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

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Title: 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
Date: May 17, 2026
Host: Tom Bilyeu (Impact Theory)

This episode of Impact Theory tackles three major current event topics: the rising stakes and polarized narratives in the Los Angeles mayoral race, a critical dissection of Mamdani's recent "balanced budget" in New York, and an in-depth discussion of how generative AI is poised to disrupt the job market—specifically noting the risk to 6.1 million workers, predominantly women. Tom and his co-hosts break down how each issue reflects larger national and even global trends in economics, politics, and technology, emphasizing the need for clear thinking, fiscal discipline, and individual adaptability in a time of rapid change.

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1. LA Mayoral Race: Narratives, Pragmatism & Polarization

[00:30–10:35]

Key Discussion Points

• Attack Ads and Partisan Framing:

  • The panel reviews a recent attack ad against a candidate named Spencer Pratt, highlighting the divisive use of compassion vs. fiscal responsibility, and the entrenched narratives around homelessness and policing.
  • Tom critiques left-leaning rhetoric that conflates compassion with progressive spending, suggesting the government has a poor track record building housing efficiently.
    • Quote: “They want to build free houses for homeless people ... Despite the fact that the government would be the world's worst people to build these houses.” (Tom, 01:45)

• Police vs. Social Workers:

  • Ads framing police hires as tyrannical and social workers as saviors, with Tom noting “the number of violent offenses come from a ridiculously small number of actual individual humans.”
  • Importance of balancing empathy with the need for public safety.

• Union Power & Local Governance:

  • Discussion on public employee unions and their influence, with Tom strongly criticizing the claim that “LA is on the right track” given evidence like sustained homelessness and out-migration of taxpayers.
    • Quote: “Unions have almost no correlation with employee power in terms of being able to actually get your wages up... what ends up happening is just like regulatory capture.” (Tom, 05:29–07:15)

• Wider Application and One-Party State Risks:

  • While focused on LA, Tom emphasizes these political strategies and patterns can be spotted across the country.
  • Warnings about the dangers of a one-party state, loss of open debate, and further polarization.
    • Quote: “No one should want a one-party state, a one-party country. That’s how you really get yourself in trouble.” (Tom, 10:17)

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2. Mamdani’s “Balanced Budget” in NYC & Lessons from Sweden

[15:23–31:29]

Key Discussion Points

• NYC Budget Balance—The Real Story:

  • Tom admits his “mortal nemesis” Mamdani achieved budget balance, but mainly by clawing back revenue from the state, not via serious cost-cutting.
    • “[Mamdani] 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 … those dollars essentially belong to New York City in the first place.” (Tom, 15:29)

• Pied-à-terre Tax:

  • A new tax on luxury second homes ($5M+) scores political points but may underdeliver revenue due to loophole exploitation.

• Contextualizing with Sweden’s History:

  • Tom unpacks the myth of the “Nordic model.” He details how Sweden abandoned quasi-socialist policies after economic crisis, cutting the top tax rate nearly in half and embracing a pro-business environment, resulting in explosive innovation and IPO activity.
    • Quote: “Sweden hasn’t been running the Nordic model for decades now… Sweden’s top income tax rate is now around 50% from its high of roughly 90%. … The country now has more billionaires per capita than America.” (Tom, 24:05)
  • Reminds listeners that high-tax, high-redistribution models only work with widespread consensus (e.g., WWII America), and break down when overextended or in divided societies.
    • “You really do run out of other people's money...” (Tom, 28:10)

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3. The Coming AI Jobs Disruption—An Urgent Wakeup Call

[31:30–45:13]

Key Discussion Points

• Generation AI Meets the Workforce:

  • The hosts reflect on viral commencement speeches warning that today's grads face an incredibly volatile job market, more uncertain than any previous generation.
    • Quote: “Artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution. True.” (Commencement clip, 31:45)

• Historical Context—Industrial Revolutions Eat Generations:

  • Tom relates how the Industrial Revolution, electrification, and the internet all destroyed jobs and upended families, often for generations.
    • “It was a brutal, tumultuous time of people getting replaced, … It ate two generations of people that were unable to make a pivot.” (Tom, 33:04)

• Actionable Advice for Graduates:

  • Tom’s advice: “You are in complete control of your life. ... Focus on skill acquisition. ... The reality is none of us can see the future. We may all get replaced by AI. … But for now, that's just a what-if science fiction novel. What you do know today is that people that are using AI are going to massively outcompete the people that don't.” (Tom, 34:57–36:49)

• Statistical Breakdown—Women, AI, and Regulatory Responses:

  • New studies show 86% of the 6.1 million U.S. workers most vulnerable to AI are women, mainly in clerical/support roles.
  • Similar global trend: “Female dominated occupations are nearly twice as likely to be exposed to generative AI as male dominated. … 29% vs 16% at the highest automation risk.” (Tom, 38:00)
  • Tom predicts a coming deluge of regulatory battles and lawsuits, as attempts are made to preserve gender balance in legacy roles—a strategy he criticizes as doomed and counterproductive.
    • Quote: “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.” (Tom, 42:31)

• Tech Paradigm Shifts & Finding Opportunity:

  • The hosts urge listeners to recognize where value is migrating in the economy and to seek roles that AI and automation cannot yet replace—regardless of gender.

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4. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Policy & Compassion:

  “The left is taking a page out of a playbook that is both pure resentment and compassion. … When they hear Pratt doesn't want to build houses for the homeless, they don't think, oh my God, thankfully somebody's being fiscally responsible. They think he's an asshole.”
  (Tom, 01:45–02:16)

• On the Dangers of One-Party States:

  “No one should want a one-party state, a one-party country. … That would be, on either side, terrible.”
  (Tom, 10:20)

• On Fiscal Reality and Tax Policy:

  “You really do run out of other people's money. … 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.”
  (Tom, 28:10)

• On Navigating the AI Revolution:

  “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… 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.”
  (Tom, 35:32–36:52)

• On Regulating AI Disruptions by Gender:

  “If this one happens to be impacting 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 to hurt women somehow … both of those are false.”
  (Tom, 41:33–43:47)

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5. Timestamps for Core Segments

• Attack Ads & Polarized LA Politics: 00:30–10:35
• Lessons from Mamdani & Sweden’s Fiscal Shifts: 15:23–31:29
• AI’s Impact on Jobs, Women, & the Future of Work: 31:30–45:13

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6. Overarching Tone & Takeaways

• Tom’s Voice: Candid, iconoclastic, and urgent—driven by a blend of skepticism about mainstream narratives, belief in market forces, and tough-love advice for personal empowerment.
• Tone: Both critical and inspiring, the episode consistently challenges assumptions about compassion vs. effectiveness in policy, warns against simplistic redistribution, and pushes listeners to embrace adaptability in the face of AI-driven disruption.

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7. Key Takeaways

• Political Narratives are everywhere—look beyond the ad copy to root causes and incentives;
• Fiscal discipline matters—true balance comes from both fair revenues and cost control;
• AI disruption is imminent—adaptability and constant learning are non-negotiable for career resilience;
• Don’t rely on regulation or nostalgia to safeguard your future—embrace the skills and mindset that the next economic era demands.

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This episode stands as a call to action—whether navigating local politics, understanding global economic trends, or bracing for the seismic shifts of AI, Tom Bilyeu urges listeners to pierce through the headlines and memes, see the hard truths, and adapt boldly.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana, give it a whirl. Love ya.

[B]

So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it.

[C]

Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up.

[B]

Fees may apply.

[D]

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

[E]

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.

[C]

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 don't think, oh my God, thankfully somebody's being fiscally responsible. They think he's an asshole. 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.

[E]

Pratt thinks LA needs thousands more police officers rather than more social workers. And Republican Spencer Pratt.

[C]

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

[D]

That is social workers, right?

[C]

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, 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 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 is. 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. 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

[D]

up the next one. This is public employee unions should have less power.

[E]

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

[C]

Vote no LA is on the right track. That, that is crazy. As somebody that's lived here now for like 32, 33 years, I assure you LA is on the wrong track as evidenced by increasing homeless populations, encampments everywhere, open drug addiction, 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 secure from an NGO or whatever then or government grants or government contracts will then feed back into your campaign. 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 going to 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,

[D]

it's going to give the union more power.

[C]

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, strengthening 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. 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. 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.

[D]

Helen Andrews of society.

[C]

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, 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 back at 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.

[D]

And I want to kind of ground us for a second because you started this at the beginning saying that this is a slant. So we're 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 of 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.

[C]

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, 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 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. Let's talk about the difference between winning and losing a deal. Your competitor responded in 10 minutes, you responded in three hours. When a customer reaches out, every minute you wait is a minute they're considering other options. Slow responses don't just frustrate customers, they cost you revenue. And if your team can't see who's already handling what, response times get even worse. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3000 reviews. Built for how modern teams actually work. More than 90,000 businesses rely on it because it's designed to keep you fast and responsive when money is on the line. Say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six [e-mail] impact. That's Q U O.com impact let's talk about how exposed you really are. Let's say you cut someone off in traffic. They're furious. They snap a photo of your license plate within minutes. They can pull up your home address on a people search site. Your phone number, the names of your kids. Your personal information is sitting on hundreds of data broker sites. Your address, phone number, email, even your Social Security number. Incogni shuts that down. They track your data down across hundreds of sites and remove it. You authorize them once they handle the rest and they keep removing it as it comes back. Plus with custom removals, you can send them any link where your data shows up and their team is going to get it taken down. Incogni is the first and only data removal service independently verified by Deloitte. So you know it actually works. Go to incogni.com impact and use code impact impact. For 60% off an annual plan, try it risk free for 30 days. That's I n c o g n I.com impact and be sure to use Code Impact. Every business has it. A ton of it hours buried in reconciling spreadsheets, chasing down reports. Re entering the same data across systems that don't talk to one another. Nobody puts it on the P and L. But it is costing you in time, in speed and decisions that just come too late. The solution is NetSuite by Oracle. It's the number one AI cloud ERP trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR and CRM into one source of truth. No more stitching Together data from five different places. Now, with NetSuite AI connector, use the AI of your choice to tap into your actual business data. Ask every question you've ever had. If your revenues are in the seven figures or higher, get NetSuite's free business guide demystifying AI at netsuite.com theory the guide is free to you at netsuite.com theory. Again, that's netsuite.com theory. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

[F]

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

[C]

I want to talk about Mamdani in in a My promise to myself and to you guys, as always, that if I see something that's done well, I'm going to call it out. Mom. Donnie, 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 60, $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 difference is 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. So 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't actually 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 plan 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 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.

[F]

Post World War II is arguably the biggest boom in economic history for America.

[C]

Right? Yes.

[F]

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 progressive tax, that's the word.

[C]

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, cases 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, 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 sentiment. 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 a 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 for per capita than America. Okay, so think about that. We have these policies, cradle to 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. Let's talk about the worst investment most guys make on repeat cheap clothes. You buy them, they look fine, but six months later they're pilling, shrinking, or just falling apart. So you replace them and you do it again and again. You're spending more over time and you never actually have anything worth keeping or wearing for that matter. That's the whole model behind Quince. I've got one of their 100% Pima Cotton Tees and the quality is immediately obvious from the second you pick them up. They're soft, well constructed, the kind of thing that holds up over time. And that is the point. Refresh your everyday with luxury. 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[C]

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

[D]

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, like, wait, did I strike a nerve?

[C]

Like I don't understand why she's so surprised.

[D]

Yeah, as well. So this is for the audience to see it.

[C]

Artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution. True. Oh, they're just not happy about it with the hands. Who's she looking at?

[D]

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

[C]

Okay, I struck a cord. 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 she's like, oh, we're trying to regroup.

[D]

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.

[C]

Even with 50 years of life experience looking at this one, it makes it. 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 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, Deb, 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 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.

[D]

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 had.

[C]

We see so much people are having negative response. Don't. Not in my backyard.

[D]

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, so

[C]

if it's like, she tags out and she's like, okay, Tom, you step in here and give a speech. 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 novel. What you do know today is that people that are using AI are going to massively out compete 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 Gonna 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 gonna be what most people do. 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.

[D]

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

[C]

When the audience gives you the unexpected result, you can tag me. And I. I got you. I got you.

[D]

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.

[C]

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 choice, 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.

[D]

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.

[C]

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. 80, 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 bullied. 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. 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, and a 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. 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.

[D]

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

[C]

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. So what I'm saying is you don't go and handicap AI because you will lose to the countries, namely China, that, 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, 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 so 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 bar bullshit that creates all the madness that we're seeing.

[D]

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?

[C]

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's 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.

[D]

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

[C]

Rosie.

[D]

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

[C]

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

[D]

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

[C]

This is going to 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, flailing arms everywhere. Pretty interesting. And then obviously warfare becomes far more terrifying when these guys are like roaming

[D]

the battlefield on the front line.

[C]

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