The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time. New episodes drop every Monday.
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Easy blueprint to steal from is to say that what we need to prove is that everyone else is wrong. Like the first thing that a new entrant into the market has to do is to demonstrate why it's necessary to the consumers of that market to have a new entrant in the first place. And the easiest reason is that the marketplace of ideas is broken in some way. And so what I see is a lot of new influencers and a lot of new media companies entering the market with the theory that The Media, capital t, capital m, is broken. And that tends to be the thesis that they exercise over and over and over again. And it creates this really interesting and somewhat even paradoxical dynamic where lots of people trust a media in order to understand the world. But because every media is telling them to distrust the media, capital t, capital m, everyone distrusts the media while loving their own individual media. It's sort of the berserk example or berserk implication of, you know, love your congressman, hate congress. But I think it does create a very bizarre dynamic in terms of trying understand what's happening in the world when you have so many different news entrants and news entrepreneurs that really are, I think, highly incentivized to sort of in cult their audience and tell them that there is a conspiracy against them. Do you think of something like crypto as a cult? Because it sure as shit feels like one. That's a great question. So crypto is a cult. You can cut some of my pausing here, but let me think about this. Yeah. We're not lying, so take your time. Yeah. And by the way, I'm not even saying that crypto is all bullshit or mostly bullshit. Frankly, I don't even really understand crypto. So it's not really a commentary on that. It's just simply a question more about the self understanding of people who are involved in it and and the way it is spread and talked about and defended and celebrated. Yeah. Let me give you two thoughts about crypto.
There's a lot of history packed into this thing, and we can't cover it all. But I do wanna ask why You decided to start your historical clock in the Netherlands of all places in the 16th century. So the book was animated by, Desiree of understand why are we going through what appears to be a kind of crazy revolutionary period in politics, you know, in the sense in which the Trump Brexit, Bolsonaro, and Brazil. Yeah. There's a sense in which the old categories of politics don't seem to be making sense and the system seems to be being upended at some level. The traditional parties in Europe by a by and large have collapsed you know, if you look at France, the the major left wing party and the right wing party are both doing terribly. And I thought, okay. So let me go back to periods where there has been similarly kind of revolutionary feeling, the feeling of politics being made new, the old order collapsing, a new one coming into being. But the more I've researched, I realized that The Dutch had really invented modern politics that before that, politics was basically about courts and kings and courtiers and it'd be a vast agriculture economies. And then with the Dutch, you get the rise of the 1st merchant Republic, a state that embraces capitalism merit some kind of more democratic political structure. And that is after all the world we live in now. The Dutch are the 1st to embrace modernity in that sense and innovation and take advantage of technological shifts like the invention of poor ships and windmills and all that. And they become the richest country in the world. And so it felt like the Dutch was the right place to start because they're the ones who begin these series of revolutions that take place. The French rebel
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My life to be easier. So tell me how you got pulled into this world of multilevel marketing schemes. It is a kinda strange and fascinating and and raging history, but it's not something you hear about very often. So, how did you find yourself neck deep in it? Well, that's the interesting part is it's something you don't hear about very often, although millions and millions of people participate in it. I mean, I initially got pulled into this world by my great grandma, Maxine, who sold Avon, but all through my childhood and growing up, I grew up outside of Flint, Michigan, like, in a very rural area, and everybody in my family pretty much does some sort of MLM or has done some sort of MLM. And my uncle, Joe, whenever he gets into a new one, he, like, announces at, like, Thanksgiving at the dinner table, like, I got a new job. And then you're like, what is it? And he's like, herbal life. And so it begins. I was like, I don't think you know what a job is. Yeah. You know, they're not wealthy people, any of them. And so that was also interesting because they keep trying it over and over again, but live in poverty. So all of that seemed kind of like a a puzzle worth taking apart. What is the simplest definition of an MLM? Basically, if you picture a triangle, there's people that own it at the very top, then they recruit, say, 5 people. And then the way the scheme goes is those 5 people are supposed to recruit 5, and then those 5 are supposed to recruit 5, and it kind of expands exponentially. And the way multi level marketing companies differentiate themselves from straight up pyramid schemes is that there's some sort of product or service involved. So, for example, Amway, they started the scheme before they had a product. They decided they wanted to be
Is looking forward to your visit today. He wants to talk to you. So I go back there, and, his wife is there again. He asked his wife to leave. And then he says, I realized that I haven't cried in a while. And and then he follows up, he's like, and you know my mom, right? I don't know his mom, but somehow in his sort of religious background and narrative, his mom was very religious, and he mentioned his mom to me a few times, so trust had been built. In his head, I knew his mom and how important religion was to his mom. And he said, I am afraid that if I die, my mom will no longer talk to my wife and my son because of many reasons. And he wasn't afraid to die in that sense. That's not what he was expressing, but he was afraid that if he did, suddenly, his wife, and son, and mother would no longer talk, and there would be friction. And so, I listened to him there, and then he started to cry. I cried with him. I talked through how he can actually begin to have those conversations and set things up practically. And that is when I learned what spiritual care was. There's a crossover between a therapist, but I wasn't there to analyze. I wasn't there to judge. I was just there to help him cry. The reason you and I are talking right now is because I I happened upon this article about your experience on death row. I guess I'm curious how you found yourself there in the first place. How does a humanist chaplain from Brooklyn end up on death row in Oklahoma? It all begins with a Zen Buddhist named Trudy Hirsch Abramson. I was doing the podcast
