Hey friends, welcome to another episode of that sounds fun. I'm your host Annie F. Downs.

So happy to be here with you today. The music in the background is from our good buddy,

Mr. Drew Holcomb. We are finishing up getting to hear his stuff every week. I'm so, so grateful for him.

And that new album, Dragon's Make sure you have a copy.

Today on the show is one of my dear, dear friends. Someone I respect so much. Jeremy Courtney

is in charge of Frampton Love. You probably heard of it doing relief work all across the middle

east. His new book Love Anyways is just, it's excellent. And I think you're going to love it and

you are going to enjoy today's conversation. So here is my good friend, Jeremy Courtney.

We just jumped into a quick Instagram live because I wanted to, I wanted people to kind of hear from

you today first hand of what's going on in Syria. But tell me the bigger story, I guess, here of,

this is a loaded question. Are you ready? Why is the middle east so complicated?

Why are any of us so complicated? Well, I mean, like this isn't happening at the border between

Scotland and England. Not this century. Oh, that's a good point. But it did. Yeah, you're right.

So when empires fall and new realities try to emerge, it's messy. Birth is messy. Yeah. And

death is messy. And that's essentially what we're still living through. The fall of the Ottoman Empire,

the lines that were drawn in the sand at the end of World War One. You know, a couple decades of

colonialism that took place after that. If you look throughout the Middle East in kind of the

20th century, you get a number of places across North Africa in the Middle East where we helped

support strong men who led for 20, 30, 40 years. And now we're kind of just coming out of that era

and a whole new, more democratic, more informed thing is trying to emerge.

So big buckets, you've got Ottoman Empire. Then coming out of that, you've got kind of a colonial

occupational sort of propping up the strong man. And is this like 1800s?

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