I doubt that this episode will ever be matched in terms of the sheer diversity of experiences we discuss. I’m joined by a former colleague, Justin Vela of the ESG consultancy GEOSTREAMS, to talk about his career.
As you’ll hear, he started freelancing on a major diplomatic incident, later snuck across the Turkish-Syrian border, became uneasy at the geopolitical aims of his employer, and eventually created a firm that helps companies manage their ESG goals. There were a lot of twists and turns for him and we talk about his thinking along the way and what he sees as the current state of freelancing in conflict areas, among other topics.
You can learn more about Justin’s current work at geostreams.org. An edited version of our conversation is below.
Chris Oates
We often think of politics as elections happening in our area, or what's going on in Congress or state houses. But there's a lot of politics and politically driven events happening everywhere across the world. Being able to navigate between different environments between different jurisdictions and keeping tabs on policies in multiple countries is a distinct and it's a very difficult skill set. So we're talking today with someone who's done that for almost 15 years, Justin Vela of the ESG consultancy GEOSTREAMS. And before that, you've had a number of very interesting jobs in a number of very interesting places. How did you first get involved in working in the political world?
Justin Vela
Yeah, in one way I was thrown into it. On the other hand, I guess I'd always wanted to work in news. After graduating from university, I went to Turkey. It was supposed to be for a couple of months. It was a relatively benign, quiet tourist spot, I got a job as an editor at an oil and gas publication. But within a week, the Israeli military had boarded a boat full of activists, killed a couple of people, and there was protests outside the window in Istanbul.
And so that essentially kicked off a career in news reporting. I had my first assignment for a major British publication by the end of that day
Chris Oates
How did you get commissioned in in a day of this happening? Did you already know the people involved?
Justin Vela
I had already started freelancing. When I was in high school, I started freelancing for local newspapers. And so I was very kind of comfortable just cold pitching news editors, either calling the newsroom and being Hey, like this is going on. Or I have this feature. Great idea.
Just kind of shooting an email, or cold calling - that's the way to really do it. Before arriving in Turkey, I had actually established some connections with news editors. I had said, hey, look, like I've done, these types of feature stories. I spent about a week in London, just kind of meeting news editors and said, I'm going to Turkey, if stuff happens that you need someone there, I'll be in touch.
And so when, you know, big news start to break. I was there. I called them, and they were already familiar enough with me to say like, okay, yeah, you know, give us 500 words. And then that 500 words quickly, you know, turned into writing front page stories.
Chris Oates
That's all kind of freelancing is, just making a connection? And then you're the person on their mind when when they need it.
Justin Vela
At the time, it was a lot easier. Especially in a very fast moving news environment. You know, the Mavi Marmara crisis was a global news story when it happened was absolutely huge. And it was very competitive to get good news.
When I say good news, I mean, you know, news from the ground quality information from the ground in Istanbul. At that time, there was actually a lot of journalists in in Istanbul, you know, there always seems to be tons of freelance journalists in Istanbul.
Unfortunately, you know, I guess not very many of them were very good. I was able to get, you know, some decent enough reporting that I got the assignments.
I think what changed, though, was the war in Syria. The war in Syria, changed journalism in a major way. It made freelancing and the kind of ease with which individuals like myself used to freelance much more difficult. And that's primarily because a lot of the journalists that were killed were freelancers. And so the kind of mentality that newspaper editors had changed.
They realized that they probably had to be a little bit more responsible than just kind of assigning someone to go and, you know, interview, you know, a group like al Qaeda, which I did in Syria, and was just lucky enough not to be kidnapped and held.
Chris Oates
Can we just focus on that for a second? Did you just casually mentioned that you interviewed al Qaeda in Syria?
Justin Vela
In 2012, it was less dangerous. It was very dangerous, actually, but Syria was more accessible to journalists. And the local al Qaeda affiliate was called, at the time Shabaat Al Nusra.
At the time, it was relatively easy to find these groups in, you know, Aleppo, and go up to them, you know, with the right kind of introduction, say, let's talk for a while. And so I actually was able to interview guys from this kind of affiliate on two different days. Even met an American citizen that was fighting along with them, who was quite young.
Within a couple of months, though, doing something like that would have been absolutely impossible. And I guess I was just very lucky, or just kind of timing is like, what's the right word, but you also have to bring in like you the way you approach people and think about the kind of people that introduce you to them.
But just to go back to the original thing is that, Syria really changed journalism, because, newspaper editors have started to be much more kind of cautious about who they commissioned to go and do this reporting, which is very, very, very dangerous at the end of the day.
Chris Oates
At what point did you did this kind of shift happen? And how are you aware of it? Seeing on the news journalists being kidnapped, and then everyone in the freelance community just kind of realized it's too dangerous now.
Justin Vela
I think the, one of the biggest changes that I saw was when a freelance journalist in Austin Tice, who is actually a former US Marine, was he was freelancing for The Washington Post. He was kind of all over Syria and doing some really interesting reporting, he was kidnapped. To this day, he's still there, he hasn't been released.
And then, you had several different journalists be kidnapped. And then, many of these individuals were beheaded. And you saw, newspaper editors wake up to this idea that Syria was so dangerous, that they actually by commissioning people, were encouraging them to take greater risks, encouraging young freelancers to go and make their name, so to speak, in a complex zone. And there was a lot more discussion on the ethics of that.
I think in the background, there is some conversation too about who are these people, what is the quality of the reporting of a21 year old American who has managed to sneak across the Turkey-Syria border.
And for the first time, I think instead of just purely focusing on headlines in the newspaper editors were thinking, okay, like, you know, what is our real duty of care? I felt pressure to do something, at the end of the day, in retrospect was kind of basic, and that was to get some hazardous environment training. I was lucky enough to get a grant to go to the UK and get trained by some former British Special Forces officers, on how to survive in a conflict zone and do these scenarios based training - have explosions go off near me, and learn how to treat gunshot wounds and stuff like that.
That put me in this kind of just different category of freelancers, because I could say on a resume, Hey, I've done this. But at the same time, if you're being held by a group for political purposes, and then you'll beheaded on international television, that's a whole different different thing.
Chris Oates
So what did you do once you decided Syria was too dangerous for you? Or for freelancers in general, in that at that moment? What was your next step? Was it I'm getting out of reporting altogether?
Justin Vela
I wasn't getting assignments. I was being told, if you want to work for us, don't cross the border.
So, I got increasingly interested in the Gulf region. The Gulf states were having this huge influence on the Syrian conflict. And not always in the best of ways. I wanted to get as close to that as possible. I was actually offered a job at this time, by one of the local newspapers in the UAE, which had not played such a visible role in supporting the Syrian rebels, as some of the other Gulf states, like Saudi Arabia, but I just wanted to get as close as possible to that area and kind of see it from the inside. This was an incredible opportunity to do that.
It was a morally gray zone, because I couldn't go there and expect, you know, to do the same kind of quality reporting, as I would have if I was working in a place in the United States, where press freedom exists.
I was somewhat jaded at the time, and in terms of the type of reporting that is allowed, even in American publications. In the US, it's not exactly censorship, but every publication does have its point of view, and wants to report things in their own way.
And then also different degrees of verification that editors are comfortable with, to some extent, I had some editors only want to report certain information after they'd gone to a government affiliated think tank, and get that information vetted, by someone that probably has had as much as agenda as anyone on the ground.
I was hired as an editor on the foreign news. I was focused on covering the world and the other Gulf states, other than the UAE. And what I was able to do was continue to reporting on the Syrian diaspora in the UAE. You saw a lot of people that were, you know, either Assad sympathizers, or on the other side, convening in Dubai, and being fairly open about their presence.
It was a kind of continuation of the reporting that I had started in Syria and Turkey. And then I also was able to visit the other Gulf states as a reporter, doing this dual editing / reporting type role.
Chris Oates
It's a fascinating thing for any reporter to be looking at that while you're there. I'm guessing you are part of the soft power of the UAE having a legitimate newspaper. While being aware of that, you're not Emirati, you're American. So what was in your thinking. You said it was a moral gray zone. Were there moments where they were it was more grayer than others, and what made you ultimately leave it?
Justin Vela
The paper I was working at hired a lot of a lot of people that actually became really well known. Middle East reporters. And so I was really impressed by their staff. And that was the main pull for me to work specifically there. But once I had arrived, the paper had started to shift and then within a year the war in Yemen started and for the first time, the UAE was involved in a war committing troops to the ground.
Like, so the newspaper very quickly became even more of a soft power tool for the UAE I think previously, it was a soft power tool to promote the UAE to the local expats and then also to provide a more in depth look at the Middle East. It tried to tell stories about the Middle East that no other English language newspaper was going to. But the war in Yemen changed that in the sense that the UAE had to be shown as winning. And we did as much as we could to tell the story in a kind of cut and dry way, in terms of the facts on the ground, relying on a mix of wire, Associated Press reports, and Reuters reports, along with some reporting on the ground as well.
But there was such a kind of clear objective that it just became too much.I couldn't continue to work there, because it had shifted from being an ethically gray area to being something that was not just censorship, but propaganda. And I feel like I, in retrospect, you know, I'm obviously speaking about this pretty openly. And, you know, in retrospect, I think I definitely learned a lot about the kind of mechanics of a body that was trying to achieve this type of messaging, and then also about the kind of conversions, people do to the justify censorship. It was a very difficult experience. I did leave, but, I guess it was also valuable to see the world from that perspective.
Chris Oates
It's a perspective almost no one has in the United States. I'm pretty sure you might be the only person will ever have on this podcast that can have this particular experience of going from starting with an oil and gas publication to freelancing in Syria, to then working at a major newspaper in the Gulf. I think that that probably is not a common career path for a lot of American journalism students.
Justin Vela
Well, yeah, I wouldn't say repeat it.
Chris Oates
Okay, so let's move on to what was next. You joined a geopolitical consulting firm in England. And again, full disclosure, that's where you and I worked together.
What was it like going to that? We weren't on the ground, interviewing members of al Qaeda. It was sitting in an office doing reports.
It was viewed from afar. So what was that shift from going from example covering the Middle East in the Middle East, to then covering the Middle East from from the UK.
Justin Vela
I wanted to leave journalism at that point, I wanted to get into consulting, particularly political risk consulting, and got hired at a well established geopolitical risk firm. And I was hired essentially for my knowledge of the United Arab Emirates, the Gulf, and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the Middle East.
It was kind of exactly what I imagined. And it was really powerful to start to think about this, think about the world from a higher level, and then also to speak to a more narrow audience, which was in in our case, a group of specific clients.
Chris Oates
So you're covering your, you're focusing on the Gulf, at least when you get started? And then how did your time there evolve in terms of just the political situations and the jurisdictions you're covering?
Justin Vela
For the first couple of years, everything was very Middle East focused, and I would also say, fairly traditional geopolitics. But there was a little bit of a pullback from traditional geopolitics at the time, and I'm not sure if you agree, but it kind of felt as if geopolitics was in was being questioned in terms of their abilities to to predict x?
Can you really use geopolitical factors to make a risk assessment, right? What is the value of that? Should we just really focus on incident reporting? There was more of a shift towards issues based reporting. So we did a lot of, let's write a report on this topic. Maybe that involves geopolitics, but it actually involves more a very specific issue, like the the future of sustainable agriculture or the use of policies towards pesticides. So like, instead of like, prediction, it was more like, let's get really smart on something and tell people how smart we are on it.
What's really interesting is that geopolitics has actually really come back. The war in Ukraine has brought more traditional political risk, and geopolitical risk analysis, back in a way.
Scenario based ways of looking at the world is actually the strongest way for organizations to prepare themselves, while at the same time understanding that what will actually happen, is probably not going to be one of those scenarios, but you will be so much better prepared by having gone through this scenario planning exercise doing the analysis, than if you were just saying like, Okay, I'm gonna get really smart on a couple of different topics.
Chris Oates
I know that you now work in the ESG field with your firm GEOSTREAMS. How did you choose ESG is the one that you really wanted to focus on with your company?
Justin Vela
With ESG, I always thought it as a way that we could tie in geopolitical risk to sustainability related issues.
A lot of what I'm doing now has coalesced around this idea of someone in business, maybe it's a sustainability manager, or maybe it's higher up the ladder, thinking, okay, like, the business has these types of goals. And it has these types of goals, because I've gone through an ESG exercise, and I've identified the issues that I really want to focus on for the year ahead. And having set those goals, you then need some way to set metrics for actually achieving the goals.
Let's make ESG tangible to the different functions in your company, by translating your goals into achievable metrics for your different functions. And so we've really kind of accelerated in what we're doing by building metrics. And not just talking about ESG per se, but let's talk about a metric in relation to what an executive knows is actually an ESG goal. And it's an ESG goal because we've done this previous exercise in thinking about what is material from an ESG perspective.
Chris Oates
If someone said, this seems like an interesting space, it's obviously about sustainability and the environment and governance, I want to get into it. Is there one thing that they should be thinking about, like learning about? Or do they just need to have a career like yours, where you're just bouncing into a lot of different places and having to learn how to land in a new environment and pick up a lot of stuff quickly?
Justin Vela
It depends on what kind of job you want. A lot of the ESG shops tend to be fairly kind of single issue. So you'll have a firm that focuses just on a specific climate related issue or on governance. And there's a smaller number that are really like multidisciplinary in their approach.
So I think you've got to figure out, Okay, do I want to specialize? Or do I want to be multidisciplinary, and if you want to be multidisciplinary, you got to take more of a project manager type approach. Either way, you got to take Chris's course and do that kind of analytical training. So you can see the world in a multifaceted way and understand how to ask the right type of questions about things. Because if there's one thing like the past that the past 15 years have shown me is that the world is actually getting more complex. It is more complex than the world that our grandfathers faced, simply because there's so much information out there. So unless you can evaluate it and analyze it and categorize it correctly, you will be doing worse than other people in your job.
Chris Oates
Not to promote Legislata within the podcast outside of the ads. But it is one reason why we did it. We're in a world of qualitative information overflowing us. And being able to manage that is hugely important. How do you manage that, given that all of the different requirements, and issues are happening all over the world? How do you analyze multiple jurisdictions simultaneously?
Justin Vela
I definitely have to have a high level understanding of what has happened in the US, Canada, the EU, and also the UK. So those are the areas that I try to understand. I try to keep up with at a high level. But once there's anything that's fairly granular, I gotta ask a friend. We got to find the right person that can go in depth on a topic. A lot of the questions related to ESG tend to be very specific about emissions trading in China, just for example, or carbon credits and so forth. I can't follow everything in depth. So I will essentially try to outsource a lot of the more granular questions to someone that is really an expert.
Chris Oates
I don't think we're gonna have many other conversations on this podcast that go from interviewing members of al Qaeda, to understanding what Brussels is going to do on environmental and sustainability regulations. So thank you for being on the show. But before you go, in your experience, what is working in the political world? Is it the West Wing, Veep, House of Cards, Parks and Rec? Or something else?
Justin Vela
What was the British show? Yeah, The Thick of It and House of Cards. Mash those together
Chris Oates
Second question, what was your best day as a professional person in the political world?
Justin Vela
Oh, that's a tough one. There's different ways to kind of think about this.
I think the listeners have already guessed this, but I definitely started off as a little bit of an adventure. And I was definitely chasing a new kind of high. I knew that politics and news reporting brings that, and I think that anyone that is involved in this space knows that, whether you're working on a campaign trail, or you're trying to report on, a war, or a consultant trying to get that assessment off late at night. It's a high pressured type of job that you do.
And I think that looking back on the wild youth, being able to cross back and forth from Syria, and go in over the border, interview some rebels, and then, go back to someplace I felt was safe, that definitely brought a high. I'm going to end it, though, with this idea that was that ethically right, because Syria is to this day, a conflict zone, and there's been so much pain and suffering involved there, it's something that we got to keep in mind that the impact of politics is real, geopolitics has ramifications.
Chris Oates
You can play politics, but it's not a game. It's real people's lives. That's always important to remember. And finally, what is something you wish you had known before that first day in Istanbul when you got your first story?
Justin Vela
Okay, I'm going to actually say two things. One is better client management skills. I think that the kind of relationships that you need to build, in order to work in this space needs to come first. Before everything else, you have to be like a relationships first person. And I was not that type of person, I was more of an, I'm gonna just pitch it a bunch of different stories and hope for the best. But if you do something, you know, learn how to make great relationships.
The other thing is being able to continuously build the skills, to not just write the stories, but to do data management to keep things organized for yourself, and also for your team, as well. Will make you a far more valuable and also understandable person.
Chris Oates
I fully agree with you. So much of life is sales. And that's something we don't ever learn. We're thrown in these environments where you're dealing with people who you're in a professional relationship with in some ways. And you're right, we we weren't taught how to do that in school. I wasn't certainly so it's important to learn and often no one teaches you so I'm glad you were able to at least learn maybe the hard way doing freelance work, I can't imagine that the easiest way to learn how to deal with people in the workplace.
Justin Vela
Working in politics, so is there's no black or white, it's a world of gray. And I think that you see that the more you work with people that are there, whether they're newspaper editors, politicians or an executive, everyone is having to make really tough decisions as the world is coming at them at the speed of light or information is coming out at high speed. And no one can make perfect decisions in that space. But I see a lot of what my work is as a consultant, what it's aimed at achieving is helping people make the best possible decision.
Chris Oates
That is great. Justin Vela of GEOSTREAM, your companies linked in the show notes if you want to check them out. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it.
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