S1 E4: The Mind is a Fertile Field

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It's called Selling the Dream, and it's coming out March 12th, 2024 on Atria.

It's about all of your favorite characters from MLMs and some that you've never even heard of, I hope.

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Previously on the dream.

I come from a PR background.

I I feel like if there's anyone who can make this work, it's me.

Hello, vampire!

You broke the sales record!

You broke the sales back!

And the reason why they're successful is they don't sell.

We are all about sharing.

You've unlocked the secrets to eternal life.

And then like millions of dollars fill out of the keyboard.

That is the type of language that they use and the visuals.

So it's not that far-fetched, but I will keep you posted.

I just got a notification saying your amazing journey starts here.

We can't wait to see how you grow this simple step into one of the best decisions of your life.

Are you feeling motivated?

I would say motivated is probably not the word I feel right now.

She just sold you a shitload of product, and she's going to get a portion of that.

Her work is done for the day.

I actually forgot about that part until you just mentioned it.

I really...

You're just transferring money from the later entrance to the earlier entrance and that is the classic definition of a pyramid scheme.

I feel like a hamster in a wheel and at the end of the month I'm reset to zero.

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On our last episode, Mackenzie signed up for her MLM.

And the minute she hit confirm payment on her starter kit, She got bombarded with emails and documents and piles and piles of language about how she should launch her new business.

In all that paperwork, we found a few practical suggestions like how she should post six times a day on Facebook, how she should magically find 30 people to make over in one month, and try to recruit them.

Mixed in though, everywhere we looked, we also saw a ton of motivational speech, notes about self-improvement, that were encouraging Mackenzie to be her best self and become a hashtag girl boss.

It was all, you can do it.

You can.

You can sell all of this makeup and you can make your upline a bunch of commission and you can eventually run the world.

This marriage of positive thinking and investing in oneself is actually the heart and soul of multilevel marketing.

No success is unearned and nothing is gained without sacrifice, a strong will, and an unwavering belief in your ability to lead and inspire others.

Imagine if at your current job, the size of your paycheck was directly proportional to your ability to sell a flawed mathematical formula so successfully that the people you're selling it to also want to sell it.

Would that make you feel empowered?

Does that sound fulfilling?

That doesn't make any sense.

I didn't, I'm not asking you a question, I'm reading my VO.

Was it always this way?

Did the pioneers of multi-level marketing intentionally tie money-making to self-esteem and therefore the ability to inspire others?

Well, let's ask Dan.

Yes,

it was literally always that way.

I'm Jane Marie, and this is The Dream, Episode 4.

The mind is a fertile field.

Dan.

Yeah.

What have you been doing?

So I've been digging into the legal history of MLMs.

And later in this series, I am going to take you on a journey through the epic battle that took place between the FTC and the multilevel marketing industry during the 60s and 70s.

And while I was looking into the old companies and the history, I started to notice this thing over and over again.

The language that we hear, the hashtag girl boss, the be your best you, that type of language that you cannot escape if you start looking into these companies has been around from the beginning of the industry until now.

It's this huge part of how these companies sell themselves to the world and how they try to recruit you.

And yeah, what I realized is it always has been and it still is.

Here's a guy named Eric Waray

and Eric makes his living training people to be a multi-level marketer.

Now?

Now.

In fact, he's the guy where if you type in MLM into YouTube, he's going to come up like six times.

Eric's face jumps up.

Yeah, it's just, he's there.

If you're constantly feeding your mind and allowing your mind to be infected by negative, pessimistic, compromising thoughts,

then

you can guess what your results are going to be.

You're not trying to look for an environment that will support you.

Your job is to create an environment that will support you.

Create.

You understand what I'm saying?

So it's your job.

There's another guy actually named Todd Falcone.

He's also a network marketing trainer.

Network marketing training is one of the most meta jobs I've ever heard of.

I'm going to train you to

train people who then will train people.

Well, not everyone just knows how to train other people to train other people.

You know what I mean?

When you're coming from a position of belief, you cannot be touched.

Nobody can touch you.

And you must build your business on a foundation of belief.

So when somebody says to you, is this network marketing?

Your answer is, heck yeah, it is.

If it wasn't, I wouldn't touch it.

I mean, you can hear this heightened sense of assertiveness, this extreme confidence.

But it also can turn dark.

There's like a back and forth between you can do it and if somehow you don't do it, it's your fault entirely.

Yeah.

Come join us, we're gonna help you do it.

Oh, look, you messed up, right?

That's your fault, right?

You're on your own.

You know what?

If people are making money in your company and you ain't,

it's not your sponsor's fault, it's not the system.

And we don't have a very good system, it's not your product's fault, it's not the company's fault, it's not customer service's fault, it is your fault.

So, like I said, this language is everywhere,

and it's been everywhere since the beginning of the industry.

And because I was looking into the legal history, the company that I wanted to focus on was the very first MLM to be prosecuted by the FTC.

And this is in the late 60s, early 70s, and the company was called Holiday Magic.

It was run a pretty larger than life kind of guy named William Pempatrick.

And William Pempatrick is like the archetype of an MLM owner.

Holiday Magic operated much like an MLM that you would see today.

They relied on recruitment to help keep money flowing to the top.

And they made really wild promises to their distributors about how rich they could become by distributing Holiday Magic.

And like a lot of MLM owners, William Pempatrick believed that wealth was kind of out there for the taking.

You just had to kind of put your mind to it.

And we're lucky because he had this kind of manifesto that he wrote in the mid-60s, and then he actually recorded it in 1967.

The mind is like a fertile field.

its size the limits of your imagination.

It, like the field, will grow whatever you plant.

One seed planted and properly nourished with warmth and moisture will return thousands of such seeds.

Work is required to keep the weeds from choking it, and work is required to nourish it, because we know that everything has its price.

He seems intense.

He's super intense.

And his story is crazy.

What is it?

Well, let's start at the beginning, Jane.

Yes, please.

Okay, so William Pimpatrick was born in 1930 in North Carolina.

He was born on March 31st, something that jumped out at me.

That's your birthday.

It's my birthday.

You and WPP.

It's sharing some cake.

His life had all the hallmarks of what all of the lives of the early MLM owners would kind of have.

Like being a depression baby?

Yeah, being a depression baby is one of them.

But also, they tended to all be door-to-door salesmen to start out.

They started a lot of businesses, but failed at them.

That's entrepreneurship.

That's what it is.

It is.

You're right.

Yeah, you're right.

We know that.

Well, not independently corroborated.

I have read in several places that he was bankrupt by the time he was 30.

So he goes bankrupt and then he goes to college, gets his teaching credential, and then he starts teaching at a junior high school.

But ambition would get the better of him, Jane.

He had to make some money.

Okay.

Right?

So that's when opportunity struck.

Let's just say that.

He was living in San Rafael.

Where's that?

Northern California, just outside of San Francisco.

The legend has it that one day he's walking down the street in San Rafael, California, and this scent is wafting out of a garage.

This fruity,

soapy, lotiony,

beautiful

scent.

Yeah.

And he's compelled.

He, at this point, stops and decides he needs to go into this garage.

This is a person's garage, a person's home, right?

He's being following the sun, like Peppy Le Pew.

Yes.

I picture him like floating up the driveway.

There's like a weird greenish-yellow waft coming out, and he floats towards it.

Anyways, he goes in and he finds out that...

I would never walk into anyone's garage unless we're having a garage sale.

This is a guy that smelled opportunity.

And he finds out that this smell is coming from this line of soaps and cosmetics that are fruit scented from a company called Zolene.

And this guy in the garage, thankfully he was there, was sitting on just boxes and boxes of inventory of Zolene.

Do you want to know what they sold?

Because it's cool.

Yeah, sure.

I would love to.

Okay.

So, what did they sell?

So they sold lemon, face splash, mint, ice, honey, almond, facial scrub.

Wait, is that one product?

Yeah.

What is it again?

Mint ice honey almond facial scrub.

Too much stuff.

Too many things.

Well, and then

pick one thing or two.

Strawberry Frope Cleanser.

It's Fruity Beauty.

So William Pimpatrick walks in and sees the guy and says, What is this?

I want this stuff.

I'm your guardian angel.

And somehow he coughs up the money to buy this guy out of all of his product.

And it costs $16,500.

What year was this?

This was 1964.

Hang on.

Are you going to do the math?

Uh-huh.

Okay.

How much was it again?

$16,500.

That is $135,000.

This is a guy that failed as an entrepreneur.

Bankrupt.

Bankrupt.

So where has he come up with that money?

I have no idea.

Anyways, he obviously changes the name of the company.

Not to Fruity Beauty.

But to Holiday Magic.

Now, where were we?

Ah, yes, the perhaps evil genius of William Penpatrick and his wild ride from bankrupt businessman to junior high teacher to prospective peddler of peddlers of fruity beauty.

There was no YouTube in the 1960s.

Dang it.

So we don't have the kind of endless treasure trove of blathering on that you get from Eric Waray and Todd Falcone.

So all we have to prove that WPP was just like every other one of those blowhards is that singular, rare recording of him, part of which you heard earlier.

Dan found it on eBay.

But don't worry, it's jam-packed with gems.

It's a vinyl record and it's called...

I have to look at it because it's got a long and important name.

First of all, it's put out on Holiday Magic Records.

And it's called Red, White, and Blue.

And with a handsome photo.

That photo, it's like a

huge

like Nixon.

Yes.

And it's called Happiness and Success Through Principle.

I mean, if you listen to it, he has a perspective that you're just not going to find anywhere else.

Do you think so?

This leads me to the point of the principle which I have discovered as the foundation of my security and happiness, which is success.

My first inclination is to do as most men do, that is, to confuse the issue by a lengthy analyses of the several specific issues available.

A volume of one million pages could be written on the general subject, with a discussion of how many angels could stand on the head of a pen, to the other extreme of how did the earth get here.

Since I do not wish to enhance my ego and since my purpose is to sincerely share with everyone those things that I have discovered to be true, I will only give you the principle knowing that when you understand the principle you will then apply it to the many available issues before you.

That doesn't mean anything.

No, wait.

It's just a word sound that you can get lost in really easily.

I'm reading the back of the record.

It says a few of William Penpatrick's principles.

Are you ready?

Yeah.

Here's one of them.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being wealthy.

That's a big one for him.

That what you're doing is you're providing a service.

So if you're wealthy, that's just because whatever you're doing is a great service, obviously.

You're providing a great service.

Yeah, if you have the money in your hand, then you are inherently valuable.

Wealth comes from giving something of value to other persons who are willing to pay for this value.

Each man in a free society is rewarded by his fellows in accordance with his contributions to his fellows.

Should you desire wealth, find a better way of giving what you have to offer to more people.

The more people you can help, the more people will pay you for this help.

This is a man who owns a fraudulent business.

Is it really fraud, Dan?

Or is it the real fraud that you don't think you deserve that money?

He just says he deserves it out loud.

That's what he says.

And then that's enough.

Yeah,

that's the idea, I guess, he's trying to sell people anyways, is that he deserves it.

Or that you can just say that out loud.

I deserve money.

And then you get money.

Yeah.

Did it work?

Well, according to the New York Times, he is a millionaire at 34 and a multi-millionaire at 36.

From this company.

From this company.

That a guy couldn't even sell one thing out of his garage.

A product that would not move.

Yeah, but the real product was him.

It was William Pimpatrick, or the idea, at least, that anyone could become like him, I guess.

Not the fruity beauty.

Today, I am earning more money each week than 90% of the American people earn a year.

Soon, my earnings per day will be likewise.

This money will continue as long as I desire it to.

But money alone is a shallow thing and should not be a man's sole purpose.

That's one of my favorite parts.

This money will continue for as long as I desire it to.

Well, first of all, William Kimpatrick, that did not turn out to be true.

One of the things he was known for was being a proponent of what's called the sour grapes philosophy.

He was widely quoted as saying, those who condemn wealth are those who have none and see no chance of getting it, which I feel like is kind of a reductive way of looking at wealth accumulation.

There are many parasites who give nothing of value to an economy or society and yet demand to be fed.

Oh,

haters gonna hate, kind of thing.

So are grapes.

He is like maximum blowhard.

He is, but we can't blame him.

It's what I would find out is that this is like as American as American can get and has a long history.

Jane, do you know who Phineas Quimby is?

Should I?

No.

Great then, no.

Okay.

Well, a lot of this way of thinking that we're talking about came from something called New Thought.

And Phineas Quimby was

one of the,

I guess you would say, forefathers of New Thought.

Phineas Quimby was a hotshot hypnotist in the early 1800s, right?

Sweet.

It is sweet, huh?

And he really believed in this idea that you could change your own destiny.

As an individual, it was kind of a mind over matter or mind over circumstances.

And at the time, it would fit in really well with what would become the American dream or what we think of as the American dream.

Just that you can do it if you try.

Yeah, exactly.

Everyone has an opportunity.

Yeah.

You just got to take a hold of that opportunity.

You got to work hard.

Be white, be a man.

Yeah.

Those two things are very important.

Yeah.

So he would say that if you could train your mind, you could not only become a success, but you could do things like make yourself healthy if you're sick.

One of the people that was very interested in his writing was Mary Baker Eddy.

She was the woman who started Christian Science and also very much believed in the power of prayer, in this case, to cure yourself of illnesses and find the keys to success within you or failure.

Okay, so if you hold the keys to your success or failure, then it's up to you to unlock them.

It is your responsibility to do that and you have the opportunity to do that.

Okay.

And New Thought would evolve through the 1800s.

And

at the time of the Industrial Revolution, we had the birth of mass manufacturing,

which gave birth to the need for a massive sales force to sell the products that they were manufacturing.

So over the next few decades, basically from the 1910s to the 1950s, there was a new group of people who would use ideas from the New Thought movement and incorporate them into books and seminars written about how to take charge and become a great salesperson.

And that's where you start seeing books like The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peel.

And then a couple other big ones were Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

But he's like rich already.

Dale Carnegie?

Yeah.

No, he wasn't.

He's not a Carnegie?

He's not a Carnegie, but he did decide something very early on that was probably a great decision for him, which is he spelled his name with a Y when he was born, and then he changed it to an IE, which would be a Carnegie that we would know.

I thought he was like a steel magnate.

Paul.

Wow, okay.

So he has.

He has so many interesting guides.

So many interesting guys.

The thing about Carnegie as well is that he introduced something new, which is large group awareness training.

Okay.

And this is where a group of people get together and start to implement the tactics and strategies and psychology and practices of whatever group you're a part of.

Also, in the 50s, you had this prosperity thinking that was starting to rise up in Christian churches all over the country.

And that's where you get a book like The Power Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, who was also a minister.

Yes, he led a church called Marble Collegiate in Manhattan.

And it was a place where a lot of very, very powerful people went, including a young Donald Trump in the family.

No.

No, seriously.

Frontline actually lays it out in an episode about Trump and totally captures this permission slip that Norman Vincent Peale was writing out for the congregation.

Like, go get what's yours.

As a young man, Donald Trump grew up hearing the gospel of success at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.

Donald's father made sure to expose him to Norman Vincent Peale.

How then can you face the future with confidence?

It elevates capitalism, honors wealth.

By being 100%

alive,

you are endowed with the tremendous powers of God and you may have trouble with it, but you can handle it.

So William Pimpatrick basically took from all of this stuff, the power of the mind to affect your circumstances, the power of positive thinking, large group awareness training, prosperity gospel, and he made it dark because he's very dark.

And he created this training program for his employees at Holiday Magic called the Leadership Dynamics Institute.

He also required his employees to go if they wanted to move up the ladder at Holiday Magic.

So it's like a continuing ed kind of thing where you go get your master's and you get a raise.

Right.

Only it's a creepy office retreat.

Right.

After this conversation, Dan and I became kind of obsessed with William Penpatrick and this whole world.

And we started texting each other weird stories that we'd find about two books that focus on William Pempatrick.

The one I read is called Outrageous Betrayal, and it talks all about William Penpatrick and leadership dynamics and how he took that new idea and also turned it into an MLM.

Well, basically, they just recruited recruited people to give these lectures and created a pyramid underneath.

Yeah.

So that whole jam is like William Penpatrick's side hustle.

Well, it wasn't just a side hustle because he required his employees, if they wanted to reach a certain level within Haldane Magic, then he required them to do it.

Eventually, the leadership dynamics got shut down, and we are lucky that they got shut down because they got taken to court, which means we have depositions

and they're bananas because william penpatrick he was just a maniac like he's a maniac about everything yeah i mean it was like the most extreme expression of these ideas about power and and he didn't have an off button so what happened well um so leadership dynamics it was a thousand dollars to go for the whole weekend wow to some motel in the bay area which in the 60s, which is like super creepy to me.

Yeah, super creepy.

Hotel California.

Exactly, the Hotel California.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

So this comes from lawsuits that eventually came up.

That's how we know all of this.

But the people who paid $1,000 to be at the Leadership Dynamics, quick aside, also they had to go to get promoted, but then they also had to pay for it.

I think it's such nonsense, but wow.

So they pay $1,000 to be at this Leadership Dynamics Institute weekend getaway retreat but it was the opposite of a retreat what do you mean they um want to hear what they got to do sure

they were forced into coffins

what like roll coffins i don't know gotta be a that's how you become a good boss uh they were strung up on giant wooden crosses where they'd hang for hours and then they also did group bullying Where like one person would admit something embarrassing or something or even just be a person and then all the the other people in the room would just be yelling at them and making fun of them.

This is at a corporate training seminar.

I guess.

Okay.

I don't mean to be laughing.

It's horrible.

No, it's totally horrible, but he's just such a lunatic.

This is taking this idea of challenging yourself, facing difficult traumas through brutal honesty to just the absolute darkest place.

There was a New York Times article written in 1973, and this is kind of after a lot of the depositions have been taken, the lawsuits filed, the lawsuits concluded.

It was talking about the coffins.

It says, sometimes students were stuffed into coffins, and others were strung up on a cross, which we've heard.

When he was questioned under oath about this, Mr.

Patrick said, no one was nailed to a cross.

They were tied, he said.

Question.

How was one individual tied to the cross?

Answer.

Well, how would you normally tie someone to the cross?

Mr.

Patrick was asked if anyone suffering from claustrophobia was ever forced into a coffin.

He replied, well let me say this.

If they did, they got over it.

Then he had this exchange with a questioner.

Is the coffin a pine box or was it...

Answer, no, we had a modern coffin.

Question, a modern coffin?

Answer, yes.

Question, with a pillow inside and a pad inside?

Answer, yes.

It's very nice.

You would like it.

What a grief.

He's saying that, being deposed.

You would like it.

To the lawyer deposing him.

Mr.

Patrick was asked at another point about people being injured in the classes.

He replied, I don't think those things are damaging, a little painful, but a man needs to learn from his pain.

And then we found that a couple people who had been at one of these leadership things wrote a book.

That's right.

It was a true story.

It was called The Pit.

And it was written by two former Holiday Magic distributors who were two of the people who were encouraged to go to these seminars.

Right.

There was a movie based on the book.

The movie came out in the early 80s and you can watch it on YouTube for free.

And it's called The Circle of Power.

Anyway, the movie's presented as fiction.

It's presented as fiction, but it's based on a

non-fiction book.

And also, remember, we're talking about about this crazy stuff because this is the world that MLMs came from.

Right.

Which is just insane.

One of the scenes in the movie, they start talking about this guy

and some trauma he had had in his life.

They were trying to make a breakthrough with him, like really get to his core, get him to open up.

Into the pit, Mula.

Jack!

Oh!

I'm not playing anymore.

Everyone plays Jackie.

We can't rest until we help him through.

Right?

And they know all this information about him, and they reveal that they know the information about him because his mom told

the people who are running the training program about this information.

And that actually came from a real

thing that happened.

Yeah.

So the author of the pit.

says in the book that a holiday magic employee was forced to acknowledge that he had witnessed his mother having sex with another woman as a child and was later molested by his father.

The instructors were told of these traumas by the participant's own mother, who was also a holiday magic employee.

Go ahead and kill me.

I don't believe in what you're doing.

And if I.

If I could find a way out of here, I would leave.

You wouldn't have the guts.

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I don't want a promotion.

Obviously,

Ted rationalizes cowardice with delusions of superiority.

Who'd like to straighten him out?

Teddy boy, up we go, Teddy Boy.

That's it.

Up, Teddy, up, Teddy.

Right, so this was.

We should probably say this was a really difficult movie to watch.

I don't recommend it personally.

It's a hard watch, and it took us two sittings.

It's just, it's kind of excruciating.

But that was a scene from the movie.

Yes.

And it's based off the pit, which was written about leadership dynamics.

The thing William Penpatrick and all these MLM leaders have in common is not just the language, not just the fandom of this particular business model, and not just their blowhardiness, but also their desire to be rulers of the quote-unquote free world.

So William Pimpatrick, he ran for governor in 1966.

Right.

He originally got the idea because he was good friends with the founder.

This is just going to get weirder and weirder.

He was good friends.

He had earlier in the decade become good friends with the founder of the Minutemen Militia Group.

What?

Yep, his name was Robert DePoe.

Robert and him struck up a friendship, and then they came up with the idea for him to run for governor against Reagan in the primaries under what's called the California Theocratic Party, which was an extreme far-right party.

And

him and Robert DePoe also had the idea

that Patrick run

as George Wallace's running mate in 1968 for president.

So this is what these guys are scheming up.

He's put himself out there.

He doesn't give a lot of interviews, but he is obviously in the public eye to some degree through politics and

whatnot.

And

the FTC eventually catches wind of Holiday Magic.

They receive a complaint.

And it's a complaint by one of the distributors for Holiday Magic, basically saying saying

that there is

no way that they can succeed in this company and that the company has, in recruiting them, told them that they would be exceptionally rich.

That's the big promise, right?

You're going to be wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.

But if it it doesn't work out,

that just means you didn't dream hard enough.

If you don't show up to a leadership dynamics course, you're not going to make it.

If you don't go to all the conventions you're supposed to go to, you're not going to make it.

But you can make it.

Right.

That's the other thing is it's not just on them, but like they 100% have the ability, they say, to be a millionaire.

And they're still talking that way.

You can't just sit at home and imagine a Lamborghini and it pulls up into the driveway and somebody gives you the keys.

It's not a magic trick like that.

Your subconscious brain is working all the time, no matter what you're doing.

It's working,

it's helping you guide and shift and make different decisions.

But if you get a clear picture in your mind, I believe you unlock the power of your subconscious mind.

And when you unlock the power of your subconscious mind, it starts to grind and grind and grind and grind to make the picture that you have in your imagination a reality so if you aren't a millionaire it's because you're not you're not unlocking your own potential you're wasted potential that's what it becomes about right

when you're recruited into an mlm that's what they talk about they don't focus on the numbers or how it actually works In other businesses, if you're asked to take part in a business to have something that looks kind of like a franchise, you would think that the numbers would make sense.

Often with MLMs, the numbers don't make sense, and it is difficult to find a way just purely in the numbers to make money.

They talk about it in terms of you can do it, you're expected to do it, it's your fault if you don't do it,

and it's not our fault if you don't do it.

So that becomes a conversation, and I think that it just clouds over this idea that it's really difficult to make any money doing this.

One of the reasons why this language is important also

is because it's something that the FTC would reference a lot in their efforts to shut down some of these companies in the 60s and 70s.

These false promises that the numbers and the structure of the companies wouldn't support.

And one of the companies that the FTC went after was Amway, and it ended up being a really big case.

And we're going to get into that a lot in later episodes.

But right now, I want you to hear a little bit of Rich DeVos talking, who is one of the founders of Amway,

because he has a knack for speaking in this same vernacular.

How would we ever know if we could succeed in the aviation business until we tried the aviation business?

How would we ever know whether you could sail a boat until you try and sell one?

How do you ever know if you're going to be able to sell salt until you try selling some?

How do you know whether you could ever be a leader of an organization of hundreds of people until you try and recruit one?

Just promise me you'll try.

Really try.

Rich DeVos, don't forget, was the father-in-law of Betsy DeVos, our current Secretary of Education.

And in many ways, the marriage between our federal government and MLMs is at its zenith because not only do we have a president that kind of just talks this way anyways, but he also used to endorse several MLMs and made a lot of money doing it.

Never, ever quit.

To be victorious, you have to think of yourself as a winner.

You have to feel that you're a winner.

You have to feel that you're better than the competition.

We want to end up being the biggest in the industry.

We are going to be the biggest in the industry.

It's going to be our company as a group and let's make this the number one network marketing company anywhere.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next time on the dream.

Hello, hello.

Hey, look at you, a little more curved.

We have a ladder.

Obviously, like most truck sales companies have, it is not a pyramid.

I always like pointing in.

There's no pyramid scheme.

Those are illegal.

I would never be part of that.

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.

And special thanks this week to Mike Richter for doing the final mix on this episode.

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

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