If Books Could Kill

The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds

If Books Could Kill

Three Cups of Tea

August 05, 2026

0:00 | 1:52:21

In 1993, a desperate man stumbled into a remote village in the foothills of the Karakoram mountains. After the residents nursed him back to health, he placed his hands on the village elder's shoulders and made a sacred promise. "Somehow," he said, "I am going to get some private jet reimbursements out of this."

Warning: Contains spoilers for the 2016 film "Arrival."

Thanks to Ted Callahan for helping us fact-check this episode!

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Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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Peter: Is this the origin of the slang, like the tea? And that's the tea.

Michael: [Laughs] This book is about building schools in Afghanistan, yes, that is where it comes from.

Peter: That's what it's about. [laughs] I don't remember any details, but I have this vague recollection of Afghanistan school scam.

Michael: Well, that's it, now you're spoiling yourself.

Peter: Yeah. What is. What is my zinger?

Michael: All I know is when I have three cups of tea, I got to go to the bathroom. [Peter laughs] I don't know. I'm channeling you, with a straight guy joke?

Peter: Straight guys don't joke about drinking tea, Michael.

[laughter]

Yeah, I think I got it. I think I got it. Okay.

Michael: Peter.

Peter: Michael.

Michael: What do you know about Three Cups of Tea?

Peter: If you tell me that there's been some kind of fraud or misconduct in Afghanistan, I'm going to lose my mind.

[If Books Could Kill theme]

Michael: Okay, so the full name of this book is “Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism, One School at a Time”

Peter: Oh, my God. Fuck. [laughs]

Michael: I'm trying not to spoil you early. I'm trying not to spoil you early. This was a massively popular book. As usual, we don't know the exact numbers, but I've heard one million. I've heard four million. It spawned a sequel in 2009, which was also a massive bestseller. But the biggest thing is how much this was taken up by the international development sector.

So, the author of the book is a guy called Greg Mortenson. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize in either 2009 or 2010, depending on the source. And when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he donated $100,000 of his prize money to Greg Mortenson.

Peter: [laughs] That's funny. Okay.

Michael: So, we are going to dive directly into the book.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: The opening of the book is Greg Mortenson, who is climbing K2, which is the second tallest mountain in the world.

Peter: Yeah, and the deadliest, right? It's like the hardest to climb or something.

Michael: Yeah, it's like harder, I guess, much more difficult than Everest.

Peter: Right.

Michael: So, this book is written by Greg Mortenson, so the protagonist of the book, but it's written in the third person because it's also written by a magazine journalist named David Relin.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: We start with Greg coming down from K2. He has been on the mountain for 78 days. He has failed to summit, and through a series of misadventures, he has become separated from everyone else in his climbing party.

So, he is alone, trekking slowly down this mountain. He has no food or supplies because those are all with his Sherpa. So, he has one power bar and a thin sleeping bag and he's wandering down the mountain, basically, on the verge of death, essentially. He's about to freeze to death.

Peter: This is why I've always said if I climb K2, I'm going to hang real-close to my Sherpa.

Michael: I read for this. I actually read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer because I was curious, and I was like, “How do people read these fucking books and want to climb mountains, dude? [giggles] It's like miserable.” One guy gets his face frozen off.

Peter: Because it's there Michael.

Michael: [laughs] Yeah.

Peter: That's how I feel about podcasting.

Michael: We're climbing our own mountain. We're also on the roof of the world, in a way.

Peter: There are podcasts about books that we haven't read yet, and I see them in my mind's eye.

Michael: So, as Greg is essentially lying down in the snow and kind of accepting his own death, he reflects on his life.

Peter: Of course.

Michael: He is born in Minnesota in 1957, but shortly thereafter, his parents moved to Tanzania, where they are Christian missionaries. They are building hospitals and schools. When he is 12 years old, he gets a younger sister named Christa.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: His family eventually moves back to the States. Greg moves to the Bay Area. His sister moves to the Twin Cities. When he is 22, she passes away suddenly. And as he's climbing down the mountain, he's holding a necklace that he received from her effects.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: So, the idea with this climb was that he was going to Summit K2, and he was going to leave his sister's necklace at the top of the mountain, but he didn't get to the top of the mountain. So, he's climbing down, and he's kind of looking at this necklace, and he's like feeling like a failure.

Peter: Sure.

Michael: And so suddenly, because of the necklace, he gets the strength to go on. He stands up. He continues climbing down the mountain. Eventually, his Sherpa finds him. They finally get back down to safety. There’s then a couple days you have to hike out of the mountain, which takes many days.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Everyday, his Sherpa leaves him in the afternoon and goes forward to make camp and make dinner.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: One day, his Sherpa goes forward, and Greg is on the trail by himself. He eventually comes to a fork in the trail. He is supposed to go to the right, but instead he goes to the left. He believes that he is on his way to this village, Askole, which is, like, where they'll get a jeep back to the city. It's sort of like where he reenters civilization.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: He believes that he is on the trail to Askole, but he is, in fact, on the trail to a village called Korphe. So, he ends up in the small, remote, rural village in northern Pakistan. He is exhausted. He hasn't showered in more than two months. And basically, he’s met in this village by the village elder, a guy named Haji Ali, who's like, “Oh, my gosh, my friend, we've never had a foreigner in this village before. What is wrong? How can we help you?”

Peter: “No one's ever gone left.”

Michael: Yeah. [laughs] This man invites Greg into his tent and feeds him, gets him warm. Greg ends up staying there for a couple days and eventually asks the village elder, Haji Ali, if he can see the school. What is the school like in this village? And then we have this sequence.

Peter: “He was appalled to see 82 children, 78 boys and the four girls who had the pluck to join them, kneeling on the frosty ground in the open. Haji Ali, avoiding Mortenson's eyes, said that the village had no school and the Pakistani government didn't provide a teacher. A teacher costs the equivalent of one dollar a day, he explained, which was more than the village could afford.

So, they shared a teacher with the neighboring village of Munjan, and he taught in Korphe three days a week. The rest of the time, the children were left alone to practice the lessons he left behind.”

Michael: And here is Greg responding to this.

Peter: Greg's like, “I have an idea for a voucher system.” [Michael laughs] “A dollar a day for a teacher? Mortenson fumed. How could a government, even one as impoverished as Pakistan, not provide that?

I felt like my heart was being torn out. There was a fierceness in their desire to learn, despite how mightily everything was stacked against them, that reminded me of Christa. I knew I had to do something. Standing next to Haji Ali on the ledge overlooking the valley, with such a crystalline view of the mountains, he'd come halfway around the world to measure himself against climbing K2 to place a necklace on its Summit suddenly felt beside the point. There was a much more meaningful gesture he could make in honor of his sister's memory.

He put his hands on Haji Ali's shoulders, as the old man had done to him dozens of times since they'd shared their first cup of tea. ‘I'm going to Build you a school,’ he said, not yet realizing that with those words, the path of his life had just detoured down another trail, a route far more serpentine and arduous than the wrong turns he'd taken since retreating from K2. ‘I will build a school,’ Mortenson said, I promise.”

Michael: So, the rest of the book is Greg building the school, building more schools, eventually setting up an NGO that builds more than 100 schools in rural Pakistan. And it all started with this one promise that he made to this village elder.

Peter: Yeah, it's best to just start promising right off the bat. I will say I don't know much about the poor villages in fucking Kashmir or wherever he is.

Michael: You're going to learn so much in the next four hours, Peter.

Peter: He paints that picture of a bunch of kids huddled outside, right?

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: In the dirt, and you're like, “Oh, the problem is lack of building,” but probably not, right? That's actually not the problem across the region.

Michael: So, this book comes out in 2006. This anecdote is from 1993. It is called “Three Cups of Tea.” Five years later, in 2011, Jon Krakauer, the sort of famed outdoor journalist, publishes a book called “Three Cups of Deceit,” which is accompanied by a 60 Minutes documentary.

Peter: That's the dream, by the way, for haters like us to publish a book that's just more like suckonomics. [Michael laughs] And it's just like a brutal takedown and everyone has to agree that you are right and they're wrong.

Michael: I also love this book. This book was released online as part of like a competitor to Amazon something something. It's like 80 pages long.

Peter: Hell, yeah.

Michael: This is like the perfect length of a fucking nonfiction book. I'm like, “Please give me more 80-page nonfiction books.”

Peter: Absolutely. Wow.

Michael: So, I am sending you a part of the 60-minute segment and we are going to watch it.

[audio starts]

Segment: It's a powerful and a heartwarming tale that has motivated millions of people to buy his books and to contribute nearly $60 million to his charity. It's a beautiful story and it's a lie.

Jon Krakauer is also a best-selling author and mountaineer who wrote Into Thin Air and Into the Wild. He was one of Mortenson's earliest backers, donating $75,000 to his nonprofit organization. But after a few years, Krakauer says he withdrew his support over concerns that the charity was being mismanaged. And he later learned that the Korphe tale that launched Mortenson into prominence was simply not true. Did he stumble into this village in a weakened state?

Jon: Absolutely not.

Interviewer: So, nobody helped him out and nursed him back to health?

Jon: Absolutely not. I have spoken to one of his companions, a close friend who hiked out from K2 with him. This companion said, “Greg ever heard of Korphe till a year later.”

Interviewer: we managed to track down the two porters who accompanied Mortenson and spoke to them in Pakistan's remote Hushe Valley. They also told us that Mortenson didn't stumble into Korphe lost and alone, and that he didn't go to Korphe at all until nearly a year later on another visit.

[audio ends]

Peter: All right, so not true.

Michael: I think the reason why it's appealing is because it has this kind of mythic kind of quality to it, but it's maybe a little too mythic when you think about it. It's like this village has never seen a foreigner before.

Peter: [laughs] This village that's like a mile away from a popular path, right?

Michael: Yeah, exactly.

Peter: Trail that goes up to K2 or whatever.

Michael: What happened here is Jon Krakauer was a big fan of the book, an early supporter and friend of Greg.

Peter: You know, Greg was sweating, by the way, when this journalist/mountaineer comes around, “If anyone's going to bust you, dude.”

Michael: Dude, never be friends with a journalist.

Peter: I'm a journalist and I climb mountains and Greg is just pouring sweat.

Michael: So basically, over the course of their friendship, Krakauer becomes increasingly suspicious of basically all of the kind of weird tall tales that Greg is telling him. So here is an excerpt from Krakauer's book.

Peter: “According to Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson was an accomplished mountaineer who, before attempting K2, had made half a dozen successful Himalayan ascents, including climbs of Annapurna IV and Baruntse, both of which are in Nepal. But there is no record in the American Alpine Journal, which meticulously documents all ascents of major Himalayan peaks, of Mortenson reaching the Summit of or even attempting any Himalayan mountain prior to 1993.

Scott Darsney, Greg's climbing partner on K2, confirms that Mortenson had never been to the Himalaya or Karakoram before going to K2.”

Michael: So, I think this is what got Krakauer curious because lying about your climbs in the climbing community is really bad.

Peter: Well, because you probably, like-- these guys probably spend years, maybe decades of their life trying to knock off a few of these.

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: And then some guys are like, “Yeah, I climbed it.”

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: “I climbed it.” And if you find out that he didn't, you're going to be mad. I get it.

Michael: He also claims to have been the youngest person to climb Mount Kilimanjaro because he was living in Tanzania growing up. He says he climbed it when he was 11.

Peter: Yeah, “I climbed up. No one was looking. Me and my girlfriend, who was hot, by the way, we climbed it.”

Michael: And I think now the youngest person to climb Mount Kilimanjaro is like five years old. So, it's not totally implausible that an 11-year-old who will climb Mount Kilimanjaro. But he says “I was the youngest person ever to do it for 30 years. Like a record I held for 30 years,” but, I could find no record of that anywhere.

And it's a claim that he makes on the official bio on the website of his NGO, but he doesn't actually make it in the book. I would be bragging about that constantly. It's weird that you mention it in one place but not another.

And then this also. I mean, it really ruins the book for you knowing that certain claims in it are fake, because he has a bunch of stories where he was like, I don't know, Greg. So, he has this from when he moves back to America for high school. He goes to high school in a public school in the Bay Area after growing up in Tanzania, so here's this.

Peter: “Between classes, a tall, sinewy basketball player wearing a Cadillac hood ornament around his neck on a gold chain shoved Mortenson up against the drinking fountain while his friends closed in menacingly. ‘You ain't no African,’” he said. [laughter]

Michael: I too have seen Mean Girls.

Peter: “You ain't no African, he sneered. Then the pack of boys began raining blows on Mortenson while he tried to cover his head, wondering what he'd done,” and then he remembered his training with Muhammad Ali. [laughs]

Michael: I've actually been to model mugging. I'm actually ready for you because I have karate training.

Peter: “When they finally stopped, Mortenson lowered his arms, his lips trembling. The leader of the group wound up and smashed his fists into Mortenson's eye. Another boy picked up a trash can and upended it on his head. Mortenson stood by the drinking fountain, the reeking can covering his head, listening as laughter faded down the hallway.” [laughs] He’s inside the garbage can at the end of the story.

Michael: Trash can on his head is like a little too, like Karate Kid kind of like cinematic detail.

Peter: Cadillac hood ornament around.

Michael: [laughs] Cadillac hood ornament is where I'm like-

Peter: Oh, shit.

Michael: “-I'm making Peter read this.”

[laughter]

Michael: I don't think you'd get beaten up for being a white guy from Tanzania.

Peter: I mean, it depends how annoying you're being about.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

Peter: But it would be funny if like what was actually happening is that like you know the teacher was like, “Who here is African American?” And Greg's like, “Well, obviously me.” I mean, look, Greg paved the way for Zohran Mamdani.

Michael: There's also a story about him visiting the body of Mother Teresa, who's a hero of his. He has a layover in Calcutta at one point and goes to see her body. He says this.

Peter: “You ain't no African.”

Michael: That's what Mother Teresa said to him.

Peter: [laughs] “You ain't no Catholic.” [laughter] “At dusk outside the Missionaries of Charity Mother House, hundreds of hushed mourners crowded the gates, holding candles and arranging offerings of fruit and incense on the pavement. The driver got out and rattled the metal gate loudly, ‘The Saheb had come all the way from America to pay his respects,’ He shouted in Bengali, ‘open up.’

An elderly watchman guarding the entrance stood up and returned with a young nun in a blue habit who looked the dusty traveler and his explosion of flowers up and down before waving him inside.” Oh, boy.

Michael: I don't know. When Mother Teresa died, a lot of people were visiting and a lot of people visited from other countries.

Peter: A foreigner has come to see Mother Teresa, this nobody.

Michael: And then they let him into a private viewing and he puts his hand on her hand and he has a moment with her. It just is like a little much.

Peter: He's like, “Yeah, I actually met God, by the way.”

Michael: Krakauer points out that he claims that this anecdote took place in the year 2000, but Mother Teresa died in 1997. Last one, he also has an anecdote about sitting next to the King of Afghan on an airplane.

Peter: “The king sat in the window seat.” Of course.

Michael: He's got his neck pillow. He's in his pajamas. [laughter]

Peter: Since this is probably a made-up anecdote, I would love for him to have just said “The king was in the middle seat.” [Michael laughs] “Mortenson recognized him from pictures of the old Afghan currency he'd seen for sale in the bazaars. At 89, Zahir Shah looked far older than his official portrait as he stared out of the window of the PIA 737 at the country he'd been exiled from for nearly 30 years. Aside from the king's security detail and a small crew of stewardesses, Mortenson was alone on the short flight from Islamabad to Kabul with Afghanistan's former monarch. When Shah turned away from the window, he locked eyes with Mortenson across the aisle.”

Michael: Let's do this as like a little script. So, you be Mortenson, I'll be the Shah.

Peter: As salaam alaikum, sir.

Michael: And to you, sir. American?

Peter: Yes, sir.

Michael: Are you a journalist?

Peter: No, I build schools for girls. “Shah's eyebrows lifted toward the brown dome of his hairless head. He patted the seat next to him and Mortenson moved over.”

Michael: Do you know someone in the area.

Peter: Dude.

Michael: And then it kind of goes on from there and then--

Peter: What the fuck is going on here?

Michael: The story ends with the King of Afghanistan pulling out a business card and also pulling out like an inkpad and putting his finger in the inkpad and then putting his fingerprint on the business card. And he's like, “Give this to anyone in the area and tell them that I sent you. I am a friend to anyone who builds schools in my country.” And then conveniently, Greg loses the business card in-- He gets caught in a machine gun fight between opium smugglers-

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: -which results in him losing the business card. And so, he's not able to present the business card to his local contact.

Peter: Here's the thing, and this will be a good lesson to our listeners. If you want to do like a fraud book, you got to keep the lies tight.

Michael: I know.

Peter: There's going to be a journalist looking into your lies and they're going to do checks on like a hundred facts. If the first 90 are true, the journalist is going to move on.

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: But if it's just like, “Hey, I think this is a lie. Hey, I think this is a lie too.” They're going to get excited. They're going to write an 80-page pamphlet about how your book is a lie.

Michael: The other mistake he makes here is making up stories about people who can respond. So Krakauer contacts the son of the former King of Afghanistan. The king of Afghanistan died, but his son, he says “He has never traveled on any PIA flights from 1973 to 2007, the year of his death.”

Peter: He obviously was not aware that tight records were kept about various things, right?

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: He's like, “You know, I climbed that mountain.” And then someone's like, “You know, there's a list of everyone who's ever climbed a mountain.” And he's like, “Oh, fuck. That's brutal.” That's brutal for a liar. I almost feel for him because this is-- If you're a casual bullshitter, you're not expecting this level of record keeping.

Michael: Oh totally, yeah. I also think the structure of the way the book is written is very crucial because Greg Mortenson, I mean, he's listed as a co-author, but it doesn't appear that he sat down and wrote any of this book. He basically told his story to this David Relin guy who's a magazine journalist, who then wrote it down in the book. I think he's just used to telling these stories and then eventually this gets written down.

Peter: I wonder if there were moments where Relin's reaching out, like, “Hey, what was that story again, about the flight?” And Mortenson's like, “Oh shit.” [laughs]

Michael: So, to circle back to the anecdote that he starts the book with of stumbling into this village, Korphe in 1993, because he took the wrong turn at a fork in the road. It is true that on the way down from K2, there is a fork in the road, and you have to go right to get to this village, Askole.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: You can go left. However, if you go left at this fork in the road, you will reach, like, a river gorge. There was no bridge.

Peter: So, you don't reach like the fucking-- like a lost village from King Kong like that. He wants you to believe that if you went left instead of right at this fork, that presumably hundreds, if not thousands of people pass through every month, but you reach a completely untouched village. [laughs]

Michael: And at the time, the only way to get to Korphe was to essentially go through Askole.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: So, you have to get to Askole, which is the city where he's trying to go, and then take a left and then go across the river on a different bridge, and then you get to Korphe.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: So basically, when Greg is confronted with this by 60 Minutes, he refuses an interview with both Krakauer and 60 Minutes, but he does provide a written statement responding to a bunch of their questions. He basically throws David Relin under the bus.

Peter: That's your only move at this point.

Michael: So, he basically says, like, “Look, to write a book like this, you have to condense some timelines. I was kind of back and forth to Pakistan for an entire decade. If we wrote down every single one, the book would have been 5,000 pages long.”

Peter: He's like slowly backing out of the room, like “Look, forks in the road. They're metaphors.”

Michael: Yeah. [laughs] So he also in his written statement says this.

Peter: “I was reminded while double checking this information that the Balti people have a completely different notion about time.” Yeah, [chuckles] now we're go good, dude.

Michael: You're being really white right now. You're being so white by asking what time something happened.

Peter: Truth. Truth is very white coated. “Even the Balti language, an archaic dialect of Tibetan, has only a vague concept of tenses and time. For example, now can mean immediately or sometime over the course of a whole long season. The concept of past and future is rarely of concern.” Yes, Classic cultural thing, they don't know about the past even.

Michael: They don't even have a word from 1993. He changes the stories at various points, but he basically says, “I was in Korphe, but I was only there for a few hours. I then went back like a year later.”

Peter: How you say hours? [Michael laughs] I was in Korphe, it was in the past. Maybe it was in the future, I do not know. [Michael laughs] Perhaps part of the concern here is the stories that I'm telling you are actually going to happen later.

Michael: It's actually arrival right now. You think it's a flashback, but it's a flash forward. Maybe it's your problem for not thinking in a circle. Maybe you don't think in a circle. The whole thing of him throwing David Relin under the bus really irks me as a journalist, because he had been telling this story publicly for a decade by the time this book was written.

Peter: Right, right.

Michael: So, you can find interviews with him, you can find podcasts with him. He always tells the same story. “I stumbled down from K2, I accidentally ended up in this village, they nursed me back to health, so I built a school.”

Peter: You always have an empathetic ear toward whatever is happening to a journalist in any of our tales.

Michael: [laughs] I'm like, “Don't make the journalist the villain here. He's writing down what you're telling him.”

Peter: You see there's a timeline where Mike Hobbs is like writing a book for some asshole. [laughter]

Michael: Well, I used to be a speechwriter for UN People and shit and so you just write down what they want you to fucking say.

Peter: Exactly.

Michael: So, what actually happened is he didn't wander down the mountain alone. He came down in a party of four people. So, it was him and his Sherpa and another climber named Scott Darsney and his Sherpa. Everybody walks together into this village, Askole. They then get a jeep, which then takes them to Skardu, which is like the closest major city. They're not nursed back to health in a random village. They're nursed back to health at a motel called the K2 Motel, which is where climbers go to recover. They're there for a week.

Peter: [laughs] They're like a fucking best Western.

Michael: They then get a jeep after that to a village called Khane because they have a cook on their expedition called Akhmalu who they become close with, they're friends with and he had invited them to his village.

They go to his village and they stay there for a couple days. And there is a newsletter that he writes in 1994 before he starts telling this whole Korphe story about why he wants to build a school in this other village, Khane, and this is an excerpt from his newsletter.

Peter: “After 70 days on the mountain, I spent some time in Khane. When I asked to see the school, the villagers took me up to a dusty apricot grove on a hill behind the village. A group of 85 children, five to twelve years old, were sitting in the dirt reciting spelling tables. Despite abject poverty, their spirits soared.”

Michael: So clearly this is the anecdote that he then transferred to a different village and this, you know, village elder story that he made up about Korphe. A couple years later. After they see this school, Greg Mortenson makes a promise to Akhmalu, the cook on their expedition, that he will build a school in Khane.

So, this is kind of a little bit of a twist in this debunking because typically when we find out, like, okay, the opening chapter of this book is a scam. This guy, he wasn't in Korphe. He lied about this. He lied about that. Typically, we would then go into a thing where we're like, okay, he never climbed K2. He's never been to Pakistan. He never built any schools. We would then do a whole thing where it's like, he's a complete fucking scammer. Like we did with Think and Grow Rich, right?

Peter: Right.

Michael: But the kind of weird twist of this is that Greg really did build a school in this village, Korphe.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: So, he went home from Khane. He found this rich Swiss guy, a former scientist, now mountain climber, who agrees to give Greg $12,000. Greg buys a plane ticket to Pakistan. He spends $8,000 on materials, construction materials. Drives two days back up into these mountain villages. He brings all of the supplies to Khane. He starts trying to build a school in Khane. He has a local fixer named Mohammad Changazi who's their local contact in the area who helped organize the expedition to K2.

They can't get a land title in Khane. There's nowhere they can legally build the school. It turns out this Changazi guy, the local fixer, is the adopted son of Haji Ali. This Changazi guy tells Haji Ali, “Hey, there's this white guy with a bunch of, like, building materials. He wants to build a school, and he can't really build one in Khane, like, that effort has stalled out.” So, he then brings Haji Ali to meet Greg. And this is from Jon Krakauer's book.

Peter: “When he learned from his adopted son that a starry-eyed American was coming to build a school, Haji Ali resolved to get the school built in his village, Korphe, rather than Khane. Only Mortenson and Changazi know exactly what happened next. Haji Ali died in 2001. But a few days after the truckload of construction materials was stacked in Changazi’s compound, Changazi introduced Mortenson to Haji Ali.

Shortly thereafter, Mortenson reneged on his pledge to build the school in Khane and announced that he intended to build it in Korphe instead.” [laughs] Dude, how are you building schools but also being a scumbag at the same time.

Michael: It’s so fucking crazy. The basic details of the story are incredible. Like this random guy raises money for Pakistan. The first third of the book is about this effort to build this one school. This village elder guy says “Well, we actually more than a school, we need a bridge. We need a bridge to link us across this river so we can get to other villages and do basic trade and stuff.” And so, Greg also builds the guy a fucking bridge.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: He gets dynamite to get stone out of the quarries and hires people and spends years building what appears to be like, a very well-built bridge over this river. He then also builds a school that is now functioning like other climbers who climb K2 will say, like, “Oh, hey, I climbed down from K2. There's been all this controversy about it. I stopped by Korphe. I went to the school and kids are in class and they seem to be getting an education there.”

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: He did build a school for poor people in Pakistan when he himself had no money. And he spent years doing this flying back and forth between the Bay Area and Pakistan, sending construction materials and hiring laborers. It's like an incredible amount of work. And he really was sleeping on the floor of these tents and stuff. This was not something he was doing to make money or in the lap of luxury, but then he just added this bizarre lie. “I made a promise to Haji Ali.”

Peter: It's very interesting psychologically what's happening here, because you did the thing. You did the main thing that you would want to brag about.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: Like he's not trying to present this totally fake version of himself to the public where he's a hero. He actually did do something kind of heroic.

Michael: Yes.

Peter: He's just lying about the details because he can't help it, maybe.

Michael: I guess. There's also something very weird that really didn't get very much attention at the time. So, in Jon Krakauer's book, he interviews Scott Darsney, who's this other climber who comes down the mountain with Greg, and he says, like, “No, Greg had never been to Korphe when we left. Greg didn't even hear about Korphe until a year later.”

After Krakauer's book comes out, Scott Darsney writes an email to Outside Magazine where he says, “I want to correct the record a little bit. Greg did actually kind of disappear for a half a day. And when he showed up in Askole, he said, ‘Oh, hey, I stumbled into this village.’” So, it's actually possible that Greg's updated story like “We condensed the timeline,” that might be true. It's actually fairly plausible that's true. He did wander into this village for a couple hours. He may have met this village elder guy. It doesn't appear that he went to a school. It doesn't appear that he made the promise. That part is still fake.

Peter: Right.

Michael: But he did actually kind of stumble into this village, or at least it's plausible that happened. So, it's kind of crazy. It's like he also could have just fucking said that in his book.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: “Hey, I stumbled in this village for a couple hours. I was intrigued by it. I tried to build a school in this other place. It didn't work out. I thought, ‘Hey, what about that other village I spent a couple hours in? I'll build one there.’” Like, that's what actually happened and then he built the fucking school.

Peter: It's so weird to do this insanely cool, insanely charitable thing-

Michael: Yes.

Peter: -and then make up little lies about it.

Michael: It's really weird.

Peter: All of our listeners who are so full of themselves, have never once done such a thing.

Michael: So basically, the next couple chapters of the book are about setting up this NGO. So, in Pakistan, he's building a school. In the U.S. he becomes closer with this Swiss scientist, rich guy, climber guy, who eventually, in 1996, as construction is going well on the school, gives Greg a million dollars and is like, “Why don't you endow an NGO? You become the executive director of this NGO. You get a board of directors, you get a whole sort of structure around you, and you just build as many schools in rural Pakistan as possible.” So, in 1996, they found the NGO. It's called the Central Asia Institute.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: And the rest of the book is essentially his adventures going back and forth to Pakistan and building up this NGO from something that started with a $12,000 donation into something that is eventually earning $20 million a year in donations.

Peter: Wow.

Michael: So, we talked about how the opening anecdote of the book is, I think, fundamentally a lie. it's obviously embellished, but there's a kernel of truth to it. There are also stories where there isn't a kernel of truth. So, one of the major incidents in the middle of the book is Greg being kidnapped by the Taliban.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: So, this begins when he is expanding into Waziristan, which is a remote rural region of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. He starts his trip by going to some sort of compound to meet his local contact. The guy leaves him waiting in a room for two hours. Eventually, the guy feeds him dinner. He's like, “You're my honored guest.” They eat dinner together. He's like, “I'll show you to your room.” Greg goes to sleep. He wakes up at 02:00 AM to eight guys around his bed pointing AK-47s at him.

Peter: It's a lot of guys. That's a lot of guys.

Michael: They put a bag over his head. They put him in the back of a pickup truck. They drive for 45 minutes. He says there's all these abandoned forts in the area from like the colonial British powers. There's these like essentially castles, and they have snipers posted on the gun turrets around these forts.

Peter: Okay. That doesn't seem practical, but all right.

Michael: They then lock him in a room, and Greg is trapped there. The only thing that's in a room is a Time Magazine from 1979, which is about the Iran Hostage Crisis.

Peter: Sure.

Michael: So eventually, six days go by. On the sixth day, a guy appears in the room. Won't give his name, but he speaks perfect English. He says, “My name is Khan,” which is like a very common name there, it's like Smith. Greg's trying to get out of there. So, Greg's like, “Oh, I'm building schools in the area,” but the guy doesn't seem very impressed. Greg eventually says, like, “My wife is pregnant and I really need to get home to her. Will you let me go?” And the guy says, “I'm afraid that's not possible.” On the eighth day of captivity, he is invited outside to watch a soccer match. The guy's like, “Do you like soccer?” And then he goes outside and all the guards are playing soccer.

Peter: The worst question you hear as an American being held hostage in a foreign country.

Michael: [laughs] You're like, “No, leave me in the room. It's fine.”

Peter: Do you like soccer? You’re like, ah.

Michael: He's sort of watching this Khan guy interacting with the other guards. Greg says “By his bearing and the respect others showed him, Mortenson realized Khan was most likely an emerging Taliban commander.”

Peter: Just eyeballing it.

Michael: Yep.

Peter: I'm getting emerging Taliban commander vibes.

Michael: The way that Greg always tells his story. He tells us a million times in interviews and in talks, etc. He always says, “I was kidnapped by the Taliban for eight days.”

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: After the soccer game, this guy Khan, he kind of pulls him out of the room, bag on his head, puts him in another pickup truck. They drive for a while and they pull up at some sort of like gathering and then this is what Greg says.

Peter: “Over Khan's shoulder, Mortenson saw hundreds of big bearded Wazir dancing around bonfires, shooting their weapons in the air. On their fire lit faces, Mortenson was amazed to see not bloodlust, but rapture. ‘What is this?’ He yelled, following Khan into the frenzy of dancing men, not trusting that his eight days of danger had finally passed. ‘Why am I here?’ ‘It is best if I don't tell you too much,’ Khan shouted over the gunfire. Let's just say we considered other contingencies.”

[laughter]

Peter: He's talking like a Bond villain. “There was a dispute and we might have had a big, big problem, but now everything is settled by jirga and we're throwing a party.”

Michael: Then people start walking up to him and giving him money. So, here's this.

Peter: “The guard with the bullet creased forehead stumbled toward him, his grinning face lit by both flames and hashish. In his hand, he waved a wad of pink hundred-rupee notes, as filthy and tattered as he was before stuffing them into the chest pocket of Mortenson's shalwar. Mortenson, speechless, turned to Khan for an explanation ‘for your schools,’ he shouted in Mortenson's ear. So, Inshallah, you'll build many more.”

Michael: So, they basically have a party in his honor at the end of this.

Peter: And to think of all the little kerfuffles we've had with them since.

Michael: It appears none of this happened. So, first of all, many people who are familiar with the region say that the Taliban was not in that region in the late 1990s. The Taliban only showed up in that region of Pakistan in 2001, 2002 after the U.S. started bombing. This is an excerpt from a Time magazine article in 2011 called, “He wasn't kidnapped. He was our guest.”

Peter: Like I said, we run a small best Western. He was just staying here.

Michael: It's actually worse, Peter.

Peter: “Mansur Khan Mahsud is a Pashtun research scholar in Pakistan who said he's considering suing Mortenson for falsely accusing his family and community of kidnapping him. In fact, says Mahsud, “They hosted and protected Mortenson during a trip to their village in the western tribal areas 15 years ago.” Mahsud says, “He first met Mortenson in his ancestral village in south Waziristan in July 1996 and spent nearly two weeks with him, guiding him throughout the region. In Three Cups of Tea, however, Mahsud is described as an emerging Taliban commander who held Mortenson captive for several days before eventually freeing him.” This is just white people in the presence of Middle Easterners. You're like-

Michael: [crosstalk] crazy.

Peter: -“am I being held hostage?” They're like, “No, we're-- This is a cafe.”

Michael: And the guy's like, I'm a director of a think tank. I'm not in the Taliban, I'm literally a research scholar. [Peter laughs] And Krakauer gets photos from this trip. It's like a vacation. So, he's staying in the home of a local political elite. And there's pictures of him sleeping in his like nice bed and taking walks in the afternoon. And there's notes from other local politician types who are like, “Thanks for the meeting yesterday. We had a productive discussion.”

Peter: So, the question is, is Mortenson lying or is he so racist?

Michael: [laughs] I was kidnapped.

Peter: He was like treated to above-average hospitality by Middle Easterners and he was like, “Get me out of here, day four. They keep bringing me tea.”

Michael: This guy went out of his way, took two weeks out of his fucking life to show you around for no compensation. You were basically on a work trip where you had a bunch of meetings.

Peter: To be fair, this is how I feel at company retreats. If you asked me what happened at a given company retreat, I'd be like, “I couldn't leave. [Michael laughs] I was marched from one room to the next forcibly.”

Michael: So, that gets into some of the other threads of the book. One thing I forgot to mention at the beginning of this episode is that this book, as well as its popularity with President Obama and all these humanitarian awards and stuff, this book was required reading for soldiers going to Afghanistan.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: As you recall, the original title of this book was Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism One School at a Time.

Peter: Right. Using education.

Michael: Greg insisted on changing the title for the paperback and future editions. It now says, Promoting Peace One School at a time. So, to his credit. But this thing of like we're fighting terrorism with schools is a huge part of the book, and it's also a huge reason for the popularity of the book.

Peter: If people learn enough, they will learn that America is cool.

Michael: [laughs] I read it. We're not really going to get into it, but I did read a bunch of debunkings of all of the terrorists who had a ton of education.

Peter: Well, Osama Bin Laden. Yeah.

Michael: Also, like Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski.

Peter: Yeah. A lot of terrorists do tend to be highly educated, but they also pull from uneducated.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's somewhere in there, but it's like the post 9/11, post Iraq and Afghanistan wars are so important for understanding the appeal of this book.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: The book comes out in 2006. It's describing events from like a decade before, but it comes out in 2006. This is when Iraq is emerging as a quagmire. Afghanistan has been a quagmire for a long time. And people want some sort of good news, some sign of hope from the region. And then you get this guy, this one heroic man who's building schools and promoting peace and maybe that's the way to do it.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: It's very telling that the military took up this book because as both of these wars were becoming increasingly like, you can't really deny anymore that they're quagmires and mistakes, you need to change the justification for the wars. So, the best articulation of this is from, wait for it, a Thomas Friedman column-

Peter: Oh, boy.

Michael: -in 2009, where he goes to Afghanistan to attend the opening of one of Greg's schools.

Peter: Oh, God, here we go.

Michael: And so, he writes a column about it. This is a long excerpt, but it's a rich text, so.

Peter: I'm sure it is. I'm sure it's just a little longer than it needs to be. “I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask, ‘Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban?’ Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that's why God created cruise missiles.”

Michael: He's such a fucking asshole.

Peter: Such a fucking piece of shit, dude. Such a fucking piece of shit.

Michael: He's fully just like, “We're going to solve our problems by bombing them.”

Peter: “But every time I start writing that column, something steals my hand. This week, it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of Three Cups of Tea, open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk, waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write. Let's just get out of here.”

Michael: What if we have to stay? We have to stay for the little girls.

Peter: What if there's always a reason to stay, occupying these countries? What if we can always find something? “Indeed, Mortenson's efforts remind us what the essence of the war on terrorism is about.” God damn it, dude.

Michael: That's why we went in there and dropped schools on them.

Peter: “It's about the war of ideas within Islam, a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas, and empower Muslim women as much as men. America's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were in part an effort to create the space for Muslim progressives to fight and win, so that the real engine of change, a new generation can be educated and raised differently.”

Michael: But the war was, in part-

Peter: The war was, in part.

Michael: -helping Muslim progressives. In part, but, you know? he was in there. He was in there.

Peter: “Which is why it was no accident that Admiral Mike Mullen, the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson's newest school and cut the ribbon. This new school teaches grades one through six. I ask some girls through an interpreter what they wanted to be when they grow up, ‘Teacher,’ shouted one. ‘New York Times opinion columnist,’ shouted another.

[laughter]

Michael: No. Shut down the schools.

Peter: “’Doctor’ shouted another. Living here, those are the only two educated role models these girls encounter. Where were they going to school before Mortenson Central Asia Institute and the U.S. Department of State joined with the village elders to get the secular public school built? ‘The mosque,’ the girls said. So, there you have it.”

Michael: They were at the mosque. They were at the mosque.

Peter: They were at the mosque. Going to school in a church, of course, something that never happens in the United States.

Michael: You can see it happening here, right? Where he's basically like, this is a mistake. Afghanistan was-- there's no reason for us to be here, we should be pulling out, but we're building schools. We need to stay.

Peter: The Mortenson anecdote was sort of like, “They didn't have a school before, and so we built them a school.” And Friedman's like, “They were fucking learning at the mosque. We've got to get out here.”

Michael: Yeah. [laughs] So there's a really interesting article about this book before all the lies and the other scandal stuff come out. Just like an analysis of the text of the book. It's by Nosheen Ali. It's called Humanitarian Development and the Narrative of the Terror.

She says, “The colonial logic of deploying culture to justify the long war and occupation does not get more straightforward than this. Imperial power as a beacon of modernity, development, civilization, and women's empowerment is precisely the discourse used by British and French colonizers in Egypt, India, and Algeria, among other places, to explain their occupations.”

This is like a psychological process that happens with colonialism where it's like, you don't want to feel like a piece of shit. You realize what you've done to these people, and so you're like, “No, no, we're here civilizing them. It's actually for their benefit. You need it to be, they are better off for our presence,” and that's precisely what Friedman is doing here.

Peter: It's almost like the Middle East invasion equivalent of the movie the Blind Side. Where it's just the idea this is being imposed upon them is not really reckoned with. I don't want to be too glib about _____ these folks did live under the Taliban. Like, this is not a situation where it's like, obviously, they were fine before, but here we are in 2026, they live under the Taliban again, right?

Michael: So, to his credit, Greg is fairly critical of the war in Afghanistan.

Peter: I can see that.

Michael: And publicly talk shit about the administration in pretty scathing terms.

Peter: He's like, “I like how you guys lied your way into it. That was cool. But the actual war, no.”

Michael: So, he is critical. However, this book contains a lot of stuff about like madrasas.

Peter: A warning about Barack Obama.

Michael: It's very clear that he thinks of his mission as providing an alternative to madrasas of these religious schools that are being built up. He has a whole thing where he's looking out over the hills of the northern areas and on the border with Afghanistan, and he can see schools popping up in the distance. And he asked his local conduct, like, “What's that?” And he's like, “Well, the Saudis are pouring tens of millions of dollars into this region. They're building thousands and thousands of schools.” And so, this is a big part of the actual book. So, I'm going to send you an excerpt from the book.

Peter: “By 2001, a World Bank study estimated that at least 20,000 madrasas were teaching as many as 2 million of Pakistan students an Islamic-based curriculum. Not every madrasa was a hotbed of extremism, but the World Bank concluded that 15% to 20% of madrasa students were receiving military training along with a curriculum that emphasized jihad and hatred of the west at the expense of subjects like math, science, and literature.” Now, that is a problem because I do feel like the hatred of the west curriculum should be supplemental to math, science, and literature.

Michael: Yeah, usually we get it in college in America. Usually, it's at Oberlin that we get that, but they're getting younger.

Peter: “’Thinking about the Wahhabi strategy made my head spin,’ Mortenson says. This wasn't just a few Arab sheikhs getting off Gulf Air flights with bags of cash. They were bringing the brightest madrasa students back to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for a decade of indoctrination, then encouraging them to take four wives when they came home and breed like rabbits.”

Michael: The birthright stuff was a shock to me. It's like, oh, birth. They're breeding like rabbits.

Peter: This is something you would see in right-wing press all the time, where they're just like, “We're getting outbred by the Muslims.”

Michael: So, I do want to talk about the numbers here, because this whole thing of Muslim madrassas in Pakistan was like a fairly prominent moral panic at the time. In his book, Greg says, “By 2001, a World Bank study estimated that at least 20,000 madrasas were teaching as many as two million of Pakistan students an Islamic-based curriculum.” So, I looked around for this, there is no 2001 World Bank study.

There's two studies that come out in 2001 and 2002 that were very influential on this moral panic. The first of them is by the International Crisis Group, which is an NGO, and the other is by the Brookings Institution. There's a very good debunking of this called “Religious school enrollment in Pakistan, a look at the data.” So, they found 44 articles in the Western press about madrasas between 2001 and 2003. There's a massive range of estimates of how many children are attending these madrasas. In the article, they say, some articles say 500,000 students. Some articles say 1.5 million students. Greg says two million, which is above even like the high estimates that they found in this article.

They said of the 44 articles in American media about madrasas, only two benchmarked the number of students in madrasas with the total number of students in Pakistan. So, Pakistan is an insanely populous country. It's 240 million people.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: It is a very young population. So, around 50% of the population is under 18. So, in this article, they say, according to the 1998 Census of Population, like, pretty good data, 159,000 students were enrolled in madrasas. This represents 0.31% of all children between the ages of five and nineteen. A very small percentage of children are attending madrasas. And that doesn't even get into like how many madrasas are militant madrasas. These are just like religious schools.

Peter: Right, right.

Michael: Looking back, it's really ironic that this moral panic emerge out of 9/11, because none of the 9/11 hijackers attended madrasas. There's a 2006 study that looked at 79 fundamentalist Islamic terrorists and found that only nine of them attended madrasas, whereas almost half of them attended western colleges. Like, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed went to college in North Carolina.

Peter: Nice.

Michael: So, it is true that many madrasas in Pakistan had conservative curricula. Like, there's now been studies of the textbooks, but as a driver of terrorism, they're just not a major source. The same author, Nosheen Ali, also wrote an article called Books vs Bombs? Humanitarian Development and the Narrative of Terror in Northern Pakistan, where she talks about how this whole narrative, as well as being kind of false overall, is not relevant at all to the region where Greg is working, so here is this.

Peter: “If one must generalize about religious identity in the diverse rural regions of Pakistan, surely the conclusion would be the opposite of what is claimed by Three Cups of Tea. Rural areas of Pakistan have been known for their adherence to a pluralistic sense of faith, in which Islam is perceived as an idiom of morality instead of theology and devotion is deemed more important than dogma. Far from being illiterate village conformists, Muslims in parts of northern Pakistan consider debate and intellectual engagement as an integral element of living their faith. In the northern areas, in particular, even the clergy has most recently been known for leading a secular Shia movement against biased public-school textbooks, not for creating hubs of anti-school extremist madrassas.”

Michael: So, it's sort of sad to think about the missed opportunity here of like, someone who spent a lot of time in the region and has a lot of credibility back in the United States. Instead of humanizing this region and helping people understand some of the complexities, he just repeats the one-dimensional narrative that people already have.

Peter: All it is people seeing shit they don't really understand and then freaking out.

Michael: Yeah, exactly.

Peter: And it's not that there's nothing to be concerned about. It's just that you barely know what you're looking at as someone who's not familiar with these regions. The politics is insanely complex. The religion is complex. The culture is complex. You don't understand any of it.

Michael: There's a scene in the book where Greg is sitting down with kind of village elders from different villages and they've been in conflict with each other. He brokers this meeting where they're all like sitting down and having tea together. Here's like one of the best quotes from the book from the end of this scene of different village elders.

Peter: “An infidel and representatives from three warring sects of Islam. And I thought, if we can get along this well, we can accomplish anything. The British policy was divide and conquer, but I say unite and conquer.” [Michael laughs] Well, he wrote that paragraph to completion, just absolute horseshit.

Michael: [laughs] I'm fucking dying. It's like, Greg, the conquering part is what people object to. It's that unite and conquer is like still conquering Greg.

Peter: He's conquering them with ideas, Michael. An infidel, and representatives from three warring sects of Islam. He’s like meeting with all these people, but he still uses the language of the New York Times op ed column.

Michael: Yeah, exactly.

Peter: He's literally just like having a meal with these folks. And he's like, “So, I'm an infidel to you, huh?” And they're like, “Greg, please.”

Michael: So, getting back to the book, the final section of the book is about Greg's efforts to expand into Afghanistan. This begins in either 1999 or 2000, depending on which of Greg's books you read. He is in northern Pakistan, on the border with Afghanistan, and he's like wandering around a Prairie. And then he is suddenly approached by about a dozen horsemen. These are like nomadic herders. And the leader tells Greg that his father, Abdul Rashid, has sent him on a six-day horse ride to find Greg because he's heard stories of Greg building schools for girls.

Peter: Bring me Greg Mortenson.

Michael: Like literally, he says, “My father, all he dreams of-- He would give up all of his worldly possessions to educate just one girl. And he sent me for six days to come and speak with you and ask you to build a school in our region,” and he wants Greg to like, come and visit. Greg says, “No, I have to get back to Montana, but I will come back. I will build you a school another time.” This is Greg's description of this.

Peter: “The man listened carefully, frowning with concentration before his weathered face cracked open in a smile. He placed his muscular hand on Mortenson's shoulder, sealing the promise, before mounting his horse and leading his men on the long trip home over the Hindu Kush to report to his warlord, Abdul Rashid.”

Michael: I've got to get back to my warlord. My warlord's waiting.

Peter: How are they doing? [laughs] I can't believe they're doing-- Like, he's doing like magical Negro stuff, but for Afghans.

Michael: [laughs] I know.

Peter: This is so insulting to me personally. I can't believe it.

Michael: So, basically, we're not going to get into it, but most of Greg's second book is about his adventures trying to build a school for this Abdul Rashid guy. He's like the tribal elder of this nomadic herding community. And kind of midway through the book is diagnosed with cancer. And there's a whole thing where he's like, “My dying wish is to see this school finished.” And Greg organizes 40 yaks to climb up the mountain with lumber and building materials and builds the school as this man's dying wish. That's like a huge part of the second book. But in the first book it just kind of appears as like this one little scene.

Peter: So, maybe he realized he was like this one little scene could be a beautiful story if I just incorporated some fictional yaks.

Michael: No, it's actually really funny because this scene in the first book is like two paragraphs. It's like a kind of a throwaway thing. But then he tells the story again in the second book. And then these men on horseback who come up to him, he's like, “Stay the night with my country director, let's have a feast.” And he like turns it into this like super embellished, huge story of a day that they spend together. And it's like, Greg, we could read your first book. It's not like you told this to one person and then another. It's like, literally the same story, and you're telling it way more embellished on the second try.

Peter: I almost understand being a compulsive liar more than I understand being so bad at it. I can't imagine not being like, “Well, can my lie be easily checked?”

Michael: So, the book ends with yet another kind of sacred promise that Greg makes to a not quite village elder, but village elder type. He goes to a city called Baharak, also in Afghanistan, and he's wandering around a bazaar, and a jeep pulls up. A bunch of dudes get out, and they're like, “What's your business in this region?” And he's like, I'm looking for someone he calls Sadhar Khan, who's kind of like the warlord of this region. He's known as kind of benevolent, but also very vicious if you cross him.

Peter: Yeah, I've seen movies, of course.

Michael: So, all these guys pile out of this Jeep, and the guy's like, “I am the man you are looking for.” And then again, they take him to like a compound, like a villa where this man lives, which is this like militarized kind of fortress sort of thing. They start brainstorming, like, there's so many girls in this region that can't find education. They're like, brainstorming different sites. Greg basically puts his hands on this man's shoulders and promises him that he will build him a school.

Peter: Dude, if I meet a warlord in Afghanistan, I'm not promising shit, bro. I'm like, “Yeah, I'll do my best.”

Michael: [laughs] You say you're going to build a school, and the warlord makes a wanking motion. So, this is the end of that anecdote.

Peter: “As the sun slipped behind the western ridges, Khan placed one hand on Mortenson's back as he pointed with the other. “Look here, look at these hills,” Khan indicated the boulder fields that marched up from the dirt streets of Baharak, like irregularly spaced headstones, arrayed like a vast army of the dead as they climbed toward the deepening sunset.” Okay, some mixed metaphors, I don't know what they look like.

Michael: Deepening.

Peter: “’There has been far too much dying in these hills,’ Sadhar Khan said somberly. Every rock, every boulder that you see before you is one of my Mujahedeen Shaheeds, martyrs who sacrificed their lives fighting the Russians in the Taliban. ‘Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile,’ Khan said, turning to face Mortenson. ‘We must turn these stones into schools.’”

Michael: Stones into schools.

Peter: Then he said, like, “But tonight we dance. [Michale laughs] And then there's a montage.”

Michael: [laughs] You know his second book is called Stones into Schools. In that book, he describes his deepening relationship with this Sadhar Khan figure. He says he's constantly going to visit him at this compound. He says there's a line of people waiting to see him, all with their own ailments and their own requests, but whatever he's doing, he always stops to embrace Greg and be like, “How's the school going, my friend?” And they stay up late into the night gabbing. They're talking until four in the morning. He at one point says, “On another occasion, Khan apologized for the fact that the pear he had selected for me was not as sweet as he thought it would be. ‘Most of my trees are too young,’ he explained. I'm trying to catch up for the 25 years we lost when we were too busy fighting to be able to farm.”

Peter: Pretty rough excuse for a bad pear. Like, “Oh, sorry about your pear, the war.”

Michael: “I'm sorry for the pear, did you know that the body keeps the score? [Peter laughs] That's why the pears are so small, due to the trauma of the region,” but then he also at one point says that this man writes him a poem. He asks him “Why do you sit staring at the brook?” And then Khan is like, “It's the sound of peace, my friend.” He's trying to construct this like mythical figure and it's just so obvious that it's bullshit.

Peter: I guess so. I will say, as someone who has some heritage from this broad region, some of the men can be a little bit dramatic. Some of them tilt towards a casual poem, and you have to be like, “Please stop. I'm allowed to be racist about this, and you can't be. And so, I'm just sort of supplementing.”

Michael: No, you know what I am actually is like you know, I did human rights for 11 years before I became a journalist, and I have been the person who goes and meets with a local leader in a rural, remote region. I've been the person going and doing that. And at this time, Greg Mortenson is running a charity with, I think, a budget of like maybe $500,000 a year for like their entire international operations. And he says like, “I'm going to build you a school.” I feel like most of these guys in that situation be like, “Yeah, right buddy, tell me when there's a school.”

[laughter]

Peter: There's someone who's like actually ill [Michael laughs] waiting for his assistance. And he's like, “Oh, fucking Greg's here. Yeah, bring him in.”

Michael: So, this entire section of the book turns out to be a mixture of embellishment and full on lies on the Sadhar Khan stuff. The biggest problem is just the basic timeline. So, in his second book, Greg says, “Over the next two years, I made several more trips to Baharak in order to cement our ties to with Sadhar Khan and plan the school.” So, he's talking about like numerous trips back and forth to hang out with this guy.

This is when they're like sitting under the walnut trees and like reading poems to each other and stuff. The problem is that if you look at the tax forms for the organization that Greg is running, they list their travel expenses and the dates that Greg is traveling. So, during this period, Greg only makes three trips to Afghanistan. And he says in his book, on the first trip he didn't meet Sadhar Khan. He's like, for whatever reason the meeting didn't materialize. So, he goes back like eight months later and that's when he does meet with Sadhar Khan. That's like the meeting that we know happened.

And then he goes back again like a year later. But he says, I was planning on staying at Sadhar Khan's house, but he wasn't there so I had to stay in a hotel. So, when exactly are these nights spent gabbing until four in the morning supposed to have happened? That may have happened once.

Peter: Look that's a very bold lie because again, it does not take a lot to get an Afghan man to write a poem for you. [Michael laughs] I wish that Greg wasn't busted because I feel like if he had just written a few more by like the sixth book, we would have gotten some crazy stories.

Michael: Like he's like floating upside down. It's like Stranger Things.

Peter: He's like, I found a lamp-

Michael: [laughs] -and I rubbed it.

Peter: There was this princess who longed to be independent from her sultan father.

Michael: Another weird detail of the story is that in his first book he says they speak through a translator. And in the second book he says Sadhar Khan speaks English.

Peter: [laughs] That rocks dude.

Michael: These are both published books.

Peter: Oh my God, yeah.

Michael: But then on the Abdul Rashid, the Horseman tribe, the guy sending 40 yaks full of construction materials that appears to just be a straight up lie. Jon Krakauer talks to an anthropologist, someone who is doing his doctorate on the region and knows the region. Like, an actual expert in the region. This guy, his name is Ted Callahan, he is contacted by Greg to sort of map out the area and like, “Hey, where should we build a school? Where are the places where they need this school? Can you just, like, travel there with Greg's country director for Afghanistan at the time and let me know where we should build the school?” He's basically hiring him as a consultant.

So, this guy, Ted Callahan, goes there in 2006 to scope out the area. The trip never really takes place because Greg's country director gets gallstones and has to be like, med evac’d. But this guy, Ted Callahan, continues working in the region. He gets a grant to spend time in the region. And he gets to know this Abdul Rashid guy, the one who sent his son for six days across the mountain to beg for Greg's help building a school.

Peter: Go find the magic white boy.

Michael: And so, as he gets to know him better, he says the guy essentially has never heard of Greg. So, in Jon Krakauer's book, he says “Abdul Rashid didn't seem to know who Greg Mortenson was or have any memory of meeting him,” says Callahan.

“Eventually, he pulled out a bunch of business cards, including Greg's, but that might have been the only time Greg ever came up.” So, it appears that essentially that entire part of the story just didn't happen. Greg did build a school there, but my father sent me and my horsemen six days to come and find you. His dying wish was to see the school completed. It appears that they met once for like 30 minutes and had, like, a work meeting, and then they traded business cards. That appears to be the actual extent of the relationship. Anytime you meet with Greg, you're either his best friend or a member of the Taliban. Those are the only two options.

Peter: [laughs] I don't know this is such a type of Western fantasy, like, you go to this part of the world that feels remote and backwards, and the leader there, who is a man, who's capable of incredible violence, he sees your pure soul.

Michael: Yeah. It's going to turn out that Greg was like a piece of performance art by Edward Said.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah. [laughs]

Michael: This entire thing was like really sophisticated satire the whole time.

Peter: And scene, Greg Mortenson was not real.

Michael: So basically, this Ted Callahan guy continues traveling to the region because he has a grant for it. It appears Greg in parallel is continuing on this plan to build a school. And Callahan keeps emailing Greg and saying, like, “Look, this is a nomadic people. They move around constantly, so the only way to make this work is to build a boarding school. A place where like people can send their kids for a couple weeks, a couple months and have like inhouse teaching. That's the only way that you can actually provide education in any meaningful way to this population.”

But of course, that then raises the problem that like a boarding school is a much more complicated proposition because it's like-- Well then, you have to have like a teacher living on site. You have to provide food. So, then you have to have like food preparation. You have to have like dormitories for the kids. It's just like a much bigger deal and he can tell that Greg is just not interested in like that level of complexity. So, Greg ends his second book with this description.

Peter: “About 200 yards from the edge of the lake, I am told that the ground rises gently and that on the south facing slope of this incline, positioned at an angle that enables it to absorb as much sunshine as possible, there stands a four-room schoolhouse with an earthen floor and walls that are made of stone.” Okay, fucking Cormac McCarthy over here.

Michael: I know.

Peter: “During the six months when the grasslands lie buried beneath the snow and all connection between the Kyrgyz and the outside world has been severed, I am told that there will be roughly 200 children who study at the school.

Michael: So, it is true that this school was built in rural Afghanistan. However, Jon Krakauer says, “Bozai, to put it bluntly, is already a ghost school. Although Mortenson staff reported on the Central Asia Institute's 2009 tax return that 66 students were enrolled there, the building remains empty.” And then he basically goes through all of the reasons why this school doesn't work like the population that he's trying to serve is staying at a summer camp, like they have a place where they camp in the summer that's 19 miles away from this school, so they're just not really going to use it.

And then there's another tribe that is camping closer, they're about four miles away. And then he talks to the guy whose camp is like closer to the school, and he says “The Afghan government provides a teacher who holds classes inside a yurt right in his camp, he pointed out. So, why would our children want to walk all the way down there to go to school and then have to walk back up at the end of the day? The school is pointless. It's empty. The border police seem to use it sometimes.” So, it's basically just like an empty square, like an empty box in the middle of a field.

Peter: Yikes.

Michael: And so, the minute he starts looking into this, Jon Krakauer finds that, like, a lot of what Greg says about the schools and, like, how many students are attending them basically turns out to be a lie. He keeps saying in interviews, he's like, “We built 200 schools in Pakistan, we built 150 schools, we built 115 schools. The number always changes.” And he doesn't have, there's no authoritative list of all of the schools. And he also keeps saying, like, “We've educated 50,000 students, we've educated 25,000 students.” These numbers also change constantly.

Peter: Interesting.

Michael: So, this is from Krakauer's book.

Peter: “Even more alarming is the fact that a significant number of CAI schools exist only on paper. The CAI website, for example, lists eight schools that have been completed in Afghanistan's Konar province. During his Charlie Rose interview, Mortenson claimed he'd built 11 schools there. At that time, he'd built only three schools in Konar.”

Michael: At every point, he's just exaggerating every single number.

Peter: I feel like he realizes that this is a part of the world where we don't have a ton of data, and so he could just-- It's a great place to go and lie about what you did.

Michael: And also, it's kind of funny that he thought he wasn't going to get caught for this, because when you're just giving talks to like a bunch of mountain climbers, it is pretty easy to get away with this, but he's doing this at a time when his book has sold four million copies and he's been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. It's like, you're not going to get away with this for that long.

Peter: Wait, was this the Nobel that went to Obama?

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: I mean, look, he didn't do anything for it either. I mean-

Michael: [laughs] Got him.

Peter: The guy's built at least one school somewhere. He built that fucking bridge and shit.

Michael: I don't know about in all of history, but in recent history, it's like one of the more embarrassing Nobel Peace Prizes. It's like the crash of Nobel Peace Prizes.

Peter: Yeah. [laughs]

Michael: Looking back, you're like, “I don't know about Obama in 2009.” All he did was run for president.

Peter: Up there with the Trump FIFA Peace Prize.

Michael: So, it turns out he was lying about how many schools they built. But then, even when he wasn't lying, it turns out a lot of the schools were basically never used as schools. They built these structures, but they were almost immediately just like abandoned or used for something else, so here is Krakauer.

Peter: “Many Central Asians Institute Schools that actually did get built were later abandoned due to lack of support. Ghost schools they're called by the disillusioned residents of Baltistan, where at least 18 CAI buildings now stand empty. No one, not even Mortenson, knows exactly how many CAI projects exist as ghost schools or simply never existed in the first place because he has repeatedly subverted efforts by his Montana based staff to track effectively how many schools have been built, how much each school actually costs, and how many schools are up and running. For the CAI-

Michael: I hate the acronym so bad.

Peter: CAI is brutal. For the CAI--

Michael: Just call it Institute for Central Asia and then it could be ICA, which is like a really easy acronym to say. CAI sounds horrible. And also your tongue wants to say CIA every time.

Peter: You want to say CIA so bad.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: For the CA [laughs]

Michael: Exactly.

Peter: Actually, I'm going to kill myself. “For the CAI staff to gather such crucial information, Mortenson would have to accurately account for how he spends funds, something he has never been willing to do.”

Michael: So, they basically don't know as an organization how many schools they've built.

Peter: It's so funny to be like a staff member in Montana and people are like, “What do you do for a living?” You're like, “Oh, I do this. I work for this like non-profit and we build schools and they're like.” “Wow, wow, wow.” And then like, “I don't know, three years later it just turns out that you were just doing a scam not knowing it.” [Michael laughs]

Michael: It's like how I feel bad for people who worked at Enron. Like, if you work in like event planning at Enron, like you had no idea the whole thing was like potemkin.

Peter: And I love how that's where your brain goes. [laughter] You're like, “You know what? This reminds me of another group of people I sympathize with the poor employees of Enron.”

Michael: [laughs] Well, most people didn't know that it was fake. I think most of his Montana staff also didn't know that it was fake.

Peter: Oh, of course, of course. Yeah.

Michael: But then what's amazing is after this happens, there's a ton of like consternation within the aid field about it. So, there's a really good blog post by a UN staffer who's like, “I went to their website and they have no evaluation information at all.” So, if you were an NGO that builds schools, you'd build in something of like, oh, every school a year later, we return to be like, “Okay, how many students are there? How many teachers? is it working? Is our approach useful?” This is like, super basic NGO stuff.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: But they're not doing that. I also want to return to what Greg Mortenson said originally. So, in that opening anecdote, he goes to Korphe, this little village in Pakistan, and he's sort of shown the school by the village elder and that's what launches this whole thing. So, I would make you scroll up through your text messages, but it's been ages. So here is that passage again.

Peter: “Haji Ali, avoiding Mortenson's eyes, said that the village had no school and the Pakistani government didn't provide a teacher. A teacher cost the equivalent of one dollar a day, he explained, which was more than the village could afford. So, they shared a teacher with the neighboring village of Munjan, and he taught in Korphe three days a week. The rest of the time, the children were left alone to practice the lessons he left behind.”

Michael: So, Greg never returns to this issue of teachers. In a lot of these villages, the problem is not that they lack a cinder block room.

Peter: He makes it seem like it's a financial issue that could be solved really easily, but I actually think it's probably like a teacher scarcity issue.

Michael: This is why I wanted to include that story about trying to build schools in Afghanistan, because providing education is just a really complicated endeavor. It's never going to be, “Oh, you build a school,” and then these kids that didn't have access to education all of a sudden have education.

Peter: Yeah, I guess I hadn't really thought of this, even though it's obvious now. But at the end of the day, he's actually just talking about building buildings.

Michael: Yeah, he's just putting a square. He's putting a square concrete building in a village.

Peter: And if you have to choose.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: If it's like there's money to invest in education here, where do you want to put it? Probably not in building, probably in teacher.

Michael: Exactly. And so, this turns out to be a broader problem and a broader shift in development in general, that there was a huge effort to provide what they called “Access to education,” all of the policies in the 1970s and 1980s were around building in more access to primary education. So, there was a huge effort by The World Bank and also by domestic governments to build schools for rural populations, also for urban populations, like, we have to build schools.

But the problem is there's almost no relationship between the proximity of a school and the enrollment rates of children. Having a school near you is only the first step to getting education. And the reason why building schools was very appealing to development agencies, and I think why it's appealing to Greg is because building a school is only a thing you have to do one time.

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: And it's something that is kind of outside of politics. Once you start talking about providing education to kids, then you have to deal with, well, okay, what are the educational curricula? What are the certification schemes? What are the salaries? You have to actually get involved in the domestic politics of the country. Whereas if you're just like, “Oh, we're going to plop down a bunch of cinder blocks in a rectangle in the middle of a field,” you don't really have to do any of that. You can pay some people to do that and then you can go.

And so, the reason why it's easy is also the reason why it's not very effective, because it's not linked up to these countries, actual education systems. There's a really interesting article called “If you build it, will they come? School availability and school enrollment in 21 poor countries.”

And it looks at 10 different studies that have tried to increase primary school enrollment by building schools, and three of the studies find no effect. Six of the studies do find an effect, but the effects are incredibly small. So, one of them says “One new school built in a district is associated with a 0.1 percentage point increase in primary school enrollment.” So, just building a school achieves almost nothing. All of the discourse around providing education in the developing world has now shifted to educational quality.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Oftentimes there's problem with teacher certification, so sometimes you get like, an adult who comes and they say they're a teacher, but they're not actually certified. In some countries, the certification schemes are bad. They're not actually qualifying teachers in any meaningful way. Sometimes people are corrupt and they get a teacher certification not through actually being a good teacher, so you have super ineffective teachers. Teacher absentee rates in some countries can be upwards of 20%. It's actually really hard to administer a school system.

Peter: Well, what if we built devices that could be installed in like town square areas that just 24/7 played our podcast. [Michael laughs] You're sort of walking around town and you're learning. You're learning about these books, you're learning about my brand of non-toxic homophobia.

Michael: So, there are a few meta-analyses that find that building schools works. But if you dig into them a little bit, it turns out they're not just building schools. They're oftentimes building roads and bridges and other infrastructure to make it easier for kids to get to the schools. So, you don't want to kind of throw everything out and say, like, “You should never build a school,” because there are some places that really do need schools.

Peter: No, you should sometimes build a school. And that's always been this podcast position that you should sometimes build a school.

Michael: I kind of had a little panic moment because I remember following this at the time when I worked in development. And ever since then I've had this belief that you can't really just build schools in rural poor regions and expect education to come from that. But I found a study called Bringing Education to Afghan Girls: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Village-Based Schools from 2013.”

So, they're bringing schools to rural Afghan populations and they had a huge effect. Enrollment rates for girls increased by 52%. And they basically eradicated the gender gap in education, that when you have a village school, an equal number of boys and girls attend and huge effects. So, I'm reading through the study and I'm like, “Oh, shit, do I have to like update my priors?

Peter: Oh, the worst.

Michael: -maybe you should build schools in Afghanistan. Maybe this does actually work in Afghanistan. Greg was right all along.” But then when you get into the methodology, they're not actually building schools, they're sending teachers. So, when they say, “We're providing a village school,” they train up a teacher, they send a teacher, and then every month they check in with the teacher to be like, “Okay, how many kids are you teaching, etc.?”

Peter: Because did you build a school? If you provide a teacher, [laughter] did you build a school at all? [laughs]

Michael: [crosstalk] does that mean? Yes.

Peter: I like how-- You're forcing. You're making me feel incredibly stupid for stumbling upon these obvious initial threshold questions late in the episode. I'm like, “Wait a second. An empty school isn't a school at all.”

Michael: So, we've talked about Greg's fibs. We've talked about how his entire theory of change doesn't really make sense and isn't really aligned with best practices in development, but I've saved the best for last, Peter. We haven't talked about the fact that this entire time, Greg was also embezzling from his own charity.

Peter: Okay. And now we're cooking.

Michael: So, after Krakauer's book comes out, about a week-- I think it was a week later, the Montana Attorney General announces that it's launching an investigation into Greg's NGO, the Central Asia Institute. That's because some of the stuff that Krakauer talks about in his book like might amount to fraud. He says on your IRS tax form, you say you're educating 66 students at the school, but the school might not exist.

Peter: Sure.

Michael: So, the Montana AG spends a couple months looking into this. They eventually produce a, I think, 80-page settlement document that lays out everything that was going on behind the scenes. They interviewed a bunch of people, they got a bunch of documents, emails, etc.

The first thing to say is that they didn't look at any of the overseas stuff because that's outside of their jurisdiction. So, it's like whether he built a school, whether he didn't build a school, we're not even going to look at that. And they also, they say they didn't find any fraud. They do come to a settlement with Greg, which we'll get to later, but nothing illegal, no one's going to jail over anything that happened.

They did find, though, that he was effectively embezzling from the charity the entire time. The way that he was doing this was through book royalties. So, after the book comes out and becomes a huge hit, Greg's life basically becomes like flying all over the place and giving talks. And as part of these talks, oftentimes the organization will buy his book in bulk. Hundreds or thousands of copies to provide to libraries, to provide to lawmakers, to have on a table when Greg is signing them, etc.

Greg could buy these through the publisher at cost, but instead the organization is buying them through Barnes and Noble and Amazon, and Greg is getting a royalty from every single book. So, between 2006 and 2011, his NGO spent four million dollars buying Greg's book.

Peter: [laughs] Oh, my God. Dude, I thought you were going to say this is like a $50,000 thing or something.

Michael: No, I know. That's what I thought too when I first started reading, I was like, “Oh, book royalties, whatever.” Four million fucking dollars.

Peter: Four million dollars.

Michael: So, Greg is not getting all four million of those dollars, cause he's getting royalties?

Peter: No, he's just getting a little slice. But still, it's insanely funny to have an organization buy four million dollars’ worth of your book.

Michael: They also spent five million dollars advertising the book. So, his NGO would take out ads like full-page ads in the New York Times or wherever saying, like, “You should buy this book,” and then Greg would get the royalties from that too. The organization is not recouping any royalties on this.

Peter: What's the ROI on those ads? You might as well have just bought nine million dollars worth of the book.

Michael: The AG finds in 2010, one-third of the budget of the organization is going to promoting Greg's book.

Peter: Dude. Hell yeah. [Michael laughs] Greg, my man, dude. There's always like this initial question where you're like, “Is this a well-intentioned fool?”

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: Then you get to the embezzling portion. You're like, “No, I don't think so, actually. This is actually a person who is obsessed with himself. This is a person who wants the whole world to buy into this fictional version of themselves where they're a hero.”

Michael: Dude, there's also-- This is mean and I wasn't going to include it, but there is an anonymous source in Krakauer's book who says that when Eat Pray Love came out, Greg like melted down because it replaced him on the nonfiction bestseller charts and he's like, “We have to buy more copies of my book.” [laughs]

Peter: Yes. Yeah. I mean, not only do you get the royalties when you buy them on Amazon, but you keep yourself in the Amazon bestsellers, right?

Michael: He also was lying about proceeds of the book going to charity, so, if you buy the book-- Like any of these full-page ads that they're taking out, it would say that either 7% of the proceeds or 9% of the proceeds would go to his NGO. But Charity Watch finds that like there's no revenue line in their filings for book sales revenue, so that's just like a straight up lie.

Peter: Damn. I got to say, it's funny to lie about 7% of your proceeds going to charity. It's funny to be like, “Yeah, I give him a few pennies here and there and then not doing it.”

Michael: So, the other thing that he's doing, Peter, is at this time his life is just like flying around giving talks. He charges $30,000 per talk. Again, none of that goes back to the NGO.

Peter: I mean, first of all, this is like 15 years ago?

Michael: Well, this is like late 2000s, like 2007 to 2011.

Peter: Late 2000s, so adjusted for inflation, that's $25 million per-- That's literally like what, like 50,000, adjusted it for inflation.

Michael: I can tell your brain immediately goes to, “Why isn't it me? Why aren't I getting $50,000 for a one-hour talk.”

Peter: I don't want the 50 grand. I'm not full of myself like this, but when I hear about these schmucks getting 25, 50 grand, all I can think is, “Why can't I pull five? Why can't someone give me five grand dude?”

Michael: The Supreme Court sucks by Peter. [laughs]

Peter: It can be about the Supreme Court, it can be about airport books. I'll talk about whatever, dude give me like a few grand and I'll do it. if it's in New Jersey, that's even better, you don't have to pay for airfare. I'll drive.

Michael: Wait, wait. Speaking of airfare, Peter. So, the weird nickel and dime scam that Greg is doing is, so he's getting paid $30,000 for these appearances. And also, I guess when you, like, speak at Davos or whatever, they also reimburse your flights.

Peter: [laughs] I guess.

Michael: Well, I mean, if they're giving you $30,000, you can pay fucking $500 of your own money out of it. I don't know how this shit works. But Greg is doing so many talks at some point that he starts using a private jet because he oftentimes has like two or three talks a day, and he's just like, jetting from place to place. So, they are reimbursing him for his private jet flight. So oftentimes it's like $10,000 or $15,000.

Peter: That's also crazy because I would just be like, “Hey, I'm going to fly commercial, but pay me an extra 10.”

Michael: But this is exactly what he's doing, though. So, he gets a reimbursement from like Davos or wherever of his, 15k that he spent on the flight, but he's also getting a reimbursement from his own NGO for the flight, so he's double-booking reimbursements.

Peter: Now, you said that there was a conclusion of no fraud on the embezzlement thing. My guess is that was just sort of like a legal formality.

Michael: I don't know the law, but, like, a lot of this stuff genuinely feels like fraud to me. And I think because Greg played ball and the NGO played ball and like turned over a lot of documents they didn't charge.

Peter: I'm not familiar with these types of investigations exactly. But in a lot of these sorts of settlements of misconduct, the government will, as part of the settlement, agree to say that there was no conclusive finding, but everyone knows there was fraud.

Michael: This is another one where you're like, “Okay, 10,000 here, 15,000 there.” The organization, according to the Montana AG report, it says “Over time, these charter costs totaled almost two million dollars.”

Peter: Bro, what is going on, dude?

Michael: Two million dollars in flights.

Peter: How is he ringing this much scam money out of it?

Michael: And then this whole time, he's also getting a salary, by the way, so he's not just living off the royalties of the book. He's also getting around $150,000 a year in a salary.

Peter: Honestly, dude, double it and then maybe cut down the ads. [laughs]

Michael: This is what I think is actually, like, kind of fascinating to me is that, like, he could have just given himself a million dollars a year in salary and spend it on whatever the fuck he wanted to, and then he wouldn't have had to do any of these weird shenanigans.

Peter: Right.

Michael: I think part of it is like people feel very conflicted about how salaries for NGO people.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: But I think Greg was bringing in $20 million in donations. I think 1 million dollar salary, like, I think personally would have been fine, but, yeah, he would have gotten shit about that.

Peter: No, for sure. And I'm with you, I think there's always a weird tension with high salaried, nonprofit leadership, but you need to attract people who would otherwise be making large amounts of money in the private sector.

Michael: Exactly, yeah.

Peter: He probably would have been worth a much larger salary if he had just asked for it. On the other hand, the entire operation was a fraud. Yeah, it's hard to know what would have been right here. But it is funny to do complicated embezzlement.

Michael: I know.

Peter: Getting double reimbursed. Like, I'm sorry. It's not like this isn't something you don't notice.

Michael: No. You know, you're doing it.

Peter: If your reimbursements are coming back at like 50% of your overall income for private jets, it's not like you're like, “Oops, ooh.” Like, you're going to your accountant at the end of the year, like, “Hey, there's an extra million here? What's going on?”

Michael: But also, there's so many descriptions in the AG Report and in Krakauer's book of people going to Greg and being like, “This is actually really weird and bad and we shouldn't be doing this. We're a fucking 501(c)(3). People are not giving money to us thinking it's going to private jets.” And Greg's like, “No, you're right. You're right. I'll repay. I'll repay the royalties. You're right. This doesn't work. I don't know what's going on. I'll fix it. I'll fix it,” and then he doesn't do anything.

Peter: You run into Greg in the hallway, and he's wearing a full tuxedo and a top hat. And you're like, “Greg, what's going on with the private jet expenses?” He's like, “You're absolutely right.”

Michael: He's wearing a Cadillac hood ornament, Peter [Peter laughs]. That's where his wealth is now.

Peter: He's on like a segue in the office hallway.

Michael: They also find in the AG report that he's charged up to $75,000 of personal expenses to the organization. It says “Through the years, Mortenson charged substantial personal expenses to CAI. These include expenses for such things as L.L. Bean clothing, iTunes, luggage, luxurious accommodations, and even vacations.”

Peter: This is why the wrong people are running these scams. You give me a couple million in scam money, I'm not shopping at L.L. Bean, brother. You'll find me dripping in Ferragamo.

Michael: [laughs] I know. And doesn't say, it doesn't say iPod, it says iTunes. He's buying songs for 99 cents. He's buying Baby by Justin Bieber.

Peter: He's writing off like Yeah!, by Usher.

[laughter]

Dude, I'm cracking up thinking of like every time you go into Greg's office, he's got an Hermes scarf on. He's like, “Yes?”

Michael: And he's listening to Hey Guys like, “That was only 99 cents, but I did 129 for the high bitrate version, that's actually the 320.”

Peter: They're like, “Oh, hey, you like the new album?” He's winking and he's like, “I didn't pay at all.”

Michael: So, at the end of all this, by the time the 60 Minutes and Jon Krakauer book come out in 2011, Greg's organization, the Central Asia Institute, is spending 60% of its budget on Greg shit.

Peter: For a nonprofit, pretty efficient.

Michael: [laughs] And only 40% is actually going to program stuff. But the way that they are doing accounting on this, they're calling all of this program expenses, and they're telling donors that they have a under 15% overhead cost.

Peter: Hell, yeah, dude because they're just not counting Greg.

Michael: Well, no, the whole thing is, they say in our mission, we say we build schools in Pakistan. And we do outreach about the importance of girls education and all of this is outreach.

Peter: Look, double paying for private jets, that's Greg.

Michael: So, Greg's entire defense for this is basically like, “Well, you bitches knew I was doing outreach. Like we said on the website, we're doing outreach and this is outreach.” But of course, I don't think anyone thought it was 60%.

Peter: The smallest print is like we will be double charging for private jets. [Michael laughs] It is the kind of thing where if you gave the donors more transparency, they would be upset. It's like you know that you're stopping short of the level of transparency that would result in everyone pulling their money and that while not technically fraud, has a fraudulent element.

Michael: And also, is the outreach really about the importance of a girl's education or is the outreach about Greg?

Peter: Purchasing your own book at market rates is not outreach. That's not what that is.

Michael: The big thing that-- I mean, obviously the embezzling bugged me, but also, as a former NGO worker, the other thing that really bugged me was just the sheer lack of transparency and how bad of a fucking manager Greg was.

So, in Krakauer's book and the Montana AG Report, they go through a timeline of the organization. So, in 1996, when he founded the organization, Greg brought on a bunch of people as his board of directors who are supposed to hold him accountable under the hierarchy of the organization, that's the way that it's supposed to work.

So, he brings on a bunch of people who are like his friends, like other mountain climbers, the widow of this Swiss guy, Jean Hoerni, who had given him a bunch of money. He brings on a bunch of basically friends of his and people who are, like, very much drinking the Greg Kool-Aid. He brings on a bunch of these people in 1996.

By 2002, every single one of them had left due to frustration with Greg's total intransparency about what he was doing. They would ask for basic accounting stuff. They're like, “Hey, you just came back from Pakistan for a month. What did you do? Who did you meet with? Do you have receipts for anything?” And he just wouldn't provide them. Just total silence.

Peter: Look, been there, all right? When I was a lawyer and I had an accounting person or whatever, be like, “Hey, can you please send in your Uber receipts for your trip?” Sometimes I would just ignore them.

Michael: Sometimes it was two million dollars of receipts that you weren't putting in.

Peter: That actually is true and the result is that I would end up paying for my own Uber. [laughs]

Michael: So, Krakauer quotes the former CFO of the organization. She says, “Since the start of my employment, Mr. Mortenson has spent over $100,000 on CAI's credit cards. Mr. Mortenson has never provided any receipts for these expenses and repeatedly ignored my request for their submission.” So, this is why they don't know how many fucking schools they opened because Greg doesn't even say what he's doing, who he met with, who he gave money to, are there contractual arrangements?

The Montana AG finds a payment of $14,000 that he transferred to an elementary school in Pakistan with just nothing, no documentation of what do they need to do with that? Are there any financial arrangements at all? Any obligations on them to do anything? Just, like, “Here's $14,000, have fun.” No one knew where the money for this organization was going.

Peter: Solving terrorism through schooling is like the mission and then the actual practice is like, we're just meeting random guys who say they have solutions and handing them massive wads of cash. [Michael laughs] This man who self describes as a warlord, we gave him $100,000.

Michael: So, this is from Krakauer's book.

Peter: “Brief flurries of intense micromanagement have proceeded lengthy periods with no guidance whatsoever. The program director in Kabul went a year without hearing from Mortenson-

Michael: A year.

Peter: -During one extended silence, Mortenson failed to contact his Pakistan country manager for an even longer interval. Staff in the Montana office would take calls from the country manager, pleading for instructions, begging for Greg to phone him.”

Michael: Imagine not hearing from your boss for a fucking year, dude.

Peter: The fucking dream dude. [laughter] What are you talking about?

Michael: I know.

Peter: I can't imagine how bored I would have to be to desperately call my boss, like, “Give me something to do.”

Michael: “Give me something, please.” [laughs] But also, we're not going to get into it, but it appears that Greg like absolutely got scammed. A lot of his country staff just took the money and basically didn't deliver anything.

Peter: I'm sure some of those people were going to scam them. And also, some people, like you smell a Greg Mortenson-

Michael: Exactly. Yeah.

Peter: -right in the air. You're like, “Oh, this guy is a scammer. This guy is full of shit,” which makes him a target and also makes you have no desire to be honest with him.

Michael: Exactly. I think almost anybody would respond to these incentives in this way.

Peter: Right.

Michael: Greg's whole thing is he wants to feel like he's the hero of the story. “Greg, I went to this village and everyone talked about how great you were and how thankful they are,” and he's like, “Oh, that's great,” and then he just disappears another couple months. You just give him the stories that he wants. “Oh, we built 10 schools, Greg,” like, that's what you would do because that's what your boss needs and there's no incentive to do anything else, basically.

Peter: Right. It's so cool to go from a guy who really built a bridge for a small village to the top of the nonprofit scamming game.

Michael: I know.

Peter: If you're going to scam like this just do it in the private sector.

Michael: No, I know.

Peter: Liz Holmes was running this same basic scam at a different scale, and she got billions.

Michael: Elizabeth Holmes, absolutely bought day and night by Kid Cudi on iTunes with [Peter laughs] company funds. So, the last thing I want to say on Greg's rank mismanagement is I want you to read a passage for me, Greg.

Peter: Yes.

Michael: Wait, Greg.

Peter: Don't start calling me Greg.

Michael: I know that's so live-- [crosstalk]

Peter: Just because we are spiritually alike.

[laughter]

If I had even a little bit of ambition.

Michael: Okay, let me send you a passage, Peter. And you have to guess where this passage is from, okay? So, here's the passage.

Peter: “Even when he was home, we often wouldn't hear from Greg for weeks, said former CAI board chairman Tom Vaughn. And he wouldn't return phone calls or emails. The board had a discussion about trying to make Greg account for how he spent his time, but we realized that would never work. Greg just does whatever he wants.

What we really needed to do was train a few Greg Juniors, said Hoerni's widow, Jennifer Wilson. Some people Greg could delegate projects to, but he refused to do that. He said ‘We didn't have enough money to rent an office or hire staff,’ and then he'd just bog down in the details of one project and neglect another. That's why I decided to distance myself from CAI. He accomplished a lot, but I felt we could do so much more if Greg agreed to run CAI more responsibly.”

Michael: Where is this from, Peter?

Peter: I mean, it's obviously some kind of post mortem.

Michael: Sort of.

Peter: I don't know, what is this from?

Michael: This is from Three Cups of Tea.

Peter: What?

Michael: This is from the book that established Greg's myth.

Peter: I almost guessed one of his books, but I was like, “No, this is too much.”

Michael: The book itself describes basically the stuff that becomes a scandal a couple years later. Not the royalty stuff, not the embezzlement but just Greg disappearing for months, being moody, alienating some of his staff, pitting them against each other, flitting from fucking project to project with no strategy.

Peter: The board being, “Greg is a loose cannon. We can't manage him and we don't have a fix,” that's in the book?

Michael: And two of his early board members being like, “I had to leave because Greg couldn't get his shit together.”

Peter: Well, did the other author think that Greg was?

Michael: David Relin, the author of the first book, I think he came across this stuff, and he could not include it.

Peter: Yeah, he felt obligated.

Michael: He writes an intro to the book where he's kind of grappling with a little bit the myth of Greg versus the actual dude. He says in the intro, he's like, “I never had a meeting with Greg where he wasn't more than an hour late.”

Peter: Wow.

Michael: David Relin clearly came across this, and he didn't pull at the thread. The only difference is that Jon Krakauer pulled this thread, he's like, “Wait a minute. I should actually look at the financials of this organization.”

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: Relin came across it, included it in the book, and then just kind of moves on.

Peter: This is where the archetype of the eccentric leader can bite you in the ass, because I feel like a lot of people read this stuff, and they're like, “This is sort of the price of genius. This is the price of someone who accomplishes so much.”

Michael: This is the NGO version of Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk biography. It's like, “Well, this is what it takes. You have to be so dedicated to the mission. You care so much. You want to help these people so bad that you just can't run an organization. You can't provide receipts to your board of directors.”

Peter: I'm not a receipts guy. I'm an ideas guy.

Michael: I mean, literally. So, to me, as a former NGO guy, the most chilling part of the book is there's this long sequence where Greg's board is yelling at him like, “Hey, we need you to actually professionalize and make an organization out of this. Right now, there's an organization on paper, but it's just you and you refuse to provide any information to us.”

And Greg is basically like, “You're right. You're right. What I need to do is I need to understand how other organizations work.” So he goes to the Philippines, and he goes to Bangladesh to spend some time with very successful NGOs, like NGOs that have scaled up really effectively. This is the description where he talks about what he took from it and the ideas that he brought back with him, so here’s this.

Peter: “On the bumpy Biman Airways flight from Dhaka to Calcutta, Mortenson had his notion of the desperate need to educate rural girls confirmed. The lone foreigner on the flight, he was shepherded by stewardesses to first class, where he sat among 15 attractive Bangladeshi girls in bright new sarees. They were young and terrified, Mortenson said ‘they didn't know how to use their seatbelts or silverware. And when we got to the airport, I watched helplessly as corrupt officials whisked them off the plane and around the customs guards. I couldn't do anything for them. I could only imagine the kind of horrible life of prostitution they were heading to.’” What?

Michael: You can imagine, this is like a conversation with Greg where people are like, “Hey man, we need you to like turn in your receipts. Can you talk to some other organizations about how they work?” And then he's like, “It's so important to educate girls in rural areas. They're being sold into prostitution.” And they’re like, “Greg, sorry, can you turn in your receipts?” And he's like, “But these girls on the plane.”

Peter: He's not a logistics guy.

Michael: He's so uninterested in this. And he thinks the point of this exercise of going to the Philippines and Bangladesh is to like reaffirm his dedication to the mission, that's not what anyone needs, Greg. Nobody questions his dedication to the mission or the fact that like, he seems to be a genuinely open-hearted guy who really does care about other people. What they need is like a boss. What they need is a manager. What they need is somebody who can run an organization and turn in his fucking receipts and show up to things on time. But it doesn't get through to Greg. You can tell he just doesn't understand the genre of the conversation that he's having.

Peter: It almost feels like he's performing for himself. The sort of act of going around the world and talking about this stuff and you bear witness to it and then you go tell other people about it. He's like putting on a performance of activism, but he's not really actually doing a lot of activism.

Michael: Well, that's the thing is he thinks of it as like you're demonstrating the kindness of your heart.

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: But also, he has this like weirdly one-dimensional understanding of the countries where he's working, he sees-- I mean, who fucking knows what happened with these girls on the plane. They were like whisked away to a life of prostitution, were they? I mean, there might have been like a gymnastics team whose like coach picked them up.

Peter: He's like, “Well, I saw some good-looking Bangladeshi girls in saris who didn't seem like they had been on a plane before and so they must have been human slaves.”

Michael: Yeah, like being trafficked in first class.

Peter: Yeah. [laughs] It's very funny to be like, “Hey, before your lifetime of slavery, you will get a first-class flight.”

Michael: Over and over again in this book, Greg's bad management is included, but it's pitched as a strength.

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: David Relin at one point accompanies Greg on one of his trips to Pakistan. And it's like, “Oh, we met his new country officer. It's a taxi driver who picked him up from the Islamabad airport.” And Greg was like, “I like the cut of your jib,” and just hired him to work for him. But that scene is like, oh, wow. He really runs by the seat of his pants and he's so spontaneous, but that's really bad management.

Peter: It's funny to have this sort of like Elon Musk sort of mythos around you, but you've actually never made any money at all.

Michael: Exactly. And you haven't built that many schools.

Peter: Greg has never actually done anything. He's just doing the scam part.

Michael: Exactly. And he goes from project to project. Like he's building schools that's like his original mission. But then at some point in the book, he starts wanting to build a youth hostel in the regional capital. He starts doing vocational programs for women. He wants to develop a Sherpa training program to train people to be like porters on these climbs. He tries to build a public tap water system.

Peter: This is very Elon. He's doing Tesla and then he's like, “And we're going to make tunnels.”

Michael: This is actually a pretty big problem in development that you get these aid celebrities and these people that get famous for their one big story in humanitarian aid. And then they get these organizations with their name on the building and they just flit from topic to topic and you can't actually deliver on any of these things and everybody just wastes their fucking time.

Peter: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Michael: I read a really good essay about this specific thing called “The naive republic of aid: Grassroots exceptionalism in humanitarian memoir,” by Emily Bauman, where she's like, fucking clocks Greg instantly, so here is this.

Peter: “As portrayed in Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson was the ultimate anti- professional humanitarian hero, the founder of an international education NGO who had no expertise in education, international development or public management.

This is a common trope of the humanitarian memoir. The naive idealist who comes from outside but instantly understands something about the culture that people within it lack.”

Michael: Once you hear this pattern, you notice it everywhere.

Peter: Malcolm Gladwell is sort of a subset of this.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: The guy who sees a problem and then is like, “Oh, my God, I see the problem and the solution with 100% clarity if only everyone saw it like I do.” They're sort of treated like heroes and then it all falls apart because they didn't actually understand the nuance of it.

Michael: It also speaks like to me just the total waste of fucking time, effort and money that philanthropy is, private philanthropy. If you were setting up a government agency in a foreign aid body that's like, “Hey, we want to promote education in rural Pakistan,” you'd get together a bunch of people who understand the education context of Pakistan, who speak the local language, who actually know the context, and who know especially what has been tried before and has worked and hasn't worked. You wouldn't just have a random guy walk around and hire his fucking cab driver. This is why you want actual professionals. I think there's a weird resistance to the idea that humanitarian aid should be professional.

It also goes back to the salary thing too. It's like you want people who are good at this. And there's something about, like, you shouldn't be good at this, or it should come from the heart, not from the head. And I think that's what people respond to in Greg’s story. What they're really doing is they're buying Greg's story, and it's one guy against all odds. That's an appealing story, but that's not actually how you deliver aid to people.

Peter: Yeah. People love the idea of the magic. The idea that you can end run around the hard stuff.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: And I feel like there's something in the American headspace in particular, where people feel like red tape and inefficiency is dragging everything down-

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: -and that out there somewhere is a really elegant solution and all it takes is one person who's just got the audacity.

Michael: So, we're now going to talk about the fallout of all of this. There's a bit of a long epilogue from all of this. So, after Krakauer's book comes out, and the Montana AG report comes out. Greg is forced to pay one million dollars back to the organization. The AG orders the organization to remove him as the executive director and appoint a real board, but the organization doesn't really do that. They keep him on and pay him a salary until 2016, and they appoint a new board, but it's like a close friend of his.

So, the organization basically just keeps coasting on the fact that he has a ton of savings from the years when he got a shitload of investment. So, Greg almost immediately, though, disappears completely from public life.

Peter: Smart.

Michael: To this day, Greg has no presence anywhere online. You can't find a Substack. You can't find a Facebook.

Peter: Honestly, admirable, because- [laughs]

Michael: I know.

Peter: -if there was ever a day and age for a guy like this to just reappear and like and have no apologies.

Michael: Brace yourself, Peter. The saddest epilogue of this is his co-author, David Relin, who basically wrote down all of Greg's bullshit, killed himself-

Peter: What?

Michael: -18 months after the scandal.

Peter: Oh, my God, dude.

Michael: Ultimately, a lot of people fell for Greg because part of the goodness of their hearts, it's like you want to believe that someone is doing something good, and you want to be a part of that and I don't think there's anything kind of wrong with that. I think you don't want to excuse the book that he wrote, which is full of falsehoods, but also, he's also partly a victim of Greg, too. He basically believed Greg.

Peter: It's easy for us to talk shit about Greg, but my guess is that the man is a charmer.

Michael: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Everybody says that.

Peter: That the man can sort of sway a room.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: It's probably pretty compelling when he's pitching to you.

Michael: So, Relin suicide happened about 18 months after the scandal. You don't want to say that it was 100% caused by the scandal. It appears he had been looking for different antidepressants that worked. He had recently stopped taking an antidepressant, and his wife said that it's one of the ones that's really hard to get off of. And suicidality is one of the known side effects of getting off of this antidepressant that could have been the trigger. Again, you don't know anything. There's only been one kind of official obituary of him, but incredibly sad story.

There's also a really bizarre attempt in the following years to rehabilitate Greg and to kind of do an attempt that you're wrong about about this entire story of the collapse of the NGO.

Peter: That's why I hate that format.

Michael: [laughs] So, in 2016, there is a documentary called “3000 Cups of Tea.”

Peter: You can't scale it up like that.

Michael: Well, the whole thing is you can blame Greg for the fibs that he told in his book, but you got to admit, he built a lot of schools.

Peter: Dude, this is kind of personal to me because we will, from time to time, criticize someone for being kind of grifty, who has done some amount of good in the real world.

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: And then you'll get what I consider the lowest form of critic who will be like, “Oh, have you ever done X, Y, and Z?” And it's like, “Give me a fucking break.”

Michael: We're getting to that literal statement, Peter. [laughs] This is one of the next examples. So, there's also a 2014 Washington Post article that is documenting his return to Afghanistan. He's going back to these villages to see his schools and to see people that he helped. He clearly has a PR team that invited this journalist along. But they do point out in that article, and this is like a little weird to grapple with that, like Greg did actually build some fucking schools.

Peter: Yeah. Of course.

Michael: They interviewed a woman who went to one of his schools and eventually became a doctor. And she says, like, “Without Greg--” She credits Greg with saving her life.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: There's also a Radio Free Europe investigation that goes to a bunch of his schools, and they find, yes, some of them are abandoned, some of them are empty, but some of them are working. And they find teachers who have had their salaries paid by Greg. They find people in the local community who are like, “Yeah, I remember Greg. He was great.”

Peter: It's the end of big fish, where it turns out all of his dad's tall tales are true.

Michael: You're going to love this, Peter. There's also-- My favorite entry in this genre is a column by Nick Kristof. He says “Greg, by nature, is more of a founding visionary than the disciplined CEO necessary to run a 20 million dollar a year charity.”

Peter: Sure.

Michael: And like everyone does this in the defenses, like, “Well, he might have been a bad manager. There might have been some inconsistencies in the budgeting, but he's a visionary.”

Peter: Wrong place, wrong time.

Michael: But also, he is running a 20-million-dollar charity. You're basically admitting that all of the allegations are true. It’s like the allegations are about his ability to run a charity. It's not whether or not he's a decent person. Kristof mentions, like, “Oh, well, Greg is a friend of mine, and he's like, been to my home for lunches and stuff.”

Peter: Also, if you're Nick Kristof, the people who you meet in the NGO world are this guy, the eccentrics who show up at the conferences and shit.

Michael: The visionary who has no fucking ability to run an organization is exactly the kind of people that Kristof is surrounded by.

Peter: The guy who can charm everyone in the room, but is running scams behind the scenes. That's the guy that Nick Kristof is friends with.

Michael: So, here is his defense, Peter, and it's almost exactly word for word what you said earlier.

Peter: "The furor over Greg's work breaks my heart. And the greatest loss will be felt not by those of us whose hero is discredited nor even by Greg himself, but by countless children in Afghanistan who now won't get an education after all. But let's not forget that even if all the allegations turn out to be true, Greg has still built more schools and transformed more children's lives than you or I ever will." Speak for yourself. [Michael laughs] How many children are sitting in a room right now while their parents play this podcast out loud?

Michael: You're speaking to podcasters right now. Excuse me? Watch your tone.

Peter: Their brains are being enriched. “As we sift the truth of these allegations. Let's not allow this uproar to obscure that larger message of the possibility of change. Greg's books may or may not have been fictionalized, but there's nothing imaginary about the way some of his American donors and Afghan villagers were able to put aside their differences and prejudices and cooperate to build schools and a better world.”

Michael: Wow, it's very inspiring. Let's overlook all of the fraud in the building of schools to focus on, “Hey, he did build some schools.”

Peter: I think it's been pretty clear based on what you said from the beginning, that this guy is capable of doing real world good and did some, but it can't be that you just-- Like, as if there's like a threshold where you do X amount of good and then you're allowed to commit fraud, no judgment.

Michael: Completely.

Peter: I view this as like the story of this disconnect. You have this guy who's capable of sort of conjuring up the energy and enthusiasm for this cause and then unwilling to deliver it in full, there's like, deep tragedy in that. Kristof is just sort of saying, like, “Well, that's the cost of doing business.”

Michael: What Kristof doesn't seem to understand is it's actually worse, like Greg played upon your good intentions, your desire to help people less fortunate than you, and he enriched himself. That's what con artists do, right?

Peter: Right.

Michael: “Oh, I have, like, my dying grandmother needs your help,” and then they steal your money. This is what we consider like the lowest form of person, like, preying on people's altruistic instincts.

Peter: I don't know. What if you just set up a thing where you, like, stole all of my money and then also ran unrelated scams? I don't know. You just scam a bunch of money out of people, and then someone just writes a defense of you where it's like, “Look, this man provided entertainment to hundreds of thousands of people.”

Michael: “This man had a mid podcast.” [laughs

Peter: “Have you ever done that? Three successful podcasts, entirely independent from the major corporate podcasting apparatus.” This stuff is so bizarre to me, but these guys are, like, they're so invested in the idea that like a little bit of fraud can ruin your reputation, like, they're upset by this.

Michael: He's not even getting funding anymore. Well, yeah. [laughs]

Peter: Kristof thinks that like the smearing of a great man is, like--

Michael: Is the injustice?

Peter: Right. That's so fucking crazy to me.

Michael: It's very frustrating to me that like there's still never been a full accounting of what happened. So, we have Krakauer's book, we have the AG investigation, but the Central Asia Institute continues to exist. It gets around three million dollars in donations now. They've never provided a full overview of, like, “Hey, how many schools did we really build? What was going on in those years?” I mean, Greg has not been at the organization for a decade now. They've never provided any kind of full accounting of what happened. The book publisher never pulped the book. Didn't, as far as I know, add a correction to the book. The book is still for sale on fucking Amazon. There's been no real accountability. Greg had to give back a portion of the money that he took, but it's not all of it, obviously.

The other thing that drives me nuts is that there's really only been this one interview with Greg, like, years after this happened because he essentially disappeared from public life. So, in this 2014 Washington Post article, they talk about how donations to the organization since the scandal have, of course cratered. They're now down to around three million dollars. It then says, “As he watches the funds dwindle, Mortenson feels guilty and angry. ‘I ust don't understand why all these people are trying to bring me down instead of help me,’ he said.”

Peter: Help you do what, dude?

Michael: So, he still doesn't really understand what he did, and he still doesn't take any accountability. Also, he still runs a three million dollars a year charity, which is wild after like two or three years after this scandal, people are still, I guess by default or by habit or whatever, giving three million dollars a year. That's still a pretty good NGO. And he's still making a decent salary.

Peter: I would assume that that's just like rich people who set up an annual donation.

Michael: Yeah, that's what I wonder. Like those AOL subscriptions that are still going from like 1997.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah. You know how like every month you'll get like, the email that's like “Your payment receipt from such and such,” and you're like, “I've got to cancel that.

Michael: No, exactly. Yes.

Peter: “You're $100,000 receipt for the fraud organization,” and you're like, you're worth like $100 million and you're like, “Okay mental note.”

Michael: I think defending Greg doesn't really work because he's never really taken accountability or like described what he actually did. The best piece I read on this actually came out at the time of the scandal. It was in the Stanford Social Innovation review by Kevin Starr. This is like to me the most important conclusion to take from this. Here's this.

Peter: “People seem most outraged by the apparent fabrications in the book. And yes, it's not nice to portray one's hosts as kidnappers, but the real crime is that CAI appears to have raised $60 million and doesn't have that much to show for it. No one really knows how many schools are actually up and running. CAI says 170. My own tiny random sample and the 60 minutes investigation indicate that they're probably a lot less. Even if you allow for a generous figure of 150, that represents $400,000 of donor money per school. That's ridiculous.”

Michael: It's probably going to work out to like, around a million dollars per school. He raised more money after this was written, so it's about $75 million.

Peter: Which in America would be a really good ROI.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. [laughs] But I mean, he also quotes other organizations who work in Pakistan, some of which say they can build schools for around $1,800. I think that's an underestimate.

Peter: Yeah. If those are the numbers, that is crazy.

Michael: That's just corruption. That's just full-on corruption. I don't care I don't care how many schools you built if that's what it's costing you.

Peter: You've been in the development world, and I imagine that it's just sort of very hard to implement controls that would adequately work. And one sort of like de facto control we have is if everyone catches you defrauding your donors out of money, then you stop getting money, and everyone says that you're an asshole publicly. To remove that control seems like a bad idea to me.

Michael: And I’m glad to be part of that effort. We're actually making a better in making this episode.

Peter: Who can say who's better? A man who builds a bridge in Pakistan or podcasters who talk shit when he fucks it all up.

[laughter]

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