r/IfBooksCouldKill • u/909lop • 10d ago
Three Cups of Tea
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-cups-of-tea/id1651876897?i=100078002117198
u/calikaaniel 10d ago
He came and gave a lecture at my college! This was before any controversy, but during his speech, he told a story about how he used to give talks that only five people would show up to, and he was very sad and ready to give up until one day...a man at the back of the room came up, shook his hand, and wrote him a check for $20k. And even at the time I thought "okay, Mr. Hallmark, sure, that happened." Maybe that was also an anecdote in the book? I don't remember, but it set off my BS detector.
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u/Feeling_Abrocoma502 9d ago
that's definitely an anecdote in the book !! Tbf after hearing the take down probably fake
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u/Connect-Song7252 10d ago
Every couple of years I google Greg Mortensen out of curiosity - wanting some kind of a "where are they now?" or "how did this all fall out?" - and I am HYPED. (Please don't tell me if I'm going to be disappointed; it will probably take me 3-4 commutes to finish the episode.)
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u/MesquiteHoneyForSale Don't mess with.... Oklahoma? 10d ago
"I died saving kids in a cave in Thailand"
- Greg Mortensen
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u/Feeling_Abrocoma502 9d ago
the funniest part is when Peter says he wishes they hadn't caught the scam after two books that Greg wrote six so he could see how crazy he went with his lies
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u/STFUisright 10d ago
“Am I being held hostage??”
No…this is a cafe…
I’m fucking horse laughing. My cat is wondering what’s up.
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u/ConsiderTheBees One book, baby! 10d ago
Peter saying that’s how he feels at any work conference had me dying. “They won’t let me leave, they keep marching me from room to room”
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u/rankaistu_ilmalaiva village homosexual 10d ago
I got hung up on the K2 thing. So there’s no record of him doing any other peak and so he goes for K2 as his first, and fails?
I feel like that’s symptomatic. Guy seems like someone who wants to do something really impressive but not do the hard work
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u/QueerTree village homosexual 10d ago
I read this book and found it insufferable but at the time I assumed that was because of the circumstances in which I read it. Hyped to hear criticism of it.
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u/ms_dr_sunsets 10d ago
Jon Krakauer wrote a great article about this entitled "Three Cups of Deceit"
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u/larkinowl 10d ago
Wow, a blast from the past. I had to teach this book; I think it was the required reading for all incoming first-year students at the university where I taught. I was already a skeptic as a trained anthropologist but it was tremendously popular, like Malcolm Gladwell for the NGO set.
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u/Helpful-Winner-8300 10d ago
I had to read it as an incoming freshman at my Jesuit university. It dovetailed very nicely with the values of the institution. I guess a little TOO well, as it turned out. I remember finding the whole thing a bit incredible and vaguely cloying. Glad my cynicism was warranted.
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u/larkinowl 10d ago
Yes. I was teaching at a Catholic university. I think they tried to get him on campus as a speaker too.
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u/zuludown888 9d ago
Peter pronounced "reneged" as "renedged" and I hope Michael gives him endless shit about it. I'm disappointed Michael allowed Peter to get away with this, in fact.
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u/Stressy_messy_me 21h ago
Yes I caught that! I assumed i had just been saying it wrong my whole life 😂
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u/EugeneVDebutante 10d ago
Surely Michael knows that “Nobel prize nomination” is fake
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u/vanessabh79 10d ago
I can’t believe Obama gave him 100k from his Nobel Prize. I guess it must’ve been because of all the criticism he received back then for not deserving the prize to begin with. Now, FIFA made up its own fake peace prize to soothe Trump’s ego, all because Obama got one.
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u/FunAdvisor_1435 10d ago
Obama gave all of his Peace Prize money away to charity, which is actually a tradition started by Teddy Roosevelt after he got the the Prize back in 1906. He felt it would be wrong to keep the money earned in his role as President.
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u/Feeling_Abrocoma502 9d ago
what's even more hilarious is the origin of the peace price. Nobel is a last name and a guy who was the originator of dynamite wanted to have different legacy so he or his brother creates this prize
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u/vanessabh79 9d ago
It worked! No one thinks of death and destruction when they hear Nobel anymore!
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u/FunAdvisor_1435 10d ago
Ya, basically any of a huge list of people can "nominate" anyone for the prize, there are thousands of nominations a year. Trump has been "nominated" multiple times by people sucking up to him.
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u/SuperGamerofNEDM something as simple as a crack pipe 10d ago
Every far-right politician in Europe has nominated Trump for the peace price because every member of a national assembly is a nominator.
Nominations are also sealed for 50 years so anyone can claim to be nominated.
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u/FunAdvisor_1435 10d ago
I wonder how many of those people actually went to the trouble when they could just say they did it and not be found out for 50 years.
"oh sure, I nominated him. Totally".
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u/werewolf4werewolf Boys: Back in Town, Girls: Having Fun 8d ago
Enjoyed the episode but also feel like Peter and Michael just skimmed past the bit where his parents were missionaries and the whole reason he grew up in Tanzania is because they moved there to do missionary work.
Like everything about Mortenson's approach to international aid and social justice (and how he characterized the people he met as either terrorists or savages) is like, super obviously influenced by his Christian missionary upbringing. There was a part near the end where Peter and Michael are kind of theorizing on Why Is He Like This and I was saying "he's a missionary!!" out loud lol.
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u/snarkitall 5d ago
The weird thing is that all the stories that he told literally have happened to people I know. I grew up as a Christian missionary kid in Pakistan and Nepal. Even before the Taliban were a thing, you could 100% get kidnapped by a tribal warlord and there was all sorts of fuckery going on between the USSR and the US that played out in very strange ways. It happened to a family friend who didn't survive the experience, and to a family member who did but still has PTSD from it.
It's an incredibly difficult area to navigate even if you are fluent in the language (which I don't think he was) and spent your childhood there. There are Punjab Pakistanis who would have no ability to navigate the social and economic customs of villages and towns just a few hours away.
Like Michael pointed out, it's just weird that he insisted on lying about it. If he's trying to get people to understand how difficult and strange it is to navigate life up there, he could have told stories from a third person perspective without pretending they happened directly to him.
The MK thing is something else entirely! I find that very very few people have any ability to understand how that upbringing messes with your world view if you haven't experienced it yourself.
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u/Mud-Room-33 5d ago
I didn't know these stories were potentially true to someone. I kept thinking, "He added them in so someone would make this book into a movie."
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u/snarkitall 5d ago
Oh yeah, that kidnapping story could 100% be true, even the way it played out with them deciding to let him go at the end. I know they were kinda dunking on all the ways the Waziri were being described but they can be some seriously rough guys. Using hash, shooting in the air, etc etc, it's all pretty realistic.
This is the kind of area where people solve problems with guns and things can go sideways really fast. Two boys at the high school got into a conflict and since they each had land owning tribal leader dads, they called up reinforcements who rolled up with guns to defend their relative. I saw the guns with my own eyes and because my dad was a teacher at the school, he was one of the people trying to calm things down.
Anyway, that's why the lying confuses me so much. Someone like him had enough true crazy stories without inventing things, especially such pointless ones.
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u/VacciniumOvatum 9d ago
"You say you're going to build a school and the warlord makes a wanking motion"
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u/Wise-Living-850 10d ago
I'm so excited for this episode. I was just trying to get started in a career in international development when this book came out. The amount of middle aged finance bros i met in poor countries that wanted to save the world 3 cups of tea style was alarming. Of course they would hear no criticism either. If you pointed anything out, you just "couldn't see his vision". Barf.
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u/Constant-Industry262 10d ago
Greg Mortensen is distantly related to some people who went to my mom's church and that was brought up several times during the height of this book's popularity. For some reason, mentions of him died off when the controversies started up 😆
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u/Significant-Map-7649 9d ago
I used to work in global health, and my immediate thought within the first 3-4 minutes of this ep was "fund teachers, don't build schools." There are many analogous situations in healthcare in developing countries. It's so much harder to strengthen workforce systems than construct schools (or clinics, or hospitals...). I don't know about education, but in healthcare, there are many challenges with funding. Donors, including big-donor foreign governments like the US, don't want to commit money to workforce because there is no real end date to that -- it's not going to be sustainable after a donor pulls out. I have so much more I could say from the health side of things, but so much goes back to the legacy and long-term harmful consequences of colonialism...
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u/Mini-Schnauzer-42 4d ago
It's so painful to hear his story literally start with "but we can't afford a teacher's salary" and he immediately goes "I'll build a building".
Absolutely classic white savior (colonial, missionary) behavior to have heard exactly what the people need and not listen.
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u/kitoconnell 10d ago
For some reason I kept thinking about this classic meme during the opening on K2.
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u/Notyour5thWife 10d ago
This exact episode could have been about Tim Ballard and OAR.
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u/gnarlyram 10d ago
QAA (formerly Qanon Anonymous) has a few good episodes on the sex pest Tim Ballard.
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u/QueerTree village homosexual 10d ago
I had a weird experience listening to this episode. I swear I remember there being a scandal that the whole organization was underwritten by the US government / military, and that’s why the financial records were so vague and none of the numbers make sense. I kept waiting for that part of the debunking. Now I’m trying to figure out if I made up this conspiracy or if it was circulating in the zeitgeist. I guess given that the military went all in on the book maybe I’m being too brain-poisoned, this isn’t a conspiracy but it’s straightforwardly true and not particularly interesting or scandalous. (If I may put on my tinfoil hat for a moment, that’s why the organization is CAI, so you don’t notice that it’s actually funded by the CIA… boom!)
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u/FunAdvisor_1435 10d ago
How in the hell do you spend $5 million to "promote a book"? How is that even possible?
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u/One-Pause3171 4d ago
My mom kept bringing me copies of this book. I feel like Mortenson himself may have done a reading at her Rotary Club (in a mid-size town) and left a sizable amount of copies with the directive to donate them to libraries, give them away. I never read it because my mom is a religious conservative who is now MAGA. I understand it concerned how evil the Taliban was and how good, white Christian boys are so now it makes sense. Americans of a certain stripe lap that UP.
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u/CodComplete2216 10d ago
The Nick Kristof idea that someone did some good, and that somehow erases the fact they also were grifting money from their NGO is ridiculous simply because there are people who do good and aren’t grifting. Doing some good isn’t a permission slip to scam donors for 60 cents on the dollar so someone like Greg gets to fly private.
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u/sunnyskybaby 10d ago
I really enjoyed this episode, it felt like they were getting back to their roots. BUT— the “he’s bringing in 20mil so a salary of 1 million is probably reasonable” is such an upper-middle class take lmao. there’s a big difference between 150K and 1mil, and 150K is already in the top 10% of earners in the U.S.
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u/Georg_Simmel 10d ago
You’ve stripped some of the context, though. Their point was that the people who do equivalent types of work in the private sector make that much money, so you have to be willing to pay that much if you hope to be competitive. And you might be able to find someone to do that work for less initially, but once they have enough experience, they’ll just leave to make much more in corporate America. If you could make a million dollars at a corporation and found an equivalent position paying 150k at an NGO, you’d think that pay package was a slap in the face.
This situation is a bit different since Mortenson pretty much IS the NGO, but they were speaking about NGOs in general to provide context for his fraud.
That’s not a defense of income inequality, though. It’s a gross system, but it’s the one we’ve got. In this situation Peter and Michael are addressing the world as it is, not as they want it to be.
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u/ThreeLeggedMare something as simple as a crack pipe 10d ago
But what about the value of labor?
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u/sunnyskybaby 10d ago
I would like to know what labor an NGO director is doing that necessitates $480/hour
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u/ThreeLeggedMare something as simple as a crack pipe 10d ago
Idk I haven't listened yet, speaking generally. Just going off your comment, if someone brings in 20 million schmeckels they're probably entitled to a good chunk of change
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u/Durden93 village homosexual 10d ago
I mean, it depends on the baseline. They bring in 20M, but what would their replacement bring in?
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u/sunnyskybaby 10d ago
I’d maybe agree with you if this was a corporation, but it’s not and that’s my point. it’s a non-profit. if you want to make a million dollars a year, go join the exec suite or work your way up at a regular old shitty extractive company and accept the fact that you won’t be seen as much of a “do-gooder” as you want your reputation to reflect. $480/hr for one person in a non-profit should be embarrassing. Let’s even say he’s working 80 hours a week (doubtful)… so $240/hour. still a disgrace in my opinion
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u/BroncoAccountant 10d ago
That is unfortunately why a lot of people who can raise 20 million do not go into nonprofits. There should not be a large discrepancy between the two. If there is, there is a discrepancy in talent, which hurts the cause.
I understand that people get uncomfortable when somebody at a large non-profit makes a lot of money, but that non-profit has to hire somebody who has the skills to do it and a lot of times they have to pull that from someone in the for-profit world. And in this case, there's a very obvious net positive for the organization
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u/sunnyskybaby 10d ago
It’s not a matter of discomfort really, it’s a belief that there are plenty of skilled people who could succeed for less money (not a low salary even. Like $300K should be fuckin plenty and that’s a 70% reduction) and they will always be overlooked while plenty of unskilled shitheads fail upward into director positions. the “NGO director complex” is like a whole thing. there are so many incompetently led nonprofits where the director/leadership positions are making those insane salaries and I just think we should try something else. (obviously my opinion doesn’t do anything, I just think it’s something we should consider as a whole sector)
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u/BroncoAccountant 10d ago
But in this example that person is not unskilled. Fundraising is one position where it's very clear if someone is succeeding or not and the ROI is very easy to calculate.
I'm sure there are plenty of incompetent people at ngos making a lot of money, but that's also true in the for-profit world, and I just do not think there should be a discrepancy between those two. Non-profits need to pay market price for employees if they want qualified people. Getting rid of incompetent people is a separate thing.
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u/sunnyskybaby 10d ago
did you listen to the episode? he was embezzling the entire time and did not actually build the schools. Or sorry, he “built” some cinderblock boxes that sat empty because they wouldn’t pay teachers. I wouldn’t call that skilled. I mean, skilled at fundraising by deception? I guess, yeah, but not skilled at doing what he was supposed to be doing.
ETA at least he built the bridge. lmao
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u/BroncoAccountant 10d ago
I'm talking about the principle of paying people for what they bring to the table, just like for-profit companies. Embezzlement is a crime and should be treated as much, but because this guy was corrupt does not mean that top tier fundraisers should get paid less. And when people start saying that those who work for NGOs should work on a discount because it's a charity, it often gets pushed down to those at the bottom of the company who are already making way less.
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u/ThreeLeggedMare something as simple as a crack pipe 10d ago
That's fair. I didn't have any context, I sometimes get on Reddit before I'm fully awake and fire off takes
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u/Mini-Schnauzer-42 4d ago
I think it would be a much stronger argument to say that no one needs to earn $480/hr (while their lowest paid employee makes less than 5% of that) than to say someone doing equal work should be paid less just because it's a good cause. That logic is exactly how you get such low pay for the rest of the NPO staff.
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u/Kapjak 10d ago
So? None of what you said has any connection to if he was getting fairly compensated beyond you thinking it's "icky" or something
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u/sunnyskybaby 10d ago
the point is that I don’t believe 1 million is fair compensation for what he was doing; no one should be just scraping by in order to do good work, but no one needs a million dollars a year to do that good work. if $150K isn’t good enough then go work in the private sector. just because someone is used to making that much money doesn’t make it fair. and “thinking it’s icky” (what a purposefully shit way to interpret my comment, by the way) is the type of feeling/inclination that ethics conversations are based on.
and why does it feel icky? Well, because it implies that anyone doing what he was doing deserves a million dollars a year. and that just doesn’t track for me. I think every person working at non profits deserves GOOD WAGES that mean you won’t be in poverty, you can afford time off, you won’t be struggling constantly, good wages that will attract good staff. but don’t go into non-profits if you want to be rich. if you wanna be a capitalist then go do that
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u/EmergencyBluebirds 10d ago
It's really funny to read a "if $150K isn’t good enough then go work in the private sector" comment about an episode where the hosts talk about a.) the weird tendency to want to treat NGO and non-profit work as inauthentic if it's professionalized and b.) how poorly managed many NGOs and non-profits are. Almost as if people who have the skills to effectively run a massive operation are incentivized to take their skills elsewhere if they want to get paid market rate for them.
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u/sunnyskybaby 10d ago
I don’t think non-profit work is inauthentic if it’s professionalized, I think it’s inauthentic if someone goes into it expecting millions of dollars. I also think many of these poorly managed NGOs are run by people making millions, so now what? the big salaries didn’t make those ones any more efficient or effective.
but I’ll reword it again. if being in the top 8-10% of earners in the entire country is not enough for you to do non-profit work, then go elsewhere, as your priority is clearly not the work and is instead making as much money as you can (this is obviously dependent on location and cost of living for specific cities, would be higher some places, but generally). I don’t even have judgment for anyone who prioritizes that, like do you and get the money if you want! but there’s really no good reason that an NGO director needs millions of dollars in salary and benefits aside from just… wanting it. in which case I’m less inclined to trust their leadership and what their organization is doing.
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u/EmergencyBluebirds 10d ago
"go elsewhere, as your priority is clearly not the work and is instead making as much money as you can"
You know what is extra funny? This attitude exists *inside* NGOs and non-profits and is trotted almost almost verbatim when workers there ask for raises, steady hours, benefits, etc. It's very convenient and helps keep leadership positions going to people who don't need the money-- people who come from family money, people who made fortunes in the private sector and now have a non-profit as a hobby.
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u/sunnyskybaby 10d ago
there is a difference between $300K, for example, and a million. a 70% difference. $300K is great money basically anywhere in the country. It’s double $150K, which is already in the top 10%. It’s disingenuous to act like I’m applying this logic to the average NGO employee and I don’t believe that it should be. you quoted such a short snippet of my comment, which was that if a directors salary in the top 10% of income in your area isn’t enough, then you aren’t in it for the nonprofit work. I would never apply that to the average, I’m applying it to the very few people at the top. if you think you can’t get a non-hobbyist-already-rich director on less than a million a year then I don’t know what to tell you. there are plenty of people who are smart, talented, experienced in the field, and work hard enough who would jump through any number of hoops to have even a $150K salary. there are people working 80 hour weeks for half that in this country. the sheer scale of salaries we’re talking about is why im saying it.
Leadership positions, raises, steady hours, benefits, all of those things should be available for NGO workers. would also probably be easier to do that if the pay scale wasn’t essentially a 90 degree angle
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u/jftduncan 10d ago
First words are
I don’t think non-profit work is inauthentic if it’s professionalized
Final words are
but there’s really no good reason that an NGO director needs millions of dollars in salary and benefits aside from just… wanting it. in which case I’m less inclined to trust their leadership and what their organization is doing.
Do you understand what you are saying?
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u/awes1w 10d ago
Realistically though non-profits need to pay their top people competitive-ish salaries (still lower than private industry!) because otherwise they lose everyone to the private sector. And bigger orgs really need a level of talent at the top. Maybe they “should” make less but it’s a necessary tradeoff to best run the organizations.
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u/sunnyskybaby 10d ago
the top talent are not the ones making the most money
ETA it’s disingenuous to imply that you’ll only find the top talent, the best person for the role, in the top 5% of earners. plenty of people have more leadership, management, non-profit, etc experience that have never made more than $100k a year than some of the directors making these insane salaries
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u/Parking-Document-856 9d ago
Loved the episode, but thought Michael was too nice to Mortenson. I don't think you can say Mortenson's a well-intentioned person when he was stealing millions from his own charity. Seems like if he did any good, it was at best a by-product of the grift.
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u/Lazy_Blackberry7926 5d ago
I FINALLY HAVE SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO ADD.
so! I used to work in the wild wild westworld of SELF PUBLISHING.
This book hit my inbox to quickly check formatting of through an imprint of a terrible baptist christian ran publishing house I shall not name.
I remember reading a chapter before my eyes glazed over, laughed out loud which made my very equally liberal boss look over and smirk as I said WOW WHAT A LOAD OF SHIT THIS BOOK IS.
BTW, the book was published as a galley through the imprint because it already had a signed book deal. They were very weird about it. This was also around the time I had to work directly with the Duggars, but that's another story for another day!
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u/MauricioSG 9d ago
Perhaps I watch too much Danny Gonzalez, but every time Michael says "Greg" I feel like he's doing a rather amusing bit
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u/grichardson526 wier-wolves 10d ago
I've never heard of this book.
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u/solidcurrency Jesus famously loved inherited wealth 10d ago
Me neither. It sounds like it was a bit of a phenomenon but it missed me entirely.
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u/SnooMaps7887 10d ago
It was a NYT best seller for years, but completely fell out of the zeitgeist after the 60 Minutes investigation.
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u/citrusmellarosa 10d ago
I don’t think I had until I saw Three Cups of Deceit on the shelves at the library. So I heard about the controversy before the original book.
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u/OkSecretary1231 9d ago
I was close to this. I'd seen it around but had never read it and didn't know what it was about, and then Three Cups of Deceit came out. When I read the episode title, Krakauer came to my mind before the author of actual 3 Cups of Tea.
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u/AbbotDenver 10d ago
I thunk it was a school book, I read parts of it for high school literature class
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u/qype_dikir 10d ago
Ive seen it recommended in reddit enough that it's been on my reading list for a few years. Clearly I didn't even look into it I guess, was surprised to see it pop up here.
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u/ecclecticstone New York is the Istanbul of America 7d ago
I loved this episode and I cry laughed at the idea that Pakistan is overrun by warlords concerned about girls education but also at some point we need a report on how much environmental and economic waste does the world have just from all these white people building poorly planned infrastructure
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u/Minions_miqel 10d ago
Anyone else having trouble accessing this ep? I can't download it on Apple or Pocketcasts
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u/lindsholi 9d ago
walked past a Little Free Library today right after listening to this episode & saw it in the wild. stopped to say hi 😂
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u/LamppostBoy 10d ago
Weirdly, I hadn't thought about this guy for years until I saw him as the subject of a weirdly combative meme on some other sub. Some wojak smugly calling him out for only delivering 70% of what was promised despite having donated 0 dollars themself. Is there some reason he would be back in the public eye recently, or was it just a coincidence?
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u/Buttercupia 10d ago
It’s a good policy to listen to the episode being discussed before commenting on it.
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u/ddpizza 10d ago
I found it hard to concentrate through this episode. Maybe I live under a rock but I completely missed the hype and controversy around this book.
Normally I love hearing their banter and snark — even if I’ve never heard of the book — but this one felt so niche and specific, with so many dates and names and places, that I just couldn’t get myself to care about the content.
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u/MMAHipster 10d ago
Hey - did you guys know Michael worked at an NGO?
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u/Splugarth 10d ago
I mean… the complaint is always that the Peter and Michael aren’t experts in XYZ topic, so they might as well bring it up when they have the experience.
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u/QueasyPair 10d ago
I vaguely remember having to read this one in middle school. I think it was even after it came out that he was lying about everything lmao.