Bahahaha this was amazing. I felt like it was 1990 all over again reading this. I only tangentially knew people who did Amway (or Mary Kay, etc. etc.) so it is super interesting and hilarious to read all the insider stuff. I need a follow up post to learn more about what happened with Lars's parents. Did they go diamond?? Did they have day jobs? I need way more info. PS. For anyone else reading this who also loves trashy MLM content, if you haven't listened to The Dream Season 1 please do yourself a favor and go listen!
Nice write-up. It's crazy how often we see the same aspects of cult-like behavior in the world today. Or, more likely, it was always there, waiting for someone to look at it in a different light. Either way, cults abound today IMO, I can only wonder if its a sign of the times, if they come in cycles, or if I was just too ignorant to pay attention in the first place.
We’ve already had OneCoin, a straight-up pyramid scam with a Crypto veneer that recruited from other more legitimate MLMs, so I think you are on to something.
A similar trap happens to truckers--companies offer to lease trucks so drivers can “own their own business”, but that means the truckers are stuck with the risks and the fees and the lender still controls what loads they can and can’t take etc.
My rule of thumb is that anyone who promises to help you start your own business is lying and wants you to take on the risks while they get rewarded.
One of the things I remember distinctly as a kid what I was always told to "follow my dreams" and "own my own business," and what I wanted to do was make video games, but if I followed all the Amway advice the only future prepared for me was to recruit people to buy vitamins and laundry detergent from me, and I couldn't see how that would help me get closer to making video games.
Excellent read. My personal exposure to MLM was Cutco knives as a teen - thankfully, I had a good support structure that brought me back to reality after a few weeks and a hundred bucks or so.
ah, the trouble there is that Cutco knives are actually quite good! Good value-for-money, even. My wife sold them in HS too, but having sold to her friends and family, she thankfully decided her time was better spent elsewhere. Cutco seems like a good middle ground between the grains of truth in MLMs - "it's good to have experience in selling something, to know what that's like to listen and convey a value prop, and to have the feeling of being able to make your own way in the world" - and the dystopian horrors they can become if allowed to metastasize.
Great article - both the back-story narrative, and the analysis. Though I don't know how you can talk about the respective music cultures and not at least take a potshot at *Mark Zuckerberg's sister* singing "We're all gonna make it" to the tune of "we're not gonna take it" (with over-the-top, jazz-hands-level energy).
There's some sort of bug in the human brain software that leads us to be so susceptible to these stories, these worldviews. It's not just get-rich-quick - most people have some immunity to that. It's not just the "insiders are In The Know and have a special secret, and outsiders will never get it and we're better than them!" kind of clubby thing, which you get at when mentioning cults (and which is most insidious as a means of controlling access to information). Jehovahs Witnesses having mock-burials for their apostates (allegedly), and so on. It's not just Fear Of Missing Out. Nor is it just the promise of being self-sufficient and the self-esteem that comes with that, twisted into a way of channelling money to the founders. The whole gestalt of the experience, the many angles you put together - up to and including the emotional pull of music and group celebration - is just so entrancing. I imagine many of us have avoided such temptations, but I also imagine most of us have at least felt that pull, given it serious consideration.
I found out about bitcoin in 2011, while I was at Big Financial Institution, learned it down to the algorithm level, and gave some thought into jumping in. Even though I was armed with a great education, few material wants and no social pressure, it's kinda nerd-sniping (XKCD reference), isn't it? Sweeps you off your feet a bit, if all you're doing is imagining the potential. At the time, I'd just gotten done narrowly avoiding the scams of penny-auction sites, and let that skepticism talk me out of it. Back when Dwolla was, sotto voce, 80% of BTC-to-USD by network volume, and you had to use that, or Mt Gox, or the various other sketchiness of early crypto to get into it.
But then over the subsequent decade, I would hear about Bitcoin basically every time it went up an order of magnitude in market cap, and think "man, I should've done that back then. Surely it's at the top now, though, or I wouldn't be hearing about it from randos, so definitely don't do it now" - and then it'd go up again. The fear of missing out, of having done something truly dumb by ignoring advice or opportunity, can kinda drag on you like the Ex Who Got Away. Even people who are emotionally and financially stable are not immune, is what I'm saying: if you're in the tech world, you can't have escaped the crypto ecosystem trend, or avoided absorbing some of its cultural memes.
I just think about the tragedy of it all, in terms an economist might like. Most MLMs have traditionally preyed on those with fewer resources and options in life, who latch on to Herbalife (allegedly!) or whatever, because they need hope and want to believe it's their lifeline. But here, you have all these brilliant software engineers and salespeople and marketers, who have all collectively convinced themselves and each other that The Emperor Has Clothes. And they've poured the collective gifts of their educations, their talents, their savings, their relationships and professional networks, all into the service of these great clothes the emperor is wearing. I can't help but think: What could have been built, had that same energy been directed elsewhere? What wonders would the world have been given, if we'd never heard of Bored Apes? Would we have jetpacks? The collective impact on the total assets of the world must, at this point, surely approach that of a major war.
That was a lot of words about Amway and a crazed libertarian. Those people aren't worth thinking about. Really. They're not. Scams and right wing sickos. You've got better things to do with your time.
FWIW, As someone who has followed you and Brad and PaulK for like forever, I'd like to point out that I haven't subscribed to any of you. There's too much content out there that's free, and despite being retired, there's no way I can make full use of what's available. For free. Yes, I know that I'm being a cheap chintz, but from my shoes, there's simply no point spending money. And I suspect that web3 will be more of that; I'm certainly not willing to give anyone the right to take even tiny amounts of money from my bank account whenever they want. I just don't think these things are going to fly in terms of being profit-making operations.
I don't know how to fix it. I do most of my shopping at Amazon. They've got what I need and are convenient. So they earn their cut. I could hop the train 3 stops up to Shinkuku to get my guitar strings, but why bother? The 320 yen train fare is about the same as the postage, and I could spend the time ranting at you. So it ain't just bookstores Amazon is killing. (The front page essay in this morning's Asahi was whining about the demize of bookstores.) So web3 or whatever has to figure out something else to kill (oops, I mean replace).
Has the bookstore not fought back. At least those left are surviving. I read that digital books sales are declining and hardcopy book sales recovering. Of course a lot of the latter will be on line but a certain percentage will be through stores and make them better able to survive.
My impression is that the big bookstores are surviving, but the smaller local ones are having a tough time. I haven't been to Kanda recently, but hear that it's changing*. Also, my impression is that things have stabilized somewhat in the publishing world; with 2015 to 2018 or so being the transition to digital publishing. Most of the best sellers my SO asks me to buy for her are available for kindle. Some periodicals have gone digital, some have not. The literary monthlies (gunzo, subaru, shinchou, bungakukai) are paper only, as is everything written by Mishima Yukio. Busgeishunjuu itself, Bessatsu Bungeishunjuu (a 6-times a year prose fiction mag for authors with Naoki Prize aspirations), and Shosetsu Gendai (now 11 times a year) (a lighter prose fiction magazine) are available digitally, both since 2015. Gunzo is over 600 pages of dead tree every month. The literary world here seems as hyper-active as it's always been.
I only take public transportation at off hours, and see some number of people reading paper (10%, maybe), but the majority with their noses in their cell phones. A bloke standing next to me the other day was reading a Japanese book titled "Groups and Representations" on paper (a graduate level math text book), but I usually can't figure out what the paper readers are reading.
*: This may be due to Amazon. Amazon provides amazing access to used and out of print books in Japanese. So that could be hurting the used bookstores, although I'd guess that the ones that figured out how to digitize their inventory and hook up with Amazon are the ones that are surviving.
> My impression is that the big bookstores are surviving, but the smaller local ones are having a tough time.
I thought it was the opposite. Borders went away a few years ago, and Barnes and Noble isn't doing so well either. But in my town there have been several new small used book stores in recent years.
Sorry about being unclear: I was talking about the big bookstores in Tokyo. Kinokuniya, Maruzen, and the like seem to be hanging in there. Japan runs on it's own logic...
This guy is not qualified to speak about Amway. Anybody who lost money was doing it wrong or just encountered an individual who was not honest. Anybody who actually looks at the business model as a business person can see the structure is sound and potential is vast.
Maybe on guest posts you should indicate the length of read in minutes.
😅😅😅
first time on Noah's blog, then? Welcome to the party, pal!
Just subscribed at half price.
Can't afford not to! Think of how many subscriptions you can sell to friends and family now!
Heh. That's how he got me, too! :)
I would like it if Noah edited guest posts more aggressively for length.
Bahahaha this was amazing. I felt like it was 1990 all over again reading this. I only tangentially knew people who did Amway (or Mary Kay, etc. etc.) so it is super interesting and hilarious to read all the insider stuff. I need a follow up post to learn more about what happened with Lars's parents. Did they go diamond?? Did they have day jobs? I need way more info. PS. For anyone else reading this who also loves trashy MLM content, if you haven't listened to The Dream Season 1 please do yourself a favor and go listen!
They did not go diamond. Direct distributors, I think we got to pearl or something. Diamond was such a hard milestone to get to.
Nice write-up. It's crazy how often we see the same aspects of cult-like behavior in the world today. Or, more likely, it was always there, waiting for someone to look at it in a different light. Either way, cults abound today IMO, I can only wonder if its a sign of the times, if they come in cycles, or if I was just too ignorant to pay attention in the first place.
Cheers Noah, keep it up.
Lars always teaches me something. Never skimps out on word count though.
Lord make me concise, but not yet.
As long as you're never concise enough to skip any lawsuit-discouraging '(allegedly)'s.
Reminds me of a comedy bit about how quitting has a bad rap. Quitters stop us from doing wrong things over and over.
Also, I'm not into book burning but any tome celebrating Prop 13 can get baked at 451 degrees Fahrenheit until crispy.
This is one of the greatest comments ever.
Excellent read, thanks!
Short version: Amway is Web3 with extra steps that involve shipping crap products.
Hearing about Amway always reminds me of their "Procter and Gamble are own by satanists!" era.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/procter-gamble-satan-conspiracy-theory
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/business/worldbusiness/20iht-satan.4966053.html
We’ve already had OneCoin, a straight-up pyramid scam with a Crypto veneer that recruited from other more legitimate MLMs, so I think you are on to something.
A similar trap happens to truckers--companies offer to lease trucks so drivers can “own their own business”, but that means the truckers are stuck with the risks and the fees and the lender still controls what loads they can and can’t take etc.
My rule of thumb is that anyone who promises to help you start your own business is lying and wants you to take on the risks while they get rewarded.
One of the things I remember distinctly as a kid what I was always told to "follow my dreams" and "own my own business," and what I wanted to do was make video games, but if I followed all the Amway advice the only future prepared for me was to recruit people to buy vitamins and laundry detergent from me, and I couldn't see how that would help me get closer to making video games.
> Anyone who promises to help you start your own business is lying and wants you to take on the risks while they get rewarded.
Screencapped with Thanks.
I couldn't keep Letterkenny and the ginger out of my mind while reading the start of this: https://youtu.be/sq1NgZf6YvE?t=182
I wondered who else was hearing Squirrely Dan.
Lars is welcome back anytime.
How can we NFT this article?
Better question, how can you turn it into a fractionalized NFT protocol and get your downline to share and monetize it for you.
Minor typo - it's Dave "Ramsey," not "Ramsay."
Excellent read. My personal exposure to MLM was Cutco knives as a teen - thankfully, I had a good support structure that brought me back to reality after a few weeks and a hundred bucks or so.
ah, the trouble there is that Cutco knives are actually quite good! Good value-for-money, even. My wife sold them in HS too, but having sold to her friends and family, she thankfully decided her time was better spent elsewhere. Cutco seems like a good middle ground between the grains of truth in MLMs - "it's good to have experience in selling something, to know what that's like to listen and convey a value prop, and to have the feeling of being able to make your own way in the world" - and the dystopian horrors they can become if allowed to metastasize.
Great article - both the back-story narrative, and the analysis. Though I don't know how you can talk about the respective music cultures and not at least take a potshot at *Mark Zuckerberg's sister* singing "We're all gonna make it" to the tune of "we're not gonna take it" (with over-the-top, jazz-hands-level energy).
There's some sort of bug in the human brain software that leads us to be so susceptible to these stories, these worldviews. It's not just get-rich-quick - most people have some immunity to that. It's not just the "insiders are In The Know and have a special secret, and outsiders will never get it and we're better than them!" kind of clubby thing, which you get at when mentioning cults (and which is most insidious as a means of controlling access to information). Jehovahs Witnesses having mock-burials for their apostates (allegedly), and so on. It's not just Fear Of Missing Out. Nor is it just the promise of being self-sufficient and the self-esteem that comes with that, twisted into a way of channelling money to the founders. The whole gestalt of the experience, the many angles you put together - up to and including the emotional pull of music and group celebration - is just so entrancing. I imagine many of us have avoided such temptations, but I also imagine most of us have at least felt that pull, given it serious consideration.
I found out about bitcoin in 2011, while I was at Big Financial Institution, learned it down to the algorithm level, and gave some thought into jumping in. Even though I was armed with a great education, few material wants and no social pressure, it's kinda nerd-sniping (XKCD reference), isn't it? Sweeps you off your feet a bit, if all you're doing is imagining the potential. At the time, I'd just gotten done narrowly avoiding the scams of penny-auction sites, and let that skepticism talk me out of it. Back when Dwolla was, sotto voce, 80% of BTC-to-USD by network volume, and you had to use that, or Mt Gox, or the various other sketchiness of early crypto to get into it.
But then over the subsequent decade, I would hear about Bitcoin basically every time it went up an order of magnitude in market cap, and think "man, I should've done that back then. Surely it's at the top now, though, or I wouldn't be hearing about it from randos, so definitely don't do it now" - and then it'd go up again. The fear of missing out, of having done something truly dumb by ignoring advice or opportunity, can kinda drag on you like the Ex Who Got Away. Even people who are emotionally and financially stable are not immune, is what I'm saying: if you're in the tech world, you can't have escaped the crypto ecosystem trend, or avoided absorbing some of its cultural memes.
I just think about the tragedy of it all, in terms an economist might like. Most MLMs have traditionally preyed on those with fewer resources and options in life, who latch on to Herbalife (allegedly!) or whatever, because they need hope and want to believe it's their lifeline. But here, you have all these brilliant software engineers and salespeople and marketers, who have all collectively convinced themselves and each other that The Emperor Has Clothes. And they've poured the collective gifts of their educations, their talents, their savings, their relationships and professional networks, all into the service of these great clothes the emperor is wearing. I can't help but think: What could have been built, had that same energy been directed elsewhere? What wonders would the world have been given, if we'd never heard of Bored Apes? Would we have jetpacks? The collective impact on the total assets of the world must, at this point, surely approach that of a major war.
> *Mark Zuckerberg's sister* singing "We're all gonna make it" to the tune of "we're not gonna take it" (with over-the-top, jazz-hands-level energy).
What.
Here was her explanation: https://twitter.com/randizuckerberg/status/1498425277734690816?lang=en
Glorious. I've sent Noah a edit request to include this in the article.
That was a lot of words about Amway and a crazed libertarian. Those people aren't worth thinking about. Really. They're not. Scams and right wing sickos. You've got better things to do with your time.
FWIW, As someone who has followed you and Brad and PaulK for like forever, I'd like to point out that I haven't subscribed to any of you. There's too much content out there that's free, and despite being retired, there's no way I can make full use of what's available. For free. Yes, I know that I'm being a cheap chintz, but from my shoes, there's simply no point spending money. And I suspect that web3 will be more of that; I'm certainly not willing to give anyone the right to take even tiny amounts of money from my bank account whenever they want. I just don't think these things are going to fly in terms of being profit-making operations.
I don't know how to fix it. I do most of my shopping at Amazon. They've got what I need and are convenient. So they earn their cut. I could hop the train 3 stops up to Shinkuku to get my guitar strings, but why bother? The 320 yen train fare is about the same as the postage, and I could spend the time ranting at you. So it ain't just bookstores Amazon is killing. (The front page essay in this morning's Asahi was whining about the demize of bookstores.) So web3 or whatever has to figure out something else to kill (oops, I mean replace).
Has the bookstore not fought back. At least those left are surviving. I read that digital books sales are declining and hardcopy book sales recovering. Of course a lot of the latter will be on line but a certain percentage will be through stores and make them better able to survive.
My impression is that the big bookstores are surviving, but the smaller local ones are having a tough time. I haven't been to Kanda recently, but hear that it's changing*. Also, my impression is that things have stabilized somewhat in the publishing world; with 2015 to 2018 or so being the transition to digital publishing. Most of the best sellers my SO asks me to buy for her are available for kindle. Some periodicals have gone digital, some have not. The literary monthlies (gunzo, subaru, shinchou, bungakukai) are paper only, as is everything written by Mishima Yukio. Busgeishunjuu itself, Bessatsu Bungeishunjuu (a 6-times a year prose fiction mag for authors with Naoki Prize aspirations), and Shosetsu Gendai (now 11 times a year) (a lighter prose fiction magazine) are available digitally, both since 2015. Gunzo is over 600 pages of dead tree every month. The literary world here seems as hyper-active as it's always been.
I only take public transportation at off hours, and see some number of people reading paper (10%, maybe), but the majority with their noses in their cell phones. A bloke standing next to me the other day was reading a Japanese book titled "Groups and Representations" on paper (a graduate level math text book), but I usually can't figure out what the paper readers are reading.
*: This may be due to Amazon. Amazon provides amazing access to used and out of print books in Japanese. So that could be hurting the used bookstores, although I'd guess that the ones that figured out how to digitize their inventory and hook up with Amazon are the ones that are surviving.
> My impression is that the big bookstores are surviving, but the smaller local ones are having a tough time.
I thought it was the opposite. Borders went away a few years ago, and Barnes and Noble isn't doing so well either. But in my town there have been several new small used book stores in recent years.
Sorry about being unclear: I was talking about the big bookstores in Tokyo. Kinokuniya, Maruzen, and the like seem to be hanging in there. Japan runs on it's own logic...
This guy is not qualified to speak about Amway. Anybody who lost money was doing it wrong or just encountered an individual who was not honest. Anybody who actually looks at the business model as a business person can see the structure is sound and potential is vast.