Jordan Neely’s Subway Death: What 3 Years of Reporting Revealed | Author Anand Giridharadas

Key Takeaway

Practice one “mental leap” today: when you feel certain that someone is wrong, pause before reacting and write down one plausible reason their experience, incentives, or environment could make their view feel rational to them. This is not agreement or surrendering your values. It is a discipline of curiosity that makes conversations less reactive, helps you see systems rather than caricatures, and gives you a better chance of finding common ground or influencing change.

Episode Overview

Anand Giridharadas discusses Man in the Mirror, his reported account of Jordan Neely’s death on a New York subway and the many systems, people, and failures surrounding it. He and Rich Roll explore dehumanization, homelessness, mental health, political polarization, elite power, and why curiosity about people unlike ourselves is both a civic skill and a practical path toward change.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Jordan Neely’s Subway Death: What 3 Years of Reporting Revealed | Author Anand Giridharadas from Rich Roll Podcast. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

I'm trying to get you into the head of all these kinds of people, not because 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 Girdharadas, everybody. Anand Girdharadas. Anand Girdharadas 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.

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

As have I. 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. Thank you. 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 Wolfe 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. That's a brilliant summary of it.

Man in the Mirror, at the heart of it, is a story that many people watching this will probably passingly remember, if that. 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 renown. People would come to New York looking for him back in the day, but had 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 2nd 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? The way you framed it is exactly right. It was reduced in that moment to this very easy clickbait story.

And if people watching this remember, they probably remember 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 systems and institutions that allowed Jordan Neely to be in the state that he was in, all the things that gave Daniel Penney 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. I spent a lot of time in the last three years thinking about some of the worst things that are happening in this country and that can happen between us, but also some of the most extraordinary acts of humanizing and humanity. This book is a petri dish of all of that. I think I wrote it in the hope that it makes people feel more alive in their connection to that humanity.

When you came across the story for the first time, was it immediately evident to you that there was a lot there to investigate, or did that happen over time? This is, in a moment, this flashpoint that contains multitudes, everything from mental health to your point, addiction, homelessness, how power operates. From the highest levels, Eric Adams, all the way down to the boots on the ground activists, it's populated with every color on the spectrum of archetype. In our current journalistic environment, that gets reduced down to these undimensional character figures.

This is fodder for endless page six or New York Post headlines, obviously. You've taken this tack of trying to really understand everybody, but at what point during the unfolding of this ongoing story, because it monopolized news here, at least in New York for quite a period of time, did you realize there's a lot here, maybe there's a book to this? I didn't realize. This book was a gift. It's an amazing story. I have many amazing friends in my life. One of my best friends is a guy named Sam, who's a brilliant journalist and editor.

He now works at the New York Times. We came up together in journalism. We were actually both foreign correspondents in India together 20 years ago. We were part of a group of friends who were all covering India. He was at the Associated Press then. I was at the New York Times then. We were covering India in this period of crazy, remarkable growth and change. We followed each other's work. We followed each other's lives. The kind of work I used to do in India, I was based in Mumbai, so I was a foreign correspondent.

I'd really tell human stories. I wasn't in the capital. I didn't have to do government, parliament, tax ... I was just saying, how in this country is changing so fast? What does that mean for people? How is marriage changing in India? How are ambitions changing? How do the way people see themselves change? That became my thing. Sam and I kind of grew and grew and went into different roles. He now is kind of someone who assigns and creates possibilities for others at the Times. I became a writer.

Over the years, Sam watched me kind of change and evolve, as we all do. He liked some of the changes, but he didn't like some of the others. He basically started to feel ... This is a conversation we started to have over years, the kind of conversation you can only have with a true friend. He sort of felt I'd lost my way. We spent a lot of time together in COVID. A lot of these conversations were in COVID. He felt that I had gone from being someone who can understand everybody, who can really get into the head of ...

I wrote a book about ... The Texas book was about a white supremacist. It's a deeply empathetic portrait. I'm not a fan of white supremacy, but I prided myself on being able to render it in a way that people would recognize the heart and soul of that person. I think with the Trump era, like a lot of people, I felt like, no, it's important to take stands. Journalism, my profession is too weak and doesn't call things what they are and doesn't call spades a spade. I sort of became of this view that it's really important to make a case.

I found success. My third book, Winner's Take All, made a really passionate case against oligarchy in American life. I became known for that. You don't necessarily ... You know this. You don't choose your destination. You just choose your next step, and then the next step, and the next step. After some years, I had just chased each thing, and chased each whim, and chased each decision. I had become not the person who tries to understand everybody. I'd become the kind of person who says, that leader's bad.

These people are good. They should win. They should ... I'm caricaturing it slightly. I think I had a little ... But that was the direction. I'd become more of an advocate. Sam was the only friend who was like, I'm worried about you, dude. I think you've lost your way. I think a lot of people can go on social media and just say, these people are good, these people are bad. Trump's an idiot. Anybody can do that. He's like, I remember when we were in India, and you would ride the train with migrants from the heartland of India to Bombay, 17 hour train ride.

You could get inside what it is that possesses people to leave their village and everything they've known. Then you'd spend the first three days with a migrant showing what it is like to arrive in a city of 20 million people, and you don't know anybody. Do that for America. Why did you stop doing that? I thought there was truth in what he was saying. I was also annoyed by what he was saying. I also felt like, I was like, you're the New York Times, you guys are always soft peddling this Trump stuff.

It was what my wife, Priya Parker, calls a worthy grapple, a worthy fight, over years. One day he called me, a few days after the Jordan Neely Daniel Penney case happened. I've been complaining, as I'm always complaining, about not having my next book. He's like, I got your next book for you. It took me a second. I said, it's a little bit of a municipal level. I'm not like a city reporter, I don't ... He said, this is an everything book, but this conversation we have been having over these years, getting back to reporting, getting onto the street, literally sitting your butt on the pavement and understanding the person sitting across from you, this will jolt you back into this thing that you say you agree maybe you should go back to.

I texted Sam within days of starting on this project, because I just hit the streets. I started reporting on the case, but also just on homeless people in New York, and on NYPD sweeps of homeless people, and clearing encampments, and city hall. I had to buy a bunch of notebooks, journalist notebooks, which I didn't have a stash of, because I'd kind of become more of someone who just makes a case on Morning Joe. I remember texting Sam saying, I know you're from LA, so this language will be familiar to you, but it's not really how I talk.

I feel like I've been on a spiritual cleanse by going back to this kind of reporting. I felt like I had ... I realized that I had sort of allowed myself to become a person with a teleprompter instead of a notebook. The teleprompter is filled, the notebook is blank. Sure. You're forming a role, and it's been this kind of hero's journey back home to really connect with what got you animated about this field in the first place on some level. That's so interesting to hear, because my ...

kind of just from an arm's length perspective, like looking at your work, like how did you make this decision? and on some level it's surprising to hear that you had to be jolted out because it feels somewhat of an extension from persuaders this idea that you start off as this man of the people journalist then you ascend into the halls of the new york times and the atlantic and you know broadcast news and all that uh and then you get kind of fetid for speaking truth to power uh from inside the halls of power which is interesting in its own right but then you become more of like a pundit right and you're trying to reconcile your activist advocate tendencies with how to actually forge real change and realizing that the fringe you know kind of side of the spectrum of activism isn't actually all that helpful in terms of forging policy change right you have to figure out how to enlist people and excite them and recruit them to your cause and that makes you somebody who's suddenly kind of in the middle i suppose and maybe that's compromising your values on some level but you're making the argument that it's necessary in order to like have the bigger picture in view and so this book and this story is a lens onto the the front lines of of the latest battle in a war that's been going on forever over like who are we essentially who are we as a culture as a society as as yeah who belongs who like what does it mean to be an american but it's also a war that's been going on from the inception of humanity in every culture and civilization like the story is timely but the themes and what you're getting at are timeless right and the way to understand that is to return back to the beginning exactly but and it isn't quite the progression that i thought it was and you you didn't have that kind of awareness you had to like be jolted out of it to get back in i think so because i think what happened to me and i don't i can't speak for anybody else but i don't think i'm the only person this has happened to in this i would say the trump era is one way to think about it although it's not the only thing that has contributed to this i got into the work i did out of curiosity as not just like a trait that i had but as like an animating force in my life right my job in its core is like it is a license to go as you are doing right now it is a license to sit down with people and ask them anything right regular civilians can't do that it's considered rude to ask people the kinds of things you and i have feel like a license to ask people right and so i got into the work i did to fill the empty note all those years ago right these were not even assignments i genuinely am curious about how do you leave a tiny village in uttar pradesh india having literally only seen a big city in movies and then just take a train to that city knowing nobody and then how do you become a taxi driver in that city how do you where do you sleep like just real curiosity that's what animates my reporting and i think what happened to me over the years partly it is what happens in journalism is a certain success gets you promoted into punditry that's just like a weird structural thing that happens that the people who have a little bit of luck in it are asked to like what should the president do instead of what happened what did you see the real core question of our question is like what did you see but you can get promoted into like what do you think should happen and like i guess as a man you're kind of like oh well let me tell you you know what i what i think should happen but the trump era also for me was an assault on that sense of curiosity i had because it encouraged this other thing which i think we all also have which is certitude and the conflicts of this era the things that were just not right and you almost felt like you see this thing you see that thing and it's like i'm almost a race to say as quickly as possible that ain't right and i think we'd all agree like there's a bunch of things that are not right that it's really feels really important to say it and it feels like being a good person in this era has demanded like are you are you saying all the things that are not you're waking up every day in a fucking deficit because of all the things that happened overnight that you now on social media need to on the record say are not right fine what i felt started to happen to my brain i felt like i was getting the brain of someone in like a religion or a cult where you're not allowed to think contrary thoughts because it was just like mantras and the mantras were true as far as i could tell but they just felt like to keep repeating that this person's bad and this idea is bad and this is dangerous and this is destructive it's actually an enemy of thinking at some level and i felt like i my thinking muscles were atrophying from all the things that righteously one wanted to like take a stand about and so this book it's not me walking like i'm very glad some people are still doing that but i felt like my gift and skill in this world is not that my everybody can do a lot of people can do that people do that better than me the thing that i think i can do in a special way is to inhabit a lot of different perspectives and i i don't know why and i grew up in ohio i grew up in the dc area i grew up outside of the u.s i live in india all those years after college i think i can understand lots of different types of americans and a lot of this book is actually using language to do that so it's not just the facts about them how they think but you're dealing with daniel penny's republican lawyer and you're dealing with ashvin vasan the health commissioner is a progressive you know mental health reformer and you're dealing with outreach workers dealing with homeless folks dealing with cops i'm trying to get you into the head of all these kinds of people not because 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 and understand the way the world looks to also the an appreciation of the value of that which we have lost touch with your internal conflict is a microcosm of the kind of macro tension and conflict that permeates the book which is when we're in our siloed states and we're preaching to the choir are we really affecting anything meaningful and it's a reflection of like our our social media state of affairs etc it's intoxicating to kind of ascend society like you have been successful you find yourself in certain rooms and suddenly you have these opportunities that maybe you didn't even think you would get and you relish them and you're playing a role there's a lot of um gestalt behind that like it's easy there's momentum right and you're just kind of moving upward as you do this thing and you're celebrated for that and there's expectations uh that you set for yourself internally but also by your tribe like hey when you go on morning joe these are the things you're going to say and if you say something differently you're going to get you know exiled from your tribe right so there's stakes as well at the same time you're no stranger to this like when you like kind of in your aspen institute days like kind of talking about like what was actually going on there that was risky for you and it kind of advanced your career ironically but then you find yourself in this position again and the solution to that is to seek understanding and lead with curiosity i mean these are things that i learned in the program of recovery where you're surrounded by all different kinds of people and in this incredibly non-judgmental space and i tend to live in the gray areas as well and when i do this podcast like i'm not looking to judge anybody i'm not looking to take a stand or have a debate or an argument i'm seeking to understand this person and the more that i can model that in these conversations i have to believe that that is like without saying it outright i'm demonstrating that this is a way to be in the world that i think is more beneficial than shouting at each other because certainly the way that we're doing that right now isn't solving any problems and i'm sure when you write these books there may be a publisher's voice who's saying well what's the solution to this instead of having bullet points at the end of each chapter here's your takeaways like you're just you're demonstrating a way of being with people that i think is the antidote to essentially everything that's ailing us if we want to find a positive way forward this is the way you do it you can't just you know entrench the bulwark of your particular point of view you have to i mean i hate that word reach across the aisle but you have to understand the deeper dynamic that's at play and one of the things that my my wife always says to me is every man is right from his own perspective and if you walked you know in their shoes throughout their entire life you would make the same decisions that they did and your kind of recurring mantra in this book is like you have to meet people where they are that's exactly right it's not the same as the mushy middle or you know the the center always has the truth what i'm actually saying is is different which is wherever you land wherever you vote and have a point of view absolutely be ardent in that but if you are not intelligent and insightful about the other ones that are in the conversation then we have a problem and you're not going to be very effective and i think that's what's actually happened so i am not making a case for like the truth is the mean point between whatever opinions are out there but this is and i've always felt this reporting on this country and i think a lot of people who maybe live in my bubble in new york but don't get to be reporters don't maybe appreciate this in the same visceral way if you do this work this is a really large country i can't overstate that right the range of types of lives lived the range in particular of geography like when you get out of this right the most dense assemblage of human beings one of them ever created uh diverse etc and then you know you spend time in rural texas like it is physically and and psychologically different right when i spent a lot of time in texas for that book the true american the notion of why people might want a gun when they live 45 minutes away from a police response i'm not i didn't change my view on whether we should do gun control or not my opinion is probably the exact same as it was before but spending a lot of time in that landscape and realizing i live 30 seconds away from police being at my house if i need them and there are people here who live with like a response time that is 90 multiple 90 times that is it possible that they might have a view about the need to provide their own defense that would be different is it possible that that difference is not about there being good or bad or whatever types of people but just literally the structure of our kind of psychic geography being so different and you could go down the list of tribes and groups and places this is a country of fighting faiths to quote that old supreme court phrase and part of what i wanted to do is to use the power the artistry of this kind of narrative non-fiction writing to say these people of these fighting faiths are actually one people they may not feel they are one people with each other a lot of my characters i've been i am still in good standing with everybody i wrote about in this book i promise everybody i wrote about in this book you said bonfire the vanities which you know tom wolf amazing book i read it as i was starting this oh that's so interesting it's the first thing i read when sam told me to write this book i go the weekend take bonfire and start reading it and i had two thoughts one this is completely what i want to do but non-fiction by the way sam had said this is potentially 2023 bonfire the vanities um my agent lynn nesbitt was the agent on bonfire the vanities a long time ago but my second thought was i want to do it in a completely different spirit than this he and i love that book to be very clear but he tore everybody down it's a mockery he's making a mockery everybody's an idiot right everybody is pulled down right i wanted to kind of see if you could do the opposite not in a pollyanna-ish way but to your wife's point what is a cop's view of what it's like to clear a encampment of homeless people i understand what i feel about that i already know that i don't need to go do research to to find out how i feel about that i got that and then what's a homeless person's view i write in the book about choco a homeless man who witnessed a kind of one hour of his being swept by the nypd from a block street pavement at the end of a block that he grew up on he was probably in his 60s or 70s he'd grown up on that block in housing and then at the end of his life ended up living on the pavement of the same block he grew up on and i'm watching for an hour as the nypd comes they offer him a chance to leave they offer him shelter he doesn't want to go back to those places um i watch him say no then i watch him start to gather up his things um he moves 15 feet around the corner which satisfies the legal requirement that he wasn't at the initial thing 10 cops garbage trucks they throw away a bunch of his stuff he takes what he wants he goes 15 feet around the corner cops leave and he goes right back to where he was and a few Weeks after that, he actually did accept shelter.

He goes to a shelter. He tells them very clearly, I'm to say, he lost a few toes to frostbite. I can't do stairs. They don't listen. They take him to a place with stairs. Takes him an hour or something to go down one flight into this space. He's like, this is not gonna work. Goes back downtown. He left a bunch of his stuff that he thought he'd get later. All gone. Social security guard gone. Photos gone. And I remember Choco telling me, they took all my photos.

And he remembered the number. And he said, I've had a chaotic life, but I know the number of things I have. I know the number of photos. I always keep things in order. And he described for me this photo that particularly pained him to lose of him, the young kid, five years old or something, as the ring bearer at a wedding. Right? He held a little box and was the ring bearer. And I just sat there thinking like, he's sitting at the end of his block, mourning the loss of this photo that was also this kid of promise who maybe wouldn't have ended up like this, who did.

And to be able to hold in your mind, as an exercise for me, both someone like that, who we have many emotional defenses to not see all the way into. I don't think you could survive walking down the streets of a city if every time you saw someone in that kind of situation, you felt everything I just described. Can you hold that and hold the fact that those sanitation workers are trying to do a job, that there actually are public health risks in large numbers of people living on the street?

Can you square that with the outreach workers who have this reality of patiently trying to persuade these folks to come into shelter and who themselves are holding the idea that come on, just say yes. And also kind of understanding why a lot of people don't wanna go to those shelters. And can you hold that with the public health official who is saying, this is all downstream, this is all deck chair rotation. We have to transform psychosocial rehabilitation, we have to change the landscape of the city, we have to make mental, who is really thinking about these generational things and not really addressing the current thing.

Can we understand the pretty facile mayor he worked for, who, despite that facileness, kind of had the insight that if all of our ideas about dealing with these folks in distress are things that'll bloom in 20 years, every mayor is gonna lose an election after the first term. Maybe we gotta do some cheap tricks like putting a few cops on the street so people feel like something's happening. Taken in isolation, each of these perspectives is very limited. If you could use the power of writing, I felt, to show these people in conversation and show their realities as part of a larger whole, I felt it could be a deepening experience for me, first of all, and then for people reading it.

This episode is sponsored by Seed. The supplement market has a very big trust me problem. Everybody is science-backed, but only about 16% of supplements are ever clinically tested. That phrase, science-backed, is essentially meaningless. It's marketing decoration. But here's how you fix that. You run the study, which is exactly what Seed did. In fact, they just conducted the largest clinical trial ever done on a probiotic for bloating and gas. 350 men and women, six weeks, on the exact product I've taken daily for years. DSO1 Daily Symbiotic, Seed's 24-strain probiotic and prebiotic.

Within one week, people were less bothered by bloating through their day. By four weeks, it was clinically shown to reduce gas. By six weeks, improved regularity and sustained relief. And the mechanism holds up. DSO1 actually survives your digestive tract, and then it increases beneficial lactobacillus 17-fold and strengthens the gut barrier. Right now, for all of you guys, the listeners and the viewers of the show, Seed is offering an exclusive 25% off your first order of DSO1 Daily Symbiotic when you enter the special promo code RICHROLL25 at checkout.

I love the outdoors, but I'll admit ever since I started driving my Rivian, I find myself making even more time to just hop in and take it to places where I can live real experiences. I was recently able to drive an R2 with RJ Scarringe, the founder and CEO of Rivian, and we talked about how this is no accident. How does that idea of like, how are we creating this completely seamless connection with the outdoors through a car that, you know, by definition sort of has to seal you off from the outdoors?

Like, and how do the design decisions inform that perspective? If you're in this car, you should feel like if you want to go somewhere and explore a hike or stay a little bit later, it's there. It's just, again, a little nudge to say, it's okay to explore. Seek out the unknown. The front trunk has a drain plug in it. In the rear, the glass dropping in this car is a really nice feature because it'll actually throw a surfboard in the back or you can easily put your gear in the back.

So it's just all these little things that are, you know, yes, they're features and they're on their own. They're maybe not the whole story, but you put them all together as a meal that should feel like a product that's just built for someone that wants to go live, you know, a full, adventurous life. To watch the rest of our conversation and learn all about the R2 and the places it can take you, go to stories.rivian.com slash richroll. I mean, behind every action that is undertaken by the protagonists and the peripheral characters in the book, there's a battery of system failures behind it and, you know, a legion of other people who were involved in the inevitability of that decision, whether it's sweeping a homeless person off the street or it's putting a guy in a chokehold on a subway train.

So it's not about like villainizing the individual, but understanding the system that led to that unfortunate event, right? And that alleviates like the culpability of the individual to highlight the systemic, you know, kind of inadequacies, you know, how we operate as a culture, but it also leads to a degree of like hopelessness. Like, okay, so there's so much wrong that by the time the guy is being removed from the street and erased and his 386 photos are tossed away and, you know, his life is, you know, in this tragic state, there's so many other things that we have to address to prevent this that are upstream of that.

And that it feels impossible, like these intractable problems. And this is at the heart of all the writing that you do. Like, how does power actually function? How do these decisions get made? How do well-intentioned people end up working at, you know, institutions or in charge of feckless systems that actually are giving lip service to effective solutions, but aren't actually solutions at all? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. But I don't mean for the book to be hopeless for the following reason. That I think when you, when we see these problems in the way that our current kind of media and social media infrastructure is designed to make you see them, you see them in kind of these reduced moralized terms, right?

So look what that white supremacist Marine did on the subway or look what that black bum did on the subway or look what this, you know, progressive feckless DA did to make the city so unsafe or look what Donald Trump is doing to encourage everybody to take matters into their own hands. You can go down the list. I think as human beings who like evolved around campfires, like we're primed to understand these kinds of stories. We're primed to understand very complex things in this way. That bad guy did this, this bad guy did this.

It comes very naturally to us. And in fact, most people, and if you just walk through the world instead of social media, you will know this. Most people are like trying to do the best they can. You know, most cops are trying to do the best they can. I think many politicians are trying to do the best they can. Certainly most homeless people didn't intend to be living in the way that they're living. I think most outreach workers are doing the best they can. And it's so easy to drive down the street in San Francisco or LA or Seattle or New York and be like, no one's doing anything.

But it's not true. What is true is that these issues are hard. I, in this book, focus on the intersection of mental illness and homelessness. But I think it is simply a metaphor at some level for the work of democracy, which is we have to live with people who are different from us. We have to manage that common life we have. We have to deal with some people who are on the edge of the outer edge of our fortune, of our compassion. We have to keep asking and revising the question of who belongs, who's in the circle.

Does everybody belong? Does nobody belong? How do we define that belonging? For all the hopelessness that people feel out there, this is actually work that is constantly happening. We are constantly revising the boundaries of belonging. We actually live in a remarkable time and people always forget this. And I wrote about this in The Persuaders that it's so easy to get caught up on some bad things that are happening right now that you realize the status of women changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 5,000.

There's some regression right now, but it would be really silly. And Gloria Steinem, who just passed, talked a lot about this. It would be really silly to forget an absolute sea change that wasn't in just legal rights. The way men conceive of themselves with regard to women has completely changed. You go to any college campus today, again, there's a little regression now, but honestly, I spend a lot of time on campuses. The way young men, I think, intuitively understand equality in a way that even the best guys in our grandfather's generation just struggled to intuit that.

We make progress. We forget that we make progress. We actually change these kinds of things all the time. Thinking about New York and the subway as a space, there's also this really phony accounting that happens where this crisis in our cities, as it is often framed, and it becomes a thing on the evening news and it becomes a thing in elections, it's not always actually a reflection of the city. And I think this is very important to understand. When some red state passes the subway, a law making it really hard to be a trans kid somewhere or making it really hard to be a gay kid or making it hard to be a woman who needs an abortion or whatever, and that kid or that young woman gets on a bus, saves up whatever he, she, or they can and gets on a bus, comes to New York, like those migrants I wrote about in India, and maybe things work out for them or maybe sometimes it doesn't work out for them and they end up sleeping on a subway bench.

Is that a crisis of the American city? Is that New York's fault? Is that the subway system's fault? How come we don't think about that as a fault of a red state that couldn't hold their person? Why don't we think about that as the fault of a family that chose some church teaching over your own child? So when I, as a New Yorker, am holding your child on my subway bench because your family couldn't hold your child in its arms, is that a crisis of the American city?

I don't know. I think very highly of my city and all these other cities that managed to catch all the kids, all the runaway teens, all the LGBTQ folks, all the young women who actually were not loved enough where they were. I am proud to live in a city that absorbs them and loves them even when we don't know them. There's something curiously both very progressive in what you just said and also very kind of red state family first, the sanctity of the family oriented around that message.

Yeah, I'd never really thought of it in that context. It becomes the city's problem, but people come to the city on the promise of opportunity and a different kind of life that's not available to them. How many people walk around the city, how many people here came here because they can be tolerated at a Friendsgiving in New York more than at Thanksgiving back home? It's not a trivial number of people and it's really not a trivial number of people. And I'm not saying this with hostility to red state.

I understand that in a society where at different stages of awareness of different things, I wrote about in The Persuaders, I think a lot of the issue with trans rights in this country, you have some mix of outright opposition with actually a much larger number of people. who kind of don't really understand what it is still, and not understanding what something is is not the same as being virulently opposed to it. But I do wanna say that as a book that is both an investigation of a terrible thing that happened in a city, and in many ways, this book is like an operatic love letter to New York City and to cities in general, I think I reject the very motivated characterization and smear of cities that you will hear all the time on Fox News, but beyond Fox News, and that you hear at the highest levels of our politics.

I went to Norway once. Countries where everybody is like within fifth cousins of each other, that's easy. It's great that Scandinavia has wonderful social cohesion and great redistribution, whatever. It's a pretty monolithic country. There's some changes in more recent years. What we are trying to do in this country, the range of people we are trying to have make a go of it, you go right across to Queens, the most, I think, statistically diverse place in the history of the world. It's a huge achievement. None of our ancestors, you go back far enough, could have contemplated, like our ancestors lived in worlds where if like one person entered the town who didn't believe the same religious stuff, it was a really big problem.

We live cheek by jowl with everybody, and so this case in Man in the Mirror is a very bad thing that happened through this confluence of all of us and all of our problems. But it is also a way of looking at what happens 99.9% of the time in cities, which is that we are able to live with other people and live with difference and live with complexity in a way that our ancestors never would. And that story is not a hopeless story. That story, I think, is a story of profound hope.

There's a light dusting of Steven Pinker in what you just shared, like this appreciation for the real progress that has been made, that we are living in this age of abundance that often gets overlooked and that things are actually improving, while also holding simultaneously this reality of divisiveness and acrimony, this breakdown in our ability to communicate, to exist with each other, harmoniously amidst, at the same time, this crisis of loneliness and the uptick in mental health issues, depression, despair, et cetera, and the political divide, of course, all this stuff.

What is your, taking another step backwards from all of this and looking down, what is your theory of how we got here? Is this unique? I know in my lifetime, I've never felt anything like this, but from a broader perspective, maybe it's not so unique. Maybe this is something that's happened before or we're not seeing it correctly. What is your sense of how we arrived here and how we should be thinking about our way forward? I mean, I think one difference, I wrote about Steven Pinker's view a little bit in my book, Winner's Take All.

I teed you up for that, because I know that. Yeah, I know, yeah, yeah. I don't wanna be unfair to him, but I think his view is a little bit, if I understand it right, that it's more of an automatic process, or it's a process of prosperity. To be clear, my view is that this is a result of very hard-fought victories that we keep making, a lot of which have to do with people fighting to expand the range of people who are seen as fully human.

And this is work. This does not happen automatically. It's not like a rising tide. It is furious work. And there are periods of retrenchment and backlash, right? So the Civil War is followed by emancipation, and then it's followed by reconstruction, and it's followed by the redemption, as it was called, and this kind of real backslide to progress in the South. And it took a long time, 100 years, by some measures, to get back to that moment of what was wanted, emancipation. I don't think there's some kind of automatic arc, but my way of understanding this moment that we're in, I think, has been a little bit different from people I'm otherwise generally kind of aligned with politically, which is, I think, the reason we are, right now, in a politics of, and led by, a president who is really interested in shrinking the circle of belonging and challenging, do you belong, can you belong?

I think there's a lot of kind of progressive-minded people who over-center Donald Trump as the kind of protagonist of the story. To me, Donald Trump is a classic figure of backlash to extraordinary progress. And so my way of understanding this moment is, we have done huge progress in building a country that, remember, is not like Norway, or Switzerland, or China, or India. Those are all, they have their diversity, but those are all countries for people from those places, generally. India, China, these are not nations of immigrants.

This, the United States is a country made of the world, of people from everywhere, right? And not just in New York, by the way. When I was working on my Texas book, I mean, I remember stopping in a fully Korean strip mall, right near where I was reporting on where this white supremacist had grown up. 10 minutes from his house was a fully Korean strip mall, where I could barely order anything, because it was all in Korean. And so we are trying to do a really hard thing, which is untested, 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, build a road, choose a leader. We're basically now, in modern American life, saying, can we achieve some of the same common prosperity and other things 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 frontlash of progress, and because now we are in the work, and The Persuader's book was very much about this, we are in the work of trying to bring lots of people who are discomfited by that kind of idea, or hostile to it, or in many cases, literally don't quite understand it, hasn't been made real to them and vivid to them.

We're in the process of inviting them into that future. And you don't invite people into that future by yelling at them. You don't invite people into that future by canceling them. You don't invite people into that future by gatekeeping your movement so they have to have the perfect thing to get in. What I have tried to do in my work, including in this book, is to say there is value in simply being able to see other people and render them in their full complexity, and then understanding if you're working in politics, okay, maybe I could speak to, I could strum that chord, and maybe if I'm talking about trans rights, for example, take the most contested things, maybe talking about how all gender is a construct is not the way to win that fight in some of the places you need to win that fight.

But talking about what's more American than people should be able to be who they wanna be? Same issue. Yeah. But the way our movements for progress often show up is through a kind of shame-based method. And I think you have to have an understanding of the heartstrings of other people. That's why, again, Man in the Mirror is trying to do that in one small story in one city, but it's actually a civic practice. If you are fighting on trans rights or you're fighting against Trump or you're fighting for some climate, but whatever you're doing, if you don't have an intelligent understanding of what heartstrings the other person has, how can you play them?

This episode is brought to you by Birch. Ah, I can just feel it. Here's an honest question for you. When did you last upgrade your mattress? We replace our phones every couple years, our running shoes every few hundred miles, but the thing we spend a third of our lives on, a decade, 15 years, given how essential sleep is to wellbeing, that math strikes me as backwards. I've been sleeping on a Birch mattress for about five years now, and it taught me what I'd been tolerating before, sleeping hot, waking up stiff, blaming everything except the slab of synthetic foam underneath me.

Birch, on the other hand, is built from actual materials, organic cotton, natural latex, responsibly sourced, all engineered to breathe, and no polyurethane foams, no fiberglass, none of that questionable off-gassing. And they give you 120 nights on your own bed to see how your body responds. It's all risk-free. Your sleep is the foundation of everything else, so the upgrade is overdue. I want all my listeners to enjoy a deep, restful night's sleep with a new mattress from Birch. Go to birchliving.com slash richroll for 27% off site-wide.

That's birchliving.com slash richroll and get 27% off site-wide. You mentioned the lack of like a common myth, but perhaps that myth is just a belief in the American experiment. And this notion, this reaction with Trump and what that represents is based on an illusory myth that it was at one time other than what it is, which is this melting pot of diversity. It's always been that way. And without some kind of common storytelling and third spaces and communalism kind of spirit behind the average citizen, how can we share that myth and celebrate it?

Like this is really the tension that we're experiencing right now with the disappearance of, as we become more secular and churches and YMCAs and all these places where we used to kind of get together and we're forced to cohabitate with each other have vanished. And our solution to that is to scroll our social media silos and further entrench our belief system that is incentivized by provoking us with fear and anger, right? Like this is not great in terms of like how this is gonna play out.

How do we iterate and innovate and find our way forward through that? And this is where, although what I'm saying may sound to some people different from the kind of argument made in a book like Winner's Take All or whatever, it's actually very consistent in this way, which is there are very wealthy and powerful people in this country who profit from manipulating us, you and me and everybody out there, into thinking we are each other's biggest problem. And there's a lot of people making a lot of money and grabbing a lot of power.

Not just in the United States. Everyone, this is the playbook. With how Russia, you know, marshaled that. It's the playbook everywhere. And there's a lot of people in this country who have fallen prey on every side of everything to the myth that the guy four doors down from you with a different bumper sticker on his truck is your biggest problem. And meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch, the least grateful immigrant in American history, is sitting there profiting and you and your neighbor are beefing. And this is profitable for them.

You have spent time, if you're watching this, I would imagine, on the social media apps. There is literally no way in which they would make money if the behavior you were doing there was curiosity, was going deeper, was, you see a thing that's interesting, let me spend an hour on that. They need you to cycle through. So here we are. We're in this sort of quasi cacus. bureaucracy, oligarchy, neo-technocracy, like how do we qualify what's actually happening? Well, we celebrate and revere this billionaire class while we fight with our neighbors.

The billionaire class operates in a completely different atmosphere where they are immune from this and are more than happy to foment the disagreements that are further dividing us because, to your point there, they're profiting from this. And this is a lens into how power actually operates. And there's a difference between the reality of power and the extremely online Redditor version of how power operates, like this star chamber kind of conspiracism. So talk a little bit about that through the lens of your own personal experience of navigating these halls of power.

I mean, I spent a lot of time, obviously I wrote about it in Winner's Take All, but over the past year, I spent a lot of time working on the Epstein files. You wrote this insane article, this opinion piece in the New York Times. You read every single email. In the initial batch, then there were millions. I read every single one when it was in the many thousands. And spent six days, I think it was, just going cover to cover, reading them all. Because I knew enough from my work on oligarchy that the first thing that kind of money buys you is privacy.

The first thing that kind of privilege buys you is not having your emails ever read. That's the first thing people do when they get that kind of money, get their own little home servers and that kind of stuff. They're not just on Gmail. So when that glimpse happened, I was like, this, I should start reading this. And I'm a very, for me, the way you understand the world is language. That's my tool. So, okay, here was a giant trove of found language that no one intended, that wasn't PR ready, it wasn't vetted, it wasn't designed for a message the way everything is now on Instagram.

It's all performance. Here was like non-performance, a very large trove of non-performance, real communication among some very wealthy and powerful people. So I spent all this time reading it. And I found several things, which I wrote about in the New York Times piece and then in this series in my newsletter, The Ink. But probably the biggest thing was that this is a group of people who operate as though they're on the same team in a fundamental way, even while they have their ideological disagreements, which they sort of hold loosely and with a sense of humor.

So in this group is Noam Chomsky, on the left is Steve Bannon, is Woody Allen, is former Obama, White House counsel, is a bunch of Trump people. And it's not like anybody's renouncing their views or doesn't sincerely hold them. I think, I'm not making the claim they don't actually believe the things they believe. I think they do in many cases. But they're able to kind of hold their beliefs out here with a kind of grin about it. And their real belief is in this cohort and in their membership in the cohort.

And that cuts across political lines. Every line, national line, right? And you would see in these Epstein files, people who might well be kind of penning a trenchant op-ed about the idiocy of the other side, also just at dinner, whatever. And I'm not passing judgment on whether one should have those kinds of relationships. I just want to make the observation, again, you are in your neighborhood looking four doors down at the guy with a different bumper sticker on his truck than you do. And you won't talk to him.

Or forget the guy, your own relatives. We all do this, I've done this. And then Steve Bannon and Larry Summers and Woody Allen and Kathy Rumler and all these other people, they're all just vibing. And they are able to find common cause in their shared interests. And we are not. So that was a really big, powerful takeaway for me. One of the ways in which that power preserves itself is through actually valuing their interests over their beliefs. And down here, a lot of us have been kind of manipulated to valuing our beliefs much more than our interests.

In Washington, D.C., the currency is proximity to power. In York, it's about proximity to financial power, I suppose. In Los Angeles, it's celebrity. In San Francisco, it's kind of all of it because these tech oligarchs are celebrities who have more power and wealth than anyone in the history of humanity. So these are individuals who recognize the power of that community. Where the fluid access to whatever they want is through these transactional relationships that are convenient. And what's not convenient is standing on your values and speaking out about this.

And so what it does is it just further entrenches their power. And while they may be progressive or conservative, and they may go on television and be a pundit and state their perspective on this, that, or the other, what they will not do is kind of further any kind of policy change that will threaten their stature as somebody who remains in power. So the power structures remain intact no matter what anybody says. Yes, and we talked about, I said from the beginning, Man in the Mirror is about this kind of battle between the dehumanizing tendency and the humanizing tendency.

And I'm watching closely as these two tendencies kind of vie for our common attention. And when I look at the tech people, I think this is really important for folks to understand. Because we've had extreme wealth and power before, and we've had oligarchs before. I think something very new and different is happening with that specific group of men, and it really is overwhelmingly men. I think this is interestingly, and very sadly, a particular group of people who have that real dehumanizing tendency as almost a core feature of their personalities, or people who are really not able to see into the humanity of other people.

And this goes beyond, I would say, corporate greed or whatever that we've always had, and always people with a lot of money want to keep amassing money, and people are interested in money. That's not really what I'm talking about. The people who are designing the tools where more and more of humanity is living, right? You don't date by going to the bar anymore, which used to be a local business some guy owned, and people would meet there. That's now on one of like six giant platforms.

It's a marketized, commoditized dating self that is now on a platform owned by one of those people. Your mail, your email, all your communication, their platforms, all your messaging, their platforms. These people are vacuuming up basically all human activity that used to be done in lots of different spaces, including mainly physical spaces. And it's really worth noting that that small group of people who happen to own these platforms that are vacuuming up all this human connection are spectacularly bad at human connection. But it almost says they're defining feature.

And so it's not just a normal issue of a concentration of power or too much money in too few hands, although that's at play. What I'm suggesting is 10 times worse than that. This is human connection being vacuumed up and redefined and now owned by people who don't value human connection. And you can see it. I don't think I'm saying anything. Again, I'm not saying Elon Musk's a bad guy, good guy. I think it is an objective statement that human connection is not something that an Elon Musk values highly or is intelligent about.

So what happens when not only do we have this kind of crazy concentration of resources, but human connection is now being designed and operated and kind of intermediated by some of the least connected and connection-friendly human beings we have? The other qualitative difference is that there does seem to be some ethical decay at the core of this. Because when you reflect upon the robber barons of generations past, like the Vanderbilts and the Carnegie's and the Mellon's and the Stanford's, there was a social and ethical obligation that they justify their largesse by giving back.

And they were founding universities and building museums. And that was just expected. If you didn't want to have kind of a revolution, right? Like in order to secure their status, that was the tax that they had to pay. And it seemed like we benefited from that as a society. That slowly morphed into like naming rights on buildings or I'll build a wing on a hospital. So it was still existing, but it was starting to wane. And now we're in an era where it's just not even part of our cultural expectation.

Like Elon Musk is basically fuck you to that. Like there's no expectation that these people who are tremendously more wealthy than that previous generation of wealth, they're not feeling that social pressure at all. And we're in seemingly in acceptance of this. Like we're co-signing this while we celebrate these individuals as the absolute pinnacle of like human achievement. And there's something fundamentally wrong with that. It's actually, Tyler had a funny idea. He's like, you know what we should do? Every year the people should get to like a vote to evict these people if they're not living up to some kind of social standard of giving back.

Like we as a people say, you're in exile now because like you've just accumulated too much and you haven't demonstrated any commitment to the common welfare. I mean, here's my theory of this, which actually really was sharpened by reading through those Epstein files. I think there's been a massive and underappreciated shift from previous elites who were somewhere people to our current elite who are nowhere people. What does that mean? It means that if you were a rich and powerful person in kind of Downton Abbey world of England in that time period, or a wealthy landowner in Punjab 300 years ago, or pick your example.

For much of history, that kind of wealth and stature and power and community came from being really tightly from somewhere. Your name might've been the name of the village. The village might've been named after your family. You might've, if you're in Scotland, you got the kilt that is the tartan of that place and that name and that, right? Being elite in a lot of previous eras had a lot to do with rootedness and attachment to land and attachment to cultural more. You were the keeper of like part of what it meant to be an aristocrat in a lot of those worlds.

It was like you were the keeper of the art of that kind of place. So you were the patron of the kind of architecture that grew out of that place. And in the kind of liquid globalization world, I think one of the things that happened, capital got more mobile, people got more mobile, et cetera, is that today's super rich are the opposite of this. To be poor today is to be tightly stuck in one place. American, the average American moves less than they used to 50 years ago.

But to be super rich is to actually not be deeply rooted to place. It is to be up in the air, like that George Clooney movie. It is to be, it's a migratory bird. You're in Davos at this thought leader thing, then you're at Ted, then you're at Aspen, or you're building your secessionary state somewhere. Some of them literally take it, what I'm saying, to a literal extreme of seasteading. There's a thing called the Seasteading Institute where they actually think they should build a nation outside of nation states in the water.

But that's only the kind of reductio ad absurdum of the way I think they're all operating. The Epstein files, it's so clear. Their loyalty is not to place. Place is almost, and used to really, again, I even try to approach writing about this group of people with the same empathy that I'm talking about with Man in the Mirror. I think it is an observable fact that I can understand that they no longer feel attached to place. Place is just not significant to them. But what this means is, if you are stuck in a place, if you are stuck, you don't have a choice of which road in the world you wanna drive to work on because your work's over there, and that's the only road that goes there, and you don't have a choice of any job in the world.

That's the plant that's in your town. You don't have a choice of any school. There's only two schools, and your kids go to that one. You're a somewhere person. And if you are entirely governed by nowhere people, if your public policy decisions are influenced less and less by you but by people who are not part of any place, even if you don't ascribe a kind of moral character to it, there's not villainy or anything else, it is just a basic fact that if your life and the infrastructure and architecture and policy regime around your life is being designed by people who are liberated from place in a way you are not, the place where you are is going to be kind of untended.

And the people that could make a difference in that, even if they are local representatives, are essentially faceless, invisible individuals. There's a detachment from civil governance on the local level that I think leads to that greater sense of powerlessness in these equations. I mean, going back to Man in the Mirror, there's 100,000 homeless people in New York, thereabouts, but 95,000 of them are in shelters or other parts of the system, and you don't necessarily see them as homeless people. It's 5,000 or so are actually street homeless.

So everybody you see on the street of New York is in that 5,000. So there's a lot of government infrastructure that's trying to help. It's complicated, as I said. But think about the money in this city. Think about all the rich people who are building these giant war chests to fight mayors around Mamdani's Pied-a-Terre attacks. You're telling me there's not enough of that money to help 5,000 people? 5,000 people in a city of eight million people. Less than one out of 1,000. Somehow, we've ended up, by the way, the Pied-a-Terre attacks is only paid for people who don't live here but have housing here.

So we've ended up in a situation where people feel the right to civically pressure a mayor in a city they don't live in, according to them, to not tax a property they don't live in but own, but don't want those resources used to alleviate the lives of a relatively small number of people whose lives could be made better. On the argument that they contribute a disproportionate of tax revenue to the city, even if they don't live there. Right. I remember a long time ago, I met a very wealthy man in France.

Well, that's lunch for this guy. You know, France has very high taxes, much higher than here. And I said, you know, I know all these tennis players, they moved to Monaco and, you know, I've heard all these French people leaving. You just live in Paris, you just pay these taxes. And he said, it's the price I pay to live in the greatest city in the world. I meet, in New York, by contrast, all these wealthy people who, within seconds, will tell you that they are constantly strategizing about their 180, which means they're always planning how to make sure they're in New York City less than 180 days a year.

It's all about tax, like decreasing their tax liability. So they live in Florida. It's really interesting. If I was that rich, the first thing I would do with that money would be to assert my freedom to live wherever I want. Right, but that's why you're not rich. It's like the people that are that rich are rich because that's what they're interested in and that's what matters to them. Yeah. And I don't think we need to necessarily. Both ways in that regard. You know, back to like this tranche of Epstein emails, you talk about the banality of it.

Like this is not eyes wide shut. This is, you know, Patagonia blue vests and, you know, coffee in Sun Valley for the most part. And these are relationships of convenience where there's a lot of kind of fluid access to individuals where they're mutually benefiting each other. And it has me reflecting on my own experience of, which I haven't really talked about publicly, like I've been in a position over the last couple of years to attend some of these thought leader conferences and these kind of private events where fancy people are there and you've written about this and spoken about this.

And so on some level, it's a very low level, like flirtation with what it's like to be in proximity to people who are very wealthy and very powerful. And in my own personal experience, there is something intoxicating about it. Like I never imagined that I would be somebody who would be invited to these sorts of things. And then suddenly you're at lunch with Sundar Pichai and Oprah, and they're asking you what you think, you know? And like, what does that do to your ego? And how does that derange how you think about, write about and speak about those individuals, the institutions and organizations that they represent?

There is a chilling effect on that because suddenly you are in relationship with these individuals. And this is something you've experienced. And I'm curious around like how you think about that. Because I know in my case, I'm fine talking about it, but I know that I've been in rooms with a lot of other people that don't, you know? And they're not because there's no incentive for them to, you know, there's a great incentive for them to nourish those relationships and not say anything negative about what these people might or might not be doing.

But when you're in the presence of them and you're spending time with them, you realize they're just human beings. And many of them come across great. And you're like, these are good people and they're trying to do the right thing. And maybe they are, maybe they aren't. But it changes your relationship. Like you no longer are at arm's length distance with powers that be that don't always have our best interest at heart, I guess. Here's my take on it and story about it, which is I actually think we are very ineffective at challenging systems where we don't understand the people in them and how they actually work at a human level.

I work on television sometimes going Morning Joe. And like everybody else, I have critiques about how our cable news system works, whatever. But I'll often hear from people who I think of as like-minded people, but the picture they have in their mind about why Morning Joe works the way it does, it's just so, they're like, oh, I bet the advertisers, people will literally say to me, oh, I bet the advertisers called down and told you to say that. Right, yeah, there's so much misunderstanding about how these things work.

Now, it's not that there's not power structure involved in that stuff. But it's not mustache twirling. Right, and if that's your understanding of how it works, then you're not an effective combatant against whatever it is that you wanna shift and change. So I had this experience many years ago. I was a young journalist. I'd come back from India after my several years in India for the New York Times. I still had a column for the New York Times. And I get this call one day that I'd been nominated to a fellowship at the Aspen Institute, which sounds like one of those Nigerian prince scam emails or something like that, but it turned out to be real.

And it was this kind of, I call it a benevolent open secret society. It was sort of this, it was a young leaders group, basically, 20 or so young leaders. Almost all of them were business people. I was the odd person out as a writer. And the idea was you were in the middle of your career and you'd take some time out. And again, it didn't quite fit me because these are mostly business people who don't really have time to think about books and ideas and whatever.

And you go to Aspen twice a year for a few days. You'd read Plato and Aristotle and Gandhi and have these really meaningful, off the record conversations with each other. So I did it. And I just don't, in my social, there's not a lot of business people in my social group. It's just not my world. And it was really interesting to have this view, intimate view, into that kind of Aspen Institute world in my own fellowship class, but also the larger Aspen Institute community. I just, I don't know a lot of CEOs.

I don't know a lot of entrepreneurs. It's just not my people. And spending time with that group, and I'm not betraying any confidences of my individual class, but just that larger cohort, it gave me a lot of insight into how the world actually works, right? Whereas I might've had some notions of the mustache twirling, as you put it, or the scheming. Like, it is actually so much more banal than that, as so many things are. It is a bunch of, I mean, one of the things I learned most is that corporate culture is so much about fear, right?

From the outside, you imagine these people are like swashbuckling, you know. But actually, what is so different between my life, where I can really say whatever I want, think whatever I want, I feel quite free in that way. When I meet people who spend time in large corporations, it is such a constant calculation about what you can say, who you can say. Are you the right person to say it? Should someone else be saying it? Are you the right hierarchy to say it? Anything they say can affect the stock price.

All of that, that's a really different way to go through the world. I learned, spending time in that world, how financially insecure very rich people feel, genuinely feel. You can laugh at it from the outside. For me, it's laughable in a certain way. But people really thinking and saying to themselves, until I get to that $100 million threshold in the bank account, I don't feel my family's safe. I don't think that's someone putting that on. I think it's a real feeling. I think it's a really problematic real feeling.

But I think it's a real feeling people have that if you want to take that stuff on, better that you understand that and have that empathy for it. And so I spent time in that world. I felt myself getting increasingly interested but annoyed by it. And a lot of the rhetoric in that world was like, as young leaders, we're gonna get together and solve these big problems in the world. And you have to have a little project to solve some problem. And it just, and then I would go and it would be like the CEO of Pepsi talking about healthcare outside the Koch Brothers building.

That's what it was. And you've been to these things, you understand. And at some point, I began to realize these people are the problem that they're trying to solve. There's something simultaneously laudable about these people actually saying like, we have problems, let's get together and figure out creative new solutions to them while also being performative. Because we have kind of off-laid solving our social problems to this elite class of individuals. And what this elite class is going to do is either tinker with these problems, maybe they'll solve some of them, but fundamentally, their interest is in preserving the power dynamic and the structure.

So they're creating the problems, giving lip service and maybe solving some of them, but not really getting out the systemic issues that are causing the problems in the first place from which they benefit. Exactly, that's very well said. And so I was at, you know, somewhere through this, a few years into this, four years into this fellowship, they asked me to give a talk one day that was actually about my Texas book. They just said, you know, they'd seen me give a TED talk about my Texas hate crime book.

And they said, can you give the same talk in Aspen a couple months later? And I said, yes. And then as it drew near, with these kind of feelings that I had been nursing, which I'd shared with you, in my mind, I was like, I actually don't want to give that talk. That's a useless talk to give here. I can give that anywhere, it's already on the internet. Why am I giving it again? I should say something in this room that needs to be said to this room.

400 of these people, some of the young leader people, but also some billionaires, patrons of this thing, lots of other wealthy, powerful people. And so I gave this speech without telling them, obviously. I surprised the room with a speech, essentially saying, this is a group of people, very wealthy and influential people at all levels of American and global life, that tell themselves you are interested in solving hard problems and advancing justice in the world, but you do so within what I call the Aspen Consensus, which is rich and powerful people can be asked to do more good, but they should never be told to do less harm.

They should be asked to give back, but what they take should never be questioned. They should be encouraged to change the world, try to change the world, a favored phrase in that community, but nothing about how they operate in the world should be changed. That's the Aspen Consensus. And I got a very weird, it was like a hateful standing ovation. You got, because they kind of have to. They knew it would be on YouTube one day, it still is. So I got a hateful standing ovation.

At the bar that night, some of those people were like, that was brave, man. And another guy was like, you're a fucking asshole. And I think a lot of people felt maybe both those things at the same time. And that grew into my book, Winner's Take All. But I think the core of what I learned there was you have to focus on the incentives of this overall system and understand that even those types of people are pretty powerless within it. You have to get really, really high up in American life to the Bezos and Musk.

Those people have give, right? They have flexibility. But corporate life is really, really regimented and fear-based and narrow. A lot of these guys truly, and I'm not saying this to exonerate them because I'm sort of known for the opposite. These guys do not have time to think and they choose not to use whatever time they have to think. And so they're just pushing through on the goal that has been assigned to them. And what has happened in the process is the kind of tending to the commons or the common welfare.

This is a completely fallen by the side of the road. I was here listening to a podcast the other day about AI. And someone was saying there's apparently a well-known thing in AI, the paperclip problem, that if you tell an AI to keep making more paperclips, it will do that and then it'll run out of metal. And then it'll, in the thought experiment, it'll start like, kill all the people in the interest of paperclips. And the point they were actually making on the podcast was a little strange to me.

It's the alignment problem. Why can't we align AI with human values? AI would do that, but humans would never do that. And I was thinking, that's exactly what humans are like if we're not careful. That's exactly, I mean, like, that's what colonialism was, that's what slavery was. This is, we are, yeah, we are all performing our own paperclip thought experiment. Why is AI, when AI gets to the end of its stock of metal, why does AI do these terrible things to keep the paperclip production going?

Because that's what a human being would do. It's like, no, no, that's totally aligned with that. I don't understand this whole alignment problem thing. It sounds like AI is exactly, exactly like what we would do. Oh, my God. Should we go take over some country to keep the metal supply going for these paperclips? What is your relationship now with the bohemian groves of the world? Like, do they, are you, like, exiled from these things or do they still begrudgingly invite you back? I got kicked out of my Aspen Institute class.

I think there were some individual people in the class who were fine with me, but, you know, there was a very senior Facebook executive who I challenged very personally. I met him, talked to him. We had a good exchange of views. And then as I saw what Facebook and Meta were kind of doing to kids and others and politics, I wrote him increasingly anguished emails saying, I know you to be a decent guy. This isn't good. And, you know, that relationship went off the rails. I was kicked out of the class in general, removed from all the, removed from the class WhatsApp group, removed from the email lists because I- You're an existential threat.

And I really didn't even say it that harshly. My Winner's Take All book was a deeply reported book in that world where I went and interviewed people and interviewed, you know, it's not throwing rocks from a distance. I actually go engage with people always. But I was kicked out of that. Look, I think I don't really get invited to lots of those kinds of things. But I think the upshot of that book is that I stopped getting invited to the kinds of things I never enjoyed being at.

And, you know, I probably get invited to more of the kinds of things that I like to be part of. And, you know, with Man in the Mirror, I think it's deeply, deeply choosing the world of writing and the world of art. And this is like the kind of artistic wing of journalism that I'm in, which is like this book is really as devoted to the artistic practice of storytelling and this kind of way of inhabiting others through language. That's my home. If I never went to another thought leader confab again, I would be so happy.

There's something kind of Rutger Bregman about like that move, but you're different from that type of ardent activist in that you're leading with this kind of compassion and seeking to understand sensibility. I mean, it's interesting. Rutger is now raising money from lots of rich people to do moral, you know, moral. He's doing a lot of cool stuff, but he's very much in a more of an activist mode, I would say. Again, I believe in this thing that I think I've described as the orchestra principle. Like we need people to be playing different instruments.

So I don't need everybody playing the instrument I'm playing. We absolutely need some militant activists. We need some unreasonable activists. We also need some reasonable activists. We need some people willing to go in and do dirty compromise in politics. We also need some pure minded people in politics. We need some, you know, business people who don't care about society just inventing some crazy thing because that's what they're good at. And then we need some other kinds of business people who are actually like mindful of community.

Like we, it takes a lot of, you know, I am not a, I think through all of my writing, through all my books, through all my different places I've worked in, I'm a real believer in the need for, I'm the opposite of a totalizer. Like I think we need different people to be doing different things and know. There are certain people who are, you know, kind of genetically designed to play a certain type of role. Like I see this in the vegan movement as well, for example.

Like you have the hardcore PETA people and they're important. They show you where the line is and they're uncompromising. And you know, that's not me. I'm more of a, like, let me try to figure out how to connect with people and understand them. I feel like that's a more effective tool for my constitution, but to each his own. And I think every movement needs all shades of these types of, you know, kind of activist warriors, whether you're a reach across the aisle person or the person who is not taking no for an answer.

But I think for me, what personally, so this is not prescriptive for anybody else, what I discovered through my friend's loving but also sharp intervention was, while I can devote myself to a lot of different ways of being in the world, and I can be that loud person who insists there's a truth that someone should see and shake people by the lapels until they see that truth. I can do that. I can play that role. And I became quite good at it. I arguably became better known for that mode of being than what I have always thought of as my underlying work.

I chose to lurch in a very different direction with Man in the Mirror, and I wanna stick with that direction. I hope I'll have the fortitude to stick with that direction of trying to understand people across my own barriers of difference with them. But more than that, I deeply believe in the project of this country as people of every type can live together. I deeply believe that truth. And I think if we're gonna pull it off, it is going to require not just some journalist you're watching on this podcast making a career shift, but for lots of people to make their version of that shift from certainty to curiosity, and from writing other people off to wondering what's going on with them, and from kind of succumbing to the manipulation that other people are worse than they actually are to a kind of openness.

And I'm not preaching this to someone who's traveling. It's very hard. I can do this professionally more easily than I do it personally. It is not even necessarily my deepest orientation. It's something I do as a professional discipline. But I think the basic, in a deeply dehumanizing world and moment when we're told there will be no jobs for us in like six to eight months, in which authoritarian leaders take it upon themselves to decide who is human and who's not, and animal comparisons are thrown around in conversations about immigration policy, I think the most powerful thing people can do is to radically humanize, to radically humanize.

That is the antidote to me to so many of the different toxicities of this moment, these systems, is to insist on the humanity of other people. Empathy and understanding as the engine of positive change. You elucidate all of these problems. You think deeply and write about politics, power, culture, society, all the issues that are raised in this new book. With this eye of trying to understand every individual's point of view on these things. But fundamentally, the mission or the purpose is to try to figure out the way forward.

How do we evolve and positively change as a society in this ongoing American experiment? And change is really the fundamental theme of this podcast. It's just through the lens of personal change. What are the obstacles to people leading better lives, happier, more fulfilled, et cetera? What do you need to do in order to change? What are the personal responsibilities that you have to shoulder? What are the more structural obstacles that are preventing you from making those changes that you aspire to make? You're doing the same thing.

You're just doing it from a lens of institutions and systems. So when you think about change, what are the biggest obstacles now in terms of how we forge this better future? And what are the responsibilities that we take as individuals? I guess what I'm getting at is, I think where our worlds kind of intersect on this is the fact that we cannot offlay these responsibilities and decisions to other people. We can't just spout off on social media or even so much show up at rallies. Fundamentally, we have to become the change we wanna see.

And we have to change ourselves if we wanna change the world. It's kind of a Buddhist concept in that way. I would say, Man in the Mirror is my fifth book. All five have been different topic areas, different places. When I think of a through line, that is it. I think my great subject over 21 years as a journalist has been the interaction, the dynamic interaction between macro change and micro change, between systems changing, countries changing and people changing. If I think about what I really saw in India and wrote my first book about India, it was about India was having the most intense high economic growth period in its history.

And it was eight, nine, 10% economic growth, which if you haven't lived through that is a lot more than what it sounds like. It actually is like everything, everything has changed every three years, like everything. Mores, values, like it is like a revolution. It's a slow rolling but kind of fast rolling revolution constantly. And so I was living in India in a period where the status of women was changing. People were having love marriages instead of arranged marriages for the first time in very large numbers.

Divorce was rising for the first time in Indian history. Huge numbers of people moving from the country to the city. All these huge things were changing. And my way of making them legible was to say, what does that mean in you? What happens when, so what that actually translates into is there's some dad in Nagpur in the center of India who has like a bunch of daughters and he has a very strong view that women don't work outside the house. Daughter one, forced into marriage, no work outside the house.

Daughter two, same thing. Because of the juncture of history he's at, by the time daughter three comes around, he starts to hear rumors about how much young women are earning as bank tellers in town at ICICI Bank. And he lets daughter number three work. And then all the rest of the daughters also get jobs. That's all of human history is that story. Yes, there are these big things, these big forces. I mean, I'm a big believer in all those big things. But the way it actually goes down is like that, right?

These big things change, and then people have to figure themselves out, figure out what they believe against the backdrop of those realities. And so I'm someone who's been very attentive to those big changes, but who is very attentive, I think, also to the way regular people make those changes, band together to make those changes, but also experience those changes, experience the shifts in identity they need to make to navigate the new thing. Fast forward to America today, maybe our version of that dad on the fence about women working is a large chunk of this country, in my estimation, that grew up not surrounded by a ton of difference, grew up in a more conservative, more religious kind of background, and now sees this other world that has grabbed a bunch of the country, sees these other places on television like where you and I live that live in this really different way.

And I think of that giant chunk of the country as being like that dad. And the decision is like, do you, because of those big changes out there, do you allow yourself to be altered? I think Keith Johnson, great improv expert, talked about all drama is about people altering each other people, other people. Are you willing to be altered? And so I think that there is very much that intersection between the things we think about, because there are these big systems and there are these big structures and there is power.

But really there is the capacity for people to change. And I deeply believe in that capacity that people have. I think we underestimate it. And I think we're living through a period now where we are testing people to see, you know, think of what we've lived through. 25th anniversary of 9-11s, the wars that came after that, financial crisis, rising authoritarianism, climate change. This is a pretty intense era. We've lived through COVID. I don't even know if I mentioned that. And I think we're being tested in this country when so many things pull us towards suspicion and enmity and hostility and that guy's your problem, that guy's your problem.

I think we're being tested in, do we have the ability to change and to enlarge ourselves? Are we the kind of people who are so threatened by how someone we don't even know identifies? Or do we have the ability to alter that and say, not only am I okay with that person being who they are, but I may be actually willing to reflect on the fact that some of the ways I've felt forced to show up as a man. I wasn't a hundred percent feeling and maybe some of this stuff is a little bit more of a Lego construction then I've understood it to be let me think about that.

That's all Can we be altered? You can't alter other people if you not ultra boy yourself I'm encouraged and hopeful about this moment being Somewhat of an awakening because I think there is a growing realization around the forces of manipulation that are fomenting are like antagonism towards each other and I think the more that we begin to understand that and take responsibility for How we interact with our mobile devices, for example That is an opening that can be exploited to make some different Decisions around how we interact with other people and it is those small things like when I talk about personal change People think of it as like bold pronouncements or setting audacious goals But it's really those tiny little things that you're doing every day in the same way that that father one day realizes Well, maybe I will let my daughter go get this job There's a banality in that as well.

I studied political philosophy, right so that's like big theories of democracy and Rousseau and Kant and Machiavelli and Hobbes and all these people and Part of me still thinks in that kind of way about in this like big theoretical way about how we all live together But I am really drawn to the microscopy at the end of the day what all those things translate to in reality Are these little decisions people make The actual political philosophers everyday people making that decision like that dad Making that decision in the middle of Kansas Your son comes out as trans You have a choice You love him in this way He stays You fail to love him in that way He ends up on a subway bench in New York or maybe very happy in San Francisco or else there's no Trans View in America, there's just like millions of people like that dad Facing that choice and then people like me and people like you trying to reach all parties with ideas Trying to maybe make that dad see something He wouldn't be able to maybe try to make that son see something about his dad that he might not see Think about a friend of mine Who's a actor brilliant actor on Broadway she her father recently Passed away and we were talking telling the story.

He was a Marine Like platoon leader or something in Vietnam his daughter South Carolina Becomes a big star on Broadway. She's gay He's from a world where that's not what's happening most of the time or shouldn't and He came up to see her when she originated one of the big shows on Broadway Couldn't be from more different worlds. And he and my friend is an incredible leader of All casts that she's in and he saw that maybe even on this show and they went to the party afterwards Opening night and he saw his daughter And he saw his daughter Total commander of that group of people.

He just saw that beyond just being a good actor. She was the glue. She was the And he sent her this email Which she recently I think gave a eulogy about And he basically said I finally understood what you do You do what I did he saw in her leadership Of a cast of you know, probably a lot of queer misfits and others in New York version of himself And as a pleading leader in Vietnam context now, she might not have made that analogy between a platoon leader who did God knows what they had to do in that era and a queer woman on Broadway, I always think of that story because I think That is exactly the thing that needs to happen in this country That mental leap he made and sent her in that email First not seeing the analogy first seeing the difference and Then seeing it without having to become her without having her having to become him just I see the rhyme and thirdly Communicating that to her as a bridge back to connection That to me that story is one of those stories I think about All the time when I think about what needs to happen for this whole country In addition to the to the book you are launching a YouTube series Which is genius and very creative and cool You spoke earlier about like the artistry of what you do.

Like I just think this is a really great idea to Use the book as a means for exploring other forms of media as an investigative journalism journalist and like digging even deeper into certain aspects of this story that You know aren't appropriate to be in the book. It's really interesting. Actually this morning. I was Outside the set of morning Joe and I ran into Pablo Torre great sports journalist who actually inspired The YouTube show because he has this great Investigative YouTube show where he sort of he kind of took this idea of unboxing videos and he Made it a way to show investigative journalism in a way that people can relate to and I heard him talk about that I got very inspired.

And so yeah, I've I've begun this YouTube experiment and what's so interesting is Particularly with man in the mirror is the kind of book that I always wanted to write But it took me five books to write which is There's no Explanation of how I do the reporting. There's no I that it is pure I really wanted it to function as a piece of art as much as a piece of journalism and So it's just yours in these people from the first page or in someone's head and then you're in someone it really reads meant to read like a novel and I really Privileged that approach and that the the beauty of that and the elegance of that and the Emotional Resonance of that kind of approach I privilege that over Kind of showing people my work right?

This is not a showing people your workbook. This is a concealing the labor book This is a book where there are paragraphs in that book that Come where the information comes from 40 different sources Documents case files transcripts interviews, but I I don't want you to know that. I just want you to read a beautiful paragraph, right? and I really believe in I wanted to always make that kind of book and so I've made it and Then I saw Pablo Torres speaking at this sub sack event about His investigative work and it's kind of unboxing and I was like I'm gonna keep my book exactly the way it is.

But what if I created something on YouTube? That does the opposite of what my books trying to do instead of neatly package it and make the work go away Let's show people the work. Let's show people what this kind of reporting is So we take it's also called man in the mirror. We take one piece of evidence Every episode it's gonna be you know, I don't know 12 or 15 episodes over the next few months One piece of evidence each week and we just look really closely at that one piece of evidence And that's something that in the book might have been given its own treatment.

It might have just kind of melted into a larger narrative the first episode is about the interrogation tape When Daniel Penney was brought into the NYPD precinct and interrogated by two detectives and It's a really fascinating piece of tape because at the beginning The vibe is not unlike you're in my vibe right now. It's like it's like guy I literally described it as it was an interrogation that looked more like a podcast It's two guys chatting the one of the guys is a marine also So they're like what branch are you and what brand are you and what was your unit?

Oh, man So cool. Look at my death before dishonor tattoo They're vibing and they're burrowing out and you can sort of see like, oh, this is why They let him go right after they took him in they let him go. It was all friendly this is what a lot of activists were saying in complaint and Just as you're trying to think that the interrogation takes a very interesting turn and Daniel Penney starts to use language that the prosecution would say is dehumanizing language when talking about Jordan Neely who we put in a chokehold and Kind of goes beyond merely.

He was a danger. I thought it was I was trying to protect people He repeatedly calls him a crackhead Talks about him squirming several just kind of this this kind of and and having lived in this era in American life we're all familiar with this kind of language of animalizing that can that can infect our discourse and Daniel Penney really in a way, that's quite striking Veers into this language pretty firmly and definitively and What's really amazing to watch in this video and surprising is that he totally loses these cops These cops who are kind of like bros of a feather with him.

So it wasn't that the cop was deliberately Creating an environment that felt safe for him to open up in the hopes that he would incriminate himself But they were legitimately like bro-ing out and then I mean obviously that is their job Yeah, so I'm and I talk about them look like of course, that's their job. But my judgment looking at that was There was a an actual warmth and connection there and I know from talking to the prosecutors That a lot of the cops who worked that case Actually went on that arc like for real life when in that went on that arc We're very supportive of Daniel Penney at the beginning and Then when they saw certain things or they heard the way he spoke They had a shift and what you see on that tape and what the government alleged and and again I think it's a it's a it's a worthy argument to have because it's a very Complicated thing they alleged they alleged The Daniel Penney they actually said Daniel Penney was right to try to do something They even said he was maybe right to put Jordan Neely in a chokehold and bring him to try to restrain him But that the subway got to the next stop within seconds.

Everybody was out. There was no one really doors I'm doors open He was hard as a light Everybody who's in there is still and it goes on for like five more minutes plus the way the government set it up was The question is why? Did he go so long? Right. It wasn't I shouldn't have done it case. It was a went-too-far case. So why did he go too far? By the way, they didn't have to prove it. They chose to anchor their case in the following logic.

He went too far In the prosecution's telling because he dehumanized this other person in other words By their theory, he wouldn't have held on that long If it had been a fellow Marine wouldn't have gone on that long if it had been a Middle-class school teacher on the subway that there was something in their telling about the status of that person The status of that body and I don't think by the way, this is to cast Daniel Penney as an anomaly I think they were making the case that all of us At one moment or other look at a body like Jordan Neely's that way passing by the road eight million people are passing people like that every day in New York and Very few are doing something Or even feeling something what they alleged was that Daniel Penney dehumanized this other person So as to be able to keep going with this chokehold not spilling killing him, but it was death by dehumanization which is a kind of Ethereal theory to ground this whole thing in they ultimately lost the case So they it was a gamble that I think didn't pay off in a in a legal sense but the reason it was interesting and we focus this whole first episode on it is Daphne Iran the lead prosecutor whose family comes from You know a Holocaust history.

She grew up in Israel until she came here. She felt like Policing this line of you can't dehumanize people Was really important now and she said to me I interviewed after the case. She hadn't lost the case in 20 years right, this is first loss in 20 years for a homicide prosecutor and she said I Know this guy is not going to commit another crime So, you know most of the cases we bring you you want to put that person away because they're gonna burgle the next house So they're gonna cash the next bad check or whatever So I knew this guy's not a good enough that that's not the motivation for this kind of case The motivation for this kind of case is to say you can't do that you can't See other people as less human than you and therefore act in a way that takes their life away Again it was a I think it was an ambitious Maybe of a reach of a theory to ephemeral a theory to compel a jury and so ultimately That theory works at cross-purposes with the goal because he gets acquitted and And so the message is you can dehumanize.

That's what she said to me at the end. She said, you know Because of her family's Holocaust history. She said, you know watching that line was really important to me my whole life and Then Fighting this case she said I was aware of the larger currents of the country. I was aware It's not just an isolated thing. We're living in a time in which There's a lot of encouragement to dehumanize by the way, whether that's authoritarian leaders saying You know Haitians are eating pets in Ohio or whether that's just the AI bros saying there's basically gonna be no work for anybody It's all dehumanization of different flavors.

We're surrounded. I I'm in the subway every day every ad in the New York City subway is telling people that they're not relevant because of AI, right? What is the effect on people of absorbing all these messages telling you, you are not needed, the most damaging message any person can hear. And so what she was saying is, it felt really important to like stand watch on that line. And she did lose the case. Maybe she lost the case because of that, or maybe she would have lost the case anyway.

But in many ways, this book is the story of people watching that line from different ways. And if people asking the question of what pulls us away from common humanity, what brings us closer to it. And it's in the asking of the questions that you find the value. It's not about purporting to have the solutions to these very difficult problems. But implicit in that is that these solutions will be found through this urgent and earnest attempt to understand each other. And the deeply and the question of how do we enlarge the circle of who we consider our people?

That question is itself a deeply meritorious question. With all respect to our ancestors, that was generally not the question they were asking. Wherever you want to go in the world, wherever your people come from, they might have been asking a bunch of other questions. But generally, the question they were asking is not, how do we invite more people into the circle of belonging? The ancient world was not great about that. Our world has become a lot better at that. We fail at it sometimes. But the project of trying to say, as individuals and as systems, how do we get to see people tomorrow who we didn't see well yesterday?

Right now, in our cities, that might be mentally ill and homeless people who are on that outer edge of the outer edge of our compassion. In the way that other groups that once were on the outer edge of our compassion have come closer into the circle of compassion. The Reverend Al Sharpton, who I spoke to for the book, he gave the eulogy at Jordan Neely's funeral. He was out front in this case at the beginning. He said, I didn't quite realize that I take on a lot of tough cases, a lot of marginalized folks, a lot of people who are not necessarily loved by society.

He said, when I took on the case of not just a black man dying a violent death, but mentally ill and homeless, not middle-class guy with two kids- Who also suffered the trauma of his mother- Yes. ... being killed in the same way. But Sharpton said to me point blank, when I tried to recruit other civil rights leaders to stand with me, this was a rare time where a bunch of people were like, sorry, Rev. That's not my plaintiff. He's like, I found the limit. And he's talking about civil rights leaders.

I have no doubt that in 50 years, that will seem quaint. But right now, in this moment, the humanity of those people in our cities is outside or on the edge of our compassion. That line, I think, does move. Right? I mean, women were once outside the edge of official compassion. Fortunately, that has improved considerably. There's always a litigation for are you inside or outside that circle. And in some ways, this book is about a group of people who are the current edge case. But the premise being, we need to expand the circle.

And that is inconsistent with a lot of people's opinion, which is that we need to shrink the circle. And so that's really the core battle that's being waged right now. Yeah. And are you optimistic about where we're headed? I am. I'm more optimistic than I was a year ago and more optimistic than may seem to make sense. I think America, in the end, will have been saved from a much more severe descent into authoritarianism by two things. Donald Trump's intense interest in renovation and his intense interest in personal plunder.

Those are both for anyone out there who's tried either or both of those things to get rich for your family or remodel a house. Those are all consuming things. And I actually mean this in a serious way. The second year was not like the first year. He has become really consumed by trying to make money and trying to redecorate Washington. And I think that Germany in the 30s conversation doesn't quite feel like the trajectory anymore, which I'm very happy about. Doesn't mean you eye off the ball.

That's very dangerous. But I just don't think he has it in him personally. But in a deeper sense, in a longer term sense, I am in love with the project of this country, as has maybe even been made clear. When I go visit my family that lives in India, my extended family, cousins, aunts, uncles, my grandmother still. India's great. I lived there six years. I wrote a book about it. I think it's a beautiful place. I don't know how to explain this. At almost every table I've ever sat in in India, dinner table, lunch table with people, the thoughts are the thoughts you would expect to happen with limited contact with difference.

The jokes circulate in themselves. The puns circulate in themselves. The opinions are within it. And it's not, I don't say this is a moral judgment, but it's not a society in which a lot of people are encountering a lot of difference. It's almost like a small town elevated to a country of a billion and a half people in mentalities. And I'm going to lose lots of different followers for this comment. And I really don't mean this in a judgmental way. There's amazing things about an ancient culture like that that has sustained so much of its ancient wisdom.

But it is a place where when a new thing is proposed, by the way, some of Europe is like this. When a new idea is proposed, the general histamine reaction is like constriction, resistance. And that's not where we live. And I'm really clear about that. So I try to be clear about Donald Trump, this and that. But we live in a country that is profoundly committed at a very cellular down to regular people level to the possibility of novelty, rethinking things, difference, trying, there being no shame in trying, failing, trying again.

There's a street dynamism and every person dynamism to this country and to the idea that difference is not a threat. Again, some people think it is, but I think they're reacting. And I think about that feeling that I've had so often in India when I lived there for six years, even with young dynamic people. I'm talking about people who were going to nightclubs all night and doing coke, like by many outward measures, young, hip, cool, free thinking people. But their view about the appropriate kind of person to marry when you actually got down to real stuff, pretty narrow.

So I have a lot of hope that in the bones of American culture are some intuitions about people's freedom and self-determination, not in some constitutional sense, in some body constitutional sense, in some lived sense. And I think that is actually going to outwit and outlast the manipulative leaders who want to prey upon people's fears and resentments and sense of being left out of the future. I don't think it's guaranteed by any means, but I'm optimistic. There is a deep, deep sense in this country that I have experienced at all levels, including white people in very small towns in this country, deep sense of acceptance of difference, acceptance of novelty, and acceptance of the notion that I can change, you can change, we can choose the future together.

I have a deep faith that those tendencies are stronger than the tendencies of any small-hearted leader, particularly one who is much more committed to getting rich and making ballrooms than changing anything. I think that's a very grounded degree of optimism, a calibrated optimism, weighed against a couple hundred years of this experiment that we've been waging. And I think that counts for something. And I think that there is a resilience in the American human. And I think, to your point, when you encounter people on the street, it's a very different experience from what you're experiencing online.

And that gives me hope, as do the younger generations and their idealism and their sense of kindness. I think that we're going to be okay. I think we're going to hit some rough spots, and it's a very tumultuous time of uncertainty, but things are always uncertain. And I believe in this experiment, and I believe in my brothers and sisters. I do too. And I think these moments, testing moments, and they're choosing moments. They're choosing moments. If we had just been on autopilot, and it had been, I don't know, Obama, Romney, that kind of...

Some of these things would have still been under the surface. We're being tested. It's all coming to the surface. So now it's very explicit. We have to fucking reckon with it. Do you want to be a country built on difference or not? Now it's a choice. Other countries have different answers. By the way, there's perfectly, as we said, there's perfectly decent countries out there that don't want to be countries of difference. Well, I think that the book and, of course, the YouTube series that is going to come out, commensurate with it, is really an act of service.

I mean, I know it's set up for success, and it's going to do amazing in the marketplace and all of that. But I think more importantly, it will serve as an example about how to have these kinds of conversations and how to interact with people who we may not see eye-to-eye with. And by you modeling that, it's giving permission to other people to do the same. And it's putting you in a position with the platform to talk more about the importance of this as the way forward to mend our divide and remember why we're all in this together.

Really appreciate it. I appreciate talking with you about it and I think pulling out some of those themes that do live at that kind of intersection of us. I really appreciate it. Well, thanks for coming and talking to me today. Thank you for having me. Great, man. A real honor on my part. The book comes out end of the month, September 29th? Yes. Is the YouTube series going to come out weekly? Are those episodes going to drip out weekly? Yeah, they're actually coming out before the book.

You have the trailer out now, but we're reporting this in advance. Trailer's out first episode I think is dropping today or tomorrow, something like that. And then it'll be weekly after that. Yeah, awesome. We'll put all the links in the description and show notes and all that kind of stuff. And please come and talk to me again. I will, I will. I'm going to send Priya a message. Yeah, I'm going to get with Priya. We have her book. And God bless you for coming and doing this on the day that on her pub date of her book, I joke with you beforehand, like, I hope your marriage can sustain this.

No, I took her in the morning, Joe, first, did my duties, then came over here. Awesome, man. Well, thanks. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. Peace.

Go deeper

• All Rich Roll Podcast episode guides