2022 MLM Conference

This conference was on two days, Friday June 10th and Saturday June 11th, 2022. These are my personal notes: my bias is written all over my blog, so don't consider this be a accurate source for direct quotes...

Day 1: Friday June 10th, 2022

Part 1: Introduction

(I wasn't taking notes on who was saying what yet...)

1. The DSA enforcement wing mostly reports non-DSA MLMs to the FTC... LOL... DSA legalizes pyramid schemes state-by-state by getting "internal consumption" to count as retail sales. (For me this raises "company store" questions.)
2. Research shows risk factors for joining an MLM include materialism, "knowing it all," impulsivity, being not-good with numbers, financial illiteracy, and lack of access to accurate information (disclosures.)
3. FTC can only go after MLM case-by-case and their most effective tool is a $43k fine that the supreme court is probably not going to support drastic use of. SCOTUS shut down Koscot which now makes it very hard to get reimbursement for MLM victims. (Daffan much latter added that the FTC is more interested in shutting down an organization for making false business claims than it is trying to classify what exactly is wrong with the MLM business model.)
4. SEC cases are very difficult prove, and Pyramid Scheme accusations go to SEC, which is why RICO isn't invoked.
5. The problem with "internal consumption" is MLMs incentivise your own personal consumption, leading to you buying more than you can use or sell. For example "bonuses" are paid out in payments where  you have to keep moving the same amount of MLM product as when you got the bonus in the first place in order to get the payments. This leads to sunk cost fallacy for staying in the MLM.
6. MLMers can been seen as in 3 groups: Recruits (most people who fall for the scam,) Grinders (who try to make it their day job,) and the Profiteers at the very top (who make most of the money.) Grinders are the most abused victims who lose the most to the MLM. "Major events" (hype conferences) use a lot of prayer meeting style visualizations instead of sales training to keep the person focused on staying in the MLM. Real employers pay money and provide benefits to retain employees while grinders pay to retain themselves in the MLM.
7. MLM use unique vocabulary and constantly changing definitions to obscure what is going on. The DSA said "everyone has their own definition of what is MLM." The top MLM people actually exaggerate their lifestyles to recruit down-line, so they know the business practice is deceptive from the beginning!

Part 2: LuLaRich

1. LuLaRich producer Blye Pagon Faust mentioned that MLM is part of the "affinity fraud" problem in the The LDS Church. 
2. Faust recommended more mandatory transparency on income disclosure and how many distributors are already in your area, as well as regulation on how many distributors should be allowed to be recruited in one area. 
3. LuLaRoe has numerous spin off MLMs by LuLaRoe family members. Faust's advice to potential MLM recruits is "be educated and know what you are getting into." 
4. My question for her was first regarding weather or not the LuLaRoe founders believe in the MLM model, she answered "they are so performative it's hard to tell... they wanted to make a buck..." She also stated she believes LuLaRoe was a pyramid scheme.
5. In Q&A Jason Jones pointed out that there doesn't seem to be any such thing as a "good MLM" that doesn't manipulate. Douglas M. Brooks pointed out the FTC has maintained the legend of the "legitimate MLM." William Keep pointed out that MLMs claim to build entrepreneurs yet offer nothing to do that.

Part 3: Regulators

(Note the Q&A started with my question asking the FTC's Daffan if there was any such thing as an MLM that was not a Pyramid Scheme. When Professor/facilitator William Keep finally said "can any of us give an example of an well run model MLM?" everyone shook their head no... though Daffan mentioned Advocare went from being a Multi-Level company to just being a regular company. That said...)

1. Kathleen Daffan from the FTC... one reason why MLM is under reported is people blame themselves for why they didn't succeed in the MLM.  First contact is through social media (49%.) Cryptocurrency and payment apps are preferred over others. Crypto currency scams are a massive problem for the FTC right now, and many crypto scams ARE MLMs. "Bitcoin Funding Team" was about "paying it forward," claiming it would help people pay for college or get surgery, but it ended up being highly focused on getting others to recruit. 
2. Daffan mentioned Financial Education Services as a services based MLM. It was a credit repair "pyramid scheme." She encourages everyone to check out FTC.gov/Subscribe. Report suspicious MLM activities to the FTC, they use the reports every day! In the Q&A she said to mention what documents, videos, recordings, etc you have. She clarified that their MLM and Pyramids Scheme data is grouped together. The FTC encourages consumers in the case of MLMs to do careful business planning.
3. Irish regulator Paul Hanna mentioned there is a generally huge problem with consumer education. It has been evident this has been a problem with crypto scams, but some of those crypto scams some are heavily recruitment oriented (Pyramid Scheme.) They have searched property and pressed charges on wellness opportunity MLM in the last year (it's a 5 year prison offense in Ireland.) Witnesses seem reluctant to report MLM, victims go on to other MLMs. In Q&A he suggested all MLM have criminal conduct in the business model.
4. Marketing Professor (Munster Technological University) Maire O Sullivan notes that debt in general being marketed is a known problem. Lending Tree reported 1/3 females used credit card to get into MLM (1/10 actually got a loan!) 2/5 Americans report feeling pressure to buy MLM products in the last year. Microfinance has gone for profit raising questions to its efficacy to relieve poverty. Communities share credit pressuring individuals to repay. 
5. O Sullivan explained Grameen America focuses on micro loans to female entrepreneurs in the USA. Their CEO is an AVON LADY!!! 1/3 of the loans go to MLM! The other 2/3 of the loans "relieved hardship," but the MLM loans did not. 15-18% Grameen loans going to get women into more debt from MLM. Herbalife locations are clustered around Grameen offices. They include MLM distributorship as a business opportunity unlike most other lenders.
6. Economist Dr. Elizabeth Villagomez - mostly female MLM membership makes this a gender equality issue. Feminism is used to push their schemes. MLM are pitched as a way to reconcile work and family life. UNDP (United Nations Development Program) has funding from Mary Kay. The UN is being used to white-wash MLMs. Villagomez asks "is it just a platform to recurit Mary Kay members in the future?" Likewise Herbalife has joined the United Nations Global Compact, bragging that they are helping with world hunger, mentioning their 3rd World distributors. Amway is involved informally. She pointed out in the Q&A that there are probably human rights violations going on in MLM with the manipulation, etc.
7. Polish regulator Dariusz Lomowski: the core pyramid scheme is 3 Rs "Return Relies on Recruitment" (no promotion = no pyramid.) MMM was a pyramid scheme by a Russian who promoted it as a pyramid scheme. The pyramid promoters in Poland are called "Jumpers" as they go from scam to scam. The scams are called "Phoenix" or "Chameleon" because as soon as you shut it down, it reappears with a new appearance. One specifically recruits people with disabilities! In Q&A: he mentioned this is an unfair business to business practice issue in Polish government & law.

Day 2: June 11th, 2022

Part 4: how we got were we are today

1. Robert L. Fitzpatrcik (author of Ponzinomics) - no documentary has been made on MLM over all, and education is lacking on MLM. He has a new podcast for educators and parents and educators called Ponzinomics 101. MLM destroys lives all the way to divorce and suicide. MLM has gotten much worse, MLMs globally now do 1 trillion dollars in business, and historically law enforcement has avoid it. "MLM is a financially lethal virus with no vaccine." India has accused Amway as being a 7 billion dollar ponzi scheme, but no news organization in the USA is reporting it. Economic anxiety is the environment in which MLM thrives. Mothers is the fastest growing MLM demographic. Another issue is "mind control" and how effective this has been at manipulating the general public. Governmental corruption and collusion is another problem. MLM has expanded massively since it was first exposed. Law enforcement and government has failed on this, as they continue to imply MLM is legit, without so much as one example of a "good" MLM. Politics "not questions of fact" that account for lack of government action. There is no way that our government doesn't know, but government officials go into a revolving door for working for MLM. MLM is able to claim legitimacy. MLM tells the voters that all their problems are on them so government's role in their problems can be ignored. Walter Mondale in the 70's proposed law to outlaw MLM, but in the late 70's congress allowed Amway to legitimize endless chain schemes. It takes a lot of effort to legitimize MLMs. "We have seen enough evidence... politicians are influenced by money... while public opinion is a malleable thing... they are dancing to the tune of their donors... congress does not reflect us..." The MLM cartel threatens small countries to keep them from outlawing MLM outright, and the WTO is compliant in this. MLMs do not compete with each other, they are part of the same cartel that only compete with each other for MLM victims. 
2. Stephen Barrett, M.D. (creator of Quack Watch) - quack medical devices used by MLM would be simple for government to regulate but they don't. He has tried to get a distributorship in all medical MLMs, and all of the medical devices were useless. This creates medical harm when people do not get medical treatment they need. He knows a woman who recently died 4 years early because of reliance on one of these devices. Psychological, social, family and political harm also a results. Zyto is a quack device that scans your hand on your computer to get product recommendations using "galvanic skin response." Zyto got clearance from the FDA without the FDA knowing what the software actually does. "Healy" is another problematic MLM-related device. When it comes to quack devices MLM regulation, "case by case does not work." He wishes the FTC would revoke the rules that allow quack devices, and the FTC should force the franchise transparency rules on MLMs. On activism "you do the best you can, you push the buttons you can... you just have to realize there are many more competing messages... the internet is probably our best hope."
3. Jason Jones (private practice and now government lawyer) - we are in a bad situation with MLM. Finding solutions is complicated and not his area. Lack of enforcement vs lack of regulation. MLM companies are doing things that could be enforced criminally. Enforcement is very expensive/labor intensive. Every state and also federal laws have anti-fraud laws. The FTC gets 100,000 complaints a day and they don't have enough lawyers to go after the 1,000 MLMs out there, but FTC is very effective when they act. The FTC needs hundreds of more people to do their work better. This is comparable to the IRS being understaffed. Decreased mobility in USA culture creates conditions that the MLMs make the MLM anti-having-a-job pitch resonate. Pay inequality in corporate structures are part of those conditions. In the press it's hard to get anti-MLM posts through editors. There are pro-MLM in the media, often paid for by MLM money, then MLM refers to this to legitimize themselves to the MLM recruits. Related advertising is fraudulent, appearing on legit websites who don't screen their ads. Distributors use social media, which shows the "pestering" to the general public, but make it easier to target vulnerable populations. Since the beginning big powerful law firms have been willing to defend MLM. Lower level firms even bring defamation cases against MLM victims. MLMs put most of the liability on the distributors themselves. MLM uses cult techniques to sell fraudulent products to form a cartel of multiple MLMs, and they share information on how to manipulate effectively with each other. Self-help "tools industry" has spun off of MLM. "Blame congress... the enforcers are on our side... I hope we can do more lobbying... so much international MLM is exported from the United States... If congress doesn't act it will get worse." He wishes the leaders of Amway criminally prosecuted. Arbitration requirements should be removed from contracts. "There is not a lot of popular support for MLMs... call your congressman twice a week... they respond to pressure..." 
4. D. Anthony Miles - the business model is flawed. They dismiss negativity, avoid feedback and make fake friendships with victims. Just because you have a relationship with someone doesn't mean you should be in business with them. He has a classification of 6 MLMs victim types: follower, unemployed, ambitious, uneducated, intelligent, gullible, cult member, junkie, wannabe entrepreneur, church member and humanitarian. He has found Freud's "gullibility" model helpful. MLMs exploit family, friend and professional relationships. MLMs appeal to greed. The Small Business Association will not give money to people involved in MLM and see MLM as problem of people not having good business education. Relationships are permanently damaged by MLM, and there have been related suicides and murders.

Part 5: social media creator panel (Q&A opened my question about is business education [example market saturation] being used to prevent MLM participation.)

1. Tailor Leigh (the Antibot) - anti-MLM content should be entertainment, advocacy, education and activist. Stories of MLM victims are powerful. Education is the main goal of MLM content. Reaction to individuals has become more popular. She has addressed Gurus who provide motivation to keep people in MLM so the MLM victims will keep buying this kind of training. Gurus serve as ring leaders in the MLM community. Deep dives need to make sure things in the deep dives applies to all MLMs. Content creators should have calls to action in their content. "Not all my goals are anti-MLM related... I want to get more viewers to report to the FTC more often." Educating people on business will be effective. The public perception has shifted, 5 years ago few people knew MLMs existed, now young people understand that MLMs are scams. She uses "commercial cult" to describe MLM.
2. Dave Vaughan (on Twitter and Instagram) - agrees with Tailor, and it also therapeutic and empowerment. "It's silly to say your are anti-MLM... it's silly to say you are against crime..." Stages of grief applies to MLM participation. Should we critique individual behavior at all? This strategy is now more educational than it was a few years ago. International downlines need to be covered more. We need to look more at the DSA... for the consumers themselves who ARE the distributors. We need to look at residual problems called by the deceptions of MLMs. MLMs are not businesses themselves. Design free courses on manipulation and small business. Educators are starting to focus more on financial literacy. A later question brought up:  https://www.foolproofme.org/
3. Savvy (Savvy Writes Books) - it is all 4 (education, activism, advocacy and entertainment.) She tries to focus on the intersection of small business vs MLM scams. She is not just anti-MLM but pro small business. Critiquing individual behavior can show the lack of work life balance in MLM, and it's important to recognize that all MLMers are victims. It's also good to use deep dives to show how MLM is able to get away with their antics. We need to provide more information on how to work from home that is not MLM, more information on how a small business should operate. She will continue to work to keep MLM out of craft fairs, but also focusing on bad advice books the ultimately result in MLM participation. Educating public about differences between real business vs MLM is effective to prevent MLM. "Savvy Business Owner" is a related book she wrote. "An MLM won't do what it's doing if people don't sign up." The main thing we need to focus on is the core structure/flawed business model.
4. Monica Hayworth - it is a mix of all of these things. With reaction videos only get legal threats from individuals, but with deep dives you are more likely to get decease and desist orders. Reaction videos reveal MLM tactics. "Ad Hominem attacks to not help the cause at all." We need to find more solutions... come up with solutions for new moms... I want to spread more education... help new moms figure out what they can do instead of MLM.
5. Michelle Carpenter (mlmchange.org) - she got out of an MLM less than a year ago. Timing, platform and creators has a lot to do with entertainment vs. advocacy vs. education vs. actvism. There are different niches in this entertainment market. For critiquing individual MLM behavior, it is mostly entertainment. Deep dives are less polarizing and more helpful to people thinking about joining MLMs. We need content on how to prevent fraud and vocabulary often used by anti-MLM but aren't well understood (affinity fraud, love bombing, etc.) I want to make it easier to get involved and be self advocates. She is hopeful in that that MLM movement is accelerating quickly. She was recruited to MLM as a teenager.
6. Elaine Linga (Invested Lifestyle [Tagalog and English]) - it's mainly education and entertainment. She focuses on deep dives and goes for emotional reactions. Deep dives keep getting views, and the search engine delivers years later. She is harassed by MLMs outside of the USA that get dismissed because she's a USA citizen. There are more voices for MLM than against. More content need to use MLM tools against MLM... provide inspiration to speak up... if you are educated by someone you trust it will have more impact... educate the educators... one teacher she knows teaches her kids about MLMs... She wants to apply what she is learning about business and government professionally to anti-MLM... she may be going to law school... She made a video to encourage people to use their own safe business practices (like giving a 7 day break before making a commitment,) before starting any business, especially an MLM. In the Philippines it is the "Wild West" of MLM with no regulations. Greed is causing the MLMs to ask for $10,000 starter kits, so that public opinion may be turning on MLM there. MLMs know they are scamming people. Asking questions about MLM can get you terminated, and it results in them joining anti-MLM.

Part 6: Leaving an MLM

1. Talented Ladies Club: entertains people with educational business content, and her anti-MLM message is just part of that. She presented a great video presentation that I will be posted on YouTube, but ultimately encourages someone currently in MLM to make a simple profit & loss statement and to leave if they aren't making money.
2. Alanda Carter (Recovering Hunbot,) & Roberta Blevins (featured in LuLaRich,)- People need to know they not alone when they are leaving MLM. 79% of people felt shame in leaving their MLM, 98% would not do it again. 59% saw MLM as a scam they couldn't involve anyone else in.   42% said the thing that helped them the most was true stories of others in MLM.  82% said they had been given a step by step plan that could be exactly copied to become rich. People still in the MLM often feel bullied. Contracts have been cancelled for speaking out against others in the MLM being mistreated. Sam from LuLaRich has a court date coming up this summer. MLM leaves people psychologically damaged. We need to be patients with ourselves when we get out of MLM. All MLMs are basically authority cults. To get the FTC to look into a specific MLM, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
3. Steve Hassan (creator of BITE model) - It is important to keep the door open to people within MLM. Possibility: get a financial advisor to "help" them in the MLM. "Identity interruption" is in the DSM 5. There can be negative psychological impacts after leaving a cult. He has an "influence continuum." Leaving cults is hard because of family and friends in the cults. We should respect that we are all a unique expression of God. Being too empathetic can lead to burnout.

(Note: there was a lot of problematic association of Trump supporters and LDS being in cults in this session. The day before Blye Pagon Faust tried to explain LDS beliefs about paying more tithing in order to get a higher rank in the LDS church* as making them feel like they had to "be successful," using the first use of the phrase "affinity fraud" in the conference. It seems like we LDS have a PR problem from hell here if we don't distance ourselves formally and specifically from MLM.)

My immediate take away from this conference:

Pyramid Schemes (PS) have a 90% chance of you losing money, while MLM have a 99% chance. PS don't fit the BITE model, but MLMs do. The FTC wants to pursue MLM for deceptive practices rather than for being a PS. PS rip you of one time, while MLM tries get you to be a "grinder" causing much more financial and social damage over your lifetime. PS don't use the UN and WTO to force their way into developing economies like MLMs do. Are the MLM Gurus right about MLMs not being Pyramid Schemes? Are MLMs instead something far worse than Pyramid Schemes?

*Fausts take on LDS tithing had good intentions, but from an insider POV doesn't hold water for the following reasons:

1. It's an all volunteer organization and it doesn't make much sense to want more responsibility in it. People who want to be promoted in the Church for social status are called things like "aspirerers" and are generally considered by most other members to not have a life.
2.  What does get you promoted within The Church is higher ranking church members feeling that you can be relied upon because you have: a stable and happy home life, a devout spouse, tolerance for giving up your free time for serving The Church, a love for people, popularity, good personal ethics, and good people skills. Income does play a factor in having a happy home life, so Faust is indirectly not-wrong here. This is why self-depreciating humor is so common with LDS is because we are NOT trying to get volunteered for greater responsibility within the organization. 
3. True story: when I was in the Skyway Ward of the Kent stake, I would play single-player Poker on my Linux netbook in the church lobby when waiting for others to get done with meetings. I successfully avoided any official church duties this way for years. Unfortunately they discovered that my gambling problem was fake AF and I ended up serving a year or two in the Elder's Quorum Presidency (a non-trivial time commitment.)

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:

LDS vs MLM

As I mentioned before on this blog I am both LDS and anti-MLM, and have been since the 1990's. In fact anti-MLM has played a major role in my religious path and my religious convictions contribute to my concerns about MLM. I am concerned about trend in the anti-MLM community to be anti-religions generally and more recently be producing media openly hostile towards LDS specifically.

As an activist myself I know how easy it is to get caught up in Black and White thinking. When the rest of society thinks everything is fine but your issue is being ignored, you have to make strong statements and take sides. For example when I was with Seattle Indymedia in the early 2000's and marching in anti-war protests, most Americans thought Iraq was full of weapons of mass destruction and invading Afghanistan was a fine idea indeed. Meanwhile at Seattle Indymedia we were looking at the photographs of blown up children that the main stream media at the time was ignoring. "Saddam Hussein is the worst threat facing his own people" was the talking media point at the time, ignoring what the "smart bombs" of George W. Bush's "shock and awe" had done to the people of Baghdad. Under those kind of circumstances you have to simplify your message, "War is Bad."

However it's easy to go from "War is Bad" to "all GOP candidates are bad because the GOP likes War," to "all people who vote GOP are bad because they are burning children alive in the middle east." It is not in fact true that someone or some organization is objectively evil because we don't agree with their ideology.

And War IS Bad, there is almost no upside whatsoever, peaceful resolution of conflict is preferable every time. In that same sense MLM IS Bad, it's a hard cold fleecing of the general public. People want to compare corporations they don't like to MLM, but this dilutes how problematic MLM actually is. Many despise Wal*Mart for their problematic labor practices and adverse effect on the local economy, but the upside is that community has access to a wider selection of cheaper goods. As problematic as Wal*Mart is, it can't be said to be a hard cold fleecing.

And in my view the most obvious social problem with the LDS religion is that like Wal*Mart a major expansion of our faith in your community may have economic ramifications. With mandates against alcohol and tobacco local breweries, vineyards, gas stations and restaurants could lose vital income. More importantly the donations to The Church don't necessarily stay inside your community as much as they would with local pastors doing their own thing. However I see the trade off with this in that our local clergy is all volunteer and thus not profit-motivated behind what they preach, our consistent involvement in disaster relief around the world, our preaching of tolerance, our encouragement of making good life choices (discouraging YOLO,) and a religious doctrine which facilitates each individual personally contacting and developing a relationship with divine rather than relying on professionals to do that for them.

However the dark side to LDS expansionism that-even-I-can-not-justify is Utah cultural influence of MLM. I have never lived in Utah and also find Utah culture slightly odd. However what anti-MLM activists need to know is that leaders of The Church in Salt Lake City are openly opposed to MLM. 

The problem is that Salt Lake Leadership has not called out MLM specifically by name, but have in general opposed "Affinity Fraud", to include all forms of scammery, including many things the anti-MLM community finds annoying: bad actors in the education industry, fake business gurus, all forms of ponzi and pyramid schemes, other financial scams and any form of "unwise investment": https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/official-statement/affinity-fraud

Yet MLMs are exceedingly effective and convincing both politicians and common voters that MLMs are not "Affinity Fraud." Can you imaginable how potent would it be if the leadership of The Church in Salt Lake City were to come out against Mutli-Level Marketing specifically? Pop LDS apologist Kwaku El has, and Mitt Romney almost spits in contempt when he mentions Trump's "Vitamin Network." MLM is incompatible with the prescribed LDS lifestyle in that it:

• Defines happiness as fundamentally about "success" and materialism.
• Is inherently dishonest.
• Encourages participation in MLM instead of other important life activities like pursuing education.
• Is notoriously bad for marriages.
• Is financially unsound. 

Salt Lake is notoriously difficult to influence by activists, but more recently they have taken an interest in lefty social issues. Dan Reynolds (lead singer of Imagine Dragons) is an LDS member who is an LBGT activist, specifically concerned with LGBT youth isolation from family members, homelessness and suicide, especially in Utah. When he organized a concert around this issue, he asked Salt Lake to support his effort, even though he expected strong opposition from them. Instead they not only fully endorsed the concert, they also mentioned they had recently approved a children's worship song that was relevant. The former LDS lead singer of Neon Trees and Reynolds sang that song at the concert: 

As an LDS activist I can tell you that ever since the LDS community was chased out of the USA at gunpoint the Salt Lake leadership has reacted very poorly to outsiders making broad negative generalizations about them. The anti-MLM community making hostile videos towards The Church generally is probably the very worst thing they can do to get The Church on board with anti-MLM. This is a lost opportunity for the anti-MLM community's agenda.

The Church is often the whipping boy for organized religion generally, as a sort of best-case-scenario to argue against organized religion (as in the South Park universe for example.) Anti-MLMers including myself will point out the naivete of religious people as a vulnerability that makes them susceptible to MLMs. However, this is exactly why the anti-MLM community should not be alienating believers in organized religion, because alienating our target audience makes it much harder for us to reach them:

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.

Anti-MLM since the 90's

The biggest pet peeve I have is Multi-Level Marketing, also known as Network Marketing by it's proponents and as pyramid schemes by its detractors. The official verbiage of the CDC is to say these organizations "fit the description of a pyramid scheme," before the underfunded CDC slowly shuts them down for being pyramid schemes one by one. There is an urban legend that says there are MLM sales opportunities out there that are not pyramid schemes, but it turns out that those sales jobs also resemble pyramid schemes.

As an adolescent my neighborhood was rocked by two separate tragedies. In two different years, friends of mine's fathers committed suicide. In both cases, these men were having career struggles and decided to put a lot of their time, money and effort into multi-level marketing "opportunities," one of them being Amway. No one else in the neighborhood was as involved in MLMs, and no one else in the neighborhood died that way in those years, leaving our entire neighborhood highly skeptical of MLMs, especially Amway.

When I graduated from high school in 1993 I decided to check out "turn key mail order business." This led me to two highly questionable practices, first Herbalife and then later an actual mail order scam. When I called up the number in the Little Nickel for the first turn-key mail-order business, it turned into an Herbalife recruitment very quickly.

Already skeptical of Amway, I took the Herbalife business claims at face value and decided to give it a try, with the caveat that if I couldn't make money off of sales myself, I wouldn't recruit anyone into my downline. As trained by my upline, I printed out thousands of leaflets and with the help of friends and family canvased the windshields of the parking lots in my county with these "lose weight now, ask me how" leaflets. The calls started coming in, and using the script from my upline, I sold people "Cellular Nutrition" and "Thermogetics" dietary supplement kits.

I had return customers, and had a clientele of a few dozen people all together. At first people were very impressed with the product (I myself enjoyed the "cellular nutrition" as well.) I had numerous friends approach me, saying that they had heard about how successful I had been, and how they wanted to get into my downline. I put them on a waiting list to get into my downline, and explained to them I wasn't sure how legit Herbalife actually was, and that if I could get it to work for me, I would recruit them right away*.

Then the business collapsed. The biggest problem was that after about three months, return customers started complaining that the supplements did not come with the amount suggested in the sales pitch I used from my Herbalife upline. The most glaring example is one of the three products in the Cellular Nutrition kit was a protein shake. I was trained to sell one canister as a one month's supply. This shake was to replace meals 1 or 2 times per day. But the shake canisters only contained 20 servings!

I had to go back to the drawing board and redesign my product offerings. But the problem was NONE of the products aligned up correctly for any sort of resale. The other parts of the Cellular Nutrition kit came in strange, nonsensical amounts as well. The Theromogetics came in two separate pills that had to be taken together, but the amount in the two separate bottles couldn't match up in anyway that made sense. The best case scenario was that Herabalife hadn't seriously thought this product line through for the end seller, which implied the worst case scenario, that Herbalife never intended to make money through the sale of their products outside of their downline in the first place!

Intentional or not, Herbalife did indeed seem to be a pyramid scheme, where recruitment was king and no products were designed to be sold outside of people suckered into joining Herbalife. With all my customers gone and my reputation tarnished, my Herbalife up line disowned me, with two disturbing statements:

1. "The real money is in recruiting in your downline. You aren't doing that, so this is not going to work out for you."
2. "I known you are Mormon, and I know Amway is a big Mormon thing. I can see why you want to recruit your friends into Amway instead of Herbalife, Herbalife isn't as big."

Apparently he didn't hear me when I told him I would never do Amway, or maybe he assumed I was as sleazy and two faced as he was. What is strange though is how he considered Amway to be legitimate. I was done.

So I decided to give the Turn Key Mail Order Business one more try. I sent off an SASE to a PO Box as advertised in the Little Nickel. The response (which looked like something from the 1950's) stated "If you send me $10, I will send you everything you need to start your own Turn Key Mail Order Business, and you will never have to send me any money again afterwords, nor will there be any more required training."

I sent in the $10, full well realizing it was some kind of scam, but wanting to know more about how the scam worked. What I got back read "The last letter I sent you, and this letter as well, are the business that I promised you. All you need to do is take out space in the want ads like I did and do the same thing, and you will have people sending you $10 in the mail, just like me." This simple mail order scam helped me understand exactly what Herbalife and other MLMs are: an "endless chain" scam. Endless chain scams ignore the whole concept of market saturation, assuming an infinite population to profit from. Endless chain scams include all Ponzi and Pyramid type schemes in general, especially MLMs. 

By the late 90's I was serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in the Western Pennsylvania area. In a small town outside of Pittsburgh, a local LDS congregation was purported to have an "apostasy" problem, and my first assignment was to that congregation, probably because I was about 4 years older than most of the other missionaries and had a year of college. At first I made the same observation the other missionaries had made, which is that there was a very large number of congregation members who wore USA-flag ties, every Sunday, and that they regarded themselves as a special group within the congregation. They called themselves "Constitutionalists," and had libertarian political views - including the idea that one should avoid paying taxes, which is antithetical to LDS teachings, and indeed a point of apostasy. There was associated apostate phenomenon, such as unauthorized meetings of Constitionalists in the Chapel after official Church services.

Then while having lunch with one of the Constitutionalists, she started using "residual income" language that was very familiar to me. I clammed up, not saying anything, and listened carefully. Afterwords I told my companion "she's the problem right there. She's doing a multi-level marketing scheme, and the product they are using is far-right literature. She is the center of it, the rest of these people are in her MLM downline." He scoffed at my suggestion, doubting that something as insignificant as an MLM could be leading to the potential excommunication of half of a congregation. But a year later that same companion, who had become one of the highest ranking missionaries in the mission, found an excuse to come visit me: I had been 100% correct on my analysis, and another talented missionary had found it necessary to root out the problem.

Going to college in the mid 2000's I began to realize how politically potent MLMs had become. They had significantly corrupted the GOP (by way of Amway) and had a strong influence even over the Clinton administration (by way of Herbalife.) I was doing an internship for school with Indymedia when they participated in and helped organize some of the biggest anti-war protests in history, and I started to realize that there was a fine line between the political corruption caused by organized criminal enterprise of Amway (and other MLMs) and the corruption caused by the military industrial complex, especially through the Devos family:

The Bush Dynasty was in no small part funded by Amway, and the Bushes had actually been involved in selling Amway to their pyramid scheme victims:

But George W. Bush with his total disregard for truth was even far more involved than his father, choosing a vice president with strong Blackwater connections and selling as much Amway to pyramid scheme victims as he could get away with, a practice he continues today:

But the Democratic Party was not innocent of MLM influence either. Madeleine Albright, Clinton's treasury secretary, was a huckster for Herbalife:

(And later Hillary's campaign in 2016 was rumored to have legal services provided by the Herbalife lawyer farm.)

After finishing grad school and paying off my student loans, I became more involved in Social Media because of other projects I was working on. There I noticed that companies that used to be into direct sales but may have not been MLMs per say (such as Avon and Tupperware) now seemed to have been corrupted by the likes of Amway and Herbalife, and were now full blown pyramid schemes. And now there were hundreds of new MLMs, the most problematic one being ACN promoted by infamous scoundrel Donald Trump.

Some of my LDS friends were involved in ACN, and I remembered a missionary on my mission that was trying to get other missionaries to join the Maelaleuca MLM. I had also learned over the years that Utah, headquarters of the LDS, is also the largest epicenter of the scourge that is MLM. I started to realize that the MLM I had helped to chase out of the LDS in Pennsylvania, (which profited by scamming people into trying to sell the gospel of the Cleon Skousen,) probably had Utah roots and had come to Pennsylvania through LDS subculture. I became alarmed: is LDS necessarily tied to MLM? Is LDS proselyting a real economic threat to a community because of the damage MLM can do?

Concerned about these problems, in January 2013 I started a facebook group called "Mormons Against Multi-Level Marketing." (This group is now called "Stop MLM Schemes.")  LDS leadership is concerned about any form of "affinity fraud," and the LDS leadership has always strongly cautioned against any and all "Get Rich Quick Schemes." I have come to realize that these schemes include fake business gurus, "legit" MLM direct sales (which turn out to also behave like pyramid schemes,) actual Ponzi schemes, fake colleges providing no real training like Trump University, and a hundred other things LDS members could be suckers for, including of course classic MLMs like Amway, Herbalife and ACN. LDS from the beginning have felt humans should strive to be more like God, and get rich quick schemes prevent people from spending their time developing valuable skill sets, and getting good at stuff is a big part of being LDS*.

Starting in 2013 some of the people who joined Mormons Against Multilevel Marketing were not Mormon, saying they could find no other Facebook groups that were truly anti-MLM. Not very many people understood just how bad MLM was and what kind of economic hazard it represented to our society. The MLM "industry" makes around the same amount of money as Hollywood, but instead of providing good jobs and entertaining everyone, the MLM industry just sucks the money out of would be entrepreneurs* and funnels it up into the hands of pyramid scheming miscreants; The MLM industry stunts the growth of our local, national and global economies*. When I spoke of MLM, most people accused me as having a political agenda, or they wrote me off as a conspiracy theorist.

I was shocked when I realized Donald Trump was going to be the GOP candidate in 2016. How could the party of fiscal responsibility be so financially illiterate? Beyond promoting ACN even on The Apprentice, he had sought out another MLM afterwords and promoted it, this time using his own name: the Trump Network. I had the same reaction to the Trump nomination as Mitt Romney.

The media finally took note of MLM as a problem as they looked into Trump's background as he ran for president. It was the first time I had seen any major attention to what I considered one of the world's most serious problems since the 90's. Recently I discovered within the last few years an Anti-MLM movement has started to gain momentum. It is largely led by women on YouTube, and they are producing very informative and entertaining content.

*Going forward I think it is important to look for honest alternatives to MLM. Many people in MLM could be doing legitimate small businesses instead. Part of why I was able to get so many return customers was because I had far less market saturation in my community than if I had recruited several other people into my downline to try to sell Herbalife products in that same area. In fact it was the bad packaging practices of Herbalife itself that led directly to the collapse of my business.

In today's world if you really want to help people get in shape, you should get certified as a personal trainer. Any supplements you incorporate into that practice should be purchased in bulk so you can get them at a discount in order to resell to your fitness customers. You will not find MLM to be helpful in this regard, because their products are overpriced, quality is often questionable, and I personally found the branding/packaging to be designed to reassure pyramid scheme victims rather than to work for fitness customers. The truth is that like most MLM victims my heart really wasn't into fitness, but if it was, here is the small business approach I should have taken:

MLM First Aid

 "My _________ has got sucked into an MLM, what can I do?"  The latest research on personality types presented at the last MLM Conference suggests these two traits make people vulnerable to joining an MLM:

1. Being in any way bad with practical use of numbers. Any failure with personal finance is a huge warning sign.
2. Being the kind of person who is overconfident in their own level of knowledge or wisdom. Most of us are like this in our late teens and early 20's and grow out of it, however it's an easy trap for naturally smart or wise people to fall into.

Anyone who has joined an MLM has failed to do adequate business planning: no one who has thought it through is going to start a chain restaurant like a McD's, if they think that other McD's are setting up in their area at that same time. Help your friend in MLM keep track of:

1. How much money they think they make each month.
2. How much they spend buying any product or service they get from the MLM.
3. How much they spend on any training materials or events that were recommended by the MLM.
4. How much they spend on any related expenses to participating in the MLM, including gas, coffee, etc.

Here are some other ideas...

Get a copy of Boss Babe The Game and play it with your fiends and family:

Ball Falls Ostrich Egg Consultants is a humorous anti-MLM group on facebook which pretends to be an MLM, in order to demonstrate the problems with real MLMs. Some members of this group use it to shield themselves from offers to join MLMs, but it also may be a way to reach out to people already in MLM.

Talk with your loved ones about scams. Why don't you give your bank account number to Nigerian Princes who contact you by e-mail? What is the difference between a Ponzi Scheme and a Pyramid Scheme? If you were going to do a scam, how would you try to get away with it? 

Small Government Creates Small Economy

This is an "I told you so" post on my theory that socialism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin, and that a reduction of socialism results in a reduction of capitalism . But here I also am warning there are other huge parts of our economy that are disastrously under regulated, and they are also going to cause major problems in the future. In 2015, renowned Capitalist/Captain of Industry Bill Gates gave the following prophecy of doom predicting our current COVID-19 pandemic:

Also in 2015 President Obama set up The Office of International Health and Biodefense specifically to deal with pandemics.  In 2016 Trump was elected on a wave of anti-government Tea Party sentiment, and true to his supporters President Trump left many cabinet positions understaffed, underfunded, and in many cases totally unfilled. This led to the gutting of The Office of International Health and Biodefense, which President Trump specifically state was to save money on government spending:

To be clear, the World Health Organization started asking countries to take drastic action in February. New Zealand was able to take the sort of swift action we would have taken if our Office of International Health and Biodefense had been in tact, and this is opening their economy much faster than what we will be able to do in the USA. But we had no one even assigned to our Office of International Health and Biodefense when that WHO conversation happened, so we were caught totally flat footed. As a result, the COVID-19 virus was able to spread for weeks if not months longer, causing magnitudes more damage to our economy.

The formula is simple: Small Government = Small Economy.

There are 3 main types of pyramid schemes: Ponzi Schemes, Classic Pyramid Schemes, and Multi-Level Marketing (MLM). What makes MLM companies different from Ponzi and Pyramid Schemes is a concentrated effort to make the scheme appear "Legal." However when MLMs are brought to court, their business structure NEVER holds up to serious legal scrutiny!

To give you an idea of how pervasive MLM is in our economy, in 2017 MLM did $35,000,000,000 in sales. Holywood had a very good year in 2017 and made $43,000,000,000. That means a segment of our economy comparable to the media industry, IS A HUGE SCAM SUCKING MONEY OUT OF THE ECONOMY INTO THE HANDS OF SCAM ARTISTS/CRIMINALS. In MLM, the customer buys a business, and in return gets completely ripped off. Over 99% of people who join MLMs lose money! This takes would be entrepreneurs and financially ruins them, it's the most financially devastating thing to the potential of our economy I can imagine. MLM shouldn't be allowed at all, and the full economic damage can't really be understood until we end the practice and see what that $35,000,000,000 recycled back into our economy year after year actually does for us.

The problem is that MLM has corrupted our government:

1. The Podesta Group is a lobbying powerhouse serving the Democrats. In an ultimate conflict of interests, they also serve notorious MLM Herbalife. This influenced the Clintons, but has even recently influenced other Democrat presidential candidates.
2. President Trump is something of a pyramid Pharaoh himself promoting both ACN and the "Trump Network."
3. Trump has Betsy Devos in his cabinet, who is the wife of the Pharoah of the most famous MLM of all AMWAY!
4. He has Steve Mnuchin in his cabinet, who made 3 million dollars in Madoff's famous pyramid scheme.
5. The big sports stadium in Orlando Florida is actually called "The Amway Center." It would be less criminal to name a sports stadium in Chicago "The Al Copone Center."
6. Many other lesser known politicians such as Orin Hatch have been completely purchased by the MLM criminal industry.
7. The entire Bush political dynasty has been heavily influenced by Amway and continues to associate with them:

Like our small government approach to COVID-19, our small government regulation of MLM isn't going to end well for us. Pyramid Schemes, like other government corruption, has leveled nation states before:

Reaching Out

I go out of my way to talk to people I don't agree with. And this is not just over minor things, this is over big controversial things such as a lot of the subject matter on this blog. Why? When you find someone you disagree with, you have found the edge of your echo-chamber: if you want to help change someone's opinion, this is your only chance. But most of the time you can't change someone's opinion by arguing with them, right? 100% correct. So why discuss something with someone when you know their opinion won't budge yet?

Marketing In the Soul Age describes people identifying themselves, at least as consumers, as a unique combination of memberships in different groups. Taking me for example, I generally associate with LDS, Tai Chi, Full Contact Weapon Fighting, Yang Gang, Antioch University, AntiMLM, etc. Think about your life, what groups do you identify with?

Now, let's take two opposites, on one hand we have a Mr. Antifa who is an anarchist, and on the other hand we have a Ms. Alt-right who is a fascist. Let's say these two open a correspondence. They argue, make a lot of broad accusations towards each other, offend one another deeply, and so on.

But as this correspondence continues something interesting happens. When Mr. Antifa goes back to hang out with the other anarchists, Mr. Antifa is more knowledgeable about fascist views. Mr. Antifa becomes the anarchist group's resident expert on fascist thinking, their resident fascist. Likewise when the Ms. Alt-right goes back to hang out with her fellow fascists, Ms. Alt-right rapidly becomes the fascists group's resident anarchist.

Even though Ms. Alt-right and Mr. Antifa may not agree with each other's thinking most of the time, because they understand each other's perspectives, they can use those opposing perspectives when it suits them. Mr. Antifa has a better understanding of how strong authority can have its advantages in certain situations, and Ms. Alt-right can see the flaws in strong authority figures and the need to avoid complying with authority blindly.

I recently posted a Tai Chi video on the Tres Espadas YouTube channel, and there is praise there in the comments by someone named "White Lives Matter." Does that sound like someone I would normally agree with? HELL NO! But look, here we have someone at least sympathetic towards white separatist views praising:

1. a channel and club with a spanglish name "Tres Espadas," (racist whites I have spoken to are offended by white people using Spanish names for things,)
2. a video which talks about a Chinese Martial art, "Tai Chi," (amidst the COVID-19 pandemic anti-Asian sentiment is high,) which is also 
3. a video featuring kids who are obviously at most only half-white. (When white separatists say they want to protect a future for white children, they are saying they eschew mixed race relationships.)

Having someone calling themselves "White Lives Matter" like that video is huge. That means when they are hanging out with their unsympathetic-to-BLM group, they are likely now the racially progressive one in that (probably racist) group!

I implore people in the anti-MLM community to keep this group association concept in mind. If you have correspondence with someone who is in MLM, they become that MLMer who has anti-MLM friends. This is one of the best things you can do to help them leave MLM, because as they inevitably run into the problems in MLM, they will have YOUR anti-MLM perspective for handling those problems, and they will have YOU as a friend so they are not so isolated as they leave MLM.

Group Association

I go out of my way to talk to people I don't agree with. And this is not just over minor things, this is over big controversial things such as a lot of the subject matter on this blog - and in fact this blog often refers to some of those conversations. Why? When you find someone you disagree with, you have found the edge of your echo-chamber: if you want to help change someone's opinion, this is your only chance. But most of the time you can't change someone's opinion by arguing with them, right? 100% correct. So why discuss something with someone when you know their opinion won't budge yet?

Marketing In the Soul Age describes people identifying themselves, at least as consumers, as a unique combination of memberships in different groups. Taking me for example, I generally associate with LDS, Tai Chi, Full Contact Weapon Fighting, Yang Gang, Antioch University, AntiMLM, etc. Think about your life, what groups do you identify with?

Now, let's take two opposing groups. One group is a historical society who wants to preserve the look and feel of downtown, and the other group is a business association that wants to renovate the downtown area.  On one hand we have Nancy who is in the historical society, and on the other hand we have Jill who is in the business association. Let's say these two open a correspondence. They argue, make generalizations about each other, and otherwise have extraordinary disagreements.

But as this correspondence continues something interesting happens. When Nancy goes back to hang out with the other people in the historical society, Nancy is more knowledgeable about the business association's views. Nancy becomes the historical society's resident expert on business association thinking, basically becoming their resident business association group member. Likewise when Jill goes back to hang out with the business association, Jill rapidly becomes the business association's resident historical society member.

In order to adequately represent business association views to the historical society Nancy will find herself sometimes defending business association views. Likewise Jill will sometimes find herself defending historical society views at the business association. But this expands both Jill's and Nancy's options, because now that they understand each others perspectives, they can use each others perspectives as needed. Jill might be able to see that some of the old buildings might make good tourist attractions to attract more business, and Nancy might be able to see that if some parts of downtown are renovated it could increase the tax revenue needed to maintain more important landmarks.

Keep this "group association" concept in mind when chatting with someone involved in MLM. If you have correspondence with someone who is in MLM, they become that MLMer who has anti-MLM friends. This can help them leave MLM, because as they inevitably run into the problems in MLM, they will have YOUR anti-MLM perspective for handling those problems, and they will have YOU as a friend so they are not so isolated as they leave MLM.

3D MLM

I have recently posted on my experience with Multi-Level Marketing and my style of 3D Thinking. Here I want to apply my 3D Thinking to the extraordinarily heinous problem of Multi-Level Marketing. Check out Anti-MLM on YouTube if you want an idea of why MLMs are so foul, but in a nutshell they are an entire economic sector of scammery that destroys individual lives, corrupts government, and stunts economic growth.

It sounds like I am extremely one sided on this, but I will remind you that I was once myself an Herbalife distributor, as much as I regret it. Though MLMs are most definitely not the answer, they are not-wrong about the problems they falsely claim to correct. In the USA, most people:

1. Don't have enough spare time. When you are talking about developing strong family relationships, taking care of your health, getting adequate rest, etc., this rapidly becomes an unfulfilled need rather than a fantasy luxury you would like to have some day.
2. People aren't able to pursue their dreams with the current lifestyle they have. Keep in mind there's two general types of dreams here: a) virtuous things you want to do with your life, a "bucket list," and b) perverse things you want in your life that can not contribute to your happiness, typically luxuries to boost perceived social status.
3. People don't like their jobs. Either the job is too demanding and takes up too much time, or they just don't like what they do.
4. Investments in the future often don't work out. Be it your education or your retirement portfolio, life is what happens when you make other plans.

The problem is that MLM will make all of these problems much, much worse. The more you try to get your MLM habit to pay for itself the more time it will consume. No one dreams of being involved in a scam that helps to ruin other people's lives and damage the global community. In the long term, it is more rewarding to be employed with a job you hate or just plain unemployed than it is to be in an MLM. For well over 99% of MLM participants, MLM will in no way compensate for your lack of education or savings.

But if MLM is not wrong about those things, and only wrong about themselves being a solution, what are the solutions to those things? Let me tell you what has worked for me:

1. Be mindful. Your job, no matter how terrible it is, someone is paying you to do it, and therefore it is important to someone. Let's take the lowest job on the corporate latter: the Janitor. They are looked down upon, and have to do unpleasant work for low pay. But think about it like this: there is a war going on between animals and germs. In the case of Humans, we are easily destroyed by various microbe threats. At the time of this writing we are in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic causing serious economic damage and taking thousands upon thousands of lives. From our perspective today, janitors battle on the front line of human survival. Being a janitor IS WORTHWHILE.
2. Be frugal. Stop thinking of your income as a check that comes in the mail that you reuse each month. Instead see each and every penny that comes into your possession as an opportunity you will never have again, once you spend that penny it is gone for ever. Pinch pennies until they bleed and live off of that penny blood like some kind of coin vampire. The less you spend, the less money you need: this is the true path to financial independence. You can be sure that most rich people who were born poor will tell you pretty much this same thing. On good terms with your parents? Great, live in their basement. Picking a college? Pick a community college. Once you truly embrace this mindset you might be surprised how easy it is to own your "dream car."
3. Stop trying to buy happiness. Sometimes needs are needs and you will be miserable without something. Sometimes wants within reason are good. But happiness can not be purchased. No amount of money you will ever spend will bring you permanent bliss. No mansion on the beach, no collection of luxury cars, no harem of supermodels, no mountain of cocaine is ever going to do it for you in the long run. From personal experience I can tell you MLM won't get you there. I can also say you shouldn't embrace a diet of fast food and microwave burritos in the name of your career, spending more and more time at the office until you actually end up sleeping for a few hours a night in the emergency shelter down the hall: It's not good for you, your career, your happiness, your health, your family, your life and in the long term it's not even good for the people asking you to put in those kind of hours.
4. Be interested in things, and get good at some of the stuff you are interested in. You should probably pursue some form of formal education in a trade or in school. You may or may not be able to find a job you like. In my experience, any job you get, weather or not you wanted it in the first place and no matter how great it is, still becomes a chore sooner or later. Satisfaction from employment has something to do with being as good as you can reasonably be at whatever it is you do to support yourself. It is also satisfying to grow and become competent in things you do for hobbies and for entertainment. If you are going to be a janitor, at be a very good janitor that knows what you are talking about in casual conversation.
5. Focus on what is important to you. Ultimately large piles of green paper are not the most important thing in anyone's life. What actually IS important to YOU? Don't miss out on THAT. Take care of business: do you need mental health treatment? Get mental health treatment. Do you feel like you need to connect with a higher power? Get to it. Do you feel like you need to relive yourself of the shackles of the world view you were raised with it? Those shackles aren't going to loosen themselves. Want to have a family? I am pretty sure you know how that works. Want to be part of a family? Develop the people skills that make that possible. 
6. Don't wait for retirement: later = never; follow your dreams NOW! As a martial artist, I can't tell you how many times I have seen this end badly; to be an effective martial artist, you have to develop at least some of your skill before retirement age! Let's say you dream of walking the beach in Hawaii in your swim suit. You are going to wait until you are 65 to do that? No one wants to see that, do everyone a favor and find another way. Find a more affordable beach to visit, or save up your lunch money for a trip to Hawaii decades before you retire, or find a job in Hawaii. If your dream is to walk the beach in Hawaii, waiting for retirement is just a way for that to never happen. That said, pick your dreams wisely, pursuing perverse dreams to try to show your neighbors you are as good as or better than them, that stuff ends badly, most belief systems advise against that kind of behavior for good reason, that entire mindset is a great way to be miserable for the rest of your life.
7. The easiest get-rich-scheme I know of is to work part time. When people retire, either their health is so shot they struggle to take care of themselves, or they get bored and look for some new part time vocation. You know what that means, right? Think about it: they could have just worked part time all along! This is pretty hard to do on minimum wage, but that is part of why you should pursue some form of education, so that you can get into a vocation that has a sustainable enough wage that you can make enough money to fulfill your needs and pursue your dreams on part-time wages. Nursing, accounting, and dental hygienist positions have all been known to have part-time decent-wage positions.

The Evil of MLM

My biggest pet peeve is Multi-Level Marketing. I had a nasty run in with one of these companies in the early 90's , and it boggles my mind that these get-rich-quick schemes are still tolerated by our governments in 2013. Here's a nice video on the subject: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000140029

This Qualoots article sums up the facts on Multi-Level Marketing nicely:  http://www.quatloos.com/mlm/mlm.htm

I set up a Facebook group (STOP Multi-Level Marketing) for discussing this problem more in depth. If your are interested in this topic and haven't read the following yet, make sure that you do: http://www.vandruff.com/mlm.html

Here's one last video on the subject, by Salty Droid that is very insightful:

MLMs Are Not Pyramid Schemes

The biggest epiphany I had watching the 2022 anti-MLM conference was that calling MLMs pyramid schemes drastically understates the damage MLMs do. MLM gurus and FTC regulators are both correct in refusing to say MLMs are pyramid schemes. Pyramids schemes are only 90% likely for you to lose money while MLMs are 99%. When a pyramid scheme rips you off for a few thousand dollars it moves on to find a new sucker, but when an MLM does the same it is just getting started with you...

Pyramid schemes don't try to milk you for money for the rest of your life.

Pyramid schemes don't try to hook you into a continuous payment plan on your credit card that is hard to cancel when you don't want to pay anymore.

Pyramid schemes don't make you sign contracts that make it impossible for you to sue them.

Pyramid schemes don't promise business training but instead deliver dumb visualizations of your wild fantasies.

Pyramid schemes don't try to dominate your ideology or spiritual practices.

Pyramid schemes don't wreck your religious congregation.

Pyramid schemes don't train you to lie about the lifestyle you are living in order to find more recruits.

Pyramid schemes don't try to fill your life with fake friendships that disappear when it all finally falls apart.

Pyramid schemes don't take much time away from your family.

Pyramid schemes don't tell you to drop out of school or quit your day job.

Pyramid schemes don't get you hyped about questionable products you would otherwise have no interest in.

Pyramid schemes don't train you to lie about products you are selling.

Pyramid schemes don't threaten your health by encouraging you to get into quack medical products instead of seeking legitimate medical treatment.

Pyramid schemes don't pay off politicians to legalize their unethical business model.

Pyramids schemes don't use the WTO and UN as vehicles to infiltrate developing economies.

Pyramid schemes don't encourage victims to get microloans intended to address poverty and then compound that debt by becoming MLM distributors.

Pyramid schemes don't leach a trillion dollars per year out of the global economy.

MLMs are not pyramid schemes because MLMs are far more lethal for individuals, families, communities and the world. 

How to Succeed at Network Marketing

I will now share with you the secret behind how I was more successful at Herbalife than most distributors. Then I will show you what my next step should have been if I had decided to stay in that business. Finally I will reveal the finishing touch you need to really succeed in your business.

My Success

If you have a down line then you know how lazy they tend to be. You spend all this time on them in meetings and training, and all they do in return is take a % of profit from what few sales they sometimes make. You could have instead made more money by using that time and effort to make those sales yourself. Admit it: most of your "team" just isn't cut out for sales, and make much better customers than team members. But whoever did MLM without recruiting? I did!

I was able to get dozens of return customers every month precisely because I didn't recruit. Because I put my time and effort into finding customers instead of do-nothing trainees, people came to ME when they wanted Cellular Nutrition or Thermojetics. I had a half of a town to myself, and when people called me up and asked to join my down line, I told them "maybe after I am done establishing my business here, I will call you." I never got to the point where I thought I should give anyone my potential customers!

But if I had wanted to stay in the game, if my heart was really into fitness, then there are a few other things I should have done in addition to this...

The Next Step

Herbalife products were packaged to appeal to distributors like me, but not packaged to appeal to my return customers. For example the Cellular Nutrition protein shake which was supposed to be a 30 day supply only contained 20 servings! What I should have done next to build my fitness business was find superior quality and superior value from OUTSIDE of Herbalife. In my martial arts training soon after this I ended up using Twin Labs protein shakes because they were more affordable and effective than the Herbalife products.

Look at how much of your hard earned cash that your up line takes out of your sales profits. Just why do they deserve that money, did they do the hard work to make the sale? Hell no, that's YOUR money they are renting that Disney mansion and BMW with. 

Do you have any idea how much better you could do with buying products in bulk than purchasing products from your up line or MLM company? The difference is massive. All of that profit could be YOURS as long as you are willing to do the smart thing, the best thing for your business AND your customers, which is to prioritize value over brand loyalty!

Finishing Touch

If I had been serious about fitness, after focusing on direct sales myself (which I actually did,) and ditching my upline along with their bad business advice, creepy conventions and fake guru nonsense, the final thing I would have needed to do is MAKE MY OFFERING UNIQUE. In my case I should have probably offered one-on-one self-defense and fitness training along with the health products I was selling.

But in today's world you don't have to study three different martial arts for years on end to become a fitness trainer. The total cost of the training to become a legitimate certified personal trainer varies between $600 to $2,000. That is a lot less than what you are probably spending now as your up line and down line leech every penny they can from your bank account. 

The Most Dangerous Game

Famous shrink Carl Rogers came up with a skill called "unconditional positive regard" which helps someone do "active listening." It means if you decide to genuinely enjoy listening to the person talking, you can get a lot more out of whatever type of interviewing you are doing. I have some kind of mental health issue which I call "universal positive regard", which is where I like EVERYONE. I could have a lot of fun being with a very rude mass murderer for a few hours, enjoying their company and listening to their unique views on life.

My condition not a good thing. Several weeks ago I found myself halfway through giving a stranger who was much larger than myself a ride home, when he started explaining that he thought I was bisexual and that he and I should experiment together. It was really awkward and a little intimidating until I finally got him out o my car. A week later I found out that he was a violent sex offender and that I had probably been in real danger.

Whether or not "attachment disorder" actually exists, the best explanation I have for my condition is that for the first eight days of my life I was isolated from bonding with any adults because of a health condition I had at birth. My childhood was normal there after with breast feeding etc, so presumably I had attachment disorder as an infant but I have had the treatment for attachment disorder (being forcefully bonded to an adult) as an infant as well. So I may have whatever it is people who have attachment disorder have after they have been cured, maybe "post-attachment-disorder?" 

Part of this post-attachment-disorder isn't just enjoying the company of people who I should not, but also sometimes getting into a habit of bully hunting. Back in the 1970's people had different ideas about raising kids, and an adult who wasn't blood related to me held me out of a 30 story window at age 3 and joked about accidentally dropping me. On the third day he did this, I snapped and bit his hand so hard he had to go to the hospital for stitches. I have had to watch myself carefully that I am not hunting bullies for sport ever since. So on one hand I find everyone such amazing and entertaining specimens to enjoy, but on the other hand if I identify you as a dangerous threat who is coming after me, I will also enjoy hunting you in return.

If you read this blog often you know I have been anti-MLM since the 1990s. Part of that is I study other scams and exploitation, to keep myself and anyone who will listen to me from getting involved. I am recently divorced and said so on Facebook, and overnight a whole new type of account was interested in me, mostly with East Asian profiles with portraits that looked like they were generated by AI. Soon one that was more convincingly human started talking Bitcoin, and I knew I had a new bully to hunt!

She went by the alias "Sophie Martin." She sent me a digital image of a convincing California state driver's license for an address in Beverly Hills. When I was interacting with her she had 5.6 million in USDT (probably stolen from divorcees by way of a fake bitcoin exchange website.) She went so far as to have a video conversation with me to prove she was a real person, and she presented as a Mongolian woman with a Russian accent, and she claimed to be from Kazakhstan living in Portland Oregon working for a Crypto exchange company. 

She never got a dime from me, but we were supposedly exclusive for about 72 hours, at her request. For the first 18 hours and last 18 hours I knew it was a scam, but I really didn't know for the middle 36 hours. Her replies were on point, her story about her x-boyfriend having a gambling problem was really convincing, and she came up with this date for us to go on in Portland that was clearly a bunch of things that SHE wanted to do, that had nothing to do with what I wanted to do (go dancing at night clubs.) 

The reason why I never put my guard down around her completely is she kept trying to shame me for not being wealthy enough. I thought it was a personality or character flaw she had. I am not well off, but I am not destitute either, I live the lifestyle I want, and if I made a million dollars a year my lifestyle would be just about exactly the same as it is now. But eventually I had to follow through with the Bitcoin side of what she was about, because this could have all been an elaborate scheme... and when we went down that road it was this crazy fever-pitch two hour crazy rabbit hole of me sending her screen shots from my phone logging into various crypto exchanges and websites... 

And then I saw it: a website designed for cell phones that was repeating information that was already on the crypto app. I made an excuse and broke off the conversation and hit the books for the next 12 hours figuring out who Sophie really was and how her scam really worked. Also how the hell did she fool ME of all people?

The game she is playing is that she is both simultaneously scamming and dating at the same time. In my case I think she was planning to sleep with me (she had no real chance as I am an LDS Sunday school teacher, but she wouldn't have understood that very well,) and I suspect she has slept with some of her victims. I think she sexually gets of on having relations with dudes she is victimizing, some kind of twisted power fetish. I further suspect that scammers like her have a chip on their shoulder against male divorcees... law enforcement thinks it's because male divorcees are lonely and alone and easily victimized, but the fact is we are all a gym membership and 6 months from being the most eligible bachelors we have ever been, it's physically impossible for us to be cat ladies. I think these scammers are targeting divorcees because these scammers are getting revenge on an ex-husband by going after all x-husbands (or their divorced dad by going after all divorced dads.)

This was really a dangerous situation, and probably came within 30 minutes of losing $200 to her and within weeks of losing many thousands of dollars to her. Who knows what else she was capable of. It was time to have a fake break up with her for our supposedly-exclusive relationship. I don't have the resources to stalk international criminals and I had learned how her scam worked. (Fake website imitates real crypto exchange, fake website takes your bitcoin and tells says you are getting daily compound interest which is of course impossible, and they come up with an excuse as to why you can't withdraw bitcoin but keep encouraging you to send more to them.)

I told her it was not practical for us to have a relationship if she was in Portland while I was in the greater Seattle area. We don't have the same values, I don't believe you can buy happiness and that's all she's trying to do with her life.  This was evident in the date she had planned that ignored dancing. At the end she slipped up and said "I don't like night clubs... but I was hoping you would see me and make me enjoy dancing at one."

Cut back to the Saturday night before. I was at The Forum in Bellevue when as I was waiting in line to get into the club, four tall muscular East-Asian women (aka Mongolians,) one of whom looked like Sophie in our video call, got into line right behind me. All night the Sophie look alike was acting strange near me, smiling at her friends with this huge wolf-like grin, but doing a wall flower type of thing near whatever direction I was facing. THAT WAS NO LOOK-ALIKE!

I have recently been stalked by an international criminal I was online dating. This is what men are dealing with in today's dating world. Understand that when you get on a man's case for not meeting your financial expectations, you are by definition engaged in exploiting him emotionally if not also financially, regardless of your intentions. I will leave you with my last words to Sophie, followed by an inspirational video. "I am looking for dance partners, and maybe a friend I can share the rest of my life with. I am not a communally owned dildo to be passed up and down the I-5 corridor by entitled mean-girl women who should know better."