True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 456: Multilevel Marketing Madness
Aired: 2025-05-05
Duration: 01:47:11


=== Stimming Interrupted (07:08) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, y'all.
[00:00:01]  No.
[00:00:05]  What?
[00:00:05]  I can't.
[00:00:05]  Where are you going with that?
[00:00:06]  I have nothing to go with.
[00:00:07]  I have nowhere to go with that.
[00:00:09]  Why are you looking at your phone?
[00:00:11]  Well, I just sometimes do that when you're talking.
[00:00:15]  Oh, I know.
[00:00:16]  No, I don't do that when you're talking.
[00:00:18]  No, I fucking don't.
[00:00:19]  You just did it.
[00:00:20]  I do it when you're talking right now because you're being mean to me and it's a fucking thing.
[00:00:22]  She's not being mean to you.
[00:00:24]  She's being mean to me.
[00:00:26]  I have no.
[00:00:26]  Okay, this is bullshit.
[00:00:28]  Now you're both being mean to me.
[00:00:30]  I was doing that right now.
[00:00:31]  She puts your phone down.
[00:00:32]  I have to use my phone because if you were paying attention.
[00:00:36]  Is this like stimming?
[00:00:37]  Are you stimming?
[00:00:38]  I'm not stimming, dude.
[00:00:39]  I'm looking at the thing I'm supposed to talk about.
[00:00:41]  No, we're doing that later.
[00:00:51]  You know what?
[00:01:08]  F you both.
[00:01:10]  Wow, bleep that.
[00:01:11]  No.
[00:01:12]  I said both.
[00:01:12]  I didn't just say it towards you.
[00:01:14]  Fine.
[00:01:14]  Fuck you.
[00:01:16]  And.
[00:01:17]  No.
[00:01:18]  I'm not going to say anything.
[00:01:19]  Because you have nothing to say.
[00:01:21]  You're right.
[00:01:22]  I'm gagged.
[00:01:24]  I'm gagged.
[00:01:25]  Wig snatched.
[00:01:26]  My wig has been snatched.
[00:01:28]  I'm fucking.
[00:01:29]  I'm gagged.
[00:01:29]  I'm stuffed.
[00:01:31]  I'm stuffed.
[00:01:33]  That should be the new one.
[00:01:33]  I'm stuffed.
[00:01:36]  Oh, he stuffed me.
[00:01:37]  Stop.
[00:01:38]  I'm Bliz.
[00:01:40]  I'm Brace.
[00:01:41]  What's gross about that?
[00:01:42]  I really want you to explicate that.
[00:01:44]  I'm Producer Young Jobs.
[00:01:46]  This is Shronan.
[00:01:47]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:48]  Real quick, before we start talking about what we're talking about today, I have something that I need to say.
[00:01:54]  If you could just settle down.
[00:02:01]  We need you to call in the tip line because we are doing a tip line show coming up soon.
[00:02:07]  And we've had some really good ones, but we noticed that more people call in when we say, hey, you should call in.
[00:02:14]  So I want to plug it now.
[00:02:16]  The phone number, which I still think we should just keep in the show notes.
[00:02:21]  It's like a constant thing.
[00:02:22]  We should just keep in the thing.
[00:02:23]  I don't know if we do that, but we should.
[00:02:25]  The phone number is 646-801-1129.
[00:02:30]  Area code 646-801-1129.
[00:02:35]  He makes it up there at the end.
[00:02:37]  But don't get confused.
[00:02:38]  Just rewind if you need it again.
[00:02:40]  And we had some really interesting, I'll say, tips recently.
[00:02:48]  Did we?
[00:02:49]  Oh, I can.
[00:02:50]  Oh, I check it all the time.
[00:02:51]  I like to check it and file it away with my little filing system.
[00:02:54]  But we had some pretty good ones on some characters out in Washington, D.C.
[00:03:02]  And I am asking all gumshoes to call in.
[00:03:06]  And then I'm being forced to make a humiliating announcement myself.
[00:03:13]  I can't remember what it was.
[00:03:14]  Oh, you please follow our.
[00:03:17]  No, you got to do this again.
[00:03:18]  Nope.
[00:03:19]  I'm doing it still.
[00:03:20]  No, If you're making me do something, then I'm going to do it my way.
[00:03:24]  Regrets.
[00:03:27]  I've had a few.
[00:03:29]  My way.
[00:03:30]  Oh, you're going, oh, am I making you do it?
[00:03:33]  Yes, you are.
[00:03:34]  You guys are both my boss.
[00:03:35]  And I'm the only employee here.
[00:03:37]  And I'm being exploited.
[00:03:40]  TikTok, short form video app.
[00:03:44]  YouTube, long form, but also with the inclusion of shorts, short form video app, and Instagram, which is an app where they show me people with severe neurodivergencies dancing around, are all apps that Truanon is on at Truanon Pod.
[00:04:02]  And I'm saying that because we're now putting shorts on them.
[00:04:06]  Is that why I'm announcing this?
[00:04:07]  I missed this when you guys were talking about this.
[00:04:08]  We got some great new content.
[00:04:10]  We got some great, well, it's sort of the same content for the show, but we have great new content on those platforms.
[00:04:16]  If you don't follow Brace on, I mean, if you don't follow Trunon on Instagram.
[00:04:21]  Oh, dude, I'm doing shit.
[00:04:22]  You should, because you will be finding some gems, whether you're a fan of Mae Musk or of what are the, what's the one, like, the shit that you see on your Instagram is so crazy.
[00:04:37]  This is not true.
[00:04:37]  Okay, I'm sick of, I'm sick of defending myself.
[00:04:40]  The things that I see, so things I say on Instagram are this.
[00:04:42]  I'm just saying, Down syndrome filters on OnlyFans girls dancing around that are like not, it's not like a joke or anything.
[00:04:50]  It's like, sign up for my OnlyFans.
[00:04:51]  I have Down syndrome.
[00:04:52]  They don't actually have Down syndrome.
[00:04:53]  Both.
[00:04:53]  They're filters.
[00:04:54]  And then freaks, just like people with severe freak issues.
[00:04:58]  Yeah, like face tattoo people like crying into a front-facing camera.
[00:05:05]  This is what they show you if you don't look at things.
[00:05:08]  No, no, no.
[00:05:09]  I don't know why you say don't look at things because you do look at you look at it and then it keeps giving you more.
[00:05:14]  This is like a Ouroboros.
[00:05:17]  Oh, yes, I look at it, so it keeps giving me.
[00:05:19]  What am I supposed to look at then?
[00:05:21]  No, but I'm saying you're saying you're saying it as if you're not looking.
[00:05:24]  You're like, oh, I don't look at it.
[00:05:25]  It's the only thing it's showing me.
[00:05:27]  And yes, then it shows me more.
[00:05:29]  But you linger and then it continues.
[00:05:31]  You're supposed to not linger.
[00:05:32]  You could, for example, you could change your algorithm if you wanted by going and looking at other stuff.
[00:05:36]  I tried to.
[00:05:37]  And then, so I tried to do that.
[00:05:40]  And now I'm not trying to be cute or funny here.
[00:05:43]  Now every, it's all Down syndrome midgets.
[00:05:47]  I'm sorry.
[00:05:48]  But like OnlyFans once.
[00:05:50]  And then also having stuff that you're looking at on your phone at other places.
[00:05:54]  And it listens to your conversation.
[00:05:56]  Yeah, it does listen to my conversation.
[00:05:57]  And your text.
[00:05:58]  Remember when people were trying to say they don't listen to your conversation?
[00:06:00]  Those people are fucking morons.
[00:06:02]  How about this right now?
[00:06:03]  If you don't own a dog, say this.
[00:06:05]  Talk to your phone right now.
[00:06:06]  Dog food, dog food, dog food, dog food.
[00:06:08]  No, you know what you should do, ladies, pick up your boyfriend's phone and you go, bottega veneta.
[00:06:14]  Botega.
[00:06:15]  Botega veneta.
[00:06:16]  Ain't that the fish guts they fucking put on pasta?
[00:06:18]  I'm just kidding.
[00:06:19]  Or, you know, Prada, whatever, whatever your copy, I think.
[00:06:23]  How about just, you know, speak it into his phone and then suck to me.
[00:06:28]  Which pops up in his ads?
[00:06:30]  You'd be surprised.
[00:06:31]  It works pretty well.
[00:06:32]  It does work really well.
[00:06:34]  Loueva.
[00:06:37]  I just started really using Instagram.
[00:06:39]  I love it.
[00:06:40]  It's so good.
[00:06:40]  And you too will love it if you follow at TrueNOM.
[00:06:44]  Because we're posting short form video content on there.
[00:06:46]  And it's not video, really.
[00:06:48]  And you know what else we're doing?
[00:06:49]  We've got some affiliate links there that I really think, because actually, what we really want to, you know, this is all a sort of amuse bouche to what we will be finally rolling out on all of our social channels, which are what, Brace?
[00:07:07]  So we are.

=== P2P Sass Merch Drop (04:04) ===

[00:07:08]  Thank you for thank you so much for that.
[00:07:10]  So we actually are doing something that no podcast has ever done before.
[00:07:13]  So obviously we sell merch.
[00:07:15]  We haven't made new merch in quite a long time due to tariffs.
[00:07:20]  There we go.
[00:07:21]  Due to tariffs.
[00:07:23]  But we will eventually be making some more when we go away and we remember.
[00:07:30]  But we're going to be rolling out something then.
[00:07:34]  We are actually, we're not going to be selling any merch.
[00:07:36]  We're going to be providing you, a podcast entrepreneur with our merch at rock bottom, almost illegal prices.
[00:07:47]  And then you sell those to people that you know that listen to our podcast.
[00:07:52]  And it's like, it's our way of giving back to the community.
[00:07:55]  The other thing that's going to go alongside the merch, and this is what I'm really excited about, is we kind of call it like P2P sass.
[00:08:02]  Yep.
[00:08:03]  Penis to pussy.
[00:08:06]  Podcast to person.
[00:08:08]  Oh.
[00:08:08]  How about that?
[00:08:09]  Podcast to person sass.
[00:08:11]  Yeah, a little bit of sass from me to you, which is we're going to be teaching you how to podcast through courses that you can take online.
[00:08:24]  A lot of people think that, okay, so twice a week you guys get into a room, turn the air conditioning off, start sweating profusely throughout the interview, and by the end of it, are almost dehydrated husks of like raisins.
[00:08:37]  I'm so puffy.
[00:08:38]  It's so easy to do.
[00:08:39]  You always, women always say baffling things.
[00:08:43]  What does that mean?
[00:08:44]  I'm so puffy.
[00:08:45]  I mean, I'm like the rapper.
[00:08:47]  My raisins.
[00:08:48]  We haven't been here for a month.
[00:08:50]  How are you puffy in the past hour and a half?
[00:08:53]  Bodies don't do that.
[00:08:54]  They do.
[00:08:55]  Is this true?
[00:08:56]  You know about bodies.
[00:08:57]  Like Sean.
[00:08:58]  I think you have no clue how women's body is.
[00:09:00]  Are you puffy?
[00:09:02]  Dude, don't look at me like that.
[00:09:04]  I will.
[00:09:04]  I'm puffy these size.
[00:09:06]  No, I don't know what you've got going on.
[00:09:08]  I'm Sally.
[00:09:08]  I'm trying to talk about myself here.
[00:09:10]  Okay, I'm sorry.
[00:09:11]  Wow.
[00:09:12]  Wow.
[00:09:12]  I'm sorry.
[00:09:13]  I shouldn't step on your heels.
[00:09:17]  I think we should just get to the interview.
[00:09:18]  That's good.
[00:09:19]  We have a fantastic interview with Bridget Reed that is beginning right.
[00:09:24]  know.
[00:09:36]  So we're going to do something a little different today.
[00:09:39]  As many of our listeners know, and particularly people who follow our reels, I'm a bit of a makeup pet.
[00:09:46]  I love Glossier.
[00:09:48]  I love help me.
[00:09:55]  Chanel.
[00:09:55]  Chanel.
[00:09:56]  I love, oh, well, if we're going that route, I love Chanel.
[00:09:59]  Of course, I love Louis Vuitton.
[00:10:01]  And I love things like that.
[00:10:04]  And I put them on my face and I look more beautiful and I look more sculpted and I even do it to my abs a little bit.
[00:10:11]  But I have been given an incredible opportunity.
[00:10:14]  So I brought you ladies here today to do what I a little bit of a makeup demonstration because as I told you both, you have really fucked up skin.
[00:10:24]  And I'm going to change, you know, you're shaking your head at me.
[00:10:26]  I'm going to change all of that.
[00:10:28]  And I do, I'm so bad at this.
[00:10:30]  I'm sorry.
[00:10:30]  I was trying to do that.
[00:10:31]  You know what you need to do?
[00:10:32]  I don't know enough about makeup.
[00:10:34]  You need to stop and you need to actually take some courses before you can go forward because you're not.
[00:10:40]  It's calm.
[00:10:41]  You're lacking confidence.
[00:10:42]  You're lacking information.
[00:10:43]  You're lacking knowledge.
[00:10:44]  And I'm made up like a tart.
[00:10:46]  And that's a brand you should have name-checked.
[00:10:48]  I know.
[00:10:48]  Tart.
[00:10:49]  I love tart.
[00:10:52]  I don't know how to sell things to people.
[00:10:55]  Or do I?
[00:10:57]  But to teach me today, and of course, my makeup assistant, Liz, who right now is buttering her cheeks with a bit of blush, is Bridget Reid, a features writer at New York Magazine.
[00:11:11]  Nobody knows what a feature is.

=== America's Entrepreneurial Spirit (03:26) ===

[00:11:12]  That's just a longer, longer journalism.
[00:11:14]  That's a good idea thing.
[00:11:15]  Yeah, whatever.
[00:11:16]  They're just like, you get the big ones.
[00:11:18]  You got a big clickety clackety fake email job at New York Magazine.
[00:11:22]  Well, you have a clickety-clackety real book out.
[00:11:24]  That's the sound of you typing it called Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America.
[00:11:30]  Who put it out?
[00:11:31]  I didn't write that part down.
[00:11:32]  Crown.
[00:11:33]  Crown.
[00:11:34]  Oh, it says that really big on my advanced.
[00:11:36]  It does.
[00:11:36]  Yeah, you can never.
[00:11:37]  Division of Penguin Random House.
[00:11:39]  And let me tell you, reading this thing on the subway, when it says it's like an early edition of a book, you know, I have that shit up in front of my face.
[00:11:46]  Right, you want them out.
[00:11:47]  Trying to get someone to snap you, for instance.
[00:11:49]  I got it early.
[00:11:50]  I got it early.
[00:11:51]  Welcome to the show.
[00:11:53]  Thank you so much.
[00:11:54]  We're so happy to have you on.
[00:11:56]  This book is, it feels like I was reading it and Bryce and I were chatting about this.
[00:12:02]  It's crazy how much spiritually we've talked about this on our show without really talking about MLMs.
[00:12:11]  Yes, it's the waters in which you swim.
[00:12:14]  It is, isn't it?
[00:12:16]  Yeah, it's funny.
[00:12:17]  I realized that.
[00:12:18]  I was like, I was reading this thing.
[00:12:20]  I was like, how have we kind of never actually covered basically any of this stuff?
[00:12:24]  I mean, we have in like so many different ways where you're talking about like Cynanon is, you know, has a lot of early influence on a lot of these like later kind of companies, especially talking about the self-help industrial complex.
[00:12:39]  But we, you know, Bridget, we were talking before we started recording and I was mentioning how, you know, there's parts of Tesla, which is like, Tesla's not an MLM, obviously.
[00:12:48]  However, Tesla's use of use and abuse of affiliate marketing, particularly for selling it stock, which is fucking crazy, is really, in my mind, textbook MLM.
[00:13:05]  And there's so many other things we've talked about just in kind of like influencer scam culture or even just like the sort of social infrastructure of the internet that weirdly all comes back to the MLM.
[00:13:19]  And your book kind of explains how all this stuff, like, I mean, it says it in the book, how it shaped America, but it really did shape America.
[00:13:27]  Thank you so much.
[00:13:28]  It is like kind of scary.
[00:13:30]  I was trying to think of like, I think there's this idea that America is this, you know, they try, you know, people sell it as or still believe in this like entrepreneurial spirit.
[00:13:40]  Everyone's trying to be an entrepreneur and make their own way.
[00:13:43]  And I'm like, really?
[00:13:43]  Everyone is just kind of trying to run a pyramid scheme.
[00:13:46]  It's like a very different kind of salesman than an entrepreneur, really.
[00:13:51]  Yeah.
[00:13:51]  And there's, I mean, we can go all the way back too, but obviously all the any like neocon you've covered and even before we would use the word neocon, like, you know, these guys who were doing, you know, free enterprise, basically organizing after the New Deal, right?
[00:14:09]  Or, you know, people, the American Enterprise Institute, back to like the DuPonts.
[00:14:15]  Anybody, anybody in the right wing who mobilized, you know, to try to get rid of Social Security to basically undo the New Deal sort of welfare state was that that is ideologically where MLM comes from too.
[00:14:29]  So like, you know, that any, any, any political figure that's downstream of that stuff is a part of MLM also.

=== Going Back in Time (05:33) ===

[00:14:38]  Yeah.
[00:14:39]  I think I want to get into that history.
[00:14:41]  Maybe before we go back in time, We could start in actually my favorite year.
[00:14:49]  By the way, this is also going back in time.
[00:14:51]  Yes.
[00:14:51]  Just not as far.
[00:14:52]  But just not as far.
[00:14:53]  So it's more of a like.
[00:14:53]  It's like a jump.
[00:14:55]  If I like stepped on a butterfly, like not that much would change, right?
[00:14:59]  I mean, come on.
[00:15:01]  No, I do want to go back a little in time, but to our favorite year, the year that changed everything, 2020, which comes up in this book a lot.
[00:15:11]  Great year.
[00:15:12]  Great year.
[00:15:12]  Everyone's favorite year.
[00:15:15]  But we've talked about it before as a kind of as two things, like a mass onboarding event onto the internet mixed with like a mass psychosis event.
[00:15:26]  And I think that like, you know, you start with 2020 as like the time when you started kind of noticing all of these MLMs popping up on the, on social media and a lot of people who were either had lost their jobs due to COVID or were just at home watching their kids and looking for,
[00:15:45]  you know, extra income or were bored at home and just being social on the internet, finding their way into these like brand new MLM pathways that like COVID era, you know, inaugurated.
[00:16:04]  I wonder if we can kind of talk a little bit about that.
[00:16:07]  I think the my first, I mean, I, everyone knows what MLMs are because some of them are old enough to be like Americana at this point, right?
[00:16:15]  So even if you don't know what MLM actually is, you've heard of Amwaite or you've heard of Mary Kay or you know about an Avon lady or Herbalife, like you sort of know what it is.
[00:16:25]  So obviously I knew I knew what that was.
[00:16:28]  But I started looking during COVID.
[00:16:32]  I think my sister pointed it out to me, the hashtag on Instagram, free car, which if you look at free car, it's like mostly ladies posing with their cars and they're free.
[00:16:44]  And you're like, why are these cars free?
[00:16:46]  And that was sort of my entry point into like, what is this weird, what is this concept where you get a free car and why?
[00:16:52]  And not in an Oprah style.
[00:16:55]  You get a car, but like the, you know, very quickly you learn the lexcon of like, you know, I work my side hustle and I can't believe it paid for this Cadillac, whatever.
[00:17:04]  You know, I'm reading one right now.
[00:17:06]  The first thing it comes up from Sherry Stefan Tupperware.
[00:17:10]  I was blown away when I discovered that you can earn a free car in Tupperware.
[00:17:13]  Yes, you heard that right.
[00:17:14]  Free car, car emoji, then the behind it.
[00:17:17]  Yeah.
[00:17:17]  And guess what?
[00:17:18]  The first level of free cars in Tupperware is the Nissan Rogue.
[00:17:21]  How amazing is that?
[00:17:22]  And then it goes on and on.
[00:17:24]  Right.
[00:17:25]  So that's one of, you know, probably thousands at least today that if not are getting posted are happening right all over the country.
[00:17:36]  So that was my first foray into MLM.
[00:17:40]  And I think what was so odd about it was, Especially in 2020, like, and I worked at the CUD at the time.
[00:17:48]  Now, I am technically a, you know, I write about housing mostly, but, but I was working at the CUD.
[00:17:54]  And so we were covering a lot of like influencer culture and, and TikTok had just started kind of exploding.
[00:18:00]  And we didn't, we were sort of figuring out like, what is this?
[00:18:03]  And trends, I remember, were, were really quick to like, like, you probably don't even remember.
[00:18:09]  There were things like Visco Girl, all those like weird, weird aesthetics trends.
[00:18:14]  And they would like, suddenly our bosses would be like, what is this?
[00:18:17]  Get an article up about these like, you know, teenagers in Iowa doing this dance.
[00:18:21]  And we would be like, okay.
[00:18:22]  And it was this, you know.
[00:18:24]  I was forced to read these articles being like, what is like Fat Boy Summer or whatever happening?
[00:18:30]  Right.
[00:18:30]  I was so confused.
[00:18:32]  I participated in all of them after I read about them, but still.
[00:18:35]  So that was already building before we were all stuck at home.
[00:18:38]  And then it was like, okay, this is our whole world now when 2020 happened.
[00:18:43]  And so to me, then digging into what MLM is and direct selling, which is their preferred nomenclature, since multiple marketing has like a really bad reputation already.
[00:18:55]  They've gone back around to direct selling, which is what it was called in like 100 years ago, basically.
[00:19:00]  But it was almost like a weird informal economy.
[00:19:05]  That's what it looks like from the outside.
[00:19:06]  So like it's the online equivalent of like the squeegee guy on the side of the highway.
[00:19:12]  And I was just like, where are we in terms of what the government knows about this and what's allowed?
[00:19:18]  And like it felt so diffuse.
[00:19:22]  And that was before I knew, you know, all the different ways, right, that policy enables that, that these are independent contractors and that, you know, they, they truly operate in like a wild west of sales where, you know, it's like if you go, I mean, from a retail perspective, it's like if you go into a store and they're sort of allowed to say whatever they want to you about the products, like that, that's what on the retail side it is, which, you know, doesn't, people aren't really buying stuff.
[00:19:50]  And then what's crazier is on the income side, it's like if you went in for a job interview and they also said whatever they wanted to you about what you're going to get out of the job, you know, if they were allowed to lie to you about your income, like it was just so crazy.
[00:20:02]  And I was just like, how, how is this allowed?
[00:20:05]  Basically, which is my, you know, just it spiked my curiosity.
[00:20:10]  And how is it exploding at this point?

=== Uptick In Online Influencers (15:24) ===

[00:20:12]  Right then.
[00:20:13]  Right.
[00:20:13]  So that was the other thing was that free car is usually a sort of like a wasteland of like people with very little likes and like it's small accounts.
[00:20:25]  And then I just started notice, you know, it just really, there was an uptick in how much attention these people were getting and how many people were getting in on it.
[00:20:36]  And then, of course, the technology you were talking about was literally evolving with them.
[00:20:41]  Right.
[00:20:41]  So like we're getting Instagram reels and we're getting these things that enable them to do more sales on social media and normalizing that really quickly.
[00:20:50]  So I think, you know, MLM has long been scammy, right?
[00:20:53]  This idea that you're like, I went to high school with you.
[00:20:56]  You know, hey, hun is what, you know, people call them the huns because the canonical message you get is like, hey, hun, or hey, babe.
[00:21:04]  You know, interesting.
[00:21:05]  I've joined this incredible company and I think you would be amazing at it.
[00:21:09]  I'm looking at Brace because I'm trying to recruit him.
[00:21:11]  No, this is you do.
[00:21:12]  You were terrible earlier.
[00:21:14]  Nobody's ever believed in me.
[00:21:16]  I'd love to help you help your recruiting.
[00:21:19]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:21:20]  Stickier.
[00:21:21]  Absolutely.
[00:21:21]  Yeah.
[00:21:22]  Can you mentor me?
[00:21:24]  100%.
[00:21:25]  Well, I think that's what's so interesting too about, sorry to interrupt for a second.
[00:21:28]  No, no, no.
[00:21:28]  Like the 2020, like social media kind of explosion of this stuff is that like it's also coinciding like it has throughout sort of like the history of direct selling, MLMs, whatever, with these sort of like trends, like overall social trends or whatever, political or economic trends.
[00:21:45]  It always has, yeah.
[00:21:46]  And that, that's, because that's like, of course, the era of like the, the diffuse sort of low rent influencer or like the person, I mean, it started a little before that, but like 2020 is this mass onboarding thing where you're like, I'm doing mentoring and you have like 800 followers on Instagram and you're like, I'm a mentor.
[00:22:02]  I'm a life coach.
[00:22:03]  I'm a coach.
[00:22:04]  But what you're really doing is you're like, you're, you are being ripped off by your upline or whatever.
[00:22:09]  And so you have to get a bigger downline to sell like Mary Kay products.
[00:22:13]  And what was fascinating, what's fascinating about what social media enabled, how it enabled this to grow is that like it, so every single vertical you could think of was there.
[00:22:25]  So you could be a guru influencer recruiter in like the male sports world or in like male balding world or like, you know,
[00:22:36]  there's obviously the mommy influencer is fucking huge or it's the regular kind of Alex Earl girl influencer or it's like like there was just so the market was so big and also at the same time so accessible and then being like shoved down your throat by the algorithms that were really pushing all of this stuff.
[00:23:00]  Yeah.
[00:23:01]  And like to be very specific about it, if you look at the kind of year by year trajectory of how of what platform has what tool, Facebook was sort of first in terms of allowing people to go live.
[00:23:19]  And if you watch like the Vice LulaRowe documentary, which is about that, the leggings MLM, it came out like in maybe 2021 or 2022, those women were going live on Facebook and it was a very specific demographic.
[00:23:32]  It was like maybe a bit older, a lot of white women, like sort of middle America, like that was kind of the predominant demographic using that.
[00:23:41]  And then on Instagram, getting reels, getting monetized links, like all of that happened a little later.
[00:23:47]  And then of course, TikTok comes.
[00:23:49]  And so it just really normalizes this idea of like going onto your pro your profile and selling.
[00:23:55]  And there's, you know, the unboxing video or whatever, all of that selling becomes not cringy.
[00:24:01]  Right.
[00:24:02]  It becomes normal and then cool.
[00:24:04]  Like influencers are doing that.
[00:24:06]  And it's like, oh, you know, I'm sexy and cool and I'm doing this rather than like, I'm a weird girl you went to high school with and this is so scammy.
[00:24:15]  Yeah.
[00:24:15]  So MLM really like in waves, you can really see how technology normalizes it and makes it seeds it in your community like at a much higher rate than it might normally like, you know, in the dot-com boom, Herbalife and other older MLMs called themselves work from home digital businesses.
[00:24:35]  And that was like the way that they were like getting in with younger professionals, people out of college degree, people who might, you might not normally, normally would think would be susceptible to a business like this, but they're, they're, they're very dynamic in that way.
[00:24:49]  So yes, 2020 was like all of this converged where it's, it was very normal to see people like soliciting.
[00:24:56]  And like, I mean, everybody had a side hustle.
[00:24:59]  Like how many people do you know?
[00:25:00]  I mean, everybody knows, thank God, like, you know, I quit my job and I'm a baker and I sell my baking.
[00:25:07]  You know, that, that, like, that's like a pandemic sort of employment trend was to leave and do your side hustle.
[00:25:12]  So I mean, I managed probably 15, 20 different OnlyFans are friends of mine.
[00:25:16]  Absolutely.
[00:25:17]  Yeah, 70%.
[00:25:18]  But no, that was like a huge thing because A, you were not getting, you might at that time be getting paid to just not go to work if you were lucky.
[00:25:27]  But B, if you still had to go to work, it's like you need some extra money.
[00:25:32]  You know, things are getting a little crazy around here.
[00:25:34]  And so it's just like, I think there was this huge, it was like the side hustle kind of era where everyone was doing this.
[00:25:39]  And it happened also at the same time that everyone went crazy on NFTs.
[00:25:43]  So there was this like sort of like mania that people got went under of like, I need to like make, there's all this money that exists online.
[00:25:51]  And part of making the money, depending on who you were, depending on what you were trying to do, Could involve becoming sort of almost like a personality or like a coach or which kind of like coincides with not only a lot of the MLM stuff, but a lot of the MLM kind of adjacent stuff in like the self-help industry.
[00:26:07]  Definitely.
[00:26:07]  And also, I was going to say the thing that's crazy about, or like the little secret sauce of social media is that it also allows everyone to kind of mask the some of the more like, I don't know, you know, you're talking about the unboxing stuff, the sort of like, or being so obvious that you're trying to like make money online is that you can kind of mask it with like, oh no, I'm just trying to be famous.
[00:26:33]  Everyone is going online to try to be famous.
[00:26:36]  And some of the allure of that can like coincide or mask like some of the more like direct selling opportunities that I think people were after.
[00:26:47]  Yeah, I'm trying to build my platform.
[00:26:48]  I'm trying to build my brand.
[00:26:50]  I'm a brand builder.
[00:26:51]  And that's, of course, that's all they, the language they use is exclusively that, right?
[00:26:55]  No one says, I work for Mary Kay or I work, I'm a seller for Mary Kay.
[00:26:59]  They'll say, I'm a mentor to a group of women or I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm a beauty.
[00:27:06]  I go on brand trips for a beauty company rather than I go to an MLM convention in Dallas and I stay in a room with four other people.
[00:27:17]  This is the Dubai of Texas, I've always said.
[00:27:30]  So I think before we go too deep down the internet road and the road to 2020, we should go back because we should say, actually, what is an MLM?
[00:27:42]  Because I think it is confusing and purposely so.
[00:27:45]  legally so.
[00:27:46]  What is an MLM?
[00:27:47]  What is a pyramid scheme?
[00:27:48]  What is a Ponzi scheme?
[00:27:49]  Maybe we can define some of these things and kind of where they start coming into their own in America.
[00:27:56]  We can do that.
[00:27:57]  And I'll just say up front that part of what was like challenging in a fun way, but also a frustrating way is that just white collar crime and financial crime in general is the history of it all is really like we don't report it as much as other types of crime.
[00:28:15]  And a lot of them are like a lot of financial crime because it's done between family members or friends.
[00:28:22]  It's what is called affinity fraud because it's based on your personal relationships.
[00:28:27]  It's almost like folk crime.
[00:28:29]  So a lot of it, because it happens in these personal relationships, we also don't have a lot of reporting on it.
[00:28:35]  So that makes it really hard to like demarcate exactly what a Ponzi is versus a pyramid versus there were things called pyramid clubs, like gifting clubs.
[00:28:44]  So there's a lot.
[00:28:45]  There's a lot to be done here, like in an honestly like scholarly way that I would love someone who's way more qualified than me to do.
[00:28:54]  But what is clear is that so a Ponzi scheme is a Bernie Madoff style fraud that we're all very familiar with.
[00:29:02]  So in a Ponzi, you have a guy who's got a great investment idea.
[00:29:08]  You know, I, Charles Ponzi in Boston in the early 1900s was doing like stamp price arbitrage.
[00:29:16]  And that was his great idea.
[00:29:18]  And of course, to many people, they were like, I don't know what the fuck that is, but the returns you're getting sound amazing.
[00:29:22]  And they give him money.
[00:29:24]  And all that's happening is the early investors are paying returns to the late ones.
[00:29:29]  Eventually, money stops coming in.
[00:29:32]  He has to stop paying.
[00:29:34]  Nobody's getting their money back.
[00:29:35]  There's a run on the early investors want to take their money out and it collapses.
[00:29:39]  So that's a Ponzi.
[00:29:42]  But a lot of a Ponzi represents what used to be called a chain letter, which is another kind of like old folky way of scamming your friends and family where you'd get a letter that's like, oh, if you give me five cents, eventually you'll get 200 bucks, whatever it was.
[00:29:59]  And that stuff has been around.
[00:30:01]  I mean, I found really early examples of it in news, you know, periodical archives in the 19th century and even before.
[00:30:10]  So there's just a lot of like, Americans have been doing financial fraud to each other for a long time.
[00:30:15]  Oh, definitely.
[00:30:15]  Yeah.
[00:30:16]  It's one of our favorite things to do.
[00:30:17]  It was really easy back then, too.
[00:30:19]  Yeah, of course.
[00:30:20]  And as always, like, it's always presented as like, this is your way into, you know, making fabulous money that other people have access to, right?
[00:30:30]  So Ponzi, part of his pitch was the stock market at the time was exploding, but not for regular people.
[00:30:37]  And it was like, this is the way that you can get in on all of this growth, right?
[00:30:40]  It's all, it's always, these scams are always flourishing when like, like just what you were talking about, there's like money in the air.
[00:30:45]  And it's like, how do we get it?
[00:30:47]  So, so that's a Ponzi.
[00:30:49]  A pyramid scheme is a Ponzi that uses the sale of product as its cover.
[00:30:56]  So the story of multiple marketing and direct selling that the industry tells about itself is that, you know, door-to-door selling, like the Fuller Brush guy, death of a salesman, that kind of thing, age-old American pastime.
[00:31:13]  These two guys who were doing that kind of sales in 1943, they're both working at the Douglas Aircraft Factory in Long Beach, California.
[00:31:24]  And they realize, what if we took all the like sort of bad things about being in sales that suck, which is namely that you can only like make so much money.
[00:31:34]  Even if you're a really good salesman, you eventually, you know, you like it gets, you get promoted or to be, you know, the head of some branch.
[00:31:42]  Basically, there's not enough money in it, even if you're really talented.
[00:31:45]  And so they come up with this idea that like, what if I could recruit people and I get a cut of all their sales and on and on and on.
[00:31:53]  And so that's what MLM is supposed to be.
[00:31:56]  And what really happens is they invent what's called a purchase volume as a way of getting paid.
[00:32:05]  So instead of getting paid on what you're actually selling, which is a traditional model, you're getting paid on what you're buying and what everyone else you bring in behind you is buying.
[00:32:13]  And so what that does is it gets rid of the problem of selling stuff entirely.
[00:32:20]  And if you can bring enough people in behind you, you can make a ton of money.
[00:32:25]  And all that matters is that they're bringing in people too and on and on and on.
[00:32:28]  So you can see how the mechanism of growth is the same as a Ponzi because you're making money as long as people are being brought in.
[00:32:38]  But that if that engine stops, the people in the beginning will profit the most and the people who come in at the end will lose their money.
[00:32:47]  So that's a pyramid scheme.
[00:32:49]  And it seems like, I mean, you just said it, but the key to the pyramid scheme is continually bringing new people in.
[00:32:54]  And so in order to do that, you have to find new and charismatic ways to attract new people.
[00:33:03]  And that's where, I mean, you know, as you talk in the book, but and Brace, you mentioned it already, but like where the kind of guru, you know, like charismatic leader cult stuff intersects so beautifully with all of this stuff and finds like they're, you know, they're like natural bedfellows because how else, like what else, what other tools do you reach for other than those kinds of, I mean, it's like one in the same.
[00:33:30]  Yeah.
[00:33:30]  And the, the, what they figured, what they realized, and this is where like the historical moment that MLM is invented is really important because, you know, these guys are in their 50s and 60s at this point, the inventors.
[00:33:45]  They, they're really kind of past middle age and they're failing.
[00:33:48]  They're, you know, this one guy, William Castleberry, was a Stanford trained psychologist who then did like self-help radio shows.
[00:33:58]  And he was like fully a eugenicist and did eugenicist research.
[00:34:03]  And so was like part of these like quite elite and very dark like scientific circles, but was losing money.
[00:34:09]  Like that's why he took this job at this factory.
[00:34:11]  This other guy was a scammy funeral plot salesman who had been like run out of town in Maine for defrauding like widows and, you know, their babies or whatever.
[00:34:19]  They actually bury their husbands in the parlor.
[00:34:23]  But they, so they were really kind of like scraping by.
[00:34:28]  And they find this guy, Carl Rundborg, who is a charlatan scientist, like totally mentally ill person, I believe, who had become obsessed with making his own alfalfa vitamins by hand.
[00:34:40]  He seems like a nut.
[00:34:41]  He's a nut.
[00:34:42]  The guy's a nut.
[00:34:43]  He's going to China.
[00:34:44]  Right.
[00:34:44]  And lying that he like helped defend the American like consulate from Chinese war.
[00:34:51]  But he's a bunch of people.
[00:34:52]  He's got to go to China and sell milk.
[00:34:54]  Yeah.
[00:34:55]  I'm sorry.
[00:34:56]  He's just a salesman.
[00:34:57]  He just wanted, he wants to get rich.
[00:35:00]  But in China on milk?
[00:35:01]  Yeah.
[00:35:02]  In China on milk.
[00:35:02]  He's a squirrel trying to get a nut.
[00:35:05]  And his nut ends up being alfalfa vitamins.
[00:35:08]  People were crazy, by the way, about alfalfa until like 88 or something.
[00:35:14]  People really alfalfa was the healthiest thing anyone could think of from like the beginning of the century until the late 80s.
[00:35:21]  Wheatgrass, spirulina.
[00:35:23]  Yes.
[00:35:24]  What's the new one?
[00:35:25]  Sumos.
[00:35:26]  Oh, yeah.
[00:35:27]  But that's not even new.
[00:35:27]  Small.
[00:35:28]  Don't get me wrong.
[00:35:28]  That's not new.
[00:35:30]  Yeah.
[00:35:31]  So anyway, it's like these three guys who like have failed at the American dream.

=== Pills and Profitability (11:10) ===

[00:35:36]  They're all trying to be entrepreneurs.
[00:35:38]  And already, this is the 40s.
[00:35:40]  It's not working.
[00:35:41]  You know, this abundance to, you know, what we're all supposed to be prospering from isn't working.
[00:35:49]  And then at the end of World War II, it's really like this is supposed to be the American era where these guys in particular, middle-aged white guys, you know, are supposed to be prospering in their businesses.
[00:36:02]  And they scoop up all of these people like them, predominantly white, middle-class couples in Southern California, many of whom served in the war and came back, who like really didn't have much going on.
[00:36:16]  And there really was a lot of anxiety about the future.
[00:36:22]  And so they make their pitch of like, you can all be your own guru, because that's what an MLM, that's what a pyramid scheme does, is it takes that Ponzi structure, which instead of one Charles Ponzi at the top doing the soliciting, you have innumerable Charles Ponzis.
[00:36:39]  Everybody has the ability, if you're a good proselytizer, you will succeed.
[00:36:45]  You will.
[00:36:45]  You just have to be willing to lie to people and push people under you as much as possible.
[00:36:51]  And they really realized, and I think this is where Castleberry, the psychologist, and what he kind of knew about manipulating people comes into play because it was really like, if you tap that little button inside a person, but usually a man at this point, because most people, most of the people involved at this point were men, you know, don't you want to be great?
[00:37:17]  And that's what the early ads said.
[00:37:18]  They were like, do you aspire to greatness?
[00:37:20]  You know, they were really like Joe Roganing kind of like in terms of like appealing to a masculinity that I think was in crisis at the time.
[00:37:30]  And so that's what they did.
[00:37:32]  He wants to be a hero.
[00:37:33]  Everybody wants to be bigger than death.
[00:37:37]  Yeah.
[00:37:37]  And they're using the product they picked was vitamins, which was also this like scammy industry that really like the technology or the research was not keeping up with the explosion around sales and vitamins at the time.
[00:37:53]  And I'm a big truther.
[00:37:55]  I don't believe in big vitamin.
[00:37:56]  I think vitamins are fake.
[00:37:58]  No one should take supplements.
[00:37:59]  Vitamins are real, but you don't need them.
[00:38:02]  I, you know, controversial.
[00:38:04]  That's the kind of shit that I put in my fucking body.
[00:38:06]  You have to do it.
[00:38:06]  I have such a crazy stack that I'm not even going to get.
[00:38:09]  I know 60 pills in there.
[00:38:10]  This is my like.
[00:38:11]  Liz is drinking, Liz is asking serums and potions.
[00:38:15]  You're at noise.
[00:38:16]  I take so much.
[00:38:17]  I've totally been taken in by big vitamins.
[00:38:20]  I just take magnesium.
[00:38:21]  That's good.
[00:38:22]  That's fine.
[00:38:24]  Okay, I'm lying.
[00:38:24]  I took zinc today.
[00:38:26]  Interesting.
[00:38:27]  The most discredited one of them.
[00:38:30]  Is it?
[00:38:31]  No.
[00:38:31]  I'm just making that up.
[00:38:32]  I don't even know what magnesium is.
[00:38:33]  But I do agree that our supplement industry is about as regulated as it was back in that era of alfalfa pills.
[00:38:43]  I just want to say, just in the future, if you're trying to play gotcha with us, anything sold in our merch store, though, is 100% some doctor or doctors have approved.
[00:38:52]  Carl Runborg.
[00:38:54]  Yes.
[00:38:54]  Going all the way back to him.
[00:38:55]  I liked his idea for getting iron, which you included in the book, which is taking rusty nails and the shavings from that and feeding it to people.
[00:39:03]  Yeah, like he was a crazy person, I think.
[00:39:04]  And probably five wives.
[00:39:06]  That's the other thing is he's a role player.
[00:39:09]  That's what this is about.
[00:39:11]  He's really like getting these women to back his vitamin business.
[00:39:15]  Every time it fails, he finds a new wife, which is kind of ingenious.
[00:39:18]  Also, a very early 20th century way to get money.
[00:39:21]  Just having the wives.
[00:39:23]  From rich wife to rich wife.
[00:39:25]  I know.
[00:39:25]  And the first wife that he meets at Pratt, shout out Pratt.
[00:39:29]  Shout out to Pratt.
[00:39:30]  Is named Hester Hawkins, which is such a good wife name.
[00:39:34]  Rich wife name.
[00:39:35]  Funnily enough, there's probably a lot of chicks at Pratt right now named Hester and shit like that.
[00:39:40]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:39:41]  Hester.
[00:39:42]  You know, I'm doing clay.
[00:39:44]  I don't know what to do there.
[00:39:46]  Somebody asked Hester on here for clay.
[00:39:48]  Yeah.
[00:39:49]  So, so anyway, so yeah, they're.
[00:39:51]  It's all love.
[00:39:54]  But so they started out there.
[00:39:59]  You know, I'm right.
[00:40:00]  I know you're right.
[00:40:00]  But so it comes from a very scammy place, both in terms of like sales tactics, because it's just based on the Ponzi scheme.
[00:40:09]  And from, although pyramids, by the way, are majestic.
[00:40:13]  And also just like complete bogus.
[00:40:16]  I mean, what do they sound?
[00:40:16]  Alfalfa pills?
[00:40:18]  Yeah.
[00:40:18]  And to be clear, they called it a profit's pyramid.
[00:40:22]  That was the name.
[00:40:22]  So like, they were very clear.
[00:40:25]  So that's also what's hard about parsing this stuff is because Americans now have this idea of like pyramid schemes are scams and they're illegal, but multiple marketing is not and it's different, but what is it?
[00:40:38]  And part of that is because pyramid schemes weren't regulated really in the very small way that they were until the 70s.
[00:40:46]  So there was like 30 years where they were just kind of cooking and some of them were scammier than others.
[00:40:53]  And anyway, and we can get into that, but they that's that's there really is functionally no difference.
[00:41:00]  People in multiple marketing buy products.
[00:41:05]  They are paid on how much they and their downline are buying.
[00:41:10]  Some of them have more customers than others.
[00:41:12]  Like some of them make more of an effort to appear above board and they do have some customer base, but they're almost virtually all of them, the people that are successful have recruited a lot and they're making money off of many, many, many people at scale buying in.
[00:41:30]  And many of those people will buy the product pack, the starter kit, and quit, right?
[00:41:35]  So a lot of it is turnover that's very quick, mass turnover.
[00:41:38]  So that's why, of course, it's a pyramid shape because you have like a huge amount of people doing very small amount of sales under, and it's all being funneled up to the top.
[00:41:48]  And they have, you know, there's all kinds of different ways of building your downline and different shapes.
[00:41:54]  And like, oh, I want to build deep or I want to build wide.
[00:41:57]  Like they use like business.
[00:41:59]  There's a couple, you know, you mentioned abundance.
[00:42:01]  There's a couple very couple chapters in there that are the same.
[00:42:04]  So, so I'm going to talk about terminology here real quick.
[00:42:08]  Sure.
[00:42:09]  Because this appears several, many throughout the book.
[00:42:11]  The upline and the downline.
[00:42:13]  So as far as I understand it, the downline are your slaves.
[00:42:17]  And the upline is your bosses.
[00:42:19]  But like, it's the people they give you money.
[00:42:22]  You take a little cut.
[00:42:23]  You take a little, you take a little cut from your stable, but you pass a piece along to your boss at the top.
[00:42:29]  And so it just kind of keeps going upwards.
[00:42:31]  Yeah.
[00:42:31]  In the in the olden days when this was invented, they were physically buying vitamins.
[00:42:37]  So they were, so if I'm your upline, I bring you in.
[00:42:41]  The other word they use is sponsor.
[00:42:44]  I get you to buy like a big amount of vitamins, like maybe, you know, $1,000 worth of vitamins.
[00:42:52]  Oh, you would have flourished back then.
[00:42:55]  And what I'm getting paid on is how many people in my downline, how much they're buying.
[00:43:00]  And in Neutralite, it was like if you had, you know, $15,000 worth of vitamins being bought and you're buying at a wholesale rate.
[00:43:09]  Of course.
[00:43:10]  But if it's worth that, then I'm getting back from the company like 2% commission of that group.
[00:43:18]  So then in the olden days, you now have been saddled with $1,000 worth of vitamins.
[00:43:24]  but what do you do?
[00:43:25]  You're recruiting under you.
[00:43:27]  And people are paying in cash.
[00:43:28]  So it's a much more like analog system.
[00:43:32]  And now the same thing, a similar thing is happening, but it's, it's obviously more online.
[00:43:38]  So you can just sign up.
[00:43:40]  If I, if you sign up under me, what a company does is track what you're, what people under you are buying.
[00:43:47]  And if you guys have been hustling a lot, I get a cut.
[00:43:51]  I get a, I get, it is a refund basically from the company.
[00:43:56]  And they do that, you know, the, every, everyone in an MLM, there's a minimum amount you have you have to spend every month.
[00:44:03]  Even if you're the tippy tippy top, you're still spending like $200 to $300, if not more a month on products.
[00:44:09]  And it's pay to win because you get, the more product you buy, like the better your sales are.
[00:44:15]  We'll get to that.
[00:44:16]  We'll get to that.
[00:44:17]  Cause I want to talk all about that.
[00:44:19]  But like you can basically buy, it's pay to win.
[00:44:21]  You can get to the top like, you know, part of the pyramid by just like giving them like $20,000 or something.
[00:44:27]  Right.
[00:44:28]  And that's why that term that they invented, purchase volume, is not sales.
[00:44:33]  It's purchase volume.
[00:44:35]  And then what the MLM industry very quickly does is start reporting that as retail sales.
[00:44:40]  So very early Neutralite, the first MLM, is reporting, you know, tens of millions of dollars in sales and the founders become millionaires and everyone's so excited because it, you know, in this, you know, era of massive growth in the United States, like look at this little company from Long Beach, California and these two guys and they're, and everyone, you know, is making so much money.
[00:45:05]  They, the, the stories about Neutralite in the newspaper in the 50s are literally like Steve Jobs and who's the other guy?
[00:45:14]  Steve Bozniak?
[00:45:15]  The two Steves.
[00:45:16]  Wow.
[00:45:17]  Yes, yes.
[00:45:17]  Thank you.
[00:45:19]  They're like, you know, Minter and Castleberry started Neutralite in their garage.
[00:45:23]  Like they're, they're doing an entrepreneur story breathlessly.
[00:45:29]  And, you know, no one understood it because it was brand new.
[00:45:33]  Okay.
[00:45:33]  Because I was going to ask them, like, how did they get away with reporting these as sales for so long when it's basically the inverse of that?
[00:45:42]  Well, and if you think now about like, I don't know how we report like corporate wealth now.
[00:45:48]  No, to me, all counting is still amazing.
[00:45:52]  It's such a fiction and how you look at someone's net worth and like a company's profitability.
[00:45:57]  Right.
[00:45:57]  And like, what is it when a company is, I was, I recently learned this one.
[00:46:02]  EBIT EBITDA, EBITDA.
[00:46:04]  Yeah.
[00:46:04]  Earnings before interest tax and depreciation.
[00:46:10]  You can be not profitable, but you can be EBITDA positive.
[00:46:13]  Yeah.
[00:46:13]  Just like different ways of trying to make a company seem like it's doing something worthwhile and people like it.
[00:46:21]  But anyway, so like imagine that, but in 1955, like it's it's way worse in terms of like who's reporting or vetting like the numbers they're giving like the lot the LA Times about how neutralite's doing.
[00:46:35]  I doubt anyone was vetting it.
[00:46:37]  Yeah, that's like that's so fascinating about all of this because I listen.
[00:46:40]  I, from my limited understanding before going into this, I was like, oh, MLMs are a scam.
[00:46:45]  Like nobody's making any fucking money here.

=== Ringing Doorbell Schemes (06:37) ===

[00:46:46]  This is just, you know.
[00:46:48]  You're correct.
[00:46:48]  It's all it's all crap.
[00:46:51]  But I didn't realize that these companies were just claiming to be profitable.
[00:46:54]  Well, they are profitable.
[00:46:55]  But like the companies were claiming that they were doing all these sales, but they're just counting the people who are buying the products from them.
[00:47:01]  They're employees.
[00:47:02]  All the stuff they buy is just sales.
[00:47:05]  So they have like no overhead.
[00:47:07]  Oh, they have overhead.
[00:47:08]  But their overhead is very minimal because all of their product is their, it's just crazy to me.
[00:47:14]  Yeah.
[00:47:15]  The business model is sales to the participants.
[00:47:20]  Yes.
[00:47:20]  So the retail sales, the actual sales to customers, the way you traditionally think about sales, it's literally a form of doublespeak.
[00:47:29]  It's the opposite.
[00:47:30]  And they just early on, they realized that they could do it and no one would care.
[00:47:37]  And then they started to care a little bit and they tried to rein it in.
[00:47:40]  And, you know, when it's a bunch of people willingly participating, and, you know, we could talk about all the caveats to willingly, but like the fact that it was people engaging in sales, you know, a lot of people, I think, saw it and said, well, you're signing up for this.
[00:48:00]  And of course, that's what's still said today.
[00:48:02]  But I think, you know, at the time, people who left, you know, it was like, okay, well, you just weren't good at it, you know.
[00:48:19]  I feel like for, like, my entryway into all of this, my entree into this is I remember the Avon ladies coming to my house when I was a kid.
[00:48:30]  You know what?
[00:48:31]  I was like, when I was reading this, I was like, damn, solicitors, something you don't really hear about.
[00:48:36]  But that was the big thing when I was a kid.
[00:48:39]  Ringing the doorbell.
[00:48:40]  Ringing the doorbell, trying to sell us Fabuloso.
[00:48:42]  Oh, yep.
[00:48:43]  What's Fabuloso?
[00:48:45]  The worst smelling cleaning product I've ever smelled in my life.
[00:48:49]  Wow.
[00:48:50]  That's like bright purple.
[00:48:51]  I remember the Fabuloso guy, but door-to-door sales.
[00:48:55]  Ever got cut coat?
[00:48:56]  No, but I know people that did sell.
[00:48:58]  I do actually know people.
[00:48:59]  That was a big one, like for people our age in like college.
[00:49:02]  Yeah, like high school.
[00:49:03]  But I remember when I was real little, like the Avon ladies, my mom never got into that.
[00:49:07]  But I know that people where she worked were very into it.
[00:49:12]  And it was a sensation.
[00:49:14]  I mean, they were on the cover of magazines.
[00:49:17]  I mean, it was like a whole thing.
[00:49:19]  And you'd think by that time in the late 80s, 90s, mid 90s, like this was, this would have been recognized for what it was.
[00:49:30]  And yet it was completely, I mean, it was like a cultural phenomenon.
[00:49:34]  Yeah.
[00:49:35]  I mean, there are so many also.
[00:49:37]  So like certain ones can pop.
[00:49:40]  And if you don't know anyone that's failed spectacularly, like why wouldn't you believe this woman who's telling you that she's doing so well?
[00:49:49]  I mean, that's part of what MLM is so insidious.
[00:49:52]  What it does is it makes you start lying right away.
[00:49:55]  Because if you join right away, you learn very quickly that what you've been told is easy to do, which is sell these overpriced products that you can get at Dwayne Reid to like your friends.
[00:50:06]  Once you get through your friends and family, like they make you make a list, like your A list and your B list and your A list is like your sister, your mom, like people who will buy your B list is maybe your coworkers and then your C list is like your friends on Instagram.
[00:50:18]  Once you've gone through those lists, like you're pretty, things are pretty dead for you, you know?
[00:50:24]  And so then very quickly you're learning that you must recruit.
[00:50:28]  And what are you telling those recruits?
[00:50:30]  You're telling them, oh, I'm doing great.
[00:50:32]  It's so easy when you're not.
[00:50:34]  And so right away, you're sort of like convincing yourself that you're making money from this.
[00:50:41]  And then you can just imagine that that's being magnified across the whole downline.
[00:50:46]  So, you know, the women who were doing well in Avon, they probably were, but they were doing it through recruiting, you know?
[00:50:54]  So they're telling this story that they're successful saleswomen and they're maybe empowered or whatever version of that.
[00:51:02]  I'm guessing it probably was.
[00:51:04]  It's true on some level, but they're empowered by doing fraud, you know, right?
[00:51:08]  Not by just like this like sweet idea of sales and this idea that like there's so many Americans who want stuff and that we can all get in on that and everybody can be making a living from people wanting stuff.
[00:51:21]  And we can just be in this like weird human centipede of selling to each other and regurgitating our earnings into other people's like sales.
[00:51:30]  It's really like, it's never been true, but that's the story.
[00:51:34]  And Avon came of age at such an important time because it was like, you know, women in the workplace, like now women can get, can start doing it for themselves.
[00:51:44]  Like ladies, you know, even if you're not, you know, armpit hair feminists, like you too get your own.
[00:51:52]  And now you can have your own bank account.
[00:51:54]  It's the 70s.
[00:51:56]  If people don't know that that's when that happened.
[00:51:59]  And now you can make your own money.
[00:52:01]  You don't need a man.
[00:52:03]  You know, you can make it on your own.
[00:52:05]  And Avon really like tapped into that in the same way that all of these scams tap into something psychological because they need that like special sauce, that charismatic special sauce to recruit these people.
[00:52:19]  Yeah, you need the dream.
[00:52:20]  And it's like, which group is getting fed the dream at that point?
[00:52:23]  And it was women at the point you're talking about.
[00:52:25]  And Avon is interesting because Avon started as normal direct selling before Mittinger and Castleberry did their thing.
[00:52:32]  You know, just regular door-to-door selling.
[00:52:33]  You buy wholesale and you sell at a profit and you keep the money.
[00:52:38]  But that's regular door-to-door selling.
[00:52:40]  And they would never, ever, ever have people order more than they could sell.
[00:52:44]  You actually had to prove in the sort of limited records we have of these companies, because we're talking like late 1800s when Avon is started.
[00:52:53]  They, you know, you had to prove your orders before they gave you the product.
[00:52:57]  So they would never want somebody walking around with all this money or with, excuse me, all the product that they've bought with a ton of money.
[00:53:03]  So that's Avon.
[00:53:05]  And then Mary Kay is really the first makeup MLM that is like basically masquerading as Avon.
[00:53:11]  And what's interesting is Avon continually is like, we're not them.
[00:53:15]  Avon even tries, you know, they Mary Kay and Amway at one point tried to buy Avon and they like rip them in the press.
[00:53:23]  They're like, you're a pyramid scheme.

=== Mormon MLMs (03:06) ===

[00:53:24]  We're not.
[00:53:26]  And then later in the 90s, when, you know, this is a really hard business.
[00:53:30]  It was already flagging.
[00:53:32]  Avon goes into more of an MLM model, which is like really sad.
[00:53:36]  But at the time, Mary Kay was really the predominant ladies getting their bag situation.
[00:53:43]  But just like you were saying, Mary Kay was like die-hard Baptist, conservative woman and who had this whole thing.
[00:53:50]  Like, she just had crazy, like weird old-timey things where she's like, you know, go do your Mary Kay all day and make your money, but then run home and like put a bunch of onions in a pan and cook them so your husband thinks you've been cooking all day.
[00:54:04]  It's like, then you're just going to make your house smell like onions.
[00:54:06]  Like, I don't know.
[00:54:07]  But like, like, that was her vibe: you know, a glorious night in the streets.
[00:54:12]  Yeah.
[00:54:13]  But like Phyllis Shaft.
[00:54:14]  Women, we can have it all.
[00:54:15]  Yeah.
[00:54:16]  That's always the sill.
[00:54:18]  Something I was so relieved to read throughout this book were frankly the startling lack of last names such as Goldstein or any kind of Witz's or anything like this.
[00:54:30]  And all that is to say, like, this seems to be a very Christian phenomenon in many ways, which that is sort of like explicitly so with some of the companies, implicitly so with other ones.
[00:54:49]  It's funny because it gets a touch of the new age later.
[00:54:52]  And now I think there's a lot of new age stuff.
[00:54:54]  But I think the Christian through line still runs through it.
[00:54:57]  It's sort of, it's a fascinating kind of journey one goes on because all of these things, like they're ripping all of their, basically everybody off from the, from the eventual, you know, potential customers to the actual people buying the products, which are like the failed salesmen that they are, they're ripping off.
[00:55:16]  But they have like somebody, I think it's Mary Kay that has like prayers and stuff.
[00:55:19]  Oh, yeah.
[00:55:20]  Well, and Mway is also, they're Calvinist Christians.
[00:55:26]  So Calvinist Christians are the ones who Max Weber, when he comes to the United States and comes up with the Protestant work ethic.
[00:55:36]  That's what he's looking at and being like, wow, y'all are crazy.
[00:55:39]  You work so hard, but it's godly for you to make, you know, to accrue wealth.
[00:55:45]  You know, and the prosperity gospel is maybe like a just more umbrella term for that.
[00:55:50]  So it definitely there was in American Christianity a seed of making money and that you can make money and it's it's actually serving God to accrue you know assets and money and it's not it's not greed.
[00:56:08]  So you know that there's a Mormon version of that too where there's a lot of where MLMs are kind of endemic.
[00:56:14]  So yes, I will say that when I went to the Mary Kay convention, one of the very successful downlines was an Orthodox woman and the rest of her download was also Orthodox and they're getting their sale.

=== Mary Kay Conventions & Cult Texts (05:49) ===

[00:56:31]  I'm sorry to tell you that.
[00:56:33]  But that was just a part of it though.
[00:56:35]  It wasn't like the head of the company.
[00:56:36]  No, no.
[00:56:37]  Okay, that's fine.
[00:56:38]  That's fine.
[00:56:40]  That actually makes sense.
[00:56:40]  MLM to the Amish.
[00:56:43]  MLM knows no creed now.
[00:56:44]  It's truly there's any everybody is orthogonal.
[00:56:48]  It's very multiple.
[00:56:49]  I'm sorry to tell you.
[00:56:50]  Yeah.
[00:56:50]  It's everywhere in the world.
[00:56:51]  It's global.
[00:56:52]  It's global.
[00:56:53]  Wait, can we talk about the Mary Kay Convention, your experience there?
[00:56:56]  Yeah.
[00:56:56]  When did you go?
[00:56:57]  What year?
[00:56:58]  That was 2023 summer.
[00:57:02]  They have it in the same place every year in Dallas.
[00:57:04]  And yeah, you can't really go unless you're a saleswoman, a distributor.
[00:57:13]  And I talked to a bunch of lawyers and they were like, you can't do that because there's a big disparagement clause in almost like every MLM contract.
[00:57:21]  So you couldn't just like sign up.
[00:57:23]  Yeah, or they could sue me much more easily, I guess, if I signed an actual non-disparagement agreement with them.
[00:57:30]  So I just went and I, at that point, had a bunch of like people who'd been inside more recently.
[00:57:36]  And so they could help me out, like, how easy would it be to just go?
[00:57:40]  And the answer seemed to be yes.
[00:57:42]  There are like certain smaller parts of it that I can get into, but I just went to Dallas and higher up the chain.
[00:57:47]  Yeah.
[00:57:48]  Yeah.
[00:57:48]  And just like the more elite events that are smaller, you stand out.
[00:57:52]  And, you know, so I packed like a floral garment, a dress.
[00:57:57]  I wore like flat Tiva sandals, which is really, really a bad idea because like no one else was in flats and that really stuck out.
[00:58:06]  But other than that, you know, I'm like a blonde woman.
[00:58:09]  I kind of had my costume ready to go and just sort of like, you know, like sort of wiggled my way into these groups and it really is like a pageant.
[00:58:20]  Yeah.
[00:58:21]  And these women are getting rewarded for their sales.
[00:58:25]  And it is so, it's so known that they're really purchases that like, I forget if it was that year or the year before, but a bunch of Mary Kay has a very active ex-distributor message board called Pink Truth and they're amazing.
[00:58:43]  Great name.
[00:58:44]  And these women had documented how this one woman who was like on stage for winning, she was like the princess of court of sales or something, which means you've sold like 20,000.
[00:58:54]  By the way, you keep for our listeners, you keep using air quotes every time you say selling and sold, which is important.
[00:59:00]  It's really important to me.
[00:59:02]  Right.
[00:59:02]  So that's what was so, these people found, they went on her Facebook and found that after she, right after she gets this award, her husband is posting and he's like, please, my wife has $20,000 worth of Mary Kay in our basement and there's pictures of it.
[00:59:17]  And he's like, please help us come by this.
[00:59:20]  So like, it's, it's really, that's, everybody knows.
[00:59:24]  And that's so, that's the psychological part that's still so until you're around it and experiencing it.
[00:59:30]  That's wild is that all of these women in the room know that the sales aren't real.
[00:59:35]  They know this.
[00:59:37]  Of course.
[00:59:37]  They're doing it.
[00:59:38]  But like the woman who I kind of chronicle in the book, Monique, like you, they really teach you not to think about it.
[00:59:44]  They teach you don't look at your balance, don't look at net and gross and all these like, it's, you're really not supposed to look at money in terms of like financial literacy like we think you're supposed to in traditional business.
[00:59:57]  It's much more mystical.
[00:59:58]  It's like money is something that comes from the universe.
[01:00:01]  And of course, this goes goes back to some of the like cult texts that are part of part of MLM and like the synonym connections and things you were, you guys, you were referencing earlier.
[01:00:11]  Like money is something that you can manifest and that will come to you.
[01:00:17]  And you're, you're not supposed to care that you're spending.
[01:00:21]  There's always going to be, you're always looking at the horizon.
[01:00:25]  There's going to be one magic moment.
[01:00:27]  And so that's what I guess all these women are waiting for.
[01:00:30]  Yeah, it's like the pink Cadillac is like the symbol of it.
[01:00:33]  Cause like the pink Cadillac is, what is that?
[01:00:35]  It's like.
[01:00:36]  That's Mary Kay's like that, the free car quote in Mary Kay.
[01:00:39]  So if you get to a specific ring of leadership with a specific amount of people under you, they pay your car payment.
[01:00:45]  So it's not free.
[01:00:46]  And there's lots of, lots of fine print.
[01:00:49]  Like if you miss a certain amount of production, which is what Mary Kay calls your, your purchases every month, which is like another, like, that's crazy.
[01:00:57]  You're not producing anything, you're buying, but they, um, you know, they'll, you're on the hook for that car payment if you miss your production, you know?
[01:01:04]  So, so everything is very tenuous.
[01:01:08]  Even the free cars.
[01:01:10]  I want to talk to you about like how, I mean, because like, how many people are we talking about that have like $20,000, $15,000, $10,000 worth of Mary Kay shit in their garage that like their husbands or they themselves are sitting with at night being like, what the fuck did I get myself into?
[01:01:26]  And like are getting saddled with debt to participate in this stuff.
[01:01:31]  And it's just like unspoken.
[01:01:33]  I mean, it makes, it's so sad.
[01:01:35]  It's so predatory and it's so sad.
[01:01:38]  When I was in Dallas, I went to the Mary Kay corporate headquarters, which has a very creepy Mary Kay Museum, which is like this weird little in the side of their lobby, a place where you can go like, it's, it, you know, it's just like a museum.
[01:01:54]  There's giant portraits of her and her like son who took over the business.
[01:01:58]  And there's, you know, her early notebooks and all kinds of stuff.
[01:02:02]  And no one was there.
[01:02:03]  And it was so weird.
[01:02:04]  Oh, it's very weird.
[01:02:05]  It's very weird.
[01:02:07]  And my Lyft driver was this middle-aged black woman in maybe her 60s.
[01:02:13]  And she was, she assumed I was in Mary Kay because she picked me up at the hotel at the convention center and she said, you know, oh, are you guys having convention?

=== Google's Ex-Recruits in Brooklyn (15:49) ===

[01:02:20]  And I was like, oh, I'm not in Mary Kay, but yes, they are.
[01:02:23]  And she immediately told me she tried Mary Kay twice.
[01:02:26]  And so she worked at Kodak, which is headquartered in Dallas.
[01:02:29]  And she had like been demoted from her job when Kodak unwound a lot of its production in Dallas.
[01:02:35]  And so she tried it in the 90s and then again later in the 90s.
[01:02:38]  And she told me this like really sad story where she brought her friend in and that friend felt really betrayed and never spoke to her again.
[01:02:44]  But she still had lipsticks in her house from the 90s.
[01:02:48]  I mean, that's, that's, that's, I guess, I guess the thing that I, I don't, the thing that's confusing to me about this is like, I feel like I, I know that these things are pyramid schemes.
[01:02:59]  And I never really had, or like that are just complete scams.
[01:03:03]  And I've never really had any like contact with them.
[01:03:05]  And I feel like a lot of the people getting into this stuff aren't like stupid.
[01:03:08]  No.
[01:03:09]  How are people falling for this?
[01:03:13]  Well, there's, there's lots of different layers to getting into a multi-level marketing scheme.
[01:03:19]  And they all have their own basically rules of operations.
[01:03:25]  Amway is one where the specific downlines in Amway are so big that they have their own companies now that are called things like leadership team development or worldwide dream builders.
[01:03:36]  They're like really like Nexiam when Nexium is an MLM and Nick Keith Ranier was an Amway and he learned it from Amway.
[01:03:44]  But he, Anyway, so those people have like a really specific way of doing it that I get into a little bit in the book where the recruitment starts with, like, are you interested in having a mentor walk you through life?
[01:04:01]  You know, and people say yes because they go after people who are, like, I talked to one woman in the book who's like, you know, she just works in a restaurant in Brooklyn.
[01:04:11]  She was recruited like in downtown Brooklyn, which I, I was really humbled by that.
[01:04:16]  Downtown Brooklyn?
[01:04:17]  Yeah, downtown Brooklyn.
[01:04:19]  I really thought I was like, okay, if this is happening, it's in like outer boroughs.
[01:04:23]  And no.
[01:04:24]  But she, she's like a young woman working in a restaurant who also wanted to do like graphic design.
[01:04:30]  Like some piercing MLM.
[01:04:33]  She was like, yeah, she was in maybe like a woker line.
[01:04:36]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:04:36]  But the overall one she was in is quite intense and Christian and conservative, how all of them are.
[01:04:42]  But anyway, they have something called, okay, so that's that's called DTM one, dropping the message.
[01:04:49]  Oh, my.
[01:04:49]  And so then there's DTM two.
[01:04:51]  And in the DTM two, you're, you're getting a little, you're, you're, you're supposed to push on what's called their pain points.
[01:04:57]  So figure out what their pain points are.
[01:04:59]  Like, do they have student debt?
[01:05:01]  Are they, you know, right?
[01:05:04]  No dad.
[01:05:04]  Are they an alcoholic?
[01:05:05]  Like, what's their thing?
[01:05:07]  And then you're supposed to like go in on that.
[01:05:09]  And then you're supposed to give them a book.
[01:05:11]  The books are like Think and Grow Rich or this like really insidious line of books called, oh my God, I'm not going to remember.
[01:05:18]  It's this writer, Bob Berg.
[01:05:20]  They're published by my publisher, Penguin Random House.
[01:05:24]  Bob Berg.
[01:05:24]  Bob Berg.
[01:05:25]  B-E-R-G, will you look up the title for me?
[01:05:28]  Not remembering.
[01:05:28]  Bob Berg.
[01:05:29]  Oh no, it's American saxophonist.
[01:05:31]  Bog Berg.
[01:05:32]  Oh, God.
[01:05:33]  What's it called?
[01:05:34]  It's about a guy named Pindar.
[01:05:35]  No, this is Pindar?
[01:05:38]  Yeah.
[01:05:38]  No, I'm getting Journey to a Star, Trials and Tribulations of a Hollywood Autograph Collector, which actually does sound.
[01:05:44]  We should interview this guy.
[01:05:45]  This is probably amazing.
[01:05:47]  I can't believe I'm forgetting the name, but anyway, it's like the go-giver.
[01:05:49]  The go-giver, the go-giver, which comes directly from Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich is this idea that like you're not a go-getter, you're a go-giver because when you sell things, you're giving people a service.
[01:06:00]  And the book, in the book, it's about this guy, Pindar, who like finds a mentor who, whatever.
[01:06:04]  It's an update where Pindar finds it founds a SaaS company.
[01:06:08]  Right, right.
[01:06:09]  He's the CEO of Google now.
[01:06:11]  True.
[01:06:12]  Pindar has gone to the moon.
[01:06:14]  But anyway, they, they, so it's all very deliberate.
[01:06:19]  So then they give you the book.
[01:06:20]  And the idea is the book is not just a book.
[01:06:23]  It's a test.
[01:06:24]  Because if you're the type of person who's going to Google and find this book on Reddit where it is, or if you're going to ask your family about it, that will help determine like how kind of how much you're doing that.
[01:06:34]  And if you don't do that, then they don't need to like extra recruit you.
[01:06:37]  This is three shades from like going clear.
[01:06:40]  It is the same fucking thing.
[01:06:41]  Then they give you an audio, which is like just a speech from one of these like weird conventions where this couple will be like, We were going to kill ourselves, but then we joined WA and we like now we love life and have generational wealth and whatnot.
[01:06:56]  Back then, Duke and I were getting high all of the time.
[01:06:59]  We were doing our dishes in the bathtub, and I weighed 500 pounds.
[01:07:05]  But, thank God, Duke found Power Marketing, and he made me find it.
[01:07:11]  And now I do not use the hash.
[01:07:13]  I am 112 pounds, and we have a dishwasher.
[01:07:20]  And anyway, so by the time you've done that, like they've, you know, you've spent time with this person, and they've like, you don't, so many things, you think of, you think of somebody that joins MLM as like a follower or a sheep or whatever, but really it's like you can actually just be a person that doesn't want to like be rude.
[01:07:38]  And so you're just like going to these meetings.
[01:07:39]  And then at some point, if the recruiter is good, they've tapped that pain point so that you have made a relationship and you do feel safe and that they actually have your best interest.
[01:07:48]  And then of course, the other thing is like they're legal.
[01:07:52]  MLMs are technically legal.
[01:07:54]  So if you do even Google it, you're going to find an FTC page that's like, there is such a thing as legitimate multiple marketing.
[01:08:01]  So you're going, okay, like herbal life is, you know, a public company.
[01:08:07]  Like, how could what, you know, so even if you are a discerning person that might Google a company, you're not going to find anything that will tell, like, you're going to find just as much telling you like green flags as red flags.
[01:08:18]  So it's really not that shocking that so many people get involved.
[01:08:24]  It's just nobody knows what I just talked about, that level of indoctrination and that it's so those that's that stuff is written down in like manuals for recruiting.
[01:08:36]  So it's like very, very specific and they've been honing it since the 50s and 60s and since the really, the era where they really figured out how to recruit really hard.
[01:08:57]  So let's talk about how this is legal because it doesn't feel like it should be.
[01:09:01]  But that's a big part of this story, which is that it's basically been carved out and I would say encouraged and watered and let bloom all over the country up until like what, you know, changes.
[01:09:18]  I mean, in the book, you talk about changes to the tax code and during Trump.
[01:09:21]  Like there's so much that the government has done to carve out space and really nurture this stuff to become what it is.
[01:09:32]  And especially how it's grown online now at this point.
[01:09:37]  So if we go back to the like historical trajectory of this, once Neutralite gets going, being an MLM, even when you're at the top, is frustrating because you're still an independent contractor constantly having to recruit.
[01:09:54]  So even when you're at the top, you want to start your own.
[01:09:57]  It's always better to be the company that's making the shitty products because then you have people paying you every month for these like shit products.
[01:10:04]  You get passive income.
[01:10:04]  Yes.
[01:10:05]  You really do.
[01:10:06]  Yeah.
[01:10:07]  And so right away, we don't even know how many early MLMs there were, like, because I found lawsuits against Neutralite that like no one else had ever found just because no one had cared to look.
[01:10:18]  And, you know, so right away, people are leaving and copying Neutralite and Neutralite's like suing them, being like, no, this is our scam.
[01:10:25]  And it's funny to even watch the judges in those read the judges in those cases try to understand what MLM is because it's so early.
[01:10:31]  They're like, what is this?
[01:10:32]  Like, where are your sales?
[01:10:33]  What are you doing?
[01:10:35]  But anyway, they, so Neutralite is how we get Amway because the Amway guys, Rich DeVos and J. Banandel, who are chummy high school friends from Grand Rapids, Michigan, very Calvinist Christians, they take their massive downline.
[01:10:50]  They're very successful in Michigan and they break off and create Amway in like 1958.
[01:10:56]  But they weren't the only ones to do so.
[01:10:58]  These other companies also started and Amway made a concerted effort to like grow a little more quietly.
[01:11:04]  And they were, like I said, very Christian.
[01:11:06]  So they're doing it in this way that they're trying to be sort of quieter about it.
[01:11:10]  And these other dudes are real crazy.
[01:11:13]  And they're doing the kind of like, basically, they look like gangsters when they're recruiting.
[01:11:18]  And the two biggest companies are this one called NutriBio, which was based in Beverly Hills.
[01:11:23]  And that's probably the country's first real pyramid scheme in that it spread really fast and was in all the papers and it was like a national scandal.
[01:11:31]  And then Holiday Magic, which was based in San Francisco, and that's a really fun one.
[01:11:37]  And then the third one is probably Dare to be Great, which is my favorite because that's the best name.
[01:11:43]  Holiday Magic's pretty good.
[01:11:44]  Holiday Magic is pretty good.
[01:11:45]  It's pretty good.
[01:11:46]  But Dare to be Great tells you to do something, you know, and I always want to be told what to do.
[01:11:50]  Holiday Magic just tells you to believe in something.
[01:11:53]  It's also the kind of name someone else.
[01:11:54]  Holiday Magic is such a sweet name.
[01:11:56]  It's so nice.
[01:11:57]  That's the kind of shit people were named in like the 1780s.
[01:12:01]  Oh, they named holiday.
[01:12:03]  No, no, just like early, like in early America, people were just named like holiday magic and shit like that.
[01:12:09]  Believe me.
[01:12:10]  But also holiday magic actually sounds like a type of acid.
[01:12:13]  Yeah.
[01:12:14]  It does.
[01:12:14]  That's true.
[01:12:15]  Yeah.
[01:12:15]  Or a weed, maybe a type of marijuana.
[01:12:18]  So the way these guys do it is they literally just like take the business model, which is a proud, and they just plop it down with a new product and say why it's better.
[01:12:26]  Like one of the early, early ones, which was called Ubunda Vita, which I really like, was Vita, they loved Vita.
[01:12:33]  They loved Vita.
[01:12:34]  Was also alfalfa.
[01:12:36]  And the way that this guy sold it was he was like, no, no, no, but I only harvest it from this field between midnight and 3 a.m. in Colorado.
[01:12:44]  And that's why it's special.
[01:12:45]  And, you know, so they're just, it's all, it's all so funny.
[01:12:48]  Like, now they call it like night harvester alpha, night harvester greens.
[01:12:52]  So they, they do that.
[01:12:55]  And those companies out west very, very quickly get attention from the authorities because people are just spending money left and right.
[01:13:06]  They do away with a lot of, or they invent new ways to buy in with more amounts of money very quickly.
[01:13:15]  And that's very obviously a pyramid scheme if you, Liz, can just join my downline in a really high position and avail yourself of the commissions by just spending 10K right away.
[01:13:24]  Like that's a big red flag, even back then.
[01:13:27]  So they're doing that.
[01:13:30]  And very quickly, state AGs and all kinds of local law enforcement is saying like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here?
[01:13:38]  And trying to figure out how to regulate it.
[01:13:40]  And the SEC and the FTC eventually get involved in the 70s.
[01:13:45]  And this is part of partly building on the consumer protection movement that grows in the 60s and 70s out of the environmental movement, out of civil rights.
[01:13:52]  You got Ralph Nader in there.
[01:13:54]  Sure.
[01:13:54]  Consumer rights.
[01:13:55]  Yes, consumer rights.
[01:13:58]  The 70s, the malaise and the total sort of disaffection of the 70s that's building has this consumer element where people are saying, why is gas, why are gas prices so high?
[01:14:08]  Why can't we buy meat?
[01:14:08]  Blah, blah, blah.
[01:14:09]  And it translates also into like people joining these scams at higher rates because they need money, but also getting bilked really quickly and just creating a lot of, a lot of, you know, Walter Mondale actually introduces in 1972 an anti-pyramid scheme act in the Senate because it's such a, so at this point, it's a national scandal.
[01:14:30]  Like one in eight Americans had been involved in an MLM, which they're calling.
[01:14:35]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[01:14:37]  We're almost getting to Albania numbers.
[01:14:39]  And they're still, and they're calling them like direct selling, pyramid profits, and multi-level marketing, the term actually comes then as a way to say, oh, we're different.
[01:14:49]  Like Amway runs national ads that say, oh, we're multi-level marketing.
[01:14:54]  We're not pyramid selling because pyramid has suddenly become a bad word.
[01:14:58]  Okay.
[01:14:58]  So same thing.
[01:14:59]  Anyway, eventually, it is definitely the same thing.
[01:15:04]  Eventually, so the FTC goes after Dare to be Great, Holiday Magic, and this other one called Costcot.
[01:15:11]  And they're, I mean, we could, like, you could spend so they're so fun.
[01:15:14]  Costcotton.
[01:15:16]  Read the book.
[01:15:16]  Costcot.
[01:15:17]  We're not talking about Costcott in the episodes of I love Costcot.
[01:15:21]  But they eventually finally in 1975 go after Amway and sue Amway And allege that it is chain selling, which is one of the terms for operating a pyramid scheme.
[01:15:34]  But by then, Amway has, like I alluded to earlier, DeVos and Van Andel have enmeshed themselves in what we now would call like the new right.
[01:15:44]  They are fundraising through the Chamber of Commerce.
[01:15:47]  DeVos is really prominent in the National Republican Party.
[01:15:52]  Gerald Ford is their hometown congressman who's a huge supporter of Amway.
[01:15:55]  And when he becomes president, they are elevated to incredible sort of levels of power.
[01:16:01]  He doesn't win.
[01:16:02]  Obviously, when he runs himself for president, Carter wins, but then they're already setting up Reagan to win.
[01:16:08]  And for all this new right backlash, they want to tell an alternate story to the economic downturn of the 70s.
[01:16:17]  They want to release, unleash capitalism and do that through deregulation and all, you know, that story.
[01:16:25]  Amway is a huge part of telling that.
[01:16:27]  You know, they're seeding the tax revolt in Michigan once it gets there.
[01:16:30]  They're, you know, copying Howard Jarvis.
[01:16:33]  They're doing everything that they can to make a populist version of basically what is just, you know, more elite, more elite capture, right?
[01:16:48]  Of all kinds of institutions.
[01:16:51]  You know, they're, and then, and they, they're totally involved in all the culture war stuff.
[01:16:55]  They're funding anti-choice films.
[01:16:57]  And anyway, so they're in with the cores.
[01:17:00]  Yes, in with the cores.
[01:17:02]  Um, Jay Van Andel is a big part of Heritage.
[01:17:04]  When Heritage gets started, um, and I think I mentioned before, but the Chamber of Commerce was huge for them because they're literally using it as like a phone tree.
[01:17:13]  They get every like disaffected middle-class car dealer and real estate agent to join it.
[01:17:21]  And they're, you know, getting them to write in and join these campaigns and then eventually to vote.
[01:17:28]  So in 1979, this crescendo builds, and a big part of the right-wing backlash is against the FTC itself.
[01:17:35]  And Amway is actually leading the charge against what is called the nanny state.
[01:17:40]  You know, they really go after the FTC as a specific agency, saying, and this should sound very familiar, that it's a hotbed of cronyism and it's useless, you know, bloated federal workers and they're doing nothing and it's wasteful.
[01:17:56]  They go donkey style on that.
[01:17:59]  And they try to shut down the FTC.
[01:18:00]  They actually, there's a threat that the FTC won't be funded by Congress.
[01:18:04]  So the FTC is like hanging on by a thread while they're about to make a decision on Amway.

=== Amway's Fight Against the FTC (15:01) ===

[01:18:10]  And while Amway is one of the biggest funders of this movement, and in the midst of all that, in 1979, the judge making the decision, and it's just an administrative law judge who's doing making a decision on the FTC's case against Amway.
[01:18:23]  It's not a trial.
[01:18:25]  And this guy just says, okay, you're not a pyramid scheme.
[01:18:29]  Believe you.
[01:18:29]  I believe the story that you're telling about that this is a robust company rivaling Procter Gamble in terms of sales.
[01:18:38]  You know, they have a Harvard business school guy get up there on the Amway side and say he's so impressed.
[01:18:43]  Like, he's never seen such brand loyalty.
[01:18:45]  And it's like, yeah, because these people think they're being making money off of buying products.
[01:18:50]  They also have so much of it in their basement that they have to get rid of.
[01:18:55]  Yeah, they have to be brand loyalty.
[01:18:56]  They literally have to be.
[01:18:57]  It's just like, it's just, it's ludicrous.
[01:19:00]  But he, in the actual ruling, he says, it's really amazing.
[01:19:05]  I actually, there's a lot of evidence that there's just, there's going to be enough human population for Amway to keep growing.
[01:19:13]  Americans are, America is going to grow so much that there's no way that Amway can be a pyramid.
[01:19:18]  So the growth of the country itself, like the fact that Amway is telling an optimistic tale about where the United States is going.
[01:19:30]  I know, I know he's dead, or maybe I would have called him up.
[01:19:34]  But anyway, that's really a part of why I think he looked at this thing and was like, I'm going to take their word for it, you know, and moved on.
[01:19:45]  And then, of course, Reagan wins and Devolves from the Kitchen Cabinet.
[01:19:49]  And there's not a single prosecution against or FTC case, excuse me, against a pyramid company, an MLM company through Reagan or Bush one.
[01:19:58]  It's so funny because that's obviously as Lyd, Liz, Lid, our favorite store.
[01:20:05]  Yeah.
[01:20:06]  Well, oh my God.
[01:20:08]  If Lids had an MLM, I would join.
[01:20:11]  That's a hat.
[01:20:11]  Selling has our one.
[01:20:12]  Selling Fit Ins.
[01:20:14]  You can do whatever you want.
[01:20:15]  I should sort of fit in this MLM.
[01:20:17]  Yeah.
[01:20:17]  I'm surprised that doesn't exist.
[01:20:20]  We all should be preparing what our MLM is going to be.
[01:20:24]  That's all that's going to be left, except unfortunately, because of the tariffs.
[01:20:27]  All MLMs are going to have a really hard time.
[01:20:29]  You just have to do the shit that's coaching Vietnam.
[01:20:31]  We can all do it.
[01:20:32]  Coaching.
[01:20:32]  We can do coaching.
[01:20:33]  Oh, I love that coaching.
[01:20:35]  Come on, man.
[01:20:36]  Patreon coaching?
[01:20:39]  But anyways, anyways, I think it's funny because as Lid alluded to earlier, it's so similar to right now with all the fucking coin scammer people getting in the White House and like talking about shutting down these federal agencies that had gone after crypto fraud in any way.
[01:20:58]  And like, it's just, it's.
[01:21:00]  And that's their playbook.
[01:21:02]  And they've, you know, they've been perfecting that since that FTC fight and even before.
[01:21:07]  So, yeah.
[01:21:08]  And many of them, you know, are coming from like one of Trump's, Trump's World Liberty Financial, his coin.
[01:21:17]  One of those dudes is an affiliate marketing guy who dabbles in like MLM kind of promotion world.
[01:21:24]  Who's my goat?
[01:21:24]  What's his fucking name?
[01:21:25]  You know him.
[01:21:26]  He's my goat.
[01:21:27]  He's the greatest podcaster of all time.
[01:21:28]  Patrick Bett David.
[01:21:30]  Oh my God.
[01:21:30]  Like, isn't he a giant MLM guy?
[01:21:32]  Yeah.
[01:21:32]  MS involved in affiliate marketing is MLM.
[01:21:36]  Like, affiliate marketing is MLM.
[01:21:38]  He's so fucking cool.
[01:21:39]  Value attainment.
[01:21:40]  The thing that, like, of course, he's amazing.
[01:21:44]  I mean, value attainment.
[01:21:45]  The thing is, like, yeah, there's these like the obvious scrifters.
[01:21:48]  There you go.
[01:21:49]  The obvious scrifters of this stuff are like fucking disgusting.
[01:21:52]  All the affiliate marketers, the dropshippers, the selling the courses, selling, like, you know, my least favorite one that really blew up, I feel like it was like during the pandemic, but also like it had kind of a long life there or a long tail.
[01:22:07]  Um, was the you can just make so much money selling digital goods on Etsy.
[01:22:12]  That whole um industry where it's just like people selling like planner, right, like printed out digital goods on Etsy and being like, you'll start making $5,000 a month and the TikTok deals about copywriting courses.
[01:22:26]  Right.
[01:22:26]  And now there's one that has become something called master reselling rights, which is another similar thing where like you get literally like a slideshow that has been created that's somehow like proprietary to you and you get you get paid every time someone else sells it makes no sense and it's literally like a PDF.
[01:22:47]  There's a lot of PDF sales going around.
[01:22:48]  There's a lot of PDFs.
[01:22:49]  But part of that is actually like because MLM and I wrote about this a little with the piece I did for Max Reed's newsletter.
[01:22:58]  MLM helped before even the FTC went after Amway.
[01:23:04]  One of the rules that was made during the 70s when the FTC made a lot of consumer rules responding to public outcry was something called a franchise rule.
[01:23:13]  Franchises were also could be very scammy and predatory.
[01:23:17]  Like please, you know, start a like checkers or whatever was around then, but you know, you'd get roped in on shadow checkers.
[01:23:24]  You wouldn't know, like they wouldn't, someone would, someone wouldn't tell you like how hard it is to actually run a checkers.
[01:23:30]  Not that hard.
[01:23:32]  It's burgers.
[01:23:33]  And so you have other stuff.
[01:23:34]  It's other stuff.
[01:23:35]  Fry too.
[01:23:36]  Fry.
[01:23:36]  Okay.
[01:23:37]  Oh.
[01:23:37]  I don't even know if checkers were around in the 70s, but anyway, there was a lot of franchise fraud.
[01:23:43]  There was like, oh, I'm going to like come get in on this like whirlpool hot tub business.
[01:23:49]  And you're going to open a whirlpool hot tub store, but actually I'm just going to run out of town.
[01:23:53]  Wait, what are they called?
[01:23:54]  Fucking, what are the mattresses that are fun to have sex on in this waterbed?
[01:23:58]  Water beds.
[01:23:59]  A water bed is perfect, yes.
[01:24:01]  Right.
[01:24:01]  Like in that movie with the Heim sister.
[01:24:04]  You know what?
[01:24:05]  Hated it.
[01:24:06]  Hated it.
[01:24:08]  And I got a lot of rude things to say off mic, but that's my just my one instance of a water bed in the culture.
[01:24:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:24:16]  But anyway, so franchise fraud, they were like, okay, franchises are going to be subject to a whole slew of disclosures.
[01:24:23]  And you have to say if you've ever been sued in the last five years and all this stuff that made it very much harder for scammers, basically, MLM and some other scammer industries say, okay, okay, okay, fine, but exempt us if the investment is lower than $500,
[01:24:38]  which is why you will find many of what you're talking about, not strictly MLM, but an Etsy business or dropshipping or whatever, if the investment to be part of the team is under $500, it's because it's now called a business opportunity rather than a franchise or an investment or something.
[01:24:56]  Exactly.
[01:24:56]  Explicitly, exactly.
[01:24:58]  So that word is used because you get out of that.
[01:25:02]  So those businesses are all operating in the loophole that MLM really created.
[01:25:08]  So it's like this little door that now all grifters have walked through.
[01:25:13]  So something I thought was very interesting is that like most, I think of MLMs as like people selling, frankly, in my head, I'm like, it's military wives on fucking base.
[01:25:24]  Maybe Jody's out of town for a couple of days, so they got nothing to do.
[01:25:27]  And they're like having parties where they're like, we're selling, you know, we're doing Tupperware parties or we're doing these kind of parties, whatever.
[01:25:32]  But it's, it's hugely, as sort of alluded to earlier, international business.
[01:25:37]  And there's something you sort of mentioned, like possibly tied to money laundering.
[01:25:43]  Yeah.
[01:25:43]  And this is something that, again, like there's so much in this book that I feel like I've just kind of done the first pass on this stuff.
[01:25:50]  And like I really want other people to dig in because there's so much left to uncover.
[01:25:57]  Like there's only one chapter I'm really able to do on the international market for MLM.
[01:26:01]  But since the 80s, most MLMs have been overseas because Americans don't want to do this, have never really wanted to do this.
[01:26:10]  And it is such a scam.
[01:26:11]  And so these businesses have been like dying out very slowly for a long time.
[01:26:17]  And they went international as soon as they could.
[01:26:19]  So they've been international since the 60s.
[01:26:22]  And they really track over American expansion.
[01:26:26]  So you have at first Canada and Western Europe in the 60s, and then everybody goes to Russia when the Berlin Wall falls at the same time.
[01:26:34]  Everybody then in the 90s finally goes to China, which is like a huge deal because it's a billion people market and there's a new middle class and all that.
[01:26:42]  So you can really just track it, which is why Van Andel being part of the National Endowment for Democracy is like so amazing because Amway is literally red, white, and blue product.
[01:26:54]  It's a propaganda project for capitalism going into these countries, many of which were formerly communist and saying, look, now you were a Russian physicist.
[01:27:07]  Now you can be a Mary Kay lady, which like sucks, but it worked because they really dangled the incredible lifestyle in front of these people.
[01:27:20]  But The international market props up the American market and always has.
[01:27:24]  So, there's one really interesting lawsuit when the UK almost shut down Amway about 10 years ago.
[01:27:35]  They didn't, but they basically cracked open their books as much as they could.
[01:27:39]  And they saw that, like, I'm going to get this wrong, it's in the book, but like Amway UK was operating at a deficit and was propped up by Amway Poland, which was in turn propped up by like Amway Korean.
[01:27:50]  So it has its own international global MLM.
[01:27:53]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:27:54]  Well, and this lie that people are successful, it's it's like the people who are buying in the most, right, are in the countries with the lowest GDP who have the people who are the most vulnerable who want to get in on this Katamari Damasi situation.
[01:28:11]  Yeah, and it's it's very um it's really exploitative.
[01:28:16]  The the Indian government also tried to shut down Amway, and that was really recent.
[01:28:21]  And I don't even know the update of that case because that was in 2023, just two years ago.
[01:28:25]  They tried to say Amway's a pyramid scheme.
[01:28:27]  Um, and in India, they, you know, there's this one anecdote in the book that they had a whole village sign up to sell car wash liquid and no one had a car.
[01:28:35]  It's like totally in China, they call they call MLMs, which are technically outlawed, but definitely in operation, they call them business cults because that's what they are.
[01:28:47]  No, you also say, you also mentioned that they call them rat societies.
[01:28:50]  That's true, that's true.
[01:28:51]  That's another name.
[01:28:52]  That's another name, rat societies.
[01:28:54]  Yeah.
[01:28:54]  Which I was, I, that's, believe me, that made it the notes for the episode.
[01:28:58]  And this is another thing where there's like, there's some fantastic like scholar, scholarship, like academic articles about MLM in China.
[01:29:07]  And there's some in India too.
[01:29:09]  There's a book by a woman who was formerly in an MLM in India, but like a lot of it is, you know, not translated yet.
[01:29:16]  So like there's, there's, there's not much, you know, I hope that there's more sharing in terms of like in the English language about what it's like, especially in China because it's so dark over there, as you say, with the rat societies.
[01:29:29]  But like they, China banned direct selling, supposedly, but it's obviously still operating.
[01:29:36]  Like the New York Times did a story in 2018 where they go over and it's like all the same shit.
[01:29:41]  They just are lying and saying it's not direct selling.
[01:29:44]  Herbalife has been, you know, the international companies of American MLMs, you can prosecute them under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
[01:29:54]  And that's the SEC.
[01:29:55]  And so I think, or the Justice Department, one of them.
[01:29:59]  Anyway, Herbalife, they were getting people to sign up as each other's emergency contacts to get around the sponsorship thing because technically you're not supposed to be allowed to do MLM for real.
[01:30:09]  So they were just doing the downline, but calling everybody, calling each other emergency contacts.
[01:30:15]  That's incredible.
[01:30:15]  So like there's all that kind of shit.
[01:30:16]  And then the mafia stuff or the organized crime stuff, there's this woman, Christine Richard, who is the independent researcher who worked with Bill Ackman to write the initial report that made him go, huh, I'll short this.
[01:30:32]  Bill Bachman, if you are, if you're little people find this for you and you're listening to this, Neary's cheating.
[01:30:38]  Nearly cheating.
[01:30:41]  Bringing you, bringing you one step closer.
[01:30:43]  I'm going to, well, no, but it just, I've got.
[01:30:46]  You got to start a show.
[01:30:47]  She's met on Instagram.
[01:30:48]  She's messaged.
[01:30:50]  Okay.
[01:30:52]  Christine Richard, former journalist who then had this, you know, research, private research fund or operation.
[01:30:59]  She has put together like basically an incredible dossier about how Herbalife.
[01:31:05]  First of all, there's an FBI file on the founder of Herbalife, Mark Hughes from the 80s.
[01:31:10]  CDO graduate, by the way, and employee.
[01:31:12]  Yep.
[01:31:13]  Who there's a line from in her report from the FBI file that says they're watching him do cocaine with his girlfriend.
[01:31:21]  And the guy writing the report says they were doing cocaine approximately every hour, like backstage, backstage at a convention.
[01:31:29]  Anyway, so he was being, the FBI was going to maybe shut down Herbalife because there was evidence that it was being used to transport cocaine for cartels in South and Central America because they opened up there in those markets in the 80s and 90s.
[01:31:46]  And I mean, there's just a slew of other incidents, high up Herbalife distributors in Mexico and Ecuador and Colombia being killed over their Herbalife businesses.
[01:32:01]  What?
[01:32:01]  Oh, yeah.
[01:32:04]  Using Herbalife as a cover, like not just using it to physically transport cocaine in the bottom of these packets of supplements or whatever, but also using it as a front.
[01:32:16]  So there were some, there's an old, I think a Times article about a downline where the guy was based in Queens and then all of his quote distributors are using his Herbalife office to like pick up their supplies.
[01:32:30]  And it's just like a perfect, if you're dealing drugs, it's like a perfect cover.
[01:32:35]  So Herbalife has like, I mean, there's a very unsavory international kind of story there.
[01:32:43]  There's in the 90s when they opened up in Russia, this guy eventually sued Herbalife because they said they sent him in to like negotiate with the Russian mafia before they could open in the country.
[01:32:53]  And he was like, I felt unsafe.
[01:32:55]  So he sued Herbalife.
[01:32:56]  Woke bullshit.
[01:32:57]  MLM lawsuits are really fun because they're like people, especially if you've been high up in the pyramid scheme, because then eventually you sue and you're like, this was a pyramid scheme the whole time.
[01:33:08]  I really enjoyed them and they're very revealing.

=== MLM Ecosystems & Regulation (09:27) ===

[01:33:11]  And just not a lot of people have just read them.
[01:33:13]  Yeah.
[01:33:13]  Cause no one cares.
[01:33:14]  Yeah.
[01:33:14]  Yeah.
[01:33:15]  It's crin, it's funny.
[01:33:16]  I was just sitting here thinking about like, I wonder if we're ever going to get back to a political place where there is even a call to regulate this stuff.
[01:33:28]  Like, I was thinking about that with the post-2020 diffusion of this stuff on through all social media and social media basically kind of co-evolving in order to support these ecosystems, right?
[01:33:42]  Like when you even look at like how Reels kind of, yes, it was there to compete with TikTok, but that was because they were monetizing and they found exponential growth through people trying to recruit other people, yes, naturally with followings and accounts and all of this stuff through monetization, kind of building all these tiny little bosses everywhere, like your book says, right?
[01:34:04]  And you think about like we now have a social base that is so fundamentally like would be fundamentally opposed to any kind of regulation against this stuff because it's how they make their living.
[01:34:19]  Yes.
[01:34:20]  Or they think it will be how they make their lives.
[01:34:22]  Potentially, or they're taking out a lot of credit card debt because eventually it might make them a living.
[01:34:27]  Yeah.
[01:34:28]  And like, you know, it's funny because you think about like, remember how we were going to ban TikTok?
[01:34:33]  Right.
[01:34:34]  In fact, we passed a law.
[01:34:36]  There's a law was passed that we were banning it.
[01:34:39]  Right.
[01:34:39]  Yeah.
[01:34:39]  Congress passed a law that we're banning TikTok and we're just not following the law and we're not doing it.
[01:34:46]  And that's because there was such a public outcry, right?
[01:34:50]  Because there's now a social base that will not stand for that.
[01:34:55]  Whether that's because of like, you know, Chinese spies or whatever they want to say it is, or whether it's because it enables this like predatory ecosystem to ruin people's lives.
[01:35:06]  You know, like there are other ways to regulate it and keep TikTok.
[01:35:08]  I'm not suggesting, but I'm, but I am saying that like, you know, in the book, I keep mentioning this, but I do want to be explicit about it because I've talked about it before is that like there have been a lot of changes to the tax code that have incentivized what used to be just informal work and tried to like formalize it within the tax code, whether it's like, here, this is how as in, you know, we've, we're reclassifying all these workers as independent contractors.
[01:35:35]  And also if you establish your own LLC or if you establish your own S-Corp or if your family does and you use your house as a business, you can write all of this stuff off.
[01:35:46]  And it enables the kind of like the all of the individuals in America to actually be small businesses themselves.
[01:35:54]  And our tax code incentivizes that.
[01:35:56]  And through that, we now have a billion small businesses that are actually just individuals, right?
[01:36:00]  And a lot of them operate online.
[01:36:02]  And all of this has kind of come about together in this really, really beautiful, horrible mess.
[01:36:09]  But it's created this social base that I think makes any kind of political project to try to tamp down on some of this stuff really difficult, right?
[01:36:23]  Like it's what it's so funny because I think about this with some of this, like, you know, abundance stuff.
[01:36:28]  Obviously, when they're talking about deregulation, I'll be generous for some reason to the abundance people and say, I know when they're talking about deregulation, they're not talking about like getting rid of the CFPB or whatever.
[01:36:38]  Maybe they are in some respects, but they aren't suggesting like wholesale.
[01:36:42]  Also, shout out to the CFPB listeners of the podcast.
[01:36:46]  Well, not anymore.
[01:36:48]  Well, former CFPB.
[01:36:49]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:36:50]  Still listeners of the podcast.
[01:36:53]  But, you know, or, you know, but the doggy people, yes, right?
[01:36:58]  Getting rid of any kind of like oversight on this, but like that isn't what unleashes the productive forces of this country, right?
[01:37:05]  It's quite the opposite.
[01:37:07]  And it actually unleashes like all of this to grow and fester and become more and more enmeshed in our lives.
[01:37:15]  And it makes me feel crazy because I'm like, what is the road out of this?
[01:37:20]  It feels like a very long-term project.
[01:37:22]  And that's why, to me, the anti-communist roots of all this are really important because it really is all about pulling apart any semblance of collectivism that we have left, right?
[01:37:34]  Whether that's like the welfare state and actual policies, like getting rid of Social Security, if they can do that, you know, Elon Musk calling Social Security a Ponzi, like that's very deliberate.
[01:37:45]  Or just what you're talking about, the idea that like you might have co-workers who aren't your family and you might have a business that you leave at the end of the day and go back to your home.
[01:38:00]  The little empires that you're talking about are what MLM has been doing since the beginning.
[01:38:08]  I mean, in the 80s, they were hauled in front of the IRS when the IRS was going crazy and trying to actually bring some of these companies to heal.
[01:38:20]  And the Amway guys had to testify that, you know, they weren't doing tax fraud and telling people, you know, they played tapes of Amway recruiters being like, you can list your dog as security and your kids are your workers.
[01:38:34]  And, you know, so they've been putting that into the world for a long time.
[01:38:41]  And what you're talking about, the changes to the tax code, of course, they've also been working on the escort stuff under Trump was hugely pushed by the DeVoses and they kept a lot of money because of that through the parent company of Amway, which is called AltaCor.
[01:38:57]  All of that is to keep money private, right?
[01:39:01]  And to keep profits private and to have nothing going back to the state in taxes and nothing that will enable those collective institutions that are more of an equalizing playing field and that give people like a basic, you know, dignified existence, even if it's like really shitty right now.
[01:39:20]  Like we're even losing that, you know, the idea that everybody's just gonna be their own boss.
[01:39:26]  Like, where are the workers?
[01:39:28]  And like one answer to that, which we're seeing in the tariff stuff is like they're overseas.
[01:39:33]  The workers are overseas and they're gonna, you know, if they stop doing their thing, like we're fucked.
[01:39:38]  But then also just like, what's being produced?
[01:39:42]  What's being made?
[01:39:43]  What, what, what is the product?
[01:39:45]  What matters?
[01:39:46]  And MLM for so long has been this nonsense market.
[01:39:49]  Like it's not real.
[01:39:50]  It's the product is crime and grift and fraud.
[01:39:55]  And so that kind of thing we're seeing everywhere.
[01:40:00]  Like I guess you could art.
[01:40:02]  There are people who think crypto is real and serves a purpose.
[01:40:06]  I don't really.
[01:40:07]  But like just.
[01:40:08]  Well, just you need to maybe do your research.
[01:40:11]  Yeah.
[01:40:11]  Send me some PDFs if you want.
[01:40:14]  Well, it'll cost you, but yeah.
[01:40:17]  But anyway, like what I called earlier affinity fraud, right?
[01:40:21]  That really is what you're talking about is like everybody's the relationships that are your family or your close relationships are monetized, all of them.
[01:40:31]  And like we're all these little independent influencers and we're, you know, beholden to nobody but our little bottom lines, you know, and there's nothing holding us up in the, in the face of disaster.
[01:40:46]  Like that's also really scary, right?
[01:40:48]  Like, like if as we consider what's happening to the economy, it's like, what is left to catch us?
[01:40:53]  And the core ideology behind MLM is you're on your own.
[01:40:58]  You know, free enterprise is free enterprise, baby.
[01:41:00]  Like you're, you're responsible for yourself.
[01:41:04]  And that's supposed to power equality, but, but obviously what's happening, you know, trend wise is incredible inequality, right?
[01:41:15]  Where like we have people who are making vast majorities of keep making and keeping all of the profits and hoarding all the resources here and everywhere.
[01:41:26]  So yeah, now I feel like I've just gone on a rant.
[01:41:30]  But what you're talking about, these little siloed, everybody being their own boss, like that's truly what they want because that's obviously not going to work.
[01:41:39]  Like obviously there's not enough for everybody to do their own.
[01:41:44]  It's honestly like as old of a story as like fucking prospecting, right?
[01:41:48]  And like the wild west that there's going to be enough land for all of us and we're all going to be able to go and be in charge of our own kingdoms.
[01:41:56]  The earliest description of be your own boss, because I was just interested in it, was some like guy in the 1830s, like traveling up the Missouri River.
[01:42:05]  He like writes back to his paper and he's like, You can be your own boss out here.
[01:42:09]  You know, it's always about expansion and that it can never end.
[01:42:13]  And that's this delusional growth, which is the heart of a Ponzi scheme that it'll go on forever.
[01:42:19]  And that's the story that MLM actually tells with sincerity, with earnestness.
[01:42:22]  They're like, it can go on forever, you know, and it's just a lie, it's not true, but we're all gonna suffer.
[01:42:28]  Well, Bridget, the book is great.
[01:42:30]  I loved it.
[01:42:31]  It was a great read.
[01:42:34]  It's out next week.
[01:42:35]  Actually, when this show comes out, when does the show come out?

=== Loving Men, Loving God (04:33) ===

[01:42:38]  No, no, no.
[01:42:38]  It comes out on the 6th for whatever the day it comes out, the book.
[01:42:42]  Oh, no, I don't know what day the show comes out.
[01:42:44]  I think the show comes out the day before.
[01:42:46]  But you know what?
[01:42:47]  It doesn't matter because we don't know when the person listening to this is listening to this.
[01:42:50]  It's true.
[01:42:51]  They could be listening to it.
[01:42:52]  But we will link to it in the show notes.
[01:42:54]  And it's an affiliate link you gave us.
[01:42:58]  Yes.
[01:42:59]  And it's just, it's so great.
[01:43:01]  It's so well researched.
[01:43:02]  If you like our show, you're going to love the book.
[01:43:05]  Yeah, there's so many sort of cuckoo bananas, incredible characters that you can't even get into while we're sitting here.
[01:43:16]  So I hope people check them out.
[01:43:19]  I think they will.
[01:43:20]  And yeah, thanks for coming.
[01:43:22]  Thank you so much.
[01:43:37]  And one thing that we're not going to do, ladies and gentlemen, is make a stupid like, oh, I thought MLM was Marxism, Leninism, Maoism.
[01:43:44]  Let me tell you something about how jokes work, right?
[01:43:46]  Didn't you just do it?
[01:43:48]  I know, but I'm saying, but I was doing it in kind of a TikToky way.
[01:43:50]  One thing we're not going to do, one thing we're, no, but here's the thing.
[01:43:54]  Here's the thing.
[01:43:55]  Here's how jokes work.
[01:43:56]  They have to be funny.
[01:43:57]  And so oftentimes, what people, and I fall victim to this myself.
[01:44:01]  Sometimes I say things that are funny in my head because, look, it's this thing that's like another thing.
[01:44:05]  It's like almost like a juxtaposition, which is one of my sex names that I used to go by.
[01:44:10]  But then you actually say them, there's no joke there, right?
[01:44:13]  It's just something that's, isn't that interesting?
[01:44:15]  You know, it's an isn't that interesting?
[01:44:17]  Isn't that a sound?
[01:44:18]  Hey, look at that.
[01:44:19]  It's a sounds alike.
[01:44:20]  It's a huh.
[01:44:21]  It's a huh.
[01:44:22]  Sounds alike.
[01:44:22]  Yeah.
[01:44:23]  It's not even a thing you ever notice.
[01:44:25]  No, it's just, here's a reference.
[01:44:27]  It's, hey, notice.
[01:44:28]  That's what it is.
[01:44:29]  And we're not doing that.
[01:44:30]  Noticing.
[01:44:30]  I just expect better from people.
[01:44:33]  And you know what?
[01:44:33]  You should expect better from us.
[01:44:35]  You should.
[01:44:35]  You should.
[01:44:37]  Men loving men.
[01:44:38]  That's what MLM stands for.
[01:44:40]  Men loving men.
[01:44:41]  That should be your MLM.
[01:44:43]  Men loving men.
[01:44:44]  I teach you my course on how to be gay.
[01:44:50]  Crack the code.
[01:44:52]  But what if it wasn't?
[01:44:54]  Just my stark.
[01:44:55]  What if it was just like creating an Iron John, like how to be like, Brible scream together?
[01:45:00]  No.
[01:45:01]  Like, what if it was just like gentle fraternity?
[01:45:04]  I think that's, they did that in the 90s, dude.
[01:45:06]  I'm not even joking.
[01:45:07]  I think that was like a huge like movement.
[01:45:10]  But I think that could be nice.
[01:45:11]  Philadelphia.
[01:45:12]  Men loving men.
[01:45:14]  Men loving men by men.
[01:45:15]  Brace belted.
[01:45:16]  Men loving men.
[01:45:18]  Brace belt.
[01:45:19]  By brace belted.
[01:45:21]  But I don't love other people.
[01:45:22]  Well, you got to take a course and figure out why.
[01:45:24]  And then you learn how.
[01:45:26]  It's because I love myself too much.
[01:45:27]  Well, it's because I'm devoted to God.
[01:45:29]  Well, that's also part of men loving men.
[01:45:31]  That's true.
[01:45:32]  Because you got to love the man.
[01:45:33]  That's the man.
[01:45:34]  It is when people are like, we don't know God.
[01:45:36]  I'm like, well, when he came to earth, he was a guy.
[01:45:39]  Well, that was a son.
[01:45:40]  But it was also.
[01:45:41]  Don't even get me a startup.
[01:45:42]  know what's going on with that because it's like but he goes by the son of God I understand, Liz.
[01:45:48]  You don't understand.
[01:45:49]  I've been trying to figure this for months.
[01:45:50]  Wait, how do you understand that Jesus Christ?
[01:45:53]  The Trinity, but beyond that, even like.
[01:45:56]  So Jesus Christ was born, right?
[01:46:03]  Jesus Christ was born.
[01:46:05]  Like the song.
[01:46:05]  Jesus Christ was born.
[01:46:08]  But he's also his dad?
[01:46:10]  Sort of a multi-level deity.
[01:46:12]  Exactly.
[01:46:13]  That's what that's unclear because he's the son of God.
[01:46:16]  And people are like, oh, God sacrificed his son.
[01:46:18]  But I'm like, but he is also God?
[01:46:20]  Well, it's the Trinity.
[01:46:22]  But what the fuck?
[01:46:23]  But that doesn't, you can't just say, oh, well, it's the Trinity.
[01:46:26]  That doesn't, that's not.
[01:46:27]  That's got to get that.
[01:46:28]  That's a fucking mind.
[01:46:29]  That's a thought killer, right?
[01:46:31]  I'm trying to think about this.
[01:46:32]  Is he, he just is also the Son of God.
[01:46:35]  And I guess God could probably do that, huh?
[01:46:37]  Yeah.
[01:46:37]  But then it's not so big of a deal, right?
[01:46:39]  Because it's like, oh, he sent his only son.
[01:46:41]  Well, he could make another one.
[01:46:43]  But then there's a third in there.
[01:46:44]  The Holy Ghost is some other shit.
[01:46:46]  That's like the God that's in us, I think.
[01:46:49]  I don't know.
[01:46:49]  Ghost thing is, they should not, they should have named it something else, but maybe that's a good translation from Latin.
[01:46:54]  But like, what I understand is if God, God, I guess, is unknowable because some of this shit does not make a lot of sense.
[01:47:00]  But I believe, dude, all of it.
[01:47:04]  And with that, I'm Liz.
[01:47:05]  My name is Brace.
[01:47:07]  I am Producer Young Chomsky.
[01:47:09]  And this has been TrueNON.
[01:47:10]  We'll see you next time.