Show notes
"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: Reason Speakeasy: Nick Gillespie and Susannah Cahalan on The Acid Queen, June 3 Reason Versus debate: Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion vs. Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual, June 24 1:43— Brushwood's podcast: World's Greatest Con6:00— The con of Disney's EPCOT13:20— The Project Alpha hoax17:47— James Randi, Uri Geller, and Banachek28:49— Why do we love to be conned?31:00— Arthur Conan Doyle's rationality and mysticism33:25— How to built a better bullshit detector35:42— Why Brushwood feels hopeful about AI40:55— How the internet changed magic42:50— Psychic surgery and the placebo effect45:21— Brushwood's origin story46:09— Magic's gender imbalance48:58— 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 pr…
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