Brian Brushwood: Why We Fall for Scams  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie]] - Full Title: Brian Brushwood: Why We Fall for Scams - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/09768d18-84b1-4c5a-98bd-562e17600d43 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Magic Tricks Mirror Scams** - The structure of a magic trick is identical to that of a con or scam. - Both lay out elements that lead people to false conclusions, ending in wonder or loss. Transcript: Nick Gillespie Cons don't fool us because we're stupid. They fool us because we're human. Okay, so let's talk about some of the episodes of that. And you had a two-part episode about Epcot Center. Oh, yeah. The world's biggest con. Tell me about that. Brian Brushwood Okay. So 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 the stakes, the very first season was about Operation Mincemeat, Which later became a Netflix movie. And in that case, Ian Fleming, of all people, helped to 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. Nick Gillespie In World War II. To kind the Nazis to chase the wrong story. Brian Brushwood Yeah. Basically, Hitler defended the wrong coast. And depending on how you squint, like that won the war. And 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 that they say what they're Going to do and then do it. That's the definition of bad magic. The moment you hear a magician say, I have an ordinary deck of cards, guess what? So instead, what you need to do is lay the elements in front of someone, let them come to the incorrect conclusion, while you blameless let them misremember things and they're left only With mystery. I perceive the job of the magician to be to play chess with the audience. And 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, tell you 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 has been how magicians have operated. But that's hard to do now, right? Nick Gillespie Because everything, all secrets emerge finally. Brian Brushwood Yeah. And Scam School, my show where I teach magic, that was on the forefront, the bleeding edge where magicians didn't know, was I exposing magic or teaching magic? And that ended up being its own thing. But it struck me early on, especially while doing scam school, that the structure of a good magic trick is identical, one for one, with the structure of a scam or a con. You lay everything out. You let them come to the false conclusion. And then you accelerate things until they're left. In the case of Magic, the good version, white hat hacking of wetware systems, they get checkmated and they're left only with wonder. ([Time 0:02:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f146e708-8546-4ec0-9e08-5f69ff5b6a9f)) - **Epcot's Original Dark Vision** - Walt Disney's original Epcot was pitched as a totalitarian city with uniform appliances and strict control. - Disney's death led to a compromised but delightful theme park, far from his initial vision. Transcript: Brian Brushwood Well, first of all, it began with the curious fact when I ran across, I found out, I was like, why is a privately held company in Florida legally entitled to handle enriched uranium? And from there you work backwards. 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, let's just say we can handle all of it. We want a nuclear reactor, can have a nuclear reactor. And then you keep going backwards from that. And you find out that the pitch for Epcot was not the objectively best part of Disney World, because it's drink around the world is the best thing on the planet. But it began as basically 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. You're going to have this and say, 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. Right. 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 how much he resented the strikes and so on. And so to pull off Epcot, they knew that they needed just an obscene amount of land. And in order to buy that land, they knew that everything had to be secret. So there's a series of shell corporations, and there's a lot of moments when it looks like the cat's about to be out of the bag. And so part one is the can we get the land? Can we build it? But then we lose our protagonist right at the height of this. Nick Gillespie Yeah, because Walt Disney dies. Brian Brushwood Exactly, right? And then at that point. Nick Gillespie And is not frozen and living underneath or frozen underneath. Brian Brushwood I still have my fingers crossed. We'll see. But it ends up being like oceans 11 but right halfway through the movie danny ocean dies and also the other 10 people don't really care about this heist but they all feel this need to complete Nick Gillespie It for the shareholders and walt disney was i mean he wanted to build a true like living thriving community, a city of tomorrow. And that's kind of what he was selling. Brian Brushwood Yes. Yeah. That was the dream he was selling. And, you know, it ended up becoming more and more compromised. And we got something. And what we got was delightful. But it is not what Disney had envisioned. Yeah. ([Time 0:06:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/55de9f78-df34-467d-9a12-f87ce1d0b314)) - **Houdin French Magic Myth** - The famed story of Houdin using magic tricks to pacify Algerians was fabricated by old memoir. - The myth collapses under historical scrutiny and lacks corroborating evidence. Transcript: Nick Gillespie Houdin goes to demonstrate that the French have superior magic. Can you lay out this story and first lay out the story as we know it or as it's received and then what's the twist? Brian Brushwood Yeah, this one was a one shot because it was always a just social story. And when we started investigating it, we had hoped that there was more to the story. The story, as magicians love to tell it because it glamorizes magicians, is... Nick Gillespie And Houdin, in the 19th century, I mean, he kind of invented modern magic. And I mean, he was such a big figure that Houdini became Houdini by adding an eye to Houdin. Brian Brushwood Correct. Yeah. 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 everybody else was dressed as wizards at the time. And he wanted to be of the people to my magician mind. And like he got it. The game is to play chess and cause wonder. Right. So the story that magicians love to tell is this is antiquated language. Forgive me the internet, but savages in Algeria had believed in magic. And to calm them down, the French government enlisted the great Robert Houdon, who using an electromagnetic, well actually, using a secret method, had something that a powerful person Could not lift, but a child could. Nick Gillespie Right. And I'll ruin it so that you don't use your crap. I mean, it's an electromagnet. So it's like a little box that when the juice is turned on, nobody could lift it. Correct. But otherwise, anybody could. Yeah. Brian Brushwood It's literally how security doors work at 7-Elevens. Nick Gillespie Right. And you bring, you have a huge, brutish, strong man fromgeria come up and he can't lift it and then any little kid or who dan can and the guy goes screaming from the stage and and the canonical Version is he leaves turns and says to the audience my magic is too weak against the french magic and then the savages you know fall into line and they put up with 100 years of French occupation. Right. Yeah. Brian Brushwood Peace is achieved until it isn't. Right. But upon examining it, that story collapses. And this is the beauty of having a flexible title like World's Greatest Khan, because what starts off as a story sounding like the French pulling a con on the Algerians becomes, no, it's Us who had the con pulled on us because everything traces back to a single source, an old man's autobiography with no corroborating evidence whatsoever. ([Time 0:10:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/868811a7-307a-4dba-a106-06de853a9d11)) - **Our Love for Near Accuracy** - Humans love being almost right; they prefer near misses that create mystery and wonder. - This desire makes us susceptible to cons where we connect plausible dots, even if false. Transcript: Nick Gillespie You know, I guess two things. One, you know, what, why do we love to be kind and then have it revealed to us? Brian Brushwood I don't know if you've read Will Storr's book, The Status Game, but he starts with an extraordinary simple statement. Humans are status seeking engines. And, and it's like, you think of humans as, I don't know, like I sometimes think of a soup of folded proteins and you shake it up and the two folded proteins that are- You are having much Deeper thoughts than I have. Yeah, okay. Okay, so we're folded proteins in a shake. You want to remain congruent, right? And so when it comes to narratives, we're narrative-seeking engines as well, right? Every Campbellian story, his character says, who am I? A bunch of stuff happens, figures out he's Luke Skywalker. Nick Gillespie This end or what is the story I'm in? And then you drive to that. Exactly. And humans love, as best I can tell, to be almost right. Brian Brushwood We hate it when we're totally right. We like seeing one and two. We see the line. And if it's three, we don't like it. That's predictable. That's too perfect. But we also don't like it if it's oblique and wild. It seems like it's nonsense. But when it's almost right, boy, do we love that, which is why, for example, the very first scam that we talk about is i got suckered into buying what i thought slash hoped were stolen speakers Right because what i was sold was the line that oh no these are studio monitors for a strip club and they we just have a couple of extra they're supposed to be 1200 look you can see it on here Yeah and i was the one who saw two and two in front of me, put together, oh my God, these are stolen, but they're not going to tell me it's stolen. So I go to the ATM, give them 350 bucks and thank them. And I'm like, oh my God, I did it. I stuck it to the man while getting sweet speakers. It turns out they're just cheap garbage speakers. And I was the one who got scammed. And so likewise, when we hear stories, and that's part of what we try to do on the show is we take those just so tales and figure out the legitimate top spin on it that you didn't see coming. ([Time 0:28:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2e704aa7-3ea3-4207-8681-e647aad9185a)) - **Rationality Doesn't Immunize Us** - Even rational people can be conned due to cognitive biases and intuition. - Our intuition often warns us, but we rationalize away gut feelings until disaster occurs. Transcript: Nick Gillespie Like that. Brian Brushwood Are people who pride themselves on rationality particularly, you know, able to be kind uh yes a hundred percent well just like um uh humans are not very good at remembering in theory We all know that there are things that we do not know and things that we do not see and worlds that are oblique to us you know that we're surrounded by black boxes in theory everybody, everybody, Our Vulcan brain says that's the case. But think of Daniel Kahneman's thinking fast and slow, system one, system two. Our guts are not so good at that. And sometimes it pays off. For example, Gavin DeBecker's book, The Gift of Fear, he essentially says, look, humans, we ain't got scales, we ain't got claws, we ain't got teeth. We have one thing, a finely honed sense of intuition. And so when the bushes are shaking, we know we're in trouble and that's why we won. Nick Gillespie Right. Because you know, you figure that's a line. So you get out of there on the savannah and those of us who were like, oh, that looks interesting. We're the ones who were eaten and that's the end of the line. Brian Brushwood Yeah. And as best I can tell the game, and it's the same game that magicians and spectators play, but with a mark and the con man and the mark that each gets one gift. The con man gets the gift of asymmetry of time. They get to spend months and months and months calculating this narrative and laying out all of the artifacts so that the mark will hopefully see this, see that, see that, piece it together In their mind. Oh, these are stolen speakers. And then fall right into the trap. The mark, however, gets a finely honed sense of intuition, that gut feeling that so often we rationalize and talk ourselves out of. Only after something disastrous happened do we realize, oh, wait, I should have known the entire time. Nick Gillespie So I love the way that you talk about the monoculture, ([Time 0:31:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f77dd15d-c112-4530-aac0-19bb7778f3c8)) - **From Monoculture to Pluralism** - The shift from a media monoculture to chaotic pluralism creates fragmented realities. - This allows selective truth acceptance and fosters many small, self-reinforcing belief bubbles. Transcript: Nick Gillespie For people under 50 at this point almost, where it's hard to remember a world where there were only a couple of sources of information. Kind of, you know, the difference between CBS, NBC, and ABC News, say it's like, whatever, you know, it's hard to know. But they're all kind of revered or all kind of trusted. And there's no knowledge outside of that. In that world, it's harder to understand that you're being fed a particular version of things, right? Now we live in a world of infinite YouTube channels and other sources of information. It's not a monoculture anymore. How does this change the way we process information and how do we develop a better bullshit detector so that we're not constantly being suckered by a reality that is very appealing to Us? Yeah. Brian Brushwood So Darwin proposed a tree of life where you got a limb for mammals and fungus and so on, and is constantly diverging. We see that with different cultures. In the monoculture days, whether the narrative from the news was right or wrong, at least it was shared. Right. But now you can select the bubble that you want to live in. If you want to say whatever the New York Times says is a lie, then you can find a clubhouse where that's the past. If you want to say both of them, all of the mainstream is a lie, you can ([Time 0:33:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/29d4b098-eb69-4e83-a7c1-4a53b2e81ff1)) - **Navigate Information Bubbles Wisely** - Avoid judging information bubbles as better or worse; recognize their existence. - Use technology like AI as a cultural translator to understand different perspectives. Transcript: Brian Brushwood Crazy? So one way for me is if you, Neil Stephenson's book, The Diamond Age, posits a post-abundance economy thanks to nanobots, where the Victorians decide, screw it, we're just going to Pick mid-century, 19th century England, and that's how we're going to live. We have that now with the internet, with all these different strata. Rule one is I'm out of the business of deciding one is better or more than or less than. But I recognize that these different pockets exist, at which point it got pretty ugly because certain words mean different things. If you're coded team red or team blue politically, you know, there are code words to indicate things. And that's very dividing. And to be honest, I'm actually very hopeful. To AI. Like I make so many cultural meme references that are appropriate to a 50 year old person in Austin, Texas, that would mean nothing to my children. And so I actually said, please translate the following sentences, Simpson reference, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to my 16 year old daughter. And then it just spat out and she's like oh, yeah, I get that. I don't know what that looks like. Nick Gillespie So that's like a babble fish for cultural wrestling. Cultural babble fish, yeah. That's amazing. Brian Brushwood And that is possible now in a way that technologically it required somebody who was, you know, aged in between two different demographics. So I think that hopefully, I am hopeful that that technology, that artificial intelligence ([Time 0:36:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1afda3a0-0058-4f82-b016-61f33254f59e)) - **Internet's Magic Revolution** - The internet democratized magic, allowing anyone to learn tricks and bypass old gatekeepers. - This change angered traditional magicians but expanded magic's reach and diversity. Transcript: Brian Brushwood The Ben Stiller show and the emergence of Mr. Show and the kind of next wave of comedy. Meanwhile, during that same time, magicians embraced what looks to me like a cartel mindset. There's only going to be 12 canonical illusions. We're all going to wear the same purple sequined shirts. And you saw that with the primetime world's greatest magic specials where it was all the same. And then so magic got their comeuppets with a rejection of that with David Blaine, and then a rejection of David Blaine with the hyper polish of Criss Angel. And then along comes the internet. And I was, it's hard to be a frontiersman when nobody knows what the rules are. Is the internet TV? Are we ruining magic or are we bringing it to the masses? And there's still a segment of magic that perceives as me teaching magic on the internet is ruining the art. And meanwhile, there's not a magician in America under 30 who hasn't seen the spiky hair dude on YouTube teaching tricks. Nick Gillespie You've mentioned Penn and Teller. How important are they to kind of the way that you think ([Time 0:40:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/835868ee-b326-44a1-a681-d28713a09bf9)) - **Penn & Teller's Honest Magic** - Penn & Teller brought honesty and narrative to magic, openly acknowledging the con. - This transparency added depth, creating a chess match between magician and audience. Transcript: Nick Gillespie Also the culture? Because they are, I mean, they're like the best performers ever, but they kind of say, okay, we're going to con you. Yeah. And then they do it. Brian Brushwood Well, and they brought that narrative layer to it and that honesty and to be honest what the the metaphor that i think of as playing chess is comes from watching them like oh this is great They're calling it out they're saying we dare you uh teller when i was 19 years old i drove out to houston from austin to uh see penn and teller for the first time live and i had Teller sign A card to my bastard son, which got a chuckle and started an email correspondence over the years. And in one of the essays he wrote me, he said, in theater, there's a willing suspension of disbelief. If I hold up a stick and say, this is a sword, you're like, all right, sure. Where's this headed? And then you go along and maybe you cry or laugh or whatever. But in magic, it's non-consensual. Like this is a sword you're like yeah i got what the fuck just happened that's a sword and uh in that wonder in that chess match is the heart of magic and uh nobody's better at it than penn And teller and it's been fascinating to watch their rise first as counterculture, but now culture. They have the ([Time 0:41:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aa3a0abf-d6fe-421f-acd1-12de5fc160c3)) - **Debunk to Disempower Frauds** - Exposing fraudulent acts like psychic surgery can defang harmful cons. - Revealing secrets publicly turns scams into laughingstocks and reduces their power. Transcript: Nick Gillespie That you did on Fool Us? Brian Brushwood It was psychic surgery. Explain that. So as a matter of fact, it's part of why we lost andy kaufman as early as we did back in the 1970s in the philippines were healing practitioners who claimed that you know if you've ever seen Indiana jones in the temple of doom you know they claimed they could do that reach inside you pull out tumors and what it was was a little bit of sleight of hand with chicken guts they they Just palm chicken guts and blood. Skin is very pliable. It mushes more than you would expect. And it feels weird. And they would pull out these chicken giblets and then wipe you down and you were fine. And the weird part is, we know that the placebo effect is so powerful. And we know that it's so powerful it works even when you know it's a placebo you know we know that red placebos work better than blue placebos big placebos work better than small placebos And uh in the case of occupant acupuncture um paranormal stuff aside we know that painful placebos work better than painless placebos and in the case of imagine a placebo so powerful That you get on a plane, you spend your money, you have somebody physically inflict pain on you. That is such a powerful placebo that you live your life in a way that is congruent as though you're healed. And for some people long enough, it worked. Was it was a fraud ultimately and got exposed as such by the likes of james randy and so uh being a stirring tape touring stage magician i've always felt like if it's important you should Never say it aloud so what i won't do is say psychic surgery is fake but what i will do is i'll say hey here's a card uh burn it up mix it with pudding eat it that's a pretty vanished card right Now lay on the table i'm going to psychically you know blood and guts doing it for comedic effect uh really the goal of that is to take the teeth out of the con uh the fraud of psychic surgery It's a similar thing happened with the ku klux Klan and the radio program Superman. By revealing the inner workings, the deeply held secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, they suddenly became a punching bag and a laughingstock. And so that did a lot to move the needle. And likewise, that's what I wanted to do with the trick that I did on ([Time 0:42:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/94c4cde3-6c6a-49f2-b72b-dce798a8f7d8)) - **Early Magic Imprint** - Brian first got hooked on magic as a child watching Penn & Teller teach a card trick on TV. - This early exposure sparked lifelong passion and pursuit of magic. Transcript: Brian Brushwood You mentioned Penn and Teller. And we don't get to choose when and where we imprint on our artistic heroes. But for me, it was in second grade and it was their PBS show, Penn and Teller Go Public, where they did a bunch of tricks. But then they said, if you have one of these VCRs, press record, we're going to teach you one. And so they did a fake news report where they taught a simple card for us. And at second grade, I did it for my family. And then we turned on the TV and the news had Penn Jillette stop and say, is this your card? And that ecstasy, first hit you know i'm still chasing that high why aren't there more ([Time 0:45:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7f6ecebc-4a70-416e-8a8d-569b11da2743)) - **Skepticism's Changing Role** - The skeptic movement overlaps with atheism but can adopt antagonistic stances unrelated to rationalism. - Fragmentation of information sources ended the need for loud monocultural debunking. Transcript: Nick Gillespie You know, atheists have kind of won. You know, there are a lot of religious people in America, but we're a much more secular society. Why is the skeptic movement over? And if it is, is it because it's achieved its basic goals to make us all more reflective on what we believe or did it die out for some other reason? Brian Brushwood I was surprised by the overlap between the skeptic movement and the atheist movement. The first time I went to an amazing meeting, I was really confused. Like, I'm like, hey, we're all here to debunk people who defraud the bereaved right and they're like yeah and i get to shout there is no god i was like why why would you do that yeah and it's It very clearly there's a subsection of people talked about this with andrew heaton where there's a flavor of atheist who they still believe in the supernatural, but they just they're Mad at the fact that, I don't know, somebody finger banged their girlfriend at church camp or whatever, you know, like whatever. Like that's what their real issue is, is not about rationalism or double blind testing or what have you. And in the case of skepticism, I mean, who are they punching against at this point? I mean, we don't see we don't there is no monoculture that is pumping simplified universal narratives at us that need to be corrected by loud, angry, shouting people. Instead, I mean, I guess Twitter was the closest to it, but that seems to have wildly fragmented. Nick Gillespie Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not a monoculture. It might be loud and annoying. But where is the best place to find what you're up ([Time 0:49:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/951677c5-b278-4046-afbe-d7373efdfc07))