Apollo Robbins once walked into the protective bubble around former President Jimmy Carter, chatted with the Secret Service agents on the detail, and came away with Carter’s itinerary and the keys to the motorcade. He used no weapon and no gadget, only an understanding of how attention works. Born in 1974 in Plainview, Texas, Robbins was a soft-spoken child who wore leg braces and grew up with a father who was entirely blind. Kept from the playground, he learned to watch people closely, and he picked up his first sleight of hand from his two brothers.

This episode follows how that childhood produced a self-described gentleman thief whom Forbes called an artful manipulator of awareness. The central idea is that attention is not a floodlight but a laser pointer, and whoever steers it controls what a person perceives. Robbins turned the Carter stunt into a career teaching law enforcement, founded the consulting group Whizmob Inc. in 2006, started a training company with his wife, the magician and mentalist Ava Do, in 2012, and became a resource for neuroscientists and filmmakers alike.

• Robbins did not beat the agents with speed. A question or a squeeze of the shoulder floods the brain with input and masks the lighter touch of a hand in a pocket.
• After the motorcade incident, law enforcement agencies sought him out, and he visited prisons to learn directly from thieves, grifters, and con artists.
• Whizmob brought law enforcement officials and former convicts together as experts on current fraud, theft, and scams, with Robbins translating between the two sides.
• He appeared on Nova ScienceNow in 2011 and served as a consulting producer on National Geographic’s Brain Games in 2013, giving researchers field evidence a quiet lab cannot supply.
• For the 2015 film Focus he taught Will Smith and Margot Robbie the craft of grifting, and he also advised a television heist series.