Money Talks: Selling The American Dream

Slate Money

Slate Podcasts

Investing, Business

4.3 • 988 Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this Money Talks: Jane Marie has spent years reporting on the tangled web of multi-level marketing companies, or MLMs, with her podcast The Dream and dives even deeper in her new book, Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans. In this episode, she sits down with Emily Peck to discuss their origins, their appeal to American women, and their extremely questionable business practices. Want to hear that discussion and hear more Slate Money? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Slate Money show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/moneyplus to get access wherever you listen. Podcast production by Jessamine Molli and Cheyna Roth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Money Talks, a special extra podcast from Slate Money, where we chat with
0:15.0	brilliant and interesting people. I'm Emily Peck. I'm a correspondent at Axios and
0:19.7	co-host of Slate Money. And I'm here today with
0:22.2	Jane Marie. She is a Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist whose amazing podcast, The Dream,
0:29.0	went really deep on maybe the most American of businesses of all time, which is the multi-level
0:36.6	marketing industry. Some people might call it
0:39.7	pyramid schemes or direct marketing, companies like Avon, Mary Kay, Lula Roe, Amway, companies that sell
0:48.5	the American Dream, but typically turn quickly into a nightmare. Jane's book is called Selling the Dream, the
0:55.6	billion dollar industry bankrupting Americans, and in it she goes even deeper on MLMs. Jane, welcome
1:01.2	to Money Talks. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm so excited you're here. After the
1:07.0	break, I want to talk about everything. What MLMs actually are, how they came to be.
1:12.3	Why aren't they legal? Are you legally required to be interested in MLMs? If you come from Michigan,
1:18.7	Shana Roth, our producer, is from Michigan and was, I think, unusually interested in this topic.
1:25.4	Fantastic.
1:25.7	That's why I bring it up.
1:30.9	And I want to talk a little bit about even maybe Donald Trump.
1:34.5	That's all coming up on Slate Money Talks.
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	...

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