Dan Olson, Part 1 - Crypto, NFTs, and Tech’s War on Doubt

Summary

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Episode Summary: Trust Me – Dan Olson, Part 1: Crypto, NFTs, and Tech’s War on Doubt

Podcast: Trust Me: Cults, Extreme Belief, & Manipulation
Hosts: Lola Blanc, Meagan Elizabeth
Guest: Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)
Original Air Date: March 18, 2026
Main Theme:
This episode dives into the “cultiness” of cryptocurrency and NFT communities, exploring how storytelling, group identity, and belief systems create fertile ground for extreme conviction, hype, and manipulation in tech-driven financial spaces. The conversation picks apart the social psychology, jargon, and gender divides in crypto, drawing clear links to behaviors reflected by historical cults, MLMs, and prosperity gospel movements.

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1. Introducing Dan Olson & The Power of Storytelling

[15:30 - 21:10]

Key Points:

• Dan Olson runs the YouTube channel Folding Ideas, specializing in deep-dives into fringe internet subcultures—Flat Earthers, NFTs, crypto, propaganda.
• Dan views storytelling as a core human technology—not just for fiction, but as a tool societies use to compress, transfer, and emotionally frame information.
  • “Oral tradition…the ability to tell each other's stories is one of the earliest technologies that humans developed in order to preserve knowledge and pass information from one generation to the next.” (Dan Olson, 16:18)
• The way narratives are told (even in tech and finance) can encourage people to “follow it anywhere it might lead,” regardless of evidence. (Meagan Elizabeth, 17:59)

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2. What Is Cryptocurrency – Simplified

[21:10 – 22:47]

Key Points:

• The original pitch was digital cash—unique, anonymous, and untraceable units, akin to physical dollar bills.
• Over time, this shifted to the concept of “digital gold”: not something to spend, but to hoard as a speculative asset.

Notable Quote:

• “The original pitch was digital money…that fell apart very quickly, and it instead became this narrative…the most dominant for the longest time is digital gold.” (Dan Olson, 21:14)

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3. The Origin Story: Bitcoin as a Cult Narrative

[23:25 – 25:26]

Key Points:

• Rooted in post-2008 economic distrust: “We are breaking away from the system…the man cannot touch [us].”
• The identity narrative celebrates self-reliance, being an outsider, and ‘cyberpunk’ legitimacy.
• Separation between narrative and reality is vast and often intentionally blurred.

Notable Quote:

• “It's this identity of self-reliance, of breaking away from the system, of being a willing outsider, you know, a digital hermit…You're cyberpunk. You're 10 steps ahead of the system, right?” (Dan Olson, 24:18)

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4. The Drug Route & Crypto Goes Mainstream

[25:54 – 30:29]

Key Points:

• Early demand for Bitcoin was driven by illicit marketplaces like Silk Road, which required Bitcoin as a medium for buying drugs.
  • “The main thing that you could buy with bitcoin…was drugs.” (Dan Olson, 25:54)
• This utility expanded Bitcoin’s user base and created an early, rapid value increase, fueling “bitcoin millionaires” mythology.
• “Bitcoin pizza”: a legendary story where 10,000 bitcoins bought a pizza, becoming a foundational myth for future financial FOMO.

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5. The Anonymity of Satoshi Nakamoto – Leader as Legend

[30:57 – 33:26]

Key Points:

• Bitcoin’s creator, “Satoshi Nakamoto,” remains anonymous, adding allure and QAnon-like mythos to the space.
  • “It has a constructed mystery.” (Dan Olson, 32:03)
• This “leader disappears” narrative, combined with tales of riches, feeds the fertile ground for cultish admiration.
• Crypto’s early days involved both practical crime and aspirational, almost religious, storytelling.

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6. Viral Community Dynamics & Rituals

[33:57 – 34:39]

Key Points:

• As with other cults and MLMs, crypto groups quickly formed strong communal rituals—daily greetings, in-jokes, and exclusionary slang.
• “It exploded. …You have Non bitcoin audience buying bitcoin, which is causing the price to go up, which is creating bitcoin millionaires, which then creates a narrative...” (Dan Olson, 33:31)
• Echoes of MLM, “hey hun” (now “hey bro”) energy: same emotional logic, different demographics.

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7. Proliferation: Altcoins, Hype & Lack of Oversight

[39:30 – 41:34]

Key Points:

• Soon, anyone could “spin off” a new coin; the space exploded with thousands of cryptocurrencies.
• This created a perfect storm for “tea leaf readers”: influencers and self-anointed experts selling hot tips and market predictions.
• Total lack of regulation compared to traditional markets.

Notable Quote:

• “Now you've got a conventional economy getting layered over top. …They all rush in because it's everything …about stock gambling…and it's all even less regulated, right?” (Dan Olson, 40:21)

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8. Hype as the Product: The Economics of Narrative

[41:34 – 43:38]

Key Points:

• Both crypto and stocks are driven by the narratives around them, but crypto lacks the fundamental grounding of actual products or profits.
• “The primary product of NFTs was hype.” (Lola Blanc quoting Olson’s video, 41:34)
• Crypto’s meme-ability becomes its main selling point—if enough people believe, value goes up.

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9. What are NFTs? Jargon, Technology & Hype

[43:46 – 51:10]

Key Points:

• NFTs emerge as units on the blockchain that ostensibly point to digital assets (usually images). In reality, the value is in the hype/story, not in what’s actually ‘owned.’
• Most high-profile NFT transactions were circular, staged, or used early-mined Ethereum—creating “illusory” value rather than real liquidity.
• “In the high profile cases…tens of millions of dollars [in sales]…In the real version, most of the very high profile transactions were the product of business arrangements.” (Dan Olson, 48:49)

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10. Gender, Manifesting, and Crypto’s Prosperity Gospel

[51:14 – 53:38]

Key Points:

• Crypto’s “manifesting” culture mirrors New Age self-help, prosperity gospel, and MLMs, but with a hypermasculine flavor.
  • “It was weird for me as a girl to see my guy friends suddenly be very superstitious, very into possibilities, very into manifesting.” (Meagan Elizabeth, 51:47)
• Language of faith, vision boards, and ‘the secret’ imported wholesale and “industrialized.”
• The boundaries between belief, identity, hype, and financial investment became totally blurred—a digital prosperity gospel for men.

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11. Crypto Groupthink: Policing Doubt with Jargon & Shame

[53:38 – 59:05]

Key Points:

• Community enforces groupthink with acronyms and slang:
  • FUD (“Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt”): Dissent shamed as sabotage.
  • WAGMI (“We’re All Gonna Make It”): Rallying cry of unity and faith.
  • Paper Hands: Weak, doubting, will sell too soon.
  • Diamond Hands: The faithful, patiently holding.
  • HFSF (“Have Fun, Stay Poor”): Insult for doubters or skeptics.
• Ritual language keeps doubters marginalized and reinforces demand for unwavering faith.
• Dan likens it to “language for policing belief, for policing participation, because so much of it is riding only on the narrative.” (Dan Olson, 59:05)

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12. The Fundamental Difference: Products vs. Belief

[59:05 – 60:48]

Key Points:

• In stocks, narratives eventually have to connect to reality—a company, a product, revenue.
• In crypto/NFTs, there is often nothing but the story, so “buoying up the narrative” is everything, faith is weaponized.
  • “…It’s all in on buoying up the narrative. You can’t point to something else…” (Dan Olson, 59:05)
• This dynamic creates the same high-control social structures as cults: narrative is more important than evidence.

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13. Hosts Reflect: Would You Join the Crypto Cult?

[61:06 – 62:45]

Key Points:

• Meagan admits she briefly invested and was susceptible to “the promise of a new way,” reflecting on cult-ready tendencies.
• Lola avoided losses because of procrastination, not skepticism—“my procrastination is what saved me.”
• Both are now more wary, crediting Dan Olson with cutting through the hype.

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14. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It's the wild wild west out there.” – Meagan Elizabeth, (04:26)
• “If anybody ever tells you to just trust them, don't.” – Lola Blanc, (03:06)
• “You just gotta manifest, you just gotta think, right bro…” – Dan Olson, (54:48)
• “It becomes an MLM for men so quickly. Like, the hey hun movement, but only it's like, hey bro…” – Lola Blanc, (33:57)
• “If you get spooked by the volatility and let go early, you got paper hands, you've got weak hands.” – Dan Olson, (58:22)
• “In the tech world, people will make these assertions and then sometimes be very, very greatly rewarded for them.” – Lola Blanc, (25:26)

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15. Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Intro & Theme: 03:06 – 04:26
• Storytelling as Technology: 16:12 – 18:09
• Cryptocurrency Basics: 20:05 – 22:47
• Origins & Myth-making: 23:25 – 25:26
• Illicit Beginnings (Silk Road): 25:54 – 30:29
• Satoshi as Mythic Figure: 30:57 – 33:26
• Cult Language & Rituals: 33:57 – 34:39, 53:38 – 59:05
• NFTs & Hype Economy: 43:46 – 51:10
• Prosperity Gospel/Manifesting Parallel: 51:14 – 53:38
• Reflections: Would You Join?: 61:06 – 62:45

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16. Tone & Style

The conversation is lively, irreverent, and honest—combining pop culture references, self-deprecating humor, and genuine curiosity. Dan Olson is thorough, precise, but also accessible (even when admitting complexity). Lola and Meagan bring warmth and candor, often relating crypto culture to personal experiences or broader cult dynamics.

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TL;DR

This episode reveals how the crypto/NFT world mirrors cult dynamics through mythic storytelling, community rituals, jargon policing, and prosperity gospel logic—all fueled by hype and belief, not tangible goods. Both faith and doubt become tools of power, exposing tech’s war on skepticism as not just financial speculation, but an often manipulative movement with cult-like contours.

Transcript

[Dan Olson]

This is exactly right.

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[Lola Blanc]

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[Dan Olson]

Trust me. Do you trust me?

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Would I ever lead you astray?

[Dan Olson]

Trust me, this is the truth. The only truth.

[Lola Blanc]

If anybody ever tells you to just trust them, don't welcome to Trust Me, the podcast about Cult's extreme belief and manipulation from two crypto babes who've actually experienced it. I'm Lola Blanche.

[Megan Elizabeth]

What's up? What's up? I'm Megan Elizabeth.

[Lola Blanc]

Wow, sounds like a real crypto babe over here. This week is part one of our two parter with Dan Olson of YouTube channel Folding Ideas. He is brilliant and he is going to talk to us about crypto NFTs and the cultiness of these communities. He will be breaking down the history of bitcoin and what cryptocurrencies actually are, how NFTs came about and we're basically an Emperor's New clothes situation. How and the cult like thinking that began to emerge in many of these online communities, promising potential investors not just wealth but destiny as long as they suppress their doubt.

[Megan Elizabeth]

We'll discuss the gender divide between crypto promises of prosperity versus say New Age promises of prosperity, some of the jargon and acronyms used by its communities to keep people in, and how it all added up to a culture that discovered, discouraged doubt and demanded keeping the faith no matter what.

[Lola Blanc]

And next week we will discuss how charismatic leaders drive basically all of this behavior and lots more.

[Megan Elizabeth]

This was a world that I've been wanting to delve into. I know a lot of people who invest in it. I myself tried my hand at a little investing in crypto and you know, it's the wild wild west out there. So it was really cool to speak to somebody who's so, so thoroughly well versed.

[Lola Blanc]

Indeed, it is something that I have like tried to understand and just failed over and over again. And he breaks it down in a way I can actually understand.

[Megan Elizabeth]

And I think that's part of the plan. You know, he, as he will say on this podcast, is like, it makes it so complicated that people are like, well I guess it must be really smart Totally, Yeah. Any who. I bet you're wondering about my cultiest thing. Oh, my God. Cut me out saying, any who.

[Dan Olson]

What the hell?

[Megan Elizabeth]

Anyway, I bet you're probably wondering about my cultiest thing.

[Lola Blanc]

Oh, my God, I so am.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Did you know I just am psychic? Okay, so mine involves crypto. This was a kidnapping last year that happened in Brooklyn, I believe, or at least New York City. So an Italian man came to New York City. He had a lot of money in crypto, and two men kidnapped him for 17 days where they tortured him for his bitcoin password.

[Lola Blanc]

Um, 17 days is a lot of days of torture.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Electric. Shocked by the rest.

[Lola Blanc]

Oh, my gosh.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Him over the stairs, threatened to kill him if he did not provide his bitcoin password. And then made him smoke crack cocaine.

[Dan Olson]

Whoa.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Which, you know.

[Lola Blanc]

Very specific.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Very specific. They would pour tequila on him and light him on fire and then urinate on him like this. And the two guys doing this to this man in New York are like two finance bros. Of course, those are the people torturing somebody in an apartment. And it wasn't any apartment. It was like a very expensive apartment. But he was able to say, I'm gonna go get the laptop to sign in after all of this, which PS5.5 seconds of torture. And I'm like, here's all the bitcoin. So already we're in a culture that you and I are not, you know, understanding quite. So he ran out, escaped, found a cop, and they led them back. There was night goggles, body armor, chicken wire, T shirts with the picture of the victim on it with his pipe in his mouth.

[Lola Blanc]

What?

[Megan Elizabeth]

What? Ballistic helmets, Polaroid pictures of. Of the guy with firearms pointed at his head.

[Lola Blanc]

Oh, my God. I have to say, these men, they are creative. They maybe entered the wrong field.

[Megan Elizabeth]

They entered the wrong field, and so they are obviously both in custody. This is the man who was torturing. He's one of the torturers. Wow.

[Lola Blanc]

Okay.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Are you seeing him?

[Lola Blanc]

Yes. Okay. She sent me a picture of a white man in a polo shirt with brown hair. And it's giving Michael Pitt in Funny Games, if anyone has seen that. And it's also giving that serial rapist that I went on a couple dates with and had no idea he was serially raping women in his own prison. For Harvard grad. Very clean cut looking. Anyone who's clean cut looking now, I don't trust it automatically. There's. You've done some shit.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Clean cut is clean cut.

[Lola Blanc]

White dudes. That's a no for me.

[Megan Elizabeth]

So anyway, that's mine. And it goes along with crypto. And it just made me think, wow, what a dangerous world. And there's so much I'm not understanding about this that somebody wouldn't give over their password, even though I understand that there's millions of dollars at stake, but just threatening to be killed, it's somehow different than real money, seemingly. There's obviously some emotional attachment to this crypto that's even more than just monetary, because so often when people are held at gunpoint or tortured, they hand over their money, you know, Exactly.

[Lola Blanc]

Whatever it also represented, in addition to the money, must have been very powerful,

[Megan Elizabeth]

is what we get into in this episode.

[Lola Blanc]

Totally.

[Megan Elizabeth]

So before we do, what's your cultiest thing of the week?

[Lola Blanc]

Oh, my God. So I sometimes I just google the word cult and see what comes up. And this week I googled the word cult and I saw a headline that said, ancient Greek mystery cult priestesses may have chemically tweaked fungus to induce psychedelic hallucinations. From livescience.com Article by Tom Metcalfe. Obviously, I needed to know who these ancient Greek mystery cult priestesses were and what this fungus was all about. And I learned mystery cults were these secret religious schools in the Greco Roman world with initiations and rituals, and only initiates could participate. And there was ritual purification, there was sacrifice, there was fasting, but it all depended on which myth, like, of the gods the cult was centered around. So this one is the Eleusinian Mysteries, apparently the most revered secret religious initiations in ancient Greece. It was to honor the gods Demeter and Persephone. Okay, so these guys, they had their annual rights twice a year, often involved sacred processions to cult sites, ritual bathing in the sea, animal sacrifices, and fasting for several days. And the reason for this headline, because I was like, why do we care? Like, I googled the name of this group.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Were they investing in crypto?

[Lola Blanc]

Oh, my God, they were. So when you look up the name of this group, the Eleusinian Mysteries, it's just like, were they on drugs? Were they not on drugs? Were they on drugs? Were they not on drugs? And I was like, why? What is the debate about whether this group was on drugs? They probably were on drugs, but apparently this is like, a big, like, source of debate in the academic world, I think, because there were so many intense religious revelations reported. And then, of course, people in the 60s and 70s were like, Whoa, we're doing so much LSD, they must have been doing so many shrooms. It's been like this ongoing debate about like, well, they had shrooms, but the kind of shrooms they had would have killed ya. And they were deeply poisonous, so there's no way they were doing shrooms. And now this new study is like, aha. But if they prepared it in a particular way, it would not have killed them. So I guess this is a big development in the ancient Greek cult.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Wow. I mean, we need to do an episode on that cult. And would I join it? Yes, I would. Drugs or no drugs. So excited to learn more about it. And how odd that that's the focal point right now.

[Lola Blanc]

I know, but you know, there's a, there's a area of study for everything. Sure, I phrased that oddly, but you know what I mean.

[Megan Elizabeth]

And you know who studies crypto? Dan.

[Lola Blanc]

Dan Olson, our guest today.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Shall we?

[Lola Blanc]

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[Lola Blanc]

Dan Olson welcome to Trust Me. Thank you so much for joining us.

[Dan Olson]

Thank you for having me.

[Lola Blanc]

As we were just saying before we were recording, we watched your your NFT and crypto video and grasped maybe 30% of it. So we are relying on you today to translate to us like we are five years old. But there is so much to get into just with the cultiness of these tech cultures. But first of all, can you just talk to us a little bit about your YouTube channel folding ideas and the various topics you've covered like flat earthers nfts. Is there a through line in the types of topics that you choose to dive into?

[Dan Olson]

Yeah. So the channel, I've been running it for 15. This'll be the 16th year.

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[Dan Olson]

Yeah, the channel's gone through a number of evolutions over time in terms of like the, the subject matter that, that most immediately grabs my attention. But the through line has always been narrative. It's been, it's been stories. And like the craft of storytelling not just applied to fiction, but to the wider world. There's, there's a long running theory that oral tradition, that the ability to tell each other's stories is one of the earliest technologies that humans developed in order to preserve knowledge and pass information from one generation to the next. And that's why we now have spacecraft and you know, aren't just aren't still hanging out in the trees. You know, I, I don't want to just like over harp that, you know, it's really easy for someone, you know, with a specialty to convince themselves that it's like, oh, well, my specialty is like the most important one, you know. Oh, I write stories. Well, did you know stories are actually like the core of human, human technology? I don't, I don't want to hype it up like that, but it is like, it is undeniably a very old tradition is very deeply baked into the way that humans interface with one another. And the, the techniques of storytelling are not just limited to fiction because stories are ult way of like compressing information and making something digestible, making it easier to transfer, making it easier to retain, giving it patterns that make sense.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah. And if it's compelling enough, people will follow it anywhere it might lead, regardless

[Lola Blanc]

of the evidence behind it.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan Olson]

So I just, I use that lens as a way of sort of breaking down different subjects. And I knew very early on when I was getting started on the channel that if I picked something like werewolf movies to talk about that I would, I would rapidly like exhaust the material that I wanted to talk about. I would get bored. So I specifically, when I was building the channel, I was like, okay, I need to make sure that I've got a framework that will allow me to just kind of like follow my interests and go where the story is, where is the thing to talk about. And so that has allowed me to move kind of seamlessly from talking about specific movies or television shows, books, et cetera, into talking about politics, propaganda, the meta narrative of the military, something like crypto, something like the metaverse, which are effectively Just these, you know, they're advertising pitches, which is a form of storytelling.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Precisely.

[Lola Blanc]

Yeah. I in particular loved your video on Flat Earthers because, I mean, for a number of reasons. First of all, you just dive so deeply into it, but it also kind of functions as Mythbusters for conspiracy theories, which I love, which is probably too reductive for to you, but to me, I'm like, yes, I want to watch someone break down, like, what is rational and what is not rational, and how much of this is driven by emotion. And that's. That's kind of what we want to focus on today is these subcultures that develop around a story that somebody is telling about how the people engaging in it are special. And so with that said, can we talk about crypto? Can we talk?

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah, yeah, let's talk about crypto.

[Lola Blanc]

Okay. So for. For the noob like us, just in very simple terms, like, what is cryptocurrency?

[Dan Olson]

Cryptocurrency is. Oh, boy. Which. Which. Which definition to pull out of the bag because it's so malleable. It's been so many different things over the years. The original pitch was digital money, which. What was digital cash? I shouldn't say. Digital money was digital cash that if you think about a dollar bill that you've got in your pocket, no one is really paying attention to that specific dollar bill. But it is also that specific dollar bill if you wrote a little note on the side of it. You know, like, people like to deface bills. Like, they'll draw funny faces on whoever's on it. Or up in Canada, one of our $5 bill for a long time had a prime minister on it that was very easy to alter so that he looked like Spock from Star Trek.

[Megan Elizabeth]

So you're saying you can have multiple $1 bills, but only there's only one each dollar bill.

[Dan Olson]

Yes. If you deface a bill, if you stamp something on, if you whatever, like that follows that bill.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah.

[Dan Olson]

And like, you could, in theory, if you were insane, track your single bit. Like you could go find it again and, like, get that specific bill back. It is a unique object in and of itself.

[Lola Blanc]

Right.

[Dan Olson]

So there was this, like, story of, like, digital cash that it behaves like cash in that you've got a wallet that you've just got stuffed full of bills. But those individual bills are no one's really, like, you know, no one can track them. It's not tied to a bank account. It's not just a immaterial ledger of debits and credits. It's It's a. It's a thing. It's a conceptual thing that moves from place to place. And that's sort of this metaphor that they were using with Bitcoin that fell apart very quickly, and it instead became this narrative. The one that's been the most dominant for the longest time is digital gold, which has some of the same elements of the Cash story, but just sort of alters the expectation of what you're going to do with it. Right. So that it's like, oh, it's digital gold. You're not meant to spend it. You're meant to, like, hoard it. And, you know, and then occasionally if you need to spend it, you convert it into some other, more spendable format.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Right. So going back to what you were saying about storytelling being kind of the most primal way humans seem to communicate. Can you kind of talk us through, like, what is the mythical origins of these people that we're trusting to be in charge of this kind of. I'm comparing it to a cult leader. And what's kind of the inner narrative people have about themselves once they're on this particular path? Cause I'm imagining it's. I'm an early adapter. I'm against the grain, but I would love to hear what you.

[Dan Olson]

Oh, boy. So the initial digital narrative around Bitcoin was very much rooted in the 2008 financial crisis and a distrust of banks and a distrust of the government to adequately regulate banks and to punish banks for malfeasance and wrongdoing and spreading chaos and destruction in their wake through negligence and reckless behavior. That's what it was rooted in. And so the initial identity that people attached to Bitcoin adoption was this. We are breaking away from the system. We are building our own system. We are creating something that the man cannot touch. And it turns out the man can very touch it. Man can touch it.

[Lola Blanc]

Yeah.

[Dan Olson]

So the. The tightrope to walk here really is kind of like. And. And this was why. LINE GOES up My. My video on the subject wound up being kind of so big and so fast paced, despite being two hours long, is that there's this frequently huge disconnect between the myth and the actual pragmatic reality of what you're doing. But so if we. If we're just going with, like, internally, what's that identity? It's this identity of. Of self reliance, of breaking away from the system, of being a willing outsider, you know, a digital hermit. And also that gets mixed in with. With factions that are very much about like, oh, it's not just. It's not just breaking away. You're not just the digital version of the guy with gold bullion hiding in the woods. You are actually on the cutting edge. You're cyberpunk. You're 10 steps ahead of the system, right? You're in a system that the current system can't even comprehend yet, which, like,

[Lola Blanc]

in the tech world, people will make these assertions and then sometimes be very, very greatly rewarded for them. As a number of people were in the crypto world, like, I remember random bros in my life being like, oh, you got to mine for bitcoin. You got mine for bitcoin. You're making so much money. And that was really fringe at the time. What was it that like, pushed it into this mainstream? Like, oh, you are going to make so much fucking money from bitcoin if you, you know, like, how did that happen? Who drove that?

[Dan Olson]

So bitcoin initially, when it was still in its cash phase, was like deeply skewed, right? So drugs, the main thing that you could buy with bitcoin, you know, like, you would spend tens of bitcoin on a little bit of drugs, basically, like a dollar value, like it had sort of an equivalency to a dollar. But then through just sort of a confluence of happenstance, bitcoin managed well. And these things are entwined, right? Like, you can't ignore angle because drugs was the thing that bitcoin could actually be spent on. So that was the thing that created a demand for people to actually want to have bitcoin. Was. It's like, oh, this is a. This is a thing that I can use to acquire a thing I want.

[Lola Blanc]

Are we talking about like Silk Road? Like, yeah, Silk Road. Okay. Okay. I didn't realize that. Okay, interesting.

[Dan Olson]

Yeah. So it was Silk Road that created, you know, created a market that bitcoin was the necessary intermediate to use that. It's like you had people who wanted drugs, you had people who wanted to sell drugs. And in the middle, was bitcoin willing to help these people

[Megan Elizabeth]

have a meat queue, have a little meet queue in the middle on.

[Lola Blanc]

On Silk Road, which was allegedly incredibly secure because of the technology.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Is that right?

[Dan Olson]

Well, the idea was that because you could just mine bitcoin at the time on your gpu, you could create bitcoin effectively out of nothing, just out of. Out of electricity that you spend. Which means that your real world money and your bitcoin money are wholly divorced from one another, right? You can acquire these bills through a method that has no connection to Your identity, no connection to. Just no connection to you and is thus pseudonymous. You're just a hash string of numbers for a wallet address and not a person. And so that facilitated Silk Road in the middle, as it's like, yeah, you're relatively risk free doing this interaction, basically, as long as you trust that the person you're ultimately giving your mailing address to so that they can send you the physical object you're trying to acquire. As long as you trust that person to mail you something.

[Lola Blanc]

Oh, the early Internet.

[Megan Elizabeth]

I know. And I'm remembering, like Silk Road, like somebody was like murdered, like somebody got caught for trying to murder someone.

[Lola Blanc]

Oh, there was a number of those, like in the dark wagon. Yeah.

[Megan Elizabeth]

It was just a disaster. But it's so interesting how this so quickly became like a self regulating, very quickly growing group of tech bros. Yeah, yeah.

[Lola Blanc]

It exploded. Yeah, yeah.

[Dan Olson]

And so the thing was that by having this actual market, even like before that phase, bitcoin was like the famous, like bitcoin pizza where it was like 10,000 Bitcoin for a $17 pizza.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Right.

[Dan Olson]

You know, so with Silk Road suddenly creating a reason for a wider number of people to engage with this all of a sudden. And a bunch of people who are like, who are coming in to bitcoin and are like, I'm not gonna, like, they look up the instructions for how to mine it and they're like, I'm not gonna do that. And so they just go on Mount Gox and they buy bitcoin using normal money and create a connection that the FBI ultimately uses to. All right, getting off track there. But they come in and they're just like, I'm not going, I'm not going to mine it myself. That sounds like a waste of my time and energy. I'm just going to buy it and then I'm going to go on Silk Road and I'm going to buy the drugs I want and then I'll get the drugs and then I've got what I want and I can move on with my life. That moment is what creates a market for bitcoin itself. And all of a sudden the price jumps. And because it was so low originally, because we were talking about, like, it's like, okay, you, you could mine like thousands of this stuff when the price suddenly like jumps from a tenth of a cent to a dollar.

[Lola Blanc]

Right.

[Dan Olson]

That person who got in early did in fact just make a lot of money, assuming that they didn't lose it all to Mount Cox.

[Megan Elizabeth]

It's interesting how suddenly this is Mainstream. Suddenly we have people that are, like, these kind of leaders in this space that people are projecting. Like, what onto?

[Lola Blanc]

Who were they? Well, who were they? Who was driving it? Yeah.

[Dan Olson]

This is where it gets complicated. So the initial leader of bitcoin is a pseudonym. Oh, I'm gonna get it wrong. Satoshi.

[Lola Blanc]

I believe you, no matter what you say.

[Dan Olson]

So, no, the thing is, is that my instinct is to say Satoshi Kon, but that is a filmmaker.

[Lola Blanc]

Wait, can I look it up? Bitcoin Legion.

[Sonesta Announcer]

Yeah.

[Dan Olson]

Bitcoin Satoshi.

[Lola Blanc]

Satoshi. Satoshi Nakamoto.

[Dan Olson]

That's it, right? Yeah. Nakamoto. Named after Nakamoto Towers from Die Hard. Because these people are huge dorks. So Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym for a still anonymous initial developer of bitcoin. He published the white paper in the initial mining software and then kind of disappeared. And there's a lot of speculation about who it actually is, but it's kind of irrelevant because the fact that it was this pseudonymous developer who then, like, vanished into the ether. Oh, boy. Is that tantalizing?

[Lola Blanc]

Yeah, it's giving Q. Okay.

[Dan Olson]

Q would eventually take a lot of Q's, a lot of Qs from it. But, yeah, so that was a really tantalizing narrative that it's like, oh, we have. It's like, hey, here's this new technology, this new money. And it has this really interesting, mysterious origin story, because the guy who did it, nobody knows who he really is.

[Lola Blanc]

It's really cyberpunk.

[Bethenny Frankel]

Right.

[Megan Elizabeth]

He's like a digital cowboy. And also, I like that the. The whole thing also has this. Which we see in cults a lot, you know, this need being met, this meaning being given to it, which is also. Not only are we going to make money, but this is going to overthrow a very corrupt system.

[Dan Olson]

Yes. And all of this is very, like, you know, none of this is happening in a vacuum. Like, Satoshi Nakamoto is named after Die Hard.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Right.

[Dan Olson]

Like, these people are not. Like, they're not unaware of what they're doing or the world that they exist in. They are aware that, like, people kind of thirst for these narratives, and they are aware that, like, doing it in this way is going to be good. Marketing is going to be tantalizing. And so that mysterious origin, it's like, okay, it's like, ah, it's got a mysterious origin. Well, it doesn't really have a mysterious origin. It has a constructed mystery.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Oh, God. Yeah.

[Lola Blanc]

So leader disappears. Drugs being sold.

[Dan Olson]

Drugs being sold. All of a sudden, you have a. You have Non bitcoin audience buying bitcoin, which is causing the price to go up, which is creating bitcoin millionaires, which then creates a narrative of bitcoin as a place that you can, you can buy in and become a millionaire. Because the price might just all of a sudden. Thousand X, 10,000 X whatever. Like, hey, look at this line on this graph. It just, it just does, it just goes up.

[Lola Blanc]

Yeah.

[Megan Elizabeth]

So it becomes an mlm. It becomes an MLM for men so quickly. Like the hey hun movement, but only it's like, hey bro,

[Dan Olson]

if you get in early on bitcoin, the gambling addicts,

[Lola Blanc]

thousand x, the capitalists, the bootstraps, people.

[Megan Elizabeth]

And also it so quickly creates a community where I don't know if this was like some 4chan thing that they did on purpose, where it's like isolated young men suddenly have a community where they're saying good morning and good night every single day to each other. And there are, there is a ritual involved in it.

[Dan Olson]

Yeah.

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[Dan Olson]

So out of this explosion, so Bitcoin, you know, orders of magnitude increases, creates this narrative of like this is, this is a gold mine, you know, this is a rich vein. But other people start jumping. You get an initial wave of people who are creating, who are taking the core of bitcoin, the technological core of Bitcoin, and sort of spinning it off in different directions. Some of them are trying to fix what they see as mistakes with bitcoin and like improve it technologically. Others are just trying to make lightning strike twice. And the thing is, is that because it's just, it's just basically a software package that you can download and just start running, these become incredibly easy to spin off. And all of a sudden you've got two cryptocurrencies, ten cryptocurrencies, a hundred cryptocurrencies, a thousand cryptocurrencies, ten thousand cryptocurrencies in a very, very short period of time. And then it suddenly becomes this game of like, okay, which ones are going to be the ones that are going to 10,000x, which ones are going to be the ones that are going to go from penny stock to like a dollar, right? And that then creates a market for tea leaf readers, fortune tellers, guys who are going to tell you how to read the market and how to predict which ones you should be buying into. So now you've got a conventional economy getting layered over top. You then get these pseudo communities of people trying to guess the future and read where things are going. The financial, all of the pre existing habits of penny stock traders and just general day traders, gambling addicts, stock gambling addicts, they all rush in because it's everything that they're used to, everything that they love about, you know, buying CMKM and losing all their money. And it's all of that and even less regulated, right? There is no one from the FTC coming and saying, like, hey, you're not allowed to lie to people.

[Lola Blanc]

Right? In your, in your film, you, you say, and this might be NFT specifically, so you're gonna have to kind of delineate where each ends and begins. But you say the primary product of NFTs was hype. And is that true of cryptocurrencies as well? Like, do they do well because people think they're going to do well? Is that how it works?

[Dan Olson]

By and large, yes.

[Lola Blanc]

Okay.

[Dan Olson]

Yeah, it is, because cryptocurrencies are overwhelmingly driven by themselves and a narrative about themselves. And you could say the same about like, stocks, I guess, stocks and economies as well. So that's not a unique criticism. And I made that argument in another video specifically about GameStop and that, you know, you could say that every stock is a meme stock in some degree, because it is ultimately driven by a narrative that a company can tell about itself. And maybe that narrative is based in a reality of like, hey, we are actually doing really well. And maybe it's based in, well, 10 years from now we might run the world.

[Lola Blanc]

Right? Right. I am learning this from industry, which is my current show obsession. I have no idea about the financial world. Again, I understand about 30% of what they're talking about, but I'm here for the drama. Have you seen it?

[TurboTax Announcer (Alternate)]

No.

[Lola Blanc]

Oh my God, it's so good. Anyway, a lot of the storylines on that show have to do with like, convincing the public that their company is the one to invest in, or like trying to save their company from their reputational damage or whatever in order to not fail in the stock market. So I don't know shit about this shit, but it's a good show.

[Dan Olson]

So. Yeah, so cryptocurrencies are just a, basically a narrative about themselves. Like, that becomes the dominant thing by like 2015. All of them are just being driven by this narrative. Like, well, it might 10,000 times in price, it might 10,000x in value. And if you buy in 2015 and at 10,000x's in 2018, you get to retire in 2019.

[Lola Blanc]

Right? So, yes. Okay, so now we're at the part where people are coming in and being like, this is the one. Don't you want to put your faith in this one?

[Megan Elizabeth]

And these are now NFTs around this

[Dan Olson]

point, 2018, 2019, NFTs first start sort of like nucleating and then they, they Become the thing of 2021.

[Lola Blanc]

Nucleating is a great word. Can. Can you explain what NFTs are to the noob?

[Dan Olson]

So the underlying technology of Bitcoin works off of a confirmation mechanism called blockchain, which is just a way for a bunch of distributed computers to all agree on what a central ledger actually says. And, well, and. And there's reasons for that. And there are legitimate. Like, this is. This is itself based off of something called a Merkel chain, which. Or a Merkel tree, which is like these. Sort of. Like, this is a bit like saying, it's like, well, human bones are built out of calcium.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Right.

[Dan Olson]

And it's like, you know, a lot of things are built out of calcium. There's nothing. There's nothing sort of like, untoward. I try to be very fair and say that it's like, okay, like, there are technological elements here that, like, you will see parts of all over the place. And I think that's important to inoculate because it's very easy for people to talk about blockchain and Bitcoin and NFTs like they're magic.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Right.

[Dan Olson]

That it's like this incomprehensible thing that just sort of like, that came out of another dimension, and that's why you took care. And it's like, well, no, it is built out of the same boring stuff as everything else. It is made out of matter. It is made out of programming. It is made out of mathematical concepts that you'll find all over the place in various forms.

[Lola Blanc]

And the basic premise is just you can trace everything that happen. Like every transaction, basically, like it's baked in.

[Dan Olson]

Yes. Because you've got this whole network of. Of computers that have this protocol that they use to agree with one another what the. The whole network should say. So it's like, what is. What is the state of the machine? So rather than having a centralized authority that's like, hey, everybody, here's the state of the machine. It's kind of this distributed machine going like, hey, everybody, let's all get together and we'll communicate and decide through a consensus mechanism of one form or another what the state of the machine is. Now, in Bitcoin's case, the consensus mechanism is burn a lifetime's household's worth of electricity and in. And other cryptocurrencies figured out other ways of doing it that have their own problems but are less immediately destructive.

[Lola Blanc]

Right, Right.

[Megan Elizabeth]

They're like, we run on dolphins. Like, that's how evil some of it gets. Yeah.

[Dan Olson]

And so an NFT is just that it's like if you already have this ledger that's just entries. Well, what if, rather than what if you made one of those entries represent a thing like what if my bank statement, what if I could have my bank also keep track of how many miles I ran today?

[Megan Elizabeth]

Right.

[Dan Olson]

What if I could just have it. Have my step counter in there? What if I could sync my step counter to my bank account? Because the bank's already, it's already dealing in numbers. That's all it deals in. In is just like long, long, long lines of numbers. So you can sort of see the logic here of like, well, we could just use, we could just use this thing that's already just a giant list of stuff. And instead of that stuff being exclusively transactions, we could make that stuff a thing. We could have it point to something. We could put other things in that list.

[Lola Blanc]

Like a piece of digital art, for example.

[TurboTax Announcer]

Yeah.

[Dan Olson]

And so those, you end up with this nft, which is a token that isn't a Bitcoin or an Ethereum in this case because NFTs really emerge on the Ethereum network. Rather than being an eth. This token is a indivisible hypertext reference. It's a link. And what's on the other side of that link could be anything.

[Lola Blanc]

Okay.

[Dan Olson]

And in most cases it was a jpeg.

[Lola Blanc]

Right? Right. And as you say in your video, in your film, very bad JPEGs, like almost exclusively, like very stupid art.

[Dan Olson]

Very.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yes.

[Dan Olson]

Because they're easy to make.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Right?

[Lola Blanc]

Right. There was a person I know who I work with sometimes who was trying, it's not Megan who was trying to get me to participate and create NFTs that they would share ownership with in. And I remember them sending me to the. I think it was, they were showing me the party ape billionaire club.

[Dan Olson]

Oh, sweet.

[Lola Blanc]

I was like this, this is what, selling for that much money.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Right.

[Lola Blanc]

It's crazy looking. How much money were these selling for?

[Dan Olson]

In the high profile cases, most of which were astroturfed in the hype version, in the mythological version, tens of millions of dollars.

[Lola Blanc]

Okay. And in the real version?

[Dan Olson]

In the real version, most of the very high profile things, most of the very high profile transactions were the product of business arrangements.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Say more about that.

[Dan Olson]

Yeah, you know, like you would, you'd dig into one and you'd be like, like, oh, so and so paid $20 million for this piece. But then you find out that the artist and the buyer are co investors working together, are co founders of a digital art gallery.

[Lola Blanc]

Okay.

[Dan Olson]

That this Thing is in theory going to be displayed in. And you're like, wait, where did this money actually come from? And where is it actually going?

[Lola Blanc]

Right?

[Dan Olson]

And was this, like, was this price agreed on beforehand? Like, was actually going on here? Like, it just wound up being very circular. A lot of it was also, like, a lot of it was illusory in the way that you have, Remember, bitcoin could be mined. You could mine a thousand in a day at one point. Well, the same was true with Ethereum. There was an early point where you could mine a thousand in a day, you could mine 10,000 in a week. So you have these people who had gotten in early and have this vast sum of, in theory, dollar exchangeable Ethereum, but has never actually been exchanged for dollars.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Okay.

[Dan Olson]

And if they were to try and cash it out, it would just crush the network and it would cause a, like, it would cause a collapse, it would cause a like, bank run and the whole thing would fall apart. So they've got nothing. It is unspendable. It is in theory, wealth, but it is unspendable.

[Lola Blanc]

Right.

[Dan Olson]

Oh, and so they can afford to then, like, yeah, sure, I've got, I've got $5 million of Ethereum that is otherwise unspendable. I might as well buy a bored ape with it.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Right. And those were the height of the,

[Dan Olson]

those are the ones that were on Jimmy Kimmel. Yeah.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yes, the Picassos, so to speak. But what interests me in particular about this time was that like, I, I'm one of those girls who was really into manifesting and like, you know, I had my tarot cards and my whatever and it was weird. I, I'm not trying to be binary of like guy, girl, guy girl, but it was weird for me as a girl to see my guy friends suddenly be very superstitious, very into possibilities, 100% very. Yes.

[Lola Blanc]

Just men's tarot cards.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah, yeah, you said tea leaf readers. It was just a very culty thing. Can, can you say more about that?

[Dan Olson]

So I've gotten very, even more interested lately in like the, the history of fortune telling and the various ways that cultures over the years have, have had for fortune telling. And so, yeah, no, it, there were veins of that already. So you get what is called prosperity gospel. You get the secret, you get the power of positive, positive thinking. You know, those sort of veins of like that, that hyper macho version of manifesting was kind of always there in various forms. You know, like Wolf of Wall Street, Belfort, Jordan Belfort. You know, he was using those that language in the, in the 90s to scam people. And you can go back even further and further and further. Like Ponzi, the name of a Ponzi scheme, you know, used it in the early 20th century. So there has kind of always been this like feminine and masculine versions of the narrative. The reason why they. Oh man, sorry, I'm gonna get super scattered here because boy, does this go off in a lot of interesting directions kind of all at once. Because it's like. Cause there is a, there is a gender element to it that is, that is undeniable. But like you have this manifesting narrative that has cropped up in various forms throughout history and it's sort of this low lying hum and it has these gendered manifestations but then all of a sudden in crypto they converge in a sort of way or like they cross over. You end up with a lot of the previously feminine language being applied to the masculine expression.

[Lola Blanc]

Right.

[Dan Olson]

And that was fascinating, but also like I am not, I am not equipped to just like pull off the top of my head accurate, well founded claims about it beyond like, yes, I totally know what you saw. And I saw it too. Right, but so, so all of these, yeah, this manifesting language, prosperity gospel, power of positive thinking, you know, fortune telling. The thing that made NFTs unavoidable and the thing that made them so infuriating to many people was the fact that basically every single expression of manipulative language got employed and unloaded at industrial scale simultaneously. And when you suddenly have this cadre of people like, who have self identified around this, this hobby and they're just spewing a relentless wave of. You just gotta manifest, you just gotta think, right bro, you just gotta.

[Megan Elizabeth]

It's not a hobby, it's an identity. Now you know, at this point, and I like some of the acronyms, if I may. F U D fud.

[Dan Olson]

Yeah, that one is a history classic. Like that one goes back way before.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Oh really?

[Dan Olson]

Way, way before. NFTs. Yeah.

[Lola Blanc]

What's the origin?

[Dan Olson]

No one really knows. Somewhere in the 20th century. But it just, it's an acronym for Fear, Uncertainty and doubt. And yeah, no, because like the thing is, I referenced this earlier that like penny stocks, Penny stocks used to be this really, really niche form of gambling that was you kind of had to do the hard way because you had to like actually fill out papers and like mail them.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Oh no, and then I'm gonna mine for bitcoin instead.

[Dan Olson]

And then in the 90s, all of a sudden you get like outfits like Jordan Belfort, like, his whole thing was penny stock scams, you know, pumping and dumping penny stocks. You pick a. You pick a company, you spin a narrative about, like, oh, yeah, they're going to 100x anytime now. They're going to shoot from 0.01 cents per share up to, you know, we've got. I heard a rumor that there's going to be a buyout for $1.25 a share. So you should give me $10,000 and I'll.

[Lola Blanc]

Yeah, right. So it creates this culture where. Because it does operate on faith to some extent.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah.

[Lola Blanc]

It's. They're kind of not wrong in a way when saying that you can't doubt because that will make it not work. But that's not really what they mean. Right. It's more like it's.

[Dan Olson]

It. Because it's these. It's these two things. It's that. It's like that. That if bitcoin, if crypto, if NFTs, if this penny stock, if the main thing that's going to cause them to go from 0.01 cents up to A$25 is an influx of people who heard a story and jump on. That's going to be the actual driver of that change. Well, you need that story. And so anything that you do that, like, any fear, any uncertainty, any doubt undermines that narrative.

[Lola Blanc]

Right. That's so interesting.

[Megan Elizabeth]

And if you do have doubt, there's hfsp, have fun, stay poor.

[Lola Blanc]

And I do.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah. So, you know, people coming up with some doubts.

[Dan Olson]

Yeah.

[Megan Elizabeth]

That insult would hurt my feelings. Oh, same. Yeah. I'd be like, oh, damn, I need to get back on. One of the other things they would say is to the moon. That means, like, it's gonna explode.

[Lola Blanc]

Also, W a G M I was it.

[Dan Olson]

We're all gonna make it.

[Lola Blanc]

We're all gonna make it.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Or nag me not gonna make it. And what was paper hands?

[Dan Olson]

Paper hands is somebody who doesn't have confidence. Like, so if you're holding a thing and if this thing represents the investment and that investment is volatile.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah.

[Dan Olson]

If it's something that you look at the graph and it's just like shooting up and down and up and down and up and down 20 times a day. That's kind of scary. That's scary volatility. But if the belief is that this thing will over time do the bitcoin thing, it's going to go from 0.01 up to $10,000, then you need to have the. You need to have the diamond hands. You need to have these rock hard hands that are necessary to hold on tight.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Right.

[Dan Olson]

As long as it takes for that transformation to happen. And if you get spooked by the volatility and let go early, you got paper hands, you've got weak hands.

[Megan Elizabeth]

This is biblical scale is so this is a religion.

[Lola Blanc]

But it may like and all of it makes sense. Like everything you're describing, I'm like, yeah, you do have to hold on to your investments through the volatility of the market. And yeah, you do have to have faith because if you all collectively stop having faith then it will lose its value. It all makes sense. But then what actually happens is it starts to create this insular cult culture where you are kind of ostracized if you do indicate any sign of doubt. Right?

[Dan Olson]

Yeah, it develops the language for policing because you know, for policing language for policing belief, for policing participation. Because so much of it is riding on only the narrative. So if we're talking about a company like Apple and we're looking at like, okay, what do we think Apple stock is going to do next year? And we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether we think it's going to go up or down and maybe we'll be right. But like we've got all of these things that we can, we can grasp onto. Here was their previous quarter results. Here was like this thing. And all of that narrative that we're building in theory filters down at some point to customers have gone into a store and exchanged dollars for products.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Products.

[Dan Olson]

When you get into these meme stocks, when you get into crypto, when you get into NFTs, that interaction doesn't exist. It isn't there. And so all you have is this narrative. And so it's all in on buoying up the narrative. You can't point to something else and be like, well they had a really strong fourth quarter and I believe it's like, and they've got this new chip that like they just debuted the new chip. It hasn't made it into, it hasn't made it into a product yet, but it's going to actually be like really power efficient. And so I think they're going to be able to make good on their promises to like double battery life. And people are going to want that. I think that's a feature people, you know, you can't have that argument. You just have to throw to like the nebulous future of like, well, it is the way of the future, it is the new normal. Commerce is Just going to happen via bitcoin.

[Lola Blanc]

Now, we're going to leave part one there for now. Come back for part two next week for more crypto discussion. And Megan, it's the time of the episode where I ask you the question and of course, yay, I must know. Would you join the crypto cult?

[Megan Elizabeth]

Oh, yeah. I mean, like I said, I'm trying. I tried. I made an investment a couple years ago when the techie boys in my life were telling me to do it. And I'm so glad I didn't convince anyone else to do it because I almost did. And those people had some real money that they were gonna play with, and so that would've been a travesty if they lost it. Yeah, I'm very into overthrowing our current system of money and corruption and I'm very susceptible to. There's a new way to do it. So of course that always comes with a shadow side and we learn that over and over and over again. But yeah, I'm susceptible to crypto, but I don't think I really am anymore. I think Dan, I think he. He got through to me.

[Lola Blanc]

You know, there were like two years where I had enough money to maybe invest in something. We are not there anymore, but there were like two. And I kept intending to invest and I was like, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do that. And I. My procrastination, honestly, is what saved me. If I were more on top of shit all the time, I fully would've lost a bunch of money. So let's be grateful for that.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah, you would own like five weird ape NFTs.

[Lola Blanc]

Totally.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Yeah. I mean, honestly, there is something to be grateful about about not having enough money to do weird shit when you're younger.

[Lola Blanc]

Yeah, I'd love to have money to do some other weird shit, but, you know, we'll get there. We'll get there.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Truly, we'll get there. As always, thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Trust Me. We loved having you. Please come again next week. Rate us 5 stars if you want to. No big deal. And as always, remember to follow your gut. Watch out for red flags and never ever trust me.

[Dan Olson]

Bye.

[Lola Blanc]

This has been an exactly right production. Hosted by me, Lola Blanc and me, Megan Elizabeth.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Our senior producer is Ji Ha Lee.

[Lola Blanc]

This episode was mixed by John Bradley.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain, and our guest booker is Patrick Cotner.

[Lola Blanc]

Our theme song was composed by Holly Amber Church.

[Megan Elizabeth]

Trust Me is executive produced by Karen Kilgareth, Georgia Hardstark and Daniel Kramer.

[Lola Blanc]

You can find us on Instagram usme podcast or on TikTok at trustme cult

[Megan Elizabeth]

podcast got your own story about cults, extreme belief or manipulation? Shoot us an [e-mail] Listen to Trust

[Lola Blanc]

Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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