How YouTuber Dan Olson (Folding Ideas) hunts internet grifts

Alberta is the unlikely front in the war against NFTs, contrepreneurs, and the metaverse.

This episode of the BetaKit Podcast is a little different because (if you want to) you can see me!

We’re back in the StartWell studio experimenting with video and it’s frankly horrifying.

“We have industrialized grift in a way that is kind of unprecedented in human history.”
– Dan Olson

But there’s a good reason: this week we’re talking with Canadian YouTuber Dan Olson, known online as Folding Ideas. We couldn’t do just an audio podcast for a YouTuber of his stature.

You might not know Dan by name, but you have probably seen his two-hour video Line Goes Up that interrogates Web3 and NFTs, or his video In Search of a Flat Earth, where he systematically proves we in fact… do not live on a flat earth.

Beyond being a really smart and thoughtful guy, I wanted to speak with Dan because he’s on a bit of a run with his content, attacking internet grifts directly, dissecting them, understanding their cultural components and implications. It is very much my shit.

Because Dan, like me, comes from a certain demographic of people unhappy with the current state of the internet because we remember what it was like before—back when grifts were charming, and not scaled to such an extent as to be dehumanizing, horrifying, or metaverse-y.

But why is Dan Olson so attracted to these dark corners of the internet in the first place? How can they be explained through World of Warcraft? What is the measure of a man?

Let’s dig in.

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