Speaker 1: Hey, dream listeners. If you like this podcast, you're going
Speaker 1: to love the book. Yeah. I wrote a book. It's
Speaker 1: called Selling the Dream and it's coming out March twelfth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, on Atria. It's about all of your
Speaker 1: favorite characters from MLMs and some that you've never even
Speaker 1: heard of. I hope check it out. Portend. I'm somebody
Speaker 1: that you've just met and I see, Oh you mean,
Speaker 1: what's this pitch? What's this? Give me the pitch? Oh? Well,
Speaker 1: give me the pun. You know you can give me
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred dollars and in a week you can walk
Speaker 1: away with twelve thousand. You know, we have endless resources.
Speaker 1: I've got a list of people that, even if you
Speaker 1: don't know them, I know them, and you can call
Speaker 1: them and all you have to do is be positive
Speaker 1: and they will get it from you. Come on, you
Speaker 1: can do this. I know you you're a great salesperson.
Speaker 1: I trust you, I believe in you, and I'd like
Speaker 1: to share this opportunity with you. You know this is
Speaker 1: don't give me your last fifteen hundred dollars. But if
Speaker 1: you've got fifteen hundred dollars ticking around that you're thinking
Speaker 1: about what should I do with it, do this, do this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did it. I'm in. Yeah, you're in. I know
Speaker 1: you're in. I'm Jane Marie and this is the dream
Speaker 1: episode one want to swim in Cash. When we first
Speaker 1: started making this show, we were super pumped, jazzed, but
Speaker 1: we have to keep the topic under wraps for as
Speaker 1: long as possible. The subjects of our investigation are highly
Speaker 1: litigious for one thing, and we had to get close
Speaker 1: inside how they work without them freaking out and closing ranks.
Speaker 1: That was touchy enough, But then there's this other thing.
Speaker 1: Half of my family and most of my friends from
Speaker 1: my hometown are involved directly intimately, and we're going to
Speaker 1: bring you into their world. It's sketchy and crazy making
Speaker 1: and almost unbelievable. Anyway, it was frustrating this not being
Speaker 1: able to talk about it thing. Like I said, I
Speaker 1: was super pumped and I talk a lot. One night,
Speaker 1: I let it slip to one of my best friends
Speaker 1: that we'd gotten a new gig. The exchange went like this.
Speaker 1: All I can say is that it's kind of about
Speaker 1: pyramid schemes. And he goes, oh, you should talk to
Speaker 1: my mom. What Yeah, my mom ran one of those
Speaker 1: when I was a kid out of our house. A
Speaker 1: literal pyramid scheme. Picture this loft. There is a sixteen
Speaker 1: foot high, twenty two foot wide window overlooking the World
Speaker 1: Trade Center. Ladies and gentlemen. My friend mom, Nan Dylan.
Speaker 1: So it's got white pickled floors, a sixteen foot ceiling,
Speaker 1: and thirty five hundred square feet. It is jammed. Hundreds
Speaker 1: of people showed up. You can't even walk there are
Speaker 1: so many people. In order to not be suffocated by
Speaker 1: the crowd, I climbed up the spiral staircase going to
Speaker 1: the second floor just to observe. And I remember just
Speaker 1: kind of sitting on that staircase overlooking this crowd of
Speaker 1: people as they moved around the room, making alliances, you know,
Speaker 1: creating future groups. Back in the eighties, Nan was working
Speaker 1: in advertising and raising her three kids in Manhattan. I
Speaker 1: was only just you know, newly unmarried and just kind
Speaker 1: of coming back into the world. It was kind of
Speaker 1: an exciting time for me that you know, life is new,
Speaker 1: feeling very empowered and on a personal basis, filled with
Speaker 1: an idea that I was smart and adventurous and I
Speaker 1: could do anything I wanted to do, and that life
Speaker 1: was just an adventure. The timing of NaN's rebirth, if
Speaker 1: you will, couldn't have been better. See at that exact moment,
Speaker 1: a cultural phenomenon was taking hold in New ag circles
Speaker 1: all over the country. It was called the Human Potential movement.
Speaker 1: Think of it as sort of a precursor to the
Speaker 1: Secret you know, just visualize abundance and happiness and voila,
Speaker 1: you're rich and skinny or whatever. In that time in
Speaker 1: New York City there was a lot of Human Potential
Speaker 1: Movement groups kind of it us all about energy. You know,
Speaker 1: energy out is energy in, and you get what you
Speaker 1: give and all of that, you know, power of positive whatever.
Speaker 1: In the midst of this movement sits an untethered Nan,
Speaker 1: riding this new wave of endless opportunity. And along comes
Speaker 1: this exciting concept where if you if you put a
Speaker 1: bunch of money in and you could talk other people
Speaker 1: into joining you, that everybody could make a lot of
Speaker 1: money and it was all cash, and it was all fast,
Speaker 1: and it was all fun and very optimistic and exciting.
Speaker 1: This new thing was presented as a game called the
Speaker 1: Airplane Game. As Nan remembers it, anyone who was even
Speaker 1: tangentially related to the whole human potential movement was a
Speaker 1: buzz about the airplane game. Parties introducing it to newcomers
Speaker 1: were being held all over Lower Manhattan. The way she
Speaker 1: describes it, they looked kind of like literary salons, with
Speaker 1: people giving inspiring lectures at their bohemian flats in the
Speaker 1: East Village and a bunch of aging hippies sitting around
Speaker 1: cross legged, wrapped with attention. There were stories about these
Speaker 1: people who had come from cal who took up residence
Speaker 1: in some lecture hall in the East Village, and these
Speaker 1: people were giving lectures on the new way of, you know,
Speaker 1: making money while stepping aside from the establishment. It took
Speaker 1: a minute, but being in that world, eventually Nan agreed
Speaker 1: to attend one of these meetups and to learn more
Speaker 1: about this exciting opportunity. The first time, I remember asking somebody, well,
Speaker 1: wait a second, how does this thing work? I was
Speaker 1: trying to understand it. I said, well, there's a pilot,
Speaker 1: and there's two co pilots, and there are passengers, and
Speaker 1: you pay to fly. These were obviously not literal airplanes.
Speaker 1: Picture this. People would set up chairs in the shape
Speaker 1: of a triangle or pyramid, with one chair at the front.
Speaker 1: That's the pilot seat behind that person. There were two
Speaker 1: chairs for co pilots, four behind them, and eight passengers
Speaker 1: in the last row. Those eight passengers were the new
Speaker 1: recruits who put in fifteen hundred dollars a piece. As
Speaker 1: they recruited more people, they moved up the ranks until
Speaker 1: eventually they became a pilot themselves and took the pot.
Speaker 1: Then they moved on to another airplane. The chairs weren't
Speaker 1: absolutely necessary. Sometimes these planes were just represented by charts,
Speaker 1: but the principal was the same. So it's this revolving
Speaker 1: thing of you pay and then you wait, and then
Speaker 1: everything moves very quickly and you are before you know it.
Speaker 1: Like we're talking about four days, you are you are
Speaker 1: a pilot and people are paying you. I can't remember
Speaker 1: some of the timing of this, but I did say
Speaker 1: yes to having a recruitment party at my loft in Tribeca.
Speaker 1: Somebody planned it, called me and said, okay, if we
Speaker 1: come to your place, And it was at that event
Speaker 1: that I started thinking, ooh, this is like, this is
Speaker 1: getting out of banned. It was extraordinary and giddy making.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was really intoxicating and fun until somebody
Speaker 1: leaned up to me and said, I think there were
Speaker 1: some FBI men in the room. I went, oh, far out?
Speaker 1: Is it really? This interview with Nan was, to use
Speaker 1: her words, giddy making. Naturally, I come out of the
Speaker 1: studio and start telling all the other producers on our
Speaker 1: team about this airplane game. And that's when one of
Speaker 1: them says that the airplane game had come up in
Speaker 1: their reporting too. It turns out one of our experts,
Speaker 1: a guy named Robert Fitzpatrick. You'll hear a lot from
Speaker 1: him this season. He got his start in studying this
Speaker 1: sort of thing because he had played the airplane game too.
Speaker 1: Think it was a telephone call, yes, and it was
Speaker 1: an invitation to come to a meeting that was going
Speaker 1: to be held in someone's house. It was presented as
Speaker 1: just something new, a movement, an event was quite vague
Speaker 1: as to what it was, and like thousands of others,
Speaker 1: I was invited to participate. When the Airplane Game reached
Speaker 1: Robert Fitzpatrick in Broward County, Florida, he was a perfect fit.
Speaker 1: Robert was a self starter, founded his own trade magazine
Speaker 1: and worked as a community organizer. He got invited to
Speaker 1: play and the party he went to was just as
Speaker 1: exhilarating as NaN's, but there was something more to it,
Speaker 1: something sweet, neighborly, wholesome. Even when you went in, there
Speaker 1: was an immediate sentiment of feeling an air of happiness, euphoria, welcoming,
Speaker 1: There was excitement, There was a speaker. People were reminded
Speaker 1: of their own goals and their home hopes for a
Speaker 1: better life, and it was presented as a kind of
Speaker 1: system that enabled people to achieve their life's purpose. Like Nan,
Speaker 1: Robert and his friends were heavily influenced by the Human
Speaker 1: Potential movement and the airplane game. To them, it just
Speaker 1: seemed like a logical extension of that way of thinking.
Speaker 1: I myself at that time, had been interested in personal development,
Speaker 1: transformational types of programs. This was the eighties, this was
Speaker 1: in the air. There's a certain type of person who
Speaker 1: was already fantasizing about their airplane game strategy, like with
Speaker 1: spreadsheets and charts and party plans and a vision board.
Speaker 1: Nan was one of those people. So I take two
Speaker 1: weeks off of work and put what I called my
Speaker 1: flight plans up on the wall and go to work.
Speaker 1: It's fifteen hundred dollars to join, but it's not a fee.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of a contribution. It's what you'd put
Speaker 1: into it. And it's all based on giving and receiving.
Speaker 1: It's sharing. It's non competitive. You pay and then you wait,
Speaker 1: and then everything moves very quickly, and you are before
Speaker 1: you know it. Like we're talking about four days, you are.
Speaker 1: You are a pilot and people are paying you. If
Speaker 1: you're wondering, fifteen hundred bucks back then would be like
Speaker 1: thirty five hundred today. So imagine a stream of people
Speaker 1: walking up and handing you three or four grand. That
Speaker 1: adds up fast. And Nan was told everyone who enters
Speaker 1: the game could walk away with twelve thousand dollars. Again,
Speaker 1: that'd be like getting almost thirty grand for going to
Speaker 1: a party. That number absolutely sent a current of electricity
Speaker 1: through the room. Idea that someone whom you knew and
Speaker 1: trusted had received twelve thousand dollars in a matter of days.
Speaker 1: It somehow clicked that this was correct, This is the
Speaker 1: way it ought to work. That thinking correctly in America
Speaker 1: is supposed to lead to prosperity. And there is a
Speaker 1: whole current of thinking like this which I had been
Speaker 1: subjected to, and virtually everybody had been subjected to, but
Speaker 1: particularly people who had studied this kind of new thought
Speaker 1: philosophy that positive attitude, confidence and right thinking attracted to
Speaker 1: you good things. There's enough for everybody. Scarcity is an illusion,
Speaker 1: and that is that kind of competitive scarcity based thinking
Speaker 1: that has held everyone back and that this system breaks
Speaker 1: through that, I mean, sales is what I did. So
Speaker 1: I was able to attract a lot of people, and
Speaker 1: I had been in seminars with people. I had been
Speaker 1: in all of these different groups with people, So I
Speaker 1: had a huge roster of people that I knew that
Speaker 1: I could call upon, and people who had who had
Speaker 1: enough exposure to me to be able to trust me. Initially,
Speaker 1: the people that were joining were those who really were
Speaker 1: oriented to that kind of thinking. I considered myself kind
Speaker 1: of wiy you know, like one of the first in Tribeca,
Speaker 1: you know, managed to wheedle my way into a thirty
Speaker 1: five hundred square foot loft that I paid seven hundred
Speaker 1: dollars a month for. If you're the type of person
Speaker 1: who moved into a thirty five hundred square foot loft
Speaker 1: in Tribeca nineteen eighty seven, then you're probably also the
Speaker 1: type of person who'd have no problem figuring out how
Speaker 1: to get the most out of this game. You like
Speaker 1: Nan would be raking it in. Some others got up
Speaker 1: and said, not only had they received that, they had
Speaker 1: re entered it as a passenger and gone through the
Speaker 1: process again and received another twelve thousand. So these were
Speaker 1: testimonials that now the mechanism, the math of this, the
Speaker 1: structure sort of went into the background. Every time I
Speaker 1: made money, I would buy into another plane. I mean,
Speaker 1: what the heck you pay fifteen hundred dollars and make
Speaker 1: twelve thousand, I can be in five or six planes
Speaker 1: all at the same time, which is what I did.
Speaker 1: I was able to attract a lot of people, and
Speaker 1: the money started to flow immediately. The kids used to
Speaker 1: gather around the bed as I would just you know,
Speaker 1: laugh and invite them to jump into the cash that
Speaker 1: was all over the bed. You know, it was just
Speaker 1: hilariously fun. I mean, at that point there had to
Speaker 1: be thirty or forty, maybe fifty thousand dollars likened, you know,
Speaker 1: one hundred dollars bills or something. It was just crazy,
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't there. It was so much money,
Speaker 1: but it was all cash, and it was like mountains
Speaker 1: of cash, and that was that was the scene that
Speaker 1: arrived with me. Hey, kids, you want to swim in cash,
Speaker 1: you know, come on into mommy's room and let's all.
Speaker 1: Let's all swim in cash. These piles of cash, they
Speaker 1: were coming from somewhere. And while NaN's passengers were more
Speaker 1: or less acquaintances with money to play with, Robert's community
Speaker 1: in South Florida was made up of friends and family.
Speaker 1: At some level, we knew that if we said this
Speaker 1: to someone we didn't know, if we couldn't leverage the
Speaker 1: trust and relationship we already had, it would probably sound bizarre.
Speaker 1: It would sound commercial, it would sound crass. But if
Speaker 1: I know you, it can suddenly transform into a something
Speaker 1: in which I am giving. It's something that you would
Speaker 1: share intimately, almost And that took the commercial edge off
Speaker 1: of it. Even though what was it all about? Fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred dollars turning into twelve thousand dollars eight hundred percent return?
Speaker 1: You know, it didn't take much to know that that
Speaker 1: was ridiculous, But yeah, I knew it was a it
Speaker 1: was it was trappings for a Ponzi scheme. I just
Speaker 1: didn't care. Eventually there will be a peasant in Bangladesh
Speaker 1: who can can't come up with the money, and the
Speaker 1: game will die. I knew that. Okay, where were we
Speaker 1: While Nan was swimming in cash Scrooge McDuck style with
Speaker 1: her kids. Roberts back in Florida watching his neighbors and
Speaker 1: friends get hooked on this new game. I lived in
Speaker 1: South Florida around nineteen eighty six, and the airplane game
Speaker 1: arrived and it exploded. It just became a sort of mania.
Speaker 1: People were smiling. There were a lot of familiar faces there,
Speaker 1: people that I knew. They looked like me, they were
Speaker 1: dressed like me, many professionals. So looked very familiar, very safe,
Speaker 1: very comfortable. And remember there was no product. This was
Speaker 1: not a business. It was not a church. It was
Speaker 1: part of a philosophy. It was a story. You used
Speaker 1: an assumed philosophical name, courage, commitment, fanciful names like this.
Speaker 1: I was invited by someone I knew and trusted. I
Speaker 1: was in a home of someone that was a mutual friend.
Speaker 1: There were plenty of people there. I knew. There was
Speaker 1: a feeling of excitement. There was nothing about it that
Speaker 1: initially made me think of it as in any way illegal, fraudulent, unethical.
Speaker 1: The people that I knew and the people that I
Speaker 1: could call on were these kind of superficial liaisons that
Speaker 1: I had created by participating in these human potential movement groups.
Speaker 1: You may know their deepest, darkest secrets, but strangely enough,
Speaker 1: they didn't make them your friend. You could walk away
Speaker 1: from any one of them and never miss anybody. For Robert,
Speaker 1: this whole thing was way more complicated. It hit a
Speaker 1: lot closer to home. Leveraging trust was a key element.
Speaker 1: One of the people that I approached was the person
Speaker 1: I later married, so that's how close it got. The
Speaker 1: money started to flow immediately. I did not think about
Speaker 1: the people who would be losing. I figured lots of
Speaker 1: people to go through if they can keep the faith
Speaker 1: and keep the energy high. Yes, of course people will lose.
Speaker 1: I knew that, but it seemed very very far away
Speaker 1: to me. And of course, at that point in time,
Speaker 1: everybody was not telling themselves that this was illegal. They
Speaker 1: were telling themselves that the Feds don't like it because
Speaker 1: there's no tax being paid and they want it. And
Speaker 1: that was the attitude. It wasn't you know, we're doing
Speaker 1: criminal activity. It was like, you know, screw them. You know,
Speaker 1: we're doing this on the side, and we are making
Speaker 1: up our own rules and everybody is a willing partner here.
Speaker 1: What's the problem. What we did decide early on was
Speaker 1: that the reason that anything could be problematic was if
Speaker 1: there was money paid but no service is rendered or
Speaker 1: no product sold. So we decided that what you needed
Speaker 1: to do was give something for the money. So what
Speaker 1: we did was we would present roses. I guess in
Speaker 1: our minds we thought, well, that's that we have the
Speaker 1: FEDS fooled. So when people came in and delivered money
Speaker 1: in big, fat envelopes, I would present them with a rose.
Speaker 1: So they were buying my flower. It was a fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred dollars rose. Yes, a very very special rose. I
Speaker 1: have this image of, you know, being in the middle
Speaker 1: of my busy day in the advertising agency where I
Speaker 1: was working and having the receptionists call back to say
Speaker 1: that Vladimir, you know, was in the waiting room and
Speaker 1: did I want to see him. They didn't have any
Speaker 1: idea who he was, and I was saying absolutely, I
Speaker 1: was just reaching for one of my roses out of
Speaker 1: the bouquet that I would buy every day to bring
Speaker 1: to work and go out to the receptionist and present
Speaker 1: this guy with a rose, that a very expensive rose.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm a grown up. I know what a
Speaker 1: Ponzi scheme is. When I hear one, I said, oh
Speaker 1: far out, so I know what that is. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't care. There were some other kind of hard
Speaker 1: to convince people. And I found myself suddenly with this
Speaker 1: sale not being quite as easy as it was in
Speaker 1: the beginning. We had our attention on winning, we didn't
Speaker 1: have any attention on losing, and then the problem happened.
Speaker 1: There's this concept in pyramid schemes or Ponzi schemes. It's
Speaker 1: called the endless chain. It posits that the supply of
Speaker 1: people coming in on the bottom tier is infinite. You'll
Speaker 1: never run out of new recruits. It's a foundational idea,
Speaker 1: and without it, the whole thing collapses. And of course,
Speaker 1: unless you eventually start recruiting babies or something, it's a
Speaker 1: completely false premise, Especially with a scheme that moves as
Speaker 1: quickly as the airplane game. It doesn't take long to
Speaker 1: run out of people who have an extra fifteen hundred
Speaker 1: bucks lying around. The people that we were recruiting were
Speaker 1: no longer on the high level of the first people
Speaker 1: who had gotten in, So they didn't have the energy,
Speaker 1: they didn't have the optimism, and they didn't have the
Speaker 1: sales ability to sell their planes. And now it started
Speaker 1: to look hard to these people, and they started to see,
Speaker 1: oh my god, maybe I'll just lose my money. I
Speaker 1: can't do this. As it progressed, we began noticing that
Speaker 1: some of the people coming in they looked aggressive, they
Speaker 1: looked well greedy, they looked opportunistic, and they didn't seem
Speaker 1: to reflect the language anymore. They just saw it as
Speaker 1: a chance to make money. There were doubts that had
Speaker 1: begun to enter the type of people coming in that
Speaker 1: certain people would warn you. The word pyramid scheme was
Speaker 1: uttered by some people. There was a sense that it
Speaker 1: might not last forever. These were doubts that were introduced,
Speaker 1: but still these were banished put aside, And then an
Speaker 1: article appeared in the local newspaper. Someone at the local
Speaker 1: paper had caught wind of a potential fraud going on
Speaker 1: around town. And do you know who reads the paper.
Speaker 1: In the late eighties, in Broward County, Florida, everyone the
Speaker 1: county Sheriff's department had gotten word of this and considered
Speaker 1: it an illegal pyramid scheme and warned people against it.
Speaker 1: And this was followed by arrests. The Sheriff's department raided
Speaker 1: some of these house meetings and arrested people, handcuffed them
Speaker 1: and took them away. Remember, this entire thing is a
Speaker 1: grassroots phenomenon. There were people that had started it. There
Speaker 1: were a few people that had manipulate related it at
Speaker 1: the beginning, who made tens of thousands of dollars, but
Speaker 1: it had no official structure. They got worried about a
Speaker 1: house meeting, they went there and they arrested whoever was
Speaker 1: at the front of the room making the presentation, who
Speaker 1: may have been a very low level person. Actually, as
Speaker 1: the scheme had already gotten into tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: people's lives by that point. The newspaper accounts the next
Speaker 1: day reported these arrests, and now they were saying things like,
Speaker 1: and these people use assumed names, they pay in cash,
Speaker 1: they expect an eight hundred percent return. It's done personally
Speaker 1: without using the mail to avoid mail and wire fraud charges.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, these elements of the program that
Speaker 1: we considered innocent were depicted as maneuvers to evade the law,
Speaker 1: and the whole thing looked, in the context of the
Speaker 1: article as a crass, ridiculous program of dim witted people
Speaker 1: who didn't even understand that they were being duped into
Speaker 1: a fraud. When we saw it in black and white.
Speaker 1: Of course, the element of being arrested sent terrible fear
Speaker 1: through everyone through the communities, because now your friendship suddenly
Speaker 1: became a liability, and people began now to avoid each other,
Speaker 1: frightened that someone would blow the whistle on you, you
Speaker 1: might be reported. So what had become this wonderful bond
Speaker 1: bringing so many people together, in which private, intimate, personal,
Speaker 1: collegial relationships had actually been commercialized, but in the language
Speaker 1: of a philosophy that almost denied the element of commercialism,
Speaker 1: those same relationships now became threats. Now also people who
Speaker 1: had given money might want it back, and so there
Speaker 1: was this element too of now debt obligation. So the
Speaker 1: whole thing became quite nightmarish at that point, and that's
Speaker 1: where things ended. For Robert NaN's reasons for quitting the
Speaker 1: game weren't quite as dire, but they do help explain
Speaker 1: some fundamentally flawed aspects of this quote business model. I
Speaker 1: had a guy who I knew I shouldn't have recruited.
Speaker 1: He was just too much of a downer. He was
Speaker 1: a guy who always thought that the other guy was
Speaker 1: getting something that he wasn't getting. He was not an
Speaker 1: empowered person. I made a mistake. The top people, the
Speaker 1: energetic people that I knew, had jumped, and now we
Speaker 1: were getting down to the mmm, the people who against
Speaker 1: your better judgment, you said yes too. Yeah, greed takes
Speaker 1: over and you try to You know, you don't always
Speaker 1: follow your intuition. When somebody waving money at you, you
Speaker 1: just say all I knew that this guy was borderline,
Speaker 1: but I thought, well, I'll help him and maybe he'll
Speaker 1: do okay, and maybe this will be fun. Well, he
Speaker 1: didn't do okay, and he started to complain, this is
Speaker 1: too hard, I can't find anybody. Don't you realize that
Speaker 1: this is a Ponzi scheme and that somebody really has
Speaker 1: to lose. I think I'm going to be one of
Speaker 1: the people that loses. My lawyer is saying this is illegal,
Speaker 1: and I'm going, oh my god, oh my god, listen
Speaker 1: to this. I accepted a check from him, and I
Speaker 1: didn't even bother cashing the check. This is how blase
Speaker 1: I was. I mean, I was really guilty of hubris.
Speaker 1: I had endorsed the check in the back and written
Speaker 1: it over to my kid's school for payments for payments tuition.
Speaker 1: I thought I was just saving a step. So now
Speaker 1: he had written proof that he had given me this
Speaker 1: money for no reason at all, and now his lawyer
Speaker 1: was saying that he could make big trouble for me.
Speaker 1: So I said oops, And I suddenly realized this might
Speaker 1: be the end of this game. So he called me
Speaker 1: up and started threatening me with all of his stuff
Speaker 1: in his whining, complaining loser way. So I said, okay,
Speaker 1: I get it. You know I can meet you, you know,
Speaker 1: in half an hour, and I'll give you every cent
Speaker 1: that you've given me. I'm going to give you back,
Speaker 1: and in exchange, you'll just make this go away. It
Speaker 1: didn't cost me anything really to get rid of him,
Speaker 1: and I knew that he was so fragile that if
Speaker 1: I didn't do this then I could have real problems.
Speaker 1: So I did it. I mean, it took me five
Speaker 1: minutes to tell him, you got it. You know, you've
Speaker 1: got your money back. Don't worry about it. So I
Speaker 1: met this guy in the corner, gave him his money.
Speaker 1: He ripped up whatever record he had of the check,
Speaker 1: and gave me his word that it was over. We
Speaker 1: shook hands and had a big hug, and I went
Speaker 1: back and ripped the plans off the wall and I said,
Speaker 1: you know it's over. We're done. Went back to work
Speaker 1: the next day. That was that I didn't know what
Speaker 1: a pyramid scheme was, and if whatever I did think
Speaker 1: I knew of it, I didn't think it was something
Speaker 1: that would show up among my friends. I thought it
Speaker 1: would be a group of sleezy looking characters wearing a
Speaker 1: lot of gold. Maybe, but it wouldn't be people that
Speaker 1: had attended all these courses and we're trying, and we're good, ethical,
Speaker 1: altruistic people. If pyramid schemes were only run by sleazy
Speaker 1: guys who would also try to sell you a role
Speaker 1: ax out of their trench coat, we wouldn't be talking
Speaker 1: about any of this roping in Otherwise, wonderful, lovable people
Speaker 1: who you trust is crucial to making these sorts of
Speaker 1: things work. Just because I was stopping, I didn't think
Speaker 1: that it meant that anybody else was stopping. I never
Speaker 1: gave them a thought. I mean, that's probably you know
Speaker 1: me as a terrible person, but I did not experience
Speaker 1: that I had left anybody hanging. Okay, here's where you
Speaker 1: get to find out what this show is really about.
Speaker 1: Remember at the beginning, I said it's kind of about
Speaker 1: pyramid schemes. It's actually about something called multi level marketing
Speaker 1: or direct sales or network marketing. And there are a
Speaker 1: lot of companies that work this way, where you recruit
Speaker 1: someone to work under you, and then they hopefully recruit
Speaker 1: someone to work under them, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: And they are, legally speaking, anyway, not pyramid schemes. As
Speaker 1: much as one would like to classify them this way,
Speaker 1: we're not allowed to. Not yet. Robert Patrick is an
Speaker 1: expert in these sorts of schemes. That's why we called
Speaker 1: them in the first place, which is what made it
Speaker 1: so shocking that he had been taken in my one. Well,
Speaker 1: let us just go forward to two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: and have people offered loans which they did not have
Speaker 1: to show their own income that we're told the house
Speaker 1: will go up in value forever. Don't worry whatever the
Speaker 1: mortgage payment is, don't worry about that payment where you
Speaker 1: get a low interest for a year and then it
Speaker 1: changes over. But don't worry because you'll be able to
Speaker 1: refinance because the house will have already gone up in
Speaker 1: value by then. You nailed me. You nailed me. I
Speaker 1: did it right. Oh, there you go. So if you
Speaker 1: knew that, if you experienced that, if you accepted that
Speaker 1: without question, then you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: I loved the house. I wanted it. There you go,
Speaker 1: And didn't you deserve it? Isn't this the way it's
Speaker 1: supposed to be? Haven't you worked hard? Oh? Boy? I mean,
Speaker 1: you're a good person, And aren't good things supposed to
Speaker 1: happen to good people? And isn't our economy supposed to
Speaker 1: offer this kind of opportunity? These opportunities don't seem to
Speaker 1: be showing up in work, but they must be out there.
Speaker 1: Well here, it shows up in the real estate market
Speaker 1: or the stock market, or I mean, there are so
Speaker 1: many other places where this kind of prosperity thinking. And
Speaker 1: that is what we're talking about here. It is native
Speaker 1: to America. It came here from the Puritans. This is
Speaker 1: what I spent five or six years tracing down because
Speaker 1: I wanted to understand. How in the hell did I
Speaker 1: not see this? Oh, they call it a business networking
Speaker 1: or I mean, I just can't even imagine anybody being
Speaker 1: hooked into any one of these things anymore. I mean,
Speaker 1: what disguised is business networking or something. This entire fraudulent
Speaker 1: structure based on the endless chain, which is unsustainable, mathematically impossible,
Speaker 1: was obscured by simply a story about giving and receiving
Speaker 1: in multi level marketing, exactly the same structure mathematically impossible,
Speaker 1: unsustainable and so on that will produce these massive loss
Speaker 1: rates is covered over by a different story. It's a
Speaker 1: story that you were actually buying and selling products that
Speaker 1: it's a business called direct selling. You've never been into
Speaker 1: a direct sale company. It's kind of hard to understand.
Speaker 1: But there is no compliment out there and can feed it.
Speaker 1: Our guys are making triple and quadruple the money. You
Speaker 1: know your best friend that you've been best friends with
Speaker 1: since high school and she's struggling a little bit, and
Speaker 1: you know her so well, like call her up. We
Speaker 1: are building so quickly here and you can make some
Speaker 1: serious money. Anyone worth recruiting will also see it as
Speaker 1: a relationship let me see that again. I want you
Speaker 1: to hear me again. Anyone worth recruiting will see joining
Speaker 1: you in this business as a relationship. Okay, don't get
Speaker 1: too informative. If they ask you the informative questions, like,
Speaker 1: give them that information, but do it in a very fun, relaxed,
Speaker 1: uplifting way. We're at a ground floor level people. People
Speaker 1: are not realizing what we have now and are not
Speaker 1: taking advantage of it. I want you to take advantage
Speaker 1: of this opportunity and be able to just fly with it.
Speaker 1: If you recruit others, you'll move up the chain. And indeed,
Speaker 1: in multi level marketing, it's designed to transfer money from
Speaker 1: ninety nine percent to one percent. You want someone who
Speaker 1: will give it their all and stick around. Multi level
Speaker 1: marketing has codified into an actual business. The deceptions, the delusions,
Speaker 1: the manipulations that the Airplane game introduced. It's amazing and
Speaker 1: it's not too good to be true. It's still based
Speaker 1: on a prosperity, belief that we are entitled to these
Speaker 1: good things, that they can come to you through belief,
Speaker 1: through confidence, and through positive thinking. That thinking is now
Speaker 1: introduced and taught in multi level marketing in a very
Speaker 1: sophisticated manner, so much so that there's no police department.
Speaker 1: There's no authority in the country right now that will
Speaker 1: openly acknowledge this for what it is, look at it
Speaker 1: in depth, and just show you, in playing black and white,
Speaker 1: that this thing is unsustainable and that it is indeed
Speaker 1: a racket. No one until now this season on the Dream,
Speaker 1: we take you behind the MLM curtain and follow the
Speaker 1: money from the lowest level to the top, the very top.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump received over a million dollars in one year
Speaker 1: for simple endorsing multi level marketing. You have a great
Speaker 1: opportunity before you at ACN without any of the risks
Speaker 1: most entrepreneurs have to take. You have the ability to
Speaker 1: market breakthrough technology before it hits the critical mass. The
Speaker 1: beauty of ACN is that you're in business for yourself,
Speaker 1: but not by yourself. You have a great partner by
Speaker 1: your side with you every step of the way. You're entrepreneurs, yes,
Speaker 1: but being an entrepreneur is even better when you have
Speaker 1: to support a great company like ACN coming up this
Speaker 1: in on the Dream. It's so easy to use excuses
Speaker 1: because it means you don't have to be responsible for
Speaker 1: your results. You get to blame someone or something else
Speaker 1: for why you don't have what you want, But is
Speaker 1: that how you want to live? Is that the conversations
Speaker 1: you want to have? Wait? How much is this going
Speaker 1: to cost? Though? Actually I think it's going to cost
Speaker 1: maybe six or seven hundred dollars? Oh my god, I
Speaker 1: mean I need to stay in a hotel. I'm over
Speaker 1: one thousand dollars now. No, we're way over one thousand dollars. Now,
Speaker 1: we're up to like fifteen hundred bucks. If you look
Speaker 1: at the Federal Trade Commission, fraud statistics, pyramid scheme and
Speaker 1: business opportunity fraud are the least reported fraud types that
Speaker 1: they monitor. Really, so this is not something that people
Speaker 1: like to tell people about. I just don't think, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of the accurate picture is just is out there.
Speaker 1: And my point now, I want to make this point.
Speaker 1: If the number was screwed up, or if there was
Speaker 1: no basis for it, and the administrative judge would have
Speaker 1: said Brownman's numbers of phony, I'm not here to tell
Speaker 1: you that I was right. What I am telling you
Speaker 1: is that I was ignored. You just PLoP it on
Speaker 1: your own personal credit card. No one's gonna say boo.
Speaker 1: All you have to do is order product in your
Speaker 1: team members' names and have it shipped to your address
Speaker 1: or another address. The company does not care if you
Speaker 1: sell the product. They just care if you buy it.
Speaker 1: The guys up on the stage they're talking about you
Speaker 1: just get five and the five get twenty five. Look
Speaker 1: at the potential here. I raise my hand, so I've
Speaker 1: got my calculator here. I'm just you know, it doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense. First of all, you know, you just keep going.
Speaker 1: You pass the population of Canada and just a few levels.
Speaker 1: He started laughing. He says, look at that guy seculator
Speaker 1: in his hands. If you have to go consult numbers
Speaker 1: in order to believe in your own ability to make
Speaker 1: this thing work, you'll never succeed. And the crowd is laughing.
Speaker 1: The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher,
Speaker 1: written and reported by Me Jane Marie, Dan Galucci, Mackenzie
Speaker 1: cassob Lyra Smith and Claire Rowlinson, editing by Peter Clowney.
Speaker 1: Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. The Dream is executive
Speaker 1: produced by Laura Mayer, Chris Bannon, Dan Galucci and Me.
Speaker 1: Special thanks today to Jenny Rattlet Nicole Cliff, Jamie mollen,
Speaker 1: Nan Dylan, Robert Fitzpatrick, and Matt Most. We appreciate you subscribing, rating,
Speaker 1: and reviewing the show wherever you listen.