Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Bridget Read (on multilevel marketing) About this episode Bridget Read (Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America) is a features writer, journalist, and author. Bridget joins the Armchair Expert to discuss working as a young writer at Vogue during the blog boom, how door-to-door salesmen evolved into multi-level marketing, and the winners, losers, and buy-in rules that designate a Ponzi scheme. Bridget and Dax talk about vitamins being the original pyramid scheme product, the staggering fact that 99% of folks involved in MLMs will lose money, and the pseudo-feminist origin story of Mary Kay. Bridget explains the mystical and religious appeal of multi-level marketing language, how pyramid schemes are really a microcosm of our entire system of income inequality, and why refusing to buy from loved ones involved in MLMs actually helps them in the long run.
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Transcript 25,208 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.
0:05 Speaker 01 Hi.
0:06 Dax Shepard? Hi. Today, we have Bridget Reed 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.
0:24 Speaker 01 MLMs, baby.
0:26 Dax Shepard? This was fascinating.
0:28 Speaker 01 We learned so much.
0:29 Dax Shepard? Yes.
0:29 Speaker 01 I've been talking about this one a lot.
0:31 Dax Shepard? 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 get support from Quince.
0:56 Speaker 01 Okay, can we talk about the fact that the holidays are already here? It's crazy. I feel like I blinked, and now we're in gifting season, which I'm not really mad about because I do love giving gifts, and Quince is making it so easy to find something great for everyone on my list, including myself, because let's be honest, self-gifting is a love language.
1:15 Dax Shepard? Quince is seriously the gift that keeps on giving. Their high-quality staples are made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather. Full-on luxury quality at prices that won't wreck your holiday budget.
1:31 Speaker 01 It's the dream. The cashmere sweater, starting at $60, down jackets, wool outerwear, cashmere accessories, you and everyone on your list are staying cozy and looking incredible all season long.
1:42 Dax Shepard? Well, I'm gonna tell you this, it just got chilly for the first time this year in California, and I'm so excited, and I'm wearing my Quince cashmere right now.
1:49 Speaker 01 It's great.
1:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I am going to gift this to some of my friends. I hope they're not listening.
1:55 Speaker 01 Quince is also more than clothing. They've got fine jewelry for your significant other, leather bags for your bestie, hotel-quality bedding to set up your guest rooms, chef-grade cookware. That's an amazing thing they offer here. And it's such a good gift because people don't like buying cookware for themselves, but it's very important. And they also have five-star luggage, another good gift that people don't like buying for themselves.
2:17 Dax Shepard? Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. This episode is supported by Helix.
2:42 Speaker 01 Okay, can we talk about how November is basically survival mode? Between the holidays, the travel, the hosting, the cooking, the everything. Sleep is the one thing keeping me from completely unraveling.
2:52 Dax Shepard? It really is the foundation. And I think people underestimate how much a bad mattress is quietly ruining their day. You wake up stiff, your back's angry, you're already behind before your feet hit the floor.
3:03 Speaker 01 That was me before Helix. I took their sleep quiz, which is so fast. It took me like two minutes. And they matched me to a mattress that actually fits how I sleep. Not a guess, not a firm or soft coin flip. It's a real match. I have a midnight mattress and I really like it. I was noticing it because I actually had to sleep in one of my other beds.
3:21 Dax Shepard? Okay.
3:21 Speaker 01 Recently.
3:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
3:22 Speaker 01 That doesn't have a Helix mattress on it. And I really could tell a big difference in my sleep.
3:26 Dax Shepard? Temperature was all over the map.
3:27 Speaker 01 It was a mess.
3:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
3:29 Speaker 01 I need a new one.
3:29 Dax Shepard? Look, they've got over 20 mattress models. So whether you sleep hot, need extra back support, or you've got a partner who moves around all night, there's one built for you. Plus free shipping and a 365-night happy with Helix guarantee. That's a full year to decide.
3:44 Speaker 01 Helix has been named the most awarded mattress by Forbes, Wired, and more. So it's not just us being enthusiastic. The experts agree.
3:51 Dax Shepard? Right now, Helix is running their Black Friday sale with up to 30% off. Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for up to 30% off your Helix mattress. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for up to 30% off your Helix mattress. Helixsleep.com/armchair.
4:26 Speaker 02 I'm having allergies.
4:28 Dax Shepard? Oh, wonderful.
4:29 Speaker 02 Claritin D. Oh, we love. You have to give your ID.
4:32 Dax Shepard? We love D.
4:32 Speaker 02 Cause there's speed in it. Yeah. I'm really loving speed, turns out. Just a little bit of that. I'm super into speed. I know.
4:40 Dax Shepard? I know, I'm allowed to use them when I'm allowed to use them. I'd like to use them more.
4:44 Speaker 02 I never have.
4:45 Dax Shepard? This is your first time on a D?
4:47 Speaker 02 I think so.
4:48 Dax Shepard? Where do you live?
4:48 Speaker 02 I live in Brooklyn, I live in New York.
4:50 Dax Shepard? Okay.
4:51 Speaker 02 Well, a leave D or Zyrtec D? I heard about Zyrtec, I got a lot of recommendations for different.
4:57 Dax Shepard? Ds?
4:58 Speaker 02 All the Ds are really good.
5:00 Dax Shepard? I got a lot of D recommendations for you while you're in LA.
5:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, right. One time Dax took a drug test and he was on it. It showed up.
5:08 Dax Shepard? It showed for methamphetamine.
5:09 Speaker 02 So now I know why I like. Speed, speed's real. It's real.
5:13 Dax Shepard? Where are you from originally?
5:14 Speaker 02 Here, I'm from Pasadena.
5:15 Dax Shepard? Wow.
5:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, my parents live in Santa Barbara.
5:18 Dax Shepard? They do?
5:18 Speaker 02 My sister lives in San Francisco where I just was last night. So, my California girl, but I've been in New York for a long time.
5:24 Dax Shepard? So what was Pasadena like in the 1990s?
5:27 Speaker 02 Did you go to the Houston's a lot?
5:28 Dax Shepard? Did you ever go to Houston's?
5:29 Speaker 02 I definitely went to Houston's. It was much more boring and suburban. The west side felt so much further away. My cousins in Santa Monica, that was a journey.
5:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
5:39 Speaker 02 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.
5:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the history of it's really interesting. I only learned it in that Strange Angel book about the guy who started JPL or was one of the founding members. But yeah, that it was originally a playground in the winter for super rich people from Chicago. The Wrigley's had a mansion, 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.
6:09 Speaker 02 Right, well, and that's why it's kind of conservative, because it has these roots that are midwestern. Oh, that's interesting. Christian people who move from 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.
6:23 Dax Shepard? Yes, and Aleister Crowley, yeah, the sexual orgies, the cult stuff. That's what was in Strange Angels.
6:31 Speaker 02 I haven't read it, but I've heard of it, I should read it.
6:33 Dax Shepard? You should, and you know, he met his end by blowing up his garage, testing a new rocket fuel.
6:39 Speaker 02 Well, I guess we know the results of the test. He was on a little too much D.
6:43 Dax Shepard? Okay, so what school do you go to? How do you end up leaving California?
6:46 Speaker 02 We then lived part in DC 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.
6:55 Dax Shepard? Is that code for something?
6:57 Speaker 02 No, not at Wesleyan. I shouldn't say it that way. That's always a problem.
7:01 Speaker 01 College in Boston, college in Connecticut.
7:03 Speaker 02 No, college in Cambridge. I went to Wesleyan.
7:05 Dax Shepard? You graduate from there and then you move immediately to New York?
7:08 Speaker 02 I did a master's in the UK because it was free. I did a creative nonfiction program. And over there, it's a little less traditional. They don't really have a strong tradition like we do. Like Jonathan Safran Foer. I guess he's more novels. Like Dave Eggers, 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.
7:31 Dax Shepard? Oh.
7:32 Speaker 02 I did a degree at the University of East Anglia, which is in Norwich, a medieval city in the east of England.
7:37 Dax Shepard? Oh, fun.
7:38 Speaker 02 I drank a lot of cider.
7:40 Dax Shepard? Did you take on an English lover? No, right?
7:42 Speaker 02 Redacted.
7:43 Speaker 01 Oh.
7:44 Dax Shepard? Redacted.
7:45 Speaker 02 Everyone was college age and we were running around.
7:48 Dax Shepard? Fun was had.
7:49 Speaker 02 Fun was had. But it was just a year. And then I came back to New York and I've been there ever since.
7:53 Dax Shepard? Okay, and you worked at Vogue for a while as the culture?
7:57 Speaker 02 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. You would get a million views. It was just nonstop 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.
8:22 Speaker 01 Did you have to report to Anna?
8:24 Speaker 02 I guess technically I did.
8:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:27 Speaker 02 I got to do 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 it was really fun. I never would have connected with her if I hadn't been able to just do my own thing and do whatever I wanted.
8:57 Speaker 01 So cool.
8:57 Speaker 02 Within reason.
8:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, tactically, I didn't even anticipate and I should have.
9:01 Speaker 02 Vogue?
9:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that I was gonna mention Vogue just as like moving on and then I didn't anticipate and I should have that you would have been like, well, stop everything.
9:09 Speaker 02 We gotta stop 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 Mag's women's vertical and so it made a lot of sense there.
9:18 Dax Shepard? 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?
9:29 Speaker 02 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.
9:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what was the yoga pants one?
9:40 Speaker 02 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 a long saga that actually started in 2012 and lasted through 2016. So there've 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.
10:22 Speaker 02 So these were the jobs that were really being discussed heavily. 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?
10:59 Dax Shepard? How'd we get here?
11:00 Speaker 02 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 squeeging 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.
11:43 Dax Shepard? Did you know going in at that stage that 7.7% of the country has at some point
11:50 Speaker 02 I did not.
11:51 Dax Shepard? Over 17 million people have worked.
11:52 Speaker 02 And I bet that's an undercount.
11:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:54 Dax Shepard? 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.
12:01 Speaker 02 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.
12:25 Speaker 01 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?
12:35 Speaker 02 Now they're not.
12:36 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah.
12:37 Speaker 02 Because it's almost a bad word.
12:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is.
12:40 Speaker 02 But multi-level 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.
12:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it could be tech.
12:57 Speaker 02 Exactly.
12:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
12:58 Speaker 02 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.
13:12 Speaker 01 On the Mary Kay website, would it say it?
13:16 Speaker 02 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, Dora. Door selling, just like in the colonial times. Yeah. Guy that would sell soap made out of whale blubber or whatever.
13:29 Dax Shepard? So there is a tiny distinction we should make, I heard you say in an interview, between a pyramid scheme and MLM.
13:36 Speaker 02 Should we?
13:37 Dax Shepard? 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?
14:09 Speaker 02 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,
14:54 Speaker 02 new innovations, and also just connecting these rural households.
14:58 Dax Shepard? I have an image of a man in like a 1940s Buick rolling up into the rural driveway and pulling his wares out.
15:04 Speaker 02 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, it'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.
15:36 Speaker 02 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.
16:19 Dax Shepard? Downline.
16:20 Speaker 02 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.
16:42 Dax Shepard? The salesmen are the customers, not the customers.
16:44 Speaker 02 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. Uh huh. And on down the chain. In theory, if we're selling all those vitamins, we're sitting pretty, right? Right.
17:15 Dax Shepard? That's right.
17:16 Speaker 02 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.
17:37 Dax Shepard? You're not incentivized to move product as much as you are incentivized to have more and more employees that are buying the product.
17:43 Speaker 02 To openly recruit.
17:44 Dax Shepard? 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.
17:54 Speaker 02 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.
18:36 Speaker 02 And this is according to the company's own records, Nutrillite, 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.
19:19 Speaker 02 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.
19:34 Speaker 02 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.
20:11 Dax Shepard? That's what delineates the two.
20:12 Speaker 02 Exactly. And then we have multi-level 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.
20:36 Dax Shepard? Is there any task? Well, I mean, we'll get to that, I guess.
20:39 Speaker 02 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.
20:53 Dax Shepard? 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.
21:02 Speaker 02 Right. Every single person on earth would be selling.
21:05 Dax Shepard? 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.
21:14 Speaker 02 Right, because they're selling a product and the customers are paying for a product. This is people investing.
21:19 Dax Shepard? So it starts with Nutrileight. So in your research, were you able to determine whether? The original two dudes, was it two guys?
21:29 Speaker 02 Always two guys.
21:30 Dax Shepard? Did they foresee it in the nefarious way? Or did they believe in it?
21:34 Speaker 02 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.
21:47 Dax Shepard? And roughly how many people are selling?
21:48 Speaker 02 At that point, there were between 30 and 50,000 people across the country, which is the lot.
21:52 Dax Shepard? Wow.
21:53 Speaker 02 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 multiple 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.
22:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
22:35 Speaker 02 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.
22:43 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
22:43 Speaker 02 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 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 expansion.
23:18 Dax Shepard? I can minimally imagine them saying, well, all we've really done is flipped 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.
23:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, and they really used the actual like exploding population of the US 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.
23:57 Dax Shepard? The baby boom.
23:58 Speaker 02 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.
24:07 Dax Shepard? And what was their product?
24:08 Speaker 02 So neutrally, it was supplements, those vitamins.
24:10 Dax Shepard? Oh, it's the original racket.
24:12 Speaker 02 Oh, 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 appearance scheme in the eighties 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.
24:50 Dax Shepard? And he remained a fan?
24:51 Speaker 02 He's a number one skeptic.
24:53 Dax Shepard? Whistleblower, yee.
24:53 Speaker 02 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-marketing, they called it a pyramid plan because that's what it is.
25:08 Dax Shepard? That's the structure if you look at it.
25:09 Speaker 02 Anyway, Mittinger, funeral plot salesman, funeral plot selling. And this is like a slight detour, but one of the industries that at this time, in the thirties and forties, 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, did it through your union. It was a municipal thing. And in the twenties and thirties, it became this big business where guys would come to your house and say, oh, you You gotta buy a funeral plot now.
25:47 Dax Shepard? You need to be buried next to your wife.
25:49 Speaker 02 Exactly, and if you want a good afterlife, it got so scammy, they would sell you shoes to wear on your dead body.
25:54 Dax Shepard? Ensure your safe passage.
25:56 Speaker 02 And of course, it's like, oh, can we upsell you next to the river, next to the stream or whatever, exactly. And some of them were land investment schemes, where it would be like, you could sell this plot. Incredibly exploitative and scammy industry. There were funeral plot rackets all around the country where the guys would like swarm in, sell all these plots and take the money and leave, and they wouldn't even build, exactly.
26:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's a great product to sell when you're not gonna find out about it for 30 years.
26:21 Speaker 02 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?
26:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We interview a lot of doctors, and they're all pretty split on supplements.
26:40 Speaker 02 Well, it's just like you said, we don't know about the afterlife. What if being by the stream made you happier?
26:45 Dax Shepard? You better get those shoes, Bonnie.
26:47 Speaker 02 Right, yeah. One of them, Lee Mittinger, we know, was a salesman in this industry. And actually, right before he starts Nutrileight, 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 plots. 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 start.
27:29 Dax Shepard? So he already has a ton of integrity.
27:31 Speaker 02 Yes, William Costner, who's the other guy.
27:33 Dax Shepard? These are great names.
27:34 Speaker 02 Very old black and white movie. He was a Stanford-educated psychologist who trained under Louis 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 un- Productive inefficient characteristics and we should do that and we can create a better and more efficient society.
28:01 Dax Shepard? Selective breeding like crops.
28:02 Speaker 02 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. Yeah. But this guy was steeped in that stuff. And then he starts this almost like eugenicsy Dr. Ruth.
28:23 Dax Shepard? Oh.
28:23 Speaker 02 Where he opens a psychological practice and does family counselling. Oh. And teams up with this other guy Paul Popeno who's a sort of more well-known figure in this space who's doing family counselling. 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.
28:58 Dax Shepard? Right.
28:58 Speaker 02 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, then.
29:08 Dax Shepard? It's harder to extend generous assessment.
29:11 Speaker 02 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 multi-marketing in addition to rewarding people based on what they buy. Is turning that around and calling them sales. So instead of Dax saying, oh, I sold Bridget. A thousand dollars worth of wholesale vitamins for doing a 50% discount, he says, I have $2,000 in retail sales, right away.
29:47 Dax Shepard? Because I know it's gonna go down line.
29:49 Speaker 02 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. So that's why on that 10 year anniversary, Nutrileight 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.
30:20 Dax Shepard? That was Enron as well, counting future projected profits.
30:24 Speaker 02 Exactly. It's called speculation and it's responsible for many of our recessions over the last 100 years.
30:31 Dax Shepard? 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, Nutrileight, were they or it was bad right out of the gate?
30:46 Speaker 02 So Nutrileight 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 product. They could cure 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
31:26 Speaker 02 Court. And Nutrileight actually enlists this very famous lawyer named Charles Rhine, who was Richard Nixon's roommate at Duke. Oh, wow. 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.
31:59 Dax Shepard? The current figure in your book is 99% of everyone that gets involved with an MLM will lose money.
32:06 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. So this is the first one, and those statistics are like that.
32:10 Dax Shepard? 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 100 is getting paid. You would never put in your fucking application.
32:33 Speaker 02 And that's why they
32:34 Dax Shepard? That's staggering statistics.
32:35 Speaker 02 They don't recruit with those income disclosures. And at various times when the FTC has tried to regulate MLM, they do it often in 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.
33:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
33:02 Speaker 02 For success.
33:02 Dax Shepard? 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.
33:24 Speaker 02 It's like when people are like, yeah, black people can succeed just as easily. Look at Obama.
33:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we got one guy.
33:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
33:31 Dax Shepard? And we're like, problem solved.
33:32 Speaker 02 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.
33:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
33:49 Speaker 02 And so it's just never been on equal footing. But when you're recruited, they're gonna say, oh, we do 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. Nutrileight was very expensive.
34:19 Dax Shepard? Oh.
34:19 Speaker 02 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.
34:34 Dax Shepard? 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.
34:50 Speaker 01 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.
35:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it really does, especially Audible Originals that feature performances from celebrities and top voices. It's like watching a movie in your head. Uh, one on my list is Treasure Island.
35:12 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
35:13 Dax Shepard? Uh, which is an Audible Original drama. It's A Timeless Tale of Pirates, Lost Treasure, Maps and Mutiny. What more could you need?
35:21 Speaker 01 That sounds really fun. I'm more of a psychological thriller girl.
35:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you're dark.
35:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm, I'm dark and I'm broody. And I've been hearing all about the author, Freedom McFadden. And I love that I can listen to her audiobooks on the Audible app when I'm commuting, taking my wogs, as you know, or just like doing laundry and chores.
35:40 Dax Shepard? 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 Armcharries. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.com/dax. That's audible.com/dax. We get support from our sponsor, Lilly. For adults with obesity or with excess weight and weight-related medical problems, it's time to find out about Foundo or for Gleepran. Foundo is a once-daily prescription GLP-1 medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.
36:25 Speaker 03 Foundao should not be used with other GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Foundao is safe and effective for use in children. Don't take Foundao if you're allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had majorary thyroid cancer or multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Stop and call your doctor right away if you have an allergic reaction, a lump or swelling in your neck, or severe stomach pain. Serious side effects may include inflamed pancreas and gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant to be, or taking birth control pills, and before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. Taking Foundao with an insulin or sulfonylurea may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and may cause kidney problems. Once daily Foundao is available by prescription only
37:07 Speaker 03 in 0.8 mg, 2.5 mg, 5.5 mg, 9 mg, 14.5 mg, and 17.2 mg tablets. Learn more at foundao.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX. Now is perfect to talk to your doctor about Foundao.
37:22 Dax Shepard? This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. Look, I have my dream job. I get to talk to folks I admire like crazy and ask them virtually any question that I want to. I can't imagine a better way to spend my time. But even dream jobs have some not-so-dreamy parts, the stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. Now that's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it, start to finish. Cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. So you and your team can focus on what matters most, which for me is, are they obsessed with male bodies on the same level as I am?
38:05 Speaker 01 They never are.
38:06 Dax Shepard? To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Every family has that one holiday tradition nobody actually enjoys, but everyone keeps doing because stopping it would feel like a federal offense. For me, it was a specific meal situation that I will not name because my family listens. But at some point, you have to ask yourself, am I doing this because I love it or because I'm afraid of what happens if I don't?
38:34 Speaker 01 Yes, and that question applies to so much more than the holidays. I think a lot of us carry these invisible rules about how we're supposed to spend the holidays. We're supposed to see what it's supposed to look like. And when you start unpacking that with a therapist, you realize half of your stress is coming from rules you didn't even write.
38:50 Dax Shepard? This is where BetterHelp can be a great resource during the holidays. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences, which means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recs.
39:09 Speaker 01 I just love therapy. I've been avoiding it recently, or not avoiding it, but I was like, oh, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. I haven't canceled, canceled, canceled, but then I-
39:17 Dax Shepard? You start feeling it.
39:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, because then I had it this past weekend and I was like, oh my God, and just thank God, thank God for her. Yeah.
39:25 Dax Shepard? BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance or live outside the US, you can still get 20% off your first month. Sign up and get 20% off at betterhelp.com/dax. That's betterhelp, H E L P, dot com slash DAX. We get support from Instagram teen accounts. So we talk a lot on this show about how the world is different now than when we were growing up. And one of the biggest differences is obviously social media. And I think a lot of people wonder, okay, what's actually being done to make it safer for teenagers?
40:05 Speaker 01 Which is a fair question.
40:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so Instagram has got something called teen accounts and they come with automatic protections built in by default. So anyone between 13 and 17 is automatically placed into this experience. They get age-appropriate content settings, contact limits, so that by default, only people they're already connected to can message them. And time management tools, daily time limit reminders, and also sleep mode that mutes notifications from 10 PM to 7 AM.
40:33 Speaker 01 Sleep mode is genius.
40:34 Dax Shepard? Right? And here's the thing, for anyone under 16, a parent has to give permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. The guardrails are on, and Instagram keeps building new safety features to create age-appropriate experiences for teens.
40:49 Speaker 01 I am really glad Instagram's helping to give parents peace of mind with teen accounts.
40:54 Dax Shepard? Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.
41:08 Dax Shepard? 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 up line. 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.
41:47 Speaker 02 You're locked into the downline, which is the most important thing, because it determines what you're gonna get. And that's why people these days, like the Amway downlines, for example, and the two guys who start Amway come from Nutrileight, they end up buying Nutrileight 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.
42:20 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
42:21 Speaker 02 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 downline. You're sitting pretty on your empire and they give those positions to their families.
42:53 Dax Shepard? They're transferable.
42:55 Speaker 01 What?
42:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, but you can inherit an Amway business.
42:58 Dax Shepard? Oh, my gosh.
42:59 Speaker 02 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.
43:12 Speaker 01 What is the technical product of Amway?
43:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so tell us the history of Amway.
43:16 Speaker 02 So Rich DeVos, as in Betsy DeVos, is her father-in-law. And Jay Van Andel, these are two high school buddies from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
43:26 Dax Shepard? Uh-oh.
43:27 Speaker 01 That's where Dex is from.
43:28 Speaker 02 And they are from this very devout Calvinist Christian sect of the Christian Reform Church in Grand Rapids. DeVos and Van Andel, they joined Nutrileight 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.
43:58 Speaker 01 Yep.
43:59 Speaker 02 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 Bunda Vita. And if Nutrileight 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.
44:23 Speaker 01 Oh, my god.
44:24 Speaker 02 You know, it's like such bullshit, but it's exactly the same.
44:27 Speaker 01 Now, if you're starting your own, do you still get the Nutrileight earnings as well?
44:34 Speaker 02 No. What they do is they take a lot of their team with them. So they start Amway with a built-in downline.
44:39 Speaker 01 Okay.
44:40 Speaker 02 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.
44:45 Speaker 01 Irrelevant, yeah.
44:46 Speaker 02 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 seventies, 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 Glistor as their toothpaste. They have the money to manufacture all of this? It's wild.
45:20 Dax Shepard? They're just private label products.
45:23 Speaker 02 They're white label products. Amway does have a factory in Michigan, but they're marked up. You've never heard of Glistor, right? Right. Why would you?
45:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
45:31 Speaker 02 But the idea that this is one of the top 100 private companies in the US? And you've never heard of the products? Yeah. That's weird, right?
45:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
45:40 Speaker 02 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 it, the alfalfa in the middle of the night. That's this company called Abundavita. 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.
46:23 Speaker 02 Again, by the FDA rather than the FTC because it's about the products and the claims of the products. And those guys then spread even more companies out here in California.
46:34 Dax Shepard? Sorry, the parallels between religion are so amazing as well. It would be so logical for anyone in the mid-rung of this pyramid to recognize, all I got to do is take my downline over here and now I'm the top of the pyramid. So like what a natural thought.
46:48 Speaker 02 You just have to be a guru and you got to be selling a good story.
46:51 Dax Shepard? 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?
47:00 Speaker 02 De Vosse and Inno 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.
47:20 Dax Shepard? Oh, really?
47:20 Speaker 02 The Calvinist Christians.
47:22 Dax Shepard? That's who they were referring to.
47:22 Speaker 02 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.
47:32 Dax Shepard? Like Mormons.
47:33 Speaker 02 Exactly. And this idea that accumulating wealth is actually gonna get you closer to God. It's not bad and it's not greed. Where you're gonna 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 the Amway did the same thing, so NutriAmway, it's Christian couples. And then in the 60s, more women are entering the labor market and they wanna 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.
48:15 Speaker 02 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 in 1963. She became the best salesman at her 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.
48:59 Dax Shepard? She was like, this is gonna be huge. I gotta get him out of the equation.
49:02 Speaker 02 I don't think that happened, but 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 then just copied the plan, which is what they called multi-marketing, like dun dun dun, 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.
49:37 Dax Shepard? Right.
49:38 Speaker 02 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.
49:55 Speaker 01 Wow.
49:56 Speaker 02 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.
50:11 Dax Shepard? What prompts that?
50:12 Speaker 02 At one point in the 70s, one in eight Americans had tried multi-marketing. Which is just crazy.
50:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah, today that would be 40 million, 45 million people.
50:23 Speaker 01 Tried as in they participated, they were selling or had enrolled to join. Because I've been to some Mary Kay parties.
50:31 Dax Shepard? You have?
50:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:32 Dax Shepard? Oh, in Georgia?
50:34 Speaker 02 I'm from the south.
50:36 Dax Shepard? And did you enjoy them?
50:37 Speaker 01 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.
50:47 Dax Shepard? But it's fun, right?
50:48 Speaker 01 The parties are fun.
50:50 Dax Shepard? 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.
51:05 Speaker 02 100%, and I've spoken to them and they've lost thousands of dollars and they don't care.
51:09 Dax Shepard? 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 gonna be impossible to sell to strangers.
51:34 Speaker 02 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.
51:51 Dax Shepard? Monique?
51:51 Speaker 02 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.
52:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
52:02 Speaker 02 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 also lying to yourself, because you're telling yourself, okay, well, I am gonna 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 kinda keep the buy-in amount small. The scamier 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. Oh, wow. They're doing tapes. And he's this incredibly charismatic salesman with hair lip from the South, who is just an incredible speaker.
52:47 Speaker 02 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 $15,000, $10,000, just straight up. Which is very much red flag investment fraud.
52:59 Dax Shepard? That's the gift circle model.
53:01 Speaker 02 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, the state's Attorney Generals, when they meet... Oh, you're supposed to say attorneys general.
53:43 Dax Shepard? It's so stupid.
53:44 Speaker 02 Oh, my gosh, that's dumb.
53:45 Dax Shepard? I just heard someone say that the other day and I was like, it sounds so wrong even though it's correct.
53:49 Speaker 02 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 Coscot. It's a play on Epcot. Oh, boy. Okay.
54:32 Speaker 02 Because Disney is a big thing in Florida at this time and this guy's from Florida.
54:36 Dax Shepard? I love Epcot.
54:36 Speaker 02 Experimental prototype community of tomorrow. I never knew that. Epcot stands for something like that. But so Coscot is just that, but for makeup and he calls it Coscot interplanetary because he's going to eventually expand. Oh, this guy's great. So anyway, Coscot 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.
55:03 Dax Shepard? The Coscot test.
55:04 Speaker 02 Exactly. So they decide how we're going to define a pyramid scheme.
55:08 Dax Shepard? Yes. Then do they go into regulating and do they do a good job?
55:13 Speaker 02 So Walter Mondale, the senator from Minnesota.
55:17 Dax Shepard? Mondale Farrar.
55:17 Speaker 02 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.
55:59 Speaker 02 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 gonna fix the economy, not by doing more progressive stuff, but the opposite deregulation, we're gonna 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 US 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,
56:44 Speaker 02 he's gotta go. And so Gerald Ford, this mild-mannered former football player from Grand Rapids, becomes president. Rich DeVos and Van Andel are close enough to him that they call him Jerry. Right? Uh huh. 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.
57:28 Speaker 02 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.
58:13 Speaker 02 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? Because it's like the FTC and the government, just a hotbed of cronyism. It's waste, it's fraud.
58:29 Dax Shepard? The swamp.
58:29 Speaker 02 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.
59:12 Speaker 02 You have to resell 70% of the items you buy before you can buy more.
59:17 Dax Shepard? Is it self-reported? Yeah, it's not like anyone goes through their house.
59:20 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. And then the third one is the buy-back 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 pyramid 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 in Cosco and seen how in Cosco... They didn't even have makeup for the first year, but 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. And Amway, they really just took the company's word for it. They accepted that the company said, "We don't keep records."
1:00:03 Dax Shepard? Okay. We're the only company in the world that doesn't keep records.
1:00:06 Speaker 02 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 backed 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 a 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?
1:00:51 Speaker 02 Has anyone ever tested them?
1:00:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Have you ever talked to anyone that worked for Amway that was able to get a buyback?
1:00:58 Speaker 02 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.
1:01:16 Dax Shepard? 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, and that being the most under-reported 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.
1:01:49 Speaker 02 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, really? Exactly, and most likely berating you to do better. Yeah. 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 like that.
1:02:33 Speaker 02 You could see why in the seventies and eighties. 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 Dunst and Alexander Skarsgård. Ooh. So good, it was right before the pandemic, it was supposed to have a second season. Kirsten Dunst 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.
1:03:05 Dax Shepard? 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?
1:03:15 Speaker 02 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.
1:03:31 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:03:40 Speaker 02 Right.
1:03:41 Dax Shepard? Like Herbalife.
1:03:42 Speaker 02 Could be AG.
1:03:43 Dax Shepard? We have a friend who sells Herbalife.
1:03:45 Speaker 01 Uses it. I don't know if sells.
1:03:48 Speaker 02 We're getting a little ahead of ourselves, but Herbalife was fined by the FTC for being effectively a pyramid scheme. They didn't use those words, but in the FTC complaint, every function of pyramid scheme they were accused of and they were fined $200 million.
1:04:00 Speaker 01 Whoa.
1:04:01 Speaker 02 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.
1:04:15 Dax Shepard? 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 just treat it as a?
1:04:27 Speaker 02 Be legitimate?
1:04:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:04:29 Speaker 02 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.
1:04:38 Speaker 01 They're like 1099.
1:04:39 Speaker 02 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 Synanon.
1:04:56 Dax Shepard? Oh, I love Synanon.
1:04:58 Speaker 01 What's Synanon?
1:04:59 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:05:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:05:09 Dax Shepard? And it was so effective. People that weren't junkies wanted to join and yeah, great documentary.
1:05:14 Speaker 02 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 Raniere, who started Nixium, learned Amway and Nixium was multi-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.
1:05:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:05:44 Speaker 02 He was banned from operating a chain selling scheme in the state of California. So that was the seventies. 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 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.
1:06:27 Dax Shepard? They're just grifters, moved to a different market.
1:06:29 Speaker 02 Exactly. And Mark being a kid in Sinanon 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 at the eighties. 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 this story of being like a health nut,
1:07:14 Speaker 02 and Herbalife just explodes and everyone's doing it and celebrities and all this stuff. He has this mansion in Malibu and he dies of an overdose. And so Herbalife is just directly related to all these old companies.
1:07:26 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:07:38 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:07:39 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:07:49 Speaker 02 From the very beginning, the NutriLife guys definitely considered themselves Christian. And interestingly, one of them was a Christian scientist.
1:07:55 Dax Shepard? We just learned a lot about that the other day.
1:07:57 Speaker 02 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. associate themselves with this guy who writes a book called Thinking Real 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 Clegia Church.
1:08:25 Dax Shepard? I guess I'm just delighted he had a pastor. I didn't even really think there was ever a pastor.
1:08:30 Speaker 02 Loved this guy.
1:08:31 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:08:31 Speaker 02 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. God, well, he's done it. There you go. From the very beginning, this is in MLM, like meditate on the car. Literally put a picture of the car on your fridge, put it in your drawer, think about the Cadillac. Vision board. Yes, it's very much a part of it. 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 American version of Christianity, the Calvinists in Amway hugely they're using churches.
1:09:11 Dax Shepard? Well, it's a great place to network, right?
1:09:12 Speaker 02 Exactly. And one FTC economist who I spoke to, who was raised in Grand Rapids. He actually met Davos and Van Nandal in church. So these communities are ripe for the picking.
1:09:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, prosperity, whatever they call it.
1:09:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:09:26 Dax Shepard? Prosperity gospel. Plus community, plus person in front of you that has attained it.
1:09:31 Speaker 02 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 Herbalife or say it's whatever, because they're independent contractors. So you can use your own name. Oh, my God. 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.
1:09:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:09:59 Speaker 02 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.
1:10:11 Speaker 04 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
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1:11:59 Speaker 01 Well, it's also a group that is by definition not skeptical. Religious people. They are there to like buy in and take things at face value.
1:12:09 Speaker 02 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.
1:12:37 Dax Shepard? The whole thing's driven on being nice because the people who have pitched me, I've had a cut code knife demonstration done for me. I've had the acai berry pitch or whatever. Mona V.
1:12:48 Speaker 02 Mona V. Those are just Amway guys.
1:12:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I've sat through those and it's like, here's someone I love.
1:12:53 Speaker 02 $90 acai juice.
1:12:55 Dax Shepard? So another sad, unavoidable pattern you see is these tend to explode when the economy's bad.
1:13:03 Speaker 02 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. So 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.
1:13:45 Speaker 02 You don't have to have $10,000 to invest in some business. All you need is $1.99 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 places 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.
1:14:29 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:14:46 Dax Shepard? 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 scales.
1:15:07 Speaker 02 Hack 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 microcosm for our entire system. 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.
1:15:51 Speaker 02 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
1:16:33 Speaker 02 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.
1:16:53 Dax Shepard? 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 that will benefit from this is whoever owned the company when we started making it efficient. And then it's over. Yeah, there's not even a way to enter and climb. It was already up here, but now it's gonna be a fucking straight line. There'll be one person with this enormous company that's being run by all this AI. It's gonna accelerate.
1:17:34 Speaker 02 I think that that isn't farfetched 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 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.
1:18:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so Monique was in the Air Force for 17 years. She gets out, she's on her retirement. It's like a stipend. It's 1,200 bucks 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?
1:18:38 Speaker 02 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.
1:18:46 Dax Shepard? This woman asked her repeatedly, would you like a facial?
1:18:48 Speaker 02 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 gonna buy makeup from this lady in a pink, it's just so antiquated.
1:19:05 Dax Shepard? And she's super lucky, a pink Cadillac.
1:19:07 Speaker 02 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. She thought this was 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. And they pray and she is looking to find her way back to religion because she was raised 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 a hundred ninety nine dollars. And then from there, we just chart her journey and right away.
1:19:49 Speaker 02 They get her to buy an eighteen hundred dollar 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 four hundred, two thousand dollars a month for a decade.
1:20:03 Dax Shepard? And she's living on twelve hundred and she has rent.
1:20:05 Speaker 02 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.
1:20:45 Speaker 02 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.
1:21:04 Dax Shepard? Does she build a downline?
1:21:05 Speaker 02 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 twenty four. 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, 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 twenty twenty three. But everyone is just buying. Everyone knows it and Monique still to this day has all this stuff.
1:21:38 Dax Shepard? She's supposed to have thousands of items?
1:21:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:21:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I would love to x-ray the whole country and to 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 product.
1:21:50 Speaker 02 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.
1:21:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah, putting on the makeup three times a day.
1:21:59 Speaker 02 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 the 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 gonna 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.
1:22:41 Speaker 02 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 multi 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 gonna have masses churning in and out, just like her, who are buying, buying, buying.
1:23:26 Speaker 02 And your success is reliant on that.
1:23:28 Dax Shepard? Their failures.
1:23:29 Speaker 02 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."
1:23:39 Dax Shepard? Where at, I think this inflection where it's like being a country of just go get yours. Is kinda 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. 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 gotta get yours. And it's a defendable point of view if you're
1:24:10 Speaker 02 Well, if everyone's at the bottom.
1:24:12 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:24:20 Speaker 02 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 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. The meritocracy is still working. The people that have so much more than everyone else, they got there fairly and that it's
1:25:02 Speaker 02 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 gonna work out for you.
1:25:44 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:26:01 Speaker 02 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 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.
1:26:22 Dax Shepard? It was your moral, actually.
1:26:24 Speaker 02 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
1:27:08 Speaker 02 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 too. 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
1:27:49 Speaker 02 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 rebranded 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 gonna be freer. That's how we're gonna get democracy.
1:28:12 Dax Shepard? Independence.
1:28:13 Speaker 02 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.
1:28:20 Dax Shepard? You all be rich.
1:28:21 Speaker 02 We will all get it.
1:28:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:28:23 Speaker 02 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 is it? 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. And they are looking at 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.
1:29:06 Speaker 02 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.
1:29:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:29:20 Speaker 02 Like, that's where we're at.
1:29:22 Dax Shepard? Oh, boy.
1:29:23 Speaker 02 This is a wild topic.
1:29:24 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:29:32 Speaker 02 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.
1:29:39 Dax Shepard? We give a very thorough history of MLMs, but your book is just full of personal stories that are really, really compelling and heartbreaking.
1:29:48 Speaker 02 And of course, I went to the convention, saw this in person and spoke to a corporate employee. This was the Mary Kay Convention. And 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.
1:30:05 Dax Shepard? 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 gonna botch.
1:30:26 Speaker 02 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 gonna just run out and they're gonna 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 reward.
1:30:53 Dax Shepard? Keep your sheet looking good.
1:30:54 Speaker 02 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.
1:31:02 Dax Shepard? Direct and obvious parallels. You shouldn't loan someone 30 bucks to get high again. You wanna try to accelerate them having to confront that.
1:31:10 Speaker 02 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 gonna get ahead. And so stop it at the pass and just don't buy it.
1:31:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Well, Bridget, this has been incredibly interesting. Everyone should check out Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America. It's kinda 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.
1:31:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, thank you.
1:31:43 Dax Shepard? Always take a leave D or whatever one you took before interviews. You were on fire.
1:31:47 Speaker 02 Claritin D.
1:31:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:31:49 Speaker 02 Speed works for me, I guess.
1:31:50 Dax Shepard? Always be on Claritin D. All right, be well.
1:31:56 Speaker 04 Hi there. This is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact check with Miss Monica.
1:32:03 Dax Shepard? Is there places you wouldn't wear that shirt? Be honest.
1:32:07 Speaker 01 There's nowhere I wouldn't wear. There's nowhere I wouldn't wear this shirt.
1:32:10 Dax Shepard? A funeral? A wedding? A christening?
1:32:16 Speaker 01 No, I'd wear it to a christening. I would wear it to a wedding with a big ball gown skirt.
1:32:24 Dax Shepard? Oh, and a Rolling Stones t-shirt?
1:32:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, and in a funeral, I'd wear it under a black.
1:32:32 Dax Shepard? Blazer?
1:32:32 Speaker 01 Blazer and black pants.
1:32:34 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:32:35 Speaker 01 But this person who's passed um really appreciates the Stones.
1:32:42 Dax Shepard? That was their favorite band. That's a high percentage chance to take. Um, I have bad news to share with you.
1:32:49 Speaker 01 What?
1:32:50 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:33:06 Speaker 01 Uh oh.
1:33:07 Dax Shepard? And that, I can't say that anymore uh in good conscience. You know, was exploring, saw someone with a huge yard, right? I'm like, oh my God, that person has thirty 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 around 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. Twenty-five foot pontoon boat.
1:33:52 Dax Shepard? I have one four hundred horsepower V-ten. This had two four hundred and fifty horsepower outboards. Nine hundred horsepower compared to my four hundred. 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 gonna order a five hundred and one horsepower engine for one side.
1:34:21 Dax Shepard? So that I have one horsepower more than that. Man or woman, I shouldn't assume it's a man.
1:34:26 Speaker 01 You gotta get off the treadmill, man.
1:34:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it can't be number one.
1:34:30 Speaker 01 We can't all be number one. We can't all be the best. He's the best. And that's that.
1:34:35 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:34:48 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:34:49 Dax Shepard? Okay?
1:34:50 Speaker 01 I don't understand, but I, I hear you and I, I, I respect your words. Okay, when I come visit, can we watch What Lies Beneath? And really get in the lake mood?
1:35:03 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:35:12 Speaker 01 That feels boring.
1:35:14 Dax Shepard? It sounds like a homework, doesn't it?
1:35:15 Speaker 01 On the waterfront. Yeah, I don't want to do that.
1:35:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, on the waterfront, not like Marsh, Longshoreman.
1:35:22 Speaker 01 You know I'm against that movie.
1:35:24 Dax Shepard? So just What Lies Beneath, I guess?
1:35:27 Speaker 01 Sure, yeah. Or isn't in, um, I, I don't think I've seen Sleeping With The Enemy, but doesn't she like
1:35:35 Speaker 01 learn how to swim?
1:35:37 Dax Shepard? Oh, to escape him?
1:35:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, she's secretly like learning how to swim.
1:35:43 Dax Shepard? Is that Julia Roberts?
1:35:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:35:45 Dax Shepard? And she moves to like a southern town, right?
1:35:47 Speaker 01 I don't know, but I think we need to watch that.
1:35:50 Dax Shepard? I'll watch it.
1:35:51 Speaker 01 Have you heard about the dock on, um, the poop boat, like a cruise where everyone pooped everywhere?
1:35:59 Dax Shepard? Shitwreck or something? I keep seeing it, um, pop up on new releases on Netflix. You haven't watched it?
1:36:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, I have not watched it because it feels like how dare I spend my time? My precious time watching
1:36:16 Dax Shepard? A disastrous.
1:36:17 Speaker 01 Some people pooping everywhere.
1:36:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I watched the trailer and they're in 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.
1:36:44 Speaker 01 Right. Also, what happened? Were they stuck out there? Like, why were they stuck?
1:36:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think there was just like a lot of mechanical failures all at once. Yeah.
1:36:54 Speaker 01 I guess I should watch it.
1:36:56 Dax Shepard? Uh, let's, let's both aim to watch it or you could watch it when you come.
1:36:59 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Okay, let's add that to the, oh, that's a water.
1:37:02 Dax Shepard? The kids are intrigued because of the poop. That's got their interest peaked. Yeah.
1:37:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, obviously. Um, I have a question.
1:37:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:13 Speaker 01 For you.
1:37:13 Dax Shepard? About my neighbors?
1:37:14 Speaker 01 No.
1:37:14 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:37:15 Speaker 01 Two questions. In the similar category. Do you say, when you, when you hear the phrase, it's all downhill from here?
1:37:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:25 Speaker 01 What does it mean to you?
1:37:26 Dax Shepard? Well, it's interesting. I think we have talked about it. It sounds good.
1:37:32 Dax Shepard? And also bad. It's a very confusing saying.
1:37:35 Speaker 01 So how would you use it?
1:37:37 Dax Shepard? Well, it's all downhill from here is positive. It's all downhill is bad.
1:37:44 Speaker 01 Oh, I see. Okay.
1:37:45 Dax Shepard? Isn't that interesting? Like from here means we've peaked. We're at the peak and we're gonna get to coast down.
1:37:50 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:37:51 Dax Shepard? But it's gonna be all downhill. Sounds like things are gonna get worse.
1:37:55 Speaker 01 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 ma, you're at the top.
1:38:05 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:38:06 Speaker 01 And so it's all downhill from here.
1:38:09 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:38:20 Speaker 01 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.
1:38:26 Dax Shepard? No, I'm all done. I don't have to climb to the top anymore.
1:38:29 Speaker 01 Oh, you just live in the valley.
1:38:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's what's like, that's the transition in life I'm at. There's no more peaks, just valley living.
1:38:37 Speaker 01 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.
1:38:46 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:38:47 Speaker 01 Like, ugh, it was all downhill from there.
1:38:49 Dax Shepard? It was all downhill from there.
1:38:51 Speaker 01 And it was bad. And I say it like, ugh.
1:38:53 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:39:14 Speaker 01 Wow, that's a ding ding ding. I made a peach galette yesterday.
1:39:18 Dax Shepard? What's a galette?
1:39:19 Speaker 01 Free form pie. We've already discussed this. You refuse to commit it to memory.
1:39:22 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:39:23 Speaker 01 Um, the inside is a little open, but there's crusts on the sides.
1:39:27 Dax Shepard? That sounds nice. You made another one of those yesterday?
1:39:29 Speaker 01 I did. I'm gonna serve it tonight for mahjong.
1:39:32 Dax Shepard? Oh, you're, are you hosting or attending?
1:39:34 Speaker 01 Hosting. And actually, when we were on the trip, I got a real BMI bonnet for mahjong. I forgot it.
1:39:40 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:39:40 Speaker 01 Forgot my set. And I was really looking forward to playing it on the trip with people.
1:39:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:39:45 Speaker 01 And so I got really upset and I was like, we gotta, we have to find mahjong. You can't find it. Like, if you,
1:39:54 Dax Shepard? It's not just for sale, yeah.
1:39:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I, so I was calling all these antique stores to see if they had any mahjong sets.
1:40:03 Dax Shepard? Did you look on Amazon?
1:40:04 Speaker 01 Stuff there. I did, but it wouldn't deliver by then.
1:40:06 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:40:07 Speaker 01 By the time we left. It wasn't like next day delivery. So I, we, I call all these antique stores, no one has it, but they're all so friendly. They're like, sorry babe.
1:40:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:18 Speaker 01 And, and then we go on Facebook Marketplace, never been on it before, okay?
1:40:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:25 Speaker 01 But we go on, there's somebody there in Palm Springs with a mahjong set that we could get.
1:40:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:31 Speaker 01 But we didn't wanna go drive to get it, right? So we were gonna send an Uber.
1:40:37 Dax Shepard? Oh wow.
1:40:37 Speaker 01 To get it.
1:40:38 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:40:38 Speaker 01 And bring it to us.
1:40:39 Dax Shepard? I would've been most excited about going to the person's house and seeing who's selling the mahjong.
1:40:45 Speaker 01 Well, we were just having too much.
1:40:46 Dax Shepard? You're having too much, okay.
1:40:48 Speaker 01 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.
1:41:02 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:41:02 Speaker 01 And we were like, no, we're not selling until we have it.
1:41:08 Dax Shepard? Oh wow.
1:41:08 Speaker 01 And I, and I understand both points of view.
1:41:11 Dax Shepard? Sure, yeah, yeah.
1:41:13 Speaker 01 Because I get, she's like, I can't just put it in an Uber and not have money.
1:41:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, but then for us, same situation.
1:41:20 Dax Shepard? Right. So what'd you do?
1:41:22 Speaker 01 We didn't follow up.
1:41:23 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay, okay. And at that point, they must've thought, well, yeah, they were trying to scam us out of our mahjong.
1:41:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:41:32 Dax Shepard? 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?
1:41:40 Speaker 01 Um, I mean, my current one is like $400.
1:41:43 Dax Shepard? Whoa, really?
1:41:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, it's expensive.
1:41:47 Dax Shepard? How would they want on Marketplace?
1:41:49 Speaker 01 Wasn't, I, I think it was cheaper, I think it was in the like, between one and $200 range.
1:41:56 Dax Shepard? Okay. I'm just killing a fly or attempting to. I don't have enough rag. You see what little bit, bit of rag I'm working with? That's not really enough to kill.
1:42:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, that looks like Hermes.
1:42:07 Dax Shepard? It's to clean my glasses, not to kill flies.
1:42:10 Speaker 01 Anyway, so that was a big dilemma, which led to no mahjong. And so I'm playing tonight and there'll be a peach galette.
1:42:16 Dax Shepard? Oh lovely. And does it get better or worse in the fridge over the night?
1:42:20 Speaker 01 This is the big question. I'm scared it's gonna 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?
1:42:34 Dax Shepard? Yes, it was delicious. The pies were so fresh. I mean, the peaches were so fresh.
1:42:40 Speaker 01 Listen, you are shaking your head no, and we are on video.
1:42:44 Dax Shepard? 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, and she seemed fine with that.
1:42:55 Speaker 01 Oh, she came over and watched you eat it?
1:42:57 Dax Shepard? No, the pie.
1:42:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, the pie lady watched you eat it?
1:43:00 Dax Shepard? No, no, no, just the pie felt fine with how I ate around it.
1:43:03 Speaker 01 Okay, okay. Listen, just so you know, I probably shouldn't break this to you, although maybe you're allowed to have it. Those peaches probably had cornstarch.
1:43:14 Dax Shepard? Not these ones. These were so fresh.
1:43:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, they did. No, no, that's how you make it. Trust me, I've made two in the past like two weeks.
1:43:22 Dax Shepard? Okay, do you remember we just had a chef on?
1:43:25 Speaker 01 Yes, Curtis Duffy.
1:43:26 Dax Shepard? Yes, Curtis Duffy, the brilliant chef, and he talked about that he would have his staff make him Chocno bakes.
1:43:32 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:43:33 Dax Shepard? So I have been talking about that out loud and saying how bad I wanted Chocno bakes with almond butter.
1:43:38 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:43:39 Dax Shepard? And Kristen made them.
1:43:41 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:43:41 Dax Shepard? 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 craved 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.
1:43:57 Speaker 01 I don't think I've had a Chocno bake.
1:43:59 Dax Shepard? Oh, well, I bet you'll have someone you visit here, because I got a hunch these are gonna 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.
1:44:11 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:44:13 Dax Shepard? But yes, I've been on a real sweets train. We got the peach pie I ate around, then I got the Chocno bakes.
1:44:19 Speaker 01 You barely ate, okay.
1:44:20 Dax Shepard? The whole thing, ate the ass of, and then.
1:44:23 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:44:24 Dax Shepard? And then I've had Dairy Queen. There's a Dairy Queen in town.
1:44:27 Speaker 01 Mmm.
1:44:28 Dax Shepard? And then there's a really cute new custard shop. Frozen custard.
1:44:33 Speaker 01 Called?
1:44:34 Dax Shepard? Oh, it's got a name like Jimmy's or something. I don't know. It's very popular.
1:44:38 Speaker 01 It's not with a G?
1:44:40 Dax Shepard? Maybe.
1:44:40 Speaker 01 Oh, it's new.
1:44:41 Dax Shepard? It's brand new.
1:44:42 Speaker 01 There's a frozen custard place that starts with a G in the south that's good.
1:44:46 Dax Shepard? 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. Line around the, out the door, you know, I don't know how long the line was, maybe fifty feet, sixty feet. There's a good forty-five 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 gonna wait in line for an hour. And I was like, oh, I'm excited to wait in line. And, and it was so fun. And I just, people watched and everyone was out to have an ice cream. So everyone was in a good mood. It's 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 gonna 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.
1:45:31 Speaker 01 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.
1:45:39 Dax Shepard? You're right.
1:45:39 Speaker 01 And you said, no, and now here we are.
1:45:41 Dax Shepard? I know. And now we have a different circumstance and I'm seemingly having the opposite of opinion.
1:45:47 Speaker 01 Very similar circumstance, but opposite opinion.
1:45:51 Dax Shepard? You're right.
1:45:51 Speaker 01 Just saying.
1:45:52 Dax Shepard? There's no difference, other than people that go to In-N-Out are often in a great mood, but they're off, they're often also just there because they're hungry. Maybe they're even cranky because they're hungry. This is
1:46:06 Speaker 01 I'm gonna get In-N-Out today.
1:46:07 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:46:14 Speaker 01 I understand.
1:46:15 Dax Shepard? I love it.
1:46:16 Speaker 01 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 Brewster's there?
1:46:26 Dax Shepard? Oh, I haven't seen one, but I saw Zaxby's, your mom's restaurant. Doesn't your mom love Zaxby's?
1:46:31 Speaker 01 No, that's mine. I love Zaxby's.
1:46:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, we have one.
1:46:34 Speaker 01 I love Zaxby's. Yes, it is southern. Fried chicken.
1:46:38 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:46:54 Speaker 01 Chicken on it. Yeah, and it's not a cafeteria.
1:46:57 Dax Shepard? It's not a cafeteria. I'm thinking that because of Nirmi. And that's why.
1:47:01 Speaker 01 It is a drive, it's a fast food, Zach's pieces, but the cafeteria, you bring up lubbies or something, but that's not what she, we don't have that there.
1:47:14 Dax Shepard? We don't have lubbies.
1:47:15 Speaker 01 She just likes all the cafeteria.
1:47:16 Dax Shepard? She just would love lubbies or lubies.
1:47:18 Speaker 01 She would love it, yes.
1:47:19 Dax Shepard? Maybe lubies even more than lubbies.
1:47:21 Speaker 01 No.
1:47:22 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
1:47:25 Dax Shepard? You don't know a wild, I mean.
1:47:27 Speaker 01 She's post-menopausal.
1:47:27 Dax Shepard? Didn't you read on for all fours?
1:47:30 Speaker 01 I did.
1:47:31 Dax Shepard? She was having no problem, right? Getting creative.
1:47:35 Speaker 01 She was perimenopause.
1:47:36 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:47:39 Dax Shepard? Okay. That's the horny section.
1:47:42 Speaker 01 I don't want to think about any of that.
1:47:46 Speaker 04 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
1:47:59 Speaker 01 Anywho, uh, okay, I have one more word riddle for you.
1:48:03 Dax Shepard? Oh, great.
1:48:04 Speaker 01 Do you say, I'm gonna turn the air down or I'm gonna turn the air up?
1:48:09 Dax Shepard? Wow, I could definitely see where that's ripe for confusion.
1:48:13 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:48:14 Dax Shepard? Um, I'm gonna, I would say, I'm gonna turn the air down a bit. Oof.
1:48:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:48:20 Dax Shepard? Turn the air on. Turn the air up. I would say both, and they shouldn't work. What would you say?
1:48:26 Speaker 01 I think I, I, I think I say turn it down.
1:48:29 Dax Shepard? Meaning you want it colder?
1:48:30 Speaker 01 Turn the air down?
1:48:31 Dax Shepard? Or you want it warmer?
1:48:32 Speaker 01 I want it colder. Oh, no, no, if I'm in the car, it's like, oh, turn the air up.
1:48:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah, turn it up.
1:48:37 Speaker 01 But in the car, huh, that's tricky though, because in the car, often the knob, you're, you are turning it up.
1:48:45 Dax Shepard? The, the fan speed, yeah.
1:48:48 Speaker 01 The fan speed, yeah.
1:48:50 Dax Shepard? But the temperature's going down. That's why it's inherently conflicting.
1:48:55 Speaker 01 That's why this is a great riddle.
1:48:57 Dax Shepard? So maybe just we could clean it up by going make the air colder, make the air hotter.
1:49:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, but that doesn't have the same ring to it.
1:49:05 Dax Shepard? That's true. We also like nuance and trying to guess. It's fun to not really know what anyone's talking about.
1:49:10 Speaker 01 We love riddles.
1:49:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:49:12 Speaker 01 Reading through the lines, mixed messages.
1:49:14 Dax Shepard? Reading between the lines, a lot of that.
1:49:16 Speaker 01 I said, reading through the lines.
1:49:18 Dax Shepard? I know. I don't think that's the same.
1:49:19 Speaker 01 Same thing.
1:49:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah, same thing, though.
1:49:21 Speaker 01 No, this is another riddle. What do you say? Between or through?
1:49:26 Dax Shepard? Betwixt. Do you think if we were in England, we'd say, reading betwixt the lines?
1:49:31 Speaker 01 I do.
1:49:31 Dax Shepard? Again, just to remind you, I've wanted to start using waltz, but I just can't figure it out.
1:49:38 Dax Shepard? I love waltz.
1:49:39 Speaker 01 You mean whilst?
1:49:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the English always say whilst.
1:49:42 Speaker 01 I was reading whilst at the pool.
1:49:44 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I love it. But I, when I try to say it, it doesn't work.
1:49:48 Speaker 01 Okay, I want you to try to say it before the end of this episode, just.
1:49:52 Dax Shepard? I'll do it whilst we're conversing.
1:49:55 Speaker 01 Not right now, not.
1:49:56 Dax Shepard? That worked out pretty good, though.
1:49:59 Speaker 01 It was too fast.
1:50:00 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:50:01 Speaker 01 It's supposed to be a pop out.
1:50:02 Dax Shepard? What are you watching? What's your summer watch?
1:50:04 Speaker 01 I'm struggling.
1:50:05 Dax Shepard? You are?
1:50:06 Speaker 01 I'm struggling. Oh, you know what's fun, though? So the New York Times had a list that they created of the hundred best movies. Hundred best. See, I don't love it, but okay. Hundred best movies.
1:50:21 Dax Shepard? There you go, hundred, hundred best.
1:50:23 Speaker 01 No, I do. I know, but I do love it because it's ranked. So there is a number one. Hundred best movies of the 21st century, so since 2000.
1:50:33 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:50:34 Speaker 01 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?
1:50:45 Dax Shepard? Yes, I would love to.
1:50:46 Speaker 01 Mine are Eternal Sunshine.
1:50:49 Dax Shepard? Love it. Oh, you just thumbs go?
1:50:51 Speaker 01 Get Out.
1:50:51 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:50:52 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:50:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:50:55 Speaker 01 Eternal Sunshine. Get Out, The Social Network, Amelie, Ocean's Eleven, Interstellar, Moneyball, Royal Tenenbaums, The Worst Person in the World, Past Lives.
1:51:10 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:51:21 Speaker 01 That's my list.
1:51:22 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:51:32 Speaker 01 I know.
1:51:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you tricked me.
1:51:33 Speaker 01 Do you want me to read it?
1:51:35 Dax Shepard? The real list?
1:51:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:36 Dax Shepard? Just top 10. I don't want to hear 100 titles.
1:51:41 Speaker 01 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.
1:51:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah, no one wants to hear 100 items out loud. I don't think.
1:51:53 Speaker 01 I do.
1:51:53 Dax Shepard? No one wants to go even past 30. Like 20 would be the limit, I think.
1:51:58 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, you guys, I love lists. They let me start at 50 and everyone was really into it once I started.
1:52:05 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:52:08 Dax Shepard? At 50.
1:52:09 Speaker 01 Number 100 is super bad, just gonna tell you that. Now, remember this is only from 2000. That's why Good Will Hunting wasn't on mine.
1:52:16 Dax Shepard? 25 years. Was Bottle Rocket 2000 or newer? I'll look that up on my own. I don't want you to leave that page. 96, okay, so I'm, I excuse that that wasn't on your list then.
1:52:31 Speaker 01 I do love that movie. But I would still pick Royal Tenenbaums.
1:52:37 Dax Shepard? And you'd pick both, you'd pick that over Rushmore as well?
1:52:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, Royal Tenenbaums is my favorite.
1:52:44 Dax Shepard? Ah.
1:52:45 Speaker 01 Wes Anderson movie.
1:52:46 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:52:47 Speaker 01 And very core to me, like one that I watched so many times that I was like so moved by.
1:52:54 Dax Shepard? I gotta rewatch it. I love it, but I definitely like Rushmore and Bottle Rocket more.
1:52:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:53:00 Dax Shepard? I love Rushmore.
1:53:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, I could rewatch Rushmore. Is there a lake in it? Can we watch it during our lake movies?
1:53:07 Dax Shepard? No, there's no lake. There's swimming, just in the swimming pool.
1:53:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, the pool.
1:53:11 Dax Shepard? That's where Bill Murray's watching his kids and he hates them, his boys, yeah.
1:53:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. Okay, ready. Number 10, The Social Network.
1:53:21 Speaker 01 Number nine, Spirited Away.
1:53:23 Dax Shepard? That's a horse movie?
1:53:24 Speaker 01 Number, no, no, no, no, you're thinking of-
1:53:27 Dax Shepard? Spirit of Cameroon?
1:53:29 Speaker 01 No, you're thinking of that TV show that the kids used to watch.
1:53:32 Dax Shepard? Spirit of Cameroon, yeah, Cimarron.
1:53:34 Speaker 01 No, it's just called like Spirit.
1:53:36 Dax Shepard? I think Spirit of Cimarron, yeah.
1:53:38 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:53:39 Dax Shepard? Let's see.
1:53:40 Speaker 01 Now, this is a, this is an animated-
1:53:43 Dax Shepard? Is there a cartoon called Spirit of Cimarron?
1:53:46 Speaker 01 It's just called Spirit.
1:53:47 Dax Shepard? And it's animated? What's the one on your list?
1:53:51 Speaker 01 Okay, Spirited Away is an animated movie. It's a hand drawn fairy tale of adolescence. Alice 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.
1:54:08 Dax Shepard? Um, the answer to my question is yes, there is a well-known animated feature called Spirit. Stallion of the Cimarron. C-I-M-A-R-R-O-N.
1:54:18 Speaker 01 But is that, remember the show they used to watch? And there was a really catchy theme song?
1:54:22 Dax Shepard? That was it. That was Spirit.
1:54:24 Speaker 01 I thought this says feature.
1:54:26 Dax Shepard? Um, yes, so that was in 2002 and then they made a TV show.
1:54:31 Speaker 01 Okay, that makes sense.
1:54:32 Dax Shepard? Follow-ups in the franchise. Spirit Riding Free, 2017 to 2020. Spirit Untamed, 2021.
1:54:42 Speaker 01 I remember when we were in Turks and Caicos, the kids were watching Spirit. And that theme song was really in my head.
1:54:50 Dax Shepard? Running wild, I'm running free.
1:54:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, something like that. Okay, number eight is Get Out.
1:54:56 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:54:57 Speaker 01 Number seven, Eternal Sunshine.
1:54:59 Dax Shepard? So it's similar list.
1:55:02 Speaker 01 Number six, No Country For Old Men.
1:55:05 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:55:05 Speaker 01 Number five, Moonlight. Number four, In The Mood For Love. I have not seen it, but I really wanna see it.
1:55:12 Dax Shepard? What is that?
1:55:13 Speaker 01 It's set in Hong Kong and it's like a love story. It's, it was in 2001. It's on, it's supposed to be great. I really wanna see it. Um, number three, There Will Be Blood.
1:55:26 Dax Shepard? Great, love it.
1:55:28 Speaker 01 Number, number two, oh my god.
1:55:30 Dax Shepard? Sorry. I got it. I'm under control now.
1:55:36 Speaker 01 Number two, Mulholland Drive. Another one I have not seen but would love to see.
1:55:40 Dax Shepard? Great.
1:55:41 Speaker 01 Did you hear me?
1:55:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah, Mulholland Drive, another one you haven't seen but you'd love to see. I could re-watch that. I love that.
1:55:47 Speaker 01 Oh, great. Is there a lake?
1:55:49 Dax Shepard? Um, can't remember.
1:55:51 Speaker 01 Okay. Number one, Parasite.
1:55:53 Dax Shepard? Love it.
1:55:54 Speaker 01 Parasite is an incredible movie. I like that at number one.
1:55:59 Dax Shepard? It's strong, number one. Alright, I'm trying to find you your song. Here we go.
1:56:17 Speaker 01 Is this it?
1:56:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:56:28 Dax Shepard? Here we go, Monica.
1:56:52 Dax Shepard? I'm not gonna lie, I just got full body goosebumps.
1:57:01 Speaker 01 It is a good song.
1:57:03 Dax Shepard? It's really good. I'm riding free.
1:57:06 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:57:07 Dax Shepard? Boy, Turks and Caicos, what a fun trip that was.
1:57:10 Speaker 01 What a fun trip. We got in a huge fight, but it was still so fun.
1:57:13 Dax Shepard? I didn't remember that part, but you did.
1:57:15 Speaker 01 You didn't? Wow.
1:57:17 Dax Shepard? I do, I do.
1:57:18 Speaker 01 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.
1:57:35 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, that's Fincher. His lessest known, least known movie. And Downey, Robert Downey.
1:57:41 Speaker 01 Downey, Jake G.
1:57:43 Dax Shepard? J. G.'s.
1:57:44 Speaker 01 J. G. Um, yeah, it was great. Oh, Mark Ruffalo.
1:57:49 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, yeah.
1:57:50 Speaker 01 Anthony Edwards, E.R., Ding Ding Ding, AIDS.
1:57:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah, AIDS.
1:57:55 Speaker 01 I know. I was confused because for some reason in my head, when I started the movie, I... Thought J G was the villain like in I was like, oh, that's that movie where Jake Gyllenhaal is the killer.
1:58:09 Dax Shepard? Jagers.
1:58:09 Speaker 01 So I'm watching it. Yeah, Jagers. And I'm watching it for so long. I'm like, wow, he. He ends up being the killer. That's so wild. And then, of course, I was wrong.
1:58:19 Dax Shepard? He wasn't, no. He was just that wasn't. He was a journalist, right?
1:58:23 Speaker 01 He was a cartoonist, actually, and then he got obsessed with the case.
1:58:28 Dax Shepard? That can happen to people. They get bit by a case. It's probably gonna happen to me before I'm dead. I'm gonna get obsessed with a case and solve it.
1:58:36 Speaker 01 What case are you gonna try to solve? A murder or?
1:58:41 Dax Shepard? Probably like a missing motorcycle.
1:58:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, that sounds right.
1:58:45 Dax Shepard? The Lord's work.
1:58:46 Speaker 01 Um, yeah, so.
1:58:49 Dax Shepard? I wanted to talk to you about shopping before we parted today.
1:58:53 Speaker 01 All right, let's hear it.
1:58:54 Dax Shepard? Cause 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 L A, 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. Um, 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.
1:59:27 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:59:28 Dax Shepard? And I gotta 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.
2:00:04 Speaker 01 That's called Instacart.
2:00:05 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm. We did figure that out as well afterwards. But ours will be different.
2:00:10 Speaker 01 Or DoorDash.
2:00:11 Dax Shepard? Ours will be, we don't charge you, but it'll probably be less convenient.
2:00:15 Speaker 01 Why will it be less convenient?
2:00:16 Dax Shepard? Cause 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.
2:00:22 Speaker 01 Oh, I think you can just sign up for Instacart like you did for the other ride.
2:00:28 Dax Shepard? Not personalized.
2:00:29 Speaker 01 Food delivery.
2:00:30 Dax Shepard? Not personalized enough for me. I want to have a relationship with the people I shop for.
2:00:34 Speaker 01 Cool.
2:00:34 Dax Shepard? And I play at this game with the cashier each time I say, what's the over under on this order? Cause 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 Erin guess and the girls guess and I guess, and we all play by Price is Right rules, which is even if someone's a dollar over, they lost.
2:00:59 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:00:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:01:00 Speaker 01 Those rules are tricky.
2:01:01 Dax Shepard? The bill could be 1500, someone could have guessed it's 600 and someone guessed 1501 and 600 wins. Those are the rules.
2:01:09 Speaker 01 That's so ridiculous.
2:01:11 Dax Shepard? It's pretty good rules though for.
2:01:13 Speaker 01 It's horrible rules. This happened during cornhole too. Cornhole's the same thing. If you get, if, if you get over 21.
2:01:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:01:23 Speaker 01 You're back, you go back to 11.
2:01:25 Dax Shepard? Ooh, that's harsh.
2:01:28 Speaker 01 That happened a lot during Palm Springs. Not to me, cause I never really got over 21, but
2:01:34 Dax Shepard? Sure.
2:01:34 Speaker 01 To a lot of other people and I was so upset on their behalf. Yeah, and Jess and Matt.
2:01:40 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:01:40 Speaker 01 And Anna. Anna's really good at it.
2:01:42 Dax Shepard? Everyone but you.
2:01:44 Speaker 01 I was most improved.
2:01:48 Dax Shepard? Do you have a hangover? Like, are you gonna wanna play in Nashville? Like, do you crave it now?
2:01:52 Speaker 01 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.
2:02:09 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
2:02:10 Speaker 01 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."
2:02:23 Dax Shepard? Mmm, he outed you.
2:02:25 Speaker 01 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.
2:02:31 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:02:32 Speaker 01 And I was like, "You don't, you didn't know me in college? How dare you."
2:02:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah, where do you get off? Where do you get the nerve?
2:02:40 Speaker 01 Uh, where exactly? And I used to drink a ton of Bud Light.
2:02:45 Dax Shepard? How much? Six at a time?
2:02:47 Speaker 01 Well, we used to play all kinds of games, waterfall, king's pin or something, I forget what that's called, you know, and also that thing where you drink a sh-
2:02:55 Dax Shepard? Beer pong?
2:02:56 Speaker 01 Oh, beer pong, a ton, flip cup, uh, all the games, you know?
2:03:01 Dax Shepard? I never played these drinking games. I never got them. It's like, I didn't need someone to tell me to drink more.
2:03:06 Speaker 01 No, it was just, it's just fun. Games are fun, Dax.
2:03:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I should play more drinking games.
2:03:12 Speaker 01 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're just, you're just learning how to play, interesting." And I, I used to play. I was a different girl in college. Oh, yeah.
2:03:30 Dax Shepard? That would have liked to meet that version. That'd be fun.
2:03:34 Speaker 01 You still can. Charlie wants to go to a Georgia game and I'm gonna arrange it. I want us all to go.
2:03:39 Dax Shepard? I would love that. That would be so fun.
2:03:41 Speaker 01 You know.
2:03:42 Dax Shepard? But also I'd like to time travel and meet you in Athens and see this version.
2:03:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:03:47 Dax Shepard? The carefree college kid who was planning her next booty bump.
2:03:50 Speaker 01 Oh, God, carefree is interesting.
2:03:53 Dax Shepard? In the mix, carefree.
2:03:55 Speaker 01 I wasn't carefree. I actually had-
2:03:59 Speaker 01 I I had I like, you know.
2:04:01 Dax Shepard? More cares.
2:04:01 Speaker 01 Really bad anxiety, but I had fun.
2:04:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you drank through it.
2:04:06 Speaker 01 I sure did.
2:04:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah, what a gift.
2:04:09 Speaker 01 Um, so when are you gonna go shopping again today?
2:04:11 Dax Shepard? Um, 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 ever done in a day?
2:04:18 Speaker 01 No.
2:04:19 Dax Shepard? I couldn't believe this day. I woke up, I was uh meditating at five thirty. Did I tell you I put up thirty two pallets on the marshy ground leading to the boat deck? Cause 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 I took thirty two pallets from the behind Lowe's at Home Depot.
2:04:43 Speaker 01 Wow.
2:04:44 Dax Shepard? And I laid them all out and I've made a boardwalk and then I
2:04:47 Speaker 01 Oh, nice.
2:04:47 Dax Shepard? I didn't want that to stick out so much. So then I ordered grass paint that you pump up in a in a big plastic jug and spray.
2:04:56 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:04:56 Dax Shepard? So I spray painted thirty two pallets green to match the grass. Um, 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 in feeders for the deer. I dropped my roadmaster off to get new mufflers at Midas. And this is the craziest one. At three forty P M. I'd already had this day where I'd done all this stuff since five thirty. At three forty P M. I'm I said to Kristen.
2:05:42 Dax Shepard? I'm thirty five minutes away from the trailer place. They close at five and then another twenty five minutes past there is the golf cart place. And I'm leaving my house at three forty in Mount Juliet. I left thinking I give this a forty percent 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 ten minutes. With the title, signed. 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 5pm.
2:06:21 Speaker 01 Wow.
2:06:22 Dax Shepard? I'm telling you, I felt like a frickin' hero, Monica. What a day.
2:06:26 Speaker 01 That's a lot. That's a lot.
2:06:28 Dax Shepard? I think just mopping the, mopping the barn would have been enough for a victorious day for me. But then I add in all that other stuff I just bored you with. I mean, spray painting 32 pallets. 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.
2:06:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, you love a list.
2:06:52 Dax Shepard? I do. And I feel as accomplished as if I work, you know?
2:06:57 Speaker 01 Right.
2:06:58 Dax Shepard? That kind of list feels like filming all day or something. I feel very accomplished.
2:07:04 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah. Nice.
2:07:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Do you think I'll run out of stuff to do?
2:07:08 Speaker 01 No.
2:07:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah, because I have these dumb cars.
2:07:10 Speaker 01 You can add like swam for 10 minutes. Like you, you can always add stuff that's actually just regs.
2:07:17 Dax Shepard? 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.
2:07:35 Speaker 01 I actually don't do lists like that unless it's truly like I need to keep track of what I'm gonna 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, I don't like any of this. All I'm doing is trying to prove to myself that I've like done stuff.
2:07:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:07:53 Speaker 01 Yes. And that started to feel silly. So I, I don't really list anymore. But yes, if you, if you're a list, if you're a list guy or a list girl, you're adding stuff last minute. You're adding stuff post, post accomplishment.
2:08:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you want to look at that list at the end of the day and go, my God, you really did it.
2:08:14 Speaker 01 And then you want to read it on a podcast.
2:08:16 Dax Shepard? And then you want to read it out loud to as many people as who will listen.
2:08:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
2:08:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah. So I want you to be impressed with my industriousness.
2:08:24 Speaker 01 Of course.
2:08:24 Dax Shepard? So you'll like me.
2:08:25 Speaker 01 Cause that's what I care about.
2:08:27 Dax Shepard? That's right. And how good of a driver I am.
2:08:31 Speaker 01 Yep. Um, all right. Should we do some facts?
2:08:34 Dax Shepard? Let's.
2:08:35 Speaker 01 This is for Bridget. Bridget and MLMs.
2:08:39 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God. I love this one.
2:08:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, me too. So informative, so interesting.
2:08:47 Dax Shepard? 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 gonna lose, no one does.
2:09:05 Speaker 01 I know. Okay, the strange angel JPL guy is Jack Parsons.
2:09:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, Jack Parsons. He's a maniac.
2:09:17 Speaker 01 Yep. He co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was deeply involved in cult practices.
2:09:25 Dax Shepard? Yes.
2:09:26 Speaker 01 Okay, also Bridget worked at Vogue and there was big news. I asked her if she reported to Anna. Anna Wintour is stepping down as editor in chief of Vogue. It's a huge deal in the fashion world.
2:09:45 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah. How do you feel about it? How are you taking that news? Can't be great.
2:09:50 Speaker 01 It's hard to take in. I'm just, it's just the end of an era.
2:09:55 Dax Shepard? Sure.
2:09:58 Speaker 01 Now, I looked up spending by gender. I just confirmed that women spend more than men, which they do tend to.
2:10:05 Dax Shepard? I think they say that they are responsible for like 80% of the domestic purchasing. Like they're who advertisers are advertising to.
2:10:16 Speaker 01 Women tend to spend more 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.
2:10:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, even higher than I just guessed. That so holds true because I just...
2:10:40 Dax Shepard? You know, I don't have anything in Nashville that I need, i.e. a workbench, paws, powered screw guns, trash bags, mops. So I went to Home Depot in
2:10:55 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
2:10:56 Dax Shepard? 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?
2:11:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're, you're really going for it.
2:11:18 Dax Shepard? I really spent a couple bucks over at Home Depot.
2:11:21 Speaker 01 Well, also because you don't like shopping, so you kind of have to get it all out of the way.
2:11:27 Dax Shepard? I want to go one time to Home Depot for the, yeah, for the rest of my life, which I already am home now and I, I have, I forgot things.
2:11:37 Speaker 01 Whereas I like to just go, I'll just, not Home Depot, but um, I like to just pop in, not even get anything.
2:11:45 Dax Shepard? 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.
2:12:15 Speaker 01 Of course. What if he sees something he might want or get an inspiration?
2:12:21 Dax Shepard? 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 um, we go into 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
2:13:04 Dax Shepard? the way to the car and my dad goes, You know what? When you steal things, things get stolen from you. It 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.
2:13:35 Speaker 01 He couldn't really steal.
2:13:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was like, it was a very like. It's a weird mix of he like, he's demonstrated a lot of integrity, even though he had just stolen a bag of dog food in front of me. It's so memorable.
2:13:47 Speaker 01 I, yeah.
2:13:47 Dax Shepard? Did Ashok ever steal shit and then rethink it?
2:13:51 Speaker 01 No, God, no.
2:13:54 Speaker 01 Listen to me. Immigrants don't have the luxury of stealing.
2:14:00 Dax Shepard? You're right.
2:14:00 Speaker 01 They're too scared.
2:14:01 Dax Shepard? You're right. You're right. Everyone already thinks they're stealing.
2:14:05 Speaker 01 Exactly.
2:14:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:14:07 Speaker 01 Everyone's already looking, looking at them with like, you know, hawk eyes.
2:14:12 Dax Shepard? Do 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?
2:14:20 Speaker 01 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 like third world country and they don't understand paying in America.
2:14:37 Dax Shepard? 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.
2:14:46 Speaker 01 Non-white?
2:14:47 Dax Shepard? Yeah, like when you go like, there's some non-whites. Does that sound very scary?
2:14:52 Speaker 01 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.
2:15:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:15:05 Speaker 01 And then making it the group of people.
2:15:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:15:07 Speaker 01 I'm not for that.
2:15:08 Dax Shepard? Sure, sure.
2:15:09 Speaker 01 Like the browns, the whites, the blacks. I'm not for that. So, yeah, non-whites would apply.
2:15:20 Dax Shepard? Oh, boy.
2:15:22 Speaker 01 Anyway.
2:15:23 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God. I'm so sorry, Bambi literally just sprinted through the backyard with Brombus following her.
2:15:30 Speaker 01 Oh. Oh.
2:15:32 Dax Shepard? You can't imagine anything cuter than two little tiny, tiny, tiny deer sprinting.
2:15:36 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. Be careful with your cars.
2:15:39 Dax Shepard? 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 gotta go so slow in my driveway.
2:15:50 Speaker 01 Um, yeah, that's it. I mean, she was very factual, obviously.
2:15:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:15:55 Speaker 01 So MLMs, wild.
2:15:57 Dax Shepard? Don't participate.
2:15:59 Speaker 01 Oh, one thing, and 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.
2:16:17 Dax Shepard? I do want to say that this episode makes me nervous because I would hate for anyone involved, the one to think that I'm saying they're stupid or anyone involved is stupid because I'm not at all.
2:16:31 Speaker 01 No.
2:16:32 Dax Shepard? I, I, 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.
2:16:51 Speaker 01 I a hundred percent agree. I just do think the system is quite predatory, especially based on all these facts we heard. And so.
2:17:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:17:01 Speaker 01 Um, but that's, yeah, that has nothing to do with the type of person.
2:17:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:17:07 Speaker 01 But I wanted her on, but we didn't plan it well. So maybe another time.
2:17:11 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:17:12 Speaker 01 Well, that's it.
2:17:17 Dax Shepard? I love you.
2:17:18 Speaker 01 Love you.
2:17:19 Dax Shepard? All right. Bye.
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