BRIAN BRUSHWOOD
First He Scams You, Then He Shows You How He Did It
Applied Training
Creator and host of "Scam School," teaching bar tricks, street cons, and social engineering to over 1.8 million YouTube subscribers
Professional magician and entertainer for over 20 years; author of six books on magic, deception, and persuasion
Host of "The Modern Rogue" and "World's Greatest Con," a podcast exploring history's most notorious scams and the people who pulled them off
Became fascinated with deception after being scammed himself as a teenager by a pair of grifters running the classic short-change con
Once described by Texas Monthly as "an unapologetic master of corruption, illusion, and deception"
Friday
3:20 PM
The Solution to the Scampocalypse Is More Scams. (Seriously)
Traditional awareness training teaches people what to look for. Cognitive defense requires teaching them how adversaries think. In this highly interactive workshop, Brian Brushwood demonstrates Wolfmasking—a supervised deceptive role-play methodology that transforms your highest-risk "always-clicking" employees into people who can think like social engineers, without becoming them.
Built around the deceptively simple R.E.A.D. teaching method and validated in a Clemson University pilot now expanding to additional cohorts, attendees won't just hear the theory—they'll experience the same intervention themselves and leave with a practical framework for building genuine cognitive resilience in hours, not weeks.
Brian Brushwood is an American magician, author, podcaster, and social engineering educator who has spent 25 years making a career out of understanding — and demonstrating — exactly how human beings are fooled. He performed 100–200 live shows per year on college campuses for two decades, combining fire-eating, mind reading, and dangerous stunts with a deeply practical education in deception and cognitive vulnerability. He is the creator of Scam Nation, the self-described "only show dedicated to social engineering at the bar and on the street," which has accumulated over 1.8 million YouTube subscribers. He co-created The Modern Rogue and hosts World's Greatest Con, a critically acclaimed podcast deconstructing history's greatest deceptions — from street hustles to Operation Mincemeat. He has appeared twice on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, on Anderson Cooper 360°, and starred in Hacking the System on the National Geographic Channel. He holds a Plan II honors degree from the University of Texas at Austin and before becoming a full-time performer, designed high-end computer systems at Dell.