Journalist Anand Giridharadas On The Lost Art Of Empathy, Compassion, & Understanding Each Other

Anand Giridharadas (0:00)

I'm trying to get you into the head of all these kinds of people, not because I like this one, or I like this one, or I think you should like this one, but because I actually think there is a real lost civic art in being able to mentally leap into someone else's head. Anand Giridharadas, everybody.

Rich Roll (0:16)

Anand Giridharadas.

SPEAKER_3 (0:18)

Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who has written for the New York Times and many other outlets. The author of the new book, Out Tomorrow, titled Man in the Mirror. It reports on the case of Jordan Neely.

Anand Giridharadas (0:30)

Black, mentally ill, homeless man gets onto a train. He starts acting out. And within that 30 seconds, a white former Marine named Daniel Penny puts him in a choke hold and continues to hold Jordan Neely for another five or so minutes, ultimately killing him.

It just immediately was an American Rorschach test. Hero or vigilante, all of America felt like it was compressed into that subway car. And I think this is very important to understand when...

SPEAKER_3 (1:06)

Such a delight to meet you. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

Anand Giridharadas (1:09)

As have I.

SPEAKER_3 (1:10)

You're looking iconic.

And you're in an affable mood to grapple with some serious issues, which your book very much is, Man in the Mirror. I mean, first of all, congratulations. It's a massive accomplishment. We were just talking about that before we were recording. You're on the precipice of the release. And the way that I'm thinking about this book is that it's almost, I mean, certainly you've identified this story, and I want you to kind of set the stage with that story. But it is a story that gets at the root of all the issues and topics that you care about, that you have been talking about and writing about for a very long time. It is the perfect Petri dish of clashes that elucidate all of these themes. And in many ways, it's novelistic. It's almost like a Tom Wolf story. It's like bonfire of the inequalities without the satire on some level. And very much a New York story, but a story about America.

Anand Giridharadas (2:20)

That's a brilliant summary of it. You know, Man in the Mirror is, at the heart of it is a story that many people watching this will probably passingly remember if that, right? There was a death on the subway in New York on May 1st, 2023 And the basic scenario was black mentally ill homeless man gets onto a train. He's a former Michael Jackson impersonator who had a little bit of a noun. People would come to New York looking for him back in the day, but it kind of fallen on harder times, mental illness tightening its grip. He starts acting out on the subway. It's a very short ride, a 30 second ride from Second Avenue to Broadway Lafayette. He starts acting out, demanding food, demanding water, saying he's ready to go back to prison, ready to die. Some people felt he was making threats. Some people felt he was more kind of crying out in despair, different memories, impressions. And within that 30 seconds from one station to the next, a white former Marine named Daniel Penny comes up behind him, puts him in a chokehold, drops him to the ground, the Marine Daniel Penny kind of underneath him and Jordan Neely on top, and is by his own account trying to restrain him.

Within seconds, the train gets to the next stop. Most everyone gets out, as you could imagine, and Daniel Penny continues to hold Jordan Neely for another five or so minutes, ultimately killing him. And from the moment this news wafted up, it just immediately was an American Rorschach test. Hero or vigilante? Is this a story of progressive cities run amok, or Donald Trump's encouragement of political violence, or pick your poison? And the way you framed is exactly right. This, it was reduced in that moment to this very easy clickbait story. And if people watching this remember, they probably remembered some version of that clickbait that they were fed.

But in fact, what I found when I went deep into this story was the Petri dish, you're exactly right, which is every single challenge in American life, but also every single valiant act of trying to make things better. Every crisis we have, every emotional undercurrent of this country, all of it was condensed in that subway car, and the doors closed, and all of America felt like it was compressed into that subway car. And so what I spent the last three years doing is trying to recover from what was reduced into clickbait, a real and profoundly human story, not just of a collision of two men in that moment, but all the things that led those two men to be there, all the things, all the systems and institutions that allowed Jordan Neely to be in the state that he was in, all the things that gave Daniel Penny both the sense of the need and the right to do what he did, and so on and so forth. And it is, to me, a story of all the things in this moment, in this country, that are pulling us away from our sense of common humanity, but also with so many of the people I spent time with reporting over the last three years, all the people and forces that pull us closer to our common humanity, all the people who don't do the thing most of us do, which is walk by that distressed person on the street and keep walking and say, so sad and keep walking. There are people who don't do that. There are extraordinary outreach workers who try to figure out how to fix and save and heal one of those lives at a time. There are high public officials thinking about, what does it look like to have mental health taken as seriously as public health, the way we understand polio prevention to be public health, or the way we understand putting nutrition labels on food to be public health. Right now, mental health is not really in the pantheon of public health. One of my main characters in the book was the Health Commissioner of New York. He was trying to think about how do you make mental health part of public health.