YouSaid · the spoken record

Apollo Robbins

lines on the record: 230
first: 2023-10-19
most recent: 2023-10-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It'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 try 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, 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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 version.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And now, by the way, you can do it. And so I'm really interested in that space. And 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 learners?”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 as something else.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happens when we just change a word? What does it do to a behavior? So, in all the long drives she's taken him with this 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 of my dad tells me not to say it because I tell you 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's, 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, should we go this way or that way? 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. She says, no, I just want to think for a little while. So she'll just look out the window and think. And really, and so it's a fascinating thing to look at how.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My daughter's six, 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, they become numb to him. So maybe you 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 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. Part of it is because boring means that your imagination is broken. 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. 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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was a definitely I can clarify a bad business model. So that was Wiz mob Incorporated, inspired by the book you mentioned, Wiz Mob. And the idea was that we would team guys together and send them out as a speaking agency for security, maybe team them with their counterparts and law enforcement. Mitnik already had that game going. He was doing full penetration testing. So he just hung out with us as a subject matter expert. It was beneficial to learn what are covert communication systems that pickpockets use versus car choose versus guys that would break into a place like a cat burglar functionally. So all those 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 pulling and tugging at social engineering, which I consider very similar to an evolution of con he had me come in and speak at DEF CON and at his company know before later.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I'm right before he got sick last year for cancer. But very dear friends, I've learned so much from. But Rod used to do high sun casinos. Metnick 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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 saying, I know you wouldn't take the money unless I did this and 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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll always move it. So I can't, man. But I really appreciate it. He goes, Well, how about all these magic books? What are you trying to do? 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 for you. So he bought all my magic books from me.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because mechanics can't have flourish. 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 complain with my team? And they were hitting casinos or at least side spots kind of periphery casinos or gas stations and hitting slot machines and things. He could cheat a slot machine and make it pay out a bonus. But he needed watch guards. He needed me to learn a coding 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 a line.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, if people have ever watched Oceans 11 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 shortlist 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 are playing long and short games using devices that shoot out your sleeve and grab things called a joint or Keplinger 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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it might need to be turned into scraps. So he put a bid as a city official to be able to look for somebody who 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 you recognize that the wife had that suspicion. And he answered it in a unique way. He just said, listen, I'm. I gotta make something on this. If you guys really want this deal, I might 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 put the extra money as well.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you see those in the literature about like, no, that's like magic territory. And then he would somebody eating pretzels and he says, and 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, 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 cementow. 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, he took advantage of the time when the Eiffel Tower was not had the significant value that it did. It was after World's Fair.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 that hat missing occasionally and side bets on a poker game. 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 they'd take the bet and throw a card through and then they close down the window. He gets a second bet. And then he says, oh, 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 window. No, just silly. And it would.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One, he would bet just first. 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. I'll play with left-handed. And then he would beat him again. And they didn't realize that he was left-handed. But he's that good. They could beat people right-handed.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. The nickname was Ty, from those who know him well. There's books been written about him. I think people have talked about doing movies over the years. Supposedly he would advertise he was coming to town because he gambled on everything and people were drawn to that. It was a proposition bet hustler, but he had super skills. He acquired a lot of skills”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 famous thieves or con artists. There is the unsinkable Titanic Thompson”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well said. I think, I don't know if the right metaphor of spoken hub, but it is a little bit like that, that I have different ways I've been able to make a very good living through, whether it's 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?”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's easier for people to remember while they're driving. But if you go to that, there will 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 model later, which is probably the best approach, but it's something that I'm doing right now.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't find it yet. There's a trailer that's we have this website called Equivoke, and Equivoke is EQUIVOKE, or they can go to my website. It's easy. My website is iSealstuff.com.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 up around Khans. 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 problem.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 is a soft business model? It's still shape of what the market is for that, but we think it's important to point the finger at the problem that we see on the horizon. The benefit is I have amazing network of people that I've learned from. It used to be thieves, but now it's security specialists and other ones, and just specialists around the world that are incredible experts in these areas. And I was saying, My background's in entertainment. We did some TV works, different things. Can we repackage shows, whether it's TV or live experience or content that can help people engage with things that they might not think are important, their data, there are other things. Can you reverse a room escape and make it a heist and what 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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to simplify it? And I think you can take that to your hotel room. 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 satisfying. You need something that satisfies your curiosity.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, EDC Everyday Carrie, and definitely a pickpockets library, right? Your water bottle, a coffee cup, those things. If I take things that are of value, sentimental value, and improvise 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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, 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 apportion your money. Any valuables that you have sentimental or other things don't wear them publicly. And 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, what is your EDC? What are the things you carry with you? Now more and more people are carrying...”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wouldn't get to see me, that 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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 time, a couple decades later went back, the latching end 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, 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 being able to know where their attention was, how much they're investing their attention on a thing. Now it becomes more salience when somebody's holding their phone and you can see where their attention is and you can see what they're doing.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 some impersonated the mayor of Kyiv 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 Keev, and they said he hasn't been on a call.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just like self defense, it's a mindset first. And over the last thirty 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. This level of unconscious incompetence or this illusion 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 have seen this on ransom case where they implied that they ransomed a daughter. And this is okay.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 when you go to an ATM or a bank and you qualify, they call it peak in the poke, seeing what money is inside the wallet. They had names for all these things. Pitt, the kick, the bridge, the fob, uptown, downtown for different pockets. 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 sidelines, he's looking, I look for people that are either targets or they're law enforcement, and I can identify those. And if I can identify him, somebody else is looking at him. So then I just track sidelines through the crowd to see who's looking at them.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 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 surge of doing 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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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. So it's more they can access your phone.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, think about the cost risk association if we're going to make a play on someone, we might go to prison for it. We need to qualify the model.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A steer is somebody who qualifies the mark, and these are right out of Wiz Mob, 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 learn those from someone.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Next Tell 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. Colombian diversion teams will use a finger at 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, if 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 they've got heat. And so they give a signal to their team to dissipate. So there's...”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So they came and moved back. Then there's the shade. The shades kind of countersurveillance. 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 target.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 has a metaphor. So how would he pass? Who would he pass to? 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 why I mean like setting a frame on something.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, yes, and there's names for him. Historically, the wire, the stick, the shade, the stall, and 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”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 gain some in space. So he had to invent whole new approaches to stealing. Also, 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. That is the driver. That's where I used to spend a lot of my time. That book, Mauer's book, taught me to be a student of these arcane disciplines to see what I could”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kay a long time ago. And Mauer was tracing that back, and he noticed it was showing up in Chicago and other places that cannons were around. But he started to meet some people that were coming to Louisville, Kentucky for, I guess, the Kentucky Derby for this event. 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 him because they could change their composition as a team, change their tactics. And they had very different skill levels. And that litifier for me to try to find a canon, to try to find Wismob. And the New Yorker article that is all about that, of me finding my first canon. And then a year ago when I moved to Washington, D.C., another canon reached out to me by email and said, hey, we have similar interests with Mauer's work. I'm one of the original WISM. I said, what? I said, well, that's an easy thing to vet. And I said.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They still reverberize his magic study of misdirection. And then Wismob. WizMob was, it was this juxtaposition that there was a professor, David Mauer, 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. They are cons and heist movies. And I was very interested because he was a linguist professor who was studying the language of thieves. And Wiz Mob was a specific type of theft. And it's not just a pickpocket on the street. The name of Wizmob 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. This term came back from the UK.”
2023-10-19 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT