What if Everyone Had a Universal Basic Income?

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FEATURING CONRAD SHAW & CORINE OLARTE-VANDERVOORT - What if everyone had a guaranteed basic income that covered their cost of living, without conditions, without means testing, without question? That’s the question an ambitious documentary called Bootstraps set out to answer over nearly a decade. Twenty individuals from all walks of life were given a basic income of $1000 a month over several years. 

Sonali Kolhatkar interviewed the filmmakers Deia Schlossberg and Conrad Shaw at The People’s Summit in Chicago in 2017.

At the 2025 Netroots Nation conference, Kolhatkar reconnected with Shaw and one of the subjects of the documentary, Corine Olarte-VanderVoort, to find out how the experiment went and what the next steps are for the work of a Universal Basic Income. 

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Conrad, we connected at Netroots and remembered that we had spoken at the People’s Summit about your documentary Bootstraps. First, remind our audience about Bootstraps and the idea that it was important to find out what would happen if people had a basic source of income that they knew they could rely on. 

Conrad Shaw: Yeah, what we found—and we were coming from filmmaking space—is that at the heart of the questions that people have about basic income,  once you get beyond sort of the wonky economics questions, it always boils down to can we really trust people? There're these human nature questions, human behavioral questions and that's what documentary is really equipped to explore. 

So, we decided instead of bringing out experts and talking heads that the best experts to look to with basic income would be those actually living and experiencing it. 

So, we put together a basic income program with people from all over the country receiving a basic income for a couple of years. So just so that we could do a sort of fly on the wall, verite coverage of it, just find out like what actually, what makes people tick and like how does it affect people's lives.