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

Anand Giridharadas is a New York Times bestselling author whose new book is Man in the Mirror. This conversation explores the death of Jordan Neely on a New York subway, the story at the center of the book. We discuss Anand's return from punditry to reporting, how power actually operates, what the Epstein emails reveal about elite relationships, the Aspen consensus, who gets to belong in America and the case for radical humanization. Along the way, I share how the program of recovery taught me to seek understanding and lead with curiosity. Anand's book is an act of service. I hope this conversation is, too. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% off your first order of DS-01®👉🏼https://www.seed.com/RichRoll Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://stories.rivian.com/richroll Birch: Get 27% Off Sitewide👉🏼https://www. BirchLiving.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Anand Girdaras, everybody. Anand Girdaras.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Anand Girdaras is a journalist who has written for The New York Times and many other outlets.

• 0:22Speaker 03

  The author of the new book out tomorrow titled Man in the Mirror. It reports on the case of Jordan Neely.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:06Rich Roll?

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

• 1:09Speaker 00

  As have I.

• 1:10Rich Roll?

  You're looking iconic.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  And you're Very, very grateful to be here.

• 1:15Rich Roll?

  In an affable mood to grapple with some serious issues, which, you know, your book very much is, you know, Man in the Mirror. I mean, first of all, congratulations. It's a massive accomplishment. We were just talking about that before we were recording. You're on the precipice of the release. And the way that I'm thinking about this book is that it's almost, I mean, certainly you've identified this story and I want you to kind of set the stage with that story. But it is a story that gets at the root of all the issues and topics that you care about, that you have been talking about and writing about for a very long time.

• 1:55Rich Roll?

  It is the perfect Petri dish, you know, of clashes that elucidate all of these themes. And in many ways, it's

• 2:06Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  That's a brilliant summary of it. You know, Man in the Mirror is, there, at the heart of it is a story that many people watching this will probably passingly remember, if that, right? There was a death on the subway in New York on May 1st, 2023. And the basic scenario was black mentally ill homeless man gets onto a train. He's a former Michael Jackson impersonator who had a little bit of renown. People would come to New York looking for him back in the day, but it kind of fallen on harder times. Mental illness tightening its grip. He starts acting out on the subway. It's a very short ride, a 30 second ride from Second Avenue to Broadway Lafayette.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  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 and 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, you know, is by his own account, trying to restrain him. Within seconds, the train gets to the next stop. Most everyone gets out, as you can imagine.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  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, you know, progressive cities run amok? Or Donald Trump's, you know, encouragement of political violence? Or pick your poison? And what you, the way you framed is exactly right. This, you know, 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.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  And so what I spent the last three years doing is trying to recover from what was reduced into clickbait,

• 5:27Speaker 00

  a real and profoundly human story. Not just of a collision of two men in that moment, but all the things that led those two men to be there. All the things, all the systems and institutions that allowed Jordan Neely to be in the state that he was in. All the things that gave Daniel Penny both the sense of the need and the right to do what he did.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  There are high public officials thinking about what does it look like to have mental health taken as seriously as, as public health? The way we, 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. So 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? So 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.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  But also some of the most extraordinary acts of humanizing and humanity. And this book is a Petri dish of all of that. And I think I wrote it in the hope that it makes people feel more alive in their connection to that humanity.

• 7:33Rich Roll?

  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? Because this is, you know, in a moment, this flashpoint that contains multitudes. Everything from mental health to your point, you know, 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. And in our current kind of journalistic environment, that gets reduced down to these, you know,

• 8:18Rich Roll?

  undimensional character figures. And this is like fodder for endless Page Six or, you know, New York Post headlines, obviously. And you've taken this tack of like trying to really understand everybody. But at what point during the unfolding of this, you know, kind of ongoing story? Because it kind of monopolized news here, at least in New York for quite a period of time. Did you realize like, there's a lot here? Maybe there's a book to this.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  I didn't realize this book was a, was a gift. And it's an amazing story. I have many amazing friends in my life. One of my best friends, a guy named Sam, who's a brilliant journalist and editor. We, 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. And 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. And we were covering India in this period of crazy remarkable growth and change. And we followed each other's work. We followed each other's lives. And the kind of work I used to do in India, I was based in Mumbai.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  So I was a, you know, foreign correspondent. I'd really tell human stories. Because I wasn't in the capital, I didn't have to do government, parliament, tax. I was just saying, what, how in this country is changing so fast? What does that mean for people? How is marriage changing in India? How, how are ambitions changing? How do the way people see themselves change? That, that became my thing.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  And Sam and I kind of grew and grew and went to different roles. He now is kind of someone who assigns and creates, you know, possibilities for others at The Times. And I became a writer.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  And over the years, Sam watched me kind of change and evolve, as we all do. And he liked some of the changes, but he didn't like some of the others. And he basically started to feel in this, this 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. And he felt that I had gone from being someone who can understand everybody, who can really get into the head of it. I wrote a book about, you know, the Texas book was about a white supremacist and 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.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  And 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, doesn't call things what they are and doesn't say, you know, doesn't call spades a spade. So I sort of became of this view that it's really important to like make a case. And I sort of, you know, and I found success. My third book, Winners Take All, made a really passionate case against kind of oligarchy in American life. And I became known for that. And I, I sort of, you don't necessarily, you know this, you don't, you don't choose your destination, you just choose your next step, and then the next step, and the next step. And after some years, I had just chased each thing and chased each whim and chased each

• 11:31Speaker 00

  decision. And 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, you know? I'm caricaturing it slightly. I think I had a little, you know, but, but that was a direction. I'd become more of an advocate. And Sam was the only friend who was like, I'm worried about you, dude. I think you've lost your way. I think you, I think a lot of people can go on social media and just say, these people good, these people bad, Trump's an idiot. Like, anybody can do that.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  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. And you could get inside what it is that possesses people to leave their village and everything they've known. And then you'd spend through 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. That's, 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 at the New York Times, like you guys are always soft pedaling this Trump stuff. You know, it was what my wife, Priya Parker, calls a worthy grapple, a worthy fight, over

• 12:54Speaker 00

  years. And one day he called me, a few days after the Jordan Neely Daniel Penny case happened. And I'd been complaining, as I'm always complaining about not having my next book. And 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. And he said, this, he said, this is an everything book. But this, 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

• 13:39Speaker 00

  you agree maybe you should go back to. And I remember, 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 like makes a case on Morning Joe. And 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 was like, I feel like I've been on a spiritual cleanse by becoming, by going back to this kind of reporting.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 14:35Rich Roll?

  Sure. You're performing 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, you know, kind of just from an arm's length perspective, like looking at your work, like how did you make this decision? 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

• 15:16Rich Roll?

  the halls of the New York Times and the Atlantic and, you know, broadcast news and all that. And then you get kind of feted for speaking truth to power 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? Like you have to figure out how to enlist people and excite them and recruit them to your cause.

• 16:00Rich Roll?

  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?

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Who belongs?

• 16:38Rich Roll?

  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.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 16:59Rich Roll?

  But 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 into that.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  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 that 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.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  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, where do you sleep? Like, just real curiosity. That's what animates my reporting.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  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. 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 profession 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, 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

• 19:13Speaker 00

  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, that ain't right, 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.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  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 US. I lived 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 or how they think, but you're dealing with Daniel Penny's Republican lawyer.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  And you're dealing with Ashwin 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.

• 21:35Speaker 00

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

• 21:52Rich Roll?

  Well, also the 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, et cetera. 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 gestalt behind that. Like it's easy to, there's momentum, right?

• 22:37Rich Roll?

  And you're just kind of moving upward as you do this thing and you're celebrated for that. And there's expectations 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, 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

• 23:23Rich Roll?

  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, I'm demonstrating that this is a, a way to be in the world that I think is more beneficial than shouting at each other. Cause certainly the way that we're doing that right now isn't solving any problems.

• 24:04Rich Roll?

  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,

• 24:49Rich Roll?

  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.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 25:07Rich Roll?

  You can have a point of view.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 25:09Rich Roll?

  The argument in that.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  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?

• 25:49Speaker 00

  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, diverse, et cetera. And then, you know, you spend time in rural Texas, like it is physically and, and psychologically different. Right? And 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.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  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

• 27:25Speaker 00

  use the power, the artistry of this kind of narrative, nonfiction 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

• 27:43Speaker 00

  in good standing with everybody I wrote about in this book. I promise everybody I wrote about in this book. You said Bonfire of the Vanities, which, you know, Tom Wolfe, amazing book. I read it as I was starting this.

• 27:55Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's so interesting.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  It was 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 nonfiction. By the way, Sam had said this is potentially 2023 Bonfire of the Vanities. My agent, Lynn Nesbit, was the agent on Bonfire of 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.

• 28:27Rich Roll?

  It's a mockery. He's making a mockery of everyone.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Everybody is 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 an 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.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  And then what's a homeless person's view?

• 29:01Speaker 00

  I write in the book about Choco, a homeless man who I witnessed a kind of one hour of his being swept by the NYPD from a block, the 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 shelter, he doesn't want to go back to those places. I watch him say no, then I watch him start to gather up his things. He moves 15 feet around the corner, which satisfies the legal requirement that he wasn't

• 29:45Speaker 00

  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 just saying, he's 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, you know, an hour or something to go down one flight into this space. He's like, this is not going to work. Goes back downtown. He'd left a bunch of his stuff that he thought he'd get later, all gone. Social Security guard gone, photos gone.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  And I remember Choco telling me, you know, they took all my photos, and he remembered the number. And he said, you know, 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. I keep, you know. And, and he described for me this photo that, 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

• 31:10Speaker 00

  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, is 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 you, 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

• 31:51Speaker 00

  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 want to 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

• 32:35Speaker 00

  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? Could we understand the pretty facile mayor he worked for, who despite that facileness, kind of had the insight that, you know, if all of our ideas about dealing with these folks in distress are things that'll bloom in 20 years, every mayor is going to lose an election after the first term. Maybe we've got to do some cheap tricks, like putting a few cops on the streets 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

• 33:20Speaker 00

  whole, I felt it could be a deepening experience for me, first of all, and then for people reading it.

• 33:29Rich Roll?

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• 34:14Rich Roll?

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• 34:56Rich Roll?

  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 Scaringe, the founder and CEO of Rivian, and we talked about how this is no accident. How does that, how does that idea of like, how are we creating this, you know, 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, you know, that perspective?

• 35:36Speaker 05

  If you're in this car, you should feel like, if you want to go somewhere and explore a hike or stay out of it later, it's there. It's just, again, a little nudge to say, it's okay to explore.

• 35:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Speaker 05

  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 allows you to 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, that, 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, it should feel like a product that's just built for someone that wants to go live, you know, a full adventurous life.

• 36:15Rich Roll?

  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/richroll.

• 36:29Rich Roll?

  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,

• 37:09Rich Roll?

  how we operate as a culture. But it also leads to a degree of, of like, hopelessness, like, okay, so there's so much wrong that by the time the guy is, 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

• 37:50Rich Roll?

  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?

• 38:05Speaker 00

  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 moralized, 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

• 38:48Speaker 00

  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, this bad guy did this. 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.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  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, no, no, no one's doing anything.

• 39:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  But it's not true. What is true is that these issues are hard. And I, in this book, focus on the intersection of mental illness and homelessness. But I, 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 edge of the outer edge of our fortune, of, 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?

• 40:27Speaker 00

  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, right? 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, like, the status of women changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 5,000. That 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

• 41:12Speaker 00

  legal right, then the way men conceive of themselves with regard to women is completely changed. You got any college campuses 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 like struggled to intuit that. Like, we make progress. We forget that we make progress. We actually change these kinds of things all the time. And thinking about, you know, New York and the subway as a space, there's also this really phony accounting that happens where, you know, this crisis in our cities, as it is often framed, and, and it becomes, you know, a thing on the evening news, and it

• 41:57Speaker 00

  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 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, or whatever, 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

• 42:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:47Rich Roll?

  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, around that message. Yeah, I'd never really thought of it in that, in that context. It becomes the city's problem, but people come to the city on the promise of, of opportunity and, you know, a different kind of life that's not available to them.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  And, you know, we, how many people walk around this city? How many people here, you know, 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, and I think it's really interesting, and I'm not saying this with hostility to red state. I, I, I understand that in a society where there are different stages of awareness of different things, you know, I, I wrote about in The Persuaders, I, 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

• 45:01Speaker 00

  it is still. And, and like, not understanding what something is is not the same as being virulently opposed to it. But I do want to 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, that you hear at the highest levels of our politics. I went to Norway once.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  You know, 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, you know, 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, you know, to Queens, the most, I think statistically diverse place in the history of the world. It's a huge achievement.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  None of our ancestors, you go back far enough, could have contemplated, they, 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 lived 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.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  And, and that story is not a hopeless story. That story, I think, is a story of profound hope.

• 47:14Rich Roll?

  There's a light dusting of, of Steven Pinker and what you just shared, like this, this appreciation for, you know, the real progress that has been made, that we are living in this, you know, 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, you know, amidst, at the same time, this crisis of loneliness and the uptick

• 47:55Rich Roll?

  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? Like, what is your theory of how we got here? Is this unique? Like, 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. Like, what is your sense of how we arrived here and how we should be thinking about our way forward?

• 48:33Speaker 00

  I mean, I think one difference, I wrote about Steven Pinker's view a little bit in my book Winners Take All, and, you know, I think-

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  I teed you up for that, because I know that, yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't want to be unfair to him, but, you know, I think, 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, you know, prosperity, you know. 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 has not happened automatically. It's not like a rising tide. It is furious work.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  And there are periods of retrenchment and backlash, right? So the Civil War is followed by emancipation, and then is followed by, you know, Reconstruction, and is followed by the redemption, as it was called, and, and, and this kind of real backslide to progress in the South. 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

• 50:04Speaker 00

  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? Do you belong? Can you belong? I think there's a lot of kind of progressive-minded people who over-center-

• 50:40Speaker 00

  Donald Trump as the kind of protagonist of this 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 aren't 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.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  When I was working on my Texas book, I mean, I remember stopping in like 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

• 52:08Speaker 00

  problems together, build a bridge together, you know, build a road, choose a leader. We're basically now, in modern American life, saying, can we achieve some of the 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

• 52:53Speaker 00

  of America, and between more progressive minded people who are too upset about what's happening to acknowledge that really amazing things preceded it. And I say, no, we are in a very dangerous moment of backlash because of the front lash of progress. And because now we are in the work, and the Persuaders book was very much about this, we are in the work of trying to bring lots of people who are discomforted 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.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  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 to 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, you know, contested things.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  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 want to 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, you have to have an understanding of the heartstrings of other people. And 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

• 55:05Speaker 00

  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?

• 55:21Rich Roll?

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• 56:02Rich Roll?

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• 56:46Rich Roll?

  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?

• 57:30Rich Roll?

  Like, this is really the tension that we're experiencing right now with the disappearance of, you know, as we become more secular and churches and, you know, YMCA's and all these places where we used to kind of get together and were forced to cohabitate with each other have vanished. And our solution to that is to, you know, 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 going to play out. You know, how do we iterate and innovate and find our way forward through that?

• 58:10Speaker 00

  I mean, 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 Winners 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.

• 58:46Rich Roll?

  Not just in the United States.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  Everyone.

• 58:49Rich Roll?

  We talk about this.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  This is the playbook.

• 58:51Rich Roll?

  With how Russia, you know, marshaled that.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  It's the playbook everywhere.

• 58:55Rich Roll?

  To divide us.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  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. It is certainly, 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

• 59:54Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  to cycle through.

• 59:55Rich Roll?

  So here we are, we're in this sort of quasi cacococracy 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, you know, in a completely different atmosphere where they are immune from this and are more than happy to, you know, foment the disagreements that are further dividing us because, to your point, they are profiting from this. And this is a lens into how power actually operates.

• 1:00:35Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  I mean, I spent a lot of time, obviously I wrote about it in Winners Take All, but over the past year, I spent a lot of time working on the Epstein files.

• 1:01:06Rich Roll?

  You wrote this insane article, this opinion piece in the New York Times. You read every single email.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  In the initial batch, then there were millions. I read every single one when it was in the many thousands. And spent, you know, six days, I think it was, just going cover to cover, reading them all. Because I knew enough from my work on oligarchy that like, 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. Right? That's the first thing people do when they get that kind of money, get their own little home servers and, you know, that kind of stuff. They're not just on Gmail. So when that glimpse happened, I was like, this, I should start reading this.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  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

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  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 that 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.

• 1:03:15Rich Roll?

  And that cuts across political lines.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  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 kind 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.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  And then Steve Bannon and Larry Summers and Woody Allen and Kathy Ruhmler 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.

• 1:04:37Rich Roll?

  In Washington DC, the currency is proximity to power. In New York, it's about proximity to financial power, I suppose. In Los Angeles, it's celebrity, right? 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, right? So these are individuals who recognize the power of that community, right? Like where the fluid access to whatever they want is through these transactional relationships that are convenient.

• 1:05:21Rich Roll?

  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, you know, somebody who remains in power. And so the power structures remain intact, no matter what anybody says.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Yes. And, you know, 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, right? 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

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  real dehumanizing tendency, as almost a core feature of their personalities, are 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.

• 1:07:20Speaker 00

  It's a marketized, commoditized dating self that is now on a platform owned by one of those people. Your mail, Gmail, you know, 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 group of, small group of people who happen to own these platforms that are vacuuming up all this human connection are spectacularly bad at human connection.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  But it almost has their defining feature.

• 1:08:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  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, just look at, 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 we have this, you know, do we have this kind of crazy concentration

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:08:56Rich Roll?

  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, you know, the Carnegie's and the Melons and the Stanfords, like, 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 a, you know, kind of a revolution, right?

• 1:09:36Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:10:21Rich Roll?

  And we're in, seemingly in acceptance of this, like, we're cosigning this while we celebrate these individuals as the absolute pinnacle of, like, human achievement.

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:10:33Rich Roll?

  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, 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.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  I mean, here's, 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.

• 1:11:19Rich Roll?

  What does that mean?

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  It means that if you were a rich and powerful person in the 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 have been the name of the village, the village might have been named after your family, you might have, you know, if you're in Scotland, you got the kilt that is the tartan of that place and that name and that, right?

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  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, was like, you were the keeper of the art of that kind of place, or 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.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  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, then you're at Bilderberg.

• 1:13:13Rich Roll?

  Or you're building your secessionary state somewhere.

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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, 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.

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  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 want to 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 you, if your public policy decisions are influenced less and less by you, but by people who are not part

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  of any place, even if you don't ascribe a kind of moral character to you, if you don't, 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.

• 1:15:02Rich Roll?

  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, you know, leads to that greater sense of powerlessness in these equations.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, 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. 5,000 or so are actually street homeless. So everybody you see on the street of New York isn't that 5,000. So there's a lot of government infrastructure that's trying to help, it's complicated, as I said. But you think about the money in this city. Think about all the rich people who are building these giant war chests to fight Mayor Ziran Mamdani's pieta terror attacks. You're telling me there's not enough of that money to help 5,000 people? 5,000 people in a city of 8 million people?

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  Less than one out of 1,000. Somehow, we've ended up, by the way, the pieta terror tax 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.

• 1:16:40Rich Roll?

  On the argument that they contribute a disproportionate of tax revenue to the city, even if they don't live there.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  Right. I remember a long time ago, I met a very wealthy man in France, went out to lunch with this guy.

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  You know, France is 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, 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.

• 1:17:37Rich Roll?

  It's all about tax, like decreasing their tax liability.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:17:53Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:01Rich Roll?

  You know.

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  And I don't think we need to.

• 1:18:04Rich Roll?

  Both ways in that, in that regard. You know, back to like this tranche of Epstein emails. You talk about the banality of it. Like this is, 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

• 1:18:48Rich Roll?

  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,

• 1:19:30Rich Roll?

  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 they're, when you're, when you're in the presence of them and you're spending time with them,

• 1:20:14Rich Roll?

  you realize they're just human beings. And, 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 arms length distance with powers that be that don't always have our best interests at heart, I guess.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  Yes, here, 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, go on 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 like-minded people. But the picture they have in their mind about why Morning Joe works the way it does, it's just so, you know, 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.

• 1:21:19Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, there's so much misunderstanding about how these.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  Now, it's not that there's not power structure involved in that stuff.

• 1:21:26Rich Roll?

  But it's not mustache twirling.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  Right, and if that's your understanding of how it works, then you're not an effective combatant against whatever it is that you want to 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, it 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, you know? It was sort of this like, this, it was a leaders, young leaders group, basically.

• 1:22:11Speaker 00

  20 or so young leaders. Almost all of them were business people. I was the odd person out as a, as a writer. And the idea was you were like 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, I don't, 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,

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  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 like corporate culture is so much about fear, right?

• 1:23:37Speaker 00

  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, and 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?

• 1:24:02Rich Roll?

  Anything they say can affect the stock price.

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  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 safe. I don't think that's, 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, 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.

• 1:24:46Speaker 00

  I felt myself getting kind of increasingly annoyed, interested but annoyed by it. And a lot of that, the rhetoric in that world is like, as young leaders, we're going to get together and like solve these big problems in the world. And you have to have a little project to solve some problem. And it just, you know, 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 like, these people are the problem that they're trying to solve.

• 1:25:19Rich Roll?

  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, 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 structures. So they're creating the problems, giving lip service and maybe solving some of them,

• 1:26:00Rich Roll?

  but not really getting at the systemic issues that are causing the problems in the first place from which they benefit.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  Exactly, that's, we're 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 of months later? And I said, yes. And then as it drew near with these kind of feelings that I had been nursing, which I 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. And I can give that anywhere, it's already on the internet. Why am I giving it again?

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  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,

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  but they should never be told to do less harm. They should be asked to give back.

• 1:27:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:27:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:28:00Rich Roll?

  You got, because they kind of have to.

• 1:28:04Speaker 00

  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 Winners 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

• 1:28:46Speaker 00

  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 like 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.

• 1:29:31Speaker 00

  And someone was saying, you know, there's apparently a well-known thing in AI called 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 like, in the thought experiment, it'll start like.

• 1:29:42Rich Roll?

  It will kill all the people in the interest of paperclips.

• 1:29:45Speaker 00

  Right. And the point they were actually making on the podcast was a little strange to me. They were like, it's the alignment problem. Why can't we align AI with human values? Right? 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.

• 1:30:02Rich Roll?

  We are, we are AI aligned.

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  That's what slavery was.

• 1:30:05Rich Roll?

  This is, we are, yeah, we are, we are all performing our own paperclip thought experiment.

• 1:30:09Speaker 00

  They were like, why, 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? 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.

• 1:30:29Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:30:30Speaker 00

  Should we go take over some country to keep the metal supply going for these paperclips?

• 1:30:35Rich Roll?

  What is your relationship now with the Bohemian groves of the world? Like, do they, are you like exiled from these things? Or are they still, they begrudgingly invite you back?

• 1:30:45Speaker 00

  I got kicked out of my Aspen Institute class.

• 1:30:50Speaker 00

  I think there were some individual people in the class who were fine with me, but you know, there was a, there's 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.

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  You're an existential threat.

• 1:31:31Speaker 00

  And I really didn't even say it that harshly. And my Winners 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, I, 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, and, and, you know, with, with Man in the Mirror, I think it's deeply, deeply choosing the world of writing and the world of art.

• 1:32:14Speaker 00

  And this is like the kind of artistic wing of, of journalism that I'm in, which is like, this book is really as devoted to the artistic practice of storytelling and, and, and this kind of way of inhabiting others through language. That's my home. I, I, if I never went to another thought leader confab again, I would be so happy.

• 1:32:36Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  I mean, it's interesting. Rutger is now raising money from lots of rich people to do moral, you know.

• 1:32:59Rich Roll?

  He's doing, he's doing a lot of cool stuff, but he's very much in a, in a, in a more of an activist mode, I would say.

• 1:33:06Speaker 00

  I, 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 to be 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'm not a, I think through all of my writing, through all my books, through all my

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  different places I've worked in, I'm a real believer in the need for, I'm, I'm the opposite of a totalizer. Like, I, I think you, we need different people to be doing different things.

• 1:33:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:57Speaker 00

  And no.

• 1:33:57Rich Roll?

  There are certain people who are, who are, you know, kind of genetically designed to play a certain type of role. Like, I see this in the, 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.

• 1:34:40Speaker 00

  But I think for me, what personally, so this is not prescriptive for anybody else, what I discovered through my friends' 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, I argued, arguably became better known for that mode of being than what I have always

• 1:35:20Speaker 00

  thought of as my underlying work. I chose to lurch in a very different direction with Man in the Mirror, and I want to 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 going to pull it off, it is going to require not just some journalist you're watching on this podcast

• 1:36:04Speaker 00

  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 like 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.

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  But I think the basic, in a, 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, 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

• 1:37:26Speaker 00

  many of the different toxicities of this moment, these systems, is to insist on the humanity of other people.

• 1:37:35Rich Roll?

  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, in, in this new book. With this eye of trying to understand every individual's point of view on these things, but fundamentally, the, 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?

• 1:38:17Rich Roll?

  And change is really the fundamental theme of this podcast. It's just through the lens of personal change. Like, 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.

• 1:38:52Rich Roll?

  What are the biggest obstacles now in terms of like 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 off lay 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 want to see. And, and we have to change ourselves if we want to change the world. It's kind of a Buddhist, Buddhist concept in that way.

• 1:39:29Speaker 00

  And that I would say, Man and the Mare is my fifth book. All five have been different, 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, you know, eight, nine, 10% economic growth.

• 1:40:14Speaker 00

  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. Morays, values, like, it is, it is, 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, what does that mean in you?

• 1:40:56Speaker 00

  What happens when, so what that actually, you know, 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 histories 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 law.

• 1:41:41Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm a, 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.

• 1:42:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:43:07Speaker 00

  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, talk about, you know, all dramas 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.

• 1:43:49Speaker 00

  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, the financial crisis, rising authoritarianism, climate change. This is a pretty intense era with 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, and that guy's your problem.

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  I think we're being tested in, do we have the ability to change? And to enlarge ourselves? Are, 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 felt forced to show up as a man, I wasn't 100% feeling. And maybe some of this stuff is a little bit more of a Lego construction than I've understood it to be, let me think about that. That's all. Can we be altered?

• 1:45:15Speaker 00

  You can't alter other people if you're not alterable yourself.

• 1:45:19Rich Roll?

  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 our 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,

• 1:46:02Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:46:20Speaker 00

  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 microscopics. At the end of the day, what all those things translate to in reality are these little decisions people make. 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.

• 1:47:04Speaker 00

  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 wherever 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 trying to make that son see something about his dad that he might not see. Think about a friend of mine, who is an actor, brilliant actor on Broadway.

• 1:47:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:48:31Speaker 00

  And they went to the party afterwards, opening night. 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...

• 1:48:46Speaker 00

  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 City.

• 1:49:09Rich Roll?

  A version of himself and a completely different context.

• 1:49:12Speaker 00

  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. The 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 her having to become him. Just, I see the rhyme.

• 1:49:53Rich Roll?

  And thirdly, communicating that to her as a bridge back to connection.

• 1:49:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:50:08Rich Roll?

  That's really beautiful. 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 journalist, and like digging even deeper into certain aspects of this story that, you know, aren't appropriate to be in the book.

• 1:50:41Speaker 00

  It's really interesting. Actually, this morning, I was outside the set of Morning Joe and I ran into Pablo Torri, 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 and 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. 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, it is pure.

• 1:51:25Speaker 00

  I really wanted it to function as a piece of art as much as a piece of journalism. And so, it's just, you're just in these people. From the first page, you're in someone's head and then you're in someone's... It really is meant to read like a novel. And I really privileged that approach and the, the beauty of that and the elegance of that and the emotional resonance of that kind of approach. I privileged that over kind of showing people my work, right? This is not a showing people your work book. This is a concealing the labor book. This is a book where there are paragraphs in that book that come,

• 1:52:08Speaker 00

  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 and I wanted to always make that kind of book and so I made it. And then I saw Pablo Torri speaking at this Substack event about his investigative work and this 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 book's 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.

• 1:52:51Speaker 00

  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 or might have just kind of melted into a larger narrative. The first episode is about the interrogation tape when Daniel Penny was brought into the NYPD precinct and interrogated by two detectives.

• 1:53:30Speaker 00

  And it's a really fascinating piece of tape because at the beginning, the vibe is not unlike your and 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. One of the guys is a Marine also, so they're like, what branch are you in? What branch are you in? What was your unit? Oh, man, so cool. Look at my death before dishonor tattoo. They're vibing and they're bro-ing out. And you can sort of see like, oh, this is why they let him go right after. They, 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.

• 1:54:14Speaker 00

  And Daniel Penny 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 or I thought it was, I was trying to protect people. He repeatedly calls him a crackhead, talks about him squirming, 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 Penny really, in a way that's quite striking, veers into this language pretty firmly and definitively.

• 1:54:55Speaker 00

  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 at the beginning.

• 1:55:06Rich Roll?

  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 it went in a different direction?

• 1:55:20Speaker 00

  Obviously, that is their job.

• 1:55:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:21Speaker 00

  So, and I talk about that in the book, 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, went on that arc, were very supportive of Daniel Penny 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 that Daniel Penny, they actually said Daniel Penny was right to try to do something.

• 1:56:05Speaker 00

  They even said he was maybe right to put Jordan Neely in a chokehold and try to restrain him. But that the subway got to the next stop within seconds. Everybody was out. There was no one really left to protect. Doors open, cars largely empty. Everybody was in there 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 a 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.

• 1:56:44Speaker 00

  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 schoolteacher 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 Penny as an anomaly. I think they were making the case that all of us, at one moment or another, 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.

• 1:57:25Speaker 00

  What they alleged was that Daniel Penny dehumanized this other person so as to be able to keep going with this chokehold, not to be like 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, in a legal sense. But the reason it was interesting, and we focused this whole first episode on it, is Daphna Yorin, 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

• 1:58:09Speaker 00

  was really important now. And she said to me, I interviewed her after the case, she hadn't lost a case in 20 years, right? This is her first loss in 20 years for a homicide prosecutor. And she said, I know this guy is not gonna commit another crime. She said, you know, most of the cases we bring, you, you wanna put that person away because they're gonna burgle the next house or they're gonna cash the next bad check or whatever. She said, I knew this guy's not, 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.

• 1:58:53Speaker 00

  Again, it was a, I think it was an ambitious, maybe of a, a reach of a theory.

• 1:58:58Rich Roll?

  Too ephemeral a theory to compel a jury. And so ultimately, that theory works at cross purposes with the goal because he gets acquitted.

• 1:59:10Speaker 00

  And...

• 1:59:11Rich Roll?

  And so the message is, you can dehumanize people.

• 1:59:15Speaker 00

  And 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...

• 1:59:27Speaker 00

  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 going to be no work for anybody. It's all dehumanization of different flavors. We're surrounded. 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, what is the effect on people of absorbing all these messages telling you, you are not needed, you are not needed?

• 2:00:10Speaker 00

  The most damaging message any person can hear. And so what, 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 of people asking the question of what pulls us away from common humanity? What brings us closer to it?

• 2:00:44Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:01:05Speaker 00

  And 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

• 2:01:49Speaker 00

  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 the outer edge of our compassion have, 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, and he said, he said, I didn't quite realize, I take on a lot of tough cases, a lot of marginalized folks, a lot of people who are not necessarily loved by society.

• 2:02:30Speaker 00

  He said, when I took on the case of a, not just a black man dying of violent death, but mentally ill and homeless, not middle-class guy with two kids and...

• 2:02:44Rich Roll?

  Who also suffered the trauma of his mother

• 2:02:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:02:48Rich Roll?

  being killed in the same way.

• 2:02:49Speaker 00

  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. Like, that's not my plaintiff, you know? Like, 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 the edge of our compassion. And that line, I think, does move. Right?

• 2:03:30Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:03:50Rich Roll?

  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, that's really the core battle that's being waged right now.

• 2:04:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:05Rich Roll?

  And are you optimistic about where we're headed?

• 2:04:09Speaker 00

  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 any, 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 by, I mean, I actually mean this in a serious way. He has become, this second year was not like the first year, like he has become really

• 2:04:53Speaker 00

  consumed by trying to make money and trying to like redecorate Washington. And I don't, I think that like 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, like that, that's very dangerous. But I think, 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 been made clear. Like, I, when I go visit, my, my family lives in India, still my, you know, extended family,

• 2:05:35Speaker 00

  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 as a moral judgment, but it's not a high, it's not a society in which a lot of people are encountering a lot of difference. Right?

• 2:06:18Speaker 00

  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 like lots of different followers for this comment. And I, 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 not a place, it is a place where like when a new thing is proposed, by the way, some of Europe, Europe is like this, like in certain, when new thing, new idea is proposed, the general histamine reaction is like...

• 2:06:47Rich Roll?

  Constriction, resistance.

• 2:06:50Speaker 00

  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, an 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.

• 2:07:32Speaker 00

  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. Right? And I'm talking, 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...

• 2:08:07Speaker 00

  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, a deep sense of acceptance of difference,

• 2:08:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:09:18Rich Roll?

  I think that's a very grounded degree of optimism, you know, a calibrated optimism weighed against a couple hundred years of this experiment that we've been waging. And I think that counts for something, you know, and I think that there is a resilience in the, you know, 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.

• 2:10:02Rich Roll?

  You know, I think that, 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.

• 2:10:20Speaker 00

  I do, too. And I think these moments, testing moments, and they're choosing moments. If we had just been on autopilot and it had been, you know, I don't know, Obama, Romney, you know, like that kind of, some of these things would have still been under the surface.

• 2:10:38Rich Roll?

  We, we're being tested. It's all coming to the surface so that we have to fucking reckon with it.

• 2:10:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:10:54Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that the book, and of course, the YouTube series that is going to come out and can measure it with it, is, is really an act of service. I mean, I, 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 a platform to talk more about the importance of this

• 2:11:32Rich Roll?

  as the way forward to mend our divide and remember about, remember why, you know, we're in, we're all in this together.

• 2:11:43Speaker 00

  Really appreciate it. I appreciate talking with you about it and, and I think pulling out some of those themes that, that do live at that kind of intersection of, of us. I really appreciate it.

• 2:11:56Rich Roll?

  Well, thanks for coming, talking to me today.

• 2:11:59Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:12:00Rich Roll?

  It's been great, man. A real honor on my part. The book comes out end of the month, September 29?

• 2:12:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:12:07Rich Roll?

  Is the YouTube series going to come out weekly? Like, are those episodes going to drip out weekly? How are we going to do that?

• 2:12:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're actually coming out before the book, and...

• 2:12:15Rich Roll?

  You have the trailer out now, but we're recording this in advance.

• 2:12:17Speaker 00

  Trailer's out, first episode that is dropping today or tomorrow, something like that, and then it'll be weekly after that.

• 2:12:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, awesome. Well, 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.

• 2:12:30Speaker 00

  I will, I will. I'm going to send, I'm going to send Priya.

• 2:12:33Rich Roll?

  And 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 joked with you beforehand, like, I hope your marriage can sustain this.

• 2:12:45Speaker 00

  No, I took her, I took her into Morning Joe first, did my duties, then came, then came over here.

• 2:12:49Rich Roll?

  Awesome, man.

• 2:12:50Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:12:51Rich Roll?

  Appreciate it. Peace.