Earn Money In Your Spare Time & Make Storytown Famous
Cults of personality! Conspiracy theories! Ponzi schemes! Multilevel marketing! Cults!!!
Why do people keep falling for this stuff? With my unrelenting skepticism I feel like a grumpy, stick-in-mud kill-joy. Why not give in to it? Live a little! Get rich quick! Solve your problems!
My wife Kerry and I have been members of a small podcast listening “club” since early in the pandemic. We meet once a week and discuss an episode of whatever podcast the group has decided on. We’ve never had an official “theme”; for no reason in particular we started out with the very entertaining Wind of Change, which contains a healthy dose of conspiracy theory. But for some reason we then fell into a number of programs involving cults, or multilevel marketing, or both. We also departed from a strict adherence to the podcast format to watch The Vow, the HBO series that examines the self-improvement (and sex) “cult” called NXIVM, founded and led by the inexplicably “charismatic” Keith Raniere. (I’ll skip the volleyball jokes, but you will enjoy spotting NXIVM’s sweatband-festooned “Vanguard” lookalike at the end of SNL’s “Murder Show”.)
“Get rich quick” schemes are perennially appealing and yet never pan out. Cult followers believe they have found the answer. Conspiracy theorists think they have the inside scoop on what’s really going on. Maybe I’m inventing a connection, but I think there’s something in common among all these — a suspension of conventional disbelief and some kind of non-rational belief in an “answer”. All seem to reflect our very human discomfort with uncertainty and our hunger for solutions.
That hunger is so great that there are get-rich schemes that involve no actual product. In the “airplane game” you simply pay to join (frequently $1000 or more), then wait for others whom you recruit to pay you, and then for those whom they recruit to … you get the idea. Get in early and get rich real quick, sometimes in a matter of days.
Note that, if everyone who joins an MLM (multi-level marketing) or Ponzi scheme recruits just 2 new people each day, the entire population of Planet Earth will have been enlisted by the end of the month. Just sayin’.
Well, as it sometimes happens, during the course of our podcast club’s listening and discussing, all this craziness filtered through my brain and came out in a song — “The One”. Here it is, and apologies if I offend anyone:
Storytown has a great band and great (IMHO) songs. But we need to grow our audience. And you know what grows real fast? A multilevel marketing scheme! If Keith Raniere can pull this kind of thing off, I don’t see why Storytown can’t as well. So here goes:
The sign-up page is under construction, but email me at guy@storytownband.com if you’re interested in this can’t-lose, win-win-win-win opportunity.
Here are the podcasts and shows that inspired “The One”:
The Vow
The Dream (season 1)
The Missing Cryptoqueen
Betting on Zero
Murder on Middle Beach
Please send me your thoughts about anything, either in the comments on this page or by emailing me directly at guy@storytownband.com. And go ahead and share this post with a friend who might enjoy it - do it! Until next week….