Speaker 1: What's Truth and the Squad. I'm Robert Evans. This is
Speaker 1: part two of our Amia episode and by popular acclaim
Speaker 1: Sophie Jack. And they're going to start this by digging
Speaker 1: into the fact that when he decided am we needed
Speaker 1: it's an internal police force to make sure people weren't
Speaker 1: making illegal, fraudulent claims about the products, he what did
Speaker 1: you call it? The truth Squad? And he was profiting
Speaker 1: off of That made me think of all the you know,
Speaker 1: the fact that everything that uh, modern mega companies are
Speaker 1: profiting from are are the things that like get the
Speaker 1: most most attention and scrutiny from the media, like Facebook
Speaker 1: and lies and you know, misinformation, And so they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna invest in like squad, like these groups that
Speaker 1: are this like entire branch of our company that's going
Speaker 1: to be the Truth Squad or the Facebook equivalent of that,
Speaker 1: and then like they just have their knees cut out
Speaker 1: from under them, like the second that nobody's looking, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I should just named it the narc squad. And then squad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just so COULTI the name. It's just like it's
Speaker 1: like triggering. I'm like, yeah, thank you, Jack, Jack, your
Speaker 1: kids used the TikTok? Are they talking? Are not old enough?
Speaker 1: Because I'm just across a letter. Kevin Barron posted it.
Speaker 1: Who's some some guy on Twitter? I don't know that
Speaker 1: he got an email from his public school system that
Speaker 1: I just want to talk about now. Uh, And it's
Speaker 1: about like kids have. There's like a series of escalatingly
Speaker 1: criminal TikTok challenges that kids are putting on each other
Speaker 1: in public schools apparently, or at least in schools. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: September's vandalized school bathrooms that I can confirm from friends
Speaker 1: who are teachers that all their school bathrooms have been
Speaker 1: like massively vandalized at a problematic scale, like several of
Speaker 1: them are non functional. October is apparently smack a staff member. Um,
Speaker 1: I have no idea how accurate the rest of these are.
Speaker 1: But a bunch of kids did vandalize their school bathrooms
Speaker 1: for TikTok in September. So there Rember, there was a
Speaker 1: there was a thing where they were supposed to be
Speaker 1: like stealing the biggest item in the room from schools,
Speaker 1: like people, and they would like take like they would
Speaker 1: take like an entire like sink set up from a
Speaker 1: bathroom from a school and take it home talk about it,
Speaker 1: and it's like, ums, crime, Yeah, that's a crime. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a bunch of these are crimes. Januaries apparently, jab abreast
Speaker 1: December's deck the halls and show your balls. Um, Februaries
Speaker 1: mess up school signs. Um. Yeah, I don't know. It
Speaker 1: seems like signs and grab a very different like I
Speaker 1: don't know whose children, I don't know who's decided these
Speaker 1: are like the things that are going to be done
Speaker 1: that I did walk in on my five year old
Speaker 1: and three year old planning this entire thing out so
Speaker 1: that we found the origin point. Yeah, they are the bread,
Speaker 1: the nerve center of this entire plot. Um. It feels
Speaker 1: suspiciously similar to like, uh, you know, you combine anything
Speaker 1: that's like a new fangled thing that parents don't understand
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe a seed of truth of like
Speaker 1: some misbehavior, and like it just seems like catnip for
Speaker 1: the local news and parents, um yeah and educators. But
Speaker 1: you're you're saying that they're actually destroying bathrooms, which I
Speaker 1: can confirm that some kids for TikTok challenges have destroyed
Speaker 1: bathrooms in a couple of different schools at least where
Speaker 1: I am. So there's an extent to which something that
Speaker 1: I think, this may just be that like that happened,
Speaker 1: there was a TikTok scam or a TikTok not scam,
Speaker 1: but there was like a TikTok thing that like vandaliser
Speaker 1: school bathroom for the likes and a bunch of kids
Speaker 1: did it, and then school instructors like flip the funk
Speaker 1: out and somebody convinced them that there was a whole
Speaker 1: list of things for the next year. Because I can't
Speaker 1: imagine I can't imagine that a bunch of kids like
Speaker 1: planned the next eleven months of TikTok, Like who would
Speaker 1: even do that? Right? Too much planning? Too much? Yeah,
Speaker 1: jab a breast day, a breast today, created by a
Speaker 1: like guidance counselor like I will believe in deck the hall,
Speaker 1: show your balls that that I will believe it that
Speaker 1: sprung from the mind of a eight year old. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I don't know, We'll see it could just be, uh,
Speaker 1: it could be a real interesting in the next couple
Speaker 1: of months on the talks. So yeah, I have your
Speaker 1: teachers alone, I do. I don't mind stealing the biggest
Speaker 1: thing in the room and then like returning that is fun.
Speaker 1: Like I'm trying to think of the biggest thing, as
Speaker 1: always most of I guess it would either be the
Speaker 1: teacher's desk or like the whiteboard. Yeah, if you could
Speaker 1: steal your teacher's desk, like, props to you, that's impressive.
Speaker 1: That is Um, but but it does I mean, destroying
Speaker 1: school bathrooms is not cool, especially during a pandemic. Kind
Speaker 1: of a bad idea. That sucks a teacher. That's like
Speaker 1: one less hand washing station that people get. Anything that
Speaker 1: violates someone's personal space or like bodily autonomy, like at
Speaker 1: the funk out of here. Also, you probably shouldn't be
Speaker 1: showing your balls to anyone. But yeah, that's that's problematic
Speaker 1: for a number of reasons. Um, if it was I
Speaker 1: don't know, deck the hall steal the school resource officers,
Speaker 1: car should probably move on to the episode. Um, okay,
Speaker 1: so Jack Robert Toberfest, october Fest. That's the only holiday
Speaker 1: I celebrate Jack. Yeah, it's all October for me. I'm
Speaker 1: just just I don't know what I'm doing. I never
Speaker 1: really stopped to figure out how to celebrate Jacktoberfest. I
Speaker 1: just told in my heart just Apple strudles. It's just
Speaker 1: strut piles of strudal So Jack. After Gerald Ford got
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter nineteen seventy six, you know, he was the
Speaker 1: big in that van Andel and rich Divos had that
Speaker 1: am ways, like political in was when he gets you know,
Speaker 1: it's not not president anymore. Um. They didn't give up
Speaker 1: on influencing the government. They just got better at it.
Speaker 1: They got into increasingly overt political fundraising. So they moved
Speaker 1: from you know, they had started kind of supporting free
Speaker 1: enterprise think tanks and putting up propaganda booklets to try
Speaker 1: to you know, change hearts and minds. Um. And they
Speaker 1: moved on to just making direct ten thousand dollar donations
Speaker 1: per year to the Republican National Committee. This earned them
Speaker 1: the rank of Eagle. If you're curious what that gets you, um,
Speaker 1: Richard Divos as usual. Yeah, yeah, it kind of is. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: you know the Republicans love them eagles. Yeah, big, big,
Speaker 1: big on eagles. So ten thousand a year doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like that much. Well this is yeah, that's like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, a hundred grand. It's a lot of money
Speaker 1: more than it is now. Um. And they're also giving
Speaker 1: more money, right, this is what they're giving to the party.
Speaker 1: But this is like emblematic of the money they're shot
Speaker 1: gutting to different conservative causes. Richard DeVos started putting a
Speaker 1: lot of money into pushing for more right to work
Speaker 1: laws UM, which despite their name, are actually make it
Speaker 1: easier for corporations to fire people without cause. Um they're
Speaker 1: kind of skirt through like different union uh restrictions and whatnot.
Speaker 1: UM divoce pumped a fortune into the Council on a
Speaker 1: Union Free Environment, which was an organization dedicated to stopping
Speaker 1: making it harder for people to unionize UM. It had
Speaker 1: been founded in nineteen seventy seven, the year he started
Speaker 1: giving it money, and he was almost immediately made a director.
Speaker 1: We saw this earlier with one of the other groups
Speaker 1: that like, this group will start, he'll give them a
Speaker 1: bunch of money and then he'll be in charge of them. UM.
Speaker 1: So he's technically donating money. I'm sure there's a tax
Speaker 1: thing there right where like he pays less taxes because
Speaker 1: he's giving these money. But also these are groups that
Speaker 1: he effectively runs and solicits donations from other people, and
Speaker 1: they're just all of these different organizations are effectively like
Speaker 1: instruments of Richard Divoce's political whims um which he hates
Speaker 1: unions um, which because what do you even care about unions?
Speaker 1: Richard Divas and weight Like none of them are your employees.
Speaker 1: How could you? Like I've been thinking about that, Like
Speaker 1: because they go from this uh you know, uh triangularly
Speaker 1: shaped financial model uh thing company to like going really
Speaker 1: hard in the direction of like being almost like legendarily
Speaker 1: uh you know, big influencers in the in the realm
Speaker 1: of like conservative politics, in like all these different ways.
Speaker 1: And I I feel like there's like, when you look
Speaker 1: at the central lie that their family is trying to perpetuate,
Speaker 1: it's that they like deserve more than their fair share
Speaker 1: rather than less, because they've like who they've morally, they're
Speaker 1: like fucked so many people over, Like the amount of
Speaker 1: damage caused by this company where everyone who works for
Speaker 1: them loses all their money is like absolutely incalculable, and
Speaker 1: so they have to convince themselves that not only that
Speaker 1: that's not bad, but that they are worth like billions
Speaker 1: times as much as other people. And I think one
Speaker 1: of the ways they do that is by believing that
Speaker 1: everyone is lazier than them, and so it's unions would
Speaker 1: make it easy for people to be lazy and laziness
Speaker 1: at scale. Yeah, yeah, And it's just trying to like
Speaker 1: perpetuate this lie across generations, like to make it so
Speaker 1: that reality like bends to like kind of your warped
Speaker 1: like hope. And this is how he beens reality too,
Speaker 1: because like he believes that his opinion, his beliefs are
Speaker 1: worth more than other people's, and he makes that real
Speaker 1: because he has all of these different political action organizations
Speaker 1: that are lobbying and that are getting donations that he
Speaker 1: winds up running either he was the one who orchestrated
Speaker 1: them being started, or because he gives so much he
Speaker 1: just winds up in charge. But these are all instruments
Speaker 1: of his will that effectively, like he was one of
Speaker 1: the earlier, earliest rich people in the country to really
Speaker 1: figure out how to make how how to do like
Speaker 1: what the Koch brothers do. Right where you have this
Speaker 1: sprawling network of think tanks and lobbying groups and influence
Speaker 1: operations that all basically exist to make people, to make
Speaker 1: it to the people what you think about the world matters,
Speaker 1: and so to keep Charlie Kerk employed. Yeah, and to
Speaker 1: keep Charling the Kirk employed. Now. One of the first
Speaker 1: politicians and we went whole hog on electing was Sue Myrick,
Speaker 1: who eventually became a congresswoman. She'd initially joined a Way
Speaker 1: in nineteen nine two, and by that point she'd been
Speaker 1: elected once to the Charlotte, North Carolina City Council. She
Speaker 1: lost a bid for mayor in nineteen five, but then
Speaker 1: one in nineteen eighties seven. So she had a history
Speaker 1: of trying to get elected, losing and then getting elected
Speaker 1: the next election. So she she had a proven ability
Speaker 1: to like figure out how to make things work for
Speaker 1: her in in politics. Now, the year she joined am Wish,
Speaker 1: she ran for Senate and her campaign did not get
Speaker 1: off to a good start because she had a lot
Speaker 1: less money than her rival. But once she joined Amway
Speaker 1: as a distributor, the company decided to allow her to
Speaker 1: start selling her own motivational tapes at company rallies to
Speaker 1: raise money for her campaign, even though she was very
Speaker 1: new um am We also donated more than sixteen thousand
Speaker 1: dollars to her campaign. Now, she lost this first Senate election,
Speaker 1: but am We continued to invest in her, largely because
Speaker 1: she was an effective speaker. They put her on their
Speaker 1: national circuit, and she visited hundreds of Amway rallies for
Speaker 1: distributors around the world and was able to sell five
Speaker 1: and ten dollar audio tapes of her motivational speeches that
Speaker 1: went right into her war chest. We've talked about these
Speaker 1: tapes a few times, and I should probably provide you
Speaker 1: with an example of how they sounded. I have, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I don't have any absume my Rick Samway recordings,
Speaker 1: but I did find a video made by her Amway mentor,
Speaker 1: Dexter Yeager, who was actually he gave her thirteen thousand
Speaker 1: of that sixteen thousand dollars that her campaign got from Amway.
Speaker 1: So this is the guy who was like her mentor,
Speaker 1: Dexter Yeager. Um, this is a segment from one of
Speaker 1: his motivational speeches from I don't know, like thirty something
Speaker 1: years ago, Sylvie. I know a guy that was dating
Speaker 1: a girl back when he was about sixteen years old.
Speaker 1: And when he dated girls, you always liked to take
Speaker 1: them out first class in accordance with his income. And
Speaker 1: he had a girl he was dating, but she turned
Speaker 1: to him and said, my folks would never allow me
Speaker 1: to marry you. You're nothing but a spendthrift and you'll
Speaker 1: have nothing ever. And I was that guy. I was
Speaker 1: that guy. I don't know where that girl is, but
Speaker 1: I know where this guy is. I can I can
Speaker 1: tell you about Dexter and Birdie living on the alley broke.
Speaker 1: Anybody can go down on Courtland av and roam New
Speaker 1: York and they can see how we lived. And it
Speaker 1: was in a sloppy section. It was a poor section
Speaker 1: of town. Don't tell me how bad you got it.
Speaker 1: Tell me how good you're gonna get it. Don't tell
Speaker 1: me about your problems, tell me about your dreams. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hell yeah, yeah, that's a that's hot ship jack. That
Speaker 1: is good American ng can you'll notice again part of
Speaker 1: how like what keeps them safe from getting charged with
Speaker 1: the ship they got charged in the past. He's not
Speaker 1: like and often generally isn't like making specific promises about
Speaker 1: am Way. He's making promises about like the way they
Speaker 1: it started out. When these distributors started putting out these
Speaker 1: motivate they'll be like they would be saying, like the
Speaker 1: am Way. You know, if you sell the way I
Speaker 1: tell you to sell, you're gonna be a millionaire in
Speaker 1: six months. You'll get rich you'll get and that's illegal.
Speaker 1: What he's doing is very general, and he's getting people.
Speaker 1: It makes people believe, yeah, I can become a millionaire too.
Speaker 1: It's all on me. It's totally on me to do
Speaker 1: the work necessary. But he's also he's very says very
Speaker 1: little about Amway like that's that's a general thing with
Speaker 1: a lot of these folks. They're they're making these very
Speaker 1: general motivational claims about what you're capable of, which is
Speaker 1: not a crime. Um. Yeah, uh so that's cool, um,
Speaker 1: but also knows like believing in yourself and not accepting
Speaker 1: no for an answer and working the system, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be a speech at literally any capitalist institution
Speaker 1: about any job. And you say it could be a
Speaker 1: speech like literally any capitalist institution. Part of what has
Speaker 1: made the kind of speeches that I'm sure a lot
Speaker 1: of people listening. You've gone to some sort of like
Speaker 1: corporate event where somebody saying ship like that came up
Speaker 1: just to motivate you, not necessarily for a scam, just
Speaker 1: because like your company was like, well, let's hire a
Speaker 1: motivational speaker. Right. The reason they all sound like Dexter
Speaker 1: Yeager is because they're all copying. Guys like Dexter Yeager
Speaker 1: and other people at Amway right like it. They helped
Speaker 1: invent the concept of these kinds of motivational speeches that
Speaker 1: are now everywhere you know, and there's other people too.
Speaker 1: I don't want to pretend like this all came from
Speaker 1: his mind, but this is really when this ship starts
Speaker 1: happening the seventies and eighties, and by the nineties it's
Speaker 1: it's a finely tuned machine. So Sue's doing the Amway circuit.
Speaker 1: She's selling tapes, probably a lot like what we just played,
Speaker 1: but with you know a lady Um and Dexter Yeager
Speaker 1: who did that would regularly record messages about her and
Speaker 1: he would put them out to Amway distributors via am Vox,
Speaker 1: which was a voice messaging line. Am Way members were
Speaker 1: encouraged to pay to have access to Richard de Vos,
Speaker 1: an other high ranking Amway Grifters would often use it
Speaker 1: to push members towards political action. We'll talk a little
Speaker 1: bit more about that in a second. So when Sue
Speaker 1: Erick runs for send it again in Nur, Yeager sends
Speaker 1: out am Vox messages to everyone in his down line
Speaker 1: Um and gets them to donate to her. Now this was,
Speaker 1: as mother Jones will argue, very likely a crime. Quote
Speaker 1: those messages may violate campaign laws. The use of corporate
Speaker 1: resources on behalf of a federal campaign as illegal, says
Speaker 1: Kenneth Cross, a former head of enforcement at the FEC.
Speaker 1: Gross says that if Yeager used the voicemail system for fundraising,
Speaker 1: the law required either am WE or Yeager to report
Speaker 1: it as an in kind contribution that should have been
Speaker 1: reimbursed by the Myrit campaign. If corporate resources are not
Speaker 1: properly reimbursed, then it would result in a violation of
Speaker 1: federal election laws. Gross says there is no FEC record
Speaker 1: of any such contribution from am WE or from Yeager,
Speaker 1: and WE spokesman Robert Loam says that Yeager rinse the
Speaker 1: ambox service for per month. What he does with it
Speaker 1: is his business. Liam said, Yeager would not Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you get it right like you get and it worked
Speaker 1: right like. Yeah, maybe it was illegal, but they didn't
Speaker 1: get charged for it because I think that he gave
Speaker 1: them enough of an excuse and they had enough people
Speaker 1: in power that were sympathetic to am WE that nobody
Speaker 1: went after them for this. And the messages worked. A
Speaker 1: review of the FEC filing shows that at least a
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy one am We distributors and family members,
Speaker 1: a hundred and forty three of whom did not live
Speaker 1: in my ricks home state, gave my ricks campaign more
Speaker 1: than a hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars in that
Speaker 1: is election. When you're talking about, like us a Senate
Speaker 1: race like that, that's enough to tip a fucking election. Um. Yeah. Also,
Speaker 1: just every time you mentioned like a new Amway product
Speaker 1: for the distributor is like am vox or the these
Speaker 1: motivational tapes. I'm just like seeing a person who like
Speaker 1: is like see somebody else using it and is like jealous.
Speaker 1: They're like, Wow, they're hot. Ship they have access to
Speaker 1: am vox and then like they you know, sell all
Speaker 1: their kids toys so they can like pay for for
Speaker 1: access to m vox. It's just like so dark and
Speaker 1: so profoundly American. Yeah, dark and profoundly American is the
Speaker 1: Amway motto. Now flush with real cash this time, Sue
Speaker 1: Myrick won her Senate campaign. Once she was in office,
Speaker 1: she wasted no time in co sponsoring a home office
Speaker 1: deductibility bill, which offered tax write offs for independent contractors
Speaker 1: who used their homes as offices, and was heavily pushed
Speaker 1: by Amway. She pushed a bunch of bills that specifically
Speaker 1: were in order to reduce the tax burden on people
Speaker 1: who worked for Amway. On July, the day before Amway
Speaker 1: announced a one point three million dollar donation to the
Speaker 1: Republican Convention, Bob Dole announced his support for Sue's bill.
Speaker 1: It's all very direct. You know, they fund her. She
Speaker 1: pushes this bill, they give up one point three million
Speaker 1: to the Republican Party. The next day, Bob Dole announces
Speaker 1: he supports the bill like obviously right, Like it's not illegal,
Speaker 1: it is corrupt um now uh. And also you know,
Speaker 1: I I will admit, like when we're talking about the
Speaker 1: scale of crimes and ways committed, a home office deductibility
Speaker 1: bill is not the shadiest thing an elected leader has
Speaker 1: ever pushed. I'm just laying this path out because it's
Speaker 1: illustrative of how the company wields influence for a variety
Speaker 1: of purposes, all geared towards protecting the profitability of Amway
Speaker 1: for the people at the top. As myrick became and
Speaker 1: stopping things from like the f There's a reason the
Speaker 1: FEC didn't look into ship, right. There's a reason why
Speaker 1: this stuff that might be illegal never gets prosecuted, and
Speaker 1: it's because they've get friends in high places. Myrick became
Speaker 1: very popular within the GOP. Speaker Newt Gingridge appointed her
Speaker 1: as a freshman senator to the Budget Committee, which is
Speaker 1: not like that's a very powerful position, like the big
Speaker 1: deal and yeah, she's a freshman senator and gets in there. Um.
Speaker 1: This was widely seen as Gingridge supplicating what became known
Speaker 1: as the Amway Caucus, which concluded three other senators at
Speaker 1: this point. So four senators are all like Amway distributors.
Speaker 1: One of these senators, Jack has the best name I've
Speaker 1: ever encountered for a senator. Give it to me. Dick Chrysler. What, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Dick Chrysler. There's a senator named Dick Chrysler. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: at least there wasn't the early nineties. Yeah, Dick Chrysler
Speaker 1: and his his his Democratic rival Cockford. Dick Chrysler. Chrysler.
Speaker 1: What an incredible name for an Amway distributor who becomes
Speaker 1: a senator. Chrystler, here to tell you about the most
Speaker 1: incredible opportunity. You never got to have to make a fortune.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, is that Dick Chrysler not his actual
Speaker 1: like given name. That is one of the great works
Speaker 1: of like authorship of all time. Whoever came up with
Speaker 1: a named Dick Chrysler. Dick Chrysler, Richard Chrysler, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: his real name. Politician from Michelin, Michigan in Minnesota, but
Speaker 1: of course, yeah, Chrysler, so Michigan. Yeah, Dick Chrysler in
Speaker 1: office from N. S. Martin. He does look a bit
Speaker 1: like Steve Martin. If Steve Martin looked kind of more
Speaker 1: like Ship. Yeah, if Steve Martin looked a little bit
Speaker 1: more like Ship, he would look like Dick Chrysler, just
Speaker 1: like like he looks like Steve Martin got tanned by
Speaker 1: just on his forehead though, just a forehead, like haphazardly
Speaker 1: had himself like like sprayed with brown face or something.
Speaker 1: It's amazing because the way the shading looks in this photo,
Speaker 1: he's clearly a white man, but it also looks like
Speaker 1: he's wearing white face because of that shade at the head. Hair.
Speaker 1: He's skinning like the scalpist. What is happening? Yeah, nobody
Speaker 1: taught him how to correctly blend his makeup. What a
Speaker 1: fascinating looking man. Also, the person who succeeded him had
Speaker 1: an incredible name, Debbie stab Now this is just like
Speaker 1: old mine. Yeah, what an incredible Michigan. Something's going on
Speaker 1: with people's names and fucking against Shout out to Michigan
Speaker 1: for some entertainingly named legislators, at least one of whom
Speaker 1: was a corrupt Amway chill um so. And we acknowledged
Speaker 1: the existence of the Amway Caucus. In fact, they kind
Speaker 1: of celebrated it. Company lobbyist John Gartland told Mother Jones
Speaker 1: that the caucus would meet with him to discuss legislation
Speaker 1: or set up conversations between senators and high level and
Speaker 1: weight distributors. Quote, we'll tell them man Way's opinion. We
Speaker 1: can't guarantee their votes, but they love Amway. There we go,
Speaker 1: And so long as the Amway Caucus voted the right way,
Speaker 1: they could count on a virtually limitless source of funding
Speaker 1: from Mother Jones. Karen Karen and Craig Jones, both former distributors,
Speaker 1: attended one rally where Sue Myrick spoke. She got up
Speaker 1: with her husband and said you're the kind of people
Speaker 1: we like, Karen says after Myrick speech, a Way leaders
Speaker 1: passed around buckets for contributions and asked donors to write
Speaker 1: their names and the names of their Amway sponsors or
Speaker 1: upline on the envelope. Karen's husband Craig ads it wasn't
Speaker 1: like you need to do this or else. It was
Speaker 1: more like, if you're smart and you want your business
Speaker 1: to grow, I'm sure your upline was aware if you
Speaker 1: gave or if you didn't, so that's fucked up, um,
Speaker 1: but not leg It's all just social pressure and like
Speaker 1: building out this kind of network of like this community
Speaker 1: where the cool thing to do is to just buy
Speaker 1: into this thing and give people who are rich thing
Speaker 1: you all your money. It's just basically the I be.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be shocked if like the Republican Party like
Speaker 1: saw this and was like we've got they did Jack
Speaker 1: Spoiler and we kind of helped create the modern Republican Party,
Speaker 1: and this is this is the process, this is what
Speaker 1: what's happening. Because they're also again they give a hunt
Speaker 1: one point three million dollars to the ninety four Republican Convention.
Speaker 1: They're giving meaningful amounts of money, and Republicans are paying attention.
Speaker 1: Oh these guys, these we're getting more Republican senators in
Speaker 1: competitive districts in some cases because am Way money and
Speaker 1: because am Way is really good at organizing funding and
Speaker 1: voting and stuff. There's a reason that Betsy DeVos was
Speaker 1: the Secretary of Education, and it's because am Way money
Speaker 1: and clout is really important to the Republican Party. They
Speaker 1: are kind of kingmakers within the Republican Party. Um. Also, uh,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump has plugged for Amway in the past, So
Speaker 1: I mean that makes perfect sense. Yep, yeah, it's good ship. Um.
Speaker 1: And you can see again, so it's number one. They say, like, well,
Speaker 1: these these caucus members, we just let them know what
Speaker 1: Amway wants. We can't make them do anything. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: that money's pickett can get turned off for your re
Speaker 1: election campaign if you don't make am Way happy, right,
Speaker 1: which again is not illegal. A lot of other industries
Speaker 1: do this. We're seeing this with Kristen Cinema right now. Um.
Speaker 1: But you can see the financial value of this arrangement
Speaker 1: for am Way, because again it is kind of hard
Speaker 1: to tell, like what did this exactly resultant? I think
Speaker 1: a good way to do that is to look at
Speaker 1: what happened in a country where they do not have
Speaker 1: political influence that's very close to the United States, and
Speaker 1: I'm talking about Canada. Um So, while the FTC gave
Speaker 1: up on regulating Amway in nineteen seventy nine and they's
Speaker 1: been smooth sailing for them ever since because they give
Speaker 1: a lot of money, because they have a lot of
Speaker 1: ties to American politicians, the same has not been true
Speaker 1: in Canada. I'm not saying they have no ties to politicians,
Speaker 1: but they do not have the kind of influence there
Speaker 1: that they have here. In nineteen eighty nine, they paid
Speaker 1: thirty eight million dollars to settle a lawsuit with the
Speaker 1: Canadian Trade Office that alleged they'd been illegally skirt and
Speaker 1: customs dues. In nineteen eighty three, the Province of Ontario
Speaker 1: nailed away with a twenty five million dollar fine for fraud,
Speaker 1: to which Amway pled guilty. So you can see why, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: give a couple of million a year to the Republican Party.
Speaker 1: It's gonna save us money in the long term because
Speaker 1: we're not dealing with the kind of ship we're dealing
Speaker 1: with in Canada. Um, that's why it's worth it for them. Um,
Speaker 1: and it very much is. But you know who hasn't
Speaker 1: been convicted of fraud in a Canadian court? Jack, that
Speaker 1: nice and specific. I think we can probably probably yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: none of the sponsors probably of our podcast. Oh we're
Speaker 1: back and we're we're talking talking am Way. So uh.
Speaker 1: Amway's deep integration with the Republican Party did not start
Speaker 1: or end with just business. Over years of congenial relations,
Speaker 1: the two melded together into something terrifying and inseparable. And
Speaker 1: to walk through the story of the merging of Amway
Speaker 1: and the Republican Party, I'm gonna have to peel back
Speaker 1: to nineteen seventy nine one more time. That's the year
Speaker 1: the religious right became an organized force in US politics
Speaker 1: for the first time. The Moral Majority is formed in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, the night that that election. Reagan's election
Speaker 1: is like the first time the religious right was a
Speaker 1: political block in American politics. Um and yeah. This all
Speaker 1: happened just in time, obviously, to to push Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: into the presidency. The Amway co found ounders were very
Speaker 1: bullish on Ronald Reagan. Not only did they pour money
Speaker 1: into supporting the campaign, but they encouraged other AMI leaders
Speaker 1: to use their tax deductible business functions to get the
Speaker 1: word out. As one former distributor claimed, they tell you
Speaker 1: to always vote conservative no matter what they say. Liberals
Speaker 1: support the homosexuals and let women get out of their place.
Speaker 1: Richard DeVos and Javan Andel there the homosexual as well.
Speaker 1: Speaking of the homosexuals, um well, not quite yet. So.
Speaker 1: By the time he died in two thousand eighteen, Richard
Speaker 1: DeVos had personally paid out more than two hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars to fund the Republican Party and other right wing causes.
Speaker 1: In addition to the groups we've already named that he
Speaker 1: gave money to, he sent fortunes to the Family Research
Speaker 1: Council Focus on the Family, and the Acting Institute. Richard's
Speaker 1: generosity earned him serious rewards. This is where gay people
Speaker 1: come into it again, unfortunately. Most notably, Ronald Reagan appointed
Speaker 1: him the to the President's Mission on the HIV epidemic.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, yeah, Richard DeVos. That fucking guy gets
Speaker 1: put on the President, which tells you how seriously Reagan
Speaker 1: treated HIV. Yeah, I get the Amway guy on there.
Speaker 1: He knows that I deal with a pandemic, He'll clean
Speaker 1: it right up with frisk You gotta frisk it so uh.
Speaker 1: Richard DeVos later wrote of this time quote of his
Speaker 1: time on the President's Commission on the HIV epitomic quote,
Speaker 1: I listened to three witnesses tell us that it was
Speaker 1: everybody else's fault, but their own, nothing to do with
Speaker 1: their conduct, just that the government didn't fix this disease.
Speaker 1: I said, you are responsible for your actions to you know,
Speaker 1: conduct yourself properly, which is a pretty solid Christian principle. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the guy you wid Christian principles right there? Yeah,
Speaker 1: does his Shapiro voice out of nowhere? Yeah, it's my
Speaker 1: right wing ship head voice. Richard used his influence to
Speaker 1: fight vigorously against workplace democracy, supporting right to work laws
Speaker 1: throughout the nineteen seventies by funding a variety of anti
Speaker 1: worker organizations. These included the Committee for the Survival of
Speaker 1: a Free Congress, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the
Speaker 1: American Conservative Union Victory Fund, the National Right to Work Committee,
Speaker 1: and the Public Service Political Action Committee. AM We didn't
Speaker 1: start the push to force right to work laws in
Speaker 1: place across the country, just that They didn't start the
Speaker 1: MLM industry, but their specific brew of grifting and political
Speaker 1: activism was extremely influential and has been copied by every
Speaker 1: generation of m l m s and right to work advocates.
Speaker 1: Since we could talk, as we often do, about how
Speaker 1: the state of Utah has famously lacks laws on supplements
Speaker 1: because certain companies that sell essential oils have lobbied for
Speaker 1: those laws. But that's a rant for another day. But
Speaker 1: the point is that these like the fact that you
Speaker 1: know you have, Utah has these very lax laws on supplements,
Speaker 1: which benefit a variety of MLMs that have given money
Speaker 1: to Utah politicians. Those MLMs are very much copying am Way.
Speaker 1: They saw what worked and they're they're doing the same thing. Um.
Speaker 1: It's not a super complicated story. Um right now, though,
Speaker 1: let's talk about another way. Amway was an innovator in
Speaker 1: mix in the field of mixing religion into conservative action
Speaker 1: and into grifting. And I'm gonna quote from the an
Speaker 1: article in Jacob in here quote. The sociologists David Bromley
Speaker 1: and Anson Shoop have argued that what is unique about
Speaker 1: Amway is not its melding of God and capitalism, and
Speaker 1: am Album almost as old as Christianity itself. Instead, the
Speaker 1: power of Amway lies in its ability to harness these
Speaker 1: ideologies to motivate individual sales persons far beyond the scope
Speaker 1: of their actual remuneration or realistic prospects. Thereof, Amway takes
Speaker 1: free market worship a step further, garnering much of its
Speaker 1: wealth from selling the idea of prosperity itself. Upper level
Speaker 1: distributors the top two percent, don't sell soap. They hawk
Speaker 1: constructional seminar, CDs, books, website access, voicemail recordings, and other
Speaker 1: sales tools to the lower level sales force at huge
Speaker 1: profit margins, as Amway profit and profit and profiteer Dexter
Speaker 1: Yeager once noted when describing Amway's model, if you work
Speaker 1: just for money, you'll reach a point where you may
Speaker 1: have enough and you'll let up. We build relationships, and
Speaker 1: people don't normally quit on people who love them. That
Speaker 1: is no it just it brings to mind earlier that
Speaker 1: Amway couple who got scammed out like fifty grand and
Speaker 1: four years who like sold their home and moved to
Speaker 1: be closer to their upline because you make them think
Speaker 1: that you care about them, right, that's how you get
Speaker 1: money from these people. Yeah, yeah, you just gotta if
Speaker 1: you And also you're constantly having to explain to them
Speaker 1: why they're losing money, right, so you have to you
Speaker 1: have to just be like I mean, if you lived closer,
Speaker 1: maybe we could like make something work a little bit better.
Speaker 1: Oh ship, you just bought the house down the street
Speaker 1: from me. Um, you guys just don't want it enough. Um.
Speaker 1: The degree to which the energy and like what you
Speaker 1: see at an MLM versus the actual product that is
Speaker 1: being sold, like our completely out of uh, any sort
Speaker 1: of like ratio to one another is always interesting to me.
Speaker 1: Like the fact that am way is like you heard
Speaker 1: that guy speak about like you know, he was basically
Speaker 1: selling the fact that that mean woman didn't want to
Speaker 1: funk him, and like he you know, he's the best, uh,
Speaker 1: but like the thing he's selling is shitty soap, like
Speaker 1: substandard like soap, bad toilet paper, bad toilet paper. H Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. And that's again what's amazing to me is that,
Speaker 1: like you know, we we we talk a lot in
Speaker 1: the old the old cracked uh crew about like how
Speaker 1: at times unreasonable everybody's devotion to work was and about
Speaker 1: like the workloads that we would take on. But it's
Speaker 1: because we like we we were doing the thing that
Speaker 1: was our dream as opposed to selling bargain terrible soap
Speaker 1: for a markup. Like That's what the genius of Amway
Speaker 1: is getting the like you always will have people who
Speaker 1: are willing to like put in unbelievable amounts of work
Speaker 1: for things they love. Am we got people to do
Speaker 1: that for nonsense, and they figured out that the way
Speaker 1: to do it was it's not about the product, It's
Speaker 1: about what these people believe about America and capitalism. And
Speaker 1: and that's the thing that's hardest for me. I can
Speaker 1: I can imagine like doing like I can imagine selling
Speaker 1: my home and moving. I can imagine like working you know,
Speaker 1: unbelievable hours, um even doing a chunk of it for
Speaker 1: no money, which I've done before for like my novel,
Speaker 1: right I, where I spent hundreds of hours working effectively
Speaker 1: for free to write a novel. It's because I loved
Speaker 1: the thing. The thing that Amway does that's so scary
Speaker 1: is they're able to hack people into doing it for
Speaker 1: like nothing. None of them care about soap, like they're
Speaker 1: not like huge into Amway brand Ziploc bags. That's the
Speaker 1: thing that's so like fucked up, And that's the thing
Speaker 1: that I don't think it's possible without the cult ship, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's people a way that they in which they
Speaker 1: resent the products because it's like so out of wack
Speaker 1: with like they're like selling their lives for these like
Speaker 1: shitty paper paper plastic products. So it's just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like how you you get people who will work
Speaker 1: And I mean you can we can talk about like
Speaker 1: the degree to which it's a little messed up, but
Speaker 1: people who are willing to like take huge pay cuts
Speaker 1: to work for like SpaceX because they believe in space travel, right,
Speaker 1: because they have there's a real dream that they're pursuing
Speaker 1: that this company is letting them pursue. And it's it's
Speaker 1: amazing that Amway is able to do that. But the
Speaker 1: dream is making Rich Divace richer, Like that's what you're
Speaker 1: giving up your life for. It's the dream of making
Speaker 1: Rich Divace more money so that he can fund anti
Speaker 1: union legislation around the country. And it's like and the
Speaker 1: central tenant is like happiness through will power and through
Speaker 1: being able to like just kind of focus on like
Speaker 1: put blinders to everything except what's in front of you
Speaker 1: and just yeah, just will yourself to happiness, which is yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's the kind of like this is not one
Speaker 1: of those episodes like with Nexium where we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about a cult leader who like raped a thousand women
Speaker 1: or whatever, Like this is not one of those episodes
Speaker 1: with like a body count, but there is when you
Speaker 1: have to when you actually try to, like the body
Speaker 1: count of Emily, it's like that one couple lost four
Speaker 1: and a half years to it. That the amount of
Speaker 1: I imagine if all of these people had had either
Speaker 1: been working on something they truly cared about that wasn't
Speaker 1: just like making rich divoce rich, had had been pursuing
Speaker 1: a real dream beyond selling soap, or that they just
Speaker 1: put that time into their families, Like it's the the
Speaker 1: evil of amilies. Like the cumulative probably tens of millions
Speaker 1: of hours of human life that could have been spent
Speaker 1: making something worthwhile or being with the people they loved
Speaker 1: that was instead spent selling soap. I mean, that's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. I think of a lot of current you know,
Speaker 1: there's that essay from uh. I think it's like ten
Speaker 1: twelve years ago about bullshit jobs and just how many. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it will only exists to justify a boss having somebody
Speaker 1: to like push around, essentially, and they don't contribute to
Speaker 1: the greater good of society. And in fact, like a
Speaker 1: lot of times they hurt and like people know that,
Speaker 1: and that's doing like psychic damage. And these are like,
Speaker 1: you know, oftentimes creative people who just happened to you know,
Speaker 1: this is where they landed, and like it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of hopeful because it's like there's so much time and
Speaker 1: energy and you know, ingenious like yeah, human brilliance, charismatic
Speaker 1: people with like you know, who are putting all of
Speaker 1: that energy and inspiration towards just non sense and like
Speaker 1: so yes, we have like a World War two level
Speaker 1: problem to solve in in climate change, but like it's
Speaker 1: like we the energy is there, the like capital is there.
Speaker 1: It's just a matter of like getting people to fucking
Speaker 1: put it towards something that will actually like save us. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the thing that's and you know, I wonder,
Speaker 1: because I guess I've a debate in my own head,
Speaker 1: what's sadder the person who works a bullshit job that
Speaker 1: exists to like give someone an underlaying or to perform
Speaker 1: some other meanings purpose and knows it. But at least
Speaker 1: like that, you're making money, right, and often oftentimes a
Speaker 1: lot of money. A lot of bullshit jobs pay you well,
Speaker 1: as opposed to a bullshit job where you give up
Speaker 1: everything in order to make someone else rich and you
Speaker 1: do nothing for society or for yourself. Really, that's the
Speaker 1: sad one. Yeah, I don't even get to like, you know,
Speaker 1: do the thing that makes them happy while pretending to work,
Speaker 1: like you know, work on their novel or fucking names
Speaker 1: or whatever. I do know a lot of people who
Speaker 1: work with they admire bullshit jobs and are perfectly happy. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's my you know, I do third forty hours
Speaker 1: a week. I spent half the time like reading a
Speaker 1: book anyway, and then I come home and I get
Speaker 1: to live my life and it's like, we'll fine. That's
Speaker 1: not the best human beings could be, but like whatever,
Speaker 1: like everybody makes compromises as opposed to Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: This has been a long like existential digression about what's
Speaker 1: like horrifying about am way. It's not one of those
Speaker 1: things where I could say like a ways evil because
Speaker 1: they killed ex people or because the founder was a
Speaker 1: child molester. It's a ways evil because of like this
Speaker 1: gaping mall that swallows human potential. Yes, and just like
Speaker 1: the the hope in that person's face. When I can't,
Speaker 1: I keep coming back to voxwear am vox and like
Speaker 1: just like being like I'm gonna buy am vox and
Speaker 1: all my problems are going to be over because that
Speaker 1: is me leveling up and this is the way. And
Speaker 1: then they sign up for this and get to call
Speaker 1: in and just like have somebody tell them to buy
Speaker 1: something else that give money to sue MYRICKX lobby for Amway.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Yeah, it's bleak, it is. I do
Speaker 1: wish I had access to a reputable independent biography that
Speaker 1: talked to folks from Richard Devas's early life and from
Speaker 1: from Javon Andels all Amway publications. I found. Note that
Speaker 1: both of their families were religious. Obviously they both went
Speaker 1: to like a religious private school. Um, but I don't know,
Speaker 1: like to what extent evangelism was the Obviously they were
Speaker 1: huge about it within their their jobs at Amway. They
Speaker 1: were big about like the pushing evangelism. I don't know
Speaker 1: the degree to which they actually believed in anything. Was
Speaker 1: this just like a convenient way for them to cloak
Speaker 1: their radical free market ideology, or was it like critical
Speaker 1: to their self perception that they believe God wants me
Speaker 1: to have this wealth? Because there's certainly a lot of
Speaker 1: like people who are like that, like prosperity gospel stuff.
Speaker 1: I don't know what these people actually believed, And I
Speaker 1: just don't have the kind of insight into their early
Speaker 1: lives to know, like how much of this was maybe
Speaker 1: directly what they were raised to believe as opposed to
Speaker 1: something they came up with, you know, post hawc too.
Speaker 1: I just don't know. Um. The purpose of religion in amway, though,
Speaker 1: as in the modern Republican Party, is to render debate
Speaker 1: over economic and political issues impossible. If capitalism is a
Speaker 1: system made by people for the benefit of a segment
Speaker 1: of the population, then it can be criticized. It can
Speaker 1: even be altered or abolished entirely in order to build,
Speaker 1: you know, either make it better or replace it with
Speaker 1: something better. If capitalism is a system made by people,
Speaker 1: it can be changed or removed. Right. But if property
Speaker 1: rights in the free market are divinely inspired and the
Speaker 1: United States was chosen by God to be a Christian
Speaker 1: nation specifically to protect free enterprise and the property of
Speaker 1: the wealthy. Well, then there is no room for debate.
Speaker 1: Then it's wholly to be an entrepreneur right um, which
Speaker 1: is now kind of a Republican gospel, But but it
Speaker 1: was really introduced in a big way. Again, these are
Speaker 1: not the only people, as we talked about, like the
Speaker 1: religious right, this is part of a Hodder movement. But
Speaker 1: Richard DeVos is one of the major people pushing this.
Speaker 1: He's a huge part of why this is so prominent
Speaker 1: because he's got number one, the money to be that
Speaker 1: influential again, two hundred million dollars over his lifetime that
Speaker 1: he put into pushing these causes. It seems accurate to say,
Speaker 1: though that amway was initially before it became as big
Speaker 1: as it was, a lot less religious than it became,
Speaker 1: just as it was initially less political than it became.
Speaker 1: The process of both started in the nineteen seventies when
Speaker 1: von Andel and Divos became very wealthy, and by the
Speaker 1: early nineteen nineties Emily meetings had taken on the characteristics
Speaker 1: of a revival gathering. One distributor told a journalist at
Speaker 1: the time after a meeting, quote, it wasn't like any
Speaker 1: church I had ever been to. I saw people professing
Speaker 1: their faith in Jesus Christ and not ashamed. I didn't
Speaker 1: see one person who reached high levels who didn't acknowledge
Speaker 1: the Lord and give him credit for the success. Now,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of Famiway horror stories you can
Speaker 1: find online. Read It in particular, has a whole community,
Speaker 1: the anti MLM subreddit with nearly three quarters of a
Speaker 1: million members that's dedicated to telling story different MLM s,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of Amway stories there. I want
Speaker 1: to read one that I think there's a good job
Speaker 1: of laying out the culti nature of the company, like
Speaker 1: where the kind of entrepreneur stuff intersects with just straight
Speaker 1: up cult ship quote. My ex husband got involved in
Speaker 1: the Amway. Every cent of our minuscule budget in our
Speaker 1: twenties was spent on expensive products, training materials, and conferences.
Speaker 1: I made it clear that it was his thing that
Speaker 1: I didn't want to be involved. I tried supporting him
Speaker 1: in meetings, but there was always a pressure to convert
Speaker 1: me as being an unsupportive spouse. He argued with me
Speaker 1: that the hours I spent commuting to university to complete
Speaker 1: post grad studies could be better spent prospecting new sales
Speaker 1: for him. Sure. Yeah, The only way I survived this
Speaker 1: part of my life was to sleep on trains during
Speaker 1: the commute as I went to school light hours, commuted
Speaker 1: five hours, then lectured at college six to ten pm
Speaker 1: each night. You do the math. I was exhausted. He
Speaker 1: glowingly reported how many Amway big wigs showed up to
Speaker 1: conferences and limousines. I argued that I too could rent
Speaker 1: a limo and appear to be prosperous for about a
Speaker 1: hundred dollars. The training material where nothing short of brainwashing.
Speaker 1: He listened to them religiously. Then he started prospecting my
Speaker 1: family and friends. Our marriage was on a down slide
Speaker 1: since this, I couldn't take the passive aggressive demands that
Speaker 1: because I saw more people on a daily basis than him,
Speaker 1: that I owed it to him to prospect them. The
Speaker 1: day that I decided to leave him, I had my
Speaker 1: bags packed and was walking out the door. He said,
Speaker 1: don't blame Amway for this. Am Way is just a
Speaker 1: vehicle for success. Rhetoric from his training materials. I kept
Speaker 1: walking like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's really bad. I thought
Speaker 1: he was gonna that's a great twist at the end
Speaker 1: that the thing he's most afraid of is that she's
Speaker 1: going to lame Amia for just a vehicle for success. Jack. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's this is my fault. I failed as a husband,
Speaker 1: not anyone. I was a shitty husband because I wanted
Speaker 1: you to give up your post grad dreams and or
Speaker 1: at least try to convert your fellow grad students to
Speaker 1: sell am Way. Oh my god. Yeah, there is a
Speaker 1: bottomless well of stories like this, Jack, and I want
Speaker 1: to read one other one that I think gets to
Speaker 1: just how deranged people are when they're stuck in kind
Speaker 1: of the worst level of am Way uh coldishness. I
Speaker 1: was in the military and lived far from posts, so
Speaker 1: to get to PT physical training in the morning, I
Speaker 1: had to wake up at five am and leave by
Speaker 1: five fifteen AM. We usually networked until eleven pm each
Speaker 1: night at amway after work, and I wouldn't go to
Speaker 1: bed until midnight or later because we'd only eat dinner
Speaker 1: after networking. Well, on a Friday, after a big meeting
Speaker 1: that lasted towards two AM, I got up at five
Speaker 1: like normal. Keep in mind, we're told that listening to
Speaker 1: any music that is negative or not value based would
Speaker 1: hold you back being a metal head and only into
Speaker 1: rap and only into wrap and hip hop, mint that
Speaker 1: I shouldn't listen to anything I like, So usually I
Speaker 1: just listened to my Bible app The Bible narrator has
Speaker 1: the most monotone voice voice ever, and some parts of
Speaker 1: the Bible are seriously the most boring and arduous things
Speaker 1: you could ever hear. Just about being real. Also the
Speaker 1: only drink I'd allow myself to dre because either water
Speaker 1: or excess. Excess is an energy drink with enough caffeine
Speaker 1: and vitamins to do absolutely nothing, especially a few pounds
Speaker 1: six a day. Seriously, if a sleeping fly fell into
Speaker 1: that drink, I would drown before waking up. So, driving
Speaker 1: down the highway after a long night, I passed out
Speaker 1: at the wheel even though I was drinking an excess.
Speaker 1: My car lurched to the right and caught the ridges
Speaker 1: on the edge of the road, And if I didn't
Speaker 1: jerk the wheelback and skid onto the road, I would
Speaker 1: have caught the railing. What's sad is I patted myself
Speaker 1: on the back for being so tired, because it meant
Speaker 1: I was a hard worker. We didn't leave until over
Speaker 1: a year later, and nearly falling asleep at the wheel
Speaker 1: was a common occurrence at least two or three times
Speaker 1: a week. And man, that's what the rumble strips are for,
Speaker 1: you know, that's that's what they're there for, guys, for
Speaker 1: the way reps, for its to grind and for the
Speaker 1: grinders out there endemic among especially enlisted uh like soldiers,
Speaker 1: like because soldiers don't make a lot of money, but
Speaker 1: they'll often get like a signing a bonus, so you'll
Speaker 1: you'll have tin grand and some a wa like, hey,
Speaker 1: you want to just waste that or do you want
Speaker 1: to turn that into a fortune? You want to be
Speaker 1: able to not have to work in the future. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's uh, it's the best jack I U I know,
Speaker 1: like I there's I found myself when you were telling
Speaker 1: the story about the person whose husband like got husband's
Speaker 1: life got taken over by a way uh like being like,
Speaker 1: how did she end up with such a dummy when
Speaker 1: she was like such a you know, a grad student.
Speaker 1: But I was also just realizing, like I've known people
Speaker 1: who were in medical school, who got whose lives who
Speaker 1: ended up devoting their lives to multi level marketing, Like
Speaker 1: who are still like trying to recruit me able to
Speaker 1: level marketing? Like there's yeah, it's uh. And you know,
Speaker 1: the same thing they say, like cult members are tend
Speaker 1: to be just as if not more intelligent than non
Speaker 1: cult members, Like I'm sure that it's not an intelligence thing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's what you're vulnerable to. You know. It's in the
Speaker 1: same way Jack that like, getting addicted to drugs doesn't
Speaker 1: mean you're dumb. It means you're vulnerable to whatever drug
Speaker 1: it is, right, Like there's a bunch of people who
Speaker 1: can do cocaine at a party once and never want
Speaker 1: to do it again, and then there's somebody who does
Speaker 1: it and it it just captures them, and it's it's
Speaker 1: just it's the same thing with colts. People have for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, what Amway puts out, the specific kind of
Speaker 1: propaganda latches on to certain kinds of people's heads, and
Speaker 1: it's it can it can destroy anybody who's got kind
Speaker 1: of the right vulnerabilities to it. It's like a virus um.
Speaker 1: I did want to note, by the way that the
Speaker 1: excess energy drink that that guy says nearly got him
Speaker 1: killed because it's so shitty is an Amway product and
Speaker 1: if you buy it, Jack, you can get twelve cans
Speaker 1: for twenty four dollars. And here's the best part, forty
Speaker 1: eight am perks points. Wow. Okay, now we're talking. Now,
Speaker 1: we're talking eighty milligrams of caffeine per can, which is nonsense.
Speaker 1: That's not enough. I feel like I think it's a
Speaker 1: hundred and eleven hundred eleven okay, yeah, um, I think
Speaker 1: the highest that energy drinks goes like two hundred usually
Speaker 1: without as the highest they can go without like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, threatening to explode your heart. But yeah, we
Speaker 1: even need a heart for is what I ask. Excess
Speaker 1: but excess, yeah not. I wouldn't call it excessive. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't call it eighty milligrams of caffeine per can excessive. Now.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eight, as a result of lawsuits in
Speaker 1: the UK, government authorities carried out a mass survey of
Speaker 1: am We distributors in that country. They found that out
Speaker 1: of a population of thirty three thousand UK distributors, only
Speaker 1: ninety people made enough money to cover the costs of
Speaker 1: operating the business. So at of thirty three thousand, ninety
Speaker 1: at least broke even I assume some of those people
Speaker 1: got rich, right, because there were a lot of three
Speaker 1: thousand people. That's a lot of down line, but ninety
Speaker 1: the total number of people who are either got rich
Speaker 1: or didn't go into debt was ninety out of three. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess right, like Robert of covering costs
Speaker 1: so we can operate our business. Speaking of covering costs,
Speaker 1: you know who more than ninety out of every thirty
Speaker 1: three thousand people make a profit from uh? Is that
Speaker 1: the products? Yeah, that's right, Jack, products and services support
Speaker 1: this podcast. I don't know. I'm not entirely certain what
Speaker 1: claim we're making either. So that's the way it goes.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you don't know what you're doing and you just
Speaker 1: do it anyway, like am we ah, we're back and yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's uh, let's let's let's let's so yeah. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you, Jack, thank you for appreciating my professionalism. So
Speaker 1: one of my favorite articles, if you want to get
Speaker 1: like an idea of the desperation uh of Amway people
Speaker 1: who really buy into it? Who who drink the kool
Speaker 1: aid so to speak? So This is not a fault
Speaker 1: the author. It's an article I came across in The Baffler,
Speaker 1: which is one of my favorite publications. The author, Matt Roth,
Speaker 1: was invited to Amway buy a coworker someone he respected,
Speaker 1: who got roped into am Way with her husband. He
Speaker 1: attended a handful of motivational events for distributors, and he
Speaker 1: even purchased a small number of products. I don't think
Speaker 1: eve Or bought into it, but he, like I think
Speaker 1: he believed at one point, well, maybe this is a
Speaker 1: business opportunity. I don't know. He also was a writer,
Speaker 1: so it may have just been like, I want to
Speaker 1: see what's going on in this weird subculture. Much a
Speaker 1: Matt's article delves into what a horrible deal and Way
Speaker 1: is for its distributors. One of their main selling points
Speaker 1: is that am We distributors get away products wholesale prices,
Speaker 1: great products. So even if you're only buying the products
Speaker 1: for yourself, it's a good deal because you're gonna save
Speaker 1: money on the stuff you need from your house. You
Speaker 1: get cheaper detergent, toilet paper and all that stuff. Right. Um.
Speaker 1: Matt found that not only were a lot of Amways
Speaker 1: products of questionable quality um, but their wholesale prices were
Speaker 1: at best slightly cheaper than supermarket retail prices for brand Yeah.
Speaker 1: Matt's friends repeated to him the line that that distributors
Speaker 1: enjoyed at discount on basic goods, which on its own
Speaker 1: might make being an am Way worth it. But this
Speaker 1: would appear to be a complete falsehood. None of the
Speaker 1: promises and Way made hold up to even a tiny
Speaker 1: degree of scrutiny. But that's why the company spends fairly
Speaker 1: little effort on these claims. The products again, and I
Speaker 1: would bring people in. What brings people in is a
Speaker 1: mix of peer pressure and the sheer spectacle of Amway events,
Speaker 1: which are forcefully pushed on new recruits and distributors to
Speaker 1: keep them in business. One of the first Amway events
Speaker 1: Matt went to was something called Dream Night. It began
Speaker 1: with the triumphal entrance of the Amway Diamond couples half
Speaker 1: jogging through a gauntlet of high fives to the theme
Speaker 1: from Rocky As the audience Right as the audience ruled
Speaker 1: It's amazing, as the audience whooped in hollard and twirled
Speaker 1: their napkins over their heads. When the standing ovation finally
Speaker 1: tapered off, the m C offered a prayer thanking God
Speaker 1: for the fact that we lived in a free enterprise
Speaker 1: system where there were no government agents kicking down the
Speaker 1: doors of meetings like dream Night. I'm just so embarrassed
Speaker 1: for them. All. Yeah, I guess I don't need to be,
Speaker 1: because they're they're having a great time. As dinner wound down,
Speaker 1: the video screens displayed a picture of what the guy
Speaker 1: next to me was quick to identify as a twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollar Rolex watch. He went on to tell of
Speaker 1: a fellow he knew who had a thirty thousand dollar
Speaker 1: Rolex and who couldn't tell the time. For the glare
Speaker 1: of the golden diamonds. As its hands reached midnight, the
Speaker 1: rolex dissolved into a series of video montages depicting the
Speaker 1: consumers shangri law that our own forthcoming and way success
Speaker 1: would open for us. We leered as a day at
Speaker 1: at We leared as a day in the life of
Speaker 1: a typical job holder, all alarm clocks, traffic jams, and
Speaker 1: dingy cubicles, was contrasted with that of an amway distributor
Speaker 1: who slept in and lounged the day away with his family.
Speaker 1: We talked hungrily his real life Amway millionaires, strutted about
Speaker 1: sprawling estates, proudly referred to his family compounds, and explained
Speaker 1: that such opulence was ours for the asking. We chortled
Speaker 1: as a highway patrolman stopped an expensive sports car for speeding,
Speaker 1: only to ride away a moment later with an Amway
Speaker 1: sample kits strapped to his motorcycle. Our laughter became a
Speaker 1: roar of delight as that cam resumed in on the
Speaker 1: sports cars bumper sticker, jobless and rich. Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: Jack gets to one of the things I find most
Speaker 1: interesting about Amway and its place in our culture. Richard
Speaker 1: de Vos was the ultimate cheerleader of the side hustle,
Speaker 1: grindset capitalist attitude. He was a man who got famous
Speaker 1: saying stuff like this. If I had to select one quality,
Speaker 1: one personal characteristic that I regardless being most highly correlated
Speaker 1: with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trade
Speaker 1: of persists determination, the will to endure to the end,
Speaker 1: to get knocked down seventy times and get up off
Speaker 1: the floor saying here comes number seventy one, which is
Speaker 1: a great thing to get people to believe. If you
Speaker 1: want them to spend years giving all their money to
Speaker 1: Amway and grind get my paper up am Way, and
Speaker 1: we's yeah, And he's a huge, huge originator of that
Speaker 1: attitude of the grinds, that you got a grind attitude.
Speaker 1: But also at the same time, a massive amount of
Speaker 1: their propaganda revolves around the idea that there's basically nothing
Speaker 1: worse than having a job. And I want to read
Speaker 1: a quote from Amanda Montell's book Coltish next quote and
Speaker 1: am Way the world's biggest MLM. Anyone who works for
Speaker 1: an employer as opposed to an upline mentor is said
Speaker 1: with disdain to have a job or jackass of a boss.
Speaker 1: When you work for someone else, you will never get
Speaker 1: paid what you're worth. And we's recruits are all taught
Speaker 1: to say to m l M r's the word entrepreneur
Speaker 1: represents not just a career, but a morally superior way
Speaker 1: of being in the economy, comments Nicole Wolsey Biggert, U C. Davis,
Speaker 1: socie oologist and author of Charismatic Capitalism, Direct selling Organizations
Speaker 1: in America. M l m's gaslight you into believing that
Speaker 1: if you follow their flawless system and don't succeed, there
Speaker 1: is simply something wrong with you. Every willing and hard
Speaker 1: working person can be successful in this business. A good
Speaker 1: system always works is a thought terminating cliche pulled from
Speaker 1: Amway's handbook. There are countless MLM vision boards all across
Speaker 1: the web featuring emotionally manipulative platitudes like people often fail
Speaker 1: in m l M s before they ever begin because
Speaker 1: the approaches from the head, not from the heart. And
Speaker 1: I really hate when broke people who don't work complain
Speaker 1: about being broke hashtag billionaire mindset. In an audible titled
Speaker 1: Top fifty MLM Quotes of All Time, the website online
Speaker 1: m l M community dot com showcases a litany of
Speaker 1: misattributed inspirational quotes, including this axiom falsely associated with Winston Churchill.
Speaker 1: The pessimists sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimists sees
Speaker 1: opportunity and every difficulty as if the British statesman success
Speaker 1: has had anything to do with direct sales, or if
Speaker 1: even if the quote were really his. Yeah, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: like yeah, Churchill or Ship or Einstein. Like if you
Speaker 1: want to just make your quote sound like it's smart,
Speaker 1: just give it to them. I'm pretty sure that speak
Speaker 1: in uh like like quippy reverse holes of like phrases.
Speaker 1: Uh No, whiter Churchill was, for one thing, when he
Speaker 1: was witty, a lot wittier than that. Um Yeah. Am
Speaker 1: Way is essentially the arch cult of American capitalism, and
Speaker 1: it's now spread across the world and into the highest
Speaker 1: levels of power. It's a lure comes from both a
Speaker 1: religious worship of capitalism and a bald faced admission that
Speaker 1: the realities of life under capitalism are unbearable and ways
Speaker 1: pitch doesn't work if you don't think one of the
Speaker 1: worst things possible is to work a job all your life,
Speaker 1: right like like that. That's that's this key factor in
Speaker 1: why their ship works. The solution to how nightmarish it
Speaker 1: is to live in like the economy is to leave
Speaker 1: the daily grind and instead work yourself to the bone
Speaker 1: to make your Amway dreams come true so that one
Speaker 1: day you can quit working and give speeches to cheering
Speaker 1: crowds while light shows play. It's an incredible grift. Richard
Speaker 1: DeVos died on September six, two thousand eighteen, at ninety two.
Speaker 1: He was worth more than five billion dollars. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: died like the two hundred richest person in the world
Speaker 1: at the time j Van Andel died in two thousand
Speaker 1: four of Parkinson's. His family today is worth four point
Speaker 1: seven billion dollars. I'm sure you all know of the
Speaker 1: divoce clan and have been waiting for the moment where
Speaker 1: we discuss them now. One thing I find interesting is
Speaker 1: that when rich died he was worth five point one billion,
Speaker 1: and today the family's worth an estimated five point four billion,
Speaker 1: so they've gotta buy about three hundred million dollars since
Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen when he dropped Um. Betsy Divas is
Speaker 1: Richard's daughter in law, so she's not a blood relative.
Speaker 1: She was originally a prince like her brother Eric Prince Um,
Speaker 1: but she has conducted herself in a way that would
Speaker 1: have made rich proud. She is also a Christian supremacist.
Speaker 1: She attended a very expensive Christian school as a child
Speaker 1: for basically her whole education, and as an adult she
Speaker 1: became the Republican National Committee woman from Michigan and chair
Speaker 1: of the Michigan Republican Party. She used her position very
Speaker 1: effectively to advocate for charter schools. Leaked videotapes in two
Speaker 1: thousand seventeen revealed Betsy admitting that her goal in doing
Speaker 1: this was to hinder secular public schools, which she called
Speaker 1: a dead end, and provide public funding to religious schools
Speaker 1: and thus, in her words, advance God's kingdom. When Donald
Speaker 1: Trump made her the Secretary of Education, she was only
Speaker 1: barely confirmed. Mike Pence, another religious extremists, cast the tie
Speaker 1: breaking vote. Here's how the website chalk Beat, which is
Speaker 1: dedicated to education, sums up her legacy as the Secretary
Speaker 1: of Education. In her first year as Education Secretary, Devos's
Speaker 1: Education department revoked guidance that spelled out how school should
Speaker 1: protect transgender students, which included providing them access to facilities
Speaker 1: corresponding to their gender identity. DeVos reportedly opposed the change
Speaker 1: at first, but eventually went along with it, saying the
Speaker 1: issues were best left to states in local school districts.
Speaker 1: Eliza Bayard, the executive director of g l s e N,
Speaker 1: which advocates on behalf of LGBTQ students, said the effects
Speaker 1: were chilling and immediate. Several g s l e N
Speaker 1: chapters reported cases of transgender students losing access to bathrooms
Speaker 1: they've been able to use before. Bayard noted transgender students
Speaker 1: who filed civil rights complaints with the department after being
Speaker 1: denied bathroom access had their cases thrown out. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and eighteen, Divos rolled back the Obama administration's guidance
Speaker 1: around school discipline, as well as guidance for school districts
Speaker 1: that wanted to use race and admissions and enrollment decisions
Speaker 1: to integrate their schools. It's unclear how many school districts
Speaker 1: changed their policies in response. Devosa's Education Department also quickly
Speaker 1: closed many of the civil rights investigations that inherited from
Speaker 1: the Obama administration, then limiting the length and scope of
Speaker 1: the investigations that did conduct. DeVos also blocked some efforts
Speaker 1: to disegregate schools, ending a program that would have given
Speaker 1: school districts twelve million dollars for school integration efforts. Without
Speaker 1: the federal money, many districts abandoned their ideas. So, yeah, Jack,
Speaker 1: it's been a pretty bad run of her Secretary of Education.
Speaker 1: She nailed it. You know, she's just like when when
Speaker 1: she's in a room, you know, it's just you get
Speaker 1: the sense of competence. Like we all saw that sixty
Speaker 1: minutes interview. Uh, there's a woman who should be in
Speaker 1: charge of how all kids in America learn. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: nailed it. My brain is so poisoned by um, you know,
Speaker 1: modern media and like the billionaire off that we get
Speaker 1: to witness between Bezos and Elon Musk that I, um,
Speaker 1: when I heard five billion, I was a little bit like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's all that, But uh so I I always this
Speaker 1: is a simple trick, but it always works for me.
Speaker 1: Comparing five million seconds, which is a fifty seven days,
Speaker 1: to five billion seconds, which is one and fifty eight years. Um,
Speaker 1: it was always helpful for me to just kind of
Speaker 1: put the just completely uh just unethical amount of wealth
Speaker 1: you need to have to be a billionaire in perspective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and every hour, every dollar in that bank account is
Speaker 1: again like dreams, not pursued, family, not spent time with,
Speaker 1: like debt incurred. It's it's it's money made breaking people.
Speaker 1: Like the original divosca I was going to probably be
Speaker 1: successful and powerful no matter what he did, and he
Speaker 1: went into stealing money from people and then spending all
Speaker 1: his time convincing people it was okay. Yeah, and he's
Speaker 1: you know, it's a part of this broader like the
Speaker 1: destruction of the middle class and the growth of the
Speaker 1: billionaire class. He just did it very directly by just
Speaker 1: taking the middle classes money, making the mortgage their homes,
Speaker 1: and giving them fairy tales. Um. It's great um as
Speaker 1: a billionaire thanks to while both her her dad who
Speaker 1: was rich in Richard Junior's inheritance, her husband who is
Speaker 1: also rich divas but you know Junior, Betsy has poured
Speaker 1: almost two million into anti LGBT causes in recent years.
Speaker 1: She and her husband funded the passage of right to
Speaker 1: work legislation in Michigan, and the exact wording of the
Speaker 1: legislation they pushed just being used as a blueprint for
Speaker 1: efforts in the remaining twenty three U s States without
Speaker 1: right to work laws. We can all be grateful that
Speaker 1: Betsy's general legislative incompetence, which was matched by the incompetence
Speaker 1: of the Trump administration, meant that she failed in many
Speaker 1: of her goals. Charter schools were not massively expanded, Department
Speaker 1: of Education funding was not cut to a massive degree.
Speaker 1: The most sweeping changes she supported required an entirely compliant Congress,
Speaker 1: and we as a nation just weren't quite ready to
Speaker 1: end public education yet. But Betsy Divas and Richard Devas
Speaker 1: are hell bent on continuing the legacy of Richard Devas
Speaker 1: Senior using the Amway money that's still daily pours into
Speaker 1: their coffers. They see this wealth is entitling them to
Speaker 1: rule over the rest of us. Betsy wrote a column
Speaker 1: for the magazine Roll Call where she made this very
Speaker 1: clear quote, I've decided to stop taking offense at the
Speaker 1: suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede
Speaker 1: the point they are right, we do expect something in return.
Speaker 1: Is like, this is the role that you are called
Speaker 1: to system. Um Yeah, just really a great sort of
Speaker 1: um crystallization of all the you know, just most rotten
Speaker 1: uh values that were created by the the original sin
Speaker 1: of this company. And then also like a great illustration
Speaker 1: of the diminished returns that you get by just being
Speaker 1: just through nepotism and spoiled shitty uh you know children. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well Jack, that's our episode. Um. I wanted to write,
Speaker 1: you actually need to go get to dream night. Uh Yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta you gotta do your dream night. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be a dream night double diamond. You gotta you gotta
Speaker 1: walk through that. That that cheering crowd. Um, Jack Pontiac.
Speaker 1: But Jack Pontiac, because you always drive up well, no
Speaker 1: one would brag about that. Um. Your fiarro is a
Speaker 1: nice carta baby. Um. Yeah, I want to remind people
Speaker 1: again we've got one of our fans is putting out
Speaker 1: a comic book series. Ringo Award nominated comic creator Brenton
Speaker 1: Lingle is a trying to crowd fund d Rudy Shadow
Speaker 1: of the People, about an anarchist UH militant during the
Speaker 1: Spanish Civil War Wind of Ventura. Do Rudy. You can
Speaker 1: find and back his comic on Kickstarter if you just
Speaker 1: type in d U r r U t I d
Speaker 1: rudy U at Kickstarter, and if you back at the
Speaker 1: book level or higher and comment bastards, you'll get a
Speaker 1: unique signed to print for free sod Rudy on Kickstarter.
Speaker 1: Check it out, Jacky. People can find you at The Zeitgeist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Daily zeit Geist, the twice daily podcast that I
Speaker 1: host with former Nest Miles Gray. Soon it's just gonna
Speaker 1: be You're never not podcasting. Yeah, That's where That's where
Speaker 1: I'm headed. And you can also follow me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Jack underscore O'Brien O b r I E. I
Speaker 1: think I am excited Jack for when we just install
Speaker 1: uh recording equipment in your head on a daily basis,
Speaker 1: and and there's you're never able to You're never able
Speaker 1: to stop podcasting all the time, no matter what. That
Speaker 1: grind mentality you know, rise and grind, gotta get my
Speaker 1: paper up. Uh yeah, I'm and it's gonna be rad
Speaker 1: when that becomes common. And you can also, like here
Speaker 1: in your head the voices of your commenters just like
Speaker 1: telling you to do things like when you're out. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's people doing that already right with with twitch. Why
Speaker 1: not just make it perpetual for everybody? You think I
Speaker 1: can already here my commenters in my head. Man, think
Speaker 1: hard at Jack, and he'll do what you tell him.
Speaker 1: It's true. Alright, Thank you Dad. By H