Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary of a CEO, asked his guest a direct question: is there a world where people live on UBI, universal basic income, a regular payment given to everyone with no conditions attached?
"I hope not. That would be cancer," said Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and economist with a Harvard PhD who previously served as managing director of Thiel Capital. In place of a basic income, Weinstein offered a proposal of his own: give workers a property right in their country's labor market, and make anyone who wants to add labor to that market, including AI, buy a license from them. The episode was published on October 12, 2026.
Why he thinks this time is different
Weinstein said he was around when UBI "got currency." He recalled Sam Altman coming over to his house to talk about basic income "before he was Sam Altman that we know now," and said Altman was already running experiments. Later, Weinstein said, he got a courtesy call in which Altman told him, "Eric, this is just coming faster than anyone imagines." Despite Altman's bad press, Weinstein said, he has "done a better job of maneuvering the AI than just about anyone," except perhaps Dario Amodei, and "Sam always cared."
Weinstein did not say which experiments he meant. For context, one large test of unconditional cash, run by the research group OpenResearch, enrolled 3,000 low-income adults aged 21 to 40 in Illinois and Texas. From November 2020 to October 2023, 1,000 of them received $1,000 a month and 2,000 controls received $50 a month. Recipients spent more on food, housing and transportation, and worked 1.3 fewer hours a week than the control group. Employment rose in both groups, from 58% to 72% among recipients and from 59% to 74% among controls. Physical-health measures showed no significant improvement, and the researchers describe cash as one part of support alongside resources such as healthcare and childcare.
Weinstein's objection was not about what such payments do to people's work habits. It was about the scale of the shift. Economists laugh, he said, when anyone claims "this time it's different," because people said it about the computer and the internet. "No, no. This time it's different," he insisted. In his account, AI is "the first innovation that threatened the entire stack of highly trained activities all at once." Past technologies pushed people up into higher-value work. Now, he said, "repetitive activity is in the crosshairs": anything a person does repetitively, AI will do better, leaving humans only the truly innovative work.
That argument echoes a 2016 essay Weinstein wrote for Edge, "Anthropic Capitalism And The New Gimmick Economy." There he floated, as a thought experiment, the possibility that market capitalism worked well under historically lucky conditions rather than universal guarantees, and that automation might reach skilled, repetitive work across professions faster than education could produce people for the one-off inventive work that remains.
A saleable right to the labor market
Weinstein's remedy starts from the economist Ronald Coase, whom he called maybe the smartest economist of the 20th century, and whose theorem he described as the most surprising discovery of that century. His own application of it: "Access to our labor market should be made into a saleable property right."
When Bartlett asked what that meant in simple terms, Weinstein set AI aside and used immigration. Suppose Bartlett is an employer who wants to hire from abroad. More workers push out the supply of labor, and since a wage is set where supply meets demand, the existing workers' wages fall unless demand rises too. Weinstein said he would accept that, on one condition. Picture him as the only American taxi driver in New York City, and the employer wants to bring in drivers from Gambia and Uzbekistan. "I say, okay, I'll license you," he said. The employer buys the right to import those workers from him. "My wage income will go down. My licensing income will go up. And my blended income will increase. And your blended income will increase." That, he said, is "the proper way to do immigration."
Bartlett checked that he understood: the worker would have the right to approve the employer bringing people in? Yes, Weinstein said, and switched to a doctor who has trained and invested in a career. If an employer says he must hire the best and brightest and wants to recruit doctors from a hospital in Thailand, the American doctor should say, in effect, knock yourself out, but first ask what the right is worth. This, Weinstein argued, is "how everybody in the U.S. gets a cut," and why the country is "not looking at Brazilian inequality levels yet": Americans get "first access to the world's richest labor market."
Bartlett suggested that came from Weinstein's PhD. "Because I was born here," Weinstein replied, adding that this is why US citizenship or permanent residency is valuable. When Bartlett asked whether, if he put Weinstein out of work, Weinstein would still get his money, Weinstein pushed back: "You're not going to put me out of work. I'm just going to have my income go down." He said the logic applies equally to Britain, France or India.
In his view, employers present limits on hiring from abroad as red tape to be cut so they can go after the best people, which he called "total nonsense." He described the real stakes with two diagrams named after economists, the Harberger triangle and the Borjas rectangle. In his telling, the triangle is "a tiny little inefficiency" that sits on top of a much larger structure, the rectangle, and "nobody cares" about the triangle. What employers want is the rectangle: "Everybody's salivating over labor's share of the labor market," he said, meaning the portion of income that goes to workers. "How do I screw over labor is the dream of every CEO of a large company."
Weinstein did not explain how the price of such a license would be set, who would negotiate it, or how payments would be divided among workers.
AI as "just another supplier of labor"
Then came the step to AI. "In this model, AI becomes just another supplier of labor," Weinstein said. "The workers license that. Right now, what we have is just out-and-out theft."
The theft, he said, is that the corpus of "all of human achievement" has been tokenized. AI language models learn by breaking text into small units called tokens, and Weinstein used the word to describe how human work and speech become material for these systems. He used the interview itself as an example. By the time viewers watch it on YouTube, he said, he and Bartlett have long since gone home; what remains are "shreds of ourselves" in persistent storage. Anyone can generate YouTube's automatic transcript and run a frequency analysis: how often Weinstein uses what he called the double copula, a grammatical quirk in his speech, or how often Bartlett says his own pet phrases. Earlier he had made the same point another way: ask an AI to answer a question the way Bartlett would, and "it knows you." People who have become important parts of AI, he said, are being "rigged like meat puppets" and "need to be compensated." Was this voluntary? "No. No, completely non-consensually."
Bartlett challenged him: was it really non-consensual if Weinstein knew all this and still came to sit in the studio to be tokenized? Weinstein answered with a question of his own: had Bartlett ever tried getting through a day without signing something he did not want to sign? Anyone with a mortgage, he said, has not read the "giant stack of paper." People are constantly forced to pretend they agreed voluntarily, just as judges say ignorance of the law is no excuse, though he doubted they would pass a spot quiz on the U.S. code.
The reason AI's builders are getting so rich, Weinstein argued, is that "this is an uncompensated theft. We don't know how to police it."
Against collectivism, for the "mesh"
Weinstein was emphatic that he did not want payment "in some Bernie Sanders socialist scheme." He named Sanders and "my friend Andrew Yang" as advocates of paying everyone a little share. "Socialism is spiritual and mental poison," he said, adding that his objection was not about money: "I just can't stand collectivism. I love individuality." He defended the idea of the lone genius, citing Isaac Newton and Aristotle, and rejected the claim that there should be no billionaires. Billionaires, he said, mostly "allocate" their money rather than consume it, though he granted that the rich do consume opulently.
What he wanted to protect is what he called "this beautiful mesh that provides us freedom": the web of voluntary choices that govern daily life. He pointed to the studio around him, from the green-room snacks to the equipment and the set, and said all of it was "a sum of choices." The mesh gives people purpose and signals about whether they are doing a good or bad job. It is not perfect, he said; he recalled stretches when he was doing great work and getting no reward, and others when the reverse was true. "It's not a great morality play the way capitalists always portray it. But it is freedom, and it's sort of on average pretty good."
AI, he warned, is "normalizing theft" and "is going to destroy the labor market."
Capital or labor?
Weinstein's deepest worry concerned the textbook model of production, in which output comes from capital, written K, and labor, written L. In the interview, the microphones, lighting and video storage are capital; the two men sitting down are labor. AI fits neither. "Is it capital? Sure looks like labor to me. Is it labor? It's not a human." Because of that, he said, "we're going to break capitalism, and we're going to break freedom. We're going to break markets."
He returned to his Anthropic Capitalism essay to argue that the old contest of capitalism versus communism was the wrong frame. The two, he said, are more like Thelma and Louise, and "Thelma hit the ground first does not mean that Louise won." Communism blew up first, capitalism "shortly thereafter." If Karl Marx and Adam Smith were alive today, he said, they would be debating what comes next.
No one in authority is doing that, Weinstein said: not academic, business or political leaders. "My phone is not ringing." He cited a White House luncheon on the future of superintelligence. He did not think physicists, mathematicians, biologists, composers or writers were there. "It was just like wall-to-wall national interest in business types."