Ted Talk By Apollo Robbins

If you could anticipate what a person would and would not focus on, if you could keep their attention centered on one activity while you were busy performing another task, what would you use that gift for? Apollo Robbins has the answer; become a pickpocket. Robbins is an absolute master of the arts of manipulation and misdirection, the name of his presentation as well, and he proves it several times in his TED Talk. During his presentation, he demonstrates to the audience how easily distracted and utterly powerless a person can become when dealing with his profession. This may be very interesting to watch, but I believe this should also raise much concern of how ignorant we are due to our fleeting attention spans. This poses a question: is this ignorance the fault of media or is it simply human nature’s lacking?
It was absolutely hilarious to be able to watch some random man get pickpocketed in broad sight. At the same time, it was worrisome because that could have been any other person in that audience up on that stage. And if that could have been anyone in that audience up on that stage being robbed from pocket to pocket, then it might as well had been me standing up there. I believe those sensations I had experienced were exactly the ones that Robbins wanted to come across. He wanted it to come to us in a subtle way so that we could figure out the true meaning behind the comedy for ourselves. If all of this is true, then he is not only a master pickpocket, but extremely adapt in studies of psychology; or he just did it on