S1 E8: Destination Amazing

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Previously, on the dream.

MLMs came to the attention of the FTC.

They went after them pretty hard for about 15 years.

Well, they were saying enough is enough.

You know what enough is enough means.

I know what it means, but

it means there's nothing credible to discuss any longer.

Oh, there's one word, Amway.

The MWI decision by the Federal Trade Commission changed changed everything.

It invented what it called rules.

Who came up with the Amway rules?

Amway.

I always assumed it was the FTC that came up with them.

No!

No!

In this post-AMWAY decision world, it seems like MLMs are everywhere.

And as we told you earlier in the season, we wanted to find out what they look like from the inside.

So we joined one, a makeup company called Limelife, formerly known and referred to in our tape as Limelight.

Remember, they had to change their name mid-reporting when they went international.

Our producer, Mackenzie, signed up, got a starter kit, and ordered a bunch more makeup at the urging of her upline.

So last we heard from her, she was struggling to kickstart her Limelight career.

She had zero sales from anyone other than herself.

Her posts on social media were going largely ignored by everyone but me, her mom, and her upline.

And that opening party?

I sent out invitations on Facebook, individualized invitations to everyone,

and

not a single person responded.

And I'm talking like my closest friends.

Like seriously, some people claimed after the fact that they never got them, but you know, it's Facebook.

You can see if someone opened it.

And I had a range of excuses, everything from I would have to hire a babysitter to it's a weeknight to my mother-in-law's in town.

And then everyone kind of ended it with, also, I don't really get why you're inviting me over for a makeup-themed party.

So no party for us.

Which is a bummer.

I love a party and was really looking forward to finally getting to know some of the products while having my ties with friends.

Plus, we already invested a lot in it.

Remember Mackenzie's upline just convinced her to spend around 300 bucks to beef up her kit?

We We asked around a bit to find out why friends ignored the invite.

And on the whole, no one felt like spending money on babysitters and expensive makeup in order to hang out with us when they could just spend money on babysitting and a cheap bottle of wine like we normally do.

As much as everyone loves McKenzie, even attending one party was way too much of an investment.

Oh, and if you think they said no because they know this is a silly project for a podcast, you are wrong.

We didn't tell them.

I'm still feeling that like overwhelmed overwhelmed feeling where I just don't know where to start, but I'm not doing anything.

I'm sort of like paralyzed by fear because there's just so much I should be doing and I'm trying to do it and it's not working.

So, what are you gonna do?

Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about.

I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream, episode eight:

Destination Amazing.

Limelight has all of these events that they do.

Everything from something called the happiest hour.

Wait, what is that?

I have no clue

to Limelight Palooza, which is like this big cruise or something or

Caribbean destination, some kind of like sales conference or something.

Here is Limelight's CEO, and that stands for Chief Empowerment Officer.

I'm not kidding.

His name is Jacob Heiser.

We found this video of him from last year's Limelight Palooza, and he's possibly having the greatest day of his life.

It validates being here, validates all the time and hours and effort you put into everything you do while you're home alone or in your office or when you're feeling stressed out.

And then you get here and you really get to realize the impact of who you are and the way that you touch and affect people and the impact that you have on the world.

It's amazing.

It's really amazing.

How do we get on that?

I don't know.

I feel like Sugar Ray will be there.

Oh, God.

Well, so that's why I'm here.

I wanted to ask you, there is something called

Destination Amazing happening in San Francisco, which is just a hop and a skip from here.

Do you have to pay to go to it?

Yeah, so I was kind of like doing the math on it and the happiest hour, I think, is like $25.

The Destination Amazing sales conference is like $50 or $75.

I'm not sure.

And then, yeah, yeah, flights are cheap-ish.

And then I was thinking I could stay in the hotel where the event is happening so I don't miss anything.

Oh, it's a hotel event.

Oh, yeah, it's a hotel.

Do the fees count toward your income or anything?

Like how buying your own supplies like counts as a retail sale?

No.

No, this is this is like

personal enrichment.

You might think, well, okay, so lots of companies encourage you to attend conferences and get training.

But oftentimes those conferences are run by a third party, some sort of professional association or something.

Or they're part of training and licensing people in the professional sector.

My dad, for example, is a dentist.

And every few years we'd go to an American Dental Association conference.

It's usually somewhere fun like Cancun or whatever.

And yeah, that costs money, but my dad attended classes there on the latest root canal techniques or on patient retention strategies or other stuff you need to know to get your dental license renewed by the state each year.

And if he didn't have the cash for one of those fun ways of earning those credits, that was okay.

You can get them through volunteering at free clinics or taking affordable courses at your local community college.

Yes, all of that costs some money, but it's a legal requirement to practice dentistry.

There are similar things for teachers.

Schools often promise a raise or a promotion if you're teaching and want to seek a master's degree.

And often the employers help with those costs.

All you need to invest is the time.

Even an office retreat, where you do trust falls with people you don't trust, even those are funded by the office hosting the retreat.

With MLMs, the very company you're selling for, in our case, one that does zero vetting or training before charging you a fee to work for them, also makes you pay out of pocket to get the training they claim you must have in order to be successful.

Wait, how much is this going to cost, though, actually?

I think it's going to cost maybe six or seven hundred dollars.

Oh my God.

I mean, I need to stay in a hotel.

We're over $1,000 now.

No, we're way over $1,000.

Now we're up to like $1,500.

So based on the videos that I've seen online, this seems to be like the magic bullet for people who are not good at this.

What are the videos?

I found a bunch where people talk about all the sacrifices that they make to go to these events.

One of them is a girl who missed her best friend's wedding to go to Limelight Palooza.

I almost didn't go to Limelight Palooza this year because one of my best friends is getting married that same Saturday.

And I'm supposed to be a bridesmaid.

And I remember crying when I found out that Limelight Palooza was that same weekend.

And it was one of the hardest decisions I've had to make business-wise.

However, I made like a promise to myself that this year, no matter what, I was going to go because last year I didn't go and I missed out and it was my bad.

So this year, I was like, I don't care.

I'm going.

So I took her out to lunch and I broke it down to her and I explained to her her why I had to be there.

She was crying.

I was crying.

But she's such a good friend that she was like, you need to go.

So now I'm telling you guys what my friend told me.

You need to go.

If I would have called you like a couple weeks before your wedding and been like, so sorry.

But here's the thing.

I do think it's friendship ending.

or at least friendship reconsidering.

Yeah.

But there is the promise that it's going to make you good at this.

this.

I've researched this, I study this, I've been in direct sales for a very long time, and I have failed in direct sales for a very long time

because I never took conventions seriously.

If you want to make some serious money in this business, you must go.

Don't think for a second that we didn't call this woman.

We called this woman, and we'll hear from her in an upcoming episode.

You don't want to miss that.

In the meantime, we sent Mackenzie off to San Francisco.

I'm at the hotel.

I'm riding the elevator up to Bayview at the Grand Height

for a happy hour.

Mackenzie arrived Sunday night, just in time for the happiest hour, which cost $25 and included one free drink.

After that, cash bar.

Wine was $14.

Cocktails, $15.

If you got a sprite, that was $8.50.

And this isn't even Limelight Palooza.

From McKenzie's count, there were roughly 60 or 70 people in attendance, all but a handful of them women.

And Mackenzie said happiest wasn't exactly the way she described this cocktail hour.

Surprisingly, most of the folks she talked to were kind of downers.

Their businesses were stalled, they weren't reaching their goals, and they were desperate to get the secret to success.

Okay, so I walk in and it's this really casual looking cocktail party.

And it seems like everyone's kind of grouped off into their little cliques, which I later learned were most likely their uplines and downlines, people on their team.

Oh, they already knew each other.

Yeah.

Okay.

And so I kind of found this group that looked really welcoming and friendly, one of the only ones.

So I went and kind of forced my way into their group and started talking to them.

And they kept asking me questions like,

you know, how's your business doing?

How much are you making?

How much are you selling?

And I didn't.

They're like, bad, nothing, nothing.

Exactly.

I just stared at them with a blank look on my face.

Sipped that 850 sprite.

That's right.

So I just kind of kept turning it around saying, well, how's your business doing?

What about you?

And then found out that most of them were also struggling.

I mean, they were pretty optimistic, but they had all acknowledged that they had hit some kind of wall and weren't.

So they weren't there just for fun.

No, they weren't there for fun.

One of the girls who kept coming in and out of the group brought cousins or something to it, to the cocktail party, so that she could see what kind of culture it was and see how much of a sisterhood it was and how fun it was.

So she could recruit them.

Exactly.

Yeah, so I was asking everyone in my group how they were doing and they were so nice and again, very optimistic, but all acknowledged that business wasn't doing great and they were there to try to figure out how to get better.

So that night, what they got was a bunch of mingling, expensive drinks, and an eight-minute pep talk from dun-da-da-da, chief empowerment officer Jacob.

Jacob is a jet setter, it turns out.

He's running this event.

In California, it's illegal to record someone without their knowledge and we knew if we asked for interviews it would end mackenzie's time as a seller so we don't have any sound from inside the happiest hour or from destination amazing the next day but mackenzie did sneak away to call me hi hi how are you the question is how are you

i'm surviving

Sorry, I'm just trying to find a space where like people keep sitting next to me and I don't know who is.

Sorry, hold on.

I'm picturing you with like one of those nose, like eyebrows and nose glasses on and a newspaper with holes cut out of it.

I literally just had my hood on in a hotel lobby in a corner.

All right.

And now I'm in

an elevator bank,

like hiding in a corner.

So

I have, I don't know, no, I have to go back in.

I can't be late.

All right.

Wish me luck.

Okay, good luck.

I'm sorry.

I won't be late.

All right.

Bye.

Bye.

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How did it go?

Okay, so on Monday morning,

I woke up and went downstairs to the conference room to Destination Amazing, which I actually had no idea what that was getting into it.

And I heard some people at lunch saying they thought it was going to be more like product training or something like that.

But apparently in the fine print, it did mention that it was something about how to be your best self and you know push yourself to the to the next phase so it was like a motivational seminar yes it starts off like you know it's in one of those um stadium seating conference rooms at uh hyatt to give you a sense of jacob's teaching style that mackenzie experienced while she was there here's a video of him we found on facebook called fempire illuminating a new possibility It's so easy to use excuses because it means you don't have to be responsible for your results.

You get to blame someone or something else for why you don't have what you want.

It's a really easy and comfortable way to live.

But is that how you want to live?

Let's relate this example to a sport.

Let's say you were at a baseball game and the losing team in their interview after said, well, if there were only two bases instead of three,

we would have absolutely scored three more points in that last round and we would have won.

Or, well, the other players have longer legs, so they're naturally faster and can outrun us.

If our legs were longer, we totally would have won, bro.

Sounds crazy when we hear it in those terms, right?

But this is essentially what we're doing.

In our industry, there are certain things that we can come to expect.

And if we start thinking of those things as conditions of the game

rather

than as obstacles that stop us from winning in our businesses

how much more successful and free from stress do you think you and your business could be and you know what

each and every single one of you has the ability to be that way

right now.

Right this very second.

We are human beings.

Being.

Each and every moment is a new moment to choose who you're being.

So that was the vibe coming from Jacob.

Intense.

It was pretty intense and it was It very much felt like we were in Oprah's studio and Jacob was Oprah.

A lot of like cheering.

Everyone's mesmerized by everything he's saying.

A lot of people are frantically writing down every word.

There was just this energy in the room and everyone was really hypnotized by it.

And I get it because, did I already tell you this?

What?

With the lipstick thing?

No.

So

I get it because when I first sat down, I had applied limelight.

lipstick red a really red lipstick you look great in red by the way thank you um so i've heard now oh so i said so i sit down in this limelight lipstick because i want to you know dress the part.

And Jacob is walking down the stadium stairs and he does a double take and stops and looks at me and says, oh my God, this gorgeous woman with this lipstick.

It's incredible.

Everyone, look at this.

What is that?

Of course, I say it's limelight lipstick.

He says, oh, I knew it.

I knew it.

And then people start.

truly patting me on the back and like whispering to me and people are smiling at me from across the room.

And I felt like his light had shined on me.

He's like a celebrity.

This warm glow.

I was bathing in it.

You get a compliment.

You get a compliment.

You get a compliment.

I mean, I get it because from that moment on, or at least at that moment, I felt really special.

Then he gave us time to write in our diaries.

I can't remember if he he was calling them journals or diaries, but something that felt really intimate.

We had to write down what our four-year goals were.

So he gave us some guidelines for how to think about it.

You know, it could be abstract, it could be something really concrete.

And then people start getting up one by one.

They're called on to share their goals.

And I kind of was expecting, based on like things I've seen online from other conferences like this, whether or not they're related to MLMs or just kind of like sales conferences,

some really energetic

interactions where people are like cheering each other on and saying like, you know, my goal is five years from now, I see myself driving in like a Lexus convertible, you know, wearing a mink and I don't know, whatever.

What do people fantasize about?

Eating caviar in one hand and like steering with the other.

So the first woman gets up and she's a mother of four children.

She homeschools them and her husband I think something like something ridiculous and unbelievable, like three jobs to support them.

And she's telling the story of how he never sleeps, he never eats, he comes home just to shower and then go back out.

And so they're really struggling, and obviously, their relationship is struggling.

And her dream is to allow her husband to get a good night's sleep.

She wants him

to be able to come home at the end of the night and just sleep and not have to get dressed and go to a second job.

So she's doing limelight so that she can take that burden off of him, at least some of that burden.

So that was one story.

Another woman has a son with special needs who isn't getting the care that he needs in the school that he's in.

And she really wants to be able to either put him in a different school or get him some sort of support in the school, but that requires her paying for it.

So she's doing limelight so that she can have that extra income to help her son.

Who's disabled?

Who's disabled?

There is another woman.

whose husband's in the military.

I think he has been in for four years.

He's deployed now.

He's missed all the major milestones of his kids growing up.

And

she really feels like he deserves to spend time with his children.

And so she's doing this so that she can allow him to, what she called, retire from the military

so that he can get another job that maybe doesn't pay as well, but she can help supplement that income.

And then the one that really, I sat next to this woman and

really, really sweet, normal, down-to-earth woman from Michigan who got up and um

same same story like you know she she wants to help her husband he's really overextending himself but but the bottom line for her is that her dad has not had a gravestone in the 10 years that he's been dead and she is doing limelight to try to raise the money

to

get

him that tombstone Oh, also another woman whose marriage is falling apart and she is doing this to get the money to pay for therapy, couples therapy for her and her husband.

This is really depressing.

Yeah.

So at this point, I'm kind of a mix of angry and also

sad on their behalf because I feel like they want real information, useful information.

You guys have been talking about that the night before.

Right.

And I thought that's what we were going to get.

And then I get there and it's all this vague gibberish.

Yeah.

Just, it's like empty, empty words.

And so I'm sitting here just thinking, I wish, I don't know, I'm not a financial advisor, but that someone would come in and say, like, open a 401k or start a savings account.

And I was also hoping for tips on how to actually sell like concrete things you can do to sell products.

Like this sort of Instagram post works.

Or

exactly.

This is your call to action in your email.

Here's what you write.

Exactly.

It gets people to click the embed a link.

Exactly.

Use this photo.

Yes.

The things that you would typically learn from a professional development class.

class.

Also,

kind of unbelievable that people in these dire situations, that this would be the thing?

I don't really understand it either.

And I tried to ask the woman next to me, like,

why this?

And I couldn't really get an answer, although she's done these before.

Okay.

And her husband is not happy with it, but he's not happy because she's spending a lot of time trying to kickstart this business.

And he feels now like they spend no time together.

So that's their issue.

But I went in thinking this was going to be some like rah-rah type event.

And instead, it started off.

I mean, people were crying by 9:15, sharing these stories of the things that are lacking in their lives and what they're here for, and what their four-year goal with Limelight is, is to be able to get their

special needs resources

for their child, or a tombstone for a deceased parent.

Like, it's not,

it's not like the fancy vacations.

No one was mentioning, you know, I think one lady said she wanted to go on vacation, but it was more like, I've never taken a trip with my family ever.

So it wasn't like, you know, we just want to move to Paris for a month.

It was

more than that.

So already, there was something very interesting about everyone

being

made to feel vulnerable or like being encouraged to feel really vulnerable.

That was something that was initiated from the very, very start of the day.

And I don't, looking back, I don't think that's coincidental.

I think there is something to the fact that, like, within 10 minutes, everyone's crying.

Everyone feels like super connected to each other.

There's this emotional thing happening in this room.

And it feels

like therapy.

It absolutely feels like therapy.

And that guy, Jacob, is the therapist.

And he's sitting there saying,

Well, how would you feel if this thing happened?

Now talk me through that.

What do you feel when this thing occurs?

But then at the end of it all, he just goes, like, oh, honey, or gives some Instagram meme wisdom.

Instead of, like, I think this traces back to something that happened with your, that you told me about in our last session with your father.

Yeah, exactly.

Instead of jotting down notes, he's like dismissively throwing out, tomorrow's a new day, and then just moves on to the next person.

Right.

And the things he was having you imagine were not like,

how would you feel when you sell 20 lipsticks?

It was like nothing to do with makeup.

Well, so this is the other thing I realized now having

a day's distance from it.

All of these women were here because they'd plateaued in their business.

There wasn't a single person that I saw who got up into the microphone and said like I'm doing great and I just want to do greater.

Every single person was there because

they started off okay.

And now they're just like, really not making any more money.

Or I've, you know, one woman said, I've been, I thought within six months I'd be star director or whatever the rank is.

And it's been two years and I haven't progressed past beauty guide.

And that was a recurring, as people got up, kind of the why are you here question.

The answer seemed to consistently be, because I'm not moving forward in my business the way I feel like I should be.

And mind you, most people who join these companies get out way sooner.

So these are like either die-hard limelight fans or really desperate for this to work for some reason.

And then it became, you know, the second part of the day was sort of, well, how do you get there?

And

very clearly.

identifying the problem.

The problem in every single situation was the person.

There was never any other problem.

I mean, we've got slides where Jacob is

saying,

is the reason you're not selling because your mindset is the wrong mindset?

Is it because you're not organized enough?

Is it because you're not optimistic enough?

Okay, so he has these slides up and they disappear in, no joke, probably 15 seconds.

It's much faster than I can write them down.

I was trying to take pictures of them.

They're not online.

They didn't send them to us or anything.

So at the end of it, all I can remember is that we all just really suck at this.

That doesn't really give you anything to work with

other than just self-loathing.

No, and that's it.

Like, so all these people are here because they've identified a problem.

The problem is, I can't move my business forward.

I can't, I don't know what else to do than what I've been doing, and it's not working.

And his answer is, well, let's go back and look at what's wrong with you.

There are all sorts of excuses that take the blame away from the company a thousand percent, not at any point.

And in fact, at multiple points it was stop blaming the company stop blaming the product seriously yeah i mean it it was it's not us like it if to go back to the therapy analogy like there was a whole section of like

what's preventing you from being the best beauty guide you can be and it was like looking back at what your parents taught you uh what your education was all these factors go into the type of beauty guide you are and sometimes you need to reprogram who you are and then there was this whole thing about showing like your inspired future and creating creating this mood board.

It's a secret.

Yeah, essentially.

And like put it as your screensaver.

But there was no,

there were no practical

steps for getting anywhere.

It was very much a like, let's open ourselves up, talk about what's wrong, blame ourselves for those wrongs, agree that we're going to change them.

With no tools about it.

Right.

None.

And at one point they did this thing, which which also now thinking back on it is so cheap and such a cheater's way it's like the cliff notes version for them he's saying all right so let's talk in small groups about um like best practices for sales tactics recruitment tactics and so he breaks us into small groups and then we share what's working for us and ironically i haven't started yet so i said you know i'll take notes but i don't have much to share in terms of what's working the girl next to me was like nothing's really working for me either i have a few tips but nothing major and the two girls next to me said that they have like one or two tips, but yeah, recruitment, they've got nothing.

So we only ended up coming up with, we were supposed to come up with 12 ideas.

We came up with like six because we only had six that worked between the four of us.

And then they pooled all of the ideas and shared them for about 30 seconds on a PowerPoint slide.

So literally the only practical advice on how to improve your business was thrown up on a PowerPoint slide.

I'm not joking.

I didn't have time to even take a picture of it.

It was up and gone so quickly.

So we didn't talk about any of them.

No one shared any of them.

And we had a couple on ours that were kind of interesting and sort of offbeat.

Like one of the girls does a grab bag with all of the random products she has.

And she'll say, you know, for $20, get, you know, surprise, surprise products, which I thought was kind of a cool idea.

It just...

creates interest or whatever.

They didn't even put that on the list.

So the list was literally like,

be open and cheerful at your parties.

Always leave your business card behind.

I mean, it was stuff that was like, yeah, no kidding.

The thing though about this that like really struck me is that he's sitting here saying like he thought a $400,000 house was so much.

And now he's in New York and like he's looking at $750,000 houses and that's reasonable in New York.

And so that's his new, that's like what he's striving for for his new budget.

And it just felt really out of touch to me that you've got these women in this room who

cannot pay their rent in a $750,000 house.

Is your example?

Is your example of like, come on, guys, if you just dream big enough, like you could be looking at $750,000 houses like me as he's walking around in his suit.

And speaking of suits, the girl next to me.

Like, I don't even know what this means.

I just need to say this.

So the girl next to me told me that she went to Target last night and bought herself a suit at Target to wear to this event because it's a business meeting.

And so, you know, again, that contrast of this guy standing up there in his like, what looks like a bespoke suit.

And he's giving an example again of buying these, going shoe shopping on Fifth Avenue or whatever.

And the girl next to me is like spending all of her money on a Target suit so that she can come to this and look professional.

There's just something really

disconnected and like

gross about it.

There were two women from corporate sitting in the back and you know they must do this all the time, obviously.

This isn't the first event like this they've done.

But they're sitting there and as at the end there was this closing

closing moment where women were invited up to share what they've learned for the day or their what he was calling their aha moment.

I think Oprah coined that, but anyway, so there are their aha moments.

And the last one that spoke was a woman who said that up until a few months before she joined Limelight, she had been feeling suicidal.

And

she joined Limelight and now she feels some sort of camaraderie and something else that was missing from her life.

And she really feels like Limelight is sort of giving her this second chance for whatever reason.

And I looked up and I looked behind her.

And the two women from corporate, one is like staring straight ahead, not even registering this.

The other woman is typing furiously at her computer.

And she'd been typing all day.

I'm guessing, I'm guessing that she was still working and she was probably there, but had emails to send or orders to fill or whatever.

But this woman is talking about how four months before she joined Limelight, She, a mother of two children, was contemplating suicide.

Everyone in the room was crying.

And this woman

at the end of the row was hitting send on her email.

It was a really troubling, troubling moment for me because,

God, I feel emotional.

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I think

people came to this because they have hope.

They have hope that something good is going to come out of it and that this will improve their lives.

And some of their lives, in some ways, sound really shitty right now.

I mean,

some of the daily struggles these women are going through are real struggles.

I mean, this isn't about getting a nicer car.

I mean, it's...

It's more fundamental than that.

And

you see that they're that they're there and they're hopeful and they think this thing is going to change their lives.

And they're pouring their hearts and souls out to the room.

And the woman from corporate is emailing.

She isn't even listening.

She's not even paying attention to what's going on.

And Jacob is standing at the front going, yeah, girl, you know, you got this girl and giving some like hashtag wisdom.

And it just felt so gross.

At the end of it, I could not wait to get out of there.

I could not wait to be away from the whole situation.

I felt extremely dirty being in there and witnessing it.

And when I went home and started thinking that a year from now,

probably most of these women are not going to be in a better situation than they're in now.

If anything, because they're investing money in this opportunity.

And it's just really, really disturbing.

I mean, and they did it on purpose.

And they did it on purpose.

I've never been to a work conference where any of this has happened.

Neither have I.

Neither have I.

And I've been to a lot.

I would quit if that was my job.

Look, I think it's nice to be vulnerable with your colleagues, and I think it's important for people to be open and honest and trust each other.

But like.

That's at the bar after the conference, after you've learned all of the actual stuff you really need to go back to your office and implement.

There was nothing.

So the whole conference was

share your goal, then talk amongst yourselves and figure out how you're going to get there.

But none of us are being successful right now.

So how is that going to be useful?

And then the only other thing that was

tangible thing

was

this

Excel sheet where you plug in, like based on what your average sales are now and how many parties you do.

If you were to continue that for like six months and then try to like add a party or maybe sell two more products a month, where could you get in 12 months and then eventually four years financially?

But it's completely arbitrary.

And they don't tell you,

this is to help you visualize that, you know, if you're selling $200 a month now, if you could just bump it up to 300 next month and then 400 the month after that, that by the end of the year, you'll be making $15,000.

But they don't tell you how to do it.

It's just like...

Add

money.

It's just sell more.

Yeah, sell more.

Like, duh.

Okay, I know this whole thing is a ruse designed to keep people in it and spending money,

but lie to me.

At least pretend you think I'm smart enough to actually do this and treat it like a real business meeting.

How hard is it?

Like just pretend like you're at a business conference.

Yeah, I mean, there, you can, you can get a this is actually true you can get a book at the library that gives you real ways to be successful in business

take a book out of the library and read it to me at the conference right do something right don't just sit there and have it be a a farce

i think

Really early on, we used to jokingly have conversations about like, are people who start businesses like this in on it?

Do they know that what they're

that what they're setting up is taking advantage of people?

Or is it just, oh, this seems like an interesting business model.

Let's try this.

And I,

I'm, I think, maybe the only one around here who really was like, I don't know, maybe they just think it seems like it's a nice business model and they're not realizing that there are people on the other side of it or whatever.

I kind of tended to give people the benefit of the doubt.

After yesterday, there is no doubt in my mind that everyone involved in that entire organization knows exactly what they're doing.

They literally were just confronted with the faces and the stories of the people they're affecting and couldn't even bother to look up from their computers.

We reached out to Limelight for an interview and we heard back from Jacob by email.

It sounded exactly like you'd imagine.

He's still deciding whether he wants to listen to the show, let alone talk to us.

Next time on the dream, as promised, the woman who missed her best friend's wedding for Limelight Palooza.

I was terminated by them.

Why?

I was let go.

Under false accusations, the stuff that you didn't see behind the scenes was crying in the corner of my apartment because I was just so stressed out.

And I'm like, oh my god, like I need to make this money, but at what expense?

The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher, written and reported by me, Jane Marie, Dan Gallucci, Mackenzie Kassab, Lyra Smith, and help from Claire Rawlinson.

We are edited by Peter Clowney.

Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.

The Dream is executive produced by Laura Mayer, Chris Bannon, Dan Gallucci, and me.

We appreciate you subscribing, rating, and reviewing the show wherever you listen.

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Leave us a voicemail at 715-600-0326 or send us an email at thisisthedreampodcast at gmail.com.

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