World's Greatest Con

World's Greatest Con

Brian Brushwood (Scam School, Modern Rogue, Scam Nation) brings you the hidden stories behind the most audacious con jobs, swindles and heists in history. Email the show at Worlds Greatest Con at Gmail dot comSupport us directly at Patreon dot com slash Greatest Con Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episodes

June 7, 2021 7 mins
Feature Trailer - Brian Brushwood is on a quest to find the World's Greatest Con.

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0101: How To Fool Hitler - The Allies have an audacious plan to win WW2. Drop a body with misinformation to hoax Hitler into believing they'll attack the wrong place. The only problem? They have to approve it first.

Support the show directly by buying actual spy gear at con.scamstuff.com


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0102: When is the perfect story too perfect? - The Twenty Committee have the go ahead to fool Hitler with the most audacious Trojan Horse in history. Can they help themselves from over writing it into a bad soap opera?

"Still Alive" piano cover played by Claire Waluch. Find her at Readyclaireone on YouTube.

Video game checkpoint theme is "Cascade" by Kubbi.


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0103: In The Flesh - The Twenty Committee wrote a story that could fool Hitler. Now they just need to make it real. Brian explores the disgusting gulf between the fantasy of a fake solider and the reality of a discarded corpse.

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0104: The Moment Of Surrender - Every con has a moment of surrender, when you've done all the work and now the mark needs to fool themselves. Our heroes haves surrendered, will Hitler do his part and fall for the what is quite possibly the world's greatest con?

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0105: Operation Mincemeat Questions - Brian answers questions about the debut season of World's Greatest Con.

Patreon.com/GreatestCon


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A producer decides to juice his quiz show by feeding answers to contestants. The attention makes them rich and famous but the revelation of the scheme extracts a terrible societal cost from everyone who took the bargain.

"...Baby One More Time" Piano Cover: Björn Gottschall http://www.bjoerngottschall.com

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The largest single-day haul in game show history. An Ohio conman exploits Press Your Luck so cleanly they're forced to admit it and hand him the cash. That's only the beginning of his strange, sad story.

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A ranking member of the military finds himself in the center of pop culture, the hot seat on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in 2001. After an embarrassing first day, he goes on an unlikely run to riches. A turnaround so unlikely he is accused of cheating with quite possibly the dumbest plan in deception history.

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http://AdamandEve.com Code: C...

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A wanted con decides to fund his escape from the law on the television game show Super Password. He plays fairly. He wins. All hell breaks loose.

Hi, Matthew.

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Manscaped // Code: ModerenRogue20
HulloPillow.com/wgc


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Only one man has guessed the exact amount on the Price Is Right's Final Showcase Showdown in the modern history of the show.

He says he came up with the number by himself. Not so, says another super fan in the audience who says he fed him the answer. But wait, people backstage believe a bitter ex-producer has something to do with it.

Who is lying? We find out using all of their own stories in their own words.

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Brian is joined by WGC co-creator Justin Robert Young to answer your questions from this season.

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http://geologie.com/greatestcon


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Here’s a special preview of the Cautionary Tales podcast from Pushkin Industries. On Cautionary Tales, bestselling author Tim Harford shares stories of human error, natural disasters, and tragic catastrophes from history that contain valuable lessons for today. In this preview, you’ll hear about two young girls who faked an image of fairies so compelling that expert photographers could not explain it and esteemed figures like Sir A...

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Brian chats with John Madden about his new film Operation Mincemeat available on Netflix in America now. The film is adapted from the same book we used for the bulk of our research in Season One.

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September 15, 2022 41 mins

Brian Brushwood brings you an update on the work of World's Greatest Con season three.


Meanwhile...


We’re sharing a bonus episode from our friends at Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about things misunderstood and overlooked. This season, Malcolm’s obsessed with experiments – natural experiments, scientific experiments, thought experiments. In this preview, you’ll learn about a mysterious and disfiguring disea...

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September 26, 2022 50 mins

Brian is in the booth recording Season Three of World's Greatest Con but in the meantime, Dog and Pony Show Audio has a new series for you: Don't Explain.


Every time you go to the theater, you're experience an onslaught of movie tropes. Every romantic comedy has the down-on-her-luck best friend. Every action movie has the badass one-liners. Every Oscar-bait drama has that tear-jerker ending.


But where do those tropes come fro...

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Two boys demonstrate genuine psychic powers in a rigorous academic study in the late 1970s. When the results are revealed, the academics will be at the center of a new field of science coveted by governments, military and Hollywood. The only problem? The boys are frauds, out to debunk the very concept of parapsychology.


For the first time ever, World's Greatest Con interviews the two boys, now men, at the center of the public e...

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April 9, 2023 42 mins
The Cold War is on, the threat of nuclear annihilation is constant. In a world of fear, a social contagion breaks out: the belief in psychic powers. Military, government and academia take it so seriously they spend millions to find people who can demonstrate these feats. Amidst this backdrop, the scion to one of America’s largest military contractors funds a study at Washington University in St. Louis to find child psychics. Two bo...

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April 9, 2023 53 mins
Steve Shaw is an orphan who bounced around the globe. Mike Edwards is an Iowa choirboy who fulfilled every hope of his loving parents. They both see a world being defrauded by hucksters. They both apply to the Mac Lab study in St. Louis and are accepted. They both believe the other to be a liability in a long con. Can they coexist?

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April 16, 2023 51 mins
The boys are a team, they’ve been fooling the Mac Lab for over a year but what comes next? Fame and fortune for the Project Alpha team, hopefully. Yet, that means total humiliation for the professors and researchers Mike and Steve have come to know and appreciate. It all comes to a head at a conference in Madison, Wisconsin where the boys have to witness a truly disturbing consequence to their deception.

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