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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“So you can still stuff. 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. pen that was clipped inside of his shirt pocket. And he 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
“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 steal it out. And I didn't have that background. I came from a different lane. And so he had heard from a friend that I could really steal. So he put me on the spine from a bunch of people. First time I met him, he just walked up to me. He says,”
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
“Why I ask. All right. Everything has a purpose. There's lots of things that can be done with this. Actually, when I pickpocketed Pen Gillette, I met at him the first time and he's a big guy, six foot six at least.”
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
“This ring is made from a silver coin. And my magic used to be based around silver. It's unusual if you talk to a magician, professional magicians tend to very...”
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 tends to be thieves will beat you to it. They'll be innovating in that space pretty quickly, and they are right now with deepfakes 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. And we're going to have to try to spot the truth. And what does that mean in a 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 in the literature that's starting to come out of 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.”
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 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 people have for uncertainty. And we've had the pandemic. We've had craziness. We've had the economy. 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 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, people think of it as arms race of technology, like when they think about AI, deepfakes, but it's our arms race of imagic.”
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 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.”
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 in order to validate the research, they have to go after 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 sports or between Kahneman and Gary Klein, they did a lot of research on first responders to smoke jumpers and other things, the context of an expertise is hard to boil down in a lab.”
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
“Buy your plane tick But it's that play that when she came out, she helped me have a different direction that I wasn't fully 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. Wear police uniforms and help people smuggle things in and out of the country while she was growing up. 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 them. If the FBI was watching or the NSA watching our house, they would have seen all these guys come in and out.”
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 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. 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 ask you to help me write this bio in 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. And I said, all right, so come help me write my bio.”
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
“To the classics 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”
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
“He was before in his career. I said, You know more about Socrates and Plato. So can you tell me? 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 root.”
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
“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 impassionate about what he says. But notice there's a central theme between all of those. That central theme is X. And that's the equivocal, 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 of that is to dilute that down, give you one point back, and I hijack the narrative.”
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
“An overwhelming cash register attendee at that time and using ambiguous statements with different ways that they could take that for, I can clarify more on that later. But a counter to that gish gallop, for example, back to a queue for equivocat.”
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
“Gish was a debater who would often do a package of assaults on a person or 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, and they're overwhelmed. They don't know how to respond because they got three minutes and he posed 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-saignal ratio piece that's used to overwhelm people inside of a cash exchange with shortchanging. And I recognize that as one approach”
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 those things, they're so similar to this thing that the yellow kid used to do, or Titan Thompson used to do this thing with 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
“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? I said, why do I know?”
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 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 end up leaning against the wall talking about psychology. 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? 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 time. I turned it down twice. Adam Green would tell you. It's like, I hear somebody better over here. 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.”
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
“Going to get a conversation. It does. One of them said, so I stole the girl's engagement ring with the thing and I did a thing with that and give it back. This lady that later turned out to be my wife, she asked me, can you steal me for me? I said, what would you like? She says, chocolate coverage strawberry from that table over there. And she points at this table nearby VIP section. I said, got it. So I grabbed a menu, walked over, pretended to be with the staff, asked them if they'd been taken care of, stole the chocolate strawberry under the menu, and I walked in and then I threw it over my shoulder to add a little flare. 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. It is. I like it, but it works.”
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
“Or 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. Come out. I said, it's too late for me. And he says, No, just come. 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, younger women, smaller guys at the table. And I'd seen that a lot in Vegas. But when I get closer, I'm talking to them. And one of the ladies in the group, as they were introducing themselves, she had a background in psychobiology. She had just graduated 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.”
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 on life in general, she brought, I think when you were 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 like Oceans 11, where they pulled Heistun 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 taking. It's related to that and how you establish rapport and things. 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.”
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
“Absolutely. Which is interesting because now that I don't have that, I've gone back to martial arts 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 newing 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. 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 now. I'm sure they're very surprised.”
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
“Real pick pocketing, they caught 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 shark a shark. Yes, and just taking inventory, you could say, yeah. And now I'm crafting, 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
“Yeah, it's because they don't believe it's true. They just were having a conversation And I'm now making that effect. She'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.”
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 said, you got anything on you, and you just see them check. They would just bump through a wall through that thing, and I'm just clocking. It's like, okay, so I got the keys here. You know exactly a mental map. And now I'm about to move into the circle.”
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
“Is done, yeah. That's why I meet this 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 through a crowd and I would walk up to the guys and say, it's the guys, you know 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”
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 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 grandma. And I said, what's this from grandma?”
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 as soon as they start to detect one thing. 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.”
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
“Absolutely Think there's a subtext to what you're asking that is unique to the way that I, 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 as 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.”
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 it was a love story, right? Yeah, 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.”
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 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.”
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
“Out of school, so I'm not going to People think it is. It's something that your body wasn't trained into. You've never had to use 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
“It was teller. Teller said he was approached about this. And at that time, him and I become pretty good friends. And we spent a lot of time together. Penn was also a friend. Teller was interesting the research side of it on the back side. And he asked me to come join.”
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 when it realized it wasn't just me stealing, but 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.”
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
“Have two sidelines. 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 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 a 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.”
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 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 DC. And I'm going to talk to the Secret Service. And I was asked about that, about task blindness and intentional blindness. And this overlapped into two fascinating neuroscientists that I met, Stephen Magnick and Suzanne Martinez, Conde. And they have 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? Do you have any ideas? And at first it was like a little session where they had different magicians that were legends, pen 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”
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
“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 Chris Chabris was his partner. They did a book called Invisible Gorilla where you watch basketball being passed and a gorilla”
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
“Does it gives people a story to tell, and it did. And it was one of a handful of legends or 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 underpromise and overdeliver when people have this expectation of what you can do. Oh, for sure. Because it 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. It began working for the government from that day forward.”
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 he finds out. And so they said, You're going to do this, 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 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 mentioned 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've done that is with him until I did it to the other guys.”
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 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 reads in his pocket and he realizes he doesn't have the credentials. And the other guy's laughing very hard at 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, 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 at a more accessible spot or I can put it on me at 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. So for this, I don't really know what it is. And I pull out this paper that was kind of tri-folded. And as I'm opening it, I see what it is. It's now the itinerary where they were taking Carter to.”
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
“He thinks he's off the clock. And so just by that's one of the things that by setting that expectation, he thinks he's done and the play has moved on. But now I reach underneath my army. 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 a couple of things. And as I was talking to the other guy”
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
“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 acknowledge that. I put that on the surface. I said very well trained. I said, it's going to be much harder to do anything with 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 lean 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 given me access from the side.”
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
“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 and their 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. 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, 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 female determin 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, he indicated to me 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
“Treat it as a whole, but it's got all these little parts. And I like to think of attention as like a limited resource. It's really useful to think of kind of the economics of attention if they spend their attention 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 approach them, I hadn't had any experience with anyone like that before. And the context was different. knew who I was, specifically when I walked up. There's a nickname for me in the show. They called me Klepto. They say 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.”
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
“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”
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 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 I see, it was the way I approached them that got in their space. I stole several of their items.”
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 get a second. Brings in the head of security for Caesar's Palace. They talk to me about certain provisions and warnings. 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 denied plausible deniability.”
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
“Do you think you could? And I'm so happy they 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 from Secret Service today, but it's a different context.”
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
“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.”
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