
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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“[A] deeply reported thrill ride-slash-horror story. This book is fascinating. And scary as hell.”—Vulture
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“Fascinating. . . . Read upends everything we thought we knew about multilevel marketing. . . . It may be nonfiction, but Little Bosses Everywhere reads like a work of narrative fiction.”—Katie Couric Media
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- By: Kate Summerscale
- Narrated by: Nicola Walker
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.
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A thoroughly researched time
- By Caitlyn Harrison on 06-03-25
By: Kate Summerscale
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The Right People
- The Social Establishment in America
- By: Stephen Birmingham
- Narrated by: Jason Leikam
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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An enlightening and entertaining inside look at the lifestyles of America's extremely wealthy from the bestselling author of "Our Crowd" It's no secret that the rich are different from the rest of us. But the rich, as author Stephen Birmingham so insightfully points out, are also different from the very rich. There's Society, and then there's Real Society, and it takes multiple generations for families of the former to become entrenched in the latter.
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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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Important documentation of one woman's honesty
- By TreasureHunter on 06-12-25
By: Amanda Hess
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How to Be Well
- Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time
- By: Amy Larocca
- Narrated by: Amy Larocca
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Peloton. Pilates. Biohacking. Colonics. Ashwagandha. Today, the wellness industry is a $3.7 trillion behemoth that touches us all. In this timely and clear-eyed book, journalist Amy Larocca peels back the layers behind the wellness movement and reckons with its promises and profits. How did we get here and how did the idea of wellness become integrated with women's lives? And how did we end up spending so much money on products that may not work at all?
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Couldn’t finish it
- By Susan Smith on 06-03-25
By: Amy Larocca
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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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Stolen Fragments
- Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts
- By: Roberta Mazza
- Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2012, Steve Green, billionaire and president of Hobby Lobby, announced a purchase of a Biblical artefact—a fragment of papyrus carrying lines from Paul's letter to the Romans, and dated to the second century CE. Noted scholar Roberta Mazza was stunned. When was this piece discovered, and how could Green acquire such a rare item? The answers, which Mazza spent the next ten years uncovering, came as a shock: the fragment had come from a famous collection held at Oxford University, and its rightful owners had no idea it had been sold.
By: Roberta Mazza
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Exile Economics
- What Happens if Globalisation Fails
- By: Ben Chu
- Narrated by: Ben Chu
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In Exile Economics, Ben Chu lays out the dangers of the current obsession with isolationism. By focusing on some key internationally traded commodities - agriculture, energy, metals and high-technology - he demonstrates just how thoroughly enmeshed and almost unfathomably interconnected our economies have become. Exile Economics will be an essential guide to this new world in all its promise and peril.
By: Ben Chu
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Uncredited
- Women's Overlooked, Misattributed & Stolen Work
- By: Allison Tyra
- Narrated by: Allison Tyra
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Women's accomplishments across history are showcased as aberrations or surprising facts. Little thought is often given to the reasons why most of our lauded scientists, reporters, sports stars, politicians, and businesspeople all seem to be men. Uncredited proves that not only have there been hundreds of ground-breaking women in all professions, but that their accomplishments have been overlooked, denigrated, or downright repressed by their male colleagues or historians.
By: Allison Tyra
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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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Why did I download this book?
- By Rehlander Reviews on 07-01-25
By: Sophie Gilbert
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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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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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Proof
- The Art and Science of Certainty
- By: Adam Kucharski
- Narrated by: Nathaniel Priestley
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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An award-winning mathematician shows how we prove what’s true, and what to do when we can’t.
By: Adam Kucharski
Fascinating
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Great book
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Well researched.
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An interesting history
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