Why do they do it?

Yeah, that'd be pretty poor risk management

Hmmm, I've met him, my initial impressions weren't that negative.

Besides, appearances can be deceptive. Madoff looked just like Washington off the dollar bill, and look what happened there.

He's a great character with bags of charisma and Scandinavian charm (but a lot more extrovert than most). I've been to a couple of free presentations, enjoyed them, and felt I got a little bit of insight out of them. On the other hand, I have always resisted any temptation to pay for any of his stuff. Conman would be too strong a word. "Lovable rogue" is the way I think of him, and perhaps even that is unjustified. If you get a chance to hear him speak in person, and it's not costing you a lot of money or time you could use better, then I would say go and listen to him, at least once.

But why does he do free talks?
To promote his site that he's charging for so he can either cut down his commissions or to increase his fund amount to trade with himself?

To get more clients. If they then open a brokerage account with Saxo, he'll get up to a quarter of all subsequent bid/ask they cross .... this will add up (oh and don't forget his subscription fee).

But hey, anyone could do this, but most don't. I think it's fairly enterprising.

The second guy was all on trading. I wanted to really get into order flow very deeply and so sought out someone that really knew it and really used it.

So basically he's a glorified salesman that can't make enough money trading their own account.
Would you give a salesman the time of day at the door or on the phone?!

Well in those particular cases, he was still working for City Index and I went along as a customer of Finspreads, so I guess it was in his contract with them to do this kind of thing.
Indirectly drumming up trade for them, but his talk was almost all about trading and the markets, and couldn't really be called a sales pitch for CI.

I don't know if he still gives free talks, but I wouldn't see any reason to question his motives if he did. There's no such thing as bad publicity is there?