"I love that you frame it as the world's greatest con because I felt this way forever," he says. "We're folk scientists in the way that people had learned to farm and rotate crops years before we understood anything about, what is it, nitrogen fixing or, or punnet squares [or cross breeding] Those are recent additions just in the last few centuries That validated what intuitively farmers figured out from grandpa, grandpa wisdom, right? So, likewise, you have this whole branch of the arts in magic where it's highly rigid and specific in its instructions."
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.