 This topic is going to get deep. Hey friends, it's Madison Harnish back in my blue kitchen for another crazy video. And well, crazy is definitely the right word to describe this because this video is going to be a little bit different today. Today I'm going to be talking about how MLMs target stay-at-home moms. So we're really going to dive into MLMs and their connection and targeting of stay-at-home moms. And then after that, I do want to talk or touch a little bit on the anti MLM community and how maybe we can be more effective at influencing change on MLMs as a whole. If you enjoy deep dives into scams and unethical business practices, you'll probably like this channel. So please subscribe and maybe even click the bell so you can be notified when I upload a new video if you want to. And well, let's get into the video. If you're familiar with multi-level marketing companies, then you're probably familiar with the type of recruits that they normally have, the humbots, the Karens, the Facebook moms. But have you ever wondered why? Why do MLMs go after the stay-at-home mom types? And why do a lot of these women join? Well, first, I want to go into some posts from MLM distributors that are very, very obviously targeted towards this demographic so that maybe we can learn more about the tactics that MLM distributors use to target and recruit stay-at-home moms. Hard is struggling to put food on the table. Hard is parents saying no to their kids all the time. Hard is dropping your kids off at a daycare so they can spend their days with someone else. Hard is paying those daycare fees after working all week. Hard is having to ask your parents for money. Hard is not being able to get time off work when you are sick or when your kids are sick. Hard is missing moments. Hard is wondering how you're going to pay your rent or bills. Hard is not being able to fill up your gas tank to full, leaving you with half a tank or less until the next payday. Hard is arguing with your significant other about finances. Hard is working a 40-plus hour week and never being able to afford a holiday. Hard is living paycheck to paycheck. These are daily struggles for so many people. This business is not hard, nowhere near as hard as some of the things I've listed. Being able to make an income from home has changed my life and so many others. I get to spend all day with this precious girl and my amazing man because of this business. If you're ready for a change, comment below. You can see from this post that this person is targeting people that are dealing with very specific issues that have to do with childcare, that have to do with affording their family, having a lifestyle where they can spend time with their family and still make a decent income. These are topics that most stay-at-home moms can relate to and it really, really plays on their emotions. You know, you feel guilty for having to say no to your kids. You're upset that you're struggling to put food on the table. You're upset that you have to work and miss maybe some moments with your children. You're upset that you have to pay for a daycare when you want to spend time with your kids but also bring in income at the same time. And posts like these are preying on those emotions that a lot of not only women but of course men that are family members really feel. Here's another post. The top is kind of cut off but this is more the important part. It says, all my money to watch my babies crying face, crying face, crying face. I hated it. I missed so much. I'm so grateful someone shared this gift called Unique with me a few years back that has changed my life in so many ways. My favorite thing now is that I raise my babies, I kiss my boo-boos. I'm the primary influence. I never miss a moment and I never thought that was going to be possible for us. So what frustrates me about this is it's very predatory because we all know that FTC has done a very extensive study on how many people make money in an MLM company and 99% of people lose money, 99%. So we know for a fact that this person is not making money but this post is aimed as if they're this successful business entrepreneur type of person that now gets to have it all and raise their children as well. It's a dream, a false dream that a lot of people want so badly and so it's really targeting vulnerable people who are feeling guilty for not spending much time with their children and are feeling guilty for having to work long hours so that they could provide for their children. It's illegal to make false income claims but to say that you have time with your children and that you have a life now where you can provide for them, that's not exactly making false income claims which is why they're able to make this claim so often. This one. Okay, so I know I'm not the only mom who is just madly in love with their kids and would do anything to stay home with them. Yes, most mothers are in love with their kids. I know I'm not the only mom who's in love with their kids. Yes, because most moms are in love with their kid. This speaks to most mothers and saying I would do anything to stay home with them. That's such a guilt trip. It's mom's guilting other moms for businesses that they have to run, for jobs that they have to have. It's mom's shaming other moms. Let's stop with the mom shame. Let's stop. If you're a mom who enjoys going to work and doesn't mind leaving your kids, this doesn't apply to you. That phrase is just so anchoring to me because it's shaming mothers who have to work and if they say no to this business opportunity, it's, oh, you just enjoy going to work and leaving your kids alone. No, I just know that I'm not going to make any money in an MLM scheme and that I need to actually provide for my children so they can go to college and have a future because I do love my children. This is shaming mothers who feel that way. It's shaming mothers who need to work and bring in income for their family and I'm just so disgusted by it if I'm being honest. Did you know 70.1% of mothers with children under 18 either have a job or are looking for work? That means out of a thousand women who have children, 700 of them have to leave their precious babies every single day. Why leave them if you don't have to? I started this business at 19 and within only six months, I built myself a full-time income on top of $22,000 in bonuses just from Facebook. Also, I never have to leave this little girl again. I want to help you do the same with a little diamond emoji. Well, like I said, the FTC found that 99% of people in MLM companies lose money, lose money and that has to do with profit. So not just the money that you have coming in, but the money you're spending on a business. A business that spends more money than it makes will run out a business. Trust me on that one from experience. Like actually, it doesn't even necessarily matter how much you make, but I still would very, very much doubt that she's built herself a full-time income personally off of statistics. This I think is a really important post made by someone defending herself and why she thinks that joining an MLM company is not in the best interest of her children. So I'm going to read that one. Ah, another MLM. So what's the amazing thing about this then? Magic dust pills, emu oil. The MLM rep says no magic over here, just an opportunity to work from home. As we know, this is not necessarily the case. Working means it's a real job providing real income and unfortunately most MLM companies don't provide you real income. Then this person says, just like all the other opportunities that prey on people who need money and brainwash them for your own gain, sacrificing friends for downline, lying to potential customers, spending hours and hours posting your adverts in any group you can find. That's no opportunity. It's a burden to everyone, not just the poor schmuck that is scraping the barrel of the oversaturated market trying to get their cut of the profit, which... Wow, she could not have explained that better. Then the MLM representative said, Is it really a burden though? When I'm currently sat here on a free leaders retreat in Spain with my team, as I type this, I can't help but disagree with a few of your points. But that's fine for all of us to have opinions, have a lovely Sunday. And then this person responds, collapse back. Yes, it is. When I am on Facebook, I am not spending time with my family. When I am answering emails, I am not listening to my partner tell me about his day. When I'm in a retreat in Spain, my children are missing their mummy because I am being selfish and not thinking of their needs first. Start living in the real world. Your Facebook friends secretly hate you as you constantly pester them to buy products. Every admin of every group hates you each time they delete another one of your secretive adverts. There are some very vulnerable people out there. And I pray that you do not get your hands on them and exploit them just as you yourself have been exploited and brainwashed by your upline. And while that's a really harsh message, I have to agree with what she's saying. I have to agree that a lot of these MLM humbots claim that you're spending time with your family, getting to be there for your children. But when you're replying to Facebook comments constantly, when you're constantly wrapped up in the MLM world of retreats and conferences and conference calls, you're not actually spending time with your kids. You're still working. It's the same thing as any other job. Same exact thing. The only time that you're actually spending time with your children is if you're on personal time, your own personal time, or if you are a stay-at-home mother, which is a respectable thing. In fact, I would say I think it's more respectable to be a stay-at-home mom and fully care for your children than to join an MLM where you're distracted with going in all these groups, trying to secretly advertise your product, message and spam people instead of actually spending time with your children. In my opinion, just being a stay-at-home mom is more respectable because you're actually not losing money to an MLM scheme. It's strange to me because most of these posts are moms targeting other moms. Since they're similar and they've dealt with similar things, they know exactly how to pray on other mothers' emotions, how to hit them where it hurts, and how to make them feel guilty and rope them in to this business opportunity. They know exactly what to say to make a mom feel like signing up for an MLM is the best thing that they could do for their children, when in reality, it's really not. But an important distinction that I think needs to be made in the anti-MLM community is that MLM distributors that are targeting vulnerable mothers are vulnerable mothers themselves that have been targeted. They themselves truly believe that MLMs are the best things for their family and their children because they were convinced when they were vulnerable in the exact same way that they're trying to convince others. I want to read a part of this reddit post that's from a marketer's opinion that explains why MLMs target stay-at-home moms. Stay-at-home moms are often lonely and crave social interaction. Husband is off at work, mom is spending a lot of time in the house and taking after the kids. Mom is not getting time for social interaction with other adults. Mom is pressured for time, right? Kids' activities, housework, running errands. She doesn't have much time to herself, let alone to take on a job or launch a business of her own. And mom should be able to do it all, have it all. And if they settle for just being a homemaker, then she must not be an empowered woman or trying hard enough. Now, imagine I'm your friend or relative, someone you have trust with and an upline recruiter. Hey, hun, I was just thinking about you. I started my own business and I was thinking you'd be perfect member for my team. Do you want to earn some extra money to help your family? All it requires is a small investment to get started and you can earn as much as you want. Based on how much time and effort you put in. Oh, you don't know anything about marketing or selling? That's okay. We can teach you everything you need to know. Why don't you come hang out with me and my team members? We girls have to watch out for each other, you know. So then he described something that I'm familiar with from my own personal studies with marketing. There's a few different types of people, but the main two sectors of people are those that value logic over emotions and those that value emotions over logic. People that are very easily influenced into making a purchasing decision or a life decision based off of emotions and will at times completely ignore logic if their emotions are strong enough. And this marketer says, MLMs firmly target the emotions over logic camp. Does it matter that they're not actually a business owner, that they're not actually an entrepreneur, that they don't know how to evaluate profit and loss, that they don't know what the word profit actually means, that they don't know anything about how to analyze if a product or service is competitive and that their entire customer model is flawed? No, because their emotions have been manipulated to drown out all of that with vague information, promises of success and leveraging their emotions and insecurities against them. You don't need negativity in your life, hun. They're just haters. I think that this is a very, very important distinction to make because emotions influence us and they influence how we act. If we feel such a strong emotion, like love for our children, love for our family, which is the strongest emotion that a mother can feel, if we feel that emotion and someone plays with that emotion, they prey on that emotion, they rope us in with that emotion of love for our family and make us feel that if we join this MLM, we'll be doing what's best for the people we love. That will trump all logic. That will trump what anyone else can say because these women love their family and they are convinced that what they're doing will be best for their family. Even further, if they truly believe this, then their actions can be manipulated because at the end they're doing this for their family so they will do whatever it takes, which includes all the scammy emails, all the manipulative practices and even the really, really crummy things that a lot of women have said that I've even reacted to on my channel here. A person can easily be swayed into doing things like that if they feel like they need to do it for the sake of their family. Unfortunately, this has affected so many female friendships. As women target other women, it's caused a lot of cruelties within groups of mothers and women friendships. Chicago Tribune has an article titled MLM ruining female friendships. There's a quote in there where a woman says, I thought I had made a genuine connection with a mom I met online and a mom group. But then this woman declined the MLM representative's offer to join her Beachbody team. And that MLM rep that was part of this mom group that this woman thought she was becoming friends with completely stopped talking to her and completely shut her out. It really hurt. I even invited her and her child to my son's first birthday party. I felt like an idiot thinking we were actually friends. And other women have claimed that they've experienced being constantly pursued for a get together by MLM friends to the point where they feel like they're being stalked. These women that have been emotionally targeted that are a part of these MLMs are being taught to go out and target other women in similar circumstances, which has created this cycle of women preying on other women, of women hating on other women. And it's just overall not good. So where does this kind of predatory behavior come from? Why do so many women go from your friend or a family member to the infamous humbot that's sending robotic like cells messages to everyone they know? It's how they're taught to act. These vulnerable women are all of a sudden told they're so solution to all their problems and are submersed in a culture where acting aggressive and predatory is the normal. Have you ever had a toxic friendship where a person was a bad influence on you and convinced you to do bad things? Well, I believe MLMs are really just a larger version of this. I remember a time when I was in a really toxic friend group and I said things that I didn't really believe in morally as a person. And I did things that I didn't agree with or looking back, I thought were terrible things to do. But at the time I felt like I was clouded by the noise of what these bad friends were saying and swayed into doing things that I would have normally never have done. We see it in the beach body video that I made where I talk about the training material that's distributed to MLM representatives and it's telling them and encouraging them to do things that are immoral and it's from the company itself. These kinds of actions all come from the top. The CEO of Beach Body, for example, who I must note is not a stay-at-home mom, encourages everyone to act this way in his company and you can see it from his Instagram posts. There's that infamous post of Carl with his Shakeology shake that says, cheers to everyone dealing with all this anxiety and turbulence and my heart goes out especially to those already affected by this illness. I appreciate the healthcare system which has to manage its normal day-to-day operations and at the same time anticipate being overwhelmed by the reality and fear of COVID-19. And more than ever, I'm proud of the trainers, coaches and customers who promote a healthy lifestyle every day to help people avoid the situation altogether. Smart nutrition choices exercise at home. Avoiding contact is an important defense. Building and reinforcing your health and immune system is important offense. Unknowingly, our business model of people helping people right from home and our product offering of in-home fitness and a healthy nutrition has turned us into an important resource during an acute situation. Calling all heroes, let's get to work. So the CEO of Beachbody is encouraging all the Beachbody consultants during this time to be reaching out to people during a vulnerable time when people can't spend money, when people are losing their jobs and their loved ones are dying. He is encouraging his consultants to be reaching out to people with this business opportunity. This comes from the top. If your CEO of your company encourages you to do something, you're gonna normalize it. You're gonna think it's fine. Right there, you have an example of how all of these actions are coming from the top and encouraged. There is that whole post of the guy with the sign that says, stop posting your home workouts. And he posted a sign saying, keep posting your home workouts. You're inspiring people. And he said, if us weekly thinks it's a good idea to use their platform to belittle the heroes who are inspiring millions to stay active, see second photo. I'm gonna use my platform to turn it around to show you the love and celebrate you heroes, no matter what program you're doing. Also, can I just make note? He's using the very targeted and very intentional word of heroes to try and uplift his consultants and make them feel empowered with what they're doing, which is reaching out to people during this very vulnerable time and trying to recruit them into their business. It's not a heroic thing to do. The real heroes are the doctors, the food service workers, and the people that have to work right now to help save others. It's not people who have been working for homes selling fitness classes. And you see how manipulative this post is. He's encouraging people to be proud about what they're selling, to be out there encouraging them to continue to push their MLM products. And the way that he's wording it is very manipulative to make you feel empowered to be doing so. They're genuinely told that they are heroes for doing this, that they are heroes for pushing their product on vulnerable people right now in this time. They're being told that they are heroes. So of course they're gonna think that what they're doing is good. And of course they're gonna keep doing it. And they are going to get so clouded with this idea of being a hero that they're not going to be grounded back to the real world of logic and what's morally and ethically right in this time. When I compare MLMs to cults or to mean girls, it's because they submerse you in their culture and encourage you to do things that people on the outside see as predatory or wrong. You become so involved in the social aspect and the conferences and the hype that you lose sight of the fact that you're not really making any money and become out of touch with reality. It's a trap that we all could fall into. And a lot of us did. You can see the countless videos and stories on a ton of different people's MLM experiences that have come out of the MLM and realized how wrong it all really was. And this is why I have to talk about my next topic. I really have to confess, lately I've been feeling really conflicted with the anti MLM community. I see myself as a part of this community and see sources like r slash anti MLM on Reddit as incredible resources that have brought to light a lot of the unethical recruitment practices that a lot of MLMs use. I love so many anti MLM YouTube channels so much that they inspired me to make anti MLM content myself. But I've been reflecting on some of the ways that I have been reacting to the posts made by MLM representatives. I think that there's a really negative tone not only against these MLM companies but against the women in these MLM companies. And I'm not sure how I feel about it. I feel like it's important to bring these shady practices and unethical posts and comments to light. I really do. But I don't think it's gonna create any real or positive change unless we change our approach. And here's why. These women are us. We are on the same team. We are working towards the same cause. 90% of my audience is women. And while I appreciate and love the 10% men who are watching my channel and do think that you guys can help with this cause too, I also want to point out the irony in these analytics. The anti MLM community and the MLM community have much of the same people within them. We are on the same team. These women are not evil or malicious. Well, most of them. Most MLM representatives are just vulnerable people who have been targeted and have had their emotions manipulated and used against them. Most people in MLMs are women very similar to those that watch my channel who have just been convinced that MLMs are the best solution out there to their problems. And they've been taught that they have to act a certain way and have been submerged in a culture where acting predatory and aggressive is accepted and encouraged. I think that this was best said actually in a wonderful anti MLM channel, Kiki Chanel in this clip right here. And they can take advantage of that. If you think about it, no one's ever joined an MLM when they were at the peak of their lives, right? Nobody ever starts these things when they're just living large doing great. It just doesn't happen that way. They prey on vulnerable people and that's what they attract. These women are vulnerable women at bad times in their life who are desperate to make things right for themselves and have been told that this is the way when it's not. These women are our friends, our family members and our loved ones. And they're in a toxic relationship with an MLM company. When they view videos or posts of people reacting to those in their MLM community in a negative way, all that they are going to see is haters. And what do MLM appliance say? You don't need negativity in your life, hun. They're just haters. And that's all that they are going to see and any hope of getting any message across will be completely lost. It's like when you're in a toxic relationship and someone tells you that that person just isn't good for you or isn't healthy, all you're gonna say is they don't know what they're talking about or my relationship is great. They're just a hater because they're single or they're just jealous. I think the same applies for people who are sucked into an MLM company. I still have hope for many of these MLM distributors and I think that they are capable of seeing reality and doing good. While I still believe that MLM representatives who do shady and unethical things need to be called out for it. For example, this post that a subscriber sent to me of an MLM representative targeting someone with cancer and guilting them saying that they have to join the MLM so that they can leave something behind for their son. That's disgusting and immoral and no matter what should be called out and that person should be shamed for. But I also believe that love and compassion needs to be a part of this movement. There are no sides, no MLM versus anti MLM. There are no women hating other women. All there are are vulnerable women in a toxic business structure and concerned women and men who are trying to help them. This is why I'm going to be uploading another video today. It's a short video that's aimed to be a positive message that you can send to women who are currently in an MLM. This video is going to be kind and compassionate but also depict the harsh realities of joining an MLM company. And hopefully this video will be moving and convincing enough that we can cultivate a positive message for those that are currently sucked into MLM companies and let them know that they have love and support and that they are capable of greater and better things than being a part of an MLM company. Let's all remember that the real evil are the MLM companies themselves that cultivate unethical practices, not the people who are victims to these companies. And that's the end of my rant. I hope that my message comes across and you guys can see my intent with this video. And if you like this video, definitely give it a thumbs up and share it. I really want to spread this positive message. I think that it's essential to the movement that's being created at this moment. And I hope you guys are staying safe and healthy and doing well. And until next time, have a good one.