What Can We Learn from the Money Nerds?

Going to college, I expected to make friends with fellow nerds. That was pretty much the part of college I was most looking forward to. What I found, on arriving, however, was that there were entirely new (to me) kinds of nerds, beyond the ill-defined handful I had met in high school.

I was, or at least fancied myself (still fancy myself), a literature-and-writing nerd. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but the vague idea of “law school” had suggested itself to me at some point between the ages of 11 and 18. When I met my first fellow pre-law student in the first week of college, I was horrified to discover that he was a debate nerd. I had never done debate. I did not understand debate. What I did understand was that every conversation with him left me feeling browbeaten and stupid. I gave up on law school pretty much immediately. I was the wrong type of nerd.

The next major nerd varietal I encountered was much more significant across the rest of my undergraduate career and beyond. As with practically all highly-ranked colleges, the #1 career destination at Columbia University was Wall Street. (I could not find the source online, but I recall reading a pamphlet in my senior year that put the number at around 30% of each graduating class. Last year’s statistics show that while tech has eaten into its lead, finance is still the top dog career outcome for Columbia undergrads with almost 20% entering this field after college.)

Enter, the money nerds.

I might have overlooked them for a year or two if I hadn’t shared a wall with one in my first year. He had a poster in his dorm room depicting a Malibu mansion with five luxury cars arrayed neatly in the driveway, a helicopter slicing across the top of the shot and the all-caps motto at the bottom: REMEMBER YOUR DREAM. For some reason I had a poker set, which I lent him once a month so he could play with his cadre of money-nerd friends. (I did not know how to play poker. I simply handed him the case, rattling with chips, never asking if I could join, if he could teach me.)

(My other wall was shared with a guy who played Halo at a very loud volume every night.)

We talked, as college students in 2010-11 did—in passing in the hall, naked except for towels on the way back from the shower; proudly and loudly over Kanye West and LMFAO while underage drinking in a dorm room crowded way beyond fire hazard levels. He was astonishingly confident about why his worldview and goals—money is the Best Thing, a career in investment banking brings with it the most money and is therefore the Best Career—were the correct ones.

I didn’t push back. There was nothing in my makeup that was capable of pushing back. He was supplying information and opinions about topics on which I had no information or opinions of my own. Career? Ever since I dumped the “law school idea” (I had also taken up and quickly dumped the “English professor idea” after three weeks of my first and only English course, an American Literature lecture which the professor had begun by declaring that she was not interested in developing or exploring our opinions of the texts, and would simply be conveying to us her own (presumably correct) opinions of them, for us to note down and reprise later in essays and exams), I had no career plan. Nor did I have any views on the relative merits of “getting rich.”

(I suppose if you had asked 18-year-old Chris how he felt about getting rich, he would have said it sounded good. He might even have said he expected it to happen as a matter of course. After all, he had done everything right in life so far, and always been rewarded. It seemed straightforward to do what he loved: read a lot, talk a lot, get good grades, ace standardized tests, feel smart, get admitted to successively more selective schools, take and ace their attendant Honors and AP courses. So what if he had no plan, had never had a plan, had never had an adult in his life suggest that he create a plan? It seemed obvious that if he just kept doing what he was doing, then success—and plenty of money—would inevitably follow.)

Eventually, after enough of those conversations with my money nerd neighbor and a series of incidents where I repeatedly overdrew my checking account and was prevented from registering for the next term’s courses due to an “administrative hold” (meaning my parents had not finished the financial aid paperwork that made it possible to pay my tuition—although ultimately I was the one who had to go with my folder of documents to the various offices around campus trying to resolve it), I did push back, in the way a person who has no actual answers often does: resentment.

To be clear, I never believed for a second that I could not learn as much about money as any of the money nerds. What I found impossibly frustrating, however, was that I could not possibly make myself care as much about money as the money nerds. Caring is what makes nerds nerds. No doubt many of the people I met in college were baffled or even annoyed at how much I cared about literature, society, philosophy, and the other ideas that danced like sugar plums in my head (I once attempted to start a conversation with the most desperate crush of my whole life by walking up to her in a bar and making a terrible joke about our recent class discussion of Dante’s Inferno).

It only got more grim when I reached sophomore year, and realized that two- or three-in-ten (or more) of my classmates were gearing up for the Big Summer Internship between junior and senior year, where (if your GPA is high enough—mine wasn’t) you go work 100 hours a week for eight weeks at Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan or similar, in a bid to secure a post-college Analyst job (and accompanying six-figure starting salary).

Two nerds diverged in a yellow wood, and knowing I could not become both and be one traveler, long I stood, and stared down one as far as I could, to where it ended in unemployment, anxiety, and unpayable student debt…

The actual cause for why I did not try to go into finance is because my GPA was not high enough (for reasons beyond the scope of this essay). But the proximate cause was that—faced with a money-nerdism I did not understand and which made me feel stupid, inferior, behind—I had cultivated a disdain of the field. Without any actual alternative, I had defended my ego by telling myself that the entire idea of getting a good GPA and working on Wall Street was something that only “bad” people did, while I was a “good” person for not doing that and instead doing… other things.

This is not a new story. Looking down on nerds has been a tenet of American popular culture since I was old enough to be aware of it. I’m no scholar of the matter, but l have to imagine this was the case even when my parents were young. The irony, of course, is that I was—am—a nerd, too. But this never stopped me from (unknowingly) internalizing a gut-reaction disdain for people who are just really into something that I don’t personally like.

This essay is not about critiquing money nerds. Any critique of the money nerds is a critique equally fairly leveled at every kind of nerd. Moreover, resentment and disdain are not a critique. These are defense mechanisms that arose in me due to ignorance and fear. I could not understand what the money nerds were doing (in many ways, ten years on, I still don’t), and so I decided they were simply Bad. And, as we all know, if you attempt to learn from or understand Bad people, you become Bad yourself.

Except, I see now, this is untrue.

With time and maturity I made a diversity of friends. I have one good friend nowadays who is a money nerd, specifically a new species of money nerd—a Bitcoin nerd. Today he sent me this article, a shareholder letter written the Founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, who is by all accounts simply an older, more established version of money nerd. Without even scrolling down past the introductory section, I was immediately repelled by the guy’s writing. See:

From Jurassic Park to Banksy to the all-but Sun Tzu Chinese “sage,” this really is a greatest hits of macho online “Gear up for how smart and free-thinking I am” stage-setting, reminiscent of your Tims Ferriss and Jameses Altucher. The thing that got me the most was the “genius” epithet for David Foster Wallace. Was Wallace a literary genius? Undoubtedly (although he was also an abuser of women. Is that a normal way to introduce someone you are about to quote at length? (Imagine: “At a presidential banquet in 1946, the genius Albert Einstein….”) You decide. Personally, I sensed right away that I was dealing with a money nerd’s money nerd. The disdain came rushing back. I nearly closed the tab.

But I stopped, because I have grown up a lot since I was a scared and clueless teenager turning instinctively away from the unpleasant realities of the Ivy League. And I subsequently read the entire—frankly too-long but ultimately interesting and informative—letter. Not because I aspire to become an investment manager and am looking for tips, but because I know now that nerds—and specifically money nerds—run the world, and I ignore them at my peril.

I am not much of a capitalist. I harbor no aspirations of starting companies or trading stocks. I once supported self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders for president. Despite all that, other people have interests and livelihoods that diverge from my own; those people and I inhabit a shared world; and I wish to pay attention to them to the extent I have spare time and energy to do so.

After twenty paragraphs of vamping I am now struggling for the words to describe the thing I want to say. Basically it comes down to this: I have discovered—with great pain over a long time—a tendency in myself to view things I do not understand or like as fundamentally bad and not worth engaging with. This is different from ideas that have been proved wrong; I don’t see the need to engage with Nazi ideas, for instance, because in my view Nazism has been defeated both militarily and intellectually, and needs only to be kept down for the rest of time, never reasoned with or given any quarter.

Although by the law of large numbers some money nerd somewhere is probably a Nazi, money nerdism broadly is not Nazism. It is infinitely more mainstream and globally dominant than Nazism ever was. And, unlike Nazism, I think there are plenty of reasonable ideas to be gleaned from the money nerds. The problem I discovered in myself, which held me back throughout college and for years afterwards, is that I refused to learn from people whose interests and aptitudes differ from my own. In that sense, money nerdism is like haggis—something that some people love, which has a bad reputation among others, and which I personally have never tried.

What good does it do me to declare that haggis is bad if I have never tried it?

In the end, the idea behind this essay has nothing to do with money nerds themselves. It has everything to do with me, and what I want to get out of life. It has not been easy to overcome my ingrown fear, resentment, disdain towards all manner of things that seemed too good to be true, things where I felt like I was on the outside looking in. In a way, it’s the Incel mentality, applied to something other than sex.

It seems obvious, now that Incels have been discovered and analyzed, that their mentality is incredibly toxic and damaging, not just to society at large, but to the people who possess it. It is angry, antisocial, and refuses to admit it has anything to learn or improve upon. These properties are not unique to Incels’ relationship to sex, however. They touch all aspects of culture and politics. There is strong internal pressure to defend our own ego by proactively declaring people and things we don’t understand to be Bad, and unworthy of learning from, even when those people and things are very important and powerful.

This is the tendency I try to fight in myself. I tell myself that, if serious industry people I trust think an article is good, then it must contain at least a filigree of good—or at least instructive—ideas, no matter how annoyingly macho its prose style.

I could have closed the tab and never read a letter from the CEO of an investment management firm ever again. But if I let my irrational disdain for certain kinds of nerds guide what I was allowed to read or learn, I would miss out on a lot of interesting ideas.

And as a nerd myself, ideas are what makes my life worthwhile.