's Promise and the Risk of Intellectual Atrophy

Economist Tyler Cowen, who advises AI labs, pushed back hard against the narrative that AI is overhyped and unprofitable. When asked where AI is already changing real work, Cowen pointed first to programming. "I don't think humans will disappear from programming," he said, "but they've already taken on a fundamentally different role. They're more like impresarios." Programmers now supervise AI-generated code, checking whether it's doing what was asked — and Cowen expects that monitoring role itself will increasingly be handed to AIs.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (02:14) **Tyler Cowan on AI: It Already Works** - Economist and AI advisor argues against skeptics, claiming the technology is already transforming real work.
  • 2 (03:38) **OECD Test Scores Hit Record Lows** - Reading and math scores for 15-year-olds have fallen across OECD countries, and AI may be making the underlying problem worse.
  • 3 (05:35) **The Real Danger of AI** - The threat isn't that AI makes us dumber, but that it lets us avoid the struggle through which intelligence develops.
  • 4 (05:52) **Trade War with Canada: A Hostile Divorce** - Scott compares the U.S.-Canada trade war to the movie *War of the Roses*—a bitter divorce where the couple stays in the same house.
  • 5 (08:55) **Canadian Economist Mike Moffat on the North of the Border View** - Moffat explains that Trump's pressure is backfiring by uniting Canadians and boosting Prime Minister Carney's popularity.
  • 6 (15:02) **Divorce Attorney James Sexton on What Ends a Marriage** - Sexton says the biggest predictor of divorce is subtle disconnection, not dramatic events.
  • 7 (18:29) **Stanford's Bill Burnett on Picking a Partner** - Burnett offers a simple test for choosing a spouse: each person should think they got the best deal.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Scott Galloway Tyler Cowen James Sexton

Show Notes

George Hahn connects the dots across the week’s biggest stories: AI’s growing threat to how we think, why Trump’s pressure campaign is backfiring in Canada, and the small acts of disconnection that quietly destroy a marriage.


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The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

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