What happens when you don't believe there's anything you can do, whether it's winning

championships or gold medals or putting on the uniform to belong?

How can you say you don't belong when you've got $30 million on the bank, but yet at the

same time, you risk all of that by taking a position supporting African Americans?

How can these two concepts exist?

Hello, and welcome to Wise This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hay.

So if you've been listening to podcasts for a while or watched on the show, you may know

that I've written two books, and the first book that I wrote was published back in 2012,

it's called Twilight of the Elites, and it's a book about what I call the fail decade

from 2000 to 2010.

Things didn't really get a ton better after that, but that's another story.

But a lot of it was about institutional failure, and particularly institutional rot, how

institutions kind of rot from the inside and what it means when they do.

And I write about a lot of different institutions, but I ended up writing in that book a fair

amount of Major League Baseball, particularly the steroids scandal, because to me, the dynamics

in Major League Baseball and steroids were very similar to dynamics that would later happen

on Wall Street, particularly the run up to the housing crash, which is basically an open

secret culture of cheating that flourishes and develops in a place where inside a locker

room, we're inside a lot of these big Wall Street banks, or at the ground level of mortgage

brokers, like everyone knows that there's like a con happening, and there's a cheating,

and that the whole thing's gonna become crashing down, but there's money to be made in the

interim.

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