Scott Galloway’s Predictions for 2026

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0:30dot com slash Prof G to check out Fundrise's venture portfolio and get in early today. All investments involve risk, including a potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. This is a paid advertisement. Today's number, 187 million. That's how many minutes our fans spent listening to Prof G Markets in 2025 on Spotify alone. That's equivalent to 356 years. In celebration, Ed, tonight I'm going to watch Jaws with my son. We're going to do it a bit different, though. We're going to watch it backwards. And it's actually, when you watch it backwards, a heartwarming story of a shark who helps people work through their disabilities.

1:16All the podcast jokes are kind of lame. It's like going to therapy and your therapist are people who haven't matured since 2011. Oh, you like that one better? Yeah, I like that. I like that. Congratulations, Ed. You're not only 30 under 30, but we're wasting people's time. Pretty good. Pretty good numbers. Should we do a crime podcast where we describe hideous murders as like skincare routines? We'd be more successful. true crime podcasts absolutely crush, which I do not understand. I've never found a true crime podcast interesting in the least. Well, let's bring in Claire. How does any woman ever be around any man or live in an apartment building or stay in her car when she parks after listening to crime podcasts?

2:09It's basically all the same thing. There's a stranger in town who's introduced early in the podcast who commits a terrible murder against a woman. They're all the same. Claire? You want my take on true crime? Do you listen to crime podcasts? I don't listen to them either. You don't listen to them? No, no. Okay. I don't listen to a lot of podcasts, Scott. I don't have a lot of time to listen to anything other than— You're supposed to give us a nuanced take on how women— On how women feel about crime. On how women feel, yeah. What actually, Claire, what—I'm the same way. The first podcast I ever listened to was the one I was on with Kara Swisher.

2:45I still don't listen to this one. But what podcast do you listen to, Claire? I actually, I listened to one podcast recently called Articles of Interest. That's all about how our fashion industry is inherently linked to the American military. Whoa. And it's been an exploration of kind of how each war has shaped what we wear as Americans. I think that one's pretty fascinating. I think you would like it, actually. That sounds cool. Articles of Interest. Yeah. Ed, what do you listen to? I listen to me. I listen to who else? I listen to Lex Friedman sometimes, actually. I've been listening to that.

3:26It's been good. Lex? Yeah. Well, that was fascinating. Let's move on from these personal interest stories. You know, you're the one who started this. Did you know that? Yeah. I was just hoping I had more interesting friends. why don't you ask a more interesting question what are you guys doing i listen to the daily um i used to listen to radical history and then i realized no one was watching me listen so i don't need to listen to him because i'm not impressing anybody that's funny so i mostly i listen to our stuff i listen to occasionally i listen to an interview that Cara does on On with Cara Swisher.

4:11I really like The Daily. I think they do a great job and it makes me feel very old and very white. I'm kind of settling in to get off my lawn when I'm listening to The Daily. I like that that guy asks a couple questions that his producer tees up and then every few seconds goes, huh, huh. So what you're saying is it was difficult. I'm like, a lot of skill there. What do you mean by that? By the way, I made fun of him and supposedly he's really upset and all butthurt. We're talking about Bobaro? Michael Bobaro, yeah. Yeah. Michael, welcome to come on anytime, you sexy beast. He's got all that Movember hair on his head now, on his face now.

4:50He's very handsome. Very good voice, too. I actually have no idea what he looks like. What are your reflections on 2025 for the show? We are entering a new year, but those minutes sounded like a lot of listening time. Reflections on the show and how we've done? Well, so kind of zooming out, I thought that podcasting, so I sold my company in 2017, started another company, and I realized I went off this hamster wheel of more money. I like more money, but I want other things to drive me. I thought, well, it would make me really happy. And I want creativity to hit intellectual property, to hit influence, and try and do meaningful work.

5:36And we started Proptree Media. And we want to make enough money to pay our people well and make good livings. But it was never, it was different. It was a different approach. It was never about, okay, I've always been, how do I raise a shit ton of money, build something and then sell it to a company. That's been my strategy for the last 30 years. This was different. This was more about, you know, quote unquote, emotional and intellectual reward. and about two years ago we started doing really well and we started launching new voices new programs and now my greed glands are going again and so prop g markets within the portfolio of the five podcasts is growing faster i think than any other of our properties and the most exciting thing about it is earlier in the year you and claire basically went to five days a week and i'm basically like one, one and a half.

6:25And so, and by the way, that doesn't, that's not in any way slowed the growth. So, and I also believe the opportunity. So I think CNBC sucks. I don't know if you've ever picked up on that for me, but I think there's a huge opportunity to be the premier business media property, especially going after young people. I think the average age of a CNBC viewer is like dead and we get the average age of our listeners is 34. So, and that's where all the money is. So I like the idea of surrounding a set of consumers with shows on economics, China, the markets, we do our political podcasts, but there's just no getting around it.

7:10You and Claire have in the Prof G markets team have killed it. You guys are what, I mean, you've won a bunch of In addition, you're 30 under 30. Jesus, what does the podcast run? We won Best Business Podcast. What did we win? We won the Signal Award, Best Business Podcast. We also won the Webby Award. There you go. So it's been great. I think this was Claire's first job. I know it was your first job. Claire, was it your first job? Yeah, it was after internships. Okay, so think about this. The two people running this show, the person running it behind the mic and the person in front of the mic, this was their first job.

7:45so i think that but that's really exciting that's really nice and and you guys work well together and uh i like the yeah i'm just uh this is probably property markets i think is growing it's probably the most successful product i've ever been involved in right out of the gates i don't have anything i can wow i don't think i've ever launched typically when i launch a product or a website or a business it's kind of like oh i have a great idea and i raised some money i'm like, well, this isn't working. And I pivot and I pivot and it does okay. And then pivot again, and we catch on to something. And that's why I tell entrepreneurs that the key is just starting because whatever you think makes sense until you face the enemy being the marketplace, you don't know.

8:31And the vision for this, granted, we had profit, we had property markets for a while at twice a week, but then when we went to five times a week, and also I love that you guys have done a great job incorporating other boys. I'm talking my own book here, but I'm really happy. How do you guys feel about it? Claire, you go first. You're the brains behind this chili bag of donut taco stand. It's been a really rewarding year. I mean, it kind of went off without a hitch and we've got such a good team behind us. So, I don't know. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a year of hard work, but it hasn't been a hard year.

9:08It's been a really fun year. So I've loved it. And I think we're going into year four. Wow. It's been that long. I didn't know that. It's been that long. We started, we started with one episode in 2022, in July of 22. Ed, reflections? I'm just surprised that there's so much to talk about. I remember when we, when you said, I want to do a daily show, I was like, well, there's not enough stuff that happens in the world to talk about. Oh my God, was I wrong? You can talk about anything. There is so much crazy shit happening, especially in business and markets. So it's been really fun learning how to do that.

9:46I need to come up with something with a plan for 2026. Our 2025 thing was, okay, now we're going to do it daily. Every year we have a thing that we're working towards. I need to think about what that's going to be for 2026. You don't think it's going to be events? Events. That's good. That's a good one. We're going to make it events. So I'm going to have people come up to me and ask me about if you're single, which I'm really looking forward to. 2026 is going to be about, I think, about events and alternative platforms for distribution. But I think Claire's point is a really important one, that she's gotten a lot of psychic compensation because this year the monetary compensation will be dramatically lower for both of you.

10:23So I just want to prepare you and I want to acknowledge Claire's recognition of the psychic compensation. I need nothing else, Scott. Yeah. I've had a terrible time. I've had a terrible time. Yeah. It's been wonderful. Thanks. Thanks for your good work. It's been a great year. Just consider that for my review. Uh-huh.

10:44Okay. Let's get into our episode here. This is our first episode of the year. It is pre-taped. So we'll be back next week for our proper episode, and we'll get into everything that's been happening. But for this episode, to kick it off, we are going to walk through your predictions for 2026. We're going to cover your thoughts on what is in store for AI, for media, for emerging tech. Try to address some audience questions and comments we got on the live stream. That sound good? Yeah, sounds great. Okay. We're going to zoom through this. So your first prediction here, Scott, AI stocks correct. Please unpack that.

11:24Yeah, so I think the groundwork for this is I think China is so sick of dealing with the sclerotic raccoon on meth policies of the Trump administration where he has changed the tariff policy with China 17 times since entering office. And if I were him, and they've seen this for a while, they've been diversifying away from the U.S. They've gone from 17 % of their exports went to the U.S. It's down to 10. And they have reduced just in the last, gosh, the last eight months, their exports to the U.S. by 70 billion. And if I were advising Sheen, I've said this before, I'd go for the jugular and I'd start dumping AI into the U.S.

12:04market with open weight, less expensive AI models. And I believe they're already starting to do that. And as you see, as technical specifications or performance of these things start to reach parity, and they seem to be able to train their models for less money and build models that require less energy, I think they're just going to dump a massive amount of AI into the market and crash our market or force a correction in the valuation of these companies. So I think that's coming. And these coming, it's really interesting. Now, they appear to be doing this, making these advances with substantially less capex.

12:41Some people would say that the capex is hidden because similar to how Boeing benefited from massive government military spending, a lot of people say that local governments are propping up these AI or open-weight AI models. But one thing is clear, they're reaching sort of technical parity. So if you can get 90 % of open AI or Anthropic for 30 % of the price, that's a really good value proposition. And the CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, kind of rattled markets when he said that they were relying on Alibaba's, I don't know if it's QN or QN model. He said it's very good and it's also fast and cheap.

13:15So I think anyways, I think these stocks are going to come under, these valuations are going to come under huge pressure as more and more companies announce that they're using much less expensive Chinese models. I'm just going to zoom us to the second prediction, which is that the data center bubble bursts. Yeah, I find that a lot of the data center modeling is essentially such that Sam Altman can pretend his business is going to be much bigger than it is. The number of data centers announced is up at 240%. But if you look at the actual number that have begun construction, it's a fraction of that.

13:56I feel like a lot of this is signaling as opposed to actual construction. and also there's huge points of constraint and specifically like one of the biggest data centers in nvidia's hometown is still empty because it's awaiting power it they're estimating for a lot of these things it would take five to eight years to connect them to the grid and if you believe the statements around the revenue projections and the power required to fund the data centers implicit in these revenues projections, we would need 250 nuclear plants, new nuclear power plants at a cost of$10 trillion. So I just think it's, Altman said, our vision is simple.

14:40We want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. I just don't see how that's feasible. I also don't think it's true. I think he's just trying to say, I know my business so well. And as a head fake, look at it, we're going to need all this power. And I just don't think it's going to happen. And I think the data storage projections are way off and that that bubble is going to pop. And whether or not the power infrastructure keeps up or increases or not, the CapEx will absolutely increase it. But meanwhile, China is continuing to power ahead. They brought on 256 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2025, the first half, and that's more than the rest of the world.

15:29So it doesn't even appear that we have the infrastructure or we have the capital, but it doesn't appear like we're actually going on with it. So it strikes me that there'll either be huge constraints logistically or that we're going to find that in fact, AI does slow down and there are cheaper, less energy consumptive ways of powering these LLMs or that they'll be powered out of China with open weight models. So I think we're going to see a bit of a bubble burst in not only AI stocks, but in this data storage hysteria. In addition, unfortunately, what we're going to see is another wealth transfer from middle-class households in the form of higher electricity prices, because it will put a strain on the existing grid, which will transfer to an increase in electricity prices for middle-class consumers, but also incumbent in the first prediction about those stocks we're correcting, I think there's going to be a bailout in 2026, and the bailout is going to be of AI, specifically they'll position as some sort of strategic government investment in the form of loan guarantees to continue the music playing, but it's effectively going to be a bailout.

16:37And that is all of these companies are built on such ridiculous expectations around revenue growth and the way they will want to get to that revenue growth and provide the infrastructure and buy more chips will be to take on massive debt loads back by the government, which in my mind is essentially a bailout. Yeah, I mean, well, AI bailed out Trump's administration, so it would only make sense that the next year Trump's administration bails out AI. It would bring everything full circle. Your third prediction, the NVIDIA and OpenAI duopoly comes under siege. Please unpack that prediction. Well, it's just the great thing about competition.

17:14NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world because they're able to command incredible operating margins. It reminds me, when I got out of business school in 92, the premier job was Intel. And Apple and Motorola got sick of Intel's essential duopoly in conjunction with their partnership with Microsoft, and they started producing their own chips. And, you know, OpenAI is saying they're going to increase their revenues by$180 billion by 2030 and NVIDIA$800 billion by 2030. And then if you look at, I mean, it's just staggering. And we're also seeing that while these companies still dominate, we are seeing some share dispersion.

17:54Specifically, Gemini is now at 15%. DeepSeq, which was at zero, is now at 4%. And also, as we've said, we think Gemini is probably the most underrated LLM because of the fire hose of a couple billion users each day that they can fire via Google search. And I find that the AI summaries at the top of Google queries are getting better and better. I think Anthropic, per our comments around, I think it's going to be a successful IPO. I think it'll grow its share. and even Amazon and Google are trying to get into the game, producing their own chips to compete with NVIDIA. This is a good thing, but right now NVIDIA's share of GPU market is 94%.

18:34That will come way down, and their market cap right now is greater than the entire stock market of Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Italy. And then if you just look at the market cap of this company, relative. NVIDIA's market cap is greater than the market cap of Costco, Bank of America, IBM, Palantir, ExxonMobil, Walmart, Netflix, Oracle, Home Depot, and Salesforce combined. I don't think that's sustainable. And go back to the Intel example. Intel had a similar type of duopoly with Microsoft versus NVIDIA and OpenAI. And in 1999, it was a$200 billion market cap. By 2000, It was half a trillion.

19:15Now it's$165 billion. And granted, Intel may be the worst managed big tech company of the last 25 years given their leadership. But I do think it's somewhat of a metaphor for what might happen to NVIDIA. And also NVIDIA is a premium price product. It costs about$10 an hour to use their NVIDIA H100 versus about half the price for an AWS Tranium or a Google TPU. So I don't think this is kind of a, this is a bit of a layup because these two companies are too profitable to maintain, to not attract huge sharks. There's so much blood in the water here. So it's just logical their share would come down.

19:55So that's not that bold a prediction. I guess the question is how much their share will come down. And who will come for them? Who are going to be the main attackers? Well, it's like Gary Oldman said in the movie, wasn't it the assassin with Natalie Portman's first movie? He says, bring everyone. And he's like, what do you mean? He's like, everyone. So everyone. I think everyone's coming for these guys. I think Amazon, every big tech player, I mean, meta, everyone's going to be trying to develop their own chips and their own LLMs. And again, per the previous prediction, China is just going to just start massive AI dumping.

20:30I don't know if they have the IP around the chip, but Jeff Bezos looks at all these rockets going into space and the value of SpaceX and starts saying, OK, Kuiper. And I would bet that they're thinking a lot long and hard about how to develop a pretty robust chip offering. We'll be right back after the break. And if you're enjoying the show, send it to a friend and please follow us if you haven't already.

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21:40There's nothing wrong with leftovers, but now, if you want, with Fundrise, you can take a seat at the table alongside the biggest names in tech investing. Visit fundrise.com slash propg to check out Fundrise's venture portfolio and start investing in minutes. All investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal past performance is not indicative of future results this is a paid advertisement we're back with prof g markets okay big tech stock pick is amazon why is that so it's all about obviously their earnings growth strategic positioning and also all of this relative to their current valuation.

22:27And Amazon, so our big tech stock pick of last year was Alphabet, it's up 68%. The worst performing stock of the year to date is Amazon, only up 7%. And if you look at their revenue per employee, it's actually down 28 % in the last 10 years versus up 49, 56, and 62 at Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft respectively. And I think a lot of that is not because of underperformance of Amazon, but because of huge investments in more people to staff their factories and also huge investments in robotics and AI. And I think that where AI begins to pay real dividends in terms of market cap increases is that I think it will lose market cap across the infrastructure and LLM layer, but I think it's going to increase market cap in quote unquote, the application layer specifically around autonomous and robotics.

23:22And I think Amazon's acquisition in Kiva was genius. And the fact that Amazon has a million robots or a million operational industrial robots versus the rest of the nation of 400 ,000 and their prediction that they can double their retail revenue by 2033 or 32 without any increase and employees just says to me that one of the biggest businesses in the world, and that is Amazon's retail business, is going to register margin expansion. Typically what's happened over the last 10 years is all the margin expansion has come from Amazon Media Group or from AWS. But if you're able to expand the margins substantially across one of the world's largest revenue streams, and that is Amazon's platform retail, that's going to be dramatic.

24:10And Amazon is the Ford of the 21st century. Ford, in about 10 or 15 years, took the production time of a car down 90%. And in the last decade, Amazon's been able to do the same thing from click to order. And I think it's going to take it down 99%. And you're going to have huge Amazon warehouses and delivery, basically almost the entire supply chain, operated by these industrial robots. And that obviously has societal implications, but it's going to be great for Amazon shareholders. And then you layer in Kuiper, which is its Bezos attempt to develop launch capability. I think that'll become, it's kind of been a pimple on the elephant to SpaceX.

24:49I think that's going to become not a big competitor, but a player, if you will. and I just don't see AWS is being kind of hammered as being seen as the least AI compatible or the least AI enabled cloud but it is still the number one cloud company and it's also trading at what are typically historically low multiples for Amazon it typically trades at 58 p of 58 which is rich it's now trading at 33 its enterprise value to EBITDA over the last five years has average 23. It's now at 17. In some, just as Alphabet looked cheap to me last year, or reasonable, I should say, not cheap. Amazon doesn't look cheap, but it looks reasonable.

25:31And I think people are going to realize that AI, the best interface of AI is in autonomous or in robotics. And Amazon is a leader in collapsing AI and robotics. Listen to Carmen. Kind of surprised the pick is an Alphabet again, given how you've praised Google's progress in AI. Why not Google again, Scott? Could be. I think, so I own some Alphabet and I'm not selling. And the thing I'm most excited about, quite frankly, with Alphabet is Waymo. Because again, I think the place that AI starts to register stakeholder growth is an autonomous. I like Alphabet. I'm not selling. It's up 69 % this year.

26:07So it's had, or 68%. So it's had a pretty big run, but I still think it's It's one of the more reasonably priced stocks. Fifth prediction, space becomes the next thing. Well, tech of the year. So, you know, AI, then I predicted voice, then AI, then GLP-1, and last year I predicted nuclear. This year I'm predicting space, and that is what technology or platform or sector attracts the most cheap capital and sees the greatest increase in valuations. And I think it's going to be space. and if I were running IR for SpaceX, the way I would position it is, okay, Google gets 90 % of search, Meta, 60 % of all social, Amazon, 50 % of all commerce, but we at SpaceX have 90 % of literally everything else.

26:58And that is, if you look at this tiny little pale blue dot in one of 10 ,000 universes or galaxies, we own 90 % of everything outside of that blue dot. We are putting, I think 90 % of launch capacity right now, two-thirds of satellites. They can get