We're up against obscene wealth and influence in the media and it's hard out there for independent platforms trying to do things differently.

So if you can, please consider donating one hour of your wage per month or whatever you can afford so that we can bring you even more of the kinds of podcasts, videos and political analysis that you won't find anywhere else.

Just go to Navara.media, forward slash support to set up a regular donation of any size. We couldn't do it without you. So thank you.

Everybody has to have a job. Everybody has to work. You have to work.

If you don't work, you don't get a wage. You don't get a wage. You can't buy food. You can't get housing. You can't do the things that you want to do.

But what if you didn't? That's the core idea behind a universal basic income, a UBI. A policy, a proposal that's captured the imagination over the last decade has been put forward by a number of people.

And it seeks to decouple a wage from work saying that everybody, regardless of who they are and what they do, should receive a certain fixed payment every week.

Now, this is a hugely challenging proposition for many people because work gets the very heart of our civilization. We identify with our jobs.

We think that if somebody doesn't work or if they don't work hard enough that they're morally faulty, that they're bad people.

We have a discourse in politics around scrounges, strivers and skivers.

So why on earth, politically, would you want to give people money for doing absolutely nothing? That's an interesting question.

And that's why I'm interviewing today's guest, Welstrong. He's the founder of a think tank autonomy.

And one of the major policy areas they look at is a universal basic income and what it can do.

Welstrong, welcome to Downstreet. Thanks for having me.

So for people who aren't aware of who you are, what your work is, which is obviously immensely important.

Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking to you here on Novara Media.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

So I'm the director of research at autonomy and we're not for profit think tank. That's based across the UK, but we're, you know, we have an office in London.

We focus on the future of work. So that's anything from the future of care work, the future of automation.

Four day weeks, anything around kind of green jobs, et cetera, et cetera.

But we also kind of take work in a more holistic sense. So thinking about things like welfare and kind of things like climate and how that's going to,

there's kind of climate kind of impacts are going to be kind of dovetailing with some of the crisis of work that we identify today.

...