The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 23: The Birth of Instagram, and Tunisia’s Jihadis

Episode Date: March 25, 2016

This week: Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger talks about how Instagram took over the world; the New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, shares his three favorite jokes; and George Packer reports from Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, where democratic governance has led to an upsurge in jihadism. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

in a conversation with someone when they have that revelation. It's making sure. Packer seems to be interested in that. John McPhee has brought this up. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. Today we're tackling global unrest, the legacy of racism, how technology is changing the way we live all the heavy stuff. But we'll take a few minutes out to talk with Bob Mankoff, who's a kind of professor of comedy about some of his favorite jokes. One of them, I understand, involves a rabbi and God, so I've got a feeling that's going to be okay. Let's start out on social media, though. Recently, Nick Thompson, who runs the New Yorker's website and all of our digital stuff,

sat down with Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram. Instagram is without doubt, one of the most influential apps of the moment. If Facebook seems a little old these days and Twitter is necessary but maybe not that much fun anymore, Instagram is where people of a certain age really want to be. They spoke at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Thank you so much. It is a pleasure for me to be here and it is even more of a pleasure for me to welcome the men that will be interrogating tonight. He doesn't have a very long biography because he's, he has a very long biography because He went to college. He then found an Instagram, which I'm sure many of you use and love.

Perhaps all of you use in love. So I'd like to welcome Mike Krieger. He is the co-founder of Instagram, and it has just been his birthday, so you can all wish him a happy, I believe. I believe, 30th birthday. He posted it on Instagram. He just returned from Oaxaca, and he has also posted some photographs of some beautiful mamalas, I believe, which look delicious. So Mike Krieger, delighted to have you here. Thanks, good of you here.

All right. Let's start by talking a little bit about the beginning. So you started Instagram about six years ago, a little less than six years ago. And that was a propitious time for photographs. It was iPhone 4, storage space increasing. Everybody has a camera on their phone. So everybody in the world was launching a photo app at that time. And somehow yours became the one used by 400 million people.

So tell me why Instagram made it and those 936 other photo startups all failed. That's a really good question. I think about this a lot, actually. And there's always the aspect of luck. So let's remove that factor, because I think there's always a little bit of that. So what did we do, right? That's boring answer to that. Right, it says luck.

It was good timing. I think part of it was that it wasn't the first product we had built. So all of Instagram was built on top of the ashes of this other thing that we were working on called Bourbon. And if it was 2009, 2010, if you remember the game Mafia Wars, you could play it on Facebook. You could have, like, your own bar. And I actually never played it because I never really played Facebook games. But there was this thing called Mafia Wars. And my co-founder, Kevin.

quit his job to basically make a mafia wars in the real world. In retrospect, not a great idea, but that's where, you know, these things start often with the totally wrong idea. But what we did is that we're like, okay, we're going to have bars and we're going to have, like, okay, actually, first we just need to build a place database so that you can, like, know where you are

and, like, people can own bars. If you remember, like, 4square, that kind of, like, mechanic of being the owner of a place. So we built this, like, super convoluted thing that nobody was using, except we added a feature to it, which was you could post photos and videos from like your speakeasy, aka like the restaurant you were at or the park you were at.

And it turns out people really loved just that piece. So nobody really uses that game part of it. And the community we had, which was tiny, it was 1,000 people, really took to the photo aspect of it. And we learned a bunch, actually. And I think even though iPhones were getting more popular, the state of the art was an iPhone 3G, which probably many of you had. At the time, it was like, this thing takes pretty good photos. If you look back at the time, they were awful, right?

It looks like digital soup. but now they're really sharp. So we knew that people wanted to make their photos look good. So that was one insight that came from Bourbon is that the people who were using these editing apps outside of Bourbon and sharing their photos to Bourbon were the ones that would share the most photos. We're like, Insight One, hey, people don't think their photos look that great. If you help them make them look great, they'll want to share more.

So what we try to build was something that was super easy to use, super fast. So when you uploaded it, it actually went through. I used to go to concerts more often, now that I'm like less cool, I guess. I don't go as often. and I would always see people in the second row or the first row always trying to post their photos of these concerts, and because the upload process was so slow, it would ruin their enjoyment

of the actual moment. So we're trying to build something that made your content look great and let you get in and out of the moment really quickly because ultimately life is what you should be experiencing, not like a little progress bar. Tell me a little bit about the international growth of Instagram, which happened very quickly, and it's something that fascinates me

because for a lot of products, international growth is hard because, you know, for Twitter, the tweets are in English, so it's hard to read in another country. Photography is like a universal language. So I would assume that Instagram grew much more quickly international than other competitive social networks.

Tell me about that. This is like something we saw really quickly. And actually our first user who we didn't know was German. And the reason was we were ready to launch. And so we're like, we're going to hit the button at midnight because all of the US is going to be asleep. It's fine.

And then by 9 a.m. it's going to all be up. We forgot because we were so busy and kind of dumb, I guess, that like there's the whole world out there. So we hit the button at night. midnight, and by 1201, we had our very first Instagram user in Germany. And we started seeing these signups come in with like at gmx.de or something.fr. And then we'd see Japanese email.

So we didn't really sleep even the first night that we launched. That was supposed to be our pre-launch rest. But very early, I think people were excited because you could follow people without knowing what language they were speaking. The first person I really connected with his name was Koji. And he is in Japan. And basically, he was sharing just his life. And what was crazy was like then the natural disasters happened in Japan.

It was like, I think, March of the following year. And all of a sudden, my experience totally changed because I knew him just as like a long-distance friend. And then he was taking photos of his house that had been turned totally upside down and talking about how it's been affecting all his friends. So when this gets to an important thing I really want to understand? When did you realize that you had built something that actually mattered in a deep way to the world? It wasn't just, oh, we got a cool project.

We're engineers. We're young. We're figuring this out. Let's build something fun. But actually, wait. people are using this to understand natural disasters. I think it was actually that moment. So I remember it really clearly,

and it was really well time for this, because we were, what, early March? It was early March then, and I believe it was 2011, probably. And I was at South by Southwest, which is also going on now. And I remember Kevin was like, Mike, open the popular page.

So at the time, the popular page, the second tab in the app, was just a global view as to what the most popular things on Instagram was right now. And they were all, like, custom-made images that all said, pray for Japan or thinking of Japan and sending strength to Japan. That was the moment. I was like, not only do we have a growing community, we had over a million

people on Instagram at the time, there's actually a way in which they're connecting to people from a totally different country and offering support. And you would see the comments on those photos be a mix of Japanese and English and Italian and Spanish. So that was the, whoa, this is actually not just international, but kind of crossing borders in an interesting thing. So that must have been inspiring and exciting. But did it also kind of freak you out a little bit about the responsibility you have? Because what if somebody posts false information, as they did,

for example, during Hurricane Sandy, suddenly you have this powerful platform that's spreading lies about something that's going on? I think the scariest the, like, you know, sort of sense of responsibility came less from misinformation, and for me

more, the site was growing really quickly. I had never built any kind of infrastructure, and basically my entire life was keeping the site up and building infrastructure. And having it not just be what at the time was the popular media perception of Instagram, which was, oh, it's just hipsters taking photos with filters. Like, it doesn't matter.

Like, once we were down for a whole day because a huge storm came through Virginia and knocked out our data center that was hosted on Amazon's cloud, and the image that went around was like this hipster that's like, Instagram is down. Just describe your lunch to me. You know, like that kind of like, it's a really good meme image.

And like, but underneath that, I also knew that there was actually a meaning behind it, which was like meaning behind beyond just the like snapping photos of lunch, but it was people really connecting and getting to know each other. Tell me about, I want to talk through some of the complex issues you must have dealt with. When did you first start having to worry about copyright? Informally pretty early, and that's because a lot of our early community, I think joined because they were excited that they had a way of sharing their aesthetic sense with the world. And they were interested in saying like, hey, like, this is almost my portfolio.

and they might not have been professional photographers, but they had some amount of pride, I guess, or a sense of ownership. So pretty early we would get into tips, really, like, with two people and one would write in, like, hey, this person's stealing my photographs. And one thing about Instagram is, like, we don't own the copyright.

All of the people who post the photos, you know, own the copyright. But I remember, like, a year in, this was pre-joining Facebook, but we had to, like, study up with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and basically make sure that we were actually following all that. So this actually gets to some, something else I've been wondering about as you talked and as I've read more about this, which is that you and Facebook have, I mean, Facebook, great product. I'm sure everybody here uses Facebook hugely important. New Yorker loves it. Please keep your algorithm so that it advantages our stories. But it's got a totally different philosophy on how things are built. They will build anything. They'll go and they'll test it with 1% of their users. There's 96 different Facebook products that you can see on the front page, 16 of which will be shut down next week. It's a constant, you know, make things, break things, build things fast, right? Ship before.

it's ready. You guys have a very different philosophy. I'm not saying one is better, one is worse, but you're owned by Facebook. So is there ever a culture clash? It mostly comes when people transfer over and they'll join the team. Because you can imagine a lot of the growth were about 300 people overall at the company. And again, we were like 13, three years ago. You don't just find 290 of them like at your doorstep. A lot of them were transfers from Facebook. And one of the things that was interesting when people would come over is that they would be like, whoa, I thought I could just run this 1% experiment and see what I would learn. And instead of like, no, like Kevin and I, I think,

are trying to be really intentional about what goes in. And we like to create, make sure that we're keeping a really coherent and like cohesive experience for people. So did you just say that when Facebook bought you with 13 employees? Yeah. And they bought you for a billion dollars. So that's each employee's worth a little under $100 million. That's pretty good.

Did you ever stop and think, this is nuts? Yeah. I mean, again, nowadays people are like, that was a really good. acquisition by Facebook, it really worked out. At the time, though, if you were wanting to read the articles, it was like, Zuckerberg is crazy. Like, they're crazy overpaid. This thing has gone in a year. Like, flash in a pan. It's just, like, fancy filters. So, like, I guess hindsight is 2020. But, yeah, at the time, it was like, wow, this is nuts. And, like, the pressure was on as well to, like, live up to that. Let's talk a little bit about the big issue that's in the news right now,

which is Apple versus the FBI. And obviously, you're not involved in this particularly, Facebook. has followed a file in amicus brief in support of Apple's position. But what is your philosophy when dealing with law enforcement? Let's say law enforcement comes to you and says there's somebody who's committed a crime. We have reason to believe that Instagram pieces he's deleted will help us solve the crime. Will you, you know, if served a valid subpoena, will you give that information up? Yeah, we do. And I believe in working with the law enforcement process.

Little did we know, I guess maybe we could have predicted this is that from that time when we joined Facebook where we had about 30 million monthly active users to today where we have 400 million. in, like, that order of magnitude also comes with an order of magnitude, like, greater interest and, like, inbound subpoenas and everything. So we've had to, like, create the right structure there. But, yeah, we'll cooperate whenever it serves. What won't you do? What won't we do?

I think if they don't have, like, the thing we make sure is that the request is sort of reasonably scoped and not just, like, this person, everyone they ever interacted with in all their photos, right? So, like, that's one requirement is that as it's served, that it is, like, sort of, you know, scoped and relevant and not unnecessarily wide. And what is your philosophy towards photographs posted in support of, say, ISIS? Is that a free speech issue? People should be allowed to post what they want to post?

Or where do you draw the line? Where do you start deleting photographs? Yeah. So terrorist organizations, if reported, will actually prioritize them because we take those really seriously and we'll take them down. So, again, like, the little things you don't think of when you're a few guys in a room and, like, on a pier in San Francisco and, like, come up and become a reality when you're reaching a global community. But yeah, that's another one where, you know, Facebook and we share

like a sort of set of terrorist organizations that we just will not allow. So let's talk a little bit about big issues of Instagram and the world. So how do you think Instagram has changed the world? If Instagram didn't exist and there was no service just like it, how would we interact with each other's in different ways? I think something would have emerged. I think there's a desire for people to tell their story. I think like the oldest way of doing that was like literally cave paintings, right? You're like telling a story to communicate in some way. And we went into the written word, which is also really valuable. But I think what Instagram does and other services that are kind of in that vein, but like

there's something so immediate and visceral, I think about seeing, especially a video. I think videos really bring you into the moment. And I think that's what it's changed. It's, at its best, I think it helps people feel like they can bring other people into that moment and almost elevate that moment that they're experiencing right then without having to have a FaceTime call with every single person, for example. Does it never worry you that it takes people out of the moment too much? Because they're thinking about what filter they should use when they take this picture of their child instead of thinking about, say, the child.

We have a metric. It's funny, like the metrics that you define and what they represent about your company values. And one of ours is, like, minimizing the time in the camera upload process. Like, that's actually a thing we track and measure. And, like, that's actually worthwhile. It means people are getting their tasks done faster and, like, again, putting their phone back into their pocket. So the object of the product and the product design is to get you back into your life. Yeah, at least the production side of things.

And the consumption side, I feel like fills in gaps like you might have waiting for the bus or the metro and you have a few minutes and that's a way of being inspired by something out in the world. All right. So another question about the company, right? So there's another rare thing about this, which is you seem to have a very happy company. You and your co-founder have been working together for six years. You've built this huge product. You've gone through financial negotiations and you don't hate each other. How? I can't stress how rare it is.

Especially in Silicon Valley, it is littered with corpses that's really dark. It's littered with the... Very unhappy relationships. Between co-founders of major companies who go through what you've gone through. I think the two things. One was the week we launched,

we didn't leave the office, and Kevin ran out of underwear. And if you can work with somebody for a week because of that same pair of underwear, you're probably doing... You're probably set for life. But two, like, we have very... complementary skills.

We come together on product and we spend a lot of time talking about the future of Instagram. He's really excited about the running Instagram part, making sure that we're a sustainable business, like how do we integrate within Facebook? I'm really excited about the technology side. We come together on product. So having that like Venn diagram has worked nicely because I think where it usually goes wrong is where you have co-CEOs or two people who want the same job. And I think that gets really, really messy.

But I'm really happy that six years in we're still good friends and it works well. Mazel Toff. These questions are great. Thanks, audience. So the audience has handed some great questions. So let's just get rocking with these. What do you know now about founding a startup that you wish you knew back then?

I kind of worry if we'd known any more we would have screwed it up. Like the fact that the site fell over on day one was because we hadn't done the probably like month plus of infrastructure investment we should have made before launching. And we didn't do it because we didn't know better.

And I think if we knew better, we would have delayed launch by a month because it would be like, well, it has to be perfectly scalable. Like, check off all these boxes. So I think our ignorance is really powerful back then. There's a lot of, like, Silicon Valley isms. And one of them is like,

if you're not embarrassed with what you shipped, you waited too long or you took too much time for her. I don't really believe in that. Like, I think there is value in Kraft. And one thing at Instagram is, like, the way we reconcile this, because we actually, we talk a lot about our values internally. And there's three of them that I think fit together really well.

One is do the simple thing first, right? Which is, like, don't create this, like, mega-complicated product that solves every use case ever, like, solve one problem really well. But then we also talk about craft and, like, a lot of the design details that we're going to make Instagram Instagram. And so the way of reconciling those two is do fewer things better. It's like, don't try to build everything. But the things you do build, like, go deep and do that. And it's never perfect. And there's things that we know are not quite right in the first version.

But, like, it's also, you learn so much the first day something's out in the world. What is the biggest challenge facing innovators today? And let's add, what is the biggest challenge facing Instagram today? It is a lot harder to get something noticed today, I think. People are always like, what was your strategy? What was your go-to-market? What's your publicity strategy? People, I think, have shifted a bit, and they're not as, like, app crazy these days.

Remember, like, the days when you would, like, come up with your friends, and they'd be like, hey, like, what apps have you gotten recently? I don't know if everybody had this experience. I had this experience where, like, a lot of my friends were really excited to try different apps. And I feel like we've gotten a little bit of app exhaustion, maybe. So it's a lot harder for something new to get noticed. So I think that is, like, on a purely like marketing and distribution sense, it's a lot more difficult than it was. I think if we built Instagram today, the odds of it actually getting noticed would be very small.

I learned a ton. I love talking with you. Thanks for answering all the questions. Thank you, audience, for those wonderful questions. And thank you, 92nd Street Y, for hosting this, this great series. Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram talking with the New Yorker's Nick Thompson. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm here with Bob Mankoff right after the cartoon meeting.

Easily the most fun thing possible to do in the course of what you loosely call a work week and what Bob basically calls this entire week. And I'd love to know, Bob, we've worked together for 17 years picking cartoons every week, but I've never asked you your three favorite jokes. None of your business. Three favorites. favorite jokes. Well, there's a, you know, there's a nerdy comedy joke. If you're really nerdy, you like a joke like a skeleton walks into a bar and says, give me a beer and a mop.

I like the joke. It's a horrible, horrible joke. Yeah, what's your second? I like, I like this sort of joke that will, that will often bring out, frankly, gender differences. So a guy is walking in a field, he sees a fond of, and the farmer has a pig and the pig has an artificial leg. And a guy says, wow, it goes up to the farm. I don't understand that. I never saw that. A pig with an artificial leg.

And the farmer says, see that house up here? That's my house. There was a fire. That pig came and it rescued me. Then it went up and it rescued my wife and my two daughters. And the guy said, so he burnt his leg. The guy says, no, no, you don't eat a pig like that all at once. I like that because it brings out.

So in people, it will bring out, in certain audiences, it will bring out, oh, and other people may be divided in certain ways. It's just a pig. Not a real pig has been eaten in this process. Then I like the joke, which is sort of about belief and faith where there's a rabbi in a small town and a flood comes. And really big flood, rain, rain, rain, and they come up to him with a boat because he's right on the porch. said, Rabbi, come, you need to be saved. He said, God will save me. It comes up to the second floor. They come again with another boat. He says, go away, God will save me. Now finally, he's at the top, the borders are at the top. They go up over me, and they come for a helicopter. He still refuses

them. He goes up to heaven. He says, God, I don't understand. I was so pious. Why didn't you save me? He said, Schmuck, I sent two boats and a helicopter. So those are three times. Bob, thanks. That was Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of the New Yorker. Now, you've got to remember, before he ever got published in the magazine, Bob submitted more than 500 cartoons for consideration.

Talk about banging your head against a wall. And if you want to try your hand at it, we have instructions at new Yorkerradio.org. Ahead this hour, Brian Stevenson talks about reparations. What a real program of reparations for slavery and racism might look. like. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Over the past few years, as we've become increasingly aware of police killings of African Americans and many other tragic injustices, one thing has become supremely clear. If you're white, the era of

lynching, of Jim Crow, official racism, all of it seems like it happened a long time ago in the bad old pre-Civil Rights days. But if you're black, those events seem somehow as if they took place much more recently, maybe well within your own lifetime. Brian Stevenson is a lawyer and civil rights activist who would like to close the gap between white and black memory. Stevenson is in his mid-50s, but he began school in a segregated classroom. He went on to found a group called the Equal Justice Initiative, and the group has published

an original study of lynching. For Stevenson, the history of lynching is also deeply personal. I don't think there's any question that it did shape me. I mean, my grandfather talked about hiding behind an alley building when a lynching took place in the community. Obviously, a lynching of a black man made it not safe for any black person to be in the area. And he talked about hiding from people that he knew,

people that he had played with, his so-called friends, because he didn't feel like if he presented himself in that moment that he would be safe. And we had all these rules. You know, you couldn't go into town. I did not grow up a free person in this nation. I couldn't go to the places I really wanted to go. I loved the beach, but the beach was segregated. I wanted to go to the big, bright public school that had the nice playground and the big baseball diamond. I wanted to play baseball.

I wasn't free to do that. And that absence of freedom shaped my worldview, what it meant to be free was much more burdensome, much more consequential in terms of opportunities. And I have no doubt that that shaped my worldview. Brian, what did you and your researchers discover about the nature of and the scope of lynching that historians had not discovered? My understanding is that the sum total of it went up by some significant percentage. I mean, we first documented hundreds of more lynchings that had been documented before.

And we just, we had a different approach. We went into these communities. We dug through courthouses and newspaper archives. It took five years, but for us it wasn't an academic project. We really wanted to understand the history of these communities. And as a result of that, we were able to identify hundreds more lynchings that had been previously identified. But I guess the question is then why you? In other words, we have a mountain of scholarship about the slave trade, about reconstruction, about lynching. What can you add? how do you go about adding to the sum total of knowledge and consciousness of the most vexed part of American history? You know, we've been asking ourselves that as well. I mean, I think we are in a place where we do not have a healthy narrative about our history. And we're doing it because we frankly don't see any consciousness about these problems. We want to offer some guidance about the ways in which we think we need to think differently about this history. And how do you do that? Well, I think it begins, first of all, by rebutting the false narratives. I live in Montgomery, Alabama. It is a community that loves talking about mid-19th century history. If you come to Montgomery, we have 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy. Our two largest high schools are Robert E. Lee High and Jefferson Davis High. They're both 99% black. Alabama's a state where Jefferson Davis's birthday is a state holiday. Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday. We don't even have Martin Luther King Day. We have Martin Luther King slash Robert E. Lee Day.

We are very comfortable invoking these images, this history, which ought to be painful, shameful. So we've been saying we've got to change that. We've got to start talking about slavery. There was nothing here really to point people's attention to this legacy when, in fact, Montgomery was one of the most prominent slave trading spaces in America. So we put out a report that documented the horrors of slavery. We talked about how enslaved people were crime victims. They were kidnapped. They were abducted. And we began telling those stories. And then we began erecting markers in downtown Montgomery that forced people to think about the fact that this is a space. So the way, those markers are competitors for the

names of streets, the names of high schools that are named for Confederate quote-unquote heroes. Yes. I think we're trying to complicate the narrative that this is a place where you can only celebrate the mid-19th century, that there is this place of great pride and achievement. And there are things about which we can be proud and things about which we can say there have been achievements, but there are also things about which there should be shame. I believe we need to talk about the shame of slavery. We need to talk about the shadows that still haunt us. The great evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude in forced labor. I think the great evil of American slavery was the ideology of white supremacy.

I've got to think that a lot of people hearing this, say, well, wait a minute, there was this thing called the Civil Rights Movement and Brown versus Board of Education in a whole series of voting rights acts and all the rest. Didn't we solve that problem? Why are we looking back to lynching in a way that's not just historical but as a present tense problem and consciousness? Yeah, I think if we don't understand the depth of the problem, we're going to misperceive the quality of the solution. I think we've made a mistake by putting too much attention to the great achievements of African Americans, Rosa Parks, Dr. King, absolutely extraordinary what they did. But we haven't paid any attention to all of those white people, those governors, those policymakers, those teachers, clergy who kept shouting segregation forever. When did they stop believing segregation forever? Can we point to a time? If you understand the great threat to be this ideology of white supremacy, this narrative of racial difference, you'd have no reason to believe that that construct, that threat has been overcome. And in fact, you know, I think the problem of our current history is that the burden has always been on people of color to prove that racism exists, when in fact, after 400 years, after narratives of racial difference, after enslavement and lynching and segregation, the question ought to be who bears the burden? And I think in places like Alabama and South Carolina and Minnesota and New York, the burden ought to be on the rest of the society to prove that we are no longer trying to maintain this narrative of racial difference.

We are committed to deconstructing white supremacy. And I've seen very little evidence of that kind of commitment, particularly at the government and national level. Brian, when you see John Lewis, a great civil rights hero, embracing and accepting the apology of a Klansman who beat him as a young man, when you see the relatives of people in Charleston, South Carolina, forgiving the murder of their child or spouse, do you think that's counterproductive in some way to the project that you're talking about? Oh, no, I think it's an essential example of the project that we're talking about. We ultimately want everyone in the nation to do that. I think when the chief of police from Montgomery apologizes to John Lewis, he is modeling exactly what should happen. When we put up markers at lynching sites, which is our plan over the next couple of years, I want the police chief.

I want the sheriff from those communities to be there with us. And I think if that sheriff or that police chief says to the black community, I want to apologize because people wearing my uniform throughout most of the 20th century failed to protect you. They allowed you to be lynched and victimized and assaulted and beat up. And I want to say, I'm sorry. And I now want to commit to you that people wearing my uniform are not going to tolerate that kind of victimization. We are going to be here to protect you. And you don't think those law enforcement officials and mayors throughout those 12 states in the South would say, well, you know, I'm too young to remember lynching.

I was born after the Voting Rights Act. You'd say, I'm okay. Why are you bothering me with this? Well, because at least for the police chiefs and the sheriffs, they are still wearing the same uniform that terrorized and traumatized people. And they know they don't have strong and positive relationships with many people of color. There is a distrust. And I think one of the things you can do is own up to that history, begin to understand how that history was developed. And what would it cost them to say, I'm sorry that people wearing this. uniform 50, 80, 100 years ago, failed to protect you. Why not do that? You're suggesting a process

that South Africa went through after the fall of apartheid, the truth and reconciliation process. How would a truth and reconciliation process look in the United States? It would look a lot like what you see in Germany. You go to Berlin, Germany, you can't go 100 meters without seeing a marker or a stone that's been placed next to the home of a Jewish family that was abducted during the Holocaust. The Germans actually want you to go to Auschwitz and reflect soberly on that history. You come to this country, you can't find anywhere where we deal honestly with the legacy of slavery. But let's note the moment we're in. One of the things that's come out of this conversation about race and history, whether it's about the history of housing policy in northern cities

or lynching in the South, is the idea of reparations. Tanahasi Coates is only the most recent person to put a hard light on what this is and what it might be. In your view, what's the proper view of reparations? Well, I do think we have to recover from all the damage that has been done. And not only do we have to do that to help people who have been victimized by this history, but those people who benefited from this history have to recover as well. And it's like, you know, if I knock someone down and injure them, I have to, in order to, in order to, to maintain my own peace quotient, make clear than that I didn't intend to hurt them. I can't really be at peace if I'm a decent human being and not do everything that's possible

to help that person recover if I'm responsible for their injury. It's just what decency requires. It's what my own progress requires. And that's the way I think about reparations. And so instead of passing the Voting Rights Act and then immediately trying to deconstruct it, repeal it, bar its implementation, which is what happened in the South, we should have been saying, no, what else can we do? If we have been really focused in the 1960s, we would have been saying to repair the damage of disenfranchisement,

we're going to have different policies for black people. We're going to say every black person is automatically registered to vote when they turn 18. And then we're going to say, we're going to allow black people to vote at any voting precinct they go to. Different set of rules, because we want to express our rejection of disenfranchisement against African Americans. We're going to actually go to the homes of black people and get their votes. We're going to allow black people to go to public state universities at half the price of everybody else because we've denied them admission wrongfully for decades. We're going to do these things that are reparational

because we have to help these communities recover, and that's the way we need to be thinking about reparations. You say the word reparations now. People immediately get tense and upset and angry because they're afraid they're going to have to give up something that they believe belongs to them. They're not looking to recover because, they don't have enough shame or awareness to appreciate that it will be as good for them as it will

be for the alleged beneficiaries of that repair. Or the reparation is understood as a, and I'm using air quotes around this, the word hand out, a discrete amount of money to each and every African American. It's one of the problems in America. We're just so dominated by money. We think that money is the only thing that can solve problems. Oh, reparations means giving a few dollars to every person of color. and I just think that's so misguided.

You know, and I give talks, I say this thing. I say I don't believe the opposite of poverty is wealth. I believe the opposite of poverty is justice. We need to be thinking, what would be just to recover from all of these injuries, all of these barriers that we have constructed? I do think it's an unhealthy retort to say, oh, it's just about money. That's not what it's about. It's about helping a society create a future where we're no longer burdened by this history.

We're as burden in 2016 as we were in 1916. These young men of color that are being shot and killed by the police, the obstacles that you have to overcome, haven't become that much easier to overcome because we haven't done enough to confront the narratives behind them. And so in that respect, we've got to reframe what it means to repair these problems. We're in this place because we haven't done this important work of owning up to our history, of telling the truth about our history. We can't insist on truth and reconciliation,

but if we insist on truth, I think good people will feel the need to reconcile themselves to the pain and anguish of our past by committing to a new future. And I don't think that's really happened yet. Everybody thinks that if they were alive during the time of slavery, they would be abolitionists. If they were alive during the time of lynching,

they'd be fighting to end it. If they were alive in the 50s and 60s, they'd be marching with Dr. King. Well, everyone is alive today, who's hearing my voice, during a time when there are threats to racial justice, where presumptions of dangerousness and guilt prevail. And we want them to recognize the connection between these eras and then do something.

That's what we hope we can create. Brian Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. I'm David Remnant. In a moment, George Packer talks about the fate of the Arab Spring. And we've also got a story about losing one faith and finding another. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. I'm David Remnick. Next week on the show, three highlights from the New Yorker Festival,

including Larry David and Randy Newman, though not at the same time, because that would be nuts. And also, Amy Poehler of Parks and Rec, and before that, Saturday Night Live. There's something kind of cool about being nine months pregnant on TV. It's weird. It's like you have this weird power because, first of all, everybody has to get out of your way.

So you take up a lot of space and you bang in the people and everybody's kind of nervous for you, and it's kind of exciting. And then also there's a hormonal freedom where you're like, I don't care, I'm like it. Right? It's going to be a lot of fun. I hope you'll join us next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. George Packer is a staff writer at the magazine and a great reporter about war and diplomacy. He goes places where most of us don't ever want to set foot, Iraq during the U.S. invasion, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan,

and he helps us understand what's going on. He was recently in Tunisia where the Arab Spring began five years ago. It was the only country involved that successfully became a democracy, or at least it seemed to. Tunisia today is one of the largest exporters of the jihadi fighters who are destabilizing the entire region and creating nightmares for so many people. George Packer sat down to talk with the New Yorkers, Dorothy Wickenden. George, we all think about Tunisia as the heart of the Arab Spring. What happened?

Yeah, it started there, and it spread from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to Syria. All of those places are in various states of hellishness. Syria is the worst place on earth. Libya is in civil war and chaos with no functioning government. Egypt had a revolution and election and a coup, and now it's ruled by the military. And how many governments has it had since. Yeah, and so none of them come remotely close to qualifying his success. stories. Tunisia does. It has had several rounds of elections. There's a margin of freedom

for the press, for political parties, for civil society groups. It's a peaceful place. It doesn't have a large army. It doesn't have an oil economy, which can be a deadly thing when oil prices go down. So in some ways, Tunisia has the ingredients for success, and yet it hasn't been very successful. And when I was there, I kept asking myself, why hasn't the freedom I see here brought about a good vision of society? And the answer I came up with is Tunisians are now free to act on their unhappiness. And there's all kinds of unhappiness in Tunisia. What's happened to the young, idealistic, democratic types who took part in the Arab Spring? Are they a noticeable force?

They're still there. They're a bit cynical. But I met. a number who are still active. I met a young woman named Ones bin Abdul Karim who runs an NGO. She's like 26. All the people I talked to were 26 years old there. Her group monitors Parliament and tries to connect Tunisians to their legislature. It's a great group. And they were truly the young, inspiring idealists that I'd hoped to meet in Tunisia. But I also felt that they were in some ways, you know, sweeping the sands. I mean, there's such a huge. generational problem of disillusionment and of joblessness. In January, there were big anti-unemployment demonstrations, including violence, across the country because there's just so much pressure that's built up. And I don't know that these very admirable youth groups are capable of handling a problem on that scale. You had some really extraordinary conversations with young Tunisians who are disaffected.

One of you talked about the project, as he called it, and he described. described it as leading to the Islamic State ruling the world. What did he and other emerging and former jihadis, and you talked to them too, what did they tell you about the lure of revolution? Their attitude toward the Islamic State or al-Qaeda or going to fight jihad for the most part seemed just like a pure expression of rage, frustration. The word that kept coming up was suffocation. I'm suffocating here in Tunisia. That was a word I heard almost from all of them. That's the question here.

Is that true in Tunisia as it is in other countries throughout the region? Does he have no hope? It seems like a number of the young kids and their kids that you talk to actually are educated and you would think they have prospects for their future. They're educated, but that's it. Tunisia has this phenomenon of the educated jobless. In fact, you're more likely to be jobless if you have a college degree than if you don't because there's still plenty of unskilled labor.

opportunities. But the old regime made sure a lot of Tunisians got college degrees, but it didn't create an economy that could produce jobs for them. So you have what, to me, is a dangerous situation for any regime, a whole generation of young people with high expectations, with educations, with some knowledge, and without any prospects of supporting themselves. And so that is a road to revolution and to jihad. You know, the other thing that's extraordinary here is, obviously, they watch Western culture closely. One of them told you he's feeling the burn. Yeah, this kid, I met him in the south of Tunisia.

He's a high school student, plays baseball, wants to come study in America. His whole mental world is Americanized. He, you know, he has this haircut that is more extravagant, you know, more hip than anything that I could conjure up from my Brooklyn life. But he also, yeah, he knows everything he asked me, are you feeling the burn? Because the last debate, I thought he really got Hillary's number. It's as if I'm talking to a kid in Brooklyn. He's in Gerba, Tunisia. And his classmates, some of them are going off to join ISIS.

What did he say about Trump? Yeah, we didn't. He seemed more focused on Bernie than Trump. That's interesting, though. Yeah, yeah, but what was bizarre, I mean, he's kind of become a liberal American, you know, late-night comedy-watching voter, a very recognizable type, alongside him in his high school, are these kids who are going off to Syria. And so there's some weird bifurcation in Tunisia. And it does see – it's a very divided society.

I felt the whole time I was there that if this were the 60s and 70s, all these kids would have been joining Maoist organizations instead of going off to fight jihad. It seemed like the same dynamic of a divided society with a lot of class rage. George, the jihadis seem to jump around the region from Tunisia. Why is that? What's going on there? And is this an ideological thing that is driving them? Well, Tunisia is a country of only 11 million is the largest producer of jihadis in the world by a lot. It's a real mystery.

I think it's partly a sense of being neglected or marked. marginalized by the state. There isn't much in the way of organized religion in Tunisia because of its history of rigid secularism. So young people are prey to the siren song of the jihadis. And most of them, when they join that movement, they can't really function as jihadis inside Tunisia. So they go to Syria. They go to Iraq to fight. More recently, they've been going to Libya in large numbers and then getting trained there by ISIS or al-Qaeda and coming back into Tunisia. I found it. to be a relatively crude and non-ideological form of jihadism. So they're kind of going where the jobs are? They're going where the action is, but then they're coming back to Tunisia to kill foreigners, Tunisian police and soldiers. There have been a number of high-profile attacks, but these are all Tunisians who are leaving the country being trained outside mainly in Libya and then coming back.

How is the current government handling the threat of terrorism? Not very well. I'd say some officials denied that ISIS existed inside Tunisia. It's a foreign problem that's being imported. Not true. Tunisians are being exported and then re-imported as jihadis. They've taken what you could call just a kind of militarized and security-minded approach. Lots of arrests in the first six months of last year, 100,000 Tunisians were arrested. It's a staggering number. Some of the old bad practices of a corrupt police force, torture and arbitrary harassment and detention are coming back. And they're struggling because honestly they have not grappled with this problem. They have no program that I could find for prevention or rehabilitation of jihadis. And that's sort of basic stuff that the European countries are doing in order to find a way to either stop these young guys from leaving or once they come back to do something. other than just throw them in prison. So Tunisia is really struggling, and I don't know that

we have given them sufficient help. In fact, I know that we haven't. Thank you so much, George. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Dorothy. The New Yorker's Dorothy Wickenden hosts our podcast, Politics and More. She spoke with staff writer George Packer. So one final story to close the show. David Hagelin grew up in the Church of Latter-day Saints. Not long ago, he joined us on the program to interview the new mayor of Salt Lake City about gays and the Mormon Church. Now, David hasn't been a practicing Mormon for quite some years, and this is the story of how that happened. I grew up Mormon, and I was devout. I was devout all through high school. I went to church every Sunday. I have a memory of a Sunday school class from when I was in high

school in which our Sunday school teacher brought in some of his friends, basically. I mean, other men in their probably late 20s to talk about their testimonies. The testimony is your belief in the church. The thing is that Mormons tend not to refer to belief so much as knowledge. I know the church is true. Even though I had been devout all through high school and all through my childhood, I hadn't had the experience that some people spoke of, which is usually about the Holy Ghost, kind of making you feel that, yes, I know that this is true. maybe you're in church or you're reading the scriptures or something and you have this powerful feeling that convinces you of the knowledge of this. And that had never happened to me.

And I remember this Sunday school class. Our teacher brought in some of his friends and they all talked about where their testimonies came from. And I realized they hadn't had those experiences either, really. They all talked about, well, you know, it wasn't one time. It was sort of gradually over. And I don't doubt their sincerity. But in the back of my mind, I started to think, huh, it seems like they don't know either.

So by the time I got to college, I started only going to church occasionally. But I would pray sometimes because that was the way that you were supposed to gain a testimony. You pray about it and you say, let me know, tell me that this is true. And then my sophomore year, I started taking a class with a professor named Wayne Booth,

and I took the class because I knew one, that he was sort of a big deal in the English department. But what I also knew about him was that he had grown up Mormon, too. I would go to Wayne Booth's office hours and say, I don't know what I think. I, you know, I've always believed, but now I'm not so sure. You know, what does everything mean? What am I supposed to do?

how do I understand the world if I don't understand it like this? And after one of these conversations or in the midst of one of these conversations, he said, have you ever read the poem Sunday morning by Wallace Stevens? And I had not. So I left his office and I went and I found the poem in an anthology,

paperback anthology, and I sat down and I read the poem aloud to myself. Sunday morning, complacencies of the pan noir, and late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, and the green freedom of a cockatoo upon a rug mingle to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little,

and she feels the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe as a calm darkens among water lights. Basically I think that there's a woman sitting at home on a Sunday stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet over the seas to silent Palestine, dominion of the blood and sepulchre. enjoying her life, enjoying coffee and oranges. Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

What is divinity if it can come only in silent shadows and in dreams? But it's Sunday, so she starts to think about Jesus. She starts to think about Christianity and faith. And over the next several stanzas, she kind of goes back and forth. Divinity must live within herself, passions of rain or moods in falling snow, wondering, is this necessary? You know, is the world that I am describing this world of coffee and oranges and the sun, is that enough, or do I need an afterlife? Do I need some promise of eternity?

After going back and forth in her mind with this sort of internal debate, here's how the poem ends. She hears upon that water without sound, a voice that cries, the tomb in Palestine is not the porch of spirits lingering. it is the grave of Jesus where he lay. We live in an old chaos of the sun, or old dependency of day and night, or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

of that wide water inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail whistle about us their spontaneous cries. Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness, and, in the isolation of the sky at evening, Casual flocks of pigeons make ambiguous undulations as they sink, downward to darkness, on extended wings. When it was over, I decided, that's it.

I'm leaving the church. Somehow it clicked. And among the things that are amazing to me now, looking back on that, almost 20 years later, is that this is in some ways the experience that I was supposed. supposed to have with the scriptures. And that many people I know did have with the scriptures, you're supposed to read the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and then afterwards have a testimony, you know, that yes, this is true. And that never happened to me with those books. But when I read

this poem, I thought, that's it. I think I was partly being converted to literature. When my grandfather learned that I had stopped going to church and he wrote me a a letter to encourage me to reconsider. He also included a poem, a sonnet by George Santayana. Oh world, thou choosest not the better part. And I'm sure he didn't realize this, but Santayana was a professor at Harvard when Wallace Stevens went there and they exchanged poems themselves about reason and faith in which they tried really to persuade each other. One that faith deciphered in the skies. to trust the soul's invincible surmise was all his science and his only art.

It meant a lot to me that my grandfather would send me a poem. I think he understood that poetry had come to mean a great deal to me. And in truth, it doesn't mean exactly the same thing to me anymore. I don't read it looking for those kinds of answers. Now at 37, I miss the intensity that I had as a 19-year-old. I'm glad that I read Sunday morning when I did, and I think there is something that can happen

when you're at that age and trying to answer these enormous questions and you read something that powerful, something happens. I don't really expect it ever to happen again, but I'm glad that it did. The New Yorker's David Hagland. And that wraps up the New Yorker Radio Hour for today,

Next week I'll be talking with Larry David, who is as funny in real life as he was on Curb Your Enthusiasm, but much less mean. It'll be fun. I hope you'll join us. Thanks, and see you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garpers of Tune Yards with additional music from Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianan and Corby, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sharon Mishie, Sarah Nix, Paul Schneider and Stephen Valentino with help from Becky Cooper and Matt Fiddler. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.