Transcriber: Michele Gianella
Welcome to the journey of freedom and a healthy life.
Before we start, let me ask you a question:
if you take a scale from one to ten,
like one being the lowest, ten being the highest,
how stressed are you today, or this week?
And in your life in general?
(Laughter)
And how do you feel with this number?
When I talk to people about this, usually they say, like an eight or higher.
And when I ask them what it's all about
they usually say, well, I feel like I'm not good enough.
They tend to want to be faster and better and even perfect, in every sense.
And what we notice is,
stress is one of the most risky disease symptoms
or causes for diseases.
That means,
we can have physical diseases from that, heart attacks.
We even age faster.
Or we can have psychological diseases,
and depression is one of this.
The World Health Organization told us
that 300 million people are affected by depression.
300 million people
is the whole population of the United States!
This is enormous!
When I started my first job, I noticed that I was stressed,
and when I talked to people they just said, yeah well, me too.
And it was like a status: here's my job, my car and my stress level.
And I wondered why is that,
and at some point I realized for myself,
my stress came from my current situation, where I am right now,
and where I wanted to be.
Because I had so many dreams and I didn't know how to follow them.
And when I pictured myself, in this job that I had taken,
and I was where I just got promoted and thought, the next three years?
The next five years?
Or the next ten years?
It just didn't feel right to stay.
And at the same time they promised all the right things:
a good salary, an excellent career, security, all for the future,
everything your parents want for you.
And it's a really tough decision:
do I go for the safety or do I go for the 100%?
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute found out that we are empathetic beings.
That's pretty cool.
So when I'm stressed, and you watch me, you have the same stress symptoms as me,
and the same stress hormones.
But the good news about it is, that if we infect each other with stress,
we can also infect each other with happiness and freedom.
And I wanted to get to the root cause of this happiness and freedom,
and I found a solution in a really unexpected area.
This is Mark.
He has a chronical disease: morbus crohn, it's a stomach disease.
His blood inflammation rate was 20 times higher than normal.
I don't know if you know what it feels like:
he can't eat a lot of stuff anymore, he feels weak, sometimes it even hurts.
I mean, food that's supposed to be good for your body and vitalize
now destroys your intestines.
In 2014, he participated in an experiment
and he won [a] basic income, that is 1000 euros for 12 months.
And at the time he realized he had won this money
and there were no strings attached, he didn't owe anyone anything,
he could watch his body heal.
And from week to week, within seven weeks
his blood inflammation dropped to a normal level.
And it's not just about the money: the money didn't heal him.
But what he experienced was dropping his existential fear
and experiencing existential relaxation.
"Mein Grundeinkommen", or "My basic income" is this experiment:
we collect from almost half a million people money,
and then as long -
until we have 12,000 euros,
and then we just give it out to someone.
With that we have distributed or raffled out money
to over 100 people so far.
And we learned a lot about these stories.
This young man of nine years is Robin, and he won a basic income as well.
And I don't know if you can imagine what happened,
but this boy -
became from one day to another a major earner in his family,
and it changed the whole dynamic:
the family said, they didn't fight this much,
they spend more time, they made a lot of trips,
even though Robin just wanted one book every month from this money.
And what his mom said well, what changed for us is not what we did:
it's how we did it.
We just spent our time more consciously.
We see how basic income, or this feeling of freedom,
can ripple out to a lot more people, for example our family.
And Robin put it just that like, well,
basic income just makes us better feelings, that's what he said.
The third story is Jesta.
She is a self-employed woman with a kid.
And the worst nightmare she could experience is,
if her kid got sick.
Because if she doesn't work, she doesn't earn money,
and if the kid is sick she can't work, and can't earn money.
And she came back to this existential fear,
and she suffered from giving her child
the impression that sick is like doing something wrong.
When she won a basic income, she not only could stay at home,
she also rippled it out to a lot of other people,
because she thought, they should experience the same thing.
And she decided to make
a "Pay what you want" concept with her clients,
because she wanted everyone to realize what it's worth what they're doing
based on quality and sympathy, and not on a price tag.
And we're so known, and so -
it's so common for us to be worth what we earn,
and to work really hard to be worth something.
And she wanted to destroy this cycle, and make it to something bigger.
What we learned from these stories and like all the different other stories
is this ripple from me
to my close surrounding like a family,
to even an ecosystem of trust.
And we've been doing this for the past three years.
I said we have already raffled out to over 100 people this basic income.
And what is not the same in every story
is that they say
they feel a lot more self-esteem when they go back to work.
They feel a lot less stressed in their overall life.
And what we didn't experience is that people would leave their jobs.
Usually if you ask someone, Would you continue working?
Then the majority of people says, yeah, well I would.
But my neighbour, he is really lazy, he wouldn't.
And for us, in our experiment only four people quit their jobs.
Three because they didn't like it and they wanted to change what they did,
and one [wanted] to go and study.
And we can learn from these stories.
With winners of basic income
we have detected three phases
which I even went through when I was thinking of quitting my job.
And the first is, acknowledge - dependency.
When you first win this money, they all say the same:
I'm so pressured, I have to do something for the crowd.
I mean, they gave me this money for free, I owe them something.
When I thought of quitting my job, my first thought was,
I can't take unemployment benefits.
I want to give something to the community, and not take something out of it.
But the truth is, we are dependent.
And this will not change.
This is a fact, and it's strengthening us.
Which leads directly to the next one: tolerate your freedom.
We noticed that a lot of times friends would tell the winners,
Why don't you just take the money and do what's good for you right now?
What is it that you really, really want to do?
And when I first experienced this freedom of taking unemployment benefits,
I noticed I had a lot more ideas
and I didn't consume as much
as if I didn't have to compensate for anything.
And it's a common story around all of our winners as well.
The third phase is self-responsible freedom.
Our society tends to skip the first two phases,
and jump right into this one,
And this is nonsense.
Because because of this credit of trust that you have been given,
something bigger can grow.
And we noticed that I had more ideas, I did them,
I was asking myself, so how can I make this freedom than I experience
and bring it into my work life,
and bring it into other people's work life?
This is how "My basic income", this experiment, has started:
because of this phase.
This is what made [me] just think,
how can I grow and give other people this freedom as well.
Because we're so -
we still think we can earn and purchase freedom.
But we can only live it.
So if you take nothing but one thing, then I would say it's,
this basic income feeling, this deep inner freedom,
can start with you.
And can start with you asking yourself and your friends,
what would you do if your income was taken care of?
And imagine what kind of society we would live in,
if we could go for the freedom
and the things that are right for us right now.
And it can start with you.
I wish us all the best of luck for that.
(Applause)