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

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

Apollo Robbins, also known as the Gentleman Thief, is a renowned entertainer and expert in magic and misdirection. Despite facing physical challenges at birth, he became a master of dexterity and hand manipulation. The guest shares their own journey from being religious to identifying as agnostic, and discusses their upbringing in a religious family and their exploration of different religious beliefs. The podcast also touches on the guest's early experiences with magic tricks and their involvement with the Humane Society.

Show more

00:30:00 - 01:00:00

The guest on the podcast discusses their early experiences with magic and how it influenced their unique style. They talk about experimenting with different techniques and developing their skills through practice. The guest also mentions their interest in mentalism and how it involves subtly directing someone's choices. They also discuss the origins of card magic and mentalism, highlighting how mentalism evolved from psychics and mediums. They talk about their jazz-based approach to magic and the importance of creating organic experiences for the audience. The guest also shares stories of their experiences as a pickpocket entertainer in Las Vegas, including instances where they accidentally broke a watch while attempting to steal it and how they handled accusations of theft. They discuss the challenges and risks involved in their line of work, and how they curate attention to distract and steal from people.

Show more

01:00:00 - 01:30:00

Apollo Robbins, a renowned pickpocket, demonstrates his skills in pickpocketing and sleight of hand. He discusses the psychology behind attention and illusions, collaborating with neuroscientists and his friendship with Teller from Penn and Teller. Robbins explains his unique approach to stealing and shares anecdotes of his pickpocketing feats. The conversation also explores establishing rapport, the importance of perspective taking, and the influence of philosophy and psychology on Robbins' career. The podcast concludes with a discussion on the need for tolerance for uncertainty and the ability to spot truth in a technologically advanced future.

Show more

01:30:00 - 02:00:00

In this episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, Apollo Robbins, the world's most famous pickpocket, demonstrates his skills and discusses the psychology of deception. He shares anecdotes about stealing objects from people and highlights the importance of manipulating attention and creating unexpected moments in his performances. The podcast also explores the role of deception in various contexts, such as fighting malaria and dealing with the spread of coronavirus. The guest recommends books on magic, persuasion, critical thinking, and changing beliefs to further understand these topics.

Show more

02:00:00 - 02:30:00

In this episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, Apollo Robbins, the world's most famous pickpocket, discusses various tactics used by thieves, including pickpocketing and counter-surveillance. He also talks about the importance of situational awareness and preventative measures to avoid theft. The conversation touches on historical figures and bands of merry pranksters and criminals, as well as Robbins' experience with cheating casinos and his friendship with famous hacker Kevin Mitnick. Overall, the episode provides insights into the world of deception and security.

Show more

02:30:00 - 02:34:00

This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show features an interview with Apollo Robbins, known as the world's most famous pickpocket. The discussion covers topics such as pickpocketing the Secret Service, manipulating attention, famous con artists, the psychology of deception, self-defense techniques, and the secret language of thieves. The host also mentions advertisements for dog food and supplements, including air-dried dog food and Momentus supplements.

Show more

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 Momentus

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 Momentus Mag3n8,

L-theanine, and Apigenin,

all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality

and duration of my sleep.

Now, the Momentus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers

single servings of all three of these ingredients.

I've also been using Momentus 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 am 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 Momentus and their products.

Momentus also partners with some of the best minds

in human performance to bring world-class products to market,

including a few you will recognize from this podcast,

like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrad.

They also work with Dr. Stacy Sims

to assist Momentus in developing products

specifically for women.

Their products contain high-quality ingredients

that are third-party tested,

which in this case means informed sport end 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,

Momentus ships internationally,

so you have the same access that I do.

So check it out.

Visit livemomentus.com slash tim

and use code TIM at checkout for 20% off.

That's livemomentus, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S

dot com slash tim and code TIM for 20% off.

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 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.

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 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 slash Tim,

or by using code TIM at checkout.

That's SundaysforDogs.com slash Tim,

or by using code TIM at checkout.

One more time, that's SundaysforDogs.com slash Tim,

or code TIM at checkout.

Upgrade your pup to Sundays for Dogs

and feel great about the food you feed your best friend.

Optimal, minimal.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile

before my hands start shaking.

Can I answer your personal question?

No, I would've seen it in a perfect time.

What if I could be out of this?

I'm a cyber-netic organism,

living this year over a metal endoskeleton.

The Tim Ferriss Show.

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 U.S. 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 slash Tim Ferriss.

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.

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 has delivered lectures at Harvard Kennedy School,

MIT Sloan School of Management,

and the Society of Neuroscience.

He has been profiled by The New Yorker,

which is an amazing profile,

and featured in The New York Times,

The Atlantic, National Geographic,

and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Robbins' TED Talk, The Art of Misdirection,

is ranked in the 20 Most Watched TED Talks of All Time

and has been hailed by the TED Editors

as a revelation in the flaws of human perception.

You can find all things Apollo Robbins at apollorobbins.com

and you can find them on Twitter at apollorobbins.

Without further ado, please enjoy a most enjoyable,

most entertaining, most educational conversation

with the one and only Apollo Robbins.

Apollo.

Yes, sir.

So nice to have you here.

It is a pleasure.

And this has been in the works for me, at least,

in my own head since, I want to say, 2018, 2019.

Wow.

And then this pesky thing that we now call COVID came along

and disrupted all sorts of plans.

But finally, here we are.

So thank you for making the trip

and I'm glad that you are here in person.

So we may get a chance to stand up.

It's nice that it's in person versus virtual.

There's so many more possibilities.

So many more possibilities.

Well, let's start.

So people might assume that right out of the gate,

maybe as a fetus,

but certainly once you entered the world,

you had the dexterity of a demigod

and were basically fated to become someone famous

for how they use their hands.

Is that the case?

No, quite the opposite.

I think almost as opposite as it could be on that.

This is a story I've been told

that once upon a time, my father,

who was legally blind, had decided to become a minister,

went to seminary in 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 encourage him to go to another area.

And he invited them to his church,

invited him to have food on a Wednesday night.

And they came and they did,

they found food and they brought their mom one time.

And then their mom met him and they got married

and that's supposedly how my parents met.

Wow.

Okay, so your parents meet,

one thing leads to another.

Yes.

Assuming no immaculate conception.

Perhaps.

And then you enter the world,

what were doctors' expectations of you?

They were upside down.

So because my mother had had previous children,

she had 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 forest gump thing

that I had to wear braces on my legs

like forest gump to get around.

But also I had fine and gross motor problems.

I couldn't control my hands.

It was kind of a joke of trying to clap the hands

three times at the therapist.

I was a little bit better in that, I can clap my hands,

but I couldn't do a lot more.

I had to, when I learned to write,

have a large diameter pencil that was through a rubber ball,

and I had to learn to you 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.

Could you tell me 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,

how did that affect you?

But let's start with a simpler version of the question.

Could you just tell us more about your father?

He was a short man.

And I think that that factors in

because he was about five foot four.

So it's quite short.

He was very physically fit.

He climbed rope out using his legs.

He was very quick to go to a fight when he was younger.

And then one time when he was going into college,

he was starting to be a CPA.

And he had tubercular meningitis

that affected him for about a year, year and a half.

It's a very serious disease at the time,

I mean, still is, but at the time was more pervasive.

And it made him blind during the product for this year.

And he became kind of born again.

Somebody had come to visit him

and witnessed to him during that time.

And he decided he was going to change the course of his life

and become a minister.

And that I think made him a very dogmatic minister too.

He really embodied himself thinking about the difference

of Paul versus Saul and 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 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, his eyesight.

Yeah, and to his chins to grin

because he would run full force into a park bench

and come tumbling over it.

But he created this ministry that was inside

of government subsidized housing

and what people think as the hood.

And he would get beat up in front of me

by gangs sometimes, or not necessarily gangs,

but just small groups, I guess you could call gangs.

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 laundry mat.

And he would draw the kids in with a story,

bring Kool-Aid and cookies every Sunday.

He did that for 20 years.

And they would come in and he would tell them these stories.

It meant a lot to him.

He was non-denominational,

but he was very dogmatic

about his specific interpretation of scripture,

which to me, myself jumping ahead, I'm agnostic.

I'm not an atheist, but I'm not subscribed to any religion.

But it was such an interesting learning lesson.

I think about the difference between most people

would judge somebody by their perceptual blind spots

as not being able to see,

but sometimes it's worse the stories that we tell ourselves

and how that limits our perception.

We'll definitely come back to this.

Okay.

Right, like perception, story,

perception say, shaping story, story, shaping perception.

I wanna 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?

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 to a family

where they're very religious,

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 say King James

for its specific interpretation.

I had a debate in debate groups

for evolution and creationism.

As far as 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 championship.

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

and stealing things, running small hustles.

They never called it pickpocketing

but they would steal from people at the zoo

when they were leaning over to watch things,

animals being fed, they would cut their pockets

or steal their bags, sporting events through bleachers,

mostly opportunistic, but later it evolved

when a military man came out

he started working again like the series Ozark.

I feel like that route that was in Ozark

is probably what my brothers are associated with

but with some type of trafficking group.

Drug trafficking.

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 grown up

with my father as a development minister.

So it was really, I think a fascinating juxtaposition

between those two worlds that seeing deception

in that true sense of the word

of what we often think it to be.

But yet also he was okay with my brothers as people.

He didn't know that that's what they did

but I got to see both sides of that.

And they did other things publicly.

They were truck drivers or other things

and exceptional people in many ways

but it taught me to see the gray.

I think back to your other question now became

when I started to go to church

I'd sneak out of the back of the church

when the services transition

and sneak off to another church and say,

well, if this simply is a God believe

that tongues is the first physical

and actual sign of baptism in the Holy spirit

then what did the Baptist believe?

And then I go see their tenants

and then as I bounced around

I noticed that there were just lots of little slices

of different views of perspectives

which to me has continued to follow me through my life

of anytime somebody claims a truth

is maybe we need more perspectives on this.

When does Ben Stone end of the picture?

Wow, that's a great name.

And how old are you?

How dark do you want to get?

I can take it light or dark or gray?

You pick dealer's choice.

And we've gone dark on this podcast before

so we can go there.

Once upon a time I had had a pursuit

to become a syndicated cartoon artist

and I was about 12, 13, 14 going through that.

And I was pretty confident that I could pull it off.

I would want to be the youngest one.

There was a guy who was imitating

Gary Larson 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.

Because of the cartooning?

Not because of the cartooning

but because of some argument that we had.

The argument, I say this is proximity

to my large case of six months of cartoons.

My parents, some variation of a waterboarding process

occurred and the water poured over on all my art.

And that's the dark side that it destroyed all the art.

And when you had that much work invested in it's a reset.

How do you start over?

What do you do?

And for me as a kid, that was what I pictured as my escape.

The cartooning was gonna be your escape plan.

Yeah, from that world.

And I was down in our basement, I was going through some boxes

and I found this little magic gadget.

It was a piece of plastic, it looked like a thumb.

And I was very curious about what that was.

And somebody said it's a magic trick

and I said, well, how did that end up in our stuff?

So I call a magic shop that was downtown

and there's this guy picked up the phone

and he was probably 70 something at the time.

His name was Ben Stone.

So long way around to answer your question.

And Ben Stone, I said, so I've got this plastic thumb.

I don't know what it is.

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 two weeks at a time, living out in the woods sometimes.

So I'm kind of a transition place

of which way I choose in my past life.

Yeah, that's a vulnerable place

where you could have inflection points or vectors

in a lot of different directions.

And I had lots of ingredients to go a certain way.

Later as I've met people in my life,

I resonated with them because of that

because I had that fork to make a decision.

So Ben had a big impact at that decision

and that's why I wanted to give you the context board.

For sure, yeah, I appreciate that.

And so what happens then?

You're like, I have this fake thumb.

What do I do?

So 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 made this coin move around.

You're kind of a guy.

Yeah, which is great.

It's exactly what should have happened to me.

And he moved the slide at hand with the coin.

He made it jump around, disappeared,

jumped through his clothing, jumped through his body.

And 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 Spingoli deck and he did a bunch of tricks with that.

He said, so here's the choice.

Kind of like a red pill, blue pill.

This deck of cards, you can walk out of here

and for $5 you'll be able to do 50 tricks

without even practicing.

Or here's this big book

and it's gonna take a lot of study.

And maybe in four or five years,

you'll be able to do a slide at 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 went back, rode my bike back to my house

and I sold some stuff at a pawn shop,

came back the next day and bought that book.

And for the first year,

I just spent my time by myself

studying the coin magic by myself.

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.

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.

You can't believe everything you read on the internet,

but is it true that you also used to take in orphaned animals?

I did.

Okay, so can you tell me more about this?

Wow, do you have a research department?

That's great.

Got teams everywhere.

Eyes and ears on the ground.

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.

Wow, it's very salient, I think.

When I was like eight or so,

I guess earlier when I walked with my father,

he couldn't see things,

but 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 gonna run around the tree.

When it does, reach straight around behind it

and cup your hand.

And he taught me that I could catch a lizard

by walking around the tree

because it'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.

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 at Baby Bear.

Hold on, let's take the bear as an example.

So bear drop off.

See you next week.

What exactly happens?

How do you get a bear out of your house?

Like how does the bear make its way to you?

Apparently now they have a mail or a service bear in a box,

but I'm just kidding.

Be careful on the internet.

You might get something you don't expect

if you try to order that.

Yeah, my address is online.

So at that time, I had raccoons,

which is a predecessor to getting a bear, as I've learned.

It's a bear starter kit.

I had worked with the Humane Society as a volunteer from a,

I was an early entrepreneur from the time I was five.

I was always doing some kind of hustle.

It was that encouraged that just emerged

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.

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 to how to count the coins.

I was finding pennies everywhere,

do anything I could to try to get jobs from everybody.

And I got all these pennies and nickels and dimes.

And they took me, my dad walked with me to the bank

and we got these paper rolls

and he had me put everything in there.

And as we put the paper rolls up,

we count up these dollar bills and other things,

walked to the store and I brought all these paper rolls

of coins and paid for that rifle.

And it was probably about a month's work.

And after that, I thought, how can I do this faster

than going around collecting pennies?

So I was like, how else do you make money?

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 that were the best

and said, hey, if I bring you work, will you,

instead of giving me a percentage,

will you teach me lessons?

And so I started mentoring and finding mentors very young.

And that has persisted with everything I've learned since then.

Okay, we're going to talk about mentors.

How does the bear in a box fit into this?

Do you get, so you get paid to babysit bears?

No, it was a slight ADD tangent.

If so, I'm in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it was like doing podcasting.

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

in 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 onto the board of my local Humane Society

when I was like eight.

So then I said, I want to help other kind of animals

because I went like all these kind of orphan animals

and I studied their habitats.

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 reacclamated them back

to be released into the wild.

And I had a knack for that of getting animals

to successfully re-release into the wild at an early age.

What do you think made you good at that?

When you can't walk the same as everyone else,

you end up watching everyone else.

And you become a people watcher.

And there's a lot of commonality between animals

and people in those ways of you start to do a lot

of what I call perspective shifting

of jumping into their head to think,

why would they make that decision?

Why would they not do that?

I think that helped with the animals

because I had to figure out how do I teach raccoons,

how to forage?

How do I create little plastic containers with mud

and crawfish and what are the things that they're gonna need

and why are they not adopting that?

Why would they?

So it's very interesting behaviors of that at that time.

So that's probably part of it.

But then this lady who was kind of mentoring me on that,

her name was Charlie Straufkamp.

She was a fascinating lady who had been

a law enforcement officer.

They got mauled in a bar fight

where she was trying to pull some people on a bar fight

and then sliced open her arm

and she had a single arm,

but she took care of bears and buffalo

and all sorts of crazy things.

She's 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

and bear for me for the weekend?

It has diapers and it needs to be fed.

It was magical.

It was an awesome little milestone at that time.

Wow, how old were you?

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

So it seems that to your parents' credit,

they were open to you having a bear in the house.

What, nine in the house?

Not so much.

Where did the bear and the diaper stay?

I had a habitat that I was using for the raccoons.

It was square footage large enough to let them move in Rome.

Like a shed type of place?

Or was it more of an outdoor enclosure?

It was an outdoor enclosure that was chained and fenced in

with some options for it to go inside that could work for you.

But I had to build a lot of those.

My mom had a background of farm,

so she taught me how to build a lot of those.

I lived in the city, but we had a strange backyard,

strange house.

So let's pick up with the book and the path of magic.

So how do you go then from, let's just say,

broad magic, generalist magic

to what you have become so well-known for?

So like, well, first you go to med school

and then you figure out your specialty.

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.

I was always kind of full force in whatever I did.

Yeah.

And I think that that's part of it,

that sometimes when we're trying to get to a place

and we just feel like we need to get to that place,

we can change the vehicle.

We just know that we're on that journey.

And that's often what it was.

I knew I was getting out of where I was.

And that was a big thing for me

is getting out of the place where I was growing up.

So at that point, this is gonna be my next question.

At what point did you have the conviction

that magic or some variant of magic

could be your sort of metaphorical bus ticket

out of that place

in the way that you hoped cartooning would be?

Yeah, which is a fun combination.

The book was a dense read.

And I think it helps me though,

now when people try to learn from magic,

they try to learn it without mentors

and from YouTube videos

where they don't have to deal with people.

And so you don't have to do the perspective

taking the management of a person in the same way.

When you're first learning it,

you're just learning it to 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 it 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.

I started to find ways to do it,

whether they were the way the book intended or not.

But what I had at my disposal,

I think is also because I had been exposed

to my brother's 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,

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 gonna 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.

And I'd had that experience one time.

I was shoplifting early, probably 13.

What were your go-to shoplifting items?

And were you shoplifting, you use them

or to resell them or something else?

There was a group, you call them hobos back in the day,

but there was a group of people that lived out

behind some of the grocery stores

and they knew sometimes when I run away from home,

I'd go stay with them.

And sometimes they would need food

or they need other things or cigarettes

or other things like that.

And one time when I went in,

I had stole some cigarettes, I didn't smoke,

but I'd stole some cigarettes

and the guy kind of recognized me

and he came up to talk to me.

Yeah, he's the kid who never buys anything.

Well, he recognized me from, I think, my family.

I live 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 on any kind of pocket on me.

I had left them underneath my arm, facing out the back.

So as he's checking my pockets,

I 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 the 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?

What else can I do with that?

So I started developing a lot of that too.

So where do you go after the book?

You have this initial tome that you're digesting

and shaping and experimenting with.

Yeah.

Course one, you flip the last page.

You've tested what there is to test.

I was trying to find a magician I had seen

when I was like seven.

And there was a guy that I thought he was a magician,

but I didn't realize it was a magician quite at the time.

And when I was like second grade,

this guy had come through my school

and it was just an announcement from the principal

that called the teacher out of the room.

And there's this guy working on the window.

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 fixed in the window.

And then everything came out of his toolbox.

They was trying to use was doing some weird thing,

but it wasn't a magic show.

It wasn't presented in that social contract.

And it hit me over the head.

And later I found that that plastic thumb that I found

was a gift to my parents from him.

So later I went back to try to find him.

I found his widow and she told me about this magic club

that was in my hometown.

And when I showed up, they said,

oh, you're new to magic.

And I started doing some things and they said,

why can you do that?

There's two things I could do.

I'd manipulate coins, make them appear or disappear,

small objects like that.

And I could do what's called equivoc,

an influence of a series of choices

that I'd learned early on when I was eight from some book,

but I had used it over the years.

And I could do that,

which was a category of mentalism that is jazz based.

And the-

Did you say jazz?

Yeah, my whole style is jazz based, which is-

And that's an important thing.

Yeah, please say more.

So in equivoc, just so I understand what that means,

I'm trying to dissect the etymology,

but I'm gonna get stuck in the weeds there.

You are in very subtle ways directing someone's choice,

even though they think they have free will in selection.

You give the illusion of agency.

I see.

Yeah, allowing them to play a game of darts,

but you're painting the bullseye on the wall

after the dart is landed.

And yet they don't realize that.

They feel with conviction that that was all choices

that they made that they navigated to.

And that takes a fluidity of thought.

There's little feedback loops that people,

you kind of blend in the segues

and people don't notice those

and the way you use your words.

And so the way that please correct me

if this is a lazy or inaccurate description,

but for people who don't know the term mentalism,

one way that could manifest is someone

demonstrating mind reading

or something along those lines.

What is the right way to think of mentalism?

I think there's a variety of ways,

but if you think about card magic,

when you see 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 at cards,

some of that filtered across

and made it into the entertainment world.

And there's this other category of,

a lot of those from thieves

and things factored 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.

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 guyship powers.

Okay, so you could do the coin manipulation.

Yes.

And you also had some mentalism game

and they were 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 equivoak.

And then what happened?

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, whoa.

That must have felt good.

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?

And now, is that what you mean by jazz influenced?

Like if you make a mistake, do it twice and then it's jazz?

No, it's a different thing.

So if you think of a lot of performance, magic,

it is very sheet music based, very classical.

It's very structured.

There's a lot of geometry in the sight lines

and the calculations of that.

There's very precise scripting of what's going on.

My style has always been very jazz based,

to a fault in many ways,

but that I would feel constricted by any script.

So for me, as soon as I had an idea,

my landscape was to try it with an audience immediately

before I'd even try to test it out.

Pick up a turtle, walk in front of that audience,

figure it out.

Yeah, jump off the cliff and build a play on the way down.

But yes, the turtle is a great metaphor for that.

But it was, I mean, the first time I did a show

with my wife and initially we had this separate tension

to go down, but we were walking to go on stage

and there was a certain skill set we learned with each other.

As she said, but what's the structure for the show?

I said, I don't know.

I haven't met the audience yet.

And I didn't...

And she was like, ah!

Which is this collision of two different mindsets,

which she 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.

Cause I thought there was a value in creating.

And to me, early on in magic,

that's what I was trying to do too.

Cause all the books said I had to do this

in 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.

All right, so did that magic club figure into

your skill development?

Was it a launching pad?

Where did you end up going from there?

They offered me books.

More books.

So you like books?

Yeah.

And they said, well, if you could get through that book

that you first read, why don't you take these other books

and learn some of those things?

Cause there's this great quote,

I don't know who it's attributed to,

but when we buy books,

we think we're buying the time to read them.

And I feel it's-

It's my unread stack.

Would agree.

Yeah, and I think that that's what they were suffering

from at that time is that you have this energy,

you read my books and teach it back to me.

Genius.

Yeah, so they did that to me.

And that was a really cool thing.

There was a couple of people that influenced-

That's a magic trick of its own type.

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.

And anything I could try to excuse or slide a hand

didn't make sense of why that could happen.

And other books I'd read,

it didn't make sense of why that could happen.

So I went back to Ben 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 Fitski.

I said, Fitski?

And I said, oh, no, that's not my radar.

And he says, well, Fitski wrote three books.

It's a trilogy.

Go read that.

And so I picked up one of the books,

Psycho-Magic by Misdirection and the Psychology of Magic.

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 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.

There was many other people that, from that time period,

a gentleman named Ed Dillard, who was a year round Santa Claus,

who did amazing things.

He would go into them all and he created experiences.

That was a great thing.

Because he was a year round Santa Claus.

Yes. He lived it all year, right?

So anybody who saw him.

But when you'd see him in a mall, you see people go up

and a kid sits on Santa Claus.

But what would be affected with him is a 12-year-old

would say, I had 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 an inner ear microphone

in his ear and the parents had the other side of it.

But he had this great book of Latin that was Santa's book

and it was all carved out of leather with this beautiful book.

And he would tell anybody about anything about themselves

but through the auspice of Santa Claus.

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

guided in my second grade when it 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.

It stayed a little bit martial arts.

I had some understanding of animation

and all of them kind of sell together

to create a style that I developed.

How did the animation inform the style?

There was a great book called The Illusion of Life

by a Disney's, what do you call them is 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 was overlaps

in relationships of that to Aikido.

And when you study Aikido,

there are certain half moves and half circles.

And so when I started blending those together

with a slight 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 a person's body

and tell them a story that they wouldn't register consciously.

And I could lock up their body without them knowing

that I had kind of locked up the mechanics of the body.

Lock up meaning like gain control, hijack.

Yeah, put them in a frame as you would say on the street.

So I could put them in a frame

that I didn't need other people, a team of thieves to help me.

I could do it by myself.

And I could use certain things that would draw.

I noticed from animation because of that,

there were certain motions that drew attention

and that later became a thing too.

Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors

and we'll be right back to the show.

This episode is brought to you by AG1,

the daily foundational nutritional supplement

that supports whole body health.

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 subscription purchase.

So learn more, check it out.

Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim.

That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim.

Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim.

Check it out.

So a lot of people try magic in some form or another.

Very few people make it to the point

where they are performing, giving TED talks,

getting profiled by the New Yorker, etc.

Very few.

What were some of the most important inflection points?

Say picking up where we left off

after reading these books, after having these various inputs,

I guess maybe could have been during these various inputs

like the martial arts and the jazz and the dance and so on.

What were some of the critical moments, let's say?

Could be decisions, could be interactions,

could be people you meet that helped to set their trajectory.

I'm so fortunate to have had some incredible people

influence me along the way.

And I've kind of surfed through my career

from person to person that's made an impact on me.

But there's one I'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.

When did you first get married?

I was 18.

So I was married.

I had a son who now I have two kids.

I have a son who's 30 and a daughter who's six.

So fascinating two different worlds.

But at that time, I had to provide for my family.

So it amped up that entrepreneurship

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 and high school,

I had some teachers recognize that I shouldn't

and they pushed me toward design and illustration

and computer graphics.

And I had two careers that I could do simultaneously,

the design aspect of that,

and then moonlighting with the magic style

and comedy clubs and things.

So I was doing both those in high school,

but then I was transitioning into doing that full time

by the time both of those simultaneously

as I graduated high school.

And there was a 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 Daryl 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.

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.

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 little place

and you're doing freelance artwork for me.

He said, but you're performing capabilities.

He says, you could do something else.

I said, what's a good reason?

Give me one good reason.

He says, wouldn't it be amazing stories

sometime later in your life if people said,

why did you quit your job as an artist

and become a magician or performer full time?

And it was because a hypnotist told you during a lunch break.

I thought that was a great idea.

So I went back into my job and I gave my notice that day.

Wow.

And that was a Friday.

What a gift.

Well, it depends on others.

I mean, I know you're sitting here.

So I'm not sure the intervening experiences looked like,

but it seems like a gift.

That was a big point because that was a jumping point, right?

And it had a context in that I was a senior designer

at that time and the company I was working for

and the 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 things.

They'd let them go.

But they found a way to get around their contract.

So they outsource them to another company

and then let that company fire them.

Okay.

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

They dodge all their severance.

And that made an impact on me.

So they had just given me a bonus.

They had 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 happen.

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 can come fill in for me

for those two weeks starting on Tuesday.

Yes, perfect timing.

Sounds great.

I'll give that a shot.

What did you have ready at that point?

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 stand-up material

and to get a polished hour, I mean,

could take years for some folks, right?

So what did you have when this opportunity

falls from the sky?

Hey, could you fill in within the next week?

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 per week.

So you had things you knew had already workshopped.

You knew that you could string them together.

Yeah.

And I knew I could make an impact.

And the big skill I had that was unique

when I came to Vegas, I decided,

let's just drop the other stuff and just focus on the stealing.

Because at that point, there was one other guy who was really good,

two other guys 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

and to differentiate yourself.

As a brand, I'll give you just a paint a picture of the,

it's a fascinating thing.

My first show I ever did in Las Vegas,

separate from Caesar's, was just a corporate event

for a large corporation.

And it was a red carpet event that limousines pulling in.

It was very different from Missouri Boy

when I first moved out there.

And these agents, they said,

so why don't I 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-

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

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-

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

Kind of, yeah, if they're going to hire me back again.

And so I walked 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.

I could feel my ears turning red.

And I just was running through the gamut.

Do I give this back to him?

Which is more important.

Because I got a lot of pressure at that moment.

So I was performing with him 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?

He said, I'm going to let you see it a second time.

This time I'm going to store a watch.

I'm going to try to do it without breaking it.

And that's a lot harder.

But I'm going to 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 want to try it?

And let's move past this idea that I just broke his watch.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Which that's always been my...

Hard to script for.

Yeah.

And that's constantly what was required for me.

I didn't take cigarettes.

You took cigarettes in the apron.

Yes.

So that's...

My career has been a majority of those, right?

My first day after I had left my job as a designer,

I'd come over to work at Cedric 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.

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.

Didn't like it.

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 going to walk in front of you.

I'm going to keep my hands out to the side.

You watch me, we're going to walk to police together.

So we walked out in the casino, we went to security,

and I got strip searched.

And his wife went up, she was very dramatic,

to me, conveyed that she was sincere about her belief,

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.

Do you get an apology?

I did.

That's good.

But I think it 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.

Hold on a second.

Yes.

This is at shows, right after a show.

During shows all over the place.

I've had every variation of that happen.

Because they think you have stolen something

or they're upset that you duped them.

Or maybe I have, yes.

But it was in a social context of entertainment, right?

Yeah.

But still that's a different thing

than if you mess up on a magic trick.

If you mess up on a magic trick, they caught you.

Look, I understand how 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 going to treat this like a vampire.

I'm going to tell them.

Like a vampire?

Vampires had to be introduced into the household.

They need to be invited.

So I'd say in three minutes,

I'm going to be wearing your watch.

Try to catch me.

And if they say yes, then...

But that was the first time I had ever seen that happen.

When I had studied the history of theatrical pickpocketing

and everything, there wasn't that open challenge

that beware, this is about to happen.

If you engage, that's the game we're going to play.

Are you ready?

But it now meant a whole different thing.

But it came from all those concerns

and lawsuits and everything.

I'll say that it almost happened, never landed.

But now I developed a style that was a very different style,

a very potent style.

But instead of surprise, it was suspense.

Yeah, exactly.

It was suspense.

It was also like a preemptive strategy.

Yes.

So you would have less need to be good at reacting.

Because you're setting the ground rules

and getting invited as a vampire.

So at what point then, you said five years,

is it within that span that Jimmy Carter

and the Secret Service show up?

Yes.

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.

24 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 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.

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

So about probably near the end,

about three years after I've been performing

at Cedars Palace, there was a special night.

We might 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.

Different rules.

Yeah, because they had done background checks on all of us.

And he said, you'll be photo ops as he goes through the show.

He's got a small party with him,

but the whole theater is just going to be 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 and 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 that 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?

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

You didn't hear this from me.

Yeah, but do you think you could?

And I'm so happy they posited that then versus now,

because I'm in my 20s.

I probably wouldn't do those things now in the same way.

I mean, I still steal from Secret Service today,

but it's a different context.

Wait a minute.

Yeah.

All right, we'll come back to that.

There you go.

Get back to that.

All those Secret Service bar mitzvahs that you go to.

Yeah, it's a thing.

All right, so.

Why else move to Washington, DC?

Yes.

Okay.

You wouldn't do it exactly the same way.

And then what unfolds?

So you get this side chat, which is like.

I get a side chat.

Technically, they didn't say you couldn't do something

with the Secret Service and then what?

He brings in the head of security for Caesar's Palace.

They talk to me about certain provisions and warnings.

Don't take any of their firearms.

Don't touch them.

That would still be considered a felony.

If they do take you to the ground, it's on your own.

You're on your own for this.

We have denied plausible deniability.

We disavow all knowledge.

Yes.

And that this could be rather serious,

which I thought was a really interesting challenge.

And I moved into that.

I was approaching the show and as I was moving through,

I saw two of them were stationed at a certain point.

And I went up and started to hit those guys.

And I see it was the way I approached them

that got in their space.

And I stole several of their items.

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

Maybe.

Yes.

And to a layperson, to civilian, I think two more complicated.

But maybe two actually provides more surface area slash opportunity.

But when you say you went into their space,

could you paint a more detailed picture of how you ended up taking items from

two very well trained people who have a lot of situational awareness,

who know what you do?

Sure.

You used a great word there.

You said surface area.

And surface area, they have a lot to protect on themselves,

both where they keep their firearms, their credentials, the keys,

the 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 kind of the economics of attention.

If they spend their attention one place versus another,

how do you toggle that?

And it's not traditionally like look here and not there.

You're curating their attention.

So in that, there's ways to approach it.

And it's usually contextual.

It changes from person to person.

And when I approached them, I hadn't had any experience with anyone like that before.

And the context was different.

They knew who I was specifically when I walked up.

There's a nickname for me in the show.

They called me klepto.

They said it's not happening,

was I think the first thing I heard from them.

And I said, no, it shouldn't at all.

I said, yet, I think is the word you're looking for, right?

So I kind of pushed it that boundaries of their confidence level

because I was coming in pretty confident.

One of them stepped back as I approached.

And there's a way that I approach the gains access to someone's space.

If you think of someone's personal space as a bubble,

and their proprioception of how you get into their awareness of their space,

it's kind of shaped like an egg and it's larger up front.

It's narrow on the sides and it's shallow on the back.

And you can break eye contact with someone to sneak underneath that as you move through.

I can show you more of that later.

But as you gain access, there's a way of approaching from the side that can often help.

So when I started to settle 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 acknowledge that I put that on the surface.

I said, you're very well trained.

I said, it's going to be much harder to do anything with you.

I said, you've been doing this for a while?

And he says, yes, I've been doing this for a while.

And I said, okay, so I'm going to have to do it to you, sir.

And so I lean into the next guy and the next guy was like, that's not happening.

And he was very serious.

But now as I'm facing him and this other gentleman is here,

he doesn't realize that he's giving me access from the side.

The first guy.

Yeah, the first guy.

He thinks he's off the clock.

He thinks he's off the clock.

And so just by, that's one of the things that by setting the expectation,

he thinks he's done and the play has moved on.

But now I reach underneath my arm and I steal from inside his jacket

and I steal what I found to be his credentials.

It was wallet, passport shaped and I stole his glasses from his outside pocket

and I stole a couple of things.

And as I was talking to the other guy,

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

No, he doesn't notice and he can't see because he's watching my hands

and they're trained to watch hands.

But there's all these pause points I learned over the years from different

thieves and other ones of holding out places.

And if I steal something, you're not going to get to see it go in

and out of my pocket or anything.

It's going to go somewhere else.

So I can put it on them and a more accessible spot

or I can put it on me in 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 trifolded.

And as I'm opening it up, I see what it is.

It's now the itinerary where they're taking Carter to.

And I said, I can't really read it with these glasses on.

He realizes that I'm wearing his glasses that were in his pocket.

And he goes, Hey, he takes my glasses and he looks at the paper

and he says, Hey, he snatches it away.

I said, you know, I really don't think you should read that

without the proper ID.

And then he really recently pocketed and he realizes

that he doesn't have the credentials.

And the other guy's laughing very hard at it.

I'm sure.

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

Oh, dad's not going to be happy with that when he finds out.

And so they said, he says, you're going to do this,

the other guys.

So he got on his mic and he starts telling me to go to other teams.

So I now have an advocate 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 just mentioned about the jazz.

I mean, I didn't know, I've never stolen with somebody

with presidential itinerary and credentials and glasses

in that combo before, but I have to kind of ad lib

with what I find and how I give it back.

And it is a unique thing that he knows is the only time

I've done that is with him until I did it to the other guys.

So what was the significance, if any, of that whole evening

to you or your career?

Maybe it was indirect in the sense that it increased your confidence

that enabled you to do X, Y and Z.

But if there was significance, what was the significance?

I think legend is too strong of a word.

But there are things.

Nothing travels like a good story.

It does.

It gives people a story to tell and it did.

And it was one of a handful of legends or lore, I guess,

lore is a better thing that traveled beyond me.

And I found that lore can take you so fast, so far,

but also it can encapsulate what people think you are versus what you are.

And it can be hard to under promise and overdeliver

when people have this expectation of what you can do.

Yeah, for sure.

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.

I began working for the government from that day forward.

William Wallace, 12 feet tall.

Yes.

He shoots flaming lightning out of Zars.

It was much better when people underestimated me.

Because working against overconfidence was a great way to play.

Pros and cons, right?

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.

Stan Simons and his Chris Chabris was his partner.

They did a book called Invisible Gorilla,

where you watch a basketball being passed and you grow up.

Incredible video, yeah.

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.

I was like, I'm not being arrested.

I guess this is a good thing, but now I'm traveling to DZ.

And I'm going to talk to the Secret Service.

And I was asked about that, about task blindness and attentional blindness.

And this overlapped into two fascinating neuroscientists

that I met, Steven Magnick and Susanna Martinez, Condé.

And they have been studying magic and visual illusions,

but they were also very interested in cognitive illusions.

And in that space, they wanted to see what could be done with attention.

And they approached me and said, can we do an experiment?

Do you have any ideas?

And at first, it was like a little session

where they had different magicians that were legends, pen and teller,

specifically teller, talking about theories.

And they were saying, is there anything there to pull research out of?

And I posited that I think we only have two sight lines.

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 sensed that there's two types of sight lines

and there's a kind of a suppression that happens during those.

And I think that that's an interesting place to experiment with.

And they said, yes, it is.

We could do that with eye tracking software.

And we did.

And it turned out to be right.

And that was the change.

That was the flip of a switch.

Because then I was part of a paper that they published in Nature Journal.

And then I was asked to speak at the International Society for Neuroscience,

10,000 Neuroscience.

You broaden your land.

It did.

Or you gained more lands.

When I realized it wasn't just me stealing,

but that that same concept of psychotic versus smooth pursuit eye movements

and their impact on different things started to branch out in other areas.

And then I was asked to speak on attention.

And the current models of attention at MIT and Harvard and other ones,

it all changed right there.

How did you connect with the scientists,

just so I can connect the lore, the stealing bullets from midair,

with the Secret Service to connecting on the scientific side?

How was that connection made?

Teller from Penn and Teller.

Oh, that was Teller.

It was Teller.

Teller said he was approached about this.

And at that time, him and I become pretty good friends.

And we spent a lot of time together.

Penn was also a friend.

Teller was interesting, like the research side of it on the back side.

And he asked me to come join at that effort.

Got it.

OK.

I want to pick up a couple of micro gingerbread topics that I've

let alone that I've committed to myself I would return to.

So the first is, in terms of making the coin levitate into the other hand,

did you ever figure that out?

I did.

OK.

And you don't know.

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

OK.

I think that gives me the answer that I'm looking for,

because we have a mutual friend, Simon Cornell.

Yes.

And I don't want to speak out of school,

so I'm not going to get into the how of it, I suppose.

But I've seen him do this and just rest assured,

it is so much harder than people think.

It is.

It's something that your body wasn't trained to do.

You've never had to use for that.

And to train it to be able to do that, to make something animate,

is a combination of unusual muscles that people wouldn't usually use.

Yeah, it is so much harder than people can possibly imagine,

which makes me think of, speaking of Teller,

presentation that he gave, I think it was at the entertainment gathering.

And he said, I'm going to show you a video.

And I think there was a balloon involved or ball.

Yes.

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.

Yes.

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.

But it was a love story, right?

It turns into a love story with an effect.

That's why I thought it was the greater lesson of him showing it and exposing it

was this beautiful piece of him coming and spending time

with this effect and giving part of his life to it.

The second thing I wanted to ask about, you have thousands, tens of thousands

of repetitions because you're doing four people every, what was it?

20 minutes, 10 minutes?

10 minutes.

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

So you're getting a lot of reps.

What do you do when it doesn't work?

What's your recovery or how do you handle that?

Because I can't imagine, as you're experimenting, you must push the envelope.

And I imagine, I mean, with any skill, it's not going to be 100%.

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.

For me, that's part of the art.

I mean, it's fascinating.

So what do you do in those circumstances?

I think there's a subtext to what you're asking that is unique to the way that I,

the context in which I steal.

I have a different social contract with my audience than a thief does on the street.

So because I can talk to someone, I get different access to their body.

I can justify what I'm doing.

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.

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

Yeah. And once they catch that one thing,

they might find themselves three pounds lighter in other places

because they've lost all these other things.

Okay.

So it changes the definition of fail.

Is fail getting caught stealing a watch or a belt or glasses?

I was pretty good at rolling with that and improvising with those things

and realizing that if they started to catch that,

I could turn it into another situation.

And I would load strange things on people.

Like I loaded a bag of oregano on a grandma.

And I said, what's this grandma?

Well, hold on.

This is actually the perfect place for me to just read an excerpt for a profile of you,

sure, 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 pickpockets tail, the spectacular thefts of Apollo Robbins.

So this is one of my favorite paragraphs.

When Robbins hits his stride,

it starts to seem as if the only possible explanation is an ability to start and stop time.

At the Rio, a man's cell phone disappeared from his jacket

and was replaced by a piece of fried chicken.

The cigarettes from a pack in one man's breast pocket

materialized loose in the side pocket of another.

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.

Okay, so hard for me to even make any sense of half of that.

But you're loading things on people is where you were.

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

You're creating for yourself options also, right?

It's not like you have one trick you're executing

and if you flub it, trick is done.

Yeah, that's why I made this sheet music versus jazz.

They don't know where I'm going, so we can always change the path.

In fact, when I used to work in situations

where I would just walk around with a group,

which I miss because I don't really get to do that.

I'm mostly a keynote speaker now,

but I used to do a lot of corporate type of events

where I would move through a crowd

and I would walk up to the guys and say,

it's the guys, you know why I'm here, right?

I'm supposed to steal everything you have.

And so I'd just say that up front.

It stops for most conversations.

I said, you got anything on you?

And you just see them check.

They would just bump through the wall to the thing

and I'm just clocking.

It's like, okay, so I got the keys here.

You know exactly.

Yeah, so I'm making a mental map

and now I'm about to move into the circle.

They telegraphed all of their possessions.

Yeah, it's because they don't believe it's true.

They just were having a conversation.

And 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 pick pocket

and they call it fanning,

small movements with my elbow or my hand

can give me an idea of what things are

in a breast pocket or other things.

It's like it's like a shark

and taking little nibbling bites, feeling things out.

Yes, just taking inventory, you could say.

Yeah.

And now I'm crafting, okay.

Or feeling out around and boxing, same thing.

Where people are gauging distance,

they're seeing how people react.

What's their pattern?

What are their defenses?

Absolutely.

What are their vulnerabilities?

Yeah.

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 a secondary weapon,

sometimes like a trainer blade and it wouldn't be there.

It was, can't do that trick a lot,

but it's a great trick when they go to draw

and then it's not there.

They're very surprised, you know.

I'm sure they're very surprised.

All right, so following this gingerbread trail,

I just wanted to address a couple.

All right, your wife.

Yes.

So you mentioned, I think,

that she's the most important influencer,

the biggest impact on you, your career.

How so?

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 were intimate friends of mine

that had done things that you would think of like Oceans 11

where they pulled heists on casinos

and switched out devices and things.

And I knew those guys well, and that was my world.

It was my cadre of team.

And around that time, I had this weird inquiry

to do a TV show about picking up women,

just because as a side thing, people said,

hey, you know, you seem to be really good at this thing.

And I wasn't ever a person who did notches on the belt,

but it's another thing, the perspective taking,

it's related to that and how you establish rapport and things.

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, sounds like a great idea.

He calls me, 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.

And when I show up, he's talking to a group of women

and I thought they were probably escorts at that point.

Professionals.

Yeah, because they were close to the VIP section

and it was a small group, younger women,

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 degree in that.

She was working as a crisis counselor

on a hotline talking people off the cliff.

She would do some pretty intense stuff

and stayed at normal psych

and very kind of intense playful.

And he said, I was a thief

when he introduced me to this group of girls.

And I stole-

That is a hell of an intro.

Like you're gonna get a conversation.

It does.

One of them said, so I stole the girl's engagement ring

with the thing and I did a thing with that and gave it back.

And this lady that later turned out to be my wife,

she asked me, can you steal something 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, a VIP section.

I said, I 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.

It's bold.

It's bold.

I like it, but it worked.

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 ended 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 a neuroscientist.

She was the one that encouraged me

to take the piece with the New Yorker,

which I didn't even know what the New Yorker was at that time.

I turned it down twice, Adam Green would tell you.

I was like, I hear somebody better over here.

It wasn't my thing.

Barely knew who the politicians were.

It wasn't my world.

I didn't think about that.

She said, let me have you watch a debate.

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.

Wait a second.

Meaning you observed a lot in the debate

that paralleled what you had learned.

Very similar concepts.

Could you give an example?

There was a term called Gish Galloping.

I forgot the guy's name for Gish.

Gish Galloping.

Gish was a debater who would often do a package

of assaults on a person or of their human character,

where she would be, he'd say,

during his three minute window of a debate,

he would say, my opponent would have you believe this,

this, this, this, this.

And then the opponent's countermeasure for that

becomes, well, they're overwhelmed.

They don't know how to respond

because they got three minutes

and he posited a lot of questions

and they don't have three minutes

functioning to answer those questions.

And that very similar to me was a noises signal ratio piece

that's used to overwhelm people

inside of a cash exchange with short changing.

And I recognize that as one approach.

Short changing.

So like giving somebody change,

but less change than they should.

And overwhelming a cash register attendee at that time.

And using ambiguous statements with different ways

that they could take that as for,

I can clarify more on that later,

but a counter to that Gish Gallop, for example,

back to Equivocay for Equivote.

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 Equivoc, right?

I can take all the things that you said,

repackage them as another thing.

Because you diluted all your points

because you put them all into the one bracket.

So the counter measure that is to dilute that down,

give you one point back and I hijack the narrative.

All right, so you're talking to Teller about this.

Yes.

And he was a Latin professor.

Okay, so that wasn't,

that was a euphemism or a joke.

He was an actual Latin professor?

He was before in his career.

I said, you know more about Socrates and Plato.

So can you tell me what, and he says, yeah,

you need to go back, read Plato's Republic.

You need to study about Socrates.

And he started prompting me to go back to learn this route.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Back to the classics.

Back to the classics.

So from the 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.

Yes.

And the driver of this was back to that was my wife.

We had this unusual thing in it.

She moved to Las Vegas pretty quickly

after we started dating.

Where was she?

She was in Los Angeles.

And at heart.

Was it hard to get her to move to Vegas?

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 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 of them.

They would come in, if the FBI was watching

or the NSA watching our house,

they would have seen all these guys come in and out.

And she was the den mom of all

that she really helped take us all for a turn.

Wow, okay.

So this is off the map.

This 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.

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.

Absolutely.

But you'd be willing to say, you know what?

I can't say it with 100% certainty,

but I would bet that A, B, or C.

I think in order to validate the research,

they have to go after low-hanging fruit,

which is a single variable.

Real life has context and multivariable.

And so when you go out in the wild,

the reason why it'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.

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.

And the society aspect of that, for example,

and the replication of that

tend to show the same darkness of an ideal society.

And what does that mean to manufacture one?

In the space where I find fascinating,

probably with the 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 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 gonna be a future where the arms race,

I like to, people think of it as arms race of technology,

like when they think about AI, deep fakes,

but it's our 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 deep fakes and other things.

And it's useful to see how people are going to deal

with having something that looks very real.

You're now in this very interesting time

that all the research historically for mankind

with deception tends to be on spotting a lie,

spotting something that's fake.

And I think we're on a cusp where that's gonna flip over

and we're gonna have to try to spot the truth.

And what does that mean in a future?

Yeah, where you gotta 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.

And there's books and literature

that start 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 a ronious sense-making,

then I should really try to lend a helping hand if I can.

So we may come back to that,

but I want to first return to something

that we discussed briefly, but didn't really flesh out.

And that is, let's call it,

for lack of a better term, your style.

Yeah.

Before we get to your style,

what is the significance of any of that ring?

This ring is made from a silver coin.

And my magic used to be based around silver.

And it's unusual.

If you talk to a magician, professional magician,

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. Yes, all with a purpose.

So that's why I ask.

All right.

Everything has a purpose.

There's lots of things that can be done with this.

Actually, when I pickpocketed Penn Gillette,

I met him the first time.

And he's a big guy, six foot, six at least.

Big guy.

Yeah.

And he had heard about, historically among magicians,

pickpockets are a kind of fake.

There's a lot of people that say,

give me your wallet before the show.

And then they've steal it out.

And I didn't have that background.

I came from a different lane.

And so he had heard from a friend that I could really steal.

So he put me on the spine from a bunch of people.

First time I met him, he just walked up to me and 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

and some shorts.

And he had a mob block pen that was clipped inside

of his shirt pocket.

And he said, still something for me now.

I said, you know, that's kind of like saying be funny now.

And I said, yeah.

So let me tell you about something that happened

to somebody one time.

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.

He said, 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 going to 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 me and he stares at me.

And he realized he's the guy in the story.

And he just, he opened his pen and saw

that the refill wasn't there.

And he goes, fuck you.

And I said, now, Penn, isn't that better

than taking your wallet?

And I threw his wallet on the table.

Okay, that's amazing.

Now, why is that made of a silver dollar?

So silver dollars in coin magic,

silver has a unique property in the way

that it feels on your skin, the way it's soft,

the way it can move, and also the sound that it makes.

But specifically for a side of the hand,

silver works very well for a side of the 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.

Very cool, very tension grabbing also,

which I would imagine helps with things

like what you just described.

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?

I do, yeah.

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

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-

I just fell for it.

Gotcha, bitch.

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, behind your back,

put it in one of your two hands

so I can't see which hand it would go in.

I'll do it behind my back.

This could be a little tight fit.

Sorry about that, yeah.

That's right.

You got it?

I got it.

So you put it in one of your hands,

now don't do the third option,

which is putting it in your pocket.

No, not gonna do it.

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?

It is in my right hand.

Can I see?

Yeah.

Okay, do that again.

Okay.

Okay, let's bring it back out.

Yeah.

Now it's in the left hand.

Correct.

Is that right?

Yeah, it is.

So you try that with me, okay?

So I, 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,

and I sort of over complicated it for myself.

Which is Princess Bride all over again.

Yeah, it's Princess Bride all over again.

Yeah, so try it with me

and see what your process is, okay?

All right.

Right hand.

It was pretty fast.

Did you peek it or how did you get it?

No, I was looking at the body language.

Okay.

Oh, shit, I already.

You're distracted?

I'll do it again, I'll do it again.

Hold on.

All right, so we're doing it a second time.

There you go.

Left hand.

So it's a big move,

because fixation would say,

stay there, you're now assuming

that I took the same pattern as you.

I switched the other hand.

I could try to talk you out of that

to go back to the wrong choice,

but you made the right choice.

I need you to miss so I can make my point.

One, just one more time.

All right, one more time.

Which hand?

Right hand.

Would you like to change?

No.

So this is not a mentalism effect

or it'd be much better.

But I also have 50-50 chance.

50-50 chance, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

But I want you to be able to make your point.

Well, so in this, that's a little mini con

with a little ring.

And we often hear people talk about biases,

so like confirmation bias.

But when you embody a real interaction like this,

you would never associate what we just did

as confirmation bias.

I think I have an advantage over you also

because you're angled to me.

Oh, okay.

So you were able to see kind of when my hand came out.

I didn't see your hands,

but I think it's easier for me to observe

your body language in a sense

because you're angled at me.

But that might be wrong.

I don't know.

No, it's an interesting hypothesis.

But I think that that's the interesting thing.

If it was never in my hand

and you were wrong every time,

you might think I was cheating, yes?

Sure.

Because when we lose, we're more curious.

And when we win, we're less curious

about why we're winning, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So now you, those people are watching,

now you have identical rings, one in each hand.

Okay, got it.

A very unique special ring

that you started the conversation on.

You found your own path.

So in that, that's a little metaphor for a con, right?

That one little ring,

because that whole story that you jumped into,

that little rabbit hole with asking about the ring,

is a great baseline that now people assume there's one

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?

When you win, yeah.

Yeah, but that's confirmation bias.

It's really helpful to know what that is.

And it's very easy.

You didn't jump into the hole like most people do.

Most people will say,

well, you know, I played 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.

Right, confidence.

It is.

Confidence, man, come man.

You see me playing low status with that.

I need you to miss in order for me to be able to.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

But that kind of thing,

everything is about helping people get to that.

Yeah.

All right, that was a great demo.

And that actually ties into the question of,

can you elaborate on what makes your style?

How is it different from what people think of as magic?

Maybe what they've seen growing up.

I'll give you an experience one time where I had,

let's just see kind of backstage.

One time I was performing for corporate event in Las Vegas.

And it's similar to the one where I had the broken watch piece.

But this is later in my career.

And it was a new agent.

And I was talking to her after the side.

And 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,

I heard you steal things, is that right?

And I said, yeah, something like that.

And so steal something from me.

I said, I'm sorry, what was your name?

He says Jamal.

I said, nice to meet you Jamal.

Before this, let's go back,

that I walked into this event thinking,

I don't want to do anything I've done before exactly.

There's some little components

and you'll hear some things coming back

what I just talked about with Penn.

But I knew that I could figure out how to put something

inside of a bag of M&Ms and then reseal it in real time

without anybody noticing.

And I thought, what could I do with that?

Let's just find out.

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 know, what was your name?

He goes, Jamal.

I said, how do you spell that Jamal?

And he said, J, I said, could you write that down for me?

And he pulls out his pen and goes to write it down.

And his pen wasn't working.

And as we've heard before,

and up to this point, my stuttering,

the break of my speech, the break of my sight lines

with him has been very low status.

Break of your sight lines, meaning eye contact?

Yeah, I didn't keep straight eye contact with him very much.

I asked him about his suit.

That's really fancy.

It was all those 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

and his refill with the other.

And he was just looking and he stunned.

He's in this cycle of trying to make that,

because the only solution it could be

is the one he didn't want to accept.

So he's canceled out the truth.

So where is he gonna go from there?

That I had stolen it, taken it 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

because I noticed he has 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 towards 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 and I said,

you still have everything.

And he put it away.

And he says, you've got to do this to Lisa.

I said, yeah, great to meet her.

I just looked over his shoulder

to where I thought Lisa might be.

And he took off to go get Lisa.

He comes back and he shoves this lady towards me

in this agent and I'm-

Dance monkey dance.

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

Yeah, I know, I know.

And I'm talking to the agent, I have a drink.

And this is an important thing, the drink,

because it's a part of the style.

And it's not alcohol, it's just water,

but 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 she hadn't quite come close to me at all.

I said, she said, what's happening?

I said, sorry, Lisa.

He wants me to steal something from you.

She says, what?

I said, do you like chocolate?

She says, chocolate?

I said, yes, there's some chocolate in your purse.

She said, what?

She opens her purse and she finds a bag of M&Ms in her purse.

And he's reacting very strongly to this

and he's watching this third party, he thinks.

And then she said, how did those get in my purse?

And 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 wallet out again and really says,

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, I just walk away.

So I let them piece it together themselves.

She tears over the M&Ms and she finds the license in her.

Okay, so if we zoom out then.

Yes.

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 what you're trying to do?

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.

And 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.

It 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 pocket

so he couldn't see anything being extracted.

And then I stepped back

and then I removed the pen, took it apart

and I find another reason to come back in

to put it back there.

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

It's amazing.

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 gonna happen

but what I saw is when his attention locked to that pen

and he was spinning.

And you can think of attention as being external or internal

inside your head or external aware.

And you can think of as being broad or narrow.

And on those axis, it's very useful

do I want him to be broad external

or do I want him to be internal narrow?

And how do I flip somebody from one to those to the other?

And I'm very attuned to 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 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.

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 gonna put this license

inside the M&Ms.

Let me see how I can do that.

And as I'm thinking about that, he said,

well, you should meet Lisa.

It's like, what a great idea.

Perfect.

Yes.

And I think she's the one I met.

Maybe there's more leases, but let's see where he goes.

And I said, yeah, I'd love to be nice to meet her.

So he goes off and he takes off to get Lisa.

I see another Lisa that I have met.

So just in case I put it inside the M&Ms

and then I walk over while this other lady, Lisa,

is talking to these people.

I open her purse, drop it in there, put it there.

And then I go back to where I was.

He doesn't know this.

So it was the right, Lisa.

It was.

Lucky for me.

Otherwise I'd have to be doing some introductions.

Okay.

So I have to ask, what is it like

for your wife to have a fight or argument with you?

Cause it could be, seems like it could be a total nightmare.

Or she would have to become such a master in your craft

to be able to mount a defense.

Or that she would be like, I have some friends

who are therapists and sometimes their kids will say,

stop 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 doc.

It'd be easier to have game on, game off.

I think we don't.

We do use it in our social interactions

with each other as well.

But she does it too.

So her career path, she became a mentalist.

She left her career as a psychobiologist.

All right.

This is non-trivial.

Okay.

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.

Why did you do that?

Like to learn what types of things?

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 40 elephants

that used to be in the UK.

And around probably 1890 to 1940s,

they ran a criminal group there.

And they could steal large amount of things

by altering their clothing

and doing a variation what's called boosters or boosting.

And that's my world.

Encyclopedia of things like that.

And who's the people are doing it now?

There's a research of footage showing up

now that YouTube is so pervasive with security cameras

of women doing things that are like that

where they're stealing a flat screen TV,

32 inch flat screen TV and putting it underneath their dress

and walking without changing their gate.

They're taking 10 pound cases of beer or wine

and just making it vanished in their clothing

and walking without changing their walk.

There's a very interesting thing there

that becomes how is that knowledge being transferred?

It probably goes back to at least the one data point

I know the 40 elephants.

I usually when I interact with different cultures of these,

I track back through signals that they use

or language or terms that they use.

And I try to track where they learn from

and we chased after that.

And that's even I did that a lot.

So to your original question, how do we ask 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 of we don't teach her

that it's bad to lie.

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.

Could you say more about that?

Because that would be very heretical

to I'm sure some people listening, right?

Wait a second, no deception bad.

Yes, yeah.

No exceptions, black and white.

That's the dark side of the force.

So could you say a bit more

about how you teach your child,

your children about deception

or if you want to tackle this a different way,

is there a pro-social or a positive use of deception

and a way to frame that for people?

That's definitely the flag I fly under now

is I think that there's value in learning about deception

that one of the reasons why we have critical thinking

is 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 did 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 something and lie

or lying is all bad, but it's not.

We use lies and levels of disclosure in our first dates.

It's funny if you hear of 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 an awareness

of what deception is and expanding the horizons

of what people think it can be.

And I'll give you an example.

Take the concepts that are used.

Here's a concept.

I'm gonna make someone think that they have acted

when they haven't.

That's a very generic concept.

Make them think that they have...

Acted on something, take it in action, when they haven't.

So I'll give you two context for that.

If I, as a pickpocket, steal from somebody

in another country and they don't,

not too familiar with the language and I run away,

their response will typically be to yell for police.

One way of stopping that is to have a second member

of my team come up to them while they're emotionally charged

and to take a police report and give them a ticket

and they think they have acted when they haven't.

They have a 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 just steal 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 when she hasn't,

I make her think that she has behaved,

taken an action when she hasn't taken the action.

And you can stop the spread of malaria.

It's the same concept.

So this use of deception is really the broader aspect.

How do we deceive a cell?

How do we deal with coronavirus?

It can be used in medicine,

it can be used in different areas.

Using truth to deceive, that's a very powerful thing.

It's the difference between malinformation

versus disinformation is malinformation

is the use of true facts to deceive.

And pultering is the name for it in business,

of using it in advertising,

of using a series of true statements to mislead.

If you give an example,

I've never heard that term before.

Which, pultering?

Pultering, yeah.

Yeah, pultering.

If I said...

It doesn't have to be a business example,

but it will be an example of using the truth to deceive.

If I've released 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 great book on propaganda by Eddie Bernice

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.

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.

Okay, let's go and know then.

I'm not sure where it's going.

So if you say no,

I say some people don't believe in ESP.

Some people don't believe we ever walked on the moon.

Both those statements are true by implied a third statement,

that now, if you don't believe in ESP,

that you're similar to the people with conspiracy theories

that you never really walk on the moon.

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

By using true statements.

And so it's also, as a legality,

it's a lot harder thing to grab on to.

If I want to pull back one layer further.

Yeah, it's slippery.

It is slippery.

There's a lot of room for deception

in advertising and product marketing also.

I mean, so I didn't know that term,

but there's a term called puffery,

which is, it's an implied structure or function claim,

but you can't make structure or function claims

for instance with dietary supplements or in shampoo,

because then it would be governed by the FDA.

It would be, and I'm simplifying this,

but classified as a drug,

and therefore you would have to go through

all of these different steps and studies and so on.

To avoid that, so puffery is the use of words

that have basically no meaning whatsoever.

So if you sell shampoo that is a hair volumizer,

no agreed upon legal definition of a volumize,

but it conjures an image.

It does.

Of a very distinct effect.

Absolutely.

It's total bullshit.

Absolutely.

And you just, when you have a label for this,

and you get a few examples,

you start to see it everywhere.

It's all over the place.

In any case, that's exactly to my point.

I hope that people expand beyond

just trying to get some of my own lie,

because so many of the things now

that are impacting people in major ways

are going beyond fabrication.

They're going to narratives that craft belief systems.

So my push that I think is a nice way

to stay off the political phrase,

just to go after, how about I show you

how these things are traditionally done?

I'm gonna show you the anatomy of those.

I'm gonna try to familiarize you with those

that, like I said, deception awareness.

Oh, I see, you're saying, okay,

we can talk about politics or a modern incarnation

of this type of perceptual shaping,

but let's do it vis-a-vis the 40 elephants.

Yeah, because my goal, if I attack a political piece

in the outcome of the behavior I 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 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,

short changing somebody at cashier.

If I wanted 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 $100 bill?

And I give you $10, $10 bills.

That doesn't raise a lot of suspicion

in the way that $100 bill would in the other way,

where they vet that.

But now you take those 1010s, you put them in the register,

you hand them to me and I take the 100.

But I just look at the 100 and I say, excuse me.

And when you look at the 100,

you see now there's a 10 there instead of 100.

What is my claim?

I just said, excuse me.

I didn't tell you that you gave me the wrong thing.

I didn't make a bolster of a claim.

I'm just allowing you to assume a story.

Write your own story.

And if you assume the wrong story

and think you made a mistake and gave me a 10 instead of 100,

you're gonna take that back, give me 100 and I made $90.

But if you went the other way

and you were highly suspicious and you're on top of it

and you said, what?

I said, could you give me two fives?

So that allows me to go either way.

Cause I have this 10 and I can take that line.

So 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

that can be taken in multiple directions.

Although you're kind of fucked on that exchange, right?

Cause you get the intent.

It helps to be able to have the recording.

All right, so I want to talk for a second about books.

So when you're younger, there were these various books

that you mentioned a few of them.

I think one of them was JB Bobo's Coin Magic.

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

Right, had a large impact on your life,

your thinking and so on.

Are there books in later chapters

that have had an impact on you that come to mind?

Specific points.

There was one where some people that I worked with

started to say, it was almost an implication

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 instead of a case and...

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

Yeah, but it was both emotional and significant to me

and I come back up, I just change into my street clothes

and I said, hey, what's the meaning of my bag?

And the ticket ladies didn't know.

I said, what did they look like?

They said, yeah, there was 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.

I said, can you spot him if we go in there?

And we go in, I wanna go look for him.

I ended up finding this guy out of a couple hundred people.

Because they helped you spot him.

No, they didn't know how to describe him.

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.

And then I went back in and changed my uniform for the show.

And I went through everybody's pockets.

I started going through assessing and profiling

of a few hundred people and I found the guy

and you're eliminating different people.

Grandpa's not gonna do this.

This guy's guy's family.

He's not gonna 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.

So then I stole it back from him without him knowing.

And I went and told my boss, hey, I found this guy.

Can you call security?

And he said, he's laughing.

And he's just like, no.

You took the evidence.

He says, but how can you find this guy?

He says, what?

And he's telling everybody else.

But at that time, back to your book's question,

I always get on in tangents.

I really wanted to understand what was happening there.

And I was like, is this NLP?

Everybody says NLP.

Is that what this is?

And it wasn't that.

But it was-

What you were doing, what he was doing?

People were thinking about what I was doing as far as,

and I didn't believe I had super skills.

But you were trying to deconstruct

what you and yourself were doing.

And I was pushing at the science and I was really,

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 needed to find what critical thinking is.

Because critical thinking, I think,

is being used as a filler term to fill in the blank

whenever we got a problem for reasoning.

And I think it needs to be more specific than that

to solve the problem.

What behavior do we want to change?

Do we want people to have an alternate hypothesis

to question their hypothesis?

Because when is that the case

and when is that a conspiracy theory?

And it now becomes the fixation on beliefs

and when should we question what we think we know?

And that's a very specific thing.

So a lot of the things I'm reading right now

are how beliefs are constructed,

when should we question what we think we know,

and how often do we update our belief systems?

Is there a firmware that needs to be updated?

And how do we go about doing that?

I'm trying to find what my role is

in trying to help with that.

Outside of technical magic books,

and I'm using magic broadly,

could be any facet of that type of performance,

what books have you reread that come to mind?

When I'm hovering around right now,

I say that rereading it,

but I wouldn't be soft on the title.

I think it's called How Minds Are Changed.

It's an important book that goes into the impact

of deep canvassing, and is it possible

to change someone's mind in a conversation

within the lasting results?

And what is the process of doing that?

And that's different than 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.

And we can get all the specifics,

put them in the show notes as well.

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 and Digital Age,

and he was with the FBI.

His name is Cameron Maylan.

It's a fascinating book in that space that I go into a lot.

Does WisMob hold any special place in your heart or mind?

And what is WisMob?

Okay, if you go to books to the spirit of your question,

which is what I should have listened to.

I don't blame you for not listening to my spirit.

It's an acquired taste.

No, there's probably, so Bobo's Coin Magic, right?

And then there was the Fitski books

that Ben Stone tricked me into reading.

God bless that guy, huh?

They still reverberates because magic,

a study of misdirection.

And then WisMob.

WisMob 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.

They are cons and heist movies.

And I was very interested in,

because he was a linguist professor

who was studying the language of thieves.

And WisMob was a specific type of theft.

And it's not just a pickpocket on the street.

The name of WisMob is this idea

that there are thieves that travel

and they don't just work as a team,

but there are some thieves

that have learned all the roles in a team.

They could shift between those roles

so they didn't need the team anymore.

And they were called cannons.

And 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.

And that lit a fire for me to try to find a cannon,

to try to find WisMob.

And the New Yorker article is all about that,

of me finding my first cannon.

And then a year ago, when I moved to Washington 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 WisMob.

And I said, well, that's an easy thing to vet.

And I said, so it's in writing, right?

So I got to vet this guy out.

And he talked about when he was 14 years old

and he was a six foot four black man coming to,

at that time it was very hard to get in some space.

So he had to invent 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 still haven't got together.

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

Yeah, I'm in.

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.

Let's see what I could learn.

So question on arcane discipline

as it applies to the team roles.

People may be familiar with the different positions

on an American football team or basketball team,

probably or not familiar with the different roles

that a cannon could take.

So what does a team of thieves look like?

Or at least what are the fundamental roles?

I think a lot of people don't know the structure

of a pickpocket team.

They tend to know football, basketball, baseball,

very intimately and very impassioned.

But for a pickpocket team it tends to be different.

There are names.

It's their intention not to be seen.

It is, yes.

There's names for them.

Historically, the wire, the stick, the shade, the stall,

and they all have functions in what people would think

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 they would hand off his stuff.

If anybody rolled him up, he's the quarterback.

They don't want to catch the quarterback

because he's the most valuable player.

And 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.

Running interference.

Yeah, so they came and moved back that then there's the shade.

The shade's kind of counter surveillance.

They're looking to identify undercover law enforcement.

As they scope through a crowd,

they're very good at identifying what they look like

and also where the cameras are.

And there's a steer who identifies as a good target.

Pause for 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?

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.

Columbia and diversion teams will use

like a finger at 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 sense they've got heat from a surveillance,

they might drop their sight line towards a lady's purse.

And if someone bounces off their sight line

and tracks to that, they know they've got heat.

And so they give a signal to their team to dissipate.

So there's-

Okay, so we stopped this shade.

I interrupted.

So what came after shade?

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.

So what does the steer do?

They qualify the mark.

They do a testing bite and they're like-

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 the mark.

We want to make sure the juice is ripped the squeeze.

So how do you qualify?

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

because they know how to fence those

and run those in the market.

Clever things are what they can do with a phone now.

They can run it through your whole bank accounts

really quick now.

So it's more than-

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

Yeah, and 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 surgeons of stealing at a nightclub.

It could be as simple as pointing it back at you,

get your face 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.

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 when you go to an ATM or a bank

and you qualify, they caught peeking the Pope,

seeing what money is inside the wallet.

They had names for all these things,

the pit, the kick, the bridge, the 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 us permeated into our culture,

but it's a fascinating place.

The steer, I think for me, when I'm looking for a team,

I often look for the steer.

Either that, the steer or the shade,

if I'm in a crowd, I'm looking for their scout

because the scout's moving sight lines, 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 sight lines through a crowd

to see who's looking at them.

And then I'm gonna look for their signals

and I can start to identify the group

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

So from a defensive standpoint,

someone's going on a road trip,

they're gonna be going through all sorts of countries

and they're gonna 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.

All right, you go to Carnival,

you can bet your ass are gonna be some pros there.

What can you do?

What would your advice be to someone

who doesn't wanna get their stuff taken?

I guess I would imagine there's just don't carry anything

you don't need to carry.

There's other preventative measures.

I mean, you hear about money belts

and this, that and the other thing.

What are your thoughts?

Just like self-defense, it's a mindset first.

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.

Deepfakes is a whole new thing.

I mean, a recent thing that's just gone to case

with impersonating, you might have seen this on ransom case

where they implied that they ransomed a daughter.

Okay, so they used a deepfake to quote unquote prove

that they'd kidnapped somebody.

The audio.

They had the audio of a daughter talking to a mother

screaming that she's been kidnapped.

And I mean, that's gonna drive anybody

to take the behavior right away.

So they were able to extract the ransom?

I believe so.

I know that it's being prosecuted though right now.

And I think it's one of the early lessons.

There's also weaponized as far as in the military right now,

there was some impersonating the mayor of Kiev

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, the guy enough information

there was a glitch, and then they called back

to speak to the mayor of Kiev

and they said he hasn't been on a call.

Okay.

So there's a future there that's coming that is intense.

So a lot of these concepts where I mentioned them

from pickpocketing and things,

that's why I noticed I didn't go

to just getting a better money belt.

I went to the importance for concepts

because the overconfidence will work against people.

Oh yeah, you see people in any major city,

we're sitting in New York City right now,

the number of people I have seen see a go signal

and walk across street with earbuds in,

looking at their phones, not checking either direction.

In this city is unbelievable.

I mean, hundreds of them, I've seen hundreds.

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 end of the smartphones

and it really does become this kind of,

not narcissism, but this kind of egocentricism

of 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 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.

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.

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?

Or some targets, I would imagine some are harder than others.

Yeah, they are.

So you're inside jacket pocket.

They used to think that that was the hardest pocket

to steal from because they would call it kissing the dog.

That was the old term.

Kissing the dog meant that I would have to see the marks face.

With most other extractions, you wouldn't get to see me.

That 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.

Headbutting the dog.

Yes, headbutting 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,

this is not just pickpockets,

this is 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.

Every day carry.

Yeah, EDC, every day 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

and 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.

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 are you going to do those things

instead of leave something there in the safe

because you need to satiate their curiosity.

You need to give the dog a bone to find.

You need to, as Herb Simon in behavioral economics,

he would call it satisfying.

You need something that satisfies your curiosity.

I'm glad I asked.

Thank you.

What is the illusion of knowledge project?

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 still shape of what the market is for that.

But we think it's important to point the finger

at the problem that we see on the horizon.

The benefit is I have amazing network of people

that I've learned from.

It used to be these, 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 works, different things.

Can we repackage shows, whether it's TV

or live experience or content,

that can help people engage with things

that they might not think are important,

their data, their other things.

Can you reverse a room escape and make it a heist?

And what people are trying to break into a thing

they learn about their personal data.

These kind of examples.

Yeah, it probably is now stolen

that I've said it out loud.

We could add in a bunch of bleeps if you like.

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.

And what does it mean for somebody to pull that string?

And that awareness of what it looks like

in different ways that those strings can be pulled,

I think can help bring people so that the flags go up.

So we're creating this project,

the illusion of knowledge project

to kind of highlight some of that.

Where can people find that?

Or can they not yet find it?

They can't find it yet.

It's, there's a trailer that's,

we have this website called Equivoke

and Equivoke is E-Q-U-I-V-O-K-E

or then go to my website, it's easy.

My website is Isteelstuff.com.

And it's easier for people to remember while they're driving.

But if you go to that,

there'll be a link to 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 31, that's six.

And I wanna 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.

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 crafts women.

It's not impossible to do, it can be difficult to do,

but I don't think it's an incorrect approach.

Does that make sense?

Because you can conversely, and look,

I invest in a lot of, or I have historically invested

in a lot of startups and early stage companies and so on.

And it can be incredibly profitable to start with a model

and then figure out what fits around that.

However, when you have a craft,

and when you have the refined perception

and ability to operate in the world that you have,

that you can expand into these different domains,

I think that approach makes a lot of sense, I really do.

Because you can corrupt the sincerity

of the knowledge you've accumulated

by force fitting it into a model.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway. Well said.

I think, I don't know if the right metaphor

I've spoken hub, but it is a little bit like that,

that I have different ways of being able

to make a very good living through whether speaking

or doing workshops or doing training

or creating things to teach security.

And as I'm doing those, since I got my boxes checked,

I felt, okay, let's 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?

So I have to ask, because this is just,

my brain won't let it go.

Yeah.

So the 40 elephants, I just love this name.

Are there other historical figures

or bands of merry pranksters slash criminals

who have particularly memorable names or stories for you?

Like if you had to put together your League of Legends,

is there a short list?

I've had the good fortune

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?

Titanic Thompson.

Yep, his nickname was Ty, from 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 gambled on everything

and people were drawn to that.

He was a proposition bet hustler,

but he had super skills.

He acquired a lot of skills.

What is a proposition bet hustler?

Meaning he bet on things that he would just win.

He had special set of skills or support staff,

covert support staff that allowed him

to make outrageous bets on weird things.

Can you think of an example?

Yeah.

One, he would bet just first on like golf.

He was very good at golf

and he would play somebody and he'd be beating him

and he says, listen, I'll give you a handicap.

I'll play with left-handed.

And then he would beat him again

and they didn't realize that he was left-handed.

But he's that good that he could beat people right-handed.

Back to Princess Pride again.

Yeah.

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, let's bet a grand that I can toss a card

through that window all the way down where the window is.

And so they'd take the bet and throw a card through

and then they'd close down the window.

He gets a second bet.

And then Kenny, he says, 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 they would.

And you see those in the literature,

but they're like, no, that's like magic territory.

And then he would, so maybe eating pretzels.

And he says, the pretzel, I'm gonna take that pretzel

and throw it over that three-story building over there

or that walnut.

And they said, 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 Unthinkable 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 through 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 Unthinkable Titanic Thompson, Joseph Wheel,

the Yellow Kid, the Count Victor Lustig.

He's the 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.

It was after World's Fair

and it might need to be turned into scraps.

So he put 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 neat 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 it's a whole fake.

So not only did he get the money he was getting,

he also had the extra money as well.

Oh man.

So there's all these guys,

all these interesting lessons of these guys.

But I had a personal best friend for 17 years,

Rod the Hop.

And he is significant.

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

and using devices that shoot out your sleeve

and grab things called a joint or a Keplinger 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.

I said, it was that thing where some magicians were in.

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.

So not the way that magicians handle cards

in the sense that you recognize more

of like a working card mechanic?

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 won't complain 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.

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 gonna do with those?

I said, I don't know.

I guess I'm gonna have to sell them

to get this thing for the divorce.

And he said, well, I'll buy those for me.

So he bought all my magic books for me.

And one of his team turned on him

and he ended up getting arrested right after that.

And I got this box of books back

with this kind of little note as a friend saying,

I knew 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 wanna be a friend?

And I asked him to join our team.

That's a great line.

So he joined the team

and we had about a dozen guys.

Kevin Mitnick, a famous hacker, was one of those guys.

The art of deception.

Yeah, and he was a dear friend

who just recently passed away.

Oh, I didn't know that.

I'm sorry.

And so I'm right before I got sick last year for 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.

So what did the team do?

What was he doing on the team?

So that was a, definitely I can clarify,

a bad business model.

So that was WisMob Incorporated,

inspired by the book you mentioned, WisMob.

And the idea was that we would team guys together

and send them out for, as a speaking agency, for security.

Maybe 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 cheese

versus guys that would break into 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 and pulling and tugging at social engineering,

which I consider very similar to an evolution of Khan.

He had me come in and speak at Def Khan.

And at his company, Know Before Later.

But we learned from each other in those worlds.

Well, we've covered a lot of ground here.

Is there anything that we haven't covered

that you'd like to cover?

Is there anything you'd like to share with the audience?

Ask of my audience?

Anything at all before we start to wind to a close?

My daughter's six.

But when she was around three,

she was learning a lot of new words that I don't say.

And you try to choose what's a good word and a bad word

and how often if he used the word no too much

to become numb to him.

So maybe use other words besides no.

And I was always interested in how different experts

do parenting and what that might be.

But there was a word she asked me, what does boring mean?

Without really thinking about too much,

I said, it's a word that's not a bad word,

but it's a word I don't use really.

Cause I don't really have it.

I don't, I've never been bored.

But part of it is cause 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.

I didn't realize what that would do,

but now I have a kid who's never said that they're bored.

And that's a huge thing.

That's huge.

What an advantage.

What happens when we just change a word?

What does it do to a behavior?

So in all the long drives she's taken 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 just, 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 or that way or what?

And it becomes a different thing.

I said, do you want to do something

that you want me to help you generate?

Come up with some ideas.

She says, no, I just want to think for a little while.

So she'll just look out the window and think.

And it really, and so it's a fascinating thing

to look at how our long-hurt tension span

is compared to a lot of her friends.

Do you think that that has helped her,

despite not having, I assume,

not having had the forced gump races

to become a better watcher in the same way

that you became a good watcher?

I think so.

I think that is one of the contributors.

I think also I'm a big proponent of,

I used to call it covert learning strategies

of the Miyagi aspect of I'm gonna do covert learning

to repackage the hard lessons as something else.

Oh, you want to learn how to levitate a coin.

I think it's in these three books.

Absolutely.

Oh, you only read volume one.

I think it's in two or three.

And there's two things.

Cause if Sime 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-

Yeah, or impossible.

Yes.

And now, by the way, you can do it.

And so I'm really interested in that space.

And we do that to her all the time.

That now if she says, like trying to teach her

a memory system, can I repackage as a series of other things

that now this little tour that we took

was secretly a mind palace.

And now she learns how to do that.

So what are the different ways that you can package-

Trojan horse.

Absolutely.

Apollo, what a gift.

What an incredibly fun conversation.

I think we may stand up and try to do some things.

So for people who are interested in some more visual,

you can go to Tim Ferriss on YouTube

and we will hopefully post some goodies there for you.

Where are the best places for people to find you online?

I'm on Facebook.

Although there seems to be like five or six of me

that isn't me, but as imposters do.

Sort of appropriate.

So I haven't canceled them out,

but there's 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 one.

Can't bring myself to say X.

TikTok, I'm not coming close to.

Just my security mind, I won't let me even touch it.

Yeah, don't do it.

But on Twitter, at Apollo Robbins.

Yeah, so pretty much at Apollo Robbins across the board.

There are, a lot of my audience is very, very interesting.

So it's worthwhile mentioning that

just because that might be fun to see

how things come out of the woodwork.

And then as far as websites go,

best website or websites?

They funnel to the same thing of ApolloRobbins.com

or Isteelstuff.com.

Isteelstuff.com.

They'll take you to the same place.

But this other new one that is gonna be a separate thing

is Equivoc.

And that one will be probably a combination

of an entertainment blog with other video content

and other things where we're gonna 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 Percanis and my wife, Ava Do.

All of them as a collective will be doing interviews,

videos and other things for those guys.

So if you wanna 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.

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 are 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 TimedUpLogs. 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,

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 subscribed

to my free newsletter,

my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday

to share the coolest things I've found or discovered

or have started exploring over that week.

It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading,

albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,

all sorts of tech tricks and so on.

They get sent to me by my friends,

including a lot of podcasts,

guests and these strange esoteric things

end up in my field and then I test them

and then I share them with you.

So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short,

a little tiny bite of goodness

before you head off for the weekend,

something to think about.

If you'd like to try it out,

just go to tim.vlogs.friday,

type that into your browser, tim.vlogs.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 are an expensive, frozen mess.

I've tried them, it's a disaster.

They're 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.

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 slash Tim,

or by using code Tim at checkout.

That's SundaysforDogs.com slash Tim,

or by using code Tim, T-I-M, at checkout.

One more time, that's SundaysforDogs.com slash Tim,

or code Tim at checkout.

Upgrade your pup to Sundays for Dogs

and feel great about the food you feed your best friend.

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 Momentus

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 Momentus Mag3nate,

L-Theanine, and Apigenin,

all of which have helped me to improve

the onset quality and duration of my sleep.

Now, the Momentus Sleep Pack

conveniently delivers single servings

of all three of these ingredients.

I've also been using Momentus 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 Momentus and their products.

Momentus also partners with some of the best minds

in human performance to bring world-class products to market,

including a few you will recognize from this podcast,

like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starran.

They also work with Dr. Stacey Sims,

who assists Momentus in developing products

specifically for women.

Their products contain high-quality ingredients

that are third-party tested,

which in this case means informed sport end 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, Momentus ships internationally,

so you have the same access that I do.

So check it out, visit livemomentus.com slash tim

and use code TIM to check out for 20% off.

That's livemomentus, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash tim

and code TIM for 20% off.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Keywords

Apollo Robbins, Gentleman Thief, Misdirection, TED Talk, Coin manipulation, Career transition, Cheating casinos, Con artists, Deception strategies, Magic tricks

People

Apollo Robbins, Simon Henderson, Anthony Percanis, Ava Do, Ben Stone, Mark Sparks, Charlie Straufkamp, Daryl Martinez, Justin Trans, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Kelly Starran, Dr. Stacey Sims, Ed Dillard, Eddie Bernice, Gary Larson, JB Bobo, Robert Cialdini, Dan Simons, Jamal, Jimmy Carter, Kevin Mitnick, Penn Gillette, Plato, Aristotle, Teller, Tim Ferriss, Titanic Thompson, Count Victor Lustig, Rod the Hop

Companies

Caesars Entertainment, Disney, Mysteries Magic Shop, Nature Journal, Sundays, Momentus, Walmart, Warner Bros, TNT, National Geographic

Organizations and Institutions

Harvard Kennedy School, MIT Sloan School of Management, Society for Neuroscience, Humane Society, International Society for Neuroscience, Secret Service, Universities

References

Warning: Undefined variable $clean_references in /srv/www/podtranscript.com/app/podcast_episode.php on line 376

Brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements, Sundays for Dogs ultra-high-quality dog food, and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

Apollo Robbins (@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, with Will Smith and Margot Robbie, along with appearances in Brooklyn 99, and the TNT series Leverage. He was a producer and co-host for National Geographic’s Brain Games, which was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Informational Series. Robbins 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. 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,” 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! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1, 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 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 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 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, apigenin, and L-theanine daily, all of which have helped me improve the onset, quality, and duration of my sleep. I’ve also been using Momentous creatine, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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. Upgrade your pup to Sundays for Dogs and feel great about the food you feed your best friend.




*

For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.

For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors

Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.

For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.

Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.

Follow Tim:

Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss 

Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss

YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss

Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.