The Daily Beast Podcast - This Is Exactly How Trump Broke Our America

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Anand Giridharadas returns to the Daily Beast Podcast to discuss his new book, Man in the Mirror, and the three years he spent reporting on the fatal subway encounter between Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny. Giridharadas takes Joanna Coles inside a story that became a national Rorschach test, exploring race, homelessness, mental illness, public safety, fear, dehumanization, and the difficulty of making sense of a morally complicated event in an era of simple slogans. He also reveals what he learned from following the people at the center of the case, including Daniel Penny’s Marine Corps training, the NYPD detectives who questioned him, and the outreach workers trying to help people living on the streets. Then the conversation takes an unexpected turn toward the Epstein files, as Giridharadas connects the sense of abandonment he found on that subway car to what he sees as a defining political emotion in America today. #ad Save 20% off Honeylove by going to https://honeylove.com/DAILYBEAST! #honeylovepod #ad Start a free trial and get 50% off your first year of Monarch Core at https://monarch.com with code BEAST. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Do I have to do everything myself? You want to want! I'll give you a... Moblad. New season is now streaming on Paramount Plus. This is a journey to the heart of America. this story. This is about fear and disorder and safety and in some ways the kind of inner life of an authoritarian age, the kind of political emotions of the Trump era that we've been living in. This idea of taking matters into your own hands because no one's coming has sort of become the thread that connects Americans when so little does. And that's not what you want as your

common culture. I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Bees podcast. Before I forget, please don't Don't forget to smash your subscription button wherever you are. Wherever you get your podcast, Spotify, Apple, YouTube. We are independent media. We appreciate your support by subscribing because it allows us to have the sort of freewheeling conversations that we have today with the author of a book, which is about an incident that happened in New York City, but which is really a metaphor for what's happening across America. and then rather brilliantly he ties it to the Epstein files and the Jeffrey Epstein of it all.

I'm talking about the author Anand Gerdaas and his book, Man in the Mirror, which is about the incident where a man gets on a subway car is threatening and yelling, people are frightened, and a Marine takes him down and ends up choking him to death. You will know the people involved as Jordan Neely and Daniel Boll. penny. And Anand spends three years talking to everybody involved in that story to try and understand how it happened, how we can avoid it happening again. But really, what does it say about the America we are living in right now? So, no time to waste. Let's get into it with Anand Gerdaas and his fantastic hair. If you like the support of a sports bra, but hate

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And after you check out, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Experience the new standard in comfort and support with Honey Love. Welcome Anand, Gerdadas, back to the podcast. I'm so happy to be here with you. Well, very pleased to have you back. We have talked endlessly about Jeffrey Epstein on this podcast, and I'm going to bring you back to talk about Epstein at the end of this conversation

and whether or not a question I am really curious about, did the Epstein class get away with it? Did the Epstein files in the end turn out to be nothing but a whimper? And has Trump won the Epstein files? But leading up to that, we want to discuss your book, Man in the Mirror, which I'm particularly, interested in because as you know, this involves an incident which happened at my local subway station, so I have much more sense of it happening. And it happened at 2.30 in the afternoon.

And it's, of course, the case between Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny. Jordan Neely was a mentally ill man having an episode on the subway and Daniel Penny was a former Marine who put him in a chokehold and sadly Jordan Neely died. You talk to almost everybody who was involved in this case from the prosecutor to those who knew exactly who Jordan Neely was because he was well known to the New York City authorities and he represented a problem and still represents a problem that No one can figure out what to do with, which is how do you help? How do you help the mentally ill who are in a state of deep distress? And this was not, as you said, someone who fell through the cracks.

He was very much known to the authorities. The issue was, how do you handle it? So what made you start to write this book? And what did it tell you about the country we're living in right now, the city we're living in right now? I have a very dear friend of mine named Sam who actually called me several days after this tragic case happened in May, 23. And he said, I have your next book for you. He had felt that I had gone, felt that I was a great reporter who could tell everybody's story once. And then I'd gone in the direction more of advocacy and kind of championing a particular way of looking at things.

These people good. But, I mean, we're in the Trump era. It's been a tempting era to think these. people good, these people bad. And I had succumbed to it in many ways myself. And he said, look, there's a place for it. We need some people yelling Trump bad, because Trump is bad. We need people doing resistance work. We need all kinds of things. But what Sam said to me over a period of years is a lot of people can yell a slogan or advocate or say these people go these people, he said, what you can do, I've seen you do, and I saw you do going back to India, and I saw you do

when you to book about a white supremacist in Texas, and he felt he'd seen me do throughout, was go into a complicated story and humanize everybody. He's like, that's your superpower, and you've sort of gotten waylaid into this other thing that feels important to a lot of people right now, which is to, like, be righteous. We don't need another righteous person. And Sam then called me, and he said, I got your next book for you. And he said, you know, that whole argument we've been having, this is the kind of thing you should be doing. And I looked at it and I'd heard about the story over those few days, but hadn't quite registered it.

And he said, look, this is a story. Although it is a story about a small incident that happened between two men, one subway car, one train in New York, this is really a story about everything in America right now. This is a journey to the heart of America through this story. This is about media and sensationalism

and narrative making. This is about fear and disorder and safety and in some ways the kind of inner life of an authoritarian age, the kind of political emotions of the Trump era that we've been living in. This is a story about race. This is a story about mental illness and homelessness

and people on the edge of the edge of our compassion. And it's also about a split second, isn't it, where everything can change and everything did change for Jordan Neely, for Daniel Penny. for everybody who is sitting on that carriage too. At every point, there is something unexpected in this book. And not everybody behaves in the way that you expect them to behave. I think that's exactly right.

And what I found was a story of profound moral complexity. The moral complexity of this incident, this was a very complicated incident in and of itself. And the complications are all around. And we don't live in a morally complicated era. We don't want to, right? We live in an era of simple slogans, and I'm speaking of myself as much as anybody else. When I do this, we live in an agent,

which it's very easy to identify good and bad, good and evil, nice guy, not nice guy. And this story forced me to reckon with the difficulty of looking at complexity. So to give you some examples, Jordan Neely, the black mentally old homeless man who was killed on that train, his family afterward came out and said he should have been institutionalized. He should have been forcibly kept in hospitals.

He should have been made to get well instead of kicked out. The activists who were allied with the family and standing with them at press conferences believe the opposite of that. Right. Some of them. Believe that that's complete miscarriage of justice and you have no right to do that and you have to respect the autonomy of every person. If they don't want care, they don't want care. Just within that camp, that's a fundamental schism. You have, in the case of Daniel Penny comes from this town in Long Island

called West Islip that's a kind of white bread, vanilla suburb in which I heard so many people talk about New York City is dangerous, never go to that hellhole, it's fentanyl everywhere. And Daniel Penny comes out of that environment where in the evening news, the evening news is not about the town, the evening news is about how dangerous New York is, 50 miles away. And Daniel Penny comes from that town, and you can imagine how that might have shaped him. And yet he was the kid who didn't want to live in that town. He wanted to leave that town. He wanted to prove himself in New York.

And then maybe couldn't quite handle a level of disorder and ambiguity that is maybe more common in New York than West Isles. You know, there are complications in this larger question. of how we tend to people in crisis, in psychiatric crisis. And everybody watching this, I'm sure, if you live in a city or visit cities, you know, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Washington, Chicago, you know your version of this, L.A. for sure. There are people who are not doing well

actively and flagrantly in our public space. Now, there's many stories we tell and clashing stories, right? There's one story that, you know, this is the fault of systems and this is a result of a callous, uncaring society and systemic injustices. There's another story that, you know,

this is like anarchy in cities and this is because of, you know, bail reform and decriminalizing drugs. Everybody has their story. But the basic issue that we can all agree on is there's a lot of people in distress in our public space. And what I found, are there a lot or is it that there are a few, but they have an outsized impact on people?

And I think the other thing that is a connective tissue in the book that everybody experiences is a level of fear. So Jordan Neely is frightened. He's on the subway losing his mind. Daniel Penny is kind of nervous because he's been in the services and he's kind of jittery. Everybody on the subway. You know, you have that hyper alert thing going on when you're on the subway because you're expecting something maybe to happen. And we're used to people trolling up and down the carriages asking for things and you get down. And I've lived here 30 years. I've never seen a violent incident on the subway.

I take the subway all the time. Every single time I get into a carriage, I think is this the moment there's going to be some kind of incident? You know, one of the things that I found in the reporting is that for many people, who work on this issue, they have found that the fear of violence is sort of the only way to get a lot of people interested in this issue. This is an issue people don't care about. Right. Except when they think of their own danger.

Now, from a statistical point of view, this is not an issue that, of like, there's many more dangerous things in American life. Well, there's guns apart from anything else, right? So this is not an actual... Right. It's not a real fear. But I do think, you know, and it is exploited and overblown by the right, but I do think there is a problem from the left in oppositely kind of minimizing the way in which this is a problem.

I think it is not to say that those people are a problem. That's the wrong way to view this, and that's the dehumanizing way to view this. But I think it alters all of us to walk past people who are suffering so much and make up whatever story we need to make up that, well, that's just how it is. It corrods your soul to do that again and again, right? I think about, and this is something that I think becomes clear at you in some other societies. I think about India where my family comes from where I lived for a long time and reported for the New York Times. a lot of living in India as a middle class or privileged person, a lot of what you are doing all day long

is training yourself to not see pain and suffering because you couldn't survive in India if every person living an awful existence. If you saw it and felt it, you would like melt it to the street. So to survive in a place like that, you have to not see a lot of things. Not into, not rational, really, like literally not see. And it's not good for you.

It may be what allows you to survive, but it alters all of us. And so it's a small number of people in New York, you know, there's 100,000 people in the homeless system, homeless care system. Only 5,000 or so are on the street. So everybody's- So it's 5,000 that are on the street. But that's because New York has a right to shelter. Right.

in the state constitution because of a court case decades ago. So in New York, everybody you're seeing on the street is part of that 5,000, is not in that 95,000. The 95,000 are in shelters, in supportive housing units, in various things, but they're not probably presenting to you as splayed out on the road. That 5,000, then, you know, there's a significant overlap of mental illness, but I don't know what the number is. You know, in a city of 8 million people, by historical standards, I mean, Mumbai, half of the 20

million people in Mumbai, I live in a slum. So, you know, 5,000 people on the street in a city of 8 million people. By some standards is a small number. But in a city this dense, I think the question is it triggers a lot of our fears about the country more broadly. I think that this issue triggers fears fears that systems are not able to care for people. It triggers fears that the government is not able to provide order and safety. It triggers fears about, you know, callousness and dehumanization. I think it triggers fears about, you know, our kids in public space, sending kids out. It triggers fears about, you know, violence in an era that has political violence, gun violence. So I decided I wanted to spend three years getting beneath the clickbait that this story

was reduced to. This, like so many stories, was just immediately turned into clickbait. My relationship with money has changed a lot over the years. When you're younger, finances can feel like something you can deal with when you absolutely have to. But as you get older, you realize that understanding where your money is going can give you a lot more freedom and control. That's why I like the idea behind Monarch. It puts your account spending, savings and investments in one place so you can actually see the whole picture instead of trying to piece it together yourself. And one feature I really approve of is the AI assistant. You can ask it something like how much did I spend on travel last summer or can I afford this vacation without touching my savings.

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or he was a hero who stood up against progressive anarchy in cities, right? Jordan Neely was either a thug, hobo crackhead who someone finally had the courage to deal with, or he was a victim of a system that refuses to care for the most marginalized people in the society. And I decided to try to recover the humanity of this story from the clickbait that it was reduced to and spent time in the world of the story. I spent time with, over these last three years, you know, Jordan Neely's close friend and mentor in the Michael Jackson impersonator community that Jordan Neely was a member of and spent time with Moses Harper, his friend and teacher in that community, understanding this kind of world of, again, people we may walk by on the street in New York, not think about, but street performers, musicians, people who kind of make people laugh and smile. And, you know, Jordan Neely at one point had European tourists looking, walking around Times Square, looking for the Michael Jackson. He was known for that. You know, I spent time at Daniel Pennies with his Marine Corps unit in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina,

because I wanted to understand the training, the kind of hypervigilant training that is meant for, you know, Iraq and ended up in an F train. I spent time with, cover the trial, you know, every day of the trial and tried to understand, you know, how the government, the Manhattan DA's office, brought this case, quite an unusual kind of case they brought, where they said what was really at stake in the case was the idea of dehumanization, an idea that in the Trump era is, you know, it has a lot of, has a lot of kind of threads.

And that's because Daniel Penny kept referring to Jordan Ely as a cracket. Well, there was a really interesting thing. Unlike the Bernie Gets case where it was really clear. And Bernie gets, if you read now some of these transcripts of things he said, I mean, he was a monster who enjoyed every bit of, you know, what he did. The notoriety of. And just like, he was like, I would, if I had more bullets, I would have kept going, that kind of thing. This was not that kind of case, right? So the government prosecution, when they finally try Penny a year and a half later, the fall of 2024, they begin by saying,

Daniel Penny's a good, nice kid. He served his country. He tried to do the right thing that day. And all of us is sitting in the courtroom saying, this is the beginning of the case against him. He had good intentions, noble intentions, tried to do the right thing. He restrained this guy.

Now, as you know, well, many listeners will not know this, but the ride in question was between the second avenue stop and Raleigh Lofi. Super short stop. It's actually one of the shortest stops in the entire New York. city subway system. Jordan nearly had gotten on Second Avenue.

Daniel Penny was already on from Brooklyn. About a 30 second ride, 45 second ride. I did it yesterday. And that 45 seconds passes. The chokehold, the acting out, the yelling at passengers, and then Daniel Penny responding to the chokehold, all happens in that 30 to 45 seconds. The train gets into Broadway Lafayette,

your home station, doors open, and as you can imagine, everybody runs out, except whoever wanted to stay and watch or help a couple of people. At that point, there was no one in the government's telling, there was no one left to protect in the car. The car was empty. And from that point on, the chokehold lasted another five minutes. Now, in the Marine Corps training manual, you're not supposed to do a choke hold more than, I think, five or eight seconds, something like that, because it's dangerous. So the government made the kind of subtle and interesting case that what happened in that 30 to 45 seconds was not wrong.

He was right to step in. He was right to step up. He was right to restrain him in whatever way he thought he could. But that additional five minutes after the car was emptied and no one was there was what they said, going too far. And then they asked the question, which was, I thought, very interesting

given the era we have lived. why did he go too far? What created the conditions for him to hold on for five minutes when he has literally been trained every time he's gotten a new belt level in the Marine Corps in what the choke called is? He's learned multiple types of show. And also it was clear that Jordan Neely was unconscious. Was progressively first moving, then not moving, then fighting, then not fighting, then having,

yes. And the government's theory was that he held him that long and that way, in spite of all the people telling him not to and advice that he was going to kill him because he dehumanized him because he didn't register him as a full person like himself. And that, you know, in some ways, it's almost like a sounds like a little bit of a grad school seminar for a criminal justice case, but they then introduced these two videos, which I report on in the book, where you see actually what they're talking about. And Daphne, the lead prosecutor in the case,

told me that a lot of the NYPD guys didn't want to really bring Penny in for this. But when they saw some of these videos, some of them changed their mind. Because what you see in the first video is on the scene, right as police respond body cam images, video. You see a bunch of NYPD hovering around Jordan Neely's body on the ground.

And Daniel Penny is standing off to the side chewing gum. He's just kind of picked up his hat up off the floor. He's chewing gum. He's standing there. And he is chill. He's relaxed. He's just, you know, well, you know, he was acting out. I put him out.

And these cops are behaving like this is an absolute catastrophe about to happen. They're behaving as though the loss of this life would be a calamity for the world. And you see this kind of moral contrast between. half a dozen people over here doing CPR running. Have you done this drug? Have you done Narcan? Freaking out, right? Whatever the debates we've been having in this country about the police are,

I'm going to tell you what I saw in that video is half a dozen cops, who probably dealt with a situation like that three times that day. Freaking out about the loss of a life of a person very much on the wrong end of power. And Daniel Penny, who put him in that condition, not showing worry. So that was striking. I think if you had somehow found yourself in that situation,

I could imagine you being part of the freak out about what you might have caused. There was none of that. So that was part of the evidence. And then he's, Daniel Penny's in an interrogation room at the precinct a couple hours later. And he's talking to these two detectives. And I describe in the book that it was sort of like

a Manosphere podcast at the beginning of the interrogation. Right. They're all kind of chilling. They're sharing tattoos. They're talking about Marines. You're in the Marines. I was in the Marines white unit.

And you think it's going to go one way. I thought that was a very effective passage because you're like, oh, no, the police are going to side with him. And then, in fact, they slowly stop talking and let him talk. And you hear the crackhead. Well, I'm telling your story. Now, you tell your story. But you do hear him start talking about Jordan Neely in ways that feel slightly

less than human. And it's really striking because again, I think we've had a very tense set of arguments over years about police and policing and all of that. And you have this setup with these two detectives. They're kind of bros of a feather around this table. And then, yeah, Daniel Penny starts recounting the incident. And he very quickly falls into many, many, many words that are very striking. crackhead multiple times squirming, I think he uses eight times. You know, there's been a lot of social

science in the Trump era about the use of animalistic language to describe people. I mean, obviously we have, you know, with Trump, you know, this vermin and all this stuff. This is not, these are not slips of the tongue in these kinds of periods in history, the use of animalistic language to describe people is sort of part and parcel of a very different kind of politic. And Daniel Penny starts using this very kind of animalizing language. He's just a crackhead. He was just a crackhead, you know. And a really striking thing happens in this interrogation video,

which I report on in the book, that these two detectives, he loses these two detectives. And you're sort of watching it, like just watching the movie, you're expecting the broying out to continue, and he loses these guys. And these two detects, you know,

and he can tell, Danny Penny can tell he's losing them, and he, he starts throwing and doing the thing we all do when we feel, you know, am I right? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? You know what I'm saying, right? Kind of eliciting these like bids for similitude and agreement.

And they don't know what he means. They don't know what he's saying. They stop brewing out with him. And you can tell that he's kind of crossed some into some cultural terrain where those two detectives who actually deal with folks like that much more than Daniel Penny did. actually don't see someone like that that way, that whatever you might think about them and who knows what people say in their private life, he seems like he'd kind of breached some line where these detectors were looking at him saying, I actually don't call someone like that

just the crack. That's not. Right. It's a reassuring portrait of the NYPD. At least of the people who were involved in this case. In this case. And you've got to remember, you know, these are. these are people who, unlike Daniel Penny, are really interacting with this kind of population all day long.

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So what happened to Jordan Neely? Because as you say, at the end of the book, you've got his family saying, this is someone that needed help who should have been institutionalized. Why wasn't he institutionalized? Because he was known to the authorities. He formerly assaulted a woman. He didn't have a clean record. He was on a list of 50 people.

that were thought of as being either as a danger to himself or as a danger to others. And that turned out to be prescient. You know, this phrase slipped through the cracks. It was in every article that I saw when the story first broke in May 2023 and I started to read it. And I think I just unconsciously absorbed the phrase. And I remember saying it to an official who worked for the mayor's office at the time in New York. You know, why did he slip through the cracks or how do he sit through the cracks? And this guy's very thoughtful mental health expert said, this is a total tragedy and disaster,

but slip through the cracks simply not correct. This guy, Jordan Neely, was personally discussed by name in the mayor's office in a weekly or very regular meeting because he was on this so-called top 50 list of some of the most vulnerable, precarious New Yorkers, whose lives they are worried about that. And in this meeting, they go around and the different nonprofits and government agencies that have some visibility will say, yep, we saw him at Coney Island, has his weight looking, looks like the same. Any signs of decompensation? No, they're going around a table in the mayor's office. Now, to go back to Mumbai for a second, get 10 million people in slums in Mumbai out of 20 minutes. No one is sitting in the government office in Mumbai checking in on, you know, like we are privileged to live in a city and a country where there is a meeting. in City Hall every week to check on 50 people like that. Specific. And so what this mental health expert Brian Stettin was saying to me is it's a media

narrative that slips through the cracks. But this is actually a much more complicated problem than that. This is if we can't save someone who is being discussed weekly in City Hall, it is not slipping through the cracks. It is a moral confusion. And I think that is something I didn't understand about this issue. And I think a lot of people who walk down the street in our cities and just feel annoyed about so much suffering being played out in public, maybe don't understand. So I think that at the heart of the confusion is we don't know quite what to do as a society when you have people in public space who say no to help, who are not so badly gone, who are not dangerous.

They're not running at people. they're not being dangerous. They're not going to die tomorrow. Well, isn't the issue that you don't actually know if they're dangerous because they could become dangerous? Sure. But from a legal point of view. They haven't done anything yet.

They're essentially, to put it in kind of medical terms, they're a chronic problem, not an acute problem, right? Because if you're an acute danger to yourself, the government has the authority to take you off the street. If you're an acute danger to others, the government has the authority to take you off the street. But think about, and this is an example that many people use, I describe in the book, you know, the guy in your subway station, and I think people will recognize their own version

of this. The guy in your subway station who's there every morning is sweet, is kind, is far in a corner, not near anybody else, not coming in anybody else, not singling people out, but is kind of rotting away. But he's rotting away on a 20-year scale, not a, he's not going to be gone next week. But he's not living a good life. and in New York, chances are if he's there, he's refused to go into shelter. Chances are the way this city works, he's refused multiple times today. It's not for lack of offers and lack of, he doesn't want to go into shelter. The shelters are often terrible.

They're often violent. They're often prisons by other names for many of these, in many people's experience, assaults and violence and sexual assault for women, all kinds of things. Thet. How do you think about that guy? Do we have the authority as, ask yourself, do we have the authority as a society to pick that guy up off of the subway floor and force hospitalize them? What's the threshold for that, for you?

Right. And it's hard because, as you know, there's a long history of that power and authority being misused in this country. It's been misused against black people. It's been misuse against women. I mean, there was a time in this country where every 1950s housewife who was not thrilled at the American patriarchy was sort of deemed hysterical. And the number of women who were put into psychiatric facilities for what we would now recognize is just like they didn't like a shitty society. Do you want Donald Trump having the power to say anybody protesting in Minneapolis must be mentally ill?

I'm going to start rounding them up. It's a very delicate thing. to grant government the power to say, just a chronic inability to care for yourself is grounds for removing you. But on the other hand, I think we can all recognize that something has gone wrong in our cities. And in the name of compassion and dignity

and autonomy and freedom, we are allowing a lot of people to rot right in front of our eyes and telling ourselves fancy stories about how it's their own choice. So at the end of the book, at the end of all this reporting, what conclusion did you come to about how we should treat people like Jordan Neely? I will say so many issues I've written about in the past, the thing that should be done is quite clear. This issue is not like that. And I think everybody I report on from different vantage points, it's not like that.

this is a, you know, this is an issue where I think if you have a single bullet solution, it's probably not going to work, right? So there's some people who say, just give everybody apartments. There's a lot of vacant apartments in New York, get people vacant apartments. Now, unfortunately, an empty apartment is not going to solve the most acute schizophrenia cases. Not the nicest department on Central Park West will solve someone very acute mental illness. There's also people who say, you know, let's force-hospitalize lots of these folks. Well, that's going to help some people.

And it's maybe a power that will be misused and it's not going to help others. There's another remedy that, you know, is, I think, very interesting. I'm kind of on the upswing represented by places like Fountain House, it's a clubhouse model where this is the theory. It may sound hokey. It's not hokey. It is the idea that what a lot of people need, who are not in full-blown prices, but have some degree of mental illness that's manageable

is frankly to be in community and be needed by other people. And that actually in America, a lot of the manifestation of illness is compounded by isolation. And so there are these clubhouses around New York, including not far from here in West 47th Street, where mentally ill folks can just go every day. And there's a Fountain House Times newspaper and the Fountain House, the Fountain Pen,

literary magazine, model in the New Yorker, and a wellness center and a coffee shop and a thrift store where if you have a job interview, you can go get some clothes. And it's this incredible model of, you know, people actually having other people who kind of wonder why they miss the Fountain House Times meeting at 10 a.m. Is a powerful remedy. But that's not going to solve all the cases.

So I think this is a, in a very ideological age, this is a problem that requires a kind of all hands approach and all methods approach. It is uniquely, not uniquely, but, but. but quite powerfully resistant to kind of single frame solution. You're going to need apartments. You're going to need a clubhouse model for some people. You're going to need some forced hospitalization and medication for people. You're going to need everything.

And we don't have politicians necessarily these days with the mental dexterity to say this and this and this and this. So who coordinates that? Do we need a new department coordinator? Is there already a setup within city government that can be replicated across the cities that you've talked about? One of my favorite characters in the book is, and I say characters,

but these are all real people. Ashwin Vassen is the Health Commissioner of New York City under the Eric Adams' mayorship. Because he was mayor while this incident happened. And, you know, if you think about the Health Commissioner of basically chief doctor for New York City, public health. Think about, when you hear the phrase public health, what do you think about?

You think about vaccines, you think about immunization, you think about, you think about, you know, tuberculosis in the past and polio and these kind of sanitation drives. And New York has, you know, AIDS issues where the city has had to have a response to a shared health problem. Ashen Vassin, who actually used to run Fountain House, the Mental Health Clubhouse, was the first mental health expert. He's a doctor, but he's a mental health specialist. First mental health doctor to ever be made New York City's chief doctor. And at the time, his appointment was viewed by the New York Times and others as a signal that mental health was actually going to be treated as public health.

And it's worth noting that it historically has not, right? If you were to say there's 45 measles cases in the Bronx, everybody would say, yeah, that's a public, that's public health. Like, yes. If you were to say a very large fraction of teenagers in New York have body image issues from Instagram, generally we kind of push that on individuals. Right. It's not thought it's not treated.

Right. But it is as collective. By the way, it's as collective as measles. It is caused by a company that you are too powerless to fight on your own. It is the essence of a collective problem. but it's not thought of right now. So Ashwin's quest that I describe in the book is to make mental health

integral to public health in a way that it's not. What does it look like for a city like New York to treat what's going on in your mind as much of its concern as whether you have a virus in your body? And one of the things that he struggles with is how do you scale

mental health responses so that you are you know, he said, what if we had these clubhouses everywhere? But then you have to acknowledge that some people need much more severe intervention. And we all want, well, I shouldn't say we all want, but lots of people walk down the street and just want to not see the suffering. What should you do? I mean, I'm always mindful of walking past people and the parable of the Good Samaritan and thinking, I want to be the person that helps this person, but there are too many people.

And frankly, I don't know what to do at this point. What am I supposed to do? They have, there's now a, there's several interesting new programs. So there's now mental health response, you know, hotlines. But there's also this new program called Scout Subway Co-response outreach team where, you know, they have paired police officers with clinicians, nurses. Yeah, and you see them going around the subway, especially in the evenings. you see them crouching by people who look homeless

or have got some kind of drugs. Because the problem in the past was everybody had kind of partial. So you'd send the, you know, the outreach workers might come and see you and they have a years-long rapport and trust. But if you walk away or you, you know, are slightly violent, they don't have authority to do anything besides coaxing and persuasion. They can't even touch you by their training. And then the cops have the authority,

but they don't really care to, you know, sit there and help develop you. They're just going to wait until a law is broken. And if a law is not broken, they're not interested. And so there was all this kind of fragmented authority. So there's efforts to try to bring, you know, bring some of this together. Can you have a clinician who is caring for you while you have cops providing some teeth on it? I spent for the book two overnights with homeless outreach workers in New York. Again, there's so much argument about this stuff.

I wanted to see immersively what this actually looks and feels like in people's lives. So I followed an incredible outreach worker named Lizette Lojo, who works for the city through a nonprofit called Bowery Residence Committee. The city kind of contracts transit outreach work too. And Lizette's job and her colleague's job is to go up to individual homeless people in the transit system, stations and subways under staircases in Penn Station. and say, would you like to, can I get you anything?

Can I help you? Basically, can I get you into shelter? And I spent a night with Lizette at Penn Station, watching her from midnight to early hours of the morning doing this work. And then another night at Inwood, northernmost Manhattan, the beginning and ending point of the A train, watching her do this work in a subway station. and it is the most compassionate,

grueling, difficult work I think I've ever witnessed someone do. And you have to, you know, you're dealing with people of a lot of delusions, but these outreach workers show them so much respect because if you don't show them respect, you will not have any rapport and not have any ability to persuade them to do anything.

you have to build trust with people who have had so many other people in systems and institutions in their life abuse their trust. And I just learned so much watching those people. And I will say that I think part of what animated me through this whole process is as a country as a whole, because those are living in the world while working on the book. This is the opposite of what we are all doing. We live in a dehumanizing time. The President of the United States

is the dehumanizer in chief, but in many ways we have all, I think, succumbed to a culture of the easiest, quickest possible dismissal of each other. In all ways. This is happening within intra-party fights, intra-tribe fights. I just look at social media.

You almost never, I mean, it's so obvious to say, but you almost never see anybody in social media, like, react to an article saying, huh, I'd never thought of that. Like, there is no more, I've never thought of that in American life. Everybody's always thought of everything.

Whatever article you are going to post, it confirms what I already knew, what I've been saying for years. And we are so quick to dehumanize everybody. And this case was about a very acute instance of alleged dehumanization. But in many ways, what I found

was that the case was received and processed by a nation that is actually kind of engaged in the same thing. That is so quick to look at people and not see them. And of course, after Daniel Penny was found not guilty, he was immediately picked up by J.D. Vance, taken to the Army Navy game, right? Yeah. So you've spent a lot of your time also writing about the very rich.

So here you're writing about someone who's essentially been unable to figure America out and is at the bottom of the heap. You've also written about people at the top of the heap. You've written books about the elite, about the Epstein class. Is there a sense in which you think the Epstein class has gotten away with it? Yes. and I'll put them together for you very simply because I think when I thought about what I was learning in this reporting,

I wrote an essay for the New York Times sort of trying to distill my conclusions from these three years of reporting and I realized that my core observation of this country completely applies to the Epstein stuff. And so let me put it this way. When you think about, when I even think about in that subway car, before it even became a news, just in the subway car itself,

the one thing that everybody had in common in that subway car on that F train that day, was a sense of abandonment. Nobody's coming. I'm on my own. Jordan Neely felt that. Many reasons to feel that. Daniel Penny has said he felt that. Police weren't there.

I'm all alone. The passengers, when they testified, bystanders testified in the trial, They all confess to just feeling this totally kind of left to themselves. And I think it is... Why did they feel that, though? Because in fact, Daniel Penny stepped to the rescue. They're describing what they felt before he...

Before he did that. Before he stepped in. So in the few seconds where Jordan Ely is yelling at everybody and threatening people. You know, you're in this kind of tube and anything can happen, right? And I think that emotion of abandonment, that sense of abandonment, that sense that no one's coming, the calorie is not coming, I'm on my own, is the defining political emotion of our time. This to me is the defining political emotion of America today, the sense of abandonment. Once you get into the particulars, who abandoned, what abandoned, what is the issue, then we go back into our tribes and our slices. But if you just stay, as I like to do in my work with the political emotion rather than the political position, the emotion is something that is shared very wide.

And that connects very directly to Epstein because we got a rare and historic dump of a glimpse into a specific pedophile ring and a much broader web of enabling all around it. We don't normally get that kind of view. We don't normally get that kind of evidence. We don't normally have, you know, such a trove. And part of what that surfaced is the sense of impunity in that world, the way in which people in that world truly live as though nothing could ever be. touch them. And they turn out to be correct. Now it's, you know, all these, all these months later.

Do you think Trump has won the Epstein files? I mean, we've still got three million that are supposed to come out. Who knows when that's going to happen? I think he, I think he was damaged by it in a way that, you know, you can't always, I think a lot of the way in which Trump is damaged generally is slow erosion. So you can't always calculate it. But I think it undermined a very central thing about him, that he was the person not from this world and he was going to deliver you from this corrupt swampy world.

And I think in an important way, it established beyond anyone's doubt that he is, he's the swamp, not the drain, right? But that, I think that sticks, right? And I think if you look at his numbers, I think that's in there, that's priced in there. I don't think it didn't touch him. But it's not just him who won, in a sense.

He survived the Epstein files. You don't have to win them. You just have to not lose them. You just have to not go to jail. And this entire class survived them. And I don't know. if you are imagining an HBO writer's room where they were like,

let's invent the most insanely sorted but also high-powered, high-concept story involving all the main characters and institutions of our age. And let's make them all in on or enabling, what's the worst crime ever?

Pedophilia. Let's do that. Let's throw pedophilia. Like, if you have to algorithm, rhythmically concoct a story that you'd say, let's test if this can get a measure of reckoning and facing that maybe some other things couldn't. Right. So you would throw in the former president of Harvard, a CEO of Barclay's Bank. You would throw in a former White House general counsel. You'd throw in a movie director. You'd throw in the co-founder of the biggest private equity company in America. I mean, I could go on.

I mean, there was a time, to put it another way, there was time I was searching the names of every major institution in American life. Like, they're all in there. It's the university that you can't find it. You know, like this was pretty comprehensive. And you, it was, it is almost a story designed to test in extremists, whether people can just get away with things.

People can just do stuff. And the answer is yes. Enhanced the sense of abandonment, which existed in that train car and exists above ground and exists everywhere. And I think until we reckon with the fact that abandonment is the thing so many Americans feel in common, is this defining emotion of our age, I don't think we're going to be able to get past authoritarianism. I don't think we're going to be able to get past this kind of rage and anger at each other. Everything we are living through, everything that you may not like about the present order we are living through and the way it feels, I think, is driven by the sense of abandon. I mean, lots of people would say, actually, there were plenty of powerful men who were felled by the Epstein files, but the one person who hasn't been is the person who was his best friend, Jeffrey Epstein's best friend, for 10, 15 years. and he's ended up as president.

I still find it astonishing that the two men were best friends for, you know, 10, 15 years. One of them ended up dead in jail in Manhattan's most, New York's most notorious prison. And the other ended up as president of the United States. I mean, I think what it makes me realize is that once you, drive as many people as we have in this country to feeling like no one's listening. No one cares. None of those people will be held accountable even for an almost comically crafted, extreme version of depravity.

You have pushed people of every ideological persuasion in this country into a basic state of fatalism and despair about the system. And what I found, because around the time that this Penny Neely case was getting resolved, the Luigi Mangione case was starting up, and the same kind of arguments that folks on the right were using to justify Penny, he was a hero who stepped up into a cruel void, the same argument structure started to develop in parts of the left saying Luigi Mangione was a brave, valiant guy who stepped up to fill cruel void.

If we allow, whether it's Epstein, I think you could say the same thing about the way Gaza has left so many particularly younger Democrats feeling. If you continue to allow the kind of dominant feeling among so many Americans to be the feeling of the cruel void. Whether you like it or not, whether it's right or not, you are going to get more and more void filling. You're going to get more Daniel Pennies. You're going to get more Louis-Mangiones.

You're going to get more people taking matters into their own hands. That is what people do when you leave them in a sense of abandonment. And you and I and everybody else are going to have, well, I'm comfortable with that person taking matters, but I don't like that. Forget that. The important point is this idea of taking matters into your own hands because no one's coming has sort of become the thread that connects Americans when so little does. And that's not what you want as your common culture.

This particular incident is a metaphor for, as you say, so much that's going on in America right now. And you can read it in chunks. You can read it at one. It's a very compelling narrative, I would say. But as it happens, I live right there. And yet it's a story that expands to the entire country. So many congratulations. Good luck with it.

Thank you. Thank you for having. And thank you for coming on and talking about it. I always love chatting with you. I think there's a lot books cannot do. There's a lot art can't do. There's a lot reporting can't do. I think what something like this can do is at a moment when so many Americans

don't even want to share a country with each other. I still have a worldview the way I did before, but I set myself the challenge with this book of saying, let's render the world as it looks to lots of different people, and let's kind of get back into the habit of being able to say, here's how I feel about it. But also, I'm going to just take a second to imagine how someone else might feel about a thing. And that I'm not complicit or I'm not capitulating by doing that. I am actually doing a thing that I think is a core, obligation of citizenship, which is to imagine what it's like to be someone else. And this book, ultimately, to me, it's not really a book about homelessness and mental illness,

although it is not really a book about one case. It is a book about, I think, the search for belonging in a country where everybody is looking for that right now. And it's a book that invites people to do that act of empathy and that act of imagination to say, what is it like to be someone else? And it reads like a thriller, which is the joy for the, the reader too. It provokes you, makes you think, but it also drives you. It has a good narrative drive, which is, you know, you want a book to be very readable. We do live in the attention economy. We do. You want it to be readable. You got to make those pages turn. Yep, you did. You did.

All right. Anand, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I love the idea of taking mental health into the public health. We made one interesting. idea and I love Anand's sort of analysis that you think people fall through the cracks. And in fact, this man, Jordan Neely, was being discussed at weekly meetings by people that were trying to figure out how to help him. And of course, that help in the end just came too late. But it's a riveting read and are very curious to get your favourite parts of the conversation. and also your ideas for how you help mentally ill people who are, as Anand says, in a sort of chronic state,

not an acute state. How do you stop it getting to that acute state? Anyway, if you have been, thank you for joining us. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday. And a big shout out to our production team, John Romero, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passa, Heather Pissaro, and Neil Rosenhouse. So the good news is we have so many BBC. tier members now there are too many names to read out and we really appreciate your support