We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - One NYC Subway Killing: An American Rorschach Test with Anand Giridharadas

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Six minutes on a New York City subway became a Rorschach test for America. Amanda invites Anand Giridharadas back to look beyond the certainty surrounding the Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny case—and toward an uncomfortable truth: We may not be as divided as we think. Across the political spectrum, Americans are crying out with the same fear: No one is coming. We’re on our own. Amanda and Anand dig into how that shared sense of abandonment can push us toward vigilantism, what we lose when we reduce complicated human beings to heroes and villains, and why reclaiming curiosity, complexity, and each other’s humanity might be essential to democracy. About Anand: You know Anand Giridharadas from our WHY ARE BILLIONAIRES?!? episode. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Persuaders, the international bestseller Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, and publisher of the newsletter The Ink. Today we dive into Anand’s spellbinding book, out today – MAN IN THE MIRROR – reporting on Jordan Neely's life and death, Daniel Penny's life and trial, and the way six minutes on the NYC subway holds a mirror to the city and the nation. Don't miss Anand's Man in the Mirror docuseries, too.   Follow We Can Do Hard Things on:  Instagram — ⁠https://www.instagram.com/wecandohardthings⁠

Hello, Pod Squad. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. This is Amanda. And today, right now, it is Monday, May 1st, 2003 in Manhattan, New York, on the Uptown-Queen's-bound F-Train, departing 2nd Avenue. On this subway car number 9774, there are a couple of 17-year-old high school students, a mom with a stroller and her five-year-old, several other folks, and Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old U.S. Marine veteran from the suburbs on his way to the gym. At 2.23 p.m., 30-year-old Jordan Neely enters the subway car. He appears agitated and almost immediately begins yelling a version of, I don't have food, I don't have drink, I'm effed up, I don't mind going to jail and getting life in prison, I'm ready to die. He throws his jacket on the floor.

He does not have a weapon, but makes half-lunge movements towards the passengers. He does not actually touch anyone, but gets really close, about six inches away with his half-lunges. One person there has experienced many things on the subway, but nothing as frightening as this. Others are genuinely terrified. One of the teenagers buries her face and the other's torso out of fear. Some others on the train do not feel they are in immediate danger. All of this happens within 30 seconds. Daniel Penny, the ex-marine, asks another passenger to hold the AirPods he's been wearing, approaches Neely from behind, grabs him around the neck, and takes him to the floor in a chokehold.

Two other men also restrained Neely, mostly by grabbing. his arms or legs. Less than 30 seconds after Penny puts Neely in the hold, the train doors open. We are now at the Broadway Lafayette station, no longer trapped on a moving subway car. Almost all the passengers run out of the car. But Penny does not leave, and he does not release Neely. He continues to restrain him on the floor. Penny has had Neely in the hold for about two minutes total, 90 seconds of this after the train doors open when a bystander journalist Juan Alberto Vasquez starts filming on his phone. In the near empty subway car, Neely is moving, kicking, attempting to free himself. At one point, Neely taps an onlooker's leg and gestures.

At another point, Neely manages to get an arm free. One witness says, he's dying. You need to let him go. Others call for the police. Another witness warns Penny if he doesn't let him go, he's going to catch a murder charge. As time passes, Neely's movements diminish. Three minutes and 10 seconds in DeVasquez's video, Neely ceases making purposeful movements, just involuntary twitches.

Penny continues holding Neely around the neck for 51 seconds after Neely's last purposeful movement. After releasing Neely, Penny and the others place a little bit. him on his side. Police and emergency personnel arrive. Neely is unconscious and unresponsive. Resuscitation is attempted. Neely is transported to a hospital. He is pronounced dead. Six minutes on a New York City train. Six minutes of real life, of real people, of fear and crisis and confusion, of life and death. Six minutes, which were instantly fomented, stripped of humanity, and manipulated into one-dimensional comic strip characters of morality and certainty for political advantage. Before the medical examiner determines that

Neely's cause of death is homicide caused by compression of the neck, before any charges are brought, before the jury hears a speck of evidence in the manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide cases against Penny. Those six minutes are immediately seized and compressed and polarized and projected into symbols of truth about America. In one version of this truth, Daniel Penny is a courageous protector. Jordan Neely is a dangerous criminal allowed to terrorize people. Who would have done worse had Penny not been so brave. Neely is a symbol of urban decay. What happens when leftist politics defang the police so that everyday Americans have to live in fear while criminals are protected. Penny wasn't merely justified using force. He was a hero, rescuing law-abiding citizens who'd been

abandoned by cities who don't care about them. Americans are endangered because liberal governments refuse to control dangerous people. When a citizen finally does something, the emasculated criminal justice system prosecutes the citizen instead of the criminal. Penny is a brave Marine, who did what the government couldn't or wouldn't do, and then was persecuted by that same government for answering the call. You want Penny on that wall. You need him on that wall. And even though some of y'all won't admit to it at cocktail parties, you know it's true. Because otherwise, how would it be that Penny's legal defense fundraiser collected nearly $3.4 million from everyday Americans. In another version of the truth, Jordan Neely was a vulnerable, homeless man, a black man

in an acute mental health crisis who was a chronic victim of institutional abandonment by a city well aware of the crisis he was in. Outreach workers had encountered him hundreds of times. police responded to more than 40 calls reporting him sick, injured, or mentally ill. New York City had him on its top 50 list. The 50 homeless people in the city believed to be most urgently in need of help and treatment. Yet they did so little for him that his last words were a plea of hunger and thirst. Neely was a Michael Jackson impersonator, an entertainer who made a living delighting people with his talent and charm, who posed no actual risk to safety. In fact, the only risk to safety were vigilantes like Daniel Penny, who were unable to see human beings, but only what Penny called,

quote, just a crackhead. The rally to make Penny a hero was the embodiment of a society that treats frightened white people's perception of black dangerousness as a justification for violence. A society that coddles racialized fear so protectively, it will celebrate murder as self-defense based on feelings of fear, even when there is zero actual physical threat. A society in which fear of black men is presumed legitimate, so killing them is presumed justified, even when they are merely yelling about being hungry and thirsty. Six minutes of real people became a Roar Shack test for America. when you look at this subway car, what do you see? And beyond the manipulated comic strip versions,

but with every bit of messy gray humanity, when you look at this story, when you really let it seep into you, what do you see in you? Six minutes and the response to it tells the story of so much of America, an America that seems to be in incredible pain and incredibly divided, with tragedy, like this one manipulated to make that divide seem all the more intractable. But perhaps it's not that we are diametrically opposed. Perhaps we are closer than we think. Maybe in some ways we are opposites, but in another way, we are actually mirror images of each other. And seeing what the other side sees is important, because as my guest, Anand Gerda Das says,

you can't keep a democracy if you can't understand the other people you share a democracy with. You don't have to agree with them or even like them, but you need to understand them. And Anand believes that we can understand because both sides have the same core experience, a sense of abandonment, that no one is listening, that no help is coming, that we are undefended, that the system is rigged and corrupted and definitely does not serve us. This is where we mirror each other. But as Anand says, we keep failing to hear the rhymes in our different cries of pain because our experiences of desertion are manipulated into competition rather than common cause. So today,

we are coming to an everything story, six minutes that are about everything, taking a look at ourselves and getting honest about what looks back. For today's show, I am delighted to welcome back. Anand Gerda Das. You will know him from our Y.R. Billionaires episode. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Persuaders, The International Bestsellers Winners Take All, the True American, and India calling. A foreign correspondent and columnist for the New York Times for more than a decade, he is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, a publisher of the newsletter The Inc. And today we are discussing his vivid, compelling, spellbinding new book, Man in the Mirror, out today about Jordan Neely's life and death, about Daniel Penny, the trial, the city of New York,

and our nation. Okay. On end, I would like to start this conversation with, because the process feels like the book and the book feels like the process. So can you tell me about your friend Sam and your conversation that led to today talking about this book? Everybody I hope has a friend who at some moment in your life has told you the truth, a kind of truth that's not just like a little truth, but it's a kind of truth that is a big enough and maybe unpleasant enough truth that they are. actually putting the friendship and their own standing with you at risk because of what they want for you. And they're willing to maybe jeopardize they're not being there to walk with you as you go

in that direction that they feel you need to go in. So if you've been there or you want to have that kind of friend, this story is for you. So my friend Sam and I started out 20 plus years ago in India as foreign correspondence. We were at different newspapers in India, kind of doing the same job, different cities. And we just met through professional circles and kind of followed each other's articles about India that were appearing in American papers. And became, you know, over time, best friends and our children are friends, our families are friends and all of that. And it's a deep, close friendship with many vectors of connection. And we sort of do similar work. Sam's now an editor at the New York Times and I write books.

And in recent years, Sam began to be worried about me. And what he was worried about was, and I'm paraphrasing years of conversations, but he would say to me some version of, when I first heard about you, even before we were friends, when I first read your articles in India, he said, I would see someone whose skill was being able to understand other people's humanity and anyone else's humanity. They didn't have to be like you,

them to be similar to you. It could be a cauliflower farmer in the fields. It could be an activist. It could be a corrupt politician. But you took us inside these people. And that was sort of your superpower. And he would say, you know, I remember reading these stories and thinking like,

how does he get access to those people, get in their heads? And basically what happened to me to have a long life summary in a sentence is I did that kind of work. I wrote, I would say two books, my first two books, that were sort of in that tradition,

one about India, one about a true crime, case in Texas in an act of forgiveness. In a period that sort of correlates with the Trump era, and I think a lot of people can also realize that all of our brains have changed in an era that has made kind of advocacy and self-righteousness and clarity important, I think I drifted in the way that a lot of people did towards, you know, less of a kind of trying to understand everybody and more of a trying to advance a particular point of view, which is fine. That's a, you know, there's a such thing as opinion.

journalism. But I think what Sam was calling out was not a professional lane switch. It was a kind of habit of mind that he saw creeping into me, which is being quicker to judge, sort of this thing of, you know, that I think so many of us now do that online cultures, like when you, when you encounter something, do you say, you know, is your only question like, do I agree with this or not? As opposed to, what does this teach me? How does this alter what I already thought? And I think he felt that he was losing the friend of his that was interested in understanding everybody and that had kind of settled for a question that so many Americans have settled for, which is, yeah or nay, right or wrong. Are these my people? Are they not my people?

And this is a very basic brain. And it had come for me also. And when you're a writer and when you're someone who thinks of yourself as a chronicler of this country, I was basically very good at winning some arguments and getting people, you know, roused around a particular thought, which is, again, a valuable skill. But he was like, a lot of people can do that. Everybody's got an opinion on social media. Everybody is able to sort, these are the good ones, these are the bad ones. We don't need one more person clarifying who is good and who is evil.

Your superpower, he said to me, is being able to go into a situation and understand everybody. And he said, I really urge you to find your way back to that kind of work. Again, there's many conversations. These are not all pleasant conversations. I wouldn't say I enjoyed all of them. There was a part of me that understood that he was right. I mean, this was a level of intervention that, like, I think even my wife, good noted friend of the show, Priya Parker, that I think even she would be hesitant because it's a lot, right?

It's a lot to be told that, like, maybe the entire, like, trajectory of your last decade should be reversed. And there's also the other piece that is a real responsive. piece, a defensive piece that is like, you know, Sam was and still works for New York Times. You were writing for them in 2015, 2016, when you literally weren't allowed to call Trump a demagogue, even though that's a factual objective term. It's not a call for can't we all just get a long, dumbing down of everything that is true and real and factual. But it's a curiosity. It's a desire to go deeper.

And to be clear, Sam was not telling me you should be a more neutral both sides. That was not the... I mean, I think I sometimes probably cast it that way in my response to him, right?

And I would say things about, you know, the New York Times should be a little tougher against Trump and these kind of things. But really what he was saying was about... I don't think he cared what the content

of the thing I was putting in the world. He cared about his friend. Right. He actually cared about my posture my openness versus closeness, my curiosity, whether my brain was still on, or whether, as I think has happened to so many of us, you just, you know, if you repeat the phrase like, I love immigrants over and over again, whatever righteous, worthy phrase you want to repeat, no matter how good

the phrase, repeating it a thousand times, like, shuts off your brain or Trump bad or, or whatever you want to repeat a thousand times in an era that it seems like it calls on us. to actually say things a thousand times because no one hears and because they're worthy of being said. And because it's not honest. Right. At the end of the day, none of us are our deepest fears, which is why this case that you dove into is so, ugh, it's so hard to really be honest with yourself because nobody is a sign. Nobody is, this is the extent of what I believe and all I believe and there's nothing that I can feel in my deepest, scariest places that actually might overlap with what you feel.

And so when we shut that off and when we make it gross to say it out loud, then we don't say that out loud. And then we say the right things out loud. And then we go into the voting booth and vote from our fear instead of something we've worked out with other people. Wow, yes. And by the way, there's like real serious social science that shows this. Basically, part of what allows people like Trump, but I would broaden it around the world to rise, is a very specific thing when real feelings that people have become profane, like sacred and profane, when we take politics, which is about just like practical questions, right, immigration is a practical question. It is reasonable for different countries to have

different views of how many immigrants they want. When you turn an issue like that into a sacred and profane thing. You don't get rid of people's feelings about it. If you render certain opinions kind of profane rather than just different from yours, what you do is you drive those opinions underground. It's like drugs or any other thing you make illicit. And then people will like pay even more, right? People will, people will do whatever it takes the market of fear. Yeah. And so Trump becomes the peddler and it creates this opening for any demagogue, which I can now say, to say, oh my God, look at all these people, all these people left, right, center

who literally won't use the word that you all are thinking, who literally won't say, make the observation that you all feel and see in your heart. And then that feels like freedom. Yes. That you get to say it. So now the demagogue is freeing you. Exactly.

And that dynamic is the core of this era. And so I, you know, just to finish the San Francisco, Sam intervened with me, and again, my experiences is quite particular as a writer of nonfiction, who, you know, that part is quite unique. But I do think the journey Sam forced me on to, and I really did. I texted him a week after I started on this book. I am not from California. I don't normally talk in this kind of verbiage, but I really felt that going back to the open notebook, going back to a podcast. posture of questions, going back to not knowing, a spirit of not knowing is the way you move through the world was just so freeing. And my belief is, my hope actually, is that a lot of people out there actually want to feel curious again themselves. Doesn't mean walking away from

any things you believe. I haven't walked away from anything I believe. It just means if you are tired of placard brain, if you're tired of chant brain, if you actually want to be able to think and actually understand people different from you again, if you feel like this decade of the kind of righteous, closed stance isn't actually serving you. And actually maybe why we are so bad at thinking about reaching out to different people and building different coalitions, then I think this book may be for you. Is Sam the one that suggested this time? Is Sam the one that suggested this topic? Yeah. Yeah. Because then I was kind of annoyed. I was like, you're telling me what not to do. And then he said, this is the story. Then he called me like some months later. He's like,

I got your next book for you. And I was like, oh, shit. Now I got to. Now I got to really put it out. Before I could hide behind, well, you're not telling me what to do. You're telling me what not to do. Right. And it's like, well, now he's telling me what to do also. So the book is dedicated to him. It's funny because Priya was just on the show. And I feel like her book, is the Sam's story is basically proof of her theory that being willing to go into conflict is the most loving thing you can do and leads to beautiful things. That was a perfect actually. I actually haven't thought of that weirdly, but that conflict I just described is a perfect

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Ron DeSantis, who was at that time governor of Florida and was really trying to be the Republican presidential nominee. This was his tweet, where one side, one truth. one version of America was. We must defeat the Soros-funded DAs, stop the left's pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law-abiding citizens. We stand with good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let's show this Marine America's got his back. He links to the legal defense fundraiser, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gates. The coming out saying defend Penny against the woke mob. They're contributing to his defense. When I look at all of that the way it was just a

complete monolith on that side, it was just such an obvious yes from the right. It makes me think about the level deeper that you discuss, which is this kind of muskism that men can't say or do what men are meant to say or do anymore. They can't be men. They are forbidden from protecting, as Penny is, and therefore society is less safe. So we need to bring that back. Is that what this is? Is it a men thing? Is it a we can't do what we need to do? Is it a society is not doing what it needs to do? therefore we need to do it. What made that so obvious that the right would step up and say, we are definitively on the side of this man we're calling a hero? When you think about, for those who have been to New York City who have ridden the subway or subways in other places,

you think about that the unit of the car, a subway car, right? Maybe 20 people in there, maybe 100 people in there. And the way I I think about it, what happened is small space, but that day, as on all days, a whole lot of American life ended up in that subway car, right? Social problems, aspirations, levels of fear, attitudes to the other, right? A subway car's not a vacuum. So people walked in there, and Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny certainly walked in there, carrying elements of the country with them and the ways in which the country and the city and our systems had failed. Jordan Neely certainly and others in different ways in that car were also present.

So then this incident happens and Jordan Ely is dead. And what began to happen immediately afterward is what you're describing, which is actually before there was any kind of trial or forget trial, just facts distributed and available to people, the kind of online civil war over the meaning of the incident was raging. And so you quote several of those different kind of responses. Something about the setup of these facts in this case, in this situation. And you can't quite always predict why in a particular case, right? Why does a George Floyd case become something people know in small towns in Japan?

and an equally horrific situation is not known one town over. This case somehow in its makeup, I think, triggered some of the deepest fears and anxieties across the American spectrum about the fundamental things going on. So I'm just going to say throw out a bunch of them, right? Great. Because they're like civilizational level fears and anxieties in many cases, right? And remember, none of this is like me thinking these. are valid. I'm just telling you what was in the online civil war that developed. So I think for sure

on the right, there was this sense, again, larger than this case, that men are being muzzled, men are being restrained, men can't be men anymore. That applies in various forms and various ways in that way of thinking. And that not only is that just suppressive of men, but that all of us suffer, women suffer, public space suffers when men can't play their natural, God-given role as protectors. Everybody watching this will know that is out there in the ether, right? And maybe even having a kind of revival and the kind of trad wife thing and a lot of online, you know, things are happening in these ways. You know, you could also say on the right this sense that cities are kind of feral and wild and anarchic and all this criminal justice reform. And

and bail reform. It's just leaving, you know, lambs to the slaughter in cities. That are mostly run by leftists who don't care about regular, regular people, meaning like middle class, white Americans. Right. And there's this idea that I read about in the book called Anarcho Tyranny, which has become very popular in a certain kind of right-wing, you know, podcast bro circle that is, yes, good, white middle-class people are left in an anarchist,

functioning anarchy in cities, then when bad things happen or they're endangered and one of them steps up to protect themselves, they are cracked down on by the tyranny of the state. And it's sort of the essence of, I think, a deep feeling on the right. I think on the left, the stakes felt equally grand, right? We literally have a president of the United States who has made quite clear that he thinks white Americans in his base should take matters into their own hands. And when Daniel Penny was ultimately acquitted, one of the first things that happened was Donald Trump invited him, you know, along with J.D. Vance, to the Army-Navy football game to celebrate.

I think there is a sense out there that political violence is becoming the law of the land in such a society. I think there's a sense Roxanne Gay put it very well, that we have a lot of kind of self-appointed judges of the peace enforcing their own arbitrary and ever-changing personal standards of behavior. I think there's a sense that our system of care is threadbare and is leaving too many people like Jordan Neely in much worse shape than they would be if there was proper care.

I think there's a sense that there's not enough housing and people who make six figures can't afford housing in many American cities, so let alone someone who is in Jordan Neely State. I think, you know, to go back to the right for a second, there's a feeling that there's a kind of blindness to disorder on the left, that when people sit on the subway and it feels like on some days,

and this is not wrong that on every other subway car, there may be someone kind of in distress. Obviously, there's a left-wing story about the failure of public systems to care for that person, and there's a right-wing story about, is it unreasonable to want to commute to work and just not have a person in distress in your subway car? And are you evil to say you'd prefer to live in a society

in which that was not happening? So when this happened, all of those sentiments, which I would argue are deep in every national election we've had in recent years, are shaping kind of our view of each other, kind of our wary view at each other across these different tribal divides, they all somehow were magnetized by this case and this set of facts and this encounter, collision of these two men. And so that online civil war began. And in many ways,

I embarked on this project because I wanted to do what none of those people were doing, which is to, A, actually find out what happened. And B, more important, to actually try, not that I don't have opinions and feelings and haven't been on sides of things, but to try to engage in the skill and in the art of seeing how this situation and this larger situation of some of our most struggling members of our communities, how it looks to lots of different types of people. To just actually be able, and it sounds, Polyana, I should say this,

but I really believe there's a lot a book cannot do. There's a lot of artists cannot do. There's a lot of writer can't do. I think a reasonable thing you can try to do in a moment like this is almost, I imagine myself, going back to my Indian roots, like 25 arms, almost just pulling all these different Americans inward

and being like, you are all actually part of the same story. are all part of the same narrative. You're all part of the same country. This story illustrated people who kind of don't want to be in the same country anymore together because of their different ways of looking. And so for me, as an act of art, it was saying, no, no, no, you share a country. Let me show you to each other. And the country that you reveal is experienced by everyone at the end of those tentacles as you describe in the book, the promise of America is here you are free. The reality of America is here you are on your own.

That Jordan Neely, and I'd like you to take us a little bit into the truth and history of his life, was very much on his own. and into that tragic, horrible death, the people in that subway car felt they were on their own dealing with that. And all of that was true. So tell us a little bit about Jordan Neely. Jordan Neely, before he was in the worst and dark period of his life and worst moment of his life on that train. He was once a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator on the streets of New York and under the streets in the subway system. He grew up in around New York City, Bayonne, New Jersey, uptown in New York, and had a very awful tragedy strike when he was barely a teenager. His mother,

everyone described as sort of his best friend in the world. They were like pals, you know, that kind of mother-son relationship where they're like pals in addition to being mother and son. She was brutally murdered by her boyfriend partner at the time. So Jordan Neely, who was not, by all accounts, not particularly close to his father, loses his mother, his best friend in this unspeakable tragedy. Remarkably, and this is one of the things we found out when he dug into the case, his mother's cause of death was also chokehold, compression of the neck, right? to think that the New York City medical examiner

would rule her death compression of the neck and then a couple decades later would rule her son's death compression of the neck. It's just mind-bending. With my research team that I had on this book, you know, tried to recreate some of Jordan's childhood through the criminal trial of the man who killed his mother, Sean Sutherland, who's still in prison.

And I was going through the testimony and various things and trying to understand this story. And I'm looking at this transcript of the interview of Jordan Neely on the witness stand, a young teenage guy a couple of years after this happened. Something really struck me in the testimony, but it's a transcript, so maybe it was wrong. So then I found the audio and the hunch was confirmed. The killer of Jordan's mom, Sean Sutherland, had taken a paralegal course in high school, and he used this to request the right to represent himself in court,

I think along with an attorney. And so when a teenage, Jordan Neely, was on the witness stand testifying in the case of his mother's murder, his cross-examiner was the man who killed his mother. I have not encountered that in any case that I have heard about or even seen on TV. And you can hear it. You can hear, we have this audio of a teenager being interrogated by the man who strangled and killed his mother. I dwell on that to say, this was someone who had a lot of spark and joy, was already getting interested in Michael Jackson impersonation and who had the light go out in a profound

way that I think we would all be profoundly altered forever if that happened to us. He went on then to to have a kind of successful career for some years in the kind of Michael Jackson impersonator trade. One of my main four characters in the book is Moses Harper, who was one of his close friends and mentor in the Michael Jackson dance community. And she kind of taught him and gave him advice and helped him with moves and clarify his moves and really get serious about it while also telling him,

get your education, you can't do this forever, your knees give out after a while. But over time, his mental illness, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, you know, which often takes its tolls, begins to show itself in one's 20s. And it really, you know, tightened its hold on him very severely. And he had a criminal record going back years of just very minor, like sleeping in the subway type things, turnstile jumping and stuff like that. And then it escalated into assaults and things like that. And he basically passed through the what is called the revolving door. of mental and kind of homeless care in New York.

You're in a shelter and you're out. You're in a hospital, but they don't keep you because you don't have the right insurance and you're not a particularly profitable client. They stabilize you, but they don't really care for you. There's all these policy folks who want folks like that to be institutionalized, but there really are no beds. And so around and around you go.

And Jordan Neely's family said after he died on that F train, you know, through lawyers, we wish that he had been institutionalized. We wished that they had kept him. We asked for that, but they wouldn't keep him. And so he is someone who illustrates, I think, both the power of profound trauma

and a system of care that is better at maintaining folks who are homeless and mentally, a lot of the folks who, people listening to this, will see every day in your public space. and you may wonder about what's going on with them. Is my city not doing anything? Well, your city is doing actually a lot,

but the kind of thing it's doing is sort of maintenance of a problem rather than the elimination of it. If I am being super honest, one of the things that was really troubling to me is that I am a bodily autonomy person. I am your body, your choice all the way. I am terrified of the slippery slope. And your book was troubling to me in dealing with that because this idea of human self-determination and public power.

And if your illness is preventing you from knowing your illness, is it more of a cruelty to let you, you know, freeze on the street? or more of a cruelty to force you against your will into treatment that you don't want. I mean, this is one of those ones that honest people, regardless of the signs I have in my yard, this is hard. Yes. I'm so glad you made that connection because I think it illustrates the difficulty of it. I am the person who will wear an accessory or a jacket. or boots until it's beyond time to replace them. But that is also true about glasses. I still have a

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varies, see mintmobile.com. Okay, you guys, so like many women, I've been going through a ton of hormonal changes recently, and it can really mess with your head and body. But I don't want to just shrug, okay, and just accept feeling off. I want to understand what's actually happening and what I can actually do about it. I use Midi Health because they specialize exclusively in women's hormonal health. Their clinicians actually take the time to look at what you're experiencing and what might help. And it's easy. Just go to join midi.com, share what you've been experiencing and get matched with a trained clinician. Appointments are available in days, not months, and MIDI is covered by most major insurance plans. For me, there's been real relief in having somewhere to go with these questions,

somewhere where I feel like I'm being taken seriously and getting care that actually designed for what I'm going through. It's time to get back. back to feeling like you again. Visit join midi.com right now to book your first visit today. That's join midI.com to book your first visit. Join midi.com. I want to make it clear that this is obviously one extreme situation that happened in one subway car in one city. But I would imagine a lot of people are in that situation where you are in public space, whether it's in transit or on the street, and you see someone, and it's not just, hey, you have a few bucks, it's, they're in trouble. And I think everybody will have felt,

okay, what do I do? Besides the decision to give money or not, what do you do? Is it your business? Is it, is it our business? Is it collectively our business? So, COVID was a mass disruption for all of us in all these ways, but I think for folks who are already in various forms of mental distress, it was a tsunami in ways that maybe cannot be appreciated by people who are not in that circumstance. I mean, Jordan Neely, I think, almost always slept in the subway in those years and then suddenly the subways closed, but New York never closes. But I think the first time in history, maybe the first time in a very long time, it closed between, I forget, 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. or some period. And it was like a cataclysm for Jordan Neely. For there not to be an

open subway in this city changed the geography of the city for him, multiply that out by all the other things that closed. So we all started to, I think, since, there was lots of people around who, which is not doing okay. And again, the far right often goes from this observation to they're dangerous or this and that. Not a lot of evidence for that. But that doesn't mean you take the opposite stance, there's nothing wrong with it.

And one of the things that really came up in my reporting that I have to say, I didn't, I'm sort of like you in that generally. my view would be like let people be free. What I didn't understand that opened my eyes through the reporting an encounter with Brian Stettin in the book, among others, is that for some of these mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, but not only,

a feature of the illness is not knowing you have the illness or can be not knowing you have the illness. And basically there are easy cases where someone is completely harmless sitting there and they're in perfectly good health, and you're like, okay, I mean, I guess, you know. And then there's some easy cases. cases at the other end where someone is like actively dangerous or like harming themselves. That's also

an easy case. You can, you know, generally the law would say they can be kind of picked up off the street. They can be forced into care. But a lot of the cases a lot of us are seeing are somewhere in between where people are not dangerous. They're not threatening anybody. They may have a sweet nature, but they are in a kind of chronic decay, right? They're not. able to tend to themselves. They're not able to kind of honor their own dignity through the upkeep that a human life requires. And they are on a trajectory that today, tomorrow, five years from I was going to kill them. And I think what I hadn't quite wrapped my head around is what is the humane thing to do for that group of people in the middle? Because as you say, you can take a human

autonomy self-determination stance, which would say, no, just let them decide. But if you don't know you have schizophrenia, if you don't know what you might need to be doing to take care of yourself and you're kind of rotting on the street in that way, are we getting kind of caught up in some philosophical idea of human dignity and human autonomy and not, frankly, having the basic intuition that I think many people would have who don't get too philosophical about it, which is like, this is not good. they should be done about this for that person's sake, if not anything else. Right. And again, going back to that sacred profane ideas going underground discussion, I think 90% of people

walking past someone whose leg is like full of colors and is rotting away on the subway, I think 90% of ordinary people are like, that's not good. That should not be happening here. Like, we should deal with that. Your way into that may be aesthetic. Like, I don't want to see that. It may be compassionate, but somehow I think we've gotten into a place in American life where the kind of two options that we were offered politically on that, well, from the far right of those people should just be like eliminated from public space and who cares what happens and they're a menace, they're a threat, they're dangerous, they're dirty.

And then a kind of progressive alternative is like, who's to judge? Let them be free. Let them be the decision makers of their own care. I think, again, not taking any stand, but illustrating these different ways of looking, I think this book, among other things, is a challenge to both of these kind of views that we are constantly offered, the kind of Trumpy, I have to invade cities because of these folks. Right. And the progressive, you have social anxiety and they're rotting away on the subway floor and who's to judge,

who needs what? I think we need a new path in between these. Yes. There's so much that is invisible to us. And as you point out in the book, most of American. And the unhoused revolves around my experience of them, not their experience, right? And so there's this whole world where it's like, is it one or the other? Or are these people actually making informed decisions for themselves in some ways?

Because as you point out, the actual shelter system can be, with some exceptions of great programs you identify dangerous and bad and awful. So are they actually choosing that in an informed way? And if we spent as much money on that as we did invading cities, maybe people would make decisions to go to them. But they're not because they've been there a hundred times, as Jordan nearly has, and is like, I'm not going back there. That place is awful. So that's a whole other question. and an investment and a need to like make the invisible visible so you can see what the real problems are. But when you're talking about the third way, I am fascinated by the prosecution's, the prosecutor Joran's case here. Because even though it was cast as this woke left hating hero's

case, it actually was very nuanced. The prosecution's case against Penny, was not that he had any bad intentions. They said he started this with good intentions. He was trying to protect the people on that subway. And we're going to show you when it went too far and why it did and why he's responsible. And to me, let's just live in that third space for a while because it wasn't as black and white as anyone on the outside was trying to project on it. It was that kind of gray, weird, real life, where do we draw a line and make a call that real Americans are living in every day. Yes. And she definitely ran

homicide prosecutor in the Manhattan DA's office. By the way, the penny case was her first loss of a homicide case in 20 years. To me, it's a very moving story, her story that I tell in the book is that she in some ways chose to fight this trial and make the case in a way that put America itself on trial in the following way because she said as you rightly put it Daniel Penny started with good intentions right so Daniel Penny is this suburban kid from west is slip Long Island surfer kind of not thrilled with college goes to the Marines four years in the Marines feeling a little aimless afterwards comes to New York City because he wants to, as he says,

he met a lot of guys from around the world in the Marines. He wants that sense of the world. His small town is quite claustrophobic. He wants that bigger world. He wants to live in Manhattan and connect with the most interesting people in the world. He's applying for bartending jobs. And that day, he's on the subway,

going to the gym and this incident happens. And Daphne Iran, the prosecutor, makes the case that this guy started with good intentions, had marine training, so thought that he could maybe put this guy in a chokehold and restrain him. However, the facts are also that the ride during which this happened was between Second Avenue and Broadway Lafayette in New York, which is a 30-second or less ride, very, very short, one of the shortest rides in the entire system.

Jordan Neely got on at Second Avenue, started screaming and acting out and saying he was desperate for food, ready to go back to jail, ready to die. Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold, dropped him to the ground. All that within the 30 seconds. the train gets into Broadway Lafayette. The doors open. As you could imagine, pretty much everyone scrambles and gets the hell out of that subway car. Platform doors remain open. At that point, there's no one left really in the subway car except a couple people who choose to want to be there or trying to help or whatever.

And Daniel Penny continues to hold Jordan Neely in that chokehold for more than five minutes from that point onward. And so the heart of the case became not. Why was this initiated? Not why did he try to do this? It became, why did he keep holding him once the doors had opened? There was really nobody left to protect immediately around. And why did he hold him in a chokehold that in Marine Corps training, you're not allowed to put someone in a chokehold for more than a few seconds because of the risk?

So he had to know this was a dangerous thing to do. And Daphne Uran's theory of the case and her argument, which really, I think, struck me because it really did feel like, making a case about this moment in this country was he held on so long, well beyond what would have been reasonable, because Jordan Neely didn't register to him as a full human being. And again, I would encourage you listening to this just hold it before you decide whose team you're on. Her argument was it's impossible to explain the way it went down and those extra five minutes without resorting to Penny's attitude to the body in question. That it was not a purely

physical act, that the attitude of one person to another, the way in which he saw who he was holding explains how the hold was, how long it was, how it went down. And that may sound like a very kind of ethereal place to ground a legal case. But the evidence that the government brought was several things, but in particular, two videos. A video on the scene right after it occurred when the police got their body cam footage. And what is really striking, particularly given all the debates we've had

about police in recent years, in this video, Daniel Penny is sort of standing there telling cops what happened, and almost all the other cops are like frantically involved in trying to save Jordan's life or revive him. And it is this very striking tableau in which Daniel Penny, who presumably is not in situations like this a lot,

it's quite extreme for a random civilian, is kind of chill, nonchalant, chewing gum, remembers to grab his hat after the incident and just standing there being like, yeah, he was acting crazy, I put him out, I put him out. And then you got these 10, however many cops nearby who are acting as though if this one life were lost, the world would be over.

And you see these cops. This is probably the fifth time. Some of them have dealt with something like that. It should be less extraordinary to them than to Penny. But they were behaving, right? There's that line, I think, in Muslim scripture, to save one life as if to save all humankind. They were behaving as though that one life was everything, right?

And you could see a difference in the NYPD's attitude to that body and to his. And then in the interrogation video that happened a couple hours later, which became very central to this argument that Daphne Iran was making Penny and these two NYPD the detectives are kind of broying out at the beginning. One of them is a Marine comparing unit numbers and tattoos. Death before duty tattoos. Death before dishonor. You could tell this cop is like trying to impress.

And of course, detectives are always trying to build that rapport. But it seemed more than that. It seemed like these were like bros of a feather, right? They were. I see you. I know you're like. There were a lot of like man nods of just like, you know, this kind of thing. Actually, for this, to analyze this video, I like went deep into like the upward man nod

versus the downward man. Oh, tell me. Do you know this? No, I don't. So the down the downward is like, I mean, you know that, but like, is like, you know, like, you know, like. Yeah. Versus the up.

Yeah. This, as we know from this case, this is the most vulnerable part of the human body. The neck, yes. So the upward is, the upward is, the upward is vulnerability. It's like, friend. It's like, I'm being vulnerable with you. I'm exposing and the downward is like. I'm protecting myself from you.

I don't know you well enough. Oh, interesting. Okay. That was very helpful. Okay. I like to know any little clues I can about men. They're very hard. Okay. So there's some of that in this. And I think it progresses if I remember correctly. So they're in this interrogation room, broying out. And then Penny starts to recount what happened. And his language takes a pretty dramatic turn as he recounts these events. In the language he's using to describe Jordan Neely. He starts repeatedly calling him. him a crackhead. For the record, this was two hours after the incident, Daniel Penny had no way of knowing any history of drug use in Jordan Neely. He used the word squirming, I think more than half a dozen times. This kind of language, like animalistic language, language of, you know, he's just a crack head. He's just a crackhead. They're throwing people in front of trains these days. He's just a crackhead, just a crackhead. Again, what is really striking in this video, as in the first one,

is the contrast with the NYPD. The NYPD guys don't go there with him. No. They refuse to actually go there with him. And I think Daniel Penny senses this. Yeah, he sends the bro withdrawal. You can see it on his face in your video series. He's like, they were with me, they were with me, where'd they go? And so he does what I think we would all do in that kind of situation where you feel that would draw.

That's when like conversational devices like, am I right or you know what I mean. It's ways of fishing for people staying with you when you sense they may not be staying with you. And so then at a certain point in the video, every time he makes one of these kind of dehumanizing statements, as Daphneurand will call them, it is immediately followed by a bid for a connection. Just a cracket, am I right? Just a crackhead, you know what I mean?

You know what I'm saying. And the thing is they don't know what he's saying. They don't think he's right. They're not picking up what he's putting down. And that's really clear in a way that is striking, because you think just visually, you think they're going to go there with him. That's what you think maybe an NYPD,

the tough guy who was in the Marines is going to do. And you see he has crossed some kind of moral line in his attitude to the person he grabbed from behind, put in a chokehold and ultimately killed. And I remember, I think Daphneurant told me for the book that some of the NYPD guys had trouble with the idea of wanting to bring this case because they sympathize with what he was doing.

They saw in him someone who does what they have to do, which is deal with disturbance in public space and deal with hard choices. Some of that question of his attitude is what won some of them over, that they actually looked at it and said, you know, actually we don't see these folks that way.

He actually had a different way of looking at this person. And so when I say Daphneurran put America on trial, what I mean is she made a case against Daniel Penny but said that the reason it had to be made and the reason it was a homicide case was he did what he did because of the way in which he failed to see the person across from him.

Because of his failure to see that person's humanity, that it would be impossible to imagine it having gone down the same way if it had been a fellow Marine in a training situation, if it had been a friend of his who went berserk. The only way to explain why it went down the way

would have to do with his feeling about the other. other person. And so what Daphne Graham was ultimately saying, and she said to me, I never thought Daniel Penny was going to go commit more crimes. Most people you prosecute, you're prosecuting, because they're going to write another bad check if they're not in prison next year. She said, with him, I knew he'd never commit another crime. With him, I felt like we had to say, given gestures at everything, that you can't look at other people and fail to see them in a society. That a society in which we can dehumanize each other so easily, in which we become crackheads squirming,

go down the list to each other instead of people, is a society that is not really a society. And what Daphna, I think, felt she was ultimately enforcing was the line of civilization. And I think in this American moment, it's also just so helpful to be like, oh, just because something starts as something doesn't give you carte blanche to take it all the way through. As if co-signing on an initial step is like a blank check to go wherever that step takes you.

And I feel like that's what we're doing right now because of this kind of weird polarity where if you say out loud, I think our immigration system needs an update. you are therefore agreeing to put human beings in cages. The same way that if you are to restrain someone for 30 seconds into people can leave the train and you think that's okay, then you're co-signing on the murder of that person. There's just a weird kind of failure to say, we can agree that there's a problem and not sprint to the most extreme version of whatever it is you're selling. Yes. We fail to do that. At each step, we kind of reevaluate, and we won't do that.

Yes, that's exactly right. One of the things I have been thinking about recently is, obviously, there's certain issues on display in this book, but I think that basic pattern applies to so many issues where take immigration or take issues of crime and homeless care in this book or others, you don't hear people who are able to say, yeah, the way the border work, right now is bad. That is a problem. A border should not work like that. However, people crossing it are human beings like you with lives and dignity, whatever. Just to start with those two things. The number of people who will acknowledge that it's a problem and stand up for the humanity of those people, it's like very rare, right? Generally, it's to be in one camp or the other. And then say, we should probably have a more orderly immigration system that does have a process. And at the same time, we have to recognize that scaring the shit out of people about family separation, these other kinds of things, is a crime against humanity. Right. Part of what Man in the Mirror is really about is democracy.

It is democracy in a subway car because democracy is the question of can we live together? Can we navigate difference? When something goes down, how do we decide what to do? Who decides? sides? Can we, as you say, hold the truth, this is a problem and not have to run it into the ground? So the only solution to the problem is like the extermination of those people from public space. And it goes all the way back to the beginning of the conversation where to keep a democracy and to get out of this condition that I would imagine every single person watching this wants to be out of, this national condition. It actually, requires a different kind of mind on our part. This is not just bad leaders at the top.

I would love to be able to tell you, we're all perfect, but he's got just like a hundred bad people at the top. That's the easiest story in the world. The reality is these habits of mind, of running things all the way to the extreme, of not seeing the humanity of someone on the other side of some line, of assuming the worst of people, of not even being. curious about what may be going on with someone, those are the mental habits of people who are asking to be ruled. Yes. Instead of self-governing. Asking to have a team where they can put a jersey on and never think again and just cheer, cheer, cheer, and bash the other team. Because that's a lot easier than calling play after play. That is harder. That's more complicated. Citizenship is a job.

And at some deep level, what authoritarianism really is is not just a political system. It's a decision about where thinking should be located down here or like in the locked room. Democracy is based on a radical idea, which must have seemed preposterous to people, that actually thinking should just be done by everybody all the time. And somehow all that thinking will float upward to decisions about the future. and if we can't do that, if we can't look at each other and see each other, we can't hear each other stories,

if we can't understand, why do so many people feel this fear of this? Why does so many people feel that? What might have been going on in a life like Jordan Neely's that maybe goes beyond my story of all these people in the town square? If we can't stretch our mind in these ways,

we are creating the conditions for leaders, not just Donald Trump, but going forward, to offer to do that, do the thinking for us. Right? But democracy is not a self-driving car.

We need to drop. We need to keep the wheel. And that requires a constant work of thinking, but also feeling what it is like to be other people that we share space with. Today's episode is brought to you by Alma. Therapy can work in ways that are easy to miss while they're happening. Maybe something that used to send you into a little. a tailspin suddenly feels manageable, or you catch yourself handling a difficult conversation

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The timing of this case is fascinating for another reason, and it's a helpful reminder that whatever team side you're on, each is susceptible. This kind of concept of no one's doing anything, we're on our own, we're abandoned. It's up to us because the systems are fucked. I think it was day two of the jury deliberations in the Penny case. Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, was shot and killed him in downtown Manhattan. And I think the day or the day before Penny was acquitted, Luigi Mangione was arrested as the murder suspect. What did the kind of honest, I would say, honest, guttural, rest. response to a lot of folks to that Brian Thompson murder tell you. And how did it relate to this case?

I remember sitting there in jury deliberations where there's nothing to do. You just sit and wait and everybody's in their laptops and the court just waiting. And, you know, sometimes when there's news like that breaks, you can almost physically feel among the bodies in the room something has happened. Vibrating. And everybody was getting these same alerts. And what was really striking is many of them or court reporters, like kind of grizzled veterans of the New York City court scene, when Brian Thompson was shot, several of the reporters I was sitting with knew that that was going to be their next case, right? Same building, that was their next thing.

So immediately, that kind of structural way, the two were linked because the people who were going to bring them to the world were the same in many cases. And then when Luigi Mangione was arrested, he immediately kind of became a hero for certain folks on the left. And I think of my work often as being to, particularly using like language as a way to, you know, as something I make, but also that I read and process from other people. I try to listen for rhymes between people who wouldn't think of themselves as saying the same thing or wouldn't think of themselves as being common cause, but in a certain underlying structure are rhyming with each other. And when I saw a certain outpouring of fandom and admiration, for Luigi on the left

and the kind of free Luigi moment, it struck me, these are none of the same people, but this is entirely the same kind of move that had attached itself to Penny on the right. And there's like no rhyme detection in American life because the way we generally look at it is like, these are those people and those are these people.

It's nothing common, end of story. But actually these people were saying the same thing. So I thought that was quite striking. And then Daniel Penny is acquitted a couple days later. There's a press conference for members of the Neely family, attorneys, activists, others. Several people go speak. And there was kind of a thread to several of the talks,

particularly most prominently Hawkinsom, an activist, The Black Lives Matter of Greater New York. This was also present in some of the other remarks that the system cannot be trusted to save us anymore. We are on our own. We take matters in our own hands. Stop petitioning the system. Hawk Newsom suggested, you know,

the time of marching has sort of passed. And he said, let the marchers march and let the stepers step. It's time for stepping, right? And that means in his telling, he said, black folks need to set up their own schools, set up their own media outlets, set up their own mutual aid, whatever. But also, he said, if they're going to have white vigilantes, we need some black vigilantes in this country. And it struck me as I was standing there.

I remember just standing there in light rain, I think. And I remember holding in my mind at the same time the arguments I had been hearing from the penny camp for a year and a half. The newfound arguments that one was hearing in the news from the people who were kind of just gleefully celebrating the death of Brian Thompson. And then this argument from supporters of Jordan Neely and his family saying, we need black vigilantes. The system's not going to protect us. We need to take matters in their own hands. We need to build their own parallel society and institutions. And listening for those rhymes that struck me, these folks are all saying the same thing, actually. These people who do not see eye to

eye on anything, didn't see eye to eye on this case, would not want to share space, are actually all saying the same thing. The cavalry is not coming. The system's rigged. No one's coming for us. No one's going to save us. No one's going to protect us. We're on our own. All the traditional ways that you're told, don't boo, vote, you know, go petition the system. None of those work. The only thing that works is sometimes somebody do something. It's just stepping up, taking matters your own hands. And it struck me that this was becoming a kind of rare thread of our common life in an era where it feels like there are not a lot of threads. Like this was becoming this kind of final American glue.

And I sort of landed in that moment, not because it's the most uplifting one to land on, but because I think it's a real one. And I think that landing place really raises a question for all of us. If we do not wish to be a society in which the most attractive option to lots of people on the left, right, and center is to take matters into your own hands and do DIY violence, then we need to build a new kind of society that makes that feeling go away. If we don't have an answer yet, understanding that lots of folks feel the same way has got to be a start of something. And I think that that's so interesting, man in the mirror, obviously a Michael Jackson reference, but also when you look in the mirror, it's the opposite of you, but it's the same as you. And that I think is a lot of what's happening in America. And I'm just really thankful for you writing this book. It's not a simple one.

It's as complicated as it needs to be to help us untangle. And I think it really, really does what I think is some of the most important work we need to do right now, which is to get honest about the gray areas. admit them and allow them to exist because that is where some of the stickiest truth is. And I think that's where we can connect in this United States of abandonment. And it's something we can do in contrast to all the things that people rightly feel they can't do, they can't fix, they can't change. There's a lot of those things too.

But I think this is something we actually can all do. we can take our minds back from the culture of reduction and dehumanization and easy answers and certitude and reflex instead of thought, that's something we can all do. And I think that is a very powerful first step, actually, to reclaiming this. country as a kind of place where we don't just, you know, yell democracy as a slogan, but embody the values of what it means to believe that you can think up the future together

with your neighbors. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for Man in the Mirror, y'all. The book is available today. There is also an amazing, we're going to put in the show notes, a video series on YouTube. where you go through the key pieces of evidence in the trial, and it's fascinating. I've loved it.

And thank you for writing this book. Thank you for coming back. Thank you for reading it. Thank you for engaging with it. So deep that I can tell your copy is beautifully beat up. It is so. There's like notes and tabs. Yeah.

I love it. Thank you so, so much for having me. Thank you. We are proud to say that we can do hard things is an independent production brought to you by us treat media treat media makes art for humans who want to stay human and you can follow us at we can do hard things on instagram