The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Why America Can’t Solve Homelessness — with Anand Giridharadas

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Anand Giridharadas, journalist and author of Man in the Mirror, joins Scott Galloway to discuss what Jordan Neely’s death reveals about homelessness, public safety, and America’s crisis of belonging. He explains why cities struggle to help their most vulnerable residents, the difficult questions around involuntary mental health treatment, and how community can help people rebuild their lives. Plus, what the reactions to Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione reveal about Americans’ growing sense of abandonment—and the line between protecting others and taking justice into your own hands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This guy is literally my Marvel genius. My favorite quote, whose balls that I have to fondle to get my own Marvel movie? I don't know, but his name rhymes with pulverine. Maximum effort. Welcome to the 416th episode of the Propgey Pod. It's like 615. Pacific daylight time.

I don't actually daylight. I mean, it just happened here. Still in L.A. O Dark 100. Had to take a sleeping pill to get to bed at like, I don't know, one such that I could get five hours sleep.

So if I seem out of it, trust your instincts. What's happening? The Profji Pod is a Signal Awards finalist. Please help us win. This is actually a big deal for us. We're a small team. Go to Signal Awards.

I don't know. We'll put a link in the body. but please do go and vote for us. In today's episode, we speak with Anon Girda Das, a journalist, best-selling author, and publisher of the newsletter at The Inc. I'm especially proud that I can pronounce Anon's name. I first interviewed Anon on stage.

I used to run a company called L2, and we used to do these events. It was coming right out of the recession, and I thought people want to... I tapped into this whole IRL thing. I think of me is kind of the Taylor Swift of academia. I used to throw these big events and bring all these professors in. With Anon, we discuss, his new book,

Man in the Mirror in America's Crisis of Belonging, what Jordan Ely's death reveals about homelessness and mental illness and the line between public safety and vigilantism. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Anon, Gere De Das. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad you're on Substack.

Yeah, what a thrill. You're kind of an original gangster here. And just to wax poetic a bit, Anand and I are fellow alumni of the hit. Alumni is an interesting word. Alumni, yeah, as in it's over. We both had shows on CNN Plus. So before we get into your book, wasn't it Vice? Oh, we're both on Vice?

I've had so many failed TV shows. You're right, it was Vice. Oh, it was Vice. I don't know that alumni is the right word for trauma bonding. Okay, but your show, to be honest, your show was boring but fine. My show was awful. Awful. I looked like an old man having an epileptic seizure.

I don't know about you, but I had to film it from my garage. It was COVID. Yep. And they put all these MTV, like graphics on it to make it feel younger. I watched it with my partner. This is a true story. And then I want to hear your experience. I watched the first episode with my partner at the end of the show.

She started crying and looked at me and said, what does this mean for our family? Wow. And I'm like, oh, my God. I've made my partner. It was my show was so bad. Your show. It was also not great. I had AOC as my first guest, so that gave it a lift.

I had you as a guest, which gave it a lift. Here's what happened with my show. probably the same with yours. It was kind of developed and set up, like winter of 2019, turn of 2020, all set contracts, ready to go. Let's start filming in February, March, whatever, and COVID strikes.

And I've never had a TV show before. Spoiler alert, I've never had one since. And COVID hits. And I was like, well, I guess we're not doing a TV show. They're like, no, no, no, we can just make it in this new reality, whatever it may be. And so my daughter had a very severe lung condition. She was like two years old.

So I had to go to this remote location because of her. And so then I didn't have proper internet, which was kind of important for making a TV show. So I was filming things on iPads and cameras, you know. And then I had to hire someone to pick up USB drives with the filmed video. Like it was like drug deals of data. And then they would come to my house. and pick up the USB drive from the driveway because we didn't want to have contact with each other

and then drive it up to their house and upload it on some faster Wi-Fi that they had. It was so surreal. So much energy to make something that wasn't good. Oh, God, yeah. I was literally a TV show, me and my garage alone, and they had a producer in my ear saying, oh, do this or next episode this.

My tech producer drew in the cloud because, you know, we couldn't have, we had social distance. So it was me trying to make 30 minutes of TV in my garage with, like, lights in a camera, and it was so bad. And the guy, forget his name, the production executive, nice guy, called me after the six episodes. I'm like, I just got to get through this. Called me after the six episodes. I'm like, I got great news.

They want to renew it. And I'm like, no fucking way. I am so out of here. And I remember him, my age. called me, the production called me, he called me back three times, the guy running vice at the time, reached out to me who I like, Shane Smith, and they were just so flummoxed that anyone would pass up an opportunity to be on TV. And the lesson for me was, people must cling to TV, like a dictator clings to power. That they were just, they could not believe I was going to pass up the opportunity

to be on TV. Did you do, have, So you haven't done any TV since then? No, not my own thing. I go talk about things I've written on MS now. You're on MSN. Yeah, I see that all the time. But I've been, particularly Morning Joe is sort of my home court there. But I have always tried to maintain the discipline of going there to talk about things I have written and not not going there to talk about, you know, like things that might be in my head.

So I don't go on to cable news very much, but I have found a few things move the needle. And the three things for me that move the needle are Bill Maher, the View, and Morning Joe. Like, that's a good home for you. I find a lot of people. I'll hear from people I haven't heard from in 30 years. You're like, oh, I saw you on Morning Joe. That gets an enormous audience. Yeah.

If you ever want to speak to 50 senators doing squats at the same time, in their home gyms or the capital gym like Morning Joe is the way to have that kind of that kind of access. Well, good. Well, your new book, Man in the Mirror, is both an investigative story about Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, or the Jordan Ely and Daniel Penny case, but also a true life opera of New York City and American Age of Fracture and a story of the search for belonging. Why did you choose? Can you do us a favor? Give us the headline news on what went down here

and talk about why you chose it to be the subject to your book? Well, you can see when you read that word belonging, why I wanted to come talk to you about it. You know, this is a story that like so many stories, America chewed up, hastily metabolized, spat out, and kind of forgot. So if you're watching this, you may be one of those people who has a foggy memory of the case that I'm talking about. May, 23, New York City, subway, Uptown F train, middle of the day.

A black, mentally ill, homeless man named Jordan Neely, former Michael Jackson impersonator, gets on the subway, starts kind of begging for food, saying he's ready to go back to prison, ready to die. A lot of people feel threatened in the train. Some say it's kind of worse than what you normally experience on the train. and a former Marine named Daniel Penny, white former Marine named Daniel Penny, comes up behind Jordan Neely,

puts him in a chokehold, drops him to the ground over his own body, and holds him. Within seconds, the train gets to the next station. Almost everybody gets out of the train, obviously, and Daniel Penny continues the chokehold for another five or so minutes, ultimately killing Jordan Neely.

And from the moment news kind of wafted up, from that Broadway Lafayette subway station, it became instantly an American Roershack test, right? People were certain they knew what they were seeing before much information was available. Daniel Penny was either a white supremacist, vigilante Batman, or he was an American hero standing up to entropy and decay

in anarchy in the cities. Jordan Neely was either a menace to society who someone finally had the current, to snuff out, or he was a victim of systemic racism and the failure to care for the least among us. And I became interested in what was erased by that hasty metabolizing and spitting out that we do with so many of these stories. It's one of these stories where everybody knew it for five seconds, and then nobody was invested in it five minutes later. And I decided to spend three years digging in because, not just because it was an interesting or complicated to that moment

itself, but because I think America itself was contained in that subway car, so many of our failing systems, so many of the political emotions of this authoritarian age, the sense of abandonment, a lot of the things you talk about, the sense of people don't feel held, the sense that people feel abandoned, the sense that people feel that systems don't see them and are condescending towards them, don't hear them, not coming for them. And so I was convinced that what happened in that subway car was a kind of distillation of what was happening all across this country. And I wanted to study it.

And I wanted to then follow not just the story of those two lives, but the ways in which our cities and people who work in them, who work for the mayors, who work for outreach organizations that help homeless people, homeless folks themselves, how we are dealing with this crisis that everybody watching this will have seen who lives in a city of some of our most desperate citizens in public space suffering. And we and our cities often not knowing what quite to do. Well, let's start with some of the atmospherics because I was just in San Francisco and I'm not there often, and I ended up at a hotel that was in a not a great part of town. And I was just struck by the number of homeless that are still in San Francisco.

And I did, I actually spoke to the mayor and looked at some data and things are actually distinctly better. And yet they're still really bad. As you did research around this, specifically Jordan Neely, what are your observations or takeaways? I actually think the homeless problem in New York, given the crush of humanity, is surprisingly, I don't want to call it good, but surprisingly not bad. I'm granted, I'm in a bubble. I spend most of my time in Soho when I'm here. But if I go to Seattle or L.A. or San Francisco, I come to New York, I think, this feels like Disneyland. Yeah, you're right. So a few things. First of all, you're right about some of those West Coast cities.

in New York. New York has, and I think a lot of people don't know this, New York has a legal kind of state constitutional right to shelter that was argued for by a young lawyer in the 70s who was walking down the Bowery and thought it was terrible the way people were being allowed to live, and his kind of compassion as his young lawyer pro bono was to fight and win a New York state constitutional right to shelter. So there's a right to shelter in New York. In New York is about 100,000 people in New York City who are homeless. 95% of them are in the system in some way. They're in shelters.

They're in supportive housing. They're in various forms of things. Those are not the folks you are necessarily seeing and clocking as homeless when you walk by them on the street. It's about 5,000 people who are on the street. And those 5,000 in New York have generally said no to shelter. And one of the things I found in the book is they've generally said no to shelter today. Like they may have said it. They may have said no three times today.

So in New York, the problem is not lack of resources, lack of beds. It is actually a problem of people who do not want to go into that system, often out of a profound and intimate knowledge of what that system is like. I'll get back to that in a second. The West Coast thing is different, right? In some of these West Coast cities, 70%, and contrast with 5% being on the street in New York, it's like 70% on the street. So it is a qualitatively different thing that you are seeing.

Now, think about San Francisco for a second. This is the Rome of our time, right? If they're in every era is one city that makes the most decisions about how everybody on Earth lives, it's actually not New York or London, I would argue, today. It is Silicon Valley, right? They're deciding what your kids' consciousness is. They're deciding what your teenage daughter's body image issues are. It's 100,000 people.

Right. This is Rome of our time, right? It's not the best. place, it may not be the richest place, but it is the place that is deciding what Cambodian lives in the countryside are, how they are lived, what their commerce looks like, what their political movements can do or not do, right? For that, for the roam of our time to look and feel the way it does, because I feel the same thing and see the same thing when I go there is appalling. But I think what a lot of people don't realize is a lot of people come to this with like, well,

the government's not doing anything. Or there's a kind of leftist view that like, we're not spending any money. We hate these people. We're not spending any money. Or there's a kind of right-wing view of the government's incompetent and just, you know, doesn't want to actually clean things up. It's actually a lot more complicated, Scott, as you might imagine.

And I think that one of the complications is that we are better at building this apparatus to maintain homelessness than to end it. Right? We are better at maintaining building these kind of these apparatus. is that people, it's called a revolving door. People cycle into an ER are held for a couple days, which is not enough to necessarily

deal with schizophrenia, but kicked out in two days and sent home to no home. Or they go to a shelter, and then they're beat up in the shelter. Their stuff is stolen in a shelter, or they're sexually assaulted in a shelter. They don't stick around there.

They go to the street. Then the NYPD or the cops in L.A. We'll sweep them from the street and say, you can't be on the street encampments. Then they may go, to a temporary facility here. We don't give people the kind of supports they need to get their lives back. And a lot of this, obviously, is mental illness.

And with the mental illness component, maybe the most important thing I learned to this book, is we have a profound moral confusion in this country about folks who you are seeing out there who say no to the help that might be offered. and I wanted to focus on New York because in New York, the folks you see on the street are, that's kind of the situation for most of them, right? Whereas in L.A., there may not be enough beds. Here in New York, you're dealing often,

certainly not always, but often with people who have some form of mental illness that one of the conditions of which may be that you don't know you're mentally ill or realize how well you are. So if you are in that subway, and you're not dangerous to anybody. You're not threatening anybody.

You're just sitting on the side of a platform, but you're kind of rotting away. It bothers us. It upsets us. But do we have the authority as a society to take that person against their will and force them on to invega medicine? What authority do we have?

And I think what I found is that people of good faith who work on this, actually work on this issue, are deeply confused about it. It is hard. We talk about bodily autonomy in this country, right? We want women to have bodily autonomy. Well, does that mentally ill person have bodily autonomy? Is the right thing for their dignity to actually force them to their happiness?

These are very, very difficult questions. And I spent, you know, three years with people living them, right? This is a book of reporting, not opinion. A lot of us have opinions about this stuff we're seeing in our cities. I wanted to go beneath that and live in the lives and in the heads of these folks dealing with this from every vantage point. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn ads. There's no worse feeling than making a major investment in something, only to realize it didn't exactly live up to the hype, such as buying a nice piece of tech that ends up in storage collecting dust,

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I'm very sympathetic to, I know a lot of people say in San Francisco and New York, I'm paying 13% incremental taxes. Figure it out. I mean, they're just, sort of, I don't have time to do the research, but other cities, you know, there are just a lot of cities in America where there aren't very many homeless. And I think the attitude is how come the cities, or many of the cities are the most resources, seem to be the least good at this. And it kind of comes down to this tension, right? And that is, if, what I would argue, some of the cities who have, quote, unquote, dealt with the problem. And we may not have, not like the way they've dealt with it. They've said, we will provide a certain level of resources

so these folks at least have a bet. My understanding is Bloomberg approach it this way. But it is illegal to be homeless. They've basically said it's illegal to be homeless. And that's a violation of rights. Is it illegal? And in my view, I am very sympathetic to the notion that if you can say whatever you want, shouldn't you be able to live wherever you want? And by the way, this came up in a Supreme Court case while I was working on the book. The Grants Pass case came up and it tested, is there a right to be homeless, specifically a right to sleep outdoors? And what, it was a very interesting debate. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, basically in America, you are allowed to sleep outside as long as you have a home somewhere. In other words,

if Professor G. If I go camping. But even in a city, right? If you were laying in Central Park stargazing and you happened to fall asleep, your odds of being arrested for that are quite low. So she made the point that I found quite striking during the argument that you basically have to have a second home to not be arrested for making a home outdoors. And I think the other argument the other side is that this is public space. And I spent time also with sanitation workers. and outreach workers who say,

look, these are public sidewalks. This is, people are going to the bathroom on the sidewalk. It is not sanitary. We have a century of public health, you know. And so I have, you know, my brain comes up with quick and hasty judgments as easily as anybody else. But I really tried with this book

to live in the minds of a homeless person trying to sleep outdoors. My character, Choco, who I spent time with, go in depth Choco being swept by the NYPD and I try to get in the mind frame of what is it like to have all your possessions in this little space

and have 20 people from the NYPD and sanitation coming at you trying to take away and Choco, an elderly man, had grown up on the very block 60 years earlier that he was now sitting on the street. He had grown up in an apartment,

on the very block. So I tried to get in his head. But then I also spend time with these outreach workers who are endlessly frustrated with people who refuse to go to shelter and who refuse any kind of help. And I spent time with folks, two different characters of mine in the mayor's office

under Eric Adams, one of whom thinks you should just forcibly hospitalize lots of these people and you are doing more for their humanity and dignity by forcing them into care than you are by letting them rot. And then another guy in the mayor's office who said, no, this is all downstream of actually a healthy society and food deserts and better schools. And so this is a book in which I am trying to kind of inhabit the fighting faiths of this country that you see on this issue and that you see even more broadly around these questions of order, disorder, fear, safety, danger that I think at the heart of this kind of era in American life.

I want to prefer to a thesis and have you respond to it because I did hear from Dan Merrilluri, and so I did a fraction of the deep dive you've done, but I did do at least some cursory research on the homeless problem, and then we'll go specifically to this case. And like a lot of people, I had stereotypes or presumptions that were just totally incorrect. I assume that a big percentage of the homeless were veterans, and it's actually only 4%. the housing and urban development, HUD and Veterans Affairs,

have actually been quite successful at finding housing for veterans. The largest cohort of the homeless are people who live alone, have no siblings, no connections. And it started me thinking I'm into this whole notion of, the answer is each other. and that if you don't from a very early age, figure out the third places, the economics, the zeitgeist, to ensure people have some deep and meaningful relationships,

you know, what determines outcomes good and bad of a hospital stay? Is it the hospitals or the doctor? No, it's that you have an advocate, that you have someone who is irrationally passionate about your well-being saying, where are the meds, where is the nurse? And it just struck me that the people, the homeless population, the top of the funnel for the homeless, is a kid who graduates from high school, works remotely, doesn't have family. And if he drops, if he or she drops off the face of the earth, nobody knows.

I would just love to get your thoughts on this. I think it is completely correct. And I think this is actually one of the people I follow in the book. I call them characters, but this is obviously a nonfiction book. These are real people who I followed for a couple years. One of my four main characters is named Ashwin Vassen. He was the health commissioner of New York City under the previous mayor, meaning chief doctor of New York City.

He was the first mental health expert to get that job. So if you think of public health, you think polio, measles, COVID, shots, sanitation drives, these kinds of things, right? his appointment was an important signal that mental health might be considered sort of public health in a more meaningful way in the past, right? Because we don't normally think about it like that.

We think about it like, like COVID is everyone's problem, right? A measles outbreak is everybody's problem, but if your, but if your teenager is depressed about climate change, like, that's kind of your family's problem, right? Um, we still privatize mental health in many ways. And to your point of people, isolated.

And so he said, what if we, what if mental health was part of public health? What if we treated the people you were just describing as having something as collective in nature as a measles outbreak? What would it look like? And what he, he had come from an amazing organization that if you don't know, you would love it. It's called Fountain House. It is a mental health clubhouse. It is an actual giant townhouse on the west side of Manhattan. It started a long time ago.

It was founded by former patients in a state psychiatric facility in New York who found community with each other inside while they were still inside and had a kind of group where they would get together and found a lot of solace in that. And then when they came out, they were discharged. They were missing it. They fell into exactly the kind of isolation you described. And so they recreated it and they created this group and eventually grew into this thing called Fountain House.

Fountain House is not a place to stay overnight. it is a daytime clubhouse for mentally ill folks. You become a member. You apply, you become a member. And then you can kind of hang out there during the day. They have a wellness center. They have a kitchen where people can cook and make food. People, you know, are customers there and they also do the jobs there.

They have a cafe. They have a place where you can get clothes if you have a job interview. Right? There's people at varying levels of severity. They have a newspaper, the Fountain House Times. And the whole theory of Fountain House, and that also animated Ashwin Vassen's turn as commissioner of public health in New York City was exactly what you said.

We think of some of these conditions as being biomedical and just beyond the reach of anything besides drugs. But actually, for some people, it is the failure to be needed. And that, again, not to minimize, like, there are some people who have, you know, severe schizophrenia where, like, being on a newspaper is not going to help you, right? But his point and Fountainhouse's point is there's a lot of people in between full-blown schizophrenia, debilitating schizophrenia, and your teenager being a little depressed, right?

And for a lot of those folks in between those degrees, being needed, being part of things, having someone wonder, why isn't Scott at the Fountain House Times meeting this morning? Where is he? That is such a crucial component of mental health. By the way, that I think all of our ancestors would have intuitively understood

that we don't understand in modernity. American life for all the reasons you so often talk about. And so Fountain House has proved this model of creating this space or people are needed and they have a place to go. And one of the things Commissioner Vassan did when he was in office was get New York City to kind of adopt this model and build this model at the level of the city. He got $30 million of funding. There's now, you know, some clubhouses starting to grow all over the city. And there was this fascinating moment in the book where the head of the CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, came to visit Fountain House. And you will understand this. Your own crossroads, I think, as a belonging

guy and a business guy, there was this fascinating clash that happened where the CDC woman was just like data and stats and like, show me what can be measured. Show me, you know, show me things that have a regression attached to them. And I just watched, she's looking around, she's asking people questions, and she was looking around to this, she treated it, it was like this hokey, kind of little larky thing.

And she couldn't process it from a kind of serious dollars and cents could Medicaid fund this kind of thing. And I think that is often the problem here, that the remedies of the kind you're talking about, How do we actually give people belonging, not as a happenstance, but in a systematized way? Fountainhouse is doing it. Clubhouses are doing it.

There is a model. It's not cheap, but it's happening. It runs into a technocratic culture that's like, I don't know. I can measure, like, infection rates and divide the lost work days by the cost of the shot. I can't do that with belonging, so I'm not going to fund it. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Athena. Client calls in the morning, school pick up in the afternoon,

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for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. You compared the Penny Neely case to the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, arguing that both men were seen as self-appointed Avengers acting in the absence of dependable authority. Say more? I, as a matter of my kind of practice of writing, I try to listen for the rhymes, I call them, the rhymes between what very different people are saying.

Because we don't do that, right? Like, you're on the left, you're on the right, you have this view, you have that view. Everything gets so siloed. But there's sometimes rhymes. right. For example, there is a rhyme, and every time I say this, people get mad at me, there is a rhyme that I pick up right now between kind of anti-gentrification feelings in places like New York and anti-immigration feelings in places like Arizona.

To totally different people, it's like elderly whites, and it's like, you know, maybe 35-year-old, often people of color in historically black neighborhoods in Brooklyn. They have nothing in common. But what the feeling they are describing of feeling their world of certainties and their place uprooted by people who feel unfamiliar to them, same. No one likes that kind of rhyme finding. I do it anyway. So here was another one. When this case, the Penny Neely case was going on,

and I was following it for these three years, I kept hearing this kind of narrative, and mostly from the right and from Daniel Penny's defenders, that he was filling the void. That the left left a void of order, it's bail reform, it's the emasculation of the police, it's men not being able to be, men anymore and provide strength and care in public space.

And into that void, both unwell, Jordan Neely stepped, and then into that void of order, Daniel Penny stepped in and protected people. That was the right-wing story. And then during the jury deliberations for the Penny case, Brian Thompson, United Healthcare CEO was killed in Midtown Manhattan. and I was struck because I was sitting in court, a lot of the reporters I was sitting with, the literal same reporters who I'd covered the penny trial with for weeks now

and gotten to know the New York Post and the TV channels and all the local New York press. A lot of them realized immediately that that was their next case, right? They were going to go from finishing this one to that was the next case in the same building, by the way. I saw some of the same security guards, court guards, in that second case. So they were connected in that way.

And as I started to listen to when Luigi was arrested, Luigi Mangione was arrested, and this kind of fandom started to develop around him on the left, parts of the left, it struck me that I was hearing one of those rhymes that I listened for. It was not the same people, it was not the same arguments, their understanding of what's going wrong in America. It's all different. But they, as you said, were framing Luigi as someone

who filled a void of order left by the other side, and making a case that if you don't hold people, if you leave people unheld, enough people unheld enough of the time, sometimes someone will decide, I'm going to fill the void, and you may not like how they do it. Now, before people start adding me,

I'm not saying Luigi and Daniel Penny are the same. I'm not saying the cases are the same. We need to actually be able to make connections without getting into the facile thing of your comparing, you're saying it's the same. The reason they are connected is they together reflect what I think has become a very widespread feeling in this country of we are abandoned. The cavalry isn't coming. The system isn't coming to save us. No one hears us. And sometimes people have to step up and do whatever they got to do.

that feeling then fractures into a left version, a right version, or this version, or that version, and we kind of lose the thread. But it's interesting information that actually so many Americans feel that feeling. And it is one of the tragedies of this time we've lived in that that common feeling keeps getting broken into pieces and failing to produce a common politics.

So you bring up a lot of issues to talk about what is the friction and the struggle and the dilemma here. However, it feels as if, based on the outcome of the case, that at least the jurors felt like they had moral clarity, that it wasn't a difficult decision for them. They acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide in about 24 hours. And I guess my understanding is every juror rode the subway, at least semi-regularly, and several had described their own frightening experiences on the train.

It strikes me this raises a host of issues, but this was, at least this jury was saying, was siding on the issue of, I don't know, on Pennyside that this, he was justified that, you know, like you said, he stepped into the void. If I wonder, my guess is, and I don't know this, my guess is that the jury is going to find the same moral clarity around Brian Thompson or Luigi. And I, you know, I think he's, I think he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison. But again, who knows, it hasn't happened yet. Didn't basically the court or the jurors, it's, they didn't have a difficult time with this decision, as far as I can tell. It was a little bit of a confusing verdict. So we were in there in court. I cover the trial virtually every day.

And during deliberations, it was, I think, more than 24 hours. There were a few days of deliberation, several days of deliberation. And what happened at the end was very unusual, not unlike some of the stuff that happened with the recent Clancy trial, where there were two charges. There was a more severe charge of manslaughter in the second degree, which could have carried 15 years or something like that. and then there was a kind of lighter charge. And the theory was the heavier charge was like,

he knew better and did it anyway. The lighter charge was like he should have known better, kind of more negligent. The jury deadlocked on the first count, the more severe count, and really struggled to get anywhere. And they eventually had to do this complex maneuver where the government actually withdraw as the top charge because they were hung on the top charge.

And then when they withdrew the top more severe charge, they quickly came to a consensus on not guilty on the lesser charge. So it's a little puzzling that you'd be divided on whether to punish someone severely and then unanimous on not punishing them more lightly. There was a lot of question about do they just lose steam?

were they just didn't want to be there anymore? Lots of different questions. But I think what the trial, what it represented was very different for lots of people, right? And one of the things I chart in Man in the Mirror is this notion of the mirror that you can look at the same thing. And it's sort of you and it's not you at the same time. And, you know, for some people who celebrated the acquittal, this was a vindication of the notion that we have a right to protect each other and take care of each other in public space. was their interpretation. You know, I spent a lot of time writing in the book about Daphne Uran, the lead prosecutor

in Alvin Bragg's DA's office, who said, look, this case was not about whether Daniel Penny was going to commit more crimes. He wasn't. This was a case about guarding the line between civilization and barbarism. Once you authorize people to decide to kind of adjudicate. someone else's life in public, you've lost the thread. And her argument, which is a very interesting argument and I think challenging one, maybe one of the reasons the case was difficult to win for her, was that Daniel Penny

didn't just restrain Jordan Neely and it went down badly. In her telling, the only way to explain why he held on so long, after everybody was gone from the car after, you know, the apparent danger of being in that contained space had passed, five more minutes when in the Marine Corps training you're not allowed to do a chokehold for more than five seconds or so. Her theory was the reason he did that, was that he didn't fully register the person he was holding. He didn't register them as a full-fledged human being, that he dehumanized that person. And she drew in particular on two videos, a video of, from right after the incident itself,

where you see, and it is quite striking this video, Daniel Penny's standing in the subway car, he goes to kind of get his hat after the incident, he's standing there, kind of chewing gum, very nonchalant. And there's like a dozen NYPD cycling in and out,

several of them around Jordan Neely's prone body. And you will notice, Scott, in that video, for all our debates about police, what people think about police, in this era, divisions about police. Every cop in that video is acting like the loss of that life

would be a tragedy for human kind. Those cops are panicked and frantic and frenzied about that one life, even though they've probably done that five times that day. And Daniel Penny's attitude to that person is different. You can see it.

He doesn't share the NYPD's concern, right? I've heard you talk a lot about raising your boys with a sense of care, protection, right? You've just held someone, they're on the ground, they may be dead, they may be dying. There's different ways one might, there's different attitudes one might have to that body. I describe it in the book as he sort of came across the way you might come across if someone is lying on the ground after like burglarizing your house and coming through your window, as opposed to if your friend, you know, had an accident. And then there's an interrogation.

video a couple hours later where Daniel Penny's talking these two NYPD guys, they're broling out, they're having this I described it as like a almost like a kind of masculinity podcast vibe. They're talking about comparing notes about the Marines and their tattoos and this and that. And then Daniel Penny starts to talk

about Jordan Neely and he refers to him as a crackhead several times. And he refers to him squirming and this kind of animalizing language. And you can see, this is not me interjecting, you can see he loses these NYPD guys. that he starts to talk about this other kind of,

this other person in a kind of dehumanizing language, as Daphneurand would argue, that just loses the cops. It becomes kind of clear in this video. He keeps saying, am I right? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Soliciting kind of bids for agreement.

And it becomes clear in this video that they do not know what he means, that they do not think he's right, that they are not picking up what he's putting down. And it's very, very striking because we think about cops, maybe in a different way, but cops actually have an intimate connection with this population that Daniel Penny didn't.

And so this case really became about those two visions in the end. Was this a case of like this guy cared for New York by standing up and stepping into the void? Or did this guy do the thing that is most dangerous in this political era we are living in, which is look at someone, fail to see them, and not render them as fully human. We're going to have to leave it there. Anand, Girda Das is a journalist bestselling author and publisher of the newsletter The Inc. Anand, it's great to see you and really enjoyed this conversation. And congratulations on your success on Substack.

As I said, you're sort of an original gangster here. Well, very happy to chat with you. I love so many of the things you are putting out into the world and sharing with folks, particularly on this theme of belonging. So I thought it would be the right place to have this conversation. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez, Laura Jeneer, and Asher Schwartz. Our video editor is Bianca Rosario Ramirez.

Cammy Rieke is our social producer. Drew Burroughs is our technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thanks for listening to the Profi Pod from Profji Media. Whatever shows up around your homeless holiday season? With Ring, you're protected. Battery Doorbell 2K Plus features retinal 2K clarity and up to six times enhanced zoom, so you can get a closer look without losing detail.

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