Why America Can’t Solve Homelessness — with Anand Giridharadas

Anand Giridharadas, journalist and author of Man in the Mirror, joins Scott Galloway to discuss what Jordan Neely’s death reveals about homelessness, public safety, and America’s crisis of belonging. He explains why cities struggle to help their most vulnerable residents, the difficult questions around involuntary mental health treatment, and how community can help people rebuild their lives. Plus, what the reactions to Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione reveal about Americans’ growing sense of abandonment—and the line between protecting others and taking justice into your own hands. 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.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from First Citizens Innovation Banking, formerly Silicon Valley Bank. First Citizens is the bank of the innovation economy. The name may have changed, but for over 40 years, their commitment to bold ideas, relentless ambition, and delivering what's next is as strong as ever. So if you're wondering where the road to innovation starts, it's here. First Citizens Innovation Banking. Head to firstcitizens.com/innovation to learn more. Support for the show comes from Yahoo Scout. Whatever you're searching for, Yahoo Scout can turn hours of research into clear, trustworthy answers in seconds, keeping up with culture, navigating the ups and downs of parenting, planning a vacation, and more. Make sense of life's everyday questions and personal decisions with Yahoo Scout.

• 0:45Scott Galloway?

  Yahoo's personal finance page has been my homepage for about 30 years, and so far, I find the user interface from Yahoo Scout really elegant, and I find the results to be really helpful, quite frankly. Go to scout.com to start exploring today.

• 1:03Speaker 01

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• 1:30Scott Galloway?

  Episode 416, 416, the area code for Toronto in 2016. Deadpool hit theaters. True story. I have worn a Deadpool outfit the last two Halloweens. This guy is literally my Marvel genius. My favorite quote? Whose balls did I have to fondle to get my own Marvel movie? I don't know, but his name rhymes with pulverine. Maximum effort. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 416th episode of the Prop G Pod. It's like 6:15 Pacific daylight time.

• 2:12Scott Galloway?

  And honestly, daylight, I mean, it just happened here. Still in LA, oh, dark 100. Had to take a sleeping pill to get to bed at like, I don't know, one such that I could get five hours sleep. So if I seem out of it, trust your instincts. What's happening? The Prop G Pod is a Signal Awards finalist. Please help us win. This is actually a big deal for us. We're a small team. Go to Signal Awards. I don't know, we'll put a link in the bio, but please do go and vote for us. In today's episode, we speak with Anand Girdadas, a journalist, bestselling author, and publisher of the newsletter The Ink. I'm especially proud that I can pronounce Anand's name.

• 2:55Scott Galloway?

  I first interviewed Anand onstage. I used to run a company called L2, and we used to do these events. It was coming right out of the recession, and I thought people want to... I tapped into this whole IRL thing. I think of me as kind of the Taylor Swift of academia. I used to throw these big events and bring all these professors in. With Anand, we discuss his new book, Man in the Mirror: An America's Crisis of Belonging. What Jordan Neely's death reveals about homelessness and mental illness, and the line between public safety and vigilantism.

• 3:30Scott Galloway?

  With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Anand Girdadas. Anand, thanks for joining us.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad you're on Substack.

• 3:48Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, what a thrill. You're kind of the original, or an original gangster here, and just to wax poetic a bit, Anand and I are fellow alumni of the hit...

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Alumni is an interesting word for that.

• 4:04Scott Galloway?

  Alumni, yeah, as in it's over. We both had shows on CNN Plus. So before we get into your book...

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Wasn't it Vice?

• 4:12Scott Galloway?

  Oh, were we both on Vice? I've had so many failed TV shows. You're right, it was Vice. Oh, it was Vice.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  I don't know that alumni is the right word for trauma bonding.

• 4:22Scott Galloway?

  Okay, but your show, to be honest, your show was boring, but fine. My show was awful. Awful. I looked like an old man having an epileptic seizure. I don't know about you, but I had to film it from my garage. It was COVID.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:41Scott Galloway?

  And they put all these MTV-like graphics on it to make it feel younger. I watched it with my partner. This is a true story, and then I want to hear your experience. I watched the first episode with my partner. At the end of the show, she started crying and looked at me and said, what does this mean for our family?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 5:01Scott Galloway?

  And I'm like, oh my God. I've made my partner. It was, my show was so bad. Your show?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  It was also not great. I had AOC as my first guest, so that gave it a lift. I had you as a guest, which gave it a lift. Here's what happened with my show, probably the same with yours. It was kind of developed and set up like winter of 2019, turn of 2020, all set, contracts, ready to go. Let's start filming in February, March, whatever. And COVID strikes, and I've never had a TV show before. Spoiler alert, I've never had one since. And COVID hits, and I was like, well, I guess we're not doing a TV show. They're like, no, no, no, we can just make it in this new reality, whatever it may be. And so my daughter had a very severe lung condition.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  She was like two years old, so I had to go to this remote location because of her. And so then I didn't have proper internet, which is kind of important for making a TV show, so I was filming things on iPads and cameras, you know? And then I had to hire someone to pick up USB drives with the filmed video. Like, it was like drug deals of data. And then they would come to my house and pick up the USB drive like from the driveway because we didn't want to have contact with each other, and then drive it up to their house and upload it on some faster Wi-Fi that they had. And it was, it was so surreal, so much energy to make something that wasn't good.

• 6:34Scott Galloway?

  Oh, God, yeah. I was literally a TV show, me in my garage alone, and they had a producer in my ear saying, oh, do this, or next episode does. My tech producer drew in the cloud because, you know, we couldn't have, we had social distancing. So it was me trying to make 30 minutes of TV in my garage with like lights and a camera, and it was so bad. And the guy, forget his name, the production executive, nice guy, called me after the six episodes. I'm like, I just got to get through this. Called me after the six episodes and like, I got great news, they want to renew it. And I'm like, no fucking way. I am so out of here.

• 7:15Scott Galloway?

  And I remember him, my agent called me, the production called me, he called me back three times, the guy running Vice at the time reached out to me, who I like, Shane Smith, and they were just so flummoxed that anyone would pass up an opportunity to be on TV. And the lesson for me was, people must cling to TV like a dictator clings to power, that they were just, they could not believe I was going to pass up the opportunity to be on TV. Did you do, have, so you haven't done any TV since then?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  I, no, not my own thing. I go, I go talk about things I've written on MSNBC.

• 7:56Scott Galloway?

  You're on MSNBC a lot, yeah. I say that all the time.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  But I, and particularly Morning Joe is sort of my home court there. But I have always tried to maintain the discipline of going there to talk about things I have written and not, not going there to talk about, you know, like things that might be in my head.

• 8:17Scott Galloway?

  So I don't go, I don't go onto cable news very much, but I have found a few things move the needle. And the three things for me to move the needle are Bill Maher, The View, and Morning Joe. That's a good home for you. I find a lot of people, I'll hear from people I haven't heard from in 30 years, like, oh, I saw you on Morning Joe. That gets an enormous audience.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you ever want to speak to 50 senators doing squats at the same time, you know, in their home gyms or the Capitol gym, like Morning Joe is the way to have that kind of, that kind of impact.

• 8:55Scott Galloway?

  Well, good. Well, your new book, Man in the Mirror, is both an investigative story about Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, or the Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny case, but also a true life opera of New York City in American age of fracture and a story of the search for belonging. Why did you choose? Can you do us a favor? Give us the headline news on what went down here and talk about why you chose it to be the subject of your book.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Well, you can see when you read that word belonging, why I wanted to come talk to you about it. You know, this is a story that, like so many stories, America chewed up, hastily metabolized, spat out and kind of forgot. So if you're watching this, you may be one of those people who has a foggy memory of the case that I'm talking about. May 2023, New York City subway uptown F train, middle of the day. A black mentally ill homeless man named Jordan Neely, former Michael Jackson impersonator, gets on the subway, starts kind of begging for food, saying he's ready to go back to prison, ready to die. A lot of people feel threatened in the train.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Some say it's kind of worse than what you normally experience on the train. And a former Marine named Daniel Penny, white former Marine named Daniel Penny, comes up behind Jordan Neely, puts him in a chokehold, drops him to the ground over his own body and holds him. Within seconds, the train gets to the next station. Almost everybody gets out of the train, obviously. And Daniel Penny continues the chokehold for another five or so minutes, ultimately killing Jordan Neely. And from the moment news kind of wafted up from that Broadway Lafayette subway station, it became instantly an American Rorschach test, right? People were certain they knew what they were seeing

• 10:50Speaker 02

  before much information was available. Daniel Penny was either a white supremacist vigilante Batman or he was an American hero standing up to entropy and decay and anarchy in the cities. Jordan Neely was either a menace to society, who someone finally had the courage to snuff out, or he was a victim of systemic racism and the failure to care for the least among us. And I became interested in what was erased by that hasty metabolizing and spitting out that we do with so many of these stories. This is one of these stories where everybody knew it for five seconds and then nobody was invested in it five minutes later.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  And I decided to spend three years digging in because, not just because it was an interesting or complicated that moment itself, but because I think America itself was contained in that subway car. So many of our failing systems, so many of the political emotions of this authoritarian age, the sense of abandonment, a lot of the things you talk about, the sense that people don't feel held, the sense that people feel abandoned, the sense that people feel that systems don't see them and are condescending towards them, don't hear them, not coming for them. And so I was convinced that what happened in that subway car was a kind of distillation of what was happening all across this country.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  And I wanted to study it and I wanted to then follow not just those, not just the story of those two lives, but the ways in which our cities and people who work in them, who work for the mayors, who work for outreach organizations that help homeless people, homeless folks themselves, how we are dealing with this crisis that everybody watching this will have seen who lives in a city of some of our most desperate citizens in public space suffering and we and our cities often not knowing what quite to do.

• 12:53Scott Galloway?

  Well, let's start with some of the amorphirics because I was just in San Francisco and I'm not there often. And I ended up at a hotel that was in a, you know, not a not a not great part of town. And I was just struck by the number of homeless that are still in San Francisco. And I did, I actually spoke to the mayor and looked at some data and things are actually distinctly better. And yet they're still really bad. As you did research around this, specifically Jordan Neely, what are your observations or takeaways? I actually think the homeless problem in New York, given the crush of humanity, is surprisingly, I don't want to call it good, but surprisingly not bad. I don't, granted, I'm a bit, I'm in a bubble.

• 13:38Scott Galloway?

  I spend most of my time in Soho when I'm here. But if I go to Seattle or LA or San Francisco,

• 13:44Speaker 02

  No, you're right.

• 13:45Scott Galloway?

  I come to New York, I think this feels like Disneyland.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  No, you're right. So, so, so a few things. First of all, you're right about some of those West Coast cities and New York. New York has, and I think a lot of people don't know this, New York has a legal kind of state constitutional right to shelter that was argued for by a young lawyer in the 70s who was walking down the Bowery and thought it was terrible the way people were being allowed to live. And his kind of compassion as this young lawyer pro bono was to fight and win a New York state constitutional right to shelter. So there's a right to shelter in New York. In New York, there's about 100,000 people in New York City who are homeless. 95% of them are in the system in some way. They're in shelters, they're in supportive housing, they're in various forms of things.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  So you, that's, those are not the folks you are necessarily seeing and clocking as homeless when you walk by them on the streets. But 5,000 people who are on the street. And those 5,000 in New York have generally said no to shelter. And one of the things I found in the book is they've generally said no to shelter today. Like they may have said it, they may have said no three times today. So in New York, the problem is not a lack of resources, lack of beds. It is actually a problem of people who do not want to go into that system, often out of a profound and intimate knowledge of what that system is like. I'll get back to that in a second. The West Coast thing is different, right? In some of these West Coast cities, 70% and contrast with 5% being on the street in New York,

• 15:17Speaker 02

  it's like 70% on the street. So it is a qualitatively different thing that you are seeing. Now, think about San Francisco for a second. This is the Rome of our time, right? If there in every era is one city that makes the most decisions about how everybody on earth lives, it's actually not New York or London, I would argue today. It is Silicon Valley, right? They're deciding what your kid's consciousness is. They're deciding what your teenage daughter's body image issues are.

• 15:47Scott Galloway?

  It's a small city, it's 100,000 people.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Right. This is, this is Rome of our time, right? It's not the best place, it may not be the richest, but it is the place that is deciding what Cambodian lives in the countryside are, how they are lived, what their commerce looks like, what their political movements can do or not do, right? For that, for the Rome of our time, to look and feel the way it does, because I feel the same thing and see the same thing when I go there, is appalling. But I think what a lot of people don't realize is, a lot of people come to this with like, well, the government's not doing anything. Or there's a kind of leftist view that like, we're not spending any money. We hate these people, we're not spending any money. Or there's a kind of right wing view of the government's incompetent

• 16:32Speaker 02

  and just, you know, doesn't want to, doesn't want to actually clean things up. It's actually a lot more complicated, Scott, as you might imagine. And I think that one of the complications is that these, we are better at building this apparatus to maintain homelessness than to end it, right? We are better at maintain, building these kind of, these apparatuses that people, it's called a revolving door. People cycle into an ER, are held for a couple of days, which is not enough to necessarily deal with schizophrenia, but kicked out in two days and sent home to no home. Or they go to a shelter and then they're beat up in the shelter. Their stuff is stolen in the shelter or they're sexually assaulted in the shelter. They don't stick around there.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  They go to the street, then the NYPD or the cops in LA will sweep them from the street and say, you can't be on the street encampment. Then they may go to a temporary facility here. We don't give people the kind of supports they need to get their lives back. And a lot of this obviously is mental illness. And with the mental illness component, maybe the most important thing I learned in this book is we have a profound moral confusion in this country about folks who you are seeing out there who say no to the help that might be offered. And I wanted to focus on New York because in New York,

• 17:58Speaker 02

  the folks you see on the street are, that's kind of the situation for most of them, right? Whereas in LA, there may not be enough beds. Here in New York, you're dealing often, certainly not always, but often with people who have some form of mental illness that, one of the conditions of which may be that you don't know you're mentally ill or realize how well you are. So if you are in that subway and you're not dangerous to anybody, you're not threatening anybody, you're just sitting on the side of a platform, but you're kind of rotting away. It bothers us, it upsets us. But do we have the authority as a society to take that person in against their will and force them onto inveiga medicine?

• 18:42Speaker 02

  What authority do we have? And I think what I've found is that people of good faith who work on this, actually work on this issue, are deeply confused about it. It is hard. We talk about bodily autonomy in this country, right? We want women to have bodily autonomy. Well, does that mentally ill person have bodily autonomy? Is the right thing for their dignity to actually force them to their happiness? These are very, very difficult questions. And I, and I spent, you know, three years with people living them, right? This is a book of reporting, not, not opinion. A lot of us have opinions about this stuff we're seeing in our cities. I wanted to go beneath that and live in the lives and in the heads of these folks dealing with this from every vantage point.

• 19:26Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 19:32Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from LinkedIn Ads. There's no worse feeling than making a major investment in something only to realize it didn't exactly live up to the hype, such as buying a nice piece of tech that ends up in storage collecting dust, or taking a business workshop where your main takeaway was little more than a few motivational words. If you work in marketing, this can happen with ads. You optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach and reactions, but when they don't show revenue, well, that can turn into an unfun conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that: bull spend. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads and invest in what looks good to your CFO. According to the 2026 Dream Data Benchmark Report, LinkedIn Ads generated the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. It's 121%.

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• 20:40Scott Galloway?

  Support for this podcast and the following message is brought to you by E-Trade from Morgan Stanley. Simplify your finances and discover the convenience of investing and banking all in one place with E-Trade from Morgan Stanley. Choose from a wide range of investment choices and award-winning banking solutions together in one platform. Plus, get up to $1,500 when you open a brokerage account with a qualifying deposit today. Learn more at E-Trade.com/offer. Banking products and services are provided by Morgan Stanley Private Bank, National Association, Member FDIC. Terms and other fees apply. Investing involves risks. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, Member SIPC.

• 21:19Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from NetSuite. AI isn't just about opening new business opportunities. It's changing the way businesses get work done, the questions they ask, the decisions they make, and even the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next. It's the next generation of the business management suite trusted by over 44,000 companies with AI woven into every tool you already rely on. It services insights when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions about your business in natural language, just like talking to a colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also changing how people and teams work together. That's why NetSuite has put out a new expert-created business guide that you can download today. It's called Aligning for the Authentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work.

• 22:03Scott Galloway?

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• 22:30Scott Galloway?

  I'm very sympathetic to, I have, I know a lot of people who say in San Francisco and New York, I'm paying 13% incremental taxes. Figure it out. I mean, they're just sort of, I don't have time to do the research, but other cities, there are just a lot of cities in America where there aren't very many homeless. And I think the attitude is, how come the cities, or many of the cities with the most resources, seem to be the least good at this? And it kind of comes down to this tension, right? And that is, if, and what I would argue, some of the cities who have, quote unquote,

• 23:10Scott Galloway?

  dealt with the problem, and we may not like the way they've dealt with it, they've said, we will provide a certain level of resources so these folks at least have a bed. My understanding is Bloomberg approached it this way. But it is illegal to be homeless. They've basically said it's illegal to be homeless. Is that, and that's a violation of rights. Is it illegal? And in my view, I am very sympathetic to the notion that if you can say whatever you want, shouldn't you be able to live wherever you want?

• 23:41Speaker 02

  And by the way, this came up in a Supreme Court case while I was working on the book. The Grants Pass case came up, and it tested, is there a right to be homeless, specifically a right to sleep outdoors? And what, it was a very interesting debate. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, basically, in America, you are allowed to sleep outside as long as you have a home somewhere. In other words, if Professor G was, but even in a city, right? If you were laying in Central Park stargazing, and you happened to fall asleep, your odds of being arrested for that are quite low.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  So she made the point that I found quite, you know, striking during the argument, that you basically have to have a second home to not be arrested for making a home outdoors. And, you know, I think the other argument, the other side, is that this is public space. And I spent time also with sanitation workers and outreach workers who say, look, these are public sidewalks. This is, people are going to the bathroom on the sidewalk. It is not sanitary. We have a century of public health, you know? And so I have, you know, my brain comes up with quick and hasty judgments as easily as anybody else, but I really tried with this book to live in the minds of a homeless

• 25:08Speaker 02

  person trying to sleep outdoors. My character, Choco, who I spent time with, go in-depth, Choco being swept by the NYPD. And I try to get in the mind frame of what is it like to have all your possessions in this little space and have 20 people from the NYPD and sanitation coming at you, trying to take away, and Choco, elderly man, had grown up on the very block 60 years earlier that he was now sitting on the street of. He had grown up in an apartment on the very block. So I tried to get in his head. But then I also spent time with these outreach workers who are endlessly frustrated with

• 25:50Speaker 02

  people who refuse to go to shelter and who refuse any kind of help. And I spent time with folks, two different characters of mine, in the mayor's office under Eric Adams, one of whom thinks you should just forcibly hospitalized lots of these people, and you are doing more for their humanity and dignity by forcing them into care than you are by letting them rot. And then another guy in the mayor's office who said, no, this is all downstream of actually a healthy society, and food deserts, and better schools, and, you know? And so this is a book in which I am trying to kind of inhabit the fighting faiths of this country that you see on this issue, and that you see even more broadly around

• 26:31Speaker 02

  these questions of order, disorder, fear, safety, danger, that I think are at the heart of this kind of era in American life.

• 26:39Scott Galloway?

  I want to perform a thesis and have you respond to it because I did hear from Dan Merrill Lurie, and so I did a fraction of the deep dive you've done, but I did do some, at least some cursory research on the homeless problem, and then we'll go specifically to this case. And like a lot of people, I had stereotypes or presumptions that were just totally incorrect. I assumed that a big percentage of the homeless were veterans, and it's actually only 4%. The Housing and Urban Development, HUD, and Veterans Affairs have actually been quite successful at finding housing for veterans.

• 27:20Scott Galloway?

  The largest cohort of the homeless are people who live alone, have no siblings, no connections. And it started me thinking, I'm into this whole notion of the answer is each other. And that if you don't from a very early age figure out the third places, the economics, the zeitgeist, to ensure people have some deep and meaningful relationships, you know, what determines outcomes, good and bad, of a hospital stay? Is it the hospitals, the doctor? No, it's that you have an advocate, that you have someone who is irrationally passionate about your well-being, saying, where are the meds?

• 28:04Scott Galloway?

  Where's the nurse? And it just struck me that the people, the homeless population, the top of the funnel for the homeless, is a kid who graduates from high school.

• 28:16Scott Galloway?

  Works remotely, doesn't have family. And if he drops, if he or she drops off the face of the earth, nobody knows. I would just love to get your thoughts on this.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  I think it is completely correct. And I think this is actually a, one of the people I follow in the book, I call them characters, but this is obviously a nonfiction book. These are real, real people who I followed for a couple of years. One of my four main characters is named Ashwin Vasan. He was the health commissioner of New York City under the previous mayor, meaning chief doctor of New York City. He was the first mental health expert to get that job, right? So if you think of public health, you think polio, measles, COVID, shots, sanitation drives, these kinds of things, right? His appointment was an important signal that mental health might be considered sort of

• 29:11Speaker 02

  public health in a more meaningful way than the past, right? Because we don't normally think about it like that. We think about it like, like COVID is everyone's problem, right? A measles outbreak is everybody's problem. But if you're, but if your teenager is depressed about climate change, like that's kind of your family's problem, right? We still privatize mental health in many ways. And to your point of people isolated. And so he said, what if we, what if mental health was part of public health? What if we treated the people you were just describing as having something as collective in nature as a measles outbreak? What would it look like? And what he, he had come from an amazing organization that if you don't know, you would love it. It's called Fountain House.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  It is a mental health clubhouse. It is an actual giant townhouse on the west side of Manhattan. It started a long time ago. It was founded by former patients in a state psychiatric facility in New York who found community with each other inside while they were still inside and had a kind of group where they would get together and found a lot of solace in that. And then when they came out, they were discharged, they were missing it. They fell into exactly the kind of isolation you described. And so they recreated it and they created this group and eventually grew into this thing called Fountain House. Fountain House is not a place to stay overnight. It is a daytime clubhouse for mentally ill folks.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  You become a member, you apply, you become a member, and then you can kind of hang out there during the day. They have a wellness center. They have a kitchen where people can cook and make food. People, you know, are customers there and they also do the jobs there. They have a cafe. They have a, a place where you can get clothes if you have a job interview, right? There's people at varying levels of severity. They have a newspaper, the Fountain House Times. And the whole theory of Fountain House that, and that also animated Ashwin Vasan's turn as commissioner of public health in New York City was exactly what you said. We think of some of these conditions as being biomedical and just beyond the reach of anything besides drugs. But actually, for some people, it is the failure to be needed.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  And that, again, not to minimize, like, there are some people who have, you know, severe schizophrenia where like being on a newspaper is not going to help you, right? But his point and Fountain House's point is there's a lot of people in between full-blown schizophrenia, debilitating schizophrenia, and your, your teenager being a little depressed, right? And for a lot of those folks in between those degrees, being needed, being part of things, having someone wonder, why isn't, why isn't Scott at the Fountain House Times meeting this morning? Where is he? That is such a crucial component of mental health. By the way, that I think all of our ancestors would have intuitively understood that we

• 31:59Speaker 02

  don't understand in modern American life, for all the reasons you so often talk about. And so Fountain House has proved this model of creating this space where people are needed and they have a place to go. And one of the things Commissioner Vasan did when he was in, in office was get New York City to kind of adopt this model and build this model at the level of the city. Got $30 million of funding. There's now, you know, some clubhouses starting to grow all over the city. And there was this fascinating moment in the book where the head of the CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, came to visit Fountain House. And you will understand this, your own crossroads, I think, as a belonging guy and a business

• 32:43Speaker 02

  guy. There was this fascinating clash that happened where the CDC woman is, was just like data and stats and like, show me what can be measured. Show me, you know, show me things that have a regression attached to them. And I just watched, she's looking around, she's asking people questions, and she was looking around at this, she treated it as like this hokey, kind of little larky thing. And she couldn't process it from a kind of serious dollars and cents, could Medicaid fund this kind of thing? And I think that is often the problem here, that the remedies of the kind you're talking

• 33:27Speaker 02

  about, how do we actually give people belonging, not as happenstance, but in a systematized way? Fountain House is doing it. Clubhouses are doing it. There is a model. It's not cheap, but it's happening. It runs into a technocratic culture that's like, I don't know, I, I can, I can measure like infection rates and divide the lost workdays by the cost of the shot. I can't do that with belonging, so I'm not going to fund it.

• 34:01Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Athena. Client calls in the morning, school pickup in the afternoon, a quick errand on the way home, and then hours spent in the home office after dinner. If any of that sounds familiar, then you could use more than an extra hour in your day. You need Athena. Athena matches you with a dedicated, full-time executive assistant, a real person, not software. This person can handle your inbox, your calendar, your travel, as well as the household stuff that quietly eats your week, such as appointments, errands, and gift shopping. Your executive assistant is vetted from the top 1% of applicants and backed by SOC 2-level security reinforced with AI tools, so they get better at supporting you over time instead of just checking boxes.

• 34:43Scott Galloway?

  Athena clients get back 15-plus hours a week on average, and one small business owner said having their EA directly led to an extra $200,000 in revenue. Go to athena.com/provchi right now and get matched with your EA. That's athena.com/provchi. Give yourself back a few hours this week. Go to athena.com/provchi and see who they pair you with this month. Support for the show comes from Yahoo Scout. Life comes with plenty of big questions, especially when you're taking your first steps into adulthood. When those questions get complicated, you want more than a quick answer. You want reliable information without spending hours searching for it. That's where Yahoo Scout comes in. Yahoo Scout is an AI-powered answer engine built to help you navigate life's big decisions.

• 35:27Scott Galloway?

  From comparing job offers and planning a trip, to learning to manage your finances and so much more. Instead of simply spitting out an answer, Yahoo Scout helps you understand your options, weigh the trade-offs, and see the sources behind the information with simple visual answers. I have been using, Yahoo's personal finance page is my homepage or starting page from the internet for 20 years. I like Yahoo Scout, I like the user interface, and I like the way it organizes the answers. You can navigate life a little easier by visiting scout.com.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  Hi, everyone. I'm Kara Swisher.

• 35:59Scott Galloway?

  And I'm Scott Galloway.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  Twice a week, we get together on Pivot to sort through the biggest stories in tech business and politics, and we're taking the show back on the road for a live tour in November.

• 36:09Scott Galloway?

  So we'll bring hot takes, I'll bring the insight, and the dick jokes, and Kara will try, keyword is try, to keep me in check. You'll get to see her hit me in person, live.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  I'll do it. If someone has to do it.

• 36:23Scott Galloway?

  We'll cover AI, whatever chaos Washington has cooked up that week, and every billionaire misbehaving.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  That's all of them. And you'll also get to participate in an audience Q and A, so bring your best questions. Scott will probably answer ones you didn't ask. We also have secret special guests, which you'll enjoy for every city. Get tickets at pivottour.com. That's pivottour.com.

• 36:43Scott Galloway?

  We are selling out, so don't wait, and we look forward to seeing you.

• 36:52Scott Galloway?

  You compared the Penny Neely case to the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, arguing that both men were seen as self-appointed Avengers acting in the absence of dependable authority. Say more.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  I, as a matter of my practice of writing, I try to listen for the rhymes, I call them, the rhymes between what very different people are saying. Because we don't do that, right? You're on the left, you're on the right, you have this view, you have that view. Everything gets so siloed. But there's sometimes rhymes, right? For example, there is a rhyme, and every time I say this, people get mad at me, there is a rhyme that I pick up right now between kind of anti-gentrification feelings in places like New York and anti-immigration feelings in places like Arizona. Totally different people. It's like elderly whites and it's like, you know, maybe 35-year-old, often people of color in historically black

• 37:49Speaker 02

  neighborhoods in Brooklyn. They have nothing in common. But the feeling they are describing of feeling their world of certainties and their place uprooted by people who feel unfamiliar to them, same. No one likes that kind of rhyme finding. I do it anyway. So here was another one. When this case, the Penny Neely case, was going on, and I was following it for these three years, I kept hearing this kind of narrative, and mostly from the right and from Daniel Penny's defenders, that he was filling the void. That the left left a void of order. It's bail reform, it's the emasculation of the police, it's men not being able to be men anymore and provide strength and care in public space. And into

• 38:31Speaker 02

  that void, both unwell Jordan Neely stepped, and then into that void of order, Daniel Penny stepped in and protected people. That was the right-wing story. And then, during the jury deliberations for the Penny case, Brian Thompson, United Healthcare CEO, was killed in Midtown Manhattan. And I was struck because I was sitting in court, a lot of the reporters I was sitting with, the literal same reporters who I'd covered the Penny trial with for weeks now and gotten to know, the New York Post and the TV channels and all the local New York press, a lot of them realized immediately that that was their

• 39:13Speaker 02

  next case, right? That they were going to go from finishing this one to that was the next case in the same building, by the way. I saw some of the same security guards, court guards, in that second case. So they were connected in that way. And as I started to listen to when Luigi was arrested, Luigi Mangione was arrested, and this kind of fandom started to develop around him on the left, parts of the left, it struck me that I was hearing one of those rhymes that I listened for. It was not the same people, it was not the same arguments, their understanding of what's going wrong in America, it's all different. But they, as you said, were framing Luigi as someone who filled a void of order left

• 39:57Speaker 02

  by the other side, and making a case that if you don't hold people, if you leave people unheld, enough people unheld enough of the time, sometimes someone will decide, I'm going to fill the void. And you may not like how they do it. Now, before people start adding me, I'm not saying Luigi and Daniel Penny are the same. I'm not saying the cases are the same. We need to actually be able to make connections without getting into the facile thing of you're comparing, you're saying it's the same. The reason they are connected is they together reflect what I think has become a very widespread feeling

• 40:41Speaker 02

  in this country of, we are abandoned, the cavalry isn't coming, the system isn't coming to save us, no one hears us. And sometimes people have to step up and do whatever they got to do. That feeling then fractures into a left version, a right version, or this version, or that version, and we kind of lose the thread. But it's interesting information that actually so many Americans feel that feeling. And it is one of the tragedies of this time we've lived in, that that common feeling keeps getting broken into pieces and failing to produce a common politics.

• 41:20Scott Galloway?

  So you bring up a lot of issues to talk about, what is the friction and the struggle and the dilemma here. However, it feels as if, based on the outcome of the case, that at least the jurors felt like they had moral clarity, that it wasn't a difficult decision for them. They acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide in about 24 hours. And I guess, my understanding is every juror rode the subway, at least semi-regularly, and several had described their own frightening experiences on the train. It strikes me,

• 41:56Scott Galloway?

  this raises a host of issues, but this was, at least this jury was saying, was siding on the issue of, I don't know, on Penny's side, that this, he was justified that, you know, like you said, he stepped into the void. I wonder, my guess is, and I don't know this, my guess is that the jury is going to find the same moral clarity around Brian Thompson or Luigi. And I think he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison, but again, who knows? It hasn't happened yet. Didn't basically the court or the jurors,

• 42:39Scott Galloway?

  they didn't have a difficult time with this decision, as far as I can tell?

• 42:43Speaker 02

  It was a little bit of a confusing verdict. So we were in there in court, I covered the trial virtually every day, and during deliberations, there were, it was, I think, more than 24 hours, there were a few days of deliberation, several days of deliberation. And what happened at the end was very unusual, not unlike some of the stuff that happened with the recent Clancy trial, where there were two charges. There was a more severe charge of manslaughter in the second degree, which, you know, could have carried 15 years or something like that. And then there was a kind of lighter charge. And the theory was that the heavier charge was like, he knew better and did it anyway. The lighter

• 43:24Speaker 02

  charge was like, he should have known better, kind of more negligent. The jury deadlocked on the first count, the more severe count, and really struggled to get anywhere. And they eventually had to do this complex maneuver where the government actually withdraws the top charge, because they were hung on the top charge. And then when they withdrew the top, more severe charge, they quickly came to a consensus on not guilty on the lesser charge. So it's a little puzzling that you'd be divided on whether to punish

• 44:03Speaker 02

  someone severely, and then unanimous on not punishing them more lightly. There was a lot of question about, did they just lose steam? Were they just didn't want to be there anymore? Lots of different, lots of different questions. But I think what the trial, what it represented was very different for lots of people, right? And one of the things I chart in Man in the Mirror is this notion of the mirror, that you can look at the same thing, and it's sort of you and it's not you at the same time. And, you know, for some people who celebrated the acquittal, this was a vindication of the notion that we have a right to protect each other and take care of each other in public space. That

• 44:44Speaker 02

  was their interpretation. You know, I spent a lot of time writing in the book about Daphne Iran, the lead prosecutor in Alvin Bragg's DA's office, who said, look, this case was not about whether Daniel Penny was going to commit more crimes. He wasn't. This was a case about guarding the line between civilization and barbarism. Once you authorize people to decide, to kind of adjudicate someone else's life in public, you've lost the thread. And her argument, which is a very interesting argument, and I think challenging one, maybe

• 45:25Speaker 02

  one of the reasons the case was difficult to win for her, was that Daniel Penny didn't just restrain Jordan Neely, and it went down badly. In her telling, the only way to explain why he held on so long, after everybody was gone from the car, after, you know, the apparent danger of being in that contained space had passed, five more minutes, when in the Marine Corps training, you're not allowed to do a chokehold for more than five seconds or so. Her theory was the reason he did that was that he didn't fully register the person he was holding. He didn't register them as a full-fledged human being, that he dehumanized that person. And she drew in particular on two videos, a video from right after the

• 46:08Speaker 02

  incident itself, where you see, and it is quite striking, this video, Daniel Penny standing in the subway car, he goes to kind of get his hat after the incident, he's standing there, kind of chewing gum, very nonchalant. And there's like, a dozen NYPD cycling in and out, several of them around Jordan Neely's prone body. And you will notice, Scott, in that video, for all our debates about police, what people think about police in this era, divisions about police, every cop in that video is acting like the loss of that life

• 46:46Speaker 02

  would be a tragedy for humankind. Those cops are panicked, and frantic, and frenzied about that one life, even though they've probably done that five times that day. And Daniel Penny's attitude to that person is different. You can see it. He doesn't share the NYPD's concern, right? I've heard you talk a lot about raising your boys with a sense of care, protection, right? You've just held someone, they're on the ground, they may be dead, they may be dying. There's different ways one might, there's different attitudes one might have to that body. I describe it in the book as, he sort of came across the way you might come across if someone is lying on the ground after burglarizing your house

• 47:28Speaker 02

  and coming through your window, as opposed to if your friend, you know, had an accident. And then there's the interrogation video a couple hours later, where Daniel Penny's talking to these two NYPD guys, they're brawling out, they're having this, I described it as like, almost like a kind of masculinity podcast vibe. They're talking about comparing notes about the Marines and their tattoos and this and that. And then Daniel Penny starts to talk about Jordan Neely, and he refers to him as a crackhead several times. And he refers to him as squirming, and this kind of animalizing language. And you can see, this is not me interjecting, you can see he loses these NYPD guys, that he starts

• 48:08Speaker 02

  to talk about this other kind of, this other person in a kind of dehumanizing language, as Daphne Iran would argue, that just loses the cops. It becomes kind of clear in this video, he keeps saying, am I right? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Soliciting kind of bids for agreement. And it becomes clear in this video that they do not know what he means, that they do not think he's right, that they are not picking up what he's putting down. And it's very, very striking, because we think about cops maybe in a different way, but cops actually have an intimate connection with this population that Daniel Penny didn't. And so this case really became about those two visions in the end. Was this a case of

• 48:52Speaker 02

  like, this guy cared for New York by standing up and stepping into the void? Or did this guy do the thing that is most dangerous in this political era we are living in, which is, look at someone, fail to see them, and not render them as fully human?

• 49:10Scott Galloway?

  We're going to have to leave it there. Anand Giridharadas is a journalist, bestselling author, and publisher of the newsletter, The Ink. Anand, it's great to see you and really enjoyed this conversation. And congratulations on your success on Substack. As I said, you're sort of an original gangster here.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Well, very, very happy to chat with you. I love so many of the things you are putting out into the world and sharing with folks, particularly on this theme of belonging. So I thought it would be the right place to have this conversation.

• 49:39Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez, Laura Janier, and Asher Schwartz. Our video editor is Bianca Rosario Ramirez. Kami Reek is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director, and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thanks for listening to the Prof G Pod from Prof G Media.