Apollo Robbins

I've taken a tenacious bulldog approach to learning new skills throughout my life.

If I need to steal from a difficult spot, I like to use a 'bottom-up' attention strategy to direct the focus.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wouldn't be able to do the things I do if I hadn't been around and seen the stuff my brothers did.

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.

I was doing all these hand exercises, trying to move things like other kids, catch things like other kids, and change my reflexes, and I guess I just didn't stop. That's why if somebody says to me, 'Can I learn this?' I will say, 'Probably, if you can get the psychology right.'

Usually I'll tell someone, for example, like their watch. If they have a watch on, I might say, 'In three minutes, I'd like to be wearing your watch. Do I have your permission?' Once they say yes, I play a little game with them as I'm interacting with them, and I steal their watch.

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.

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.