Chris Arnade on Walking Cities
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
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.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated CWT channel.
Recorded February 27th, 2025.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:13.5 | Learn more at Mercadis.org. |
| 0:15.7 | For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, |
| 0:20.4 | visit Conversationswithtyler.com. |
| 0:27.4 | Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:31.2 | Today I'm chatting live and in-person with Chris Arnadi. |
| 0:35.5 | Chris has a long, interesting, and varied history. He started with a PhD |
| 0:40.7 | and particle physics from Johns Hopkins, was then a bond trader on Wall Street for about 20 years, |
| 0:47.3 | had a life course shift around 2011, where he started traveling around lower-income America, |
| 0:53.7 | and he became quite famous for what |
| 0:56.1 | you might call photojournalism, his writings about lower-income America and also Trump voters. |
| 1:02.1 | He published a very well-known book called Dignity, Seeking Respect in Back Row America. |
| 1:08.2 | He is now, I would say, obsessed in the good sense with a new project, |
| 1:11.7 | which is walking, both walkable and non-walkable cities throughout the world. And he writes a |
| 1:18.3 | substack about his walking and his travels. Chris, welcome. Thank you for having me. |
| 1:23.2 | If you had to live in either Beijing or Shanghai for 10 full years, which one would you pick and why? |
| 1:29.2 | You know, I thought I was actually thinking about that a lot on the airplane. I couldn't come up with an answer. |
| 1:34.1 | I think Beijing, ultimately, because there is just more there. Shanghai, I had a better experience in. |
| 1:42.0 | I think the reason I liked Shanghai more initially was just because of my location. |
| 1:45.9 | I had a good location. I was right next to People's Park, and I kind of had a good four or five |
| 1:49.8 | days. Beijing grew on me with time, though. I just thought there was just more there. |
... |
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