MLM Global Parasite

I am concerned about the threat MLM poses to the economy in the USA and the global economy as well. In the third world MLMs are turning microloan opportunities for the developing world into pyramid-scam garbage. The pyramid scheme advocacy lobbying group called the "Direct Selling Association" says MLMs did 34 billion dollars of business in 2018, and that same year total box office revenues were around 40 billion dollars (so that it's safe to same MLMs probably made more money than the global movie industry did over the pandemic.)

That is a whole lot of money going up in smoke. That money could be better used anywhere else besides MLM, regardless of how we look at it from individual household to the entire global economy. In a time when our economy has needed that money the most, it is instead being turned into family destruction and shady bank accounts.

But perhaps even worse, MLM wrecks potential entrepreneurs. Regardless if you are a Socialist or a Libertarian, everyone agrees small business is a good thing and the primary source of employment. Everyone who falls for an MLM was enticed by the idea of being an entrepreneur. Once in the MLM they are not going to have the resources they need to start a real small business, and once they get out their heads will then be filled with bad business advice from MLM and self-doubt.

It seems to me that we have here a crisis of education. If we as a civilization value business so much, how come enough business topics aren't covered in basic GED-level education to prevent someone for falling for a scam so obvious as an MLM? The best K-12 program for teaching business right now is not-nothing, but it is an optional after-school club:

So injecting enough business education into basic education to be able to put together a decent business plan is probably not realistic. But in our world of barrages of scam phone calls and shady e-mail offers, we should provide some kind of education to prevent harm from scammery. There are lots of scams out there similar to MLM like other ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes and exist schemes, as well as tons of MLM adjacent scams like fake business gurus, motivational speakers posing as business experts, etc. 

But I doubt we are going to see this kind of education reform any time soon. So then my question is what is the best way the anti-MLM community can educate the general public about scammery? One is a board game called "Boss Babe The Game" which does us the favor of focusing on the problem of MLM generally and related issues around market saturation key to understanding pyramid and Ponzi schemes in general:

There have been some good documentaries on MLM, including Betting On Zero about Herbalife and LuLaRich about LuLaRoe. There is a hilarious fake MLM group on facebook that is great for showing the problems with MLM through humor. There's also now a wealth of good anti-MLM information on YouTube. All of these things are going in the right direction.

Change Cycles

From an academic perspective I have noticed something over the course of the pandemic which I call Four Phase Change Cycles. First let's note that the human mind already categorizes seasonal changes this way:

1. Winter is a time of stasis, were we huddle down and live off of stored resources, brutally enduring the status quo whatever that may be.
2. Spring is a new time of opportunity, were we are able to go out and explore the changes that may have happened while we were hiding in Winter.
3. Summer is when we are following through on our best opportunities we discovered in the Spring, and discarding the others.
4. Fall is when we finish up our year's work. Harvest time is when we collect the bounty that we previously worked for. This prepares us to survive another Winter.

The most obvious Four Phase Change Cycle is the "OODA Loop." OODA loops were discovered as the US Military learned to train fighter pilots better, and this same OODA Loop concept is now sometimes used to train other types of soldiers, police and security. OODA Loops give us a model for how humans make split second decisions:

1. Observe: this is status quo, just paying attention to what is going on in your environment.
2. Orient: when a threat emerges in your environment, you consider the implications this for has you.
3. Decide: this is when you decide what you are going to do about the threat.
4. Act: this is when you react to the threat.

Three points about OODA Loops. First in an emergent situation it is important to be able to course correct quickly based on new information: when fighting against an opponent whoever is making decisions faster will have an advantage, because the chaos of combat requires us to adapt quickly, or in other words "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." Second the number one job of training is to make your OODA Loops faster: if you have trained a low kick thousands of times, you don't have to think about how to do the low kick once you have decided that's what you need to do. Third is that in a split second decision, the Winter or "status quo" is observe, Spring or "new opportunity" is Orient, Summer or "following through" is Decide, and Fall or "harvest" is Act.

But this also applies to group development. "Tuckman's Stages of Change" identifies four inevitable phases a group will go through in order to do a job effectively for a any real length of time:

1. Forming is the honeymoon phase where everyone is polite and tries to stay out of each other's way.
2. Storming is the choas that happens when people get comfortable enough to start being really honest with each other about their disagreements and personality differences.
3. Norming is when the group creates ground rules and processes to get things done as they resolve disagreements and determine what issues have to be compromised on.
4. Performing is the amazing work a group that has been through the first three stages together can get done.

BEWARE THE NAYSAYERS who want to add extra phases to this. For example people want to end an "adjourning" phase, but that is delusional because when groups terminate it is usually with very little warning. Beyond that it is more likely a Performing group will have new membership throwing them back into the Forming stage than it is that the group will terminate. These change cycles evolve their subject.

And I will go one step further than all of the above and dare say that the Transtheoretical Model of Change, also known as "stages of change" in addictions counseling, also only has 4 phases:

1. Maintenance: status quo, whatever your habits already are.
2. Contemplation: you realize one of you habits is bad and it needs to go.
3. Preparation: you put everything together you need to in order to get ready to quit.
4. Action: you stop your habit. When your habit has been stopped for a long time, you find yourself back in the Maintenance stage with a new status quo with healthier habits.

Some naysayers feel that "Maintenance" is a 5th stage and the 1st stage should be called "precontempaltion" (aka "denial.") However if we see you as a continuously evolving individual we do not define you buy your original bad habit. Instead we recognize you have moved on, possibly to quit another bad habit you have. Other naysayers want to say there is another stage called "relapse" which is just as irrelevant to this model as "adjourning" is to Tuckman's model above. (Of course things don't go smoothly, but that's exactly why adding another phase is a bad idea: complicating the model doesn't keep unexpected things from happening.)

And thus we see that coming from very different disciplines, humans generally construct and make effective use of models of change with four phases:

1. Winter: maintenance, forming, observe.
2. Spring: contemplation, storming, orient.
3. Summer: preparation, norming, decide.
4. Fall: action, performing, act.

I get impatient with people who develop a victim mindset from having unrealistic expectations for change. The world is rapidly becoming a better place but of course that is messy. Have some perspective.

Street Fighting

Most striking martial arts intentionally develop effective wide-hook hand strikes as part of their curriculum. These are as fundamental to Choy Li Fut as jabs are to Boxing:

Mike Tyson was famous for powerful overhands and hooks. However one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time used these kind of punches as a core part of his effective strategy that often won by KO:

A lot of people on the internet criticize punches-that-are-not-straight-punches as "wide," "swinging wild," "sloppy," "hay makers" or "wind up punches." Here's an example of someone stereotyping all wide punches like this:

When emotion takes over technique is replaced by the body's natural attack mechanisms. When a fight escapes control of the judges and referee, what gets used are: 

1. those wide punches used by Tyson and Fedor,
2. low kicks, 
3. clinching and 
4. grappling for position on the ground (without submission holds.) 

I would add that these are legitimate techniques, so you can train to do them well. But are these the most important techniques to get good at to protect yourself in a street fight?

What is important to beginners is a critical question, and I think we need to explore this question further as martial arts continues to evolve.

Under the Banner of Heaven

On Amazon in around 2006 I left a nasty review of "Under the Banner of Heaven" (UBH) by John Krauker. What is strange is people who read my critique of UBH reached out to me trying to correct my Mormonism, ignoring my critiques of the book. (I am sure I will enjoy the TV series based on his book because I love me some true crime drama, and because I have enjoyed related media like the series "Big Love.") Here I will regale you with that tale and then illustrate how my views have matured since then.

UBH attacks LDS as a whipping boy for organized religion, using fringe cases of murder by extremists Mormons who aren't even LDS. Krauker blames LDS by way of association for these criminal actions, digging up Mountain Meadows Massacre drama, ignoring the historical context of how violent the Old West was in general. And he absolutely follows that up with anti-theist rants that struck me as somewhat Islamophobic when I read this book back in 2006-ish. 

After reading my review a sad man e-mailed me complaining about my review of UBH. LDS was bad because a friend of his had to sell space on her body for a tattoo artist to practice when a bishop wouldn't help her with rent money. (It was the Problem of Evil applied to LDS specifically: if God is Good, and God made Everything, how come Evil exists?) The sad man asked me how I dare defend such a violent religion, and complained that the LDS religion destroyed his family. The sad man's wife didn't leave him exclusively because of his abandoning of his faith, but apparently he wanted a lot of other things to change about their lifestyle and the wife and kids were not having that. 

So I replied to the sad man,"you say God could not have a church where in some cases it does not work as well as advertised for families, or a church where leaders make mistakes. But in school I have studied numerous global human services problems, and the one that haunts me is child soldiers in Africa. Those kids are forced to kill their own family members in front of the rest of their village so that they can never return, and then are used as sex slaves for that army until they are old enough to use an AK-47. If we can have a God that would allow something like that to happen, then I think that same God could have a Church with flawed leaders and flawed members." His reply expressed disgust for my my cynicism, and the conversation ended when I sent him the lyrics of this song:

LDS believe in the REAL divine, whatever that may be, and we do dare name that divine "Jesus." We live in the world we do, and it is a dark place. Jesus may have a very different value system from the rest of humanity. Or at least that's how I saw it then.

A few years ago I became interested in LDS apologetics because I had a younger friend who was interested in LDS and I thought he deserved betters answers than my dark rivethead views on life. Kwaku El on YouTube pointed out something I had always known about LDS but I didn't realize the philosophical significance of before: the LDS reject entirely the premise of Ex Nihilo.

Ex Nihilo is the belief that God makes things out of nothing. The problem is ancient peoples never experienced anything like that, and never believed anything like that: everything that was created in the ancient world was created from other raw materials. Ex Nihilo wasn't even formalized until the 2nd Century AD, so that none of the Christians, Jews, Samaritans, Romans, Philistines or anyone else you read about in the Bible ever actually believed that God "created the universe out of nothing."

The actual belief is that 1st century Christians and others at their time or before had was that God created the universe out of chaotic unorganized matter. LDS see all of humanity as "children of God," so that our mortal existence is part of an ongoing act of creation, as we become more God-like through trying to be better people and through our eventual Resurrection from death. Life is then an ongoing battle between God and chaos.

As someone with a lefty activist background, I never really identified with the "warrior codes" (Chivalry, Bushido, etc.) found in the martial arts, because I didn't see myself as a warrior, but as part of a resistance against oppression.  But seeing Kwaku El's point here helps me appreciate the role of the warrior, because we like God fight to establish the order we desire in a chaotic and unforgiving universe. The world is indeed a dark place, but that's not God's fault.

So again I reject Krauker's anti-thesim in UBH. In Tai Chi we realize that when things are good it is time to watch out for vulnerabilities, but when times are bad it's time to search for and exploit opportunities. A dark chaotic world is an opportunity for us to create the world WE want to have, and we do so primarily by choosing what rules we want to live by. You may not like the can-of-answers that is the LDS religion, but your contempt for my empowerment sounds like a you problem.

Sham Focus

"Sham Focus" is focusing on the fact that MLM is a sham first, before being distracted by other annoyances (cult overtones, personal health consequences, poor product value, etc.) For those who don't understand why MLM doesn't work, every MLM ever has convincing arguments as to why their specific MLM is not like the others. Thanks to a Trump endorsement, ACN did significant financial and reputation damage to multiple people I know after those same people had already sworn off other MLMs:

Part of why I was able to get out of Herbalife in the 90's as quickly as I did was that I did not recruit downline. A few of my friends warned me I was getting involved in a "Pyramid Scheme," even as other friends were trying to join my downline. However, once I was out of Herbalife I didn't really understand what was wrong with MLM until I ran into an endless-chain-scheme that worked in 3 phases: 

1. I read an advertisement in the paper which read "turnkey mail order business, send self addressed stamped envelope (SASE) to [a post office box.]" 
2. I got a convincing letter back in my SASE that said if I send them just $10 they will send me a package that will get me started in the business. 
3. In return for my $10 was the final "package," another letter that read: including the final letter I was now reading, the first letter I received in my SASE, and the advertisement I originally read in the paper, I now had everything I needed to run my own turn key mail order business. 

Obviously there was no way for that business to work because sooner or later if everyone who lost $10 started pulling the same sham, they would eventually run out of people gullible enough to fall for it. Understanding this endless chain scheme helped me see why MLM does not work and thus avoid any further participation in MLM. I challenge you and your friends to openly discuss the following:

1. Why don't you send money or bank account information to a Prince who contacted you randomly by e-mail?
2. What is "Affinity Fraud" and why should you avoid it?
3. What is an Exit Scam?
4. What is a Ponzi Scheme?
5. What is the difference between an Endless Chain Scheme and a Pyramid Scheme?
6. What would you have to do to "legalize" a scam in order to get away with it and avoid prosecution?
7. How would "legalization" of a scam impact that scam's victims?
8. What is the difference in risks between owning stock through an Index Fund, vs investing your time and money in a semi-legalized pyramid scheme (MLM)?
9. How does the risk of participation in MLM compare to the risk of participating in an illicit pyramid scheme or gambling at a casino?
10. Why are people who are interested in real business concerned about "market saturation?"

However most of us are not going to get together to discuss THAT over the weekend. Here are some other strategies I have seen that I like for getting hip to the MLM sham:

• Balls Falls Ostrich Egg Consultants is a spoof MLM that illustrates what is wrong with MLM through humor. Right now I believe it is mostly good for keeping people from joining new MLMs after they got out of previous ones, but their proselytizing of Balls Falls Ostriches is a notable example of reaching out to people caught up in scammery.
• I have a strategy for undermining the MLM mindset by building on the victim's doubts regarding their upline and downline.  My "How to Succeed at Network Marketing" ploy aims to educate the MLM victim regarding market saturation and what a legitimate business model might look like. 
• Encourage anyone considering joining an MLM to make a business plan considering both time and money they will be spending to participate in the MLM. Ask "could you possibly become financially independent doing this direct selling without recruiting others? Considering that others are being recruited to sell the same thing in your social network and community, how much of this stuff do you think you can actually sell month after month?"
• Ask anyone currently in MLM to keep financial records of all time and money spent on the MLM, and have them go over their records with you. Help them include anything they have forgotten in their records, including the cost of training, inventory, travel and how much they value their own time they could have spent not doing the MLM. When they see issues, explain to them the problem is the corrupt business model, not their lack of effort or ability.
• VanDruffs "What's Wrong With Muti-Level Marketing?" is the document that recruited me to the cause of anti-MLM in the 90's, long before Reddit ever existed. It does a great job of putting the problem of MLM being a sham first, before explaining their other annoyances regarding MLM.
• There are a lot of good YouTube videos regarding MLM now that emphasize the fundamental business problems with MLM. I think this one video helps illustrate the problem faster than anything else:

Martial Arts Evolution

I hypothesize there have been two main stages of Martial Arts Evolution so far (1.0 and 2.0,) and we are now moving into a 3rd stage (3.0.) First understand that children wrestle and swing sticks at each other in mock battles naturally without adult supervision. Free sparring is fun and natural and anthropologically speaking probably predates formal martial arts training. Martial arts that do NOT have free sparring have degenerated into incomplete (0.?) martial arts. These incomplete martial arts are usually based on older arts that did have free sparring. 

Martial Arts 1.0: Traditional Martial Arts

Martial Arts that have been around a long time and have a systematized form of free sparring are what I would call the first generation of complete martial arts, or Martial Arts 1.0. This includes Fencing, Wrestling, and many Eastern Martial Arts. These Traditional Martial Arts have curriculum driven by two main factors: 

1. Tradition - often based on drills taught to soldiers for life and death combat, techniques continue to be studied even when considered obsolete by modern soldiers. 
2. What works in free sparring with other people studying the same martial art.

The most common martial art in the world, Tai Chi, is an example of a Traditional Martial Art:

Martial Arts 2.0: Mixed Martial Arts

In the 80's and 90's people experimented with full contact competition rules that would work for different Traditional Martial Arts to compete against each other. The Martial Arts that competed in these kind of competitions were influenced by other styles, and new Martial Arts formed based on that mindset of training. Examples of these kind of competition formats and styles include Combat Sambo, San Shou, Pankration, etc.

Martial Arts 2.0 curriculum is based on two main factors:

1. The strategies inherited from the multiple Traditional Martial Arts that the individual Martial Art 2.0 was based on.
2. What works when competing against other styles of martial arts.

A great example of Martial Arts 2.0 is Kudo (Judo augmented with Karate):

Martial Arts 3.0: Evolved Self Defense

We are now in an era of the evolution of martial arts where Martial Arts 2.0 has been around a while. Thanks to social media like Facebook and YouTube, martial arts consumers are able to learn a lot about the downsides of martial arts training before they get involved. In fact there seem to be Seven Deadly Sins of martial arts including:

1. Neglecting Beginners: is failing to get real skill into the hands of new students quickly enough. This is often giving beginners too much to practice, so that they don't get good enough at any one skill set to use in self defense while still beginners.
2. Over Specializing: is focusing on one specific type of self defense technique while neglecting other import types of self defense training. For example some styles focus almost exclusively on high kicks while neglecting other strikes, take down defense, knife attacks and situational awareness.
3. Neglecting Sparring: is not having enough free sparring. Usually being Evolved Self Defense will require a martial art to have multiple forms of free sparring instead of focusing on sparring with only one set of rules.
4. Over Training: is putting performance ahead of safety. Combat sports for example are notorious for seriously injuring people while preparing for fights or while fighting in fights.
5. Ignoring Consequences: is ignorance of legal needs of today's martial arts consumer. Just because ground-and-pound is a good idea in the cage doesn't mean that it is a good way to stay out of prison.
6. Assuming Enforcement: is misapplying strategies for police, security and military to civilian martial arts consumers. Most martial arts consumers need to focus on personal safety rather than enforcing rules.
7. Neglecting Weapons: failure to train for dealing with improvised weapons (especially knives.) Contrary to what you see in the movies, knives and other improvised weapons present both a self defense opportunity and personal safety threat to most martial arts consumers much more often than firearms.

It doesn't take long for the potential martial arts student to figure out what is available to them could take too long to learn to be worth their time, make their life a lot worse through training related injury, not actually work at all, potentially land them in prison, give them bad habits for a real self defense situation or ignore basic self defense scenarios people are likely to encounter such as a knife attack. As time goes on, Martial Arts 3.0 curriculum is likely to be based on:

1. Techniques and strategies from Martial Arts 1.0 and Martial Arts 2.0.
2. Fixing the above Seven Deadly Sins with the martial arts training already available.

Christopher Hein teaches a form of Aikido augmented by his experiences in other internal martial arts, training in MMA, participation in Dog Brothers, and careful examination of what his Aikido students really needed. Hein's Dojo (Fresno Aikido) appears to be teaching a form of Martial Arts 3.0, Evolved Self Defense:

It's time for martial arts consumers to think deeply about what we do and do not want out of martial arts training. One possible exercise is to think about what changes a martial art would need to make in order to become Evolved Self Defense. For example I did such a thought experiment with Brazillian Jiu Jitsu here: https://bfgalbraith.blogspot.com/2021/06/how-to-fix-bjj.html

Overtrained

Self defense training should improve your fitness and reduce your injuries if you are attacked, and should help you prevent being attacked, and it shouldn't take away from the rest of your life from being too time consuming. Combat sports does the opposite: it asks you to turn your self defense training into a part time job for the next few decades of your life, guarantees you will be in public fights half naked against very well trained people who will hurt you, and will give you more violence related injury than you were probably likely to suffer without any training at all. The public one on one fights, super intense fight camps, and intense daily training give you skills rapidly in the short term but in the long term may give you injuries that make you less able to defend yourself than if you had NOT done public one on one fights, intense fight camps, and intense daily training. 

In the following an Aikido black belt reports gaining better self defense skills by studying kickboxing and BJJ casually, only to have his over all self defense capacity reduced by preparing to participate in combat sports events:

Imagine how much better off this Aikido Black Belt would have been if he simply did NOT agree to fight publicly. Take the daily over-training and the fight camps out of it, and he would be more physically capable of defending himself than he is now!

In the 90's both of my fights were cancelled because of chronic wrist pain, and I had been training 6 days a week for 4 hours a day for about 18 months when I finally gave up on becoming a pro fighter. I returned to the same instructor several years later to train casually only, and in so doing got a few medals from competing in Tai Chi in the 2001 Tiger Balm Internationals. While I was there I observed the controlled contact San Shou competition and could see instantly that it was of high value to me and other martial arts consumers. However my instructor  dismissed this controlled contact competition as not important enough to distract him from training his boxers and kickboxers:

Training for a controlled contact tournament like the above example is much more appropriate for the average martial arts consumer than training for match on a fight card. This is in my view a huge part of why BJJ has been so successful, instead of relying on a system of pre-arranged fights, they instead focus on a culture of frequent participation in tournaments. Training is then just as casual or intense as any particular martial arts consumer studying BJJ actually wants or needs, without the pressure to strip down and fight half naked in public.

Icy Mike recently had a rant were he bemoaned that "there is no such thing as a self defense school" because there are too many areas of self defense to cover at any one location (firearms, situational awareness, submission grappling, kickboxing, etc.,) and that it would take "dedicating your life" to any one of those areas to become adequately proficient do defend yourself. However this demonstrates the need to distill and focus the material presented to martial arts consumers. Some kickboxing techniques are a lot better than others for self defense: leg kicks, footwork and clinch are a lot more important than higher round kicks and superman punches. Likewise when it comes to grappling, sprawling and escaping from mount and side control is far more important for self defense than arm bars and guard pulls. Most people have faster access to knives than guns in self defense situations.

Is fully possible to have comprehensive self defense systems in today's world, but the people qualified to put such a system together are too distracted by "dedicating their lives to the art," to develop such a system. It's time to appreciate that martial arts consumers are not violence professionals. It is time to evolve self defense and martial arts to the needs of our generation.