Translator: Michele Gianella
A few years ago,
I was having breakfast with my husband in the kitchen.
And up from our basement guestroom appear these two huge German dudes.
My husband, who had failed to mention that he had invited them to stay,
quickly said,
"Oh, meet Arman and Shay. They're leaders of the UBI movement in Switzerland."
I said, "Oh wow, that's so awesome!
What's UBI?"
Arman and Shay both said, "Oh, that's universal basic income."
"And that would be ... ?"
"Oh," they explained,
"it's when everyone gets, say, monthly income, automatically,
and they don't have to work for it,
so they can pay for things like food, and clothing, and a place to live."
"And so how much are we talking about here?" I asked.
My husband chimed in. He said, "Oh, about $1,000 a month."
I said, "Oh, that's pretty wild, right?
But if we didn't have to work for it,
wouldn't we all become slugs
or binge watch Netflix or play video games all day?
Where would be the motivation and the curiosity to do things?
Wouldn't it all be dulled?"
I had tons of questions.
And what was the purpose of UBI?
Why were they so enthusiastic about it?
So I decided to do some research.
I talked to a bunch of people, I even watched video debates.
I wanted to figure out what the deal was here.
And it turns out that UBI is a really complicated idea,
and it's seriously controversial.
So what I did was I went on a journey.
And I realized that it actually had to do
with how technology was making everything cheaper.
See, I'm a tech entrepreneur,
and I realized that when I launched my video tech business
that powers thousands of applications around the world,
I couldn't do that years ago.
I would've had to hire hundreds of people for what I could do now.
And technology is making things like food cheaper
with vertical farms that are robotically powered
and making clothes cheaper with automatic knitting machines.
And even 3D printing houses where we can live.
But the problem is that
although technology is making things cheaper,
the reason it can do that
is because it doesn't require people to do the work,
which means
that a massive number of people are soon going to be unemployed.
In fact, it turns out, a study recently said
that 47 percent of all jobs could be lost in the next 20 years -
almost half the population.
So think about truck drivers.
There are three and a half million truck drivers out there.
I think they're anticipating something like
80 percent of those truck drivers
could lose their jobs to self-driving trucks.
And it's not just blue-collar jobs.
It's also all kinds of jobs,
like paralegals, or folks in the medical profession,
or engineers across the board.
Now, the folks who are speaking in favor of UBI
are saying that we need a way, when those folks are out of work,
they need a way to pay for food and clothing and a place to live.
And UBI could be that income that they could get to pay for them.
Now the folks against UBI are saying,
those numbers? They're actually misleading.
Because what will happen is,
eventually, over time, those jobs will be replaced by other jobs.
And they may be jobs that we can't even imagine today.
So for instance, 20 years ago,
we never even imagined
that there would be jobs
like UX designers or app developers.
So they're saying, we don't have to worry about it.
Well, I actually think that we do
because we need to figure out the way, in the transition -
there's going to be this transition period where we have to figure out
how people are going to be able to eat and pay for places to live.
And how are we going to pay for this?
Turns out that if every person got, say, $10,000 a year,
then it would cost about $2 trillion additionally.
And there are lots of different ideas as to how to pay for it.
For instance, folks are saying:
Look, we don't need our whole welfare system
or maybe any of it at all
because UBI will replace it.
Things like food stamps and homeless shelters will go away
because people will be able to pay for food and housing.
Other people are saying: Well, we can make cuts in the military,
or we can add income tax to the rich,
or maybe carbon tax for corporations that hurt the environment.
Some people are even saying
we could print money because it's a whole new economy.
Or maybe a combination of all of them.
I don't have an answer,
and I don't think anybody really understands
or has an answer at this point.
But I'm an entrepreneur, and when I start a company,
I don't have to figure out how it's all going to happen.
We don't go from 1 to 100 overnight.
It takes phases and experiments,
and we start little by little, and we figure it out as we go along.
So I wondered if experiments were happening with UBI.
And then I met Mikael and Johannes, two other German dudes,
and they told me about experiments that were happening all over the world.
There are experiments happening in Kenya, and it was wild.
They said that 90 percent of all UBI recipients
actually started businesses with it or bought livestock.
Mikael and Johannes actually started their own UBI experiment out of Berlin.
And they're crowdfunding it.
So what they're doing is,
each time they raise about 12,000 euros or so,
then they hold a completely random lottery,
anybody can participate, even you guys here,
and the winner gets 1,000 euros a month.
So it's about $1,000 a month.
No strings attached.
You don't have to say what you're going to do with the money.
You don't have to say what you've done with it.
And the winners, it turns out, also started a number of businesses.
There was one woman who started a funeral service business.
She goes around at funerals,
and she says nice things about the recently deceased,
and gets paid for it.
Pretty cool.
I know as a founder,
it takes a lot of time and months and months
to figure out product-market fit.
It took us about 18 months for Ziggeo, my company.
And I could see how having UBI in the background,
knowing you can eat and have a place to live
while you're figuring it all out
could be the difference between persevering and failing.
All of this talk about UBI made me think about my own life.
See, I wasn't always a tech entrepreneur.
In fact, I originally studied art history, focusing on the Renaissance -
you know, Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci.
They painted the Sistine Chapel and The Last Supper.
And they were able to do it because they had patrons,
like Pope Julius the Second and the Medicis.
I, unfortunately, was not as lucky.
I did not have a patron.
And I didn't have any particular talents,
well, except maybe ping pong,
but I didn't think that was going to pay the bills.
So I had to figure out a way to make a living.
I decided to go to law school and become a lawyer.
The problem is, I was never particularly interested in the law.
And once I became a lawyer,
I spent years and years
toiling in a profession that I wasn't particularly interested in.
I wondered if I had gotten UBI, that $1,000 a month,
growing up or as a young adult,
whether I would've started businesses sooner.
Probably.
And would I have gone to law school?
I doubt it.
I wondered if my friends were in the same boat as I was,
so I decided to launch a survey that a number of you took.
And I asked,
if you knew as a teenager
that you would be given $1,000 a month, guaranteed for life,
would you have made different choices?
And I got 576 responses in just a few days. Thank you.
And the results were fascinating.
What I found was that I wasn't alone,
that there were so many people who would've taken risks
and would've followed their passions had they had that money.
There was a woman who said
that the money would've given her the confidence to be bold.
Another who said that she couldn't afford to take risks
because failure would've meant no food on the table.
I had hundreds of people
respond that they would've traveled more
or lived independently,
people who said
that they wouldn't have moved in with their boyfriends
or gotten married so young.
There were people who said
that they would've taken more maternity leave
or spent more time at home with their kids.
A guy who said
that he would've spent time with his sick mother;
and a woman who said
that she would've spent more time with her terminally ill husband.
But not everybody was so positive about that $1,000.
There was a guy who said
that he would have burned through it in college bars.
And another woman who said
that she would've pissed through it on material things.
And then there was one women who said that she was a teenage drug addict,
and that automatic income
would've probably been the worst thing for her.
I heard from musicians and artists and opera singers and theater directors,
all of whom had given up their passions
to become bankers and lawyers and engineers.
Now, there were certainly those who had passions for that,
and that was wonderful, and the UBI would've helped them as well.
But time and time again, I heard of people
who said that they lost three years of their life,
ten years of their life and more
working in crappy jobs or professions that they had absolutely no interest in.
And for me, that's the worst.
That time, that precious time -
actually, the most precious thing that we have - lost,
wasted years, not focusing on the things that they love.
I wonder whether if we had UBI,
whether we could focus on the passions.
Whether we could spend more time with the folks that we love.
Whether we might jump start
an entire renaissance of artists and painters and sculptors.
Whether in fact UBI could be our new patrons,
just as Michelangelo and Leonardo had Julius the Second and the Medicis.
So let's not get hung up
on whether we're going to have jobs in 20 years,
or how much UBI is going to cost.
Those are mere distractions.
Let's focus on the questions that really matter.
Questions like: Can we spend the time on things we're passionate about?
Do we have to take the job or go to law school to become a lawyer
just because we think
we have to pay the bills and find a way to make a living?
If we have an idea, can we find creative ways in which to fund it?
Can things like Patreon and Kickstarter be our new personal basic income?
And as we raise our children
in a world that values money more than meaning,
how can we teach them
to follow their passions and hearts and focus on what interests them most?
These are the questions I'm curious about.
These are the questions that empower me every day.
I hope that these questions and the answers empower you as well.
And I hope together, we can build a world
in which we have the confidence,
and income,
to go where curiosity takes us.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)