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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“I don't blame you for nothing. No, there's probably. So Bobo's coin magic, right? And then there was the Fitzki books that Ben Stone tricked me into reading.”
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 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 of Digital Age, and he was with the FBI. His name is Cameron Malin. It's a fascinating book in that space that I go into a lot.”
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, I'll give you a list of those, yeah. 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.”
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'm hovering around right now. I say that rereading it, but I'm going to be 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. And I go back to that quite a bit. There's a book called The Person in the Situation. I think it's Nisbit.”
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
“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 to question their hypothesis? Because when is that the case and when is that a 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? I'm trying to find what my role is in trying to help with 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
“But you were trying to deconstruct what you yourself. And I was pushing at the science, and I was really, so I found out about Robert Ceraldini and his book on influence and different studies on the history of persuasion. I started ordering 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.”
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 how can you find this guy? He says, What? And he's telling everybody else. But at that time, back to your book's question, I always get on tangents. I really wanted to understand what was happening there. And I was like, is NLP? Is this everybody says NLP? Is that what this is? And it wasn't that, but it was.”
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 I found the guy And you're eliminating different people. And he called himself. 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. So I tapped the thing, not tap, tap, but enough for me to know what it was. And it was my case. So then I stole it back from him with I'm known. 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 him.”
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
“No, they didn't know how to describe him. 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. 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.”
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, but it was both emotional and significant to me. And I come back up, I just changed in my street clothes and I said, hey, what's somebody in my bag? And the ticket ladies didn't know. I said, what did they look like? They said, yeah, there's a guy back here. I said, old, young, this dark hair light here. And they said, I'm not sure. I said, did he go in the show route or did he go side door? 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. So can you spot him if we go in there and we go in? When I go look for him, I ended up finding this guy out of a couple hundred 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
“Specific points, there was one where some people that I had worked with started to say, it was almost an implication I was getting that they thought of psychic. And I wasn't buying into that. There was an incident that happened somebody had stolen something from me, 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 instead of a case”
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 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.”
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 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 100, 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?”
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
“100, 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 100. What is my claim? 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.”
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 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. All right, 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 another point of something more ambiguous, I talked about change raising earlier, shortchanging somebody cashier. If I wanted to be softer in that, I could just, as a slight-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 hundred dollar bill? And I give you $10, $10 bills. That doesn't raise a lot of suspicion in the way that $100 bill would in the other way where they vet that. But now you take those 1010s, you put them in the register, you hand them to me, and I take...”
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 that's exactly to my point. I hope that people expand beyond just trying to get someone to lie because so much 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 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 that, like I said, deception awareness.”
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
“By using true statements. And so it's also as a legality, it's a lot harder thing to grab onto. And if I want to pull back one layer further”
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'm not sure where it's going. So if you say no, I say some people don't believe in ESP, and some people don't believe we ever walked on the moon. Both those statements are true by imply a third statement that now if you don't believe in ESP, that you're similar to the people with conspiracy theorists who never believe Walk on the Moon.”
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
“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? 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. So the All-American breakfast, bacon, eggs and toast is the 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. And smaller thing, if I want to convey an”
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
“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. How do we deceive a cell? How do we deal with coronavirus? It can be used in medicine. It can be used in different areas. Using truth to deceive. That's a very powerful thing. It's the difference between malinformation versus disinformation. Is malinformation is the use of true facts to deceive? And faltering is the name for it in business of using it in advertising, of using a series of true statements to mislead.”
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 while they're emotionally charged, what do they need to see? Maybe a clipboard, 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 female female female f”
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
“Acted on something, taken an action when they have it. 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 report and give them a ticket and they think they have acted when they have they have a peace of mind that they've taken some action.”
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's definitely the flag I fly under now. 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 a lie. Or lying is all bad. 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 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.”
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
“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 it becomes, how is that knowledge being transferred? It probably goes back to at least the one data point I know the 40 elephants. Usually when I interact with different cultures of thieves, 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 chase 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. We don't teach her that it's bad to lie. We try to talk to her that deception is 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 your intent. And that's the big 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
“It's easy to say that a magic tricks comes from this book. It's different thing to say, but where do 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 these group of women called the 40 elephants that used to be in the UK. And around probably 1890 to 1940s, they ran a criminal group there and they could steal large amounts of things by altering their clothing and doing a variation in what's called boosters or boosting. And that's my world. Encyclopedia of things like that. And who's the people who 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...”
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 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.”
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'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 psychobiology.”
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 I think she's the one I met. Maybe there's more leases, but let's see where he goes. And I said, Yeah, it'd be nice to meet her. 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 then 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”
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 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. It's like, what a great idea.”
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's amazing. But it's a strange thing. And then each one of those moments on the back side of that is 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 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 doing that, of moving people between those four stages. And so that was a big part there was to do that to him. And when he pulled out and he thought he had the money.”
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. 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 in trying I had a set of skills that I could do by having 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
“Now he's jumped back into the equation. He rips his water again, rolls his license is missing. And he is wearing the fuck is my driver's license. And I said, it's in the chocolate as I take a sip of my water and 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.”
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 I'm talking to the AJ. I have a drink, and this is an important thing, the drink, because it's a part of the style. It's not alcohol, it's just water 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, it didn't quite look at her at first. Sorry, it's nice to meet you. I looked over and I said, what was your name? She goes, Lisa. And so you 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? 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 on my purse? I said, the same way Jamal's driver's license got out of his wallet.”
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
“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. 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. And 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 Elisa might be. And he took off to go get Lisa. He comes back and he shoves this lady towards me and this agent.”
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 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 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 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?”
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, I didn't keep straight eye contact with him very much. I asked him about his suit. That's really fancy. It was all those status. And then everything just changed. Then it's this thing I said, would this help Yajamal? And it's straight eye contact and it's the refill to his ink pen.”
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
“Let's just find out 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, I don't know. What was your name? He goes, Jamal. I said, how do you spell that, Jamal? And he said, J-A. I said, could you write that down for me? And he pulls out his pen and 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 sidelines with him has been very low status.”
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
“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 of what 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. And I thought, what could I do with 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'll give you an experience one time where I had a literacy 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, but this is later in my career. And it was a new agent. And I was talking to her off to the side. And somebody, I met a couple of the people that 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 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.”
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 confidence, man. You see me playing low status with that. I need you to miss in order for me to be able to do that. Yeah, yeah. But that kind of thing, everything is about helping people get to 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
“Yeah, but that's confirmation bias. It's really helpful to know what that is, and it's very easy. You didn't jump into the whole, like most people do. Most people will say, well, you know, I play 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.”
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, 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 women are 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 went, right? When you win.”
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
“Might be wrong. I don't know. No, it's an interesting hypothesis, but I think that that's the interesting thing and you were wrong every time, you might think I was cheating, yes? Because when we lose, we're more curious, and when we win, we're less curious about why we're winning, right?”
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, so in this, that's a little mini-con 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 bias.”
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
“You're distracted? I'll do it again. I'll do it again. Hold on. All right. So we're doing it a second time. There you go. Left hand. 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 just one more time. All right. One more time. Which hand?”
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
“Gotcha, bitch. Set your pin 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, In one of your two hands so I can't see which hand it would go in.”
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
“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.”
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
“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?”
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 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 side 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. 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.”
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
“Still something from me now. I said, you know, that's kind of like saying be funny now. He said, Yeah. So, let me tell you about something that happened to somebody one time. If I still watch from someone as one plus one, you say, oh, you're fast. You got my watch. I didn't notice. But one time I was talking to a guy, and during the conversation, I stole his pen and I took the refill of his pen out, put his pen back 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 going to steal something from me? He said, can you draw a circle around this ring for me? And he pulled out his pant and go do it. And he stops and he stares at me and he realized he's the guy in the story.”
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