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Chris Arnotti
I wake up. From Executive producer Isaac Saul this is Tangle.
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Will Kaback
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take. I am Senior Editor Will Kbach. About a month ago I spoke with Chris Arnotti, and Chris is somebody who, if you're on Substack, you may be familiar with his writings there. He does this really cool project where he will go basically anywhere in the world. As far as I know, he has been to every continent except maybe Antarctica. And, and he walks these long distances, hundreds of miles across cities and rural areas. And he tries to just meet as many people as he can during these walks and get a real sense of the genuine culture of the place. And then he writes about it. And his writing and the themes it covers intersects with a lot of the big issues here in the US There's a lot of writing about immigration, there's cultural differences, there's education, there's class, there's poverty. So it's a fascinating read and I highly recommend checking it out if you're interested in something like this. That he's also a photographer and takes these incredible photographs that go along with his pieces. But the reason that I wanted to talk to Chris was actually multifold. For one, I did want to talk about this walking and writing project that he does and hear a little bit more about the insights that he's gained from it. But also from following him on Twitter and reading some of his insights there, I have learned that he has pretty incisive views about immigration here in the United States, about the way that politicians and policymakers talk about class. And he talks about these issues in a way that certainly can ruffle some feathers. He's a very frank person, as you'll hear, but it's a really interesting perspective that I think is informed by his travels around the world and also his background as a bond trader on Wall street for two decades, as a PhD in physics, as somebody who went around the greater New York City area photographing poverty and crime and mental health challenges and drug use challenges. He's got quite an informed perspective on all of this. So it felt like a great opportunity to talk to somebody who you may not come across in the mainstream circles or the mainstream commentary pages, but who has this really unique informed perspective about a lot of the issues that we all think and care a lot about. So without further ado, let's jump into my interview with Chris Arnotti.
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Chris, thanks so much for joining us. Excited to have you on.
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Chris Arnotti
Well, thank you for having me.
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Will Kaback
So I would love to start with a quick history of how you came to the work that you're doing right now. As I mentioned over email when we corresponded, I've been a follower of yours on your sub stack and on X for some time. And I think you have a fascinating background and a really interesting story of how you got to doing what you're doing right now. So I can give a quick recap. I know you've talked a lot about it in interviews, but for our listeners who aren't familiar, you earned your PhD in physics and then you worked as a bond trader on Wall street for two decades. I've read and heard you talk about the 2008 financial crisis as a catalyst for your eventual move out of finance a few years after that. And then you began kind of just walking around parts of New York City, particularly areas where people had advised you not to go or told you that were dangerous. But you got to know the people who were there, you began photographing them. That turned into a book project. And one of the particularly powerful ideas that came out of that project, at least for me, is this idea of the front row and the back row in society. So could you just explain what those terms mean and the metaphor that you developed there for those who aren't familiar?
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Chris Arnotti
Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you. Well, that's about as good a summary as I've heard. So, yeah, the work in the in the Bronx primarily, is where I didn't put the work starting around 2010, 2009 in that region where I spent four to five years following, following about 30 to 30 to 40 street addicts, a family of street addicts, a street family, not blood family. And I kind of learned a lot from there about the US and about our sociological issues and our political issues. And I kind of then wanted to see if that was true across the United States. So I went for three to four years that happened to overlap with the 2016 election. It was entirely coincidental. I wasn't going to write about politics. What I saw and these places I went to which I put like 400,000 miles in my car. So I went.
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Will Kaback
I think it was an Odyssey, right? Honda Odyssey.
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Chris Arnotti
Literally, an Odyssey.
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Will Kaback
Yeah, that's, that's, it's 2006. Honda Odyssey is what my family road tripped all over the country. And.
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Chris Arnotti
Yeah, you know, I took out the seats in the back and I put a bed in there and I slept in Walmart plazas. And.
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Will Kaback
Yeah.
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Chris Arnotti
You know, and then I would walk around town. So I went to kind of all over the U.S. i intended to try to see as much as the US Possible in parts of US that were similar to what's Hunts Point in New York is which kind of the part of a town where people tell you not to go and where plenty of people live. And I try to balance it between rural and urban. So I also try to get kind of every major demographic in the US I went to Hispanic neighborhoods, I went to black neighborhoods, I went to white neighborhoods, but they were all kind of uniform, unified by one thing, which was, by and large, I called them. I kind of came up. This was in 2016. I saw. I came up with kind of our biggest division at the time, political division and then sociological division, and then a little deeper than that was education, meaning the poor, working class black neighborhoods that we're Hispanic, like in the Bronx were very similar to the poor white neighborhoods I was in. And I say Portsmouth, Ohio. And, you know, there was obvious differences, but they were kind of more unified in terms of how they thought about the world and how they saw the world and how they envisioned themselves in the world and how they saw themselves in the world. And that contrasted a lot with kind of what I was much more familiar with in my years on Wall street and my years in physics, which was what I call the front row. The front row is kind of easier to explain. It's kind of. It's me, it's people with PhDs, it's people with kind of postgraduate degrees from what I say call selective universities who, you know, one of the things I wrote in my book was we may look differently, you know, but we share a very similar worldview, you know, and that, that kind of difference, you know, at the time when I was writing about it, I got a lot of pushback about it. A lot of people said that's, that's, that's crazy. But I think if you look now at the elections, you realize that there's been people now talk about the educational divide 10 years later. And I don't think it's considered controversial, but at the time it was Seen as kind of like, you know, because I had. I had said, you know, one of the things I kind of said early on was that, you know, that Trump had a lot of. Had a lot of resonance with people I was talking to and that kind that, you know, I remember I went off on one particular trip, it was four months, when a show went around there, went around the United States talking to people about what the American dream was. And it, you know, almost coincidentally, I left almost exactly for that trip when Trump was had to just announce his candidacy and went down the stairs and escalator and, you know, contrasting what I heard from people and what I saw on Twitter, social media was entirely, you know, kind of shocking to me at the time, which was, you know, nobody took Trump seriously then. You know, this was a. This was a novelty candidate. There was no chance he was going to win. And I was like, well, within a week after he announced, I was starting to say on Twitter, this guy has a lot of. Everybody's talking about him. Absolutely everybody's talking about him. Half love him, half hate him, but everybody's talking about him. So there was kind of. And generally, the people who loved him were primarily from the back row, and people who hated him were from the front row. And, you know, that it's more complex than that, but that was the overall view. And so, you know, I kept saying. I kind of got chased off of Twitter, actually, because I kept saying, this guy has a real chance of winning. You know, like, I take this seriously. And, you know, lo and behold, he did win. But that sort of. Kind of, that sort of division. You know, again, I never wanted to write about politics. I don't. I only talk to people about what they want to talk about. And that was one of the rare times in American history, for me, at least, when talking to people, when they wanted to talk about politics, which was in general, they don't. But, you know, I talk to people about what their dreams are, what their aspirations are, what their hopes are. And I really saw just this very kind of this sense of frustration that was bubbling out there in the back row, starting around. I started seeing around 2013, but by 2016, it reached kind of a fever pitch where I was kind of saying, look. And I remember writing things on Twitter or writing essays where I said, there's this kind of discontent out there in the back row. And people would say, what do you mean? The GDP is highest than it's ever been? We have more things in the world, all things true. But those two things can exist Simultaneously, because I think how the back row sees themselves, how they envision their place in the universe, how they envision their sense of purpose was kind of being eroded. We kind of weren't listening to them, their complaints. And when they did complain as manifest through the politics of Trump, they kind of were dismissed as deplorables or racist. When I was, like I was saying then, trying to thread a needle of saying, look, you can disagree with some of their solutions, but you have to take the fact that they're angry or they're frustrated seriously. You can't ignore that. So that was kind of eye opening for me in the sense of I expected to. And then I ended up writing a book called dignity in 2017 that was about my time. And again, it wasn't very. My book is not very political. I try to stay away from politics. When I try to write a book, I think. I think Trump has mentioned once the one, one word, I try to stay away from politics because, you know, I wanted. I think a lot of people, the issues are a little bit deeper than who they vote for. So, you know, I expected that book to be. I was kind of surprised with the reaction to that book. I expected it was a pretty. I thought it was a book that was generally from the center, but it kind of got pushed back on the left, who either ignored it or attacked it.
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Will Kaback
Yeah, I guess. How do you respond to that? Because I know you yourself have identified as a liberal, said that you identify broadly with the left in terms of your own ideology. So how did you respond to the pushback coming from that direction?
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Chris Arnotti
I mean, I was mystified by it. I mean, I understand in retrospect why it happened. You know, people don't want to hear things that are uncomfortable. And also, I wrote very, very admirably about faith, about religion and the role of religion, and I think that made some people on the left uncomfortable. But, you know, a lot of what. A lot of what David Shore writes about now and Ezra Klein right now are kind of what I was writing about eight years ago. So, you know, the party got there eventually. Yeah, it took. It took, took, you know, two losses to personally deserve to win, to get there, but they got there.
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Will Kaback
Well, that segues into my next question, which is, you know, here we are about a decade later, Trump has won again. Won much more decisively and dominantly than he did the first time. Does it seem to you that the lessons of that first victory just have not been internalized, by and large, by the Democratic Party or by the left? What Are you sensing today in the conversations that you're having with people?
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Chris Arnotti
You know, I feel like the party has had its head in the sand. You know, I think Biden. Biden's victory in 2020 obviously know, made it easier to say, well, look, we got. We got this. You know, we got this. But, you know, I'm not very, you know, the present. The present. The present department. You know, there is. There is what I would say is kind of like Trump derangement syndrome on the left. And I remember when Trump was. When Trump was first elected in 20. I mean, a lot of my work on Wall street and my personal background from my family history is I'm very familiar with Latin America. I mean, my dad was from Bolivia. He was a Bolivian historian. I traveled quite a bit in Latin America as a child, and then also through my work in Wall Street. I remember watching Trump on TV and, you know, my first reaction to him in 2016 was, that's a different version of Chavez in Venezuela. That's a Peronist in Argentina. And, you know, Trump has been gifted with enemies that just have made his job much easier. You know, there are two or three issues he's highlighted that the Democrats just ignored. I remember the big kind of elephant in the room was immigration. And I spent a lot of time in El Paso, spent a lot of time in Los angeles back in 20. El Paso's. El Paso was basically divided into. There's a. You know, there's a fence literally through El Paso, and on the other side is Juarez, Mexico. And, you know, I spent quite a bit of time, probably the city I spent most of my time in, during. During kind of 2014 to 2018 to 2020 was El Paso, because I happened to love the city. And, you know, there was just, you know, I walked along the fence. There is a. There's a fence, and it goes through people's backyards. I walked along the fence. And this was in 2016, late 2015, before the original Trump election. And I was talking to people about, what do you think about immigration? And there was a lot of frustration with the policy, the immigration policy even then. And this was coming from Mexican Americans who were not necessarily a demographic that was supposed to be side with Trump on immigration. You know, I think there was a. There was a recognition that I think a lot of the back row just kind of feels it's not being listened to when it says, hey, you know, we. We're not happy with this. And, you know, my personal opinions aside, you know, what I tried to say Was, you know, you just. You just got to look at this issue and just, you know, we're a democracy. You know, like, if more people disagree with you, you know, you just can't ignore them. You've got to figure out a way to work with them. And so I think the way the immigration played out during the Biden administration kind of guaranteed that Trump was going to win in 2024, because, you know, again, it's just kind of this kind of thing where because Trump says something in a language you don't approve of, you know, you just have to take immediately the opposite side. And that's kind of what happened with immigration, because I remember being el Paso in 2023 or so. It was. It was. It was. It was chaotic. You know, there was just. There was just this kind of porous, open border, and people were taking opportunity. You know, you know, I. I don't. You know, I. I spend my time in kind of dive motels. And what you ended up seeing in the dive motels were all filled with people who had flown into Mexico City from Turkey or. Or. Or, you know, or Sudan. A lot of. Primarily, there are Mexican Americans, though. And, you know, they had heard on Facebook that, hey, come to the U.S. you know, once you're in, you can just basically say, hey, I've been. I've been. I've been, you know, repressive regime. And you would see them. They have all these. They had these mesh bags, yellow and red mesh bags that were given to them by. By nonprofits, which has a cell phone in it, you know, some. Some discount cards from different places, you know, toothpaste and things like that. And so they come in, they claim, hey, I'm, you know, I'm. I'm being repressed. Put make up an issue. And they say, fine, okay, here, we'll release you. Come back in three months. Nobody had any intention of coming back in three months. And you, you know, they show me Facebook posts where they would say, you know, they translate. You translate the Facebook post as something in Spanish saying, hey, you know, come to. You know, I'll charge you $800 to get you across the border. So it became this kind of just, you know, people are smart, like. And I don't. I have no. I have no personal animosity towards the people. You know, the people who are crossing the border. I get what they're doing. You know, they want to come to the US as the land of opportunity. And that sort of kind of chaos was just. Kind of people are in denial that. That was happening and it was very frustrating.
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Will Kaback
It raises One of the first introductions I had to your work was actually you writing about some of these struggling communities in America and how immigrant communities have kind of revitalized them. You talked about Buffalo, New York a few years ago. You've mentioned Lewiston, Maine and the Somali American community there. I grew up in Minneapolis, big Somali American community there that's had a real imprint on the city. And you've talked about these communities as almost sustaining the American dream in the way that they have brought the work ethic and the values that they have over. But at the same time, I think the dynamic you're describing Under Biden presents challenges of its own. And so I'm just, I wonder, you know, what you think the proper balance is there. Because I think, I mean, one of.
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Chris Arnotti
The things I've always part of the reason I love being in la, my favorite neighborhood, one of my favorite neighborhoods in the United States is Downey, la, which is a working class Mexican American community. Similarly, I really love El Paso because it doesn't, you know, often first generation to second generation immigrants, especially coming from Mexico, really do embody the American dream, you know, faith, family and, you know, and, and, you know, so you get to, they work hard, they get the S450 and they put, you know, you know, American flag on it as well, with the Mexican flag on it. And that's kind of, that's the embodiment. Their kids are going to do better than they are and that, you know. So again, I'm not here to demonize immigrants. We're a country of immigrants, and I truly believe that. But PACE matters and the route and the way which they come in matters. You know, I had many Mexican Americans tell me, you know, in Downing, like, you know, no, like, I came here legally. I work through the process. You know, we need to do the same thing. There needs to be some sort of, you know, there has to be a rule of law here. And so I'm for increasing legal immigration. But it has to be legal and has to be through. Through a process by which, you know, there's a kind of sense of, a sense of order to the whole process and PACE matters. You know, you can't, you just can't. You know, Lewiston is actually an interesting sign of a place where, you know, it's kind of worked out much better than people think it has. I mean, you went from a town that was 99.9% white to 1 where there's, you know, 15% of the population are from Somalia. And they're very different now. You know, that was self immigration, by the way, out of Curio. Interestingly, that's something that people don't realize is a lot of the, A lot of the Somalis moved to Lewiston on their own after having been settled in Atlanta or Minneapolis because they, I can't really say the phrases they said because it's inappropriate, but they were pretty blunt about the fact that they wanted to be around white people, you know, because they perceived it to be kind of stepping up in the world and they felt like they face a lot of racism from the black community in places like Atlanta and Minneapolis. I mean, the issue is complex, but, you know, the Somalis have done pretty well in Lewiston, and I think it's. Overall, there has been one or two ugly incidences, but, you know, the community is kind of, you know, when you go from putting in 15% of the population who is, you know, different in many different ways, religion, you know, it's. It's worked out pretty well. And you can go to the, you know, you can go to the Lewiston Walmart and you'll see, you know, that, you know, it's. There's a lot of intermixing going on. So. But, you know, pace does matter and how it plays out. You just can't. You just can't. You can't make people feel like they're being kind of. Kind of overwhelmed. You got to do it at a pace that, where, where the community can handle the change. And I, you know, if you want to, again, you know, if you don't want a backlash and, you know, it's human nature. It's not one of the better things about human nature, but it is human nature to feel a kind of sense of. A sense of, a sense of, you know, almost just backlash happening. And so, you know, again, we're in a democracy, you got to win the vote and you have to maintain some principles as well. And that kind of balance is hard.
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Will Kaback
Yeah. This is obviously not an issue that's contained to the United States either. And I want to broaden the aperture a little bit and hear about the conversations related to immigration that you've had in your travels around the world. I know you've written a bit about it in your substack. What do you think of the challenges that some other Western democracies are facing relative to immigration? Some of the similarities and differences here in the US and, and what you've learned from your conversations with people there.
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Chris Arnotti
You know, I mean, again, PACE matters, and I mean, I'm going to be very blunt here, may annoy some people, but the type. Immigrants matter. You know, you like, you know, I was just in. I just spent all of August in Australia, which has a pretty. By what by US stands a pretty regressive, a pretty restrictive immigration policy. You know, they're an island, and they did have people arrive by boats illegally, and it was a big case in the 2000s, was very, very controversial, but the nation. But Australia sent them to a prison, shipped them right back to an island prison and said, nope, no, you're not coming in. And that was their policy. If you, if you land on our shores without process. We're going to. We're going to actually put you in jail and on offshore island and ultimately ship you back to where you came from again. It was a very contentious issue in 2005, 2006, but the nation decided that's what they want. So the only. And they have a point system. They have a. They have a. You know, they give. They give. You have to get so many points to get it, to get a. To get effectively the version of a work visa. And to do that, it's a pretty complex. You know, you have to have. You have to show English proficiency, you have to show sort of, you know, you get points for being in college, you get points for certain degrees. And so they're looking for skilled immigrations. And, you know, a lot of their immigrants come from Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, China. And, you know, there's just kind of a more. There's more of an aspirational, okay, I'm here. This is my opportunity to kind of like, you know, become. Become an Australian. So they don't get a lot of cultural clashes like you get in the US where you get, you know, get people with very different religions intermixing. There's generally kind of a uniformity of kind of similar worldviews. You know, different culture. Cultures differ. You know, I don't think that's. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be controversial to say that different cultures. You know, a Somali is very different than a Vietnamese is very different from, you know, Burmese. And how they, you know, you have to consider that when you're kind of. Because you are building. When you build a nation, you're building a culture, and you're trying to keep some sort of cohesion, you know, for some period of time, so that it all works. It works out. You know, you know, people talk about Japan as, you know, people try to spin Japan as saying that Japan is. Is, you know, changing Japan's not changing immigration. Japan is. Is one of the most homogenous populations in the world. You know, they took in a total. When someone says, oh, Japan's, you know, very, very diverse. You know, I always pull up the stat that they. The total of refugees they had in 2024 was 40. 40. Not, not, not like 4,000, not 40,000, but 40, 40 people. And, you know, you break their laws, you're ejected. You know, it's very hard. You have to be on your best behavior in Japan. So different places, you know, different places have very different policies. We're probably one of the more. Europe is. Europe is having problems Right now, you know, I am, I spent.
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Will Kaback
I mean, you've walked the length of Britain.
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Chris Arnotti
Yeah, I walked in, you know, I walked across England. This is back. I went from, I went from Liverpool to Hull, walked across a lang. You know, and I saw it there. I was in Oldham, which I guess reached the news recently. You know, it was there. There are some very, There are some very contentious issues going on. And I saw it back in. I mean, the bigger issue is when you get with England. I wrote about this in 2022, 2021, whatever. When you get outside of London, it's just very, you know, tourists don't go to Oldham. Tourists don't go to the parts of England I went to, you know, and everybody is suffering, regardless of if it's immigrants or not. There's an economic distress there and a kind of, kind of a dreariness because, you know, we talk about kind of flyover country versus New York. I mean, they have one city, London, and that's it. And that's kind of their uber New York. And then everything else comparison feels kind of left behind in some ways. So there's a lot of issues in uk, you know, I mean, I walked the length of. I walked Germany and I walked in France and Italy. And you know, they're having problems integrating their immigrants because a lot of the immigrants are Muslim and societies that have been Christian for 2,000 years, 1,000, 1,000 years, and there's a lot of distress going on. There's a lot of cultural clashes going on and a lot of idle men, a lot of immigrants who were single men. And that's never a good sign. I remember I was walking, I walked from Milan to Verona, which is like 220 miles. I walked out through kind of the Muslim north part of Milan. It's the first time in Italy, first time in Europe I felt unsafe because, you know, there's a lot of single men sitting around on a Sunday morning drinking. And I kind of wanted equip to them, you know, like you're breaking the Quran there, buddy, by sitting there drinking your booze. But, you know, I didn't think that was the time to do it. So I just did an asala malakum and I went on. But, you know, there is a problem. You got to, you got to think about who you let in and kind of like let in families. You know, that's always a much better situation than letting in single men.
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Will Kaback
Yeah.
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I'm curious as well, your perception of.
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Poverty, how that's been influenced by your travels here. In the United States and also around the world. Some of the learnings you've taken away from that.
- [33:00]
Chris Arnotti
Yeah, I mean, I've kind of always said that we tend to think that the more stuff you have, the happier you are. And, you know, there is. That's generally true. I'm not here to romanticize poverty and I've been to, I've been. I've walked Uganda, I've walked Senegal. You know, below a certain income level, life is really, really hard. And, you know, you should be very happy that we live in a modern, modern age civilization where we can go to the grocery store and get so many different things. But there comes a point of, you know, marginal returns where kind of we got most of the squeeze out of the lemon and kind of like, you know, I think I said this almost 10 years ago and it's been only reinforced by what I, what I've seen around the rest of the world is, you know, rather than having additional stuff, maybe people need an additional friend. You know, like instead of growing. And, you know, so one of the things I've seen, and I saw all this in Vietnam. I saw this happen. And I use Europe as an easy contrast because people know Europe. But, you know, I've written over and over and over again about the contrast between Europe and US because people love that subject. But in general, like, you know, Europe has de. Emphasized growth and emphasized community, and they still have a lot of community. And, you know, people in general, I think it's a better life in many ways. You know, I think there's a great, there's a lot to admire about the U.S. i'm a huge fan of the U.S. but I think, you know, we do tend to be a little bit too libertarian for my views in the sense of we just kind of just like it's all about the self, not about the community. And, you know, you know, whenever I'm in Europe, I realize how American I am because, you know, for about four days I really like sitting at a cafe just kind of doing nothing and talking. Then eventually I'm like, oh, geez, I need to do something. Whereas the Europeans keep on, you know, but I actually think their, their work life balance is healthier than mine, you know, but, you know, you're a product of the culture, you're raised. And so I do think that, I do think that, you know, you want to, you know, we need more kind of better metrics and looking at kind of what I would call fulfillment than just money. Because, you know, in the US it's really tough when you don't have money because, you know, we're so much about money that you're clearly a loser if you don't have money. You've clearly, you know, like part of our meritocracy. The flip side of our meritocracy, which says, you know, with enough hard work, anybody can be anything, is the flip side of that. If you, if you don't, if you don't do well, then it's your fault, apparently. And then, you know, that's a hard thing to live with. And people, you know, people feel it, like they know they're kind of being looked down on. So it's really hard to be poor in the US Even though we have so much stuff. And, you know, a poor person in the US is, you know, someone who's living in Poverty in the US has literally 10, 10 times more than someone in Vietnam. Someone in Vietnam, you know, in terms of material possessions. But someone in Vietnam are just so much happier because they have a community, usually, you know, who support them.
- [36:14]
Will Kaback
Yeah. I have one more broader question about your Walk in series and the travels that you've done. I will say from following you on X, something that's always struck me is when you return home, I believe you live in upstate New York. Is that right?
- [36:31]
Chris Arnotti
That's correct.
- [36:32]
Will Kaback
You return home and you have some snapping turtles that live in your backyard. Is that right? Or in their pond.
- [36:39]
Chris Arnotti
They live in my pond.
- [36:41]
Will Kaback
And you post these great videos of them feeding them hot dogs. They come out of the pond. And it's a great series that I always enjoy. But I think also about you. I've just read your posts, or you read your writing from all over the world, from these vast expanses of the globe. And then I think about returning to upstate New York, which is an area that I've lived in and know intimately well. But also I just have this sense when I return from travels that my relationship with my home base kind of shifts and evolves in these subtle ways when I get back. And I wonder what that experience has been like for you as somebody who's much more well, traveled than me, has seen a lot more, has had a lot more conversations. And what do you feel that your perception and your relationship to home changes as a result of the travels that you've been on.
- [37:24]
Chris Arnotti
I mean, it is frustrating coming home can be. I mean, I love being home. I love my snapping turtles. I love my routine here, you know, my daily walk, my time to sit down and just read. But, you know, there is a kind of one of the things that's always striking to me when I arrived back in the US after, let's say, six weeks abroad and from again, from places that are often, you know, every place is almost poor than the U.S. you know, is how kind of angry the country is. But angry is not the right word because that's not fair. How kind of, how kind of. Just, there's just, there's this kind of intensity here that is kind of almost dysfunctional. Dysfunctional intensity that you just kind of like you don't get in the rest of the world. You know, New York is not, is not a nice place. I lived in New York City for 20 years. I happen to, you know, be very fond of the city. But it's not a nice welcome community back to the United States. There's a meanness about it and a kind of intensity to it that just kind of is missing from the rest of the world and just, and it's dirty and a dysfunctionality and, you know, we just always feel like it doesn't have to be this way. You know, we, you know, we, you know, I'm going, I'm leaving tomorrow for China and I spent quite a bit. This will be my fifth trip to China, I think, fourth trip to China. And you know, I'm going to a minor city that has only 20 million people. But like, you know, you know, China is like, it's, it's, you know, things work there. And I understand the political problems with China. I'm not, I'm not delusional. I'm not here to say, you know, like, you know, China is so much better than us. You know, there's, it's a trade off, but you know, there's just a pleasantness about things work, you know, we're building things. You know, it's not the backwards looking place that people think it is. You know, you don't feel like you're going to always be kind of, you're always in danger of someone kind of being offended by you or anything like that. There's this real kind of, there's a gentleness to the place that just is missing in the US and, and so it's very hard. I don't want to become that person. I love the US but there is a frustration with why can't we get our act together? Can we be a little bit kinder and can we do a little bit better than what we're doing now? Because for all the money we have, we seem like a relatively unhappy group of people.
- [40:07]
Will Kaback
Foreign.
- [40:10]
Podcast Break Announcer
We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [40:16]
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- [41:39]
Will Kaback
I'd love to end on a little bit of a lighter note and just talk through a few maybe superlatives or semi superlatives about the work that you do and the travels that you've been on. The first question I have is what city in the U.S. have you found to be the most walkable?
- [41:56]
Chris Arnotti
You know, I think every. I actually came up with a, the kind of mock people who do everything quantitative. I came up with like a 7 variable walking system score. And in US, US walkability is not nearly as good as the rest of the world, but New York usually scores the highest. Although I think that's a little bit, you know, that's, that's largely about the, about the, the metro system and the density. But you know, I, I really say that I think people underestimate how walkable LA is. You know, one of the things that really matters about walkability is, is, is good weather. Like I don't, you know, like LA is just LA is probably my favorite large US City. I think there's just, there's just a lot to it that I think people misunderstand.
- [42:40]
Will Kaback
I was going to say I think some people might be surprised to hear you say that.
- [42:43]
Chris Arnotti
Like, I mean. Yes, you know, look, I. Walkability includes, you know, being able to get around without a car. And, you know, the bus system in LA is really good if you, if you understand it, you know, you can get around. But, you know, it's also just very pleasant weather and it hasn't. I actually think it has the best food in the world. You know, best food scene in the world. Yes, it's a little bit, you know, a little bit too, too spread out. I like Chicago as well. I think, you know, I think getting outside the outside of New York, you know, every town has a walkable section. The big problem in US is, is safety. And compared to the rest of the world and, and public transportation, every city has a bus system. You just have to be willing to wait. You just have to know your schedules.
- [43:35]
Will Kaback
Yeah. How about a city outside the US that you found to be particularly walkable?
- [43:42]
Chris Arnotti
I was just in Sydney. Sydney is absolutely wonderful city. It may be my favorite city in the world now, but I'm going back to Seoul. Before I go to China, I'm going to Seoul and Seoul is the city I go to that I've gone to the most. So if you look at kind of like, you know, putting your, putting, you know, where you put your money. I spent most of my time in Seoul. I love Seoul. The two countries are the most walkable in terms of what I do is, are England, UK and Japan. UK is probably the most walkable country in the world. It's got this process and I've done two major walks in Japan and in uk, but it's got this rite of passage rule. So you can basically walk almost from between any two points and not have to be on the side of a road. You can go through cow path, you go through pastures and through fields. So UK is, and also just it's a small place, so you're never too far away from people and it's well curated, like they take care of it, everything. So the land is gorgeous, the cities are nice. So I, I generally think that, you know, if I were to re. If I was just trying to settle on one place to walk for the rest of my life, one country would be either Japan or uk.
- [45:06]
Will Kaback
What's a particularly memorable bus route that you've taken?
- [45:10]
Chris Arnotti
You know, I love buses. Thank you for asking. You know, I, I've. I'll probably go with Australia because it was my most recent one, but I took a bus from the coast into Alice springs, which was 27 hour ride. I don't think people, I think everybody knows how large Australia is. They don't know how empty it is. It's the size of the United States with the population of New York City. It's 25 million people. And so, you know, the bus ride, it was equivalent to basically going to Kansas City from New York. And I've done that ride on greyhounds in the US I've done rides like that in the greyhounds in the US and every four hours you're in another city where you stop and I could get off and maybe say the night. There was none. There was no, it was a 27 hour ride from, effectively Casey, from New York where there are only two cities that we passed through that had any kind of restaurants and hotels. But it was just absolutely, you know, it was, it was just, it's just a, in terms of what I learned, I don't think I've learned more from a bus ride. And I, you know, I kept on expecting, I brought myself. If I go on a 27 bus, 27 hour bus ride, I bring all sorts of books and I prepare to read. I, I didn't read one word. I spent the entire time looking out the window at the nature and then just talking to people on the bus, you know, and then talking to people at the bus stops. It was just. I, I mean I would actually sign up to do it again though. Like I didn't expect a 27 hour bus trip and be like, hey, can I do it again?
- [46:51]
Will Kaback
How about one of your favorite beers?
- [46:54]
Chris Arnotti
You know the beer culture. I say the two best, two best countries for beer in the world are UK and, and Germany, you know, people. But I find, I find British, British drinking culture to be really gross. It's kind of aggressive and there's a, people get, get really drunk and really, really nasty. Germany has the best drinking beer in the world and the best drinking culture. I did a walk from along the Rhine in Rhone Valley where I walked to Bonn. I walked to Bonn from Dussel, Dusseldorf I think. Dr. What's the name of the place that has the soccer team that. No, no, no, no, no. In the north. Anyways, I'm not sure, I forget the name of the town, but it was like a 200 mile walk. It took like two weeks. But what was really wonderful was, you know, I'd walk 13 to 14 miles and I would end in a small bar and every city has a different beer. Every city has a different, they brew their own beer. You get a Kolsh and Cologne, you know, you get the ales in other cities, but they're also just a really welcoming bar place where people don't get so drunk that they end up getting into fights like in the uk. So I really have a lot of admiration for German beer culture. You know, I walked across the Netherlands and I walked in, I walked through Denmark and people kept saying, you know, the Belgium or the Belgian. I walked through Belgium and people said the Belgian beer culture is just not the same, though. Yeah, it's just much better in Germany.
- [48:32]
Will Kaback
Yeah, you've done many, many hundreds and thousands of miles of walking. Do you have preferred footwear?
- [48:39]
Chris Arnotti
Yeah, I wear Tevas. I wear Teva Hurricanes. You know, I'm famously walking like, like a, like a physicist. I wear sandals with socks. And when I do the heavier walks with a backpack, the long distance walk with the backpack, I end up having to use keen boots because it's just too much wear on the, it's just the, the weight. Given my weight and given the weight of the pack, it's just too much on my feet to wear just keen boots. But my, my, like my trip to Asia, I'm leaving on in a few days, where I'll be for a month. I'm just going to wear. I generally just wear my Teva unless I'm doing a long, long walk.
- [49:16]
Will Kaback
Yeah. Last one. Could you give us the location of one of your favorite McDonald's in the world?
- [49:25]
Chris Arnotti
You know, that's a hard one. I ended up liking the one in Alice Springs. I don't want to, like, it comes down to three, basically. I think four. And there's a McDonald's in El Paso that is about 100 yards from the border fence that I probably. I spent about six months back in the 2000s. Just again, it's working class Mexican American families. This kind of. It really is a community center. You know, people go in there on their laptops to work. People come play video games. There are kids who don't have WI fi at home. I think there is a. There is a McDonald's in Alice Springs, Australia that I believe admired because it was, you know, it's where the Aboriginals went. You know, the city is like half Aboriginal and they have these Aboriginal art galleries, these Aboriginal cafes, but there's no Aboriginals in them. They use a McDonald's. And so there was just like, it was a really welcoming McDonald's where I sat there for most of the day and talked to people. Again, very, very communal. And then the one in Beijing, you know, there's a big McDonald's in Beijing. And it's really interesting is, you know, it's fascinating that, you know, I write about McDonald's as these community centers in the US and you see them in especially dysfunctional communities because it's one of the few things that works where people can go to kind of like, you know, get, get, get, get power cords and get wi fi and just kind of sit and escape the elements. It was interesting being in the McDonald's in Beijing had a similar feel to it. But in many ways people went there because it was kind of a place that, where the government didn't have a say. It was kind of, they went there to maintain because it worked, but it worked without the government. So there was a sense of kind of almost freedom there that you didn't have in the rest of China's. The authoritarianism of China at a day to day level is overblown. You can do what you, you want as long as you're just not like, you know, throwing stones at the government. But in general there's a sense of kind of a kind of sense of freedom and openness in the McDonald's that just isn't there in the rest of China.
- [51:37]
Will Kaback
Chris, if people want to follow along your upcoming travel to Asia and beyond, where would be the best place for them to do that?
- [51:45]
Chris Arnotti
Yeah, I post about once a week on Substack. It's called Walking the World. My name Chris Arnotti. I'm on Twitter but I usually lock my account when I'm traveling because of when he cross borders. You don't want the guards to look at your stuff. But I'll be opening that up again once I land in Seoul. But So you just google my name and go to Substack's probably the best.
- [52:09]
Will Kaback
Yeah, we'll put a link to it in the episode notes for this Chris, really appreciate the time and the conversation, all the best and enjoy your upcoming travel.
- [52:18]
Chris Arnotti
Thank you, Will. That was very kind of you.
- [52:20]
Podcast Break Announcer
Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Sull and our executive producer is John Lowell. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing editor Ari Weitzman with Senior editor Will Kaback and Associate editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead Bailey, Saul Lindsey Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@retangle.com.
- [52:58]
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