The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Why Scott Shut Down His AI Persona, His Daily Routine, and When to Give Kids Money
09 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Office Hours of Prop G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehoursofpropgmedia.com. Again, that's officehoursatpropgmedia.com.
Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. Question number one. Our first question comes from Pygmy Nuthatch on Reddit. Pygmy Nuthatch, where do they get these names? They say, I'd like to ask some questions about your Google persona. What were the original goals of the project? Do you have any future plans for PropG AI offerings?
I was lucky enough to get to use the persona. It helped me with a complex career question. The tool or something similar could do a lot of good, though we all understand and respect the reasons you gave for ultimately deciding not to move forward with an expanded launch. Thanks. So just some background here. I have students, and then the best students, I ask to be my graduate student instructors.
I usually have four or five because I usually have about 180 students. And I say, you're running the class. I'm just the talent. And then one of my graduate student instructors went on to go to work for Google about seven, eight years ago. She's been very successful there.
And she contacted me about a year ago and said, we're doing a bunch of profiles where we crawl a person's information or all of their IP and create a character AI for them such that people can ask them questions. And they were doing some in the health space, some in the
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Chapter 2: Why did Scott shut down his AI persona?
business space, and then some of the academic space, and they asked me if I'd be interested. And I said, sure. And there was no commercial agreement, no money involved, but the impetus and the motivation was the following. I get between
20 and 30, that's conservative, outreaches a day from single mothers, from young men, from people in the mental health profession, from high school teachers, looking for help, advice, insight, basic questions. Where did you find this piece of information? Here's an idea. And I can't get to 1% of them. So I thought, how could I come up with something
that would say, hey, here's my character AI, ask it the same question, and there's an 80% probability it'll get it 80% right. And so we started working on this thing about a year ago. And then in that time, things changed dramatically. And that is character AIs became a thing. And it was discovered that a lot of young people
people, miners, were engaging these character AIs and starting to develop these, not even parasocial relationships, but in-depth relationships that oftentimes led to very dark places. And so when it came out, it was launched, I went on it, and I just was so uncomfortable with the idea of contributing to the sequestration of young men from their parents, their mentors, and their friends.
And I thought, if I'm in any way giving a young man an excuse to spend less time pursuing offline relationships, then that is bad and I don't wanna engage in it. So it was up for about four hours. And the Twitter philosopher, I think his name's Naval, he said something that struck me. He's actually, I think, a venture capitalist, but I think of him as a philosopher.
There's a few things I miss about Twitter, but he's one of them. I found his stuff was really interesting. He said that if you're having trouble making a decision, the answer is usually no. And I was just so uncertain and uneasy about this thing. And it had only been up four hours. And I felt bad because... the good people at Google, and they were good people.
I think the world of this woman and my interaction with this team at Google had been nothing but positive. And they'd spent so much time on it, and I just finally, I said, I'm just not fucking comfortable with this thing. And I called them and said, can you take it down?
I just don't want to be part of the character AI dilemma right now until we figure out what the guardrails are and how to handle it. And so they took it down. Is there potential upside? Yeah, but the potential downside I think is unknown right now. And I'm very uncomfortable with character AIs. I don't think there should be, until there's age gating, I don't want to participate.
And that is, I don't think anyone under the age of 18 should be in a synthetic relationship. And supposedly three quarters are already in some sort of synthetic relationship. So where was I? It started out as a good idea. I think my intentions were good or in the right place, but I was increasingly uncomfortable with the development and evolution of character AIs and decided to pull it down.
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Chapter 3: What concerns does Scott have about Character.AI?
Honestly, I go to their site whenever I'm looking for a basic or a staple for my closet. Kind of my go-to at this point for when I'm looking to build out my wardrobe. So absolutely love Quince.
There you go. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Don't wait. Go to quince.com slash profg for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash profg to get free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com slash profg. Welcome back. Our final question came from a listener who emailed us. Hey, Scott. Charles from Texas. Hi, Charles.
I want your take on my inheritance strategy for my son. Instead of giving him a pile of money when he's 70, when he'll just spend it on knee injections, a firmer mattress, or some dick pills, I want to give him cash when it actually matters. Plan is 25K at 18 so he doesn't start adulthood broke, 100K at 30 so he can buy a house or start a business. and then 1 million of 40.
After that, the gravy train stops. Dad retires from being the bank. What pitfalls should I watch for? And feel free to tell me this whole plan is genius or just financial cosplay. Huge fan of everything you do. Thanks, Charles from Texas. So Fed data shows that US inheritance recipients had a median age of around 49 to 50 at the time they received wealth transfers.
And according to the Richmond Fed, at least half of people don't receive their first inheritance until after age 40. I would bet that's going to go up because people are living longer. And what people actually spend on, younger groups tend to spend a larger share on categories including shelter, food away from home, transportation, and education. And overall, consumer spending data confirms that.
Necessities dominate budgets when they're younger, which is why a lump sum for housing down payment or business seed capital can be more financially productive than inheriting money late for discretionary spending. I don't think anyone's figured this out. I'm thinking about the same thing. I always go to a couple of things.
One, if you have the blessing of having some money to pass on, you want to give your kids enough money so they can do anything. but not enough money so they can do nothing. That's a Warren Buffett quote. And my approach is going to be, I learned this from Morgan Housel. I'm going to scale up or scale down my kids' efforts.
And that is, I'm not sure I'm going to lock into, and I don't think there is a reason to create a suicide pact or something you have to stick to. Cause I think a lot of it depends on the kid. Now, what do I mean? So if my kid gets out of college at 22,
and wants to be in nonprofit, I'm gonna give him money to try and, if he's a productive citizen and works hard and is in a low-paying industry, if he wants to be a high school math teacher, I'm gonna give him money. If my kid is not doing a whole lot of anything but partying, and I keep seeing on his Instagram, he's in Ibiza or something, by the way, I don't have that problem.
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