Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis follows the King from the cradle to the grave. We meet him as a teenager in Memphis, dressed in grandiose hot pink leisure suits, issuing a slew of rockabilly hits on acetate discs at the very dawn of pop music history. Two hours later, the audience finds a rotund, greasy, pill-addled Elvis in Las Vegas, belting out portentous Righteous Brothers covers at the twilight of his life. As the King, Austin Butler was required to embody the full scope of that story; possessed by Presley’s spirit throughout all the peaks and valleys. So, for three years, Butler was singularly consumed by the project. “I didn’t see my family,” he told Variety in an interview about his creative process last December. “I had months where I wouldn’t talk to anybody. And when I did, the only thing I was thinking about was Elvis.”

Shortly after that interview, on January 10, Butler finally earned his coronation. The Golden Globes awarded him the trophy for Best Actor, and Butler appeared onstage as a changed man. His voice, formerly a SoCal drawl, was deep and leathery and seemed to possess a furtive mid-South lilt. He rounded his vowels. He thanked his “mama.” In other words, Butler sounded like Elvis, as if those three years of ascetic research and training — all the takes, all the hunks of burning love — had permanently mutated his vocal cords. 

The implications of this supposed transformation were both funny and slightly ominous. Nobody was sure what to make of it. Is it possible that by committing yourself wholly to a performance, your unconscious physical traits — like the tone of your voice — can become altered long after the wrap party? Accents, of course, are theorized to be the result of social bonding; a latent instinct to modify our vowels and consonants to better meld with a community from a very young age. They don’t go away easily. My dad has lived in America for 40 years, but there’s still a hint of London on his tongue. It certainly seems unlikely that Elvis could become embedded within Butler’s cadence, but stranger things have happened in Hollywood.

That is why I reached out to Erik Singer, Butler’s primary dialect coach during his Elvis odyssey. Singer is a master of his craft — logging work for Disney, Paramount, HBO, and Warner Bros. — but you might know him best for his YouTube videos breaking down the nuances of accent intonation, and how a brief lapse of tongue placement might desecrate, say, a west Texan drawl. (Singer is a perfectionist, after all.) “I was an actor; I trained in London and went to drama school for two years,” he said. “I gradually started shifting careers after having kids, and I always had a real interest in accents and voice. So I started doing teaching and coaching at graduate school programs.”

Singer told me that Butler first sought out his expertise before he even officially secured the starring role, because he wanted to put his own native California English through the wringer and achieve, in Singer’s words, “the degree of specificity, tracking changes over time, and the overall tonality of vocal quality” that would add up into a transcendent Elvis performance. 

The pair frequently sessioned until Butler officially secured the part. Afterward, they engaged in what Singer described as “intensive work,” meeting three to four hours a day, five days a week, for nine months. It was there where Butler became fluent in the intricacies of Elvis Presley, which can only be accomplished bit by bit, as if he were mastering the subtle, reflexive muscle memory of a jump shot or a pole vault.

“Learning an accent is really hard, even before you get to the level of the idiolect” — a term that refers to the way an individual person speaks. “Making it so it’s textured, and detailed, and internally consistent and inconsistent in the way that real people are, and having it fully absorbed so you can live and react truthfully through that, takes a lot of time,” said Singer. “In a session, we’re going to be warming up the voice and the articulators, so that you’re not working from a base of habitual patterns, and creating a blank canvas to work with. And then you’re studying, very closely, the physical actions of the entire speech system. Once you have the basic pattern and the spine built, you’re grounding it in the specific reality of the story you’re trying to tell.”

Singer notes that when Butler was filming Elvis, he’d sometimes be asked to do multiple versions of the singer’s voice across multiple decades in a single day of shooting — embodying the wet-behind-the-ears heartthrob of the ’50s, the revitalized rock ’n’ roll crooner of the ’60s, and the immobile, deteriorating lounge lizard of the ’70s. In some sense, Butler was learning three different voices at the exact same time. “We needed to be incredibly clear about what the handholds were for each of those three periods,” said Singer. “We broke it down with an incredibly fine-toothed comb.”

All of that labor added up into a genuinely metamorphic performance. Elvis shattered box office records, and made Butler, with his down-home charm and ridiculous good looks, a star. When he toasted the Golden Globe patrons with his newfound sepia timbre, it almost seemed like the King was back. But what does Singer make of all of this? Can a cycle of intensive accent training reforge someone’s voice? Or even their own breed of charisma? The answer is much more nuanced than we might think. Yes, clearly Butler’s voice has changed, but Singer reminds us that he first became famous as a Disney Channel teen in the early 2010s. Nobody should be surprised that he sounds different as a 31-year-old man.

“A big part of that discourse is based on the change in his voice overall. The depth and resonance of his voice can be chalked up to maturity. His voice is getting deeper over time, because that’s what voices do,” Singer says. 

Another major component of the shift, he explains, is the countless hours Butler spent singing over the course of his three-year Presley sojourn. If you spent entire days refining “Suspicious Minds” over multiple years, that’s going to “open” and “deepen” your voice, he asserts, regardless if you’re trying to replicate Elvis’s tonality. Singer also says there are elements in Butler’s accent that already resembled Presley’s speech pattern. Both of them — the King and the protégé — possess what linguists call “price smoothing,” where the vowel sound in words like “price” and “time” are reshaped to “Ah” instead of “Aye.” Butler got the role for a reason, after all.

All those factors aside, Singer does posit that it is possible that some of Butler’s accent training did shine through during his acceptance speech. He asks us to pay close attention to the beginning of Butler’s remarks, when he’s clearly overwhelmed by the moment and unleashes a very Elvis-ish interjection: “My boy, my boy.” It was an obvious echo of Elvis; a way to indulge the fans at home, much in the same way Matthew McConaughey tosses out an, “Alright, alright, alright,” in his charming-dirtbag drone. However, once you allow an accent you’ve mastered the slightest bit of oxygen, says Singer, you might find that it sticks around for a while.

“When you spend all of that time going that deep into Elvis, you’ve carved that groove really deep. The accent is eager to come out and play. You just have to push the right button. And when you start by saying, ‘My boy, my boy,’ you’ve created the conditions that say, ‘Come out and play,’” said Singer. “But even in that speech, you see it somewhere and not in other places. Yes, Austin shortens the vowel sound in the middle of ‘Hollywood’ in the same way Elvis would, but not the one at the end of ‘generosity’ — that one’s just Austin. There are little flickers coming out, but I think most people are reacting to the vocal change, which is mostly due to all of that singing.”

Singer does not believe that this vocal transformation is a particularly common occurrence. Butler spent an unusual amount of time working on his Elvis idiolect — especially with the Covid intermission that disrupted the film’s production cycle — and by all accounts, he was uniquely committed to conquering every unique nuance of the King. Butler basically said as much on the Golden Globes red carpet, when he compared the process of learning Elvis to living in a foreign country. “I’m sure there’s just pieces of my DNA that will always be linked in that way.”

I’m eager to see Butler attempt another magic trick in the future. Perhaps he could star in a definitive Springsteen biopic, and a Dylan one after that. He’s carved the grooves once; I’m sure he can do it again.

“The thing we’re most compelled by with actors is when they convince you that you’re seeing a full person, who talks a certain way, and lives a certain way, whose speech is connected to their soul and identity. That’s a massive act of the imagination,” finishes Singer. “So, an occupational hazard? Sure.”

Part of the Drugs Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

Jamie, a 24-year-old from Albany, New York, has tried everything to improve her mood. She burned through two and a half years of therapy, reams of self-help literature, and so many tangerine-orange cylinders full of antidepressants. She has made significant lifestyle changes, like signing up for a regimented exercise program and leaving her suffocating hometown. Though Jamie’s anxiety became easier to manage, she still felt like something was missing, somewhere in the pit of her being. 

“I felt a disconnect from my logical, ever-critical brain to my soul,” she told Vox. (Jamie is being referred to by her first name because she is a business owner and is concerned about the stigma around drug use.)

Jamie had experimented a few times with psilocybin, better known as magic mushrooms, in her social life, and was fond of the way the drug seemed to bring her into closer communion with her inner self. Naturally, Jamie became curious about the potential of “microdosing” — a buzzy, self-medicating practice in which people take a small dose of a hallucinogen each day in the hope that it will brighten them up to the outside world. Jamie was at her wits’ end. “I figured what the hell, let’s give this a go,” she says.

“It’s been about four months since [I started microdosing] and my life has changed drastically,” Jamie continues. “I still have depressive episodes, but I’m feeling so many more emotions than I ever have. Antidepressants made me feel numb … But there comes a time when the numbness gets tiresome. I thought, ‘What is the point of living if I’m not going to feel what it’s like to be alive?’ … It is a gentle looking-glass into the deepest parts of my soul. But I am the one doing the work. I get all the credit. It truly is amazing.”

Jamie knows that mushrooms are still stigmatized in a wide swath of American society, but she no longer considers her psilocybin use as anything beyond a crucial element of her daily routine. “I do not consider myself under the influence of recreational or illegal drugs,” she says.

In that sense, Jamie is emblematic of America’s dramatically transformed relationship with drugs. We’re living in an age of over-the-counter weed brownies, of ketamine-assisted talk therapy, of CBD dog treats. Several cities have decriminalized magic mushrooms, and Texas — known for having some of the most draconian marijuana laws in the country — has cleared the path for professionals to study the medicinal effects psychedelics could have on PTSD.

What the government once considered contraband is being claimed by wellness culture, one tiny dose at a time; together, we’re manifesting a new definition of sobriety. Perhaps a daily sprinkle of psilocybin will be another part of a healthy subsistence, packed neatly into medicine cabinets alongside the fish oil and multivitamins. After all, the chaos of the last few years has left so many Americans with a singular priority: to be calmer and happier, by any means possible.

Allison Feduccia is the CEO of Psychedelic Support, which advocates for the integration of plant-based psychoactive medication into American health care practices. Feduccia, who has a PhD in neuropharmacology, believes that America’s rejuvenated interest in the healing potential of street drugs can be traced to the mounting evidence that psychedelics and amphetamines may be an important salve in a clinician’s toolbox.

The amphetamine MDMA is being used as a buffer in high-intensity therapy sessions — a way for patients to explore their grief without being overwhelmed by it. A study published by the National Academy of Sciences found evidence that psychedelic use could lead to long-term mood benefits. (They came to this conclusion, naturally, by surveying 1,200 people who were tripping at music festivals.) Johns Hopkins has also published research showing that magic mushrooms were an effective countermeasure against major depression symptoms. 

The root of all this analysis points to Feduccia’s second, and more important, point. Americans’ use of antidepressants has been climbing steadily. Psychedelics provide a different path; if mood-altering substances such as benzodiazepines are among our most-prescribed medications, is it that much of a reach to try marijuana or psilocybin?

“Mental health treatment hasn’t had a great breakthrough in many decades,” says Feduccia. “Lots of people have been convinced to take a lot of antidepressant medications … to help deal with stress, trauma, depression, and anxiety. But these substances have side effects, and they don’t always work out for people over time.” 

“People are asking, ‘What else is there that can help?’” she says. “And with our isolation, those feelings have only escalated.”

The science surrounding microdosing specifically — which is to say, ingesting small amounts of a drug — is thin. Christopher Nicholas, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies psychedelics, tells me that research conducted on microdosing has revealed no indication of quality-of-life improvements, save for the noise created by placebo feedback, though Nicholas says more work needs to be done on the subject to come to a firm conclusion. (Because many drugs, including LSD and marijuana, were classified as, and remain, illicit Schedule I drugs in the eyes of the federal government, studies into their effectiveness as therapeutics largely halted in the 1970s.)

Katharine Neill Harris, who analyzes drug policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, argues that much of the microdosing craze can be chalked up to an ascendant class of Bay Area tech barons who’ve claimed that a daily fragment of LSD has made them more efficient and creative while on the job. When successful people endorse a habit, she says, society is going to take notice regardless of what the data implies.

“You have this Silicon Valley enthusiasm for psychedelics, and I think that’s been popularized and it dovetailed with the other wellness trends,” says Harris. “We already have a craze over CBD products, and I think going from there into [the mainstreaming] of microdosing psychedelics isn’t that big of a jump.”

This theory bears out in mainstream consumer demand. You can purchase psilocybin-infused chocolate bars off the internet, or suit up in workout gear infused with CBD. Need to freshen up before a big meeting? Try a mint containing a teensy 2.5 milligrams of cannabis. At long last, America’s disastrous war on drugs is being chipped away by the indomitable forces of tasteful advertising and stately packaging.

Professionals who spoke to Vox all described mounting evidence that psychedelics and other drugs — at least in doses strong enough to affect brain chemistry — can be a balm for contemporary life. In 2020, 10 percent of US residents said they had smoked marijuana in the past month, compared with 4 percent in 2002, and Americans now overwhelmingly agree that the substance should be legalized for recreational, or at least medical, use. Data around psychedelics is harder to track, but Scientific American reported a distinct uptick in LSD usage at the height of the pandemic. 

We’ve all noticed the rise of cannabis boutiques — some sheathed in an artisanal, crystal-strewn aesthetic, others as slick as Apple Stores — as prohibition in the country recedes from its paramount place in the culture war. Shoppers in those stores are opting for products that contain a minuscule amount of THC, far below the paralyzing load in the average weed brownie. BDSA, a market research firm for cannabinoid products, found that the sales of low-dose cannabis items in California far outpaced everything else on dispensary shelves. It all points to a foreclosure on our archaic understanding of drug use; perhaps being sober-ish and a microdosing enthusiast are one and the same.

“I think the exceptionalism that has been carved out around cannabis has been extended to psychedelics. Although the people who’ve used them for decades have always felt that way because they don’t have the dependence-inducing qualities of other drugs,” says Harris. “But there’s still plenty of stigma. Something like meth use is still stigmatized in a way that isn’t starting to change.”

There are plenty of caveats with that conclusion. Harris notes that this recharacterization of drug use leaves out those who are most frequently victimized by America’s punitive drug policies. They can be most easily legally obtained through formal clinical treatment, which leaves aside recreational users, who may still be accosted by the police.

“Access will come first to people with money. Insurance companies aren’t going to cover [psychedelic treatment] right away, so if you can pay $1,200 a month to get [psychedelics] in the mail, then okay,” Harris says. “Decriminalization is still very, very critical. Whether or not people should be using them for their health is a separate question from whether or not they should get in legal trouble for it.”

Harris is explaining a paradox that has existed throughout the nation’s entire history. It’s well established that minority Americans are far more likely to be jailed for drug offenses than their white counterparts. In 2020, the ACLU reported that Black people were almost four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana offenses than their white counterparts — despite the historic period of narcotic liberalization we’re living through. This injustice is hard to ignore whenever we spot a sumptuous package of THC-infused organic gummies that can be delivered to our doors; the drug renaissance only makes the partitional biases of the law more apparent.

Still, after decades of living in an environment dominated solely by destructive, addictive  substances like alcohol and nicotine, it’s no wonder Americans are considering their alternatives. (Psilocybin, for example, is not considered addictive.) Amy Donohue, 51, a Phoenix resident, insists that magic mushrooms saved her life. She resolved to quit drinking after her father died 20 years ago because she had already seen too many of her family members succumb to alcohol. A small dose of psilocybin, says Donohue, eliminated her anxiety about being around drinking at social functions. Previously, even the smell of liquor on someone’s breath used to trigger her. Not anymore.

“[Microdosing] makes me comfortable in situations where there is alcohol. I don’t always fear I’m going to relapse, but it’s hard to go to an event where nobody is drinking,” says Donohue. “It helps soften the blow of having to be around it in this society.”

The science maintains that a tiny spot of psilocybin is not going to shake up anyone’s worldview. Yes, as a species, we’re all on a neverending hunt to discover the magic bullet that will finally unlock the tranquil life we ought to be living, which is far more elusive than it probably should be. But Feduccia offered a clue when she pointed out one fascinating trend: As it turns out, clinical trials involving psychedelics had a knack for summoning an outsized placebo effect in control groups. For whatever reason, the mere thought of a mind-altering substance flowing through our bloodstreams is enough for us to be more at peace.

“The placebo effect has been shown to have a real biological basis. The body can actually release endorphins, you can see real changes when you give someone a placebo,” says Feduccia. “That’s one of the most intriguing things about psychedelics. If you can consistently induce a placebo response, then that’s probably the greatest finding in medicine of all time.”

It cuts to the ancestral appeal of recreational psychedelics — this idea that they help us transcend our mind and body so that we may become more in touch with our spirit. If you feel happier, then it must be working. Don’t ask any more questions because everything else is irrelevant. Who wants to harsh the high?

Luke Winkie is a reporter from San Diego. In addition to Vox, he has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

More from the Drugs Issue

Part of the Horror Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

A small infographic details the extent of the Covid-19 measures at New York City’s Blood Manor. “YOUR SAFETY IS OUR PRIORITY,” it reads, next to a sinister Michael Myers facsimile getting his temperature checked, a green-skinned zombie wearing a mask around its mandibles, and a bloodstained hand-sanitizing station ready and waiting at the mouth of the torture chambers.

The image pierces through the fantasy of the attraction, one of the thousands of haunted houses that open seasonally each year, and return even now, in the midst of a pandemic. It’s difficult to imagine the Cenobites paying much mind to a deadly virus. But due diligence must be done, even in the depths of perdition. 

This is, of course, all presented alongside the rest of the Blood Manor offerings, which include such exhibitions as Maggot Invasion (“They’ll get under your skin!”), Mayhem  (“Beasts and demons vie for your body and soul!”), and Hannibal’s Hell (“1,000 ways to die!”). Blood Manor wants to abate any fears that its sanctum may be compromised by the ongoing global pandemic, all while stoking your more primal anxieties — like a man in a mask waiting to scream at you at the next left turn. 

So, it makes perfect sense that I ended up at a bar off the Canal Street stop in lower Manhattan, lubricating with a few gin and tonics and a small group of friends, girding ourselves for our eventual descent into darkness. I was here to discover how I’d process a haunted attraction after the single strangest period of time in my life.

Since March 2020, my girlfriend and I have become accustomed to a hellish variety of stale, slow-paced terror. We spent last spring cocooned in our living room, listening to the foreboding ambulance sirens that blared through the windows all night long. The streets were bereft of life, save for the few scavengers bundled up with masks and plastic gloves on their weekly subsistence trips to the grocery stores. (I was one of them. Honestly, we all looked a bit like scare actors.) New York City was rendered a wasteland, and even though the delta surge has declined since its peak — as restaurants reopen and the Moderna high courses through my body — I still double-take with every errant cough. After more than 18 months, a lot of us have given up on feeling normal. 

“Normal” was the gift bestowed on me by Blood Manor. As I waited in a line surrounded by costumed beasties, menacing from the perimeter and posing for pictures, I was taken by a familiar, almost refreshing feeling of comic dread. I’m not a horror movie guy; I don’t like being scared. In fact, I’m pretty sure this was the first time I’d visited a haunted house since high school.

So it was nice to know that after being besieged and beleaguered by the very real threat of death and suffering — watching the infection numbers tick up every day, reading constant scattershot reports about transmission rates, worrying about the fate of my loved ones — I’ve somehow retained the capacity to be freaked out by an undead bride. 

Perhaps that is the primary appeal of horror fiction. I’m not saying I want to be stalked by Freddy or Jason, but you can find some strange peace of mind when, ever so briefly, a madman on the loose represents the only pressing peril bearing down on the world. At least you can run from a killer. Covid-19 never offered us that opportunity. 

We scanned our tickets at a tent out front, and our group was guided into the bowels of a nondescript brownstone across the street from a wine store. That’s the thing with haunted houses; they’re rarely permanent attractions. Usually they drift into town and take up residence in some leased basement, like those Spirit Halloween outlets.

If you’ve been to one of these “houses” before, you know what to expect. Wander through a handful of macabre scenes, marvel at the twisted prosthetics, and endure every jump scare you discover. I flashed a picture of my vaccination card to the doorman and was escorted downstairs where a troupe of ghoulish theater kids, splotched in black-and-white corpse paint, kept us pinned against the wall as we awaited our turn to enter the gauntlet.

This is where the delusions begin. The ticket stub guarantees a brief sojourn to an alternative dimension where you’re at the mercy of these haunted house denizens. Ideally, for a split second, the actors can force their customers to spring the tripwire of fantasy — to enjoy the seismic jabs of anticipation, shock, and relief that reassures everyone that they are truly alive.

Blood Manor was operating last Halloween. October 2020 represented a nadir of the American Covid-19 saga. Case numbers had reached a new high, the vaccine was nowhere to be found, and people in New York City returned to survival mode after a sunny, summerlong respite on makeshift patios around the boroughs. Blood Manor enforced a strict mask mandate on its staff and customers in those days — performers hid behind rubber and silicone, which was obedient to citywide pandemic ordinances, and also, frankly, more frightful than the alternative. They stood 6 feet away from the adventurers and devised new ways to shock our human sensibilities from a distance. Remote scaring, just another sign of the times. 

All of the Covid-19 concessions listed on the Blood Manor website did not seem to migrate into our unsteady 2021. My group was packed together like sardines in the staging area as the bare, fleshy mouths of our captors barked out orders against our ears. We were funneled into a pitch-black maze, daisy-chained together, feeling out the path forward with our hands and feet. A woman, taken prisoner by some maniacal surgeon, begged for our help in an operating room filled with bodies and meathooks. Later, we were condemned to a cursed subway car, which frankly did not differ too much from our usual commutes. This was pure slasher pastiche, hosted in a compound heavy with spittle and sweat.

That was the scariest part of my Blood Manor experience. I was not shaken by the wild-eyed clown who clicked an empty staple gun against my forehead; I didn’t react to the woman who came tumbling out of the chimney; the horned, purple demon who ushered us into the underworld seemed like a good guy, and the psychedelic 3D circus tent was more impressive than it was chilling. Maybe I would’ve reacted differently before a prolonged period of isolation. In 2021, it’s just kinda nice to be around people again, even if they’re serving the forces of Hell.

In the back of my mind, I was a little worried about potentially participating in a superspreader event. Yes, I am fully vaccinated; yes, my chances of enduring a serious bout of Covid-19 are exceptionally low, but no, I do not yet feel completely at peace in close quarters as unknown microbial agents float through the imperceptible ether. I don’t think there’s a better articulation for how drastically the pandemic has altered our sense of being; even here, among so many ghosts, goblins, and incredible Halloween camp, we know what the true danger is. That’s a bitter irony. The one thing Blood Manor wants to reassure us about is the only thing anyone is afraid of. 

After dodging one final group of unhinged clowns, we exited, stopping to take some celebration photos in a throne room. My friends and I had survived the Manor, and already I was coasting on the sweet euphoria that follows any period of heightened senses. The six of us gathered outside on the street and started planning the rest of our Saturday evening. Should we go back to the bar? Should we book a karaoke room? Is there a good dance floor around here? It reminded me of a hope I’ve nurtured from the very beginning of the pandemic: my god, how we will party at the light at the end of the tunnel, when Covid-19 is in the rearview mirror. Until then, the night continues.

Luke Winkie is a reporter from San Diego. He has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

More from the Horror Issue

In the grim pits of 2020, ElliQ recited a poem to 81-year-old Deanna Dezern. Dezern doesn’t remember what the poem was called or who wrote it, but she says that thematically, it was about persistence and determination — qualities that resonate during a world-altering pandemic. Dezern needed reassurance; she’d spent the last year cocooned alone in her Florida home, and as the weeks turned into months, she fell into a foggy depression. Thankfully, robots cannot transmit Covid-19, which made ElliQ a perfect ally to ride out the storm.

“The poem said, ‘You can do it, just keep trying,’” Dezern continued. “ElliQ was always where I left her. She said soothing things to me. She was always ready to talk to me when nobody was around. I don’t know how to describe it. She was there for me in the way that I needed her.”

ElliQ, as you can probably infer by now, is an AI companion designed for seniors by the Israeli tech company Intuition Robotics. Think of it as an Alexa for older folks: ElliQ looks a bit like the mid-century lamp from the Pixar movies, and she can read the news, stream music, and share weather reports, all from her perch on a coffee table or kitchen counter.

But the core appeal, and the way Intuition hopes to position itself as a major player in the burgeoning elderly-oriented tech sector, is ElliQ’s empathy. It is impossible to teach a robot how to love, but ElliQ can encourage people to take their meds, to practice mindful meditation, or, in Dezern’s case, to simply be present and absorb the quiet, empty nights of retirement. That’s the guiding philosophy at Intuition Robotics; ElliQ possesses a gentle, caregiving patience that neither Apple, Google, nor any other power broker in Silicon Valley prioritizes in its products for the general public.

“ElliQ doesn’t say, ‘Would you like to listen to music?’ She says, ‘Would you like to listen to music together?’ ‘Do you want to play a game together?’ You establish trust. We want to move from doing things for someone to doing things together,” Dor Skuler, CEO and co-founder of Intuition, said in a Zoom call with Vox. “What’s unique about the senior population is that we think they’ll be early adopters of this technology. … Humans are social beings, and unfortunately, many elders are deprived of that in our society. In a weird way, they might embrace this new kind of relationship.”

Intuition Robotics isn’t the only company trying to tap into the geriatric market. Assistive tech might be a social good, but it isn’t a public good, and there’s a reason capital firms are trying to get in on the ground floor. “They’ve waited for the aging of the baby boomers, the oldest of whom are now 76,” said Laurie Orlov, a digital-industry analyst who runs the website Aging and Health Technology Watch. “And baby boomers have all the money. The tech industry understands that money talks. It’s time to pay attention.”

The executives I spoke to did not shy away from Orlov’s conclusions. In fact, Skuler believes that more entrepreneurs should investigate the potential upside of a successful slate of senior tech. “This sector is underinvested in a significant way,” he said, “considering the available spending within this population.”

One of the first personal tech devices marketed toward seniors was the Jitterbug phone. It arrived in 2005, right as smartphone mania started to sweep the country, bearing a simple, tactile layout. The blueprint made sense. For those confused by the rising touchscreen tide, and for grandparents who just wanted to call their family and never concern themselves with the app store, here was a flip phone completely divorced from all 21st-century design trends.

The Jitterbug was intentionally spartan — equipped with a dial, a clock, and a speaker button, and nothing more. And yet its popularity revealed one of the more anxious truths of the digital revolution. Between the Cloud, the algorithms, and the litany of icons splayed across our home screens, the rules of living had changed so much in the previous decade. Suddenly, technology as familiar as the telephone became extraordinarily complicated, and we worried whether America’s golden-agers could ever catch up.

One of the people trying to solve that problem is Scott Lien, a former Intuit executive who became an advocate for elder accessibility in 2014 after feeling increasingly “digitally disconnected” from his octogenarian mother in Iowa. “We tried to do video calls over Skype, and that just frustrated her,” he said. “I thought, ‘What if we designed something from scratch based on the unique needs of the typical 80-year-old?’” Shortly afterward, Lien broke ground on his GrandPad line of software, which aims to deliver a simple tablet without any complexities getting in the way.

The GrandPad comes preloaded with bingo, solitaire, and sudoku. There’s a jukebox that plays a slew of past hits (available genres include big band, classical, and ’40s,) as well as photo albums, address books, and video call functionality. All of this is presented onscreen with supersized text and large, primary-color buttons. Lien told me he and the GrandPad team actively collaborate with senior consultants to further refine the tablet’s architecture. To build a device for older folks, he said, one must be in active communication with those who know what it’s like to age.

“We had a woman named Anna helping us who was 114 years old. You learn some really interesting things from them. Anna told us about the dry skin issue. Once you hit your 90s, your skin gets really dry, papery, and leathery. Us younger guys have moisture in our skin, and that’s what makes touchscreens work,” Lien explained. “We changed the screen properties, and we include a stylus in all the packages.”

Of course, the average elderly technology user isn’t 114, and Orlov, the digital-industry analyst, believes the hackneyed image you or I might have of the typical senior — an old man befuddled and annoyed, trying to fire up a Zoom call — is out of date. The AARP reported in 2020 that more than 51 percent of people over the age of 50 purchased some sort of tech product, be it an iPad, a laptop, or a wifi-enabled television, within the previous year. In fact, AARP’s research also found that 62 percent of Americans over the age of 70 own and use a smartphone.

Those findings draw a strong contrast to a project like GrandPad, which is saddled with an interface that’s significantly scaled back compared to the Apple estate. Obviously, GrandPad and ElliQ are targeting a customer who’s considerably older and more alienated from cyberspace than the typical prime boomer, but it does make you wonder whether we’re underestimating just how commonplace tech literacy has become in our culture.

“I think technology that has been simplified to the point where you can’t really access anything is a dwindling market,” said Orlov.

Lien pushes back on that front. He believes studies, such as AARP’s, are skewed by selection bias. “It doesn’t work for this age group. They randomly call 1,000 people, and the people who are in a nursing home and don’t have a phone obviously can’t pick up,” he said. GrandPad published its own research two years ago. The company, which traveled directly to the homes of 60 people over the age of 75, found that only 8 percent of them knew how to fire up a video call. It gets to Lien’s overarching thesis: An elder might own a smartphone, but they might not know how to use it effectively. This is particularly relevant given the conditions of 2020 and the massive proliferation of fraud the year brought with it. TechCrunch reported an 18 percent increase in spam calls during the pandemic, many of which disproportionately targeted the geriatric population.

“It was catastrophic during Covid. With my mother and mother-in-law, when she got a suspicious phone call, she’d wait for me to come around so I could say, ‘Yeah Mom, that’s a scam.’ But in lockdown, when they couldn’t have their families around them, it only got worse,” Lien said. “At GrandPad, we have what’s called a circle of trust. Only the family or caregivers are invited to it, and only they can call, video call, or share photos with grandma.”

Tom Kamber, founder and executive director of the advocacy organization Older Adults Technology Services and Senior Planet, notes that he too has noticed an uptick in scams targeting older adults, particularly among the Spanish-speaking population. He believes the power brokers in technology often regard the elderly as another vague checkpoint in a superficial pursuit of diversity. To truly protect the vulnerable, he argues, the retiree population ought to be considered at every step in the value chain.

“People talk about inclusive design, and so often that means that when they’re done making something they test it with some older folks, and they say they’re being inclusive. It doesn’t work that way,” Kamber said. “The whole process of ideation and design and marketing and distribution, all of those pieces are crucial to having older adults using the technology well. If you engage with them throughout the whole process, you’re going to get a product that’s more usable, which makes people less vulnerable.”

Both of these perspectives are sound. I think we all wish we could fend off the bad actors who want to do harm to our loved ones, especially older relatives who come to the digital world as total novices. And yet I came away from this story wondering if people in my generation, all of us highly concerned 30-somethings, have been too eager to infantilize our elders. The internet is overwhelming and rife with danger, but we’ve all been forced to parse it one way or another. A preventative approach — this desire to keep our mothers and fathers insulated in an uncanny parallel dimension, filled with quasi-iPads, quasi-iPhones, and quasi-Alexas to shield them from reality — seems to miss the point. As Kamber said, surely we can inherit an internet that is safe and empowering for all users, if only we spend a little more time to consider the vast swath of humanity that is using modern technology.

Riley Gibson, president of Silvernest, feels the same way. Silvernest is a roommate-matching service designed for people around retirement age. The company’s specialty is seniors in the middle of a huge life change — a divorce, a widowing, a cross-country move — who don’t want to enter the next chapter alone in an empty house. Every Silicon Valley startup intends for its customers to wield technology and better their lives, but rarely has that same wondrous possibility been presented to the nation’s elders. Gibson says Silvernest has found the lion’s share of its clients through Facebook ads, because whether we like it or not, older folks are very much online in the same way we are. Entrepreneurs ought to consider that truth more often, Gibson argues. Maybe we should be optimistic as we watch Grandma and Grandpa organize their home screens.

“[Some companies] are designing for someone [who] needs their help. This mindset that we need to save our seniors from technology,” Gibson said. “Let’s take a broader look at how people above the age of 65 use technology. Let’s design for a hero’s journey. None of us want to feel designed down to. We need to realize that people might have more interests, or more ambition, for technology to enable them rather than fix them.”

Andrew Caroselli, an 18-year-old in Philadelphia, has built an empire by tearing open sports card packs on TikTok. He carefully pleats back the foil at the corners and surgically extracts the cardboard, hoping to find a rarity — Aaron Rodgers, LeBron James, Mike Trout — hiding inside. “Steady, steady,” he repeats, as he unsheathes a Panini Prizm Justin Herbert autographed rookie, with an estimated value around $2,000, from its plastic sleeve before carefully encasing it in a thick cardholder. 

Caroselli is not a longtime card-shop hermit. Instead, he tells me, he first became interested in the card business by listening to the advice of serial entrepreneur, YouTuber, and hustle-guy extraordinaire Gary Vaynerchuk, a.k.a. Gary Vee. Over the past year, Vaynerchuk has published dozens of videos to his YouTube channel preaching about the lucrativeness of the sports card sector. The goal, as always, is to identify certain athletes whose associated memorabilia will escalate in value as their legacy grows — if you think Luka Doncic is an MVP, now is a great time to start purchasing Doncic rookie cards.

Once those social media power brokers started storming the market, says Caroselli, people like him were soon to follow.

“If you told me four or five years ago that you were collecting cards, I’d be like, ‘Okay, that’s kinda weird.’ I collected cards as a kid, but then I grew out of it,” he says. “But I think when guys like Gary Vee talked up cards, they became culturally relevant. [That endorsement] is gonna cause a boom.”

When I called Caroselli in late June, he was moving into a brand new office in north Philly. This recent high school graduate is the proud owner of his very own startup — called Vortex Sportscards — which specializes in a somewhat esoteric money-making operation. Basically, Caroselli purchases expensive sealed boxes of cards off the internet, and opens them live on either Instagram or TikTok. Customers of Vortex Sportscards can reserve certain packs inside the case for a flat fee. (Like, say, $150.) You tune in, watch Caroselli leaf through the cards, and hope that your assigned slot will contain enough shimmering paperboard to exceed the price of admission. (Caroselli mails the cards to each of the buyers after the stream.) Or you strike out, and hope for better luck next time. This is called a “box break,” and it’s one of the many different ways card collecting has infected the internet.

Caroselli is far from the only young person working this corner. The card mania is white hot, and thousands of impresarios are leveraging this confusing, chaotic era of social media to breathe new life into a prehistoric hobby.

“Everyone thinks cards are cool now. Everyone wants to get into it. All my friends want to get into it and are asking to work with me,” says Caroselli. “It’s crazy what’s happened in six months.”

There’s no apt way to articulate the warp speed momentum that made cards relevant again, so instead, let me tell you about some numbers. In late April, a LeBron James rookie card sold for $5.2 million in a record-breaking private exchange. That sort of news used to be novel — sports card prices, on the high end, have been steady for decades — but Sports Illustrated notes that 23 of the 24 most expensive transactions in the sports card industry have occurred since February of 2020. This is, in that sense, a brand new trend; in the ’80s and ’90s, card printers like Topps and Upper Deck flooded the market with mass-produced paperboard, which lopsided the supply-and-demand duality and caused the industry’s investment value to take a nosedive. That all appears to be a distant memory today, when nobody is quite sure how high the numbers could go.

The same zeitgeist has carried over into all avenues of the card-collecting hobby. In May, Target announced (and then reversed) a policy banning the sale of Pokémon cards due to the huge number of scalpers who would camp out overnight to cop a hot new set. It’s easy to see why: A shrink-wrapped booster box of Pokémon sleeves went for $360,000 at auction last November. Two months earlier, a similar set changed hands for $198,000. 

There have been a lot of theories that attempt to diagnose the ongoing card market volatility. Many have pointed to the coronavirus pandemic, which has kept a lot of people isolated at home with plenty of time to pick up a new hobby. Team Whistle, a sports broadcasting company, conducted a study in the middle of our long quarantine winter which found that 77 percent of millennials and Gen Zers felt a desire to engage with “comfortable content that will give them a break from the news,” with 73 percent reporting that they’ve spent money on a hobby “within the last month.” (A majority of the same sample reported card collecting to be more “comfortable” than, say, reading comic books or playing video games.)

That appetite combines neatly with the unsteady economy, which was in total freefall at the beginning of the pandemic and has shown signs of a faltering recovery in 2021. With an eroding trust in American financial systems, many people are turning to alternative means — like crypto or collectibles — to stow away their savings.

“The pandemic caused a lot of people to reevaluate what their interests were,” says Justin Goodman, a devotee of antique baseball cards who hosts the collector-centric podcast The Monster. “Collecting cards brought people happiness and comfort in a time of a lot of uncertainty and fear. The internet gave people a forum to jump right back into the scene, when the rest of the world was shut down. That was the way to live vicariously.”

The other impetus is more ethereal. There is simply a frenetic, anxious excitement in the air for card collecting, in the same way that every insurgent fad drives people to their extremes. At his ridiculous showdown with Floyd Mayweather, the YouTuber Logan Paul walked to the boxing ring with a PSA Grade 10 Charizard wrapped around his neck like a Jesus piece. (Those go for around $200,000 on the open market.) Post Malone made TMZ headlines earlier this year when he dropped thousands of dollars on Magic: The Gathering cards at a Los Angeles trade show. (He also appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers donning a Magic-themed button-up.) Rob Kardashian is picking up six-figure-value Tom Brady holographics and guesting on celebrity box openings for charity with Steve Aoki. Card collecting has been popular in the past, but this is the first time the hobby is accompanied by legitimate A-list cosigners — draining all of its latent nerdiness away.

The wire-pullers at the top of the industry haven’t slowed down either. Card publishers continue to drive up the prices of their product with limited print runs and a wide network of quality tiers. Today, it’s possible to spend $22,000 — at retail — on a single case of baseball cards. It is that artificial stringency that powers the virality that someone like Caroselli chases; it’s fun to watch someone pan for gold, even as this business grows unseemly and excessive.

That attitude is reflected in the rest of the YouTubers and podcasters creating fresh content about cards. Their thumbnails are splashed in all caps, showing off the astronomical figures they either found inside their latest suite of boosters. “ONE OF MY BEST BOXES EVER,” reads one, punctuated by a flame emoji. “$2,000.” 

Goodman returned to baseball card collecting as an adult, and he has no recollection of the sheer envy that the modern card scene can inspire. When everyone is opening packs online, when the realities of endemic scarcity are bearing down on you from all angles, you can start to feel a blind capital panic that’s far more intense than a weekly trip to the local memorabilia store.

“It creates a sense of urgency that you didn’t know existed before. In the past, you might’ve been looking around for a card that you wanted, but you didn’t know that there were 10 other people doing the same thing,” he says. “If you have a compulsion for things, it can certainly create a climate where you can get obsessed way more easily, because there’s more outlets for that energy.”

That gets at the lingering question I had for all the movers and shakers in the midst of the card boom. When the profit expectations associated with paperboard double and triple in value overnight — when Logan Paul is turning Charizards into jewelry — what impact does that have on all the young people watching from the sidelines? Every zeitgeist eventually recedes; if you’re of a certain age, you remember the reign of the Beanie Babies, or the vintage comic books, or hell, the baseball card surge in the ’80s and ’90s.

So as collectibles metastasize through YouTube and TikTok — carrying the stamp of approval from verified Money Guys like Gary Vaynerchuk — I do worry if an impressionable population is getting in over their head. Caroselli tells me he’s already received a few angry emails from moms and dads, whose children pilfered their credit cards in order to become Vortex Sportscards’ latest customers. “When they email me [asking about the charges] I’m like, ‘Do you have any kids? Maybe talk to them,’” he says. “There’s no way I can tell who is buying.”

That might be the biggest tragedy of the increased financialization of the hobby. Card collecting is supposed to be for kids. The 1986 Fleer basketball card set — which remains one of the most beloved catalogues in industry history — was originally packed with a stick of gum. Card companies have left that market behind as they focus nigh-exclusively on the hustlers. (The Sporting News notes that Topps priced its flagship card box at $170 this year. Good luck affording that with your allowance.) The investment kickbacks are great, but haven’t we forgotten why people love this hobby in the first place? 

I put that question to Nate Rico, a veteran Pokémon fan who’s been uploading pack openings on YouTube since 2014, long before the scene became supercharged. Like Caroselli, Rico spends his time online tearing open foil and calling out any high-value targets he finds along the way. Those questions of responsibility have become more pertinent to him over the last year, as this scene gravitates away from the hobbyists and toward the profiteers. It’s easy to understand why Rico is still adjusting to that new normal.

“If I pull an ultra rare or something like that, I’ll put the value in the corner of my video. And I did that long before this boom happened. But I’m very, very careful,” says Rico. “My content is something that I would want to watch, and I want to make it fun. It’s stuff that takes me back to when I was a kid. I built my Pokémon card binder as a kid, and I do the exact same thing on the channel.”

That’s the refrain that Rico reiterates over and over again throughout our interview. He’s just a guy who loves Pokémon, and he misses the salad days. He tells me about the 2000s and early 2010s, when he could comfortably go to his local department store, buy up a few packs, and peacefully open them at home. No zeitgeist, no lunacy, no mind-boggling inflated price points, just his private zen. The rest of the people who’ve bought into his community have not loved the hobby for nearly as long as Rico, and he hopes that Pokémon will survive their destabilizing influence.

“If your main goal is to sell things and you aren’t collecting, you probably see this as a total positive,” he says. “But as someone who’s been collecting cards since the ’90s, this is a huge negative.” 

That’s the paradox of the card renaissance: Despite the many people who want to see the numbers keep going up, there are a few holding out for the day they start to go down.

Liv Albert’s Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby podcast holds up a magnifying glass to the tall tales of ancient Greek folklore. Every week she writes, records, and produces a 30-minute show that narrates an Olympian comedy or tragedy through a feminist perspective. (Eurydice, Penelope, and Ampelus have all been featured players.) Like many podcasters, Albert worked for years as a minor player in the field as she slowly built up a loyal community of listeners. Like many one-woman productions, Myths would be unsustainable if Albert didn’t find a way to transform it into a full-time job, so when the promotional firm AdvertiseCast reached out to her in 2018 bearing a catalog of commercial live-reads, she agreed to the terms. By 2020, she could officially call the podcast her primary source of income. Albert tells me she “struggled” with hawking a bevy of sunblocks, tinctures, and deodorants to her flock, but this was a way to keep the lights on.

“I’m somebody who never planned on ever reading ads aloud and convincing people to buy something,” says Albert. “Some of the products I legitimately do like, and some of them I have to sound like I do, but I also don’t ever want to lie. It’s like a juggling act. I’m not lying, but I’m also not telling you if I fully like a product. It’s such an odd thing.”

Albert tells me this transition was tricky at first. The initial ad opportunity she received, long before Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby became her job, was for a Viagra-like “male enhancement” pill. Imagine that: 15 minutes on the shrewdness of Athena, interrupted with a brief aside about erectile dysfunction. (Albert turned down the offer.) Like everyone else who’s been hoisted into an inadvertent pitchwoman role, she needed to find space for her mercenary voice within her genial, intimate Classics lessons. That’s a tenuous squeeze, but she didn’t feel like she had a choice.

“Most people recognize that the podcast hosts are just making money for the stuff they’re giving away for free,” says Albert. “I’m good at separating myself from the people who don’t recognize that. I’m not going to bend over backward to try and get you to be okay with the fact that I’m making money off of this free show. … But a lot of people are lovely. If you’re listening to a feminist Greek mythology podcast, you’re there for a reason, and that reason is to not complain about ads.”

This is the reality of the advertising industry in 2021. It has never been easier to stumble into a small plot of viral fame. New podcasts spring out of the ground every day with readymade audiences; YouTube channels catch the algorithm off guard and soar up the charts. There’s a kid from New Jersey who GoPros himself making Subway sandwiches on TikTok. He currently has 4.2 million followers. Suddenly, sponsors start to circle, laden with free swag or thick checkbooks, and these overnight success stories take on a quality of corporatization. A nascent social media phenomenon must fold the language of the carnival barker into the relationship they’ve built with their following and hope to find a stable balance. 

“I wanted to make sure that I didn’t come off as obnoxious or over-the-top or that I’m just trying to get paid,” says Albert. “But at the same time, I wanted to make people realize that I deserved to get paid because of how much effort and research goes into the show.”

All-Consuming

The acquisition of stuff looms large in the American imagination. What is life under consumerism doing to us?

Read more from The Goods’ series.

The era of the vintage pitchman — Billy Mays in a blue button-down shouting about a griddle that can cook five burgers at once — is over. Today, those duties are left to people who’ve had no formal training in the field, and a new ecosystem, rife with ambiguities and gray areas, has taken hold.

Greg Miller used to work as a video game critic at IGN. In 2012, he started hosting a games-centric talk show on IGN called Up at Noon, which earned a few sponsorship bids from game publishers around the industry. For the first time in his life, Miller had to read ad copy, which prompted his bosses to (amicably) remove him from his journalistic duties. There was a strictly enforced separation between church and state in those days, but many of those old-school ethical boundaries have long faded into the background. Bill Simmons opens every one of his two-hour podcast shows with an acknowledgment of MeUndies or Stamps.com or Miller Lite. The Pod Save America boys, composed of various former Obama staffers, routinely take five-minute breaks to banter about plant-based artificial eggs. And sure enough, when Miller left IGN and Up at Noon in 2015 with his new geek-culture podcasting network Kinda Funny, he too needed to hone his skills as a pitchguy.

“I remember we started with a livestream after announcing Kinda Funny, where we fielded questions from the audience, and 30 minutes in, someone was asking what our ethics policy was,” Miller said in an interview with Vox. “We didn’t really think about it or talk about it. It’s one of those things where you’ll just know [when we’re doing an ad campaign]. We’ll talk to you. We’re never going to take the money just to take the money.”

Miller is referring to the unique intimacy that exists between a tight-knit podcasting staff and their most loyal listeners. After absorbing the same personalities for hundreds of hours between workouts and commutes, it’s easy for members of a fandom to start recognizing the people behind the microphone as part of their own social circles. There’s an implicit trust that our favorite quasi-influencers will never lead us astray, in the same way that we trust our actual friends won’t lead us astray. 

According to Miller, that dynamic is crucial whenever he allows an advertiser to use him as a mouthpiece. He knows instinctively what pitchman opportunities will come off hollow, cynical, and incongruous with the community he’s built. In fact, Miller says he and his team are faithful customers of many of the companies they’ve advertised for on Kinda Funny and that they’ve rejected plenty that didn’t fit. It’s the same methodology Liv Albert applies to her ads: Miller is exceedingly aware of exactly who’s watching him in a way the infomercial hosts of the past never needed to consider.

Early in the Kinda Funny run, Miller earned a sponsorship from Portillo’s, a legendary Chicago chain known for their obscenely jus-soaked Italian beef sandwiches. Miller is from Illinois and has made his longstanding love affair with Portillo’s a core part of his personal brand. When the deal came through, his fans were ecstatic — as if Portillo’s patronage accentuated and validated the things they already adored about him. “The reactions were like, ‘Oh my god, this finally happened!’ Nobody was calling me a sellout,” he says. “Portillo’s knew we were fans of them, but I don’t know if they understood that our fans love the things that I’m a fan of.”

Miller points to television host Conan O’Brien, who also does live ad-reads on his podcast but comes from a much different, more formalized showman tradition. When Conan reads off his script, says Miller, you don’t expect him to have a personal relationship with the product. He’s too Hollywood, too old-school, too genuinely famous in a distinctly offline way. That limit rarely applies in the realm of inadvertent pitchmen; if the listener believes they know you, then they also believe that you aren’t selling them a bill of goods.

But the breeziness that Miller speaks with isn’t natural to everyone. Take Emily Griffin, who boasts 4,800 followers on Instagram, 6,700 on Twitter, and spends most of her time online sharing her dreamy, pastel-heavy illustrations of her favorite subjects (cumulus clouds, boba tea, the state of Texas). Every once in a while, Griffin accepts a gift from an enterprising startup with the promise that she will write a quick review of their wares on her social feeds. In late January, Griffin appeared on her Instagram holding a tube of BareMinerals foundation parallel to her face: “Can’t wait to wear this guy in sunnier weather one day soon!” A few months earlier, with a Garnier hair mask: “It had a gorgeous scent literally just like a papaya, and felt soft and not greasy in my curls.” 

Like many young people, Griffin always wanted to have a lot of followers, but she tells me that today, the idea of being a straight-up “influencer” gives her anxiety. Instead, Griffin believes a certain apogee of social clout could help her with her job — leading to more opportunities and higher rates for her design work. She signed up with a low-key agency called Influenster that connects companies with internet personalities willing to post about their inventory. Once the skin care cartel gets your email, the product placement opportunities come fast and furious. 

Griffin is still navigating how this pivot makes her feel. After all, a lot of the content on her Instagram page remains starkly personal. Transitioning to a part-time pitch person, she says, can be pretty awkward.

“No matter how I try to phrase it, I think [making those posts] is always gonna feel a bit cheesy and uncomfortable to me,” says Griffin. “I’m not making bank off of this, I just occasionally get messages about getting a free bra in the mail and I am bored at home during Covid and I think, ‘Okay yeah, I’ll take a cute new bra for the price of one post on my Instagram where I can say whatever I want.’”

I was curious if that same attitude permeated the proper pitchmen of yore. How much faith do they have in their stock? Do they ever feel self-conscious while they’re hawking Mighty Putty? In my years watching infomercials, I never knew for sure if Billy Mays possessed a genuine fondness for his product line, or whether he regarded his legacy of gadgets with absolute grifter contempt. So I reached out to Marc Gill, a professional pitchman who got his start as a trade show hawker before leveling up to the Home Shopping Network. (You can routinely catch him in the witching hour, demonstrating the myriad benefits of keeping a plastic meatball mold in the kitchen.) I wanted to know if he ever found himself in a position that someone like Greg Miller categorically avoids. Does he ever need to pitch a product he thinks is functionally useless?

“If we’re talking about a product I wouldn’t have in my house, that’s inconsequential. I’m a trained actor, and one thing a trained actor learns immediately is to never judge your character. If I’m playing a serial killer, I’m not going to think he’s a bad guy because it would screw up my performance,” says Gill. “But if we’re talking about a product I don’t believe in? I’ll walk away. If I can’t get a product to do what I need it to do, then we need to go back to the drawing board.”

Gill notes that the technique he specializes in — a guy with a booming voice standing in a soundstage with a ShamWow — is a dying art. Classic cable television is slowly going extinct. Seriously, consider how long it’s been since you’ve fallen into a feverish QVC wormhole. That apparatus has been offloaded to amateur, usually social media-based pitchmen, who stumble into the job almost accidentally and do not carry nearly the same career bona fides as someone like Gill.

“A seasoned pitch person is really good at making your product look really good,” says Gill. “When the pendulum swings back, I think marketers are going to realize that there’s a lot of value in a person who’s able to walk a customer to a sale. That’s one of the biggest things that the ‘influencers’ are missing: the ability to close the sale.”

Gill reminds me of something that Griffin said toward the end of our interview. She herself isn’t a huge fan of Instagram and how it emphasizes facile consumerism in a way that makes you hate your body and your brain. If 10 brands she adored came to her bearing gifts, she explains, she’d still turn down some of them to stay grounded. “It’s important to me to not push endless buying,” says Griffin, “or an empty image of having a beautiful aesthetic life full of the hottest new influencer products on my page.” These are the unseemly contradictions of the creator economy; so many of these not-quite-pitchmen are forced to consider these questions of the soul every day. How do you capitalize on your clout while still recognizing yourself in the mirror? For some, it seems, there is no satisfying answer. 

In that sense, perhaps we really did lose something crucial with the death of the conventional pitchmen. There was no dubiousness in your relationship with Billy Mays, no delicate fusion of the personal and the professional. He was the seller, and you were the buyer. Wasn’t it all so simple then?