​I love surfing. Well, that’s not quite right. I love the idea of surfing. The exotic locations, the commitment to something so elemental, ephemeral, and violent: the wave.

I recently finished reading Barbarian Days, a story about two young men who drag themselves malnourished and broke to the other side of the world to chase it. They would camp out by the sea and gnaw on rotting fruit rinds just to get in the water at sunrise.

The truth is, I love surfing the way a sixth-grader loves the popular girl going into high school: with a combination of impossible longing and fear. And that uncomfortable crush has never been stronger than it was last summer, when I went to Hawaii for the first time with my family.

*

I don’t think I’m alone here. I’ll occasionally see photos of friends on vacation, crouched uncertainly atop a rental board or holding it underarm while they stand on the beach, looking wistfully out there.

I get it.

Thing is, I don’t think it’s possible to really convey what they’re feeling. In conversations (or an essay like this one) it’s very easy to come across like the guy who he caught a glimpse of the Virgin Mary in a piece of burnt toast. You might have and I’m sure it really was incredible, but I’m also having a tough time getting as excited about it as you are.

This difference—between actually experiencing this thing and trying to tell your friends about it—sort of mirrors the dissonance between watching someone surf and acknowledging who is, at least occasionally, doing the surfing. The dude. The burnout. The artist. The wanderer.[1] The vocal fry sizzling, van-living, beachside-camping kid who’s going to get a real job soon he swears.

For example, arguably the best surfer in the world right now is a 23-year-old named John John Florence[2] who is impossible to confuse with anyone other than a surfer. Bleach blonde hair, wiry frame. He’s sort of distractible in his interviews. Uses words like “gnarly.” He just came out with the world’s biggest budget surf film to date called View from a Blue Moon (for which I have watched the trailer well over a dozen times) and in that movie/trailer, he is another person entirely.[3] Seeing him stuck in a chair for an interview is about as comfortable as watching a sea turtle drag its big, stupid body across a beach, but watching him in the trailer is like the first time you realized that thing is actually made to swim.

​The difference isn’t just huge—it’s transformative.

For me, on the other hand, getting in the water had precisely the inverse effect. Surfers have their own term for beginners: they’re called kooks. As surfers know, and as kooks quickly learn, we do not belong in the path of the great forces at work in the ocean. The wave inflicts levels of physical and psychological humiliation, and other surfers compound this humiliation to scare us off and keep us out. If you ascribe to the belief that this is more sacred art than sport, then we kooks are obnoxious tourists in a holy place.

Which is to say, I’ve been a beginner at a lot of things, but never has it been quite as embarrassing as it was being a kook in Hawaii.

*

I had taken a surfing lesson once when I was in Mexico. We took a shuttle to a beachside hostel where we spent the first 10 minutes on the sand learning to pop up and down. That was the whole lesson. Just get from your belly to your feet as fast as you can.

So when we got to Hawaii, there would be no lessons. All I wanted was a board and directions to a spot where I wouldn’t die.

As soon as we got to our hotel on Waikiki beach I looked out through the open-air lobby and saw surfers in the water, bobbing like action figures way out at a distant break. Most had parked in this public lot up the side of the harbour where they launched off a rocky pier. Waves didn’t seem too intense. Maybe shoulder-high, I thought to myself. It’s just water for Christ’s sake.

​I went out over there alone for a closer look. In the parking lot, there were vans with surfboards lashed to the roof and pickups with surfboards sticking out of their cabs. A few people were tailgating, sitting on cement parking blocks and huddled around charcoal barbecues, their white flakes rising on currents of hot air.

I walked out on the pier to where the surfers were going in and coming out of the water, stepping gingerly across the gaps in these immovable boulders while crabs scuttled over and around the slick contours. I saw a guy standing there with his surfboard under his arm, watching people who I imagined were his friends in the water. I asked him if he was going in. He said he was. I asked him if this was somewhere someone who hadn’t really surfed before could try and he said absolutely not. He was nice about it, but I got the feeling I had violated some social norm, like asking a stranger to puff on their cigarette. He said I should walk farther down the beach. Here the reef was too shallow and when I fell I would get knocked around pretty good.

I noticed he had an accent and asked where he was from. He said Israel. I asked whether or not he was enjoying his vacation and he told me (rather excitedly) that he actually lived on Oahu. After I walked back to the beach I saw him and the other surfers walking back across the pier, their silhouettes set against the sunset like something you’d see on a postcard. At that moment, nothing in the universe could dispel my impressions of how cool these people were.

Over the next few days I saw him hanging around our hotel’s courtyard, working a booth where he sold wind mobiles. I never approached him again.

*

In the four days I was in Waikiki, the guy at the surf booth urged me not to go surfing because the conditions sucked. But this was Hawaii, and I wasn’t about to let some surf booth operator tell me I shouldn’t go surfing in Hawaii.

Now I couldn’t say for sure whether that first outing was more a result of the shitty conditions or my overwhelming incompetence but I spent a solid hour paddling to spots where the waves just finished breaking (I would soon learn that this is very much a waiting game), trying to stand up on teeny waves that didn’t so much break as collapse into a mushy pile of whitewater, and confusing the shimmering reef under the clear water with what might have been a shark. I also learned what a rash guard is and why people wear them.

So that sucked. But only a few days later, we flew to the island of Maui and we heard about a surf spot close to our apartment complex called Whaler’s Village. It’s an outdoor mall on the beach with a sandy break just a short walk away from some of the hotels.

I rented a board from a hut on the beach, approaching the owner to ask about the conditions. He made a bunch of hand gestures and told me a bunch of things I pretended to understand. Then he handed over a big blue soft-top and I took off towards the water.

*

​The first time I read John Saward’s column for VICE, I remember laughing so hard I had to stop to catch my breath. Here’s the opening paragraph from his piece “Why I Love Watching Ron Jeremy Fuck”:

That’s just the beginning. The rest is just as densely packed with that. Upon finishing my teary-eyed second reading, I dropped whatever it was I was supposed to be working on that day and read everything else he’d published.

If you read VICE, you’ve likely come across something he’s written. He’s mostly known for his meditations on masculinity from his column “We Are Not Men” and, more recently, for his takedowns of various media/celebrity blowhards.

Probably his most popular post entitled “This American Bro: A Portrait of the Worst Guy Ever” appeared continuously in every one of my social media feeds the day it came out. One person who shared it said it was “required reading.”

But beyond sheer incisiveness and wit, the writing also has incredible heart. Last father’s day he wrote about his dad and this Valentine’s Day he wrote an essay on being in love: a series of descriptive scenes that were actually lucid in the same way your own philosophical arguments seem lucid when you’re talking about really impenetrable shit at the bar.

Easily my two favourite pieces, though, are about boxers. His piece on Mike Tyson is one of the best things VICE has ever published and his piece on Joe Frazier might be even better. After I read the Frazier piece I felt, for the first time, like I needed to tell the author how great I thought his story was. I emailed saying I wanted to be able to write like him and asked if we might be able to talk about his work, what he reads, etc.

His response remains one of the most cherished emails I’ve ever received. You can read it in full below.

​Near the end of the 1977 docudrama Pumping Iron there is scene where a few men—who to this day remain some of the most famous bodybuilders of all time—are gathered to celebrate the conclusion of the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the de facto leader of the great bodybuilders is lying supine on a couch, smoking a little pot and wearing a t-shirt that says “Arnold is numero uno.” The other contestants are milling around the tiny room including a freshly defeated Lou Ferrigno. They’re eating fried chicken and—because it’s Lou’s 24th birthday—cake.

Up until this point, the filmmakers had been showcasing the psychological warfare of the recently concluded spectacle, even taking some creative liberties to stage some of the more camera-friendly moments themselves. Throughout the movie, the steely and seemingly untouchable 5-time champ, Arnold, has been carefully working Lou, not so much softening his already fragile psyche as much as dismantling it. The final jab comes in that moment with Lou standing off to the side, as alone as a 6’4” 280-pound mountain of muscle can be in a room of that size.

After a happy birthday song, led by the possibly stoned Austrian, the group starts chanting for a speech, unsympathetic to the fact that Lou—who’s been nearly deaf since childhood and is, in all likelihood, having a pretty shitty birthday—probably doesn’t much care to give one.
Lou smiles: “I got nothing to say, I just want to eat my cake.”

I love that scene and while it might be oversentimental to say it’s heartbreaking, it is surprisingly moving. It’s not tough to imagine it was scripted and used by the filmmakers to put the proverbial bow on everything they had been wrapping up to that point. If that’s true, it worked. Some might argue the events of the film culminate the moment the judges announce the results, but they’d be wrong.

There is only one moment, and it’s when Lou utters those words.

​*

While Pumping Iron, is, at it’s core, just a flick about gawking at fleshy statues, Lou and Arnold make it something more. Lou is denied the win, but he’s also denied any real closure, fading into the background amidst the celebration. This film is very clearly meant to be a comedy but if you reacted like I did to the cake-eating scene, it is also a tragedy.

For the entire movie it seems obvious that Arnold is being set up to be the man who’ll win the Olympia. His journey to the title seems almost effortless, fated, and punctuated by laughs, photo-ops and various homoerotic frolicking with his gym buddies in the sun-kissed city of Venice Beach (he compares ‘the pump’ one gets from lifting to coming, enough said). Lou stands in sharp contrast, training in a dimly lit gym in Brooklyn with people who are definitely not bodybuilders, working—no, struggling, loudly, painfully—to build a body that will beat Arnold. In a follow-up documentary made years later, the filmmakers would describe the bigger and younger Lou as the dark prince that would threaten the golden king.

He finished third.

What you may not have known about Lou is that, as a bodybuilder, he was paid next to nothing and worked as a sheet metal worker for $10 an hour until a friend cut his hand off. Lou left after that. His father, who is depicted in the film as his overbearing coach, was deployed as a character by the filmmakers and wasn’t nearly as involved in Lou’s training as he was made out to be. Even after Arnold retired from bodybuilding following that competition, Lou never won an Olympia.

Yet, the film almost manages to convey all this—gesturing at it through darkened shots, laboured screams and futile resolve—without betraying its tone.  In other words, you’re clearly meant to feel Lou’s pain but you’re also meant to root for Arnold. What’s jarring is the conclusion, the feeling that all is right while what is essentially a poetic injustice hovers just below the surface. Catharsis there is not.

That may sound ridiculous since this film catapulted Lou into the acting role that would eventually define his career. Yet, when we take a step back to consider how the only real non-CGI’d human being to portray the Hulk made his way into the public eye, it’s not only ironic, it’s downright sad. He’s reduced to the kid standing in the corner, watching the others smoke pot and eat cake.

​He just wants to eat his cake, but in that moment they even manage to deny him that.

There is something about the combination of money, caffeine and fraternal support that wrestles hopes and dreams up out of the benign depths of the adolescent imagination. In this student house in uptown Toronto, that’s as true on a Sunday night as it is on any work day. Cars fill the driveway and line the curbs for a few hundred metres on both sides of the street. People are constantly walking in and out of the front door which is just open enough to make you feel ridiculous for knocking. Inside, the walls around the entrance are plastered with the same sort of hideous wallpaper you’d see on the set of a 70’s sitcom. The meltwater from the pile of shoes is soaking the carpet. After a quick “hello” with an acquaintance on his way out, I notice a young man on his cell phone in the living room, pacing like a caged bull while he recites a well-rehearsed sales pitch. It soon becomes obvious that everyone in the house is either giving or receiving this same pitch.

This is the hive. There was supposed to be a big meeting here today—“a house event,” as they’re known—where two very successful young people from Michigan would drive hundreds of kilometers to personally deliver this pitch to anyone interested in Vemma, a nutrition company best known for its healthy energy drinks and multi-level marketing business model. It was cancelled after they were turned around at the border—“some shit with their papers,” I was told—but people are still showing up.

​Instead, I’m here to meet Emilio Nafarrate, a friend and former highschool classmate of mine. He is a Vemma affiliate; someone who both sells this drink and recruits new affiliates. Back when he was still relatively new to the company, he offered me a chance to join, pitching me some variation of what I was now overhearing in the living room.

It begins with a claim that with some elbow grease, a can-do attitude, and the proper guidance from the now wealthy young people who recruited you, it will be within your power to achieve the financial freedom known only to movie stars and professional athletes. They’ll tell you you’ll make residual income after you’ve done enough legwork to establish yourself; like how Donald Trump makes money when you play on his golf course without actually joining your foursome. They’ll tell you when (rarely “if”) you hit a certain rank, the company will provide you with a leased Mercedes Benz or BMW. They’ll tell you this is a product that you—a young person who presumably drinks Redbull, Rockstar, Coke, Sprite, Powerade and Gatorade—should be drinking. They’ll tell you it’s been on Dr. Oz and is the official drink of the Phoenix Suns.

If you don’t know any better, you’ll start looking for the dotted line on which to sign. If you don’t know any better, you’ll see the piddly getcha started fee as a worthy investment. And if you’re like me, before the end of your first meeting, you’ll be deciding whether to personally pick up your first batch of product or get it ordered to your house.

*

​Like many businesses though, the reality is a little different than the pitch. It’s all right there in Vemma’s annual affiliate earnings.[1] Last year over 90% of active affiliates earned under $12,200 which is less than one would make working 20 hours a week at minimum wage. These affiliates were also required to order a certain amount of product every month—about $150 worth—which means that only about 12% made any money at all.

For this reason, Vemma has drawn fire from critics saying it’s a pyramid scheme, an illegal business model where no new money is brought in and members within the company are paid with money that comes from those who are losing money. The truly discomfiting bit is that in these models, people are paid based on how well they can recruit others into the business. But, for reasons that have been enshrined in economic law and common sense, the vast majority cannot make money.[2] People caught up in pyramid schemes will tell you that some new recruits will succeed and, in more sophisticated models, even make more than some of those above them in the hierarchy. That’s true, but the fact remains that the entire framework would crumble if everyone could succeed as promised.

In other words, the problem is not that there are more losers than winners, it’s that the winners unknowingly stand on the backs of the losers.

*

William Keep is the dean of the New Jersey business school. He has served as an expert witness in the prosecution of pyramid schemes for several years and has co-authored a number of papers with a Peter J. Vander Nat, an economist employed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. While he has not personally taken an official stance on the Vemma’s legitimacy, he did issue a warning to his college students about Vemma, saying that they “should know that some MLM companies have been identified as illegal pyramid schemes where almost everyone who joins loses money.”

He says that Vemma “has a tendency to rewrite history” insofar as it “presents some logical arguments that have some huge logical flaws.” With a very tiny bit of digging, I learned that these arguments were equally common in the $8 billion MLM giant Herbalife. For example, both Herbalife and Vemma have partnerships with professional sports teams and according to one member of the hive, “organizations like the NBA just don’t partner with scam companies.” It is treated as bulletproof fact that because David Beckham has Herbalife pasted across the front of his L.A. Glalaxy soccer jersey, the company must be legitimate. Or there’s the well-perpetuated myth that any company with a viable product—or a good product, even according to non-affiliates in Vemma’s case—cannot possibly be a pyramid scheme. Not so.

“Even though the company is selling a viable product and their message is one of developing a retail customer base, companies found to be pyramid schemes were operating businesses where buying in involved purchasing the product and the purpose was to be rewarded when you got people to buy in,” says Keep. While Vemma has approximately nine different methods of compensating its affiliates, the business model is built around those two fundamental points: affiliates must purchase the product on an ongoing basis and they are rewarded when their recruits do the same. There is nothing that requires any of these purchases come from people outside the company.

​And Herbalife? The company recently came under intense scrutiny when Wall Street hedge fund manager Bill Ackman made a $1 billion bet that the company would collapse. As of the time of this writing, it hasn’t and the company has mounted a defense. But even after operating for 34 years, Herbalife has been unable to shake the claims that their business model is—to put it politely—questionable. Vemma has been operating for only 10.

How then, if there are potentially legitimate legal issues with these businesses, do they continue to operate unfettered under the proverbial noses of massive government bureaus like the Federal Trade Commission? Keep wrote a piece for CNBC where he explained that MLM companies “could be legitimate” if they placed an emphasis on its true retail customer base and limited rewards for recruitment. Yet it’s very difficult to prove Vemma affiliates aren’t selling to unaffiliated customers, even though there is zero incentive to do so. According to the numbers released by the company last year (see above), there was an nearly exact[3] 30/70 split between affiliates and customers respectively. No other information about these particular figures was released publicly, and the only other information the company offered after being pressed is that “at no time were customers ever affiliates.” In other words, the company was less than forthcoming about where the money is coming from.

None of this has stopped Internet commenters from trying to hash out this dispute in a predictably mean-spirited manner. Even the more articulate blog, article and video comments are just regurgitated spiels, copied and pasted from elsewhere on the Web. And any commenters that don’t feign cool indifference[4] viciously attack anyone who dares question company wisdom. Here, as in real life, everyone who encounters the business model—and thus, the sales pitch—is swept up in the debate, forced to believe that they are either being duped or presented with a great opportunity. There is no in between. Apathy is alien.

*

It’s getting late and I’m sitting across from Emilio in Andrew Hood’s bedroom. Hood is Nafarrate’s upline, the young man several levels above him in the company or, as Emilio first introduces him with a sarcastic smirk, the “pyramid leader.” He is an unexpected listener for the first part of the interview, leaning against the back wall while he absently plays with earbuds hanging around his neck. At first, the baby-faced 20-year-old is both quiet and unimposing: someone who wouldn’t seem out of place playing the voice of reason in an American Pie movie. Emilio, by contrast, sounds like a sped-up recording (I know because when I slowed down the recording, he didn’t sound like he’d been shot with a tranquilizer dart). This would be surprising if I was meeting him for the first time or didn’t already know how much product he’d consumed.

They give me one of the drinks to try, just to get a sense of how it stacks up against more ubiquitous pick-me-ups. It’s one of the company’s original products, Verve, a red-bull sized can of orange fizz with a slightly sour medicine-y taste. It brings to mind like a chewable multivitamin for kids. I enjoy it and when I tell Andrew and Emilio this they seem unsurprised. When Emilio leaves to take a call, Andrew sits in his place and begins answering questions, “educating” me in defence of the company.

Both are a part of a movement known as the Young People’s Revolution or the YPR which includes all Vemma affiliates under the age of 30. In a news release from January 2013, the company publicly credited this massive body for being “one of the driving forces behind the [30 per cent] increase in sales” in 2012. Last year, that increase jumped to 89 per cent with sales rocketing from $117 million to $221 million[5]. If you’re a young person and you’re a part of Vemma, you’re part of the YPR. It’s made very clear to every potential recruit that success is impossible without the help of your upline. Opting out is just another avenue to failure.
​
“There are three aspects for enrolling somebody in Vemma,” says Hood, “knowledge, credibility, and trust. You and your friend trust each other, but what you lack is the knowledge and credibility.” Hood reckons that at first, any potential affiliate will ask the recruiting affiliate two questions: “how does [the business] work and how much money have you made?” If you’ve just signed up, odds are you don’t really know how the business works nor have you made any money, at which point the pitchee will promptly tell you to fuck off. But, if you can coax them into a house event, where they will meet people who have made money and who do know how the business works, then they’re likely to change their minds. “In fact, I’ve had literally hundreds of people come to my events thinking it’s a pyramid scheme and left enrolling,” Hood says. Here at the hive it’s easy to see why: the heartfelt camaraderie, the promises of mutual success, and dreams of making more money at 25 than the vast majority of the population could squeeze out of their savings at 50, people (like Emilio) have a tendency to “dive right in” with a resounding “fuck it!” That’s just the effect the YPR has.

Of course, following these caffeine-fuelled gatherings, it’s hard to imagine these young people ever consider the more labour-intensive route to success: getting out there and actively selling some drink rather than waxing poetic to other impressionable adolescents about Rolexes and company cars in hopes of cashing in on their recruitment bonus. The YPR fosters this outlook. Plain and simply, their purpose is to put the dream on display. A more cynical reader might see that and say the YPR’s membership has grown fat feasting on the insecurities of young people, luring them away from jobs they don’t want to do, misrepresenting a long shot as a viable means of dealing with mountains of student debt. But such a conclusion is not for the journalist to make.[6]

​*

There is one young man who has recently become the Internet’s foremost authority on all things anti-Vemma. He is a self-styled pariah[7] of the YPR who runs a blog that brings in over 1,000 views a day. In his posts, he methodically dismantles claims made by the company and its affiliates citing research, personal experience, and anecdotes from defected corporate employees. His articles routinely appear near the top of Vemma-related web searches and he says that veteran affiliates have instructed the newbies to avoid his blog. He himself left the company after a friend and mentor confided that many must fail for a few to profit. “You know what I’m talking about man,” YPR pariah later wrote of their conversation, “some of us hit gold the rest pay up.”At the time of his remarkably civil break, he was positioned atop a team of a few hundred affiliates making several hundred dollars a month.

But not all members of the YPR have the same constitution or wherewithal to leave like he did. And that’s not their fault. In fact, this blogger maintains that he’s still friends with many affiliates.

While some newcomers approach the business with a Machiavellian mindset, ruthlessly cutting down those in their way in hopes of achieving success, the consensus among successful affiliates is that those people fail even more often than everyone else. They can’t function in the system. Most of the successful people in this business are well-intentioned and hardworking young people who’ve come to believe that this drink is the key to their financial freedom and are actively committed to evangelizing (or “educating” as they prefer to say) other people. They aren’t trying to fool or mislead potential recruits. Each of them is tangled up in a web of distant promises where the only hope for their own success is to embrace others into the sticky warmth of the fold.

That’s why when Andrew says the only way for him to really succeed is by helping others below him, he’s telling the truth. When Emilio punctuates his sentences with business-building aphorisms—like “we’re not hunters because then people feel hunted, we’re farmers because we grow relationships”—he means it. It’s not that they are being intentionally misleading; it is that misrepresentation has been built into the business model, obscured by the same hopes and dreams that brought these young people onboard in the first place.

When I first signed up for Vemma, I told Emilio that I wanted to do some research before I ordered $500 worth of product and became an active member. Like a good salesman who believes in his product, he didn’t break eye contact and he didn’t get discouraged.

“You’re just going to see a bunch of stuff about it being a scam and shit.”
​
​*

The gap in viewpoints between Vemma’s supporters and critics essentially comes down to odds of success. If you ask Andrew Hood, there is nothing wrong with selling the opportunity to make substantial sums of money, no matter how unlikely. After all, everyone has the same compensation plan.

“The only X-factor is you,” Emilio says repeating a well-worn cliché of the self help genre. It means if you don’t succeed it’s your fault rather than that of any business model that may or may not depend on the failure of the vast majority of its members. Here’s another analogy often used to expound this mantra of personal responsibility: “It’s like if you go get a gym membership but you don’t go into the gym and a month later you go back and say ‘you guys scammed me, I bought this gym membership and I’m not jacked.’ No dude, you didn’t work out, you didn’t run on the treadmill, you didn’t lift weights,” Hood says.

Alex Morton is this viewpoint personified. He’s become the unofficial poster boy of the YPR and at 25, is among the ten highest earners in the company. If you have the pleasure of listening to Alex speak (he’s on YouTube) or perusing his YPR Facebook feed, it will become painfully obvious that he has no time for losers. He’ll belligerently scold laziness, stopping just shy of outright telling his wide-eyed, mouth-breathing audience that he don’t give a fuck if you sign up for Vemma or not. He makes it very clear that hardworking people “will” get rewarded—not “may.” He says it with the same certainty one would use to assert a scientific law. His Facebook feed is peppered with posts that can be crudely summarized as “luck is bullshit” and he’s fond of reminding people that he was once just an Arizona State student getting kicked out dorms and being put on academic probation. My personal favourite post, though, is an image of him in sunglasses and a hoodie posing alongside big bold letters that read: “All dreams are crazy, until…they come true.”

Ill-placed punctuation aside, there is one hypothetical scenario that could undermine this the-only-problem-is-you outlook: What if there were no quitters? What if the company was full of keen, ambitious, young people like him? Would they all, at the very least, make some profit? I tried to get in touch with Morton as well as four other high earning affiliates to ask them just that. I got one, “msg me on fb,” one unfollowed-up “how are you” and one “not interested.” I also got the run-around from the PR company connected to Vemma HQ which, apparently, couldn’t find a single person in a building of more than 200 people who had time for a ten minute phone call or written statement. They had several weeks to do so.[8]

*

By the end of the night, it becomes clear that Andrew would not be happy if I used his name in the article, a sentiment he shares with at least one other affiliate I spoke to. While Andrew made it clear that every word attributed to him should indicate his full support of the company he has good reason to be nervous. YPR pariah says missteps and bad words about the company usually result in names being “dragged through the mud” and even when the Varsity, the student newspaper at the University of Toronto, got in touch with Vemma HQ, the spokesperson did not reveal her full name.

The reality is that this business is a controversial one, and few are willing to go out of their way to embroil themselves in that controversy. It simply isn’t worth it. They have their audience and, in the case of the successful affiliates, that audience hangs off every word they say. Morton has more than 22,000 Twitter followers. Why would he step away from that audience to answer a few questions for an article he knows isn’t changing any minds? After all, he’s walking proof that the dream can be a reality. The business model incentivizes people like Morton to bring all your insecurities screaming to the surface, because even if you do think this business is a whole bunch of baloney, you cannot possibly argue with the fact that he makes more money than a lot of us do.

But what if the opportunity he was selling was not only very likely to fail but financing the golden bait he was dangling in front of you? What if the truth was that the dream would never be more than that? If you were about to become one of his customers, wouldn’t you want to know?

---
Notes:

[1] These are privately released numbers and to my knowledge have not been verified by any external bodies.

[2] It’s not that this ‘vast majority’ will not make money. The problem with this model is that the vast majority must lose money in order to function as it does.

[3] This itself is suspicious considering the Federal Trade Commission’s “70 – 30 rule.” That is, “70 per cent of product must be sold to customers outside of the distributor chain for a company to qualify as legal.” Vemma Canada’s numbers are almost the same at 71.4 per cent.

[4] The most popular comments are all some variation of: “I’m driving a BMW thanks to Vemma so fuck y’all.”

[5] See note 1.

[6] I should make it clear that despite the tone of this piece, there is absolutely zero ill-will directed at Emilio, Andrew or the other affiliates. I am not one of the YPR’s frequently cited examples of a young affiliate who had signed on and failed. I never paid for the product and never attempted to sell it, I simply signed up to secure a spot in the pyramid-looking network but decided not to go ahead after I began researching.

[7] Revealing his identity would have compromised his ability to collect information about the company.

[8] I am obligated to admit here that when This accepted a similar article (several months after the one you’re reading here was already written) Vemma COO Brad Wayment did send me an email. He gave me the familiar “results aren’t typical” spiel that you find in tiny disclaimers at the bottom of all their bolded success stories and cited some obscure term and/or condition which says affiliates can say how much money they make but must also tell the person on the receiving end of that information that they must look at the Vemma income disclosure statement. I know I’m going to catch some flak from those of you who read your terms and conditions top-to-bottom (probably the same people who read footnotes) but I’ll go ahead and say very few affiliates know of that condition and even fewer follow it, meaning this information doesn’t merit anything other than a footnote on it. Also, Vemma fucked off as soon as the deadline for the magazine passed, leaving several unanswered questions in this humble—but more thorough—piece.
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When I was 11 or 12 years old, my dad and I got on a plane and flew off to a hockey tournament in North Carolina. It was the same sort of forced father-son time I knew all too well after a childhood of long drives to tournaments closer to home, so I settled in for what I figured would be an uneventful flight.

​Shortly after we took off, my dad turned on his laptop and started watching Robin Williams Live on Broadway, a stand-up routine that was, admittedly, a little more graphic than his other work I’d seen (which at that point had been Aladdin, Jumanji and maybe Flubber). It was nothing that, in his adult opinion, I couldn’t handle. So he rummaged through his briefcase and pulled out a little two-pronged headphone jack so I could watch with him.
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You already know Williams’ stand-up is known for his motor-mouthed soliloquies and wild one-man spectacles. In his tribute in the New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott describes the time he ran into Robin Williams in Cannes during the film festival’s fireworks:
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​Re-watching his standup today, it’s a perfect description, one that explains how this man can turn his own act on its head, switching between family-friendly impressions and jokes about fake tits.

​As an 11- or 12-year-old who still shuffled nervously when I heard a swear word within earshot of my parents, you can imagine what kind of experience I was in for. Sure, I understood almost none of it, but the awkward parts that I did catch were overpowered by the hilarity of it. You know as a kid when you laugh at everything your dad laughs at because he obviously knows what’s funny? Sometimes there’s a half-second delay when you look over at him to see if he’s laughing before you start laughing too? Or there’s the odd time you go out on a limb and laugh first, hoping he laughs too, but when you realize he’s not it makes you doubt everything you’ve ever thought was funny? Well, when my dad laughed—and he laughed much louder than anyone in a darkened plane cabin has a right to—I forgot that feeling. It was just unmitigated happiness. It didn’t matter if I knew, for Williams’ last joke, why he’d buried his face in the crook of his obscenely hairy arm or what he was doing with that water bottle. I was laughing because dad was.
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On the night Robin Williams died I came across a story Williams had written in the Times last year in remembrance of a comedian he loved: Jonathan Winters. He talked about watching Winters with his dad and after a joke that had something to do with squirrels and nuts “my dad and I lost it,” Williams wrote. “Seeing my father laugh like that made me think, ‘Who is this guy and what’s he on?’”
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As soon as I read that quote I felt a weird connection.

What did it mean that Williams had those same moments with his dad? What does it mean that my dad and I shared those moments watching him? What does it mean that Williams killed himself and what does it mean that, six years ago, my dad did the same?

Obviously none of those are questions I’m equipped to answer. All I can say is that it has compelled me to write something; to toss in a little more than my two cents in the wake of all this. Despite my reservations, I think it can be meaningful to share these connections, in fact for the very reason that these connections—whether they’re about fathers and sons, laughter or suicide—often prompt others.
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It’s been a while since I’ve scoured the obits and eulogies, the penetrative analyses and sad ruminations, in hopes binding together bridges of cosmic significance between little coincidences. Of course I had no more claim to this tragedy than anyone else, but I’m happy I found something.