Conrad Shaw:
If what the predictions are about AI come to pass, it feels like it's no longer going to be a travesty that we didn't do this for all the people that suffered. It's going to be — society's going to collapse. If everyone loses their jobs and we don't have an answer for how to get resources to people, then there's like a civil war. I don't know how we get around that without something like UBI.
Steve Smith:
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Work Tech Weekly. I'm Steve Smith, Managing Director of Growth at Rep Cap.
My guest today is Conrad Shaw. Conrad is a filmmaker, mechanical engineer, and Universal Basic Income, or UBI, advocate. He's the creator of the Bootstraps project, a multi-year experiment in which 11 households across the country received a basic income for two and a half years while Conrad and his wife documented what actually happened.
He also built the UBI Calculator, a tool for modeling what different basic income policies would do to the economy. And because of these endeavors, he’s widely known as “the UBI Guy”.
The AI displacement conversation has been getting louder. Companies are cutting. Entry-level roles are disappearing. And the question nobody has a clean answer to is what happens to people if the labor market can't absorb them.
In this conversation, we talk about what UBI actually is and what people consistently get wrong about it. We talk about what Conrad's pilot revealed about human behavior when the financial pressure lifts. We get into the difference between work and jobs. And we talk about why Conrad thinks the window for getting this right may be closing faster than most people realize. Whether you have a strong opinion about UBI or are still trying to figure out exactly what it is, there’s a lot to talk about in this episode.
Let's get into it.
Conrad, welcome to the episode. Really happy to have you here.
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Steve Smith:
So you're the UBI guy. That's a pretty specific personal brand. How did that become your thing?
Conrad Shaw:
I guess some people would would say no. I think of Andrew Yang or Scott Santens, but I sort of claimed that years ago when, so we have a docuseries that my wife and I are working on about UBI for the last 10 years. And that had a handle, it's called Bootstraps. And it was just way too early to have a handle for that project 'cause it would sort of make us look silly.
So I sort of claimed it for myself as UBI advocacy for me specifically. And that was the name that came to me, 'cause I always found myself going to conferences or things like that and I was the guy who pivoted every single conversation to UBI because it touches everything really. And so by the end of the conference, I'd be like, hey, it's me, the UBI guy.
And so that's just kind of where it came from.
Steve Smith:
Okay, so let's, you know, I guess let's take a little bit of a step back here and start with a bit of UBI 101. You know, obviously our audience probably knows, or is a little bit familiar with the idea around universal basic income, but let's not assume that everybody's there. So let's start with the basics.
What is universal basic income and what do you think people get wrong about it?
Conrad Shaw:
So one main thing I like to point out is the difference between UBI and welfare. So UBI is sort of a re-imagining, or even a, not a, so much a replacing as like a re, yeah, a re-imagining of the social safety net. Whereas a safety net in practice ends up having a lot of holes in it. Like a lot of people get missed.
You know, 80% of the people who are supposed to get different sorts of welfare benefits are missed entirely, whether it's because of stigma or bureaucracy, or they timed out of it, or they just missed a certain eligibility requirement, or punitive welfare cliffs. Like, there's all these things that actually make the safety net, as we've designed it specifically to be targeted, to have to try to figure out first, who are the people that should be getting help, the people who are deserving.
That sort of noble intention to not waste money by giving it to the wrong people ends up being incredibly wasteful and incredibly inefficient and incredibly punitive. So this metaphor of the net is actually pretty apt because a net can have holes that you fall through. A net is very wobbly, hard to stand on.
There's a lot of reasons why the welfare program as we have it is very problematic. That said, people defend it tooth and nail because the alternative that people imagine is doing nothing, which is also unconscionable in a society where there's a lot of inequality, there's a lot of ways that you can be in a lot of trouble through no fault of your own.
And we've all sort of decided that people who work hard, the American dream, whatever, should be able to, you know, pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Is the phrase. So the difference with UBI is that it replaces this net that is spotty and wobbly with a floor, just a solid structure that nobody can fall beneath.
So looking at the letters, U means universal. So you can imagine this floor stretching as far as you can see, right? So everyone starts on it. It's like a new starting point. You also sometimes mean unconditional, meaning you can spend it however you want. It's just cash. It's not a voucher. Basic means it's a baseline.
It's like where you start. So this is a big confusion people often have. They think basic means enough for basic needs, which just starts an endless debate about, well, how big is basic needs? People have different opinions. It's better to understand it as a baseline. That's not zero, like raising the floor from zero.
And then that sort of helps answer the question of why would you give it to Bill Gates or a billionaire? It's like, well, if everyone starts at the same floor, you can also still couple it with taxation that taxes higher earners or certain things back more. So in the end, it ends up being efficiently targeted to the people who need it most. Like, if I'm making $150,000 and I get a $15,000 basic income, but I paid an extra $25,000 in taxes, then I'm a net payer, right? So we have a universal floor for everybody. Basic, it's just the baseline for everybody. And income means it's cash.
Steve Smith:
I think that, you know, you're in a bit of a unique spot because of your work with the Bootstraps project. It's like you're not just talking about this from a theoretical standpoint. You've actually been involved in running a multi-year pilot where you've actually been executing on this and actually providing like a real-time basic income experiment. Can you explain what you actually did and how all this worked?
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah. So everything we wanted to do has always been experiential, like tired of ideas going around. Let's just try it out and see. Can I swear on this podcast?
Steve Smith:
Yeah, please do. Believe me.
Conrad Shaw:
I just, I like that phrase for what we're doing essentially.
So one is like, if we wanna speculate about what people are doing, we could just do that forever, or what the people would do with the money. Why don't we just pick a bunch of people of different types and find out. So we found 11 households across the country, 20-some people or so, like the size changed if someone was born or got married, and we raised a bunch of money to give them a two-and-a-half-year basic income.
And then did verite filmmaking, just kind of fly on the wall, like once every couple of months the entire time, just to see what they would do, just to see how the stories evolved. And then that sort of emerged into our other project later, which we can talk about, that is like trying it at the next level.
So Bootstraps is a documentary that turned into a series that we're hoping to release this year, that is really about living in the shoes of your fellow Americans. I don't even like to pitch it as a UBI documentary. It's a documentary about life in America, about other people, about like, what's it like to live on a reservation? What's it like to be a middle class family? What's it like to flee a hurricane? Right? All of these situations that we don't really get to see in all of our bubbles. And then the catch is that it's through this sort of alternate universe lens of like, but what if you also had a basic income, which makes it super interesting to watch these stories unfold.
Steve Smith:
And so what surprised you the most about how people use the money?
Conrad Shaw:
I think the thing that surprised me the most was how quickly people started making moves. So we wanted to make it at least two years because we figured like, year one, maybe stop the bleeding; year two, maybe make some moves. Like ideally, UBI would be permanent. We just, we can't test that, so we're limited.
It was really an issue of trust where, as soon as people sort of trusted that the money was gonna keep coming, they trusted the way that we set it up. Like we had a banking partner and a nonprofit partner to sort of run it. People sort of attacked their ambitions, or the things that have been daunting in their lives, the challenges that they've been sort of avoiding for a long time. They just started going after it.
It was very impressive. And that's kind of part of what turned our documentary film into a documentary series, is that, whoa, way too much is happening, way too fast. These stories are all interesting. We have to use all of them. That's kind of what surprised me.
And in that realm, also what I was reminded of, that I think we generally forget while living our lives, is that there's always stuff going on. Like life happens all the time. And in the memory it's like it kind of blurs into, oh, 2023 was like blank, right? But every single day and every single week of 2023 had some sort of little crisis or thing you were navigating.
So our original plan to like take our three most compelling stories, make a feature film, I was like, no, they're all too compelling. There's too much happening all the time. And also it wouldn't be great science to sort of cherry pick the data. We're like, if we picked these people, I mean, we already sort of casted it, but we shouldn't only tell some of the stories that we have.
Steve Smith:
The thing that I think is most interesting about the entire UBI conversation is just, what does it do to work in the labor market? And there's, as you kind of set out, there's this sort of like the critical argument that, you know, people are inherently lazy and if you give them money, they're just gonna sit around and watch Netflix and eat Cheetos and nothing's gonna happen.
But I kind of take a different view. I think that most people want to work because work gives them purpose. Whether you are, whatever you're doing for work, it's just like people want to feel like they're good at something. They want to feel like they have mastery, that, hey, I'm gonna be a fantastic woodworker. Or I really, hey, I like painting. It doesn't matter what it is, but I think that there's a connection of work to purpose that is inherent in more people than it is people inherently being lazy.
But there's also just this angle about, okay, you know, is UBI going to destroy the incentives to go to work? You kind of see what you want to see. And I mean, I think you have a point of view and I certainly have a point of view around it, but what does the evidence actually say based on kind of what you've observed in your experiment?
Conrad Shaw:
So the evidence in general, both in my experiment and like the much bigger ones that have gone on, is that people work as much or more. If there's a reduction in work in some cases, it's generally a very specific group of people that we would arguably want to be working less, like new moms and kids in school. People we wanna have their time spent on those other forms of work.
And I think this raises an interesting point. I think something we need to start doing is differentiating work and jobs. 'Cause life is work, right? Coming from a mechanical engineering perspective, work is just force times distance. It's like moving an object a distance, the expending of energy. Whether you're writing a novel or taking care of a sick parent or doing a construction job, they're all forms of work. And jobs are a subset of work that someone pays you for, either a boss or a customer. And so the question people are really asking, will this upend the labor market, is, will people still job? Like, can we make job a verb? 'Cause people will always work. Getting up, brushing your teeth, walking the dog, all of it's work, right?
Which is the work that you're doing for hire or as a service or whatever. And I think in the world of jobs and the world of work in general, things would shuffle. I think more people would do the forms of work that are more rewarding to them as more of a default. So I think we would get probably less flight from like teacher jobs to finance jobs. And this is before talking about all the AI stuff that's going to add a whole new variable. But I think more people would stay home and take care of their kids rather than going to work to earn enough money to pay someone else to take care of their kids.
So the one we always get, which is like a little bit dark, is like, well, who's gonna clean the toilets? Right? Who's gonna do the unrewarding jobs? And one of the things I wanna say is like, clean your own damn toilets. But also it's like, pay the people enough, right? So one of the things that's gonna go away is extortionary work, abusive work. If someone's only taking that job because they have no fucking choice, they've been given a choice. So you have to pay them enough for them to do the least rewarding work. So I think certain jobs would start to pay a lot more. Rather than the least pleasant jobs paying the least, they would start to pay more. And the most pleasant jobs that are super fulfilling could pay less, if we know everybody's okay.
And your work in general does touch back on your purpose that you wanna pursue in life. Your jobs may or may not. Like, you can still want to go do that job. If the work that you wanna do is like, oh, I wanna raise five amazing children, that's pretty expensive. And I also wanna, like, I want them to go to sports and I want us to travel and whatever, it's like I need money for that. So I'm gonna go to this job this many hours a week and still sell my time in the labor market, because everyone wants nicer things and I want nice lives for me and my kids, right?
There's plenty of reasons to still engage in the labor market and work for somebody else, including, not everybody wants to start a business. It's stressful as hell. Some people just want to participate in some way or another, don't wanna have to make it up, and then go home and spend time with their family. I think that's most people in general. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.
So on one hand I think we shuffle up the labor market dynamics for how we negotiate the value of labor. And we also free up all the would-be entrepreneurs to pursue their business or their art or whatever they would be doing with their talent and inspiration if they weren't worried about desperation.
Steve Smith:
Yeah. You know, I think that you mentioned bullshit jobs earlier. It's just like, you know, if we've got a basic income floor, what happens to bullshit jobs? Because we still need clean toilets. When you go to a hotel or you go to the mall, you want to go into a clean toilet. I mean, hey, people still gotta go to Arby's. Who's gonna give them the curly fries? I mean, it's just like, there's still, you know, you say bullshit jobs, I say bullshit jobs, but we still need some of these things. What happens to those?
Conrad Shaw:
So we should define what a bullshit job is. I encourage people to read the book, 'cause a bullshit job is not something that is unpleasant or like lower class as we understand it now.
The way that David Graeber sets up this idea of a bullshit job is you ask the person doing the job if they think it contributes to society in any way, if it makes the world any better. And if they say no, then it's a bullshit job. That's just the measure of it. Do they feel like they're doing anything good for the world? So someone who cleans toilets, absolutely not a bullshit job. They might say, I hate this fucking job, but they'll also say, if I didn't do it, we'd have disgusting, like it'd be gross around here. Like, clearly I'm doing something incredibly important.
So yeah, we have to reframe what we think of as bullshit jobs. A bullshit job is like middle management two tiers above the call center workers who are selling basically spam to people. Like the people who, like, all, there's so many marketing jobs where we take our best and brightest and we have 'em like try to convince as many people as possible to click on a thing, right? Like that's a bullshit job. They probably go into work that day like, well, at least I'm getting paid well.
And the funny thing is bullshit jobs tend to pay more, because people are purpose-seeking. If you're gonna sacrifice your purpose, you're gonna have to pay me for that, or else I could be doing something, if you're not gonna pay me, I could do something I actually like. So there's actually a premium that people pay to do non-bullshit jobs, which is, you don't make as much money to do something where you get to know that you're doing something important for the world.
Isn't that fucked up? Like, if you're a teacher or a firefighter, I'm sure they do fine, but you don't get paid what like an IP lawyer makes. I don't know, I don't want, the point is it's not up to me to say what's a bullshit job. If you're doing it and you feel like the world would be better if you weren't doing this, then you're in a bullshit job.
Steve Smith:
So I mean, you know, I think the thing that we're sort of dancing around here is kind of the AI question because it seems like a lot, especially right now, the big question and the big anxiety, and I think the big kind of interest driver around UBI is the artificial intelligence question. And it's interesting 'cause like just this morning I was walking my dog and I saw my neighbor. I live in St. Louis, and St. Louis has a large contingent of the Block company, has a big headquarters here, so Block. At the time we're recording this, they just announced that they were going to cut, what, 40, 50% of their workforce?
A large percentage of it, oddly enough. Like Jack Dorsey's from St. Louis. He grew up about three blocks that way. And so not really popular in St. Louis. But I was talking to my neighbor, he's like, yeah, I have a friend who worked for Block and she just lost her job. And this is the first time I can say, oh, this is AI putting somebody out of work. And I was like, well, you know, there's other things too. This is not about AI. This is about Block, you know, Jack Dorsey running a bad company, but let's just blame AI. That's neither here nor there, but I think that's where people are right now. It's like, oh, AI is going to displace workers.
We're going to need UBI. Do you see AI as being the real driver or the traction creator behind this, or is that just a coincidence?
Conrad Shaw:
I do see it as being a major traction creator. I've long bristled at the positioning of UBI because of the AI thing, like, 'cause people were talking about AI in more intellectual terms, like it's coming, but like it's really sort of coming fast now. But UBI, to me, is sort of just a smart systemic move to like establish a better human rights system, a better social safety net. Something like Martin Luther King was fighting for it. Tom Paine was fighting for it. Tom Paine wasn't worried about AI. And so, but at the same time, I think there's a lot of correct reasons to be a fan of basic income. Just like I said, it can appeal to everybody. It's cash in your pockets, power to the people.
And I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. Anything that brings attention to something I think would help fix the world, okay. I'm not a purist on why someone has to appreciate it. And also in this moment, AI is, at least from what we're hearing and what seems possible, such a disproportionate disruption that it's like, it could be the catalyst that kicks our labor market and our economy beyond the point of like, how many people are we able to ignore suffering?
You know, if it's like 10% of people are in poverty, and then the rest of us can kind of convince ourselves, that's what keeps the hierarchy and structure. That's where all those bullshit jobs come from. And middle management, it's like keeping people at some level so they can fight the people below and protect the people above. If you have that hierarchy breakdown where all of a sudden 70% of people lose their jobs, or even 25, then all of a sudden you have way too many people with nothing to lose, and it's a lot harder to convince the middle class or whatever that like, just keep playing the game by the rules and you'll stay ahead. It's like, you're watching everyone around you fall into poverty. Eventually there's a tipping point, right?
So I would say we should have done UBI decades ago. But also there's an urgency now where if what the predictions are about AI come to pass, it's like...
Steve Smith:
Ooh.
Conrad Shaw:
It's no longer gonna be like a, it feels like it's no longer gonna be like, it's a travesty that we didn't do this for all the people that suffered. It's gonna be like, society's gonna collapse.
If everyone loses their jobs and we don't have an answer for how to get the resources to people that we do have, then there's a lot of, there's like a civil war. I don't know how we get around that without something like UBI.
Steve Smith:
So let me ask you this. Do you believe that we're actually headed toward large-scale technological unemployment, or do you think that's things?
Conrad Shaw:
Personally, I do actually. And I don't wanna harp on it because, like I said, I don't think that should be the main reason for appreciating UBI. 'Cause in the past it was like, the answer was always like, okay, when AI happens, then we'll do UBI. It's like, no, we need to do it now. But now we're at a point where it's like, with my project specifically, building UBI and testing UBI, it's like I feel like five years from now it would be too late.
You know, we've been doing this for so long 'cause the level of disruption I'm seeing, and I'm tapped into a fair amount of people who are involved in AI stuff or really into it. And in the film world, I'm seeing the way films are made and editing. I'm seeing lots of insecurity for actors. I'm seeing a lot of insecurity for the software developers who are working on our platform. And the vibe I'm getting from all the, oh, we've always had disruption and we found new jobs, is like sort of a head-in-the-sand thing where it's like, if you can point to the new jobs, I'd love to hear it.
In the past when we automated something, we had a very specific machine that could do that one job, but now what we're supposedly automating is the ability to think and adapt and learn, right? So what do I tell a kid who's a senior in high school going into college to study? I had some kid interview me the other day for a project and I was like, I don't know what I would tell you to study, 'cause it might not be a viable career in a year and a half. So you'll have two and a half years, and then what are you gonna switch your major to? Another thing that's gone, like, what is gonna be left? You know? And why will you have spent a hundred thousand dollars getting that education?
I don't know. My daughter, who's three months old, I feel like she's actually in a better situation, if the world doesn't collapse, than the kids in high school now, because we'll have to reinvent the entire educational system by the time she gets there. So yeah, I do think something major is happening with technology. And if people are like, we'll just have new jobs, like they never tell you what they're gonna be. They're like, oh, they'll magically appear out of nowhere. But you have to, in this case, point to something I can do better than the technology. And if the technology can outlearn me quickly, faster, then I'm at a loss for what I'm going to provide that's more efficient than a machine. Like, why would someone hire me unless they were forced to, or AI was banned or something?
Steve Smith:
So let me ask you this. There's this idea that UBI is sort of the dividend check for the AI economy. So there's this idea that, okay, great, these AI companies are gonna be making money hand over fist. You're seeing that, you know, revenue per employee with an AI company is like 10, 20, 50x what it is for a non-AI company, at least in the tech industry. Should they just be, should AI be footing the bill for the technological disruption they're causing? What's your take on that?
Conrad Shaw:
I think so. I mean, it goes back to a deeper framing that I've always liked for how to pay for a UBI, which is sort of a dividend framing where it's like, this is your share of national prosperity, right? And that goes back to the question of resources. In my mind, at first principles, do we have enough food, shelter, clothing, whatever, services for everybody. And if the answer is yes, then we should be able to find a way to get it to everybody.
What's gonna happen now is, if jobs is the only way that we have to get money to most people and those go away, then we need a new way to get money to most people. It is a redistributive problem. So there's other versions of this dividend idea, but the obvious front runner at the moment is AI. Like if all the money is flooding toward AI, then that's where it should come back from.
Steve Smith:
Well, tell me this. If you had to bet, does the US adopt some sort of UBI in the next 20 years?
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah. I'm gunning for the next few years, and we're like building a model in the private sector. But like I said before, if the disruptions of AI, even in the next five years, do half of what they are predicted to do in the next year and a half, I don't see how we get around it. And you can even see like there's a lot more hunger and openness to this idea of sending people checks, whether it's like lip service or actual intentions.
You have people on the left, like Rashida Tlaib has an essentially basic income bill, a reduction in poverty act, that's a pretty strong one, a pretty aggressive one called the Boost Act. But even Trump is talking about like, oh, when I do this thing with the tariffs, or I do that thing, everyone's gonna get a check of X, right? People are starting to realize we have to make sure people get money, you know, on both sides of the aisle. People want to know how am I gonna feed my kids. And learn to code, just get an education or whatever, or blame the immigrant, like none of those things are going to have sticking power when the middle class all loses their job, if that happens.
So yeah, 20 years from now, I don't understand, if things are going the way we're going and we don't ban AI or something, then I don't understand how we don't have a UBI, maybe universal healthcare.
Steve Smith:
So if the US implements UBI tomorrow, what do you think changes first?
Conrad Shaw:
Well, it depends if they implement a good version. There's a lot of people that say, this is UBI, and it's really not. But if I was the one designing it, right, to make it like enough to sustain your life, like at least the poverty line, to have some, for kids to be, you know, have the right frequency. I would think we'd see a pretty radical transformation in the first few years, and a generation of people coming to terms with exactly what it even means. People getting out of scarcity. People reshuffling how much a job is worth. What we do in our lives. And then the thing that almost makes me more curious.
Just 'cause we're all sort of damaged goods. Like we've all lived in a rough situation. We've all been raised up on these bootstraps and meritocracy sort of mantras and dogmas.
I would, I am almost more curious to see what happens to like the human species down the generations. Like what happens to a kid who never grew up with parents who are obsessed about retirement? You know, like knowing that they're gonna be okay, or being pushed into careers that are gonna be able to pay certain amounts, or just more domestic violence in the household because of the stress that money scarcity causes.
It's like in a couple of generations, do we look like barbarian times? I don't know. I just, it's just a wholly different mindset to start thinking about people walking around not existentially worried, to nearly the same degree, about their daily lives. Maybe we'll still be worried about nukes or something, but I feel like I get a little new agey when I start thinking about this, and it feels naive and unbelievable.
But if we did something so transformative as essentially saying, UBI, and I would throw in universal healthcare, like, no matter what you do, you are going to be fundamentally okay. You won't have to be on the street. You know, you'll always be able to build back. I think we look like a different species.
Steve Smith:
Conrad Shaw, the UBI guy. Thank you so much for your time today. You've given me a lot to think about, and I think you've also given the audience a lot to ponder. So thanks for joining us and hope to have you back sometime soon.
Conrad Shaw:
Thanks.
Steve Smith:
Conrad makes the case that people will always work. The question, he says, is whether they'll job. “Job”, of course, being a verb here.
Work is everything… raising kids, writing, building something, taking care of someone who can't take care of themselves. Jobs are the work we do in exchange for money to survive. Most of the conversation around AI displacement treats those terms as the same, which is why the debate keeps going in circles.
If the real question is whether people will keep showing up to do work that matter, UBI pilots so far answer that pretty clearly. They still want to. What changes when you remove the financial floor isn't motivation. It's leverage. The worst jobs have to pay more. The most meaningful ones can pay less. The labor market reshuffles around what work is actually worth to the person doing it, not around what someone can be forced to accept.
Whether that holds at scale is still an open question. But the AI displacement curve is running faster than the policy conversation. Conrad's view is that we have maybe five years to build the infrastructure before the window closes. That might be optimistic. It might not be. Either way, much of the case against UBI rests on the assumption that people will just stop working. The UBI research keeps disproving that point.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to Work Tech Weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. And I'll see you next time.
