Transcript
Simon: Okay, my friends here’s the big one, something the books won’t tell you. You see, if you do a bet for big money, and I don’t advise you to do this, unless you want to be like me running round Europe, trying to get away from Interpol and stuff like that, a whole story for another day. Just do the bets for one, two, three, five dollars, a couple of drinks. You’ll be fine.
You want to be the life of the party guy, but if you’re ever tempted to do a bet for a bit of a bigger bet, well you’re going to get somebody who is going to get mad at you sometimes, and this is where the important, the critical part of the bet comes in, calling the mark. Calling the mark means letting them get away, while still loving you. You see con men don’t carry guns and knives and things. We prefer to use words and here’s how you do it.
You’ll watch some of these bets maybe, and you’ll see one let’s say where I tie a cigarette into a knot, and I take the guy for $20 bucks on it and he gets mad at me. That’s when you speak very slowly, very calmly. “Look my friend, here’s the deal. Yeah, I’m going to take your $20, but think about how many of your friends you can show this bet to next week or the week after or the week after that. Think of how many $20 you could take. Think of this as a little $20 lesson, because that’s what it is. As a college course that you can actually make money from.”
They’ll look and go, “Hmm, you know you’re right. I can actually make money from this.” So if you bet your friends for a buck or two bucks, they know that they can easily make that off their friends. I will, however advise you, once you start getting into the four, five, six, seven hundred thousand dollar range, you are totally on your own, because you’d better be a really fast runner or a really good fighter. So that’s my big advice to you on bar bets. Be the fun guy, where everybody welcomes you at the bar.
I have a buddy, Freddy the Fox. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve seen him leave a bar with people at the door saying, “Can’t you stay a little longer, my friend and show us a couple more bets? We’ll buy you some more beers. It’s fine.”
He’s walked in with two bucks in his wallet. Walked out completely sated and satisfied and maybe had four or five hundred bucks in his wallet, and they loved it. Why? Because he kept the bets small. There’s an old salesman’s quote that says, “Pile it high, sell it cheap.” That’s the concept that you’ve got to do with bar bets.
Of course, remembering that a good prop man; that’s what bar bet guys are called; proposition men. The prop guy can easily make $200,000 a year cash, if he’s a bit of a naughty boy. Could have been me, maybe, allegedly. But my friends that’s the big secret. That’s the call off. Tell them they can do it too. You become the multi-level marketer of con men and that’s a wonderful thing.
