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's amazing what you just did with these raccoons. Would you like to take care of this young bear for me for the weekend? It has diapers and it needs to be fed. It was magical. It was an awesome little milestone at that time.”
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 can't walk the same as everyone else, you end up watching everyone else and you become a people watcher and there's a lot commonality between animals and people in those ways. You start to do a lot of what I call prospective shifting, of jumping into their head to think why would they make that decision? Why would they not do that? I think that helped with the animals because I had to figure out how do I teach raccoons how to forage. How do I create little plastic containers with mud and crawfish? And what are the things that I'm going to need and why are they not adopting that? So I was very interested in behaviors of that at that time. So that's probably part of it. But then this lady who was kind of mentoring me on that, her name was Charlie Stroffkamp. She was a fascinating lady who had been a law enforcement officer that got mauled in a bar fight where she was trying to pull some people out of a bar fight and then sliced open her arm and she was had a single arm, but she took care of bears and buffalo and all sorts of crazy things. She was a powerful lady. And she said, hey.”
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 be released into the wild, and I had a knack for that of getting animals to successfully release into the wild at an early age.”
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, yeah, yeah, no. I'm doing podcasting. But I was along that, so I was doing lots of little efforts. I was used to working jobs. And I went to humane society and I volunteered for a couple of weekends to help out. And I saw a puppy get euthanized because I didn't have enough space. And I was like eight. And that hit me pretty hard because they just didn't have space. And I was drawing a lot and I was really interested at that time of being an architect. So I redrew spaces of their cage to do triple stack cages and they ended up saying they would use the idea. So more dogs could stay there. And they added me on to the board of my local humane site when I was like eight. So then I said, I want to help other kind of animals because all these kind of orphan animals and I study their habitats. And I never half said this stuff out loud. So it really paints a picture of myself that I haven't seen before. But it's fun. So then raccoons were part of it. They were orphaned and they brought two raccoons to me and I raised them and reacclimated them back.”
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 so from paper routes to creating a little art business where I had a knack for drawing when I was a kid, even though I was disabled a little bit, I was early to pick up on 2D perspective, two-dimensional perspective or three-point perspective. And so it gave me a unique insight, I think, at that age that I went back to the back of a comic shop, took down the fliers of all the artists there that were the best, and said, hey, if I bring you work, instead of give me a percentage, will you teach me lessons? And so I started mentoring and finding mentors very young. And that has persisted with everything I've learned since then.”
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 single bolt hello toy bullet inside of it, and I thought I must have this. And my parents didn't have money to buy it, but they said, if you want to get it, you're going to have to come back and buy it. But right down this number. And I wrote down the number, the cost of what it cost to get that. And they said it's probably going to be there for this amount of time. So you got to figure out how to get that much money. And so I had to learn to count that much money. So I had to learn how to count the coins. I was finding pennies everywhere, do anything I could to try to get jobs from everybody. And I got all these pennies and nickels and dimes. And they took me, my dad walked with me to the bank and we got these paper rolls and he had me put everything in there. And as we put the paper rolls up, we count up these dollar bills and other things, walked to the store and I brought all these paper rolls of coins and paid for that rifle. And it was probably about a month's work. And after that, I thought, how can I do this faster than going around collecting pennies? So I was like, how else do you make money? Because there's a lot of things in the store I want”
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 if you run the definition of extracurriculars, yes. There's a specific moment. So at five, I was at Walmart and I saw a toy rifle that I really wanted.”
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 had worked with Humane Society as a volunteer from eight. I was early entrepreneur from the time I was five. I was always doing some kind of hustle.”
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
“Wow, it's very salient, I think. When I was like eight or so, I guess earlier, when I take walks with my father, he couldn't see things, but he would stop me when we would go for a hike through a woods or something. And he'd say, if you look around you right now, within five foot, there's a world. There's lots of little worlds. There's little communities of things that are happening. You just have to find them. So find them and tell me about them. That was a big thing. I saw a lizard on a tree and he said, walk straight to it. And it's going to run around the tree. When it does reach straight around behind it and cup your hand. And he taught me that I could catch a lizard by walking around the tree because it would go to the same position. There's kind of a pattern to that. And he taught me this perspective taking for animals, I think, helped a lot. It's a variation of empathy that I think transferred later on for me. But I had at that time squirrels, raccoons. I babysit bear for a weekend.”
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
“Wasn't the plan, so I went back, rode my bike back to my house, and I sold some stuff at a pawn shop, came back the next day and bought that book. And for the first year, I just spent my time by myself studying the coin magic by myself.”
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
“Around your kind of guy. Yeah, which is great. It's exactly what should have happened to He moved this sleight of hand with the coin. He made it jump around, disappear, jump through his clothing, jumped through his body. I was fascinated because I was thinking if this old guy can do this, I could probably pull this off myself. Then he pulled out a deck of cards, called his Fengali deck, and he did a bunch of tricks with that. He says, so here's a choice. Kind of like a red pill, blue pill. This deck of cards you can walk out of here. And for $5, you'll be able to do 50 tricks without even practicing. Or here's this big book. And it's going to take a lot of study, maybe in four or five years. you'll be able to do sleight of hand with almost anything. Your choice.”
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 do I do Says, Come to the magic shop downtown Springfield. There's about 12 miles from where my house was. So I rode a bike. I went with a friend. He didn't show me anything about the fake thumb, but he used it as a trap. He made this point.”
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 had lots of ingredients to go a certain way later as I met people in my life, I resonated with them because of that, because I had that fork to make a decision. So Ben had a big impact at that decision. And that's why I wanted to give you the context for it.”
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 I act like my fingers cut off? What do I do? I'm like 14. I'm very precocious. I'm borderline at this choice in my life. Like I'm shoplifting. I'm running away from home for two weeks at a time living out in the woods sometimes. So I'm kind of a transition place of which way I choose as my path in life.”
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 be a year scheduled plan. Yeah, from that world. And I was down in our basement. I was going through some boxes and I found this little magic gadget. It was a piece of plastic, looked like a thumb. And I was very curious about what that was. And somebody said it's magic trick. And I said, well, how did that end up in our stuff? So I call a magic shop that was downtown and there's this guy picked up the phone. He was probably 70 something at the time. His name was Ben Stone. So long way around to answer your question. And Ben Stone, I said, so I've got this plastic thumb. I don't know what it is.”
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
“Not because the cartooning, but because of some argument that we had. The argument I say this is proximity to my large case of six months of cartoons. My parents some variation of a waterboarding process occurred and the water poured over on all my art. And that's the dark side that it destroyed all the art. When you had that much work investment, it's a reset. How do you start over? What do you do? And for me as a kid, that was what I pictured as my escape. The cartoon.”
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
“Once upon a time, I had had a pursuit to become a syndicated cartoon artist. I was about 12, 13, 14, going through that. And I was pretty confident that I could pull it off. I wanted to be the youngest one. There was a guy who was imitating Gary Larson's single panel cartoons. And I had six months of character sheets. I was going to send them out to get syndicated. And my parents didn't understand what this was or what this weird thing I was doing. They just knew I like to draw and do cartoons. But I think it's important to understand the energy of what that was. And then there is a fight. And parents have fights with their kids, with their teens. It's just mine was a little bit more intense. My father thought I was possessed, so they tried to evoke a demon out of me.”
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 as I bounced around, I noticed that there were just lots of little slices of different views of perspectives, which to me has continued to follow me through my life of anytime somebody claims a truth is maybe we need more perspectives on this.”
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
“Drug trafficking up through that pipeline. One of my brothers also did smuggling for firearms. So moving those in and out. So it became very intense. And I was exposed to some of that at the same time that I was growing up with my father as a devout minister. So it was really, I think a fascinating juxtaposition between those two worlds that seeing deception in that true sense of the word of what we often think it to be. But yet also he was okay with my brothers as people. He didn't know that that's what they did, but I got to see both sides of that. And they did other things publicly. They were truck drivers or other things and exceptional people in many ways. But taught me to see the gray. I think back to your other question now became when I started to go to church, I would sneak out of the back of the church when services transition, I'd sneak off to another church and say, well, if this simply is a God believe that tongues is the first physical initial sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit, then what did the Baptists believe? And then I'd go see their tenant.”
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
“She had raised these three kids that her husband had died very early, and two of them had picked up this beyond a hobby of how they were making money on the other side of the law from stealing things, running small hustles. They never called it pickpocketing, but they would steal from people at the zoo when they were leaning over to watch things, animals being fed. They would cut their pockets or steal their bags at sporting events through bleachers, mostly opportunistic, but later it evolved when the military and when he came out, he started working again like the series Ozark. I feel like that route that was in Ozark is probably what my brothers are associated with, but with some type of trafficking group.”
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 certainty is what flagged me, just the absoluteness of my father's answer. And it was in juxtaposition of what was happening on the other side of my family. So my mother, and this shifts to the other 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
“I started off as religious, which I think is the same thing. People start off as extremely patriotic to their certain country where they're born or where you go from a family where they're very religious or under that flag as well. And my father had me study a lot of different types of scriptures from Jehovah's Witness to the Mormons because he wanted to be able to debate those for a lot of different topics. The book of Hebrew, he wanted me to study King James for its specific interpretation. had to debate in debate groups for evolution and creationism. As I was on teams that did that, I was in a Bible quiz team where I would buzz these buzzers and quote scriptures and went to the world championships and that and placed in the world championships. So it's all these things as young kid that I was deeply entrenched in that world. And there was just poking at this thing 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
“And he would draw the kids in with a story. He'd bring Kool-Aid and cookies every Sunday. He did that for 20 years. And they would come in and he would tell them these stories. It meant a lot to him. He was non-denominational, but he was very dogmatic about his specific interpretation of scripture, which to me, myself, jumping ahead, I'm agnostic. I'm not an atheist, but I'm not subscribed to any religion. But it was such an interesting learning lesson. I think about the difference between most people would judge somebody by their perceptual blind spots of not being able to see, but sometimes it's worse the stories that we tell ourselves and how that limits our perception.”
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, now it's branded as a TV show, the Ozarks. Okay. But the city was Springfield, Missouri. And he would go into those neighborhoods. He would go, he would set up his ministry inside of a laundry mat.”
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. His eyesight. Yeah. And to his shin chagrin because he would run full force into a park bench and come tumbling over it. But he created this ministry that was inside of government subsidized housing, what people think as the hood. And he would get beat up in front of me by gangs sometimes, or not necessarily gangs, but just small groups, I guess you could call gangs.”
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 came out, he was a traveling minister for most of my early life. He would travel, visit churches. And some of the things I think one of the creative parts that I really took from him was that he would travel to a church not knowing what his presentation was going to be, but he would find an animal along the way, a turtle crossing the road. And that became his presentation. He would sit it in front of the pulpit, and everybody would circle around him and talk about the turtle as an analogy or a metaphor. And he was able to connect these ideas. And meanwhile, I would sit in the back with my little braces and usually a pen and paper and trying to draw everything that was going on. Art was a big thing for me, and it had been for him before he had lost his sight. So I think those influences factor in later to some of the other things. But I think one of the bigger takeaways wasn't the blind spots he had through vision, although it did help that when we would walk around, I would try to be his eyes for him. There was this Tugger War that he didn't want 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 was a short man, and I think that that factors in because he was about 5'4. So it's quite short. He was very physically fit. He climbed rope out using his legs. He was very quick to go to a fight when he was younger. And then one time when he was going into college, he was studying to be a CPA. He had tubercular meningitis that affected him for about a year, year and a half. It was a very serious disease at the time, I mean, still is, but at the time was more pervasive. And it made him blind during the product of this year. And he became kind of born again. Somebody had come to visit him and witnessed to him during that time, and he decided he was going to change the course of his life, become a minister. And that, I think, made him a very dogmatic minister too. He really embodied himself thinking about the difference of Paul versus Saul and the Bible.”
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 write that with both hands up until them about the second grade. So I had a lot of therapy, which I think that idea of persistent learning through overcoming an obstacle like that has helped me be resilient with acquiring a lot of skills over my lifetime.”
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
“Perhaps We were upside down, so because my mother had had previous children, she had had three and she was a widow, they were also in their teens. They supposed they assumed that I had the same father. So they didn't test their blood. So there was a factor in the blood, I think it was an RH factor, but it created what they call ABO blood disease. So it required when I was born that I had a transfusion there. There were a few other things my mom had lupus connective tissue disease, which created tumors in her uterus. So my legs developed around those, so they were twisted up. And I think out of that, when I was born, there was a product of a little the Forrest Gump thing that I had to wear braces on my legs like Forrest Gump to get around. But also I had fine and gross motor problems. I couldn't control my hands. It was kind of the joke of trying to clap the hands three times at the therapist. I was a little bit better than that. I can clap my hands, but I couldn't do a lot more. I had to, when I learned to write, have a large diameter pencil that was through a rubber ball, and I had to learn.”
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, quite the opposite. I think almost as opposite as it could be on that. This is a story I've been told that once upon a time my father, who was legally blind, had decided to become a minister, went to seminary in an Enid, Oklahoma, and was walking down the streets from seminary, but he had moved into this kind of rough neighborhood, was trying to witness, and these two teenagers decided to try to steal from him. He didn't know what they were up to, but then when they realized he was blind, they decided not to hustle him. But instead, they tried to guide him to where the bus was and encouraged him to go to another area. And he invited them to his church, invited him to have food on a Wednesday night, and they came and they did. They found food, and they brought their mom one time. And then their mom met him and they got married, and that's supposedly how my parents met.”
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