Brian Brushwood tours the country performing a magic show, and has appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He created a YouTube series that’s one of the top destinations for aspiring magicians and people who simply crave entertainment. He hosts one podcast about bizarre science and another on online streaming trends. He also co-hosts a comedy show and his albums have hit #1 on Billboard. Yet his successful career began as a practical hobby.
“To be honest, I just sort of picked magic out of a hat,” says Brian. In college, he started learning tricks, because he found that magic was easy to pick up later in life and seemed like a good skill to have. He also found ways to learn more about magic at the university.
“I managed to talk my way into doing a magic show as a creative writing thesis in this honors program that I was in. I was taking these insane classes, like History of Witchcraft, Languages of Science Fiction, Pseudoscience of the Paranormal, and the whole time I’m having a blast, but none of it feels like real work; I just think I’m a pulling a scam on the university. By the time I graduated, I had this decent little 30 minute show,” he says.
After graduation, however, Brian worked a day job. “It wasn’t until I got a raise that the day job terrified me because I realized I could walk away from this amount of money and try finding myself for a year, but if they gave me another raise I would be trapped. I realized that’s how you end up stuck doing something you hate for the rest of your life. As a direct result of that raise, I thought, well, I’m going to take a year and get this magic thing out of my system,” he says. “Much to my surprise, two years later I was on the Tonight Show.”
Magic was officially more than a hobby, and just like many magicians at that point, Brian figured the next step was a TV show.
“I did a development project with Court TV and I said yes to all of their compromises and changes because I didn’t know what I was doing. And they got a very bland product that they passed on. I was so frustrated. I thought, man, I’ve got to get more experience; I need to be in the position where I’ve done this before so that I feel comfortable speaking up and saying no,” says Brian.
Scam School was that experience. He created a concept for a video series and grasped the potential YouTube held when the platform was only about two years old.
“I had an intern, and he was really interested in magic and I kept telling him all the books I’d read and he was not interested in books at all. He would just go online and find tutorials. I was like, holy cow, there’s something to this,” says Brian. “A few years later Scam School is the #1 magic teaching tutorial site on the Internet.”
Now each day of the week holds something new for Brian. Mondays is the Cordkillers podcast. Tuesdays is his Night Attack comedy show, created with Justin Robert Young. Wednesdays a new episode of Scam School is released, and Thursdays he shoots the next one. Often he’s on the road over the weekend, still performing a live show. All this experience deceiving and dazzling people has taught Brian how terrible humans’ memories are.
“Only seven or eight years ago did it really hit me how our memories are flawed. I’ve had so many people describe back to me my own show, minutes after I’ve performed it, and they are getting massive elements of the show mixed up. They’re remembering there was a 4½ inch nail, but they’re forgetting I hammered it in my nose and not my eye. I used to be the kind of person that would get in arguments all the time about whether something happened one way or the other, and now, it’s been the best thing ever; I don’t ever argue. I’m like, ‘I don’t know, maybe, I’m probably wrong.’ Once you get to that phase where you don’t mind saying ‘I’m probably wrong,’ there is so much freedom to adjust and pivot and make smarter decisions.”
He’s also learned that consistently pushing out of comfort zones is crucial to success.
“Say yes often, and step outside your comfort zone, and it will always suck. Understand that no matter what you do, no matter where you go, there will always be zones that are outside your comfort zone. So learn to be comfortable outside your comfort zone as fast as you can because that is something you will experience for the rest of your life and you will never regret training yourself to deal with that,” says Brian. “Practice! You’ve just got to do it! Right now, today, whether it’s asking a girl for her phone number, whether it’s doing five more pushups than you’ve ever done before, whether it’s doing open mic night, find something that is outside of your comfort zone and do it. Don’t do it because you expect anything other than to evaluate what it feels like to put yourself in that position, because only by being there will you build up the tools to compensate and deal with it.”
Visit Brian’s website to watch his shows or listen to podcasts, and connect with him on social media.
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