Jonathan Tepper - Shooting UpA Memoir of Love, Loss and Addiction-youtube

ABOUT: Heard on iHeartRadio. To bring as many different points of view, from around the circle, into your view, to assist you in expanding your life and living. To assist in the positive evolution of mankind and bringing about a greater awareness of self and others in order to create the kind of world YOU want. ABOUT THE BOOK At seven years old, Jonathan Tepper was not collecting baseball cards or building model airplanes—he was walking the streets of Madrid’s most drug-ravaged neighborhood, handing pamphlets to heroin addicts and inviting them into his family’s home. Set against the backdrop of Spain’s devastating AIDS-era heroin epidemic, Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Addiction (Infinite Press, February 17, 2026) is Tepper’s searing coming-of-age story about growing up inside a radical experiment in compassion—one that exposed a young boy to addiction, death, and grief, while teaching him, in the most intimate way possible, what it means to love people society has written off. In 1985, Jonathan arrived in Spain with his Christian missionary parents and three brothers and was soon immersed in the harsh realities of San Blas, then the epicenter of Spain’s—and Europe’s—heroin crisis. While most children his age were absorbed in schoolyard routines, Jonathan was sent into the streets to seek out yonkis—heroin users living on the margins—and encourage them to come to the mission center his parents were building from the ground up. That center, Betel, would become a pioneering drug-rehabilitation community. Jonathan befriended many of the addicts, who became his surrogate older brothers and sisters. But tragedy soon struck his own family: in 1991, Jonathan’s younger brother Timothy was killed in a car accident at the age of nine. At the same time, many of the recovering addicts Jonathan loved faced a second, merciless fate. Having shared needles, they were HIV-positive and would go on to die during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Shooting Up weaves together addiction, recovery, faith, and bereavement as Jonathan struggles to reconcile his family’s unwavering commitment to helping others with their own devastating loss. It is also a rare and humane account of a largely overlooked population in AIDS history—intravenous drug users—capturing the dignity and courage of figures such as Raul and Jambri as they faced their deaths with grace and defiance. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, Shooting Up is, ultimately, a story of endurance and impact. Betel, the organization Jonathan’s parents founded, has since helped more than 100,000 people overcome addiction and now operates worldwide, including in the UK. Quietly devastating yet deeply compassionate, the memoir is a haunting exploration of belief, belonging, and the profound costs—and rewards—of sacrifice. About the Author Jonathan Tepper is the chief investment officer at Prevatt Capital. Jonathan was the founder of Variant Perception, which provides research to asset managers. Formerly, he was an analyst at SAC Capital and a vice president on the proprietary trading desk at Bank of America. Along the way, with his friend Turi Munthe, they founded Demotix, a citizen-journalism website and photo agency. They sold Demotix in 2012 to Corbis, a company owned then by Bill Gates. Jonathan is the author of financial books, the latest of which is The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition. He is a Rhodes scholar and graduated with highest honors in history and honors in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has an MLitt from the University of Oxford.