By It’s a Tuesday night. You’re scrolling through Facebook looking at Garfield memes (or y’know—whatever it is our readership does when they’re not reading our website) when all of a sudden you receive a message from a female high school acquaintance you haven’t spoken to in like, 10 years:
“Hey! How’s it going?”
Seems innocuous enough. This girl was in your math class—or was it your history class? Anyway, you’re pretty sure she’s the one who told everyone you were gay because you happened to be rocking the pixie cut before J-Law took it mainstream.
“Hey!” You respond. “Fine—you?”
It only takes three seconds for her to respond:
“Great! I remember how cool and ambitious you were in high school so I thought you’d be interested in my exciting new business opportunity!”
If you’re on Facebook in 2019, you’ve had this happen to you at least once if not many, many times. Seems like every girl from your high school is shilling crappy makeup, crappy essential oils, crappy leggings, and crappy protein shakes for some kind of “Multi-Level Marketing” Company (read: pyramid scheme). Most people respond to these messages by going off on them and unloading all that sweet pent-up aggression, putting them on blast on r/antimlm to reap that sweet karma, or ignoring them completely.
THE DREAM takes a different approach to the world of MLMs. Sure, there’s plenty of the eye-rolling and roasting one might crave while listening to a podcast about MLMs; however, host Jane Marie brings a much-needed nuanced approach to the subject rooted in her rural Michigan background where many of her family members and closest friends sold products for at least one of these companies. Acknowledging that your misguided high school friend isn’t the problem and striving to understand why so many people (especially women of color) fall for these companies’ promises is a key tenet of the podcast—and a refreshing one.
That’s not to say there isn’t a healthy share of Anti-MLM rage fuel over the course of 11 episodes. A few highlights include a deep dive into the history of MLMs going back to the 1970s and the batshit world of William Penn Patrick, a member of the podcast team joining an MLM herself, and a heated interview with a lobbyist that was so incredibly rage-inducing I very nearly drove my car off a bridge listening to it.
THE DREAM ends on an emphatic call to action to overturn the deceptively-named “Anti-Pyramid Promotional Scheme Act of 2017” (a.k.a. H.R. 3409). It’s better to hear Jane Marie explain this in the context of the podcast, but for now just imagine “deceptively-named” in giant early-internet-style animated glitter letters.
Here—I did it for you
It would have been easy to take the r/antimlm approach—but THE DREAM’s examination of what MLMs are, why they exist, and what specific steps we can take to eliminate them and help people involved just feels like the correct approach. Check it out—and maybe the next time Maddie from History/Math class hits you up for essential oils, you’ll think twice before screencapping her message and laughing about it with all your friends.
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