My guest on this episode of Punk Rock HR is Conrad Shaw. He is a writer, filmmaker, co-founder of Comingle.us, and a universal basic income (UBI) researcher. Conrad is a font of wisdom about UBI, and we discuss what it is, how it works, his upcoming documentary series “Bootstraps,” and more.
I know Conrad as the UBI guy, but he’s had a long career across various fields and interests. He was a mechanical engineer who went to New York to pursue acting and filmmaking.
Now, he’s using his talents to advocate for UBI and show people how a living wage can transform people’s lives. We chat about all of this and more on the show, although there is some breaking news here in this post: Conrad and I both sit on the Income to Support All Foundation board. It’s a new, visionary non-profit aimed at realizing economic freedom for everyone through the principles of unconditional universal basic income (UBI). Our mission encompasses three primary areas of focus: implementing UBI to alleviate poverty and economic distress, fostering public understanding and support for UBI through compelling storytelling, and advancing UBI-related research to inform effective policymaking. In the coming weeks, I’ll have more information for you!
Punk Rock HR is proudly underwritten by Betterworks. The world’s most dynamic organizations rely on Betterworks to accelerate growth by supporting transparent goal setting, enabling continuous performance and learning from employee insights. Betterworks is on a mission to help HR leaders make work better. Discover how they can help you by visiting www.betterworks.com.
Universal Basic Income 101
We’ve talked about UBI on this podcast before, which I’m passionate about. Conrad has his own philosophical outlook on UBI.
“It’s power to the people in the most direct and simple way possible, which is money,” he says. “Money is power. And it’s ensuring that everyone in society has a reliable regular income floor.”
One common scenario of UBI is that the government gives everyone an extra $1,000 a month, regardless of their wealth, income, or other circumstances. That’s just one concept of how UBI could be funded. But Conrad explains it differently — everybody starts with $1,000, but high earners ultimately fund the program through taxes on their other income.
“So people say, ‘Why would you give a thousand bucks a month to Bill Gates? He doesn’t need it,’” Conrad says. “And it’s like; It’s his first $1,000 a month, and then he pays a million dollars on the other hundred million he made, and he’s helping fund the program.”
Using Stories to Humanize UBI
The benefits of UBI are backed by research, but data doesn’t sway people as much as stories do. So Conrad and his partners developed the docu-series “Bootstraps” to humanize the concept and share 11 households’ real-life, human stories of UBI in action.
“Essentially, we set up our own form of basic income experiment with the purpose of telling stories. A qualitative rather than a quantitative experiment,” Conrad says. “And we picked 20 different people from all over the country from different walks of life — from homeless to solidly middle-class families, individuals.”
What surprised Conrad the most during this process was how quickly UBI helped these people change their lives. One household avoided foreclosure on their home, while another person recovered more quickly from hurricane damage.
“Bootstraps” was intended to be a 1.5-hour film, but the filmmakers uncovered so many impassioned stories that the final result is a series of episodes.
Helping People Thrive
One concern or criticism of UBI is the fear that people will spend their money irresponsibly, such as people battling addictions turning to drugs or alcohol. But Conrad believes that UBI can be part of the support they need to become sober.
“You’re giving people money, but it’s not replacing all the rest of the government,” he says. “The question to then ask is, ‘What are the programs for people who are still dealing with addiction to help them, especially now that they have an income source, through rehab, through reconnection to society?’”
Another common argument for UBI is that people will no longer want to work. Conrad argues that UBI can help people get closer to their purpose, both professionally and personally — and free the workforce from people who don’t want to be there.
“In a world where your basic existence is supported to a degree, where you have that security just sort of built in and that trust that’s going to be there permanently, your focus can completely change from ‘what I have to do’ to ‘what I want to do,’” Conrad explains. “And so it becomes a lot harder to staff bullshit jobs, I think.”
People in This Episode
Conrad Shaw: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Comingle website, Medium (writing), LinkedIn
Transcript
Laurie Ruettimann:
Punk Rock HR is sponsored by Betterworks. The world’s most dynamic organizations rely on Betterworks to accelerate growth by supporting transparent goal setting, enabling continuous performance, and learning from employee insights. Betterworks is on a mission to help HR leaders make work better. Discover how they can help you by visiting betterworks.com today.
Hey everybody, I’m Laurie Ruettimann. Welcome back to Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Conrad Shaw. Some people know him as a filmmaker. Some people know him as an entrepreneur. I know him as the UBI Guy. He is a source of wisdom and great thinking and great content on universal basic income. And he’s on the show today to talk about that concept — UBI — what it means for Americans, and also some of the great work he’s doing on a documentary series called “Bootstraps.” And towards the end of the conversation, we actually talk about making “Bootstraps” come to life through an app, through a platform that he’s working on called Comingle.
So I love this conversation. Conrad’s a super-fun guy, someone I think you need to know. And please sit back and enjoy this fascinating conversation about universal basic income with Conrad Shaw on this week’s Punk Rock HR.
Hey Conrad, welcome to the podcast.
Conrad Shaw:
Hi, how are you doing?
Laurie Ruettimann:
I’m great. It’s so awesome that you’re here. Listen, you and I are buddies, we know one another. But for people out there who don’t know anything about you, why don’t you tell them all who you are and what you’re all about?
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah, sure. So my name is Conrad Shaw. I took a sort of a long and circuitous path. Former engineer, came to New York to pursue acting and filmmaking. And at this point, I’m a full-time activist, researcher, filmmaker around the topic of universal basic income.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I love that topic. It’s something I’m incredibly passionate about. We’ve covered it on Punk Rock HR, but would you quickly tell us what universal basic income is for those who aren’t familiar?
Conrad Shaw:
I think the way I like to boil it down is more philosophical. It’s power to the people in the most direct and simple way possible, which is money. Money is power. And it’s ensuring that everyone in society has a reliable regular income floor. So guaranteeing that through the government, say — a common proposal is everyone gets $1,000 a month, for example.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah. All right. So we all get a thousand bucks a month, free and clear, right? No judgment. No matter how much you earn. Whether you earn zero dollars on your own or a million dollars on your own, you get a thousand bucks a month in this theory, this philosophy of universal basic income. Where does that money come from?
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah, so one thing to understand that a lot of people have a misconception about is that everyone gets an extra thousand dollars a month. A better way to understand it is it’s the first thousand dollars a month, if we’re doing a thousand dollars a month. So if you go on to make many millions of dollars, the taxes that would be coupled with this program to help fund it, would end up being more than the basic income you’re getting.
So people say, “Why would you give a thousand bucks a month to Bill Gates? He doesn’t need it.” And it’s like, “It’s his first $1,000 a month,’ and then he pays a million dollars on the other a hundred million he made, and he’s helping fund the program. So the short answer is, some people would say you could print money, but a lot of people would think that’s fiscally irresponsible. You could fund it through taxes. There’s all kinds of different ways to fund it through taxes.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, that makes sense. I’m all for taking Bill Gates’ money and redistributing it, by the way. I’m OK with that. So that’s another show, though, about burning everything down. But I love universal basic income because I think it offers a floor to individuals who normally would make different choices about their lives. It guarantees a certain level of security. And for me, if I had a thousand dollars a month, I certainly know that basic things could be paid for. I wouldn’t have to take a job that I didn’t want. I wouldn’t have to pursue a career in human resources. Maybe I could be an artist or a painter or I could foster cats and dogs full-time. I could make better choices if I had money guaranteed every single month. And I think that’s something that you’re passionate about showing the world, demonstrating through art. So can you tell us a little bit about some of the stories that you’ve encountered with basic income?
Conrad Shaw:
Part of what incentivized us to do a docu-series about the idea is there are plenty of studies that show the data that people make good choices, that they use less drugs, that they work just as much or more, that they’re driven intrinsically. But data is data, and it’s not that interesting in the form of a white paper. And so we know that people generally are moved and can relate to stories, human stories.
Essentially we set up our own form of basic income experiment with the purpose of telling stories. A qualitative rather than a quantitative experiment. And we picked 20 different people from all over the country, from different walks of life, from homeless to solidly middle-class families, individuals. People dealing with all different sorts of topical issues of the day, from indigenous rights, trans rights, retirement, medical issues, domestic abuse. And we set them up with a program that essentially gave them a thousand dollars a month per adult, $333 per kid per month, and let them go for two-and-a-half years. And we filmed with them to see what they did. So the data that comes out of our experiment will be very experiential, very intimate, very human.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I’m really fascinated by stories, by data and excited that you’re working on this cool docu-series. Can you tell us the name and maybe one or two stories that might pique our interest about it?
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah, the title of the series is “Bootstraps,” which is sort of a nod to the bootstraps mythology: you pick yourself up by your bootstraps. So we had 11 different stories, 11 households. Some were families, some were individuals. Without wanting to go too deep into spoiler territory, it is fun to talk about what happened with some of their stories. And I think one of the things that surprised me the most was how quickly people started effecting change in their lives. We had sort of intended or planned for it to be a feature film. Take three stories that are the most interesting, fit them into an hour-and-a-half-long movie. That’s about how much you could fit. And it turned out, all of the stories were far too important and too interesting, that it had to become a series.
And we had people — I guess “unleashed” is the term that I like to use, because they were so fast about it. We had one couple that was within a month, they had quit their jobs, moved across the state, moved in with their mom in the basement to save up money for a few months and bought their first house. We had people who were avoiding their financial worries. In the first interview, we sort of uncovered that they were losing money every month, and they weren’t allowing that to sink in. Because what do you do when you don’t really have a way to address the problem? You do your best and hope it goes away. Two weeks after we started, it turned out that they were about to lose their house, and they were ignoring the foreclosure notices coming in the mail. And within a few weeks, they had saved the house, they were out of payday loan debt, and they were starting to plan to build a garden in their backyard for sustenance into retirement.
One more really fun story is, we had a man who has been stuck in North Carolina for a while, sort of being flooded out in Hurricane Alley when Hurricane Matthew and other storms had sort of wiped him out several times. And he didn’t have the money to get out and get his livestock out and things like that. Within a month of when the program started, Hurricane Florence came through. And because of just a month’s worth of UBI, he was able to evacuate in front of the hurricane and then come back and spend the next year rebuilding with that support and, eventually, try and move on.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I think about the concept of UBI, and it sounds really great in this discussion, right? We’re talking about people who get money free and clear and can make good decisions. And at the front end of the story, you talked about the data being boring, but very serious about how people take this money and generally apply it for good. Did you have any examples in your experiment of people taking the story and going on benders? Going gambling, doing anything that might be morally distasteful to some other Americans?
Conrad Shaw:
Not so much. If they did it, they didn’t share it with us. We saw the overall trends of people’s lives and their financial stability, and them just generally uplifting themselves. They did tell us a few things about things that they were maybe a little ashamed of, because they saw it as taking a luxury with this very special money that they’re supposed to do something with.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, I want to hear about that. How were they spending their money in frivolous, sketchy ways?
Conrad Shaw:
So these are people who have only ever in the last few years gotten money from the grocery store and cooked dinner, like really cheap dinners. And going out once every few weeks to a modest restaurant felt like wasteful luxury to them.
Laurie Ruettimann:
It’s interesting that they took the money in this example and went out to dinner, which actually stimulates the economy. Which is actually a good thing, right? There’s a trickle-down effect from UBI, it’s not like they’re hoarding the money like a rich person and not investing it back into America. They’re actually going out and being part of the local community. I wonder if that’s the theme that you picked up on, as well?
Conrad Shaw:
Absolutely. If there’s a flowing up, I like to call it, effect, not as opposed to a trickle down. Because people who need money get money, they spend it. They spend it back into the economy. There’s a story I like to tell from early in our research when we are interviewing people across the country just on the street, and we had two questions we would ask. The first question, and this is 2016, so we had to describe what UBI was for most people. But say, “What do you think about the idea?” And generally around 50% said, “Oh, that sounds like a great idea. I’d like to hear more.” Another 50%, “That sounds like a terrible idea, it’s socialism. People are going to waste it, people are going to blow it.”
One of the main concerns was that people couldn’t be trusted with the money. And then the next question we asked them is, “OK, let’s focus on you. Let’s say UBI was passed and you and everyone was getting $1,000 a month, what would you personally spend it on?” And 99.9% of people had a great answer. And the other 0.1 were pulling our legs, but they had a great answer so I could justify it as a boon for them. Their personal lives, a boon for society. Someone spends it on a gym membership, someone might see that as luxury. But I see that as reducing medical costs, preventative care. I see that as a happier, healthier society. I see that as money going to that local gym.
People said they would give more to charities and Kickstarters. And that’s what we see in practice. People, once they feel comfortable thinking less about what they need to take for themselves and what they can give back to society, it sort of changes how we think about our role in society.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I love that idea of care, that you have the ability to care for others once your basic needs are met. That’s really beautiful and quite surprising. The other thing I was thinking about is, what if these individuals went and blew it on drugs or weed or alcohol? It’s still sort of benefits society. I mean, it’s still money back into the economy, correct?
Conrad Shaw:
Sort of. There’s a few takes on that. That was one of the scariest issues, was addiction. What if it turns out we’re enabling someone to have an addiction and OD themselves? And when you think about, at the national level, it’s easy to imagine that some people would do that. And then you start to think, what are the overall numbers? How many people do less drugs versus go on a bender? There’s a few elements to the design of a good UBI policy that sort of addressed that. One is that it’s not in a vacuum. You’re giving people money, but it’s not replacing all the rest of government. The question to then ask is what are the programs for people who are still dealing with addiction to help them, especially now that they have an income source, through rehab, through reconnection to society?
Well, we were fascinated with this issue. And we were determined not to create an advocacy piece, but an actual investigative piece to find out, to kick the tires of UBI, see where it fails, to see where it needs support. So it was important to us to embrace scary stories, like someone who had a criminal record and two people who had drug abuse and alcohol abuse histories. And not only did both of these people use far less or successfully stay sober, as was the case for one, the thing that was the most interesting to me is there was one woman who — she described it beautifully.
She was going through Alcoholics Anonymous and things like that. She had all the terminology to really understand what she was going through. And this urge, when you’re in a state of not knowing and your state of despair, a state of purposelessness, to check out. And when the money started coming, and the financial situations in her life started becoming manageable, she suddenly felt so much more free to check back into her life.
I think a lot of these behaviors happen when you’re escaping. They’re escapist behaviors. And it doesn’t have to be drugs, it can be Sudoku. Some people eat too much food, some people, whatever. We all have these ways of coping. But the funny thing is, going back to the name “Bootstraps,” sort of acknowledging these greater mythologies that we all buy into, that we’re all raised with. It’s like the American religion. The people who are the most suspicious, even after the entire program, which worked out successfully in their cases, have the most hesitation about a UBI, are the people with a drug addiction history.
And then say, “I think maybe this is a good program, but we shouldn’t give to people with a drug addiction history because they’ll blow it. Or it’ll enable their drug habit.” And there are two things I say to that is one, part of the beauty of a UBI design — it’s like we did, weekly, or it’s a monthly subsidy. It’s not $10,000 in one lump sum to blow it on a bender and OD yourself. Whether it’s drugs or investments or gambling or whatever, you have many chances to fail and learn and fail and learn.
But the other thing is I said directly to this woman, I said, “To be honest with you, that’s why we chose you. We chose you for this project because many people that we imagined would be watching this would look at you and your story and say, ‘We should not give her money.’” And she was an unmitigated success and she radically turned her life around. And she didn’t really have an answer to that, but it gave her pause. And to me, it says we have to be, if we’re doing something that’s more — It’s not just one person that we picked, but it’s society-wide. We do need to be very sensitive to the fact that some people are so deep in addiction or trauma that further help might be needed other than just cash. But that cash is power. And giving people power and resources, I don’t think, is anything but a good thing if you give them the support they need.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I was driving the other day, and I was behind a car whose brake lights were out. And the only reason I didn’t hit this car is because I have an automatic braking system on mine. And so I avoided hitting him. So I got pretty mad about it. I pulled around next to him and then I started to look at this car. And he wasn’t just some corporate idiot like I thought he might be. He was a working-class guy and he had a crack in his windshield. And he definitely was going to work and seemed to me to be working to earn money to go to work, and didn’t have enough to fix his car.
And it just reminded me that, at some point, it never trickles down enough. And at some point, you get stuck and you get locked into a system, and it’s almost like there’s no escaping it. And that’s the beauty of the gift of UBI. If we do this right, if we design it right, if we test it properly, that we can pull someone like that out of a system and hopefully get him to have a car with brake lights so it doesn’t kill another human being. So I wonder if you have any thoughts about that trickle-down effect that I’m talking about?
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah, I mean, I think in general, when it comes to bullshit jobs, what makes them bullshit is you feel like you’re doing it because you have to. And you feel like you’re doing something that you don’t believe contributes to the world. And this goes back to what we were saying before about the driving element of human nature being that urge to have purpose, the urge to matter. In a world where your basic existence is supported to a degree, where you have that security just sort of built in and that trust that is going to be there permanently, your focus can completely change from “what I have to do” to “what I want to do.”
And so it becomes a lot harder to staff bullshit jobs, I think. It’s a lot harder to find people to be your telemarketer in that sort of economy. That doesn’t mean people won’t work. See, this is a big concern people have is, if you give people enough money to survive, why would they still work? Because people still want nice things. People want more than to stare at a wall and eat ramen with roommates. People want to go on vacations, have a family, buy a car, invest. People want to live nicely.
Laurie Ruettimann:
But it does prompt the question, so what if they don’t want to work? And so what if they can live on $1,000 a month? This is a conversation I have with journalists, with executives right now. Dare me to be poor. Offer me a job that sucks my soul out, that wears me down, that makes me commute to work. You know what? I’ll live on 15 bucks an hour doing something like at the local library, and I just won’t reinvest in my local economy.
So this is a standoff that seems to be happening anyway. People are saying, “I don’t want a certain type of job anymore.” In fact, during the pandemic, we had been preaching continuous learning for so long that people took the time to do online learning and secure better jobs so that we couldn’t backfill many of those open positions when the economy started to reopen. So isn’t this already happening without UBI?
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah. I, too, it depends on who I’m talking to, who the audience is. There’s a different pitch for UBI, whether it’s a libertarian or a progressive or a conservative or whatever.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Or how about just a corporate HR audience? Which is what we are. What’s your pitch, then, in that circumstance?
Conrad Shaw:
I was at Lockheed Martin for a while out of college before I decided I wanted to abandon that. And I had all these questions. I came here curious to ask you about how HR works. And I have these theories. You come into a job. I remember I was busting my butt to be super-productive. I got the highest review of anyone in my cohort of kids that came in, and I think I got a 3.1% raise, and they got a 3.0% raise. And I’m looking at senior engineers who, I do five times the work as them, and they’re not caught up with the modern technology that we use, and they’re making twice as much as me. And it seems like it’s just really hard to fire somebody. And I think part of the reason it’s really hard to fire somebody is we’ve put all of this onus on businesses to prop up people’s safety and security.
If you fire someone, they could be on the street, it’s your fault. Or if you fire someone, they’ll lose their health insurance, it’s your fault. But in the end, we end up tied to these companies whose main objective is supposed to be profit. We burden them with the social welfare system. And what we end up with is a financially abusive situation where people are now beholden to their jobs because they can’t leave their jobs.
So I would like to see a situation in which, when I came in, there would be a lot fewer people competing for my job because they didn’t really want it and they didn’t feel like they had to. And there would be less dead weight in the office from people who they just didn’t have the energy to try to fire, so that maybe they could pay me eighty dollars of the $150 they charged for my services an hour rather than $30. I see all of this lack of appreciation for what I’m bringing in, the value I bring, and this disconnection between my productivity and my reward, that I get disillusioned when I think about it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
When I hear you speak this, I want to make the reverse pitch to you and tell you, “Come work in human resources.” We need this kind of creativity, this innovation, and rethinking the world of work. Because you’re right, we are burdened with — what did you call it? — A financially abusive relationship between employer and employee. And we are also burdened with making sure that people don’t fall through the cracks in society. We need health care, we need consumers. And we’ve created this co-dependent system that doesn’t really benefit anybody except like seven American oligarchs now. So I’m with you. If you ever want to quit what you’re doing and come to work in human resources, I’ll train you up. We’ll burn it down together. That would be my dream.
Conrad Shaw:
That would be fun. I do have some ideas. And we’re putting together a company now where I want to implement them, but I feel scared to say it in certain audiences. But I’m open to being told why I’m wrong. But I believe salaries should be fully transparent and public for everybody.
Laurie Ruettimann:
You’re not wrong. No. I mean there should be no secrets, right? At all levels. We should talk openly and honestly about salaries and how much people earn. And there are current initiatives around that, but it’s not enough. And also, Conrad, I’m going to throw something out there for you. If you structure your company right, and you incorporate a value of self-leadership, you may not need much HR at all. There are technologies out there, processes, training that you can do to get people to be fully accountable for showing up and producing in a different way that you can structure your company so that people can leave if they don’t like it. Or you can ask them to leave if you don’t like them. Right? So what do you think about all that?
Conrad Shaw:
That sounds like something I’m really interested in doing — having people be fully empowered to bring their most creative and competent selves rather than micromanaged. So yeah, when we’re making those decisions, I’ll probably send you some emails and say —
Laurie Ruettimann:
OK!
Conrad Shaw:
— “How do we do this?”
Laurie Ruettimann:
I will give you my friends and family discount rate. How does that sound? Listen, I’m so pleased that you’re doing the work that you’re doing and that you’re working on this docu-series, you’re working with your partner. Can we give a shoutout to her? ‘Cause she’s pretty terrific. Tell us a little bit about her.
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah, her name is Deia Schlosberg. I met her on OkCupid, and we went on a climbing date and that’s how I knew she was pretty special. She invited me climbing. And she is a documentary filmmaker who has lived enough of a life to have two memoirs at this point. And sort of intimidating to talk about, and she’ll never brag about it, so it’s sort of my job, self-imposed. So some fun facts. A couple of weeks after I proposed to her, she was arrested in North Dakota filming a pipeline protest. This was at the same time as Standing Rock, and they tried to slap 45 years’ worth of felonies on her, and there was a whole hashtag #freedeia campaign and a lot of stuff around that.
Laurie Ruettimann:
And she’s free?
Conrad Shaw:
Oh yeah, they had her in their pretty crappy situation for several days. And then we dealt with all the legal for the next year. We got a good pro bono lawyer. And it was fortunate that she had some connected friends, because that pro bono legal extended to the other five or six filmmakers around the country that were going through a similar situation.
This is in the middle of a certain part of the Trump administration. It was right at the crossover from Obama to Trump. And I remember being at an event watching the election results come in, and she was crying, thinking, “Oh, they’re going to send me back to North Dakota, and I’m going to do my sentence.” But yeah, it was a very scary time when people were trying to crack down on any sort of activism as some sort of eco-terrorism. She was legally filming from a street and not involved in the event and she got swept up, too.
Another really fun story about her is that she was awarded a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year back in 2008 or so because she and her ex, now ex, they hiked the entire length of the South American continent along the spine and the Andes. They sort of blazed the trail that had never been done. And it took two years, 7,800 miles. And I can get about 20 minutes into her telling me a story or two about it before I need to curl up into a ball and say, “Let’s revisit later. Because that’s just horrifying.”
Laurie Ruettimann:
Harrowing. Wow, what a badass. And I just want to say I want my husband to go on a podcast one day, which will never happen, and talk about me in the loving, dear sweet way that you talk about your partner. I mean, it’s quite wonderful. And it’s nice to be on a journey with someone to be like-minded and pushing for change and doing it in a way that taps into your creativity. I mean, what a wonderful thing. Tell us when we can expect to see “Bootstraps.”
Conrad Shaw:
OK, so the production and the UBI experiment part of “Bootstraps” was a two-and-a-half-year experiment. That’s all done, completely over. We’re in post-production. We still have some fundraising to do, but about a year’s worth of post-production, likely. So we’re hoping to release in 2024.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Conrad, before we end the conversation, there’s also another project that you’re working on that’s really fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit about Comingle?
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah. Comingle, it’s sort of like a Venmo for mass mutual aid. It’s an app that we’re building. And this kind of came about after the UBI experiment was done for “Bootstraps.” I had done a lot of research on the economics. I had built this thing called the ubicalculator.com and someone reached out to me with this idea for a platform that was money-pooling for gig workers. And I said, “That’s really cool. Why don’t we make it a little more radical and make it just money-pooling for everybody and make it like a UBI?” And because I had less to do with the docu-series at that point, I jumped in full-time to help try to build up this app.
Laurie Ruettimann:
From filmmaker to tech startup. I love it. It was just a normal career.
Conrad Shaw:
Just kind of figuring it out as I go. So with any documentary, cause documentary, it’s only half-done when it’s done. Because then there’s the impact campaign. And because I know Deia, and I’ve seen her different environmental films and things like that, there’s that point in the impact campaign where you’re doing screenings all around the country. And at the end of each screening, there’s the Q&A. And everyone’s all excited or they’re mad or they’re sad about whatever issue, and they say, “What can we do?” And the answer is, “Write a letter to your senator.” And you could just feel the room deflate. Everyone’s like, “What? What can we actually do? And have that feeling that we mattered.” So Comingle became to us the very tangible call to action when people are really excited about the idea of UBI, or curious to learn more or whatever, is this is UBI in practice.
It’ll be essentially the very first basic income that is permanent and scalable and universal to anyone who wants to join. And if you’re sitting there in that audience and you want to do something about this, then you can do it today. Just sign up, right? That’s the idea. So we’re hoping to have Comingle ready in time for the release of the docu-series so that the one-two punch can be, “Here’s the idea, talk about it, fight about it, get interested, learn about it, and then if you want to explore further with us, hey, let’s just try it out. We don’t have to wait for the government.”
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, I love that. I love that. So when you talk about an app being created, this isn’t just some sketchy cash app, you’ve got some real brainpower and some real serious thought behind what you’ve created? And you have advisors who have helped you build this as well, correct?
Conrad Shaw:
Yes. Yes. So there’s a wealth of experience advising us and going into the process of developing this thing. There’s a lot of time and care put into both making the system super-efficient in theory and everything, but also making sure it’s secure. Because it involves connecting with people’s bank accounts, making sure the messaging is non-politicized and open to everybody. Making sure it’s not proselytizing, but it’s more of just an open invite to people. There are a lot of elements that need to be very deeply thought out to pull this off in the way that I would feel comfortable releasing it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, yeah. Well, you have some time, but it’s going to come up in the next year or so. We’re going to hopefully see both, “Bootstraps” and Comingle out in the market. And we’re so grateful that you came today to talk a little bit about all of this. If people want to learn more about you, Conrad, your ecosystem, all the good stuff that you’re working on, you got a couple places to send them?
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah. So quickly, for Bootstraps and Comingle, you can get on the notification when we launch, mailing list, bootstrapstv.com and comingle.us, that’s US not com. And then I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the idea of UBI. So if you’re curious to just explore some of that by many different angles, I have a page. Conrad Shaw on Medium. I’m on all social media as @theUBIguy.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I’m surprised you didn’t do a shoutout for your LinkedIn page. You’re so corporate. Come on now.
Conrad Shaw:
Oh no. I came from acting. We don’t think of LinkedIn. I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into LinkedIn, and I’m still trying to meet people through Facebook.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. Skip it all. Skip it all. Stay on Medium, you’re doing really well. And I’m so grateful that you spent some time today with us. Thanks again for being a guest on the show.
Conrad Shaw:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Laurie Ruettimann:
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