I’ve been sitting on this for a while and I’m finally ready to send it out into the world.
It’s called THE INNER EMPIRE — 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.
The transcript of this episode is below.
The algorithm that runs your life is magic. Not metaphorically. Not “like” magic. The same psychological principles that ceremonial magicians have been using for five hundred years — now controlling your imagination, automated, in a way that no Renaissance sorcerer could have imagined.
I’ve spent years investigating true conspiracies, crackpot theories, religious cults, and con artists. And I kept running into the same question, from every direction: how does belief get installed? Not argued into you. Not chosen. Installed. Running in the background before you’ve decided anything.
You’ll meet a woman who built an entirely new identity for herself — with a new name, new face, new birth certificate — one ritual at a time, over years. A Czech magazine put her on its cover in a dark hood, wielding a dagger, and called her the “Witch of the new generation.” She didn’t care that they were also mocking her. She was done hiding. “You need to pick a character and play it,” she said. She meant it as practical advice. She died last year. Estranged from her family, but beloved by people all over the world.
You’ll hear a cassette tape I spent years trying to track down. A cult leader on the Arizona border, channeling a celestial being of supposedly immense cosmic authority, ascended all the way to Paradise. On tape, he needed notes. You can hear him flipping pages. He sounds like Porky Pig. But that doesn’t matter. Behind him was a real production pipeline: a sound engineer, a transcription team, an editing team polishing the grammar of celestial transmissions. Hundreds of people, over three decades, built their entire lives around what came out of that room.
You’ll meet a Pennsylvania ceremonial magician with an affinity for ancient grimoires, a doctorate in applied physics, and a sophisticated understanding of the psychology of belief. You’ll go inside evangelical churches where people are trained, step by step, to hear the voice of God. Researchers who studied these communities found that people with a strong capacity for mental absorption were six hundred percent more likely to report hearing God’s voice directly. Practice mattered too — the more time spent in this kind of prayer, the more reliably it worked. And you’ll sit with a movement of people who’ve spent years waiting for the government to formally disclose the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence — watching congressional testimony, under oath, from a former intelligence officer who says it’s already happened. The disclosure never arrives. And somehow, years later, the anticipation is stronger than ever. The absence of evidence has become its own kind of proof.
Every one of these stories illustrates the same three-part mechanism: attention, association, expectation. Install the right images, charge them with the right emotion, repeat them long enough — and you don’t have to convince anyone of anything. Attention determines what enters the system, shaping what you notice; association links what you attend to with existing emotional and cognitive structures. And once that loop is running, it keeps running whether or not anyone is left standing at the controls.
A Renaissance philosopher named Giordano Bruno described this mechanism five hundred years ago — in detail — and was burned at the stake for it. A scholar named Ioan Petru Couliano spent his career tracing what became of Bruno’s method, and was murdered in a locked bathroom stall in the middle of his research. Nobody has ever been charged.
Couliano wrote that the modern heir to the Renaissance magician “busies himself with public relations, propaganda, market research, sociological surveys, publicity, information, counterinformation and misinformation, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography.” He wrote that this figure follows the principles of magic, but gives them “a technical and impersonal turn of phrase.” Technical. Impersonal. That’s not a description of a man in a robe. That’s a description of an algorithm.
This is a show about murder, magic, machine learning, and the parts of your own mind that are not under your complete control. This is The Inner Empire.
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