(piano jingle)

(kettle whistling)

Open your eyes, sheeple.

Dark forces are at work behind the scenes.

Puppet masters pulling the strings

and controlling everything you see and hear.

No, not the next Templar, the robes, and crucians.

I mean the hacks who keep using secret societies

as short hand for evil in their pop cultural products.

Dan Brown's latest book, Inferno, has the concercion,

Jay-Z and Drake name check the Illuminati

and Rick Ross rhymes about Freemasons

and the Templars show yet again

in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

All of these secret societies seem to fail

at their central mission, being secret.

Story tellers are deploying

secret societies far too casually.

They've turned it paint by numbers super villains

with a dash of X Files and a pinch of Alex Jones

but what bothers me more than the laziness is the fact

that these leeches power from actual conspiracy theories,

our most vital and powerful form of modern day folk art.

Don't believe me?

Search YouTube for Illuminati.

So that's who forced Tupac Shakur and Paul McCartney

to fake their own deaths, live and learn.

Live and learn.

Look, you can make great art about secret societies

but only if you make it about the paranoia itself

like Eco did with Foucault's Pendulum

or Steve Jackson did with his Illuminati card game

or Philip K. Dick did with everything.

With everything he ever did, ever.

People who record rants about how the pyramid

on the dollar bill proves that the trilateral commission

controls Major League Baseball are a national treasure.

The movie National Treasure is not an actual treasure.

(low tone chord)

What's your favorite conspiracy theory?

Let me and the NSA know in the comments.

(playful music)