If you have your own story of being in a cult or a high control group or if you've had

experience with manipulation or abuse the power that you'd like to share, leave us a message

on our hotline number at 347-86 trust. That's 347-868-7878 or shoot us an e-mail at TrustMePod

at gmail.com. Trust me, do you trust me? Trust me, I'm like a smart person. Yeah, I've never

lied to you. I'll never have lied. If you think that one person has all the answers, don't!

Welcome, welcome, welcome to TrustMe, the podcast about cults, extreme belief and manipulation

from two edge lords who have actually experienced it. I am Lola Blanc, and I am Megan Elizabeth.

And today our guest is Virginia Heffernand. She is a journalist, author, columnist at Wired,

and former member of an intellectual organization called Edge. She's going to tell us about meeting

book agent Kingmaker and Edge founder John Rockman and how she got involved with his curated

collection of prominent academics, tech billionaires and artists, many of whom you would recognize,

including Elon Musk, Richard Dawkins, and Jeffrey Epstein. We'll talk about Edge's promise to create

a third culture, the so-called billionaires dinners, the group's close financial ties to Epstein,

and the overlap with the dubious academia of the intellectual dark web. I realized, after this

interview, that some conspiracy theories I had heard before about Marina Abramavik

are rooted in Edge, and that this is like the origin of conspiracy theories that I knew about,

but I didn't know where they were coming from. She's an incredible artist. She's known for

performance arts, you know, where she'll like sit in a room and let people do whatever they want

to her for 48 hours or whatever, and she's done all of these performance pieces that are very

provocative. She used pig's blood to write phrases on walls of museum. She invited people to a

dinner party, I guess, that like for some reason people thought a performance thing was cannibalism,

but it was like, thought it was Satanism and cannibalism. I don't know, but it was, it was not.

...