ASM203 Love Anyway with Jeremy Courtney

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you got questions he's got answers even though he may not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't solve them but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face [Music] hi friends welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where you believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response this week we're doing an interview show instead of the usual question and response format because i had a conversation with a man named jeremy courtney who has an incredible story to tell um that i think many of us will relate to because jeremy grew up in texas and grew up uh with an understanding of american exceptionalism and and conservative uh religious ideas uh that that were the framing of his whole life and he moved to the middle east to in his own words love his enemies and in the process realized that the people over there weren't his enemies at all it's a really compelling conversation i hope you enjoy jeremy's story as much as i did and well let's just get right into the interview so the other day i got a text message from my friend propaganda who's a friend of mine is a hip-hop artist and he said that i really needed to talk to somebody named jeremy courtney um about the work he was doing in the middle east and i thought well um prop usually knows what he's talking about so i think i'll try that so um can i think our producers and and and folks connected and now here we find ourselves uh in the magic of remote internet audio connecting so we're we spent about 15 minutes just trying to get this call working so we could record it uh and amidst all of that confusion thanks for sticking with it i'm so pleased to welcome jeremy courtney to ask science mike we're here we're doing it did it so for someone who's not familiar with preemptive love what how's your how's your explanation usually begin man i don't have a canned response uh preemptive love exists to end war and i guess we came to that conclusion because my wife and i and our family we've been living in the middle east for 15 years living in iraq for about 13 of those years we've lived through a number of cycles of war we've expanded our work from iraq into syria and libya and iran at times and even now in mexico and i think yeah we've just pieced together a story and we've seen the patterns of war and we've seen people not be at war and then go to war and then choose to stop being at war again and so we want to bring the lessons we've learned and scale those up globally to create a community of peacemakers around the world who's working together to end war how do you go from living in texas to deciding to move your family to the middle east hmm i mean that's like that isn't a wild wild story yeah so i'm 40 years old which means i had just gotten married and just graduated college when the terror attacks on september 11th went down in 2001 and you know at that point in time given where i'd grown up and who all my influences were i i we as a family set out into the world to be in response to september 11th and what that meant at that time is that we set out as christian missionaries if if muslims are so against us if if they hate our way of life as was the the kind of talking point of the day then we can be a response to that we can go to them and help them see the error of their ways and come to see things more the way we do and then we would all be better off and we would all be safe um looking back on it now i would say it a little differently from my vantage point today though my intentions our intentions were pure i think it's the story's a little more complicated than i understood it at the time and i now believe that we were somehow weaponized into the war on terror and that is somehow what landed us in the middle east um how is that your whole question no like so there's like really polished interviewers in the world and i'm not one of them uh what i do is i actually listen to people talk and then when you get done talking i'm still processing what you said and so i started one of those internet glitches no i didn't have the question for when i began it what i'm saying is in that there's there's an interesting point of revelation there and when you're saying we went with this idea and we would have used this language but now we that experience has in some way been refactored or recontextualized in your whole life and i'm just really curious about that transformation that this program at science mike it's a weird audience in that there's like current christians post-christians and i've never been a christian in pretty equal number listening um and so i would imagine any story of um shifting views centered on matters of faith tends to be pretty interesting to a large group of uh or a large segment of the audience and i feel like a lot of cars are shown there we saw it this way now we see it differently i just wonder if you'd be willing to tell us a little bit about what that transformation looked like well one of the reasons i use the word weaponized is because [Music] we were a part of a particular tradition that i think made us very malleable very pliable material for use in in a kind of state-sponsored religion which i think evangelical christianity largely has been for for most of the history of the united states and um what so our context and our environment and all of our input socially and theologically and culturally meant that i didn't know any muslims um so i was a blank chalkboard on which to be told who are muslims what is islam what is the rest of the world they do in fact hate us et cetera et cetera and the the strength of that from a propagandist standpoint is that you know you can you can write whatever you want on my blank slate the risk on the other hand is that when you successfully launch people like me out into the world and we come to find the world to be less antagonistic more generous more humane than we were told it would be then the house of cards is at risk of falling apart and once i started meeting muslims for the first time once i started knowing them on their own terms i sort of presented them with this coloring book picture that i had of them of islam of their countries and they were like that's your picture of us here give me that eraser let me erase some of what you're bringing to the table and now here give me those crayons and let me color in for you the picture of what it means to be a muslim of what it means to be iraqi of what it means to be whatever let me color it in for you this is this is how i know myself this is what life here is like and once i had a replaced picture i i no longer wanted to dominate these people i no longer wanted to beat them i no longer wanted to win i had a greater sense that we were the same and we were in it together [Music] i think that's part of the like sustaining power of the american story in the american christianity story is like these notions of american exceptionalism keep us relatively ignorant and insulated from other cultural experiences and i'm struck over and over and over how those preconceptions just collapse yeah with any exposure to inclusion and diversity that's right um i've thought so often i read pretty recently though i don't have a citation so this could be wrong that 75 of white americans don't have any non-white friends and that that data point helps me understand the enduring power of some of these us versus them mythologies where american christians are the good and right people seeking to save and protect the world and other people our enemies who are only enemies because they just don't understand how good we are and that's certainly a narrative that survived for years into my adulthood um and it took i mean just like you encounters with actual people to realize my map of navigating the world was really bad i really paused before saying the word bad but bad in its impact on people that my good intentions were often weaponized in a way that made me an active participant in the oppression of other people is that kind of where the pivot in your work kind of from missions work to what seems like more of a humanitarian focus was that kind of transition part of the catalyst yeah it was very much a part of the catalyst um because we went out looking to win we went out kind of with the world view i now would characterize that chapter of my life as everyone is wrong except me you know in parentheticals um and once i started realizing that once i could not sustain that narrative anymore that everyone is wrong um some elements of faith fell away and and certainly some of the fuel in the tank or or all the fuel in the tank for dominating and conquering and winning other people that that fell away we ended up moving into iraq um we had lived in turkey for those initial years and ended up moving into iraq which was at war the u.s had just invaded it was kind of the height of sectarian violence the american interventionist project had gone completely off the rails and we were looking for a way to turn over a new leaf in a lot of ways leave behind that that initial chapter and start afresh and i i think moving into the the wake of a war um moving into kind of a country at war was a way of starting something new starting fresh and um you know some elements were slower to fall away than others i think our our heads and hearts were out a little bit ahead of other parts of our personal development on these matters but but yeah we moved into iraq looking to turn over a new leaf and uh didn't have a hard time finding people to befriend people who welcomed us and befriended us and communities in need that we could get to work helping each other hmm i know what i'm gonna ask i'm trying to figure out how to ask it maybe just right on the nose is the way to go how do you navigate being a white american in the middle east i mean iraq and syria to me are kind of the epicenter of no seriously we're not an empire american foreign policy and then the response to the chaos that we have such a major part in creating like a white saviorism in response yeah um i'm curious like since you're actually there and the things i read about the news are just like part of your daily life how you navigate that tension yeah a couple things i think it helps on a level that i'd already lived through a cycle of white saviorism before landing in iraq i'd already seen the futility of some of that the particular lens that i'd already come to the end of the road on was was the the religious version of that but i hadn't to be fair i hadn't tried the humanitarian version of it yet and i still think i had some things to unlearn but but i at least seen in general the futility of white saviorism you know at a macro level once the other thing i would say is [Music] as it relates to the united states at least i think syrians and iraqis and iranians and turks i have often found to be better at distinguishing between the brand of america the government or administration regime of america at any one time and the and the american people um they do a better job at that i think than a lot of americans do when we look at a russia or china or iraq like we are more susceptible because of what you've already named our lack of exposure to the world our our drunkenness on our own narrative and point of view our dominant position in global society we are more prone to look at things in a flat way kind of monolithically whereas when you come from a minority position globally and you've had some more experiences and you have to live at peace with your neighbors i think you you develop a finer sensibility for distinguishing between governments and their people and i i think then therefore we we were just welcomed as americans not as the american empire embodied wow certainly there were people who were suspicious of us and for good reason we met over and over and over to this day genuine victims who have real grievances against the american military or american allies in the region or whatever but [Music] but i i would still say that even those victims in most cases even those with grievances have have found a way to sit with us in the pain and ultimately welcome us into their lives [Music] in that welcoming in people's lives and with a mission of ending war which is like so laudable and also seems completely impossible right like what would i want more than the end of all war gosh boy that's hard to even imagine right like i'm a i'm not what you'd call a hawk right um but i mean that's it it seems from my naive position we could sooner reverse climate change than end war so i mean do you see where i'm going this like what yeah what are you doing monday tuesday wednesday thursday it's such a big mission it's almost impossible to imagine what you could do what step two is out of those twelve thousand steps um like what how do how do you manifest that mission in relationship with people today yeah so i think from the jump we've wanted to end war i mean we've got military language embedded in our name we are the preemptive love coalition so we've been circling around some of this the essence of it for whatever we're at 13 some years now but i don't think we had the guts to say i didn't have the guts to say at a top level we exist to end war until this last year and i think part of what's finally given me the guts to say it to name it and to lean into it and claim it is what we've lived through in those intervening 12 13 years i've lived through enough cycles now i've seen how men and women make war and i've come to the conclusion that if men and women can make war then men and women can stop and that's not just theory i've actually seen us stop i've lived through the cycles where the bombing actually stops the ceasefires the the various stages of coming back together and rebuilding society together and um we've got our own internal data but you can also look at global data that tells us that violence is down when when we set our minds to something and when we work on our personal development and we we improve economic markers and things like that war and violence numbers are way down globally and i i don't think this is just a pipe dream we don't war over exactly the same things that we used to war over or at least we don't do it on the scale that we used to and so um we might very well see new points of contention over which we were introduced into our lives in the coming decades but there's a lot of reason to believe that we can stop killing each other right now and i don't think the end of war has to require full-blown harmony and peace and kumbaya sing-alongs everywhere it it could merely just mean cease-fires just the conclusion that to do harm to each other ultimately is going to hurt my kids more than to just let some of the status quo play out a little bit so um that's one response to be a little more on the nose you asked what monday tuesday and wednesday look like we treat violence like a disease and we're not the only ones who relate to violence epidemiologically there are others out there who see this connection but we the world health organization has a model that we all kind of know intuitively as to how we stop the spread of disease you you have to respond fast to kind of patient zero that's step one step two is you work to shore up the vulnerable so we we give vaccinations to kids we we sequester more vulnerable populations in times of outbreak whatever and then step three is we change the behaviors that lead to the spread of disease that's why we learn to wear condoms and we wash our hands and things like that we changed our behaviors and that stops the spread of disease and we apply that to violence we respond fast on the front lines right when violence breaks out we try to get there why bombs are still falling or snipers are still sniping because how you show up or don't show up in times of violence has a profound impact on whether it spreads or whether we can stop the spread early on and then at that step two phase we work to protect the vulnerable and we see a lot of that through the lens of jobs because economic markers are a huge indicator of whether there's a huge correlation between economics and violence and when we can provide jobs for people both at an individual level and a community national level it there are lessons to be learned and there are decreases in violence that can be had by economic improvement it protects young men for example from being recruited into violence when they have the jobs that they need to care for their family so our jobs work is a big part of how we shore up the vulnerable and stop the spread of violence and then our community work our third step is how we change the ideas that lead to violence and that's a lot of inner work it's a lot of inter interpersonal work how do we see the other how do we relate to ourselves how do we wield our identities faith politics national ethnic so those are our three main things that we spend the week doing week in week out ask science mike would be impossible without my friends at betterhelp and betterhelp is an online counseling service that lets you find a therapist really easily i've been using betterhelp for months now and i love the way that i can talk to my therapist from the comfort of my own home instead of having to drive across town and try to find someone and all the things that hold people back uh from usually finding a good therapist which also is really cool because uh betterhelp will actually find a therapist for you you go to betterhelp.com sciencemike and from that url you fill out a brief questionnaire and then they'll match you with a therapist that you're going to love and if you don't you can find a new therapist at any time for no additional cost any reason at all they'll find someone new for you these are a licensed therapist these are actual real therapists who are trained and certified in all kinds of mental health challenges and best of all it's affordable and protects your privacy you can get started today just by going to betterhelp.com sciencemike where you'll not only be able to finish the questionnaire but get 10 percent off your first month's service with better help [Music] i wasn't fast enough to write it down but uh something you said right up front there about the way we respond to violence and the way we show up to violence as it's happening so impacts the spread of violence yeah i have a talk that i give sometimes called the science of peacemaking which kind of digs into the anthropological and sociological phenomena that create war in primates especially humans um only two warring species of primate that's chimpanzees and humans and of the two we are the most war ready so chimps have a greater wisdom about war making that homo sapiens do and um part of where i take that talk is the notion that in the data the most effective the most cost-effective way of dealing with war is to prevent it through economic empowerment um and that it's not close [Laughter] yeah preemptively economically empowering people is wildly more cost effective than industrial scale conflict forget human cost which is massive i mean let like let's assume for a second you don't actually have some belief in the value of human life at all and you're a total capitalist and all you care about is money um these conflicts are wildly expensive in capital and in human life uh and i guess all i'm saying is a very long and roundabout way is thank you for showing me something i've read about in research actually happening in the world like i am really encouraged right now [Music] because i'm always frustrated that we have all this wonderful information that we so rarely put into practice yeah um and that's probably pretty awkward like you're just talking to a guy you've never talked to before um but i have a tear rolling down my cheek right now because the notion that you've lived these lessons in your life where you went from othering people to seeing them from rescuing to being with him and ultimately understanding that the power of aid and intervention is in a sustainable empowerment of local populations these are really good lessons for all of us to learn and they're not they're not just about uh you know those people over there i think that's the that's been i guess among the more painful and then therefore profound realizations is this is not just a this isn't a iraq problem this isn't a syria problem alone this is this is the stuff that's common to all of us wherever we live and it's still salient here in the united states and on the korean peninsula and you know globally well we want to build a wall instead of support a mexican economy we want to punitively punish people for selling drugs instead of addressing the socioeconomic factors that create the demand for drugs uh we want to invest in larger police forces instead of investing in actual american citizens to be economically empowered um that this this backward way of thinking is so common in american society almost uniquely common um but not as you say it's happening all over the world in different regimes and different control systems and structures um so often our common sense approach is wrong and yet like you know and you've taught others on before when your highest mode of development is a kind of tribalistic antagonistic us versus them way of seeing the world that is the most sensible response you you literally do not have a category for responding differently and i and we don't get to higher levels of personal and societal development if we stay surrounded by all the sameness that that tribalism encircles around us so it becomes a bit of a snake eating its tail kind of dynamic where even if we in theory want to be more compassionate or want to live up to our ideals or want to break out the the question that we're trying to solve in that third piece that i talked about changing the ideas that lead to war is how do we help more and more and more and more of us have those empathic responses where people humbly offer to take our picture that we've created of them do a little bit of erasing do a little bit of coloring in of their own life and experiences and then gently hand it back to us so that we can learn the lessons from their life that we need to learn to understand how these policies and theologies and whatever so negatively in fact impact their lived experience um while we were working out the audio stuff on this call this wasn't planned i literally hopped on facebook which i never do and it's almost creepy how uncanny the information these machines show us is some time because it popped up in my facebook feed someone sharing an article of yours that you'd written um on preemptive love um reporting on failure do you remember the piece in question that was really powerful for me to read you know two minutes before we started our conversation um where you kind of lean into the challenges of doing important work and the fear we have about failing and people finding out about us failing and um you even talked about if you don't mind i want to read the quote of an individual who after you were doing a food distribution where where cans of food were damaged in transit and then rotted in in transit and an individual came up to you and said you come here you give us rotten food you take our pictures and you leave and the reason i say that obviously is not because i want to attack you you printed it but because when we try to do work of significance it doesn't happen in a vacuum it happens in a system where many people's primary motive is just fundraising many people's primary motive is just good posturing on social media um the the the trope of white people taking pictures with dark-skinned children um but here you name that and name a process and i just wonder if you would talk a little bit about how you came to see sharing failure as a value instead of a liability yeah yeah this is kind of a standing column that we do so to speak where when it feels appropriate when it's at a you know a significant enough level we're not sharing every internal conversation that goes a little awry or whatever but you know when there when there are things of foregoing communal concern that we think we need to own up to that would impact trust in us whether that's with our donors or whether that's with the communities that we serve then we have this standing column that we use called failure report that i i speak to things that we've screwed up and how we're learning from them and how we're trying to make it right and i i mean one way of saying it is that it's just a lot of organizational and leadership energy goes into not being found out that sucks up all kinds of creative energy and forces that could be used for good and so we just we learned early on so i've glossed over this part of our story but early on in iraq we started by providing life-saving heart surgeries to children and so we were only working with maybe 10 or 20 children in an entire year and we would bring our donors along the journey will you fund so-and-so's heart surgery yes we will great now walk with us for the next three months as we get little muhammad ready for surgery take him to surgery oh he came out of surgery now he's in the icu and oh my gosh muhammad died there's there's no way to cover that up if you've brought a whole community of people along with some individual child's story you can't just move on to the next child you have to tell the truth about what's happened and so i think it was in our dna from from early on to tell hard truths and break our own hearts and break other people's hearts in pursuit of trying to save lives and i think as our work morphed into kind of the civil war and isis era and you know we were doing things on on scales of like hundreds of thousands of people at a time helping hundreds of thousands of people we just have done our best to keep that that ethos intact that when things go wrong or they just don't turn out the way we hope we're going to tell the truth about it and rather than cover it up or try and polish it up or spin it we just think we can help everyone rise together and be better off for telling the truth and then we we don't spend as much negative energy trying to try to do the spin thing and we can use that energy for the next positive thing has that been your experience that being more honest about when things have gone wrong that you do find that energy is freed up yeah and i think people are so smart like by this point in supporting public service organizations and charities and ngos like um people are savvy enough to know that it couldn't possibly all go well all the time i don't think anyone actually has that expectation of us and so there's an interesting ironically there's a wide open space for charities and nonprofits to tell these failure report stories and that's part of what we started seeing early on is like we actually could play a leadership role here this isn't just for us in our community this could actually set a standard that maybe more organizations would take up and the more that we tell the truth the more we increase trust writ large in organizations that are daring to tell the truth because as an industry there's still a lot of people who don't trust non-profits very much and there's still a lot of skepticism or suspicion and that means there's just this wide open space to to be more honest and it actually rings truer to people than the shiny instagram accounts alone do so for people who are listening right now who are frustrated with war and the impacts of war which i i can just go ahead and tell you is a vast majority of this audience who are frustrated because they don't know what to do they don't know how to help they see what's happening on in the news cycle they look at syria and they're just wrecked or just wrecked by what their own country is involved in doing how would you advise them to support people on the front lines and and what could they do to get involved yeah i'll i'll say that um there is something about distance from a problem that can lead us in one of two directions if we're not proximate to the problem then we can just be ignorant to it and it cannot cause us any great concern we know that sort of ignorance meets apathy whatever but the another thing about distance is also true and that is that distance can give us a sense of impotence and lack of agency and we we have empathy but we lack agency and it can lead us to really dark sad disgruntled places because we're full up with empathy for other people but we just don't feel like we have any role to play and i'll say that's true of me as well even though i've got a whole organization that i can help leverage into a situation or whatever even me i feel more hopeless about syria more hopeless about iraq when i am far from them more hopeless about our work in juarez when i'm far from it than i do when i'm in it with my friends with my people and i think a lot of it just comes down to forgetting forgetting the agency that that we have the agency that i have even i i can forget it at times when i'm far away and so i guess my message would be to remember that we we do each individually matter because in the very least we matter collectively we matter collectively in how we vote we matter collectively and how we give we matter collectively in how we speak about our neighbors and i think over these 15 years of being abroad i still live in iraq today over these 15 years i am now able to piece together a story um that in my in my view of the world now how we talk about each other in alabama or southern california has direct correlation to who which one of my neighbors gets a bomb dropped in their front yard and so i think our words about mexicans actually have profound impact on syrians our our words about the lgbtq community have profound impact on iraqis our words about muslims have profound impact on mexicans it's all interconnected these things don't happen in isolation from one another and so i think we can take up our collective sense of agency and responsibility that that when we speak well and bring nuance and compassion to one side of the conversation we are we're hopefully helping impact in multiple directions multiple vectors as well to be more on the nose i would say we are a community of peacemakers with you doing this work and and we can't do it without you so i would urge and invite all of our friends listening to join us in this work our work is really sustained by a community of monthly donors who at one dollar a month or one thousand dollars a month help make this work go round and while we accept one-off gifts and they help us tremendously the monthly stuff really starts allowing us to look six months in advance or 12 months in advance and go oh wow this community is going to be with us 12 months from now well we can really start biting off some bigger ideas and taking some bigger moon shots if if we have a community this large that's decided to be monthly donors with us then we can do this much more yeah i mean i've i'm not a non-profit i'm a guy with a podcast but i certainly found the difference between monthly support and people who just send a thing once is it's night and day um it lets you plan for the future and it lets you know how much to budget over time in a way that you can't with with one times a one-offs and um that really is valuable work yeah exactly um if people are like great i'm in where do they go to to join you uh with a monthly gift so i'll just repeat all the information because i know it can be hard to remember all this my name is jeremy courtney ceo founder of preemptive love coalition and one of our main like taglines that you can find us via out in the wild is love anyway and so i'll say loveanyway.com is one of the easiest maybe phrases to remember to find your way to us loveanyway.com but you can find it through googling the organization name or any of that as well jeremy i'm so sorry i have a marketing background uh that's where i came from and so i'm always like communicate a clear call to action [Music] that's what the second question literally was like is there a specific url that we can have without the context of anything else so sorry about that that's weird so did i did i get there you did you absolutely did uh but i've noticed like a really good thing when i'm on shows is people don't expect me to be so on the nose with it like people are busy right like someone is listening yeah they're driving they have at most seven chunks of working memory so i'm always like give them let's let me ask a question where there is literally one chunk of information to carry and that thing dear listener is loveanyway.com that's your gateway to being involved in everything that jeremy just talked about that's right is there anything else you want to tell everybody listening my new book came out a couple weeks ago and i'm super proud of it would love to get that into as many of your hands as possible i think it it uh stands as a uh invitation of tries to cast a vision into this more beautiful world that i think a lot of us are reaching for but maybe we just haven't we haven't seen uh what it looks like amidst some of the world's worst pain and so i'm trying to walk us through some of the harder things and maybe a lot of us live within our daily life to prove what's possible to demonstrate what's possible and to kind of see the idea that if this stuff works in the midst of iraq and syria and some of the world's worst conflicts then i deeply believe that it works wherever you live as well okay and my copy's on the way and i think it's here tomorrow so i'm looking forward to checking it out myself i just grabbed a copy on amazon yesterday so thank you thanks for taking the time today and thanks for i don't know how to say this thanks for willing to grow and change and talk about that publicly i think so often in the culture many of us grew up in there's a really performative aspect there's a need to look like we have it together and we have it figured out and to not admit the ways in which our our lifestyle might have been fulfilling for us but cause challenges for other people and jeremy i'm really inspired by the openness in which you not only refuse to be disheartened and give up and do important work but as you do so to be a committed learner and a transparent grower i've been really inspired by our conversation today thanks man i appreciate that means a lot thank you i'd like to thank my patrons on patreon who make ask science mike possible andrew golucky for pre-production greg nordine for production and sound design caitlin hermstad for production print cradle for management services thanks for listening everyone i can't wait to talk with you next week