Hello nerds.
When I first started interviewing Scott Santens years ago during the Nerds for Yang era, he was one of the most relentless and articulate advocates for universal basic income (UBI) in America. Back then, it felt like the country was on the verge of something big. Andrew Yang was on the debate stage making “Freedom Dividend” a household phrase. Silicon Valley technologists were whispering about automation in the same breath as moral responsibility. Even Republican voters were entertaining the idea that direct cash transfers might be less bureaucratic and more empowering than sprawling social programs.
Fast forward to 2025, and the conversation feels quieter. The pandemic-era stimulus checks are long gone. Washington has reverted to tribal warfare. Meanwhile, AI is advancing faster than anyone—maybe even Scott and Andrew —predicted. The irony is thick: the very forces that made UBI seem like a radical idea a decade ago are now transforming entire industries before our eyes. And yet, the movement feels stuck in neutral.
So when Scott rejoined me on Nerds for Humanity this month from his new base in Washington, D.C., I wanted to know: What happened? Why did UBI lose its moment? And is there a realistic path back to the mainstream before millions of Americans get left behind?
The Move to D.C. and the Lost Moment
Scott began by explaining why he left New Orleans for D.C. a few years ago. “It just seemed that UBI was really a bigger part of the conversation,” he said. “I thought if the Democrats came in again in 2024, I could actually get some traction.”
He laughs a little when he says that now. “That didn’t end up happening,” he admitted, reflecting on how the Biden reelection froze the kind of idea competition that defined 2020. “The big problem was that Biden decided to run again, and there was no primary process. Then suddenly Kamala comes in and still no primary process. So there was no ideas competition. We really missed out on that.”
That lack of competition, Scott argues, has a ripple effect. Political movements thrive on moments of contrast, when new ideas bump up against old dogmas and voters are forced to re-evaluate assumptions. The 2020 race—with Yang, Sanders, Warren, and others pitching structural reforms—was one of those rare idea-rich moments. 2024, by comparison, was a desert.
As Scott put it bluntly: “We were close enough to taste it during the pandemic. It really felt like we were actually on the cusp of doing a monthly cash payment that could change things. But none of that happened.”
He’s not wrong. The COVID checks were, in effect, a large-scale experiment in direct income support. Poverty temporarily plummeted. Families caught their breath. Consumer demand stayed strong. And then we let it all expire.
AI Ate the Jobs While America Slept
What’s striking about this quiet period, as I noted to Scott, is that the threat he and Yang warned about—the automation of work—is no longer hypothetical. Knowledge worker jobs are being eaten by AI faster than policy debates can catch up.
“I’m a parent of two teenagers,” I told him. “Other parents are starting to wonder if a computer science degree is still the golden ticket. Should we be preparing our kids to be plumbers instead?”
Scott nodded grimly. “It’s disheartening,” he said. “Now that these impacts are here… this is the stuff that we’ve been warning about. It’s not a sudden thing, but it does seem to already be impacting the entry-level job market.”
He pointed to a convergence of pressures: corporate hiring freezes driven by uncertainty around tariffs, companies experimenting with AI productivity tools, and executives under shareholder pressure to “do more with less.” The result: stagnating headcount even in high-growth sectors.
“We don’t really need people that we likely would have if AI had not been introduced,” he said. I observed from Silicon Valley, “What we’re seeing right now is that companies can grow revenue while keeping headcount flat.”
It’s not a collapse. It’s a quiet deceleration—a slow bleed. And that’s arguably more dangerous because it doesn’t provoke a policy response. There’s no headline-grabbing “AI layoffs.” Just the invisible absence of opportunities for millions of new grads.
Even top business schools are struggling to place students. “It’s like the hardest market in years,” Scott said, and I agreed. “If we hit a recession,” he warned, “that’s when all these businesses really lean into productivity. The recession ends, and they realize they don’t need those people back.”
That scenario—automation accelerated by economic downturn—is the nightmare UBI advocates have been predicting for over a decade. Each downturn becomes a ratchet that permanently eliminates another layer of middle-class work.
The Automation Mirage
When politicians talk about “bringing manufacturing jobs back,” Scott and I get visibly frustrated. “I don’t think people realize—you don’t need that many people in those factories anymore,” I said.
He reminded me of a chart he once published showing that U.S. manufacturing output is higher than ever, even though manufacturing employment has fallen dramatically. “We’re manufacturing more than ever, we just have fewer jobs,” he said. “If we did reshoring, sure, we could manufacture even more, but jobs would continue going down.”
I brought up a U.S. tech investor who recently toured Chinese EV plants. “He said the number of BYD employees per car is something like a fifth of what it is for Ford or GM,” I told Scott. “If we build plants here, we’re not going to hire 20 people per car—we’ll hire four or five.”
Scott didn’t hesitate: “Exactly. The only way to bring it back is to minimize labor. American labor is expensive. You can’t both re-shore and keep the same job intensity.”
Then he pivoted to a deeper critique of political dishonesty. “Trump sold a lot of people false hope,” he said. “He told them, ‘Once I negotiate these trade deals, everything’s gonna be back to post–World War II full employment.’ But that’s a lie. We’ve heard that lie over and over again, even from people in the AI world. They say this will create more jobs than it displaces. Come on. We all know the realities.”
This is the paradox of modern capitalism: productivity growth has decoupled from employment growth. We make more stuff with fewer people. And our political imagination hasn’t caught up to that new reality.
From Careers to Gigs: The New Normal
Scott traced this shift back decades. “We know what happened when we displaced people from manufacturing jobs—they went lower down the ladder into lower-paying work,” he said. “You went from careers to gig labor.”
He rattled off examples that have become painfully familiar: “People now earn extra money by signing up for Uber, delivering food, DoorDashing. There’s just a transformation of what employment even means.”
In Scott’s view, the only logical response to this is UBI. “You need to make sure everyone actually gets basic income,” he said. “That helps feed demand for new jobs. If people’s incomes fall as a result of AI, demand falls. And when demand falls, the entire economy reorients.”
He pointed to a staggering statistic: “Right now, the top 10% are buying half of everything produced and sold in the U.S. It’s a very unequal consumption economy. The markets start ignoring the basic needs of people and reorient around luxury experiences.”
That imbalance, he argued, isn’t just economic—it’s political. “It leads to people getting violent. It’s key to the erosion of democracy.”
The Coming Middle-Class Awakening
If there’s any silver lining, I said, it’s that the pain is spreading up the income ladder.
“I think it’s going to affect a lot of middle-class and upper-middle-class people in a way it hasn’t before,” I said. “When Andrew talked about truck drivers losing jobs, people thought, ‘My kid’s going to college, they’ll be fine.’ Now they’re realizing maybe not.”
Scott agreed. “We just didn’t realize how fast it would hit arts, music, images, and photos. I didn’t think about that. It took me by surprise.”
I added, “When he said doctors and lawyers, it felt far away. Now you’re like—oh s**t—that’s happening right now.”
He laughed and I added more examples. “People are winning court cases using ChatGPT as their attorney. And with tools like Sora and Grok Imagine, you can generate realistic videos and images instantly. There’s no ground truth anymore.”
That last point hits hard. “You just give people a reason to doubt it,” Scott said. “You can have fake security cam footage of Sam Altman stealing something, and people will believe it. Or you can have real footage of Trump doing something, and people won’t.”
When truth itself becomes negotiable, democracy can’t function. Evidence is the oxygen of public accountability. Once it’s gone, all we have left are teams—and team loyalty.
The Tariff Fantasy
That team loyalty came up again when I told Scott about a debate I’d had with a MAGA relative in Florida. My brother argued that Trump’s tariffs would pay for his tax cuts. Scott immediately laughed. “Even assuming that were true—which it’s not—you’re still taxing the working and middle class to pay for tax cuts for the rich,” he said.
He broke it down simply: “It doesn’t make any sense to say, ‘Tariff revenue will cover it.’ Who covers the tariff revenue? It’s the consumers. And yet people believe it.”
Scott sees this as part of the broader epistemic collapse—people believing “whatever their team is saying,” no matter how illogical. “It’s impressive in some ways,” I said. “You can propose policies that hurt your base and they’ll cheer you for it.” He nodded. “Yeah. It’s really frustrating.”
UBI Research: Misunderstood and Misreported
I asked Scott about recent UBI research that some media outlets described as “disappointing.” His response was both sharp and nuanced.
“Those weren’t negative results,” he said. “They were null results.” He walked me through three often-cited studies: Baby’s First Years, the Denver Homeless Pilot, and Sam Altman’s Worldcoin/Overture experiment.
“The key is to understand what’s being tested,” he explained. “These weren’t saturation pilots. They gave money to small groups of individuals. But real universal basic income changes communities. It creates new demand, new jobs, new dynamics.”
He contrasted these with the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes oil dividends to every state resident annually. “In Alaska, we saw an overall increase in employment due to the dividend,” he said. “Some people worked less, but the spending created new jobs.”
That’s the essence of his argument: if you only study individuals, you miss the macro effects.
He was especially skeptical of the way media covered the Baby’s First Years study, which found no measurable difference in children’s brain development after four years of $333 monthly payments. “That’s a null result, not a failure,” Scott said. “It doesn’t mean UBI doesn’t work. It just means we didn’t see differences yet. Impacts often show up later in life.”
He also noted that measuring brain development via EEG scans is an odd and narrow metric. “Maybe families were happier. Maybe they bought what they needed. That still matters.”
The Secret Study and New Frontiers
Scott hinted that a major new study is underway. “There’s a study I can’t talk about,” he said, smiling, “but it’s looking at something no other experiment has looked at. I’m excited for those results.”
He also mentioned Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Overflow) is funding a $50 million set of county-level pilots, focusing on rural areas. “That’s exciting,” Scott said. “It’s a different political slice, and it’s potentially saturation-like.”
Globally, he’s watching Thailand closely. “They announced they were going to do a negative income tax starting in 2027,” he said. “If that happens, they’d be the first country in the world to have a basic income guarantee. It could reduce poverty by over 90%.”
Then he sighed. “But the day after they announced it, their prime minister got fired. So who knows.”
ITSA Foundation: Building UBI From the Ground Up
Scott’s not just theorizing anymore. His ITSA Foundation is taking action with two ambitious projects launching next year.
First, the Bootstraps documentary series, which follows families receiving a basic income to humanize the policy through storytelling. “Storytelling is key,” he said. “People need to feel it, not just read data.”
Second, the Comingle app, which will create what he calls “a small basic income floor of around $50 per week without waiting for government.”
“You can create it yourself, through community pooling,” he said. “If Bill Gates joined Comingle and put 7% of his income in, everyone’s income would go up. Don’t worry about him getting $50 a week—everyone benefits.”
It’s the kind of practical experimentation the movement needs: bottom-up systems proving that shared prosperity can be engineered today, not someday.
Reflections: The Hard Politics of Intelligent Reform
After the interview ended, I stayed live on the stream to share a few personal reflections—some of them, frankly, tinged with frustration.
I told my audience that I’m a believer in two three-letter acronyms: UBI and RCV (ranked choice voting). I have conviction that both are essential for a healthier democracy and a fairer economy. Yet it’s maddening how little traction they get compared to what dominates our discourse.
This morning, I argued politics with another MAGA acquaintance on WhatsApp. He was fired up about “the trans agenda” and “illegals.” When I asked what he thought about RCV or UBI, he admitted he didn’t know what they were.
And that, I said, is the tragedy. Many voters are animated by cultural wedge issues that barely affect their lives, while transformative structural reforms barely register. People will march for hours over trans athletes, but not over gerrymandering, open primaries, or the collapse of middle-class livelihoods.
Maybe that’s why Scott is investing in storytelling. “You have to boil this down into a bumper sticker,” I said. “Or a story.” Policy briefs won’t cut through a media ecosystem optimized for outrage.
It’s sobering to realize how little energy we allocate to existential issues—like the sustainability of democracy or the viability of a middle-class life in an AI-driven economy—compared to the performative culture wars that dominate cable news.
A Political System Addicted to Distraction
I sometimes wonder if America is capable of solving long-term problems anymore. We have the tools and the talent, but not the attention span.
We obsess over symbolic fights while the foundations rot. Closed primaries keep extremists in power. Gerrymandered districts ensure incumbents never lose. The electoral incentives all point toward division, not solutions.
UBI and RCV are, in many ways, tests of whether we can think systemically again—about incentives, about fairness, about the structural forces shaping our future. And right now, the answer seems to be: not yet.
As I told my audience, “It’s sad that people will march for red-meat issues where government isn’t even the decisive actor, while ignoring how broken the system itself has become.”
The AI asteroid is heading straight for us. Millions of jobs—white-collar jobs—are on the chopping block. And neither party is talking seriously about it. Not Trump, not Schumer, not Newsom. Maybe Andrew Yang. Maybe Buttigieg. Maybe Bernie. But as a national conversation? Crickets.
What’s Next: Awakening or Denial
My optimism, if you can call it that, lies in inevitability. The pain will broaden until reform becomes unavoidable. Middle-class professionals will begin to experience the same precarity that working-class Americans have faced for decades.
The good news is that when comfortable people get uncomfortable, politics shifts. The bad news is that it often takes crisis to get there.
UBI isn’t charity. It’s infrastructure for an economy that no longer guarantees stability through employment. It’s the plumbing of a post-industrial democracy.
Scott put it best when he said: “You have to make sure everyone actually gets basic income so you have that cash. That can feed demand for new jobs. Without it, demand falls, inequality grows, and democracy erodes.”
A Call to the Nerds
As we wrapped, I asked Scott how people could stay involved. “Sign up at ItsaFoundation.org,” he said. “Subscribe to the newsletter. Next year we’ll have the Bootstraps docu-series, the Comingle app, and events across the country to organize communities.”
I told him I’d be cheering him on. Because, frankly, the next five years are going to test whether America is still capable of rational self-government—or if we’ve outsourced that too.
If you’ve made it this far into this post, you’re probably one of the few people left who actually cares about data, ideas, and structural reform. You’re a nerd. And that’s a good thing.
But as I told my audience at the end of the livestream: being a nerd isn’t enough. We need to organize, support, and amplify. If we don’t, the algorithms will drown out the quiet voices of reason.
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Bye nerds.
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