I love this story so much on like a thousand different levels, one being it's pure psychological warfare. It harkens into your massive area of expertise with which is con-autistry and magician thinking. And what's beautiful is by the end of season one, we find ourselves, it wasn't until after we did it that we realized what we had done. Like, oh, did we just position Hitler as the sympathetic rub and the con men as the good guys?
In this episode, we sit down with famed stage magician and infamous instructor of the school of scams, Brian Brushwood, whose new podcast explores the world's greatest con artists and con jobs from World War II to modern game shows.
We cover everything in this episode from why you can't con an honest person to the power of shame and fame to folk psychology to how the British conned Hitler using one of the oldest tricks in the book to how one man broke the code for Press Your Luck earning him the most money ever awarded in a single day on any program in the history of game shows.