What's syphilitic? My eighteen seventies sailors, I'm Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards. That introduction had really nothing to do with the topic today. But I mean, sailors in the eighteen seventies had a hell of a lot of syphilis. You can't argue that that's just that's just fact, that's just science. Here with me to talk about syphilis a little bit more is my once and current and probably future boss Jack O'Brien. Actually it ends after after this, after that one more time over swan song. Yeah, yeah, No, pleasure to be here, Pleasure to just be on a zoom with both of you, Robert and Sophie. It's good. What is more the American way than syphilis? You know? It is, it is. It is the most American disease, and I think one we ought to bring back. Let's bring back everybody slowly losing their minds as worms eat their brains. It's good for you. It brought us. There's a bunch of art we got because of syphilis. You know, what, what are we what are we losing now that we've cured it? A lot? Is my contention, We're losing a lot and possibly a Hitler too. Yeah, we might be losing exactly, we're losing a Hitler or two and maybe, uh well, okay, probably has nothing to do with what we're talking. It really doesn't. It really doesn't, Um, Jack O'Brien attack Jacktoberfest. This is every time I do this. I'm continuing a series of jokes that are our colleague Dan O'Brien did when I was like seventeen. It's funny the things that stick with you, Um, Jack, how do you funny? The things that stick with you? Like that being a thing that everybody says to me. Also, people thinking that I am a fictional character created by Daniel O'Brien, aren't you. I did think that right up until you called me about the internship when I was I just I'm just somebody who saw a branding opportunity and reached out to Daniel and said, Hey, I want to occupy this character of Jack O'Brien that you invented. We should really be nicer to Jack. He employed both of us. He's employed me virtually my entire adult life. Jack saved me from the tech world. He saved me from very lucky and a teacher. Well, you're still still teaching people stuff. I would feel more bad about that, but I feel like you do a good job teaching people stuff, so I appreciate that. Well, Jack, how do you feel about AMI? I mean, I don't know a ton about it, and that's good. I know it as a like door to door sales thing, and I know it as sort of the uh grandmother of multi level marketing that which has turned into a massive thing. Now, yeah, yeah, that's that's the basics, And the most important thing to know about Amway, Jack, is that it is not legally a pyramid scheme, as in never legally not a pyramid scheme. And the fact that we have to say it's legally not a pyramid scheme does say all that you should know about the kind of business Away is as and it's the kind of business where you have to specifically note that legally it's not a pyramid scheme. A lot of lawyers. They have a lot of lawyers and a lot of money. If there's like a mathematical equation you can do based on like the the amount of money you have and then how much of that money you spend on lawyers that just like attack people on your on your behalf. Um. Yeah, uh, and so it is. It is not legally a pyramid scheme. Um. But the Consumer Awareness Institute has calculated that Amway's loss rates for distributors exceed ninety nine point nine percent, which means virtually all of the people who are kind of sort of employees of a way, of course, legally they're not employees. They're independent, you know, distributors, um make zero money or lose money. And and nearly all of the profits that am Way makes come from its distributors and are funneled up to a tiny group of people at the top, while the vast majority of people at the bottom make nothing. You can visualize the shape of that arrangement in your head. But it's legally not a pyramid scheme. Yeah. Yeah, Now the ninety nine point nine is not not great. It would be a really different podcasting industry if well, I guess that is like if you look at podcasting as a whole. But that's not you know, a company. Um, I'm just saying most podcasts are are are like my favorite ever tell you about my favorite podcast? Jack? What's that? Oh my god? I came across this before I ever gotten to podcasting. But when people started talking about it as a thing, I think around and I fell in love with it because it was the most tasteless, tactless thing I have ever encountered in my life. It was a vaping podcast by like four four kind of chetty dudes in South Carolina, and the name they picked for their podcast was the Serial Vapists. Yeah, they shaped it did um and the content was exactly what you'd expect it was. It was horrible, but it was very funny. I don't think they am fairly certain. They never made Joe Rogan bucks off of that show, but it was very funny to me. I was really hoping you were going to name drop one of your own podcasts that's your favorite. Were you were that that guy? No, no, no, I don't listen to podcast Sophie, I just make them um. I've actually never time to listen in my life. Exactly tubiously making that Cassy making them um um. It's like Dan Acroyds never seen one of his own movies. You know that that can't be possible. Dan was the only man who hasn't watched Ghostbusters. Probably watched that one, you'd have to think. But he claims he doesn't watch his own movies. Yeah, I mean that would be did you did you just when you were discovering, uh, the Cereal vapists? Did you just put is there like some cereal? It was like really cereal and it was whenever whatever. Years the first serial came out, So I was looking for Cereal and I saw underneath it like and I had to listen, um and it was amazing. Like one of the episodes, the first like twenty minutes, was just a guy talking about taking a ship at a vape store and the fact that they were cool with the fact that he took a giant ship in their bathroom. Like it was an incredible moment in content history. If someone can find their old episodes by all means do um. It was amazing, So Jack, The first important thing to know about Amay is that it's legally not a pyramid scheme. The second most important thing to know about am Way is the history of pyramid schemes, because once you learn the history of pyramid schemes, why am Way isn't legally one makes somewhat more sense. Now if you go into this line of research, if you google for first ever pyramid scheme, you will generally be directed towards the tale of Charles Ponzi, who we've discussed a couple of times on the show. In brief, he was an immigrant from that perfidious peninsula, Italy who in nineteen nineteen hatched a scheme involving what we're called international Postal Reply cupons. These were essentially stamps that had been created for small international transactions, and they were redeemable at post offices in the United States for real stamps, which obviously have a cash value. Ponzi got one of these international Postal Reply coupons from a friend in Italy while he was in Boston, and he realized that the coupon he had gotten had been purchased in Spain because they were cheapest there um and because of basically, to make a long story short, because of how much stamps were worth in the US, and how cheap these things were to get in Spain, you could make a profit just buying these in Spain and redeeming them for stamps. It was kind of a loophole in the system. So Ponds he hatches this that that sounds like basically the most honest way that somebody could make a living today. At like a hedge fund or like that just sounds like it's every financial job in existence. Well, this is not what he actually does, um, but this is how he justifed. Like So, his initial plan was to do this at a huge scale, like getting a bunch of basically giving getting people to give him money to use to buy these international coupons that he would then redeem for stamps which he would sell for cash and then just redistribute the profits. That was the idea on paper cover story. Yes, so he founds a company, the Security and Exchange Company, which was not He wasn't trying to do a thing with the SEC. The SEC did not exist at this point, so he just came up with the same name they did, which think of that what you will. Um. So he comes up with the SEC to facilitate this scheme, and he promises a return to investors in ninety days, which is obviously bullshit. Any what time someone tells you unless it's drugs. If someone's telling you that they're gonna if they're gonna do that with your drug money, that might be real, but you know it's it's drugs. So um. It did well for a few months, but Ponzi never really went through like he got a bunch of investments, but he never did the international cupon thing. Instead, he just lived the high life for months, uh and would repay early investors with money from new investors, which is obviously an unstable situation that can't last forever. And eventually the Boston Post found out what he was up to. They wrote a bunch of expose a s on it, and the District Attorney of Boston got all aggro about the whole thing. In the end, Pond Ponzi was arrested and his name went on to adore and countless other similar schemes. So that's where we get the Ponzi scheme from you like Bernie made Off did that and kind of over time, the term pyramid scheme became the catch all term to refer to a wide variety of cons that were all descended from Ponzi scheme. So Ponzi generally seen as like the first pyramid scheme, um but all. It's also worth note that he wasn't the first pyramid scheme as a matter of fact, if you want to look at the real originator and maybe the person Ponzi was copying, um as best we can tell, it was a woman named Sarah How in Boston in eighteen seventy nine. So the first pyramid scheme properly may have been the invention of a of a lady in Boston in the eighteen seventies. She just very rarely gets the credit for this um. But but we're all about, you know, giving credit to the women grifters, So I'm gonna talk about Sarah How for a little bit. She created a con called the Ladies Deposit Company, and the Ladies Deposit Company was ostensibly a bank run by women, women and exclusively for women. In the eighteen seventies, women weren't allowed to have bank account open bank accounts on their own, Like if you had a bank account as a one was because like your husband or your dad had opened one for you, and like they were would would have like a co you know whatever on it. Um. So it was a fairly huge deal that Sarah was creating a bank that was like four women and specifically, Sarah's bank only accepted deposits from women who were what she called unprotected i e. They did not have a male guardian in charge of their finances. So this was like a big deal, but of course it was. It was a giant scam, right um. So Sarah promised that an exchange for investments from these unprotected women, she would give them an eight percent interest on their like eight percent return on any money they invested. So if you deposited a hundred dollars at the end of the year, you'd have a hundred nineties six bucks in your account. Um. And she was also giving out the first three months of interest in advance to women who started accounts with her. So even the day that would sound like a scheme, right um, And it was definitely a scheme back then. Um. So people at the time asked how this could work, how the bank could possibly profit doing this, and Shara Sarah ashared them it's because it was not a for profit endeavor. She claimed that her bank was funded by Quaker philanthropists, um, which was a lie. Um. But it was a very successful con And you can see why she picked this population to con The fact that these women are unprotected means like were they going to go to right, like they don't have like they don't Presumably these are like kind of these poor women, right if you're an independent woman, you don't have like a man, either a father or a husband. You're kind of in the least protected segment of society. So she's going after these people in part because she she figures they're not going to be able to do anything right. Um. And the con is very successful because there was a huge need for a bank that would actually serve these women. And in short order, Sarah gathered between two hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand dollars in eighteen seventies money from close to a thousand people. Um a local paper. Yeah, she made a lot of money off of that. That was millions and modern dollars. Was just the first one to get caught. Basically, No, she gets caught before him. But she's a woman, so they're not going to name it a Sarah scheme. You know that literally does seem to be like why um so a local Also, I mean Ponzi scheme was larger, but Sarah scheme was not small. This is not a low level con. You know, you're making a quarter of a million dollars or more in the eighteen seventies, you have you have pulled off a good scheme. Um, as with Ponzi, A local paper exposed this as a scam. Sarah had been a fortune teller in the past, so that was a big part of like the reporting on her that like, this is not a banker, This is like a person who you know, told fortunes and stuff. Um, I picked all my financial advisors, is making sure that they have a background and fortune telling. You could argue that that's what any stockbroker is. I mean, yeah, I just don't want to admit it. But yeah, there is that fun article about how there's that hamster that has outperformed the vast majority of humans in the crypto industry, um, which I I do love. Um. They even made acute little desk um. So yeah, and the the articles also exposed that, in addition to having a background that maybe was not the most credible basis for a someone who founded a bank, she had uh you know, essentially created I mean, she didn't create a Ponzi scream. She created a house scheme, and Pondsi created a house scheme. But I'm going to quote from a write up on long Reads here, when a new depositor arrived, how would use their money to pay out older clients. So the whole scheme required a constant influx of new depositors to pay out the old ones. Like every other Ponzi fraudster, House Bank would have eventually run out of new money. The run of stories in the Boston Daily Advertiser instilled enough fear in the banks investors that they began to withdraw their money, and eventually there was a run on House Bank. It took two weeks in five days from the first story published in the Advertiser uncovering house fraud before she was arrested. The press extended her victims a modicum of sympathy, describing their plights will also reminding the reader that they deserved their pain for trusting a woman with their money. I put every dollar I had into the bank, and if I lose it, I am a beggar. One depositor told the Boston Globe at the time. I wanted the interest so badly that I placed a mortgage on my furniture to secure the principle to deposit. Oh I wish I hadn't now, for I shall have my goods sold from under my head, said another. Those characters were made up by writing that story because they yeah, yeah uh. Also to a woman, I'm a journalist. Also, isn't it true that women couldn't women couldn't have credit cards until like the nineteen seventies, Like yeah, it's like a very uh DP entrenched sort of myth about women. Yeah, it's um it's it's like there's a lot of fund up stuff about like what women were and weren't allowed to, uh to do financially, but in the eighteen seventy it was basically nothing. So she was going after the most desperate people. Um. And it says a lot about society that they were just like, well they trusted a woman with that money, you know, even though like well they weren't allowed to trust a man with their money, like they legally couldn't. What were they supposed to do? Um? Right? I mean that's also probably why I got picked up. And like we still know the story is because it like goes to prove a thing that every buddy, all the white men in existence wanted to believe. So yeah, it's funny, um and by which I mean it's sucked up. So and I guess I mean it should be a house scheme, we should call them house schemes and fairness, but also a Ponzi scheme. Is just a great name. Ponzi did have a better name objectively, for for calling a scheme. Um, it's funny, it's Italian. We all know the Italian scampie trusted. You know, it's just good. So Sarah how and Charles Ponzi were the first of what would become an American institution. Confidence games of one sort or another have existed probably as long as economies have existed. One could argue that most states and corporations are just confidence games on a very grand scale, but I'm not gonna get into that right now. What made the schemes that how in Ponzi started different was the fact that they were built to masquerade within the facade of reputable institutions, banks, and other like financial investment companies. By the late eighteen hundreds, capitalism was a very solid concept for most Americans, and inequality was soaring. People were enticed by a scam that seemed to offer them away out of wage slavery by doing what looked on the surface to be the same thing that all of the rich people around them were doing. Right, They weren't promising anything like new and fantastic. They were saying, hey, you know all those bankers are rich because of interest. Here's a way you can get interested, you can get out and like move up into the middle class and whatnot. Right not, this is a you know, fanciful scheme. This is an investment in its investment that unlike the other investments that you know, the rich people are in, Like, I'm letting you win on this, right. We talked about this a little bit with a nessarist scheme. Um. It's a big part of just saying like, hey, this, if you frame your scheme as we're giving regular people a chance to do the stuff rich people do all the time, that's the best kind of financial scheme because you're building it on a basis, well, people know there's some way to make money with interest. People know some people get rich off of investments. Why couldn't it be me this one time? Haven't I worked hard enough? You know? Um? And then kids of Bernie made off. He did it to the people who were the financial inst which is like, wait a second, nobody knows what how any of this ship works. And that's why we're you're never going to hear about made off on behind the bastards because I don't have a problem with ye oh of course, Yeah, yeah, avenging angel. I mean, I'm sure he did a lot of but like, I don't give a shit. Um, his victims were people like whatever. Um. So in Sarah's day, for impoverished single women. Um, it's like the thing that she was promising this downtrond group of people was like, you know that rich people have number one, have bank accounts and make interest. I'm going to give you that opportunity. So it didn't see these were people weren't making a dumb decision. They thought they were getting a chance to do the thing that the people who have money have been doing forever. In Ponzi's day, investments like the stock market was starting to get to be a huge deal and and he made people feel like, well now you can get in, get in on that thing. Um. Both schemes work because most of the targeted people sign tutaneously misunderstood the real thing the scams were pretending to be, but also knew enough about that real thing to know that something like what the scammer was promising was how all of the rich people they knew had gotten that way. Um. So that's why these things work. Now, the exact origins of the term pyramid scheme are unclear, but the term certainly seems to have come into widespread use during the early nineteen seventies thanks to a scam cosmetics company named Holiday Magic Um, which if if you listen to the podcast The Dream, which is a very good podcast, they go into a lot of detail about this. I'm just gonna give you the cliffs notes. So Holiday Magic had started in the mid nineteen sixties the project of a man named William Penn Patrick, and he old Billy was a real character. He had he had had a bunch of failed businesses. He apparently came upon he was like walking past and smelled like or like solid like cosmetics, stacked up in some guy's garage and bought the business off of him. It was very like sketchy story. Um. William Penn Patrick is a fascinating guy. He unsuccessfully ran against Ronald Reagan from the right as governor of California. Um. He was a one time vice presidential nominee of a party called the California Theocratic Party, which just seems like it's straight up fascism. And of course he was a member of the John Birch Society. So yeah, you know this guy. Right, everybody's got a picture of William Penn Patrick in their hair in their head. Now, Holiday Magic sounds like a like a name you would give to actual snake oil, like that you would run that, you yeah, Whereas like we're I feel like we're learning the importance of names because like with Ponzi and uh am Way, sounds like you know that they build fucking trucks or something. You know, like it's like yeah, yeah exactly, or or at the very least like a place to buy sturdy groceries or something like that. You know. Um So, Holiday Magic was a multi level marketing company. It was not the first. In fact, by the time William Pennpatrick started it, there was Avon, am Way, Mary Kay, a bunch of other MLMs existed. We'll talk about what maybe the first was in a little bit, but Holiday Magic was probably was within the first generation of such companies, and it was by far the scammiest. The basic idea behind Holiday Magic was that women would become distributors and buy makeup kits that they could then throw parties where they did the makeup for their friends and they would sell them makeup via this. The makeup was terrible and it was so heavily marked up that you know, number one, it was very much impossible for distributors to make money off of it. And number two, William Pennpatrick made a shipload of money off it. He was a very short order, making like six million dollars a month um. He had quite a few mottos for his distributors. One was tell recruits that going to be happier, healthier, wealthier and receive what they went out of life with the Holiday Magic Program. Any person who fails in the Holiday Magic Program must fall into one of the following categories lazy, stupid, greedy, or dead. Yeah he's the best. Also is he a time traveler from the nineteen twenties? Who? Okack? You know that? Okay, okay, this is happening in the seventies though right the voice, Yeah, this is happening in the seventies. I mean, that's the voice that I pitched behind the bastards to you. One we're gonna talk about like Jack, We're gonna talk about Saddam. Who's saying it was because you were doing it all with while doing a soft shoe and like taking your hat top hat on and off, juggling a little Yeah, that's the guy. So his personal motto was those who condemn wealth are those who have none and see no chance of getting it. Uh So again you see the eye that he is. Um. Now, as I said, there were other m l m s out there at the time. What made William Pennpatrick special, and you really have to say all three names, is that he was very astutely married the kind of American dream style grift of the pyramid scheme with cultic influence techniques. So he was kind of the first to like, I'm not just gonna have a money grift to get money out of people. I'm gonna keep them there by kind of making my grift into a cult. Right, because if you're just taking people's money in a scam, eventually they'll figure it out and leave. If you get them to like believe that they're getting them getting scammed is like makes them morally superior, like keys them in spiritually to something as part of some sort of sacred you know thing, then you can keep them forever. Right, Like that's the Church of scientology, you know. Um, that's the way to to really make a grift last. And William Penn Patrick is kind of the first MLM dude to get it right. Well sort of, he went a little far. I was gonna say that Holiday Magic is too stupid a name for a cult, and then you immediately disproved that by saying scientology. Uh, well of, and you know the cult. He had another organization that was the cult, and this was called It was a series of course is called Leadership Dynamics, which were build is like a training conference for Holiday Magic and other MLM distributors. So like on paper, leadership Dynamics is of course that you take in order to learn how to run your own business selling MLM products. The reality of the program is that people would pay like a thousand dollars and again seventies money to hang out in a horrible hotel getting locked in coffins and mentally abused. Like it was all these like weird power games and ship like quasi torture of people. Um. It involved a lot of we've talked about sinning on and Chuck de Eric. It involved a lot of the game where like you'll sit around in a circle and everyone in the group will harass one person for a period of time and insult them. Like it was a lot of like fucked up cult ship, you know, yeah, yeah, next Sea Vibes. Everything that came after Nexium is very much descended from this cult, from this cult pyramid scheme too. Now again, if you want to learn a lot more detail about this, because I'm really breathing over a lot, the podcast The Dream has done an excellent series of episodes on this. For our purposes, what you need to know is that Chuck's Dream fell apart as a result of the fact that he was just promising way too much and it wasn't really a product he was selling. He was just getting money straight from distributors to sell the product, and like that's that. That was too much of a scam. Holiday Magic generated enough complaints that it kept coming up in the House of Representatives, and eventually the FTC took him to task for being a pyramid scheme. And I'm going to quote from the excellent book Cultish by Amanda Montel here. Patrick's behavior was unhinged from all angles, But when the FTC brought him to court, their most compelling argument against him, and what eventually allowed them to shut down Holiday Magic, was their points about his speech. Ultimately, the court ruled that Patrick's deceptive, hyperbole, loaded buzzwords, and gas lighting to guysed as inspiration were what defined him as a pyramid schemer. This makes sense because in every corner of life, business, and otherwise, when you can tell deep down that something is ethically wrong but are having trouble pinpointing why, language is a good place to look for evidence. This is where the FTC turned to squash Holiday Magic, and over the next few years, it's attorneys sited the same kind of outlinedish, fraudulent messaging as they prosecuted a litany of mL ms, including the biggest one they went after, am Way. Now am Way, as we started the podcast by stating, is legally not a pyramid scheme um And to explain why the FDC blasted William Pinnpatrick Scam scam to hell, but did not do that to am Way, we have to talk a little bit about the men who founded am Way. We're gonna be veering back and forward in time here so they can we cut in some of Cody's time machine noises here. Okay, well, did you say no, No, it's horrible. Let me try. Oh right, right, Okay, I know what you're talking like. I think he'd be proud, Um, I feel smiling up, smiling upon me from heaven. By the way, so you know, I host the show The Daily Zy, So I'm not just putting that in there as a plug. But we haven't. We have been covering Um co host with Miles Gray, former guest on the show. We've been covering a lot of Amazon lately. And they also have coffins and like scream at each other until they start weeping at work, Like did you know about the about them? We're doing this the holiday Magic scheme Amazon Amazon booths, which are just these like booths I haven't heard and like they are like you're good, you aren't worth it. It's basically like a place you can a coffin you can cry in for like fifteen minutes. That's God as hell, Jack, Yes, I love it. I love to see a company respecting tradition. You know exactly what it's all about. To me, embraced tradition, reject modernity. Put your employees and coffins and scream at them. Speaking of that, Jack, do you know who else puts their employees and coffins and screams at them. I mean it's going to be like an accidental Amazon at like there's a decent JA that's a non zero. What happened might be Chevron, you know, I really hope not. I don't know. Look, I think one of the great things about this country is that we all have a sacred right to force our employees into coffins and scream at them. It's the American way. It's the American way. It's the am way. Yeah, that's what comes from right, Yes, yeah, well, yes, the dead actually does. We'll be talking about that briefly, but first products, Ah, we are bad. I don't know, Jack, I don't know. It's my connection slower and split out. We've been casting too many pods lately. I'm I'm I'm overwhelmed by the amount of content of it. No, I get it, man, I'm right there with you. We just recorded our thousandth episode of Daily's Guys Jesus clost on a cracker. But we realized that because somebody wrote it into an a k Otherwise, Yeah, you never. I have no idea how any podcasts I've done other than far too many. Uh. But you know the nice thing about this, Jack, is when we're both dead teenagers a hundred years from now, we'll be able to make us say literally anything. There's there's plenty of our voices. Yeah, we can finally immortality Jack. Yes, and then my kids will finally be able to hear me speak to them because uh yeah, yeah, you're famously have never never speak around your children. Um, I only speak cling on to my children. You're doing like a Star Trek version of the experiment that one PopEd it. There's actually a psychologist who did did a klingon thing to his children. Don't only spoke cling on around them. That's that's this hard, this beautiful mix of like kind of abusive and also kind of mad. Like it's a really unique area. Um okay. So am Way got its start thanks to a company called neutral Light, which was a dietary supplement business founded in nineteen thirty four. And I think from the name Neutralite, you know it's a scam. Um yeah, yeah, Now the founder was an American businessman named Carl F. Rainberg, who, as far as I can tell, yeah, I don't know the degree to which this guy was a total con artist. Neutralite definitely sounds like a scam. By some accounts, it maybe the first MLM company, but also I think it was m l m's were not quite as much of a of a bald faced at that point because it was really just like a modification of door to door salesman. Right. That was a big thing at the time. The fact that the idea that like someone would buy products and then go to door to door selling them was like not weird, um like it is now. Um So, I don't know. Rainboard had been working for the steel industry as well as Colgate and China when the Chinese Civil War forced him to flee, and he claimed that seeing so much poverty and starvation convinced him of the value of vitamins, and so he got into the dietary supplement business next again. Neutralite maybe the first MLM company. It's unclear to me how scammy it was. Um. He sold his products wholesale to distributors who eventually formed their own companies to sell it. Uh. And two of the people who became independent distributors of Neutralite where j Van Andel and Richard divorce They got involved in nineteen forty nine. Yeah, we all know that last name, yep. For the first men. Oh yeah, there's a big old divorced. I feel like we need like a horrifying sound effect. Yeah, let's uh hear no, not that one. That's the good that's that's the Divos sound was appropriate. So they become independent distributors in nineteen forty nine. And there is not a tremendous amount that I found of reputable information about these men's early lives. They both did kind of write memoiry books, but there again mainly existed to sell you on amways, so not the best sources. Jay was born on June third, nineteen thirty four, which is the same year that neutral It was founded. He was the grandchild of Dutch immigrants um His parents were extremely religious and members of the Christian Reformed Church. He attended a Christian high school, and when World War Two broke out, he joined the Air Force and trained bomber crews. After the war, he became a door to door salesman, where he met his wife. Jay had met Richard Divos back in high school. They both went to the same Christian academy. Now Richard DeVos will call old Dickie D. Was born on March fourth, nineteen in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was a true child of the twenties, by which I mean his mother was named Ethel and his father was Simon Cornelius, which I know it's a name you just have to punch. So his family, I think we're fairly He would later say that like they had hard times during the depressions, that was difficult for them. I'm sure it was tighter than other times where they also paid to go to a private school. I don't think it was like like my grandpa had to leave the family when he was seventeen because they didn't have enough food. I don't think they were that kind of poor. But he makes a lot out of how poor they were there in depression. I don't know. I wasn't there. Um, his family and Jays seemed to have been, you know, more comfortable than most in this period of time. Again, they're able to send their kids to a private school. There is fairly little about the early lives of either men and sources that are particularly trustworthy. When he was eighty eight, Rich wrote a memoir where he described his grandfather as a huckster um, but he meant that in a positive sense and from a it up in Politico here. Grand pod Decker had been an immigrant from the Netherlands, Dutch in origin, like the word huckster itself. During the Great Depression, he sold freshly farmed vegetables door to door in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rich Divos used to tag along, noting the way the old man's neighborly demeanor and good humor gave him an instant rapport with customers. At the end of the usual roots, young rich had the chance to peddle the leftover vegetables. The first thing to Voss ever sold was a bag of onions. His father let him pocket the profit. So that's apparently how Richard Divoss claims he got and that may very well be a lie because it's a very folksy story, you know. Um, But rich is very very bullish about the trade, the craft of being a salesman. He kind of builds his whole life around that. Um. The official away account of both men's life from the website Amway Global dot Com runs just a few paragraphs long. They stayed up front quote the founders of Amway, Rich DeVos and j Van Andel first became friends in high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They had no way of knowing that their individual lives would become forever entwined, or that their combined would change the landscape of business for good. But they don't give a lot of detail about these guys. Again, it's kind of hard to nail down on a whole lot about their early lives. So, as I stated, Richard and j started as independent Neutral Life distributors in nineteen forty nine, right after World War Two. Direct sales were a big deal at the time, and the concept of people going door to door to sell things was still fairly common and not really weird, right. Part of what's weird about m l m's now is that like business doesn't work that way anymore, where like a salesman just like buys a bunch of products wholesale and like goes around selling them. That did used to be a kind of normal. When J and Rich got involved in Neutral Life, it was fighting off an attack by the f d A who accused the company of false advertising. So again I think that their vitamin things were kind of a scam um. J and Rich were very good salesman, but the blu Ha hall with the FDA concerned them. So after ten years as Neutral Life distributors, they quit and they spun off their own company to sell different household products. They called it the American Way, or am for short. Now. A few short years later, Von Andelen Divos would buy Neutral Life from Carl Rainberg, and it today remains one of the staples of their product line. But the first Amway product was a type of highly concentrated organic detergent which they bought as a patent from a Detroit area scientist who had fallen on hard times. The organic home cleaner was called Frisk, and the men liked it because it was the kind of product that they claimed anybody could sell. Amway was successful early on offering Americans during an unprecedented economic boom, the chance to quote own a business of their own. And this is from the beginning a huge part of the pitch, right, a lot of people are getting rich. This is the biggest economic expansion in history, and they're like, am Way is a chance to own your own business. So you're not our employees. You're starting their own business to sell these great products, and like, that's how you're going to get your piece of of the American Dream. That was the m Way pitch from the beginning, and am Way wrapped itself in the cult of the American Dream. Rich and Jay's most quoted line on modern a Way company websites is quote, we were just two guys from Ouda, Michigan, USA who wanted to have a business of our own. The Amway slogan is you can do it too, right, And you see the the I mean the this is a little bit of the evolution of the grift, right, these ponzi and how these first schemes. It's you know, how rich people are making their money, you can do that too. And this is more of like a a an intimate sort of thing. We're just two regular guys who started a business and it got us rich, and you can do that. They're selling entrepreneurship as a brand, right, Like you two could be your own entrepreneur. You could start your own business, be your own business owner, because that is what all the rich people that you've read about have always done. Like they really are like basically selling the American dream, like the American way. Like that they tell you in the title exactly what they're going to do to you. Yep, that's exactly right now. Rich Divos, I think was more than driver of the duo um and he was first and foremost a salesman. He wrote in a nineteen book quote. My own particular thing has always been salesmanship. I am always amazed to see how many people look down their noses at salesmanship as a worthy occupation. Now to sell am Way, Rich had to sell his own lifestyle, the fact that he was rich, big house, nice cars, and he'd all learned it through am Way. And if Rich could do it, you could do it too. He would warn his new distributors that A Way wasn't about making a quick buck. It was about making your own slice of the American dreamer reality through hard work from Politico quote. He helped his distributors along the way with guidelines and best practices, but he mostly saw himself as a cheerleader for people to realize their own capabilities and to expand their ideas of what is possible, all while undergirded by specific political and spiritual ideas. He saw is fundamental to the American Way. And this is again what separates this from these early pyramid schemes are promising d return, you'll get rich. You know, you do nothing but handing your money, you get rich. The much more durable version of the grift is it's gonna be hard work. It's gonna you'll get rich, sure, but you have to do you know, you have to put in this work. This is the you know you can. This is your own business. This is not like a quick return thing you'll get you'll be a millionaire if you follow these steps. But you have to follow these steps and it's gonna be hard. And that's a lot more durable. And it also means if all you're doing is handing in money being promised to return when the return doesn't come, it's pretty easy to figure out who to blame. If you have to do put in the hard work quote unquote um, then if it doesn't work out, because maybe it's close to impossible for it to work out, the blame is on you, which is a much smarter grift. You know, right, you're and like your family as you're you know, taking out a second mortgage on your house to buy like wheelbarrows full of fucking cleaning solution that doesn't really work in your family is like don't do this. You're like, don't you trust me? Like I'm going to I Am going to make this happen because just through sheer tyranny of will, because like that's what America it treats teaches us as possible, and then you know, when it doesn't happen, you're kind of fucked because you already like kind of put it on your own shoulders. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right, and that's brilliant. It's much smarter than what Ponzi and how we're doing. But it's very evil, but it's also legally not a scam. Yeah. So, for Divorce, the American Way meant a country that embraced the free enterprise system, exalted God, and held true to the conservative Christian principles. This country was built on a religious heritage, he wrote in his book Believe and We'd better get back to it. It meant a country where the only limit to what one could achieve was how hard one worked. I think being poor is something many people do, he said in a nineteen sixties six speech. It sort of has to do with being poor by choice. And it meant a country where personal responsibility and belief in yourself were two sides of the same coin. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, Divorce believed that those values were under threat from the rise of the welfare state, that a client of religion to the Soviet threat and the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. At the time, Conservative Christians hadn't become yet a potent political force, but the makings of the movement were there. The sexual Revolution, the Supreme Courts rov Wade ruling, the pornography wars, the white backlash to desegregation, the backlash to the women's lib lib movement, the rise of the silent majority in quoth. It's all from Politico's obituary of the Man, and it makes a good point about like where where this guy is situating himself very consciously, So he's from the beginning not just a businessman, and from the beginning doing the kind of thing that that William Pennpatrick did. This isn't just a money making scene. This is wrapped up in in in this cult of Americana, and it is wrapped up in Christianity and this this religious belief in the free market um. And again that makes it all much more durable because it's not just a matter of well, if this doesn't work, maybe it was a scam. It's a matter of like, well, this must work, and so if it's not working, it's on me, because this is what God wants you know now, the religious right in the nineteen seventies, which is when Amway really starts to make serious money, was not yet an organized factor in US politics. That didn't come around until nineteen seventy nine. But Richard knew the future was in marrying conservative electoral politics with Christian fundamentalism and free market ideology. By the early nineteen seventies, he was wealthy enough to start spreading some of his money around to deserving causes. He founded the Christian Freedom Foundation, which he shaired. Now today there's an organization by this name that comes to be an apostolic law ministry UM, but that is not the the the CF that existed at his time. According to a Mother Jones report from one the purpose of the CF was quote was as stated by a member during one meeting to elect conservative Christians to Congress. Shortly after giving it twenty five thousand dollars, Richard Vos took divorce, took control of the board of the CF, and ran it. He used funds from the organization to funnel money into yet another right wing theocratic organization, Third Century publishers. These fund folks published a guide book for conservative Christians who wanted to win local elections. They framed this as returning to America quote as it was when first founded a Christian Republic. Now, during the same period, j Van Andel, the co founder of Amway, organized the Chamber Citizens Choice Lobby, which agitated against government regulations that he claimed reduced choice and that other people said reduced the ability of corporations to like crush workers with factory equipment. So both of these guys are are are seeing both like the fight for deregulation and whatnot, in the fight for um, you know, corporate rights as the same as like fighting for a Christian republic, because obviously a Christian republic would have no limitations on what capital can do. Now, the Amway co founders established the Center for Free Enterprise and Ada, Michigan as the and this is like kind of like a museum, it sounds like. The lobby of this building featured life size bronze statues of both men. Mother Jones described the it has quote one of many displays in the saucer shaped building that illustrate the rewards of a capitalism stewarded not by the federal government but by God fearing tycoons themselves. It's like a propaganda outlet right this like this, this this museum dedicated to the UH, the wonderful history of free enterprise and all that goes great when the government stays out of the way of Richmond and its first full year of business nineteen sixty, a Way had made just half a million dollars. By nineteen seventy seven, the company was selling more than three hundred million dollars in products per year, mostly to its own distributors. While Amway had started off as a multi level marketing company, the focus was initially on selling products to actual customers. It quickly became clear that this was not the best way to make a fortune. If you relied on selling products the normal way, you had to worry about whether or not they worked oral marketed well to customers. Instead, DeVos and Van Andel created a modified cult dedicated to convincing people to buy more Amway products in the guise of independent businesses that they would ostensibly sell, but in most cases would just kind of accrue in their house because they were unable to move them. Um Mother Jones lays it all out quote. Am Way measures a distributor success by how many products the person sells and by the size of their distributors downline. Each time the distributors get a new recruit, they add to their personal salesforce and elevate their own position, increasing the amount of money they get from people below them, while acquiring ever loftier titles first Direct than Ruby, Emerald, Diamond and so on. So you can are technically make money by selling the products, but the real way to make money is by selling Amway to new people, right, because then you get a and in order to stay in it, you're you're pressured to buy a certain amount of the products a month. Most of most of what's bought is distributors buying it just so that they can say that they're continuing to quote unquote cell products. And if there's people are in your downline, you get a chunk every time they buy more Amway stuff, so they pressure them to buy more Amway stuff. And if you have a lot of people in your downline, you make a shipload of money. You know, down means like so you get somebody to join an Amway who like answers to you, and then they get people to join them. All those people are in your downline, their their money is rolling up flowing as they buy the products too, then yeah, exactly, And again you don't if you can think about the shape that that would be if you were to dry out the way that arrangement works. Um. But yeah, that's all we can say on the matter. So triangular, definitely, like a triangular is shape to the way the money would be flowing. Um. Yeah. Now. William Campbell, a distributor for the company, explained the traditional Amway sales pitch this way for when he was interviewed for a nineteen seven article. Ama is just the good old American dream. Everybody has the idea to open their own business and see it go and wait lets you And of course most AMIA distributors either made nothing or lost money. This discrepancy between the wealth made by Amway and the poverty of many AMIA distributors lead to Vos and van Handle to earn the nickname the gold Dust Twins. Um. I don't know who gave him that nickname, but that's what people. I am pretty sure they gave themselves that. Yeah, it does sound like a nickname, give yourself. Despite all of their growing propaganda operations, de Vos continued to prefer to deliver his sermons on capitalism and Christianity in person to wrapt audiences of Amway distributors. His speeches at regular Amway events were said to drive the audience into a quote near frenzy and always ended in a chorus of weepy God, bless America's from the mostly husband and wife teams who attended. And we purchased its own radio broadcasting system. In one interview, Devas explained that purchasing the media directly was important to Amway so that, quote, we can expose to a broader audience the things we feel are important in the future of this country. Keep that in mind, because that's gonna come up again soon. Am We also increasingly published its own cartoons, films, booklets, and audio cassettes. Many of these were geared at training people to sell, but more were pure ideology, aimed towards in their war words, objectively fighting the unfair scapegoating of the profit motive by the left now. DeVos and Van Andel also took the fight directly to politicians in Washington, generally by you know, buying them out right. When Gerald Ford took office in nineteen seventy three after some unpleasantness with his old boss, the Amway founders had been shotgunning money his direction and towards the Republican Party for years, and so they quickly became regular guests at the White House. This came in really handy for them because in nineteen seventy five am we fell under a Federal Trade Commission investigation to determine whether or not they were a pyramid scheme. Um, but beyond speaking terms with the president, when the FTC starts looking into whether or not you're a grifter, but Jack, you know who the FTC never looks into as far as we know, as far as far yeah is it is it? The product is the products products ever never EC isn't even aware of them. We fly right under the FDCs right our baby, that's the promise behind. The bastards didn't even know what we're doing. We use a VPN. It's fine. Um, here's ads Okay, These these are returns from Adverick sir. Yeah. Yeah, we've never won anything. Yeah, we've I've never won an award and never will not not not not a one. We're you know awards, Jack, We're back. Uh you know what, Robert, you just reached my Ruby level of podcast hosts. So you you get that reward, You're you're certified Ruby, thank you? Does that? Does that come with a car? Do I get the Do I get the Cadillac? Yeah? Yeah, of course the red, the red Cadillac, the bright red Cadillac. I'm gonna man go cruising in the main drag. So just a question on kind of what we've covered so far, because they're you know, they have these people who are like the foot soldiers, Like are they rewarding those people based on how enthusiastically they like sing the praises of Amway because that that does seem to be like part of it, right, is Like I'm assuming they think by kissing us and saying his uh speeches like throw them into like you know, orgasms of fucking capitalist joy, that they are then like kind of finding favor in the Amway world. Yeah. I mean, obviously you have to praise the boss, but also the people. Thank you, Sophie was what I was getting it, and I appreciate it. The people who like get to give talk for Amway are going to be other successful distributors. So you do have you have the people who are actually trying to run a business and like sell Amway products who uh don't make money uh and wind up broke uh and and dying on the street. And then you have the people who are really good at getting people to be that person, and those people do make money. There's not a lot of them, but those are the people who get to like who when you go out for quotes and whatnot, are representing Amway. Right, these big distributors who are not Amway employees. Often we'll talk a little bit about that, but like, that's um like it in A big part of it is like building this this cult of personality around the founders and around the successful distributors, And it's this huge part of what works about Amway is the worship of success. So when somebody does make money, you put that person in front of crowds, you have them deliver these and the kind of people who are capable of making money at Amway are going to be good public speakers because they're kind of people who are charismatic. Right, They're good at getting people to buy in people. Yeah, and I don't think. I don't think that audience is faking it. That audience is cheering and losing their minds because they desperately want to believe in what Amway promises because it's the only hope they have of living a life that isn't wage slavery. Um. And so they they they they want the promise that Amway is making them um. And so when they hear someone tell them it's possible you can do this. You know, you can succeed, you can have the big house and the boats and everything, um, they don't question it. Uh. And instead they find it like inspiring. Um. And I'm sure when they get home that night to their house full of unsold Amway products, UM, there's there's a crushing feeling of inadequacy and failure. Um. But it's it's maybe even made worse than it otherwise would have been because they've convinced themselves, well, this guy was able to do it. And so as the Amway motto goes, I can do it too. You know, it's if I haven't done it, there must be something wrong with me. Um. It's I mean, it's it's how America talks about homeless people and poor people. Right. It's just like a company that's bottled that that discussion of like, if you're not succeeding under this system, it's because there's something wrong with you. Yeah, Now, in nineteen seventy five, as I stated, and we the FTC is like this might be a pyramid scheme. Holiday Magic had just been busted, and the FTC was at this point kind of going bullish lee after other MLMs. Their argument against Amway seemed pretty strong, despite Richard divorces strident claims that Amway was a good way to build an independent business and get rich. The average gross monthly income of distributors with sixty seven dollars a month. Now, and you have to consider that's average when you consider guys like Von ANDL and Divorce, who are making millions of dollars a month. Right, that's the average when you include the people who are getting rich off of this stuff, which means the vast majority of the seven and fifty thousand away distributors were making nothing or loo using money. Right. I mean didn't you say at the top the independent distributors lose ninety nine point nine percent of their Yes, yeah, that's a more recent number, but yeah, like that, this was the number back then, right, with sixty seven dollars a month was the average in nineteen seventy five. Um, we now know based on again that when I started the episode with it. Yeah, ninety percent of people lose money. Um, you know the data on am Way obviously it's different throughout the years, and you know, we know more now than we did at that point. Um. So that same year, nineteen seventy five, Van Andel and Richard de Vos met with President Gerald Ford in the Oval Office for forty three minutes. The same year that like this, this investigation gets underway. Next from the Washington Post. A month later, Van Andel was quoted in a Michigan newspaper is saying that Ford was aware of em Ways travels with the FTC. Later, Warren rustan director of fords scheduling office, and William Nicholson, his assistant, were listed as stockholders in a Nebraska insurance company being formed by Van Andel and Divos Wrestling. Nicholson dropped doubt of the venture, despite White House approval of their participation. Nicholson was later hired in Amia's government affairs office. You know, there's ways of greasing things. Um. In nineteen seventy nine, the FTC ruled that Emily was not a pyramid scheme, but that the recruiting strategy. Yeah, amazing, a true underdog story. Yeah, if you have a forty three minute meeting with the president of the Oval Office. You two can make court stuff. Maybe not not continue. Yeah. Devas's picture on Wikipedia is him standing next to ford and at the White House holding up what appears to be the Constitution, like I don't know what, well, I don't know exactly what they're holding. It's like a single page documents. Yeah. Interest very funny and not at all corrupt. In nineteen seventy nine, again the FTC rules and is not a pyramid scheme, but the FTC the judge did note that the recruiting strategy had the capacity to deceive spective marks because it heavily implied they'd get rich, they were fine, and am we had to agree to change their ads to more accurately reflect what people could actually make. The reality is that they just got slightly more cunning it promising the same things to people while skirting right up to the legal line. I found a book, Merchants of Deception, published by a former am WI distributor named Eric schlib Scheibler. Uh. He came into Amway well after the FDC case, and he explains how it was sold to him. So this is kind of how they've modified things since the case to not make fraudulent claims so to speak. Quote. One of the many analogies used by am Way distributor leaders to illustrate this was a reference to the McDonald's franchising scheme. Would you rather own one McDonald's or be Ray Kroc and have the right to franchise or duplicate your efforts? Isn't it far better to have ten percent of a hundred businesses than a hundred percent of one. By helping many people succeed in owning their own franchise, so to speak, you could literally work yourself out of a job and live comfortably on the residual income generated by the businesses you started. This regidual income stream could even be passed onto your children as part of your estate. There was no way to lose money, that's end quote. As it was the perfect business opportunity with no employees or overhead because again, the people sales and no sales. When we questioned them about the apparent pyramid nature of the business, we were advised, no one makes more money off your business than you. Carry later informed us this is a legal requirement that keeps this business from being an illegal pyramid. Am Way claimed that the worst deception found in their marketing strategy was the fault of rogue distributors, individuals who had made their own money signing folks up for Amway and who had started posting, like pushing motivational tapes and pamphlets at conferences to teach people how to become super salesman. And this is not entirely untrue. All these things are hallmarks of Amway today, but they actually started as independent from the main Amway business. So all of again, everybody an ami Way, These are all independent little companies, and some of them are independent large companies. The people who are really successful, the guys who are good at getting people to buy an ami Way, those guys start selling books and pamphlets where they're talking about how rich you can get, and am Way claims like, well, that's that's a big part. That's that's what the FTC had an issue with. It wasn't what we were doing. We just weren't keeping enough of an eye on these distributors, you know of like gig workers almost like all the massive like tech companies built on gig workers who are not actually employees. It does seem a lot like what Uber is doing. Um Uber the company that a lot of people got rich for starting and has never made a profit, which is fun um It's neat. So as I noted, the way this worked in the beginning is that am Way sold products to distributors, who often started their own companies to sell said products, much in the same way as to Vos and van Andal got into the business. The money was in selling the products to distributors, and the smartest Amway distributors made money by promising the good life too smaller fish and getting them to buy a bunch of Amway products. Thanks to a nineteen eighties court case, we have a memo Richard DeVos wrote in the nineteen seventies as FTC scrutiny of his company reached a height. In it, he very bluntly laid out what the FTC would later say was true and weight distributors were being lied to quote and this is Richard devas widespread illegalities inherent and am Way distributor designed systems of tapes, books and rallies. While most of these systems were conceived of in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, is genuine support programs to help and Way distributors developed their Amway business entrepreneurial higher higher pins discovered and developed programs for substantial, separate and additional income under the Amway umbrella. Again, he was very aware of what was going on. Richard outlined these support systems as a threat to the future security of the Amway Corporation. He acknowledged to his subordinates that the disproportionate to Amway sales, intensity and solicitation of these tools systems are illegal per se under several US federal and state laws. So he's aware and like the early seventies, that a lot of his distributors are breaking the law, but he he can't really like he's there's not He's not going to do anything about this, because those people are how Amway makes money, right, those big fish distributors who are all breaking the law and the promises they're making are also where his money comes from, because they all have a bunch of people in their down line. Um, but they're not Amway employees and they're not uh yeah, none of them. Yeah, And he's not the one doing the lying. So it's exactly feels like he's good, yeah, yeah, he I mean legally he was good. Um So, after the FTC decides that Amway is not a pyramid scheme, a bunch of different state attorneys general start investigating Amway to like try to figure out if there's anything else they're doing illegal that they can because you know, they're getting a lot of complaints. People who like come out of the Amway culture like, well, I lost a bunch of money. Something seems like they'd be wrong here. Uh. In Wisconsin, the state attorney general sent people into Amway meetings and he found these shady distributors running conferences and hawking tapes that made promises about wealth that am Way absolutely could not back up up. The state filed civil complaints against Amway, which sent journalists undercovered to poke around, which is when Richard DeVos finally started to care. He proposed a number of possible solutions, perhaps the funniest of which was to create what he called a truth squad to ferret out big distributors who were lying in their supplemental materials. But the very quickly realized there was nothing am We could actually do without harming like his ability to make money. As doctor Carol Juth, a sociologist who studies Direct Marketing, wrote, the entrepreneurs of the Amway Corporation, perhaps unwittingly, created an organizational structure which evolved into two powerful symbiotic organizations. The survival of the corporation and the distributor organizations are now dependent on and constrained by the other. The Amway Corporation is constrained and instability to garner desired profits because of the amount of money it must allow for distributor incentives and the fact that distributors are more inclined to sponsor rather than to sell retail. After the FTC find a way for false advertising, the company was forced to make change. Is since am we couldn't actually do without these big distributor organizations, they brought them in their propaganda into the whole deal. So they actually like kind of merge these two. They bring a lot of these distributors into like uh where, and particularly the propaganda they're they're making, they just start selling that as part of Amway um. These big distributors with ranks like double Diamond became a key part of the internal Amway business, and their motivational speeches and books were rolled into the product line. The grift got slightly smarter. Instead of saying this book or conference will teach you to be a millionaire, it became if you want to grow your business, this mentoring can help. I found one story and a mother Jones article from nineteen ninety six that relates the tale of two Amway distributors, Karen and Craig Jones, and I think this illustrates that where am Way moves after nineteen seventy nine in terms of like how these promises are made to people. After paying about a hundred dollars for a starter kit, the Joneses started buying motivational audio tapes recorded by such Amway leaders as Divorce Yeager and Bill Britt and other well known district eater. Before long, am we pressured them to place a standing order for new tapes, which cost six dollars a piece. They tell you that the people who are serious about their future in the business do this, Craig says. Soon the Joneses were receiving two tapes a week by mail, and we also expected them to buy at least two hundred dollars in Amway products each month. You start believing them, says Karen. You want to do what they did to get to where they are. Karen quit her cleaning business. The couple sold their three bedroom home in Charlotte and moved their three young children an hour north to Concord to be closer to their upline. They contacted every acquaintance they could think of, trying to recruit new distributors. It didn't work, Karen said, They lost friends and within a year we're broke. We would eat beans all week long. We sold our living room furniture and our TV. As Craig lost interest in Amway, Karen says she received a less than Christian response from her sponsors, who implied she should file for divorce. They tell him, they tell me, flush him, flush my husband, says Karen. If he's not doing his part, then flush him. After Karen stopped showing to meetings in April ninet, Craig returned to work full time as an architectural engineer. And we'll squeeze the jones is out. I know, right, business and architectural engine These people had real jobs, like but it's again, a real job is like hard and you yeah, you have to do it for years. Maybe you get to retire today and get rich. Yeah, like three kids eating means like for every meal, because they wanted to live closer to the person that they bought their giant boxes of soap from that they would just end up storing at their basement because they couldn't sell them to anyone because nobody wants this ship. Yeah, their business peaked at revenues of three hundred dollars a month um. And the couple claims that A Way cost them fifty dollars in nineteen nineties money and four and a half years of their lives. And having people who are struggling financially who just keep spinning their wheels blaming themselves. Uh, and than a group of people in power also blaming them is the most American thing that I can possibly imagine. Like, this is just I mean, couldn't be a better metaphor for everything about our country. Yeah, it's um, it's perfect, Jack, It's perfect. Well that's gonna be the end of part one. A A what A I don't know I was being Italian Jack wildly offensive. You're the co host of the Daily Zeitgeist. That's one of the geist. You can also find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore Old Brian Uh and yeah, that's those are the kind of the two man places awesome. UM. I want to end this with a little plug for something cool that a fan is making. Um. Those of you who listened to our episode, our Christmas episode on Nestor mack No, who is an anarchist warlord in a Ukraine. Um, this is about a different anarchist revolutionary guy who actually knew mock No and fought during the Spanish Civil War, a guy named Buena Ventura. Do Rudy. Um, there's uh. The Ringo Award nominated comic creator Brenton Lingle is creating a new comic series called Drudy's Shadow of the People, and he's looking for people to back it on Kickstarter. Do you go to Kickstarter and you search for d U r r U t I d Rudy. Um, you'll be able to find it if you're back at the book level or higher and comment bastards. He'll send you a unique signed print free. It's a cool product. Uh, do Rudy at Kickstarter. Um, and you'll find Brenton's Brenton's project. So I think it's Nate. Check it out. Um anything else? Jack, nothing for me, Robert, nothing from you. Well that's all for me. Also, all right, I can't wait until next episode. I I can I can't. I can't. Let's wait. Let's wait like a day, Let's wait like okay. Okay, sounds good. All right,