Susan i wanted to put the cover of your new book, dignity, on the screen. And have you explain its essence to me. Chris it is a book about my five years driving around the United States, spending time in what i would call back road america, the part of america that is everywhere. It is not a red state or blue state thing, it is the towns and communities that have been ignored or left behind or forgotten. Places like selma, alabama, like the north side of milwaukee, places like the bronx in new york city. Places that are kind of stigmatized and defined in various ways as being places where there is high crime or poverty, but places that make up a large part of the United States. Susan that is the back row, the front row is chris the front row is me. Me and my colleagues. I used to work on wall street. I was there for 20 years before did this. I have a phd in physics. Those are what i call front row professions. People who have harvard degrees, yale degrees, people who make up a large part of the political class. People who make up a large part of wall street and journalism, the media. People who are very different in many different ways but have a similar lived experience after high school, which is primarily about where they go to college, where they go to school. Susan and the poor, which a lot of these folks are, have always been a part of our society, many western societies. Is there anything distinctive about people who are poor in america right now . Chris the gap first of all i would say that part of the change over my lifetime certainly, i am in my 50s, is the income gap between the poor and wealthy. Both statistically has grown in the last 30 years. What i have found and what my book tries to highlight is the differences are not just about statistics. The differences are about how people live, how people think, how people their whole worldview. What i learned in my book, and i hope i can communicate to the reader is that being poor, or being forgotten or left behind is not just about a statistic. Its about a way of life and eeling humiliated, feeling disenfranchised. It is about feeling the whole way you view the world is ignored and demeaned and looked down on. And i think i call the book dignity because what i found during those five years all over the United States in these communities was i found a frustration and humiliation and a search for dignity, a desire to be dignified. A desire to have dignity, despite what statistically is really bad circumstances. Susan the concept of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps has been part of america from its very beginning. You think about abraham lincoln, running from Office Running for office from the log cabin to the white house. S that concept one that is grounded in reality . Chris i certainly dont think so. I think it is a wonderful ecosystem a wonderful ethos. I think everyone i met during my journey has aspirations to pull themselves up, but i think the ability to do that is very much about where you are and who you know. I think in this world we have created, where i say we have this gap between the front row, the educated elite, and the back row, the people i spent time with, that gap is so large. That gap is so large not only in material terms, but also in how people think about the world that some people in the back row dont even know what it means to be in the front row. They dont know how to pull themselves up. Ne of the things we in the front row, we educated, we know how to we know the rules. We know what we are supposed to do. E are supposed to study real hard, sit in the front row, listen to the teacher, perform well on tests, go to the right school, build a resume that gets us into the right schools, which gets us into the right jobs, which gets us into the right neighborhoods, so on and so on and so on. The people in the back row dont know that, some of them dont know that exists. They do not know the map. They dont know how to do it. Even if they do know how to do it, there are so many obstacles n their way. I liken it to to succeed in the world we have created, to be successful, to go to harvard on a scholarship and go to graduate school and work as a wall street trader, you have to walk this tightrope of doing all of these things right from the very beginning. If you make one mistake and fall off, you often cannot it is over. You cannot do it. Susan is dignity, the book, inherently political . Chris not explicitly. I certainly intended it to be a book that was timeless in that sense. It was not the five years i was doing the research took place during the election of 016. It is hard not to have politics explicitly in it. But explicitly, i think the 2016 election is only mentioned three times in the book out of 300 pages. But i think the political ramifications are clear. I think what the book i hope communicates to people is that if you are in a forgotten community and you feel humiliated and you want dignity, there are political ramifications for a lot of people feeling that way. If a large percent of the electorate is so frustrated, so humiliated, the political consequences are clear. Youre going to have people who, in some cases, just remove themselves, they are so frustrated. They just opt out of the system. I call it justified cynicism. They just look at the system and say nope. Why should i play this game . And then there is another group of people who are going to basically knock over the table. Things are not working for them as is, so why not knock over the table and try some thing different . Susan i heard in an interview that you said the book has generally been ignored by people on the left of the political spectrum. If that is the case, why do you think it is so . It seems ultimately something of an indictment of capitalism, so why would it not appeal to that side of the spectrum . Chris i dont know. It is for me a little surprising. For some background, my parents are both democrats. I was raised we had Democratic Club meetings in our ouse as a kid. I am a lifetime democrat and i count myself as a leftist. I felt the book was to the degree it has an ideology, as you said, it is an indictment of the current capitalistic ystem. I think part of it is, one of the chapters is called faith. And one of the lessons that i learned over those five years was the importance of faith and the very dignified role religion plays in peoples lives. I think that caught people on the left off guard. I think some on the left dont particular want to hear that. I say this as somebody who started the project as an atheist. I count myself now as agnostic, i guess. But spending five years with Homeless People and in neighborhoods blighted by poverty and drugs and seeing that the only thing that works for a lot of people was religion. And it was not just a pragmatic role. It played a real, central role in their life. I could not ignore that. I could not look beyond that and not write about that. Susan it is clear this was an evolution for you. In order to understand that evolution, tell me more about your roots. Where were you born . You mentioned your parents were democrats, tell me how you were brought up. Chris i was born in a small, southern town in florida. A lot of people dont think florida is the south, but believe me, my town was very much the south. 500 people in town and my parents were a bit of the outsiders. They arrived in the late 1950s when most people in the town had been there three or four generations. My father was a professor. Again, one of the few professors in town. And that is where we grew up. This 99 white workingclass community in the south. And the minute i could, i got out of there. I was good at math, and as much as i liked the people in the town, and i did like them, it just was not for me. And i was an altar boy and did all of the things in town, played little league, played high school football. But by the time i graduated high school, i was reading science books, i was an atheist, and did not feel like i fit in and wanted something different. So i left, i went to college, got an undergraduate in math. Susan where did you go to school . Chris new college in sarasota, florida. Susan how did you get from there to the phd . Chris i took tests and was good at it. It came naturally to me. I was always into the big questions. The big question in my mind was cosmology. I went to johns hopkins, which had the space telescope. This was in 1986, 1987, i went and got a phd in theoretical physics. Susan and from there to wall street. What was the path . Chris [laughter] susan that doesnt seem like a logical progression. Chris i was one of the first people to do it. It is now a pretty common route. They call them rocket scientists. At some point people on wall street realize it is all numbers and here is this group of people who are good at numbers. I was not particularly great at physics. To make a career in physics, you have to absolutely love it and i liked it but i did not absolutely love it. And so i was not particularly good at it, so i left and went to wall street. Susan were you good as a bond trader . Chris yeah. I was. Susan how long did you do it . Chris 20 years. Susan how did your lifestyle change while you were doing that . Chris quite a bit. Me and my family would like to say we did not change much, but i think over time i got paid more my first year than my father ever made. Far more, 10 times more than i got as a grad student. And you know, we lived what i thought was a relatively modest life, but it was not. We had a big apartment in brooklyn and sent our kids to a private school and did all of the things you do when you live in new york city as a wealthy person. Susan so then what happened . Chris i always was i always took walks to relieve stress, long walks. Like 20 miles. And being something of a science geek, i made a goal to walk the entire length of the new york city subway system above ground. And i had done that and then i realized at some point that i had not gone to the bronx. So i took i called them my terminus walks. I would take the subway to the end and walk along the route. In 2008 during the financial crisis, my life changed dramatically because of the financial crisis. My kids started getting older, y walks could be longer. I started making those walks not just about the goal of completing the subway system, walking wherever you could, but i started realizing what i enjoyed about the walks were the people i met during the walks. The kind of things you had to experience that you would not necessarily want to experience or did not plan to xperience. So eventually i started bringing a camera along to document the people i met and the stories i heard during these walks, and that evolved into me taking pictures of people and writing their stories. Susan what kind of camera did you use . Was it an obtrusive one . Chris initially it was a little pointandshoot, but then i got a real camera. For the photo geeks, a nikon 5. Susan had you done photography efore . Chris just as a hobby. Susan from there all the way to publishing a book essentially a of photographs, you found something you were good at and could use to tell a story . Hris what i like most about photography was, a, people liked having their photos taken. The minute my camera was there, folks would ask me to take their photos. That allowed a conversation to evelop about them. You know, when anybody saw my camera and wanted their picture taken, inevitably they would spend an hour and a half telling me about their life. You know, for the viewer, these re not people who usually have pictures taken. These are drug addicts, Homeless People, the poorest of the poor, often. In neighborhoods that to be blunt, a lot of white people will not go. Largely hispanic, largely black neighborhoods. And it was a conduit in retrospect it was a conduit for e to learn more, to learn in a different way, to learn from people rather than books and spreadsheets and articles. Susan you ended up spending quite a bit of time in one part of the bronx called hunts point. Why did this part of the city, in such a big, diverse city, attract you so much . Chris a variety of reasons but initially i went because i was told not to go there, which is kind of my way of dealing sometimes. I remember i was on wall street and people were like, where are you walking this time . I said im going to the end of the two train, i believe it was, and then im going to walk home. They go, youre going to have to go that is the bronx. Whatever you do, do not go to hunts point. Ok, i am going to hunts point. Susan sure. Chris the reason they told me that is it is considered to be the most the poorest neighborhood in new york, it is long stigmatized as being poor, crimeridden. Hbo had done a salacious show called hookers at the point. So it has a big stigma attached to it because of drugs and the sex trade. I did not know much of that but i knew i was not supposed to go there. I remember when i first walked there, i just want to say it is a wonderful neighborhood before saying anything else and thats what i try to communicate in my book. I saw that the minute i walked n there. T is a tongue of land jugget out, if you ever fly into laguardia, you fly over it coming from the north. It is a tongue of land that juts out into the east river most almost directly across from laguardia airport. And it is kind of a gated community in all of the wrong ways. On three sides it is cut off by water, and on the fourth side, it is cut off by the massive interstate, the expressway. It is kind of where new york puts things it does not want. Garbage dumps, junkyards, auto body shops. But it is also home to 40,000 people. Susan and who are they . Who lives there . Chris mostly i think it is 99 hispanic and black, workingclass. 50 below Poverty Level. And they live in one area. The minute i walked into the neighborhood, i felt, in an odd way, it was like what i had grown up with, which is a small town. A place where people watch out or each other. It also, as a photographer, because it faces the south, it has good light. It doesnt have tall buildings, it has good light, so it was very beautiful photographically. Susan i want to put another picture on screen. This is a person his name is to keisha. Ho is she . Chris she was the first there is a sex trade, and she is a homeless addict. I mean, she is much more than that, but that is what she would be called. She has been living on and off the streets for 40 years. She is one of the first people i met in hunts point. I had kind of intentionally she is always walking the streets and i had intentionally out of respect for what she is doing and knowing the big difference between us, i had given her space. Eventually she called me over. She kept on yelling, come take a picture of me. So i walked over and took a picture. It was a sunday morning i believe, or a saturday. It was empty because all the semis were gone. She was in the industrial part of hunts point. Immediately her intelligence just kind of came right through and we spoke for about an hour, half an hour or so. She told me her life, which is just, you know it is like a cliche of everything wrong that an happen to somebody. Eventually i asked her what i asked everybody i photographed, which is, what is one sentence how do want me to describe you . Give me one sentence. She shot back, what i am a prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of god. Susan you have been done with this project for years and it seems like you are still emotional. Chris yes, sorry. Susan why is that . Why is it you bring so much emotion . Chris because i think sorry, i tear up when i talk about her. I just as an author, there is a frustration of not being able to communicate how rich of a person you ask who she is. And i go to the cliche. She is a homeless addict, but there is so much more than that. So part of it is the frustration of an author not being able to say, well, she is this immensely rich, smart, wonderful person who is going to be called a homeless addict. And, you know, i also get emotional because i know how rough her life has been and how rough her life still is and how nfair that is. Susan you said she became your guide to hunts point. How did that relationship work and who were the kinds of people she introduced you to . Chris its basically, i call it a street family. It is roughly 30 a collection of 25 to 30 people who call each other sister, mother, father, brother. Hey act like a family. They are homeless. And they shoot up heroin, often 10 bags a day. They live under bridges, in abandoned buildings, and broken down cars, on roofs, in its. Under expressways, wherever. And some of them do sex work. Some of them dont. Some of them scrap iron, some of them steal, some of them rob. They have to make 150 per day o shoot up heroin. And she and i she, amongst others, basically let me into their lives. And kinda guided me through this community. And for roughly two and a half to three years, i was kind of an outsider, fly on the wall, if you will, and an honorary member of this family. They were kind enough to let me in with my camera. Susan at what point did you quit your job on wall street . Chris after about nine months of hanging out in hunts point and doing that, it was absurd. I mean, i couldnt. I had this absurd, weird life being a wall street trader in the day and on the weekends, being under bridges with heroin addicts. Susan when i was reading your and there are two parts to it, which we will talk about. One at hunts point, and one around the country, but i kept thinking about your own family. Clearly you were changing so much, and you were leaving them at odd hours. How did your family members react to this journey you were on . Chris i have a supportive family, which i am very fortunate of. And i think the way i explain it is this was more me than being a wall street banker was, and they knew that and appreciated that. If you knew me growing up or knew me in college, i was not a wall street banker. This was more who i was. So it is kind of like, oh, you are back to being you again. But also, once i quit, i was physically around my family more. I may be gone two months at a time when i ended up going on the road, but i am also back for two months and always there. It has been tough on my family. That is part of the problem with doing Something Like this. It changed me. It is unfair to my family. It is not fair, they did not ign up for this. I think the old book is mosquito coast, about a guy who goes on a journey and drags his family through hell, and at some point i said i am not going to mosquito coast. I have to put boundaries. That is partially why i stopped going to the bronx. Susan along the way, you write about the fact that you got very involved in peoples lives. And of course, some of the critics of your book suggest thats where the line with journalism stops. If you involve yourself. What do you think about that . Chris i could spend hours talking about it. Susan the rulebook . Chris i do my best not to get too angry. The rulebook is wellintentioned. But it is conveniently a way to keep people from doing projects like this. It is conveniently a way to keep a boundary and not get involved in peoples lives. I got criticized for helping people out financially, which i cant imagine not doing. How can i not