Welcome to Inside the Hive. I am your host Nick Bilton. So we're going to take a little

break from Trumland, yes thank God, this week so that I can welcome a guest to my show who is a world famous magician.

Why a magician you might ask?

Well that's because there's something the magicians know about their audience that is not too dissimilar to what politicians and news outlets know about their audience, and that is that people want to believe.

So that's the entire reason that magic works in the first place. We'll get to

this and more in the show, but you can imagine how it relates to fake news and social media and the world we live in today.

So my guest has some fascinating stories he's going to

tell us about the marketing tricks old magicians use to become famous like Houdini and folks like that.

And he's going to explain how some amazing tricks work, which he's not really supposed to do,

but he'll do it just for us, as long as you don't tell anyone.

And he's going to tell us how magic is often used in war, in the battlefield battlefield, yes in war. In fact, during World War II,

there was a group of magicians who were recruited by the allies to help fight Hitler.

They helped disguise battleships, make entire ports disappear from the sky, so that bombers couldn't see them.

And they also created these James Bond-like objects that prisoners of war could use to escape like shoelaces embedded with wire that they could

saw through bars or board games that contained real currency and playing cards with maps of escape

routes.

And finally he's going to talk to us about how magicians

sometimes work with folks like the CIA and FBI to try to catch bad guys. In fact, my

guest today has actually created a TV show around this very concept.

If you stick around after my guest is on, I'm going to talk to John Kelly about a story

that I wrote that's going to be in this issue's vanity fair about spies who work in Silicon

Valley. Yes, Russian and Chinese spies who work for companies like Facebook and

...