Hello, I'm Adrienne Dob.

And I'm Weirond again.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, today we are lucky enough to be joined by the esteemed writer for New York

magazine, Bridget Reed, who is the author of this really

cool new book called Little Bosses Everywhere, How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, which is a history

of the MLM in the U.S. And it became, for me, like this kind of crazy rosetta stone that unlocked so much about

ambition and gender and money and how we think about the future and the good life in ways that

can of course bring us further from the object of our desires.

And I thought it was just such a fun ride for being such a densely informative book.

So, Bridget, I really want to thank you for being here because I'm so excited to talk about MLMs with you.

Thank you for having me.

And what a lovely intro.

I'm so glad that it was fun and dense. Those are, you know,

the two things we want to hear, right? Well, it's a book that, like, you move through so many of

these scams and you show how this idea of the pyramid scheme sort of had this germ in American

culture and then mutated as more and more people

copied the same scam and brought it in different forms to different parts of the country

and different demographics. My favorite part was a chapter on Mary Kay, and the analysis you bring

to how MLMs offered a kind of work that managed to merge second-way feminist ideas about

ambition and paid work as a mode of self-fulfillment with really that simultaneous backlash

about attempts to preserve women's role in the home. But this is a book that does so much more

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