#699: Apollo Robbins, The World’s Most Famous Pickpocket — Pickpocketing the Secret Service, Manipulating Attention, Famous Con Artists, The Psychology of Deception, Self-Defense Techniques, The Secret Language of Thieves, and More

Brought to you by Momentous https://livemomentous.com/tim high-quality supplements, Sundays for Dogs https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim ultra-high-quality dog food, and AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement. Apollo Robbins (@ApolloRobbins https://twitter.com/ApolloRobbins) is often referred to as “The Gentleman Thief.” He first made national news when he pick-pocketed the Secret Service while entertaining a former U. S. President. Forbes has called Robbins “an artful manipulator of awareness,” and Wired has written that “he could steal the wallet of a man who knew he was going to have his pocket picked.” Robbins’ entertainment credentials include the Warner Bros. film Focus https://www.amazon.com/Focus-Will-Smith/dp/B00YORD3PY/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, with Will Smith and Margot Robbie, along with appearances in Brooklyn 99 https://www.amazon.com/The-Tagger/dp/B00ESB6EUC/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and the TNT series Leverage https://www.amazon.com/The-Nigerian-Job/dp/B001N4RAEQ/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. He was a producer and co-host for National Geographic’s Brain Games https://www.amazon.com/Focus-Pocus/dp/B00CHHTAAU/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Informational Series. Robbins applies 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. His contributions to attention and perception research have been published in Scientific American Mind and Nature Reviews Neuroscience https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2473. 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 and featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Wall Street Journal. Robbins’ TED Talk, “The Art of Misdirection https://www.ted.com/talks/apollo_robbins_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. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health. * This episode is also brought to you by Momentous http://livemomentous.com/Tim high-quality supplements! Momentous offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, and I’ve been testing their products for months now. I’ve been using their magnesium threonate https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products, apigenin https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products, and L-theanine https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products daily, all of which have helped me improve the onset, quality, and duration of my sleep. I’ve also been using Momentous creatine https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products, and while it certainly helps physical performance, including poundage or wattage in sports, I use it primarily for mental performance (short-term memory, etc.). Their products are third-party tested (Informed-Sport and/or NSF certified), so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. If you want to try Momentous for yourself, you can use code Tim for 20% off your one-time purchase at LiveMomentous.com/Tim http://livemomentous.com/Tim. And not to worry, my non-US friends, Momentous ships internationally and has you covered. * This episode is also brought to you by Sundays for Dogs https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim, ultra-high-quality dog food without the prep or mess! I want to give my pooch, Molly, the best of everything. This is especially true when it comes to the ingredient quality of her food. But most healthy dog foods are an expensive, frozen mess. They’re a hassle to thaw and serve, and the prep work eats up time I’d rather spend hiking with Molly. Sundays for Dogs https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim solves my problem with air-dried, high-quality dog food I can store and pour right from my pantry. ​The magic behind Sundays for Dogs https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim is in their proprietary air-drying method. To lock in nutrients, they gently dry the meat, low and slow. Unlike other dry brands, which are filled with hyper-processed grains and synthetic vitamins, Sundays for Dogs https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim uses only all-natural poultry and USDA-grade beef. And meat makes up 90% of their recipes. The other 10% are fruits and veggies, ingredients you’d find at the farmer’s market, not at the pharmacy. Get 35% off your first order of Sundays for Dogs by going to SundaysForDogs.com/TIM or by using code TIM at checkout https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim. Upgrade your pup to Sundays for Dogs and feel great about the food you feed your best friend. * [07:51] Was Apollo a naturally dextrous wunderkind? [10:26] The influence of Apollo’s blind minister father. [14:10] Apollo’s slide toward agnosticism. [17:24] Ben Stone enters the picture. [21:08] Taking in orphaned animals as a youngster. [23:31] An early lesson on the value of money. [25:20] Bear in a box. [28:19] Seeing magic as a ticket to the larger world. [30:55] Shoplifting for fun, profit, and education. [32:19] Equivoque magic and Jazz-based mentalism. [38:09] A magic book club and a year-round Santa. [44:10] Apollo’s first fateful trip to Vegas. [52:14] A false accusation leads to a real job and a vampire code. [55:27] Jimmy Carter and the Secret Service. [1:03:44] The pros and cons of becoming legendary. [1:05:39] Academic accolades. [1:08:01] A sauce less secret isn’t necessarily less rich. [1:09:28] Recovering when the reps get rough. [1:11:12] Sheet music versus jazz. [1:14:10] The introduction to — and enduring influence of — Apollo’s wife, Ava Do. [1:22:27] Perception science perceived but not yet entered into the lexicon. [1:26:16] The significance of Apollo’s silver ring. [1:27:01] Meeting (and stealing from) Penn Jillette. [1:29:10] Demonstrating the confidence of a con man. [1:33:03] Hallmarks that differentiate Apollo’s style. [1:40:14] Who has the advantage with arguments in the Robbins household? [1:41:18] 40 Elephants in the modern world. [1:42:52] Teaching kids about the cons — and pros — of deception. [1:45:50] Paltering and puffery. [1:49:14] Perceptual shaping and change raising. [1:51:14] Slick re-thievery. [1:54:01] Influential reading. [1:56:38] Whiz Mob. [1:59:22] How is a team of pickpockets organized? [2:04:54] The pandemic of the Dunning-Kruger effect. [2:08:37] Best practices to avoid becoming a target for theft. [2:11:14] The Illusion of Knowledge Project. [2:15:28] The Unsinkable Titanic Thompson and other noteworthy charlatans. [2:19:06] Rod the Hop, Kevin Mitnick, and Whizmob Inc. [2:23:11] How one word can make a difference to an impressionable child. [2:26:38] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Momentus offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. One of the things I love about Momentous 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 Momentous Mag3, Nitrates, L-theanine, and Apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentous Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients.

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  I've also been using Momentous Creatine, 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, Tour de France winners, Tour de France winners, the US military, and more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Momentous and their products. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. They also work with Dr. Stacy Sims, who assists Momentous in developing products specifically for women. Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed sport and/or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition and supplement world very well, that is a differentiator that you want in anything that you consume in this entire sector. So, good news. For my non-US listeners, more good news, not to worry. Momentous ships internationally, so you have the same access that I do. So check it out.

• 2:09Tim Ferriss?

  Visit livemomentous.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout for 20% off. That's live momentus, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash TIM and code TIM for 20% off.

• 2:27Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Sundays for Dogs. Ultra-high-quality dog food without the prep or mess. I want to give my pooch Molly the best of everything. This is especially true when it comes to the ingredient quality of her food. I've tried tons of different options, but most healthy dog foods are an expensive, frozen mess. I've tried them, it's a disaster. They're a pain in the ass to thaw and serve, and the prep work eats up time I'd rather spend hiking with Molly, let alone the cleanup. So, there's a lot that goes into it, and I was looking for other options. Sundays for Dogs solves my problem with air-dried, high-quality dog food I can store and pour right from my pantry, no mess at all. The magic behind Sundays for Dogs is in their proprietary air-drying method. To lock in nutrients, they gently dry the meat, low and slow.

• 3:12Tim Ferriss?

  And unlike other brands, which are filled with hyper-processed grains and synthetic vitamins and so on, Sundays for Dogs only uses all-natural poultry and USDA-grade beef. Meat makes up 90% of their recipes. The other 10% are fruits and veggies, ingredients you'd find at the farmer's market, not at a pharmacy. Sundays for Dogs, and I've worked out a special deal just for you, my dear listeners, get 35% off of your first order of Sundays for Dogs by going to Sundays, that's plural, sundaysfordogs.com/tim, or by using code TIM at checkout. That's sundaysfordogs.com/tim, or by using code TIM, T-I-M, at checkout. One more time, that's sundaysfordogs.com/tim, or code TIM at checkout.

• 3:57Tim Ferriss?

  Upgrade your pup to Sundays for Dogs and feel great about the food you feed your best friend.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:09Tim Ferriss?

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:26Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, lemurs and squirrels. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is one I've been looking forward 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-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 pickpocketed the Secret Service while entertaining a former

• 5:11Tim Ferriss?

  US president. And we will get into that story. Forbes has called Robbins, quote, "an artful manipulator of awareness," end quote, and Wired has written that, quote, "he could steal the wallet of a man who knew he was going to have his pocket picked," end 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/timferriss. 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 Nine-Nine and the TNT series Leverage.

• 5:54Tim Ferriss?

  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 has cultivated can transfer to other areas. And that really, at its core, is 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's delivered lectures- At Harvard Kennedy School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Society of Neuroscience.

• 6:39Tim Ferriss?

  He's 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. Robin's 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 him on Twitter @ApolloRobbins. Without further ado, please enjoy a most enjoyable, most entertaining, most educational conversation with the one and only Apollo Robbins.

• 7:19Tim Ferriss?

  Apollo.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 7:21Tim Ferriss?

  So nice to have you here.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  It is a pleasure.

• 7:23Tim Ferriss?

  And this has been in the works for me, at least, in my own head, since, I want to say, 2018, 2019.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 7:31Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  It's nice that it's in person versus virtual. There's so more, so many more possibilities.

• 7:48Tim Ferriss?

  So many more possibilities. Well, let's start. So, people might assume that 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?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  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 Enid, Oklahoma, and was walking down the streets from seminary, but he had moved into this kind of rough neighborhood, was trying to witness, and these two teenagers decided to try to steal from him. He didn't know what they were up to, but then, when they realized he was blind, they decided not to hustle him, but instead, they tried to guide him to where the bus was and encouraged him to go to another area. And he invited them to his church, invited him to have food on a Wednesday night, and they came, and they did. They found food, and they brought their mom one time.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  And then their mom met him and they got married and that's supposedly how my parents met.

• 9:02Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. Okay. So your parents meet. One thing leads to another.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:09Tim Ferriss?

  Assuming no immaculate conception.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Perhaps.

• 9:14Tim Ferriss?

  And then you enter the world. What were doctors' expectations of you?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  They were upside down. So because my mother had had previous children, she had had three and she was a widow. They were also in their teens. They supposed, they assumed that I had the same father. So they didn't test their blood. So there was a factor in the blood. I think it was an RH factor, but it created what they call ABO blood disease. So it required when I was born that I had a transfusion. There 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 Forrest Gump thing. I had to wear braces on my legs like Forrest Gump to get around. But also I had fine and gross motor problems. I couldn't control my hands. It was kind of the joke of trying to clap the hands three times at the therapist.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  I was a little bit better than that. I can clap my hands, but I couldn't do a lot more. I had to, when I learned to write, have a large diameter pencil that had, was through a rubber ball. And I had to learn to write that with both hands up until 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.

• 10:26Tim Ferriss?

  Could you say 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, let's start with a simpler version of the question. Could you just tell us more about your father?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  He was a short man and I think that that factors in because he was about five foot four. So it's quite short. He was very physically fit. He climbed rope with, out using his legs. He was very quick to go to a fight when he was younger. And then one time when he was going into college, he was studying to be a CPA and he had tubercular meningitis that affected him for about a year, year and a half. It was a very serious disease at the time. I mean, it still is, but at the time was more pervasive. And it made him blind during the productive this year and he Became kind of born again. Somebody had come to visit him and witness to him during that time, and he decided he was going to change the course of his life and become

• 11:31Speaker 02

  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 in the Bible. And when he came out, he was a traveling minister for most of my early life. He would travel, visit churches. And some of the things, I think, one of the creative parts that I really took from him was that he would travel to a church, not knowing what his presentation was going to be, but he would find an animal along the way, a turtle crossing the road, and that became his presentation. He would set it in front of the pulpit, and everybody would circle around him, and he would 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

• 12:15Speaker 02

  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... Ill-suited to his... Yeah. His eyesight. Yeah, and to his shin chagrin, because he would run full force into a park bench

• 12:56Speaker 02

  and come tumbling over it. But he created this ministry that was inside of government-subsidized housing, 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'd call gangs. Where was this again? Can you remind me? Well, now it's branded as a TV show, The Ozarks. Ah, okay. But the city was Springfield, Missouri. And he would go into those neighborhoods. He would go, he would set up his ministry inside of a laundromat, and he would draw the kids in with a story. He'd bring Kool-Aid and cookies every Sunday. He did that for 20 years. And they would come in, and he would tell them these stories. It meant a lot to him. He was nondenominational. He was very dogmatic about his specific interpretation of scripture, which to me, myself, jumping ahead, I'm agnostic.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  I'm not an atheist, but I'm not subscribed to any religion. But it was such an interesting learning lesson. I think about the difference between most people would judge somebody by their perceptual blind spots of not being able to see. But sometimes it's worse, the stories that we tell ourselves and how that limits our perception.

• 13:57Tim Ferriss?

  We'll definitely come back to this.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right, like perception, story, perception safe shaping story, story shaping 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 in that way?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I started off as religious, which I think is the same thing. People start off as extremely patriotic to their certain country where they're born, or where you go up in a family where they're very religious, so it would 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 its specific interpretation. I had to debate in debate groups for Evolution and Cretianism. So I was on teams that did that. I went, I was in a Bible quiz team where I would buzz these buzzers and quote scriptures. And I went to the world championships and that and placed in the world championships.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  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, from stealing things, running small hustles. They never called it pickpocketing, but they would steal from people at the zoo when

• 15:53Speaker 02

  they were leaning over to watch things, animals being fed. They would cut their pockets or steal their bags at sporting events through bleachers, mostly opportunistic. But later it evolved. When in military, when he came out, he started working again like the series Ozark. I feel like that route that was in Ozark is probably what my brothers associate with, with some type of trafficking group.

• 16:14Tim Ferriss?

  Drug trafficking.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, drug trafficking up through that pipeline. One of my brothers also did smuggling for firearms, so moving those in and out. So it became very intense, and I was exposed to some of that at the same time that I was growing up with my father as a devout minister. So it was really, I think, a fascinating juxtaposition between those two worlds that seeing deception in that true sense of the word of what we often think it to be, but yet also he was okay with my brothers as people. He didn't know that that's what they did, but I got to see both sides of that. And they did other things publicly. They were truck drivers or other things and exceptional people in many ways. It 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

• 16:56Speaker 02

  out of the back of the church when services transitioned and sneak off to another church and say, well, if there simply is a God, believe that tongues is the first physical initial sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit, then what do the Baptists believe? And then I'd go see their tenets. And then as I bounced around, I noticed that there were just lots of little slices of different views and perspectives, which to me has continued to follow me through my life of anytime somebody claims a truth is maybe we need more perspectives on this.

• 17:24Tim Ferriss?

  When does Ben Stone end of the picture?

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Wow, that's a great name.

• 17:29Tim Ferriss?

  And how old are you?

• 17:31Speaker 02

  How dark do you want to get? I can take it light or dark or gray.

• 17:34Tim Ferriss?

  You pick, dealer's choice. And we've gone dark on this podcast before, so we can go there.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Once upon a time, I had had a pursuit to become a syndicated cartoon artist. And I was about 12, 13, 14, going through that. And I was pretty confident that I could pull it off. I wanted to be the youngest one. There was a guy who was imitating Gary Larson's single panel cartoons. And I had six months of character sheets. I was going to send them out to get syndicated. And my parents didn't understand what this was, or what this weird thing I was doing. They just knew I liked 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.

• 18:19Tim Ferriss?

  Because of the cartooning?

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Not because of the cartooning, but because of some argument that we had. The argument, I say this, it was 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 invested, 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.

• 18:46Tim Ferriss?

  The cartooning was gonna be your escape plan?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, from that world. And I was down in our basement, I was going through some boxes, and I found this little magic gadget. It was a piece of plastic, looked like a thumb, and I was very curious about what that was. And somebody said, it's a magic trick. 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, and 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, do I act like my fingers cut off? What do I do? And I'm like 14, I'm very precocious. I'm borderline at this choice in my life. Like, I'm shoplifting, I'm running away from home for at least two weeks at a time, living out in the woods sometimes. So I'm kind of at a transition place of which way I choose is my path in life.

• 19:34Tim Ferriss?

  That's a vulnerable

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:35Tim Ferriss?

  place where you could have inflection points.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 19:38Tim Ferriss?

  Or vectors in a lot of different directions.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  And I had lots of ingredients to go a certain way. Later, as I've 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 board.

• 19:53Tim Ferriss?

  For sure. Yeah, I appreciate that. And so. What happens then? You're like, I have this fake thumb.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  What do I do? Ben says, come to the magic shop downtown Springfield is about 12 miles from where my house was. So I rode a bike. I went with a friend. He didn't show me anything about the fake thumb, but he used it as a trap. He, uh, he made this coin move around.

• 20:13Tim Ferriss?

  Your kinda guy.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is great. It's exactly what should have happened to me. And he made, he moved a sleight of hand with the coin. He made it jump around, disappear, jump through his clothing, jump through his body. I was fascinated because I was thinking, if this old guy can do this, I could probably pull this off myself. Then he pulled out a deck of cards called the Svengali deck and he did a bunch of tricks with that. He says, so here's a choice, kinda like a red pill, blue pill. This deck of cards, you can walk out of here and for $5, you'll be able to do 50 tricks without even practicing. Or here's this big book and it's gonna take a lot of study and maybe in four or five years, you'll be able to do sleight of hand 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, I went back, rode my bike back to my house and I sold some stuff at

• 21:00Speaker 02

  a pawn shop, came back the next day and bought that book. And for the first year, I just spent my time by myself studying the coin magic by myself.

• 21:08Tim Ferriss?

  So I wanna pause because we're gonna pick up on this particular thread, but I wanna rewind, I think just a few years, because you're around 14, 15 at this point.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:18Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:28Tim Ferriss?

  You can't believe everything you read on the internet, but is it true that you also used to take in orphaned animals?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  I did.

• 21:35Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so can you tell me more about this?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Wow, do you have a research department? That's great.

• 21:40Tim Ferriss?

  Got teams everywhere, eyes and ears on the ground.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:44Tim Ferriss?

  And so I'm curious how that came to be and if it, I don't wanna make it too leading of a question, but how that has informed or how it reflects who you are.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Wow, it's very salient, I think. When I was like eight or so, I guess earlier when I would take walks with my father, he couldn't see things, but he's, he would stop me when we'd go for a hike through woods or something. And he'd say, if you look around you right now. Within five foot, there's a world, there's lots of little worlds. There's little communities of things that are happening. You just have to find them. So find them and tell me about them. That was a big thing. I saw a lizard on a tree and he said, walk straight to it and it's going to run around the tree. When it does, reach straight around behind it and cup your hand. And he taught me that I could catch a lizard by walking around the tree because they'd go to the same position. There's kind of a pattern to that. And he taught me this perspective taking for animals, I think helped a lot.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  It's a variation of empathy that I think transferred later on for me. But I had, at that time, squirrels, raccoons. I babysit a bear for a weekend, a baby bear.

• 22:51Tim Ferriss?

  Hold on. Let's take the bear as an example.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 22:56Tim Ferriss?

  So, bear drop off. See you next week. What exactly happens?

• 23:01Speaker 02

  How do you get a bear dropped up at your house?

• 23:02Tim Ferriss?

  How does the bear make its way to you?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Apparently now they have a mail order service bear in a box, but no, I'm just kidding.

• 23:09Tim Ferriss?

  Be careful. On the internet, you might get something you don't expect.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, my address is online. So, at that time, I had raccoons, which is a predecessor to getting a bear, as I've learned.

• 23:20Tim Ferriss?

  The bear starter kit.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  I had worked with the Humane Society as a volunteer from eight. I was an early entrepreneur from the time I was five. I was always doing some kind of hustle.

• 23:31Tim Ferriss?

  Was that encouraged? Did that just emerge sort of out of your programming, out of the box? It was just something other people were doing? It sounds like you had a family that was sort of active in extracurriculars.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you broaden the definition of extracurriculars, yes. There's a specific moment. So, at five, I was at Walmart and I saw a toy rifle that I really wanted. It was a single bolt, had 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 write down this number. And I wrote down the number, the cost of what it costs to get that. And they said, it's probably going to be there for this amount of time. So, you got to figure out how to get that much money. And so, I had to learn to count that much money. So, I had to learn how to count the coins. I was finding pennies everywhere, doing 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

• 24:26Speaker 02

  and he had me put everything in there. And as we put the paper rolls up, we count up these dollar bills and other things, walked to the store and I brought all these paper rolls of coins and paid for that rifle. And it was probably about a month's work. And after that, I thought, how can I do this faster than going around collecting pennies? So I was like, how else do you make money? Cause 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, two dimensional perspective or three point perspective. And so it gave me a unique insight, I think at that age that I went back to the back of a comic shop, took down the flyers of all the artists there that were the best and said, hey, if I bring you work,

• 25:11Speaker 02

  will you instead of give me a percentage, will you teach me lessons? And so I started mentoring and finding mentors very young and that has persisted with everything I've learned since then.

• 25:20Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, we're going to talk about mentors. How does the bear in a box fit into this? Do you get, so you get paid to babysit bears?

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Uh, no, it was a slight ADD tangent. So

• 25:31Tim Ferriss?

  If so, I'm in.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.

• 25:34Tim Ferriss?

  What am I doing, podcasting?

• 25:35Speaker 02

  But I was along that. So I was doing lots of little efforts. Like I was used to working 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 would use the idea so more dogs could stay there. And they added me on to the board of my local humane society when I was like eight. So then I said, I want to help other kinds of animals because I like all these orphaned animals and I study their habitats.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  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 re-acclimated 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.

• 26:35Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think made you good at that?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  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 they're gonna need? And why are they not adopting that? Why would they? So it was 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 Straffcamp. She was a fascinating lady who'd been a law enforcement officer that got mauled in a bar fight,

• 27:20Speaker 02

  where she was trying to pull some people out of a bar fight and then sliced open her arm. And she was had a single arm, but she took care of bears and buffalo and all sorts of crazy things. She was a powerful lady. And she said, hey, it's amazing what you just did with these raccoons. Would you like to take care of this young bear for me for the weekend? It has diapers and it needs to be fed. It was magical. It was an awesome little milestone at that time.

• 27:42Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, how old were you?

• 27:43Speaker 02

  I was probably nine, eight to probably eight to 10 is when I was doing those things.

• 27:47Tim Ferriss?

  So it seems that to your parents' credit, they were open to you having a bear in the house.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  What, not in the house?

• 27:54Tim Ferriss?

  Not so much. Where's where did the bear in the diaper stay?

• 27:57Speaker 02

  I had a habitat that I was using for the raccoons. It was square footage, large enough to let them move and roam.

• 28:03Tim Ferriss?

  Like a shed type of place? Or was it more of an outdoor enclosure?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  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. And my mom had a background in farms, so she taught me how to build a lot of those. I lived in the city, but we had a strange backyard, a strange house.

• 28:18Tim Ferriss?

  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 like, well, first you go to med school and then you figure out your specialty.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:41Tim Ferriss?

  And then like 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.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:12Tim Ferriss?

  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 metaphorical bus ticket?

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:26Tim Ferriss?

  Out of that place in the way that you hoped cartooning would be?

• 29:30Speaker 02

  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, where they don't have to deal with people. And so you don't have to do the perspective taking and the management of a person in the same way that when you're first learning it, you're just learning it to fool a 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. And 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.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  But what I had at my disposal, I think, is also because I'd been exposed to, like my brothers 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, it 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 a coin's going to 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? They won't find it there.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  And I'd had that experience one time. I was shoplifting early, probably 13.

• 31:00Tim Ferriss?

  What were your go-to shoplifting items? And were you shoplifting to use them or to resell them or something else?

• 31:06Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 31:29Tim Ferriss?

  This is the kid who never buys anything.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Well, he recognized me from, I think, my family. I lived close by. And 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 in 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 reach around behind my back with my right hand. I removed the cigarettes from there, and I load 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 those cigarettes in his apron. But 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. So why doesn't it appear in someone else?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  What else can I do with that? So I started developing a lot of that, too.

• 32:19Tim Ferriss?

  So where did you go after the book? You have this initial tome that you're digesting and shaping and experimenting with.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:31Tim Ferriss?

  Course one. You flipped the last page.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:35Tim Ferriss?

  You've tested what there is to test.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  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 he 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. He 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 it 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 that 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

• 33:19Speaker 02

  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 could manipulate coins, make them appear or disappear, small objects like that. And I could do what's called equivoke, 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

• 33:55Tim Ferriss?

  Did you say jazz?

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, my whole style is jazz based, which is

• 34:01Speaker 02

  and that's an important thing.

• 34:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, please say more.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:03Tim Ferriss?

  So in equivoke, 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.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:09Tim Ferriss?

  You are in very subtle ways directing someone's choice, even though they think they have free will in selection.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  You give the illusion of agency.

• 34:18Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're allowing them to play a game of darts, but you're painting the bullseye on the wall after the dart has landed.

• 34:25Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  And yet they don't 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.

• 34:41Tim Ferriss?

  And so the way that, please

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:44Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 35:00Speaker 02

  I think there's a variety of ways, but if you think about card magic, when you see a magician pick a card, where did that come from? It came from at one point, some card mechanics or card sharps that you did 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 into 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 that as a camp, mentalists usually will not claim that they have real powers.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  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 God-given powers.

• 35:55Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Okay, so you could do the coin manipulation.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:01Tim Ferriss?

  And you also had some mentalism game. And they're like, wait a second, you just said you were new to all this. So how are you able to do these things? And you gave the specific example of the Equivoc.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:14Tim Ferriss?

  And then what happened?

• 36:15Speaker 02

  I told them I'd read these books and I'd learned it on my own. And they were surprised by that. And they said, well.

• 36:21Tim Ferriss?

  That must have felt good.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  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. I was like, oh, that's great. So what did they mean?

• 36:34Tim Ferriss?

  Now, is that what you mean by jazz influenced? Like, if you make a mistake, do it twice and then it's jazz?

• 36:41Speaker 02

  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 in the sightlines 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 tried, tested it out.

• 37:13Tim Ferriss?

  Pick up a turtle, walk in front of that audience, figure it out.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah, jump off a 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. And 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.

• 37:38Tim Ferriss?

  And she was like, ah.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Which is this collision of two different minds, which you 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, then phase one, then 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.

• 38:09Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 38:19Speaker 02

  They offered me books, more books.

• 38:23Tim Ferriss?

  So you like books?

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they said, well, if you could get through that book that you first read, why don't 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 that it's-

• 38:38Tim Ferriss?

  As my unread stack would agree.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and 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.

• 38:47Tim Ferriss?

  Genius.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they did that to me, and that was a really cool thing. There was, there was a couple of people that influenced my-

• 38:53Tim Ferriss?

  It's a magic trick of its own type.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  It is, yes. But Ben was a 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 a traveling performer who was brilliant. And I'd seen him make a coin fly up from one hand to another. Anything I could try to excuse or sleight of 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 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 Fitchy. I said, Fitchy? And I said, I don't know, that's not on my radar. And he says, well, Fitchy wrote three books, it's a trilogy, go read that. And so I picked up one of the books, Psychomagical by Misdirection, and then Psychology of Magic.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  I read it, and it was a hard read. And I came back and I said, Biff, it 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'm- 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 to 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. And there was many other people that from that time period, a gentleman named Ed Dillard, who was a year round Santa Claus, who

• 40:23Speaker 02

  did amazing things. He would go into a mall and he created experiences. That was a great thing because.

• 40:28Tim Ferriss?

  He was a year round Santa Claus?

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Yes, he lived it all year, right? So anybody who saw him, but when you'd see him in a mall. You, you see people go up and a kid sits on Santa Claus, but what would be effective with him is a 12 year old. It's AI at Santa Claus. And he says, it's good to see you, Nick. So what's been happening this year, Nick? It sounds like you've had some problems with your friend. We want 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 that he had a 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 of leather with this beautiful book. And he would tell anybody about anything about themselves, but through the auspices of Santa Claus.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  And I just loved this beautiful approach that it wasn't so much of what I saw magicians initially getting into magic for was to fill a hole in themselves. They were hiding behind what they're 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. And 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 sealed together to create a style that I developed.

• 41:50Tim Ferriss?

  How did animation inform the style?

• 41:53Speaker 02

  There was a great book called The Illusion of Life by Disney's, what do you call them? His nine men, but 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's overlaps and relationships of that to Aikido. When you study Aikido, there are certain half moves and half circles. And so when I started blending those together with sleight of 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

• 42:37Speaker 02

  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

• 42:44Tim Ferriss?

  Lock up, meaning like gain control, hijack?

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, put them in a frame, as you'd 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 were certain motions that drew attention and that later became a thing too.

• 43:07Tim Ferriss?

  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. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first

• 43:50Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 44:10Tim Ferriss?

  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, et cetera. Very few. What were some of the most important inflection points, say, picking up where we left off? And after reading these books, after having these various inputs, I guess, maybe it 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?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  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'd 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. And so it was my first wife.

• 45:17Tim Ferriss?

  When did you first get married?

• 45:19Speaker 02

  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 that 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, in 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

• 46:03Speaker 02

  full time by the time both of those simultaneously as I graduated high school. And there was a gentleman 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, yeah, that's 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 Darryl 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. 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.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  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 atrophied 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 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.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  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, a little place and you're doing freelance artwork for me. He said, but your performing capabilities, you could do something else. I said, what's a good reason? Give me one good reason. He says, wouldn't it be amazing story 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.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  I thought that was a great idea. So I went back in my job and I gave my notice that day.

• 48:01Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  And that was a Friday.

• 48:03Tim Ferriss?

  What a gift. Well, it depends on, I mean, I know you're sitting here, so I'm not sure what the intervening experiences looked like, but it seems like a gift.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  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 reason why I 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

• 48:28Tim Ferriss?

  They'd let them go.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  They, but they found a way to get around their contract. So they outsourced them to another company and then let that company fire them.

• 48:35Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So they wouldn't know any severance or they would dodge something.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  They dodged all their severance and that made it.

• 48:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  And that made an impact on me. So they had just given me a bonus. They'd just given 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, but let me just clean this slate on this thing and see what happens. And coincidences, I still believe, happened. And 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. Perfect timing. Sounds great. I'll give that a shot.

• 49:16Tim Ferriss?

  What did you have ready at that point? Like filling in, does that mean you have a 30 minute set, a 15 minute set? I'm not sure if that's the right term. 60 minutes? Because I think of comedians working on standup material and to get a polished hour, I mean, could take years for some folks, right?

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:33Tim Ferriss?

  So what did you have when this opportunity falls from the sky? Hey, could you fill in within the next week?

• 49:40Speaker 02

  I'd 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 that, per week.

• 49:50Tim Ferriss?

  So you had things you knew had already worked out. You knew you could string them together.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  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 this dealing. Because at that point, there was one other guy who was really good, two other guys that 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.

• 50:15Tim Ferriss?

  To differentiate yourself.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, to differentiate as a brand. I'll give you, just to paint a picture of the, it's a fascinating thing. My first show I ever did in Las Vegas, separate from Caesars, was just a corporate event for a large corporation. And it was a red carpet event, they had limousines pulling in. It was very different for a Missouri boy when I first moved out there. And these agents, they said, so, all right, go steal things from people, I guess. And they gave me $100 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.

• 50:46Tim Ferriss?

  When you say agent, this is someone who works at the casino?

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Uh, these are agents that hire for entertainment in Las Vegas. And they were watching and they were trying to vet if I was a good fit. And the first guy.

• 50:55Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, this is like your audition gig in a sense.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Kind of, yeah, if they're gonna hire me back again. And so I walk up to somebody that was important, they brought this big 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.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  I could feel my ears turning red.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  And I just was running through the gambit, do I give this back to him, which is more important?

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Because I got a lot of pressure at that moment. So I was performing with him and another gentleman, and then I said, oh, and here's your watch, and he's shocked that I 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 he goes, yeah, that lady? I said, yeah, see her watch? Said, I'm gonna let you see it a second time. This time I'm gonna steal her watch, I'm gonna try to do it without breaking it. And that's a lot harder, but I'm gonna try to see if it's possible. He goes, 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 wanna try it? And let's move past this idea that I just broke his watch.

• 51:59Tim Ferriss?

  Jazz.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, which that's always been my-

• 52:02Tim Ferriss?

  Hard to script for.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's constantly what was required from me.

• 52:06Tim Ferriss?

  I didn't take cigarettes, you took cigarettes in the apron.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Yes, so that's, my career was, has been a majority of those, right? My first day after I had left my job as a designer, I'd come over to work at Caesar 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'd they go?" And she's, "Somebody stole them." And I hadn't even touched her. And I said, "What did you have?" And she goes, "I had diamonds and rubies and emeralds, so my..." And I just said, "Oh, I must have sent them as a child support payment." I just turned it as a joke. And then the husband really got mad.

• 52:40Tim Ferriss?

  Didn't like it.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  No. And so, once everybody cleared out, they came at me, come up to me, came at me too. And he said, "Give us the rings." I said, "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. I said, "Stop, don't walk away." 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 gonna walk in front of you, and I'm gonna keep my hands out to the side. You watch me, we're gonna 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, which to me conveyed that she was sincere about her belief.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  That she really believed that that happened. So then she, up in her room, found her ring sitting on a sink and she'd been washing her hands.

• 53:27Tim Ferriss?

  Did you get an apology?

• 53:29Speaker 02

  I did.

• 53:29Tim Ferriss?

  That's good.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  But I think it may also helped, 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. I had-

• 53:47Tim Ferriss?

  Hold on a second. This is at shows, right after a show, independent-

• 53:51Speaker 02

  During shows, all over the place. I've had every variation of that happen.

• 53:54Tim Ferriss?

  Because they think you have stolen something, or they're upset that you duped them?

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Or maybe I have, yes. But it was in a social context of entertainment, right?

• 54:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right, right.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's 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 your 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 if 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 gonna treat this like a vampire."

• 54:35Tim Ferriss?

  Like a vampire?

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Vampires had to be introduced into the household.

• 54:39Tim Ferriss?

  You're right, they need to be invited.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  So I'd say, "In three minutes, I'm gonna 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 gonna play. Are you ready?" But it now meant a whole different thing, but it came from all those concerns and lawsuits and everything. They also, it almost happened, never, never landed. But now I developed this style that was a very different style, very potent style, but instead of surprise, it was suspense.

• 55:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. It was suspense. It was also like a preemptive strategy.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:18Tim Ferriss?

  So you would have less need to be good at reacting, because you're certainly just 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?

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Yes. So 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 10 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 it comes back to them later. I would do that every 10 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,

• 56:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:29Tim Ferriss?

  So could you please tell the story of the Secret Service?

• 56:34Speaker 02

  So about probably near the end, about three years after I've been performing at Caesar Palace, there was a special night when I 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 in to visit. And we are going to have some people go home that haven't had background checks.

• 56:52Tim Ferriss?

  Slightly different rules.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, because they had done background checks on all of us. And he said, there you'll be photo ops as he goes through the show. It's he's got a small party with him, but the whole theater is just going to be sectioned off for that. They have Secret Service will 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 Apollo, they 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, I said, well, that's not fair. I'd like a picture with the president. It was Jimmy Carter at that time, not that I was in the era of Jeremy Carter. He was an ex-president at the time. He was on a tour, book tour. And he said, but you know, they didn't say anything about the Secret Service. I said, what does that mean?

• 57:36Speaker 02

  Because they didn't say that you couldn't steal from the Secret Service.

• 57:39Tim Ferriss?

  You didn't hear this from me?

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:40Tim Ferriss?

  But.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  Do you think you could? And I'm so happy they posited that then versus now, because I'm in my twenties. 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.

• 57:55Tim Ferriss?

  Wait a minute.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:56Tim Ferriss?

  All right, we'll come back to that.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  There you go. Get back to that.

• 58:00Tim Ferriss?

  All those Secret Service bar mitzvahs that you go to.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a thing.

• 58:05Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Why else move to Washington DC?

• 58:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. Okay. You wouldn't do it exactly the same way. And then what unfolds? So you get this side chat, which is like.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  I get a side chat.

• 58:14Tim Ferriss?

  Technically, they didn't say you couldn't do something with Secret Service. And then what?

• 58:18Speaker 02

  He brings in the head of security for Caesar Palace. They talked to me about certain provisions and warnings. Don't take any of their firearms. Don't touch them. That would still be considered a felony. If they do take you to the ground, it's on your own. You're on your own for this. We have denied plausible deniability.

• 58:33Tim Ferriss?

  Disavow all knowledge.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  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. I stole several of their items.

• 58:55Tim Ferriss?

  So the two Secret Service agents, I guess is the right term, maybe.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:59Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Sure. You used a great word there. You said surface area. And surface area, they have a lot to protect on themselves, both where they keep their firearms, their credentials, the keys, the itinerary, all these things. So they just treat it as a whole, but it's got all these little parts. And I like to think of attention as like a limited resource. It's really useful to think of 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

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  show. They called me klepto. They said, not happening, was I think the first thing I heard from them. And I said, no, it shouldn't at all. I said, yet, I think is the word you're looking for, right? So I kind of pushed at that boundaries of their confidence level because I was coming in pretty confident. One of them stepped back as I approached. And there's a way that I approach. That gains access to someone's space. If you think of someone's personal space as a bubble, and their 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 in 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,

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  there's a way of approaching from the side that can often help. So when I started to saddle up next to one of the gentlemen to show him something, he stepped back, and they have a term for it called maintaining occupied space. And it also indicated to me with a slight brush that in my world, I have to know a lot of being able to determine what's inside people's pockets, and the printing of a jacket, and what it means, being able to make pretty good estimates of what a good target is inside of the outline of a pocket. So as soon as he stepped back on the left, it indicated to me that he might have a firearm on that side versus on his right side. So it was probably underneath in a holster underneath his jacket. So I just acknowledged it, I put that on the surface, I said, "You're very well trained." I said, "It's gonna be much harder to do anything with you." I said, "You 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 gonna have to do it to you, sir." And so I leaned

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:01:47Tim Ferriss?

  The first guy.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the first guy.

• 1:01:49Tim Ferriss?

  He thinks he's off the clock.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  He thinks he's off the clock. And so just by, that's one of the things, 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, passport shaped, and I steal his glasses from his outside pocket, and I steal a couple of things. And as I was talking to the other guy...

• 1:02:10Tim Ferriss?

  As you're doing that, does the other guy notice?

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  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 gonna get to see it go in and out of my pocket or anything, it's gonna go somewhere else. So I can put it on them in a more accessible spot, or I can put it on me in another place. So I did some of that. But at the end of that, with the two guys, I said, "You know, I didn't get anything for this. I don't really know what it is." And I pull out this paper that was kind of tri-folded. And as I'm opening it 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 were in his pocket.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  And he goes, hey, he takes my glasses and he looks at the paper and he says, hey, and he snatches it away. I said, you know, I really don't think you should read that without the proper ID. And then he really reached in his pocket and he realizes that he doesn't have the credentials. And the other guy's laughing very hard at him.

• 1:03:06Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sure.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  And he said, I'm not gonna be the only one.

• 1:03:09Tim Ferriss?

  Ooh, dad's not gonna be happy with that when he finds out.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  And so they said, he says, you're gonna do this to the other guys. So he got on his mic and he starts telling me to go to other teams. So I now have an advocate in and in to approach the other teams because this guy's sending me because he didn't want to be the only one. But that's kind of why I was mentioning about the jazz. I mean, I didn't know. I've never stolen with somebody with presidential itinerary and credentials and glasses in that combo before. But I have to kind of ad lib with what I find and how I give it back. And it is a unique thing that he knows is the only time I'd done that is with him until I did it to the other guys.

• 1:03:44Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  I think legend is too strong of a word.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  But it, but there are things.

• 1:04:07Tim Ferriss?

  Nothing travels like a good story.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  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've 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 over deliver when people have this expectation of what you can do.

• 1:04:30Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Because it was spread into, oh, you stole their bullets and you took out their bullets out of their guns. And I've heard all sorts of variations of that that I began working for the government from that day forward.

• 1:04:38Tim Ferriss?

  William Wallace, 12 feet tall.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:41Tim Ferriss?

  Shoots flaming lightning out of his arse.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  And it was much better when people underestimated me because working against overconfidence was a great way to play.

• 1:04:50Tim Ferriss?

  Pros and cons, right?

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Pros and cons, yes. And I was asked to speak for the Secret Service. It was around. A time where there was a shooting at the Pentagon and there were two officers outside and a gentleman had approached. And he drew firearms and both of them missed it, even though they thought they were watching for his hands. But they were both tasked on a similar thing. And there's an interesting thing in psychology called inattentional blindness. Dan Simons and his Chris Chabris was his partner. They did a book called Invisible Gorilla, where you watch a basketball being passed.

• 1:05:19Tim Ferriss?

  Incredible video. Yeah.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  And I like to refer to that as task blindness. I think it's a more approachable term. But when someone is tasked, they often miss other things. And at that time, I was asked to come speak to the Secret Service afterwards. So I was like, I'm not being arrested. I guess this is a good thing, but now I'm traveling to D Z. And I'm going to talk to the Secret Service. And I was asked about that, about task blindness and attentional blindness. And this overlapped into two fascinating neuroscientists that I met, Stephen Macnic and Susanna Martinez Conde. And they were had 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?

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  And at first it was like a little session where they had different magicians that were legends, Penn and Teller, specifically Teller. Talking about theories and they were seeing, is there anything there to pull research out of? And I posited that I think we only have two sightlines. And this circles back to my early days with animation. And I said, I've noticed when I'm stealing, that if I move in a straight line, that there's a transition point from A to B, that when something is no longer at A, that people expect to be there. They bounce back, their attention bounces back like a rubber band to B. But if I move in a half circle from A to B, when we get to that destination point, nobody ever looks back at the point of origin. I said, so I sense that there's two types of sightlines and there's a kind of suppression that happens during those.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  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. Cause then I was part of a paper that they published in Nature Journal. And then I was asked to speak at the International Society for Neuroscience, 10,000 neuroscientists.

• 1:07:07Tim Ferriss?

  You broaden your lane.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  It did.

• 1:07:09Tim Ferriss?

  Or you gained more lanes.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and when it realized that it wasn't just me stealing, but that that same concept of psychotic versus smooth pursuit of 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.

• 1:07:29Tim Ferriss?

  How did you connect with the scientists? Just so I can connect the lore.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:07:34Tim Ferriss?

  The stealing bullets, right?

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:07:36Tim Ferriss?

  From midair with the Secret Service to connecting on the scientific side. How was that connection made?

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Teller from Penn.

• 1:07:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that was Teller.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  It was 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.

• 1:08:00Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Okay. I want to pick up a couple of micro gingerbread topics.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:08:06Tim Ferriss?

  That I've let alone that I've committed to myself I would return to. So the first is, in terms of making the coin levitate into the other hand, did you ever figure that out?

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  I did.

• 1:08:18Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. And don't know.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  A lot of blood, sweat and calluses, but yes.

• 1:08:22Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, I think that gives me the answer that I'm looking for because we have a mutual friend, Simon Cornell.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:08:27Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  It is. It's something 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.

• 1:08:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it is so much harder than people can possibly imagine, which makes me think of, speaking of Teller, a 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 was a balloon involved or ball.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:09:02Tim Ferriss?

  And he shows the magic trick, let's call it the performance on video. He says, all right, now I'm going to explain how I did it.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:09:08Tim Ferriss?

  And he explains it. And then he shows it again. And he says, now, are you more or less impressed? I'm paraphrasing here tremendously.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  But it was a love story, right? It turns into a love story with an effect. That's why I thought 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.

• 1:09:27Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  10 minutes.

• 1:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  Multiple times an hour, over and over and over. And 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.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:58Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:10:05Tim Ferriss?

  And for me, that's part of the art. I mean, it's fascinating. So what do you do in those circumstances?

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  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. It functions 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.

• 1:10:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right. If they cover their head, you go to the body.

• 1:10:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:10:50Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  So it changes the definition of fail. Is fail getting caught stealing a watch? Or a belt or glasses? I was pretty good at rolling with that and improvising with those things. And realizing that if they started to catch that, I could turn it into another situation. And I would load strange things on people, like I loaded a bag of oregano on a grandma. And I said, what's this from grandma?

• 1:11:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hold on. This is actually the perfect place.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:11:15Tim Ferriss?

  For me to just read an excerpt from a profile of you.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:11:20Tim Ferriss?

  Which was by Adam Green in The New Yorker. And the title of this, I recommend everybody read this. And if you have anything you'd like to correct in the piece, we can cover that too. But A Pickpocket's Tale: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins. So this is one of my favorite paragraphs.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Tales, yes.

• 1:11:37Tim Ferriss?

  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 cellphone 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. A woman's 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.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:12:06Tim Ferriss?

  So, hard for me to even make any sense of half of that, but you're loading things on people is where you were.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I take things off, I switch them, I alter them.

• 1:12:18Tim Ferriss?

  You're creating for yourself options.

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:21Tim Ferriss?

  Also, right? It's not like you have one trick you're executing and if you flub it, trick is done.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's why I meet this sheet music versus jazz. They don't know where I'm going, so we can always change the path. In fact, when I used to work in situations where I would just walk around with a group, which I miss because I don't really get to do that. I'm mostly a keynote speaker now, but I used to do a lot of corporate type of events where I would move through a crowd and I would walk up to the guys and say, "Guys, you know why I'm here, right? I'm supposed to steal everything you have." And so I'd just say that upfront. It stops most conversations. I said, "You got anything on you?" And you'd 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.

• 1:13:00Tim Ferriss?

  You know exactly.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm making a mental map and now I'm about to move into the circle.

• 1:13:05Tim Ferriss?

  They telegraphed all of their possessions.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Yes, because they don't believe it's true. They just were having a conversation.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  And I'm now making that effect. It's like, okay, that seems to be a room key here, that's over here, this is what here. And as I move through them, in real pickpocketing, 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.

• 1:13:26Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a shark and taking little nibbling bites, feeling things out.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  Yes, and just taking inventory, you could say, yeah. And now I'm crafting, okay, so.

• 1:13:35Tim Ferriss?

  Or feeling out around in boxing, same thing, where people are gauging distance, they're seeing how people react.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  What's their pattern, what's their go-to?

• 1:13:40Tim Ferriss?

  What are their defenses?

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:13:43Tim Ferriss?

  What are their vulnerabilities? Yeah.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Which is interesting because now that I don't have that, I've gone back to martial arts because it was one of the few places I could get that feeling. And I was studying a Filipino-style martial arts. And as I was new in it, one of the things that I could do in the first part was they would go to draw secondary weapons, sometimes like a trainer blade, and it wouldn't be there. Can't do that trick a lot, but it's a great trick when they go to draw and it's not there. They're very surprised.

• 1:14:07Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sure they're very surprised.

• 1:14:10Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So following this gingerbread trail, I just wanted to address a couple. All right. Your wife.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:17Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned, I think that she's the most important influencer, had the biggest impact on you, your career. How so?

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And on 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 artists, thieves, and I had a soft spot for those guys. I knew a lot of those guys that were intimate friends of mine that had done things that you would think of like Ocean's Eleven, 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.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  And how you establish rapport and 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 hidden cameras on them and see when people approach them, how ridiculous people do approach them. And then we'll talk about that. And I said, 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 out. I said, it's too late for me. And he says, no, just come. When I show up, he's talking to a group of women and I thought they were probably escorts at that point.

• 1:15:50Tim Ferriss?

  Professionals.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause they were close to the VIP section and it was a small group, younger women, some older guys at the table. And I'd seen that a lot in Vegas. But when I get closer, I'm talking to him and one of the ladies in the group, as they were introducing themselves, she had a background in psychobiology. She had just graduated a degree in that. She was working as a crisis counselor on a hotline, talking people off the cliff. 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'd stole.

• 1:16:22Tim Ferriss?

  That is a hell of an intro. Like you're gonna get a conversation.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  It does. One of them said, can you, so I stole the girl's engagement ring with the thing and I did a thing with that and gave it back. And this lady that later turned out to be my wife, she asked me, can you still sell me for me? I said, what would you like? She says, chocolate covered strawberry from that table over there. And she points at this table nearby, the IP section. I said, got it. So I grabbed a menu, walked over, pretended to be with the staff, asked them if they're being taken care of. Stole the chocolate strawberry under the menu and then I walked in and I threw it over my shoulder to add a little flair. I caught it and 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.

• 1:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  It's bold. It's bold. I like it, but it worked.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it almost didn't work because her advocacy and her academia and it was the opposite. It was too slick and she felt that pressure from the group. She gave me the kiss, but we end up leaning against the wall, talking about psychology. And that dove into a deep thing. She says, have you ever thought about this? Long phone conversations later on, but she said, have you ever thought about all this stuff you're learning and how it applies to bigger problems in the world? And she was the one that encouraged me to do the event with the neuroscientists. She was the one who encouraged me to take the piece with the New Yorker, which I didn't even know what the New Yorker was at that point. I turned it down twice. Adam Green would tell you. I was like, here, 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.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  She said, let me have you watch a debate. And when I saw my first presidential debate, I went back to tell her. I said, tell her you're a Latin professor. What was that? So 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.

• 1:18:05Tim Ferriss?

  Wait a second, meaning you observed a lot in the debate?

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:18:09Tim Ferriss?

  That paralleled what you had learned.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  Very similar concepts.

• 1:18:12Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example?

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  There is a term called gish galloping. I forgot the guy's name for gish.

• 1:18:18Tim Ferriss?

  Gish galloping.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Gish was a debater who would often do a package of assaults on a person of 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 got three minutes and he posed a lot of questions and they don't have three minutes functionally to answer those questions. And that very similar to me was a noise to signal ratio piece that's used to overwhelm people inside of a cash exchange with shortchanging. And I recognize that as one approach.

• 1:18:54Tim Ferriss?

  Shortchanging, so like giving somebody change, but less change than they should.

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  And overwhelming a cash register attendee at that time.

• 1:19:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  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 gallop, for example, back to equivocate, for equivoke. If somebody were doing a series of personal assassinations, they also, what they're doing is diluting their argument. Because now if I say 10 bad things about you, or you said that about me, then I'd say, as you can see, he's very impassioned about what he says. But notice there's a central theme between all of those. That central theme is X. And that's the equivoke, right? I can take all the things that you said, repackage them as another thing. And because you diluted all your points, because you put them all into the one bracket. So the countermeasure that is to dilute that down, give you one point back, and I hijack the narrative.

• 1:19:43Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So you're talking to Teller about this?

• 1:19:46Speaker 02

  Yes. And he was a Latin professor.

• 1:19:49Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So that wasn't, I thought that was a euphemism or a joke. He was an actual Latin professor?

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  He was. Before in his career, I said, I said, you know more about Socrates and Plato. So can you tell me what, and he says, yeah, you need to go back, read Plato's Republic. You need to study about Socrates. And he started prompting me to go back to learn this route.

• 1:20:08Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Tim Ferriss?

  Back to the classics.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  Back to the classics.

• 1:20:11Tim Ferriss?

  So from.

• 1:20:14Tim Ferriss?

  This chocolate strawberry in the mouth to broader applications in 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.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  Yes, and the driver of this was back to that was my wife. We had this unusual thing that she moved to Las Vegas pretty quickly after we started dating.

• 1:20:42Tim Ferriss?

  Where was she?

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  She was in Los Angeles.

• 1:20:45Tim Ferriss?

  Was it hard to get her to move to Vegas?

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  It was a negotiation because she didn't want to come visit and be under an obligation. So when I asked her, I said, please come visit me. And she said, I have a lot of work that I'm doing here and I don't currently have the money to do that. And I said, I understand. Can I ask when you write, what is your per page fee? And she said, my per page fee is usually about this amount. I said, so if I 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 have a different direction that

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  I wasn't solely focused on entertainment. And she also, just because of her counseling background, she really broke apart a lot of my early childhood. And she had had these complexities too. She had moved from Vietnam and she had grown up, her father was incredible. He 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 Darren Brown in the UK, doing some things for him. So she was fascinated by that with her training in psychology. She says, well, that's not exactly what that is. And then at that time, I had this group of thieves around me. That were professional criminals and she kind of became a den mom to all them.

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  They would come in, if the FBI was watching or the NSA watching our house, they would have seen all these guys coming in and out. And she was the den mom of all that. She really helped take us all for a turn.

• 1:22:25Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, okay. So this is off the map. This has nothing to do with the questions that I've written down, but I'm curious. When you're describing, for instance, the semicircle 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.

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:59Tim Ferriss?

  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 experience as a practitioner around attention or perception that has not yet made its way into the scientific circles.

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:23:31Tim Ferriss?

  But you'd be willing to say, you know what? I can't say it with a hundred percent certainty, but I would bet that A, B, or C.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  I think in order to validate the research, they have to go after the low hanging fruit, which is a single variable. Real life has context and multi-variable. And so when you go out in the wild, the reason why it's sports or between Kahneman and Gary Klein, they did a lot of research on first responders to smoke jumpers and other things, the context of an expertise is hard to boil down in a lab.

• 1:24:00Tim Ferriss?

  Super hard. Also really hard for replication with animals and say, animal learning chimpanzees. Project NIM for people who are interested highlights this. Very hard.

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  And the society aspect of that, for example, and the replication of that tend to show the same darkness of an ideal society and what does that mean to manufacture one?

• 1:24:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  In the space where. I find fascinating probably with current research, I'm really interested, I guess, like an armchair social psychologist, I really read a lot in that space, that hearkens 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

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  need to fill in the gap, that need to have an absolute answer for something that they've seen happen, versus a 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 arms race of technology, like when they think about AI, deepfakes, but it's an arms race of imaginations, and tends to be 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

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  think we're on a cusp where that's going to flip over, and we're going to have to try to spot the truth. And what does that mean in a future? Yeah, where you got to spot the truth, and how do you deal with that? And I think that's really, there needs to be a lot more research on how we develop comfort with uncertainty, how we authenticate, all those types of things. There's, there's books and literature that's starting to come out in that space, and that's definitely, I'm leaning into that too, because I feel like, since my job is distorting perceptions and creating erroneous sense-making, then I should really try to lend a helping hand if I can.

• 1:26:15Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:29Tim Ferriss?

  Before we get to your style, what is the significance, if any, of that ring?

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  This ring is made from a silver coin. And my magic used to be based around silver. It's unusual. If you talk to a magician, professional magicians tend to be-

• 1:26:42Tim Ferriss?

  It's a very pretty ring. And for people who aren't watching the video, I've been watching you play with 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 thought.

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  Yes, all with a purpose.

• 1:26:55Tim Ferriss?

  So that's why I ask. All right.

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  Everything has a purpose. There's lots of things that can be done with this. Actually, when I pickpocketed Penn Jillette, I met him the first time, and he's a big guy.

• 1:27:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  Six foot six at least.

• 1:27:07Tim Ferriss?

  Big guy.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he had heard about, historically, among magicians, pickpockets are a kind of fake. There's a lot of people that say, "Give me your wallet before the show," and then they steal it out. And I didn't have that background. I came from a different lane. And so he had heard from a friend that I could really steal. So he put me on the spine from a bunch of people, the first time I met him. He just walked up to me, 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 a Tommy Bahama shirt, with some shorts, and he had a mod block pen that was clipped inside of his shirt pocket. And he said, "Steal something from me now." And I said, "You know, that's kind of like saying, 'Be funny now.'" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "Let me tell you about something that happened to somebody one time."

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  If I steal a watch from someone, it's one plus one. You say, "Oh, you're fast. You got my watch. I didn't notice." So but 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, and he went to write it down. And he says, "Okay, yeah, are you gonna steal something from me?" He said, "Can you draw a circle around this ring for me?" And he pulled out his pen and go to it. And then he stops and he stares at me, and he realizes he's the guy in the story.

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  And he just, he opened his pen and saw that the refill wasn't there. He goes, "Fuck you." And I said, "Now, Penn, isn't that better than taking your wallet?" And I threw his wallet on the table.

• 1:28:35Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, that's amazing. Now, why is that made of silver dollar?

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  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 sleight of hand, silver works very well for sleight of hand. As a memory of that, even when I'm not performing, I had one converted into a ring. So they punched a hole and rolled it into this ring. And it's a reminder to me of where I came from for that.

• 1:29:02Tim Ferriss?

  Very cool, very tension grabbing also, which I would imagine helps with things like what you just described.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  It can be used, it can be used as a level of confidence I can talk to you about. And I'll show you something with that, actually, because it does mean a lot to me. Do you have anything in your pockets right now?

• 1:29:17Tim Ferriss?

  I do, yeah. I have a hotel key. I have some credit cards.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  Okay, great. And I appreciate you letting me know where those are. If I asked you right now, and this is something we could just-

• 1:29:27Tim Ferriss?

  I'll spell for it. Gotcha, bitch.

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  Take this, set your pen down for a second and take my ring and put it in one of your hands. And now, whether under the paper or behind your back, put it in one of your two hands so I can't see which hand it would go in.

• 1:29:41Tim Ferriss?

  I'll do it behind my back. This can be a little tight.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Sorry about that, yeah.

• 1:29:44Tim Ferriss?

  That's all right.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  You got it? So you put in one of your hands. Now, don't do the third option, which is putting in your pocket.

• 1:29:50Tim Ferriss?

  No, not gonna do it.

• 1:29:51Speaker 02

  Okay, bring both your hands out. Now, I'll try to guess which hand. It's right now, it's in your right hand, correct?

• 1:29:55Tim Ferriss?

  It is in my right hand.

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  Can I see?

• 1:29:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  Okay, do that again.

• 1:29:59Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  Okay, bring it back out?

• 1:30:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

  Now it's in the left hand.

• 1:30:05Tim Ferriss?

  Correct.

• 1:30:06Speaker 02

  Is that right?

• 1:30:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  So you try that with me, okay?

• 1:30:09Tim Ferriss?

  So, all right, yeah, I was trying to think like logic through this. It's been like, 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 overcomplicated for myself.

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Which is Princess Bride all over again.

• 1:30:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's Princess Bride all over again.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. So try it with me and see what your process is, okay?

• 1:30:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right hand.

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  It was pretty fast. Did you peek it or how did you get it?

• 1:30:33Tim Ferriss?

  No, I was looking at the body language.

• 1:30:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:30:36Tim Ferriss?

  Oh shit, I heard.

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  You're distracted? I'll do it again. I'll do it again. Hold on. 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. Just one more time. Alright, one more time. Which hand?

• 1:30:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right hand.

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  Would you like to change?

• 1:30:58Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  So this is not a mentalism effect, or it'd be much better.

• 1:31:01Tim Ferriss?

  But I also have 50/50 chance.

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  50/50 chance, yeah.

• 1:31:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. But I want you to be able to make your point.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  Well, so in this, that's a little mini con with a little ring. And we often hear people talk about biases, like confirmation bias. But when you embody a real interaction like this, you would never associate what we just did as confirmation bias.

• 1:31:19Tim Ferriss?

  I think I have an advantage over you also, because you're angled to me.

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. So you were able to see kind of when my hand came out?

• 1:31:26Tim Ferriss?

  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 might be wrong. I don't know.

• 1:31:34Speaker 02

  No, it's an interesting hypothesis. But I think that that's the interesting thing, that if it was never in my hand, and you were wrong every time, you might think I was cheating, yes?

• 1:31:42Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  Because when we lose, we're more curious. And when we win, we're less curious about why we're winning, right?

• 1:31:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So now, for those people who are watching, now you have identical rings, one in each hand. Okay, got it.

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  A very unique special ring that you started the conversation on. You found your own path.

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  So in that, that's a little metaphor for a con, right? That one little ring, because that whole story that you jumped into, that little rabbit hole with asking about the ring, is a great baseline that now people assume there's one, and there's that baseline piece. But to me, that is that greater question, that when we're 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?

• 1:32:31Tim Ferriss?

  When you win, yeah.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's confirmation bias. It's really helpful to know what that is. And it's very easy. You didn't jump into the whole, like, most- People do. Most people will say, well, you know, I play poker with my grandma since I was four. I'm really good at reading people and they walk away with this confidence and that's the con aspect of that. But in this one.

• 1:32:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right, confidence.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:32:50Tim Ferriss?

  Confidence, man.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  You see me playing low status with that and I need you to miss in order for me to be able to.

• 1:32:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. But that kind of thing, everything is about helping people get to that.

• 1:33:00Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:33:15Speaker 02

  I'll give you an experience one time where I had, let's just see kind of backstage. One time I was performing for a corporate event in Las Vegas and it's similar to the one where I had the broken watch piece, but this is later in my career. And it was a new agent and I was talking to her off to the side and 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 dressed 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, what was your name? He says Jamal. I said, nice to meet you Jamal. Before this, let's go back that I walked into this event thinking, I don't want to do anything I've done before exactly.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  There's some little components and you'll hear some things coming back, what I just talked about with pen. But I knew that I could figure out how to put something inside of a bag of M and M's and then reseal it in real time without anybody noticing. And I thought, what could I do with that? Let's just find out.

• 1:34:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Speaker 02

  And that's where it started to become a jazz. So this interaction with this guy Jamal, when he came up, he says, so you can steal something from me? And I said, I don't really, I don't know. What was your name? He goes Jamal. I said, how do you spell that Jamal? And he said, J A. I said, could you write that down for me? And he pulls out his pen and goes to write it down. His pen wasn't working. And as we've heard before.

• 1:34:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:36Speaker 02

  And up to this point, my stuttering, the break of my speech, the break of my sightlines with him has been very low status.

• 1:34:44Tim Ferriss?

  Break of your sightlines, meaning eye contact?

• 1:34:46Speaker 02

  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, would this help you out Jamal? And it's straight eye contact and it's the refill to his ink pen. And he had way underestimated and stepped way too close, he realized suddenly. And when that moment happened to him, you saw him holding his pen with one hand, his refill with the other, and he was just looking and he's stunned. He's in this cycle of trying to make that. Cause the only solution it could be is the one he didn't want to accept. Right? So he's cancelled out the truth. So where is he gonna go from there?

• 1:35:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  That I had stolen it, taken apart, put it back together and put it back on him. Couldn't be that. So what else could it be? Pausing time, time travel. So in that, now at that moment, while he's in that bewildered state, I just said, well, at least you didn't lose your money or your wallet. And when I did that, I just glanced down, cause I noticed he has a watch on his left wrist. So he's probably right-handed. So he's probably gonna keep his wallet in his back right. So I just glanced back toward his back right pocket. And he jumped on that big, he reached in, pulled out his wallet real quick, checked to see if he had everything still in his wallet. And I laughed and I saw his attention shift back to the pen. And I pushed down his hand. I said, you still have everything. And he put it away. And he says, you've got to do this to Lisa. I said, yeah, great to meet her. And I just looked over his shoulder to where I thought Lisa might be. And he took off to go get Lisa.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  Comes back and he shoves this lady towards me and this agent and I'm-

• 1:36:06Tim Ferriss?

  Dance monkey dance.

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have, I'm having, well, I'm there to perform.

• 1:36:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  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. It's not alcohol, it's just water, but it's the, 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 at her at first. I said, sorry, it's nice to meet you. I looked over and I said, what was your name? She goes, Lisa. And so you hadn't quite come close to me at all. I said, she said, what's happening? I said, sorry Lisa, he wants me to steal something from you. She says, what? I said, do you like chocolate? She says, chocolate? I said, yes, there's some chocolate in your purse. She said, what? She opens her purse and she finds a bag of M and M's in her purse.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  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 in my purse? I said, the same way Jamal's driver's license got out of his wallet. Now he's jumped back into the equation. He rips his water out again, rolls his license is missing. And he goes, where in the fuck is my driver's license? And I said, it's in the chocolate. As I take a sip of my water and I just walk away. So I let them piece it together themselves. She tears over the M and Ms and she finds the license in her thing.

• 1:37:23Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so if we zoom out then.

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:37:26Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing story. I mean, I would have to think 100%, maybe 99.999% of people listening have never experienced something like this. What 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?

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and part of that, that's quite different in magic is it tends to be that they'll have a set of effects that are linked together. In that one, I walked in trying, I had a set of skills that I could do, but I hadn't pieced them together. And I take advantage of the movement, kind of like you would if you were sparring in that way. When he leaned in forward, I stepped 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 pockets. So he couldn't see anything being extracted.

• 1:38:27Speaker 02

  And then I stepped back and then I removed the pen, take it apart and I find another reason to come back in to put it back there.

• 1:38:33Tim Ferriss?

  So outrageous that you can do any of this. It's amazing.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  But it's a strange thing. And then each one of those moments on the backside of that is I didn't know what was going to happen. But what I saw is when his attention locked to that pen and he was spinning. And you can think of attention as being external or internal, inside your head or external aware. And you can think of it as being broad or narrow. And on those axis, it's very useful of, do I want him to be broad, external? Or do I want him to be internal, narrow? And how do I flip somebody from one to those to the other? And I'm very attuned to the 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 that out and he thought he had the money, I just copped his driver's license out of his wallet and let him put his wallet back.

• 1:39:21Speaker 02

  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 and M's. Let me see how I can do that. And as I'm thinking about that, he said, well, you should meet Lisa. It's like, what a great idea.

• 1:39:42Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  Yes. And I think she's the one I met. Maybe there's more Lisas, but let's see where he goes. And I said, yeah, it'd be nice to meet her. So he goes off and he takes off to get Lisa. I see another Lisa that I have met. So just in case, I put it inside the M and M's. And then I walk over while this other lady Lisa is talking to these people. I open her purse, drop it in there, put it there, and then I go back to where I was. He doesn't know this.

• 1:40:04Tim Ferriss?

  So it was the right Lisa?

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  It was lucky for me. Otherwise I'd have to be doing some introductions.

• 1:40:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so I have to ask, what is it like for your wife to have a fight or argument 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?

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:40:31Tim Ferriss?

  Or that she would be like, I have some friends who are therapists. And sometimes their, their kids will say, stop therapizing me, mom. And they'll be like, I know what you're doing. And they're like, oh. So what does that dynamic look like? Or is she like weapons and badge on the table? Like, take your tools, put them away. I don't want any of your horseshit. Like, we need to have a talk.

• 1:40:51Speaker 02

  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 psycho biologist.

• 1:41:03Tim Ferriss?

  All right, this is, this is non trivial. Okay.

• 1:41:05Speaker 02

  It's huge. And so she studied mentalism after meeting Darren Brown. She went deep down that she started performing for companies. But she had the background to science that I didn't have. So she'd translate for me. We had a daughter together a number of years later and In between those, we had these unusual experiences of going in very dangerous places with different criminal groups to learn about them together, me and her, on these adventures around the world in different strange places.

• 1:41:30Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you do that? Like, to learn what types of things?

• 1:41:33Speaker 02

  It's easy to say that a magic tricks comes from this book. It's a different thing to say, but where did this really come from? Where did this idea really come from? A certain type of pocket or a certain type of thing? And there were legends of people doing things in certain places. There's these group of women called the Forty Elephants that used to be in the UK. And around, probably 1890 to 1940s, they ran a criminal group there. They could steal a large amount of things by altering their clothing and doing a variation what's called boosters or boosting. And that's my world, an encyclopedia of things like that. And who's the people who are doing it now? There's a resurgence of footage showing up now that YouTube is so pervasive with security cameras, of women doing things that are like that, where they're stealing a flat-screen

• 1:42:17Speaker 02

  TV, 32-inch flat-screen TV, and putting it underneath their dress and walking without changing their gait. They're taking 10-pound cases of beer or wine and just making it vanish from their clothing and walking without changing their walk. There's a very interesting thing there that it becomes, how is that knowledge being transferred? It probably goes back to at least the one data point I know of the Forty Elephants. 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 learned from, and we chased 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 her that it's bad to lie.

• 1:43:02Speaker 02

  We try to talk to her that deception is a social lubricant. It happens all the time around us, from the moment we put on makeup to something else, whether it be a defeat for cancer by using decoy cells. There's all these things that have a reason, but it's about your intent, and that's the big thing.

• 1:43:19Tim Ferriss?

  Could you say more about that because that would be very heretical to I'm sure some people listening, right? Wait a second, deception badge.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. No exceptions.

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:30Tim Ferriss?

  Black and white.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:43:31Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:43:49Speaker 02

  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 to counter deception. And it's helpful now when people say we need more critical thinking to understand what was the original reason for it. Why do we need this reasoning process inside of a communal culture? We need to understand the role of deception. And there's been chases in the history of the study of the psychology of deception of trying to say, well, let's catch somebody in a lie or lying is all bad. But it's not. We use lies and levels of disclosure in our first dates. It's funny if you hear me now versus what my father's thinking would have been as a child. Sorry, my son is advocating for deception, but what I'm advocating for is awareness of

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  what deception is and expanding the horizons of what people think it can be. And I'll give you an example. Take the concepts that are used. Here's a concept. I'm going to make someone think that they have acted when they haven't. That's a very generic concept.

• 1:44:43Tim Ferriss?

  Make them think that they have.

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  Acted on something, taken an action when they haven't.

• 1:44:48Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  So I'll give you two contexts for that. If I, as a pickpocket, steal from somebody in another country and they don't, are 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 peace 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 germ in malaria. But if I can release a hormone to a female mosquito to make her think that she has mated

• 1:45:32Speaker 02

  when she hasn't, that makes 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. 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.

• 1:46:04Tim Ferriss?

  Can you give an example? I've never heard that term before.

• 1:46:06Speaker 02

  Which, paltering or?

• 1:46:06Tim Ferriss?

  Paltering, yeah.

• 1:46:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, paltering. If I said...

• 1:46:09Tim Ferriss?

  It doesn't have to be a business example, but it would be an example of using the truth to deceive.

• 1:46:13Speaker 02

  If I release a series of true statements in a certain order, you're going to connect those and tell yourself a story. If you vet any of those true elements, they will show up to be true. But because they were delivered to you in a certain order, they'll create a belief. And that's the bigger thing. How do I craft a belief in you? And that's been done a variety of ways on both sides of the political spectrum, that we could say. It's done in advertising as well. There's a great book on propaganda by Eddie Bernays, where he explored it with doing a study on the most important meal of the day. And it was, at that time, I think, funded by the pork industry. And they found that breakfast was the most important meal of the day.

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:47:14Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, let's say, let's go to no then.

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:16Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not sure where it's going.

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if you say no, I said, some people don't believe in ESP.

• 1:47:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:21Speaker 02

  And some people don't believe we ever walked on the moon. Both those statements are true by imply a third statement that now, if you don't believe in ESP, that you're similar to the people with conspiracy theories who never believe we walked on the moon.

• 1:47:32Tim Ferriss?

  Right, you're making a sort of a false.

• 1:47:33Speaker 02

  Association.

• 1:47:34Tim Ferriss?

  Association.

• 1:47:35Speaker 02

  By using true statements. And so it's also, as a legality, it's a lot harder thing to grab on to. And if I want to pull back one layer further.

• 1:47:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's slippery.

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:47:44Tim Ferriss?

  There's a lot of room for deception in advertising and product marketing also. I mean, there's, so I didn't know that term, but there's a term called puffery.

• 1:47:51Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:47:52Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:48:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:48:20Tim Ferriss?

  So if you sell, if you sell shampoo that is a hair volumizer, no agreed upon legal definition of volumize, but it conjures an image.

• 1:48:32Speaker 02

  It does.

• 1:48:32Tim Ferriss?

  Of a very distinct effect.

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:48:35Tim Ferriss?

  It's total bullshit.

• 1:48:36Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:48:37Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:48:45Speaker 02

  That, but that's exactly to my point. I, I hope that people expand beyond just trying to get someone to lie. Cause so much, many of the things now that are impacting people in major ways are going beyond fabrication. They're going to narratives that craft belief systems. So my push that I think is a nice way to stay off the political phrase, just to go after, how, how about I show you how these things are traditionally done? I'm gonna show you the anatomy of those. I'm gonna try to familiarize you with those that, like I said, deception awareness.

• 1:49:13Tim Ferriss?

  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 a vis the 40 elephants.

• 1:49:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, because my goal, if I attack a political piece, in the outcome of the behavior I'd like is I would like for people to move more center. And I want there to be a kind of diplomacy between people. All right, that's the very nature of politics. So can I get them off the extremes? And I believe that teaching them without having to target them with their current beliefs, to use these other metaphors, instead of a turtle, I'm using cons and other deception. But to another point of something more ambiguous. I talked about change raising earlier, shortchanging somebody at cashier. If I want to be softer in that, I could just, as a sleight of hand artist, I have the ability to change a bill from one bill to another, right? I can do that very quickly, but so do thieves. And if I go to a cashier and I said, can you give me a hundred dollar bill?

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:50:37Tim Ferriss?

  Write your own story.

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  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 I made ninety dollars. But if you went the other way and you were highly suspicious, you're on top of it, and you said, what? Say, could you give me two fives? So that allows me to go either way. Because I have this ten, I can take that lane. So do you want, can you give me two fives? And that's what it means by equivocate. The equivocation of those things is this ambiguity used to deceive can be taken in multiple directions.

• 1:51:05Tim Ferriss?

  Although you're kind of fucked on that exchange, right? Because you give the ten.

• 1:51:09Speaker 02

  It helps be able to have the recording.

• 1:51:13Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so I want to talk for a second about books. So when you're younger, there were these various books. You mentioned a few of them. I think one of them was J.B. Bobo's Coin Magic.

• 1:51:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a book that Ben Stone gave me, yes.

• 1:51:26Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:51:38Speaker 02

  At specific points, there was one where some people that I had worked with started to say, it was almost an implication I was getting that they thought I was psychic and I wasn't buying into that. There was an incident that happened, somebody had stolen something from me at that show at Caesar Palace with hundreds of people. And I had a backpack and somebody got there and stole out a set of special coins that I had that were very sentimental to me and set of a case.

• 1:52:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's a bummer, probably of no use to them.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it was both emotional and significant to me and I come back up, I just changed in my street clothes. And I said, hey, 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. And I said, old young this, dark hair, light hair. 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. So he's in the luminarium, which is like a couple hundred people in that space now. And they said, yeah, he's there. I was like, oh, man. So can you spot him if we go in there? And we go in, when I go to look for him, I ended up finding this guy out of a couple hundred people.

• 1:52:37Tim Ferriss?

  Because they helped you spot him?

• 1:52:38Speaker 02

  No, they didn't know how to describe him. And I called my boss and I said, hey, can we do an announcement? Somebody stole my stuff. Can you do an announcement that we know that they stole it? And he says, no. I said, all right. So then I went back in, 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 got his family. He'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 tap tap, but enough for me to know what it was. And it was my case.

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  So then I stole it back from him with I'm No One. 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.

• 1:53:32Tim Ferriss?

  You took the evidence.

• 1:53:34Speaker 02

  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 books question, I always get on tangent.

• 1:53:42Speaker 02

  I really wanted to understand what was happening there. And it's like, is NLP, is this, everybody says NLP, is that what this is? And it wasn't that, but it was.

• 1:53:49Tim Ferriss?

  What you were doing, what he was doing?

• 1:53:51Speaker 02

  People were thinking about what I was doing as far as, and I didn't believe it was, I had

• 1:53:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:53:56Speaker 02

  super skills.

• 1:53:57Tim Ferriss?

  But you were trying to deconstruct what you yourself.

• 1:53:59Speaker 02

  And I was pushing at the science and I was really, and so I found out about Robert Cialdini and his book on influence and different studies on the history of persuasion. I started ordering textbooks from universities and really going into that. But then now my areas of interest, the nice thing is I'm friends with a lot of the authors that I know. So Dan Simons just wrote a book called Nobody's Fool that is going specifically after a problem that I'm very interested in, which is 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?

• 1:54:42Speaker 02

  Do we want people to have an alternate hypothesis to question their hypothesis? Because when is that the case? And when is that a conspiracy theory? And it now becomes the fixation on beliefs and when should we question what we think we know? And that's a very specific thing. So a lot of the things I'm reading right now are how beliefs are constructed, when should we question what we think we know? And how often do we update our belief systems? Is there firmware that needs to be updated? And how do we go about doing that? And I'm trying to find what my role is in trying to help with that.

• 1:55:14Tim Ferriss?

  Outside of technical magic books?

• 1:55:17Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:55:18Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm using magic broadly, could be any facet of that type of performance. What books have you reread that come to mind?

• 1:55:27Speaker 02

  What 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 last few results? And what is the process of doing that? And that's different than in a traditional magic book. And also, when should you and why should you? It poses the idea of questioning your own beliefs and how you arrived at those and how necessary it is for you to update yours. And I go back to that quite a bit. There's a book called The Person in the Situation. I think it's Nisbet.

• 1:56:04Tim Ferriss?

  And we can get all the specifics.

• 1:56:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll give you a list of those, yeah. I do suffer from that. When I buy a book, I think I'm gonna buy the time to 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 that are driving me in life. A friend of mine wrote a book called Deception in a Digital Age. And he was with the FBI. His name is Cameron Maylin. It's a fascinating book in that space that I go into a lot.

• 1:56:29Tim Ferriss?

  Does whiz-mob hold any special place in your heart or mind? And what is whiz-mob?

• 1:56:35Speaker 02

  Okay, if you go to books to the spirit of your question, which is what I should have listened to.

• 1:56:40Tim Ferriss?

  I don't blame you for not listening to my spirit. It's an acquired taste.

• 1:56:43Speaker 02

  No, there's probably, so Bobo's Coin Magic, right? And then there was the Fitzki books that Ben Stone tricked me into reading.

• 1:56:51Tim Ferriss?

  God bless that guy, huh?

• 1:56:52Speaker 02

  They still reverberize because magic, the study of misdirection. And then whiz-mob. Whiz-mob was, it was this juxtaposition that there was a professor, David Maurer, 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 that are cons and heist movies. And I was very interested because he was a linguist professor who was studying the language of thieves. And whiz-mob was a specific type of theft. And it's not just a pickpocket on the street. The name of whiz-mob is this idea that there are thieves that travel and they don't just

• 1:57:35Speaker 02

  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 canons. This term came back from the UK a long time ago. And Maurer was tracing that back. And he noticed that it was showing up in Chicago and other places that cannons were around. But 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.

• 1:58:16Speaker 02

  And that lit a fire for me to try to find a cannon, to try to find Wiz Mob. 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 DC, another cannon reached out to me by email. And it said, hey, we have similar interests with Maurer's work. I'm one of the original Wiz Mom. And I said, what? 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 in space. So he had to invent whole new approaches to stealing, also what racism meant in that kind of community. He was writing a book about that and he wanted to get together with me. He lives in the DC area. We haven't, still haven't got together.

• 1:59:01Speaker 02

  So sometime if you want to get together with the two of us.

• 1:59:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm in.

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  That is the driver. That's where I used to spend a lot of my time. That book, Maurer's book, taught me to be a student of these arcane disciplines and see what I could learn.

• 1:59:14Tim Ferriss?

  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 are 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?

• 1:59:40Speaker 02

  I think a lot of people don't know the structure of a pickpocket team. They tend to know football, basketball, baseball very intimately and very impassioned. But for a pickpocket team, it tends to be different.

• 1:59:51Tim Ferriss?

  It's their intention not to be seen.

• 1:59:53Speaker 02

  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 as, oh, that's just a diversion. But it's more than that. And as you move from country to country, there's different approaches of how people steal in one country versus another. And it tends to be that you see them move like a school of fish through a crowd. So if somebody's in an event and they've locked onto a target, as that target moves through, whether it's a casino or an event, you'll see the thieves move with them as a school of fish. And the roles with that, the wire, is kind of embodied in a character from a movie called Harry Never Holds. And it was about a pickpocket that would steal from people and he would hand off his stuff.

• 2:00:39Speaker 02

  If anybody rolled him up, he's the quarterback. They don't want to catch the quarterback because he's the most valuable player. That function has a metaphor. So how would he pass, who would he pass to? And the other roles in the team become the stalls or the sticks, which they set up a frame. They stop somebody's elbow from moving backwards and grabbing hold of the thief's hand. They might open a newspaper, they might look at a book if it's on a subway, but they're going to be underneath the edge of an elbow so a hand can't get back. So that's why I mean like setting a frame on someone.

• 2:01:07Tim Ferriss?

  Running interference.

• 2:01:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they came and moved back. Then, 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 the good targets.

• 2:01:26Tim Ferriss?

  Pause for one second. So the shade, is that a pre-game activity or is that done real time? How do they alert people to an issue?

• 2:01:37Speaker 02

  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 telephones or they used to. So I've seen that happen at a mall when I visited DC a number of years ago. I've seen it happen different ways in Japan with like kissing noises. In Naples, they do whistles. It's different sounds. Colombian diversion teams will use like a finger up the back of the neck, which indicates that we have surveillance and split. And they'll do probe testing where maybe as somebody's going in to do a steal, they'll, if they, since they've got heat from a surveillance, they might drop their sightline towards a lady's purse. And if someone bounces off their sightline and tracks to that, they know they've got heat. And so they give a signal to their team to dissipate. So there's.

• 2:02:19Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so we stopped at shade. I interrupted. So what came after shade?

• 2:02:22Speaker 02

  Steer. A steer is somebody who qualifies the mark. And these are right out of Wismob, but as I started meeting different teams, it's been fascinating to find people on the street that still use variations of these terms. Cause that means somehow they learned those from someone.

• 2:02:37Tim Ferriss?

  So what does the steer do?

• 2:02:38Speaker 02

  They qualify the mark. So let's say.

• 2:02:40Tim Ferriss?

  They do a testing bite and they're like.

• 2:02:42Speaker 02

  Well, think about 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.

• 2:02:48Tim Ferriss?

  Want to make sure the juice is worth the squeeze. So how do you qualify?

• 2:02:52Speaker 02

  It's changed now with phones, but if you have earbuds or any kind of cord going down to a device, I now know where it is and I can qualify that. And so for a lot of Eastern European teams and in England and other places, they just know that you're going to have a phone. So more people become targets just for their phones. Cause they know how to fence those and run those in the market. It's clever things what they can do with a phone now. Now they can run it through your whole bank accounts really quick now. So it's more than.

• 2:03:17Tim Ferriss?

  They can access your bank account vis a vis your phone.

• 2:03:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know exactly this place because it's not like a zero day major hack. Not like a sponsored state hack. They do have some way of getting into your phone pretty quick. And I've seen that over the last three years, take a resurgence of stealing a nightclub. It could be as simple as pointing it back at you, get your facial recognition. But some kind of automation that they're running to be able to run through all your accounts, through your passwords, shut you out, set up dual factor authentication, lock you out of everything and just take you virtually. Yeah, so that's a whole different thing. But back in the day, once upon a time, when the steers would go, they'd be more interested in when you go to an ATM or a bank and you qualify. They call it peeking the poke, seeing what money is inside the wallet. They had names for all these things.

• 2:04:00Speaker 02

  The pit, the kick, the bridge, the fob, 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 its 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 scout's moving sightlines. He's looking, I look at for people that are either targets or they're law enforcement. And I can identify those. And if I can identify them, somebody else is looking at them. So then I just track sightlines through a crowd to see who's looking at them. And then I'm going to look for their signals and I can start to identify the group.

• 2:04:43Speaker 02

  And then I can start to look at how they're doing there.

• 2:04:46Tim Ferriss?

  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. Or you go to Carnival, you can bet your ass there are 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 is other preventative measures. I mean, you hear about money belts and this, that, and the other thing. What are your thoughts?

• 2:05:27Speaker 02

  Just like self-defense, it's a mindset first. And 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. And it's a juxtaposition between that. It's the pandemic of the Dunning Kruger effect. It's this level of unconscious incompetence or this illusion of invulnerability. And there's articles saying that pickpockets don't really exist anymore, that that's gone down. I disagree. And pickpockets aren't the only problem. Like I just talked about the hacking element of this. Deep fakes is a whole new thing. I mean, 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.

• 2:06:09Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so they they used a deep fake to quote unquote prove that they'd kidnapped someone.

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  The audio, they had the audio of a daughter talking to a mother screaming that she's been kidnapped. And I mean, that's going to drive anybody to take the behavior right away.

• 2:06:23Tim Ferriss?

  So they were able to extract the ransom?

• 2:06:25Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. 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 somebody impersonated the mayor of Kyiv within the last three months that was speaking to other mayors in Europe, and it was Russian based. But they were on a real time live Zoom call while they were talking to these people and doing a real time live deep fake on a Zoom call. And then about a few minutes in, there was some kind of glitch. Longer than that, they got enough information, there's a glitch. And then they called back to speak to the mayor of Kyiv 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.

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  I went to the importance for concepts because the overconfidence will work against people.

• 2:07:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh yeah, you see people in any major city, we're sitting in New York City right now. The number of people I have seen see a go signal and walk across the street with earbuds in, looking at their phones, not checking either direction.

• 2:07:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:29Tim Ferriss?

  In this city. Is unbelievable. I mean, hundreds of them. I've seen hundreds.

• 2:07:34Speaker 02

  And it's like, 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, went back, the latching in of the smartphones. And it really does become this kind of, not narcissism, but this kind of egocentricism 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 grift sense. And they felt that the grift sense was more important than technique, the ability to extract that from someone and be able to know where their

• 2:08:16Speaker 02

  attention was, how much they're investing their attention on a thing. Now it becomes more salient when somebody's holding their phone and you can see where their attention is and you can see what they're doing.

• 2:08:29Tim Ferriss?

  So I don't want to beat a 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. Right? You got it. You got a safe 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? Are some targets, I would imagine some are harder than others.

• 2:08:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, they are. So your inside jacket pocket, they used to think that that was the hardest pocket to steal from because they would call it kissing the dog. That was the old term. Kissing the dog meant that I would have to see the mark's face. With most other extractions, 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 can show you maybe some of that a little bit.

• 2:09:23Tim Ferriss?

  Headbutting the dog.

• 2:09:24Speaker 02

  Yes, the dog. Make 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 that often beats security is what they call satisfaction of search, where they're looking for a thing, an anomaly, they find something that satisfies that and they stop looking. You can reverse that and use that for thieves. Give them something to find. Give them a, if you're going to go make a purchase out somewhere. Quarantine a portion of your money, any valuables that you have sentimental 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 pickpockets, it's going to be for getting mugged too. And you can hide them in plain sight. So for example, what is your EDC? What are the things you carry with you? Now more and more people are carrying-

• 2:10:09Tim Ferriss?

  Everyday carry.

• 2:10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, EDC, everyday carry, and definitely a pickpockets library, right? Your water bottle, a coffee cup, those things. If I take things that are of value, 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, strip me, taser me and strip me down, you probably won't search in that coffee cup.

• 2:10:31Tim Ferriss?

  Ah.

• 2:10:32Speaker 02

  That's the mindset that I'm talking about. So the idea of treating the unimportant as important and the important as unimportant, if you want to simplify it. And I think you can take that to your hotel room. Are you going to buy some kind of stash concealment that looks like aftershave, or you're going to do those things? Instead of leave something there in the safe, because you need to satiate their curiosity. You need to give the dog a bone to find. You need to, as Herb Simon in behavioral economics, he would call it satisficing. You need something that satisfies their curiosity.

• 2:11:03Tim Ferriss?

  I'm glad I asked. Thank you. What is the Illusion of Knowledge Project?

• 2:11:07Speaker 02

  That is a current effort. So we have a new company that we're trying to create. And I've kind of tiptoed into that as we've been speaking about, it's a soft business model. We're trying, it's still shape of what the market is for that, but we think it's important to point the finger at the problem that we see on the horizon. The benefit is I have an amazing network of people that I've learned from. It used to be thieves, but now it's security specialists and other ones, and just specialists around the world that are incredible experts in these areas. And I was saying, my background's in entertainment. We did some TV work, different things. Can we repackage shows, whether it's TV or live experience or content, that can help people engage with things what they might not think are important? Their data, their other things. Can you reverse a room escape and make it

• 2:11:52Speaker 02

  a heist? And while people are trying to break into a thing, they learn about their personal data. These kind of examples. Yeah, it probably is now stolen that I've said it out loud.

• 2:12:02Tim Ferriss?

  We could add in a bunch of bleeps.

• 2:12:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, leave it in there. It's just karma for me doing all the things I've done. But it's the kind of things that give you those ideas. So we did a project along that. It was a video project called The Illusion of Knowledge. And it's this Daniel Borson quote, "The enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge." And that marries so well with my background growing up around cons. And since my job has always been instilling confidence, not just the extraction of personal items from a person, it's getting people to make other decisions. And as I learn about that, I think it's very important for people to understand that we are all puppets, that we all have strings. 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.

• 2:12:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:13:02Tim Ferriss?

  Where can people find that? Or can they not yet find it?

• 2:13:04Speaker 02

  They can't find it yet. There's a trailer that's, we have this website called Equivoke. And Equivoke is E-Q-U-I-V-O-K-E. Or they can go to my website. It's easy. My website is istealstuff.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 Equivoke. There's a link to those things. Explore and poke around. I don't have much content out there that I put as products because right now I'm at a phase where I have two kids. I have one that's 30, one that's six, and I want to try to do the thing that I can to change the world in the way that I can. So a lot of these are legacy type things that build it first, build business model later, which is probably the best approach, but it's something that I'm doing right now.

• 2:13:48Tim Ferriss?

  You know, it's, it may not always be the most fail-safe approach, but it is, I think, the approach that I see align with. Intention and integrity very often in people who are, and I mean this in the most complimentary sense possible, high-level craftsmen or craftswomen. 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.

• 2:14:27Tim Ferriss?

  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 forcing it into a model.

• 2:14:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:48Tim Ferriss?

  Anyway.

• 2:14:48Speaker 02

  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 it's speaking or doing workshops or doing training or creating things to teach security. And as I'm doing those, since I got my boxes checked, I felt, okay, let's be exploratory. 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?

• 2:15:19Tim Ferriss?

  So I have to ask, because this is just, my brain won't let it go.

• 2:15:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:24Tim Ferriss?

  So the 40 elephants, I just love this name. Are there other historical figures or bands of merry pranksters slash criminals who have particularly memorable names or stories for you? Like, it's like if you had to put together your League of Legends, right? Is there a shortlist?

• 2:15:44Speaker 02

  I've had the good fortune of 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-

• 2:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  Titanic Thompson.

• 2:16:00Speaker 02

  Yep, his nickname was Ty, for those who knew him well. There's books been written about him. I think people have talked about doing movies over the years. Supposedly, he would advertise he was coming to a town because he yambled on everything. And people were drawn to that. He was a proposition bet hustler, but he had super skills.

• 2:16:17Tim Ferriss?

  What is a proposition bet hustler?

• 2:16:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:16:31Tim Ferriss?

  Can you think of an example?

• 2:16:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. One, he would bet just first on like golf. He's very good at golf. And he would play somebody and he'd be beating them. And he says, listen, I'll give you a handicap. I'll play with left-handed. And then he would beat him again. And they didn't realize that he was left-handed. But he's that good, they could beat people right-handed.

• 2:16:47Tim Ferriss?

  Back to Prince's pride again.

• 2:16:49Speaker 02

  Yes. And so he definitely could switch the hands. He was very famous for being able to throw things accurately inside of cups from a distance, other things. He could throw a card from a long ways away through a window and being above a pool hall was one story where he would be trying to toss a hat, missing occasionally, and side bets on a poker game. And he says, this is better grand that I can toss a card through that window all the way down where the window is. And so he'd take the bet and throw a card through. And then they closed down the window. He gets a second bet. And then Kenny, he says, oh, listen, I'm gonna throw it through the window. It's gonna come back and it's gonna stick to the outside of the window. What? No, just silly. And it would. And you see those in the literature, but like, no, that's like magic territory. And then he would, somebody be eating pretzels. And he says, the pretzel, I'm gonna take that pretzel

• 2:17:32Speaker 02

  and throw it over that three-story building over there, or that walnut. And they'd say, no, that can't. And he would. And he'd throw a pretzel over a walnut. So he seemed like some kind of Robin Hood slash superhero. But there's great books on him, on the Unsinkable Titanic Thompson. I have the good fortune of knowing the last surviving member of his team that was the guy who was down below in the pool hall with a fan and rubber cement to paint the window. 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 Weil, the Yellow Kid, the Count 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, he took advantage of the time when the Eiffel Tower was not, had the significant value that it did.

• 2:18:16Speaker 02

  It was after a World's Fair and it might need to be turned into scrap. So he put out a bid as a city official. To be able to look for somebody who could tear it down. And then as different contractors bid on it, he found a guy who really needed the job. And meanwhile, the wife of the guy says, I think there's a rat. I smell something. There's something up here. And he had the beautiful turn in a con, which he recognized that the wife had that suspicion. And he answered it in a unique way. He just said, listen, I gotta make something on this. If you guys really want this deal, I'm gonna 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 it's a whole fake. So not only did he get the money he was getting, he also got the extra money as well. So there's all these guys, all these interesting lessons of these guys.

• 2:19:01Speaker 02

  But I had a personal best friend for 17 years, Rod the Hop. And he is significant. If people have ever watched like Ocean's Eleven and they wondered, well, I wonder if there's a real ocean. There's a couple of guys that Ocean's character would probably be attributed to do, but Rod would be on that shortlist, among thieves at least. And he was a legend among thieves and people didn't know what he looked like generally because of the nature of the work. But he played a lot of different styles. He was a card hustler, card cheat. But there's like a southern style, a gardenia style. These different styles are playing long and short games. They're using devices that shoot out your sleeve and grab things called a joint or Kaplenger holdout. He was very good at a lot of those things. I met him when I first moved into Vegas. He was sitting off in a corner. It was that thing where some magicians were in.

• 2:19:45Speaker 02

  He was off the side of that and he was playing with plastic cards. And he was shuffling them at the table and not in a way that magicians handle cards. And he had an edge that was a little bit more, felt like family to me. And I saddled up to him, talked to him a little bit.

• 2:20:00Tim Ferriss?

  So not the way that magicians handle cards in the sense that you recognize more of like a working card mechanic?

• 2:20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, because mechanics can't have flourish. They can't pick up the deck off the table. They don't shuffle in the same way that they do. All their slides have to be done within the constraints of what the casinos have manifest. So it would look very mundane on the surface, but there's a lot going on there. And also, plastic cards, magicians would never want to use plastic cards, but poker players would. So when I began talking to him, we kind of hit up a friendship and talked a little bit. And as He learned more about my past and I was going through a divorce at the time too. I was around 21. He knew I needed some money and he said, hey, you want to come 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.

• 2:20:51Speaker 02

  But he 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, what are you going to do with those? 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 from you. So he bought all my magic books from 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 saying, I know you wouldn't take the money unless I did this. He gave me all my books back. So later, when he got out of prison, I said, I'm doing some new stuff now and I need some friends. You want to be a friend?

• 2:21:36Speaker 02

  And I asked him to join our team.

• 2:21:38Tim Ferriss?

  Great line.

• 2:21:41Speaker 02

  So he joined the team and we had about a dozen guys. Kevin Mitnick, a famous hacker, was one of those guys.

• 2:21:46Tim Ferriss?

  The art of deception.

• 2:21:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he was a dear friend who just recently passed away.

• 2:21:50Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

• 2:21:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. And but I, so I'm right before he got sick last year of cancer, but very dear friends I've learned so much from. But Rod used to do heist on casinos. Mitnick had all of his legends. It's a story for another time. But I've been influenced by amazing guys in that way that I've learned about.

• 2:22:07Tim Ferriss?

  So what did the team do? What was he doing on the team?

• 2:22:11Speaker 02

  So that was a, definitely I can clarify, a bad business model. So that was WisMop Incorporated, inspired by the book you mentioned, WisMop. And the idea was that we would team guys together and send them out for, as a speaking agency for security, maybe team them with their counterparts in law enforcement. Mitnick 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 are covert communication systems that pickpockets use versus car chase versus guys that would break into. To a place like a cat burglar functionally. So all those kind of guys we had kind of in our cadre. And they all had different ways of approaching those things. So it was valuable also him employing and tugging at social engineering, which I consider very similar to an evolution of Khan.

• 2:22:56Speaker 02

  He had me come in and speak at DEF CON and at his company know before later. But we learn from each other in those worlds.

• 2:23:03Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 2:23:11Tim Ferriss?

  share with the audience, ask of my audience? Anything at all before we start to wind to a close?

• 2:23:20Speaker 02

  My daughter's six, but when she was around three, she was learning a lot of new words that I don't say. And you try to choose what's a good word and a bad word. And how often if you use the word no too much, do they become numb to them? 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.

• 2:24:05Speaker 02

  And that's a huge thing.

• 2:24:06Tim Ferriss?

  That's huge. What an advantage.

• 2:24:08Speaker 02

  What happens when we just change a word? What does it do to a behavior? So in all the long drives she's taken with us across the country, she's never said I'm bored. She knows what it means. She hears her friends say it and she doesn't think of my dad tells me not to say it. Cause I tell her you can say it, but she chooses not to. And it's a thing that I'm obviously proud of her about that. But it's also to me such 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. Where do we want to start? And I said, should we go this way, that way, or what? And it becomes a different thing.

• 2:24:51Speaker 02

  I said, do you want to do something that you want me to help you generate? Come up with some ideas? Or she says, no, I just want to think for a little while. So she'll just look out the window and think and really. And so it's a fascinating thing to look at how long her attention span is compared to a lot of her friends.

• 2:25:08Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think that that has helped her, despite not having, I assume, not having had the Forrest Gump races, to become a better watcher in the same way that you became a good watcher?

• 2:25:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:25:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you want to learn how to levitate a coin? I think it's in, uh, these three books.

• 2:25:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:25:45Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you only read volume one? I think it's in two or three.

• 2:25:47Speaker 02

  And there's two things, because if Sme has a big ego, and they don't think that they need to learn something, or you have learned helplessness, where people don't think it's possible for them to learn it. So what if I hide that? Another pro-social application of deception. Maybe I can use that to help them learn a thing they thought was irrelevant, and secretly I've taught that to them.

• 2:26:05Tim Ferriss?

  Or impossible.

• 2:26:06Speaker 02

  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 it as a series of other things, that now, this little tour that we took was secretly a mind palace, and now she learns how to do that. So what are the different ways that you can package learning?

• 2:26:27Tim Ferriss?

  Trojan horse.

• 2:26:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:26:30Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 2:26:49Speaker 02

  I'm on Facebook, although there seems to be like five or six of me that isn't me, but as imposters do.

• 2:26:54Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of appropriate.

• 2:26:56Speaker 02

  So I haven't canceled them out, but there is one me on Facebook. I'm on Instagram, not very active, but I'll probably be more. I haven't engaged with the new version of Twitter. I haven't fully jumped onto the next.

• 2:27:06Tim Ferriss?

  Can't bring myself to say X.

• 2:27:08Speaker 02

  TikTok, I'm not coming close to. Just my security mind won't even touch it.

• 2:27:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, don't do it. But on Twitter, @apollarobbins.

• 2:27:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so pretty much @apollarobbins across the board.

• 2:27:18Tim Ferriss?

  There are a lot of my audience, very, very interesting folks are on Twitter. So it's worthwhile mentioning that just because that might be fun to see.

• 2:27:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:27Tim Ferriss?

  How things come out of the woodwork. And then as far as websites go.

• 2:27:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:27:31Tim Ferriss?

  Best website or websites?

• 2:27:32Speaker 02

  They funnel to the same thing of apollobobbins.com or istealstuff.com.

• 2:27:38Tim Ferriss?

  I steal stuff.

• 2:27:39Speaker 02

  They'll take you to the same place. But this other new one that is going to be a separate thing is Equivoke. And that one will be probably a combination of an entertainment blog with other video content and other things where we're going to be, try to point to tools that are important in this space. There's a guy that I think is amazing that studies deception, Simon Henderson, he's from the UK, him, Anthony Perkakis, my wife, Eva Doe, all them as a collective will be doing interviews, videos and other things for those guys. So if you want to come play in the space, learn a little bit about cons, we won't attack your political beliefs, but we will attack what you believe.

• 2:28:13Tim Ferriss?

  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 dot blog slash podcast. And as usual, I'll say it again, until next time, please be a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

• 2:28:54Tim Ferriss?

  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? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe 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 I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps. Gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field,

• 2:29:39Tim Ferriss?

  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.blog/Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/Friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Sundays for Dogs, ultra-high-quality dog food without the prep or mess. I want to give my pooch Molly the best of everything. This is especially true when it comes to the ingredient quality of her food. I've tried tons of different options, but most healthy dog foods aren't expensive,

• 2:30:19Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:31:03Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:31:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:32:28Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:33:13Tim Ferriss?

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