---
title: Episode 19 Street Hustling
episode_number: 19
era: early
source_file: Episode 19 Street Hustling.mp3
audio_size_mb: 51.7
duration_sec: 1694.8
duration_min: 28.2
language: en
provider: deepgram
model: nova-3
diarized: true
confidence: 0.998
transcribed_at: 2026-05-27T17:10:54Z---

# Episode 19 Street Hustling

**Speaker 0:** Good evening from Central London. This is podcast number 19 coming out to you. Hope all is good. Hope you're enjoying this bizarre, rare, glorious London sunshine. I don't know if it's gonna last, but today's day game was unbelievable. I was out weaving my way around Soho and Seven Dials and Covent Garden. Boy, oh, boy, was it good. It was nice to finally do some solo day game on my own for myself, not just when I'm coaching, not just with a wing, but just proper old school doing it myself and enjoying that kind of animalistic side to solo daygame. That's a topic for another podcast, I guess. How to do solo daygame, the advantages and disadvantages of it, but I would really, really recommend it. Anyway, today's topic is something close to my heart. I talk about this in my first book, daygame. The link is below. And that book is not just my backstory and the lay reports and the outer game techniques. But in that book, I make many parallels between daygame as a hustle and other forms of street hustling, from street magic to underground street art, even to things like pickpocketing, to charity sign ups, to sales and marketing, etcetera, etcetera. Now when you say the word hustle or I like to call daygame street hustle, even though it's obviously done in supermarkets and coffee shops and malls. When you say the word hustle to people, it sounds very dark and manipulative. Yeah? It sounds wrong on some level. It sounds forced. It sounds totally fake. And there are classic hustle films, if you like heist hustle films like me. You might be aware of that one with Paul Newman. It's in the sixties, I think it was released, called The Hustler, about a pool shark. And even though it's really cool that he's winning all this money from hustling pool, you'll see how he descends into a kind of darkness, the darker side of the hustle. So that's a good film to kick off with. You might have seen The Sting, similarly with Robert Redford, that was in the seventies. I think that's a good film. You're probably aware of hustle films like Ocean's 11 or Reservoir Dogs. One of my favorites is Catch Me If You Can. There's a new one actually. Yeah. This is it's a bit of a shit film. It's a Will Smith film. It's just come out called Focus. It came out a few months ago, but I've just seen it. Yet there is a lot of game going on. The person who obviously wrote that script or helped to write that script knew game terminology, game techniques, hustle techniques. So it's good for the hustle. There's other films like the true account of the MIT blackjack heist in Vegas, that's called 21. I think the book's called Bringing Down the House, but the film's called 21. The book is better than the film, but that's a good heist story, a true story. And what was the one last year or the year before? Oh yeah, American Hustle. That movie about hustlers throughout The United States. But anyway, I've always been fascinated by this kind of thing, by people pulling things off against all odds. It really started as a kid, guess, when I was fascinated by magicians, close-up magicians, street magicians. I wasn't really into the big stage illusions. I loved magic being outside or magic happening really fast, coming and going. I love the fact that the magician's not in any way deceiving the audience in an evil way because the audience are willingly suspending their disbelief. So the participants in a magic show, they want to be tricked. They want to see the magician's sleight of hand. They want to see this thing in front of their eyes because it's enjoyable. And we'll come on to why that's quite similar to game. I was always fascinated by the theater, not for watching the show but I was fascinated by the behind the scenes. For example, when I was in secondary school, rather than being in the productions like my friends wanted to be, I was always volunteering to be like the stage hand or working the lights, working the curtains, getting right up there and doing the smoke machine, whatever. I was fascinated by the art of the illusion. I mean, what a beautiful craft it was and that links to the magic and obviously that links to my opinion of daygame. First of all, got to think why is daygame a hustle then? What are we hustling in daygame? Well, obviously, we're hustling girls who are younger and hotter than us. So it's an SMV hustle really, if you think about it. She's trying to hustle her SMV, you're trying to hustle your sexual market value. She's trying to get a guy who's either got very strong alpha DNA or he's got a nice fat bank balance so she can hustle her survival and her children's survival and their protection. A guy is trying to hustle for a younger, hotter girl to mate with so his DNA can combine with hers and his children will also have a higher chance of being hot and passing on their genes, etcetera, etcetera. That's just simply survival of the fittest. That's evolutionary biology in action. So you've heard me talk many times about the sexual marketplace and how you're hustling your sexual market value. Now, there's nothing unethical about that. Where it gets, you could say, slightly strange is that with daygame, if you're just being a player and you're going out there just to fuck girls and then pump and dump them, then that's a hustle in the sense that you're perhaps pretending that you're gonna stick around and then you vanish. There's many pickups. All seducers have these pickups where she perhaps starts to think that you're more than just sex, then you vanish or you just drop it or you move on to the next girl or you cheat on her or it's an open relationship. Ultimately, you've hustled her SMV and she loses out. Things break up. So she walks away with chips down. Yeah? There's a different form of hustle though if you think about daygame in the fact that you're hustling society. Guys think they have to meet girls in clubs and pay for drinks and buy tables. Guys think you need cars and watches and suits and good jobs and big cars, like I've said, and big houses. And the daygamer is bypassing all that, he's going straight to the source, stopping that hot girl on the street, even if she's got a boyfriend or a husband, taking her number, taking her for a date. And maybe if he's doing daygame in lover mode, just being that adventure sex, alpha sex guy, having sex with her and nobody else needs to know. So in that sense, both the girl and the guy win and they're hustling against what society is telling them to do. So you can choose choose either view of the hustle in terms of daygame. Sometimes it's win win for you and the girl. She might be having sex on the side, or it can be win lose in that you're getting sex from these girls and then never seeing them again. So she's left feeling a bit bitter. Anyway, why I think daygame is a hustle technically is that it follows a system. We call it the London daygame model. And in any other type of hustle, there is a system. For example, in a classic con artist hustle, the sequence goes like this and see if you can compare it to daygame. The first thing the hustler does is the setup. Alright. So in daygame, you'd call that the approach, the open, the stop, the compliment, whatever. The second thing the hustler does is to bake the hook. Alright. So again, in daygame, in the London daygame model, that is the stacking and the vibing, the teasing and the challenging. The third thing the hustler does in hustle terminology is called playing them down the wire. That comes from an old telephone hustle in a bar to do with gambling, and delayed transmission. In daygame, you'd call that getting them to invest. Yep. Dialing down, getting them to do the work. And the finale of the hustle is the sting. That's why that movie is called the sting. And in daygame, we call it the close. The number close, perhaps a kiss close further down the line or even the full f close. Yep. Now a hustle follows these very distinct stages, whether you're playing pool or it's a specific con or you're hustling, whatever. This is tried and tested. This is practiced. And a good example of this is a great documentary I saw involving a stage pickpocket from Las Vegas who picks the audience's pockets for fun. And he went to Naples in Italy to try to find real pickpockets because it's one of his fascinations that this guy, Bob Arno, travels around the world looking for real pickpockets because he wants to study their techniques. He's not judging them. He finds them fascinating. And this documentary I've linked below, I watched this thing and I thought, wow. This is just like daygame. Because in Naples, there's men who've grown up a bit like Oliver Twist and Fagan with this art and craft of pickpocketing. And they don't pickpocket locals or elderly people or disabled people, people of their own. They pickpocket tourists who are going to Vesuvius or whatever. There's obviously other pickpockets or big concentrations of pickpockets in places like Rome and Barcelona. But Naples, they say, has the most professional. And Bob Arnaud set up lots of situations where he could kind of honey trap these guys. And remarkably, he finds them. He even finds the leader. And even more remarkably, they agreed to be interviewed by him and the camera crew. And you see the camaraderie, you see the hierarchy, you see the guys that teach the other guys, you see the guys that have given up. But most importantly, you see their technique and they perform different routines and they show him how they work as a group. They show him how their hustles work. He shows them a few of his little Vegas tricks. It's just fascinating. Not because it endorses crime or pickpocketing, but just that it is a skill set. There's nothing natural about this. They're not just being themselves. This is not natural pickpocketing, this is a deeply learned, deeply practiced, deeply technical. And this is why I find this fascinating just like the street magic. When I was walking around Covent Garden beginning my daygame, five years ago, more now, every day I would watch the same street magician who stands and performs on a corner of Covent Garden called Surprise Surprise Magician's Corner. It's a guy if you know Covent Garden, this guy is a little bit tubby. He has a beard. He does the trick with the cups and balls, and the finale is under his hat, he produces a watermelon. But his technique is fantastic. And for years and years and years, I've watched him do it. But what's cool about him, like the street pickpockets, is that he follows the sequence. He follows a hustle sequence of the setup, the baiting, the hook, playing them down the wire, then the sting. The setup is that he does tricks for children using balloons that draws the crowd. Baiting the hook, he does some kind of flashy tricks. Playing them on the wire, he gets the audience to move closer and he gets them to invest in different ways by stacking and having lots of open loops and promising this finale. The patter is all down. He says the same thing every single time. The jokes are the same every single time. He's got a comeback for every single neg or interruption people throw at him. He's very good at street improv, bringing people outside into the trick. And then the sting is obviously the finale in getting people's money because that's his job. And again, he's perfect at getting people to pay and embarrassing people if they walk off without paying. I'll try and video this guy one day and I've even chatted to him, this was about four years ago, when I was slightly uncalibrated. I I went up and I said, oh, hey man, do you do daygame? Do you know what the game is? And surprisingly, he said, yes. He had read the game. He used to do pickup in bars, I guess inspired by Mystery and Mystery's Magic. But now I think he's married, but he's aware of the hustle. And that brings us back to the one and only Mystery, co author of The Mystery Method and a famous Los Angeles pickup artist because of Neil Strauss' book, The Game. And Mystery before he was a pickup artist was obviously a magician. A close-up magician in bars and clubs. That's why he brought magic into his pickup. People misunderstand Mystery on many levels but they think that he was endorsing fakery, trickery, and magic. When they forget that he was, he is a magician, working with people like David Copperfield. And Mystery was fascinated by how social dynamics can be manipulated, how social dynamics can be used to your advantage if you understand it, and how it can be a hustle. Why a nightclub is a hustle, and how you can out hustle other hustlers. So the Mystery Method was the first time really on paper somebody had defined the hustle for meeting women in bars. Obviously, day games come a long way and it does things slightly differently, but it's still that hustle. The m three model of attraction, comfort, seduction. Alright? So don't go dissing Mystery. I've made a video on that. So if you're looking for commonalities between street magic and daygame and those charity sign up people that try and get your credit card details by stopping you in the street, or by any kind of sales really from buying a car to walking into a TV showroom or bartering with somebody in a market. The same skills, the same techniques are often applied. And I talk about this in Badass Buddha when I'm going over the book, Principles of Persuasion by professor Robert Cialdini. I also talk about this in my new product, Flow Mad. And how his principles of persuasion, he picked up whilst working as a car salesman, despite being a professor, he went undercover to be a car salesman and learned these persuasion techniques. How you see them in daygame and nightgame and street magic, etcetera, etcetera. Some obvious ones are things like misdirection. So a close-up magician will always misdirect. In a daygamer, when he's fractionating properly, he'll also misdirect. Or a good example of this in daygame on the street is when you say to a kill, yeah, after a minute of chatting, you say, oh, just move over here a second. Someone's trying to get past or watch out. A bus is coming or oh, it's just drizzling. Just step under here. We call that in daygame the mini bounce, which is a test of compliance. It's the beginning of the compliance ladder. You could say an in instant date with, hey. I've just got ten minutes for a coffee. Let's just go and sit over here. All that kind of stuff is testing for compliance using a little bit of misdirection. And the spike comfort spike comfort spike comfort fractionation thing allows you to get away with more. It allows you to escalate faster. That's another form really of misdirection. As Bob Arno says, think somewhere, he goes, attention is what steers your perception. Yeah? And that controls your reality. So if you can change somebody's attention, then you can change their perception of an event. That's why hustlers are studying human behavior in very unorthodox ways because whereas some people do it academically, psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, the hustler is learning from experience. Whether you're a pool shark or you're hustling in a casino or you're pickpocketing or you're doing street magic or you're doing daygame, you're learning social dynamics live in situ. And for a daygamer, you start to pick up on lots of patterns, repeated behaviors. Like I said in my street improv video, you learn timings of the day and the flows of people, how girls respond in different situations on different streets at different times of the day, even in different countries, how different ages of girls respond, how different nationalities respond. You get a sixth sense as your social intelligence and calibration improves. So you can kind of predict the next move of the girl one step ahead of her. It's a bit like chess. You know what she's gonna say. You know what shit test she's gonna throw at you. You know what's gonna happen. And this is why we can look for things like the hook point. This is why we know what attraction looks like. This is why we know what a same day girl looks like. This is why we know what an ovulating girl looks like. This is why a good day gay male will know when to go for the number, know when to invite to out and text, know when to go for the bounce, know when to go for the kiss, know when to escalate, know when to not escalate, know what token resistance is, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. To someone who's never done this, this would look like magic. But to another experienced daygamer, it's like a magician watching another magician. Now the cool thing with daygame is even when you know how the magic trick works, it can still blow your mind when you see somebody else do it well. So when I watch another good day gamer who's using a different style, perhaps a different form of the hustle to me, or I watch a night gamer, somebody with a completely different hustle to me with girls, I just say, wow, that is impressive. I admire the art and craft of it, the thousands of hours that have gone into that. Yeah? It's the geeky side of me. It's lifting the curtain. It's peeking behind the theater scenery. That's what I find fascinating. And that's why when I read the game just after two thousand and five, that's really what gripped my attention. Not this thing that you were gonna con girls into giving you their number or sleeping with you, Just that it was the suspension of disbelief. Women want to be seduced by alpha guys. Yeah? Feminine women like masculine men. So like people turning up for this magic show and watching the show and then giving money. That's the closest analogy I can think of to daygame where the girl gets swept up in all of this. Even on the street, she might know you're a bit of a Casanova. She knows that she's gonna give you her number and she knows that if she comes out on a date that it might well lead to sex. She goes along with the hustle and she enjoys it. Yep. She might feel bitter and angry if you leave her completely high and dry and you've promised her the earth and that you'll be her boyfriend and then you really do do a runner. That's more like the pool shark. But I'm not one to stand here and lecture and preach and moralize about the ethics of daygame as a hustle. Because if you've read my first book, daygame, there's over a 100 lay reports in there. And many of them right at the beginning were, you could say, quote unquote unethical if you're coming from a Christian standpoint. Because they had boyfriends, they were married or it was pump and dump or perhaps I was pretending to be the boyfriend because that's the early form of the model really when you have to go on two, three, four dates. Girls would catch me with other girls and I hadn't told them that it was an open relationship, etcetera, etcetera. But now I try to keep things a lot more above board, you could say, and let girls know what I'm doing. But this is why it makes me laugh when people say daygame or seduction should be natural. It should be simple. It should be you being yourself. It should be totally transparent. It should be easy and effortless. I see the nirvana state that guys are trying to get to. I see this idealized halcyon idea of pickup being pure, especially after the RSD shit storm a while ago when pickup got a very bad press. And obviously, the press loved it. They jumped on board this thing of pickup being dark and creepy and manipulative. Obviously, the feminists love that too. But let's not go down that negative road. What was I saying? Yeah. So a lot of people even drop the word pickup and pickup terminology and they wanted to seem pure and above it and beyond game. But it makes me laugh because the definition of game, the definition of life and survival is this chess analogy. Alright? It's tit for tat. It's cat and mouse. That's how genetics and evolution works. And dating and mating, that is cat and mouse. That is a game where you could say there are winners and losers. Yeah? Whether that's the woman or other guys or society. It follows a predictable pattern. It follows predictable moves. It's a skill set. You can learn it. You can get better at it. There's techniques. There's different techniques for different situations. And to deny all that goes on and just to think, well, girls and guys just get together in a beautiful flowery meadow full of hearts and balloons and it's all just wonderful and pure. That's just very naive. And I would say that that's just new age bullshit and possibly new age bullshit marketing. Okay? Because what we're doing, stopping girls on the street and trying to get them into bed, that's a very calculated thing to do. Whether you like it or not, I hope that's a part of your daygame. You're seeing a young hot girl and you're thinking, I would like to have sex with her. And she might say, I have a boyfriend or I'm married. She might be a maybe girl, so therefore you have to do the attraction work, you have to get her to hook and invest, you have to do the correct texting and then you have to do the correct dating, you have to know what to do when she's back in your house. That's all very calculated. So this whole thing about trying to make pickup pure is quite laughable really. That's like a magician saying, come and see my show. There will be no tricks and it will all just be peace and love and hugging. Will not trick you because that is wrong. Or another analogy I give is, imagine any company in the world not doing any sales or marketing. So even if it was BMW, they don't have to hustle hard in the form of whatever, IKEA or Tesco's, because BMW is one of those products that, yeah, they can afford to be choosy and customers come to them and the brand name's strong, etcetera, etcetera. But they still have to have showrooms, they still have to sell their car, they still have to persuade their clients with perhaps a free coffee or a glass of champagne or a test drive, etcetera etcetera. That's the definition of the free market economy. In any kind of sales where people have a choice, then there's going to be a hustle. So let's not all get all high and mighty and holier than thou when it comes to this. I'm not judging anybody. Once again, I'm saying respect the hustle. Respect all the different forms of the hustle because daygamers sometimes like to think of themselves as better than night gamers or night gamers dis daygame. It's very easy for gamers to diss rockstars or people playing the celebrity hustle. Some guys are using the dance floor hustle. Some guys are hustling by being promoters, some guys are hustling because they're musicians, some guys are hustling in hostels, some guys are doing internet hustling or Tinder hustling, using their looks, whatever. It's all the same form of the hustle. You're trying to channel your SMV and hustle for a girl who's younger and hotter. I hope that makes sense. It started off as a very concrete idea, this street hustle thing. But in my mind, makes sense and I like the analogy between those hustle films and magic and street art, street theater, daygame. Oh, one last thing I wanted to say about an analogy and that's this charity sign up model. You must be aware, especially if you live in Europe, of people with clipboards stopping you very needily and weekly during the day and trying to do some kind of daygame on you to get your credit card details to sign up for saving tigers or the British Red Cross, whatever. Now, once I dated and slept with a girl who was one of these charity sign up people, it was at the beginning of my daygame career and she tried to stop me in a shopping center and just as she was about to open her mouth and do her spiel, I did my spiel on her. It was a little bit indirect, think. This was before I was doing full direct daygame and I asked her about her shoes. Anyway, we got into a conversation. She was Lithuanian and eventually I slept with him and told her what I did. And she was fascinated by the London daygame model because she had been taught the chugger, that's what we call the charity sign up person, charity mugger. She had been taught that model which was very similar to the hustle model I told you about, which is obviously very similar to the London daygame model. So all our models were kind of the same and that those charity sign up people have to approach and stop and then they have to do some form of attraction, baiting the hook, a bit of bamboozling, certain type of questioning. They're told all about their form of hook point and when to recognize that, then to go into rapport, find commonalities, sell on a high, that's their sting. So they've got a set pattern and she was even training other people who worked for that company. So if you're a charity sign up person, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on how it links to street hustling in terms of daygame. Leave your comments below. If you're a close-up magician, leave your comments below. I'd like to know about your hustle model. If you're a naughty boy and you really hustle on the dark side, like you're a pickpocket or you're a pool shark or you've got, you know, the three card Monty down or you do that kind of Romanian dodgy cups and balls thing, which is street magic really crossed over to the dark side. If you do that and you're aware of how daygame links to the other forms of hustling, real hustles, then I would be fascinated to know this because it's something I'm working on. It's a project that's going on in the background. But anyway, I'll leave it there for today. A bit of an abstract podcast, but I hope it made sense on some level. Anyway, speak to you next week. Torero.