Chris Arnade on Walking Cities

Most people who leave Wall Street after twenty years either retire or find another way to make a lot of money. Chris Arnade chose to walk through cities most travelers never truly see. What emerged from this approach is a unique form of street-level sociology that has attracted a devoted following on Substack https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/. Arnade's work suggests that our most sophisticated methods of understanding the world might be missing something essential that can only be discovered by moving slowly through space and letting strangers tell you, their stories. Tyler and Chris discuss how Beijing and Shanghai reveal different forms of authoritarian control through urban design, why Seoul's functional dysfunction makes it more appealing than Tokyo's efficiency, favorite McDonald's locations around the world, the dimensions for properly assessing a city's walkability, what Chris packs for long urban jaunts, why he's not interested in walking the countryside, what travel has taught him about people and culture, what makes the Faroe Islands and El Paso so special, where he has no desire to go, the good and bad of working on Wall Street, the role of pigeons and snapping turtles in his life, finding his 1,000 true fans on Substack, whether museums are interesting, what set him on this current journey, and more. Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/chris-arnade/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/ob5-SXLkRO8 on the new dedicated CWT channel. Recorded February 27th, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by donating https://mercatus.donorsupport.co/page/podcastgift?utm_source=cwt+podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=shownotes today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Follow Chris https://x.com/Chris_arnade on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Photo Credit: Bryan Jones

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:27Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I'm chatting live and in person with Chris Arnadi. Chris has a long, interesting and varied history. He started with a PhD in particle physics from Johns Hopkins, was then a bond trader on Wall Street for about 20 years, had a life course shift around 2011, where he started traveling around lower income America, and he became quite famous for what you might call photojournalism, his writings about lower income America and also Trump voters. He published a very well-known book called Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. He is now, I would say, obsessed, in the good

• 1:10Tyler Cowen?

  sense, with a new project, which is walking both walkable and non-walkable cities throughout the world. And he writes a Substack about his walking and his travels. Chris, welcome.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:23Tyler Cowen?

  If you had to live in either Beijing or Shanghai for 10 full years, which one would you pick and why?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  You know, I thought I was actually thinking about that a lot on the airplane. I couldn't come up with an answer. I think Beijing ultimately because there is just more there. Shanghai, I had a better experience in. I think the reason I liked Shanghai more initially was just because of my location. I had a good location. I was right next to People's Park, and I kind of had a good four or five days. Beijing grew on me with time, though. I just thought there was just more there.

• 1:54Tyler Cowen?

  I think I would much prefer Beijing. It feels more intellectual, and there's a greater variety of Chinese foods there.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the food part, I didn't do as much time as I usually do in a city when I was in both Shanghai and Beijing. I usually try to spend at least 10 days in a place, and in both cases because of visa constraints, I was there for six or less days. But the food thing, to me, was interesting was...

• 2:18Speaker 01

  I felt very much like what I had hoped to find in China, I didn't find, which was I thought I was going to have like a Taipei-like experience where there was just going to be a variety of different foods all over the place on the streets. And I ended up finding that it was just, I was eating in mall food courts. It felt very similar. Like, there was a lot of diversity there, but it felt very hard to choose because they were just all crammed together in these small food courts.

• 2:44Tyler Cowen?

  If you had to explain the fundamental difference between the residents of the two places in as small a number of dimensions as possible, how would you explain it to an outsider?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  And those two?

• 2:56Tyler Cowen?

  Beijing versus Shanghai.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I don't have a good answer to that one because I don't feel like I know it well, either of them well enough. How would you do it?

• 3:04Tyler Cowen?

  Shanghai, what is status is money and conspicuous consumption. In Beijing, what is status is power. In a funny way, that intersects with making the city more intellectual, having better bookstores, and having ties to more of China. Shanghai is more tied to the outside world, which is maybe better for the city, but for me makes it less interesting.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  You know, it was interesting because I didn't get as much of a sense of those places as you did. I felt the overwhelming feature to me and what kind of frustrated me in some ways was how similar Shanghai and Beijing were, that they were kind of inscrutable to me at the level I do things. And a lot of that, to me, maybe the way I approach kind of learning, which is just simply walk 15 miles. And they're not particularly walkable cities.

• 3:52Tyler Cowen?

  Right.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  And, you know, that's one of the things I've come to have to deal with in my project is, you know, I walk to learn, but some places that's not the actually right approach. And in both cases, what I, the analogy I use, because I walk, you know, 15 miles in Beijing or 15 miles in Shanghai. And I kept on saying that it felt like I was in one of those cheap cartoons where the background kept repeating. And it was kind of frustrating to me in the sense of, I didn't feel like I got a sense of either place, at least at the granular level, like I usually do from when I do what I do.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  And I don't know if that was kind of intentional, is that's what kind of how the cities are designed to kind of like, you know, to be uniform, to kind of to remove any differences.

• 4:38Tyler Cowen?

  I think parts of Beijing are designed to discourage protests and demonstrations, and that correlates with being hard to walk. It doesn't explain the whole pattern.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that there's a lot, you know, I was thinking in particular of that approach when I, I've been reading James C. Scott, who writes a lot about kind of the idea of kind of, you know, control, regulation as control, or top-down regulation as control. And that's certainly the case in Beijing, where you, like, you know, gone are the small winding dens of kind of small neighborhoods, because those are hard to control. They're much easier if you replace them by, you know, 50-story towers with a mall next to them.

• 5:14Tyler Cowen?

  And surveillance.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and surveillance. And so what struck me when I was in Beijing is not so much the difference between Beijing and Shanghai, but how top-down regulation is often designed, you know, very intentionally for control. And, you know, Beijing in particular, you know, feels that way. And that's kind of what frustrated me initially, was I had just kind of said, you know, because I kind of do all these kind of something, see the pants, I just do, you know. So I landed, I said, I'll just walk to Tiananmen Square. Well, he just didn't do that. You know, the thing is-

• 5:50Tyler Cowen?

  I did that once, but it wasn't easy.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  I got there, even though I didn't, I had found out along the way that you had, I went through six security checks, or five security checks, and I was supposed to have had a QR code where I'd signed up for it. And I didn't, I just kind of like walked by. I just, you know, so I kind of came up with, what I wrote about was there being kind of what I call a totalitarian anarchy, which is, I think they intend to be controll-y, but they're just don't pull it off very well. They're just too incompetent to pull it off.

• 6:18Tyler Cowen?

  Some of that's a bit deliberate, though. I think they feel that if people have a sense of partial freedom, they can control them better along the dimensions they want to, and they're probably correct.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  I mean, that's kind of what I thought about with the firewall, right, which is, you know, everybody has a VPN, and everybody knows everybody has a VPN, or so they- So that there really isn't a firewall. But it's kind of like, it's kind of like, you know, the idea that you regulate people by making sure that people who are the most ignorant can't possibly deal. You know, like the people who don't have enough, get, you can't get enough together to figure out how to get around it. Don't get around it.

• 6:53Tyler Cowen?

  And the VPN is also a way to monitor them, right?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 6:56Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, you can't actually trust the VPN supplier.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  I don't like to be conspiratorial because I think that's often wrong. But I did notice my VPN kind of clunked out at very odd moments. Like I was there during the actual election.

• 7:11Tyler Cowen?

  The US election.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I was following, I noticed that my VPN went out at very inopportune times. Like when, you know, when there was kind of stuff going on that probably wouldn't have been fun to watch or wasn't convenient. So, you know, so you think they actually, the loosey goosey approach is actually intentional?

• 7:26Tyler Cowen?

  I'm not sure they have the option of cracking down entirely. But I think they have come to terms with the partial controls and they found that it's still working.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:35Tyler Cowen?

  And until it starts not working, don't try too hard to fix it.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  What do you think ultimately is driving them though? Like, what is their goal here?

• 7:43Tyler Cowen?

  Well, when you say them, if you mean the

• 7:44Speaker 01

  CCP.

• 7:45Tyler Cowen?

  The inner committee of the CCP. I think it is to make China, quote unquote, a great nation again. To drive the United States out of Asia, to have much of the world kowtow to China, to have China be rich, never democratic and stable. Now, all that together is probably impossible, but it's not a crazy set of goals. They're not my goals.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  I mean, what struck me was, and you know, one of the things I wrote about on both the pieces was I just kept thinking of, you know, them as a guardian class, kind of incorporating Plato's Republic. You know, they really do think of themselves as kind of, as the guardian class, whose goal it is to build the best society. I just don't know what they're working towards because if they're working towards kind of. A fully material, increasing material wealth, they're doing that, they're doing well. But if the endpoint is someplace like Korea, Korea is famously not particularly happy.

• 8:39Tyler Cowen?

  Yes.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Like, so, you know.

• 8:41Tyler Cowen?

  I don't think that's their goal, but I think they want China to be happy enough. I don't think they're not altruists. I just think it's a very nationalistic view of altruism, where Chinese lexically come before other considerations and anyone who's ethnic Chinese ultimately falls under their purview, which is also different than, say, an American view.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm going back again because I find it so fascinating because I don't understand it to the well, to the degree I feel like I understand other places. Like, other places I've come away with a pretty, pretty quick sense of describing a town in some ways, but like, both Beijing and Shanghai just felt a little bit, and I don't know, maybe it's the scale, because again, they're not really smart places to walk.

• 9:26Tyler Cowen?

  Right. I find it's oddly like America in a number of ways. I think you've written about this too. Inward looking, large, self-confident, business oriented, pretty friendly, pragmatic. But I think a lot of the CCC plan is improvised rather than planned. So something like the fertility crisis, I think they were not expecting, really no one was. They don't know what to do, they'll try different things, and the larger the scale at which you operate, the more the so-called plan just becomes improvisation.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  And again, it's also, it's the problem that comes with top-down management, which is sometimes you just get it wrong.

• 10:03Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  You just get it wrong, you know?

• 10:07Tyler Cowen?

  And I think they're deathly afraid of disorder and civil war, given their history. In a way, we are not.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  But to me, what's interesting about it is, is how explicit the top-down organization is at the built level, as well as at the cultural level. Like, everything is micromanaged, but, you know, again, with a loosey-goosey approach to give a little bit of wiggle room, but like, you know, the image I will always have of, at least Shanghai, one of the initial images. Asia has very rambunctious cities and a lot of the, the, the, the, kind of what I like about Asian cities is they have kind of an organic street life, kind of low regulatory organic street life. That is gone in China. And so I, you know, I, to have gone from like Taipei to Shanghai to see that, that lack of organic street life is intentional. And

• 10:57Speaker 01

  like they've like, we don't like this, you know? And so they, there was this neighborhood I was walking through Shanghai where they had bought up the entire neighborhood, had been an old neighborhood, and it was going to be developed, slayed for development into kind of a business park style living. And they had replaced where there had been stores with murals of store life. Like, you know, it was like, it's just kind of too, too spot on for what they're doing, which is replacing, taking, removing actual organic street life and replacing it with cartoon images of it.

• 11:27Tyler Cowen?

  You should try Kunming, by the way, if you haven't been there. It still has organic street life, as does much of Western China. It's more fun, it feels less authoritarian.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  I'm going to Xi'an next trip.

• 11:37Tyler Cowen?

  That also has organic street life.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  It's a bit hard to, it's a bit harder, the further west you go, the harder it is to get a visa.

• 11:44Tyler Cowen?

  Yes. But you should be able to get to Kunming without problems. And Xi'an, try the cherries, they're fantastic. Now, which is more interesting in a major Chinese city? A McDonald's or a KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  I, I'm gonna, you know, everybody told me KFC, and I stuck with McDonald's because of my past history with McDonald's. But what struck me about Beijing and China, both in cases, was it's the one time on my trips, I famously have become kind of online the McDonald's guy, because I wrote a lot about McDonald's in US and the role of McDonald's in the US. And whenever I go overseas, people expect me to use McDonald's, but I just don't use them. Because people don't use them. There, you know, there's alternatives in Japan at 7-Elevens and Izakayas and, you know, other countries, there's other forms of kind of what I would say, kind of third spaces, organic third spaces. In Beijing, it was McDonald's. Like, and it was interesting, it served the same role it does in the US for very different

• 12:37Speaker 01

  reasons, which is, in the US, McDonald's is the place people go because it's the one function, because it's functional relative to the neighborhood. McDonald's in Beijing people go because it's dysfunctional relative to the neighborhood in terms of regulatory rate, like you just can go and relax. People say the guy, I did, I went, I went to a few KVC's, use a bathroom, but I do not, I don't like fried chicken. I just do not like it. I don't like fried foods in general, so I didn't really spend time there. I just found myself spending a lot of time in the McDonald's in China and, you know, I find them to be really wonderful places.

• 13:14Tyler Cowen?

  My favorite McDonald's in the world is in Auckland, New Zealand, which is the world's largest Polynesian city. And McDonald's there often serves as the center for Polynesian gatherings, not just Murray, but Cook Islands, Tongans, Fiji.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can see that.

• 13:30Tyler Cowen?

  And if you're ever in Auckland, it's a phenomenal McDonald's.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  You know, the mixing that takes place in McDonald's is just, you know, is absolutely amazing, you know, is, in the US, it's absolutely amazing. And it's similarly across the world, but again, other, a lot of other countries have other things that serve that role. And so.

• 13:49Tyler Cowen?

  Where's your favorite McDonald's in the world?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  My favorite McDonald's in the world, the one I probably use the most is in LA.

• 13:56Tyler Cowen?

  But where in LA?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  East LA. I don't remember the name of the street. A lot of my book was written in it. It's kind of in the Mexican, East LA, Mexican neighborhood. I forget.

• 14:05Tyler Cowen?

  That should be a good one.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  The name is, the street is, is on the tip of my tongue. It's just, you know, there's, there's just a organic life there that is just absolutely wonderful. And I just learned so much in that, you know, I was, because what, when I was in the US doing my project, I would literally just sit in McDonald's at night and type up my notes, you know? And that's where I got so many of my stories would ultimately come from, from just being in McDonald's for not trying to get stories. And it's funny to look back on that, that period because, you know, when I was doing this project on addiction and poverty, I would talk to people and then I'd meet them in McDonald's and then I would take them outside the McDonald's to photograph them because it just didn't seem photographic, you know, like, but then I was like, wait a second, this, you know, the fact that every, I'm meeting everybody in McDonald's, that's

• 14:51Speaker 01

  the story. It's just such a great community center for so many people.

• 14:55Tyler Cowen?

  Why is Seoul, South Korea possibly your favorite city?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  It's got a, it's got a functional dysfunction. It's a little bit more dysfunctional, a little more, less uptight than Tokyo, but it has a lot of the same positive qualities of Tokyo, which is, it's very, it's very safe. It's very efficient. It's got an amazing food scene. If you like food, it's very active, but it's a little bit quirkier to me than Tokyo. And I feel like it's a little bit less known and I kind of enjoy that. But also, you know, I just find when I'm in a place, I like to get into a regular walk and they just have a, I have a 10 mile walk there I absolutely love. Like I just do it every day when I'm there. It's a long, revital, it had been an old drainage ditch and it goes underneath subways and it goes underneath interstates.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  And now it's just this beautiful reclaimed 10 mile walk.

• 15:48Tyler Cowen?

  What I like there is that the food scene is not Instagrammed to death. So you can find an obscure place that's more or less undiscovered and it can be very good in almost any neighborhood.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  You know, the, someone asked me about the best foods and I think if you measure the best food by the kind of, the median food, like, you know, I actually think Japan is still higher than Korea that way.

• 16:10Tyler Cowen?

  But they have the worst food also.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they, you can get some really.

• 16:14Tyler Cowen?

  Disgusting things there.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  I had, I had the night before got on a 15 hour flight. I had chicken shishimi. There should, you should not have chicken shishimi. You should not have chicken shishimi.

• 16:25Tyler Cowen?

  I've refused, I saw.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  No, I, I didn't, I had two pieces down before I realized what it was. And I'm like, okay, if I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die. But it wasn't good. Like.

• 16:35Tyler Cowen?

  It doesn't look good either.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Even for the risk, it wasn't good. Like, you know, I'll take a risk if something tastes good. Also, some of the fried foods Japan, Japanese have is just, just Koreans have some weird food. Like, you know, one of the things I like about Japan is I can go to the 7-11s and get a good sandwich.

• 16:51Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, very good food.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Sandwiches in the Korean 7-11s have a lot of sugar in them. Sugar when mixed with ham, things like that. But I actually think Japan has better food than Korea, but I agree with you that the Koreans, the Korean food scene is less understood by the West and I think it's less precious. But you know, some of the best food I've had in the world is in just small places in Japan that are just, you know, off the beaten track.

• 17:17Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah. Now, when evaluating cities, how much do you take weather into account? So I've been to Seoul at the end of November, which is not even the worst of the winter. And it was awful. It was truly freezing.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  I love cold weather, though. So I was just in Seoul three days ago.

• 17:33Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  And it was, when I got up in the morning, it was 18 degrees and I love that. So I like cold weather, but I, if you don't like cold weather, don't go to Seoul. Like, I mean, the thing is, the winds come off the mountains and it's really cold. Like, when the winds come off, it's just really bitterly cold.

• 17:50Tyler Cowen?

  And how much do you count air pollution for? Because that's going to hurt China, right?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 17:55Tyler Cowen?

  For walking especially.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  I actually put together a metric on walkability. I had, I think, seven, eight categories. And I put climate, climate and crime and pollution are three big factors. Like, I think people don't forget about, like, you know, I famously rank relative, people got on my ass for ranking LA relatively high as a walkability.

• 18:17Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, I put it near the top.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's got great weather. And if you can deal with some of the distances involved and lack of density, it's just a really wonderful. It's got a fantastic bus system that, you know, part of being able to walk is when you choose not to walk, you can just jump on public transportation. So it's got a ubiquitous bus system that can get you pretty much everywhere. It's got great climate. And it's also just, it's just a visually impressive city. It's got, you know, it's got good skies. It's just like, it's a very enjoyable place to walk and it's got an amazing food scene. It's got a better food scene than almost any place in the US.

• 18:51Tyler Cowen?

  Sure, yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  So.

• 18:52Tyler Cowen?

  I once walked across Sao Paulo, which in retrospect was insane. I wouldn't do it today.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's not, that's tough.

• 18:58Tyler Cowen?

  It's tough.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you remember which direction you walked?

• 19:02Tyler Cowen?

  No, but it was a very long walk. And then, you know, the murder rate then was much higher, but street problems were much less frequent.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  You know, I've always found that I generally.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  A lot of the locals tell me not to go where I go and I've never had a problem. I think if you are, I mean, I have zero, you can look, I have zero jewelry on. I never wear jewelry. I dress very simply and I've just never had a problem. I think Latin America is one of the few places and Latin America, Africa are some of the few places where there are real problems and you do have to have a little bit of common sense. I walked all over Lima, Peru when I was told not to and I was fine.

• 19:41Tyler Cowen?

  That's okay.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:42Tyler Cowen?

  But what's your nomination for the least walkable city?

• 19:46Speaker 01

  I mean, Phoenix is pretty bad. And in the rest of the world, where, what was, what was the lowest ranked on mine?

• 19:52Tyler Cowen?

  I think it's Dakar is your lowest ranked.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Dakar is.

• 19:54Tyler Cowen?

  But I don't find that so bad.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  It was partially the heat and also there was a safety issue, which is it's not actual violence. It's just the risk of a miscommunication going very badly. When you're in a neighborhood where you're a slum, basically where you're one of few white people. It's, it's not that I feel threatened by being robbed. I feel threatened that something you do, it can be just a miscommunication. Like, why are you here? What are you doing here? And so that can spiral out or really control if you don't, if you don't speak the language. Dakar was really, really tough. Kampala was really tough to walk.

• 20:27Tyler Cowen?

  Why is that? I've never been there.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Again, these are cities that are not meant to walk. Locals don't walk them, you know? And so people would look at me like I'm crazy, like, so, because first of all, you can jump on a hack bus. So why would you walk?

• 20:41Tyler Cowen?

  Right.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Or the boda bodas, which are, you just jump on the back of a motorcycle, which I won't do. I did it once and I'm like, I'm not doing this. This is, this is just a really dumb risk.

• 20:50Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, I wouldn't do that.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  It's like, I almost got killed in the first time I did it, but they do it. And so consequently, people, there is not much, there's no walking infrastructure. And when you do walk, you're at risk of being hit by a boda bodo or like, or, you know, people will walk out of, out of necessity, but there's just no infrastructure, absolutely none. And then you, you have, you're getting hit by a car. You can get hit by a car or, or motorcycle.

• 21:16Tyler Cowen?

  Rio for me would be the least walkable. It's very dangerous, but on top of that, there are so many places where walks end. There's mountains, there's tunnels.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I mean, I I have not in this recent project gone to Brazil to walk, partly because when I was a banker, I spent a lot of time in Brazil. And so I don't really want to go back. I I would imagine that just connecting dots. Sao Paulo is a lot more walkable than than Rio is.

• 21:42Tyler Cowen?

  Sure.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Rio is just, there's just no go zones. Like, it's just literally, those are dangerous. And also, you have, you know, the topography of a place does determine its walkability.

• 21:52Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Certain cities are just disjoint, and it's really just hard to walk. One of my favorite cities in the world, and I quite enjoyed walking, was Amman, Jordan. And I would encourage people who listen to this, that it's, it's, you know, people always like, what's undiscovered places, relatively really undiscovered place. And it was safe. You know, I went into some very, quote, rough neighborhoods, but I was, you know, even though I was open about, open to people that I was Jewish.

• 22:18Tyler Cowen?

  And that most of the Arab world is quite safe.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. Just, assalamualaikum, and you know, you know, you're, you're good. But it's eight hills. Like, there are, there are climbs I was taking that I was just, just absurd. Like, I'm walking up basically 60 floors of steep flights. And then, you know, you're, you feel like a hero, and then a 50 year old, 60 year old woman comes right past you, who's been doing it all the day with like, stuff on her back.

• 22:45Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know if you've ever been there, but one of my favorite walkable cities was Alexandria, Egypt.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  I have not been.

• 22:52Tyler Cowen?

  Because you have both the waterfront and streets with interesting buildings. And when I was there, at least it was quite safe. It probably still is.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  I also do these long walks where I, like, I walked across England and I walked across Japan. Kind of what I, I walk the Rhone Valley and I walk the Rhine Valley, kind of what, you know, 200 mile walks, well, I'll do over the course of two weeks. I've been trying to, that's one of the ones I want to do, which is to walk from basically down part of the Nile. You know, from Alexandria down to, down to Cairo in that region.

• 23:21Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah. What's the greatest purely physical problem you have with all your walking?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Heat, usually. Heat exhaustion, because a lot of the interesting places are in very hot parts of the world.

• 23:32Tyler Cowen?

  Heat never bothers me. I feel very lucky. It's cold I hate.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Dehydration and heat are my big problems because, again, places I find really interesting tend to be in the, near the equator. So I don't know, I don't know how old you are, but as I've gotten older, I just can't handle the heat.

• 23:48Tyler Cowen?

  Sixty-three.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so it's, I'm impressed that you can handle the heat.

• 23:53Tyler Cowen?

  And I've lived in Virginia a long time. I think for five years, I'd never turned on my air conditioner because I felt I should get used to it. And I did. When you take the trip as a whole, not just the walk, but the trip, you're not packing very much, right?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 24:07Tyler Cowen?

  What is it you wish you could carry, but you can't? It just doesn't work?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  You know, I would like a few more night outfits.

• 24:17Tyler Cowen?

  And you say night outfits? What are you, you want me to dress up?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  I usually have one go-out shirt, so I want to walk in the shirt. After a while, that gets a bit raggedy. I feel like, I feel a little bit like, I also, whenever I'm, whenever I'm traveling, I also do attend mass every, every Sunday, wherever I am, and I would like to, I famously wear only sandals. Another pair of shoes would be nice to feel less, less disrespectful when I go to mass, so.

• 24:44Tyler Cowen?

  Is there anything you bring a double of? Like, I bring a double pair of glasses. I've never needed them?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  I bring double tie, I bring lots of tie pods. Those are, those are my secret weapon, tie pods. I bring backup computer cords. I bring backup glasses. I'm trying to think what else I have a double of. I carry two spare batteries, kind of. I've never needed a second one, much less the first one, but I always like to know, like, you know, I won't run out of power.

• 25:09Tyler Cowen?

  Sometimes I bring spare chargers. For books, you use Kindle, or how do you do that?

• 25:13Speaker 01

  I always have one physical book and then my Kindle. Like, I always keep one physical book because I just prefer reading physical books.

• 25:22Tyler Cowen?

  I always bring my Kindle, but try to get by with only physical books.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I think honestly, I never regret underpacking. Like, I always feel very, I pack remarkably light. And I think that's almost, to me, if I had one hack to people for traveling, you know, what I would say is, when you get home, look at what you brought and see how much you didn't use. You'll find that you didn't use like a third of what you brought. And you can buy things on the road, you know? If you run out of stuff, like, I can buy that second shirt. And sometimes I have.

• 25:56Tyler Cowen?

  No, I did an episode with Paul Salapek. Do you know who he is?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 26:00Tyler Cowen?

  He's walking around the world.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Literally.

• 26:02Tyler Cowen?

  But literally in a

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:04Tyler Cowen?

  Circle isn't exactly the right word, but, and he's had trouble with the war, with Russia. China at first was an issue. This was during pandemic, some of the time. Are you ever tempted to do that?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the problem is, is I've looked at paths and I've looked at, you know, like, I looked at walking across the US multiple times. I don't know how much you're gonna learn the third day in a wheat field. One day of wheat fields is good, like, two more days. And, you know, the Gobi Desert's the same. Like, what am I gonna learn the 15th day in the Gobi Desert, you know? So this whole project started with this idea of walking around the world, literally. And I started saying, well, why do I have to, I just cut out the middle parts, the boring parts, and focus on the cities? Because I like people. You know, I'm focused on, on, on culture. I'm focused on how people operate. And so I like people, and I like being around people. So I generally do not, you know, the Woody Allen joke is I'm too with

• 26:56Speaker 01

  nature. I kind of get that. I like small doses of it, but what are you gonna learn?

• 27:01Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, I'm the same.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  I go to, fourth day, like, you know, like, if I walk from here to Florida, like, that's a, that's a lot of pine forest, man. There's not much to learn there.

• 27:12Tyler Cowen?

  What is it you think you learn least well, traveling the way you do?

• 27:17Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting is I've so, I, I, I used to be a, you know, I used to be a macro trader, a macro type trader. And so I used to be very top down. And I think I've in some senses thrown too much of that away. I think there I've gone in too blind without reading, you know, I could do a little bit more background reading in terms of political strategy. But one of the things I've learned from my project is most people don't talk about politics, you know, and it's because I only kind of talk about what other people want to talk about. I, no one talks about politics. You know, I, being in Beijing, Shanghai, maybe it's not the best example, because people would say, well, there's a reason they don't want to talk about. I don't think that's it.

• 27:59Tyler Cowen?

  No, I agree. Yeah. Most of the world.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I, and so.

• 28:04Tyler Cowen?

  Even Idaho.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, 98% of the people aren't political and they don't talk about politics. And so, you know, I kind of got beat up on, on, on social media when people were talking about, oh, oh my God, Trump's gonna be elected. That's gonna, you know, the world hates us. No, they don't. I've heard more, you know, I, when that person said that, I was actually in a Kampala, a bar in Kampala with a person, a woman telling me how much she loved Trump. But that was a rare political conversations. Most people don't talk about politics. And so in that sense, is I, I could probably do more reading outside of the conversations about politics, because I go to a lot of these countries. I don't know what's going on politically, because they, people don't talk about it.

• 28:43Tyler Cowen?

  What other macro views of the world have you revised due to your walking, visiting, traveling? Obviously, particular views about any individual place, but on the whole, humanity?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  I mean, the biggest change I would say is, you know, I, I've become religious, although, you know, that is, that's, that's not entirely just the walking, but that's just.

• 29:06Tyler Cowen?

  But you think the walking is fed into it?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:08Tyler Cowen?

  And how is that operated?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  You just kind of, I think you, you know, part of it was utilitarian is like, if this worked for so many people, like, you know, but also it was, is a little deeper than that, which is an understanding that people are a little bit more complicated than science leads you to believe. And life is a little more complicated. So in that sense, you know, there's, there is something that, there is something to what I would call common sense, folk wisdom. That's just more than, you know, something that needs to be explained away with science, or eventually we'll move beyond. I do think there are.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Very human qualities that are, you know, I am, I am not a relativist. I, I might've been, you know, 30 years ago, kind of believe in kind of cultural relativism. I'm not a relativist. I think there are some cultures that are just better than others.

• 29:55Tyler Cowen?

  I agree with that.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, I, why can't we say that?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  And I think part, you know, I, I had started off as a way back when, before I found out I was good at math. I started off kind of with the intention of going anthropology and I basically, you know, as a freshman, I left it after three months because it was just, it was filled with this, you know, this cultural relativism, which I just thought was absurd. And now, you know, I feel more, more certain of that. But I would say the kind of bigger thing I've been thinking about for the last two years is I, I've been, you know, a year is I really do think if you would, you know, I, I was famously six, six years ago, seven year, I would say like, what, what elites say doesn't matter. Who cares what people are fighting about on Twitter, but like, but actually, you know.

• 30:45Tyler Cowen?

  It does matter, I think, yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  We elites, we, and I'll put myself, we as an elite, I'm, I'm one. We, we build cultures, we build societies, so we matter immensely. And I, I've, maybe I've gone a little bit too far now where I think all of culture is built by elites. And, you know, to almost a level of

• 31:06Speaker 01

  giving excuses to people who aren't elites in terms of their behavior, because that's the culture they grow up in. I won't go that far. I think, you know, there is, and there is free, free will and people have, have, have agency. But I think Beijing, I think CCP is an extreme example of what takes place in almost every culture, which is there is a small group of guardian classes, different definitions in different places, who effectively create culture. And most people are not political and they're, and they, and they choose not, they, the way they choose to live is based not on a law decision, it's based on what culture gives them.

• 31:42Tyler Cowen?

  True, conformity.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I think in that sense, I think what academics do or what elites do, what politicians is immensely important and shapes how, how societies are built and how they evolve.

• 31:55Tyler Cowen?

  Putting aside issues of financial security, but how many people do you think should do what you're doing? Is it like, oh, there's only a few of us in the world? Or is it some kind of life arb opportunity that say 3% of people actually should be doing if they can?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  You know, what's interesting is I'm probably going to take like a six month break from what I'm doing because I've leaned too far away from reading books. Like I kind of, you know, there's book learning and then there's what I call sarcastic experimental learning, which is kind of what I'm doing. Like you need both. And so I think if you only do what I'm doing, you're going to kind of miss out on a lot of, a lot of, a lot of the world.

• 32:32Tyler Cowen?

  Why can't you do both though? So I once had a trip to Goa and I mistimed the monsoon and I could hardly go out at all. So I went out two or three hours a day. That was crushingly sad. I read a lot. In fact, it was still a great trip.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, I would have to change how I travel, which is part of what, part of it's just, just me, which is people are expecting content every 11 days based on walking. So, you know, like if I sit around and reading books.

• 32:58Tyler Cowen?

  But you can write about that too. You have a post on your recent reading.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I can, but I do think that you have to do a mixture of both. And I've leaned a little too far into the, into the walking. In terms of how many other people can do it, it's, it's not, you know, it's logistically a hard lifestyle. Like you have to be a certain personality. Like I do not mind waking up in a different bedroom every night.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I do, I quite, you know, this might be just a quirk of my personality. I do not mind 16 hour flights. I kind of look forward to them. Like, you know, and I don't fly first class. I fly in economy.

• 33:32Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  So if you don't.

• 33:33Tyler Cowen?

  13 hours is my limit. 13 is fine. Past that, it wears thin on me.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  But, but like it's the time to read, you know?

• 33:39Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  I go to the back and, you know, I know my airplanes now. I know exactly where the stewardess is hanging out and I go back and I talk to people, you know, I sit in the back. So I actually don't mind long flights. And if you gotta, you have to have a personality that enjoys that. I also don't mind, I like talking to people, like.

• 33:56Tyler Cowen?

  What do you, what is it you learned from stewardesses?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, like, speaking of the, you know, just the Faro Islands example, like I landed at three in the morning and she got a friend to drive me to the hotel. So like, small things like that. But, you know, in general, I just, they're just, they're just interesting people to talk about in terms of like, they tell you about where they grew up, they tell you where to go. I often take some of the information back, you know, I use the information probably in the way they wouldn't think I use the information. Like if they told me go someplace, I may not go there because that sign's like, it's gonna be crowded. And I don't like crowds. I just like to hear the life stories of people, you know, how they got into the career they got into and what they want out of life. And what's their goal here?

• 34:41Tyler Cowen?

  Why should more people visit the Faro Islands?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  It's just, you know, I said I'm to with nature, but I give an exemption for Faro. It's gorgeous. It's absolutely gorgeous. Like physically, it's, it's, it's the most sublime. It has a sublime beauty that I just can't, you know, that was, I kind of got people who get religious experiences out of nature. It never got old, the beauty. I also think it's extraordinarily functional. And I like functionality.

• 35:09Tyler Cowen?

  Great seafood, also.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  It's different. Although, you know, all the seafood, have you been?

• 35:14Tyler Cowen?

  Of course I've been.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  How many times have you been?

• 35:17Tyler Cowen?

  I've been to a lot of places.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Have you been, how long were you in Faro for?

• 35:22Tyler Cowen?

  I think five days. I'm not sure, but less than a week, but more than just a day or two.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  It's, it was interesting. I was planning to be there for five days and I canceled my next trip to stay there for two weeks.

• 35:32Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, I can imagine that easily.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  What I liked most about it was I would just go to the bus depot and get on a bus and just get off somewhere and then walk for four or five hours. And then, you know, I would make sure that I would get another bus back because of the timetables. You can just go, you can island hop and just walk around.

• 35:52Tyler Cowen?

  I like these incredible, you can't even call them towns, but maybe five homes Yeah. in a corner somewhere with the world's best view. And the homes are nice.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  What I didn't like about it, I'm terrified of heights. And I remember the first day I got there, I walked, I walked, I walked out of Torsvan across the island to the other side, over the, over the mountain there. It was like a eight mile walk over the, up, up the mountain and down.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Part of that walk, there were some kind of cliffs and I was like a little bit scared, but I got through it. But I'm like, I'll just take the bus back. That's fine. The bus is more terrifying than the walk because it would go down to pick up these kids and they live down at the, like one of those villages.

• 36:38Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, I did this once. Yeah.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  And the road is a dirt road that's maybe, you know, just a car length wide and this bus is going around the corners and these, I had to move sides of the bus not to be on the side that was near the looking down at 50. These kids were just like looking down, smiling. I was terrified.

• 37:01Tyler Cowen?

  Is Istanbul the world's most walkable city?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  I think it's one of, I would put Tokyo up there. Tokyo wins, wins a walkability award. Istanbul is probably my, it's one of the most walkable cities. If it wasn't for the motor scooters, delivery guys, it's got the weather, it's got the beauty, it's got the diversity. It's got, the biggest thing what I call for walkability is what I call local distribution, meaning you can always, there's always a shop somewhere.

• 37:26Tyler Cowen?

  Yes.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  It's also, I, I don't know if your experience was this, I just get over to the Asia side. That to me is a much more interesting side and get out of the tourist parts. It's just a very, it's just a, I mean, it's just a wonderful city. It has the history. The thing I like about the history there is it hasn't frozen the city. They just, you know, like on the, on the European side is that famous wall. I forget the name of the wall that was there, been there to the wall that was eventually breached in like 1453 or whatever, 1456, the northern defense wall. It's still there, remnants of it, and it's just used as a car park. Like, you know, there's this, there's this 13th century wall that's just used as a car park, which I still think is pretty impressive. So I like the way history

• 38:12Speaker 01

  is both, both there, but also not relegated to just kind of a museum-like status.

• 38:19Tyler Cowen?

  Is anywhere in India truly properly walkable?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  I've not been since a kid. I canceled this last trip. I was going to go to Mumbai. I don't know. I do a lot of Google street views before trips and it looks like part of the reason I canceled my trip, I was going to go in January, I had to cancel for a variety of reasons. I'll go sometime soon, but it looks like it's going to be, you know, it looks like it's going to be hard to walk. I mean, I was able to walk into Jakarta, I was able to walk Hanoi, I found both of them to be okay walkability.

• 38:52Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  How would you compare it to Jakarta? Have you been to both?

• 38:55Tyler Cowen?

  I've been to both. I've as many parts of India. Amritsar struck me as the most walkable part of India I've visited. The Sikhs are a bit like Mormons of India in terms of how they keep the city. It's fairly well maintained. There's pollution issues, there's weather issues, and there's big, you could call pothole, sidewalk pothole issues. So it's tough.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, the pothole issue is, I mean, it's awful in Jakarta, it's awful in Hanoi. You just have to look down a lot. Or you can just break an ankle.

• 39:23Tyler Cowen?

  Right. And then there's somewhere like Gawa, which is fairly well maintained, but it's just not well set up for walking. You need vehicles to get around.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of the developing world, you know, is not intended to be walked.

• 39:39Tyler Cowen?

  Quite the contrary.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Like, you know, and, and again, I remember when I was in Hanoi, people become friends with me and they're like, no, no, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take you on a scooter. I'm not gonna, why are you walking? Like, I was like trying to explain what I was doing. They were like, why would you walk? You know, when you can, when you can, when you can go on a moped. Like, you know, and that's, that's, that's, that's probably the right attitude, too.

• 40:00Tyler Cowen?

  I have the view that people should pick out a place where they're quite sure they don't want to go. And at least subject to some safety constraint, then go to that place.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  I agree with that.

• 40:10Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's kind of my whole strategy in many ways is, I mean, although it spectacularly failed with Phoenix.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  I wanted to be a smart ass and prove that unwalkable Phoenix was in fact walkable. And it did not happen.

• 40:24Tyler Cowen?

  It's getting less walkable, too, right?

• 40:27Speaker 01

  It was, it was, I mean, but again, it's no one, no one there walks. And no one should walk there. Like, they have no intention to be walkable. Like, and that's okay. You know, like.

• 40:39Tyler Cowen?

  At current margins, where is it you think you definitely don't want to go?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Where do I definitely not want to go?

• 40:45Tyler Cowen?

  Again, put aside North Korea, middle of war zones.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  I'm kind of burned out on Latin America. I spent so much time there as a, during my banking career. I've, I generally don't find.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  You know, I think Peru is Lima is quietly some of the best food in the world.

• 41:03Tyler Cowen?

  Sure, absolutely.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Like if I had to, if I had to say where, you know, one of the, to me, one of the dirty secrets is the food you get in a place is not that much better than you can get in the US. And you know, the average person does not eat that much.

• 41:16Tyler Cowen?

  Right.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  This, the, the exceptions being France, Japan, Korea and

• 41:20Tyler Cowen?

  Italy, I think.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  And Italy, yes.

• 41:22Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, Italy is, I put up there as well. In general, I get better, I got better Indonesian food in, in Netherlands than I did in Indonesia by far. Vietnam, I'd also put up there as a place where the food is exceptionally better relative than what you get outside of Vietnam. Latin America just doesn't really interest me in terms of like, ah, you know, I mean, I don't see a lot of variety in the cities. I'm not particularly into, like, I keep on wanting to go. I've had this childhood fascination with Suriname. In fact, last night I spent about an hour looking once again at flights to Suriname to Par, I can't pronounce the name of the capital, Parise.

• 41:58Tyler Cowen?

  I know, it's funny, just this morning I was looking up Suriname and thinking of going.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Paro.

• 42:04Tyler Cowen?

  Yes, whatever, the P, the P city.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there are direct flights from, from actually Netherlands, but like, but there's no direct flight from JFK, you can go to Georgetown, but also just, you know, doing lots of pin drops, looking at possible places to walk. It's not that interesting, you know, it's kind of spread out, it's hot.

• 42:22Tyler Cowen?

  But the mix of groups is interesting. The food is good when you buy it in the Netherlands, yes.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  That's a hope. So, I mean, I, I kind of, this, this morning I booked my next trip and my, originally it was going to be Georgetown and then going to, I can't pronounce it, Paro.

• 42:36Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, Suriname, yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  But I, I just, I just, for whatever reason, I just, the Caribbean, this doesn't interest me. I don't know what it is, it just doesn't seem like there's a lot of cultural depth there. You know, you can, your readers, your listeners can yell at me who are Caribbean, but like.

• 42:54Tyler Cowen?

  I will go there, this is on my list.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  They're wealthy now and I think the interesting thing about Georgetown is they have the oil, so you have the economics side.

• 43:03Tyler Cowen?

  They had 40% GDP growth in the prior year.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Got to imagine that changes the place.

• 43:07Tyler Cowen?

  Just to look at that for me is interesting.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and Suriname has a spillover of the same thing, or they're getting like 20% growth.

• 43:14Tyler Cowen?

  Lower, but still impressive, yeah.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  So I think that would be, in Latin America, that'd be interesting, but in terms of not, yeah, I don't, I don't want to go to South Africa either. I have no interest in going to South Africa.

• 43:24Tyler Cowen?

  I went to Cape Town last summer. I was surprised how much I liked it.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:28Tyler Cowen?

  I'm afraid to go elsewhere in the country, perhaps, but

• 43:32Speaker 01

  I mean, I was

• 43:32Tyler Cowen?

  I would say consider it, and I walked quite a bit.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  I spent six months there as a child, so I don't, I just, I don't know.

• 43:39Tyler Cowen?

  But that was a very different South Africa also.

• 43:43Tyler Cowen?

  And there were smaller towns where I quite seriously thought of just moving there for a month.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  In South Africa?

• 43:49Tyler Cowen?

  It's near Cape Town, to be clear, basically Cape Town. Small towns of, I don't know, 40,000 people with fully walkable city squares, perfect weather, amazing food, and prices were maybe one-third of US prices with a much higher standard of living.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  I'm trying to think where else I wouldn't go. I don't have much interest in Scandinavia.

• 44:11Tyler Cowen?

  I've had good trips there. And Helsinki for walking is one of my favorite cities.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Faroe Island surprised me. Like, I didn't expect it like Faroe Island, so you know, there you go.

• 44:20Tyler Cowen?

  And for in summertime, it's, I don't mind the heat, but my wife does, and they're great.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Orkneys?

• 44:25Tyler Cowen?

  Of course.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  And?

• 44:26Tyler Cowen?

  Incredible.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:27Tyler Cowen?

  But small, it's not that big a trip.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Because I was thinking of doing an Orkney, Shetland, Faroe trip.

• 44:33Tyler Cowen?

  I've never been to Shetland, but Orkneys I'd recommend.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  You can do that by boats, all three.

• 44:37Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, yeah, that would be fun. And in Orkney, to get to the ancient sites in Orkneys, I guess you could do it by bus, but a car is useful.

• 44:47Tyler Cowen?

  And it feels quite Nordic, not, not Scottish.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:50Tyler Cowen?

  And that surprised me a bit. I should have known, but

• 44:53Speaker 01

  I mean, very Norwegian, right?

• 44:55Tyler Cowen?

  That was my sense. Yeah.

• 44:58Tyler Cowen?

  Iran I want to go to, but I don't have my hopes up.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  You know, in places I want to go that are not particularly easy is basically Russia. I love Russian culture, absolutely love Russian.

• 45:06Tyler Cowen?

  I've only been twice.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  I was thinking about, one of the trips I'm trying to book is Belarus. But again, it's just, it's just, it's just hard for a lot of reasons. And there, there are risks, you know?

• 45:18Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  And I don't know if I particularly want to take those risks right now.

• 45:20Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  So, but I also know, you know, to the questions of, of issues of political morality, I would say that, again, 98% of the people aren't involved in politics. Like, you get to a place and they don't care.

• 45:33Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  And so it's kind of, it's unfair to condemn a place based on the elite's behavior when 98% of the people don't care. And you know, similarly, the the opposite behavior is, you know, I find a lot of foreigners are very forgiving of American policy because they they they understand that, you know, the citizens are not necessarily responsible for the behavior of the country.

• 45:55Tyler Cowen?

  We're very popular in Vietnam, I think.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  When I was in Vietnam, people kept asking me to, readers kept asking me to write about the political, like, what about the war? And no one talks about it. Nobody.

• 46:04Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Like, and I was right next to a, I remember having, you know, talking to some people right next to a, you know, I was in an outdoor bar, right next to a memorial to a Christmas Day bombing we did. And I think whenever we killed like 30 people. And there was this, you know, there was this memorial, including having a, like, a jet fighter, part of the jet fighter from the US jet fighter. No one cared.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  You know?

• 46:28Tyler Cowen?

  Why do you like El Paso so much?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  The the optimism, this American dream.

• 46:34Tyler Cowen?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  So I think the American dream is very much alive in the working class Mexican American community. And you see that in El Paso. Like, you don't have, you know, when I was doing my my project on addiction and poverty, El Paso is just fundamentally different.

• 46:49Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  You know, you don't have the despair that you have in places. You, you know.

• 46:54Tyler Cowen?

  And a low crime rate, too.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, extraordinarily, in, you know, in some senses, Mexico acts as the Roach Motel, right? Like, if you're going to do crime, go over to Juarez. So consequently, there's no crime in El Paso. But it's it's it's one of the most optimistic cities in the United States. It has amazing food, by the way. I, you know, I think it's walkable. And I've walked a lot of it. But I can understand why some people might not see that. I find just the colorful buildings. I find the good weather, fantastic weather, by the way, desert, desert, high desert is always my favorite weather. Great weather. And again, the optimism, like, you, you know, when you, when you look at working class Mexican Americans versus working class whites, working class blacks in the US, statistically, all the

• 47:37Speaker 01

  things are the same, except for issues of deviance, you know, crime, addiction, you know, the Mexicans drink too much. Like, you know, generally, you know, it's, it's where someone can come and really feel. And I think a lot of it is, you know, it's, it's the, it's the, it's the slope of the curve, not the height. They can literally look across over to Juarez and see what they've gotten, what their, what their, how their life has improved. And that just brings a great deal of optimism.

• 48:04Tyler Cowen?

  Looking back on your career as a whole, what were the best things about working on Wall Street?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Smart people.

• 48:11Tyler Cowen?

  Smart people.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've had, you know, particle physics, banking, and then I guess journalism, whatever you want to call it, writing now, punditry. And I have found in general that the friends, the group of people that was the smartest, the people I enjoy talking to the most, and I still enjoy talking to most in terms of being able to have kind of discussions that you can talk about anything.

• 48:38Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  And not feel like you're going to offend somebody at a level, or generally bankers. Not all of them, they're like, you know, there is a, there is a hierarchy in banking.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  But in general, I think it was a great way to learn about the world at a very top-down approach. And, you know, and, you know, people make fun of the idea of like becoming a specialist in X for what, but that was, that was the great thing about banking is, you know, all of a sudden you had to learn about oil for three months. You became an expert in oil. And then three months later, you became an expert on like palladium or whatever. And I found that kind of intense continual learning to be very, very enjoyable.

• 49:18Tyler Cowen?

  What were the worst things about working there?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  It was a very narrow view, again, which is why I'm doing what I'm doing now, which was it was very much, you know, the view from the Ramada. It's kind of fly in, you know, one of the things I will say is that, you know, I stay away from certain neighborhoods and certain towns, and which are generally the wealthy neighborhoods. They're all the same. Like, you know, like, they're all variations on a theme. The wealthy neighborhood and Sophia is very similar to, like, it's like a little Fifth Avenue. And that's just not interesting. And that's kind of what bankers do when they look at a place. You just go, you know, my joke I used to say about, because I was a, I did emerging markets, fixed income. So we bond trade in Russia, bond trade in Turkey. It's like, you

• 50:04Speaker 01

  know, the entire investor base in the bond market of Turkey could fit into this, this, this restaurant. And they often do. Like, they're all there every night, the same group of people. So it's just very, it's very limiting perspective.

• 50:17Tyler Cowen?

  What's the special role that pigeons played in your career?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Hi, John, for asking that question. A lot, actually. I became fascinated with pigeon keeping. When I started this project of documenting addiction, it came basically through pigeons. So during the financial crisis, I would go on these long walks in New York, these 15 mile walks, 16 mile walks, and I became fascinated with the pigeon keepers. I would see these flocks of pigeons above the air. And then I started documenting, becoming friends with these pigeon keepers. And they were, it was an old Italian sport brought over to the Bronx and Brooklyn. And now it's mostly a black and Puerto Rican sport. These guys will find these abandoned buildings and put coops up there and just keep pigeons. And they're up, I find them to be extraordinarily beautiful. I think it's an art form. They, they call it a sport, but there's really no goal to it.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Like you're not racing, it's just, it's husbandry, animal husbandry. Like you just keep pretty pigeons and then every day you fly them. And I found it to be a really wonderful hobby. So I started going all around New York, becoming part of this documenting pigeon keeper. That brought me to Hunts Point, which started me on my addiction project.

• 51:25Tyler Cowen?

  How about snapping turtles?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  I have two snapping turtles, Reginald and No Name, that are in my pond at home. And so for every, for the last eight years, when, when the summer comes, they come out and I feed them every night. I find it really fascinating that these two animals, these two creatures, one of which is probably 40 years old, will live underneath the ice, my pond's frozen right now, will be underneath the ice for six, seven months, and then they know when to come and where to come to get hot dogs every, at the same time every year, which I think is pretty, pretty amazing instinctive skill.

• 52:01Tyler Cowen?

  What's the best thing about writing Substack?

• 52:05Tyler Cowen?

  And tell us the full name of your Substack and how to connect to it.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Chris Arnade Walks the World. I would just Google Chris Arnade Walks the World. The freedom to basically do this, you know, like, I can't believe people are, I'm being paid, not tons, but enough to literally walk around the world. Like, you know, it's, it's kind of the perfect job for me. I don't think you could do that with, you know, there's, there's a, I forgot who it was who wrote about, back in the, about the 60s or 70s, someone who related to the Grateful Dead, wrote about the concept that you could, if you just, if you just have 2,000 fans. On anything.

• 52:40Tyler Cowen?

  That's right.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  You could, I forgot who it was who, who had that.

• 52:43Tyler Cowen?

  Is it Kevin Kelly or?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I believe that's it was.

• 52:47Tyler Cowen?

  No, Stuart Brand, I think.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Who, who come up with the concept, all you need is 2,000 people.

• 52:52Tyler Cowen?

  That's right.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  And.

• 52:54Tyler Cowen?

  Or sometimes one.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and that's pretty amazing. Like, you know, there's, you know, there's five billion people in the world. That's like, you don't need that many people.

• 53:01Tyler Cowen?

  But it's hard to get, right?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  It is, but it's not a high her, it's not a high barrier. So it's, you know, it's, it's, it's a really a niche, niche culture because I have a niche thing, you know, and all you need is 2,000 people. So I really find kind of the Substack model of allowing people to, to build a life based on just finding 2,000 people who appreciate what they do or 1,000. That's a really, that's a really liberating, you know, notion because, you know, in a big world, you can usually find 1,500 people who have, if you have an, if you have a unique enough interest.

• 53:37Tyler Cowen?

  And do you think you'll turn your Substack into a book or something else or?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Why?

• 53:43Tyler Cowen?

  So there's no plan per se.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Like, why would you do? Like, I don't understand. I mean, I don't really understand books, like in the sense of like.

• 53:49Tyler Cowen?

  But you want to read more of them, right?

• 53:51Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I like, I'm glad people wrote books in the past, but like, you know, like I think in many cases, kind of a, a weekly essay is a bi-weekly essay or is, is kind of the perfect, at least for me, is a perfect way to kind of communicate.

• 54:07Tyler Cowen?

  Do you use AI at all when you travel?

• 54:09Speaker 01

  I do not. I'm starting to use it now as a, I, I take that back.

• 54:13Tyler Cowen?

  Very good for travel.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Started using as a copy editor, but you, why, what do you, what do you use it for, for traveling?

• 54:19Tyler Cowen?

  If I'm just arriving in a city, I will have guidebooks, but I'll ask GPT or Claude, what should I see in the city? And I'll tell it what I'm interested in. It's better than any guidebook.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Really?

• 54:29Tyler Cowen?

  It is.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  So what do you, so when you land in the city, what do you tell, let's say you were going to Xi'an. What would you do?

• 54:37Tyler Cowen?

  I would say I'm interested in Chinese history, art, culture, and food.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  So you're a museum guy?

• 54:43Tyler Cowen?

  I'm a museum guy, and I've been to Xi'an and before.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  You go through the museum.

• 54:48Tyler Cowen?

  That's right.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  So I do exactly the opposite. I've never been to, I don't, the only museums I go to is military history museums because I.

• 54:53Tyler Cowen?

  Those are great, too.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  There are histories of propaganda, which I love.

• 54:57Tyler Cowen?

  The one in Tokyo is incredible.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Like, they're almost histories of histories. They're almost museums of museums at this point. So you, you go through museums.

• 55:06Tyler Cowen?

  But in China, there are not many good ones to see. But in Xi'an, by far, the best thing to see is in a museum. You cannot not go to the museum. To see the Terracotta Warriors, right?

• 55:16Speaker 01

  So I, I don't want to, you know, what do you get out of a museum?

• 55:22Tyler Cowen?

  I love the visual arts.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Okay, but.

• 55:24Tyler Cowen?

  So I see what's in it.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but to see it in, like, I.

• 55:27Tyler Cowen?

  But it's elites building a narrative.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 55:30Tyler Cowen?

  If you're interested in that.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  What can you get out of that that you can't get out of that from a book? So I go.

• 55:35Tyler Cowen?

  The color plates are not very good compared to the actual paintings.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  So it's, to me, I'm kind of asking, what's the Walter Benjamin question? Like, you know, the age, the age, age in mechanical reproduction.

• 55:45Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, the reproductions are terrible.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, but so.

• 55:47Tyler Cowen?

  But in the book, you don't really see the process of defining the history and the narrative and how people respond to it.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  So did, did you, you've been to the Hagia Sophia?

• 55:58Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, sure.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Did you get something out of it?

• 56:00Tyler Cowen?

  Of course.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  What did you get out of it?

• 56:01Tyler Cowen?

  The visual splendor of it, which cannot be captured in a photograph.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  So the aura.

• 56:05Tyler Cowen?

  Right, aura.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Okay, the aura.

• 56:07Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  And that helped you understand it better?

• 56:10Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know if understand is the word. I enjoyed it. I felt inspired. I shared it with other people who were there. Yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  And sometimes I, I kind of more the, I think you have a, you have a reputation of being something of a libertarian, kind of like, materialist. Is that fair?

• 56:26Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know what that means.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  No, but.

• 56:28Tyler Cowen?

  I'm a broadly libertarian.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, but no, but like, I'm almost kind of, you're almost more romantic about it than I am here.

• 56:34Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, much more, of course.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  And whereas I find the museums to be kind of like, eh.

• 56:40Tyler Cowen?

  And a thing you can do with AI is you can take a photo of any picture in the museum or any bird, any plant, any building.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  And give the history.

• 56:49Tyler Cowen?

  And ask it all the questions you want, and that guidebooks cannot do, and that's phenomenal.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  I mean, again, I love.

• 56:56Tyler Cowen?

  And it's free. I mean, if the margin is free.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:59Tyler Cowen?

  You have to pay some subscription, but it's not much.

• 57:03Tyler Cowen?

  So what do you think you'll do next?

• 57:05Speaker 01

  I'm going to do this for another few, another, another few years, and then I don't know. Like, I didn't know I was going to do this, you know what I mean?

• 57:13Tyler Cowen?

  This, how did it come about that you did this? What was the moment of realization or decision?

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Life was stressful. I found I always walked. You know, when I, when I'm at home, I walk, I have a standard 10 mile daily walk that I do, which is very different from my, like, learning walk. It's just, it's therapeutic. Around COVID, when COVID happened, I looked at actuarial tables and I said, oh, I'm a little bit overweight. Like, you know, that's not good. And so I started walking 10 miles every day and I really enjoyed it. And then I started saying, well, I should just, you know, I shouldn't, I, I, when I was in Brooklyn, I used to, I walked the entire length of the New York subway system above ground. And I've always been into walking and I just realized, hey, I can just, I can, you know, I think I was looking at some plate, a table that like, what, about one and a half billion people live in, live in massive cities that we really don't know the names, like, you know, these big sprawling Jakarta's. I'm like, I would like to see that.

• 58:04Tyler Cowen?

  Agree.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Like, that's where, how, that's the normal experience for most people. And so I just started, I booked a trip to Jakarta and just started walking Jakarta.

• 58:12Tyler Cowen?

  Listeners, I love Chris's Substack. It's walking the world. Chris's book I can recommend as well. Chris, thank you very much for coming on the show.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 58:26Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.