Loading summary
Transcript200 lines
- [00:00]
Barry Ritholtz
This message is brought to you by Apple Card It's a great time to apply for an Apple Card. You'll love earning unlimited daily cash on every Purchase. That includes 3% daily cash when you buy the latest iPhone, AirPods and Apple. Watch at Apple through this special referral offer. When you get a new Apple Card, you can earn bonus daily cash. To qualify, apply at Apple Co getdailycash Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch offer may not be available elsewhere. Terms and limitations apply.
- [00:38]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors, llc SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com disclosures hey,
- [01:39]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
this is US Olympic gold medalist Tara
- [01:41]
Barry Ritholtz
Davis Woodhull and I'm US Paralympic gold medalist Hunter Woodhull.
- [01:45]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
As athletes, our lives are about having
- [01:46]
Hillary Allen
a clear path and a team that you can absolutely trust.
- [01:50]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
So when it came to getting the
- [01:51]
Hillary Allen
best mortgage, we chose PennyMac.
- [01:53]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
PennyMac is proud to be the official mortgage provider of Team USA and you
- [01:57]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
learn more at pennymac.com PennyMac Loan Services, LLC equal housing lender NMLS ID 35953 licensed by the Department of Innovation under the California Residential Mortgage Lending Act. Conditions and restrictions may apply.
- [02:11]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News this is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.
- [02:25]
Barry Ritholtz
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Hillary Allen. She is a professor at the American University Washington College of Law in D.C. where she specializes in financial regulation, banking law, securities regulation, and technology law. She published a book, Fintech Dystopia, A Summer Beach Read About How Silicon Valley Is Ruining Things, covering the intersection of finance, technology, law, regulation, and politics. It's a perfect subject for us to talk about. Hillary Allen, welcome to Bloomberg.
- [03:08]
Hillary Allen
Thank you so much for having me.
- [03:10]
Barry Ritholtz
So, fascinating conversation, Fascinating topic that you write about. Before we jump into that, let's spend a few minutes going over your background. You get a bachelor's in laws from the University of Sydney in Australia, a Master of Laws in securities and Financial Regulation Law from Georgetown here in the States, and you graduated first in your class there. What was the original career plan? Was it simply, I'm going to go be a lawyer. What were you thinking?
- [03:41]
Hillary Allen
The original career plan was, I'm just going to be a lawyer. And then I loved law school and I practiced for seven years and discovered there wasn't so much law always in the practice of law. And I'm a nerd and I missed it. And so the drive was to go back to Georgetown, get my master's, do some academic writing, and then launch a career as a professor where I could really sort of think slowly about the law.
- [04:05]
Barry Ritholtz
And you practiced. You were in London, you were in Sydney, Shearman and Sterling here in New York. Tell us a little bit about the sort of legal work you were doing when you were a practicing attorney.
- [04:15]
Hillary Allen
So basically there's sort of two broad categories of the work I did. I did transactional work, banking transactional, typically acting for banks in leveraged buyouts. But the work I think I enjoyed more was the regulatory compliance advisory. So there was more law in that, especially when you had new financial laws being handed down in Australia and changes in the US With Dodd Frank and sort of trying to figure out how to comply with those new rules.
- [04:43]
Barry Ritholtz
So how do you go from practicing bank transactions and some regulatory law to ultimately working with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? Tell us a little bit about your experiences there.
- [04:56]
Hillary Allen
So that was a series of fortunate events. While I was doing my master's at Georgetown, I had a professor who was tapped to be on the staff of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. And he pulled me in to work with them two days a week. And we were investigating the causes of the 2008 financial crisis to put together the report that came out, which really was sort of.
- [05:19]
Barry Ritholtz
It's a nice thick book that they published.
- [05:21]
Hillary Allen
It's a really thick book with a really thick inde. The idea was to tell the story, and that's really sort of stuck with me throughout my career. The importance of being able to explain complex things and how they knit together to cause things.
- [05:35]
Barry Ritholtz
So working with the fcic, how did that affect how you looked at regulation in general? But more specifically, the government's response to technology, new financial products, the regulatory world in general.
- [05:53]
Hillary Allen
So the gift that I got from working with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is sort of understanding that there are a lot of things that come together and you need to really look very broadly to understand systemic changes. Another gift that it gave me was, I think, a healthy skepticism of innovation rhetoric. Right. Because if you think back to 2008 and what caused it, there were all these stories about, well, these new financial products, these complex new derivatives, we don't need to regulate them, they're innovation sophisticated parties involved. We don't want to tamp down on innovative potential. And so that skepticism has been a helpful skill set. As I've been navigating the sort of post 2008 financial world where you have the innovation rhetoric from Silicon Valley infiltrating into financial services, you raise a really
- [06:44]
Barry Ritholtz
interesting issue that I have to ask about. So how much of what we see as regulation is either an adherence to an ideology that sometimes says regulation is good and are guardrails on capitalism, and other ideology says regulation is expensive and anti innovative and reduces job creation. It seems like regardless of the facts on the ground, each side has their belief system. How do you contextualize that?
- [07:22]
Hillary Allen
Well, I mean, I think. I don't think there were too many people in the depths of the 2008 crisis who were saying there's too much regulation. Right. I think it's a function of where you are in a particular time. I think people's memories fade really quickly. And as soon as regulation has solved the problems it was intended to solve, or the crisis that spurred the regulation has dissipated, people quickly forget why that regulation is there in place. And then it becomes much easier to see it as something that is just a hindrance, something that is just expensive, that doesn't have a role to play. But I think what we're actually seeing right at this moment is the erosion of the securities laws that really have stood investors in good stead since the 1930s. Not to say they're perfect, but the general sort of investor protection regime that the securities and Exchange Commission has always implemented has really encouraged trust in the US Stock market and it sort of made it the envy of the world. And people wanted to list here, that's really getting peeled back right now. And so I think, you know, it'll be pretty soon a moment where we realize why we had all that regulation and we'll miss it.
- [08:41]
Barry Ritholtz
So. So heading into the financial crisis, I recall looking at some of what I called radical deregulation prior, and this isn't means the sole cause of the financial crisis. Lots of factors led to this. But you had the Commodities Futures Modernization act, which allowed what was essentially an insurance product to be issued without any insurance reserves. Seems kind of risky. And then you had the repeal of Glass Steagall that kept depository banks separate from speculative Wall street banks. Probably didn't cause the crisis, but certainly allowed it to get much bigger at the very least. And yet there didn't seem to be any desire after the crisis, hey, maybe we should put these things back into place. Maybe we should repeal what was added and restore what was repealed. Nobody want. They want to go a totally different direction.
- [09:42]
Hillary Allen
Well, I think, again, this is a story of political economy. And there are still a lot of people who are mad at the Obama administration for prioritizing healthcare over financial reform because basically they had one shot at doing something big. And if they had, and I'm not weighing in to say that this was the right or the wrong move, but if they had gone right out of the gates with financial reform, I think we would have seen more of the bigger structural things that you're talking about. So, you know, in that immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis, you had Sandy Weil, who had been the head of Citigroup and had sort of engineered the end of the Glass steag legislation. And from this is maybe apocryphal, but apparently he had a deal toy that said Shatterer of Glass Steagall that he kept on his desk. And again, this may be apocryphal, but I heard that he basically sort of had a conversion after 2008, said, Ooh, yeah, probably shouldn't have done that.
- [10:41]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, a lot of people did. Alan Greenspan famously said, I incorrectly assume people's concern over their own reputation would have prevented some of the excesses we've seen. I'm paraphrasing, but that was pretty close to what he said.
- [10:55]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, he said, the world sort of didn't work the way I thought it did. And I think, you know, had they gone straight out of the gates with financial reform, you might have seen some of that structural reform. But by the time they got around to it, you know, Dodd Frank wasn't passed to 2010. You know, then. Then the political economy calculus had shifted. The industry was in more of a position to sort of argue for weaker rules and fewer structural changes.
- [11:20]
Barry Ritholtz
It's amazing how rap memories fade and people just quickly, oh, no, that was then, now it's new. You've worked inside the global financial system as well as studying it from the outside. How did being part of the FCIC affect how you perceive technology, new financial products, regulation, and deregulation? How did that affect your perspective?
- [11:47]
Hillary Allen
You know, I didn't think a ton about technology at that time. That's sort of been a later addition to the work that I do. But the broader themes of financial innovation, regulation, deregulation, you know, I see the value in financial stability regulation in particular. So financial stability regulation are the rules that are supposed to prevent financial crises. And they work often sort of hand in hand with investor protection regulations, but they also aim to do something differently. And part of the challenge when you're trying to prevent a financial crisis is this silo mentality where people just think about their own little piece of the world, and, okay, we can deregulate our little piece and we won't think about the flow on consequences and what incentives it'll create, et cetera. And so my real takeaway was always to have the most holistic perspective possible, to break down that silo mentality. And later in my career, that meant learning about the new technologies that are sort of infiltrating the financial system.
- [12:51]
Barry Ritholtz
So I want to talk about technology and I want to talk about fintech dystopia, but there is a quote from within that that applies directly to what you're describing with stability, which was. It's the economic precarity. Stupid. Paraphrasing James Carville. Tell us a little bit about the economic precarity.
- [13:13]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, So I think a mistake that we have made collectively in recent years is to say, well, look, the economy's doing well, everything's fine. And that really doesn't mesh with many people's experience of the economy. So it used to be, well, probably not always the case, but closer to the case in the Clinton years where there was less economic inequality than there is now that you could sort of say a rising tide lifts all boats. But now what we're seeing is over half of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, even in a good economy. Right. And so in that kind of circumstance, the financial systems and the economy aren't working for everybody. And so I think when we think about what we're trying to achieve with our financial system, it should be that we are trying to find a solution to this economic precarity. And also that begs the question of whether the financial system and investing is actually the way to get there. And maybe we need broader public policies to address that economic precarity so that no one, or at least not half of the population are just scraping by.
- [14:27]
Barry Ritholtz
So we just passed a new set of laws that include thousand dollar accounts for newborns. Isn't that going to solve financial inequality? These kids, by the time they're 30, they'll be worth million.
- [14:44]
Hillary Allen
You might need to offset against the people losing their health insurance subsidies. I don't think that $1,000 is going to go very far.
- [14:51]
Barry Ritholtz
And what's fascinating is watching just a parade of billionaires come out and no, no, we need to supplement that thousand dollars. So first it was Michael Dell and then it was Ray Dalio. I don't know who else is going to step forward, but it appears, hey, we're not really paying a whole lot in taxes. We might as well throw some money at some, some babies. That seems to be the philosophy.
- [15:14]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, I mean, I don't love philanthropy in that sense. Supplementing democratically sort of elected policies, you know, it gives a lot of sort of discretion and power to people as to how they want to distribute their largess. And to some degree that's fine, but again, when we have a society where half of the population is barely scraping by, I don't think their livability should be predicated on the whims of billionaire largesse.
- [15:43]
Barry Ritholtz
Fair enough. You talked about technological innovation in your book. You argue that that is financial technology. Innovation is driven largely by legal design rather than technical brilliance. Explain that a little bit. What is it about Fintech that seems to be working? The perspective from an attorney rather than an engineer.
- [16:10]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, so this was something that, as I said, I came to a little later in my career. I think earlier in my career when I first started looking at Fintech, I generally accepted the party line, this technology is revolutionary. This technology is making things more efficient. This technology is fixing things. Then I realized that the people who were saying that had something to sell. And I probably should learn a little more about the technology because if you want to work on financial regulatory policy now, you need to understand the extent to which the technology actually lives up to what it's claimed it can do. And so sort of my first sort of foray into this was I've looked really in detail at Blockchain, which is truly, frankly a terrible technology. It's a clunky database and it's not something you would ever choose for any kind of financial market infrastructure, but for the fact that, that it's been very easy to convince regulators not to regulate it. And so the value add that comes from crypto has never been blockchain technology. As a technology, it's been whipping up stories about that technology that have justified avoiding regulation. And we see it in other instances as well. There are fintech lending that is replicating some of the predatory payday lending that we've seen before.
- [17:31]
Barry Ritholtz
The buy now, pay later sort of financing or.
- [17:34]
Hillary Allen
Well, payday loans have been around a lot longer than that. This is sort of a sort of. It's like a $400 loan that you get to bridge you over till your next payday. And you know, there's been a lot of predation in that market and some states had banned those, those products.
- [17:52]
Barry Ritholtz
Essentially you think 29% interest is not fair. You have a problem with that? We're just trying to make a profit here.
- [17:59]
Hillary Allen
Some of these interest rates are 300% get out.
- [18:03]
Barry Ritholtz
That's insane. And what does New York turned out at? Like 19%, something like that?
- [18:07]
Hillary Allen
I don't know about New York.
- [18:08]
Barry Ritholtz
Yeah, but normally anything, you know, mid double digits is thought of as usurious. 300% is just next level.
- [18:17]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, I mean it's not set as an interest rate per se, they're fees. But once you actually convert that into a per annum, they can be in the hundreds of percentages. And so that has always been a problem. And we've had states act and then we've had new fintech lenders saying, well actually we're different from payday lenders because we use AI to screen our borrowers. And so you should treat us differently. And yet they're charging interest rates that are equivalent to what payday lenders do. And then you mentioned buy now, pay later. Again they say, well, we're not even extending loans. This isn't a loan at all. So we shouldn't have to comply with the laws around lending around, disclosure around that kind of thing.
- [18:55]
Barry Ritholtz
How is that not alone? You're buying a product that you don't have money for. Someone is paying for that. Isn't that a loan?
- [19:03]
Hillary Allen
I would say so.
- [19:05]
Barry Ritholtz
Okay, but what's the counter to? This isn't a loan. This is a pre layaway, essentially.
- [19:13]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, no, we don't charge interest. There are late fees if you don't pay, but that's not the same as interest.
- [19:19]
Barry Ritholtz
That's fair. Like we bought a couch. No interest for six months. So as long as you pay it off within six months. That sort of thing seems to be interest free.
- [19:31]
Hillary Allen
But then when you look at the business model and you see that a significant chunk of the people are incurring
- [19:35]
Barry Ritholtz
these late fees, then, well, that's their fault, isn't it? That's human nature. You can't blame us if we take advantage of people procrastinating and not paying off their fees in time.
- [19:47]
Hillary Allen
Well, it's not that they're procrastinating, it's that they're choosing between paying rent or paying this off.
- [19:52]
Barry Ritholtz
Food, medicine.
- [19:54]
Hillary Allen
Exactly. So this is coming back to it's the economic precarity. Stupid, right? If people are in these dire straits, we should not be surprised that Fintech firms are trying to capitalize on that and profit from it. Which is why I think, you know, what we need are some kind of public safety nets to sort of make and a higher minimum wage and higher Social Security benefits.
- [20:19]
Barry Ritholtz
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Professor Hilary Allen discussing her new book Fintech Dystopia A Summer Beach Read about Silicon Valley and how it's ruining things. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. This message is brought to you by Apple Card It's a great time to apply for an Apple Card. You'll love earning unlimited daily cash on every purchase. That includes 3% daily cash when you buy the latest iPhone, AirPods and Apple Watch at Apple through this special referral offer. When you get a new Apple Card, you can earn bonus daily cash. To qualify, apply at Apple Co getdailycash Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch offer may not be available elsewhere. Terms and limitations apply.
- [21:26]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI it all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors, llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete Disclosures available at public.comdisclosures Now I'd
- [22:27]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
like to introduce you to Meaningful Beauty, the famed skincare brand created by iconic supermodel Cindy Crawford. It's her secret to absolutely gorgeous skin. Meaningful Beauty makes powerful and effective skin care simple and it's loved by millions of women. It's formulated for all ages and all skin tones and types and it's designed to work as a complete skin care system, leaving your skin feeling soft, smooth and nourished. I recommend starting with Cindy's full regimen which contains all five of her best selling products including the Amazing Youth Activating Melon Serum. This next generation serum has the power of melon leaf stem cell technology. Its melon leaf stem cells encapsulated for freshness and released onto the skin to support a visible reduction in the appearance of wrinkles. With thousands of glowing five star reviews, why not give it a try? Subscribe today and you can get the Amazing Meaningful Beauty system for just $49.95. That includes our introductory five piece system, free gifts, free shipping and a 60 day money back guarantee. All that available@meaningfulbeauty.com.
- [23:30]
Barry Ritholtz
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Hillary Allen. She teaches at the American University Washington College of law in Washington D.C. where she specializes in in regulation of financial and technology laws. So let's talk about the digital only book, Ironic, right? Fintech Dystopia where you describe modern financial technology simply as Silicon Valley ruining things. Explain that seems like an extreme example and give us some examples of how Silicon Valley is ruining things.
- [24:15]
Hillary Allen
So just to be clear, not all modern technology is ruining things. There's a particular business model approach that I think is ruining things and that is derivative in many ways of the venture capital model in Silicon Valley.
- [24:28]
Barry Ritholtz
Venture capital.
- [24:29]
Hillary Allen
Just venture.
- [24:30]
Barry Ritholtz
Okay, yeah.
- [24:31]
Hillary Allen
Venture capital model in Silicon Valley. So it's sort of got this sheen around it that's iconoclastic and they, they make bets on these moonshots that'll, you know, save all of humanity and yada yada yada. But in fact it's, it's pretty well established as a playbook at this point. There's a lot of subsidies that go to venture capital by virtue of their having access to pension funds, by virtue of capital gains taxation. And so they've got sort of, and especially in low interest rate environments, they attract a lot of money. So they have pretty cheap money available to them. And then they go shopping. And what they go shopping for is not the iconoclastic sort of outlier that we think of, but what we've seen and what the evidence shows is that they tend to go shopping for the same things that their friends are going shopping for. And they go shopping for the businesses that their friends have developed. And so there's this sort of very sort of insular mentality in what they're looking for. And they're also looking for something that they can cash out of very quickly. Because the average venture capital fund has a 10 year, sometimes 12, but usually 10 year duration. That's really not that much time to find something to invest in, have it grow and then cash out. And so they're not looking for things that are going to take decades to develop. They're looking for things that they can grow quickly and get out of in about five or six years.
- [25:57]
Barry Ritholtz
So give us a few examples. What do you think is the sort of not adding a whole lot of value, venture backed businesses?
- [26:07]
Hillary Allen
So, so not intentionally, but it just turned out that way. As I wrote this, this book, almost every fintech business I looked at had been funded by Andreessen Horowitz. They had been sort of the lead.
- [26:19]
Barry Ritholtz
So you know, they, they're the hot VC these days. I have full disclosure. I've interviewed Andreessen, I've interviewed Kapoor, I've interviewed Horowitz. So I've sat with them and talked about a lot of their businesses. But the past few years they've been very front and center, very active.
- [26:39]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, no, and they sort of, they have their as a marquee name. As you say, they're the hot VCs. Once they say they like something, they can basically attract other venture capital to those, those businesses. And so they're essentially tastemakers, which, which
- [26:54]
Barry Ritholtz
is fascinating you say that because before that it was Sequoia, before that it was Kalina Perkins. Like you work your way, there's a hot firm for a decade, the 90s had it, the 2000s had it, the 2000s had it. They tend not to maintain that position forever. Although to Andreessen Horowitz's credit, they've been the it girl for a good, good run so far.
- [27:17]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that that's a good thing, but yeah. So you know, they, they basically built the crypto industry. So you know, the narrative around crypto is that is this organic sort of community of cyberpunks and libertarians, but they really built that industry. They were early investors in Coinbase. That was their first crypto investment. And then they have plowed a lot of money into the industry and it's sort of their seal of approval has been what's attracted people to it. And part of what Andreessen Horowitz does is it doesn't just invest, it does aggressive marketing campaigns for the things that they've invested in, aggressive lobbying. So they've really been at the forefront for trying to get the law has changed to accommodate their business models. So yeah, there is, there's crypto, but they've also been at the sort of the forefront of I always, there's one of the do not pays. I think it's a firm that's theirs. I always get, get mixed up. They, they were very early investors in Robinhood, the fintech trading stock app, which
- [28:27]
Barry Ritholtz
originally started out as a stock app and then it became eventually a crypto app and now it's a bet on anything app.
- [28:35]
Hillary Allen
Yeah. And again, that is a company that by the time it IPO'd had racked up all kinds of fines from the SEC and FINRA because it was violating laws left, right and center. You know, it's, it was one of the first to offer commission free brokerage. But as the chestnut goes, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And it makes most of its money from payment for order flow and was not clear with its customers in the early years about how that was going on and how they get paid a lot more for your options trades than your regular stock trades. Because more profitable. Yeah, more profitable for the citadel securities of this world to take those.
- [29:21]
Barry Ritholtz
Yeah, really kind of interesting. And yet at the same time, you have a chapter in your book Silicon Valley Welfare Queen. Explain. I thought that these are, you know, Ayn Randian libertarians that don't want to suckle off the teat of big government. And these are people that are builders and self made people, you're arguing. Not so much.
- [29:49]
Hillary Allen
Well, they don't want us suckling on the teat of the state because they might have to fund that with taxes, but they're okay suckling themselves.
- [29:56]
Barry Ritholtz
Right. So give us a few examples. What companies started out as welfare queens.
- [30:03]
Hillary Allen
Well, I mean again, the whole story of tech, the Internet and smartphone boom is very much based on technologies developed
- [30:12]
Barry Ritholtz
by the Government, DARPA and the whole Internet.
- [30:15]
Hillary Allen
Exactly. And you know, and I think if you look at the iPhone, a lot of the individual technologies that went into
- [30:21]
Barry Ritholtz
that again came from everything with microwaves comes out of NASA. Right.
- [30:25]
Hillary Allen
So first of all, this entirely self made story falls apart right there because as I mentioned earlier, if you've only got six years to turn around a technology, you're not really investing in prototypes, in thinking really hard about physical hardware and how that works. You're really looking for a software thing that you can gin up pretty quickly. The really long term investment comes from the states and has always done. And then it's commercialized, you know, and I think that that sort of has worked well, except that you get to the point where the, you know, the venture capitalists who are commercializing are saying, well, we shouldn't have to pay any taxes to fund the state that develops these technologies. They also benefit, as I said, enormously from laws that they lobbied for in the late 70s. I believe changes to ERISA, which allowed pension funds to venture to invest in Ven Capital, basically didn't exist before. And at that same period they were lobbying for changes to the capital gains taxation.
- [31:30]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, you have the carried interest loophole.
- [31:32]
Hillary Allen
Exactly.
- [31:32]
Barry Ritholtz
Continues to persist. I'm drawing a blank on the author's name. There's a book, Americana, 400 Years of Technological Innovation that makes the argument you're making, go back to the Telegraph, funded by Congress, go back to railroads. Like every major technological innovation or most major innovations got seeded with the government. And then eventually the private sector takes over. And what has changed in recent years is that public private partnership seems to have broken.
- [32:08]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, actually. So the book I really like on this is Margaret Omara's book, the Code who Doesshe does a great history of Silicon Valley. And yeah, I think the, the understanding that there was a quid bur quo has sort of fallen away. So always the private sector has commercialized this technology. But if we have an unwillingness to sort of pay any taxes, if we have an unwillingness to invest in government capacity, to invest in universities where so much of this stuff is developed. You take Marc Andreessen. He got his start because he was happy or sorry, lucky enough to be a student at the University of Illinois at the time where they had a special grant to look at the beginnings of the Internet. He worked on a team there that developed a prototype Internet browser. And then he went into the private sector and they let him build one for the private sector. And that was Netscape. And that's how he made his fortune. So he was sort of in the right place at the right time to take advantage of public investment in this kind of thing. And yet this is the kind of thing that we're seeing that these leading venture capitalists want to shut down.
- [33:25]
Barry Ritholtz
Really interesting. Since we've been talking about books, you've criticized abundance, which is by Derek Thompson. And as recline as the whole concept of abundance is sort of a sexy way to make excuses for techno solutions. Tell us a little bit about that.
- [33:43]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, so this is something I get into a lot of conversations with people these days because I think there are some elements of the original sort of abundance agenda that are very appealing to people in terms of, for example, increasing housing capacity. And I do think that that is something that needs to happen and has to be done in the right way. But if you look at who is funding the abundance movement, they have conferences, et cetera. It is Andreessen Horowitz and other people from Silicon Valley. And it seems to be this att to essentially put a happier face on the deregulatory project that Silicon Valley is looking for, to sort of make it seem kinder, gentler and more progressive. Because the abundance movement sort of in a nutshell is supposed to be, well, we shouldn't have artificial scarcity, we should build more of what we want to do that. We should take away some of the roadblocks that are getting in our own way. And when you say it like that, it's sort of hard to disagree with.
- [34:43]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, that works for housing. You have NIMBYism with housing. But when you take that away, it also means you're going to end up with perhaps high rises or multi family units in a suburban area that some people don't want in their neighborhood. There's always a series of trade offs with people who are already there versus people who want to get there. What is the specific problem with abundance as a philosophy towards building more of what we want as a society?
- [35:16]
Hillary Allen
Because it's who gets to decide what more of what we want is. And if you look at who's funding the abundance agenda, it is the billionaires and the tech elite. And these are people who have really shown that they are quite willing to run roughshod over regulations that are there to protect the public from harm if that enables them to profit. And so I am just skeptical that a movement that is funded by these people is really going to be prioritizing the kinds of projects that would benefit the economically precarious. I think it's more likely that they'll be benefiting themselves and will lose protections for people with less voice that are currently in place.
- [35:57]
Barry Ritholtz
So what sort of overhyped products do you think best explain the problems with this approach? Like, what are these companies putting out that either is a result of regulatory capture or just don't do what they promise? Because you would think that in the world of venture, either your product finds an audience, it finds a customer base, or it doesn't and fails, and that goes out of business.
- [36:25]
Hillary Allen
Yeah. So that's sort of the perverted part of this, is that that market logic, like survival of the fittest because of all the subsidies that that benefit venture capital, that doesn't really apply that logic anymore.
- [36:38]
Barry Ritholtz
So, you know, give us an example.
- [36:39]
Hillary Allen
Crypto. Crypto should have died many times already. Particularly, it should have died in 2022 when we had the big crypto winter. At that time, particularly Andreessen Horowitz, crypto had this huge war chest of funds that they had raised, and they stopped investing in crypto startups at that point because, you know, everything was moribund. But what they started using that money was lobbying, political spending, and they really worked very hard on members of Congress to essentially create laws that would allow the crypto industry to keep doing what they're doing, which was not allowed under the securities laws as they were. So the whole business model was regulatory arbitrage. They wanted laws that would sort of give a patina of legitimacy and hopefully encourage institutional investment, attract more money to the space, but not actually make them have to. For example, like Coinbase combines the functions of a broker, dealer, and an exchange. That's not allowed in securities. You can see why there's all kinds of conflicts of interest that.
- [37:50]
Barry Ritholtz
Right. Either you're an exchange or a brokerage firm.
- [37:53]
Hillary Allen
Not both, but in crypto, you're both. Right. And so if you applied the securities laws to crypto, they would have to disaggregate and basically would probably destroy their business model. So what they wanted was a law that said, no, it's fine. Crypto special, you do both. And so that really, an industry that should have failed is again rising, being propped up all through this sort of aggressive political spending. And I mean, I've talked to people in Congress, off the record, who have said that they've only voted for these laws because they're afraid that if they don't, that crypto industries will target them.
- [38:37]
Barry Ritholtz
What other products do you think are overhyped and fail to satisfy their markets?
- [38:44]
Hillary Allen
Well, right now, the obvious answer is a lot of The AI products. It's hard when you talk about AI because it's such an umbrella term for so many different things. Right.
- [38:55]
Barry Ritholtz
I have perplexity on my ph. It does a better job with search than Google does. I get better, more comprehensive answers. What's wrong with AI?
- [39:07]
Hillary Allen
Well, let me disaggregate it first because there's plenty of AI that there's nothing wrong with. Right? So AI is not intelligent in any way, shape or form. It's a market. That's a marketing term. What it is is it's an applied statistical engine. You have an algorithm that looks for patterns in data and then acts accordingly. And, and that kind of technology has been around for a long time. It does. Like for example, it's great for fraud detection in a bank, for credit card transactions, for example. So that's an A plus use of AI. But the last few years everybody has been pouring everything they've got into these LLM based tools, these large language model based tools. So these are tools that can, you know, old AI tools would just sort of classify something, put something in a group or predict something. But, but now we have these tools that generate content, particularly text, but also, you know, video, music, etc. And there are so many problems with this technology because it's being sold as technology that can replace humans, right? That can. Basically it's worth throwing trillions of dollars into this because of the productivity gains that we'll get by firing all the humans, essentially is the story they're telling. First of all, that wouldn't be great, right?
- [40:29]
Barry Ritholtz
That's a problem in and of itself. The way I have heard it described, that's a little less catastrophic, is this is going to make everybody more efficient, more productive, it'll make companies more profitable and we'll all be able to do more with our existing staff than having to go out and hire hundreds of more people.
- [40:54]
Hillary Allen
But that is not true, sadly. That's the pitch line, right? So these tools make a lot of mistakes. Even the very best ones make mistakes.
- [41:05]
Barry Ritholtz
We've seen a lot of attorneys, you and I are both attorneys. A lot of judges have been calling out attorneys who theoretically are supposed to be doing this on their own and instead are outsourcing it to AI and all of its hallucinations and citing cases that don't exist. The assumption is that's going to get better eventually, but it won't.
- [41:26]
Hillary Allen
So this is the problem.
- [41:28]
Barry Ritholtz
But it won't.
- [41:28]
Hillary Allen
But it won't. So these things are statistical engines, right? They can't check for accuracy because they don't understand accuracy as a concept. Right. There's no reasoning. It's literally the most statistically most likely word after the last word I gave you is this word. There is no way to make that care about accuracy because it's not a thinking machine. And I think there's increasing acceptance that these models have hit a wall and they are as accurate as they are going to get.
- [42:03]
Barry Ritholtz
Really?
- [42:03]
Hillary Allen
Yeah.
- [42:04]
Barry Ritholtz
That's kind of fascinating. My concern was, at least on the legal side, hey, you have this existing body of work and all this research and brief writing and arguments that exist as of now, if you're going to replace people from doing that, are you going to freeze the state of legal knowledge at 20, 26 and 5 or 10 years from now? If you don't have people writing these briefs, you don't have people writing these decisions. How can AI respond to what's taken place over the past 10 years if we don't have the humans actually doing the grunt work?
- [42:40]
Hillary Allen
Yeah, I mean there's a, there's, I mean, I think those kinds of concerns have been expressed very much in the cultural context. You know, if we disincentivize creators from making new music and new art, is this it? Are we stuck with what we've got? With something like the law? One of the challenges is that, you know, these large language models, they don't get updated on a day to day basis. You know, there's sort of a stop point and then they don't know. Well, they don't know anything that they don't have the data from after a certain date. So that, that's a limitation. But the thing I worry most about with the law is that you have to be able to spot the hallucinations or you're going to get yourself in very big trouble. And I think this is true for a lot of different fields. And this is again, just to digress a little, why the profitability narrative is not true. Right. Because the only place where you can just put this content out and just leave it there is in very low stakes places, right, where it doesn't matter if you get something wrong. But even, you know, things that you wouldn't think are such a big deal have proved to be quite high stakes. So Air Canada had a chatbot that told a customer that if they wanted to apply for a bereavement discount for a flight, they could do that after their flight was done. Now that's not Air Canada's policy. You had to do it in advance. And so this customer tried to get their refund after the fact. And Air Canada said, well, the chatbot got it wrong. Too bad. So sad for you.
- [44:15]
Barry Ritholtz
It's your chatbot, you own. I'm responsible for it.
- [44:18]
Hillary Allen
Exactly.
- [44:18]
Barry Ritholtz
Not my mistake. Your mistake.
- [44:20]
Hillary Allen
Exactly. And so even in these sort of reasonably low stakes customer service interactions, there's reason to be really worried about inaccuracy. Now you start dialing up to things, to medical advice, legal advice, you know, it's just you can't rely on them. And I worry that we're putting people in a very difficult position because it's a lot easier to get something right when you write it yourself than it is to find mistakes in something someone else has put together. Right.
- [44:49]
Barry Ritholtz
So let me push back a little bit because I've been watching the AI reading medical scans, and at some point last year, or maybe it was two years ago, the technology theoretically passed the accuracy rate of humans. Fewer false positives, more identifying missed negatives that should have been positive than people. Is that not accurate? Or where are we with the medical application of that?
- [45:25]
Hillary Allen
So this is why I think it's so important to disaggregate the different kinds of AI, because that, that is not sort of LLM based AI, and some, as I said, some of those tools are great. I can't weigh in on medical imaging and things like that. So it may very well be the case. What I'm talking about is, you know, what if you've got, you know, a doctor coming up with instructions for a care plan for their patients and they let the AI do it right, if there's a mistake in there, they're much less likely to catch it. If the AI, because you know how things go, you'll be expected to look at more of these because you're not generating them yourself. And it's always easier to get things right when you do it yourself than when you're reviewing someone else. I mean, when we were lawyers, we used to. That's why you want to have the pen on contracts. You want to hide things from the other side. And now it's the AI hiding stuff from you. And I worry that, especially with younger lawyers coming up through the ranks who are encouraged to rely on these tools from the beginning, who won't actually develop the skills because you don't learn well when you sort of don't process it yourself. So if you spent your whole career using AI, you're not going to be able to spot the problems in the AI.
- [46:42]
Barry Ritholtz
You're not going to have the skill set.
- [46:43]
Hillary Allen
No. And so then I'm worried about those young lawyers getting sued for malpractice because they missed something that the AI generated, but they were never even given the opportunity to learn how to spot it themselves.
- [46:55]
Barry Ritholtz
It's a problem with the rungs on the ladder being removed. Especially we see that now manifesting itself. The unemployment rate of the under 30 is about double what it is for the national unemployment rate. And I can't help but wonder how much of that is somehow related to the proliferation of AI tools for white collar jobs.
- [47:19]
Hillary Allen
I think, you know, Cory Doctorow, who does a lot of work in the tech space, has a great quote on this that I'm gonna to butcher a little, not say it quite as well as he does it, but he said the AI can't do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to replace you with AI that can't do your job. Right. So it's. I think you're right that there is at this moment. You know, I mean, it's also hard to say how much of this is AI washing as opposed to real AI displacement. Right. The economy's not in a great place right now. People don't want to hire anyway. It looks a lot better if you say, well, we're not hiring because we're replacing them with AI than just we're having a rough time. We're not hiring.
- [48:02]
Barry Ritholtz
AI washing is a phrase I haven't heard used in modern parlance yet, but it certainly makes a whole lot of sense. The line I heard, and I don't know where I'm stealing this from, is you're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by somebody with a greater facility working with AI than you have. And it sort of creates a self fulfilling arms race to make sure you learn how to use that tool. Otherwise you're at risk for being replaced by somebody who knows how to use that tool.
- [48:33]
Hillary Allen
I've heard that too, but I don't think these tools are that hard to use. Right. I mean that's a failure on the part of the AI companies if they're so hard to use. Right. It wasn't hard to use.
- [48:41]
Barry Ritholtz
Google, Search, perplexity, and even ChatGPT is absolutely easiest pie to use. I don't, I don't find them difficult. Sometimes you have to keep changing the prompts to get an improved answer. Like if you just ask a question and walk away, well, then you're getting what everybody gets. But if you. I don't, I don't really buy into the Prompt engineer job title. But a little exposure is the more you ask it and the more you vary it, you get a variety of answers and eventually you come up with something oh, that's interesting and different. Let me take a look at that.
- [49:20]
Hillary Allen
So I mean, I have strong feelings about this as an educator because if these tools are worth their salt, it shouldn't take our students long to figure out how to use them.
- [49:29]
Barry Ritholtz
Right, Right.
- [49:30]
Hillary Allen
So why are we bringing them into education where what they really need to learn is how to spot hallucinations, how to think critically so that if they are going to use these tools later, they can use them to the best of their abilities. This whole arms race sense of, well, they need to use them school so they don't get left behind. I'm like, it didn't take long to learn how to Google. They'll be fine.
- [49:50]
Barry Ritholtz
You've been pretty critical of things like crypto and stablecoin. We're going to get to those in a moment. I want to talk about some other things you've discussed. You've brought up the whole idea of technology as a branding exercise. Phrases like democratizing finance, disruptive technology, banking, the unbanked. You've described these as just marketing and not really accomplishing anything. Tell us a little bit about those and give us some examples.
- [50:26]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
Sure.
- [50:27]
Hillary Allen
I mean, I think at the heart of all this is innovation speak and innovation worship. Right. We alluded to that earlier. This sense that anything that is innovative is, is inherently good and must therefore be permitted at all costs. And that is sort of the font of a lot of the rhetoric and narrative that we get out of Silicon Valley that ultimately is there to attract funding. Yes, but also to procure legal treatment that facilitates what they want to do. It actually creates often an unlevel legal playing field where you have the incumbents who have to comply with all the laws and then the disruptors, as you say, who don't have to comply with all the laws and can succeed on that basis even if their product isn't superior in the way we would typically expect a disruptors product to be. So yeah, I mean, disruptive innovation goes back to Clayton Christensen and the innovator's dilemma. This sense that if you stay still and just make good products, you'll be out competed by someone who is trying to do things a little differently. But there's no real formula that you can take away from that as to what disruptive is in the eye of the beholder.
- [51:49]
Barry Ritholtz
So let me push back on that a little bit and all my VC friends, I could just hear their voices in my head. And the pushback is, look, most new companies fail, most new technologies crash and burn, most new ideas never make it. And even the best of the best VCs, they'll make 100 investments for the that one moonshot that works out. And most of the other 99 are at best break even. But mostly losers. How can you say this is true? Oh, and real innovation often finds itself in between the regulatory regime because the technology that's being created was never anticipated by the regulators or anybody else. Fair pushback.
- [52:39]
Hillary Allen
A lot of points that I would quibble with there. So that's fair. Quibble away, quibble away. All right, so there's this idea that the law is a barrier to innovation because law is old and innovation is new and the law couldn't possibly have contemplated the innovation. The story about the innovation is what makes it new. Right. Most of the things that we're seeing in the fintech space, they're not that new. Right. As I said, we've got fintech lending has a lot of the things that we didn't like about payday lending. Right. Why shouldn't the laws from payday lending apply? Crypto, basically. I mean, the crypto markets for all the world look like the stocks and bonds in the unregulated markets of the 1920s. We saw how that ended. They ended in such a spectacular crash that we ended up with the securities laws. Why shouldn't they apply? What's so different? So this construction of novelty is something that is done intentionally as a narrative. Now, I fully appreciate that we need the optimists in this world who are going to try new things. And I say that very early on in the book. The people who these stories are useful because they attract funding to new things. So I'm not saying we should do away with it completely. My argument is that the yin and yang, the balance between, between the optimists and the realists is badly out of whack because we give so much deference to the stories about innovation, about disruption, about how technology can solve problems that have been with us for centuries. We can magically get rid of intermediaries now with blockchain technology, apparently.
- [54:18]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, that was one of the narratives was this intermediation until it no longer was a story. But, but let's talk about some specific companies that you've mentioned, that you've written about, and I want to get your sense on it. And the oldest one was PayPal. To this day, and I was a PayPal user back in the 1990s with eBay and those sort of things. To this day, I don't understand what they did that was any different than a credit card other than being a bit of middleware that eventually became a rentier. Why not just use a credit card? Why do I need PayPal between me and Amazon or me and ebay?
- [55:05]
Hillary Allen
So this is really an interesting story and I learned a whole lot about this in research for this book by reading Max Chavkin's book the Contrarian, about Peter Thiel and the start of the beginning of the, of PayPal. And in fact, the idea for PayPal came from the same place that the idea for crypto has come from, which is this, this techno libertarian idea of we don't like regulation, we don't like central banks, we would like to have private money and we would like technology to help us have private money. And PayPal wasn't the only one of these kinds of startups back in the early dot com bubble. So, so PayPal, I think succeeded because it sort of lucked into this deal with ebay, as you said. It sort of had no distinguishing features as far as I can tell that made it any superior to the Beanses and the floozes of this world. It lucked into this deal with ebay
- [56:01]
Barry Ritholtz
and eventually ebay buys them to solve their, I guess, credit card management problem. I don't really understand. I still, until 20 or 25 years later, I still don't understand why they were necessary.
- [56:16]
Hillary Allen
I think, yeah, I mean, my knowledge of this comes primarily from reading Max Chavkin's book, which I highly recommend, but that's my understanding too. And so they are a payments technology. I too struggle to sort of understand what they offer that a credit card doesn't in many ways. One thing they are though is they are sort of the or regulatory arbitrage story in fintech. Right. So, you know, I've said so much of fintech is actually about arbitraging the law rather than technological superiority. PayPal from the beginning was flaunting quite aggressively the banking laws because only banks are allowed to accept deposits and people were keeping money in their PayPal wallets. And for all the world, that looks like keeping a deposit. Peter Thiel from the beginning with, was very aggressive on the lobbying to make sure that that was not considered deposit taking. Early on there were multiple states that were investigating it because they thought it was the unlawful taking of deposits. He lobbied heavily in Congress and lobbied heavily at the fdic and ultimately that worked. And so I Think that has sort of been the prototype, that blitzscaling prototype. I think people perhaps underestimate the degree to which blitzscaling is really about playing it on an unlevel, unlevel legal playing field.
- [57:43]
Barry Ritholtz
Let's talk about stablecoins. What sort of value do they provide?
- [57:47]
Hillary Allen
Again, unless you are trying to do illicit transactions or gamble? Not a whole lot. Right. So.
- [57:53]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, a stable coin is worth a dollar and it promises to always be worth a dollar. Don't we have dollars? Why do I need a stablecoin?
- [58:02]
Hillary Allen
Well, you need a stablecoin often to do illicit payments. So if you want, you know, if you're. They're very popular, for example, with all kinds of drug cartels and they're good for sanctions evasion. They're also very good if you want to gamble in crypto and you want to use it as sort of a cash management tool in between crypto investments, kind of like a money market mutual fund in your brokerage account for parking funds in between crypto gambling. But they've really never had any utility in any big way as a legal payments mechanism.
- [58:37]
Barry Ritholtz
All right, so what about, you mentioned the blockchain. I keep reading that blockchain is going to allow us to use smart contracts and have things happen automatically that now have to be manually. What's the problem with blockchain?
- [58:52]
Hillary Allen
Well, first of all, smart contracts can work without a blockchain. Smart contracts predate blockchains. They can run on all kinds of databases. So if you want that kind of functionality and it has pros and cons and, and I've written about this a ton, you can have that without a blockchain. The reason why you don't want to have it on a blockchain, and this is something that does not get anywhere near the attention it needs, is that there's all kinds of operational risks associated with the blockchains themselves. So blockchains are software. They are maintained by, in the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, just a few individuals. In the case of the Ethereum blockchain chains, the Ethereum foundation, they're not regulated at all. They have no obligation to invest in cybersecurity, to invest in getting their blockchains up and running again should something go wrong. You're just, you're really sort of, as I sometimes say, yoloing operational risk with regards to these, these blockchains. And so if you want smart chain, sorry, smart contract functionality, they don't use a blockchain.
- [60:00]
Barry Ritholtz
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Professor Hilary Allen discussing her new book Fintech A Summer beach read about Silicon Valley and how it's ruining things. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
- [60:23]
Hillary Allen
Foreign.
- [60:29]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
For the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue revenue over 20% year over year. You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete Disclosures available at public.comdisclosures hi, I'm
- [61:31]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty. Well, I don't know about you, but like I never liked being told oh wow, you look so good for your age. Like why even bother saying that? Why don't you just say you look great at any age? Every age. That's what Meaningful Beauty is all about. We create products that make you feel confident in your skin at the age you are now. Meaningful Beauty. Beautiful skin at every age. Learn more@meaningful beauty.com. Financial growth begins long before the first investment.
- [62:09]
Hillary Allen
It comes from understanding what you're building
- [62:11]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
towards, what's at stake and what success
- [62:14]
Hillary Allen
looks like for you. At Oppenheimer, we bring bold thinking guided
- [62:18]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
by the full strength of our expertise
- [62:20]
Hillary Allen
to put capital to work building and protecting wealth that lasts generations. Put the power of Oppenheimer thinking to work for you.
- [62:29]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
Wealth management, Capital markets, Investment banking.
- [62:35]
Barry Ritholtz
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My My Extra special guest this week is Hillary Allen. She teaches at the American University Washington College of law in Washington, D.C. where she specializes in regulation of financial and technology laws. So we mentioned stablecoin. We've mentioned blockchain. Is there any value in any of the crypto coins, be it Bitcoin or Ethereum? I know we can't actually describe the last hundred coins that are out there on the radio will violate George Carlin's seven words you can't say on TV or radio. But there's a. Outside of the, you know, eboo, dogecoins and everything below that, what's the value of the first five or so cryptocurrencies? Is there anything worthwhile to these, or is this just a solution in search of a problem?
- [63:36]
Hillary Allen
Problem. It's a solution in search of a problem. I mean, essentially. Even so, Bitcoin often is seen as the most credible of these because it's been around the longest and has the largest.
- [63:45]
Barry Ritholtz
It's Bitcoin and eth. Those are the two I hear about the most.
- [63:49]
Hillary Allen
But both of them are essentially Ponzis in the sense that there's nothing backing them. The only reason they have value is because someone else might buy them from you if they choose not to. It could go to zero. And actually someone put it to me this way, it's not that they could go to zero. They could go to less than zero because they don't even have any assets that could be used to administer a winding up. Right. And that's expensive. You're going to get the lawyers and the courts and everybody involved.
- [64:17]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, you're not suggesting that if you own Bitcoin, you may have a liability down the road? Is that the implication?
- [64:24]
Hillary Allen
No, I'm just saying that if someone was trying to work out the end of one of these things, there wouldn't even be office furniture you could sell to pay the lawyers.
- [64:35]
Barry Ritholtz
Okay, you've written about startups like Theranos. I remember Juicero.
- [64:43]
Hillary Allen
Juicero's the best.
- [64:44]
Barry Ritholtz
Tell us a little bit about those two. And was that just, you know, one of these products that just didn't work out? What's the problem with that technology? Solution to our juicing problems.
- [64:59]
Hillary Allen
So Juicero is just my favorite metaphor for all of this. So for those of you who are unfamiliar with the gift that is Juicero. So basically this was a machine that cost hundreds of dollars. It was WI fi enabled.
- [65:11]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, roll back the guy. And you describe this in the book. The guy who invented this previously had set up a fairly successful was it a juicing chain of companies that got bought. And so he had some credibility in the space. And now I'm not going to run restaurants, I'm going to. To create a technology that people can juice at home.
- [65:35]
Hillary Allen
It was venture funded. They put a lot of money into
- [65:37]
Barry Ritholtz
this hundred plus million dollars.
- [65:39]
Hillary Allen
And these, these, what it did was it squeezed these juice pouches. And the problem was that people could just squeeze the juice pouches with their bare hands and get all the juice there was.
- [65:49]
Barry Ritholtz
There was a notorious Bloomberg article about this, but it raises the question, did the company already squeeze the juice and put in these pouches? Why didn't they? Like why wasn't this set up so that you can actually put fresh fruit? Like doesn't it defeat the purpose if you're buying pouches? Or was the whole idea the razor blade model?
- [66:14]
Hillary Allen
So I mean the reason why I love this as a metaphor is it really gets at this techno solutionism, which is one of the concepts that I'm really coming for in this book. And techno solutionism is this idea that everything in our world can be reduced into a technology problem and that the only reason we haven't solved certain things is because we haven't spent enough time and money on developing the technology. And what that does is it sort of flattens problems into. It gets rid of the human messiness, it flattens problems. It ignores domain expertise. People who've been working in particular fields for a long time and know a lot of non tech stuff, it sort of dismisses their expertise. And I mean sadly there's just this magic associated with technology at this point. And as I said, I'm not anti technology. A lot of it's great, but it doesn't deserve the level of magical deference that we give it. It can't solve all our problems. And when we get into this mindset where we think that if we throw enough money at technology it can solve anything and it will always be the best solutions, we end up squeezing pouches with a machine that we could squeeze with our bare hands. And, and a joke that I try and make in the book is like with AI, we may be better off squeezing things with our bare minds.
- [67:32]
Barry Ritholtz
So one more company I have to ask about, Theranos. I love the book Bad Blood really went into details about how corrosive and co opting the company itself was for everybody around it, including the attorneys and all sorts of other bad actors. Why wasn't Theranos just an idea that didn't work, that you can't, if you want to draw blood from a vein, you have to draw blood from a vein. You can't just prick your fingertip and think that's going to be the same as venal draws well, so that's the
- [68:09]
Hillary Allen
thing with this techno solutionism. It presumes that everything is a tech problem waiting to be solved. It doesn't even countenance the possibility that there may not be a technological solution for what you want to do, that the technology you want may not be able to do the thing you want it to do. And when you have that sort of collective sense that I think we have now, that if we throw enough money at any technology, it can solve any problem we give it, you can see how people get so susceptible to being sort of drawn into the stories that outright con people like Elizabeth Holmes might be telling, but also the stories that were being told about, about AI right now and about crypto. The more you know about these technologies, the less impressive they seem and the more clearly it becomes illuminated that they just can't do a lot of the things that they're going to do. But that's so counter to how we typically talk about technologies that it sort of, it feels a bit weird to talk like that. And you sort of, you're going against societal norms in a way. And so one of the things that I really wanted to do with this, this is to start making it easier to talk about these things critically, to be not such an outlier, to express your frustrations. And I think we're actually having a moment like that about AI because so many people really hate it, really.
- [69:38]
Barry Ritholtz
So, so you use the phrase techno solutionism and Theranos is really the poster child for that because as you're describing a lot of these things, I am recalling the story, especially what you're referring to. With domain expertise. She had no medical or medical device training. None of the VCs who put money into Theranos were healthcare, biotech, medical devices. Like they all passed eventually. She hired a number of people to try and, and with some background, but they seem to turn over pretty quickly because no, you can't do that. Just pricking the skin. You're getting all the interstitial tissue and fluids and you're corrupting the sample that you want to test for something. The reason we draw from the vein is very medically specific and yet it attracted Henry Kissinger and all sorts of big law firms and everybody plowed in. She's the next Steve Jobs, the youngest self made female billionaire. What is it about us that we're just so susceptible to buying into these narrative tales that turn out to be nonsense?
- [71:00]
Hillary Allen
So I mean, part of it is that we're humans and humans have often sort of been snowed by things that are flashy and shiny and exciting. I mean, that's just very much the human condition. Some of the stuff I talk about in the book that I really enjoyed working on was the cognitive psychology aspects of it. You know, sort of when we hear certain stories, it's very difficult to budge ourselves and be contrarian. And as I was saying earlier, so you sort of need a collective tipping point where people start to question it so you don't feel like an outlier or the norm when you start to question these things. And so I think there's a role for media here. I think there's a role for education. Unfortunately, the people who benefit from techno solutionism also know this and have a very big media presence and invest a lot in education. So it's, it's an uphill battle to start talking about these things differently. But you know, ultimately we are all human and it's nicer to believe that something will succeed and then that it will fail. I mean, you might not think I'd be much fun at cocktail parties, although I am.
- [72:16]
Barry Ritholtz
And the book is available for free@fintechdistopia.com let's jump to our final questions, our favorite questions we ask all of our guests, starting with tell us about your mentors who helped steer your career.
- [72:34]
Hillary Allen
So my first mentor is probably my first law firm partner boss in Australia, Stephen Kavanaugh. And I had thought I was going to be an IP lawyer, but we had a rotation system and we ended up, and I ended up in his financial services practice and he was just a wonderful person to work for. It was a time when the law had just changed in Australia and he really was willing to hear what I had to say about this, this new, new law. And so it was just, I just felt very invested in and that, that was, that was lovely. And then I think as an academic, Patricia McCoy, who I adore, sort of, I have had a very non traditional path to academia. I had more practice experience than is usually the case. I had fewer of the bells and whistles credentials that people usually have. And again, she just saw in me someone who was really passionate about preventing financial crises, about sort of systemic risk and sort of was willing to look through the fact that I wasn't as polished as most of the other people trying to enter academia and support me. And I was very grateful for that.
- [73:47]
Barry Ritholtz
We've talked about a run of different books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?
- [73:53]
Hillary Allen
Oh, I was an English lit major, so I have many favorites. I'm very into the dystopian track. So Handmaid's Tale 1984. Yeah, I just finished the Parable of the Sower in that vein, which was. Parable of the the Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler. I also have always had a soft spot for really good children's literature, so Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy is one of my favorites. And right now I'm reading with my kids Katherine Rundell's books Impossible Creatures and the Poison King. And it's just, they're just so good. And then work wise, I've just started Jacob Silverman's Gilded Rage, which is very much on point for the conversation we're having.
- [74:37]
Barry Ritholtz
Gilded Rage, you know, we talked about a few crypto related books. Did you see Zeke Fox's number go up? It really is just an astonishing, astonishing work. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career on whether it was law, financial technology, regulation? What's your advice to those people?
- [75:04]
Hillary Allen
It's a really hard time for them and I talk to my students a lot about the careers and the ground is shifting under our feet and in this time of uncertainty it's really hard to figure out what to do. So I would recommend investing in the fundamentals. And I think it's hard to do when AI is being pushed. But, but becoming a good communicator, learning how to write and speak to people clearly will never, I think, go out of fashion. And investing in relationships again. We're in this time where everything is sort of becoming technologized and atomized, et cetera. But in my career, having good relationships with people and I'm pretty sure you'll agree with this, has been one of the most successful things that has helped me along the way. And so just investing in personal relationships, I think think is always good advice.
- [75:51]
Barry Ritholtz
And our final question, what do you know about the world of fintech investing? Regulation today might have been useful 20, 25 years ago.
- [76:04]
Hillary Allen
Honestly, I'm not sure that there's much because the world was very different 20 to 25 years ago. You know, I always just invested in, in index funds basically. And that worked out frankly great. For the challenge is, and I study financial crises, the challenge is that when things go horribly wrong, everything is correlated. Everything is correlated.
- [76:31]
Barry Ritholtz
All correlations go to one in a crisis for sure.
- [76:33]
Hillary Allen
And I think we're on the brink of a crisis.
- [76:38]
Barry Ritholtz
When you say on the brink, days, weeks, months, years.
- [76:41]
Hillary Allen
Ah, well, John Maynard Keynes said that the market can stay irrational longer than you and I can stay solvent. So I will never put a timeframe on it. But I, you know, all warning indicators are flashing red at the same time as we are pulling back all regulatory apparatus. So I think it's safe to say we're on the brink of a crisis.
- [76:59]
Barry Ritholtz
How could that ever go wrong?
- [77:01]
Hillary Allen
How could it go wrong?
- [77:02]
Barry Ritholtz
Regulation unleashes the animal spirits. As long as we're talking about canes, it's all good.
- [77:11]
Hillary Allen
Perhaps not.
- [77:11]
Barry Ritholtz
Perhaps not. Hillary, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Hilary Allen, professor of Law at American University Washington College in D.C. and author of the book available for free online. Fintech A Summer Beach Read about how Silicon Valley is ruining things. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the 600 previous discussions we've had over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, or wherever you find your favorite podcast. I would be remiss if I didn't thank our crack staff that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Well, the holidays have come and gone once again. But if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift. Well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless.
- [78:29]
Hillary Allen
So here's the idea.
- [78:30]
Barry Ritholtz
You get it now, you call it
- [78:32]
Hillary Allen
an early present for next year. What do you have to lose?
- [78:35]
Barry Ritholtz
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time
- [78:39]
Cindy Crawford / Tara Davis Woodhull (Ad Voices)
50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy. See terms. Hey, did you know Dietz and Watson has been family owned for over 85 years? To us, that means it's more than a business. It's personal. We make our premium meats and cheeses the right way, even if it's slower or inconvenient or hard. Because that's how you get the highest quality. If it's not good enough for our family, it's not good enough for yours. And while others cut corners, we keep raising the bar. So if you see the Dietz Watson name, you'll know every slice has my family's seal of approval. Dietz Watson. It's a family thing since 1939.
- [79:19]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
This is Jacob Goldstein from What's yous Problem? When you buy business software from lots
- [79:24]
Hillary Allen
of vendors, the costs add up and
- [79:25]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
it gets complicated and confusing.
- [79:28]
Barry Ritholtz
Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a
- [79:31]
Hillary Allen
suite of enterprise apps that handles everything
- [79:33]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at o d o o.com com.
- [79:48]
Hillary Allen
That's o d o o com.