The Highwire with Del Bigtree - WILL AI USHER IN UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

As AI technology continues to displace large segments of the U.S. workforce, universal basic income (UBI) is moving from theory to potential reality. Jefferey explores what the studies reveal about the societal impact of such programs and how they may pave the way for government-controlled digital currencies, which could include troubling features like expiration dates and restrictions on how and where the money can be spent.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

I'm going to talk about the artificial intelligence conversation. We've been drilling this. I've been hammering it. When you were away, I had Alex Newman on. We talked about this. And artificial intelligence is interesting because it was thrown into our lap after COVID. Looking at COVID as a template, we, you know, a lot of people lost their jobs. It hurt the economy and it isolated us.

And we come out of COVID and all of a sudden, artificial intelligence is just thrown at us. It's here. It's a foregone conclusion. And just like COVID, they had this idea of an MRNA technology. Before COVID, people in the medical community were saying, saying this is kind of risky to go on a population level maybe we should just do this in small sections but when COVID happened obviously we vaccinated the world well another idea is happening what I'm seeing with artificial intelligence people are saying it's here let's try this idea

because what's happening is they're saying everyone's going to lose their job there's going to be no jobs people are going to have all this free time what do we do with them let's try universal basic income this is an idea that's been around for centuries and no one's really tried it on a widespread basis, but now it's coming out of the mouth of what seems like everybody. Take a listen. All right. A lot of people that feel completely disenfranchised by the system that's currently in place now that I think is going to be upended by AI.

What to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. I'm very worried about AI taking over lots of mundane jobs and And that should be a good thing. It's going to lead to a big increase in productivity, which leads to a big increase in wealth. And if that wealth was equally distributed, that would be great.

I think ultimately we will have to have some kind of universal basic income. I don't think we're going to have a choice. A paycheck every month, even if you do not have a job, it is called universal basic income. What if you are paid an income each month without having to lift a finger? We should explore ideas like universal basic income income to make sure that everyone has a cushion to try new ideas. I think a basic minimum earnings for everybody so that there's nobody that is having to sleep on the street.

Guaranteed basic income or universal basic income. A hundred percent think that's really important. We have unfathomable wealth that's being created by these same systems. Right. Right. So universal basic income, on one hand, has a lot of hope. All right. So just give people money. Easy, right?

Well, the Belgian University in Antwerp actually looked at this and did a big study looking at, is this even feasible? And this is the study here, not that basic. And what they found when it comes to basic income, they say this. Yet a miracle remedy for persistent poverty, basic income is unlikely to be.

Even when set at a very high level, that means giving a lot of people a lot more money. It's heralded simplicity seems vastly overestimated. Basic income has something of a treacherous, iceberg, below that gleaming, appealing tip of simplicity, there's a murky mass of complex choices to be made and interactions to be accounted for. What you get may be very different from what you wish for. And then you go to an article just reporting on that same study and they basically straight up say basic income doesn't work. And it says redistribution via basic income appears to reduce inequality

slightly, but the simulation showed that poverty levels increased by three percentage points. So that's basic income. So when you hear this conversation coming out of the mouths of people saying, well, it's just simple, just give people money. It's just it'll fix everybody's, everybody's lives. The study is showing it's saying it's very complex. And even from country to country, again, it's kind of like the COVID response. You can't just have a one world response to this. Every state, every country has specific situations that they have to account for. Basic income is no different. So we see this conversation. And you know, Jeffrey, the part of this that always bothers me is like, you know, reducing inequality, as though

finance is all that we are, that money is the solution to everything. You can't reduce the inequality of passion. You can't reduce inspiration. You can't get rid of, and in many ways, I think that that's what these studies are showing, whether they state that directly or not, handing someone money does not give them a reason for being. It doesn't give them an excitement to get up in the morning. It doesn't make them, it doesn't fulfill ideas of passion or achievement that are all human necessary, you know, evaluations of ourselves, of our own self-esteem. And that's where I just think everyone is crazy if they think we're just going to hand money to people to stay at home. By the way, people that are just sitting at

home are more bored needing to spend more money because they have got no other reason. Someone that's working, you know, is out there passionately living, is not spending that much money. Most of the time, you're totally focused on what you're doing. if you're sitting around with nothing to do, there's just not enough money in the world to fill that void. So I think this is an insane idea. I think it will lead to all sorts of crime, certainly depression like we've never seen it before, because we've got to talk about the equality of human interest and passion and being curious, all of those things. You rob someone if you just keep them alive, and we've seen that in our welfare programs.

You see that on Indian reservations. Every way that we have tried, we say we try to help people. I think we know we're enslaving them. And I think this is an international goal to enslave even more people. And the conversation turns to as well, universe by saying, okay, let's say it happens. Are people going to be receiving a check in the mail? Are you receiving a bundle of cash by UPS each?

No, it's going to be digital. It's going to be digital money, digital currency. Last week we had a conversation around the Genius Act. This is an act to produce what are called stable coins. This is something that's tethered to it's attached to something of value like the U.S. dollar or like gold or silver, but it's a coin in cyberspace on a, you know, presumably a blockchain. And the conversation from Marjorie Taylor Green during this back and forth,

really a test to see if we're going to go digital. This is the first test from really 1913 with the Federal Reserve Act that has been, you know, making money out of thin air, we're going to go now fully digital. And this is what Marjorie Taylor Green said. She said this week, the House is voting on the Genius Act, which lays the groundwork for a layered central bank digital currency where Americans interact with stable coins. But behind the scenes, there are the functional surveillance capabilities of a CBDC. The bill is written, does not expressly ban CBDC and does not protect self-custody. Self-custody means that you control your own money, not a third party. So some big issues there. That actually passed. So Trump signs this.

This is Forbes article, signs the Genius Act into law. So we're on this experiment now. Fortunately, the House also passed what was called the Anti-C-CBDC Surveillance State Act. So they're very serious about not wanting the CBDC. And this blocks the digital dollar rollout. So although, and there's two camps on this, not to go into this, but really quickly, there's the people that are saying this puts, an off ramp to the Federal Reserve and their deflationary policies of the last over centuries. Maybe we can get some monetary policy back. But the other camp says this puts us into the digital slippery slope towards a CBDC. So we're going to, we're all in this experiment together. We're going to continue to report on this. But one of the countries that in Europe that's really

going full force is the Bank for International Settlements. That's in Basel, Switzerland. And they have something called the Pine Project. So where America is really trying to hold this back, this in Europe and Switzerland, they're going full force. This is a central bank open market operations with smart contracts. You go into this document, they're using kind of bankered language, but they're talking about digital tokens with smart contracts that can be executed when pre-specified conditions are met. What kind of conditions? Well, here's an article on this from Sky News, Australia, money that can expire. And you go, Royal Bank of Australia, also participating in this is laying the groundwork. And you go into this article, it says, we're witnessing a shift in who

gets to decide how your money functions, how it moves, where it goes, what it touches, and what it refuses to. It's a shift in who holds the final say, the individual or the system. Programmable money means every single transaction can be pre-shaped, every permission can be baked into the code, and every restriction can be enforced automatically without warning and without recourse. And now, bankers know what they're doing, and they've been steering us in this direction for well over five years. Take a look at this. This is just a short snippet of some of the key people moving in this. One final note I will make is that if you think about the benefits of digital money,

there are huge potential gains. It's not just about digital forms of physical currency. You can have programmability, units of central bank currency with expiry dates. You could have, as I argue in my book, potentially better. And some people might see there are a darker world where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things. but not other things that it deems less desirable, like, say, ammunition or drugs or pornography or something of the sort.

And that is very powerful. Now, in all our analysis on CBDC, in particular for the use of general, to the general use, we tend to establish the equivalence with cash. And there is a huge difference there. For example, in cash, we don't know, for example, who's using a $100 bill to do. We don't know who is using a 1000-peso bill today. A key difference with the CBDC is that central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability.

And also we will have the technology to enforce that. Those two issues are extremely important, and that makes a very important. makes a huge difference with respect to what cash is. Boy, they really go hand in hand, don't they? The universal basic income, because you say to yourself, well, I want to say over what you can spend that money on. I don't want you buying drugs or, you know, whatever. You know, I want you spending it on food and things that matter.

And then you see that slippery slope. It was great, yeah, we're on that. We've already got that covered. The money they'll be getting will have rules to it. And I wonder, Jeffrey, does this go as far as if you're getting a job? The money this job pays can't be used for guns or drugs or porn or whatever. I mean, are you going to be choosing who you work for based on what they're going to allocate the money you're making goes to them?

This is a crazy, really, I mean, it's walking imprisonment. We keep talking about it. Yet these world leaders couldn't be, you know, more tickled to move in this direction. And that's the final gentleman there was Augustus Carlin. He's the president of the Bank for International Settlements, and he's talking about absolute control baked into money. So I want people to really pause there. That was five years ago. It's here now for some countries. They're already beta testing this. So this is something we need to fight here in the U.S. If anything, we can be this bastion of hope for the rest of the country and not get swallowed up into this push because there's so many people trying to do this.