How to AI-Proof Your Career, Spot Market Hype, and Raise Critical Thinkers — ft. Greg Shove

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Welcome to PropG on AI.

This is a special series where we are joined by Greg Schobe, the CEO of Section, to tackle your questions on what AI means for work, business, and the future.

So disclosure, I'm the founder of Section.

Section is a firm that helps deploy AI to the workforce of companies.

Anyways, if you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehours at propgmedia.com.

Again, that's officehours at propgmedia.com.

Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode.

All right, Greg, let's get into it.

Our first question comes from user Brosa 802020 on threads.

They say,

It seems AI is the only thing giving the SP 500 its gains over the past year or two.

How much longer can this last?

And when will the vast majority of the remaining companies start to show signs of life?

Greg, what are your thoughts about the concentration

of a small number of stocks specifically?

It feels like AI is driving the S ⁇ P and to that extent, kind of valuations of the global markets.

What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think we've got a couple more years to find out how this is going to end, meaning they are.

These valuations have been driven by an assumption that the independent AI companies, and I would specifically focus on OpenAI and Anthropic, can actually generate at least a hope of profitable revenue.

They've got revenue now.

Can they they show even a hope of profitable revenue in a couple, three years?

I kind of feel these companies got those two in particular, right?

The whole work, we're heading to AGI, give us bucket loads of cash pitch has worked.

Both those companies just closed new rounds of capital.

And I feel like they can do it one or two more times, which seems like two to three more years of runway, at which point the whole thing starts to collapse under its own weight.

And only the guys with the picks and shovels actually made money.

So the data centers, the chips, the energy.

But we've got to get to a place where we can see some revenue that might have some margin.

I agree.

It's pretty striking.

There's just four big tech stocks, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, and Broadcom,

account for 60% of the SP's index total returns so far this year.

So, the majority of the index's returns are driven by just four companies.

And the SP is up 2.6% this year, just based on just based on NVIDIA.

And in addition,

it's not just the SP.

The SP is becoming the global market.

The Magnus and 7 make up over 20% of the MSCI all-country index.

So they're not only driving and dictating the returns in the SP, they're driving and dictating the returns of just the global market.

NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Apple each carry a heavier weight than all of China's stock market combined.

Think about that.

So those three companies, their movements are more influential and important than the entire Chinese stock market.

And the premium here is pretty substantial.

The SP 500, I think, trades at about 23.5 forward earnings.

And if you take away those four mega cap stocks, the multiple falls to 19.4.

And if someone were to tell us,

and I'm curious what you think of this thesis, Greg, that in six months, we know that there'd been a crash in the markets, that there had been a global sell-off,

and we were asked to guess what it would be.

It would be fun to catastrophize a civil war or an outbreak of war, Article 5 triggered because of attack drones coming from Russia and in Romania and Poland.

I think the most obvious explanation would be the one to be kind of more boring, and that is a big or a series of big

corporations, traditional corporations, announced in their earnings calls that they were dramatically scaling back their investments in AI, that their investments had not shown the ROI they'd hoped for.

You'd see NVIDIA crash, and then you'd just see this ripple effect all the way through the

S ⁇ P AI supply chain.

And people just don't realize how dramatic it is.

Most recently, you had a 38% one-day gain in Oracle, which made Larry Ellison the richest person in the world.

He increased his wealth by about $120 billion.

in one day.

And this was driven off of an announcement that OpenAI was committing to spend, get this, $300 billion

to rent compute from Oracle over five years.

So when OpenAI looks at its consumer behavior and its business, it is so confident in its business that it is committed to a contract that will obligate it to pay $60 billion a year for the next five years off a company that's currently doing $10 billion a year.

So the expectation of this market is just so incredible that any

kind of flaw, I mean, this isn't priced to perfection.

It's priced to insanely perfect.

Yeah, I agree, Scott.

I don't think investors realize how fragile these businesses are.

I mean, just look at the last couple of weeks, right?

Anthropic settled one class action publisher lawsuit and had to use 10% of the capital they just raised, $1.5 billion out of a $13 billion round they had to pay out just to settle one lawsuit, right?

XAI just laid off 500 people

this past week because they realized the way they were training their AI models didn't work as they had planned.

You know, Zucks pays $14.5 billion to get one CEO, Alexander Wang from Scale, to help him recruit other AI researchers.

These companies have faced unprecedented challenges.

They have no idea what they're doing.

And I think you're right.

What we're seeing is super companies are being built potentially.

If OpenAI, Anthropic, and others can actually get to $20 billion in revenue with a fraction of the headcount that Google can, with revenue per employee metrics that are more like $3 to $5 million per employee.

These are literally super companies in today's context and traditional metrics.

And I think what the market's saying is we want to back super companies only.

And so I think that, you know, if this thing all works out, I think we'll see this concentration potentially getting even narrower, even, you know,

even tighter, meaning the rest of corporate America has to figure out how to become a super company in some way using AI, or they won't be able to attract any capital or any investor interest.

All right.

Question number two comes from Reddit, Hawaiian Bry.

I gotta give it to Reddit.

The people there come up with very interesting titles.

Anyway, so Hawaiian Bry asks, Scott, you said AI won't take your job.

Someone who knows how to use AI will take your job.

What are the key areas in which a competitive employer candidate really needs to demonstrate their AI competency today?

Personally, I'm in the legal space and use AI for research, summarizing law regulations and prioritizing my inbox.

But a lot of my work is still very manual.

Plus, I don't want to be one of those people who cite AI hallucinations in my work, so I spend a lot of time vetting and revising AI output, which often feels like I'm doing all the work myself anyways.

Greg, thoughts on AI and more specifically AI in the legal profession?

First of all, I think we all have to be, you've got to show that you're really good with AI and you've got to be a driver of your AIs and not what I call a passenger.

So if you're using AI, you've got to really be in the 1% of people that know how to use it.

And what that means is you're able to steer your favorite AI model to get the kind of outputs you like.

And that includes managing for hallucinations.

And we can all complain about hallucinations, but the reality is a lot of them are manageable and can be eliminated or at least reduced to make yourself more productive.

So what I mean by steering AI, I mean that you need to be able to provide context with your AI.

You need to be able to know how to upload your own documents of data.

You need to be able to ask AI to adopt a persona when it's working with you.

You need to be able to work with reasoning models and multi-step

AI tasks with your AI, again, to get a successful outcome.

So when we interview people, we're really looking right away for their ability to steer AI.

The second thing we're looking for is do they have their favorite use cases?

And it sounds like this listener hasn't yet found the use case that generates a decent return in terms of their efforts.

But you got to be able to talk about three to five use cases, whether it's personally at home or but certainly at work, where you've been able to get AI, you've been able to coax and steer AI to get the outcome you want to make yourself more productive and a little bit smarter.

And we all have those.

And when I talk to candidates that really have very superficial use cases, that tells me they're not spending enough time with AI and they're not really figuring this out.

And the last thing we look for is hacks, Scott.

Everybody who's a really active AI user has a couple, three personal hacks, things they figured out, might be talking to AI using advanced voice mode or, you know, whatever it is, we're just, they've been able to sort of find a workaround or a way to sort of, you know, get, get more from AI.

So we've just got to be in that 1% of people that are using AI, kind of like power users.

And that's the, for us, that's the base case for a candidate.

So I learned something from you.

And that is, and I'm going to hold this up, what you called,

you suggested that everyone have a second screen.

I don't know if you remember saying this, but I took it to heart.

And now wherever I am, I have my screen where I do my regular work.

And then I bring with me a second screen.

And up on the second screen, if anyone could see it, is

Claude.

And I have Claude and ChatGPT.

Those are the two I use.

I need to get better at using the rest.

I keep seeing those TikToks saying, if you're only using ChatGPT, you're not.

No, you don't.

You don't, Scott.

I think that this is one of the mistakes a lot of people are making.

Instead of getting overwhelmed with too much AI and trying too many tools, pick one or two at most, but really one, GPT or Cloud or maybe Gemini if you love Google, and just get really great at one AI.

That's interesting.

I use them for different things, but my point is, I've taken your advice and what I do is I use it for everything now, or I test it and I use it as a thought partner is the way I would describe it.

When I first started using it, I thought, oh, this is going to be great.

I'll just give it a very long prompt and have it write my next book, and boom, I'll collect my advance.

It doesn't work that way.

It's very anodyne.

But what it is really good for is when I write my newsletter newsletter on Fridays, No Mercy No Malice, if I need to trim it by 200 words, I say, trim this post by 200 words and then highlight which words you trimmed.

Or I'll say, I don't like my ending.

It's too emotional and angry.

How do I tone it down?

Which words?

And then it'll come back with a couple ideas.

And I do compare Claude against ChatGPT to see what they're coming at.

What I've noticed recently is they're becoming the same AI, that they're reverse engineering each other and coming back with the exact same answers.

I'm literally using it for almost everything.

We're in a negotiation right now about taking Prof G markets, editing it.

We do two and a half hours a week of, I don't even call it podcasts, of our content, editing it down to 48 minutes, and then running it on Saturday or Sunday morning on this network and doing a rev share because they need, you know, the problem with the cable news is that it's declining so fast that they need to dramatically decrease the cost of the means of production.

So I went to someone who runs one of the bigger networks and I said, give us an hour and it's zero incremental cost to you.

We have all of it already done and we'll do a rev share.

Okay, the rev share.

So we're talking to them, right?

I go on to ChatGPT and Claude and say, this is the deal.

This is the show.

This is the network.

Based on viewing patterns, ad rates, ad revenues, and previous deals like this, what should the rev share split be?

And they both came back with the exact same answer and a bunch bunch of rationale and reason in a range.

And it was just so helpful.

And in this instance, you know, human instinct kicks in.

I don't mind going at the low end of the range because I want my partners to make money.

And I just, you know, quite frankly, I'm excited about the opportunity to have a new channel.

But before, I just would have had absolutely no idea where to start.

This gentleman in the legal field, I think law is just going to get gutted.

And it's going to be a metaphor for America.

What do I mean by that?

Everything's being optimized for the top 1% or the top 10%.

And I am now using ChatGPT to drop legal contracts.

I'm just going to spend less money.

And I keep, the one place I keep hearing corporations saying the low-hanging fruit, I talked to one of the largest private equity firms in the world and the guy who runs one of their biggest divisions.

And he said, we've been tasked with cutting our legal expenses by 30 to 50 million this year.

And he said, we're going to exceed it using AI.

Any closing thoughts here?

Yeah, Scott, I want to go back to what you said about the AI monitor screen.

I think that all of us need a reminder to use AI.

We're not AI native.

We're not in school now.

The kids in school now are AI native.

And when they come out and go to work, they won't even think about, should I use AI for any task?

They'll use AI for every task.

I think for the rest of us, you know, the monitor was the sort of hack I started in January of this year.

Before that, I had a post-it note.

Talk about lo-fi, right?

I just had a yellow post-it note on my monitor saying, ask AI, just to remind myself to, you know, kind of consult AI.

I also now use that, I use the GPT-5 widget on my phone.

So I'd recommend this for others as well.

PUD, either Claude or GPT-5, whatever your favorite AI is, I use GPT-5 widget right on my, on my home screen.

So it's always there.

And I basically have turned off Google as much as I can in my life.

It's really important.

that you we all get to something like a hundred conversations a day with AI.

That's what power knowledge workers are doing today.

And in some cases, hundreds.

And I'm not talking about talking to your AI companion.

I'm talking about, you know, when you're at work, lots of conversations for all kinds of questions with AI.

You really got to, you got to kind of jump over from Google into this world as fast as you can.

Great.

Thanks, Greg.

We'll be right back after a quick break.

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Welcome back back on to our final question.

Hi, Scott.

Tim from Long Island, New York.

As a father of four and five-year-old girls, I really appreciate the emphasis you place on being a father.

And while I'm not raising young men myself, I do realize my duty in providing a positive example for my daughters so that they may one day partner with someone and recognize qualities to look forward to mate.

That being said, my question is related to what I think is very much a common theme in your assessment on a variety of topics, and that is the generational loss of reasoning and critical thinking skills.

In this coming age of AI, how can we continue to raise children that can think critically and reason on their own?

I'll repeat the last part of the question.

In this coming age of AI, how can we continue to raise children that can think critically and reason on their own?

Greg, what are your thoughts?

Well, this is coming from, my advice is coming from someone who was really ineffective in terms of intervening with his kids.

So what I would say is we cannot outsource this question to our schools.

Really, that's the advice here, which is we do, as challenging as it can be, have to intervene, I think, in this moment with our kids.

In that I think most schools, from middle schools up to colleges, are really struggling right now in terms of how they should talk about AI, how they should use it in the classroom, and so what the road ahead looks like.

They'll eventually sort it out, presumably.

But until that happens, I think we as parents are going to have to get pretty hands-on with our kids in terms of how they should be using AI.

We're going to have to be quite explicit around using AI as a thinking partner, not an outcome partner.

And kids are going to want to use it as an outcome partner.

They're just going to want to use it to get the damn paper or assignment done and submitted and

get a good enough grade.

That's the reality.

Kids have always thought that way.

So we're just going to have to talk to them about things like, show me the prompts.

Did you fact check AI?

Show me how you worked with AI to get to get this kind of outcome that you're going to submit.

We're going to have to get hands-on here for the next few years.

Anyone who thinks that families have good parents, I know you and Cindy, I know you're great parents.

I'd like to think I'm a good parent, aspire to be a great parent, but I think probably I'm just good.

And

there's just no getting around it.

First off, 90%,

90%?

Yeah, about 90% of the anxiety, stress, agitative fights in our house have to do with the fucking phone.

I mean, this has,

if we could go back, they would say, you know, if you could go back in time, Warren Buffett would joke, we'd kill the Wright brothers because airlines have been such a terrible investment.

I think our biggest regret about this era of tech is going to be what we let happen to our children here.

It is just whether it's addiction to TikTok, getting misinformation, and believing shit is true they see online because it's a TikToker they like, or their brains being rewired to the point where I'm not even sure my kids are capable of watching a movie.

And that is, if I put them in a seat in a movie theater where it's like high-impact, crazy sound, and we get a ton of shitty food they can consume to keep them all hopped up, they can sort of do it.

But trying to sit them down for a movie night, it's near impossible because they're so used to getting DOPA hits in 90-second cycles or 20-second cycles.

So I'm sort of now of the mind that

we need to to probably ban phones, smartphones for kids under the age of 16.

And I'm now thinking under the age of 18.

I just think the downsides far outweigh the upsides.

And there's two different,

I mean, some of it's good, some of it's bad.

My youngest is essentially,

you know, trying to start a bunch of businesses using AI.

He has AI build a website, and his latest one was he was going to sell home goods, and he came up with this thing called Root Home.

And it was this bad website.

And then he asked AI, how do I drive traffic?

How do I make money?

And I can look at it and go, okay, this isn't going to work.

But that sounds like some of your early e-commerce centrists, Scott.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

But I couldn't be more proud that my 14-year-old, now 15, is using AI to try and figure out how to build websites and make money.

And I think, I want him to be an AI-enabled warrior around this stuff.

And it was like, it's just, it's just fantastic.

At the same time, AI is being weaponized by these social media platforms to keep him occasionally on his side, like he's in the midst of a gigantic heroin trip, staring at his phone, just this bed rot.

So I'm of two minds about it.

And that is, I think kids should pretty early learn how to use AI such that the same way we

learned how to use calculators.

At first, they didn't want calculators.

Remember that?

They didn't want calculators in school.

I remember in business school, they didn't want us.

My first year in business school, they didn't want us using spell check because they thought it was unfair.

And then they got their heads out of their asses and said, of of course you should use technology to have better inputs and better deliverables.

The admissions departments at universities are struggling with whether they should let kids use AI or not.

And of course they will.

I don't think there's going to be any way to not screen it out.

Anyway, I'm of two minds of this, and that is you got to have competent kids, but if AI is being used to cry, frankly, radicalize them, get them addicted to certain technologies, we've got to be more mindful there.

And my advice to any parent, and I did not do this,

absolutely prohibit social media and even a smartphone until probably age 16.

I'm with Jonathan Hyde on this.

There's certain upsides, downsides to that.

You won't be able to communicate as easily with them.

Your thoughts, Greg?

Yeah, we're just back to the question.

Just one last thought on this.

Listen, I used to say to everybody, and I think this was sort of a mean.

Are you mocking me?

Are you saying I wasn't answering the question?

No, I was just trying to.

Is this what happens when you bring your friends on?

No, I was just trying to help this listener out dude listen i think that um

we used to say use ai for your first draft i used to say this all the time to my team and and so everyone i spoke to and i think actually i've changed this is a mistake i've changed my mind

yeah exactly i agree like i think you want Starting with kids, we all need to struggle with that first draft.

Even just an outline, just sit with it and try to think it through yourself.

And then, frankly, you're going to have a much better conversation with AI anyway.

So I think just that little bit of struggle doesn't have to be for hours.

It just could be for 10, 15 minutes with whatever the problem is or whatever the question is.

Ask your kids to do that first and then get to AI next.

And then, for that, for that from there, have a good conversation with AI, learn how to use it, try to get a good outcome.

But we've all got to struggle, I think, with the blank page a little bit more.

That was great.

Thanks, Greg.

Greg Shove is the CEO of Section,

a company that helps deploy AI for enterprises

and a good friend for 30 years.

Greg, very much appreciate your time today.

Thank you, Scott.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.

Our assistant producer is Laura Janaire.

Drew Burroughs is our technical director.

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