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Scamapalooza 36 – Alien Autopsy Part 1 with Spyros Melaris
In 1995, the world was captivated by the Alien Autopsy video, a grainy 17-minute film supposedly depicting the dissection of an alien...
The Greatest Magicians Of All Time (you’ve probably never heard of)
Everyone knows the big names in magic. Copperfield. Angel. Penn. Teller. Johnson. But what about those magicians who’ve made an...
Why so many Melbourne audiences are falling in love with close up magic
Every month, I run an evening of close up magic with four of my magician buddies at The Laneway Theatre in Northcote. And every month,...
Episode 40 – Paper Moon with Sarah Baggs
It’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea. And this week’s episode is only pop culture queen Sarah Baggs exploring the...
Episode 39 – The Annals Of Gullibility with Stephen Greenspan
Stephen Greenspan has dedicated a large part of his career to explaining why people act gullibly. As a psychologist and author, he’s...
Episode 37 – The Laborastory
The Laborastory is a science storytelling event in Melbourne that comes to tell the stories of science – the heroes, the egos, the...
Why do intelligent people make such good suckers?
One of the great shames of my life is that, for a two year period, I believed Mr Ed, the talking sitcom horse, was a zebra. Producers of...
Episode 34 – The Gentle Grafter With Tosh Greenslade
Do you remember that story about the man who sold his fob watch to buy his wife a comb while she sold her hair to buy him a watch chain?...
Episode 33 – Alien Autopsy Part 2 with Spyros Melaris
In the second part of Nicholas’ conversation with Spyros Melaris about the 1995 Alien Autopsy video, Spyros discusses the fallout from...
“Booze and the blowens cop the lot.”
Back in 1997, magician Ricky Jay filmed a HBO special based on his one man show ‘Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants.’ About twenty minutes...
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
It’s time to class the joint up a touch with a little poetry. This Emily Dickinson wasn’t published until fifty years after her death but...
The Many Deaths Of A.V. Lamartine
On a spring morning in the 1859, A.V. Lamartine walked into the Chemeketa Hotel in Salem, Oregon. The concierge noticed that the man...
Episode 28 – Mediums At Large with Paul Zenon
On the last episode, skeptic Richard Saunders talked about treating those who claim they have psychic powers with respect and the level...
The Five Greatest Female Con Artists Of All Time
If you’re to believe popular culture, the world of the professional swindler is a particularly masculine place. After all, it’s con MAN...
Episode 27 – The Million Dollar Challenge with Richard Saunders
“Prove it.” It’s the catch cry of skeptics and critical thinkers around the world. Presented with fraudulent claims of psychic powers and...
Episode 26 – F Is For Fake with Simon Caterson
Orson Welles’ last project before the descending into a life of frozen pea commercials and voicing Transformers was F Is A Fake. The film...
Welcome To 2016
Scamapalooza returns this week with a miniepisode that, while it doesn’t have a guest, is packed full of news, stories and the tired...
5 Ingenious Small Scale Swindles I Wish I’d Come Up With
The website Reddit is a treasure trove of little confessions, bite-sized trivia and minor misogyny (Ok, major misogyny, but that’s a...
5 Most Popular Scamapaloozas of 2015
After years of procrastinating, Paul Culliver from Mammoth Audio and I finally launched the podcast Scamapalooza in July. Since then,...
Episode 24 – Houdini and The Medium with Jon Cox
In his time, Harry Houdini was known not just as the world’s most famous magician but also as a hoax-buster, exposing fraudulent psychics...
Here you'll find resources for teaching and promoting critical thinking, scam protection, and deception education. Many are linked to his school incursions while others are just for fun.
Make sure you subscribe to Nicholas's podcast. Scamapalooza. He interviews psychologists, authors, and researchers about why people are so easy to fool.
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