smoke and mirrors

Gabriel could have come across as a mere cipher in this environment, a faceless spook navigating smoke and mirrors.

"Neuralink is currently just smoke and mirrors, with a lot of hype," Herve Chneiweiss, a neurologist and expert in ethics at France's research organisation INSERM, told AFP.

Roberts never had to prepare the smoke and mirrors required to navigate the final third of the game.

The pay package is replete with smoke and mirrors, its benchmarks painstakingly tweaked to make them much more achievable than they appear on the surface.

Although that was more than 30 years ago, the smoke and mirrors nonsense usually produced by meetings like these has not changed.