From Joseph L. Flatley, author of New Age Grifter and creator of The So-Called Prophet from Pittsburgh

THE INNER EMPIRE is a podcast that pulls together a lot of what I’ve spent years reporting on and thinking about: cults, the occult, conspiracy culture, and the platforms that have inserted themselves directly into our daily life.

Here’s the simplest way I can put it: for five hundred years, people have known how to install a belief in someone’s mind: magicians did it with ritual and symbol, cults did it with repetition and isolation, ad men did it with images. What’s changed is that the same basic mechanism now runs automatically, every time you open an app, with nobody at the controls. This show is about tracing that mechanism across history and figuring out how it ended up running our lives without anyone deciding it should.

Enjoy this introduction. Be sure to subscribe so you can hear new episodes when are released.

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

And be sure to sign up for my newsletter, Failed State Update: ⁠⁠https://lennyflatley.substack.com/⁠