TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #119: Chris Arnade

Episode Date: November 26, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Chris Arnade, Author of Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, to discuss: - Traveling through back row America - Cognitive hubs and spatial redistribution - Trading on Wall Street - Connecting with "the other" - Retribution as politics - The importance of community - much more Follow Chris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Chris_arnade Pick up Dignity: https://www.amazon.com/Dignity-Seeking-Respect-Back-America/dp/0525534733 Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Casa. Use promo code “TFTC” to get up to $250 off your Casa membership … or hit their team up [e-mail] for a free demo, or to put them to the test with your hardest OpSec questions! Subscribe to our YouTube channel: tftc.tv Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

well hey there freaks it's your boy marty bank here with his am radio voice this morning here on a beautiful tuesday morning before thanksgiving here in the united states and myself a good monday night with family and friends watching a little boxing now i'm here to introduce this episode of chris arnade really excited for this one really excited for you freaks to hear this one chris is somebody for you freaks that don't know he's a photojournalist and author ex wall street Trader. He wrote a book called Dignity about America's back row. And basically, I found Chris on Twitter a few years ago. And the run up to the 2016 election, he was some odd man going into neighborhoods that many would deem unfavorable and talking to people. He

was sitting down and talking with people in middle America, taking pictures and sharing their stories on Twitter. So I've been following him for quite a while now and the stories that he's been sharing. And I was very fortunate to get Chris to agree to allow me to drive up to his house and sit down and chat. I am really excited for this episode. We don't talk a lot about Bitcoin. I try to goad Chris into diving more into Bitcoin. But yeah, we really just talk about dignity and the underlying societal problems that persist in america today at least from his point of view he's seen a lot of shit he's talked to a lot of people i think you guys are really going to like this episode i know i certainly uh had a lot of fun sitting down

and picking chris's brain chris if you're listening let me know if you're ever coming down to brooklyn to drink and make that happen this episode of tales from the crypt is brought you buy the cash app as you know cash app is the simplest way to send and save money and now it's the simplest way to try to grow your money introducing cash app investing unlike investing tools that only let you buy entire shares of stocks cash app lets you instantly invest as little or as much as you want we're stacking slivers of shares freaks this way when your favorite company's stock is just a little too expensive you can still own a piece with as little as one dollar and invest one dollar in a hundred dollar stock if you wanted to get that sliver of

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the code stacking at stacking stats uh stacking stats excuse me um go to the google play store or app store today this episode of tales from the crypt is also brought to you by our friends at casa freaks how protected are your c phrases does your key setup have one single point of failure are you even asking your question your questions are you even asking yourself these questions yet our friends at casa have drummed up the smartest and most secure way to holler your bitcoin no kyc no all coins no percentage fees on your bitcoin no one standing between you and your keys use the promo code tftc to get up to 250 off your casa membership and you can also just reach out to them directly at membership at team

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faradags and early access to all future kasa products so use the code tftc get up to 250 off go to keys dot uh excuse me keys.kasa slash keymaster to check out their multi-sig setup or email them directly at membership at team.kasa i hope you freaks enjoy this episode uh with chris arnade legend of the game uh enjoy Tales from the Crypt um bringing respect to america's back row or searching for respect for america's back row correct i actually don't know you have it written down seeking respect here you go in the back row america there you go um yeah so chris i was just telling you i've been a huge fan for you for years

for you freaks out there that uh don't under don't know of chris or or what you've been doing i'll explain how i found you i found you on twitter i think in the midst of the 2016 election when there was a lot of talk about deplorables and people in middle America and their thoughts and why they were bad people because they voted for Trump. And you were on the road going to small towns across America doing some incredible photojournalism, actually going to talk to people in these places

that the coastal elites were talking about. And it really, to me at least, created a lot of empathy And you really draw out a lot of the systemic problems that exist in our society. Well, thank you for having me, and thank you for that introduction. I will just add, I wasn't just going to small villages, towns. I was actually going to towns within the coastal, you know, 100 yards away from where the coastal elites live, where they don't go. Yeah. So, places like the Bronx or places like East New York and Brooklyn, where people drive through but they don't go.

Yeah, I'm right in the thick of that. Yep. So, why did you do this? What drove you to go on this journey to get this message out? It was kind of twofold. One was, as you had mentioned in the introduction, I was a Wall Street trader for 20 years. I joined Salomon Brothers, which some of your readers or listeners might know from Liar's Poker, which then became Citibank. Did you work with Louis Ranieri? We did not overlap. Okay.

But I joined in 93, and I think most of the people in the book had left by then. I actually didn't read the book before I got there, so I kind of came in blind. So I had 20 years on Wall Street as a bond trader. Um, and prior to that, I had been a PhD in physics, particle physics. And so, um, the way I thought about things all my life was very quantitative, very data centric, looking at literally sitting in front of computer screens, making judgments based simply on numbers. And through the course of those 20 years, I had kind of a slow realization

that maybe that was a very close minded way to look at the world. And so I started talking to people, realizing that to look behind the numbers and some of the, to look into the data, as it were, at a personal level. And so I started going on these, I always walk, take long walks, but basically 20-mile walks all through New York City and talking to people and just letting kind of whatever happened, happen. And it was also personally interesting. that's kind of, I learned a lot, but I also enjoyed myself a lot. I got to meet a lot of different people. Um, and so that was my way of relieving stress in some senses or my hobby. Um, and eventually it evolved into doing what I do now, which is effectively documenting, um, and writing about the people I meet on those walks. And those walks became drives and those

drives became, um, more extensive than just, you know, driving to Buffalo or so it became going all across the country yeah you've been all around alabama middle indiana any small town you can think of yeah i think over the course of the last seven years i kind of probably i think the number is between 300 400 000 miles i racked up on my car so um a lot of driving and um and that that meant with no real purpose beyond just going to places that people told me basically what unifies the places i've went to are they're generally places people tell you not to go um so i would actually do this little trick on twitter where i'd say hey i'm in michigan where should i go and then i would go where people told me not to go so if they said to go to blank i

would put an x through it and not go there um which was a way to kind of find you know places that have been overlooked in many ways yeah and so it seems like there is a great amount of people who are currently being overlooked in this country in particular and yeah i mean you know it's it's frustrating because there are a lot of people who read my book who come from that background or people who work with people documenting it in my book you know people who do non-profits perhaps or people who grew up in these communities and left who all look at me and go like, why doesn't anybody else get it?

Why don't they get that there's, you know, this is kind of, if not, you know, not close to the majority of human experience in the United States, and yet we don't talk about it, and we don't hear from them. We certainly don't hear from them on TV. We don't hear from them on Twitter.

We don't hear from them in the New York Times. We don't hear from them in The Economist or the Wall Street Journal. If we hear from them, it's generally someone like me telling their stories but in a very i i find in many cases when people do that they do in a very condescending way it's talking about what these people have done wrong and how they need to fix themselves and how we can help them fix themselves as opposed to just simply letting them talk yeah and a lot of that condescension comes from assumptions that the

way we're doing things is correct right that's well that's right that that what what happens is you use the word coastal elites, I use the term front row, basically the educated elite, who often are in the coast, but in certain neighborhoods in the coast only, really feel like they've got it figured out, and that if there's a problem, especially in a community, it's due to some fault in that community. It's not due to the fault of the policies the elites have put into place,

but it's due to the failings of the people. in these communities yeah now that's a big theme of this podcast is that uh sort of the kpis that we strive for as a country you know as an economy and that being gdp inflation um cpi in particular really aren't good things to strive for strive for because i would i would argue i'm not going to speak for others that a lot of this policy has driven a wedge in the inequality we're experiencing in in the country yeah i think there was somebody who reviewed my book who i i wish i could remember the line they use i would steal it from them which is um kind of the economy we created is is not conducive to to to building meaningful lives and communities and healthy communities

meaning that if you if you're going to build a meaningful life and you're going to build a a functional community within the structures we have, you have to overcome odds to do that. You're not incentivized to do that. You're incentivized to actually be atomized. You're incentivized to basically be, you know, to put it in kind of revolutionary terms, you're incentivized to suck it up and listen to the man.

Yeah, yeah. Shut up, don't think, consume, obey. Yep. Hop in, be part of the machine. And, you know, people respond—responding is not the right word. People have to deal with the incentives that they're given or the options they're given. You know, people operate within the structures that they find themselves in, and they often make the best decision within those structures. But when people look from the X-tide, they look at it as bad decisions when, in fact, they're just doing their best to deal with a system that's not working for them.

I think that's a very good point. And this is good to draw attention to what happened on Wall Street. And this is something I've – when I talk about – as I was an economics major, I worked at a managed futures fund out of college. And to some of my friends, I am the economics finance nerd. And a lot of people blame bankers in particular. And yes, there is definitely plenty of blame to go around, but they were just working, like you said, within a system that incentivized them to lever up. I mean, you know, there's a piece I wrote a long time ago that I, you know, basically, you know, why it's smart to be reckless on Wall Street. I mean, the incentives very much were aligned, you know, to do bad, to do unethical things.

And so, not surprisingly, people did unethical things. Well, not surprisingly, it's funny because you go back to the Great Depression and the government's response to that calamity was the Glass-Steagall Act. And you fast forward to 99, you have Travelers Group and Citibank join and basically destroyed Glass-Steagall with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. And they basically tore down the barriers, which basically stopped them from acting immoral, right? Yeah. And the Glass-Steagall Act was effectively dead by then already. Effectively, I mean, you know, it was killing something that was already dead. And it had died, basically it died a slow erosion starting in the 80s by just people, you know, bankers are, the elites and bankers are great at exploiting the gray area. You know, the way we build rules in this system is we make very hard laws for the poor people that give you no wiggle room.

And then we make very gray laws for the wealthy that gives people a lot of wiggle room. And that's how basically over time from through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, by the time I got to the Salomon Brothers, which became Travelers in 93, the Glass-Steagall was effectively dead. They weren't enforcing it. No one was behaving like it existed. um in my mind though if you want to look at kind of where um where the elites really uh fucked up and set a bad precedent it goes back to um a little known event at least little known nowadays um which was the tequila crisis which was um the mexico bailout in 95 or late 94, early 95. And the reason I referenced that was what had happened then was NAFTA had passed.

There was a lot of economic speculation in Mexico. Mexico collapsed. And the collapse of Mexico risked collapsing a lot of U.S. banks who had overextended themselves in Mexico, including the bank I worked at. And the way the new administration, the new Bill Clinton administration with its new undersecretary of treasury, Lawrence Summers, Larry Summers, dealt with it, he was a point person on it,

was a bailout. They bailed out Mexico and they bailed out Wall Street. I think it was, I don't remember the amount. I think it was 50 billion. but it was a precedent that it set a very bad precedent of this is how we deal with financial crises

we bail out banks we bail out markets and so that process of from the perspective of the policy people it worked Lehman which was overextended in Mexico survived

the Mexico bailout it might not have had Larry summer has not stepped in in 94 95 um and fast forward to 2007 and there you go right back where they were yeah even worse in between then there was a lot of other bailouts um and many of them again directed by um the u.s treasury department yeah and so what are your thoughts on bailouts in general are they necessary um okay in some instances and not others you know i mean i always my kind of view is i'm i'm a i'm a what happens in bailouts is we built we've built a system that requires them and it's how how convenient we we we require to bail out bankers when they get into

trouble we don't think about the other option which is to bail out the um public and so rather than direct $50 billion at salvaging, saving the market. The other option is to basically print money, for instance, and give it to individuals, which could have been done in 2007. Bail out the homeowners, not the banks. Well, yeah, and that's what you see people clamoring for now after six years of the greatest monetary base expansion the Fed's ever seen.

It seems as though that bailout to Wall Street sort of just went to asset prices, whether it be stocks or real estate and other rich stores of value. And now the left is becoming more popular with Andrew Yang trying to give everybody $1,000 per month. Bernie and Senator Warren leading the pack, it seems, for the Democrats. It seems like people are clamoring for that bailout of the back row, if you will. Right.

In my mind, if you're going to bail out somebody, it's better to bail them out. than it is to bail out the bankers. It's also probably more effective if your goal is the usual goal of policymakers, which is to increase the GDP, et cetera. But what happens is we don't have the structure in place to do it. And so when crises come, policymakers will say,

well, I don't have enough time to do this. I've got to use the old playbook. And not surprisingly, the old playbook benefits the elite. So we need a new playbook. And, you know, between the way compensation is provided on Wall Street, between that and how we bail out markets, it's all very much incentivized speculative crazy behavior. And so it's not surprising crazy speculative behavior happens.

No, so that's why Bitcoin, I think we need a whole new system and to sort of throw a wrench in what's happening now. And so I guess that's a question I have for you. The system that we're living under now has led to birth rates and family formation falling to lows we haven't seen in a while, suicide rates, opioid addiction at all-time highs. It seems that even though everything's good on paper, inflation's within around 2%, GDP's up and to the right

for the last decade or whatever, or better part of a decade. Uh, but the, the KPIs again, don't reflect the underlying, uh, vitality and health of the society. Right. And then, um, it feels like we've lost a bit of what this life is all about, which is family and community and what you try to get at in your book. Right. I mean, the, you know, the quants of one, I call it sometimes a revenge of the nerds.

the old the old 80s movie which is they took over baseball they take over wall street and they take over a lot of policy and one of the things that i say this as a phd in theoretical physics and as somebody who was a quant on wall street for 20 years i respect numbers i respect quantitative ability but the way i say it is science and the quantitative is very good at building bridges, but it's not necessarily good at building a meaningful life. And one of the problems is when you put everything in quantitative terms, you overlook those things that can't be measured or not easily measured. And so we've overemphasized that which we can measure easily, which is GDP, inflation, income, efficiency, profits. And we've underemphasized those things

that can't really be measured that easy, which is community, family, faith, place. And not surprisingly, over the last X number of years as we've done that, to obtain increased GDP and to obtain increased efficiency, we've destroyed a lot of things that we've chosen not to look at, i.e. not to measure, like community, meaningfulness, happiness. So it's a very narrow way of looking at the world. And it's a very dangerous way to look at the world. But one of the more frustrating things about it, it also feels right. And so the people who do this really think they're right.

And I can't blame them. I mean, I used to be one of them, and contrary to a lot of other people, I don't blame them per se. They really think they're on the right side of history. They really think they're doing good. They'll pull out all their data and say, look at all the good we've done. You know, people are wealthier. Poverty is down. Lifespans are, you know, not currently, but they used to be able to say lifespans are up, global poverty.

And so they really feel like they can't understand why anybody's criticizing them. Well, I'm going to call out one paper in particular that I know you noticed as well that makes me think, all right, maybe these guys just have no sense of reality. And it was the Richmond Fed's paper, Cognitive Hubs and Spatial Redistribution. Yeah, I mean. How could you honestly publish that? In their defense, they said it was a think piece, but, you know, come on. Right. I mean, I call it, you know, I got yelled at on Twitter for using the term colonialism because colonialism is strictly speaking about denying people voting rights.

But it's economic colonialism, this idea that, you know, we're going to have the hinterlands that kind of produce the stuff we need. But otherwise, that's where the dumb people go. They just described gulags, basically, in the paper. but yeah so i mean people wasn't i've ranted about this paper uh a few times in the last i think i'm the one who called it the hunger games yeah exactly you're creating the hunger games but just the orwellian uh name of the paper cognitive hubs and spatial redistribution it's like are they that dumb do they really think they're doing that good are they just trying to sneakily i think they really think they're doing good and so one of the frustrations

is it's been hard for me to engage them because they think you're attacking them because they're moral. They're on the right side of history, and you're clearly not if you can't see that. Or the way the elites, the way the left, and generally they're center-left more than center-right, but they're the same.

The way they dismiss something is just to look, it's condescending to snark on it. like you don't understand like how dare you um and one of the problems is the whole framework of their whole worldview is built to support their worldview not surprisingly so their way of talking about it as well where's your data right like you but no your point my whole point is is the data isn't measuring what i'm doing and that's why i'm going out and talking to people is because the data your worldview is very narrow and that it misses the things that the data misses And then the other thing, and think about it, their whole world framework is built on if you're right, you can argue better with data.

And so their response is, well, debate me, which is very much, again, playing on, it's like, you know, it's like playing the Eagles in their home field, right? It's like, you know, you've got a disadvantage, you know what I mean? Like that debating, debate by definition is kind of the way they judge what is right and wrong. whereas reality is a lot more nuanced than what can be decided in a physical debate with numbers yeah right because you sort of set the framing and yep in a way and you're you're doomed from the start yeah and so which is why my response to them was i'll come out you know come out with me go to this town of deplorables or this town of you know the ghetto either one both dismissive terms you know one one dismissive for whites the other dismissive towards blacks

come with me and actually talk to these talk to people and then try to explain to them the well actually well actually it's better that your factory moved and you're now a not a member of a cognitive hub you know like you know and then the the greatest disdain that the greatest where they show and within their framework even within their framework and on their home field where they show the complete, in my mind, the most misunderstanding is when they talk about people being physically able to move whenever. You know, the just move. Like, you know, Buffalo's dying, just move. Prestonburg, Kentucky's dying, just move. You know, and what that misses in my mind is, well, so much. You know, first of all, we shouldn't, is it positive to make us all

economic migrants within our own country right um but also it's within their you know also place the value of place family local connections are one of the few things that the poor are gifted at birth like it's it's a something that means something to them that has value to them not necessarily monetary that you don't have to have a resume to have that's maslow's hierarchy needs I mean, it's just it's something that gives you a place in the world, literally. And yet we're trying to take that away. So it's very elitist. It's saying the few things that we can gift to the poor through birth, like place and faith, things that don't require a resume to get in family are somehow easy to break and not valuable. But also within their framework, the just move thing is asking them to sell the one asset they have at the lows. Yeah, at the lowest, and especially where they're living. Yeah, and so on every level it's offensive. Within their worldview it's offensive.

Within a worldview that they don't see it's offensive. And it gets at a lot of how they think about the world, which is just widgets to be moved around in a spreadsheet. Yeah, and how do we break out of this mindset of we need to micromanage everybody? Cognitive hubs? what was the second part of the paper spatial redistribution yes

people are widgets to be moved around like on a checkerboard yeah you know we'll just move these people from here to there and that's why I say it's very colonialist because it treats it's kind of top down

you know yes the people in the spatial have have voting rights but uh it's a very much uh it's an extraction of value it's extraction of wealth and economic wealth from the hinterlands for the benefit of the of the cognitive hubs yeah no i'm actually happy you said uh it's all top down obviously is i'm actually reading a book right now called strong towns um i was on their podcast oh you are yeah um so i'm reading chuck's book right now but i think they chuck makes a good point about literally how uh our towns and our cities have been built uh via the expansion uh the monetary expansion post-world war ii we

sort of uh built all these these highway systems and these suburbs and uh cities and designed them poorly in haste uh while we were expanding our economy and it's coming uh to light decades later that there's a lot of infrastructure debt that comes when you build all this stuff and city debt and you get more dilapidated cities because people aren't literally designing the way these cities act in the physical space correctly. Yeah, I mean, it's very top-down.

And, I mean, it's funny when... I'm not a town planner type. You've walked around a lot, though. Yeah, but I notice it. And so one of the things that strikes me is you can put me blindfolded and drop me into any town. By just looking around, I can tell you if I'm a wealthy cognitive hub or not. And it's by the town planning. Like, the cognitive hub is overplanned.

Like, there will be three bike lanes and, you know, triple pedestrian and all this. And whereas in the back row, it's fucking libertarian, man. It's like, do it. People running through back alleys. it's like you know it's like self self um self-organized hive mind right yeah the perfect example like you uh design versus user experience right you have like a pavement that's very clean and well paved but there's like a patch of grass so you can see a clear trail yep uh well i just was in jakarta and one of my favorite things to do was that everybody has a moped um speaking of

town planning to be a little bit off um off off topic but um and everybody drives mopeds um but there's no stoplights at a lot of places and in an odd way it works like you know it just eventually i mean i'm sure i'm sure that i'm sure it doesn't work by town planner standpoint because the fatality rates or something but it's but it's it's kind of fascinating to watch how soft organization works yeah now i've seen those videos on youtube it is fascinating but we seem so dead said on not letting these systems emerge and being a top-down driven society yeah and i think you know a lot of that comes from again it's the it's the cognitive hubs really feeling like they're in the right and you know again and they have a lot of data on their side and so they would

look at the jakarta things and say well again fatality rates blah blah blah and so we have this this intense safety mindset that you know where that gets to the point where we're going to squeeze out you know we're going to we're going to squeeze out efficiency efficiency and fishing and safety to the point where you you take away the vitality of you suck suck away humanity um but again i really think they're right because you know they're building a safer more efficient society and you know that's their that's their religion and you're not gonna you're not and you're not gonna and they make a good strong case but that's maybe what they should do you know so they feel very strong that and again and i don't want to i'm not attacking them because they really are

well-intentioned this is really how you know they want they're doing right and they really are in in their mind doing right well to the uh probably silent majority of us outside of that system making these decisions who think something's terribly awry um it seemed i would argue i think this strongly i think we're a nation in need of immense healing very disconnected obviously with the polarity of our politics right now and it is how do you like shift the conversation to thinking about these social and non-tangible nebulous ideas of faith community um family from the the analytical quantitative growth side i have no idea and you know i think my pessimistic sizes say you don't and you know heads will roll eventually the peasants will

revolt you know it's that you know yeah it's that wizard of id cartoon i don't know you've seen where the king is sitting looking out the window and someone says the peasants are revolting he says of course like i think now i messed up the joke he says of course they are like they are revolting you know i messed up the joke sorry um but you know they're gonna they're gonna be toppled one way or the other and as a member of their club as a cognitive elite i've been trying to warn them that if you don't want things to go very badly and i don't want things to go very badly and they don't want things to go very badly we have to enact some changes here or else the changes are going to come from the bottom up and they're not going to be pretty like you know the

revolution, you know, you can, you can admire the goals of the, you know, you can admire the, why someone's being revolutionary, but they never play out well, right? Like it's not going to be pretty on the other side and it's going to do everybody, including the revolutionaries damage. So you, you'd rather the changes come in a wholesome way where the cognitive elite and their hubs recognize that something needs to be done and change their behavior and change the policy to integrate more the spatial hubs yeah it was actually my last not this isn't the last question it was the last question i have written down here but like are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future and so that my optimistic side is i think

the self the pessimistic side is i think they don't they continue to bury their heads in the sand um and eventually it just gets to be basically where both sides end up dehumanizing the other side the the front row in my language the front row scorns the back row the back row hates the front row they both treat each other as as subhumans um the hate goes both ways and eventually it just erupts into violence that's the very pessimistic scenario um and you get retribution and revenge becomes the goal of politics you know you look at latin america and a lot of the world that's the way it used to be the goal of political power is is revenge on your enemies um to attend enrich your own group and then retribution on the other and that's very bad and that plays out

I don't care if it plays out on both sides, and that's not good. My more optimistic side is that basically the system has enough correctives in it that the elites, the cognitive elites, realize they've got to change the system or else they're going to lose control. What are your thoughts on the background, just building a new complete system by themselves? You know, that's also, you know, silos is another way to go, right? Which is to kind of, in some senses, that's a nonviolent revolution, right? which is preferable to violence always, which is to diminish the power of the elites through alternative systems.

The problem is with that is I guess I'm just cynical about how people in power don't let go. Yeah. They just don't. Yeah. And they have a lot of power. And they don't let go for two reasons. One is they really, again, they think they're on the right side of history. And they really think they're right.

And so you're not going to let go if you think you're right. And the second is selfishness. Like, you know, you don't want to give up what you have. So one of the things I learned from Wall Street is the wealthy don't let go. How much have you looked in the Bitcoin? What? How much have you looked in the Bitcoin? Not much.

I'm all for alternative again I'm all I can tell you here's a rubber hits the road issue that frustrates me and it tangentially has to do with Bitcoin one of the things I deal with a lot is addicts and homeless people

and people in prison and I often help them out often that means I have to use Western Union do you know the fees on Western Union? 30%, right? It's absurd.

It's 15, it's like the VIG. Right. It's a scam. It's a complete scam. And so if I send someone 100 bucks, I pay 120. Yeah, 20 in fees. Now, anybody who spends any time with a working class knows that Western Union and money transfers is a big thing.

And so, especially for immigrants. And they get ripped off. And, you know, so when I don't look at these things, I'm not a policy person, but when Facebook announced its thing, Libra, there was a lot of snark about it. My response was, I hate Facebook. I got off of Facebook like two years ago. I think they have a lot of problems.

But my response was, that's great for Mexican-Americans. That's great. Everybody has Facebook. Everybody has WhatsApp, especially in Latin America. WhatsApp's more popular. So, you know, the current system as it is, the current banking system, the current monetary system, completely screws over the poor. I always say poverty is a friction. And friction takes a toll no matter what direction you move.

and that's what it's like it's like when they're trying to get rid of again everything every way they, all of their monetary policy is one of the things I always say about the cognitive hubs, the front row, is

they don't understand the lived realities of the people they advocate for so they don't know what it's like to be poor and they don't know just the logistics of being poor such as western union costing or just other you know you know just all that like you know they don't know what it is like um all the frictions that they accumulate and if they did they would have very different policies

i think and that's why i kind of that's go back to the optimistic question i hope that through projects like mine and other people they get out of their bubble out of their cognitive hubs spend six months in the hood or six months in you know a mexican-american community or six months and uh white working class neighborhood and they just by just by having to live to live with them these people recognize that a lot of their policies are misguided yes um i completely agree and i chris i think you would love bitcoin you should jump more down that because so really the reason i'm into bitcoin most importantly is i think monetary policy is at the root of the problem right you uh via monetary policy and slow inflation over

the course of decades you force people uh poor people particularly if they want to save any purchasing power throughout time they're forced to chase yield and stock market bonds whatever it may be if there was a money through which they could save their purchasing power uh throughout time that has no chance of being debased uh that would be again it's not a panacea but it is a tool that which the individual can use to preserve their purchasing power and therefore their economic

dignity over time the current system is very top down I will say that and it's also it's also very close minded in looking at other alternatives

because they're scared to give up the ghost. I mean, the Fed, you know, I have a lot of respect at many levels for the people at the Fed. But, you know, there's this outrage that the Fed's being politicized. And my response is I think it should be outrage that it hasn't been politicized before. I mean, the Fed has immense powers. They should not have it.

They have immense power. Nobody should have it, right? I don't know about that. I do know that if you have that much immense power, it should be subject to scrutiny. Yeah. And, you know, the period of time when the Fed was largely treated as untouchable. It's past us.

Yeah, it's past us, and it wasn't particularly a good time. you know greenspan arguably did more yeah and damaged than um you know and a lot of people irrational exuberance is needed we need it and um so i think the politicization of the fed is i'm not saying to be badly political but you know it deserves scrutiny like i mean they have a lot of power for people who are largely unelected yeah and they're trying to micromanage a multi multi-trillion dollar global economy yes so you know if you have that much power and that much say in policy you probably should be you should probably expect scrutiny expect scrutiny maybe you should be allowed to be

audited every once in a while i mean the the the thing about the modern day fiscal system and monetary system is it very much is it needs the it needs an aura of it needs a sense of untouchable to it to work

when you start looking behind and it's just very it's very mundane and it's it's basically like a Rube Goldberg machine it's one of those things that's you know

it's built on a lot of shaky foundations it's all confidence game yes it is well every all markets are entirely confidence game that's true and so they can't but they want to pretend like theirs is not right because it's important to to to them to work that way to be um the sense of like you know we're above

it all and like you know once the emperor once the curtain's removed you know it's a wizard it's a wizard of oz thing like so um they need to maintain this sense of seriousness yeah no that's why that's again that's another reason why bitcoin too because knowing how these monetary games work right so the world is continuously uh engaged in a currency war whether people want to want to admit it or not in the uh unspoken agreement of this currency war is that you never talk about it and trump's been talking about it ad nauseum well i promise look at it more how's that yeah oh bitcoin yeah oh i'm glad i'm just yeah i'm like we're focused on monetary policy here but um yeah look more into bitcoin chris i think you would uh really like it and the ethos

behind it like i said the the facebook thing would have helped poor people yes it definitely and that's uh um there's a lot of good companies around bitcoin that are using bitcoin to create uh so one of the problems with bitcoin for people in latin america in particular is volatility of the price so they need a vehicle through which what libra would have provided a stable coin that can hold their value, but they can transact digitally. There are companies out there that are working to allow these people to use their Bitcoin, which is very volatile, to get access to loans of stable coins.

So it's happening slowly but surely. But again, Bitcoin in particular is a new monetary good that just showed up in the world 11 years ago. We're trying to discover what it is and how it works. One of the things that's interesting is when you grow up on Wall Street like I did, or grew up in the front row or a cognitive hub.

You build these biases to new things that you don't even know you have. What do you mean by that? There's just certain things that elites roll their eyes at the minute they're announced or come out.

Bitcoin was one of those. There's a lot of other ones. They're kind of things that you just are supposed not to question. And one of the things that this project, the seven years has taught me

is to question everything. Because I had these biases, I realized, I always thought I was open-minded, but I was the person to immediately roll my eyes at something that wasn't kind of front row approved. You seem pretty open-minded to me. Now, but what I'm saying is even though you think you're open-minded, if you live in this, if you immerse yourself in this culture that is kind of the policy makers, the front row, the cognitive elite, whatever term you want to use, the coastal elites, you come with biases that you don't realize you have. And one of the biggest biases is basically what I'd call credentialism, which is you just roll your eyes at anything new that doesn't come from, quote. Oh, I saw you roll your eyes when I said I went to DePaul, not the University of Chicago.

I don't think I did. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. It was a joke. No, that is funny. But the thing is, like, so you just, you know, you just you just question free trade. You don't, you know, free trade is good. It's not questioned. um you know and bitcoin's bad because it's just it's a weird thing that poor people do i mean it's kind of one of those things like to entirely to give you i mean entirely um off topic a little bit of an odd example is when trump went to the ufc fight um in um

madison square gardens was booed and all these very thoughtful serious blue checkmark journalists were like he got booed by his base it's like dude man ufc is not his base like like i mean it's no ufc madison square gardens is is bros from bros from bronx who are going to go to don coquille and astoria after party like you know and sanders fans like you know it's like you don't know but and then then there came a second round of just dismissing the ufc as this like human cockfighting right like this off and i'm like you don't like just because it's poor people just because it's working class they hate it yeah you know and so you know i didn't particularly but ufc is another eye roll example like when i was working on wall street like initially when it came out that was

my reaction like i was supposed to dislike it but over the course of like eight years hanging out in bars and all the way it's on i grew to like it and because the participants enjoy it yeah that's actually very so i thought ufc was too barbaric mma in particular too barbaric and brutal i actually don't like seeing people because i've had many concussions i don't particularly like seeing it either but you know but people like it no like you said the athletes they it is what they train for their whole lives and they get a lot of enjoyment out of it and purpose more importantly yeah and so you know but it's it's again how the point i'm using is that anything that at all is affiliated with the back row the working class that is non-elitist is just

scorned but it's not always been this way like i was telling you i was listening to your econ talk episodes you were describing how in florida the the owner of the orange juice factory used to live in the town you would know that's right you wouldn't know whether or not he was well off or not that's right part of the community that doesn't happen anyway you know i that's that's the question i've not been able to answer and that's one of those things you you're not allowed that talk about in modern day, it's just cultural values. It was considered louche where I grew up. It was considered bad form to flaunt your wealth.

So what you're talking about, for those people who don't know, is I grew up in a small town in the south. I had two orange juice factories. And one of those orange juice factories was owned by a family who owned a lot of the groves around. And we knew they were wealthy because, you know, they owned the orange juice factory. But we didn't really know they were wealthy. I mean, like, they went to—kids went to public school with me, you know, shitty public school.

They worked the fields, like, you know, the orange groves, like everybody else did. They might have worked at a higher level, like they might have managed a shift or something, but not—you know, they still got dirty. Yeah, they were servant leaders. Yeah. And then I just, I remember finding out when I got to college or so, it was the first time I think they were in the Forbes 500. I mean, like, wait, like, whoa, like the kid who, you know, again, their measure that they were wealthy in the sense that when the kid got 18, their parents bought him a car. That was cool. It wasn't a used car. It might even be a new car. Like, no one else around us did that.

But still, it wasn't have a private island in the Bahamas, go to private boarding school, which is the kind of wealth they had. But, you know, now people of similar wealth, not similar wealth, but even less wealth in the town I grew up with flaunt their wealth. It's part of the culture now, right? It's like they now actually do go to private iron resorts in the Bahamas. So I don't know how that changes. There was a sense of obligation to the community that is not there anymore. Part of that's because, again, the factory no longer is there. It was bought by a conglomerate, which is now headquartered in Brazil, I think.

So the distance ownership is an issue. You know, when the owner is not part of the community that his company operates in, it's the spreadsheet thing I talked about initially. Like when the persons who pull, who are making the decisions is only caring about numbers on a spreadsheet and isn't in the community to see the effect of his policies or her policies or their policies. Yeah. Again, like the concept of a servant leader, servant leadership, it feels like it's dying art, right? Like somebody who's down to get in the trenches. And do you think we fit an extreme though? like if to me at least the last being in bitcoin in particular knowing where bitcoin is and just

observing pop culture so that's like a question that's been popping in my head as you've been going on here is like there's two parallel things going on like the the system of the monetary fiscal system and the way it affects individuals and then the culture like what do people value culturally and what do they strive for it seems like to me at least as a millennial 28 year old uh my cohort in particular strives to get drunk go to concerts and it's really less of us are starting families and getting married i'm not trying to preach or anything but it's like what do we have uh what big goals do we have to look forward to and strive for and it doesn't seem like there are many and then seeing somebody like kanye west come out with

jesus is king and get such a backlash for something that um should should be benign just saying that you're okay with being faithful um yeah the it's interesting is the the educated elite front row cognitive hubs have um instituted this um have basically emphasize individual liberty as a goal. And so the goal is to maximize in some senses, to underemphasize the value of families

and say that you should be able to do what you want, all those things. Enjoy your personal life. But then they don't live that way. And then the people who live that way are the working class and then they judge them for it yeah what does that say though like do again do these people

believe their own bullshit or are they well again i i i'm not i don't think groups i don't ever assign negative quality negative personal qualities to any group you always have to look at the political structures they're operating in and so the front row makes decisions i don't like but I think it's again it comes from the incentives you know they really do think they're doing the right thing it's how they it's how their world it's it's a it's

the it's the best they can do within the manifestation of the system they operate in and that system is fundamentally flawed that overly quantitative system that overly narrow way of looking at meaning that you know philosophically it's positivism you know I you know the

idea that that what is right and just is entirely a function of data um you know and so that's the world they operate in and um so they're doing within that world they're doing what they think is the right thing but you couple that that notion and the data the data collection and crunching and you pair that with the pace of change that we're seeing as a society from technology population growth and all that and how can the data accurate accurate accurately reflect all the changes that are going on with how fast they're happening well i think there's i mean independent of if the data can even measure what's important the actual manipulate the actual what you do with data

there's so many there's so many mistakes people make um in terms of just actual data massaging I mean, you can make the data do almost anything you want. And so there's this—and the speed certainly is an issue, how much things are changing. I think, you know, I think someone—what was the term? There's a dismissive term, I think, that frames it, liquid capitalism, I think, or just like liquid modernity where things are just changing so quickly. Never heard that one. That people just feel, you know—and that's certainly how I look at, for instance,

immigration issues as an example where at a moral level I share the goals of an open immigration policy. I think it's the just thing to do in my world view, but to think that you can change communities that quickly and not have a backlash is I think just it's just it's not being pragmatic at all you know sure over the course of maybe 30 years 40 years but if all the changes take place in four years people's head spin and so I think this the pace at which we do things has to be thought at yeah it's surprising here hearing you say this when it considers himself left-leaning it is but yeah

these are intricate complex systems not complicated and the humans and our interactions are complex and we're building complicated system I mean you know I'm again I'm all for immigration but at a moral level I'm not gonna support it and say well does more and more for the economy no I mean it's it's It's a very basic human, a non-moral system. It's the right thing to allow people into this country who, especially those we've damaged through our foreign policy. But you also have to recognize that throwing, like I wrote in my book, putting 2,000 Somali Americans into Lewiston, Maine is going to cause some problems on both ends. right um you know so um i advocate for it i'm for it but to to not to be in denial

that that the pace at which these things happens doesn't impact how they're perceived or the integrity of the community is is in is being in denial yeah i mean uh to not expect friction and, uh, it's just, it's stupid, right? Like there's people have different views and their views are shaped by how they grew, grew up where they grew up. And if that is, uh, affronted pretty immediate, pretty starkly, um, people are naturally going to get around. Um, I mean, I grew up in Philadelphia, Northeast Philadelphia, and, uh, our neighborhood had changed pretty fast we had to move we moved to south carolina for a few years and then back to philadelphia but a suburb of philadelphia but got to a point where we felt like our neighborhood

was changing so fast that we had to leave as well it's um the uh you you mentioned williamsburg it's interesting as um where you're from is um it went when it went puerto rico when i look at New York I look at basically wealthy people wanting what they want and in the 60s and 70s they didn't want to be in cities so they left and into the vacuum came poor immigrants and African-Americans and then they're and then the next generation of the wealthy decide they want the cities back that's reverse white flight and so they're kicking out the immigrants and the plaques and recolonizing the cities and it's just very frustrating they can't see on in both cases that they you know the poor people are the ones being flung around they got flung into cities

into communities that nobody else wanted and they got now they're getting flung out when they want when the wealthy want them back well how do we co-mingle how do we make it so it's just the town that you grew up in where everybody's i don't know yeah i mean and that's biggest and that's probably partially why a lot of people were frustrated when we booked because i don't know um chris i came to you for answers i think you know i think your inclination is your inclination that we need big changes right um you know and then there's a the problem with big changes big problems can come from it and but you know it's it's kind of why i got laughed at prior to the election when i said i think trump can win and the basis for that was not only seeing the the

enthusiasm for him what i saw but it was also a lack of enthusiasm in the whole system by a lot of other people it was people who basically were like i don't care anymore you're talking to one of them yeah and so if the status quo is not working for people there are two responses one is to exit stage left and just remove yourself from it and that's what a lot of minorities have done um and so i call it justified cynicism what do you mean exit not vote yeah not not participate yeah um is that a vote though i see my non-vote as a vote yeah so then people say there's only two choices no there's three choices the third choice is the number one choice exhibited by people in my book which is not to vote um so there's there's that what i call justified

cynicism the system is so rotten there's no point fighting against it it's big it's mean it's gonna win like fuck it i'm gonna just build my own life outside my own silo my own private idaho um what are the silos like it's just just it's just living your life man it's like going to uf it's watching UFC in the bar and working your job and finding your own little pleasures and building a family and just, you know, doing your best. It's just ignoring what, you know, what, what everybody is talking about on CNN and, you know, and then put your head down and do your thing.

And that's the way most people live, by the way, not, not necessarily by choice, just as a reality, like, you know, like I don't. And then there's and then there's just the knock the gate and knock the checkerboard over the, the accelerationist which is in some senses like you know there was a lot of that in Trump voters which is

I don't care this isn't working for me I'm going to knock the table over right like might as well like so one of the first pieces I wrote that got traction was a kind of a piece with putting that in within

Wall Street framework I don't know if your listeners or you know what an option is I guess. But there's something on Wall Street called a digital option. It's a financial product, which is very simple. If the price of a stock is above a point, you get paid one. If the price is below that, you get paid zero after like three months. It's called a digital option.

If the stock exceeds, let's say, 100 by December 1st, you're paid a dollar and the question is how much would you pay for that like you know um but the mathematics the mathematics behind the how much you would pay for that is basically is called volatility what's what's the volatility of the stock um and if you're if the stock is at 90 currently and you need it above 100 for you to win to get that one point the one $1 payoff, you want volatility. It's your friend. It may end up at $70, but it also may end up at $110. If the stock is currently sitting at $110, you don't want it to move. You don't want volatility. So I said, if you look at the election, the people who are in the money, meaning

they own an option on society where if things doesn't change, they benefit, that's the wealthy people they want things to stay the same that's low volatility voters and if you're somebody who doesn't have a lot and you own an option and you need things to change for it to pay off to happen you want volatility so you're gonna throw the chessboard yep you want things to change i mean yeah it may end up worse but things are already bad for you so like why not fuck it you know i heard a lot of people say what else do i have to lose if i've been screwed over so many other times yeah that's what bitcoin a lot of people describe bitcoin as a call option or a put option on the call option on the technology succeeding and a put option on the traditional system falling that's

right and so i mean you it's just you go for high volatility payouts or when you're when you're in the back row you want things to change because the system isn't currently working for you as simple as that you want stuff to change and so um that's that's that's behind a lot of um you know so the piece i wrote was you know because a lot of people have said trump at the time they were saying anybody who votes for trump is a complete idiot was the phrase somebody used a new york times columnist that'd be nice today and um i said they're not completed they're actually doing a rational choice in their own little worldview like they they want things to change they needed to they've gone from idiots to uh to racist nazis exactly and the thing is is um

so you asked me what what can be done i mean i mean change is their friend change is a change is a friend of the people and who are who are out of power do we ever have quote-unquote normal politics from here on out when we have a normal president after trump do you think um has the board from been flipped and changed forever i i think one of the things i um i was i actually still keep in contact with my wall street friends because i used to do what's called macro trading which is the big picture serious stuff looking around the world at what's going on in chile or get into bitcoin or turkey or all that and i said to them that the world we had you know from the 90s to about 2015 um the stable quote world of of sane leaders of

serious democracies that was the anomaly in history i think i think 100 100 years or not 50 years or now people look back at that period just the 90s to 2015 i mean kind of the period of kind of like bush clinton bush um but that was the anomaly of of these countries a lot of countries moving to democracies being quote stable globalism the spreading of democracies the rest of the world is an anomaly yeah and what you're going to do is much more of the the world politics of my world when i was growing up at the 60s and 70s 50s and 40s which is strong men um dictatorships totalitarian regimes chaos coups um that's not a good thing i'm not like looking i'm not i'm not saying yay i'm saying uh-oh that that's more normal than people realize

and so you ask me I don't think I'm always very skeptical of projecting out but I think what you could see easily is what I call what US politics is very much again what we have in Latin America which is the pendulum swinging between two parties

and in both cases retribution being the goal You go from one extreme to the other. And the goal becomes over time, more and more, the party in power doesn't care so much about governing as it does about enriching itself and harming the others. So, you know, Trump has a lot of that. Him and his buddies are going to get rich and he's going to make fun of Sleepy Joe. Yeah, Sleepy Joe. And then when the Democrats get in power, I suspect they'll take up his playbook.

And the call for doing that will be higher because there will be people who will say, well, Trump did it, so why don't we do it? Trump broke all these norms. Why don't we break all these norms? Trump attacked his enemies. Why don't we attack our enemies? And the fact that Trump attacked his enemies makes those people who were attacked feel more justified in attacking Trump's people. so it's just this very ugly spiral where both you know it it it becomes more about just

kicking the other people's ass where do they catch all of us up in their bullshit right because it's only a few men that are they're really making these decisions at the end of the day when you really think about it um yeah i mean it's it's it's it's you know i mean if if i had to if i ever get too regressive and kind of boil it down to like, what was our, you know, what was our fundamental flaws? You know, you look at, so we had this period of the 90s and 2000s where we handed, you know, we handed policy to the very serious people. We handed policy see the very serious people the the quants and the and the eggheads like myself egghead i haven't heard that one yes you haven't heard eggheads no that's the old school that's the old term

derogatory term for intellectuals really yeah you know big heads that are yeah i might start using that one i've been called a meathead never an egghead yeah the back rows meatheads and the front rows I guess so we handed it to us what do we do we we did tarp and we did that rock war tarp Iraq war ad tech that's turning into digital panopticon I mean we made some big bumbling errors yeah and and that hurt a lot of people and so i think there's a right you know do you feel personal responsibility or um i mean i i think i don't look back you know with pride on my wall street years i i will i will say that um um i enjoyed it um it's a it's a it's a very very interesting game intellectually

yeah intellectually stimulating i mean yeah i mean in i know macro so i've followed macro too when i worked at the managed futures fund and macro just following everything going on in the world is just addicting yeah i mean it's um it's probably the most and the people i was around are some of the most enjoyable people to be around in the sense that they're very open-minded about debating like you on a trading floor you can't personally you can't you can't you can't harm somebody with your speech all these trades got to be battle tested right yeah so um but but i mean the system we we're working in i have regrets over um you know how can you not look back at the financial crisis and and and the things that you know the kind of centrist approach to the

world and not see some major failures hey well that's the big question all of us meatheads have looking at the eggheads uh why are you building ad tech and and algos for trading what what do you think quants energy could be directed towards that would be more productive for society um pretty much anything else i mean it's hard to you know so my my smart ass answer to that as a former quant is like was i really doing the world any good as a theoretical physicist so my prior answer would have been to you if you met me in 2005 2004 is um i'm not doing any good but i'm not doing any harm it's benign i mean being a theoretical physics is not particularly doing a great deal of work positive for society either i mean it's it's an intellectual um masturbatory yeah i mean

like okay it's fun it's interesting but really come on um i mean do you know is knowing that we have the Higgs boson going to change anybody's lives so a lot of egghead pursuits intellectual pursuits are kind of pointless and selfish so might as well

do one that put my kids through college but I think the thing you know on a more personal note this over the seven years of putting all these miles and talking to people the people who quote were doing the best in my mind who were living really wonderful

lives and doing good and happy too were people who basically eggheads who were interacting with meatheads to use your language which is people who were teaching at community colleges in el paso mentoring kids who come from the back row people working in ministers working in shelters and non-profits in north dakota not getting a lot of attention and they were just content yeah you You know, that's, that's, that's a problem with the front row too. It seems like nobody's ever content. Well, again, well, the system we built makes nobody happy. And that was one of the things that was the other thing that,

that was insightful to me on wall street was I remembered like saying to a lot of my friends at the time, um, like, why are you so miserable? Like, why are you so angry and miserable? We're making so much money. How could you be? But a lot of them were, because they judged their life relative to the people who have more than them. So it's a very envy-heavy society system where we always compare ourselves to someone slightly above us and feel bad. But no, the people who were living, quote, the most meaningful, happiest lives were people who were, again, working in small community colleges, working in small state schools, but really interacting with

kids and young adults or older adults who are in night schools who really were just, you know, aspirational and trying to help them at a one-to-one level. And, you know, one of the things that's been fascinating about writing this book and being on Wall Street is a lot of former bankers types like my book which i'm appreciative of and they liked it a lot but then their next question is how can i help which is which is sweet that's the right thing to ask which is fine but then the next question is then eventually how can i maximize my help to have the most efficiency and leverage and i'm like no you're thinking about it wrong man like no jesus christ you know i get it like you want to do you want the biggest bang for your buck but that's not the point

And the point is, you know, they want to know that their dollars and their contribution is not being wasted. It's being maximized. Like, no, that's the whole wrong way of thinking about it. But, you know, just sell. My advice to them is sell. My real advice to them, which they'll never take, and I understand it because it's a hard advice, is sell your apartment,

move to Kansas City and teach at university their finance to kids who are aspirational you know make a real difference does anybody have the balls to do that?

no it's kind of like what I say to be a smart ass I say to whenever I see someone a Harvard professor talking about inequality dude or ma'am

you probably have the one person who can make a personal impact on inequality through a personal action, quit Harvard, go teach at Ivy community college in Gary, Indiana. You know, I can't see a Michigan doing that. Um, so, you know, but I think, I think there's a lot that can be done, um, at a personal level, but collectively, you know what, you know, you need a movement to do that. And I don't think that happening. Right. it's actually this episode uh it's brought to you by the cash app i'm not reading an ad read right

now but what the cash app does is they uh when you download the app you get ten dollars it's sort of an ad read and it's not really an ad read but then ten dollars goes to a program that i worked an inner city program in chicago i worked for when i was in college called owls lacrosse and i agree you really can't understand or empathize with with um back row uh the back row of society unless you go into these neighborhoods and check it out and try to make a personal connection. And when you do show up, you realize it's a lot fucking harder than you would imagine.

And the other thing is, it goes back to the, I can also reframe it in their world, it goes back to the leverage question. You'll find out the leverage point. Meaning, like, you know, someone says to me, how should I donate? I have, like, you know, some money to donate, which I do. I said, well, what you should do first,

if you really want to be smart about it, is go volunteer at a shelter or go volunteer at a nonprofit. and over the course of three months there you'll figure out what needs to be done they might need a new refrigerator uh a kid you know you know who's having trouble community might need a new bike you know it's just it's just you'll see for owls it was just these kids need something to do between two and five yep we're eight and eleven on the weekends and um so it was teaching them what lacrosse see i've always thought someone i was interesting on twitter i was making some snark the other day that someone should do that because lacrosse is the is the um arbitrage way

to get on wall street yeah yeah like there's so many look i when i before i got on wall street i didn't know lacrosse existed and then i got on wall street like everybody's probably lacrosse it's big uh there's big lax mafia on wall street yep but no also al stands for outreach with lacrosse in schools and that is sort of the mentality uh just help develop uh confidence number one yep confidence uh public speaking leadership skills and uh working as a team importantly like learning how to work as a team but i think one of the things that is important when when i went in the people who were doing this that i like that i met is they're not doing this for attention like they're not doing this to try and like go to a spreadsheet and see how

much good they're doing they're just doing because they want to do it yeah i think uh the dude who started out as sam angelotta shout out sam is a the personification that he's just some kid from ohio he had a good family upbringing but he was a bit of a rebel in high school and uh he found a lot of uh solace in lacrosse and wanted to give back to to the inner city of chicago being lacrosse and it's crazy it started in 2011 i was one of the first volunteers and volunteered as much as i could before i left chicago in 2014 but now sam's able to do it full-time they've got full funding there's hundreds of kids doing it every every year now um but it is an example of that's eight years of working hard in these neighborhoods uh to get to this point alone and again you can

once you do that you'll see how much um you know you what you can really do to change things um again but not because you want to maximize it but because you really want to do that I'm looking through my pictures to find the Wizard of id cartoon so I get it right I'm trying to figure out where it is well why how do we get more and again I don't want to come off sanctimonious at all this is a pure curiosity of how do we get more people to care about personal connections with others you can read it since I blew it last time all right here we go the peasants are revolting you can say that again so he's so there's the joke is basically

like all right shit's up by the time he realizes it's too late yeah yeah um so what was your question again i'm sorry again like i don't want to come off sanctimonious but i'm generally curious how do we how do you think again i know that you don't have all the answers even though i came for them um how do we get people to care more about personal connections with strangers or the other the other more importantly I think you know again the hope of the book was it affects people in some way by forcing people to to look at other people's lives and hear about their views and then see them in pictures I just you know at a personal level I look back at the way I was raised versus the way I

raised my kids and i was raised in a community that was very working class and even though my parents were eggheads um you know we weren't shielded from the meatheads i mean we were immersed in them we were like you know it was it was my entire life was you know um shame same shared experiences i worked jobs starting at you know eight working in orange groves working in factories all that crap and then i'll get my kids and you know they're they're as liberal as me but they don't interact with the working class because we don't really have places and spaces these days that you know now they do because we're in a different community than we were when we were

in brooklyn but in brooklyn no like you know there's just not places where people interact we're so siloed between um cognitive hubs and non-cognitive hubs yeah sometimes i feel like i live in an ant farm i'm that crazy dude the crazy dude in the apartment building that says hi to people in the elevator and as we're passing each other in the hall exactly um people are siloed and um and again it's it's not me my libertarian instincts is not to tell people not to silo if you want to you know because when i speak at universities a lot of kids ask me the question you're asking me a lot of very very bright you know um college kids who are come from the back row perhaps and it's not me for me to tell them not to do what i did because what i

did was very enjoyable at a personal level like i they they they may have grew up in lumberton north carolina why who am i to tell them to stay to go back to their community you know when they want to see the world yeah and so i but it but i think it's the good thing is you can do that without forgetting where you came from and out losing i mean the people who need to the people we need not who need we need to not forget where they came from are policymakers you know the people actually involved in the creation of policy well it seems like all these policymakers are being bred like in the uh in the uh in the beltway in dc or in cape cod and greenwich They have a very, you know, as I said in my book, when I was hanging out with that world, the front row, the eggheads, the quants, we're all very, we all have a geographical and racial diversity.

But after, basically after college, after high school, our experiences were almost all the same. You all go to the cognitive hubs. yep like we we all went through the same set of colleges all the same set of post postgraduate colleges all the same apprenticeships the same um the same you know and lived in the same communities and so it's fascinating it was like you get these people who think they're very global because they've they've lived they've lived in london and they've lived in tokyo and they lived in new york but you know believe me i've been to the neighborhoods they've been to in all three of those places, and they're all the same.

The neighborhood, they live in Mayfair. They live in Mayfair or Kensington, London, which is exactly the same as the Upper West Side. A little bit different, like the architecture is different. Yeah, it's a lot different. Mayfair and Kensington, London are a lot different than Mayfair and Kensington, Philadelphia, I can tell you that. Wow, off topic, man.

So a lot of my time I spent in the U.S., the bulk of it in very, very, quote, dangerous neighborhoods, statistically. But the only time I've ever felt out of place or at least been much more aware of my surroundings in May was Kensington. Philly? Yeah. That's where I grew up is right next to Kensington. What's the street underneath the elevator there?

Frankfurt Ave. is it the one where um there's there's like these cambodian um liquor stores that shell jello shots for five dollars yeah i mean i haven't been down in that area frankfurt i have in a while i haven't lived in philly in like 11 years um kensington is actually having a gentrification right now too there's a lot of breweries and but wow um i grew up in frankfurt which is a bit further northeast you know um people ask did i ever feel the only time i've ever felt like you know hmm like looked around a little bit yeah people stab you there um well the difference is is um the gun laws are different that's what people carry so it's like you know um

and um yeah there was just a there was a there was a lot more anger there than i've seen in a lot of other places in the united states we weren't allowed to ride our bikes to kensington growing up that is actually one of the the parts of philly that has stayed pretty terrible throughout the last three decades as the rest of the city has had to glow up, if you will. But it does seem like the expansion beyond Fishtown is starting. Do you think technology can solve this at all?

Do you think the access to information that the internet provides can help solve these problems? It's interesting as I think, again, it's one of those eye-roll moments I had as a banker was, we're all supposed to think that social media is bad right because but it's because it gives the voice to the little man basically which they're eye-rolling because you know we all hate facebook like i do right but i hate it for me but you know what it's it's it's where the back row is on

and it gives them a voice and it gives them a chance to have a say so there's this real there's this real um there's this real annoying um um duality within the egghead community front row of you love democracy but they hate populism right like wait what so you only like democracy that you approve of you know you can you you can hate democracy and then therefore hate populism but to love democracy and advocate for it and then not expect people to exercise it in ways that you don't like is missing the point. And I see that with, in terms of what you said about technology and social media is like,

Oh, Twitter is bad. And I said that and I, and again, but at the same time it gives, you know, shines a floodlight on the hypocrisy. Well,

yeah. And so what, you know, and so I've come around to saying like, you know, people like me or people like me i mean you know like oh people criticize me for when i write articles like well they should have the right to like and i've learned a lot from the criticism i get on twitter you know um and and it's allowed much more feedback it's very socratic if you will

yeah so i you know a lot of it's badly intended but but at the core of i i listened to it nonetheless because you know eventually if enough people say you know yo dude you're an idiot you're gonna think you might want to think yeah um so there in that sense it's it's positive well again that's i'm very very grateful to be here right now because i've been a fan of your twitter account for for years now as i said and that's what i love about your approach to everything is you're getting your rolling your sleeves up getting your hands dirty and these hard problems and actually dissect them and try to get to the core of what's happening and try to relay that to the rest of the world.

And you're finding that people on the right and the left can agree on the stuff that you're talking about, at least in my opinion. Yeah, it does get frustrating, though, because the most powerful people don't want to hear. And I get that. Like, you know, it's not, again, it goes back to the volatility question, right? There's a lot of people who have a lot of interest in not having anything change because it, you know, it's very bad for them. What percentage of the overall population is that, though?

Five. Yeah, if that. I would even say less. But they got a lot of power, man. Yeah. You know, it's one of the things when I watch, you know, to reveal my politics, I'm probably a Sanders guy or a Warren. I don't really care that much between the two of them. I mean, splitting hairs.

Everybody on Twitter is fighting about it, but I think they're basically whatever, one or the other. I mean, but it's one of the—my old banking—I'll put my old banking hat on when I do see some of Sanders and Warren supporters saying, you don't know how much the wealthy are going to fight. I spent 20 years with them, working with them. They don't go down without a fight. They might not be able to fight Bitcoin. I would look into it. I'll look at Bitcoin. But, I mean, the vested interests don't give up.

I know. And one of the things that, one of the things I've learned, you know, if I had to come up with a simple lesson for my seven years is, um, the poor always get fucked over. Uh, are we doing for that? Do we, do we need faith in our lives to get over this? Uh, a Jesus-like character to have us care for the poor? Uh, I think there's a, um, a lot of value to faith and a lot of pushback to my book came, I think, from the left because I don't write dismissively about faith. you've been tweeting a lot more about I've seen a lot of Bibles on

McDonald's tables I mean it's again as a scientist you can't go spend seven years in the communities I spend in and not recognize the power of faith it's just like you're in denial if you don't but

so I do think I've never I think somebody had to tell me who Kanye was about six months ago i'm that kind of clueless about some parts of culture but i i do i do have to smirk at the backlash he's getting because i mean the dude is going through something and he's doing it genuinely and now apparently if you actually are religious it's counterculture you're yes i

mean you're now he's all of a sudden profane right he's all of a sudden persona non grata like and it's crazy and personally i agree with kanye like i just feel compelled to explore faith more earnestly because people are have turned away so vigorously yeah and i think i think there is um the the outrage he's gotten is a sign of how vigorously people have turned away from it And it's unfortunate because, you know, as a self-described former atheist, you know, again, it would be basically lying of me to say that there's not—to deny what I saw. Yeah. And so why are these people so faithful? Is faith their last safeguard? And, you know, there's the—I was kind of—where I was like three years ago was at a very—and it's almost a very dismissive view of faith, which is that it's pragmatic because it works for these people.

These people need it. I don't need it, but they need it. And my view has more evolved to a role of—one of the things I write about in the book is maybe it's my experiences of privilege, that have denied me access to seeing the power of faith. That maybe I'm the one who has been denied the evidence for faith. Interesting. As opposed to the, you know, the much more dismissive view, it's the opiate of the masses and they need it.

That view is true in my sense of meaning, but I think the more evolved sense, the less condescending way to think about it is that— You haven't potentially opened your mind to it? Yeah, that's right, and that living in privilege. So to get kind of philosophical here is I see ultimately the secular world as being about the hubris of man and thinking you have it all under control and thinking you don't—to put it in scientific terms, that there is no error bar that we can't understand.

And I think I see faith in its various manifestations as being about accepting a humility that I'm not particularly special, that we aren't particularly special, and there are things larger than us that we can't explain and we just need to accept. You know, the error bar is not understandable. And I think if you are living in that secular world with wealth, it's easy to delude yourself into thinking you're powerful enough to figure it all out. And so I guess I would reframe it as growing up in the back row doesn't afford you the ability to gain the hubris. You have to accept the evidence for human humility and fragility is there every day. Yeah, the hubris of man might be at an all-time high right now. That was beautifully put. I completely agree with that.

And I think, you know, the cognitive hubs have a lot of hubris. Enough hubris to apparently write that paper, right? We're going to spatially redistribute. I mean, it's kind of like, and there's a small chance I may piss off some people, it's kind of like the cognitive hubs and the policymakers are always thinking It's just one policy tweak away from fixing the system. We're one kludge away. It's right around the corner.

QE4, it's going to make it better, don't worry. Exactly. All that needs to be done is a refinement to the system when maybe the whole system is rotten. Exactly. And unfixable through micromanagement. Yeah. This has been incredible.

Almost two hours, an hour and a half. Chris, thank you for all that you do. And thank you for having me onto your show. Well, thank you for having me into your house. It's a beautiful property you have up here. It was a beautiful drive up here. You're lucky a bird didn't fly into the window. Does that usually happen?

Is that why you have to have this cat here? I have pasted up a black cat on my window to keep the birds from flying into the window. I see a couple smudges. A couple places where the birds may have come. Keep fighting the good fight, man. I don't think you realize it, but I think we're fighting to change the system

from different angles in the same way. Again, I would look more into Bitcoin. I think you'll like Bitcoin. I promise. It is a little scary. There are hardcore libertarian views. People at Bloomberg aren't going to like me anymore, though. Joe Weisenthal is pretty open to it.

Joe's been on this podcast. I like Joe. He's open to it. I like Joe, too. He's a good egg. I just see him trolling Bitcoin people all the time. He's a master at it. He's very good at it.

well that was yeah he's become a troll i give him credit for it you know i say that positively by the way i did he's uh an ethical troll in a good way and he's so good at it because bitcoiners word to the wise all you freaks listening out there get triggered so easily stop getting triggered so easily realize that he's trying to trigger you but he also does bring up good points and helps bitcoiners steel man our arguments um i think deep down joe likes bitcoin as well um chris where can we learn more about you is there anything upcoming that we should be aware um uh rush to your library and get my book um or or buy it um um preferably for my publisher's sake um it's called dignity um seeking respect in the back row um or um it's one

of the few books i would actually suggest it's probably not easy to read on an e-reader because it's um a lot of pictures a lot of pictures um and their pictures are as important as the words in my mind um or follow me on twitter um i can be a bit of a troll myself um just my name chris underscore arnade a-r-n-a-d-e um and that's about it you have a final thought for the freaks out there final note parting note if you will i think what i would simply say is i try to always say is before you judge anybody, walk a mile in their shoes. Or before, if you feel like people are

judging you, it's probably because they don't know the situation you're in. And rather than yell at them, although that's fun, try to explain your situation. Yeah, I think that's beautiful advice. And that's where we're going to end it, Chris. Again, thank you.

Thanks for having me. Peace and love, freaks.