Bridget Read (on multilevel marketing)

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now.

Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert.

I'm Dan Shepard.

I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hi.

Hi.

Today we have Bridget Read on.

Bridget is a reporter and features writer at New York Magazine, and she has a new book out now called Little Bosses Everywhere, How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America.

This is all about multi-level marketing.

MLMs, baby.

This was fascinating.

We learned so much.

Yes.

I've been talking about this one a lot.

Yep.

And great advice, too, for people within this episode.

Please enjoy Bridget Reed.

We are supported by Audible.

Thanks to Audible for being the presenting sponsor of today's episode.

We could all use an escape these days and the best way to do it, Audible.

With over 1 million titles in their selection, there's more to imagine with Audible.

We are supported by Boar's Head.

Back to school time means back to lunch packing time.

And what hits harder than a perfect sandwich?

And not just any sandwich.

You can become your kids' lunchtime hero when you pack them a sandwich with Boar's Head premium craft deli meats and cheeses.

And of course, Boar's Head is not just for kids, it's for everyone.

Nothing beats an afternoon slump quicker than a good lunch.

If you feel yourself fading at your desk, that means it's time to take a break and reward yourself with a boar's head sandwich.

I love a boar's head sandwich.

I love the oven gold turkey.

Oh my gosh.

That's my favorite.

Yeah, don't rule out, though, the boar's head maple honey ham.

I can pile that sky high with a little mustard mayo.

Oh, and it is a party.

Elevate lunchtime with boars Discover the craftsmanship behind every bite at your local Boarshead deli or deli counter.

Boarshead, committed to craft since 1905.

We are supported by the new movie from Searchlight Pictures, The Roses.

All's fair when love is war.

Starring Benedict Cumberpatch, Olivia Coleman, Andy Samberg, Allison Janney, Shuti Gatois, and Kate McKinnon.

This star-studded crowd-pleasing comedy will resonate with anyone who's ever been in a relationship.

So pretty much all of us.

Perfect couple, Ivy and Theo Rose have it all.

Successful careers, a loving marriage, and great kids.

But when Theo's career comes crashing down, just as Ivy's fame starts to skyrocket, a tinderbox of fierce competition and growing resentment ignites, threatening to destroy everything they've built.

That is, if they don't destroy each other first.

Directed by Jay Roach of Meet the Parents and written by Tony McNamara of Poor Things, this film is this summer's must-see comedy.

I love Tony McNamara.

Poor Things was like my favorite.

I can't wait to see this.

Yes, and Jay Roach is just a beast of a director.

The Roses from Searchlight Pictures in theaters, everywhere, August 29th.

Get tickets now.

I'm having allergies

on a Claritin D.

Oh, we love it.

I love to give your ID.

We love D.

Because there's speed in it.

Yeah.

I'm really loving speed.

It turns out a little bit of that.

I'm super into speed.

I know.

I know.

I'm allowed to use them when I'm allowed to use them.

I'd like to use them more.

I never have.

Is this your first time on a D?

I think so.

Where do you live?

I live in Brooklyn.

I live in New York.

Okay.

Well, a Leave D or Zyrtech D.

I heard about Zyrtech.

I got a lot of recommendations for different all different Ds.

I got a lot of D recommendations for you while you're in LA.

Yeah, right.

One time Dax took a drug test and he was on.

It showed for methane drugs.

Now I know why I like

speed.

Speed's real.

It's real.

Where are you from originally?

Here.

I'm from Pasadena.

Yeah.

My parents live in Santa Barbara.

My sister lives in San Francisco, where I just was last night.

So I'm a California girl, but I've been in New York for a long time.

So what was Pasadena like in the 1990s?

Did you go to the Houstons a lot?

Yeah, do you ever go to Houston?

I definitely went to Houston.

It was much more boring and suburban.

The West side felt so much further away.

My cousins in Santa Monica, that was a journey.

Yeah.

Versus now with the gold line and young people live in Pasadena and families.

It was much more like Westchester or Long Island or something compared to New York.

That was the vibe.

Yeah, the history of it's really interesting.

I only learned it in that Strange Angel book about the guy who started JPL or is one of the founding members.

But yeah, that it was originally a playground in the winter for super rich people from Chicago.

The Wrigleys had a mansion and all these Empire families had homes.

And then if you moved all the way to California from Chicago, you'd stop in Pasadena.

You wouldn't go to the ocean.

Well, and that's why it's kind of conservative because it has these roots that are Midwestern.

Oh, that's right.

That's like white Christian people who moved from the Midwest.

Yeah.

And so it's very different than some of the east side.

And then you get into the Scientology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Yes.

And Alistair Crawley.

Yeah, the sexual orgies, the cult stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

That's what was in Strange Angels.

I haven't read it, but I've heard of it.

I should read it.

You should.

And, you know, he met his end by blowing up his garage, testing a new rocket fuel.

Well, yes,

the results of the test.

He was on a little too much D.

Okay, so what school do you go to?

How do you end up leaving California?

We then lived part in D.C.

when I was a teenager, but always came back to California.

So very sort of bi-coastal.

And then I went to college in Connecticut, and so I've been in New York ever since.

Did that come collection?

Did you go to EA?

No, no, no.

I went to Wesleyan.

I shouldn't say it that way.

That's always a problem.

College in Boston, college in Canada.

Yeah, no, college in Cambridge.

I went to Wesleyan.

You graduate from there, and then you move immediately to New York?

I did a master's in the UK because it was free.

I did the creative nonfiction program.

And over there, it's a little less traditional.

They don't really have a strong tradition like we do of like Jonathan Saffron Foe, or I guess he's more novels.

Like Dave Edgar's creative nonfiction as a genre is sort of still being figured out over there so they were like come on Americans come here for free oh I did a degree at the University of East Anglia which is in Norwich a medieval city in the east of England so that was fun I drank a lot of cider did you take on an English lover no right redacted oh

everyone was college age and we were running around fun was had fun was had

and then I came back to New York and I've been there ever since okay and you worked at Vogue for a while as the culture.

I was writing and blogging there during this sort of boom in blogs where you would write one headline about Melania Trump's jacket or whatever, and you would get a million views.

It was just non-stop all the time, 2015 to 2020.

And then traffic really changed, and Google and Facebook messed with their algorithms.

And it's really different, but especially for women's...

blogs, women's political writing.

It was a boom era.

Did you have to report to Anna?

I guess technically I I did.

I got into

really cool stuff because culture was anything that wasn't fashion or beauty.

And so I was doing politics.

I was doing books.

I was doing kind of whatever.

I covered AOC really early in 2018 before she won her primary.

And so then I was sort of in touch with her people.

And they had me do a profile of her.

after she'd been in office for a year.

And I went down and spent three days with her in Congress.

And that was her first big profile.

So that was really fun.

I never would have connected with her if I hadn't been able to just do my own and do whatever I wanted

within reason.

Yeah.

Tactically, I didn't even anticipate and I should have

mention Vogue just as like moving on.

And then I didn't anticipate and I should have, that you would have been like, well, we got stuck here for a second.

Yeah.

Well, and then when I went to New York Magazine next at the cut, that was the transition because the cut is New York Mags women's vertical.

And so it made a lot of sense there.

Okay, so in 2021, you wrote an article about MLMs.

And I'm presuming that you thought that would be it.

You would just kind of write an article, but what happened?

I was aware of MLMs because, in sort of the cultural amoeba, there have been a few things that have bubbled up, and MLMs are in the culture and kind of have been.

Yeah, what was the Yoga Pants one?

Lula Row, that company, that documentary, Lula Rich, which is great.

So, that had come out.

A fantastic podcast called The Dream had come out.

And there was a documentary in 2016 called Betting on Zero, which is about when Bill Ackman tried to short Herbalife, which was was a long saga that actually started in 2012 and lasted through 2016.

So there have been like a few moments where it bubbles and I was aware of it and being a writer who was covering women at the time.

And during 2020, I was covering labor and women because so many women were laid off and the COVID front lines were predominantly women because women make up the majority of the service sector of retail.

Women are nurses.

Women are teachers.

So these were the jobs that were really being discussed.

Right.

They were essential workers.

And so

MLM was interesting to me in that respect.

And these companies were really pitching themselves as a different type of job for people who were laid off.

So that was the impetus for the article.

And I certainly wasn't the only one.

There were a flurry of articles about this phenomenon.

But when you are a journalist and you write an article, even a short one, you always do the background graph.

More recently, I've been covering real estate.

And so whenever I'm writing about something, I go back and you do the little quick and dirty of what's the deal with this.

How'd we get here?

Exactly.

The how'd we get here paragraph.

And in this article for MLM, I couldn't write the paragraph in the way I normally did because there are just so many contradictions right away about how it worked.

And I couldn't understand why

there was this.

aura around MLM that was so scammy.

And you literally look it up.

The American government website says, this is legal, but maybe don't do this.

What is this?

And how it was both so informal, it seemed like the Wild West, like the guy squeegeeing your car.

Literally an informal economy.

But then also you look up these companies are traded on stock exchanges and they're some of the richest people in America.

And that dichotomy was also weird.

Did you know going in at that stage that 7.7% of the country has at some point

over 17 million people have worked.

And I bet that's an undercount.

Yeah.

Right.

So when you think of any domain that would employ 17 million people, you'd think there'd be like a really rich history.

There would be a definitive history because that's what we always go to, right, as journalists.

And even if you're doing an update and rewriting a narrative, which happens every so often, you do have something to work with, whether it's an academic book or whether it's another journalist or whether it's a film, you have something to go to.

And that didn't really exist in a mainstream way about MLM.

And that was just so bizarre to me.

Is it because you don't have to like register it?

MLM is something we've placed on it.

Those companies aren't acknowledging that they're MLMs or are they?

Now they're not.

Okay, yeah.

Because it's almost a bad word.

Yeah, it is.

But multiple marketing, the word was invented because pyramid scheme became a bad word.

When they were invented, they used the word pyramid.

For a long time, MLM was the correct term.

And then I would say maybe in the 2000s, they started using network marketing because it sounded more internet-y, more digital.

Yeah, it could be tax.

Exactly.

Yeah.

More innovative, even though it's all the same shit.

Multi-level marketing is definitely the official name.

And if you Google the FTC, what they say about multi-level marketing, that is the official name for this type of business where you're recruiting people and you can make money off your team and stuff.

On the Mary Kay website, would it say it?

It says direct selling.

So they've gone

all the way back to the very beginning to try to seem like it's just like Avon door-to-door selling.

Just like in the colonial times, a guy that would sell soap made out of whale blubber or whatever.

So, there is a tiny distinction we should make.

I heard you say in an interview between a pyramid scheme and MLM.

Should we?

Or not?

You tell me.

If 17 million people have been employed in this racket, there will be many people listening that are either currently involved, will be approached soon, or have already been through it.

And so, what I want to attempt to do is not give them the defenses that have been set up on a silver platter by their employer.

So it's not a pyramid scheme, right?

They probably know why it's not a pyramid scheme.

So I think it behooves us to acknowledge what their counters would already be.

Does that make sense?

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

So what multi-level marketing is supposed to be, these guys that invented it, they took that old direct selling model.

As long as the United States has been around since we were an agrarian republic before the Civil War, when everyone was basically a farmer, there weren't cities.

Door-to-door selling has been around.

We didn't have shipping lines and train lines and manufacturing centers and all the things that we have now.

You know, there is a more rich history about these guys because they were very significant in bringing new products, new innovations, and also just connecting these rural households.

I have an image of a man in like a 1940s Buick rolling up into the rural driveway and pulling his wares out.

But it's always been a menial type of labor.

It's always been filling in the gaps.

It's not a job you want because there's not security.

You're buying stuff.

for a wholesale price and you're selling it and you are subject to the weather.

You're subject to the whims of like if you encounter someone that day who's had a bad day who says, get off my doorstep.

Stealing.

right?

You don't get benefits.

You don't have minimum wage.

So that exists.

And the men who invented MLM, who were salesmen in the 1940s, they invented a scheme to avoid all the worst things that we just talked about, which is that instead of being compensated on what you could actually sell, you would be compensated on what you buy.

And then you could bring other people in under you, which was again normal in sales, where if you were maybe a branch manager of a Fuller Brush outfit, you would recruit good salesmen.

And if they were great salesmen and selling a lot, you would get a chunk of their commission.

Right.

But it was always on what they sold.

And so what these guys did was they said, what if

it was just on what people bought

and whatever the people you brought in also bought, you would get rewarded based on that all the way down.

Downline.

And create your downline.

And so what that does is instead of bringing in a bunch of salesmen and your cut from the company is dependent on what they sell and the weather and the mood of the housewives they encounter, what they're selling is that opportunity to bring in other people behind them and everyone is buying, buying, buying.

The salesmen are the customers, not the customers.

Exactly.

And at the time when it was invented,

ostensibly that stuff was getting sold.

So if this is really working, I'm Bridget, I'm joining, and Dax is my sponsor or upline and so he sells me a thousand dollars worth of vitamins and if i bring in you monica and i get you to also buy a thousand dollars worth of vitamins dax gets a bigger cut

and on down the chain in theory if we're selling all those vitamins we're sitting pretty right right

but Already selling vitamins was not a way people were making a lot of money.

And if in this system, all you have to do is show that you're buying and you're rewarded based on what you're buying, Why would you sell them?

You would just recruit.

And so that's what happens.

Interesting.

Immediately, in the way they set up these companies from the very first one, you get more based on the bigger group buying.

You're not incentivized to move product as much as you are incentivized to have more and more employees that are buying the product.

To openly recruit.

So a pyramid scheme actually doesn't have a product.

There isn't a best case scenario where all the vitamins got sold.

There's never been a product.

There is a product, but it's just a cover for what is essentially a Ponzi scheme.

So in the scenario we just discussed where everybody is just buying in.

If I'm at the top and I get in early and I get a bunch of people under me and you get a bunch of people under you.

So all of that group in my downline are buying a big amount of vitamins every month.

I'm getting a big check from the company every month.

But all of those people also have to recruit.

And so what inevitably ends up happening is the people who get in later have a harder time.

Because once everybody's buying, you're saturating your market.

Maybe I had an easy time doing it.

But now that this scheme has been bubbling, it started in Long Beach.

And this is according to the company's own records, Neutralite, which was the first multiple marketing company.

Already the couples that start doing this within a year, they have to move west because they don't have enough people have already bought in.

Interesting.

And so it becomes a Ponzi scheme when the expansion is what is required to make money.

And inevitably, not everybody has the equal chance of expanding.

And so that's a Ponzi scheme.

And that's a classic, whether you're Charles Ponzi, who it's named after, who was just doing this banking scheme in the 1920s, or whether you're Bernie Madoff.

What's actually expanding in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme is the group of people paying in.

And so he's just making money off of more and more people paying in.

And what inevitably happens is once that stops, it collapses.

And the people who got in early make out with the most money and the people who got in later lose.

So that's a Ponzi.

The problem though, to answer your question, is that MLM

eventually by the 70s when a bunch of multi-level marketing companies turned out to be pyramid schemes, there was this problem of what is this and how does it work?

And multi-level marketing ostensibly created these rules that keep it from being a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme.

A pyramid scheme being just a Ponzi with a fake product.

You're moving product, but really you're not.

You're just bringing people in.

And so in the 70s, we get this distinction between a pyramid scheme, which is a system where people are rewarded by buying in.

It has nothing to do with the retail product.

That's the definition of a pyramid scheme.

That's what delineates the two.

Exactly.

And then we have multiple marketing, which is something that operates the exact same way.

And yet, through these rules, which are not enforced, it's not a Ponzi scheme.

It is a gray area.

And these were trade regulations based on an FTC case.

So it's not like we have legislation that did this.

This wasn't a Supreme Court case, right?

We don't have a pyramid scheme law.

So this is the only thing.

Is there any task for?

I mean, we'll get to that, I guess.

Yeah.

So your question is the perfect one to ask because this is the problem.

How do we deal with this thing that's been legalized in the United States?

And yet there's overwhelming evidence that there isn't a difference.

My book really argues that there isn't a difference functionally.

And I agree, functionally for sure.

And if you just model out it unimpeded, you would have to get to the conclusion: okay, well, then everyone's been converted.

Right.

Every single person on earth would be selling.

It has to collapse at that point.

That's not the model of if everyone uses Netflix, Netflix crumbles.

No, Netflix is the most valuable company in the world.

Right, because they're selling a product and the customers are paying for a product.

This is people investing.

So it starts with neutral life.

So in your research, were you able to determine whether the original two dudes was it two guys always two guys did they foresee it in the nefarious way or did they believe in it i love that question when mlm was invented in 1945 and then it grows exponentially this company by 1955 they're celebrating their 10-year anniversary they have this big celebration in long beach and they're millionaires and roughly how many people are selling at that point there were between 30 and 50 000 people across the country which is the lot wow at that point in the united states we've won World War II.

The American era has begun and Eisenhower becomes president and we really become American consumers for the first time in the way that we had a booming product, retail, manufacturing economy.

And this is why housewives become kind of the canonical figures of the 50s because

Not only are they doing leave-it-to-beaver style domestic labor, they have all these products to help them.

And that's why Tupperware, which was a door-to-door selling operation and was not multi-value marketing for many years, Tupperware is a great emblem of that because it's all about homemaking, but it's a scientific product.

It's made with plastics, which were new.

And so you have this booming economy based on products and selling and the idea that we were all going to be good citizens by buying stuff.

That's how you could be a good citizen, was being a real consumer.

There's a scholar who's named this the Consumer Republic.

That's the idea.

That was a political act to be a good buyer.

And then of course, salesmen then become these patriotic patriotic figures because we're all building this amazing economy and the idea that that's how we would get abundance.

So at that time, the idea that you could have a system based on everyone constantly buying and that there would always be more people to buy, maybe that was more believable, that there would always be more people and more markets and more expansions.

I can minimally imagine them saying, well, all we've really done is flip the order of events.

Normally, we would give you the product, you would sell it, you'd pay back what you owed of it, we'd then give you your commission.

And this is just you buy it, you right away are the holder of that.

Whether or not that could have been their intentions or not, I could see where their argument would be like, I don't know what you're upset about.

We just changed the order of this.

Yeah, and they really used the actual like exploding population of the U.S.

as their justification.

There's a quote that one of them gave a newspaper that we really don't ever see people running out of people and markets because at that time it really was, you know.

The baby boom.

And California was exploding.

It was just growing, growing, growing.

And this idea that you could have a product that was brand new and that it would set you up for life.

And what was their product?

So Nutri was supplements, those vitamins.

Oh, it's the original racket.

Yeah, yeah.

I kind of do weirdly lend them some credulity in that way.

However,

at least one of them, so Mittinger, who's one of the guys, he was a salesman selling funeral plots.

I have to give a shout out to Bob Fitzpatrick, who's this guy who makes a lot of appearances in my book.

And he's kind of the original Cassandra of this.

He was roped into a parent scheme in the 80s and became obsessed and never dropped it.

And he's really the first one to even have started to put these strands together.

He's self-published.

He's written two books on MLM.

Without him, I would have never been able to draw the conclusions I did and go a little deeper than he did.

And he remained a fan?

He's the number one

whistleblower.

Yes.

But anyway, he's the first person to put these two figures back on the map because they've been written out of that narrative we talked about because like i said earlier when these guys invented multi-tailed marketing they called it a pyramid plan because that's

just a structure if you look at it anyway mittenger funeral plot salesman funeral plot selling and this is like a slight detour but one of the industries that at this time in the 30s and 40s was booming in a very exploitative way before the sort of modern funeral industry and the biggest one that everyone thinks of is Forest Lawn, which is here in Los Angeles.

Before that, a funeral and funeral plot and burial was really not something that made a lot of money or that cost a lot of money.

You did it through your church, you did it through your union.

It was a municipal thing.

And in the 20s and 30s, it became this big business where guys would come to your house and say, Oh, you got to buy a funeral plot now.

You need to be buried next to your wife.

Exactly.

And if you want to go to afterlife, and it got so scammy, they would sell you shoes to wear on your dead body.

Ensure your

safe safe passage.

And of course, it's like, oh, can we upsell you next to the river or next to the stream or whatever?

Exactly.

And some of them were land investment schemes where it'll be like, you could sell this plot.

Incredibly exploitative and scammy industry.

There were funeral plot rackets all around the country where guys would like swarm in, sell all these plots, and take the money and leave.

And they wouldn't even build.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's a great product to sell when you're not going to find out about it for 30 years.

And it's weirdly similar, I think, to vitamins in that you're selling your future and it's so unknowable.

The way to sell it is to press on anxiety about your future and your health and your family.

And no one can really say, actually, you don't need this.

No one knows, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We interview a lot of doctors and they're all pretty split on supplements.

Well, just like you said, we don't know about the afterlife.

What if being by the stream makes you happier?

You better get those shoes, mommy.

Right.

Yeah.

One of them, Lee Mittinger, we know was a salesman in this industry.

And actually, right before he starts Neutralite, he is employed by a funeral plot company that's actually driven out of the state of Maine because they're so exploitative and so scammy.

These guys would go into towns around Christmas time, set up a nativity and watch to see who's religious to come visit it and take down the license plate numbers to then go to those houses to sell funeral plants.

We know this because this one Maine state senator got on the floor of the state senate and listed all of these things that this company had done.

It was called Brook Lawn.

And so that's his last job before he comes to Starbucks.

So he already has a ton of integrity.

Yes.

William Castleberry, who's the other guy.

These are great names.

Very old black and white movie.

He was a Stanford-educated psychologist who trained under Lewis Terman, who's one of America's foremost eugenicists.

So at the time in the 30s, when this guy's at Stanford, eugenics, the idea that certain characteristics are undesirable, largely black and brown people, and that we can weed out unproductive, inefficient characteristics, and we should do that.

And we can create a better and more efficient society.

Selective breeding like crops.

Exactly, exactly.

Which, of course, in the 30s becomes really related to Nazism.

And that's why, as a fad, it has academic departments and it's totally accepted.

And then, very quickly, in the lead up to World War II and after, it becomes debunked as a pseudoscience and racist.

But this guy was steeped in that stuff.

And then he starts this almost like eugenics-y, Dr.

Ruth, where he opens a psychological practice and does family counseling.

Oh, and teams up with this other guy, Paul Popono, who's a sort of more well-known figure in this space, who's doing family counseling for specifically white families and basically discouraging divorce, discouraging women living alone.

So it's all very preserving the nuclear family.

Yeah, white race.

Exactly.

And a patriarchal household.

And he's going on radio shows and doing occupational therapy.

And it's very familiar now.

He's doing lessons on how to do a job interview or how not to feel lost, self-help,

and doing it on the radio.

So he's very good at manipulating people.

That's his field.

And he writes a self-help book that doesn't do very well.

So when all of that context is in it, that's.

It's harder to extend a generous assessment.

That's why within 20 years, all of these companies are extremely problematic because we've now had them around long enough to see how they work.

When they invented it, all people saw in MLM was people

doing well.

And that's because right away, the other number one invention of multiple marketing, in addition to rewarding people based on what they buy, is turning that around and calling them sales.

So instead of Dak saying, oh, I sold Bridget

$1,000 worth of wholesale vitamins for doing a 50% discount, he says, I have $2,000 in retail sales right away.

Because I know it's going to go downline.

The hypothetical sale, they just report it as reality.

And this is in their documents.

In the documents we have on how it worked, it's just very open that they reported retail sales as a just estimate based on whatever discounts people were getting of what they bought.

Whoa.

So that's why on that 10-year anniversary, Neutral 8 says it's a X million dollar business, which at the time was huge.

I can't remember the exact figure, because they're just counting everything that everyone's buying and assuming that it's all being sold.

And that to this day is how the industry estimates its value.

That was Enron as well.

Counting future projections.

Exactly.

It's called speculation and it's responsible for many of our recessions over the last 100 years.

Now, I have to imagine there are varying levels of success in these.

I can imagine there are companies where a good percentage of it did get sold or not.

And I'm curious.

So the first one, Neutralife, were they or it was bad right out of the gate?

So Neutralite ends up getting government attention, but not first from the FTC, which is the agency of the Federal Trade Commission that now goes after bad MLMs.

But it was the FDA because vitamins were the product and regulation was catching up to vitamins.

They're making crazy claims.

Alfalfa pills was his chosen product.

The hero

of cancer.

They can make you skinny.

They could make you fatter if you were too skinny.

They could cure of worry, of small things.

So the FDA comes in and says, no, no, no, this is violating all the rules that we do have.

And they try to get them to pulp these booklets.

They don't.

It goes all the way to the state Supreme Court and Neutralite actually enlists this very famous lawyer named Charles Rine,

who was Richard Nixon's roommate, a Duke.

Oh, and he becomes a quite prominent Republican.

But anyway, they allow a bunch of claims through.

And as long as they just make those claims, they don't shut down the company.

So that's in the 50s.

But what we do have from that court case.

are statistics on success in the company.

And right away, under 2%

of people enrolled in the company were even making the minimum to be considered like a leader.

The current figure in your book is 99%

of everyone that gets involved with an MLM will lose money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is the first one.

And those statistics are like that.

Yeah, you just have to imagine walking into, I can't even think of a place that employs 100 people, but you go onto the floor of an assembly line and there is 100 workers in there and you're thinking about applying and the person says, oh, just so you know, only one guy here of these hundred is getting paid, you would never put in your fucking application.

That's

a staggering statistic.

They don't recruit with those income disclosures.

And at various times when the FTC has tried to regulate MLM, they do it often.

And that way, there will be an earnings claim rule that they'll try to pass where an MLM would have to give you.

all of those true earnings statements when they recruit you and make sure that you read it and you'd have to take seven days to review it.

So yeah, of course they don't recruit openly, but right away, the first company, the statistics are dismal.

Yes.

Success.

And then such an obvious parallel with the MLM, just the American ethos in general, which is as long as we can prop up the one person that did.

crush, it perpetuates the whole dream.

Like all you need is the 1% being very vocal that are making money to

make you ignore all the people around you that are not.

It's like when people are like, yeah, black people can succeed just as easily.

Look at Obama.

Yeah, we got one guy and we're like, problem solved.

And the idea is that if you're not doing well, it's your own fault, right?

Because everybody has an equal chance to buy in when, of course, it's not equal.

Because if you're early in it, of course, you have a better chance, but also everybody's not a good salesman.

It's hard.

Yeah.

And so it's just never been on equal footing.

But when you're recruited, they're going to say, oh, we do everything everything for you you're gonna have amazing sales training and nowadays podcasts youtube audio books there's so much that they'll give you that will make you think you have an equal chance but it's just never been that way and of course also now the problem is we live in a world where you can buy everything at big box retailers for cheap prices.

Every MLM is expensive and it's always been that way.

Neutralite was very expensive because all you care about is what they're buying.

You don't care about what they're selling.

So you need it upfront to be expensive.

And of course, that means that even if people only do it for a few months, you're getting a lot of money more than you would if you made it cheap.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert.

If you dare.

Let's take a minute to thank our presenting sponsor, Audible.

With Audible, the leading audio entertainment app, it's easy to discover new stories and ideas while going about your day.

Yeah, and with over a million audiobooks, Audible originals, and more, it's basically impossible to run out of things to listen to.

Plus, there's just something about audio storytelling that hits a little different.

Yeah, it really does.

Especially audible originals that feature performances from celebrities and top voices.

It's like watching a movie in your head.

One on my list is Treasure Island.

Aha.

Which is an audible original drama.

It's a timeless tale of pirates, lost treasure, maps, and mutiny.

What more could you need?

That sounds really fun.

I'm more of a psychological thriller girl.

Yeah, you're dark.

Yeah, I'm dark and I'm broody.

And I've been hearing all about the author Frida McFadden.

And I love that I can listen to her audiobooks on the Audible app when I'm commuting, taking my wags, as you know, or just like doing laundry and chores.

Well, with Audible, you can find the genres you love and discover new ones.

There's more to imagine when you listen.

And to make it even better, Audible has a special offer for arm cherries.

Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial, and your first audiobook is free.

Visit audible.com/slash Dax.

That's audible.com slash Dax.

We are supported by Wild Planet.

Love canned seafood, but having a hard time finding a high-quality and sustainable option, Wild Planet has wild-caught, responsibly harvested tuna, sardines, and more.

It's seafood the way nature provided it, with less processing and more delicious nutrients.

If you're a trend chaser, tinned fish is having a moment this summer.

Sea cuterie boards and tinned fish date nights are blowing up on social media.

And haven't you heard?

It's sardine girls summer.

What's wild tastes better?

Not only does Wild Planet taste good, it's good for you and the planet.

You haven't had canned tuna like their Albacore tuna, a solid tuna steak without any fillers, just cooked once in its own juices.

It's an amazing source of clean protein with 33 grams in each can.

It's time to bring tuna salad back into your lunch rotation.

Wild Planet is offering arm cherries 25% off and free shipping through August 15th.

Go to wildplanetfoods.com and redeem coupon code DAX.

That's wildplanetfoods.com, promo code DAX.

We are supported by Allstate.

Some people just know they could save hundreds on car insurance by checking All State first.

Like you know to check your tent for holes first before discovering you're sharing it with every mosquito in the campground.

Like you know to check your hiking boots still fit first before getting blisters halfway up the mountain.

Like you know to check your picnic basket for utensils first before having to eat potato salad with your hands.

Checking first is smart.

So check All State First for a quote that could save you hundreds.

You're in good hands with Allstate.

Savings vary subject to terms, conditions, and availability.

All state fire and casualty insurance company and affiliates North Brook, Illinois.

We are supported by JCPenney.

Guys, do not sleep on JCPenney.

They've got stylish clothes for everyone in your life.

Yourself, obviously, your parents, your kids, your friend's new baby.

There's something for every age, everybody, and every budget.

Yeah, the budget part is huge because scoring a great deal is one of the last socially acceptable forms of bragging.

So true.

Why does it feel so good when someone gives you an outfit compliment and then you drop that you paid less than they think?

It's just really satisfying.

Yeah, and then you tell them where you got it.

It's from JC Penny.

Yes, JC Penny.

It's so good.

I just got a second pair of Levi's that are just blowing my mind.

They had a wash on there I couldn't find anywhere else.

And boy, God, I look, I just, I'm approaching Beckham status with these slacks.

Nice.

So if you've been sleeping on JC Penny, wake up and check it out.

They've got fashion worth bragging about.

And they've got a great reward system, too, that makes every shopping trip even more worth it.

Shop jcpenny.com.

Yes, JCPenney.

There's also this deep irony, which is the appeal of it is

totally understandable, which is be your own boss, which of course isn't really even true because you were recruited and you pay upline.

But you probably are disenfranchised with the broader options, jobs available, and you think that there's a kind of hierarchical cabal happening and you've been excluded.

And this is a license to not have to play by all those rules.

And then you enter into the most structured, hierarchical cannot move up

scenario.

It's just so ironic that the appeal of it, what it promises versus what it is, it's the exact opposite.

You're locked into the downline, which is the most important thing

because it determines what you're going to get.

And that's why people these days, like the Amway downlines, for example, and the two guys who start Amway come from Neutralite.

They end up buying Neutralite in the 70s.

So Amway is functionally the oldest MLM in the world.

Those families that did well in Amway and got in early in the 60s, they still are at the top of the downline.

The Amway founders actually have a position in the downline in addition to owning the company.

Oh my God.

And they still have it.

And so it really is like a little dynasty.

And this is why in the past, the SEC tried to regulate MLM as a security because it is like a position.

If you bought stock in Apple in X year, the value is worth this.

If you joined at this time and your position is here in the downline, so all the downlines under you, even if you stopped recruiting long ago, but you have a recruiter that then built their own big down line, you're sitting pretty on your empire.

And they give those positions to their families.

They're transferable.

What?

Yeah, but you can inherit an Amway business.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Which of course is like the idea that you're selling products.

That's a joke.

You know, it just is even more evidence that it's not based on product sales because the idea that the Amway founders are selling products door to door.

What is the technical product of Amway?

Yeah, so tell us the history of Amway.

So, Rich DeVos, as in Betsy DeVos, as her father-in-law, and Jay Van Andel, these are two high school buddies from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Oh,

and they are from this very devout Calvinist Christian sect of the Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids.

DeVos and Van Andel, they joined Neutralate around, around, I think, 1949, and they are very successful.

They build a huge organization of bringing people in and they then

do what becomes a pattern in MLM, which is, as we've discussed, the statistics are as bad as, say, gambling.

It's always better to be the house than to be a gambler.

Yep.

Even the most successful gambler.

So people start their own MLMs almost immediately.

And they're really funny because some of the early ones are just literal copies.

And these are in the book.

The guy who starts one of the first ones, he calls it a Bundavita.

And if Neutralite was a little alfalfa pill, he's like, well, my alfalfa pill is from this special farm in Colorado.

And you can only harvest it between midnight and 3 a.m.

because of the moon.

Oh, my God.

You know, it's like such bullshit, but it's exactly the same.

Now, if you're starting your own, do you still get the neutralite earnings as well?

No.

What they do is they take a lot of their team with them.

So they start Amway with with a built-in downline.

Okay.

And they name the company before they even have a product, which ding, ding, ding.

Another piece of evidence that the product is the people.

They bring their downline over and they start Amway, which stands for American Way, shortened to Amway eventually.

And they start with a product that's a liquid cleaner.

And they were really prescient.

It was a sort of natural cleaner.

In the 70s, they're sort of ahead of the curve when people are starting to talk about chemicals.

And that's one of their first products.

But then it expands.

And now you can buy anything from Amway.

And when you join Amway, they encourage you to get rid of what you're buying from Costco or Walgreens.

Buy Glister as their toothpaste.

They have the money to manufacture all of this.

That's wild.

They're just private label products.

Exactly.

They're white-labeled products.

Amway does have a factory in Michigan, but they're marked up.

You've never heard of Glister, right?

Right.

Why would you?

But the idea that this is one of the top 100 private companies in the U.S.

and you've never heard of the products.

Yeah.

That's weird.

Right.

Yeah.

So they start their company, Amway.

They're incredibly good at recruiting and at the business opportunity and they're just really good.

And so they start doing that in Michigan.

At the same time, another branch splits off.

I described at the alfalfa in the middle of the night.

That's this company called Ubundavida.

Those guys are like, well, we don't like this.

We're going to start a new one.

And it's literally like a virus spreading.

And there's a company called NutriBio.

And that company really is probably the first pyramid scheme because it spreads across the country like wildfire.

They're really good recruiters.

They go into Canada.

They spread, spread, spread.

The authorities take notice and they are shut down within a few years.

Again, by the FDA rather than the FTC, because it's about the products and the claims about the products.

And those guys then spread even more companies out here in California.

Sorry, the parallels between religion are so amazing as well.

It would be so logical for anyone anyone in the mid-rung of this pyramid to recognize all I got to do is take my down line over here and now I'm the top of the pyramid.

So, like, what a natural fall.

You just have to be a guru and you got to be selling a good story.

And there's the proselytizing and the spreading.

It just has all these parallels of American Christianity, which is, well, this is a new spin on it.

Well, why don't I have a spin on it?

DeVos and Manino were raised in this Calvinist church, which has a really strong tradition of proselytizing and sermons.

And in that tradition, the prosperity gospel is very strong.

And the Protestant work ethic, that term by Max Weber, the sociologist, is coined when he comes to America and observes this group of people.

Oh, really?

The Calvinist Christians.

That's who they were referring to.

Not Puritans, not the like Massachusetts pilgrims, but these guys, because their work ethic is extremely strong, and they're doing it all to be more godly.

Like Mormons.

Exactly.

And this idea that accumulating wealth is actually going to get you closer to God.

It's not bad and it's not greed.

Where you're going to get into heaven is based on how industrious you are on earth.

So they're doing it in Michigan, the Amway guys, these much flashier companies.

There's one called Holiday Magic, which is amazing.

They're selling makeup.

So in the 60s, makeup becomes the product as women stream into MLM.

At first, it was these Christian couples.

And Amway did the same thing.

So Neutral AMWI, it's Christian couples.

And then in the 60s, more women are entering the labor market and they want to go to work, but they still have to do childcare.

It's much harder to enter the sort of traditional wage labor market where you're working a nine to five or you're checking in in a factory.

So they're doing work and they also need to supplement it.

And so they want this flexible pitch.

So that becomes the pitch.

And then in the 60s, you get Mary Kay, which is probably the most well-known

company for women.

She starts her company in Dallas and she's this old grandma.

And her story is that she was in traditional door-to-door selling when she just came upon this business model with her husband.

They're about to start the company.

It's 1963.

She became the best salesman at our old company and they promoted a guy above her.

There's this like pseudo-feminist thing.

Exactly.

And her husband, well, he drops dead at the breakfast table the day before they're starting the company.

So she's all by herself.

So she murdered him.

She was like, this is going to be huge.

I got to get him out of the equation.

I don't think that happened.

But they can't roll it.

That origin story persisted for so long.

And that was a niggling thing for me when I was doing my research because I was like, well, wait, the other companies I described to you that Nest, you can document it, how these guys took the company idea and just copied the plan, which is what they called multiple marketing.

Like done, done, done, truly.

They just copied the plan with different products.

And this lady in Texas, I'm like, but how did she figure it out?

And I'm trying to have an open mind.

So I'm like, maybe it does make sense from direct selling.

And it isn't this specific fraud that's being copied all over the country.

Right.

But what I discovered was that her husband worked for one of these other companies, NutriBio.

And it just was never, she always said her husband was a businessman and she never said what kind.

And I was able to find his death record and newspaper records that showed he worked for this company, NutriBio, the one I said was the country's first pyramid scheme.

Wow.

So they're all like a nest, and you can trace them all the way to Herbalife, which starts in the 90s.

The guys who started Herbalife, they trained in these early companies in the 60s.

And so it's all the same thing.

And then what happens in the 70s is the government finally tries to crack down.

What prompts that?

At one point in the 70s, one in eight Americans had tried multiple marketing.

One in eight.

Which is just crazy.

Yeah, today that would be 40 million, 45 million people.

Tried as in, they participated.

They were selling or had enrolled to join.

Because I've been to some Mary Kay parties.

You have?

Yeah.

Oh, yes.

You're from the South.

I'm from the South.

That makes sense.

And did you enjoy them?

I would just be brought by my aunt or my mom.

They give you all these samples, but they're like tiny things of lipstick.

And it's pretty wild.

But it's fun, right?

The prize isn't fun.

Yeah.

It's interesting what's being sold.

And then it gets really hard to evaluate what the people are really after and is it beneficial or not.

It's multifaceted.

I bet there are people who, yeah, they didn't make money, but they'll look back on that.

Mary Kay period of their life as maybe they loved it.

100%.

And I've spoken to them and they've lost thousands of dollars and and they don't care yeah that's right because it's a nice social network and they get together and the purpose is to get pretty that day and to feel special and all that it's a tenuous business model in that i have to imagine the burnout as you said like one in eight people tried it my assumption is it's easy to try and you exploit your immediate circle of friends and family and then once that's over you recognize it's going to be impossible to sell to strangers you make your a list which is your family and friends your b list which is your coworkers, maybe your acquaintances, and then your C list, which is the girls you DM on Facebook or Instagram.

And so once you burn through those, very quickly you will learn.

And there's a woman who I document in the book.

Monique.

Yes, because I wanted to show the granularity of, uh-oh, you've spent this money, you've bought all these products, you've gone through these people, and immediately your upline tells you, well, recruit.

Build a team.

So even when you're struggling, now you're going out and saying, oh, join me.

This is great.

So immediately you're lying to somebody else.

And then you're you're also lying to yourself because you're telling yourself, okay, well, I am going to sell it eventually because I'll build this team.

That's what already is happening in the 70s when this many Americans have tried it.

And the guys, not Amway, they're smart and they kind of keep the buy-in amount small.

The scammier companies like Holiday Magic, I mentioned, which is San Francisco-based, and they're selling makeup.

This other company that's amazing called Dare to be Great, and they're just selling self-help.

They're doing tapes.

And he's this this like incredibly charismatic salesman with hair lip from the south who is just an incredible speaker.

And he starts in holiday magic and he's so scammy.

They run him out and he just starts his own thing.

Anyway, these guys allowed people to buy in for like $15,000, $10,000 just straight up, which is very much red flag investment fraud.

That's the gift circle model.

Exactly.

You're just buying into this position where you've bought the ability to access these greater cuts without even having to build the team under you.

You buy in at this level and they'll assign people to you.

Or once you recruit a certain amount, then you can basically cash out.

And so they do that and very quickly attract the authorities.

And that's when the attorney generals of all kinds of states, California passes its own chain selling, which is a Ponzi.

That's one of the terms that comes up in the 70s.

They passed very early legislation on that in 1968, one of the first states, but spreads like wildfire all around the country.

And by 1971, 1971, the state's attorney generals, when they meet, oh, you're supposed to say attorneys general.

It's so funny.

Oh my gosh, that's dumb.

I just heard someone say that the other day, and I was like, it sounds so wrong even though it's not.

At their annual meeting, they're like, this is the number one consumer problem in the country.

Wow.

The FTC as the federal, they're all kind of like, we have patchwork laws.

We are trying to do chain selling.

Is it consumer law?

Is it an investment scheme?

They don't even really know what it is.

And that's when this term pyramid scheme starts being used to identify these companies.

And you start getting the Better Business Bureau and local consumer orgs who are saying this is a thing, and this is bad, and don't do it.

And the FTC finally starts to crack down, and they take down Holiday Magic, that one from San Francisco, and they take down the Dare to Be Great guy had a makeup company called Costcot.

It's a play on Epcot.

Oh boy, okay.

Because Disney is a big thing in Florida at this time, and this guy's from Florida.

Experimental prototype community of tomorrow.

I never knew that.

FCOT stands for something like that.

But so Costcott is just that, but for makeup, and he calls it Costcott interplanetary because he's going to eventually expand.

Oh, this guy's crazy.

So anyway, Costcot finally, when they take down that company for being a pyramid scheme, that legal precedent in 1975 is where we get the definition of a pyramid scheme.

The Cause COT test.

Exactly.

So they decide how we're going to define a pyramid scheme.

yes then do they go into regulating and do they do a good job so walter mondale the senator from minnesota mondale farrar exactly who eventually ran for president and lost he writes a bill the pyramid sales act introduces it in 1972 it doesn't pass doesn't make it out of i believe the senate on that front legislation kind of fails and then The FTC, with these two big cases, has sort of set legal precedent, which enables them to go after other companies.

And they finally set their sights on Amway

in 1975.

By this time, the Amway founders, DeVos and Van Andel, have become incredibly prominent members of the Republican Party.

And they're donors from the right flank of the Republican Party.

So what we now call the Reagan Revolution or the new right.

So during the 70s, when a lot of backlash because of how bad the economy was, that backlash helped fuel this more rightward revolution where we were going to fix the economy not by doing more progressive stuff, but the opposite: deregulation, we're going to lower the tax rate, supply-side economics.

All those ideas are being built and funded in part by these guys who are helping to start the Heritage Foundation.

They're funneling their money into the U.S.

Chamber of Commerce, which is a main incubator of this.

And of course, they're giving a ton of money to politicians.

And Gerald Ford, who becomes president by accident in 1974, because Nixon steps down and then Spiro Agnew, who's his replacement, he's got to go.

And so Gerald Ford, this mild-mannered former football player from Grand Rapids, becomes president.

Rich DeVos and Van Andler are close enough to him that they call him Jerry, right?

And so

he is president when the FTC finally files its case against Amway.

He eventually runs for president and loses to Carter.

And so he's not president during the investigation.

But then by the time the FTC is ready to make its decision, it's actually not the FTC making the decision, it's a law judge.

That's how an FTC case works.

An administrative law judge makes a decision and the FTC then votes to uphold the decision.

So it doesn't go to a jury or a trial or anything like that.

And I guess I knew that, but I didn't really think about it, that it was just this one guy.

Like looking at the FTC's case, they make the case that Amway is a chain-selling operation, that people are buying in, and they're making money off recruiting, and they're not making money on retail products, which is the cost-cut test.

And by the time that guy's making the decision, that new right revolution has reached a fever pitch, and it's all about the FTC.

The FTC is trying at this point to regulate basically big private companies, and they're going after advertising.

Like they try to make a children's advertising rule where companies would actually be forbidden to advertise to kids under a certain age.

We would not have sugary cereal ads.

We would not have toy ads because there's all these consumer groups coming out and saying, you know, this is actually really harmfully affecting children.

People flip out.

Those big companies, also the advertisers flip out and they start running ads calling the FTC the national nanny and they're blaming the FTC.

And it feels very resonant today, right?

Cause it's like the FTC and the government.

It's just a hotbed of cronyism.

It's waste.

It's fraud.

Exactly.

It's all bureaucratic swamp and we're going to drain it.

And very much of it is focused on the FTC.

So all of that's in the background when this guy is ruling on Amway and those guys are in the press in the vocal chorus against the government.

They're very much backing Ronald Reagan, who's running for president.

And so

when he makes this decision, he basically puts his hands up and is like, okay, Amway, we accept your version of things, which is that Amway has these rules.

They're now known as the Amway rules that.

keep it from being a pyramid scheme because they're all about retailing.

So Amway tells the FTC, well, you have to have 10 customers a month.

That's the 10 customer rule.

Okay.

You have to resell 70% of the items you buy before you can buy more.

Is it self-reported?

Yeah, it's not like anyone goes through their house.

Oh, yeah.

And then the third one is the buyback rule.

So they enable people to sell their products back if they don't sell them, which of course would deter a company from being a parent scheme because you're saddling people with all these products.

And if they can just give them back to you and you have to give their money back, then that would be hard.

Of course, nobody cracks Amway's books to see if this is actually happening, right?

And in these other cases, they had opened the books of Holiday Magic and Costcott and seen how in Costcott, they didn't even have makeup for the first year that they were in business, right?

They had no products.

So there was just all these ways that you could see people were really being rewarded, but based on recruiting.

In Amway, they really just took the company's word for it.

They accepted that the company said, oh, we don't keep records.

Okay.

We're the only company in the world that doesn't keep records.

Exactly.

They don't keep the records that the FTC asked for, which would be like, what are people making?

What are people buying?

That's basically the only federal regulation that exists to this day.

And because Reagan is so in bed with these people, and then they really back Bush One, and by now the Amway founders are billionaires.

They have a yacht.

They're building new space for the RNC, the Republican National Committee.

They're big, big donors.

And so there's not a single prosecution against Pyramid Scheme Company through those two terms.

So 15 years, we just have MLM exploding.

And then we start going after certain pyramid companies in the 90s, but just one by one, one-offs.

No one is taking on the business model itself.

These hypothetical rules, do they actually exist?

Has anyone ever tested them?

Have you ever talked to anyone that worked for Amway that was able to get a buyback?

Buyback rules have so many loopholes.

You have to resell them after a certain time.

You have to sell them back exactly in the same condition.

You still are paying tax and shipping on the retail amount to send it back.

So you're still losing money.

So there's just so many different ways that the buyback doesn't work.

It's also, I think, really important to imagine what state of mind someone would be in before they would initiate this buyback, which is it kind of parallels people who have been conned in that being the most underreported crime there is is confidence schemes because the person's embarrassed that they got conned, so they don't report it.

Likewise, you would be at the point where you were saying, I failed at this.

I have all this shit in my closet.

You're not at your most robust,

you're feeling like a failure, and you probably want to forget this whole thing happened.

And in the olden days, when we hadn't gone online yet, you really were buying from

a person, your sponsor.

You were actually going to pick up the products from their house.

And so the buyback would go through them.

And so the idea that you're going to go to your sponsor, like your friend, exactly, and most likely berating you to do better

for weeks or like your mom exactly that you're gonna go show up to her and be like mom i failed give me my money back and it's her paying you now it's all done online and so you're buying just from the company they ship it to you directly and the downline is all digital so it's like if i buy from monica in the system that's what's important is that monica brought me in and so you're still getting paid based on my purchases, but you don't have to do the admin.

Right.

You could see why in the 70s and 80s.

And there's a great short-lived Showtime show that is basically a company that looks like Amway called On Becoming a God in Central Florida.

It starred Kirsten Dunce and Alexander Skarsgaard.

It was so good.

It was right before the pandemic.

It was supposed to have a second season.

Kirsten Dunce takes on the business and she really is the salesman and people are coming to buy from her.

It's a great depiction of why it doesn't work in practice.

And the FTC didn't go observe it in practice.

They just accepted it.

And so we're just downstream from that decision being the only thing that mattered.

Okay, so after Mary Kay, I want to talk about Monique because I think that's a really compelling story.

And I want to save time for her, but where does Herbalife fit into this?

And how big are these companies?

We don't really, there's so little oversight and they're private.

And so even Herbalife, which is publicly traded, all their data is just on their distributors and what the distributors buy and they buy.

So if you're investing in the sock, you're like, okay, they have data on that.

I guess it would be inevitable.

There's so many companies that have tried this.

They're making so many different products.

What's really comical almost is when one of them actually could be a business.

Right.

Like Herbalife.

Could be AG.

We have a friend who sells Herbalife.

Uses it.

I don't know if sells.

We're getting a little ahead of ourselves, but Herbalife was fined by the FTC for being effectively a payment scheme.

They didn't use those words, but in the FTC complaint, every function of a payment scheme they were accused of and they were fined $200 million.

Whoa.

And they had to restructure their business.

And so now it is a little easier to be what's called a preferred customer in Herbalife and buy the products on a subscription model.

But there's a lot of ways they get around that.

And I've been watching them and I'm like, you guys, this is not good.

But it is funny to think of someone starting it with the full intention of just having a business that makes money off of its employees and then going, like, oh, God, we kind of have a hit product here.

Should we also try to do that?

Yeah, should we just be legitimate?

Yeah.

I do want to.

call out the fact that they're not employees, right?

Which is really important because they're independent contractors.

So that's another way we don't have oversight here because these are not employees.

They're like 1099.

Exactly.

And so that already just gives you so much leeway because these are not your full-time employees.

You don't pay benefits on them.

Herbalife is started in 1980 by this guy, Mark Hughes, who actually, as a child, is in one of these schools related to Cinanon.

Oh, I love Cinnanon.

What's Cinnanon?

Remember, I was talking all about it.

It was this guy that was from AA and he started a program to help junkies.

They played the game, which is this group therapy where you scream at each other yeah and it was so effective people that weren't junkies wanted to join and it yeah it's like yeah great documentary and there's just a huge overlap between mlm because to stay in mlm really does rely on a lot of coercion which is why mlms have been accused of being cults because there really is a lot of behavior that's similar to cults and keith ranieri who started nixium learned amway and nixium was multiple marketing tony robbins was basically taken in by this guy, Jim Rohn, who was an evangelical preacher from the Midwest.

He was one of the original executives of that very first pyramid company, NutriBio that I talked about.

He was banned from operating a chain selling scheme in the state of California.

So that was the 70s.

He just takes a break and then comes back to Herbalife.

They call him the international business philosopher or something.

And you can still see clips of his sales, basically sermons going viral on TikTok because he's very good at speaking about being persistent.

But anyway, so him and a bunch of other guys guys who were involved in NutriBio and Holiday Magic helped Mark Hughes start Herbalife in the 1980s.

He worked for a company called Golden Youth, which was run by this guy, Larry Huff, who if you just Google him and Attorney General California, he's been banned from a million pyramid companies.

I don't think he's living anymore, but Mark Hughes just learned the plan.

They're just grifters.

Move to a different market.

Exactly.

And Mark being a kid in Synanon, who then basically pimped out.

There's a little anecdote people love telling about him that he visited Ronald Reagan when Reagan was the governor of California and like got him to donate to this school.

He was very charismatic,

but it's all to make money.

And clearly this is a very vulnerable guy.

And Mark Hughes' whole thing was that his mom was an addict and died of basically being obese.

That was the story they told at the time.

I remember this is the 80s.

So the way this is being talked about is really gross in a way we wouldn't talk about it now.

He's like, now I run this supplement company and it's all about lose weight now.

Ask me how.

In 2000, he dies himself of an overdose.

So while he's telling the story of being like a health nut, an herbal life just explodes and everyone's doing it and celebrities and all this stuff.

He has this mansion in Malbu and he dies of an overdose.

And so herbal life is just directly related to all these old companies.

I want to talk about the Christian element of it.

And in my own anecdotal experience, a lot of the people that have approached me with different MLM products learned about it in church.

Yep.

I want to cover that.

And I also want to cover this maybe MLM in disguise.

Now with remote working, it's been rebranded a bit.

So hit me with the Christian aspect.

From the very beginning, the Neutralite guys definitely consider themselves Christian.

And interestingly, one of them was a Christian scientist.

We just learned a lot about that the other day.

And this idea that you can impact your physical world with your mind, that is like a huge part of MLM.

From the very beginning, multiple marketers associate themselves with this guy who writes a book called Think and Grow Rich.

That book is all about literally meditating on money.

It's like the secret.

Absolutely.

And this guy, Norman Vincent Peale, who writes The Power of Positive Thinking in the 50s, he goes on to become Donald Trump's pastor in Manhattan

at Marble Collegiate Church.

I guess I'm just delighted he had a pastor.

I didn't even really think there was ever.

His dad loved this guy.

And this book was the secret of the 50s.

Like it was a huge popular book and bestseller.

And so they loved coming.

And this guy is saying, do not think negative it doesn't matter what's happening around you you can literally just create your own reality well he has done it there you go from the very beginning this is an mlm like meditate on the car literally put a picture of the car on your fridge put it in your drawer think about the cadillacion board yes

very much a part of it and so that's the mystical side and then on the actual christian side more of a traditional Christianity rather than Christian science, which is only a 200 something years old and an American version of Christianity, the Calvinists in Amway, hugely, they're using churches.

Well, it's a great place to network.

Exactly.

And one FTC economist who I spoke to, who was raised in Grand Rapids, he actually met DeVos and Van Andel in church.

So these communities are ripe for the picking.

Yeah, prosperity, whatever they call it.

Yeah, prosperity gospel.

Plus community, plus person in front of you that has attained it.

Yeah, there's an Amway sect that I know that is operating out of a church in Brooklyn, in Long Island.

And people are brought in thinking that it's something else because also these companies don't have to say it's Amway or say it's Herb Life or say it's whatever because they're independent contractors.

So you can use your own name.

Oh my gosh.

You can call it like, I'm in Freedom Legends or I'm in Sales Stars or I'm in a group called Rise Legends.

They're all really corny.

Yeah.

And so maybe you're in church and you're like, stay after for Rise Legends where we talk about self-development.

Then they'll start saying, well, you should buy mentoring and the mentoring is buying in.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert

if you dare.

We are supported by Hills Pet Nutrition.

Something we celebrate here on Armchair Expert is that we all have juggles, struggles, faults, and flaws because we're human.

Those of us with pets know this all too well.

We are their whole world, and that can be a lot of pressure.

Things are just going to go wrong sometimes, and we can only plan for so much.

Pet parent guilt is unavoidable.

Yeah, like when you left one of your dogs when you went traveling, you probably had guilt.

I did.

Whiskey wasn't fit to make the trip, but I was relieved that he's having such a great time with Peggy at home.

But yeah, because you're only human, there's hills.

Science does more.

Find the right food at hillspet.com slash stacks.

We are supported by Quince.

With Quince, you can get luxury basics at prices that make sense.

Get all the good stuff, quality fabrics, classic fits, and lightweight layers for warm weather without dropping a fortune.

I just was staring at a box of quince that arrived yesterday.

Kristen's been firing off orders.

We all love everything that arrives.

I ordered some sheets, some really, really amazing sheets.

They're also so cute.

They, they're striped.

They have this like cream stripe.

It is,

I love quince, and I feel like it's a hack, honestly.

It's like the quality is so good and it's so reasonable.

If you need to get anyone a present or anything, I think Quince is the place.

Look no further.

Quince has closet staples you'll want to reach for over and over, like cozy cashmere and cotton sweaters from just $50, breathable flow-knit polos and comfortable lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and dressed up dinners.

And everything you're going to order from Quince is half the cost of similar brands.

By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you you luxury pieces without the markup.

Keep it classic and cool with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash DAX for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

That's q-u-i-n-ce-e dot com/slash dax to get free shipping and 365-day returns.

Quince.com/slash DAX.

Hi, I'm William Googe, a Vuri Collaborate and professional ultra runner from the UK.

I love to tackle endurance runs around the world, including a 55-day, 3,064-mile run across the US.

So, I know a thing or two about performance wear.

My go-to daily short is the core short from View.

It's perfect for my daily run in the gym, strength training, or even when I'm taking a day off, relaxing, doing some stretching, and recovering the best way I can.

Check them out by visiting viewery.com/slash William.

That's v-u-o-r-i.com slash William, where new customers can receive 20% off their first order, plus enjoy free shipping in the US on orders over $75 and free returns.

Exclusions apply, visit the website for full terms and conditions.

Well, it's also a group that is by definition not skeptical.

Religious people.

Yes.

They are there to like buy in and take things at face value.

Yeah.

Or maybe even if you are skeptical, you're taught not to voice that.

Because I think a lot of people are way more skeptical than you think,

but they're keeping quiet.

And I actually spoke to so many people who just were afraid to be rude.

And that's why church is such an insidious environment because people are supposed to be being kind to each other.

When someone approaches you, your instinct is not to be like, whoa, this is scammy and weird.

It's to be like, oh, we have this fellowship and to respond in fellowship and stay for the meeting.

The whole thing's driven on being nice because the people who have pitched me, I've had a cutcoat knife demonstration done for me.

I've had the Sai Berry pitch or whatever.

Mona V.

Mona V.

Those are just Amway guys.

Yeah, I've sat through those and it's like, here's someone I love.

$90 acai juice.

So another sad, unavoidable pattern you see is these

tend to explode when the economy's bad.

From the very beginning.

And that's why they exploded in the 70s because inflation was so bad and unemployment rose so much in the 70s.

You just had people like pouring into these companies.

They did it in the dot-com boom in the 2000s where they said, oh, these are home-based digital businesses or network marketing.

That's when they started using these different terms.

And then, of course, during the Great Recession, same thing.

That's when Trump lent his name to this supplement company, which was called Ideal Health, and they rebranded as the Trump Network.

And he's literally saying, this is how you're going to survive the recession.

If you've been laid off, do this.

And then, of course, the pandemic being the most recent moment where they always get this little.

boom of participation because people are falling for this pitch of you don't have to have a degree.

You don't have to have $10,000 to invest in some business.

All you need is $199 to start your starter kit and then they'll immediately ask you for $1,000.

You have more control.

And that's the thing that I think is really what it's getting into is the desire for control.

People are feeling buffeted by these forces that are way bigger than them.

And they have this sense of feeling wronged and injustice.

And that's what's so really scary.

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

And it teaches you to channel that inward and say, I can fix myself.

I know it's sad.

And I can take myself out of this.

Yeah.

The fuel source for it is really a sad one that I have great sympathy for.

And you explicitly say it in the book, which is there's a significant portion of the country that has just great distrust.

And I think it's largely driven by income inequality.

It's like you're looking at all these people that have all this stuff constantly, and now it's only exacerbated by Instagram and other ways to monitor people's life.

And there's just this collective sense of something's unfair here.

And this seems like a way to right the scale.

Attack the system.

And what's so crazy about that and why the subtitle of the book is literally How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America is because those dynamics that we talked about where there's only a fraction of people succeeding, and more and more people are participating, but more and more people are losing.

That is actually what's happening to the economy in terms of income and how a fraction of just a few people

in this country are making so much more and keeping so much more than everyone paying in.

Yeah, it's a micro cost of fraud.

And what MLM does is instead of looking at that and thinking, hey, why is this the way that it is?

And maybe we could do something about that, it's keep going and maybe you'll get in that club one day.

And we're all just trying to get into that fractional club instead of looking at the whole shape and saying, well, does it have to be this way?

And is there a way that the distribution could be fairer?

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

All of that is to get rid of those collective safety nets that we all share and push this wild west where you can make a lot of money if you're willing to exploit a lot of people.

I hate to add this to the fire, but I was just at a conference, a lot of AI people and in that space.

And I was saying to someone, all these products are making all these companies so much more efficient.

People are wholesale cutting like 30% of their workforce already.

replacing with AI.

And I was like, wow, if you model this out,

the only human in the whole scenario scenario that will benefit from this is whoever owned the company when we started making it efficient.

And then it's over.

You know, there's not even a way to enter and climb.

It was already up here, but now it's going to be a fucking straight line.

There'll be one person with this enormous company that's being run by all this AI.

It's going to accelerate.

I think that that isn't far-fetched at all.

And if we go all the way back to the beginning, to the people that invented this and this idea that one of them had about eugenics and about the idea that people people are expendable and that some people are cogs in an efficient machine.

That's not that far off from how MLM operates when it's successful.

And that's why Monique's story is so important because you see how she is the most successful in that company when she is not caring about herself at all, just paying into the system and is functionally a cog.

That's why MLM is so corrosive in that if you're not at the top functionally, mathematically, you have to be losing.

Yeah.

So Monique was in the Air Force for 17 years.

She gets out.

She's on a retirement.

It's like a stipend.

It's $1,200 a month is her retirement from the Air Force, which is her rent.

And she's wildly depressed.

She's directionless.

She's sleeping 15 hours a day.

That career has ended and she's kind of at a loss of what to do.

And someone, was it a church friend?

No, she was in Florida and she tried to join this business networking group where she would meet people and maybe get a job.

And so this woman in Mary Kay meets her there.

This woman asks her repeatedly, would you like a facial?

Yeah, a facial, which is so weird because Mary Kay women aren't facialists.

Yeah, there's training.

Yeah, there's training and like a certification.

They just teach you how to put makeup on.

She joins in 2013.

In 2013, we already had Sephora and Alta.

The idea that you're going to buy makeup from this lady in a pink, it's just so antiquated.

She's super lucky, a pink Cadillac.

She meets this woman and she gets the facial.

And what I wanted to really make sure was out there was, it was a weird thing.

She didn't love it, right?

It was awkward.

This is weird.

But then she invites her to this party, and she doesn't know anyone in Florida.

And so she goes, and there's food at the party, and she's hungry.

Oh my gosh.

And they pray, and she is looking to find her way back to religion because she was raised a Baptist and wants to feel closer to God again.

And Mary Kay is very explicitly Christian.

And they pray, and she just feels so much love and community.

And she signs on for that starter kit, which is $199.

And then from there, we just chart her journey.

And right away, they get her to buy an $1,800 wholesale order because they say that's what star consultants do.

And they have all these phrases like you can't sell from an empty basket and all this stuff.

And she is basically spending $400,020 a month for a decade.

And she's living on $1,200 and she has rent.

They encourage her to talk about how successful she's being.

Meanwhile, they know that the VA retirement benefits are what's sustaining her barely.

She's taken on a huge amount of debt and she has bought a house, but she's done it with a VA loan.

So not with Mary Kay, but her uplines are convincing her.

You tell your why in MLM, what are you getting out of it?

Whether it's I get to be with my kids or I bought a house or I pay for school.

Hers is I bought this house, even though they know that it's a lie.

She's just spending, spending, spending and they tell her, keep your eye on the horizon.

It's an investment.

And nowadays, the whole entrepreneur

self-help world

really helps these MLM people because they'll just show you a video where some entrepreneur is talking about how he lost a million dollars in his first year of business.

And so they're just telling you, don't think of it as a loss, it's an investment.

Or an entrepreneur is saying how he never went to college because MLM is telling you, don't go to college, invest here, small business.

And so that's what they're doing with her the whole time.

Does she build a downline?

She really only recruits a handful of people and then those people recruit.

And at a certain point, she reaches a rank where you have to have a group of 24.

And Mary Kay has this crazy qualification where eventually to sort of get to the next rung, you have to all be buying several thousands worth a month and you push, push, push and recruit, recruit, recruit.

And it's all to then walk across the stage and get this sash and a recognition at this convention, which I went to in 2023.

But everyone is just buying.

Everyone knows it.

And Monique still to this day has all this stuff.

She just must have thousands of items.

Yeah.

Yeah, I would love to x-ray the whole country and just see like how much of this product is sitting in the salespeople's homes.

I bet all these people are just storing all this fucking yeah.

Well, that's why, especially if you know somebody that sells it, they're using it all the time because they have to, because they have so much around.

Yeah, putting on the makeup three times a day.

Yeah.

And she really gets out of it, though, feeling love, feeling self-worth, feeling like she has a purpose and a place in this country.

And so much of being American, right, is this idea that we can transform our circumstances.

That's the American dream and that's the American story is we live in a democracy.

We don't have royalty.

We don't have these fixed hierarchies.

We don't have nobility.

Where you're born is not where you're going to die.

And so that's really what she's trying to do.

And she's a black woman, raised in poverty.

It's really incredibly noble.

What she's trying to do is build something for herself.

She's taking care of family members.

She served her country.

Exactly.

She served her damn country.

And instead, she's being funneled into this horrifying dystopia, just like you said earlier, where they're feeding off of her every month.

And I do think there are some people, I know there are some people that would come on and say, I have a really successful business.

I have all these recruits.

They're really happy.

But I really would challenge them.

And I know they wouldn't because they never do.

But if you really open your books as a successful multiple marketer and you see all your recruits and how much they're buying and how much they're actually making in an income,

maybe you have a few on your downline who are also really successful recruiters and they're making money.

But if you really open your books, you're just going to have masses churning in and out, just like her, who are buying, buying, buying.

And your success is reliant on that.

Their failures.

And I would just challenge those people to really look at what is your success actually built on if it requires people to fail.

Again, I think those people would say, well, they weren't good at it.

We're at, I think, this inflection where it's like being a country of just go get yours is kind of untenable and heartbreaking and has tons and tons of wreckage surrounding it.

But there are still a lot of us, even where I came from in my very blue collar town is survival.

You just had to fucking get ahead.

And yeah, if someone was failing below you, I don't think there was an ethical dilemma in that.

Everyone's on the bottom.

We must crawl out of this barrel and you got to get yours.

And it's a defendable point of view if you're

desperate.

If you're a desperate person.

So I think a good chunk of the country still feels like, yeah, get yours and that's it.

Absolutely.

This is why MLM is such a useful story to be telling.

And first of all, it's not just right-wing.

MLM has been bipartisan for a long time.

The FTC finding of Herbalife that allowed the company and the business model to stay around was under Obama.

This is not just like a Reagan thing or a right-wing thing or Bush.

And the reason I think.

it persists is because that story that this American style of capitalism and the thing that we do in the free market that sort of meets out everyone's fate is ultimately fair and just.

And we are in a democracy and we are living out that dream that the meritocracy is still working.

The people that have so much more than everyone else, they got there fairly, and that it's not something that should be possibly changed, right?

We shouldn't have a class war.

We shouldn't even have a class discussion of whether this is fair.

That's a really useful story for all kinds of elites on both sides of the aisle and always has been because the booms and busts that you asked about, like why does MLM flourish in a dark economic time, we have these moments where capitalism is not working for all of us in the way that it's being practiced here.

It is creating that sense of unrest and that things are not fair and things are rigged.

And MLM just, again, seeds on the ground among individuals in their living rooms, in their churches, that...

It's still fair.

You just keep grinding, just keep going.

It's going to work out for you.

It'd be interesting to see because mostly in the book, at least, this has historically really preyed on women uniquely.

But it's interesting to imagine the flip that is ahead for us when you have 20 some percent of 20 year old boys unemployed.

And you could say that crypto is

the MLM for men when they're not just straight up gambling and being addicted to gambling sites.

Yes.

And just doing lotteries, which is why just bypass the whole thing altogether.

And, you know, what you were talking about, basically the Gilded Age, where get yours was a matter of policy.

It was your moral, actually.

Right.

We were in the wild west of those robber barons.

The reason they're called the robber barons is they were robbing.

They were fighting.

They were calling police on horses and shooting into crowds of workers when they were doing strikes, right?

This is before the New Deal, before the sort of modern era.

of worker-employer relations where we had some boundaries on what private companies and capitalists could do.

And that's why we have child labor laws.

That's why we have the right to organize a union.

That's why we have all of these things.

And for a while after the New Deal, in this American era where MLM was conceived, that stuff was something to be prideful about.

Ronald Reagan was a spokesperson for GM when the union at GM was really important.

And of course, there were all kinds of ways that GM was always trying to undercut the workers because, of course, their interests are different.

But like the idea that there were wage laborers who had rights was a point of pride and was something that we then built the welfare state on those rights to.

If you were GI, you could go to college on the GI bill, or you could go to a public school.

These are things that everyone has access to.

It's the opposite of get yours.

And of course, again, lots of flaws in all of these systems, lots of flaws in Social Security.

But the idea of it is that we all have access.

It's not Darwinian.

It's not, you only get it if you can get it.

And so these guys who built MLM already in the 40s, they're trying to reverse that.

They're trying to then seed this idea that actually, no, no, no, let's go back to the get yours.

Let's go back to the Wild West.

They're very honest that they want to rebrand this free, free, free market, deregulation, that Wild West, rebrand it as it's not a place where everyone's being hurt.

It's not a violent place.

The ferry boats aren't crashing.

But actually, it's like, that's how we're going to be freer.

That's how we're going to get democracy.

Independence.

Exactly.

We will all benefit.

And of course, trickle down, literally, that's the idea, right?

That if we let these people accumulate as much wealth as possible, you all be rich.

We will all get it.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's what's happening.

And again, not to put the tinfoil hat on, but so many people seem ready to accept that story.

Yeah, where

so many people, it's only in America where you have people paying into Amway.

$400 a month.

I talked to one woman who, by the end, she and her husband, he worked in an oil field.

They had a little baby.

They're budgeting $20 a week for their groceries because of how much they're spending on Amway.

Oh, my God.

And they are looking at the the fact that the Amway families have a yacht.

They have their own family office because they have so much money.

Their kids will never work.

Their kids' kids will never work.

This is an American dynasty.

These are royals.

And they're just thinking, I'll get there one day.

They're like, I'm so proud of this yacht.

And of course, this woman has since left and she's basically done cult deprogramming, but like only in America, I think, are you not getting in the streets being like, excuse me.

Yeah, this will not stand.

We're just all getting back to posting being like, hey, guys, I have an amazing offer for you, this incredible opportunity.

Yeah.

Like, that's where we're at.

Oh, boy.

This is a wild topic.

It is a wild topic.

I'm delighted you wrote this book, and it is crazy how little existed on this topic as you endeavored it.

I feel like it's five books because there's so many little rabbit holes to go down.

And I hope people write more books on this because I feel like I have scratched the surface.

We give a very thorough history of MLMs, but your book is just full of personal stories that are really, really compelling and heartbreaking.

And of course, I went to the convention and saw this in person and spoke to a corporate employee.

This one, the Mary Kay convention, she said, we don't track what people are selling.

We only track what they're buying.

It's very clear that this is the way that this is set up.

And I just think more people should know that.

Yeah.

Oh, I want to leave everyone on this.

In a different interview, the interviewer asked you, what would you recommend people do when they're getting pitched these?

And it may be a little bit counterintuitive, but your advice is you're doing them the best favor by not buying it now.

You're accelerating, please elaborate.

I'm not going to botch.

When people humor their sister or friend and buy one of these products, they think they're helping them out, but you're just prolonging their involvement.

Because if you're in the A list, once they get through you and then the B list and the C, they're going to just run out and they're going to recruit and maybe stay longer or buy more.

Because, of course, what's documented in the book is also people just buy.

So even if you can't recruit, you'll buy for somebody and just put it on your credit card if they can't afford it, just to get the rewards, exactly, keep your place in the downline.

And so contributing at all is keeping that hope alive.

I think the faster somebody sees the reality, the faster they will get out.

Direct and obvious parallel is you shouldn't loan someone 30 bucks to get high again.

You want to try to accelerate them having to confront that.

Exactly.

It's all gamified.

And I think that that impulse has been increased in all of us to respond to a gamified environment.

So we're all even more vulnerable to this idea that we're going to get ahead.

And so, stop it at the pass and just don't buy it.

Yeah.

Well, Bridget, this has been incredibly interesting.

Everyone should check out Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America.

It's kind of like a glimpse of an aspect of our country that is very much fractal of our whole setup.

It's got larger implications than even MLMs.

So, thank you so much.

This has been a blast.

Thank you.

Always take a Leave D or whatever one you took before interviews.

You were on Clarity.

Claritin.

Speed works for me, I guess.

Always be on Claritin D.

All right, V well.

Hi, there.

This is Hermium Permian.

If you like that, you're going to love the fact checker.

Miss Monica.

Is there places you wouldn't wear that shirt?

Beyond it.

There's nowhere I wouldn't wear this shirt.

A funeral.

A wedding.

A christening.

No, I'd wear it to a christening.

I would wear it to a wedding with a big ball gown skirt.

Oh, and a Rolling Stones t-shirt?

Yeah, and in a funeral, I'd wear it under

a black

blazer and black pants.

Okay.

But this person who's passed

really appreciates the stones.

That was their favorite band.

That's a high percentage chance to take.

I have bad news to share with you.

What?

I don't know what the solution is.

I don't know if I have to move and put the house up for sale or order another engine, but

I had made a promise to my family that they would not be out on the lake and

come across anyone with a faster pontoon boat.

Uh-oh.

And

that I can't say that anymore in good conscience.

You know, was exploring, saw someone with a huge yard, right?

I'm like, oh my God, that person has 30 acres on the lake.

The house was astronomical.

So we're just snooping around the shore and looking at this impossible piece of property.

And how do they mow it?

You know, those are the kind of questions you ask on a boat.

Like, how are they mowing that?

That looks steep on the side.

I'd like to somehow be out here when they're mowing it next time.

All that to say, we come around the, they're on this huge peninsula and we come around the side to where we see where their boats are at.

And oh my god

there it was 25 foot pontoon boat

i have one 400 horsepower v10 this had two

450 horsepower outboards 900 horsepower compared to my 400.

so i don't i don't know what my move is i don't know if i should sabotage his boat ask him to move sell our house order i told aaron i was going to order a 501 horsepower engine for one side so that I have one horsepower more than that.

Man or woman.

I shouldn't assume it's a man.

You got to get off the treadmill, man.

Yeah, I can't be number one.

We can't all be number one.

We can't all be the best.

He's the best, and that's that.

Well, okay, minimally, I'd like to put a small tracker on the boat so that I know if he or she is out on the lake because I would like to avoid being out there at any point that they're out there.

Okay.

Okay.

I don't understand, but I hear you and I

respect your words.

Okay, when I come visit, can we watch what lies beneath and really get in the lake mood?

Oh, for sure.

We could do, we should really think about all the lake movies.

We could do on Golden Pond, I guess.

That's what's supposed to be good.

That feels like boring.

It sounds like a homework, doesn't it?

On the waterfront.

Yeah, I don't want to do that.

Yeah, on the waterfront, not like more

longshoremen.

You know, I'm against that movie.

So just what lies beneath, I guess?

Okay.

Sure.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Or isn't in, I don't think I've seen Sleeping with the Enemy, but doesn't she like

learn how to swim?

Oh.

To escape him?

Yeah, she's secretly like learning how to swim.

Is that Julia Roberts?

Yeah.

And she moves to like a southern town, right?

I don't know, but I think we need to watch that.

I'll watch it.

Have you heard about the dock on

the poop boat, like a cruise where everyone pooped everywhere?

Shitwreck or something.

I keep seeing it pop up on new releases on Netflix.

You haven't watched it?

Yeah.

I have not watched it because it feels like,

how dare I spend my time, my precious time, watching

some people pooping everywhere.

Yeah, I watched the trailer and a very functional cruise ship pulls up alongside of them to, like, I guess, ferry on some supplies.

And the other cruise ship is like blasting music and partying.

They're having fun.

They're on a cruise.

And the other cruise is, there's no toilets and they're all staring at the partying boat and they're not happy that they're partying.

And then I thought, well, what should they do?

Be miserable because you're miserable.

They should party.

Right.

Also, what happened?

Were they stuck stuck out there?

Like, why were they stuck?

Yeah, I think there was just like a lot of mechanical failures all at once.

Yeah.

I guess I should watch it.

Let's let's both aim to watch it, or you could watch it when you come.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, let's add that to the.

Oh, that's a water.

The kids are intrigued because of the poop that's got their interest peaked.

Yeah, yeah, obviously.

Um,

I have a question

for you about my neighbors.

No, okay, two questions

in the similar category.

Do you say when you hear the phrase, it's all downhill from here?

Yeah.

What does it mean to you?

Well, it's interesting.

I think we have talked about it.

It sounds good

and also bad.

It's a very confusing saying.

So how would you use it?

Well, it's all downhill from here is positive.

It's all downhill is bad.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

Isn't that interesting?

Like from here means we've peaked.

We're at the peak and we're going to get to coast down.

Uh-huh.

But it's going to be all downhill.

Sounds like things are going to get worse.

Right.

And in some ways, even if you say it's all downhill from here,

it still could be worse because it's like you're at the top of the map.

You're at the top.

And so it's all

over here.

Everyone wants to be at the top.

But I like a valley.

I like a valley a lot.

I think I'm in the Ohio River Valley or the Tennessee Valley.

I like it.

Yeah, but then you have, you're in the valley, but you have to get, then you have to climb to the top to get to the next.

No, I'm all done.

I don't have to climb to the top anymore.

Oh, you just live in the valley.

Yeah, that's what's like, that's the transition in life I'm at.

There's no more peaks, just valley living.

I think I use it negatively.

I definitely, I know I do.

I've never said it's all downhill from here in a positive way.

Right.

Like, oh, it was all downhill from there.

And it was all downhill from there.

And it was bad.

And I say it like, ugh.

Okay, back to my neighbors who you wanted to know about.

They're so friendly.

We have been delivered two pies, just like you would expect from the south.

They delivered

two completely delicious warm peach pies.

Wow, that's a ding, ding, ding.

I made a peach galette yesterday.

What's a galette?

Freeform pie.

We've already discussed this.

You refuse to commit it to memory.

Okay.

The inside is a little open, but there's crusts on the sides.

That sounds nice.

You made another one of those yesterday?

I did.

I'm going to serve it tonight for Mahjong.

Oh, are you hosting or attending?

Hosting.

And actually, when we were on the trip, I got a real BMI bonnet for Mahjong.

I forgot it.

Okay.

I forgot my set, and I was really looking forward to playing it on the trip with people.

Yeah.

And so I got really upset and I was like, we got it.

We have to find mahjong.

You can't find it.

Like if you eat

just for sale, yeah.

Yeah.

And I, so I was calling all these antique stores to see if they had any mahjong sets because there's a lot of vintage stuff there.

I did, but it wouldn't deliver by then.

Okay.

By the time we left.

It wasn't like next day delivery.

So we I call all these antique stores.

No one has it, but they're all so friendly.

They're like, sorry, babe.

Yeah.

And

then we go on Facebook Marketplace, never been on it before.

Okay.

Yeah.

But we go on, there's somebody there in Palm Springs with a Mahjong set that we could get.

Yeah.

But we didn't want to go drive to get it, right?

So we were going to send an Uber

to get it and bring it to us.

I would have been most excited about going to the person's house and seeing who's selling the Mahjong.

Well, we were just having too much money.

We were not doing it.

Okay.

So

this created a dilemma, another dilemma, like downhill from here, where the lady who was selling it was like, okay, you need to sell me before I put it in the Uber.

Right.

And we were like, no, we're not selling until we have it.

Oh, wow.

And I, and I understand both points of view.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Because I get she's like, I can't just put it in an Uber and not have money.

yeah, yeah, but then for us, same situation, right?

So, what'd you do?

We didn't follow up.

Oh, okay,

okay,

and at that point, they must have thought, well, yeah, they were trying to scam us out of our Mahjong,

but that's pretty funny to assume someone would send an Uber to steal a Mahjong.

How much was the Mahjong set?

Are they more than I think?

Um, I mean, my current one is like $400.

Whoa, really?

Yeah, yeah, it's expensive.

How would they want to do that?

I mean, this one wasn't.

I think it was cheaper.

I think it was in the like between $100 and $200 range.

Okay.

I'm just killing a fly or attempting to, but I don't have enough rag.

You see what little bit of rag I'm working with?

That's not really cool.

Yeah, that looks like Hermes.

It's to clean my glasses, not to kill flies.

Anyway, so that was a big dilemma, which led to no mahjong.

And so I'm playing tonight, and there will be a peach galette.

Oh, lovely.

And does it get better or worse in the fridge over the night?

This is the big question.

I'm scared it's going to be bad.

So I also have another pie crust in the wings waiting in case I need to make that tonight.

Did you eat the pie that the

neighbors brought?

Yes.

It was delicious.

The pies were so fresh.

I mean, the peaches were so fresh.

Listen, you are shaking your head no.

And we are on video.

Well, I ate around it like Jess.

I ate the peaches i couldn't have the other stuff but i ate around it and the peach okay and she seemed fine with that oh she came over and watched you eat it no the pie yeah the pie lady watched you no no no no just the pie felt fine with how i ate around it okay okay listen um just so you know yeah i probably shouldn't break this to you although maybe you're allowed to have it that those peaches probably had cornstarch not these ones these were so fresh yeah they they did.

No, no, no, that's how you make it.

Trust me, I've made two in the past like two weeks.

Okay, do you remember we just had a chef on?

Yes.

Brilliant.

Curtis Duffy.

Yes, Curtis Duffy, the brilliant chef.

And he talked about that he would have his staff make him chalkno bakes.

Yes.

So I have been talking about that out loud and saying how bad I wanted chalkno bakes with almond butter.

Oh.

And Kristen made them.

Oh.

And here's a shocker.

They're better even with almond butter.

I was expecting to not have the thing from my childhood that I crave so much.

No, it's even better with almond butter.

You should really look into making some chocno bakes with almond butter.

You wouldn't believe what a hit they are.

I don't think I've had a chalkno bake.

Oh, well, I bet you'll have some when you visit here because I got a hunch these are going to be on high rotation.

My diet has gone in the toilet now that I'm in the south.

That's, I think a lot of people would have predicted, could have predicted that.

Sure.

But yes, I've been on a real sweets train.

We got the peach pie I ate around.

Then they got the chocolate that you barely ate the whole thing, ate the ass of.

Okay, and then I've had Dairy Queen.

There's a Dairy Queen in town.

And then there's a really cute new custard shop, frozen custard.

Called.

Oh, it's got a name like Jimmy's or something.

I don't know.

It's very popular.

It's not with the G?

Maybe.

It's new.

It's brand new.

There's a frozen custard place that starts with the G in the south that's good.

Well, this could be it this appears to be a chain but it's brand spanking new and there is that's another fun thing monica lying around the out the door you know i don't know how long the line was maybe 50 feet 60 feet there's a good 45 people in it and i pulled up normally in la that would drive me nuts right i'd be like oh i'm not going i'm not going to wait in line for an hour And I was like, oh, I'm excited to wait in line.

And it was so fun.

And I just, people watched and everyone was out to to have an ice cream.

So everyone was in a good mood.

It was kind of like being at Disneyland.

Remember when we took David to Disneyland?

I'm like, where else can you go where people decided they're going to have a great day?

Well, that's what was happening at this place.

And I realized I loved hanging in line.

And Delta did too.

We both had a really good time.

Okay.

Well, this is the opposite of what we were talking about with In N Out, where I said, yeah, part of it is the line.

That's part of it.

You're right.

And you said no.

And now here we are.

I know.

And now we have a different circumstance.

And I'm seemingly having the opposite opinion.

Very similar circumstance, but opposite opinion.

You're right.

Just saying.

There's no difference.

Other than

people that go to In-N-Out are often in a great mood, but

they're often also just there because they're hungry.

Maybe they're even cranky because they're hungry.

This is

we've already eaten and now we're going to get dessert.

And it's like what we're doing tonight.

And we're outside.

I understand.

I love it.

I do.

i love i love a ice cream a summer ice cream moment i love a summer ice cream moment do you guys have brewsters there oh i haven't seen one but i saw zaxby's your mom's restaurant doesn't your mom love zaxby no that's mine i love zaxby's oh we have one i love zaxby's

it is southern fried chicken but what's your mom love loves what's your mom's cafeteria i was talking about it yesterday i was looking at zaxby's delta said is that a such-and-such and i said no i think it's a cafeteria.

And then I think my father-in-law said, I think it's chicken.

And there's a big, big picture of a chicken on it.

Chicken on it.

Yeah, and it's not a cafeteria.

It's not a cafeteria.

I'm thinking that because of Nermi, and that's why.

It is a drive.

It's a fast food, Zaxby's is.

But the cafeteria, you bring up Lubbies or something, but that's not what she, we don't have that there.

We don't have that.

She just likes all the cafeteria.

But she just would love Lubbies or Lubies.

She would love it.

Yes.

Maybe Lubbies even more than Lubbies.

No.

Oh, okay.

You don't know how wild that's.

Didn't you read on all fours?

I did.

She was having no problem.

Right?

Getting creative.

Perimenopause.

Oh.

Okay.

That's the horny section.

I don't want to think about any of that.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert,

if you dare.

The town of Agda in France is famous for sun, sand, sea, and sex.

But lately, life on the coast has taken a strange turn.

The town's mayor, a respected pillar of the community, has been arrested for corruption.

His wife claims he's been bewitched by a beautiful clairvoyant.

Then there's the mysterious phone calls that local people have been getting.

I am the Archangel Michael.

The whole town has been thrown into chaos.

As the mayor is unable to carry out his duties, I would like to address you all.

Legal proceedings have been initiated.

Join me, Anna Richardson, and journalist Leo Sheikh for The Mystic and the Mayor as we investigate a story of power, corruption, and magic.

Binge all episodes of The Mystic and the Mayor exclusively and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus.

Start your free trial in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the Wondery app.

Anywho,

okay, I have one more word riddle for you.

Oh, great.

Do you say, I'm going to turn the air down or I'm going to turn the air up?

Wow, I could definitely see where that's ripe for confusion.

I'm going to, I would say, I'm going to turn the air down a a bit.

Oof.

Yeah.

Turn the air on.

Turn the air up.

I would say both, and they shouldn't work.

What would you say?

I think I say turn it down.

Meaning you want it colder.

Do you want the air down?

Or you want it?

Meaning I want it colder.

Oh, no, no.

If I'm in the car, it's like, oh, turn the air up.

Yeah, turn it on.

But in the car, huh?

That's tricky, though, because in the car, often the knob,

you are turning it up.

The fan speed, yeah the fan fan speed's going up but the temperature is going down that's why that's inherently conflicting that's why this is a great riddle so maybe just we could clean it up by going make the air colder make the air hotter yeah but that doesn't have the same ring to it that's true we also like nuance and trying to guess it's fun to not really know what anyone's talking about We love riddles.

Yeah.

Reading through the lines, mixed messages.

Reading between the lines, a lot of that.

I said reading through the lines.

I know.

I don't think that's the same thing.

Same thing.

Yeah, same thing, though.

No, this is another riddle.

What do you say?

Between or through?

Betwix.

Do you think if we were in England, we'd say reading betwixt the lines?

I do.

Again, just to remind you, I've wanted to start using walst, but I just can't figure it out.

I love walst.

You mean whilst?

Yeah, the English always say walst.

I was reading whilst at the pool.

Yeah.

I love it.

But when I try to to say it, it doesn't work.

Okay.

I want you to try to say it before the end of this episode.

Just

do it whilst we're conversing.

Not right now.

That worked out pretty good, though.

It was too fast.

Okay.

It's supposed to be a pop-out.

What are you watching?

What's your summer walk?

I'm struggling.

You are.

I'm struggling.

Oh, you know what's fun, though?

So the New York Times had a list that they created of the 100 best movies.

Hundred best.

See, I don't love it, but okay.

100 best movies.

There you go.

Oh, I do love it.

No, I do.

I know, but I do love it because it's ranked.

So there is a number one.

100 best movies of the 21st century.

So since 2000.

And then it was also like you submitted yours

and your, your top 10,

which was a fun game.

Do you want to hear what mine were?

Yes, I would love to.

Mine are eternal sunshine love it oh you just thought get out okay oh yeah

eternal sunshine get out

the social network omelie oceans 11 interstellar moneyball royal tenen bombs the worst person in the world past lives okay so I saw your list and I thought you were reposting the list because that list to me is what I thought the recently published best of list is.

But that was your list.

That's my list.

Oh, wow.

I was like, this is a good list and it's eclectic.

It's not what I would expect from a poll of a magazine.

So now I'm curious what the real list is because I thought that was the real.

Yeah, you tricked me.

Do you want me to read it?

The real list?

Yeah.

Just top 10.

I don't want to hear 100 titles.

Dang.

This happened at dinner for in Palm Springs.

I was excited to read the whole list and they made me they didn't want that yeah no one wants to hear a hundred items out loud i i do no one wants to go even past 30 like 20 would be the limit i think oh my god you guys i love lists they let me start at 50 and everyone was really into it once i started okay

at 50 number 100 is super bad just gonna tell you that now remember this is only from 2000 that's why goodwill hunting wasn't on mine 25 years Was Bottle Rocket 2000 or newer?

I'll look that out on my own.

I don't want you to leave that page.

96.

Okay, so

I excuse that that wasn't on your list then.

I do love that movie.

But I would still pick Royal Tenant Bombs.

And you'd pick both.

You'd pick that over Rushmore as well.

Yeah.

Royal Tenant Bombs is my favorite

Wes Sanderson movie.

Okay.

And very core to me, like one that I watched so many times that I was like so moved by.

I got to rewatch it.

I love it, but I definitely like Rushmore and Bottle Rocket more.

Yeah, those are the more.

I love Rushmore.

Yeah, I could re-watch Rushmore.

Is there a lake in it?

Could we watch it during our lake movies?

No, no, no, there's no lake.

There's swimming just in the swimming pool.

Yeah, the pool.

That's where Bill Murray's watching his kids and he hates them, his boys.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, ready.

Number 10, the social network.

Number nine, Spirited Away.

That's a horse movie?

Number, no, no, no, no.

You're thinking of Spirit of Cameroon.

No, you're thinking of that TV show that the kids used to watch.

Spirit of Cameroon, yeah.

Cimarron.

No, it's just called like Spirit.

I think Spirit of Cimarron, yeah.

Okay.

Let's see.

Now, this is a...

This is an animated.

Is there a cartoon called Spirit of Cimarron?

It's just called Spirit.

and it's animated what's the one on your list okay spirited away is an animated movie it's a hand-drawn fairy tale of adolescence

allison in wonderland of our age unforgettable characters keep spilling out of abandoned magical bathhouse i have heard of this it's like on a lot of people's lists um the answer to my question is yes there is a well-known animated feature called spirit stallion of the cimaron c-i-m-a-r-r-o But is that member of the show they used to watch and there was a really catchy theme song?

That was it.

That was Spirit.

I thought this says feature.

Yes, so that was in 2002 and then they made a TV show.

Okay.

Well, here you go.

Follow-ups in the franchise.

Spirit Riding Free,

2017 to 2020.

Spirit Untamed.

2021.

I remember when we were in Turks and Caicos, the kids were watching Spirit, and that theme song was really in my head.

Running Wild, I'm Running Free.

Yeah, something like that.

Okay, number eight is Get Out.

Okay.

Number seven, Eternal Sunshine.

So a similar list.

Number six, No Country for Old Men.

Okay.

Number five, Moonlight.

Number four, In the Mood for Love.

I have not seen it, but I really want to see it.

What is that?

It's set in Hong Kong, and it's like a love story.

It was in 2001.

It's supposed to be great.

I really want to see it.

Number three, There Will Be Blood.

Great.

Lovely.

Number two.

Oh, my God.

Sorry.

I got it.

I'm under control now.

Number two, Mulholland Drive.

Another one I have not seen but would love to see.

Great.

Did you hear me?

Yeah.

Mulholland Drive, another one you haven't seen, but you'd love to see.

I could re-watch that.

I love that.

Oh, great.

Is there a lake?

Um, can't remember.

Okay, number one: Parasite.

Love it.

Parasite is an incredible movie.

I like that at number one.

It's strong number one.

All right, I'm trying to find you your song.

Here we go.

it's

ready.

Ready to live out every single dream.

I'm stronger than I seen.

Yeah, I'm feeling

love is gonna hold me back.

I'm gonna ride.

Come on, let's go along.

Come on, let's jump with me.

I'm gonna ride.

I'm gonna ride

the free farm.

As long as I am here with you, I feel expensive.

I'm not going to lie,

I just got full body goosebumps.

It is a good song.

It's really good.

I'm riding free.

Oh, wow.

Boy, Turks and Caicos, what a fun trip that was.

What a fun trip.

We got in a huge fight, but it was still so fun.

I didn't remember that part, but you did.

You didn't?

Wow.

I do.

I do.

It's really seared.

Let's not unpack it.

Because of this list, I have decided I want to go through a bunch of these and watch ones that I haven't seen that are intriguing to me.

So I did watch Zodiac.

I had never seen that.

Oh, yeah.

That's Fincher, his

least-known movie.

And Downey, Robert Downey.

Downey, Jake G.

Jeez.

JG.

Yeah, it was great.

Oh, Mark Ruffalo.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Anthony Edwards, E-R, ding, ding, ding, AIDS.

Yeah, AIDS.

I know.

I was confused because for some reason in my head, when I started the movie, I

thought JG was the villain.

Like, I was like, oh, that's that movie where Jake Gyllenha is the killer.

J-Gers.

So I'm watching it.

Yeah, Jagers.

And I'm watching it.

And for so long, I'm like, wow,

he ends up being the killer?

That's so wild.

And then, of course, I was wrong.

He wasn't.

No.

He was just

a journalist, right?

He was a cartoonist, actually.

And then he got obsessed with the case.

That can happen to people.

They get bit by a case.

It's probably going to happen to me before I'm dead.

I'm going to get obsessed with a case and solve it.

What case are you going to try to solve?

A murder or like a missing motorcycle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That sounds right.

The Lord's work.

Yeah, so I wanted to talk to you about shopping before we parted today.

All right, let's hear it.

Because I normally, obviously, I can't relate at all to you with the shopping.

But because I have a garage here and I don't have anything I had in LA, I've been going to Lowe's and Home Depot.

And I went with Aaron.

Well, I went on that great trip with the girls, I think I told you, and I gave them half the list and they were on fire.

I couldn't believe how good they were.

Then I went back with Aaron day one when he was here, and I had to get a lot of stuff.

Monica, trash cans, brooms, power washer, you know, all this stuff.

Sure.

And I got to tell you, it was so fun.

You're right.

It was so fun.

When it's a place like Home Depot, and I like every aisle has something I know I need, but I just need to go look because I've forgotten.

I get it.

And Aaron and I, when we left, I was like, that's among the most fun times I've ever had with you.

And he's like, I completely agree.

I would love to come back and just do three more hours of shopping.

And we decided we should have a business where people just give us their list at Home Depot or Lowe's and we go get it because we like so much shopping there.

That's called Instacart.

We did figure that out as well afterwards.

But ours will be different.

Ours will be, we don't charge you, but it'll probably be less convenient.

Why will it be less convenient?

Because we don't have an app and all the sophisticated stuff.

So you'll have to write your list out and then probably take a picture of it.

Oh, I think you can just sign up for Instacart like you did for the other ride.

Not personalized.

Food delivery.

Not personalized enough for me.

I want to have a relationship with the people I shop for.

Cool.

And I play this game with the cashier each time I say, what's the over-under on this order?

Because they're good at it.

They should be good at it.

They ring up all day long.

And then they guess, and then I make Aaron guess and the girls guess and and I guess and we all play by price is right rules which is even if someone's a dollar over they lost

oh yeah those rules are like tricky the bill could be 1500 someone could have guessed it's 600 and someone guessed 1501 and 600 wins those are the rules that's so ridiculous it's pretty good rules though for well it's hard prices right

this happened during cornhole too cornhole is the same thing if you get if if you get over 21 yeah you're back you go back to 11.

oh that's harsh that happened a lot during palm springs not to me because i never really got over 21 but sure to a lot of other people and i was so upset on their behalf yeah and jess and matt okay and anna Anna's really good everyone but you i was most improved

do you have a hanger for it like are you gonna want to play in nashville like do you crave it i love cornhole i love cornhole i've always loved it oh my god this is just like when did i already tell this story

i was shopping ding ding ding uh with jess and we were at a vintage store and i got a sweatshirt that says bud light on it

and um It's so cute.

And I was checking out and Jess said in front of the lady who was ringing me up, he said, you've never even drank a Bud Light in your life.

He outed you.

It's not an out.

That's a lie.

I got so mad.

He made me look like an idiot in front of this lady.

Okay.

And I was like, you don't, you didn't know me in college.

How dare you?

Yeah, where do you get off?

Where do you get the nerve?

Where exactly?

And I used to drink a ton of Bud Light.

How much?

Six at a time?

Well, we used to play all kinds of games.

Waterfall, King's Pen, or something.

I forget what that's called.

You know, and also that thing where you drink a shoe, beer pong, a ton.

Flip cup.

All the games.

I've never played these drinking games.

I never got them.

It's like I didn't need someone to tell me to drink more.

No, it was just, it's just fun.

Games are fun, dad.

Yeah, I should play more drinking games.

Games are so fun.

But anyway, so Cornhole is like that.

Like, I know I just sensed from you that you were like, oh, you just, you're just learning how to play.

Interesting.

And I, I used to play.

I was a different girl in Athens.

Oh, yeah.

I would have liked to meet that version.

That'd be fun.

You still can.

Charlie wants to go to a Georgia game, and I'm going to arrange it.

I want us all to go.

I would love that.

That would be so fun.

You know.

But also, I'd like to time travel and meet you in Athens and see this version, the carefree college kid who was planning her next booty bump.

Oh, God.

Carefree is.

That wasn't in the mix, carefree.

I wasn't carefree.

I actually had,

I had like, you know.

More cares.

Really bad anxiety.

But I had fun.

Yeah.

You drank through it.

I sure did.

Yeah.

What a gift.

So when are you going to go shopping again today?

It's possible.

You know, I did have a day here.

Did I already bore you with it where I did the most amount of things I've ever done in a day?

No,

I couldn't believe this day.

I woke up.

I was meditating at 5:30.

Did I tell you I put out 32 pallets on the marshy ground leading to the boat deck?

Because it was mud.

By the time you got to the boat, you were covered in mud.

And then coming back, you'd get covered in mud.

So I took 32 pallets from

behind Lowe's and Home Depot.

Wow.

And I laid them all out.

And I've made a boardwalk.

And then I

didn't want that to stick out so much.

So then I ordered grass paint that you pump up in a big plastic jug and spray.

Okay.

So I spray painted 32 pallets green to match the grass.

I took the trash to the dumpster.

I went to Home Depot.

I dropped my car off to get tires.

I mopped my entire barn,

which I don't think you can imagine what a big project that is mopping that entire barn.

But I mopped the whole thing in the gym.

Then I got salt licks and feeders for the deer.

I dropped my roadmaster off to get new mufflers at Midas.

And this is the craziest one.

At 3.40 p.m., I'd already had this day where I'd done all this stuff since 5.30.

At 3.40 p.m., I said to Kristen,

I'm 35 minutes away from the trailer place.

They close at 5.

And then another 25 minutes past there is the golf cart place.

And I'm leaving my house at 3:40 in Mount Julia.

I left thinking, I give this a 40% chance I succeed at this.

I walked into the trailer place and I said, Hi, do you want to set a world record for fastest trailer sold?

And she goes, Yeah, let's do it.

I was driving out of the parking lot with a new flatbed trailer within 10 minutes with the title signed.

Wow, wow.

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

Wow.

I'm telling you, I felt like a freaking hero, Monica.

What a day.

That's a lot.

That's a lot.

I think just

mopping the barn would have been enough for a victorious day for me.

But then I added all that other stuff I just bored you with.

I mean, spray painting 32 pounds.

I do.

I love a to-do list.

I had all these things written and I just kept going, shit.

It's time to pull out that to-do list and tackle something else.

Yeah.

You love a list.

I do.

And I feel as

accomplished as if I work, you know?

Right.

That kind of list feels like filming all day or something.

I feel very accomplished.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nice.

Yeah.

Do you think I'll run out of stuff to do?

No.

Because you can always add stuff.

You can add like swam for 10 minutes.

Like you, you can always add stuff that's actually just regs.

And how do you feel about that?

So I ethically have a dilemma.

So some of those items were added after I did them to my list.

Do you do that?

You have a list and then you pick up some stray things and then you add it to the list to feel proud of yourself.

You do do it.

Okay.

It feels a little grimy when I do it, but I, but I do it.

I actually don't do lists like that unless it's truly like I need to keep track of what I'm going to have to do tomorrow.

When I did make lists, I would add stuff like that.

And then I did, yeah, I was like, I don't like any of this.

All I'm doing is trying to prove to myself that I'm doing this stuff.

Yes.

And that started to feel silly.

So

I don't really list anymore.

But yes,

if you're a list guy or a list girl, you're adding stuff last minute.

You're adding stuff post, post

accomplishment.

Yeah, you want to look at that list at the end of the day and go, my God, you really did it.

And then you want to read it on a podcast.

And then you want to read it out loud to as many people who will listen.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so I want you to be impressed with my industriousness.

Of course, you'll like me because that's what I care about.

That's right, and how good of a driver I am.

Yep.

Um, all right, should we do some facts?

This is for Bridget,

Bridget, and MLMs.

Oh my God, I loved this one.

Yeah, me too.

So informative, so interesting.

I mean, the fact that some of those stats that we learned, like that 99%

of people lose money,

the notion, I mean, I think I said it in the interview, but anything where 99% of the time you're going to lose, no one does.

I know.

Okay, the Strange Angel JPL guy

is Jack Parsons.

Yeah, Jack Parsons.

He's a maniac.

Yep.

He co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was deeply involved in cult practices.

Yes.

Okay, also, Bridget worked at Vogue

and

there was big news.

I asked her if she

reported to Anna.

Anna, Wintor is stepping down as editor-in-chief of Vogue.

It's a huge deal in the fashion world.

Yeah, how do you feel feel about it?

How are you taking that news?

Can't be great.

It's hard to take in.

I'm just,

it's just the end of an era.

Sure.

Now, I looked up spending by gender.

I just confirmed that women spend more than men, which they do tend to.

I think they say that they are responsible for like 80% of the domestic purchasing.

Like they're who advertisers are advertising to.

Women tend to spend more than than men, particularly in terms of total consumer spending and influencing purchasing decisions.

While men may spend more per transaction, women's overall spending and influence on purchases are higher.

Women are estimated to control or influence 85% of consumer spending.

Oh, even higher than we just guessed.

That so holds true because I just,

you know, I don't have anything in Nashville that I need, i.e., a workbench, Paz,

powered screw guns, trash bags, mops.

So I went to Home Depot

in

Hermitage

with the girls, and I had the craziest list, and I deployed them each with their own shopping cart to go grab stuff as I was grabbing stuff.

And

yeah, so I never go to a store, but when I go to a store, buckle the fuck up, you know.

Yeah, you're really going for i really spent a couple bucks over at home depot well also because you don't like shopping so you kind of have to get it all out of the way i want to go one time to

depot for the yeah for the rest of my life which i already am home now and i i have i forgot things Whereas I like to just go, I'll just, not Home Depot, but I like to just pop in,

not even get anything.

My dad was like you.

And in fact, when I was at Home Depot with the girls, I said, is this so annoying?

And they're like, no, this is super fun.

And I'm like, oh my God, my dad would want to go to Ace Hardware on Sundays.

And I'd walk with him as he stared at every fucking product.

I'm like, why are we in paint aisle?

You're not.

intending on painting anything.

He just wanted to see every product in the store, even if he's just going to get screws or something.

And it was maddening.

Of course.

What if you see see something he might want or get an inspiration?

He did.

This does remind me of one.

I don't know why.

This is one of the most like distinct memories I have of my father.

I know I've told you this before, but we went to AMP grocery store.

And I had to be fucked.

We had a dog.

So we only had a dog for a couple of years when I was maybe nine or something.

And we go on to AMP, AMP, we get all the groceries.

And then we're on our way out.

And they've stacked all the dog food in like the breezeway.

You know, in Michigan, there's always these buffers.

You walk in one door because of the cold and then there's another.

And then this breezeway,

my dad like threw a bag of dog food on the cart.

I don't even know if I clocked it so much, but we get all the way to the car and my dad goes,

you know what?

When you steal things, things get stolen from you.

What goes around comes around.

And he walked all the way back in the store and he paid for the dog food.

But he was, he was stealing a bag of dog food with me there for about two minutes till we got to the car.

But I guess more than I was disappointed that he stole, I was impressed that he stole and then pivoted and was like honest about it.

He couldn't really steal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it was like, it was a very, like, it's a weird mix of he like he demonstrated a lot of integrity, even though he had just stolen a bag of dog food in front of me.

It's so memorable.

I, yeah.

Did a shoke ever steal somebody?

I hadn't heard that story.

Rethink it.

No, God, no.

Listen to me.

Immigrants don't have the luxury of stealing.

They're too scared.

You're right.

You're right.

Everyone already thinks they're stealing.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Everyone's already looking at them with like, you know, hawke eyes.

Did you pay for that?

I think that every time I see a non-white with a grocery store

with a grocery cart, I go, Did you pay for that?

Did you even pay for that?

Or, like, they think if they're like Indian, they think like, oh, they don't speak, they don't even know that they're supposed to pay.

Like, they think like they live in a third world country and they don't understand paying in America.

It's all for free, yeah, because America is so much bounty.

They just think it's all for free.

By the way, do you think non-white sounds implicitly racist?

I do.

Non-white?

Yeah, like when you go, like, there's some non-whites.

Doesn't that sound very scary?

To me, yes.

Okay.

You know, my stance on this.

I don't like, and I, a lot of people have no issue with this, but I don't like, you know, taking the color, pluralizing it,

and then making it the group of people.

Yeah.

I'm not for that.

Sure, sure.

Like the browns, the whites, the blacks.

I'm not for that.

So, yeah, non-whites would apply.

Oh, boy.

Anyway.

Oh, my God.

I'm so sorry.

Bambi literally just sprinted

through the backyard with Brombus following her.

Oh, awesome.

You can't imagine anything cuter than two little tiny, tiny, tiny deers sprinting.

Oh, my God.

Be careful with your cars.

Oh, I know.

I was out for a ride on my electric motorcycle and I came into the driveway kind of hot and they were there and they got so spooked and I got, I felt so terrible.

I'm like, I got to go so slow in my driveway.

Yeah, that's it.

I mean, she was very factual, obviously.

Yeah.

So MLMs, wild.

Don't participate.

Oh, one thing I'm sad that we didn't plan ahead, but I wanted to have a friend on this fact check who

has lived a big portion of her life sort of involved in an MLM.

Well, not sort of, definitely involved.

I do want to say that this episode makes me nervous because I would hate for anyone involved

to think that I'm saying they're stupid or anyone involved is stupid because I'm not at all.

No.

I see anyone involved as someone who is industrious and wants to make a living and better their lives.

And I admire the gumption and the sense of industriousness.

And I just hope I want them to find one that'll work for them.

But I don't think anyone is stupid for having been involved with one.

I 100% agree.

I just do think the system is quite predatory, especially based on all these facts we heard.

And so, yeah, um, but that's yeah, that has nothing to do with the type of person.

Yeah, but I wanted her on, but we didn't plan it well, so maybe another time.

Okay, well, that's it.

I love you.

Love you.

All right.

Bye.

Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondry.com slash survey.

It's your man, Nick Cannon, and I'm here to bring you my new podcast, Nick Cannon at Night.

I've heard y'all been needing some advice in the love department.

So who better to help than yours truly?

Nah, I'm serious.

Every week, I'm bringing out some of my celebrity friends and the best experts in the business to answer your most intimate relationship questions.

Having problems with your man?

We got you.

Catching feelings for your sneaky link?

Let's make sure it's the real deal first.

Ready to bring toys into the bedroom?

Let's talk about it.

Consider this a non-judgment zone to ask your questions when it comes to sex and modern dating in relationships, friendships, situationships, and everything in between.

It's going to be sexy, freaky, messy, and you know what?

You'll just have to watch the show.

So don't be shy.

Join the conversation and head over to YouTube to watch Nick Cannon at night or subscribe on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

Want to watch episodes early and ad-free?

Join Wondery Plus right now.