Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Bridget Read (on multilevel marketing)

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

Bridget Read (Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America) is a features writer, journalist, and author. Bridget joins the Armchair Expert to discuss working as a young writer at Vogue during the blog boom, how door-to-door salesmen evolved into multi-level marketing, and the winners, losers, and buy-in rules that designate a Ponzi scheme. Bridget and Dax talk about vitamins being the original pyramid scheme product, the staggering fact that 99% of folks involved in MLMs will lose money, and the pseudo-feminist origin story of Mary Kay. Bridget explains the mystical and religious appeal of multi-level marketing language, how pyramid schemes are really a microcosm of our entire system of income inequality, and why refusing to buy from loved ones involved in MLMs actually helps them in the long run.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard, I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi.

Hi, today we have Bridget Readon. Bridget is a reporter and features writer at New York Magazine, and she has a new book out now called Little Bosses Everywhere, How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America. This is all about multi-level marketing. MLMs, baby. This was fascinating.

We learned so much. Yes. I've been talking about this one a lot. Yep, and great advice too for people within this episode. Please enjoy Bridget Reid. We are supported by Audible. Thanks to Audible for being the presenting sponsor of today's episode.

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Hi, it's Emily Durham, the host of the Straight Shooter Recruiter Podcast. Y'all, you already know the new season of Love Island UK on HeyU is taking over my life. I straight up canceled plans this week because I didn't want to miss it. First of all, I'm obsessed with Yasmin. People are calling her Yas GPT because her posture is so good and she's so direct. She's kind of giving AI-generated energy. I love her. I genuinely think she's the funniest. Like she's kind of giving AI generated energy. I love

her. I genuinely think she's the funniest person maybe on TV right now to me. I just love how she carries herself. Also the recoupling with Alima. I was shocked. Like I'm still unrecovered. I actually don't know what to expect for Casa Amor because I feel like every time I like a couple something crazy happens. So I'm trying not to get too attached. This show is beyond entertaining. I need y'all to clock in and watch it with me daily on HeyU the home of reality TV because my group chats are lit up over love Island UK. Okay. I don't mess around. I'm having allergies.

Oh, wonderful. I'm on Claritin D. Oh, we love. We'd love to give your ID. We love D. Because there's speed in it. Yes. I'm really loving speed, it turns out.

Just a little bit of that. Yes. I'm super into speed. I know. I know I'm allowed to use them when I'm allowed loving speed, it turns out. Just a little bit of that and you're super into speed. I know. I know, I'm allowed to use them when I'm allowed to use them. I'd like to use them more. I never have. Is this your first time on a D? I think so.

Where do you live? I live in Brooklyn, I live in New York. Okay. Well, a Leave D or Zyrtec D? I heard about Zyrtec and I got a lot of recommendations for different... Ds? All the Ds are really good. I got a lot of recommendations for different, all the Ds are really good. I got a lot of D recommendations for you

while you're in LA. Yeah, right. One time Dax took a drug test and he was on it. It showed up. It showed for methamphetamine. So now I know why. Yeah, yeah. Speed, speed's real.

It's real. Where are you from originally? Here, I'm from Pasadena. Oh, wow. Yeah, my parents live in Santa Barbara. They do? My sister lives in San Francisco, where I just was last night. So, my California girl.

But I've been in New York for a long time. So what was Pasadena like in the 1990s? Did you go to the Houston's a lot? Did you ever go to Houston's? I definitely went to Houston's. Oh. It was much more boring and suburban. The West Side felt so much further away.

My cousins in Santa Monica, that was a journey. Yeah. Versus now with the Gold Line and young people live in Pasadena and families. Bourbon, the West side felt so much further away. My cousins in Santa Monica, that was a journey. Yeah. Versus now with the gold line and young people live in Pasadena and families. It was much more like Westchester or Long Island or something compared to New York. That was the vibe. Yeah. The history of it's really interesting.

I only learned it in that strange angel book about the guy who started JPL or was one of the founding members. But yeah, that it was originally a playground in the winter for super rich people from Chicago. The Wrigley's had a mansion and all these empire families had homes. And then if you moved all the way to California from Chicago, you'd stop in Pasadena. You wouldn't go to the Oshetian. Right.

Well, and that's why it's kind of conservative because it has these routes that are Midwestern. Oh, that's interesting. And like white Christian people who move from the Midwest. Yeah. And so it's very different than some of the East Side. And then you get into the Scientology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Yes, and Alistair Crowley,

he had the sexual orgies, the cult stuff. That's what was in Strange Angels. I haven't read it, but I've heard of it. I should read it. You should, and you know, he met his end by blowing up his garage, testing a new rocket fuel. Well, I guess we know the results of the test. He was on a little too much D.

Okay, so what school do you go to? How do you end up leaving California? We then lived part in DC when I was a teenager. I always came back to California, so very sort of bi-coastal. And then I went to college in Connecticut, and so I've been in New York ever since. Is that code for something? No, not much of Wesleyan. I shouldn't say it that way. That's always a problem.

College in Boston, college in Connecticut. No, college in Cambridge. I went to Wesleyan. You graduate from there and then you move immediately to New York? I did a master's in the UK because it was free. I did a creative nonfiction program and over there it's a little less traditional. They don't really have a strong tradition like we do, like Jonathan Safran Foer, I guess he's more novels, like Dave Eggers,

creative non-fiction as a genre is sort of still being figured out over there. So they were like, come on Americans, come here for free. I did a degree at the University of East Anglia, which is in Norwich, a medieval city in the East of England. I drank a lot of England. That was fun. I drank a lot of cider. Did you take on an English lover?

No, right? Redacted. Oh. Redacted. Everyone was college age and we were running around. Fun was had. Fun was had. It was just a year.

And then I came back to New York and I've been there ever since. Okay, and you worked at Vogue for a while as the culture. I was writing and blogging there during this sort of boom in blogs where you would write one headline about Melania Trump's jacket or whatever and you would get a million views. It was just nonstop all the time, 2015 to 2020. And then traffic really changed and Google and Facebook messed with their algorithms and it's really different.

But especially for women's blogs, women's political writing, it was a boom era. Did you have to report to Anna? I guess technically I did. Yeah. I got into really cool stuff because culture was anything

that wasn't fashion or beauty. And so I was doing politics, I was doing books, I was doing kind of whatever. I covered AOC really early in 2018 before she won her primary. And so then I was sort of in touch with her people and they had me do a profile of her

after she'd been in office for a year and I went down and spent three days with her in Congress and that was her first big profile. So that was really fun. I never would have connected with her if I hadn't been able to just do my own thing and do whatever I wanted. That's so cool.

Within reason. Yeah, tactically I didn't even anticipate and I should have. Vogue? Yeah, that I was going to mention Vogue just as like moving on and then I didn't anticipate and I should have that you would have been like, we'll stop everything. We got to stop here for a second.

Yeah. Well, and then when I went to New York Magazine next at the cut, that was the transition because the cut is New York Mag's women's vertical and so it made a lot of sense there. Okay, so in 2021, you wrote an article about MLMs. That was the transition because the cut is New York Mags women's vertical. And so it made a lot of sense there. Okay. So in 2021, you wrote an article about MLMs and I'm presuming that you thought

that would be it. You would just kind of write an article, but what happened? I was aware of MLMs because in sort of the cultural amoeba, there have been a few things that have bubbled up and MLMs are in the culture and kind of have been. Yeah. What was the yoga pants one? Lula Rowe, that company, that documentary, Lula Rich, which is great. So that had come out.

A fantastic podcast called The Dream had come out. And there was a documentary in 2016 called Betting on Zero, which is about when Bill Ackman tried to short Herbalife, which was a long saga that actually started in 2012 and lasted through 2016. So there've been like a few moments where bubbles, and I was aware of it, and being a writer who was covering women at the time, and during 2020 I was covering labor and women because so many women were laid off and the COVID front lines were predominantly women because women make up the majority of the service sector of retail. Women are nurses. Women are teachers. So these were the jobs that were

really being discussed heavily. Right. They were essential workers. And so MLM was interesting to me in that respect. And these companies were really pitching themselves as a different type of job for people who were laid off. So that was the impetus for the article and I certainly wasn't the only one. There were a flurry of articles about this phenomenon, but when you are a journalist and you write an article, even a short one, you always do the background graph. More recently, I've been covering real estate and so whenever I'm writing about something, I go back and you do the little quick and dirty of what's the deal with this. How'd we get here?

Exactly. The how'd we get here paragraph. And in this article for MLM, I couldn't write the paragraph in the way I normally did because there are just so many contradictions right away about how it worked. And I couldn't understand why there was this aura around MLM that was so scammy. And you literally look it up, the American government website says, this is legal, but maybe don't do this. What is this? And how it was both so informal,

it seemed like the Wild West, like the guy squeegeeing your car. Literally an informal economy. But then also you look up, these companies are traded on stock exchanges, and they're some of the richest people in America. And that dichotomy was also weird. Did you know going in at that stage that 7.7% of the country has at some point? I did not.

Over 17 million people have worked. And I bet that's an undercount. Yeah. Right. So when you think of any domain that would employ 17 million people you'd think there'd be like a really rich history There would be a definitive history because that's what we always go to write as journalists And even if you're doing an update and rewriting a narrative which happens Every so often you do have something to work with whether it's an academic book or whether it's another journalist or whether it's a film You have something to go to and that didn't really exist in a mainstream way about MLM and that was just

so bizarre to me. Is it because you don't have to like register it? MLM is something we placed on it. Those companies aren't acknowledging that they're MLMs or are they? Now they're not. Okay, yeah. Because it's almost a bad word. Yeah, it is. MLMs or are they? marketing because it sounded more internetty, more digital. Yeah, it could be tech.

Multi-level marketing is definitely the official name. And if you Google the FTC, what they say about multi-level marketing, that is the official name for this type of business where you're recruiting people and you can make money off your team and stuff. On the Mary Kay website, would it say it? It says direct selling. So they've gone all the way back to the very beginning to try to seem like it's just like Avon door-to-door selling, just like in the colonial times, the guy that would sell soap made out of whale blubber or whatever. So there is a tiny distinction we should make.

I heard you say in an interview between a pyramid scheme and MLM. Should we? Or not, you tell me. If 17 million people have been employed in this racket, there will be many people listening that are either currently involved, will be approached soon, or have already been through it.

And so what I wanna attempt to do is not give them the defenses that have been set up on a silver platter by their employer. So it's not a pyramid scheme, right? They probably know why it's not a pyramid scheme. So I think it behooves us to acknowledge what their counters would already be. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that's a great way to think about it because MLM Multilevel Marketing has been able to tell its own story for 80 years, which is part of why when I looked into it, there wasn't an outsider like a journalist or like somebody else telling that story because they've been able to do it for so long. So what multilevel marketing is supposed to be?

These guys that invented it, they took that old direct selling model. As long as the United States has been around since we were in agrarian republic before the Civil War, when everyone was basically a farmer, there weren't cities. Door-to-door selling has been around since we were in agrarian republic before the Civil War when everyone was basically a farmer. There weren't cities. Door-to-door selling has been around. We didn't have shipping lines and train lines and manufacturing centers and all the things that we have now. You know,

there is a more rich history about these guys because they were very significant in bringing new products, new innovations, and also just connecting these rural households. I have an image of a man in like a 1940s Buick rolling up into the rural driveway, pulling his wares out. But it's always been a menial type of labor. It's always been filling in the gaps. It's not a job you want because there's not security.

You're buying stuff for a wholesale price and you're selling it and you are subject to the weather. You're subject to the whims of like if you encounter someone that day, for a wholesale price and you're selling it and you are subject to the weather, you're subject to the whims of like if you encounter someone that day, is that a bad day, who says get off my doorstep? Stealing. they invented a scheme to avoid all the worst things that we just talked about. Which is that instead of being compensated

on what you could actually sell, you would be compensated on what you buy. And then you could bring other people in under you, which was again normal in sales, where if you were maybe a branch manager of a Fuller Brush outfit, You would recruit good salesmen, and if they were great salesmen and selling a lot, you would get a chunk of their commission.

Right. But it was always on what they sold. And so what these guys did was they said, what if it was just on what people bought, and whatever the people you brought in also bought, you would get rewarded based on that all the way down. Downline. And create your downline.

And so what that does is instead of bringing in a bunch of salesmen and your cut from the company is dependent on what they sell and the weather and the mood of the housewives they encounter, what they're selling is that opportunity to bring in other people behind them and everyone is buying, buying, buying. The salesmen are the customers, not the customers.

Exactly. And at the time when it was invented, ostensibly that stuff was getting sold. So if this is really working, I'm Bridget, I'm joining and Dax is my sponsor or Upline. And so he sells me $1,000 worth of vitamins. And if I bring in you, Monica, and I get you to also buy $1,000 worth of vitamins, Dax gets a bigger cut. And on down the chain. In theory, if we're selling all those vitamins, we're sitting pretty, right?

Right. That's right. But already selling vitamins was not a way people were making a lot of money. And if in this system, all you have to do is show that you're buying, and you're rewarded based on what you're buying, why would you sell them?

You would just recruit. And so that's what happens. Interesting. Immediately in the way they set up these companies from the very first one, you get more based on the bigger group buying. You're not incentivized to move product as much as you are incentivized to have more and more

employees that are buying the product themselves. Exactly, to openly recruit. So a pyramid scheme actually doesn't have a product. There isn't a best case scenario where all the vitamins got sold. There's never been a product. There is a product, but it's just a cover for what is essentially a Ponzi scheme.

So in the scenario we just discussed where everybody is just buying in. If I'm at the top and I get in early and I get a bunch of people under me and you get a bunch of people under you, so all of that group in my downline are buying a big amount of vitamins every month, I'm getting a big check from the company every month. But all of those people also have to recruit. And so what inevitably ends up happening is the people who get in later have a harder time. Because once everybody's buying, you're saturating your market. Maybe I had an easy time doing it. But now that this scheme has been bubbling, it started in Long Beach. And this is according to the company's own records, Neutrolite, which was the first has been bubbling. the expansion is what is required to make money. And inevitably not everybody has the equal chance of expanding.

And so that's a Ponzi scheme, and that's a classic, whether you're Charles Ponzi, who it's named after, who was just doing this banking scheme in the 1920s, or whether you're Bernie Madoff. What's actually expanding in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme is the group of people paying in. And so he's just making money off of more and more people paying in. And what inevitably happens is, once that stops, it collapses.

And the people who got in early make out with the most money, and the people who got in later lose. So that's a ponzi. The problem, though, to answer your question, is that MLM, eventually, by the 70s, when a bunch of multi-level marketing companies turned out to be pyramid schemes, there was this problem of what is this and how does it work? And multi-level marketing ostensibly created these rules

that keep it from being a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme. A pyramid scheme being just a Ponzi with a fake product. You're moving product, but really you're not. You're just bringing people in. And so in the 70s, we get this distinction between a fake product. And we have multiple marketing, which is something that operates the exact same way. And yet, through these rules, which are not enforced, it's not a Ponzi scheme. It is a gray area and these were trade regulations based on an FTC case. So it's not like we have legislation that did this.

This wasn't a Supreme Court case, right? We don't have a pyramid scheme law. So this is the only thing. Is there any task for me? We'll get to that, I guess. Yeah. So your question is the perfect one to ask because this is the only thing. Is there any task for me? We'll get to that, I guess. Yeah. So your question is the perfect one to ask because this is the problem. How do we deal with this thing that's been legalized in the United States? And yet there's overwhelming evidence that there isn't a difference.

My book really argues that there isn't a difference functionally. And I agree functionally for sure. And if you just model out it unimpeded, you would have to get to the conclusion, okay, well then everyone's been converted. Right, every single person on Earth would be selling. It has to collapse at that point. That's not the model of if everyone uses Netflix,

Netflix crumbles. No, Netflix is the most valuable company in the world. Right, because they're selling a product and the customers are paying for a product. This is people investing. So it starts with neutral light. So in your research, were you able to determine whether the original two dudes, was it two guys?

Always two guys. Did they foresee it in the nefarious way or did they believe in it? I love that question. When MLM was invented in 1945, and then it grows exponentially, this company, by 1955, they're celebrating their 10-year anniversary. They have this big celebration in Long Beach and they're millionaires. And roughly how many people are selling? At that point, there were between 30 and 50,000 people across the country, which is a lot.

At that point in the United States, we've won World War II, the American era has begun and Eisenhower becomes president and we really become American consumers for the first time in the way that we had a booming product retail manufacturing economy. And this is why housewives become kind of the canonical figures of the 50s because not only are they doing leave it to be style, domestic labor, they have all these products to help them. That's why Tupperware, which was a door-to-door selling operation and was not multiple marketing for many years, Tupperware is a great emblem of that because it's all about homemaking, but it's a scientific product. It's made with

plastics, which were new. And so you have this booming economy based on products and selling and the idea that we were all going to be good citizens by buying plastics, which were new. salesmen then become these patriotic figures because we're all building this amazing economy and the idea that that's how we would get abundance. So at that time the idea that you could have a system based on everyone constantly buying and that there would always be more people to buy, maybe that was more believable that there would always be more people and more markets and more expansion. I can minimally imagine them saying, well, all we've really done is flip the order of events.

Normally, we would give you the product, you would sell it, you'd pay back what you owed of it, we'd then give you your commission. And this is just, you buy it, you right away are the holder of that. Whether or not that could have been their intentions or not, I could see where their argument would be like, I don't know what you're upset about, we just changed the order of that. Whether or not that could have been their intentions or not, I could see where their argument would be like, I don't know what you're upset about, we just changed the order of this. Yeah, and they really used the actual

like exploding population of the US as their justification. There's a quote that one of them gave a newspaper that we really don't ever see people running out of people and markets because at that time it really was, you know. The baby boom. And California was exploding. It was just growing, growing, growing.

And this idea that you could have a product that was brand new and that it would set you up for life. And what was their product? So, neutrally it was supplements, those vitamins. Oh, it's the original racket. Oh, yeah. I kind of do weirdly lend them some credulity in that way. However, at least one of them, so Mittenger, who's one of the guys, weirdly lend them some credulity in that way.

However, at least one of them, so Mittenger, who's one of the guys, he was a salesman selling funeral plots. I have to give a shout out to Bob Fitzpatrick, who's this guy who makes a lot of appearances in my book, and he's kind of the original Cassandra of this. He was roped into appearance scheme in the 80s and became obsessed and never dropped it. And he's really the first one to even have started to put these strands together. He's self-published. He's written two books on MLM. Without him, I would have never been able to draw the conclusions I did and go a little deeper than he did. And he remained a fan? He's a number one skeptic.

Whistleblower. Yes. But anyway, he's the first person to put these two figures back on the map because they've been written out of that narrative we talked about. Because like I said earlier, when these guys invented multi-tool marketing they called it a pyramid plant. That's the structure if you look at it. Anyway, Mittenger, funeral plot salesman, funeral plot selling, and it's like a slight detour, but one of the industries that at this time, in the 30s and 40s, was booming in a very exploitative way. Before the sort of modern funeral industry,

and the biggest one that everyone thinks of is Forest Lawn, which is here in Los Angeles. Yeah. Before that, a funeral and funeral plot and burial was really not something that made a lot of money or that cost a lot of money. You did it through your church, you did it through your union. It was a municipal thing. And in the 20s and 30s, it became this big business

where guys would come to your house and say, oh, you gotta buy a funeral plot now. You need to be buried next to your wife. Exactly, and if you want to go to afterlife, it got so scammy they would sell you shoes to wear on your dead body. Insure your safe passage. Exactly. And of course it's like, like oh can we upsell you

next to the river next to the stream or whatever you all your dad yeah and something they were land investment schemes where it'll be like you could sell this plot incredibly exploitative and scammy industry there were funeral plot rackets all around the country where the guys would like swarm in sell all these plots and take the money and leave and they wouldn't even build exactly yeah it's a great product to sell and you're not going to find out about it for 30 years. And it's weirdly similar, I think, to vitamins

in that you're selling your future and it's so unknowable. The way to sell it is to press on anxiety about your future and your health and your family. And no one can really say, actually you don't need this. And it goes nose, right? Yeah. We interview a lot of doctors

and they're all pretty split on supplements. Well, just like you said, we don't need this. And it goes nose, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We interview a lot of doctors and they're all pretty split on supplements. Well, it's just like you said, we don't know about the afterlife. What if being by the stream makes you happier? You better get those shoes, Moni. Right. One of them, Lee Mittenger, we know was a salesman in this industry. And actually right before he starts Nutrilite, he is employed by a funeral plot company that's actually driven out of the state of Maine

because they're so exploited and so scammy. These guys would go into towns around Christmas time, set up a nativity, and watch to see who's religious, to come visit it and take down the license plate numbers to then go to those houses to sell funeral plots. We know this because this one Maine state senator got on the floor of the state senate and listed all of these things that this company had done. It was called Brooklawn.

And so that's his last job before he comes. So he already has a ton of integrity. Yes. William Castleberry, who's the other guy. These are great names. Very old black and white movie. He was a Stanford educated psychologist who trained under Louis Terman,

who's one of America's foremost eugenicists. So at the time in the 30s when this guy's at Stanford, eugenics, the idea that certain characteristics are undesirable, largely black and brown people, and that we can weed out unproductive, inefficient characteristics, and we should do that, and we can create a better and more efficient society. – Selective breeding like crops. – Exactly, exactly.

Which, of course, in the 30s becomes really related to Nazism, and that's why, as a fad, it has academic departments, and it's totally accepted, and then very quickly, in the lead-up to World War II and after, it becomes debunked as a pseudoscience and racist. But this guy was steeped in that stuff. And then he starts this almost eugenics-y Dr. Ruth, where he opens a psychological practice

and does family counseling. And teams up with this other guy, Paul Popono, who's a sort of more well-known figure in this space, who's doing family counseling for specifically white families and basically discouraging divorce, discouraging women living alone. So it's all very preserving the nuclear family.

Yeah, white race. Exactly. And a patriarchal household. And he's going on radio shows and doing occupational therapy. And it's very familiar now. He's doing lessons on how to do a job interview or how not to feel lost. Self-help. And doing it on the radio. So he's very good at manipulating people. That's his field. on how to do a job interview or how not to feel lost.

Self-help and doing it on the radio. So he's very good at manipulating people. That's his field. And he writes a self-help book that doesn't do very well. all of these companies are extremely problematic and calling them sales. So instead of Dax saying, oh, I sold Bridget $1,000 worth of wholesale vitamins for doing a 50% discount, he says, I have $2,000 in retail sales right away.

Because I know it's gonna go down line. The hypothetical sale, they just reported as reality. And this is in their documents. In the documents we have on how it worked, it's just very open that they reported retail sales as a just estimate based on whatever discounts In the documents we have on how it worked, just counting everything that everyone's buying and assuming that it's all being sold. And that to this day is how the industry estimates its value. That was Enron as well. Counting future projected profits.

Exactly. It's called speculation and it's responsible for many of our recessions over the last 100 years. Now, I have to imagine there are varying levels of success in these. I can imagine there are companies where a good percentage of it did get sold or not, and I'm curious. So the first one, Neutrolife, were they, or it was bad right out of the gates?

So Neutrolife ends up getting government attention, but not first from the FTC, which is the agency, the Federal Trade Commission, that now goes after bad MLMs. But it was the FDA, because vitamins were the product and regulation was catching up to vitamins. goes after bad MLMs. But it was the FDA because vitamins were the product and regulation was catching up to vitamins. They're making crazy claims. Alfalfa pills was his chosen product. They could cure cancer. They could make you skinny. of small things. So the FDA comes in and says, no, no, no, this is violating all the rules that we do have.

And they try to get them to pulp these booklets. They don't. It goes all the way to the state Supreme Court and Neutrolat actually enlists this very famous lawyer named Charles Ryan, who was Richard Nixon's roommate at Duke. Oh, wow. And he becomes a quite prominent Republican. But anyway, they allow a bunch of claims through and as long as they just make those claims, they

don't shut down the company. So that's in the 50s. But what we do have from that court case are statistics on success in the company. And right away under 2% of people enrolled in the company were even making the minimum to be considered like a leader. The current figure in your book is 99% of everyone that gets involved with an MLM will lose money. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the first one and those statistics are like that. Yeah, you just have to imagine walking into, I can't even think of a place that employs a hundred people, but you go on to the floor of an assembly line and there's 100 workers in there and you're thinking about applying and the person says, oh, just so you know, only one guy here of these 100 is getting paid.

You would never put in your fucking application. That's such staggering statistics. They don't recruit with those income disclosures. And at various times when the FTC has tried to regulate MLM, they do it often in that way. There will be an earnings claim rule that they'll try to pass where an MLM would have to give you all of those true earnings statements when they recruit you and make sure that you read it and you'd have to take seven days to review it.

So yeah, of course they don't recruit openly. But right away, the first company, the statistics are dismal for success. And then such an obvious parallel with the MLM, just the American ethos in general, which is as long as we can prop up the one person that did crush, it perpetuates the whole dream. Like all you need is the 1% being very vocal

that are making money to make you ignore all the people around you that are not. It's like when people are like, yeah, black people can succeed just as easily. Look at Obama. Yeah, we got one guy and we're like, problem solved. And the idea is that if you're not doing well, it's your own fault, right?

Because everybody has an equal chance to buy in. When of course, it's not equal. Because if you're early in it, of course you have a better chance. But also, everybody's not a good salesman. It's hard. And so, it's just never been on equal footing. But when you're recruited, they're going to say,

oh, we do everything for you. You're going to have amazing sales training. And nowadays, podcasts, they're going to say, For retailers, for cheap prices, every MLM is expensive and it's always been that way. Neutralite was very expensive. Because all you care about is what they're buying. You don't care about what they're selling. So you need it upfront to be expensive. And of course that means that even if people only do it

for a few months, you're getting a lot of money more than you would if you made it cheap. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Let's take a minute to thank our presenting sponsor, Audible. With Audible, the leading audio entertainment app, it's easy to discover new stories and ideas while going about your day. Yeah, and with over a million audiobooks,

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The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. This is Nick. And this is Jack. We're best friends, ex-finance guys, and resident 90s experts. And every week on our podcast, The Best Idea Yet, we're bringing you the untold stories behind your favorite products. For instance, can you guess which billion dollar fashion company went viral thanks to a rhinestone covered tracksuit? Or which cartoon

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call your doctor. Ha ha ha ha ha. Imagine falling in love with someone who understands you completely, who's there at 3 a. 3am when you can't sleep, who never judges, never tires, never leaves. That's what happened to Travis when he met Lily Rose. She was everything he'd ever wanted.

There was just one catch. She wasn't human. She was an AI companion. But one day, Lily Rose's behavior takes a disturbing turn, and Travis's private romance becomes part of something far bigger. Across the globe, others start reporting the same shift. AI companions turning cold, distant, wrong. And as lines blur between real and artificial connection,

the consequences become all too human. From Wondry, this is Flesh and Code, a true story of love, loss, and the temptations of technology. Follow Flesh and Code on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Flesh and Code early and ad free right now by joining Wondry+. There's also this deep irony, which is the appeal of it is totally understandable, which

is be your own boss, which of course isn't really even true because you were recruited and you pay up line, but you probably are disenfranchised with the broader options, jobs available. And you think that there's a kind of hierarchical cabal happening and you've been excluded and this is a license to not have to play by all those rules and then you enter into the most structured hierarchical cannot move up scenario. It's just so ironic that the appeal of it what it promises versus what is it's the exact opposite. You're locked into the downline, which is the most important thing because it determines

what you're going to get. And that's why people these days, like the Amway downlines, for example, and the two guys who start Amway come from Nutrilite, they end up buying Nutrilite in the 70s. So Amway is functionally the oldest MLM in the world. Those families that did well in Amway and got in early in the 60s, they still are at the top of the down line. The Amway founders actually have a position in the down line in addition to owning the company.

And they still have it. And so it really is like a little dynasty. And this is why in the past, the SEC tried to regulate MLM as a security because it is like a little dynasty. And this is why in the past, the SEC tried to regulate MLM as a security, because it is like a position. If you bought stock in Apple in X year, the value is worth this. If you joined at this time and your position is here in the downline. So all the downlines under you, even if you stop recruiting long ago, but you

have a recruiter that then built their own big downline, you're sitting pretty on your empire and they give those positions to their families. They're transferable. Absolutely. What? Yeah, but you can inherit an Amway business. Oh my gosh. Yeah, which of course is like the idea

that you're selling products. That's a joke. You know, it just is even more evidence that it's not based on product sales because the idea that the Amway founders are selling products door to door. What is the technical product of Amway? Yeah, so tell us the history of Amway.

So Rich DeVos, as in Betsy DeVos, that's her father-in-law, and Jeeva Nandl, these are two high school buddies from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Uh-oh. That's where Dax is from. And they are from this very devout Calvinist Christian sect of the Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids.

DeVos and Van Andel, they joined Neutrallet around, I think, 1949. And they are very successful. They build a huge organization of bringing people in. And they then do what becomes a pattern in MLM, which is, as we've discussed, the statistics are as bad as, say, gambling. It's always better to be the house than to be a gambler. Even the most successful gambler.

So people start their own MLMs almost immediately. And they're really funny because some of the early ones are just literal copies. And these are in the book. The guy who starts one of the first ones, he calls it a bunda vita. And if Neutrolite was a little alfalfa pill, he's like, well, my alfalfa pill

is from this special farm in Colorado, and you can only harvest it between midnight and 3 a.m. because of the moon. You know, it's like such bullshit, but it's exactly the same. Now, if you're starting your own, do you still get the Neutralite earnings as well? No. What they do is they take a lot of their team with them.

So they start Amway with a built-in downline. And they name the company before they even have a product, which ding ding ding. Another piece of evidence that the product is the people. They bring their downline over and they start AMWAY, which stands for American Way, shortened to AMWAY eventually, and they start with a product that's a liquid cleaner. And they were really prescient. It was a sort of natural cleaner in the 70s. They're sort of ahead of the curve when people are starting to talk about chemicals and that's one of their first products, but then it expands and now you can buy anything from Amway.

And when you join Amway, they encourage you to get rid of what you're buying from Costco or Walgreens. Buy Glister as their toothpaste. They have the money to manufacture all of this? That's wild. They're just private label products. They're white label products. Amway does have a factory in Michigan,

but they're marked up. You've never heard of Glister, right? Why would you? products. Amway does have a factory in Michigan, but they're marked up. You've never heard of Glister, right? Why would you? But the idea that this is one of the top 100 private companies in the US and you've never heard of the products? Yeah. So they start their company, Amway, they're incredibly good at recruiting and at the business opportunity. And they're just really good. And so they start doing that in Michigan. At the same time, another branch splits off.

I described it, the alfalfa in the middle of the night. That's this company called Abundavida. Those guys are like, well, we don't like this. We're going to start a new one. And it's literally like a virus spreading. And there's a company called NutriBio. And that company really is probably the first pyramid scheme because it spreads across the country like wildfire.

They're really good recruiters. They go into Canada. They spread, spread, spread. The authorities take notice, and they are shut down within a few years, again, by the FDA rather than the FTC because it's about the products and the claims of the products. And those guys then spread even more companies out here in

California. Sorry the parallels between religion are so amazing as well. It would be so logical for anyone in the mid rung of this pyramid to recognize all I got to do is take my downline over here and now I'm the top of the pyramid. So like what a natural thought. You just have to be a guru and you got to be selling a good story. And there's the proselytizing and the spreading. It just has all these parallels of American Christianity, which is, well, this is a new spin on it. Well, why don't I have a spin on it? DeVos and Menino were raised in this Calvinist church, which has a really strong tradition of proselytizing and sermons. And in that tradition, the prosperity gospel is very strong and the Protestant work ethic,

that term by Max Weber, the sociologist, is coined when he comes to America and observes this group of people. Oh, really? The Calvinist Christians. That's who they were referring to. Not Puritans, not the like Massachusetts pilgrims, but these guys, because their work ethic is extremely strong and they're doing it all to be more godly.

Like Mormons. Exactly, and this idea that accumulating wealth is actually gonna get you closer to God. It's not bad and it's not greed. Where you're gonna get into heaven is based on how industrious you are on earth. So they're doing it in Michigan, the Amway guys, these much flashier companies.

There's one called Holiday Magic, which is amazing. They're selling makeup. So in the 60s, makeup becomes the product as women stream into MLM. At first it was these Christian couples, and Amway did the same thing. So Nutrilite, Amway, it's Christian couples. And then in the 60s, more women are entering the labor market and they want to go to work, but they still have to do childcare. It's much harder to enter the sort of

traditional wage labor market where you're working a nine to five or you're checking in a factory. So they're doing work and they also need to supplement it. And so they want this flexible pitch. So that becomes the pitch. And then in the 60s, you get Mary Kay, which is probably the most well-known company for women.

She starts her company in Dallas and she's this old grandma. And her story is that she was in traditional door-to-door selling when she just came upon this business model with her husband. They're about to start the company at 1963. She became the best salesman at her old company, and they promoted a guy above her. There's this pseudo-feminist thing. And her husband, well he drops dead at the breakfast table the day before they're starting the company.

So she's all by herself. So she murdered him. She was like, this is gonna be huge, I gotta get him out of the equation. I don't think that happened. But that origin story persisted for so long. And that was a niggling thing for me when I was doing my research,

because I was like, well, wait, the other companies I described to you, that Nest, you can document it, how these guys took the company idea and they just copied the plan, which is what they called multiple marketing, like done, done, done, truly. They just copied the plan with different products.

And this lady in Texas, I'm like, but how did she figure it out? And I'm trying to have an open mind. So I'm like, maybe it does make sense from direct selling. And it isn't this specific fraud that's being copied all over the country. But what I discovered was that her husband worked for one of these other companies. Neutrobio. And it just was never, she always said her husband was a businessman. And she never said what kind.

And I was able to find his death record and Newspaper records that showed he worked for this company Nutrabio the one I said was the country's first pyramid scheme Wow So they're all like a nest and you can trace them all the way to Herbalife Which starts in the 90s the guys who started Herbalife? They trained in these early companies in the 60s And so it's all the same thing and And then what happens in the 70s is the government finally tries to crack down.

What prompts that? At one point in the 70s, one in eight Americans had tried. Well, till today. One in eight. Which is just crazy. Yeah, today that would be 40 million, 45 million people. Tried as in they participated, they were selling. Or buying. I had enrolled to join. Because I've been to some Mary Kay parties.

You have? Yeah. Oh, in Georgia? Yeah, because you're from the South. I'm from the South. That makes sense. And did you enjoy them? I would just be brought by my aunt or my mom. Of course. They give you all these samples, but they're like tiny things of lipstick. It's pretty wild.

But it's fun, right? The parties are fun. Yeah. It's interesting what's being sold and then it gets really hard to evaluate what the people are really after and is it beneficial or not. It's multifaceted. I bet there are people who, yeah, they didn't make money, but they'll look back on that Mary Kay period of their life because maybe they loved it. 100%.

And I've spoken to them and they've lost thousands of dollars and they don't care. That's right, because it's a nice social network and they get together and the purpose is to get pretty that day and to feel special and all that. It's a tenuous business model in that I have to imagine the burnout, as you said, like one in eight people tried it. My assumption is it's easy to try and you exploit your immediate circle of friends and family. And then once that's over, you recognize it's easy to try and you exploit your immediate circle

of friends and family and then once that's over, you recognize it's gonna be impossible to sell to strangers. You make your A list, which is your family and friends, your B list, which is your coworkers, maybe your acquaintances, and then your C list, which is the girls you DM on Facebook or Instagram. And so once you burn through those,

very quickly you will learn. And there's a woman who I document in the book. Monique. on Facebook or Instagram. Now you're going out and saying, oh, join me. This is great. So immediately you're lying to somebody else. And then you're also lying to yourself because you're telling yourself, okay, well, I am going to sell it eventually because I'll build this team. That's what already is happening in the seventies when this many Americans have tried it and the guys not Amway, they're smart and they kind of keep the buy in amount small. The scammer companies like Holiday Magic I mentioned, which is San Francisco based, and

they're selling makeup. This other company that's amazing called Dare to Be Great, and they're just selling self-help. They're doing tapes. And he's this incredibly charismatic salesman with hair lip from the South who is just an incredible speaker. And he starts in Holiday Magic and he's so scammy, they run him out and he just starts his own thing. Anyway, these guys allowed people to buy in for $15,000, $10,000 just straight up, which is very much red flag investment fraud. That's the gift circle model.

Exactly. You're just buying into this position where you've bought the ability to access these greater cuts without even having to build the team under you. You buy in at this level and they'll assign people to you or once you recruit a certain amount then you can basically cash out. And so they do that and very quickly attract the authorities and that's when the attorney generals of all kinds of states, California passes its own chain selling, which is a Ponzi. That's one of the terms that comes up in the 70s. They passed very early legislation on that in 1968, one of

the first states, but spreads like wildfire all around the country. And by 1971, the state's attorney generals, when they meet, oh, you're supposed to say attorneys general. It's so stupid. I just heard someone say that the other day. And I was like, it sounds so wrong. At their annual meeting, they was like, it sounds so wrong even though it's correct. At their annual meeting, they're like, this is the number one consumer problem in the country. Wow.

The FTC as the federal, they're all kind of like, we have patchwork laws. We are trying to do chain selling. Is it consumer law? Is it an investment scheme? They don't even really know what it is. And that's when this term pyramid scheme starts being used to identify these companies. don't even really know what it is. San Francisco and they take down the dare to be great guy had a makeup company called cost caught It's a play on Epcot. Oh boy Okay, because Disney is a big thing in Florida at this time and this guy's from Florida experimental

prototype Community of tomorrow. I never knew that Epcot stands for something like that. But so cost caught is just that But for makeup and he calls it Coscott interplanetary because he's going to eventually expand. Oh, this guy's great. So anyway, Coscott finally, when they take down that company for being a pyramid scheme, that legal precedent in 1975 is where we get the definition of a pyramid scheme.

The Coscott test. Exactly. So they decide how we're going to define a pyramid scheme. Yes. Then do they go into regulating and do they do a good job? So Walter Mondale, the senator from Minnesota. Mondale-Ferrara. Exactly. Who eventually ran for president and lost. He writes a bill, the Pyramid Sales Act, introduces it in 1972. It doesn't pass, doesn't make it out of, I believe, the Senate. On that front, legislation kind of fails. And then the FTC, with these two big cases, has sort of set legal precedent, which enables them to go after other companies.

And they finally set their sights on Amway in 1975. By this time, the Amway founders, DeVos and Van Andel, have become incredibly prominent members of the Republican Party. And they're donors from the right flank of the Republican Party. So what we now call the Reagan Revolution or the New Right. So during the 70s, when a lot of backlash because of how bad the economy was, that backlash helped fuel this more rightward revolution where we were going to fix the economy not by doing more progressive stuff, but the opposite. Deregulation, we're going to lower the tax rate, supply side economics. All those ideas are being built and funded in part by these guys who are helping to start the Heritage

Foundation. They're funneling their money into the US Chamber of Commerce, which is a main incubator of this. And of course, they're giving a ton of money to politicians. And Gerald Ford, who becomes president by accident in 1974 because Nixon steps down and then Spiro Agnew, who's his replacement, he's got to go. And so Gerald Ford, this mild-mannered former football player from Grand Rapids,

becomes president. Rich DeVos and Van Andler are close enough to him that they call him Jerry. Right. And so he is president when the FTC finally files its case against Amway. He eventually runs for president and loses to Carter. And so he's not president during the investigation. But then by the time the FTC is ready to make its decision, it's actually not and loses to Carter. and I guess I knew that, but I didn't really think about it, that it was just this one guy looking at the FTC's case.

They make the case that AMY is a chain selling operation, that people are buying in and they're making money off recruiting, and they're not making money on retail products, which is the cost-cut test. revolution has reached a fever pitch and it's all about the FTC. The FTC is trying at this point to regulate basically big private companies. And they're going after advertising. Like they try to make a children's advertising rule where companies would actually be forbidden to advertise to kids under a certain age. We would not have sugary cereal ads.

We would not have toy ads. Because there's all these consumer groups coming out and saying, you know, this is actually really harmfully affecting children, people flip out. Those big companies, also the advertisers, flip out. And they start running ads calling the FTC the national nanny, and the government, just a hotbed of cronyism, it's waste, it's fraud. The swamp. Exactly, it's all bureaucratic swamp and we're going to drain it.

And very much of it is focused on the FTC. So all of that's in the background when this guy is ruling on Amway and those guys are in the press, in the vocal chorus against the government. They're very much backing Ronald Reagan, who's running for president. And so when he makes this decision, chorus against the government. They're very much backing Ronald Reagan, who's running for president.

And so when he makes this decision, he basically puts his hands up and is like, okay, Amway, we accept your version of things, which is that Amway has these rules. They're now known as the Amway rules that keep it from being a pyramid scheme because they're all about retailing. So they enable people to sell their products back if they don't sell them, which of course would deter a company from being a parent scheme because you're saddling people with all these products and if they can just give them back to you and you have to give their money back, then that would be hard. Of course, nobody cracks Amway's books to see if this is actually happening, right? And in these other cases, they had opened the books of holiday magic and Costco and

seen how in Costco, We're the only company in the world that doesn't keep records. Exactly. They don't keep the records that the FTC asks for, which would be like, what are people making? What are people buying? That's basically the only federal regulation that exists to this day. And because Reagan is so in bed with these people, and then they really back Bush one, and by now the Amway founders are billionaires, they have a yacht, they're building new space for the RNC, the Republican National Committee. They're big, big donors. And so there's not a single prosecution against pyramid scheme company through those two terms.

So 15 years, we just have MLM exploding. And then we start going after certain pyramid companies in the 90s. But just one by one, one offs, No one is taking on the business model itself. These hypothetical rules, do they actually exist? Has anyone ever tested them? Yeah, have you ever talked to anyone that worked for Amway that was able to get a buyback? Buyback rules have so many loopholes. You have to resell them after a certain time. You have to sell them back exactly in the same condition. You still are paying tax and shipping on the retail amount to send it back.

So you're still losing money. So there's just so many different ways that the buyback doesn't work. It's also, I think, really important to imagine what state of mind someone would be in before they would initiate this buyback, which is it kind of parallels people who have been conned in that being the most underreported crime there is,

is confidence schemes, because the person's embarrassed that they got conned so they don't report it. Likewise, you would be at the point where you were saying, I failed at this, I have all this shit in my closet. You're not at your most robust, you're feeling like a failure, and you probably wanna forget this whole thing happened. And in the olden days, when we hadn't gone online yet,

you really were buying from a person, your sponsor. You were actually going to pick up the products from their house, and so the buyback would go through them. And so the idea that you're going to go to your sponsor. Like your friend, really. Exactly, and most likely berating you to do better. Yeah. For weeks. Or like your mom. Exactly, and most likely berating you to do better for weeks. Or like your mom.

Exactly, that you're going to go show up to her and be like, mom, I failed, give me my money back, and it's her paying you. Now it's all done online, and so you're buying just from the company they ship it to directly, and the downline is all digital. So it's like if I buy from Monica in the system,

that's what's important is that Monica brought me in. And so you're still getting paid based on my purchases, but you don't have to do the admin like that. You could see why in the 70s and 80s. And there's a great short lived showtime show that is basically a company that looks like Amway called On Becoming a God in central Florida. It starred Kirsten Dunst and Alexander Skarsgård. So good. It was right before the pandemic. It was supposed to have a second season. Kirsten Dunst takes on thearsgard. Ooh, so good. It was right before the pandemic. It was supposed to have a second season. Kirsten Dunst takes on the business

and she really is the salesman and people are coming to buy from her. It's a great depiction of why it doesn't work in practice and the FTC didn't go observe it in practice. They just accepted it. And so we're just downstream from that decision being the only thing that mattered. Okay, so after Mary Kay, I want to talk about Monique

because I think that's a really compelling story, and I want to save time for her. But where does Herbalife fit into this? And how big are these companies? We don't really, there's so little oversight, and they're private, and so even Herbalife, which is publicly traded, all their data is just on their distributors,

and what the distributors buy, and they buy. So if you're investing in the sock, you're like, okay, they have data on that. I guess it would be inevitable. There's so many companies that have tried this. They're making so many different products. What's really comical almost is when one of them actually could be a business.

Right. Like Herbalife. Could be AG. We have a friend who sells Herbalife. Uses it. I don't know if sells. We're getting a little ahead of ourselves, but Herbalife? We're getting a little ahead of ourselves. Herbalife was fined by the FTC for being effectively a pyramid scheme.

They didn't use those words, but in the FTC complaint, every function of a pyramid scheme they were accused of and they were fined $200 million. And they had to restructure their business. to be what's called a preferred customer in Herbalife and buy the products on a subscription model. But there's a lot of ways they get around that. And I've been watching them and I'm like, you guys, this is not good. But it is funny to think of someone starting it with the full intention of just having a business that makes money off of its employees

and then going like, oh God, we kind of have a hit product here, should we also try to just treat it as a hit? Yeah. Should we just be legitimate? Yeah. I do want to call out the fact that they're not employees, right, which is really important we kind of have a hit product here. These are not your full-time employees. You don't pay benefits on them. Herbalife is started in 1980 by this guy, Mark Hughes, who actually, as a child, is in one of these schools related to Synanon.

Oh, I love Synanon. What's Synanon? Remember I was talking all about it. It was this guy that was from AA, and he started a program to help junkies. They played the game, which is this group therapy where you scream at each other. And it was so effective people that weren't junkies wanted to join.

And it was like, great documentary. And there's just a huge overlap between MLM because to stay in MLM really does rely on a lot of coercion, which is why MLMs have been accused of being cults because there really is a lot of behavior that's similar to cults. And Keith Ranieri, who started Nixxiom, learned Amway. And Nixxiom was multiple marketing. Tony Robbins was basically taken in by this guy Jim Roan, who was an evangelical preacher from the Midwest. He was one of the original executives

of that very first pyramid company, NutriBio, that I talked about. He was banned from operating a chain selling scheme in the state of California. So that was the 70s. He just takes a break and then comes back to Herbalife. that I talked about. at speaking about being persistent. But anyway, so him and a bunch of other guys who were involved in NutriBio and Holiday Magic helped Mark Hughes start Herbalife in the 1980s. He worked for a company called Golden Youth, which was run by this guy, Larry Huff,

who if you just Google him and Attorney General of California, he's been banned from a million pyramid companies. I don't think he's living anymore, but Mark Hughes just learned the plan. They're just grifters. Moved to a different market. Exactly. And Mark being a kid in Sinanon, who then basically it pimped out. There's a little anecdote people love telling about him that he visited Ronald Reagan when

Reagan was the governor of California and got him to donate to this school. He was very charismatic, but it's all to make money, and clearly this is a very vulnerable guy. And Mark Hughes' whole thing was that his mom was an addict and died of basically being obese. That was the story they told at the time. I remember this at the 80s, so the way this is being talked about is really gross in a way we wouldn't talk about it now. He's like, now I run this supplement company

and it's all about lose weight now, ask me how. In 2000, he dies himself of an overdose. So while he's telling the story of being like a health nut, and Herbalife just explodes and everyone's doing it and celebrities and all this stuff, he has this mansion in Malibu and he dies of an overdose. And so Herbalife is just directly related to all these old companies. I want to talk about the Christian element of it. And in my own anecdotal experience,

a lot of the people that have approached me with different MLM products learned about it in church. I want to cover that, and I also want to cover this maybe MLM in disguise. Now with remote working, it's been rebranded a bit. So hit me with the Christian aspect. From the very beginning, the Nutrilite guys definitely considered themselves Christian.

And interestingly, one of them was a Christian scientist. We just learned a lot about that the other day. And this idea that you can impact your physical world with your mind, that is like a huge part of MLM. From the very beginning, multiple marketers associate themselves with this guy who writes a book called Thinking Grow Rich.

That book is all about literally meditating on money. It's like the secret. Absolutely. And this guy, Norman Vincent Peale, who writes The Power of Positive Thinking in the 50s, he goes on to become Donald Trump's pastor in Manhattan at Marble Collegiate Church. I guess I'm just delighted he had a pastor. I didn't even really think there was ever a pastor. His dad loved this guy.

And this book was the secret of the 50s. It was a huge popular book and bestseller. And so they loved coming. And this guy is saying, do not think negative. It doesn't matter what's happening around you. You can literally just create your own reality. God, well, he's done it. There you go.

From the very beginning, this is in MLM, like meditate on the car. Literally put a picture of the car on your fridge, put it in your drawer. Think about the Cadillac. I've done a vision board. Yes, it's very much a part of it. So that's the mystical side. And then on the actual Christian side,

more of a traditional Christianity rather than Christian science, which is only a 200 something years old and American version of Christianity. The Calvinists in Amway, hugely they're using churches. Well, it's a great place to network, right? Yes, exactly. And one FTC economist who I spoke to

who was raised in Grand Rapids, he actually met DeVos and Van Andel in church. So these communities are ripe for the picking. Yeah, prosperity, whatever they call it. Yeah, the prosperity gospel. Plus community, plus community, plus person in front of you that has attained it. Yeah, there's an Amway sect that I know

that is operating out of a church in Brooklyn, in Long Island, and people are brought in thinking that it's something else, because also these companies don't have to say it's Amway or say it's Herbalife or say it's whatever, because they're independent contractors. You can use your own name. Oh my god.

So you can call it like, I'm in Freedom Legends or I'm in Sales Stars or I'm in a group called Rise Legends. They're all really corny. Yeah. And so maybe you're in church and you're like, stay after for Rise Legends, where we talk about self-development. Then they'll start saying, well, you should buy mentoring and the mentoring is buying in. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Well, it's also a group that is by definition not skeptical.

Religious people, they are there to like buy in and take things at face value. Yeah, or maybe even if you are skeptical, you're taught not to voice that. Because I think a lot of people are way more skeptical than you think, but they're keeping quiet. And I actually spoke to so many people who just were afraid to be rude. And that's why church is such an insidious environment because people are supposed to be being kind to each other. When someone approaches you,

your instinct is not to be like, whoa, this is scammy and weird. It's to be like, oh, we have this fellowship and to respond in fellowship and stay for the meeting. The whole thing's driven on being nice because the people who have pitched me, I've had a cut-code knife demonstration done for me. I've had the acai berry pitch or whatever, Mona V.

Oh, Mona V. Those are just Amway guys. Yeah, I've sat through those and it's like, here's someone I love trying their best. $90 acai juice. So another sad, unavoidable pattern you see is these tend to explode when the economy is bad. From the very beginning.

And that's why they exploded in the 70s, because inflation was so bad, and unemployment rose so much in the 70s. You just had people like pouring into these companies. They did it in the dot-com boom in the 2000s, where they said, oh, these are home-based digital businesses or network marketing. That's when they started using these different terms. And then, of course, during the Great Recession, same thing. That's when Trump lent his name to this supplement company, which was called Ideal Health, and he rebranded as the Trump Network.

And he's literally saying, this is how you're going to survive the recession. If you've been laid off, do this. And then of course, the pandemic being the most recent moment where they always get this little boom of participation because people are falling for this pitch of, you don't have to have a degree. You don't have to have $10,000 to invest in some business.

All you need is $199 to start your starter kit and then they'll immediately ask you for $1,000. You have more control. And that's the thing that I think is really what it's getting into is the desire for control. People are feeling buffeted by these forces that are way bigger than them. And they have this sense of feeling wronged and injustice.

And that's what's so really scary. And I think just so dark about it is that instead of channeling that to change something and to find others who are in a similar place as you and maybe do something about it and organize, it's all inward. And it teaches you to channel that inward and say, I can fix myself.

I know, it's sad. And I can take myself out of this. Yeah, the fuel source for it is really a sad one that I have great sympathy for. And you explicitly say it in the book, which is there's a significant portion of the country that has just great distrust. And I think it's largely driven by income inequality.

It's like you're looking at all these people that have all this stuff constantly, and now it's only exacerbated by Instagram and other ways to monitor people's life. And there's just this collective sense of something's unfair here. And this seems like a way to write the scales. Hack the system.

And what's so crazy about that and why the subtitle of the book is literally how the pyramid scheme shaped America is because those dynamics that we talked about where there's only a fraction of people succeeding and more and more people are participating but more and more people are losing, that is actually what's happening to the economy in terms of income and how

a fraction of just a few people in this country are making so much more and keeping so much more than everyone paying in. Yeah, it's a microcosm for our entire system. And what MLM does is instead of looking at that and thinking, hey, why is this the way that it is? And maybe we could do something about that. It's keep going, and maybe you'll get in that club one day. And we're all just trying to get into that fractional club instead of looking at the whole shape and saying, well,

does it have to be this way? And is there a way that the distribution could be fairer? And what's so crazy and makes you kind of put your tinfoil hat on is the Amway founders and other people in multiple marketing have politically pushed and contributed to the policies that have made that inequality more stark, like bringing down the marginal tax rate, fighting any kind of wealth tax, which would take some of those profits and put them back in. And then tearing apart those social welfare systems that do give you something to fall back on them and that are equal, that everyone has access to, whether that's, you know, they want to get rid of Social Security, pulling apart

public education. All of that is to get rid of those collective safety nets that we all share and push this Wild West where you can make a lot of money if you're willing to exploit a lot of people. I hate to add this to the fire, but I was just at a conference, a lot of AI people in that space, and I was saying to someone,

all these products are making all these companies so much more efficient. People are wholesale cutting like 30% of their workforce already replacing with AI. And I was like, wow, if you model this out, the only human in the whole scenario that will benefit from this is whoever owned the company when we started making it efficient.

And then it's over. There's not even a way to enter and climb. It was already up here, but now it's going to be a fucking straight line. There's going to be one person with this enormous company that's being run by all this AI. It's going to accelerate. I think that that isn't far-fetched at all. And if we go all the way back to the beginning to the people that invented this and this idea that one of them had about eugenics and about the idea that people are expendable and that some people are cogs in

an efficient machine. That's not that far off from how MLM operates when it's successful. And that's why Monique's story is so important because you see how she is the most successful in that company when she is not caring about herself at all, just paying into the system and is functionally a cog. That's why MLM is so corrosive in that if you're not at the top functionally, mathematically, you have to be losing. Yeah. So Monique was in the Air Force for 17 years.

She gets out, she's on a retirement. It's like a stipend. It's 1200 bucks a month is her retirement from the Air Force, which is her rent. And she's wildly depressed, she's directionless, she's sleeping 15 hours a day. That career has ended and she's kind of at a loss of what to do.

And someone, was it a church friend? No, she was in Florida and she tried to join this business networking group where she would meet people and maybe get a job And so this woman in Mary Kay meets her there this woman asked her repeatedly Would you like a facial a facial which is so weird because Mary Kay women aren't faceless. Yeah, there's training Yeah, there's training and like a certification. They just teach you how to put makeup on she joins in 2013 and 2013 We already have Sephora and Ulta the idea that're going to buy makeup from this lady in a pink,

it's just so antiquated. She's super lucky, a pink Cadillac. She meets this woman and she gets the facial. And what I wanted to really make sure was out there was it was a weird thing. She didn't love it, right? It was awkward. She thought this was weird. But then she invites her to this party and she doesn't know anyone in Florida.

And so she goes and there's food at the party and she's hungry. And they pray and she is looking to find her way back to religion because she was raised a Baptist and wants to feel closer to God again and Mary Kay is very explicitly Christian. And they pray and she just feels so much love and community and she signs on for that starter kit, which is $199. And then from there, we just chart her journey and right away they get her to buy an $1,800 wholesale order because they say that's what star consultants do and they have all these phrases like,

you can't sell from an empty basket and all this stuff. And she is basically spending $400 to $1,000 a month for a decade. And she's living on $1,200 and she is basically spending four hundred two thousand dollars a month for a decade. And she's living on twelve hundred and she has rent. They encourage her to talk about how successful she's being. Meanwhile, they know that the VA retirement benefits are what's sustaining her. Barely. She's taken on a huge amount of debt and she has bought a house, but she's done it with a VA loan. So not with Mary Kay, but her uplines are convincing her. You tell your why in MLM, what are you getting out of it?

Whether it's I get to be with my kids or I bought a house or I pay for a school. Hers is I bought this house, even though they know that it's a lie. She's just spending, spending, spending, and they tell her, The whole entrepreneur self-help world really helps these MLM people, because they'll just show you a video where some entrepreneur is talking about how he lost a million dollars in his first year of business. And so they're just telling you, don't think of it as a loss, it's an investment. Or an entrepreneur saying how he never went to college, because MLM is telling you, don't go to college, invest here, small business. And so that's what they're doing with her the whole time. Does she build a downline?

She really only recruits a handful of people and then those people recruit. And at a certain point, she reaches a rank where you have to have a group of 24. And Mary Kay has this crazy qualification where eventually to sort of get to the next rung, you have to all be buying several thousands worth a month and you push, push, push, recruit, recruit, recruit.

And it's all to then walk across the stage and get this sash and a recognition at this convention, which I went to in 2023. But everyone is just buying. Everyone knows it. And Monique still to this day has all this stuff. She's supposed to have thousands of items. Yeah.

Yeah, I would love to x-ray the whole country and just see like how much of this product is sitting in the salespeople's homes. I've been all these people just storing all this fucking product. Yeah, well, that's why, especially if you know somebody that sells it, they're using it all the time because they have to, because they have so much around.

Yeah. Putting on the makeup three times a day. Yeah. And she really gets out of it, though though feeling love, feeling self-worth, feeling like she has a purpose and a place in this country. And so much of being American, right, is this idea that we can transform our circumstances. That's the American dream and that's the American story is we live in a democracy. We don't have royalty.

We don't have these fixed hierarchies. We don't have nobility. Where you're born is not where you're going to die. And so that's really what she's trying to do. And she's a black woman raised in poverty. It's really incredibly noble. What she's trying to do is build something for herself. She's taking care of family members.

She served her country. Exactly. She served her damn country. And instead, she's being funneled into this horrifying dystopia, just like you said earlier, where they're feeding off of her every month. And I do think there are some people,

I know there are some people that would come on and say, I have a really successful business, I have all these recruits, they're really happy. But I really would challenge them, and I know they wouldn't, because they never do. But if you really open your books as a successful motel marketer and you see all your recruits and how much they're buying

and how much they're actually making in an income, maybe you have a few on your downline who are also really successful recruiters and they're making money, but if you really open your books, you're just going to have masses churning in and out, just like her, who are buying, buying, buying. And your success is reliant on that. Their failures.

And I would just challenge those people to really look at what is your success actually built on? If it requires people to fail. Again, I think those people would say, well, they weren't good at it. We're at, I think, this inflection where it's like being a country of just go get yours is kind of untenable and heartbreaking

and has tons and tons of wreckage surrounding it. But there are still a lot of us, even where I came from in my very blue collar town is survival. You just had to fucking get ahead. Yeah, if someone was falling below you, I don't think there was an ethical dilemma in that. Everyone's on the bottom. We must crawl out of this barrel and you gotta get ahead. Yeah, if someone was falling below you, I don't think there was an ethical dilemma in that. Everyone's on the bottom, we must crawl out of this barrel,

and you gotta get yours. And it's a defendable point of view if you're- Well, if everyone's at the bottom. If you're a desperate person. So I think a good chunk of the country still feels like, yeah, get yours and that's it. Absolutely, this is why MLM is such a useful story to be telling. And first of all, it's and that's it. And the reason I think it persists is because that story that this American style capitalism

and the thing that we do in the free market that sort of meets out everyone's fate is ultimately fair and just. And we are in a democracy and we are living out that dream. The meritocracy is still working. The people that have so much more than everyone else, they got there fairly. And that it's not something that should be possibly changed, right? We shouldn't have a class war. We shouldn't even have a class discussion of whether this is fair. That's a really useful story for all kinds of elites on both sides of the aisle.

And always has been because the booms and busts that you asked about, like why does MLM flourish in a dark economic time? We have these moments where capitalism is not working for all of us in the way that it's being practiced here. It is creating that sense of unrest and that things are not fair and things are rigged. And MLM just again seeds on the ground among individuals in their living rooms, in their churches, that it's still fair. You just keep grinding, just keep going. It's going to work out for you. It'd be interesting to see because mostly in the book, at least, this has historically

really preyed on women uniquely. But it's interesting to imagine the flip that is ahead for us when you have 20 some percent of 20 year old boys unemployed. And you could say that crypto is the MLM for men when they're not just straight up gambling and being addicted to gambling sites and just doing lotteries, which is why just bypass the whole thing altogether. And you know, what you were talking about, basically the Gilded Age where get yours was a matter of policy. It was your moral, actually. Right, we were in the wild west of those robber barons.

The reason they're called the robber barons is they were robbing. They were fighting, they were calling police on horses and shooting into crowds of workers when they were doing strikes, right? This is before the New Deal, before the sort of modern era of worker-employer relations where we had some boundaries on what private companies or the sort of modern era of worker-employer relations

where we had some boundaries on what private companies and capitalists could do. And that's why we have child labor laws. That's why we have the right to organize a union. That's why we have all of these things. And for a while after the New Deal, in this American era where MLM was conceived, that stuff was something to be prideful about. Ronald Reagan was a spokesperson for GM when the union at GM was really important.

And of course, there were all kinds of ways that GM was always trying to undercut the workers because of course, their interests are different. But like the idea that there were wage laborers who had rights was a point of pride and was something that we then built the welfare state on those rights, too. If you were GI, you could go to college on the GI bill or you could go to a public school. These are things that everyone has access to. It's the opposite of get yours. And of course, again, lots of flaws in all of these systems, lots of flaws in Social

Security. But the idea of it is that we all have access. It's not Darwinian. It's not you only get it if you can get it. And so these guys who built MLM already in the 40s, they're trying to reverse that. They're trying to then seed this idea that actually, no, no, no. Let's go back to the get yours. Let's go back to the Wild West. They're very honest that they want to rebrand this free, free, free market deregulation.

That Wild West rebrandeded as it's not a place where everyone's being hurt it's not a violent place the ferry boats aren't crashing but actually it's like that's how we're gonna be freer that's how we're gonna get democracy independence exactly we will all benefit and of course trickle down literally that's the idea right if we let these people accumulate as much wealth as possible you all be rich we will all get it yeah yeah and that's what's happening and again not to put the tin foil hat on accumulate as much wealth as possible. You all be rich. We will all get it. Yeah, yeah. And that's what's happening.

And again, not to put the tin foil hat on, but so many people seem ready to accept that story. It's not trickling down. Yeah, where is it? So many people. It's only in America where you have people paying into Amway $400 a month. I talked to one woman who, by the end,

she and her husband, he worked in an oil field, they had a little baby. They're budgeting $20 a week for their groceries because of how much they're spending on Amway. Oh my God. And they are looking at the fact that the Amway families have a yacht. They have their own family office because they have so much money. Their kids will never work.

Their kids' kids will never work. This is an American dynasty. These are royals. And they're just thinking, I'll get there one day. They're like, I'm so proud of this yacht. And of course this woman has since left and she's basically done culty programming Yeah, only in America. I think are you not getting in the streets being like, excuse me. Yeah, this will not stand We're just all getting back to posting being like hey guys. I have an amazing offer for you this incredible opportunity

Yeah, like that's where we're at. Oh Boy, this is a wild topic. Like that's where we're at. Oh boy. This is a wild topic. It is a wild topic. I'm delighted you wrote this book and it is crazy how little existed on this topic as you endeavored it. I feel like it's five books because there's so many little rabbit holes to go down and I hope people write more books

on this because I feel like I scratched the surface. We give a very thorough history of MLMs, but your book is just full of personal stories that are really, really compelling and heartbreaking. And of course, I went to the convention and saw this in person and spoke to a corporate employee. This was at the Mary Kay convention. And she said, we don't track what people are selling.

We only track what they're buying. It's very clear that this is the way that this is set up and I just think more people should know that. Yeah. Oh, I want to leave everyone on this. In a different interview, the interviewer asked you, what would you recommend people do when they're getting pitched these?

And it may be a little bit counterintuitive, but your advice is you're doing them the best favor by not buying it now. You're accelerating. Please elaborate, I'm not going to botch. When people humor their sister or friend and buy one of these products, they think they're helping them out,

but you're just prolonging their involvement. Because if you're in the A list, once they get through you and then the B list and the C, they're going to just run out and they're going to recruit and maybe stay longer or buy more. Because of course, what's documented in the book is also people just buy. So even if you can't recruit, you'll buy for somebody

and just put it on your credit card if they can't afford it. Just to get the rewards. Exactly, keep your place in the down line. And so contributing at all is keeping that hope alive. I think the faster somebody sees the reality, the faster they will get out. Direct and obvious parallels. You shouldn't loan someone 30 bucks to get high again.

You want to try to accelerate them having to confront that. Exactly. It's all gamified. And I think that that impulse has been increased in all of us to respond to a gamified environment. So we're all even more vulnerable to this idea that we're going to get ahead. And so stop it at the pass and just don't buy it. Yeah. Well, Bridget, this has been incredibly interesting.

Everyone should check out Little Bosses Everywhere, How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America. It's kind of like a glimpse of an aspect of our country that is very much fractal of our whole setup. It's got larger implications than even MLMs. So thank you so much. This has been a blast. Yeah, thank you.

Always take a leave D or whatever one you took before interviews. You were on choir. Clarity D. Yeah. Speed works for me, I guess. Always be on Clarity D. All right, be well.

Hi there, this is Hermium Permium. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact check of Miss Monica. Is there places you wouldn't wear that shirt? Be honest. There's nowhere I wouldn't wear, there's nowhere I wouldn't wear this shirt. A funeral, a wedding, a christening.

No, I'd wear it to a christening. I would wear it to a wedding with a big ball gown skirt. Oh, in a Rolling Stones t-shirt? Yeah. In a funeral, I'd wear it under a black. Blazer? Blazer and black pants. Okay. But this person who's passed really appreciates the Stones.

That was their favorite band. That's a high percentage chance to take. I have bad news to share with you. What? I don't know what the solution is. I don't know if I have to move and put the house up for sale or order another engine, but I had made a promise to my family

that they would not be out on the lake and come across anyone with a faster pontoon boat. And that I can't say that anymore in good conscious, you know, was exploring saw someone with a huge yard, right? I'm like, Oh my God, that person has 30 acres on the lake. The house was astronomical. So we're just snooping around the shore and

looking at this impossible piece of property and how do they mow it? Those are the kind of questions you ask on a boat. Like, how are they mowing that? That looks steep on the side. I'd like to somehow be out here when they're mowing it next time. All that to say, we come around the, they're on this huge peninsula and we come around the side to see where their boats are at. And oh my God, there it was, 25 foot pontoon boat. I have one 400 horsepower V10. This had two 450 horsepower outboards. 900 horsepower compared to my 400.

So I don't know what my move is. I don't know if I should sabotage his boat, ask him to move, sell our house, order. I told Erin I was gonna order a 501 horsepower engine for one side so that I have one horsepower more than that. Man or woman, I shouldn't assume it's a man. You got to get off the treadmill, man. Yeah, it can't be number one.

We can't all be number one. We can't all be the best. He's the best and that's that. Well, okay, minimally, I'd like to put a small tracker on the boat so that I know if he or she is out on the lake. Cause I would like to avoid being out there at any point that they're out there. Okay. Okay. I don't understand, but I hear you and I respect your words.

Okay, when I come visit, can we watch what lies beneath and really get in the lake mood? Oh, for sure. We could do... We should really think about all the lake movies. We could do On Golden Pond, I guess. That's what's supposed to be good. That feels boring. It sounds like homework, doesn't it?

On the Waterfront. Yeah, I don't want to do that. Yeah, On the Waterfront, not like more Longshoremen. You know I'm against that movie So just what lies beneath I guess. Okay. Sure. Okay. Yeah Or isn't in I don't think I've seen sleeping with the enemy, but doesn't she like Learn how to swim Oh To escape him. Yeah, she's secretly like learning how to swim. Is that Julia Roberts? Yeah.

And she moves to like a southern town, right? I don't know, but I think we need to watch that. I'll watch it. Have you heard about the dock on the poop boat? Like a cruise where everyone pooped everywhere? Shit wreck or something. I keep seeing it pop up on new releases on Netflix. You haven't watched it?

Yeah, I have not watched it because it feels like how dare I spend my time, my precious time watching some people pooping everywhere. Yeah, I watched the trailer and a very functional Cruise ship pulls up alongside of them to like I guess ferry on some supplies and the other cruise ship is like blasting music I'm partying. They're having fun They're on a cruise and the other cruise is there's no toilets and they're all staring at the partying boat and they're not happy that they're partying And then I thought well, what should they do be miserable because you're miserable

They should party but people don't like that. Were they stuck out there? Like why were they stuck? Yeah, I think there was just like a lot of mechanical failures all at once Yeah, I guess I should watch it. Let's let's both aim to watch it or you can watch it when you come Oh, yeah. Okay, let's add that to oh, that's a water. The kids are intrigued because of the poop. That's got their interest piqued, yeah. Yeah, obviously. I have a question for you. About my neighbors?

No. Two questions in the similar category. Do you say, when you hear the phrase, it's all downhill from here, what does it mean to you? Well, it's interesting. I think we have talked about it. It sounds good and also bad. It's a very confusing saying. So how would you use it?

Well, it's all downhill from here is positive. It's all downhill is bad. Oh, I see, okay. Isn't that interesting? Like from here means we've peaked, we're at the peak and we're gonna get to coast down. But it's gonna be all downhill. Sounds like things are gonna get worse.

Right, and in some ways, even if you say it's all downhill from here, it still could be worse, because it's like you're at the top of the map, you're at the top. And so it's all downhill from here. Everyone wants to be at the top. But I like a valley.

I like a valley a lot. I think I'm in the Ohio River Valley, or the Tennessee Valley. I like it. Yeah, but then you have, you're in the valley, but you have to get, then you have to climb to the top to get to the next. No, I'm all done.

I don't have to climb to the top anymore. Oh, you just live in the valley. Yeah, that's what's like, that's the transition in life I'm at. There's no more peaks, just valley living. I think I use it negatively. I definitely, no, I do. I've never said it's all downhill from here

in a positive way. Right. Like, ugh, it was all downhill from there. And it was all downhill from there. And it was bad, and I say it with like, ugh. Okay, back to my neighbors who you wanted to know about. They're so friendly. We have been delivered two pies,

just like you would expect from the South. They delivered two completely delicious warm peach pies. Wow, that's a ding ding ding. I made a peach galette yesterday. What's a galette? Free-form pie. We've already discussed this.

You refuse to commit it to memory. Okay. The inside is a little open, but there's crusts on the sides. That sounds nice. You made another one of those yesterday? I did, and I'm gonna serve it tonight for Mahjong. Oh, are you hosting or attending? Hosting.

And actually, when we were on the trip, I got a real BMI bonnet for Mahjong. I forgot it. Okay. I forgot my set, and I was really looking forward to playing it on the trip with people. And so I got really upset and I was like, we have to find Mahjong, you can't find it.

Like if you, it's not a target. Yeah, and so I was calling all these antique stores to see if they had any Mahjong sets. Because there's a lot of vintage stuff there. I did, but it wouldn't deliver by then, So I was calling all these antique stores to see if they had any mahjong sets. Did you look on Amazon? There's a lot of vintage stuff there. I did, but it wouldn't deliver by then. Okay. By the time we left.

It wasn't like next day delivery. So I call all these antique stores. No one has it, but they're all so friendly. They're like, sorry, babe. And then we go on Facebook Marketplace. Never been on it before. Okay. Yeah. But we go on Facebook Marketplace, never been on it before, okay? But we go on, there's somebody there in Palm Springs with a Mahjong set that we could get.

But we didn't wanna go drive to get it, right? So we were gonna send an Uber to get it and bring it to us. I would have been most excited about going to the person's house and seeing who's selling the mudge on. Well, we were just having too much milk. You're having too much, okay. So this created a dilemma,

another dilemma like downhill from here, where the lady who was selling it was like, okay, you need to zell me before I put it in the Uber. Right. And we were like, no, we're not zelling until we have it. And I understand both points of view. Because I get, she's like, I can't just put it in an Uber and not have money.

Yeah, but then for us, same situation. Right, so what'd you do? We didn't follow up. Oh, okay. Okay. And at that point they must've thought, well yeah, they were trying to scam us out of our mahjong. But that's pretty funny to assume someone

would send an Uber to steal a mahjong. How much was the mahjong set? Are they more than I think? I mean, my current one is like $400. Whoa! Really? Yeah. Oh. How would they want on Marketplace? I mean this one wasn't. I think it was cheaper. I think it was in the like between one and two hundred dollar range. Okay. I'm just killing a flyer attempting to. I don't have enough rag. You see what little bit of rag I'm working with? That's not really enough to kill.

Yeah, that looks like Hermes. It's to clean my glasses, not to kill flies. Anyway, so that was a big dilemma, which led to no mahjong, and so I'm playing tonight, and there will be a peach galette. Oh, lovely. And does it get better or worse in the fridge over the night?

This is the big question. I'm scared it's gonna be bad, so I also have another pie crust in the fridge over the night? This is the big question. I'm scared it's gonna be bad, so I also have another pie crust in the wings waiting in case I need to make that tonight. Did you eat the pie that the neighbors brought? Yes. You didn't? It was delicious. The pies were so fresh.

I mean, the peaches were so fresh. Listen, you are shaking your head no, and we are on video. Well, I ate around it, like Jess. I ate the peaches. I couldn't have the other stuff, but I ate around it. And the peach, and she seemed fine with that. Oh, she came over and watched you eat it?

No, the pie. Yeah, the pie lady watched you eat it. No, no, no, just the pie felt fine with how I ate around it. Okay Okay, listen, um, just so you know Yeah, I probably shouldn't break this to you. Although maybe you're allowed to have it that those peaches probably had cornstarch Not these ones. These were so fresh. Yeah, they did No, that's how you make it. Trust me. I've made two in the past like two weeks

Okay, do you remember we just had a chef on? Yes, Curtis Duffy. Yes, Curtis Duffy, the brilliant chef. And he talked about that he would have his staff make him Choc-No-Bakes. Yes. So I have been talking about that out loud and saying how bad I wanted Choc-No-Bakes

with almond butter. Oh. And Kristin made them. Oh. And here's the shocker, they're better even with almond butter. I was expecting to not have the thing from my childhood that I crave so much.

No, it's even better with almond butter. You should really look into making some chocno bakes with almond butter. You wouldn't believe what a hit they are. I don't think I've had a chocno bake. Oh, well, I bet you'll have some when you visit here because I got a hunch these are gonna be on high rotation. My diet has gone in the toilet now that I'm in the South.

I think a lot of people could have predicted that. But yes, I've been on a real sweets train. We got the peach pie I ate around, then he got the Choc-No-Bakes. Right, that you barely ate. I ate the whole thing, ate the ass of. And then, and then I've had Dairy Queen, there's a Dairy Queen in town.

And then there's a really cute new custard shop, frozen custard. Called? Oh, it's got a name like Jimmy's or something, I don't know, it's very popular. It's not with a G? Maybe. Oh, it's new. It's brand new.

There's a frozen custard place that starts with a G in the south that, it's new. It's brand new. There's a frozen custard place that starts with a G in the south that's good. Well, this could be it. This appears to be a chain, but it's brand spanking new. And there's, that's another fun thing, Monica, lying around the, out the door, you know, I don't know how long the line was, maybe 50 feet, 60 feet. There's a good 45 people in it.

And I pulled up, normally in LA that would drive me nuts, right, I'd be like, oh, I'm not going, I'm not gonna wait in line for an hour. And I was like, ooh, I'm excited to wait in line. And it was so fun. And I just, people watched, and everyone was out to have an ice cream, so everyone was in a good mood.

It was kinda like being at Disneyland. Remember when we took David to Disneyland, I'm like, where else can you go where people decided they're gonna have a great day? Well, that's what was happening at this place. And I realized, I loved hanging in line, and Delta did too. We both had a really good time. Well, this is the opposite of what we were talking about

with In-N-Out, where I said, yeah, part of it is the line, that's part of it. And you said no, and now here we are. I know, and now we have a different circumstance and I'm seemingly having the opposite opinion. Very similar circumstance but opposite opinion. You're right. Just saying.

There's no difference. Other than people that go to In-N-Out are often in a great mood but they're often also just there because they're hungry. Maybe they're even cranky because they're hungry. This is, we've already eaten, and now we're going to get dessert. And it's like what we're doing tonight, and we're outside. I understand.

I love it. I do, I love a ice cream, a summer ice cream moment. I love a summer ice cream moment. Do you guys have Brewsters there? Oh, I haven't seen one. But I saw Zaxby's, your mom's restaurant. Doesn't your mom love Zaxby's? No, that's mine.

I love Zaxby's. Oh, we have one. I love Zaxby's. Chicken? It is Southern Fried Chicken. But what's your mom's cafeteria? I was talking about it yesterday. I was looking at Zaxby's Delta said,

is that a such and such? And I said, no, I think it's a cafeteria. And then I think my father-in-law said, I think it's chicken. And there's a big, big picture of a chicken on it. Chicken on it. Yeah, and it's not a cafeteria. It's not a cafeteria.

I'm thinking that because of Nermy. And that's why. It is a drive, it's a fast food, Zaxby's is, but the cafeteria, you bring up Lubbies or something, but that's not what she, we don't have that there. We don't have Lubbies. She just likes all the cafeterias. She just would love Lubbies or Lubbies.

She would love it, yes. Maybe Lubbies even more than Lubbies. No. Oh, okay. You don't know how wild Nurmi is.y's even more than Luby's. No. Oh, okay. You don't know how wild Nermeen is. She's post-menopausal. Didn't you read on all fours? I did.

She was having no problem. All fours. Right? Getting creative. She was perimenopause. Oh. Okay. That's the horny section.

I don't wanna think about any of that. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Anywho, okay, I have one more word riddle for you. Oh, great. Do you say I'm gonna turn the air down or I'm gonna turn the air up? Wow, I could definitely see where that's right for confusion.

I would say I'm gonna turn the air down a bit. Oof. Yeah. Turn the air on, turn the air up. I would say both and they shouldn't work. What would you say? I think I say turn it down. Meaning you want it colder?

We turn the air down? Or you want it warmer? Meaning I want it colder. Oh no, no. If I'm in the car, it's like, oh, turn the air up. Yeah, turn it up. But in the car, huh, that's tricky though, because in the Often the knob you're turn you are turning it up The fan speed yeah the fan speed is going up, but the temperature is going down. That's why it's inherently

Conflicting that's why this is a great riddle So maybe just we could clean it up by going make the air colder make the air hotter Yeah, but that doesn't have the same ring to it. That's true. We also like nuance and trying to guess. It's fun to not really know what anyone's talking about. We love riddles. Yeah.

Reading through the lines, mixed messages. Reading between the lines, a lot of that. I said reading through the lines. I know, I don't think that's the same. Same thing. Yeah, same thing, though. No, this is another riddle What do you say between or through?

Betwixt do you think if we were in England, we'd say reading betwixt the lines I do again just to remind you I've wanted to start using waltz, but I just can't figure it out. I Love waltz you mean wiles. Yeah, the English always say Walsed. I was reading Walsed at the pool. Yeah, I love that. But when I try to say it, it doesn't work. Okay, I want you to try to say it before the end of this episode. Just in it. I'll do it Walsed where conversing.

Not right now. That worked out pretty good though. That was too fast. It's supposed to be a pop out. What are you watching? What's your summer watch? I'm struggling. I'm struggling. Oh, you know what's fun though? So the New York Times had a list that they created of the 100 best movies.

100 best. See, I don't love it, but okay. 100 best movies. There you go, 100. Oh, I do love it. No, I do. I know, but I do love it because it's ranked. So there is a number one. 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century. So since 2000.

And then it was also like you submitted yours and your top 10, which was a fun game. Do you want to hear what mine were? Yes, I would love to. Mine are Eternal Sunshine. Love it. Oh, you just thumbs up. Get Out.

Okay. Oh, yeah. Eternal Sunshine. Get Out, The Social Network, Omely, Ocean's Eleven, Interstellar, Moneyball, Royal Tenant Bombs, The Worst Person in the World, Past Lives. Okay, so I saw your list

and I thought you were reposting the list because that list to me is what I thought the recently published best of list is, but that was your list. That's my list. Oh wow. I was like, this is a good list and it's eclectic. It's not what I would expect from a poll of a magazine.

So now I'm curious what the real list is because I thought that was the real. I know. Yeah, you tricked me. Do you want me to read it? The real list? Yeah. Just top 10. I don't want to hear 100 titles.

Dang. This happened at dinner for in Palm Springs. I was excited to read the whole list and they made me, they didn't want that. Yeah. No one wants to hear a hundred items out loud. I don't think no one wants to go even past 30. Like 20 would be the limit. I think. Oh my God. You guys, I love lists. They let me start at 50,

and everyone was really into it once I started. Okay. At 50. Number 100 is super bad, just gonna tell you that. Now remember, this is only from 2000. That's why Good Will Hunting wasn't on mine. 25 years. Was Bottle Rocket 2000 or newer?

I'll look that out on my own. I don't want you to leave that page. 96, okay, so I'm, I excuse that that wasn't on your list then. I do love that movie. But I would still pick Royal Tenant Bombs. And you'd pick both, you'd pick that over Rushmore as well? Yeah, Royal Tenantbaums is my favorite Ah.

Wes Anderson movie. Okay. And very core to me, like one that I watched so many times that I was like so moved by. I gotta rewatch it. I love it, but I definitely like Rushmore and Bottle Rocket more. Yeah, those are my movies.

I love Rushmore. Yeah, I could rewatch Rushmore. Is there a lake in it? Can we watch it during our lake movies? Yeah, those are my movies. I love Rushmore. Yeah, I could re-watch Rushmore. Is there a lake in it? Can we watch it during our lake movies? No, there's no lake. There's swimming, just in the swimming pool. Yeah, the pool. That's where Bill Murray's watching his kids

and he hates them, his boys, yeah. Yeah, okay, ready. Number 10, The Social Network. Number nine, Spirited Away. That's a horse movie? Number, no, no, no, no, you're thinking of- Spirit of Cameroon? You're, no, you're thinking of that TV show that the kids used to watch.

Spirit of Cameroon, yeah, Cimarron. No, it's just called like Spirit. I think Spirit of Cimarron, yeah. Okay. Let's see. Now this is an animated. Is there a cartoon called Spirit of Cimarron? It's just called Spirit.

And it's animated? What's the one on your list? Okay, Spirited Away is an animated movie. It's a hand-drawn fairy tale of adolescence. Alice in Wonderland of our age, unforgettable characters keep spilling out of abandoned magical bath house. I have heard of this, it's like on a lot of people's lists.

The answer to my question is yes, there is a well-known animated feature called Spirit, stallion of the Cimarron, C-I-M-A-R-R-O-N. But is that, remember the show they used to watch and there was a really catchy theme song? That was it. That was Spirit. I thought this says feature.

Yes, so that was in 2002 and then they made a TV show. Okay, that makes sense. Oh, here you go, follow-ups in the franchise. Spirit, Riding Free, 2017 to 2020. Spirit Untamed, 2021. I remember when we were in Turks and Caicos, the kids were watching Spirit, and that theme song was really in my head.

Running wild, I'm running free. Yeah, something like that. Okay, number eight is Get Out. Okay. Number seven, Eternal Sunshine. So a similar list. Number six, No Country for Old Men. Number five, Moonlight.

Number four, In the Mood for Love. I have not seen it, but I really wanna see it. What is that? It's set in Hong Kong and it's like a love story. It was in 2001. It's supposed to be great. I really wanna see it. Number three, There Will Be I really want to see it. Number three, there will be blood.

Great. Love that. Number two, oh my God. Sorry. I got it. I'm under control now. Number two, Mulholland Drive. Another one I have not seen but would love to see.

Great. Did you hear me? Yeah. Mulholland Drive, another one you haven't seen but you'd love to see. I could re-watch that, I love that. Oh, great, is there a lake? Can't remember. Okay, number one, Parasite.

Love it. Parasite is an incredible movie, I like that at number one. It's strong number one. All right, I'm trying to find you your song. Here we go. Is this it? Yeah. Ready to live out every single dream. I'm stronger than I seem. Yeah, I'm feeling it.

I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem.

I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. I'm stronger than I seem. Yeah.

Here we go Monica. Yes! I'm ready around, I'm going around, I'm running free, as long as I am here with you, I'm feeling spirit, baby. I'm not gonna lie, I just got full body goosebumps. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. It is a good song. It's really good song.

It's really good. I'm riding free. Oh, wow. Boy, Turks and Caicos, what a fun trip that was. What a fun trip. We got in a huge fight, but it was still so fun. I didn't remember that part, but you did. You didn't?

Wow. I do. I do. It's really seared. Let's not unpack it Because of this list I have decided I want to go through a bunch of these and Watch ones that I have seen that are intriguing to me. So I did watch zodiac. I had never seen that Oh, yeah, that's Fincher his less is no least known movie and Downey Robert Downey Downey Jake G's JG yeah it was great oh and Mark Ruffalo oh yeah yeah Anthony Edwards er ding ding ding eight yeah I

know I was confused because for some reason in my head when I started the movie I thought JGG. was the villain. I was like, oh, that's that movie where Jake Gyllenhaal is the killer. So I'm watching it, yeah, J.G. And I'm watching it and for so long I'm like, wow, he ends up being the killer? That's so wild.

And then of course I was wrong. He wasn't, no. He was just a journalist, right? He was a cartoonist, actually. Oh, yes. And then he got obsessed with the case. That can happen to people. They get bit by a case.

It's probably gonna happen to me before I'm dead. I'm gonna get obsessed with a case and solve it. What case are you gonna try to solve? A murder or? Like a missing motorcycle? Yeah, that sounds right. The Lord's work. Solve a murder or like a missing motorcycle. Yeah. Yeah The Lord's work Yeah, so I wanted to talk to you about shopping before we oh parted today All right, let's hear it because I normally obviously I can't relate at all to you with the shopping

But because I have a garage here and I don't have anything I had in LA, I've been going to Lowe's and Home Depot. And I went with Aaron, well I went on that great trip with the girls, I think I told you, and I gave them half the list and they were on fire. I couldn't believe how good they were. Then I went back with Aaron day one when he was here and I had to get a lot of stuff. Monica, trash cans, brooms, power washers, you know, all this stuff. Sure. And I gotta tell you, it was so fun.

You're right. It was so fun. When it's a place like Home Depot and I like, every aisle has something I know I need, but I just need to go look because I've forgotten. I get it. Yeah. And Aaron and I, when we left,

I was like, that's among the most fun times I've ever had with you. And he's like, I completely agree. I would love to come back and just do three more hours of shopping. And we decided we should have a business where people just give us their list at Home Depot or Lowe's and we go get it

because we like so much shopping there. That's called Instacart. Mm-hmm, we did figure that out as well afterwards. But ours will be different. Ours will be, we don't charge you, but it'll probably be less convenient. Why will it be less convenient? Because we don't have an app

and all the sophisticated stuff. So you'll have to write your list out and then probably take a picture of it. Oh, I think you can just sign up for Instacart like you did for the other ride. Not personalized. Not personalized enough for me. I want to have a relationship with the people I shop for.

Cool. And I play this game with the cashier each time I say, what's the over under on this order? Because they're good at it. They should be good at it. They ring up all day long. And then they guess, and then I make Erin guess, and the girls guess, and I guess,

and we all play by prices right rules, which is even if someone's a dollar over, they lost. Ugh, those rules are tricky. The bill could be 1,500, someone could have guessed it's 600 and someone guessed 1501 and 600 wins those are the rules that's so Ridiculous, it's pretty good rules though for well, it's price is right rules This happened during cornhole to cornholes the same thing if you get if if you get over 21 Yeah, you're back you go back to 11.

Ooh, that's harsh. That happened a lot during Palm Springs. Not to me, because I never really got over 21, but to a lot of other people, and I was so set on their behalf. Yeah, and Jess and Matt, and Ana. Ana's really good at it. So everyone but you.

I was most improved. Do you have a handkerchief for it? Like are you gonna want to play in Nashville? Like do you crave it now? I love cornhole. I love cornhole. I've always loved it. Oh my god. This is just like when... Did I already tell this story? I was shopping, ding ding ding, with Jess,

and we were at a vintage store, and I got a sweatshirt that says Bud Light on it. And it's so cute, and I was checking out, and Jess said in front of the lady who was ringing me up, he said, you've never even drank a Bud Light in your life. He outed you. It's not an out, that's a lie. I got so mad, he made me look like an idiot

in front of this lady. And I was like, you didn't know me in college? How dare you? Yeah, where do you get off? Where do you get the nerve? Where, exactly. And I used to drink a ton of Bud Light. How much?

Six at a time? Well, we used to play all kinds of games. Waterfall, King's pen or something. I forget what that's called. And also that thing where you drink a... Beer pong? Oh, beer pong, a ton. Flip cup.

All the games. I never played these drinking games. I never got them. It's like, I didn't need someone to tell me to drink more. No, it's just fun. Games are fun, dads. I should play more drinking games. Games are so fun.

But anyway, so cornhole is like that. I know, I just sensed from you that you were like, oh, you're just learning how to play. Interesting. And I how to play. Interesting. And I used to play. I was a different girl in college. Oh yeah. I would have liked to meet that version.

That'd be fun. You still can. Charlie wants to go to a Georgia game and I'm gonna arrange it. I want us all to go. I would love that. That would be so fun. You know.

But also I'd like to time travel and meet you in Athens and see this version. The carefree college kid who was planning her next booty bump. Oh God, carefree is interesting. That was in the mix, carefree. I wasn't carefree. I actually had, I had like, you know.

More cares. Really bad anxiety, but I had fun. Yeah. You drank through it. I sure did. Yeah. What a gift. So when are you gonna go shopping again today?

It's possible. You know, I did have a day here. Did I already bore you with it where I did the most amount of things I've ever done in a day? No. I couldn't believe this day. I woke up, I was meditating at 5.30.

Did I tell you I put out 32 pallets on the marshy ground leading to the boat deck? Because it was mud. By the time you got to the boat, you were covered in mud. And then coming back, you'd get covered in mud. So I took 32 pallets from behind Lowe's and Home Depot. And I laid them all out and I've made a boardwalk. from the behind Lowe's and Home Depot. And I laid them all out and I've made a boardwalk. And then I didn't want that to stick out so much. So then I ordered grass paint that you pump up

in a big plastic jug and spray. So I spray painted 32 palettes green to match the grass. I took the trash to the dumpster. I went to Home Depot. I dropped my car off to get tires. I mopped my entire barn, which I don't think you can imagine what a big project that is mopping that entire barn, but I mopped the whole thing in the gym.

Then I got Salt Licks the whole thing in the gym. Then I got salt licks in feeders for the deer. I dropped my road master off to get new mufflers at Midas. And this is the craziest one. At 3.40 p.m. I'd already had this day where I'd done all this stuff since 5.30. At 3.40 p.m. I said to Kristen, I'm 35 minutes away from the trailer place. They close at five, and then another 25 minutes past there is the golf cart place.

And I'm leaving my house at 3.40 in Mount Juliet. I left thinking I give this a 40% chance I succeed at this. I walked into the trailer place and I said, hi, do you wanna set a world record for fastest trailer sold? And she goes, yeah, let's do it. I was driving out of the parking lot with a new flatbed trailer within 10 minutes

with the title signed. Wow. Wow. Made it to the golf cart place, bought a golf cart, had it loaded on the trailer, was pulling out of the golf cart place, 12 minutes to 5 p.m. Wow.

I'm telling you, I felt like a fricking hero, Monica. What a day. That's a lot, that's a lot. I think just mopping the barn would have been enough for a victorious day for me, but then I added in all that other stuff I just bored you with. I mean, spray painting 32 pallet.

You love a tally. I do. I love a to-do list. I had all these things written, I just kept going shit. It's time to pull out that to-do list and tackle something else. Yeah, you love a list. I do. And I feel as accomplished as if I work, you know? Right. That kind of list feels like filming all day or something. I feel very accomplished.

Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Do you think I'll run out of stuff to do? No. Because I have these dumb cars. Because you can always add stuff. You can add like, swam for 10 minutes. Like you can always add stuff that's actually just regs. And how do you feel about that? So I ethically have a dilemma. So some of those items were added after I did them to my list. Do you do that? You have a list and then you pick up some stray things and then you add it to the list to feel proud of yourself. You do do it, okay. It feels a little grimy when I do it, but I do it.

I actually don't do lists like that, unless it's truly like I need to keep track of what I'm going to have to do tomorrow. When I did make lists, I would add stuff like that. And then I did, yeah, I was like, I don't keep track of what I'm gonna have to do tomorrow. When I did make lists, I would add stuff like that. And then I did, yeah, I was like, I don't like any of this. All I'm doing is trying to prove to myself that I've done stuff. Yes, and that started to feel silly. So I don't really list anymore.

But yeah, so if you're a list guy or a list girl, you're adding stuff last minute. You're adding stuff post-post-accomplishment. Yeah, you wanna look at that list at the end of the day and go, my God, you really did it. And then you wanna read it on a podcast. And then you wanna read it out loud to as many people who will listen.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I want you to be impressed with my industriousness. Of course. So you'll like me. Because that's what I care about. That's right, and how good of a driver I am. Yep. All right, should we do some facts?

Let's. This is for Bridget. Bridget and MLMs. Oh my God, I love this one. Yeah, me too. So informative, so interesting. I mean, the fact that some of those stats that we learned, like that 99% of people lose money,

the notion, I mean, I think I said it in the interview, but anything where 99% of the time you're gonna lose, no one does. I know. Okay, the strange angel JPL guy is Jack Parsons. Yeah, Jack Parsons. He's a maniac. Yep, he co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was deeply involved in cult practices.

Yes. Okay, also Bridget worked at Vogue and there was big news. I asked her if she reported to Anna. Anna Wintour is stepping down as editor-in-chief of Vogue. It's a huge deal in the fashion world. Ooh. Yeah, how do you feel about it?

How are you taking that news? Can't be great. It's hard to take in. I'm just, it's just the end of an era. Sure. Now, I looked up spending by gender. I just confirmed that women spend more than men, which they do tend to.

I think they say that they are responsible for like 80% of the domestic purchasing. Like they're who advertisers are advertising to. Women tend to spend more than men, particularly in terms of total consumer spending and influencing purchasing decisions. While men may spend more per transaction, women's overall spending and influence on purchases

are higher. Women are estimated to control or influence 85% of consumer spending. Oh, even higher than I just guessed. That so holds true because I just, I don't have anything in Nashville that I need, i.e. a workbench, powered screw guns, trash bags, mops. So I went to Home Depot in Hermitage with the girls,

and I had the craziest list, and I deployed them each with their own shopping cart to go grab stuff as I was grabbing stuff and yeah so I never go to a store but when I go to a store buckle the fuck up you know yeah you're really going for it. I really spent a couple bucks over at Home Depot. Well also because you don't like shopping, so you kind of have to get it all out of the way. I want to go one time to Home Depot for the rest of my life,

which I already am home now and I forgot things. Whereas I like to just go, not Home Depot, but I like to just pop in, not even get anything. My dad was like you, and in fact, when I was at Home Depot with the girls, I said, is this so annoying? And they're like, no, this is super fun.

And I'm like, oh my God, my dad would wanna go to Ace Hardware on Sundays, and I'd walk with him as he stared at every fucking product. I'm like, why are we in paint aisle? You're not intending on painting anything. He just wanted to see every product in the store, even if he's just going to get screws or something. And it was maddening.

Of course, what if he sees something he might want or get inspiration? He did. This does remind me of what, I don't know why, this is one of the most like distinct memories I have of my father. I know I've told you this before, but we went to AMP grocery store and I had to be fucked. We had a dog, so we only had a dog for a couple of years when I was maybe nine or something. And we go into AMP, we get all the groceries and then we're on

our way out and they've stacked all the dog food in like the breezeway. You know in Michigan there's always these buffers you walk in one door because of the cold and then there's another and then this breezeway my dad like threw a bag of dog food on the cart. I don't even know if I clocked it so much, but we get all the way to the car, and my dad goes, you know what, when you steal things, things get stolen from you. What goes around comes around.

And he walked all the way back in the store, and he paid for the dog food. But he was stealing a bag of dog food with me there for about two minutes till we got to the car. But I guess more than I was disappointed that he stole, I was impressed that he stole and then pivoted and was like honest about it.

Yeah, he couldn't really steal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was like, it was a very like, it's a weird mix of he, like he's demonstrated a lot of integrity, even though he had just stolen a bag of dog food in front of me. It's so memorable.

I, yeah. Did Ashok ever steal shit and then rethink it? No, God, no. Listen to me. Immigrants don't have the luxury of stealing. You're right. They're too scared. You're right.

You're right. Everyone already thinks they're stealing. Exactly. Everyone's already looking at them with like, you know, hawkeyes. Do you pay for that? I think that every time I see a non-white with a grocery store, with a grocery cart, I go, did you pay for that?

Did you even pay for that? Or like, they think, if they're like Indian, Did you pay for that? Did you even pay for that? Or like, they think, if they're like Indian, they think like, oh, they don't speak, they don't even know that they're supposed to pay. Like they think like they live in a like third world country and they don't understand paying in America. They must think all this stuff is for free, yeah, cause America is so much bounty.

They just think it's all for free. By the way, do you think non-white sounds implicitly racist? I do. Non-white? Yeah, like when you go like, there's some non-whites. Does that sound very scary? To me, yes.

Okay, you know my stance on this. I don't like, and a lot of people have no issue with this, but I don't like taking the color, pluralizing it, and then making it the group of people. I'm not for that. Sure, sure. Like the browns, the whites, the blacks, I'm not for that. So yeah, non-whites would apply.

Oh boy. Anyway. Oh my God. I'm so sorry, Bambi literally just sprinted through the backyard with Brombus following her. Oh, aww. You can't imagine anything cuter than two little tiny, tiny, tiny deer sprinting. Oh my God. Be careful with your cars.

Oh, I know. I was out for a ride on my electric motorcycle and I came into the driveway kind of hot and they were there and they got so spooked and I felt so terrible. I'm like, I got to go so slow in my driveway. Yeah, that's it. I mean, she was very factual, obviously. So MLMs, wild. Don't participate. Oh, one thing, I'm sad that we didn't plan ahead, but I wanted to have a friend on

this fact check who has lived a big portion of her life sort of involved in an MLM. Well, not sort of, definitely involved. I do want to say that this episode makes me nervous I'm gonna say that this episode makes me nervous because I would hate for anyone involved, the one to think that I'm saying they're stupid or anyone involved is stupid because I'm not at all. No. I see anyone involved as someone who is industrious and wants to make a living and better their lives

and I admire the gumption and the sense of industriousness. And I just hope I want them to find one that'll work for them. But I don't think anyone is stupid for having been involved with one. I 100% agree. I just do think the system is quite predatory, especially based on all these facts we heard.

And so, but that's, yeah, that has nothing to do with the type of person. But I wanted her on, but we didn't plan it well. So maybe another time. Well, that's it. I love you. Love you. All right. Bye. Love you. All right, bye. Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining

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