Our Complicated Relationship With Money

In the movie, Wall Street, Oliver Stone through his character Darien Taylor, played Daryl Hannah, reminds us that “when you've had money and lost it, it can be much worse than never having had it at all!” This fundamental principle is true, not just on a grand, Bernie Madoff style scale, but it plays itself out in the everyday lives of people whose financial fortunes are constantly subject to economic flux.

There are literally hundred of aphorisms about money and there is a simple reason why. Money, having it or not, and equally important, our relationship to it, is the principal driver of our personal relationships, our self esteem, and frankly how we see the world.

Lee Siegel, dives deep into these ideas as he draws from his own experiences in The Draw: A Memoir.

My conversation with Lee Siegel:

Money is not what you think it is

Few things are more ubiquitous than money. Yet what seems so simple, can often become so complex. Money is far more than just the notes and coins we carry in our pockets. It’s part of a complex system of debits and credits and clearing. Just look at the workings of Bitcoin and you start to see how those notes and coins are really just tokens and symbols that represent a much larger and more complex world of money.

That's the world that Felix Martin ushers us into in Money: The Unauthorized Biography.

My conversation with Felix Martin:

Wall Street, Gambling and Baseball

What do you do if you are a veteran Wall Street trader who worked for Lehman Bros. when the collapse came?  To make matters even worse, you were struck down by an ambulance and had to go through months of recovery.  Then when you finally returned to work, you were fired.

What you might do is turn to a new job in the 380 billion dollar industry that can return profits even bigger than Wall Street....sports gambling.  That's what Joe Peta did, but with a difference. He used his skills as a Wall Street trader to bring discipline and metrics to sports betting. Riffing off the work of Bill James and Nate Silver, he would turn his dark days into a 41% profit and in the process, share his story in Trading Bases: A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball.

My conversation with Joe Peta:

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