Hi there, I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Every time he sees a triangle these days, my 10-year-old son points and says,

The Illuminati. This is a meme that he and all his friends have absorbed from YouTube.

It's interesting that several

centuries after the Illuminati first appeared as basically an idealistic secret boys club

followed by the Freemasons, these kinds of shadowy organizations still exert so much power

on our imaginations. That's because power doesn't always come in the shape of queens, presidents,

CEOs, or members of parliament. Often always come in the shape of queens, presidents, CEOs, or members

of parliament. Often, it exists in the more or less invisible relationships between people.

My guest today is renowned historian Neil Ferguson. His new book, The Square and the Tower,

networks and hierarchies from the Freemasons to Facebook, looks at the two ancient power structures that continue to move the world today.

Welcome to think again, Neil.

My pleasure.

So is YouTube wrong? Are secret organizations not in fact running everything?

Well, it would be probably going better if they were, but the sad truth is that they're not.

The Illuminati don't exist anymore.

I checked.

There are other organizations that are occasionally attributed with great power behind the scenes,

the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum, the Rothschilds, George Soros,

I could go on. The conspiracy theorists are quite creative in the ways that they explain the world.

But when you encounter those organisations and people, it's a little disappointing to find that they aren't in control at all.

In fact, they're these days in an almost permanent state of anxiety because the world is so clearly not under their control.

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