Attention is what steers your perceptions; it's what controls your reality. It's the gateway to the mind.
When we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side when, actually, the things right in front of us are often the hardest to see: the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to.
If you could control somebody's attention, what would you do with it?
Think about it this way - if you have five senses, and they're all feeding into one place, kind of like a bottleneck, then now your mind has to make decisions of what is important and what is going to be above the radar and what's going to be below the radar.
Our absolutes should always be hypothesis. They should never be confirmed as fact because everything that we construct through our perceptions, through our memories, is so corruptible. The skills that I have can really display that.
I've taken a tenacious bulldog approach to learning new skills throughout my life.
I'm a jazz performer - I have to improvise with what I'm given.
When I was around 13 or 14, and I was in a private school, I had a Frisbee that had the name Apollo on it. And I'd walk around with it. People would say, 'Hey, there's that Apollo kid.' That's where the name generated from.
If you don't attend to something, you can't be aware of it. But ironically, you can attend to something without being aware of it.
Normally, when I'm not performing or stealing, I second-guess myself; I have doubts.
A lot of magic is designed to appeal to people visually, but what I'm trying to affect is their minds, their moods, their perceptions.
Usually, when people watch magic, there are two levels: the people who walk away accepting that there are things they don't know, and the other group, who wants to know, 'How did it work? How did that happen?' They want to unravel the puzzle.
At the zoo, people would gather around the railway to see the snakes being fed, and my brothers would walk around the group, taking from purses or bags or using a razor to cut pockets and take wallets.
When I shake someone's hand, I apply the lightest pressure on their wrist with my index and middle fingers and lead them across my body to my left. The cross-body lead is actually a move from salsa dancing. I'm finding out what kind of a partner they're going to be, and I know that if they follow my lead, I can do whatever I want with them.
I had physical disabilities as a kid. I had fine gross motor problems, so I didn't have natural dexterity in my hands. I also wore corrective braces on my legs, like in 'Forrest Gump.'
I was at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, and I was performing at a show there. Jimmy Carter was going to be coming through with his Secret Service detail. The manager pulled me aside, and they didn't want me to shake Jimmy Carter's hand because they were afraid it would make the news if I stole from him.
Too often, we take our construct of reality as an absolute, and what I'm trying to point out for most people is it's important for us to know what we don't know.
When you look at all this massive data that comes in from our senses, and it all has to come in through this central point, it's really interesting that we can identify the filter that our mind is using to select what it thinks is relevant and what it's going to forget.
We always think of misdirection as, 'Look over here while I do this over here!' And that's not what it is. You can be looking straight at it, and if you're not thinking about it, you won't process it. I find that fascinating.
If I need to steal from a difficult spot, I like to use a 'bottom-up' attention strategy to direct the focus.
