Scamapalooza with Nicholas J. Johnson

PATREON MY STUFF STEVE'S WEBSITE STEVE'S TIKTOK I’ve been sick for the past few months. Which is why there has been an episode of a Scamapalooza in a little while. Instead, I’ve been spending a lot of time in bed feeling sorry for myself while trawling tiktok. Among the craft videos, slime reviews and video game analysis, I came across a video of a young academic making iced coffee while explainin...

Support the podcast on Patreon ! Magicians have secrets that you don’t see on stage. I’m not talking about HOW they do the tricks—the trapdoors and mirrors—but the mundane secrets that make the show happen.  The tour schedules, the marketing plans, the box office reports and the horror stories of gigs that went off the rails.  Kent Blackmore, digs up those secrets. An author and magic historian, K...

Support the podcast on Patreon ! If I had an origin story as a magician/con artist/science communicator it would be me, in the early 2000s, hunching over my computer trying to count how many times a basketball is being thrown while completely missing the full-size gorilla walking right through the middle of the shot. The creation of psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisibl...

Imagine it's 1850 and you live in a rural area, far away from doctors and the latest advances in medical technology. And then you get sick. What would you do? It's this fear that gave rise to The Snake Oil Salesmen, travelling hucksters who sold ointments, tinctures, tablets and the eponymous snake oil.  In this episode, I talk to historian Dr Jo Clyne about snake oils (both real and fake), electr...

Support Scamapalooza On Patreon I busted my cat scratching the couch yesterday. As soon as she caught my eye, she stopped scratching and started to stretch instead, acting as if she’d hadn't just been digging her claws into our brand new four seater. The question is, did she KNOW she was trying to deceive me? Or did it just look like that through my human eyes? Lixing Sun is the man with the answe...

I’m often asked what my favourite con artist movie is and I always have a different answer.  Usually, I’ll say Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men or David Mamet’s House of Games.  If I’m feeling a little pretentious I might name drop Fellini’s Il Bidone or Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. At the same time, I also have a soft spot for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Paper Moon, and Brother’s Bloom. However, if you...

If I told you that “the cafeteria is permanently closed for the schnitzel inventory.” what would you think I was saying? If your Russian, the chances are you’d know exactly what I was getting at. The novel The Little Golden Calf is the story of Ostap Bender a con artist trying to become a millionaire in 1920s Soviet Russia, a time when millionaires aren’t supposed to exist.  Little read in the res...

Have you ever had to deal with corporate bullshit? Had your projects “put on the back burner”? Or had your job “right-sized”?  Also, what the hell is “disruption?” Ian McCarthy is the Professor of Innovation and Operations Management at Simon Fraser University. His paper Confronting indifference toward truth: Dealing with workplace bullshit introduced the C.R.A.P Framework, a system for organisati...

If I had to guess what the cardinal rule for card counters was, “Don’t draw attention to yourself” would be way up there. While card counting isn’t illegal, casinos aren’t too keen on having players use probability to actually win at blackjack. Flying under the radar seems like common sense. What I wouldn’t expect is for a successful card counting to share his experiences on youtube in a wildly su...

Every other week, I am sent a video of someone playing The Shell Game. Maybe it's a cat finding a single treat under three cups, or maybe it's a magician impressing audiences with hand-carved replica walnuts and silicone peas. However, despite being one of the most famous scams in the world, The Shell Game is also one of the most misunderstood. Even the name is misleading, as it is rarely performe...

There is a popular image of a con artist that doesn’t exist in the real world.  It’s an image of well-dressed, suave, fast-talking swindlers who—despite their dodgy dealings—always does the right thing in the end. After all, they have a code. Johnny Hooker and Henry Gondorf in The Sting.  Danny Ocean and his gang in the Ocean’s film. The casts of shows like Hustle, Leverage and white collar.  But...

I have long suspected that Deepak Chopra spouts garbage. Despite being a trained physician, the author and self-help guru’s trademark new-age ramblings have always struck me as little more than pseudo-scientific garbage. But, I’m also the kind of guy who doesn’t like to dismiss ideas out of hand, just because I don’t understand. It turns out that my instincts were correct. A 2015 study in the jour...

How does the daughter of a railroad hand become a millionaire in an age when women couldn’t even open a bank account? If you’re Cassie Chadwick, the answer is you pull off one of the most audacious scams in history, a fraud that took millions from US banks and saw the richest man in America turn up at her trial. On this episode of Scamapalooza, I talk to Tori Telfer, author of Confident Women, abo...

Have you ever thought about how magicians learn their tricks? Not the methods—the smoke and mirrors behind the illusion—but the actual process of learning a new effect.  Even magicians don’t think too much about how they learn magic, treating our instructions like a recipe that—if followed—will create a moment of wonder. Brian Rappert, a Professor of Science, Technology and Public Affairs at the U...

If you know me then you’ll know that my nemesis is Dr Matt Pritchard. For the last few years, this evil genius has been creating impenetrable optical illusions on social media. A toy elephant vanishes in a split second in impossible circumstances. A lego pirate ship appears in a clear glass bowl. A bike helmet is suddenly filled with coloured balls. Unlike other online magicians, Matt uses almost...

My kid just performed their first solo magic show. In front of 300 of their peers, they correctly predicted a randomly selected TV show, vanished a bottle of coke and tricked the principal into opening a can of spring snakes. Classic comedy! But why do so many kids, particularly girls, give up on magic?  Amy Kimlat is a children’s author and former kid magician whose new picture book Hocus Pocus P...

Why have there not been more video games about card cheating?   I remember playing Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist as a kid and thinking that the stage of the game where you have to catch the Wheaton “Aces” Hall cheating was the best bit.    Why couldn’t that be the whole game?   Game designer and illustrator Nicolai Troshinsky has taken up the challenge with Card Shark, a new game in which pl...

Did you know the world “bullshit” might just be an Australian invention? During World War I, Australian troops found themselves arriving at the front and suddenly under the command of British officers.  These officers were obsessed with appearances and would have the Australian soldiers bull polish their shoes constantly, regardless of whether they were dirty or not. The Australians called this po...

Magicians have a complicated relationship with the Harry Potter franchise.  On the one hand, the success of J K Rowling's creation has given them hours of work at movie premieres, book launches, and themed events.  On the other hand, it's hard dealing with constant jokes about where our broomsticks are and whether we were raised under a staircase. The Boy Who Lived casts a long shadow. So what hap...

There's been a weird evolution in the wellness industry.  What was once a market dominated by new age, holistic, self-care has seen a recent rise in hypermasculine, ideology-driven bro science. Forget Gwenyth Paltrow’s jade vagina eggs, these are health products that advocate eating raw liver, dangerous workouts and tanning your testicles. In this episode, Nicholas talks to Dr Vyom Sharma about wh...

Scamapalooza is back. New episodes are dropping in December 2022. Make sure you're subscribed so that you don't miss out on the wild chats with magicians, authors, psychologists, con artists and other liars. www.conman.com.au

Imagine you're a professional magician, performing a few card tricks at function when you're approached by a mysterious stranger who wants to make use of your unique set of skills. He wants to turn you into a card counter. That is exactly what happened to Dale Sadler, a magician turn card counter who spent years making his living winning at blackjack at casinos across Australia. On this episode, D...

What would you say is the best method of detecting lies? A truth serum? A polygraph machine? A body language expert? The truth about lie detectors is…they probably don’t work. So why do they show in popular culture on reality tv shows and, most disturbingly, in criminal investigations? And what are the ramifications of putting our faith in these dodgy devices and half baked theories? On this episo...

I have always assumed that it must be hard to be a woman in magic. It’s an industry dominated by men and populated by old guys with outdated ideas of gender, young boys who got into magic to pick up girls and antisocial men of all ages who struggle to talk to ANYONE, let alone members of the opposite sex.  We have the organisations like the International 'Brotherhood' of Magicians and The Magic Ci...

What’s the difference between a con artist and a magician? A great magician tells you they’re about to lie you. They admit it out right. And then fool you anyway. But a great con artist will suck you in and leave you refusing to believe you were ever deceived. So what then, about mentalism, that branch of magic that brings to life psychic phenomena like psychokinesis and telepathy or that makes ex...