S3 E36 GET AWAY, AMWAY!

In this episode of the Cult Vault Podcast, Kacey and Darren Mudd delve into the world of multi-level marketing (MLM), specifically focusing on Amway. Darren shares his personal experience of being recruited into Amway during a vulnerable time in his life, highlighting the psychological tactics used by recruiters to exploit emotional states. The conversation explores the cult-like dynamics of university environments, the early warning signs of MLMs, and the brainwashing techniques employed through a structured learning curriculum. As the discussion progresses, they examine the challenges of recruitment, the illusion of success, and the growing dependency on the system, ultimately shedding light on the manipulative nature of MLMs and the emotional toll they can take on individuals. 


Darren’s recollections of participating in the Amway Pyramid Scheme as a university student:

Amway Pyramid Scheme

David’s brother joined AMWAY In the UK as an IBO, quickly became obsessed with it, and took control of the family’s capital assets
AMWAY In the UK

The tools/training business (an unofficial organisation) was based in Somerset and supposedly meant to “help” people build the Amway business through mentorship and materials - this was the actual cult whereas Amway was the pyramid scheme.
Amway and one of its tools/training businesses

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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Hello and welcome to the Cult Vault podcast, your dedicated
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Before we get started, a word of caution. Today's episode

(00:49):
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(01:51):
pledge not only gives you exclusive access but also directly
supports the continuation of this work. Thank you again for
your support and your listenership. Now let's unlock the vault. Hello, Hello,
hello listeners, and welcome back to another episode of the
court World podcast. Today we are going to be diving

(02:11):
into a subject that I have not discussed on the
podcast for a really long time, and I'm looking forward
to getting back into it and learning more about this
subject that I ever had before. Hello, and welcome to
the show, Darren.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Hi, thank you very much.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Darren. You've come to chat with us today about multi
level marketing and specifically AMWAY. So I am going to
ask you to start by introducing yourself to the listeners.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
Hi. My name is Darren mud and almost twenty years
ago I was recruited to what I now know to
be the coup of Amoy, the five letter word that
most people have heard at least once in their life.
Way means the American way, and it's spread across the globe.

(03:05):
It's an MLM, it's a pyramid scheme, and I was
in it as a student graduate for a brief amount
of time. Thankfully I got out, and ever since I've
been somewhat suspicious of any kind of proposition that includes
complicated commission schemes and certainly these power structures which are

(03:29):
very similar to capitalism itself, perhaps a microcosm of capitalism,
and in the worst ways.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
You say that you were coming out of higher education.
Do you think this was the vulnerability that was exploited
in terms of recruiting you into this system.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
Yeah, I'd say so. I mean I mean, first of all,
I mean people don't join a cult. They are recruited,
and that's the first thing to understand. I mean, you
may say I signed up to note that you didn't
sign up to anyway, you were recruited. And usually there
is something going on in someone's life at the time.

(04:18):
It may be that there's a big change in their life,
there's a transition, their circumstances are fundamentally changing. Something might
have happened, somebody might have died, There may be a
loss in the family. There could be bereavement, heartbreak, disappointment,
and so people aren't quite thinking rationally. They become overly emotional,

(04:41):
and in that state they are the perfect candidate for
recruitment into a cult. I'd say this, it's not that
nobody can be scammed or recruited to the cult. It's
just that the script that is being used by the

(05:02):
recruiter any given time might not fit your circumstances right
there and then. So it's a bit of a numbers game.
So it could be like a very rational person would
never get into that stuff normally, but ten years later,
maybe they're in a different headspace and there's exact same
sales pitch, the same script would fit them. Perfectly, and
that's why they get into it. So when I got

(05:24):
into Unway, when I was recruited into Unway, I was
finishing university with no clear idea what I was going
to do. You know, I'd been a student for three years,
having a great time. But then there's the world of
work looming before you, and I'm thinking, well, what do
I do? I mean, like, I don't really know what
I want to do. I know I enjoyed doing this,

(05:45):
but now I need to find a job. You know,
you've got to grow up as it happens. My parents
had separated about a year before. There was a divorce
going on, so I knew that the family home wouldn't
be the same. You know, they were both living separately,

(06:08):
so things had changed fundamentally. Several things were happening, and
for whoever gets involved in a kill, I dare say
something similar is happening.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
So do you think it was? Maybe? I don't know.
I feel like I'm to speak for myself when I
say that university is like another microcosm where reality outside
of university doesn't really exist completely until you have to
re enter it, especially if you're like a full time

(06:40):
student living on campus. Or living in the area surrounded
by other students who were also full time. So even
though there were things happening with my family outside of university,
I didn't really think or deal with any of that
until after I graduated. So I don't know if that
was the same for you, you know, having the your
parents divorce and then having university. I mean there could

(07:06):
be a number of different things that the recruiters at
Amway exploited during that point in your life.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
Yeah. Yeah, because university is a bubble in some ways.
I mean it's cult like in itself, I mean harmle,
it's but it's well, the word cult comes from the
word culture, or maybe it's the other way around, but
you know, yes, it's a bubble with its own set
of rules, and everyone's sort of in the same headspace
and the same beliefs and things like that. So yeah,

(07:33):
I mean it's a bubble. It's a world and to itself,
and you've now been asked to leave that and choose
something else. So Amway was like a replacement for that.
Because as a student, it's very structured. You have well
over so within each academic year, you've got three semesters,

(07:54):
each of which is about twelve weeks. It's a learning program.
When anway came wrong, it was present in a very
similar way. This is a learning program, and you can
make money as well, and it can guarantee your future.
It can provide you with an income. And the people
who recruited me and some of my fellow students were teachers.

(08:15):
One of them was a retired headmaster and his wife
was a mathematics teacher. Very nice people, very very nice,
lovely people. They themselves were pawns and puppets in the
whole thing. But they were hanging around student campuses trying
to recruit young people because they knew they were impressionable
and that they had to make some sort of life

(08:37):
decision and they wanted to guide them into nwoy.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Wow, that's really tricky. That's so tricky. If you think
about Robert Chaldeini's psychology of influence when he talks about
people that have people in positions of power. So a teacher,
you know, a teacher instantly is somebody in a position
of authority to you know, somebody that knows what they're
talking about. They are there as like life mentors that

(09:05):
guide you through pivotal points in your life. They are
supposed to be people that are trained to, you know,
protect you and take care of you. So immediately, like
a teacher has like an elevated status. So if they're
telling you that this thing is good for you, you're
more likely to believe a teacher than you are to
believe maybe one of your peers or like a sibling

(09:27):
or somebody you know, same thing with like police officers
or lawyers, or people that have status through you know,
financial status, like richer people. That kind of takes you
down the Harvey Weinstein, r Kelly a rabbit hole. But
that is so tricky, Darren, having people that are in

(09:48):
these elevated positions telling you this is what you should
do next.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
Power and Balance said that the power dynamics are not
It's not unequal footing, is it. It's not an equal
footing at all. So yeah, I mean that this tendency
to look for a leader. I remember one time when
we were having a meeting so what I'd been recruited
into amway, so had one of my housemates, and we

(10:14):
were asked to try and find some other students and
bring them along to their meeting. And I think we
met in one of the buildings on campus. I think
it was in the library. The library was huge, but
they had like lots of smaller rooms where you could go,
like study rooms. And I remember we were sat around
this round table and the guy was there. His name

(10:36):
was Richard, dressed very smartly, very charming, very personable, had
a very good way with students. And I remember we
were sat around the table and there was another table
of people arguing and well making a lot of noise,
and it was obviously getting louder and louder, and we
were sort of looking to him to do something about it,

(10:57):
and he did. He turned around and he said, ladies, ladies,
do you mind, and they stopped the noise. And I
thought I respected him for doing that because he showed leadership.
So there you go, that's an example of a teacher
that the power dynamic, the power imbalance, and you know,
so that was a critical moment, I think. So I

(11:20):
trusted him because all my other lecturers and teachers were
about to disappear, so I needed a new one.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
So when when you talked about kind of university campuses
and stuff, I thought that it was going to be
a case of being recruited sort of on campus by
people that just kind of hang around. You see that
in groups chinchunji for example. But this is not this
is internal. This is this is recruitment happening inside your university.

(11:53):
I don't know how was that legal.

Speaker 3 (11:56):
Well, it wasn't necessarily that they were targeting universities, but
they were certainly very keen on the idea. What it was.
My one of my housemates had a cousin who wasn't
a student, and she was recruited. But they found out
that she had a cousin my housemate and said, oh great, yes, yes,

(12:20):
ask her, because they saw it as an in route
into the university. So they weren't hanging around on the
street corners of the university. It was more like, oh great,
oh we we've recruited somebody who has a cousin and
she's a student. That's her way into the university. So
it wasn't it certainly wasn't like they were getting in

(12:46):
like internally, as you say. And they were very keen
because they were trying to sell this drink called Excess,
which was one of the flagship products that Amway was promoting,
and they like it was around the time when you
there's a lot of like vodka, red ball, that kind
of thing, energy drinks. So they wanted to have us

(13:08):
promote these energy drinks to the local clubs, which we did.
We did tasting sessions. We approached local clubs with these
drinks with the intention of trying to sell these drinks
to the clubs who would sell them at the bar
to students and then we'd make money through that and
generate points which are redeemable for cash. But at the
same time, the idea was we try and get other

(13:30):
students in on this and say, hey, look, we have
this drink, could you help us to sell it? And
that gets them into unway and obviously all the other
courtlike practices like purchasing books and CDs and training materials
under the auspices of business support.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
So were there any early warning signs for you entering
this particular phase of the recruitment process.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
There were. I mean I ignored some of those signs because
some way is such a broad proposition to so many
different types of people, and a lot of this stuff
I found a bit cringe worthy, Like when they showed
the plan in our kitchen for the first time. You know,
they had a projector of shining onto the far wall

(14:23):
with the slides from the presentation, and Richard, this ex headteacher,
was going through the whole thing, and a lot of
the stuff that he said I found rather cringe worthy
because a lot of it was quasi religious, you know,
like he'd be he was trying to cast a wide
net and try and sort of get everyone in. But

(14:44):
he'd say things like and and if you join us,
we can talk about how we can help you achieve
your dreams. And I thought, achieve your dreams? I thought
that's a bit cringe worthy. I mean, whereas that from
I mean, that's it's it sounded very off to me.
And they were constantly talking about financial freedom, and whenever

(15:09):
they did that, they'd have like a picture like some
stock photography on the slide of people having a great time,
like something out of a Coca Cola advert, which is
almost unreal, you know, It's like it seems so just off.
And I thought that's not for me. I but there
were certain parts which did appeal to me about you know,
ten percent of it. The rest of it, I thought, well,

(15:30):
that's not for me. But I didn't realize that all
that other stuff were the warning signs, you know the
fact that they were you know, they had us reading
books with titles like The Millionaire next Door or Prosumer Power,
The Parable of the Pipeline, how to win friends and

(15:52):
influence people. I mean, this is the they got us
on a curriculum very early on to trains to brainwash
has already. But I didn't see it that way. To me.
It was just more study. And there's a student. I'm
used to all that, you know, I'm reading books, writing essays.
So this was just more of that kind of thing,
a bit unusual, but I thought, yeah, it's okay, I'm

(16:12):
open minded, I'm a student. I'll read this stuff. I'll
put my ego to one side. But I was effectively
letting the fox into the henhouse, and it was via education.
So a warning sign that I can see now looking back,
but at the time I didn't really see it. I
chose to ignore certain red flags.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Hmm. Yeah. I think that's common as well, isn't it.
When something feels good for the most part. The things
that maybe don't sit right or don't feel good, I
think are easier to push aside. When you have the
promise of like community and continued education, and you know,

(17:15):
help with your finances, Like all of the things you're
being promised almost outweigh all of the things that don't
just don't quite sound right or don't don't sit well.
And that's the trickiest part, you know, that's that's the
hardest thing to to discern.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
You know, it seemed almost transactional, that there's a lot
of incent Sometimes when people said stuff, it seemed insincere,
you know, like it was there was like a lot
of like over the top eye contact, you know, like
a lot of handshaking and stuff, and a lot of
back pattering, and a lot of it just seemed a

(17:54):
bit artificial. I remember years later I watched this you know,
look Through. You know who Luis Through is American listeners
might not be so familiar, but he's a BBC journalist
who had this series back in the nineties called Weird Weekends,
which were a bit satirical in tone, but later on
they became a bit more serious. And I remember one

(18:15):
episode was where it was I think it was called
Televangelists or something, that he was investigating megachurches and that
kind of thing. And also there was this guy by
the name of Marshall Silver, who was a very slick,
smooth talking salesman, almost like Soul Goodman from Breaking Bad,

(18:36):
but more sinister. And there was one episode where Louis
Through's meeting this guy and following him around in Las
Vegas where this guy is teaching a mixture of hypnosis
and stage guru scam wisdom, I guess, teaching people to
be millionaires. So he's on stage with a microphone teaching

(18:56):
people how to, you know, how to behave like a
million how to act like a millionaire, how to adopt
all the traits and characteristics of a rich, successful person
in order to get people to follow you and copy you.
And so I was seeing a lot of that. I
didn't know it at the time. It wasn't until I
saw this through documentary that I thought, oh, that's what
I'm in. I'm in, that's me. And I saw myself

(19:20):
as the lily through character sort of asking questions which
were being defended or battered away or explained away. So
it was so transactional, and it was clearly it became
you know, over time, it became bs to me. But
initially I just won't say. I wasn't saying that.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
When you mentioned that there was like a learning curriculum.
How did that process start? Did you have to go
to like four more classrooms or were you just given
like homework type things?

Speaker 3 (19:52):
It was books, it was. It started with How to
Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which was
written in nineteen thirty six, so it predates any MLM
that came out during the depression. And Dale Carnegie, by
all accounts, was a bit of a grifter to himself.

(20:12):
His name wasn't even Carnegie, it was something else. He
borrowed Carnegie to try and sound like Andrew Carnegie, who
was a steel magnate of the day, you know, rich, famous, influential.
This book was released, It was the first book of
its kind. Arguably it kickstarted the entire self help industry,

(20:33):
and it was followed by books like Chicken Soup for
the Soul and a lot of other stuff in that
sort of genre. So How to Win Friends and Influence
People was recommended to us, and I have to say
it was good. It was a good book, and I
still see good things about it. But it was kind
of the gateway to the other stuff. It was quite
it was kind of it wasn't woo woo or esoteric.

(20:53):
It was quite It was about just being a decent
person and not being so egotistical, not gossiping about people
behind their back, not saying unpleasant things because it gets
back to people, that kind of thing, How to present
yourself in sales meetings, how to get people to open
up and tell you stuff about themselves. It was that

(21:14):
and I enjoyed that book and I found it at
the time life changing actually, because that was the first
time I'd read anything that was that positive, and I thought, wow,
I'm glad I read that. But I didn't realize that
that was just a gateway to the hard stuff. You know.
That was you know, that the harder drugs were yet
to come. This was like I don't know, a couple

(21:35):
of beers by comparison, but we were going to be
soon introduced to this more addicting stuff. So that was
how the curriculum started, and from there it got increasingly esoteric.
But that was, you know, over the following say twelve months,
that all these other books were prescribed almost like a prescription,

(21:58):
you know, like you need to read this, this is
what's next for you.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
How does it work in terms of you actually becoming
involved in like a team or selling products. Do you
have to go through a process of reading books and
learning how to be deployed or is it just that
that happens in conjunction with you selling things and I

(22:27):
don't know, I guess putting some of your own money
in to start with.

Speaker 3 (22:31):
Yeah, it was. It all happened at the same time. Really,
we just sort of jumped in with both feats and
before we knew it, we were well. We approached clubs
and pubs and got some of them to allow us
to do a tasting session outside their club or within
the club. So as people were coming in on a
Friday or Saturday night, we were there like, Hi, would

(22:54):
you like to taste this drink? And some people you know,
So that was all happening. There was no sort of
for normal process. It's a bit like sales in general.
I mean, if you wear a smart suit and you
don't dribble, then you're a salesperson. You know, as long
as you you can speak, as long as you can
string a sentence together, that's it. Hooray, you're a salesperson.

(23:16):
Now that there's no real sort of process of real training,
so it's kind of all about you just need to
believe in yourself. You just need to take the plunge
and feel the fear and do it Anyway, which is
the name of one of the books that was given
to me. It's not like an onboarding in a typical organization,

(23:39):
which can go on for quite a long time. It
was just, oh, no, you can do it. Anyone can
do it. Anybody can do this business. You don't have
to be loud or gregarious or open. You just need
to believe in yourself and be open to learning a
few tactics. You know. It was that simple, really deceptively simple.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Was there an amount that you had to pay into
MWAY before you could get started with selling your own products?

Speaker 3 (24:14):
It was one hundred pounds to join for the year.
It was one hundred pounds, that was it. And we
had to pay for the books, and we had to
pay to go to the seminars that the very early
meetings I think might have been free, might have been
two pounds or something. So there wasn't really a lot
of Outly you had to pay something. You had to

(24:37):
pay for the books to the meetings, but to join
m weigh itself and Way operated separately to the training organization.
The training organization was called International Business Systems, which was
set up by the leaders who were in Mway. Like
the high ranking distributors had set up their own organization,

(24:58):
so it ran in ten them with Amway. So you've
got to so Amway is there to fulfill the product
orders and to calculate the amount of points that you
earn on your purchases. It tracks who is in your downline,
who is in your up line. That's the administration side
of it. IBS was there for motivation, you know. That

(25:23):
was where they were making the real money, as it
turned out later, but initially it was one hundred pounds
to join Amway itself and then it was ongoing fees
and expenses with IBS, and some of those fees and
expenses started to become quite high, especially when you're attending

(25:45):
a major function like the one in Telford, which is
not far from where I live. It's not far, it's
near Wales. Actually it's in England, and they used to
hold this enormous major function there which was like almost
like a rock concert. It was parrotechnics and music and
I mean we can talk more about that shortly. I

(26:06):
mean it was quite the spectacle. But It was all brainwashing.
That was what it was. There was. It was all
brainwashing in the interests of getting you to believe in
yourself and to believe in the leaders.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
With the IBS stuff. Were you given like a sheet
of like seminars or courses that you were expected to
attend by a certain date or could you just ignore
the IBS stuff and just stick with the Amway selling
products and trying to build a downline. They did.

Speaker 3 (26:44):
It wasn't really a structured course the way university would be.
Like with university, you know the modules that you're going
to be doing. You know that there are submission deadlines
for essays and that kind of thing. Mway wasn't like that.
It was mostly seminar and function based. It was you know,

(27:06):
they'd sometimes have special office one. It says, you know,
if you can recruit five people in your downline in
this amount of time, that will entitle you for a
free trip to the Writz in London, all expenses paid,
so you'll have dinner at the Writs for the night.

(27:27):
All you need to do is recruit five people. In
order to do that, you have to buy five introductory
kits as accord them. So the kits would contain a CD,
a book, and some information in like a plastic folder.
So if you could buy five kits and get those

(27:50):
into the hands of five people who agreed to go
into your downline, that would entitle you to go to
the RITZ. So accord it five kits for the Ritz.
And while we were at this seminar, they played this
video on the big screen, like a music video that
they'd put together themselves. It was quite quaint, really amateurish,

(28:10):
but you know, people were sort of hooked, you know,
and quite engrossed in this special offer. So they'd do
that quite frequently. And they'd also do these like these
like short term currica. I guess you could call it
a curriculum where if you could recruit this many people

(28:30):
in this amount this amount of time, that will make
you something known as a pace setter, a pace setter.
So it was like borbulls and meaningless decorates. It's what
what was it that the Napoleon said? He said something

(28:51):
like by such bar balls, men are led so basically
meaningless titles, you know, just titles which seemed fancy and
prestigious within the confines of the colt but to the
outside world pace setter meant nothing, you know, it was nonsense.

(29:11):
I who pace setter. You're a pace setter, you know,
So you'd get these little badgers to her like a
pin that you get to put on the lapel of
your jacket, your soup jacket, because we're expected to dress smartly.
All these sort of pointless, meaningless titles which to your

(29:31):
peers meant something, and you could be proud of it,
a bit like in scientology, really, you know, people have
these silly titles which you know mean everything to those
people but nothing to us. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, And interestingly, just to parallel with scientology a bit more,
the more money you put in, the more money you
have to spend to continue climbing that ladder. So you're
not only kind of feeling almost like the addiction of
the process. You know, you're supposed to feel dependent, You're

(30:05):
supposed to feel, you know, almost addicted to the work.
You're also then expected to spend more and more money
to continue feeling that way, to continue feeling like a success,
to continue being given trinkets. And I mean, just interestingly,
I just looked up there a night at the Ritz

(30:29):
London with dinner can cost anything from one two hundred
and ninety pound upwards. So that's the basic dining and
dancing package. So let's round that up to thirteen hundred
in American dollars. That's maybe around sixteen hundred dollars, maybe
seventeen hundred dollars. So how much to how five kits?

(30:53):
How much do five kits cost at the time you
paid for them?

Speaker 3 (30:58):
I think they're about what is back in two thousand
and seven, so I can't remember what it costs. There
might have been like ten or fifteen pounds each. But
if I could get five people to sign up, then
IBS was supposedly going to pay for this ritz outing.
You know, they had deep pockets, you know, not that

(31:18):
not that we knew any of that. I mean they
said that they were a nonprofit organization, that they were
just making money to cover their costs. We didn't know
that there were millionaires off the back of it, so
you know, they were making these very attractive propositions to
motivate people to get It was more about getting people
into IBS than away. I mean, if you're not making

(31:41):
money in anway, it doesn't matter as long as you're
bought into IBS and you're in it for the long haul.
There's a lifetime value for each of their customers. If
you can call them customers that they're members, they're court members.
If you get someone into IBS for twenty years and
you get them come into every every open meeting, every Sunday, seminar,

(32:03):
every major function, buying every book CD, and god knows
what else, you're draining them with the principle of death
by a thousand cuts over the period of a long
you know, for a very long period of time. So
they would regularly do these offers. You know, do this,
and we'll do that for you. You can come to

(32:24):
the RITZ.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
So I know, it sounds great, but it's a lot
of work to have to go through and you have
to put money in to get an experience out of it.
It's like the whole process. Robert Chardini talks about this
as well. It's like when you have a coupon and
it says, you know, buy five boxes of cereal instead
of three, and you'll get the fifth box for free.

(33:05):
And it's like, who needs five boxes of cereal in
one one shop, you know, And so people end up
spending more to get the free trinket or the free gift.
And I think the example he uses in the Psychology
of influence is the first time that a company had said,

(33:26):
like if you buy this like new car or something,
if you buy this car, you'll get a free watch.
And everyone was like, oh my gosh, you watch. And
it looked like a nice watch, but really it was
just like a standard, you know, metallic watch. And it
was so successful that that became a staple. You see

(33:48):
that type of thing all over the place now, and
that's basically what's being used here right. If you do this,
you get a free trip to the Ritz. It's not
really free because you've had to buy five kits to
get to the Ritz. And also all of the work
that goes through recruiting five people. When you were involved
in this this stage of the process, how easy or

(34:11):
how difficult was it to just recruit five people?

Speaker 3 (34:14):
Well, very hard. Because I showed the plan to my
fellow students, you know, I got I think, I Well,
actually I wasn't selling. I wasn't showing the planting. I
was rounding up people and bringing them to my house.
Just watch the plan as given by my upline, this teacher,
And it was really hard to get people I mean,

(34:36):
because it felt creepy and seedy and weird, you know,
like you were never allowed to say exactly what it
was about, and you couldn't give them details that we
were We were coached on exactly what to say, almost
with a script, and we weren't really supposed to deviate
from that. They were putting words in our mouths and saying,

(34:58):
don't say it some way because people think that Amway
is negative. Say if you have to say anything, say
it's a business opportunity. And if they press you for
the name of the company, say it's a Mevo because
that's a UK subsidiary of Amway. So there was a
lot of smoke and mirrors, a lot of obfiscation of details,

(35:20):
just saying enough to tease people and hook them in,
like sort of going, no, I've got an opportunity for you. Yeah,
I think you'd be interested. I'm not going to say
too much, but what are you doing on Tuesday? It
was like that, and you had to get people to
come along, and once they figure it out, it's like, oh,
you know.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
You're like, oh, I don't know what am I doing Tuesday?
Are we going on an adventure? And you're like, oh,
some kind of adventure.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
I found it because I started showing the plan myself eventually,
but I found it quite nerve wracking because I knew
I couldn't do it on my own terms. I couldn't
use my own style. I had to you know, even
I ended up using the same jokes as they did,
you know, because I didn't have any of my own.

(36:07):
I didn't really I mean at twenty one, I mean
you didn't really have a lot of life experience, not
compared to you know, what you would have twenty years later.
So it was just really hard, and I just thought,
I don't want to do this. You know, this is
I don't know. I mean I was staying in it
because I liked some of the books and I was
getting something out of it. I just wasn't recruiting people

(36:29):
or making money.

Speaker 2 (36:32):
So after you are kind of pushed through the recruitment
process and then you yourself are showcasing the plan and
you're actively trying to recruit people yourself. But how do
things escalate? I mean, if they escalate, do you start
to realize that there are some strange things happening, or

(36:53):
do you move further down that funnel of sort of
isolation and dependency. Uh.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
I think I did move down the funnel with isolation
and dependency. But at the same time, I had like
this voice in the back of my head saying, Oh,
this is so boring, this is just I don't want
to do this. Why oh is that me? Am I
the problem? Am I lazy? I mean I knew I
wasn't really lazy. I mean I was quite driven and
quite you know, I'm one of those kids that always

(37:22):
did his homework just to get it out of the
way so I could go and do this stuff I
already wanted to do. So probably why they recruited me.
They probably saw something in me that they could co
opt and use. But I was moving down this funnel
and sort of getting into arguments for people about amw
I tried. I presented the plant to someone on you
and like she didn't you know it wasn't keen on
it at all, and was quite aggressive about it. And

(37:46):
you know, I was going to these major functions and
getting all these pep talks and coming home buzzing with excitement.
But then that would soon wear off a bit like
getting drunk. It's nice to feel drunk, but you've got
to pay for it in the morning and the days thereafter.
So it was kind of like I was flip flopping

(38:06):
between two mindsets. On the one hand, yes, I wanted
to do it, but I just didn't believe in the
business model. I was starting to read things online which
were challenging my assumptions. The people who were getting up
on stage, and you know, giving these pep talks was

(38:27):
a bit cheesy, you know, the you know, the phrases
like you know or everybody else is a dream stealer.
If people are saying that anay can't possibly work, that
they it's just that you're holding up a mirror to

(38:49):
them and they're seeing themselves reflected in that mirror, and
they didn't like it, and because of that they want
to take you down with them. They'd say things like
most people are like crabs in a barrel, and if
you try to crawl out, they'll grab you and pull
you back down. They'd be saying things like if you

(39:12):
one day you will be unemployable, you'll be on stage
motivating other people and telling them how you got to
where you are. It was I remember when we went
to Telford to the major function. I think it was
the second time i'd been. And so there were like

(39:33):
these two diamonds. That was their status, as it was
known in anway, diamonds, And they'd reached diamond status. They
were making enough money to be financially free. They no
longer had a job, they'd quit their job decades ago,
and they were now continuing to attend these IBS functions

(39:54):
and meetings out of the goodness of their heart to
motivate us. They didn't have to, they were doing it
because they wanted to. They wanted to help us and
pass on their knowledge. And you know it that there'd
be the MC on stage who would introduce these two people,
please welcome to the stage, so and so and so

(40:15):
and so, and then there'd be a huge round of applause.
And I'm not kidding. The applause went on for about
three minutes solid, which when you're just applauding like a seal,
you know, clapping mindlessly, everyone's clapping, that's quite a long
time to be clapping. And I remember it got to
the point where I thought, when the applause going to stop.

(40:36):
I didn't stop because other people were still applauding, and
nobody else stopped because the person next to them was
still applauding, and it was going on for a wrong time.
It felt fantastic, by the way, to be in that
sort of environment where everybody is in the same sort
of mindset, it feels amazing. I mean, that's what it's
like to be part of the commune. That's what it's

(40:58):
like to be part of a tea, you know, to
get out of this individual mindset and into the team mindset.
And we were just clapping and my hands were hurting.
I wanted to stop, but I didn't dare stop because
nobody else was stopping, And eventually it petered out. But
I remember as we were clapping, I remember looking at
them on the stage and they looked like they were
in absolute bliss. They looked like they must have felt

(41:23):
as though they were like the king and Queen of
the universe or something. I mean, I think back to
that now and I think, what would it be like
if I was on stage and I had a whole
room full of people applauding me thunderous applause and from
out that function like every single beat was an opportunity

(41:45):
to manipulate it, Like even the music that they were
playing there was this artist that this electronic music artist
from America by the name of BT Brian Something, who
had a string of albums, and one of this songs
he had was called Dreaming. And I've been listening to
that song only a few months ago. Not because it

(42:07):
was anything to do with anway, it was just by
sheer coincidence as they were playing the same song. So
in between the talks at this major function, which lasted
all day, by the way, like twelve hours or something,
in between talks, they'd be playing music, and one of
the songs was Dreaming. The lyrics go, no words, no talk,

(42:28):
We'll go dreaming. No pain, no hurt, we will go dreaming.
Walk with me, the futures at hand, here with us,
hear where you stand. We both know the power of pain.
We get back up and start it again with new hope,
no place for tears, Leave behind those frozen years, Come
with me, and will go dreaming. So they were playing

(42:50):
songs like that. All The theme of all the songs
was about achievement, goals, you know you can do it.
They played the Rocky soundtrack a lot, a lot of
the I mean, I think it's laughable. I remember, right,
I recruited my cousin to an we right, we went

(43:11):
to a meeting and I can't remember where it was.
It was quite far out from where we live. We
were driven there by our platinum upline who had been
in the business about fifteen years and he was making
about twenty grand a year or so. We said. He
was a very proud man, very confident, quite short in stature,

(43:33):
but big in different ways, and we all respected him.
We went to this meeting and it was like when
his regional seminars held on a Sunday and there was
whoever the big cheese was in that region was there
up on stage. They may have been Emerald, you know.
And I remember they were introducing people to the stage

(43:54):
who had recently achieved you know, three percent, seven percent,
whatever the levels were, which was quite low level but
still meant something. This old guy was introduced onto the stage.
I mean, this guy could barely stand. He had to
have people help him get up and go to the stage.
But apparently he'd introduced a lot of people and they

(44:17):
were all buying the products and it was generating points
and he was making money and the money was traveling
up the pyramid as it does and as you was
introduced to the stage, they played one of the tunes
from Rocky and it was so funny because I tried
to keep a straight face, but I looked at my
cousin up out of the corner of my eye and

(44:39):
I just saw him face palm and laugh as we
watched this old guy being helped onto the stage. He
clearly could never go not one minute in a boxing match.
It must have been about eighty five getting onto the stage,
and took quite a long time for him to get
on the stage, and all the time it's just like
Rocky music playing. It was so satirical. It's the kind

(45:02):
of thing that you'd see like in an episode of
The Office, you know. It was something like that. And
I remember that for me was a turning point because
I thought, this is just beyond comical. This is actually amateurish.
That they'd have like these people that work in the
mixing desk at the back of the room, and sometimes
they'd make mistakes and I played the wrong sound. It

(45:25):
was like you ever seen that Peter Kay thing. It's
a sitcom that Peter Kay. It's like a six episode sitcom,
like an anthology of different stories. And in each of them,
he plays a different character in a different situation. I
think in one of them he played like an ice
scream man who was warring with another ice s cream man.
It was so this antway. It was almost like an

(45:47):
episode of that. You can imagine Peter Kay playing like
all the wrongs, like he's both the guy on the stage,
but he's also like playing the role of the new recruit.
And you could say, I think if anyone's ever seen
that Peter K thing, that's the name of the series,
that Peter K thing. It's I think it's from Bolton.
I don't know. It was almost like that so amway

(46:08):
was it was. They presented it as deadly serious, but
I started to see it is absolutely ridiculous. And that's
when I thought, I want out of this. I just
don't want to be I don't want people on stage
referring to us as road warriors. You know, oh yeah,
show the plan. I know someone who showed the Plan
twelve times in one night and he didn't get back

(46:30):
till five am, and he was up at seven to
go to his job. He's a road warrior. If he
can do it, why can't you do it? You need
to quit your job, just over broke job and go
all in on amway. You don't need a university education.
A university education that's expensive by comparison, we're offering the

(46:51):
real deal. You need us. We can have you maken
enough money to be financially free in the next five years.
Why on earth would you spend money at university. All
it is is debt. You don't need debt. You need
money quickly. So they were just ramming this crap down

(47:12):
our throats all the time, along with all the silliness
and the absurdity of it and the amateurishness clapping for
three to four minutes for people on stage. It turns
out just Charlatan's. So that's when I thought, that's it.
I'm done, And I did get my opportunity to get out.

(47:32):
You know that came in two thousand and seven.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
Two thousand and seven, so that was quite a while ago. Now,
I guess that you've done a lot of work in
understanding your experience since then, because of the conversations we
had before we hit record. You're clearly knowledgeable about all
of this stuff outside. You know how these systems are

(48:17):
put together. Just your LinkedIn is so impressive with how
you've broken down some of your experiences and what Amway
is and how it fits into the kind of EMLEM
world as a whole. I just wanted to ask you
if it was the.

Speaker 3 (48:45):
Was it this one from rock I think it was
that one. It might have been that one. They used
a few from Rocky, They use a few different ones. Yeah, yeah,
I think they played all of them without any irony
on their part that they're deadly serious. I mean, if
I did something like that, I would mean it to
be satirical. But yeah, yeah, I mean what happened was

(49:08):
in two thousand and I didn't know this, but in
the background things were happening, And it was January two
thousand and six that the Secretary of State for the
DTI it was known as the Department of Trade and

(49:29):
Industry back then that was the name of the UK
government department which later became the Department for Business, Enterprise
and Regulatory Reform. They launched an investigation into the operations
of Mway UK as in you know, the Mway Corporation,

(49:51):
but also into some of these training organizations which existed
unofficially side. But so I was an IBS that was
the one I was in, but I didn't know this.
But there were others around the country, and one of
them was called brit Worldwide. One was called Network twenty one.
There were other Anway distributors in the UK besides those

(50:15):
under IBS, so obviously Amway had come to the UK
via many means. You know, there was other lines of
affiliation as known. I was in the IBS one and
I think but it all went back to, you know,
like the big cheeses in the USA, back up to
the very top of the pyramid, like the actual true

(50:36):
top of the pyramid. So I didn't know this, but
something was happening in the background, and one day I
was told that there was a mauratorium on all sponsoring
in the UK because of an investigation that was going
on into the Anway Corporation and into some of these
other organizations. Now apparently it wasn't that IBS was investigated.

(51:01):
It was that these other organizations that were similar to
IBS were being investigated and they were doing it all wrong.
Apparently they were being misleading and unethical, not IBS. IBS
was clean as a whistle, but the others they were
doing something wrong and they had attracted the government and

(51:21):
the government were looking very closely at everybody, and because
of that we had to pause. There was no more sponsoring.
So this went on for a few months, you know,
like it was like downtime. Everything was on hold, frozen apparently.
So we were told not to sponsor, and I thought,
that's fine. I don't want to sponsor anybody anyway. In fact,

(51:41):
I was wanting to get out of this. And my
upline would call me regularly, my platinum upline. He'd lived
quite close to me, he lived in the city, and
he called me up to give me updates, and he'd
just drone on and on and on, and I think, oh, yeah, okay,
yeah great, all right, yeah right, okay, well thanks for

(52:01):
letting me in there, and then hang up the phone
and I think, oh, for God's sake, I wish you'd
stop calling me. And one day he caught me up
and he said, Darren, I want you to come to
a meeting. This is a really important meeting. It's going
to explain everything that's going on. It's really important that
you come. I will pick you up. I will take you.

(52:23):
It's quite far away, but don't worry. It's fine. So
I said right, Okay, So we went to this meeting,
and on all the way there in the car, like
he was doing the usual stuff, which is like droning
on about our weigh and giving me all the usual letterons.
I mean, they'd refer to cars as a mobile university.
It's a university on wheels. When you traveled to and

(52:46):
from functions, you should be talking about the business. And
if you're not talking about the business, you should be
listening to the tapes and the CDs that we've recorded
for so it was just endless brainwashing. You know, everything
had to be about and so we went to the meeting.
We took our seats, so for quite a few people there,
and they did all the usual stuff, like you know,

(53:07):
the speakers take turns to go on the stage and
talk about the state of the economy and what's going
on in how this business is the future of commerce,
and that we see online shopping becoming a huge thing
now what with Amazon and eBay, and it's all moving
online and we should be doing our spending online. And

(53:27):
it got to the point where they said, right, and
as for the moratorium, well there's some good news and
there's some bad news. The bad news is we've had
our contracts terminated. So the diamonds who had been applauding
clap clap, clap, clapping like seals, like morons at this
Telford function, we're now standing there saying, oh yeah. As

(53:51):
part of the government's investigation and the recommendations that the
government are making to m where UK and where UK
have decided to terminate our contracts to try and send
a message to the government. We haven't done anything wrong,
but Mway are just overreacting and terminating our contracts. Your

(54:13):
contract is still valid, but it's just that we've been terminated.
So the business that we've spent the last twenty five
years building in order to achieve diamond status is no more.
It's not our fault. It's just that all these other
training organizations have been doing it all wrong. They attracted
the attention of the government. The government came down hard

(54:36):
on Umway the corporation, and now Unway the corporation have
come down hard on us and we're caught in the crossfire.
So that's disappointing because we believed in this business and
do you know what, on second thoughts, Umway wasn't that great.
In fact, it's slightly out of date, and really there

(54:58):
are better opportunities that are available. It's a bit like
when you realize that you need a car, but the
only thing you've got is a horse. And it's even
worse when you find out that they've just put the
price of hay up. I've thought, what they're flipping? Hell
are you talking about? What's all this convoluted analogy between cars,

(55:20):
horses and hay what you're talking about? And it was
that point I was like, you know, people were looking
at us each other, a guest, you know, there was
sharp intake of breath terminated, It terminated, what do you
mean terminated? So then so the speakers invited all these
other people on stage who had never heard of promoting

(55:41):
these weird schemes which were clearly pyramid schemes designed to
replace away. One of them was called uv me, which
is like an online gaming thing, but it was all
pyramid scheme. You invite somebody and they can invite people
and blah blah blah, and commissions can earned. There was
another one called Success University, which sounded suspiciously like Trump University,

(56:07):
which was a known pyramid scheme run by Donald Trump,
which was wound up at some point that was a
property pyramid scheme with multiple layers to it, and they
had loads of other people come on stage and they
were basically pitching these weird schemes, and I was just
thinking what my heart was sinking. But at the same time,

(56:28):
I thought, well, I don't have to do this anymore.
So what they were trying to do was, so these
Diamonds are trying to get us to quit amway and
move over to this new scheme with the former Diamonds
at the top of the organization, and we're just all
register in the exact same systems, so it would be
like moving one organization to another. Do you see what

(56:50):
I mean? It was just porting the way the uplines
and the downlines were registered into this new organization, like
we'd sort of put it all together, like you know,
good God.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
That's like speed dating. It's like our next up. You
know all that I've seen in Shrek where Lord Farquaad
is having a look at all the princesses that he
could send somebody to go and bring to him. They're like,
you know, and she likes Peena, Kalad isn't getting caught
in the rain and then who's next on stage? Oh,
it's this Success University.

Speaker 3 (57:28):
Yeah, it was it wild.

Speaker 2 (57:29):
It sounds like a fever dream.

Speaker 3 (57:32):
Yeah, it was weird. And when I think about it now,
I think, did that really happen? Because it just seems
to me like a weird dream I had, or, as
I said, like a satirical episode of something. I mean,
these this industry is ripe for satire. It's perfect because

(57:54):
I remember on the way out of the seminar, everybody
sort of filed out the car in the daze. There
were quite a lot of people, and there's over a
thousand people there, which is quite a lot of people
when you put them all into one room. So the
entire school like in one room we all filed out.
People were kind of like dazed. But the thing was
people were still trying to do the positive talk, like

(58:17):
or a sort of all the stuff that they'd learned.
They were still saying all that stuff like on auto pilot,
You've just been told that the world is ending, yet
at the same time you're still being very positive about
it all. And I remember it was I think it
was my upblind uplind uh. I forget which one one

(58:41):
of them turned to me, and he said, wow, so
how about that? Pretty cool? Eh, some great opportunities there,
that gaming one. Now, I know people would love that
gaming one. I know a lot of people who play games,
and I'm telling you they will go for this that. Yeah, definitely,
And I've thought, oh, shot the eff up. You know,

(59:02):
I had to keep it to myself. And we went
out into and I got a lift back to where
I live with a different upline who actually is an
anesthesiologist at my local city hospital. And I always found
him a bit odd. He always sent a bit slippery
to me. He had sort of like the doctor's bedside

(59:22):
mana thing going all the time, like he just wouldn't
drop it. Very charming and very professional, but I just
found him difficult to relate to, and I felt like
it wasn't so I was in the car with him
and we were car pooling, and there were a bunch
of people in the back seat who he was dropping
off on route. So I was the last person to
I think I might have been the first to drop off.

(59:45):
We got into the car and someone in the back
seat went, what the hell are they talking about. We
signed up to Amway four weeks ago now, they're telling
us we can't do it. I did not understand any
of what they're talking about. And this guy, so I
was in the front seat, This guy was a driver
that I'm a sesiologist. He turned to her and smiled

(01:00:07):
and he said, look, if you don't understand it, it
doesn't matter. You don't need to understand it, because the
thing is. And then she went, of course you need
to understand it. What are you talking about? And he
looked at me like in shock, and I looked at
him him and sort of shrugged, and he was sort
of looking at me to say, help me, Help me.

(01:00:28):
So I managed to placate the situation by just saying
a load of preprogrammed umway unbot crap, which I'd heard
a million times. It just came out like the words
came out automatically. You've rehearsed them so many times. And
I sort of placated her and got her to calm
down and be less emotional. And he looked at me

(01:00:49):
with absolute relief. I've never seen an expression of relief
on someone's face like that before. He looked at me
like up the corner of his eyes sort of grinned,
like as if to say well played, and I thought
I didn't like doing that, but it had to be
done just to keep the peace because it was embarrassing,
you know that. You know, he's the upline and you've

(01:01:10):
got the downline like going into like full rebellion mood,
like mutiny, and we had to sort of maintain the
power dynamic at least for the journey home because it's
an hour. We've got an hour this awkward atmosphere. And yeah,
so on the way home, we were just chip chatting
in our usual unbopp pleasantries, you know, just in violent

(01:01:34):
agreement over every little thing. But secretly I was thinking,
I'm getting out of here. I'm getting out of here.
This is it. This is it. When I get out
of this car, they can all f off as far
as I'm concerned, because I don't want anything to do
with these people. So that was it, you know, that
was like a key moment.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Well, I hope the lady in the downline also also
got out of there as well, after having you know,
that kind of realization in the back of the car,
like what do you mean what's going on?

Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
Yeah, me too. I hope she came to her senses.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
I hope.

Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
So but some people are very easily manipulated. I mean
I was, she wasn't as far along in the journey
as I was. I hope she got out too. Yeah,
And I hope the doctor learned his lesson as well.
Because I'll tell you something, Casey. I read the report
that came out of the DTI. The report was published

(01:02:30):
in two thousand and eight, and the recommendations from a
High Court judge were the Amway not cease operations, but
significantly change the way they operate and the way they
make their financial claims. Right, don't make such bombastic financial claims.

(01:02:51):
Don't refer to people as an IBO, which means independent
business owner, but referred to them as ABO, which means
Amway business owner. Because you cannot be a business owner
in AMW it's not a business. You're selling products on
behalf of a corporation. You are unpaid consultant on a
commission only a basis. You are not a business owner,

(01:03:14):
and may are the business owner. They control the marketing
and the pr you don't. So the changes were recommended,
and and we made those changes, and it changed down
Way forever. It was in many ways newted. It was
new toed like a dog. It had its certain parts

(01:03:34):
were removed and it couldn't really do what it was
doing prior to that. But I think the COLT may
have continued. The cult of ibs continued in a different
form because they formed a new organization simply called wait
for it, the team, the team that was it, and

(01:03:55):
they were basically doing the same thing but with different businesses.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
Is that is such an interesting way to describe it,
the kind of the Newton expression. Imagine if all multi
level marketing schemes were not allowed to use the you're
a small business owner or you're a successful business owner
kind of hook, and they had to say you're a

(01:04:23):
successful like MLM business owner, Like, it just wouldn't have
the same impact, would it. And I know that that's
how a lot of people are recruited or seduced or
attracted to or however people want to describe that. That's
process of being pulled into an MLM scheme, Like the

(01:04:46):
one of the biggest attractions is you'll be your own
business owner boss. Yeah, you'll be yeah, that's it. You're
a hashtag boss babe.

Speaker 3 (01:04:56):
Absolutely exactly. Or you'll be a hungbot or a geo
or a money honey, you you can just make these
things up, can't you. And a lot of women are
targeted because a lot of these MLMs copy Amway, because
Amway has set something of a template. Well, Scientology set
a template which I believe Amway may have copied somewhat,

(01:05:17):
and then Amway has set a template in a formula
for all the other MLMs which have appeared over the years,
with some differences, but generally it's the same bombastic bs
And sadly, a lot of this stuff is aimed at
women because women can often find themselves in a vulnerable position.
You know, I knew someone in my town. I don't

(01:05:39):
know who well, but she was recruited to an MLM
during COVID and I happen to know by doing a
bit of research that she was a single mother with
a baby at the time, and she was posting all
this stuff to her Facebook. I mean, when I was
an Amway, they discouraged social media. But it's all different now.
Umway has changed. Unway has its own business support materials

(01:06:03):
and you have to pay to be a member of
the app and get their officially sanctioned unwagh podcasts. You know,
so organizations of ibs don't really exist anymore, at least
not for unway, but for these other businesses that are
targeting women, like I think it's like beach body or
I forget what they care, but they're selling.

Speaker 2 (01:06:23):
Like Mary Kay of all those types of ones.

Speaker 3 (01:06:26):
Yes, exactly, so the targeting women a lot of the time,
and corded and boss babes and hunbots and things. Well, no, no,
hunbot is a slightly derogatory term that x MLM has
used to describe someone who's still very much in the
cult mindset and hasn't quite come to the censors. But
people self describing as she e o and that kind

(01:06:47):
of thing, which is cringe worthy. And you know, I
mean what I mean, what does that do for women? Really?
I mean it's a bit. I mean, it's a bit.
Come on, you can do better.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Than I imagined in some circumstances if you were using that,

(01:07:19):
you know, like, oh, she's a you know, she's a
she eof. If it was like legitimately, like you are
an independent female business owner who has built a successful
business or platform or whatever it is, like, it might
feel empowering to call yourself a she eo, but it's
not is it. It's under the guise of you're not

(01:07:42):
really you're not really a business owner because you're not.
You're working for your upline. And that's that's the really
sad thing. That's why I think it's good that that
you had to then say you're an Amway business owner,
because it takes that, it takes that selling point out
of you know, the whole business owner aspect of it,

(01:08:04):
and I think that that really lifts Avail quite significantly.

Speaker 3 (01:08:09):
Yeah, it's not a business because they can do a
rug pool at any time. Your platform has gone just
like people who build businesses entirely on social media. Let's
say some people do and then the terms change unilaterally
and then it's all right, so you can't do that anymore.
So it wasn't really a business because it wasn't stable,

(01:08:29):
you know, it wasn't It had no sure footing, and
you weren't in control. Ever you weren't. You might have
felt in control and it felt empowering and you were
drunk on ideas of financial freedom one day in the future.
But no, it's all gone now. So I've learned to
be very very suspicious and to trust my judgment and

(01:08:51):
to beware the friendly stranger. You know.

Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
Well, I think that it's interesting to consider how much
multi level marketing has changed in the digital age, because,
of course, there are different ways for people to sell
their product on behalf of the MLM that they are
associated with. There are different ways to recruit people, there

(01:09:18):
are different ways to sell the vision. You know, when
you say, look at the watch I want, or look
at the holiday I've been gifted, and all of these
things that are like half truths. You know, that holiday
that you were gifted isn't really a gift because you've
had to work so hard and pay so much into
getting to that point, kind of like the you know,

(01:09:39):
the Ritz example. But even then, I think it's something
like you'll probably know this like statistics specifically, it's something
like if six people, if there was like a six
a six person per layer of a pyramid scheme. I

(01:10:02):
think by the twelfth layer model, where each person recruits
six others, it would take approximately twelve layers to exceed
the world's population. This means that to even theoretically fill
the entire global population, the model would not be sustainable
due to the exponential growth in the number of participants

(01:10:22):
required at each level. So in these in these MLEM
schemes where you'll promise like, oh, you'll just keep going
up and up and up and up, that's not true
because you get to a certain point in that pyramid
and there's no one left on earth.

Speaker 3 (01:10:37):
But it can never get to that stage anyway, because
there's effectively a one hundred percent churn rate because so
many people drop out they have to be replaced, and
new people are being born all the time, and you know,
by the time they're twenty or so, they're illegible to
be in it, So there's constantly a churn, with new
blood having to come to the table and put their

(01:10:59):
money in to the pot as it were. Having said
that there's more chance of winning at actual gambling than
there is to make money in MLM, you'd be better
off literally spending a roulette wheel because people lose money
hand over fist in MLM, so they'd be better off
chancing it in the casino than what is supposed to

(01:11:21):
be a business. Do you know what that's another book?
Speaking of Robert Fitzpatrick, you've meanted you've reminded me that
he recently endorsed a book by one Jane Borden this
was published by Simon and Schuster. I think it's that's
a publishing house, colts like Us. So this is the

(01:11:42):
first time a large publishing house, so not a vanity press.
A lot of books are published self published, you know,
on what you call a vanity press, self published Amazon,
that kind of thing. This has actually been published by
a major publisher, colts like Us, and it identifies the
reading Robert Fitzpatrick's introduction that this is a narrow and

(01:12:09):
deep and personal understanding of the court phenomenon and how
it relates to MLM. It goes into quite a lot
of detail, and it says how the media has largely
ignored or sidelined the reality of the court epidemic in America,

(01:12:30):
in particular Umway, Herbalife, Mary kay Avon and more such
schemes involving more than eighteen million people in the US
each year, which continues to be treated as a legitimate
direct selling business, and this false business, he says, its

(01:12:50):
identity is maintained despite the verified fact that ninety nine
percent of all people in MLM lose their money and
virtual virtually none of the salespeople actually make a profit.
So that's cooks like us I learned of this book
on David Brier's website. David Brier, I don't know if

(01:13:12):
your listeners know that name. If anyone's familiar with Anwy
in the UK, then might do. He's a guy whose
brother was recruited into Amway, and his brother was completely
and utterly brainwashed. By all accounts, it was a rather
strange individual, a narcissist and quite unpleasant. He gave away

(01:13:34):
the family inheritance to the leaders of Amway, well at
least not Unway corporate, but the people running IBS. Yeah,
they're like a parasite, these these motivational organizational leaders, you know,
the IBS is of the Unway world, if they still exist.

(01:13:57):
They took over David Brier's brother's life and had him
basically turn the family home into sort of like a
headquarters for Unway meetings and stuff like that. So David
Breer has a website. It's called MLM, The American Dream
Made Nightmare Brier. It's b R e A R b

(01:14:22):
R E R. You can find it. It's like the
seventh result down or something in Google. He writes in
Eyewater in detail about Anway. I mean, he's he's coming
for it's April twenty twenty five. He's been writing about
it since twenty twelve, right, virtually NonStop, going into such

(01:14:43):
But he's the one who actually got the ball rolling
with this two thousand and seven DTI investigation. I mean,
in the background, he was lobbying all the time, you know,
trying to speak to the movers and shakers of that world,
trying to get something, anything, to happen. And so when

(01:15:04):
he heard me on another podcast, it was on Life
After MLM, he heard it and he contacted me, and
we've been talking ever since. But he thinks, he insists
he's correct in saying that Amway in all its copycat
MLMs are colts and perhaps the most dangerous court because

(01:15:26):
it is given the endorsement of the FTC. Back in
nineteen seventy nine, they had the chance to rule. The
Amway in MLM is a pyramid scheme. They chose not to.
Jimmy Carter was the sitting president at the time. So
what tends to happen is Amway or lobbyist. They're very
rich and powerful. I mean, they have deeper pockets in

(01:15:46):
the mafia. I mean they are more powerful than the mafia,
and probably willing to do worse than the mafia. In
many cases, they will often have the ear of the king,
as it were, well the president. They whisper in the
ear of the president, and they let us continue to exist.

(01:16:07):
It's fine. It's good for American commerce. It's a good
American business. And so it's allowed to exist. And the
FTC had their chance, they didn't take it. Umway was
given sort of protection almost and then it's proliferated from
there all over the world. It's now in China. China

(01:16:28):
isn't capitalist, it's communist with Chinese characteristics, but they've adopted
a certain amount of capitalism because what they've got to
So Umwey is now in China. Umway means American way,
That's what it means. It's in India as well. It
is destroying communities and of the continents. It is a

(01:16:52):
dangerous court. And during Trump's first administration, he made Betsy
DeVos Education Secretory. Betsy DeVos of the DeVos family as
in Javan and Richard DeVos, the founders of Amui, Dutch
immigrants who set up in America and very much made
it a family business. So we've now got I don't

(01:17:16):
know if Betsy DeVos is still in Trump's cabin I
didn't think so, but you know, we've got four years
of Trump, so anything could happen.

Speaker 2 (01:17:26):
I believe there's also heavy ties to the Mormon Church
and Amway, really and a lot of people in the
Utah area of America are or have been involved in
Amway in some capacity. And there are ties to the
mafia through the Mormon Church as well. I mean, maybe

(01:17:48):
not the LDS Church, but certainly more along the lines
of the la Baron family, and you know, everything to
do with Brigham Young's blood doctrine and all of the
controvers events that happened around that particular particular piece of doctrine.
So it's this is wild and this has been such
an education for me. We've talked about Dale Carnegie's nineteen

(01:18:11):
thirty six book. We've talked about Robert Charldini's influenced The
Psychology of Persuasion book from nineteen eighty four. We've talked
about ponzin Noomics by Robert Fitzpatrick, which came out in
two thousand and twenty twenty one. Yes, we've talked about
the cults like us new Jane Borden book which came

(01:18:33):
out this year. So we've talked about so much stuff
that can be used as resources for people to go
and do additional learning in an academic sense, not in
an MLM sense after this podcast if they want to,
and I will put links to your work in the

(01:18:55):
episode description. I'll put a link to Jane Borden's book
in the episode description. There's some other things I wanted
to maybe I'll put a link to Ponzinomics as well,
and David's work as well that you've mentioned.

Speaker 3 (01:19:10):
Absolutely to include David's work. Yeah, and there's also I mean,
I think we might have left this out, but if
it's not obvious by now, there's a huge tie in
with right wing Christianity in America, and there are elements
of the Southern Baptist Prosperity Gospel as well, which you

(01:19:30):
see in all these courts, Yeah, Naggod churches and things
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:37):
Well, thank you so much, Darren. This has been an
education for me today. I just want to ask you
if there's anybody listening who may be part of an MLM,
has left an MLM or gets approach to be recruited
into what sounds like potentially at EMLM what sorts of
advice would you say two people coming across anything multi

(01:20:00):
level marketing.

Speaker 3 (01:20:02):
Well, that's a good question, and my initial answer was
going to be, trust your gut if it doesn't feel right. However,
if you're in a position where you're considering joining an MLM,
it might be that your gut is untrustworthy. Maybe you're
in a particular situation or circumstances. So saying telling people

(01:20:23):
to trust their gut isn't always the best advice because
they may trust it and make the wrong decision and
end up in the MLM. But I'd say, ask hard
questions and don't be embarrassed to do so. I asked
to see proof of income for one thing. That's something
that I never asked, but I felt like it was
a faux pas to do so. It almost felt like

(01:20:45):
it would be an insult, Like you wouldn't ask a
millionaire if you could see the bank statements because it
would be like ludicrous, You know that. So you should
ask the tough questions, and you know, don't just go
in on these things on blind faith. It's okay to
to take your time and not to let your emotions

(01:21:09):
override your logic. Most people make decisions based on emotion,
and people say I make logical decisions. No, you don't.
Any decision you make, I mean, whether it's buying toothpaste
in the supermarket or buying a house, it's emotional, so
be aware of that. You can back it up by
logic and reason. But they will try to move you

(01:21:30):
to emotion. And if they're talking about your private life
and asking prying questions about your parents and things like that,
or siblings or whatever, they might be looking for something
that they can use to manipulate you. They're looking for
your hot button, as described in a lot of their
training literature. You know, I remember reading books about being

(01:21:53):
taught to find someone's hot button, which on reflection, is
incredibly manipulative. So that's what i'd say. If they're asking
very personal questions and trying to find out things about
your private life, be wary.

Speaker 2 (01:22:10):
Fantastic, that's great. I've thoroughly enjoyed our chat today. I've
learned loads and you've made me laugh a lot. So
even though you're feeling under thewmer Darres, thank you so
much for our chat today.

Speaker 3 (01:22:21):
My pleasure. Thank you, Casey