Manhattan Shooting: What Will it Mean for Public Safety? : City Journal Podcast

Charles Fain Lehman, Carolyn Gorman, Renu Mukherjee, and Ilya Shapiro discuss the deadly shooting in Manhattan on Monday, exploring issues of mental health, gun violence, and the political implications for the upcoming mayoral election. The conversation shifts to cultural reflections on violence, community responses, and the dynamics of public safety.

The panel also delves into the backlash against American Eagle’s ad campaign with Sydney Sweeney and discusses the effectiveness of advertising in shaping consumer behavior.

Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today are Carolyn Gorman, responsible for all things mental health policy at the Manhattan Institute, Renu Mukherjee, responsible for a variety of things educational and ethnicity-related at the Manhattan Institute, and Ilya Shapiro, who fights the good fight for the Constitution at the Manhattan Institute. Thank you all for joining me today. I want to take us into the more serious news of the day or more precisely earlier this week. As I think most of our listeners will know by now, on Monday evening, after we recorded the Monday podcast, a shooter opened fire in the lobby of 345 Park Avenue, which is actually not that far from Manhattan Institute’s offices in Manhattan. He killed four people, including NYPD officer Didarul Islam, a Bangladeshi immigrant, a father of two, a husband to a wife expecting their third child who was working off duty. The suspect, Shane Tamura, also killed himself. A note found in his pocket claimed he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, and he may have been targeting the NFL offices in the building, although it’s a little bit unclear. So this is, among other things, a shocking event, a very high profile shooting in New York, the second one this year. It fits in with sort of our broader theme of violence and terrorism, and it’s left a lot of people feeling uneasy. You know, what was your… What was your response to this event, as people who are, I think everyone calls not is not New York local but obviously we’re all in New York on a regular basis so what you know what was your…

Ilya Shapiro: I mean, Charles, 25 years ago, I was a summer associate just a couple of blocks from there. So know very well where that is. I could picture what happened. It did hit home in a way, even though that I don’t live there. But this strikes me as somewhat different than the political violence or civil terrorism. This guy might have had mental health issues. I’ll let Carolyn to speak to that. But if his beef was with football and the NFL, who knows whether his brain is going to be autopsied now, whether he really does have CTE. This is just an unfortunate confluence of things. People are trying to make a little bit of commentary about guns because he drove from Nevada. He shouldn’t have gotten it. It’s none of that. It seemed like a freak thing. And it’s just gotten a lot of attention because it happened in the center of the financial universe rather than some suburb or rural area.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I’ll say is I just personally have no interest whatsoever in amplifying any message that this shooter was trying to send, whether or not, you know, we think it’s justified. I just think we as a society should not be willing to accept gun violence as appropriate, full stop. Like we shouldn’t be willing to excuse this. It was like a premeditated action and, you know, for what? Some perceived slight? There might have been some issue, some like trauma issue, head trauma issue, but we’re still not totally sure. And I think the same thing can be said about this Brian Thompson murder, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. I just think we as Americans need to get on the same page about this if we’re going to prevent gun violence because there’s so much we can be better about compromising on and this is something that we shouldn’t.

Charles Fain Lehman: I do think to this point there’s been some degree of chatter on social media in line with the murder of Brian Thompson where one of the victims worked for Blackstone during their real estate investment and there’s been a great deal of just sort of like horrific ghoulishness about this woman being murdered. I think there’s some degree of connection there, it’s not clearly how widespread it is.

Ilya Shapiro: It’s people glorying, New Yorkers especially, glorying in the deaths of capitalists. That’s what this is. It’s a tremendously unhealthy cultural development. I mean, forget the actual violence and if there was anything that could be done to stop it, whether it’s mental health, whatever, but the kind of the after effect, without his actually having the shooters having any political motive it looks like, is what’s disturbing here, and that anytime someone who is I don’t know whether because they’re well paid or they’re in industry that the narrative is cannibalizing on poor Americans or whatever it is, then we glory in their deaths. That to say the least is not a healthy for the body politic.

Renu Mukherjee: Another wrinkle also with respect to both the Blackstone executive that was killed and the younger young woman who I think had recently graduated about five years ago from college and was working at the real estate firm that, you know, owned the building. Both of them were Jewish and particularly online on X in response to the Blackstone executive, in addition to the rhetoric being, you know, say, awfully saying that she should have lost her life because she was a capitalist, because she worked in private equity, it was also, you know, what’s come out on X and then also in reporting on this is that the Blackstone executive was not only Jewish, but very involved in New York’s Jewish community. She had received awards for her philanthropy with respect to Jewish organizations in the city. And so it’s, you know, there’s sort of this convergence of anti-capitalism. There’s this, you know, this is another instance of horrific anti-Semitism, and so all these awful factors have sort of come together in the response to this tragedy.

Charles Fain Lehman: One thing I want to pull into this is, know, obviously this has been a thorny moment for New York mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, who has a long and sort of storied history of being opposed to the NYPD, being critical of the NYPD, calling for the abolition or defunding of the NYPD, calling for the abolition or defunding of police generally, and who, you know, I think to his credit has gone out of his way to not, to recognize officer Islam, recognize people like Westley LePatner, the Blackstone executive, has not leaned into that rhetoric unsurprisingly, but also, for example, doubled down on…

Ilya Shapiro: He also recently had a wedding where security was provided by actual men with guns rather than social workers. Yeah.

Charles Fain Lehman: He did in Uganda, in Uganda. No, but you know, think the other thing on the other hand, he’s called for shutting down the security risk group, the SOG, the NYPD group that responded to the shooting at 345 Park. And he doubled down on that when asked about it at a press conference immediately afterwards. So you know, one question for the panel is like, will this be a lasting story in the New York City mayor race? Is this going to impact that? Is it going to raise, you know, we talked about the relative salience of public safety in the election on this podcast. Do we think this is going to raise the salience of public safety? Is this an issue for Mamdani or is this sort of a flash in the pan?

Carolyn D. Gorman: You know, one sort of sad aspect about this is that unfortunately we just do experience so many of these kind of tragedies so frequently that we’ve almost gotten used to it a little bit. So I would worry if we did not consider this or voters did not consider this when they’re thinking about who is going to run the country because again, unfortunately this stuff happens and you really want to have a leader in place who knows how to react, who knows how to mobilize the right teams, who supports the right teams, who supports the people that are going to keep New Yorkers safe. So hopefully New Yorkers keep that in mind when voting.

Renu Mukherjee: Unfortunately though, I hope so too. I don’t know if this will stick. And the reason for this, for example, is bringing in one of the other victims of the shooting, the Bangladeshi officer Islam, who passed away, you know, working as a security officer off duty, providing for his family. So Mamdani immediately after returning to the city from Uganda, went to visit Officer Islam’s widow, his children, and his father. And they seemed, and in the photos and statements then released by Officer Islam’s father, it made it seem as though they were very touched, one, that Mamdani went there, and two, again, in both reporting in his press conferences and commentary on his response on X, it seems as though, despite our friends over at the New York Post repeatedly reporting that he wants to do away, you know, with this special unit within the NYPD. He wants to defund the police. At the same time, you have many New Yorkers, you know, even in these communities that are affected by, you know, policies that Mamdani is in favor of, such as Bangladeshis, sort of okay with him. You know, he’s just, he just seems to be very good at a human connection. And I also, don’t know if this is still true, but at the time that Mamdani and Adams had met with Officer Islam’s family, Andrew Cuomo had yet to reach out to them. So, you know, it just seems like his policies are crazy and are adversarial to the communities that he seeks to represent. But at the same time, these communities seem to be receptive to him.

Ilya Shapiro: Hmm.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, this gets to a broader point that you made a couple of times right now about the effectiveness of the Mamdani campaign in the South Asian community at large. He’s been very good at doing outreach. Also, I should note that I got the SRG, it’s the Strategic Response Group, SRG, I generated some other name to go with the acronym, so sorry to elicit this, but yeah. And this gets to broader point, he’s, I think, demonstrated his ability to play politics very savvily and it seems like totally plausible that he will capitalize on this moment. On the other hand, you know, it does maintain the salience of public safety. You know, Aaron Renn, friend of CJ, friend of MI, wrote something about New York and he pointed out that basically—recently on X—and he pointed out that he felt like the city was in many regards safer than it has been in long time, which is true if you look at the data. Not perfectly, but in many ways it’s safer, and that, you know, in some senses it was this like, that this is a shocking violence is really an outlier, but then the other thing that sort of instances of shocking violence are things that people grab on to, so ideological violence or just you know, that the possible something random will happen I think strongly affects people’s perception of how safe they are. Particularly, you know, to Ilya’s point when this violence is regardless of the intrinsic motivation post-hoc justified by this sort of like gutter talk about, you know, people. You’re killing people because they’re capitalists, killing people because they’re Jews or whatever. You know, I think independent of the city’s overall violent crime level, there are still very real concerns about sort of radicalism-motivated murder, random murder, and the ways in which that can make you know, even though it’s relatively small incident, it can make people feel substantially less safe in the city.

Ilya Shapiro: It feels very dark. It feels like the Upside Down from Stranger Things, kind of a minor key, very Batman movie or Joker movie, kind of Gothamite, you know. Something is just a little off.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah.

Carolyn D. Gorman: That’s really important when we think about, alright, what the response was here, even if it was a smaller incident, I don’t want to say smaller in the sense that it was less important, but maybe resolved quickly. What does the management look like of some other issue, some longer standing issue or some more massive issue? I mean, I think about the terrorist attacks on 9-11, like who is going to be the leader in place who is responding to something like that in, you know, God forbid that something terrible were ever to happen. And it worries me to think about someone with such little experience in place when if something were to happen, you really want to know that someone can manage people, know the right people to reach out to, mobilize the right people, etc. So, yeah.

Renu Mukherjee: That does seem to be—I totally agree with Carolyn—that does seem to be Cuomo’s pitch, you know, that I’m the guy that I’ve been around here, you know, I’m part of a family that’s been around here. Like, I know what to do in a time of crisis in a way that Mamdani does not. But it seems as though he hasn’t really been effective in communicating that pitch, where Mamdani is very politically adroit and he is effective in say, in making New Yorkers feel as though he’s competent when he actually does not appear to know a lot. And just like one cool thing I’ll add, why I think like his being politically adroit at convincing various constituencies in the city that he does have their backs, that he is going to be able to help them. He met with the, within the NYPD, he met with the Bangladeshi American Police Association. So they seemed very happy to have him and were receptive to what he had to say. So it’s, he’s hostile toward law enforcement, but somehow he’s convincing various law enforcement constituencies, organizations to back him, that he can play with respect to ethnic politics. So I think, you know, he is quite dangerous as a politician in that he’s been able to do that.

Charles Fain Lehman: All right, want to stop us there. So I want to ask people, do we think that this story is going to last? Is it going to impact the mayoral election? Is it going to be relevant in November? I think another model is that in some senses, it doesn’t fit neatly into either ideological bucket, and so it’s likely to pass. Which do we think is more likely? Is it that it’s going to be relevant? Yeah.

Ilya Shapiro: I think it will not play a factor in the election for all of these reasons. It’s not obviously an ideological thing. It comes in the heat of summer, the dog days, people aren’t as involved, and so many things are going to happen between now and then to overtake it.

Charles Fain Lehman: Fair. Carolyn?

Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, I probably agree with Ilya.

Renu Mukherjee: Likewise, think, you know, Mamdani is going to release an infinite number of, you know, popular TikTok videos between now and then, and everyone will unfortunately have forgotten about this.

Carolyn D. Gorman: And Sydney Sweeney is going be part of another ad campaign that pisses everyone off.

Ilya Shapiro: How is the MI TikTok…. What’s that?

Charles Fain Lehman: Carolyn’s setting up the next segment.

Ilya Shapiro: That’s right. That’s right.

Charles Fain Lehman: The MI TikTok presence, we need, we’re working on… I think our producer Isabella is involved in that, is involved in that effort.

Ilya Shapiro: My interpretive dance about the dormant commerce clause is ready to go.

Charles Fain Lehman: Alright, we’ll move from that very sad story to something slightly lighter. I was going to do this as like our closing story is what in our internal copy referred to as the digestif. And then everyone had so many thoughts about it that I was like, okay, we’ll do it as our second sort of cultural topic. So I’m going to I’m going to leave it to the panel to tell me why this is a deemed an important issue. But we’re going to talk for a minute about the backlash against the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans ad campaign in which the actress and model poses in American Eagle jeans. She was actually, she’s wearing what I understand to refer to as a Canadian tuxedo, which is jeans on the bottom jeans on the top. And then there’s…

Ilya Shapiro: For the record, I have never owned a Canadian tuxedo.

Charles Fain Lehman: But there’s a series of puns about genes, g-e-n-e-s, and jeans. And this drove a very surprisingly un-2025 backlash. Many people on the internet were concerned about some of the white supremacist dog whistles and eugenicism because she was talking in genes and she’s blonde and blue eyed and attractive and has good genes and apparently that’s, that’s you know, reinforcing fascism.

Ilya Shapiro: Ted Cruz had an apt one-liner about this. Democrats or the radical left are now coming out against hot women. Yeah, you should run with that.

Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, yeah, so like, so you know, I think everyone was convinced that this was like a significant cultural moment and even our colleague and sometime panelist, Rob Henderson had some interesting commentary on this. So maybe, you know, is there more to this story than just like people are being, and sometimes the story is interesting, just so far as like people are still trying to do this kind of backlash in 2025. That’s interesting. But then is there more to the story here? I don’t know. You’re also convinced.

Ilya Shapiro: I mean, is this the last gasp of woke-ism because all of these critiques, the so-called backlash is being laughed at. American Eagle stock price has jumped. I don’t know how many, like, millions were up, hundreds of millions were up to now. mean, best money invented. I want to talk to MI’s Director of Marketing, Ilana Grossman, about what made this, what captured this lightning in a bottle. was just the most perfect thing. I’ve watched a few of these short actual video ads, not just the billboards or, you know, photos, but the video clips, they’re really good. They’re tongue in cheek, like she’s not taking herself seriously. They’re not taking the brand’s not taking itself seriously. Very effective. And hey, made me go out and buy some AE jeans, some shirts on clearance as well. One of my next… When it arrives, I’ll do one of my next, podcast appearances here, in, in the new getup.

Charles Fain Lehman: Ilya is actually going to be the next the next spokesmodel for American Eagle after Sydney Sweeney.

Ilya Shapiro: For Gen X, absolutely.

Charles Fain Lehman: Carolyn nd Renu, let me throw it to you. You had opinions on this when we discussed it, so.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, no, I just think it’s really fun and it’s interesting that people are like getting so worked up on it on either side. I was looking at some Google trends this morning because I was curious to sort of put a little more context around this. So web searches for Sydney Sweenet first peaked around the 27th. So it did take a couple of days for these ads to drop to like really blow up.

Ilya Shapiro: Was it bimodal?

Carolyn D. Gorman: So I did look at cyclicality. What do mean by bimodal?

Ilya Shapiro: It was a joke.

Charles Fain Lehman: Charming. Charming.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Well, I was interested to see if there was some Sydney Sweeney cyclicality or seasonality and whether or not people just get hot and bothered by Sydney Sweeney in the summer. It is not the case that she has cyclical interest in her Google searches. The last peak we saw from Sydney Sweeney was around 2024 when her movie with Glenn Powell came out. But an interesting aspect of what I was looking at was that there is a lot of interest that varies by sub-region in the U.S., and D.C. was one of the areas that was like most interested in this topic, which is maybe… Yeah, I just sort of thought that was funny to see who who really cares about the Sydney Sweeney developments.

Ilya Shapiro: I think Hollywood has produced a lot, kind of hotter starlets, if you will. And we were in our podcast chat, you know, a few of us were on Team Daddario, although I guess she’s 10 years older. So it’s depending on which generation you’re looking at, what have you. But no, but the thing is, she’s, you know, using the tools that she has. And like I said, at AE is, they captured the zeitgeist. They really pinpointed what would be effective at this moment.

Renu Mukherjee: What’s also interesting about this is like if this happened in 2020, we would sort of expect the brand to, even if, you we’ve seen, for example, with ESG that even when it’s monetarily detrimental to the company, sometimes they’ll just, you know, try to make, you know, to take a quote from Mean Girls, since we’re kind of in this realm, to try to “make ‘fetch’ happen,” even though it’s, it fiscally makes no sense.

Ilya Shapiro: A sequel to, no, not Mean Girls, Freaky Friday is coming out, Freakier Friday. Anyway, not relevant, sorry.

Renu Mukherjee: I’ll be at the midnight premiere for that. But anyway, in 2020, we would expect a brand to sort of backtrack, issue this public apology. What I saw this morning is that some of the senior leadership over at American Eagle, they not only pointed to the increased value of their stock, but they also said, the internet is not reality in the sense that there’s sort of this left wing backlash on social media to this ad, but within our own polling on this, within our own focus groups we conducted, over 70 percent of our customers that we polled said that they loved this ad, that they love Sydney Sweeney, that they want to buy more of our product. And they released a statement saying that. So to your earlier point, Charles, this is 2025. It’s reminiscent of 2020. But in 2020, I would have expected American Eagle to issue a groveling apology to everyone on social media that’s upset by this, primarily left-wing women. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. They’re sort of standing their ground.

Ilya Shapiro: Somebody called it the anti-Bud Light marketing moment.

Charles Fain Lehman: Right, right. I think that’s… And so, you know, there’s this general argument about, like, fashion goes in cycles, right? And this is a subset of fashion, but it’s sort of a general inference of culture, which is that part of what fashion in particular is always trying to do is be different, be distinctive, right? In fact, there are sort of things which are intrinsically beautiful, appealing, and timeless, but it is also the case that you are always trying to do the thing that is out in front of what everyone else is doing at the sort of front edge of fashion. That’s why a lot of it looks very experimental. That’s why a lot of it doesn’t work. But like, it doesn’t, it does not work as a statement if it’s not distinct from other things. And I think part of what you’re seeing here is, if you remember going to Target in 2021, where they were very interested in showing, shall we say a diversity of body types. They were much more interested in the question of like, do the models represent what we imagine representation to look like, independent of what the actual American population looks like? They were much more interested in that than they were in are the models appealing or attractive, which, that was very out. It seems like it’s now in again, that in fact, in some instances there’s like, you know, part of the Sidney Sweeney pitch, our colleague and Sweeney fan, Jesse Arm has many thoughts on this topic. Part of the Sydney Sweeney pitch is that she’s just like sort of unapologetic about being attractive and not, being apolitical about it. She doesn’t…She’s not EmRata. She’s not interested in sort of lecturing you about politics while simultaneously being attractive. She’s just interested sort of like unpolitically being appealing to viewers. And that’s like, that is a marked departure from what we were doing in 2020. I think we said that already a little bit, but that is actually, I think, a very a sign of the way the fashion cycle is moving is that people are sort of swinging back against that. You know, I think like…

Ilya Shapiro: A return to normalcy?

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, right. Well, you know, is this, is this like, is this like a Trump moment? This is a very Trump thing. I’ve observed repeatedly that Donald Trump has the most attractive cabinet in American history.

Carolyn D. Gorman: That’s interesting.

Ilya Shapiro: Kind of a low bar and the TikToks from the 1830s are lost to history but…

Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, you can find photos of them. They are not good-looking individuals in the 1830s. Like, they don’t have teeth, right? I mean, some of them have teeth. No, I mean, but, you know, and I think he specifically selected many of his cabinet members not exclusively, but in part on the basis of their being telegenic, right? That is a thing that matters a great deal to the president. And so, you know, that I think that is part of the truth.

Ilya Shapiro: Often with nominees, he asks whether they look the part. Does that look like a judge? Does that look like a defense secretary? Yeah. Yeah.

Charles Fain Lehman: Right, exactly! Yeah.

Renu Mukherjee: You’re all, Charles. What’s interesting about all of this is actually, I think yesterday, and I don’t know if anyone on the panel will know of this TV show. I know of this TV show because of my 21-year-old sister. It’s called The Summer I Turned Pretty. The third and final season has premiered now. Very much, well, the main character is half white and half Asian. The two male protagonists who are brothers are, you know, very much, you know, the vibe of Sydney Sweeney. So Dunkin’ Donuts, I have to mention Dunkin’ on every single City Journal Podcast, released an ad for one of their summer refresher drinks either yesterday or two days ago with one of the characters from The Summer I Turned Pretty, exact same message playing to, you know, him being blonde and blue-eyed. And in the comments, you similar sort of, you know, you have leftists that are quite angry, but he seems to really own it and Dunkin’ has not apologized.

Charles Fain Lehman: So here’s the other question I want to ask, which is like, you know, the consensus seems to be this is a sign of the depletion of wokeness that I’ve been just sort of laughing at the backlash. Then again it is still there, right? There are still people on my LinkedIn and my X or whatever… They’re not on X anymore, they’re on BlueSky, but who are unironically watching this ad and going, it’s a Nazi dog whistle. you know, I…

Ilya Shapiro: And yet only the leftists hear it.

Charles Fain Lehman: Well, but I think, you know, a friend observed to me that if you look at these sort of tight leftist enclaves, you know, you go to elite prep schools in New England, for example, they are still peddling the same content. If you’re the president of Harvard and Yale, the Trump administration is after you, so you ratchet it back. But if you sort of take a step down from there, a lot of that material is still festering under the surface. So one question is like, OK, we agree this is not a return of wokeness, but is it a sign that there is a reservoir of it that could spring back in, say, three years?

Carolyn D. Gorman: I don’t know, it might just be that unfortunately there are some dynamics, some psychological dynamics that play out between women that are worth recognizing that are not illegitimate. There could be some sort of intersex competition angles going on here. And you’ve got people that are calling Sydney Sweeney attractive and saying that this is Nazism because, you know, she’s blue eyed and blonde haired and whatever. But then you also have on the other side, this whole group of people who are calling her mid. And so it’s sort of like, you know, she can’t win, no one can win, and she can actually win by ignoring everything. As soon as I said that, I was like, she’s, she’s actually the winner out of this.

Ilya Shapiro: She’s winning. She’s getting paid a fair bit.

Renu Mukherjee: Charles, think there’s always going to this kind of goes to both your point and Carolyn’s point. I think there’s the sort of demographic of progressive women, particularly those who are racial minorities and, you know, get very upset by this. That’s always going to exist on X. Yesterday, there was a video of it went extremely viral. Last I checked, it was like over three million views of on TikTok. This Indian influencer, this Indian American influencer saying that the ad has caused her to, has caused a resurgence of her childhood trauma in believing that there’s, Indian women aren’t perceived as beautiful and all of this and like, what’s this going to do to her daughter and all of this such nonsense. And I don’t think that these individuals realize that you can say that Sydney, Sydney Sweeney and Priyanka Chopra are not mutually exclusive. Sydney Sweeney can be viewed as very beautiful because she objectively is, and the same thing can be said about Priyanka Chopra or Beyonce. But yeah, I think, you know, people are always going to be upset about this.

Carolyn D. Gorman: I think that’s right, we should avoid the, what’s the phrase, the bucket of crabs issue? Like, stop pulling each other down. Yeah, build each other up.

Ilya Shapiro: Everyone pulling each other down? Well, there might be some resonance here with the polling that’s comes out that’s come out about partisan identification shifts. The biggest one being young men 18 to 29 in the last two years have shifted R plus 44. Young women have also shifted like R plus six or something. Basically, the only two demographics by age that have shifted plus D are 30 to 49 year old women and 60 and above men, I think.

Charles Fain Lehman: And this is in Pew’s national opinion reference survey, national survey, I forget what the acronym is. It’s in Pew’s really big, really well-conducted survey that they use as their benchmark for constructing weights for other surveys. So it’s probably pretty accurate. And it shows that it is relatively rare for Republicans in the historical data for Republicans to have the partisan identification advantage. And they do currently. And a lot of it is driven by young people, just to underscore what the data is saying. That’s a very unusual and a very well-supported finding.

Ilya Shapiro: Pennsylvania is apparently about to go to tip to a majority, slight majority Republican registration for the first time since they’ve had that or something like that. So we have these trends. We’ll see whether that’s lasting in the post Trump era. You know, the Texas redistricting, they’re creating a lot of majority Hispanic districts that are currently Republican, but does that hold?

Charles Fain Lehman: Right. All right. Let me take this out by asking the extremely practical question, which is I’m always interested in the question of does advertising work? And so Ilya has already answered this, but I’ll ask the rest of the panel.

Ilya Shapiro: I’m very impressionable. When I was watching, my wife always points to this, when we were watching Mad Men and there was the scene where Don Draper was making a campaign for beans, I got up and went to the pantry and got a can of beans and started eating it.

Charles Fain Lehman: So the question is, you more likely to buy American Eagle jeans by virtue of this ad? And Ilya’s answer was yes, he’s already done it! Carolyn, Renu?

Carolyn D. Gorman: Well, my propensity to buy American Eagle jeans has not changed just because I don’t buy a lot of jeans, but I am also very impressionable about ads. Like, I’ll see a burger ad.

Ilya Shapiro: They sell other things and the prices are very reasonable, I should say. Go check it out.

Charles Fain Lehman: This podcast brought to you by American Eagle. Sorry, Carolyn.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Good to know, good to know. No, I mean, I see ads for like Arby’s. I don’t even think I’ve ever been to Arby’s, but every time I see an Arby’s ad, like, I need a burger right now.

Ilya Shapiro: Be right back going for a beef and cheddar.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah. And yeah, Instagram ads, I buy cat toys all the time. I’m like totally a crazy cat lady. It’s not good. So advertising works, I think.

Charles Fain Lehman: Renu?

Renu Mukherjee: I actually did purchase a pair of American Eagle jeans this morning, and the reason being, I was more, it was less, I mean, I really liked Sydney Sweeney as an actress, but it was less her and more that I had forgotten about American Eagle, and it had reminded me of, you know, the heyday of being 16 and at my local mall with my friends and, you know, buying a pair of $20 jeans, and so I thought, they’re just like 30 bucks, why not?

Charles Fain Lehman: See, I shop like a dad, which is to say that I’m extremely, what’s the word, a penny pincher. And so I look at the American Eagle jeans, I’m like, why can’t I just go buy them at Costco? So I’m really at the other end of the distribution. I get mad when the ads try to work on me. I’m like, no, you can’t fool me.

Ilya Shapiro: No, but Charles, these are not expensive, like, you know, the wars in the 80s between, what, Jordache and Sergio Tacchini or whatever. No, this is not that fancy sort of stuff. This is, I was actually surprised how, I mean, they might as well be sold. I mean, I don’t know about Costco, but like, you know, your local department store, Target or whatever it is.

Renu Mukherjee: $30!

Charles Fain Lehman: Alright, alright, that’s enough from American Eagle spokesmodel Ilya Shapiro. Before we go, a recent article at The Cut asks, would you pay $13,000 to rid your blood of microplastics? And this article stuck out to me, A, because it’s a good question. I mean, it’s not a good question in the sense of course, I assume everyone else’s answer is no. My answer is no. But my wife has told me that she’s become like 5 percent more MAHA. She’s 5 percent more willing to sort of like capitulate to the latest health and nutrition trend, and I suspect that this is true of many people. So let me ask, which strange health trend do you find the most attractive or persuasive? Which of them has stuck out for you?

Renu, we’ll start with you.

Renu Mukherjee: I’ve been on the green powder train for five years, so powdered vegetables, and I’ve seen a demonstrable difference in the quality of my skin. But not athletic greens. There are much better products out there.

Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, okay, fair enough. Ilya, do you have a preferred strange health trend?

Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, I don’t know how much this is MAHA or, you know, health trends, but this is one of those, you know, dad moments when I get together with my friends, you know, middle-aged dads, we all talk, compare what supplements we’re taking. And, you know, you get to an age and you need stuff. So I have my creatine, I have my turmeric, I have magnesium, multivitamin. You tell me, I’m always on the hunt for new things that I should be taking.

Charles Fain Lehman: Fair, Carolyn?

Ilya Shapiro: Resveratrol, Resveratrol, which is like, like cherry skins and grape skins and things like that. So anyway.

Charles Fain Lehman: I’m just taking notes because like, you know, I’ve got like 10 years. Like, Ilya probably has 95 percent of my genes, so I’m just like, what am I going to need?

Ilya Shapiro: I have great genes, Charles.

Carolyn D. Gorman: That was incredible. I still live off like uncrustables and lunchables. And so I really need, Ilya, for you to like send me your list and Renu for you to send me yours so that I can like finally get on some health train. I’m really, maybe this is like not exclusively MAHA. It’s more common sense, but I am a big proponent of outdoor time. We’re in beautiful upstate New York for the month of August and trying to get out, do some hikes and just five minutes every day if you can be outside a little bit, see some greenery. I think that’s the biggest health trend that I’m on. Otherwise I’m sticking to my uncrustables.

Charles Fain Lehman: See, I’m like, resolutely anti-MAHA, like I, you know, I like use more seed oils every time somebody lectures me, because I can. I just I hate being told what to do.

Ilya Shapiro: You should be like chain smoking during this podcast.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, no, because that that would violate the anti-drugs thing. So I have to optimize the two of them. But like big seed oils guy, but I do now take vitamin D. I’m not convinced it does anything, but I do it and it seems…

Ilya Shapiro: Hey, the placebo effect.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, yeah, it’s real. It’s powerful. And also I do walk 10,000 steps a day. So you know, we’re, I’m getting, I’m getting into the health trends, even in my own way. On that note, I believe that’s about all the time that we have. Thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our producer, Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, or even if you didn’t, don’t forget to like, subscribe, click the button, ring the bell, do all the other things on YouTube, Spotify, or any other platform where you might be listening to us. Don’t forget to leave us comments and questions down below if you’re watching on YouTube. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.