Hey, Hun: Emily Lynn Paulson on MLMs and Other Lies
A Little Bit Culty
Sarah Edmondson & Anthony “Nippy” Ames
4.6 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2023
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode is sponsored by Better Help. Imagine this: an invitation comes your way to join a group of friends, mostly moms (and let’s assume you are one). Primary activities involve drinking lots of wine, relishing in sisterhood and female empowerment, and best of all, making loads of money. It’s enticing as hell, which explains why Multi Level Marketing groups (MLMs) remain ubiquitous today.
What could go wrong? A shit ton! Hence why our guest today, author and mother Emily Lynn Paulson, believes that all MLMs—which form a $180 billion industry—are cults. Oh, but they’re not just your average cults, because lobbyists and politicians are fighting hard to keep the legal pyramid schemes not only intact, but growing throughout American suburbia (and beyond) like wildfire.
In this episode, we discuss how to not get caught up in the flames.
Paulson is also the author of Highlight Real: Finding Honesty and Recovery Beyond the Filtered Life as well as the forthcoming Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing (May 2023).
Emily Lynn Paulson’s website
Sober Mom Squad website
Please note, this series includes details of sexual abuse. Listener discretion is strongly advised. If you, or someone who know, is a survivor of sexual assault, abuse, grooming, child abuse, or human trafficking, RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline offers support at 800.656.HOPE (4673).
Also…
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The views and opinions expressed on A Little Bit Culty do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast. Any content provided by our guests, bloggers, sponsors or authors are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything. Nobody’s mad at you, just don’t be a culty fuckwad.
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CREDITS:
Executive Producers: Sarah Edmondson & Anthony Ames
Production Partner: Citizens of Sound
Producer: Will Retherford
Senior Producer: Jess Tardy
Writer: Mathias Rosenzweig
Theme Song: “Cultivated” by Jon Bryant co-written with Nygel Asselin
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The views and opinions expressed by a little bit cultier, those are the hosts, |
| 0:03.6 | and don't reflect the official policy or position of the podcast, right, sir? |
| 0:07.6 | Correct. |
| 0:08.3 | Any of the, quote, fire content, I prefer lava content provided by our guests, blog |
| 0:13.2 | responses, or authors of the opinion, and are not intended to malign a religion, |
| 0:18.3 | a group, a club, an organization, business individual, anyone or anything, unless, sir? |
| 0:23.8 | You're a douchebag. |
| 0:24.6 | Yeah, I mean, pretty much. |
| 0:26.8 | Also, we're not doctors, psychologists or wizards. |
| 0:29.5 | We're just two non-experts trying to make you a friendly and formative podcast |
| 0:33.5 | based on our experience that we've turned into wisdom. |
| 0:35.7 | Okay. |
| 0:36.3 | Good talk. |
| 0:46.9 | Hey everybody, Sarah Edmonds in here. |
| 0:49.3 | And I'm Anthony Ames, aka Nippie, Sarah's husband, and you're listening to |
| 0:53.6 | a little bit cultier, aka a LBC. |
| 0:57.3 | A podcast about what happens when devotion goes to the dark side. |
| 1:00.7 | We've been there, and back again, a little about us. |
| 1:03.4 | True Story, we met and fell in love in a cult, and then we woke up and got the hell out of |
| 1:08.7 | dodge. |
| 1:09.2 | And the whole thing was captured in HBO, the documentary series The Vow, now in its second season. |
| 1:14.5 | I also wrote about our experience in my memoir, SCART, the true story of how I escaped |
... |
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