Massimo Polidoro

Massimo Polidoro (born 10 March 1969) is an Italian psychologist, writer, journalist, television personality, and co-founder and executive director of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences (CICAP). At The Amaz!ng Meeting 2014 Polidoro announced that work on the biography of the life of James Randi was underway.The need for the biography was Penn Jillette’s brainchild, and in 2005 Jillette began interviewing Randi for this reason. Kim Scheinberg helped Jillette with his research for the book which included the search for stories, documents, and clippings. This resulted in the collection of hundreds of hours of interviews and a large amount of material covering 60 years.Polidoro announced that he had begun work on the biography, and had reviewed the material gathered by Jillette and Scheinberg, along with source material used for the documentary An Honest Liar, directed by Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom, which tells the story of Randi’s life. In an interview, Polidoro stated, “One of the most interesting things is that going through the research about Randi's life, his stories, when he tells them, that's quite something because many times you see they are different, but the original ones, they're even more interesting, more surprising! And that's how memory works.”The biography will be co-authored by Scheinberg with an introduction by Jillette.

In September 2017, Polidoro was able to interview James Randi for attendees at the 17th European Skeptics Congress.Polidoro shares 13 lessons he learned from Randi on the art of thinking and living in his 2022 book Geniale (Brilliant). Each chapter of the book can be seen as a magic and science lesson that can teach the reader something about life: give it a try, without any expectations; cultivate your passions; always try; be humble and recognize your limits; change your perspective and seize the opportunities; criticize the claims, not the person; be selfless for the sake of being selfless; learn to make rational choices; don't disperse your attention; identify priorities; put order inside and outside yourself; persist in the face of difficulties and nourish absolute curiosity.