Hey, I'm Roberta Blovins, and this is Life after M. L.M.

A podcast where we work to end the stigma of failure in an industry designed for you to fail.

Welcome to another episode of Life After MLM. Today, as always, we have a super special guest. We're talking to John Turbizan, who wasn't actually in an MLM himself, but grew up around MLMs consistently.

So I'm going to hand it over to you.

Please introduce yourself and let's start by talking about what it was like growing up with parents who were hunbots.

Hi, my name's John. I'm not really all that interesting. I go to work. I do my job. I come home and then I try to do as little impact on society in a negative way as I can.

Both of my parents either are or were in MLMs.

My mother by far was much less bad in them. She was you know she was the Avon lady, pampered chef, uh, tastefully simple all the all of those ones but my dad got very badly drug into the whole herbal life thing and the you're going to make millions of dollars and you know if you lose your job over this whatever and all of that craziness that comes with the that the training in air quotes that they give you about oh do this do that this is what you need to do if people tell you you're wrong you know tell them they're wrong kind of a thing. Wow okay so from how far back can you remember like what age were you like looking around and seeing them in your life and being like what the heck is this? So the first time I remember seeing an Avon box was like five or six but the way it was always presented is it never especially when I was that little it never seemed like it was anything inherently malicious. It was just like, oh my mom sells this stuff and her friends buy it and she makes a little extra money for it and I get a thing to play with the cats with because the cats love the the box bands that was like their favorite thing in the world or you know oh you get to stay with the grandparents tonight because mom's having a party for and it would be pampered chef ar arbonne, party light, avon, all of them.

And then she would have some that she wouldn't talk about,

which I assume were the more adult themed ones,

which I have no idea because I've never asked her about it because the less I have to hear about them the happier I am personally.

So from my mother's side, things were never really that bad. I mean I used the Avon products. They're not bad. They were never anything that was like, oh my hair is falling out or anything like you know if it was Monet or something like that's

shampoo oh it's deodorant okay so I still have a pampered chef knife in my drawer that I use I have

tastefully simple spices that I still use because I'm not going to throw it out because they

taste good. Just because they're from an MOM doesn't mean I'm not going to use them.

Yeah, and that's actually something that I like to tell people, you know, you spent good money on these products. It seems very silly to throw away perfectly fine items and then spend more money to replace them. So for those of you listening who feel guilty,

looking at that cut-co knife that you spent money on

or that Tupperware water pitcher or whatever it is,

don't feel guilty. It's okay, don't support them further, but also don't throw away things that you spent good money on.

It's really okay.

Yeah, and that's the other one. I never, I would have never in a hundred years thought that Tupperware was an MLM because you see it in stores. It's like, oh, well, if this is sold in a store, then why is this, how can this be an M.

And then you find out no, no, it's definitely not just in stores,

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