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Upgrade your pup to Sundays for dogs and feel great about the food you feed your best friend. Optimal minimal. Like this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I also request a question? Now I just see it in a perfect time. What if I did the other day? I'm a cybernetic organism living to show a metal impulse guy. Lead to Paris show. Oh. Hello, boys and girls, lemurs and squirrels. This is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show.
This is one I've been looking for to for a very long time. Now, going meta, very briefly, for those who have not listened to the show, this is a show about deconstructing world's class performers across many different disciplines, to tease out the habits, routines, frameworks, et cetera, that you can borrow and apply to your own lives. And sometimes you find gems in the most unusual of places. And today's guest may be an example of that.
Apollo Robbins. Apollo Robbins is often referred to as the gentleman thief. He first made national news when he picked pocketed the secret service while entertaining a former US president. And we will get into that story. Forbes has called Robbins, quote, an artful manipulator of awareness, and quote, and wired his written that quote, he could steal the wallet of a man who knew he was going to have his pocket picked, and quote, and that is an understatement, a vast understatement.
And if you want to get an idea of what that looks like, you can also check out the video that we took for this podcast on my YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Tim Ferris. So listen to the audio, but definitely also check out some of the visuals. Robbins entertainment credentials include the Warner Brothers film Focus with Will Smith and Margot Robbie, along with appearances in Brooklyn 9.9 and the TNT series Leverage.
He was a producer and co-host for National Geographic's Brain Games, which was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding informational series. Robbins applied his expertise in magic and misdirection beyond entertainment, pulling back the curtain to show how the principles behind these illusions can enhance strategic thinking and decision making. And we get into how much of what he is cultivated can transfer to other areas.
And that really at its course, what this podcast is about, to train you to see those hidden threads or those through lines. His contributions to attention and perception research have been published in scientific American mind and nature reviews neuroscience. He has delivered lectures at Harvard Kennedy School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Society of Neuroscience.
He has been profiled by The New Yorker, which is an amazing profile, and featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Robbins' TED Talk, The Art of Misdirection, is ranked in the 20 Most Watched TED Talks of All Time, and has been hailed by the TED editors as a revelation in the flaws of human perception. You can find all things Apollo Robbins at ApolloRobbins.com, and you can find them on Twitter at ApolloRobbins.
Without further ado, please enjoy a most enjoyable, most entertaining, most educational conversation with the one and only Apollo Robbins. Follow! Yes, sir. So nice to have you here. It is a pleasure. And this has been in the works for me at least, in my own head since I want to say 2018-2019. Wow. And then this pesky thing that we now call COVID came along and disrupted all sorts of plans, but finally, here we are. So thank you for making the trip, and I'm glad that you are here in person.
So we may get a chance to stand up. It's nice that it's in person versus virtual. There's so many more possibilities. So many more possibilities. Well, let's start. So people might assume that it's right out of the gate. Maybe as a fetus, but certainly once you entered the world, you had the dexterity of a demigod and were basically fated to become someone famous for how they use their hands. Is that the case? No, quite the opposite. I think almost as opposite as it could be on that.
This is a story I've been told that once upon a time my father, who was legally blind, had decided to become a minister, went to seminary in an Inodocloma, and was walking down the streets from seminary, but he had moved into this rough neighborhood was trying to witness, and these two teenagers decided to try to steal from him. He didn't know what they were up to, but then when they realized he was blind, they decided not to hustle him.
But instead, they tried to guide him to where the bus was and encourage him to go to another area. And he invited them to his church and invited him to have food on a Wednesday night. And they came and 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. Oh, wow. Okay, so your parents meet one thing leads to another. Yes. I'm assuming no immaculate conception. Perhaps.
And then you enter the world, what were doctors' expectations of you? They were upside down. So because my mother had had previous children, she had three and she was a widow. They were also in their teens. They supposed they assumed that I had the same father. So they didn't test their blood. So there was a factor in the blood. I think it was an RH factor, but it created what they call ABO blood disease. So it required when I was born that I had transfusion. There 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 of the forest gump thing that I had to wear braces on my legs like forest gump to get around. But also I had fine and gross motor problems. I couldn't control my hands. It was kind of a joke of trying to clap the hands three times at the therapist. I was a little bit better than that.
I clapped my hands, but I couldn't do a lot more. I had to, when I learned to write, have a large diameter pencil that had, was through a rubber ball. And I had to learn to do right that with both hands up and tool about the second grade. So I had a lot of therapy, which I think that idea of persistent learning through overcoming an obstacle like that has helped me be resilient with acquiring a lot of skills over my lifetime. Could you tell you more about your father?
So was he blind for your entire life? Did that have some onset? And how did that shape who he was? And of course, the implicit question is, you know, how did that affect you? But let's start with a simpler version of the question. Could you just tell us more about your father? He was a short man. And I think that that factor's in, because he was about five foot four. So that'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 staying to be a CPA. And he had tubercular meningitis that affected him for about a year, and a half. He was a 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 him during that time.
And he decided he was going to change the course of his life and become a minister. And that, I think, made him a very dogmatic minister, too. He really embodied himself thinking about the difference of Paul versus Saul on the Bible. And when he came out, he was a traveling minister for most of my early life. He would travel, visit churches.
And as 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 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 try to draw everything that was going on. Art was a big thing for me. And it had been for him before he had lost his sight. So I think those influences factor in later to some of the other things. But I think one of the bigger takeaways wasn't the blind spots he had through vision, although it did help that when we would walk around, I would try to be his eyes for him.
There was this tug of war that he didn't want anybody to know that he was really blind. He didn't often emphasize that. He would often walk with a confidence level that was... Ilsu did do this. Yeah. His eyesight. Yeah. And to his shins, your grin, 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 and what people think is the hood. And he would get beat up in front of me by gangs sometimes.
Or not necessarily gangs, but just small groups. I guess you call gangs. Where was this again? Can you remember? Well, now it's branded as a TV show, The Ozarks. Yeah. But the city was Springfield, Missouri. And he would go in those neighborhoods. He would go. He would set up his ministry inside of a laundry mat. And he would draw the kids in with a story. He'd bring cool-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 who judge them by their perceptual blind spots of not being able to see, but sometimes it's worse the stories that we tell ourselves and how that limits our perception.
We'll definitely come back to this. Okay. And like perception story, perception say, shaping story, storytelling perception. I want to talk a lot more about this. But since it's something you just mentioned, the agnosticism, did you start off religious and then at some point along the way become agnostic? Was it a response to perhaps your father's dogmatism? How did you get to self-identifying that way? Yeah, I started off as religious, which I think is the same thing.
People start off as extremely patriotic to their certain country, whether born or you go to a family where they're very religious or will be 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 a specific interpretation. I had a debate in debate groups for evolution and cretinism.
As far as on teams that did that, I went 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 a young kid that I was deeply entrenched in that world. And there was just poking at this thing that this certainty is what flagged me, just the absoluteness of my father's answer. And it was in juxtaposition of what was happening on the other side of my family.
So my mother and this shifts to the other side. It was a dichotomy between the two because she had been a widow and she had raised these three kids that her husband had died very early and two of them had picked up this beyond a hobby of how they were making money on the other side of the law. I'm 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, sporting events through bleachers mostly opportunistic. But later it evolved. When a military when it came out, he started working again like the series Ozark. I feel like that route that was in Ozark is probably what my brothers associated with with some type of trafficking group. Drug trafficking.
Drug trafficking up through that pipeline. One of my brothers also did smuggling for firearms. So moving those in 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 val 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 the services transition and sneak off to another church and say, well, if this simply is a God, I believe that tongues of the first physical and a shill sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit, then what are the Baptist beliefs? And then I go see their tenets.
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 some may claims the truth is maybe we need more perspectives on this. When does Ben Stone end of the picture? Wow, that's a great name. And how old are you? How dark do you wanna get? I can take it lighter, dark or gray? You pick the other choice. And we've gone dark on this podcast before. So we can go there.
Once upon a time, I had had a pursuit to become a syndicated cartoon artist. And it was about 12, 13, 14. And 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 Larsen's single panel cartoons. And I had six months of character sheets. I was going to send him 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'd like to draw and do cartoons. But I think it's important to understand the energy of what that was. And then there was a fight. And parents have fights with their kids, with their teens. It's just, mine was a little bit more intense. My father thought I was possessed. So they tried to evoke a demon out of me. Because of the cartooning. Not because of the cartooning, but because of some argument that we had.
The argument, I say this is proximity to my large case of six months of cartoons. My parents, some variation of a waterboarding process occurred. And the water poured over on all my art. And that's the dark side that it destroyed all the art. And when you had that much work in bed, and it's a reset, how do you start over? What do you do? And for me as a kid, that was what I pictured as my escape. The cartooning was going to be your sketch one. Yeah, from that world.
And I was down in our basement. I was going through his inbox and I found this little magic gadget. It was a piece of plastic. It 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 a 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. I said, is this the way I like my fingers cut off? What do I do? I'm like 14. I'm very precautions. 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 my past.
Yeah, that's a vulnerable place where you could have inflection points or vectors in a lot of different directions. And I had lots of ingredients to go a certain way. Later as I met people in my life, I resonated with them because of that. Because I had that tree. I had that fork to make a decision. So Ben had a big impact at that decision. And that's why I wanted to give you the context for it. For sure. Yeah, I appreciate that. And so what happens then? You're like, I have this fake thumb.
What do I do? Ben says, come to the magic shop. Downtown Springfield is about 12 miles from where my house was. So I wrote a bike. I went with a friend. He didn't show anything about the fake thumb, but he used as a trap. He did, I mean, this point. Move around. You're going to die. Yeah, which is great. It's exactly what should have happened to me. He moved this slide at hand with the coin. He made it jump around, disappeared, jumped 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 Deca Cards called the Spengali decade. He did a bunch of tricks with that. He says, so here's a choice. Kind of like a red pill, blue pill. This Deca 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 sliding him with almost anything. It's your choice. And it was his way of vetting at that point, I think. And I didn't have money either way. That wasn't the plan. So I went back, rode my bike back to my house, and I sold some stuff I had pawn shop, came back the next day and bought that book. And for the first year, I just spent my time by myself studying the coin magic by myself.
So I want to pause because we're going to pick up on this particular thread. But I want to rewind. I think just a few years. Because you're around 14, 15 at this point. So I think this takes place a bit earlier. You mentioned your father and the animals that then become the parable or part of the sermon. Yeah. You can't believe everything you read on the internet. But is it true that you also used to take in orphaned animals? I did. Okay. So can you tell me more about this?
Wow. Do you have a research department? That's great. Yeah. Cut teams everywhere. Eyes and ears on the ground. Yeah. I'm curious how that came to be. And if it, I don't want to make it too leading of a question, but how that has informed or how it reflects who you are. Wow. It's very salient, I think. When I was eight or so, I guess earlier, when I ticked walks with my father, he couldn't see things. But he would stop me when we'd go for a hike through woods or something.
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 cut your hand.
And he taught me that I could catch a lizard by walking around the tree because it goes 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 maybe said bear for a weekend, I maybe bear. Let's take the bear. That's an example. Bear drop off. See you next week. What exactly happens? How do you get here?
How does the bear make its way to you? Apparently now they have a male or a service bear in a box. Just kidding. Be careful on the internet. You might get something you don't expect if you try to order that. Yeah, my address is online. So at that time, I had raccoons, which is a predecessor to getting a bear. It's a bear starter kit. I had worked with the Humane Society as a volunteer from a, I was an early entrepreneur from the time I was five. I was always doing some kind of hustle.
Was that encouraged? Did that just emerge sort of out of your programming out of the box? Is this something other people were doing? It sounds like you had a family that was sort of active and extracurriculars. If you've run the definition of extracurriculars, there's a specific moment. So at five, I was at Walmart and I saw a toy rifle that I really wanted. It was a single bolt, a little toy bullet inside of it and I thought I must have this.
And my parents didn't have money to buy it, but they said if you want to get it, you're going to have to come back and buy it, but right down this number. I wrote down the number, the cost of what it cost to get that. 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 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 months work.
And after that, I thought, how can I do this faster than going around collecting pennies? So I was like, how else do you make money? Because there's a lot of things in the store I want. And so from paper routes to creating a little art business where I had a knack for drawing when I was a kid, even though I was disabled a little bit, I was early to pick up on 2D perspective, 2 dimensional perspective or 3 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, will you, instead of giving me a percentage, will you teach me lessons? And so I started mentoring and finding mentors very young and that has persisted with everything I've learned since then. Okay, we're going to talk about mentors. How does the bear in a box fit into this?
Do you get, do you get paid to babies at bears? No, it was a slight ADD tangent. So it's still on then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like doing podcasting. But I was along that. So I was doing lots of little efforts like I was used to work in jobs. And I went to the Humane Society and I volunteered for a couple of weekends to help out. And I saw a puppy get euthanized because it didn't have enough space. And I was like eight. And that hit me pretty hard because they just didn't have space.
And I was drawing a lot and I was really interested at that time of being an architect. So I redrew spaces of their cage to do triple stack cages and they ended up saying they reduced the idea. So more dogs could stay there and they add to me on to the board of my local Humane Society when I was like eight. So then I said, I want to help other kind of animals because I like all these orphan animals and I study their habitats. And I never have said this stuff out loud.
So it really paints a picture of myself that I haven't seen before. But it's fun. So then raccoons were part of it. They were orphaned and they brought two raccoons to me. And I raised them and reaccompanied them back to be released into the wild. And I had a knack for that of getting animals to successfully re-release into the wild at an early age. What do you think made you good at that? 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 of commonality between animals and people in those ways. Of you start to do a lot of what I call perspective shifting of jumping into their head to think, why would they make that decision? Why would they not do that? I think that helped with the animals because I had to 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 they're going to need and why are they not adopting that? Why would they? So there's very interesting 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 Stroughcamp. She was a fascinating lady who'd been a law enforcement officer.
They got mulled in a bar fight, where she was trying to pull some people out of bar and sliced open her arm and she had a single arm, but she took care of bears and buffalo and all sorts of crazy things. She was a powerful lady and she said, hey, it's amazing what you just did with these raccoons. Would you like to take care of this bear for me for the weekend? It has diapers and it needs to be fed. It was magical. It was an awesome little milestone at that time. Wow. How old were you?
I was probably eight to ten as well as doing those things. So it seems that to your parents credit, they were open to you having a bear in the house. What not in the house? Not so much. Where did the bear in the diaper stay? I had a habitat that I was using for the raccoons. It was square footage large enough to move in Rome. Like a shed type of place? There was enough, some more of an outdoor enclosure.
It was an outdoor enclosure that was chained and fenced in with some options for it to go inside that could work for you. But I had to build a lot of those. My mom had a background of farms so she taught me how to build a lot of those. I lived in the city, but we had a strange backyard. Strange house. So let's pick up with the book and the path of magic. So how do you go then from, let's just say, broad magic, generalist magic to what you have become so well known for?
So it like, well, you first go to mid school and then you figure out your specialty and then you do your residency and you're like, okay, actually, I'm not really great at this, but I am pretty good at this. So let me zig and zag was it that type of process or how did you meander your way? Maybe it wasn't meander. Maybe it was a direct line. I was always kind of full force in whatever I did.
Yeah. And I think that that's part of it that sometimes when we're trying to get to a place and we just feel like we need to get to that place, we can change the vehicle. We just know that we're on that journey. And that's often what it was. I knew I was getting out of where I was. And that was a big thing for me is getting out of the place where I was growing up. So at that point, this was going to be my next question.
At what point did you have the conviction that magic or some variant of magic could be your sort of metaphorical bus ticket out of that place in the way that you hoped cartooning would be? Yeah. Which is a fun combination. The book was a dense read. And I think it helps me though. Now when people try to learn from magic, they try to learn it without mentors and from YouTube videos, but they don't have to deal with people.
And so you don't have to do the perspective taking the management of a person in the same way. When you're first learning it, you're just learning it to full of camera through a certain angle and you only have to do it once. So it's a different thing. And at that time when I was reading from a book, I didn't have a mentor. So I was reading this dense copy that described how something was supposed to look magical. I was trying to transfer that into an idea and doing that in front of a mirror.
And I started to find ways to do it, whether they were the way the book intended or not. But what I had at my disposal, I think is also because I had been exposed to like my brother stealing things and other things, it allowed me to have a perspective that I didn't have the same baseline other people did for guilty knowledge, for an anxiety that happens when you get caught. And so I was willing to try things that other people thought made them shake and made their skin shake, make them do.
And I was very comfortable with doing a lot of unusual things with magic that really started to shape, for instance, instead of trying to do what you can call complete vanish where coins can disappear, but rather than retaining in your hands, you hide it somewhere in a pocket or somewhere else. I thought, why not put it on another person? Now that they won't find it there. And I'd had that experience one time. I was shoplifting early, probably 13. What were your go-to shoplifting, Edos?
And were you shoplifting to use them or to resell them or something else? There was a group, you call them hobos back in the day, but there was a group of people that lived out behind some of the grocery stores and they knew sometimes when I ran away from home, I'd go stay with them and sometimes they would need food or they'd need other things or cigarettes or other things like that.
And at one time when I went in, I stole some cigarettes, I didn't smoke, but I stole some cigarettes and the guy kind of recognized me and he came up to talk to me. Was the kid who never buys anything? Well, he recognized me from my family. I live close by. He came up to talk to me and I didn't want to be found with him. And I think he saw me do something so he went to check me. It was an interesting thing just by instinct. I didn't put them on any kind of pocket on me.
I had left them underneath my arm facing out the back. So as he's checking my pockets, I reached around behind my back with my right hand. I removed the cigarettes from there and I loaded them in his apron that was on him. So he definitely wasn't going to look there. And I left and I got away, but later he's going to find the cigarettes as apron. I think that influenced my style of magic too.
Because very quickly I would take traditional magic effects and things that would be called like an impossible location where something disappears from myself and appears somewhere else. I said, why doesn't it appear on someone else? What else can I do with that? So I started developing a lot of that too. So where do you go after the book? Well, you have this initial tone that you're digesting and shaping and experimenting with. Yeah. Course one. You flip the last page.
Yeah. You've tested what there is to test. I was trying to find a magician I had seen when I was like seven. And there was a guy that I thought he was a magician, but I didn't realize it was a magician quite at the time. And when I was like second grade, this guy had come through my school and it was just an announcement from the principal that called the teacher out of the room. And there's this guy working on the window. It was in overalls.
And he was working on the window and he asked one of the kids to help measure a rope. And then he cut the rope and went back together. It wasn't a show. It was just these magical things were happening from this old guy that was fixing the window. And then everything came out of his toolbox. They was trying to use was doing some weird thing. But it wasn't a magic show. It wasn't presented in that social contract. And it hit me over the head.
And later I found that that plastic thumb that I found was a gift to my parents from him. So later I went back to try to find him. I found his widow. And she told me about this magic club that was in my hometown. And when I showed up they said, oh, you're new to magic. And I started doing some things. And they said, why can you do that? There's two things I could do. I manipulate coins. I make them appear small objects like that.
And I could do what's called an influence of a series of choices that I learned early on when I was eight from some book. But I had used it over the years. And I could do that, which is a category of mentalism that is jazz based. And they say jazz. Yeah. And that's an important thing. Yeah, please say more. Yeah. In equivogue, just so I understand what that means, I'm trying to dissect the etymology, but I'm going to get stuck in the weeds there.
You are in very subtle ways directing someone's choice, even though they think they have free will in solution. You give the illusion of agency. I see. Yeah. You're allowing them to play a game of darts, but you're painting the bullseye on the wall after the dart is landed. I see. And I realize that they feel with conviction that that was all choices that they made, that they navigated to. And I, and that takes a fluidity of thought.
There's little feedback loops that people, you kind of blend in the segues and people don't notice those and the way you use your words. And so the way that, please, yeah, correct me if this is a lazy or inaccurate description. But for people who don't know the term mentalism, one way that could manifest is someone demonstrating mind reading or something along those lines. What is the right way to think of mentalism?
I think there's a variety of ways, but if you think about card magic, when you see magician pick a card, where did that come from? It came from at one point some card mechanics or card sharps that you did at cards, some of that filtered across and made it into the entertainment world. And there's this other category of a lot of those from thieves and things factored in the magic. There's an interesting genealogy there, I think. But mentalism came from psychics and mediums.
And that category was this impersonation that I have some type of exceptional ability to read minds, influence, predict the future, talk to the dead, whatever it might be. The different label is it as a camp. Mentalists usually will not claim that they have real powers. They'll say that they're doing it under the flag of entertainment versus psychics and mediums who often use the same tools will sometimes convey that they have those. Gotcha. Got it. Okay. So you could do the coin manipulation.
And you also had some mentalism game and they're like, wait a second, you just said you're ennued all this. So how are you able to do these things? You get the specific example of the Equivoke. And then what happens? I told him I read these books and I learned it on my own and they were surprised by that. They said, well, that must have felt good. Yeah. Yeah, it was nice. And I also learned early there that even though I learned some things wrong by their interpretation, it created a new thing.
And they said, well, that wasn't what they meant. It's like, oh, that's great. So what did they mean? And now, is that what you mean by jazz influenced? Like, if you make a mistake, do it twice and then it's jazz. No, it's a different thing. So if you think of a lot of performance magic, it is very sheet music based, very classical. It's very structured. There's a lot of geometry and the sight lines and the calculations of that. There's very precise scripting of what's going on.
My style has always been very jazz based to a fault in many ways, but that I would feel constricted by any script. So for me, as soon as I had an idea, my landscape was to try it with an audience immediately before I'd even try to test it out. Pick up a turtle walking in front of that audience, figure it out. Yeah, well, yeah, jump off the cliff and build a play on the way down, but yes, the turtle is a great metaphor for that.
But it was all, I mean, the first time I did a show with my wife and initially we had this separate tension to go down, but we were walking to go on stage and there was a certain skill set we learned with each other. As she said, but what's the structure for the show? I said, I don't know. I haven't met the audience yet. And I didn't think she was like, which is this collision up to different mindset, which she's changed me for the better.
But at that time, I didn't want to start until I knew, until I met the audience. It's like, let's create this together because I thought there was a value in creating. And to me, early on in magic, that's what I was trying to do too. Because all the books said I had to do this phase one and phase two, then phase three. It's like, I get that. And that's useful for some things. But also I want the organic feeling that this person feels like they're having this experience.
And it's not happening to anybody else. This only happened in this moment. All right. So did that magic club figure into your skill development? Was it a launching pad? Where did you end up going from there? They offered me books more books. So you like books? Yeah. And they said, well, if you could get through that book that you first read while you take these other books and learn some of those things. Because there's this great quote I don't know who it's attributed to.
But when we buy books, we think we're buying the time to read them. And I feel it's my own red stack. Would agree. I think that that's what they were suffering from at that time. You have this energy. You read my books and teach it back to me. Genius. Yeah. So they did that to me. And that was a really cool thing. There was a couple of people that influenced my magic trick of its own type. It is. Yes. Ben wasn't mentor. He wasn't with the club, but Ben did some things. He did one thing.
There was a magician. I really admired who helped me on the business side named Mark Sparks, who was traveling performer, who was brilliant. And I'd seen him make a coin fly up from one hand to another. And anything I could try to excuse or slide a hand didn't make sense of why that could happen. And other books I'd read. It didn't make sense of why that could happen. So I went back to Ben's stone in that shop called Mysteries Magic Shop. I said, Ben, what is with this coin?
Well, I think it's this. Here's my hypothesis. One, two, three. And he goes, ah, well, that's obviously Dariel Fitsky. It's a Fitsky. And I say, I don't know. That's not my radar. And he says, well, Fitsky wrote three books. It's a trilogy. Go read that. I picked up one of the books, Psycho Magic by Misdirection and Psychology of Magic. I read it. It was a hard read. And I came back and I said, Biff, he wasn't in there.
And he says, well, he wrote two other books, The Trick Brain and Showmanship for Magicians. So I read all those. I came back and I said, it wasn't in any of those because I must be wrong. And Ben tricked me again.
He tricked me to use my desire to learn how to make that coin fly up to read three books that have influenced me till this day of a very structured analytical approach for performance that I needed, but also for the psychology of magic and understanding how an illusion is constructed in the audience's mind. And I needed that at 15 because I wasn't thinking about that. And so that was the biggest thing I would say.
There was many other people that from that time period, a gentleman named Ed Dillard, who was a year-round Santa Claus, who did amazing things. He would go into a mall and he created experiences. That was a great thing because he lived it all year, right? So anybody who signed. When you'd see him in a mall, you see people go up in a kid's sits on Santa Claus. But what would be effective with him is a 12-year-old, say, I had Santa Claus and he says, it's good to see a neck.
So what's been happening this year, Nick? It sounds like you've had some problems with your friend. I'm going to talk about it. And he would say these things and just know so much about someone. And he was mentalist as well, not to also throw off. He had an inner ear microphone in his ear and the parents had the other side of it.
But he had this great book of Latin that was Santa's book and it was all carved out leather with this beautiful book and he would tell anybody about anything about themselves. But through the auspices of Santa Claus. And I just loved this beautiful approach that it wasn't so much what I saw magicians initially getting in a magic for was to fill a hole in themselves. They were hiding behind what they were doing. They're trying to get this validation from somewhere and they needed attention.
And that wasn't the driver for me. I was trying to figure out, is there something here? I can create sparks in people and experience like that guy did in my second grade when he came in as repairing the window or the Santa Claus. So I think it started to shape that I had one skill set which outside of magic I could steal things that I could blend in. And there was a few factors also. I stayed a little bit martial arts.
I had some understanding of animation and all of them kind of settled together to create a style that I developed. How did animation inform the style? There was a great book called The Illusion of Life by Disney's what he called him is Nine Men. It talks about The Illusion of Life, how to create in just frame by frame when you're hand drawing how to create life motion. And one of those is secondary actions and what they call slowing in and slowing out.
Something moving at the top of a curve, how it will have more frames versus on the bottom of a curve. And I started realizing there was overlaps in relationships of that to IKido. When you study IKido, there are certain half moves and half circles. And so when I started blending those together with slight a hand, I realized that I could lock people in a dance when you're doing a cross body lead. How does somebody know that you have a lead? And how do you transfer that with your hands?
So by putting those together, I started to see that I could manipulate a person's body and tell them a story that they wouldn't register consciously. And I could lock up their body without them knowing that I had kind of locked up the mechanics of them. Lock up meaning like gain control, hijack. Yeah, put them in a frame as you would say on the street. So I could put them in a frame that I didn't need other people, a team of thieves to help me. I could do it by myself.
And I could use certain things that would draw. I noticed from animation because of that, there was certain emotions that drew attention and that later became a thing too. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. Now, do you get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1.
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To learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim, check it out. So a lot of people try magic in some form or another. Very few people make it to the point where they are performing, giving TED talks, getting profiled by the New Yorker, etc. Very few. What were some of the most important inflection points?
Say picking up where we left off after reading these books, after having these various inputs, I guess maybe could have been during these various inputs like the martial arts and the jazz and the dance and so on. What were some of the critical moments, let's say? Could be decisions, could be interactions, could be people you meet that helped to set their trajectory? I'm so fortunate to have had some incredible people influence me along the way.
And I've kind of surfed through my career from person to person that's made an impact on me. But there's one I would say that makes the most impact, which is my wife. I'll circle back to her because she's probably the biggest. But at that time, when I was in Las Vegas, I was married when I was young. So it was my first wife. When did you first get married? I was 18. So I was married. I had a son who now I have two kids. I have a son who's 30 and a daughter who's six.
So fascinating two different worlds. But at that time, I had to provide for my family so it amped up that entrepreneurship. I think made it a very serious thing that I had to find out if I'm going to do this. And I was in a juxtaposition between two worlds. I had given up art because of this incident with my father. But in school and high school, I had some teachers recognize that I shouldn't and they pushed me toward design and illustration and computer graphics.
And I had two careers that I could do simultaneously, the design aspect of that and then moonlighting with the magic style and comedy clubs and things. So I was doing both those in high school, but then I was transitioning into doing that full time by the time both of those simultaneously as I graduated high school. And there was a German who was a touring magician from Las Vegas came through town and he saw me performing and he said, you should go to Vegas. And I said, yes, what everybody says.
And he says, come visit me. I said, I've never flown on a plane before. I don't even know what it's like outside of like Missouri. And he says, come. And I flew to Vegas to visit this guy. His name was Darrell Martinez. They call him the magician's magician. He picked me up at the airport. He drove me straight downtown into a gambling spot and he was a gambler. He showed me that world.
And he said, Vegas has everything to offer, but it will give you nothing, which was perfect for me because I love working for it. And I formed a model real quick. I looked at all the magicians that were around me and I recognized that they blew me away. They had exceptional skills. Things I didn't know were possible, but they didn't have everything. They either had high skill, which I put underneath the talent.
They had low business sense, maybe, or their ambition to take that effort to the next place. And the combination of those were atroofied in different areas. And I felt like even if I don't have the same skill level, I can bring some of that back or find other angles. And so I decided to move out to Las Vegas and to try to go after that. And then I'm jumping through a timeline real quick. But I was initially working at doing a couple of design jobs.
And my second one was for a series of slot machine design designing at the animation sequences for slot machines and doing all the illustrations for that. And I was doing freelance artwork for a hypnotist named Justin Trans. And I was designing all this stuff and he said, why are you here? He says, for a couple of years, you've been in this work that they'll place in your doing freelance artwork for me. He said, but your performing capability says you could do something else.
I see what's a good reason? Give me one reason. He says, wouldn't it be amazing stories sometime later in your life if people said, why did you quit your job as an artist and become a magician or performer full time? And it was because a hypnotist told you during a lunch break. I thought that was a great idea. So I went back in my job and I gave my notice that day. Wow. That was a Friday. What a gift. Well, it depends on how you're sitting here.
So I'm not sure the intervening experiences look like, but it seems like a gift. That was a big point because that was a jumping point, right? And it had a context in that I was a senior designer at that time and the company I was working for and the rewind didn't say their name. They had let off a large production team that supported the graphics I did. I'd hand my designs to them. They would port them across to bigger things. They'd let them go. They found a way to get around their contract.
So they outsource them to another company and then let that company fire them. Okay. So they wouldn't know any severance or they'd dodge something. They dodge all their severance. And that made it impact on me. So they'd just give me a bonus. They'd just give me a raise. That was the context at that time that he said that, well, why are you here? And it wasn't about the money for me and it was that moment of, yeah, what would happen if I did this thing? I don't know how.
I clean this light on this thing and see what happens. And coincidences, I still believe happened in that weekend. A friend of mine said, hey, I'm going on tour for a couple of weeks and there's a show called Caesar's Magical Empire. And I was wondering if you could come fill in for me for those two weeks starting on Tuesday. Yes. Perfect timing. Sounds great. I'll give that a shot. What did you have ready at that point, like filling in?
Does that mean you have 30 minutes set, 15 minutes set, I'm not sure sets the right terms. Yes. I mean, I mean, I think that's a lot of comedians working on standard material and to get a polished hour, I mean, it could take years for some folks, right? Yes. So what did you have when this opportunity falls from the sky, hey, could you fill in within the next week? I had been doing it professionally at the same time.
So even back in my hometown, I had contracts with, I did restaurants, I did nightclubs, I had 15 different contracts at the end per week. So you had things you knew had already worked out. You knew that you could string them together. Yeah. And I knew I could make an impact. And the big skill I had that was unique when I came to Vegas, I decided, let's just drop the other stuff and just focus on the stealing.
Because at that point, there was one other guy who was really good, two other guys were in that space. One of them had passed away. He was a friend and he worked at that place. And so it was a good angle for me to explore further and more. To differentiate yourself. Yeah. To differentiate. As a brand, I'll give you just a paint of picture of the, it's a fascinating thing. My first show I ever did in Las Vegas, separate from seizures was just a corporate event for a large corporation.
And it was a red carpet event that limousine is pulling in. It was very different from Missouri boy when I first heard about that. And these agents, they said, so why don't I go steal things from people, I guess. And they gave me hundred dollar poker chips to give to people as gifts. I went up to this guy and the agent was watching. And the first time I tried to steal. And you say agent, this is someone who works at the casino. These are agents that hire for entertainment. I see.
And they were watching and they were trying to vet if I was a good fit. And the first guy, this is like your audition gig. Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. If they're going to hire me back again. And so I walk up to somebody that was important. They brought this VIP up to me right away. And as I go to steal his watch, his watch band was very worn out and it snapped in two pieces while I was stealing it. I could feel my ears turning red. And I just was running through the gamut. Do I give this back to him?
Which is more important. Because I got a lot of pressure at that moment. So I was performing with him in another German and then I said, oh, and here's watching. He's shocked. They have his watch. And before he even processed, I said, I pulled out the other piece of his watch and gave him the second piece of it, which was a leather band. And I said, see that lady over there and goes, yeah, that lady. I said, yeah, see her watch. I said, I'm going to let you see it a second time.
This time I'm going to start watching. I'm going to try to do it without breaking it. Now that's a lot harder. But I'm going to try to see if it's possible because no, you can't do that. And I was gambling on the idea that he didn't need the money. He probably knew that he needed to replace this band. But I'm reframing it that, hey, that's a whole nother level. You guys want to try it? And let's move past this idea that I just broke his watch. Yes. Yeah. Which that's always been my...
Part of the script for it. Yeah. And that's constantly what was required for me. I didn't take cigarettes. You took cigarettes in the apron. Yes. So that's... My career has been majority of those, right? My first day after I had left my job as a designer and I came over to work at Scusri Palace, I was accused of stealing this lady's rings. I was doing a performance in front of a group and she said, my rings and her husband said, where they go? And she said, somebody stole them.
I hadn't even touched her. And I said, what did you have? And she goes, I had diamonds and rubies and emeralds. Oh my. And I just said, oh, I must have sent them as a child support payment. I just turned it into a joke. And then the husband really got mad. Didn't like it. No. And so once everybody cleared out, they came at me. It came up to me. It came at me too. And he said, give us the rings. Do you really believe that I have your rings or are you joking? And he says, no, give us the rings.
And he says, we're going to the police. And they started to leave and I said, stop. Don't walk away. And he goes, what? Said, if you walk away right now, you'll never know if I have your rings. Because I could hide them anywhere. But I want you to know that I don't. So I'm going to walk in front of you. I'm going to keep my hands out to the side. You watch me. We're going to walk to police together. So we walked out in the casino. We went to security and I got strip searched.
And his wife went up. She was very dramatic. And to me, it can be that she was sincere about her belief. That she really believed that that happened. So then she up in her room found her ring setting on a sink and she'd been washing her hands. Do you get an apology? I did. That's good. But I think it may also help. It wasn't just an apology. It helped me secure a job there beyond filling in for a friend. I got it for five years. So that five years came from how I handled that situation.
And over that time, I had people grab my throat, pull out a gun one time, pull out knives. Hold on a second. This is at shows right after a show. In the show. In the show. All over the place. I've had every variation of that happened because they think you have stolen something or they're upset that you do. Or maybe I have. Yes. But it was in a social context of entertainment, right? Right. Right. Yeah. But still, that's a different thing than if you mess up on a magic trick.
If you mess up on a magic trick, they caught you. Look, I understand how you trick works. In the space I was playing, it was accusations, law enforcement, lawsuits. And I was constantly doing with that. I learned certain rules. Don't steal from someone who's been drinking. Don't steal from someone who has Alzheimer's or any potential for that because that's a really hard one to fight your way out of what they believe they had something they didn't.
And I started making my own set of rules and it changed one big thing in my style, which was, right, I'm going to treat this like a vampire. I'm going to tell him. Let's go vampire. Vampires had to be introduced into the household. I thought they needed you right. They need to be invited. So I'd say in three minutes, I'm going to be wearing your watch. Try to catch me. And if they say yes, then, but that was the first time I had ever seen that happen.
When I had studied the history of theatrical pickpocketing and other things, there wasn't that open challenge that beware. This is about to happen. If you engage, that's the game we're going to play. Are you ready? But it now meant a whole different thing. But it came from all those concerns and lawsuits and everything else that almost happened. Never, never landed. But now I developed a style that was a very different style, very potent style. But instead of surprise, it was suspense.
Yeah, exactly. It was suspense. There was also a preemptive strategy. Yes. So you would have less need to be good at reacting. Because you're setting the ground rules and getting invited as a vampire. So at what point then, you said five years, is it within that span that Jimmy Carter and the Secret Service show up? Yes. At that time, I had been there and I'll give you more context. So when I was performing, it was a specific role at the beginning of the show.
Twenty-four people would go into a certain area and they'd be there for ten minutes before they went on to the next part of the show. During that time, I would steal from four people and pass their items off for the function in the show. And one person then I would bring up front steal all of his stuff while everybody's watching and give it back and then later everybody would find it and comes back to them later.
I would do that every ten minutes, six times an hour, five hours a night, five nights a week for five years. So some math is somewhere around 200,000 people plus my side gigs that it became a lab for me to experiment. Can I take someone's glasses while they're wearing them? And what does that do? Is it possible? Can I steal their belt? What are the boundaries? And that was a place for me to experiment on the aspect of that. Could you please tell the story of the Secret Service?
So about probably near the end, about three years after I've been performing at Sears of Palace, there was a special night when we had come into work and they had a big meeting before the show. And the manager said we have previous president of the United States coming into visit and we are going to have some people go home that haven't had background checks. There's still a lot of different rules. Yeah, because they had them background checks on all of us.
And he said there, your photo ops as he goes through the show, he's got a small party with him. But the whole theater is just going to be section off for that. They have Secret Service. We'll be here so don't be alarmed, but they'll be stationed throughout the casino and throughout the theater. And then we were all departing and he said, but I probably asked you not to meet the president not to shake his hand.
They don't want it to get in the news if you're to steal from him and everybody just kind of laughed. And I went back to him and said, well, that's not bad. I'd like to picture with the president. And it was Jimmy Carter at that time, not that I was in the era of Jimmy Carter. He was an express. He was on a tour, a book tour. And he said, but you know, they didn't say anything about the Secret Service. I said, what does that mean? They didn't say that you couldn't steal from the Secret Service.
You didn't hear this from me. Yeah, but do you think you could? And I'm so happy they positive that then versus now because I'm in my 20s, I probably wouldn't do those things now in the same way. I mean, I still still from Secret Service today, but it's a different context, excuse me. Wait a minute. Yeah. We'll come back to that. There you go. Come back to that. All those Secret Service bar mitzvahs that you go to. Yeah, it's a thing. Okay. All right. So why else moved to Washington DC?
Yes. Okay. You wouldn't do it exactly the same way. And then what unfolds? So you get this side chat, which is like I get a side chat. Technically, they didn't say you couldn't do something with Secret Service. And then what? It brings in the head of security for Caesar 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 been eye-plossible to die, but it disavow all knowledge. Yes. And that this could be rather serious, which I thought was a really interesting challenge. And I moved into that. I was approaching the show and as I was moving through, I saw two of them were stationed at a certain point. And I went up and started to hit those guys. And I see it was the way I approached them that got in their space. And I stole several of their items.
So the two Secret Service agents, I guess is the right term, maybe. And to a layperson, to civilian, I think, two more complicated. But maybe two actually provides more surface area slash opportunity. But when you say you went into their space, could you paint a more detailed picture of how you ended up taking items from two very well-trained people who have a lot of situational awareness, who know what you do? Sure. You used a great word there. You said surface area.
And surface area, they have a lot to protect on themselves, both where they keep their firearms, their credentials, the keys, the artillery, all these things. So they just treat it as a whole, but it's got all these little parts. And I like to think of attention as a limited resource. It's really useful to think 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 approached them, I hadn't had an experience with anyone like that before. And the context was different. They knew who I was, specifically when I walked up. There's a nickname for me in the show. They call me klepto. He says 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 it's 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. One of them stepped back as I approached. And there's a way that I approach the gains access to someone's space. If you think of someone's personal space as a bubble and their proprioception of how you get into their awareness of their space, it's kind of shaped like an egg and it's larger up front.
It's narrow on the sides and it's shallow on the back. And you can break eye contact with someone to sneak underneath that as you move through. I can show you more of that later. But as you gain access, there's a way of approaching from the side that can often help. So when I started to sail 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 slight brush that in my world, I have to know a lot of beam loadage from what's inside people's pockets and the printing of a jacket and what it means. I'm 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, I indicated to me that he might have a firearm on that side versus on his right side. So it was probably underneath and a holster underneath his jacket.
I saw just a acknowledge that 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 giving me access from the side. The first guy. Yeah, the first guy thinks he's off the clock. He thinks he's off the clock. And so just by that's one of the things that by setting the expectation, he thinks he's done and the play has moved on. But now I reach underneath my arm and I steal from inside his jacket and I steal what I found to be his credentials.
It was wallet passports shaped and I stole his glasses from his outside pocket and I still a couple of things. And as I was talking to the other guy, as you're doing that, does the other guy notice? 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 and a more accessible spot or I can put it on me in other 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 trifolded. And as I'm opening it up, I see what it is.
It's now the itinerary where they're taking Carter to. And I said, I can't really read it with these glasses on. He realizes that I'm wearing his glasses that wear his pocket. And he goes, hey, he takes my glasses and he looks at the paper and he says, hey, 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 recently in pocket, he really says they doesn't have the credentials. And the other guy's laughing very hard at it.
I'm sure. And he said, I'm not going to be the only one. Oh, dad's not going to be happy with that. We need to find out. And so they said, he says, you're going to do this to the other guys. So he got out of his mic and he starts telling me to go to other teams. So I now have an advocate and an 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 add live 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. So what was the significance if any of that whole evening to you or your career?
Maybe it was indirect in the sense that it increased your confidence that enabled you to do X, Y and Z. But if there was significance, what was the significance? I think legend is too strong of a word. But there are things. Nothing travels like a good story. It does. It gives people a story to tell and it did. And it was one of a handful of legends 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 under promise and overdeliver when people have this expectation for what you can do. For sure. Because they spread into, oh, you stole their bullets and you took out their bullets to other guns. And I've heard all sorts of variations of that. I became working for the government from that day forward. William Wallace. Yeah. 12 feet tall.
Yes. Flaming lightning out of the hours. And it was much better when people underestimate me because working against overconfidence was a great way to play. Frozen cons, right? Frozen 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 German 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 the Inattentional Blindness. Dan Simons and his Chris Chabris. Was his partner? They did a book called Invisible Gorilla where you watch a basketball being passed and it really was a credible video. Yeah. 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 DZ and I'm going to talk to the Secret Service. And I was asked about that about task blindness and attention blindness. And this overlapped into two fascinating neuroscientists that I met.
Stephen Magnick and Susanna Martinez, Condit. They were, 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 positive that I think we only have two sidelines. And this circle is 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. And so I sense that there's two types of sidelines. And there's a kind of suppression that happens during those. And I think that that's an interesting place to experiment with. And they said, yes, it is. We could do that with eye tracking software. And we did. And it turned out to be right.
And that was the change. That was the flip of a switch. Because then I was part of a paper that they published in Nature Journal. And then I was asked to speak at the International Society for Neuroscience, 10,000 Neuroscience. I just... I just... I just brought in your land. It did. Or you gained more land.
Yeah. And when it realized that it wasn't just me stealing, but that that same concept of psychotic versus smooth pursuit eye movements and their impact on different things started to branch out in other areas. And then I was asked to speak on attention and the current models of attention at MIT and Harvard and other ones, it all changed right there. How did you connect with the scientists just so I can connect the lore? Yeah. The stealing bullets, right?
Yeah. From mid-air with the Secret Service to connecting on the scientific side. How was that connection made? Teller. Teller. Teller said he was approached about this. And at that time him and I had become pretty good friends and we spent a lot of time together. Penn was also a friend. Teller was interesting like the research side of it on the backside. And he asked me to come join at that effort. Got it.
Okay. I want to pick up a couple of micro gingerbread topics that I've let alone that I've committed to myself I would return to. The first is in terms of making the coin levitate into the other hand. Did you ever figure that out? I did. Okay. And a lot of blood, sweat and calluses, but yes. Okay. I think that gives me the answer that I'm looking for because we have a mutual friend, Simon Cornell. Yes. And I don't want to speak out of school so I'm not going to get into the how of it I suppose.
But I've seen him do this and just rest assured it is so much harder than people think. It is. I think that your body wasn't trained to do you've never had a use for that and to train it to be able to do that to make something animate is a combination of unusual muscles that people wouldn't usually use. Yeah, it is so much harder than people can possibly imagine, which makes me think of speaking of teller presentation that he gave. I think it was at the entertainment gathering.
And he said, I'm going to show you a video and I think there's a balloon involved or ball. Yes. And he shows the magic trick. Let's call the performance on video. This is all right, now I'm going to explain how I did it and he explains it and then he shows it again. He says, now are you more or less impressed? I'm paraphrasing here. Tremendous. But it was a love story, right? It turns into a love story with an effect.
That's why I thought it was the greater lesson of those, him showing it and exposing it was this beautiful piece of him coming and spending time with this effect and giving part of his life to it. The second thing I wanted to ask about you have thousands, tens of thousands of repetitions because you're doing four people every, what was it? 20 minutes, 10 minutes. 10 minutes. Multiple times an hour over and over and over again. So you're getting a lot of reps. What do you do when it doesn't work?
What's your recovery or how do you handle that? Because I can't imagine as you're experimenting, you must push the envelope and I imagine, I mean, with any skill, it's not going to be 100% hit rate. So what do you do? Even at, let's say, for instance, the magic castle. It's like you see how people recover when things don't work out exactly as planned. Absolutely. For me, that's part of the art. I mean, it's fascinating. So what do you do in those circumstances?
I think there's a subtext to what you're asking that is unique to the 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. The function is more like sparring in martial arts that if they start to pick up on a thing, there's a feedback loop that I can see.
And the cost of them fixating on that catch comes at the cost of them losing something else. So as soon as they start to detect one thing, if they cover their head, you go to the body. Yeah. And once they catch that one thing, they might find themselves three pounds lighter in other places because they've lost all these other things. Okay. So it changes the definition of fail. Is fail getting caught stealing a watch or a belt or glasses?
I was pretty good at rolling with that and improvising with those things and realizing that if they started to catch that, I could turn it into another situation. And I would load strange things on people like I loaded a bag of oregano on a grandma and I said, what's this program on? And I think, this is actually the perfect place for me to just read an excerpt from profile of you, which was by Adam Green in the New Yorker. And the title of this, I recommend everybody read this.
If you have anything you'd like to correct in the piece, we can cover that too, but a pick pocket's tail, the spectacular thefts of Apollo Robbins. So this is one of my favorite paragraphs. True. Yes. When Robbins hits his stride, it starts to seem as if the only possible explanation is an ability to start and stop time. At the Rio, a man's cell phone disappeared from his jacket and was replaced by a piece of fried chicken.
The cigarettes from a pack in one man's breast pocket materialized loose in the side pocket of another. The engagement ring vanished and reappeared attached to a key ring in her husband's pants. A man's driver's license disappeared from his wallet and turned up inside a sealed bag of M&Ms in his wife's purse. Okay. So hard for me to even fake any sense of half of that, but you're loading things on people is where you were. Yeah. I take things off. I switched them my alter room.
You're creating for yourself options. Yes. It's like you have one trick you're executing and if you flub it, trick is done. Yeah. That's why I meet this 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.
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. I said, it's the guys you know I'm here, right? I'm supposed to steal everything you have. So I'd say that up front, it stops most conversations. I said, you got anything on you and you just see them check. They would just bump through a wall to the thing and I'm just clocking. It's like, okay, so I got the keys here.
You know exactly what they're doing. Yeah, so I'm making a mental map and now I'm about to move into the circle. They telegraphed all of their possessions. Yeah, it's because they don't believe it's true. They just were having a conversation. And now I'm making that effect. It's like, can that seem to be a room key here? That's over here.
And as I move through them in a Rupic pocket and they call it fanning, small movements with my elbow or my hand can give me an idea of what things are in a breast pocket or other things. And I can say a shark and taking little nibbling bites, feeling things out. Yes. And just taking inventory, you could say. Yeah. And now I'm crafting. Okay. So we're feeling out around a boxing. Same thing where people are gauging distance. They're seeing how people react. What's their pattern?
What are their defenses? Absolutely. And their vulnerabilities. Yeah. I think 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 at Filipino style martial arts. And as I was new in it, one of the things that I could do in the first part was they would go to draw a secondary weapon, sometimes like a trainer blade and it wouldn't be there.
I just can't do that trick a lot, but it's a great trick when they go to draw and it's not there. They're very surprised, you know? I'm sure they're very surprised. Yes. All right. So following this gingerbread trail, I just wanted to address it a couple. All right. Your wife. Yes. So you mentioned, I think, that she's the most important influencer. The biggest impact on your career. How so?
Yeah. And life in general, she brought, I think when you're a specialist in an area, it's easy to get so fixated that everything in your world revolves around that. And mine was all around con artisteves. And I had a soft spot for those guys. I knew a lot of those guys were intimate friends of mine that had done things that you would think of like Ocean's 11 where they pulled high sun 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 established reporting things. And there's a friend of mine who was hostage negotiation. He had a special forces background.
He says, hey, why don't we do this book together and we'll go shoot this video and we'll ask women how they would like to be approached. And then we'll put in cameras on him and see when people approach him, how ridiculous people do approach him. And then we'll talk about that. And it sounds like a great idea. He calls me, he got a film crew coming in and some models and other things. And he says, hey, we're having this thing late night at a party in Las Vegas at a all night spot.
He says, come on, I said, it's too late for me. 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 because professional. 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 him. One of the ladies in the group, as they were introducing themselves, she had a background in psychobiology.
She had just graduated from a degree in that. She was working as a crisis counselor on a hotline, talking people off the cliff. She would do some pretty intense stuff and stayed abnormal psych and very kind of intense playful. And he said, I was a thief when he introduced me to this group of girls. And I stole it. That is a hell of an intro. Like you're going to get a conversation. It does.
And when I'm sick, so I stole the girls engagement ring with the thing and I did a thing with that and give it back. And this lady that later showed up to be my wife, she asked me, he still sent me for me. So she was a chocolate coverage strawberry from that table over there. And she points at this table nearby, a VIP section. I said, got it.
So I grabbed a menu, walked over, pretended to be with the staff, asked them if they were being taken care of, stole the chocolate strawberry under the menu. And then I walked it and then I threw it over my shoulder to add a little flair, I caught it. I went to hand it to her and when she went to take a bite of it, I put it in my mouth and I just winked at her so she'd have to kiss me to get the strawberry. And it's that playfulness, I think, that's the important thing. It's bald. It is.
But it worked. Yeah. And then I just didn't work because her advocacy and her academia and it was the opposite, it was too slick. And she felt that pressure from the group. She gave me the kiss, but we ended up leaning against the wall talking about psychology. And that dove into a deep thing. She said, have you ever thought about this long phone conversation later on? But she said, have you ever thought about all this stuff you're learning and how it applies to bigger problems in the world?
And she was the one that encouraged me to do the event with the neuroscientist. 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. I was like, I heard 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.
And when I saw my first presidential debate, I went back to Teller. I said, Teller, you're a Latin professor. What was that? Why do I know all those things? They're so similar to this thing that the yellow kid used to do or Titanic Thompson used to do this thing with this. Wait a second. Meaning you observed a lot in the debate. Yes. That paralleled what you had learned. Very similar concepts. Could you give an example? There is a term called Gish Galloping.
I forgot the guy's name for Gish Galloping. Gish was a debater who would often do a package of assaults on a person or their human character where it should be, he'd say, during his three minute window of a debate, he would say, my opponent would have you believe this, this, this, this, this. And then the opponent's countermeasure for that becomes, well, they're overwhelmed.
They don't know how to respond because they have three minutes and he posits a lot of questions and they don't have three minutes functioning to answer those questions. And that very similar to me was a noise and signal ratio piece that's used to overwhelm people inside of a cash exchange with short changing. And I recognized that as one approach. They were changing, so like giving somebody change, but less change than the insurance. And overwhelming a cash register attendee at that time.
And using ambiguous statements with different ways that they could take that as for, I can clarify more on that later. But a counter to that Gish Galloping, for example, back to Equivocay for Equivo. If somebody were doing a series of personal assassinations, they also, what they're doing is deluding their argument. Because now if I say 10 bad things about you or you said that about me, then as you can see, he's very impatient about what he says.
But it knows there's a central theme between all of those. That central theme is X. And that's the Equivo, 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 that has diluted that down, give you one point back and I hijacked the narrative. All right. So you're talking to Teller about this. Yes. And he was a Latin professor.
OK, so that wasn't, that was a euphemism or joke. He was an actual Latin professor. He was. Before in his career, I said, you know more about Socrates and Plato. So can you tell me what, and he says, yeah, you need to go back at Replato's Republic. You need to study about Socrates. And he started prompting me to go back to learn this. That's amazing. Yeah. Back to the classics. Back to the classics.
So from the Chalka Strawberry in the mouth to broader applications and psychology or at least harnessing psychology, recognizing maybe the common threads across multiple domains that you'd already been exposed to and had polished in your craft to presidential debate to then reading Plato and Aristotle. Yes. And the driver of this was back to that was my wife. We had this unusual thing and she moved to Las Vegas pretty quickly after we started dating. Where was she? Issues in Los Angeles.
And is it hard to get her to move to Vegas? It was a negotiation. Because she didn't want to come visit and be under nobligation. 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 it. Can I ask when you write, what is your per page fee? And she said, my per page fee is usually about this amount.
I said, so if I asked you to help me write this bio and some other portions for me, I would actually be getting a discount by paying for your airplane versus paying for the writer's fee. And she said, yeah, I guess so. And I said, all right, so come help me write my bio. And I'll buy you a plane ticket. But it's that play that when she came out, she helped me a different direction that I wasn't solely focused on her team.
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 moved from Vietnam. And she had grown up her father was incredible. She would 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 Aaron Brown in the UK doing some things for him. So she was fascinated by that with her training in psychology. She said, 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. They would come in. If the FBI was watching or the NSA watching our house, they would have seen all these guys come in and out.
And she was the den mom of all that she really helped take us all for a turn. Wow. Okay. So this is off the map. This is nothing to do with the questions that I've written down.
But I'm curious when you're describing, for instance, the semi-circle A to B versus the linear A to B, it makes me think of sports and exercise science and how the practitioners, the people on the field, the top coaches, the top athletes are always a few years ahead of the literature and the science and so on, which is not to denigrate the science. It just takes a while. People need to write grants typically. They need to really pick and choose their shots.
And a lot of what's experimented with in the field doesn't work. And that's okay as long as a few things really work. And I'm curious if, given that you have this broader awareness and you've had these interactions with neuroscientists and so on, if there are any beliefs you have based on your experiences of practitioner around attention or perception that has not yet made its way into the scientific circles. Absolutely. But you'd be willing to say, you know what?
I can't say it with 100% certainty, but I would bet that A, B or C. I think in order to validate 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 it sports or between conumin 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. Super hard.
Also really hard for replication with animals and say animal learning chimpanzees, project nymph for people are interested, highlights this very hard. And the society aspect of that, for example, and the replication that tend to show the same darkness of an ideal society. What does that mean to manufacture one?
In this space where I find fascinating, probably with current research, I'm really interested, I guess, an armchair, social psychologist, I really read a lot in that space, that harkens back to my dad and my childhood, which is I think that there's a really interesting place right now when people focus in politics on the left and the right, that there's a bigger problem with how people engage with uncertainty.
That there needs to be a lot of work done on the study of the tolerance that people have for uncertainty. And we've had the pandemic. We've had craziness. We've had the economy. And I think it's really interesting if you look at that, instead of left and right, if you look at that as north and south, that you have people from both sides that need an absolute answer when they're confronted with something unusual. And that need to fill in the gap.
That need to have an absolute answer for something that they've seen happen versus tolerance for uncertainty. I think could help inoculate people from some of the problems that they're running into. There's going to be a future where the arms race, I like people think of it as armzaries of technology, like when they think about AI, deepfakes, but it's armzaries of imaginations. Intensibly, these 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, it needs to be a lot more research on how we develop comfort with uncertainty and we authenticate all those types of things. There's books and literature at the start and come out in that space.
That's definitely, I'm leaning into that too because I feel like since my job is distorting perceptions and creating a rony of sense-making, then I should really try to lend a helping hand if I can. So we may come back to that, but I want to first return to something that we discussed briefly, but didn't really flesh out. And that is, let's call it for lack of a better term, your style. Yeah. Here we get to your style. What is the significance of any of that ring?
This ring is made from a silver coin and my magic used to be based around silver ants. It's unusual. If you talk to a magician, a professional magician, it's just a ten. So it's a very pretty ring and for people who aren't watching the video, I've been watching you play with it. I manipulate it and manipulate it and take it off and put it back on. And I would imagine, given what you do, that you might choose your adornments with some fault. Or with the purpose. So that's why I ask. All right.
There's lots of things that can be done with this. Actually, when I pick pocketed Pendulet, I met him the first time and he's a big guy, six foot six at least. Big guy. Yeah. And he had heard about, historically among magicians, pick pockets are a kind of pick. There's a lot of people that say, give me a 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. But first time I met him, he's just walked up to me and he says, so you can steal stuff. And I said, yeah, sometimes I can. He says, then steal something from me. He held out his arms. And I remember him wearing like Tommy Bahamas shirt, some shorts. And he had that's my block pin that was clipped inside of his shirt pocket. And he said, still something from me now. I said, you know, that's kind of like saying, be funny now.
And he said, yeah, let me tell you about something that happened to somebody one time. If I still watch from someone, it's one plus one. You say, oh, you're fast. You got my watch. I didn't notice. It's about one time I was talking to a guy and during the conversation, I stole his pen. I took the refill of his pen out, put his pen back together, 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 even try it down.
And he says, okay, are you going to steal something from me? I said, can you draw a circle around this ring for me? And he pulled out his pen and he goes, and he stops me and he stares at me. And he realized he's the guy in the story. And he just, he opened his pen and saw that the refill wasn't there and he goes, fuck you. And that's it. No, pen. Isn't that better than taking your wallet and I threw his wallet on the table? Okay. That's amazing. Now, why is that made of solar dollar?
So, silver dollars in coin magic, silver has a unique property in the way that it feels on your skin, the way it's soft, the way it can move. And also the sound that it makes. But specifically for a side of hand, silver works very well for a side 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 very cool. It's very fun to me where I came from for that.
Very cool, very tension grabbing also, which I would imagine helps with. It can't be. It can be used as a level confidence. I can talk to you about it. And I'll show you something with that actually. Okay. It does mean a lot to me. Do you have anything in your pockets right now? I do. Yeah. I have a hotel key. I have some credit cards. Okay. Great. So, I know what those are. If I asked you right now, and this is something we could just stuff for it, got your bitch. Take this.
Set your pen down for a second and take the in my ring and put it in one of your hands. And now, whether under the paper behind your back, put in one of your two hands so I can't see which hand it would go in. I'll do it behind my back. I'll just give you a little tip. Sorry about that. Yeah. That's all right. You got it? Okay. So you put them one of your hands now. Don't do the third option, which is putting in your pocket. Not going to do it.
Okay. which Hannah, it's right now, it's in your right hand, correct? Let's see, it is in my right hand. Can I see? Yeah. Okay, do that again. Okay. Okay, let's bring back out. Yeah. Now it's in the left hand. You correct. Is that right? Yeah, it is. So you try that with me, okay? So, all right, yeah, I was trying to think like logic through this.
Yeah. Sort of like rock paper scissors, because I was like, he would expect me to probably go with the same hand because I would maybe think it, I should switch it. I sort of over-complicated it for myself. But yes, you got it. You just put this bright all over again. Yeah, just put this bright all over again. Yeah. So try it with me and see what your process is, okay? All right. Right hand. It was pretty fast. Did you peak it or how did you get it? No, I was looking at the body language.
Okay. Oh shit, I heard it. You're just trying to, I'll do it again. I'll do it again. Alright, so we're doing 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. One just one more time. Right. One more time. Which hand?
Right hand. Would you like to change? No. So this is not a mentalism effect or it would be much better. I think, but I also have 50-50 chance. So I'm going to chance you. Yeah, yeah. But I want you to be able to make your point. Well, so in this, that's a little minicon with a little ring. And we often hear people talk about biases, so like confirmation bias. But when you embody a real interaction like this, you would never associate what we just did as confirmation bias.
I think I have an advantage over you also. Because you're angled to me. Oh, okay. So you were able to see kind of when my hand came out. I didn't see your hands, but I think it's easier for me to observe your body language in a sense because you're angled at me. But that, too, might be wrong. I don't know. No, it's an interesting hypothesis. But I think that that's the interesting thing. If it was never in my hand and you were wrong every time you might think I was cheating, yes?
Sure. Because when we lose, we're more curious. And when we win, we're less curious about why we're winning, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. So now you, those people are watching. Now you have identical rings, one and a half. Okay, I got it. A very unique special ring that you started the conversation on. You found your own path. So in that, that's a little metaphor for a con, right?
That one little ring because that whole story that you jumped into, that little rabbit hole with asking about the ring is a great baseline that now people assume there's one. 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 win, right? When you win, 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 hole 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 way. It's confidence. It is. You see me playing low status with that? I need you to miss in order for me to be able to.
Yeah. Yeah. But that kind of thing, everything is about helping people get to that. Yeah. All right. That was a great demo. And that actually ties into the question of, can you elaborate on what makes your style? How is it different from what people think of as magic? Maybe what they've seen growing up? Well, give you an experience one time where I had, let's just see kind of backstage. One time I was performing for 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 so 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, dress guy. And he said, so I heard you steal things. Is that right? And I said, yeah, something like that. And so still something for me.
I said, I'm sorry, what was your name? This is Jamal. Nice to meet you, Jamal. Before this, let's go back that I walked into this event thinking, I don't want to do anything I've done before exactly. There's some little components and you'll hear some things coming back where I just talked about with Penn. 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?
Let's just find out. Yeah. And that's where it started to become a jazz. So this interaction with this guy, Jamal, when he came up, he says, so you can steal something for me. And I said, I don't know. What was your name? He goes, Jamal, I said, how do you spell that, Jamal? And he said, Jay, 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 sight lines with him has been very low status. Break of your sight lines, meaning eye contact. Yeah, I didn't keep straight eye contact with him very much. I asked him about his suit. That's really fancy. It was all low status. And then everything just changed. Then it's this thing I said, with this healthy, Jamal, and it's straight eye contact. And it's the refill to his ink pen.
And he had way under us made it 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 at his stunts. He's in the 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?
Yeah. That I'd stolen it, taken apart, put it back together and put it back on him. Couldn't be that. So what else could it be? Posing time, time travel. So in 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 towards his back right pocket and he jumped on that big. He reached him, pulled out his wallet real quick, checked to see if he had everything stolen 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 at least it might be.
And he took off to go get Lisa. He comes back and he shoves his lady towards me in this agent. And I'm dance monkey dance. Yeah. I'm there to perform. I know. Yeah. And I'm talking to the agent. I have a drink. And this is an important thing, the drink because it's a part of the style. And it's not alcohol. It's just water. But I don't need anything from him. I'm not being validated. And a lot of performers will try to spoon feed the audience.
But it's letting them bring a thing to them, letting them have a reaction without you needing to feed back off of it. And letting people have this experience for themselves. And so when he pushed the lady up, I didn't quite look her up first. I said, sorry, it's nice to meet you. I looked over and I said, what was your name? She goes, Lisa. She hadn't quite come close to me at all. I said, she said, what's happening? I said, sorry, Lisa, he wants me to steal something from you. She says, what?
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 wage of malls drivers license got to have as wallet. Now, he's jumped back into the equation. He rips his water out again, really says, license is missing.
And he goes, where in the fucking my driver's license? And I said, it's in the chocolate. As I take a sip of my water, I just walk away. So I let them piece it together themselves. She tears over the M&Ms and she finds the license in her thing. Okay. So if we zoom out then, amazing story. I mean, I would have to think 100%, maybe 99.99% of people listening have never experienced something like this. And are the ingredients, you mentioned some of them.
Are there other ingredients that you can call out explicitly that are sort of the, some of the hallmarks that differentiate? Yeah. And that's quite different in magic. It tends to be that they'll have a set of effects that are linked together. And that one I walked in trying, I had a set of skills that I could do by hand and piece them together. And I take advantage of the movement. It kind of like you would if you were sparring in that way.
And then when I lean in forward, I step back with my left foot and I said it's nice to meet you. But at the same time, as my right hand comes up with the back of my hand, I kind of put my hand towards his chest as he came in a little bit too close. My left hand came up underneath the sight line and slipped inside of his jacket and took out his pen really quick. And I went down the line of my arm and into my pocket so he couldn't see anything being extracted.
And then I step back and then I remove the pen, take it apart and find another reason to come back in to put it back there. Well, Rage, you can do any of this. It's an amazing. But it's a strange thing. And then each one of those moments on the back side of that, I didn't know what was going to happen. But what I saw is when his attention locked to that pen and he was spinning. Anyway, 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 access, it's very useful. 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 anything, he had the money. I just copped his driver's license out of his wallet and letting him put his wallet back.
But he was already still thinking about the pen. So I could see he was thinking about the pen. So when I pushed down his hand, I just took the wallet out. The problem is his train of thought would go straight back to it. If I reveal, oh, I've got your license, he would go straight to it. So I thought, hmm, I guess I'm going to put this license inside the M&Ms. Let me see how I can do that. And as I'm thinking about that, he said, well, you should meet Lisa. I was like, what a great idea.
Perfect. Yes. And I think she's the one I met. Maybe there's more Lisa's, but let's see where he goes. And I said, yeah, it'll 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 I walk over what the other lady Lisa is talking to these people. I open her purse, drop it in there, put it there. And then I go back to where I was. He doesn't know this. So it was the right Lisa. It was like you for me.
And I was, I'd have to be doing some introductions. Okay. So I have to ask, what is it like for your wife to have a fight or argue with you? Because it could be, it seems like it could be a total nightmare. Or she would have to become such a master in your craft to be able to mount a defense or that she would be like, I have some friends who are therapists and sometimes their kids will say, stop therapistsing me mom. I know what you're doing. So what does that dynamic look like?
Or is she like, weapons badge on the table? Take your tools, put them away. I don't want any of your horses shit. Like we need to have a dog. 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 to, so her career path, she became a mentalist. She left her career as a social biology. All right. This is, this is non trivial. Okay. It's huge. And so she studied mentalism after meeting Darren Brown.
She went deep down that, she's her performing for companies. But she had the background to science that I didn't have. So she'd translate for me. We had a daughter together a number of years later. And in between those, we had these unusual experiences of going in very dangerous places with different criminal groups to learn about them, together me and her on these adventures around the world in different strange places. Why did you do that? Like to learn what types of things.
It's easy to say that a magic trick comes from this book. It's a different thing to say, but where do this really come from? Where do 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 the 1940s, they ran a criminal group there.
And they could steal large amount of things by altering their clothing and doing a variation what's called boosters or boosting. And that's my world. Encyclopedia of things like that. And who's the people are doing it now? There's a research of footage showing up now that YouTube is so pervasive.
It was security cameras of women doing things that are like that where there's tooling of flat screen TV, 32-inch flat screen TV and putting underneath their dress and walking without changing their gate. They're taking 10 pound cases of beer or wine and just making it vanish in their clothing and walking without changing their walk. There's a very interesting thing there that becomes, how is that knowledge being transferred?
It probably goes back to at least the one data point I know the 40 elephants. I usually, when I interact with different cultures of these, I track back through signals that they use or language or terms that they use. And I try to track where they learn from and we chase after that. And that's even 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 you that it's bad to lie. We try to talk to her that deception is social lubricant. It happens all the time around. It's 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. Could you say more about that because that would be very heretical to I'm sure some people listening. Wait a second, no deception badge. Yes. No exceptions.
Black and white. Absolutely. That's the dark side of the force. So could you say a bit more about how you teach your child, your children about deception or if you want to tackle this a different way? Is there a pro-social or a positive use of deception and a way to frame that for people that's definitely the flag I fly under now is I think that there's value in learning about deception that one of the reasons why we have critical thinking is the 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 reason 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 some of you and 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 want to make someone think that they have acted when they haven't. That's a very generic concept. Make them think that they have acted on something.
Make an action when they haven't. So I'll give you two contexts for that. If I as a pickpocket steal from somebody in another country and they don't 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 haven't.
They have a piece of mind that they've taken some action. 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 German malaria.
But if I can release a hormone to a female mosquito to make her think that she has made it when she hasn't, I make sure 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 paltering is the name for it in business of using it in advertising, of using a series of true statements to mislead. Can you give an example of never heard that term before? Which paltering or... Paltering. Yeah, paltering. If I said... It doesn't have to be a business example, but it will be an example of using the truth to deceive.
If I release a series of true statements in a certain order, you're going to connect those until 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 great book on propaganda by Eddie Bernice where he exploded with doing a study on the most important meal of the day. And it was at that time I think funded by the pork industry and they found that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. He says, so the All-American Breakfast, Bacon, Eggs and Toast is most important. But that wasn't part of the original study, the bacon and the eggs to become part of the All-American Breakfast. But repackaging that in there as well.
And a smaller thing if I want to convey an implied statement to you. If I said, do you believe in ESP, then I don't have anything to do. Let's go to know that. I'm not sure where it's going. So if you say no, some people don't believe in ESP. Some people don't believe we ever walked on the moon. Both of the statements are true by implied a third statement. But now if you don't believe in ESP that you're similar to the people who conspiracy theories who never believe we're walking the moon.
Right. You're making us sort of a false association. By using true statements. And so it's also as a legality, it's a lot harder thing to grab onto. If I want to pull back one layer further. Yeah, slippery. It is. There's a lot of room for deception in advertising and product marketing also. I mean, so I didn't know that term, but there's a term called puffery, which is, it's an implied structure or function claim.
But you can't make structure or function claims for instance with dietary supplements or in shampoo because then it would be governed by the FDA. It would be, and I'm simplifying this, but classified as a drug and therefore you would have to go through all of these different steps and studies and so on to avoid that. So puffery is the use of words that have basically no meaning whatsoever.
Okay. So if you sell, if you sell shampoo that is a hair volumizer, no agreed upon legal definition of a volume eyes, but it conjures an image. It does. It's a very distinct effect. Absolutely. It's total bullshit. Absolutely. And you just, when you have a label for this and you get a few examples, you start to see it everywhere. It's all over the place. In any case, that's exactly to my point.
I hope that people expand beyond just trying to get someone to lie because so many of the things now that are impacting people in major ways are going beyond fabrication. They're going to narratives that craft belief systems. So my push that I think 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. Am I going to try to familiarize you with those?
Like I said, deception awareness. Oh, I see. You're saying, okay, we can talk about politics or a modern incarnation of this type of perceptual shaping, but let's do it vis-à-vis the 40 elephants. Yeah. 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 a very nature of politics. So it can get them off the extremes.
And I believe that teaching them without having to target them with their current beliefs to use these other metaphors instead of a turtle. I'm using cons and other deception. But to another point of something more ambiguous, I talked about change raising earlier, short changing somebody I cash here. If I wanted to be softer in that, I could just, as a sleight of hand artists, 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 ten-ten-dollar bills. That doesn't raise a lot of suspicion in the way that a hundred-dollar bill would in the other way, where they vet that. But now you take those ten-tens, you put them in the register, you hand them to me, and I take the hundred. But I just look at the hundred, and I say, excuse me. And when you look at the hundred, you see now there's a ten there instead of a hundred.
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. Write your own story. And if you assume the wrong story and think you made a mistake and gave me a ten instead of a hundred, you're going to take that back, give me a hundred and made ninety dollars. But if you went the other way and you were highly suspicious, you're on top of it, and you say, what?
You say, could you give me two fives? So that allows me to go either way because I have this ten, I can take that length. Can you give me two fives? And that's what means by equivocation. The equivocation of those things is this ambiguity used to deceive. You can be taken in multiple directions. Although you're kind of fucked on that exchange, right? Because you get the ten-tent. It helps that. It helps that you be able to have the recording.
Yeah. Alright, so I want to talk for a second of those books. So when you're younger, there were these various books you mentioned a few of them. I think one of them was JB Bobo's Coin Magic. Yeah, that was a book that Ben Stone gave me, yes. Right. Had a large impact on your life, your thinking, and so on. Are there books in later chapters that have had an impact on you that come to mind?
At specific points, there was one where some people that I worked with started to say, it was almost an implication I was getting, and that they thought I was psychic. And I wasn't buying into that. There was an incident that happened to me, stolen something from me. That show, it's usually published with hundreds of people. And I had a backpack and somebody got that and stole out a set of special coins that I had that were very sentimental to me and set of a case.
And that's a bummer, probably I've no use to them. Yeah, but it was both emotional and significant to me. And I come back up, I just changed my street clothes. And I said, hey, was 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 area light here. And they said, I'm not sure. I said, did he go in the show route or did he go side door? And they said, side door.
It's always 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, it's a can you spot him if we go on there? And we go in, I want to go to look for him. I ended up finding this guy out of a couple hundred people. Because they helped you spot him. No, they didn't know how to describe him. And I call my boss and I said, hey, can we do an announcement? You may stow 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, changed my uniform for the show. And I went through everybody's pockets. I started going through assessing and profiling a few hundred people. And I found the guy. And you're eliminating different people. Grandpa's not going to do this. This guy's guy's family's not going to take that chance. And so I narrowed down to couples and other things.
And then I see this guy and he's with another girl. And I went up to him and I said, hey, man, what's your name? And he goes, slick. And I. And he called himself slick. I mean, that's not the thing. But as I went by, he was wearing like jogging pants and he only had something in his front left pocket. So I tapped the thing, not tapped at enough for me to know where 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 the evidence. He says, but how can you find this guy? He says, what? And he's telling everybody else. But at that time, back to your book's question, I always get out. Tans, it's. I really wanted to understand what was happening there. And it's like his NLP is this. Everybody says NLP is that what this is? And it wasn't that. But it was what you were doing, what he was doing.
People were thinking about what I was doing as far as I didn't believe was I had super skills. But you were trying to deconstruct what you yourself were doing. And I was pushing at the science. And I was really, and so I found out about Robert Chaldeini and his book on influence. And different studies on the history of persuasion. And 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 Simon just wrote a book called Nobody's Fool that is going specifically after a problem that I'm very interested in, which is if we posit this idea that we need more critical thinking, we really need to define what critical thinking is. Because critical thinking, I think, is being used as a filler term to fill in the blank whenever we got a problem for reasoning.
And I think it needs to be more specific than that to solve the problem. What behavior do we want to change? Do we want people to have an alternate hypothesis 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 a firm where that needs to be updated? And how do we go about doing that? And I'm trying to find what my role is in trying to help with that. Outside of technical magic books, and I'm using magic broadly, could be any facet of that type of performance, what books have you reread that come to mind?
When 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 within the lasting results? And what is the process of doing that? And that's different than 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. And we can get all the stuff I could put them in the show as well. I do suffer from that when I buy a book. I think I'm on by the time I read it. But I do have several that I go back to repeatedly.
And it tends to be that they are for specific functions of the things they're driving me in life. For my book called Deception in Digital Age. And he was with the FBI. His name is Cameron Maillan. It's a fascinating book in that space that I go into a lot. Because Wismob holds any special place in your heart or mind. And what is with mob? Okay. If you go to books to the spirit of your question, which is what I should listen to. I don't blame you for not listening to my spirit.
It's an acquired taste. No, there's probably so Bob was quite magic, right? And then there was the Fitsky books that Ben Stone tricked me into reading. God bless that guy. They still reverberize his magic in a study of misdirection. And then Wismob. Wismob was, it was this juxtaposition that there was a professor, Dave Mauer, who was studying the language of thieves. And not just, he wrote two books. He wrote the American Confidence Man, which later became big con.
And it was one chapter of that was turned into the movie sting. And that influenced a lot of other parts of that book were turned into elements for other movies. They are cons and high movies. And I was very interested in, because he was a language professor who was studying the language of thieves. And Wismob was a specific type of theft. And it's not just a pickpocket on the street.
The name of Wismob is this idea that there are thieves that travel, and they don't just work as a team, but there are some thieves that have learned all the roles in a team. They could shift between those roles so they didn't need the team anymore. And they were called cannons. This term came back from the UK a long time ago. And Mauer was tracing that back. And he noticed that it was showing up in Chicago and other places that cannons were around.
So he started to meet some people that were coming into Louisville, Kentucky for, I guess the Kentucky Derby for this event. And he found that there were groups of cannons that would find each other internationally and play as bigger teams. And they were fascinating because it was hard for surveillance to catch them because they could change their composition as a team, change their tactics. And they had very different skill levels.
And that lit a fire for me to try to find a cannon to try to find Wismob. And the New Yorker article is all about that, of me finding my first cannon. And then a year ago when I moved to Washington, D.C., another cannon reached out to me by email. And it said, hey, we have similar interests with Mauer's work. I'm one of the original Wismob. And I said, well, that's an easy thing to vet. And I said, so it's in writing, right? So I got to vet this guy out.
And he talked about when he was 14 years old and he was a six foot four black man coming to, at that time, it was very hard to get in some space. So he had to invent all new approaches to stealing, also what racism meant in that kind of community. He was writing a book about that. And he wanted to get together with me. He lives in the D.C. area. We haven't still haven't got together. So sometimes if you want to get together with the two of us, that is the driver.
That's where I used to spend a lot of my time. That book, Mauer's book, taught me to be a student of these arcane disciplines. Missy Wackeler. So a question on arcane discipline as it applies to the team roles. People may be familiar with the different positions on an American football team or basketball team, probably or not familiar with the different roles that a cannon could take. So what does a team of thieves look like? Or at least what are the fundamental roles?
I think a lot of people don't know the structure of a pick pocket team. They tend to know football, basketball, baseball, very intimately and very impassioned. But for a pick pocket team, it tends to be different. Are there names? It's their intention not to be seen. It is. Yes. There's names for them. Historically, the wire, the stick, the shade, the stall, and they all have functions in what people would think is, oh, that's just a diversion. But it's more than that.
And as you move from country to country, there's different approaches of how people steal in one country versus another. And it tends to be that you see them move like a school of fish to a crowd. So if somebody's in an event and they've locked onto a target, as that target moves through whether it's a casino or an event, you'll see the thieves move with them as a school of fish. And the roles with that, the wire, is kind of embodied in a character from a movie called Harry Never Holtz.
And it was about a pick pocket that would steal from people and they would hand off his stuff because if anybody rolled him up, he's the quarterback. They don't want to catch the quarterback because he's the most valuable player. It function as a metaphor. So how would he pass? Who would he pass to? And the other roles in the team become the stalls or the sticks, which they set up a frame. They stop somebody's elbow from moving backwards and grabbing hold of the thieves' hand.
They might open a newspaper. They might look at a book if it's on a subway, but they're going to be underneath the edge of an elbow so a hand can't get back. So that's why I mean, like setting a frame on someone. Running interference. Yeah. So they came and moved back. Then there's the shade. The shade's kind of counter surveillance. They're looking to identify undercover law enforcement.
As they scope through a crowd, they're very good at identifying what they look like and also where the cameras are. And there's a steer who identifies as a good target. Pause for once. Yeah. So the shade, is that a pre-game activity or is that done real time? How do they alert people to an issue? Well, that's often an indicator of who they are too. A shade might use a physical indicator, sometimes as different groups go, they used to use next-to-hell phones or they used to.
So I've seen that happen at a mall where I visited DC a number of years ago. I've seen it happen in different ways in Japan with kissing noises and naples. They do whistles. It's different sounds. Clemion diversion teams will use a finger up the back of the neck, which indicates that we have surveillance in split.
And they'll do probe testing where maybe as somebody's going in to do a steal, they'll, if they, since they've got heat from a surveillance, they might drop their sight line towards a lady's purse. And if someone bounces off their sight line and tracks to that, they know they've got heat. And so they give a signal to the team to dissipate. So there's a couple of. Okay. So we stopped the shade. I interrupted. So what came after shade? Steer. A steer is something who qualifies the mark.
And these are read out of WISMA, but as I said, meeting different teams, it's been fascinating to find people on the street that still use variations of these terms. That means somehow they learn those from someone. So what does the steer do? They qualify the mark. They do a testing bite and they're like, well, it's not the cost-risk association of, if we're going to make a play on someone, we might go to prison for it. We need to qualify them. Want to make sure the Jews is ripped the squares.
Yeah. To how do you qualify? It's changed now with phones, but if you have earbuds or any kind of court going down to a device, I now know where it is, and I can qualify that. And so for a lot of Eastern European teams and in England and other places, they just know that you're going to have a phone. So more people become targets just for their phones, because they know how to fence those and run those in the market. Clever things that they can do with a phone now.
They can run it through your whole bank account really quick now. But it's more than a phone. They can access your bank account, Vee Savi, your phone. Yeah, and I don't know exactly this play because it's not like a zero-day major hack. Not like a sponsored state hack. They do have some way of getting into your phone pretty quick.
And I've seen that over the last three years, take a surge in some, still in a night club, it could be as simple as pointing it back at you, get your facial recognition, but some kind of automation that they're running to be able to run through all your accounts, through your passwords, shut you out, set up dual factor authentication, lock you out of everything and just take you. Yeah, so that's a whole different thing.
But back in the day, once upon a time, when the steers were go, they'd be more interesting when you go to an ATM or a bank and you qualify, they caught peeking the Pope, seeing what money is inside the wallet, they had names for all these things, the pit, the kick, the bridge, the phab, uptown, downtown for different pockets. They all had names and they could use them around each other.
They had a lot of, it was a very rich language that has some of us permeated into our culture, but it's a fascinating place. The steer, I think for me, when I'm looking for a team, I often look for the steer. Either that, the steer or the shade. If I'm in a crowd, I'm looking for their scout because the scouts moving sightlines, he's looking, I look at people that are either targets or they're law enforcement and I can identify those. If I can identify, I'm somebody else is looking at them.
So then I just track sightlines through a crowd to see who's looking at them. Then I'm going to look for their signals and I can start to identify the group and then I can start to look at how they're doing there. So from a defensive standpoint, someone's going on a road trip, they're going to be going through all sorts of countries. They're going to be in crowded environments, surrounded by lots of people.
Chances are there's going to be, if not solo operators, teams in these environments, right? Let's say it's festivals and so on where certainly teams are at work, much like the Kentucky Derby, you go to Carnival, you can bet your ass, they're going to be some pros there. What can you do? What would your advice be to someone who doesn't want to get their stuff taken? I guess I would imagine there's just don't carry anything you don't need to carry. There's other preventive measures.
I mean, you hear about money belts and this, that and the other thing. What are your thoughts? Just like self-defense, it's a mindset first. Over the last 30 years, I guess, that I've been doing this kind of crazy three decades, I've seen society lower their situational awareness and increase their overconfidence. It's a juxtaposition between that. It's the pandemic of the Dunning Krueger effect. It's this level of unconscious incompetence or this illusion of invulnerability.
There's articles saying that pickpockets don't really exist anymore that that's gone down. I disagree and pickpockets aren't the only problem. Like I just talked about the hacking, element of this, deep fakes is a whole new thing. The recent thing that's just gone to case with impersonating, you might have seen this on a ransom case where they implied that they ransomed a daughter. Okay, so they used a deep fake to quote unquote prove that they're kidnapped.
The audio, they had the audio of a daughter talking to a mother, screaming that she's been kidnapped. I mean, that's going to drive anybody to take the behavior right away. So they were able to extract the ransom? I believe so. I know that's being prosecuted though right now. And I think it's one of the early lessons.
There's also weaponized as far as in the military right now, there was some impersonated, the mayor of key within the last three months that was speaking to other mayors in Europe and it was Russian-based. But they were on a real-time live Zoom call while they were talking to these people and doing a real-time live deep fake on a Zoom call. And then about a few minutes in, there was some kind of glitch.
Long in there, the guy enough information, there's a glitch and then they called back to speak to the mayor of key and they said he hasn't been on a call. So there's a future there that's coming that is intense. So a lot of these concepts where I mentioned them from pickpocketing and things, that's why I noticed I didn't go to just getting a better money belt. I went to the importance for concepts because the overconfidence will work against people.
Oh yeah, you see people in any major city were sitting in New York City right now. Number of people I have seen, see a go signal and walk across street with earbuds in looking at their phones, not checking either direction. Yeah. In this city is unbelievable. I mean hundreds of them. I've seen hundreds. And it's two times when I've been to Japan, the first time I went there, there was this kind of connection of everybody around.
And then the second time, a couple of decades later, I went back to the latching end of the smartphones and it really does become this kind of not narcissism, but this kind of egocentrism of their through their virtual world, they're exploring out there and while they're plugged into that, like the matrix, I guess you'd say their physical body becomes vulnerable. And so as a predator mindset of looking at people like that, there used to be a term among thieves called the griff sense.
And they felt that the griff sense was more important than technique, the ability to extract that from someone, to be able to know where their attention was, how much they're investing their attention on a thing. Now it becomes more salience when somebody is holding their phone and you can see where their attention is and you can see what they're doing. So I don't want to be to dead horse here, but I am curious.
Let's just say you've tried to identify the minimum of the essentials that you want to have on you. You got to save at the hotel, not saying that's automatically safe, by the way. But for argument's sake, you've tried to leave as much behind as possible. You have no cash. You're like, I'll try to use Apple Pay, you got your phone, where should you put it on your body? Or some targets I would imagine some are harder than others. Yeah, they are. So you're inside jacket pocket.
They used to think that that was the hardest pocket to steal from because they were caught kissing the dog. That was the old term kissing the dog meant that I would have to see the marks face. With most other extractions, you wouldn't get to see me. My team would lock you up. I would work in a blind spot angle and I would do an extraction that way.
But if I had to steal from inside your jacket pocket, I've come up with a few ways to extract that without you having to see my face per se and I could show you maybe some of that a little bit. Headbutting the dog. Yes. Making sure they don't remember. So inside jacket pocket is a spot. I think it's more of when you take things out to make a payment, it's useful to leave something there.
There's a great, I think they often beat security is what they call satisfaction of search where they're looking for a thing, an anomaly, they find something that satisfies that and they stop looking. You can reverse that and use that for these. Give them something to find. Give them a, if you're going to go make a purchase out somewhere, quarantine a portion of your money.
Any valuables that you have sent them and all or other things, don't wear them publicly and those, if you're moving into any kind of isolated spot, because it's not just pickpies, it's going to be for beginning mug too. You can hide them in plain sight. For example, what is your EDC? What are the things you carry with you now? More and more people are carrying. You're carrying everyday carry. Yeah, EDC everyday carry and definitely a pickpockets library, right?
Your water bottle, a coffee cup, those things. If I take things that are a value, a sentimental value, an improvised safe could be a coffee cup. I put these items inside of a coffee cup, put a lid on it and now even if you rob me, it taser me and strip me down, you probably won't search in that coffee. That's the mindset that I'm talking about. The idea of treating the unimportant as important and the important as unimportant. You want to simplify it.
I think you can take that to your hotel room. Are you going to buy some kind of stash concealment that looks like aftershave or are you going to do those things instead of leave something there in the safe because you need to satiate their curiosity. You need to give the dog a bone to find that you need to, as Herb Simon in behavioral economics, he would call it, satisfying. You need to, something that satisfies your curiosity. Glad I asked. Thank you. What is the illusion of knowledge projects?
That is a current effort. We have a new company that we're trying to create and I've kind of tipped out into that as we've been speaking about, it's a soft business model. We're trying to still shape of what the market is for that. But we think it's important to point the finger at the problem that we see on the horizon. The benefit is I have amazing network of people that I've learned from. It used to be thieves, but now it's security specialists and other ones.
Just specialists around the world that are incredible experts in these areas. My background is an entertainment. It did some TV works, different things. Can we repackage shows whether it's TV or live experience or content that can help people engage with things that they might not think are important, their data, their other things. Can you reverse a room escape and make it a heist and what people are trying to break into a thing they learn about their personal world data?
These kind of examples. Yeah, it probably is now stolen that I've said it out loud. We could add in a bunch of bleeps if you'd like. Yeah, no, leave it in there. It's just karma for me doing the other things I've done. But it's the kind of things that give you those ideas. So we did a project along that. It was a video project called the Illusion of Knowledge. It's this Daniel Borsen quote, the enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge.
And that marries so well with my background growing up around cons. And since my job has always been in Stoinc confidence, not just the extraction of personal items from a person, it's getting people to make other decisions. And as I learn about that, I think it's very important for people to understand that we are all puppets, that we all have strengths. And it's a benefit for people to know that about themselves instead of saying, but I'm not a puppet. And realize that they do have a string.
And what does it mean for somebody to pull that string? And that awareness of how what it looks like in different ways that those strings can be pulled, I think can help bring people so that the flags go up. So we're creating this project, the Illusion of Knowledge project to kind of highlight some of that. Where can people find that? Or can they not yet find it? They can't find it yet. There's a trailer that's, we have this website called Equavoke. And Equavoke is EQUIVOKE.
Before they go to my website, it's easy. My website is iSteelStuff.com. And it's easier for people to remember while they're driving. But if you go to that, there'll be a link to Equavoke. There's a link to those things, explore and poke around. I don't have much content out there that I put as products because right now, I'm at a phase where I have two kids. I have one that's 31, the six. And I want to try to do the thing that I can to change the world in the way that I can.
So a lot of these are legacy type things that build at first, build business model later, which is probably the best approach, but it's something that I'm doing right now. You know, it's, it may not always be the most fail safe approach, but it is, I think the approach that I see a line with intention and integrity very often in people who are, and I mean this in the most complimentary sense possible, high level craftsmen or crafts women. It's not impossible to do. It can be difficult to do.
But I don't think it's an incorrect approach. Does that make sense? Because you can conversely, and look, I invest in a lot of, or I have historically invested in a lot of startups and early stage companies and so on. And it can be incredibly profitable to start with a model and then figure out what fits around that.
However, when you have a craft and when you have the refined perception and ability to operate in the world that you have that you can expand into these different domains, I think that approach makes a lot of sense. I really do because you can corrupt the sincerity of the knowledge you've accumulated by force fitting it into a model. Yeah. Anyway. Well said.
I think, I don't know if the right metaphor I've spoken hub, but it is a little bit like that I have different ways I've been able to make a very good living through whether speaking or doing workshops or doing training or creating things to teach security. And as I'm doing those, since I got my boxes checked, I felt, okay, let's say, I've just been exploratory.
Let's, what else can I use this thing that I have, this network that I have and instead can it be something that is using the fun part of where I came from? So I have to ask because this is just my brain won't let it go. Yeah. So the 40 elephants, I just love this name. Are there other historical figures or bands of Mary Prankster slash criminals who have particularly memorable names or stories for you? Like if you had to put together your League of Legends, is there a short list?
I've had the good fortune meeting a lot of interesting characters. There's some that I've spent time with and there's some that I've just read about in the space of like famous thieves or con artists. There is the unsinkable Titanic Thompson who Titanic Thompson. Yeah. Is that, the nickname was Ty from those you know him well. There's books been written about him.
I think people have talked about doing movies over the years, but supposedly he would advertise he was coming to a town because he gambled on everything and people were drawn to that. He was a proposition bet hustler, but he had super skills. He would have proposition bet hustler. Meaning he bet on things that he would just win. He had special set of skills or support staff, covert support staff that allowed him to make outrageous bets on weird things. Can you think of an example?
Yeah. He would bet just first on like golf. He's very good at golf and he would play somebody and he'd be beating him and he says, listen, I'll give you a handicap. I'll play with left handed and then he would beat him again and they didn't realize that he was left handed. He was that good. They could beat people right handed back to Princess Pride again. Yeah. So he definitely gets switched the hands. He was very famous for being able to throw things accurately inside of cups from a distance.
Other things he could throw a card from a long ways away through a window and being above a pool hall was one story where he would be trying to toss that hat missing occasionally and side bets on a poker game. And he says, let's bet a grand that I can toss a card through that window all the way down where the window is. And so I take the bet and throw a card through and then they close down the window. He gets a second bet. And then Kenny says, I'll throw it through the window.
It's going to come back and it's going to stick to the outside of the window. What? No, just silly. And they would. And you see those in the literature about it. They're like, no, that's like magic territory. And then he would maybe eating pretzels and he says, the pretzel, I'm going to take that pretzel and throw it over that three story building over there or that walnut. And they'd say, no, that can't. And he would and he threw a pretzel over a walnut.
So he seemed like some kind of Robin Hood slash superhero. But there's great books on him on the unsinkable titanic Thompson. I have a good fortune of knowing the last surviving member of his team that was the guy who was down below in the pool hall with a fan and rubber cement through the window of his bed, but he would do amazing things to layer these very intricate cons besides that.
So there's a handful of those guys, the unsinkable titanic Thompson, Joseph Wheel, the yellow kid, the, uh, come Victor Lustig. He's a guy who sold the Eiffel Tower twice. And it's amazing. How do you sell the Eiffel Tower? And it is a beautiful con of took advantage of the time when the Eiffel Tower was not at the significant value that it is after World's Fair. And it might need to be turned into scrap. So he put a bit as a city official to be able to look for somebody who could tear it down.
And then as different contractors bid on it, he found a guy who really needed the job. And meanwhile, the wife of the guy says, I think there's a rat. I smell something. There's something up here. And he had the beautiful turn in a con which he recognized at the wife had that suspicion. And he answered in a unique way, he just said, this, I got to make something on this. If you guys really want this deal, I'm going to need a cut. So they decided, okay, hey, that's the rat.
That's the thing he is suspicious. He's a city official who needs a cut instead of a whole fake. So not only did he get the money he was getting, he asked for the extra money as well. So there's all these guys, all these interesting lessons of these guys. But I had a personal best friend for 17 years, Rod the Hop. And he is significant. If people have ever watched like Oceans 11 and they wondered, well, I wonder if there's a real ocean.
There's a couple of guys that Oceans character would probably be attributed to do, but Rod would be on that short list among thieves at least. He was a legend among thieves and people didn't know what he looked like generally because of the nature of the work. But he played a lot of different styles. He was a card hustler, card cheat. But there's like a southern style, a gardenia style. These different styles are playing long and short games.
They're using devices that shoot out your sleeve and grab things called a joint or kept in your holdout. He was very good at a lot of those things. I met him. I first moved to New Vegas. He was sitting off in a corner. I said it was a thing where some magicians were in. He was off the side of that. He was playing with plastic cards. He was shuffling him at the table and not in a way that magicians handle cards. He had an edge that was a little bit more felt like family to me.
I settled up to him, talked to him a little bit. So not the way that magicians handle cards in the sense that you recognize more of a working card mechanic? Yeah. Mechanics can't have flourish. They can't pick up the deck off the table. They don't shuffle in the same way that they do all their slides have to be done within the constraints of what the casino is to manifest. So it would look very mundane on the surface. There's a lot going on there. And also plastic cards.
Magicians would never want to use plastic cards, but poker players would. So when I began talking to him, we kind of hit up a friendship and talked a little bit. And as he learned more about my past, and I was going through a divorce at the time too. I was around 21. He knew I needed some money. And he said, hey, you want to play with my team? And they were hitting casinos or at least side spots, kind of periphery casinos or gas stations and hitting slot machines and things.
And he could cheat a slot machine and make it pay out a bonus. We needed watch guards. He needed me to learn a Cody system and stuff. And I said, sorry, man, I've grown up around some things like this. And there's this line that I know once I step across the line, I'll always move it. So I can't, man, but I really appreciate it. He says, well, how about all these magic books? What are you trying to do with those?
And I said, I don't know, I guess I might have to sell them to get this thing for the divorce. And he said, well, I'll buy those for me. So he bought all my magic books for me. And one of his team turned on him and he ended up getting arrested right after that. And I got this box of books back with this kind of little note as a friend to say, I knew you wouldn't take the money unless I did this and give me all my books back.
So later when he got out of prison, I said, I'm doing some new stuff now. And I need some friends. You want to be a friend? I asked him to join our team. That's a great line. So he joined the team and we had about a dozen guys, Kevin Mittnik, a famous hacker. There's one of those guys. The Arab deception. Yeah. And he was a dear friend who just recently passed away. Oh, I didn't know that.
Sorry. And so I'm right before we got sick last year for cancer, but very dear friends, I've learned so much from, but Rod used to do high sun casinos. Mittnik had all of his legends. It's a story for another time. I've been influenced by amazing guys in that way that I've learned about. So what did the team do? What was he doing on the team? So that was a, definitely I can clarify, a bad business model. So that was Wismob incorporated, inspired by the book you mentioned Wismob.
And the idea was that we would team guys together and send them out for, as a speaking agency, for security, maybe teaming with their counterparts and law enforcement. Mittnik already had that game going. He was doing full penetration testing. So he just hung out with us as a subject matter expert. Like when it was beneficial to learn what our covert communication systems that pickpockets use versus car cheese versus guys that would break into a place like a cat burglar functionally.
So all those kind of guys we had kind of an Arcadre and they all had different ways of approaching those things. So it was valuable, also him in pulling and tugging at social engineering, which I considered very similar to an evolution of con. He had me come in and speak at Defcon at his company know before later, but we learned from each other in those worlds. Well, we've covered a lot of ground here. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you'd like to cover?
Is there anything you'd like to share with the audience, ask of my audience, anything at all before we start to wind to a close? My daughter's six. But when she was around three, she was learning a lot of new words that I don't say. And you try to choose what's a good word and a bad word and how often if he is a word no too much to become numb to him, so maybe use other words besides no. And I was always interested in how different experts do parenting and what that might be.
But there was a word she asked me, what does boring mean? Without really thinking about too much, I said it's a word that's not a bad word, but it's a word I don't use, really, because I don't really have it. I don't, I've never been bored. But part of it is because boring means that your imagination is broken. So you got to find a way to do it. You got to find something to do and you got to use your imagination better.
And I didn't realize what that would do, but now I have a kid who's never said that they're bored. And that's a huge, that's huge, what an advantage. What happens when we just change a word? What does it do to a behavior? So in all the long drives she's taken away with this cross the country, she's never said I'm bored. She knows what it means. She hears her friends say it and she doesn't think of my dad tells me not to say it because I tell you can say it, but she chooses not to.
And it's the thing that I'm obviously proud of her about that. But it's also to me such valuable thing of the state of being bored is where creative epiphanies often happen. But what if we just remove that word and think of it in a different way and we think about as when she is in that state, she's, I need some help. I need to think of something to do. And she's just doing that. And I said, well, there's so many things and you only got so much time. What do we want to start?
And I said, should we go this way? That way or what? And it becomes a different thing. I said, do you want to do something that you want me to help you journey? I'm open to my ideas. She says, no, I just want to thank for a little while. So she'll just look at the window and think and really, and so it's a fascinating thing to look at how our long-haired tension span is compared to a lot of her friends.
Do you think that that has helped her despite not having, I assume, not having had the force-comp races to become a better watcher in the same way that you became a good watcher? I think so. I think that is one of the contributors. I think also I'm a big proponent of, I used to call it covert learning strategies of the Miyagi aspect of, I'm going to do covert learning to repackage the hard lessons as something else. Oh, you want to learn how to live Tidakon. I think it's in these three books.
Absolutely. You only read volume one. I think it's in two or three. There's two things because if Mie has a big ego and they don't think that they need to learn something or you have learned helplessness where people don't think it's possible for you learning. So what if I hide that? Another pro-social application of deception. Maybe I can use that to help them learn a thing they thought was irrelevant. And secretly I've learned that. I've learned that possible.
Yes. And now, by the way, you can do it. And so I'm really interested in that space and we do that to her all the time that now if she says like trying to teach her a memory system. Can I repackage as a series of other things that now this little tour that we took was secretly in mind palace. And now she learns how to do that. So what are the different ways that you can package learning? Trojan Horace. Absolutely. Apollo, what a gift. What an incredibly fun conversation.
I think we may stand up and try to do some things. So for people who are interested in some more visual, you can go to Tim Ferriss on YouTube and we will hopefully post some goodies there for you. Where are the best places for people to find you online? I'm on Facebook, although there seems to be like five or six of me that is, but as imposter's do. Sort of appropriate. I see. So I haven't canceled them out. But there's one me on Facebook. I'm on Instagram.
I'm not very active, but I'll probably be more. I haven't engaged with the new version of Twitter. I haven't fully jumped on in the next. Can't bring myself to say X. Tick tock, I'm not coming close to just my security mind. Don't leave it me even touch it. Don't do it. But on Twitter, add Apollo Robbins. Yeah, so pretty much add Apollo Robbins across the board. There are a lot of my audience.
It's very, very interesting folks are on Twitter, so it's worthwhile mentioning that because that might be fun to see how things come out of the woodwork. And then as far as websites go, best website or websites? They funnel to the same thing of ApolloRobbins.com or ISteelStuff. I still stuff. They'll take you to the same place. But this other new one that is going to be a separate thing is Equavoke.
And that one will be probably a combination of an entertainment blog with other video content and other things where we're going to be trying to point to tools that are important in this space. There's a guy that I think is amazing that studies deception, Simon Henderson, he's from the UK, him, Anthony Percanis, my wife, Abidot, all of them as a collective will be doing interviews, videos and other things for those guys.
So if you want to come play in the space, learn a little bit about cons, we want to attack your political beliefs, but we will attack what you believe. What a great place to end. Apollo, thank you for such an incredibly, not just entertaining, but educating and invigorating conversation. I'm so glad that you made the time. And for people listening, you can do more than you may believe you were capable of doing. So Apollo and I and hopefully you will seek to prove this out.
And we'll put links in the show notes as always to everything we talked about at Tim Dublock such podcast and as usual, I'll say it again. Until next time, please be a bit kinder than it's necessary, not only to others, but also to yourself and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
Even one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles on reading, books on reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on.
Like it's sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts, guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blogslashfriday. Type that into your browser, tim.blogslashfriday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.
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I've been testing the products for months now and I have a few that I use constantly. One of the things I love about Mementis is that they offer many single ingredient and third party tested formulations. I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later. Personally, I've been using Mementis Mag 3 and 8, L-theanine and Apigenein, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep.
Now the Momentus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. I've also been using Mementis Creeatine, which doesn't just help for physical performance, but also for cognitive performance. In fact, I've been taking it daily, typically before podcast recording, as there are various studies and reviews and meta-analyses pointing to improvements in short-term memory and performance under stress.
So those are some of the products that I've been using very consistently and to give you an idea I'm packing right now for an international trip. I tend to be very minimalist and I'm taking these with me nonetheless. Now back to the bigger picture. Olympians, Trudeau France winners, Duolta France winners, the US military and more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Mementis and their products.
Mementis also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starat. He also work with Dr. Stacey Sims, who assists Mementis in developing products specifically for women.
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