Let’s face it. It’s tough to talk about some things. Even things that are really important… like the individuals and institutions running the world in the shadows. Nothing will ruin a Thanksgiving faster than bringing up Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to the inner circles of power or running through some of the bizarre circumstances around the assassination of JFK. Talk like that and you’ll get written off as a conspiracy theorist… or worse. You can face social or professional suicide (or maybe even get “suicided”?). But there are real conspiracies out there. They are just really difficult to talk about, as even documented events can seem like the world of paranoid fantasy. 

Ghost Stories for the End of the World tackles the history of conspiracies. It is not a “conspiracy theory” podcast, rather it is a well-researched exploration of para-politics. Matt, the mysterious host of Ghost Stories for the End of the World, describes his work as “a history podcast about corruption, organized crime, deep politics and big business, with the occasional detour into celebrity and the truly weird”. In over 50 episodes so far, he invites us to join him “riding ghost horses into murky lands haunted by spooks and gangsters, the sickos who shape our glitching reality”.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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