Brian Brushwood: Why We Fall for Scams
Magician and podcaster Brian Brushwood talks about deception and skepticism while exploring historical hoaxes, the psychology of magic, the libertarian dystopia of Epcot, and the story behind World’s Greatest Con.
"You don't get conned because you're stupid—you get conned because you're human."
That's the message of this week's guest, Brian Brushwood. He's an Austin-based magician, podcaster, and professional skeptic. With shows like Scam Nation and The Modern Rogue, he's taught millions of us how to upgrade our B.S. detectors in a world where truth is more up for grabs than ever before.
Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with him about World's Greatest Con, Brushwood's mind-blowing podcast where he reveals grifts like Disney World's authoritarian Epcot theme park, the psychic-soldier panic of the Cold War, and the myth that the French used magic tricks to subdue colonial Algeria.
Along the way, they look at how media monocultures used to gatekeep truth—and how the chaotic pluralism of the internet is both a blessing and a curse (mostly a blessing!). Brushwood is a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian who celebrates decentralization, transparency, and personal agency—even when it's messy. He discusses the influence of performers like the Amazing Randi and Penn & Teller, why teaching magic online pissed off the old guard, and why skepticism has to evolve or die in a world full of customized realities.
Upcoming Reason events:
1:43— Brushwood's podcast: World's Greatest Con
6:00— The con of Disney's EPCOT
13:20— The Project Alpha hoax
17:47— James Randi, Uri Geller, and Banachek
28:49— Why do we love to be conned?
31:00— Arthur Conan Doyle's rationality and mysticism
33:25— How to built a better bullshit detector
35:42— Why Brushwood feels hopeful about AI
40:55— How the internet changed magic
42:50— Psychic surgery and the placebo effect
45:21— Brushwood's origin story
46:09— Magic's gender imbalance
48:58— Skepticism and atheism
Transcript
This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: Brian Brushwood, thanks for talking to Reason.
Brian Brushwood: Thank you for having me, man.
You are a podcaster, a magician, a debunker of bullshit and things like that. I want to start off by talking about your series The World's Greatest Con.
Yeah.
What's the catchphrase?
"Cons don't fool us because we're stupid. They fool us because we are human."
OK, let's talk about some of the episodes. You had a two-part episode about Epcot— one of the world's biggest cons. Tell me about that.
OK, whether it's the greatest in terms of it has the longest shadow of history, whether it's the greatest in terms of scale or stakes, the very first season was about Operation Mincemeat, which later became a Netflix movie. In that case, Ian Fleming, of all people, helped design a Trojan horse—a haversack ruse—where they took a dead body, filled it with pocket litter that told a false story.
In World War II, to kind of get the Nazis to chase the wrong story.
Yeah. Basically, Hitler defended the wrong coast. Depending on how you squint, that won the war. What I loved about that story is that, like a good magic trick—you never say. A good magician-teller once told me that the cardinal sin of all magicians is they say what you're going to do and then do it. That's bad magic. The moment you hear a magician say, "I have an ordinary deck of cards," guess what?
Right.
Instead, what you need to do is lay the elements in front of someone, let them come to the incorrect conclusion, and let them misremember things. They're left only with mystery. I perceive the job of a magician to play chess with the audience. There's two ways to be the best chess player in town. One is to read all of the book moves, study the greats, practice, practice, practice, until you're the best. The other is to form a cartel and say, "Nobody's allowed to know the rules of chess except us." And that, traditionally, is how magicians have operated.
But that's hard to do now, right? Because all secrets eventually emerge.
And Scam School, my show where I teach magic, was on the forefront, the bleeding edge. Magicians didn't know whether I was exposing or teaching magic. That ended up being its own thing.
It struck me early on, especially while doing Scam School, that the structure of a good magic trick is identical, one for one, to that of a scam or a con. You lay everything out, you let them come to a false conclusion, and then accelerate things until they're left…in the case of magic, the good version, the white-hat hacking of wetware systems—they get checkmated and they're left only with wonder. I cannot reconcile what I saw with what just happened. In the black-hat version, you're defrauded and you have no money.
Usually, when we see stories of cons, it's rare to see a morally just con man. Usually, it's someone whose past catches up with them. The idea of recasting the 20 Committee and their bold, audacious plan as a con. And who knows, for every one success, who knows how many failures there were, but it's truly wonderful. We did a season of game show cons. You've heard the legendary story—it's about to be a movie—about the guy who won Press Your Luck by figuring out the patterns.
No whammies.
Yeah, exactly. Most people don't know he was, I believe, somebody'll fact-check me, because the internet—I believe that the FBI said that he was the very first person to perpetrate an internet fraud. Him on Usenet news groups was running a lottery scam or something. Anyway, we did a whole series on game show scams. And in the third season—which I think we tricked you into listening to—it was the one on Project Alpha.
Let's get to Project Alpha in a minute. I want Epcot.
Oh yeah.
Lay it out quickly—what is the con? Because you know, Disney World in Florida started as a giant version of Disneyland in California. It opened in the early '70s, they started building it in the mid-'60s. But then what about Epcot Center? Why is that a con?
Well, first of all, it began with the curious fact that I ran across, I found out, "Why is a privately held company in Florida legally entitled to handle enriched uranium?" And from there you work backward, and it's like well because they wanted legal status to create the city of tomorrow, and they didn't know what kind of energy they were going to run on. So they just said, "Let's say we can handle all of it." If we want a nuclear reactor, we can have a nuclear reactor.
And then you go backward from that and find that the pitch for Epcot wasn't the objectively best part of Disney World—because "drink around the world" is the best thing on the planet—but it began basically as Silo or Fallout. This totalitarian, highly structured…"All of you are going to have the same toaster, and because this month we have signed an agreement with General Electric, we're throwing out your Westinghouse toasters. Also, you're going to be things to be gawked at as people walk around."
And the wild part is, part of the reason that that existed, that hellscape of totalitarianism or the pitch for it, came from the fact that the fact that Disney wanted so much more freedom but had to deal with so many restrictions or regulations and Disneyland ended up being so compromised from what he wanted it to be.
If you go to the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco—it is very much not a Disney corporate institution. It's the family museum. Which means there's a whole wing dedicated to how much he hated unions and resented the strikes, and so on.
To pull off Epcot, they knew they needed an obscene amount of land. In order to buy that land, everything had to be secret. So there's a series of shell corporations and there are a lot of moments where it looked like the cat was about to be out of the bag.
And so Part One is: Can we get the land? Can we build it? But then we lose our protagonist. Right at the height of this.
Yeah. Because Walt Disney dies.
Exactly.
And is not frozen and living or frozen underneath Disney.
I still have my fingers crossed. We'll see. But it ends up being—imagine Ocean's Eleven, but halfway through the movie, Danny Ocean dies. And also, the other 10 people don't really care about the heist, but they all feel a need to complete it for the shareholders.
And Walt Disney—he wanted to build a true, living, thriving community. A city of tomorrow. That's what he was selling.
Yes. That was the dream he was selling. And it ended up becoming more and more compromised. We got something, and what we got was delightful. But it is not what Disney had envisioned.
Yeah.
Thankfully actually—because what he envisioned was objectively a hellscape.
And that's partly because he was thinking in mid-century terms. The perfect city was perfect for him because everyone would do what he wanted, or would fill out his aesthetic landscape.
And it's funny because, when you say it out loud, the actual plan out loud, it sounds like pure fiction. I'm going to describe for you a place where the good people are on the surface, up top, where everything is green and lush and there are no filthy automobiles. Beneath them—literally beneath them—are the people who make sure the good people have everything they need. And beneath them will be all the filthy automobilists, coming and going.
So you also, I can't remember if it's that season or a different one, you also tell a story about Robert-Houdin, the great French magician, who supposedly, at the behest of the French government when they were having trouble with Algerians, which had recently become a French colony, Houdin goes to demonstrate that the French have superior magic. Can you lay out this story? First lay out the story as we know it, or as it's perceived, and then what you discovered?
Yeah, this one was a one-shot because it was always just a short story. When we started investigating it, we had hoped that there was more to the story. The story, magicians love to tell it because it glamorizes magicians—
And Robert-Houdin, in the 19th century, kind of invented modern magic. He was such a big figure that Houdini became Houdini by adding an i to Houdin.
Correct. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin is the canonical top-hat-and-tails magician. And as Penn and Teller point out, the reason he wore that was because everyone else was dressed as wizards at the time. He wanted to be of the people. To my magician mind, he got it. The game is to play chess and cause wonder.
So, the story magicians love to tell—this is antiquated language, please forgive me, internet—is that "savages" in Algeria believed in magic. To calm them down, the French government enlisted the great Robert-Houdin, who used an electromagnetic—well, a secret method—that had something that a powerful person couldn't lift, but a child could.
I'll ruin it so you don't lose your credit—it's an electromagnet. It's a little box that, when the juice is on, nobody can lift. Otherwise, anyone can.
It's literally how security doors work at 7-Elevens now.
You bring out a huge, brutish, strong man from Algeria, come up and he can't lift it. Then any little kid, or Houdin, can. Then the guy goes screaming offstage.
The canonical version is that he turns and says to the audience, "My magic is too weak against the French magic."
And then the "savages" fall into line and put up with 100 years of French occupation.
Right. Peace is achieved—until it isn't. But upon examining it, that story collapses. This is the beauty of having a flexible title like World's Greatest Con. What starts as a story about the French pulling a con on the Algerians becomes no it's us who had the con pulled on us. Everything traces back to a single source: an old man's autobiography with no corroborating evidence whatsoever.
How did you find that out?
By going back. There have been greater historians—which is to say historians—there have been historians who pointed out, well, here's what we know: We know he toured, we know he had a magic shop, and we know that most people know him from his autobiography.
There's a quiet period during which the dust settles, and I would imagine an old man might lengthen the shadows on a lot of those tall tales.
So let's talk about Project Alpha, which is a season-long story. What was Project Alpha?
That was a wild one. I'd be curious to hear your take on this, but I couldn't even begin to tell the story without setting the landscape. It is hard to convey to anyone under the age of 30, just how insane it was when communication was limited to the monoculture—the big three networks. When the only intel we had on what was going on behind the Iron Curtain was clearly propaganda.
Out come these tales of Soviet psychic soldiers. Again, whether it was real or not—spoiler alert: It was not—it made sense that if there was going to be an arms race, even just for P.R. reasons, America needed to be armed.
So people hear stories that somewhere in the Soviet Union they are training people who can bend spoons and needles with their minds, and it's like, "Goddamn, we've got to get to the moon first, and we've got to be able to bend spoons, better than anybody," right?
It's interesting you mention the moon, because the speculation is, if what you want is the P.R. win, why actually go to the moon? And essentially, when it came to psychic soldiers, that's exactly what the Soviets did. They were like, "Hey, does it matter? Can we just tell everyone we have magic powers?"
So that and the beginning of the series does a great job scene setting what it was like living in a world with far less knowledge and a lot less transparency on stuff. Particularly in the '70s, there was a boom in all kinds of parapsychology or paranormal stuff. You point to—major universities that were funding basically psychic labs.
Yeah. You see this anytime there's a big advancement in technology. In the 19th century, in a world where suddenly we're able to have telephone communication across the Atlantic Ocean, why not a version of that to the great unknown—the afterlife? So you see the rise of spiritualism.
In the 1970s, in a postatomic, nuclear age, why wouldn't these things work? And oftentimes, we still see this today we see statistically small samples that aren't double-blind or peer-reviewed.
For example, Chevreul's pendulum. Michel Eugène Chevreul. He had heard about dowsing. He took an empty bowl, held a pendulum over it, and it did nothing. Then he put a bowl filled with mercury under it—the pendulum started going nuts. Swapped it back to an empty bowl—and it was calm again. He said, "It's sacré de crap," because he was French.
Then he correctly thought, "What if I'm unconsciously affecting this?" He had a partition set up. And once he didn't know whether the bowl was filled or not, he figured out this was the beginning of the double-blind experiment.
When it came to early parapsychology, it's so internal, it's so personal because we've all had that experience—for those of you who remember picking up a phone expecting a dial tone and instead getting the exact party that you intended to call. That feels like magic.
Likewise, we all remember the time we had a song stuck in our head, started up the car, and it was playing that exact song. We remember the hits and forget the misses. Just like every night we dream a bunch of crazy stuff, but you remember the dream where it happens to be a premonition of 9/11, and forget the others.
Most people aren't statisticians or economists. They don't think, "I'm remembering the hits, not the misses," or about unconscious bias. So you get all these anecdotes that create a throughline, a narrative that feels right. That feeling is so powerful and personal that you seek confirmation of it.
Parapsychologists essentially would develop a framework—again, this sounds ridiculous nowadays, but you would get somebody who would claim to have ESP, they would demonstrate ESP, and you'd have very smart, learned, paper-holding, robe-wearing scientists. And if the scientist discussed with each other and they could not think of a way that it was possible, then it must be an actual ESP.
Which, of course, I'm describing also…a magic show.
And this is where we introduce James Randi into the scene. Our story takes place in the shadow of these two great colossus entities: Uri Geller and James Randi. Uri Geller claimed in every way to have what the world wanted. And when the world wants something badly enough—when there's a void—nature abhors a vacuum. Somebody, usually the con men, shows up and says, "I've got that," and collects money.
Sometimes, they're all like, "one second" and maybe they pull it off, in which case, you know, they're a legitimate businessman. But more often than not, they're con men.
In that space, I on this podcast will not make any evaluations as to whether or not the claims are true or not. But Uri Geller definitely claimed to have the goods, and he had everything the world wanted from this.
And he would go on The Tonight Show—well, we'll get to that—but he would go on TV shows and elsewhere and use his mind to bend spoons and keys and pins.
He could find water using dowsing—that was a big one. Drawing replication, the ability to see through things. James Randi was of the opinion that these were magic tricks. So he would go on shows and replicate the feats.
The story that we tell in episode one of Project Alpha is the most famous encounter, which objectively seems like it should have worked. It should have fixed things.
James Randi gets word from Johnny Carson—who is a magician—that Uri Geller is going to do psychic demonstrations on the show. As a fellow conjurer, he works with Johnny Carson and says, "Here are the test conditions. He might try this. Don't let him do this. Whatever you do, blank, blank, blank. Bring your own spoons," and so on.
What happens is the most awkward 15 minutes in the history of television. Just flop sweat and silence.
This is when The Tonight Show, you know, 50 percent of American households were watching it. Carson says, "OK, Uri Geller, bend your spoons, bend your keys." And Uri Geller is like, "Mmm…" and then realizes—
Johnny Carson straight-up no-sells him. Doesn't help. Doesn't keep the conversation afloat. Just lets him choke on live air. The story that trickles down is that Uri Geller thought, "Well, that's it. I must be through. I'm over with." He does mention like, "I don't know. You weren't feeling the vibes. I wasn't feeling the vibes."
Yeah, "This gift comes and goes," right? Like The Shining—"It was cloudy tonight, so I don't read minds."
Exactly. And nowadays, in this internet attention economy, it's more common to understand that people quickly forget what you're famous for. They just know that you're famous.
If they remembered anything about Uri Geller, there's three parts to this sentence: "Uri Geller was on The Tonight Show for some ESP thing. It went some way—either good or bad, I don't recall."
So instead, his star just went higher. You would think a very public debunking would do something—but it did not.
Then, in this emotionally charged peak Cold War era—where they want there to be psychic soldiers—you begin to get private investments in testing for ESP. This is the story I'm really proud we were able to uncover.
There were two kids, about 18 years old at the time, who applied for ESP tests in St. Louis.
At Washington University…
At Washington University…
At a lab that was funded by one of these…
McDonnell Douglas?
A major airline manufacturer and defense contractor was funding a major ESP lab at a very highly regarded university.
Correct. Correct.
This is already crazy.
Yes. And much like—well, I don't know how much of my own show to spoil. The reason we were attracted to this is because we had extraordinary access to the principal players.
My co-writer and co-creator, Justin Robert Young, was an intern at the James Randi Educational Foundation. He would help with those million-dollar challenge paranormal tests. I toured with a show in the spirit of James Randi, got advice on how to perform psychic surgery, which I later performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us. I took college students on a 90-minute "best of parapsychology" experience.
We wanted to basically tell the full version of the original story we heard, which was: James Randi got two kids, taught them magic, sent them into the depths, and they fooled—made fools of—the entire industry.
Turns out, that wasn't the story at all.
Turns out, the kids have agency. They did this on their own. They looked up to James Randi and let him lead point. The stories that emerged—we quickly discovered through the interviews—this was less a story of a takedown of a monolith. And more of a story of two undercover detectives who got in too deep, and who realized, month after month, that "Oh wait, these are humans who are trying to advance science and we're actively deceiving them, even though it's for a good end"
Because of the nature of storytelling, the simpler story wins. The story that emerges on live TV—there's an astonishing moment, an astonishing moment. Where again back in the monoculture the entire world is watching as during a press conference, the students are asked, "How do you do it?" And they say, "Quite honestly, we cheat."
James Randi—shall we say—simplifies the narrative. It's a sanded-down narrative in which James Randi is at the center of it because he has the more tradable brand.
Just to say, "James Randi plus Banachek plus Mike Edwards." Even now I can barely get the whole sentence out as opposed to just saying James Randi, this iconic person.
It's fascinating, you go through the show, these two young kids show up at this lab at Washington University, and they kind of work through how they fooled the people who run this lab. And then they also, the main guy, what was the name of the guy who ran the lab?
I should know this.
OK.
Since I hosted. That's the thing about podcasts is you consult your notes and let it go. Well, Peter, let me actually look it up. If we have the power of pausing time…
Peter Philips, that's what it was.
All right. So then, you know, they go through their stuff where they're, you know they're faking the people out there and then the guy who ran the lab, Peter Phillips, who's a respected scientist, he's just completely destroyed by this.
Yeah. This is pure speculation on my part. One of the difficult things is that on the one hand it's great to bring to light the boots-on-the-ground experience of Mike and Banachek. Who were just under these brutal test conditions, where every single day, they would have to essentially invent a new magic trick on the fly.
Later, it's fascinating—Banachek became one of the greatest mentalists on the planet, specifically because he went through this two-year trial by fire of having to invent magic methods on the fly constantly.
They were constantly closing down the ability for them to cheat, and they would figure out a way to wiggle out of that. So, they were still reading signs through a wall or bending stuff.
Yeah, and there would be a few examples that we get to cover in there, some neat moments where somebody sees something over somebody's shoulder, or there'd be a gentle tee-up, or maybe one person might set up something in a tricky way so that the other one could get the payoff hours later.
Basically they're tinkering with information inefficiency. As the results were more and more amazing, the rules got more and more stringent. Mostly because—out of nowhere—they were getting letters from James Randi saying, "By the way, if they were conjurers, they might be doing this…"
So something that would work on day one they would show up and now suddenly there's a glass partition. But he would notice that there was a bit of a gap. Maybe they could blow it down and have it work. Then there's a gasket, but he realized that if he made an excuse, they'd pick it up—and maybe a bit of sand might wedge it enough.
This constant cat-and-mouse would give increasingly small, statistically insignificant results—but it was still enough that the lab kept on going, all the while setting up this big gotcha reveal.
Right. Describe that because there was a TV show where a special where Randi and the two kids are like—
Yeah, the show was called Magic or Miracle, and it's an interesting hodgepodge. You could tell it was sold as one thing and then the producer wanted to make it something else. So as a result it's a little bit meandering, but the big moment was the reveal of Project Alpha. And it was really surreal to hear the first-hand accounts of these kids showing up. They're in the spotlight. Nobody knows nothing when you're a late teenager. And so you think, "well, this must be, objectively, it's going to be the most famous thing that ever happens to me." "After this," thinks Mike Edwards, "I'll go to Hollywood. And after this, everything will be fine." And so instead, it doesn't work out that way. Instead, it comes, it goes, and the narrative gets sanded down, sanded it down. And then you hear Project Alpha, you hear James Randi and that's it.
That's a hard thing when you think of how much they gave up. There's a bit of a moral question because what is ethically the right thing to make the biggest impact? Because in one reality, you just keep spending money and who's going to show up, charlatan after charlatan after charlatan, all that money that could have been used to actually do real science to cure cancer and so on. But, on the other hand, the factual collateral damage to the reputation…of the lab to the entire industry, like who knows what advancements might have happened. That's less the realm we cover because, you know, we had access to the principles.
Like you were talking about the Houdin story or, you know, listening to your show it's like being in, you know, the David Mamet movie, House of Games, or The Sting where you think of this one con. That's the con. And then you realize that there's a reversal, which really keeps you guessing.
Yeah. There usually is.
So, I guess two things. One, why do we love to be conned? And then have it revealed to us?
I don't know if you've read Will Storr's book, The Status Game, but he starts with an extraordinary statement: "Humans are status-seeking engines." And it's like when you think of humans as, I don't know, I sometimes think of a soup of folded proteins and you shake it up and the two folded proteins…
You are having much deeper thoughts than I am…folded proteins…in a shake.
You want to remain congruent. When it comes to narratives, we're narrative-seeking engines as well. Every Campbellian story has a character saying, "Who am I?" A bunch of stuff happens. Then he finds out he's Luke Skywalker.
So I mean, long before Google we're doing autocomplete, we were making sense, "How does this end?" or "What is the story I am in?" And then we drive toward that ending.
Exactly. Humans love—as best I can tell—to be almost right. We hate it when we're totally right. We like seeing one and two, we see the line, and if it's three we don't like it. That's too predictable. That's too perfect. We also don't like it if it is oblique and wild, and it seems like it's nonsense, but when it's almost right, boy do we love that. Which is why, for example, the very first scam that we talked about is that I got suckered into buying what I thought/hoped were stolen speakers. Because what I was sold was the line that, "Oh no, these are studio monitors for a strip club and we just have a couple of extra. They're supposed to be $1,200. Look, you could see it on here."
And I was the one who saw the two and two in front of me, put it together, and thought, "Oh my God, they're stolen—but they're not going to tell me they're stolen." So I go to the ATM, gave them $350, thanked them, and thought, "I did it. I stuck it to the man while getting sweet speakers." Turns out, they're just cheap garbage speakers and I was the one who got scammed.
Likewise, when we hear stories, part of what we try to do on the show is take those "just-so" tales and figure out the legitimate top spin on it that you didn't see coming.
I'm thinking, as you're talking about people like Arthur Conan Doyle—who invents—or with Poe in mind who kind of created the first ratiocination detective who uses his mind to figure out impossible mysteries. You get Sherlock Holmes, who is the ultimate avatar of enlightenment rationality and figuring everything out.
But then Arthur Conan Doyle is a kind of sad case. He's this man of science and rationality who then is conned in a variety of things, including obviously fake pictures of fairies and things like that. Are people who pride themselves on rationality particularly susceptible to being conned?
A hundred percent. Humans are not very good at remembering…In theory, we all know that there are things that we do not know and things that we don't see and worlds that are oblique to us, you know, that we're surrounded by black boxes.
In theory everybody, our Vulcan brain says that's the case. But think of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. That's System One, System Two. Our guts are not so good at that. And sometimes it pays off. For example, in Gavin De Becker's book, The Gift of Fear, he essentially says, "Look, humans, we ain't got scales, we ain't got claws, we got teeth, we have one thing, a finely honed sense of intuition. And so when the bushes are shaking, we know we're in trouble, and that's why we won."
Because you figure that's a lion. You get out of there on the savanna. And those of us who were like, "Oh, that looks interesting"—we're the ones who were eaten. And that's the end of the line.
Yeah, and as best I can tell, the game—and it's the same game that magicians and spectators play—but with a mark and the con man. And the mark, each gets one gift. The con man gets the gift of asymmetry of time. They get to spend months and months and months calculating this narrative and laying out all of the artifacts so that the mark will hopefully see this, see that, see that, piece it together in their mind—"Oh, these are stolen speakers"—and then fall right into the trap. The mark, however, gets a finely honed sense of intuition—that gut feeling that so often we rationalize and talk ourselves out of. Only after something disastrous has happened do we realize, "Oh wait, I should have known the entire time."
So, I love the way that you talked about the monoculture—which I would say is probably unfamiliar to people under 50 at this point—where it's hard to remember a world in which there were only a couple of sources of information. Kind of, you know, the difference between CBS, NBC, and ABC News, it's like whatever, you know? It's hard to know. But they were all kind of revered, or all kind of trusted, and there was no knowledge outside of that. In that world, it's harder to understand that you're being fed a particular version of things, right?
Now we live in a world of infinite YouTube channels and other sources of information. So, it's not a monoculture anymore. How does this change the way we process information? And how do we develop a better, you know, bullshit detector so that we're not constantly being suckered by a reality that is very appealing to us?
Yeah, so Darwin proposed a tree of life where you've got a limb for mammals, and one for fungus, and so on. And it's constantly diverging. We see that with different cultures. In the monoculture days, whether the narrative from the news was right or wrong, at least it was shared, right? But now, you can select the bubble that you want to live in. If you want to say, "Whatever The New York Times says is a lie," then you can find a clubhouse where that's the fact. If you want to say, "Both of them—all of the mainstream—is a lie," you can find a clubhouse for that. If you want to say, "That clubhouse got it wrong," you can find one for that, too.
And so what we end up with is this self-repeating, self-similar fractal. Because—and I think Will Storr has this right—we are status-seeking engines. Would you rather be king of the nonbelievers in this sub-conspiracy domain, or a peon—one of the sheeple—who actually believes 9/11?
And so what we have is that the exact same objective information can now be dissected through different lenses and reinterpreted differently. Some things we all have to agree on. But even then, we can't even agree that the world's flat at the moment—or, sorry, that the world isn't flat. Did I just bust myself? I think we know what's going on. Did I just bust myself?
But, you know, it's liberating, though, too, right? To be out of the monoculture—because the monoculture kind of sucked, right? It's, you know, because if you didn't buy into a big story—or the story that everybody agreed was reality—it was lonely, it was difficult, and it was wrong, right? In many ways.
But so now we're in this more fragmented universe. How do we navigate this and kind of assess different forms of information without either becoming very cynical, or overly skeptical, or just crazy?
So one way for me is—if you—Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age posits a postabundance economy, thanks to nanobots, right? Where just kind of the Victorians decide, "Screw it, we're just gonna pick mid–19th century England, and that's how we're gonna live."
Right.
We have that now with the internet—with all these different strategies. And so, if No. 1, Rule 1, is: I'm out of the business of deciding one is better or more than or less than, but I recognize that these different pockets exist—at which point, it got pretty ugly because certain words mean different things.
If you're coded Team Red or Team Blue politically, you know, there are code words to indicate things. And that's very dividing. And to be honest, I'm actually very hopeful, thanks to AI. Like, I make so many cultural meme references that are appropriate to a 50-year-old person in person in Austin, Texas—that would mean nothing to my children. And so I actually said, "Please translate the following sentences—Simpsons reference, you know, et cetera, et cetera—to my 16-year-old daughter." And then it just spat it out, and she's like, "Oh yeah, I get it. I don't know what that looks like."
That's like a Babel fish for cultural—
Exactly. A cultural Babel fish.
That's amazing.
And that is possible now in a way that, technologically, used to require somebody who was, you know, aged between two different demographics. So I think that—hopefully—I am hopeful that that technology, that artificial intelligence, will allow us to see the humanity in each other.
Talk about your—your kind of politics and your—I mean, maybe your epistemology. And where does that come from? You consider yourself libertarian?
Oh, very much so.
So again, it's good, like, we want hyper-individualized everything, right? But then you need to be able to navigate your reality with other people.
I mean, there's a difference between what we want and what we know is best. What I want is to eat candy all day. What is best is for me to eat vegetables. And libertarianism is inherently ugly. It is the definition of ugly. If we all agree that it was pleasant, it's the movie Pleasantville. That's a terrible place, but everything is surface-level pleasant while secretly deeply unpleasant. Libertarianism is about taking all that ugliness and putting it on the surface.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson—the first time I read it, I was like, "Oh, this is a hellscape." And then the second time I read it, I'm like—or an anarcho-libertarian paradise, where everything from currency to the roads are up for grabs. It is objectively true that competition is the tide that lifts all the boats. It is also objectively true that I personally would prefer that I have no competition.
It is objectively true that the internet and the sharing of magic methods has elevated the whole art of magic—because we are no longer limited by access to a library, or the fact that your parents bought you a magic set, or that the local magic shop either does or does not exist in your small town. All of magic is better than ever, and you see it. It's held in higher regard than at any point in my life. Now, it was ugly to get there. Because in the 1980s—here, you remember this—in the 1980s, there was a time, and this is hard to believe, that stand-up comedy and magic were held roughly in the same regard. They were peers.
But what happened was, as comedy clubs went crazy, some people were like, "I work very hard. I can do magic." And that was a filter that kept people out. Whereas everybody—"Oh, I'm funny." And so, too many people…There was a time Austin had, I think, three, four comedy clubs, right?
And then, in the early '90s, all of that collapsed because everybody was stealing each other's material. There was no enforcement. And so comedy had to go through a metamorphosis. By the time you get to, like, Bob Odenkirk, The Ben Stiller Show, and the emergence of Mr. Show and the kind of next wave of comedy…
Meanwhile, during that same time, magicians embraced what looks to me like a cartel mindset: "There's only going to be 12 canonical illusions. We're all going to wear the same purple sequined shirts." And you saw that with the primetime World's Greatest Magic specials, where it was all the same.
And then, so, magic got their comeuppance with a rejection of that—with David Blaine. And then a rejection of David Blaine with the hyper-polish of Criss Angel. And then along comes the internet.
And I was—it's hard to be a frontiersman when nobody knows what the rules are. Is the internet TV? Are we ruining magic, or are we bringing it to the masses?
And there's still a segment of magic that perceives me teaching magic on the internet as ruining the art. And meanwhile, there's not a magician in America under 30 who hasn't seen the spiky-haired dude on YouTube teaching tricks.
You've mentioned Penn & Teller. How important are they to kind of the way that you think about magic and also the culture? Because they are—I mean, they're like the best performers ever. But they kind of say, "Okay, we're going to con you." And then they do it.
Well, and they brought that narrative layer to it—and that honesty. And to be honest, the metaphor that I think of as playing chess comes from watching them. Like, "Oh, this is great. They're calling it out. They're saying, 'We dare you.'"
Teller—when I was 19 years old, I drove out to Houston from Austin to see Penn & Teller for the first time live. And I had Teller sign a card "To my bastard son," which got a chuckle, and it started an email correspondence over the years. In one of the essays he wrote me, he said: In theater, there's a willing suspension of disbelief. If I hold up a stick and say, "This is a sword," you're like, "All right, sure—where's this headed?" And then you go along, and maybe you cry or laugh or whatever.
But in magic, it's nonconsensual. You're like, "This is a sword." You're like, "Yeah, I got—what the fuck just happened?"
That's a sword. And in that wonder—in that chess match—is the heart of magic. And nobody's better at it than Penn & Teller. And it's been fascinating to watch their rise: first as counterculture, but now—culture. They have the number one show on The CW. And so, I don't know what comes next after them.
What was the trick you did on Fool Us?
It was psychic surgery.
Explain that.
So, as a matter of fact, it's part of why we lost Andy Kaufman as early as we did. Back in the 1970s, in the Philippines, there were healing practitioners who claimed that—you know, if you've ever seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom—you know, they claimed they could do that: reach inside you, pull out tumors. And what it was, was a little bit of sleight of hand with chicken guts. They just palmed some chicken guts and blood.
They—you know, skin is very pliable. It mushes more than you would expect, and it feels weird. And they would pull out these chicken giblets and then wipe you down, and you were fine. And the weird part is, we know that the placebo effect is so powerful. And we know it's so powerful, it works even when you know it is a placebo. You know, we know red placebos work better than blue placebos. Big placebos work better than small placebos. And in the case of acupuncture—paranormal stuff aside—we know that painful placebos work better than painless placebos. And in the case of…imagine a placebo so powerful that you get on a plane, you spend your money, you have somebody physically inflict pain on you. That is such a powerful placebo that, you know, you live your life in a way that is congruent—as though you're healed. And for some people, long enough, it worked.
But it was a fraud, ultimately—and got exposed as such by the likes of James Randi. And so, being a touring stage magician, I've always felt like, if it's important, you should never say it aloud. So what I won't do is say, "Psychic surgery is fake." But what I will do is say, "Hey, here's a card. Burn it up. Mix it with pudding. Eat it. That's a pretty vanished card, right? Now lay on the table." I'm going to psychically—you know, blood and guts—doing it for comedic effect. Really, the goal of that is to take the teeth out of the con, the fraud of psychic surgery.
A similar thing happened with the Ku Klux Klan and the radio program Superman: By revealing the inner workings—the deeply held secrets—of the Klan, they suddenly became a punching bag and a laughingstock. And so that did a lot to move the needle. And likewise, that's what I wanted to do with the trick that I did on Penn & Teller: Fool Us.
How did you get interested in magic—and in con-man stuff?
You mentioned Penn & Teller, and we don't get to choose when and where we imprint on our artistic heroes. But for me, it was in second grade, and it was their PBS show Penn & Teller Go Public, where they did a bunch of tricks. But then they said, "If you have one of these VCRs, press record—we're going to teach you one."
And so they did a fake news report where they taught a simple card force. And in second grade, I did it for my family. And then we turned on the TV, and the news—we had Penn Jillette stop and say, "Is this your card?" And that ecstasy, that first hit—I'm still chasing that high.
Why aren't there more women involved in magic?
The internet. Straight up.
Let me put it this way: Before the internet, the only way for the methods—when I was 19 years old, I would go to a cafeteria here in Austin, IBM Ring 60—and a curious thing would happen. We would do the minutes and the thing and the lecture, and they never wanted to hang out and session with each other.
And it was weird, because people would do the same tricks with the same lines, and everybody would laugh. And I was like…that was the same one as last month. Why are we all laughing again? And now I realize what we were doing: We were all aping the structure of our performance so we could all compare notes and borrow each other's bits, rhythms, routines, plots, and techniques.
And then all of a sudden, the internet came along, and there was a much more direct route for that information. It became an efficient market of information. You didn't have to show up. For some people, that was great, because it opened a lot of doors.
For other people, it suddenly made their previously easy job harder. And so, it's just like libertarianism—it was ugly to suddenly have anybody be able to do it. But also, it did the very healthy thing of…if there was a girl of any age in that room—she was, and in this case, it was my wife—she was selected for every single trick.
And so these archetypes become established: "Oh, are you a woman adjacent to magic? Your job is to be the assistant." And then all of a sudden, people come to magic, and nobody knows the expectations—the rules. All of a sudden, a 7-year-old girl is discovering a trick and does it for her dad. Nobody told her that that's not how it's supposed to go.
And I do believe that there's something as close as real magic that happened in that quiet revolution.
So, I mean, it's democratizing because it's no longer passed through secret handshakes or social situations. It's much more wide open.
Yeah, and it also eliminated some truly awful, grotesque artifacts. Like, for example—similar to the highly rigid structure of, say, the Catholic Church—there were two ways to learn magic. Nowadays, we learn it on the internet.
When I was young, the only way to learn magic was for a 14-year-old boy to go in a room with a 45-year-old man who explained the importance of keeping a secret. Exactly what you would expect happened.
Sorry. Sorry. I can't speak with authority. I made it sound like a specific thing.
You mentioned James Randi, and Randi created—you know, he is like the ultimate skeptic, kind of—and he helped introduce what we talk about as skepticism, particularly about paranormal or religious sensibility.
You know, atheists have kind of won. You—there are a lot of religious people in America, but we're a much more secular society. Why is the skeptic movement over? And if it is, is it because it's achieved its basic goals—to make us all more reflective on what we believe? Or did it die out for some other reason?
I was surprised by the overlap between the skeptic movement and the atheist movement. The first time I went to The Amazing Meeting, I was really confused. Like, I'm like, "Hey man, we're all here to debunk people who defraud the bereaved, right?" And they're like, "Yeah. And I get to shout, 'There is no God!'"
And I was like, "Why would you do that?" And it's very clearly—there's a subsection of people—I talked about this with Andrew Heaton—where there's a flavor of atheist who… they still believe in the supernatural, but they're just—they're mad at the fact that, I don't know, somebody finger-banged their girlfriend at the church camp or whatever. You know, like, whatever. That's what their real issue is. It's not about rationalism or double-blind testing or what have you.
And in the case of skepticism—I mean, who are they punching against at this point? I mean, we don't see—we don't—there is no monoculture that is pumping simplified, universal narratives at us that need to be corrected by loud, angry, shouting people. Instead—I mean, I guess Twitter was the closest to it. But that seems to have wildly fragmented it.
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not a monoculture. It might be loud and annoying, but where's the best place to find what you're up to?
The Modern Rogue on YouTube—youtube.com/modernrogue. I'm perpetually on a quest to be the ultimate gentleman, warrior, and scoundrel.
Out of warrior, gentleman, and scoundrel, which is your preferred role?
When I was in my 30s, I was playing the scoundrel. In my 40s, I tried on the warrior. Now that I'm 50? It's gentleman all the way.
We'll leave it there. Brian Brushwood, thanks for talking to us.
Thank you.
- Video editor: Ian Keyser
