Speaker 1: I'm t T and I'm Zakiah, and this is Dope Labs.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore
Speaker 1: science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship.
Speaker 1: We are in a world that is more and more
Speaker 1: and more online. I feel like I'm constantly online. I'm
Speaker 1: never offline. There you go, and I feel like our
Speaker 1: pockets and wallets are not exempt from that either. M
Speaker 1: this episode, we're diving into fintech. With the rise of
Speaker 1: AI and technology, there seems to be promises of banking
Speaker 1: and finances that are hyper personalized, instant, seamless, more secure,
Speaker 1: basically daft punk, harder, better, faster, stronger, organ manner manner.
Speaker 1: All right, let's jump into the rest ofation. What do
Speaker 1: we know? Okay, so we're not new to fintech, which
Speaker 1: is short for financial technology. We've talked about fintech in
Speaker 1: another lab, but we know that there's a little bit
Speaker 1: more to this. Yeah. Yeah, Fintech is a broad term
Speaker 1: and it encompasses various categories of apps and platforms. Some
Speaker 1: of them are for payments and transfers think PayPal and Vemo,
Speaker 1: investing in trading apps, sometimes even saving like Acorn, and Robinhood.
Speaker 1: There's banking and budgeting apps. I use Copilot, not Microsoft Copilot,
Speaker 1: you know, same name, but different tasks. Right. We also
Speaker 1: talked about by now pay later apps, so that's like
Speaker 1: Klarna and things like that. And there's also cryptocurrency, which
Speaker 1: we haven't talked about as much, but those platforms are included.
Speaker 1: And there are so many promises of fintech revolution with
Speaker 1: blockchain and decentralizing finance and how financial technology can improve
Speaker 1: access for people who are underbanked and underserved. But how
Speaker 1: does it all work? It just feels like words that
Speaker 1: and said, you know, how do we get to that point?
Speaker 1: Are we on the blockchain? All right? So what do
Speaker 1: we want to know? I think let's start with the
Speaker 1: history of this, because it just feels like one day
Speaker 1: we were all say authentech or it was just all around.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you that movie Dope that came out
Speaker 1: a while ago. That was the first time I ever
Speaker 1: heard of anything like crypto and I don't know what
Speaker 1: that is, but they were ahead of their time because
Speaker 1: it then it felt like in the pandemic, everybody had NFTs,
Speaker 1: everybody was trying to buy crypto or bitcoin or whatever,
Speaker 1: and I was like, what is going on? And it
Speaker 1: promised a lot, but did it deliver? I don't hear
Speaker 1: a lot of folks talking about it. It feels like the
Speaker 1: people who wan want big and early and early, right,
Speaker 1: But what does that mean for the future of fintech?
Speaker 1: And with us being on the precipice of a financial crisis,
Speaker 1: to many of us, it already feels like a financial crisis.
Speaker 1: What does that mean? Yeah, and with anything that has
Speaker 1: to do with money in this country, there are winners
Speaker 1: and losers, so to speak. So how does fintech help?
Speaker 1: But also how does it hurt? Yeah? I think these
Speaker 1: are great questions. Let's jump into the dissection. In today's lab,
Speaker 1: we have Hillary Allen.
Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Hillary Allen. I'm a law professor at the
Speaker 2: American University Washington College of Law and the author of
Speaker 2: Fintech Dystopia, which you can access online for free at
Speaker 2: fintech Dystopia dot com.
Speaker 1: I would love to have us kind of jumpstart and
Speaker 1: jump in at a very introductory level into fintech. Can
Speaker 1: you describe in plain language like what fintech is and
Speaker 1: kind of shine a light where folks may not really
Speaker 1: know they're using fintech.
Speaker 2: Honestly, it's going to be tricky to do because people
Speaker 2: don't use the term in the same way, right, right,
Speaker 2: So you know, obviously it's a combination of the words
Speaker 2: financial and technologies. So when we talk about fintech, we're
Speaker 2: usually talking about particular category of financial technologies that have
Speaker 2: been in use since the two thousand and eight financial crisis.
Speaker 2: They're usually using apps, there may be some AI involved,
Speaker 2: there may be some blockchain involved, So those are sort
Speaker 2: of the technologies that are being used. But it's really
Speaker 2: sort of more of a business model or marketing type
Speaker 2: description than a category of technology. So one person's fintech
Speaker 2: may very well not be someone else's fintech.
Speaker 1: You said something and I was like, please, finally someone
Speaker 1: who can answer my questions. Blockchain?
Speaker 2: You want me to You want me to explain blockchain
Speaker 2: to you?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Sure. What a blockchain really is is a database, right.
Speaker 2: We record asset ownership on it, and you perform transactions
Speaker 2: on it by moving asset from one person to another person. That's, frankly,
Speaker 2: how we process all financial transactions these days using databases.
Speaker 2: The thing that's a little different about a blockchain is
Speaker 2: that there aren't trusted, permissioned people who we are in
Speaker 2: charge of saying, yep, this person does have that asset already,
Speaker 2: I'm going to move it across for them instead. It's
Speaker 2: supposed to be that sort of anyone can theoretically can
Speaker 2: process the transaction, and that anyone can check to see
Speaker 2: if a person has the asset by looking at the blockchain,
Speaker 2: because they're publicly available. That has the potential to be abused.
Speaker 2: Right if you think about imagine anyone being able to
Speaker 2: move money in an out of your bank account. Right, so,
Speaker 2: need to have something in place to discourage bad actors
Speaker 2: from spending the same asset twice or stealing assets. And
Speaker 2: so what they have are these game theory based mechanisms
Speaker 2: things they get called proof of work proof of steak
Speaker 2: that are expensive essentially to participate in. And so you're
Speaker 2: discouraged from doing bad transactions because it's going to cost
Speaker 2: you something. So that's sort of the the logic behind these,
Speaker 2: but it's actually quite expensive to participate in these game
Speaker 2: theory based mechanisms for approving transactions.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, So blockchain is an online record that folks
Speaker 1: can see and that a lot of computers can keep
Speaker 1: up a copy of and when new information gets added,
Speaker 1: it's hard and expensive to do fraud, okay without folks noticing. Okay,
Speaker 1: So that's what they say is the security. And so
Speaker 1: people use blockchain for things like cryptocurrency and tracking who
Speaker 1: owns something digitally like an NFT. You remember those NFTs
Speaker 1: with the monkeys in space and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, and blockchains matter because it helps people agree on
Speaker 1: what happened without needing a company to be in charge
Speaker 1: of the records. So it's basically like how banks work
Speaker 1: for us and our money. Sounds like we remade a bank,
Speaker 1: but without regulations. I don't know.
Speaker 2: No, you literally just described the crypto industry. They remade
Speaker 2: everything that was already in finance, only without regulation.
Speaker 1: One of the things that stood out is you mentioned
Speaker 1: fintech as being this category of technologies and applications that
Speaker 1: came on the tail of the two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: financial crisis. Now people are not saying we're having a
Speaker 1: financial cris Well, some people are say I'm having one,
Speaker 1: but there are some people who are in denial. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But I feel like we're not always saying like we're
Speaker 1: in a financial crisis. It doesn't feel like the news
Speaker 1: is saying it the way it did in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight.
Speaker 2: We're not in a financial crisis yet, like we're in
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight. I think we're on the brink
Speaker 2: of one. But I think the point you're making is
Speaker 2: really important point, which is that it's been a long
Speaker 2: time since sort of the economy doing well meant that
Speaker 2: everyday people were doing well. Right. Economic inequality has been
Speaker 2: widening for decades, and we're now at the point where
Speaker 2: you know, people working full time are often just scraping by.
Speaker 2: We're going to focus on making the economy good for people.
Speaker 2: And now even a good economy doesn't help half the population, right,
Speaker 2: So even in a good economy, a lot of people
Speaker 2: are struggling. The sad news is that I think we're
Speaker 2: on the brink of another financial crisis. So we're now,
Speaker 2: I think, on the brink of a bad economy, which
Speaker 2: is going to be problematic for those who were already
Speaker 2: struggling and others.
Speaker 1: Well, what does fintech get right?
Speaker 2: It's funny because I criticize fintech a lot, and people
Speaker 2: assumes then that I'm like playing defense for the banks
Speaker 2: and saying that everything was perfect with the banks, which
Speaker 2: is not the case. I've been criticizing banks for longer
Speaker 2: than I've been criticizing anything else. And one thing fintech
Speaker 2: has done reasonably well, I think is, you know, I
Speaker 2: identify a lot of the pain points right that people
Speaker 2: were excluded from financial services, were excluded from opportunities, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And so a lot of the people in the fintech
Speaker 2: industry sort of say the right things because they've identified
Speaker 2: the right problems, but they don't have solutions to those problems,
Speaker 2: because if you think of what the problems are at
Speaker 2: a metal level, there this economic precarity we're just talking about,
Speaker 2: and when people are barely getting buy you're not going
Speaker 2: to solve that by giving them investment opportunities because people
Speaker 2: don't have enough money to invest, you know. And then
Speaker 2: what we see is that the investment opportunities that are
Speaker 2: being pushed on people who have very little to invest
Speaker 2: look an awful lot like gambling. I'm talking about crypto,
Speaker 2: I'm talking about some of these stock trading options apps,
Speaker 2: and so this is money people can't afford to lose.
Speaker 2: Another way when we're trying to solve economic pricarity with
Speaker 2: financial services is to say well, people need to be
Speaker 2: able to borrow more. So now we're talking about buy now,
Speaker 2: payof later, we're talking about earned wage access programs, we're
Speaker 2: talking about fintech lending platforms that sometimes look just like
Speaker 2: payday lending, only they have a fancy or app right,
Speaker 2: and financial services are in those circumstances are most likely
Speaker 2: to be predatory and exploitative because they can't really respond
Speaker 2: to the economic procarity, which we need to get at
Speaker 2: with increasing the minimum wage, increasing social security benefits, bringing
Speaker 2: down healthcare costs like that, that's what needs to be solved.
Speaker 1: There. What other types of financial services problems do we
Speaker 1: see in the US that we really need to address.
Speaker 2: So we have a lot of people in this country
Speaker 2: who are unbanked, they don't have access to banking services,
Speaker 2: and we've seen a lot of neo banks, fintech banks
Speaker 2: try and fill that voice. But what they don't come
Speaker 2: out and say is that you don't get deposit insurance
Speaker 2: with those neo banks, those fintech banks. They may have
Speaker 2: some arrangement with a bank where it's sometimes covered depending
Speaker 2: where your money sits, but if you're forfeiting some consumer
Speaker 2: protections when you're using those instead of an ensured regulated bank.
Speaker 1: Because when a bank is insured, that means if anything happens,
Speaker 1: they have to give you your money. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: check your account details. Also if you go to the teller,
Speaker 1: if anybody's still driving to the bank, if you go
Speaker 1: to the teller, on the window, you'll see FDIC and
Speaker 1: the Federal I think the minimum amount is like two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand dollars per account. That's how much
Speaker 1: they will ensure.
Speaker 2: So there are plenty of countries around the world that
Speaker 2: just pass laws saying, guess what banks you need to
Speaker 2: offer extremely low cost or no cost bank account everybody.
Speaker 2: And that is I think the real solution to limited
Speaker 2: access to financial services, not these sort of alternatives that
Speaker 2: don't protect your funds the same way banks to it.
Speaker 1: I think that's such a great point about the folks
Speaker 1: who are unbanked and underbanked. The FDIC said that fourteen
Speaker 1: point two percent of households are underbanked, so that had
Speaker 1: bank accounts but used non bank services, just like you
Speaker 1: were talking about. And when we then dig a little
Speaker 1: bit deeper into the demographics of folks that are most
Speaker 1: likely to be unbanked or underbanked, we see that there's
Speaker 1: a racial disparity there as well, and so there's cascading
Speaker 1: effects and there's compounding effects because of that.
Speaker 2: For sure, the users of fintech services, many of these
Speaker 2: fintech services are disproportionately black and Hispanic, and as I said,
Speaker 2: there are often fewer consumer protections than if you're using
Speaker 2: more traditional financial services. I want to point out something
Speaker 2: because it's really important. You mentioned unbanked and underbanked, and
Speaker 2: they're two very different problems. Right, So if you're unbanked,
Speaker 2: you don't have a bank account at all. It's very
Speaker 2: expensive to be unbanked. You've got to use check cashing
Speaker 2: services for everything, etc. So that kind of problem is
Speaker 2: solved by the solution I mentioned just before about giving
Speaker 2: everybody a bank account. Under banked, now we're getting more
Speaker 2: the economic precarity problems, because these are people that have
Speaker 2: access to financial services but simply don't have enough money
Speaker 2: to make ends meet. Right they can't wait a couple
Speaker 2: of days for their paycheck to clear. That is something
Speaker 2: we could actually fix by law, by the way, Congress
Speaker 2: could just say paychecks clear quicker.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: It's not a tech problem at all. So much of
Speaker 2: this is political economy. We should fix that, but also
Speaker 2: we shouldn't have half the country so desperate that they
Speaker 2: can't get buy for a few days until they're check
Speaker 2: clears right, right, So a lot of the underbank stuff
Speaker 2: really ties to this economic precarity, and financial services products
Speaker 2: can't really fix that problem. They can serve as a
Speaker 2: bit of a band aid, but sometimes that band aid
Speaker 2: lessens the pressure to actually fix the problem. And also
Speaker 2: that band aid can also be quite exploitative lucrative for
Speaker 2: the providers, while at the same time, myers the people
Speaker 2: who need those services even more in debt or they
Speaker 2: lose money gambling essentially, and then they're in a worse
Speaker 2: position than they were before.
Speaker 1: So I think I use traditional banking services. That's what
Speaker 1: I grew up on. I mean, my mom gave me
Speaker 1: a fake check book at a very early age and
Speaker 1: was like, you have to balance this, and I was
Speaker 1: writing my grandmother checks for dinner, like thank you for dinner.
Speaker 1: I love here you go unlimited deposits though it was
Speaker 1: not insured either. But when I think about that, and
Speaker 1: I think about some of the things that I've used
Speaker 1: for convenience, like not check cashing services, but things where
Speaker 1: you like even in starting a business, things that feel frictionless.
Speaker 1: I think part of the traditional banking system is it
Speaker 1: feels like there's so much friction, like you have to
Speaker 1: have these many differ types of forms of ID to
Speaker 1: open an account and an address that matches your on
Speaker 1: your license, it has to match your bills or whatever.
Speaker 1: So when you're moving and things like that, it becomes
Speaker 1: very difficult when things feel frictionless like this, like you
Speaker 1: are the cost that's being paid, Like your information, your
Speaker 1: data that becomes the cost. Is that the same way
Speaker 1: for fintech.
Speaker 2: I think it's always true. When you're not paying for
Speaker 2: the product, you are the product. And payments data is
Speaker 2: so valuable to these companies because think about it, when
Speaker 2: you post something on social media, you're showing the world
Speaker 2: what you want them to see. When you're actually buying stuff,
Speaker 2: that's what you really care about, right, So payments data
Speaker 2: is very very juicy and very very valuable. I want
Speaker 2: to come back to this point about frictions and so
Speaker 2: much of what we see in tech, and I'm not
Speaker 2: just talking about finance here, and like tech in general,
Speaker 2: it's all about making things simpler, easier, reducing frictions and
Speaker 2: stuff but and this alludes to something you just said, like,
Speaker 2: not all circumstances are the same, right when you know,
Speaker 2: we always hear like make money as easy as sending
Speaker 2: an email or a photograph. Well, if your email or
Speaker 2: your photo never gets there, too bad, so sad. Right
Speaker 2: if your money disappears, that's a much bigger deal. Yes,
Speaker 2: So sometimes when the stakes are high, there are some
Speaker 2: frictions for a reason, which doesn't mean they all should
Speaker 2: be there, and we should definitely think about which ones
Speaker 2: we should eliminate. I'm not saying we should just stick
Speaker 2: with the status quo. But convenience comes at a cost, right,
Speaker 2: and sometimes having some inconvenience can be worthwhile when the
Speaker 2: steaks are really really hot. Sometimes investing in sort of
Speaker 2: the boring aspects of like just making sure your stuff
Speaker 2: is in a bank and someone is keeping an eye
Speaker 2: on it is worth it. I mean, even if you
Speaker 2: have like a PayPal account or a Venmo account, if
Speaker 2: you keep your money in a wallet, but then it's
Speaker 2: it's not insured, it's just part of their assets. If
Speaker 2: they were to go bankrupt, that stops being You become
Speaker 2: an unsecure creditor and you wait years for their bankruptcy
Speaker 2: to go through. So as much as it can be
Speaker 2: a little inconvenient and boring, like, I highly recommend keeping
Speaker 2: your money in an FDIC inshored bank.
Speaker 1: There are a few things that popped out to me,
Speaker 1: and one of them was regulations and Congress and how
Speaker 1: they play a role in this. When you think about
Speaker 1: moments in US financial history, like the post two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight Dodd Frank era and things like that, what
Speaker 1: patterns do you see with regulators and what does that
Speaker 1: history tell us about the future as fintech continues to evolve.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question, And if you don't mind,
Speaker 2: I'm going to go a little further back than two
Speaker 2: thousand and I'm going to go back to the nineteen
Speaker 2: twenties because I think that's the analog for our moment now. So,
Speaker 2: you know, the Roaring twenties, there was huge wealth inequality.
Speaker 2: People were buying stocks and bonds left, right and center,
Speaker 2: from door to door salesmen. They often had nothing behind them.
Speaker 2: People this is people would talk about it over their
Speaker 2: fences of parties, et cetera. And then there's not really
Speaker 2: much regulation around that, and then we have a giant
Speaker 2: stock market crash in nineteen twenty nine. That precipitates a
Speaker 2: banking crisis where banks start failing left, right, and center.
Speaker 2: There's not deposit insurance yet, and we end up with
Speaker 2: the Great Depression. And so the response to that was
Speaker 2: to put in place what has become the sort of
Speaker 2: the backbone of our financial regulatory infrastructure, deposit insurance, banking regulations,
Speaker 2: splitting banks that sort of do classic banking business from
Speaker 2: investment banks. We get the securities laws, which basically say,
Speaker 2: if you want to sell stocks and bonds to the public,
Speaker 2: you've got to make disclosures and you've got to register
Speaker 2: with the sec Things start to unravel a little bit
Speaker 2: in the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties. In nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine they allow for investment banks and commercial banks
Speaker 2: to come back together again. We get laws that say, oh,
Speaker 2: you're not allowed to regulate certain financial products like derivatives,
Speaker 2: because that's we don't want to hurt innovation. They keep
Speaker 2: saying that. Then starts spiraling out of the control, and
Speaker 2: then we have a financial crisis. In two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: Some things TT and I've been talking about for our
Speaker 1: listeners about gambling and like how it seems to be
Speaker 1: little micro gambling everywhere and the like. Were they doing
Speaker 1: that in the nineteen twenty two Yes see.
Speaker 2: There was a really interesting article that came out, like
Speaker 2: I think in twenty twenty one in the Atlantic about
Speaker 2: America's gambling addection metastasizing, and they said that basically, in
Speaker 2: times of uncertainty and precarity, you always see more gambling.
Speaker 2: So like around the French Revolution, everybody was gambling. It's
Speaker 2: just you know, it's it's something that happens.
Speaker 1: Why didn't they teach us that in the history books?
Speaker 2: That's a good question.
Speaker 1: I just am thinking about how it feels like we're
Speaker 1: always behind the technology. We're always behind and protecting the people,
Speaker 1: And I don't know how we change that because that
Speaker 1: doesn't feel limited to finance. It feels like that for
Speaker 1: it feels like that for space travel, it feels like
Speaker 1: that for everything, environmental pollution.
Speaker 2: AI And the answer is it's nothing to do with
Speaker 2: the technology, right, So the technology would have you believe
Speaker 2: that the law can't keep up with the technology law totally?
Speaker 2: Can you just have broad functional laws and you enforce
Speaker 2: it as new things evolve? You know your reason by
Speaker 2: analogy law totally can keep up with developments, but the
Speaker 2: money doesn't want it to. And that is the issue, right.
Speaker 2: It's not that the law can't keep up with technology,
Speaker 2: it's that those who are developing the technology have a
Speaker 2: very vested interest in making the law seem obsolete. And
Speaker 2: money talks. So you know, the answer to your question
Speaker 2: is really a political economy story, which is like, how
Speaker 2: the hell do we get regulatory apparatus that actually focuses
Speaker 2: on protecting people from harm and doesn't just favor the
Speaker 2: interests of the wealthy who are pushing this stuff. One
Speaker 2: of the sort of things I talk about a lot
Speaker 2: in this fintech dystopia book that I published is the
Speaker 2: importance to laugh at the wealthy, the importance to laugh
Speaker 2: at when we're told stories about all this stuff that
Speaker 2: technology is going to do, and how amazing it's going
Speaker 2: to be with the space travel and the AI, and
Speaker 2: how we can't possibly rein it in because you know,
Speaker 2: we'll be shooting ourselves in the foot. We need to
Speaker 2: collectively laugh at that a little because the people who
Speaker 2: are saying this often, to be clear, aren't even grounded
Speaker 2: to the technology. They're people that developed an app or
Speaker 2: a browser, twenty years ago, made a ton of money
Speaker 2: and now think they know everything about everything. We've got
Speaker 2: Elon Musk telling us that we're just going to terraform
Speaker 2: Mars and move there and then get people who actually
Speaker 2: know anything about it. They're like, yeah, no, that's not
Speaker 2: going to happen. But we have to listen to these
Speaker 2: people because they have such all out and megaphone, because
Speaker 2: they have so much money. So I hope we can
Speaker 2: at least laugh at them a little bit.
Speaker 1: So that leads to my next question is, as the
Speaker 1: citizens of this country, how do we prepare ourselves for
Speaker 1: what is possible to come? And how do we hold
Speaker 1: our elected officials accountable? What should we be asking for?
Speaker 1: What should we be saying is needed in order to
Speaker 1: protect ourselves the common people?
Speaker 2: One thing, and this is very niche, but I actually
Speaker 2: think it's really worth looking at. So the crypto industry
Speaker 2: has been very aggressive in their political spending. In the
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four election cycle, Over half the corporate pack
Speaker 2: money spent was spent by the crypto industry. So think
Speaker 2: about that. You know there's pharma whatever, half of it
Speaker 2: was crypto.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of money to be spent. So when
Speaker 1: you think about packs, and when you hear the term pack,
Speaker 1: I'm always like, oh, political groups, what are they doing.
Speaker 1: They're working together because they have policy or certain laws
Speaker 1: they want to be passed, and so these groups put
Speaker 1: money behind candidates that are aligned with their interest. So
Speaker 1: you begin to see people who are more and more
Speaker 1: pro crypto because they want friendlier rules for the crypto
Speaker 1: industry and these are things we should be paying attention to.
Speaker 2: And they were so pleased with how it worked out
Speaker 2: that they're getting ready to do it again for the
Speaker 2: twenty twenty six election cycle. And also, so the same
Speaker 2: people who are sort of behind the crypto industry push there,
Speaker 2: particularly the venture capital firm Dries and Horowitz, want to
Speaker 2: do the same thing for AI, right, and so they're
Speaker 2: doing the same strategy of forming their super PACs and
Speaker 2: basically putting a target on the back of anybody who
Speaker 2: they think will get in the way of their AI ambitions.
Speaker 2: And I have spoken to people off the record in
Speaker 2: Congress who have admitted that they have voted for legislation
Speaker 2: because they're afraid of this money, even when they know
Speaker 2: it's bad legislation. So I think what we need in
Speaker 2: Congress is fighters and to make this money a liability.
Speaker 2: So the crypto industry came up with this website called
Speaker 2: stand withthcrypto dot com and it gives people ratings members
Speaker 2: of Congress. Like the NRA gives people's ratings for gunfriendliness,
Speaker 2: this gives people ratings for crypto friendliness. And as I said,
Speaker 2: this is both sides of the aisle. So if you
Speaker 2: see that your representative has an a from the crypto industry,
Speaker 2: you might want to consider supporting their primary challenger. I
Speaker 2: think we're going to see a wave of primary challengers
Speaker 2: in this next few months, and that might be a
Speaker 2: good litmus test for you.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a great way to think about it. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it right now. Okay, Yes, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be like, get tell me where you live and I
Speaker 1: will tell you. Yes, this is an amazing website. There's
Speaker 1: so many a's so that's a lot of money. Though,
Speaker 1: that's a lot, a lot of work to do. Mmmm,
Speaker 1: We've got work to do, folks. That's what that Soon
Speaker 1: they'll probably be a similar website for AI so we can.
Speaker 2: Look well exactly well, and honestly, you don't even need
Speaker 2: one because it's the same people the same thing, right,
Speaker 2: Like there's the Venn diagram of crypto support and AI
Speaker 2: supporters our girl.
Speaker 1: Yes, I think we've asked a lot of questions and
Speaker 1: we've focused on like what is fintech gotten wrong? What
Speaker 1: is banking gotten wrong? Is there looking ahead? Is there
Speaker 1: anything you're hopeful about or optimistic about, or that you
Speaker 1: think fintech might get right?
Speaker 2: So, fintech is such a big umbrella and there's so
Speaker 2: many different things. There are places where there are frictions
Speaker 2: you want to fix, right. There are some people that
Speaker 2: are doing payments technologies that can speed things up in
Speaker 2: a way that doesn't sacrifice regulatory protections and things like that.
Speaker 2: I think there's some opportunities there, But I think so
Speaker 2: much of what we want to fix and we look
Speaker 2: to finance to fix or not financial service industry problems. Right.
Speaker 2: So I guess if I'm talking about my silver lining here,
Speaker 2: I'm hoping maybe that if we see all this stuff
Speaker 2: blow up, will be a little less credulous promises that
Speaker 2: these are things that tech business models can fix, and
Speaker 2: maybe then we do the hard work of getting the
Speaker 2: minimum wage increased, of improving employment benefits, you know. But
Speaker 2: I mean maybe that's just a pie in the sky.
Speaker 2: But it's just the real solutions are not in the
Speaker 2: technology for most of these problems.
Speaker 1: Anytime I hear stuff like this, it always makes me
Speaker 1: feel two things. One, I feel very very frustrated with
Speaker 1: elected officials and the way that the money moves, and like,
Speaker 1: because we go to the polls, we vote for people
Speaker 1: and we expect for them to have our best interests
Speaker 1: at heart, and it doesn't feel like that. The other
Speaker 1: thing that it makes me feel is that as we
Speaker 1: turn on people's microphones, like you, Hillary, and you share
Speaker 1: this information and people hear it, we also have the
Speaker 1: power to make some changes and to ask more so
Speaker 1: that we can have the rights that we deserve as citizens.
Speaker 1: You know, like we shouldn't feel constantly duped by our
Speaker 1: elected officials, and that feeling should be nonpartisan and we
Speaker 1: should all be really fed up with it and really
Speaker 1: hold their feet to the fire.
Speaker 2: Here here, I mean, it's primary season, people, It's time
Speaker 2: come on.
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Speaker 1: Labs podcast. You can find me tt on X threads
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Speaker 1: production of Lemonada Media. Our supervising producer is Keegan Zemma.
Speaker 1: Dope Labs is sound designed, edited, and mixed by James Sparber.
Speaker 1: Lemonada's Senior Vice President of Content and Production is Jackie Danziger.
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Speaker 1: is Alison Tanter. Original music composed and produced by Takayasuzawa
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Speaker 1: Dia and Zakiah Wattley