The Tim Ferriss Show - #699: Apollo Robbins, The World’s Most Famous Pickpocket — Pickpocketing the Secret Service, Manipulating Attention, Famous Con Artists, The Psychology of Deception, Self-Defense Techniques, The Secret Language of Thieves, and More

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Starting point is 00:04:00 you feed your best friend. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, lemurs and squirrels. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is one I've been looking forward to for a very long time. Now, going meta very briefly for those who have not listened to the show,

Starting point is 00:04:40 this is a show about deconstructing world-class performers across many different disciplines to tease out the habits, routines, frameworks, etc. that you can borrow and apply to your own lives. And sometimes you find gems in the most unusual of places. And today's guest may be an example of that. Apollo Robbins. Apollo Robbins is often referred to as the gentleman thief. He first made national news when he pickpocketed the Secret Service while entertaining a former U.S. president. And we will get into that story. Forbes has called Robbins, quote, an artful manipulator of awareness, end quote. And Wired has written that, quote, he could steal the wallet of a man who knew he was going to have his pocket picked, end quote. And that is an understatement, a vast understatement. And if you want to get an idea of what that looks like, you can also check out the video that we took for this podcast

Starting point is 00:05:35 on my YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Tim Ferriss. So listen to the audio, but definitely also check out some of the visuals. Robbins' entertainment credentials include the Warner Brothers film Focus with Will Smith and Margot Robbie, along with appearances in Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the TNT series Leverage. He was a producer and co-host for National Geographic's Brain Games, which was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Informational Series. Robbins applied his expertise in magic and misdirection beyond entertainment, pulling back the curtain to show how the principles behind these illusions can enhance strategic thinking and decision-making. And we get into how much of what he has cultivated

Starting point is 00:06:15 can transfer to other areas. And that really at its core is what this podcast is about, to train you to see those hidden threads or those through lines. His contributions to attention and perception research have been published in Scientific American Mind and Nature Reviews Neuroscience. He has delivered lectures at Harvard Kennedy School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Society of Neuroscience. He has been profiled by The New Yorker, which is an amazing profile, and featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. Robbins' TED Talk, The Art of Misdirection, is ranked in the 20 most watched TED Talks of all time and has been hailed by the TED editors as a revelation in the flaws of human perception. You can find all things

Starting point is 00:06:59 Apollo Robbins at apollorobbins.com, And you can find him on Twitter at apollorobbins. Without further ado, please enjoy a most enjoyable, most entertaining, most educational conversation with the one and only Apollo Robbins. Apollo. Yes, sir. So nice to have you here. It is a pleasure. And this has been in the works for me, at least, in my own head, since I want to say 2018, 2019.

Starting point is 00:07:30 Wow. And then this pesky thing that we now call COVID came along and disrupted all sorts of plans. But finally, here we are. So thank you for making the trip. And I'm glad that you are here in person. So we may get a chance to stand up. It's nice that it's in person versus virtual. There's so many more possibilities.

Starting point is 00:07:48 So many more possibilities. Let's start. So people might assume that right out of the gate, maybe as a dexterity of a demigod and were basically fated to become someone famous for how they use their hands. Is that the case? No, quite the opposite. I think almost as opposite as it could be on that. This is a story I've been told, that once upon a time, my father, who was legally blind, had decided to become a minister, went to seminary in Enid, Oklahoma, and was walking down the streets from seminary.

Starting point is 00:08:32 But he had moved into this kind of rough neighborhood, was trying to witness, and these two teenagers decided to try to steal from him. He didn't know what they were up to. But then when they realized he was blind, they decided not to hustle him. But instead, they tried to guide him to where the bus was and encourage him to go to another area. And he invited them to his church, invited them to have food on a Wednesday night. And they came, and they did. They found food, and they brought their mom one time.

Starting point is 00:08:58 And then their mom met him, and they got married. And that's supposedly how my parents met. Wow. Okay. So your parents meet, one thing leads to another. Yes. I'm assuming no immaculate conception. Perhaps. And then, you enter the world. What were doctors' expectations of you?

Starting point is 00:09:23 They were upside down. So, because my mother had had previous children, she had had three, and she was a widow, they were also in their teens. They supposed, they assumed that I had the same father. So they didn't test their blood. So there was a factor in the blood. I think it was an RH factor, but it created what they call ABO blood disease. So it required when I was born that I had transfusion. There are a few other things. My mom had lupus connective tissue disease, which created tumors in her uterus. So my legs developed around those, so they were twisted up.

Starting point is 00:09:48 And I think out of that, when I was born, there was a product of a little of the Forrest Gump thing. I had to wear braces on my legs like Forrest Gump to get around. But also I had fine and gross motor problems. I couldn't control my hands. It was kind of the joke of trying to clap the hands three times at the therapist. I was a little bit better than that. I can clap my hands, but I couldn't do a lot more. I had to, when I learned to write, have a large diameter pencil that was through a rubber ball, and I had to learn to write that with both hands up until about the second grade. So I had a lot of therapy, which I think that idea of persistent learning through overcoming an obstacle like that has helped me be resilient with acquiring a lot of skills over my lifetime. Could you say more about your father? So was he blind for your entire life? Did that have some onset? And how did that shape who he was? And of course, the implicit question is, how did that affect you? But let's start with a simpler version of the question. Could you just tell us more about your father?

Starting point is 00:10:49 He was a short man. And I think that that factors in because he was about five foot four. So that's quite short. He was very physically fit. He climbed rope without using his legs. He was very quick to go to a fight when he was younger. And then one time when he was going into college, he was studying to be a CPA,

Starting point is 00:11:09 and he had tubercular meningitis that affected him for about a year, year and a half. It was a very serious disease at the time. I mean, it still is, but at the time it was more pervasive. And it made him blind during the project for this year. And he became kind of born again. Somebody had come to visit him and witness to him during that time, and he decided he was going to change the course of his life and become a minister. And that, I think, made him a very dogmatic minister, too.

Starting point is 00:11:38 He really embodied himself thinking about the difference of Paul versus Saul in the Bible. And when he came out, he was a traveling minister for most of my early life. He would travel, visit churches. And some of the things, I think one of the creative parts that I really took from him was that he would travel to a church not knowing what his presentation was going to be, but he would find an animal along the way, a turtle crossing the road, and that became his presentation. He would set it in front of the pulpit, and everybody would circle around him, and he would talk about the turtle as an analogy or a metaphor. And he was able to connect these ideas. And meanwhile, I would sit in the back with my

Starting point is 00:12:15 little braces and usually a pen and paper and try to draw everything that was going on. Art was a big thing for me, and it had been for him before he had lost his sight. So I think those influences factor in later to some of the other things. But I think one of the on. Art was a big thing for me, and it had been for him before he had lost his sight. So I think those influences factor in later to some of the other things. But I think one of the bigger takeaways wasn't the blind spots he had through vision, although it did help that when we would walk around, I would try to be his eyes for him. There was this tug of war that he didn't want anybody to know that he was really blind. He didn't often emphasize that. He would often walk with a confidence level that was... Ill-suited to his eyesight. Yeah, and to his shins to grin, because he would run full force into a park bench and come tumbling over it.

Starting point is 00:12:57 But he created this ministry that was inside of government-subsidized housing, what people think is the hood. And he would get beat up in front of me by gangs sometimes. Or not necessarily gangs, but just small groups. I guess you'd call gangs. Where was this again? Can you remind me? Well, now it's branded as a TV show, the Ozarks. Ah, okay.

Starting point is 00:13:16 But the city was Springfield, Missouri. And he would go into those neighborhoods. He would go, he would set up his ministry inside of a laundromat. And he would draw the kids in with a story. He'd bring Kool-Aid and cookies every Sunday. He did that for 20 years, and they would come in, and he would tell them these stories. It meant a lot to him. He was non-denominational, but he was very dogmatic about his specific interpretation of Scripture, which to me, myself, jumping ahead, I'm agnostic. I'm not an atheist, but I'm not subscribed to any religion. But it was such an interesting learning lesson, I think, about the difference between most people would judge

Starting point is 00:13:49 somebody by their perceptual blind spots of not being able to see, but sometimes it's worse the stories that we tell ourselves and how that limits our perception. We'll definitely come back to this. Okay. Right? Like perception, story. Perception, say, shaping story, story, shaping perception. I want to talk a lot more about this. But since it's something you just mentioned, the agnosticism, did you start off religious and then at some point along the way become agnostic? Was it a response to perhaps your father's dogmatism? How did you get to self-identifying in that way? Yeah, I started off as religious, which I think is the same thing. People start off as extremely patriotic to their certain country where they're born or where you go to put a family where they're very religious, it would be under that flag as well. And my father had me study

Starting point is 00:14:41 a lot of different types of scriptures from Jehovah's Witness to the Mormons, because he wanted to be able to debate those for a lot of different topics. The book of Hebrew, he wanted me to study King James for its specific interpretation. I had to debate in debate groups for evolution and creationism. So I was on teams that did that. I was in a Bible quiz team where I would buzz these buzzers and quote scriptures and went to the world championships in that and placed in the world championships. So it's all these things as a young kid that I was deeply entrenched in that world. And there was just poking at this thing that this certainty is what flagged me, just the absoluteness of my father's answer. And it was in juxtaposition of

Starting point is 00:15:25 what was happening on the other side of my family. So my mother, and this shifts to the other side, it was a dichotomy between the two because she had been a widow and she had raised these three kids that her husband had died very early. And two of them had picked up this beyond a hobby of how they were making money on the other side of the law, from stealing things, running small hustles. They never called it pickpocketing, but they would steal from people at the zoo when they were leaning over to watch animals being fed. They would cut their pockets or steal their bags at sporting events through bleachers, mostly opportunistic. But later it evolved when the military, when he came out, he started working again, like the series Ozark. I feel like that route that was in Ozark is

Starting point is 00:16:10 probably what my brothers are associated with it, but with some type of trafficking group. Drug trafficking. Yeah, drug trafficking up through that pipeline. One of my brothers also did smuggling for firearms. So moving those in and out. So it became very intense. And I was exposed to some of that at the same time that I was growing up with my father as a devout minister. So it was really, I think, a fascinating juxtaposition between those two worlds that seeing deception in that true sense of the word of what we often think it to be. But yet also, he was okay with my brothers as people. He didn't know that that's what they did, but I got to see both sides of that. And they did other things publicly. They were truck drivers or

Starting point is 00:16:48 other things and exceptional people in many ways, but it taught me to see the gray. I think back to your other question now became, when I started to go to church, I would sneak out of the back of the church when services transition and sneak off to another church and say, well, if the Assemblies of God believe that tongues is the first physical initial sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit, then what do the Baptists believe? And then I'd go see their tenets. And then as I bounced around, I noticed that there were just lots of little slices of different views or perspectives, which to me has continued to follow me through my life of anytime somebody claims a truth is maybe we need more perspectives on this.

Starting point is 00:17:24 When does Ben Stone end of the picture? Wow, that's a great name. And how old are you? How dark do you want to get? I can take it light or dark or gray. You pick, dealer's choice. And we've gone dark on this podcast before, so we can go there. Once upon a time, I had had a pursuit to become a syndicated cartoon artist. I was about 12, 13, 14, going through that. And I was pretty confident that I could pull it off. I wanted to be the youngest one. There was a guy who was imitating Gary Larson's single panel cartoons.

Starting point is 00:17:56 And I had six months of character sheets. I was going to send them out to get syndicated. And my parents didn't understand what this was or what this weird thing I was doing. They just knew I liked to draw and do cartoons. But I think it's important to understand the energy of what that was. And then there was a fight. And parents have fights with their kids, with their teens. It's just mine was a little bit more intense. My father thought I was possessed, so they tried to evoke a demon out of me. Because of the cartooning? Not because of the cartooning, but because of some argument that we had the argument i say this is proximity to my large case of six months of cartoons my parents some variation of a waterboarding process occurred and the water poured over on all my art and that's the dark

Starting point is 00:18:37 side that it destroyed all the art and when you had that much work invested it's a reset how do you start over what do you do and for me as a kid that was what i pictured as my escape the cartooning was gonna be your escape plan yeah from that world and i was down in our basement i was going through some boxes i found this little magic gadget it was a piece of plastic looked like a thumb and i was very curious about what that was and somebody said it's a magic trick and i said well how did that end up in our stuff so i call a magic shop that was downtown and there's this guy picked up the phone. He was probably 70 something at the time. His name was Ben Stone. So long way around to answer your question. And Ben Stone, I said, so I've got this plastic thumb. I don't know what it is.

Starting point is 00:19:17 I said, is this, do I act like my fingers cut off? What do I do? I'm like 14. I'm very precocious. I'm borderline at this choice in my life. Like I'm shoplifting. I'm running away from home for two weeks at a time, living out in the woods sometimes. So I'm kind of at a transition place of which way I choose my path in life. Yeah, that's a vulnerable place where you could have inflection points. Absolutely. Or vectors in a lot of different directions. And I had lots of ingredients to go a certain way. Later, as I met people in my life,

Starting point is 00:19:44 I resonated with them because of that. Because I had that fork to make a decision. So Ben had a big impact at that decision. And that's why I wanted to give you the context for it. For sure. Yeah, I appreciate that. And so what happens then? You're like, I have this fake thumb. What do I do? Ben says, come to the magic shop, downtown Springfield. It's about 12 miles from where my house was so i rode a bike i went with a friend he didn't show anything about the fake thumb but he used it as a trap he uh he made this point move around you're kind of guy yeah which is great yeah it's exactly what should have happened to me and he may he moved the sleight of hand with the coin he made

Starting point is 00:20:21 it jump around disappeared jump through his clothing jump through his body i fascinated because I was thinking, if this old guy can do this, I could probably pull this off myself. Then he pulled out a deck of cards called the Sphingali deck, and he did a bunch of tricks with that. He said, so here's a choice, kind of like a red pill, blue pill. This deck of cards, you can walk out of here, and for $5, you'll be able to do 50 tricks without even practicing. Or here's this big book, and it's going to take a lot of study, and maybe in four or five years, you'll be able to do sleight of hand with almost anything. It's your choice. And it was his way of vetting at that point, I think. And I didn't have money either way. That wasn't the plan. So I went back, rode my bike back to my house, and I sold some

Starting point is 00:20:59 stuff at a pawn shop, came back the next day and bought that book. And for the first year, I just spent my time by myself studying the coin magic by myself. So I want to pause because we're going to pick up on this particular thread, but I want to rewind, I think, just a few years because you're around 14, 15 at this point. So I think this takes place a bit earlier. You mentioned your father and the animals that then become the parable or part of the sermon. You can't believe everything you read on the internet, but is it true that you also used to take in orphaned animals?

Starting point is 00:21:34 I did. Okay. So, can you tell me more about this? Wow. Do you have a research department? That's great. Got teams everywhere. Eyes and ears on the ground.. And so I'm curious how that came to be. And if it, I don't want to make it too leading of a question, but how that has informed or how it reflects who you are. Wow. It's very salient, I think.

Starting point is 00:21:59 When I was like eight or so, I guess earlier when I would take walks with my father, he couldn't see things, but he would stop me when we'd go for a hike through woods or something. And he'd say, if you look around you right now, within five foot, there's a world. There's lots of little worlds. There's little communities of things that are happening. You just have to find them. So find them and tell me about them. That was a big thing. I saw a lizard on a tree and he said, walk straight to it and it's going to run around the tree. When it does, reach straight around behind it and cup your hand. And he taught me that I could catch a lizard by walking around the tree because it'd go to the

Starting point is 00:22:34 same position. There's kind of a pattern to that. And he taught me this perspective taking for animals I think helped a lot. It's a variation of empathy that I think transferred later on for me. But I had at that time, squirrels, raccoons, I babysat a bear for a weekend, a baby bear. Hold on. Let's take the bear as an example. So bear drop off. See you next week. What exactly happens? How does the bear make its way to you? Apparently now they have a mail order service bear in a box, but I'm just kidding. Being careful on the internet, you might get something you don't expect if you try to order that. Yeah, my address is online. So at that time I had raccoons, which is a predecessor to getting a bear, as I've learned. It's the bear starter kit. I had worked with Humane Society as a volunteer from eight.

Starting point is 00:23:26 I was an early entrepreneur from the time I was five. I was always doing some kind of hustle. Was that encouraged? Did that just emerge sort of out of your programming, out of the box? It was just something other people were doing? It sounds like you had a family that was sort of active in extracurriculars. Yeah. If you brought in the definition of extracurriculars, yes.

Starting point is 00:23:46 There's a specific moment. So at five, I was at Walmart and I saw a toy rifle that I really wanted. It was a single bolt, had a little toy bullet inside of it, and I thought I must have this. And my parents didn't have money to buy it, but they said, if you want to get it, you're going to have to come back and buy it, but write down this number. And I wrote down the number, the cost of what it costs to get that. And they said, it's probably going to be there for this amount of time. So you got to figure out how to get that much money. And so I had to learn to count that much money. So I had to learn how to count the coins. I was finding pennies everywhere, doing anything I could to

Starting point is 00:24:19 try to get jobs from everybody. And I got all these pennies and nickels and dimes. And they took me, my dad walked with me to the bank and we got these paper rolls and he had me put everything in there. And as we put the paper rolls up, we count up these dollar bills and other things, walked to the store and I brought all these paper rolls of coins and paid for that rifle. And it was probably about a month's work. And after that, I thought, how can I do this faster than going around collecting pennies? So I was like, how else do you make money? Because there's a lot of things in the store I want. And so from paper routes to creating a little art business where I had a knack for drawing when I was a kid, even though I was disabled a little bit.

Starting point is 00:24:56 I was early to pick up on 2D perspective, two-dimensional perspective or three-point perspective and so it gave me a unique insight i think at that age that i went back to the back of a comic shop took down the flyers of all the artists there that were the best and said if i bring you work will you instead of giving me a percentage will you teach me lessons and so i started mentoring and finding mentors very young and that has persisted with everything i've learned since then okay we're going to talk about mentors. How does the bear in a box fit into this? Do you get paid to babysit bears? No, it was a slight ADD tangent. If so, I'm in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:33 I was doing podcasting. But I was along that, so I was doing lots of little efforts. I used to work in jobs. And I went to the Humane Society and I volunteered for a couple of weekends to help out and I saw a puppy get euthanized because it didn't have enough space and I was like eight and that hit me pretty hard because they just didn't have space and I was drawing a lot and I was really interested at that time of being an architect so I redrew spaces of their cage to do triple stack cages and they ended up saying they'd use the idea so more dogs could stay there. And

Starting point is 00:26:05 they added me onto the board of my local humane site when I was like eight. So then I said, I want to help other kind of animals because I like all these kind of orphan animals and I study their habitats. And I never have said this stuff out loud. So it really paints a picture of myself that I haven't seen before, but it's fun. So then raccoons were part of it. They were orphaned and they brought two raccoons to me and I raised them and re-acclimated them back to be released into the wild. And I had a knack for that of getting animals to successfully re-release into the wild at an early age. What do you think made you good at that? same as everyone else. You end up watching everyone else and you become a people watcher. And there's a lot of commonality between animals and people in those ways of you start to do a lot of what I call perspective shifting of jumping into their head to think, why would they make that decision? Why would they not do that? I think that helped with the animals because I had to

Starting point is 00:26:59 figure out how do I teach raccoons how to forage? How do I create little plastic containers with mud and crawfish? And what are the things they're going to need? And why are they not adopting that? Why would they? So I was very interested in behaviors of that at that time. So that's probably part of it. But then this lady who was kind of mentoring me on that, her name was Charlie Strofkamp. She was a fascinating lady who'd been a law enforcement officer that got mauled in a bar fight where she was trying to pull some people out of a bar fight and then sliced open her arm. And she had a single arm, but she took care of bears and buffalo and all sorts of crazy things she's a powerful lady and she said hey it's amazing what you just did with these raccoons

Starting point is 00:27:34 would you like to take care of this young bear for me for the weekend it has diapers and it needs to be fed it was magical it was an awesome little milestone at that time. Wow. How old were you? I was probably nine, eight to, probably eight to 10 is when I was doing those things. So it seems that to your parents' credit, they were open to you having a bear in the house. Not in the house. Not so much. Where did the bear in the diaper stay? I had a habitat that I was using for the raccoons.

Starting point is 00:28:00 It was square footage, large enough to let them move and roam. Like a shed type of place or was it more of an outdoor enclosure? It was an outdoor enclosure that was chained and fenced in with some options for it to go inside that could work for you. But I had to build a lot of those. My mom had a background on farms, so she taught me how to build a lot of those. I lived in the city, but we had a strange backyard, strange house. So let's pick up with the book and the path of magic. So how do you go then from, let's just say, broad magic, generalist magic, to what you

Starting point is 00:28:35 have become so well known for? Is it like, well, first you go to med school, and then you figure out your specialty, and then you do your residency, and you're like, okay, actually, I'm not really great at this, but I am pretty good at this. So let me zig and zag. Was it that type of process or how did you meander your way? Maybe it wasn't meander. Maybe it was a direct line. I was always kind of full force in whatever I did. Yeah. And I think that that's part of it, that sometimes when we're trying to get to a place and we just feel like we need to get to that place, we can change the vehicle. We just know that we're on that journey. And that's often what it was.

Starting point is 00:29:07 I knew I was getting out of where I was. And that was a big thing for me, is getting out of the place where I was growing up. So at that point, this was going to be my next question, at what point did you have the conviction that magic or some variant of magic could be your metaphorical bus ticket out of that place in the way that you hoped cartooning would be. Yeah, which is a fun combination. The book

Starting point is 00:29:33 was a dense read. And I think it helps me though, now when people try to learn from magic, they try to learn it without mentors and from YouTube videos, where they don't have to deal with people. And so you don't have to do the perspective taking and the management of a person in the same way. When you're first learning it, you're just learning it to fool a camera through a certain angle, and you only have to do it once. So it's a different thing. And at that time when I was reading from a book, I didn't have a mentor. So I was reading this dense copy that described how something was supposed to look magical. I was trying to transfer that into an idea and doing that in front of a mirror. And I started to find ways to do it,

Starting point is 00:30:11 whether they were the way the book intended or not. But what I had at my disposal, I think, is also because I've been exposed to my brother stealing things and other things, it allowed me to have a perspective that I didn't have the same baseline other people did for guilty knowledge, for an anxiety that happens when you get caught. And so I was willing to try things that other people thought made them shake and made their skin shake, make them do. And I was very comfortable with doing a lot of unusual things with magic that really started to shape, for instance, instead of trying to do what you can call complete vanish where a coin's going to disappear but rather than retaining in your hands

Starting point is 00:30:49 you hide it somewhere in a pocket or somewhere else i thought why not put it on another person they won't find it there and i'd had that experience one time i was shoplifting early probably 13 what were your go-to shoplifting items and were you shoplifting to use them or to resell them or something else? like that. And one time when I went in, I stole some cigarettes. I didn't smoke, but I stole some cigarettes. And the guy kind of recognized me. And he came up to talk to me. He's the kid who never buys anything. Well, he recognized me from, I think, my family. I live close by. And he came up to talk to me, and I didn't want to be found with him. And I think he saw me do something, so he went to check

Starting point is 00:31:40 me. It was an interesting thing, just by instinct. I didn't put them in any kind of pocket on me. I had left them underneath my arm, facing out the back. So as he's checking my pockets, I reach around behind my back with my right hand. I removed the cigarettes from there and I load them in his apron that was on him. So he definitely wasn't going to look there. And I left and I got away, but later he's going to find the cigarettes in his apron. But I think that influenced my style of magic too because very quickly I would take traditional magic effects and things would be called like a impossible location where something disappears from myself and appears somewhere else so why doesn't it appear in someone else what else can I do with

Starting point is 00:32:17 that so I started developing a lot of that too so where do you go after the book? You have this initial tome that you're digesting and shaping and experimenting with. Yeah. Course one. You flip the last page. Yeah. You've tested what there is to test. I was trying to find a magician I had seen when I was like seven. And there was a guy that I thought he was a magician, but I didn't

Starting point is 00:32:46 realize it was a magician quite at the time. And when I was like second grade, this guy had come through my school. And it was just an announcement from the principal that called the teacher out of the room. And there's this guy working on the window. He was in overalls and he was working on the window and he asked one of the kids to help measure a rope. And then he cut the rope and it went back together. It wasn't a show. It was just these magical things were happening from this old guy that was fixing the window. And then everything came out of his toolbox that he was trying to use was doing some weird thing. But it wasn't a magic show.

Starting point is 00:33:13 It wasn't presented in that social contract. And it hit me over the head. And later I found that that plastic thumb that I found was a gift to my parents from him. So later I went back to try to find him. I found was a gift to my parents from him. So later I went back to try to find him. I found his widow and she told me about this magic club that was in my hometown. And when I showed up, they said, oh, you're new to magic. And I started doing some things and they said, why can you do that? There's two things I could do. I could manipulate coins and make them disappear, small objects like that. And I could do what's called equivoke an influence of a series

Starting point is 00:33:45 of choices that i learned early on when i was eight from some book but i had used it over the years and i could do that which is a category of minimalism that is jazz based and did you say jazz yeah my whole style is jazz based which is okay and that's an important thing yeah please say more yeah so in equivoke just so I understand what that means, I'm trying to dissect the etymology, but I'm going to get stuck in the weeds there. You are, in very subtle ways, directing someone's choice, even though they think they have free will and solution. You give the illusion of agency.

Starting point is 00:34:18 I see. Yeah, you're allowing them to play a game of darts, but you're painting the bullseye on the wall after the dart has landed. I landed. And yet they don't realize that. They feel with conviction that that was all choices that they made, that they navigated to. And that takes a fluidity of thought. There's little feedback loops that people, you kind of blend in the segues and people don't notice those, and the way you use your words. And so the way that, please correct me if this is a lazy or inaccurate description, but for people who don't know the term mentalism, one way that could manifest is someone demonstrating mind reading or something along those lines. What is the right way to think

Starting point is 00:34:59 of mentalism? I think there's a variety of ways, but if you think about card magic, when you see a magician pick a card, where did that come from? It came from, at one point, some card mechanics or card sharps that you did at cards, some of that filtered across and made it into the entertainment world. And there's this other category of a lot of those from thieves and things factored into magic. There's an interesting genealogy there, I think. But mentalism came from psychics and mediums, and that category was this impersonation that I have some type of exceptional ability to read minds, influence, predict the future, talk to the dead, whatever it might be. The different label is that as a camp, mentalists usually will not claim that

Starting point is 00:35:42 they have real powers. They'll say that they're doing it under the flag of entertainment versus psychics and mediums who often use the same tools will sometimes convey that they have those god-given powers. Got it. Okay, so you could do the coin manipulation. Yes. And you also had some mentalism game. they're and they're like wait a second you just said you were new to all this so how are you able to do these things and you gave the

Starting point is 00:36:11 specific example of the equivoke yeah and then what happened i told them i'd read these books and i'd learned it on my own and they were surprised by that and they said well that must have felt good yeah yeah it was nice and i also learned early there that even though i learned some things wrong by their interpretation it created a new thing and they said well that wasn't what they meant i was like oh that's great so what did they mean and now is that what you mean by jazz influenced like if you make a mistake do it twice and then it's jazz no it's a different. So if you think of a lot of performance magic, it is very sheet music based, very classical. It's very structured. There's a lot of geometry and the sight lines and the calculations of that. There's very precise scripting of what's going on.

Starting point is 00:36:58 My style has always been very jazz based, to a fault in many ways, but that I would feel constricted by any script. So for me, as soon as I had an idea, my landscape was to try it with an audience immediately before I'd even tested it out. Pick up a turtle, walk in front of that audience, figure it out. Yeah, jump off a cliff and build a play on the way down. But yes, the turtle is a great metaphor for that. But it was, I mean, the first time i did a show with my wife and initially we had this a separate tension to go down but we were walking to go on stage and there was a certain skill set we learned with each other and she said but what's the structure for the show i said i don't know i haven't met the audience yet and i didn't and she's like which is this collision of two different

Starting point is 00:37:42 minds which she changed me for the better but at that time I didn't want to start until I knew, until I met the audience is like, let's create this together. Cause I thought there was a value in creating. And to me early on in magic, that's what I was trying to do too. Cause all the books said I had to do this phase one, then phase two,

Starting point is 00:37:58 then phase three. It's like, I get that. And that's useful for some things, but also I want the organic feeling that this person feels like they're having this experience and it's not happening to anybody else. This only happened in this moment. All right.

Starting point is 00:38:10 So, did that magic club figure into your skill development? Was it a launching pad? Where did you end up going from there? They offered me books. More books. So, you like books. Yeah. And they said, well, if you get through that book that you first read, why don't you take these other books and learn some of those things? Because

Starting point is 00:38:30 there's this great quote, I don't know who it's attributed to, but when we buy books, we think we're buying the time to read them. And I feel that it's- As my unread stack would agree. Yeah. And I think that that's what they were suffering from at that time. You have this energy, you read my books and teach it back to me. Yeah. And I think that that's what they were suffering from at that time. You have this energy, you read my books and teach it back to me. Genius. Yeah. So they did that to me. And that was a really cool thing. There was a couple of people that influenced my-

Starting point is 00:38:54 It's a magic trick of its own type. It is, yes. But Ben was a mentor. He wasn't with the club, but Ben did some things. He did one thing. There was a magician I really admired who helped me on the business side named Mark Sparks, who was a traveling performer who was brilliant. And I'd seen him make a coin fly up from one hand to another. And anything I could try to excuse or slide a hand didn't make sense of why that could happen. And other books I'd read, it didn't make sense of why that could happen. So I went back to Ben Stone in that shop called Mysteries Magic Shop. I said, Ben, what is with this coin? Well, I think it's this. Here's my hypothesis. One, two, three. And he goes, ah, well, that's obviously Daryl Fitsky. I said, Fitsky? And I said, I don't know. That's not on my radar. And he says, well, Fitsky wrote three books. It's a

Starting point is 00:39:33 trilogy. Go read that. And so I picked up one of the books, it's called Magic by Misdirection and the Psychology of Magic. I read it and it was a hard read. And I came back and I said, Biff, it wasn't in there. And he says, well, he wrote two other books, The Trick Brain and Showmanship for Magicians. So I read all those. I came back and I said, it wasn't in any of those because I must be wrong. And Ben tricked me again. He tricked me to use my desire to learn how to make that coin fly up to read three books that have influenced me to this day of a very structured analytical approach for performance

Starting point is 00:40:03 that I needed, but also for the psychology of magic and understanding how an illusion is constructed in the audience's mind. And I needed that at 15 because I wasn't thinking about that. And so, that was the biggest thing, I would say. And there was many other people that from that time period, a gentleman named Ed Dillard, who was a year-round Santa Claus Claus who did amazing things. He would go into a mall and he created experiences. That was a great thing because- He was a year-round Santa Claus? Yes, he lived it all year, right? So, anybody who saw him. But when you'd see him in a mall, you see people go up and a kid sits on Santa Claus. But what would be effective with him is

Starting point is 00:40:40 a 12-year-old that's AI at Santa Claus and he says, it's good to see you, Nick. So, what's been happening this year, Nick? It sounds like you've had some problems with your friend. We want to talk about it. And he would say these things and just know so much about someone. And he was a mentalist as well. Not to also throw off that he had an inner ear microphone in his ear and the parents had the other side of it, but he had this great book of Latin that was Santa's book, and it was all carved out of leather with this beautiful book and he would tell anybody about anything about themselves but through the auspice of santa claus and i just loved this beautiful approach that it wasn't so much of what i saw magicians initially getting into magic for was to fill a hole in themselves they were hiding behind

Starting point is 00:41:18 what they're doing they're trying to get this validation from somewhere and they needed attention and that wasn't the driver for me i was was trying to figure out, is there something here I can create sparks in people? An experience like that guided my second grade when it came in as repairing the window or the Santa Claus. And so I think it started to shape that I had one skill set, which outside of magic, I could steal things that I could blend in. And there was a few factors also. I stayed a little bit martial arts. I had some understanding of animation and all of them kind of settled together to create a style that I developed. How did animation inform the style? There was a great book called The Illusion of

Starting point is 00:41:55 Life by Disney's, what do you call them, his nine men. But it talks about the illusion of life, how to create in just frame by frame when you're hand drawing, how to create life motion. And one of those is secondary actions and what they call slowing in and slowing out, something moving at the top of a curve, how it will have more frames versus on the bottom of a curve. And I started realizing there's overlaps in relationships of that to Aikido. When you study Aikido, there are certain half moves and half circles. And so when I started blending those together with sleight of hand, I realized that I could lock people in a dance. When you're doing a cross body lead, how does somebody know that you have a lead and how do you transfer that with your hands?

Starting point is 00:42:33 So by putting those together, I started to see that I could manipulate a person's body and tell them a story that they wouldn't register consciously. And I could lock up their body without them knowing that I had kind of locked up the mechanics of the body. Lock up meaning like gain control, hijack. Yeah. Put them in a frame, as you would say on the street. So I could put them in a frame that I didn't need other people, a team of thieves to help me. I could do it by myself. And I could use certain things that would draw. I noticed from animation, because of that, there were certain motions that drew attention and that later became a thing too. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show.

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Starting point is 00:43:51 So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash tim last time drinkag1.com slash tim check it out so a lot of people try magic in some form or another very few people make it to the point where they are performing giving ted talks getting profiled by The New Yorker, etc. Very few. What were some of the most important inflection points, say, picking up where we left off after reading these books, after having these various inputs? I guess maybe it could have been during these various inputs like the martial arts and the jazz and the dance and so on. What were some of the critical moments, let's say? Could be decisions, could be interactions, could be people you meet that helped to set their

Starting point is 00:44:54 trajectory. I'm so fortunate to have had some incredible people influence me along the way. And I've kind of surfed through my career from person to person that's made an impact on me. But there's one I'd say that makes the most impact, which is my wife. I'll circle back to her because she's probably the biggest. But at that time, when I was in Las Vegas, I was married when I was young. And so it was my first wife. When did you first get married? I was 18. So I was married. I had a son who now I have two kids. I have a son who's 30 and a daughter who's six. So fascinating, two different worlds. But at that time I had to provide for my family. So it amped up that entrepreneurship that I think made it a very serious thing that I had to find out if I'm going to do this. And I was in a juxtaposition between two worlds. I had given

Starting point is 00:45:39 up art because of this incident with my father. But in school and high school, I had some teachers recognize that I shouldn't, and they pushed me toward design and illustration and computer graphics. And I had two careers that I could do simultaneously, the design aspect of that, and then moonlighting with the magic style and comedy clubs and things. So I was doing both those in high school, but then I was transitioning into doing that full-time. By the time both of those simultaneously, as I graduated high school. And there was a gentleman who was a touring magician from Las Vegas, came through town, and he saw me performing. And he said, you should go to Vegas. And I said, yeah, that's what everybody says.

Starting point is 00:46:17 And he says, come visit me. I said, I've never flown on a plane before. I don't even know what it's like outside of Missouri. And he says, come. And I flew to Vegas to visit this guy. His name was Daryl Martinez. They call him the magician's magician. He picked me up at the airport. He drove me straight downtown into a gambling spot, and he was a gambler. He showed me that world. And he said, Vegas has everything to offer, but it will give you nothing, which was perfect for me because I love working for it.

Starting point is 00:46:42 And I formed a model real quick. I looked at all the magicians that were around me and I recognized that they blew me away. They had exceptional skills, things I didn't know were possible, but they didn't have everything. They either had high skill, which I put underneath the talent. They had low business sense maybe, or their ambition to take that effort to the next place. And the combination of those were atrophied in different areas. And I felt like even if I don't have the same skill level, I can bring some of that back or find other angles. I decided to move out to Las Vegas to try to go after that. Then I'm jumping through a timeline real quick, but I was initially working at doing a couple of design jobs. My second one was for a series of slot machine design, designing the animation sequences for slot machines and

Starting point is 00:47:26 doing all the illustrations for that. And I was doing freelance artwork for a hypnotist named Justin Trans. And I was designing all this stuff and he said, why are you here? He says, for a couple of years, you've been in this work, little place and you're doing freelance artwork for me. He said, but your performing capabilities is you could do something else. I said, what's a good reason? Give me one good reason. He says, wouldn't it be amazing story sometime later in your life if people said, why did you quit your job as an artist and become a magician or performer full-time? And it was because a hypnotist told you during a lunch break. I thought that was a great idea. So I went back into my job and I gave my notice that day. That was a Friday. What a gift. Well, it depends on how, I mean, I know you're sitting here, so I'm not sure what the intervening

Starting point is 00:48:08 experiences looked like, but it seems like a gift. That was a big point because that was a jumping point, right? And it had a context in that I was a senior designer at that time and the company I was working for, and the reason why I didn't say their name, they had let off a large production team that supported the graphics I did. I'd hand my designs to them they would port them across to bigger things let them go they but they found a way to get around their contract so they outsource them to another company and then let that company fire

Starting point is 00:48:35 them okay so they wouldn't know any severance or they would dodge something they dodge all their severance and that made it yeah yeah and that made an impact on me so they just gave me a me a bonus. They'd just given me a raise. That was the context at that time that he said that, well, why are you here? And it wasn't about the money for me. And it was that moment of, yeah, what would happen if I did this thing? I don't know how, but let me just clean the slate on this thing and see what happens. And coincidences, I still believe, happen. And that weekend, a friend of mine said, hey, I'm going on tour for a couple of weeks. And there's a show called Caesar's Magical Empire. And I was wondering if you can come fill in for me for those two weeks starting on Tuesday. Perfect timing. Sounds great.

Starting point is 00:49:15 I'll give that a shot. What did you have ready at that point? Filling in, does that mean you have a 30-minute set, a 15-minute set? I'm not sure if set's the right term. 60 minutes. Because I think of comedians working on stand-up material and to get a polished hour, I mean, it could take years for some folks, right? So what did you have when this opportunity falls from the sky? Hey, could you fill in within the next week? I've been doing it professionally at the same time. So even back in my hometown, I had contracts with, I did restaurants, I did nightclubs. I had 15 different contracts per week. So you had things you knew had already worked out. You knew that you could string them together. Yeah. And I knew I could make an impact. And the big skill I had that was unique when I came to

Starting point is 00:49:59 Vegas, I decided, let's just drop the other stuff and just focus on the stealing. Because at that point, there was one other guy who was really good. Two other guys were in that space. One of them had passed away. He was a friend. And he worked at that place. And so it was a good angle for me to explore further. To differentiate yourself.

Starting point is 00:50:16 Yeah, to differentiate as a brand. I'll give you just paint a picture of the, it's a fascinating thing. My first show I ever did in Las Vegas, separate from Caesars, was just a corporate event for a large corporation. And it was a red carpet event. They had limousines pulling in. It was very different for a Missouri boy when I first moved out there. And these agents, they said, so, all right, go steal things from people, I guess. And they gave me $100 poker chips to give to people as gifts. I went up to this guy and the agent was watching. And the first time I tried to steal- When you say agent, this is someone who works at the casino? These are agents that hire for entertainment in Las Vegas. And they were watching and they were

Starting point is 00:50:52 trying to vet if I was a good fit. And the first guy- Okay, this is like your audition gig in a sense. Kind of, yeah. If they're going to hire me back again. And so I walk up to somebody that was important. They brought this VIP up to me right away. And as I go to steal his watch, his watch band was very worn out, and it snapped in two pieces while I was stealing it. I could feel my ears turning red. And I just was running through the gamut. Do I give this back to him?

Starting point is 00:51:21 Which is more important. Because I got a lot of pressure at that moment. So I was performing with him and another gentleman. And then I said, oh, and here's your watch. And he's shocked that I have his watch. And before he even processed, I said, I pulled out the other piece of his watch and gave him the second piece of it, which was a leather band. And I said, see that lady over there? He goes, yeah, that lady? I said, yeah, see her watch? He said, I'm going to let you see it a second time. This time I'm going to do her watch. I'm going to try to do it without breaking it now that's a lot harder but i'm gonna try to see if it's possible he goes no you can't do that and i was gambling on the idea that he

Starting point is 00:51:51 didn't need the money he probably knew that he needed to replace this band but i'm reframing it that hey that's a whole nother level you guys want to try it and let's move past this idea that just broke his watch yes yeah yeah which that's always hard for. Yeah, and that's constantly what was required for me. I didn't take cigarettes. You took cigarettes in the apron. Yes. So, my career has been a majority of those, right? My first day after I had left my job as a designer, I come over to work at Caesar Palace. I was accused of stealing this lady's rings. I was doing a performance in front of a group, and she said, my rings. And her husband said, where'd they go? And she says, somebody stole them. I hadn't even touched her. And I said, what did you have? And she goes, I had diamonds and rubies and emeralds.

Starting point is 00:52:32 And I just said, oh, I must've sent them as a child support payment. I just turned it as a joke. And then the husband really got mad. Didn't like it. No. And so once everybody cleared out, they came at me, come up to me, came at me too. And he said, give us the rings. I said, do you really believe that I have your rings or are you joking? And he says, no, give us the rings. And he says, we're going to the police. And they started to leave. I said, stop, don't walk away. He goes, what? I said, if you walk away right now, you'll never know if I have your rings because I could hide them anywhere. But I want you to know that I don't.

Starting point is 00:53:05 So I'm going to walk in front of you. I'm going to keep my hands out to the side. You watch me. We're going to walk to police together. So we walked out in the casino. We went to security and I got strip searched. And his wife went up. She's very dramatic, which to me conveyed that she was sincere about her belief, that she really believed that that happened.

Starting point is 00:53:21 So then she, up in her room, found her ring sitting on a sink and she'd been washing her hands. Do you get an apology? I did. That's good. But I think it also helped. It wasn't just an apology. It helped me secure a job there beyond filling in for a friend. I got it for five years. So that five years came from how I handled that situation. And over that time, I had people grab my throat, pull out a gun one time, pull out knives. I had- Hold on a second. This is at shows, right after a show, independent? During shows, all over the place. I've had every variation of that happen.

Starting point is 00:53:54 Because they think you have stolen something or they're upset that you duped them? Or maybe I have, yes. But it was in a social context of entertainment, right? Right, right, right. Yeah. But still still that's a different thing than if you mess up on a magic trick if you mess up on a magic trick they caught you look i understand how your trick works in the space i was playing it was accusations law enforcement lawsuits and i was constantly dealing with that i learned certain rules don't steal from someone who's been drinking don't steal from someone who has alzheimer's or any potential for

Starting point is 00:54:24 that because that's a really hard one to fight your way out of if they believe they had something they didn't. And I started making my own set of rules, and it changed one big thing in my style, which was, all right, I'm going to treat this like a vampire. I'm going to tell them. Like a vampire? Vampires had to be introduced into the household. You're right.

Starting point is 00:54:40 They need to be invited. So I'd say, in three minutes, I'm going to be wearing your watch. Try to catch me. And I'd say, in three minutes, I'm going to be wearing your watch. Try to catch me. And if they say yes, then... But that was the first time I had ever seen that happen. When I had studied the history of theatrical pickpocketing, there wasn't that open challenge that, beware, this is about to happen. If you engage, that's the game we're going to play.

Starting point is 00:54:57 Are you ready? But it now meant a whole different thing. But it came from all those concerns and lawsuits and everything. They all said it almost lawsuits and everything else. It almost happened. None of them ever landed. But now I developed a style that was a very different style, a very potent style. But instead of surprise, it was suspense. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:55:15 It was suspense. It was also a preemptive strategy. Yes. So you would have less need to be good at reacting. Because you're setting the ground rules and getting invited as a vampire. So at what point then, you said five years, is it within that span that Jimmy Carter and the Secret Service show up? Yes. So at that time, I had been there, and I'll give you more context. So when I was performing, it was a specific role at the

Starting point is 00:55:43 beginning of the show. 24 people would go into a certain area, and they'd be there for 10 minutes before they went on to the next part of the show. During that time, I would steal from four people and pass their items off for the function in the show. And one person then I would bring up front, steal all of his stuff while everybody's watching, and give it back, and then later everybody would find it, and it comes back to them later. I would do that every 10 minutes, six times an hour, five hours a night,

Starting point is 00:56:10 five nights a week for five years. So some math is somewhere around 200,000 people plus my side gigs that it became a lab for me to experiment. Can I take someone's glasses while they're wearing them? And what does that do? Is it possible? Can I steal their belt? What are the boundaries? And that was a place for me to experiment on the aspect of that. So could you please tell the story of the Secret Service? So about probably near the end, about three years after I've been performing at Sears Palace, there was a special night when I come into work and they had a big meeting before the show.

Starting point is 00:56:43 And the manager said we have previous president of the united states coming in to visit and we are going to have some people go home that haven't had background checks different rules yeah because they've done background checks on all of us and he said there you'll be photo ops as he goes through the show it's he's got a small party with him but the whole theater is just going to be sectioned off for that they have secret service will be here so don't be alarmed. But they'll be stationed throughout the casino and throughout the theater. And then we were all departing.

Starting point is 00:57:13 And he said, but Apollo, they asked you not to meet the president, not to shake his hand. They don't want it to get in the news if you're to steal from him. And everybody just kind of laughed. And I went back to him and said, well, that's not fair. I'd like a picture with the president. It was Jimmy Carter at that time. Not that I was in the era of Jeremy Carter. He was an ex-president at that time.

Starting point is 00:57:30 He was on a tour, book tour. And he said, but, you know, they didn't say anything about the Secret Service. I said, what does that mean? They didn't say that you couldn't steal from the Secret Service. You didn't hear this from me. Yeah. But. Do you think you could?

Starting point is 00:57:42 And I'm so happy that he posited that then versus now because i'm in my 20s i probably wouldn't do those things now in the same way i mean i still still from secret service today but it's a different context usually um wait a minute yeah all right we'll come back to that there you go get back to that all those secret service bar mitzvahs that you go to yeah it's a thing. Okay. All right. Why else move to Washington, D.C.? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:58:08 You wouldn't do it exactly the same way. And then what unfolds? So you get this side chat, which is like... I get a side chat. Technically, they didn't say you couldn't do something with the Secret Service. And then what? He brings in the head of security for Caesar Palace. They talk to me about certain provisions and warnings.

Starting point is 00:58:23 Don't take any of their firearms. Don't touch them. That would still be considered a felony. If they do take you to the ground, it's on your own. You're on your own for this. We have plausible deniability. We disavow all knowledge. Yes. And that this could be rather serious, which I thought was a really interesting challenge. And I moved into that. I was approaching the show, and as I was moving through, I saw two of them were stationed at a certain point. And I went up and started to hit those guys. And it was the way I approached them that got in their space. I stole several of their items. So the two secret service agents, I guess is the right term, maybe. Yes.

Starting point is 00:58:59 And to a layperson, to a civilian, I think two more complicated. But maybe two actually provides more surface area slash opportunity. But when you say you went into their space, could you paint a more detailed picture of how you ended up taking items from two very well-trained people who have a lot of situational awareness, who know what you do? Sure. You used a great word there. You said surface area. And surface area, they have a lot to protect on themselves, both where they keep their firearms, their credentials, the keys, the itinerary, all these things. So they just treat it as a whole, but it's got all

Starting point is 00:59:38 these little parts. And I like to think of attention as like a limited resource. It's really useful to think of the economics of attention. If they spend their attention in one place versus another, how do you toggle that? And it's not traditionally like look here and not there. You're curating their attention. So in that, there's ways to approach it. And it's usually contextual. It changes from person to person. And when I approached them, I hadn't had any experience with anyone like that before. And the context was different. They knew who I was, specifically when I walked up. There's a nickname for me in the show.

Starting point is 01:00:08 They called me Klepto. They said it's not happening, was I think the first thing I heard from them. And I said, no, it shouldn't at all. I said, yet, I think is the word you're looking for, right? So I kind of pushed at that boundaries of their confidence level because I was coming in pretty confident.

Starting point is 01:00:25 One of them stepped back as I approached. And there's a way that I approach that gains access to someone's space. If you think of someone's personal space as a bubble, the appropriate reception of how you get into their awareness of their space, it's kind of shaped like an egg. And it's larger up front, it's narrow on the sides, and it's shallow on the back. And you can break eye contact with someone to sneak underneath that as you move through. I can show you more of that later. But as you gain access, there's a way of approaching from the side that can often help. So when I started to saddle up next to one of the gentlemen to show him something,

Starting point is 01:00:58 he stepped back, and they have a term for it called maintaining occupied space. And it also indicated to me with a slight brush that in my world, I have to know a lot of being able to determine what's inside people's pockets and the printing of a jacket, what it means, being able to make pretty good estimates of what a good target is inside of the outline of a pocket. So as soon as he stepped back on the left, it indicated to me that he might have a firearm on that side versus on his right side. So it was probably underneath in a holster underneath his jacket. So I just acknowledged that. I put that on the surface. I said, you're very well trained. I said, it's going to be much harder to do anything with

Starting point is 01:01:31 you. I said, you've been doing this for a while? And he says, yes, I've been doing this for a while. And I said, okay, so I'm going to have to do it to you, sir. And so I leaned into the next guy and the next guy's like, that's not happening. And he was very serious. But now as I'm facing him and this other gentleman is here, he doesn't realize that he's giving me access from the side. The first guy. Yeah, the first guy. He thinks he's off the clock. He thinks he's off the clock.

Starting point is 01:01:51 And so that's one of the things. By setting that expectation, he thinks he's done and the play has moved on. But now I reach underneath my arm and I steal from inside his jacket and I steal what I found to be his credentials. It was wallet, passport-shaped. And I steal his glasses from his outside pocket. And I steal what I found to be his credentials. It was wallet, passport shaped, and I steal his glasses from his outside pocket and I steal a couple of things. And as I was talking to the other guy- As you're doing that, does the other guy notice?

Starting point is 01:02:12 No, he doesn't notice. And he can't see because he's watching my hands and they're trained to watch hands. But there's all these pause points I learned over the years from different thieves and other ones of holding out places. And if I steal something, you're not going to get to see it go in and out of my pocket or anything. It's going to go somewhere else. So I can put it on them in a more accessible spot, or I can put it on me in another place. So I did some of that. But at the end of that, with the two guys, I said, you know, I didn't get anything for this. I don't really know what it is.

Starting point is 01:02:39 And I pull out this paper that was kind of tri-folded. And as I'm opening it up, I see what it is. It's now the itinerary where they're taking Carter to. And I said, I can't really read it with these glasses on. He realizes that I'm wearing his glasses that were in his pocket. And he goes, hey, he takes my glasses and he looks at the paper and he says, hey, and he snatches it away. I said, you know, I really don't think you should read that without the proper ID. And then he really reaches in his pocket and he realizes that he doesn't have the credentials. And the other guy's laughing very hard at him. And he said, I'm not going to be the only ID. And then he really reached in the pocket and he realizes that he doesn't have the credentials. And the other guy's laughing very hard at him. I'm sure. And he said, I'm not going

Starting point is 01:03:09 to be the only one. Ooh, dad's not going to be happy with that when he finds out. And so they said, he says, you're going to do this to the other guys. So he got on his mic and he starts telling me to go to other teams. So I now have an advocate in and in to approach the other teams because this guy's sending me because he didn't want to be the only one. But that's kind of why I was mentioning about the jazz. I mean, I didn't know, I've never stolen with somebody with presidential itinerary and credentials and glasses in that combo before, but I have to kind of ad lib with what I find and how I give it back. And it is a unique thing that he knows is the only time I'd done that is with him until I did it to the other guys. So what was the significance, if any, of that whole evening to you or your career? Maybe it was indirect in the sense that it increased your confidence that enabled you to do X, Y, and Z, but if there was significance, what was the significance? I think legend is too strong of a word. But there are things- Nothing travels like a good story it does it gives people a story to tell and it did and it was one of a handful of legends

Starting point is 01:04:13 there's lore i guess lore is a better thing that traveled beyond me and i found that lore can take you so fast so far but also it can encapsulate what people think you are versus what you are and it can be hard to under promise and over deliver when people have this expectation of what you can do for sure because it was spread into oh you stole their bullets and you took out their bullets out of their guns and i've heard all sorts of variations of that uh that i began working for the government from that day forward william wallace yeah 12 feet tall yes shoots flaming lightning out of ours it was much better when people underestimated me. Because working against overconfidence was a great way to play.

Starting point is 01:04:50 Pros and cons, right? Pros and cons, yes. And I was asked to speak for the Secret Service. It was around a time where there was a shooting at the Pentagon and there were two officers outside and a gentleman had approached. And he drew firearms and both of them missed it, even though they thought they were watching for his hands, but they were both tasked on a similar thing. And there's an interesting thing in psychology called inattentional blindness. Dan Simons and his crew, Chabris, was his partner. They did a book called Invisible

Starting point is 01:05:16 Gorilla where you watch a basketball being passed and a gorilla- Incredible video, yeah. And I like to refer to that as task blindness. I think it's a more approachable term. But when someone is tasked, they often miss other things. And at that time, I was asked to come speak to the Secret Service afterwards. So I was like, I'm not being arrested. I guess this is a good thing. But now I'm traveling to D.C.

Starting point is 01:05:37 And I'm going to talk to the Secret Service. And I was asked about that, about task blindness and attentional blindness. And this overlapped into two fascinating neuroscientists that I met, Stephen Magnick and Susanna Martinez-Conde. And they had been studying magic and visual illusions, but they were also very interested in cognitive illusions. And in that space, they wanted to see what could be done with attention. And they approached me and said, can we do an experiment?

Starting point is 01:06:02 Do you have any ideas? And at first, it was like a little session where they had different magicians that were legends, Penn and Teller, specifically Teller, talking about theories. And they were saying, is there anything there to pull research out of? And I posited that I think we only have two sight lines. And this circles back to my early days with animation. And I said, I've noticed when I'm stealing that if I move in a straight line, that there's a transition point from A to B, that when something is no longer at A that people expect to be there, they bounce back. Their attention bounces back like a rubber band to B. But if I move in a half

Starting point is 01:06:35 circle from A to B, when we get to that destination point, nobody ever looks back at the point of origin. I said, so I sense that there's two types of sight lines and there's a kind of suppression that happens during those. And I think that that's an interesting place to experiment with. And they said, yes, it is. We could do that with eye tracking software. And we did. And it turned out to be right. And that was the change. That was the flip of a switch because then I was part of a paper that they published in Nature Journal. And then I was asked to speak at the International Society for Neuroscience, 10,000 neuroscientists. You broadened your lane. It did.

Starting point is 01:07:09 Or you gained more lanes. Yeah. And when I realized that it wasn't just me stealing, but that that same concept of psychotic versus smooth pursuit eye movements and their impact on different things started to branch out in other areas. And then I was asked to speak on attention and the current models of attention at MIT and Harvard and other ones. It all changed right there. How did you connect with the scientists? Just so I can connect the lore, the stealing bullets from midair with the Secret Service to connecting on the scientific side. How was that connection made? Teller from Penn and Teller. that connection made? Teller.

Starting point is 01:07:45 Oh, that was Teller. It was Teller. Teller said he was approached about this. And at that time, him and I had become pretty good friends and we spent a lot of time together. Penn was also a friend. Teller was interesting, like the research side of it on the backside. And he asked me to come join at that effort. Got it. Okay. I want to pick up a couple of micro gingerbread topics that I've let alone that I've committed to myself I would return to. So the first is, in terms of making the coin levitate into the other hand, did you ever figure that out?

Starting point is 01:08:17 I did. Okay. And I don't know. A lot of blood, sweat, and calluses, but yes. Okay. I think that gives me the answer that I'm looking for, because we have a mutual friend, Simon Cornell. Yes. And I don't want to speak out of school, so I'm not going to get into the how of it, I suppose, but I've seen him do this, and just rest assured, it is so much harder than people think. It is. It's something that your body wasn't trained to do, you've never had a use for that, and to train it to be able to do that to make something animate is a combination of unusual muscles that people wouldn't usually use yeah it is so much harder than people can possibly imagine which makes me think of speaking of teller presentation that he gave i think it was at the entertainment gathering and he said i'm going to show you a video and i

Starting point is 01:08:59 think there was a balloon involved or ball yes he And he shows the magic trick, let's call it, the performance on video. He says, all right, now I'm going to explain how I did it. And he explains it. And then he shows it again. And he says, now, are you more or less impressed? I'm paraphrasing here tremendously. But it was a love story, right? It turns into a love story with an effect. That's why I thought it was the greater lesson of him showing it and exposing it was this beautiful piece of him coming and spending time with this effect and giving part of his life to it. The second thing I wanted to ask about, you have thousands, tens of thousands of repetitions because you're doing four people every, what was it?

Starting point is 01:09:37 20 minutes, 10 minutes? 10 minutes. Multiple times an hour, over and over and over again. So you're getting a lot of reps. What do you do when it doesn't work? What's your recovery or how do you handle that? Because I can't imagine, as you're experimenting, you must push the envelope. And I imagine, I mean, with any skill, it's not going to be 100% hit rate. So what do you do? Even at, let's say, for instance, the Magic Castle, it's like you see how people recover when things don't work out exactly as

Starting point is 01:10:04 planned. And for me, that's part of the art. I mean, it's fascinating. So, what do you do in those circumstances? I think there's a subtext to what you're asking that is unique to the context in which I steal. I have a different social contract with my audience than a thief does on the street. So, because I can talk to someone, I get different access to their body. I can justify what I'm doing. It functions more like sparring in martial arts, that if they start to pick up on a thing, there's a feedback loop that I can see. And the cost of them fixating on that catch comes at the cost of them losing something else. So as soon as they start to detect one thing... Right, if they cover their head, you go to the body. Yeah, and once they catch that one thing, they might find themselves three pounds lighter in other places because they've lost all these other things. Okay. So it changes the definition of fail. Is fail getting caught stealing a watch or a belt or glasses? I was pretty good at rolling with that and improvising with those things and realizing that if they started to catch that, I could turn it into another situation. And I would load strange things on people. Like I loaded a bag of oregano on a

Starting point is 01:11:09 grandma and I said, what's this for grandma? Well, hold on. This is actually the perfect place for me to just read an excerpt from a profile of you, which was by Adam Green in The New Yorker. And the title of this, I recommend everybody read this. And if you have anything you'd like to correct in the piece, we can cover that too. But A Pickpocket's Tale, The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins. So this is one of my favorite paragraphs. Fairy tales, yes.

Starting point is 01:11:36 When Robbins hits his stride, it starts to seem as if the only possible explanation is an ability to start and stop time. At the Rio, a man's cell phone disappeared from his jacket and was replaced by a piece of fried chicken. The cigarettes from a pack in one man's breast pocket materialized loose in the side pocket of another. A woman's engagement ring vanished and reappeared attached to a key ring in her husband's pants. A man's driver's license disappeared from his wallet and turned up inside a sealed bag of M&Ms in his wife's purse. Okay. So hard for me to even make any sense of half of that, but you're loading things on people

Starting point is 01:12:13 is where you were. Yeah. I take things off. I switched them. I alter them. You're creating for yourself options. Yes. Also, right? It's not like you have one trick you're executing and if you flub it, trick is done. Yeah. That's not like you have one trick you're executing and if you flub it, trick is done. Yeah. That's why I mean the sheet music versus jazz. They don't know where I'm going, so we can always change the path. In fact, when I used to work in situations where I would just walk around with a group, which I miss because I don't really get to do that. I'm mostly a keynote speaker now, but I used to do a lot of corporate type of events where I would move

Starting point is 01:12:44 through a crowd and I would walk up to the guys and say, so guys, you know why I'm here, right? I'm supposed to steal everything you have. And so I'd just say that up front. It stops most conversations. I said, you got anything on you? And you just see them check. They would just bump through a wall to the thing and I'm just clocking. It's like, okay, so I got the keys here. You know exactly. Yeah, so I'm making a mental map and now I'm about to move into the circle. They telegraphed all of their possessions. Yes. Cause they don't believe it's true. They just were having a conversation. And I'm now making that effect. It's like, okay, that seems to be a room key here. That's over here. This is what here. And as I move through them in real pick pocketing, they call it fanning small movements with my elbow or my hand can give me an idea of what things are in a breast pocket or other things. And I can now- It's like a shark taking little nibbling bites, feeling things out.

Starting point is 01:13:30 Yes. And just taking inventory, you could say. Yeah. And now I'm crafting, okay, so- Or feeling out around in boxing, same thing. Where people are gauging distance, they're seeing how people react. What's their pattern? What's their go-to? What are their defenses? Absolutely. What are their vulnerabilities? Yeah. Which is interesting because now that I don't have that, I've gone back to martial arts

Starting point is 01:13:48 because it was one of the few places I could get that feeling. And I was studying a Filipino style martial arts. And as I was new in it, one of the things that I could do in the first part was they would go to draw secondary weapons, sometimes like a trainer blade, and it wouldn't be there. I can't do that trick a lot, but it's a great trick when they go to draw and then it's not there they're very surprised you know i'm sure they're very surprised all right so following this gingerbread trail i just wanted to address a couple all right your wife yes so you mentioned i think that she's the most important influencer had the biggest impact on you, your career, how so?

Starting point is 01:14:26 Yeah. And on life in general, she brought, I think when you're a specialist in an area, it's easy to get so fixated that everything in your world revolves around that. And mine was all around con artists, thieves, and I had a soft spot for those guys. I knew a lot of those guys were intimate friends of mine that had done things that you would think of like Ocean's Eleven, where they pulled heists on casinos and switched out devices and things. And I knew those guys well, and that was my world. It was my cadre of team. And around that time, I had this weird inquiry to do a TV show about picking up women, just because as a side thing, people said, hey, you know, you seem to be really good at this thing. And I wasn't ever a person who did notches on the belt, but it's another thing, the perspective

Starting point is 01:15:08 taking, it's related to that and how you establish rapport and things. And there's a friend of mine who was hostage negotiation. He had a special forces background. He says, hey, why don't we do this book together and we'll go shoot this video and we'll ask women how they would like to be approached. And then we'll put hidden cameras on them and see when people approach them, how ridiculous people do approach them. And then we'll talk about that.

Starting point is 01:15:30 And I said, sounds like a great idea. He calls me, got a film crew coming in and some models and other things. And he says, hey, we're having this thing late night at a party in Las Vegas at an all-night spot. He says, come out. I said, it's too late for me. And he says, no, just come. And when I show up, he's talking to a group of women. And I thought they were probably escorts at that point. Professionals. Yeah, because they were close to the VIP section and it was a small group,

Starting point is 01:15:54 younger women, some older guys at the table. And I'd seen that a lot in Vegas. But when I get closer, I'm talking to him. And one of the ladies in the group, as they were introducing themselves, she had a background in psychobiology. She had just graduated with a degree in that. She was working as a crisis counselor on a hotline talking people off the cliff. She would do some pretty intense stuff and studied abnormal psych and very kind of intense, playful. And he said I was a thief when he introduced me to this group of girls. That is a hell of an intro.

Starting point is 01:16:23 Like, you're going to get a conversation. It does. introduced me to this group of girls and i'd stole it is a hell of an intro like you're gonna get a conversation it does one of them said can you so i stole the girl's engagement ring with the thing and i did a thing with that and gave it back and this lady uh that later turned out to be my wife she asked me can you still send me for me i said what would you like she says chocolate covered strawberry from that table over there and she points at this table nearby a vip section i said got it so i grabbed a menu, walked over, pretended to be with the staff, asked them if they're being taken care of, stole the chocolate strawberry under the menu. And then I walked in and I threw it over my

Starting point is 01:16:51 shoulder to add a little flair. I caught it. I went to hand it to her. And when she went to take a bite of it, I put it in my mouth and I just winked at her. So she'd have to kiss me to get the strawberry. And it's that playfulness. I think that's the important thing. It's bold. It's bold. I like it, but it worked. Yeah, but it almost didn't work because her advocacy and her academia, and it was the opposite. It was too slick. And she felt that pressure from the group. She gave me the kiss, but we ended up leaning against the wall talking about psychology.

Starting point is 01:17:18 And that dove into a deep thing. She said, have you ever thought about this? Long phone conversations later on, but she said, have you ever thought about all this stuff you're learning and how it applies to bigger problems in the world? And she was the one that encouraged me to do the event with the neuroscientists. She was the one that encouraged me to take the piece with the New Yorker, which I didn't even know what the New Yorker was at that point. I turned it down twice, Adam Green would tell you. I was like, I hear somebody better over here. It wasn't my thing.

Starting point is 01:17:44 Barely knew who the politicians were. It wasn't my thing. Barely knew who the politicians were. It wasn't my world. I didn't think about that. She said, let me have you watch a debate. And when I saw my first presidential debate, I went back to tell her. I said, tell her you're a Latin professor. What was that? So why do I know all those things? They're so similar to this thing that the yellow kid used to do, or Titanic Thompson used to do this thing with this. Wait a second. Meaning you observed a lot in the debate yes that paralleled what you had learned very similar concepts and could you give an example there is a term called gish galloping i forgot the guy's name for gish galloping gish was a debater who would often do

Starting point is 01:18:21 a package of assaults on a person of their human character, which would be, he'd say during his three-minute window of a debate, he would say, my opponent would have you believe this, this, this, this, this. And then the opponent's countermeasure for that becomes, well, they're overwhelmed. They don't know how to respond because they got three minutes and he posits a lot of questions and they don't have three minutes functionally to answer those questions. And that very similar to me was a noise-to- noise to signal ratio piece that's used to overwhelm people inside of a cash exchange was short changing. And I recognize that as one approach. Short changing.

Starting point is 01:18:55 So like giving somebody change, but less change than they should. And overwhelming a cash register attendee at that time. Right. And using ambiguous statements with different ways that they could take that as for, I can clarify more on that later, but a counter to that gish gallop, for example, back to a quid vique for equivote. If somebody were doing a series of personal assassinations, they also, what they're doing is diluting their argument. Because now if I say 10 bad things about you, or you said that about me, then I'd say, as you can see, he's very impassioned about what he says. But notice there's a central theme between all of

Starting point is 01:19:28 those. That central theme is X. And that's the equivoke, right? I can take all the things that you said, repackage them as another thing, because you diluted all your points, because you put them all into the one bracket. So the countermeasure to that is to dilute that down, give you one point back, and I hijack the narrative. All right. So, you're talking to Teller about this? Yes. And he was a Latin professor. Okay. So, that wasn't, I thought that was a euphemism or a joke. He was an actual Latin professor? He was. Before in his career, I said, you know more about Socrates and Plato. So, can you tell

Starting point is 01:20:00 me what, and he says, yeah, you need to go back, read Plato's Republic. You need to study about Socrates. And he started prompting me to go back to learn this route that's amazing yeah back to the classics back to the classics so from the chocolate strawberry in the mouth to broader applications in psychology or at least harnessing psychology recognizing maybe the common threads across multiple domains that you'd already been exposed to and had polished in your craft, to presidential debate, to then reading Plato and Aristotle. Yes, and the driver of this was, back to that, was my wife. We had this unusual thing in that she moved to Las Vegas pretty quickly after we started dating.

Starting point is 01:20:43 Where was she? She was in Los Angeles. Was it hard to get her to move to Vegas? It was a negotiation. Because she didn't want to come visit and be under an obligation. So when I asked her, I said, please come visit me. And she said, I have a lot of work that I'm doing here, and I don't currently have the money to do that. And I said, I understand.

Starting point is 01:21:03 Can I ask when you write, what is your per page fee? And she said, my per page fee is usually about this amount. I said, so if I asked you to help me write this bio and some other portions for me, I would actually be getting a discount by paying for your airplane versus paying for the writer's fee. And she said, yeah, I guess so.

Starting point is 01:21:20 And I said, all right, so come help me write my bio and I'll buy you a plane ticket. But it's that play that when she came out, she helped me have a different direction that I wasn't solely focused on entertainment. And she also just, because of her counseling background, she really broke apart a lot of my early childhood. And she had had these complexities, too. She had moved from Vietnam, and she had grown up. Her father was incredible. He would wear police uniforms and help people smuggle things in and out of the country while she was growing up.

Starting point is 01:21:50 So she had these really interesting kind of engagements with deception too that she was trying to manifest through psychology. And at that time, I was consulting for a mentalist named Darren Brown in the UK, doing some things for him. So she was fascinated by that with her training in psychology. She says, well, that's not exactly what that is. And then at that time, I had this group of thieves around me that were professional criminals, and she kind of became a den mom to all of them. If the FBI was watching or the NSA watching our house, they would have seen all these guys come

Starting point is 01:22:19 in and out. And she was the den mom of all of them. She really helped take us all for a turn. Wow. Okay. So this is off the map. This has nothing to do with the questions that I've written down, but I'm curious when you're describing, for instance, the semicircle A to B versus the linear A to B, it makes me think of sports and exercise science and how the practitioners, the people on the field, the top coaches, the top athletes are always a few years ahead of the literature and the science and so on, which is not to denigrate the science. It just takes a while. People need to write grants, typically. They need to really pick and choose their shots. And a lot of what's experimented with in the field doesn't work, and that's okay as long as a few things really work. around a tension or perception that has not yet made its way into the scientific circles.

Starting point is 01:23:31 But you'd be willing to say, you know what? I can't say it with 100% certainty, but I would bet that A, B, or C. I think in order to validate their research, they have to go after the low-hanging fruit, which is a single variable. Real life has context and multivariable. And so when you go out in the wild, the reason why it's sports or between Kahneman and Gary Klein, they did a lot of research on first responders to smokejumpers and other things. The context of an expertise is hard to boil down in a lab. Super hard. Also really hard for replication with animals and say animal learning,

Starting point is 01:24:06 chimpanzees, Project NIMH for people who are interested, highlights this. Very hard. And the society aspect of that, for example, and the replication of that tend to show the same darkness of an ideal society. And what does that mean to manufacture one? In the space where I find fascinating probably with current research, I'm really interested, I guess, like an armchair social psychologist, I really read a lot in that space, that harkens back to my dad and my childhood, which is, I think that there's a really interesting place right now when people focus in politics on the left and the right, that there's a bigger problem with how people engage with uncertainty. That there needs to be a lot of work done on the study of the tolerance that

Starting point is 01:24:46 people have for uncertainty. And we've had the pandemic, we've had craziness, we've had the economy. And I think it's really interesting if you look at that instead of left and right, if you look at that as north and south, that you have people from both sides that need an absolute answer when they're confronted with something unusual, And that need to fill in the gap, that need to have an absolute answer for something that they've seen happen versus a tolerance for uncertainty, I think could help inoculate people from some of the problems that they're running into. There's going to be a future where the arms race, I like people think of it as arms race of technology, like when they think about AI, deepfakes, but it's our arms race of imaginations. Intensive eth thieves will beat you to it.

Starting point is 01:25:25 They'll be innovating in that space pretty quickly, and they are right now with deep fakes and other things. And it's useful to see how people are going to deal with having something that looks very real. You're now in this very interesting time that all the research historically for mankind with deception tends to be on spotting a lie, spotting something that's fake. And I think we're on a cusp where that's going to flip over

Starting point is 01:25:49 and we're going to have to try to spot the truth. And what does that mean in the future? Yeah, where you got to spot the truth and how do you deal with that? And I think that's really, there needs to be a lot more research on how we develop comfort with uncertainty, how we authenticate, all those types of things. There's books and literature that's starting to come out in that space. And that's definitely, I'm leaning into that too, because I feel like since my job is distorting perceptions and creating erroneous sense-making, then I should really try to lend a helping hand if I can. So we may come back to that, but I want to first return to something that we discussed briefly,

Starting point is 01:26:22 but didn't really flesh out. And that that is let's call it for lack of a better term your style yeah before we get to your style what is the significance of any of that ring this ring is made from a silver coin and my magic used to be based around silver it's it's unusual if you talk to a magician professional magician it's a very pretty ring and for people who aren't watching the video i've been watching you play play with it and manipulate it and take it off and put it back on. And I would imagine, given what you do, that you might choose your adornments with some thought. Yes, all with a purpose. So that's why I ask. All right.

Starting point is 01:26:57 Everything has a purpose. There's lots of things that can be done with this. Actually, when I pickpocketed Penn Jillette, I met him the first time and he's a big guy. Yeah. Six foot six at least. Big guy. Yeah. And he had heard about, historically among magicians, pickpockets are a kind of fake. There's a lot of people that say, give me your wallet before the show. And then they've steal it out. And I didn't have that background. I came from a different lane. And so he had heard from a friend

Starting point is 01:27:23 that I could really steal. So he put me on the spot. I'm from a bunch of people. And the first time I met him, he just walked up to me. He says, so you can steal stuff. And I said, yeah, sometimes I can. He says, then steal something from me. He held out his arms. And I remember him wearing like a Tommy Bahama shirt and some shorts. And he had a monoblock pin that was clipped inside of his shirt pocket. And he said, still something for me now. I said, you know, that's kind of like saying be funny now. He said, yeah. I said, let me tell you about something that happened to somebody one time.

Starting point is 01:27:52 If I steal a watch from someone, it's one plus one. You say, oh, you're fast. You got my watch. I didn't notice. I said, but one time I was talking to a guy and during the conversation, I stole his pen. I took the refill of his pen out, put his pen back together, together put it back in place and later i was asking him to sign something and when he went to sign it he couldn't he realized he couldn't he went to write it down and he says okay yeah are you gonna steal something from me he said can you draw a circle around this ring for me

Starting point is 01:28:17 and he pulled out his pen go to it and he stops and he stares at me and he realized he's the guy in the story and he just he opened his pen in the story. And he just, he opened his pen and saw that the refill wasn't there. And he goes, fuck you. And I said, now, Penn, isn't that better than taking your wallet? And I threw his wallet on the table. Okay. That's amazing. Now, why is that made of silver dollar? So silver dollars in coin magic, silver has a unique property in the way that it feels on your skin, the way it's soft, the way it can move, and also the sound that it makes. But specifically for sleight of hand, silver works very well for sleight of hand. As a memory of that, even when I'm not performing, I had one converted into a ring.

Starting point is 01:28:58 So they punched a hole and rolled it into this ring. And it's a reminder to me of where I came from for that. Very cool. Very attention-grabbing also, which I would imagine helps with things like what you just described. It can be used as a level of confidence I can talk to you about. And I'll show you something with that actually, because it does mean a lot to me. Do you have anything in your pockets right now? I do. Yeah. I have a hotel key. I have some credit cards. Okay, great. And I appreciate you letting me know where those are. If I asked you right now, and this is something we could just... I just fell for it.

Starting point is 01:29:28 Gotcha, bitch. Take this, set your pen down for a second, and take my ring and put it in one of your hands. And now, whether under the paper or behind your back, put it in one of your two hands so I can't see which hand it would go in. Oh, I'll do it behind my back. This is going to be a little tight. Sorry about that, yeah. That's all right. You'll do it behind my back. This could be a little tight. Sorry about that. Yeah. That's all right. You got it?

Starting point is 01:29:47 I got it. So you put in one of your hands. Now don't do the third option, which is putting in your pocket. No, I'm not going to do it. Okay, bring both your hands out. Now I'll try to guess which hand. Right now it's in your right hand, correct?

Starting point is 01:29:55 It is in my right hand. Can I see? Yeah. Okay, do that again. Okay. Okay. Bring it back out. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:30:04 Now it's in the left hand correct is that right yeah it is so you try that with me okay so I alright

Starting point is 01:30:10 yeah I was trying to think like logic through this yeah like sort of like rock paper scissors because I was like he would expect me to probably go with

Starting point is 01:30:17 the same hand because I would maybe think I should switch it I sort of over complicated for myself which is princess bride all over again yeah it's princess bride all over again yeah so, it's Princess Bride all over again.

Starting point is 01:30:26 Try it with me and see what your process is. Right hand. It was pretty fast. Did you peek it or how did you get it? No, I was looking at the body language. Oh shit, I already... You're distracted? I'll do it again. Alright, so we're doing it a second time. There you go. Left hand.

Starting point is 01:30:43 So it's a big move, because fixation would say stay there. You're now assuming that I took the same pattern as you. I switched the other hand. I could try to talk you out of that to go back to the wrong choice, but you made the right choice. I need you to miss so I can make my point. Oh, just one more time.

Starting point is 01:30:54 All right, one more time. Which hand? Right hand. Would you like to change? No. So this is not a minimalism effect, or it'd be much better. But I also have 50-50 chance.

Starting point is 01:31:03 50-50 chance, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I want you to be able to make your point well so in this that's a little minicon with a little ring and we often hear people talk about biases so like confirmation bias but when you embody a real interaction like this you would never associate what we just did as confirmation i think i have an advantage over you yeah also because you're angled to me oh okay so you were able to see kind of when my hand came out i didn't see your hands but i think it's easier for me to observe your body language in a sense because you're angled at me but that might be wrong i don't know it's an

Starting point is 01:31:34 interesting hypothesis but i think that that's the interesting thing that if it was never in my hand and you were wrong every time you might think i was cheating yes sure because when we lose we're more curious. And when we win, we're less curious about why we're winning, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So now, for those people who are watching, now you have identical rings, one in each hand.

Starting point is 01:32:00 Okay, got it. A very unique special ring that you started the conversation on. You found your own path. So in that, that's a little metaphor for a con, right? That one little ring, because that whole story that you jumped into, that little rabbit hole with asking about the ring, is a great baseline that now people assume there's one, and there's that baseline piece. But to me, that is that greater question that when we're succeeding, we're often not curious why we're having success. And it's a very unusual thing for us to say, well, let me check out the other hand when you win, right? When you win, yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:32 Yeah, but that's confirmation bias. And it's really helpful to know what that is. And it's very easy. You didn't jump into the hole like most people do. Most people will say, well, you know, I played poker with my grandma since I was four. I'm really good at reading people. And they walk away with this confidence. And that's the con aspect of that. But in this one. Confidence. It is.

Starting point is 01:32:50 Confidence, man. You see me playing low status with that. I need you to miss in order for me to be able to. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But that kind of thing, everything is about helping people get to that. Yeah. All right.

Starting point is 01:33:02 That was a great demo. And that actually ties into the question of, can you elaborate on what makes your style? How is it different from what people think of as magic? Maybe what they've seen growing up. I'll give you an experience one time where I had, let's just see kind of backstage. One time I was performing for a corporate event in Las Vegas, and it's similar to the one where I had the broken watch piece, for a corporate event in Las Vegas. And it's similar to the one where I had the broken watch piece, but this has been later in my career. And it was a new agent. And I was talking to her off to the side. And so I met a couple of the people that

Starting point is 01:33:34 were there, one of the ladies who ran the thing named Lisa, several other people. But then this other guy came up, well-dressed guy. And he said, so I heard you steal things. Is that right? And I said, yeah, something like that. And he said, so steal something from steal things. Is that right? And I said, yeah, something like that. And he said, so steal something from me. I said, I'm sorry, what was your name? He says, Jamal. I said, nice to meet you, Jamal. Before this, let's go back that I walked into this event thinking I don't want to do anything I've done before exactly. There's some little components and you'll hear some things coming back where I just talked about with pen but i knew that i could figure out how to put something inside of a bag of m&ms and then reseal it in real time without anybody noticing

Starting point is 01:34:10 and i thought what could i do with that let's just find out yeah yeah and that's where it started to become a jazz so this interaction with this guy jamal when he came up he says so you can steal something from me and i said I don't really know. What was your name? He goes, Jamal. I said, how do you spell that, Jamal? And he said, J-A-M. I said, could you write that down for me?

Starting point is 01:34:31 And he pulls out his pen and he goes to write it down. His pen wasn't working. And as we've heard before. And up to this point, my stuttering, the break of my speech, the break of my sight lines with him has been very low status. Break of your sight lines, meaning eye contact? Yeah, I didn't keep straight eye contact with him very much. I asked him about his suit. That's really fancy.

Starting point is 01:34:50 It was all low status. And then everything just changed. Then it's this thing I said, would this help you out, Jamal? And it's straight eye contact, and it's the refill to his ink pen. And he had way underestimated and stepped way too close, he realized suddenly. And when that moment happened to him you saw him holding his pen with one hand and his refill with the other and he was just looking and he's stunned he's in this cycle of trying to make that because the only solution

Starting point is 01:35:14 it could be is the one he didn't want to accept right so he's canceled out the truth so where is he going to go from there yeah that i had stolen it taken apart put it back together and put it back on him couldn't be that so what else could it be? Pausing time, time travel. So in that, now at that moment, while he's in that bewildered state, I just said, well, at least you didn't lose your money or your wallet. And when I did that, I just glanced down because I noticed he has watch on his left wrist. So he's probably right-handed. So he's probably going to keep his wallet in his back right.

Starting point is 01:35:39 So I just glanced back toward his back right pocket and he jumped on that big, he reached in, pulled out his wallet real quick, checked to see if he had everything still in his wallet. And I laughed. I saw his attention shift back to the pen. And I pushed down his hand. I said, you still have everything. And he put it away. And he says, you've got to do this to Lisa. I said, yeah, great to meet her. I just looked over his shoulder to where I thought Lisa might be. And he took off to go get Lisa. Comes back and he shoves this lady towards me and this agent and i'm dance monkey dance yeah i have i'm having well i'm there to perform but no i know yeah and i'm talking to the agent i have a drink and this is an important thing the drink because it's a

Starting point is 01:36:15 part of the style and it's not alcohol it's just water but it's that i don't need anything from him i'm not being validated and a lot of performers will try to spoon feed the audience but it's letting them bring a thing to them, letting them have a reaction without you needing to feed back off of it and letting people have this experience for themselves. And so when he pushed the lady up, I didn't quite look at her at first. I said, sorry, it's nice to meet you. I looked over and I said, what was your name? She goes, Lisa. And she hadn't quite come close to me at all. I said, she said, what's happening? I said, sorry, Lisa, he wants me to steal something from you she says what

Starting point is 01:36:45 i said do you like chocolate she says chocolate i said yes there's some chocolate in your purse she said what she opens her purse and she finds a bag of m&ms in her purse and he's reacting very strongly to this and he's watching this third party he thinks and then she said how did those get in my purse i said the same way jamal's driver's license got out of his wallet now he's jumped back into the equation he rips his wallet out again really says his license is missing and he goes where in the fuck is my driver's license and i said it's in the chocolate as i take a sip of my water i just walk away so i let them piece it together themselves she tears over the m&ms and she finds the license in her thing. Okay. So if we zoom out then. Yes.

Starting point is 01:37:26 Amazing story. I mean, I would have to think 100%, maybe 99.999% of people listening have never experienced something like this. What are the ingredients? You mentioned some of them. Are there other ingredients that you can call out explicitly that are sort of the, some of the hallmarks that differentiate yeah and what you're trying to do that's quite different in magic is it tends to be that they'll have a set of effects that are linked together in that one i walked

Starting point is 01:37:55 in trying i had a set of skills that i could do but i hadn't pieced them together and i take advantage of the movement it kind of like you would if you were sparring in that way. When he leaned in forward, I stepped back with my left foot and I said, it's nice to meet you. But at the same time, as my right hand comes up with the back of my hand, I kind of put my hand towards his chest as he came in a little bit too close. My left hand came up underneath the sight line and slipped inside of his jacket and took out his pen really quick. And I went down the line of my arm and into my pocket so he couldn't see anything being extracted. And then I stepped back and then I removed the pen,

Starting point is 01:38:29 took it apart, and I find another reason to come back in to put it back there. It's so outrageous that you can do any of this. It's amazing. But it's a strange thing. And then each one of those moments on the backside of that, I didn't know what was going to happen. But what I saw is when his attention locked to that pen and he was spinning. And you can think of attention as being external or internal, inside your head or external aware, and you can think of it as being broad or narrow. And on those axes, it's very useful of, do I want him to be broad external or do I want him to be internal narrow? And how do I flip somebody from one to those to the other and i'm very attuned to the doing that of moving people between those four stages and so that was a big part there was

Starting point is 01:39:10 to do that to him and when he pulled that out and he thought he had the money i just copped his driver's license out of his wallet and let him put his wallet back but he was already still thinking about the pen so i could see he was thinking about the pen. So when I pushed down his hand, I just took the wallet out. The problem is his train of thought would go straight back to it. If I reveal, oh, I've got your license, he would go straight to it. So I thought, hmm, I guess I'm going to put this license inside the M&Ms. Let me see how I can do that. And as I'm thinking about that, he said, well, you should meet Lisa. I was like, what a great idea. Perfect idea perfect yes and i think she's the one i met maybe there's more lisa's but let's see where he goes and i said yeah it'd be nice to meet her

Starting point is 01:39:48 so he goes off and he takes off to get lisa i see another lisa that i have met so just in case i put it inside the m&ms and i walk over while this other lady lisa is talking to these people i open her purse drop it in there put it there and then i go back to where i was he doesn't know this so So it was the right Lisa. It was, lucky for me. Otherwise I'd have to be doing some introductions. Okay. So I have to ask, what is it like for your wife to have a fight or argument with you? Because it could be, it seems like it could be a total nightmare. Or she would have to become such a master in your craft to be able to mount a defense.

Starting point is 01:40:31 Or that she would be like, I have some friends who are therapists, and sometimes their kids will say, stop therapizing me, Mom. And they'll be like, I know what you're doing. And they're like, oh. So what does that dynamic look like? Or is she like, weapons and badge on the table? Like take your tools, put them away. I don't want any of your horse shit.

Starting point is 01:40:50 Like we need to have a talk. It'd be easier to have game on, game off. I think we don't. We do use it in our social interactions with each other as well. But she does it too. So her career path, she became a mentalist. She left her career as a psychobiologist. Okay, all right.

Starting point is 01:41:03 This is non-trivial. Okay. It's huge. And so she studied mentalism after meeting Darren Brown. She went deep down that. She started performing for companies, but she had the background to science that I didn't have, so she'd translate for me. We had a daughter together a number of years later, and in between those, we had these unusual experiences of going in very dangerous places with different criminal groups to learn about them together, me and her on these adventures around the world in different strange places. Why did you do that?

Starting point is 01:41:31 Like to learn what types of things? It's easy to say that a magic trick comes from this book. It's a different thing to say, but where did this really come from? Where did this idea really come from? A certain type of pocket or a certain type of thing. And there were legends of people doing things in certain places. There's this group of women called the Forty Elephants that used to be in the UK. And around probably 1890 to the 1940s, they ran a criminal group there. And they could steal a large amount of things by altering their

Starting point is 01:42:00 clothing and doing a variation of what's called boosters or boosting. And that's my world, an encyclopedia of things like that. And who's the people that are doing it now? There's a resurgence of footage showing up now that YouTube is so pervasive with security cameras of women doing things that are like that, where they're stealing a flat screen TV, 32-inch flat screen TV, and putting it underneath their dress and walking without changing their gait. They're taking 10-pound cases of beer or wine and just making it vanish in their clothing and walking without changing their walk. There's a very interesting thing there that becomes, how is that knowledge being transferred?

Starting point is 01:42:34 It probably goes back to at least the one data point I know, the 40 elephants. Usually when I interact with different cultures of these, I track back through signals that they use or language or terms that they use, And I try to track where they learn from and we chased after that. And that's, Ava and I did that a lot. So to your original question, how do we, as a couple, we both are fascinated by that space. We now have a kid and I'd say it's more interesting probably for our kid of, we don't teach her that it's bad to lie we try to talk to her that deception is a social lubricant it happens all the time around us from the moment we put on makeup to something else whether it be a defeat for cancer by using decoy cells there's all these things that have a reason but it's about

Starting point is 01:43:16 your intent and that's the big thing could you say more about that because that would be very heretical to i'm sure some, some people listening, right? Wait a second, no, deception badge. Yes, yeah. No exceptions. Yeah. Black and white. That's the dark side of the force.

Starting point is 01:43:32 So could you say a bit more about how you teach your child, your children about deception? Or if you want to tackle this a different way, is there a pro-social or a positive use of deception and a way to frame that for people? That's definitely the flag I fly under now is I think that there's value in learning about deception. One of the reasons why we have critical thinking is to counter deception. And it's helpful now when people say we need more critical thinking to understand what was the original reason for it. Why do we need this reasoning process inside of a communal culture? We need to understand the role of deception. And there's been chases in the history of the study of the psychology of deception of trying to say, well, let's catch somebody and lie or lying is all bad.

Starting point is 01:44:17 But it's not. We use lies and levels of disclosure in our first dates. It's funny if you hear me now versus what my father's thinking would have been as a child. Sorry, my son is advocating for deception. But what I'm advocating for is an awareness of what deception is and expanding the horizons of what people think it can be. And I'll give you an example. Take the concepts that are used. Here's a concept. I'm going to make someone think that they have acted when they haven't. That's a very generic concept. Make them think that they have? Acted on something, taken an action when they haven't. That's a very generic concept. Make them think that they have... Acted on something, taken an action, when they haven't.

Starting point is 01:44:48 Okay. So I'll give you two contexts for that. If I, as a pickpocket, steal from somebody in another country and they're not too familiar with the language and I run away, their response will typically be to yell for police. One way of stopping that is to have a second member of my team come up to them while they're emotionally charged and to take a police. One way of stopping that is to have a second member of my team come up to them while they're emotionally charged and to take a police report and give them a ticket. And they think they have acted when they haven't. They have a peace of mind that they've taken some action. And while they're emotionally charged, what do they need to see? Maybe a clipboard,

Starting point is 01:45:17 a badge, a couple of things. And I don't need to show them much. But that concept, if you can distill the concept of that, how do I fight malaria? It's female mosquitoes that transfer the germ in malaria. But if I can release a hormone to a female mosquito to make her think that she has mated when she hasn't, I make her think that she has behaved, taken an action when she hasn't taken the action. And you can stop the spread of malaria. It's the same concept. So this use of deception is really the broader aspect.

Starting point is 01:45:43 How do we deceive a cell? How do we deal with coronavirus? It can be used in medicine, can be used in different areas. Using truth to deceive, that's a very powerful thing. It's the difference between malinformation versus disinformation. Malinformation is the use of true facts to deceive. And paltering is the name for it in business, of using it in advertising, of using a series of true statements to mislead. Can you give an example? I've never heard that term before. Which, paltering or? Paltering, yeah.

Starting point is 01:46:07 Yeah, paltering. If I said- It doesn't have to be a business example, but it would be an example of using the truth to deceive. If I release a series of true statements in a certain order, you're going to connect those and tell yourself a story. If you vet any of those true elements, they will show up to be true. But because they were delivered to you in a certain order, they'll create a belief. And that's the bigger thing. How do I craft a belief in you?

Starting point is 01:46:36 And that's been done a variety of ways on both sides of the political spectrum that we could say. It's done in advertising as well. There's a great book on propaganda by Eddie Bernays, where he explored it with doing a study on the most important meal of the day. And it was, at that time, I think, funded by the pork industry. And they found that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. He says, so the all-American breakfast, bacon, eggs, and toast is most important. But that wasn't part of the original study, the bacon and the eggs, to become part of the all-American breakfast. But repackaging that in there as well.

Starting point is 01:47:07 And a smaller thing, if I want to convey an implied statement to you. If I said, do you believe in ESP? Then I don't have anything to do. Okay, let's go with no then. I'm not sure where it's going. So if you say no, I say some people don't believe in ESP. Some people don't believe we ever walked on the moon. Both those statements are true, but I imply a third statement, that now, if you don't

Starting point is 01:47:28 believe in ESP, that you're similar to the people with conspiracy theories who never believe we walk on the moon. Right, right. You're making a sort of a false... Association. Association. By using true statements. And so, it's also, as a legality, it's a lot harder thing to grab onto.

Starting point is 01:47:40 And if I want to pull back one layer further... Yeah, it's slippery. It is. It's slippery. There's a lot of room for deception in advertising and product marketing also. I mean, so I didn't know that term, but there's a term called puffery, which is, it's an implied structure or function claim, but you can't make structure or function claims, for instance, with dietary supplements or in shampoo, because then it would be governed

Starting point is 01:48:06 by the FDA. It would be, and I'm simplifying this, but classified as a drug, and therefore you would have to go through all of these different steps and studies and so on. To avoid that, so puffery is the use of words that have basically no meaning whatsoever. Okay. So if you sell shampoo that is a hair volumizer, no agreed upon legal definition of a volumize, but it conjures an image of a very distinct effect. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:48:35 It's total bullshit. Absolutely. And when you have a label for this and you get a few examples, you start to see it everywhere. It's all over the place. In any case. But that's exactly to my point. I hope that people expand beyond just trying to get someone to lie, because so many of the things now that are impacting people in major ways are going beyond fabrication. They're going to narratives that craft belief systems. So my push that I think

Starting point is 01:49:01 is a nice way to stay off the political phrase, just to go after, how about I show you how these things are traditionally done? I'm going to show you the anatomy of those. I'm going to try to familiarize you with those, like I said, deception awareness. Oh, I see. You're saying, okay, we can talk about politics or a modern incarnation of this type of perceptual shaping, but let's do it vis-a-vis the 40 elephants. Yeah, because my goal, if I attack a political piece in the outcome of the behavior I'd like, is I would like for people to move more center. And I want there to be a kind of diplomacy between people.

Starting point is 01:49:38 That's the very nature of politics. So can I get them off the extremes? And I believe that teaching them without having to target them with their current beliefs to use these other metaphors instead of a turtle, I'm using cons and other deception. But to another point of something more ambiguous, I talked about change raising earlier, short changing somebody at cashier.

Starting point is 01:49:56 If I want to be softer in that, I could just, as a sleight of hand artist, I have the ability to change a bill from one bill to another, right? I can do that very quickly, but so do thieves. And if I go to a cashier and I said, can you give me a $100 bill? And I give you 10 $10 bills. That doesn't raise a lot of suspicion in the way that a $100 bill would in the other way where they vet that. But now you take those 10 tens, you put them in the register, you hand them to me and I take the hundred. But I just look at the hundred and I say, excuse me. And when you look at the hundred, you see now there's a 10 there I take the hundred. But I just look at the hundred and I say, excuse me. And when you look at the hundred, you see now there's a 10 there instead of a hundred. What is my claim?

Starting point is 01:50:29 I just said, excuse me. I didn't tell you that you gave me the wrong thing. I didn't make a bolster of a claim. I'm just allowing you to assume a story. Write your own story. And if you assume the wrong story and think you made a mistake and gave me a 10 instead of a hundred, you're going to take that back. Give me a hundred and I made $90. But if you went the other way and you were highly suspicious, you're on top of it, and you say, what? I said, could you give me two fives? So that allows me to go either way, because I have this 10, I can take that lane. Can you give me two fives? And that's what it means by equivocate. The equivocation of those things is this ambiguity used to deceive that can be taken in multiple directions.

Starting point is 01:51:08 Although you're kind of fucked on that exchange, right? Because you get the intent. It helps to be able to have the recording. Yeah. All right. So I want to talk for a second about books. So when you were younger, there were these various books. You mentioned a few of them. I think one of them was J.B. Bobo's Coin Magic. Yeah. That was the book that Ben Stone gave me, yes. Right. Had a large impact on your life, your thinking, and so on. Are there books in later chapters that have had an impact on you that come to mind? At specific points, there was one where some people that I had worked with started to say,

Starting point is 01:51:48 it was almost an implication that they thought I was psychic. And I wasn't buying into that. There was an incident that happened. Somebody had stolen something from me at that show at Caesar Palace with hundreds of people. And I had a backpack and somebody got there and stole out a set of special coins that I had that were very sentimental to me and said of a case. That's a bummer. Probably of no use to them. Yeah, but it was both emotional and significant to me and set up a case. That's a bummer. Probably of no use to them. Yeah, but it was both emotional and significant to me.

Starting point is 01:52:10 And I come back up, I just change into my street clothes. And I said, hey, what's the name of my bag? And the ticket ladies didn't know. I said, what do they look like? They said, yeah, there's a guy back here. I said, old, young, this, dark haired, light haired. And they said, I'm not sure. I said, did he go in the show route or did he go side door?

Starting point is 01:52:24 And they said side door. So he's in the luminarium, which is like a couple hundred people in that space now. And they said, yeah, he's there. I was like, oh man. I said, can you spot him if we go in there? And we go in, when I go to look for him, I ended up finding this guy out of a couple hundred people. Because they helped you spot him. No, they didn't know how to describe him. And I called my boss and I said, hey, can we do an announcement? Somebody stole my stuff. Can you do an announcement that we know that they stole it? And he says, no.

Starting point is 01:52:47 I said, all right. So then I went back in and changed my uniform for the show. And I went through everybody's pockets. I started going through assessing and profiling a few hundred people. And I found the guy. And you're eliminating different people. Grandpa's not going to do this. This guy's got his family. He's not going to take that chance.

Starting point is 01:53:03 And so I narrowed down to couples and other things. And then I see this guy and he's with another girl. And I went up to him and I said, hey, man, what's your name? And he goes, Slick. And he called himself Slick. I mean, that's not the thing. But as I went by, he was wearing like jogging pants and he only had something in his front left pocket.

Starting point is 01:53:19 So I tapped the thing, not tap, tap, but enough for me to know what it was. It was my case. So then I stole it back from him with i'm no one and i went and told my boss hey i found this guy can you call security and he said he's laughing and he's just like no you took the evidence he says but how can you find this guy he says what and he's telling everybody else but at that time back to your books question i always get on in tangents i really wanted to understand what was happening there. And I was like, is NLP? Is this, everybody says NLP.

Starting point is 01:53:47 Is that what this is? And it wasn't that, but it was- What you were doing or what he was doing? People were thinking about what I was doing as far as, and I didn't believe it was, I had super skills. But you were trying to deconstruct what you yourself were doing. And I was pushing at the science and I was really, so I found out about Robert Cialdini and his book on influence and different studies on the history of persuasion. I started ordering

Starting point is 01:54:07 textbooks from universities and really going into that. But then now, my areas of interest, the nice thing is I'm friends with a lot of the authors that I know. So, Dan Simons just wrote a book called Nobody's Fool that is going specifically after a problem that I'm very interested in, which is if we posit this idea that we need more critical thinking, we really need to define what critical thinking is. Because critical thinking, I think, is being used as a filler term to fill in the blank whenever we got a problem for reasoning. And I think it needs to be more specific than that to solve the problem. What behavior do we want to change? Do we want people to have an alternate hypothesis

Starting point is 01:54:44 to question their hypothesis? Because when is that the case and when is that conspiracy theory? And it now becomes the fixation on beliefs and when should we question what we think we know? And that's a very specific thing. So a lot of the things I'm reading right now are how beliefs are constructed, when should we question what we think we know, and how often do we update our belief systems? Is there firmware that needs to be updated? And how do we go about doing that? And I'm trying to find what my role is in trying to help with that. Outside of technical magic books, and I'm using magic broadly, could be any facet of that type of performance, what books have you re-read that come to mind? When I'm hovering around right now, I say that I'm re-reading it, but I'm going to be

Starting point is 01:55:31 soft on the title. I think it's called How Minds Are Changed. It's an important book that goes into the impact of deep canvassing, and is it possible to change someone's mind in a conversation with any lasting results? And what is the process of doing that? And that's different than in a traditional magic book. And also, when should you and why should you? It poses the idea of questioning your own beliefs and how you arrived at those and how necessary it is for you to update yours.

Starting point is 01:55:57 And I go back to that quite a bit. There's a book called The Person in This Situation. I think it's Nisbet. And we can get all the specifics, put them in the show notes as well. I do suffer from that when I buy a book. I think I'm going to buy the time to read it. But I do have several that I go back to repeatedly. And it tends to be that they are for specific functions of the things that are driving me in life. A friend of mine wrote a book called Deception in Digital Age. And he was with the FBI. His name is Cameron Malin.

Starting point is 01:56:25 It's a fascinating book in that space that I go into a lot. Does Wismob hold any special place in your heart or mind? And what is Wismob? Okay. If you go to books to the spirit of your question, which is what I should have listened to. I don't blame you for not listening to my spirit. It's an acquired taste. No, there's probably, so Bobo's Coin Magic, right? And then there was the Fitski books that Ben Stone tricked me into reading. God bless that guy, huh? They still reverberate because magic, the study of misdirection.

Starting point is 01:56:55 And then Wismob. Wismob was, it was this juxtaposition that there was a professor, David Maurer, who was studying the language of thieves. And not just, he wrote two books. He wrote The American Confidence Man, which later became Big Con. And it was one chapter of that was turned into the movie Sting. And that influenced a lot of other parts of that book were turned into elements for other movies that are cons and heist movies. And I was very interested because he was a linguist professor who was studying the language of thieves.

Starting point is 01:57:23 And Whiz Mom was a specific type of thieves. And Wismob was a specific type of theft. And it's not just a pickpocket on the street. The name of Wismob is this idea that there are thieves that travel, and they don't just work as a team, but there are some thieves that have learned all the roles in a team. They could shift between those roles so they didn't need the team anymore, and they were called cannons. And this term came back from the UK a long time ago. And Maurer was tracing that back, and he noticed that it was showing up in Chicago and other places that cannons were around. But he started to meet some people that were coming into Louisville, Kentucky for, I guess, the Kentucky Derby for this event.

Starting point is 01:58:08 And he found that there were groups of cannons that would find each other internationally and play as bigger teams. And they were fascinating because it was hard for surveillance to catch them because they could change their composition as a team, change their tactics, and they had very different skill levels. And that lit a fire for me to try to find a cannon, to try to find a whiz mob. And the yorker article that is all about that of me finding my first canon and then a year ago when i moved to washington dc another canon reached out to me by email and it said hey we have similar interests with mauer's work i'm one of the original whiz mom i said what i said well that's an easy thing to vet and i said so it's in writing right so i got to vet this guy out and he talked about when he was 14 years old and he was a six foot four black man coming to, at that time, it was very hard to get in some space. So he had to invent whole new approaches to stealing. Also,

Starting point is 01:58:53 what racism meant in that kind of community. He was writing a book about that and he wanted to get together with me. He lives in the DC area. We still haven't got together. So sometime if you want to get together with the two of us. Yeah, I'm in. That is the driver. That's where I used to spend a lot of my time. That book, Maurer's book, taught me to be a student of these arcane disciplines and see what I could learn. So, a question on arcane discipline as it applies to the team roles. People may be familiar with the different positions on an American football team or basketball team, probably are not familiar with the different roles that a canon could take. So what does a team of thieves look like? Or at least what are the fundamental roles?

Starting point is 01:59:40 I think a lot of people don't know the structure of a pickpocket team. They tend to know football, basketball, baseball very intimately and very impassioned. But for a pickpocket team, it tends to be different. It's their intention not to be seen. they all have functions in what people would think is, oh, that's just a diversion. But it's more than that. And as you move from country to country, there's different approaches of how people steal in one country versus another. And it tends to be that you see them move like a school of fish through a crowd. So if somebody's in an event and they've locked onto a target, as that target moves through, whether it's a casino or an event, you'll see the thieves move with them as a school of fish. And the roles with that, the wire is kind of embodied in a character from a movie called Harry Never Holds. And it was about a pickpocket that would steal from people and he would hand off his stuff. If anybody rolled him up, he's the quarterback. They don't want to catch the quarterback because he's the most valuable player. That function is a metaphor. So how would he pass? Who would he pass to?

Starting point is 02:00:49 And the other roles in the team become the stalls or the sticks, which they set up a frame. They stop somebody's elbow from moving backwards and grabbing hold of the thief's hand. They might open a newspaper. They might look at a book if it's on a subway, but they're going to be underneath the edge of an elbow. So a hand can't get back. So that's what I mean by setting a frame on someone. Running interference. Yeah. So they came and moved back.

Starting point is 02:01:10 Then there's the shade. The shade's kind of counter surveillance. They're looking to identify undercover law enforcement. As they scope through a crowd, they're very good at identifying what they look like and also where the cameras are. And there's a steer who identifies the good targets. Pause for one second. So the shade, is that a pregame activity or is that done real time?

Starting point is 02:01:33 How do they alert people to an issue? Well, that's often an indicator of who they are too. A shade might use a physical indicator. Sometimes as different groups go, they used to use Nextel phones or they used to. So I've seen that happen at a mall when I visited DC a number of years ago. I've seen it happen different ways in Japan with like kissing noises. In Naples, they do whistles. It's different sounds. Columbian diversion teams will use like a finger up the back of the neck, which indicates that we have surveillance and split. And they'll do probe testing where maybe as somebody's going in to do a steal, they'll they since they've got heat from a surveillance they might drop their sightline towards a lady's purse and if someone bounces off their sightline and tracks to that they know

Starting point is 02:02:15 they've got heat and so they give a signal to their team to dissipate so there's okay so we stopped this shade i interrupted so what came afterer. A steer is somebody who qualifies the mark. And these are right out of Wismob, but as I started meeting different teams, it's been fascinating to find people on the street that still use variations of these terms, because that means somehow they learned those from someone. What does the steer do? They qualify the mark. They do a testing bite and they're like... Well, think about the cost-risk association of if we're going to make a play on someone,

Starting point is 02:02:46 we might go to prison for it. We need to qualify them. Want to make sure the juice is ripped to squeeze. So how do you qualify? It's changed now with phones. But if you have earbuds or any kind of cord going down to a device, I now know where it is and I can qualify that. And so for a lot of Eastern European teams and in England and other places, they just

Starting point is 02:03:04 know that you're going to have a phone. So more people become targets just for their phones because they know how to fence those and run those in the market. Clever things of what they can do with a phone now. They can run it through your whole bank accounts really quick now. They can access your bank account vis-a-vis your phone. And I don't know exactly this place because it's not like a zero-day major hack, not like a sponsored state hack. They do have some way of getting into your phone pretty quick. And I've seen that over the last three years take a surgence of stealing in a nightclub. It could be as simple as pointing it back at you, get your facial recognition, but some kind of automation that they're running to be able to run through all your accounts, through your passwords, shut you out, set up dual-factor authentication, lock you out of everything, and just take you. So that's a whole different thing. But back in the day, once upon a time, when the steers would go, they'd be more interested in when you go to an ATM or a bank and you qualify, they call it peeking the poke, seeing what money is inside the wallet. They had names for all these things, the pit, the kick, the bridge, the fob, uptown, downtown for different pockets.

Starting point is 02:04:06 They all had names and they could use them around each other. It was a very rich language that has some of us permeated into our culture, but it's a fascinating place. The steer, I think for me, when I'm looking for a team, I often look for the steer. Either the steer or the shade. If I'm in a crowd, I'm looking for their scout. Because the scout's moving sight lines. He's looking. I look for people that are either targets or they're law enforcement. And I can identify those.

Starting point is 02:04:35 And if I can identify them, somebody else is looking at them. So then I just track sight lines through a crowd to see who's looking at them. And then I'm going to look for their signals. And I can start to identify the group. And then I can start to look at how they're doing there. So from a defensive standpoint, someone's going on a road trip, they're going to be going through all sorts of countries, they're going to be in crowded environments surrounded by lots of people. Chances are there's going to be, if not solo operators, teams in these environments, right? Let's say it's

Starting point is 02:05:04 festivals and so on where certainly teams are at work, much like the Kentucky Derby, or you go to Carnival, you can bet your ass there are going to be some pros there. What can you do? What would your advice be to someone who doesn't want to get their stuff taken? I guess I would imagine there's just don't carry anything you don't need to carry. There's other preventative measures. I mean, you hear about money belts and this, that, and the other thing. What are your thoughts? Just like self-defense, it's a mindset first. And over the last 30 years, I guess, that I've been doing this kind of crazy three decades, I've seen society lower their situational awareness and increase their overconfidence. And it's a juxtaposition between that. It's the pandemic of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's this level of unconscious incompetence or this illusion

Starting point is 02:05:50 of invulnerability. And there's articles saying that pickpockets don't really exist anymore, that that's gone down. I disagree. And pickpockets aren't the only problem. Like I just talked about the hacking element of this. Deepfakes is a whole new thing. I mean, a recent thing that's just gone to case with impersonating, you might've seen this on a ransom case where they implied that they ransomed a daughter and this is okay so they they used a deep fake to quote unquote prove that they'd kidnapped the audio they had the audio of a daughter talking to a mother screaming that she's been kidnapped and i mean that's going to drive anybody to take the behavior right away so they were able to extract the ransom?

Starting point is 02:06:29 I believe so. I know that's being prosecuted though right now. And I think it's one of the early lessons. There's also weaponized as far as in the military right now, there was somebody impersonated the mayor of Kiev within the last three months that was speaking to other mayors in Europe and it was Russian based, but they were on a real-time live Zoom call while they were talking to these people. And doing a real-time live deep fake on a Zoom call. And then about a few minutes in, there was some kind of glitch. Longer than that, they got enough information, there was a glitch. And then they called back to speak to the mayor of Kiev. And they said he hasn't been on a call.

Starting point is 02:06:58 So there's a future there that's coming that is intense. So a lot of these concepts where I mention them from pickpocketing and things, that's why I noticed I didn't go to just getting a better money belt. I went to the importance for concepts because the overconfidence will work against people. Oh yeah, you see people in any major city. We're sitting in New York City right now.

Starting point is 02:07:17 The number of people I have seen see a go signal and walk across the street with earbuds in looking at their phones not checking either direction yeah in this city yeah it is unbelievable i mean hundreds of them i've seen hundreds and it's like i two times when i've been to japan the first time i went there there was this kind of connection of everybody around and then the second second time, a couple of decades later, went back, the latching in of the smartphones. And it really does become this kind of, not narcissism, but this kind of egocentricism of through their virtual world, they're exploring out there. And while they're plugged into that, like the matrix, I guess you'd say, their physical body becomes vulnerable. And so as a predator mindset of looking at people like that,

Starting point is 02:08:06 there used to be a term among thieves called the griff sense. And they felt that the griff sense was more important than technique. The ability to extract that from someone and be able to know where their attention was, how much they're investing their attention on a thing. Now it becomes more salient when somebody is holding their phone and you can see where their attention is and you can see what they're doing. So I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but I am curious. Let's just say you've tried to identify the minimum of the essentials that you want to have on you, right? You got a safe at the hotel, not saying that's automatically safe, by the way, but for argument's sake, you've tried

Starting point is 02:08:45 to leave as much behind as possible. You have no cash. You're like, I'll try to use Apple Pay. You got your phone. Where should you put it on your body? Or some targets, I would imagine some are harder than others. Yeah, they are. So your inside jacket pocket, they used to think that that was the hardest pocket to steal from because they would call it kissing the dog. That was the old term. Kissing the dog meant that I would have to see the mark's face. With most other extractions, you wouldn't get to see me. My team would lock you up. I would work in a blind spot angle and I would do an extraction that way. But if I had to steal from inside your jacket pocket, I've come up with a few ways to extract that without you having to see my face per se. And I can show you maybe some of that a little bit.

Starting point is 02:09:23 Headbutting the dog. Yes, headbutting the dog. Make sure they don't remember. So inside jacket pocket is a spot. I think it's more of when you take things out to make a payment, it's useful to leave something there. There's a great thing that often beats security is what they call satisfaction of search, where they're looking for a thing, an anomaly.

Starting point is 02:09:42 They find something that satisfies that and they stop looking. You can reverse that and use that for thieves. Give them something to find. Give them a, if you're going to go make a purchase out somewhere, quarantine a portion of your money. Any valuables that you have, sentimental or other things, don't wear them publicly. If you're moving into any kind of isolated spot, because it's not just pickpockets, it's going to be for getting mugged too. And you can hide them in plain sight. So, for example,

Starting point is 02:10:09 what is your EDC? What are the things you carry with you? Now more and more people are carrying. Everyday carry. Yeah. EDC, everyday carry, and definitely a pickpockets library, right? Your water bottle, a coffee cup, those things. If I take things that are of value, sentimental value, an improvised safe could be a coffee cup. I put these items inside of a coffee cup, put a lid on it. And now even if you rob me, taser me and strip me down, you probably won't search in that coffee cup. That's the mindset that I'm talking about. So the idea of treating the unimportant as important and the important as unimportant, if you want to simplify it. And I think you can take that to your hotel room.

Starting point is 02:10:45 Are you going to buy some kind of stash concealment that looks like aftershave? Or are you going to do those things instead of leave something there in the safe? Because you need to satiate their curiosity. You need to give the dog a bone to find. You need to, as Herb Simon in behavioral economics, he would call it satisficing. You need something that satisfies your curiosity. I'm glad I asked. Thank you. What is the Illusion of Knowledge project? That is a current effort. So we have a new company that we're trying to create. And I've kind of tiptoed into that as we've been speaking about, it's a soft business model. We're trying to still shape of what the market is for that. But we think it's important to point the

Starting point is 02:11:21 finger at the problem that we see on the horizon. The benefit is I have an amazing network of people that I've learned from. It used to be thieves, but now it's security specialists and experience or content, that can help people engage with things that they might not think are important. Their data, their other things. Can you reverse a room escape and make it a heist? And while people are trying to break into a thing, they learn about their personal data. These kind of examples. Yeah, it probably is now stolen that I've said it out loud. We could add in a bunch of bleeps if you like. Yeah, no, leave it in there. It's just karma for me doing all the things I've done. But it's the kind of things that give you those ideas. So we did a project along that. It was a video project called The Illusion of Knowledge. And it's this Daniel Borson quote, the enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge. And that marries so well with my background growing

Starting point is 02:12:23 up around cons. and since my job has always been instilling confidence not just the extraction of personal items from a person it's getting people to make other decisions and as i learn about that i think it's very important for people to understand that we are all puppets that we all have strengths and it's a benefit for people to know that about themselves instead of saying, but I'm not a puppet and realize that they do have a string. And what does it mean for somebody to pull that string? And that awareness of how, what it looks like in different ways that those strings can be pulled, I think can help bring people so that the flags go up. So we're creating this project,

Starting point is 02:12:59 the Illusion of Knowledge project to kind of highlight some of that. Where can people find that? Or can they not yet find it? They can't find it yet. There's a trailer that's on it. We have this website called Equivoke. And Equivoke is E-Q-U-I-V-O-K-E. Or they can go to my website. It's easy.

Starting point is 02:13:15 My website is isteelstuff.com. And it's easier for people to remember while they're driving. But if you go to that, there'll be a link to Equivoke. There's a link to those things. Explore and poke around. I don't have much content out there that I put as products because right now I'm at a phase where I have two kids. I have one that's 30, one that's six, and I want to try to do the thing that I can to change the world in the way that I can. So a lot of these are legacy type things that build it first, build business

Starting point is 02:13:42 model later, which is probably the best approach. But it's something that I'm doing right now. You know, it may not always be the most fail-safe approach, but it is, I think, the approach that I see align with intention and integrity very often in people who are, and I mean this in the most complimentary sense possible, high-level craftsmen or craftswomen. It's not impossible to do. It can be difficult to do, but I don't think it's an incorrect approach. Does that make sense? Because you can conversely, and look, I invest in a lot of, or I have historically invested in a lot of startups and early stage companies and so on. And it can be incredibly profitable to start with a model and then figure out what fits around that. However, when you have a craft and when you have the refined perception and ability to operate in the world that you have, that you can expand into these different domains, I think that approach makes a lot of sense. I really do. Because you

Starting point is 02:14:40 can corrupt the sincerity of the knowledge you've accumulated by force fitting it into a model yeah anyway well said i think i don't know if the right metaphor i've spoken hub but it is a little bit like that i have different ways i've been able to make a very good living through whether speaking or doing workshops or doing training or creating things to teach security. And as I'm doing those, since I got my boxes checked, I felt, okay, let's be exploratory. What else can I use this thing that I have, this network that I have? And instead, can it be something that is using the fun part of where I came from? So I have to ask, because this is just, my brain won't let it go. Yeah. So the 40 elephants elephants i just love this name are there other historical figures or bands of merry pranksters slash criminals who have

Starting point is 02:15:35 particularly memorable names or stories for you like it's like if you had to put together your league of legends yeah is there a short list i've had the good fortune meeting a lot of interesting characters there's some that i've spent time with and there's some that i've just read about in the space of like famous thieves or con artists there is the unsinkable titanic thompson who titanic thompson yep his nickname was ty from those who knew him well there's books been written about. I think people have talked about doing movies over the years. Supposedly, he would advertise he was coming to a town because he gambled on everything, and people were drawn to that. He was a proposition bet hustler, but he had super skills.

Starting point is 02:16:17 What is a proposition bet hustler? Meaning he bet on things that he would just win. He had a special set of skills or support staff, covert support staff, that allowed him to make outrageous bets on weird things. Can you think of an example? Yeah. One, he would bet just first on golf. He's very good at golf. And he would play somebody and he'd be beating them. And he says, listen, I'll give you a handicap.

Starting point is 02:16:41 I'll play with left-handed. And then he would beat them again. And they didn't realize that he was left-handed, but he's that good that he could beat people right-handed. Back to Prince's pride again. Yes. And so he definitely could switch the hands. He was very famous for being able to throw things accurately inside of cups from a distance, other things. He could throw a card from a long ways away through a window. And being above a pool hall was one story where he would be trying to toss a hat missing occasionally and side bets on a poker game.

Starting point is 02:17:06 And he says, let's bet a grand that I can toss a card through that window all the way down where the window is. And so he'd take the bet and throw a card through, and then they'd close down the window. He gets a second bet. And then Kenny, he says, listen, I'm going to throw it through the window. It's going to come back and it's going to stick to the outside of the window. I said, what? No, just silly. And it would.

Starting point is 02:17:23 And you see those in the literature. They're like, no, that's like magic territory. And then he. And you see those in the literature about it. They're like, no, that's like magic territory. And then he would, somebody be eating pretzels and he says, the pretzel, I'm going to take that pretzel and throw it over that three-story building over there or that walnut. And they'd say, no, that can't. And he would. And he'd throw a pretzel over a walnut. So he seemed like some kind of Robin Hood slash superhero, but there's great books on him, on the unsinkable Titanic Thompson. I have the good fortune of knowing the last surviving member of his team that was the guy who was down below in the pool hall with a fan and rubber cement through

Starting point is 02:17:52 the window. But he would do amazing things to layer these very intricate cons besides that. So there's a handful of those guys, the unsinkable Titanic Thompson, Joseph Wheel, the yellow kid, the Count Victor Lustig. He's the guy who sold the Eiffel tower twice. And it's amazing. How do you sell the Eiffel tower? And it is a beautiful con of took advantage of the time when the Eiffel tower was not had the significant value that it did. It was after a world's fair and it might need to be turned into scrap. So he put out a bid as a city official to be able to look for somebody who

Starting point is 02:18:23 could tear it down. And then as different contractors bid on it, he found a guy who really needed the job. And meanwhile, the wife of the guy says, I think there's a rat. I smell something. There's something up here. And he had the beautiful turn in a con, which he recognized that the wife had that suspicion. And he answered in a unique way. He just said, listen, I got to make something on this. If you guys really want this deal, I'm going to need a cut. So they decided, okay, hey, that's the rat. That's the thing. He is suspicious. He's a city official who needs a cut. Instead, it's a whole fake. So not only did he get the money he was getting, he also got the extra money as well. Oh, man.

Starting point is 02:18:57 So there's all these guys, all these interesting lessons of these guys. But I had a personal best friend for 17 years, Rod the Hop. And he is significant. If people have ever watched like Ocean's Eleven and they wondered, well, I wonder if there's a real ocean. There's a couple of guys that Ocean's character would probably be attributed to do, but Rod would be on that short list, among thieves at least. And he was a legend among thieves and people didn't know what he looked like generally because of the nature of the work. But he played a lot of different styles. He was a card hustler, card cheat, but there's like a Southern style, a Gardenia style. These different styles of playing long and short games, but using devices

Starting point is 02:19:34 that shoot out your sleeve and grab things called a joint or a Keppinger holdout. He was very good at a lot of those things. I met him when I first moved to New Vegas. He was sitting off in a corner. It was a thing where some magicians were in. he was off the side of that. And he was playing with plastic cards, and he was shuffling them at the table, and not in a way that magicians handle cards. And he had an edge that was a little bit more, felt like family to me. And I saddled up to him, talked to him a little bit. So not the way that magicians handle cards, in the sense that you recognize more of like a working card mechanic? Yeah, because mechanics can't have flourish.

Starting point is 02:20:10 They can't pick up the deck off the table. They don't shuffle in the same way that they do. All their slides have to be done within the constraints of what the casinos have manifest. So it would look very mundane on the surface, but there's a lot going on there. And also plastic cards, magicians would never want to use plastic cards, but poker players would. So when I began talking to him, we kind of hit up a friendship and talked a little bit. And as he learned more about my past and I was going through a divorce at the time too, I was around 21. He knew I needed some money. And he said, hey, you want to play with my team? And they were hitting casinos or at least

Starting point is 02:20:42 side spots, kind of periphery casinos or gas stations and hitting slot machines and things. And he could cheat a slot machine and make it pay out a bonus. But he needed watch guards. He needed me to learn a Cody system and stuff. And I said, sorry, man, I've grown up around some things like this. And there's this line that I know once I step across the line, I'll always move it. So I can't, man. But I really appreciate it.

Starting point is 02:21:04 He says, well, how about all these magic books? What are you going to do with those? I said, I step across the line, I'll always move it. So I can't, man, but I really appreciate it. He says, well, how about all these magic books? What are you going to do with those? I said, I don't know. I guess I'm going to have to sell them to get this thing for the divorce. And he said, well, I'll buy those from you. So he bought all my magic books from me. And one of his team turned on him and he ended up getting arrested right after that. And I got this box of books back with this kind of little note as a friend

Starting point is 02:21:25 saying, I knew you wouldn't take the money unless I did this. He gave me all my books back. So later when he got out of prison, I said, I'm doing some new stuff now and I need some friends. You want to be a friend? And I asked him to join our team. Great line. So he joined the team and we had about a dozen guys. Kevin Mitnick, a famous hacker, was one of those guys. The art of deception. Yeah. And he was a dear friend who just recently passed away.

Starting point is 02:21:50 Oh, I didn't know that. I'm sorry. But I saw him right before he got sick last year for cancer. But very dear friends I've learned so much from. But Rod used to do heists on casinos. Mitnick had all of his legends. It's a story for another time. But I've been influenced by amazing guys in that way that I've learned about.

Starting point is 02:22:08 So what did the team do? What was he doing on the team? So that was definitely, I can clarify, a bad business model. So that was WizMob Incorporated, inspired by the book you mentioned, WizMob. And the idea was that we would team guys together and send them out as a speaking agency for security maybe teaming with their counterparts and law enforcement mitnick already had that game going he was doing full penetration testing so he just hung out with us as a subject matter expert like when it was beneficial to learn what are covert communication systems that pickpockets use versus car cheese versus guys that would break into a place like a cat burglar functionally so all those

Starting point is 02:22:44 kind of guys we had kind of in our cadre, and they all had different ways of approaching those things. So it was valuable. Also him in pulling and tugging at social engineering, which I consider very similar to an evolution of Khan. He had me come in and speak at DEF Khan and at his company, Know Before Later. But we learned from each other in those worlds. Well, we've covered a lot of ground here.

Starting point is 02:23:04 Is there anything that we haven't covered that you'd like to cover? Is there anything you'd like to share with the audience? Ask of my audience? Anything at all before we start to wind to a close? My daughter's six

Starting point is 02:23:21 but when she was around three she was learning a lot of new words that I don't say. And you try to choose what's a good word and a bad word. And how often, if you use the word no too much, do they become numb to them? So maybe use other words besides no. And I was always interested in how different experts do parenting and what that might be. But there was a word she asked me, what does boring mean? Without really thinking about it too much, I said, it's a word that's not a bad word, but it's a word I don't use really because I don't really have it. I've never been bored. But part of it is because boring means that your imagination is broken.

Starting point is 02:23:55 So you got to find a way to do it. You got to find something to do and you got to use your imagination better. And I didn't realize what that would do, but now I have a kid who's never said that they're bored. And that's a huge thing. That's huge. What an advantage. What happens when we just change a word? What does it do to a behavior?

Starting point is 02:24:12 So in all the long drives she's taken with us across the country, she's never said, I'm bored. She knows what it means. She hears her friends say it. And she doesn't think if my dad tells me not to say it, because I tell her you can say it, but she chooses not to. And it's a thing that I'm obviously proud of her about that. But it's also to me such a valuable thing of the state of being bored is where creative epiphanies often happen. But what if we just remove that word and think of it in a different way? And we think about it as when she is in that state, she says, I need some help. I need to think of something to do. And she's just doing that. And I said, well, there's so many things and you only got so much time. Where do we want to start? And I said,

Starting point is 02:24:48 should we go this way or that way or what? And it becomes a different thing. I said, do you want to do something that you want me to help you generate? Come up with some ideas? Or she says, no, I just want to think for a little while. So she'll just look out the window and think. And so it's a fascinating thing to look at how long her attention span is compared to a lot of her friends. Do you think that that has helped her, despite not having, I assume, not having had the four scump races, to become a better watcher in the same way that you became a good watcher i think so i think that is one of the contributors i think also i'm a big proponent of i used to call it covert learning strategies of the miyagi aspect of i'm going to do covert learning to repackage the hard lessons

Starting point is 02:25:39 as something else oh you want to learn how to levitate a coin i think it's in uh exactly three books absolutely oh you only read volume one i think it's in these three books. Absolutely. Oh, you only read volume one. I think it's in two or three. And there's two things, because if somebody has a big ego and they don't think that they need to learn something, or you have learned helplessness where people don't think it's possible for them to learn it. So what if I hide that? Another pro-social application of deception. Maybe I can use that to help them learn a thing they thought was irrelevant. And secretly I've taught that to help them learn a thing they thought was irrelevant and secretly or impossible yes and now by the way you can do it and so i'm really interested in that space and

Starting point is 02:26:10 we do that to her all the time that now if she says like trying to teach her a memory system can i repackage as a series of other things that now this little tour that we took was secretly a mind palace and now she learns how to do that. So what are the different ways that you can package learning? Trojan horse. Absolutely. Apollo, what a gift. What an incredibly fun conversation. I think we may stand up and try to do some things. So for people who are interested in some more visual, you can go to

Starting point is 02:26:40 Tim Ferriss on YouTube and we will hopefully post some goodies there for you. Where are the best places for people to find you online? I'm on Facebook, although there seems to be like five or six of me that isn't me, but as imposters do. Sort of appropriate. So I haven't canceled them out, but there's one me on Facebook. I'm on Instagram, not very active, but I'll probably be more. I haven't engaged with the new version of Twitter. I haven't fully jumped onto the next.

Starting point is 02:27:06 Can't bring myself to say X. TikTok, I'm not coming close to. Just my security mind won't let me even touch it. Yeah, don't do it. But on Twitter, add Apollo Robbins. Yeah, so pretty much add Apollo Robbins across the board. There are a lot of my audience. It's very, very interesting folks are on Twitter.

Starting point is 02:27:23 So it's worthwhile mentioning that just because that might be fun to see yeah how things come out of the woodwork and then as far as websites go yep best website or websites they funnel to the same thing of apollo robbins.com or i steal stuff.com i steal stuff they'll take you to the same place but this other new one that is going to be a separate thing is Equivoke and that one will be probably a combination of an entertainment blog with other video content and other things where we're going to be trying to point to tools that are important in this space. There's a guy that I think is amazing that studies deception, Simon Henderson, he's from the UK, him, Anthony Perkanis, my wife Ava Doe, all of them as a collective will be doing interviews,

Starting point is 02:28:05 videos, and other things for those guys. So if you want to come play in the space, learn a little bit about cons, we won't attack your political beliefs, but we will attack what you believe. What a great place to end. Apollo, thank you for such an incredibly, not just entertaining, but educating and invigorating conversation. I'm so glad that you made the time. And for people listening, you can do more than you may believe you are capable of doing. So Paulo and I, and hopefully you, will seek to prove this out. And we'll put links in the show notes, as always, to everything we talked about at Tim.blogspotcast. And as usual, I'll say it again. Until next time, please be a bit kinder than is necessary,

Starting point is 02:28:48 not only to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Starting point is 02:29:04 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short,

Starting point is 02:29:46 a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Sundays for Dogs, ultra high quality dog food without the prep or mess. Thanks for listening. frozen mess. I've tried them. It's a disaster. They are a pain in the ass to thaw and serve,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #699: Apollo Robbins, The World’s Most Famous Pickpocket — Pickpocketing the Secret Service, Manipulating Attention, Famous Con Artists, The Psychology of Deception, Self-Defense Techniques, The Secret Language of Thieves, and More

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