Introduction
Four years and over 200 episodes ago, I pitched Scam School to Revision3 as “the only show dedicated to social engineering at the bar on the street.” I wanted to cover everything from street crime, cons, and hustles to bar scams, mind-reading, and magic tricks… and not just from an academic standpoint. I wanted to get out there, in the actual bars, and teach these effects to real people.
What came out of that pitch has been one of the most exciting, terrifying, and transformative experiences of my life. I’ve received thousands of emails from all over the world thanking me for the show… and hundreds of YouTube comments telling me to shave off my ridiculous hair. From the middle-school kid in Bulgaria thanking me for making him popular at school, to the close online friendships I’ve made through the show, I’m endlessly thankful, both for the connections Scam School has made possible and for the growth it’s brought me as a performer.
People have been asking me for years to create a singular resource for all of the scams and tricks covered on Scam School. Before now, it would take you almost 50 hours just to watch every episode of Scam School (…and you’d have to take your own notes).
Thanks to the magic of e-books, we are able to create a super-dense resource, packed with audio commentary, video illustrations, and detailed instructions for over 80 effects. And to me, the best part is that you can keep all of it on your smartphone. Now you’ll have a singular resource in your pocket to refresh your memory on any Scam School effect before you attempt it at the bar.
You’ll notice each effect is given its own category: opener, tweener, or closer. We’ve mentioned this in a couple of Scam School episodes, but here’s what they mean:
Openers: Effects that require no attention or effort from your target audience. Bars and parties are inherently chaotic environments, and your first effect should be one that will always work, whether someone’s paying attention or not. These effects should cause people to stop and shout “Do that again!” (Hint: never repeat a trick. Once is a trick, twice is a lesson. Instead, move on to…)
Tweeners: Effects that require participation or extended focus from your targets. Maybe they need to remember a card, or maybe there’s just enough process in the trick that you only want to perform it for people who want to see magic. These effects usually have more powerful impacts and help to build momentum with your audience.
Closers: Effects where you translate your momentum into getting a free drink, the girl’s phone number, or anything else you want. These are unbeatable challenges that offer you an opportunity to ask for something in exchange for an answer. They re-establish you as the person in charge of the social interaction, and you can use them to cement a precedent of “pay-for-play”: You’re happy to keep entertaining the crowd, as long as those free drinks keep coming.
(If you want to hear more about these, check out my TEDx talk, How to Scam Your Way into Anything
To explain more about the book, I’m going to turn things over to my producer, Jon Tilton. Jon is without a doubt the reason you’re able to read this book today. In the midst of hosting four internet TV series and performing hundreds of live shows, Jon’s been the one voice able to keep me on task. If it weren’t for his hard work, enthusiasm, and tenacious focus, I’d never get this launched.
Take it away, Jon!
- Brian
Hey all, Jon Tilton here. I’m the one behind the production, layout, and lovely(?) doodles contained in this book. Working on Scam School Book 1 has been an absolute blast. As a huge Revision3 fan throughout my high school and college days, I felt truly honored to work with Brian on this series of books compiled from Scam School’s backlog of entertaining, yet informative episodes.
We currently live in an interesting time for digital book publishing - a time that’s simultaneously exciting and frustrating. On the exciting end, e-book readers like the Kindle, Nook, and iPad are selling like hotcakes and the enhanced features of these technologies allow writers to deliver their content in new ways. On the frustrating side, the industry still doesn’t have much of a standard in formatting, which especially affects media-enhanced books like ours.
From the get-go, Brian and I wanted to pack these books with an abundance of media-rich content, from video demonstrations to audio commentaries. The various platform differences led us to use a few work-arounds to guarantee every reader access to our book’s bonus content. Because of these work-arounds, you may notice some redundancy with the audio and video content, such as external links to videos that already display properly on your device.
At the top of every section, under the heading, you’ll see an overview of each trick with an external link to the corresponding episode. Below each overview is an audio commentary. For e-book readers that support embedded media, each commentary can be played in the actual book. If your device currently does not support embedded media, we’ve included the same audio commentary through an external link to YouTube in every section.
Throughout the Scam School books, you’ll find helpful video demonstrations for some of the tricks with highly visual elements. Again, if your e-book reader allows you to view embedded media, you can watch each demonstration within the book. For users on devices that do not support embedded media, you can use the external link to watch the same video demonstration on YouTube.
We’re proud of the package we’ve put together for Scam School Book 1 , and we look forward to making our second book even better. Feel free to let us know what you think by contacting us at ScamSchoolBook@gmail.com.
Special thanks goes to the entire Vook team who built the platform we used to make this book possible. We also owe a huge thank you to Paul Ballard who designed the photo frame templates used throughout the book. And of course, thank you for your support through purchasing this title. We packed a ton of extra content throughout the book, and we couldn’t be more excited for you to experience the final product of our many hours of hard work.
