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. 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.
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Recorded February 27th, 2025.
Read the full transcript
Thanks to Steve Alexandrowski, CFP of GEM Asset Management, for sponsoring this transcript.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m chatting, live and in person, with Chris Arnade. 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 sense with a new project, which is walking both walkable and non-walkable cities throughout the world. He writes a Substack about his walking and his travels. Chris, welcome.
CHRIS ARNADE: Thank you for having me.
COWEN: If you had to live in either Beijing or Shanghai for 10 full years, which one would you pick and why?
ARNADE: I was actually [laughs] thinking about that a lot on the airplane. I couldn’t come up with an answer. I think Beijing ultimately, because there was 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 had a good four or five days. Beijing grew on me with time though. I just thought there was more there.
COWEN: I think I would much prefer Beijing. It feels more intellectual, and there’s a greater variety of Chinese foods there.
ARNADE: 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. In both cases, because of visa constraints, I was there for six or less days.
The food thing to me that was interesting was, what I had hoped to find in China I didn’t find, which was, I thought I was going to have a Taipei-like experience where there was just going to be a variety of different foods all over the place on the streets. I was eating in mall food courts. There was a lot of diversity there, but it felt very hard to choose because it was all crammed together in these small food courts.
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?
ARNADE: In those two —
COWEN: Beijing versus Shanghai.
ARNADE: I don’t have a good answer to that one because I don’t feel like I know either of them well enough. How would you do it?
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.
ARNADE: 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 frustrated me in some ways — was how similar Shanghai and Beijing were, that they were inscrutable to me at the level I do things. A lot of that may be the way I approach learning, which is simply to walk 15 miles, and they’re not particularly walkable cities.
COWEN: Right.
ARNADE: That’s one of the things I’ve come to have to deal with in my project is, I walk to learn, but some places that’s not actually the right approach.
In both cases, the analogy I use — because I walked 15 miles in Beijing and 15 miles in Shanghai — I kept on saying that it felt like I was in one of those cheap cartoons where the background kept repeating. It was 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 when I do what I do. I don’t know if that was intentional, that’s how the cities are designed to be uniform, to remove any differences.
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.
ARNADE: I was thinking in particular of that approach. I’ve been reading James C. Scott who writes a lot about the idea of regulation as control, or top-down regulation as control. That’s certainly the case in Beijing, where gone are the small winding dens of small neighborhoods because those are hard to control. They’re much easier if you replace them by 50-story towers with a mall next to it.
COWEN: And surveillance.
ARNADE: And surveillance. What struck me when I was in Beijing — not so much the difference between Beijing and Shanghai, but how top-down regulation is often designed very intentionally for control. Beijing in particular feels that way. That’s what frustrated me initially. I had said — because I do all these trips, something seat of the pants — I landed and I said, “Oh, I’ll just walk to Tiananmen Square.” Well, I just can’t do that.
[laughter]
COWEN: I did that once, but it wasn’t easy.
ARNADE: I actually got there even though I had found out along the way that you had to . . . 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 walked by. What I wrote about was there being what I call a totalitarian anarchy, which is, I think they intend to be control-y, but they don’t pull it off very well. They’re just too incompetent to pull it off.
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.
ARNADE: That’s what I thought about with the firewall, which is, everybody has a VPN, and everybody knows everybody has a VPN, so there really isn’t a firewall, but it’s the idea that you regulate people by making sure that the people who can’t get enough together to figure out how to get around it, don’t get around it. [laughs]
COWEN: The VPN’s also a way to monitor them, right?
ARNADE: Yes, exactly.
COWEN: You can’t actually trust the VPN supplier.
ARNADE: I don’t like to be conspiratorial because I think that’s often wrong, but I did notice my VPN clunked out at very odd moments. [laughs] I was there during the actual election and —
COWEN: The US election?
ARNADE: Yes. When I was following, I noticed that my VPN went out at very inopportune times when there was stuff going on that probably would have been fun to watch, or wasn’t convenient. So you think the loosey-goosey approach is actually intentional?
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, and until it starts not working, don’t try too hard to fix it.
ARNADE: What do you think ultimately is driving them though? What is their goal here?
COWEN: When you say them, if you mean the —
ARNADE: The CCP.
COWEN: The inner committee of the CCP — I think it is to make China “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.
ARNADE: What struck me and one of the things I wrote about on both the pieces, was I kept thinking of them as a guardian class incorporating Plato’s Republic. They really do think of themselves as the guardian class whose goal is to build the best society. I just don’t know what they’re working towards, because if they’re working towards increasing material wealth, they’re doing well. But if the end point is someplace like Korea, Korea’s famously not particularly happy. [laughs]
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. Anyone who’s ethnic Chinese ultimately falls under their purview, which is also different than, say, an American view.
ARNADE: I’m going back again because I find it so fascinating, because I don’t understand it to the degree I feel like I understand other places. Other places, I come away with a pretty quick sense of describing a town in some ways. But both Beijing and Shanghai felt a little bit . . . Maybe it’s the scale because, again, they’re not really smart places to walk.
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. I think a lot of the CCP plan is improvised rather than planned. 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.
ARNADE: Again, it’s the problem that comes with top-down management, which is, sometimes, you just get it wrong. [laughs] You just get it wrong.
COWEN: I think they’re deathly afraid of disorder and civil war, given their history, in a way we are not.
ARNADE: To me, what’s interesting about it is how explicit the top-down organization is at the built level as well as at the cultural level. Everything is micromanaged, again, with a loosey-goosey approach to give a little bit of wiggle room. The image I will always have of, at least Shanghai, one of the initial images is how . . .
Asia has very rambunctious cities, and what I like about Asian cities is they have an organic street life, a low regulatory, organic street life. That is gone in China. To have gone from Taipei to Shanghai to see that, and that lack of organic street life is intentional. They say, “We don’t like this.”
There was this neighborhood I was walking through in Shanghai where they had bought up the entire neighborhood. It had been an old neighborhood, and it was slated for development into a business park–style living. They had replaced where there had been stores with murals of store life. [laughs] It’s just too spot on for what they’re doing, which is, removing actual organic street life and replacing it with cartoon images of it.
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.
ARNADE: I’m going to Xi’an next trip.
COWEN: That also has organic street life.
ARNADE: The further west you go, the harder it is to get a visa.
COWEN: Yes, but you should be able to get to Kunming without problems. In Xi’an, try the cherries. They’re fantastic.
COWEN: Now, which is more interesting in a major Chinese city, a McDonald’s or a KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken?
ARNADE: Everybody told me KFC, and I stuck with McDonald’s because of my past history with McDonald’s. What struck me about Beijing and China, in both cases was it’s the one time on my trips. I famously have become, online, the McDonald’s guy because I read a lot about McDonald’s in the US and the role of McDonald’s in the US.
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’re alternatives. Japan has 7-Elevens and Izakayas, and in other countries there’re other forms of what I would say organic food spaces.
In Beijing, it was McDonald’s. [laughs] It was interesting. It served the same role it does in the US for very different reasons, which is, in the US, McDonald’s is the place people go 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. You just can go and relax.
I went to a few KFCs to use the bathroom, but I don’t like fried chicken. I just do not like it. [laughs] I don’t like fried foods in general so I didn’t really spend time there. I found myself spending a lot of time in the McDonald’s in China. I find them to be really wonderful places.
COWEN: My favorite McDonald’s in the world is in Auckland, New Zealand, which is the world’s largest Polynesian city. McDonald’s there often serves as the center for Polynesian gatherings, not just Māori —
ARNADE: I can imagine that, yes.
COWEN: — but Cook Islands, Tongans, Fiji.
ARNADE: Yes, I can see that.
COWEN: If you’re ever in Auckland, it has a phenomenal McDonald’s.
ARNADE: The mixing that takes place in McDonald’s is absolutely amazing. In the US, it’s absolutely amazing, similarly across the world. Again, a lot of other countries have other things that serve that role.
COWEN: Where’s your favorite McDonald’s in the world?
ARNADE: My favorite McDonald’s in the world? The one I probably use the most is in LA.
COWEN: Where in LA?
ARNADE: In East LA. I don’t remember the name of the street. A lot of my book was written in it. It’s in the East LA Mexican neighborhood.
COWEN: That should be a good one.
ARNADE: The name of the street is on the tip of my tongue. There’s organic life there that is absolutely wonderful. I learned so much in that, because when I was in the US doing my project, I would literally just sit in McDonald’s at night and type up my notes. So many of my stories would ultimately come from just being in McDonald’s, not trying to get stories.
[laughter]
ARNADE: It’s funny to look back on that period because when you realize . . . When I was doing this project on addiction and poverty, I would talk to people, and then I’d meet them at a McDonald’s, and then I would take them outside the McDonald’s to photograph them because it just didn’t seem photographic. Then I was like, “Wait a second. The fact that I’m meeting everybody at McDonald’s — that’s the story.” It’s just such a great community center for so many people.
COWEN: Why is Seoul, South Korea, possibly your favorite city?
ARNADE: It’s got a functional dysfunction. It’s a little bit more dysfunctional, a little less uptight than Tokyo, but it has a lot of the same positive qualities of Tokyo, which is, 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 enjoy that.
Also, when I’m in a place, I like to get into a regular walk. I have a 10-mile walk there I absolutely love. I do it every day when I’m there. It had been an old drainage ditch, and it goes underneath subways, and it goes underneath interstates, and now it’s just this beautiful reclaimed 10-mile walk.
COWEN: What I like there is that the food scene is not Instagrammed to death. You can find an obscure place that’s more or less undiscovered — and it can be very good — in almost any neighborhood.
ARNADE: Someone asked me about the best food, and I think if you measure the best food by the median food, I actually think Japan is still higher than Korea that way.
COWEN: But they have the worst food also.
ARNADE: Yes, you can get some really —
COWEN: Disgusting things there.
ARNADE: — disgusting. The night before I got on a 15-hour flight, I had chicken sashimi. You should not have chicken sashimi.
COWEN: I’ve refused. I saw it and I was like, “No.”
ARNADE: I had two pieces down before I realized what it was, and I’m like, “Okay, if I’m going to die, I’m going to die.” But it wasn’t good.
COWEN: It doesn’t look good either.
ARNADE: Even for the risk, it wasn’t good. I’ll take a risk if something tastes good. Koreans have some weird food. One of the things I like about Japan is, I can go to the 7-Eleven and get a good sandwich.
COWEN: Yes, very good food at the 7-Eleven.
ARNADE: Sandwiches in the Korean 7-Elevens have a lot of sugar in them, sugar mixed with ham, things like that. I actually think Japan has better food than Korea, but I agree with you that the Korean food scene is less understood by the West, and I think it’s less precious. [laughs] Some of the best food I’ve had in the world is in small places in Japan that are off the beaten track.
COWEN: Yes. Now, in evaluating cities, how much do you take weather into account? 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.
ARNADE: I love cold weather though. I was just in Seoul three days ago. When I got up in the morning, it was 18 degrees, and I love that. I like cold weather. If you don’t like cold weather, don’t go to Seoul. The thing is, the winds come off the mountains, and it’s really cold. When the winds come off, it’s really bitterly cold.
COWEN: How much do you count air pollution for? Because that’s going to hurt China, for walking especially.
ARNADE: I actually put together a metric on walkability. I had, I think, eight categories. Climate and crime and pollution are three big factors. People got on my ass for ranking LA relatively high as a walkability city.
COWEN: Oh, I put it near the top.
ARNADE: It’s got great weather. If you can deal with some of the distances involved and lack of density, it’s got a fantastic bus system. Part of being able to walk is, when you choose not to walk, you can just jump on public transportation. It’s got an ubiquitous bus system that can get you pretty much everywhere. It’s got great climate. It’s also just a visually impressive city. It’s got good skies. 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.
COWEN: Sure. I once walked across Sao Paulo, which, in retrospect, was insane. I wouldn’t do it today.
ARNADE: Yes, that’s tough.
COWEN: It’s tough.
ARNADE: Do you remember which direction you walked?
COWEN: No, but it was a very long walk. The murder rate then was much higher, but street problems were much less frequent.
ARNADE: I’ve always found that a lot of the locals tell me not to go where I go, and I’ve never had a problem. I have zero jewelry on. I never wear jewelry. I dress very simply. I’ve just never had a problem. I think Latin America and 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.
COWEN: That’s okay. What’s your nomination for the least walkable city?
ARNADE: Phoenix is pretty bad. In the rest of the world, what was the lowest ranked of mine?
COWEN: I think Dakar is your lowest ranked.
ARNADE: Dakar is low.
COWEN: I don’t find that so bad.
ARNADE: [laughs] It was partially the heat. Also, there was a safety issue, which is not actual violence. It’s just the risk of a miscommunication going very badly because when you’re in a neighborhood where they have a slum basically, where you’re one of few white people, it’s not that I feel threatened by being robbed. I feel threatened that there can be miscommunication, like, “Why are you here? What are you doing here?” That can spiral out of control if you don’t speak the language. Dakar was really tough. Kampala was really tough to walk.
COWEN: Why’s that? I’ve never been there.
ARNADE: Again, these are cities that are not meant to be walked. Locals don’t walk them. People would look at me like I’m crazy. Part of the reason, first of all, you can jump on a hack bus, so why would you walk? 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 a really dumb risk.”
COWEN: Yes, I wouldn’t do that.
ARNADE: I almost got killed the first time I did it, but they do it. Consequently, there’s no walking infrastructure and when you do walk, you’re at risk of being hit by a boda-boda. People will walk out of necessity but there’s just no infrastructure. Absolutely none. Then you can get hit by a car. You can get hit by a car or a motorcycle.
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’re mountains, there’re tunnels.
ARNADE: 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 would imagine that, just connecting dots, Sao Paulo is a lot more walkable than Rio.
COWEN: Sure.
ARNADE: Rio is — there’re just no-go zones. Literally, those are dangerous. The topography of a place does determine its walkability. [laughs] Certain cities are just disjoined, and it’s really hard to walk.
One of my favorite cities in the world — and I quite enjoyed walking it — was Amman, Jordan. I would encourage people who listen to this . . . People are always like, “What’s a place that’s a relatively really undiscovered place?” It was safe. I went into some very “rough” neighborhoods, even though I was open to the people that I was Jewish.
COWEN: Most of the Arab world is quite safe, I found.
ARNADE: Exactly. Just, “Assalamu alaikum,” and you’re good. It’s eight hills. There are climbs I was taking that it was just absurd. I’m walking up basically 60 floors of steep flights. You feel like a hero, and then a 60-year-old woman comes right past you, [laughs] who’s been doing it all day with stuff on her back.
COWEN: I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but one of my favorite walkable cities was Alexandria, Egypt.
ARNADE: I have not been.
COWEN: You have both the waterfront and streets with interesting buildings. When I was there, at least, it was quite safe. It probably still is.
ARNADE: I also do these long walks, like I walked across England, and I’ve walked across Japan. I walk the Rhône Valley and I walk the Rhine Valley — 200-mile walks. It’s what I’ll do over the course of two weeks. That’s one of the ones I want to do, which is to walk basically down part of the Nile, up from Alexandria and down to Cairo in that region.
COWEN: What’s the greatest purely physical problem you have with all your walking?
ARNADE: Heat, usually. Heat exhaustion, because a lot of the interesting places are in very hot parts of the world.
COWEN: Heat never bothers me. I feel very lucky. It’s cold I hate.
ARNADE: Dehydration and heat are my big problems because, again, places I find really interesting tend to be near the equator. I don’t know how old you are, but as I’ve gotten older, I just can’t handle the heat.
COWEN: Sixty-three.
ARNADE: I’m impressed that you can handle the heat.
COWEN: I’ve lived in Virginia a long time. I think for five years, I never turned on my air conditioner because I felt I should get used to it, and I did.
Now, when you take the trip as a whole — not just the walk, but the trip — you’re not packing very much, right?
ARNADE: That’s correct.
COWEN: What is it you wish you could carry but you can’t? It just doesn’t work.
ARNADE: I would like a few more night outfits. [laughs]
COWEN: When you say night outfits, do you mean to dress up?
ARNADE: I usually have one go-out shirt. I want to walk in the shirt. After a while, that gets a bit raggedy. [laughs] Whenever I’m traveling, I also do attend mass every Sunday, wherever I am. I famously wear only sandals. Another pair of shoes would be nice, to feel less disrespectful when I go to mass.
COWEN: Is there anything you bring a double of? I bring a double pair of glasses. I’ve never needed them.
ARNADE: I bring lots of Tide Pods. Those are my secret weapons, Tide 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. I’ve never needed a second one, much less the first one, but I always like to know I won’t run out of power.
COWEN: Sometimes I bring spare chargers. For books, you use Kindle? Or how do you do that?
ARNADE: I always have one physical book and then my Kindle. I always keep one physical book because I just prefer reading physical books.
COWEN: I always bring my Kindle, but try to get by with only physical books.
ARNADE: I think, honestly, I never regret under-packing. I pack remarkably light. To me, if I had one hack to people for traveling, what I would say is, when you get home and look at what you brought and see how much you didn’t use, you’ll find that you didn’t use a third of what you brought. You can buy things on the road, you know, [laughs] if you run out of stuff, like I can buy that second shirt, and sometimes I have.
COWEN: Now, I did an episode with Paul Salopek. Do you know who he is?
ARNADE: No.
COWEN: He’s walking around the world.
ARNADE: Literally?
COWEN: Literally. In a — circle isn’t exactly the right word. He’s had trouble with the war or with Russia. China, at first, was an issue. This was during the pandemic some of the time. Are you ever tempted to do that?
ARNADE: Yes. The problem is, I’ve looked at paths. I looked at walking across the US multiple times. I don’t know how much you’re going to learn the third day in a wheat field. One day of wheat fields is good. Two more days? The Gobi Desert’s the same. What am I going to learn the 15th day in the Gobi Desert?
This whole project started with this idea of walking around the world, literally. I started saying, “I’ll just cut out the middle parts, the boring parts, and focus on the cities,” because I like people. I’m focused on culture. I’m focused on how people operate. I like people. I like being around people. The Woody Allen joke is, “I am at two with nature.” I get that. I like small doses of it, but what are you going to learn from the forest on the fourth day?
COWEN: I’m the same.
ARNADE: If I walk from here to Florida, that’s a lot of pine forest, man. [laughs] There’s not much to learn there.
I looked at walking across the US multiple times. I don’t know how much you’re going to learn the third day in a wheat field. One day of wheat fields is good. Two more days? The Gobi Desert’s the same. What am I going to learn the 15th day in the Gobi Desert?
This whole project started with this idea of walking around the world, literally. I started saying, “I’ll just cut out the middle parts, the boring parts, and focus on the cities,” because I like people. I’m focused on culture. I’m focused on how people operate. I like people. I like being around people. The Woody Allen joke is, “I am at two with nature.” I get that. I like small doses of it, but what are you going to learn from the forest on the fourth day?
COWEN: What is it you think you learn least well traveling the way you do?
ARNADE: It’s interesting. I used to be a macro-type trader. I used to be very top-down. I think I, in some sense, have thrown too much of that away. I’ve gone in too blind. I could do a little bit more background reading in terms of the political situation.
One of the things I’ve learned from my project is, most people don’t talk about politics. It’s because I only talk about what other people want to talk about. No one talks about politics. Being in Beijing and Shanghai — maybe it’s not the best example because people would say there’s a reason they don’t want to talk about it. I don’t think that’s it.
COWEN: No, I agree. Most of the world. Even Idaho.
ARNADE: Yes, 98 percent of the people aren’t political and they don’t talk about politics. I got beat up on social media when people were talking about, “Oh my God, Trump’s going to be elected. The world hates us.” No, they don’t. [laughs] When that person said that, I was actually in a bar in Kampala with a woman telling me how much she loved Trump. That was a rare political conversation. Most people don’t talk about politics.
In that sense, 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 people don’t talk about it.
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.
ARNADE: The biggest change I would say is I’ve become religious, although that’s not entirely just the walking, but that’s —
COWEN: Do you think the walking has fed into it?
ARNADE: Yes.
COWEN: How has that operated?
ARNADE: Part of it was utilitarian. This works for so many people, [laughs] but also, it’s a little deeper than that, which is an understanding that people are a little bit more complicated than science leads you to belief, and life is a little more complicated. In that sense, there is something to what I would call common-sense folk wisdom. That’s just more than something that needs to be explained away with science or eventually, we’ll move beyond.
I do think there are very human qualities that are . . . I am not a relativist. I might’ve been 30 years ago — belief in cultural relativism. I’m not a relativist. I think there are some cultures that are just better than others. [laughs]
COWEN: I agree with that.
ARNADE: Why can’t we say that?
[laughter]
ARNADE: Way back when, before I found out I was good at math, I started off with the intention of going into anthropology. Basically, as a freshman, I left it after three months because it was filled with this cultural relativism, which I just thought was absurd. Now, I feel more certain of that.
I would say the bigger thing I’ve been thinking about for the last two years is . . . Six years ago or seven years, I would say, “What elites say doesn’t matter. Who cares what people are fighting about on Twitter?” [laughs] Actually —
COWEN: It does matter, I think.
ARNADE: Elites, and I’ll put myself as an elite — I’m one — we build cultures. We build societies, so we matter immensely. Maybe I’ve gone a little bit too far now where I think all of culture is built by elites to almost a level of 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 there is free will and people have agency.
I think CCP is an extreme example of what takes place in almost every culture, which is, there is a small group of a guardian class — different definitions in different places — who effectively create culture. Most people are not political. The way they choose to live is based not on a law decision; it’s based on what culture gives them.
COWEN: Sure, conformity.
ARNADE: In that sense, I think what academics do, or what elites do, what politicians do is immensely important and shapes how societies are built and how they evolve.
COWEN: Putting aside issues of financial security, how many people do you think should do what you’re doing? Is it like, “Oh, there’re only a few of us in the world”? Or is it some kind of life arb opportunity that, say, 3 percent of people actually should be doing if they can?
ARNADE: What’s interesting is, I’m probably going to take a six-month break from what I’m doing because I’ve leaned too far away from reading books. There’s book-learning, then there’s what I call stochastic experimental learning, which is what I’m doing. You need both. I think if you only do what I’m doing, you’re going to miss out on a lot of the world.
COWEN: Why can’t you do both though? I once had a trip to Goa, and I mistimed the monsoon, and I could hardly go out at all. 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.
ARNADE: I would have to change how I travel, which part of it is just me. People are expecting content every 11 days based on walking, so if I sit around reading books . . .
COWEN: You can write about that, too. You have a post on your recent reading.
ARNADE: 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 walking. In terms of how many other people can do it, it’s logistically a hard lifestyle. You have to be a certain personality. I do not mind waking up in a different bedroom every night. [laughs] This might be just a quirk of my personality. I do not mind 16-hour flights. I look forward to them. [laughs] I don’t fly first class; I fly in economy.
COWEN: Thirteen hours is my limit. Thirteen is fine. Past that, it wears thin on me.
ARNADE: Yes, I know, but it’s the time to read. I go to the back. I know my airplanes, now. I know exactly where the stewardesses hang out, and I go back and I talk to people. I sit in the back. I actually don’t mind long flights. You have to have a personality that enjoys that. I like talking to people.
COWEN: What is it you learn from stewardesses?
ARNADE: Speaking of the Faroe Islands example, I landed at 3:00 in the morning and she got a friend to drive me to the hotel. [laughs] Small things like that. In general, they’re just interesting people to talk about. They tell you about where they grew up. They tell you where to go. I use the information probably in the way they wouldn’t think I use the information. If they told me to go someplace, I may not go there because that sounds like it’s going to be crowded [laughs], and I don’t like crowds.
I just like to hear the life stories of people — how they got into the career they got into and what they want out of life, what’s their goal here.
COWEN: Why should more people visit the Faroe Islands?
ARNADE: I said I’m two with nature, but I give an exemption for Faroe. It’s gorgeous. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Physically, it has a sublime beauty. I get 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.
COWEN: Great seafood also.
ARNADE: It’s different. Have you been?
COWEN: Of course, I’ve been.
ARNADE: Oh, how many times have you been? [laughs]
COWEN: I’ve been to a lot of places.
ARNADE: How long were you in Faroe for?
COWEN: I think five days. I’m not sure. Less than a week, but more than just a day or two.
ARNADE: It was interesting. I was planning to be there for five days, and I canceled my next trip to stay there for two weeks —
COWEN: Yes, I can imagine that easily.
ARNADE: What I liked most about it was, I would just go to the bus depot and get on a bus and get off somewhere and then walk for four or five hours. would make sure that I would get another bus back because of the timetables. You can island-hop and just walk around.
COWEN: I like these incredible . . . you can’t even call them towns, but maybe five homes in a corner somewhere with the world’s best view. And the homes are nice.
ARNADE: What I didn’t like about it — I’m terrified of heights. I remember the first day I got there, I walked out of Tórshavn, across the island to the other side, over the mountain there. It was an eight-mile walk up the mountain and down. Part of that walk, there were some cliffs, and I was a little bit scared, but I got through it. I’m like, “I’ll just take the bus back. That’s fine.” The bus was more terrifying than the walk because it would go down to pick up these kids, and they lived down —
COWEN: I did this once.
ARNADE: The road is a dirt road that’s maybe just a car length wide, and this bus is going around the corners. I had to move sides of the bus to not be on the side that was looking down the 50 . . . These kids were just looking down, smiling. I was terrified. [laughs]
COWEN: Is Istanbul the world’s most walkable city?
ARNADE: I think it is one of them. I would put Tokyo up there. Tokyo wins the walkability award. Istanbul is 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. The biggest thing for walkability is what I call local distribution, meaning there’s always a shop somewhere.
COWEN: Yes.
ARNADE: 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. Get out of the tourist parts. 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.
On the European side is that famous wall. I forget the name of the wall that had been there, the wall that was eventually breached in 1453 or whatever, 1456. The northern defense wall. It’s still there, remnants of it, and it’s just used as a car park. There’s this 13th-century wall that’s used as a car park, which I still think is pretty impressive. I like the way history is there but also not relegated to just a museum-like status.
On
COWEN: Is anywhere in India truly, properly walkable?
ARNADE: I’ve not been since a kid. I canceled this last trip. I was going to go to Mumbai. I don’t know, because I do a lot of Google Street Views before trips. 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 hard to walk. I was able to walk into Jakarta, I was able to walk Hanoi. I found both of them to be okay walkability.
COWEN: I agree.
ARNADE: How would you compare it to Jakarta? Have you been to both?
COWEN: I’ve been to both. As many parts of India, Amritsar struck me as the most walkable part of India I visited. The Sikhs are a bit like Mormons of India in terms of how they keep the city. It’s fairly well maintained. There’re pollution issues, there’re weather issues, and there’re big, you could call, sidewalk pothole issues, so it’s tough.
ARNADE: The pothole issue — it’s awful in Jakarta. It’s awful in Hanoi. You just have to look down a lot, or else you can break an ankle.
COWEN: Right. Then there’s somewhere like Goa, which is fairly well maintained, but it’s just not well set up for walking. You need vehicles to get around.
ARNADE: A lot of the developing world is not intended to be walked.
[laughter]
COWEN: Quite the contrary.
ARNADE: Again, I remember when I was in Hanoi, people become friends with me, and they’re like, “No, no, no, I’m going to take you on a scooter. Why are you walking?” I was trying to explain what I was doing. They were like, “Why would you walk when you can go on a moped?” That’s probably the right attitude, too.
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.
ARNADE: I agree with that. That’s my whole strategy in many ways. Although it spectacularly failed with Phoenix.
[laughter]
ARNADE: I wanted to be a smart ass and prove that un-walkable Phoenix was, in fact, walkable. It did not happen.
[laughter]
COWEN: It’s getting less walkable too, right?
ARNADE: Again, no one there walks, and no one should walk there. They have no intention to be walkable, and that’s okay.
COWEN: At current margins, where is it you think you definitely don’t want to go?
ARNADE: Where do I definitely not want to go?
COWEN: Again, put aside North Korea, in the middle of war zones.
ARNADE: I’m burned out on Latin America. I spent so much time there during my banking career. I think Peru, Lima, is quietly some of the best food in the world.
COWEN: Sure, absolutely.
ARNADE: If I had to say where . . . 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. The average person does not eat that much. The exceptions being France, Japan, Korea, and Peru.
COWEN: Italy, I think.
ARNADE: And Italy, yes. Italy. I put up there as well. In general, I got better Indonesian food 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 to what you get outside of Vietnam.
Latin America just doesn’t really interest me. I don’t see a lot of variety in the cities. I’m not particularly into . . . 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. I can’t pronounce the name of the capital [Paramaribo].
COWEN: I know. It’s funny, just this morning I was looking up Suriname and thinking of going.
ARNADE: There are direct flights, actually, from Netherlands, but there’s no direct flight from JFK. You can go to Georgetown, but also, just doing lots of pin drops, looking at possible places to walk. It’s not that interesting. It’s spread out. It’s hot.
COWEN: But the mix of groups is interesting. The food is good when you buy it in the Netherlands.
ARNADE: That’s the hope. This morning I booked my next trip. Originally it was going to be Georgetown, and then going to, I can’t pronounce it, Para —
COWEN: Suriname.
ARNADE: Suriname. For whatever reason, the Caribbean just 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. Your listeners can yell at me who are Caribbean.
COWEN: I will go there. This is on my list.
ARNADE: They’re wealthy now. I think the interesting thing about Georgetown is they have the oil, so you have the economics side.
COWEN: They had 40 percent GDP growth in the prior year.
ARNADE: You’ve got to imagine that changed the place.
COWEN: It’s incredible. Just to look at that, for me, is interesting.
ARNADE: Suriname has a spillover of the same thing, or they’re getting 20 percent growth?
COWEN: Lower, but still impressive, yes.
ARNADE: I think in Latin America, that would be interesting.
I don’t want to go to South Africa either. I have no interest in going to South Africa.
COWEN: I went to Cape Town last summer. I was surprised how much I liked it. I’m afraid to go elsewhere in the country perhaps, but I would say consider it. I walked quite a bit.
ARNADE: I spent six months there as a child, so I don’t know.
COWEN: That was a very different South Africa. Also, there were smaller towns where I quite seriously thought of just moving there for a month.
ARNADE: In South Africa?
COWEN: 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.
ARNADE: I’m trying to think where else I wouldn’t go. I’ll go to anywhere. I don’t have much interest in Scandinavia. I just don’t.
COWEN: I’ve had good trips there. Helsinki, for walking, is one of my favorite cities.
ARNADE: Fair Island surprised me. I didn’t expect to like Fair Island, so there you go.
COWEN: In summertime, I don’t mind the heat, but my wife does, and they’re great —
ARNADE: Have you been to the Orkneys?
COWEN: Of course.
ARNADE: And?
COWEN: Incredible but small. It’s not that big a trip.
ARNADE: Because I was thinking of doing an Orkney-Shetland-Faroe trip.
COWEN: I’ve never been to Shetland, but Orkneys I’d recommend.
ARNADE: You can do that by boats — all three.
COWEN: Oh, yes, that would be fun. To get to the ancient sites in Orkneys, I guess you could do it by bus, but a car is useful. It feels quite Nordic, not Scottish, and that surprised me a bit. I should have known.
ARNADE: Very Norwegian, right?
COWEN: That was my sense, yes.
Iran, I want to go to, but I don’t have my hopes up.
ARNADE: Places I want to go that are not particularly easy is, basically, Russia. I love Russian culture. Absolutely love Russian culture.
COWEN: I’ve only been twice.
ARNADE: I was thinking about one of the trips I’m trying to book is Belarus, but again, it’s just hard for a lot of reasons. There are risks, and I don’t know if I particularly want to take those risks right now. I also know, to the questions of issues of political morality, I would say that, again, 98 percent of the people aren’t involved in politics. You get to a place and they don’t care. It’s unfair to condemn a place based on the elite’s behavior when 98 percent of people don’t care. [laughs]
Similarly, the opposite behavior is, I find a lot of foreigners are very forgiving of American policy because they understand that the citizens are not necessarily responsible for the behavior of the country.
COWEN: Very popular in Vietnam, I found.
ARNADE: When I was in Vietnam, readers kept asking me to write about the political. What about the war? No one talks about it. Nobody. I remember talking to some people. I was in an outdoor bar right next to a memorial to a Christmas day bombing we did in, I think, whenever. We killed like 30 people, and there was this memorial, including having part of a US jet fighter. No one cared.
COWEN: Why do you like El Paso so much?
ARNADE: The optimism. It’s the American dream, and so I think the American dream is very much alive in the working-class Mexican American community, and you see that in El Paso. When I was doing my project on addiction and poverty, El Paso was just fundamentally different. You don’t have the despair that you have in places.
COWEN: A low crime rate, too.
ARNADE: Yes. Extraordinarily, in some senses, Mexico acts as the roach motel. If you’re going to do crime, go over to Juárez. Consequently, there’s no crime in El Paso, but it’s one of the most optimistic cities in the United States. It has amazing food, by the way. I think it’s walkable.
[laughter]
ARNADE: I have walked a lot of it, but I can understand why some people might not see that. I find the colorful buildings, I find the fantastic weather — by the way, high desert is always my favorite weather. Great weather. Again, the optimism. When you look at working-class Mexican Americans versus working-class Whites or working-class Blacks in the US, statistically, all the things are the same except for issues of deviance, crime, addiction.
The Mexicans drink too much, [laughs] but generally, it’s where someone can come and really feel . . . I think a lot of it is the slope of the curve, not the height. They can literally look across over to Juárez and see how their life has improved, and that just brings a great deal of optimism.
COWEN: Looking back on your career as a whole, what were the best things about working on Wall Street?
ARNADE: Smart people.
COWEN: Smart people.
ARNADE: I’ve had particle physics, banking, and then I guess journalism — whatever you want to call it — writing now, punditry. 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 discussions that you can talk about anything and not feel like you’re going to offend somebody, at a level, were generally bankers. Not all of them.
[laughter]
ARNADE: There is a hierarchy in banking, [laughs] but in general, I think it was a great way to learn about the world at a very top-down approach. People make fun of the idea of becoming a specialist in X, but that was the great thing about banking. 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 palladium or whatever. I found that kind of intense, continual learning to be very enjoyable.
COWEN: What were the worst things about working there?
ARNADE: It was a very narrow view, again, which is why I’m doing what I’m doing now. It was very much the view from the Ramada. It’s fly-in. One of the things I will say is that I stay away from certain neighborhoods in certain towns, which are generally the wealthy neighborhoods. They’re all the same. They’re all variations on a theme. The wealthy neighborhood in Sophia is like a little Fifth Avenue. They’re just not interesting. That’s what bankers do when they look at a place.
My joke I used to say — because I did emerging markets fixed income; we bond trade in Russia, bond trade in Turkey — the entire investor base in the bond market of Turkey could fit into this restaurant, and they often do. [laughs] They’re all there every night, the same group of people. It’s a very limiting perspective.
COWEN: What’s the special role that pigeons played in your career?
ARNADE: [laughs] 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. 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 and becoming friends with these pigeon keepers.
It was an old Italian sport brought over to the Bronx and Brooklyn. 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. I find them to be extraordinarily beautiful. I think it’s an art form. They call it a sport, but there’s really no goal to it. You’re not racing. It’s animal husbandry. You just keep pretty pigeons, [laughs] and then every day you fly them.
I found it to be a really wonderful hobby, and so, I started going all around New York, becoming part of this, documenting pigeon keepers. That brought me to Hunts Point, which started me on my addiction project.
COWEN: How about snapping turtles?
ARNADE: [laughs] I have two snapping turtles, Reginald and No Name, that are in my pond at home. For the last eight years, when the summer comes, they come out, and I feed them every night. I find it really fascinating that 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 [laughs] at the same time every year, which I think is a pretty amazing instinctive skill.
COWEN: What’s the best thing about writing Substack? Tell us the full name of your Substack and how to connect to it.
ARNADE: Chris Arnade Walks the World. I would just Google “Chris Arnade Walks the World.” The freedom to basically do this. I can’t believe people are . . . I’m being paid — not tons, but enough to literally walk around the world. It’s the perfect job for me. I don’t think you could do that with . . . I forgot who it was, who wrote back in the ’60s or ’70s, someone related to the Grateful Dead, wrote about the concept that you could, if you just have 2,000 fans on anything —
COWEN: That’s right.
ARNADE: I forgot who it was who had that.
COWEN: Is it Kevin Kelly?
ARNADE: I believe that’s who it was.
COWEN: No, Stewart Brand, I think.
ARNADE: Who comes up with the concept, all you need is 2,000 people.
COWEN: That’s right, or sometimes one.
ARNADE: And that’s pretty amazing. There’re five billion people in the world. You don’t need that many people. [laughs]
COWEN: But it’s hard to get, right?
ARNADE: It is, but it’s not a high barrier. It’s really a niche culture because I have a niche thing, and all you need is 2,000 people. I really find the Substack model of allowing people to build a life based on just finding 2,000 people who appreciate what they do, or 1,000 — that’s a really liberating notion because in a big world, you can usually find 1,500 people if you have a unique enough interest.
COWEN: Do you think you’ll turn your Substack into a book or something else?
ARNADE: Why?
COWEN: So, there’s no plan per se.
ARNADE: No. Why would you? I don’t really understand books in the sense of —
COWEN: But you want to read more of them, right?
ARNADE: I’m glad people wrote books in the past, but I think in many cases, a weekly essay or biweekly essay, at least for me, is a perfect way to communicate.
COWEN: Do you use AI at all when you travel?
ARNADE: I do not. I’m starting to use it now as a . . . I take that back.
COWEN: It’s very good for travel.
ARNADE: I started using it as a copy editor, but what do you use it for for traveling?
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?” I’ll tell it what I’m interested in. It’s better than any guidebook.
ARNADE: Really?
COWEN: It is.
ARNADE: When you land in a city — let’s say you were going to Xi’an — what would you do?
COWEN: I would say I’m interested in Chinese history, art, culture, and food.
ARNADE: So, you’re a museum guy?
COWEN: I’m a museum guy, and I’ve been to Xi’an.
ARNADE: You go through museums?
COWEN: That’s right.
ARNADE: I do exactly the opposite. The only museums I go to are military history museums because —
COWEN: Those are great, too.
ARNADE: — their history is a propaganda, which I love. [laughs]
COWEN: The one in Tokyo is incredible.
ARNADE: They’re almost histories of histories. They’re almost museums of museums at this point.
COWEN: Yes.
ARNADE: You go through the museums?
COWEN: 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?
ARNADE: What do you get out of a museum?
COWEN: I love the visual arts, so I see what’s in it.
ARNADE: Okay, but seeing —
COWEN: It’s elites building a narrative, if you’re interested in that.
ARNADE: What can you get out of that that you can’t get from a book?
COWEN: The color plates are not very good compared to the actual paintings.
ARNADE: To me, I’m asking the Walter Benjamin question. The age of mechanical reproduction.
COWEN: Yes, the reproductions are terrible, but in the book, you don’t really see the process of defining the history in the narrative and how people respond to it.
ARNADE: You’ve been to the Hagia Sophia.
COWEN: Yes, sure.
ARNADE: Did you get something out of it?
COWEN: Of course.
ARNADE: What did you get out of it?
COWEN: The visual splendor of it, which cannot be captured in a photograph.
ARNADE: Okay, so the aura.
COWEN: Right, aura.
ARNADE: Okay, the aura.
COWEN: Yes.
ARNADE: And that helped you understand it better?
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.
ARNADE: Okay. In some senses I am more the . . . I think you have a reputation of being something of a libertarian kind of materialist. Is that fair?
COWEN: I don’t know what that means. I’m broadly a libertarian.
ARNADE: No, but you’re almost more romantic about it than I am here.
COWEN: Oh, much more. Of course.
[laughter]
ARNADE: Whereas I find the museums to be like, eh.
COWEN: The 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 —
ARNADE: And get the history.
COWEN: — and ask it all the questions you want. That guidebooks cannot do, and that’s phenomenal.
ARNADE: Again, I love the . . .
COWEN: And it’s free. At the margin, it’s free. You have to pay some subscription, but it’s not much.
What do you think you’ll do next?
ARNADE: I’m going to do this for another few years, and then, I don’t know. I didn’t know I was going to do this. You know what I mean?
COWEN: Just how did it come about that you did this? What was the moment of realization or decision?
ARNADE: I just found when life was stressful, I always walked. When I’m at home, I walk. I have a standard 10-mile daily walk that I do, which is very different from my learning walk. It’s therapeutic. When COVID happened, I looked at actuarial tables, and I said, “Oh, I’m a little bit overweight. That’s not good.” So, I started walking 10 miles every day, and I really enjoyed it.
Then I started saying, “Well, I should . . .” When I was in Brooklyn, I walked the entire length of the New York subway system above ground. I’ve always been into walking, and I just realized, “Hey I can just . . .” I think I was looking at a table that about 1.5 billion people live in massive cities that we really don’t know the names, these big sprawling Jakartas. I’m like, “I would like to see that.”
COWEN: Yes, agreed.
ARNADE: That’s the normal experience for most people, and so I just started. I booked a trip to Jakarta and just started walking Jakarta.
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.
ARNADE: Thank you for having me.
Photo Credit: Bryan Jones