Hmm.

They were basically saying, "When the system fails all of us, when people feel abandoned, when there's no one there, don't judge the watch.

Don't judge the person who steps into the void." Right? It's that line from A Few Good Men, "Who's gonna do it? You?" Right? And there's a weird way in which Luigi developed a fandom and Daniel Penny developed this fandom that would probably hate each other if they met in a bar, but actually felt and said the same thing.

And then when Penny was acquitted a couple days later, outside the courthouse, um, Neely's family and activists and others allied with them gave a press conference.

At-- And I was thinking about all these arguments.

At the press conference, one of the activists, Hawk-- I mean, several of them spoke about you can't trust the system, system doesn't work anymore.

One of the activists, Hawk Newsome, who's one of my minor characters in the beginning of the book, Hawk says, "If they're gonna have vigilantes, we need Black vigilantes.

Mm-hmm

[laughs]

Um, um, Terry, I'm so honored.

I wanted to read you...

Uh, we were just talking about it back there.

I wanted to read you a scene from the book that has nothing to do with the case of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny.

Um, because most of this book is not about this really dark moment in a subway car.

Um, but the only way to sort of explain the book quickly is to say that it's a story of a thing that happened in a subway car.

Uh, and in, and in fact, you have the line, "What would the city have to build for both Jordan Neely to be alive and for Daniel Penny to choose otherwise?" That w- what systemic lessons are there?

But you're not thinking stats when you're riding on the subway.

Right, exactly, and people are, you know, people are trying to get to work.

People are trying to live their lives, and they're afraid.

And then there's another version of this question that happens within families, right? We're, we're talking about folks who are sort of adrift on the street or in transit, but there's another even perhaps larger version of this is unfolding within families in this country.

There are people who we love in our families who mental illness comes for, and if you have adult children or adult siblings or parents who this happens to, in this country, it is very difficult to get care for them if they don't want care.

So in a city like Boston, which has, you know, a certain amount of right to shelter, the same way New York does, a certain number of the folks you're seeing on the street, same way in many of our families, actually do not want the care that is being offered.

And you may say that's because they're deluded.

Right

the

hospitals.

which I think in some ways, in my experience of the reporting, come out as some of the worst villains in this whole thing.

Hospitals, I mean, you and I have been to hospitals where maybe you've gotten great care, but maybe you feel a little bit not fully seen as a human being.

You can only imagine what Jordan Neely's experience of our healthcare system was.

Discharged almost as soon as he is brought in And with sometimes with instructions to like work on his coping skills or, you know, on his social interaction skill.

I mean, just completely out of touch.

Anyway,

Right

... danger to society, menace to society, was rightfully put down, or he was purely a victim of systemic injustices and American cruelty and, you know, white supremacist vigilantism.

So those were the kinda two stories.

And what is lost in that is, of course, an actual life.

So I tried to spend time, among other things, you know, recovering some of that actual life.

So this is someone who, you know, grew up between Uptown Manhattan, the Bronx a little bit, and Bayonne, New Jersey, uh, mostly.

Uh, was very, very close to his mother.

Yeah

Um, I mean, you kind of touched on this a second ago, but why do you think it is that people can't embrace the and both in this case, rather than having to be either or? I

mean, now you're getting to the heart of the whole project.

You know, the other day I did an event in Washington where my parents still live and afterwards had some drinks with my parents' friends.

And one of their friends, this lovely woman, self-identified auntie, said to me, She said, you know, when you wrote your book criticizing billionaires, I thought you were brave.

But now I know you're really, really brave because you've written a book of a kind nobody wants, which is to say complexity, which is to say holding multiple truths about people.

And I am very purposefully running against the grain of the culture here because I think it's important and necessary.

So you're picking up on that exactly right.

Where does that leave us? That insight about America?

What, what, what does that do to a society when all sides feel this sense of abandonment and isolation and, and alienation?

You know, Jacob, when I, when I s- set out to write the book, I think I had two goals that were a little bit in tension with each other.

One is I, I, I understand people are busy and fragmented and stressed out by this era we're living in, and I wanted to write a, a gripping human story that would actually hold them.

But I also wanted to take people to the very burning heart of this country and allow them to see the country and maybe even see themselves in a way that they, that they can't when they're just in the daily crush of every little news alert, one after another.

And the passage you just read is, I think, the landing place of that journey to the heart of America, where, you know, if you're, if you're just tuning in today and you're hearing a story about a homeless guy on the s- on the subway and a death, it may sound exotic or alien from your life.

What I found is that what pervaded that subway car that day, what actually everybody in that subway car had in common, uh, including Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny and the passengers, is a sense of abandonment that I think is pervasive up above in the country over that subway system.

Um, it is a sense that, that, you know, policymakers don't hear you and see you.

Wow

But in your own mind, when you were starting out the process, did you say, here's a theme that I'm really going after, or at least I anticipate being central?

I would say there was one more than theme approach that was very central, which is an approach of moral complexity.

And that really was from the beginning, which is to say, as I even went to my characters from Man in the Mirror, who I knew from the beginning had to and were going to represent a pretty broad swath of how Americans look at the world, I said to them, As part of a conversation about I'd love to, you know, the kind of work I do, I'm not just asking you to sign up for an interview or five interviews.

I'm asking you to sign up for like, can I be a major part of your life for two and a half years, right? It's a very intense request to ask people to sign up for the kind of books I'm making, right? I mean, I've done the other thing.

I've interviewed people for the New York Times and that's a 10 minute phone call, right? This is a two and a half year thing you're signing up for.

And you're going to be sort of indelibly put in this thing that's going to be in libraries forever.

So you're really signing up for a lot.

why did why did the victims i'm going to say the victims i mean jordan neely's why did his it sounds like his humanity got lost i mean sort of vanished in the process why

I would just love to get your thoughts on this.

I think it is completely correct, and I think this is actually a...

One of the people I follow in the book, I call them characters, but this is obviously a nonfiction book.

These are real, real people who I followed for a couple of years.

One of my four main characters is named Ashwin Vasan.

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, right? 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 than the past, right? Because we don't normally think about it like that.

Didn't the, 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.

I would just love to get your thoughts on this.

I think it is completely correct, and I think this is actually a...

One of the people I follow in the book, I call them characters, but this is obviously a non-fiction book.

These are real, real people who I followed for a couple years.

One of my four main characters is named Ashwin Vasan.

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, right? 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 than the past, right? Because we don't normally think about it like that.

Didn't the, 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.

Yeah, okay.

And I'm gonna say, if you followed the, the, you know, the social media videos from inside that plane, um, it, you saw a lot of dads and moms comforting their little children in, during a nosedive of a plane, right? You think about what it would be like to give that talk to your child.

And contrary to the Macklemore thing, it actually reminded me of a lot of videos I've seen from Gaza in the past few years.

There is a universal and vast overwhelming number of people who that's all they want, right?

Right

...

in, at a level one, a level two, a level three, and then it ends in a level 10.

We are, if these numbers are to be...

Mm-hmm.

10 minutes from his house was a fully Korean strip mall where I could barely order anything because like it was all in Korean.

And so we are trying to do a really hard thing, which is untested, [laughs] which is can a bunch of people who don't share all the things our ancestors needed to share to be able to live together, language, religion, shared history, shared books, shared hymns, shared stories.

Our ancestors had all of these forms of glue working for them when they wanted to solve problems together, build a bridge together, you know, build a road, choose a leader.

We're basically now in modern American life saying, "Can we achieve some of the, the same common prosperity and other things, uh, that our ancestors would have tried to realize without shared myths, without shared language always, without shared history, shared religion?" And I think we have actually made so many advances to being able to do that, that it's dazzling.

I feel sort of caught between, personally with this orientation of mine, I feel caught between people who don't want that to be our story because they don't want that kind of America, and between more progressive-minded people who are too upset about what's happening to acknowledge that really amazing things preceded it.

And I say, no, we are in a very dangerous moment of backlash because of the front lash of progress, and because now we are in the work, and the Persuaders book was very much about this.

Mm

And I want to know what this was like.

Well, first of all, thank you for having me.

I was moved by the way you you set it up with that personal connection, because I think this is this is both a question of how do we care for people who we may not know on the edge of the edge of the edge of the American dream.

Right.

This is people who are homeless and experiencing mental illness are.

really, in a way, tests of our collective compassion.

But as you say, these are also folks in our families.

But the fact that that even made its way sort of into the mainstream shocked me in the moment, but maybe it didn't shock others.

What did you think the public and the media missed in the initial coverage?

Well, first of all, happy 50th birthday, Rev.

I see your Instagram videos of your green juices and your workouts.

You're like those guys in Silicon Valley who are aging in reverse.

So congratulations on your birthday.

You know, I... was convinced that this case was an incident that America reduced to clickbait and refused to understand.

We do this with so many of these stories now.

Can you talk about how these two people's lives intersected in that moment and how the public perception of them has played out ever since?

What is the basis of the issue that took place on the New York subway that made you want to write about it?

To me, this was a small story that illuminated and explained and got to the heart of what was happening in a big country.

Three years ago, in Manhattan, New York, on an uptown F train on the subway, a black mentally ill homeless man named Jordan Neely, who was once a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator in New York City streets, known to tourists in Times Square and in the subway system, and who had since fallen in harder times and active psychiatric crisis.

He entered the subway car.

He threw his jacket to the ground.

He began screaming at people, saying he was hungry, ready to go back to prison, ready to die.

And a white former Marine named Daniel Penny came up behind him, put him in a chokehold, dropped him to the ground, held him for six minutes, most of which took place after the train got to the next station and many people left, and ultimately killed Jordan Neely.

What did you find after doing that for three years?

What did you find after doing that for three years?

You know, I did spend a lot of time riding the trains and understanding what happened in that train car.

And one of the things that's striking, this is an age of division.

This is an international show.

You have covered these issues in so many different places, and we're speaking to people in so many different places.

But I think one of the things we have in common around the world right now is this sense of abandonment.

And if you look inside that subway car, just starting in that subway car that day, This was an experience that everybody in that subway car had in common, despite all the differences.

So with all that, what do you think is the solution?

How did Jordan Neely get to the position that he, that he was in when he's on the subway?

So Jordan Neely, um, grew up, uh, in and around kind of uptown Manhattan, Bayonne, New Jersey.

Um, was very close to his mother.

Uh, father not as much in his life when he was a young man.

It was a precarious life.

His mom was in and out of shelters, in, in and out of women's shelters for women who were experiencing abuse, um, domestic abuse.

And, uh, when he was just a, you know, young, early adolescent, um, had a, had a, you know, life-altering trauma.

You know, whether or not you think accountability was had here or shouldn't have been had here, like, how many steps of the way towards solving the problem and, and preventing a thing like this from happening in the future did we get? Not very far.

I'll, I'll read-

Because so you set it up very well.

There's this, there's this, you know, I'm just watching this situation and, and, you know, the platform.

There's lots of different people doing lots of different things.

Um, and this is the moment where, uh, a man comes and walks towards the trash can.

"Soon, a man draped in a giant white Red Cross blanket walked up to the garbage can behind Lizette," one of the outreach workers, "and began to dig through it.

After a few seconds of careful rummaging, he fished out a white fast food bag of promising nutritional weight.

That was interesting

So, Anand, after three days of, of really important conversations, uh, sparked by this, uh, important book, um, what do you hope someone who does pick this up, who, who picks it up and reads it, what do you hope they take from it?

You know, we're talking a- in a way about a very specific set of issues, but actually, to me, this is about what do we, how do we respond as a society when people fall? How do we catch people? Today when we've been talking about mental illness, the situation, five minutes ago we were talking about ICE agents, but it's all the same conversation in a way, right? When...

Do we just let people drop? Um, you know, Joe, you talked about the conservative view that I think a lot of the folks we're talking about here are caught between conservatives who say, "I don't wanna see this," but won't fund any of the-

No

... stand.

And neither of it is dealing, neither of it is actually seeing those people, which is interesting.

They're both ideological approaches.

And I think everybody watching this walks down streets, sees these folks, and I think, you know, humanizing people begets humanizing people.

Why?

You know, we are creatures of story, right? It's hard to absorb the world as a whole, and sometimes a story comes along that I think contains the world and makes it small for people and understandable.

Um, this was a story that was, you know, i- in some ways very easy to understand and, and, and easy to reduce.

Black, mentally ill homeless man, as you said, white former Marine from the suburbs.

Um, and people very quickly went into their corners, right? Daniel Penny either a hero or a vigilante.

Jordan Neely is either, you know, a criminal, uh, that was put down or a victim of systemic oppression.

And I spent three years inside the case because I think the reality was actually much more complicated.

Yeah, totally.

So I'm

sort of happy that I'm being accused by various people of excessive humanization of all kinds of people.

And I'm going to keep at it.

And I did in this book.

Daniel Penny, also a human being.

By the way, we shouldn't need to humanize people.

People are just human.

place

So much of the, the culture of those towns is

isA, a kind of longing and loathing relationship to New York City.

New York is the aspirational place.

You go to Bergdor- Dorfs on your birthday to get a special thing.

You go to Peter Luger Steak House on a anniversary, but there's a lot of, "The city's unsafe.

The city's dangerous." These are largely white suburbs that have a, a kind of contempt for the city that their parents and grandparents had to leave.

Daniel Penny grew up in, in that world.

Go ahead.

So tell us a little bit about Jordan Neely.

Jordan Neely, before he was in the worst and, and dark period of his life and, 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 and 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, you know, 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 we dug into the case, his mother's cause of death was also choke hold, compression of the neck, right? To, to, 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.

It's vibrating and-

what we thought we knew about the case versus what you report and tell us about.

I was thinking about that ad.

You know, sometimes you have to zoom all the way in to individual human lives to kind of see the truth of the country.

It's hard to see a country as a country.

And so the story of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, the brief refresher is three years ago, a subway car in New York, a black mentally ill homeless man enters a subway car, throws his jacket down, starts screaming, asking for food, for water, saying he's hungry, thirsty, ready to go to jail, ready to die.

in obvious psychiatric distress.

A white former Marine comes up behind him, puts him in a chokehold, drops him to the ground.

What did you find in his background? What did you find with his Marine buddies? What did you find like that in sort of the mindset that had developed with him that that led maybe not to the five minutes, but led to him being in that position?

And six minutes in a situation like that, that's a long fucking time.

And so, as I began to follow the case, it started to wind its way towards a, a trial, and the district attorney's office in Manhattan decided to bring a case again.

And people weren't sure what it was gonna do.

They decided in the end to bring a case that was a complicated case to bring for a whole lot of reasons, right? There are certain cases that a DA's office is, like, raring to go.

This was a harder case, uh, not least because a lot of the public was on Daniel Penny's side, um, and it was a kind of lightning rod, and they don't generally wanna bring cases that they're not sure they're gonna win.

Um, so they bring this case, and a year and a half later, it goes to trial.

And in the trial, um, the government decides to s-- to bring a case centered on the following idea, which I think relates to so many of the things you and I are often talking about on television or on Morning Joe or wherever else together, which is the government says Daniel Penny did the right thing.

So talk us through how he got to that subway car.