Ava Doe

Well, he stole my watch. He stole my jewelry often. So I stopped wearing jewelry just to see what else he would steal.

You know, we started hanging out with all these different people. So some of them were thieves. One was a hacker. One was a canon, which is the lingo for a thief who can steal all by himself. He doesn't need anyone else on the team. One was a really renowned card hustler. His name was Rod the Hop, and he was very famous for this one move called the hop.

They've made observations about people for all of their life and for high consequences. So I'm trying to learn what is it that they're seeing in people because I'm trying to learn to see the same thing.

Because what magic and crime share is the, you, whether it's, whatever the consequences and the consequence in crime is much more severe than it is in magic. But you are trying to, you know, to put it in plain language, get away with something. You know what it's like to try to get away with something.

And when you meet each other, when you meet another person who's been trying to do that, you feel it.

Everyone leaves it at the door. Where you work, who you steal from, what you steal, we leave it at the door when we talk about skills.

Yes. I remember asking Rod, who was in full transparency a really good friend of ours. I said to him, I said, Rod, you could do anything else you want probably. Why are you cheating slot machines? And he said, he never gave me the answer I wanted, but what he said was, I'm just going to do this until this. And it was always some variation of that, that he's just going to do this until this time.

When we had dinner with him, it was fascinating because I asked him, do you hang out with any pickpockets? And he said, no, I don't know any of them. And his tone was interesting. And I said, OK. And he said, oh, you think I'm like them? I said, no, not at all. He said, yeah, I'm not like them. I don't steal from people. And I said, you don't. And he said, no, people play my game.

They will take the money out of their pockets and put it down and play my game. I don't put my hand in their pockets.

My parents wanted me to be a doctor, obviously. They eventually found out what I do, but not after I ensured that I could make a really good living. You know, immigrant parents and all.

When I met Apollo, I was still thinking that I would become a psychiatrist, that I would work in a clinical setting. I didn't think that I would shift gears.

I've always been a watcher, so I just watch. And then one day, he was performing something. I walked away because I had a phone call. When I came back, I saw a detail in the way he handled something, and I figured out how it worked. She was interested in how people responded to him. There was this vulnerable moment where people are exposed to a shift in what they thought is real.

So I wanted to do that. She started off learning how to pickpocket, but then she got tired of it. It was a gender problem. The performing space that I often performed in was corporate parties, which had many men And I didn't love the responses I would get when someone realized I had been in their pockets. Instead, Eva became a kind of magician called a mentalist.

All of the routines you would see a mentalist perform are more things that your mind fools you. Not so much in sleight of hand. It uses some sleight of hand, but mostly psychological. Give me an example. I mean, of a simplistic. Someone might pretend to read your mind. Someone might pretend to have psychic phenomenon. Someone might move an object with their mind on the table. That kind of thing.

Yeah, but look, I bought a house.

And the person, the lady that I was performing for, she, when I said her mother's maiden name back in full, she said, okay. And I thought I failed. But she was stunned. And I realized then that I realized at that moment that if I wanted an applause, maybe mentalism isn't always the thing. People don't applaud mentalism. I don't know why exactly.

I mean, I have some theories about why they don't applaud, but most people are quietly stunned.

I should say there's no Vietnamese word for magic. There's only a Vietnamese word for illusion, and there's a Vietnamese word for miracle.

Yeah. Okay. But you're not one of the people that would move the Ouija board, right?

And he's kept it.

We get this question a lot. Do we still get fooled? I look to get fooled at least once a day.

I grew up with staunchly anti-communist parents, but I went to school under communist regime, which means that I was exposed to my teachers who would teach me propaganda, and I would go home and my parents would say everything I've just learned was wrong.

And she, you know, the trick requires a lot of practice. And she had talked to me earlier that day about how do you practice. So I told her that one of my magic teachers told me that you should practice until you get it right seven times in a row.

And later that day, she had taken a piece of paper and drawn out a series of rows and columns, and she was marking X's and check marks in these squares for all of the times that she had gotten the different phases of the cups and balls routine correctly. I think I was so incredibly surprised at the science, the scientific approach that she was taking.

What are some of the ways that we misperceive reality? Because that's what magic is taking advantage of.

You know, we were asked to call him Uncle Ho and there were all these things that Uncle Ho did for the country. And we sang songs to him and I would go home. My parents would say he was a mass murderer and he had committed all these war crimes. And so I was exposed to these different perspectives on the same set of reality very early. Which was confusing for a child.

I'm going to honestly answer this question, Apollo.

Which is, no, I don't think it would have worked as well. You know, you only know the one door that you open. But I think that if we weren't both aligned in the same interest... I think that we would have been attracted to each other for a while, and I don't know how long that while would have lasted. I just don't think that we would have this connection.

I think I'm always kind of amazed by how much we can still talk.

Yeah, and I think the other dimension to Phoebe is that, you know, we have other choices. I always wonder what would happen if we have no other choice. I don't know that I could, you know, 100% with certainty definitively say that, no, if I had no other choice, I wouldn't.

do something that could benefit myself, breaking the law because I had the skill to do it, you know? Those people that we met, a lot of them didn't have choices.

Not at all. I think we know more about the different kinds of things and we might recognize when a game is being run. But we will have moments in our life where we're vulnerable, when our blind spots will be activated, and when we're not looking for it. And those are good times to be targeted.

Absolutely, yes. And it was emotionally confusing as well because I liked my teachers, I liked my parents, I liked everyone, you know.

There was this stretch after the war where a lot of Vietnamese people were escaping by boat, the boat people. And my father was part of those people who would smuggle people out of Vietnam.

He had immersed himself in police culture. He bribed them to hang around them, to learn how they talk. He would feign a deeper northern accent. He would use the words that they would use. She says he once paid an officer for a uniform. And if the police ever caught up to him and his escapees, he would pretend that he was one of them.

I didn't see why it was a secret. I already knew how to keep secrets by then, so I was surprised. I think I thought, maybe she didn't think I could lie well enough.

I wanted to believe that... There was possibly maybe a place in the world where people did say everything that they think and that they weren't running to threats of reality. Maybe there are people who just tell you everything.

We had put on tennis shoes. I had never worn closed-toe shoes before in my life. We had socks on, and I had a jacket on like I do now, but it was 80, probably 80 to 90 degrees with 90% humidity, and I just remember being hot. They arrived in Seattle in 1992, three days before Halloween. I remember thinking that America didn't have any smells anymore. It just smelled like nothing.

I didn't smell food. I didn't smell the streets. I didn't smell sweat. And I hadn't ever seen so many yellow leaves.

He stole my friend's engagement ring after just what it seemed to be shaking her hand and saying a few sentences with her, and then he gave it back. And I thought this was the most bizarre thing, to give it back. If you could steal something, why would you give it back? I've never met an honest thief, I guess.

I said, why did you give it back?

What was the first magic you learned? Probably how to tell someone's credit card number without seeing it.

This is now maybe 4 a.m. at an after-hours Las Vegas nightclub, and everything felt a little bit half-tinged with fabrication, you know?

I think he said that I'm a theatrical pickpocket. to which I had no idea what that meant. I didn't know what to make around the premise of stealing for entertainment.

Before we saw each other again, because I lived in LA at the time and Apollo lived in Las Vegas, we had phone calls that lasted an average of four hours. It was anywhere between two to nine hours. We had very long conversations about everything, but a lot of it was about psychology and I thought it was a really peculiar thing to be interested in deception if you didn't have to grow up with it.

And I thought that if you grew up in America and the living was easy, then why would you be interested in cons and scams and, I suppose, heists? But I knew very little at that time.

He said that his brothers were thieves.

Well, not on radio. That would be illegal. But you could? Yes.

I had stolen a guy's watch on the Vegas Strip. And it was a good three, four minutes after I had stolen it. And he realized that his watch was missing. And he was shocked. So you were practicing on the Las Vegas Strip? Sometimes, but not all the time. It's very dangerous to do so. I wouldn't recommend it.

What stood out to me that evening was Apollo made a point to turn off his cell phone and put it away. And I don't know that I had been on a date. I didn't date a lot, but I hadn't been on a date where someone did that.

It definitely made me nervous. It made me nervous thinking about what else does it mean if I continue this relationship long term? We'll be right back.

I didn't trust him.