"I do love the duality of magic being essentially a safe chess game in which we use the same tools as nefarious actors would when it comes to an actual con," he says. "A lot of it is taking advantage of those core intuitions all the way down to your sense of self or your sense of memory."
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.