Endless Thread - This is Not a Pyramid Scheme

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Every year, thousands of Americans lose money participating in multi-level marketing (MLM). So, last year, when a new business idea that promised to correct MLM's sins bubbled up on Instagram and TikTok, a lot of people hopped off the MLM train, and onto this new one, lured by the promise of a low-lift and lucrative side hustle. This new business idea is called "master resell rights." But what exactly is it? Where did it come from? And does it actually solve any of MLM's problems? Endless Thread investigates. ***** Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson, Amory Sivertson, and Grace Tatter.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Merotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Brock, it's so nice to meet you. Love to meet a Brock Johnson.

I know if I've never met another Brock Johnson. Nice to meet you. Emery Siebertson, I don't know how many there are of you? There can only be one. Well, apparently there's at least two of me. Recently, I met a guy named Brock Johnson so we could duel it out to see who was the true Brock Johnson.

Brock Thunderdome Battle, so to speak, two Brock Center, one Brock leaves. I understand that your website says you're the CEO of Silly. I feel like in some ways we're the same person, except you're more famous because I'm also very silly. And you also have a podcast. I do actually. I have two podcasts now. Uh-oh, Ben.

He's got you beat. Should we just go ahead and make it three podcasts right now? Should he be co-hosting this episode right now? All right. Should we have swapped in the other Brock dress? Not so fast, Amory. Brock and I have some key differences. Oh, yeah?

Yeah, for one, he's an Instagram growth coach. What? And I'm an Instagram grouch coach. I don't know. Also, before I talked to him, I didn't even know really what Instagram growth coach. coach was. My primary demographic is the small business owner, the founder, the entrepreneur, who wants to establish a following on social media so that they can transition those followers

into customers. Okay, I'll hold off before handing him the keys to endless thread co-hostery. But why were you talking to Brock Johnson? Not the Brock Johnson, just A. Brock Johnson. Are you starting your Instagram side hustle? Not yet. I was talking to him because Brock is a big name in the world of digital marketing. This is a world I know nothing about. And in this world of digital marketing, which I know nothing about, there's a kind of mysterious thing going on called master resell rights.

Thousands and thousands of videos on Instagram and TikTok that sound almost exactly the same. If you've been following me, you know that I've been doing master resale rights for a master resource journey. I'm going to break down master resell rights right now, so make sure that you like save and follow. What are master resell rights? Well, it's a little hard to tell. If you Google the phrase, you're going to come up with a bunch of stuff in your top results, explainers, YouTube, and TikTok videos, like I said, Etsy shops, Reddit posts, posts on Medium, posts on LinkedIn, podcast episodes, but no Wikipedia page, no articles in, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post. Instead, you've got this glut of, to be honest, a bunch of pretty non-official sources for what Master Resale Rights is, including just a ton of websites.

Master Resell Rights Collective.coms.coms.coms.coms. Emery, let me show you an example. You ready? Okay. Yeah. Here's one of the first websites that shows up when you Google Master Resel Rights. master resalecourses.com. The roadmap course. Master resale rights is changing the way people can make massive plus passive income. Massive and passive.

I can't afford not to. Making money online has never been more simple. All right, this sounds already like a pyramid scheme. It really does. The website is like on the one hand, it's like kind of like clean and well designed. And on the other hand, like the top of it, the kind of. The kind of like clip art situation that's happening at the top of this gives me pause. It's like got a computer and a book and a laptop and a phone and like a pamphlet and just a thing that just says bestseller on it.

Yeah. That's it. Yeah. For someone who doesn't know what this is, this collage at the top here is not, it's not clarifying anything currently. It's giving chaos is what it's giving. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Since that website clears up very little, let me try my best. There is a bunch of digital products you can buy with Master Resale Rights, including this one key product. It is a course called the Roadmap course that you buy and then you can sell this course or whatever. You've got to buy it to sell it. But then you can sell it to anyone and keep all the money from those sales. I don't get it. Me either and I worked on a whole episode about it. Get ready.

Oh, no. What will we be learning on this journey? Well, thanks to producer Grace Tatter, who did most of the work, we should learn a lot. Okay, Grace, can you help us understand? I mean, I'm not totally sure. I'm still a little misquered myself. What are we doing? Okay, so truly have no fear, but get ready for an ethereal internet journey, Emery.

Grace and I, we've got your back. We're going to help you, help us, help everyone hopefully understand just what the heck master resale rights is or are and why they've been all over the place for the last year or so. I am ready for said ethereal internet journey. So glad to hear that because even Instagram growth coaches like other Brock Johnson have been both mystified and intrigued and a little skeptical of what appears to be a master resale rights explosion on the internet over the last year or so. An explosion of what? You ask. Nobody knows, which is part of the plan. Maybe. Master resale rights is not a scam, but the way a lot of people are treating it is pretty scammy. It's kind of hard to measure exactly how popular this trend has gotten, but since last summer, there have been thousands more videos posted under the Master Resale Rights hashtag on Instagram and TikTok. I even saw it on Reddit, if you can believe that. It's not real until Ben sees it on Reddit.

There are now sub-genresres within the Master Resale Rights genre. There are shaky handheld videos posted from the car during a coffee break. Faceless marketing accounts, which is like stock footage of models sipping Prosecco by the pool with pink text overlaid on the video telling you that if you buy a course with master resell rates, you too can sit Prosecco by the pool. Oh man, one man's scammy marketing is another sign from the universe to invest. But why? Why do people get sucked into these, you know, quote unquote great business opportunities? Well, Amory, that is what we're going to figure out today. Okay. I'm Amory sipping on Prosecco Severson. I am the one and only master copy of Ben Brock Johnson.

The Ben is key. And I really am the only Grace Tatter, as far as I know. You're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR in Boston. And this is not a pyramid scheme. Okay, Amory, Grace and I are going to take you back to Instagram growth coach and marketing guy Brock Johnson. and his mom. Right. Brock has a podcast with his mom,

Shalene Johnson, called Build Your Tribe. Hey, thanks so much for joining us here today and Build Your Tribe. Last year, Brock and Shaline did a Master Resale Rights

deep dive episode. I could create an e-book, sell it to Brock, and I say, Brock, I'm giving you master reselling rights, which means not only am I selling it to you,

but I'm giving you the right to resell it. Master Resell Rights is a concept that is not new. It seems to date back to the 2000s. Back then, people called it master resale rights, but there's not that much written about it. Basically, it's just a licensing agreement that allows you to resell a digital product and keep 100% of the profits. That's it. Maybe it's helpful to use

the music industry as an example, Amory. Like, you know what masters are, right? Like master recordings. So, like, when you make a recording, when you record an album, you have a set of masters. Those are usually, they're often on like real to real tape, as we know, right? Or they can be, or maybe they're just digital recordings. Yeah, not anymore, but sure. Yeah, not these days unless you're spending the big bucks. And then, and then you basically sell the right to resell copies of that recording, right? And the whole reason that record companies and book publishers and the,

the like exists at all is really the reason of distribution. You can be Johnny Cash and make a great record, but you'll never be able to reach millions of fans with that record because it costs so much money to make tons of copies of it and give it to radio, DJs, record stores all over the place. You know, as a musician, you can't do that. And it's the same with authors and books, right? Like with books, it would be bookstores, libraries, things like that. It's really about distribution. And the internet has flattened all of this important distribution infrastructure. You can access your millions of fans much more easily. And Master Resell Rights is almost like being Johnny Cash or Taylor Swift and saying, here, take my master recordings and sell it

yourself on the internet and you never have to give me any money for it. That doesn't seem like a thing they would ever do. That doesn't make business sense. No, it doesn't. But, But the important thing to understand about Master Resol rights, Amory, is that it's become really popular in the digital world. So in a way, we have to think about this not in terms of physical things, but in terms of ideas on the Internet. It's more of a philosophical, open-ended licensing agreement that has been pretty viral over the last year or so.

Hmm. And it's totally normal for a type of licensing agreement to go viral. Happens all the time. Yeah. This is part of the reason that Brock was so confused. He was hearing from a lot of people who wanted him to take a look at this. At first, I kind of just brushed it off as, you know, this is nothing major. This is just a couple people who are concerned.

But then, you know, a couple turned into dozens, turned into hundreds of messages I was receiving about this new topic. Brock says he was especially hearing from people in the network marketing world, a.k.a. multi-level marketing or MLM. Ah, yes, that old chestnut. But they weren't talking about it as if it was a type of licensing agreement. They were talking about it like it was a key to financial success. They were showing these crazy numbers. It was me $3.5 million in my first 18 months since starting.

But there was rarely ever any explanation as to how. I purchased the passive profit millionaire course only two weeks ago, and I've made like $7,280. Or why? His master resale rights, my fucking baby, I made $8,946. Or what was truly going on? My husband's a doctor, and I'm on pace to not match, but double his monthly income in my first 30 days. What do you think, Emery?

Doubling a doctor's salary? This is banana's. Yeah, Brock was with you. And what seemed specific? Bananas was this kind of confusion where it wasn't clear what exactly was being sold or consumed. A lot of people were saying, I bought this course yesterday and I'm selling it today, which led me as a course creator and a course consumer to ask the question of, did you even consume the course? Did you actually even learn what it was teaching? Or did you just buy it so that you could resell it?

That course that everyone was talking about cost $497. And Amory, if you're waiting to understand how buying that course is a great business idea, I am going to give you a spoiler right now. It is not. I mean, yeah, I'm kind of getting that. Mathematically, if you're increasing the number of sellers as you decrease the number of potential customers, you're going to have a like not enough chips for my dip, problem pretty soon.

We did try to talk to some of these people in videos everywhere who have been claiming to be pulling in lots of dollars via master resale rights. And most of them did not get back. Random but may be relevant fact, by the way, it is illegal to make false statements about your income according to the FTC. But the FTC isn't really going after TikTokers who have like 200 followers, which is the case. for a lot of the people posting these types of testimonials. Pretty much everyone acknowledges that at best, this sounds like a lousy side hustle, and at worst, it sounds like a scam.

Including the people selling it. I got a comment saying pyramid scheme regarding the course that I sell. And I wanted to address this, because if you are thinking it, you're not the only person who's thinking it. Not a pyramid scheme because pyramid schemes are illegal. Welcome back to part two of the scam of Master Reefat.

soul rights and how it actually isn't a scam. As we all know, the best way to convince people that something is not a scam is to say over and over, this is not a scam, I swear, this is not a scam. People hardly even mention the names of the courses they're selling in their videos, just that they can be resold. But there seemed to be a few particularly popular ones, the Universal Branding Course, or UBC, passive profit millionaire. And the course that seemed to have started this all, the roadmap, to riches. Wait, is this roadmap to riches thing the same course we saw that they were selling

on that clip art-ridden website that we looked at earlier? Yes. And it's still a big thing in the digital marketing universe Brock works in more than a year after it first came into the world. But where did this set of quote unquote products come from? Who is into this? I feel like I would run away as fast as possible. This is a very very very important. Very good question, and it gets at why it's become so popular. Okay, so Brock told us that master resale rate seemed to have really taken off within the network marketing community, also known as multi-level marketing. It sounds like you're a little familiar with MLM. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, Grace. Not intimately familiar? I was about to say, geez, Emery's going to a Tupperware party in five minutes.

I've got my, what's the Mary Claire, Mary Kay? Mary Kay, yeah. Emery's favorite word is Han, you know? No, I'm just familiar enough, yes. Yeah, these are companies where you're buying inventory, makeup, leggings, Tupperware, whatever, to sell to people in your network. So think Avon, think Mary Kay, think Lula Row. But you're also trying to recruit other people in your network to sell the product. themselves, so they'll buy more inventory from you.

We often call them MLMs plural, but MLM is actually the type of company, a multi-level marketing company. So for the rest of the episode, we're going to use the singular. Potato. Potato. Potatoes. Potatoes. Who's to say?

Who's to say? Which is the correct pronunciation of potato? They're both problematic. Except I don't really feel that way about potatoes. You know what I'm trying to say. But yes, problematic MLMs, singular or plural. Yeah, and that's part of the reason Hannah Pippins wanted out of the MLM world. It's kind of what all we saw out there at that time on the internet.

So like we said, Amory, we reached out to a bunch of people claiming they were pulling in big dollars with master resale rights. And we got almost zero responses. But Hannah Pippins got back to us right away, and she'd had a lot of experience with MLM. A lot of times whenever you leave those organizations and you kind of hurt the quote-unquote upline that is no longer earning from you anymore, they kind of shun you and you don't actually make the genuine connection that you thought you were making at the time because there was money involved on a monthly basis where somebody was always earning off of somebody else. And this is why Hannah and her husband, Zach, decided they wanted to improve upon some of the MLM stuff. Fix it with master resale rights.

We're Zach and Hannah Pippins. We started a company last year called Changing Courses 11. From our video chat, it looked like Zach and Hannah had a nice at-home recording setup. Good mics, a professional clutter-free backdrop, which is more than I can say. So I apologized for my recording setup, which is kind of a semi-permanent blanket for it. There's nothing wrong with that. And to be honest, man, we're just, I wouldn't even say we're influencer Jason. We're just normal-ass people, man.

Normal-ass people who wanted normal-ass things, like to be their own bosses. Which is how Hannah got into MLM in the first place. I was 18 when I joined my first MLM at Mary Kay. I was willing to try anything. Hannah tried different MLM companies for years. Zach was vocally not a fan. He'd say, like, don't do that. I don't like this.

I don't support it. I always felt like it was more high. hypey than anything, where they would hype you up to spend money, but then they weren't teaching you the actual fundamentals to be successful. Zach isn't wrong about this. Upwards of 99% of people who try to make money with multi-level marketing actually lose money. This is well-documented.

Oh, I get it. So it's not a pyramid, it's just pyramid-shaped. You know, like a Dorito or an angry bird. or just a pile of bullshit. And yet, according to a 2018 study, one in 13 American adults has participated in multi-level marketing. And most of these people are women.

In large part because, surprise, there's always been more pressure for women to stay home. And selling products to people you already know is, in theory, a way to do that. Zach is a contractor, and he and Hannah decided to start their own construction company, fixin' pippins. What? Oh, that's so delightful.

Yes, but I have bad news. Fixing pippins didn't make it. Oh, no. We got a fix. Fixing pippins. Yeah, fixing pippins ain't fixed. Hannah and Zach decided to take what Hannah had learned from MLM and what they'd both learned from fixing, now broken pippins, and create a marketing course. The idea behind the course is you can get your business fundamentals, your marketing fundamentals, and you can learn how to implement those things with the added benefit of if you're just starting out and you don't have anything at all,

you can use the license attached to it to be able to practice what you're learning. In other words, the course comes with master resale rights. They named it the Roadmap to Riches. So this is the couple that started the course that started it all. Zach and Hannah actually started selling the course with Master Resale Rights on TikTok before they'd even developed it. We sold five in the first 30 minutes of me just getting on live talking about it. And I was like, okay, here's proof of concept. And then it started with those five people.

And then it went to 10 and then I went to 30 and then it just grew from there. It's like, would you like the idea of perhaps eventually? maybe an ice cream cone. The concept launch was late 2022. The project officially launched in February 2023. And by August of that year, the Fixin Pippins felt like they had fixed MLM by evolving it through master resale rights

and their roadmap to Riches course. And other people must have felt the same way because the Fixin Pippins kick started this master resale rights craze. The good thing about MLM is you can leverage a product that you didn't have to create so you can focus on what's important marketing and learning how to brand yourself. So we took a lot of those nasty features out and we said, okay, we're not going to earn off everyone. Everyone's going to make their own money.

I'm a capitalist, you know, I believe wholeheartedly in a free market structure, but are in part of my French. Hannah and I literally sat down and said, we can run a business without being a dick. Did the capitalist fixing Pippins figure out how to run a business without being a dick? We will find out in just a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more

than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at Science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay, so when Hannah and Zach Pippen started the roadmap course that started the master resale rights craze, they took some inspiration from MLM.

MLM is so controversial because, as we've mentioned, so many people lose money on these companies. Except me. I'm going to be the difference. I'm going to be the one who makes money, said no one. No, that's the problem, said a lot of people. This is exactly the problem. Oh, good point. And, you know, these things have only gotten more popular since 2020. Amory, can you think of why? Well, you know what else happened in 2020, Ben and Grace? You invented a sandwich called the, oh, sorry. I invented a sandwich called the work from home.

home. This is now what I eat every day of my life. Yes. The pandemic. Yes. That's right. At the height of the pandemic, up to two million women left the workforce because of added caregiving responsibilities. But many of them still needed some sort of income. Oh, we expected the women to do all the work in that situation? That's weird. It never happens. Plus, with MLM, you are supposed to sell your network and with social media, our networks can feel so much bigger. Hey, girl, I know it's been years since we talk. You look great in your profile picture, and I just wanted to reach out and say hi. Also, I wanted to tell you about a business opportunity that I think you would totally crush.

So all of this kind of thing has been a jumping off point for a researcher named Rachel Pavelko. She's a communications professor at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, and she's researched the kind of language MLM uses to appeal to women. So one afternoon, she and I did some internet browsing together to see if she saw any similarities between the MLM sites she studied and how master resell rights, including the roadmap course, are marketed. Yeah, it seems like visually women are far more represented here. Same sort of content that you're seeing on MLM sites for sure. We looked at websites, Instagram accounts, and other places online that a lot of people use.

used to sell master resale rights. This promise of money and success is built in to just like the most basic of bios. That stands out immediately. One account we looked at said that master resell rights is quote unquote, mom's redefining the American dream, which is also an idea that comes up a lot in MLM. Rachel said that in the MLM context, the American dream almost always made. means. You're your own boss. You can be financially free. But if you're your own boss, whose fault is it if you fail? If you aren't successful, it's a you thing, right? All of the

blame and responsibility and agency falls on the individual, not this structure that is pretty much set up for only a very few people at the top to make money. There are other similarities between the MLM websites, Rachel studied, and these master resale sites. A focus on community. The course also comes with a free community of supportive, like-minded people and service. It's going to help you be able to help them by taking the course. And faith, sometimes overtly Christian. And I just say out loud, God, if this is for me and if this is something that I'm supposed

to be doing, please just like, give me some comfort, give me some peace, give me a sign. Sometimes more general spirituality or a belief in the power of the universe. If you've dabbled in the idea of manifestation, if you've dabbled in the idea of aligning your chakras, if you live by your affirmations, and I'm telling you, this course is for you. Is it, though, I'm not sure what aligning your chakras has to do with selling people a marketing course. Call me old-fashioned when it comes to ancient Eastern spiritual beliefs originally written in Sanskrit. We did talk to a researcher who says there are certain kinds of spirituality, or at least ideas of spirituality, that connect with master resale rights. My name's Lucas Dixon. I'm a researcher and a teacher at the University of Queensland here in Australia and the business school.

Lucas was interested in what psychological components make people more likely to be attracted to MLM. Things like what people are motivated by. whether they make decisions logically or more intuitively. And as we mentioned, how spiritual people are. How we measured it was basically to ask people whether they felt like their spiritual higher power helped to guide them and to help them on their sort of journey of success. And then we also asked them whether they felt like their thoughts alone could create their future. And this is called thought action fusion.

Translation. It's almost like a magical thinking. So it's the idea that if you have a thought, it actually affects the way that reality turns out for you. And look, to a certain degree, I get that, or at least I believe in it. My outlook, my attitude, I do believe that helps me succeed in my daily life. But Lucas says it's not general spirituality or optimism that gets people. It's ignoring all logic and very real data points in front of your face to keep the faith that you'll achieve a certain outcome. It's like deciding that if you just have faith that you can qualify for the Boston Marathon, you can do it without any training.

So am I to gather that Delulu is not always the Solulu? Sadly, delusion is not the solution when it comes to making money online. And a lot of people out there who are trying to work from home, maybe engaging in a little delusion, they kind of need the money. I've just been in my head the past couple days because money's tight and we're kind of struggling if I can be real and honest. Oh, this makes me sad. You know, before I'm saying like, why do people get sucked into these things? And it's like, well, the answer is obvious. You're in a place where you need money.

You want to believe in yourself. You feel like maybe this is the solution. This is the quick fix. And it's it's not. I mean, we generally are trusting of people, and we often make quick judgments about things based on if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And this, I think, gets at what has felt a little off for us from Jump, right? Like, I want people to build new skill sets. I want them to bring in income and evolve their approach to financial independence. I want people to have optimism in the work they're doing, and I want that optimism to,

feed into their success. But I joked Amory about this being an ethereal internet journey, remember? Oh, yes. And ether, you know, it's like a pleasant, smelling, colorless, volatile liquid that is highly flammable. Master Resel Rights feels like something that smells nice, but is actually pretty likely to go up in smoke. It's harder than ever to tell what's real on the internet, right?

And I want to trust people, like the Pippins. The Fixin' Pippins. They wouldn't lead you astray. When we left the Pippins, their roadmap course had skyrocketed, mere months after they launched it. The copycats came quickly. Soon there were a ton of other courses being sold with master resell rights. Not to mention, thousands of people selling the roadmap under their own brands. It can be hard to tell what to attribute to the Pippins and how much they have to do with some of the marketing that feels skin.

I will admit it was hard enough for me to understand, when I first saw evidence of this, that I was like, this is absolutely a scam and or a pyramid scheme, right? Like that, I just like, my immediate visceral reaction was like, this, I, no. Yeah, so my visceral response is, if I'm a scammer,

I need some lessons from legitimate scammers because I really botched it. Instagram and TikTok might be flooded with testimonials from people claiming they've gotten rich because of the roadmap. But the creators themselves say they have not. That's probably our most asked question. It's like, how are you guys going to make money if you give away 100% of the profit?

Which to give some perspective to that, guesstimation-wise, because we can't give you an exact number, our product is done almost $55 million. And we've walked away with, again, roughly, can't give you an exact, about 1% of that, possibly less. At the end of 2023, the Fixin Pippins told their followers that they'd made about $400,000 from the roadmap and their other digital courses.

But if you factored in expenses, Hannah says their net income was about $152,000, which is pretty close to the median household income for the county where they live in Tennessee, a fine living, but not filthy rich. The Pippins actually changed the official name of the course from Roadmap to Riches to just the Roadmap. Good for them for making it more accurate. They said they wanted to de-emphasize wealth and focus more on education. It's far more powerful and effective to help other people whenever you're actually in the trenches doing the same thing as them versus standing up top being like, look at how amazing my life is or look at how amazing I am. don't you want that? So the effectiveness of that strategy, I think, is a lot more long-term than any other strategy. So they're basically saying their reward now is helping other people. But also building trust and goodwill down the line. Presumably to sell them more things. Hannah evoked a refrain of the MLM gospel while we were talking to her. The common phrase is, your network is your net worth.

The way Zach and Hannah talked to us, emphasizing that they're just normal-ass people, is pretty much the way that they talk to their followers on TikTok and Instagram. I've said it before, and I'll say it a million times over. This space can be so gross. It can be gross. Unlike the people at the top of these big MLM companies, the Pippins are not becoming bagillionaires on the backs of people who are just trying to make ends meet. There are no videos that the Pippins.

popping Prosecco by the pool. And unlike with MLM, what they're selling is less likely to lead to total financial ruin. At worst, you're just out the one-time payment for the roadmap course, right? But Master Resale Rights has grown far beyond the Pippins. Most of the marketing is straight out of the MLM playbook. And to use Hannah's own word, it's kind of gross. I think that some of the people claiming to have gotten rich off of Master Resell Rights, maybe a lot of the people, are probably lying.

But even if they aren't, they're praying on people's dreams. And then they're recruiting those people to pray on other people's dreams. They might think or at least pretend to think that they're helping people make money, but they're actually just helping perpetuate this magical thinking that for most people is only going to lead to disappointment. And the course itself, Grace, we said, is $497, right? It's like $500. So, yeah, I mean, we all need to make money. money, capitalism, but do we need to make money off of our social networks, which are usually,

you know, our friends and family, 500 bucks at a time by selling this marketing course that teaches you how to sell a marketing course? I would say no. And for what it's worth, Amory and Grace, if you both convinced me to give you each 500 bucks for the roadmap to riches course, now just the roadmap course, I think I'd be pissed. Like, I mean, it would be my fault, I guess, for buying it. But I would be unhappy when I realized that I maybe wasn't going to make the money back unless I turned around and, you know, sold it to you or suckered some other people into buying it. What all of this reminds me of is how so much of our economy is based on collective hallucinations.

Even money is only worth something because we all agree to say it's worth something. We're in a similar zone, I feel like, with master resell rights. And whether it's a passing fad or truly something that is going to change the way people make money online forever, it's probably good to remember that money does not come fast and easy unless you, unfortunately, already have money. So, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, our routing number for endless thread is just kidding. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Yeah, four-20. This episode was produced by me, Grace Tatter. Woohoo. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and me, Amory Severson.

Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Paul Vikis, Sumita Joshi, Dean Russell, and Mia Giuliani. Also, shout out to The Dream, an investigative podcast hosted by the journalist Jane Marie about the toll of MLM. You should go give it a listen. Endless Thread is a podcast about the blurred lines between illegal pyramid schemes and perfectly legal ways to lose money. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or any other kind of wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up, Endless Thread at WBUR.org. By the way, thank you to everyone who identified the mystery TikTok song from two weeks ago that episode. The song was Buttercup by Jack Stober. And thank you for submitting your meme songs.

We have a playlist going on WBUR Spotify. Just search Endless Thread. meme pop-bops or find a link on our subreddit. We'll see you next week.