We live in Las Vegas, an entire city built on glorious bad math! We headed downtown to the world famous Fremont’s Street Experience where we were overwhelmed by the stench of urine, but we met up with this man! This is our friend, Michael Close. He is a professional magician. Go ahead put him where you want it, right there! The money goes there. Loser! Loser! Loser! We interrupted Michael as he was helping some Las Vegas tourist with their short term financial planning. You had that one too, did you not, brother? We asked him to demonstrate how bullshitters use numbers. Can you perform a couple of classic numbers cons, first up! We hit some cameras like in this band and in that notebook and then in those glasses, damn! We are good! Michael is looking for a cashier to con like this one, watch closely as Michael confuses this lady with bullshit numbers so she will give them an extra ten dollars.
Can you give me a ten for ten one’s, great! Check, I think there is ten there. Count first, I mean, what have I got? Let us see, hang on a second! Well that would be good! I got another signal here—that would be great! That seem fair to you?
Watch out, that Mike Close is sleek. She gave him a total of thirty dollars, but he only gave her twenty. Michael just pulled a classic numbers con called change raising. Let us do a little recap.
I have a whole bunch of singles—Michael asked the cashier to trade a ten dollar bill for his ten one’s. She hands him a ten, but with his right hand, he gives her a pile of cash, with his left hand, he pockets her ten. She counts the pile and discovers it is actually nine one’s and a ten. He gives her another one, she sees a total of twenty dollars in front of her and gives him a twenty dollar bill, but because she is trying to keep track of the arithmetic, she is sure that she already gave him a ten and that is the con. If you were doing it to me, I would have just lost—right an under an ass load of money! If you keep throwing the amount of change out of balance which makes it hard for people to follow exactly how much money is involved and the whole payoff of it is that they give you more money than they actually show you!
The find out even more about numbers, we turn to another guy, a guy we think—
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