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Ep. 99 - Buzzword Salad: The Courtney Retort
75 Plays2 years ago
Last week, we aired an interview with Jeremy Courtney, who along with his wife Jessica, founded the charitable organization Preemptive Love. We had a lot to say about the controversy surrounding the Courtney’s dismissal from the charity that they had spent well over a decade building, but we thought it best to let people hear from Jeremy, first. This week, we got together with Jeremiah to discuss the accusations made against them, the tone and inflection of the articles written by two former employees, the preemptive critiques of Humanite (a new project that has only just launched and is already under assault), and final thoughts on what this mess says about the people involved, both directly and indirectly. This conversation might ruffle some feathers, but it needs to be had. The callous, enthusiastic way in which we discard imperfect people who have done so much good is infuriating. The Courtneys aren’t perfect, but they’ve been in the field helping save lives and build communities for a long time. We think they deserved better than they got. Here are the articles we discuss:
“Preemptive Love: What Happens When a Charity Runs More Like a Cult” by Ben Irwin
“Jeremy and Jessica Courtney’s misconduct at Preemptive Love, documented” by Ben Irwin
“A Donor’s Guide to Preemptive Love’s Financial Statements” by Ben Irwin
“What you should know about Humanite, Jeremy and Jessica Courtney’s new organization” by Ben Irwin
“An Open Letter to Preemptive Love” by Courtney Christenson
The Board of Directors’ Statements & Timeline of Events
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Personal Anecdotes
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of Growing Up Christian. I'm Casey. I'm Sam. I'm Jeremiah. And I wanted to start this episode off by first sharing a story from my week last week. Do you ever do something like dumb and immediately, like before it's even like totally played out, like immediately in your brain, you're like, why are you like this? Like, why are you this stupid?
00:00:48
Speaker
So I was doing some training with one of my salesmen at a car dealership and we're in the service department and we were demonstrating like one of our things that we sell, right?
00:01:03
Speaker
So, uh, it's a busy day in there. We got to work fast and I'm trying to like talk through everything that I'm doing as I'm doing it. And I just got a little ahead of myself. So I've got all this stuff hooked up in the front seat of the car, right? It's, this is one of the service advisors vehicles. It's a, it's a Jeep and.
00:01:26
Speaker
The next step in the process is you got to start the car. Well, it's a manual transmission and I don't drive a manual very often. I see you smart and you already know.
00:01:40
Speaker
But it's kind of jacked up too, so it's tall to get in there. And I turn the key and nothing happens, right? And I'm like, oh, manual. So I had a bunch of stuff in the front seat so I couldn't sit in the car to start it. So I wiggle my fat little thigh over the side of the floorboard.
00:02:05
Speaker
and I stuff it in there to get to the clutch pedal. And as I'm doing that, the guy that I was working with goes, hey, you might want to, you know, and I'm just like working fast, not really paying attention. I push down the clutch, crank it over, it starts.
00:02:22
Speaker
Not realizing it was in gear, I remove my foot from the clutch and it immediately just goes whoosh and like smashed a big metal table up against the wall just like BAM smash this thing up against the wall, messed up the whole front end of this poor guy's jeep who was like nice enough to let us use it for the demo.
00:02:47
Speaker
And the last time he ever lets you use one of his cars for a demo. Yeah. Well, it kind of serves him right. Honestly, you're just trying to make a point. You're like, this is what happens when you let people use your stuff. I'm teaching you a lesson. Very valuable. Look at this guy. Does this guy look like he knows what he's talking about?
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, he's the CEO's son. I mean, we let Tommy boy get behind the wheel and Tommy boy did, but Tommy boy does. It's like when he's sitting in the office playing with the cars on the guy's desk with real cars, like actual Tommy boy.
00:03:24
Speaker
But, uh, yeah, so I smashed the crap out of this poor guy's car. Um, and like immediately there's a crowd of technicians and other people who work there just like standing around, staring at this Jeep, smashed all up against the wall. Pile of wreckage. Yeah. And I just like, it was like, as it was lunging, I was just thinking to myself, like, you know how this works. Like, what are you, you know, what this like that you have to make sure it's not in gear. Like.
00:03:55
Speaker
It was too late. I just apologized profusely to the crowd and then to the individual, then to the manager, then to the owner. Thankfully, they have company insurance because it was like $7,200. Did you make the sale though?
00:04:11
Speaker
Yeah, I guess. Gotta make a bunch more now. Was it a Wrangler or like a Gladiator? What type of Jeep was it? It was like a Wrangler and it was like a special edition one. It was like something like maybe it might've been one of those like Willy's ones, you know, that they came out with in the past few years.
00:04:32
Speaker
You know, it's got a bunch of, uh, one-off unusual parts on it that are really hard to locate. Uh, I, I, that's what I was worried about was like, he said it was a manual and it was a Jeep, uh, because they might have like a crawler first gear or something where it actually, if you start it, you might be able to like your foot, not being on the clutch. If you popped it, it might be able to start on it, like drive on its own until it hits something without you being in it because like.
00:04:59
Speaker
the first gear is low enough that it overcomes the torque pretty easily. It sure felt like that was the case, yes. Traveled a little ways. Did it stall immediately or was it going?
00:05:11
Speaker
No, it made its way to the wall. I mean, there wasn't a lot of room there. Okay. Yeah. Cause like your average normal car, that's a stick. It probably, as soon as you pop your foot off the clutch, it would just stall. So jerk forward, but then it would have been cut off. But a car that's made for off-roading has a really low, like a crawler granny first gear where it can like idle along at four miles an hour or something.
Injury, Humor, and Travel Plans
00:05:35
Speaker
yeah i think that's what i was dealing with what's crazy is like okay it's it's funny because it was dumb and nobody was standing in front of this thing yeah dude right but
00:05:50
Speaker
Right. There's, there was an actual situation in Michigan, like in one of our old, the stores that I used to call on up there. Uh, I think it was last year. It might've been the year before, but same exact thing happened. Jeep Wrangler popped the clutch and there was a guy standing in front of it and it killed him. Like literally just smashed him. I kept thinking of that video that Thompson girl always plays for.
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah, who gets completely pinned against the wall. The horrible or hilarious segment. I actually haven't seen that video, even though I've heard it probably a thousand times at this point. It looks remarkably familiar now. If you feel any better, Casey, I'll give you a similar dumb story so at least you can feel a tiny bit better. On the way back from the beach trip that I took a month and a half ago, two months ago, I was driving my F-150.
00:06:43
Speaker
back completely full of vacation stuff like the bed all the way up to the cap towing an 18 foot open bed trailer with our RAV4 on it with a kayak, a surfboard, bicycles, like this thing was loaded down. Like we put everything we could in the truck and trailer for the purposes of like the other vehicles being, you know, not having a lot of them.
00:07:03
Speaker
And, uh, at one point we needed to pull over cause we had two dogs in the back seat. It was me and my father-in-law driving this car and we had our two, uh, our dog and their dog in the back seat and their dog needed to go to the bathroom. It was just getting really antsy and whatever. So we're in the outer banks. I pull over in like one of their pull off zones and he hops out and grabs the dog, just trying to get her out of the car before she starts going to the bathroom everywhere. And, uh, you know, and I saw something like flapping a bit on the trailer. So like, we're all, you know, kind of like high, high adrenaline at the moment.
00:07:31
Speaker
And so I hopped out and ran back to look and I turned and the trailer's just creeping forward and I'm like, oh no. I just stopped and got out and I'm sprinting back towards the arm. Oh my God. And I'm like, and I had that same thought of like, I'm not going to be the guy who's on video watching like this truck drive into the ocean or whatever. Like I'm not going to be that guy.
00:07:52
Speaker
And it moved maybe a foot by the time I got back to it. Like, it was really not that bad. And it turns out I had pushed the emergency brake on. I just hadn't put it in park. So it was just creeping its way forward a little bit against the brake. But as soon as I took that off, I was like, man, I don't think I've ever messed that up in my entire life until now. And it was the same thought you're talking about. Like, I'm not that stupid. Like, I'm better than that. Like, I'll make a mistake or something. But like, I'm not get out of your car without putting it in park.
00:08:22
Speaker
It's an internal dialogue of like, I thought better of you. Yeah, exactly. That makes two of us on the podcast that have done the same exact thing, Jeremiah. When I gashed my leg open like a month and a half ago, I sent you guys the picture, right? Yeah, fine. Yeah. When I gashed it open, I thought before I started doing it, I was like, man, I wonder if I should be wearing like safety equipment.
00:08:42
Speaker
And then I just like, wham into the sink. And then I felt the pain and I looked down and I was like, yeah, I don't know what I thought was going to happen. Like, at least don't wear shorts next time. Yeah, like, you know, it's just a general pair of jeans might be a good move. Or maybe don't open the cabinet specifically to open up a pathway from the thing you're hitting with a sledgehammer down to your legs. At least you'd have a mortal wound full of like denim shrapnel. Yeah, I have a chance, you know.
00:09:12
Speaker
Something for the blood to coagulate with. Hey, I'll have you know, the feeling is starting to come back in that area. There is about an inch below it was just dead for like, it grows back. I think the nerves grow like a millimeter a month or something. So it's going to be a while, but like I'm very slowly starting to get it back. Oh, interesting. I didn't even realize I never gave any consideration to what nerve.
00:09:40
Speaker
recovery would look like but a millimeter a month, huh? Well, and there's no guarantee they're going to grow back and completely rejoin either. Like they might, I don't know enough about nerves. So any doctors listening, please correct me. But like, they might just grow back from other places or whatever, fill it in. But it's, they're not going to probably grow through the scar area. No, I have a good sized scar on my arm from when I broke it when I was a kid. And
00:10:04
Speaker
There's like very little feeling in that general area. But fortunately, it's on my shin. I don't need feeling on my shin. No, actually, I would prefer less feeling on my shin because when you bump into things and you hit your shin, that is one of the most aggravating feelings of all time. Yeah. Yeah. Every time I see a video of somebody like
00:10:22
Speaker
Like they're walking behind their truck and they just like shin kick their hitch. Oh man. It's, it's hard to watch. Like you watch terrible things and not really like feel anything, but for some reason, like that one in particular, I see it and I'm just like, Oh, I feel sick.
00:10:40
Speaker
The more relatable the pain, the harder it is to wash. When it's like, it's like, if it's something really egregious, it's disconnected from your personal experience. Right. It's so bad. Oh, it's a gunshot. Obviously that's terrible. Not like you bent your pinky nail back. Yeah. So we were like, Oh, that's the fate worse than death. When you just stub your toe in the middle of the night, walking down the hall and you have the lights. Oh my God. Stubbing your toe, hitting your shins. Uh,
00:11:09
Speaker
I feel like there's another one that's like really gets me going. Like you get that. It's not like it's the pain, but you also get that instant feeling of like anger. You miss a step. How about if you miss a step coming down the stairs? Oh yeah. That one is just a little more surprising.
00:11:26
Speaker
If you fall, oh yeah, that is one of the feelings that when you fall and you hit your tailbone and it sends that shock, you're just like, you almost feel it in your gut a bit. You're like, is this the time that I'm paralyzed? Every, and as you get older, it increases the chances. That's why I like skateboarding videos. Uh, you can like watching people really take a tumble is like,
00:11:46
Speaker
Oh, wow. That was wild. But when you watch them just like catch a rail between the legs, you just. Oh, that's another one of the things like I know I would have been amazing at that. I like riding my skateboard around when I was a kid and I could like do a small ollie. And that was about in a small manual. And that was about the extent of like anything I could ever do. But watching kids just wipe it out and stuff like, you know what? I'm too risk averse. I never would have made it like I would have had to have so much padding on to even try that, like to drop in on a tall half pipe. Are you kidding me? Absolutely not.
00:12:15
Speaker
I never got past the introductory phase of figuring out how anybody even stayed on them or kept them moving. It was like a Ninja Turtles skateboard that had the square back end on it and the big rubber pad. The old banana board. I don't know if that's what they're called.
00:12:33
Speaker
I've got a problem coming up this weekend. Could use your gentleman's help with. So a buddy of mine is going to the when we were young music festival in Vegas. Oh, nice. And I am not going to the music festival because I didn't buy tickets when he did. And also, I don't really like music festivals. That's a different topic. But like it's going to be hot. They allow you to bring in like one water bottle and you can't have anything in your pockets. And there's going to be 50,000 people. I don't know how many.
00:13:00
Speaker
Like all of my boxes for like, I would pay full price VIP ticket price to stream it from home and I would have a fantastic time, but that's not the problem. I'm going with him because his wife did not want to go with him to outdoor music festival for all the reasons I just explained. Uh, and then afterwards we're going to go to Utah and go to Zion national park and do some hiking and whatever that part will be fun. Amazing.
00:13:22
Speaker
But that means that I'm going to be in Vegas for an entire day after I drop him off at the concert, and I'm going to have to entertain myself. And I was like, what type of stuff is there to do in Vegas? And I don't like almost everything there is to do in Vegas. Like, I'm not going to a casino and going dabbling. I could not possibly care less. And I'm like, maybe I'm going to a magic show. There's a lot of magic shows. There's like 30 different Cirque du Soleil's.
00:13:47
Speaker
There's no good concerts that day because they're all, you know, the festival is drawing all the stuff. Like, I don't know what I literally don't know what I'm going to do. Go to them. There's got to be some like resident who someone is going to tell her. I feel like the idea of you sitting in a, in like some dopey Vegas comedians puppet show alone, drinking a $32 Long Island iced tea that tastes like, uh,
00:14:14
Speaker
you know, Arizona is so sad.
00:14:18
Speaker
Well, that's the thing. I would never go to one of those places because I like any place with a minimum drink thing. I'm like, Oh yeah, I'm just not going to that. That's dumb. That's a waste. Yeah. It's not usually required. It's just like one of those things where it's like, well, we have these bottles of water for $40 or I don't know, you can die in the sea. Oh yeah. Any place that wouldn't let me bring my own water bottle in. I'm already like, I'm out. This is not the place for me.
00:14:46
Speaker
I don't know how that's still a thing. Like water is like, isn't that a human right? That's how I feel about it. I'm like, just do me. I have the right to drink water.
00:14:54
Speaker
They're like, yeah, you can drink it out of the tap. I mean, they have to give it to you from the tap, but do you want Vegas tap water? Probably not. I was making jokes about like the terrible things I don't want to do in Vegas. And I had to explain to my wife that there are actually strip clubs with buffets and just the idea. I wasn't planning on going to either. But I made a joke about it and she just like gave me a look like, oh, that's such a stupid thing. I was like, no, no, that's a real thing that people do. Like not people that I want to associate with, but it's a thing.
00:15:24
Speaker
I feel like it should only be like cylindrical foods. It should all be like hot dogs, Twinkies, corn dog, mostly just dogs, I guess. The list grows pretty short after you rule out dogs. There's a sad little subway in the corner doing $5 foot longs. Right now, I think it may be like a magic show and like a restaurant and that's it. I haven't thought.
00:15:50
Speaker
Do a restaurant have lunch alone or go to a magic show, dude. If I had a whole day in a city by myself, I would I would probably walk 10 miles. I would just keep walking. I'd be interested to see and what's around. And then I'd probably just hop into a bar that seemed cool and grab a drink.
00:16:08
Speaker
Go online and see what restaurant had a good lunch menu and then like try something cool I don't know man I feel like that's just like that's a wing it kind of day and it's like Vegas is a wing it city I know there's like what I don't know not from personal experience with the old strip and the new strip I guess and I don't know I guess they had different types of attractions is all done
00:16:32
Speaker
So it's not that interesting anymore. I mean, it's, it's fine. It's, it's just all stuff that you want to do with like your buddy. Like once your buddy gets out of the concert or wherever you go walk around and just look at people like beasts, you know, normally I am like a winged person, but like when we go on vacation, me and my wife, we, we make some plans, but we love just let's show up into town. Let's find somewhere cool to eat. Let's go drive around and see. Oh, there's a cool, there's a museum. Let's go to the museum. Like,
00:16:58
Speaker
We've had some of our best vacations very loosely planning and then doing that. I feel like with Vegas, I know enough already. I don't think I need to discover the real Vegas, if you know what I mean. I don't think there's hidden gems. There probably is if you're a resident or something like that. All the good restaurants in Vegas, I've spent a lot of time there.
00:17:21
Speaker
because of like trade shows and work things and whatnot. And like, there's tons of good restaurants and stuff there, but like most of it, you want to leave the strip. You go off the strip, there's like good sushi places and just about anything. You should just rent a car and like go out to like Red Rocks or something out there. You leave the city limits of Vegas and there's nothing. I mean, it's a wasteland for, you know, hundreds of miles in any direction, which
00:17:51
Speaker
I kind of prefer to the strange saying we committed to. We've gotten the cheapest rental car available for while we're in Vegas. It's a Nissan Versa from our rental. And that's so when we drive to Zion, where we've got a Corvette rented. And we're excited about that. But to balance it out, we're like, what's the worst vehicle we can rent while we're in Vegas?
00:18:12
Speaker
Which is great because of Nissan Versa, I feel nothing for it. I'll drive that thing over curbs, it's going to get a mixture of water and regular gas.
00:18:24
Speaker
You're drinking out of the tap, buddy. Oh my God. It'll be fun. If nothing else, you just put your earbuds in, put on something really bleak. Vegas is a good place to put in headphones and just walk around listening to Acacia strain and judge people. There you go.
00:18:52
Speaker
I like the idea of driving far away from the strip. I just want to be close enough that like, if he needs something, I could get, you know, I don't know. I just feel like slightly protective because it turns into like a Woodstock 99 situation and he's like mud bogging and human sewage. Yeah, something like that.
00:19:10
Speaker
But yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not looking forward to that. I am looking forward to going to Zion. I think that'll be great. I think it's the most boring environment to rent a Corvette for. Cause it's going to be just like sit on the highway at 80 miles an hour, but yeah, it'd be comfortable. It'll be fun.
Controversy at Preemptive Love Coalition
00:19:24
Speaker
Zion's amazing. And there's like, you can go through the park, but then like, if you take some of the back roads that sort of weave up around the park, it's very similar and it's empty, which is awesome. So you're going to have a good time.
00:19:41
Speaker
All right. I say we move into the meat of this conversation now. All right. It's time to get into it. So last week we had Jeremy Courtney on to share about his experience with everything that went down with
00:19:57
Speaker
Preemptive Love Coalition and him and his wife being removed from the company. They were both founders, they were both the founders of the company and he was the CEO and she was the, I think it was the CPO, was her title. CPO is, what's that one? Chief
00:20:20
Speaker
I don't know. Okay. No one knows CPO. All right. I just saw the acronym. Chief procurement officer. Chief procurement officer. That makes way more sense. All right. Yeah.
00:20:36
Speaker
Uh, and when we did the introduction, we kept a neutral, fairly neutral standpoint. I think I don't really know. Um, I actually feel like after the fact that came out a little more like wrote and a little bit like all you guys decide, I don't know. I didn't necessarily love the way that it came out personally, but we just rolled with it.
00:20:59
Speaker
But what we didn't want to do was set up the interview with our opinions of it because Jeremy had yet to speak on this issue. Uh, this was, we were lucky enough to, uh, for him to, for us to be the first place that he had that conversation. And it it's, he's in a weird spot having that conversation, right? Because he's the one who had former employees right to the board about.
00:21:28
Speaker
regarding problems with his leadership or the problems that they perceived there to be. So immediately he's being under that kind of fire to try to go out and be like, to smooth that over yourself. Usually if someone has an accusation of any sort brought against them, it doesn't really look good to immediately go on the defensive. So Jeremy just kept very quiet. He worked with the board. They worked together to
00:21:54
Speaker
and agreed on the process by which they would go through finding out how people felt and what they needed to do as an organization to be better and where that would take them. So there was, I'm trying to think of where to maybe start this off, but anyway,
00:22:12
Speaker
Going back to the intro that we did for it, it's like we wanted to keep it neutral because people have strong feelings about this, about what happened. Was it just? Was it not? Should it have played out differently? And as people who were supporters of the organization, there was a lot of people who felt like there wasn't as much clarity or transparency about what happened. It was kind of frustrating for people who had been supportive of the organization over the years like myself.
00:22:42
Speaker
And we wanted people to walk into the interview and be able to think that they were getting just that interview and God and interview.
00:22:54
Speaker
Let him speak for himself. Yeah. If we came out swinging with our opinions on at the top, we didn't want to dissuade anybody from checking it out and hearing how it all happened. But we do have a lot of thoughts and opinions on it. Since talking to Jeremy, we've thought about it a little bit more. Before talking to Jeremy, we read a lot of things written by people who
00:23:21
Speaker
We're really the ones who lit this fire to begin with. So we wanted to just take the remainder of this episode to kind of go over our thoughts on it and how we perceive this to have happened and whether or not we think it should have happened the way that it did.
00:23:38
Speaker
So, Jeremiah, I'm going to kick it to you actually because you were not part of the conversation we had with Jeremy. You listened to it this past week. So, I don't know if you...
00:23:53
Speaker
prep you to come with any thoughts. So I did just put you on the spot right now. But no, that's fine. And I had never heard of preemptive love or him or the controversy or any like this was literally my first intro into all of this was the podcast episode. Well, you guys telling me to listen to the podcast episode so we could talk about it. But
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah, so I was going in completely cold to all of it. And it's always hard when you're hearing somebody like I love long form podcasts, when you're hearing someone tell their side of the story in long form, like I think there always is some natural skepticism that comes in of
00:24:28
Speaker
you assume that there must be other sides to this or more information, right? Like you want to be a little bit skeptical. I thought as a person, he seemed very compelling. You know, the history of how they ended up in their position that they were in, I thought, felt very like believable. I, you know, I didn't resonate with me from any like directly relevant life experience. I did work at a, not a missions organization, but an organization that works
00:24:53
Speaker
Um, in other countries with very disadvantaged people in potentially dangerous situations. I was never in any dangerous situations. I worked in North American support office, but like I actually have some perspective as we get farther into this of my take on some of the leadership things, because I went through some similar stuff at where I worked. Like a lot of the leadership things people are talking about. I saw where I worked. I was very low man on the totem pole, but, uh,
00:25:17
Speaker
So I think that's going to be interesting to talk about when I get into that because I'm curious what y'all will think of some of that too. But no, I mean, I I enjoyed it. It seemed most of all like a really sad story of somebody feeling like their life's work got upended for.
00:25:33
Speaker
not important enough reasons, if that makes sense. Like if you go up against somebody big and you get struck down and it doesn't work out for that, like at least you can say like we fought the good fight feeling like you got booted over like mishandled internal process investigation stuff. Like it feels like that's so petty in the scope of what they were trying to do as an organization. It feels like that's the way somebody loses their like sparrows franchise or something like that.
00:26:02
Speaker
It just it felt like it was two radically different stories, you know, kind of going on. And so whether he's all in the right or all in the wrong and probably neither of those is completely true. Right. That I can't imagine what a frustrating, like heartbreaking way it is for that to be how that story ends.
00:26:19
Speaker
at all of that work over so long and to end in that way. And the people who lit some of those fires, not that they don't have their own trauma to work through or whatever, like I don't know any of them, so I can't possibly wait on that. But like, they certainly weren't a part of the organization for that long. They certainly don't have as much skin in the game, and they certainly get to walk away a lot cleaner and just move on to the next thing. And that's also very frustrating because in the age of the internet,
00:26:43
Speaker
There really isn't two way accountability. It's kind of the court of public opinion, whichever way it decides to go. Your only option is to like not play or just try to weather the storm and not play may not be an option if you're somebody who is working in the public sphere trying to do some good like.
00:27:00
Speaker
man, that's, that's brutal. And like, yeah, when he was talking about how there wasn't, it wasn't like financial crimes or like sexual misconduct or something like also, you know, the good reasons why you get booted out of an organization like, right, how frustrating it must be for stuff like people said I was mean.
00:27:18
Speaker
Like, come on, really? Like, even if you were, like, that just, it feels like, man, we got to have something better than this. And I'll have more once we get farther into that stuff. And man, like, I'm trying, I was trying to draw parallels. Cause like, I have a lot of people who work for me and I don't always get along with all of them. And like, some people have left cause they disagreed or not. I don't know if it was exclusively cause they disagreed with me and be like, they definitely disagreed with me and they left. And having that thought of like,
00:27:43
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely haven't seen eye to eye with people, but like, I feel like no one has quit under me who didn't feel like I genuinely cared for them or whatever. But like, is there one of these people out there too? That's like, I am the super villain in their life story. They're ruined everything they care about. Like I certainly hope not, but it seems like Jeremy was pretty surprised. Can you be, um, like, I feel like if you are a boss, there probably is someone who thought you were
00:28:12
Speaker
an asshole or a bad boss. And I think that's inevitable. Like, that's, there's no way to get around that, especially I think, well, I don't know if this is getting in too deep too quickly. But like somebody who works in the position that he works in doing the thing that he does, and he and his wife did as founders,
00:28:27
Speaker
that not everybody can be that type of person. And that type of person isn't necessarily the person who's going to run a massive organization that just has like a good business bureaucracy and everything like those can be very, very different types of people. And in a successful way, they probably should be.
00:28:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for the drive that allows you to do the things that you do and create the things you create and then and then that that not necessarily translating super well to very warm management style or something like that, but
00:29:04
Speaker
Yeah, like I don't necessarily know that that's the case because I know so we could get into it a little bit more, but I know there are there's a lot of organizations and, you know, communities that worked with them that preemptive love is losing or is struggling to keep as partners because they're they're unhappy with the way things played out with the courtneys. One of them is the one of their communities in Iraq who does their soap making.
00:29:30
Speaker
they they're not happy with the court and he's no longer being part of it and it's so that's the they're experiencing ramifications from those decisions at this point I don't know if we want to get into like to start out with like a gent like a timeline of events because I don't think that was particularly clear in the episode I might have we did a lot of bouncing back and forth yeah so
00:29:56
Speaker
preemptive love on their website. They had a response to some of the articles that were written.
00:30:02
Speaker
We don't have a super detailed account of some of the things that are supposedly happening. That's one of the things that Sam and I talked about right from the get-go when we started reading about this. Like we said in the episode, Sam was very familiar with the organization, had been a supporter and a follower for a long time. I was like Jeremiah, I didn't know who they were, I'd never heard of them, never read the guy's book, never heard of Jeremy Courtney.
00:30:30
Speaker
So jumping into this from an outside perspective, I mean, one of the things that I was struck by right off the bat from the things that we have to go off of, which is really it comes down to outside of a couple of statements by the organization itself, which are mainly similarly vague, instead we have like a few different articles written by one ex-employee. Are we dropping names?
00:30:56
Speaker
I don't see why not. I mean, I don't, he wrote the article and it comes up when you find it. Like we intentionally avoided names while talking with Jeremy because we weren't trying, the point of the conversation wasn't for him to personally respond to any particular criticisms from individuals that he knew. So we were like, we talked about articles and maybe some of the issues that came up with them.
00:31:24
Speaker
in a general sense, and he did respond to them, but it wasn't necessarily a creator like, oh, this guy said this about you, how do you respond?
Investigation and Organizational Challenges
00:31:33
Speaker
We did try to avoid that, but I think for this and the purpose of what we're doing here in addressing, as the three of us, the information that is out there about it, I think putting the names and the articles out is totally reasonable. So this guy's name is Ben Irwin, and he was
00:31:51
Speaker
He's an ex-employee at the time when he started writing these articles and he's written, I think three or four. There's like one, there's like first one and then he wrote two immediate followups that just provided a little bit more information to the first one, like the letter that they had written to preemptive love. And then the, the letter. So he shares some of the letter that was originally written for them, you know, to them.
00:32:19
Speaker
To the board of directors, it was signed by a number of employees and part of it is there and readable and part of it is redacted. So there's a big section towards the end that's redacted.
00:32:32
Speaker
I think actually looking at that again, I think it was just – I think that last section are the names of all the people who were on it, and he redacted those. Yeah, and I think he made mention of that. So I mean it might not be that there was any further content there. But so basically we're talking – the timeline of events here starts in July of 2021.
00:32:55
Speaker
So on the 26th of July, this particular guy, Ben Irwin, says, a departing member of the senior leadership team contacted the board and shared several concerns about preemptive love's culture and leadership dynamics. The concerns were raised from the standpoint of a concerned employee hoping to proactively alert the board to areas requiring our collective attention. The board acted immediately to gather information. Now this is the board of directors statement of what happened.
00:33:24
Speaker
So on August 13th, you know, they continue to evaluate it, blah, blah, blah. August 20th, the board received a letter signed by a number of former employees that included serious complaints about preemptive loves founders, Jeremy and Jessica Courtney. This letter also made allegations related to race, gender and power dynamics within the organization. We took these claims very seriously. The board concluded that immediate action should be taken. August
00:33:55
Speaker
26th, the board voted to launch a directed inquiry into preemptive loves leadership and financial transparency related to a single donor project, focusing specifically on the allegations race. So they were going to look at a single project, which I think is probably the one that comes up in later articles. It was kind of like a PR project where they sent
00:34:19
Speaker
They shared little care packs that included a t-shirt to a bunch of their donors.
00:34:27
Speaker
So on August 30th, after researching and interviewing numerous firms, the board commissioned Guidepost Solution because of their international experience, their familiarity with NGOs, and their reputation for thorough analysis. Both parties agreed that Guidepost should maintain total independence throughout the inquiry process, at no time as the board attempted to tamper with or influence their work.
00:34:49
Speaker
Now, I'm trying to see here. August 13th, I skipped through August 13th, but it says, while we evaluated the concerns about organizational culture and leadership dynamics, the board selected a respected international agency to conduct a full organizational cultural review. This organization, led primarily by women of color, has noted experience working with similar organizations in cross-cultural settings.
00:35:19
Speaker
That's one of the things that's frustrating about this whole situation and the way that you know the nature of the complaints and the way it was brought up is that you get this back and forth, like vying for positioning where, you know,
00:35:35
Speaker
constantly people are, you know, touting the race and gender and stuff of whoever's on their side of this. I don't know. Maybe it maybe that's not a big deal, but it just I agree with you. I I'm not going to use the word woke because that's been what that doesn't even have a definition at this point. It's been so overused, but like there is like a uber progressive Olympics, I think sometimes when it comes to this.
00:36:03
Speaker
these type of things where everyone needs to state their qualifications as upfront as possible. You can't just say they're super qualified for all these reasons. They have to be super qualified and primarily women of color, which if this was investigating something specifically related to misuses around women of color, I'd be like, helpful context makes sense. 100%.
00:36:24
Speaker
that. It's weird. It feels like I, I'm not offended learning that information, but I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that information now that you've told me other than like being pressed because you're like, is that what you wanted is for me to be impressed with your qualifications? Yeah.
00:36:40
Speaker
Well, and it's strange and on top of that, like the people filing the complaints here basically vetoed this organization out of the way. They did not like them because they said that they didn't have enough investigative background.
00:36:59
Speaker
And it's interesting to look at like the board's timeline of events versus what's brought up in these articles, because there's a number of things that when read in the context of the article sounds nefarious, but what's missing in a lot of those things is like the speed at which the organization reacted to concerns about that particular thing and tried to bring in somebody different or change the policy or whatever. And I think that like,
00:37:29
Speaker
You just have to remember through all of this that we are not talking about a long period of time between July 26, which is where one employee who's leaving raises concerns.
00:37:44
Speaker
August 20th, when the board receives this letter signed by a bunch of ex-employees, you know, talking about their concerns. And this initial article, which, you know, the initial article that came out that went public with their complaints, or with, you know, this particular guy, Ben Irwin, came out on December 16th. So we're talking about less than, what, like five months?
00:38:11
Speaker
There was immediate action taken. They reacted. They tried to bring in an organization that the people raising the concerns said, no, we don't like that organization. So they both agreed on guidepost solutions.
00:38:26
Speaker
They conduct this internal investigation and audit of procedures. There's a couple other organizations that are brought in to review specific things like their international policy and some of their financial procedures and stuff. I don't remember the exact details of it.
00:38:45
Speaker
They they sought third-party assistance in looking at several of the things that were brought up as concerns And yet, you know this investigation didn't really even get a conclusion before This guy takes the story public and just like throws his side of things with a heavy heavy like Anti jeremy and jessica courtney spin on it out into the public sphere and and you know which stirred up
00:39:13
Speaker
Uh, you know, the, uh, the kind of Twitter storm that you would expect. And that's true of a lot. I think it's true a lot of times and stuff where it's the court of public opinion is they're expecting action and resolution before you've even had a chance to find out what actually happened. Like all it takes is a couple half cooked internet rumors that get a little bit of traction. And then people are angry that you've ever done business with this person or whatever. And you're like, hold on, like we barely even got out of bed to figure out, is it real?
00:39:43
Speaker
Like, and I think that's because the reality of that stuff is it does take a long time to get to the truth. And if you're trying to operate with some integrity, you have to wait with for the truth. But by that point, if the public is mad about it, they feel like you've shirked your duty and you're allowing an abuser to remain in power, like whatever variation of it it could be. I think it's just that stuff just takes longer than you want it to. And the people who who initiate the complaints or bring the problems to the table
00:40:10
Speaker
I mean, regardless of what happens after an investigation, the people who feel that they've been wronged are never, they're not going to be like, well, you did your investigation and therefore all I'm hearing is you telling me that this person's on a problem, but my personal experience says otherwise. Right. And they're never going to be on board. They're only going to be happy with the version. It's obvious from his story. He's only going to be happy with the version where they get drummed out of the organization and people say you're right and whatever.
00:40:37
Speaker
And then turns out, I don't think he really is happy with that because he has a lot of stuff to say about them after the fact. Because he's the type of person who's going to write the article. It's like, well, they've left, but their legacy of abuse and blah, blah, blah remains. It's like, what do you want, dude? I think that's where we're at with some of this is like, what do you want? I want to point out also, so Casey was reading some of the timeline of events on the preemptive love website. And that's, but I think it's worth mentioning that the timeline of events that they posted
00:41:06
Speaker
was on December 20th of 2021. So the reason they posted this timeline of events was because there was a lot, because when it was really in response to Ben's article, because his article dropped on December 16th, and it said a lot of things about what had happened. And I think preemptive love was trying on December 20th, they're just like,
00:41:35
Speaker
What they said, unfortunately, what has been communicated online about this process has contained misinformation and verifiable falsehoods. As a result, we are providing clarifying facts along with a timeline of events. Although we reverently hold space for everyone to share their own experiences and their own words, we cannot endorse false information or misleading statements about preemptive love as it affects the ongoing good work of the organization. Which always comes off as second.
00:42:01
Speaker
in these complaints.
Communication and Criticism in Nonprofits
00:42:02
Speaker
The core purpose and work of the organization overseas and Iraq and all that kind of stuff, it's always kind of seems like an afterthought to the people writing these articles. It's like the primary concern is clearing up the inner office disputes that they had and the problems that they had with Jeremy's management style and stuff like that.
00:42:27
Speaker
And they're willing to just spike the organization publicly in order to get their way. And I think here's a good example of the, there's a couple of things here that I think are a good example of the timeliness of the board's reaction to some of these concerns. So he said that on August 20th was when the board received the letter that was signed by all of these ex-employees, right?
00:42:56
Speaker
August 26th, board voted to launch a direct, a directed inquiry into preemptive loves leadership and financial transparency related to a single donor project for focusing specifically on the allegations raised. Right. So like here's a concrete thing that we can go review and see if there was, you know, uh, wrongful action taken or if people were misled. Right. Um,
00:43:22
Speaker
On August 30th, they brought in Guidepost Solutions, which is that third-party organization that had familiarity with NGOs because the people that were lodged in the complaints had problems with the initial organization that they hired.
00:43:39
Speaker
On September 2nd, so from August 20th, receiving that letter from the employees, September 2nd, the board decided that Jeremy and Jessica should take a leave of absence until the conclusion of that investigation in order to protect the integrity of the process.
00:43:54
Speaker
That's incredibly fast for anyone hearing this that doesn't understand like the corporate world. That's anything to happen in that amount of time. Just getting the board together to talk about something is a several day thing frequently and just getting enough information. People can relay back and forth. Like no matter how much you want it to be true, people's lives can't just stop the moment something happens. And it normally takes a few days to have those conversations and make decisions and then come up with a public thing to say about the decisions and whatever. So all of that happening in a couple of weeks.
00:44:23
Speaker
That's very, very quick in the corporate world. And it's also worth noting that it says also Jeremy and Jessica agreed with the board and they remained on leave as the board was waiting to figure things out. Jeremy and Jessica were not just in full cooperate, like, oh, okay. But they were like, yes. And Jeremy did point this out. And I think what preemptive love's website states specifically speaks to what Jeremy said was that, yeah,
00:44:51
Speaker
We heard this and we agreed with the board. We thought, yes, we should figure out where these problems are because it's not their intent to, I mean, I don't, maybe it would have been a bad look to fight it and be like, I don't think so. I could, maybe they just were aware of the type of optics, optics that would have come with fighting something like that. But I don't know. I think there's other places further down and some of the other things we'll look at that.
00:45:17
Speaker
when going over some of this timeline stuff that really confirms that this was a mutual decision with Jeremy, Jessica, and the board. So I don't believe it was just an optics. Let's go along with it. Well, and even, you know, the optics side of it is the worst part for the organization. Like, you're not talking about like the, you know, the financial guy that sits in the basement and, you know, works on a calculator like this guy.
00:45:42
Speaker
It's another part of the continued complaints from these ex-employees about Jeremy is that he's a figurehead. He's the public face of this organization. He's a big part of their marketing, a big part of their outreach. Like, they're donors who support all their work and stuff like that. A lot of them, they have a relationship with Jeremy.
00:46:04
Speaker
as well as preemptive love. So it's a big deal to say, hey, we're putting these two on administrative leave while we figure this out. That in and of itself carries serious PR ramifications for the organization, even if it turns out that there's nothing to these allegations and everything's fine. It's damaging in and of itself. Yeah. And so the first
00:46:29
Speaker
piece that preemptive love put out publicly was the, was actually, let me just see what they called it here. Let me scroll up real quick. Update board update to the preemptive love community. Nope. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Nope. So they, but the original email that went out to people who were on their email list, they posted it on their Facebook, whatever.
00:46:57
Speaker
It was on December 17th was when they put this like open letter out and that letter just in the letter it says like that Jeremy and Jessica were put on the sleeve. And it's just worth pointing out because we did talk to Jerry about this too. Like the December 17th, here's what's going on with preemptive love. And then it was on December 20th. They gave the full timeline events speak in response to right before they put this letter out.
00:47:25
Speaker
is when Ben put his medium article out, seemingly to, I don't know, spearhead whatever it was that preemptive law was going on. The results of the investigation, which I assume he expected he wouldn't like.
00:47:42
Speaker
Yeah. Or he knew because I mean, preemptive love does maintain that they were in communication with people about the process. They weren't just like, give us your side of the story. All right. Now piss off until it's time to until it's time to go. Like they're they're not going to publicly announce the where they're at without having any sort of private conversations with the people involved saying this is where things are going. And I this is where if I could be devil's advocate for a minute. Yep.
00:48:12
Speaker
I was assuming there's some actual real stuff behind what these people are saying like 34 people signing a letter probably does not mean it's completely made up right like sure if it's hurt feelings or or slights or whatever like there's got to be something there for that many people to be in some level of agreement about it.
00:48:30
Speaker
I think one of the frustrating things about something like an investigation like this is there's what you know, there's what you know, and there's what you can prove. And an investigation is going to have to work. They can work off of testimony, but they're going to also have to work off of like, Oh, you said that Jeremy was gaslighting you about this or spoke abusively or whatever. Like does anyone have a recording? Does anyone have contemporaneous notes? Does anyone like, what do you have to substantiate this? Because if you read this guy's letters, he has all kinds of stuff in there that there is
00:48:58
Speaker
he doesn't provide any basis for. And it doesn't mean that he didn't do the investigators, but he doesn't give you anything to know that that's anything other than his opinion. And the problem with that is even if his opinion is accurate or even close to accurate, that may not be something the investigation could do something with. And you see this with the Me Too movement and sexual harassment and sexual assault cases. There's what you know happened, the people involved, and there's what you can actually prove
00:49:26
Speaker
to the satisfaction of a jury or a court of law or to satisfy a judge that a lawsuit should go forward. And that doesn't mean if that doesn't work out, that you're entirely wrong. It just means it didn't meet the standard for whatever. And it's possible that he's right or partially right about a number of these things and got very frustrated when what he was hearing from the investigators or from the board was like, we don't have evidence to substantiate that or like we have not found anything solid and compelling enough to move past this point. That doesn't mean it didn't happen.
00:49:56
Speaker
It just means they can only work with what they've got. And I wonder if that's where he got kind of frustrated and was like, well, I'm going to air it out anyway, because I know it's true. You know, in my heart, my lived experience says it's true and nobody can take away his opinion from him.
00:50:11
Speaker
Right. And I'm sure I mean, I can't disagree with any of that. I do feel like 34 people signing this. And then, um, I don't think all of the people who signed it, uh, were ended up deciding to be part of the investigation. They decided to not share their story. Um, for whatever reasons that obviously there's no way to know what that is, but it's like they, if they're,
00:50:39
Speaker
Even if you have like 20 something, even, you know, that having 20 something people say the same thing somewhat independently is still, uh, that's, that's good information. So I think where we, I think what becomes the problem is if, if this is true.
00:50:57
Speaker
what would the correct outcome been? Because it feels like with the articles written, the only acceptable outcome was Jeremy and Jessica being fired for Ben and maybe some other people that Ben is a spokesperson for. But I think where this becomes troubling
00:51:18
Speaker
Uh, is when I get some suffering here, like some, uh, regarding the timeline of statements released by preemptive love and what they were working to do. So on January 4th, um, that was, that was then. So on, I already pointed out on December 20th, they released their timeline of events in response to the misinformation.
00:51:46
Speaker
And then on January 4th, they posted a new update. Some quotes from that I think get to the meat of it. Of course, go on the website and read it for yourself. I don't, I'm not intentionally leaving out anything that could be helpful, but I think I've
00:52:02
Speaker
I think I've narrowed it down to a couple of main points of milestones that preemptive love was proud that they had achieved. So one of them says, another milestone in our process was to commission additional supportive services for preemptive loves people and talent department. This included a comprehensive analysis of preemptive loves policies and procedures, measuring them against industry standards and best practices.
00:52:28
Speaker
where there were gaps, a roadmap was developed to move the organization forward in these areas over the next six months. So we see that in light of what they found, which was related in a lot of ways to like, we just, and Jeremy also pointed this out too. And I think this just, this statement backs up that that's factual information he was providing is that it, there were
00:52:52
Speaker
Yeah, there were gaps in policies and procedures. Some of it related to HR, some of it related to the way that there was a channel for people to go if they had a problem with the way things were done. And I think he was really transparent about all of that. And then the next thing they state is we reached another significant milestone on December 20th, 2021 when Guideposts Solutions verbally presented the findings of their investigation to the full board of directors. Jeremy and Jessica Courtney,
00:53:20
Speaker
were also present during this call. That also is what Jeremy stated when we spoke with him. He says, because of our commitment to respecting the confidentiality we promised to every person willing to share their experiences, we did not review specific interviews during the presentation. Broad themes became apparent and the information we received confirmed the information that the board itself had independently collected and verified during this time. Then they ended the letter
00:53:51
Speaker
by letting people know Jeremy and Jessica Courtney will not be returning to their roles or serving the organization in any capacity. We will have more information about this to share shortly. So you get the idea that they were, I think this is where I'm feeling the conflict. And they, so they, again, 22, a few days later on January 26th, make a more, another statement to,
00:54:20
Speaker
try to clarify their previous statement because it looked like, yeah, we developed this roadmap with Guidepost Solutions. This is what we wanted to do. We had a kind of a path forward. I think it sounds like that path may have originally included Jeremy and Jessica, and then one day it no longer included them. That's what it feels like when I read this.
00:54:47
Speaker
Yeah. In the cost benefit analysis, at some point around the 1st of January, it became evident that their best course of action was to somehow separate themselves from the PR nightmare that was bound to follow if they kept those two. Yeah. It was January 26th. They released their other statement. They go, the decision to separate from Jeremy and Jessica Courtney was not due to sexual misconduct or financial malfeasance.
00:55:14
Speaker
including fraud or corruption, but there were serious errors in judgment and upholding the values of preemptive love, which is vague as fuck. I'm not satisfied with that answer at all. Sure. I think that's another way that corporations or organizations drop the ball, even if they do everything right with investigation behind the scenes.
00:55:33
Speaker
and I'm saying this from like direct personal experience, if they even if they do a good job with that, it when you're being tried in the court of public opinion, you also have to do a good job with the way you communicate and it sucks because a lot of the time, a lot of that information is not fit for public consumption.
00:55:48
Speaker
And it's hard to strike that balance of like, doing your due diligence to be accountable and transparent with not just hanging dirty laundry out to dry, to satisfy the bloodlust of people who don't have any skin in the game. And like, that's, it is hard to get that decision right. But I agree with you. When you say, yeah, they weren't fired because they were sexual assaulters or stealing money. That makes it sound really bad, even if it's not those two things. It's like, well, it wasn't those. You're thinking like,
00:56:16
Speaker
Was it murder? Like there's a lot of other bad things. Like what errors and errors in judgment and not living up to our values. Like everyone reading that with any discretion is going to understand that like that that's glossing over a lot. Like not living up to the values. What does that really mean? And what are the values? I think because that's that statement came so far after
00:56:41
Speaker
the results of the Guidepost investigation and their path forward. If these are the problems we found and these are the things that people have experienced, we need to find a way to fix this. Usually, Plan A isn't to just fire the founding members and CEOs.
00:57:01
Speaker
No, to cut them out of any role. Yeah. Usually plan A is to, okay, you're missing all of this. And we just reviewed that with plenty of people who understand industry standards. So step A is to implement these standards. If we get down the road and despite, or we think that these two are like thwarting this, road blocking it, making it irrelevant.
00:57:22
Speaker
and trying to just maintain the level of control that is inappropriate like yeah then you revisit that with the board but to step one just say all right uh we had a plan forward uh to implement
00:57:36
Speaker
a solid HR plan or a good way to report problems or whatever. And then to just be like, actually scratch that. We're just going to get rid of these people. Yeah. It seems dumb. So something I mentioned earlier about, like, I didn't know when we were going to get into the depth. I feel like this is the depth part. Yeah. When he was saying the, when Jeremy was saying the bit about the ladder, about the policy regarding ladder usage that actually like that helped click some pieces into place. Yeah. To me, what would have made sense? And this is again, not having any backstory. I don't know if any of this is true or not, you know,
00:58:05
Speaker
But it seemed like based on what we do know, what would have made sense is if they were like, look, you guys are founders, you have a heart and a passion that is not cannot be duplicated with anyone else in the organization, most likely, at least not to that level. That's why you are the founders. That's why you bootstrap this like,
00:58:21
Speaker
And those people aren't always going to be the nicest, most patient, most understanding person, because they're passionate. And they're doing something they really believe in. So they're gonna, they're, they are going to potentially hurt people or processes or companies wanting to do that, even if their intentions are great, move them into a founder role, where they stay in the pocket of what they're uniquely good at, hire people who are good at being executives.
00:58:45
Speaker
and not running administering nonprofits, have them run that stuff. And if you present that option and Jeremy and his wife are like, no, you know, it's our way or the highway, we built this place and we'll run it, you know, until the day we die, then OK, then you're out of options. But like, it doesn't sound like they went down that road at all based on what what Jeremy said. It seems like it was a total surprise to him. So if they consider that option, it wasn't for very long. But like that way, you keep the founder in a public position.
00:59:11
Speaker
But you remove them from the things that they're a founder of a missions related organization. Yeah, they're not an amazing administrator. He doesn't understand ladder policies. You need someone who does understand ladder policies so you don't get sued. And the organization doesn't get hurt in a way that actually hurts their mission. Like you need those people to be good at that stuff. And they don't have to be the same people who are amazing at the missional work that they started it for in the first place you want to
00:59:36
Speaker
the Christian term would be protect their anointing. Right. But but it illustrates it. You want to keep them in the pocket of where like, this is why you guys started the organization. This is what you're uniquely good at. This is why all these people followed you. Let's keep you in that and insulate you and build some protection around you and some guardrails so that you do have some accountability and everything to make sure you maybe you're not the one who's directly coaching some of those staff because you're not good at it.
Leadership Critique and Public Perception
01:00:02
Speaker
Maybe you're not the one setting those policies like remove those things from you.
01:00:06
Speaker
And let's keep you doing the thing that you're amazing at and you'll probably like it more. It didn't sound like he loved running in 150 person organization. He just wanted the extra size to to reach more people, right? Like, I imagine they probably would have been okay with that once they got over the sting of like some of that being taken from them and everything, that would be painful. But like, it feels like there's a great path forward there as long as the thing that they did is not so horrible.
01:00:29
Speaker
that they have to be removed immediately. And at least from what we know, it doesn't sound like there was a smoking gun for that. No, if there was, it would be here. I mean, let's, let's be honest, like these articles are full of like,
01:00:43
Speaker
like just ancillary, seemingly unimportant stories and examples and stuff. And it's all vague. Like if there was some real misgivings and nefarious deeds,
01:01:00
Speaker
There was plenty of space for those, you know? Lots of space on very flowery adjectives. I hate it when people write this way. They're talking about, like, and they've done violence against our friends and gaslit us and da da da. And they're describing a lot of very flowery things. I'm like, hold on, substantially buzzwords.
01:01:16
Speaker
Right, right. It's like, please, if that's true, it's terrible. Take out some of those sentences, replace them with proof that one of them is true. And I'll take it more seriously. But otherwise, it sounds like you're just using flowery language to beat up on somebody and you're keeping it vague enough that it cannot be proven one way or the other.
01:01:33
Speaker
Well, I think to the point of like the separation of powers and like how that would have made more sense as an option. I think like what you see here in the timeline is that, I mean, it looks to me like immediately the board was like on the, they were, you know, on the back foot playing def or desperately trying to play defense against this like group of people with that were lodged in the complaints, you know, I mean,
01:02:02
Speaker
Like I said, the speed at which they acted on some of these things and the way in which they were portrayed in these articles kind of illustrates that like this was a no win situation for everybody involved and the board should have taken a more a more control. They should have kept more control over the process, I think.
01:02:21
Speaker
One of which, and this comes up in one of the articles, is they talk about how during the investigation, they characterize it as the board of directors tried to protect the organization and stuff by making all of the people who wanted to be interviewed, they had to come through the board of directors in order to talk to the organization. They were trying to control the flow of information and
01:02:48
Speaker
intimidate people into staying quiet, especially if they were people who would rather remain anonymous. And it says, OK, so September 15th, after the board became aware of gaps and preemptive loves, people and talent policies and procedures, including reporting grievances, a respected outside firm was engaged to review all employee related policies and make detailed recommendations to ensure a safe and healthy workplace for all employees. OK, outside company again.
01:03:15
Speaker
September 15th, same day. The board was approached by staff members who wish to share their experiences with the board and with the investigative team. The board offered to be the point of contact for any employee who would like to be interviewed. So there comes the, you know, you have to go through us in order to talk to the investigator, right?
01:03:34
Speaker
Now the next day, September 16th, the board learned the established process might raise concerns among those who wish to speak to interviewers but wish to with their participation to be confidential. The board immediately revised the path for participating in the investigation and gave staff direct access to the investigative team for those who wish to contact Guidepost directly while offering to be a direct point of contact for those who preferred to contact the board first.
01:04:00
Speaker
That sounds like they're doing all the right moves. That sounds like someone brings up a concern. They're like, Oh, yeah, good point immediately. We'll make a change. No big deal. And this was used in the article as like an example of like this desperate need to control the fallout of the situation. And it's the next day.
01:04:16
Speaker
Right. They change the people who have never been in charge of this type of thing and they don't understand how it works. They're not getting their pound of flesh as quickly or as juicy as sizzling as they want it. So they're like everything is seen as they use language. This Ben Guy and I think the other article was written by Courtney, I think.
01:04:35
Speaker
They use a lot of language that sounds like they're retreating or they're cowering or like they're using words in a very specific way to make it seem like anything is nefarious, like you said. And all that says to me is you just you've never run anything of this size. You don't understand what goes into this. You don't understand how any of this works. And you're interpreting everything through your lens of these are bad people and must burn.
01:04:58
Speaker
Like it's gone from whatever actual slights existed to it's a binary. Like you, you must burn this down or otherwise justice is not being done. Exactly. That was, that seems like that was just the intent from the get go for some of the people involved here. Yeah.
01:05:16
Speaker
Let's go through the rest of, there's only a few more dates on the timeline of events. Why don't we just hit the rest of those and that way we kind of cover all the bases on that. Okay, so the following day, the board sent a follow-up staff communication with a direct channel to guide posts for employees with concerns or a desire to be interviewed, okay? So concerns raised on the 15th or on the 16th, next day, a public message is sent out saying, here is the direct channel to guide post.
01:05:45
Speaker
November 2nd, based on facts gathered independent of the investigation, the board engaged an external organizational expert to evaluate infrastructure and recommend modifications intended to increase accountability of leadership and enhance employee empowerment, communications and relations. So another outside organization putting structures in place to make sure there's accountability for leadership specifically.
01:06:11
Speaker
Uh, November 12th, the board that they had not yet chosen to get rid of. Exactly. The board commissioned an extra externally conducted regulatory and compliance audit of international policies and procedures to supplement the investigations findings related to leadership. So again, leaning on an outside force specifically auditing their international policies and procedures.
01:06:34
Speaker
November 24th, the people and talent team conducted a thorough analysis of compliance with preemptive loves current policies and procedures. The board was presented with necessary areas of improvement along with a six month plan to roll out a comprehensive suite of revised policies. An organization wide implementation of these recommendations is already underway. So November 24th, day before Thanksgiving, they're presented with some of the findings on the people and talent team.
01:07:04
Speaker
and they presented a six month plan to institute some of the changes necessary in that particular. So it's easy to get a little tied up here, but there's multiple separate audits and investigations going on by third parties, different third parties that are specifically oriented to look at certain parts of the organization to make sure that the correct policies and procedures are in place. And look, like we said before,
01:07:30
Speaker
I'm sure that they found some things that needed to change. I think you have to keep in mind that this is an organization that had grown to include up to 150 people across multiple different countries. Sometimes you just don't have that corporate structure in place yet to handle the complexities of dealing with that.
01:07:55
Speaker
I think that puts us up to the end of the board's involvement of the controversy. But July through... Also, the last update you gave was November 24th, and then it says July through present. Contrary to what has been asserted online, the board has been openly and regularly communicating with staff. Nothing has been hidden, and the board has never sought to operate in secret at any point.
01:08:23
Speaker
I interpret that as they're not communicating with you personally, so you're mad or you're not getting what you want from the board. You don't get to head up the investigation. Or just like your, does this guy doesn't work there anymore, right? No.
01:08:38
Speaker
So yeah, you lose some of your, your access privileges when you no longer have access. And I also that's the interpretation I got from some of that is like, he's not, they're not getting everything that they want out of this. But also, they're not entitled to that anymore. They're an ex employee. And you may not like that. That's how the world works. But the board rightly is more concerned by the people who currently work at the organization than someone who doesn't and is never coming back. So like,
01:09:03
Speaker
Why do they care about you? In the cold corporate world, why should they care about you compared to some of the active employees and all the active missional work that they're doing? Even in a small business setting where none of these structures are in place, if on your way out the door, you lodge complaints about how the owner did things and the policies that you didn't like and the things that you were worried about,
01:09:26
Speaker
you know to expect that he's going to keep you updated on how he's changed those things over the course of six months is just not realistic and and it's yet like that's one more thing that that sam and i've talked about several times in regards to all of this is that there's a feeling here that like some of these people involved especially you know ben erwin in particular and uh the the other woman that
01:09:54
Speaker
wrote a blog post, which we'll get into, I'm sure, but there's this just like overwhelming sense that like, oh, these are not like, are these people just, are they out of touch with what it's like to work for a normal company?
01:10:09
Speaker
right? Dude, we've had terrible bosses. I mean, I've been pretty lucky in that I've never had a really awful like direct manager. But I disagreed with a lot of the things that I saw and I deal with businesses on a daily basis that like if I if I wouldn't work there, if, if they talk to me the way that they talk to some of their employees, you know, but like,
01:10:38
Speaker
That's just reality and it is different because it's a nonprofit that's all based around these ideals and stuff like that. I have, there's no doubt in my mind that Jeremy and Jessica's management style probably left something to be desired and maybe they were course with employees when they didn't get their way and stuff.
01:10:57
Speaker
I mean I can see those complaints being valid but you know we also don't really get a lot of good examples of those complaints. That's part of what's irritating about this whole thing is like all of this is given in generalities and then there's a few examples given of like what seems to be kind of trivial things.
01:11:18
Speaker
Are examples of like well you know they didn't like what this person posted on social media and so they reprimanded them for it or you know one of the complaints that that the woman makes in her blog post is that like she wrote some articles that they didn't they didn't like the message and they didn't like the direction or felt that it.
01:11:39
Speaker
You know, upheld the values and public image that the company was trying to put out. And so they, you know, said that, you know, her writings had to be reviewed.
01:11:51
Speaker
before they were posted on the company website. And that's one of the things that's brought forth as like a complaint and like this, you can't believe what control freaks these people are and stuff. And it's like, my company would not let the marketing department, like one person in the marketing department just put out public statements about the values of the company without them being reviewed.
01:12:14
Speaker
Because they have like overall goals of what they're trying to communicate everything and you want to like brand alignment and very boring corporate words like that. Like it doesn't mean it's something nefarious. It means they're in charge of steering the direction.
01:12:26
Speaker
And they want to make sure that everyone's pulling in that direction. And it's okay for you to disagree with it. It's okay for you to think they're making those decisions for the wrong reasons. It's okay for you to think that they're not participating in a conversation that they should, but they're the ones who get to make those decisions. And them making that decision does not mean they're doing anything wrong. I mean, you disagree.
01:12:46
Speaker
And like maybe you're right. But it's almost never going to be as binary as you're right and they're wrong. It might just be you have a different goal in mind. You have different values. You have a different mission that you personally care about. And that's fine. That might just mean you're not a good fit for what they're trying to do. And you joined their organization. Yeah, like I think it's so strange because we go from, you know, November 24th, the board was presented with the necessary areas of improvement along with a six month plan to roll out
01:13:16
Speaker
a comprehensive suit of revised policies and organization wide implementation of these recommendations is already underway on November 24th. And then on January 4th, we have Jeremy and Jessica Courtney will no longer be returning to their roles after the shit storm that got created of like how awful they were the day before they gave a public response about all of this. It's just, they, it's, it's,
01:13:45
Speaker
It seems obvious that they found stuff that was a problem and needed to be fixed. Otherwise, you don't go on a six month plan to fix it. So like, I don't know what was said. I don't know what they gathered. But yeah, like as we've mentioned, like there might have been aspects of their leadership style that we're wanting. They may have really hurt some people in the wake of trying to continue the mission of their work and
01:14:14
Speaker
I don't know. I just, yeah, I think it sounds like there were problems and that they were trying to fix them. And then this, the court of, you know, you mentioned the court of public opinion before Jeremiah, where it's just now they just have to juggle this. And it feels like there was, I did feel like they had a good way forward at that point. And you just had to vaguely talk about them not aligning with your values and move on.
01:14:44
Speaker
Well, and maybe this is a good time to like really look at the, the, some of the content of the, uh, of the articles written by, by Ben Irwin and, uh, and Courtney Christensen.
01:14:57
Speaker
Yeah. So just to put some of this in context, because I feel like the way that all of this is framed is just really in bad faith, in my opinion. It's like this is a sales pitch. And they're pitching the idea that the courtneys are these power-hungry, celebrity-drunk,
01:15:26
Speaker
control freaks running a cult and and the the title of the Article is preemptive love what happens when a charity runs more like a cult the aid group founded by Jeremy and Jessica Courtney has a history of abusing staff and possibly misleading donors We're gonna hear a lot of possibly this possibly that when it comes down to actually alleging Wrongdoing or or dishonesty when it comes to finances and stuff like that, right?
01:15:56
Speaker
So it talks about the organization's start. They call their followers to love anyway and build a world where everyone rises. Inside the organization, it's a different story. The courtneys prefer to govern by fear. They see themselves as authorities on gender and racial equality. While in practice, they embody some of the worst forms of white saviorism.
01:16:19
Speaker
Staff are verbally and psychologically abused. The courtneys at times appear to mislead donors about how their money is used.
01:16:28
Speaker
Earlier this year, dozens of former staff came forward with stories of bullying, gaslighting, threats. At times appear to. Yeah. Sorry. I'm just, that just sunk it. At times appear to. Also the white saviorism. That's. That seems to be a title that you can apply to anything that you don't like from, uh, from so like, like good deeds that you, that come from a person you don't like.
01:16:52
Speaker
can be labeled as white saviorism. It would make sense if like he started this ministry and they raised a whole bunch of money and then he went over and was taking lots of pictures of him in war torn areas and whatever but it sounds like they started with the in war torn areas doing the work and then started promoting it later as a way of growing the ministry which to me is like the opposite of like what's he supposed to do not go like it's it's white saviorism if you're
01:17:17
Speaker
If you're trying to make it seem like such a big deal that you're personally there and they do call out those couple examples where he says it looks like they posted misleading and you know, footage or something like that, which I guess we have no way of proving one way or the other. Like we have to take the guy's word or not. It's even some of those which which we'll get into shortly. I mean, the the nefarious way in which he describes how the footage was edited.
01:17:41
Speaker
is ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It is but it doesn't mean there couldn't be a misleading aspect to it whether intentional or unintentional because it doesn't sound like he ever confronted Jeremy about it or got an explanation. This is just his interpretation.
01:17:56
Speaker
of the raw information he believes he saw. And again, I'm not doubting his lived experience or whatever, but he might just misunderstand. I am just viewing it through a laugh. Honestly, if you don't like somebody, if you're already at a point where you don't like somebody, you're going to view everything they do as in bad faith too. So I don't know where he was at at this point, but it's just like maybe he didn't even have a problem at that time with what
01:18:25
Speaker
with Jeremy, but you get to a point where it's just like, well, now that I have this feeling about him, I'm going to go ahead and reinterpret everything that's been done through this lens of you're a bad person. If you did that to any one of us, you could write some pretty shitty blog posts about anyone from that perspective, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
01:18:51
Speaker
I don't know, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole today looking at past tweets and at one point he kind of went after Shane Claiborne.
01:19:05
Speaker
Which which guy? Or when the guy who wrote this article as like some sort of like like basically accused him of valuing like peace with the oppressors over, you know, like showing the truth of like the whatever it was something to do with footage and he didn't release the whole video because he said it didn't look
01:19:29
Speaker
Ah, so this guy, so Shane didn't meet Ben's personal standard of morality. Exactly. Ben gets to enjoy as someone who has not put himself in front of the bullets before, it sounds like. Yeah, wasn't Shane like a human shield in Iraq? We've talked to him and like so many people who listen to this podcast have talked about how highly they think of Shane Claiborne and to see like, oh, oh, it's not just
01:19:57
Speaker
It's not just this person. It's not just the courtneys that don't meet his standard. It's also Shane Claiborne isn't good. It's like, what do you want? Please don't follow me around. The guy who forgoes a profit on any of the works that he does, every book he writes, everything goes into an organization of which he doesn't control the money and he gets a poverty level salary that he lives off of. Like this guy, I don't...
01:20:26
Speaker
There's so few ways to criticize someone who lives their life like that. The biggest criticism people have given him is that he hasn't come out, that I've heard so far is that he hasn't specifically stated that he's pro or in support of LGBTQ people.
01:20:44
Speaker
or affirming, even though he's supportive of them. And it's like, I don't know, man, I just, you look at his life and everything he does and everything he's given up and the way that he lives it and gives it completely like
01:20:58
Speaker
He could be an asshole and still be doing an amazing, wonderful work in the world. It's crazy to think that you criticize him for not portraying something the way you want, when his entire life has been about building bridges and trying to establish. And I think Jeremy did a good job of articulating that of like, for any of his sins, real or imagined, like, he's put in the work and the people he put in the work with directly, for whatever reason, maybe they're all misled, or whatever, like this guy Ben thinks, but
01:21:26
Speaker
They're still in there putting in the work with them and the organization. Members of his cult. Yeah, exactly. Because they're incapable of making their own decisions as adults, you know? That's the other thing. I don't know. I'm getting off track here. He has an impossible standard. That's what we're seeing throughout all of this. He doesn't articulate exactly what his standard is, but it's an impossibly high moral ground that he gets to not define and then sit on and cast dispersions on anyone who doesn't meet it.
01:21:53
Speaker
Even been satisfied with the outcome. Yeah. Cool. Now as a person who's fired from his organization, who is not, you know, a prisoner, he's not in jail, he isn't a he's a person who gets to go on and do something else's life. Now, the second he launches his new organization, you post an article the next day, disparaging it completely. And that's another thing about the internet that I really hate is like,
01:22:18
Speaker
he goes back to you, what's good enough for you? Like you don't you don't have to bear any accountability, whether you were right or wrong. And I'm not saying that, like this guy Ben needs to be punished or something. I'm saying like he needs his banking. He gets to okay, he gets to walk away from this, you know, relatively scot free. Like I don't I don't he doesn't appear to be super famous or anything. I'm not trying to disparage him. But like, it doesn't look like he's using this to catapult his like,
01:22:42
Speaker
commentary career or whatever, you know, like, it looks like this is this is just some stuff he's done. And then he's moved off probably some other normalish job, maybe working for a nonprofit, maybe not. But like, he gets to just cast these barbs as much as he wants to. And it will get traction because he's talking about someone with a lot higher public profile than him. And all he's potentially doing, well, in his mind, he might believe he's he's saving the people who are going to be hurt by this new organization, I guess.
01:23:06
Speaker
But like, yeah, it feels like so. What would you like him to do? They've they've lost their life's work or what they feel like is their life's work. They have taken the people who still believe in them and they're going to do that work again somewhere else with the people who are happy to be there and all chose to be there under their own volition. Isn't that your ideal situation? Yeah. Yeah. And that's I mean, it probably if it sounds like we're being a little harsh towards
01:23:32
Speaker
Ben. That's that's one of the things we're jumping ahead a little bit like Jeremy recently announced that he's part of a new organization called humanite. It's founded by refugees and war survivors. Instead, I mean, they barely takes issue with because he says Jeremy's like considering himself to be like a refugee, which I think is connecting a few dots that are a little far away from each other. But sure,
01:23:57
Speaker
Right. But this organization hasn't had a chance to do anything yet. They've just announced the founding of it and like a couple of social media posts about the direction of things. And he's already posting like takedown articles about what to maybe expect about this organization and what it could do in the future. Like just pure speculation based on like, well, we know from past experience that Jeremy and Courtney are terrible people.
01:24:25
Speaker
And that past experience is what we're going to use for the rest of time. And so what and then the lack of character that I think he shows with with this recent article is why I find it I think it's even it's more easy, I think to dismiss anything that he said before. And I don't know if that's a right way to go about the way that I process information. But
01:24:53
Speaker
It's like, here he goes in some, he's talking about pictures that are up on the Humanite website.
01:25:01
Speaker
And he goes, some aren't even, the image below depicting a man giving a drink of water to a detainee belongs to IH AO, an Iraqi based NGO that was funded by pre-emptive love until the courtneys cut them loose, whatever that means. But before we even touch on that and how frivolous he says something that has a lot of serious implications, he goes, neither the courtneys nor any PLC staff took part in this particular aid mission.
01:25:31
Speaker
The photo below showing a child holding a bag of bread is from a former partner in Syria, which preemptive love doesn't appear to have funded for some time. And then he goes, there is a small disclaimer on humanites footer stating that some of the photos show the founder's previous work and that they were used with permission. So they did everything technically correct. They're not stealing these photos. He followed this up with a Twitter post saying exactly the same thing about the photos that they use.
01:25:59
Speaker
That's it's it's so I have I have some experience in that that like if you don't guys don't mind go for it to walk through so I told you I used to work for a nonprofit what they did is they worked in Honduras and El Salvador with orphaned abuse and incarcerated kids and what I really loved about this nonprofit was yes we had a North American support office but it was very small almost all of the staff were Honduran and El Salvadoran
01:26:23
Speaker
This organization didn't believe in adoption. They didn't believe adoption was a solution for white saviorism reasons and whatever else. They believed the solution was invest in the country down there. Hire people down there to teach these kids, to teach them job skills, general education, counseling, inside detention centers.
01:26:43
Speaker
All that type of stuff. And I mean, I could talk for hours about it. I believe a lot in the organization. I did not leave because I didn't believe in the organization. It was actually because of the leadership at the time. And I still support them these days. Again, that's a whole long story we could talk about sometime. But I was the graphic designer in the North American office. I was also their photographer, quote unquote. We got photographs from trips that would go down to in-country. But I went on a trip in 2011, and I took photos of orphan abuse and incarcerated kids in detention centers and stuff.
01:27:12
Speaker
And when we came back, we developed rules for how we were going to responsibly use these images because some of these kids were in gangs or they used to be in gangs and then like got saved when they got in jail or something. And so they have to be sequestered in a different part of the jail away from the gang. Some of these kids, their parents were looking for them to abuse them or sell them again. Like there's all these horrible, horrible reasons
01:27:36
Speaker
why you would want to be careful with the privacy of some of these kids involved. So usually our policy was we would not use the photos of the kids until they had already aged out. So we would use a photo to illustrate them of like they were here three years ago, but we wouldn't use it while they were still actively there. And we constantly had to have phone calls
01:27:55
Speaker
from in-country and stuff saying, hey, this kid's parents are looking for them. Go look through our photo archives, tag anything that has them in it, make sure we're not using it anywhere. The heartbreaking moment is like, this kid died. Are we using them anywhere? Not that we would remove it from everywhere that we were using it if a kid had died, but you'd want to be selective.
01:28:16
Speaker
And like we have those policies because the important thing was illustrating the thing that was happening, not that it happened yesterday or the day before, because the detention communicating an idea through an image. Exactly. And like we were very, very careful about that. We were a tiny organization. And we already had that figured out of like, you have to be careful with this, because this is not America.
01:28:36
Speaker
People will do very bad things with this information if you do not carefully protect it. And so, yes, a lot of the times we were not showing the exact detention center or the exact kids or whatever. We did lie about that all the time, but I don't view it as like a moral lie. I view it as using our discretion to protect the people that we were trying to help.
01:28:56
Speaker
and illustrate the point that we were trying to make in a way that is intellectually and emotionally honest, even if it's not technically accurate all the time. And to me, that's all I got from reading this is like, they're using photos of what they've done to illustrate what they want to do.
01:29:11
Speaker
And they're they got permission. I mean, assuming, you know, if they put that disclosure on there and they actually did it, they got permission and it is stuff that they funded. What's the problem? It sounds like this person just doesn't know about acceptable use policies and how to actually protect people in sensitive situations or whatever, because they've never done it. Well, he didn't say neither the court. What is it? No, he says it's
01:29:36
Speaker
Only preemptive love or its former partners can confirm whether that last part is true. The part about it being used with permission. But like it's going to be like you're not going to put up images, state underneath them that those images are used with the organization's permission and have that not be true as a launch site. Like what this guy's been around the block. I don't know. It's just just like the pettiness that so many of these accusations have. And I'll give you another example here from his original article.
01:30:06
Speaker
Because like I said in the interview, there seems to be a lot of resentment over who gets credit for what and whether or not Jeremy is, you know, taking steps to make sure that everybody knows he's not like, you know, standing under a firing AK 47 while he's in, you know, raising funds and stuff.
01:30:32
Speaker
And so in this in the section of this article called plausible deniability This is where like
01:30:41
Speaker
It's a good example of what's just laced through these things because he says in May of 2016, Iraqi forces launched an offensive to retake Fallujah from ISIS control. Tens of thousands of people fled for their lives. While Hala al-Saraf's team risked their lives bringing food to fleeing families, Jeremy was in his office 250 miles away in the relative safety of Northern Iraq.
01:31:06
Speaker
That's one detail often left out of his story of dropping into Iraq in the middle of a war. He landed in one of the safer parts of the country. As Hala's aid workers sent back footage of their work, Jeremy looked for a way to put himself in the story.
01:31:21
Speaker
certainly not trying to put a leading narrative out there at all, right? He went outside and found a backdrop that, to the undiscerning viewer, made it look as though he was in Fallujah, in the same place where Hala's team was handing out food. He later wove that footage of himself with footage of Hala's team pretending to narrate events in real time, as if he was personally there.
01:31:44
Speaker
Mind you, Jeremy never actually said he was in Fallujah, but he let you think he was. possible deniability is preemptive love's ultimate sleight of hand. There might be a tiny bit of truth that like it is possible he's Jeremy's obviously good at marketing and good at selling a story like you have to be if you're in that position, you want people to believe in you.
01:32:05
Speaker
But this guy is assuming that there's malicious intent behind that. And not just like, that wasn't the most forefront thing on his mind is explaining now, I'm 250 miles away. But let me explain what's going on. Like, is the dude thinking about that? Or is he thinking about, hey, here's what's going on? Here's what we're doing. We need the organization. Here's what we're doing.
01:32:22
Speaker
He's mad that people think that everywhere in Iraq looks the same. Like, sorry, bro. But also, like, if you watch- He's sitting in front of a wall. He's sitting in front of a tan wall in the example photo. As if, like, I don't- Like, he painted a set.
01:32:38
Speaker
Yeah. If you, if anytime I've ever watched anything that's narrated, you're never like, Oh, I assume the person who's narrate, you're narrating what they're watching. So it's going to be in real time. You're not going to be like, like when I watched the discovery channel, I don't think somebody's there. Like the narrator is actually there explaining what's happening as it's happening. Of course not. Like.
01:33:01
Speaker
I don't know. It's just it. And what's the goal? What is the goal of all of this? It's to show what's happening in this country, to bring people in like this is what's going on right now in Fallujah.
01:33:16
Speaker
And we need to raise awareness and raise funds so that we can do something good for these people that are going to need your help. And he says, I remember the uneasy feeling I had watching the edited video. I knew I should say something.
01:33:32
Speaker
I also knew Jeremy didn't tolerate dissent well. I knew the price you could pay for questioning him. I didn't say anything. I chose to believe there had to be some reasonable explanation and put it out
Financial and Racial Issues in Nonprofits
01:33:44
Speaker
of my mind. It's a decision I regret to this day.
01:33:48
Speaker
So what he says, he doesn't tolerate to said, it sounds like you complain a lot and he got tired of you. But it's just so ridiculous. Have you ever. Ridiculous. And I don't know that this was the case with this guy, but have you ever had an employee work for you who like just never was happy with anything no matter what? And eventually you have to draw a line of like, hey, dude, I'm like, I have to run like I have to actually run stuff. I'm sorry that you're unhappy.
01:34:14
Speaker
Yeah, you can be over there. But me spending more time with you is not going to make you less unhappy. So I guess you get to be unhappy. Like, that's what this guy strikes me as like, Yeah, if I was Jeremy doing the things that it sounds like he was responsible for, whatever. This guy sounds like he'd be really irritating to have working for you. Because every day he's like, Hey, I need to talk about some of the violence that you communicated in your memo. He didn't talk about it. And it's a decision he regrets. Because evil that was done.
01:34:44
Speaker
people so might have gotten the impression that Jeremy was there when he wasn't he was several hundred miles away. And because they may have given money because they thought Jeremy was there. Because that's the only way they would give money is because Jeremy was there. They don't believe in the mission. Otherwise, like this guy also like it strikes of him having very little regard for the people who support the organization like they can't be discerning enough to make some of those decisions themselves. All of these types of things do there is like there's like a egocentricness
01:35:13
Speaker
to these types of complaints about people and organizations. And it's like, it's always framed in a light of like, you know, stupid normal people. They could never figure this out on their own, you know, without me here to guide them, you know, and it's my duty to do so. It's the pastor syndrome.
01:35:35
Speaker
Yeah, where's the white saviorism there? I don't know how many specific examples we want to give of Ben seemingly being- Yes, true. Are we ganging up on him too much? I mean, probably, but I think every single one of his points as someone who
01:35:56
Speaker
Like when this story first broke, I talked to my wife and was like, well, that fucking sucks. I guess Jeremy is one of those guys now. I didn't hear this and disbelieve it because I'm some Jeremy Lackey crony.
01:36:12
Speaker
I'm not beholden to him. Outside of that one conversation I had, I don't know him. I want to believe he's a good person. I wanted to believe that and I chose to suspend that belief for months. I assumed that this was going the way... I assumed a lot and I just was bummed about it. But I didn't suspend any critical thought because I had to believe Jeremy was above
01:36:40
Speaker
all of that. Was that a decision that you regret to this very day? To this day. Why I think it's worth pointing out and talking about all of
01:36:53
Speaker
Maybe there's one or two that could be a little bit more based, but I honestly think there is everything he says. I think there is so much that isn't genuine. There's so much that's like that feels like gaslighting as much as he doesn't like to be gaslit that I I.
01:37:12
Speaker
I can't trust any of the ones that even would seem reasonable. Like in his newer article going after humanite, like it's clear. Preemptive love is very clear. There was no financial malfeasance. And in his article criticizing humanite, one of his questions and a whole list of questions he has at the end, like what kind of governance will there be? Are the leaders subject to meaningful independent oversight?
01:37:38
Speaker
All stuff he can't know and will never know because he's not part of the organization. And I'm sure if he applies for a job, he won't get it. But in one of them, he says, is there financial transparency? What mechanisms will be put in place to prevent executives from misusing donor money or deceptively categorizing marketing expenses as program costs
01:38:19
Speaker
About how he financial how he handled the organization's financial so it's like why would we listen to you like you're? You're trying to make people think things happen that didn't that have been directly addressed by an organization And you still won't give that up because you didn't like how much the t-shirts cost or some dumb shit right because what he does have like that slack message that seems kind of like
01:38:21
Speaker
in order to artificially inflate their overhead ratio.
01:38:40
Speaker
maybe a little bit callous or joking from Jeremy. Like he pulls together a few different things to be like, how much did it really cost? Who was really funding it? Well, I'm assuming the investigators before they said that there was no financial malfeasance probably did look into that. And that's one of those things where you weren't entitled to that information. So yes, you can interpret some of his jokes or something as being in him lying or being inappropriate about it. Or it just wasn't like maybe he just tumbled a little bit. Jeremy did on how to communicate some of that to his staff. And there wasn't actually anything going on.
01:39:10
Speaker
That's exactly what it seemed like to me. So the example that pops up several times in all of this is that they sent out these care packages to donors, which included a t-shirt, which he goes out of his way multiple times to describe as a expensive designer quality t-shirt, whatever that means.
01:39:31
Speaker
God, whatever that means. It's not it's not a gilden with a scratchy collar. So, you know, God forbid people get something nice to thank them for their being a part of this, this organization. Yeah. And so like they post these slack messages showing like the conversations between members of the team and Jeremy about the cost of this program, which is a PR program. And look,
01:39:56
Speaker
Here's the thing. I have this conversation with customers all the time about marketing and advertising. It kind of sucks.
01:40:06
Speaker
right? Because it's hard to measure the effectiveness. I mean, in this case, it's pretty easy to tell who gave after receiving a thing and who didn't. But you know, for most of the time, like for a car dealership, like I work with to run radio ads or put ads in the local paper, like it's very hard to track your intern on investment. And it's a it's something that everybody is apprehensive to do. But
01:40:30
Speaker
everybody knows you have to do something. You have to try to bring in new customers because there's attrition no matter what you do. And that's kind of the argument made by Jeremy in the Slack post is that like, hey, we have to invest in the future. He specifically says that relying on media coverage of tragedies is not a business plan or a strategic model.
01:40:55
Speaker
We have to like proactively try to reach out to people and keep, you know, it's a leaky bucket that we're trying to keep our, and we're trying to keep donors over long periods of time. Right. So they tried something new. They tried this care package thing for their donors.
01:41:11
Speaker
It sounds like it went over budget. It was originally projected to be $150,000 or $165,000, and it wound up being like $230,000, I think. I think it was $208,000 they said.
01:41:26
Speaker
And so members of this like PR marketing team are asking like, Hey, if people complain about the cost of these shirts or more, more specifically, like, Hey, what do we tell people if they complain about the fact that we're sending out gifts to donors? Like if they don't like that we're spending money on that and not on programming and stuff. And so like, I don't.
01:41:52
Speaker
It's so wild to think that someone might complain about that. Somebody I'm sure does. But like none of those customer like none of those donor complaints are really listed anywhere in any of these articles. It's all just like people asking like what if.
01:42:05
Speaker
What if someone complains? What do I tell them? And he gives them a line. Now it sounds to me like this is one of those situations where there's just not a good clear cut corporate policy on how to handle those expenses and how to like represent them to donors if they do have questions about them.
01:42:26
Speaker
Yeah, so if I could also weigh in there for nonprofit experience, there is some fuzziness with the way a lot of nonprofits do handle classifying their program expenses and everything for communication to people because some people do get fussy about it. The thing that rang very true was when he's talking about who is this mysterious donor. There were multiple times where the mysterious donor like the organization I worked at that was matching donations at a dinner or something.
01:42:50
Speaker
was one of the board members or something where it was like a, they just wanted to stay out of it. And yes, there are nonprofits, not the one that I worked for, but there are nonprofits that would do some funny stuff where like they have two different organizations and they would match money from one to another. And then they would use this one to match money to another. That happens all the time in politics with political nonprofits. So you can kind of keep the shell game going as a way to drive donations. Is it dishonest? Yeah, I think it is. But like, is it illegal? No.
01:43:19
Speaker
Um, you're, and you're not technically lying to anybody. You're just, you're misrepresenting. I mean, it's, I think it's one of those things that's unethical. Corporate games. Yeah. Yeah. But it's like, but that is something that happens and it's very possible depending on what, uh, fundraising advice or what school of nonprofit fundraising he was from, it's very likely or very possible. He could have been following some of that device or advice because the nonprofit world, like I can just tell when I get a form letter from
01:43:44
Speaker
nonprofits of like, oh, you guys went to the same school of thought as the person who wrote our form letters at the place that I worked at of like, you can tell where they're getting their stuff from once you're used to it. And it could have just very easily been one of those things like they this is their advice they got, hey, when you're doing matched gift donations, you say it's from a blah, blah, blah, and you actually shuffle money around this way, or you get one of your donors who gives you 100,000 every year, and you get them to sign up ahead of time of great
01:44:10
Speaker
Can we take 50 of that and set it aside to be a match donation for people for this particular campaign to try to drive donations up in it? Is it like, are you telling the truth? Yes. Is it a little bit dishonest potential, depending on which way you look at it, like it is, it is, but it's, that's very common in the nonprofit world. So I'm not saying that to excuse Jeremy, but like, that's one part of what this guy Ben is saying that it very,
01:44:36
Speaker
may very well be true whether or not you like it. It's very common in nonprofits because you're using marketing tricks to get people to give. It's basically the same technique as donations are on sale today. People love sales whether they're real or they're made up and stores price that in. It's the same exact thing.
01:44:54
Speaker
is Ben say that's what Ben said they were doing in the he said he didn't like how they were the way they talked about the the mysterious donor who that mysterious donor was where did that guy actually come from that side of things and it doesn't mean anything was wrong it means he just doesn't have info about that and Jeremy wasn't telling him I'm saying that sounds very familiar to
01:45:14
Speaker
plenty of fundraising situations I've seen firsthand of like, I would have no problem believing that that's what they were doing is just parking someone's regular yearly donation to the side as a match or repurposing it for this or whatever where it's like, there's nothing illegal. There's nothing that a board of directors who actually understand how stuff works would like have a problem with, but people who don't understand it or understand it and have ethical problems with it, which I think would be fair, you would look at and go, Oh, that feels slimy.
01:45:40
Speaker
That doesn't feel right. That could be a valid feeling, but it doesn't mean he was committing a crime. Well, okay. And so here's another financial issue that's brought up and a misstep on Jeremy's part. So it says, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Jeremy announced he would forego his $165,000 a year salary to avoid any cuts to programming our staff.
01:46:02
Speaker
which that's continually put out there. He makes $165,000 a year. Well, he lives in Iraq and he runs a team of 150 people and that's really not that much money to consider. Working for a non-profit doesn't mean you have to live in poverty. This is a common misconception about, I mean, I feel like I'm really just ranting about non-profits tonight, but if you want to have really good talented people, non-profit doesn't mean they're all working for $30,000 a year. You have to hire good people. How is this person going to cost that replaces him?
01:46:32
Speaker
Right. And probably his salary is set by the board. And if the board has ethics, they have a financial advisory component of the board that looks at market rates for nonprofits, for people who are a director or a CEO at that level. And it's probably within a certain range and they apply like a cost of living calculation and they decide that's what he gets paid. That's how that stuff works. So if you don't like it, fine. But just because you weren't getting paid, that doesn't mean he's not worth it.
01:46:57
Speaker
And it's specifically put out there over and over again for that reason is like 165. Can you believe that this is supposed to be a charity, which, whatever. I mean, they're part their financial records are public domain, right? It's a nonprofit. So, I mean, it's out there for public consumption.
01:47:14
Speaker
Anyways, he said he would forego his $165,000 a year salary to avoid any cuts to programming or staff. He quietly reinstated his pay three months later. Now, that was a misstep.
01:47:28
Speaker
That does sound like that's a marketing technique thing that, like, well, whether he was advised on or he read about it, that feels like, oh, you do that and it makes people feel good. And then you just undo it later or something like in March of the of 2020, when the pandemic was growing legs, nobody knew what was going to happen. I mean, we we put our sales guys on like a tiered guarantee and like all we did, like everybody was doing all these steps.
01:47:57
Speaker
to make sure that if this was going to last a year where people couldn't go to work at all and stuff like that, then you took this stuff. Now, reinstating his pay, I mean, I understand why he did it. I want to make money too, but that wasn't a very wise decision from a public relations standpoint.
01:48:19
Speaker
It also says preemptive love took $494,400 PPP loans in 2020, which it had forgiven several months later, despite being well on its way to its best fundraising year ever. I feel like this PPP loan thing is, it just reminds me of the meme of the two Spider-Man's pointing at each other. It's literally like, how would you, okay, publicly or non, public or non-public company,
01:48:45
Speaker
How do you go to the people that you're responsible to, you know, that, that, that hold you accountable and say, we got offered several hundred thousand dollars or, or several million dollars in PPP loans, but we chose to forego those, or we decided to pay them back even though we decided to, we decided to risk it. Uh, cause we think we're going to survive just fine without them. Let's see what happens. Like, yeah, everyone will be like, drain our entire bank account.
01:49:14
Speaker
in the name of not taking a loan. You originally believed you were going to pay back. Well, some of those companies took those PPP loans. I don't think they ever had any attention. We can't bump that on preemptive love. Now, Casey, what you were saying before about him reinstating his salary, do you think it was something where he froze it and then things actually turned out not to be as grim as they thought they would be? They're like, oh, that's not really necessary.
01:49:41
Speaker
And I have the PPP loan, so we're good. We can just, I think that's what happened. And they just did a poor job of communicating it. Yeah. And I think it was a misstep for him. I mean, maybe he explained that he was, but I kind of doubt it. I bet you it was a quiet move. And you know, from your, from the standpoint of your team, that doesn't look good. You know, is it illegal? No, but.
01:50:05
Speaker
I mean, maybe if there was a better explanation of what he was doing, like, hey, guys, things seem fine. And, you know, I got bills to pay. Yeah. I think they're better than we thought. And I actually get to get paid just like you people. Do you like getting paid? So do I.
01:50:23
Speaker
But I'm not, I'm not trying to be overly defensive. I don't want to come up, come up as just like a full blown apologist. Cause I know we've done a lot of dunking on the articles that Ben wrote, but I, so I hear you Casey. I mean, it does feel like not addressing that in any way with your team is a misstep.
01:50:42
Speaker
Well did we know that he didn't address it with that guy? Like did the board the people in charge of like his salary maybe they were like hey actually we're doing fine on financials like appreciate it but you know take your paycheck back we're good. I doubt it was his decision personally to reinstate his own salary.
01:51:05
Speaker
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but like, I agree. I think it would be surprising if no one else had any input into that. Yeah. Okay. So maybe at this point, we should move on to a couple of incidents that are brought up by both Ben and Courtney Christensen. Yeah. Race and gender relations and issues.
01:51:31
Speaker
I'm assuming you guys both read the portions that deal with this. So there was there was two main examples that were given for, you know, to show the Courtney's, you know, their. I guess primitive views of race and gender issues specifically in the US and.
01:51:52
Speaker
This is another one of those things that just has this weird air of like egocentrism. I mean, Courtney Christensen, one point in her articles said, you know, I'll find the quote, but said basically that like, oh yeah, having lived outside the US for so long, it had been 13 years in 2017, your understanding of race and other American social issues was,
01:52:21
Speaker
behind. You'd missed a lot. Yeah, it's like, you know, the cultural hub of the entire world, right? You know, Syria, you're too busy in Iraq to understand what's been going on with race for the past 13 years, like
01:52:39
Speaker
All right, back it down just a little bit. So the two of the examples that are brought up by both people are the first one was in the immediate wake of the George Floyd murder.
01:52:55
Speaker
So, they published a video of a Zoom call or, you know, some sort of a conference call with their staff in which Jeremy is speaking and he's talking to the group about what had happened, what had just happened to George Floyd murder.
01:53:17
Speaker
And on the call, he said, you know, I want us to just take a moment to really think about like the gravity of the situation and what happened and like the violence of this, you know, this murder.
01:53:34
Speaker
He said, why doesn't everybody just turn off your webcam so you've got some privacy? He said, I just want you to take a few minutes here to think about what happened and think about how long these couple of minutes seem and how long that officer stood on George Floyd's neck. And to me, I was listening to it and I was thinking,
01:54:01
Speaker
Well, this seems like quite a, you know, it seems like he was really trying to contextualize and put a good conversation out there about what had happened and what their reaction to it should be. And it seemed like he was really trying to pay respect to the gravity of the situation into George Floyd in like calling the employees to meditate on what had happened.
01:54:26
Speaker
And Ben and Courtney both take issue with this saying that like he didn't consider the feelings of the people of color on our team and how traumatic it might be for them to contemplate the situation. Like that's not what we're doing by being on this call in the first place.
01:54:49
Speaker
Like, did they say, and I don't remember from reading them, did any people of color on the teams express a concern about it? Or is it just them getting offended ahead of time for people who don't say whether or not they're actually offended by the thing that happened? I don't know. There's no specific examples given of complaints from those employees. They might have. They might have. But let's be honest, there is nothing
01:55:15
Speaker
certain white people love nothing more than getting offended on behalf of other people groups. Like, they'll do all the offense work for you whether or not you're actually offended. They're here for you because they're a real ally. Yeah, I think it is actually definition of it. No, no, no aspect of it was like the moment of silence for the whatever
01:55:42
Speaker
However, how long, I forget how long it's like seven and a half minutes, nine minutes, what seven minutes, 42 seconds, seven minutes, 42 seconds. And I don't know if they took any issue with that, but I went to a couple of BLM protests over that summer where that was like, that was pretty normal to be like, we're going to all sit in silence for seven minutes and 42 seconds or whatever it was too. And.
01:56:10
Speaker
It's what, to sit there in silence with a group of people for that long, it feels like a lifetime. And it's not, I think the criticism of Jeremy for doing that, for initiating something like that and having that conversation and because he's white and that that's how people, how people might feel during that. People were doing that. Like that wasn't a Jeremy idea. That was something that was happening across the US. People were taking those moments of silence as a group.
01:56:39
Speaker
Maybe they could have had somebody else run it. Maybe they could have done. Maybe, but then they could be criticized for the figureheads of the organization not speaking out against us because they don't really care. Like this is one of those no win situations of like, maybe he did fumble it a little bit. And maybe it wasn't a little situation. Maybe really no one else. Like we just have the idea from these two that.
01:56:58
Speaker
Did you even consider how this might make other people feel? Maybe he did. And he was trying to imperfectly lead in the moment because he's their leader. And this isn't something that had anything to do with his organization. But still, if he's expected to speak on it or he's trying to lead his people through a difficult time, like, yeah, maybe he fumbled it a little bit. But is it really that bad? I just don't understand, like, what would be the right response? Like, what would be the right way to address it? And like, how does any but how is anybody supposed to know those things?
01:57:28
Speaker
And that doesn't mean that you can't criticize it if it's wrong, if it didn't feel right, or if someone was upset about the way that it was handled. But to paint it as, obviously, this guy, his cultural understandings of racism and stuff are just backwards, this troglodyte. It just seems so ridiculous.
01:57:51
Speaker
Now, there's one more example that's a little tougher to talk about. So there was a discussion on violence against Asian Americans and a recording from a call was posted in which Jeremy is talking about the stop Asian hate
01:58:17
Speaker
movement in the US when that was really you know movement strong and he I don't want to mischaracterize this but he said something to effective like
01:58:30
Speaker
whiteness has become a scapegoat for everything that happens. And like, you know, the the Asian Americans that I talked to in the US, you know, have said that like, they're experiencing violence at the hand of black and brown people and
01:58:49
Speaker
There's no way for them to really talk about it or have a discussion about it because they're a protected class right now. It was rough. It was a rough comment. It's one that I've heard elsewhere. It didn't sound good. It's understandable for people to be offended.
01:59:09
Speaker
By that discussion, I would like to know what was said before that because we have like a four minute. Excerpt from the call. I would like to know what that was in response to, but regardless, it's not a statement I would have made call to my team.
01:59:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of those things where if you feel like you're, you know, safe, you're with your people on your team and you're talking candidly, I think everyone is more likely to say stuff that's not exactly formatted for public consumption, not because you like you believe something different than you say publicly, but like, you're going to be more conscious of explaining your heart or your intent behind something versus when you're talking to people who you believe already know you and understand the context in which you are framing something you don't feel like you have to be that guarded, because they already know your character.
01:59:55
Speaker
That said, I agree with you, Casey. I think context could help. It does feel like a statement that would be out of place in most contexts though, or if we're being kind, like maybe would be ignorant in many contexts. So like giving him some benefit of the doubt without knowing exactly what was said, I guess we can't know, but yeah, I would have a hard time understanding the context in which that makes sense and isn't just wrong to some degree.
02:00:21
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I don't feel like I haven't said anything. So I don't want to just sit here and be silent on it, I guess, but I don't feel like I have a lot to add to that. Um, well, Sam thinks it doesn't read or doesn't read well. Uh, and that, so that was, that was on a conference call with the team. And that's what, so then that was a recorded aspect of it.
02:00:46
Speaker
Yeah, so audio from that call was was published. There's like four minutes of it. Yeah, I mean, that's doesn't sound good.
02:00:54
Speaker
I, yeah. Cause I guess if you're trying to, if you're trying to understand, uh, instead of just pile up, I mean, it does. This sounds like a valid criticism. I don't know how you would really. Yeah. Without, it's hard to tease this one out certainly, but I guess if you were trying to, and you're trying to understand Jeremy's perspective, um, and why he said it and what the context was.
02:01:20
Speaker
I guess knowing what had been said before could be helpful. Like what, what was he trying to address? Like why it sounds from what you're saying case that he's trying to figure out, like that there was some call to, to address this issue, uh, the stop Asian hate movement and to have a participate that participate in that conversation as like a company or have some sort of statement made about it. Was that what people were expecting?
02:01:50
Speaker
I think that was the backdrop of it is, so that's where I think it makes sense to talk a little bit about Courtney Christensen's blog post. Yeah. It's called sparksandmatches.com is where it's posted. It's like a diary of her.
02:02:14
Speaker
Basically like the ways in which her ideology conflicted with that of the court with the direction of preemptive love.
02:02:25
Speaker
everything it sounds like in her article here, it sounds like she was really committed to being involved in local things that are going on. So she was very intent
Ideological Conflicts and Cultural Issues
02:02:40
Speaker
on pushing the company to get involved in like US domestic cultural disputes and racism and
02:02:52
Speaker
you know, gay and trans issues and that kind of stuff. And it seems to me like the organization did not view that as their primary goal as a company. I mean, they were, you know, they were focused on their overseas work and, you know, she and a group of the, you know, employees that are in the United States were really intent on using, you know, the company platform and funds
02:03:21
Speaker
to get involved in like the U.S. cultural issues and stuff that are going on. She is the one that there's complications with that, not to drift away from the original thing that you brought up and what he said regarding the stop Asian hate stuff. But there is a good reason to avoid getting involved in certain political not. I don't want to say it's political, but it is part of our culture war here.
02:03:51
Speaker
And when your organization is focused on what's going on over there and raising money to help what's going on over there, to get involved in that over here definitely has potential financial ramifications too. Yeah. And there's like a lot in this article that points to like the inflexible nature of
02:04:14
Speaker
of her and I'm assuming like their team hears ideology on some of those things. So, you know, at one point, as like I already said, she said, having lived outside the US for so long, your understanding of race and other American social issues was dot, dot, dot behind. You'd missed a lot. In addition, as you discuss in your books, Jeremy, your understanding of culture when you did live here was largely informed by conservative white evangelicalism.
02:04:43
Speaker
When we began to discuss these things internally, it quickly became clear that there are pieces of your cultural understanding that needed to be reexamined, especially when it came to gender and race. And like over and over again, it really like becomes evident that reexamining your understandings of gender and race and any of the other things, it really comes down to like, you need to get on board with my ideas about this. Like we're in the right here and you're in the wrong.
02:05:13
Speaker
And, you know, it seemed like they were really intent on just staying neutral on those issues. And these people like them were not involved abstaining from those issues because for whatever reason.
02:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, what is that saying in the Twitter verse? It's like, silence is complicity. Silence is violence. Oh, but yes, silence, silence is complicity. I've heard variations of that. So it says, oh, here's the example. Neutrality favors the oppressor. Is that the one you're thinking of? Yeah, well, all of those, all of those.
02:05:47
Speaker
Okay, it says this was evident when you reprimanded me for an article I wrote in response to the Charlottesville riots saying the angry tone quote, I took with the white supremacist didn't reflect our commitment to love anyway. And she links to this article here, which is still up on preemptive loves website.
02:06:06
Speaker
And it does seem to really not jive well with the overall goals and vision of the organization. I mean, it's a lot of like, what is, it's called, what love anyway does and does not mean after Charlottesville. Okay, so this is in the wake of the, you know, the Charlottesville Nazi demonstration where the white supremacist random group, a woman with his car,
02:06:35
Speaker
It says What does it look like to love anyway when people are marching through Charlottesville with Nazi flags and should we even love anyway This idea is more comfortably applied at a distance and much easier to apply to other people But it applies all the time to everyone. That's the radical thing about it However, it does not mean we have to be cool with everyone quote-quote
02:06:59
Speaker
So let's break down what love anyway does mean to the situation where Klansman wheeled torches and a white supremacist mows down 30-something women with his car in an act of terror.
02:07:10
Speaker
Love anyway does not mean we tolerate white supremacy or make any room for it in our society. It does not mean that the oppressor and the oppressed should be treated as two sides of the same coin. I'm skipping through a little bit here. It does not mean we sacrifice the well-being of people of color, especially children of color who are watching our response to these events in order to make peace. So, you know, there again, there's like continued calls to like, what's important is what we say on this stuff.
02:07:39
Speaker
Like our public statement is what's important and it has to be there, right? It does not mean we should all just try to get along or appease racist groups in order to avoid conflict. It does not mean that we ignore these groups or allow them to exist unchallenged. We cannot accept ideologies that seek the destruction of others. It does not mean that those who perpetuate evil in the name of white supremacy should avoid dire legal consequences for their action.
02:08:07
Speaker
There's a lot in here about what it does and doesn't mean. There's a couple of lines here that stuck out that I thought, yeah, I could see where this would be something that they would say. I wish we could have reviewed that a little bit. It says, it means we respect the humanity of the people in these groups by refusing to injure or kill or dehumanize them, even though they don't show the same respect to others.
02:08:33
Speaker
And that's just, I don't know. I mean, like the ideas there are good. I think most people agree with them, you know, but like,
02:08:47
Speaker
It's just the way that all of them are framed and said, it's just got this like, you can see why they would have said, hey, I don't know that this really aligns with the message that we're trying to put out here or that, you know, this is the stance that we want to take on this really like important sensitive issue.
02:09:07
Speaker
Um, it's easy to misinterpret, like, even if, uh, the Courtney's agreed with a lot of that and I'm not putting thoughts in their minds or words in their mouth, but like, I agree with you, like that that's, it's got a lot of raw edges on some of that stuff. She's saying that sounds like it's written from an emotional place. And I would be worried of like, it would be too easy to have people twist and mercy misinterpret some of those statements against the organization in the future. That feels like that needed a third party editor pass.
02:09:36
Speaker
to just make sure all of that's in alignment with how you present your other stuff, which is standard in most organizations, most organizations, it's not one person's job to put out what's that in controlling gaslighting organizations run by dictator despots, maybe
02:09:56
Speaker
Like most organizations, especially large ones, you know, it's not one person gets to decide on messaging and stuff like that for the company. Like it it's run through things like articles and blog posts and statements aren't posted without several sets of eyes on them to make sure that they align with what the organization is trying to do. And there's just a lot of things here that that like show that they just had conflicting viewpoints on a lot of like what the company should be doing.
02:10:25
Speaker
says it was evident when Jessica told me that I needed to rework the curriculum I wrote for preemptive love gatherings because she was afraid it would make white people uncomfortable. And she wanted to make sure gatherings were a quote safe space for white people. Which without seeing what she wrote, which doesn't look like she shares that curriculum there. We can't weigh in on that one way or the other. Like it could be another situation where she's not technically wrong about anything. It's just written in a
02:10:51
Speaker
raw enough or rough enough way that they felt like, this doesn't reflect how we want to communicate.
02:10:57
Speaker
Here's one. It was evident in a March 2018 Zoom call when both of you shouted at the team and Jessica cried toxic white woman tears because someone called her out for her backward understanding of race and gender dynamics. It was further evident in the same Zoom call when you, Jeremy, loudly questioned my commitment to feminism because I wasn't standing up for Jessica while she was crying.
02:11:22
Speaker
That sounds like the retort of a guy trying to defend his wife, which maybe that statement doesn't land super well, but that also sounds like, eh, I can kind of understand. If my wife was crying because someone was loudly disagreeing with her, I might say some not incredibly kind things in response to just because I'm defending her.
02:11:41
Speaker
toxic white woman here is the phrase there. That's a rough, that's a rough phrase. I feel like when you're dealing with stuff like this, I mean, these, those are conversations that come up. Uh, like what is, cause what is it?
02:11:57
Speaker
I don't know. I just it's I get why he was throwing out a buzzword to combat a buzzword. Right. Still not a smart thing to say, but like also it sounds like one of those things which hurt in context. You could understand the emotion behind it. And yeah, maybe it's where it's one of those like, well, everyone screwed up a little bit here today. Let's take a minute, you know, take a beat. Calm down. Yeah, it sounds like it got heated on the conference call.
02:12:23
Speaker
Yeah, people are crying. Does that make him a monster? I don't know. Feels feels a little strong. But there's just so much of this stuff here. That's like, they don't agree with my view on this. And obviously, we don't know the view. But that's true. That's we don't know the view on any of it. And I think that's what makes us really complicated is like, and does having so say it's true. Say they don't have a 2022 understanding of these issues.
02:12:53
Speaker
Does that mean your your toxic work environment and that you are no longer capable of fulfilling your duties as a CEO? And I feel like that's what's so frustrating about the way all these articles are written is just like it's character assassination and Nothing more like it does this Does you do being wrong about something like that and needing to evolve?
02:13:21
Speaker
mean you can't run your organization that's not directly involved in that kind of work. Like if he was directly involved in that kind of work and he had a backwards or outdated understanding or needed to evolve and space needed to be given to him to do that, I would, sure, like if that's what, if his mission was based on trying to serve black and brown populations in the United States and he was wrong about it,
02:13:46
Speaker
If he was wrong about how we viewed certain things, yeah, that would be a problem. But that's not. The investment of preemptive love in the United States is to take our money. And that's bluntly put, but they're raising money here in the United States to put it over there to save people's lives.
02:14:09
Speaker
I don't know. I know companies are often forced into, especially nonprofits are forced into having to have conversations that might even be outside their wheelhouse. There's an expectation placed on them as a humanitarian organization that they should be actively involved in everything. But the reason, I mean, you can only spread yourself so thin and you don't have to be everything to all people as an organization. So I think that's without knowing what her views are,
02:14:36
Speaker
without knowing what the Courtney's views are and just stating that they're wrong and backwards.
02:14:43
Speaker
And that, that is part of why that they should, why they shouldn't be able to run an organization that they founded to not address that has literally nothing to do with addressing these problems in the United States is like, you can get swept up in the article and the way that it's written in, Oh, now you've built this. You've built, you've painted this picture of the Courtney's not being good people or not being the kinds of people you would want to run the organization you're funding. And.
02:15:12
Speaker
It really has no bearing on the organization in some respects. Based on the hearsay without any actual understanding of what anyone believes in this conversation. That's what's exhausting about it. By the time you read it and you think about it, you're like, I read nothing. There's no substance.
02:15:34
Speaker
There's serious allegations and there's sweeping generalizations about how people are wrong about things because they didn't agree with you and they made you feel bad. And when you called them out on it, they didn't respond the right way, but we don't have the content. Well, and like a lot of the rest of this is really just like a details. I mean, vague details of
02:16:00
Speaker
a dispute between her and the Courtney's who obviously did not like each other. I mean, it's clear for like, if this stuff is clear, they didn't get along. They did not jive well. And because of that, they completely, they were like routinely butted heads on things because, you know, she talks about like, she was upset that they made that they wanted to read everything she wrote before it was published. And then it never approved any of it, no matter how benign.
02:16:30
Speaker
It wasn't even when you told me my efforts to be a peacemaker in my local community were nothing more than attention seeking. And then she goes into this last example here where it says, the last straw from you was a voice message from Jessica explaining that you don't really believe that anyone can be a peacemaker on the front lines where they live. Because you sent this message in the summer of 2018 after I suggested that we partner with a local organization near my home in Oregon
02:16:56
Speaker
that was helping separated immigrant families being held at a nearby detention center. I had connections there. Partnering with them aligned with preemptive love's commitment to building up local organizations rather than our own. But you told me that despite the fact that immigrant families were being actively, were actively being held here, Oregon was too far removed from the issue. So basically like
02:17:20
Speaker
I had an idea that worked for me and my friends that I had over in this other organization, and I wanted to take company resources and put them towards this, and they said no, right? You told me that preemptive love said anyone could be a peacemaker on the front lines where they live. That's not actually true. You said I could never be a real peacemaker while I lived in Oregon, because to be a real peacemaker, I had to be in the red hot center of the conflict, meaning in the media spotlight.
02:17:47
Speaker
Then you said the two of you had decided the only way I could prove myself as a peacemaker and as a preemptive love employee was to immediately uproot my family and move to the Arizona-Mexico border to address family separations there. Despite the fact that I had no connections there, I speak very little Spanish. I had no intimate knowledge of the issue beyond what I read in the news, and I had no meaningful way to make a difference there. This aligned with your value of going where the news coverage was, quote,
02:18:16
Speaker
which you had announced to our staff summit a few months prior, but it wouldn't have helped anyone in need. It was an absurd proposition and would have been the worst form of white saviorism. It's also exactly what you guys did 13 years ago when you moved to Iraq in the middle of a war.
02:18:33
Speaker
Well, a few differences. She's griping about the suggestion, which we don't know the context behind the suggestion, but their suggestion is she moved to another US state that would be, you know, 10 hours drive away from where she lives. And she's flustered about that. That's a little, maybe that should give her a little more understanding for them moving to another country that is actively at war. I feel like those things are different. Everything they did was white saviorism. Like she literally just wrote off their entire 13 years worth of work.
02:19:03
Speaker
in these like other countries helping, you know, save lives, do all of that stuff as like.
Internal Tensions and Resource Allocation
02:19:09
Speaker
This was white saviorism. This was all about you guys. And literally like everything in this paragraph is about like, well, how am I supposed to do something for, you know, that, that touches me and that I can feel good about. It's just like, there's so, and I want you to send your resources here for me to be, it's like, if
02:19:34
Speaker
Look, you start there, you volunteer there. You do it, do the work. But just to say, I had friends there. I can imagine a conversation going something, and this is of course wild speculation, but I also know how people work to some degree. And I can imagine the job of the people in that center being difficult. And I can imagine,
02:20:00
Speaker
wanting more resources. Sure. And I can imagine them being like, I work for pre-emptive love. We're an organization that's specialized in this. I should reach out to, I have a direct line of communication with the CEO, which also isn't always a helpful thing for CEOs to have direct lines of communication with their employees. And maybe we can partner. That'd be great. And you just build it up. And it's like,
02:20:24
Speaker
But there has to be a discrimination. If every employee has an organization that they think is a good place to send money to, that's not how nonprofits work. You don't get to work for an organization or a nonprofit and just say, because I think we should be involved in this, that's the green light.
02:20:49
Speaker
I mean, even in retail and business, it's like I work for a retail company. I have a friend, we sell, our retail company sells small vendor product. I have a friend that does small vendor stuff. I reached out to the buyer who I know from working there for a number of years, who would handle that product. And I was like, I really don't want to be too forward. I just, I don't want to know anything about
02:21:13
Speaker
where this goes after the fact. I know this person and I think their product is good. I think their brand and their marketing works with a lot of our locations in this area. Here's the contact information. Maybe you would want to try it, do a test order, maybe not. Whatever happens from this point on is not my business. I gave it to them and I walked away and I don't know what's happened since.
02:21:40
Speaker
I don't know if they ever reached out. I know that they didn't reach out, but I don't know if they – and that's fine. I'm not like, this is a great opportunity for us. I should write a blog post about how you didn't want to invest. You're giving the in, but you're trying to stay within the lines of what's appropriate given the different business and personal relationships. To me, it sounds like – and this is also wild speculation – that
02:22:03
Speaker
she was interested in this for all the reasons you said you guys have both said, and they explained why no, they don't think this fits with what they want to do. And they explained some more information as to why and tried to like
02:22:19
Speaker
illustrate that to her a little bit, like giving her analogy of, you know, this doesn't fit with our mission of how we try to do these things, we would do something more akin to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it sounds like she interpreted is that that is them telling her like, no, you have to move to Arizona, which to me, that sounds like just them trying to use an analogy or allegory to explain why they wanted to do or not do something. Well, and it could also be that like, these people did not like each other anymore.
02:22:44
Speaker
They did not like working together. They got an email that said it was from her. They were like, oh, God, now what? And she equally didn't like them. And this might have been another situation where maybe some sort of corporate structure, a mediary, someone in between her and the Courtney's would have been a good idea.
02:23:08
Speaker
Yeah, which sounds like they're already in the process of that six month plan. But like, I don't know. It's just there's so much of that type of stuff in these articles. And I another thing that like the last thing is to that I think is ironic. And it just shows like the the fundamental disconnect with
02:23:30
Speaker
you know, how people think and how an organization runs is like the contempt that they seem to have for donors. Over and over, you know, there's like several examples where they're like, well, they didn't want to offend donors or a donor complained and they made someone take down a social media post and this and that and the other. And I don't know, maybe it's working in sales and in a, you know, for profit situation for too long, but like,
02:23:58
Speaker
You only win if you get the money. You know what I mean? It might feel good to spit in somebody's face, like a customer's face when they're being rude to you. And sometimes, I don't know, that's just what happens, right? But that's not a win. You don't win unless you can get that. You take their money and you put it into something good. Not every hill is worth dying on.
02:24:25
Speaker
Yeah, and sometimes to do that you have to, you know, fall on a sword or, or grin and bear it or whatever the case may be. But like, I don't know this idea that like, you know, they just cave to, you know, the whims of donors who got offended about this or upset about that. I don't know. It's just, I think, I think final thoughts on this.
02:24:48
Speaker
whole situation is I think this just has echoes a lot of this I mean there's obviously there's like real issues here that were brought up that required action and stuff like that but the extent to which you know the Courtney's felt the blow
02:25:06
Speaker
does not seem, by any of the examples given, it does not seem to be appropriate or a measured response to the complaints. I think in the complaint, the public complaints here between Ben and Courtney really have like the air of like disgruntled ex-employee that didn't like how the organization was run, didn't like the management, didn't like this, didn't like that, and sometimes for good reason, but
02:25:35
Speaker
In most cases, you just go find another job. You find some place that has a better working conditions or has a goal or a mission that more aligns with what you want to do or your values or whatever. In this case though, they drug this entire organization through the mud and the end result was that these people
02:26:00
Speaker
lost the very organization that they had founded that had done such big things over such a long period of time. It was taken from them and they're fine and they're going to do okay, but it doesn't make it any less gross. Yeah. It was done under, I mean, really,
02:26:20
Speaker
It wasn't the people who signed the letter and some of the people who signed the letter didn't want to actually go through the investigative process. It was just, it was preemptive love was moving in a direction. Ben Irwin published an article on Medium that required a more measured response from preemptive love. For two weeks-ish, they dealt with terrible PR, a shitstorm of
02:26:49
Speaker
of just comments and on social media and that it just spread like wildfire and
02:26:59
Speaker
Like for the amount of people who have concerns or think that they're like, that he's a real whistleblower. It's like, there's just not, there's two people publishing. I mean, it's ultimately Ben Irwin mostly. And then Courtney shared some of her perspectives and opinions. And it's like, that was published. And then it re and then the response was the Courtney's are no longer going to move forward with preemptive love. And you're like, you won, dude, you won.
02:27:27
Speaker
You wrote a shit piece on people. It was just a character assassination piece where you got to smear their name and area grievances because you probably didn't like the resolution that was about to come forward, which was that they were going to actively work on fixing this after swiftly responding to the complaints. And you'd
02:27:49
Speaker
You published an article that you hoped would ultimately get them fired, and it did. And now that they did, your attempt is to kind of blackball them from ever doing meaningful work in this world again, which is so strange. Imperfect people can't do good, which is the most ridiculous thing in the world. And I think that the courtneys have responded pretty gracefully to everything that's happened.
02:28:18
Speaker
They've given these people space to say what they want to say, even though they didn't agree with it. And just the fact that they don't agree with their assessment of it is offensive enough to warrant trying to sink their new organization. You can make speculations about how the courtneys are going to be running it still, but behind the scenes.
02:28:42
Speaker
But by all accounts, it looks like they're not in the driver's seat of this new organization. So you can cry white saviorism all you want and talk about how horrible they are. But it looks to me like people from Iraq and from these communities overseas that have been through wars and everything else, which maybe you describe as the Courtney's cult members, that's not demeaning at all. But it looks to me like they're running this new organization.
02:29:10
Speaker
And the fact that you didn't even let it get off the ground before you start trashing it and trying to undermine it, I think is just disgusting. I think you should grow up, and I think you should find something reasonable and rational and worthwhile to get into.
New Beginnings Amid Criticism
02:29:29
Speaker
Or you can just keep tweeting 50 times a day. I guess maybe this detracts
02:29:36
Speaker
from the real work that you're doing of retweeting people. Of hot takes on Twitter? Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe we didn't pay enough respect to the fact that you're doing the real work out there of tweeting.
02:29:49
Speaker
Like I think you gotta be ashamed of yourself, man. I really do. I mean, it just, it makes me angry. Like this whole thing just makes me angry when I look at it because like a more measured response that called out some actual problems. Like I can see, I mean, same situation that we've seen so many times with other organizations, like he said, where, you know, like you're almost preconditioned to believe that like, oh, it turns out so-and-so who I thought was cool is
02:30:19
Speaker
actually a, you know, con artist. Like we've seen that play out so many times that you're almost kind of like ready to hear the bad news about someone that you thought was good, you know. But in this case, like it's just fluff. It's fluff, you know, with a couple of real accusations built in there. And I just think like, the extent to which you've like gone after
02:30:44
Speaker
the courtneys and now after their new organization they're not even running themselves like it's just it's disgusting.
02:30:52
Speaker
I think it's also noteworthy. I know we're trying to wrap down here, but throughout the whole thing, they never really any substantive way attack the actual work that preemptive love was doing, because I'm guessing the work was actually good. And the thing that keeps ringing around in my head like this whole time we've been talking, I almost hate to bring it up because I feel like it's one of those quotes that has just been beaten to death by grifters and con men and idiots. But you're familiar with like Teddy Roosevelt's The Man in the Arena.
02:31:22
Speaker
Quote, okay. Do you mind if I read it, Sam? Read it. It's what I just keep thinking of while we're talking about this. He said, it is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who's actually in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.
02:31:47
Speaker
But who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." And that's a great way to wrap that up. That's what Andrew Pate said, that.
02:32:15
Speaker
I'm sorry for the camel wheeze, you're gonna have to. Not that this is like a direct fit for this situation. That's what keeps going around in my head is like, throughout all of this, it sounds like they don't have anything they can attack about the work in the organization. And to me, that speaks to the founders.
02:32:33
Speaker
is even for all of their potential missteps, which we may never fully understand. And I think it sounded like Jeremy even admitted on the podcast, he probably was not the perfect leader or perfectly suited for that type of leadership. It sounds like they were doing the work. And I any critique, absent of an acknowledgement of the good that they've done feels like it's hollow, because it does seem from the, you know, medium research I've done so far,
02:32:59
Speaker
that the organization is a good, it is one of the organizations that you wanted, at least historically, wanted to support with your money that was making a meaningful difference, that wasn't wasting it, that was actually moving the needle forward. And maybe it was undone by these Twitter hot takers just looking to get their pound of flesh. Well, I think that is for kids to get heart surgery if employees are being gas lit.
02:33:43
Speaker
I just appreciate your reading ability. You did a great job reading that. Thank you, Sam. Thank you.
02:33:44
Speaker
in the U.S.
Conclusion: Leadership and Criticism in Nonprofits
02:33:51
Speaker
All right. Okay. Well, I- Just close it. Who cares? Yeah. This might kind of offer us a couple of times.
02:34:00
Speaker
I'm sure that there's some people listening who disagree heartily. If you want to talk about it or if you want to just call us names or whatever, join our Discord. If you're going to call us names, put a time limit on it at least. Join for a few days, chew us out, and then leave. But you want to hop in on the conversation, you want to weigh in on what happened.
02:34:26
Speaker
Either way, that's probably the best way to get at us. So find a link in our social media. And if you're enjoying the podcast, review it wherever you listen to it. So until next time, thanks for listening and we will see you later.
02:34:57
Speaker
you