Phone A Friend: Anand Giridharadas.

Max: Okay, Unf*ckers, special treat today. So this is somebody that I actually spoke to in the development of this project, and now I have the other end of it, the finished project. I’m speaking today with Anand Giridharadas, who is the author of Man in the Mirror, which just came out. It’s Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City. And I can tell you, folks, having devoured this book, that this is—forget about the subject matter, we’re going to go through everything and actually what this says about us as a nation—just as a journalistic project, it is an absolute feat. I would encourage you to go get this book. And if you are interested politically, if you are interested in New York City, if you are interested in mental health dynamics, there’s really something for everybody, and it tells a very important picture. So it is my great pleasure to bring on Anand. Thank you so much for being here.

Anand Giridharadas: I’m so honored to be here. Thank you.

Max: So I want to start just by sort of setting the table, giving the author’s introduction of what this book is about, from its central characters, before we get into some of the broader themes. So if you could just sort of tell us what this project is.

Anand: Three years ago, on a subway train in New York City, a 30-year-old Black, mentally ill, homeless man named Jordan Neely boarded the train. He was formerly a Michael Jackson impersonator of modest renown. European tourists would sort of prowl around Times Square looking for the Michael Jackson guy in his heyday. He had since fallen on pretty hard times with homelessness and severe mental illness, schizophrenia.

He begins acting out in that subway car, throwing his jacket to the ground, sort of screaming, “I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I want something to eat. I want something to drink. I’m ready to go back to jail forever. I’m ready to die.” Those kinds of things. And maybe kind of moving towards different passengers. And in that very brief moment of that one-stop ride, a 24-year-old former Marine, a white guy named Daniel Penny, comes up behind Jordan Neely, puts a kind of chokehold around his neck, drops him to the ground over his own body, and just sort of begins holding. The train gets to the next station, Broadway–Lafayette. Doors open, virtually everybody gets out except those who want to stay. And from that point on, Daniel Penny continues to hold Jordan Neely for another five or so minutes, ultimately killing him.

And from the moment you might have first heard about this case, it immediately was this American Rorschach test. Did you see in Daniel Penny a hero standing up to anarchy in progressive cities, or did you see a vigilante in Donald Trump’s America? Did you see in Jordan Neely a career criminal who someone finally handled, or did you see a victim of every marginalization and systemic injustice in American life?

And I became convinced that there was so much more to this story than the clickbait version we were all being served and fed. I became convinced that in fact America itself was in that subway car with those two guys. There are many, many system failures. The racial and other hostilities that have thrived in this past decade of the Trump era. The sense of abandonment that so many Americans feel. The sense of taking matters into your own hands that I think has become one of the last threads of common culture in this country across the chasms. The way media and social media work to flatten and reduce other people and stories like this. Fear, the panic of disorder. All of these things.

What this book amounts to, I think—look, I wanted it to be a propulsive true crime page-turner story, because these days you have to make it that if you want people to read it and put down their cocaine phone for a couple hours and dive into a book. But I also really wanted to portray the heart of America in this age, and show this country, hold up the mirror, so we can see who we are, what we’ve allowed ourselves to become, and what it might take to get out of this era that I think a lot of us would prefer to be done with.

Max: So, thank you for setting this up. The one thing about the book, in the way that you’re talking about it as sort of a crime thriller and a page-turner—I thought it was a really interesting device to have chapters but not sections, and chapters that actually were kind of tucked in to the other chapters. There’s no “you’ve gotten to the end of this thing, and then you’re on to the next thing,” and it almost gives you this very flowing narrative where one section just feeds into the other, into the other, into the other. There’s no mental break for you to stop at any point. I thought that was a really interesting choice, a narrative choice, to be able to drive the book. So even if this is not a subject matter that’s interesting to you—for me it felt like, I remember reading a book called Blindness several years ago, where it was just basically one run. There were no chapters to the—

Anand: The Saramago book.

Max: Yes. Brilliant, brilliant piece, that’s not for everybody. Although once your ear starts to tune to it, you realize it actually puts you into the rhythm of the story in a very different and approachable way. So I appreciated that device. But more than just the device, more than just the characters—which I do want to talk about, because the characters in this book go beyond Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny. You actually make places certain characters, and then there are people in the periphery who are involved and not involved in the case that become central characters to develop this narrative. We’ll get into those.

But I was wondering if you could first also set us in time. This is 2023. We don’t know yet who Zohran Mamdani is. This is, I would say, the beginning of the real breakdown of the Adams administration, where things were falling apart. New York City at this time is very, I would say, uneven and erratic in its post-COVID recovery. There isn’t a sense of full harmony yet in the city proper, and then you have the looming specter of Trump coming back. Very high inflation. There’s all of these competing forces. 2023 to me feels very much like a fever dream. So I was wondering if you could just talk about the point in time and what this story did to sort of punctuate that time in America.

Anand: Yeah, that’s very well said. A couple things. I would put actually at the top of that list COVID. Even though you’re talking about three years plus since the beginning of COVID—this is a book partly about mental health and about mentally ill individuals, and we talk about psychotic breaks as something individuals have. Well, I think COVID will be understood in the future as a collective psychotic break that we all had.

Max: Yeah.

Anand: And this is something I’ve come across again and again in my career. When a terrible thing happens to one person, we have a name for it. But when the same terrible thing happens to everybody, it’s just called history. It’s just called culture. It’s just called life. If you had done to one person what COVID did—like if you locked one person in an apartment for a year and cut them off from all forms of, you know—you would recognize that that person was probably going to be in bad shape on the other side of that year.

Max: Instead, it becomes one of these “where were you when this happened?” moments, but because we all went through it all at once—

Anand: Right. And because we all went through it, it’s like, well, I guess that just happened. So there was, I think, a lot of us were in a bad way. A lot of us have not fully recovered. There’s some numbers around substance use and things like that, never quite the same. And I think for those who were already on the edge, mentally and otherwise, or with places to live or not live, this just pushed people into new places.

So I think in 2023, New York and other cities—you could just feel it. And sometimes statistics bore this out, sometimes they didn’t, but you could feel there was something a little feral in our cities. You could feel that a lot of people—I personally don’t come from a point of view of viewing it as dangerous, and statistically it’s not actually particularly dangerous. But there’s just a lot of people not in good shape. There’s a lot of people suffering in open view. And people have visceral reactions to that. So that was very much in the air, in addition to all the things you talk about.

So in some ways it was a particular moment. But I would say that if you step back and look at some of the deeper dynamics that the case implicated and triggered, I think the deeper dynamics still remain true, even though we’ve had some elections since then. Things have swung this way and that way. We’re in a Zohran era, not an Eric Adams era. We’re in a Trump era again, not a Joe Biden era.

But I think this book—although this phrase does not appear anywhere in it—I think this book is about the inner life, the kind of emotional inner life, of an authoritarian age. Which is to say, when we talk about authoritarianism, we talk about why do we have these leaders like Trump. What is going on? We talk about these kind of hard things, like voter suppression, or DOGE firing all these people, or these big palpable things. I think what I have come to learn in my years of reporting, and certainly at the heart of this book, is that an era like this one has a lot to do with what’s going on in people’s hearts, and I think those of us who write about politics struggle to convey that. Otherwise, how do you explain the number of people who Zohran won in New York who were Trump voters?

Max: Right.

Anand: Zohran won all—and he went and interviewed them. He was going and doing all these man-on-the-street interviews with all these Black and Brown people in Queens who voted for Trump and then seemed super excited about him. There is no conventional political logic that can explain that to you. But I think if you take the view I do, which is that a lot of what ends up in politics, what crashes on the shores of politics, is emotional. Is: am I okay? Do I feel safe? Do I feel as central and relevant as I used to feel? Is there going to be a place for me in the future? Am I respected? The kind of mirror questions, right? The questions you ask when you’re brushing your teeth. No one’s brain is looping through budget deficit or the border when they’re brushing their teeth.

Max: Right.

Anand: You may get to a very toxic position on some issue. But I think—and I’m saying this as a more general thing that I found in my reporting—to understand some of those things, like this person feels very passionately about the border even though they live in rural Wisconsin—

The way to explain a lot of that, or why suddenly everybody is really obsessed with who can go into bathrooms, and they may not even have any of those bathrooms near their house, is because there’s an inner dislocation and stress and a crisis of esteem.

And I think this book is about a lot of those inner dynamics of this age. The way fear is functioning in our politics. The way disorder is often ignored by politicians at their own peril. The way anonymous trust, which was one of the hallmarks of America in the world, is on the decline, so we don’t extend that kind of good faith to other people. The way people’s trust in whether they’re going to get the right outcome by doing the right thing, by petitioning the right authorities, by asking the system—the way that feeling is on the decline. The way people feel abandoned. The way people feel like, “fuck it, I might as well take matters into my own hands, because no one’s coming.” Everything I just described is on the level of emotion.

Max: Right.

Anand: None of that is about policy. And I think the things I just described are the driving forces in American political life. And I think in this story, this is a story where you get to watch those emotional forces in a particle collider in that subway car. My conviction was that if you could just watch those emotions in the particle collider of that F train car, you’d be able to understand something about how American life is working in this moment.

Max: That brings me to where my mind went. So I finished the book late, late last night, and like I said, I did it in two sittings.

Anand: The whole book in two sittings?

Max: Yeah. And again, that goes to the narrative substance and style of it, because once you’re into it and once you’re into the characters—I had to put it down the first time because I was just out of time, and then I finally dove back into it and finished it. And I had a lot of emotions by the end of it. And we’ll talk about the ending. We’ll talk about how the case turned out and, if we have time, really explore the characters.

But it occurred to me: this is a book about New York City. Yes, it’s sort of a proxy for the country, and a lot of those themes are in there, but they’re not explicit. The themes are whatever you read into them as the reader and what you’re feeling. And I think that there’s plenty of characters here to align with and identify with that tease that out about yourself. The one character that’s missing is you.

So the first book I took off my bookshelf last night was How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis. Because for me this was sort of a bookend version of what Riis’s project was about all those years ago, that I think fundamentally changed us as New Yorkers back then, but also it wound up changing national policy, of course. And it’s one of the most important books ever written. I would put How the Other Half Lives as an ancestor of this book, because it’s jumping into the modern age, but in the same way that Riis was approaching the tenements as a bystander, as objective as he could, to say, here’s the life that’s happening in this place that you do not see. You put us inside this subway car, and then you put us in the lives of the other people on the street, and then in the hospitals, in the suburbs, on the ocean, surfing, in diners. You put us everywhere, in all these places.

And by the end of it, here’s I think the biggest compliment that I can give you: I didn’t know where you landed on anything. I personally didn’t perceive any bias in it. I came to the book with bias, because I’m a consumer of political media and I’ve been watching you for years. So obviously I knew who was writing the book, and I kept looking for traces of you in this thing, and I never found you. So I think that that is also a really powerful note about this book. I think people are going to find it’s such a better way to teach people about a moment in history, is just to, as you say, put—who’s the man in the mirror? Just put that mirror up, and then see, did you find yourself in it? And I found myself in a number of spots in this that were, I think, really important for me to connect with. But I never found you. How did the reporting of this book impact you along the way, and either change you or maybe deepen some of your perspectives?

Anand: I love that question. That’s such an insightful comment, and you know the trade we’re in and these choices about how you tell the story, how you position yourself.

I would say, when I first started in journalism I was at The New York Times, and there also obviously you have to be fair and even-handed and not put yourself into it, really. But it’s a different kind of thing than this book. It’s a kind of neutrality, so it’s almost a lack of any kind of feeling or any kind of deep connection to anybody you’re writing about, and it’s from a remove. This book is, I think, trying to be fair in a different way, which is actually deeply feeling everybody’s perspective. So it’s not a kind of clinical cool objectivity of “I’m feeling no one’s point of view, I’m just neutral and unfeeling.” It’s a kind of roulette of feeling. A friend of mine described the book as perspective roulette. Every time you flip a chapter—and as you said, my editor suggested this, the chapters don’t even start on new pages.

Max: Right.

Anand: Right, which is an unusual choice, a very specific choice, to like, let’s keep it rolling and let’s totally dislocate you. You’re in this world, and now boom, you’re in that world.

And what I wanted to do, that is different from a New York Times or different from that kind of newspaper thing, is say—the first chapter of the book is from the perspective of, it’s about Tom Kenniff, Daniel Penny’s lawyer, but it’s also from his perspective. And it’s a Republican kind of law-and-order guy. A lot of people are surprised that the book starts on a Republican law-and-order guy. Well, that’s how the story starts. And my suspicion is, when you’re kind of in his world—I’m not fact-checking him, I’m giving you the way he looks at New York. He looks at New York as a kind of fentanyl-ravaged basket case where his client sort of finally stood up and did something. As you’re reading a few pages in, you might be getting annoyed if that’s not your worldview, or you might be feeling, this is fantastic, this guy gets it, if it is your worldview.

And then you flip a page—actually, you don’t even flip a page—and you’re in chapter two, and it’s Hawk Newsome, Black Lives Matter activist, who was kicked out of the global Black Lives Matter group for kind of excessive conviction. And Hawk Newsome has a completely different view. He’s a Black Lives Matter activist. He hates everything that Tom stands for. He thinks that the problem is not anarchy, but it’s abusive police and indifferent politicians, and the not-mattering of Black life. And you might then again be feeling rah rah, this is amazing, this is someone who gets it. Or you may be feeling, who the fuck is this guy?

Max: Right.

Anand: But you’re going to ride with it, maybe. And then you turn the next chapter, and it’s Al Sharpton, an older Black activist, who a lot of these younger Black activists don’t have any patience for anymore.

Max: That’s right.

Anand: With their approach of knowing friends in the establishment and trying to get things done behind the scenes. And I hope when you’re reading that, you can understand the perspective of an elder in the Black fight, and you can understand his sense of, hey kids, I know how to work power here. And I think you might be able to maybe also feel Hawk’s perspective of, why are these guys turning the other cheek again?

What my secret project of this book is—which I am now making less secret by saying it on your show—is to get lots of American readers to feel what it is like to be other people. I am not asking you to agree with any of these people. I think the odds are you probably won’t be more likely or less likely to agree with them on issues, having read these chapters. But I think you will gain a sense, a feeling, of what it is like to be them, and that’s really what I wanted you to do.

And I wanted that because—you said this thing of relating. I think about this a lot in my work. This is probably one of the things that I, sitting at this desk writing, do most often, which is I try to find what I call micro analogies to other people’s lives. So if I were to say, here’s a micro analogy: my second book was about a white supremacist in Texas who killed a bunch of immigrants after 9/11. So a macro analogy—if I was looking for a macro analogy with him, I’m trying to write him. Mark Stroman is his name. A macro analogy would be like, do I relate to Mark Stroman, the white supremacist murderer? Well, at the level of macro analogy, no, I don’t. I do not, in fact, relate to a white supremacist killer of a bunch of Brown people.

Max: Right. Yeah.

Anand: And I think for a lot of us, we kind of end there. Well, here’s micro analogies. Micro analogies are: are there parts of—again, going to that idea of the emotional inner life of things—are there component parts of him that I relate to? Are there pieces of his making, pieces of his motivation, that I can find a relation to? So then you say, okay, forget the white guy part. What was really going on for him was, like a lot of people of his ilk, he used to feel very central in this country, and then he began to feel less central. He began to feel like all these other people were cutting in line or getting more attention. Have I ever felt that? Forget the white part. Have I ever just felt like, this used to be my joint, and now who are all these other people? Yeah, I felt that all the time. I felt that in a restaurant. I felt that with the music. There’s like a million ways that you might have felt that, right?

Max: Maybe your wife is also writing a book and people are receiving it, and you’re like, “hey, I wrote one.”

Anand: Got it right here. Got it right here.

Max: What about my book?

Anand: Completely.

Max: Yeah.

Anand: So, have I felt that? Yeah, of course.

Max: Yeah.

Anand: So what I try to do when I’m writing people is I try to find micro analogies to them, not the macro analogies. So Hawk Newsome: can I relate to being a Black Lives Matter activist who thinks all of the cops are thugs? Not necessarily. Can I relate to Hawk’s theory that if you shape the optics of things you can have a disproportionate impact to the amount of people actually behind a cause? Yeah, I totally understand that. I promote books, I understand what that means. So this whole book is me trying to get you into the heads of people you share a country with.

Max: And again, you’re not in it. You’re truly not in it. And that is the best compliment I can give you. Did you have to resist the urge to reflect some sort of bias or editorializing? Did your editor ever get involved and be like, “all right, this one sticks out. I see you here.”

Anand: Yeah. And again, I think the reason I start with The New York Times thing is, I’m not trying to get rid of all—to the extent that bias means, like, are you fundamentally leaning one way or another? I definitely didn’t want that in the book. But it’s not a New York Times thing in the sense that it’s not without my judgments. It’s not zero judgments. It’s actually that it has so many of my judgments in it that they don’t all point one way or another.

Max: Even the decisions of who to platform as central characters.

Anand: Yeah, and just even my interpretations of things. I mean, I have this long chapter on Long Island. It’s not unbiased any more than my portrayal of the trauma that shaped Jordan Neely’s life is unbiased. There’s a judgment there. One might come to the view that Jordan Neely’s childhood trauma did not explain what happened to him later. There are people who could take that view. That’s not the view I took. So in a way, I’m making judgments, and I have beliefs based on the reporting. But what I’m not doing is fundamentally trying to tilt you this way or that way, or tell you what to think. This is a book that respects you, the reader, enough to say, you figure out what you think. But I am going to interpret the information I had. So, for example, to try to understand Daniel Penny, I spent a couple days with his Marine Corps unit in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

Max: I meant to ask you: were there any of those guys that actually crossed over with Penny? Were they aware of him as individuals? Did they know who he was?

Anand: No.

Max: This more of a mindset thing, this is where he trained, this is where they—

Anand: Yes.

Max: Okay.

Anand: Yeah. But it was his specific unit, so at least there was that kind of history. But no, people did not know him as an individual. But his training became very central in the trial, right? The training in the chokehold, his mentality. Certainly, outside the trial, a lot of people were raising questions about, did he have PTSD, or what was his state of mind. So I wanted to, again, in the spirit of reporting and understanding, go and see for myself. And I spent time with a bunch of these Marines and interviewed them. An d actually, this is the only chapter in the book where I didn’t write it up myself. I kind of did it as an oral history of just these voices of different Marines talking about their training, talking about the shaping of their worldview.

Max: Their language to me was actually really halting. The way that they spoke and some of the words that they used, to me, was actually kind of halting.

Anand: In what way?

Max: In that I didn’t expect them to use—I expected them to be much more hard-nosed and very matter-of-fact about certain things, when they actually interwove sort of emotional context into the work they were doing. And I was surprised by that.

Anand: Yeah, I was too. I thought they really opened up. It took a little time, but yeah, I tried to get them there, and I think a lot of them did go there to a degree that I found interesting. And one of the things I learned is that part of joining the Marines—and the Marine Corps in many ways is built, there’s interesting books about this, is built on a theory that there’s a lot wrong with American culture, that Americans are selfish and materialistic and short-termist and all about trivial things, and the Marine Corps needs people to be collectivist and not any of those things. And so the Marine Corps training is really based on a purging of a lot of who you are before you enter. You’re not allowed to say the word “I” for the first couple weeks of boot camp. In the United States of America, the most I-oriented country in the history of the world, the Marines who defend the United States are forced to not use maybe the most important word in American culture for the first day. Think about that.

Max: But if you set that against another set of characters that become a character unto themselves—what stands out to me about what you just said there is one of the surfers saying to you, “I just can’t imagine that a surfer would do this to somebody.” So Daniel Penny was not a monolith. He was not a single person that was carved out of stone from the Marines and became this one thing. He was also a surfer, and in that culture, his actions, his stances, what it became in the world, also belied that military training in a weird way. So you have all of these sort of conflicting forces in this young man’s life as well, which I thought was really interesting.

Anand: And it’s important. Part of what I’m trying to do is recover the human, the actual complex human beings here, from the clickbait.

Max: Yeah.

Anand: So Jordan Neely was very much reduced, and we can talk about that. But Daniel Penny was also reduced. He was reduced in some people’s telling to this kind of valiant hero who stood up against anarchy in the cities. I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that Daniel Penny conceived of himself in the terms that Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk projected onto him. Or he was framed as this white supremacist vigilante. There’s not a lot of evidence that he was a white supremacist vigilante either, taking orders from Donald Trump. None of those narratives were borne out by things in real life.

So I wanted to understand the actual makings of this. And one of the ironies is that Daniel Penny comes from this very insular town on Long Island called West Islip, which is a very kind of bland, cookie-cutter suburb that, when I spent time there for the book, I sort of realized was in many ways—I felt it was like a privileged refugee camp for middle-class people who fled New York City.

Max: For anybody that is not familiar with Long Island, by the way—because now you’re in my neck of the woods—you cannot mix up your Islips when you’re talking to people from Islip. There’s three of them. There’s actually four technically, but there’s different Islips within the bigger town of Islip, and they do not meet and they do not mix. Welcome to an island with 127 school districts next to one of the biggest cities in the world that has one. Anyway, continue.

Anand: It’s remarkable. And so one of the things I found was that the way to understand that town is almost as—it’s almost like an immigrant story, that everybody there, or refugee story, where there’s an obsession with New York City. It’s a very complicated relationship I describe in the book, of longing and loathing, where everybody is there, generally speaking, because they fled, or their parents fled, or their grandparents fled New York City.

Max: Right.

Anand: So everybody has a story of like, well, we were in the Bronx, we were in Queens, we were in Brooklyn. Then it got dicey, it got shady, it got—you know, those kind of softly spoken racial—

Max: What we say is, yeah, we’re over here now. We’re over here now. That’s all you need to know.

Anand: Exactly, exactly. And so it’s really interesting when you have a place that is settled by flight from fear of one place.

Max: Yeah.

Anand: Right. And sort of in a relatively brief period of history. You don’t have some people who came 300 years ago, and some people—it’s like a very tight band of history, the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, where people were like, get me out of there.

Max: Yeah.

Anand: The evening news, as you know—you turn on the television, and it’s not about stuff happening in the town around you. It is all too often terrible, dangerous, awful things happening in New York City. And that’s very interesting, right? To have people turning on the TV and just being fed sensational danger porn about a place 50 miles away.

Max: And the interesting thing about that—and you’re in this business, so you know better than anybody else—is that the packages, because of the budget cuts to broadcast, the packages tend to be very localized. And so you’re seeing, not just on national news, you’re seeing packages developed by New York crews, and then the local crews and broadcast also have access to those same packages. So whether you’re looking at local or you’re looking at national news, you’re getting this wall-to-wall dystopian vision, just because of the fact that they don’t really have crews that are distributed all around the country in the way that we used to. So Long Islanders do get fed a pretty steady diet of everything going on in New York, both local and national news. And then here on Long Island, we don’t actually have the local resources anymore. We’re just doing broad recaps of everything that the guys on the New York station said. So that point very well taken.

Anand: Which thenhas this impact of spreading a perception, spreading a fear. When I spent time in West Islip, the way I heard some people describe where I live, New York City, it was like they were talking about Somalia.

Max: Yeah, I’m sorry.

Anand: It’s so interesting. But I say all this to say, and this is part of the complexity of reporting: Daniel Penny came from that world. He was deeply from that world.

Max: Yeah.

Anand: And he wanted out.

Max: Right.

Anand: Which is one of the ironies of this story.

Max: That’s the misdirect of Daniel Penny as well, without a doubt. There were so many of those curveballs in there where you begin to think that you’ve got a bead on somebody, and then you really don’t. That’s what makes every story in here so human and so well told.

But I actually want to get off Penny for a minute. We’ll come back to it as sort of the conclusion of all this because—spoiler alert—he got off, for anybody that actually didn’t follow this case. Daniel Penny was acquitted. I want to talk to you about that moment in the trial. But first I’d actually like to talk about Jordan Neely, the human being at the center of this, who did lose his life and did not have an ability—you did not have the ability to talk to him as a full disclosure narrative of a human being in a human life, because he was gone.

If you could just talk a little bit about, I think, his tragic backstory, which might have led to his psychotic break, which is extremely important in all of this. But also then the system that failed him. And part three of that, I think, would be how there’s also this phenomenon among unhoused people who are also experiencing mental illness, that they actually do not want to be in the system. It struck me how many times you revealed cases of some of these characters, of people who willingly went back to the streets because they actually felt more comfortable there. There’s so many important themes that are teased out in this, especially in a place like New York City that actually takes far greater care to get its arms around mental health and the unhoused community. But again, so I fucked that question all up for you. Part one is talking about him as a person and maybe the psychotic break because of his tragic past, and then part two of that is him as it relates to the system and what failed along the way.

Anand: So, just as Daniel Penny was reduced, Jordan Neely was reduced, and unlike Daniel Penny, he was not alive to contribute to a different narrative. So I tried really hard in this book to recover him as a person, in whatever ways I could. It was the kind of life that was probably under-witnessed, let’s say. So it’s hard to do that. But I did as much as I can. I’ve been accused by some reviewers of empathizing too much with Jordan Neely, or having an overly intense empathy for Jordan Neely, and I am so proud of that criticism.

Jordan Neely is someone who was born into a precarious and difficult life. His mom was kind of in and out of shelters, struggled with abusive partners, and this is kind of Bayonne, New Jersey. In and out of shelters there. He had some time in Uptown Manhattan. He’s someone who had this very difficult childhood, made all the more difficult when he was barely an adolescent. His mother was murdered by her partner, her boyfriend. In an eerie twist that I found in the reporting, her cause of death listed on her death certificate from the Office of the Medical Examiner in New York City was compression of the neck, chokehold—the same cause of death that would be found for her son a decade and a half later by the same medical examiner’s office. So the way in which that kind of pain and mistreatment can spread through generations is also mind-boggling.

Obviously, this took an already precarious Jordan Neely and caused an enormous traumatic situation and so much difficulty. His mother was, by all accounts, his best friend. And he was very troubled by it. He had to actually testify in the trial against her boyfriend, who was accused of the murder.

Max: Represented himself.

Anand: The boyfriend had taken a paralegal class in high school—I think that’s what we could figure out from the reporting. A paralegal class in high school, and as a result was allowed to represent himself. Which means that on the witness stand—and I could only really figure this out when I was able to listen, we somehow obtained the audio of the trial from all those years ago, and listening to it I realized, that’s not the lawyer, that’s the defendant interrogating his dead victim’s son.

Max: It’s unreal.

Anand: And he would sometimes ask him questions. “Did you do that to get away from the defendant,” or whatever. And Jordan Neely would respond, “Yes, I did that to get away from you.” So talk about the trauma of losing your mother, and then the trauma of having to testify against the boyfriend who killed her, with the boyfriend grilling you on the witness stand when you’re a teenager. We contacted the judge all these years later. I said, “What do you think about this?” Well, I never thought about it at the time, but I guess that does seem a little bit strange.

Max: Oh my.

Anand: Not a trauma-informed process, as we would call it now.

And then Jordan Neely actually, from that very low point, he found community and connection and purpose in the Michael Jackson tribute artist community. Impersonators, super fans, others gave him a structure. Moses Harper, one of his good friends and one of my main characters in the book, said the MJ world sort of gave Jordan a way to be active in his healing, right? To kind of enter a world where cause and effect could sort of become related again, and you could take these actions and they would result in those things, and you could advance in your life.

Max: This is not the right framing of this, but she’s my favorite character, so to speak. I just loved her. She’s incredible. She was so necessary to the telling of this story.

Anand: Ah, thank you. Yeah, she’s an incredible person. She’ll be happy to hear that. I think a lot of people need to hear Moses’ story, a story of friendship. When all of us die, one day I hope we all have a friend, an advocate, like Moses Harper, who fights for what our time on this earth was about, and fights for us to matter in whatever ways that we can in death.

And so he entered the MJ world. He was an impersonator. He was around Times Square. People knew him. He was, I think, probably at the peak of his thriving, by all accounts. And then as he rounded the bend of his 20s and headed towards 30, mental illness really became more of the central story of his life. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, lots of demons, lots of substance use, just a lot of difficulty. Michael Jackson stuff kind of fell out of his life. He was street homeless. He was often walking around in soiled clothes in a sort of a daze. And that’s how he ended up that day in that subway car in that state.

When he was severely mentally ill and homeless, et cetera, he passed through this system that is sometimes called the revolving door. Which is all these institutions in New York, and versions in other cities, that care for folks who are homeless, mentally ill, other issues. There’s a giant apparatus, right? People may have a feeling nothing’s being done, but that’s not true. There’s a giant apparatus. But it’s called the revolving door because you go to an ER, they’ll stabilize you, but you don’t have good insurance, they’ll kick you out. Then you might end up on the street. Then you go into a shelter, but the shelter’s rules are too coercive and tight, and you don’t want to be there anymore, or they don’t want you there anymore, and you’re out of there in a few days. And then you might end up in a clinic somewhere. And then you might end up with outreach workers somewhere. Then you might end up in a supportive housing unit, but you then might get kicked out of that for some violation. You might be in a rehab program. You might be in Rikers.

Jordan Neely very much passed through this revolving door system, that in many ways has this issue of coordination you raised. And I’ve been doing events with many people, but including the MTA and the Department of Homeless Services last week, where they talked about, we have a giant coordination problem. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, except it’s more like an Indian god where there’s like 300 left hands and 300 right hands, and none of them are talking to each other. So that’s a problem.

But to your final point, I think there’s another issue, and I said this at this event at the Transit Museum with the Department of Homeless Services and MTA. I think even if you fixed all the technocratic problems, even if you dealt with all the siloing and the information sharing, and you had perfect iPads with all the information loaded, and imagine IBM were to take over the information system of this world—there is still another problem, which Jordan Neely embodied. Which is the problem that a lot of people, as you say, who are in this condition, who are severely mentally ill on the street, do not know they are ill, and say no to various forms of care. Do not want medicine in their veins. Do not want to go to a hospital against their will.

And at some point, as a society, we have to make democratic, small-d democratic decisions about what we believe in that case. If you are flagrantly dangerous, obviously the police have the right to grab you off the street. If you are self-harming, they have the right to grab you off the street, force you into care. But if you are just in the far-off corner of a subway station every day, smiling at people, not getting in anybody’s way—you’re not going to be dead tomorrow, you’re not going to be dead next year, but you’re not taking care of yourself, you’re not showering, you don’t quite know you’re ill—do we, as a society, have the right to grab you off the street and force you into care? Ask yourself now, as you listen to this. Do you think we do? It’s complicated.

Max: Yes.

Anand: This is a society where we talk about “my body, my choice” on one set of issues. Is that also my body, my choice, or is that different? Do you want Zohran Mamdani having that power? Do you want Donald Trump having that power, to deem someone too ill to make decisions for themselves?

There was a time in this country where every housewife who was unhappy being a housewife was deemed crazy. It turns out they were not crazy to hate being housewives in the 1950s. So these are hard issues, and one of the reasons I wrote the book is to hold up a mirror to those issues and force all of us to grapple with them. These are not decisions that should be made behind closed doors, behind our back. I think the public needs to participate in these questions. When we see street encampments in San Francisco and Seattle, when we see folks on the street in New York and Chicago and elsewhere, we need to weigh in as the public on: are we comfortable with taking away people’s autonomy sometimes in the name of their dignity?

Max: Well, and I think what you did was beyond just humanizing people. You actually gave us a perspective of the people wearing the orange vests, who are clearing the encampments. What are they thinking? What are they feeling in that moment? Is this really what they signed up for? Why do they do what they do? To the police, to the prosecutors, to the defenders. It’s everybody within this system, and each part is falling apart just enough where people can fall through the cracks.

And it does offer that internal investigation—it forces this internal investigation of what I’ve heard you talk about in a couple of other interviews, between idealism and realism. Like, we put these ideals out there, but then we have to govern in the reality and put ourselves in those positions. And I think you’ve given us the opportunity to have better conversations by doing the narrative this way.

But we have to get to the trial itself, where he was acquitted. There were two charges that Penny was brought up on. At some point, the prosecutor dropped the bigger charge, which left the one that I have a feeling that everybody, maybe including Daniel Penny himself, thought was pretty much a slam dunk. Can you talk about those final moments of acquittal and what that charge was?

Anand: It was very striking and legally quite novel and confusing, what happened. The top charge was a manslaughter charge, I think second-degree manslaughter, and that could have carried 15 to 20 years. And then the second one was criminally negligent homicide, I think, which was a maximum of a few years, couple years. And the kind of layman summary of the two charges was: he knew better, and he should have known better.

So the top charge really in particular leaned on his Marine Corps training. He, unlike most people, knew what a chokehold could do. Had been certified in it. Had followed Marine guidelines about it not being longer than five seconds, things like that.

Max: I think, as the prosecution pointed out, not the only way to subdue a person. That’s not the only training you receive. There were other ways to accomplish.

Anand: And you could imagine someone of Daniel Penny’s strength. A strong punch could have also been quite effective, quite crushing for someone like Neely, but not in the territory of life-threatening. And you would assume, as a Marine with four years’ training, he would be able to deliver a punch or a throw or something like that that could have incapacitated Neely, but not implicated the ability of his brain to get oxygen.

So the trial is going on, and the jury hangs on this top charge. They just cannot get to resolution, which basically means they can’t get to unanimity for convicting him, and they can’t get the unanimity for acquitting him. There’s disagreement. Some people presumably really want to acquit him, and some people really want to convict him on that top, 15-ish-year charge.

Max: So this Rorschach test is continuing in the jury, right?

Anand: Yeah. And you can tell, just the vibes in the jury, there was tension. And then the government withdrew the top charge. There was just kind of a little bit of a legal stalemate. Like, what do you do in this situation? They withdrew their own top charge, which thus forced the jury to move on to the second charge, and the jury came back really quickly on the second one, and acquitted Penny. So that was extremely confusing to everybody.

Max: If you get hung up on the big one, how do you—

Anand: How do you have a jury that’s very divided on “should this person go away for 15 years”—

Max: Yeah.

Anand: —but then is unanimous on the person not going away for two years. Clearly, it wasn’t a legal rationale, right? It does not make sense for any legal rationale. There was a lot of speculation that it just had to do with more human things, like not wanting to do the case anymore, not wanting to go into another weekend, not wanting to fight with each other anymore, if that’s what was going on in that room. The basic human motivations that drive a lot of what we all do.

And so then, as soon as the acquittal happened, there was some press conferences which I covered, and then I got word that Daniel Penny was having a victory party at a bar in Midtown.

Max: This is unbelievable.

Anand: And somehow I managed to be the only reporter invited to come to the American Whiskey bar in Midtown, and so I went. And I will say—not to sound prideful—part of what I really try to do in this book is be so sincere and dogged about trying to understand everybody’s point of view, that I think by the end, whether it’s Daniel Penny’s team or Jordan Neely’s family or others, there was a level of trust about what I was trying to do. I think everybody understood what I was trying to do. I think now that a lot of those folks have read the book, I think they’ve found in the book the thing that I said I was trying to do. I try to be really straightforward, because there’s so little trust in anything anymore, and so I tried to be really trustworthy in this.

And I go to that whiskey bar, walk in. Daniel Penny’s lawyers are sitting there at the table. I sit with them, and they’re confused by this jury thing. They’re sitting there wondering—that’s what they’re talking about at the high-top table. How did this happen? How do you hang on a top charge and then acquit on a lesser charge.

Max: And then there was a phone call.

Anand: And as I was sitting there talking to them, Steven Raiser, the other lawyer, his phone rang, and he looked at me, and he’s like, “I’m so sorry, I have to take this.” And I looked down at his phone, because I’m a reporter, and it said Kyle Rittenhouse. Kyle Rittenhouse was calling to offer his congratulations. The jury consultant that he had hired, that O.J. Simpson had hired an eon ago, had been their jury consultant as well. So there’s a kind of kinship between some of these cases and some of maybe the people involved in these cases, and so he was calling to offer his congratulations.

Max: And we should say that life has worked out fabulously for Daniel Penny, and that he was picked up for a job he had zero qualifications for by the now-bad guys, Andreessen Horowitz, and has the ability to live a very fruitful, productive life in the city that he has claimed to want to be a part of.

There was one moment though that you write about that gave me sort of chills, almost akin to watching the end of Primal Fear. I don’t know if you remember that movie—that’s Ed Norton’s breakout role with Richard Gere, where he’s basically playing a role in order to convince a jury that he is two people, and it turns out he’s faking. And it’s that moment at the end where Penny finally, after not doing so the entire trial, locks eyes with the prosecutors for a little bit too long, with a very stern gaze, almost like a “fuck you, I did this,” and then just walked out and just very casually went on with his life. That to me was—if anything was haunting about the book, to me that was the moment. Because again, it’s so matter-of-fact in the way that you put it down. But this is clearly something that had bothered the prosecution, who found itself in the wilderness, like even they couldn’t believe that it happened.

So I want to, before you go, I have to ask you about one other thing that maybe sets up a future conversation between us once your schedule maybe dies down, if that’s ever a thing in your life. Because while you are reporting out this—this is three years of reportage, three years of very obviously detailed reportage—but while you’re doing this, you are also probably one of the keenest and most insightful commentators with respect to the Epstein files.

So I had followed you. It’s weird. I had this sort of out-of-body, like, I’m following you in this one world, but I knew that this book was happening as well. The contrapuntal nature of looking at a small story like this, such a human and devastating story, and then going into the justice system to see that, at least in my opinion—I’m not putting this on you—that justice was ultimately not served, while you’re also working on the biggest case files that we’ve ever had access to, maybe not fully, but we’ve ever had access to, about the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card of the elite who find solace in the system as well.

I don’t know that I have a question here, except to say: did the reporting of the two break your brain in the same way that it breaks my brain thinking about you living in these two different worlds? That they couldn’t be further apart, and yet they’re coming to the same fucking conclusion.

Anand: Here’s what I do think they have in common, because they are obviously very different stories, and yet I think there’s something emblematic about the era we live in, the election we’re about to have, that I think is captured in both stories.

So one is that I think at the heart of the Penny and Neely saga—the key context of this whole saga is, I think, the widespread sense of abandonment that Americans feel. And contrary to the divisive nature of the case, I tried to actually understand that sense of abandonment as something we have in common. I think you can quibble with different people’s perceptions, but in that subway car that day, Jordan Neely felt abandoned and had reason to feel abandoned. Daniel Penny claimed to feel abandoned by the lack of police, a lack of law enforcement, and all these systems of homeless and mentally ill care that probably should not have left Jordan Neely in that car in that state. The passengers felt abandoned by all these systems, and you can sort of hear that in these 911 calls: where are the authorities? And I think a lot of the authorities who I later spoke to for the book confessed that their systems abandoned all of those people to themselves, when those systems should have been more responsive.

And I think that sense of abandonment wasn’t just in that F train. That is a defining emotion in American political life today. I think it is the emotion that is going to be crashing into these midterms. It is driving our politics. It is driving people to the left. It is driving people to the right. It’s driving people in all kinds of directions. But it’s a powerful emotion.

And if you look at the Epstein story, in a very different kind of trajectory and a different arc, it’s also a story of that abandonment. It’s those girls who are abandoned, and women who are abandoned. It’s the sense that we all have that even when it’s a story that is almost perfectly narratively constructed to be an easy, open-and-shut case for justice like predatory plutocrats preying on little girls—that even then we can’t quite get there. So the Epstein story in many ways fed on that sense of abandonment.

And I was talking to someone the other day about the fact that Penny got this job as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, this venture capital firm. And for many people, there’s just this—it seems unfair, or it seems like a reward for something that shouldn’t necessarily be rewarded. But I think there’s even a deeper meaning in that too, which is if you look at the kind of AI conversation that is now being had—and I’m exaggerating here slightly, but I think these are exaggerations that are very much in the news, so I’m not even sure they’re exaggerations.

There’s sort of a view you have from Silicon Valley, if you listen to a Peter Thiel or if you listen to some of these prognostications, that there’s kind of two scenarios for all of us. Like, if you’re lucky, you will be sort of adjacent to the tech world, you’ll have brilliant startup ideas. You’ll be early to figuring out how to use AI and supercharge whatever it is you do. You will go from making one podcast a day to making 700 a day, and you’ll be a tycoon of podcasts. That’s like one scenario. Make yourself adjacent to tech and thrive and survive and thrive and become an overlord. And then, from that very same world, there’s all these predictions out there that the rest of us are kind of gonna all die.—

Max: Mass societal dislocation at a minimum.

Anand: And at a minimum, no jobs. No work.

Max: Right.

Anand: No purpose, nothing for us to do. But these people are literally talking about 10% chance of human extinction. They’re talking about their bunkers. They’re talking about going interplanetary.

So if you look at the world right now, I think it’s only a minor exaggeration to say the two scenarios we’re sort of being offered are: be a tech-adjacent overlord, or risk death. And when you think of this story of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, this collision on the F train, this moment, the way it ended was one of them dead—

Max: Right.

Anand: —and the other a venture capitalist. It feels like America in the 2020s, as perfectly distilled as could be.

Max: You see, everybody, this is why this guy writes the fucking books. See what he did there? Let me tell you something. That was beautiful, what you just did. Amazing.

Anand: Thank you. Thank you.

Max: I gave you all the compliments because I really believe them, and I did devour it. People need to pick this up if they want to get dialed into this story completely. Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City. I can’t thank you enough for spending this amount of time with us. I really appreciate it.

Anand: I can’t thank you enough. You’re part of why this book has been able to be what it was. So I’m really, really grateful to you.

Max: Oh yeah, I mean, I introduced you to a couple of knuckleheads on Long Island and said, I don’t know, talk to these guys. That’s the sum total of my experience with it.

Anand: Well I’m very grateful.

Max: Well, I really do appreciate it, and hopefully we can do this again sometime.

Anand: Anytime.

Max: Link in the description below to where you can get this book. And again, thank you so much for making the time.

Anand: Thank you, real pleasure.