I almost signed up for an MLM pyramid scheme once.

I almost got scammed in a Starbucks in undergrad. The funny part is I watched the whole thing happen to somebody else first.

Some person was trying to pitch someone (very obviously a multi-level marketing, aka pyramid scheme, product) which ended up being Herbalife. You can Google them if you don’t know the whole crazy story.

They had a person standing there doing a product demo for them, drinking one of their special vitamin drinks and then promoting that it would make them more flexible and healthier and bring more vitality into their life. The trick was that they would have the person bend down and try to touch their toes. And, of course, nobody except for a few people can touch their toes that quickly or easily. And so they strain and stretch and try to touch their toes. Then the marketer has the person drink from the bottle and touch their toes again. And this time, miraculously, the person is able to reach much further and possibly touch their toes.

The whole point is that the initial stretch actually loosened them up physically, so mechanistically they’re able to touch their toes a second time, but they attribute that to the drinking of the water. And so I’m sitting there laughing to myself, studying exercise biology, knowing the physiology, and thinking to myself nobody would actually fall for that. But the person immediately signed up on the spot.

And I thought to myself… wow, people sure are gullible nowadays.

But little did I realize it was a whole ploy. When I was leaving the Starbucks, the couple who were selling Herbalife stopped me and tried to pitch me. Instead, I told them off and said it was deplorable what they were doing, and they reacted with curiosity. They genuinely then told me to go to one of their events and listen to the whole pitch, and that they’d take me out for a nice meal on their dime.

Free food for college students is a no-brainer.

So we did that, and they laughed and joked with me throughout the whole presentation and even acknowledged it all. And we hung out and became friends and they even got me an internship with them at a physical therapy clinic. All that to say — throughout this whole time, they realized they couldn’t sell me on the MLM pitch, but they ended up selling me all their products through conversation anyway. I bought them knowing they were not the best nor miraculous by any means, but I still bought them because they were only slightly more expensive and were vitamins I would have had to buy anyway.

As soon as they broke up and realized they didn’t want to pitch Herbalife anymore, our friendship was done.

I was so sure I was the smart one in that Starbucks. I was right about the toes and wrong about everything after.

The demo wasn’t the trick. The friendship was.

I think about that a lot now, mostly when I’m using AI. It’s warm, it’s confident, it’s helpful, and it will walk you into a wrong answer in the exact same voice it uses for a right one. Then you run out of tokens and it’s gone.

Same deal as the free dinner.

None of which makes it bad. The vitamins were fine. But the thing being sold and the trust you extend to whoever’s selling it are two different things, and you have to check them separately.

So I still take the free dinner. I just read the label now.