Episode 100 – Brian Brushwood on the Art of Deception, his career in Magic, and Scam School

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what brings you to a place where all you want to do is sit in the back of the room and and poop all over somebody else’s act while they’re working especially if you know how hard it is to do the difference can’t be give me 20 bucks and now you’re a magician the difference has to be you’ve put forth the time energy and effort to prove that you want to to become sugar rather than taste sugar it was an old sideshow stunt I was a kid rooting around with a q-tip

and it just slid right into my nostrils like oh that’s pretty cool

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what’s up guys Xavier katana here you were listening to the human experience and wow what an amazing episode with mr. Brian brushwood who has made a career on influencing human perception we cover everything in this episode from illusion to cold reading we especially go into how people memory is and such an amazing episode to have our 100th episode on and with that there’s a few people I want to thank the show would not be possible

without my producer Josh Josh thank you so much for your consistent very hard work Kimmy she’s one of our writers she’s the female version of Hunter S Thompson Kimmy thank you so much for everything you do for us Casey also one of our writers amazing amazing literary genius Casey thank you so much for all of your work and finally Jasmine Jasmine thank you so much for helping out with the show there are other people that I could

probably mention here but those are the four people on our team that make everything that you hear possible for us so a huge amount of gratitude to them and again this episode was a lot of hard work getting to a hundredth episode of anything is pretty difficult so we did it thank you guys so much for listening and I hope you guys enjoy this one the human experiences in session my guest for today’s mr. Brian brushwood Brian my good sir thank you for making

the time welcome to hxp oh man I’m so glad we finally got to make this happen this is gonna be a blast yeah likewise you know I’ve I’ve followed your career for a while now for anyone who doesn’t know why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction on how you got into what you’re doing right now sure sure so May of 99 I quit my day job because I had visions of doing a punk rock blood guts magic show and touring all over the United States

so after about 10 15 years of that started hosting a show called scam school all about how to win free drinks at the bar by using magic and trickery and out of that came the television project hacking the system that I did for National Geographic and now it’s 2.0 iteration called the modern rogue that me and my buddy Jason Murphy do yeah I love that show I love the little techniques that you show on you know credit card skimmers and all this

different stuff how to hit a bull’s-eye in one shot how did this start for you how did you begin this interest in kind of acting the system and showing people you know how to sort of alter their lives sure well for the Montrouge it was a very simple idea like if basically if Houdini James Bond and I don’t know magnum p.i had a baby it would be the modern rogue and it’s like the idea this perfect man’s man what would he know even know everything from how to talk

his way past the velvet rope hotwire a car handle himself in a fight and so you know here Jason and I a couple of doughy four-year-olds begin this quest to try to become this ultimate para ground of badassness but I think all of it came from a place as long as I can remember I’ve always been interested in thinking around problems with clever solutions I think that’s what attracted me to magic early on and certainly you know fueled

the ideas behind hacking the system and now the modern rogue I absolutely love that I love that so when you’re in this sort of state where you’re talking to someone what are you using to affect their perception you mean on a day-to-day basis or onstage or when we’re done camera more when you’re doing a trick when you’re going up to people or when you’re when you’re busking in front of a large crowd I mean is there a sleight-of-hand

process that you use there’s something that you keep in mind yeah as a matter of fact I didn’t have words for it I think in many ways magicians are sort of folk psychologists you know for thousands of years farmers they didn’t know anything about genetics but they did know that when you combine these two plants you tended to get a better yield when you rotated crops when the land was treated a certain way you know they didn’t know why it worked they just know

that it worked and I think in many ways magicians have been essentially psychologists or both neuroscientists for years and it wasn’t until I read the book incognito that talks about you know we think of ourselves as the person in charge of everything but the more we learn about brain science the more we realize that the brain is basically like Congress you got all these different parts of the brain that are arguing for different

things and usually they have to come to some kind of consensus to pull it off and once I read that I realized that intuitively when I’m doing magic even now as as work having this conversation there’s another part of my brain sketching out making sure that we’re gonna be able to button this up that it’s gonna segue into something interesting likewise when you’re doing magic there’s a physical element to it you have to be present focused on the

other person you have to be speaking and essentially lying with your eyes in your body presence and the things that you’re saying while secretly what you really care about is whether or not your ring finger is properly positioned on the coin so that you’re able to balm it in a few seconds I love it I’m fascinated by the human psychology of it the social engineering of it was NLP a big factor for you like your own linguistic programming do you study that yeah I I

read I read a fair amount of it you know piece of work you won in that the stuff that’s most useful is also the most kind of transparent stuff like mirroring matching the body language the pace the tenor the volume other people’s stuff I got a little turned off when you get to some of the stuff that sounds a little bit like voodoo like ah if you look up and to the left you’re remembering from the past and anytime a chart gets involved and you start

labeling stuff yeah that that felt to me like a little bit too pseudoscience for me but I do like the core idea of it the idea of essentially using your mirror neurons to to project into what somebody else is thinking based on their body language and so on human perception is such a big component in the way advertising works so what we see every day is there an element of your trade that kind of exploits that absolutely and one of the biggest and

most pleasing surprises that have learned in an entire 20-year career in magic is just how malleable memory is how what lousy video tape recorders our brains are there’s a dated reference for it the fact that the moment I do a trick all I have to do is recap and say it ever so slightly different from the way I did it the moment they hear those words they’re picturing it done that way and sure enough it scrubs the the memory you know when we remember things we

don’t remember the way they actually happen we remember the last time we told ourselves the story of it which is why Elizabeth Loftus has done some of this amazing memory work where not only does she prove that we don’t remember things very well but that it’s astonishingly easy to plant false memories for example she did one experiment where she divided a class into group a and group b all of them were shown the exact same footage

of two cars colliding but and they all had for the most part the same set of questions but one of them was asked how fast do you think the cars were going when they collided the other group was asked how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other and just that tiny difference in language he had shifted the lens through which they viewed it so as a result two or three weeks later when they were asked follow-up questions like was there blood

at the scene was there broken glass the folks who hadn’t asked the question smashed into were much more likely to report those things that didn’t even happen so as a magician you know we rely on that the moment the trick is over or even while the trick is happening and we’re recapping what happened just five minutes ago they’ll be carefully selected language that causes people to be like yeah no I do remember that I remember that

remember that all while massaging away real heat that we want to avoid on the actual moment we did the trickery yeah that’s so important so crucial to everything that you’re doing um there was a time in your life where you were working for the computer industry you were offered a raise but you chose to give yourself a year to try to make it in the magic industry what happened during that year what sort of directed your career into what you’re doing now

sure so when I went to college I did a exclusive honors program where the first two years you took the classes they told you to but the last two you took whatever was related to your thesis and I thought it would be great to do something magic related and somehow talked my way into doing a magic show as a creative writing thesis which meant that the last two years of college I took classes like history of witchcraft pseudoscience and the paranormal

psychology he was a blast and the whole time I thought like oh look at me I’m getting away with having fun instead of you know everyone else is writing papers and whatnot but by the time I graduated I had a good little 30 minute show and so even as I had a day job I would live for Wednesday nights when I would go down to perform just off of 6th Street and past the Hat and I started to pick up a bit of corporate work on the side

and this was another company that was kind of a peer of the group I was working with during the day so I get up there onstage I do a performance and it’s going really well but I find out afterwards that apparently there was somebody sitting in the back of the room who grew up in the circus or was familiar with sideshow stunts and he basically held court and just every time I do a trick people would run to the back and he’d say like oh that’s no big

deal you just do this and that’s a dumb trick I know that I know this and it occurred to me what brings you to a place where all you want to do is sit in the back of the room and poop all over somebody else’s act while they’re working especially if you know how hard it is to do and then as a mental exercise I projected myself 20 years in the future and I was like okay imagine you’re a middling vice president at this tech company and it’s a big holiday

extravaganza they hire some magician and all the attentions on him everybody’s clapping for him and if you’ve never went for it you never knew whether or not you would be able to pull it off and I could picture myself being that bitter bastards in the back of the room crapping on someone else’s back so what happened was once I got a raise I realized oh this is the first step of a thousand mile journey that very likely gets me to a

place where I spend my whole life wondering what might have been and I become that bitter bastard in the back of the room who could only feel important by crapping on someone else’s act so as the direct result I never thought even as I quit I didn’t think magic was gonna work out full-time but I did know that after that year even if I racked up a bunch of debt and had to go back to work I knew that for the rest of my life I would never have to be

a bitter bastard because I could say yeah man I spent a year touring I couldn’t quite hack it but at least I would know you know and so as a result of that you know my wife was kind enough to keep the lights on and a year into it I’d made garbage money like i grossed less than half of what i had made that previous year but at the end of that year i saw how it could be done and I was like Bonnie quit your job come with me let’s do this and you know it’s it’s

grown slowly and steady with a lot of work and a lot of setbacks but now I no longer have to wonder who I might have been yeah very very intriguing one of the things that really interests me is just the perceptual threshold that we all have there’s a magician out of the UK Darren brown who I jumped into his work and I just found it fascinating how much of the psychology involved in doing this stuff is and how much we can sort of manipulate what for someone is

perceiving at any given moment there’s a part of your act to which involves kind of nailing a nail into your face what does that involve yeah well first of all – Darren Brown Darren brown is truly an amazing talent the phenomenal performer he just did a run a shows in New York and I’m very sad that I missed it but everybody said amazing stuff about it the real brilliance of Darren brown was that he figured out that if I tell you

but I was on a journey in Far East India and got struck by lightning and now I have the power of telepathy you’re gonna roll your eyes be like that’s not true but if he mixes in enough real psychology with a bit of you know trendy fringy pop psychology he’s still doing the same trick he’s still telling you what your card is but you view it through a different lens and you see it from that perception of like oh wait no I do believe all this and so

that’s the funnest part for me is as a magician trying to pinpoint that exact moment when he flips from you know talking about the actual psychology to like okay we’re in trick mode some people have criticized their and Browne for being a little too comfortable with leaving people with the impression that key use psychological techniques to program them rather than making it clear that this is a fantasy that this is a magic trick but to me I love the

challenge of that stuff and I think he’s backed off from some of that from his television shows back in the day but but the effect you’re talking about hammering a four and a half inch nail in your nose that’s a that’s an old sideshow stunt called the human blockhead and the idea is very simple if you’ve ever seen the cutaway of the human skull you’ve got your sets of sinuses your front toes are up top and then your maxillary sinuses are the ones that

curve down and become your throat someone has a feeding tube they basically run a tube up the nose and straight down into the belly and when I do that effect it’s basically sword swallowing in miniature I actually feel that nail touching the back of my throat when it ends Wow I mean it makes for a really good stage you know entertainment when I look at your work and I when I was watching the YouTube videos that have been watching through this week how

much of this is for your own personal amusement versus just entertainment oh that’s interesting I think almost everything in the show began with something that was interesting to me in fact even the human blockhead years before I knew it was an old sideshow stunt I was a kid rooting around with a q-tip and it just slid right into my nostril I was like oh that’s pretty cool and then forgot about it and it wasn’t until years later I’m watching the Jim

Rose circus sideshow and I’m watching people literally faint and Lollapalooza 1990 to be at the sight of that because they were so horrified and I realized that that that show did something very clever in that they primed everyone to say what you’re about to see is so extraordinary there absolutely will be people fainting at this show when this happens procedure everybody just the folks around I want you to point down we’ll get paramedics right over by priming the

viewers to believe that what you are about to see is gonna have such a shocking impact that people are going to faint around you of course you know that became the reality and so I I actually by by doing the weird sideshow stuff mixed with the sleight of hand and mind-reading my goal is to take what is traditionally a very jaded audience you know college students are not known for being in love with magic shows because most of them last time they saw him was

at a 12 year olds birthday party and so as a result I walk out and the first thing I do is the fire-eating it’s this virtuosic skill there is no trick to it it’s just you know really impressive to watch the kind of you know the juggling the tossing of a flame from one torch to another and then there’s this contract that I have to build because some audiences are conservative they don’t want to see a dude chub nails in his eyes but I need to seduce them

into doing it so after doing the fire eating the first thing I ask is I was like okay we have a very important question we can move and try some traditional magic or we could do some freaky stuff what’s it going to be and of course every audience shouts out freaky stuff and even if they’re more conservative older audience at that point they’ve all shouted that they want freaky stuff so it’s sort of it cuts off that ability for them to be suddenly

horrified and disgusted when I start doing the human blockhead because they asked for the freaky stuff and so everything keeps going one step forward one step forward and you take the audience on this bizarre journey or somebody who didn’t think they would be cheering for a bunch of blood and guts and me cutting off my tongue on stage they’ve been primed and warmed up to that point where they’re evolved all in huh it’s very interesting

so with scam school the large element of this is that you reveal what you’re doing at the end do you get a lot of flack from other magicians or other performers when you are revealing these tricks I’ll tell you what it has been a fascinating 10 years I had the idea for scam school 10 years ago this month it was during the summer of 2007 that I pitched it and at the time the only thing anywhere close to what I was wanting to do was the magic

Cribbs revealed specials which you know obviously upset a whole bunch of magicians they ended up you know try trying to sue fox and so on but to me the crime of that show was so it here’s the question is what is the difference between teaching and exposure so that show was very much exposure you saw a magic box you saw the girl get in you had a moment of magic then they took a giant dump on magic and say yeah it’s dumb it’s just a trick and you’re a

sucker for liking magic so yes they exposed the effect no the people watching did not get any closer to being able to perform it whereas on the flip side scam school the way I wanted to present it was each one beginner appropriate something that you could watch today later that night be two and a half years in half remember the trick and still be able to pull it off because to the core of the difference between teaching and exposure is when the lesson

is over can you do the trick if you can do the trick then clearly you’re taught if you can’t do the trick then all that’s happened is you’ve scratched the itch of your curiosity and that would be exposure and so I was terrified that there would be a big backlash and I kept waiting for it to happen and instead what happened is over the last 10 years magicians had to wrestle with the question of what is fair because there are some people who felt like well

you’re just giving it away for free on the internet and I was like well but you got it for free when you got a magic kit when you were a kid you got it for free when you went to the library you know the the the difference can’t be give me 20 bucks and now you’re a magician the difference has to be you’ve put forth the time energy and effort to prove that you want to to become sugar rather than taste sugar that’s the difference is

people who enjoy magic gets a taste sugar but if you make that decision that you want to be sugar instead it’s a lot less sexy but it is very very satisfying to bring that kind of joy to other people it could go either way really because in one sense you’re you’re keeping other magicians other mentalists on their game and you’re asking them to kind of improve their skill set and in the other direction it’s like oh well you just gave away this you know this

trick that I’ve been studying and learning for the last six months we’ll keep in mind magicians have a saying if you want to keep a secret put it in a book it is I think I googled on or checked on Amazon there was over a hundred thousand different titles books that had magic in it to some degree so obviously magicians are concerned with secrecy as much as they say they will because everybody the moment you come up with a slight derivation yeah

everybody puts it in a book they publish it in magazines and so on so but but I do think that there’s it’s important how you present it and in that regard I’m not going to pretend like it’s my job to keep other magicians or working performers on their toes I think I think any working professional knows that’s hard enough as it is what I am interested in is minting new magicians I want very much for scam school to be a kind of a gateway drug to get people a

taste of that high of having deceived someone and that’s both because I want more people doing magic as an art and I want more people literate about magic so that they could tell the difference between good magic and bad magic but also I think even for the folks who pick up magic for a little bit and then and then set it aside I think you’re fundamentally changed once you’ve experienced what it’s like to deceive another human and and I think it arms

you to better prevent yourself from being deceived when I was 18 or 19 I was working at a movie theater cash register and guy and a girl come walking in girl walks all the way down to the far end and asks about the candies the guy starts talking to me saying he needs change for a poker game later today so we start to make it change for a twenty and a 50 and up and down and along the way I think man there’s something about the cadence and the rhythm of this this

feels like a magic trick and unfortunately I didn’t have the wherewithal to stop everything and call the manager right there but the moment he left I was like that felt like a magic trick and I only knew that because I had been doing magic and sure enough we counted the till and $50 with light and so that’s something that I would have even known anything was afoot if it weren’t for magic and with a little more experience I certainly don’t think I

would be taken for a ride like I was as now so it’s my hope that folks who get into just a little bit of magic with scam school will either become somebody who gets in to a lot of magic or somebody who’s better armed to not get suckered by all the the fraudsters out there yeah that’s an interesting perspective I really like that what is what is it the sort of protocol when a trick goes wrong you don’t ever stop a trick in the middle do you or do you kind of admit to

failure oh you know what it depends um for example there is one stage show piece that I do where I get two people from the audience and one of them’s blindfolded and as a boxer over said so there’s no way you can see and the other person you know thinks of an image it draws it onto poster board and then hopefully at the end the the version that the guy in isolation draws exactly matches and you know there’s a lot of variability in it because I really I

don’t say anything up ahead of time while I’m talking and giving the instructions I’m looking to see how well they’re paying attention and whether or not they’re following along but one in a hundred performances we get to that last part and it’s eight minutes of comedy and build-up all to this one moment where we’re gonna reveal the two pictures and hopefully they’ll match and one in a hundred times they just don’t match at all not even close to it and

when that happens it is amazing because I turn them around and everybody laughs cuz they don’t match and I just end the routine saying and that’s why I don’t believe in ESP let’s have a big big round of applause for both of them and everybody claps and you call the show this is a they call it the Texas sharpshooter fallacy which is you shoot the bullet then you draw the target around it so in this case I don’t announce everything that’s gonna happen

at the beginning I don’t say hey we’re gonna grab two people they’re gonna think of pictures the pictures are gonna match because that would pin me into that being the only outcome whereas if I begin by saying we’re gonna try and experiment in ESP second sight psychic phenomenon and we get volunteers and it’s a fun funny process the whole way the only thing that ever it is at the end they don’t happen to match but I never said they would match I said we

were gonna do an experiment and then the punchline is just and that’s why they don’t believe in ESP on a more localized you know when you’re doing table hopping or talking forming maybe a card trick or whatever maybe you need somebody to take a certain card but they don’t take that card the nice thing is is nobody knows where you’re supposed to end up and as long as you continue to tell an interesting story you could take anyone

along for the ride and as long as there’s a good ending and it doesn’t have to be the ending you intended because what will happen is is there’s some tricks where maybe I’ll get halfway through and it’s very clear they didn’t follow instructions they don’t have the right card I can’t finish the trick as I did intended but at that point I might recap like alright let’s be totally fair you did blank blank great remember your car and then then turn on

and say now your turn and I as if I’m setting up the next phase when really I just never get around to finishing the first guy’s trick I didn’t admit defeat I didn’t make the person feel bad I didn’t guilt them for not following instructions instead I said you’ve done a very good job you followed everything exactly right let me press pause on this now we’re gonna do this other stuff and I think you’ll see where this is all ends up and of course statements like

that basically satisfy the itch in their mind of knowing okay this will pay off at some point and even if it doesn’t by that point hopefully you’re three or four tricks into the other thing to where the worst thing that can happen is after the show they’re all like hey what was that whatever happened with my card and then which you know you could be honest we like oh you know what I didn’t get back to that but here let me show

you another trick let me do a different one for you as long as you provide some kind of value and you and you scratch that itch people will stay with you huh it’s intriguing I love this stuff is it’s a absorb it as much as I can so all right I want to know about there was a trick that you did on scam school where you mind control by way of poetry which was later yeah by Richard Garriott on the International Space Station how did

that trick work this is quite possibly the single best thing I ever did on scam school we had this idea so um the way the effect works and the beautiful of this is that you could do it over the phone you could do it in person you don’t need anything on you as long as somebody is connected to the Internet and so you begin in my case I say oh I interviewed this guy but you could just as easily say oh I was watching this show scam school and I

always began you know hey do you believe in mind control not like like voodoo zombie you know the puppet master stuff but the idea that we can influence your thoughts with certain words okay because there’s this crazy life coach guy who joined me for a scan school and he claimed that it was possible if I just recited a few lines from a Robert Frost poem but it would cause you to think of one playing card in the deck of cards and so you know what you want to give it

a try sure okay the lines are the woods are lovely dark and deep but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and then I’ll say now right now you probably have flashed a few different cards in your mind but now your brain wants to settle and end up on just one card what card are you thinking of and in your name a card so so whatever card you say oh you want me to name a card sure sure yeah okay so he served clubs ASA clubs great

and and at this point I would put them on defense saying shut up you saw this too right you saw this episode really no what are you talking about like that’s what the guy said no yeah I’m telling you he’s a life coach look up coach Alfred singleton and find the interview and so no matter whether they ask Siri whether they ask ok Google whether they look it up on YouTube whether they just search coach alfred singleton they’ll find an interview and you know to throw

the word scam school in there and then they hit it and sure enough it’s an interview with me and this guy coach alfred singleton and he’s explaining you know how this really will cause everyone to think of the ace of clubs and in that moment people are just like shut up and then they instantly say well i guess that makes sense i well you know the brains a funny thing when in fact the whole thing is a sham because you’ll notice i never say the name of the

expert until after I get the card so in this case we recorded a hundred and four different versions of the video under 52 different names for the expert and so this is something everyone could try right now let’s say let’s say you wanted to do okay basically is either a coach a reverend a professor or a doctor so doctor is diamonds professor spades coaches clubs and what was the last one I left out Oh Reverend Reverend his heart and then

whether his you know his last name if it’s the first five cards he’s a singleton of one through five if it’s the second five cards six to ten he’s a Doubleday and if it’s the third side of cards he’s a triplet and then and then basically within those little neighborhoods he’s either an Alfred Byron Charles David or edgert so ABCDE so basically so if somebody says the three of Hearts I’ll say he’s Reverend Charles singleton and the biggest moment

of my life was when one of my childhood heroes performed that effect on the International Space Station over ham radio to his dad and as a result I realized oh my god I designed mind-control experiments that were executed on the International Space Station which was a pretty pretty freakin great thing so if you want to watch the video or get a cheat sheet for all that just Google mind-control scam for scam school and you should be able

to find it yeah we will make that available for all her listeners I love it and I love the ingenuity and I love the thinking behind it I mean it’s almost like a game of chess where you’re kind of predicting where the person is going to be in in their thinking before they even know yeah as a matter of fact that’s a really good example and that’s why that’s why when magic is bad it’s frustrating because imagine I don’t say bad magicians because everyone’s on their

own paths but but somebody who doesn’t have a very good show often times they make the mistake of thinking they’re playing chess against an idiot who doesn’t know the rules and as a result they don’t go out of their way to give credit to the audience to think okay they’re probably going to suspect X or Y or Z the good magicians they’re able to project into the audience’s perceptions and and think well if I was in this situation I would be suspicious of this

box or I would want to examine these cards or whatever so what you do is you make sure to do all of that but you do it out of order let’s say you got a special card that I don’t know it has something tricky about it and you can’t let people check it out so what you do is you do steps out of order you give them the chance to look at the card before you do the trick you’re like look I’m gonna do something and you’re gonna want to look at the card I’m not gonna

say what I’m gonna do but I want you to remember clearly that you checked out the card and they do they check out the card very very thoroughly you know use what magicians called time delay and then you know when you need the sneaky version of the card you switch them out or whatever but all of this is predicated on giving the most credit that you can to the audience and realize that that you are playing chess to create a moment of genuine magic and

genuine wonder and the only way you do that is by believing that you’re not talking to an idiot and going out of your way to make it as fair as possible you have been listening to the human experience podcast with Brian brushwood to hear the rest of this episode get to the human acts being dot-com / members this is how we scale the show up it allows us to move into a video format to bring bigger better guests on so become a member today it helps us out it helps

us sustain the show thank you guys so much for listening

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