
Little Bosses Everywhere
How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America
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Narrated by:
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Nikki Massoud
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By:
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Bridget Read
About this listen
A “gripping” (The Washington Post) work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing: a massive money-making scam and radical political conspiracy that has remade American society.
“Reads like a thriller . . . masterfully illuminates the tricks and sleights of hand that in multilevel marketing are simply the rules of doing business.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
Companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the world’s greatest opportunity: the chance to be your own boss via an enigmatic business model called multilevel marketing, or MLM. They offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and—most precious of all—financial freedom. If, that is, you’re willing to shell out for expensive products and recruit everyone you know to buy them, and if they recruit everyone they know, too, thus creating the “multiple levels” of MLM.
Overwhelming evidence suggests that most people lose money in multilevel marketing, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes. Yet the industry’s origins, tied to right-wing ideologues like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny. MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, and teachers—anyone who has been left behind by rising inequality.
In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny postwar California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the devoutly religious suburbs of Michigan, where the industry built its political influence, to stadium-size conventions where today’s top sellers preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffett, and President Donald Trump, all while eroding public institutions and the social safety net, then profiting from the chaos. Along the way, Read delves into the stories of those devastated by the majority-female industry: a veteran in Florida searching for healing; a young mom in Texas struggling to feed her children; a waitress scraping by in Brooklyn.
A wild trip down an endless rabbit hole of greed and exploitation, Little Bosses Everywhere exposes multilevel marketing as American capitalism’s stealthiest PR campaign, a cunning grift that has shaped nearly everything about how we live, and whose ultimate target is democracy itself.
©2025 Bridget Read (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“[A] deeply reported thrill ride-slash-horror story. This book is fascinating. And scary as hell.”—Vulture
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Story
Featuring thirty-five puzzling stories, Mysteries of the National Parks takes listeners to every corner of our diverse and beautiful country. You'll explore some of the most beloved national park units, including Yellowstone National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Blue Ridge Parkway, Ford's Theatre National Historic Site, and many more!
By: Mike Bezemek
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Second Life
- Having a Child in the Digital Age
- By: Amanda Hess
- Narrated by: Amanda Hess
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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As an internet culture critic for The New York Times, Amanda Hess had built a reputation among readers as a sharp observer of the seductions and manipulations of online life. But when Hess discovered she was pregnant with her first child, she found herself unexpectedly rattled by a digital identity crisis of her own. In the summer of 2020, a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious abnormality in Hess’s baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers.
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Every mother should read this book
- By Mariya Mayer on 05-18-25
By: Amanda Hess
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Tequila Wars
- Jose Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico
- By: Ted Genoways
- Narrated by: Andrew Joseph Perez
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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At the dawn of the twentieth century, José Cuervo inherited his family's humble distillery, La Rojeña, in the Tequila Valley. Within a decade, it would become Mexico's leading producer of tequila. But when the Mexican Revolution erupted, a charge of treason and a death threat against him by Pancho Villa forced Cuervo to flee. In Tequila Wars, award-winning author Ted Genoways restores Cuervo to his place as a key player in Mexico's formative period. Before the revolution, Cuervo's acclaim spread worldwide, and once war broke out, Cuervo remained an impresario, kingmaker, and cultural force.
By: Ted Genoways
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Bear Witness
- The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land
- By: Ross Halperin
- Narrated by: Perry Daniels
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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As young men, Kurt Ver Beek, an American sociologist, and Carlos Hernández, a Honduran schoolteacher, devoted their lives to helping the poor. But it wasn't until they moved to an extraordinarily dangerous neighborhood in Honduras that they came to a radical conclusion: The charity world was combating poverty incorrectly. In gripping prose, journalist Ross Halperin chronicles how these two best friends became quasi vigilantes and charged into a series of life-and-death battles.
By: Ross Halperin
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The Work of Empire
- War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines
- By: Justin F. Jackson
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the US Army seemed minuscule and ill-equipped for global conflict. Yet over the next fifteen years, its soldiers defeated Spain and pacified nationalist insurgencies in both Cuba and the Philippines. Despite their lack of experience in colonial administration, American troops also ruled and transformed the daily lives of the 8 million people who inhabited these tropical islands.
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They Poisoned the World
- Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals
- By: Mariah Blake
- Narrated by: Beth Hicks, Mariah Blake
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2014, after losing several friends and relatives to cancer, an unassuming insurance underwriter in Hoosick Falls, New York, began to suspect that the local water supply was polluted. When he tested his tap water, he discovered dangerous levels of forever chemicals. This set off a chain of events that led to 100 million Americans learning their drinking water was tainted. Although the discovery came as a shock to most, the U.S. government and the manufacturers of these toxic chemicals had known about their hazards for decades.
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Devastating. If you don't know, you need to.
- By Kristen on 05-08-25
By: Mariah Blake
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Personhood
- The New Civil War over Reproduction
- By: Mary Ziegler
- Narrated by: Jesse Abeel
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Personhood chronicles the internal struggles and changing ideas about race, sex, religion, war, corporate rights, and poverty that shaped the personhood struggle over half a century. The book explores how Americans came to take for granted that fetal personhood requires criminalization and suggests that other ways of valuing both fetal life and women's equality might be possible.
By: Mary Ziegler
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The Price of Experience
- Money, Power, Image, and Murder in Los Angeles
- By: Randall Sullivan
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 36 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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When it first came to the public’s attention in the fall of 1986, the story of the Billionaire Boys Club and its leader, Joe Hunt, a young man labeled a “yuppie Charles Manson” by the prosecutor, was splashed across headlines and TV screens throughout the nation. The story of rich kids, flagrant excess, and multiple murders fascinated the American public, but deeper truths lay buried beneath. The saga was so complex that neither its scope nor its implications could be clearly discerned—that is, until The Price of Experience was published in 1996.
By: Randall Sullivan
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Ponzinomics
- The Untold Story of Multi-Level Marketing
- By: Robert L. FitzPatrick
- Narrated by: Robert L. FitzPatrick
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Ponzinomics by Robert L. FitzPatrick, author of False Profits, is the first comprehensive account of how "multi-level marketing" was created in America, escaped criminal and civil prosecution, and spread all over the world. It is the first book to fully explain how the legitimate business of "direct selling" was turned into pyramid recruiting. Ponzinomics reveals how multi-level marketing helped to lay a foundation on Main Street of pervasive deception, financial self-destruction, authoritarian leader-worship, and economic make-believe.
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"Glorified Pyramid Schemes"
- By RedGiraffeMan on 05-27-22
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Oklahoma Scoundrels
- History’s Most Notorious Outlaws, Bandits & Gangsters
- By: Laurence J. Yadon, Robert Barr Smith
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Early Oklahoma was a haven for violent outlaws and a death trap for deputy U.S. marshals. The infamous Doolin gang's OK Hotel gunfight left five dead. Killers like Bible-quoting choir leader Deacon Jim Miller wreaked havoc. Gunslinger femme fatale Belle Starr specialized in horse theft. Wannabe outlaws like Al Jennings traded train robbing for politics and Hollywood films. And Elmer McCurdy's determination and inept skill earned him a carnival slot and the nickname "the Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up."
By: Laurence J. Yadon, and others
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Selling the Dream
- The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans
- By: Jane Marie
- Narrated by: Jane Marie
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Peabody and Emmy Award–winning journalist Jane Marie expands on her popular podcast The Dream to expose the scourge of multilevel marketing schemes and how they have profited off the evisceration of the American working class.
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Surprisingly Fun
- By Flamingo Girl #3 on 03-14-25
By: Jane Marie
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The Ceely Rose Murders at Malabar Farm
- By: Mark Sebastian Jordan
- Narrated by: Mark Sebastian Jordan
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The people of mid-Ohio's Pleasant Valley went on with their normal lives that cold and rainy spring of 1896, not knowing that young Ceely Rose was brooding. She'd been told to forget her obsession with handsome Guy Berry. She'd been told about the danger of Rough-on-Rats poison. She'd heard about murdering those who stand in the way of love. By the time she was done, her family would be dead and others threatened. Later, the place where these crimes took place became Malabar Farm, the estate of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and conservationist Louis Bromfield.
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Ceely Rose
- By Theresa Atashkar on 05-03-25
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Girl on Girl
- How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
- By: Sophie Gilbert
- Narrated by: Sophie Gilbert
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and “riot grrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization.
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Very lucid, clever, bright
- By boo the cat on 05-14-25
By: Sophie Gilbert
Fascinating
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Well researched.
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An interesting history
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