LA's Mayoral Race is Heating Up, Truth About Mamdani's "Balanced Budget" is SHOCKING, 6.1 MILLION Workers Are About to Lose Everything to AI | Weekly Recap

Summary

Impact Theory – Weekly Recap (May 17, 2026)

Episode Theme:
Tom Bilyeu and his co-hosts break down the week’s hottest political and economic headlines with a focus on critical thinking, personal responsibility, and understanding the true causes and effects behind policy proposals and media narratives. Major topics include LA’s mayoral race and campaign tactics, the reality behind Mamdani’s so-called “balanced budget” in New York City, and the seismic impact of AI on the workforce—especially for women.

---

1. LA’s Mayoral Race: Attack Ads, Political Narratives, and Compassion vs. Responsibility

[00:45–12:25]

Key Discussion Points

• Breakdown of Spencer Pratt Attack Ad:

  • Tom analyzes a negative campaign ad against Republican candidate Spencer Pratt, critiquing claims around homelessness, policing, and public employee unions.
  • Left-leaning arguments blend resentment and compassion, often using "compassionate" language to push for taxpayer-funded solutions, such as free housing for the homeless.
  • Tom challenges the government’s efficacy in building housing:

    “They want to build free houses for homeless people as a one, two punch of, like, landlords, housing is a right...using taxpayer dollars to build it. Despite the fact that the government would be the world's worst people to build these houses.” — Tom Bilyeu [01:04]

  • Police vs. Social Workers Argument:

    “Police officers are tyrants. Social workers are kind and loving…Not realizing that the number of violent offenses come from a ridiculously small number of just actual individual humans.” — Tom Bilyeu [02:48]

• Homelessness and Criminal Justice:

  • Acknowledges the tragedy of broken childhoods but insists on necessary hard boundaries:

    “Anybody that doesn't meet that with like deep, deep empathy...but nonetheless if you've got somebody that kills, like you gotta lock em the F up.” — Tom Bilyeu [04:46]

• Unions and LA’s Direction:

  • Criticizes the belief that unions inherently empower workers, attributing stagnant wage growth mostly to globalism instead.
  • Raises concerns about regulatory capture and unions prioritizing their own interests over the public or business:

    “Unions are not voting for the things that are gonna be best for the consumer or for the business. They're voting things that are best for the union.” — Tom Bilyeu [05:45]

  • Discussion of the feminization of public sector unions; Tom argues for dynamic tension between compassion and personal responsibility.

• Political Context Beyond LA:

  • Drew points out these dynamics are echoed in races across the US, not just California [10:09].
  • Tom emphasizes the dangers of one-party dominance in states like California:

    “No one should want a one party state, a one party country. Like that's how you really get yourself in trouble.” — Tom Bilyeu [11:52]

---

2. New York's Budget: Mamdani’s “Balanced Budget” and Sweden as a Cautionary Tale

[13:27–27:57]

Key Discussion Points

• Mamdani’s Budget Strategy:

  • Gives credit to Mamdani for good political maneuvering: clawing back NYC tax revenue from the state, which had been sending more money to the rest of New York than it received.
  • Examines the new “pied-à-terre” tax (on multi-million dollar second homes):

    “No one is going to fight for the ultra wealthy guy that doesn't want to be taxed on his extremely expensive second or third home.”— Tom Bilyeu [13:35]

  • Skeptical about actual revenue impacts, noting wealthy owners can restructure assets to avoid taxes.

• Balanced Budget Reality Check:

  • Critiques the lack of spending cuts and overreliance on raising taxes for balancing budgets.

• Sweden’s Model Debunked:

  • Tom addresses the popular “Nordic model” often cited by US progressives.
  • Highlights Sweden’s shift from high-tax socialism toward capitalism and private market reforms after a severe banking crisis in the 1990s:

    “Sweden hasn't been running the Nordic model for decades now. They immediately began implementing what has become some of the most aggressive set of reforms in Sweden's history.” — Tom Bilyeu [21:30]

  • Sweden now features lower top tax rates (~50%), more private healthcare/education provision, and a higher billionaire-per-capita rate than the US.
  • The take-home: you “run out of other people’s money,” and prosperity follows free-market reforms, not top-down redistribution.

• Historical Tax Rates (US and Sweden):

  • Tom dissects the US’s own history with high marginal tax rates post-WWII and argues they didn’t bring in more tax per taxpayer as many believe.

    “Even comparing it to today, on a per taxpayer basis, they were collecting less money.” — Tom Bilyeu [20:11]

---

3. AI Revolution: Job Losses, Gender Impact, and the Future of Work

[28:31–43:10]

Key Discussion Points

• Commencement Speech & Generational Anxiety:

  • Tom and Drew react to a commencement address about AI triggering visible alarm among graduates.
  • Tom empathizes with the anxiety but insists the response should be agency and adaptation:

    “Your life is going to be a reflection of your choices...Focus on skill acquisition. The reality is none of us can see the future. We may all get replaced by AI. That's entirely possible. But for now, that's just a what if.” — Tom Bilyeu [31:55]

  • Advice: Limit debt, live below means, get a job and use AI to your advantage.

• AI Job Displacement and Gender:

  • Major finding: Female-dominated job categories are at highest risk from AI:

    “86% of Americans, most AI vulnerable workers are women. Three new reports just confirmed the pattern.” — Tom Bilyeu [34:58]

    • Clerical/admin/office support roles at greatest risk.
    • Global phenomenon, not US-specific.

  • Warns against regulatory overreach (like extending Title VII or EEOC action) as a response:

    “Letting this play out in regulatory is a terrible idea. This is going to be regulatory capture in the extreme.” — Tom Bilyeu [37:45]

  • Urges women not to stick with doomed job types out of inertia; instead, they should pivot to roles less susceptible to AI.

  • Diversity and Technology:

    • Technological substitution isn’t “aimed” at women; just happens to overlap with traditional job gender splits.
    • Attempts to artificially maintain women’s dominance in exposed sectors would be as absurd as “saving trucking for men” when automation arrives.
    • Focus should be on equal opportunity to compete for future-proof jobs.

• Socioeconomic Pressures & Double Disruption:

  • Drew and Tom discuss how economic inequality and AI disruption are colliding:

    “Having these two things happening at the same time is wildly exacerbating the problem…That is the only way that we're going to get out of this — [we need] more jobs, higher paying jobs, [not just] stocks becoming more valuable.” — Tom Bilyeu [42:11]

• Home Robotics and the Future:

  • Brief discussion of humanoid robots entering daily life and the battlefield, illustrating the accelerating pace of automation [42:23–42:54].

---

4. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Everything about the way [Katie Porter] talks, her tone of voice, the way she holds herself, literally everything about her screams like this is a person who inside is just angry.” — Tom Bilyeu [01:04]
• “No one should want a one-party state, a one-party country. Like that's how you really get yourself in trouble.” — Tom Bilyeu [11:52]
• “Sweden hasn't been running the Nordic model for decades now.” — Tom Bilyeu [21:30]
• “Your job right now is to make sure that you can adapt. Now, a big part of this is going to be you have to minimize your debt. And so if you're already in debt, that is going to be the biggest thing. You have to focus on. Do not keep making that problem worse by taking on more and more debt.” — Tom Bilyeu [31:55]
• “Letting this play out in regulatory is a terrible idea. This is going to be regulatory capture in the extreme.” — Tom Bilyeu [37:45]

---

5. Timestamps for Landmark Segments

• [00:45] — LA mayoral campaign ad breakdown begins
• [02:48] — Policing vs. social work, Tom’s stance on mental health and violence
• [05:34] — Attack ad on union power; Tom on the limits and dangers of unions
• [10:09] — Applicability of these campaign tactics/politics nationwide
• [13:30] — New York City budget and Mamdani’s “shock” solution
• [17:30] — How Sweden’s failed socialism led to the rise of free-market policies
• [28:43] — AI’s impact on new graduates—paralyzing uncertainty
• [31:55] — Tom’s “improvised” motivational speech for anxious graduates
• [34:58] — Data on women’s vulnerability to AI-driven job loss
• [41:25] — Collision of economic inequality and AI-driven disruption

---

6. Tone and Takeaway

• The tone is direct, intellectually restless, and sometimes provocative.
• Tom Bilyeu consistently pushes for personal responsibility, critical examination of narratives, and adaptation mindset in the face of technological, economic, and political disruption.
• Listeners are encouraged to think beyond slogans and party lines, seek out the true mechanisms of prosperity, and prepare for a world where adaptability and skill acquisition are more important than ever.

---

Summary for New Listeners:
This episode of Impact Theory offers a hard-hitting, sharply analytical survey of urgent sociopolitical and economic issues. Tom and his co-hosts demystify political attack ads, expose the realities behind socialist “success stories,” warn about the coming tidal wave of job losses due to AI (with a special focus on gender vulnerability), and challenge all listeners to take an active, skill-centric approach to their futures. The message: The world is chaotic, but you can thrive if you refuse comforting illusions and adapt rapidly.

Transcript

[Tom Bilyeu]

Book a loved by guest property with VRBO and you get a top rated vacation rental that's loved for all the right reasons.

[Commercial Voiceover 1]

Uh, I love my VRBO for the location.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Good reason.

[Commercial Voiceover 1]

Oh and for the pool cause pools are cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I feel the love. Book a VRBO that's loved by guests. If you know you VRBO saving for

[Commercial Voiceover 2]

your next milestone, turn your everyday errands into cash back opportunities. Thanks to the Blue Cash Every Day card, we can earn 3% cash back in the US on essentials like groceries at supermarkets, online retail purchases and gas stations. That's how we started growing our family's little nest egg. Take the next step with Blue Cash every day from Amex. Learn more at americanexpress.com Explore BCE terms and cash Back Cap Apply Rental Prac

[Drew]

has just had an attack ad launched against him and certain people are laughing because they say, yeah, this actually sounds great.

[Political Ad Narrator]

Republican Spencer Pratt is the last thing Los Angeles needs for mayor. Pratt opposes using taxpayer money to build brand new houses for our unhoused neighbors, saying it's time for the homeless to get help or get out.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The left is taking a page out of a playbook that is both pure resentment and compassion, and the two get intermingled. And especially when they make their arguments, they can argue from a place of compassion. I don't know that everyone will agree with me, but Katie Porter to me is the embodiment of somebody who says compassionate things but is clearly just a bitter, angry person. Everything about the way that she talks, her tone of voice, the way she holds herself, literally everything about her screams like this is a person who inside is just angry. And so when I look at that, they want to build free houses for homeless people as a one, two punch of like landlords, housing is a right. You're going to hear more people say that. They may even say that here, but I've certainly heard that out of many left leaning politicians, which is absurd. That's insanity. But they're like, hey, everybody should have it. We're going to use taxpayer dollars to build it. Despite the fact that the government would be the world's worst people to build these houses. Look at what they've done with the rail and a whole host of other things. Like they'll get bogged down in bureaucratic nightmares. They'll fund NGOs with the money. I mean just, it becomes pure insanity. But they want that. So when they hear Pratt doesn't want to build houses for the homeless, they they don't think, oh my God, thankfully somebody's being Fiscally responsible. They think he's an, like, what kind of tyrannical monster would side with the quote, unquote, landlords that want to charge you money for housing? Like, that's crazy. That's what they're going to hear.

[Political Ad Narrator]

Pratt thinks l. A. Needs thousands more police officers rather than more social workers. And Republican Spencer Pratt.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, pause. So same idea here. Police officers are tyrants.

[Drew]

That is social workers, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Police officers are tyrants. Social workers are kind and loving, and we don't want to put more people in prison. Prison is, you know, just a brutal place that doesn't do any good for anybody. And so we've got to get these people back out on the street. We've got to show them compassion. Not realizing that the number of, like, violent offenses come from a ridiculously small number of, like, just actual individual humans. That there are just some people that, either through mental illness or whatever, have ended up in a place where, for them, they. Violence is just an option. And so you're getting now more of these. Like, there was a guy recently who refused to press charges on a guy, and then like, some matter of months later goes and kills somebody else. And now the guy's like, oh, like, maybe I should and press charges. So it's one of those where if you are trying to respond to a violent outburst with the part of you that is devastated, as I am by the way, that somebody has ended up in this position, either because they were. I mean, take drug and alcohol impacted at birth, right? I mean, just you're setting somebody up for failure. If you're raised in a broken home, if you're abused, like, all of these things break the human psyche. And they set you up to do horrific things down the road. Like, that's rough, man. They did not do anything to deserve to be in that position. But nonetheless, like, when they roll up and the person is having a mental health crisis and they're putting other people in jeopardy, you have to physically restrain them. You can't show up and be like, listen, everything's gonna be okay. Like, that ship sailed a long time ago. And so that's where I'm like, I get it. I get it. It really is a human tragedy, dude. I've been way too close to this. When you see somebody who was broken in childhood, for whatever reason. We were talking about IQ earlier. No one has earned their iq. Nobody. Maybe you got dealt a bad hand, and because of that, you were unable to defend yourself when you were young.

[Drew]

And.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And just every kid is vulnerable. And so you Just get broken and now you're an adult. Anybody that doesn't meet that with like deep, deep empathy, which again a quote that sounds like it should be from the Bible but probably isn't there but for the grace of God go I. Right dude. I think that way too often in my life. It's like I really believe the importance of childhood is so extreme. Any of us could have been broken in childhood and the ones of us that dodged it, just like we got lucky. I hear about somebody in emotional distress doing a very bad thing and I'm like, that is so brutal. Because you can track it back oftentimes to head trauma, drug and alcohol abuse, genetic misfire, whatever. Like there's so many things that they didn't do to earn that bad thing. But nonetheless if you've got somebody that kills like you gotta lock em the

[Drew]

F up the next one, this is public employee unions should have less power.

[Political Ad Narrator]

Employee unions should have less power, not more. LA is on the right track and needs to stay the course.

[Tom Bilyeu]

LA is on the right track. That, that is crazy. As somebody that's lived here now for like 30 to 33 years, I assure you L A is on the wrong track as evidenced by increasing homeless populations, encampments everywhere, open drug addiction, like gnarly, the number of taxpayers that are fleeing bad. So we just have less money to deal with things. Now the thing in that, that I expect people to have a knee jerk reaction to is that the union should have more power. And I think they're going to find it weird. The thought of wait, why wouldn't we want workers to have more power? The reality is that unions have like almost no correlation with employee power in terms of being able to actually get your wages up. Globalism, like when you chart that, that that has decimated workers ability to increase pay over time. Unions had like something like a 2% correlation. It was very, very low. So getting people to understand what ends up playing out with unions is that they end up basically being able to hold people hostage, the politicians, because they can vote as a bloc. And so now they're saying we want to get these policies which as you can imagine will be good for them. There's also a lot of feedback loops where it's like hey dear politician, if you help us get this money secured from an NGO or whatever then, or government grants or government contracts will then feed back into your campaign. So, so that gets very incestuous on both sides. So don't think anybody's clean here. But looking at that, what ends up Happening is just like regulatory capture. The unions are not voting for the things that are gonna be best for the consumer or for the business. They're voting things that are best for the union. And so when you look at education,

[Drew]

it's gonna give the union more power.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Exactly. So we end up spending more per student than basically anywhere else on earth. And we're middle of the pack in terms of results. So to me, that is a catastrophe. And it shows you that throwing money at the problem strength the union. Neither of those things help. You want to put yourself in a position where people can be fired, that they're held accountable to results. As a society, roughly 50% of people have completely abandoned that notion. And so we're constantly in this super precarious position where you've got a body that is able to get itself more and more power to help politicians get elected. They yield worse and worse results. And go back to that image. For me, I have a growing hypothesis that I fully understand is going to be very unpopular, which is. But unions, especially in education, that whole mentality of collectivism, we've got to get what's, quote, unquote, fair. I need to see the image, though. And this is pure anecdote, and I have no idea that this is going to end up being true. But if you had said, tom, I'm about to show you a picture of a union, do you expect to see more men or women? I would default say, you're going to expect to see more women. And I really think that part of what makes women so powerful from an evolutionary perspective is this desire to caretake, to look after people, to make sure people are okay to connect with humans, to think more about humans. That's super necessary. You need that. But it has to be in dynamic tension with personal responsibility, male, like ambition and aggression. Like all of those things, they. They have to, like, hold each other accountable. And when they don't, things get out of balance. And so there's that woman, Helen something, something Helen.

[Drew]

Helen Andrews, the vision of society.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. Talking a lot about this issue. And I think it's really potent. And she's like, things broke, quote, unquote, woke when women started making up the majority of that given role. And so this is one of those I will beat to death the drum. Women are incredible. Lisa's one of the best business partners I've ever. I mean, literally, my wife is up there in the top echelon of. And I've worked with incredible people. Being a woman just has had no impact in terms of her ability to perform as an entrepreneur. It's incredible. We have a host of females here at Impact Theory that are incredible at a host host back a quest. Incredible, incredible. However, without that dynamic tension, you end up in a problem. And so that's where I think we're going to see more and more of this. And women need to come to an understanding that oh, this is how we go pathological. Just as men have to understand how they go pathological. And right now we're not seeing it. They wrap it in this language of compassion. How could you ever push back? I can push back because it yields terrible results.

[Drew]

And I want to kind of ground us for a second because you started this at the beginning saying that this is a slant toward depending on what the what part of the partisan side they're leaning towards. So right now we're talking about the LA Mayor race. But I'm saying right now this is going to be in Ohio, this is going to be in Florida, this is going to be in Texas. So while we're breaking down this specific entity, I think the same guidelines that you're pushing should be applied to wherever our viewers are listening from and whatever political ads they're going to see in their YouTube TV shows that's going to be coming increasingly frequent over the next couple months. So this is the groundwork that you're setting out. But this is also kind of a, a cause and effect breakdown if you would give me that generosity of how to approach these ads when they're saying these claims and when they're saying certain things.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, the, that's all true. The reason that I wanted to talk about this specifically is that I think in California they think that people on the right think that, oh my God, Spencer Pratt's got this on lock. Like his ads are incredible and I am admittedly optimistic and I certainly as of right now, he's the only candidate that I would ever consider putting any energy behind. However, I think it is a mistake to think that there is a huge swath of independence that are swayable. I think we're a one party state for a reason. We have been a one party state for a very long time and there's actually a name for this, but I forget it was based on a Boston politician who basically ran, ran the city more or less into the ground to get people to leave that didn't want to be a part of his policies. And I think that California does the same thing by being so anti business, by doing things that are so left leaning. People on the right like myself go, okay, am I really going to try to get people over the hump in terms of looking at cause and effect, or do I just go, I got to get the out of here? And so more and more people leave, making the state more and more one party. And that is the thing I really want to call attention to. It's like no one, no one should want a one party state, a one party country. Like that's how you really get yourself in trouble. And I see people increasingly calling for that. So yeah, that would be on either side. Terrible. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

[Grainger Commercial Voiceover]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Commercial Voiceover 1]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery, so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

[Ryan]

Our favorite pothole filling socialist out in New York City actually did balance the budget recently.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I want to talk about Mamdani in my promise to myself and to you guys, always, that if I see something that's done well, I'm going to call it out. Mamdani, who I consider my mortal nemesis, he has balanced the New York City budget. And he did it largely by clawing back New York City tax revenues that were flowing to the state. So in fairness to him, those dollars essentially belong to New York City in the first place. I think that that is a very good place to start. And the most recent fiscal flow study from 2026, it uses fiscal year 2021, 2022 data. So some things may have changed, but that found that New York City contributes 54.5% of state revenues when measured by place of work. That's very important. Now on the spending side New York city only receives 40.5% of state operating expenditures. Okay, so that's dodgy. In my estimation, the rest of the city is gobbling up nearly 60%, which is substantively more than they generate. New York city contributed roughly $68.8 billion, but only got back roughly $47.6 billion. This is a net subsidy to the rest of the state on the order of $21 billion in that fiscal year. Now, admittedly, the gap narrows down depending on how you allocate the income taxes. So if you look at place of residence, then New York City contributed 46.7 of the total revenue rather than the 54.5. The differ basically commuters. So these are suburbanites that work in New York City. They pay New York income tax on wages earned there. And if you credit that revenue to them out in the suburbs, that does change the picture. But if you set that aside, Mamdani, I think, had a pretty reasonable request of New York State and they gave it to him. So I think that they recognize that New York City is the economic engine of the entire state. And so trying to push them around was probably going to be a better idea or a bad idea. And so that one makes sense to me. Now you guys know me and I'll talk more about this in a second. But cuts, cuts. He should have done cutting. He didn't. But at least he's clawing back dollars that were generated by New York City. He also did another thing that I thought was pretty clever. And so the headline win on his like, we did it by taxing the rich. Not really. But there is one thing that they're doing that is legitimately targeting the rich, and that is this new pied a terre tax. Now, pied a terre is basically a non primary residence of second or third house. It's only things that are above $5 million. So that to me is very clearly targeted at specifically the wealthy. It's projected to bring in $500 million annually. Now, I think it's a very smart bit of political engineering on his part. No one is going to fight for the ultra wealthy guy that doesn't want to be taxed on his extremely expensive second or third home. That gets pretty hard to argue, especially if he can't vote because he doesn' live there. So that one I thought, okay, I get it, it's smart. Politically, obviously I would rather see them do this via cutting. But if you're going to do it, this one makes sense. So where I start saying, okay, hold on a second is that a pied a terre probably isn't going to generate as much of the revenue as they think it's going to. It's certainly not going to affect housing affordability. Because even if this does cause the ultra wealthy to stop the practice of owning the properties in that place, the properties that are in question aren't the properties that are driving values high. That is a dearth of properties in the ranges that the average person actually can afford. And also the wealthy owners are likely to restructure their assets into LLCs, trusts and corporate vehicles that are owned there, owned by someone in the state, and then may take it outside of this tax. And because of that, and this is many people are already saying this, the tax gains will inevitably fall short of what they're projecting. So the $500 million number is a nice planning assumpt assumption, but it's not a guarantee. And so I'll be interested to see if at the end of the year if the budget actually balances or not, because I have a feeling they're going to have a shortfall here. Now, if this ends up chasing off would be buyers. Another bit of pushback I would have is that now there's just less money flowing into the city. I get that we're at a cultural inflection point where we think people with money are bad, but the reality is everybody's got to have money. Nobody wants to work for free. So anybody that ever says, I'm not going to do that because I'm not getting paid, we're all the problem. So just getting everybody to remember you want money to flow into your city, you want that money to be handled well. You want your city, your state, your country to respect that capital. You want them to put restraints that don't end you up in the kind of like runaway toxic inequality that we have now. Obviously this needs to be fixed. But you don't just want to become predatory with your taxes causing people to leave. We've run this story before and it ends up being bad news. In fact, I want to talk to you guys about something that's going on in Sweden, which Mamdani himself has used as an explanation for the kind of policies that he wants to bring. Really fascinating. For years everybody has been talking about like the Nordic model. Look at what Sweden has been able to accomplish. And they use this, Mamdani specifically use it as an example of, of why they want to put forward the policies that they're putting forward. And what we're going to talk about now is basically largely me Going after the dsa. Because when you've got Mamdani banging the drum about making it sound like cutting isn't an option, fiscal discipline isn't an option. The only option is more free stuff and more tax on the wealthy. I've been so propagandized around Sweden and the Nordic model, even I didn't realize what was actually happening under the hood. So a recent article came out showing that Sweden has leaned into capitalism, has been doing it for decades, and as a result, they've gotten richer, a lot richer. From the 1970s through the late 1980s, Sweden's GDP per capita, that growth had trailed the OECD average, which is basically other developed democracies. So they were falling behind. So with all the Nordic model, they were falling farther and farther behind. They had a progressive tax system that's going to. AOC is going to love this. They had a progressive tax system that at the highest level is pushing past 90%. In an effort to say it with me now, tax the rich. But what was it actually doing? It was dragging down their entire economy.

[Ryan]

Post World War II is arguably the biggest boom in economic history for America, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Ryan]

At that time, though, the tops, the top marginal tax rate on the highest earners in the United States was 91%. And so I'm curious how that feeds into your argument about. I can't think of the word right now, but the fluctuating tax rates, the

[Tom Bilyeu]

progressive tax, that's the word. Yeah, man, what a great question, Ryan. I love this. Okay, so the US comes out of World War II, 90% progressive tax rate. And the reason that they were able to do that is because everybody believed in the war. So we go into World War II, we're fighting on the side of right and good. We've got to end the Nazis. You know, people are becoming increasingly aware of the atrocities we've been attacked at Pearl Harbor. So people were all in. And so there was a real sense of it is my patriotic duty is even the wrong word, but sure, my patriotic duty to do this. But people wanted to do it. They wanted to help America. There was this real sense of, we're all in this together, we've got to do whatever it takes to win. As we came out of the war, what we realized was that on a per taxpayer basis, we were actually capturing less money. And so it probably felt good to say that people are paying up to 90%, but the reality is that even comparing it to today, on a per taxpayer basis basis, they were collecting less money. So I get it. People love to hear that number, but the reality is that you're never going to actually capture that money. So what's going to end up happening is either people stop producing or they find ways around it. So it just doesn't work. And that's why we then very rapidly began backing off of that. I think there's a very credible argument to be made that the redistributive. Redistributive, making that sound hard nature of like the New Deal. What was that called? What was his name? Roosevelt. Doing his whole thing. Thing. Oh yeah, that. That ended up prolonging the Great Depression and that it was only the economic juice of the war that ended up getting out of it. And that if we had just let the depression run its course, not tried to engineer our way out of it, that we probably would have gotten out of it faster. That is the right way to look at what happened in World War II. And it goes back to the idea of when values are aligned, you can do things that you can't when values are misaligned. And I cannot think of a time other than, I mean, you've got during the Civil War and during maybe the 60s where the US was as divided or more divided than we are now. And so this would be a terrible time. I mean, we're seeing it in the fraud numbers. They're just absolutely ludicrous. This is my fear for New York City. This is my fear for the DSA policies. So Sweden had a heavily nationalized approach to business. They were doing their best to tax the life out of the rich. And they were famous for being the prototype of cradle to grave socialism. Hey everybody, don't worry, we've got you. Like you're never going to have to worry about a thing. Now, ironically or not, if you understand the physics of economies, this actually ended up putting them in an insanely fragile position. Because remember, the only thing that generates any taxable revenue are entrepreneurs. Full stop. So you're either an employee for an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur yourself, but that's it. This is how we derive value. So when Swedish. The Swedish banking crisis hit, lasted from about 90 to 93. That dropped their GDP by roughly 5% and sent unemployment skyrocketing from 2% over 10% in just three years. Yikes. Now, in the middle of all that, voters finally decided that they'd had enough of what I will call moronic policies. Though I imagine at that time they would have been pretty happy to agree with that. Sentimen. And it's one of those things that works on paper, but in real life it starts having problems when you find yourself in that kind of position. And so they ended up electing Sweden's first center right prime minister in 61 years. Not some like, wild right leaning guy, just center right, okay? He comes in, his coalition dismantles the Nordic social democracy model that had gotten them in the mess in the first place. The very model that people will say, oh, they're running the Nordic model. Sweden hasn't been running the Nordic model for decades now. They immediately began implementing what has become some of the most aggressive set of reforms in Sweden's history. Sweden's top income tax rate is now around 50% from its high of roughly 90%. Public social spending has dropped to 24% of GDP, which is the same as the U.S. by the way. Which, there are many things to be said about that, but we'll leave it at that for now. And the country now has more billionaires per capita than America. Okay? So think about that. We have these policies, cradle the grave, going to take care of you hit a banking crisis, all of a sudden we go, whoops, you really do run out of other people's money. We're going to have to go in, do things that actually stoke the engine of prosperity, which is a free market. And now we actually turn things around, get things going in the right direction. Suddenly people are waking up within Sweden, you know, back in the 80s, that the country needed to go in a way that gets the fiscal engine to be more disciplined and gets the free market to kick off more capital that can be taxed. And so what everybody is now seeing with this article is that the very country that Americans have argued about for 50 years, the one that was supposedly supposed to be proof that socialism really just makes life better across the board, has actually spent two decades not proving the exact opposite. It is complicated, and I want to be as fair to what works and what doesn't work. And I don't want to paint some propagandist picture about the free markets. However, as of right now, nearly half of Sweden's primary healthcare clinics are privately owned, mainly by private equity firms. By the way, one in three public high schools is privately run and school operators trade on the stock market. In Stockholm, healthcare spending per capita has only grown by roughly 1% a year from 2014 to 2024, which is half the rate of UK and a third of the rate of the increasingly socialist United States. And what it shows is that private competition, even in health care, is the thing that keeps costs down. Regulation, government involvement when they get out of hand. Because listen, Sweden is still very heavy government, but when they get out of hand, that involvement is the thing that drives costs up. So if you want to know why the US is moving in the wrong direction, it's because of this weird helter skelter like regulatory madness in both trying to not become single payer but not let the private market do what it does. It's crazy when you really start looking into it. Sweden has produced more than 500 IPOs in the last decade. Okay? That's all about private capital. Free market capitalism in the decade that ran through 2024. That's more than Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain combined. Bro, do you know how small Sweden is? It is tiny. It's like 11 million people. Spotify, Klarna, Skype, Minecraft, my beloved Candy Crush. All of them came out of Sweden's embrace of capitalism. If you create an environment where you just keep redistributing from the people that are able to pull it off, you disincentivize them to go and do it. Now all of a sudden there just isn't anything left to redistribute. That's what they found out the hard way in the 70s and 80s. Change their policy and they've been richly rewarded for doing it. It is the very thing that the west is going to be confronted with. You will run out of other people's money and you'll have to answer the question, what are you going to do to get back on the right side of that? No country needs to answer that more urgently than America. Which is why I hope I can really get people to pay attention to what actually happened. Taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after Stay tuned.

[Commercial Voiceover 1]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.

[Drew]

I've been watching this commencement speaker for like the last like 10 minutes now. It's just funny because she hits kind of the meme of just like, wait, did I strike a nerve?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't understand what he's saying, why she's so surprised yeah, it's wild.

[Drew]

So this is for the audiences here.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution evolution. True.

[Drew]

Oh, they're just not happy about it with the hands.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Who's she looking at?

[Drew]

Tell them to stop booing me. What's going on?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish? She's so uneasy there, man. Oh, I hope you guys are watching it. Like the finger tap on the thing. You can tell, like, oh, we're trying to regroup.

[Drew]

This is one of those things. We talk about it, it's fun. We talk about the breakthroughs, we talk about the new LLMs. But as a new graduate, I don't know if you're as excited because you're walking into this workforce that is quite literally being torn apart in real time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Even with, you know, 50 years of life experience looking at this one, it makes it so hard to look into the future and understand where things are going. I come out of film school and I'm looking at how to break into the industry, and it's just a wall of confusion. And that already was. Was very startling. But if you had said not only do you not know how to break into the industry, but the industry might not exist, or it won't exist in the way that you think of it now in the next, like, three years, that's a level of unnerving where you just go, have I just wasted the last, you know, however many 15, 16 years of my life? I am not at all surprised that graduates are on a knife's edge with this. And the reality is that if she's right and AI becomes the next Industrial Revolution, this is where people need to understand what actually happened with the Industrial Revolution. It was a brutal, tumultuous time of people getting replaced, having put their life on one trajectory and then having that completely upended. It ate two generations of people that were unable to make a pivot. So it's not only you, but it's oftentimes your kids. And it's not until your grandkids come along that they're able to take advantage of that and that you can see that play out in the Industrial Revolution, the great electrification and the Internet. So it's like when this stuff plays out, it. It really is disruptive and not for a short period of time. So while I think ironically, the young people will be the people that will adjust the easiest, it's people that are, say, north of 35ish, they're really going to struggle because they have so much invested in their lives, debt that they're Carrying their job has to go well. They're not at the beginning of their career where they're not married, they don't have kids, and they haven't yet built up well, Some of them will have will with college debt, but they haven't got as much of the yoke of responsibility that a lot of people that are north of 35 have. And so they'll adjust. But I get why they would boo a sentiment like that. And I'm extremely surprised why she's surprised.

[Drew]

It's one of those things, though. This is something that we have, we were talking about, but we haven't necessarily seen anything been enacted. So data centers are kind of on the chopping block now. We have, we see some, many people

[Tom Bilyeu]

are having negative response, not in my backyard kind of thing.

[Drew]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, we're seeing sentiment bubbling up, but we haven't seen anything actually happen. No legislation, nothing that has been sweeping. So to tell a young person, is it simply just hurry up and wait or you'll be okay? Once we get to the other side of this, I don't know what those timelines are. How, what would you tell, like, the recent graduate who was booing like, okay,

[Tom Bilyeu]

so if it's like, she tags out and she's like, okay, Tom, you step in here and give a speech. Yeah, here it is impromptu, but I'll tell you, she tagged me in. I'm not going to be tapping on the podium. I'm going to say, listen to everybody out there. I have wonderful news for you. You are in complete control of your life. Your life is going to be a reflection of your choices. You are facing a very daunting enemy, and that enemy is a world that is changing so fast, it is nearly impossible to predict the future. Anytime that you're in that scenario, you want to maximize your optionality. So focus on skill acquisition. The reality is none of us can see the future. We may all get replaced by AI. That's entirely possible. But for now, that's just a what if. Science fiction. No. What you do know today is that people that are using AI are going to massively outcompete the people that don't use AI. So you have been born into a world where humans have become the ultimate apex predator because of our ability to adapt. So your job right now is to make sure that you can adapt. Now, a big part of this is going to be you have to minimize your debt. And so if you're already in debt, that is going to be the biggest thing. You have to focus on. Do not keep making that problem worse by taking on more and more debt. Live below your means. Get a job. Prove your value by leveraging AI. Climb the corporate ladder. It became very apparent to me in my early 20s that you could drop me in at the bottom of any company and I could work my way up. The same is true for all of you. Do not be the person that is whining and crying about how the world is changing. Just win. The rules of the game are what the rules of the game are. Don't spend all your time trying to change the rules. That is going to be what most people do and they will get eaten by the wave of AI. You, on the other hand, my dear, people sitting in this audience today are going to retain control of your life. You're going to acquire skills like a fiend and you're going to outperform all the old people who have gotten so calcified in their thinking that they will be easy to demolish. So go forth and prosper.

[Drew]

He's available for bookings, everybody. If anybody needs an improper speech, that's the man.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When the audience gives you the unexpected result, you can take me in. I got you. I got you.

[Drew]

It's one of those things that was like, that sounded good and I need the hoorah rah. But it does seem like if I'm a young graduate, I don't have anywhere to go. It's just cloud and fog.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And the bad news is they will hate my speech more than they hated hers. And I've been at this long enough to know how strangely people actually respond when you're talking to the masses. If I can get an audience that has self selected into the way that I view the world, it'll go well. But the audience at large is disgusted by my it's all your fault rhetoric. I say that, I get it, it's provocative. I say it to trigger people. But I'm actually just trying to get people to understand if you make a different ch, you will get a different outcome. And the goal here is to figure out what things do I need to do in order to get the outcome that I want.

[Drew]

A new analysis reveals that female dominated corporate roles are more vulnerable to AI automation than male roles. I don't necessarily understand what they mean by this, but I'll let you give us the breakdown of it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let's go into it. This is becoming rapidly one of the most fascinating areas to think about. Women are bearing the first wave of AI job losses and I for one think a regulatory war is going to be the result. 86% of Americans, most AI vulnerable workers are women. Three new reports just confirmed the pattern. The January 2026 study from the Brookings Institute and the center for the governance of AI identified 6.1 million US workers who face the highest AI exposure and the lowest ability to find new work. 86% are women. Clerical jobs, admin jobs, office support. Roles overwhelmingly held by women. Now to be clear, it's not that these are the only roles held by women which many people are going to spin this as. AI is just going after women. So you can completely ignore anybody who uses this data to say, ah, listen, women don't do useful work, they're just going to get replaced so easily by the economy. That's bull. That is not what this data shows. Women obviously do incredibly valuable work in the economy, but the roles that are most exposed to AI happen to be the roles that as a category are dominated by women. So women tend to be abnormally attracted to the things that AI is going to be able to do very quickly. On March 5, the International Labor Organization confirmed, by the way, that this pattern is global. Female dominated occupations are nearly twice as likely to be exposed to generative AI as male dominated ones. So it's 29% versus 16% at the highest automation risk. The gap widens to 16% versus 3% across 88% of the countries that the ILO studied. Job categories dominated by women face more exposure than categories dominated by men. Then on April 28, the National Partnership for Women and Families made this all even harder to ignore. Women make up 47% of the US workforce. They make up 83% of workers in the 15 most AI vulnerable jobs. Given that policies in the west right now are largely driven by the female approach to compassion, however misguided, any sense of fairness over effectiveness, here's what I think is going to happen next. When a technology produces this kind of statistically obvious outcome that is disparate between the sexes, US regulators are going to lean on a 60 year old playbook doing things like Title 7, EEOC enforcement, state AGs that obviously are looking to push this agenda. Class action firms are going to jump in on this. So you're going to get disparate impact lawsuits. By the way, you don't even have to prove intent. They just require proving that the pattern exists and the pattern is already very well documented. Minutes. So I think that we can expect a regulatory battle to begin to unfold. I don't think anybody's going to be confused that I think Letting this play out in regulatory is a terrible idea. This is going to be regulatory capture in the extreme. We will try to do something that is top down to hold on to making sure that women continue to make up roughly 50% of the workforce as AI comes in. But that just doesn't make any sense. You want to make sure that the most qualified person is the one that's getting employed. And if for whatever reason, AI overlaps with the things that women have a tendency towards, you can't change that. That doesn't make any sense. And start saying, okay, we're just going to make sure that women can keep having those roles. You've got to say, hey, women that want to be in the workforce, here are the things that aren't being disrupted by AI. Go after them if you care about being in the workforce.

[Drew]

It seems like we're dunking on women a lot today. Is it?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Here's the thing. I tried to be very clear in that, that this is not about women like being able to add to the workforce. All we're saying is the jobs that AI overlaps with tend to be the jobs that women are drawn towards. Saying is, you don't go and handicap AI because you will lose to the countries, namely China, that don't handicap AI. What we should be doing is saying, women, look, these are the things that the world is going to value on the other side of this. So don't be a lamplighter, don't be a knocker upper. Like, go and be somebody who's doing the thing that the modern economy is going to want. They should have equal opportunity to qualify for the jobs that the world says, AI is not ready for this 100%. But you don't just go, oh yeah, they want those jobs, so we're going to make sure that they can have those jobs. It would be just as absurd if you flip the script and say, oh, this is like, everyone was like, oh my God, this is going to take over trucking. Trucking is largely male, therefore we've got to defend the men and make sure that they have these jobs. No, like, if it takes over trucking, it takes over trucking. The world is saying, this is a better technology. We don't want to live in the past, we want to live in the future. And so, yeah, it's going to disrupt a generation of men who. That's what they have optimized their lives for. It just is what it is, man. Like, trying to stop the tide of technology to me is absurd. Like, it's never worked in the past, it is not going to work in the future. If this one happens to be impacting women. I can see that people are going to make that argument that you're making that this is somehow like targeted at women. That just isn't true. And if we end up having the debate at that level as if this is something that is specifically being used, used to hurt women somehow, or the one that I worry about, which is that people are going to be like, haha, I told you, women aren't adding value to the workforce. Which is patently absurd. And so both of those are false. And the thing that we need to be looking at is this is where the job market is going and let's make sure that women can compete meaningfully for those jobs, that there's no hurdles for them just because they are a woman. They either can do the job or they can't. But if they can't do the job or don't want to do the job, there's no holding jobs for them just because they want them. That's absurd. That's that top down because bull that creates all the madness that we're seeing.

[Drew]

It's interesting though because I know that there's a majority of Americans who feel like they can't get on the property ladder, who feel like the economy is leaving them behind, who feel like in order to benefit they have to go more to the left in their policies, more socialism, more communism. And that's going to make the world fairer and better for me. We thought that we were going to have to kind of quell that uprising before we had to worry about the AI revolution. It seems like these two things are now happening at the same time where AI isn't disrupting enough jobs, that everybody's massive homeless and we haven't done this big. Seems that we're still like people are already at the stage one of this AI revolution and we're already breaking communist and socialism. What happens when we get to stage seven of that revolution? You know what I mean?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I think that we would have been fine if we weren't dealing with the K shaped economy. But yeah, having these two things happening at the same time is wildly exacerbating the problem. So that's going to shorten our timelines to figure out a solution here. Which is bad because how much of this is PR around? Like hey, we made all these cuts because of AI, but in reality some percentage of that is just we overhired or the economy is turned or whatever. But some of it is certainly AI productivity. I don't think there's any doubt about that. So it'll be interesting to see if we feel the economic uplift from. And when I say that, I do not mean that stocks are becoming more valuable. That is not going to help solve the problem. It's got to be felt in wages, more jobs, higher paying jobs like that is the only way that this, that we're going to get out of this.

[Drew]

And then last story. This is very interesting, right, because we're seeing all these robots and dexterity increase and people moving around and stuff like that. So now you kind of said it. I forgot the Jetsons house.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Rosie.

[Drew]

Rosie. So this would be, you know, Rosie in 2026.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is so crazy, man. I was like, drew, you and I are really about to get that bot for the show.

[Drew]

I'm right here. I'm waiting for it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is gonna be wild. Now I need to get to the point where I'm convinced that's not going to attack us. I've seen far too many unitry clips where the bot is having a stroke. Yeah, but flailing arms everywhere. Pretty interesting. And then obviously warfare becomes far more terrifying when these guys are like roaming

[Drew]

the battlefield on the front line.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yikes. Nine out of the ten largest banks get it. They get advantagescore. The modern credit score is the leader in predictive power, improving mortgage default predictions and saving lenders billions better predictions. Better for your business with VantageScore.

[Grainger Commercial Voiceover]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.