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