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Ep. 98 - From Frontlines to Headlines w/ Jeremy Courtney of Humanite
76 Plays3 years ago
This week, we got the opportunity to sit down with humanitarian and author, Jeremy Courtney, who comes to you from his home in northern Iraq! In 2008, Jeremy and his wife Jessica founded an incredible organization called Preemptive Love, who’s mission includes providing aid in the form of food, shelter, and medical care to people caught in the midst of global conflict, as well as launching local businesses in war-torn parts of the world to bring jobs, revenue, and stability back to their communities. For over a decade, Jeremy and Jessica worked side-by-side with local partners all over the Middle East, and Preemptive Love grew to become the large, impactful organization that it is today. In late 2021, several former employees voiced complaints and concerns about the Courtney’s leadership. The organization willingly subjected themselves to a third-party investigation by Guidepost Solutions hoping to better understand the problems and how to address them. However, a couple of ex-employees went public with their grievances. Shortly thereafter, the board of directors published a statement saying that Jeremy and Jessica Courtney would not be returning to Preemptive Love. After months of radio silence, the Courtneys announced that they were partnering with many of their longtime friends and fellow humanitarians to form a new organization called Humanite Peace Collective. That’s obviously the abridged version of the story, but hopefully it gives some context…
This is the first time Jeremy has spoken publicly since leaving Preemptive Love, and we were as anxious as anyone to hear his thoughts on what happened. Whether or not you followed the Courtneys or Preemptive Love over the years, I think you’ll find Jeremy’s story fascinating. We encourage you to check out Humanite at www.humanite.org, and if you’d like to join the conversation, you’ll find a link to the official Growing Up Christian Discord server in our Instagram bio, @growingupchristianpodcast!
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Transcript
Addressing Allegations and Personal Statement
00:00:00
Speaker
That's not a corporate statement to me. It's a personal statement of hurt because for whatever motive, complex, probably stew of motives that ended up being present at the end when a decision had to be made.
00:00:22
Speaker
One thing that is decidedly clear as day, there was no financial wrongdoing. There was no sexual misconduct. And we were very clear about that. We were allowed to be hung out to dry in a way that cast a really hurtful pall over us in those particular regards.
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:01:05
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Growing Up Christian. I'm Sam. And I'm Casey. And this week we're gonna kinda cut straight to the point here. We have an amazing guest. We're not gonna spend any real time on our goofy little intros that usually go on longer than we intended them to. Because our conversation with our guest went quite long. It's definitely one of the longer conversations we've had.
00:01:32
Speaker
And we're very thankful for, well, our guest is Jeremy Courtney. He's the founder of an organization called Preemptive Love. He's also an author of two books. Preemptive Love was his first book, obviously named after his organization and the story leading up to the founding of that organization. And then his follow-up book to that was called Love Anyway.
00:01:57
Speaker
and Jeremy was incredibly gracious with his time. We had scheduled him in technically for an hour and a half, and I think we went, I don't know, it was over
Jeremy Courtney's Background and Mission
00:02:07
Speaker
two hours. Close to two and a half, I think. Yeah, so he was incredibly gracious with his time. It took us, we wanted to get through a lot of his story. There's a lot that's gone on with Jeremy in the past year, but also his life, and I wanted to be able to set up who he was. I wanted to have a conversation about where he started,
00:02:25
Speaker
how he grew up, of course, but where he ended up, how he started the organization that he did. Explain exactly what the organization's mission was. Yup. So Preamt of Love, it's an organization that it started out of
00:02:42
Speaker
After he moved to Iraq, the dates will come up in the interview, but it started out of the need for heart surgeries for originally a child, but just life-saving heart surgeries for everybody in which getting those was complicated due to the nature of the way things were in Iraq at the time. Maybe doctors of different religions or
00:03:08
Speaker
geographical locations weren't exactly welcome in Iraq to perform these surgeries. So it was a lot of logistics and getting kids to these doctors. And it wasn't necessarily always, or it definitely wasn't legal and safe to do so. And it required a network of people. And through that network, that organization blossomed into something that worked with locals in war-torn areas to
00:03:35
Speaker
provide aid, but also to help them rebuild in the wake of war or to work with the locals in order to... Basically just a lot of different types of support for refugees and people in war-torn areas. For those of you who didn't know, there was a war in Iraq at the time. Yeah, a little one.
00:04:02
Speaker
People seem to forget about it sometimes, just kidding. Anyway, so he built this organization and I've been a long time supporter of it. My wife bought me the book, Preemptive Love, when it came out. Maybe I read it in like 2013 or something like that, but my wife and I have been supporting the organization, not so much through monthly donations, but we buy a lot of, we've bought a lot of product.
00:04:31
Speaker
from their website over the years and that product is, has been, they work with, that's another thing they do is they work with refugees who make certain goods. So maybe you're buying candles or certain, I don't know, just, it's a lot of different things, but we've bought those as gifts almost every year for holidays for people over the past seven years or so.
00:04:52
Speaker
I've just followed their work, followed Jeremy's work, and it's been incredibly meaningful to
Investigation and Recusal
00:04:58
Speaker
me. So last year or a little over a year ago when there became, maybe it was in January, so maybe not quite a year ago, but it came out that there were some former employees that filed some sort of grievance against him.
00:05:16
Speaker
I'm not sure in what official capacity, but to the organization and to the point where the board thought it – and Jeremy himself thought it was worth looking into. So they – Jeremy kind of was recused from his management role and focused on other duties while this investigation went on and they interviewed me. It was a third-party investigation.
00:05:40
Speaker
We're saying Jeremy, but his wife Jessica was also, she was also a co-founder of the organization and was right alongside him. They together recused themselves while this third party investigated the claims made by these former employees.
00:05:58
Speaker
So we spend a lot of time talking. And this is the first time that Jeremy's really talked about any of this outside of a Facebook post or an Instagram post here or there that is references to it. So not only were we gracious for, I mean, were we thankful for his time, but also very thankful that he just felt comfortable coming on and talking to us about
00:06:27
Speaker
his experience and his perception of the event. Because ultimately, after the investigation, he was removed from his position at preemptive love. And that hasn't been without controversy. It hasn't been without there being a lot of different opinions
00:06:48
Speaker
about it. And it hasn't gone without a couple of articles floating around the internet, trying to directly speak to it as well. So there's a lot to be said here. So I think at some level, you can all listen to the interview and hear from Jeremy himself on his experience and exactly how he feels things were handled, how things went, and then what he's got going on going forward.
Jeremy's Religious Background and Growth
00:07:18
Speaker
Yeah, and you know, Sam, like you said, he had a history with this organization and had been following him for a long time. I didn't. So I kind of came into this whole situation without really any prior knowledge of the organization or what had gone on.
00:07:35
Speaker
Um, and so for me, you know, as my first exposure to, uh, you know, jump into the conversation and also to read some of the articles and stuff that had come out. Um, so I, I, I mean, I guess we'll see if that's valuable, but, uh, you got two different perspectives on this. Um.
00:07:55
Speaker
We definitely have more to say about this whole thing, but for now, I think we really just wanted to have you listen to Jeremy and hear what he has to say about things. And then I think Sam and I will reconvene on this later in the week and talk a little bit more about reactions and stuff like that. So whether you love it, whether you hate it,
00:08:21
Speaker
If you want to talk directly to us about it, the best place to do that is in our Discord server. You can find the links on our social media and whether you like it or whether you hate it, we would really appreciate it if you'd share the episode and leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. So without further ado, here is our conversation with Jeremy Courtney.
00:08:48
Speaker
Hey everybody, we are back with our guest, Jeremy Courtney. Jeremy, thanks so much for joining us, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Uh, dude, so very excited to talk to you. I, I want to say I first learned, I don't mind when did, okay. When did your first book come out? When did, um, preemptive love come out? I can't remember the date. 2012, I think 2013. So I guess I got it shortly after it came out. I think my wife saw it on like a Facebook advertisement or something like that. Um,
00:09:18
Speaker
She saw it advertised somewhere and thought, Sam would like that. So she she bought it for me, maybe for Christmas or something like that. And it that was a pretty instrumental book for me, man. I had I was undergoing a lot of faith shift at the time. And I was had, I guess, probably since like 2010, then started considering these ideas of like Christian nonviolence, things like that. And while I've
00:09:45
Speaker
I was shifting from one binary to another. This book kind of came along in a way that did something different than some of the other books that I had picked up on, which were very specifically Christian.
00:09:57
Speaker
And I got the undertones of that, but I didn't necessarily get like, it wasn't like a Christian case for anything. It was just your story and what was going on. So it kind of like, it kind of was an example. It's like, oh, I'm listening to these people talk about their theories and their theologies, but it was just kind of an example of practically what it looks like to do something differently. So just want to start out with that and how that impacted me and kind of the shift and how I considered all of those things.
00:10:28
Speaker
Thanks, it's encouraging. So before we get started into pre-emptive love and how you started that organization when you wrote your book, like I said, not super familiar with your religious background and how your faith tied into the development of pre-emptive love. And I'm sure it's shifted a lot too, which we'll get into, but maybe just kind of start us off with your religious background and maybe the
00:10:56
Speaker
the geography in which you grew up because that has usually a good impact on religious backgrounds. Yeah, for sure. My grandfather was a pastor who himself came to faith in a kind of radical way, you might say. So I grew up hearing his radical
00:11:19
Speaker
salvation story went from drunk in the military to being dragged to church one Mother's Day by my grandma and just feeling like the weight of God landed on him as the pastor spoke straight into his soul.
00:11:37
Speaker
Grew up with that story. He ended up leaving the business life that he was a part of after the military and became a pastor. So by the time I came along, all I'd ever known was my family, the professional ministers. My father followed in his footsteps in many ways. And it looked like I was, you know, I guess maybe I felt some kind of pressure to be the heir apparent, you know, the third
00:12:00
Speaker
generation in a lot of ways. And went off to a small Christian college in Texas was where I grew up most of my kind of latter and adolescent years. Went to a small part of Texas. What's up? What part of Texas was it? Austin, Austin, Texas was where where we were. And yeah, but so kind of
00:12:26
Speaker
In my high school years, I started kind of dabbling between the Austin that a lot of people know about and think about and the kind of religious rural outside of Austin place where we actually live. So we were like hill country people living in small town kind of life in a lot of ways, but then we would go into the big city, sixth street, all this stuff on weekends. And so I had a bit of exposure outside of the
00:12:54
Speaker
otherwise very small little fundamentalist bubble that we were in. And I do think that's important. We were a very fundamentalist kind of family. We were not just Christian of any stripe or kind of a broad general kind of come one come all. We were fairly serious about the convictions that we had and the limitations on what was allowed and what was kind of disallowed under the banner of
00:13:23
Speaker
being a Christian. And going off to college actually was a kind of liberating or liberalizing experience in a lot of ways. Because even though I was going to a Baptist school, it itself was much more liberal and forgiving and welcoming than anything I had ever experienced up until that point.
00:13:42
Speaker
Yeah, that was the dangers of college, right? I was always warned about the dangers of going to college other than a Christian school. For me, they meant University of Texas, right? Downtown Austin, you know, drugs, alcohol, women. But it was actually going to a more like mainstream Baptist school that was like, oh, wow, this is like really liberalizing my life and my faith. Have you meditated at all upon the parallels between your story and Jerry Falwell Jr's?
00:14:12
Speaker
No, I'm not sure I'm even familiar with the parallel. You guys are tracking right together so far, you know?
00:14:21
Speaker
Well, let's see how the story ends up in the end. So that's funny because that's kind of like that was kind of my experience. Like going to Liberty was like very fundamentalist school and church and stuff like that. And Liberty was like where I got to stretch my legs a little bit, which is kind of hilarious.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, that was, even for me, it was a, actually that was a good, Liberty was the perfect shift for me cause it was zero, it was almost zero culture shock. I just met more charismatic Christians for the first time. And those people freaked me out a little bit at first, but so when you went to college and you said that was a somewhat liberalizing experience, was there, was that just related to light, like a lightening up of behavior and you could kind of just be more normal without worrying about
00:15:16
Speaker
fire and brimstone coming down to get you? Or is it like a theology thing too? Were you thinking about it in those terms? It's a little bit of everything.
00:15:27
Speaker
In some ways, I myself went theologically more conservative. I was introduced to John Piper and Jonathan Edwards and became very interested and really intoxicated, I guess, by that notion of God's total sovereignty over everything, every action, every deed, every thought on the one hand.
00:15:58
Speaker
humanity's total depravity and ruinousness, on the other hand. So that was, I would say, more theologically conservative than anything I had grown up in to that point. In some ways, culturally, though, it was more liberal, I guess. I mean,
00:16:20
Speaker
didn't feel like there was such a deep entrenchment about all things, sexual, sexual mores, girls, boys kind of stuff. We didn't use the King James Bible only for everything. And so that in and of itself just kind of opened up a reading and an exposure to interacting with scripture in a way that was, I don't know, maybe more palatable or comprehensible than anything I'd really understood
00:16:50
Speaker
before. So those, those things were, I guess, more behaviorally or culturally liberal. That's exactly what they warned us about. Yep. That's right. What, uh, what year range are we talking about? Like when you were in school? Yeah, I graduated high school in 97. So I was in college till 2001. So, I mean, we were pretty young at the time, but it seems like. Thanks for that.
00:17:19
Speaker
Not that much younger, but like, that seems to like correspond with the time period where, well, I mean, I guess September 11th is like the seminal event of the whole thing, but like, was, I'm curious, like in those, in the years before it, like, was there this, so much of this, like,
00:17:39
Speaker
you know, this like, rah rah nationalist, American spirit within the church? Or was that something that ramped up at about the time that you were starting to go, I don't know about some of that, you know, to begin with? I didn't notice it until post September 11. I'm sure it was there. But for
00:18:00
Speaker
for various reasons, I just, I was blind to it. It wasn't a, it wasn't a thing that I saw. Maybe it was just the water I was swimming in, but I somehow became aware that I was swimming in that water maybe for the first time post 9-11.
Shifts in Faith and Missionary Work
00:18:13
Speaker
Yeah, I was, I think I was 13 when it happened, but I was homeschooled and we had done home church for a lot of my life up until that. So it's like, I, I,
00:18:25
Speaker
was totally unaware of what bubble I was in. There was just, this is what life is and how you think about things. And then it wasn't until, God, I don't even know, I guess it wasn't until college for me, even at Liberty that I started, you know, I met people who had different ideas about all that, but it definitely seemed to change the landscape of Christianity or aspects, not necessarily even aspects, denominations in certain sects of Christianity for
00:18:54
Speaker
Sure. And so I'm in Massachusetts. I want to say that that's, you know, well, slightly more liberal area, but there's a lot of the non-denominational churches are very, very conservative.
00:19:10
Speaker
And I think even being in that world, being in that conservative world, knowing you were in an area that was more liberal kind of made you dig, it made me dig my feet in a little bit more. And then especially after 9-11, I remember being 13, knowing nothing. I actually remember vividly conversations I had with people about how stupid people were for thinking that we shouldn't respond to the way we did or whatever. And even still, I think what's funny, and you'll probably be able to correct a lot of
00:19:39
Speaker
whatever misconceptions I have. But the timeline of events, I think is really shoddy for a lot of people my age, because it's like, it feels like there is September 11th. And then there was like, then we went to war. And, and it was not exactly like that. And it wasn't as clear cut is, I think people reflect on it as either. Yeah.
00:20:00
Speaker
I don't know quite which thread there to pull on more right now. Let me go back to the nationalism piece because I guess I have come to think of that part of my life, especially maybe a decade or so there as like a series of conversions.
00:20:20
Speaker
I grew up under this notion of kind of a single conversion and that was it bada-bing bada-boom you're in and if it's real then you can never be out and that's the whole story. My experience of it was something more like a series of unfolding conversions. One of which was the notion of like personal, like a personal awareness of need, a personal awareness of something greater than myself and that I understood to be a personal need for salvation.
00:20:50
Speaker
The next major conversion I think I remember was probably tracking with the notion of nationalism that in that Piper kick that I was on, one of the books that I read was Let the Nations Be Glad, which is essentially his missions treatise. And so that for me kind of opened up the world of Jesus beyond America, so to speak.
00:21:21
Speaker
And even though I grew up again, like with missionaries coming in and out of our house every week as a pastor's kid, um, I dunno, there was just something about that time of life and that book and whatever where it landed. And so I guess by the time 9 11 happened, I was, I was kind of on the other side of that a little bit. And it was like, wait, this isn't.
00:21:44
Speaker
the Christianity I want to be a part of, I don't want to be a part of wrapping myself in the flag and wrapping us in the flag and saying, Ra-Ra Jesus Christianity, or Ra-Ra America. The Jesus I'm trying to follow here is bigger than America and is for everyone. So I think that particular unfolding or that particular conversion was what maybe allowed us to go in a different direction after 9-11 than we might have otherwise gone.
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I really like the way you mentioned feeling like it was a
00:22:20
Speaker
a switch from the idea that you have your single conversion and it's just an in and out version of Christianity versus this idea of multiple conversions. I like the way you frame it like that because I think that probably is indicative of a lot of people's experiences if they've had any sort of changes of heart throughout their lives. Major red flags to me for people who's
00:22:44
Speaker
beliefs haven't changed or developed much since, you know, their original conversion experience. And I think that was one of the things that became alarming to me was just like, as I got older, it's like, I'm starting to have different questions and think about the world differently through, like I said, I mean, part of it was reading your book, reading authors like Shane Claiborne. He did a number on a lot of us at that time when we were
00:23:10
Speaker
trying to figure out which direction we were going in and what our Christianity meant to us personally versus it just being an identity and a culture. And yeah, it feels to me like for
00:23:27
Speaker
That should be the norm and that should be the way that people think about their experiences, even outside of if they move on from Christianity, just this idea of multiple conversion experiences, regardless of where you end up in the faith. It's hard to imagine going back to this world where everything just fits perfectly in a box. So when you talk about moving out of that prior to 9-11, which kind of gave you a more global perspective in regards to your faith,
00:23:59
Speaker
Was that in the midst of reading Piper, or were you saying that there was, when you read his book, let the world be glad that you were like, he's taking it from a perspective. You're like, I don't know about that. That doesn't match with how I view the world. No, Piper was instrumental in breaking me out of that box.
00:24:20
Speaker
And that's really interesting because I think a lot of people would expect it to go the other way, given maybe the taste that millennials have for that last name. Yeah, for sure. And I think that's part of the story overall, or that's part of my journey overall, is learning to look back and be thankful for each step of the journey rather than condemning or belittling of things that I may no longer
00:24:49
Speaker
fully embraced in the same way or, or maybe perhaps embrace it all, but to still find a way to be grateful, genuinely grateful for how that Jeremy gave birth to this Jeremy or how that guide led me to the next guide. That's tough to do because I mean, I, I know for me, I look back on some of those things and, and I, I, you can't help but feel a little ashamed of like some of the things that you thought and the things that you like.
00:25:18
Speaker
I remember specifically like some of the things that I said to people who were directly affected by them and I'm like.
00:25:26
Speaker
That is terrible. I hope they don't remember that. Yeah. And I think when it comes to specific, I've got those moments too. And I think when it comes to those specific kind of moments that I'm aware of and the things that have kept me up at night at various times, ways that I treated people who were in my life, who were part of the LGBTQ community, perhaps in particular, those are some of the ones that
00:25:52
Speaker
that haunted me the most for a while. I had to do some outreach back to old friends who may have drifted apart. We may have cut ties, and I can't remember everything right now.
00:26:08
Speaker
Yeah, I felt compelled at times to reach back out and apologize. And I think that, I guess for me, I learned or I chose to maybe distinguish between certain behaviors or interactions or moments that might have caused someone pain while trying not to accept the notion that I should have been ashamed for who I was at that time that gave rise to that behavior or that action.
00:26:37
Speaker
Makes sense. No, up to that point where, so were you originally, were you headed towards, you know, kind of the, the, the family track of, you know, being a pastor in the U S somewhere. And then that's the point at which you got the call to the mission field.
00:26:54
Speaker
It's not real clear to me. I haven't thought about it in a while. I mean, my time at university and then later in seminary where I went for three years was all filled with various forms of what anyone would have recognized as professional Christian ministry, vocational Christian ministry. It didn't look exactly like my dad or my grandfather's version, but whatever. I mean, it was more or less the same.
00:27:25
Speaker
So, but somehow I felt like I was charting my own path. Now, whether that's true or not, I don't really know. But when the missionary kind of moment came around and we raised our hand and signed up for that, it did at once feel like I was part of the family tradition and it felt like we were charting our own path. I guess that's the answer. Because we were doing something different. We were doing something that was considered
00:27:54
Speaker
full-blown crazy by a lot of people at that time to move to, quote-unquote, the Muslim world where they kidnapped and behead everyone was like, we got tremendous pushback from the very Christians that sat beside us in church every day and said that we were supposed to win all Muslims everywhere to Jesus, you know?
00:28:17
Speaker
So it was confusing. And I think maybe even the craziness of it, probably so-called craziness of it in their eyes, probably allowed us to feel a little punk rock in the midst of somehow following a family vocation all at the same time. Yeah, I totally can hear that. I feel like I never
00:28:41
Speaker
I never pulled the trigger on the missionary thing, but that was something my wife and I talked about for a long time. And there's like, honestly, within the Christianity we came from, it's like a sexiness to it. It's glorified in some ways. And then people want to, it's like, then, I guess that's how you get so many people to contribute to it, because they don't want to go and do it.
00:29:06
Speaker
You have to, you can pray on that guilt a little bit, that Christian guilt to keep it funded. I'm mostly stressed out about potentially feeling guilty that I didn't go, but you know, I'm a narcissist. You didn't support it, you didn't go and you just squashed those feelings of guilt down until you said, I don't believe in anything anymore. I pray for all you guys in general terms, you know?
00:29:29
Speaker
You take all the missionaries Casey bases all of his beliefs on what's convenient to him. So That is true
00:29:40
Speaker
What was the original call to action that you responded to? Uh, what, what had come up and how did the original, uh, plan to move to Iraq? It was originally Iraq or my, no, we first moved to Turkey. Yeah. So what year was that? And then what was the specific call that you were responding to? Well, we, like I said, I had become.
00:30:07
Speaker
I don't remember this shining moment. I don't remember this, you know, cry out to God where everything kind of coalesced, but somewhere in the culture that we were in, it became increasingly attractive or interesting that we might do that.
00:30:20
Speaker
then 9-11 happened and around the same time one of the next major conversions or unfoldings for me was what I would deem a conversion to community. It's become certainly more common now and a lot of people in the last 20 years have gone through something similar but my understanding of kind of culture at that time was there
00:30:45
Speaker
the mega church and the kind of light show and all that kind of stuff was kind of really getting ramped up.
Life and Work in Iraq
00:30:53
Speaker
And we fell in with a group of people who kind of wanted to rebel against that a little bit and said, we want to actually know the people that were around and we want to have a sense of like,
00:31:04
Speaker
belonging and community with the people in our life that we claim to profess the same things with. And so we started meeting outside of the Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night kind of rituals and started meeting in a home in addition to all that. We didn't cut off with kind of the mega church thing, but we just added a mealtime and a Bible study and a real sense of belonging with a core group of people. And it was, it was transformative. I mean,
00:31:34
Speaker
having just left college where you kind of experience that kind of camaraderie and freedom for the first time, and then launching out into the adult world and fearing that you may never experience those heady college days ever again, we actually did. Our post-university days were probably more heady and more deep and more connected than our university days because we had this community. And that entire community was
00:32:02
Speaker
more or less predicated on launching out a group of the community to become missionaries overseas in Turkey. And it was a whole experiment on like, could some of us stay and could some of us go and could we actually still be one community together? And we raised our hands to be the goers. I guess we could have just as easily been the senders or the stayers, but the real experiment was
00:32:30
Speaker
Can we know each other and love each other and belong to each other and do something that we've never really seen done before?
00:32:36
Speaker
Is a, so part of that community, I'm sure was, you know, a support role back here in the, you know, at the home base. Did you guys, did you do the traditional missionary support circuit where he went around to churches and raised money and all that kind of stuff? A little bit. Um, yeah, a little bit. The church supported us quite a bit. And then, and then we were expected to do some on our own as well. Yeah. How bad does that suck?
00:33:05
Speaker
Like I think about all the missionaries that came through and they would cut like you're you're kind of like it's like a shark tank like you're pitching weird your idea of like yeah, we're gonna go to Belgium and I'm gonna live there and I I'm gonna be I want to be comfortable and I will occasionally You know, I'll head out tracks on the center stage or whatever
00:33:29
Speaker
No, it's it's weird. It's it's just as competitive as Shark Tank and you learn. You can't help but learn. I mean, these are we could have a whole podcast. Maybe we should about the things that missionaries never tell you. But
00:33:44
Speaker
But you can't help but learn human psychology and how to play the free market system for missionary dollars that are up for grabs. I mean, it's just basic survival. Oh, I have questions about that. I'll wait until later. So we had this young guy on.
00:34:04
Speaker
Maybe six months ago, and he grew up in Hong Kong, right? His parents were missionaries, basically spent his whole life overseas as a missionary kid.
00:34:19
Speaker
more fun parts of that conversation was him telling us about weird experiences they had on these home trips where they would go around and raise support and visit churches. Did you have any strange interactions with people when you were trying to raise support or weird questions or anything like that?
00:34:40
Speaker
To jump ahead in the story a little bit, we only really lived that life for about two and a half years, give or take. And I don't remember a lot from that time. I don't remember trips. I don't remember begging for money much during that time. My recollection is that we did a fairly good job in the run up and everything stayed fairly stable in the years that we were out as missionaries proper.
00:35:10
Speaker
And yeah, I don't remember anything too much. When we moved from Turkey into Iraq, we almost immediately started a charitable organization to begin responding to some of the needs of people around us that we discovered in Iraq during the war for the first time.
00:35:29
Speaker
We moved to Iraq to kind of turn over a new leaf and to start a new chapter in a lot of ways. And the nonprofit became central in our fundraising efforts, not the kind of personal support side. And that dynamic of raising money for others versus raising money for yourself is just a whole different thing. That makes a ton of sense. Were you guys in Istanbul when you were in Turkey? Yeah.
00:36:00
Speaker
I'm fascinated by Turkey and Iran. I feel like it would be amazing to go look around it. I mean, was there anything particularly really cool about the city that you remember? Oh, I mean, we loved it. We absolutely loved it. It was a fascinating time of life. It was a fascinating time in world history with the US
00:36:25
Speaker
Let's see, by the time we landed, the US was fully at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. So the entire, every Muslim country in the world kind of had some part of that alliance or opposition against Americans and what we were about and what we stood for in the world and or alliance or opposition against the Al Qaeda types of the world and what they stood for and what they were about in the world. So it was a heady time. It was,
00:36:51
Speaker
It was charged, you know, uh, it was the era of 24, like the TV show 24 hour Muslim terrorists around every corner, sleeper cells, everyone's in the CIA. Um, so you, you couldn't always have at least 12 moles. They're really bad. Weeding out moles. Glenn Beck's on the home front writing about the caliphate on his blackboard.
00:37:19
Speaker
I think everyone thought we were in the CIA. Everyone thought we were missionaries. We thought we were super clever and we're flying below the radar and we're tricking everyone with our, you know, really masterful disguises and cover stories. But as for what I remember most is the people. I mean, yeah, I was charmed by the city. I was charmed by the food. We loved it all.
00:37:45
Speaker
You could be on a bus for two to four hours a day in the city to get to your destination one way, just a massive sprawling place. But what I remember the most is the people. And looking back, I would come to understand how even through their suspicions of us, even in spite of their suspicions of us, and I think at times their convictions about who we actually were, there was still
00:38:12
Speaker
a lot of real friendship and hospitality and benefit of the doubt extended and efforts to convert us. It's like, oh, you're here to convert us? Well, we'll just convert you. Let's go. Head to head, idea for idea. And yeah, there was some really beautiful relationships and experiences born out of that. The conversion aspect of it is always interesting.
00:38:38
Speaker
So the original intent with going to Turkey, it was kind of a traditional Christian missionary idea of bringing people to understand Jesus. And specifically church planting. Okay.
00:38:54
Speaker
And I guess this distinction may only matter inside that community, but it was actually not enough for us to just get notches in our belt or convert individual souls. It only mattered if we formed a church that could thrive on its own. And I would argue that's a taller
00:39:12
Speaker
order and it really burned a lot of people out and confused a lot of people and left a lot of people wounded on the highways of the whole kind of experience. At that time, or maybe still, but was there hostility, like government hostility towards a Christian church being opened or were you able to do that without, I mean, I don't know if maybe the cultural hostility was there, especially given that you were Americans trying to do
00:39:42
Speaker
an American, what would be maybe perceived as a fairly Americanized Christian religion? Was there a lot of hostility either way or were you able to kind of just fly under the radar and do that without a lot of opposition? I think it might have gotten a little more dangerous and some of those stories from Turkey started emerging perhaps a little more after we left. While we were there,
00:40:09
Speaker
in spite of all the warnings that we had been told from Americans to not get our heads cut off, and in spite of the drama that we drummed up for ourselves and the kind of anxiety and the boogeyman that we created that was always one step behind us.
00:40:25
Speaker
I don't actually think the government themselves in retrospect was too concerned about us or missionaries in general. I may be wrong about that and I don't mean to belittle anyone else's experience, but I do think it in fact got worse. And I do think it was always worse for Turkish citizens than it was for us as foreigners. If that makes sense. It gets a little dicey when you start messing with people from other countries, especially maybe
00:40:55
Speaker
America, if there's, you know, they have a pretty big stick that they walk with. Exactly. Exactly. And we're seeing the, the brunch of that stick being used in countries that were fairly close to them geographically. So Baghdad, is that where you guys moved to from there? No, we moved to Northern Iraq. Okay.
00:41:14
Speaker
So you mentioned it was almost like another conversion experience. You felt like you wanted to start something new, turn over New Leaf. What was that and why Iraq at that time?
00:41:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, essentially I had a, the major conversion experience at that point was, and I'll spare the story because I haven't told her in a while and I haven't thought about it in a really long time, but in a nutshell, I essentially had what felt like a spiritual epiphany, like a literal kind of encounter that I had never had before that
00:41:51
Speaker
essentially made me not believe in converting people to Christianity anymore. That makes sense to me. Yeah, it didn't lead to me. It's hard to explain those. Sorry to interrupt, but you mentioned sparing the story. I have moments in my life that I chalk up to legitimate spiritual experiences and trying to explain those and what they meant
00:42:15
Speaker
And how they were meaningful and life changing just always falls flat every time you start trying to explain it. But sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. Yeah. So the upshot was, uh, I don't necessarily know how to explain this, but here's what happened. And I don't think I want to be a part of this anymore. And it wasn't necessarily like I want to move home. It wasn't, I want to quit.
00:42:38
Speaker
It was like, I think the thing they warned us about, to use your phrase, Casey, I think the thing they warned us about just happened. I think the goalpost just moved, you know? How long was that after you had moved there? Two and a half years, something like that, two years. Okay. That's not long to realize that you had that shift. It's not long. I'm guessing experience with people who were
00:43:05
Speaker
It's part of what I think was so concerning for some people. I was accused of basically being a quitter.
00:43:13
Speaker
and not having enough, not having enough. Can't do that in America. Well, it was like, you know, your forefathers labored for 60 years and only to have one convert and you're giving up two years in and moving the goalpost. And I was like, well, I don't know what to tell you. This didn't feel like a rationalization to me. It felt like a spiritual awakening.
00:43:37
Speaker
And in any case, I don't think I'm going to explain myself much more on this. I think I'm just moving on. Was that disruptive to your community? Exactly. It's complicated because both the community and the money. And so that became a bit of a high wire act. Did it cost any friendships? I don't know that that's always the line in the sand for people, but once you're
00:44:03
Speaker
you're in another country and you have that ideological shift to not even necessarily like, uh, I guess we can't be friends anymore, but you know, things can fizzle out and you look back and it can be disappointing. So did you have any experiences like that afterwards?
00:44:19
Speaker
I don't remember it costing anyone from the core group, no. The core group had lived a certain set of experiences with each other and we were pretty much in it. Even if we fell on different lines with regard to some of that.
00:44:35
Speaker
But I think in kind of maybe the support group who hadn't lived those experiences, kind of to go back to Casey, I think Keenely picking up on that distinction, which maybe I had not even picked up on, those who hadn't lived those experiences with us, but still reckoned themselves as part of the community, they had things to say, and they had opinions, and they had money to withhold in punishment. And
00:45:02
Speaker
that was difficult because it was like, wait a minute, you told us for all these years that we're your hands and feet to go places you can't go, to put our lives at risk in a way that you can't or the way that you won't. And now that us living that certain kind of life has led us to different conclusions than you, now you're going to pull back
00:45:28
Speaker
when you haven't been the one who took any of the risk to do any of it. So that was an early wake up call, which in some ways I think reprises 10, 15 years later in the story. But that was my first experience of that. I feel like that I could see how that would probably be hurtful in a way because
00:45:54
Speaker
I think everybody's kind of had some sort of experience where you have a falling out with someone or a group or something like that and you kind of want to go to them and be like,
00:46:06
Speaker
You could, you got, I thought you knew me. I thought you knew who I was. Like, do you guys not, do you not trust that? Trust. Yep. Yeah. Like where, you know, I thought we had like a mutual respect and trust with each other. Can you not trust that? Like I'm, I'm responding to what I'm finding here on the ground. Right.
00:46:27
Speaker
But it's it's it's almost kind of an interruption of that person's vision and self-purpose and stuff in a way to I imagine we're like to accept those notions about the futility of That type of work in that particular place or something like that would I get I mean that would demand a lot of changes from them on how they look at the world and their place in it and things and it seems to me like I there had to be an aspect of
00:46:54
Speaker
the, the, the, that big shift on the move to Iraq and the change in how you were doing, you know, what you guys were doing that like, did it feel almost like a higher calling? Like I all of a sudden, like I have a better idea of like, what would actually make a difference in the lives of these people here.
00:47:12
Speaker
It was, there were two, to keep it the motif, there were two conversions that more or less converged around the same time. One, what I previously called, I don't wanna convert people anymore, might also be, if you flip it and look at it from the other side of the window, you could say, wait a minute, it's not just Muslims that need to be converted to Jesus.
00:47:41
Speaker
It's Christians that need to be converted to Jesus. So if Christians need to be converted to Jesus, then maybe this whole paradigm is broken. And maybe I just don't want to be a part of this paradigm anymore because I'm surrounded by a bunch of Christians who don't follow Jesus any better than the Muslims are following Jesus.
00:48:00
Speaker
Maybe we should just get rid of any notion of Christianity, Islam. I don't care about that. I don't want to put my focus on that. I want to honor all of it. And I just want to talk about Jesus and the way of Jesus and the ideas of Jesus and the life of Jesus. That's what I want to focus on. I don't care if you're a Muslim. I don't care if you're a Buddhist. I don't care if you're a Christian.
00:48:18
Speaker
that doesn't hold any interest to me anymore or any water for me anymore. You leaving your camp and coming to my camp isn't where it's at because I'm surrounded by people in my camp that I don't think know where it's at. So I think I've been chasing the wrong goal here and I'm going to remove the goal post. That's one way of looking at it.
00:48:38
Speaker
So Christians need to be converted. That was one of my conversions, so to speak. And then the other one is, and this is kind of maybe the fourth major thing, was what you referenced about what would, quote unquote, truly help these people.
00:48:55
Speaker
It was an awakening or an unfolding in my own life to a life beyond the soul and saving the soul. And I became much, much more interested for the very first time in the body.
00:49:11
Speaker
and the economy and the environment and the state and politics and the neighborhood. And I think as I unfolded from just a consumption with the eternal resting place of the soul and started to take a more holistic view of who I was and who the people around me were, whether they were Muslim or Christian, didn't matter anymore, that's where Iraq
00:49:38
Speaker
entered into the picture for the first time. Because it was like, wait, if I broaden the conversation beyond just whose soul is in eternal peril, and I look around my broader regional neighborhood at who's in need, well, Iraq is my neighbor to the south, and Iraqis are in a lot of need right now.
00:49:58
Speaker
And as I'm learning to care about the body, as I'm learning to care about politics and the environment and all these things, I couldn't take Iraq out of my mind anymore. I became much, much more interested in what it would mean to respond as a follower of Jesus in the context of war and human suffering.
00:50:20
Speaker
What year is this when you moved down there? 2006 was when I started making my first kind of forays and then we later moved.
00:50:35
Speaker
That's that was the year that, uh, Saddam was tried and hanged and yeah. So we invaded in 2003. Um, he was captured within, within that year. And then he had a trial and the hanging took place right before we ended up moving. Um, and.
00:50:57
Speaker
that that year six to seven kind of ended up being the height of sectarian conflict, the height of the Civil War, things like that. Oh, when when you moved to northern Iraq, what was what was on the table for? Did you have a goal in mind of what you wanted to do when you got there? Or did you just were you responding to your your kind of like your epiphany of some sorts to say, like, I feel
00:51:28
Speaker
I feel like this is where I need to be and these are the people I need to help given everything that's going on. And did the idea for what you wanted to do for that come after or did you have some semblance of what you were looking to do before you got there? A little bit of both. I didn't understand it at the time I've come to understand it.
00:51:47
Speaker
as a pattern in a lot of people's lives more now in retrospect and having lived through it a number of times and coached people through it. If you're not on video, if you're listening to the audio, I'm holding up my hands kind of in two poles, this kind of notion of like a polar opposites in this spectrum of things that we kind of go through or land on. And what I now understand is that I was leaving one place and I was on my way to another place, ideologically or experientially or whatever.
00:52:18
Speaker
But I was somehow in the middle or maybe just having left. I had just left that missionary world, that missionary life that I had just kind of decided, we had just kind of decided that we weren't doing the conversion thing anymore.
00:52:33
Speaker
But I was a long way from that next community that would embrace us. I was a long way off from anything that I would recognize in my future as my next home. I was just stuck in a no man's land. We were stuck in a no man's land in a lot of ways. So in some ways, we'd had a bit of a falling out with some of the missionary community because we'd stuck a line in the sand that some couldn't embrace.
00:53:00
Speaker
but we didn't have a new home or a new community to embrace us. And so we didn't have any of the things that make for belonging. We didn't have any kind of secular liturgy or rituals or songs to sing or beliefs that we shared as humanitarians. We didn't have like a humanitarian community or anything like that yet. So those early years were confusing.
00:53:27
Speaker
Um, it was still a lot of missionary stuff because that's what I knew, even though I didn't embrace it or understand it in the way that I once did. And it was like play acting.
00:53:39
Speaker
with some humanitarian stuff and some activist stuff and some war analyst opinionated anti-government, anti-war protestor stuff, but I didn't have any coaches or guides or mentors or community much around that either. So it was like wearing dad's clothes and they were a little too big, they didn't fit right, but it took some time and eventually we grew up into it.
00:54:04
Speaker
without ever fully rejecting certain things. I think we just synthesized some things and learned to make something of our own. Was it logistically difficult to move around? I mean, you were in Turkey and then you wanted to go to Iraq. I mean, it's not like you have, you just go rent an apartment so easily. I assume there's a lot of complications moving internationally between countries as an American.
00:54:31
Speaker
It was complicated and it was kind of scary. I mean, not scary, mostly because it was unknown, not scary because we were like trying to thread our way through Al-Qaeda territory or anything like that. It decidedly was not that. But yeah, there was some real unknown and some real fear associated with it all, but in the end it actually worked out.
Impact of War and Humanitarian Challenges
00:54:54
Speaker
early years living in Iraq were difficult in ways that can be hard to appreciate if you weren't there because a lot of the place where we live now and the places around where we live have grown up. And there's amenities and niceties here now that were completely unthinkable 15 years ago. But in those early days, I mean,
00:55:17
Speaker
one hour of electricity a day, maybe three hours if we were lucky of electricity a day at times, no water for three days on end. I mean, that stuff was really taxing on us in a way that we were we grossly underestimated how unprepared we were to live without some of those creature comforts. I feel like a wild time, too. I mean, because that's about when the I mean, it was happening before that, but like that was
00:55:45
Speaker
around the time when the public opinion in the US on Iraq really started to shift and you got a lot of pushback on the idea that
00:55:55
Speaker
You know, there was ever weapons of mass destruction and stuff like that. The, uh, the insurgency went through a real uptick there and you started to see a lot more bombings and troops killed and everything like that. I mean, it, it's really like stepping into the maelstrom in terms of, you know, just the, the peak of the chaos of the war. It seemed like, you know, this is, this has come up in the last year as well. Kind of a.
00:56:25
Speaker
a look back at how this story about my life has been told or how our origin story has been told through the lens of 2021 from people who were not there in 2006, 2007, we were not in the maelstrom of Baghdad. We were not in the maelstrom of the so-called Sunni triangle, but
00:56:54
Speaker
for us at that time, having never lived through anything like it, it was harrowing at times. It was scary at times. There were suicide bombings in our city. I split my time between an otherwise very peaceful city and a very, very contested at war city. So I was often in another city at work
00:57:19
Speaker
where there would be suicide bombings and when the whole city would go on lockdown and where there were kind of ad hoc checkpoints on any random street corner by militants that you didn't always know who they were or what they were associated with. And then on the other side of the country where we worked, in the opposite direction of home, we were in
00:57:41
Speaker
like holdout, restive holdout cities where the kind of predecessor to Al-Qaeda in the region or an offshoot of Al-Qaeda in the region still had a lot of operatives. So we could walk through the streets and there were no tanks in those streets, but you didn't know if the butcher or the kebab guy was a full-blown Al-Qaeda loyalist and you didn't know
00:58:11
Speaker
what they might want to do. You didn't know what they were capable of doing. You didn't know if today was going to be the day where, you know, Al Qaeda gets its wind back and everyone coalesces and some major op goes down. But we wanted to be in those villages too. And, and so it was,
00:58:31
Speaker
And that's now that I've kind of lived through some cycles of this and worked through some cycles of this in various countries, I now understand that's just what war is. War is not only airstrikes in the capital city and nothing else.
00:58:46
Speaker
War is the whole stew of all of it. Sometimes it looks really Sometimes it photographs really well for Instagram and sometimes it's still just scary as hell shit that That is hard to capture the essence of unless you live through it a hundred percent and you know, this is a
00:59:09
Speaker
reading some of the stuff you mentioned, the recent articles and stuff like that. That's one of the things that makes me bristle out a little bit because this is something that's done
00:59:22
Speaker
in a lot of different segments. It's really easy in 2022 to look back at a timeline of events and go, well, you know, there wasn't really that much going on here. You can't quantify uncertainty and fear and different things like that by looking at a timeline on a website, you know, in 15 years in the future. And I feel like the, the urge to downplay.
00:59:49
Speaker
those feelings find on anybody's account is, it's just kind of ridiculous. And it, I don't know, it really, it bugged me to read some of that stuff. Yeah, I think to speak to what you're saying, Jeremy, like that fear, like, I mean, there's obviously plenty of studies done on people who live in war torn areas and the trauma that causes long like you, you live with a baseline of fear, like, even if you're not in a city that's maybe actively occupied, but
01:00:19
Speaker
things are happening to cities around it occasionally just just living adjacent to something like that you anyone who lived in that area at the time like you don't you I imagine you don't leave your door and go for a walk without wondering like having that idea in the back of your mind that anything something could happen
01:00:36
Speaker
And it's there's never been an established at that time, there wasn't a long enough or established time of peace to the point where you can let that that fear or anxiety go where you're just like, you just have to live with that and know that that that's just that's a known risk in this area at this time. And it has an effect on people.
01:00:57
Speaker
and the way that they make decisions and the way that they perceive it, their livelihood, and that perception influences a lot of your decisions. It sounds like what Casey was saying, to look back 15 plus years later and try to decide what someone should have felt and how they should have made decisions based on those feelings when nothing actually ended up happening, or at that time, it seems disingenuous. For you, frustrating.
01:01:27
Speaker
Yeah. And the way you just said it was interesting, I could see someone picking apart what you just said a little bit. And the picking apart is actually part of the story. Because even among those of us who live in these countries, you get a rainbow spectrum of people who choose to approach it different ways. You get the hyper-vigilant and you get the devil may care.
01:01:53
Speaker
And you get the tensions between them, saying, what are you worried about? Nothing has happened here in X many days. Or you get the, why are you not worried?
01:02:05
Speaker
Do you know what we will feel if you get kidnapped or killed? And there are tensions in families. There are tensions in apartment buildings. There are tensions in neighborhoods, in cities, in regions, in countries about how we should think or feel or react to this present reality in light of past experiences and future threats. And that's war. That's war.
01:02:34
Speaker
Why don't we invest more in creating a new business? Well, because X, Y, or Z might happen. Well, welcome to losing a decade of economic development. That's war.
01:02:44
Speaker
Why did you invest in a new business? Well, I was trying to be among the hopeful. I was trying to be among those who helped get us back on our feet. Well, now all our money is gone. Well, welcome to being the hopeful and the naive. This is war. This is the impact and the realities of how we just have to grope our way through together and we hope somehow that
01:03:13
Speaker
Net-net on balance, the hope and the light wins out over the anxiety and the fear. I got to feel like it seems to me that that's got to be part of the frustration too when dealing with, you know, my neighbors, the Midwestern, you know, red-blooded American Republican voter who, you know,
01:03:42
Speaker
advocating against war kind of gets their dander up, you know, but it's, it's, it's easy to look at it as just like, you know, war is wearing a flak jacket, ducking behind a burning car while bullets fly overhead. But in actuality, like, you know, a big part of why you advocate against war is not necessarily just because people are going to die on the front lines. It's because you, you put,
01:04:10
Speaker
the civilian population of an enormous area through years of stress and turmoil and hell. You can't help but look back at the conflicts that the US has been a part of for the past 20 years and go, why? What did we get? What was accomplished that was worth the turmoil that we put these people through? I don't know. That doesn't really relate to anything, I guess.
01:04:40
Speaker
I will say, Sam, you referenced, I think you walked up to the edge of maybe making a reference about how you jumped into a new anti war binary, you know, kind of early on. And that's, that's more or less how I would describe my own experience as well. And I don't live so comfortably in that binary now this many years on as I did
01:05:10
Speaker
when I first had the pluck to name our charity at that time, Preemptive Love Coalition. That was a finger in the eye of the establishment who were, to my sensibilities at that time, warmongers. And I wanted to be peacemonger. I wanted to be a lovemonger, so I was going to create a new coalition.
01:05:34
Speaker
Um, but in truth, the boiling pot that I thought I jumped into called Iraq in 2006, seven, it turns out that was lukewarm water and it, there was a much hotter water for me to get into over the years to come. And there's hotter water yet to get into than even what I've seen. Um, and the more that I experienced.
01:06:04
Speaker
these things and the more that I experienced them in community with other people for whom there was no escape. Because at the end of the day, while I haven't really ever ran away, I've always had the option to run away. And I think that optionality has probably provided a significant cushion for me psychologically that some other people don't have.
01:06:26
Speaker
And the more that I experienced with Iraqis and Syrians and to a lesser degree, maybe Lebanese and some others, the more I have found it difficult to hold on to that clearly black and white binary of anti-war, never war. It's like, is all war hell? Yes, all war is hell. That's black and white, I can say that.
01:06:55
Speaker
But is there never ever a time for missiles? I don't know, man, it's it's gotten to be a little more complicated in my mind than that. You know, I've been listening to I recently like went through a series like a podcast series about like the
01:07:16
Speaker
the invasion of Iraq from two guys who, you know, one guy was in the Navy and one guy was a, uh, he was Navy intelligence. One guy was Navy seal. And, you know, they, they talk about some of the aspects of it going into it. And, uh, you know, just like the absolute horrors and terror of the Bathurst regime under Saddam. I mean, did you, did you hear a lot of that from people on the ground? And cause I mean, they were just, just.
01:07:46
Speaker
I mean, the way that they treated the civilians there, right? There was a significant amount of torture, a significant amount of disappearing of dissidents and people who were even suspected of being anti-Saddam, anti-Bathist, minority, well, I shouldn't say minority, non-Sunni Arab communities, both the Kurds and the Shia, who Shia Arabs were the majority of the population.
01:08:16
Speaker
at that time and today, I mean, they bore the brunt of a lot of that. And while we never lived under that ourselves, a lot of people see the echoes of it and the mimicking or the parroting of it in today's, across today's Iraq.
01:08:42
Speaker
A lot of people feel like there are aspects of Iraq that have found a way to put a democratic veneer on a new kind of totalitarianism like that, or a new kind of autocracy like that, that a lot of the methodologies for silence and control still exist in Iraq today.
01:09:06
Speaker
The lack of freedom of speech, lack of freedom of expression, things like that are still very, very strong and hold a lot of people in check. And also I'll just say that it's worth noting that all the methodologies that Saddam used and earned him the nickname Butcher of Baghdad and the way we vilified him, I mean, all those things still exist in Syria.
01:09:30
Speaker
today, in Russia today, in Iran today. So Saddam and his era were bad, were very, very bad. Somehow we've also made some different calculations as a population, as a voting bloc about who is worthy of our attention and who's worthy of our response and our rescue when it comes to
Growth of Preemptive Love and Entrepreneurial Approach
01:09:56
Speaker
If that was the real motivation and the real crime, then we've got some other questions outstanding about why other people haven't been worthy of our salvation militarily. And maybe the answer is we learned our lesson. Maybe that's the thing that people would rightly say, but it's complicated. It's really complicated. Shout out to the Saudi royal family.
01:10:23
Speaker
Yeah, lead golf tournament.
01:10:28
Speaker
I want to be able to get us up to speed a little bit so that we have time to get into some of the recent challenges you've faced and for the listeners to not totally bury the lead. You are no longer with the organization that you founded, Preemptive Love. But so you moved to Iraq. I know that's where Preemptive Love was born out of from the Cliff Notes version that I feel like I remember from your book is that it
01:10:54
Speaker
Things kind of came together in a way that allowed you to facilitate kind of mobilizing children to get heart surgeries that they needed. And that was kind of like the foundation of it. I don't know if you want to give like just a quick synopsis of like how that started and then how it turned into something bigger than just that, a more humanitarian type organization. Then we'll get into where things ended up.
01:11:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, shortly after moving to Iraq, it was probably within three months or so, if I remember right. I was in a cafe, met this guy who asked me if I could help his cousin get a lifesaving heart surgery. And so over the course of kind of responding to that relationship, we learned that this little girl who needed a lifesaving surgery was not alone. She was one of many.
01:11:41
Speaker
And then the more we peeled back the onion, we would come to find out it was many, many, many, many children across the country who were in need of not only life-saving heart surgeries, but other life-saving surgeries, which seemed by the information we were getting from many doctors across regions, ethnicities, sex, it seemed we were being told that it was connected to the war. And that seemed very plausible.
01:12:06
Speaker
that there was an increase in birth defects because of the weapons that were being used in war. Now I would later come to understand or believe that just the stress of war itself probably had an impact as well in addition to whatever may have been happening with the weapons that were implicated.
01:12:25
Speaker
Yeah, so we started providing life-saving surgeries to kids across Iraq, did that for a number of years, did great success, worked with the Iraqi government, brought in some amazing physicians and nurses from across the world. They ended up kind of taking the professional doctors and nurses, ended up taking a lot of that work on their own. We had been a bit of a broker and a middleman.
01:12:47
Speaker
And we were not so needed once that handoff had occurred. And then right about the time we were trying to figure out, so what's the next move? You know, do we keep working with these doctors and nurses in other places all over the world, which we had begun doing Libya, ended up working in Iran with them and some other places, Ukraine, I think at one point around that time.
01:13:13
Speaker
Then ISIS took over a third of Iraq and a third of Syria and we were thrust back into a very, very acute crisis, a very acute war against a now land controlling military terrorist organization.
01:13:29
Speaker
They committed genocide against a huge number of Yazidi people and Christian and other minority Shia Muslims, kidnapped thousands and thousands of Yazidi girls and women and controlled a huge swath of territory from 2013-14 into 17-18-19 across Syria and Iran. Wow, it was 2013-14 that they came in, huh? It's so crazy.
01:14:00
Speaker
depending on how you tell the story, I mean, started in Iraq, migrated over to Syria, started getting some wins in Syria, then back over to Iraq. Yeah, so around that time with the huge rise of displaced people and refugees kind of occurring on both sides, Syria and Iraq, we pivoted.
01:14:22
Speaker
not away from heart surgeries, but kind of more toward emergency relief services. And then after realizing that we didn't want to just be a kind of food line that people had to come back to day in and day out to get their next dole out, we started developing a bit of a theory of change with regard to job creation and business creation and things like that in the communities we were working in.
01:14:46
Speaker
So in the end, we ended up building on a fairly, I think, holistic and beautiful way of working that kind of went soup to nuts from the emergency needs that you would have to helping you rebuild your home, helping you rebuild a business that might have been destroyed by war, destroyed by an airstrike, blown up by ISIS.
01:15:08
Speaker
And through it all, trying to wrap it all in a kind of reconciliatory framework, a peacemaking framework that to whatever degree might be possible, you know, to hold society together, hold ethnic and religious groups together and not allow those very simple narratives to tear us all apart.
01:15:28
Speaker
I was listening to an interview that you did maybe like a year ago or something like that and we're talking about how, you know, when you started the organization and you were looking around at what.
01:15:39
Speaker
else was being done there and stuff, you know, you guys, I think he used the word, uh, a more of an entrepreneurial approach to, uh, to support and things like that. There was something to do with like, you were selling, you guys were marketing like some shoes that were locally made and can tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. I mean, early on, um,
01:16:03
Speaker
My very first job in Iraq was working for another organization helping them write grants and I was So new like I said, we didn't we were very fresh to the whole humanitarian world. I had these very naive ill-informed ideas of what it took to get money from the system and I I did not have the patience for it and I got very self-righteous about it very fast and
01:16:29
Speaker
And I thought, well, I wrote this great perfect grant proposal and you didn't give our small little organization. This was for another group that I was working for. You didn't give us the money. What's wrong with you? And when I left that organization to start our own thing, I kind of just vowed, I don't want to be a part of that. I don't want to be on these 12 month cycles where you might get crumbs from the table from the US government or the German government or the UN.
01:16:58
Speaker
And that's what kind of gave rise to looking for more entrepreneurial supply, demand, business oriented, or even just even just telling the story of people in need in a different way that might draw a different kind of donor maybe than than the poverty porn that I grew up on about Ethiopia and famine, you know, or something like that poverty porn. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know it's I think what's so I
01:17:30
Speaker
appreciation for your book. But I followed the organization for the years to come after that. On my wall, I got the big love anyway flag. We've ordered countless gifts. You guys would work with selling product made by some of the refugees in your shop. I've appreciated it a lot and I think it's always been a beautiful organization. It's done things differently, which was what
01:17:49
Speaker
I mean I've talked about my
01:17:59
Speaker
It felt it actually felt like me, like many others who had supported along the way, there was a who felt connected to it. It felt like there was a more personal approach to the way that's because my wife and I have also given to other organizations over the time. But it's just like this feels more personal. So when when everything maybe a year ago came out that you were being
01:18:29
Speaker
you were being kind of put on a hiatus because some people had made claims that you were difficult to work. I don't really know the specifics of the claims. What I felt like was that the information from the board was obviously very calculated and written in a particular way, but it was fairly cryptic with these words of like, we want to be open and transparent. We can only do so much if we're doing an open investigation. So they hired this third party company to
01:18:58
Speaker
investigate. I believe it's the same one that the Southern Baptist Convention used. I want to say that's what it was, so it wasn't one that wasn't without any sort of reputation because I saw those accusations go around at first too like, oh this is just some, these are platitudes, blah blah blah blah. You just keep seeing the Facebook posts, which are the worst forms of ideas.
01:19:17
Speaker
But either way, so I guess I'll just stop talking and let you speak to those events that unfolded and then what the public narrative for it was. Yeah. Well, first I'll say that this is my first chance to address it or the first attempt to address any of it in public in kind of a live conversational format beyond
01:19:46
Speaker
the statement that we put out on Instagram, maybe eight months after it all went down. It's been confusing, I'll say that. It's been a very, very disorienting, confusing upside down kind of experience over the last year that this has played out.
01:20:10
Speaker
in no way, shape or form would any of us on the leadership team have ever claimed to be flawless or anything like that. So the idea that someone had
01:20:24
Speaker
anything to say against anyone was a welcomed point of feedback for growth and improvement as a leadership team, as an organization, as an individual. The process, however, of how to deal with that appropriately and the transparency
01:20:49
Speaker
with what actually happened behind closed doors has left a lot of us confused and left a lot of us feeling like things don't add up. So I don't know. I'm happy to answer maybe more specific questions. I don't know. But I think the broad thing that I'll say to just get started in response is
01:21:13
Speaker
We initially saw it as a great opportunity for feedback and growth and didn't, and we fully cooperated with the process and we believed that it was going to provide good insights and catapult us into a new future that was going to be better than the past. And I've got a lot of points of feedback to suggest that
01:21:38
Speaker
the organization, the people of the organization all felt the same way. The criticisms arose from former employees. The current employees were petitioning and were on our side. But yeah, somehow I didn't shake out that way in the end.
01:22:00
Speaker
What's the size of the team? Cause it sounds like the organization grew pretty quickly over the years. Like how many people are we talking about on your, on your team? Yeah. Um, I don't know exact numbers. So for those really keeping score at home, I'm intentionally ball parking here, but it was about 150 people.
01:22:21
Speaker
Wow. Okay. Um, across, if I remember correctly, and I'm not mistaken here, I think 10 or more offices across the world. Um, some of them were obviously very small. Some of them were much bigger, but you know, geographically and logistically, that's about the scope that we had near the end of my time there. So you in a, in a, in a short period of time, you went from being a guy who
01:22:51
Speaker
had a vision for doing something more, you know, more impactful for people on the ground to, for all intents and purposes, being a CEO of a pretty big company. I mean, it's, is that a fair way of characterizing it? It's all relative. I mean, um, we're, we were super small and insignificant compared to a lot of major players out there and we were a lot,
01:23:17
Speaker
bigger and more complicated than we had been three, four, five years prior. And there's no denying that I had stumbled along the way and made some poor errors in judgment and
01:23:31
Speaker
They were all things that I thought were in bounds and they were all things that I thought were par for the course just in anyone's kind of leadership and growth journey, especially given the context that we work in and the dynamics. I wasn't a desk sitting boss ever. I was with our people and I was in the hard places and that
01:23:56
Speaker
that was for a long time really seen as a strength and it attracted a lot of people to the organization, both donors and staff alike. And it endeared a lot of the staff who walked that road together in the trenches were still together in the trenches. But there's a reason that CEOs end up sitting at a desk, you know? It's a lot of logistics. There's desk work to be done and there's
01:24:23
Speaker
there's politicking to be done and there's relational stuff to be done that exists on a bit of a trade-off continuum with being not at the desk, so to speak. And I think it's clear looking back that some of those dynamics clearly got the best of a few relationships on the team, which ended up unwrapping.
01:24:48
Speaker
I, so I'm a career salesman in the past five years, I've kind of moved into a management position, but you know, I have nine sales guys in the field and sales guys are an odd bunch. There's a lot of personalities there, you know, um, but learning to, uh, and continuing to learn how to manage a team of people, you know, a team of, of nine individuals.
01:25:17
Speaker
who are all different, who are motivated by different things. I mean, I've got, I have guys that they need to hear from me on almost a daily basis. And if they don't, they really start to unravel, you know? And then I've got other guys that like, I see them at our warehouse once a week and it's a five minute conversation and they're like, all right, I'm back out at it. And they, and they're gone and they do great, you know? And like that dynamic is.
01:25:44
Speaker
and there's not a lot that prepares you for it. Was learning to manage a group, I mean, was that tough? Especially considering the stakes in what I do and what you were doing at the time are slightly different. Was that hard? How would you describe yourself as a manager?
01:26:11
Speaker
I don't think I've been just one thing as a manager and I think that I've had a few different iterations or versions and I've always tried to be a learner, which for better or worse has meant maybe at times that I was reaching for something
01:26:30
Speaker
that was maybe just out of grasp. And that word you brought up earlier, entrepreneurial, is at the core of who I am. So I'm always reaching for something that's out of grasp, not just in my own personal leadership, but I'm always trying to reach us as a team for something that's just out of our grasp. And I don't know, maybe those dynamics, I would come to believe that the amount of change was just unsettling for some personality types, understandably.
01:27:00
Speaker
I have, it turns out, a very, very, very high tolerance for change and uncertainty. My wife Jessica has a very, very high tolerance for change and uncertainty.
01:27:11
Speaker
necessarily understand the degree to which that was different. We didn't understand the degree to which most of our Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese counterparts were like us because they've been living through change and uncertainty for most of their lives. But if you came to preemptive love from a different job or a different American environment or something like that,
01:27:37
Speaker
That group wasn't necessarily all aligned for some of the style and the pace of change that we were going through at certain times.
Resignation and Organizational Challenges
01:27:45
Speaker
And for those who came from more corporate environments, I can understand why it was very, very different. I'd never worked in a corporate environment, so I didn't even know how to maybe speak that language or walk that walk or fake that kind of modality.
01:28:05
Speaker
But part of what I was trying to do over the last couple of years was turn that corner in some ways. And to my understanding, I did turn the corner in certain ways. And then in other ways, I think we were still turning. But yeah, I mean, we were at that inflection point. And inflection points are inherently dangerous. They are just dangerous fragile times. And we were at an inflection point.
01:28:35
Speaker
something blow up during a season of transition. And that was that. I've kind of seen the company that my company is a part of, the bigger umbrella company is obviously a lot bigger. And I've sort of been here to watch the transition from somewhat of like a
01:28:58
Speaker
You know, a small, small group, good old boy, you know, just a family atmosphere group of people, you know, by, by necessity have to institute some of those corporate policies and things like that. Like, uh, and some of them catch you totally off guard. I mean, I got asked last year, we were having an, you know, an audit of our warehouse procedures, which is not a big part of what we do. And.
01:29:26
Speaker
Uh, the, the auditor said, what is your ladder policy? And I said, I don't know what that means. He's like, well, you have this ladder here. Who maintains the ladder? I'm like, what are we talking about? Well, you gotta have a ladder policy. And like, that's the kind of stuff that like you exist without for so long. You never even know that you need it. And then all of a sudden it's like, we got 150 people working here. Like we have to have some of this stuff etched in stone. We have to have policy and structure.
01:29:55
Speaker
some of it, but not all of it. And part of where the falling out with certain key people would end up happening in my case was, was my resistance to the ladder policy. You know, it was like, cool, let's do the HR policy. I'm totally down for that, but I'm not doing the ladder policy. Like, no, we're trying to save lives and we're trying to be fast and responsive. And I'm not, I'm not going to,
01:30:25
Speaker
have three people that I have to sign out the ladder from before we can use it to reach into the building and get some people out of the fire. So there were those kind of dynamics where like the things, the tools that I had used to get us so far then started running into the wall of a more risk averse.
01:30:49
Speaker
body of people and those same tools weren't getting me through that next challenge. And I lost, ultimately. I lost. I did not either play the game right or come up with a new set of tools fast enough
01:31:06
Speaker
I stood my ground on something I really believed in and it rubbed some decision makers the wrong way and they had the right to dispose of us and they did. The truth is we don't have a lot of details about what happened and that has left us confused and I think it's left some other people who wanted to hear certain things from us confused because I think there's a
01:31:30
Speaker
There's an assumption that we knew everything. There's an assumption that we were read in on, you know, maybe specifics, and then therefore we were supposed to come back out in public and say certain things. But there was a lot that was hidden from us, and we asked specific questions and weren't given answers.
01:31:49
Speaker
So it's made it really difficult for us to give any specifics. It's made it difficult for us to respond to certain things. We asked for help reconciling, and a lot of that was shut down. So it's just left a lot of people, I think, with different expectations than what I think one might have rightly expected out of an organization called Print Love, who
01:32:17
Speaker
had exhibited certain behaviors for years and years on end. That is what's confusing. I'm sorry, Sam, go ahead. Because the way that the final word from the board came down was, and I reread pretty much all of their updates over the past couple of weeks since we last talked, just to refresh my memory and see.
01:32:42
Speaker
I've read a couple of other things that someone else had written that I'll probably bring up in a second here.
01:32:51
Speaker
The board really just left with missteps and wrongdoings. And it was just a very vague response. And of course, you could be here saying, yeah, there were missteps and wrongdoings. Who's without those? So to lack those specifics and to be like, and because of that, they're no longer going to be affiliated with the organization anymore.
01:33:15
Speaker
It felt like a shadow was cast over you and your wife. And when you're trying to run an organization that requires people to fund it and trust it and support it, as soon as there's enough shade, it becomes.
01:33:31
Speaker
problematic. And I don't know if it's a good idea for you to speak to that at all, but I'm putting that opinion out there. And that's how I felt following these stories, rereading these stories. And that's as someone who had been
01:33:46
Speaker
a preemptive love supporter in various ways for the past almost 10 years, it's just like, oh, fuck, I really thought we'd get a little bit more out of that. And it feels like this is just a protection game that it's really a coin flip. You know, people who felt
01:34:06
Speaker
who supported it because they felt the connection to your story, which is what drives things. That's what drives most things. That's what drives human change. That is the sole driver for anything meaningful in somebody's life is connection, relationship, and that
01:34:21
Speaker
building up that meaning.
Perception of Christianity in Middle East
01:34:23
Speaker
So like, mine started with reading your story and following your work since then. You hear you pop up on a podcast and I wanted to know what you had to say about the American church and Christianity and how it's perceived in the Middle East or like, it was just so to have you removed from that.
01:34:39
Speaker
very interesting. I don't want to be someone who's like, well, I guess I don't care about that organization anymore. I don't want to support it. But it makes me even as a supporter and someone who would purchase product and want to for various reasons feel conflicted. And I imagine that's how a lot of people feel. And just looking through the internet and the Facebook pages and
01:35:03
Speaker
Instagram comments. I don't feel alone in those confused feelings and frustrations.
01:35:11
Speaker
Yeah. Well, let me, let me not respond to the corporate side of things. And I'm not trying to get you in any trouble with that side of things, but let me just make a personal statement. Um, personally, the way it was handled was extremely, extremely disorienting and hurtful. Um, and I cannot for the life of me and the oceans of benefit of the doubt that I have always extended.
01:35:40
Speaker
in public and in private to everyone under the sun, including known ISIS fighters and murderers. With all that benefit of the doubt that I have in my heart for everyone, I cannot understand why it needed to be this way. And I cannot, we cannot piece together the comments of the investigators that were made to us over the course of hours and hours of conversations
01:36:09
Speaker
the comments by board hired organizational psychologists that were made to us over the course of weeks and weeks and weeks of meetings.
01:36:21
Speaker
the statements made to us by many, many stakeholders in this conversation, we cannot understand why it needed to go down this way in the end, except that things broke out into the open, into public. And now suddenly, this was no longer about all of those factual statements that had been made to us and became about something else altogether.
01:36:47
Speaker
The personal, that's not a corporate statement to me. It's a personal statement of hurt because for whatever motive, complex, probably stew of motives that ended up being present at the end when a decision had to be made.
01:37:10
Speaker
One thing that is decidedly clear as day, there was no financial wrongdoing. There was no sexual misconduct. We were allowed to be hung out to dry in a way that cast a really hurtful pall over us in those particular regards. And that narrative was not corrected.
01:37:40
Speaker
until the fundraising team themselves made a case that if we don't correct this narrative, no one's gonna give us money anymore with or without Jeremy and Jessica because it looks like the organization itself all the way up to the top is complicit for having let sexual misconduct happen and financial malfeasance happen. And so it was only at the behest of the fundraising team and in the interest of money that
01:38:09
Speaker
the narrative was ever corrected. But who listens to the narrative weeks after the die has been cast? It's been a really hurtful personal journey for us to try and put our head back out over the parapet under this
01:38:30
Speaker
this cloud that people think we did something that was decidedly and proven to be nowhere in the narrative at any point in time. And I don't know. I mean, I guess we're just kind of in this modality now where we hope that time will reveal the truth.
01:38:52
Speaker
And we hope that time will bring some healing to what from our perspective has been 15 years of trying to give our life in service to other people. And I think it's been shocking at times to find how many people are willing to send you out to war and then wash their hands of everything that happens in the life of a person, a family, a team.
01:39:22
Speaker
while doing the work at war. Like, what did you think we were doing? What work were we involved in here? If the biggest critique against us is that we spoke curtly to you at one point, I mean, I probably did. I did. I own that. But I thought we had a mutual understanding that we were
01:39:49
Speaker
doing a certain kind of work and it's kind of intense and like living at that intensity level all the time and then knowing how to throttle it down for a specific conversation like I'm not always the best at that and I'm working on it and I'm in therapy.
Leadership and Public Perception Struggles
01:40:05
Speaker
The stakes are high and I think what kind of irritated me too about the complaints and articles and stuff that I read about it was
01:40:18
Speaker
We spend some time talking about your job as a manager of this big team of people doing really important things that are time sensitive, that have high stakes. But there seem to be a complete and almost willful misunderstanding of the other part of your role, which I mean, you're a figurehead.
01:40:40
Speaker
of an organization that relies on input and participation from people who are not on the front lines, who don't see what's going on.
01:40:49
Speaker
And part of your job is to lobby support for the group and to bring those people in and to give them a bird's eye view of what's happening and make them feel like they're a part of it. Because I mean, you said it, Sam, like it feels personal. That's not by accident. That's deliberate. And you do that. And I think that's probably one of your skills
01:41:14
Speaker
is that you can paint that picture for people who aren't standing in Syria. And I was really put off by how much of the focus of the critique seemed to be on
01:41:29
Speaker
Who's taking credit for this and that and what's going on? And were you standing next to a bombed out building taking fire from a helicopter? Or were you two miles from there? Was your life an immediate danger to that day? Or were you out of the blast radius of the bomb that was going on? And I felt like that just seemed like such a ridiculous
01:41:59
Speaker
It seemed nit-picky and like a willful misunderstanding of what your role is in pushing the company and the organization forward. We're making videos to show people what their money is going towards and why this work's important and it needs to keep happening. I think credit and money
01:42:22
Speaker
Had to play a big role in like the malcontent and stuff that happened afterwards and and you know Well, this project was supposed to cost this much and then it actually cost this much and like painting that is some nefarious thing When you know things go over budget they just do i've done that a lot of times i've taken some heat for it, but it's not Theft it's not stealing or misleading anyone. I mean what?
01:42:48
Speaker
Did you feel any of that pushback like against you when you were in the organization, when you guys were working over the years, like in like, Hey, what, you know, why are you the one on the video? Or why didn't you talk more about so-and-so who actually handed out the food at the event or some, or was that stuff that just kind of like murmurs behind the scenes that didn't make it to you?
01:43:11
Speaker
Can I make a quick point to what you're talking about, Casey, so the listeners understand? There wasn't a lot written about this, but if you do any Google searching for it, so I want to address it specifically because it will come up and people will read it and whatever. So if you do any Google searching about this, you'll find probably two medium articles written by the same person.
01:43:36
Speaker
It's those articles that some of what Casey's talking about came up as the complaints from someone who used to work in the preemptive love organization. So that's where people will know where these criticisms are coming from that Casey's referencing. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot in what you just said.
01:44:00
Speaker
I'm trying to think back to the lines that you just laid out. Credit and money. I mean, a couple of key things here. First of all, the core team
01:44:19
Speaker
that really grew the core like local team of Iraqis, Lebanese, in Syria, people who built the organization over the last number of years, that brain trust. They all left the organization after we were fired. And we have all regrouped and started a new organization together. That's awesome. So for like, I have things I want to say.
01:44:48
Speaker
And I have refutations of all the lies and misdirection that's been put out there, but arguably nothing stands as a greater testament to our life and who we are and what we've done than the fact that those people that we've gotten shot at with and been inside the blast radius with and gone into war zones with and done a lot of other work with that maybe wasn't so Instagrammable.
01:45:14
Speaker
We're all still together. And whatever this was meant to do, and the really negative things that it did in fact accomplish, have not been strong enough to pull apart those of us who actually lived it. And the critique I don't actually believe is being done in good faith. And it's being done by someone from the safety of their living room who didn't live any of this stuff with us.
01:45:40
Speaker
Now, they claim to speak on behalf of a list of people, but the original letter that was submitted to the board of directors does not bear any of these complaints that ended up being put into the public much, much, much, much later. The initial letter doesn't talk about any of that stuff that you just listed out, really. It spells out more interpersonal kinds of dynamics.
01:46:10
Speaker
And these claims that he's put out in public, there's no other signatories. All the list of people who ostensibly were against us and wanted all this to happen or whatever, it's not an open letter that everyone is co-signing on every point that has now
01:46:31
Speaker
been made to look like it was the original campaign. This is not the original campaign. This is post hoc stuff that emerged on the eve of the investigation report being made public to force a public conversation because of what the investigators had actually been telling us in private over the course of weeks and weeks leading up to that point.
01:47:00
Speaker
the the the initial article on medium was put out on the eve of the release of the investigative report yes so that's a helpful timeline oh my god okay but it changed everything i'm putting some stuff together here it changed i mean it's higher temperature in the room behind the scenes
01:47:26
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, I mean, it's, I don't think on Google, which means that's what people are reading first. So it's going to have that impact. Right now is that so
01:47:39
Speaker
I mean, so the investigative report probably didn't find the kind of malfeasance that this person or this couple of people or whatever wanted to see. And so this was their alternative route. They went straight to the public and created enough buzz to cause problems regardless of what the investigation found. And- You don't have to answer that. Yeah, you don't have to answer that.
01:48:06
Speaker
Because the articles that I read, I mean, they cite dozens of employees of comfort. So these dozens of employees are just nameless, faceless references made by people. I believe they exist. I believe we probably hurt the feelings of that many people somewhere along the way. Um, without quoting the investigation, let me say it like this. I.
01:48:34
Speaker
was given to believe at the end of it all that some people involved came to the conclusion that the expectations on us were deemed unreasonable by certain professionals who have been called in to evaluate the situation. I get it. I get it. If you read my book and decided after buying and donating and following that you wanted to come work for me and then I disappointed you.
01:49:04
Speaker
That's a great way to put it. I get it. I get it. I didn't necessarily know that dynamic was happening. And I didn't understand. The cult thing, that's projection. That's because a lot of the people who came to us belonged to this podcast. They were disillusioned with their pastor. They were disillusioned with their parents. They fell out with their faith.
01:49:29
Speaker
They were on the verge of losing hope and felt like everything that they had ever been taught inside of Angelical Christianity was a sham.
01:49:39
Speaker
something emerged that looked a little different. And without realizing it, I think we took on a role in certain people's lives, I don't say everyone, but in certain people's lives, I think we took on a role unwittingly, unknowingly as a new kind of pastor, a new kind of spiritual guide that we didn't ask for. I don't think I cast myself
01:50:05
Speaker
in that role, I didn't use words like we're a family. We were a team. We were a business. And we had stuff to get done. And somewhere along the way, I think those expectations clashed. And we clearly did not live up to expectations. That much is that much I know. If I would have known what some of those expectations were, if some of those expectations would have been told to me in the course of the
01:50:31
Speaker
Investigation maybe there's some things I should apologize for maybe there's some things that we could have had a meaningful conversation about why did you ever think I was going to fulfill that that role of that expectation but a Reconciliatory reparative approach was not undertaken here. So We didn't get some of that insight. They didn't get some of that closure. I think we were all left worse off for it.
01:50:55
Speaker
Yeah, it seems that's the way it appears from my vantage point. Even not getting the opportunity to try to recognize, not that everyone wants that. I mean, maybe someone who works for you doesn't want like their old boss to say sorry. And that's fine, but it's not like the willingness wasn't there. And it's, I don't, I don't know if someone's looking for a public apology. I find public apologies pretty bullshit. So I'm not,
01:51:24
Speaker
I usually find that I like not hearing from you on anything over the past year. I was like, because I check. I was like, I wonder, I get the update from the board. I'm like, I wonder what's going on with Jeremy Courtney. And so I appreciated that. I was like, it wasn't a mudsling campaign to get this sorted out. I just, I don't know. I don't, it's hard to know what anyone's expectations were. And then with the lack of transparency or the, into how this all played out.
01:51:53
Speaker
All we have is speculation, obviously this conversation, but it's, yeah, I'm hearing what you're saying and a lot of that makes sense. That narrative makes sense to me. And I appreciate you being willing to talk to us and share that perspective, especially, I know, like you said, this is their first time doing it. So I imagine you're trying to navigate, you're navigating this in real time.
01:52:21
Speaker
And let me say this, I don't think... I mean, the tell-tale sign for me in all of this that the worm turned or somebody jumped the shark is that nuance went out the window. I mean, the essence of who we are as preemptive love, and I will say are,
01:52:40
Speaker
The essence is about nuance and not jumping to conclusions and not broad brushing people and not broad brushing situations. And that was lacking in the end critique made public and in the numerous statements around our firing. But I want to say unequivocally, I don't think anyone's evil here.
01:53:09
Speaker
I think what happened with us, to us, whatever the appropriate preposition is there, I think it's not altogether on normal. I think it's actually becoming a little more normal. Um, at least I'm, I'm finding that there are other people reaching out to us and I am finding people that I'm being told to reach out to because this thing seems to be happening with a little more frequency right now.
01:53:38
Speaker
The internet is a dangerous place. It can be a beautiful place, and it can be a dangerous place. And I think that the internet got the best of us in this situation. And I don't think anyone is evil. I don't think this was what was intended. And I have evidence and testimony to suggest that I'm not just making that up.
01:54:01
Speaker
But the internet does what the internet does, you know? And then once it does that, then you find people start to double down. And then in the doubling down and the defensiveness, nuance goes further out the window. But where this thing started and these were a combination of hurts that we're trying to have voice on the one hand and fiduciaries who were thrust into a public role of making a decision on the other.
01:54:31
Speaker
And I just, the internet got the best of everyone involved, I think.
01:54:44
Speaker
disturbing to is that it does seem to happen more in nonprofits. Maybe that's just my perception, but it seems like that nonprofits are particularly in charitable organizations to particularly vulnerable to that. And I think for the exact same reasons, I think it's like people have this romanticized idea of what it's going to be to work in this organization and to work with the people that would, and, you know,
01:55:11
Speaker
People just don't live up to those ideas. And I think where people go wrong is like, I think you can contrast the way that these things were handled both from the people who, the accusers and then from you and the way that you guys handle it.
01:55:31
Speaker
I think when you value the work that the organization does and the good that it puts out into the world and stuff above most other things, then you have to consider the fallout and what that's going to do to that organization that you're supposedly advocating for. And I think like the fact that you've said very little about it and you've been very, I mean, even in our conversation today, like you've been
01:55:59
Speaker
I think very protective of preemptive love, even though it's not necessarily like your baby anymore. And I think that shows how much you value what it does. And I don't know, that to me just speaks volumes.
01:56:20
Speaker
When this all came out publicly, I mean, the investigation, I'm sure had to be stressful and that had to be like upsetting and stressful enough, but then to like have this just all of a sudden on the eve of like finally getting some sort of resolution, hopefully.
01:56:36
Speaker
boom, you're in medium and there's blood in the water and the internet mob is like dissecting your videos and stuff, looking for any sort of thing that they can throw, you know, cast aspersions on there. They're trying to build this case is what it looked like. What was your guys's reaction that you and your wife, I mean, did you guys, did you go through a period of like depression? How long did it take for you to kind of
01:57:02
Speaker
Write yourself and get back on your feet and start doing things again. What was that like? Hmm. Thanks for asking that. Um, in many ways, the investigation was not that stressful because our basic posture was number one, everything is data and everything can be learned from. So if we made any mistakes, let's hear it out and learn from it.
01:57:30
Speaker
We're not saying we didn't make any mistakes. We will say unequivocally, we did not do any wrong in the sense of like, wrong, you know, like wrong doing, moral, moral wrongdoing, ethical wrongdoing. We maintain to the board that there was no wrongdoing.
01:57:49
Speaker
defined in that way, but it was never our posture, our position that we didn't make mistakes or we had nothing to learn from this or we had no upgrading that needed to be done. In fact, quite the opposite. We invited the investigation because we believed some of this stuff had been, like I said, these were former employees. And so some of this had been churning for maybe I think as far back as three plus years.
01:58:16
Speaker
in one conversation with the board, we were all like, yeah, let's do an investigation. I mean, maybe this is what we should have done three years ago. Gosh, why didn't we think of it at that time? That would have put this to rest. Yeah, let's do it. Investigation all the way. So we were all in on the investigation.
01:58:33
Speaker
It wasn't stressful because our basic thought was, well, we lived through this. Like, if we said something, then we were there. We said it. We know we said it. And I know what I said, and I know what I didn't say. And I know that I speak with a very, very high degree of nuance.
01:58:55
Speaker
And I rarely say anything that is not words carefully chosen. So yeah, let's get past the innuendo and let's get to the actual forensic investigation. I want to see exactly what I am said to have said, because I can almost guarantee you in every situation, it doesn't mean what is being said to me. If I, you know, whatever it was. So I was, I was eager for that. Then.
01:59:24
Speaker
When we so like two, three months went by and we weren't actually they were investigating by listening to everyone else in the room and then because we're the.
01:59:33
Speaker
the defendants or whatever were the last ones to get met with. So by the time we start meeting with people, investigators and org psychologists and board, the feedback that we were getting, I'll just say was very, very encouraging. Leave it at that. So the investigation wasn't stressful. Now that Wednesday in December or whatever it was, I think it was a Tuesday or Wednesday in December when my phone started blowing up,
02:00:04
Speaker
We were in Texas. We were, we were back from Iraq for the holidays and we were in Texas. And it was like, Hey, he just broke it on the internet and it's bad and it's full of stuff. And the team is like all up in arms, working left and right, up, down all nighters to refute these lies. I'm on, I'm on leave. So I'm not engaged in any of this. The team is mobilizing itself.
02:00:33
Speaker
to refute the lies. The team is putting together line by line deconstructions and refutations. The team is signing petitions. The team is pulling their own video forensic evidence. There's testimonial from those who were there at the blast site saying, no, we were dodging shrapnel. The smoke may look like it was X far away, but shrapnel actually flies through the air at an incredible distance. Maybe you don't know because you've never lived through this. So all that was going on.
02:01:01
Speaker
You know, all that was going on without my involvement. And I was like, I'm not, I'm not getting involved. I'm not, I'm not trying to insert myself into the drama. I'm not going to read anything that's being said online. And that was that I was like, there was a process chosen to adjudicate this. The process was a third party investigation, not the public jury.
02:01:25
Speaker
I submitted myself entirely. We submitted ourselves to the private investigation. I don't need to worry about what the public jury says, because we chose this adjudication path. So I didn't read anything. I didn't read the allegations. I didn't read the news coverage. I didn't read the chatter chatter. I didn't even read some of my text messages, just a few choice people. And that was that. I thought we were going to be OK.
02:01:54
Speaker
because of what I had heard behind the scenes for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks on end from people in authority who had data. So no, it was actually not that bad in a lot of ways, and it was 100% shocking when we showed up to the call on January 4th and we were fired. We were not prepared for that.
02:02:24
Speaker
We had no data and had a lot of data to the contrary that led us to believe that was not going to happen. So that's when it all got hard for us to answer your question about how long it took us to what we go through and whatever bounced back.
02:02:40
Speaker
I wouldn't say that either of us went into depression. I won't speak for Jessica, but it's not a word I've heard her use. We were sad and we were devastated. I mean, we worked our whole life to build the team, build the organization, left behind nearly $20 million in the bank. And that was going to cover
02:03:03
Speaker
months and months and months of work, even if we did have a rocky year ahead because this created some disruption, that was part of my business philosophy, was save because Iraq is not always gonna be in the news. Syria is not always gonna be in the news. Something's gonna happen. We can't go up and to the right forever. And rather than spend stupidly, like some humanitarian organizations do, just to be able to say that they spent it
02:03:33
Speaker
in a certain timeframe on BS programming, we always aim to do the best programming. And as soon as we couldn't do the best programming anymore, we stopped and we looked around and we regrouped until we could do the best programming again. So that led to some budget, you know,
02:03:50
Speaker
vulnerabilities where someone could say we didn't spend X amount of money on this thing or that thing. No, that's probably more or less true, broadly speaking, because we didn't do BS programming. We did legit work that would hold up under the most intense scrutiny. So
02:04:11
Speaker
So we were devastated. I mean, we hit rock bottom. I wouldn't call it depression, but we hit rock bottom. But the conversation pretty quickly turned to like, well, now what? This is who we are. This wasn't a job for us. This is who we are. We're not leaving. This is our life. This is our home. So rebuild. All right, let's go.
Personal Growth and New Beginnings
02:04:34
Speaker
And we got back to work and started rebuilding.
02:04:37
Speaker
think it speaks to, uh, how mentally tough you guys are. Cause if it were me in that scenario, I'd be so fat right now. You look like you've maintained a jaw line. So hats off more than that. I.
02:04:57
Speaker
I my therapist helped me when some of this started brewing back in like May 2021 in the run up to everything being made kind of official. My therapist helped me kind of touch on some patterns in my life that were really working for me. And one of them was
02:05:15
Speaker
like a nightly walk. And I was like, is that a thing? I know it's not working out, it's not running, but I just have been taking these walks and I feel so good. And he's like, yeah, that's a thing. That's a big thing. Keep walking. And walking into the summertime wouldn't work anymore in this 125 degree heat. So then I got a gym membership.
02:05:36
Speaker
And for the first time in my adult life, I started working out and it made all the difference, probably in my mental health throughout the investigation. It's probably a significant part of why it wasn't more difficult. And it's a significant, significant part of what we've thrown ourselves into to stay balanced, you know, since getting tired.
02:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. So you mentioned rebuilding. I see the sign behind you. What's a little bit of time we got left? You've been super generous with your time too, Jeremy. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Well, good for you guys. Thanks. Yeah, so let's talk about what you got going on, what you're building, what your core team went over with you to do next. I'm super excited to hear about it.
02:06:22
Speaker
Yeah. So, um, obviously, I mean, in a team that was as close as we were and as mission driven and ideological as we were, there was some complexity in the aftermath of it all. I mean, the initial knee jerk of everyone, I dare say everyone probably was, uh, well, there were two narratives I heard. One was we got to quit. We got to do a mass walkout right now and we got to force the board's hand. And then the other narrative was.
02:06:52
Speaker
we got to save the organization and we got to preserve Jeremy and Jessica's legacy. Over time, that core team that we worked with wanted to keep working together. And through our conversations and through our, we never stopped hanging out. I mean, we met together the day after we were fired, the day after that, the week after that, the month, you know, we never stopped being together.
02:07:21
Speaker
after we were fired. And throughout those conversations, you know, they would express their confusion. They would express their disillusionment. They would express and all this matters. This isn't talking poorly. They had certain expectations of that were more based in like Iraqi law or Lebanese law, Syrian law, that
02:07:45
Speaker
were just different from what American law allowed to happen. And we'd never discussed it before, because honestly, never, it never come up. We didn't, I don't know, it just never came up. And so no one was on this side, a lot of people didn't even maybe know that we could be fired. Because according to some of their local laws, if you're the founder, I guess, as I understand it, maybe you can't be fired in a situation like that. So, so they started. That's what Saddam thought.
02:08:14
Speaker
a little bit different. But, um, the, the reason it mattered and the reason it, it ended up being a point of interesting insight is because it made them feel for the very first time in all the years working at this organization, it made them feel like they were very, very vulnerable. And like they as Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians were in the hands of Americans living in America,
02:08:44
Speaker
working by American cultural and internet mores, American legal systems, and they'd never felt that before. Even though we were American, we lived here with them. We lived like them.
02:08:56
Speaker
And the acuteness with which they felt foreign in their own organization for the very first time really came to a head. And so as we kept dreaming together about what working, continuing our work together might look like in a new organization, we decided to found something together and decided to adopt some different structures, both in terms of leadership and
02:09:24
Speaker
Communications and how decisions get made and how the board is structured and different things like that. So humanite is our new organization and humanite is founded by refugees and war survivors. We're still an American legal entity. We have Americans on the board, just like any American organization would, but in the past, we never had Iraqis on the board. We have.
02:09:53
Speaker
one of our core founders as an Iraqi is on the board now. And that's starting to kind of open a doorway for new structures and new paths that we never before. Before, even you said it, you were, you said something to the effect of being interested in our story or my story.
02:10:14
Speaker
Well, the story here is a team of refugees and war survivors who decided to leave foreign aid and start their own organization. And it's placed me in a really exciting, interesting role of trying to communicate their thoughts, trying to give perfect English expression
02:10:39
Speaker
both culturally and linguistically and grammatically to what they think and what they have otherwise have a hard time maybe reaching or articulating in English for a Western audience. And in the past, I got to shape talking points largely by myself because I was the founder. Now I'm a co-founder.
02:11:02
Speaker
with refugees and war survivors and I get to play a role that's got a large kind of press secretary role to it in a lot of ways where I'm bringing their thoughts to the fore and I'm helping organize their vision for what an international organization could look like and what leadership models could look like.
02:11:25
Speaker
All the while, we continue to do the work that we're really good at, the work that we've honed our chops on for seven years together in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the front lines. We're still doing all of that, but we've managed to really turn over a new leaf and do it in a way so that humanite is structured a little differently, positioned differently in the marketplace, and I think has a chance to stand for something and inspire something different, led by and founded by refugees and war survivors that
02:11:54
Speaker
that
Humanite's Mission and Future Endeavors
02:11:55
Speaker
the kind of American hero story that prevailed previously, you know, is just not really part of that now. That's really cool. Yeah. That's awesome. I can't wait to, you know, I know you guys just launched. We're recording this on October 1st. Was it a couple of weeks ago? A week or so ago. Yeah. I mean, we've been working quietly behind the scenes all year, but we finally went public with it about a week ago. Yeah.
02:12:23
Speaker
Yeah, I checked out the website. I'm excited to see as it builds, as you put forth more information about some of the work that you're doing on a more specific level and it's, I imagine it, like you said, you've been doing a lot of that already for seven plus years. You all have been involved in.
02:12:43
Speaker
Is there going to be some similarities when you say that work? Is it going to be similarities to working with people in these war-torn areas to help rebuild businesses? Is it going to have that same entrepreneurial aspect or are you guys looking into other directions too at the time? It'll be all of it. We honed a particular style for doing relief and development work that earned the attention of European governments, the UN, and other donors.
02:13:14
Speaker
I won't say we were alone in that. I mean, there were other organizations coming to similar conclusions around the same time, but we believe those conclusions were right that many of us came to around the same time. And so we want to keep preserving everything that was good, that we already built and already kind of made the mistakes to learn from and level up toward.
02:13:36
Speaker
And we're always iterative. We just are entrepreneurial, so we can't help but continue to try and fail and iterate and improve. And so the things that we're doing now, they may not end up being exactly what we're doing five years from now because we're always reaching for improvement.
02:13:55
Speaker
Sure. So you get your website, you guys are on social media, Instagram. Humanite.org is the best place to stay in touch right now. We've also launched a newsletter that is like the news, but for people who don't really like the news very much. It's kind of like about the rise and fall of peace around the world in a style that you actually want to read.
02:14:21
Speaker
So that's called The Peacemaker's Guide to the Galaxy. You can also sign up for that at humanite.org. The Peacemaker's Guide to the Galaxy has been really fun to work with this team on covering kind of a weekly news recap free every Friday in a style that brings it down to earth, sometimes doesn't take it all too seriously and tries to put the really hard stuff
02:14:44
Speaker
in front of us in a way that seems comprehensible and actionable. So we're not just delivering the news and there's never anything that you can do about it. There's sometimes action points and ways to get involved. One, for example, that I'll highlight here because you said you referenced what we're actually doing right now with regard to the protests across Iran right now that are happening.
02:15:13
Speaker
one of our founders was a refugee in Iran as a child and experienced great care at the hands of our Iranian neighbors here. And it's been really important to all of us to try and not only stand with them as we see all over Instagram right now, but to act with them in this kind of
02:15:35
Speaker
singular moment that they're living through. So Humanite is helping to fund an underground network of medical professionals, doctors and nurses in a series of safe houses across Iran who are providing medical care for those injured by state forces right now as they protest the government and protest for their freedoms.
Conclusion and Expressions of Gratitude
02:16:01
Speaker
So that's one of the actionable things that when you
02:16:05
Speaker
When you have a refugee who's a founder who can reach out to other Iranians in the network and And and other people, you know with that kind of story and that kind of connection It's it's been really meaningful for us all over the last week or two to to be able to support our Iranian neighbors in that way That's awesome in very cool
02:16:26
Speaker
Yeah, so go to humanite.org and you can stay up to date there, sign up for the newsletter. Jeremy, thanks for your time, man. You've been so gracious with us and stayed past what we told you and really appreciate your candor and giving us some answers and just some perspective on what happened from the people who went through it. Thanks. Appreciate you guys. Thanks for reaching in with us.
02:16:53
Speaker
All right, everybody. Well, thanks for listening and we will see you next time.