Scamfluencers - Multi-Level Marketing: Your Product is You | 162

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Multi-level marketing businesses like Mary Kay, HerbaLife, and Amway are so ubiquitous, it's almost hard to imagine where they started or how deep their influence goes. In this special episode of Scamfluencers, Sarah Hagi talks with Bridget Read about her new book, Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America. She spent years researching the origins of the “pyramid scheme,” a twist on the classic Ponzi scam, and she talks about who is most vulnerable to these massive, billion-dollar frauds, and why they’ve become unavoidable today. Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletterListen to Scamfluencers on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/scamfluencers/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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immerse yourself in the chaos with Wondry+. Wondry+. Asachi, have you had the experience of like a random stranger from your past all of a sudden changing their entire social media presence, you know, posting pictures of them with perfect makeup, they're on fabulous vacations, talking about self-empowerment and being their own boss? And you just know they've joined an MLM. Honestly, I don't see a lot of this. And I think it's a testament to how disinterested I

stay in other people's lives. You know what it is? It's something you would have seen from people you knew in high school or when you worked other jobs. And then you kind of see it in your 20s. And by now, you've probably removed them from who you see. Yeah, they're just not in my life. I actually did have one person try and recruit me.

It was someone I'd worked retail with for many years, and she kind of hits me up, and I'm like, oh yeah, we were friends at work. Maybe she wants to get coffee or something. And it turns out it was a multi-level marketing scheme. Very quickly did I realize it was. I was like, she's never been interested in me. And now she wants me to be my own boss?

Why does she care? She was not trying to empower you. No, she totally wasn't. Sarah, it's funny that even you have almost gotten clipped by one of these people, because it does really speak to how ubiquitous they are. I feel like I see them all the time, like on TikTok or on whatever X is anymore. Women who are like talking about being their own bosses.

But it always seems a little unlikely. Yes. And as you know, multi-level marketing or MLM is so ubiquitous, it's almost hard to imagine where they started or how deep their influence goes. But I got to talk to a journalist who spent years researching and uncovering not just how predatory these schemes are, but how government policy helps them flourish. It's 2016 and Josie Nykhoi is at a company retreat. Josie is in her late 20s with long dark hair and a perfectly applied cat eye. She used to work as a makeup artist and hairstylist before joining her current job, a network marketing company that offers workout routines and health shakes.

Today, Josie is meeting with about a dozen of the company's top earners. They're gathered in a huge rented mansion, sitting around an enormous marble kitchen island with their laptops in front of them. These women are power hitters in the company. Almost all of them rake in millions of dollars a year. But when Josie looks around the room, she notices something. These successful, high-powered women all look exhausted. And as a weekend wears on, the group never leaves the retreat house. They hardly change out of their pajamas. Everyone just wants to lay around and rot because they are so burned out.

Alarm bells start ringing in Josie's head. She's here to learn how to be more like these women, to finally reach the highest tier, rake in big money and live the good life. But these women are not only tired, they're unhappy. Here's how Josie describes a moment years later. I also witnessed the top, the seven figure earners in it being miserable. Everybody was miserable. Everybody. And that scared me. This is already a problem for anybody operating in capitalism, unfortunately, but an MLM is

capitalism on speed. And so all the things you really hate about capitalism and about what it does to us, what it does to our spirits, what it does to our bottom lines, what it does to our quality of life happens in a bigger, faster, harder way in an MLM. Yeah, and Josie has overcome a lot to get where she is. She was raised in a small town in Missouri. Her family was very religious, but after getting divorced in her early 20s, she left the church. Josie went to cosmetology school and found work in a salon, but at some point she sustained

a whiplash injury. She needed physical therapy and paying for that was tough. She was fully booked at the salon, but you can only cut so many people's hair in one day. Before long, Josie was swimming in medical debt. Plus, cutting hair was aggravating her injury. Around this time, Josie discovered a brand of workout DVDs and protein shakes that helped her lose some weight. And one day in the fall of 2013, she saw a video posted by a woman who worked for that company. In it, the woman said that her job had changed her life and enabled her to pay off all of her debt. Josie was intrigued, so she sent the woman a message, and before long, she started working there herself.

The job is in multi-level marketing. Sachi, do you know how those jobs generally work? Yeah, okay, so it's a business that recruits people to sell a product directly to a consumer. So it's sort of like how Mary Kay works, where there was like a lady in your neighborhood who was a Mary Kay rep, and she sold lipstick to your mom. So let's say you're recruited to sell makeup.

You buy the products from the person who recruited you, otherwise known as your upline. Then it's on you to figure out how to sell the makeup at a markup. But the real way to make money is by recruiting people to come in and work under you. And those people have to buy makeup from you, which is guaranteed money. Those people are in your downline. And soon enough, those people are recruiting other people to work under them,

and on and on and on. And that, Sarah, is why they call it a pyramid scheme. Yes, that is exactly it. And like all MLM jobs, Josie was required to buy a certain amount of the product every month. She either had to sell it or eat the cost. Josie took to multi-level marketing like a fish to water. She believed in the product because she'd actually had success with it.

She was soon taking in up to $2,000 a week, but only $200 to $400 of that was from retail sales. The bulk of her earnings came from recruiting more people to her team. And Josie was good at it. By her third year, she made more than $100,000. She quit working as a hairstylist and bought a Mercedes. And she was able to put her sister through college. But she's working nonstop.

And she started to notice that there was always a catch. Like, at some point, Josie earned a $500 a month car bonus. So if she leased a car, her company would pay the dealership $500 a month to cover the expense. But to get this perk, Josie had to agree to spend more than $1,000 on company product each month. The math wasn't even girl-mathing. It's always amazing to me how bad the margins are

and the math is on these businesses, and people still fall for them. Yeah, it's like the goalposts never stop moving. There's always one more thing, one extra thing. But at this retreat, the grind is finally getting to her. One of the women there was a top 10 earner in the company who had just made enough to earn a special Superstar Day. The company flew her to corporate headquarters in California, where all the employees greeted

her with flowers and balloons, clapping and cheering. But when Josie asks, how was your Superstar Day? The woman doesn't even crack a smile. She says, it was one day, after all that hard work, one day. Josie is totally thrown. It takes a couple more years and stints at two other MLM companies, but she eventually decides she has to leave. Josie's decision to go has pissed off all of the friends she made in her MLM jobs.

She's cyberbullied for leaving, and everyone blocks her on social media. And Josie feels guilty for all the people she recruited, who she worries she set up to fail. She starts working as an aesthetician and tries to heal from an utterly draining six years in multi-level marketing. But about a year later, during the pandemic, Josie starts seeing tons of people posting about their business opportunities. She knows they're all getting sucked into MLM and she feels like she has to speak out. So she starts her own YouTube channel

called Not The Good Girl where she talks about her experience. Josie is part of a big online anti-MLM community that warns people about this technically legal but insanely predatory industry. An industry that, by one estimation, employs more than 6 million Americans. Although it's estimated to be a $40 billion industry, more than 99% of MLM workers will not only not make any money, they'll actually lose money. Looking for the ultimate online casino experience? Step into the BedMGM Casino app, where every deal, spin and gold brings Las Vegas excitement into the

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a charismatic influencer with millions of followers. But behind the glamorous posts and inspirational quotes, a sinister truth unravels. Binge all episodes of Don't Cross Cat early and ad-free on Wondery+. From Wondery, I'm Sarah Haggi. And I'm Saatchi Cole. And this is Scamfluencers. Even if you don't know how multi-level marketing works, you're familiar with the biggest names in the industry.

Mary Kay, Herbalife, Amway. And odds are, you probably know someone who's been involved in one. To spell out how the idea of being your own boss turned into the hamster wheel from hell, we're talking to Bridget Reid, author of the book Little Bosses Everywhere, How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America. She's going to tell us about how a pyramid scheme is a cute little twist on the classic Ponzi scam, explain who's most vulnerable to these massive billion dollar frauds, and share how the biggest MLM companies have used their clout to avoid regulation,

fund conservative causes, and get a few heartbeats away from the White House. This is Multi-Level Marketing. Your product is you. Hey, Bridget. Welcome to Scanfluencers. I'm so excited to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm so happy to be here. We'll start with something very broad. How did you become interested in MLMs

and researching them to this degree? I started looking at the Instagram hashtag free car, which it's an abundant hashtag and it is where MLM recruits of all stripes from many companies post themselves with their car. I think maybe it was my sister, I have a twin sister and she was like, well, please I'll get this hashtag. And that was one of my first kind of forays into MLM

as it exists now. Obviously, I was aware of Mary Kay and Amway and things like that growing up, but that was kind of my first intro into like, wow, these things still exist and people still do them. And then I did a short, very short story in 2021 for New York Magazine about MLM companies experiencing this mini boom in the pandemic.

And it was just barely scratching the surface and I just thought, this is a crazy thing. You can barely explain it. So that kind of opened the door. And that was the beginning. I think a lot of people vaguely know about multi-level marketing and know that it's like scam adjacent, but they're probably more focused on specific companies like LuLaRoe. I don't think many people could explain what an MLM is exactly.

The thing I learned about MLM really quickly was that there was a lack of long sustained journalism on it and journalism about it as an industry rather than looking at specific companies which are scammy and have so many crazy characters. And so at this point when I started looking into writing a book, there was the Vice documentary about Lula Rowe. There was Betting on Zero, which is a documentary about herbal life. There Betting on Zero, which is a documentary about Herbalife. There was the Dream podcast, which is a fantastic podcast,

but they also focused on just a few specific companies. No one had really looked at MLM like a business, even though MLM calls itself a business. Already, that was my primary goal was like, okay, if you're a business, then fine. I'm going to look at you like you say you are and do that from the perspective of an objective third party trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

And I do think MLM was so smart to camouflage itself among quote business, because nobody in the business world and in a lot of business reporting and financial reporting, nobody wants to confront the fact that a publicly traded company on American stock exchanges might be like a complete fraud. It opens up a lot of questions. Yeah, there are a lot of thorny questions and let's start from the beginning. MLM sells itself as the chance to achieve

the ultimate American dream which is being an entrepreneur. But in your book, you lay out that sales was not always synonymous with American values. Yeah, the history of sales was something that I really had to dig into because it feels like a part of our DNA in a way that's really insidious. Because Americans weren't always salesmen. It really was something that demand had to be kind of created for. Before, say, the Civil War, sales, like retail, as we think of it now, was not a major industry, right? The U.S. was an agrarian society. Most Americans worked on a farm. And then around the Civil War, expansion, railroads, shipping, urbanization, all of these forces then create a new kind of door-to-door salesperson.

So the Yankee peddler, which is like the old timey guy going door to door with like knives and books or whatever, actually becomes someone who works for another company. But where it really expands is in the early 20th century when US imperialism is really also expanding, right? And then you get the door to door salesman as you kind of think of him in like Death of a Salesman or Glengarry Glen Ross and that happens with the expansion of US consumer culture. And then when MLM is invented, we've just won World War II and US consumer culture becomes the way you're going to be a good citizen in the world, is you're gonna buy stuff.

And demand has to be created, and salesmen are the ones who are gonna create that demand. So I wanna get to how consumer culture goes from above board to essentially a Ponzi scheme in the form of MLM. Like, could you just explain who Lee Mittenger, William Castleberry, and Carl Rennberg are? These men are super important in the book, but they're not household names despite having changed the world in so many ways. William Castleberry and Carl Rennberg are. These men are super important in the book,

but they're not household names despite having changed the world in so many ways. Yes. So the quick and dirty on the inventors of MLM. Carl Rennberg is a homemade vitamin maker who invented a multivitamin around the 1930s called Nutrilite. And he created these homemade vitamins

while the vitamin industry, as we know it today, was becoming a thing. Americans were taking supplements. But his company didn't go anywhere. Carl Rennborg's life is just like a series of utter failures at being a salesman. Like, he sucks. And it's not even just because he sucks,

it's just because it's already really difficult. The trend in the United States is big corporations, big conglomerates. And by the time he invents his vitamin, he's competing with like literally Merck and Pfizer and Bayer, these big companies that still exist today. And so he runs this company for at least a decade before he meets two men who are also salesmen who come up with the structure of the company that becomes Multilabel Marketing. And one is Mittenger, who's a funeral plot salesman. He actually was the head of a company that was run out of the state of Maine for defrauding people into investing in funeral plots. And then Castleberry was a Stanford educated psychologist

who was kind of a bit of a Dr. Ruth, like he had a self-help radio show in Southern California. And in my own research, I found that he was a eugenicist. He was straight up studied under Louis Terman at Stanford, who's one of the most prominent American eugenicists. So that's the world that those two guys are coming from. And they meet when they're both working

at the Douglas Aircraft Factory at the tail end of World War II. And the sort of parable goes that they're standing around saying, oh, sales sucks, what if we could come up with a solution where no one would have to like give up a cut of their sales? And that's how they invent MLM, which just covers up so much of what really they invent,

which is a version of the Ponzi scheme using the vitamins of Karl Rennborg's business as a coverup. But instead of one guy at the top, you have a million little Ponzies who get a cut of whatever anybody under them buys. And so that's how MLM is born. Yeah, this is such a crazy concept

and it blows my mind every time. It's basically supercharging a Ponzi scheme because like in a Ponzi, the scammer gets people to give him money for a phony investment. The twist here is turning investors into salespeople, pulling them into the con, and using real products as a cover. And in your book, you say that these two men, Mittenger and Castleberry, call this innovation,

quote, the plan. Then they make their own company, M&C, to put the plan in action by selling Renberg's vitamins. Can you break down what this actually looks like in practice? The plan is the early euphemism for what becomes multilevel marketing, and it is the way that the business is structured. In traditional door-to-door selling, I bridge it by a pack of vitamins and I get them at a discount and I sell them for a higher price and I pocket the difference.

That's like classic direct selling. That's your Avon Lady or Fuller Brush. Those are kind of the two iconic American companies where that's how you would make a really small living. What the plan is, is they create something called the Neutralite Business Opportunity. So you can make your pennies on the dollar selling your vitamins door to door, but what you can also do is recruit a team member under you

and what that person buys at their discount, you will get paid based on that. So what people often say when describing the plan, because it's never changed, is that multi-level marketing is you get a cut off of your recruits' sales. And the word sales is what's wrong with that because what Mittenger and Casper invent in the plan

is something called purchase volume. And that's what you get paid on. You get paid on what people buy under you in what's called your downline. And that, again, same in MLM today. But that is what makes it a Ponzi, not some other type of quote selling. The sales of the vitamins,

which of course was such a problem for Carl Renbord, because no one wanted to buy his like weird homemade alfalfa vitamins, obviously, they do away with that problem entirely. Because now you're just getting paid on what your recruits buy under you. And it does not matter if they ever sell it, which is why the classic MLM scenario

of like ending up with boxes and boxes in your basement, that's endemic to MLM because you're getting paid just on bringing people in. So you can see how you tell somebody, oh, you're going to do great, you're going to sell vitamins, and you get them to buy a two-month supply of vitamins. You've brought in a huge amount of your, quote, purchase volume. And now that person also has a bunch of vitamins that they need to offload. So they're going to bring people in, do the same thing. So it creates this, like, sort of ingenious level of, like, multi-ponsy operators in one pyramid. And what M&C did in the plan is they enabled you to get a cut

on an unlimited amount of people under you. So like, you have such an incentive to recruit and recruit and recruit and buy and buy and buy, and no one cares if you sell the vitamins. So that's the plan. Yeah, it's diabolical and baffling. And like, essentially working in MLM is not about actually selling product to a consumer at all, but it's more just like recruiting other people to buy product from you, and then those people are responsible for selling it. But what they actually do is just recruit more people under them, so nobody's actually even buying shit.

And I don't know, like, do you think they really believed, like, that this business approach could work? I have gone back and forth about whether Mittenger and Castlebury, at this point in American history, 1945, whether they truly believed that America would expand so much that there really would be an endless supply of salesmen and that the pyramid really would go on forever. Like how much of that was an optimistic story that they were telling themselves about the United States in this moment, and how much of it was fraud, was straight up just a lie that they were telling people and they knew that's impossible, that even, you know, the greatest country in the world couldn't expand like that.

Yeah, and thanks to all the research you talk about in your book, we know that, in fact, the pyramid isn't endless. Like, people hardly make money. And you cite a 2011 study of 350 MLM companies that found that 99% of participants lost money during their time in an MLM. If you get in early, you're high in the down line and you have tons of people paying in under you. And even joining just a little bit later, the way those numbers work,

you just have such a smaller pool of people to bring in. And so already you face far worse chances of making your money back. Yeah, but as you talk about it in your book, like those downline numbers are actually reported as retail sales, like as if the business is actually successfully selling the product. That's still how these companies operate.

So it's documented in the book, for example, in Mary Kay, they call it production. So what you buy in Mary Kay, they take that number and they basically double it because in Mary Kay, you get a 50% discount and they call it your production, which is then called retail sales. None of that has to be documented. All that's documented is me, the recruit, what I'm buying.

And that's what's in their internal systems. And that's the only thing that they keep track of, which is, to me, like the most damning piece of evidence. And again, companies over the years have put in place different, oh, we track customers, you have to prove you have 10 customers, it's all very easily fake. And how could they even keep track of it, right? These companies are independent contractors and they have millions and millions of recruits worldwide.

It would be the most expensive compliance. It would be millions and millions that you would have to spend on reading receipts from random people, so they don't care. Damn, it's so crazy. It's crazy. So do you think multi-level marketing is inherently a scam? I don't think there is such a thing as legitimate multi-level marketing with the evidence that we have.

And I'm not the first person to say it. There was an attorney general from Wisconsin named Bruce Craig who went after and prosecuted Amway sponsors, who sort of flooded into the state in the 80s. And he, throughout the rest of his career, before he passed away a few years ago, kept writing to FTC officials, government officials, saying, this thing you have decided to call a legitimate LM, it does not exist. I don't believe it exists. It's a distinction without a difference. And they ignore him. Okay, stick around because after the break,

we're going to talk about who is most likely to be targeted by MLM. And it's not who you think. And Bridget is going to talk about the former Mary Kay saleswoman she followed while researching this book. The Spy Who and Legacy. In our podcast British Scandal, we uncover the bizarre tale of William Joyce, dubbed Lord Horhor, the plummy-voiced traitor who became Hitler's favourite broadcaster. His radio catchphrase, Germany Calling, reached millions of British listeners. But behind the mic, Joyce's loyalties were anything but British. In the latest season of The Spy Who,

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and you walk us through what drew her in and what her experience was like within that company for years. How did you hear about her story and what made you wanna highlight her experience specifically? So Monique, that's a pseudonym, but I met her on YouTube.

She had commented on someone else's coming out of Mary Kay video, but she was brand new. She was, her comment was something like, oh my goodness, I'm gonna have to sit with this one or something. Like I could tell that she had not fully kind of reflected on it and that really drew me to her because I really did want to like be with somebody as she was

reflecting herself and sort of in the middle of that processing. And I was really lucky that she let me kind of do that with her when we were doing these interviews like literally while she was still technically in Mary Kay. And so she had access to all of her like internal stuff and I could see what it looks like in her quote back office online and she still had all these products and was getting these texts from her uplines. And so it felt important to like be able to do that with somebody. And she is a veteran in Florida. She is a black woman who left the military and not only had retirement money, but had a disability payment. And that made her like a huge target because she has this stable income coming in.

And so even though it's definitely not enough income, that's a big draw. If you're an MLM recruiter, because it's like, oh, this woman has like a little nest egg every month that she can put towards her Mary Kay payment. So that was interesting to me because it was like really obvious and a sort of sinister element that made her really vulnerable. And then her military background, I think, really contributed to her being ready to like seek some order and seek some external validation. But she let me really like go through it with her.

It seems like there's a perfect storm of circumstances that makes some people more prone to getting recruited into an MLM. So what did you learn in your research about the demographics of people who are sucked into these businesses? The demographics of MLM are sort of woefully under-reported and certainly like hard to parse because it is not well studied. We do know that it's women, predominantly women, 75 percent, but that's also self-reported by the DSA, the lobbying trade group for direct selling.

So take that with a grain of salt. But then within that, there are a few studies that have helped illuminate that women in labor markets where they don't have access to traditional labor, so like retail, wage labor, or service, hospitality, you have to look at who has student debt, who has medical debt, who has medical debt, who needs flexibility, who probably can't afford child care. And obviously, that means younger women and that means women of color. We don't have statistical evidence that those

people are sort of gaining traction in MLM, but anecdotally, that's a lot of who I spoke to was younger women. Many of them are women of color. A lot of them are like even in cities, right? Like one woman at the end of the book is in Brooklyn. She lived very close to me and that was surprising to me. I was like, oh, you're not in Utah, you know? So I think it's everywhere. So the people getting sucked into MLM

are already some of the most vulnerable people out there and they have to spend money just to participate, buying stuff that they can hardly sell. You know from your research that very, very few people are actually making money, so why do they stay at all? I think about it in terms, honestly, of what Mittenger was doing when he was selling people funeral plots,

which is like, it's all about your future and the horizon and like what's to come. And they get you on like, you will win one day. And that's how they keep people in. And Monique, the whole time was being told, it'll come back to you. You're gonna get that rung of leadership where you're gonna make everything back and it's all gonna be worth it. They'll bring in powerpoints with like Steve Jobs

and they'll say like Steve Jobs spent XYZ on his you have to invest in business to get it back. There are so many euphemisms that will just force people to accept that they're spending this money. When you buy the products, they told Monique, you can't sell an empty from an empty wagon. Like there's a truism for everything that convinces people that they're investing in a business. It's incredibly manipulative to teach somebody, like don't look at your balance.

They teach you like, but we won magic moment and you won't know when it's coming, conveniently, but it'll come and then you'll win. They teach you like, the we won magic moment and you won't know when it's coming, conveniently, but it'll come and then you'll win. Yeah, you know, it sounds so familiar to influencer wellness culture and like this idea of betting on yourself until you make it and you know, making it is basically also being an influencer. Like people get lured into the presentation of wealth and access, but what is it they're actually supposed to buy? Like they're buying something that I

guess isn't real. I think the collapse that happens when you're an influencer between yourself and your product, that is truly what MLM shares with that world. The idea that your product is you and the way you're going to like bring more people in is convincing them that they are also their own product. The idea that we shouldn't question everything being commodified and why are we selling ourselves, that also feels like MLM world to me. This idea that that's a good way to think about

being a person and what you owe somebody is what you can get out of them. Stay with us. After the break, Bridget talks about how MLM doesn't just mess with your money, they go after your mind too. Behind the closed doors of government offices and military compounds, there are hidden stories and buried secrets from the darkest corners of history. From covert experiments pushing the boundaries of science to operations so secretive they were barely whispered about.

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Other People's Problems was the first podcast to take you inside real-life therapy sessions. I'm Dr. Hilary McBride, and again, we're doing something new. The ketamine really broke down a lot of my barriers. This work has this sort of immediate transformational effect. Therapy Using Psychedelics is the new frontier in mental health. Come along for the trip. Other People's Problems Season 5, available now. So, multilevel marketing companies aren't actually about selling a product.

So the people at the top make money based on how many people are recruited into the business underneath them. And since they can't really justify their existence financially, they recruit people by projecting like a very specific worldview. They claim to embody the American entrepreneurial spirit and they tell people that working for the company

means they're masters of their own destiny. So in that sense, there's kind of a philosophy behind MLM. So what did you find that philosophy to be in your research? There's definitely a few different strains of what multilayable marketers think about the world and how ideological or political they are. But certainly in the beginning, they share this radical free enterprise ideology, which then becomes the new right or Reaganism in the 80s. But really in the beginning,

it's a reaction to the New Deal. It goes that far back. Early, early on, Mittenger, Casablanca, and Rennborg are Republicans, but they also like dabble in this very strange and and quite fringe element of conservatives. They're market purists, right? You could call them like Ayn Rand kind of Republicans or you could call them Libertarians, but they really believe that like the market is basically God, that

we are market actors and that that is primarily the way to organize society. And so the reason they react to the New Deal is because they don't want anything impinging on the market or on capitalism. So they react against social security, they react against unemployment benefits, all the welfare state that is established by the New Deal. They immediately after the depression start figuring out how do we get rid of all this. MLM very early on has ties to those movements and then really through Amway and through the DeVos and Van Andel families, the founders of Amway are very explicitly part of this

radical political movement. And they really build power over the course of the seventies. And then Reagan really unleashes all kinds of policies that they want, which are essentially these free market policies that are all about deregulation, about cutting taxes, about privatizing industry, and really cutting out the core of what the New Deal did, which with all caveats about the ways that it worked and ways that it didn't, it established like a basic dignity for all Americans that we like get from the government and what the ideology of MLMers really they share that the government turns us into slaves if we are given anything for free.

That really we deserve nothing and everybody should be working for what they have, and that that's true freedom. Right, as though all Americans are starting out with the same advantages. I want to focus on one very important company you mentioned, Amway. In some ways, they're the most important MLM in your book. And Amway has been around since 1959. And like you mentioned, their founders, Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos, had very deep ties in conservative politics. And in your book, you talk about how that continues on today.

For example, members of the DeVos and Van Andel families were pretty central to the extreme rights political playbook Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation was started in 1973 and Jay Van Andel of the DeVos-Van Andel duo takes up Heritage as really one of his projects, although both families give money to the organization over the years. And the Heritage Foundation is just one of many right wing groups, think tanks, that they funnel their money into, which is of course coming from people enrolled in AMWA, right?

So while politicians are spreading these ideas about like small government and that we should all, you know, the ills of the 70s, because at this point, it's important to remember that the 70s, the economy was tanking. We were in the midst of stagflation. This story that they wanted to tell was, okay, capitalism's not working and we're going to fix it with more capitalism. What MLM does is they build the grassroots effort to seed that in people's hearts and minds and convince people that the path forward is less government, not more. Right. And that really culminated with Reagan's election and the legalization of Amway and MLM because you say in your book in 1979, the FTC ruled that while pyramid schemes are illegal, they don't consider Amway to be one. And you spell it on the book that the agency

was under a lot of pressure and some in Congress are really kind of rallying to get rid of the agency entirely. So they basically want to avoid controversy and said that Amway could continue operating. Yeah, Amway makes a billion dollars. Their profits surpass a billion dollars, which at the time, you know, was huge. and Reagan wins, and they sort of cap off the best decade ever. So these people who are enrolling in Amway are directly bangrolling. Things like Heritage, they give money to the Council for National Policy, which is like a dark money group. The Acton Institute, Mackinac Institute, these are all right-wing policy

think tanks. Some of them are explicitly religious or anti-choice, things like that. But Heritage is really prominent because now, J Van Andel's daughter, Barbara, Barb, excuse me, Barb, Van Andel, Gabby, is his daughter and she is the head of the board of trustees of Heritage. Literally, when she inducts Kevin Roberts, who's the new president of Heritage who wrote for Project 2025, she says, he will only grow our influence on Capitol Hill.

Like they really see Project 2025 as their vision. But the reason MLM paved the way for this, when I look at it is because MLM is like the wild west of a corporation, right? There's literally no rules except the rules of the guys at the top. And that's supposed to be the selling point is like, there's no limit. You're gonna grow infinitely

and there's no employees, there's no labor law, you don't even have a store, there's nothing keeping you from doing. You're the only thing standing in your way, which translates to there's a line in the book where somebody who's really excited about the Trump administration and MLM, he's from Herbalife, but he says it's the post-regulatory world.

This idea that there's no rules, MLM pioneered that early, early on. They are an industry that said, we're going to regulate ourselves. They literally have something called the self-regulatory council. And so now, obviously, like Doge, that's Doge's number one thing, right? It's like the government is a useless arbiter. It's full of corruption and everybody should just be in charge of themselves or we're gonna use AI to like Certify whatever and like make building plans are just terrifying to me

But anyway beyond Doge like self-regulation is the new call to arms for the whole tech industry, right? That we're gonna regulate ourselves So like MLM is doing that way before anybody else and trying to sell this idea that like all government regulation is harmful to growth and getting get in the way of growth and productivity. Can you talk a bit more about this socially conservative and religious component to the MLM philosophy? Jave and Andaline DeVos were Michigan Calvinists,

which is a conservative type of Christian that really believe in the prosperity gospel and that certain types of Christians are ordained by God to be rich, like to get riches to be godly. And so those guys truly believe that like getting money is to get into heaven. So that's, you know, a really

important part of their philosophy. Nowadays, it's really all about wellness and getting money getting your bag as a way to be healthy and healthful. Like I see a through line from the early MLMers all the way to that guy Ashton dipping his face in the Saratoga water and the banana, you know, like there really is this the true conspicuous consumption, but as a like godly activity that the way that you're gonna be the best, you know person and citizen you can be is through making money Yeah, and the way you laid out in the book It's so clear how you know prosperity Bible beliefs are kind of exemplified in MLM.

And you also connect the world of MLM directly to the rise of like positive thinking, self-help gurus, because MLM doesn't work for the vast majority of people. Like, they don't really want for you to think about it as a system. Like, they want you to focus on self-improvement and positive thinking. And that way, if you aren't making money, they can just say it's your fault. So can you talk about that more?

MLM is a really unexamined pioneer of self-help as a booming business. Like truly before self-help exists in the way that it does as an industry. Like MLM was already making self-help content essentially, right? And that actually comes all the way from like old-timey direct selling before MLM was even invented. Fuller Brush and Avon, they had newsletters.

They had prizes. They were giving you the car. And it's all because the work sucks so badly that they're like, we have to give them something to make them feel like they're getting something out of it. And that's why being a floor brush man, they would say to you, how are you feeling? And as a floor brush guy, you were supposed to say fine and dandy. And it's truly like all about teaching you that you're getting something,

you're becoming better even as you're like selling these shitty brushes and making no money. So this, like, the self-help element and the constant mental work is very key. It keeps you busy, it keeps you occupied, and it keeps you from not thinking about what money you're spending. You're just constantly thinking about moving forward

and who you're gonna be, and that's the most toxic part, I think, because it really teaches you to not think critically. You don't care about yourself and you don't care about the people under you who you're bringing in. And that, to me, is like the darkest element of what MLM does in changing how people think. Yeah. It's just so shocking that MLM is still considered legal when so many people are losing from

it. So why do you think this hasn't received the kind of attention it should, even though it is so pervasive and everyone knows it's bad? First of all, like, white-collar crime is just not considered something that is really that punishable, right, in the United States. Like, financial crime is just not punished in the same way. And then I do think that the way MLM kind of eats into the fringes of people's livelihoods, the people who really suffer are like, you know, Monique spending $80,000 over a decade. For her that was, I mean, it's devastating. It's like her savings, it's truly heartbreaking.

Right. But, like, that's not who Americans are gonna read about. And when we really take stock of, like, loss, it's Bernie Madoff level loss or, like, FTX, right? It's like big corporate, the scammers that really go down have to have, like, taken out somebody that matters. And I think that that's a really awful thing. It's a pyramid, even all of us on the bottom, even altogether.

The aggregate of the losses on the bottom is a drop in the bucket with the profits at the top. Yeah, it is about wealth. And I think it crosses, you know, whatever political boundary there might be, because it's about upholding wealth. And I feel like a huge takeaway for me was that, like, you know, these things are kind of bad or are harming people. And, you know, the government does benefit a lot

from this harm. You know, even in our show, I feel like... there's so much white-collar crime, and very often the consequence is just a slap on the wrist. Or they can just go back to doing the exact kind of scam again. And it does seem like there's a huge contingent of people who've just been, like, severely affected by MLM and who've lost so much money and

their lives have just completely been changed and destroyed through this lie. There's a big community of people trying to fight it but as you talk about in the book some of the most foremost experts aren't really optimistic that anything can be done at all and I'd like to like, where do you stand on that? And do you think anything can be done about MLM? Like, can there be any type of justice here? Lena Kahn, she was the FTC commissioner appointed by Biden and she initiated what's called an FTC rulemaking. So the FTC has the power to make rules

which are regulatory. They're not laws because they're not passed by Congress, but they function as laws. The process for making a rule is sort of long and bureaucratic, but she did initiate two separate rulemakings that would impinge, if not totally destroy MLM. One is called the business opportunity rule and one is an earnings claim rule. So both of these, without getting too nitty gritty, have to do with like disclosures that you make when you're recruiting someone into an MLM.

They would basically make it impossible to do what MLMers do, which is like lie about how easy it is to sell things and how much money you can make and like showing you their checks and it would be impossible to recruit the way that they do if these rules took effect. So that happened before she left office but now of course like the new administration even though the new FTC commissioner is like an antitrust guy who has kept the lawsuit against Facebook for example that rulemaking is probably

it could die on the vine. That's like what's probably going to happen. Yeah, that's very depressing to think about. What worries you the most about MLM today? What freaks me out about MLM is like, it's an oligarchy, but it's an oligarchy that teaches everyone to want to be an oligarch. It's a system that teaches you to aspire to be your own rich person at the top who has inordinate wealth and power. And so that ability to get inside somebody's mind and when you're looking at a really, really inordinately wealthy person like say like a Jeff Bezos, MLM teaches you to like look at that and say, not like, hey, why does that guy have so much more than I do? It teaches you to say, oh, like, I'm gonna do that too.

And I'm gonna be that too without really thinking like, well, is that really rational? So that lack of critical thinking about wealth, lack of critical thinking about wealth, lack of critical thinking about class, where we are at in American history, but also just like the world, that is a bipartisan problem. Like so many people are not thinking about that

and they're not thinking critically about where we are in our own pyramid. You know, progress on MLMs is like, how do we just get people to wake up and say, I'm not gonna be a cog in this giant machine? No, I mean, you just saying that kind of gave me chills. I was like, yeah, I mean, I think it is so important to remember that it's easy to kind of feel dispirited

by what you see as those in power, and to feel like you don't have any power and you can't do anything. But as corny as it sounds, it does take people to try and change things, right? Like things don't have to be forever or set in stone. So yeah, I think that's a very good note to end on. Brigitte, thank you so much. You are genuinely one of my favorite reporters. I love your work. I mean everything you do.

And I'm gonna tell everyone to buy this and I really want everyone to read it. Bridget's book is Little Bosses Everywhere and it is out now, available wherever books are sold. Bridget, where can people find you? Where can people find your work and your thoughts and your beautiful mind? I still work my day job at New York Magazine.

I'm a features writer there and I'm on X, I guess we call it now. Bridget Gillard is my handle. It's my middle name. And I made a little Instagram for the book called Little Boss's Book. Primarily, my beautiful mind is in this book, so please buy it. And then tell your friends to buy it, and they're friends, and they're friends. And if you buy enough of them, you could sell them to other people. Yeah, and you'll generate passive income for generations.

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Beckman, Marsha Louie, and Erin Oflerity for Wondery. Last year, law and crime brought you the trial that captivated the nation. She's accused of hitting her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe with her car. Karen Reed is arrested and charged with second degree murder. The six-week trial resulted in anything but resolution. We continue to find ourselves at an impasse. I'm declaring a mistrial in this case. But now the case is back in the spotlight and one question still lingers. Did Karen Reed kill John O'Keefe?

The evidence is overwhelming that Karen Reed is innocent. How does it feel to be a cop killer, Karen? I'm Kristen Thorn, investigative reporter with Law and Crime and host of the podcast, Karen, The Retrial. This isn't just a retrial, it's a second chance at the truth. I have nothing to hide.

My life is in the balance and it shouldn't be. I just want people to go back to who the victim is in this, it's not her. Listen to episodes of Karen, The Retrial, exclusively and ad free on Wondery Plus.