YouSaid · the spoken record

Hilary Allen

lines on the record: 87
first: 2026-02-20
most recent: 2026-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 know, you take Mark 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 from 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 place. 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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually, so the book I really like on this is Margaret O'Mara's book, The Code Who Does She does a great history of Silicon Valley. And yeah, I think the... The understanding that there was a quid pro quo has sort of fallen away. So always the private sector has commercialized this technology. But if we have an unwillingness to sort of”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Laws that they lobbied for in the late 70s, I believe, changes to ERISA, which allowed pension funds to invest in venture capital basically didn't exist before. And at that same period, they were lobbying for changes to capital gains taxation.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, 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. And so the really long-term investment comes from the state and has always done. And then it's commercialized. And I think that that sort of has worked well, except that you get to the point where 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”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And, you know, and I think if you look at the iPhone, a lot of the individual technologies that went into that again came from.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, again, the whole story of tech, the internet and smartphone boom, is very much based on technologies developed by the government.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't want us suckling on the teeth of the state because they might have to fund that with taxes, but they're okay suckling themselves.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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...”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one of the do not pays. I think it's a firm that's theirs. I always get mixed up. They were very early investors in Robin Hood, the fintech trading stock app.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that that's a good thing. But they basically built the crypto industry. The narrative around crypto 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 Andreasen Harowitz does is it doesn't just invest, 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 laws changed, to accommodate their business models. So, yeah, there's crypto, but they've also been at the sort of the forefront of”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. No, and they sort of 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 businesses. And so they're essentially taste makers.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So not intentionally, but it just turned out that way as I wrote this book almost every fintech business I looked at had been funded by Andreessen Horowitz. They had been sort of the lead. So they”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just venture. Yeah, venture capital model in Silicon Valley. So it's sort of got this sheen around it that's iconoclastic and they make bets on these moonshots that'll save all of humanity and yada yada yada. But in fact, 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 having access to pension funds, by virtue of sort 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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. What we need are some kind of public safety nets to sort of make and to higher minimum wage and higher social security benefits.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then when you look at the business model and you see that a significant chunk of the people are incurring these late fees, then that's the”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Existentially, yeah. No, we don't charge interest. There are late fees if you don't pay, but that's not the same as interest. That's true.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's not said 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 have 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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 products.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. You know, there are fintech lending that is replicating some of the predatory payday lending that we've seen before.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, the party line. This technology is revolutionary. This technology is making things more efficient. This technology is fixing things. And 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”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I don't love. Philanthropy in that sense supplementing democratically sort of elected policies. It gives a lot of sort of discretion and power to people as to how they want to distribute their large ass 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 larges”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think 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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 in 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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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. 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, etc. And so, you know, my real takeaway was always to have the most holistic perspective possible to”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, Dodd-Frank wasn't passed to 2010, 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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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-Steagall 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 and said, ooh, yeah, probably shouldn't have done that.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is always implemented has really encouraged trust in the US stock market and 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 it'll be.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I think it's a function of where you are in a particular time. I think people's memories fade really quickly.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really thick book with a really thick index even. And 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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 into 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 the nice thing.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2026-02-20 · Masters in Business · How AI Could Freeze Progress with Hilary Allen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source