Hollow can you go?

Bridget Read, Little Bosses Everywhere (2025)

I’m honestly not sure how Bridget Read’s book, Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, ended up on my Kindle. I bought it right when it was released, but I honestly don’t recall why. I do occasionally dip into the world of documentaries and podcasts about scams, but not obsessively so. I watched one YT interview with the author (Adam Conover’s), but there aren’t a lot to choose from, and that was after I’d bought the book, so it did push me to read it, but only because I already owned it.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I did.

Little Bosses Everywhere reminded me a lot of Mood Machine (my review) in that it’s a deeply researched book that maps out a vast web of connections, but LBE surveys the many pyramid schemes that lie deep at the heart of American capitalism. This web extends back more than a century, though it’s very much alive and well today, and it implicates a broad range of figures from our country’s politics, economics, and discourse. Many of the figures and organizations detailed in the book are highly litigious (and wealthy), so the book itself errs on the side of verifiable actions, associations, and reporting. But for a book so focused on historical fact, I found myself shaken by its contents. Vulture describes it as a “deeply reported thrill ride–slash–horror story. This book is fascinating. And scary as hell.” I’m not sure that I could put it better.

The history of something for nothing

Whether they’re called Ponzi, pyramid, direct selling, or multi-level marketing, one thing that Read’s book makes clear is that these schemes all have a fraught relationship with the law. She shares story after story about the origins of these companies; nearly all of them are tales about failed salespeople who cloaked themselves with false credentials, junk science, and above all, a sociopathic belief in their God-given, American right to screw other people out of their money. Oh, and to greenwash their reputations, using their gains to manufacture false authenticity, to overwhelm their adherents with opulent displays of wealth that they won’t ever have access to, and to create myths and lies about their origins and qualifications.

One of the things that was shocking to me as I read LBE was how much of our current politics and economy was grounded in these schemes. The “gig economy” is based upon a model of “independent contractors” that was developed by MLM direct sellers. Free market evangelism, advertised to the masses as the freedom to earn, but enacted as the freedom from government intervention (or commonsense notions like justice or fairness). Billions of dollars spent applying irresistible pressure to legal systems and/or capturing government regulation. For the better part of a century, on a global scale, these companies have set about to systematically drain millions of people of hope, what little wealth they have, and whatever influence they might have wielded to change the system.

As I mentioned above, LBE is thoroughly researched, and the level of detail that Read provides doesn’t make for a quick or breezy read, but I struggled to put it down. This horrible story is punctuated with a couple of ongoing narratives as well. Read does speak with some of the few people who have really tried to bring multi-level marketing to task, and what comes across is how Sisyphean their efforts have been¹ compared to the massive resources deployed against them. She also tells the story of Monique, a woman who served in the Air Force for 16 years, who joins Mary Kay after meeting a representative at a networking event. Throughout a series of interstitial chapters, we hear the tale of the 8 years Monique spends with Mary Kay, before nearly getting trapped in another network of life coaching.

Jessica had started her own virtual coaching company, and she was primarily working with Mary Kay beauty consultants. In 2020, Monique had signed up for her program: $12,000 for a year of group coaching sessions, which Monique had been allowed to pay in monthly installments. The modules covered things like “visioneering,” Jessica’s term for manifestation, and something called EFT (emotional freedom technique) tapping. EFT involved gently but firmly hitting your body at various points with your index and middle fingers, to restore energy channels disrupted by negative emotions. Jessica taught a tapping session for “Money Responsibility,” which Monique was supposed to do twice a day for two weeks, repeating mantras like, “I appreciate how money shows up for me today” and “Money flows to me with ease, knowing I will help it expand.” This was how she was going to improve her business.

What’s perhaps scariest about Monique’s story as it unfolds is that isn’t all that remarkable. Her “upline” is full of people who self-present as wildly successful, literally surrounding her with messaging drawn straight from toxic self-help nonsense, doing everything they can to talk Monique into trying just a bit harder, giving them a bit more of her time and money. Success beyond one’s wildest dreams is always just around the corner, if you’re willing to spend a few thousand dollars to take that “final” step.

Towards the end of Monique’s time in the program, Jessica sends her to a financial coach, Ross, who charged her “$3,000 first for a few weeks of coaching, then another $5,000 for more coaching he said would help take her to the next level.” Then Ross recommended a new program of coaching (cost: $18,000) along with a loan company to help her pay for it. “[Monique] realized that the coaches were passing her and other Mary Kay participants around in a kind of loop.” But their only suggestion was that she start a coaching service, and find other women whom she could charge thousands of dollars and refer to them. By the end of her Mary Kay experience, Monique had spent more than $75,000 and “never made more than $5,000 total in retail sales and in commissions.”

It’s one thing to read about the hundreds of millions of dollars that these companies and families have poured into (largely Republican²) deregulation as a means of protecting their hoards, most of which was our money to begin with. As Read notes, “The money of millions of people caught up in a web of innumerable downlines has been used to convince many generations that government regulation turns them into slaves.” But it’s another entirely to read individual stories of people ruining their lives because they’ve struggled to resist their own hopes and dreams, and those who have exploited them.

Ultimately, this is a book about one core dynamic that plays out throughout our country’s recent history, and that’s the wildly exaggerated “right” to extract money from each other without returning value. From Apple’s 30% cut on their app store, to Amazon’s predatory pricing schemes, to the current administration’s patchwork of tariffs and carve-outs, to the strategy at the heart of enshittification, the prevailing model of “free enterprise” or “free markets” involves being free to install oneself between customers and the things they want, then charging fees, rent, a percentage, or even a “golden share.” Ours is an economy dominated by “passive income” schemes, and Read’s book tells the depressing story of how this economy was invented, developed, protected, and expanded by a cadre of “free (for me but not for thee) market” evangelists.

The Hollow Men

I found most surprising the strong interconnections between MLMs and the motivational speaker circuit, although perhaps it shouldn’t have been. Most of these companies begin by offering products, but then lock in their “independent” contractors by selling them “tools.” For instance,

The Yager Group preached a very simple system for success in Amway: books, tapes, and functions. In Amway parlance, these motivational materials were called “tools.” The tools system was simple, but it was relentless. When a new IBO registered to sell Amway, they…would also be urged to join, to “plug into,” a second organization that was not run by Amway, their “line of affiliation” (LOA). After the IBO bought their products from Amway via their sponsor, the sponsor then sold them a host of books, tapes, and rally tickets they supposedly needed to run their successful business, via their LOA.

I don’t want to rehearse this entire parallel history, although I think there’s probably more than enough there for a whole other book. But I think it’s significant that several of the MLM pioneers were engaged with Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People or Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. And that sort of magical thinking, in addition to becoming part and parcel with MLMs, later matures into the motivational and self-help industry, touching on names like Tony Robbins (protégé of Herbalife’s “International Business Philosopher” Jim Rohn), Keith Raniere (who dabbled in MLMs before NXIVM and then prison), and Norman Vincent Peale, he of The Power of Positive Thinking fame.

I mention Peale here at the end because of his lasting impact on our contemporary circumstances:

But most famously, Peale made Donald Trump who he is. Trump considered himself to be Peale’s “greatest student of all time.” He often attended Peale’s church in Manhattan, whose book was commonly read in Trump’s home growing up. Peale also officiated Trump’s first marriage to Ivana, and Trump later co-hosted Peale’s 90th birthday.

Anton Cebalo’s account of Peale’s impact on our culture is worth reading alongside Read’s book. In addition to providing an entire, exploitative shadow business that chugged along below the surface of these technically legal MLMs, the idea of focusing inward and valorizing individuality and the self above all else has played a large role in the collective action problem in our culture. Cebalo links Peale to the work of John ‘Vasco’ Vasconcellos,

famous for successfully creating the first government task force dedicated to “boosting self-esteem.” By 1990, the committee’s self-esteem report found support from the likes of Bill Clinton, Barbara Bush, Colin Powell, and Oprah Winfrey. Other states and schools would implement similar self-esteem programs that decade, with one consequence being rampant grade inflation.

Vasco’s efforts are a fitting dead-end of the American turn inward. It is as if Peale’s empty philosophy was repackaged, made better for the permissive liberal age.

While these MLMs have gradually colonized spaces (sellers were encouraged to take advantage of their families, neighborhoods, churches, clubs) by preaching a (toxic) positive message of self-fulfillment, the cultural developments that Cebalo tracks demonstrate a persistent, aggressive inward turn in our society (one of the hallmarks of neoliberal policymaking, it should be noted). And he describes the consequence as a cultural dead end.

The self is not a substitute for place. And without a place, there is little left inward to console. Its symptoms are apparent: the rapid rise in loneliness, anxiety, depression, and other mental ailments.

As Cebalo notes, the internet didn’t so much cause this as it accelerated tendencies whose seeds had already been planted. But it’s made it even more difficult not only to avoid, but to avoid falling prey to it. The contemporary wellness industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, operates with many of the same tricks pioneered by MLMs. It’s also absolutely flooded with bad actors (Read cites BlackOxygen, for example, a company selling literal bags of poisonous dirt for $100+ a pop.).

It’s been a couple of weeks since I finished Read’s book, and I’m falling here into a habit that sometimes happens for me, where a book will make other texts (like Cebalo’s post) more noticeable, the same way that buying a new car often means that you start seeing the same make and model way more often (it’s called the frequency illusion). I’ve also just started reading Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification, which is why I mentioned the collective action problem above. I think my mind’s been trying to suss out the overlaps between Read and Doctorow, and while I think they’re there, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as I’m trying to make out. If there’s one important parallel, though, it’s the extent to which the corporations that Read and Doctorow describe respectively have draped themselves in the language (and aspirations) of capitalism while doing everything they can to transcend capitalism. They’ve used the wealth they’ve extracted from the rest of us to insulate themselves from any sort of accountability, at the same time that they’ve convinced us to look the other way (and often inward³) when it comes to wondering how we’ve arrived at our present moment.

Once I’d finally finished Read, my first reaction to it was that the book could have been more polemic than it was. I understand why it wasn’t, but it provides a chilling look at the past century, one that explains more than I expected it would about our current economy. I found myself experiencing a weird simultaneity of clarity and conspiracy by the end, and that’s probably the highest recommendation that I can offer. I wasn’t planning on it, but Little Bosses Everywhere changed the way I perceive things.

1. This shouldn’t stop you from visiting Robert FitzPatrick’s site. FitzPatrick authored the 2020 book Ponzinomics, “the first book to deeply investigate the multi-level marketing phenomenon and to fully explain how the legitimate business of “direct selling” was turned into deceptive pyramid recruiting.”

2. It’s not purely Republican, if I’m fair. For most of my lifetime, save for the brief, beautiful interruption of Lina Khan at the helm of the FTC, politicians from both sides have steadily hobbled our government’s ability to regulate at the same time that they’ve reaped unprecedented wealth from it. And yet. I’ve got 2 phrases for you: Chamber of Commerce & Heritage Foundation. Our current administration’s war against Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and the like is the tip of an iceberg that runs deep throughout this history. See, for example, Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands.

3. If there’s a second parallel, I think that both books offer some real insight as to how our shared, social world has been slowly eroded in favor of the neoliberal focus on individuality.