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Episode 41 – Fake News with Toby Halligan
We are living in a golden age of bullshit. Nowhere is this more evident than in the media where fake news is now almost indistinguishable...
Why can’t Donald Trump shake hands?
In recent days, the media has become obsessed with Donald Trump’s complete inability to shake hands like a normal human being. What is...
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 38 – I Love You FOCUS with Martin Dunlop
There are no two con artists films less alike than I Love You Phillip Morris and FOCUS. One is a true story, the other fiction. One is...
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...
Episode 36 – Brain Magic with Tony Barnhart
Anthony “Magic Tony” Barnhart is a cognitive psychologist at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He studies the psychological...
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 36 – Brain Magic with Tony Barnhart
Anthony “Magic Tony” Barnhart is a cognitive psychologist at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He studies the psychological...
A Scam From The White Man’s Money House
Redditor Sal_Mugga (whose username is slang for money shared an extraordinary story of being scammed on the website this week. He fell...
Episode 35 – Now You Seem Mean 2 with Nick Mason
Nick Mason, from the Weekly Planet Podcast, returns to help me deal with my complex feelings about the 2016 film Now You See Me 2. The...
How to at cheat cards with salt, a green marker and a poison ring
My favourite card cheat of all time isn’t the riverboat swindling George Devol or the modern criminal mastermind Phuong Quoc Truong but...
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?...
Scam revealed after con artists infect network with their own malware
You’ve probably heard about fake invoice scams where con artist sends out millions of phishing emails to businesses. The emails have...
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...
Get Rich By Throwing Yourself In Front Of Moving Cars
Everyone has their own secret YouTube shame. My aunt is obsessed with videos of blackhead being squeezed by doctors. My cousin watches...
Deceptology at Melbourne Magic Festival
It has been a while since my last update. I have not, as some sources suggest, been ‘disappeared’ by con artists I’ve upset. Instead I’ve...
Episode 31 – Small Time Criminals with Ben McKenzie and Kevin Turner
Ben McKenzie and Kevin Turner just want to play. As two members of Pop Up Playground they create fun, immersive game experiences that...
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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