The Spiritual Ponzi Scheme
When Hope Is a Sales Funnel
What is a Ponzi Scheme and why are most people caught in one without knowing it?
There is a structure to manipulation. It is not accidental. It is not chaotic. It is not random.
It is engineered.
When I decided to kill my podcast—the vehicle that garnered me such respect and recognition—and finally take it off the air for good, I had recently received confirmation of something I’d been conflicted about for quite some time.
There were so many red flags, but I let myself be misled temporarily to fulfill my soul’s purpose.
I always performed for the good—though I cannot control which “god” controls their signals.
Whenever I’ve given testimony to anyone or anything, it’s because I’d witnessed the best of them—even if only momentarily.
I believe in focusing on what’s right and good, rather than looking for the glut and worst of it.
But that isn’t how they work.
I’d already given up my business by that point—after briefly working with a particularly vile sort of monster.
But I kept the podcast up to help the masses—as I had already invested everything I collected into sharing the voices of people I believed were helping humanity thrive.
I believed in my guests. I adored my guests. I even paid a number of them for their time, in addition to making connections and solving problems for them—gratis.
Every so often I’d find myself really troubled by something I’d see from a past guest and would remove their episode, but I never went hunting for cause.
I was busy living my life while my broadcasts enjoyed lives of their own.
One day fairly early into my memoir writing, a colleague told me that one of my guests was under investigation for a Ponzi scheme, and was said to have embezzled millions of dollars from investors.
It was someone that I had access to by paying a lot of money to be in a group where they sold him as one of their instructors and best examples of their business buying system.
This man was introduced as an expert to me and to thousands of other “students” who paid to be in an online community of investors, frauds, and fools.
He came highly recommended by people with clout, and this is how it really works.
I’d recognized the mechanism many times over the years, but never imagined that I could be so stupid to fall for it in everyone.
Weren’t most of them good?
Or were they just exceptional imitators?
Micah 3:11 (NIV)
Her leaders judge for a bribe,
her priests teach for a price,
and her prophets tell fortunes for money.
Yet they look for the Lord’s support and say,
‘Is not the Lord among us?
No disaster will come upon us.’
In every civilization that begins to collapse under the weight of its illusions, there are patterns that repeat—rituals of extraction that disguise themselves as opportunity.
The Ponzi scheme is one such pattern. Not simply a financial device, but a spiritual one. A distortion of trust, a weaponization of hope.
Most people have heard the term, but very few understand what it actually is—or that the architecture of the Ponzi has replicated itself across nearly every domain of American life.
A Ponzi scheme functions on a simple premise: those who enter early are promised returns, but the system does not generate its own value.
It feeds on the constant intake of new participants.
What looks like profit is simply redistribution of belief—until the illusion inevitably collapses.
This model now appears under countless names: mentorship, empowerment, legacy-building, collective healing, even ministry.
It has entered into the therapeutic, the educational, the entrepreneurial, and the spiritual.
It speaks in the language of uplift. It invites participation with the illusion of transformation.
But at its core, it is parasitic.
It survives by enrolling good people—people who believe they are doing the right thing, who want to serve, who want to matter—and converting them into extensions of the machine.
Their names, their faces, and their stories all become marketing assets.
Their trauma becomes currency.
Their testimonies become recruitment material.
And often, by the time they realize what has happened, they are too ashamed or too entangled to name it.
This is not rare. It is foundational.
Entire industries now thrive on this model—coaching networks, digital empires, personality cults masquerading as leadership development.
The product is irrelevant.
What matters is the narrative. The architecture depends on constant motion, repeated scripts, and the exploitation of visibility.
Those who hesitate are pressured.
Those who question are excluded.
Those who walk away are erased.
The tragedy is not simply in the manipulation—it is in the sincere people who get absorbed into it, believing they are healing when they are being hollowed out.
They did not intend to deceive anyone.
They believed they were becoming better.
They wanted to share what helped them.
But what helped them was never theirs to sell.
And what they pass on is not medicine. It’s mimicry.
This is the evolution of the Ponzi: no longer just financial, but spiritual.
Not always illegal, but almost always unethical. And nearly always immune to critique, because its public face is benevolence.
In this model, healing becomes content.
Sovereignty becomes branding.
Purpose becomes a sales funnel.
And the more charismatic the leader, the more aggressively doubt is framed as resistance, or “lack consciousness,” or fear.
They’ll challenge your “money story” and “overcome objections” before you’ve even thought of them.
Those who sense something is wrong often remain silent.
They worry about offending.
They do not want to be seen as bitter, or ungrateful, or unaligned. So they continue. They smile. They share posts. They repeat mantras. And the machine persists.
But it is not healing. It is assimilation.
What’s required now is not more teaching. Not more programs. Not more belief.
What’s required is recognition.
Recognition that the majority of people alive today are not designing their own lives—they are participating in inherited delusions.
They have been told that success means influence, that value is visibility, that proof is payment. They do not see the trap, because the trap has been normalized.
This is not an invitation to shame. It’s a call to attention.
You are not obligated to continue participating in something simply because it once felt meaningful.
You are not required to protect those who misused your story.
You are not responsible for preserving an illusion because you once benefited from it.
Truth dismantles false structures. But it does not demand rage.
What it demands is clarity.
And clarity begins by calling things what they are.
The Ponzi scheme of 2025 is not only financial. It is social. It is psychological. It is spiritual.
It turns awakening into a performance, healing into a commodity, and identity into a tool of influence.
You cannot dismantle it by reforming it.
You dismantle it by refusing to serve it.
If something in you has already begun to see it—honor that. What you do next will determine whether you return to yourself—or continue disappearing into someone else’s design.