Beau Friedlander:
Adam.
Adam Levin:
Beau, Beau, Beau, Beau, Beau, Beau, Beau, Beau, Beau, Beau, Beau, Beau. Beau, Beau, Beau, Beau.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, I’m sorry. You weren’t finished.
Adam Levin:
Beau.
Beau Friedlander:
Adam.
Adam Levin:
Beau, Beau.
Beau Friedlander:
Adam, listen-
Adam Levin:
Beau.
Beau Friedlander:
… this would be-
Adam Levin:
Travis.
Beau Friedlander:
… That’s my line.
Travis Taylor:
Hey.
Adam Levin:
Oh.
Beau Friedlander:
No. Hey, you can’t ask Travis. You can’t say Travis. I get to say Travis. That’s what I get to say.
Travis Taylor:
Well then, by all means.
Adam Levin:
You sound very kingly.
Beau Friedlander:
Say something kingly, Travis.
Travis Taylor:
Wine and cheese for all of my men.
Beau Friedlander:
Why wine and cheese? Why are your men … They sound soft, your men.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, you know.
Adam Levin:
How about mead and boar for all of my men?
Travis Taylor:
Oh, even better.
Adam Levin:
Yes. So try that one, Travis.
Beau Friedlander:
That sounds better to me. I think Adam’s got the right feel. This has to be a little more masculine. Is mead masculine though?
Travis Taylor:
Mead is pretty manly, I have to say. It’s like a Viking drink. It’s something you drink out of a horn, which just by definition makes it pretty manly.
Beau Friedlander:
All right, go for it.
Adam Levin:
[inaudible 00:01:13]
Travis Taylor:
Mead and boar for all of my men.
Adam Levin:
Yes, your majesty.
Beau Friedlander:
And scene. Okay. What was your horrible experience of the week?
Adam Levin:
I think I might have found one scorpion running around, but I smooshed it so badly that I couldn’t tell if it was a scorpion by the time that I saw what was left of it. But it was certainly spinning around and looked a little bit like a lobster.
Beau Friedlander:
What was it doing? Was it doing anything? Was it throwing you gang signs and trying to get you to fight?
Adam Levin:
It said “Howdy, boy.”
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, so your scorpion was a cowboy?
Adam Levin:
We’re in Arizona my man.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay. Cowboy scorpion, sounds-
Adam Levin:
Hee-haw!
Beau Friedlander:
… yeah, sounds really kind of annoying, terrifying. And someone else was just telling me that if you get stung by a scorpion, it is the most painful thing you can imagine.
Adam Levin:
That’s what they say, and other people go, “Ah, it’s like being stung by a hornet,” which to me is one of the more painful things I can imagine.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, I don’t know. My horrible thing was, look, look at this. Look.
Adam Levin:
Oh, a boo-boo on your thumb.
Beau Friedlander:
I had my hand resting against the front loader of my tractor as I loaded wood into it, logs. And so that’s where my thumb was when the log traveling at the speed of let’s get this done fast banged into it from about two feet away.
Adam Levin:
That’s what happens when you try to be Farmer McCray. So now that we’ve shared some horror stories, anything else that might be cyber related of horror that happened this week?
Beau Friedlander:
100%. You shared something hilarious, either today or it was yesterday. If you’re a regular listener to this show, you know that one of Adam’s only ways of knowing what’s going on with Heather, his very wonderful wife, is through her Instagram account. He’ll look and see what she’s doing. She’ll post a lot of stories.
Adam Levin:
Well, it’s a shortcut. There’s nothing worse than saying, “How was your day?” and having a … So therefore I figure …
Beau Friedlander:
Your credo has always been, “Don’t overshare,” right?
Adam Levin:
Oh, don’t overshare, except with your spouse, maybe.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, well, that’s a different thing, and that’s for a different kind of podcast. But I meant don’t overshare on social media, which you don’t do at all. I think the only thing you’ve ever posted is that bottle of water in the footwell of your car. How come you don’t put up a picture of the chicken suit? And come to think of it, how come you never did the chicken dance on the show as promised? Scratch that.
Adam Levin:
[inaudible 00:04:10].
Beau Friedlander:
Scratch that guys. Adam is going to do a dance for you on TikTok.
Adam Levin:
I will totally do my chicken dance on TikTok. I will totally do my chicken dance on TikTok. TikTok. Yes, I do believe my son was waiting for the arrival of his chicken suit so he could do a father-son chicken dance.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, blame it on the person who’s not even 10 years old.
Travis Taylor:
I think Elon Musk could probably learn a thing or two about stretching things out and coming up with new reasons.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh yeah, he’s been in the news quite a bit. It was nice when Twitter was like, “Oh, so that data you wanted, here it is. Want to buy the company?”
Adam Levin:
Oops!
Travis Taylor:
Regardless, yes, I do think we had a standing commitment to a chicken dance.
Adam Levin:
We did. We did.
Beau Friedlander:
Now, what you sent me that I thought was hilarious was someone targeted you for an ad that allowed you to spy on someone’s Instagram account, which I know you would never do in a million years, but it was basically like, “Not that we think that if your partner is cheating on you or is not acting in the way that you suspect something’s wrong, the first thing you should do is talk to him. The second thing you should do is listen. The third thing you should do is really try and get to a good warm place with them. But if you can’t, we sell an app that will let you spy on them.”
Adam Levin:
Yeah, I would say there’s-
Beau Friedlander:
I just saw that as really alarming.
Adam Levin:
… there’s a greater chance of universal world peace than me spying on my spouse.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, you know what they say, and I have a little experience of this having shoulder surfed on somebody I shouldn’t have, you get what you deserve when you snoop.
Adam Levin:
That’s right. Oftentimes you find what you don’t want to find. So if you don’t want to find something, don’t even be looking.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, don’t look. Just don’t look. That was how I found out that, yeah, I was … Years ago, let’s just say I went to the doctor because I was having some man problems, and I was too young to be having these man problems. I was in my twenties. And so I went to the doctor and he said, “Well, if I had to bet, I’d say you have this thing,” which is a disaster by any standard, especially since my reply was, “But doctor, I’m in a monogamous relationship.”
Beau Friedlander:
There was a very pregnant pause and he said, “No, you’re not.” And that’s how I found out. This was long before there were apps. And obviously, anyway, you could spy on your spouse. But if you’re going to use these spyware things, first of all, we think you’re a lout, and a cur, and a bad person. Secondly, you just have the conversation, because you’re not going to like what you find out. Am I right?
Adam Levin:
Well, I certainly think if you use one of those apps, which you shouldn’t, you just might find yourself at the wrong end of a lawsuit, which you don’t want.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. But how do you even explain, like, “Oh, I saw you went on a date with …”? How do you start that conversation? You just you know something that is like emotional dynamite. I don’t understand. I don’t even understand the concept. It’s like, you can’t use it in court in a divorce. It’s not admissible. There was some Elon Musk news for real this week, was there not?
Adam Levin:
There’s always Elon Musk news every week.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, apparently there was a video campaign going around in India with a deepfake of Elon Musk yet again promising free cryptocurrency.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, but Adam-
Adam Levin:
Wait, wait. That’s fake?
Travis Taylor:
That was fake. Yeah.
Adam Levin:
Oh, no wonder I’ve been waiting for my cryptocurrency for like three months now.
Beau Friedlander:
… I guess I know what we’re going to be doing for the next few days, Travis.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
But Elon Musk, the reason it’s easy to make a deepfake of Elon Musk was the same reason it was easy to make that deepfake of Obama that came out many years ago, which is there’s a lot of tape. I think people are kind of hip to the fact that, that exists. If someone were to try to do that during the election cycle, for example, with someone campaigning, it probably wouldn’t work. But what I worry about is there’s recent news from the January 6th hearings, or whatever that’s called. And-
Adam Levin:
The January 6th hearings.
Beau Friedlander:
… I could see somebody saying that the tape of Bill Burr saying that he told Trump that his fears were unfounded, that was all doctored tape and not real. That’s the problem is like the truth and reality have become rubberized.
Adam Levin:
Well, and that’s led to the whole fake news situation that you’re talking about. It’s led to the whole AI thing. And today it’s kind of like, “Well wait, is that real? Is that fake news?” And never forget that hackers are creative, sophisticated and persistent. Anytime there’s anything new in the world of cyber, it’s going to show up somehow in some communication from a hacker or a scammer.
Beau Friedlander:
Right. Or like even a state sponsored hacker trying to destabilize an election or-
Adam Levin:
It’s limitless, because the evolution of technology is limitless. As you like to say, Uncle Beau, with the technology that makes us powerful also makes us vulnerable.
Beau Friedlander:
… That’s you. You like to say that.
Adam Levin:
We both like to say it. Travis likes to say it too. He often says that.
Travis Taylor:
All the time.
Beau Friedlander:
I’m Mr. Beau, by the way.
Adam Levin:
Oh, excuse me, Mr. Beau.
Beau Friedlander:
Before we get into the show, Travis, did you get those new microphones that I sent to you?
Travis Taylor:
Microphones?
Beau Friedlander:
Well, Adam called me up and said Travis desperately needs these new microphones … Wait a minute.
Adam Levin:
I don’t remember calling you at all. It might have been me when I took my Ambien, but I don’t seem to remember it being me. Why would I do that?
Beau Friedlander:
Wait. Wait.
Adam Levin:
It wasn’t me.
Beau Friedlander:
Wait a second. I can look at my phone right now. Hold on. Yeah. All right. It’s right here. It was at 12:26 last Tuesday.
Adam Levin:
Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
It’s clearly a phone call from you. Oh my God.
Adam Levin:
Ooh.
Travis Taylor:
All right guys, time to come clean. I actually did put together an AI bot based on previous recordings from Adam, just because we have so many of them.
Beau Friedlander:
You bastard. Ugh!
Travis Taylor:
Yeah.
Adam Levin:
[inaudible 00:11:12]
Travis Taylor:
And I didn’t get the microphone, but I did send it to my friend Jake, so he thanks you.
Adam Levin:
It’s the least we could do it for Jake.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay, come double clean. You didn’t do any of that, but that’s the way it would work.
Travis Taylor:
Exactly. Yeah.
Adam Levin:
Well, the iconic story of this was it happened in Europe, that the CEO of a portfolio company got a call from the CEO of the parent company saying they had a new cooperative advertising program going every company was contributing, all the portfolio companies, could he please send $200,000. And because the CEO of the portfolio company absolutely knew the voice of the parent company CEO-
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, I remember that. Yeah.
Adam Levin:
… he wired the money. And-
Beau Friedlander:
Yes, because it was the dude. It was the guy.
Adam Levin:
… It was the guy, except it wasn’t the guy. And the money was gone, and then that guy was gone.
Travis Taylor:
Well, the thing that’s especially sneaky about that one too, is it would take a lot of guts to be able to get a call from your boss telling you to do something and saying, “I don’t believe this is you.”
Beau Friedlander:
It’s true, which is why I sent the mics to you.
Travis Taylor:
Right.
Beau Friedlander:
No I didn’t, but they weren’t there. But anyway.
Travis Taylor:
Well, I don’t know if you guys were watching the Obi-Wan show.
Adam Levin:
I started to. It’s very good.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, I’m enjoying. I’m a bit of a Star Wars nerd. But one thing that I was really happy to see was when they brought Darth Vader, they had James Earl Jones’s voice.
Beau Friedlander:
Impossible.
Travis Taylor:
Right. Unfortunately it ended up that was a deepfake. That was something that was put together from previous clips.
Adam Levin:
Oh, really? James Earl Jones didn’t come in the studio and do it?
Travis Taylor:
Apparently not. They got his voice with his permission and sort of put that together from previous samplings of his work.
Beau Friedlander:
So it was a licensing deal basically.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, exactly. But also slightly disappointing just because I was sort of giddy to hear the Darth Vader voice.
Adam Levin:
And I just want you to know for all those people out there who are listening, I am happy to lend you my voice, licensing it. You know what I mean?
Travis Taylor:
And if they don’t want to use James Earl Jones, hit me up.
Adam Levin:
That’s right. If you don’t want James Earl Jones, Travis is your guy.
Beau Friedlander:
That’s the sound of a man dying, and with machine assisted almost not dying, dying. It’s a very strange thing Darth Vader.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, it’s true. I mean, you get dubbed down a volcano or whatever happened to him, tossed in lava. You’re not really going to be that well afterwards.
Beau Friedlander:
I’d retire personally. I’d be like, “Eh, I don’t want to do this anymore.” But he, no, he kept going.
Adam Levin:
I mean, a lot of people thought Anakin was pretty hot.
Travis Taylor:
Ooh!
Adam Levin:
Ooh! Welcome to What the Hack, a show about hackers, scammers and the people they go after. I’m Adam, Obi-Two Kenobi.
Beau Friedlander:
I’m Beau, cyber Jedi.
Travis Taylor:
And I’m Travis, straight up Lando Calrissian.
Adam Levin:
And today we’re talking with bon vivant, Man About Town, dashing rascal, award-winning, BBC and HBO journalist, Andrew Gold, about how scammers aren’t the only people to scam people. Andrew, I realized getting ready for the show today that actually you and I share rock stars in common. Andrew Gold and Beau would back me up with this, and I’m sure you know. It was a very famous musician, songwriter. Unfortunately he passed away in 2011. So you live with the ghost of Andrew Gold, and I live with the reality of Adam Levine, who completely messed up my Chi on Google.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, well, so did Adam Levin the guitar teacher and Adam Levin the-
Adam Levin:
Author and all of that.
Beau Friedlander:
… How many literally [inaudible 00:15:24]
Travis Taylor:
Let’s not forget the publisher of High Times.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. And also Andrew Gold and Adam Levin, how dare you? You both have names where there are literally you’re like Chrysanthemums, you’re everywhere in the fall.
Adam Levin:
But we are everywhere, Beau.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh my gosh, Adam Duvall. I’m sorry. Did you see what I did there?
Andrew Gold:
Well, Andrew Gold, yeah, he played with the Beatles quite a bit. Did you ever watch that sitcom Mad About You?
Adam Levin:
Yes.
Beau Friedlander:
No.
Andrew Gold:
Oh, he did the song for that, I think. And he did the one for the Golden Girls as well.
Speaker 5:
Thank you for being a friend.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, that I do know.
Andrew Gold:
I was just going to say that I know the songs obviously because of my name. I wouldn’t have known him otherwise, I don’t think. But I ended up speaking to his wife, it’s not his late wife because he died, unfortunately. But I spoke to her on Twitter, because we got talking and she kept seeing sort of Andrew Gold popping up and it wasn’t him. Of course it’s quite sad.
Andrew Gold:
And she still uses his old account on Twitter. She signs in and sort of checks if anyone’s saying things to Andrew, and sort of replies to people on his behalf. And it’s all quite sad, but very lovely as well. And we had a chat because it was like a name, it sort of means nothing. And it means everything, if you know what I mean.
Andrew Gold:
It’s like you go through life as one of the … I mean, he’s the only other person in the world I’ve ever known of who’s had the same name as me, which is quite something, but of course it’s just a name as well. So there was some sort of bond we created.
Adam Levin:
Andrew, I have learned many, many fascinating things about you, but one of my favorite little Andrew Gold tidbits is you represented England in beer pong.
Andrew Gold:
Yeah.
Adam Levin:
I need to know this.
Beau Friedlander:
Wait, they are represented? How?
Andrew Gold:
They are represented. I called it beer pong because I don’t know how to call the game when there’s no beer actually involved. I suppose it’s just pong, but then that sounds like a bad smell or like the old game in the ’80s, the arcade game. I was living in Argentina. I spent seven or eight years out. That’s where I did a lot of my documentary work, exposing exorcists and things like that.
Andrew Gold:
And because I did that kind of stuff, and when you’re out in Argentina and I think a lot of people will have this experience if they’ve lived in sort of far flung places and you are the British or American representative over there, you start getting called for different kinds of things. I suddenly got a call saying, “Look, we’re looking for somebody. We’re doing a World Cup, like the soccer, football world cup.”
Andrew Gold:
They were copying the teams that were playing each other in the World Cup on some sports channel on an Argentine TV or Argentinian TV. And it was games of like this pong ball thing from across the table. And so England’s soccer group was with Panama, and I can’t remember who else, but let’s say it’s Sweden and Paraguay or whatever it was. I had to go into the studio. They sent some expensive car to come and pick me up and take me in. And they gave me this England shirt and everything.
Andrew Gold:
And I was on the other side playing against someone from Panama, because that’s who the England football team were going to play against. But this Panamanian person was an 11 or 12-year-old girl that they had found somewhere in Argentina. It was one of these sort of lose, lose situations, because it’s like, well, if I win, that’s not great. Nobody wants me to win. And if I lose, I’ve lost to an 11-year-old girl, and I just thought, “You know what, I’m not going to overthink it. I’m just going to try and sort of get the ball in the cup,” and I lost.
Andrew Gold:
She just, she wiped the floor with me this girl. And it was all very embarrassing, and everyone laughed. In Argentinian TV there was a lot of like … I don’t mean this in a snobby way, but it’s a little bit sort of low brow. There’s a lot of like shouting and cheering in the background going on. I was really having my face rubbed in this kind of thing. And then they wouldn’t even let me keep the England Jersey that they’d given me. They were just like, “Okay, we need that back now.” Yeah, so I didn’t even get that.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, that’s a really sad story. I mean, getting chanced by an 11-year-old girl at pong.
Andrew Gold:
Tell me about it.
Beau Friedlander:
And for our listeners in the United States, pong, we don’t have that word here. Did you know that, Andrew?
Andrew Gold:
Well, as in the smell.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. It’s like, we say sidewalk, you say pavement, all that sort of thing. Pong is another one of those words where we just say body O, BO, or stench, or they just use my name. And then you have pong. Did you guys know the word pong?
Adam Levin:
Beau went to university in England, so he kind of stretches the [inaudible 00:19:47]
Beau Friedlander:
Did not. I did not. I did. Well, anyway. I have the only vestige of having lived in England is the way that I say extraordinary, and my kids rake me over the coals when I do it. I don’t know how I used to do it. I’ve stopped, but I used to have a slightly Mid-Atlantic accent.
Andrew Gold:
Extraordinary. Yeah, I love that Mid-Atlantic accent. It just doesn’t exist anymore, does it? And it’s so great to hear it, that sort of classic film, 1930s. “Well, I’ll tell you a thing about … ” They speak really fast, and I wish it existed.
Adam Levin:
I got to ask you one other thing too, especially now since the United States Senate is even taking this up now, and that is you hunted UFOs. That’s pretty cool.
Andrew Gold:
Yeah. Well, I mean, hunted in the pursuit kind of sense, but I say hunted because it sounds like I’ve gone out with a bow and arrow or something after these, yeah, UFOs. That was just another thing. I was doing these things obviously in Argentina. A lot of the things I do, a lot of the documentaries I do are around belief, extreme belief sometimes to expose those kinds of things or sometimes just to sort of marvel at them.
Andrew Gold:
And a UFO case was one of those where it didn’t feel like anything bad was coming from this kind of belief. It felt like a kind of delusion that was fine. I’ve just done an interview for my podcast with a Stuart Vyse, who’s a philosopher who wrote The Uses of Delusion, all about how delusions can be good for you, which is great. Because most of my episodes, the podcast are about how delusions are bad and we should stay away from magical thinking and stuff. But they can be good.
Andrew Gold:
And the UFO stuff, I went out to a village called Capilla del Monte, or with an Argentine accent it’s Capilla del Monte out in the countryside of Argentina. And that village is known as like this alien place, because in the 1980s, some sort of alien apparently landed there. This is not like the recent news of the unidentified aerial phenomena that I think is the American Navy have been talking about, which could be very real. This is more like little green men that people think have come along.
Andrew Gold:
And what really probably happened was there was a fire in a forest, and they can’t explain what had happened because the fire went out. They’re like, “Oh, there’s a dark patch on the hill. There were aliens here,” and now it’s become the go to alien place. It’s very like new age touristy and all that kind of thing in Argentina. I went there, I met some of the guys who were like the most zealous about their alien belief.
Andrew Gold:
And we went trekking up into the mountains at like 4:00 in the morning to look for aliens. And they did some sort of meditation and stuff. And it was all very hippy and new age, which I don’t really go for, but it was a lot of fun, and beautiful views like I’ve never seen.
Andrew Gold:
I mean, often these places where there’s a lot of UFO belief are in extremely beautiful countryside places, and they were sort of saying like, “Can you see those lights? Those are third dimensional or fifth dimensional beings who live underground and come out at night,” and I was like, “But they look like car headlights really,” and they were like, “Well, they might be car headlights.” So that was that. But it was fun.
Beau Friedlander:
Belief is like kind of the linchpin of a lot of scams. If you believe that you’re going to get a certain outcome, it makes you a lot more susceptible to getting scammed. And going and hunting for certain stories or the truth behind a belief, it also it puts you in the position sort of the scammer sometimes. I mean, you have to think like the person trying to get someone to believe. It’s a game of make believe where you’re making them believe something, is that right?
Andrew Gold:
Oh yeah. And I think some people who have fallen for things, they don’t want to admit it sometimes, and that’s no good because they should admit it so we all learn about the scam. And they don’t want to admit it because they feel like it was show that they were stupid. And there’s so much evidence to suggest that it doesn’t prove that you’re stupid.
Andrew Gold:
And there’s a great book, another guy I had on my podcast called David Robson, he wrote a book called The Intelligence Trap. And it was all about how often it’s the smartest people who fall for things the easiest. And a great example was the Sherlock Holmes writer, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was supposed to be outrageously intelligent and the master of deduction and critical thinking obviously to create a character like Sherlock.
Andrew Gold:
And he’s known for having had a very strong belief in fairies, because of a prank that some teenage girls pulled where they put up pictures of these fake fairies that they pinned to a board. And because the pins went through their stomachs of the photos or whatever these things, Arthur Conan Doyle believed that, that was evidence that they had belly buttons, and that fairies could give birth and they were born.
Andrew Gold:
And that actually caused his fallout with Houdini, who was obviously a skeptic as a magician. And he was very, very skeptical. They fell out over that, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s belief in Ouija boards as well. And he tried to convince Houdini that Houdini’s mother was trying to contact him from beyond the grave. And it led to this great falling out. But obviously Arthur Conan Doyle is supremely intelligent, or was interesting person. Anybody can fall for stuff, particularly intelligent people a lot of the time.
Andrew Gold:
I think it’s a really interesting point you’re making as well. In terms of looking at what we all do in common, if you guys are exposing scams and belief and looking, that kind of thing, and what I do as well. I mean, because I went out into Buenos Aires again, and it was an exorcist who was basically giving people bits of olive oil and saying, “That’s going to cure your cancer. And you don’t need to go to a shrink when you’ve got schizophrenia, just come here and I’ll get the demon out of you.”
Andrew Gold:
And it was just to an extent I had to scam the exorcist so that he would allow me to continue filming him for a couple of months. And I did it in a way that I maybe not proud of now, but I was a bit cheekier when I was younger, so I was being a bit mischievous. And I would ask questions that I knew would make him look ridiculous, but as if I were being sincere.
Andrew Gold:
So I was asking, “Oh, so are there vampires here a lot of the time?” And he was like, “Oh yeah, yeah, a lot of vampires.” “And levitation and stuff?” And he is like, “Oh yeah, we’ve seen people lift up onto the roof.” I had to be a little bit insincere myself and also try to get, yeah, as you say into his mind, it’s a whole complex thing.
Travis Taylor:
In the case of that guy, was he a scammer himself or did he actually believe his own stories?
Andrew Gold:
Yeah, that is the golden question. And I stayed up for like weeks, months, years trying to know about that. And I guess the disappointing answer is I’ll never know. I think that the closest thing to knowing is that I think these people deep down they know they’re scamming people and they don’t really want to admit it to themselves maybe. They just keep going with … It’s theater and they convince themselves.
Andrew Gold:
I know somebody, a friend of the family friend who believes that she can talk to ghosts and stuff, and she has a business doing it. And because I know her personally, I know she’s not trying to scam people. It’s just so not her. It’s just no way she would do that. I know there are definitely people out there who believe they can do these magical things.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, like psychics. Magicians at least have a mechanical kind of, a lot of the time, there’s a mechanical aspect to what they do. But like the clairvoyance and psychics, they actually think that they’re-
Adam Levin:
Well-
Andrew Gold:
Some of them.
Adam Levin:
… Beau speaks to bears, so I mean, anything’s possible. Speaking about all things magic, you sent over an interesting story about a magician.
Andrew Gold:
Last night, this happened, and I thought about you guys this morning, because obviously we’re on the theme of hacking. And obviously my journalism stuff leads me to, I think, more of a mental hacking, and as you spoke about, belief and falling for certain things. And I guess in that domain, and maybe in all of our domain, there’s no more interesting person than Derren Brown, the way he gets into people’s minds, the way he does these hypnosis things.
Andrew Gold:
He got people up on stages and all this stuff, so I went to see him last night. And he’s a fan of my exorcism film. I’m very proud of that. And I know that through a friend, that he’s watched it and seen it. But he got me up on stage last night in front of thousands of people, because he did one of those things where he says like, “Put your hand up if you are this. Put your hand up if you are excited or a risk taker, if you’ve got a partner,” and all this stuff. My partner was with me.
Andrew Gold:
And then he said, “Keep your hands up if your partner wants to come on stage,” or something, and my girlfriend was just going like, “Go on. Go on,” so I said, “Okay, I’ll do this.” So then he does this thing where he throws out frisbees into the audience, four different frisbees, and he says, “Whoever catches it, get it to the nearest person who still has their hand up,” and I was one of them.
Andrew Gold:
I have to be careful about how much I reveal, because I actually think I know how Derren Brown did this trick. And he’s very clear when he says, “Please don’t tell anyone about what happens on the show,” I think he won’t mind me telling you this particular trick.
Beau Friedlander:
But does he know who you are when you come up? Does he know you that made the movie that he liked?
Andrew Gold:
I don’t think he recognized me. No. And I was so tempted to say it. You know what I mean? I wanted him to be, “Oh, it’s you from the …” And everybody listened to his podcast, now please download. But no, he didn’t. It would’ve been fantastic though. I was thinking, “How can I get this into a sentence when he’s got me up on the stage?”
Beau Friedlander:
You could have done like a quick rate and review.
Adam Levin:
That’s right.
Andrew Gold:
That would’ve been so good. But yeah, basically, he got me and my girlfriend up together. And he did this thing of … There were four different couples, I should say. And he managed to sort of work out which couple was which, because we went up on different sides of the stage. So he was like, “Okay, you two. You two. You two.” He knew which of us were couples, who my girlfriend was and all of that straight away.
Andrew Gold:
He was able to guess certain things about each person, and then he sent them on their way. And then it was left with just me and my girlfriend on the stage. And he suddenly just said, he said like, “Is there any embarrassing stories or anything related to you guys?” Anything?” And we were just sort of quiet. And then he said, “I’m seeing something about nose picking,” right?
Andrew Gold:
The audience start laughing then. You know that feeling, you’re up on a stage, it could just be like you’re at a wedding doing a speech or whatever it is, that feeling. Your legs are turning to jelly, and there’s lights on you, and I was like, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” And he’s like, “Yeah, nose picking.” We’re both shaking our heads. And he’s going, “Yeah, something to do with the mum and nose picking. Someone’s mum saw someone nose picking or something like that.”
Andrew Gold:
And I know what he’s getting at, because there’s a story that’s so embarrassing. And it’s one of these stories that I don’t mind telling it myself because I’m sort of owning it, but when it’s a magician who’s looked into my head, supposedly, because that’s the trick, to find that out, it’s very embarrassing in front of a huge audience. The story is just that when I was in Argentina … My girlfriend’s Argentine, Argentinian.
Andrew Gold:
And when I was out there, I was just sort of sitting on her bed or something. The bedroom door was open. My girlfriend was like often I don’t know where she was at the time. And I was just having a little nose pick. You’re just clearing it out sort of thing. And the funny thing-
Beau Friedlander:
It needs to be done sometimes.
Adam Levin:
Perfect accessible in private.
Andrew Gold:
… It is exact way. You think if you’re in private, that’s the thing. And I looked up after a while and I saw that my girlfriend’s mother was in the doorway. And she looked like she’d been settled there for quite some time, and I had my finger right up and I was … It was just the most embarrassing thing.
Beau Friedlander:
Were you past the … You were to the second knuckle, I think?
Andrew Gold:
I think it was like fist deep.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh no.
Andrew Gold:
I was fist-
Adam Levin:
[inaudible 00:31:32]
Andrew Gold:
… Yeah, two hands, other people’s hands. Everything was just as far as you can get.
Beau Friedlander:
Hit yourself in the back of the head to get it to come down.
Andrew Gold:
Yeah, exactly. I was all over the place. Fingers in my mouth. Everything was everywhere. Especially because-
Adam Levin:
Yeah. Well, you are Andrew Gold, so therefore digging for gold.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh gosh.
Andrew Gold:
… Oh, well-
Travis Taylor:
Exercising the demons in your nose.
Beau Friedlander:
I hope that, that’s the only time you’ve ever heard that, Andrew. Go on.
Andrew Gold:
… That was the first time. Unfortunately, her mother doesn’t speak English or wouldn’t have been able to do the gold within auto, which, well, I suppose you could dig for auto in Spanish. But I mean, it was so embarrassing and also because I had sort of cultivated, I think, maybe not entirely on purpose, but a bit of a British suave character over the years, because I wouldn’t always speak as much as I do now.
Andrew Gold:
Right now I’m quite erratic and eccentric in English, whereas in Spanish I’m very fluent, but I’m also a little bit more like, “Hey, I’m this cool English guy,” and that was just gone in that second. Any cool suaveness I had was gone, and that was the end of it. And yes, so Derren Brown revealed it all, and that was a case of, I suppose, hacking into my mind. Although I do think I know how he did it, but I can’t say because it wouldn’t be right.
Adam Levin:
But you talk about that, social engineering. I mean, but we see every day in terms of people getting other people to do things. It’s about somebody getting into your head and getting you to do stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily do, or getting you to do something impulsive.
Beau Friedlander:
Magicians are hackers. Let’s face it.
Adam Levin:
Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
What was the hack? What happened? He knows this weird story, which is pretty detailed. How does he know this weird story? Did you write it about it and he did recognize you?
Andrew Gold:
No, my mind was going around there. It does ruin the trick. That’s why I can’t … I can’t reveal it because I think it is simpler than you’d like to think. It reminds me of the phone hacking stuff that happened in the UK. I’ll get onto that in a sec. Just in the same way that it’s disappointing when you learn how it happens, because you want to imagine that hacking.
Andrew Gold:
When you don’t know anything about hacking, which someone like me doesn’t, you guys do, but you imagine that it is always this kind of ethereal, esoteric, almost alien thing you’re doing that’s like green stuff on a screen with the matrix and whatever. And sometimes I guess it is just these silly scams. You’re just like saying to someone, “Can you give me some money,” and they’re going, “Yeah.” And then sometimes in the UK we had this huge hacking scandal.
Andrew Gold:
When I was working at the Sun newspaper, The News of the World newspaper, they had this big hacking thing where they were calling celebrities, mostly celebrities, inboxes, and just typing 1234 as the password or 0000, and it worked. And so they listened to their messages and they published them. And that was all sort of fun and games to an extent. I mean, it wasn’t very nice of them to do that.
Andrew Gold:
But the worst thing was that they actually hacked into the voicemail of a girl, or I think a teenage girl. She was called Milly Dowler, who was reported missing. It was this big story about a missing girl. And they hacked into her voice message to find out if they could get the inside scoop on what happened to her. But because of that, it gave the parents and the police hope that she was still alive, because it seemed like she was accessing her voice messages and it sent the police in a different direction.
Andrew Gold:
And actually she had unfortunately been killed, and it was just horrific, and it was just awful. But they were doing it all the time, that kind of hacking. I remember when I found out about it, I was like, “Is that all they did, it was just typing 0000 or 1234?” And similarly with Derren Brown and other magicians, I mean, Derren Brown’s a genius.
Andrew Gold:
The stuff he does is incredible, but some of it is mind control stuff and some of it is like any magician sort of look the other way, get somebody to write a certain thing down with someone else, find a way to get that into … It’s that kind of thing. Again, I don’t want to show how the sausage is made too much there, because it’s not fair on him, but yeah.
Travis Taylor:
How much of that do you think is putting the person on the spot without necessarily giving away the trick? I mean, if you’re on a stage in front of a several thousand people, I would imagine that, that’s also sort of creating a very specific environment to be able to get more information at you.
Andrew Gold:
Yeah. Well, you do feel when you go up, you feel really susceptible. You want it to work more than anything, right? You want him to be successful in what he does. And if he isn’t, then you feel like it’s your fault. If something-
Beau Friedlander:
Okay, so stop there. Stop there. Because you’ve got a nose, I’ve got a nose. Everyone on this podcast has a nose. And we all have fingers, and we all knew that it was funny that you got caught picking your nose, and we’ve all been caught picking our noses. The fact is we all probably almost certainly had mothers. And so a mother seeing some nose picking is almost 100% for sure going to be a story that we all have in common.
Adam Levin:
But-
Beau Friedlander:
Is it that simple?
Adam Levin:
… But someone else’s mother catching you piking your nose is [inaudible 00:36:39]
Beau Friedlander:
Well, that too is going to happen with partners. Because like it or not, your mileage may vary, we have to spend time with our mothers in-law.
Andrew Gold:
It’s even more like, it’s just about like … I can’t go into it because it will just give it away. And it’s you don’t really want to know and-
Adam Levin:
No, no, no.
Andrew Gold:
… And he specifically-
Beau Friedlander:
I do.
Andrew Gold:
… says as well, he’s like, “If you’re reviewing this, if you’re talking about it, please don’t talk about what happened.” I’ve already done so, but I sort of feel like I vented into a pact, whereby he, without really telling me he was going to do it has gotten me up on a stage, as you were saying, Travis, and put me in a position where he has revealed to thousands of people something very embarrassing to me.
Andrew Gold:
And I think, okay, I can take that with humor. And I’ve got to own it and tell the story myself. But some people wouldn’t like that. I feel like I’ve given that up. So even though he’s asked people not to say what happened, I feel like, “Okay, I have a right. I contributed to his show. I can say a little bit.” But I think giving away exactly what I think I saw happen would be crossing that boundary and I’ll never [inaudible 00:37:44]
Beau Friedlander:
Can I ask you one question about what happened and then we’ll never speak of it again?
Adam Levin:
We shall never speak of this again.
Beau Friedlander:
My question is this, when you say what happened, do you mean the subtle shift during a date where you’re like, “We’re totally going to kiss,” or did you mean something mechanistic, mechanical?
Andrew Gold:
Ah, mechanical. Yeah. I mean, because magic doesn’t exist, right? And he can do amazing things with suggestion, and his shows have shown he can get people to jump off of buildings. He can get people, when they think they’re going to die, and there’s actually a security thing, he can get people to memorize things in extraordinary ways. He’s got incredible talents.
Andrew Gold:
He can guess things about people, but some, and I’m not talking about Derren, I’m talking about all these mentalists in general, sometimes they are using slight of hands and they are suggesting that things are deeper than they are. They are saying like, “Ah, you moved in a certain way. That showed me you were nervous,” and blah, blah, blah, when actually there was another way that they realized, which was maybe not as exciting and a bit more boring and behind the scenes kind of thing.
Beau Friedlander:
There’s a similarity between what a investigative reporter does and what a magician does, if they know the story they’re after. If you know you’re going after a certain kind of criminal, like I’ve been trying to get, I all morning have been corresponding with a scammer online selling a tractor. I know it’s fake, I just want to hear how the scam goes.
Adam Levin:
Oh, Beau’s going to write a book about great tractor scams that I have experienced.
Beau Friedlander:
There’s thousands and thousands, but this person, this one’s pretty simple. They’re just trying to steal money through eBay, but I’ll take it through. Now, as a reporter, do you do that kind of work, and do you see how it is sort of similar to what scammers do?
Andrew Gold:
Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, look, it’s about what you guys do and what I do. I suppose it’s about empathy, and I don’t mean that kind of empathy that’s ideological and, “Oh, I feel sad for people,” and all that kind of thing. It’s, I mean, the putting yourself into the position of the other person. I watched Derren when he came up, and I’m thinking the whole time, “What would it be like to be him? What is he enjoying?”
Andrew Gold:
And I do feel that maybe if you’re not thinking in that journalistic way, you’re just enjoying the show. You’re able to enjoy it a bit more. Not to say, I mean, most people are looking, “How did he do that?” that kind of thing, but I’m thinking, “What joy is this giving him?” He’s got a very showmanship kind of way of speaking and being. And I’ve heard him interviewed and talk about his teenage years and things like that when it gave him this presence, it enabled him to impress people around him.
Andrew Gold:
And so I guess I’m trying to empathize with him on that level first before thinking about what he’s doing, and maybe that might give me an idea of what he might aim to do, what his motivations might be. And look, his motivation is entertainment, and sometimes it is getting a laugh at the expense of some of the people. I mean, that’s what most of the show is.
Andrew Gold:
He gets people up and hypnotizes them, and gets them to do silly things. But they enjoy it, so I’m not saying it in a bad way. They enjoy it and it’s an amazing experience you’ve had afterwards. But yeah, I think you’re right. Do you find that as well? I mean, that’s what you do, isn’t it? You’re finding out about hackers. You’ve got to think about getting to their heads, right?
Beau Friedlander:
Well, what I do is, I think you kind of said that you did it as well. I tend to ask questions I know the answer to. And I ask it in a really, really naive way. And I do it on purpose because I want them to explain it to me. And what I’m listening for is mistakes they make in explaining this thing.
Beau Friedlander:
They have the hacker handbook in front of them. They’re like, “Okay, once he says this, say this. And then do this, and then you do this, and then do this, and then send this. And then you get malware on their computer, and then you open their bank account and steal their money. Okay, got it? Got it.”
Beau Friedlander:
I ask questions. And if he or she, I always think it’s like some grubby he guy, but anyway, makes a mistake because they’re not so experienced, maybe they haven’t been doing it for that long, it’s just, I want to see where you can see, when you can see through the veil and how good people are at doing it.
Beau Friedlander:
Because I’ve had the experience with some of these scammers that even though you know just around the corner is the bolt that’s going to kill you and put you into the slaughter house, you keep walking because they’re very good at getting you to keep going.
Beau Friedlander:
And I think some of these scammers are kind of, if they were real mentalists, they wouldn’t have to do these scams for a living, they could do magic shows. But they’re a form of mentalist.
Andrew Gold:
Yeah.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah. I think one of the main things that a scammer has at their disposal, in their toolbox is the ability to create panic. And I think that’s one of their primary weapons there, where if they were to call and say, “There’s something wrong with this account,” or they make you think that you have malware and you need to install something in order to be able to fix it and so on, that kind of that initial sense of that jolt that they get with their victims is a thing that actually gets them to be able to open them up and make them do what they want them to do.
Travis Taylor:
And that’s one of the things I was talking about with a mentalist. If you’re up on stage, you’re probably going to be answering a question or things like that just because you’re like, “Okay, there are thousands of people looking at me.” And it sounds like a similar phenomenon with a scammer of just sort of saying, “There’s a problem with your account or you’re being audited or what have you,” that when you kind of get into that, then you’re going to … You’re not thinking as rationally and you’re going to respond in ways that you wouldn’t otherwise.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, Travis, the other thing about that, it’s not just panic. It’s also wishful thinking. And the magician, the mentalist, they’re also operating very much on wish fulfillment or like, “Here’s what …” Or even getting up on stage and being persuaded or hypnotized into doing something funny. I would love permission to just strip down to my boxers and dance around like a clown.
Travis Taylor:
Oh, yay!
Adam Levin:
And do that every week?
Travis Taylor:
I thought you’d never ask.
Adam Levin:
Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
Right. Anyway.
Andrew Gold:
There’s an element of having to relinquish your ego with … And I think you need to be able to do that to do this kind of work. I think some people wouldn’t be able to, particularly if they’re on camera or particularly if they’re talking to other people they see as like intellectual adversaries, they wouldn’t be able to do that, whereas I guess we have to be happy to do this.
Andrew Gold:
When I spoke to that exorcist, I had to pretend I was the idiot and I was this stupid guy. And I think it helps speaking the foreign languages as well, because they sort of trust me because they don’t imagine I’m this clever … Well, not that I am clever, but I just mean they don’t imagine that I have an ulterior motive, that I’m being sneaky.
Andrew Gold:
If you speak to someone who’s got an accent, who’s a bit like speaking in broken, how I must sound to them must be like, “Hello, what is your …” They’re not thinking I’ve got this ulterior motive, and I play on that full naive mask as much as possible. And a lot of the time it’s a case of just letting them talk. And I guess you are just letting them play out as hackers. I’m letting the exorcist just talk and talk, and show me and I’m going, “Wow,” and I’m being impressed, and I’m being the idiot and I’m playing up his ego.
Andrew Gold:
And gradually I started to find out that he was taking advantage of young women that he had abducted from schizophrenia ward, psychiatric ward who had schizophrenia. And I don’t think I’d have gotten to that. I think he would’ve closed up straight away if I’d come in just like all guns blazing and gone, “What are you doing? This isn’t right.” So it was this gradual-
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, that is very different from the hackers. Because on the hacking side of thing, I just got another email from the person selling the tractor and it just said, “No, you cannot see it. No, you cannot try it. But here, send me your banking information.” So they are the person who is like, “Yes, yes. Tell me more about yourself, but really let’s just start making out on the first date,” and you’re like, “No, I’m not that easy.”
Beau Friedlander:
But the scammer, hacker, if they have a financial motivation, and it’s not a state sponsored hacker who’s trying to get trade secrets or whatnot, they’re usually really impatient. And if they sense that you’re being too careful, or you’re not an idiot, they move on.
Andrew Gold:
… I think if we are comparing journalists to hacker exposes of hacks and the hackers themselves, I think we could be on both sides, because those hackers would do better by just being a bit … If they come on too strong on you, you’re going to be scared and go away. And sometimes if they just very casually go in and they act like they’re a bit stupid, they’re not sure, “Oh, you don’t want it. Okay,” you might give them something.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, that was interesting to hear how reporters are basically hackers. I never really thought of it that way.
Adam Levin:
Mind hackers. Yeah.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah. With hackers and scammers, one of the main things that they’re trying to get you to do is provide them with information.
Beau Friedlander:
But they’re not as suave as that magician. I mean, as I mentioned, I’ve been trying to get hacked by this tractor salesperson. The whole time that we were on, I would mute and send another note. And the hacker’s name is supposedly Martha Williams. And Martha’s grandfather died and has a tractor that if I had to guess, I would say is worth about $25,000, but she’s selling it for $1,200.
Travis Taylor:
Oh, what a bargain.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. Well, it’s for somebody who doesn’t want to sell it to make money. They just want to use it. She just thinks that would be nice for her grandpa. The only problem is this tractor which was listed in my neighborhood is now in Montana.
Adam Levin:
Oh, that’s because they’re filming the next season of Yellowstone and they needed the tractor to clear away some of the land.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, I didn’t know that. That makes sense though. So I said, “For $1,200, which is the list price, I am more than happy to fly out to Montana and look at the tractor and try it. I’m still going to be ahead by about $20,000 when I do that.” And she won’t get back to me because obviously that is the lie that they’re trying to get around.
Beau Friedlander:
And so the scam here is that you have to go to eBay to do the transaction, and then they make money off of that transaction. And the thing that we always forget is while we’re looking at some huge crime, like, “Oh my God,” in reality, the hacker usually has their pinky to the corner of their mouth and they’re asking for $30.
Adam Levin:
Yeah. And this proves a point. The point we were talking about with Andrew today is that a lot of hacks and scams aren’t really complicated. They’re pretty simple. And we don’t want to believe things that are simple, we want to believe they’re harder and more complicated than they really are.
Beau Friedlander:
So which brings us to Derren Brown. What do you think, Adam?
Adam Levin:
This is a perfect example of why Derren Brown doesn’t want people to give away the secrets of what his tricks are. Because every night he probably does many of the same tricks. And if you go several nights in a row, after a while you’ll start to get into the flow and you’ll start to notice things that perhaps you didn’t see the first time out, or you were misdirected the first time.
Beau Friedlander:
Or you’ll see it right away, Adam, because it’ll be the same card, the same story, the same this, same that.
Adam Levin:
That’s right.
Beau Friedlander:
What The Hack with Adam Levin is a production of Loud Tree Media.
Adam Levin:
It’s produced by Andrew Steven, the man with two first names.
Travis Taylor:
You can find us online at Loudtreemedia.com, and on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @Adamklevin.
Adam Levin:
Loud Tree.
