Slate Money - Money Talks: Selling The American Dream
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ 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.
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli and Cheyna Roth.
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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. |
| 1:42.4 | Ready to launch your business? |
| 2:02.7 | Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scaleups, online, in person, and on the go. |
| 2:08.9 | Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Okay, so I feel like I always knew what multi-level marketing was, but not until I really listened to the dream and read your book. |
| 2:20.5 | Did I really kind of think about how mathematically impossible MLMs are? |
| 2:26.9 | Before we get into the math, can you maybe just explain what exactly makes a business a multi-level marketing company? |
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