If Books Could Kill - Three Cups of Tea

00:00:00.000 Is this the origin of the slang, like the T?

00:00:03.260 And that's the T.

00:00:05.420 From this book about building schools in Afghanistan?

00:00:08.560 Yes, that is where it comes from.

00:00:09.580 That's what it's about. 0.89

00:00:10.460 I don't remember any details, but I have this vague recollection of an Afghanistan school scam. 0.98

00:00:19.340 Well, now you're spoiling yourself. 0.89

00:00:20.860 Yeah, what is my zinger?

00:00:22.580 All I know is when I have three cups of tea, I got to go to the bathroom.

00:00:26.220 I don't know.

00:00:26.920 I'm channeling you.

00:00:27.760 What's a straight guy?

00:00:28.460 What's a straight guy joke?

00:00:29.360 Straight guys don't joke about drinking tea, Michael.

00:00:33.180 Yeah, no, I think I got it.

00:00:35.580 I think I got it.

00:00:36.140 Okay.

00:00:36.480 Peter.

00:00:37.220 Michael.

00:00:37.980 What do you know about three cups of tea?

00:00:40.080 If you tell me that there's been some kind of fraud or misconduct in Afghanistan, I'm

00:00:45.660 going to lose my mind.

00:00:59.360 Okay, so the full name of this book is Three Cups of Tea, Colon, One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism, One School at a Time.

00:01:09.060 Oh, my God.

00:01:10.400 I'm trying not to spoil you early.

00:01:12.180 I'm trying not to spoil you early.

00:01:13.700 This was a massively popular book.

00:01:15.960 As usual, we don't know the exact numbers, but I've heard one million.

00:01:18.860 I've heard four million.

00:01:20.180 It spawned a sequel in 2009, which was also a massive bestseller.

00:01:24.020 But the biggest thing is how much this was taken up by the international development sector.

00:01:30.820 So the author of the book is a guy called Greg Mortensen.

00:01:34.140 He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in either 2009 or 2010, depending on the source.

00:01:40.480 And when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he donated $100,000 of his prize money to Greg Mortensen.

00:01:51.040 That's funny. Okay.

00:01:52.420 So we are going to dive directly into the book.

00:01:54.640 Okay.

00:01:54.940 The opening of the book is Greg Mortensen, who is climbing K2, which is the second tallest

00:02:02.820 mountain in the world.

00:02:03.740 And the deadliest, right?

00:02:04.960 It's like the hardest to climb or something.

00:02:06.500 Yeah.

00:02:06.600 It's like harder, I guess, much more difficult than Everest.

00:02:09.860 Right.

00:02:10.200 So this book is written by Greg Mortensen, so the protagonist of the book, but it's written

00:02:14.680 in the third person because it's also written by a magazine journalist named David Raylan.

00:02:20.140 Okay.

00:02:20.360 We start with Greg coming down from K2.

00:02:25.020 He has been on the mountain for 78 days.

00:02:28.080 He has failed to summit.

00:02:30.880 And through a series of misadventures, he has become separated from everyone else in his climbing party.

00:02:38.080 So he is alone, trekking slowly down this mountain.

00:02:42.100 He has no food or supplies because those are all with his Sherpa.

00:02:46.600 so he has like one power bar and like a thin sleeping bag and he's like wandering down the

00:02:53.020 mountain basically like on the verge of death essentially right he's like about to freeze to

00:02:56.920 death this is why i've always said if i climb k2 i'm just i'm gonna hang real close to my sherpa

00:03:02.740 i read for this i actually read uh into thin air by john krakauer because i was curious and i was 0.98

00:03:07.000 like how do people read these fucking books and want to climb mountains dude it's like miserable 0.98

00:03:11.320 One guy gets his face frozen off. 0.99

00:03:14.080 Because it's there, Michael.

00:03:16.800 That's how I feel about podcasting.

00:03:18.560 We're climbing our own mountain.

00:03:19.640 We're also on the roof of the world in a way.

00:03:21.520 There are podcasts about books that we haven't read yet.

00:03:26.500 And I see them in my mind's eye.

00:03:28.260 So as Greg is essentially lying down in the snow and kind of accepting his own death, he reflects on his life.

00:03:35.740 Of course.

00:03:36.100 He is born in Minnesota in 1957, but shortly thereafter, his parents moved to Tanzania,

00:03:42.060 where they are Christian missionaries.

00:03:43.900 They are building hospitals and schools.

00:03:46.360 When he is 12 years old, he gets a younger sister named Krista.

00:03:52.540 His family eventually moves back to the States.

00:03:55.160 Greg moves to the Bay Area.

00:03:56.740 His sister moves to the Twin Cities.

00:03:59.040 When he is 22, she passes away suddenly.

00:04:03.400 and as he's climbing down the mountain he's holding a necklace that he received from her

00:04:10.240 effects. Okay. So the idea with this climb was that he was going to summit K2 and he was going

00:04:15.820 to leave his sister's necklace at the top of the mountain but he didn't get to the top of the

00:04:19.920 mountain. Okay. So he's climbing down and he's kind of looking at this necklace and he's like

00:04:23.400 feeling like a failure. Sure. And so suddenly because of the necklace he sort of gets the

00:04:28.480 strength to go on. He stands up. He continues climbing down the mountain. Eventually his

00:04:35.120 Sherpa finds him. They finally get kind of back down to safety. There's then a couple days you

00:04:41.120 have to hike out of the mountain, which takes like many days. Every day his Sherpa leaves him

00:04:47.020 in the afternoon and goes forward to like make camp and like make dinner. One day his Sherpa

00:04:52.860 goes forward and Greg is on the trail by himself. He eventually comes to a fork in the trail. He is

00:04:59.880 supposed to go to the right, but instead he goes to the left. He believes that he is on his way to

00:05:05.040 this village, Askol, which is like where they'll get a Jeep back to the city. It's sort of like

00:05:09.180 where he reenters civilization. He believes that he is on the trail to Askol, but he is in fact

00:05:14.700 on the trail to a village called Korfei. So he ends up in the small remote rural village in

00:05:21.260 northern Pakistan. He is, you know, exhausted. He hasn't showered in like more than two months.

00:05:26.760 And basically he is met in this village by the village elder, a guy named Haji Ali, who's like,

00:05:33.900 oh my gosh, my friend, we've never had a foreigner in this village before. What is, what is wrong?

00:05:37.620 Like, how can we help you? No one's ever gone left. Yeah. This man invites Greg into his tent

00:05:45.380 and you know feeds him gets him warm greg ends up staying there for a couple days and eventually

00:05:52.700 asks the village elder haji ali if he can see the school what is what is the school like in this

00:05:59.960 village and then we have this sequence he was appalled to see 82 children 78 boys and the four

00:06:08.380 girls who had the pluck to join them kneeling on the frosty ground in the open haji ali avoiding

00:06:13.680 Mortensen's eyes said that the village had no school and the Pakistani government didn't provide

00:06:18.200 a teacher. A teacher cost the equivalent of one dollar a day, he explained, which was more than

00:06:22.640 the village could afford. So they shared a teacher with a neighboring village of Monjung and he taught

00:06:28.740 in Korfi three days a week. The rest of the time, the children were left alone to practice the

00:06:33.620 lessons he left behind. And here is Greg responding to this. Greg's like, I have an idea for a voucher

00:06:39.680 system. A dollar a day for a teacher, Mortensen fumed. How could a government, even one as

00:06:44.860 impoverished as Pakistan's, not provide that? I felt like my heart was being torn out. There was

00:06:50.020 a fierceness in their desire to learn, despite how mightily everything was stacked against them,

00:06:54.080 that reminded me of Krista. I knew I had to do something. Standing next to Haji Ali, on the ledge

00:06:59.100 overlooking the valley with such a crystalline view of the mountains he'd come halfway around

00:07:02.800 the world to measure himself against, climbing K2 to place a necklace on its summit, suddenly felt

00:07:07.640 beside the point. There was a much more meaningful gesture he could make in honor of his sister's

00:07:11.660 memory. He put his hands on Haji Ali's shoulders, as the old man had done to him dozens of times

00:07:16.640 since they'd shared their first cup of tea. I'm going to build you a school, he said, not yet

00:07:20.780 realizing that with those words the path of his life had just detoured down another trail, a route

00:07:25.340 far more serpentine and arduous than the wrong turns he'd taken since retreating from K2. I will

00:07:31.100 build a school, Mortensen said. I promise. So the rest of the book is Greg building the school,

00:07:35.740 building more schools, eventually setting up an NGO that builds more than 100 schools

00:07:41.300 in rural Pakistan. And it all started with this one promise that he made to this village elder.

00:07:48.640 Yeah, it's best to just start promising schools right off the bat. I will say I don't know much

00:07:53.900 about like the poor villages in the fucking Kashmir or wherever he is, right? 0.97

00:08:00.720 You're gonna learn so much in the next four hours, Peter. 0.98

00:08:02.640 He paints that picture of like a bunch of kids huddled outside, right?

00:08:06.160 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:08:06.560 In the dirt.

00:08:07.280 And you're like, oh, the problem is lack of building.

00:08:10.380 But probably not, right?

00:08:11.880 That's actually not the problem across the region.

00:08:14.180 So this book comes out in 2006.

00:08:16.720 This anecdote is from 1993.

00:08:18.880 It is called Three Cups of Tea.

00:08:21.040 Five years later, in 2011, John Krakauer, the sort of famed outdoor journalist, publishes

00:08:27.120 a book called three cups of deceit which is accompanied by a 60 minutes documentary that's

00:08:35.300 the dream by the way for haters like us to publish a book that's just like you know more like

00:08:41.680 suckonomics and it's just like a brutal takedown and everyone and everyone has to agree that you

00:08:47.980 were right and they're wrong i also love this book this book was released online as part of

00:08:52.680 like a sort of competitor to Amazon something something. It's like 80 pages long. Hell yeah.

00:08:57.840 This is like the perfect length of a fucking nonfiction book. I'm like, please give me more 0.99

00:09:02.080 80 page nonfiction books. Absolutely. Wow. So I am sending you a part of the 60 minute segment

00:09:07.920 and we are going to watch it. It's a powerful and a heartwarming tale that has motivated millions

00:09:14.460 of people to buy his books and to contribute nearly 60 million dollars to his charity.

00:09:19.760 It's a beautiful story, and it's a lie.

00:09:23.160 John Krakauer is also a best-selling author and mountaineer

00:09:26.460 who wrote Into Thin Air and Into the Wild.

00:09:29.700 He was one of Mortensen's earliest backers,

00:09:32.220 donating $75,000 to his non-profit organization.

00:09:36.620 But after a few years, Krakauer says he withdrew his support

00:09:40.620 over concerns that the charity was being mismanaged,

00:09:43.960 and he later learned that the corfetale that launched Mortensen into prominence

00:09:48.600 was simply not true.

00:09:50.900 Did he stumble into this village in a weakened state?

00:09:53.980 Absolutely not.

00:09:54.740 So nobody helped him out and nursed him back to health?

00:09:57.560 Absolutely not.

00:09:58.200 I have spoken to one of his companions, a close friend,

00:10:01.920 who hiked out from K2 with him.

00:10:04.160 This companion said,

00:10:05.060 Greg ever heard of Corfei until a year later.

00:10:07.380 We managed to track down the two porters

00:10:09.700 who accompanied Mortensen

00:10:10.980 and spoke to them in Pakistan's remote Houshe Valley.

00:10:14.940 They also told us that Mortensen

00:10:16.700 didn't stumble into Corfe lost and alone and that he didn't go to Corfe at all until nearly a year

00:10:22.640 later on another visit all right so so not true I think the reason why it's appealing is because

00:10:30.500 it has this kind of mythic kind of quality to it yeah yeah but it's like maybe a little too mythic

00:10:34.920 when you think about it it's like this village has never seen a foreigner before this village

00:10:39.620 that's like a mile away from a popular path right like a yeah exactly this trail that goes up to

00:10:46.020 K2 or whatever. What happened here is John Krakauer was a big fan of the book, an early

00:10:51.800 supporter and friend of Greg. You know, Greg was sweating, by the way, when this journalist slash

00:10:57.640 mountaineer comes around. If anyone's going to bust you, dude. Dude, never be friends with a

00:11:02.540 journalist. I'm a journalist and I climb mountains and Greg is just pouring sweat. So basically over

00:11:07.220 the course of their friendship, Krakauer becomes increasingly suspicious of basically all of the

00:11:12.420 kind of weird tall tales that greg is telling him so here is an excerpt from krakauer's book

00:11:22.500 according to three cups of tea mortensen was an accomplished mountaineer who before attempting k2

00:11:27.540 had made half a dozen successful himalayan ascents including climbs of annapurna 4 and

00:11:33.320 barunzi both of which are in nepal but there is no record in the american alpine journal which

00:11:39.060 meticulously documents all ascents of major Himalayan peaks of Mortensen reaching the summit

00:11:44.380 of or even attempting any Himalayan mountain prior to 1993. Scott Darsney, Greg's climbing

00:11:50.900 partner on K2, confirms that Mortensen had never been to the Himalaya or Korokorum before going

00:11:56.880 to K2. Hmm. So I think this is what got Krakauer curious, because like lying about your climbs,

00:12:03.800 like in the climbing community is like really bad. Right. Well, because you probably like these

00:12:08.040 guys probably spend years maybe decades of their life trying to like knock off a few of these yeah

00:12:16.180 yeah and then like some guys like yeah i climbed it yeah i climbed it and if you find out that he

00:12:22.060 didn't you're gonna be you're gonna be mad i get it he also claims to have been the youngest person

00:12:27.660 to climb mount kilimanjaro because he was living in tanzania growing up he says he climbed it when

00:12:32.840 he was 11 yeah i climbed up no one was looking yeah me and my girlfriend who was hot by the way

00:12:38.260 we climbed it and i think now the youngest person to climb mount kilimanjaro is like five years old

00:12:42.740 it's not like totally implausible that an 11 year old will climb mount kilimanjaro but he says i was

00:12:47.700 the youngest person ever to do it for 30 years like a record i held for 30 years but like i could

00:12:53.540 find no record of that anywhere and it's a claim that he makes on like the official bio on the

00:12:59.640 website of his NGO, but he doesn't actually make it in the book. I would be bragging about that

00:13:03.540 constantly. It's weird that you mentioned it in one place, but not another. And then this also,

00:13:08.020 I mean, it really ruins the book for you knowing that like certain claims in it are fake because

00:13:12.520 he has a bunch of stories where he's like, I don't know, Greg. So he has this from when he moves back

00:13:18.100 to America for high school. He goes to high school in a public school in the Bay Area after growing

00:13:23.800 up in Tanzania. So here's this. Between classes, a tall sinewy basketball player wearing a

00:13:29.440 Cadillac hood ornament around his neck on a gold chain, shoved Mortensen up against the drinking

00:13:33.960 fountain while his friends closed in menacingly. You ain't no African, he said. I too have seen 0.62

00:13:41.060 mean girls. You ain't no African, he sneered. Then the pack of boys began raining blows on 0.88

00:13:45.940 Mortensen while he tried to cover his head, wondering what he'd done. And then he remembered

00:13:49.940 his training with Muhammad Ali. I've actually been to model mugging. I'm actually ready for you 0.76

00:13:56.760 guy of karate training. When they finally

00:13:58.700 stopped, Mortensen lowered his arms, his

00:14:00.740 lips trembling. The leader of the group wound

00:14:02.700 up and smashed his fist into Mortensen's

00:14:04.820 eye. Another boy picked up a trash can and

00:14:06.760 upended it on his head.

00:14:08.740 Mortensen stood by the drinking fountain, the 0.53

00:14:10.660 reeking can covering his head, listening as

00:14:12.680 laughter faded down the hallway.

00:14:15.400 He's just

00:14:16.160 inside the garbage can at the end

00:14:18.700 of the story. Trash can on his head is like a little

00:14:20.720 too, like, karate kid 0.94

00:14:22.300 kind of, like, cinematic detail, you know?

00:14:24.660 Cadillac hood ornament around

00:14:26.140 The Cadillac Literature is where I'm like, I'm making Peter read this. 1.00

00:14:30.300 I don't think you'd get beaten up for like being a white guy from Tanzania. 0.99

00:14:33.640 I mean, it depends. 1.00

00:14:34.280 It depends how annoying you're being about it.

00:14:36.400 But yeah, exactly.

00:14:37.340 It would be funny if like what was actually happening is that like, you know, the teacher

00:14:41.820 was like, who here is African-American?

00:14:43.600 And Greg's like, well, obviously me.

00:14:45.700 I mean, look, Greg paved the way for Zoran Mamdani.

00:14:49.640 There's also a story about him visiting the body of Mother Teresa, who's a hero of his.

00:14:58.260 He has a layover in Calcutta at one point and goes to see her body.

00:15:02.620 He says this. 0.72

00:15:04.520 You ain't no African.

00:15:06.220 That's what Mother Teresa said to him.

00:15:08.740 You ain't no Catholic.

00:15:10.680 At dusk outside the Missionaries of Charity Mother House, hundreds of hushed mourners crowded the gates,

00:15:15.740 holding candles and arranging offerings of fruit and incense on the pavement.

00:15:19.640 The driver got out and rattled the metal gate loudly.

00:15:23.220 The sahib had come all the way from America to pay his respects, he shouted in Bengali.

00:15:27.280 Open up.

00:15:28.460 An elderly watchman guarding the entrance stood up and returned with a young nun in a blue habit

00:15:32.960 who looked the dusty traveler and his explosion of flowers up and down before waving him inside.

00:15:38.340 Oh, boy.

00:15:38.880 I don't know.

00:15:39.420 When Mother Teresa died, a lot of people were visiting.

00:15:41.800 A lot of people visited from other countries.

00:15:44.080 A foreigner has come to see Mother Teresa.

00:15:46.540 There's nobody.

00:15:47.040 And then, like, they let him into, like, a private viewing and he, like, puts his hand on her hand and he has, like, a moment with her.

00:15:54.500 It just is, like, a little much.

00:15:55.900 He's like, yeah, I actually met God, by the way.

00:15:58.220 Krakauer points out that he claims that this anecdote took place in the year 2000, but Mother Teresa died in 1997.

00:16:04.760 Last one, he also has an anecdote about sitting next to the king of Afghanistan on an airplane.

00:16:12.500 So, da-da-da-da.

00:16:13.820 The king sat in the window seat, of course.

00:16:16.340 He's got his neck pillow.

00:16:17.720 He's in his pajamas.

00:16:20.140 Since this is probably a made-up anecdote,

00:16:22.040 I would love for him to have just said the king was in the middle seat.

00:16:24.700 Mortensen recognized him from pictures of the old Afghan currency

00:16:28.100 he'd seen for sale in the bazaars.

00:16:30.720 At 89, Zaheer Shah looked far older than his official portrait

00:16:34.240 as he stared out at the window of the PIA 737

00:16:37.120 at the country he'd been exiled from for nearly 30 years.

00:16:40.780 Aside from the king's security detail and a small crew of stewardesses,

00:16:44.740 Mortensen was alone on the short flight

00:16:46.680 from Islamabad to Kabul

00:16:47.780 with Afghanistan's former monarch.

00:16:50.440 When Shah turned away from the window,

00:16:52.340 he locked eyes with Mortensen across the aisle.

00:16:54.420 Let's do this as like a little script.

00:16:55.940 So you be Mortensen, I'll be the Shah. 0.67

00:16:58.840 As-salamu alaykum, sir.

00:17:00.320 And to you, sir.

00:17:01.420 American?

00:17:02.320 Yes, sir.

00:17:02.920 Are you a journalist?

00:17:03.900 No. 1.00

00:17:04.740 I build schools for girls.

00:17:07.180 Shah's eyebrows lifted toward the brown dome

00:17:09.160 of his hairless head.

00:17:10.480 He patted the seat next to him

00:17:11.740 and Mortensen moved over.

00:17:13.120 do you know someone in the area dude and then it kind of goes on from there and then what the 0.82

00:17:16.980 fuck is going on here the story ends with the king of afghanistan pulling out a business card 0.69

00:17:20.480 and also pulling out like an ink pad and like putting his finger in the ink pad and then putting 0.99

00:17:25.480 his fingerprint on the business card and he's like give this to anyone in the area and tell

00:17:29.980 them that i sent you like i am a friend to anyone who builds schools in my country and then

00:17:34.880 conveniently greg loses the business card in um he gets caught in a machine gun fight between

00:17:41.580 opium smugglers yeah which results in him losing the business card and so he's not able to present

00:17:46.320 the business card to his local contact here's the thing and this will be a good lesson to our

00:17:50.380 listeners if you want to do like a fraud book you gotta keep the lies tight i know there's gonna be

00:17:55.540 a journalist looking into your lies and they're gonna do checks on like a hundred facts if the

00:18:02.180 first 90 are true the journalist is gonna move on yeah yeah but if it's just like hey i think this

00:18:07.840 is a lie hey i think this is a lie too yeah they're gonna get excited they're gonna write

00:18:11.500 an 80-page pamphlet about how your book is a lie.

00:18:15.000 The other mistake he makes here is making up stories

00:18:16.980 about people who can respond.

00:18:18.680 So Krakauer contacts the son of the former king of Afghanistan.

00:18:22.600 The king of Afghanistan died, but his son, he says,

00:18:25.480 he has never traveled on any PIA flights from 1973 to 2007,

00:18:30.340 the year of his death.

00:18:31.420 He obviously was, like, not aware that tight records

00:18:34.760 were kept about various things, right?

00:18:36.700 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:18:37.220 So, like, he's like, you know, I climbed that mountain,

00:18:39.000 and then someone's like, you know, there's a list of everyone 0.98

00:18:41.120 who's ever climbed a mountain and he's like oh fuck this is that's brutal right that's brutal 1.00

00:18:45.840 for a liar uh i almost feel for him because this is uh if you're a casual bullshitter you're not 0.99

00:18:51.860 expecting this level oh totally record keeping i also think the structure of the way the book

00:18:56.080 is written is very crucial because greg mortensen i mean he's listed as a co-author but it doesn't

00:19:01.100 appear that he like sat down and wrote any of this book he basically told his story to this david

00:19:06.240 raylin guy who's a magazine journalist who then wrote it down in the book uh-huh right i think

00:19:10.380 he's just used to telling these stories and then eventually this gets written down i wonder if

00:19:14.080 there were moments where realin's reaching out like hey what was that story again about the

00:19:18.360 about the flight and morton's like oh shit so to circle back to the anecdote that he starts the

00:19:24.820 book with of stumbling into this village corfe in 1993 because he took the wrong turn at a fork in

00:19:30.880 the road it is true that on the way down from k2 there is a fork in the road and you have to go

00:19:36.020 right to get to this village, Askel. Okay. You can go left. However, if you go left at this fork

00:19:41.560 in the road, you will reach like a river gorge. There was no bridge. So you don't, you don't

00:19:46.660 reach like a, like the fucking, like a lost village from King Kong. Like that. He wants you 1.00

00:19:52.760 to believe that if you went left instead of right at this fork that presumably hundreds, if not

00:19:58.280 thousands of people pass through every like month. Yeah. That you reach a completely untouched

00:20:03.300 village. And at the time, the only way to get to Corfei was to essentially go through Askel.

00:20:10.520 Yeah. So you have to get to Askel, which is like the city where he's trying to go,

00:20:14.500 and then take a left and then go across the river on a different bridge, and then you get to Corfei.

00:20:20.140 Okay. So basically when Greg is confronted with this by 60 Minutes, he refuses an interview with

00:20:24.900 both Krakauer and 60 Minutes, but he does provide a written statement responding to a bunch of

00:20:29.500 their questions he basically throws david raylin under the bus that's your only move at this point

00:20:34.980 so uh he basically says like look to write a book like this you have to condense some timelines

00:20:39.980 you know i was kind of back and forth to pakistan for like an entire decade if we wrote down every

00:20:44.120 single one the book would have been 5 000 pages long you know he's like he's like slowly backing

00:20:47.980 out of the room like look forks in the road they're metaphors uh so he also in his written

00:20:53.800 statement says

00:20:55.960 this. I was reminded

00:20:58.080 while double-checking this information that the

00:21:00.080 Balti people have a completely different notion

00:21:02.020 about time. Yeah. 0.54

00:21:03.880 Now we're

00:21:05.000 cooking, dude. You're being really white 1.00

00:21:08.120 right now. You're being like so white by asking 0.82

00:21:10.180 what time something happened. Truth? 0.81

00:21:12.280 Truth is very white

00:21:14.220 coded. Even the Balti language,

00:21:16.740 an archaic dialect of Tibetan,

00:21:18.580 has only a vague concept of

00:21:20.240 tenses and time. For example,

00:21:22.080 now can mean immediately or sometime over the course of a whole long season.

00:21:27.320 The concept of past and future is rarely of concern.

00:21:32.100 Ah, yes.

00:21:32.740 Classic cultural thing.

00:21:34.260 They don't know about the past even.

00:21:35.880 They don't even have a word for 1993.

00:21:38.040 He changes the stories at various points, but he basically says,

00:21:40.760 I was in Corfe, but I was only there for a few hours.

00:21:45.380 I then went back like a year later.

00:21:48.160 How you say hours?

00:21:49.820 I was in Corfé, it was in the past, maybe it was in the future.

00:21:55.920 I do not know.

00:21:57.320 Perhaps part of the concern here is the stories that I'm telling you are actually going to happen later.

00:22:02.380 It's actually a rival right now.

00:22:03.580 You think it's a flashback, but it's a flash forward.

00:22:05.680 Maybe it's your problem for like not thinking in a circle.

00:22:07.700 Maybe you don't think in a circle.

00:22:08.880 The whole thing of him throwing David Raylan under the bus like really irks me as a journalist

00:22:13.060 because he had been telling this story publicly for a decade by the time this book was written.

00:22:18.260 Right, right, right.

00:22:18.760 You can find interviews with him.

00:22:20.500 You can find podcasts with him.

00:22:22.020 He always tells the same story.

00:22:24.120 I stumbled down from K2.

00:22:25.560 I accidentally ended up in this village.

00:22:27.480 They nursed me back to health.

00:22:28.780 So I built a school.

00:22:29.820 You always have an empathetic ear toward whatever is happening to a journalist in any of our tales.

00:22:37.140 I'm like, don't make the journalist the villain here.

00:22:39.500 He's writing down what you're telling him. 1.00

00:22:40.720 You see, there's like a timeline where Mike Hobbs is like, just like writing a book for some asshole. 1.00

00:22:47.300 I know. 1.00

00:22:47.860 Well, I used to be a speech writer for like UN people and shit. 0.99

00:22:51.480 And so like you just write down what they want you to fucking say. 0.96

00:22:54.280 So what actually happened is he didn't wander down the mountain alone. 0.99

00:22:58.720 He came down in a party of four people.

00:23:01.760 So it was him and his Sherpa and another climber named Scott Darsney and his Sherpa. 1.00

00:23:06.580 Everybody walks together into this village asshole. 0.98

00:23:09.280 They then get a Jeep, which then takes them to Skardu, which is like the closest major city. 0.99

00:23:14.700 They're not nursed back to health in like a random village.

00:23:17.660 They are nursed back to health at a motel called the K2 Motel, which is like where climbers go to recover.

00:23:23.360 They're there for a week. 0.98

00:23:24.840 They're like a fucking West Western. 0.97

00:23:27.020 They then get a Jeep after that to a village called Kane because they have a cook on their expedition called Akmalu, who they become close with, they're friends with. 0.99

00:23:36.560 And like he had like invited them to his village.

00:23:39.500 They go to his village.

00:23:41.300 They stay there for a couple days, and there is a newsletter that he writes in 1994, before

00:23:47.360 he starts telling this whole Corfe story, about why he wants to build a school in this

00:23:52.220 other village, Kane, and this is an excerpt from his newsletter.

00:23:57.920 After 70 days on the mountain, I spent some time in Kane.

00:24:00.980 When I asked to see the school, the villagers took me up to a dusty apricot grove on a hill

00:24:05.060 behind the village.

00:24:06.240 A group of 85 children, 5 to 12 years old, were sitting in the dirt reciting spelling

00:24:10.680 tables.

00:24:11.300 Despite abject poverty, their spirits soared.

00:24:14.200 So clearly this is the anecdote that he then transferred to a different village.

00:24:17.820 Yes.

00:24:18.380 And this village elder story that he made up about Corfe a couple years later.

00:24:22.460 After they see this school, Greg Mortensen makes a promise to Akmalu, the cook on their expedition, that he will build a school in Kane.

00:24:32.600 So this is kind of a little bit of a twist in this debunking.

00:24:36.880 Because typically when we find out like, okay, the opening chapter of this book is a scam.

00:24:41.240 This guy, you know, he wasn't in Corfei.

00:24:43.360 He lied about this.

00:24:44.120 He lied about that.

00:24:44.940 Typically, we would then go into a thing where we're like, okay, he never climbed K2.

00:24:49.420 He's never been to Pakistan.

00:24:50.680 He never built any schools. 1.00

00:24:52.000 We would then do a whole thing where it's like he's a complete fucking scammer, right? 0.98

00:24:54.940 Like we did with Think and Grow Rich, right? 0.99

00:24:57.180 Right.

00:24:57.640 But the kind of weird twist of this is that Greg really did build a school in this village,

00:25:02.960 Corfei.

00:25:03.420 Okay.

00:25:03.680 So like he went home from Kane.

00:25:06.560 He found this rich Swiss guy, like a former scientist, now mountain climber, who agrees to give Greg $12,000.

00:25:15.020 Greg buys a plane ticket to Pakistan.

00:25:17.360 He spends $8,000 on like materials, construction materials, drives like two days back up into these mountain villages.

00:25:26.040 He brings all of the supplies to Kane.

00:25:28.740 He starts trying to build a school in Kane.

00:25:31.800 He has a local fixer named Muhammad Chingazi, who's like their local contact in the area who helped organize the expedition to K2.

00:25:40.060 They can't get a land title in Kani. 0.96

00:25:43.380 Like there's nowhere they can legally build the school. 0.87

00:25:45.820 It turns out this Chingazi guy, the local fixer, is the adopted son of Haji Ali. 0.77

00:25:53.220 This Chingazi guy tells Haji Ali, hey, there's this white guy with a bunch of like building materials. 0.66

00:25:58.200 He wants to build a school and he can't really build one in Kani.

00:26:01.560 like that effort has stalled out. So he then brings Haji Ali to meet Greg. And this is from

00:26:10.500 John Krakauer's book. When he learned from his adopted son that a starry-eyed American was

00:26:15.660 coming to build a school, Haji Ali resolved to get the school built in his village,

00:26:20.140 Corfe, rather than Kane. Only Mortensen and Changazi know exactly what happened next.

00:26:25.460 Haji Ali died in 2001. But a few days after the truckload of construction materials was

00:26:30.500 stacked in changazi's compound changazi introduced mortensen to haji ali shortly thereafter mortensen

00:26:36.520 reneged on his pledge to build the school in khanai and announced that he intended to build it in 0.96

00:26:41.000 korfay instead how dude how are you building schools but also being kind of a scumbag at the 0.96

00:26:46.840 same time it's so fucking crazy the basic details of the story are like kind of incredible like this 0.94

00:26:52.160 random guy raises money for pakistan the first third of the book is like about this effort to 0.74

00:26:56.980 build this one school this village elder guy says like well we actually more than a school we need

00:27:01.580 a bridge we need a bridge to link us across this river so we can get to like other villages and 0.54

00:27:05.700 like do basic trade and stuff and so greg also builds the guy a fucking bridge okay he gets like 0.53

00:27:10.760 dynamite to like get stone out of the quarries and like hires people and spends years building 0.70

00:27:15.360 what appears to be like a very well-built bridge for this river he then also builds a school that

00:27:22.160 is now like functioning like other climbers who climb k2 will say like oh hey you know i climbed

00:27:27.420 down from k2 there's been all this controversy about it i stopped by corfe i went to the school

00:27:31.480 and like kids are in class and like they seem to be getting an education there yeah he did build

00:27:35.920 a school for like poor people in pakistan when he himself had like no money and he spent years

00:27:41.160 doing this like flying back and forth between the bay area and pakistan sending like construction

00:27:45.980 materials and like hiring laborers it's like an incredible amount of work and he really was like

00:27:50.860 sleeping like on the floor of these like tents and stuff it's like this is not something he was

00:27:54.900 doing to like make money or like in the lap of luxury right but then he just like added this

00:27:59.080 bizarre lie right i made a promise to haji ali so it's very interesting psychologically what's

00:28:04.620 happening here because like you did the thing that you did the main thing that you would want

00:28:08.860 to brag about yeah he's like he's not trying to present this totally fake version of himself to

00:28:14.060 the public where he's a hero he actually did do something kind of heroic yes he's just lying about

00:28:18.680 the details because he can't help it? Maybe? I guess. There's also something very weird that

00:28:23.880 really didn't get very much attention at the time. So in John Krakauer's book, he interviews Scott

00:28:28.680 Darsney, who's this other climber who comes down the mountain with Greg. And he says like, no,

00:28:32.480 Greg had never been to Corfe when we left. Greg didn't even hear about Corfe until a year later.

00:28:36.800 After Krakauer's book comes out, Scott Darsney writes an email to Outside Magazine where he says,

00:28:43.120 I want to correct the record a little bit. Greg did actually kind of disappear for like a half a

00:28:48.320 day. And when he showed up in Askel, he said, oh, hey, I stumbled into this village. So it's

00:28:54.160 actually possible that Greg's like updated story, like we condensed the timeline. That might be

00:28:59.020 true. It's actually fairly plausible that's true. He like did wander into this village for a couple

00:29:03.520 hours. He may have met this village elder guy. It doesn't appear that he went to a school. It

00:29:07.780 doesn't appear that he made the promise. That part is still fake. Right. But he did actually

00:29:11.200 kind of stumble into this village, or at least it's plausible that that happened. So it's kind

00:29:15.060 of crazy. It's like, he also could have just fucking said that in his book. Hey, I stumbled 0.99

00:29:19.420 in this village for a couple of hours. I was intrigued by it. I tried to build a school in

00:29:23.460 this other place. It didn't work out. I thought, hey, what about that other village I spent a

00:29:27.300 couple of hours in? I'll build one there. Like that's what actually happened. And then he built

00:29:30.960 the fucking school. It's so weird to do this like insanely cool, insanely charitable thing. 1.00

00:29:37.060 Yes. And then make up little lies about it. It's really weird. All of our listeners who

00:29:41.080 are so full of themselves have never once done such a thing.

00:29:44.820 So basically, the next couple chapters of the book are about setting up this NGO.

00:29:48.960 So in Pakistan, he's building a school in the US.

00:29:51.820 He becomes closer with this Swiss scientist, rich guy, climber guy, who eventually in 1996,

00:29:57.960 as like construction is going well on the school, gives Greg a million dollars and is

00:30:02.940 like, why don't you endow an NGO?

00:30:05.760 You become the executive director of this NGO.

00:30:08.020 You get a board of directors.

00:30:09.340 You get a whole sort of structure around you.

00:30:10.800 And you just build as many schools in rural Pakistan as possible.

00:30:13.820 So in 1996, they found the NGO.

00:30:16.780 It's called the Central Asia Institute.

00:30:19.320 And the rest of the book is essentially his adventures going back and forth to Pakistan

00:30:23.220 and like building up this NGO from, you know, something that started with a $12,000 donation

00:30:27.960 into something that is eventually earning $20 million a year in donations.

00:30:32.840 Wow.

00:30:33.220 So we talked about how the opening anecdote of the book is, I think, fundamentally a lie, right?

00:30:39.780 Like it's obviously embellished, but there's like a kernel of truth to it.

00:30:43.780 Yeah.

00:30:44.000 There are also stories where there isn't a kernel of truth.

00:30:49.120 So one of the major incidents in the middle of the book is Greg being kidnapped by the Taliban.

00:30:55.340 Okay.

00:30:55.840 So this begins when he is expanding into Waziristan, which is a remote rural region of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan.

00:31:05.220 he starts his trip by going to some sort of compound to meet his local contact the guy like

00:31:12.280 leaves him waiting in a room for two hours eventually the guy like feeds him dinner he's

00:31:16.020 like you're my honored guest they eat dinner together he's like i'll show you to your room

00:31:19.940 greg goes to sleep he wakes up at 2 a.m to eight guys around his bed pointing ak-47s at him that's

00:31:28.660 a lot of guys that's a lot of guys they put a bag over his head they put him in the back of a pickup

00:31:33.400 truck. They drive for 45 minutes. He says there's all these like abandoned forts in the area from

00:31:39.300 like the colonial British powers. There's these like, these like essentially castles and they

00:31:44.140 have like snipers posted on like the gun turrets around these forts. That doesn't seem practical,

00:31:51.320 but all right. They then lock him in a room and Greg is like trapped there. There's the only thing

00:31:56.520 that's in a room is a time magazine from 1979, which is about like the Iran hostage crisis.

00:32:02.320 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, right? So Greg's like, oh, I'm building schools in the area. But the guy doesn't seem very impressed.

00:32:20.400 Greg eventually says, like, my wife is pregnant and I really need to get home to her.

00:32:25.280 Will you let me go?

00:32:26.860 And the guy says, I'm afraid that's not possible.

00:32:29.540 On the eighth day of captivity, he is invited outside to watch a soccer match.

00:32:36.320 The guy's like, do you like soccer?

00:32:37.680 And then he goes outside and all the guards are playing soccer.

00:32:41.780 The worst question you hear as an American being held hostage in a foreign country.

00:32:46.020 You're like, no, leave me in the room. 0.76

00:32:47.580 It's fine.

00:32:48.220 Do you like soccer?

00:32:48.860 here like he's sort of watching this Khan guy like interacting with the other guards Greg says 0.92

00:32:55.640 by his bearing and the respect others showed him Mortensen realized Khan was most likely an

00:33:01.260 emerging Taliban commander just eyeballing it yeah I'm getting emerging Taliban commander vibes

00:33:07.240 the way that Greg always tells his story he tells us a million times in interviews and you know in

00:33:11.620 talks etc he always says like I was kidnapped by the Taliban for eight days yeah after the soccer

00:33:16.900 game this guy con he kind of pulls him out of the room bag on his head puts him in another pickup

00:33:23.340 truck they drive for a while and they sort of pull up at some sort of like gathering and then this is

00:33:30.580 what greg says over con's shoulder mortensen saw hundreds of big bearded wazir dancing around

00:33:36.260 bonfires shooting their weapons in the air on their fire lit faces mortensen was amazed to see

00:33:42.360 not bloodlust, but rapture. What is this? He yelled, following Khan into the frenzy of dancing

00:33:47.140 men, not trusting that his eight days of danger had finally passed. Why am I here? It is best if 0.58

00:33:52.160 I don't tell you too much, Khan shouted over the gunfire. Let's just say we considered other

00:33:56.720 contingencies. Contingencies. He's talking like a Bond villain. There was a dispute and we might

00:34:02.720 have had a big, big problem, but now everything is settled by Jirga and we're throwing a party.

00:34:07.240 Then people start walking up to him and giving him money.

00:34:11.120 So here's this.

00:34:12.300 The guard with the bullet-creased forehead stumbled toward him, 0.88

00:34:14.940 his grinning face lit by both flames and hashish.

00:34:17.420 In his hand, he waved a wad of pink hundred rupee notes,

00:34:20.180 as filthy and tattered as he was, 0.90

00:34:22.020 before stuffing them into the chest pocket of Mortensen's shalwar. 0.82

00:34:26.500 Mortensen, speechless, turned to Khan for an explanation.

00:34:29.940 For your schools, he shouted in Mortensen's ear.

00:34:32.440 So inshallah, you'll build many more.

00:34:34.240 So they basically have a party in his honor at the end of this.

00:34:37.880 And to think of all the little kerfuffles we've had with them since.

00:34:43.060 It appears none of this happened.

00:34:44.860 So first of all, many people who are familiar with the region say that the Taliban was not

00:34:50.240 in that region in the late 1990s.

00:34:52.560 The Taliban only showed up in that region of Pakistan in like 2001, 2002, after the

00:34:56.280 U.S. started bombing. 0.95

00:34:57.380 OK.

00:34:57.560 This is an excerpt from a Time magazine article in 2011 called He Wasn't Kidnapped, He Was Our Guest.

00:35:06.100 Like I said, we run a small Best Western. He was just staying here.

00:35:09.800 It's actually worse, Peter.

00:35:11.520 Mansur Khan Masoon is a Pashtun research scholar in Pakistan who said he's considering suing Mortensen for falsely accusing his family and community of kidnapping him.

00:35:20.480 In fact, says Masood, they hosted and protected Mortensen during a trip to their village in the Western tribal areas 15 years ago.

00:35:26.800 Masood says he first met Mortensen in his ancestral village in South Waziristan in July

00:35:32.080 1996 and spent nearly two weeks with him, guiding him throughout the region.

00:35:36.200 In three cups of tea, however, Masood is described as an emerging Taliban commander who held

00:35:42.260 Mortensen captive for several days before eventually freeing him. 0.96

00:35:46.940 This is just white people in the presence of Middle Easterners. 1.00

00:35:49.640 You're like, am I being held hostage? 0.64

00:35:52.340 They're like, no, this is a cafe.

00:35:54.320 And the guy's like, I'm a director of a think tank. Like I'm not, I'm not in the Taliban. Like I'm literally like, I'm a research scholar. And like Krakauer gets photos from this trip. It's like a vacation. So he's staying in the home of like a kind of local political elite. And there's pictures of him like sleeping in his like nice bed and like taking walks in the afternoon.

00:36:17.260 and there's notes from like other local,

00:36:20.540 like local politician types who are like,

00:36:22.140 thanks for the meeting yesterday.

00:36:23.320 We had a productive discussion.

00:36:24.800 So the question is, is Mortensen lying

00:36:27.240 or is he so racist?

00:36:30.200 I was kidnapped.

00:36:31.360 That he was like, that he was just treated,

00:36:33.340 he was like treated to above average hospitality

00:36:35.840 by Middle Easterners. 1.00

00:36:38.380 And he was like, he was like, get me out of here. 1.00

00:36:42.420 Day four, they keep bringing me tea.

00:36:45.040 This guy went out of his way, 0.99

00:36:45.920 took two weeks out of his fucking life to show you around for no compensation. You were basically 0.99

00:36:51.460 on a work trip where you like had a bunch of meetings. To be fair, this is how I feel at like

00:36:55.640 company retreats. If you asked me what happened at a given company retreat, I'd be like, I couldn't

00:37:00.500 leave. I was, I was marched from one room to the next forcibly. So that sort of gets into some of

00:37:07.360 the other threads of the book. One thing I forgot to mention at the beginning of this episode is

00:37:12.640 that this book, as well as its popularity with like President Obama and like all these

00:37:16.160 like humanitarian awards and stuff, this book was required reading for soldiers going to

00:37:21.560 Afghanistan.

00:37:22.400 Okay.

00:37:22.800 As you recall, the original title of this book was Three Cups of Tea, One Man's Mission

00:37:27.720 to Fight Terrorism One School at a Time.

00:37:31.060 Right.

00:37:31.640 Using education.

00:37:32.680 Greg insisted on changing the title for the paperback and future editions.

00:37:38.020 It now says Promoting Peace One School at a Time, so to his credit.

00:37:41.060 Yeah.

00:37:41.500 But this thing of, like, we're fighting terrorism with schools is a huge part of the book.

00:37:46.940 And it's also a huge reason for the popularity of the book.

00:37:49.200 If people learn enough, they will learn that America is cool.

00:37:52.820 Yeah.

00:37:54.260 There's, I read it, we're not really going to get into it, but I did read a bunch of debunkings of, like, all of the terrorists who had, like, a ton of education.

00:37:59.960 Well, Osama Bin Laden, yeah.

00:38:00.980 Also, like, Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski.

00:38:03.320 Yeah, a lot of terrorists do tend to be highly educated, but they also pull from uneducated.

00:38:07.740 Yeah, exactly.

00:38:08.440 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:08.800 So it's, like, 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.

00:38:19.460 Yeah.

00:38:19.680 The book comes out in 2006.

00:38:21.140 It's describing events from, like, a decade before, but it comes out in 2006. 0.99

00:38:24.620 This is when, like, Iraq is emerging as a quagmire. 0.93

00:38:27.500 Afghanistan has been a quagmire for a long time, right? 0.91

00:38:30.580 Yeah. 1.00

00:38:30.780 And, like, people want some sort of, like, good news, like some sign of hope from the region, right?

00:38:36.120 And then you get this guy, this one heroic man who's like building schools and promoting peace and like maybe that's the way to do it.

00:38:42.860 It's very telling that the military took up this book, right?

00:38:46.540 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.

00:38:56.280 So the best articulation of this is from, wait for it, a Thomas Friedman column in 2009 where he goes to Afghanistan to attend the opening of one of Greg's schools.

00:39:13.920 Oh, God. Here we go.

00:39:14.840 And so he writes a column about it.

00:39:18.080 This is a long excerpt, but it's a rich text.

00:39:21.240 I'm sure it is.

00:39:22.240 I'm sure it's just a little longer than it needs to be.

00:39:25.180 i confess i find it hard to come to afghanistan and not ask why are we here who cares about the 0.82

00:39:31.000 taliban al-qaeda is gone and if its leaders come back well that's why god created cruise missiles 1.00

00:39:35.980 he's such a fucking asshole such a fucking piece of shit dude such a fucking piece of shit like 1.00

00:39:41.120 we're gonna solve our problems by like bombing them but every time i start writing that column 1.00

00:39:44.880 something stills my hand this week it was something very powerful i watched greg mortensen

00:39:49.620 the famed author of three cups of tea open one of his schools for girls in this remote afghan

00:39:55.140 village in the hindu kush mountains i must say after witnessing the delight in the faces of those

00:40:00.340 little afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn i found it very hard to write let's just 0.99

00:40:05.040 get out of here what if we have to stay we have to stay for the little girls what if there's always

00:40:08.720 a reason to stay occupying these countries what if we what if we can always find something indeed 0.98

00:40:15.140 morton's efforts remind us what the essence of the war on terrorism is about it's about god damn it 0.94

00:40:21.920 That's why we went in there and dropped schools on them. 0.98

00:40:24.580 It's about the war of ideas within Islam, a war between religious zealots who glorify 0.91

00:40:28.960 martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths,

00:40:33.740 and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women

00:40:38.540 as much as men.

00:40:40.440 America's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space 0.68

00:40:44.880 for Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, a new generation, 0.73

00:40:49.300 can be educated and raised differently. 0.85

00:40:51.540 The war was, in part, about helping Muslim progressives.

00:40:56.160 In part. 0.76

00:40:56.680 In part.

00:40:57.320 But, you know, it was in there.

00:40:58.940 It was in there.

00:40:59.500 Which is why it was no accident that Admiral Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint

00:41:03.540 Chiefs of Staff, spent half a day in order to reach Mortensen's newest school and cut

00:41:08.300 the ribbon.

00:41:09.500 This new school teaches grades one through six. 0.99

00:41:12.400 I ask some girls through an interpreter what they wanted to be when they grow up. 1.00

00:41:15.820 Teacher shouted one. 1.00

00:41:16.980 New York Times opinion columnist shouted another. 0.97

00:41:20.440 No! 1.00

00:41:21.540 Shut down the schools.

00:41:23.460 Doctors shouted another. 1.00

00:41:25.120 Living here, those are the only two educated role models these girls encounter. 0.98

00:41:29.660 Where were they going to school before Mortensen Central Asia Institute in the U.S. Department of State joined with the village elders to get the secular public school built? 0.88

00:41:37.340 The mosque, the girls said.

00:41:39.100 So there you have it.

00:41:40.100 They were at the mosque.

00:41:41.420 They were at the mosque.

00:41:42.160 They were at the mosque.

00:41:42.960 Going to school in a church, of course, something that never happens in the United States.

00:41:48.100 So this, I mean, you can see it happening here, right?

00:41:50.240 Where he's basically like, this is a mistake. 0.95

00:41:52.720 Afghanistan was like, there's no reason for us to be here. 1.00

00:41:55.320 We should be pulling out, but we're building schools. 1.00

00:41:58.480 We need to stay.

00:41:59.580 The Mortensen attitude was sort of like, they didn't have a school before.

00:42:02.060 And so we built them a school. 0.98

00:42:03.120 And Friedman's like, they were fucking learning at the mosque. 0.99

00:42:06.020 We've got to get out here. 0.98

00:42:08.960 So there's a really interesting article about this book.

00:42:11.220 Before all the lies and the other scandal stuff come out, just like an analysis of the text of the book.

00:42:16.080 It's by Noshin Ali.

00:42:17.400 It's called Humanitarian Development and the Narrative of Terror.

00:42:21.120 She says,

00:42:21.860 The colonial logic of deploying culture to justify the long war and occupation does not

00:42:26.860 get more straightforward than this.

00:42:28.720 Imperial power as a beacon of modernity, development, civilization, and women's empowerment 0.60

00:42:32.600 is precisely the discourse used by British and French colonizers in Egypt, India, and

00:42:37.340 Algeria, among other places, to explain their occupations.

00:42:40.340 This is like a psychological process that happens with colonialism, where it's like 1.00

00:42:45.200 you don't want to feel like a piece of shit. 0.99

00:42:46.660 you realize what you've done to these people. And so you're like, no, no, no, we're here 0.99

00:42:50.980 civilizing them. It's actually for their benefit. You need it to be, they are better off for our

00:42:55.780 presence. And that's precisely what Friedman is doing here. It's almost like the Middle East

00:43:00.980 invasion equivalent of the movie, The Blind Side, right? Where it's just, the idea that this is 0.57

00:43:06.700 being imposed upon them is not really reckoned with. I don't want to be too glib about, I mean,

00:43:12.580 you know, these folks did live under the Taliban, right? Like, this is not a situation where it's

00:43:16.660 like, obviously, they were fine before. But here we are in 2026. They live under the Taliban again,

00:43:21.980 right? So to his credit, Greg is fairly critical of the war in Afghanistan. I can see that. And

00:43:28.200 like publicly talk shit about the administration, like in pretty scathing terms. He's like, I like 0.98

00:43:33.580 how you guys lied your way into it. That was cool. But the actual war, no. So he is critical. However,

00:43:39.940 this book contains a lot of stuff about like madrasas a warning about barack obama but it's

00:43:46.500 very clear that he thinks of his mission as providing an alternative to madrasas of these

00:43:53.180 religious schools that are being built up he has a whole thing where he's like looking out over the

00:43:58.500 hills of like uh the northern areas and on the border with afghanistan and he can like see schools

00:44:04.840 popping up in the distance and he asks his local conduct like what's that and he's like well the

00:44:09.100 Saudis are pouring like tens of millions of dollars into this region. They're building

00:44:12.140 thousands and thousands of schools. And so this is a big part of the actual book. So I'm going to

00:44:18.000 send you a excerpt from the book. By 2001, a World Bank study estimated that at least 20,000

00:44:23.760 madrasas were teaching as many as 2 million of Pakistan students an Islamic-based curriculum.

00:44:28.720 Not every madrasa was a hotbed of extremism, but the World Bank concluded that 15 to 20 percent

00:44:32.940 of madrasa students were receiving military training along with a curriculum that emphasized

00:44:37.440 jihad and hatred of the West at the expense of subjects like math, science, and literature.

00:44:43.180 Now, that is a problem because I do feel like the hatred of the West curriculum should be

00:44:48.040 supplemental to math, science, and literature.

00:44:50.800 Yeah, usually we get it in college in America.

00:44:52.460 Usually it's at Oberlin that we get that, but they're getting younger. 0.97

00:44:55.200 Thinking about the Wahhabi strategy made my head spin, Hortensen says. 0.97

00:44:59.500 This wasn't just a few Arab sheiks getting off Gulf Air flights with bags of cash.

00:45:03.240 They were bringing the brightest madrasa students back to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait 0.99

00:45:06.360 for a decade of indoctrination, then encouraging them to take four wives when they came home and 0.98

00:45:11.860 breed like rabbits. The birthright stuff was a shock to me. It's like, oh, birth, they're breeding

00:45:17.240 like rabbits. This is something you would see in like right-wing press all the time, where they're

00:45:22.100 just like, we're getting outbred by the Muslims. So I do want to talk about the numbers here,

00:45:26.920 because this whole thing of like Muslim madrasas in Pakistan was like a fairly prominent moral 0.99

00:45:32.400 panic at the time. In his book, Greg says, by 2001, a World Bank study estimated that at least

00:45:39.520 20,000 madrasas were teaching as many as 2 million of Pakistan students an Islamic-based

00:45:45.040 curriculum. So I looked around for this. There is no 2001 World Bank study. There's two studies

00:45:51.420 that come out in 2001 and 2002 that were very influential on this moral panic. The first of

00:45:56.520 them is by the International Crisis Group, which is an NGO, and the other is by the Brookings

00:46:00.780 institution. There's a very good debunking of this called Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan,

00:46:07.880 a look at the data. Okay. So they found 44 articles in the Western press about madrasas

00:46:14.480 between 2001 and 2003. There's a massive range of estimates of how many children are attending

00:46:21.320 these madrasas. In the article, they say, some articles say 500,000 students, some articles say

00:46:26.240 1.5 million students. Greg says 2 million, which is above even like the high estimates that they

00:46:32.080 found in this article. They said of the 44 articles in American media about madrasas,

00:46:37.920 only two benchmarked the number of students in madrasas with the total number of students in

00:46:44.200 Pakistan. So Pakistan is an insanely populous country. It's 240 million people. It is a very

00:46:50.120 young population. So around 50% of the population is under 18. So in this article, they say,

00:46:55.580 according to the 1998 census of population, like pretty good data, 159,000 students were enrolled

00:47:02.700 in madrasas. This represents 0.31% of all children between the ages of 5 and 19. A very small

00:47:10.260 percentage of children are attending madrasas. And that doesn't even get into like how many

00:47:15.160 madrasas are like militant madrasas. These are just like religious schools. Right, right, right.

00:47:18.860 Looking back, it's really ironic that this moral panic emerged out of 9-11 because none of the 9-11

00:47:24.940 hijackers attended madrasas. Right. There's a 2006 study that looked at 79 fundamentalist

00:47:32.060 Islamic terrorists and found that only nine of them attended madrasas, whereas almost half of

00:47:38.920 them attended Western colleges. Like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed went to college in North Carolina.

00:47:45.000 Nice. So it is true that many madrasas in Pakistan had like a conservative curricula. Like there's

00:47:50.700 now been studies of the textbooks, but as a driver of terrorism, they're just not a major

00:47:56.240 source. The same author, Noshin Ali, also wrote an article called Books vs. Bombs, Humanitarian

00:48:01.900 Development and the Narrative of Terror in Northern Pakistan, where she talks about how

00:48:06.220 like this whole narrative, as well as being kind of false overall, is not relevant at all to the

00:48:10.720 region where Greg is working. So here is this. If one must generalize about religious identity in

00:48:17.160 the diverse rural regions of Pakistan, surely the conclusion would be the opposite of what is

00:48:21.840 claimed by three cups of tea. Rural areas of Pakistan have been known for their adherence

00:48:26.340 to a pluralistic sense of faith in which Islam is perceived as an idiom of morality instead of

00:48:31.180 theology, and devotion is deemed more important than dogma. Far from being illiterate village

00:48:36.440 conformists, Muslims in parts of northern Pakistan consider debate and intellectual engagement as an

00:48:41.460 integral element of living their faith. In the northern areas in particular, even the clergy has

00:48:45.600 most recently been known for leading a secular Shia movement against biased public school

00:48:50.020 textbooks, not for creating hubs of anti-school extremist madrasas.

00:48:53.920 So it's sort of sad to think about like the missed opportunity here of like someone who

00:48:58.060 spent a lot of time in the region and has a lot of credibility back in the United States.

00:49:03.060 Instead of humanizing this region and helping people understand some of the complexities,

00:49:07.580 he just repeats the one dimensional narrative that people already had. 0.97

00:49:11.420 All it is is people seeing shit they don't really understand and then freaking out. 0.93

00:49:14.380 And it's not that there's nothing to be concerned about. 0.98

00:49:17.060 It's just that you barely know what you're looking at as someone who's not familiar with these regions.

00:49:22.360 The politics is insanely complex.

00:49:25.620 The religion is complex.

00:49:27.580 The culture is complex.

00:49:28.700 You don't know and you don't understand any of it.

00:49:30.440 There's a scene in the book where Greg is like sitting down with kind of village elders from like different villages and they've been like in conflict with each other.

00:49:39.180 He brokers this meeting where they're all like sitting down and having tea together.

00:49:44.060 Here's like one of the best quotes from the book from the end of this scene of different village elders.

00:49:49.340 An infidel and representatives from three warring sects of Islam. 0.97

00:49:53.100 And I thought if we can get along this well, we can accomplish anything. 1.00

00:49:56.600 The British policy was divide and conquer.

00:49:59.260 But I say unite and conquer.

00:50:02.080 Well, you wrote that paragraph to completion. 0.98

00:50:05.820 Just absolute, absolute horseshit. 1.00

00:50:10.560 I'm fucking dying. 1.00

00:50:11.440 It's like, Greg, the conquering part is what people object to. 0.99

00:50:15.600 It's that unite and conquer is like still conquering.

00:50:18.820 He's conquering them with ideas, Michael. 1.00

00:50:21.520 An infidel and representatives from three warring sects of Islam. 1.00

00:50:24.980 He's like meeting with all these people, but he still like uses the language of the New York Times op-ed columnist. 0.61

00:50:31.420 Yeah, exactly.

00:50:32.180 He's literally like just like having a meal with these folks.

00:50:36.020 And he's like, so I'm an infidel to you, huh?

00:50:38.580 And they're like, Greg, please.

00:50:39.680 So getting back to the book, the final section of the book is about Greg's efforts to expand

00:50:45.000 into Afghanistan.

00:50:46.660 This begins in either 1999 or 2000, depending on which of Greg's books you read.

00:50:53.620 He is in northern Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan, and he's like wandering around

00:50:58.660 a prairie.

00:50:59.600 And then he is suddenly approached by about a dozen horsemen.

00:51:03.400 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 like building schools for girls.

00:51:21.340 Bring me Greg Mortensen.

00:51:23.260 Like literally, he says like my father, all he dreams of, like he would give up all of

00:51:27.580 his worldly possessions to educate just one girl.

00:51:30.340 And he sent me for six days to come and speak with you and ask you to build a school in

00:51:35.440 our region.

00:51:36.280 And he wants Greg to like come and visit.

00:51:38.340 Greg says, no, I have to get back to Montana, but I will come back.

00:51:41.900 I will build you a school another time.

00:51:44.080 This is Greg's description of this.

00:51:46.860 The man listened carefully, frowning with concentration before his weathered face cracked

00:51:50.820 open in a smile. He placed his muscular hand on Mortensen's shoulder, sealing the promise before

00:51:56.080 mounting his horse and leading his men on the long trip home over the Hindu Kush to report to his

00:52:01.160 warlord, Abdul Rashid. I've got to get back to my warlord. My warlord is waiting for me. How are

00:52:06.460 they doing? I can't believe they're doing like, he's doing like magical Negro stuff, but for 1.00

00:52:12.860 Afghans. This is so insulting to me personally. I can't believe it. So basically we're not going 1.00

00:52:18.940 to get into it but most of greg's second book is about his adventures trying to build a school

00:52:24.980 for this abdul rashid guy he's like the tribal elder of this nomadic herding community and kind

00:52:31.500 of midway through the book is diagnosed with cancer and there's a whole thing where he's like

00:52:35.020 my dying wish is to see this school finished yeah and greg organizes 40 yaks to climb up the mountain

00:52:41.720 with like lumber and building materials and build the school as this like this man's dying wish

00:52:46.240 that's like a huge part of the second book but in the first book it just kind of appears as like

00:52:49.900 this one little scene so maybe he realized he was like this this one little scene could be

00:52:54.820 a beautiful story if i just incorporated some fictional yaks no it's actually really funny

00:52:59.240 because this scene in the first book is like two paragraphs it's like a kind of a throwaway thing

00:53:04.340 but then he tells the story again in the second book and then the these men on horseback who come

00:53:09.640 up to him he's like stay the night with my country director let's have a feast and he like turns it

00:53:14.380 into this like super embellished, like huge story of like a day that they spend together.

00:53:18.880 And it's like, Greg, we can read your first book. It's not like you told this to one person

00:53:22.560 and then another. It's like literally the same story and you're telling it way more embellished

00:53:26.580 on the second try. I almost understand being a compulsive liar more than I understand being so

00:53:31.440 bad at it. I can't imagine being, not being like, well, can my lie be easily checked?

00:53:37.280 But so the book ends with yet another kind of sacred promise that Greg makes to a not

00:53:45.180 quite village elder, but village elder type.

00:53:47.060 He goes to a city called Baharak, also in Afghanistan, and he's like wandering around

00:53:53.280 a bazaar and a like jeep pulls up.

00:53:57.300 A bunch of dudes get out and like, what's your business in this region?

00:54:00.560 And he's like, I'm looking for someone he calls Sadar Khan, who's kind of like the

00:54:05.260 warlord of this region. 0.62

00:54:06.340 He's known as kind of benevolent, but also very vicious if you cross him.

00:54:11.100 Yeah, I've seen movies, of course.

00:54:13.440 So all these guys pile out of this Jeep and the guy's like, I, I am the man you are looking for.

00:54:20.460 And then again, they take him to like a compound, like a villa where this man lives, which is this kind of like a militarized kind of fortress sort of thing.

00:54:29.920 They start brainstorming.

00:54:31.920 Like there's so many girls in this region that can't find education.

00:54:34.920 They're, like, brainstorming different sites.

00:54:37.160 Greg basically, like, puts his hands on this man's shoulders and promises him that he will build him a school. 0.99

00:54:45.960 Dude, if I meet a warlord in Afghanistan, I'm not promising shit, bro. 0.98

00:54:51.000 I'm like, yeah, I'll do my best. 0.99

00:54:52.780 You say you're going to build a school and the warlord makes a wanking motion.

00:54:56.080 So this is the end of that anecdote.

00:55:00.300 As the sun slipped behind the western ridges, Khan placed one hand on Mortensen's back.

00:55:04.920 as he pointed with the other.

00:55:06.460 Look here, look at these hills.

00:55:07.740 Khan indicated the boulder fields that marched up from the dirt streets of Bahar'aq

00:55:11.520 like irregularly spaced headstones,

00:55:13.860 arrayed like a vast army of the dead

00:55:15.560 as they climbed toward the deepening sunset.

00:55:17.880 Okay, some mixed metaphors on what they look like.

00:55:20.160 Deepening?

00:55:20.660 There has been far too much dying in these hills,

00:55:22.720 Siddharth Khan said somberly.

00:55:24.680 Every rock, every boulder that you see before you 0.76

00:55:27.040 is one of my Mujahideen, Shahids,

00:55:29.260 martyrs who sacrificed their lives fighting the Russians and the Taliban.

00:55:32.560 Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile.

00:55:34.920 Khan said, turning to Faith Mortensen, we must turn these stones into schools.

00:55:39.820 Stones into schools.

00:55:41.000 Then he said, like, but tonight we dance.

00:55:44.160 Then there's a montage.

00:55:46.560 You know, his second book is called Stones Into Schools.

00:55:48.920 In that book, he describes his deepening relationship with this Siddharth Khan figure.

00:55:55.020 He says he's like constantly going to visit him at this compound.

00:55:58.280 He says there's like a line of people waiting to see him all with like their own ailments

00:56:03.140 and their own requests.

00:56:04.220 But whatever he's doing, he always stops to, like, embrace Greg and be like, how's the school going, my friend?

00:56:11.340 And they stay up late into the night gabbing.

00:56:14.740 They're, like, talking until four in the morning.

00:56:17.100 He, at one point, says, on another occasion,

00:56:20.500 Khan apologized for the fact that the pair he had selected for me was not as sweet as he thought it would be.

00:56:26.180 Most of my trees are too young, he explained.

00:56:28.400 I'm trying to catch up for the 25 years we lost when we were too busy fighting to be able to farm.

00:56:33.480 pretty rough excuse for a bad pair like oh sorry about your pair the war i'm sorry for the pair

00:56:39.860 did you know that the body keeps the score that's why the pairs are so small due to the trauma of

00:56:44.540 the region but then he also at one point says that this man writes him a poem like he asks him like

00:56:50.900 why do you sit staring at the brook and then con is like it's the sound of peace my friend like

00:56:57.180 he's trying to construct this like mythical figure and it's just like so obvious that it's 1.00

00:57:01.720 bullshit. I guess so. I will say as someone who has some heritage from this broad region, 0.99

00:57:08.500 some of the men can be a little bit dramatic. You know, some of them tilt towards a casual poem

00:57:15.980 and you have to be like, please stop. I'm allowed to be racist about this and you can't be. And so

00:57:20.520 I'm just sort of supplementing. No, you know what I'm actually thinking is like, you know,

00:57:23.220 I did human rights for 11 years before I became a journalist. And like, I have been the person

00:57:27.160 who goes and meets with like a local leader in like a rural remote region like i've been the

00:57:32.360 person going and doing that and like right at this time greg mortensen is running a charity

00:57:36.400 with i think a budget of like maybe five hundred thousand dollars a year for like their entire

00:57:41.480 international operations and he says like i'm gonna build you a school i feel like most of

00:57:46.460 these guys in that situation be like yeah right buddy right tell me when there's a school there's 0.98

00:57:50.480 someone who's like actually ill yeah waiting for his assistance and he's like oh fucking greg's 0.92

00:57:55.620 here? Yeah, bring him in. So this entire section of the book turns out to be a mixture of 0.98

00:58:01.620 embellishment and full-on lies. On the Sadar Khan stuff, the biggest problem is just the basic

00:58:08.200 timeline. So in his second book, Greg says, over the next two years, I made several more trips to

00:58:13.640 Baharak in order to cement our ties with Sadar Khan and plan the school. So he's talking about

00:58:18.160 numerous trips back and forth to hang out with this guy. This is when they're sitting under the

00:58:21.740 walnut trees and like reading poems to each other and stuff. The problem is that if you look at the

00:58:27.260 tax forms for the organization that Greg is running, they list their travel expenses and

00:58:32.900 the dates that Greg is traveling. So during this period, Greg only makes three trips to Afghanistan.

00:58:39.300 And he says in his book, on the first trip, he didn't meet Sadar Khan. He's like, oh, for whatever

00:58:43.140 reason, the meeting didn't materialize. So he goes back like eight months later. That's when he does

00:58:48.540 meet with Sadar Khan. That's like the meeting that we know happened. And then he goes back

00:58:52.280 again, like a year later, but he says, I was planning on staying at Sadar Khan's house,

00:58:57.020 but he wasn't there. So I had to stay in a hotel. So when exactly are these like nights spent

00:59:01.440 gabbing until four in the morning supposed to have happened? Like that may have happened once.

00:59:05.240 Look, that's a very bold lie because again, it does not take a lot to get an Afghan man to write 1.00

00:59:10.500 a poem for you. I wish that Greg wasn't busted because I feel like some of, if he had just 1.00

00:59:15.140 written a few more books by like the sixth book we would have gotten some crazy stories like he's

00:59:19.980 like floating upside down it's like stranger things it's like i found a lamp and i rubbed it

00:59:26.060 there was this princess who longed to be independent from her sultan father another

00:59:31.020 weird detail of the story is that in his first book he says they speak through a translator

00:59:35.260 and in the second book he says sadar khan speaks english that rocks these are both published books

00:59:42.300 Oh, my God. Yeah.

00:59:44.580 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.

00:59:54.260 John Krakauer talks to a anthropologist, someone who is doing his doctorate on the region and knows the region, like an actual expert in the region.

01:00:03.460 This guy, his name is Ted Callahan.

01:00:05.220 he is contacted by Greg to sort of map out the area and like, hey, where should we build a school?

01:00:10.980 Where are the places where they need this school? Like, can you just like travel there with Greg's

01:00:15.660 country director for Afghanistan at the time and like, let me know where we should build a school?

01:00:20.360 It's basically hiring him as a consultant. So this guy, Ted Callahan, goes there in 2006 to scope out

01:00:25.060 the area. The trip never really takes place because Greg's country director gets gallstones

01:00:30.620 and has to be, like, medevaced.

01:00:32.700 But this guy, Ted Callahan, continues working in the region.

01:00:35.320 He, like, gets a grant to, like, spend time in the region.

01:00:37.560 And he gets to know this Abdul Rashid guy,

01:00:40.440 the one who sent his son for six days across the mountain

01:00:44.080 to beg for Greg's help building a school. 0.93

01:00:46.460 Go find the magic white boy. 0.95

01:00:47.740 And so as he gets to know him better,

01:00:49.760 he says the guy essentially has never heard of Greg.

01:00:53.900 So in John Krakauer's book, he says,

01:00:56.700 Abdul Rashid didn't seem to know who Greg Mortensen was

01:00:59.620 or have any memory of meeting him, says Callahan. Eventually, he pulled out a bunch of business

01:01:04.220 cards, including Greg's, but that might have been the only time Greg ever came up.

01:01:08.980 So it appears that, like, essentially that entire part of the story just, like, didn't happen. Greg

01:01:13.200 did build a school there, but, like, my father sent me and my horseman six days to come and find

01:01:19.540 you. His dying wish was to see the school completed. It appears that they met once for,

01:01:26.080 like 30 minutes and had like a work meeting and then they traded business cards that appears to

01:01:30.680 be the actual extent of the relationship anytime you meet with greg you're either his best friend

01:01:35.240 or a member of the taliban those are the only two options this is such a like uh i don't know

01:01:40.680 it's such a type of western fantasy like you go to this part of the world that feels remote and

01:01:47.780 and backwards and uh the leader there who is a man of who's capable of incredible violence 0.81

01:01:55.880 he sees your your pure soul yeah it's gonna turn out that greg was like a piece of performance art

01:02:00.640 by edward saeed yeah yeah this entire thing was like really sophisticated satire the whole time

01:02:05.860 and scene greg mortensen was not real so basically this ted callahan guy continues traveling to the

01:02:14.320 region because he has a grant for it. It appears Greg in parallel is continuing on this plan to

01:02:20.160 build a school. And Callahan keeps emailing Greg and saying, look, this is a nomadic people. They

01:02:26.180 move around constantly. So the only way to make this work is to build a boarding school, a place

01:02:31.520 where people can send their kids for a couple of weeks, a couple of months, and have in-house

01:02:35.240 teaching. That's the only way that you can actually provide education in any meaningful

01:02:38.720 way to this population. But of course, that then raises the problem that a boarding school is a

01:02:43.780 much more complicated proposition, right? Because it's like, well, then you have to have like a

01:02:47.700 teacher living on site. You have to provide food. So then you have to have like food preparation.

01:02:52.540 You have to have like dormitories for the kids. It's just like a much bigger deal.

01:02:56.460 And he can tell that Greg is just not interested in like that level of complexity. So Greg ends

01:03:01.800 his second book with this description. About 200 yards from the edge of the lake,

01:03:07.760 I am told that the ground rises gently and that on the south facing slope of this incline,

01:03:11.920 positioned at an angle that enables it to absorb as much sunshine as possible,

01:03:15.560 there stands a four-room schoolhouse with an earthen floor and walls that are made of stone. 0.98

01:03:20.620 Okay, fucking Cormac McCarthy over here. 0.98

01:03:22.480 I know. 0.99

01:03:22.980 During the six months when the grasslands lie buried beneath the snow 0.99

01:03:25.840 and all connection between the Kyrgyz and the outside world has been severed,

01:03:29.780 I am told that there will be roughly 200 children who study at the school.

01:03:33.060 But so it is true that the school was built in rural Afghanistan.

01:03:37.000 However, John Krakauer says,

01:03:38.920 Boseye, to put it bluntly, is already a ghost school. Although Mortensen's staff reported on

01:03:44.520 the Central Asia Institute's 2009 tax return that 66 students were enrolled there, the building

01:03:49.600 remains empty. And then he basically goes through all of the reasons why this school doesn't work.

01:03:55.280 Like the population that he's trying to serve is staying at a summer camp. Like they have a place

01:03:59.580 where they camp in the summer that's 19 miles away from this school. So they're just not really

01:04:05.220 going to use it. And then there's another tribe that is camping closer. They're about four miles

01:04:09.840 away. And then he talks to the guy whose camp is like closer to the school. And he says,

01:04:15.960 the Afghan government provides a teacher who holds classes inside a yurt right in his camp,

01:04:20.620 he pointed out. So why would our children want to walk all the way down there to go to school

01:04:24.680 and then have to walk back up at the end of the day? The school is pointless. It's empty.

01:04:29.200 The border police seem to use it sometimes. So it's basically just like an empty square,

01:04:33.440 like an empty box in the middle of a field. Yikes. And so the minute he starts looking into this,

01:04:40.000 John Krakauer finds it like a lot of what Greg says about the schools and like how many students

01:04:44.900 are attending them basically turns out to be a lie. He keeps saying in interviews, he's like,

01:04:49.440 we built 200 schools in Pakistan. We built 150 schools. We built 115 schools. The number always

01:04:55.020 changes. And he doesn't have, there's no authoritative list of all of the schools.

01:04:59.580 And he also keeps saying, like, we've educated 50,000 students.

01:05:02.980 We've educated 25,000 students.

01:05:04.780 These numbers also change constantly.

01:05:07.900 So this is from Krakauer's book.

01:05:09.960 Even more alarming is the fact that a significant number of CAI schools exist only on paper.

01:05:14.660 The CAI website, for example, lists eight schools that have been completed in Afghanistan's

01:05:19.280 Konar province.

01:05:20.360 During his Charlie Rose interview, Mortensen claimed he'd built 11 schools there.

01:05:24.060 At that time, he'd built only three schools in Konar.

01:05:27.440 At every point, he's just exaggerating every single number.

01:05:30.720 I feel like he realizes that this is a part of the world where we don't have a ton of data.

01:05:36.160 And so he could just, this is, it's a great place to go and lie about what you did.

01:05:39.720 And also, I mean, it's kind of funny that he thought he wasn't going to get caught for this

01:05:42.200 because, you know, when you're just like giving talks to like a bunch of mountain climbers,

01:05:45.380 it is pretty easy to get away with this.

01:05:46.960 But like, he's doing this at a time when like his book has sold 4 million copies

01:05:50.800 and he's been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

01:05:54.180 It's like, you're not going to get away with this for that long.

01:05:56.400 Wait, was this the Nobel that went to Obama?

01:05:58.700 Yeah.

01:05:59.060 I mean, look, he didn't do anything for it either.

01:06:01.060 You know, I mean.

01:06:02.420 Got him.

01:06:03.460 The guy's built at least one school somewhere, right? 1.00

01:06:05.500 He built that fucking bridge and shit. 0.99

01:06:06.660 I don't know about like in all of history, but in recent history, it's like one of the 1.00

01:06:09.680 more embarrassing Nobel Peace Prizes.

01:06:11.780 It's like the crash of Nobel Peace Prizes.

01:06:14.420 Yeah.

01:06:15.260 Looking back, you're like, I don't know about Obama in 2009.

01:06:18.300 All he did was run for president.

01:06:19.880 Up there with the Trump FIFA Peace Prize.

01:06:22.040 So it turns out he was lying about how many schools they built.

01:06:24.560 But then even when he wasn't lying, it turns out a lot of the schools were basically never used as schools.

01:06:30.280 They built these structures, but they were almost immediately just like abandoned or used for something else.

01:06:35.880 So here is Krakauer.

01:06:37.340 Many Central Asia Institute schools that actually did get built were later abandoned due to lack of support.

01:06:42.360 Ghost schools, they're called by the disillusioned residents of Baltistan, where at least 18 CAI buildings now stand empty.

01:06:48.060 No one, not even Mortensen, knows exactly how many CAI projects exist as ghost schools or simply never existed in the first place.

01:06:54.560 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.

01:07:05.400 For the CAI –

01:07:06.220 I hate the acronym so bad.

01:07:08.720 CAI is brutal.

01:07:10.600 For the CAI –

01:07:11.460 Just call it Institute for Central Asia and then it could be ICA, which is like a really easy acronym to say.

01:07:16.540 CAI sounds horrible.

01:07:17.860 And also your tongue wants to say CIA every time.

01:07:20.460 You want to say CIA so bad.

01:07:21.940 Yeah.

01:07:22.440 For the CA –

01:07:23.360 Exactly. 0.99

01:07:24.000 Actually, I'm going to kill myself.

01:07:26.140 For the CAI staff to gather such crucial information, Mortensen would have to accurately account for how he spends funds, something he has never been willing to do.

01:07:35.840 So they basically don't know as an organization how many schools they've built.

01:07:39.540 It's so funny to be like a staff member in Montana and people are like, what do you do for a living?

01:07:44.240 You're like, oh, I do this.

01:07:45.100 You know, I work for this like nonprofit and we build schools.

01:07:49.480 And they're like, wow, wow, wow.

01:07:50.900 And then like, I don't know, three years later, it just turns out that you were just doing

01:07:55.480 a scam, not knowing it.

01:07:57.540 It's like how I feel bad for people who worked at Enron.

01:07:59.320 Like if you work in like event planning at Enron, like you had no idea the whole thing

01:08:03.000 was like Potemkin.

01:08:04.160 I love how that's where your brain goes.

01:08:07.820 You're like, you know what this reminds me of?

01:08:09.440 Another group of people I sympathize with, the poor employees of Enron.

01:08:13.400 Well, most people didn't know that it was fake.

01:08:15.340 I think most of his Montana staff also didn't know that it was fake.

01:08:18.020 Of course.

01:08:18.560 Of course.

01:08:19.000 Yeah.

01:08:19.160 But then what's amazing is after this happens, there's a ton of like consternation within the aid field about it.

01:08:24.340 So there's a really good blog post by a UN staffer who's like, I went to their website and like they have no evaluation information at all.

01:08:32.340 So like if you were an NGO that builds schools, you build in something of like, oh, every school a year later we return to be like, OK, how many students are there?

01:08:41.480 How many teachers like is it working?

01:08:43.000 Is our approach useful?

01:08:44.320 Right.

01:08:44.520 This is like super basic NGO stuff.

01:08:46.720 Yeah.

01:08:46.900 But they're not doing that.

01:08:47.760 I also want to return to what Greg Mortensen said originally, right?

01:08:52.080 So in that opening anecdote, he goes to Korfay, this little village in Pakistan, and he's

01:08:57.040 sort of shown the school by like the village elder, right?

01:09:00.720 And that's what launches this whole thing.

01:09:02.580 So I would make you scroll up through your text messages, but it's been ages.

01:09:06.020 So here is that passage again.

01:09:09.480 Haji Ali, avoiding Mortensen's eyes, said that the village had no school and the Pakistani

01:09:14.060 government didn't provide a teacher.

01:09:15.620 A teacher cost the equivalent of $1 a day, he explained, which was more than the village could afford.

01:09:21.440 So they shared a teacher with the neighboring village of Monjong, and he taught in Corfi three days a week.

01:09:26.520 The rest of the time, the children were left alone to practice the lessons he left behind.

01:09:30.500 So Greg never returns to this issue of teachers.

01:09:34.360 Right.

01:09:34.600 In a lot of these villages, the problem is not that they lack a cinder block room.

01:09:39.120 He makes it seem like it's a financial issue that could be solved really easily.

01:09:42.540 Right, right.

01:09:43.080 But I actually think it's probably like a teacher scarcity issue.

01:09:45.620 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, right?

01:09:52.400 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.

01:09:57.760 Yeah, I guess I hadn't really thought of this, even though it's obvious now.

01:10:01.440 But at the end of the day, he's actually just talking about building buildings.

01:10:04.940 Yeah, he's just putting a square.

01:10:06.080 He's putting a square concrete building in a village.

01:10:08.740 And if you have to choose.

01:10:10.020 Yeah.

01:10:10.600 If it's like there's money to invest in education here, right?

01:10:14.880 Where do you want to put it? Probably not in building, probably in teacher.

01:10:19.460 Exactly. And so this turns out to be a broader problem and a broader shift in development in

01:10:24.700 general, that there was a huge effort to provide what they called access to education. All of the

01:10:29.640 policies in the 70s and 80s were around building in more access to primary education. So there was

01:10:35.260 a huge effort by the World Bank and also by domestic governments to build schools for like

01:10:39.440 rural populations, also for urban populations. Like we have to build schools. But the problem is

01:10:44.520 there's almost no relationship between the proximity of a school and the enrollment rates

01:10:51.680 of children. Having a school near you is only the first step to getting education. And the reason

01:10:57.840 why building schools was very appealing to development agencies, and I think why it's

01:11:01.900 appealing to Greg, is because building a school is only a thing you have to do one time. And it's

01:11:06.580 something that is kind of outside of politics. Once you start talking about providing education

01:11:10.640 to kids, then you have to deal with, well, okay, what are the educational curricula?

01:11:14.220 What are the certification schemes?

01:11:15.800 What are the salaries?

01:11:17.220 Like you have to actually get involved in like the domestic politics of the country.

01:11:20.660 Whereas if you're just like, oh, we're going to plop down a bunch of cinder blocks in a

01:11:24.200 rectangle in the middle of a field, you don't really have to do any of that, right?

01:11:27.620 You can like pay some people to do that and then you can go.

01:11:30.800 And so the reason why it's easy is also the reason why it's not very effective because

01:11:34.020 it's not like linked up to these countries like actual education systems, right?

01:11:38.620 There's a really interesting article called, If You Build It, Will They Come?

01:11:41.840 School Availability and School Enrollment in 21 Poor Countries.

01:11:46.320 And it looks at 10 different studies that have tried to increase primary school enrollment

01:11:51.300 by building schools.

01:11:53.720 And three of the studies find no effect.

01:11:56.940 Six of the studies do find an effect, but the effects are incredibly small.

01:12:00.540 So one of them says, one new school built in a district is associated with a 0.1 percentage

01:12:06.480 point increase in primary school enrollment. So just building a school achieves almost nothing.

01:12:14.140 Right. All of the discourse around providing education in the developing world has now 0.61

01:12:18.380 shifted to educational quality. Yeah. Oftentimes there's problem with teacher certification. So

01:12:23.960 sometimes you get like an adult who comes and they say they're a teacher, but they're not actually

01:12:27.100 certified. In some countries, the certification schemes are like bad. Like they're not actually

01:12:31.480 qualifying teachers in any meaningful way. Sometimes people are corrupt and they get a

01:12:35.360 teacher certification not through actually being a good teacher. So you have like super ineffective

01:12:38.580 teachers. Teacher absentee rates in some countries can be upwards of 20%. It's actually like really

01:12:43.600 hard to like administer a school system. Well, what if we built devices that could be installed

01:12:49.020 in like town square areas that just 24-7 played our podcast? You're sort of walking around town

01:12:55.800 and you're learning. You're learning about these books. You're learning about my brand of non-toxic

01:13:00.420 homophobia. So there are a few meta-analyses that find that building schools works. But if

01:13:05.340 you dig into them a little bit, it turns out they're not just building schools. They're oftentimes

01:13:09.840 building like roads and bridges and other infrastructure to make it easier for kids to

01:13:14.340 get to the schools. So you don't want to kind of throw everything out and say like, you should

01:13:18.620 never build a school. Cause like there are some places that really do like need schools.

01:13:22.840 No, you should sometimes build a school. And that's, that's always been this podcast position

01:13:25.940 that you should sometimes build a school. I kind of had like a little panic moment because

01:13:29.860 I remember following this at the time when I worked in development. And ever since then,

01:13:33.880 I've had this belief that like you can't really just build schools in rural poor regions and like

01:13:38.660 expect education to come from that. But I found a study called Bringing Education to Afghan Girls,

01:13:45.000 a Randomized Control Trial of Village-Based Schools from 2013. So like they're bringing 1.00

01:13:50.680 schools to rural Afghan populations and they had a huge effect. Enrollment rates for girls

01:13:56.460 increased by 52% and they basically eradicated the gender gap in education that when you have

01:14:02.940 a village school, an equal number of boys and girls attend and like huge effects. So I'm reading

01:14:08.660 through the study and I'm like, oh shit, do I have to like update my priors? The worst. Maybe 0.99

01:14:13.640 you should build schools in Afghanistan. Like maybe this does actually work in Afghanistan.

01:14:17.580 Greg was right all along. But then when you get into the methodology, they're not actually

01:14:22.160 building schools. They're sending teachers. So they say we're providing a village school.

01:14:27.080 they train up a teacher they send a teacher and then every month they check in with the teacher

01:14:33.120 to be like okay how many kids are you teaching etc because did you build a school if you didn't

01:14:36.720 provide a teacher did you build a school at all like does that mean yes i like i like how you're

01:14:42.740 forcing you're making me feel incredibly stupid for stumbling upon these obvious initial like

01:14:47.720 threshold questions late in the episode i'm like wait a second an empty school isn't a school at

01:14:54.200 But so we've kind of 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.

01:15:16.060 Okay. And now we're cooking.

01:15:18.800 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 Gregg's NGO, the Central Asia Institute.

01:15:31.700 That's because some of the stuff that Krakauer talks about in his book, like, might amount to fraud, right?

01:15:36.440 He says on your IRS tax form, you say you're educating 66 students at the school, but the school might not exist.

01:15:42.840 Sure.

01:15:43.100 So the Montana AG spends a couple months looking into this.

01:15:46.160 They eventually produce a, I think, 80-page settlement document that lays out everything that was going on behind the scenes.

01:15:53.000 They interviewed a bunch of people.

01:15:53.760 They got a bunch of documents, emails, et cetera.

01:15:55.800 The first thing to say is that they didn't look at any of the overseas stuff because that's outside of their jurisdiction.

01:16:00.420 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.

01:16:04.520 And they also – they say they didn't find any fraud.

01:16:07.160 They do come to a settlement with Greg, which we'll get to later.

01:16:10.120 But like nothing illegal, like no one's going to jail over anything that happened.

01:16:13.820 They did find, though, that he was effectively embezzling from the charity the entire time.

01:16:19.820 The way that he was doing this was through book royalties.

01:16:24.780 So after the book comes out and becomes a huge hit, Greg's life basically becomes like

01:16:28.600 flying all over the place and like giving talks.

01:16:30.700 And as part of these talks, oftentimes the organization will buy his book in bulk, hundreds

01:16:35.580 or thousands of copies to provide to libraries, to provide to lawmakers, to have on a table

01:16:39.820 when Greg is signing them, etc. Greg could buy these through the publisher at cost, but instead

01:16:47.240 the organization is buying them through Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and Greg is getting a royalty

01:16:53.780 from every single book. So between 2006 and 2011, his NGO spent $4 million buying Greg's book.

01:17:04.320 Oh, my God.

01:17:07.900 Dude, I thought you were going to say this is like a $50,000 thing or something.

01:17:10.680 No, I know.

01:17:11.040 That's what I thought, too, when I first started reading.

01:17:12.400 I was like, oh, book royalties, whatever. 0.99

01:17:13.660 Four million fucking dollars. 0.99

01:17:15.680 Four million dollars. 0.99

01:17:18.040 So Greg is not getting all four million of those dollars, right?

01:17:20.980 Because he's getting royalties.

01:17:22.080 No, no.

01:17:22.440 He's just getting a little slice.

01:17:23.600 But still, it's insanely funny to have an organization buy four million dollars worth of your book.

01:17:30.840 They also spent $5 million advertising the book.

01:17:35.320 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.

01:17:42.880 And then Greg would get the royalties from that, too.

01:17:45.100 The organization is not recouping any royalties on this.

01:17:48.100 What's the ROI on those ads?

01:17:49.560 You might as well have just bought $9 million worth of the book.

01:17:52.500 The AG finds in 2010, one-third of the budget of the organization is going to promoting Greg's book.

01:17:59.620 Dude, hell yeah, Craig, my man, dude. 0.98

01:18:03.120 There's always like this initial question where you're like, is this a well-intentioned fool? 0.99

01:18:08.160 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.92

01:18:08.520 Then you get to like the embezzling portion and you're like, no, I don't think so actually.

01:18:13.500 This is actually a person who is obsessed with himself.

01:18:15.720 Yeah.

01:18:15.940 This is a person who wants the whole world to buy into like this fictional version of themselves where they're a hero.

01:18:21.820 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,

01:18:29.620 Love came out, Greg like melted down because it replaced him on the nonfiction bestseller charts.

01:18:35.000 And he's like, we have to buy more copies of my book. Yes. Yeah. I mean, not only do you get the

01:18:40.040 royalties when you buy them on Amazon, but you keep yourself in the Amazon bestsellers, right?

01:18:44.320 He also was lying about proceeds of the book going to charity. So if you buy the book, like

01:18:50.000 any of these full page ads that they're taking out, it would say that either 7% of the proceeds

01:18:55.020 or 9% of the proceeds would go to his NGO. But Charity Watch finds that like there's no revenue

01:19:01.800 line in their filings for book sales revenue. So that's just like a straight up lie.

01:19:07.180 Damn. I got to say, it's funny to lie about 7% of your proceeds going to charity. 0.99

01:19:12.800 I know.

01:19:13.240 It's funny to be like, yeah, I give him a few pennies here and there and then not doing it.

01:19:17.060 So the other thing that he's doing, Peter, is at this time, his life is just like flying around

01:19:21.500 giving talks. He charges $30,000 per talk. Again, none of that goes back to the NGO.

01:19:26.760 I mean, first of all, this is like 15 years ago.

01:19:28.640 This is, well, this is like 20, like late, late 2000s, like 2007 to 2011.

01:19:32.580 Late 2000s. So adjusted for inflation, that's $25 million per,

01:19:36.780 that's literally like what, like 50,000 adjusted for inflation.

01:19:39.840 I can tell your brain immediately goes to, why isn't it me? Why aren't I getting $50,000

01:19:44.120 for a one hour talk?

01:19:46.020 I don't want the 50 grand. All right. I'm not full of myself like this, but when I hear about

01:19:50.420 these schmucks getting 25 50 grand all i can think is why can't i pull five why can't someone give me 0.96

01:19:57.860 five grand dude the supreme court sucks by peter it can be about supreme court it can be about 0.99

01:20:02.620 airport books i'll talk about whatever dude just give me just like a few grand then i'll do it 0.78

01:20:07.500 like if it's in new jersey that's even better you know you don't have to pay for airfare i'll drive

01:20:11.200 wait okay wait speaking of airfare peter so the weird nickel and dime scam that greg is doing is

01:20:18.120 So he's getting paid $30,000 for these appearances.

01:20:20.840 And also, I guess when you like speak at Davos or whatever, they also reimburse your flights.

01:20:25.680 I guess. 0.94

01:20:26.580 Well, I mean, if they're giving you $30,000, you can pay fucking $500 of your own money 0.98

01:20:29.880 out of it. 0.93

01:20:30.240 I don't know. 1.00

01:20:30.520 I don't know how this shit works. 0.99

01:20:31.260 But Greg is doing so many talks at some point that he starts using a private jet because 0.99

01:20:35.700 he oftentimes has like two or three talks a day and he's just like jetting from like

01:20:38.620 place to place.

01:20:39.540 So they are reimbursing him for his private jet flight.

01:20:43.320 So oftentimes it's like $10,000 or $15,000.

01:20:45.480 That's also crazy because I would just be like, hey, I'm going to fly a commercial, but pay me an extra 10.

01:20:50.960 But this is exactly what he's doing, though.

01:20:52.440 So he gets a reimbursement from, like, Davos or wherever of his, like, 15K that he spent on the flight.

01:20:56.940 But he's also getting a reimbursement from his own NGO for the flight.

01:21:01.060 Ooh.

01:21:01.700 So he's double booking reimbursements.

01:21:04.060 Now, you said that there was a conclusion of no fraud on the embezzlement thing.

01:21:08.800 My guess is that that was just sort of like a legal formality.

01:21:11.600 I don't know the law, but like a lot of this stuff genuinely feels like fraud to me.

01:21:16.260 And I think because Greg played ball and the NGO played ball and like turned over a lot

01:21:21.180 of documents, they didn't charge.

01:21:22.660 I'm not familiar with these types of investigations exactly, but in a lot of these sort of settlements

01:21:26.680 of misconduct, the government will, as part of the settlement, agree to say that there

01:21:33.120 was no conclusive finding, but everyone knows there was fraud.

01:21:36.980 This is another one where you're like, okay, 10,000 here, 15,000 there.

01:21:39.900 the organization according to the montana ag report it says over time these charter costs

01:21:45.560 totaled almost two million dollars bro bro what is going on dude two million dollars in flights

01:21:52.240 how is he wringing this much scam money out of it and then this whole time he's also getting a

01:21:57.360 salary by the way so he's not just living off the royalties of the book he's also getting around

01:22:00.460 150 000 a year and a salary honestly dude double it and then maybe cut down the ads no this is what

01:22:06.040 i think is actually like kind of fascinating to me is that like he could have just given himself 0.56

01:22:09.780 a million dollars a year in salary and spend it on whatever the fuck he wanted to. And then he 0.96

01:22:13.880 wouldn't have had to do any of these weird shenanigans. Right. I think part of it is like

01:22:17.500 people feel very conflicted about high salaries for NGO people. Yeah. But like, I think Greg was

01:22:22.740 bringing in 20 million dollars in donations. I think a one million dollar salary, like I think

01:22:26.500 personally would have been fine. But yeah, he would have gotten shit about that. No, for sure. 0.98

01:22:29.960 I mean, and I'm I'm with you. I think there's always a weird tension with high salaried

01:22:34.900 nonprofit leadership. Yeah. But you need to attract people who would otherwise be making

01:22:39.220 large amounts of money in the private sector.

01:22:41.060 Exactly, yeah.

01:22:41.440 He probably would have been worth a much larger salary if he had just asked for it.

01:22:46.040 Yeah.

01:22:46.280 On the other hand, the entire operation was a fraud.

01:22:50.300 So, yeah.

01:22:51.280 Yeah, it's hard to know what would have been right here.

01:22:53.620 But it is funny to do complicated embezzlement.

01:22:55.900 I know.

01:22:56.160 Getting double reimbursed.

01:22:57.080 Like, I'm sorry.

01:22:57.540 It's not like it's – this isn't something you don't notice.

01:23:00.020 No, you know you're doing it.

01:23:01.000 If your reimbursements are coming back at like 50% of your overall income for private

01:23:05.940 jets, it's not like you're like, oops, oh, hey.

01:23:08.500 Like you're going to your accountant at the end of the year like, hey, there's an extra

01:23:11.500 million here?

01:23:12.440 What's going on?

01:23:13.140 But also there's so many descriptions in the AG report and in Crack Hours book of people

01:23:17.380 going to Greg and being like, oh, this is actually like really weird and bad and like

01:23:21.180 we shouldn't be doing this. 0.99

01:23:22.700 We're a fucking 501c3. 0.99

01:23:24.940 Like people are not giving money to us thinking it's going to private jets. 0.99

01:23:29.580 And Greg's like, no, you're right.

01:23:30.800 You're right.

01:23:31.140 I'll repay.

01:23:31.880 I'll repay the royalties.

01:23:32.820 You're right.

01:23:33.280 This doesn't work.

01:23:34.140 I don't know what's going on.

01:23:35.160 I'll fix it.

01:23:35.680 I'll fix it.

01:23:36.020 And then he doesn't do anything.

01:23:36.860 You run into Greg in the hallway and he's wearing a full tuxedo and a top hat.

01:23:42.160 And you're like, Greg, what's going on with the private jet expenses?

01:23:44.520 He's like, you're absolutely right.

01:23:46.120 He's wearing a Cadillac hood ornament, Peter.

01:23:48.100 That's where his wealth is now.

01:23:50.760 He's on like a Segway in the office hallway.

01:23:52.940 They also find in the AG report that he's charged up to $75,000 of personal expenses to the organization.

01:23:59.680 It says, through the years, Mortensen charged substantial personal expenses to CAI.

01:24:04.200 These include expenses for such things as L.L. Bean clothing, iTunes, luggage, luxurious

01:24:10.460 accommodations, and even vacations.

01:24:12.520 This is why the wrong people are running these scams.

01:24:14.580 You give me a couple million in scam money, I'm not shopping at L.L. Bean, brother.

01:24:18.720 You'll find me dripping in Ferragamo, all right?

01:24:21.020 No, I know.

01:24:22.420 And it also, it doesn't say iPod.

01:24:25.340 It says iTunes.

01:24:26.620 He's buying songs for 99 cents.

01:24:28.860 He's buying Baby by Justin Bieber.

01:24:32.500 He's writing off like, yeah, by Usher.

01:24:37.180 Dude, I'm cracking up thinking of like every time you go into Greg's office, he's like wearing – he's got like an Hermes scarf on.

01:24:43.800 He's like, yes.

01:24:45.860 And he's listening to Hey Ya.

01:24:47.240 He's like, that was only 99 cents.

01:24:48.520 But I went for – I did 129 for the high bitrate version.

01:24:51.380 It's actually the 320.

01:24:53.160 They're like, oh, hey, you like the new album?

01:24:56.140 He's winking.

01:24:57.020 He's like, I didn't pay at all.

01:24:58.460 So at the end of all this, by the time the 60 Minutes and John Krakauer book come out

01:25:03.380 in 2011, Greg's organization, the Central Asia Institute, is spending 60% of its budget 0.99

01:25:09.620 on Greg shit. 0.98

01:25:11.080 For a nonprofit, pretty efficient. 0.99

01:25:13.800 And only 40% is actually going to like program stuff.

01:25:17.520 But the way that they are doing accounting on this, they're calling all of this program

01:25:23.780 expenses and they're telling donors that they have a under 15% overhead.

01:25:28.460 cost hell yeah because they just they're just not counting greg well no the whole thing is they say

01:25:34.260 in our mission we say we build schools in pakistan and we do outreach about the importance

01:25:39.440 of girls education yeah and all of this is outreach look double paying double paying for 1.00

01:25:44.720 private jets that's greg so greg's entire defense for this is basically like well you you bitches 1.00

01:25:50.940 knew i was doing outreach like we said on the website we're doing outreach right and this is 1.00

01:25:54.680 outreach. But of course, I don't think anyone thought it was 60 percent. The smallest print is

01:25:59.980 like, we will be double charging for private jets. It is the kind of thing where if you gave

01:26:05.640 the donors more transparency, they would be upset. Yeah. Right. It's like, you know that you're

01:26:10.580 stopping short of the level of transparency that would result in everyone pulling their money.

01:26:15.720 And that, while not technically fraud, has a fraudulent element. And also, is the outreach

01:26:20.720 really about the importance of girls' education, or is the outreach about Greg?

01:26:24.780 Purchasing your own book at, like, market rates is not outreach. That's not what that is.

01:26:29.840 The big thing that, I mean, obviously the embezzling bugged me, but also as a former

01:26:34.040 NGO worker, the other thing that really bugged me was just the sheer, like, lack of transparency 0.98

01:26:38.380 and how bad of a fucking manager Greg was. So in Crack Hours book and the Montana AG report, 0.97

01:26:43.940 they go through a timeline of the organization. So in 1996, when he founded the organization,

01:26:49.000 Greg brought on like a bunch of people as his board of directors who are like supposed to hold

01:26:53.260 him accountable under the hierarchy of the organization, right? That's the way that it's

01:26:56.220 supposed to work. So he brings on a bunch of people who are like his friends, like other

01:26:58.940 mountain climbers, the widow of this Swiss guy, Gene Herney, who had given him a bunch of money.

01:27:04.000 He brings on a bunch of basically like friends of his and people who are like very much drinking

01:27:08.080 the Greg Kool-Aid. He brings on a bunch of these people in 1996. By 2002, every single one of them

01:27:14.320 had left due to frustration with Greg's total intransparency about what he was doing. They would

01:27:21.300 ask for like basic accounting stuff. They're like, hey, you just came back from Pakistan for a month.

01:27:25.640 What did you do? Who did you meet with? Do you have receipts for anything? And he just wouldn't

01:27:29.100 provide them. Just total silence. Look, been there, all right? When I was a lawyer and I had

01:27:34.480 like an accounting person or whatever be like, hey, can you please send in your Uber receipts

01:27:40.260 for your trip. Sometimes I would just ignore them. And sometimes it was $2 million of receipts

01:27:45.480 that you weren't putting in. That actually is true. And the result is that I would end up

01:27:49.020 paying for my own Uber. So Krakauer quotes the former CFO of the organization. She says,

01:27:55.640 since the start of my employment, Mr. Mortensen has spent over $100,000 on CAI's credit cards.

01:28:01.760 Mr. Mortensen has never provided any receipts for these expenses and repeatedly ignored my

01:28:06.640 request for their submission. So this is why they don't know how many fucking schools they opened 0.99

01:28:10.680 because like Greg doesn't even say like what he's doing, who he met with, who he gave money to. 0.98

01:28:15.860 Are there contractual arrangements? The Montana AG finds a payment of $14,000 that he transferred

01:28:22.400 to an elementary school in Pakistan with just nothing, no documentation of like, what do they

01:28:28.100 need to do with that? Are there any financial arrangements at all? Like any obligations on

01:28:33.080 them to do anything just like here's fourteen thousand dollars have fun no one knew where the

01:28:37.180 money for this organization was going solving terrorism through schooling uh is like the

01:28:42.320 mission and then like the actual practice is like we're just meeting random guys who say they have

01:28:48.120 solutions and handing them massive wads of cash this man who self-describes as a warlord we gave

01:28:54.240 him a hundred thousand dollars so this is from crack hour's book brief flurries of intense

01:28:59.520 micromanagement have preceded lengthy periods with no guidance whatsoever the program director

01:29:04.020 in kabul went a year without hearing from mortensen a year during one extended silence

01:29:08.420 mortensen failed to contact his pakistan country manager for an even longer interval staff in the

01:29:13.500 montana office would take calls from the country manager pleading for instructions begging for 0.99

01:29:18.020 greg to phone him imagine not hearing from your boss for a fucking year dude uh the fucking dream 0.99

01:29:22.920 dude what are you talking about what i know i i can't imagine how how bored i would have to be 0.99

01:29:29.640 to desperately call my boss like give me something please but also we're not going to get into it

01:29:36.560 but it appears that greg like absolutely got scammed a lot of his country staff just like

01:29:40.960 took the money and like basically didn't deliver anything i'm sure some of those people were going

01:29:45.040 to scam them and also some people like you smell a greg mortensen exactly right in the air you're 0.99

01:29:50.700 like oh this guy is a scammer this guy is full of shit yeah which makes him a target and also makes 0.98

01:29:56.120 you have no desire to be honest with him exactly i mean i think almost anybody would respond to 0.99

01:29:59.960 these incentives in this way right greg's whole thing is he wants to feel like he's the hero of

01:30:04.380 the story yeah greg i went to this village and like everyone talked about how great you were and

01:30:08.440 how thankful they are and he's like oh that's great and then he just disappears another couple

01:30:11.840 months you just like give him the stories that he wants oh we built we built 10 schools greg

01:30:16.120 like that's what you would do because that's what your boss needs right and there's no incentive to

01:30:19.620 do anything else basically right it's so cool to go from a guy who like really built the bridge

01:30:24.840 i know for a small village to this to like the top of this of the non-profit scamming game i know

01:30:30.880 if you're gonna scam like this just do it in the private sector no i know liz holmes was running

01:30:35.060 this same basic scam at a different scale oh yeah she got billions elizabeth holmes absolutely bought

01:30:41.300 day and night by kid cuddy on itunes with company funds so the last thing i want to say on like

01:30:45.740 Greg's rank mismanagement is, I want you to read a passage for me, Greg.

01:30:51.160 Yes.

01:30:51.720 Wait, Greg.

01:30:52.420 Don't start calling me Greg.

01:30:53.600 I know.

01:30:53.800 That's so libelous.

01:30:54.880 Just because we are spiritually alike.

01:30:58.300 If I had even a little bit of ambition.

01:31:00.840 Okay.

01:31:01.100 Let me send you a passage, Peter, and you have to guess where this passage is from.

01:31:06.860 Okay?

01:31:07.340 So here's the passage.

01:31:08.400 Even when he was home, we often wouldn't hear from Greg for weeks, said former CAI board

01:31:13.500 chairman tom vaughn and he wouldn't return phone calls or emails the board had a discussion about

01:31:18.480 trying to make greg account for how he spent his time but we realized that would never work

01:31:21.900 greg just does whatever he wants what we really needed to do was train a few greg juniors

01:31:27.020 said hernie's widow jennifer wilson some people greg could delegate projects to but he refused

01:31:32.680 to do that he said we didn't have enough money to rent an office or hire staff and then he just

01:31:37.720 bogged down in the details of one project and neglect another that's why i decided to distance

01:31:42.380 myself from CAI. He accomplished a lot, but I felt we could do so much more if Greg agreed to

01:31:47.220 run CAI more responsibly. Where is this from, Peter? I mean, it's obviously some kind of

01:31:51.820 postmortem. Sort of. I don't know. What is this from? This is from Three Cups of Tea. What? This

01:31:58.540 is from the book that established Greg's myth. Dude, I almost guessed one of his books, but I

01:32:04.340 was like, no, this is too much. The book itself describes basically the stuff that becomes a

01:32:09.640 scandal like a couple of years later not the royalty stuff not the like embezzlement but just

01:32:13.360 like greg disappearing for months being moody alienating some of his staff pitting them against 0.95

01:32:19.180 each other flitting from fucking project to project with no strategy the board being like greg is a 0.86

01:32:25.640 loose cannon like if we yeah we can't we can't manage him and we don't have a fix that's in the 0.99

01:32:31.700 book and two of his early board members being like i had to leave because greg couldn't get his shit 0.98

01:32:35.400 together. Well, did the other author think that Greg was... David Raylan, the author of the first

01:32:40.140 book, I think he came across this stuff and like he couldn't not include it. Yeah, he felt obligated.

01:32:46.000 He writes an intro to the book where he's kind of grappling with like a little bit like the myth

01:32:50.840 of Greg versus the actual dude. He says in the intro, he's like, I never had a meeting with

01:32:55.940 Greg where he wasn't more than an hour late. Wow. David Raylan clearly came across this and he

01:33:00.820 didn't pull at the thread. The only difference is that John Krakauer pulled this thread. He's like,

01:33:04.420 wait a minute i should actually look at like the financials of this organization yeah raylin

01:33:07.440 came across it include it in the book and then just kind of moves on this is where like the 0.99

01:33:11.500 archetype of the like eccentric yes the eccentric leader yes can bite you in the ass because i feel 0.98

01:33:18.240 like a lot of people read this stuff and they're like this is sort of the price of genius right 0.99

01:33:21.780 this is the price of someone who accomplishes so much this is the ngo version of walter isaacson's

01:33:28.300 elon musk biography yeah right it's like well this is what it takes like you have to be so

01:33:32.200 dedicated to the mission, right? You have to, you care so much. You want to help these people

01:33:36.180 so bad that you just can't run an organization. You can't provide receipts to your board of

01:33:40.880 directors. I'm not a receipts guy. I'm an ideas guy. I mean, literally. So to me as a former NGO

01:33:46.500 guy, the most chilling part of the book is there's this long sequence where like Greg's board is

01:33:51.180 like yelling at him, like, hey, we need you to actually professionalize and like make an

01:33:54.240 organization out of this. Right now there's an organization on paper, but it's just you and you

01:33:57.920 refuse to provide any information to us. And Greg is basically like, you're right, you're right.

01:34:02.200 What I need to do is I need to understand how other organizations work.

01:34:06.300 So he goes to the Philippines and he goes to Bangladesh to spend some time with like

01:34:10.120 very successful NGOs, like NGOs that have scaled up really effectively.

01:34:13.820 This is the description where he talks about like what he took from it and like the ideas

01:34:18.700 that he brought back with him.

01:34:19.980 So here's this.

01:34:20.640 On the bumpy Buman Airways flight from Dhaka to Calcutta, Mortensen had his notion of the

01:34:25.380 desperate need to educate rural girls confirmed.

01:34:28.580 The lone foreigner on the flight, he was shepherded by stewardesses to first class.

01:34:32.200 where he sat among 15 attractive Bangladeshi girls in bright new saris.

01:34:36.600 They were young and terrified, Mortensen said.

01:34:39.060 They didn't know how to use their seatbelts or silverware.

01:34:41.480 And when we got to the airport, I watched helplessly as corrupt officials whisked them off the plane and around the customs guards.

01:34:46.680 I couldn't do anything for them. 0.78

01:34:48.120 I could only imagine the kind of horrible life of prostitution they were heading to.

01:34:51.680 You can imagine this as like a conversation with Greg, where people are like,

01:34:55.380 hey man, we need you to like turn in your receipts.

01:34:57.660 Can you talk to some other organizations about how they work?

01:34:59.980 And then he's like, it's so important to educate girls in rural areas. 0.99

01:35:03.260 They're being sold into prostitution.

01:35:05.200 Yeah.

01:35:05.460 And you're like, Greg, sorry, can you turn in your receipts? 0.71

01:35:09.120 And he's like, but these girls on the plane.

01:35:11.240 He's not a logistics guy.

01:35:12.960 He's so uninterested in this.

01:35:14.860 And he thinks the point of this exercise of going to the Philippines and Bangladesh is

01:35:18.720 to like reaffirm his dedication to the mission.

01:35:21.520 Right.

01:35:21.820 That's not what anyone needs, Greg.

01:35:23.640 Nobody questions his dedication to the mission or the fact that like he seems to be a genuinely

01:35:27.660 open-hearted guy who really does care about other people.

01:35:29.980 what they need is like a boss.

01:35:32.700 What they need is a manager.

01:35:33.720 What they need is somebody

01:35:34.360 who can run an organization 1.00

01:35:35.340 and like turn in his fucking receipts 0.99

01:35:37.580 and like show up to things on time. 1.00

01:35:39.660 But like Greg,

01:35:40.500 it like doesn't get through to Greg.

01:35:42.580 You can tell he just like

01:35:43.320 doesn't understand the genre

01:35:45.020 of the conversation that he's having.

01:35:46.720 It almost feels like

01:35:47.260 he's performing for himself, right?

01:35:49.060 Like the sort of act of going around the world

01:35:52.660 and talking about this stuff

01:35:53.980 and you bear witness to it

01:35:55.680 and you go tell other people about it.

01:35:57.880 He's like putting on a performance of activism,

01:35:59.640 But he's not really actually doing a lot of activism.

01:36:01.920 Well, that's the thing is he thinks of it as like you're demonstrating the kindness of your heart.

01:36:06.120 Yeah, yeah.

01:36:06.680 But also he has this like weirdly one-dimensional understanding of the countries where he's working, right? 0.51

01:36:11.320 He sees, I mean, who fucking knows what happened with these girls on the plane? 0.97

01:36:14.980 They were like whisked away to a life of prostitution. 0.99

01:36:17.580 Were they?

01:36:18.280 I mean, there might have been like a gymnastics team who's like coach picked them up.

01:36:21.360 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.

01:36:30.000 Right. 1.00

01:36:30.400 And so they must have been human slaves.

01:36:32.060 Yeah, like being trafficked in first class.

01:36:34.120 Yeah.

01:36:35.380 It's very funny to be like, hey, before your lifetime of slavery, you will get a first class flight.

01:36:41.000 Over and over again in this book, Greg's bad management is included, but it's pitched as a strength.

01:36:46.980 Yeah, yeah.

01:36:47.360 David Raylan at one point, like, accompanies Greg on one of his trips to Pakistan.

01:36:50.420 And it's like, oh, we met his new, like, country officer.

01:36:53.540 It's a taxi driver who picked him up from the Islamabad airport.

01:36:57.140 And Greg was like, I like the cut of your jib and just, like, hired him to work for him.

01:37:00.740 But that scene is like, oh, wow, he really, like, runs by the seat of his pants.

01:37:04.560 And he's so spontaneous.

01:37:05.920 But that's really bad management.

01:37:07.460 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.

01:37:14.840 No, I know.

01:37:15.160 Exactly.

01:37:15.660 And you haven't built that many schools.

01:37:16.860 Greg has never actually done anything.

01:37:19.640 He's just doing the scam part.

01:37:21.500 Exactly.

01:37:21.940 And like he goes from project to project.

01:37:24.260 Like he's building schools.

01:37:25.420 That's like his original mission, right?

01:37:26.720 But then at some point in the book, he starts wanting to build a youth hostel in like the

01:37:31.160 regional capital.

01:37:32.100 He starts doing vocational programs for women.

01:37:35.040 He wants to develop a Sherpa training program to train people to be like porters on these

01:37:40.400 climbs.

01:37:40.860 He tries to build a public tap water system.

01:37:43.980 This is very Elon.

01:37:44.860 who's like he's building he's doing Tesla and he's like and we're gonna make tunnels this is

01:37:48.480 actually a pretty big problem in development that you get these aid celebrities and these people

01:37:54.140 that get famous for their like one big story in humanitarian aid and they get these organizations

01:37:58.880 with their name on the building and they just like flit from like topic to topic right and you can't 0.98

01:38:04.080 actually deliver on any of these things and everybody just wastes their fucking time yeah I 0.74

01:38:08.160 I read a really good essay about this specific thing called The Naive Republic of Aid, 0.93

01:38:14.480 Grassroots Exceptionalism in Humanitarian Memoir by Emily Baumann, 0.98

01:38:19.560 where she's like fucking clocks Greg instantly. 0.97

01:38:22.200 So here is this. 0.98

01:38:23.320 As portrayed in Three Cups of Tea,

01:38:25.300 Greg Mortensen was the ultimate anti-professional humanitarian hero,

01:38:28.880 the founder of an international education NGO who had no expertise in education,

01:38:33.340 international development, or public management.

01:38:35.520 This is a common trope of the humanitarian memoir,

01:38:37.600 The naive idealist who comes from outside but instantly understands something about the culture that people within it lack.

01:38:43.860 Once you hear this pattern, you notice it everywhere.

01:38:46.700 Malcolm Gladwell is sort of a subset of this.

01:38:49.160 Yeah.

01:38:49.380 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.

01:39:01.900 Yeah.

01:39:02.100 They're, you know, sort of treated like heroes.

01:39:04.660 Yeah.

01:39:04.800 And then it sort of all falls apart because they didn't actually understand the nuance of it, right? 0.92

01:39:08.440 It also speaks to, like, to me, just the total waste of fucking time and effort and money that philanthropy is, private philanthropy.

01:39:15.600 If you were setting up, like, a government agency in, like, a foreign aid body that's like, hey, we want to promote education in rural Pakistan, 0.69

01:39:23.500 you'd get together a bunch of people who understand the education context of Pakistan, who speak the local language,

01:39:28.680 who actually know the context and who know especially what has been tried before and has worked and hasn't worked. 0.92

01:39:34.280 You wouldn't just have like a random guy walk around and hire his fucking cab driver, right? 0.84

01:39:40.240 This is why you want actual professionals. 0.94

01:39:42.460 I think there's a weird resistance to the idea that humanitarian aid should be professional.

01:39:47.540 Like it also goes back to the salary thing too.

01:39:49.600 It's like you want people who are good at this and there's something about like you

01:39:53.740 shouldn't be good at this or it should come from the heart, not from the head.

01:39:56.980 And I think that's what people respond to in Greg's story.

01:39:59.380 What they're really doing is they're buying Greg's story and it's one guy against all

01:40:03.080 odds.

01:40:03.500 That's an appealing story, but that's not actually how you deliver aid to people.

01:40:06.760 Yeah. I mean, people love the idea of the magic, right?

01:40:09.200 The idea that you can sort of end run around the hard stuff.

01:40:12.700 Yeah.

01:40:12.940 And I feel like there's something in the American headspace in particular where people feel like red tape and inefficiency is sort of like dragging everything down.

01:40:27.480 Yeah, yeah.

01:40:27.840 And that out there somewhere is a really elegant solution.

01:40:32.220 And all it takes is one person who's just got the audacity.

01:40:35.720 So we're now going to talk about the fallout of all of this.

01:40:38.320 There's a bit of a long epilogue from all of this.

01:40:41.220 So after Krakauer's book comes out and the Montana AG report comes out, Greg is forced

01:40:46.460 to pay $1 million back to the organization.

01:40:49.360 The AG orders the organization to like remove him as the executive director and like appoint

01:40:55.200 a real board.

01:40:55.800 But the organization doesn't really do that.

01:40:57.180 they keep him on and pay him a salary until 2016 and they appoint a new board but it's like friends

01:41:02.680 it's like a close friend of his so like the organization basically just like keeps coasting

01:41:06.640 on the fact that it has a ton of savings from the years when i got a shitload of uh of investment

01:41:10.720 so greg almost immediately though disappears completely from public life smart to this day

01:41:16.940 greg has no presence anywhere online you can't find a sub stack you can't find a facebook honestly

01:41:22.320 admirable because i know this is if there was ever a day and age for a guy like this to just

01:41:28.020 reappear and like i know and have no apologies brace yourself peter the saddest epilogue of 0.93

01:41:33.760 this is his co-author david raylin who basically wrote down all of greg's bullshit uh killed 0.67

01:41:38.800 himself what 18 months after the scandal oh my god dude ultimately a lot of people fell for greg 0.91

01:41:44.200 because like part of the goodness of their hearts it's like you want to believe that someone is

01:41:48.040 doing something good and you want to be a part of that and i don't think there's anything kind

01:41:51.100 of wrong with that i think sure i mean you don't want to excuse the book that he wrote which is

01:41:54.800 full of falsehoods right but also he's also partly a victim of greg too right i mean he basically 0.84

01:41:59.120 believed greg i mean it's easy for us to talk shit about greg but my guess is that the man is 0.88

01:42:06.040 a charmer yeah oh yeah yeah everybody says that the man can sort of uh sway a room yeah it's 0.62

01:42:11.580 probably pretty compelling when when he's pitching to you so rayland suicide happened about 18 months

01:42:16.880 after the scandal you don't want to say that it had you know it's 100 caused by the scandal it

01:42:20.900 appears he had been looking for different antidepressants that worked. He had recently

01:42:24.860 stopped taking an antidepressant and his wife said that it's like one of the ones that's really hard

01:42:29.640 to get off of. And suicidality is like one of the known side effects of getting off of this

01:42:34.480 antidepressant. That could have been the trigger event. Again, you don't know anything. There's

01:42:37.800 only been one kind of official obituary of him, but incredibly sad story. There's also a really

01:42:44.600 bizarre attempt in the following years to rehabilitate greg and to kind of do like an

01:42:50.600 attempted you're wrong about about this entire story of the collapse of the ngo that's why i

01:42:56.240 hate that format so in 2016 there is a documentary called 3 000 cups of tea you can't scale it up

01:43:05.340 like that well the whole thing is like you can blame greg for like the fibs that he told in his

01:43:08.980 book but like you gotta admit he built a lot of schools dude this is kind of personal to me

01:43:14.720 because we will from time to time criticize someone for being kind of grifty who has done

01:43:22.400 some amount of good in the real world yeah and then like you'll get like the what i consider

01:43:27.020 the lowest form of of critic yeah who will be like oh but have you ever done x y and z and it's 0.92

01:43:34.340 like, give me a fucking break. We're getting to that like a literal statement. It's one of the

01:43:39.280 next examples. So there's also a 2014 Washington Post article that is documenting like his return

01:43:46.720 to Afghanistan. He's like going back to these villages to like see his schools and to see

01:43:52.520 people that he helped. He clearly has like a PR team that like invited this journalist along,

01:43:55.920 but they do point out in that article, and this is like a little weird to grapple with it. Like

01:44:00.580 greg did actually build some fucking schools yeah they interview a woman who went to one of 0.99

01:44:05.460 his schools and eventually became a doctor and she says like without greg like she credits greg 0.99

01:44:10.040 with saving her life okay there's also a radio free europe investigation that goes to a bunch

01:44:15.360 of his schools and they find yes some of them are abandoned some of them are empty but some of them

01:44:19.580 are working and they find like teachers who have had their salaries paid by greg they find people

01:44:24.480 in the local community who are like yeah i remember greg he was great it's the end of big fish where

01:44:28.980 It turns out all of all of his dad's tall tales are true.

01:44:32.140 You're going to love this, Peter.

01:44:33.000 There's also my favorite entry in this genre is a column by Nick Kristoff.

01:44:38.360 He says, Greg, by nature, is more of a founding visionary than the disciplined CEO necessary

01:44:44.040 to run a 20 million dollar a year charity.

01:44:46.440 Sure.

01:44:46.740 And like everyone does this in the defense is like, well, he might have been a bad manager.

01:44:49.980 There might have been some inconsistencies in the budgeting, but he's a visionary.

01:44:54.660 Wrong place, wrong time.

01:44:55.800 But also he is running a 20 million dollar charity.

01:44:58.980 Like, you're basically admitting that all of the allegations are true.

01:45:01.640 It's like the allegations are about his ability to run a charity.

01:45:04.600 It's not whether or not he's a decent person.

01:45:06.460 Right.

01:45:06.640 He also, Kristoff mentions like, oh, well, Greg is a friend of mine and he's like been

01:45:10.440 to my home for lunches and stuff.

01:45:12.240 Also, if you're Nick Kristoff, the people who you meet in the NGO world are this guy, 0.96

01:45:18.280 the eccentrics who show up at the conferences and shit. 0.99

01:45:21.260 The visionary who has no fucking ability to run an organization is exactly the kind of 1.00

01:45:24.740 people that Kristoff is surrounded by. 0.99

01:45:26.240 The guy who can charm everyone in the room, but is running scams behind the scenes.

01:45:31.320 That's the guy that Nick Kristoff is friends with.

01:45:33.180 So here is his defense, Peter, and it's almost exactly word for word what you said earlier.

01:45:37.620 The furor over Greg's work breaks my heart.

01:45:39.960 And the greatest loss will be felt not by those of us whose hero is discredited,

01:45:43.900 nor even by Greg himself, but by countless children in Afghanistan

01:45:47.380 who now won't get an education after all.

01:45:49.660 But let's not forget that even if all the allegations turn out to be true,

01:45:52.920 Greg has still built more schools and transformed more children's lives than you or I ever will.

01:45:58.300 Speak for yourself.

01:45:59.600 How many children are sitting in a room right now while their parents play this podcast out loud?

01:46:04.760 You're speaking to podcasters right now?

01:46:06.040 Excuse me.

01:46:06.760 Watch your tone.

01:46:07.460 Their brains are being enriched.

01:46:09.260 As we sift the truth of these allegations, let's not allow this uproar to obscure that larger message of the possibility of change.

01:46:16.380 Greg's books may or may not have been fictionalized,

01:46:18.760 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.

01:46:28.320 Wow.

01:46:28.880 It's very inspiring.

01:46:29.720 Let's overlook all of the fraud in the building of schools to focus on, hey, he built some schools.

01:46:36.080 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.

01:46:43.400 Yeah.

01:46:43.560 But it can't be that you just like – like as if there's like a threshold where like you do X amount of good and then like you're allowed to commit fraud, no judgment.

01:46:51.880 Completely.

01:46:52.280 I view this as like the story of this disconnect, right?

01:46:55.100 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.

01:47:07.300 You know, there's like deep tragedy in that.

01:47:09.700 Kristoff is just sort of saying like, well, that's the cost of doing business.

01:47:12.400 What Kristoff doesn't seem to understand is it's actually worse, right? 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? 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.

01:47:34.520 I don't know. What if you just like set up a thing where you like stole all of my money and then also ran like unrelated scams? I don't know. You just scam a bunch of money out of people. And then someone just like writes a defense of you where it's like, look, this man provided entertainment to hundreds of thousands of people.

01:47:50.860 This man had a mid-podcast for like four years.

01:47:53.240 Have you ever done that?

01:47:54.520 Three successful podcasts?

01:47:56.900 Entirely independent from the major corporate podcasting apparatus.

01:48:01.660 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.

01:48:10.960 Like they're upset by this.

01:48:12.540 He's not even getting funding anymore.

01:48:13.840 Well, yeah.

01:48:14.700 Kristoff thinks that like the smearing of a great man is like –

01:48:19.880 Is the injustice.

01:48:20.460 Right. That's so fucking crazy to me. 0.98

01:48:23.140 It's very frustrating to me that like there's still never been a full accounting of what happened. 0.93

01:48:27.520 So, you know, we have Crack Hours book. We have the AG investigation.

01:48:31.060 But the Central Asia Institute, you know, continues to exist.

01:48:33.960 It gets around $3 million in donations now.

01:48:37.100 They've never provided a full overview of like, hey, how many schools did we really build?

01:48:42.460 What was going on in those years?

01:48:43.700 I mean, Greg has not been at the organization for a decade now.

01:48:45.980 They've never provided any kind of full accounting of what happened.

01:48:49.400 The book publisher never, like, pulped the book, didn't, as far as I know, add a correction to the book. 0.96

01:48:54.700 The book is still for sale on fucking Amazon. 0.92

01:48:57.180 There's been no real accountability. 0.95

01:48:59.800 Greg had to give back a portion of the money that he took, but it's not all of it, obviously.

01:49:03.780 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.

01:49:11.240 So in this 2014 Washington Post article, they talk about how donations to the organization since the scandal have, of course, like, cratered.

01:49:18.320 They're now down to around $3 million.

01:49:20.460 It then says, as he watches the funds dwindle, Mortensen feels guilty and angry.

01:49:25.700 I just don't understand why all these people are trying to bring me down instead of help

01:49:29.240 me, he said.

01:49:30.020 Help you do what, dude?

01:49:31.080 So he still doesn't really understand what he did, and he still doesn't take any accountability.

01:49:35.500 Right.

01:49:35.640 Also, he still runs a $3 million a year charity, which is wild after, like two or three years

01:49:40.720 after this scandal, people are still, I guess by default or by habit or whatever, giving

01:49:45.440 $3 million a year.

01:49:46.960 That's still a like pretty good NGO and he's still making a decent salary.

01:49:51.040 I would assume that that's just like rich people who like set up an annual donation.

01:49:54.620 Yeah, that's what I wonder.

01:49:55.660 Like those AOL subscriptions that are still going from like 1997.

01:49:58.980 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:49:59.580 You know how like every month you'll get like the email that's like your payment receipt

01:50:02.960 for such and such and you're like, I've got to cancel that.

01:50:04.680 No, exactly.

01:50:05.320 Yes.

01:50:05.660 Your $100,000 receipt for the fraud organization and you're like, you're worth like $100 million.

01:50:11.600 You're like, okay, mental note.

01:50:12.660 I think defending Greg doesn't really work because he's never really taken accountability

01:50:16.120 or like described what he actually did.

01:50:18.820 The best piece I read on this

01:50:20.220 actually came out at the time of the scandal.

01:50:22.600 It was in the Stanford Social Innovation Review

01:50:24.980 by Kevin Starr.

01:50:26.960 This is like, to me,

01:50:27.860 the most important conclusion to take from this.

01:50:29.800 Here's this.

01:50:30.260 People seem most outraged

01:50:31.520 by the apparent fabrications in the book.

01:50:33.520 And yes, it's not nice to portray

01:50:35.040 one's hosts as kidnappers.

01:50:37.060 But the real crime is that CAI

01:50:38.820 appears to have raised $60 million

01:50:40.400 and doesn't have that much to show for it.

01:50:43.040 No one really knows how many schools

01:50:44.400 are actually up and running.

01:50:45.640 CAI says 170.

01:50:47.500 My own tiny random sample and the 60 Minutes investigation

01:50:50.160 indicate that they're probably a lot less.

01:50:52.340 Even if you allow for a generous figure of 150,

01:50:54.820 that represents $400,000 of donor money per school. 0.86

01:50:58.160 That's ridiculous.

01:50:59.060 It's probably going to work out to like around a million dollars per school.

01:51:02.580 He raised more money after this was written, so it's about $75 million.

01:51:05.740 Which in America would be a really good ROI.

01:51:08.020 Yeah, exactly.

01:51:08.480 But I mean, he also quotes other organizations who work in Pakistan,

01:51:12.280 man, some of which say they can build schools for around $1,800. I think that's an underestimate.

01:51:18.320 Yeah. I mean, if those are the numbers, that is crazy.

01:51:20.660 That's just corruption, right? That's just full-on corruption. I don't care how many

01:51:23.900 schools you built, if that's what it's costing you.

01:51:25.580 You've been in the development world, and I imagine that it's just sort of very hard

01:51:30.600 to implement controls that would adequately work. And one sort of de facto control we have

01:51:37.480 is if everyone catches you defrauding your donors out of money, 1.00

01:51:42.100 then you stop getting money and everyone says that you're an asshole publicly. 0.99

01:51:46.360 To remove that control seems like a bad idea to me. 0.99

01:51:50.000 And I'm glad to be part of that effort.

01:51:51.320 We're actually making aid better in making this episode.

01:51:54.020 Who can say who's better?

01:51:55.520 A man who builds a bridge in Pakistan? 1.00

01:51:58.800 Or podcasters who talk shit when he fucks it all up? 1.00

01:52:07.480 We'll be right back. 1.00

If Books Could Kill - August 05, 2026

Three Cups of Tea

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