The Writers Strike

When I wrote “The War on Normal People” a number of years ago, I was deeply concerned about the impact AI would have on all sorts of jobs.

One job I didn’t talk about much is writers – yet the Writers’ Guild of America strike is very much now on the frontlines of what is happening with new technologies. The strike was initially thought of as the Streaming Strike because of writers being compensated more poorly with the shift to streamers. But now AI is front and center as studios want to retain the right to use the technology to produce scripts. Writers understandably want to restrict the use of AI and its ability to develop models based on their work. “This town is going to be leveled by AI” is how one friend in LA put it to me. That’s in part what the writers are going on strike to prevent.

There are about 11,500 writers in the writing strike.  This week on the podcast I interview one of them, Michael Jamin, a showrunner and writer for such shows as King of the Hill, Beavis & Butthead, and Just Shoot Me (I’m a big Mike Judge fan).  “It takes a while to become a good writer.  You learn a lot from the veterans in the room.  You need to spend time not just in the writers’ room but on set if you’re ever going to run a show,” Michael comments. 

Michael continues, “We want to make sure that writing continues as a profession.  It’s gotten harder and harder for anyone to make a living as there are fewer episodes per season with the streamers.  They’ve also put in mini-rooms where they have you write scripts that may or may not be used and say, ‘we should pay you less because we might not use these.’  Our argument is, if I go into a grocery store can I pay less because I might throw the banana away?  It takes the same amount of work to make it whether you use it or not.”     
 
There’s a notion that Hollywood writers are all rich.  I can say with authority that that’s not true, as I know a few of them.  “A lot of us don’t know where the next gig is going to come from.  Some people have other jobs to tide them over.”  Even some writers with noteworthy credits are essentially on the edge. 
 
That said, the writers seem very determined.  The last strike in 2007 went on for 100 days.  How long might this one last?  “Keep in mind it’s not just the writers who are going without pay due to the strike.  It’s the caterers, the set decorators and carpenters, the countless small businesses that benefit from a film shoot.  This is disrupting a lot of lives.”  The content pipeline would really dry up if the Actors join the strike later this year; SAG-AFTRA is voting to authorize a strike right now. 
 
The media landscape is being quickly transformed as tech firms grow in prominence; Amazon and Apple essentially have major studios stapled onto them as marketing arms, and the content producers are competing for finite attention and dollars.  They want to manage their costs.  On the other side are the writers.  What role will human creativity play in the future of storytelling?  I told Michael that good writing is what distinguishes the good shows from the not-so-good ones; who will be doing the writing in the future?  And if the most skilled creatives are in danger of being commoditized in the 21st century economy, who is safe? 
 
We essentially turned a blind eye when automation came for manufacturing and industrial workers.  It’s coming for more and more of us.  The Writers are an unusual group to be on the frontlines of the tug-of-war between tech-fueled efficiencies and humanity, but here they are.  They’ll have more company soon.    
 
For my interview with Michael, click here.  For my book “The War on Normal People” click here.  To join Forward to humanize our economy, click here.  

Testimony

Hello!  I hope that you are celebrating Memorial Day weekend with family and friends.  
 
The Republican primary is heating up with Trump as the frontrunner.   A significant proportion of his supporters are evangelical Christians.  Why do so many evangelicals support Trump despite any number of controversies? 

Jon Ward, the chief national correspondent for Yahoo News, tries to answer this question in his deeply personal new book, “Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation.”  It’s personal because Jon grew up evangelical himself in the suburbs of Maryland.  
 
Jon is the son of a pastor.  His parents kept him out of the local public school as too secular and prone to bad values.  Jon went to a church school through sixth grade, was homeschooled for two years and then attended a Christian high school.  “Christians established their own communities, educational institutions, and music festivals, isolated from the rest of the world,” Jon writes.  He recalls being part of pro-life protests as a young child.  
 
Not that he was unwilling; “I was still under the spell of my upbringing, which had taught me there was nothing to think about.  Just vote GOP.  This dismissal of thinking carefully was based on the notion that because Democrats support abortion, voting for any Democrat was unthinkable.”  That simplicity was later challenged when he “met more actual Democrats who were real people and who were doing good in the world.”  
 
Indeed, his work as a journalist with Yahoo, the Huffington Post and the Washington Times brought him into contact with thousands of people in a multitude of different environments.  It broadened his sense of texture and complexity.  
 
And then came the rise of Trump.  Jon understood Trump’s appeal on a gut level.  “Trump blew up the rules, ditched the media, and millions of Americans loved it.  And I get it.  How could I not?  I had grown up deep inside the world that said the media was out to get us.”  Of course, as a member of the media now himself Jon had quite a different perspective.  
 
Jon details arguments he’d have with his family over Trump.  Here, he believes that, at least for some, faith had lost to fear.  “Faith gave us courage to stick to our principles even if there was a cost.  Courage gave us the strength to engage lovingly and constructively with others who thought or believed differently from us.  Fear, on the other hand, drove us to withdraw and retreat from dialogue and cooperation with others who were not like-minded.  Fear would drive us to abandon our principles, to seek safety and protection at almost any cost, no matter who it hurt or how it reflected on our faith.”  
 
One thing that I have been consistently dismayed by is how often people are willing to caricature supporters of one candidate or another.  Perhaps it is because I’ve traveled the country so extensively to rural areas in the Midwest and the South, but I’ve always thought that most people are good and moral in any walk of life or town, blue or red.  
 
“Testimony” is a valuable book in explaining how so many Americans of faith were – and still are – willing to support a candidate who seems so anathema to many of their expressed values.  It ultimately is a call to avoid black and white binary ways of thinking, for people of faith or anyone else.  “Christians should become agents of nuance rather than of reductionism.”  
 
He writes, “[T]ruth-seekers don’t search for battles outside themselves to win.  Instead, they examine their own point of view, searching for holes, weaknesses, errors . . . Journalism has made me more of a Christian, a better Christian.  It has exposed me to the richness and complexity of life and has led me into the adventurous pursuit of truth that has durability, integrity and honesty . . . It is to live a life of curiosity and wonder.”  
 
To hear Jon's story, click here.  For Jon’s book click here.  To move our politics beyond one side vs. the other, click here.  

A Rockstar Joins Forward

Some huge news came out this week – Krist Novoselic has joined the National Board of the Forward Party!  Krist co-founded Nirvana with Kurt Cobain – he’s the tall, good-looking one playing the guitar toward the back.  Nirvana sold more than 75 million records and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.  Also, seemingly every teenager wears a Nirvana T-shirt to this day. 

Krist is no stranger to political activism.  He was the chairman of Fairvote, an org championing Ranked Choice Voting, for 9 years and was the former chair of his local county Democratic Party.  He even wrote a book, “Of Grunge and Government: Let’s Fix this Broken Democracy.“

I’ve been in touch with Krist for a number of months, but our first meeting was last month in Seattle.  At 6 foot 5 inches tall, Krist is a very conspicuous figure.  He joined me in speaking to the Washington Forward Party, and agreed to join our efforts after meeting the local activists and volunteers in the state. 

I remember when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out in 1991 – it felt impactful immediately.  Nirvana and the Seattle grunge scene was the defining music for a generation.  It certainly shaped me, based on the oversized flannel shirts I wore for years. 

You would imagine that Krist might feel larger-than-life between his height and fame, but he’s extraordinarily down to earth.  He’s still making music in Seattle, most recently with musicians from Pearl Jam and Soundgarden as part of the supergroup 3rd Secret. 

“The only way you do anything is to become really active,” Krist says.  He also said, in another context: “I kind of discovered my voice for the first time, and the more I did it, the better it got.”

That’s a pretty good summary of what Forward is about.  Can we change the face of American politics?  Krist thinks we can – and he’s done it once already.   

To check out Forward Party click here.  More people join every day! 

Take Back Your Power

Are we holding ourselves back?  Deb Liu thinks that most of us are. 
 
Deb is the CEO of Ancestry, a multi-billion dollar genealogy company that enables people to identify and learn about their family trees.  She came to Ancestry as a senior executive and product manager at Facebook, PayPal and eBay.  She wrote a very compelling book:  “Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work” about her personal journey. 

“I was a very introverted child.  And I got bullied a lot growing up in South Carolina – I resented my parents for moving us there from Queens where I was born,” Deb relates.  “I thought that doing well at school was my path out of that town, so I resolved to be an excellent student.”  That kind of motivation fueled Deb’s ambition for years.  “I definitely had a chip on my shoulder.” 
 
Deb graduated with an engineering degree and was a top student, but found that her professional success required different skills and attributes.  “I thought it was about doing the work, which was the way I was brought up.  But a lot of it was about how you communicated the work you were doing and the relationships you built.  I learned that at the consulting firm I joined out of college.  Then, in business school I took a class that asked what I would do differently to achieve my goals.  I wrote down, ‘I will be an extrovert at work.’” 
 
This is quite a statement; most of us think of ourselves as having a certain nature, and that nature is not subject to change through a simple act of will.  Deb approached it differently.  “If I told you that you were going to Spain for work and you had to learn Spanish to succeed, wouldn’t you do it?  I approached being extroverted at work the same way, as something you need to develop in order to achieve your goals.” 
 
Deb recounts many painful experiences through work.  About beating herself up for expressing something imperfectly.  About being cut off by co-workers, only to have a sponsor intercede and tell others to make sure and give Deb and others the space to express themselves.  About reporting to a colleague that she didn’t get along with, whom she said, “I’d quit if I had to report to him,” only to be put in what you would consider professional marriage counseling because they had to make it work.  About becoming a product manager when fewer than 10% of others in that role were women and changing the rules as to what was required for the job.  “There was a technical requirement that didn’t necessarily help the organization actually perform well, but it was in place and no one questioned it even as it was clear that there were people, like me, who were excelling in the role without a computer science degree.”  And about being a female CEO of a multi-billion dollar firm and still being mistaken for an assistant periodically at conferences and other gatherings.  “For a while, you justify it and want to make other people comfortable.  But eventually you say, ‘you know what, it’s okay to make someone else a little uncomfortable.’”
 
I could relate to Deb’s account of being an introvert who had to push beyond it.  I too was a bookish child of immigrants.  I did the most extroverted thing that you can imagine: run for President of the United States.  I did it because I had a mission in mind that seemed much more important than my own discomfort.  Still, my team had to adjust to my nature; realizing, for example, that after a day of in-person events and interviews I would want some alone time to let my brain cool down. 
 
Deb is a Christian, and writes a lot about the idea of forgiveness.  But not just of our enemies or those who slight us - of ourselves.  “Forgiving yourself is often the hardest type of forgiveness,” she writes.  “Forgiveness creates its own power and soothes the pain of old wounds.  It allows us to break free of the hold the past has over us.”  I remember also berating myself when I was young; it was only after I was able to let things go that I started being a better friend and leader. 
 
Deb’s story is extraordinarily uplifting; she now has a thriving family with 3 children, a loving husband and a career that most wouldn’t have thought possible.  And still, she is finding new ways to make a difference.  “The ladder is infinite if you are willing to climb it, and there is never a top rung.”  All things are possible if you have a mission and can push beyond your comfort zone, and are working with the right people.
 
For my interview with Deb click here.  For a copy of her book click here.  For a better approach to our politics, check out Forward Party here. 

9 Ways Vivek Ramaswamy Can Beat Donald Trump

Ever since Vivek Ramaswamy declared his presidential run, people have been comparing him to me. And I get it. We’re both young (in political years in particular) with new ideas, tech-savvy, Asian and really, really good-looking.

I don’t agree with Vivek on a lot of things. I also don’t know him and haven’t spoken to him. But I vastly prefer him to, let’s say, the big orange frontrunner in the Republican field.

Continue reading on Politico >>

The Debt Limit and 2024

Hello, I hope you had a great weekend!  It definitely feels like Summer is about to begin. 
 
The news has been dominated by the return of Trump to cable news and the debt ceiling negotiations.  The debt limit has all the makings of an obvious impending crisis that takes everyone by surprise.  You think it will get hammered out like last time, only it might not.  One person I spoke to in DC said, “Those who have confidence that the debt limit increase will work itself out aren’t seeing what I’m seeing.”  He puts the odds of a hard default at 25%. 

This week on the podcast I interview Dave Weigel, veteran political reporter for Semafor who I met while he was at the Washington Post.  “The White House think that people will blame the Republicans if there’s a crash.  But Republicans figure they will blame the President.”  And Trump just called for a default if Dems don’t cave. It would be very hard for McCarthy and the Republicans to capitulate to a clean debt ceiling increase, so the question is what gets included in a compromise.
 
One reason why the possibility of default is higher is that both sides can hand wave a little bit on when the drop dead date is.  Janet Yellen said the US could start defaulting as soon as June 1, but both sides and the press believe that the Treasury could shift some money around and continue to pay bills after that – other orgs forecast that the US might make it to July or August.  It’s that kind of fuzziness that could lead to going past the deadline and cause markets to shudder.  I’m glad that both sides seem to be taking the June 1 deadline seriously; the next two weeks will be enormous to avoid a completely unnecessary crisis that is born of the fact that the two parties are so polarized and unable to perform even basic tasks. 
 
Dave and I also discuss the 2024 presidential field at length.  We have both heard that there’s still some doubt as to whether Joe Biden actually stands next November; he may back out before the convention in August and the DNC could put together a ticket.  But according to Dave, “There is no way they bypass Kamala.  She would be at the top of the ticket, perhaps with a male governor to balance her out.”  I am incredulous that the Dems would have confidence that Kamala would win the general given her shaky polling and performance in the Democratic primary and as Veep.  I’ve heard concerns from a number of plugged-in people.  Still, Dave’s take makes sense particularly given the current DNC leadership.  He thinks there is still time to turn around public perception of Kamala (which I, personally, disagree with).  Barring this kind of turn, it’s Joe Biden, as the DNC isn’t even bothering to hold debates. 
 
For the Republicans, we both think it’s Trump in the pole position.  The CNN Townhall almost certainly helped him stay above his rivals.  There are another 4 or 5 Republican candidates who are set to announce, which will make consolidation more difficult.  The biggest threat to him remains Ron DeSantis, whose campaign will be announced imminently.  Will DeSantis the candidate perform much better than DeSantis the candidate-in-waiting?  When I asked Dave, he was already projecting Trump into the general.  Not a great sign for those who want another GOP candidate to emerge.  There’s not much time, as the first GOP debates are in August. 
 
A healthy political system wouldn’t give us a rematch between Biden and Trump, who will be a combined 160 years old in 2024.  But a healthy political system wouldn’t have us facing a possible debt default either.  Avoiding a self-imposed crisis is the best we can hope for nowadays, and even that hope might not last forever. 
 
For my interview with Dave Weigel, click here.  To build a better politics, check out Forward Party here.  

The Arrival of AI

Hello, I hope that you had a good weekend!  I spent it in Seattle where I spoke at a festival and had a public Forward Party event, which was a lot of fun. 

The Forward Party got its first mayor in Newberry, Florida, where the sitting mayor, Jordan Marlowe decided to join Forward.  “I have a party now that that is judging my leadership based on the ability to get things done and to compromise and work with other people.”  It’s what a lot of people want. 

Last week, a public tech company, Chegg, reported disappointing results.  The CEO said that students that use their services had started using ChatGPT.  The stock crashed by 50% in response, losing about $1 billion in value overnight. 

The same week IBM announced that it would use AI to replace jobs that are readily automatable, estimating that 7,800 new hires wouldn’t be. 
 
Dropbox just cut 500 jobs, 16% of staff, and cited AI as a reason why. 
 
These are public occurrences; there are many similar things happening behind the scenes that aren’t announced.  AI is changing the way that we work and learn.  The Chegg phenomenon is telling; already thousands of students around the country have turned to AI to inform them about various subjects instead of textbooks and online study tools.  People are adopting these new tools quickly.  The same will happen in other fields.  

One of the foremost authorities on the impact of AI is Martin Ford, whom I interview on the podcast this week.  His bestselling book Rise of the Robots influenced me a great deal.  Martin writes, “As artificial intelligence continues to advance, it has the potential to upend both the job market and the overall economy to a degree that is likely unprecedented.”  Martin compares AI to electricity in its transformative impact.  “All of this points to increasing inequality and potentially dehumanizing conditions for a growing fraction of our workforce.” 
 
I talked to a civil rights leader last week who was discouraged.  “Things are changing so fast and people can’t keep up.  It’s worse in the communities like mine that people often ignore anyway.” 
 
Our being behind the curve in terms of our government’s ability to understand and adapt to new technologies is quickly going from inconvenient to disastrous.  I ran for President in part to speed us up.    
 
For my interview with Martin click here.  To help speed up our political system with Forward click here – our first mayor is just the beginning.  

The Land of Opportunity

May is AAPI Heritage month!  It’s a time to gather and learn about the role that Asian Americans have played in our nation’s history, and also reflect on the present and future.  

I was in Utah campaigning last Fall, and met with a group of Chinese Americans I was rallying for Evan McMullin who was running for US Senate.  It turns out that many of the Chinese Americans in Utah descended from railroad workers in the nineteenth century that literally built the tracks that connected one end of this country to the other.  

My family arrived much more recently, in the 1960s as students from Taiwan at UC Berkeley.  My parents moved East, and I was born in Schenectady, New York in 1975.  I showed my children my childhood home this summer to give them a sense of how I grew up - I don’t think it registered, but maybe it will when they’re older.  

As the first generation born in this country, I was raised with a deep love of America but also experienced a struggle to belong or fit in.  I spent much of my childhood trying to prove my toughness because that seemed necessary to avoid being bullied or picked on.  I’d skipped a grade so I was generally smaller than my peers until high school.  

AAPI Heritage Month encompasses a very wide range of experiences.  We are an extraordinarily diverse community - more than any other in some quantitative respects.  Yet I do think there are some common threads that most of us can relate to.  

Many of our families came here for better opportunities.  My parents came to the US to create a path for my brother and me.  It worked.  I’ve had the kind of life and career they could only have dreamt of when they arrived here 60 years ago as students.  Beyond their dreams actually - they were not excited about my presidential run when I told them of my plans in 2017.  Their reaction was one of deep concern.  

Months later, when I was coming off of one of the presidential debates, I was told that my father attended a watch party in Taiwan.  He told the gathered crowd, “That is my son!” and the crowd cheered for him and bought him drinks the rest of the night.  When I heard that story, it pumped me up.  We had come a long way.  

It reminded me a bit of meeting an Asian American family in New Hampshire that worked at a restaurant.  They brought their son to take a picture with me.  They said to me, “Thank you.  We didn’t know we were allowed to run for President.”  

Asian Americans are as American as anyone else, yet we have somehow internalized that certain things are not for us.  That’s what I’d like to change.  Change not just for our sakes, but for the country’s.  

The US is more polarized than ever, and so much of American life has devolved into an ideological struggle. Hatred is on the rise between different groups, and Asians are not exempt. Most Americans don’t want this, but they don’t see a way out.  In my view, this land that our families came to for a better life, that has given so many of us so much, now needs us.  It needs our spirit of service and love of country in a way that it perhaps has never needed it before.  It needs our leadership to create a new set of examples.  

AAPI Heritage Month is about reckoning with our history and contributions in this country, so that we can both appreciate our past but also shape the nation’s future.  Let that be the message: nothing is beyond us.  We are Americans - we build in countless ways to strengthen the fabric of the U.S.  This is our country, our children’s country, and we will act and lead in a way that will leave it to the next generation still the land of opportunity that our families came so far to find.  

Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump ‘24

Joe declared his re-election bid last week.  It was, like many things of late, both inevitable and yet somehow surprising when it happened. 

It had been expected that Joe would run for months.  He has a low-ish approval rating – 43% or so – and will be 82 at the end of 2024.  A majority of Democrats in polls say they didn’t want him to run again.  Yet here he is, announcing in a video that felt a bit rushed. 

(It was rushed by the way – there’s a technicality that you have to announce within 15 days of spending $5,000 or more, so as soon as they brought the cameras they were under the gun to announce).   

His challengers in the Democratic Primary so far are Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy Jr.  The DNC has yet to schedule any primary debates, and I expect them not to do so in the name of ‘party unity;’ the media will play along with nary a peep.  If a candidate runs but no one covers the race, how can they contend or compete? 
 
This could change if a major establishment figure – e.g. Governor Newsom – decided to run against Joe in the primary.  But that’s not going to happen.  Instead, these major contenders will prepare campaigns-in-waiting on the chance that Joe Biden decides not to run sometime this year or next.  There’s some thinking that Joe is announcing in part because he refuses to be a lame duck that everyone ignores or tramples on, but he could still have second thoughts or a medical issue before Election Day.  The Democratic convention in 2024 is August 19th – 22nd in Chicago.  It’s conceivable that the DNC could run some abbreviated process leading up to that Convention if Joe were to decide to back out early next year. 
 
On the other side, Trump is gathering a sense of dominance with the deflation of the Ron DeSantis bubble.  He has started musing about skipping the Republican primary debates, the first of which is scheduled for this August in Milwaukee, as he has built a 20 pt. lead in polling over DeSantis with Nikki Haley and Mike Pence stuck in the low single digits.  Tim Scott should announce soon – he strikes me as the candidate with the highest upside to rival Trump.  Chris Christie will enter in May as a critic and foil.  There will be others. 
 
But the energy and base remain with Trump.  He has dominated headlines recently with the grand jury indictment in New York galvanizing Republicans in his defense.  Like him or not, he’s a star and the Republican machinery is having trouble manufacturing a new one.  There isn’t unlimited time to do so. 
 
The Biden vs. Trump rematch that no one wants is becoming more and more likely, even inevitable.  The two major leading candidates having a combined age of 160 in 2024 is a clear sign of how sclerotic and dysfunctional our political system has become.  How in a country of 330 million are these to be our two choices? 
 
Tens of millions of Americans are wondering the same thing. The way to change it is through changing the two-party system and our current election mechanics.  I talked to a public figure – whom I think would make a fine President – and he said, “I’d run if our political system allowed me to do so without breaking things.” 
 
Want better choices?  Let’s change the system.  It’s the only way. 
 
To see how to change the system, join Forward today.  

Scott Santens and UBI

Hello, I hope you had a great weekend!  I spent it in SF and LA campaigning for our new Forward affiliate in California, the Common Sense Party. 
 
Back in 2015, I first learned about Universal Basic Income when I read “Rise of the Robots” by Martin Ford, “The Second Machine Age” by Eryk Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and “Raising the Floor” by Andy Stern.  Each of these books was concerned that automation was going to displace various jobs and that we would need a new way to keep people functional and distribute buying power. 

When I set out to learn more, I met Scott Santens, whom I interview on the podcast this week.  Scott is Mr. Universal Basic Income – so much so that he crowdsourced a basic income for himself back in 2013 and has been championing it ever since. No one has compiled more data on UBI than Scott, who also moderates the UBI reddit community.  It was Scott who came up with the line, “It’s not left or right, it’s forward” back in 2017 in reference to UBI. 
 
Now, in Scott’s view, UBI is taking center stage again because of AI.  “People weren’t really focused on the automation argument until this past November, when ChatGPT-3 came online. Now, all sorts of new people are saying we should look at it,” Scott says. “People see that AI is actually here and may impact them and their job.” 
 
I ran for President on Universal Basic Income in 2020.  At the time, it seemed far out, though it became increasingly mainstream once COVID hit.  I got hundreds of calls about the possibility of relief checks that Spring as we entered lockdown.  That Spring I started a non-profit - Humanity Forward - that lobbied for relief checks to put money into people’s hands.  Scott is an advisor to Humanity Forward, which continues to do work I’m incredibly proud of. 
 
One thing Scott and I discuss is the confusion around inflation; people often say, “Oh the stimulus checks caused inflation.”  I have to point out to them, “Well, the government issued $5 trillion in stimulus, which is about $16,000 per person.  Do you remember the checks being that big?  Most people got around $2,000.  The vast majority of the money went into the financial system, state and local governments, corporate balance sheets and other programs.” 
 
Perhaps the most effective thing the government did during COVID was pass the enhanced child tax credit, which brought 2 million children out of poverty, improved their nutrition and ability to learn, and was lauded by 130 economists as the most effective anti-poverty policy in generations.  It ended in 2022, dashing those children and families back into deprivation.  Humanity Forward continues to make the case for reviving the enhanced child tax credit to this day. 
 
By the end of 2020, I concluded that our political system right now is less and less oriented toward intelligent policy because it is getting bogged down in polarization and ideology.  I started Forward to try and realign the incentives for our elected representatives to do the right thing.  It’s been a heady 18 months or so, as we merged with 2 other organizations and hired a new CEO; we are having our first national summit in June with leaders from all over the country. 
 
During the same period, Scott moved to DC, where Humanity Forward is based, to continue to make the case for UBI.  “It’s entering the endgame, and I want to be here when it’s signed into law.” Scott says.  “It may take a while or it may happen sooner than we think.  I think a window will re-open soon.” 
 
I asked Scott about his level of optimism or pessimism.  “At this point, we’re a bit too late.  I used to think we could get UBI in place before AI came and started taking jobs.  Now, AI is here, and we need UBI as fast as possible.” 
 
To help Scott and Humanity Forward make the case against poverty, click here.  To help Forward fix our political system so that it cares about people click here – the events in California this weekend were phenomenal.