Gurkha Beast

Welcome to Nice Ashes, I'm Nate. And I'm Mike. What are we smoking tonight Mike? Well to go with our theme, we are going to smoke the Gurkha Beast. So this looks like a Maduro, pretty similar stick to the beauty. Hopefully it will please Nate more. You know I'm all about the beast. Exactly. You know, I was messing around with my lighter before we started recording. As one does. And of course they go to light it and it's dead.

So glory, glory, I'm going to have to light it with a match, which is you know, whatever. That's so old school bro. Is Mike still around? He's going to get his match I think. I'm here and I'm lit. I just didn't want to break anybody's ears. Oh yeah. So we're going to do an episode now of kind of Nate knows and Mike doesn't know, but Nate also might not know, but he might also still know, but we don't know who knows what. We good? Yes. We good on that? Okay. Oh yes.

Okay. And so this is something that Mike and I have never actually talked about ever. As far as I know, I guess there might have been a couple of drunken nights where we maybe touched on it, but I don't think so. I don't think so. Okay. The topic for this episode is going to be MLMs. MLMs. Define. Multi-level marketing, AKA pyramid schemes. So are you excited or are you unexcited? I am excited. I don't know a whole lot about these.

I know I've heard a few, heard of a few of my time, but not that many. I mean, I know of a few. Yeah. Tupperware, right? Isn't Tupperware supposed to be, used to be at one time? Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of them and we'll get into it. I've got a whole list here. I've found the report I was looking for. I was looking for the FTC report on MLMs and it's nice. It compiles all the stuff by company name and it gives you all of these stats that you need to know.

So the other thing, and Mike, you tell them what you know about me and my Sarah. What do I know about you and your Sarah? That we used to be in one. Oh, I didn't know that for sure. I guess I didn't know that you guys were. Yeah. I mentioned it at one time and we didn't really talk a whole lot about it. At least maybe it was too intoxicated to remember potentially. Well, or maybe you just had the good sense right off the bat. Maybe, yeah.

Not to color the outcome of ultimately what we decided about MLMs and things. So a lot of the MLMs like to, oh, let me pull this up too. They like to go, there was, I think it was like a 1975 to 74, it was an FTC versus Amway big legal battle. And they kind of ultimately said that it wasn't a pyramid scheme. And so a lot of the multi-level marketing companies like to use that as kind of trying to legitimize their business models.

Okay. But for those of you who don't know, an MLM is pretty much anything that has like, you've got a group of people and they bring you in and you go to these meetings and they've got their own products usually. And you switch your products to these products and then you have to go and like try and sell or recruit other people.

And they want you to kind of burn through your contact list on your phone, your friends and family and get them to buy from you or join you in what they would call, like air quotes business. And they usually try and promise you like, well, if you do like X amount of work, you can make X amount of money, then you wouldn't have to work at your job and you could just do this full time. And it's a lot of different things. There's a lot of different companies. Tupperware for sure.

The Tupperware parties of the 80s and 90s. You've got Amway, you've got Herbalife. What is Amway? What is one? Amway is, they do a lot of home products. And so the older generation, and this is the one that we were a part of, but they do, a lot of people think of them as like a soap company because they came out with like a laundry detergent and that was kind of their big like seller for a long time. And they do all sorts of products nowadays.

And we'll get into that, but they do a lot of like home cleaning and their whole thing was you already use these products. So just buy from yourself and go get some other people to buy from themselves and boom, you're a millionaire. But Herbalife is one and that's a big one because they have kind of like the shake bars or whatever, like every town's got one. And they're a little different because you need to have a storefront to do it.

You have to have a storefront, you get your Herbalife and you sell your shakes and things. Melaleuca is one. There's a lot on here. I'm just going to kind of read off the ones that I've heard of. Yeah, Tupperware is on here.

Melaleuca, Shackly, I don't know, they got AirBond International, Cyberwise, EcoQuest, FHTM, FreeLife, Ignite, ImmunoTech, Inet Global, Isagenix, Isagenix I think is a big one now with Younger Generation, Manatech, Melaleuca, MonoV, MXI, Nikken, New Skin, Relive, SendOut, SendOut Cards, Sunrider, Symmetry, Tahishin Nani, sounds super legit, and USANA. I'm sure there's more, WorldVentures, Zango, Your Health, Your Travel, and that's kind of it.

I mean, I'm sure there's, I mean, they're kind of like a dime a dozen, right? Sure. So like is a Sensei or a Norwex or one of those. Those are basically. Yes. Yep. Those are those. And they also have, and this would be something that you or your sir might know, is they have MLMs for even like press on nails. Okay. So basically anything you could think of that you could sell, there's probably an MLM that sells that. Sure. She used to do candle light or something like that.

Okay. And I bet you that's one of them. And I guess Mary Kay and Avon maybe? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I don't know why Mary Kay and Avon aren't on here, but those are totally MLMs. Sure. Pampered Chef. Pampered Chef. Yep. For sure. Weird. And I don't know why this is another one. Okay. So they're not necessarily not selling good stuff. It's a different sort of business model. So the business model for multi-level marketing, and it means marketing, right?

So you're selling something and it's basically that there are different tiers that you can get to different levels of performance. And at the different levels of performance, you get different compensation based on the people below you and what they've sold. Yes. So in the sense of all in all business and how this stuff kind of works, is it pretty much works like your nine to five job, right?

You support the salespeople or you support the customers and the salespeople make all the money because they're out doing it, but they really don't make all the money and the CEOs make all the money and you don't. So like C-suite and above makes it, but they try and build these as more approachable to like anyone can do this. The whole point though is you have to have, and I can only speak for Amway because that's what we were involved in.

And they had, and a lot of these MLMs, especially if they're bigger and have been around for a long time, they have kind of these training groups or subgroups that operate within these MLMs and they're sanctioned by the MLM governance board or whatever. And they are just kind of like methods of training. And so all of your training support comes from this, I can't remember what they're called, but it's like a sub, like it's its own kind of like organization within the MLM.

And there were two big ones within Amway and they had similar but different training modules and they kind of do their own functions and events as separate groups within the company. Right? So it kind of depends, like you, I mean, you could just straight up go to Amway and be like, Hey man, I want in and I want to be a thing. And they just assign you to some random, what they would call an upline, right? Like someone who sponsors you in business. So all of your work would go under that person.

And then if you got somebody in all of their work would count for your stuff. And there's different ways that they tabulate these numbers. So and they'll all tell you something different, right? They'll tell you, Hey, you get in, you get your family to buy and you get like 10 of your 20 friends or whatever to sell some stuff on their own or buy from themselves.

And then you've got the right parameters and you can make a couple grand a month and then we'll get you up to make in, you know, significantly more than that. I mean, that's kind of always the promise, right? Right. That's the, that's the walk in the door type of deal. Yeah. Yeah. And like, what is it? It's like Cutco, right?

Like they're an MLM, the knives, the kitchen knives, because you go in and you can buy knives and then they're like, Hey, did you know you could actually like pay less for the set of knives if you sold a set of knives as well? So I mean, there's a lot of them out there and a lot of them seem like they're a legit storefront and like they're a legit store, like Target or Walmart that you'd go into and buy goods and then just leave. But they're an MLM.

So they also try to get you to sell extra stuff for them when you make a purchase. Sure. I've never had that experience with buying from the Mary Kay lady or whatever. Not that I've ever, I don't think I've ever purchased Mary Kay literally, but I bought Pampered Chef stuff, you know? Oh, and I bought Pampered Chef stuff too. And you know, some of them are a little more subtle about it. Like the Pampered Chef is like, usually it's like, Hey, we're hosting a party for so and so, right?

And that so and so is your friend. And you go there and they're like, Oh yeah, here's my Mary Kay lady. Well, the Mary Kay lady is giving a discount based on how many people buy stuff to the person that's hosting the Mary Kay party or the Pampered Chef party. Right? So they get a, they get a cut. So like if, if their party performs at this level, they get a 10% discount. If it performs at that level, they get a 20% discount and so on and so forth.

Even though the host of the party isn't necessarily selling Pampered Chef, but they're incentivized to have people come that would buy Pampered Chef stuff so that they can get the same Pampered Chef stuff for cheaper. And if you notice, like I still get emails from the one Pampered Chef party I went to and she's like, I'm doing a big Pampered Chef sale right now.

So you can like direct buy or you can do a party or even at the bottom of the email, it's like, if you want to learn how to make money selling Pampered Chef, let me know. Like I'm happy to help you. So some are a little more aggressive on recruiting than others. Right? So I mean, it's a, it's a wide swath.

And even within some of these organizations, it's a wide swath of whether they focus primarily on training and maximizing the, what you would call like the profit schedule or something or the profit charts, or if they just go heavy on recruiting or whatever they do. Like, you know, all of these training organizations within these companies have different, different MOs. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

I met quite a few of these people that sell, let's say Norwexer, Pampered Chef and all this stuff. Like most of them are just in it so they can get a quick discount on buying Norwex towels. And once my sister-in-law did that, when she got her damn discount to buy towel, she bought a whole set of them for the house and then she stopped doing it immediately. That's all she wanted. And you know, and there's people that do it that way too.

And you know, it's kind of like, it depends on who you're kind of connected with. And you know, I mean, we sat down and I was super skeptical at the time. This is around the time that Mike and I butted heads, but they just started talking about like, you know, having your own thing and being able to kind of set your own stuff and you know, like however hard you work, you get paid for and you know, all that stuff kind of sounded good. Like it didn't sound bad.

And we went to some of the meetings and they're kind of like, you know, you should give every kind of business venture kind of like five years. And you know, because you're not going to see profits in the first year, even if you start like a traditional business, right? Like it's going to take a bit of time to generate income. And so, and then it seemed like everybody was surprised when after five years, we're like, now we're out, we're done. Like we're not making anything off of it.

And we can go into more, we'll go into more of that stuff in a little bit. But I mean, that's just, there's so many of these companies out there and I'm not trying to say that they're not like legit, but the kind of the thing that got us in was anybody can do this and it's super easy.

You just switch your products from the, you know, like, and a lot of people buy the Target brand or the seventh generation or they buy the Walmart brand or they buy the generic brand of whatever, the store brand of these things, right? Because it's a little bit cheaper and they're like, we'll just buy your brand. You know, we set you up with the Amway shop and you got your Amway products and you just buy those instead of the ones there.

And then you get like 15 other people to do that over the course of, you know, three years, two years, whatever it is. And then you're making, you know, 75K a year from this. And you know, and just to be clear, because I don't want to get like prosecuted or anything, nobody ever really like promised or guaranteed income. You know what I mean? Like it was more of a, if you can hit these performance parameters, you can make this amount of money, blah, blah, blah. Right?

So there's extra stuff there. It wasn't just, if you can get 15 people in, you're making 75K. There's other, there's like parameters. So I felt they were like the group that we were with was fairly transparent with what that stuff would entail or what you would need to do to do it. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been interested at all because I don't like, I'm not about that. And I guess what we kind of found out was their whole thing was like, anybody could do this. But it makes sense, right?

Like if everybody could just do it, you just, you just change your point of purchase and you're good. And you get a couple other people to do that and you're good. Well, that's not how it goes. As you're dealing with people and you know, and a lot of the stuff they kind of taught was like super would, would if we would have gone full out with it, could have driven huge wedges between a lot of our friendships. You know what I mean?

Like it was kind of like a, you're either with us or it was, it was almost very cultish. Interesting. Which wasn't, it wasn't a huge, huge deal because you know, they would say, well, you're a business owner. If you don't want to do that, you don't do that. So they weren't really like pushing anything, but it got really, really weird. In the first, I can't remember which election, what the 2016 probably was that the Trump when Trump won? Yeah, that was 16. Yep. Yeah.

Because they always said that they had a policy at this subgroup that they wouldn't preach politics or religion from stage and yet they had a, an organizational sanctioned pastor on staff that they paid. And they had one of the, one of the multimillionaires allegedly on stage saying, I can't tell you who to vote for, but I know we can all make America great again. And they had, and I can talk about this guy.

They had this Rick Green twat come and talk to us and say that all the founding fathers were Christian. And he prefaced it by saying, he prefaced it by saying, the atheist will tell you that the founding fathers weren't Christian, but I'm here to assure you that they are. And of course, being an atheist, I was like, okay. And he runs like a freedom ranch or something and he has all these kids get sent to him and he teaches them the constitution.

And if you can't hear my air quotes, I'm mentioning them now because, you know, and it's like, but what, what does this have to do with me getting, you know, out of my job and not having to work? And it was that kind of stuff that really kind of like finished it for me because I'm like, cause you're supposed to recruit people and you know what? I mean, part of life is if you're passionate about something, you're going to recruit people.

If you want to start your own business, whether it's an MLM or a bookstore or a whatever it is, right? You're going to have to recruit people or like sell people on it. But it got to the point where I was like, these people are so fucking religious and conservative about their opinions and all of this stuff that I honestly could not in good conscious or conscience introduce them to anybody.

Even some random person I fucking met because it was like, it was getting to the point where like you're supposed to do these kind of meet and greets and you bring your sponsor, your sponsor, sponsor or somebody, right? Somebody upline from you. And they would like, they would start like quoting the fucking Bible. And it's like, we're just trying to qualify these people. We're not even trying to like, like why would anybody want to go into business? Somebody who's quoting the fucking Bible.

Like I understand you think it's a great like freedom of speech thing, but like my God, this amway sell fucking soap then. Well, yeah. It was. So what the, what does Jesus and conservative politics have to do with soap soap? Shouldn't they be selling the soap? Isn't that like the goal here? Yeah, but what I'm saying is these, these training, these training groups that are sanctioned by Amway, right?

So it depends on which training group you get kind of like associated or roped into why aren't they training you on the benefits of the soap? You know what I mean?

Or like they're, but they're trying to, but so like, so the one that we were part of, I'm not going to mention it because I don't even know what, like I know they have lawyers and I know they've told us that they've gone after other people that have tried to disclose their proprietary information, but they focus more on the training and less on the products. They're like, you know, you guys know what soap is. Soap is fucking soap.

You buy the soap from fucking Amway and you make money if you can get other people to buy the soap from fucking Amway. Like I don't need to tell you the soap is great. It's as good as the other soap out there, you know, like, so they wouldn't really do a whole lot of the product demos, right?

Which I liked like honestly, but then they started getting like really religious and conservative and I was kind of like, I don't really want anybody to come here and talk to you because even in your functions, when you're supposed to be talking about, you know, living the dream and how to talk to people about this thing, you're still bringing up God and conservative America and it's not relevant to what's going on.

And it's kind of what we talked about in some of our other episodes, like whatever you want to do in your bedroom, it's fine. I don't need to hear about it at work. Like I don't, I'm not interested in it. I don't care. I am an introvert. I don't need to know. I don't need to know how you vote. I don't need to know what you eat for dinner. Doesn't matter to me.

You know, like all of that stuff and they just kind of like ended up taking it too far and the Trump stuff only made it worse, you know, so. That's crazy. Well, in their defense, the Trumpers and the Christians don't really have the wherewithal to understand that there are people who are different than them because they really do live in a bubble. Oh, I understand that. People that think like them. And that's a lot of it too.

You know, the purple haired people, they also live in that bubble and everybody is just like them, you know. Yeah. They can't understand how somebody could be radically different, you know. Yeah. And to be fair, I mean, they had some homosexuals that had advanced through the ranks, I guess. And they would put them on stage, but they were also very Christian. So it was kind of one of those things where it's like, as long as you love Christ, do whatever you want to do. But we want you up on stage.

Were they openly homosexuals or were they classed homosexuals? No, they were open. It was two women. OK. OK. You know, so I'm just saying like in their defense, right, like there was two women up there. There were a couple and they were like, yep, we did all the work and we did all this and Jesus and we thank Jesus for helping us with all the work. And so, you know, it's kind of like one of those double standards where it's like, are you really?

And so they were they were purposefully trying to be more diverse. Right. But it was a little too too late, a little too little too late or whatever it is. Right. You know, and so it just was kind of a thing. And like we gave it a really good shot and it just didn't pan out. And right after we we kind of like we didn't renew, like it wasn't like we quit. But most of the people that we associated with during that time haven't really reached out or talked to us.

So and they were all like, hey, we're building this great friendship and whatever. And then it's like, yeah, but the organization kind of sucks and it's kind of like super not inclusive, which is weird for, you know, like a white male to say. But you know, like if you're not a white conservative male who loves Jesus, then it's not inclusive. Sounds a lot like a cult. I know you said that before. No, I know. I know. This seems why is it so cult like it's just they're selling.

It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be. Right. It wouldn't have to be. And so that's that was kind of our biggest disconnect was they were kind of their whole this training organizations whole like motto was you're in business for yourself and we're going to teach you the business skills. And they had, you know, business book reading lists and a lot of them were religious for whatever reason. And so I didn't like a lot of those and they kept bringing in all this weird personal stuff.

And I'm like, business should be business. Like why should I care if somebody that I'm in business with is a homosexual or an atheist or a Christian or Catholic or a Jew? Like it doesn't matter as long as they do what they say they're going to do. Right. Like you judge the character, you don't judge the other the other stuff. You know, do you think it was a front for like some weird pastor type situation or was it no they only had the one. And they didn't give a shit what they were saying.

I don't know. I feel like it was one of those things where they felt like they were helping and they were spreading God's word. And it was one of those things where the popularity of Amway has kind of gone up and down. Right. So when all the people that were speaking on stage got in and made all their money in it like the getting in was good. Right. And it was easy to get other people in. And because it was easy to get people in, everybody had great success.

And these people made made it to like the millionaire and beyond level every year income. And then there's a huge tanking of Amway in the in the 90s and 2000s, early 2000s. And nobody wanted to be in it because it was a whole big thing. And they tried to like rebrand as quick start with the age of the Internet. And then that didn't work because that doesn't even make any sense because it's spelled Q U I X T A R like the fuck is that about?

And that tanked so hard that they abandoned that and went back to Amway or like renamed you know, like unrenamed themselves. And then they got a very terrible reputation as door to door soap salesman. Right. And they sell a lot more than soap and they do vitamins and whatever. And they've got all these acres and acres and acres of organic, non insecticide, whatever shit. And they're all certified vitamins like out in California and stuff. But you know, like whatever.

I mean, they've got all this stuff and you could, you know, you can talk about the products. You could talk about whatever. And it's like, I feel like if it was a little more like products like, hey, man, products, you want some, you don't want some, whatever. But yeah, it got like really kind of weird because they have like a resident pastor that would come and speak. And I don't know, you know, and John and I don't know if you've heard of John Maxwell.

He writes a ton of like business self-help books. I've never heard of him. All right. And he does good writing. He's a really good writer and I like a lot of his books and I never would have heard of him outside of this, but he would speak a lot of times. Never in person at ours. He'd go speak somewhere where he was at and then they'd record it and play back for us. But like, you know, he seems like a good writer and he knows what he's talking about. He pumps out an awful lot of books though.

So you kind of have to wonder. But you know, so do other people like whatever, anybody, anyone, anyone of those people. Yeah. I mean, they pump out a lot of books. So, but yeah. So, and I'm not a huge Stephen King fan. We've talked about that, I think. Stephen King is weird. Like I enjoy Stephen King until he gets to the point where he has to bring in that one extra thing, right? Like he gets a really good like horror story going and you're like, holy shit, holy shit.

And then he's like, yeah, so you were terrified of that clown and it, but here's a giant fucking spider for no reason. And you're like, oh, okay, Stephen, that's out of left field. Thanks I guess. Yeah. But what I always find is that it's more about the path, the journey. His books never finish well. They're never satisfying. Not at all. You know, and I'm never satisfying ever. And I think he does it on purpose. He might. I don't know. I think so.

So I wanted to get into some of these stats because this is a federal trade commission report that they did on all of these different MLMs. So let's just, we'll start with Amway, right? And so they've all got these different levels that you come in and they're producer levels, right? If you can produce X number of whatever production unit they use. So for Amway they use a PV and a BV, so it was like a personal volume and a business volume.

And the personal volume is what you yourself use and generate. And the business volume is you plus anyone you've sponsored in business, right? So any of your downline. And the interesting thing is that for the longest time when we were in, the Amway thing was you had to have 50 points of customer volume, right? And so it's a little less than one for one with like dollar.

So you'd probably have to sell about 75 to a hundred dollars depending on what they bought and what the markup was or the, you know, the profit of these things were in customer volume in order to hit that 50, 50 customer volume to qualify for the additional bonus levels to actually get paid by Amway for selling stuff outside of just getting your discount, right? Sure. So that makes sense.

You have to sell, you have to have a customer, not a business person or somebody that wants to also sell and make money, but you have to have enough customers buying, let's just say soap or, you know, Pampered Chef stuff or Mary Kay stuff or whatever it is, like buying the product as to equal a certain amount to get paid.

Well, the, I think Congress ruled just recently that something like 50% of your total volume had to be customer volume, which is a drastic change because the group I was with said, okay, you need the 50 customer volume to qualify for all the stuff. So you go out and you get 50, you get 75, whatever you get, you know, like a hundred or less, somewhere between 50 and a hundred customer volume.

And then you can, and then you make bank and then you just recruit people and you teach them how to get that, that bare minimum 50 every month and you're on your way to making bank. Well, then the government came out and of course the big selling point was, well, Amway's got people connected to the government and they were super excited about that DeVos lady because she's a family member of Rich DeVos who founded Amway, right?

And so they were thought they were sitting pretty and the point is the government will fuck anything it can. And it was Amway's turn and they said, you got to have at least 50 or 60% customer volume to be a legitimate business in the eyes of the government or we're going to deem you like a pyramid scheme. So Amway had to change their payout compensation to say, well, now you have to have 50% of your total volume or whatever be customer, not just the 50 customer points. You know what I mean?

So it's like the whole talk was you want to be in business for yourself because nobody can change the deal on you. And then right before we decided not to renew the government's like, guess what? We're changing the deal on you. You know, so it kind of like, I mean, I understand the government, but it was funny that these people didn't. Well, Betsy DeVos was an absolute moron. Oh yeah. So it doesn't surprise me that her family fortune was won through a scam.

Well, not according to the FTC ruling, it wasn't a scam. Yeah, okay. So and I think the point here is that we need to clarify a little bit. This is not the pyramid scheme of sending money in for nothing and then getting money back, right? Like Bernie Madoff or whatever, where it's like, hey, give me $1,000 and you're going to get back $5,000.

Like, it's not that there's actual product in all of these cases like Herbalife, Shackley, Alaluca, Amway, Cutco, Pampered Chef, Tupperware, there's actual product, right? Like you're not, you're still getting something and if you're paying extra for it, fine. If you want to pay an annual due and try and make money off of it, you can, right? You can try that. It's not fully the same thing. But it's also not a store.

It's also not a store and even the Herbalife stores, right, and the Cutco stores, they have store fronts. You can go into a store and buy these things, but you can just interact with them as if they were a store. Or if they talk to you and you're interested, they could try and help you set up your own store, right? Or you work for their store. I don't know how it all works with some of these other ones, but you know, you've got your own like web store, right?

That is like amway.com slash nice ashes or whatever it would be, right? Or herbalife.com slash get the grind on or something. And whatever profits there were would go to you instead of straight to Herbalife or Amway or whatever it might be. So it's not a full on like scam. I mean, if you can make it work, you could actually make some money off of it and people have. But I think the big caveat is a lot of these companies have people to try and recruit you and say, anybody could do this.

Here's how easy it is. And the fact of the matter is, it's not easy at all and not everybody can do it. And it really depends. It's very circumstantial, very circumstantial. You can learn the best sales pitch in the world and it's very circumstantial because not everybody's a salesperson, right? And you could be a salesperson wherever you work right now. You could be a salesperson and you could not make it right.

Because some people don't like working under quotas and you're not going to get fired from Amway or Herbalife or any of these places. You're not going to get fired. You're just not going to make money. The majority of your money at Amway you're making is by convincing other people to sell Amway. Yeah, for sure. We're convincing other people to convince other people. That's where the pyramid scheme part comes in. It's not coming in by selling 20,000 pump bottles for Pampered Chef.

That's trying to convince other people to sell Pampered Chef. Yeah. And I mean, it's set up that way. It's more profitable for the company and then they have to disclose how people make money and some people do and some people don't. And there's a whole MLM nonprofit organization that ranks all these things too. So I mean, there's a lot of data out there to be had. Sure. I'll tell you what, I have the spritzer for Pampered Chef. Everybody that's listening, if you don't have one, go buy it.

It's fucking phenomenal. I have two of them. I don't know how much I like to think. We have a Stoneware loaf pan and a Stoneware pizza pan from Pampered Chef and they're great. Stoneware is awesome. I mean, you could get Stoneware anywhere, I'm sure, but whatever. These are great. So this is not, Pampered Chef is not a sponsor. No, Pampered Chef is not a sponsor and Norwex makes some incredible towels. My hiking towels and my camping towels are Norwex and they're phenomenal.

Like a little tiny square does it all. Sorry. I mean, that's the weird thing, right? It's like some of these products are really good. And that's the whole thing is like, hey, this product is really good or like this product is as good as the other products. So why not just use this product and get other people to use it and you can make some money. Like it's super tempting, right? And they say anybody can do it. But the fact of the matter is like not everybody can do it.

You could, there are some, I don't know who, but like, it's like, you know, no matter how good a salesperson you are, you could not sell water to a dehydrated person in a desert, like a hundred percent of the time, right? Like you're not going to close that sale a hundred percent of the time, right? Because people, right? Like just people in general. So I mean, that's kind of a big thing, but I think looking at the statistics here are going to be very, very eye opening.

We need to talk about the cigar cause I'm over halfway. We do. I'm, I'm just about to pull, peel off the beast sticker. Oh, see it. I have three and a half inches left, something like that. Well, I've been talking. God damn it. I know. I like this one. I like this one too. This one's been really good. It's flavorful. I've got about four inches left, three, three and a quarter, three and three quarters. So I'm not too far behind you. Yeah, this was good. This is better. Better than the V8.

This is so much better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So much better. Yeah. Yeah. This, I mean, so far I would recommend it for anybody. It's me as well. Uh, okay. So I've pulled up and it's a 40 page report. I'm going to now read to you verbatim the full 40 pages. Uh, I'm just kidding. This one, I'm going to, I'm going to say this and I'll put this report in the, in the link or in the description of the episode.

This is chapter seven of a, of a full it's, it's called the case for and against multi-level marketing by John M. Taylor, uh, MBA, PhD, consumer awareness Institute. And this is hosted on the ftc.gov site and, and chapter seven apparently is 40 pages long, uh, which is great. Thank you, John. But they, what they do here is they bring in, okay. This is the page that I wanted. This is the chart that I was most interested in.

And this is, they've got the MLM company and year of average earnings report that they pulled. And these are all, you know, 2001 to 2009. Okay. So this is a little bit old, some older data, but I don't know how often they do this. This kind of stuff. Uh, and then they do estimated minimum annual costs for effective recruitment campaign, which means how much money are you out to try and be active in the business? And that's the big kicker is there are people that sign up just to get the discount.

And that does not mean they're actively trying to do the business per like IRS tax laws or some or something. Right. They kind of like, like our last episode, their stats and they have to qualify these stats because if they took everybody involved, the stance are terrible. But if they take people that are actively trying to build it, they're not as terrible. Right. Yep. Because some people go to the gym just to use the shower, um, massage chairs. But anyway, yeah. So and it goes by company.

So I don't want to necessarily go through all of the companies, but I can kind of tell you, I'm just going to kind of go general for this. And if there's something that leaps out at me as I'm kind of going through here, then we can kind of dig into it a little bit.

So the estimated minimum annual costs for effective recruitment campaign, this is how much you're going to kind of like lose money or spend money or ha ha ha as a business person would tell you how much money you're going to invest to get a big return. And so it looks like on this first page here, and we actually has the least annual cost to try and grow your business and make, make bank doing so.

And I just scrolled down and so Amway comes in at the lowest amount of money out of pocket to run an effective recruitment campaign. So you have to have product on hand to demo. You have to have materials on hand to show because they have legal requirements. If you're trying to sign somebody up in business, you have to have the legal documents from the company. You have to present them with all the information, right? You can't, you can't be a fly by night person.

I mean, you can, but then you're going to be prosecuted. So Amway's annual costs. What do you think it costs, Mike, if you're trying to run a successful and wake up campaign and you know, it's the least of all of these companies on this list, 1500 bucks, 2090. So you're in the ballpark. Most of these others are, it goes from about 2000, 2000, 90 is the lowest. It goes from 2000 and 90 to about 25, 2600 depending. So they're all kind of right in that 2500 range.

Okay. So some, a little less, some a little more. So that's what you're kind of out. And that's, that's just for your company sponsored, right? Like the comp, what the company says you need. That's not including if you're part of another mentorship program or training program and you have to fly out. We had, we had to fly out to like Denver, drive out to Denver a couple of times a year and they had other meetings like in the twin cities and stuff.

And those all had fees because they had to pay for the room at the hotel or whatever. So that's not cutting all that stuff. This is like legitimately just the stuff from the company that you need. Sure. Okay. And they don't, and they don't really disclose that when they're kind of recruiting you, they don't ever say like, Hey, look, you're going to need at least two grand a year, three grand a year to make this work. They say, Hey, you sell enough. You get enough to make it work.

And so the next column is level at and above which net profits are possible. So net profits aren't even possible until you hit a certain level within the, within the, within the conversation plan. Right? So they've got, they've all got a comp plan. Right. So that's like how much product do you have to sling before you make a profit? Yeah. And I mean, it's a little more nuanced than that, but by and large, yes. You or your downline, right?

You or your organization that you're building have to move. And so these are just names. So it doesn't really matter because it's not a, it's not a, it's not a number, you know? So like Amway, you have to be a platinum to make net profits. Herbalife you have to be a world team before you can make net profits. Melaleuca you have to be a director three or four. Tupperware you have to be a manager before you can make net profits.

And basically, which means you're offsetting what it costs to run the business and above. Right. And then, so now here, here's where we start getting really interesting is the approximate number of active participants at that level or above. Right. So the, the number of people, the percentage of people that are at that level to make a profit and above. Yes. And not only that, but active, active participants. So not the people that sign up for the discount.

Yes. What, what do you think these numbers are? I would say they range, they range. The lowest is going to be 10% and the top is going to be 15%. Oh Mike, you sweet summer child. The lowest is, let's see here. Yeah. The lowest here is going to be, it's going to be this Air Bond International and it is 0.59%. Okay. Now, now listen, now listen. Amway is slightly better at 0.60%. So less than a percentage point of active participants actually make money at this.

Now the highest one here, and most of these are, they're all, most of these are single digit. Okay. So Herbalife is 5.71. Melaleuca is 2.9%. Tupperware is 2.85%. The highest is actually Sunrider with 11.19%. That's the highest. That's the highest on this list. Oh, and actually World Ventures is 0.2%. So I think that's less than Air Bond. Yeah, that's less than Air Bond. So we're not talking, we're not talking this works for everybody. No, no, no. That's crazy levels of failure.

That's way, that's, I mean, I don't know if it's true, but I've always been told that 50% of businesses fail within the first two years. But that is like, that stat is horrible. It's not good. It's way worse. No. It's not good. And I think the stat for Eagle Scout is I think like 3% or something, or maybe it's up now, I don't know. But it was a pretty low percentage of Boy Scouts that made Eagle Scout rank. And I made it and my two brothers made it.

And that's higher than any of these, or not any of these, but like it's higher or as competitive as these. So like if you're not in it to win it, you're just not going to win it, right? Right. You're not in it. 0.5% is like, that's pretty terrible. You're going to fail. You're going to fucking fail. Yeah, that's a pretty terrible odds. I'm not going to succeed at that game for sure. There's no way. Yeah. This is not a Han Solo never tell me the odds kind of situation.

This is a, you're going to fucking fail. Especially when you see this next column stat. Okay. The next column is max retention rate. So business owners that renew. What do you think the range is here, Mike? Well given I have those other stats, I'm going to guess it's 0.01%. It's got to be below. No, no, no. This stat is better, but when you think about the whole way that you make money at these things is signing people up and eat you. The max maximum retention rate. So this is an average.

This is maximum retention rate, 10 to 15%. Those are the maxes everybody. The maximum retention rates hit. Beyond the minimum period. These are the people that renew year to year. Yeah. Maximum. So that's not everybody. This is like, this is the 0.1% get 10% retention or 15% retention. This next column is approximate percentage of all participants that could have profited from participation. So I guess they ran like a economic model on this. And there is, wait a second.

There is one of all of these companies that is above a 1%. It's a 1.12%. Everything else is like 0.3. There's one that's 0.08. So these are people that could have made money by participating, I guess. I don't know what kind of model they use. I'm not going to read it. I don't care. So best case scenario, according to the government, less than 1% of the people involved could have made profit if they really would have tried hard.

Yeah, if they believed hard deep down, any pizza is a personal pizza. That is psychotic. Right? So, and then this is the big one. Do you want to do the big one? Do you have questions so far? I feel like I've been talking a lot. I want to answer any of your questions because I was involved in one and I've been approached by a couple other ones. So if you have questions. Interesting.

I've never been approached by a multi-marketing thing as far as in, I don't, I mean, I would never be interested in doing it anyway. But that's interesting statistics. I can't believe they don't have to disclose that. Well, they do the same thing that the government does with the GDP. You know what I'm saying? So if you take, you know, let's say, let's just say Amway here, right? So there's 0.6% of the people at this level called platinum that they can make money. They can make a profit. Right?

And then they say, well, we've got 0.6% of people that are active participants and they're active. So we've got 0.6% of the people that are at that level that are active. We've got, I don't know. I don't know what you would say that are the people that are active. Right? So you have to, you'd have to qualify which people are active or how, how, how many of the people involved are active. So you get that number, right?

And then you know that the, the percent of active participants that are at that level or above are 0.6%. But you can say, well, the people that are actually truly, truly, truly active, 50% of those are at that level or whatever. Like they can cook the numbers, right? They can cook the stats like, cause they get to define to whoever they're talking to what active means. And it might mean something different for every company. I don't know.

It seems like these companies make money by getting people involved and then charging them fees. Yeah. That's how they're there. This is like a fee charging organization. Well with, with Amway, there weren't really any fees. I think it was, I don't know, 65 bucks a year to get the discount or maybe it was a hundred bucks. I don't know. It's similar to a Costco membership, right?

You said Costco has everything, but you sell the pay, but you could get a discount in addition to whatever, you know, whatever the price was. So you basically got kind of like the Costco membership prices by paying this and you could make money. I guess if you were the 0.60%, you could make some money and there weren't really any fees, but you had to do all these other things because most people don't just join straight Amway.

You join the mentorship or training or leadership program or whatever they called. And so they have like a reading list or they have meetings that you have to go to, or they have functions or whatever it is, right? So you're spending all this money and you can deduct it from your taxes. It's no big deal, except you can't lose money as a business for more than a set number of years or for the IRS is like, you can't deduct that anymore. You're not making it work.

Like you have to actually make it work. So you know what I mean? Like it's, it's, it, unless you can be that 0.6% or that one to 5%, right? Or even that 11% like it's a very slim margin. If you can be that slim margin and make the money, then it's worth it. But if you're not like, you're better off just buying a Costco membership because it's a lot less work. You just have to fight the people at the store.

You don't have to go and try and like sell your shit to people, even if the shit's good shit, right? Right. Which is why, like I said, most of the people that I know that have done it, they're doing it for one year and they're doing it so because they're planning on buying a shit ton of stuff and it's worth it at that point, you know?

Yeah. Or they just like doing the parties for people and they don't really care about extra money and they're just like, Hey, I like getting the couple hundred buck bump a couple of times a year. Right. Like I like the product, happy to go demo it, get a couple hundred bucks. Perfect. Like not a big deal. So, you know, I mean, it's just, it's interesting. These stats, when I saw them, I was like, Holy fuck. Those are not good stats. Not at all. They're not good stats at all.

And you know, I'm not saying corporate America is, yeah, I'm not saying corporate America is better, but at least you get benefits for the most part, even if they're shit benefits, right? You get some sick time, you know, there's some other stuff. In this, you're just, you're schlepping and you're spending all these free hours. And we just talked about last episode, America has the fewest number of free hours. So when the fuck are we supposed to do this? Right. Right.

Okay. So this last column is probably the most telling of all. It is a proximate percentage of all participants who lost money. Okay. What do you think this stat is at? I would say 85% lose money. Gotta be at least 85%. Oh, you sweet summer child. Every single one of these is a 99 point something. Here's one 99 world, world ventures, 99.97. My man, 99.97 of your participants lost money. That's almost a hundred, depending on how you round. Almost a hundred percent have lost money.

The average, so they've got an average down here. The average across all of this, the average across all of these people. Let's count them up. One, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Oh, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. So they got 30. There's 30 companies that they did across the 30 companies. The average people who lost money, 99.6%.

Every single one of these companies has a 99 plus percentage of people that have lost money. Wow. That's incredible. And Amway's on there. Amway's on there. 99.94. 99.94. So they're not the worst. Go America. Oh my God. Herbalife, 99.43. Isagenix, 99.79. Melaleuca, 99.71. Tupperware, 99.71. Yeah, man. I think that last column, and that's approximate, but you rounded out to two decimals. So it's approximate my ass. He's losing them, losing their ass. That's incredible.

Yeah, I wish they would have had Pampered Chef on here. I wish they would have. That would have been interesting to see. Yeah, I think that'd be really interesting. Or Mary Kay. Avon, I think, is done now. Yeah. At least Mary Kay. There's some women that swear by that shit. Oh, I know they do. And like Mike and I said, we're not saying these products are bad. No, Tupperware's pretty good.

The point we're trying to make is if you're doing this to try and make money, the average across 30 is like 99 plus percent losing money. So the chances of you making money on it, not really that good. No, that's dog shit. Yeah. If you want to do it for the discount, sure, fine. Treat it like a Costco membership, but let's not get all hopped up on this shit, is what I'm saying. Right. Yeah, yeah.

I suppose there's a way to figure it out to where you're not going to lose money if you're just like probably not going to sell anybody anything. Well, I think the only way to make money at it because it says level at which net profits are possible and these are high levels. These are at least familiar with the Amway levels. And so the level that they say platinum, that's a pretty high level. It takes a bit to get there. It's a big kind of a big deal.

I'm assuming a lot of these other ones are big deals to hit these levels because only what 0.6% of people hit those levels. So it's a big deal to hit that level and you're just not going to make that money. So you can't go into these things thinking you're going to make money at it because only 0.6, like in a lot of cases, 0 to 11% of people actually make money at these things. So you can't go into it thinking that way.

It'd be like saying, oh, hey, about a Costco membership, I'm going to make money at it. No, that's not how that works. No. We're not saying the products are bad. We're not saying the companies are bad. It's just the MLM portion of it. If you sell Mary Kay or you sell Pampered Chef or whatever you sell, that's fine. That's good. The products are probably good. And we both have products from different companies that we enjoy.

But I'm not going out of my way to say, my God, I need to host myself a Pampered Chef party so I can get that thing that I've been looking at. That's me. Some people do think that. Sure. Obviously, that's probably the better way to go about it rather than sign up with the company. Reach out to a Pampered Chef person and say, I really want that blender thing or that stoneware thing. Let's do a party. I'll invite all my friends and give me a discount on it. Then you're ahead. Do it that way.

You know, don't, don't sign up and think you're going to make money at it. Yeah, there's a couple. Yeah, that's crazy. That's like these stats are mind boggling. And this is on the FTC website. Well, we talk about it all the time where everybody has this little thing in their pocket with pretty much all the information that the world has ever produced on it. Pretty close. And it's just a matter of spending the time to look for yourself and find the truth. And sometimes it's hidden.

You got to look because they are trying to lie to you. But there is there is information out there. Yeah. And to be fair, I think this report was probably 2009, 2010 somewhere in there. So you know, it's let's say, you know, 10, 15 years old, this report. Do I think things have drastically changed? No, not at all. If they have, it's changed for the worse. Probably. I mean, I don't know, like how, how, how would it have gone through the pandemic?

You know, I mean, a lot of these companies have internet ordering, so it's really not a huge deal. A lot of these companies depend on face to face meetings and having Tupperware parties or Pemper Chef parties or whatever kind of party. Right. So probably didn't go well for a lot of people. Well, the Pemper Chef party thing just moved on to Facebook. Yeah, that's what they did. Oh, OK. Yeah. They came up. Yeah. I mean, so like, yeah, so they pivoted, they adapted.

I know that Amway, at least the group that we were associated with within Amway, switched to virtual events or virtual functions, right? They call them functions and they'd bring, you know, like ra ra guest speakers up and whatnot and successful people, the point six percent successful people up to talk. They do it virtually and that worked out well enough and it was better than having to travel places. But, you know, like some of them pivot and some of them do whatever.

But man, like no matter how tech savvy or pivot friendly they are, point six percent, point six percent. All of these companies, all 30 of these companies pulled over 90, like the average was 99.6 percent. Fucking lost money. That's crazy, dude. That is mind bogglingly bad. And we just talked in our last episode, right? Like wage increases versus inflation and purchasing power. Like that's that's bad, too. But this is like 99.6 percent bad.

There's so many ways we should rename the country Scam-erica, you know? Yeah, just Scam-erica. Yeah, dude. Scam-erica. Welcome. Welcome to Scam-erica where the where the Supreme Court justices are on the payroll of the billionaires. Yeah. There's a sucker born every minute. Right. Yeah. And no means yes and yes means oh, I'm not allowed to say that. Oh, yeah. If you want to be racist, we can frame it as states' rights instead. It's about states' rights. And what was the other one?

There's all these euphemisms. I love the euphemisms. Oh, yeah. Well, and the thing now is I want to talk about this. This is unless you have. OK, so do you have any more questions about MLMs or, you know, kind of like I don't want to get into like what constitutes a pyramid scheme versus an MLM versus a whatever the fuck. No, Nate, I think that you've pretty much convinced me not to be involved with that shit.

And, you know, I'm not going to not I'm not going to like throw away my pampered chef spritzer that everybody should go out and get one. But yeah, maybe I'll try to find a spritzer at a store. I don't you know what I mean? They well, you know what I think it's really good. I think I think the point is, is that the products aren't bad, right? The products are probably moderately to fairly well researched and developed and all that stuff. And I've got some pampered chef.

I don't know what you call them. They're the things that like let you pick up stuff from like a chopping board, like a cutting board. OK. And I like using those like when I chop onions and I grab those two paddle things and like I scoop up the shit and dump them in the thing. You know, if you have a good knife, you can use the side of your knife. I'm just I'm just letting you know that. I know. You know what?

I haven't used my pampered chef like scraper things for a long time because I just used a knife edge. But you know what I mean? But these companies, they have products and they're like they're perfectly serviceable. OK. And sometimes they're better than what you find at like a Target or a Creighton Barrel or a Williams Sonoma or whatever the fuck. Right. Or at least just as good. Like who cares? Like whatever. If the review works for you, not a big deal. We're not dissing the products.

We're not hating on the products. You like the Herbalife shakes? More power to you. Like awesome. Like get on it. Whatever before today. They got them all over the place. They're like fitness buff like shakes. That's not true. That's not true. You've got at least one or two in your town. What? Never heard of it. Never saw it. Well, that's because they don't brand themselves as a Herbalife shake shop. They have their own names. Right.

Like they come up with their own names and they just sell the Herbalife product. So these fitness places, you just Google like a fitness place and by and large it's a Herbalife storefront. Yeah. Me either because that's too much work. But so like we said, like we're not dissing the products. We're not dissing that. It's just you're not going to make money at it. Right. You're just not. For some reason the 0.6% that has made money at it deems you worthy of then helping you make the 0.6.

Right. But I did want to talk briefly because we were talking about previous episode, we're talking about America. Great or not. This episode we're talking about, you know, like going into business for yourself kind of in some sense in a kind of a convoluted and a dishonest, not dishonest way of doing business, but a dishonest way of like recruiting people saying that anybody, because that was the whole thing. Anybody could make this work if you work hard enough. Well, you know what?

99.6% of people lose money at this. So don't tell me that anybody could do this. Right. I want to talk about Bud Light. Okay. Yes. Bud Light. And I don't know the full story other than they apparently have a trans spokesperson or they put like a rainbow on a can or a trans person on a can. I'm not exactly sure what they did. Yes. Okay. Okay. So Bud Light is the person's name.

Yes. Okay. So all of the conservatives that are against trans anything have decided that they're going to go out and buy Bud Light by the crate so they can shoot it with their AR-15s and they don't understand that they're buying Bud Light because of a trans person. Right. Like you're literally doing what Bud Light wants you to do.

Like Bud Light doesn't care if you shoot it with an AR-15 or drink it or throw it down the toilet as long as you fucking buy it and you're falling right into the fucking thing. Then you're saying, hey, I'm going to do a live stream of me shooting Bud Light with the trans thing. Great. You fucking bought that case of Bud Light. So you're a dipshit. Like go buy the beer you like. If you don't, how hard is that? If you don't like, still buy it. Like Jesus. Kind of like the MLM thing, right?

Like 99.6% of people aren't going to make it. So don't join one. It goes way beyond that. First of all, who gives a fuck? Second of all, InBev I think is the company that owns Bud Light. Whatever company owns Bud Light, they produce like 64 kinds of beverages in the United States. Man, and they bought up a lot, a lot of the craft beers.

So even if you don't like Bud Light and if you like some craft beer, the chances of Anheuser Busch or InBev or whatever the fuck owning it is pretty goddamn good. It's like you can't escape the megacorp. No matter what you do, unless you're buying something that's made in the town you fucking live in and you know the person that owns that store, you're probably going to feed the beast. If you care about the weird train again, which I don't care at all. Like whatever. Why would you care?

I care that InBev is so massive that you can't escape them. I don't care that Dillamovany is on the can. I don't care. I don't care. Whatever dude. Put whatever symbology you want on there. Yeah. Like if I like the beer, I'm buying the beer. I don't like Bud Light so I'm not buying Bud Light no matter who you put on the can. Like it doesn't matter who you put on the can. Yeah. I saw a guy, he said, if you're going to protest Bud Light because they put Dillamovany on the can, congratulations.

You joined everybody else who's protesting Bud Light because it tastes bad. Yeah. I mean, it's so ridiculous. It's stupid. It's all this tranny talk. If every trans person in the country disappeared tomorrow, traffic would not change. There's so few trans people. It doesn't even matter. It's like 0.6% of the population. There's more homeless people than there are trans people. Like it's no one.

Why does anybody, why is it taking up so much energy other than the government and the corporations want you to focus on that instead of the fact that you're not making as much money as you were 20 years ago? Right? Yeah. Or you've had 5,000% inflation and we haven't raised the minimum wage for 50 years. Right. Well, yeah. Since 2007 or something. Last episode basically, right? Yeah. All the, yeah. So I mean, it's all distractionary techniques. They want it to be a distraction.

It shouldn't matter to any human being on this planet. What, like who cares? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You know the thing that's even worse, even worse than this. Like one, who cares what they put on the can? It literally doesn't matter. It doesn't change the taste. It doesn't change the flavor. Marketing does what marketing does, right? Like push light.

Come hunting season, they have like blaze orange cans or they have, they put like corn cobs on their cans and they call it like a limited edition can. Well, it's bullshit. They pump these cans out in mass. It's not a limited edition anything. You know, they just changed the can design seasonally, which is fine. Like who cares? Like, hey, it's kind of fun. Like thank you for like breaking up the monotony of life and changing your can design.

But here's the thing I never really got is like all the people losing their absolute minds over the M&Ms, like the M&M characters, like she's wearing like the green M&M is wearing the wrong kind of shoes or something. Like it's a fucking fictional candy character. It's a lame advertisement for highly addictive nonsense that they market to children. You know, if you're going to be upset, have them ban sugar commercials on television. That's what we should be talking about. Right?

Or have them ban prescription drug commercials or anything like that. I mean, why are you upset about what kind of shoes a fictional M&M character cartoon thing is wearing? Why don't we talk about a 30% sugar tax? Anything that has added sugar needs to have a 30% tax on it. Instantly. Added sugar is terrible for you. It's like killing America.

And that was the whole thing is like, there's a whole, the sugar industry convinced Americans or maybe the world, I don't know that the fat content on the nutrition label was what makes you fat. Well, guess what, everybody? It's not the fat content. It's the sugar content. Yeah. It's the sugar scammers, scam Erica. Exactly what it is. America, man. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, a lot of people do a lot of the things that the MLMs do.

And a lot of things could be, depending on your definition of a pyramid scheme, could definitely be a pyramid scheme. Like your average nine to five job, most likely a pyramid scheme. You're never going to make as much as a CEO. You're never going to be able to get to CEO. Like you're just never going to get to, unless your name happens to match the last name of the owner or of the current CEO. Like you're just not going to make it. Like it's not going to happen.

And I guess that would have been an interesting counterpoint is to pull up a corporate America stats, right? And how many people of corporate America actually, you know, make above the median or whatever. But we kind of did that in the last episode, right? Like not many, not many, probably. I mean, you know, you can tell us for yourself or you can tell yourself based on what, what the, the median GDP was.

And if you're making that or less or more or whatever, you you'll know, we don't need to know, but I don't think the stats are good across the board for anything that you might choose to do in life in America right now. Okay. Like the people who are quote unquote rich in your area, probably not even, they're probably not even there. So they're so debt leveraged. They're not top one percent, most likely. You know what I mean? And their debt leverage to the hilt. You know what I mean?

Like the rich people that you know are probably top 10, top 15 percent. You know what I mean? Like maybe it depends on how you define rich. Of course, everybody's, whoever's rich is just whoever has more money than you at the time. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's crazy. But yeah, so disappointing. And like, well, they picked Dylan Mulvaney. That was a master stroke by Bud Light, because Dylan Mulvaney is only has been a woman for 365 days. So it's like the perfect person to enslave everybody.

All the conservatives are going to be upset because of the trans thing. But then all the hardcore trans people are going to be like, well, Dylan Mulvaney is not a real trans person. He's only been a trans person for a year. And this apparently Dylan Mulvaney has done some very questionable things on their Twitter or whatever their social media, which is like, oh, again, it's all AstroTurf. It doesn't matter. Right. Like it's nonsense.

Well, it's like that it's like that weightlifting record you sent me where the the current or the previous record holder was upset because a man came in and said he identified as a female and broke the record by exactly 100 pounds. Not even his personal best. And he didn't make a big show of it. He did it more so to point out the ridiculousness of the rules that this organization had where they didn't ask to check anything.

And if you identified as a woman, you could come in to identify as a woman. You could look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime and they wouldn't question it. And you were then a woman and you could go and compete with the women. And the previous record holder was and that was the whole point is the previous record holder was trans and was complaining on their thing about how they might have had an advantage, but they had transitioned. And the most important part was they were nice to people.

And so the other person shouldn't have been able to do it because they were nice. This other person was nice. And you know, like what people are going to get upset because this person has just recently transitioned or within a year's time or whatever. And it's like, what are you guys doing? Like some kind of trans club where you're gatekeeping and hazing people or you just are you pro trans rights or you're not?

Like if you're, I know they are, but if you're, if you're, if you're pro trans rights, like who cares how long you've been trans, who cares if you're trans and I like trans rights, then more power to you like welcome. We support you. We're here for you. But no, that's not, that's not kind of how it is. At least with the, with the vocal ones, right? I think by and large, most people, regardless of what your background is or whatever, like most people are supportive of anybody.

If it makes sense for that person, like I'm not going to sit there and somebody's going to tell me they want to do this, that or the other thing. And I'm going to say, no, that's stupid. If that's what they feel like, then I'll support them. I'm in support of adults doing whatever they want to do with their life. It doesn't matter. We talked about that before. Yeah. Like I don't care what you do. I have, I support whatever you want. As long as you're not hurting anybody else.

It doesn't matter to me. So I said, what you want to do and I support your hatred for the government. Yes. Well, we all, you know, to the extent allowed by law, I support your hatred for the government. Yes, exactly. So I am nubbing right now. Yeah, I'm nubbing too. This is really good. This was, yeah, it was actually, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. It's so much better than the beauty.

And I know I smoked the beauty incorrectly and I tried to be a little more like cool with this one, but I think this one's got a little more friendly leeway with it. Yeah. Slightly. So I like this one. I would smoke this one again. Oh yeah. I have three quarters of an inch left and it's still good. And I've been puffing on it pretty slow trying to keep the temperature down, you know? So but it's good.

I just tossed her out now just because it's so short, but I didn't really have any sour notes on it. Very consistent, I would say. Yeah, it was very consistent. It was just dark enough. It wasn't overly strong or powerful, but it had more flavor, I felt, than the beauty did. It did. It had more flavor and it was mild, but still dark. You know, it wasn't like overpowering in any way. No, it was probably, I don't know if I should say this.

It was probably just left the center on the darkness, right? If we're going political on things. Yeah, yeah. But you know, it's good. It's good. It's a good one. It's a fairly long smoke. I mean, we're almost, we're not quite an hour and a half into the episode. You know, it's a good smoke. I think with these two gurkas, for sure at least, the beauty and the beast, you gotta smoke them slow. Yes. I think in a way that that is a definite must. Slow and steady wins the race on these things.

So yeah. And if I would have known that for the beauty, maybe I'd have a different opinion of the beauty. But you know me, I don't smoke or really fast. I mean, I sometimes try and like smoke a little quicker than I normally would because I know how fast you smoke. Right. But I don't feel like I was like chain smoking that beauty down. No, you weren't tremendously ahead of me. It's good to know.

Yeah, you weren't tremendously ahead of me by the end, but I think you might have burned it on the front side when we were having some technical problems. Yeah, that could have, that could be, and I didn't know. Like I didn't know that the gurkas are these ones, because you've had this one before, the beauty before. Yes. And I didn't know that, you know, you got to go a little slower on it.

So I think that's important for our listeners to know is like we did it and I did it and I fucked up and it was bad. And if you don't fuck up and if you listen to the smoke, it's slow. Let it kind of sit in between puffs is probably a perfectly fine cigar. Yeah. So cool. Well, of the beauty and the beast, I think the beast was better. Yeah. And I would recommend the beast. He gave, he gave Bell a library, right? I mean, he's got to be better. He put a trans person on it's can, right?

Yeah. No one smokes like Gaston. No one spits like Gaston. Now I'm going to get Disney after us. Anyway. Anyway, everybody is the winner or beast is the winner. Beast is the winner. Yep. Be safe. Have fun. Catch us next week. I'm Ecce le Off road.