
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
“Gripping and instructive. . . . Lucid and engaging . . . . [Bridget Read] sketches a vivid portrait of a cultish culture.”—The Washington Post
“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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Story
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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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Millennial women needed this book.
- By Nina Sreshta on 06-08-25
By: Sophie Gilbert
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The Family Dynamic
- A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success
- By: Susan Dominus
- Narrated by: Susan Dominus
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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An Olympic athlete. An award-winning novelist. A successful entrepreneur. All raised under one roof. What can we learn from those families whose children aim high and succeed, sometimes in widely varied fields? Just as important: What were the costs along the way, and what can we glean from their travails and triumphs? The acclaimed New York Times journalist Susan Dominus offers compelling profiles of six such families in search of the factors that led to their success—was it an inherited quality, a specific way of parenting, the influence of a sibling, or a twist of luck?
By: Susan Dominus
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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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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
Fascinating
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Great book
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Well researched.
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An interesting history
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