Jonathan Tepper, Rhodes Scholar and investment fund manager, discusses his memoir Shooting Up with the host. The book chronicles his childhood as a missionary kid in 1980s Madrid, where his parents established a drug rehabilitation center in Saint-Blas, then Europe's heroin capital.

The conversation explores Tepper's unique upbringing among recovering heroin addicts during the AIDS epidemic, the tragic loss of his younger brother Timothy in a car accident, and how these formative experiences shaped his investment philosophy. Tepper draws connections between the literary education his parents provided through works like City of God and A Grief Observed, and his later success as a contrarian investor.

The discussion also covers the challenges of memoir writing, the publishing industry's risk aversion, and how Tepper's multilingual background and exposure to business operations through the rehab center's enterprises informed his approach to analyzing companies and markets.

Growing Up in Europe's Heroin Capital

In 1985, the Tepper family moved to Saint-Blas, Madrid, which had 'the highest rate of heroin use in Europe' and contained 'a very large gypsy camp' serving as 'a central drug dealing point for the whole of Madrid.'

The family distributed pamphlets featuring 'a skeleton with a skull and this sort of hand, its claw, sort of motioning at the reader' with their home address and phone number, with the job to 'bring addicts back to the house.'

Seven-year-old Jonathan experienced 'probably more excitement than anything' during these encounters, viewing his father as 'invincible' - a former college wrestler who 'could do like 31-handed push-ups and walk up flights of stairs doing handstands.'

The addicts included dangerous characters like Mahara, nicknamed 'crazy' because 'a dealer had stuck a gun in his face, and he grabbed the barrel and stuck it in his mouth and dared him to shoot.'

AIDS Crisis Meets Heroin Epidemic

The HIV virus spread rapidly through Madrid's addict population because 'almost all the addicts had shared needles on the street' and in Caravancher prison, 'they theorized that's probably why the virus spreads so quickly.'

Tepper's friend Jamede reported that in Madrid's largest prison, 'there was more heroin available in prison than out, but they shared two syringes' among hundreds of inmates.

Even in 1992-93, Spanish TV featured doctors answering basic questions like 'if you swim in the same pool as someone who is HIV positive, can you get AIDS?' showing widespread ignorance persisted years after the Surgeon General's 1985 report.

Many HIV-positive former addicts 'died without their families even knowing why they had died' and some survivors still keep their status secret from family members decades later.

From One Addict to Global Movement

The rehabilitation center began when Raul, 'a very charismatic figure' who 'used to help hold people up at knife point,' asked to move in with missionary Lindsay McKinsey in his small apartment.

Raul 'then invited eight of his friends into Lindsay's apartment' and the program grew exponentially through 'this transmission of love and compassion and trying to help people detox.'

The organization now operates 'in 20 countries and there's 2,000 addicts living in the program and it's been going for 40 years,' all starting from that single apartment.

The center operates through 'running secondhand furniture stores, gardening teams, painting teams' where 'the addicts run those businesses' and 'bring the receipts in and the cash in at the end of the day.'

Tragedy and Transformation Through Loss

In summer 1991, during a family trip to the US, Timothy Tepper died in a car accident driven by brother David, fundamentally changing the family's understanding of loss.

The tragedy gave the family 'a much more profound empathy for the families who had lost sons and daughters to overdoses and who had lost sons and daughters to HIV.'

Tepper reflects that 'you never recover. You never become the person you were before again. You don't get over death' and hopes Shooting Up 'might be one that people can read, and to those who have lost, that it can let them know that they're not alone.'

The family read A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis 'at the dinner table' to help process their loss, with Tepper noting that 'our grief is as unique to us as fingerprints.'

Literary Education and Investment Philosophy

Despite financial constraints, Tepper's mother homeschooled the children for two years, believing 'the job of a teacher isn't to teach the student something, it's rather to inspire the desire to learn.'

The family's extensive reading included theological works like City of God and Confessions by St. Augustine during 'long, long devotionals for breakfast and dinner, which we deeply resented at the time.'

Tepper's contrarian investment approach stems from asking 'what do people hate and why are they wrong?' and focusing on cash flow, learned from watching addicts who 'intuitively knew that the business should have more cash at the end of the day than it did when the day started.'

He recommends Ben Graham The Einstein of Money, noting that Graham 'was a polymath' who 'read extraordinarily widely' and 'would translate from Greek into Latin and Latin into Greek' for fun.

Publishing Struggles and Memoir Craft

Shooting Up was inspired by Bruce Davidson's Flying over 96th Street Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy, which Tepper discovered at Barnes & Noble 20 years ago, thinking 'someone needs to do this for my friends.'

Publishers repeatedly rejected the memoir with responses like 'it's a beautiful story, it's very moving, but I'm not sure there's an audience for it,' despite the book's eventual strong reader response.

Tepper's agent explained that 'publishers are not angel investors. They're venture capitalists. They're trying to go out and find something that's already working.'

The memoir evolved from academic writing to novelistic approach where 'great writing is show, don't tell' and required greater honesty about family complexities, moving beyond 'trying to protect everyone.'