Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Exposing Legal Scams | MLM Pyramid Schemes

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Exposing Legal Scams | MLM Pyramid Schemes

Scammers will always adapt, right? Scammers will always find new ways. But consider, multi-level marketing is the only scam that has stayed the exact same since the very beginning with no need to adapt because it's legal. You actually have a better chance of success in a no product Ponzi scheme than an actual product-based MLM. I'm Marco. My YouTube channel is always Marco, and I'm most known for my series infiltrating a pyramid scheme where I go into a multi-level marketing company or MLM companies meetings and show what goes on on the inside. And the first time I did this, I thought, what's an MLM? An MLM is a multi-level marketing company. It's basically a company where

you're incentivized to recruit people who then recruit people, who then recruit people. And it is essentially a pyramid scheme in disguise because these companies have products or services that you have to buy as a starter pack when you sign up with the company. And the company reports those signups as retail sales of the product when really it's the recruiting engine that is actually generating these sales. Okay. And you're and so so on your channel you you go into you actually find MLMs and then you kind of you kind of expose them. Sure. Yeah. I mean you do that. Basically I go in there with a hidden camera or just very sneaky with my phone. I have a camera that's not much bigger than this. It's a pen and the lens is right here by where you would click the pen. And so I can just sort of put. that in the breast pocket if I'm wearing a suit jacket and record everything and um it's interesting

anything no it's just it has a micro sd card inside so you open up the the pen like so and then there's a little slot in the cap that you can put the SD card and it and then the clicker on the pen is actually the recording button wow yeah okay so it's one of them Chinese Amazon uh products So the camera quality isn't great, but in terms of covert gear, it works. Right. So you go in and you record them and what like just how overt they are or and then you kind do you just kind of like unpack what's really happening? Right.

So the thing that you always see in these multi-level marketing meetings when you go there to get recruited is people in the company will tell you a rags to riches story and then basically brag about how this company changed their life and now they're making so much money and in some cases they're millionaires or 10x millionaires. And when you compare these claims to the income disclosure of any MLM company that I've researched, those income disclosures show you that actually 99% of people in the company lose money, which means that these income claims and these wealth promises are actually fraudulent fake false advertisements, false advertising earnings claims. Well, there's and like the people at the top, they're making their money off of selling you

on selling your friends and your family and those friends and families selling their friends and family. And so it's all getting trickled up. So it's only one or two people at the very top making anything. Everybody else was basically losing. Totally. So the number that I find when I actually dissect the income disclosures of these companies is 99.6% loss rates. So if there was a hundred people in a company, yeah, we'd be looking at actually less than one person making that kind of money. So yeah, one person. And you could extrapolate that number out. You know, if there's 1,000 people in the company, 990, you get me. Right.

So what, so what, have any, have they ever, like, has anything ever happened? Like, like, they've caught you with the pen or they've, or nothing like that? The very first time I did this was with a company called World Financial Group. And it's actually the first MLM company that I was ever exposed to when I was 19 years old. But that's a story I'll tell later on. Right. and they called the police on me and the police told me to get out of there

and they also sent me a cease and desist letter after I put the video out because they were not happy with the publicity of course and there's always threats of legal action there is some I have had legal action taken against me that I still am not able to speak on but yeah it's definitely a exciting venture I'll say that.

People reach out to you and stuff, like after you've posted videos and... I've had literally countless thousands of people who have reached out to me and told me even just after that first video, how they had a friend or relative that was caught up in the same scam and how my videos are helping to keep people from joining in the first place or helping people to leave if they've been in it for a while. And after that happened, I just realized there was such a huge need. for this type of exposure and this type of education to the public on multi-level marketing. It's pretty sparse what's what's available out there.

So that sort of led me down this path that I'm on now. My best friend from high school had told me that he started a business. And so he said, you know, man, you got to come check this business out. I'm a financial advisor now. I'm a licensed financial advisor. I'm thinking, oh, awesome. Like my friend, mind you, my best friend, a little bit of background on him, he was the smartest guy I knew in high school. Like I would rely on him to cheat off his homework so that I could pass math.

Like even during a test, he would openly show me his answers. Like he was very smart, especially when it came to numbers. Like I remember that. And so he told me he's a financial advisor. And I thought, you know what? He is out of here. like he is going to be so successful because this is his forte you know so he invites studying that he that's what he said he said he's a financial advisor now and to me that totally clicked because

i was like man he was already so good with numbers i'm not surprised that you know a year out of high school he's he's doing something like this so he invites me to uh his office for a presentation about how maybe i can also make some money and like mind you He's my best friend. To say that I trust him is an understatement. And to say that I value his judgment when it comes to money and numbers, you know, is also an understatement. So it gives me the address of this place. I don't have a name of a building.

I just have an address. And he's going to be there. I go there. I walk in. There's a lot of people. The gentleman greets me at the door. Hey, how are you? What's your name?

Marco, are you an agent here? I said, no, no, no, I'm just, I just got invited. Like, this was, it felt very official, very legit. Like, I was out of my depth. I was in over my head. Like, I felt really, like, you know, underdressed. Yeah. But not because I was even underdressed, but just because I felt like imposter syndrome even being here, right?

I was like, oh, I don't belong. Like, this is too professional for me. And I go in there and there's a bunch of people, regular looking people sitting in chairs in front of a, you know, bored waiting to be presented to and then I see my friend he's wearing a suit all his other co-workers there are wearing suits I'm thinking my god my friend has like made it this is sick and um he's like yeah man this is going to be so sick like check it out do do do so I sit down one guy goes up starts speaking he tells us a story of how it's basically a rags to riches story everyone claps another guy goes up tells a regs to rich's story this guy also

includes a little bit of rudimentary financial advice. Did you know that most people can't afford to cover even a $400 emergency? Did you know that most people don't have $1,000 in their savings? Do you know about the power of compound interest? Do you know about the rule of 72? Everyone claps. The next guy goes up. This is, and each time the previous speaker says, this next guy who's going to come speak to you is way sicker than me. And then so now the final boss goes up there and he just butters us up. The final guy goes up now, and he just sells it. Our agents go on yacht trips.

They go to amazing locations. We go to Bora, Bora. We do this, we do that. We go on jets. We drive Lambos. We do that. And I'm thinking, oh, something felt wrong within me. And while I'm sitting there listening to this, I pulled out my phone, and I'm Googling the name of this company.

which they said was World Financial Group. And I'm Googling, and I just immediately start seeing a flood of, don't attend this, it's a scam, it's a pyramid scheme. They charged my credit card after I had canceled, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm like, fuck. I didn't know what a pyramid scheme was. I didn't know what an MLM was. I just knew my friend had been duped.

And at the end of that meeting, my friend came up to me, with a look on his face like I had never seen before. It was this look of intensity like, so when are you going to sign up? So did you like it? When are you going to sign up? And it was like it wasn't him. It wasn't him. And it scared me.

And I was like, you know, yeah, I got to get, made some excuse. I didn't sign the paper that they, you know, because they signed me, they handed me this paper. Okay, when can we call you? When are you going to come back to the office to sign up? You know what I mean? And it's like, I don't even remember how I. got myself out of that pressure, high pressure situation. And so I thought, man, I need to talk to my friend. So when I got home later that night, he texted me and, you know, asked me, what did you

think of it? And I, I called him. And at the time, I thought I was doing the right thing and saying the right thing. He said to him, hey, look, man, you know, I care about you and I want to see you succeed. I just don't want to see you get hurt. And I looked online and it said this company is a pyramid scheme and he just he just flipped you're just like everyone else they told me you would say that you don't believe do do do do do and um you know that was the end of our friendship really that was the end of our friendship because after that he didn't want to have anything to do with me and this really affected me and that was the seed so that was only in 2015 i didn't start my YouTube channel until 2019.

So what happened in those years in between? In those years in between, I was just doing regular people shit. I worked at restaurants. I worked at a casino. And then in 2018, my best friend who I met around that same time that I lost my old best friend, my current best friend, he started a YouTube channel. He was posting videos on Facebook. Both of us had always posted like silly little gag videos on Facebook, right?

Right. He started posting these videos on YouTube, and one of them just took off, and it went really big on Reddit, was how it went viral. And then a big Facebook page posted it, and then it got on the YouTube algorithm, and it just hit, like, millions of views. And so very rapidly, my best friend became like a big YouTuber and started making money from this. And so from 2018 to 2019, I was just working with him. on his channel, helping him with his videos and doing his live streams with him. Shout out to my best friend, Philip, Philip Solo TV. His video that went viral was eating at the worst reviewed restaurant in my city.

And it started this like trend of every YouTuber going and eating the worst reviewed type of cuisine, worst reviewed Chinese, worst reviewed Italian, worst reviewed whatever. And it was like, you know, a sort of fear factor type gross, funny video to do. So it was easily repeatable. everybody copied it, right? Everybody hopped on the way. So in the summer of 2019, Philip said that he was going to move to Vancouver. I lived in Edmonton. I couldn't afford to move to Vancouver. I was living in the basement of my aunt's house where she had, like my aunt and uncle had custom built the house to have a basement suite so that my grandma could come live with them, you know, when she was there. She would usually spend half her time back home in Lebanon and then half her time. the time, half the year back, back home. So, so they had this like basement suite set up for her. So I was living in the basement suite when my grandma was in Lebanon because I was like trying to save some money and, you know, nothing was guaranteed. So anyways, Philip says he's going to move

to Vancouver. So if he moves to Vancouver, I can't really live stream with him anymore and I can't really do his videos with him anymore. So I'm going to need to figure something out. And over this past year of just doing YouTube, I knew I didn't want to go back and get a job again. So I decided I'll start my own channel. He started it with a selfie stick and his iPhone. No reason I can't do the same thing. So I wrote down a list of ideas that I thought would be funny YouTube videos. And the fourth idea on the list was called join a pyramid scheme. And initially I wanted to make the video about the company Amway. Because when I Googled Pyramid scheme, that's what I kept coming across was Amway. So I talked to a couple people from Amway, but the video wasn't quite, you know,

the footage I was getting just wasn't really anything. And then I remembered back in 2015, this company World Financial Group. And I thought, okay, there's more of a story here already because I know a bit about this. I remember what it was like going to that meeting. If I could get a camera inside one of those presentations where everyone's clapping and cheering and promising everyone that they're going to make millions of dollars, that could be a video. So I just called one of those offices, hey, can I come, secretly recorded the whole thing. And it sort of happened by accident that now I am this anti-MLM creator because the first video I made, I was just sort of looking to point out how goofy the whole thing was.

And then I didn't realize that it's actually such a, it's a much more sinister and widespread fraud that is being perpetuated in society today and has been perpetuated for decades. And, you know, as I've learned more, I've realized that multi-level marketing is the longest standing and biggest scam that exists. Whatever happened to your buddy, your original buddy, like, did, do you know what the fallout? from that was because i mean let's face it only the people at the top at the top of these these MLMs all they're the only ones who ever really make any money yes so okay so um i hadn't really talked to him since that time like i said it ruined our friendship in 2019 four years later after i put the video about world financial group out he sends me a message on facebook i think i still have it here let me see

He built some of the nation's largest banks out of an estimated $55 million, because $50 million wasn't enough, and $60 million seemed excessive. He is the most interesting man in the world. I don't typically commit crimes, but when I do, it's bank fraud. Stay greedy, my friends. Support the channel. Within like a couple days of me posting the video, it started to gain traction. I had like 100,000 views, I think, in the first 24 hours. And this was only my fourth YouTube video ever.

So it was, you know, it was huge for me. And my original friend messaged me and he said, your video is grossly misconstructed. I get it. You want to gain a following. But do you not have better ideas? I'm no longer associated with WFG. And still, your statements made me cringe. I made tangible profits in my run with WFG.

and also added value to my finances as well as others. Plus, you lied to your viewers, clout chasing. So he was not happy. And you know what? I found really interesting was he wasn't even in the company anymore. And he was defending it. And I thought, well, if it was such a good opportunity, why didn't you stick with it? And he said, I left because it wasn't a career choice I wanted to make.

So, I mean, so where did he go somewhere else? Is he still, it sounds to me like somebody who's after that I know after that I believe he was just working with his dad doing like construction work like labor work with his dad. And you know what I found as as I went on and I learned more about exactly how these companies perpetuate their scams. I learned that minority communities are actually the most targeted because these companies thrive on people's vulnerabilities. They need you to need them if you're struggling. If you're a single mom, if you've just lost somebody, if you're just getting out of high school, you don't know what to do with your life, but you know you want to make a bunch of

money. If you're an immigrant and you have immigrant parents and you want to give a better life to them and all of these things that I learned about just I realized like why my friend was such a perfect target for them because he was Mexican and the Mexican community is especially when it comes to like Herbalife there's a whole documentary called Betting on Zero about how Herbalife really targets Hispanic communities and my friend was Mexican and I think before World Financial Group he was in Herbalife because he you know we would hang out and he'd be showing up with these protein bars and things like that.

And he never said Herbalife, but it was either Amway or Herbalife that he was getting these products from. And I just realized, oh, my friend was actually like predisposed to be susceptible to this type of scam. And that's what it is. It is a scam. So, yeah. I don't understand.

So he would rather work construction than drive a Lamborghini? Well, that's the thing is they delude people so effectively to the point. to the point where even if you lose money, you are brainwashed essentially from that very first meeting onward into believing that any failure was your fault. However, the numbers show across every multi-level marketing company that 99% of people fail. And the setup of these companies makes it so that you are predetermined to fail.

There is no MLM company. As far as I know that exists today, that doesn't have a 99% failure rate. And it is, this is fucked up to say. But the 99% failure rate of an MLM company is actually a 99% success rate. If 99% of people fail, it means the system is working perfectly because the losses of the 99% are the profits of the one. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, don't, not just failure, but I mean, isn't there a massive percentage of, of them? that actually people that enter into them lose money.

Not that they break even or don't make the money they thought they were going to make. They actually lose money because they buy products that they can't really sell. Right. So, for example, I was looking, and I'll just make this easy for the audience to understand without me pulling up graphs and things like that. I was looking at an income, I was looking at an income disclosure for a multi-level marketing company the other day. And it says, on average, we paid our representatives $8,000 for the year.

part-time and full-time, this was just an average. But the calculation of $8,000 a year, which is, I mean, how much is that a month? Yeah. It's not a lot. It's not a lot. You'd make more money working at McDonald's, frankly, even with that number. But you have to consider that number doesn't include the expenses paid by the people who join. It doesn't include their startup kit that they bought, which can be 500 paid.

They paid. They did pay. They absolutely paid. And they pay monthly as well for their, the privileges to the, you know, most of these companies have like a website where there's a representative portal or like an app that you need to pay for, you know, it's just a, it's just a fee, essentially. It doesn't calculate that. It doesn't calculate the, it doesn't calculate the cost of their time, the time that you put

into prospecting people, messaging friends and family, going to these meetings, Logging on to Zoom, that's all unpaid work. Plus, you know, a lot of them have product. Product that you, if you don't sell, sometimes it can expire. You know, if you're selling clothes, it won't expire. But if you're selling shampoo or food items, those do, those are perishable, right? Those expire. So you either have to sell those or you take the loss on it or you eat it yourself.

There's a phenomenon in multi-level marketing called inventory loading, which there's an Amazon Prime documentary called Lula Rich, which shows this really well. These women were selling leggings and clothing items for their multi-level marketing company, and each month, they needed to purchase more of the clothing to maintain their rank in the company. So because they were buying more than they were selling, they end up with garages and basements and guest rooms full of this stuff. And you can go on Craigslist or eBay and find a ton of unsubing.

sold MLM products just being sold for dirt cheap because of this. But going back to the income disclosure thing. So 8,000 people, so people on average are being paid, let's say, $8,000 a year. It doesn't take into account people's expenses, financial expenses and time expenses. It also doesn't include, it also doesn't take into account that this average is being boosted greatly by the people at the top of the company who do make a lot of money. You know, their incomes, their salaries are bringing up the total average. So if you get rid of those people who stay, who are there every year, they're there year after year getting that check, if you get rid of those people, then you see that the $8,000 a year

actually becomes much, much lower. And then you factor in the expenses. Now the $8,000 a year becomes much, much, much lower. then consider the high attrition rates in multi-level marketing companies. Most people are losing money, which means most people don't stay from one year to the next, which means that that's why they're constantly recruiting because they need new people to replace the old people. And in an income disclosure, it only shows the finances for one year.

So it also isn't taking into account how the people that are being reported in the income disclosure of this year, it doesn't really show that those are all mostly new people who are not going to be here next year. So when you factor in all of these things, you realize, oh, we have a 99% or more loss rate. I think 99.6% is the actual number. And just to give people a frame of reference, you have better odds playing blackjack at a casino. You have better odds making it to the NFL or the NBA, you have better odds making a living just begging for change on the street.

People still play the lottery. People do still play the lottery. However, however, you know, I hear a lot of these sort of these MLM recruiters are very skilled in linguistic tactics and they almost sort of speak in riddles too. It's like a dance.

I might say something like 99% of people lose money. That's one of their favorite things to rebut because then they say, well, Marco, do YouTube, more than 99% of people who make YouTube videos don't make any money, sounds logical, right? Sounds like a good argument. Sounds like a good rebuttal. Oh, damn. So then is YouTube not legit either, but then you don't consider. I also don't have to pay to upload YouTube videos. I also don't have to recruit other YouTubers who make videos in order

to make money on YouTube. So there's all these false equivalences that they make. People do still play the lottery. You're right, Matt, but you don't have to recruit people to play the lottery. Right. Well, I'm just saying that, you know, that what I was saying was despite the fact that you have almost no chance of winning the lottery, people still play. You could tell people all those statistics, but like you said, most of these people are just predisposed to, you know, think that they're going to, it's a get, they don't think of it as a get rich quick scheme. They think that they're special and that they can do this. And it's going to, if it worked for him, it'll work for me. And they're not really laying out the, you know, all of the things that are happening and realizing it's a scam. They're just saying that guy's got a Lamborghini and he said all I have to do is sell a little bit of product and convince other people to sell it. And that seems reasonable. Totally. And I'll need a whole bunch of money.

But the truth is, you just, you know, first of all, it's skeezy going to all your friends and family and trying to get them to buy $1,000 of, you know, mouthwash. or shampoo or something to have them sell it so you can make money off of them and you know and then of course the products themselves it's always like okay really it's just a knockoff pro it's a it's a white label for something I can buy instead of for $10 I can go buy it for $6 so when it's jacked out I'm not even getting a good deal on the product like just across the board it's just there they're always seem jacked up to me like it's always not like there's no unless you started the the the MLM, there's just no good position to be in in the organization. Yeah, so there's a lot of layers to what you just said right there.

I mean, first of all, with the recruiters and people thinking they're special, that's the whole point of the recruiters in your very first exposure to the company going up there and saying, I was born on a dirt floor in Mexico and I had nothing and I came here with $3 and I had to sell gum on the corner. And you know what? If I can do this, you can do this. And within six months of this company, my life totally changed. And I started making $10,000 a month.

Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. If you're in the first world, like me or my friend was, you might think, oh, fuck. If he could do it, I could do it. So, I mean, that rate there, why am I on inside true crime with Matt Cox? Because that actually does constitute crime. To have an income disclosure that shows 99% of people lose money, but to get people hooked into the idea of joining. off the strength of you making a lot of money or that you could make a lot of money, it's just blatant false advertising.

It's a misleading income claim. That is crime. And the FTC says as much. And these companies own internal documents, these companies all have social media guidelines, for example, which are there, they don't follow them, of course, but they exist just so that the company can be like, we've done our due diligence. All of their internal documents say that you're not. allowed to say things like you made X amount of dollars. You're not allowed to post a Lambo,

a Rolex, a stack of cash. But they all do this anyways because their business absolutely depends on, you know, romanticizing the idea of material wealth to people. So there's that. The next thing that you mentioned was the products themselves, no, sorry, the next thing that you mentioned was it's skeezy to have to pitch it to your family. Well, that's another one of the costs that is basically impossible to calculate. When a company or a person is brought before a judiciary body, you know, a jury, a regulatory board, whatever, that body is looking to determine losses in the form of finances or property. How do you quantify emotional loss? How do you quantify the harm done to your network of friends and family and the bridges you burn

because they put distance between you and them because you're just pitching them on an opportunity every time you talk to them. And you are resenting them because they're a dream stealer and they don't believe in your vision and they don't believe in you and they're a hater. Some of these relationships are irreparable. To this day, my friend and I are still no longer. friends. How do you quantify that? How do you how do you put someone's grief on a on a graph and hold it up to the next person and say, I lost this much in my heart? You can't. And that's another element of it that I that I really want to shed a light on in my videos is that it's not just about financial fraud. It is about destroying people's relationships, the fabric of people's

identities, the thing that they rely on the most, the thing that is the most important in most people's lives, their family, their friends, their identities, you know, that's why I say it is the most rampant. It's the most rampant fraud. And then the last thing that you talked about was the products themselves. These companies claim to be direct selling companies, network marketing companies. And as a matter of fact, the regulatory committee that watches over all of these companies is called the DSA, the direct selling association, but with the exception of a couple literally single digits companies, every one of the companies in the DSA is actually a multi-level marketing company. And the companies rely on mixing up the language

direct selling, network marketing, multi-level marketing, they use these terms interchangeably, even though those are not the same thing, to confuse you further. It's sort of like, I use this analogy, when someone says, can you give me a Kleenex? Can I get a Kleenex? You know what they mean. But Kleenex is actually the brand name of the company that makes a multitude of products. It's called a tissue. But nobody says, let me get a tissue.

People say, you know, the term became so popular that it's synonymous. anonymous with tissue, the word Kleenex, right? And so these MLM recruiters use words like network marketing. You're just marketing to your network. Everybody does that. YouTubeers sell their merchandise to their subscribers. That's their network. They're network marketing. Restaurants, they advertise to people in their community. That's a network. Their network marketing. It's a false equivalence. Because that's a one and done. If I advertise to you, if I'm a YouTuber and I advertise my merch to you, you buy it, it's done. there's no incentive for you to make money and you're also there's there's also no point or no

element of like you recruiting other people to buy it or you signing up under me and paying me to then go sell my merch to other people who then sign up other people to go sell my merch to other people so that is a blatant misdirection and then as it pertains to the products themselves you're right it's usually just crap that you could get anywhere else for cheaper then there's another layer which is the idea of direct selling, Matt, I'm going to ask you, and everybody at home ask yourself this, when was the last time that you needed to contact a person and go meet up with them in order to buy a thing? Just think about it for a moment. With the exception of hard drugs and prostitution, I cannot think of anything today that requires that type of sales

method. We have Amazon. We have Walmart on every corner. Direct selling, the idea of like door to door whatever selling is akin to the idea of like the milkman coming to your house or blockbuster. These are just things that went away because we have now more efficient tools. We have technology that makes them unnecessary. And direct selling, this method that we're talking about of making sales this way accounts for less than 1% of all sales, retail sales made in North America. So where are all these direct sellers? The MLM industry makes billions of dollars a year. They have millions of people each year involved in this direct selling, as they say. Where are they? Where are they? Somebody that I know is in an MLM, they've recruited 10 other people. Wouldn't I be getting a knock at my door every day

with somebody trying to sell me lotions and potions and insurance? Where are they? Yeah. So I know I said a lot there, but it's necessary to unpack these different layers because no matter what element, no matter what angle you take to dissect multi-level marking, no matter how you slice it, it is fraudulent. Right. Well, I was thinking to the psychology behind it, I'll give you an example. When I used to, I used to disclose to people, right?

So I just, you know, when you get a mortgage in the U.S., you have to disclose to your customer. You have to explain all the different facets of the mortgage. So I would go and I would just, I would explain, okay, well, your interest rate is going to be, you know, 8%. And they would say 8% and oh my gosh. And I'd say, well, you know, you have some dings on your credit. You were 30 days late, you know, 18 months ago on this bill, 60 days late on this bill. Your credit score isn't great. And they would like, right, right.

And I'd say, you know, I'd say, well, here's the thing. Those are also pretty old. And they're moving away from you. And they will fall off or get past the two and three year mark. So you can always refinance at that time. And so they're like, yeah, yeah, you're right. But this is what you ask them. They'll say that's expensive.

But of course, that's not my fault. It's expensive. I didn't not pay your credit card. I didn't not pay your your car payment, you know, for 60 days. So that's not my fault. But I can refinance it provided you're going to repair your credit. Like you're going to keep paying things well for the last few months. Are you going to, do you plan on continuing to pay things well?

What are they going to say? Yes, of course I am going to. Where are they going to say, no, I'm a scumbag. I always pay late. I've always done it. I will always do it. No. They're going to say, of course.

I'm going to pay. And then I say, well, you plan on paying this mortgage on time for the next two or next three years, next year and a half at least? Of course, Matt, of course I do. So I'm asking you questions that you cannot say no to. Well, if you continue to pay your credit, your credit cards, and you continue and you start paying this mortgage for the next year, I can refinance your house at that time for a lower interest rate. Now, the truth, and they go, and of course they're like, oh, okay, that makes sense, and it does make sense. But the truth is, I know the likelihood they're going to continue to pay their bills on time is unlikely. I know this because their rent was $800 and their water bill was 50 and their electric was 50.

and I just put them into a three-bedroom two-bath house where their new mortgage payment is $1,200, and their water's going to be more expensive, their electric's going to be in more expensive, and they've got a homeowners association. So at $800, you couldn't make your bills. You're damn sure not going to be able to make it at $16 or $1,700. So one, you know that. I know that going in, but I also know that they can't say no to any of those questions. So I get them to agree to the higher interest. rate because they have no rebuttal. That doesn't make them look bad. The second thing is then when I would get to the point where the interest rate is, it's a variable rate mortgage. It's going to vary. It's going to go up and down. They say, hey, wait a second. This is an arm product, right? This says that it's not a fixed rate payment. And I say, well, it actually is a fixed rate payment for two years. But like we just said, we're going to refinance your house in a year. So you don't have to worry about it adjusting every month or so because you just told me you were going to make your payments and we were going to refinance it. And they say, oh, that's right. That's right. What are

they going to say? Yeah, but we were lying and we're probably not going to. And what if we screw up and so you know the psychology behind it is when you keep pitching people over and over again you get a real feel for for who you're talking to and I used to be able to know when someone would walk in to my office and I would start to take an application on them one of the questions I would ask was this so how much money do you make and you know some people would say I make $15 an hour. Some people would say I make $3,000 a month. Some people would say I make $60,000 a year.

Now, the guy that says I make $15 an hour almost always had bad credit. He had bad credit because this is a guy who doesn't think pass an hourly wage. The guy that made $3,000 a month, he might be, is $50,000. The guy that says I make $65 or $70,000 a year, he's probably got pretty good credit. So you get to know. So I can see people raising their hand in the pitch saying certain things and they already have these perfect rebuttals.

So these people are when they walk in that room, you're doomed. Like you can't, you can't, be in a battle of the wits with a seasoned con man when you have you have no experience. So the people that walk in those rooms, you know, luckily, you had an intuition, you felt like something was off,

you grabbed your cell phone. Most people don't do that. A lot of people, just like you said, you know, he leaned into it. He was excited. He wanted to be rich. Everybody's driving a Lamborghini. They promised me.

Well, see, in the example you gave, you are basing your assessment of whether they're going to be a reliable creditor or not with actual data, numbers, things they say that, intuit that. And when they eventually fail, which you were able to predict, it really is their own fault, right? Now imagine if you, now imagine how much of a scumbag you would have to be to start to reverse it and instead of the people telling you yes matt i will be able to pay yes i will be able to imagine you're the one telling them you got this you got this

love bombing them you can do this you can do this and it makes no difference to you whether they succeed or fail because you actually know that they probably are going to fail now imagine how much of a scumbag you'd have to be to when they fail tell them you just didn't work hard enough it's your mindset it's it's broken yeah you absolutely have to be the highest level tier, morally bankrupt, scumbag person to be at a high level in one of these companies. And I say high level because I want to make the distinction. I believe most people who join MLMs, that 99% are not bad people, are not scammers. Everyone, regardless of your level of intelligence, is susceptible to being scammed.

because every one of us is susceptible to vulnerability. Nobody, nobody can stop a relative dying. Nobody can stop the world pausing for two years. Nobody can stop emergencies that turn our world upside down. Anybody can be taken in by one of these things. But there are those, and I've highlighted some of these people in my videos, there are those who have been in it so long and are so high up, who have seen people come and go year after year who know the numbers who know that people lose who know that they are scamming people who know that they are causing suffering who don't give a fuck because they're getting rich yeah i i have no no doubt about that um oh man i i had something i was going to tell you too i didn't want to interrupt you damn sorry sorry no let's go back even a bit

further and maybe you'll remember another key thing with what you said in your uh mortgage financing analysis there is that the key word you used is disclosure. Disclosure. With an MLM company, MLMs don't have to disclose these sort of numbers to their recruits, like simple things like an income disclosure. They always make the analogy between what they do and sort of being a franchisee. Their recruits, oh, it's just like you're a franchisee. It's just like we're a real estate brokerage and you're one of our real estate agents.

It's not the same because to be a franchisee, you get to look at books. You get to see disclosure. In MLM, you don't have to do that. And the reason for this, I'm not going to bore anyone with the boring history. Years and years ago, something called the business opportunity rule was proposed. And it basically was this rule that, if passed, work from home opportunities would have to come with one sheet disclosure to the people who were signing up. Multi-level marketing companies realized this would probably be the end of them if this happened to them. So they lobbied congressmen and rallied their people in the industry to write to the FTC, to the government, and say, exempt MLMs from the business opportunity rule.

And they were successful in doing that. And there's also little things like, you know, one of the distinctions between being a franchisee is that, hey, we know, we know. you probably hit play to escape your business banking, not think about it. But what if we told you there was a way to skip over the pressures of banking? By matching with a TD small business account manager, you can get the proactive business banking advice and support your business needs. Ready to press play? Get up to $2,700 when you open select small business banking products. Yep, that's $2,700 to turn up your business. Visit TD.com slash small business match to learn more. conditions apply your startup costs or your cost to join is more than $500 so a lot of these MLMs the

cost is actually less than 500 like you know 300 or 400 just to like skirt that so um just another layer of of of the fraudulence there yeah but you go ahead i was thinking about um i was thinking about grant cardone and and doing the whole telling everybody that if they didn't make 400,000, they were a loser. And, you know, he says so many just ridiculous things. It's, it's like, you know, like, I always love that he's, he does this whole thing on how not to own a house, how you shouldn't own your own house and you should rent and you should this. And it was like, it's like, okay, well, don't you sell houses? Like, don't you, you know, one of the things you do is buy apartment complexes and help people buy apartment, help people, help people.

people buy houses, fix them up and sell them to what? Suckers? You know, it's like, like you're, he's, he's so grossly offensive and contradictory toward what, toward what he's doing. It, it just, it kills me. But hold on my, I want to, I want to help you remember what you were going to say before. Did you remember it? Was that it?

The Grand Cardone thing? Um, well, it was no. Well, I also remember I have somebody when you mentioned the business opportunity. I was locked up with a guy who did a business opportunity scam. Okay. Very interesting scam. He would look, the psychology behind this guy, it was, it was, it was baffling. Like it was, he was amazingly good at sales. And it was the same types of things where, you know, he would disclose, you know, listen, when I walked into a room to disclose to somebody, I was, I already had all the places you needed to have highlighted, highlighted with a sticker. I kept my hand over the document the whole time, and I very quickly explained what you were signing, and I kept poking at the page, you know, I checked my watch, and I kept telling them that what they were signing wasn't, you know, this isn't the final product. The final product that you will be signing is at closing, and you'll be able to review all those documents at closing. This is just a disclosure to let you know that I did tell you

what, you know, what you were going to be signing when you get to closing. So this doesn't mean anything. You know, you keep telling them. It doesn't mean anything. The truth in lending doesn't mean anything. It's just, these are just documents for the state. You have to sign them for the federal government. You just got to sign.

No big deal. Here, sign here. This says that I didn't make you get your homeowners insurance from where you got it, right? Like, I didn't tell you you had to go to state farm. You went to all state. That's, see, and they seem very benign. You make everything sound very benign. And they sign and they sign.

Then, of course, they go to closing and they get a stack of documents for their mortgage, which is 12 pages long, fine print. They're not going to read that. You know, like, it just, there were, there were so many things that were like this. And it was the same thing with the business opportunity scam that I was telling you about that guy. And, you know, the big thing, too, is that they, I know, because I've talked to, well, I watch a podcast and I, talked to a guy that researches and i talked to mike when uh wait why am i saying his name

wrong winette winette you know it's the same thing it's that you know they do they they blame you if you're not successful it's because of you you know but you're having me sell an inferior product for double what i should be selling it for you know door to door like it's the whole system is rigged It's just stupid. And I had to put up several thousand dollars to get to this point. And I have to sell it higher and convince the people I'm selling it to for them to turn around and sell it. Like the whole thing is just. Well, I mean, think of how actually impractical it is that somebody could be successful just selling shampoo out of their trunk and making $10 a bottle, $20 a bottle at best.

overpriced shampoo, like making an actual living from just the commissions of this, you would probably be the best salesman who ever lived, whoever lived. And then you also have to recruit people so that your commission rate, because here's the thing in these MLM companies, when you first join, the commission rate you qualify for is very low. It's the people with the higher ranks that earn the better commission. Well, how do you get to the higher rank? Well, you have people under you who are also distributors.

Okay. So if I have, let's say, 10 people under me. And now instead of just a 20% commission, I qualify for a 70% commission on the product, right? So now I'm able to make 70%, but they're still higher to go. So I keep recruiting people. But wait, wait, wait, Marco, what about sales? I thought you're recruiting people so that your commission can be higher. So what about the sales?

Well, when you sign someone up, they buy a starter kit that counts as a sale right my sales are now based off of the starter kits exactly so i mean that is how these companies like quantify that they tie the purchase of a product when you join when you join you have to purchase a product that is how they disguise themselves as a legitimate network marketing product product-based, product-selling-based business and not just a money-transfer Ponzi or pyramid scheme. But consider this. I'm going to ask you, because I was doing this thought experiment in my head yesterday, but you'll get this.

And this is not like a trick question. What is the one, if you were a company, think any industry, any field, any company, any business, if you could only track one piece of data regarding your business if you could only track one metric what would it be i mean it would probably if you could be sales sales yeah sales totally right you'll die without sales you'll die without sales any company whether you sell cars hamburgers haircuts you name it every company must know their sales your sales your sales to an actual outside market, to the public, determines everything else how much you make.

So what's your revenue? So what's our budget? So how much can we pay this guy? So what's our marketing? Which product was the most popular so we can double down in the marketing? Which product didn't do so well? Okay, let's discontinue that one or let's rebrand it and work on it. How do you know without sales?

You don't. Any business without sales, without knowing its sales, would fold. Would we agree? Right. Very quickly, it would fold. if you don't track your sales. Even a little kid with a lemonade stand must know his sales. MLM companies don't know their sales.

MLM companies sell the products to the people who sign up to sell the products. Once, if I'm a distributor for a company that sells shampoo, an MLM, I buy it. How did they know whether I sold it or whether it sat in my garage? They don't know. So when MLM companies report their earnings, that earnings statement is only a reflection of the product they sold to its own people. Right. How does it know?

How does it know whether people out there in the marketplace actually want the product? They don't know. And like we agreed, any company that doesn't track its sales would fail. And these companies are doing fine. Billions in revenue. They're around year after year, some decades. Amway been around almost 100. fucking years. So there must be another way that they're making money. Yeah, well,

their sales are based off of recruiting, not sales. They don't care what the product is. Exactly. And it's like, you know, they claim that the reason they don't sell these products in stores, they claim that the reason they don't do traditional advertising is so that they can cut out the middleman. Well, you know, I'm impersonating an MLM recruiter here. Well, you know, those big box retailers, they take a cut and then it's more expensive and that's no good. And like, you know, the advertising. Well, how about we just use word of mouth? We let our recruits advertise for us. That way we can give them the money for advertising instead of giving it to the television station or the radio. That's what they say. But in truth, advertising, bless you, in truth,

in truth, advertising is totally irrelevant to a company that doesn't even sell to the outside world. Right. So that's not the reason why. It's not because they are so generous and they want to give more money back to their workforce, it's because the workforce is the ones buying it. Why the fuck would I go and advertise to the outside world when you suckers are giving me billions of dollars a year to sign up and buy it? I wonder what the closing ratio is when they get a group together. Like if they get 100 people together, do they sell 20 of them or 60? It's about volume, right? I spoke to a woman on my multi-level misery series who was in a company called Monet for five years. They sell shampoo and things like this.

And she told me she would cold DM 200 people a day on Facebook. And Facebook would block her from using the function because she was just spamming, essentially. You know, she could go in Facebook jail. So it's, you know, it's about volume. If you are constantly... So if 200 a day, how many did she get after 200 a day? I don't know her closing rate. but the point is just that it's about it's about volume like you're not actually selling people on an

opportunity you're just casting a very wide net yeah you know and think about this too when the when the pyramid collapses a lot of people uh they re they get tricked over again because the next MLM company comes along and they join that one and they'll tell them they'll have some again some riddle some slick way of explaining why this one is not like that one why this one why this one's better. Every MLM I've ever investigated has said we have the best compensation plan in the industry. Every one of them has said that. Every one of them calls the other companies that are a carbon copy, a scam. Right. Mway is the grandfather of all MLMs. Every MLM is actually just a branch of the Amway tree. Amway is the industry. Okay. And I've been in MLM meetings where they

call Amway scamway. And they do the exact same thing. It's all part of this like thought stopping cognitive dissonance brainwashing fraud trickery i so i have i i remember what i was going to tell you was i um i acted as a scammer con man for vice tv on a series they did and they gave like they were these little three minute videos and i want to say two of the people were immigrants. So they didn't understand that the IRS wouldn't call you and tell you to go to Walmart and get four different Walmart credit cards for $1,000 and call and give them the numbers. Like they didn't understand that wasn't it. That wasn't how it worked. Another one of the scams was, what was it? Oh, that someone had called, they called and said

his mother was in a car accident. She needed surgery. She was at the hospital. She needed surgery. Or she was going to die. Like there was just no way to save her, but they couldn't do the surgery unless he had a credit card. And then they ended up finding it, figuring out how much was on the credit card. And he had like a $30,000 limit on his credit card. And he actually, the credit card company, they billed them for the whole $30,000. And he actually had the credit card company called him and verified, are you sure? sure this is you like everything he was like absolutely yes no i need to pay for this and and they let it go through so and i forget what the third one was why can you just call his mom

yeah that that was the whole thing it was such a rush thing he just never ended up talking to his mother but um it listen i i i you know i get it like it's like you know the problem was that during that course of that interview, I remember the guy that was the producer was asking me, like, what do you think of these people? Like, you know, a lot of people think that if you get scammed like this, like you deserve it. Like, what's your thought? And, you know, you mentioned something to me, which was, you know, that people get sick, you know, people, things happened out of the blue. And I remember saying, you know, that the problem is, is a lot of people think, oh, well, you've got to be stupid. But the truth is that most people that get scammed aren't

stupid, you know, like if it makes sense, you know, in those cases, those people didn't know how the system worked, right? So they know that, look, if you go to the hospital and you need a surgery, they're going to do the surgery. They're not going to call you and say, if somebody doesn't pay for it, we're going to let you bleed to death. That's not going to happen. in the United States. They're going to give you the surgery. They're going to bill you later. They're going to come after you for the money. They're going to put a lien on your house. But the truth is, they are going to do the surgery. Same thing with the IRS. They didn't realize how the IRS worked. Right. Those people weren't stupid. They were just ill-informed. You know,

they lacked the, they lacked the understanding of how the system work. But most people that get scammed aren't stupid. You know, what happens is they're just, like you said, they're predisposed. And a lot of times, if the scam, now I'm not talking about an MLM, I'm talking about regular scams, if the scam makes sense, doctors, lawyers, investors, people with money, people that only own companies, will invest hundreds of thousands, if not millions, because it makes sense. The problem is, like a lot of Ponzi schemes, they make sense. What they're not counting on is the fact that it's a Ponzi scheme. Like, that may have worked if that's what they were doing with your money,

but they're not. They're just spending it. You know? So I think a lot of the lot of people believe, oh, well, if you get scammed by an MLM or you get scammed by a scam, you're just stupid. But really you're not. You'd be shocked how many people are susceptible to it. Totally.

And like in the example you gave with the hospital, your mom's in the hospital scam, what are they praying on? your emotional yeah your emotion and emotion is stronger than logic emotion is stronger than facts you know early on i thought i would convince people like i going back to the story with my friend right i told him hey man look at this stuff that i saw on google even if i showed him what i know now even if i showed him 99% loss rate there's no sales to an outside market emphasis on recruiting um even if i pointed out all these logical fallacies they have hooked him on things that are so much more powerful than a number on a screen could be.

Think of your mom, think of your dad, think of your family, think of your dream future. What do you think is more palpable in a person who, mind you, a person who, they go for two demographics, visible minority, visible disability. Look for somebody who's vulnerable. Did you just lose someone? Is your guard already down? Are you already in a heightened emotional state where you're not thinking straight? you know are you are you a kid fresh out of high school who is lost and doesn't know what they

want to do these are the things they need these things and that's why you know there's a lot of scams out here there's a lot of scams out here and almost all of them from what i've seen have to do with your money going from your pocket into my pocket this multi-level marketing does that but it does so much more and so much worse Um, it's, it's, the guy, shoot, I was going to tell you, but the guy, the business opportunities guy that I told you about, he, he, he really had it down. Like, he, he had it, you know, he had a, a great system down. Kind of forget what I was going to, where I was going to, but let's go back. Let's, let's, let's rewind. Um, I was saying, they're praying on your emotion. What's more powerful. Oh, that's what he said. He said, he said that the fear of, of losing out on a deal is more powerful than the fear of losing your money. He said, people's fear of being that guy, that guy that invested in Apple and chose to say, you know what, Steve, I don't think this is going to work. Give me my $2,000 back and I'll give you

my 30% of the company. That got no, but people are more afraid of being that guy. than they are of losing their money. They don't want people to ridicule them in the rest of their life. They'd rather risk their million or $100,000 or $2,000 or whatever it is than to be that guy that missed out on the next Amway, you know, a package. Like, I was going to make millions in Amway. Never meant to get more than that. It's, I mean, think, yeah, that's, I mean, what are stocks? Stocks are speculative, right?

They go up and down in value because of what people think. we've just we're just now on the tail end of a crypto social contagion where everyone thought that they were going to become a millionaire off of monkey pictures and realistically that's not what happened even you know scammers always adapt foreign exchange crypto NFTs these were so popular during COVID everyone's locked at home oh I can make money right here so even MLMs you know, there's a couple of MLMs that dealt with Forex that, you know, they claim their products with their products were education on Forex, but underneath it's still the same, still the same thing. And it's interesting. You mentioned the, you know, scammers over in India making somebody go

by Walmart, you know, Walmart gift cards or whatever. These are, that's an example of an evolving scam, a new method, new tools, telephone, internet, you know, screen sharing, soft, that makes it look like we've got into your bank account those scammers will always adapt right scammers will always find new ways but consider multi-level marketing is the only scam that has stayed the exact same since the very beginning with no need to adapt because it's legal right right um so what are what are the worst ones out there that you think it's a good question people have asked me this question And a lot of MLMs have definitely made the case for employing tactics that could be considered the scummiest and the most misleading and thus the worst. But I think the argument could be made that Amway is the worst insofar as Amway is the OG and it is the reason why multi-level marketing exists today.

they very early on realized the power behind political influence, political lobbying, and that has its arms reach far into the future. And that's why we have, they're still around today. You know, consider we think of pyramid schemes, like one person gets five people, gets five people, gets five people. We can almost look at the industry in the same way. Amway spawns. all these other ones who, when they get shut down, their leaders branch off and spawn other ones.

So there is almost a pyramid scheme of pyramid schemes that is going on. Ronald Reagan, when he was the president, spoke at an Amway Convention while he was the sitting president. Trump, before he was president, up until the year before he was president, would speak at ACN. There's an MLM called ACN conventions every single year. They paid him millions and millions of dollars. Betsy DeVos, who is Trump's secretary of education. She gets her last name, DeVos, from her husband, who is the son of Amway's founder.

Her money is Amway money. So the political influence goes so high. Kamala Harris, the current vice president, her husband is a lawyer for a firm that defends MLMs like Amway, Herbalife, et cetera. It goes very, very deep. And, you know, I will have to get ready for the next few years of people calling me like a conspiracy theorist. But, you know, I always think of Harry Markopoulos, the guy who exposed Bernie Madoff years and years before they actually got him. Nobody believed him.

He's a key. They thought he's crackpot. He's a crackpot. And I mean, same thing. But that's the problem. Like you said, with Bernie Madoff, he had done it for so long and he had so much credibility. It's the same thing with Amway. Like you said, they've gone so long. It can't be a scam at this point. Of course. Oh, my grandma sold Amway. That's not a scam? It's part of the cultural influence and it's sort of like going back to the very beginning how we talked about like you you could have stopped and started over, but you just went deeper and deeper into it. It's like our society has gone deeper and deeper into it. Scarface you know, to a lot of people is a hero that represents the American dream. Jordan Belfort,

same thing. But it seems like people only remember the first two thirds of the movie where they go from regs to riches and they don't remember the last act where the person dies or goes to jail and people miss the point completely that Scarface was the bad guy. And Jordan Belfour was the bad guy. He wasn't the hero. He was the villain. And, you know, I love those movies too. Don't get me wrong. But they've been turned into the wrong, they've been, you know, reinterpreted to be the wrong type of, the wrong type of influence. And so, you know, yeah, Harry Markopoulos, he was just a crackpot, right? You know, slavery was legal for hundreds of years. And if you had said, you know, oh, slavery, this isn't right. Back in like 1800, people would have probably looked at you like,

dude, this is the way it's always been. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? It is not until people, the public, the people rally together and put pressure on their governments that things change. That's the way it's always been. You know, just in the last decade of my life, I have seen gay marriage and weed become legal. Those are huge things but yet there are still things that are legal that are unethical and there were things that were illegal that are ethical you know i think it's a good thing that weed and gay marriage have been legalized you know so um sam bankman freed just recently was essentially running a personal piggy bank with ftx and it was a legitimate it was so legit yeah it's so many people so

many big celebrities appearing in advertisements for it. They had FTX Arena. I mean, it's about as legit as it gets from the layperson's point of view, you know, and that's why these MLM companies also employ celebrity speakers at their events because it adds legitimacy, you know. So I interviewed a guy on my, you know, on my channel, and he was actually a part of an MLM and he was from Canada he came to LA and and you know during the and got pitched for the MLM and then later on whatever it was I don't know how many years after he went through the whole process he he wrote a movie about it wrote a movie he produced and acted in a movie and you know it's it's actually I always say this I always say that's

not a great movie but it actually isn't a bad movie does it have big stars in it no but it's actually not a bad movie and especially if you watched it like this is a guy who gets pitched in a living room with like eight people next thing you know it's a bigger those people branch off and then there's another kind of a meeting those people branch off and i'm sorry what's the movie called it's called um all i need gotcha and it's on my it's on my it's on my um Um, actually, it's actually, I think it's on Amazon. It's something like one of these channels, like Peacock or Amazon. It's called All I Need.

What is his name? I'm seeing it. You're not saying it? No, I am seeing it. But I'm seeing, um, I'm seeing a horror movie called All I Need, not a, uh, anyway, I'll find it. I'll find it.

Hold on. It's a scheme. Don't get caught. Hold on. You know what? It's a punch in. Shoot. What is his name?

I, too. I did a. so i don't just look for it on the channel um here it is here uh yeah it's it's it's it's it's it's super interesting i can get you the the i can get you the the link or the the movie i know he he'd be interested interesting to talk to because he went through oh here it is oh it's all that i need and the name of my the episode is what it's really like inside it says Ponzi scheme okay but it's it's really you got to watch it it's I think it's more of a pyramid scheme because because but it's literally there's not you're not selling anything so it's really it's kind of a mixture

because the whole thing is like if you bring in money and give me money I forget the way set up. Yeah, so the Ponzi scheme is essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul. So if you, if I present you the scheme, I tell you that you give me $10 and I'm going to return back to $20 in X amount of time. I will give you that $20 because I went and found another few people to give me $10. Right, which eventually it collapses. Which eventually it collapses because there's not enough new people to support paying out the old people. This is what Bernie Madoff was running. Fun fact, did you know that you actually have a better chance of success in a no product Ponzi scheme than an actual product-based MLM?

Really? Think about it. It's very simple. In a product-based MLM, you have overhead. In a Ponzi scheme, you don't have overhead. Right. A lot of the problem with the Ponzi schemes is that people just, they promise too big. You know, the return, like, like, what's his name?

Like Bernie Madoff went so long because he wasn't giving outrageous. returns. They were higher than average, but they weren't insane. Like, Charles Ponzi is giving you three times your money in 90 days. Like, it's outrageous. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think Charles Ponzi would actually be a really good like period piece movie. I, you know, I've thought of this like much more down the trough, but like I would love to be involved in a, in a movie about Charles Ponzi, the historic figure because it's such a so applicable today. And I'm not even really a huge fan of like period pieces like that but um what was like in a search there was oh yeah who was the man who sold the Eiffel tower oh victor lusting yeah that guy it's not really a Ponzi scheme but that guy

really uh he was he was an OG for sure he sold the Eiffel Tower twice genius um yeah he he he was he also used to sell the romanian box you know the romanian box where he would sell you the box it made money you put a dollar bill in or a hundred dollar bill or 20 and hilarious and then it would roll in there and you would wait and then you had to wait like an hour or two and then you could roll it out and it would come out then two of them would come out hilarious so he sold the box to people and then he would show them how he'd show them once how it works they sit there then they bring the money to the bank. And the bank would say, yeah, this is a real $100 bill. And then the person would go out

and get him like two or $3,000 and come back. He'd give him the paper, give him everything. And then he had an hour or two hours to leave. That was why that you had to wait. Genius. Yeah. Traditional. Traditional snake oil salesman, you know, put the shit back on the wagon. Let's go to the next town. Do the pitch again. Yeah. And you know, he got a police officer one time, like a sheriff oh shit and the sheriff he got because the sheriff had stolen money that had been seized the sheriff had stolen it and spent it so the sheriff needed a way to recoup the money so he convinced the sheriff he could do this if he just gave him so much money so he also by the way he also conned um al capone damn he had a bunch of he had a it was

really interesting. Of course, he ended up dying in prison. So, you know, that sucks. Damn. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, that thing that I said a moment ago really stunned me when I first read it that you have a better chance of making money in a traditional Ponzi scheme. But it does make sense because there is no overhead that you would have to pay. Like, as long as you're early enough in the Ponzi scheme, you probably will get a return. And for the person running the scheme, you do want to pay your first few levels of investors back their money because that's how you're going to access more people. You have to build that trust initially. So you have a much, much better chance doing that. Whereas if you're joining an MLM pyramid scheme, you're already too late. You know,

these companies have been around for years, you know. The other thing I was going to, I was going to mention about pyramid schemes. Like I knew a guy in prison. Well, I've known a few people in prison that ramp pyramid schemes or not, I'm sorry, Ponzi schemes. and another one I knew another guy that went 15 years 15 years the problem with him was he was spending so much of the money it was it was outrageously spending that when when the market crashed and people started asking for their money back it it you know he couldn't pay it so yeah so it ended up collapsing had the market not collapsed, and had he not been spending so lavish, lavishly, he would have had enough to probably,

because not everybody was pulling out. There was only a few people, but it was so much that he just couldn't do it. Right. Right. Totally. Yeah, that's what they mean by collapse, right? Is that you have to at that point, then flee town essentially, change your name and start again. So on the FTC website, if you just search FTC MLM on Google, you'll come to a page that says

multi-level marketing businesses and pyramid schemes. So first thing to note is that they share a page. Supposedly, these things are both different, but they share a page on the FTC's website. So that's step one, okay? On the web page, it says, if you scroll down a little bit, it says pyramid schemes are scams. They can look remarkably like legitimate MLM business opportunities and often sell actual products, maybe even ones you've heard of. But if you become a distributor for a pyramid scheme, it can cost you in your...

But if you become a distributor for a pyramid scheme, for a pyramid scheme, it can cost you and your recruits, often family and friends, a lot of time and money that you won't get back. Right, we know this. Now, just Google Ponzi versus Pyramid. It says Ponzi schemes can be easier to detect, but pyramid schemes can be hidden to make them look legitimate. Ponzi schemes simply require a cash investment. Pyramid schemes, on the other hand, need you to pay a fee or purchase products and services in order to participate. and earn an income. So considering these three things, Matt, can you tell me the difference between a Ponzi scheme,

a pyramid scheme, and an MLM? Well, I mean, the product, you have a product that you're selling. Is that it? Yep. So that's the difference between Ponzi because a Ponzi named after Charles Ponzi is just cash. I give you $10.000. You give me back $100 or you give me back $20. So now, Matt, tell me what's the difference between a pyramid scheme?

and an MLM if a pyramid scheme hmm I mean I I I don't I just I don't I don't see a difference you know who also doesn't see a difference the FTC they have never actually been able to answer the question there is no documentation as far as I know that exists and I've looked through a lot from the actual FTC that says here is the difference between an MLM and a pyramid scheme right so but the difference is is that they're not going after pyramid schemes because they're not they're just not being given the the legal basis or legal jurisdiction to do it basically i mean

if you think about it like this this in this way i think about it you have political lobbyists right corporations with corporate interests they want to protect what they do MLM industry has a lot of money. They give money to politicians to say, hey, wink, wink, cough, cough, don't let this bill pass, protect me, et cetera. Right. So now that government that is partially paid for by the MLM industry is now in charge of this arm of it called the FTC to tell them, hey, go after this, don't go after this. So I was going to say, isn't that kind of what Sam Bateman-Fried was kind of aiming toward to kind of... I believe so.

Try and get himself in a situation where he could protect his little fiefdom. I believe so. So, you know, the government, the FTC is run by the government. The government is at least partially influenced by the MLM companies. So I don't think that the FTC themselves are this super corrupt organization because even if the government that's put in place is partially there because of MLM companies. The MLM companies themselves are not deciding on the budgets of the FTC, nor are they deciding which companies they go after. The FTC is not a huge department. They have many things to look at. Basically,

every fraud they have to cover, and there's not enough people. The only way that MLM companies will be investigated are if people speak out and report the fraudulent income claims that they see on Instagram or Facebook or whatever to the FTC and report the company and report their experience. You know, a lot of these people, like we talked about earlier,

when they leave an MLM and they lose money, they're so shamed that they don't even want to speak out because they believe it was their fault. Why would you report? Why would you report a company being a scam if you thought it was your fault that you failed and scammed your friends and family out of them absolutely because now you're culpable right right now you were part of it so what are you what are you going to do um

so the i had another important thing i was going to say here um another reason why the ftc can't on their own bring cases against these companies is because a lot of the fraudulent income claims that these people are making are behind closed doors and personal meetings in these meetings or Zoom calls that, you know, they're, they happen in the moment and then they're gone. B, they happen on Instagram on people's Instagram stories, which expire after 24 hours. The FTC does not have people sitting there screenshoting people's stories. But that's what I'm trying to mobilize my audience to do because many hands, make light work. So if I had even a thousand people per year, target one specific company

to find, to keep track of and screenshot the posts that they saw from their friends or family who were in that company, these fraudulent claims, and send them to the FTC, I believe that company would be reprimanded. And then if the next year we do it again with another company and on and on and on, I believe it's only a matter of time before the, you know, the public pressure is so glaring that the FTC has to do something drastic.

Right. It's been a long time, but, um, so I've been a long time, sorry, it's been a long time, but it's been a long time with no social media. Now we have tools to catch them and provide proof and evidence. Now we have the internet to share people's stories, and destigmatize and get rid of this idea of it was your fault you were an idiot you

were you didn't work hard enough so I believe you know I believe that this is a business model that won't survive when I'm 50 years old they won't be around so is that so is that what is the goal of your channel is that the the goal of your channel or yes just to expose them and or is it to hope to bring legislation to long term long term that is the hope you know in the short I do have to still try to make edutainment, essentially, make videos that are interesting that inform people about what's going on and entertain them at the same time and ask people to, you know, everybody, everybody is affected by this. Everybody knows somebody who was in this, who was in an MLM.

Everybody has a friend, a relative, or knows someone who knows someone who was in one of these companies. I truly believe that if somebody, maybe me, pointed people in the right direction and said, hey, guys, there actually can, changes actually can be made. Just report it. I do believe that long term we can make change. I'll do all the legwork. I'll dive into the records of the company. I'll go to the meetings with the hidden camera. I'll put myself at risk.

You know, I'll do all that stuff. I'll put myself in the line of fire. Just help me when I ask. Help me to report whichever company it is that I'm investigating at the time. And, you know, yeah. Well, how, so how is your channel, like, how's it doing now? Like you had like a little sabbatical you mentioned. You've been up and running again for how many months now,

Six months? Not even one month. Oh, not even a month? Not even a month. You took off like six months. Took off a year. A year? A whole year.

I didn't post anything that was pyramid scheme related. I've been back now a few weeks and like it's actually insane how how drastic the spike has been. How many videos if you put out, just one or two? I've done a couple live streams and I put out. Two videos, the third, the second episode of multi-level misery, it will be out by the time this is out. But I'm working on another installment of my larger series called Infiltrating a Pyramid Scheme. These are the more fleshed out, almost documentaries where I go with a hidden camera into a pyramid scheme meeting and listen directly from the source of the person presenting to try to get a picture and I go compare the financial records and et cetera. Okay. Well, cool. So all right. I'm good. Do you have anything else you want to say?

I just want to make the clarification. Why am I doing this? I'm totally transparent about it. It's fun. It's a blessing to be able to make money off of this type of content. So from a business standpoint, I have absolutely no shame in saying that I make money from this type of content. I think if you're doing good work, in the world and helping people you deserve to make money. And also, at the at the real heart of it, I said those two things first because I know that that's what all the naysayers or not even naysayers, just all the brainwashed pro MLM people are going to say about me. He's doing this for cloud for his YouTube channel. He's doing it to make money, et cetera. The real reason is because I lost my best friend because of this. And I know far too many people from doing this work who have reached out to me in messages and comments who have had the same experience who won't talk to their parents or whose parents won't talk to them. I've talked to old

women who have now been barred from seeing their grandchildren because their child is so deep in an MLM and everything that is not pro that MLM is an enemy. And I'm doing this to prevent that type of thing that happened to me happening to more people yeah i can definitely see how it becomes kind of a cult situation do you interview people i've done a couple interviews um and i guess now i'm i'm really getting more into the interviewing because i just started this new series where i interview former uh victims of m lm companies so i guess i'm i'm doing that a lot more regularly now now that i think of it. Yeah, that's, it's, you know, well, I mean, I was going to say the intro is always frustrating. Plus, you just never know where, you know, well, I mean, in general, I mean, I, I didn't

know you interviewed people because I watched a couple of your, your videos. And it was just you explained, talking about the different MLMs. So, I have, good. I was going to say, I have one interview up on my channel with a gentleman named Robert Fitzpatrick. He's like, considered the world's expert on multi-level marketing and i have one the first episode of this multi-level misery series has gone public on my channel with a girl who is in primarica for a couple years so that weekly series has started um and uh by the time people are watching this the second episode should be out so yeah getting getting more into it but i always do the intro i film it after when i'm by myself so that i don't put the pressure on myself because you could always just slap it

the beginning when you edit you know yeah uh i listen sometimes i nail it sometimes i'm off that's fair it's uh but you know like i said nobody's watching this because they think you know this is a professional person he's he's polished now nobody's nobody thinks i'm polished your setup looks good though you have a good camera obviously um you know i've got a couple of those sony vios the ones that they sony like designed the camera specifically for for uh YouTubers Oh, okay. So it just, you know, you turn it on and it just runs and runs. And I've got them, they're all networked together to a switcher.

I've got a whole little console. Like, it's actually, it's set up very well. You know, I just slowly put it together over the last couple of years. And at first, it was, you know, it was just held together with, you know, bubble gum and spit. And now, and now I'm slowly getting better and better equipment. So. Totally. Totally. Totally. So you want me to call you Matt? Sure. There was a real missed opportunity to not call this show Talks with Cox.

What? It talks with, yeah, well, you know, it was true crime. Yeah, yeah, I feel that. But if you ever do a different show, have you ever do a more casual talk show format? That's it. You've got to promise me. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I've thought, like, I would love to get like four guys together and just talk. Like, four interests. guys and just talk for two or three hours like one of those types of right right you know have pretty much the same guys right that's easy and i find a lot of times i'll i'll talk with someone especially people that i don't necessarily think would be interesting and the conversation just goes and we jump from one topic to another and you're two hours go by three hours go by and you're like wow like that blew by and it was really interesting so it would be great a podcast with just

all the whole crew is completely boring and everyone's just like the the atmosphere of the show is just everyone feeling the pressure to keep the convo going but nobody really wants to be there that I would watch that that would be a good show what was it my buddy told me listen my buddy told me this one who who is a friend of mine and you know he's he's always got these ideas you know he never does anything with him but uh and he took the idea from another podcast he was watching and the podcast was like what if you had some kind of a restaurant type of situation where you you you wire the whole you know the the table and you invited people in and then they basically they just sat there and ate dinner and talked and you just videoed it or maybe it was just four friends and they

talked and there was different groups like twice a week it was a different group of people And you interviewed, or you did the whole podcast, recorded it, and then just put it up. Do the people at the restaurant know they're being recorded? Yeah, they know. They know you're being recorded. And they know it's going to be posted. So it's just a podcast, but with more clanking and fork sounds and more expensive. Maybe it's just drinking.

Maybe it's drinking. Okay. Well, that exists. Drink champs. Oh, is it? Yeah, there's a podcast called Drink Champs where they do that. Or is it different people every time? It's the same hosts.

but different different person they bring in to interview every time yeah okay well i think this way he was saying like there is no host oh just let people wing it yeah yeah they just come in you got two or three interesting couples they sit down they start talking oh what do you do oh i do this i do oh yeah you know and they just have a six hour conversation i mean free content you just have to record it and you know just change the chance change the cameras put it up that'd be good for ticot like you get a lot of bites you'd get a lot of clips i don't know if it'd be if you'd have like a coherent hour-long episode, but for sure, for TikTok, you could kill that. Yeah, you'd be all over the place.

Yeah. So I'm sorry. I was just going to say, like, as a sidebar, I checked out your TikTok and I think your content would really kill if you just posted like podcast clips, like sort of like the Andrew Tate method of you posting, like if you have an hour long podcast or I don't know how long your typical podcasts are, but like Mike Dowd, for example, that episode did really good for you on YouTube. If you just like took the coolest moments from that, you could probably get 10, 20 clips from that one interview for TikTok. And one of them would crush,

especially if you post on all three of those platforms that allow that type of vertical content to blow up, Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts, TikTok, and you had 20 pieces of content. That's essentially 60 posts. You'd crush. Yeah, we did that. Oh, shit. Okay. Yeah, the channel went up to about 60,000 subscribers. I had several videos that had a million, two million, you know, the TikToks. And then after it was up for about four months, five months, and then we got so many strikes, they eventually just took the whole channel down. Oh, because of the subject matter?

Honestly, you know, I wish I could say I was 100% positive of what it was, but a lot of the videos, like half the videos were completely, in my opinion, they were benign. And we may have been talking about a bank robber, how he robbed a bank or something. But this is someone telling their story. And it wasn't a lot of cursing. It was, you know, like if you mention a gun or if you mention, if you do mention violence or if you mentioned, a lot of those had that. And the guy I had running it for me, he was like 19 years old.

And he just couldn't understand that that's, you know, it was like, hey, we keep getting these violations and then one time they they took they didn't let us post for 10 days you know they build up to that and then a month later bam they just took the channel down dang so that tic talk you have now is not even the original tic talk no no because i you know i got frustrated and he's he kind of disappeared like i think he thought he was scared like thought i was mad or something which i wasn't he disappeared and then like a month or so later he came back he's like hey i'm i'm ready to i'm sorry man i'll start another channel and And I said, okay, well, if you want to start one, that's fine.

And then then he just, he disappeared again. You know, and he's 19. Yeah. Got to find a new kid. Yeah. There's kids out there that somewhere. I mean, they might not even be in the U.S. That'll, that'll chop clips.

But, yeah, I mean, they just got to be, you got to play the game of TikTok and not use any of the. I agree. Those words, you know. The other funny thing about that, now that we're on the subject is that, I've had another group and this both this happened with both with this kid one kid and another another guy group or two guys that said hey I'll do your content they gave us a price then they switched the price then now the problem with the original kid that helped me I was like look here's what I'll do for you we'll pay you this much and I'll take you

You know, once it blows up, I'll take you to Podfest, because I'm going to Podfest. It's like for YouTube and for podcasters. I'm like, I'll take you there. I'm going to do a speech there. And I was like, I'll talk about how you have helped, you know, blow up my channel or get me a bunch of subscribers, that sort of thing. And he wasn't even interested. No, I don't really want to do that. Like, he's basically like a 19-year-old.

He lives at home. He wants enough money to take out his girlfriend. I mean, nice. kid but you know a lot of kids they just they just don't want to they don't want to work they don't want to do anything they don't want to build anything they don't yeah totally uh it's a there's definitely a social contagion of of laziness but uh you got to sift through the the herd to find to find the gems you know yeah so you're you're in um sorry you're in uh Canada I'm in Canada I'm in Alberta West West West West

west coast okay um god west coast of canada i don't even think of anything over i can't so so you you would know like uh vancouver like british columbia so i'm one province or state to the right of that so yeah you know british columbia's rate on the it's it's the western most province right right on the water above if you're thinking looking at the canada above the u.s on the map above sort of um california and then going over to the right alberta okay yeah i'll check it out yeah you heard of the edmonton oilers the hockey team wayne greetsky i'm not i'm not like there you go i'm not a sports guy that's fair that's fair um so okay so you were you born in canada i was born here yep all right yeah i'm canadian i'm canadian what made you so

you know um born there raised there did you go to college i did one year of uh just general like business uh elective classes basically at uh a university here i didn't want to go i actually i wanted i wanted to go to school for audio engineering at a sort of like technical college to get a certification for that. But my parents, after initially agreeing, sort of changed their mind and forced me to go the more traditional route. I didn't really have a choice. It was either you go to school for what we want you to go for or you don't live here and you go figure it out on your own. And I at that time did not have the resources to figure it out on my own.

So I sort of split the difference by going, but I flunked, I think a good, chunk of my classes and I just sat in the back of the class most of the time watching like tutorials on my laptop about audio engineering and then after that first year I was just working jobs and um ended up working at a recording studio as an audio engineer so sort of sort of they put an obstacle in my way but I found a way around it is that is that how long ago is that like is that when you started your channel or no so that was 2014 15. I graduated high school in 2014. So I know I'm, you're probably thinking, I know he's so young. I graduated, but you're young too. You don't look to be old. You don't look to be older than like

38, 39. How old are you? 53. You're 53? Holy boy. I've had a lot of work. Have you actually? Yeah. Holy shit. Well, because you're in good shape. You got a good hairline. Is your hair line original? No. Okay, mine isn't either. I had the, I had the, I had the, what's it called hair transplant. They took the, they took the hair from the back of the head. They took the follicles from the back. They put them here in the front because I had like the reverse widow's peak where like, it wasn't, it wasn't that I was balding. It was just like the pattern of my hair and other people have this where like, you know, some people's hair goes down to the point. Yeah. Mine, mine was normal, but then had like a right here would go up a little bit. So nobody ever really noticed it.

but I was I was bothered by it so I it was a very small a graft like it cost me two thousand Canadian dollars it was not a big operation so they did it and then recently um despite doing that I've just been wearing my hair I've just been shaving my head I've just been wearing it short I mean it look you'd never tell like it looks great I would yeah yours looks good too I would I would only I would only guess that yours wasn't the original because I know what from my experience what the before and after might look like but yours looks crispy yeah i i listen i like i'll i'll walk through a crowd and be like that guy yep yeah yeah that guy yeah this like the the hairline is like men's version of the bbl you know

like going to turkey and get into bbl like that's for sure because it's not i mean there's not as much we we can do i had two surgeries what'd you do i had two and but one was seven thousand the other one they were both seven thousand dollars and i'd like to get a third Yeah. I mean, even though everybody's like, no, no, it's it. But to me, it's still, it's a little thin. You know, like it's a little thin. I mean, I understand it looks, you know, natural. But, you know, I'd like to get a third one. But that was, I did these before I, this was, gosh, this must have been 20 years ago. I did this when I was on the run. Okay. I was on the run for three years from the Secret Service. And, you know, I got the hair. I got a nose job. I got a liposoc. I got a mini facelift. liposuction. Oh, wow. I did everything. Like, I was, you know, prison wasn't part of my, my plan, but, you know. Right. Well, props to you, man, it looks, all the work that you've had done looks natural. Like, I would have just guessed that you were a young guy. You don't look like

an older guy that's had a bunch of work done, in my opinion. Well, that's, that's good. But also, consider this. You said you wanted to have the third for your hair. I think it might look more uncanny valley if you are like say 60 but you have a perfect flowing head of hair like some thinning might actually be look more you know yeah more yeah more real like more natural because if you're 70 and you have perfect hair or perfect other features that's just like it might be unnerving to to the what's like Sylvester Stallone I'm trying to think of how he looks now. Oh, there's a new series with him. He's like a retired mobster or something. And he's, Oh, course. But his hair is so thick and black. And it's just like, come on. This, it's so like,

he's got to be, he's in his mid-70s. Let me look what Sylvester Stallone looked like, Sylvester Stallone, 2022. You know who he's doing it, right? In my opinion, like, I really, not to say that people like Arnold and Sylvester Sloan aren't doing it right but I really respect like the Jack Nicholson Al Pacino way of doing it they're like fuck it I'm 80 I'm fat I'm gonna eat a hot dog fuck it yeah but listen I came out of prison you know three years ago I need to get a girlfriend I need to start a career like it's not like I've got a wife I've had for 10 years and or 15 and three kids like I'm starting my life over like I've got to put some effort into it fair enough dude So I'm very curious about this.

So I, if you don't want to go into this, because I know your audience probably already knows your story, but maybe you can cut this out, but I would just still like to know. Like, what is that background? You were in prison for 13 years? Yeah. Okay. So in Florida. Well, I mean, it's a federal, like, I mean, you know, we have states.

You have states, but, you know, we have states. And then we have the federal government. So the federal government indicted me. in multiple different jurisdictions. I see. And then I, so I went to prison. I was in Florida, but, you know, I could have been in California or Nevada or, you know, wherever.

I could have been anywhere. But I happened to be in Florida. I got lucky they put me in Florida close to one of the jurisdictions that I was indicted out of. I see. You know, I was actually sentenced in Georgia. And I have several indictments that they kind of put together and hit me once. And I went to a prison in Florida. Luckily, I was close to my family there.

So are you open about this or do you not want to get into? No, I talk about it all the time. Okay, so why did you, what did you do? I mean, the short version is that it's funny. I was just thinking like Colby will probably take this and move it to the back. But the short version, the short version is that I own a mortgage company. And, you know, it's like I. I started doing a little bit of fraud.

You know, somebody comes in with a W-2 that, you know, they made $45,000 last year. So they can't qualify for the house they want to buy. So what do I do? If it said $52,000, they could get the house.

So I changed the numbers to $52,000. I cut and paste it, put it together, send it in. It doesn't get caught, and the loan goes through. So I just got, I got more and more imaginative.

Eventually, I end up getting caught. I get caught and I lose the mortgage company. And, you know, instead of doing the right thing and saying, hey, I'm going to start over, you know, I was on probate, federal probation instead of being like, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to start selling used cars or I'm going to go work at Walmart, just do a regular thing. I decided I was going to start doing a much larger fraud. And so what I did was I started making synthetic identities. And, you know, synthetic identity is? Is that like a fake ID?

It's kind of like fake identity. But what I did was, which was unique, was I. actually went, I actually figured out how to get our social security administration to issue social security numbers to people that, that to basically children that don't exist. I would then get credit cards in their name, build a credit profile and now I've got somebody who has like a 750 credit score. So on paper he looks real. I then figured out how to get like an ID in that person's name and then I started buying houses in those names and I would record the value of the houses at a much higher sales price. So I took an area that was selling for around,

let's say, 50 or 100,000. I drove up the prices. And I borrowed like $11.5 million of the course of 18 months. Well, eventually I got caught. Well, a couple of friends got caught and they worked with the basically like a task force. They handed that task force to the FBI. They came to arrest me and I took off on the run. I was on the run for three years. Um, I was on the, I was on the run for three years. I borrowed another three and a half to four and a half million dollars while on the run. Um, you know, and I had like passports. I've had two dozen passports issued by the state, by the by the by the state department, U.S. state department. I've had 27 driver's licenses. Um, I've had over 50 identities and barred another whatever, three or four million dollars. And then eventually I get called. taught after three years and I get sentenced and I go to prison. I ended up doing 13 years. But when I was in prison, I started writing guys prison stories like true crime stories. So, you know, I start writing all these guys' stories and I figured when I got out, I'd try and do

some kind of a podcast or something. And so that's a very short version of what led me to start this channel. Right. And I still do that. I still write stories and I've optioned a bunch of stories a bunch but several and i'm working on getting some of them turned into documentaries and that's that's what i do now i do i do that i do this i paint oh yeah man so i mean obviously like that's that's something that could sort of tie into what we can talk about later with my thing is like you talked about how after that initial initial fraud like i don't know the law is too well but i'm guessing after that initial mortgage company fraud like if you had just owned up to that like The punishment probably wouldn't have been too severe.

Like, you probably wouldn't have even done time, right? Like, a lot of that could be chalked up to, like, clerical error, the inputting of incorrect numbers, right? Like, it wouldn't have been the 13 years that you got from. You know what I mean? No, no. When I first got caught, I got probation. Right. Like, I should have done something else.

Instead, I kept committing fraud. Totally. Well, that definitely, you know, have you heard of the hedonic treadmill, this philosophy, the hedonic treadmill It was like, in the pursuit of hedonism and more material good, material wealth, you will fall down the rabbit hole of the never-ending pursuit of more. So maybe you've seen that cartoon with a guy on the bike. He's looking at the guy in the car saying he wishes he had a car. The guy in the car is looking at the guy in the nicer car saying he wishes he had the nicer car.

The guy in the nicer car is looking at the guy with the helicopter saying he wish he had the helicopter. And the guy in the helicopter saying he wish he had a young. Yeah. So, you know, there's always this strive for more. And I think that that is at, at least in what I do in my experience, that it is now part of our Western culture, right? Think of these popular icons, Scarface, Jordan Belfour, Wolf of Wall Street, right? Like the pursuit of just like excess is almost. Yeah, Jordan, yeah. Like it's almost virtuous now where it's like you must be. like that is a measure of one's value or whatever you know i i was i think of i think of like you know um grant cardone like i saw a video the other day where he was saying he was talking to a crowd and he was saying like if you make less than 400,000 you're a loser like really 400,000 you make 380,000 you're a loser like i just you know every time i see hit that guy

my skin crawls. I think he's just such a scumbag. I agree. Well, Grant is telling people that if they make less than $400,000 or whatever, they're a loser because he's about to offer them the thing for $700,000 that can teach them how to make $500,000. So I mean, you know, but shout out to Greg Cardam. I was going to say eventually, you know, someone with that mentality, I think eventually that will catch up with him and he's going to be indicted for something. I mean, there's just no way that you're that brazen and it doesn't ultimately catch up to you. He's already been investigated multiple times, you know? Yeah.

I'm not too educated on the, on the Grant Cardone Rabbit Hall. I'm sort of scared to pull back the curtain on that one. But yeah, man, at least in your experience, I think, I mean, tell me what you think. Do you think that that played a part, you know, the pursuit for for more sort of made you feel invincible and that's why you didn't just sort of start over like you said I mean I think I mean yeah I I had an all or nothing attitude and and and definitely I thought I kept you know when I first did it it was because I did it and I thought I didn't want to you know like literally I was going under I mean we're talking about like I'm multiple several car payments behind my

mortgages behind like I was I bet every everything on being a mortgage broker and my first loan that it's going to close, I'm going to make $3,500. I'm going to close this loan. And suddenly the girl, my client had a 30 day late on her on her rental, her rental verification of rent. So I, I whited it out, you know, and my boss told me to do it. So I thought, you know, I just need to get ahead. If I could just get everything caught up. But then I got caught up. And then I thought if I could just get, this much money, I would be okay. And then I thought, and then even when I got caught and I was making, I got caught and I ran an addition, another scam and I started making money. You know, it was

never enough. A hundred thousand in the bank wasn't enough. A million wasn't enough. Two million. If you had three million, three million and I would be good. You know, it just never, it kept getting worse. And the problem was is, see, in my mind, I always think to myself, you know, I realize now that It just wasn't the money. You know, the money wasn't the issue. It wasn't that I was, I don't feel like I was chasing money because I had money. But I, I just think I was, I just wanted everybody to think I was successful and smart. It was just arrogance.

It was just arrogance and pride. Yeah. And it's, you know, I'm not a psychotherapist or a psychologist or anything like that. But, you know, I've read a lot about sort of this, this pursuit and why we have it in our culture. And I think from my understanding, a lot of it, is like stemming from like a sense of lack from childhood, you know, whether it was our parents' approval. Maybe you had strict parents.

Like with me, you know, my dad is an immigrant and very traditional and sort of growing up. I felt that the things that I saw my friends at school doing, the relationships they had with their parents where it was just like, you know, I remember talking to a girl in fifth grade, sixth grade she didn't do good on a test and i i was so scared for her i was like oh my god your dad's gonna fucking kill you she's like no he's not i was like what do you mean she's like well i tried my best i was like i was like you white kids got it made because i'm about to go home and i'm about to go home and never leave my room so um i think that definitely at least in my experience in my life when i became an adult played played a role because i remember too when i was

was like 19 saying, if I just had $10,000, I could make, I could, I could make it last. Like I could invest it wisely. And then, uh, fast forward to when I was like 23, 24, I was working a really good job. And I was saving money. And I had $30,000 save. And I was just like a piece of shit. I was just lazy playing PlayStation all day, drinking Starbucks, hanging with my girlfriend. Oh, let's watch a new Netflix series. Like, let's start a new series. So I declared a, I've declared. hood bankruptcy a few times. Hood bankruptcy when you sell your PS4. I definitely, I had a PS4 sold it when I lost when I, when I needed money. And then when I was up again, I bought another

PS4. And then when I was down again, I sold the PS4 again. And so for the past few years, I have been able to afford a PS4 and I have resisted the temptation because at this point, it seems like a bad omen. But yeah, you know, that's a, that's a very, it's very cool for me to hear from your point of view because you were doing this, you know, hedonistic pursuit for more on such a grand scale that it's really refreshing and interesting to hear the perspective of somebody now who's on the other side of it. So I wanted to ask you, yeah, like when you left prison, you said you got out three years ago, you had this plan for you wanting to do, you know, true crime, tell stories, podcasts, and whatever opportunities came through that pipeline.

But when you first actually came out, how did you sustain yourself? Because I'm guessing you would have to register as a, you know, a felon, right? So when you got out, how did you like how did you actually make money and also were you in debt? Did you have to pay like some sort of restitution? Well, I owe six million. So, you know, I have to pay, make payments every month. But I'm on probation. you don't like registered like but if somebody were to pull my you know if you were to pull your

record or anything that would probably come up but i mean when i initially i went to a halfway house for about six seven months and i worked for a friend of mine who owned a he owned a gym so i worked there for seven months then really i've never worked anywhere since then like it literally as soon as i got out i was doing i was painting was doing paintings you know for like i paint painting and I ended up doing a podcast with this guy here named Danny he owns he runs a podcast called Concrete on YouTube with a K and it suddenly it got like within like three months it got like a million views I told my story over the course of like a month over the course of like two hours I told my story and it's funny that you

mentioned like your parents like I talk about my dad my dad was a was a was a he was an alcoholic and he was extremely you know just disappointed in me like I wasn't the son he wanted you know he wanted a he wanted I think he wanted somebody that played football and you know was a tall and athletic and I was you know I'm five foot six like I'm not and you know and I'm not super athletic and I so and I have a learning disability so I wasn't getting straight A's in high school you know and he very quickly realized oh this he's he's not going to be anything. He barely read. He's not going to be nothing. So he's, you know, and then, of course, he's getting drunk and said horrible things. And, you know, so, you know, there was, there was that

whole added bonus of not wanting to be a disappointment. Because when I own the mortgage company, I was, I was, he was, he was amazed, how much money I was making. Then I started buying houses and flipping houses. He was like, my God, I never thought this kid would be anything. So the idea that I was going to, you know, claim bankruptcy. move into his spare room now that's just i wasn't going to do anything to to avoid that so um but you know when i got out of prison i did danny show i did the podcast and then i or concrete and then i did valutainment with patrick bet david then i did um soft white underbelly is a i'm familiar with that yet yeah i did that one i did vlad tv okay so you know i did a bunch of these podcasts that are

podcast and so you know i i then i then i started my channel you know i was hoping to have a really good setup but i couldn't afford it i couldn't afford the setup i have now then so i just kind of started posting videos of me and then i kind of put together kind of a uh makeshift you know little sit um little setup with this guy with colby my my my the guy that runs the channel and then we just started this about two years ago we just started posting videos and so it did okay I kind of feel like I missed the wave like I had a huge wave when I was doing all those podcasts but you know there's a lot of interest and I didn't have a channel yet so you know by when the wave started coming down that's when I came in and started my channel so you know well you know

all the content every piece of content is new if you've never seen it before so there i don't you know there's nothing stopping you from taking the clips of the appearances you did and and catching a new wave using ticot reels shorts so i think there's still definitely a way forward but i i definitely hear you yeah i i just i feel like i would have what but you know it i don't know i would have probably had a lot more subscribers but it's irrelevant i'm still you know i'm doing i feel like i'm doing great i'm super happy um you know i i look i i pay my bills every single month. I pay my restitution. I live in a nice house in a great neighborhood.

I have a brand new car. I have a gorgeous girlfriend. You know, I'm, I'm thrilled with the way things are going. I've got a bunch of my true crime stuff has been optioned and they're doing well. So, you know, it's, it's like everything's moving along. It's going well. And so I'm, I'm happy with that. Yeah, bro. And, you know, what you said a moment ago, I think is much more significant than somebody watching this might pick up on. Like you said, you feel like you maybe missed the wave. I think even just from hearing the short bit of your story that you've told me, the biggest hurdle that you've overcome is not getting trapped in this.

I shoulda, coulda, woulda. You know what I mean? And so that's very, that is really, really good. And I wanted to make a mention, too, of you mentioned about your dad, you know, I listened to this audio book last year called The Way of the Superior Man. And it's basically a bunch of very short chapters

that sort of give you like a, you know how in like The Art of War? It's not really like a novel. It's just like different tidbits of wisdom. Right. There was one chapter that came on while I was driving and it's like chapter four or whatever. Live as though your father were dead.

And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. And I was like, man. Just that phrase. live as though your father were dead had me unpacking so much stuff in my mind about like my motivations and my personality and why I do the things I do and why I think the way that I think and that was a big that was a big big key for me you know and it made me really look at everybody um you know everybody was a baby at one point everybody was a child and so in that sense everyone is innocent in that sense everyone no matter what crime they've done unless it's the

the rare case where they actually had like a issue with their brain chemistry where they don't have emotions or whatever most people didn't become most people didn't start that way they became right person that did the thing that maybe wasn't so good so um yeah i've been trying to do a lot of that myself in my own life and and free myself of this um pressure to live up to somebody else's expectations and and uh just just do the right thing you know so it's really cool really cool to hear that i yeah i mean you know what that just remind me of uh you know jordan uh jordan peterson i heard him say one time that um and i forget where he he quotes where he got this where somebody says said that you know you can't truly be a man until your father is dead right you know

And I thought that was, I was, you know, like, you know, that, okay, I didn't, it was, it was, it was, you know, I hadn't thought about it like that, that, you know, you'll always be a boy to somebody, to your father. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a question for you. So, so let's. Sorry. I've totally hijacked your show and I'm asking too many questions. I apologize.

It's fine. I think Colby will either, you know, he'll move it around. But you know, you know how you look at the analytics. Sure. um i think my my my listeners are tired of my story like they've heard it a thousand okay cut this whole thing out i i've well and what well he'll do is he'll probably just take it and put it in the back i'm going to leave the link to marco always marco's youtube channel in the description box so check out his channel and um and subscribe obviously uh also do me a favor

and if you like the video subscribe to this this video hit the bell leave me a comment share the video do all the things hit the like button i never say hit the like button i don't know why but hit the like button i appreciate it i appreciate you guys watching and thank you very much i will see you