The Sunday Drive - 05/31/2026 Edition [#217]
Musings and Meanderings of a Financial Provocateur
đđź Hello friends!
This past week, I had the privilege of being a panelist at the inaugural Basis Northwest taxable wealth conference in Seattle, WA, hosted by my friend, Brent Sullivan.
It was an wonderfully productive and informative conference, with the added bonus of making a number of new friends and re-connecting with many old ones. I canât wait until next year!
Now, letâs enjoy another Sunday Drive around the Internet.
đś Vibinâ
The weekâs theme: the story everyoneâs been telling about AI and jobs seems to be wrong, and the data appears to prove it.
This week Iâm vibinâ to Fatboy Slimâs Right Here, Right Now. Enjoy.
đ Quote of the Weekâ
âPractice like youâve never won. Play like youâve never lost.â
â Michael Jordan
đ Chart of the Week
A Different Story
The narrative around AI and jobs is pretty well established at this point. AI is coming for your job. Wages will fall. Inequality gets worse. Itâs a compelling story.
PwC analyzed nearly a billion job ads, thousands of company financial reports, six continents. What they found doesnât match the story.
Start with productivity, where the conventional wisdom holds that AI hasnât moved the needle yet. Industries most able to use AI are generating 3x higher growth in revenue per employee than industries with the least AI exposure. Since 2022, when ChatGPT arrived and the world snapped to attention, productivity growth in the most AI-exposed industries has nearly quadrupled. The least-exposed industries? Flat, maybe slightly down.
Wages follow the same pattern. Industries most exposed to AI saw wage growth of 16.7% from 2018 to 2024. Least exposed: 7.9%. Workers whoâve built actual AI skills command a 56% wage premium on average, up from 25% just a year earlier. Every industry PwC analyzed pays a wage premium for AI skills, including mining and construction.
Job numbers are growing in virtually every AI-exposed occupation, including the most highly automatable roles. Growth is slower than in less AI-exposed jobs (38% vs. 65% over five years), but itâs growth. The mass displacement story hasnât materialized in the data. More recent 2026 academic research puts a finer point on it: industries with higher AI exposure are seeing 3.9% job growth and 4.8% wage growth per standard deviation of AI exposure, with no statistically significant employment declines.
The most surprising finding is whatâs happening in automatable roles, the jobs everyone assumed were most at risk. These roles are experiencing the greatest skills disruption, yes. And also growing wages. And job counts. PwCâs read: AI isnât eliminating these jobs, itâs upgrading them. The customer service agent who handled routine queries now handles complex ones. Automation is changing what people do, apparently making them more valuable in the process.
One caveat worth sitting with. Skills required by employers are changing 66% faster in AI-exposed occupations than in others, and that pace has more than doubled in a single year. The skills workers need are evolving faster than at any point PwC has measured. PwCâs workforce lead put it plainly: core skills used to last 4 to 6 years; in the AI era, theyâre morphing every 12 to 18 months.
The gap thatâs opening isnât between jobs that exist and jobs that donât. Itâs between workers who adapt and workers who donât.
Sources: PwC, âThe Fearless Future: 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometerâ; ScienceX, Industries most exposed to AI are not only seeing productivity gains but jobs and wage growth too; Dallas Fed, AI is simultaneously aiding and replacing workers, wage data suggest.
đ Interesting Drive-Byâs đ
đ§ The Expertise Paradox (And Why Youâre Probably Underestimating Yourself) â The more expertise youâve accumulated, the harder it is to see its value â because once deeply internalized, it stops feeling like expertise and just feels like thinking. Brian Clark at Further calls it the curse of knowledge, and adds a sharper twist: AI doesnât commoditize expertise, it amplifies it by handling the execution layer you used to need a team for.
đ¤ The Economics of Intelligence â Citadel Securities pushes back on the AI-kills-jobs consensus with actual data: labor displacement isnât showing up at scale, and AI exposure correlates positively with new business formation. Complement, not substitute.
đ´đź Whatâs Better Than Retirement? For Some, Itâs Work â One in five Americans 65+ are now employed or looking for work â about 2x the share in 1988 â and most arenât doing it out of boredom. Denmark is eyeing a retirement age of 74 by 2060; meanwhile, a Gen Z âretirement homeâ in Malaysia is fully booked. The bookends of the modern work life are getting stranger by the day.
đ Can the Market Absorb Three Trillion-Dollar IPOs? â A follow-on to last weekâs SpaceX index mechanics: US IPO proceeds have exceeded $100B only once in 46 years, and SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic together would clear $180B+ â competing for the same finite Nasdaq-100 passive pool, sequentially. SpaceX prices first and re-weights the index before either lab arrives. The labs donât get a fresh pool; they get whateverâs left.
đ Has the Singularity begun? â Stephen McBride tracks eight exponential curves and asks whether weâre already living in Kurzweilâs whoosh. The stat that stopped me: AI task duration has gone from 36 seconds to 14.5 hours and is doubling every four months. Rational optimism, with receipts.
đđź Parting Thought
If you have any cool articles or ideas that might be interesting for future Sunday Drive-byâs, please send them along or tweet âem (X âem?) at me.
Please note that the content in The Sunday Drive is intended for informational purposes only, and is in no way intended to be financial, legal, tax, marital, or even cooking advice. Consult your own professionals as needed. The views expressed in The Sunday Drive are mine alone, and are not necessarily the views of Investment Research Partners.
âI hope you have a relaxing weekend and a great week ahead. See you next Sunday...
Your faithful financial provocateur,
-Mikeâ
If you enjoy the Sunday Drive, Iâd be honored if youâd share it with others.ââ
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