Any kind of sales where you are buying leads or paying for the right sell someone else's product. If it was as good as they say, they'd be doing it themselves not pitching it to you.
1 person has limited time. They can be doing it themselves and still sell you the rights to do it too. It would be pure coincidence if the market demand fit exactly into 1 persons ability to supply it. I say 1, but this is not limited to 1 person.
Selling information is a valid transaction. It requires much less time, and the price is justified by a similar idealogy to having trade secrets. Yes I could pursue this list of 100 potentials and convert 5% of them for 50k over the next couple months OR I can sell it to someone else for 2k and do something else with my time.
If selling information is an established type of sale, then it follows that at a large enough scale of demand, someone can specialize in that sale rather than acting on the relevant information at all. And now AGAIN it would be pure coincidence if that 1 person specializing in selling only information is exactly meeting the demand for such activity. So they accept money to train others on how to sell information.
Hence the entire data broker industry.
The problem is that even though this truth exists, the trust involved is easily abusable. I don't think I need to explain how.
It isn't a pyramid scheme, but it can very easily become a saturated market where late comers end up getting no value back since there still is a very real limit on demand. But it is not good for sales for the people training others in the sale of information to acknowledge that limit, so it ultimately leads to people effectively getting scammed even without anyone explicitly trying to scam anyone.
Information or power asymmetry is the problem. Sometimes it’s the other way around. E.g. a large retailer selling a small company’s products.
That first sentence was important context for the second.
Counterfactual: franchises.
There was a segment on John Oliver's program about Subway being particularly predatory about this, as well as deliberately maintaining information asymmetry to mislead franchisees.
In which sense do you think franchises are counterfactual here?
Plenty of franchises have sustainably made money for the franchiser and the bulk of their franchisees. That stands in stark relief to the history of MLMs.
I think of the airlines and rewards programs, google identifying people, and silicon valley startups selling stock.
If your research into the Subway franchise indicates otherwise, I'm all eager to hear the counterfactuals.
That's not really the point. I'm not disputing the correctness, I'm saying your argument is flawed. Imagine I told you "the sky is blue, my cat told me so". Well sure, the sky is in fact blue, but that doesn't make my cat a good source of information. A comedian, even one playing as a social crusader, is not a source, much like my cat is not.
> If your research into the Subway franchise indicates otherwise, I'm all eager to hear the counterfactuals.
Do you mean counterarguments? Counterfactuals are things that didn't happen or are not true, not a response to an assertion.
I think we just have a different approach to communication. If you told me "the sky is blue, my cat told me so", I would probably just verify the color of the sky and completely disregard the 2nd portion.
And no, that doesn't make your response flawed, because it mentioned a cat. It just makes it padded with irrelevant information. Part of comprehension is filtering irrelevant stuff like that from text in order to arrive at distilled facts that can be checked or verified through an experiment.
Same way that my mentioning John Oliver doesn't really impact the weight of my arguments, since the facts within accurately reflect reality. It was just an irrelevant padding for context, not something that was supposed to give extra weight to my arguments.
Does that make sense?
I also feel the need to acknowledge that I'm slightly entertained to be conversing with "antisthenes" under the handle "seneca".