Apollo Robbins - The art of misdirection

[TarJak]

Pay attention! http://www.ted.com/talks/apollo_robbins_the_art_of_misdirection.html#!

Interesting study of human behaviour.

[Jimbuna]

The wife's been doing that to me for years :)

[Sailor Steve]

Pay attention!
I did. It didn't do me a bit of good. I had to go back and look again to see exactly when he pulled his final bit.

Great stuff, and more than a little scary! :shifty:

[STEED]

Politicians are very good at it. :03:

[BrucePartington]

I did. It didn't do me a bit of good. I had to go back and look again to see exactly when he pulled his final bit.

Great stuff, and more than a little scary! :shifty:
I missed him removing his tie. Had he not hinted at it I'd never have noticed that. And neither did the audience.

For some reason it reminds me of The Sting, w/ Robert Redford and Paul Newman.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070735/
Great story, great performances. All that Hollywood has to offer now is special effects at a hectic pace, with big punch lines every other queue.

[BrucePartington]

Politicians are very good at it. :03:
Indeed. Every time I see some petty issue being blown out of proportion into a pseudo scandal, I know they are trying to distract us from something far more serious.

Not directly related, but here's a piece of George Carlin (RIP) about politicians and language. IMO it applies to politicians world wide.
Enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz4K-R8ZlhU

[Wolferz]

Isn't that a required course for a degree in political science?

Passive aggressive vocabulary and misdirection?

[Platapus]

A bunch of people know who John Mulholland (1898-1970) and what his full time job was. Until a few years ago, very very few people knew what his part time job was.

John Mulholland was a magician. A pretty good one with some fame. He was a magic historian and instructor. He was a master at misdirection and stealing stuff in front of people. He wrote many books on the art of performing magic.

Then around 1950, he was approached by some guys who thought it would be swell if John taught some of their buddies all about misdirection and how to steal stuff in front of people.

They would pay him a lot of money, but he could not tell anyone about it. Well two things that Magicians are good at are keeping secrets and an eagerness to earn a lot of money.

Thus started John's classified relationship with the CIA -- a group of people very interested in learning how to misdirect attention and steal stuff in front of people.

In 1953, John published a classified text book: Manual of Trickery and Deception. It is all about misdirection and how to steal stuff in front of people. When his relationship with the CIA was declassified after he died, the book was released to the public under the name: The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.

He may have been a poor magician for revealing (and teaching) how his tricks were done, he was an excellent Intelligence Asset as he never leaked to anyone, his classified relationship with the CIA. :salute:

Magicians are good at keeping stuff secret. :up: