And so next, what did you do?

So the next thing is I learned about working groups and how working groups are organized. And I thought to myself, I just don't have time for that. I have three kids; I have a full-time job. But I would love to join someone else's working group and go to the meetings.

And pretty soon my friend, who, as I said, walks through Zuccotti Park every day, told me that there was an alternative banking working group being set up. So I went down to Zuccotti Park and I found the e-mail address of [director of diplomatic advisory group Independent Diplomat] Carne Ross, and I e-mailed him and said, "I'd love to be part of this group." So I --

He's the guy running the group?

Yeah, he started the group. And I went to the first meeting in his office. And it was really exciting, and there were quite a few people there, maybe 30 or 40 people, and a bunch of people on the phone, and we had a really exciting feeling. You know, here we are; we want to help this system; we want to fix it or create a new one, like, "Let's do this." You know, it was really cool.

And we met again the next week. It was even more popular by then. I think there were more like 60 people. And we had some really interesting people join it. A lot of the people were from the inside, so I realized I wasn't the only person -- and my friend who told me about it was also there -- that was in finance and wanted to change the system. We had quite a few people from the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission], from banking, from hedge funds, all over the place. It was so large, in fact, the meeting, that Carne asked us to split into two groups at the end of the second meeting.

So we split into two groups. One of them, which Carne is still with, talks about reimagining the financial system, just starting a new system. And they're trying to work on opening a bank that sort of follows kind of a mission that they've written down, and an ethic.

And the other group, which I started facilitating in that second meeting, is talking about how the current system works and possible improvements to the current system -- reform, essentially. So to that end we do things -- we are trying to help the regulators do their job, become adversaries of Wall Street. One of the projects we're working on is submitting public comments to the Volcker Rule, [a section of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act]. So there's a subgroup called Occupy the SEC that's part of alternative banking.

And they're putting together a long letter to the SEC explaining what their comments are on the implementation the SEC is suggesting for the statute, which is written from the Volcker Rule. And I was actually on a call with the SEC last week about that. It was really fascinating.

One of the things I realized is that the SEC is filled with people that are probably not quants. They're closer to lawyers, I think, so they're very technically correct on a lot of things. But when I asked them about, "How is this risk section going to really expose proprietary trading so that the Vol…" To back up just a second, the goal of the Volcker Rule is to separate proprietary trading from banks that are supposed to be deposit holding banks and only engage in market making, not proprietary. So they're not supposed to take risky bets if they have people's money.

And, well, how do you tell? How can you figure out whether someone's taking risky bets? And one of the ideas in the Volcker Rule is we'll keep an eye on the risk numbers. If the risk numbers vary wildly, then it's a good chance that they're doing proprietary trading.

But the risk section of the Volcker Rule is really vague, really vague. And, you know, I worked in risk, so I explained to them: "... If I'm a bank, I can game this. I can game this requirement to make my risk numbers as small as I want for various reasons." And the SEC people -- there were 11 people on the call, and I mean, they were really nice, right; this is not a criticism of them as people, but their background, I mean, they just said, "Well, we'd really love if you could come up with better wording for that section."

And it just hit me. I was like, these people, they're not experts in this. We need people at the SEC who are experts, who have gamed the system in this way, and write down the regulations so that they couldn't even game that system."