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Jeff Frazier
Foreign. Okay, we're doing it. Finally. Finally, we're doing it. Season three, it's time. Thank you, everybody for being patient during our long break. I'm sorry it took a while. We are, as you know, in the midst of blending our family with our adoptive children. And the summer has been. Been very busy and fascinating and joyous and all the superlatives, but most importantly, it's been busy. So thank you very much for your patience and waiting for me to get to season three. I've gotten outreach from many of you who have been patiently yet eagerly awaiting our kickoff because you have been wonderfully wanting go and do action items so that you could contribute to making progress down in Haiti. And I am honored by those requests and excited and invigorated by those requests. And so I'm excited to get started on season three. Here we go. This is going to be absolutely that call to action. And I want to honor each of you for coming back, for having made it through season two and coming out the other side ready to. To act. That says a lot about you. You know, most media these days seems to be more about escapism, getting away from hard things. Right. And this media, this podcast or YouTube channel, whatever you're watching this on, is kind of the opposite of that. It's. It's not escapism. It's like rescuism. Right? It's. It's finding people who are in need of rescue and then taking on the responsibility of figuring out how to res. Come to their rescue. Right. And that's much heavier. And, and you are the people that didn't look away. And you've continued to consume this content, hopefully, in an effort to become more well equipped to address these issues and come to the rescue of the people and need the. In this case, the captives being held in Haiti by whether it be the ruthless gangs or the ravages of critical poverty. So thank you. Thank you. I salute you and want to honor your time by educating you as best I can on how to. To go forward with wisdom and. And power. In order to do that, I really want to share a lot learnings that I've had in my years in Haiti. I don't know it all, but I want you to at least know what I know moving forward. Okay. So. So in order to do that, I want to take you back to when I began doing work In Haiti, circa 2018, I started going down specifically around the cause of child exploitation. So trying to address child sex trafficking, I began to quickly realize how big the issue was. In Haiti, while we were finding children being trafficked by the tens and you know, let's say dozens, there were hundreds of thousands of children in Haiti who had been abandoned. Many of those were being exploited, whether it was for their labor or for sex acts. But the massive issue of child abandonment and thus exploitation was just bewildering. Estimates are somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 kids in Haiti. Haiti that are abandoned. So why such a broad range? I think that's because the definitions of abandonment can vary dramatically. For example, I often tell this story. I, I call him Pierre. I don't remember his real name, but we'll call it the Pierre story. We were doing a agroforestry pro. Excuse me, agroforestry project along the border of Haiti and the doctor, that area is where these kids are particularly susceptible to sex trafficking. Recruitment. The buscom, the recruiters will come across the border from the doctor and bring them back to the doctor to be trafficked to western visitors that it's much more attractive to travel as a westerner to the doctor versus Haiti. So they'll consume on the doctor side, but the supply comes from the Haiti side. So we were doing these projects right on the border to help those communities that were susceptible to recruitment to have sufficient food. And in order to do that, we were planting thousands and thousands of fruit trees, right? That's called agroforestry, so they could have food in their neighborhoods. Well, I remember one day we were building, building that nursery or doing some sort of work at that nursery where we were going to grow all of those trees. And there were teenage boys around who wanted work for the day, right? And one of those boys was really young. He looked like he was about 10, maybe 9 years old. And I approached him and wanted to understand his story. And he had walked probably about 60 miles from the, the town where he was from. We were on the eastern side of Haiti and he was from almost the full west. Inside it's probably about 60 miles that he had walked looking for work, right? So imagine a 10 year old, 9 year old that, you know, that is so desperate for food that he's willing to walk 60 miles away from his home just to find it. Right. And he's been sleeping outside that whole time, right. As he migrated. I don't remember how long he had been in that area looking for work, but he was clearly emaciated and his clothes fallen off, you know, that, that whole deal. So absolutely horrible. And so he, he would be an ex. Example of an abandoned child. He has presumably parents somewhere, but they couldn't take care of him. They weren't doing him any good. He was only starving. Right? That's the level of poverty. You'll hear me use the term critical poverty. The international community typically only quantifies and acknowledges extreme poverty, which I think they determine is people who survive on a dollar a day or less. But that, to me, that's a useless distinction because I'm trying to address people who are starving, meaning they're so poor that they can't feed themselves enough to. Right. They're going to eventually die if they don't get more food than they're currently getting. Right. And that term we, we at STIMPAC calls critical poverty. So this young man is obviously suffering from critical poverty, and so he's gone out in. In search of food. So. So that is an abandoned child in some definitions and not in others. So that's why the, the big range. So somewhere between 200, 000 and 800, 000 children in Haiti that are abandoned, that's a massive amount of street kids. And so to put that in perspective, you of the population in Haiti, I think they're at like 11 million people in all of Haiti. And so, you know, in the U.S. i think they're. We're at somewhere around 370 million people. So you're looking at somewhere between 6 and 20 million abandoned kids, right? If it was the same ratio as in Haiti. So imagine if there's 6 million abandoned kids in the US we'd be flipping out, right? That's the situation. That's how dire it is in Haiti. And so I wanted to rescue all of these kids, right? I wanted to lift them out of the situation that they're in. And you learn pretty quick that in order to rescue any of them, you really got to lift this whole country. And I wanted to figure out why was this country so impoverished that it's. It so many of its population are suffering from this critical poverty. So I started to read all the books and get my hands on whatever I could to understand Haiti's plight. It was talking to professors and reading essays and watching the documentaries and gleaning whatever information I could as best I could, because I wanted to really get it. And it was absolutely eye opening, to say the least. I then started experimenting as I looked around the globe and would find things that were working in other countries. I used to really enjoy the analogy of how Walmart uses its thousands of stores around the world to pilot things. And then if it works, you Use it in the rest of the stores around the world. And I want to do that with development work. When I say development work, I'm referring to the work of lifting developing nations. In my past life, and as a tech guy, development meant programming, right? Engineering is building tech, so something very different. And then I invest in real estate. So development means something else there. But in this context, development work is code for building developing nations. Or some people would say third world nations. Most people in the space don't say third world anymore. It's. It's developing nations. So learning what the best practices were in development work was fascinating journey for me. And so then we would, I would, I would spot something that had worked somewhere else on the globe and then try to replicate that in Haiti and see what our impact was and experiment with that agroforestry project to which I just referred a moment ago is an example of one of those things. And in that process I started to see my own screw ups, right? One of the things that we did really early on was, I think I've told this story to you guys before. I'll make it quick. We took on an orphanage. We wanted to support a particular orphanage that had been run down and underfunded and a number of other things. And so the first thing we asked them is, hey, what do you need? And they said, we need shoes for the kids to go to school. They're being made fun of when they go to school because all the kids know that they're orphans. And I would love for them to have decent shoes so they don't get mocked. Great, pull on my heartstrings. I want to be Santa Claus. And so I basically buy out all of the Walmarts in our area in South Florida, cleared out four or five Walmarts of all of their black school age shoes. It was a little leather kind of loafer looking shoe. And we put them in like six bags of luggage, stuffed them in, vacuum sealed them and shipped them down there. I took them myself and. And we show up with all these shoes to the orphanage, given to the kids. They're thrilled. The orphanage director, thrilled, thank you very much. And then I had the idea to ask them if we had not brought these shoes down from the U.S. where would you have gotten them? And they motioned down the street to a street side vendor, a tabletop vendor who I estimated probably sold about 8 or $9,000 worth of shoes in a year, right. By some rough estimates. And I had just brought somewhere on the order of two or three thousand dollars worth of shoes down and essentially decimated this guy's sales. Right. If his margins were 30%, I just ruined that margin by bringing these shoes down. Right. And so I'm now killing the local economy. And my next trip was to bring a whole bunch of medicines from the US and the local pharmacist, you guessed it, little tabletop pharmacist with, you know, 30 or 40 different medicines on his tabletop. I was going to wreck him too. And you can see that kind of damage, how that, that can damage a local economy. Right. And so time and time again, you get these non profits like myself going down there and wrecking this country because there's thousands of non profits down there, NGOs as, as they're known. So you'll hear NGO means non governmental organization. You'll hear me use that term. It's international code for nonprofit. So we would start to see all of these missteps by governmental organizations as well as NGOs, and we wanted to rectify that and share our learnings. And so at Stimpak, we started to think maybe our, that's our role is to demonstrate best practices to the thousands of NGOs that are operating in Haiti. Great. So that's a pretty easy process. You contact an NGO and say, hey, we've got these best practices. We want to pitch them to you just so that you can know what we've learned and maybe that'll help you. Great. And people were receptive to that. I also contacted a lot of other NGOs that were doing really good work and having success and asked them to share their best practices with us. And that was really effective. Great. But then I started to realize that what we were doing was not particularly scalable. Meaning if I really want to lift this whole country and I want to lift them right now. Right. I don't want to wait 20 years for the impact of my efforts because I could see the direction we were headed and it, it was going to be an endless effort. It was not scalable. I could not solve the whole country by just talking to a bunch of NGOs and giving them best practices. I wasn't going to do it. I started to look at budgets of governmental organizations versus the budgets of non governmental organizations. You start to see that it's an 80 20s. You know, you've got somewhere around 100 to $200 million a year coming in through NGOs, which sounds like a lot, but the governmental money is close to $500 million a year on average. And it spikes a lot, but give or take, it's $500 million a year, just budgets alone. 80% of the funds flowing in are coming from governmental organizations. So maybe it makes more sense for Stimpact to be steering and trying to influence the way the international dollars are spent, and not only the international aid dollars. But now I started to run, eventually I began to run into policy issues. I'll give you an example of one. The agriculture in Haiti has been decimated over the past, say, 20 years, certainly post quake. I'll give you an example. When the earthquake, big earthquake happen, 2010, millions and millions of pounds of free rice flowed into the country because people were starving. Right. And that seems like the right thing to do is to bring in free food. And maybe it was, but the impact of that was that all of the rice farmers in Haiti weren't able to sell their rice yet. They have piles and piles of rice that now have $0 value or near, near $0 value, because they can just get the free American rice that's coming in, in. And then now those rice growers don't have the money to reseed. And so you essentially, that's an oversimplification, but you're essentially decimating the rice growers. And then rice in the US on the regular is subsidized so they can produce rice far cheaper than the local Haitians. Right. And so that kind of policy work from the U.S. while generous, is destructive. And I wanted to steer that kind of thing. That whole situation, situation is oversimplifying. And I'm not saying I'm an advocate for one position or another, but you can see how policy creates this environment that is highly impactful. Right. So I started realizing if Stimpak wants to have the impact that it intends, we've got to start looking toward Washington D.C. and Paris and Ottawa to influence policy on top of steering their foreign policy dollars to where we believe are the best practices and best methods for getting impact in Haiti, which is tricky because I didn't know anyone in D.C. and didn't know anyone in the French or Canadian governments, that's for sure. So I spent some time trying to figure out how to approach that. And while, of course, doing all the projects that we were working on as well. And then on July 7, 2021, everything in Haiti changed when the president, Jovenel Moise was assassinated in his home. Things in Haiti were already a mess. And. But it did seem like the country was headed the right general direction. As Haiti is a rough place. You. You kind of feel like, everything's terrible. You hear all the bad things in the news, even back then in 2021, it seems like they're terrible. But if you look at the data, the economy was still growing, and. And they were doing relatively well, and most of the indicators in Haiti were actually improving. But then when the president was assassinated, everything started to go crazy. You know, I have a buddy of mine, he runs a food manufacturing facility there. Huge. Like, you know, imagine, you know, the size of a target in the US plus its parking lot. So a big facility. He'd had a lot of success there. But if I went to go tour his facility, you'd see all over the campus or the. The facility. He's got these guard towers with sandbags, essentially sniper towers, to protect the facility from the gangs in and around his area. And that. That's just a testament to me of the resilience of the Haitian entrepreneur. We often joke about New York being, you know, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. If you can make it in. In Haiti, you can make it anywhere. These are resilient, powerful, tenacious entrepreneurs who are successful in Haiti. This guy is an example of one of those. And you could see him before the assassination, fighting the good fight and making progress and just dealing with the realities on the ground in Haiti. After the assassination, you started to see the country fall apart. And business owners like this guy couldn't even figure out a way to deliver their goods to the grocery stores around the country. Right? They were getting. They were losing their trucks. The gangs would pillage the goods on the truck, and then they started to take the actual trucks. Then they would have to ransom the truck back from these guys. Just became impossible to do business for him and many, many others around the country. What ended up happening once the assassin assassination happened was you end up with a power vacuum, which makes sense. That's not a surprise. The unexpected thing, at least for me, was that power vacuum was not filled by politicians. You expected politicians to show up and say, you know, I'm in charge. No, I'm in charge. And. But you didn't hear that. Instead, the gangs filled the vacuum on a local level because there was no strong federal government. The police force, the Haitian National Police, you'll hear them called the HMP or pnh, depending on if you're a French derivative or English. So the HMP began to fall apart, and one by one, the police stations were taken down by these gangs. The kings would take them over and thus take over that geographic area. And as this continued to happen. The international community wanted to do something about it. And eventually the United States appointed what's called a special envoy. A special envoy is kind of like an ambassador, but operates a little bit outside of that. So an ambassador is in charge of every agency at a given embassy in Haiti. I feel like there's 10 to 15 agencies within the US embassy. If you go down the hallway right there's. And he's in charge of all of those. He's essentially overseeing all efforts in Haiti. It's a. It's a big job. These are career diplomats, highly experienced, what they do. A special envoy can be quite, quite a bit different. Where their scope can be. Can be tailored to a specific outcome. So for example, you might have a special envoy over. Over women's rights in a certain region of the world. You can have a special envoy over energy issues. You can have a special envoy that is over a certain country because of. For whatever reason, we need extra attention and senior level expertise dedicated and focused on a certain country or topic or issue issue. And the US appointed a special envoy to Haiti. And their mandate being this guy, his name was Daniel Foote. His mandate was something along the lines of establish an interim government. Right. Because he was. The president was assassinated and nobody filled the void. So establish an interim government, get an electoral council that's essentially a group of people who will oversee the upcoming or presumed elections and then execute those free and fair elections. And I was pleased that the US government was paying attention to Haiti. We'll likely talk at a future date about what the appropriate level of involvement is for a foreign nation like the US or Canada or the EU on Haiti. Like how involved should they be, how heavy handed should they or shouldn't they be? That's a robust discussion that we should have. But it makes a lot of sense for anyone who has a relationship with Haiti to at least have senior level talent involved in helping and assisting. And so the US had this special envoy. Unfortunately, after about three months, Daniel Foote resigned in a bit of a huff. And you can google that and hear his explanations. I'm not here to characterize that, but I remember when it happened. I was disappointed, but I presumed that within a few weeks we'd get a new one and we'd be back to the races. And you could tell that the Haitian political environment expected new special envoy as well, but it never came. And as we continued to wait for that special envoy to step in and take the lead, it never happened. And during that whole period of time, the Haitian gangs took more and more territory and more and more police stations fell and were burned to the ground. I began to see, as time went by, so many opportunities for the US to come in and influence the political discussion through the power brokers within Haiti. So many accords that could have been solidified and supported that weren't the international community. So Canada and the EU and the us, they have a history of meddling too strong handedly in Haiti, and that's a well founded concern. And therefore those governments wanted to be totally hands off. And we're in my estimation, two hands off off. And that created this disarray where these political accords that were very fragile, that got really close to being sealed, ratified and moving forward, they wouldn't be ratified. Nobody would kind of take it over the finish line. You'd have the US send out a tweet, just the wrong tweet, like a literal tweet on Twitter that would send the wrong message. And then the whole political direction would change in Haiti and these accords would get broken and I just smack my forehead and slump in sadness because we were so close to some good thing happening and we'd have progress and that political vacuum would be filled and we'd move toward elections. But instead we saw the gangs take more and more territory and increase in their pillage and plunder and more kidnappings and more rapes and more burnings and murder and mayhem. So as the months went by and Haiti kept falling apart, I started asking myself the question, why wasn't the US filling the special envoy position like there was such a clear need? And to answer that question, I began to learn a little bit about foreign policy politics and its relationship to US politics at large. And so it's no surprise to anyone that politicians in the US want to get reelected, right? And to do that, they need to be associated with success. And this dynamic is also present in the U.S. state Department. Although these senior officials that we're talking about are not elected, their positions are highly politicized appointments and thus their performances are heavily scrutinized. As you can imagine, this is understandable for most of us. We would like to be seen in our careers as being successful as well. And unfortunately, in Haiti, the work is difficult. It's a hard place to be successful. You know, it's also a difficult place to live and work. You know, if you're a career diplomat, you may be hoping for a posh post in Qatar or Tokyo. If you're unusual, really ambitious and looking for a challenge, you might look to serve somewhere like Sri Lanka or Argentina. Haiti is not the top of any dream sheets, so to speak. I've spent time in the US Embassy in Haiti, and those people are not typically thrilled about their post. It's a sacrifice. You know, even the most selfless of those with whom I've worked at the embassy, typically around children's issues, they recognize that serving in Haiti is a sacrifice. You know, they may want to make that sacrifice, but it's still a sacrifice. You know, the standard of living is low and it's dangerous, and the likelihood that you're going to be successful is not great. And so if your job is high profile, like a special envoy tasked with achieving free and fair elections in Haiti, something that is extremely difficult and rare throughout Haiti's history, your likelihood of absolute career suicide is dishearteningly high. So it's. Haiti's a bit of a hot potato, right? And I started to notice that anybody who might be qualified was not likely willing to do the job. So I started asking myself a stupid question. Was I willing to do the job? Was I qualified to do the job? And I started looking around because typically special envoys are appointed career diplomats, right? They're very predictable choices. But there are also quite a few cases of high profile donors or high profile businessmen who are appointed as special envoys. Now, those are usually posh assignments, right? Think Luxembourg or England, right? The places where they can leverage their contacts for career advancement, right? Whether it be business or. Or otherwise. But they're. They're not to Haiti. But it does exist. There is precedent for it. So I started thinking, you know, maybe it's possible, but I'm neither a high profile donor or high profile anything for that matter. And so. So it wasn't clear that I would ever be considered qualified. But I started looking in the mirror and thinking if I believed I was qualified, right? And, you know, I know Haiti and I know the culture and I speak the language pretty well. I do have deep leadership, negotiation and peacemaking experience. But most importantly, I was willing would appear as though the list of people willing to do the job was very short. And so I decided that I would look into it further to see if it was possible. I wanted to know if it was a real possibility to get that appointment, to secure it, to have somebody high up in the government decide that Jeff Frazier was the right guy for the job. And if nobody else wanted the hot potato, would we throw it at Jeff and let him go to work? And so I started calling around. I then asked a friend of mine who was, well, connected in D.C. and he called in some favors. And before long I had a small team that was starting to open doors for me. You know, I had, within a few days I had a little promotional packet that they put together and a bunch of meetings put together with key opinion leaders. And it felt like we were on our way. So it seemed possible, if our assessment was correct, that the, the reason that the US was not making a special envoy appointment was because there was a dearth of qualified and willing servants to do the work or candidates. I should say that, that maybe it could be me, right? And so at the peak, by the way, my, my thought was that I could make a push in D.C. to, if it wasn't me, it should be someone, right? So my little mini campaign could be not just about me, but about, hey, you know, let's get on the ball, let's get a special envoy appointed, right? So either way I could press some, put some pressure and, and get it done. And you better believe I wished it was someone else besides me, right? I would much rather do something else. I was, I'm going to consistently be the guy who's trying to do the thing at the top of his value pyramid, right? We, this is business language. When, when I was running businesses, I was always encouraging team members to figure out what is the thing they do of the greatest value, right? The thing at the bottom of their value pyramid is probably sweeping the floors or organizing their desk or taking the trash out. And the thing at the top of their value pyramid is probably something more conceptual and high skilled, maybe an engineering task or in a accounting analysis or something, you know, level, right? I always want to do the thing at the top of my value pyramid. And if somebody else would step in and do this special envoy job, then I could go do something else, right? I'm always going to be trying to solve the biggest possible problem. That's just my style. And so that would. That was also true in this case, right? If we get somebody else to be a special envoy, then great. So at the kind of peak of my momentum toward this special envoy appointment, I was invited to this game gala in DC. This is in the fall of 2022 and it's a huge event in DC for all the Western hemisphere. Diplomatic leaders, political leaders, civic leaders, anybody who cares about foreign relations issues in the Western hemisphere would love to be invited to this gala. And I secured an invitation to it. So the keynote speaker that night would be Brian Nicole Nichols. He's the Assistant Secretary of State over the whole Western hemisphere. So Remember that Brian Nichols name. It's going to be important later. So this is the number two guy at the Department of State. Under Secretary Blinken. You probably heard of Secretary Anthony Blinken. This guy's right under him in the Western hemisphere. He's a big deal and I was looking forward to hearing him speak. I was familiar with his writings and his, his policy positions on Haiti. I'd read them all, agreed with some, not with others. He was smart, experienced guy, I believe, earnest and sincere, but certain. Certainly not specialized on Haitian policy by any means because he's got, you know, the whole half of the world. It's important to understand that in order to receive this appointment as special envoy, I would need to either get appointment through the White House or through the State Department. Right. Those are kind of my, my two routes in. For either of those options to work, I would need to get some sort of congressional support first. Remember, this is D.C. and everyone in D.C. is playing politics and no one wants to go out on election limb for someone or something. No one wants to do that. So they're all worried if, you know, they stick their neck out and they, they take a risk and it fails that their enemies will fry them for it. And that's a, of course, a well founded fear. So in order to assuage those presumed fears in the White House and the State Department, I would be wise to gather support from both sides of the aisle and then approach the White House and State delicately. Right. It's a, it's an extremely delicate process. But that night at the gala, I was still figuring this all, all out and new to D.C. and just figuring out the process. You know, my natural style is, is a mix of bullet, china, shop and a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. And you know, that approach has proven effective for me in many ways. You know, I definitely look before I leap, but just barely. Right. Look quickly. Throughout my career, you know, I've seen big results in, in fast order using this method. It, but it's not without its downsides as, as you'll see here in a moment. So I'm in this ballroom, massive ballroom, probably the size of a football field, right. Huge. Hundreds of people in there. The invitation that I got said it was a black tie event, but when I arrived, I was clearly overdressed. The women seem to get the memo. They're all in gowns, but many of the men are, are in sport jackets and more like intellectual attire, which I kind of got a kick out of. But anyway, I'm feeling A little overdressed, a little bit self conscious. Because of that, I'm new to this whole thing, right? And so all of it's eye opening. It's got me, you know, nervous. So anyway, my main goal that evening was to meet people of influence on Haitian affairs, right? I want to know who the power brokers are specifically around Haiti, who steers this thing? And I knew they were in the room, but I didn't know how to find them, right? So before or on my way into the gala, I'm asking around, right? Anybody who I encounter, I. I'm trying to figure out, how do I find these people, right? I. There's like a mixer ahead of time, right? Before the gala, I go to the mix or I meet as many people as I can, and my exit question is always, hey, do you know people that care about Haiti? Right? And I don't know if that's a thing that people know. And sure enough, they don't. So I, I don't meet anybody of value on my way in. So I'm getting a little concerned, like, how am I going to find the power brokers in this room of probably a thousand people? Anyway, so just before the gala program itself began, the people were mingling near their assigned tables in this huge banquet hall. My assigned table was at the very back and all the way to the side could not have been further from the main stage. It was almost in the hallway. So I. I decided to make the best of it. I jumped in and began asking my table mates about their work. And to my total surprise, every single person at my table worked deeply on Haiti. I was absolutely thrilled. Somehow my team had set me up on a table of absolute Haitian All Stars, right? Somehow they curated that, and I was super pumped. I didn't realize that was going to happen. These guys were all great, and most of them I'm in contact with to this day, they're just important friends of mine now. It was incredible. So I got to talk with all these people and I was hanging on their every word. They taught me so much. It was absolutely fascinating. When I told one of them what I was trying to achieve, he was immediately supportive and started making excellent suggestions about what I should do next and where I should publish and people I should meet, etc. He then asked me if I had met Bryan Nichols yet. I said no. He quickly responded with something like, oh, you've definitely got to meet him. He'll be here tonight. Wait, there he is. Come with me, I'll introduce you. Now, you may be Thinking, that's great. What an opportunity. And you'd be right. However, when my friend said his name, I didn't really hear it. You know, it didn't quite get into my skull. He had just listed off a bunch of names of Haitian affairs spirit space experts that I didn't know, and they're all sort of running together. And so when he mentioned Brian Nichols, I assumed he had said another name that I just didn't know. And so I didn't really log it in my brain. So, you know, I follow my new friend over toward this, like, gaggle of, I don't know, maybe 15 people toward the center of the banquet hall. And we worked our way past a number of people and stood, you know, a few feet off from Brian, and. And my friend kind of makes eye contact as we kind of patiently wait for him to finish with some other people. Brian could see us and did that kind of squint, nod, finger point thing that says, you know, I'll be right with you. And so we. We wait patiently, and, you know, I've got my glass of Sprite or something. We're just kind of relaxing. My. My new friend and I. And I think at this point, he can sense my friend, can sense that I'm not grasping the gravity of what's about to happen. And so he. He mentions it, you know, if you're. If you're going to get this special envoy appointment, this guy's really important to. That he's probably the decision maker, you know, on that. And I'm about to introduce you to him. And he didn't say that, right? He. He's. But he's trying to say that, right? And he even mentions Brian's title, right? And as soon as the word Assistant Secretary of State comes off of my friend's tongue, I put it together, right? And my eyes dart over at Brian Nichols name tag to confirm that it's Brian Nichols that I. I now am registering, right? I'm starting to put it all together. And unfortunately for me, just as I finally put it together, he's done with his conversation and he's headed over to me, over to us, right? And so I've got maybe 10 seconds to figure out what I'm going to say to this guy to not look like a total fool. And it's important for you to understand at this point, I can be awkward. It may not sound like it because I'm in this controlled environment and recording booth, and, you know, you've never heard me say anything stupid, but I definitely can I was famous at my. One of my old companies for putting my hand out to handshake at the wrong time in important business settings while meeting people or greeting or saying goodbye. I know you're thinking, what is he even talking about? Like, how's that even possible? Because you've probably never met anybody who's been as awkward as I can be at times. And so I would. I would do this thing and I became famous for sticking my hand out at the wrong time or in the wrong way, right? And. And then my team members and even my clients would just goad me over it, and then they would set me up in these increasingly complex handshaking scenarios where they knew I would fail and they just mock me mercilessly. Anyway, long story short, I can be awkward. And so Brian Nichols making his way over in this intense, high pressure situation is not a good recipe for me to be doing well. So, you know, I've been prayerful all night long, right? This is a really important night for me, right? This, the work is really important to me. And so I'm prayerful along the way. I'm always asking for help, right? That's just. That's part of who I am. And so my prayer as Brian Nichols is walking over me is, please don't let me screw this up. All like, you know, all these thoughts were going through my head of things I could say to him. This is all within 10 seconds, you know, but all of them seem to be from the list of things not to say. And so luckily, you know, just as he shows up, my friend introduces me and. And then we explained, exchange some pleasantries. I think I said something about, I think probably thanked him for his service and that kind of thing, and probably told him that I'd read some of his work. And then I'd said something like, hey, I'm in the process of gathering support to be appointed the special envoy to Haiti right away, and I was hoping to get your support as well. And I remember hearing it come out of my mouth and thinking, hey, that's pretty good. It's not too bad. And it was interesting because he didn't respond right away. Like, he just sat silently, maybe measuring me up. And then he kind of walks away from the group that he was in, and the three of us kind of create this new huddle. Like, I don't know, he's getting a little bit more privacy. And he then begins to be very frank and tell me about his feelings about the position that were different than mine. I tried to explain my Positions and argued my desires and urgent need that I observed, but we weren't aligned and essentially agreed to disagree without saying that out loud. Ended politely, but without next steps. Whole thing took like eight minutes, something like that. And so we. My new friend and I walked away and kind of debriefed. And he was surprised at how candid Brian had been in the conversation. You know, to. To get the Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere to. To open up on a position of significance like that is was great. I think it says a lot about his trust in my friend. But it was clear that we were not aligned and weren't going to be, and that if I was going to obtain the appointment from the State. State Department or from the White House, it was going to be against their will. And in order to get the State Department to do something against their will, it takes a congressional support or congressional power and influence. So you got to. You got to push, because that's who they work for, right? They work for legislation, legislators, whether it be the White House or otherwise. So it became more clear than ever that I was going to need congressional support, meaning the House of Representatives and the Senate. So I began to find the legislators that already appeared to be supporting Haiti. They call them the Haiti Caucus. It's a semi formal group of legislators that typically back pro Haiti issues, whatever they happen to be. There is, however, a clear delineation between those who claim to care about Haiti and those who really do care about Haiti. And I'm not condemning those politicians for their priorities. No idea what it's like to be a politician. But I do, however, get deeply disappointed when I see them being insincere as I started to observe, which is lame. So, you know, you get these feigning crusaders sometimes, you know. So one morning I was at the Rayburn Building. This is a huge historic building across from the Capitol. I was waiting on a member of Commerce to Congress to arrive to our scheduled meeting. And while I'm waiting there, I'm watching this TV in the office. It's like this raw feed from the House floor. And there's, you know, there's votes happening all day, so the staff keep an eye on the TV to know when they have to go vote, right? And I'm watching this feed as a member was walking to the mic. He approached the mic very nonchalantly, casually, and my feed showed the whole room. But there must have been some other camera involved that he was much more interested in, because once he steps to the microphone, to the podium, he became this totally different person entirely. He was no longer the casual guy. Now he's absolutely incensed. He's livid. He's so upset about some cause. I don't remember what it was. And I laughed out loud in the office. It was so stark, the way he just flipped into this different character. Like he just stepped on stage at, you know, at a Broadway show. The congressional aide in the office with me just kind of chuckled and discussed, but was clearly not surprised, at least not as surprised as I was. And I caught this other member of Congress on the floor on the TV who raised his eyebrow. When the guy starts freaking out, he raises his eyebrows, eyebrows and smiles and then just shakes his head and, and then he must have lit out an apparently audible laugh because the guy at the microphone responds with something like, you think this is funny? And then keeps going on, on his tirade, right? It's like this strange vaudeville show. And then he finishes his time at the microphone and steps away and goes right back to casual guy and starts flipping through paper and it's just kind of like, like he had stepped off of stage. And so I, I later learned that these members of con, these politicians, they, they use these video clips on their social media accounts so they, they have to show their constituents that they're, you know, on the rampage crusading for, for their cause, whatever that happens to be. And so they're just, I, it just saddened me. The two faced nature of it all was, was disheartening, you know, so there I am in this office in the Rayburn Building where I continue to wait in that office all that day, that entire day, waiting for this member to show up for our morning meeting. It was always, it'll be 15 more minutes, 30 more minutes and 50 more minutes. It's going to be another hour, that kind of thing. All day long. I'd flown in for this meeting and eventually I give up because I've got to make my flight. I think it was probably like a 6:00 flight. So I head back to Reagan Airport and I get a phone call and it's from a D.C. number. And so I pick it up and it's this member. And they said, you know, they were apologizing and said, hey, I'm sorry that, that I missed our meeting. I really do care about Haiti. We'll have to reschedule and I'll have my people, you know, reach out, reach out because I really do care. And it sounded just like the guy that I had seen on, on tv, right? It was Just insincere. And so I of course raised my eyebrows and smiled and shook my head also and I never heard back from them again. So I say all that just to acknowledge the fact that there's. There are some members that care and some that don't. And so part of my work is finding the ones that really do and then nudging the ones who don't, but will still do the work we need them to do, even if they're just faint that that will be part of the work that I'll need your help on. You know, I don't know what it's like to be a true leader as an elected official in D.C. you know, it may be much more difficult than it sounds. And I, I want to be slow to judge them for, for this kind of two faced pandering thing. What I do know is that there seems to be very little true leadership happening there. What I see a lot of is members of Congress that follow their constituents rather than actually lead them and only make time for what their constituen care about or tell them they care about. So I'll save the argument for the obligation of politicians to lead rather than follow for another day. The reality is that I know little of the plight of the politician. But I, I don't know that it matters to us, you and I, given that what we're trying to achieve on behalf of Haiti. But what I do need you to, to know and understand from all this is that you are one of these constituents, constituents that politicians serve and that your congressional representatives do care about what you want and what you and your friends care about. You are the ones they are making those social media videos for. Right? They're. They're trying to please you. And so that's, that's the power and influence that you do have on the local level that then becomes the national level. So that is why I need you not to help me get the special envoy appointment. Appointment, but something much more exciting. So we took a run at getting the support to force the issue. Thus far we've failed at securing the special envoy appointment. Right. I just told you stories from 2022. We're now 2024. So our current state, now that you know, we're two years later, so the State Department website still lists the special envoy position as vacant. So it's still an open position, which I find humorous. I'm still willing to serve. Right. It'll likely be the next administration if they decide to prioritize Haiti, which of course I hope whoever that Ends up being. However, in my pursuit of this special envoy appointment, there have been a number of positive steps that have allowed me to contribute in less formal ways. I am now regularly consulted on significant Haiti policy issues, specifically security issues. In particular, you know, my kidnapping was. Was kept from the press, but many within the US Government were following my story and trying to help somewhere. Extremely helpful to my wife and my team along the way. So that notoriety and experience, quote, unquote, behind enemy lines, has allowed me to contribute substantively and I would hope in helpful ways. I actually just came from a call right before starting to record this on a Haiti working group that was looking to influence some justice issues at a future date, how to. To prosecute these gang members moving forward. So I'm grateful for those contacts, but much more cool was along the way. You know, this. We were going through this kind of messy, bumpy, educational road. Working toward this appointment, I would often ask myself the question, what if. What if we win? What if we get this appointment? What if I am in charge? What would I do? What. What's the plan, Jeff? You know what you know, how will you establish peace? How will you conduct elections? What's the plan? And I wanted the answer to that, right? I'm. I'm a strategist. You know, that's my core competency. I. I'm always looking to understand how complex systems work and of course, understand why they don't work. Like in Haiti's case, spot points for leverage to. To rectify those systems, right? And figure that out. And I. So in an effort to do that, I would work with as many really smart people as I could find. I really wanted to be ready to answer those questions and more. I wanted to feel deeply confident in my understanding of Haiti, its dynamics, its obstacles, and its opportunities. So I started meeting with many brilliant experts on Haiti. I've had the chance to dig in deep over the last couple of years and learn all that I. I could about everything that I could. And in that process, our. Our little team of stimpak affiliated experts and researchers uncovered something much bigger, much more important than the special envoy appointment. And once we saw it, once we understood this particular dynamic in Haiti, everything else, the elections, the security solutions, political accords, the constitution reforms, agriculture and ecological programs, even my own sacred cow programs around abandoned children, all of those solutions were comparatively, band aids temporary fixes, right? We found something that no one else is talking about, right? And that. That might initially seem jarring if no other experts are talking about it, but once we show it to you. You'll understand why they aren't talking about it, why did they didn't see it? And I want to share that that with you. Right, so. So what then is this grand unified theory of Haiti policy you say, Jeff? Well, that's what season three is all about. I will do my very best to share with you all that you need to know in order to see the puzzle that is Haiti, so that you can see and truly appreciate the missing pieces to that puzzle and then join me in trying to put those missing pieces into their proper place. That's my invitation to you. I'm inviting you to join us in an effort to do something truly special, to join this little army of advocates, educated advocates, armed with nothing but understanding. You know, to the casual observer today in Haiti, Haiti looks like absolute chaos. To the casual observer of Haitian history, population, poverty, their politics, their gang dominance, it all looks like chaos. It is not. There is a pattern and predictable order in it. And we are excited to share that with you this season right here on the Stimpak podcast. That's where you're gonna learn it. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for your willingness and time for the rest of this season to come to the rescue of those in Haiti who are truly suffering from the death grip of these vicious gangs and the viciousness of critical poverty. Thank you honor you for your willingness to jump in and care if you're here. You are our people. Thank you for doing that. You are part of this pack of people willing to, quote, stimulate change. So welcome to the Stimpak. We'll look forward to hanging out with you this season and we'll see you next time. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Stimpak Podcast, Season three. Will you please subscribe, rate, review and share it with your friends and colleagues?