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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your quote. What? Court? Cult? Cult? Leader? Spencer Henry? And you're listening to a little leader in little leaders are where I read the stories that you send to me. Hey, if you have a story you would like to send in for a little leader, go ahead and send that maybe on over to Spencer at Cult Leader.com. And you can see it's a link in the description. And I'm going to send a link to you. And we will get to your list. And we'll see you in the next video.

And make sure you put little leaders somewhere in the subject or the title. Is this an inclination of what's happening right now because I can't talk. Can't talk today. Part of it is, well, I'm joined by my co-host co-star hot dog.

There she is. There's that Hollywood smile. If you don't know about how to, you need to look hot dog up. She is one cute, hot, hot dog. Confident. I love it. We are suffering together in silence in this room right now. And that is because when I'm recording for some reason I have to turn off the air conditioning. Otherwise it makes this insane noise that the microphone picks up. So I mean, don't say I never did anything for you because boy is it a hot one today.

This week on Cult Leader we talked about Clark Rockefeller, which is one of my favorite cases today. And I know it's not the most like, oh, that's so crazy. Oh my god. But it's a good story. And I feel like if you haven't already, you should watch the lifetime movie that I mentioned in the episode.

Other things you should be checking out is obituary. There's that plug. We were all waiting for it with BatedRath. No, but obituary is so much fun. We put out a new episode this week. Basically if you're not familiar yet obituary, we read absurd obituary. We talk about dumb criminals. And we talk about like a different topic each week.

We each come to the table with the topic. It's a lot of fun. This week Madison talked to us about body farms. And I talked about moirologist, which are professional mourners. And it's also insane. But it's a good one. So go check that out if you haven't listened yet. I think that's it. I think that's all I wanted to tell you.

I have a few stories today. First up, we have an email about an MLM. Listen, you guys multi-level marketing pyramid schemes. If you got a story, I want to hear it. Hey, Spencer, I love cult leader. It keeps me entertained while working from home. Please keep me anonymous since I still have friends in this MLM. Hey, thanks. I don't know if you've heard of this company called Cut Co. But basically it's an MLM that sells knives. I do have definitely heard of Cut Co.

I feel like one of the stories that we covered. I want to say maybe John List. I don't know. Someone someone worked for Cut Co at some point. I started Cut Co as a summer job before college to help pay for tuition cost.

We were put into a group interview and pretty much all of us got the job, but only a few stayed. At first, it seemed like a normal sales position. But then we were told to cold call our friends and family to make appointments to sell knives through Skype or in house demos.

Which you gotta admit, a little odd, hey, jump on Skype or let me come over and let me show you my knives. Look how sharp they are. These suckers can cut through anything.

By doing this, many of my friends and family actually stopped talking to me. They were not interested. The money was okay, but being an independent contractor meant taxes were insane and you didn't keep a whole lot. Sure.

We were expected to set some insane goals for ourselves about how much money we could make for the company by a certain time and we would have cold call parties in the office in our PJs and eat pizza, which was fun but a little weird. I'm into it. I'm into any sort of pizza party in an office culture. I want to have a pizza party tonight. What do you say?

I notice some red flags when like when my manager asked me to get my parents workplace directories to cold call all their co-workers.

That is one way to do you think imagine though. Imagine getting that call from your parents. They're like, listen Janet, stop calling our goddamn secretary. She doesn't want to buy your fucking knives.

And then when I drove to New York for a conference, I was told I would be compensated for tolls and gasp by my manager, but then he told me, nope, get the money from your colleagues that rode with you. So weird.

The last red flag that made me leave was when my manager told me to give a hiring manager $100 to put into cut co stocks to get a position as a branch manager. Essentially my boss told me to bribe my way into the position. I did it because I was 18 and gullible after that interview I quit so I could focus on my college career. I did not receive the money back until five years later. That's crazy. Yeah, don't mess with cut co they'll stab you in the back.

The company likes to change offices frequently and make itself appear like a fun place to work. The goals they make you set for yourself however are impossible to achieve.

There were times where I would skip meals just to sell knives. What? One woman that still works for them was in a back brace in in and out of the hospital and still selling knives to make ends meet since they had no healthcare benefits.

That is very depressing. After college, my old boss called me and told me I could come back as a secretary, but I declined. I learned if work seems like it's too good to be true, it probably is. Sorry this was so long. I hope this will keep people away from this MLM since not many people talk about cut co.

Oh man, I'm not a lot of people do. I truly aside from your email. I don't, I can't think of any emails that I've gotten related to cut co.

Now I'm gonna have to go search my inbox. I wanted to learn a little more. So I actually found an article. It's from the Daily Beast. It's in, it was in 2017. I read a few different articles, but this one had the best summary.

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