Alliance Magique

This Sunday, September 20, Alliance Magique hosted me to talk about our shared passion and my creations during a live Zoom session that lasted two hours and forty-five minutes! Many thanks again to Steeve Marion and Nicola Damien Deramaix for the invitation.

 

(French audio, with subtitles and chapters in English, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese)

 

Here are the chapters of the video:

00:00:32 - Welcome and introduction to Vincent Hedan

00:01:36 - Journey: discovering magic, studies, and becoming a professional

00:03:23 - How theater contributes to the practice of magic

00:06:21 - Early card magic, Earl Nelson, and respect for the spectator

00:10:04 - Leaving France and settling in Asia

00:11:37 - Cultural differences and performing magic in different countries

00:16:01 - Audience attention, participation, and beliefs

00:19:52 - Audience reactions: challenge, enthusiasm, and adapting the show

00:25:21 - “About Time”: favorite routines with a watch

00:31:51 - Smartwatches: remote controls and the particularities of Pitata

00:36:32 - Building a table to conceal a phone and access information

00:42:19 - Hiding a Notifier screen in a pocket

00:45:41 - René Lavand: poetry, personality, and artistic influences

00:51:40 - Allowing yourself to explore personal themes on stage

00:52:36 - Creativity: looking for inspiration outside magic

00:56:55 - “Grave of the Fireflies” and the emotional ambition of magic

01:02:57 - Magic in film: “The Prestige,” “The Illusionist,” and “Now You See Me”

01:08:05 - “Rainman”: memory, competitions, and the mentalist label

01:12:57 - Moving beyond categories and surprising audience expectations

01:16:38 - “Mental Theater”: how the book came about and a routine about luck

01:21:25 - Turning a family story into a magical experience

01:23:00 - From “Votre esprit” to “Mental Theater”: participation and making routines your own

01:28:42 - Visual magic and social media: grabbing the audience’s attention quickly

01:30:42 - Simplicity, clear instructions, and writing a show

01:35:40 - Artificial intelligence: speech recognition and automated predictions

01:39:02 - Invisible electronics and choosing mentalism accessories

01:43:03 - Handwriting recognition and multilingual mind reading with AI

01:45:10 - Electronic reliability and backup solutions

01:48:16 - The hierarchy of peeks and degrees of separation

01:52:26 - Creating book tests: literature, Borges, and “Babel”

01:58:23 - The origins of “Pi” and “Haiku”

02:01:05 - The creative process as assembling puzzle pieces

02:02:12 - “Echo”: themed book tests and customized editions

02:07:02 - Vincent’s personal memorized stack and plans to publish it

02:11:15 - Choosing and mastering a memorized stack: applications in “Pi Max”

02:14:31 - A training app created with AI

02:15:21 - Learning several memorized stacks: parallels with languages

02:18:23 - Translating magic books and discovering other approaches

02:19:42 - Danny Orleans: what children’s magic can teach mentalism

02:23:09 - Break and announcements for upcoming live streams

02:24:31 - Projects: memorized stacks, Tamariz’s legacy, “Multitude,” and translations

02:29:21 - A possible return to France for lectures

02:32:43 - “The Devil’s Tarot”: origins, emotional impact, and ethical questions

02:37:22 - Rider-Waite Tarot: imagery, interpretation, and audience interaction

02:39:52 - Playing a character without sharing their beliefs

02:41:30 - Additional questions, the offer announced during the live stream, and thanks

 

 

Here is the transcription:

Steeve Marion:
Okay, that's good. That's good. Tap, tap, tap, tap... and there we go.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
I'm going to switch over to Alliance. Hang on, I'll turn my sound down. We should be live now. You tell me, check it.

Steeve Marion:
It's the 20-second delay. It shouldn't be red. Live. All good, Nico, you're live.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
I'm on Alliance, right? Yeah. Let's not do the same thing as last time. Okay. Hello everyone, we're really happy to see you and to be back with you on this Sunday morning. It's a slightly unusual live because we very rarely do them on Sunday mornings. But like I was saying, this is a special live for a special guest.

Steeve Marion:
Exactly. We've been hoping to have him on for quite a while. We're really, really, really happy to welcome Vincent.

Vincent Hedan:
We had talked about it before, but yes, it's been a while because of all my moving around geographically and the time difference.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
In any case, a huge thank you to you, and welcome to Alliance for this first live of September. Oh yes, it's back-to-school season. Actually, this is really the first proper live of the season, because when we came back with David Ethan's lecture, that was a little bit separate. This is different; this is really the official return of the live sessions. Michael Chatelain has just joined us. So Vincent, little tradition: for anyone who might not know you, could you maybe give us a quick reminder of who you are and a brief overview of your journey in magic?

Vincent Hedan:
Sure. My name is Vincent Hedan. There's no accent on the E, but in French you still pronounce it “Aidan”; that's one of those quirks of French. I was born in France in 1983. I'm not going to go through every single year or we'll never get anywhere. But I started magic when I was probably three or four years old. I actually have the photo behind me on the shelves, with a magic set I got for Christmas—the Majax magic set, which probably sparked a lot of passions for a lot of people. The difference is, I never stopped. I was incredibly lucky to know what I wanted to do from the very beginning. It first became a passion during my teenage years.

Then I studied things that had nothing to do with it—well, mathematics and linguistics. You can actually see a bit of both in my work today, but at the time that wasn't the plan. I failed my science year, so I switched to languages instead because maybe it was easier. Then magic started taking off at the same time as I had to decide whether I was going to continue my studies or not. So I chose magic because I was really passionate about it at the time, and I've been incredibly lucky to make a living from it ever since—since around 2012, I think, something like that—in several different ways.

And now, for the past four years, since 2022, I've left France to travel around Asia and try to find, somewhere in Asia, a region and eventually a new home. I ended up settling in Manila, in the Philippines. Hence the six-hour time difference: it's 4 p.m. where I am and 10 a.m. where you are.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Yes. And you did theater as well, right?

Vincent Hedan:
Because that helped you. It's true that when you get into magic and also do theater, the two often work very well together. Theater is an incredibly useful tool because when you do theater—at least, maybe I was lucky enough to have a very good drama teacher, then a succession of good drama teachers—you learn approaches and a certain discipline that become extremely useful once you're onstage. But even if you're doing table-hopping or close-up, you can scale down what you've learned about staging, acting, and interacting with an audience when there is one. It's enormously useful.

So I started theater when I was seven, actually. I started theater and then got really, really serious about magic, with books and so on. And yes, that reminds me of an anecdote about—what's his name?—Laurent Beretta, a major French stage magician. At the time he had a very original act using blank cards, and the act was very sculpted physically in the way he moved onstage. He explained that he'd trained in dance, actually classical ballet, and that he recommended everyone do some dance, even classical ballet, because it's the strictest and probably the most physically brutal version, and it teaches you a great deal about how to carry yourself onstage.

Sometimes you see someone and you think, “Yeah, this is your first time onstage. You're not used to standing properly, projecting your voice, articulating, staying open to the audience all the time,” and so on. Theater gives you lots of little tools like that. And what's interesting is that I started with workshops. So you don't have to commit to a full year of intensive classes three times a week. Anyone, at any age, can find one- or two-week workshops in a medium-sized city during school holidays or at other times. As an introduction, it really gives you a lot.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Yes, it's true. You often hear that theater is really a tool that helps magicians a lot, especially when performing professionally and all that. And did you start making a living from magic—from your magic—pretty quickly, or...?

Vincent Hedan:
It happened while I was still a student, so when you're a student, that's almost a full-time job in itself. You don't necessarily have huge financial needs either, although I'm very minimalist nowadays, so that helps. Yes, yes. I don't remember the exact date, but I think when I was in Australia, I was a student and that was the first year when 100% of my income really came from magic. I spent a year there working and studying, so that must have been around 2012, something like that, because I came back to Europe afterward.

And yes, I never really... let me think. No, I stopped studying, I did magic, and I had one regular job once: I worked for the Yellow Pages for six months in hell. That was a disaster. And after that, no—just magic.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
And did you move straight into mentalism, or did you have, like everybody else, a cards-and-coins phase first?

Vincent Hedan:
Coins, never, because I'm far too bad at them. I played around with them a little, read a few books. At the beginning it was magic in general, because when you start very young—and especially at my age, or rather in “my era,” in quotation marks, now I sound old—if you were born in 1983, you're seven years old in 1990. And in 1990, there weren't necessarily many examples of mentalism around you, especially because there was no Internet. All you had was French culture on television, so it was a very narrow lens, even though we did have the TV show Attention Magie. And in Belgium, I don't know what there was because I didn't have access to that at the time.

There was nothing. There was nothing in Belgium in your time either—when you weren't even born yet. So yes, magic, magic. And when you live in a small village with no magic shop, no library carrying magic books, nobody around you who does magic—which was my situation; I was in the Charente-Maritime region—you simply don't have access to many things. So you do card tricks you might have found in a book because a deck of cards is cheap and you can do a huge number of things with it. Whereas buying a Transe Cube when you're ten years old is a bit out of reach.

So I started out very card-heavy, very close-up. And I don't know whether I was lucky, well surrounded, or some mixture of both, but I came across books and people who very clearly shaped what I am today. The first magic book I would classify as “serious” that I ever read was Earl Nelson's The Art of Close-Up, which I think is called Variations in English. Both editions still exist; CC Magique or Marchand de Trucs probably has it somewhere on their website. I read it in French because at the time I didn't speak English at all.

The book is extraordinary because the routines are by Earl Nelson, who was a real worker: he performed them in restaurants and casinos, so he genuinely used this material professionally. And the routines are exceptional. There are some I still perform today, including a routine called Envol if you find it in the book. There are ring routines, a few coin routines, so it let you explore quite a broad range of close-up.

But above all, there was a foreword that changed my life. I'd need to find the book again to reread it and quote it precisely, but in the foreword he explained this idea—I don't remember whether it was him saying it, Vernon, or another one of our legends—that people enjoy being fooled by a gentleman. So if you're fooling people, showing them something they don't understand, or sometimes making them feel a little like the victims of the magic you're presenting, and then you mock them on top of that, their natural defensive reaction is going to be to attack you, to attack your effect, your personality, your frame, and that can lead to very difficult situations. Especially since I was twelve or thirteen when I read that and, in terms of fighting, even now I'm not exactly an expert.

The idea was that you can perform magic without doing it at the expense of the people in front of you. You can perform magic by involving them and letting them enjoy the experience with you. It may sound less original now because you see many, many performers working that way, but at the time there were still books listing jokes like, “Show the card to your friends—if you have any.” And depending on who you're saying that to, that's an instant headbutt. Times change. What is acceptable changes too, and some things land better than others.

So I think that very strongly shaped the way I perform magic: much more, “Come with me, we're going to do something enjoyable together,” rather than, “Look how brilliant I am and how stupid you are because you don't know the secret.” That's really not my approach.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
I'm just looking here because, to answer David Ethan, he's asking where you currently live since you move around a lot. Hang on, yes, that was the question. He wanted to know where you are at the moment. So you're in the Philippines, right?

Vincent Hedan:
In the Philippines, in Manila. Manila is the capital of the Philippines. My brother and sister came to visit me two years ago, and my mother came this summer. And it's true that before this, I knew absolutely nothing about the Philippines. I'd barely ever heard about the country apart from certain political aspects that, now that I live here, I'm not allowed to discuss. But there had never really been any major news about it. You hear about Colombia, Japan, Bulgaria, all sorts of countries, but the Philippines is almost never in the news.

When I started out—when I left France in August 2022—I had just two backpacks. I knew I was going to Thailand because I'd already visited and really liked it, so I went back. Then I did Vietnam, then Japan again. I had already studied in South Korea to learn Korean, so I'd visited there before. Then I did Malaysia and Indonesia. After doing this little catalogue of roughly one month per country, because I didn't want to be a tourist—I really wanted to find somewhere pleasant to live—the idea wasn't to spend two weeks on a beach drinking cocktails. It was to genuinely spend a month in each place and see whether I could work, whether I could find people to share magic with. And the answer is yes: there are magicians everywhere in Asia.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Exactly. Through that sort of world tour you've done, moving around so much, what's your perspective on magic in the different countries? Do you feel there are real differences in mentalism, in the way people look at it compared with Europeans? Is it genuinely very different?
Vincent Hedan:
Totally, because I'd already had the chance to travel around Europe quite a bit. When you live in France, it's relatively easy to travel. I'd done lecture tours and a few shows in Germany, England, Spain, Italy. Belgium too, quite a lot. Belgium is easier because there isn't the language barrier, so it's easy to connect. I'd done Canada and the United States quite a lot too.

But when I went to Asia, there was a real cultural disconnect because suddenly you don't have any familiar reference points anymore. In Thailand, for example, Catholicism is no longer part of the landscape. The weather isn't the same, the currency isn't the same. Absolutely everything is different. Vietnam has Catholicism, so you still recognize a few things. The Philippines is a major Catholic country. When you're in Indonesia, it's Islam everywhere, all the time, so that's very different too. Malaysia is roughly half Chinese, half Muslim. Japan, of course, is very different; Korea is very different. There are huge cultural, financial, religious differences, and that carries over into magic.

I realized, for example, that Japan, which to us can feel like a completely separate world, doesn't necessarily approach magic very differently from the way we do. They have magic bars a little like Le Double Fond. They understand the concept of being the spectator of a magic trick and occasionally taking part as well, which isn't as self-evident everywhere as you might imagine.

Then you arrive in Thailand and, for example, there are two things you can forget about. First, you'll basically never be able to buy a deck of cards easily, because cheating and gambling are prohibited. Gambling is completely illegal in Thailand. So you can't go to Toys“R”Us or a bookstore and find playing cards. They sell Tarot decks—that you can find, and we may talk about that later—but a Bicycle deck is either impossible to find or insanely expensive because you have to order it online. That's tied to gambling legislation: cards mean cheating, gambling, so they're restricted. You can still perform magic with them if you make it very clear what's happening and that it's being done in a controlled context.

Another limitation in Thailand involves money. Coins and banknotes bear the image of the King, who is a sacred figure in Thailand, so you can't just do anything you like with them. You can't put a cigarette through a coin, you can't tear a banknote, you can't do the cigarette-through-coin effect. It's lèse-majesté. And in Thailand, the law is enforced, so you go to prison and, basically, you don't come out. It's horrifying.

In the Philippines, on the other hand, it isn't really the law that limits magic. There are no restrictions at all, in fact, and there's a huge magic community in the Philippines because everyone speaks English, so they're very exposed to American culture and to all the products that come out, the books, and so on.

What didn't exactly shock me, but definitely struck me, was the feeling that they're on the same timeline as we are, but not at the same point on that timeline. If you look at a lot of the magic that's performed in the Philippines, there's a lot of children's magic. There's absolutely nothing wrong with children's magic, by the way. It's an extremely difficult discipline because child psychology is very particular. But you see a lot of parasol productions, silks, things like that. Those are things I used to see on television on Attention Magie or in shows in France in the 1990s. So it's not that they're “behind”; they're simply at a different point on the timeline.

And now you start seeing clients here saying, “No, no, definitely no magic—we'd rather have mentalism.” So there is a growing awareness of other forms and other tastes in magic. Partly because there are guys here doing excellent work and they're very, very talented. One of my best friends is Justin Pinon—not Pignon like the François Pignon films, but Pinon, P-I-N-O-N. Look him up online. He's an extraordinary performer in the Philippines. He's done radio, television, he's been everywhere. He's basically the biggest name in the country. And he only performs mentalism. He has no trouble making a living from it or making people understand what he does.

So that's the first barrier: maybe there's still a bit of that 1990s silk-and-parasol style. Very colorful. Unfortunately, that's not my style at all.

And then there's another problem. I don't know whether it's specifically the Philippines because I've been away from France for so long—maybe it's the whole world—but I observe it in the Philippines, and you're probably going to tell me it's the same thing in Belgium, France, and the West: people have absolutely no attention span anymore. And that's disastrous. People don't read anymore. They don't watch long movies anymore. They're on TikTok all day. Everything has to be short and immediate. Instant hook. And even if you hook them quickly, it still can't last very long; it has to be extremely visual.

So that's the exact opposite of everything I do, which makes things quite difficult for me, but you adapt. Because people are so focused on TikTok, they're glued to their phones even while walking in the street or using public transport. It's zombies everywhere. Apparently that's worldwide.

Another issue is that they're not necessarily used to interacting in the way we want them to interact during a magic effect. They don't necessarily understand, “Okay, now I really need to listen to the instructions I'm being given. I need to cut the deck, choose a page in a book, remember something for more than ten minutes because it's going to matter at the end.” There is real work involved—not “education,” exactly, but getting people accustomed to that kind of procedure. You have to manage the spectator much more carefully than you used to, at least that's my impression.

Justin taught me a rule that he applies. It sounds incredibly harsh, but since I've started applying it, I don't have problems anymore: people are children. Treat them as if they're between five and ten years old. So no complicated concepts, no long sentences, no ellipses, no crazy vocabulary. You adapt a little, and then a lot more becomes possible.

And because it's a very Catholic country, you also have to be careful with certain symbolism. You can't just do anything. You don't have exactly the same freedom of expression, or the same latitude with humor in certain shows. A year ago, a comedian made a joke about Catholicism and got shot in the head on his way out. Someone shot him outside the theater. So it's not the same environment. There are small things you have to be careful about.

What's complicated is that you might think, “But he's a comedian. That's crazy. He could just say, ‘No, it was a joke. Let me explain irony or the structure of humor to you,’ and people will understand.” But they don't always. Some subjects are difficult. Political subjects, of course, are untouchable. That's the case everywhere to some degree.

There's another thing I noticed a little in Vietnam, but very strongly in Thailand and the Philippines. When you perform mentalism, as you know, certain things seem much more believable than magic. If I take two silks and change their color, there are very few people left in the world who will genuinely believe that what they just saw literally happened. There are still places where they may believe it because they haven't been exposed to that kind of thing—“You're a sorcerer,” and so on—but most people understand, even if they don't know you bought the thing from a magic shop, that what happened wasn't literally reality.

With mentalism—and this already happens in Europe, but I've seen it at much deeper levels in Thailand and the Philippines—there are people who genuinely believe that what you just did is real. And when, for ethical reasons, you try not to explain how the effect works but simply to explain that it isn't real, so that things don't get out of hand, they refuse that explanation. “Yes, yes, of course it exists. We've seen it elsewhere, with some village sorcerer or whatever. There's no problem. We know what you just did. It's witchcraft. It's real.”

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
And that's exactly what I was going to ask you. Do you notice a difference in terms of audience interaction and reactions? Because, you know, in France and Belgium it's more or less the same: you often get spectators who immediately go into this slightly confrontational mode with magicians. They try to... I don't know whether you see where I'm going with this, but do you find that people over there let themselves be influenced more—well, not “influenced” exactly, but allow themselves to go along with the experience more? Or...?

Vincent Hedan:
Yes, it's something I pay quite a lot of attention to now because I have friends in France who are out there working events, weddings, even theaters with their shows. The anecdotes they tell me simply don't apply to the Philippines, and vice versa. People don't behave the same way.

You also have to understand—and maybe I'm saying this because I'm French—that the French are the worst audience, because they behave in a very particular way. There's really this attitude of, “Right, I'm going to figure out what you did. I'm from a culture that's half Latin and half Germanic, so I'm going to give you shit from both directions.” It's going to be very complicated. We're really at the crossroads, so it's very strange.

So friends in Europe tell me about getting heckled—I'm not even sure what the exact French word is—being bothered during a performance. “I'm going to examine that. I'm going to check it. Go on, do it again now that I've imposed impossible conditions on you,” and so on.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
That's exactly what we were saying earlier while we were setting up before the live. We were talking about social media. How many times does it happen when you're working an event, you perform a trick, and immediately afterward the person goes online to look up how you did it, because they'll find videos—and now with artificial intelligence on top of that, it's complicated.

Vincent Hedan:
It's very complicated. We're entering an interesting world where we're going to have to evolve differently.

In the Philippines, you don't really have that issue of audiences disrupting the performance in order to debunk it. Filipinos are very Americanized because their history involves roughly four hundred years of Spanish colonization, hence all the Spanish-sounding names, street names, and cultural elements. Then the Americans came to liberate them and basically said, “Well, we'll stay anyway.” So they stayed for quite a while afterward, and now the country has finally been independent for decades.

They're therefore very Americanized. There are McDonald's everywhere; American brands are extremely present here, for better and for worse. American audiences are generally very pleasant because they completely accept their role as spectators, unless you specifically go out of your way to antagonize them. Filipinos react very positively and enthusiastically. It's incredibly pleasant to perform magic or mentalism for them. They don't resist the experience as long as you're respectful, obviously, of what is happening to them. So it goes very well. It's just not a European “old Europe” audience, or a Japanese audience, or a Korean audience. It's genuinely its own culture.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Of course. And have you managed to adapt? For example, when you put a show together, do you adapt the show to the place?

Vincent Hedan:
I have a double handicap. Because I'm French, when I speak English I have a decent accent, but not a perfect American accent—or even a Filipino-English accent, because they have their own accent. So that's a double handicap for me. Everyone here speaks English, but it still isn't their only language. They have Tagalog, which is the local language, and then dialects depending on the province and the island, and so on.

So English already requires a little effort from them, and from me too. There's a double filter just in communication. Then there are the things I do, the concepts I address, and the presentations I want to bring them into, which sometimes require me to smooth things out a little and make them simpler.

It's fine now. I've had the opportunity to perform here with Justin and another friend, Mateus, who is Portuguese-Filipino and grew up in the United States and Europe, so he has this very mixed, versatile cultural background. We've performed shows together here and it works well. Part of it is also about finding your audience, in a way. If you promote yourself with a certain image, certain language, certain pricing, and certain venues, some people come and some don't.

A lot of the children's magic performed here is for extremely low budgets, so the guys doing it struggle to make a living from it. I'm positioned more toward certain venues and, let's say, a somewhat more affluent demographic. That tends to come with a certain level of education and English fluency, so those audiences are a bit more comfortable with what I do.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
There was a small question related to that, which you've partly answered. You mainly perform in English, right? Someone was asking whether you do your shows in Filipino or not at all.

Vincent Hedan:
It's complicated. Filipino apparently isn't a particularly difficult language. It's just that there are sounds in it—especially NG sounds—that are awkward for me to pronounce. And I'll be honest: after learning German, English, Korean, Japanese... I have my limits. So Filipino, maybe in another life.

Especially since English basically works with everyone anyway. Once or twice I'll throw in a little phrase in the local language, in Tagalog, because it makes them laugh to see a white guy saying one of their words. There's always something amusing about that.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
They're proud too when you make the effort, that's for sure. I'm going to scroll back up a little because there was a question earlier and otherwise we'll miss it. Simon Abbé was asking: in your book About Time, which effect do you use most often?

Vincent Hedan:
That's a good question. Hang on, I'll pull the book out and look inside. Ah, that's funny—we'll be able to talk about something along the way that I wanted to show you, something I've never shown anyone.

To answer Simon, it depends on the conditions. Simon from Belgium—hi, I know him well. It depends. I've got the book here in English, so I don't remember the French title exactly, but I think the first effect in the book is called L'Heure humaine in French. I'll show you the English version; I think I have it here.

Can I do this to test what we were talking about earlier? Screen share like that... and if I do this... Maurice Douda has just sent you a little message saying he's happy to hear you, Vincent. I almost mentioned Maurice earlier because he's been posting regular videos on his YouTube channel for years—which is an insane amount of work—and I think he's performed one or two Earl Nelson effects. I think Envol is in there. Maurice can confirm in the chat or not.

Can you see my shared screen with the book cover? That's the book Simon mentioned. I released it in May, I think. It's a book that only uses a connected watch linked to a remote control. So it works with the PITATA watch, which is the one I wear every day, but there's also the Electricks SB Watch, and the IARVEL watch, which has a remote as well. There are older watches too. Miranda had a watch with a remote, but it's very hard to find now. Turner had one with a remote too, but it's practically impossible to find nowadays because it's been discontinued for years.

The PITATA is the one that suits my needs best. I'll tell you why: it's the only one that has a feature none of the others have, and for me that feature is fundamental. There are actually two features, but they're related—really one and a half.

But don't worry: the material in the book works with any connected watch that has a remote control. In my case, I use Illuminati's remote, called the Thumper V2, which you can find on their website. PITATA also supplies a remote for their watch. Their remote is awful, so I strongly recommend throwing it straight in the trash because it's unusable. That's why I don't want anyone to think I'm doing an advertisement for PITATA. They make some things that are brilliant and some things that belong straight in the garbage. I have no sponsorship; I don't care. I'm telling you the truth.

So the book has five or six routines using just the watch. To answer Simon, there's one effect I really like and perform systematically whenever I'm doing close-up, table-hopping, or cocktails. It's essentially the equivalent of the Invisible Deck, but without cards.

That has an advantage because I love the Invisible Deck. We may talk about it later; I have a version that uses a normal deck, which means I don't need to carry an extra gimmicked deck in my pocket and I save space. But the watch version lets you create the same effect for the audience. The procedure is the same, the emotional impact at the end is the same, except that because no cards are involved, that's one fewer card trick in the repertoire. You can spend your “playing-card credit” on another effect later in the performance.

So for this effect, you take the watch. There are several versions in the book, but I'll describe the simplest one. You take the watch and explain to the people that you can...

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Yes, go ahead. Can I just ask you, if you don't mind, to switch back to full screen? Otherwise we can barely see you. There—
Vincent Hedan:
That's better, we're bigger now. And I'll do this—there, that should be good. Okay. So here's the watch, and you ask people to move the hands on the watch. It's going to be a little difficult to show you because I need to look at what I'm doing at the same time, but basically you can... I don't know whether you can see because of the reflection from my light, it's very difficult, and of course I'm mirrored. Am I being stupid or what? I don't know whether you can see the hands. Anyway, you can move the hands using the little thing—the crown on the side.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
So basically they mix up the hands and all that. But they do it face down.

Vincent Hedan:
They do it face down, and then one of them stops. You ask people to pass the watch from hand to hand. So people make a little circle like this. You give the watch to the person next to you, who gives it to the next person, then the next person, and it goes around this small group of four or five people around you.

The game is that anyone, at any moment, can decide they're going to keep the watch without telling anyone. So it really is a completely free, individual decision for everyone. And while the watch is moving around the group, everyone is allowed to think of any time they personally like—the time they were born, the time of anything at all.

Then someone stops and says, “I'm going to keep the watch. That's my choice.” You ask what time they had chosen, to make it clear that everyone was thinking of something different. You ask the two people on either side, “What time were you thinking of?” One says 8:15, the other says 10:10, and the person who kept the watch wanted 9:30. They look at the watch, and it is showing 9:30. Nine thirty. Okay.

And if you think about it, it's the exact same structure as the Invisible Deck. With the Invisible Deck, I use a version called Circle of Energy, by Nicholas Belleas. It was in the book Neal Scryer and Friends, which is this huge book packed with routines, and there's this little gem inside. He does it with a deck of cards in an envelope. The deck is passed around the group and everybody thinks of a card. One person decides to keep the deck and says, “I was thinking of the Eight of Hearts.” You open the deck and there is one card reversed in the deck: the Eight of Hearts. So it's the Invisible Deck.

But instead of saying, “There's an invisible deck,” which is a very magical kind of presentation, his presentation is very mentalism-oriented. And here it's the same thing: an object goes around, someone stops whenever they want, somebody names something, and the object manifests that thing. Same structure, but with a watch.

So for close-up, to answer Simon, that's the effect I perform all the time. Onstage, there's another one I'll mention, but I won't go into detail because otherwise it gets too complicated. There's a routine built around a Christmas story that I used to perform in the middle of my theater show in Paris, in the same venue where Julien Losa had performed before me, the Comédie Saint-Michel. I told a Christmas story and, at the end, it manifested a particular time chosen by the audience—the same time displayed on a watch I had handed them right at the beginning of the show. So those are my two favorite routines in the book.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Since we're on About Time, if you don't mind, I'll pass along the other questions that came in. We've already answered that one. Simon asks: what app do you go through to use the Illuminati remote and operate the PITATA watch?

Vincent Hedan:
There isn't an app. There's one routine in the book that asks you to preprogram the remote by making it memorize three different times that you'll then send to the watch, but that's an optional routine because there are bonuses in the book for slightly more specific setups.

But in practice, because I use the watch and the remote directly, that's all I need on me. I could be naked in outer space with nothing but the watch and the remote and that would be more than enough, because they communicate directly with each other.

Now, I'm not going to turn this into Illuminati technical support, but there are tutorial videos on the Illuminati website showing how to pair this particular watch with their remote. Once you've done that, it remembers the pairing. So every time you wake up the watch or the remote, it works.

A few seconds ago I said that, for me, the PITATA is the best one. I just wanted to explain why. It has one extremely interesting feature. It has a real crown, whereas the IARVEL, if I remember correctly, just has a knob that spins freely. That's not an issue if none of your routines require the spectator to touch the crown. No problem at all. But in some of my routines, I actually need the spectator to mix up the hands.

With the PITATA, you can pull the crown out. You can turn it and it clicks like a normal crown. And on top of that, it's the only one that genuinely moves the hands when you do it. The SB crown turns too, but it just spins freely; you can't actually use it. You can keep the watch face down and tell people, “Mix the hands,” but nothing is really happening. With the PITATA, you can genuinely do it face up, right in front of people.

And there's another feature that's extremely interesting. Can I show you that? Let me try it on my end first and make sure it works. I don't want to give you a crappy failed demo.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
You don't have battery problems with your watch, though? No more than usual? Because there was quite a lot of negative feedback about the IARVEL watch in particular because it ate batteries.

Vincent Hedan:
That answer is very geographical, because here in the Philippines the battery I need for this watch costs one euro. I buy five and that's basically my year covered. At five euros, I don't really worry about it.

But no, it's not rechargeable by induction or USB or anything like that. There is an actual battery inside. You just check before going onstage that it isn't dead, and then you're fine.

Let me check that everything's working. It looks good. So what I'm going to do is share the screen of the app I use, which is simply the standard PITATA app. I don't know whether people realize this, but this feature is incredibly powerful. Can you see the PITATA screen next to me?

At the same time, maybe you can also see that I have the watch on my wrist. I'm going to set it to another time. So I push the crown in—I'm the spectator—I turn it, turn it, turn it. Now watch the screen and look at what happens to the two times displayed inside the app itself. It has just jumped to 5:46 in blue—the time in the middle at the bottom, 5:46—and that's the time on my watch. Okay.

That's one of the features I wanted, and so far I think it's the only watch that does this. I'd be delighted if someone made another one with the same function. If someone chooses a time—for example, she's thinking of the time her son was born—she sets it on the watch, and you can find out that time either by glancing at your phone or by glancing at a small hidden display somewhere that shows you the information.

So the watch isn't only receiving information. It is also sending information back to you, which you can then interpret, reveal, or build an effect around. That's extremely interesting with this particular watch. Unfortunately, I think it's the only one that does that, unless someone in the chat has another reference, because I'm always interested if other models exist.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
I don't know if you'll see what I mean—this is just a tiny technical detail—but I think PITATA is also the only one where the hands move faster.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes, because the hands aren't locked by the motor, so they don't have to make mechanically logical full rotations. They immediately take the shortest path.

Whether you set the time through the app, through written input, or with the remote, if I press 10:10 while the watch is showing 9:30—so something almost completely opposite—the hands jump to the correct position practically instantly. You don't have to wait forever for them to rotate all the way around until they reach the right time.

I mentioned a moment ago giving the watch to someone, and I also do that onstage: I have them choose a time and then I need to see what they selected. The problem is that the information is mainly displayed on the phone. And I absolutely refuse any visible technology. I've talked about that before, and we can talk about it again if you want, but I wrote a blog article about it and I'll send people there.

So how do you look at a phone screen onstage without holding a phone in your hand? I found a solution. I'm not the only person who's found something like this, but I showed it to some friends here and they liked it, so I'll share it with you. I've never shown this publicly before.

Let me try to do this properly because it's quite funny. Hop, hop, hop. You're onstage—this is a solution for stage performers. There's some reflection because I have a shiny surface on top, but imagine this is a small table, the top of a little side table. You can't see anything unless... you move across like this. And what you actually have is a table that hides a screen.

I also have it on video; that might be easier. I'll share that and we can talk over the animation. Can you see the table onscreen? Okay. This table looks incredibly thin. The stand is a microphone stand, and the top is—what would you call it?—an overhead-projector tray, the kind of tray you'd use at a lecture or something. You can buy it on Amazon or eBay for about fifteen euros. There's a hole in the top and bottom with a little...

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
The French word is escaping me. A screw, so you can screw it on—is that what you mean?

Vincent Hedan:
Exactly, thank you. It has the same kind of screw as the one on the microphone stand, so it almost looks as if it were designed for this. I'd never seen one before, so I was very happy.

And this table hides electronics. It hides a screen. It also hides—you'll see later—the running order of my show. So it takes up no space, it's incredibly light, and as we scroll through the video you'll see the phone screen appear.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Oh yes, that's brilliant. So from the audience's point of view, what they see onstage is just this...

Vincent Hedan:
...extremely minimalist, stripped-down, thin table. There's absolutely no reason to imagine there is any kind of electronic wizardry inside it. But when you, the performer, stand beside the table to look for something, pick up a pen, whatever, you can see the phone screen with the PITATA app—or anything else you want. If you have an electronic impression pad, for example, it can duplicate the writing and let you read it.

So you say, “I absolutely don't want to look,” and you turn your head toward the table—and of course, from your point of view, it's fantastic.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
You could even put crib notes on there for book tests or things like that.

Vincent Hedan:
Exactly. You mention crib notes: if you look at the yellow piece of paper on top—it's a video, so you can't see it very clearly—that's actually a Post-it note. On that Post-it, I've written the list of effects in my show, in order. Okay? Because I'm completely stupid and I can't remember the tricks I'm supposed to perform in the right order.

So you have what we call a set list in English—a running order, I suppose, in French—and it's just sitting on the side. Once again, from the audience's point of view it's an extremely bare table with barely a pen and the paper ball I'm going to throw later to select somebody in the audience.

But from your point of view it's an absolute control station. And here I've only cut one hole to fit a phone. If I wanted an iPad, I'd cut a larger hole. If I wanted two phones, I'd cut two holes: one phone could control lights and music, the other could control the magic. I can basically do whatever I want.

Let me switch back to full screen and show you how it's built, because I like inexpensive solutions and this really costs very little.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
That's exactly the question: how do you get one?

Vincent Hedan:
In terms of thickness, it's thinner than a deck of cards if you put the two side by side. So it's impossible to suspect anything.

Inside, with my system—where's my phone? Here it is. Right, so that's what you see when I'm full screen. Basically the system is simply a phone and this tray. Because it's an overhead-projector tray, it's designed so things don't slide off and fall, which means it has this sort of raised gutter all the way around the edge. I use that border to hide foam board.

I used two layers because I couldn't find 6 mm foam board, so mine is two layers of 3 mm. It costs practically nothing; you can buy it in any stationery shop. You take a craft knife, cut out the shape of the phone, and place the phone inside.

The problem is that now there's an obvious hole. And that's where I found something I'm really pleased with. I use what we call a privacy screen in English—I don't know what you'd call it in French, maybe a privacy protector or screen protector. It's the thing you normally put on a phone so the people beside you can't see what's on your screen.

The problem is that they're mostly sold in phone-sized pieces, while our tables are larger. The table in the video is about twice the size of this tray. But because people now use huge computer monitors at work and don't want colleagues seeing what they're looking at—because they're supposed to be working but they're browsing illegal websites or whatever—you can buy privacy filters for big desktop displays, 27 inches and so on.

So you buy one. They're cheap, on Amazon or wherever. Then you stick it onto the foam board. Mine is literally held on with ordinary tape. And now from here, you see nothing.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
And from there, you can see straight through. That's brilliant. And if you really want to protect it...

Vincent Hedan:
Because the filter has an orientation, it blocks the view in one axis. If you want to protect all four directions, my friend Justin actually used two layers: one oriented one way and another rotated ninety degrees. Then absolutely nothing gets through except a straight vertical viewing angle, and nobody except you can see anything on the screen.

I have a feeling somebody is going to like this and build one very quickly. Hi, David. And it costs nothing. Really, practically nothing. I still have foam board left over and plenty of the privacy film left. It's very easy to make.

It's a great idea even if you don't use electronics. As you said, you can use it for crib notes. If you have a progressive anagram with a logic tree that's too hard to memorize, put the tree on there, pretend you're looking away, and boom—you've got it.

For the backstory, I discovered this approach because I was looking for a way to hide a little display I use called Notifier. For those who know PeekSmith, it's basically the same kind of idea, but made by Illuminati. It's a tiny screen roughly the size of a small Bic lighter or maybe a Sharpie cap. You can palm it and peek the information, but I'm bad at that, so I don't.

What I used to do was put it in my pocket. I have a kind of template permanently set up inside my pocket. I have one for every size and type of suit, clothing, jacket, and so on. On the back I've glued two magnets—I don't know whether you can see them here—just two ordinary little fridge magnets. The display has matching magnets, so it snaps onto them. Click. Okay. Putting it over my face is not the best demonstration.

So it sticks like that. Then, inside my jacket, shirt, coat, whatever, I have an invisible peek. It's not exactly right at the edge; it's about one finger joint down inside the pocket, just deep enough that I can still see it.

The issue is that normally you'd have to do this to look down at it. So I found another little trick. If someone rolls a die—a connected die, for example—or makes a drawing on a piece of paper, or does the watch thing, I tell them I don't want to look. Watch the gesture; it's incredibly simple, very technical, you'll see: “I don't want to see what you're doing.” Then I come back up and, by practically dislocating my neck in this direction, I have a direct line of sight to the display. Instantly I know what's happening.

And while working on that idea, I thought: the brightness is too strong. It can be adjusted, but even at minimum it's too bright. More importantly, this is what I see because I'm looking straight down at it at a perfect ninety-degree angle. But if I tilt it... Right now it isn't disappearing completely because of my lighting, but I've also added a privacy screen on top of the display.

So when it's in my pocket and I'm looking straight down vertically, I can see exactly what's happening. But if you come in from even a thirty-degree angle, from your point of view the display is black. You see absolutely nothing.

And that's when I thought, “This is silly. This works on a tiny display. Why don't we put the same thing across the entire tabletop?” Then we'll have total protection. So yes, that's also the little pocket-and-magnet trick. It holds very well.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
That also ties in with Arthur's question. Doesn't the privacy screen make it harder to use the touchscreen on your...
Vincent Hedan:
...phone, for example? And that's the beauty of it: because it's designed for phones, it remains touch-sensitive. You can still use the touchscreen. So on your table, while you're moving a pen, picking up a glass of water, or whatever, you can use a fingertip to change menus, adjust a setting, change the brightness—anything you want. It remains perfectly responsive to touch.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
And maybe this is a stupid question, but do you have a screen protector on your iPhone, or...?

Vincent Hedan:
Never. I'm insane. I've had iPhones for fifteen years and I've never broken anything. I don't use a passcode, I don't use protection.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Right, that's what I thought. I was just wondering—it would need testing, like everything else—but if you already had a screen... would it still work just as well if you had, you know, a...

Vincent Hedan:
A screen protector. Ah, almost a double layer, you mean: a normal protector plus the privacy screen. That's a good question. We'd have to test it. Someone test it in the chat.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
I'm scrolling back through the questions, just to make sure we get to everyone who asked something. Mathieu Améi asks: who are the best performers you've seen in mentalism, magic, cards, coins, and onstage?

Vincent Hedan:
In my whole life, or just in the Philippines?

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
I think in general. In general—or maybe the ones who influenced you the most.

Vincent Hedan:
Well, I mentioned Attention Magie right at the beginning. There were so many people on that show. Those of us who saw that series were incredibly lucky because the guests were extremely prestigious. At the time, we didn't know what all of them would later become; there were future champions among them.

I remember being very young and having VHS tapes where I'd recorded those shows. There was one man who appeared at least once, definitely, and then later appeared again on Le Plus Grand Cabaret du Monde. That was René Lavand, an Argentinian magician who sadly died a few years ago. I never had the opportunity to see him live.

He lived near Buenos Aires, in a city called Tandil. Richard Kaufman wrote three books about him or with him, unfortunately never translated into French. And for those who remember, he had only one hand because he'd lost an arm. I don't want to say something stupid—I think it was his left arm because he always used his right hand... Wait, no, I'm talking nonsense. He had his left arm; he lost his right arm. That's it.

He lost his right arm in a car accident in Buenos Aires. His forearm was crushed by a car on a sidewalk when he was eight years old. So we're talking the 1900s, 1910s, something like that. Let's just say surgery in Buenos Aires around 1920 wasn't exactly straightforward. They basically told him, “Either you lose everything or you lose the arm.” So he “only” lost the arm.

Obviously that's catastrophic at that age and in that era, but he became an extraordinary magician despite it. And another remarkable thing about his persona is that he always refused to show the missing arm.

There are other magicians, such as Richard Turner, who is blind, or—I've forgotten his name—Mehdi something, who was born with malformed hands and can nevertheless perform palms, faros, really insane card manipulations. Those performers either use, in quotation marks, their disability, or at least make it not the center but an integral part of their presentation.

With René Lavand, what's so striking is that he only reveals it at the end. He tells a story at the end of his show about a man who lost his arm a very long time ago and became an artist, and so on. As the story progresses, you gradually realize he's talking about himself. The story ends with, “Actually, that man is me, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell you this story,” and so on, and that's the finale of the show.

He explained that he had always refused to show his missing arm because he didn't want it to distract people from what he was trying to present. That's an extremely interesting choice. It shows a very strong level of self-awareness.

And he was never a full-time professional magician in everyday life. He worked in a bank his whole life. At the bank, when he was working, he had one of those prosthetic clamps people used at the time, attached to the arm and operated by muscle movement, which gave him the use of two hands in ordinary life. He tried performing magic with it a couple of times and the audience stared at the clamp the entire time. That could obviously be useful in magic because it misdirects attention, but that was absolutely not what he wanted. His goals were very artistic.

So he thought, “We'll put the hand—well, the arm—in the pocket and never mention it.” His hope was that people would assume it was simply a stylistic choice throughout the performance: “Oh, that guy keeps his hand in his pocket all the time. That's his style.” He never, ever mentioned it until the end. And then people suddenly thought, “Oh. So all those miracles we just watched for an hour—on top of everything else, he only had one hand to do them with.” It instantly elevates the entire performance.

And beyond that physical attribute, he was someone who, perhaps like many Argentinian artists of his generation, had a very particular sensitivity. He's almost a contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, who is my favorite Argentinian author and who was blind. So I seem to have a lot of disabled people around me: one is blind, another is missing an arm, Stephen King is blind, Hayao Miyazaki is blind—I'm surrounded by people with problems. I'm not perfect either.

Borges was blind. He was an Argentinian author. I've written blog articles about him; they're on my website, so you can go look at those later. But he and Lavand were contemporaries, and you can feel in René Lavand the same sensitivity toward poetry, toward the milonga, which is a sung poem belonging to that culture.

And look at the texts he uses. He's the guy who does the bread crumbs—the three bread crumbs that go into a cup and keep coming back—and while doing it he recites a Chinese poem. It's insane when you think about it: “I'm going to do tricks with bread crumbs while reciting a Chinese poem.” That's completely crazy.

Then there's his very famous red-and-black routine, Oil and Water, where he says, “It cannot be done more slowly.” He repeats it, then repeats it again, then again, and every time he says it, it becomes more powerful because he performs it more and more slowly.

There's an almost poetic construction to what he does. That inspired me enormously because when you see that at twelve or thirteen years old, it's a huge contrast with what you might find in Earl Nelson or in contemporary magic. And that's interesting because you suddenly think, “Oh, this kind of thing can exist. Other things can exist in this field I thought I knew.” Being exposed to a different style of magic, mentalism, or art in general gives you permission to explore the directions that interest you personally.

There were one or two times when I thought, “I'd like to do this, but I can't, because nobody is going to connect with the idea or the proposition.” Haiku was exactly that. When I created Haiku the first time, I thought, “Who is going to care about 1,850 Japanese poems in a book? I'm going to lose everybody.” But there's no problem. If it's part of your world, it's fine.

Yann Frisch also gave me that advice. When I premiered my show in Paris, he came to either the first or second performance—I can't remember—and we talked afterward. I was telling him about the show, and in the show I talk about Hiroshima, the atomic bomb, and a personal story I experienced that connects to that international history.

At first I wasn't sure. You're French, you're white, you're telling a story about Hiroshima, you're supposed to be doing magic—what exactly is going on here? And I told Yann this. Yann Frisch, everyone knows him, incredible champion, extraordinary artist who also comes from circus, so again you can see the influence of other disciplines in what he does.

I told him, “I'm not sure I actually have the right to express this kind of story or present this kind of material onstage.” And he said, “It's your stage. It's your show. It's your writing. You can do whatever you want. People can say yes, people can say no, but you can't censor yourself at the writing stage over things like that. Otherwise it will never come out at all.”

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
And that actually lets me segue into a question I wanted to ask you, although I think it's going to be a difficult one. Do you have a specific way of creating? I know you're influenced by a lot of things, and cinema in particular is a major influence, but do you have an actual creative process—a specific way you create?

Steeve Marion:
I'm with you on that one, Nico, because I had more or less the same question about influence. We know you're passionate about cinema and that it has had a huge influence on your creations. Tell me if I'm wrong, but that's the impression I have. And in terms of your creativity and all your creations, the contribution of cinema is something that really...
Vincent Hedan:
...has been important across all my creations. Yes. But it could have been something else. We mentioned Laurent Beretta earlier: he was inspired by choreography, by the relationship to the body, and he created beautiful things onstage through that. That's his source of inspiration. I'm sure he's good with cinema too, but for other people it might be music.

Yves Carbonnier, for example, is a very well-known card magician in France and he's passionate about cooking. So naturally he mixes the two, and that becomes his own world. Yann Frisch comes from circus, so of course there are circus elements in what he does.

For me, it's cinema. I'm not entirely sure why I fell into cinema when I was young. It's not exactly original—lots of people love movies—but in my case one thing that reinforced it was a book by Christian Chelman, obviously a very famous and creative magician. In Urban Legends, in one of the forewords, he quoted someone—I can't remember who, an Italian name—and that person said that drawing inspiration only from magic in order to create magic was madness. It's almost a creatively incestuous relationship. You just keep looping inside your own field and asking yourself, “What am I going to make as the fourteenth version of Matrix, or the Ambitious Card, or this thing, or that thing?”

We were saying earlier that you shouldn't censor yourself from themes and ideas you might want to explore. But if you never expose yourself to those themes in the first place, how are you supposed to explore them?

Cinema has a huge advantage. It's existed for less time than magic, yet paradoxically it has developed much faster than we have, and cinema allows itself to do absolutely everything. Even the same filmmaker can do wildly different things.

Look at Spielberg, this little director who's coming up right now—people are starting to learn his name. If you look at Spielberg's filmography, it makes no sense. He makes a film about the Holocaust, a film about dinosaurs, a film set in space, an end-of-the-world film, films about the history of cinema... I've forgotten the title of that recent almost-autobiographical one. He puts out work on every possible subject and in every possible style. He shoots black-and-white, he shoots color, he makes action movies, he makes Minority Report, he makes all sorts of completely different things.

Nobody says to him, “You can't do that. You're only allowed to stay inside horror or science fiction or whatever. Why are you using different actors? What's going on here?” No. Absolute freedom. Literature is the same. Stephen King doesn't only write horror. Borges didn't only write intellectual masturbation, even though he did plenty of that at one point.

That's interesting because if you draw inspiration from a field that gives itself that much freedom, it gives you permission to be free too.

And sometimes in cinema—especially auteur cinema or independent cinema, because they have less of a studio behind them telling them to make industrial products—you see filmmakers attempt things with staging, with writing, with rhythm. It's also interesting to confront not just cinema, but cinema where you have no foothold at all.

When you discover Korean or Japanese cinema, even contemporary films, you sometimes have no point of reference. The culture is completely different, the rhythm is completely different. I've seen Japanese films where there is basically no plot. Something happens for two hours, you have no idea what's going on, and only at the very end do you realize, “Oh, right. That's what we've been talking about for the last two hours. Now we finally have the resolution.” From our point of view, the actors behave in completely bizarre ways, obviously.

When works like that knock you off balance, you can ask yourself, “Okay, now what do I do in my own field in response to this kind of thing?”

I talked about this on my blog too, because sometimes the conclusion is almost depressing. There's an animated film by Isao Takahata called Grave of the Fireflies. I don't know whether you've seen it, or whether people in the chat have. It's magnificent. For anyone who doesn't know it, I'll show some images because otherwise people won't know what we're talking about. It's really incredible. Everyone recognizes the title, of course, Japanese title. I'll scroll through some pictures.

It's harsh. It's very harsh. Extremely harsh. And for me it was a revelation. I don't remember the exact year anymore. I must have been eighteen, twenty, something like that. I watched the film completely by accident.

I had insomnia one June during a very hot summer. It may actually have been 2003. That didn't help you sleep. No, it did not help me sleep. I didn't sleep all night.

I'm watching TV because I can't sleep, watching all sorts of crap at three in the morning that I wouldn't normally watch, and I land on Arte. By incredible luck I arrive during the very first minute of the very first scene of this film. So I catch the program right from the beginning.

I look at the images and, having grown up in France in the early 1990s watching French television, I'm used to Le Collège fou, fou, fou, Grendizer, Saint Seiya, all those shows, and—what was that soccer one called again? I've forgotten. You know what I mean, Captain Tsubasa, the soccer players. Nothing whatsoever to do with Grave of the Fireflies.

And what's crazy is that at the time, when people saw Japanese animation on television, I think it was mostly on TF1 because they'd bought the reels in bulk and just broadcast them. People thought, “Oh, it's a cartoon, therefore it's for children.” Same as Disney, The Fox and the Hound, The Sword in the Stone, all of that.

So parents put their kids in front of it and everything seemed fine because there wasn't sex, there wasn't a problem, it all looked clean enough. And that trained an entire generation of adults watching their children watch this stuff—and the children themselves—to think: Japanese animation equals children, equals stupid children's entertainment with soccer balls, monsters, robots...

Steeve Marion:
Fighting and all that.

Vincent Hedan:
Exactly. And dumb stories with nothing very deep in them. So that's the mindset I had because I grew up with that in the early 1990s.

And then Grave of the Fireflies begins. There—this is one of the first scenes you see onscreen. With the famous candy tin. There it is, the iconic tin that you can now buy online. I've seen it for sale. I tried to order one here, but getting things delivered to the Philippines can be complicated, so I never got it.

Anyway, I watch the film begin and think, “Okay, I recognize the format.” The faces, the animation style, the drawing—this is Japanese animation. You recognize those very characteristic faces. So I start watching because the visual language is familiar to me, and then it destroys me because it's the first animated film I see that's genuinely for adults.

I mean the story has depth. It has an almost literary quality. It's actually adapted from a novel that itself is based on the true story of the people portrayed in the film. The story is catastrophic. It's set during World War II, with two children trying to survive the firebombing of Japan. So obviously we're not in Captain Tsubasa anymore with a soccer ball flying toward the goal. This is something else.

The film is hell. I watch it, it hits me emotionally like a truck, and I'm twenty years old and I stay awake all night afterward because I realize that Japanese animated cinema has only existed for roughly a hundred years. I looked into it afterward. It's genuinely very, very recent.

Magic has existed for at least five thousand years—we have traces that may go back even further, though that would need checking. And yet when you say you're a magician in France, the Philippines, or anywhere else, people say, “Oh, you do children's birthday parties.”

So magic still suffers from the same stigma that Japanese animation had in France in 1990 because of Captain Tsubasa and shows like that. Except somehow animation managed to transcend the category of “only for children.” Now there is animation for a fifty-year-old housewife, for teenagers, for retirees. There are anime about postmen, war, geopolitics, space. Every subject that exists in written form or live-action film exists in animation too.

That was the first time I told myself, “Okay. I refuse to continue making magic if I'm constantly limiting myself and refusing to explore territory that isn't normally considered ours.”

And coming back to what we said earlier about Christian Chelman and the Italian quote—that we shouldn't draw inspiration only from magic because that becomes incestuous—it's the same idea. Christian Chelman, Eugene Burger, Jeff McBride and others wouldn't be doing bizarre magic if they constantly censored their creativity. At some point, if you want to talk about the things they talk about in bizarre magic, you first have to give yourself permission to talk about them.

And if cinema does it, literature does it, music does it... When you listen to bands like Marilyn Manson criticizing society, or Rammstein, or others, you can think, “I came here to dance and listen to dumb music. I wasn't expecting deep lyrics.”

Steeve Marion:
It's about breaking the existing codes.

Vincent Hedan:
Totally. And beyond that, you have to realize that you may be the only person who can talk about a particular subject in that particular way.

Someone who grew up like me—I'm not saying I'm special or more important than anyone else—but my cultural background, my cultural and mental profile, is probably unique simply because I'm the person I am, just as you're the people you are.

And if you stop yourself from discussing a subject, that's a shame because maybe you were the only person who was going to talk about it that way. Then nobody ever will. That perspective is lost. It's gone. It never enters the broader body of work that exists.

Sorry, that was very, very long. But it's like everything else: if you have two magicians presenting the same act, the audience will experience two completely different things because it won't be introduced the same way or told the same way.

Steeve Marion:
And that's important. So while we're talking about cinema, I want to ask you this: what's your favorite movie about magic? I mean magic as the subject. You have The Prestige, Now You See Me, things like that. I want your opinion.

Vincent Hedan:
There's The Illu... The Illusionist is very good. It actually came out almost at the same time as The Prestige, more or less in parallel, while Now You See Me came later. They all have their strengths. There were also earlier films about Houdini that were very good.

More recently there was a series with Brody, I think—Adrien Brody did a series. Fantastic actor, by the way, in The Pianist, which was an extraordinary film.

But to answer your question, if I had to choose my favorite among films about magic, I'm going to give the unoriginal answer: The Prestige. And I'll tell you why.

First, the film has undeniable cinematic quality. It's genuinely good. It's not just, “We like it because it's about magic, even though as a movie it's garbage.” And then there's Christopher Nolan, obviously. A little beginner who's just getting started. You can tell he's feeling his way around and looking for his style.

Speaking of style and codes, he made The Odyssey—which I haven't... I haven't seen The Odyssey yet, so don't tell me anything about it.

Steeve Marion:
I won't say anything, then. But Nolan is interesting too. He's very clearly influenced by Kubrick rather than Spielberg, and he's sort of the “new generation,” although he's starting to get older now. But he too has made a war film with Dunkirk, he's done space, he's done Batman—huge blockbuster spectacle that hits you over the head, but done very, very well. I love Nolan's Batman films, by the way. So yes, he also gives himself permission to move around instead of doing only sexy films or horror or whatever.

Vincent Hedan:
Exactly. So why The Prestige? Because in my opinion it's the film for non-magicians that most accurately represents what it can feel like to be us.

There's the tortured side, constantly searching for methods, maybe fighting among ourselves. There's also the reality of putting on a show: it's not easy, it costs money, audiences don't necessarily show up. Then there's this obsessive dimension that destroys everything—the obsession destroys his marriage, his friendships, absolutely everything around him.

There are many fascinating points there. The Illusionist, by contrast, is more of a mystery with magic around it. And a romance. There's a romance on the side. Romance. Horrible.

And I have a much harder time with Now You See Me because it's not really magic at all. It's visual effects presented as magic. But I absolutely recognize one major value in Now You See Me: it created a new generation of enthusiasm for magic.

I suspect the revival of magic we saw in the early 2010s is partly connected to that. If you remember the Got Talent shows before that—American, British, French, they're all related because the producers sell formats to one another, so you get similar content. Strangely enough, masked magicians would suddenly appear everywhere in the same year. I wonder why. Pure coincidence.

If you remember those shows, you had the singing dog, the dancer, whatever, all the people with the little stories designed to make the judges cry. And there were magicians too, already. But ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, every time a magician walked out, the judges would go, “Oh no, not a magician. This is going to be some guy doing something terrible.” And, to be fair, the magic very often was cheesy and terrible.

Nowadays, when someone comes on those shows with magic—although we're probably starting to come out the other side of that trend now—the reaction is different. Tonio went through that, for example. Maurice Douda did the show too, although unfortunately his segment wasn't broadcast. Lots of people we know have gone through it. David Stone did it, Jean-Luc Bertrand, and so on.

Now you say you're a magician and the judges are more like, “Okay, we're ready to watch something original and interesting involving magic.” Magic gained legitimacy. They basically decided that magicians were going to stop being the clowns of the format and would be given a real place. It became more serious.

And Now You See Me contributed to that. I've met people—I won't say who because I don't want to date them historically—who tell me, “I knew nothing about magic. I saw Now You See Me, thought it looked cool, thought, ‘Being a magician looks fun,’ and that sparked my passion.” For me it was Attention Magie and other things. For them, it was that.

Steeve Marion:
It's funny because The Prestige really is incredible. I'm the same: I already love Christopher Nolan and his films, and The Prestige is so well structured.

Vincent Hedan:
It comes from a novel originally, written by his brother—Jonathan, I think, Nolan. I haven't read the book, which is a serious failing on my part; I need to get around to it one day.

But when you mention structure, I think you really feel that in The Prestige. Nolan likes playing with time, with temporal construction, and you can feel an almost chapter-based structure, with constructions that echo back to earlier moments and so on.

But as a piece of cinema, the film is beautiful. The actors are excellent. Hugh Jackman—normally he's just the hedgehog with claws—and here he's playing a serious, interesting role. He's a superb actor. Scarlett Johansson also gets a very good role rather than just playing some half-hooker in another movie.

So the casting, the music, everything has a very high level of quality. Sorry for my violently sophisticated film criticism.

Steeve Marion:
And it's related because there was a question further down about your use of memory. That's another major theme in your creations, and it also helped make your name, in quotation marks, because you won first prize with Rainman. Did that effect come from the film? And did you build it that way because, at the time, there weren't many major effects around prodigious memory? At least in France, at that time, it wasn't very widespread. Was it really the movie that inspired you to create that effect and made you think, “Damn, I need to...”?
Vincent Hedan:
If by “inspired” you mean I had absolutely nothing, watched the movie, and suddenly had the idea—no. It would be a lie to say that's what happened. But did the film help me accept that memory, combined with playing cards, could be an interesting theme to present to an audience? Yes.

There's also a little story behind that, because earlier you were asking why I ended up in mentalism instead of doing more “traditional” magic first, and then we went off onto other subjects. Let me go back a little and connect the dots, because everything is linked somewhere in the galaxy of all this.

I was doing magic, I was also doing mentalism, and I never made a huge distinction between the two. I've talked about that in one of my books. To me, it's all illusionism: we're creating illusions; the format can change.

So I created this routine. Rain Man, the film, was an influence in the sense that it gives memory a particular emotional sensitivity. The character is very endearing—Best Actor Oscar, by the way, so they didn't exactly mess that up.

Then I entered the competition—or rather, before that, I performed the routine at the CAMP magic club. Maurice will remember. CAMP stands, if I remember correctly, for Collège des Artistes Magiciens du Poitou, in Poitiers. Frantz Réjasse from CC Éditions was there, Maurice Douda, Stéphane Chenevière also comes from that group, with his book Altitude. He also won first prize in card magic, I think in 2001, with a vampire-themed act. Altitude is an extraordinary book, packed with material.

So I performed the routine at the club, and Frantz and Maurice said, “Maybe you should consider entering this in competition. You should probably film it and send the video to the FFAP to see whether they'll accept it.”

So I filmed it and sent it in. At the FFAP at the time—I don't know how it works now—you had to submit a video first so they could make sure you weren't going to show up with sponge balls, foam penises, and terrible nonsense. They basically screened you by video beforehand.

I sent the video and they said, “Okay, you can come, but based on what you're doing you have a choice between the card magic category”—which was a category of its own; I think there was close-up, card magic, stage, children's magic, miscellaneous, and then mentalism—“so: card magic or mentalism.”

I asked what the practical difference was. They told me card magic would obviously be very card-focused. In my act there was nothing but cards, so it fit card magic perfectly. The problem was that the jury member judging technical difficulty would probably give me zero, because the entire point of the act was to make it look as though nothing technical was happening. Things were happening, obviously, but I was hiding them. That's sort of the point of magic, but, well, competition judging is competition judging. So there was a real risk of losing points on technique.

They also said I could enter it as mentalism. That worked too, although my act was about memory. I wasn't reading anybody's thoughts. I was reading my own memory, so to speak. That's different.

But in mentalism I was allowed twelve minutes, whereas at the time card magic was limited to eight. And since I'm someone who talks far too much—as you can clearly see—and who performs slow routines, that mattered. The act originally had six phases; I later shortened it to four. I thought, “For safety, and because this is more mental than dexterity-based, we'll enter it as mentalism.”

I performed it and won, tied with the only other competitor in the category that year. And from that point on I became somewhat labeled as a mentalist. When you win a prize in, I don't know, gymnastics or javelin, you win inside a category and then people associate you with that category.

So I ended up with the mentalism label, even though in my book Amnesia there are cheating routines, illusion routines, and so on. That's more or less how I got there.

Memory is a subject that interests me, but I don't consider myself an expert in memory in the way Vincent Delourmel or Benoît Rosemont are, for example. They genuinely know memory and practice it. Rosemont knew Charles Barbier very well, among others. I met him too—a very nice man who did perpetual calendar demonstrations and things like that.

Those people know what they're talking about when they discuss memory because it's genuinely their field. They use real memory tools. I pretend. I create illusions of memory with Pi Max, with memorized-deck routines, and so on.

Steeve Marion:
But that's exactly what's interesting. And on the other hand, I agree with you that in magic we may be categorized too much sometimes. Once you're placed in a category, it can be very difficult to get out of it.

I don't remember who we were talking about this with, but someone was telling us about putting their show online on entertainment-booking websites and nobody ever knew which category to put it under in order to sell it. I wonder if it was Clément who told us that. I think it was Clément.

Vincent Hedan:
And again, the answer can come from somewhere outside magic itself. Going back to this idea of not having an incestuous relationship with our own field.

Look at music. It's obvious there. Some bands only do rock. Rammstein doesn't make classical music. Marilyn Manson has done a little instrumental work, but look at Queen, or Radiohead. Radiohead gives itself permission to do electronic music, rock, ballads, piano in an attic with nothing but acoustic sound. They don't care. Their attitude is basically, “Our style is us. We're Radiohead. You come to see us, and we'll show you whatever we want to show you.”

Or Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is interesting. He's ancient now—I apparently listen to old things—but there's a story about him that I find fascinating. He was doing country, blues, things like that, very inspired by Black American musicians of the time, and he was very good at it. Great. He built a small audience through that—a “small” audience that became a huge audience.

Then one day he basically said, “I'm bored. Electric guitar.” He started playing electric guitar and rock in concerts. At the first shows where he walked onstage with an electric guitar, people booed him because they were thinking, “No. I paid ninety dollars to see you sing ballads with a piece of straw in your mouth and an acoustic guitar in your hand. I don't give a shit about your electric guitar.”

And his answer was basically, “No, no. You're not here to hear what you want to hear. You're here to hear what I want to offer you. That's the deal.”

I won't go too far into that because it's a huge subject, but I invite people to go to my blog and search for “Chancel”—C-H-A-N-C-E-L. Jacques Chancel was a French television host. I never saw him live because I'm too young, but he had an interesting idea. He said—I'm paraphrasing—that you shouldn't give audiences what they already know they want. You should give people what they don't yet know they're going to like.

For him, the purpose of television wasn't simply to feed people the same mush they expected so they could turn on the TV, receive exactly what they expected, and feel they'd gotten what they paid for. There was also an idea of awakening or discovery: “We're going to show them things we think they'll like because they have the cultural background and the appetite for them, but they don't know it yet. They simply haven't been exposed to those things.”

I think we can give ourselves the same permission in magic, and I'm far from the only one doing it. When Christian Chelman performs bizarre magic for people who have never seen that before, they go, “Oh, so this is magic too. This is another kind of magic that exists.”

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
By the way, I've just put Vincent's blog directly in the comments with all the articles.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes, and it's free. There are about two hundred articles, both video and written.

Steeve Marion:
And when we put up the replay—when Nicola puts up the replay—we'll also include all the links to your shop, all your creations, your website and so on. We do that systematically, and we'll put all the links back in tomorrow.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Go ahead, Nico—well, I was just going to say, since we're coming back a little... Oh yes, David Ethan was mentioning Le Grand Échiquier by Jacques Chancel. Yes, exactly.

I was going to say: since we're coming back to your creations, maybe we should talk a little about the latest one. About Time, which Simon mentioned, was actually the one before the latest. The newest one is Mental Theater.

Vincent Hedan:
About Time wasn't exactly a niche book, but in the sense that if you don't own the watch, the book is useless to you. So naturally it was aimed at a limited number of people.

I'd started accumulating lots of routines dedicated to specific electronic tools—the Illuminati printer, for example, then the die, then the watch. With the watch, that was the first category where I felt the gauge had finally filled up: “Okay, now I have enough routines to justify a book.” So I published that in May.

Then almost immediately I started working on Mental Theater, which, strangely or perhaps not, connects with many of the themes we've just been discussing. There's a cinematic influence. I talk about the show I performed in Paris. The book contains the opening effect—what we'd call the opener in English—the introductory effect from my show. It's a routine about luck.

And in my show, I talk about Hiroshima. So I tell a story. I'll summarize it very quickly because it's extraordinary, and people can go look it up on Netflix. There's a documentary about this man, and he has a Wikipedia page; he's quite well known now.

His name, if I'm not mistaken, is Tsutomu Yamaguchi. If I just say that name, nobody knows what I'm talking about. He was an engineer, in his early twenties in 1945, who traveled around solving engineering problems and doing that kind of work.

On August 6, 1945, he was in Hiroshima for work. It wasn't his home city; he was there doing his ordinary job. Except that on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima and destroyed everything for miles around. Almost nothing survived. Buildings were annihilated. I visited Hiroshima many years later and there are still ruins preserved as memorials.

Tsutomu was a few kilometers from the explosion—I don't remember exactly how far. He wasn't right at ground zero, but he still took the full blast. He was burned all over, temporarily blinded by the explosion. His clothes were either torn off or melted into his skin. You have to imagine the nightmare. Hiroshima was catastrophic. People have somewhat forgotten, fortunately in a way because it was so long ago.

He survived and managed to travel home. Two days later he arrived back home in Nagasaki. Then on August 9, 1945, the second atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, destroying that city as well. The United States wanted to demonstrate that the first bombing had not been an accident and that they were capable of repeating the technological feat.

So Tsutomu had a second atomic bomb dropped on him—and survived again, which is completely insane. He lived into his nineties and became a major advocate against nuclear weapons: nuclear power for energy, but not nuclear weapons. Japan itself rejected nuclear weapons after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You can imagine the sales pitch would have been difficult after the population had already experienced them twice.

His story is extraordinary because he belongs to an extremely small group. The Japanese government researched this, and there were literally only a handful of people—around fifty-six people—who, through historical coincidence, were exposed to both bombings one after the other.

The question I ask in the show—and remember, this is right at the beginning of the show; I open with two atomic bombs—is this: was Tsutomu unlucky because he experienced two utterly improbable atomic explosions? The odds of being in exactly that alignment seem impossible. Or was he lucky because he survived both?

It's the ultimate example of the glass being half full or half empty. You can't have one interpretation without the other, except both sides are catastrophic.

You also need to understand that many people survived even one atomic bombing. There were enormous numbers of victims, but also many survivors. Yet afterward, their lives were often destroyed because everybody knew what had happened to them. They had marks on their bodies, medical histories. People didn't want to marry them, touch them, or work with them because they thought, “You were affected by the bomb.”

There was still a lot of magical thinking in Japan in 1945: “Maybe I'll be infected. We don't know what's happening.” So survivors became untouchable—literally untouchable.

So what kind of life is that? Do you consider yourself unbelievably lucky or unbelievably unlucky? You're alive, you have children, you have a life, you eventually become famous. It's extremely complicated.

Then, after that introduction, we perform a routine about luck. That's the routine explained in the book. And what I explain in Mental Theater is that you absolutely do not have to tell the Hiroshima story when you perform the routine. It's simply a kind of introductory tale that brings in the concept. Then you can decide whether or not you want to use it.

In the same way, the book includes a story about my grandfather, André, my paternal grandfather. I'd had that story in my head forever and never dared to turn it into an effect because I kept thinking about my family and about people who had lived through similar experiences.

Back to World War II again: my grandfather was a captain in a military unit that became some of the first French prisoners of war. They were unlucky—again, the theme of luck. They went into the forest near their camp, close to the German border, for a training exercise. They practically had wooden rifles; it was basically, “Let's go into the forest and see whether we can survive for two days.”

Then they turned a corner around a bush and there were German soldiers—the Nazis—right in front of them. Hands up, and off they went to a prisoner-of-war camp. Thankfully it wasn't a concentration camp, but German POW camps were still no picnic.

He ended up very far away, I think near Düsseldorf on the other side of Germany. He survived in catastrophic conditions, which he later told us about.

And none of that is something you can predict. You attend Saint-Cyr, the military academy, you're twenty-two years old, you're committing yourself to your country with grand ideals—and then at the very beginning of the war you get captured like an idiot and spend five years in a camp. At some point you probably think, “Maybe I made a poor career choice.”

I tell that story in the effect and ask people in the audience to rearrange the blocks—the bricks—of his story into the right order. Then we discover whether the chronology makes sense, and it becomes a way of encouraging people to think about the chronology of their own lives too.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
It's really... I loved your latest book, personally. Honestly, there's a lot in it. There was a question about it: someone asked me whether, in a way, it was in the same line as Your Mind Is My Playground.

Because when you look at all your creations, as you were saying, you have material around prodigious memory, then Tarot—which we may talk about later—with Devil's Tarot, which is really fantastic too. And then you have routines like the ones in Your Mind Is My Playground, and book tests, and so on. Since you've read all of Vincent's books, you could almost answer the question yourself.

For me, the answer is clearly yes: it's in the same spirit. Obviously you didn't want to call it Your Mind Is My Playground 4. But for people wondering, since you've also published the connected-watch book and you touch on many different subjects, somebody asked me that question, so I'm passing it on.

Vincent Hedan:
No, it's a legitimate question. If you take a book like Multitude, Amnesia, or Rainman, you're very much in card magic, and that will appeal to a certain audience. The watch book clearly depends on a particular prop, so in that sense it's almost deliberately selective.

Devil's Tarot is similar. The prop itself is ordinary, but if you don't like Tarot, the book obviously isn't for you. Or if you're not comfortable with the subject—we can talk about that later.

But Your Mind Is My Playground, the trilogy that goes with it, and Mental Theater are absolutely in the same lineage.

The idea is that I don't describe those effects primarily to say, “Look how brilliant the method is,” even though the methods are extremely solid and often extremely simple. They're usually paper-and-pencil methods, or things you can build at home—very straightforward, in the sense of easy to make. We're not talking about hours and hours of construction work.

I've had people receive the book and two days later send me photos of the envelopes they'd made for the André effect. You can build them immediately; there's no problem.

Steeve Marion:
Exactly. Nico, the first thing you told me was, “The first routine is incredible.” Without giving too much away, the first routine in the book is the one with the postcards, right?
Vincent Hedan:
Method-wise, there's practically nothing to it. You print the postcards, you're ready to go, and you have a great effect.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Thank you. It's true that we both really like the theme of travel and all that. And honestly, for anyone who doesn't have the book, just that routine alone is worth getting the book for. Really.

Vincent Hedan:
No, but seriously—yes, shameless promotion. To answer your question, the connections are made a little like that.

You've noticed it because you've read them, and you can tell me if I'm making this up, but in the Your Mind trilogy and in Mental Theater, the idea is to be inspired by real stories or fictional stories—to be inspired by something other than, “Here's my fourteenth version of the Sack's Dice Trick,” or whatever. To have something a little more original thematically.

That also means some of the stories in my books are my stories. The Hiroshima story is something anyone can tell. But the story about my grandfather—what I explain in the book is that, obviously, you're not going to take photographs of my grandfather and tell the same story. That would be insane unless you're an extraordinary actor and can interpret it properly.

But maybe someone in your own life—a grandparent, a friend, a colleague—has an incredible story. People often don't realize they have completely extraordinary stories around them and never use them. I can already think of examples, but I don't want to derail us immediately. We can come back to that later.

So there's that idea: what are you inspired by, and how can an inspiration that apparently has nothing to do with magic become a magical experience for an audience?

There's also a very strong participatory dimension in the book. Very few of the effects are things you do to someone. Most of them are things you do with someone. The participants are heavily involved in the procedure, sometimes even in embodying the hero of the story.

There are effects where I almost don't need to be there. In the fruit effect, for example, I'm basically a facilitator. The participants are the ones preventing everybody else from dying. That's quite interesting.

Then there are methodological connections too. Bella Ciao, which was another postcard effect in the trilogy: I took its method and applied it to something else.

There are methods I really like because they're inexpensive, reliable, require almost no thought, and are obvious to use. And you can reapply them to other things because the story changes and the props take on a different visual identity.

So yes, it's in the same general lineage. I wouldn't exactly say it's a book “for beginners,” but—tell me if I'm wrong—I don't think there are any real technical or mental barriers to performing the material.

After that, as we always say, there's a lot of work on presentation. There's always work somewhere.

And this almost answers a criticism I've never liked because it seems so meaningless to me: people saying, “The most important thing is the presentation.” They often say that to avoid having to learn anything technical.

Steeve Marion:
Yes, yes. Like, “Why bother learning faros?”

Vincent Hedan:
Exactly. “If you presented things properly, you could just do a self-working trick.” And strangely, when you hand those same people a self-working trick and put them onstage and ask them to actually perform theater, suddenly nobody's volunteering.

So yes, I'm happy to say presentation is the most important thing. That's true. But exactly: there is always a minimum amount of work required.

And as we were saying earlier about social media, everything now has to move quickly, grab people instantly, and so on. That's another interesting dimension.

What was his name—wasn't it Oseland? A young English magician who published a book about magic for social media. Ah, I know the name, but anyway, I translated a book about magic and visual magic. They sent me the translation project and I saw, “Magic for social networks, on a phone,” all the things I personally hate.

Then I read the book, and once again it's proof that you shouldn't close yourself off too quickly. You realize the guy has genuinely thought deeply about his subject.

That also reminds me of an anecdote about Dan and Dave, the Buck twins. They're American twins who did a lot of—what was it called again?—cardistry, all that juggling with cards and decks. Again, the absolute opposite of what I do.

They did an interview with—I can't remember who, maybe Theory11 at the time—and said something that really hit me.

Normally, if a magician arrives at a table and meets people, it takes more than two minutes before the audience truly understands and experiences the fact that this person is a magician. There's “hello,” then the beginning of the effect, then the procedure—which is often boring—and then finally you reach the ending and go, “Ta-da, something actually happened.”

Dan and Dave's counterpoint was: “We need five seconds.”

Because what they do is so explosive, so visual, so immediate—a card change, an extremely fast Ambitious Card moment without even selecting a card, and so on—that it takes them far less time for people to understand the “business card” of what they do.

So you could absolutely study that field—social-media magic with an extremely fast, visual hook, or what Dan and Dave do—and think, “That's how I'm going to open people's minds at the beginning. Then, once they've given me some trust, time, and respect, maybe we can move into something longer.”

I think that's a problem we all have as magicians.

I experienced something similar not too long ago—well, a while ago now—with one of Ben Earl's books, because I love Ben Earl's work. When I first received the book and read it, I thought, “Yeah, maybe this is a little too simple.”

Then you read it a second time and really take time to analyze the concepts he's describing, and you think, “This is incredibly simple—but do it in front of real people and it's insane.”

And I don't mean this badly, but sometimes you put yourself through hell doing things that are absurdly complicated. I'm not saying Ben Earl isn't technical; he's an outstanding card technician. But sometimes you work incredibly hard on complicated material while he's offering you something very simple, and the first time you do it you think, “Actually, he understands exactly what his magic needs.”

He has also really—what's the word in French?—streamlined a lot of what he does. Refined it, reduced it to its simplest essence. I know because I worked through his book Less Is More, I think that's the title. I don't know the French title.

He takes something, develops it, then simplifies it, simplifies it, simplifies it until only the pure essence remains.

And that brings us briefly back to René Lavand, because there's a passage you can probably find online—it was on Le Plus Grand Cabaret du Monde—and it was a phrase he used often. It's probably on YouTube. He said, “There is a difference between simplism and simplicity.”

It sounds a little literary, but it's essential.

Simplism means simplifying something at the expense of understanding, at the expense of quality. It becomes almost stupid because you've dumbed it down to the level you imagine your audience—or yourself—to be at.

Simplicity is something else. Something can be simple and beautiful. You see that in Japanese painting, Picasso did it too, and you see it in writing.

Borges—I'm going to connect everything again, sorry—talked about this too. I think the lecture is online. I bought it years ago. He gave a lecture at the Collège de France in 1980, three years before I was born, so I was a little late.

And he gave the lecture in French, because this lunatic spoke six languages fluently even though Spanish was his native language. The lecture is incredible; there are wonderful things in it.

He explains that when he was young—fifteen, twenty, twenty-five—he was already writing and already recognized because he came from a family of writers. He wrote very well, but the older he got, the more he simplified his language.

And when you read his early work, it's obvious. There are Pléiade editions of him, or small paperback collections. Some of the early short stories are almost incomprehensible. He uses extremely sophisticated words, and the ideas are monstrously complex. I've nearly torn my brain apart trying to understand him.

He's one of the few authors I cannot read in English. My English isn't bad, but with Borges I have to read the French translation. Otherwise I start tearing my eyebrows out. It's impossible.

But as he gets older, his vocabulary becomes simpler and simpler. Somebody in the audience noticed that and asked, basically, “Why does your vocabulary become poorer as you get older? What's going on?”

And Borges said, “Because I don't want to make people leave the act of reading.”

He wanted people to stay immersed in the work. If you have to pull out a dictionary every two seconds or ask someone, “What does the paragraph I just read even mean?”, you're no longer inside the emotion or the understanding of what the writer is trying to communicate.

Again, that's a devastatingly powerful idea because you start thinking: maybe we can simplify our procedures. Maybe we can simplify our instructions.

The number of magicians I see repeating the same instruction three times to a spectator, with none of the three versions phrased the same way... Either all three versions are bad, or one is good and the other two are unnecessary. You don't need to say the same thing three times.

If your instruction is correctly written, delivered once, understood immediately, and placed at the right moment, don't repeat yourself. It's useless.

Sorry if that sounds slightly brutal.

Steeve Marion:
No, you're completely right.

Vincent Hedan:
When you do theater, there's also this notion of text that has been written and memorized. That doesn't mean it's frozen forever and gathering dust. But when I perform Rainman, it is written. I rehearsed it beforehand. I memorized my script.

The complication is that there's a spectator involved. That's one of the difficulties of magic. You write your script, then you go onstage and events don't happen exactly as written.

There's always a degree of improvisation you need to master. You have to know how to write with gaps or flexible zones, where you think, “Okay, people are probably going to go in this direction. Let's prepare for that. Maybe I need several possible outs.”

But the number of people I see improvising their entire script in a stage show... If you're doing cocktails and nobody warned you what the conditions would be, of course you can freestyle a little. But if you're doing an actual show and improvising absolutely everything—and you're not good at it—that's unfortunate.

Steeve Marion:
Yes, absolutely.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
And while we're here, before I forget, there were some other questions. Yes, there was the question about electronics. But wait, there was one before that. One I found interesting: how has your use of artificial intelligence influenced or changed your magic?

Vincent Hedan:
I hadn't prepared an answer for that one. Not that I prepared answers for everything else, but that's the first time anyone has asked me that, so I haven't already beaten the subject to death in my own head.

A simple answer would be technical.

There are tools now that simply didn't exist before and that rely entirely on artificial intelligence. There's no other practical way to do the same thing. With other tools, sometimes you can go back to analog methods or “old-school” methods, in quotation marks.

One example—and I won't be able to show it because it isn't mine anyway, so never mind—is if people use the PeekSmith app or MysterSmith, which is the app I used until very recently. MysterSmith is excellent. It's by Benke Smith, a brilliant, incredibly nice Hungarian developer who makes wonderful things.

Among other features, it has speech recognition. Speech recognition itself can still be done without AI because it runs locally on the phone. So let me give you an example.

Imagine we have the watch and the phone. My preferred setup would be onstage, where you have a microphone feeding into the phone and the phone itself is hidden outside the visible staging. Or you're in a café and your phone is sitting on the table. I personally think that's a shame, but it's a possible setup.

So: watch, microphone or no microphone, and phone.

Inside the app, you turn on speech recognition. It happens locally on the phone, so even if you have no Internet connection it's fine. You configure the phone to listen to what is being said and, within that speech, detect the moment when either you or the person you're talking to mentions a specific time.

For example, you ask someone to tell you about the birth of their child, or what time they got up for work that morning, or some other meaningful time in their life.

That's where AI comes in. Without AI, you'd have to manually look through the written transcript, identify the time yourself, then manually send that time to the watch.

With AI, you can be completely hands-free, having a natural conversation with someone. The time is heard and transcribed, then the system recognizes, “Okay, the transcript contains 9:15. That looks like a time,” and boom, it pushes 9:15 to the watch. Done.

Likewise, with MysterSmith connected to a printer—it doesn't work particularly well with the printer I have, at least not in my experience—but with Electricks' writing slate, the Spirit Echo, which I have here, you can do the same thing with text.

You could tell the phone, “Listen to the story this person tells.” Then you ask them, “Who did you meet today? Tell me the name of the person who made you laugh the most today,” for example.

They say, “Nicola made me laugh,” or “Steeve made me laugh.” The system hears Nicola, hears Steeve, identifies those as names, and sends those two names to be handwritten on the Echo slate or into some other prediction format.

You simply cannot do that in the same way without artificial intelligence unless you have somebody backstage manually handling everything for you. I work alone, so I rely on these tools.

And that connects with Simon's earlier question: apart from the connected watch, do I use other...

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
...connected or electronic products in your routines? In other words, do you use impression pads and things like that?
Vincent Hedan:
I don't want to say I use everything, because I'm poor and I can't afford to buy every single thing that exists. I'd love to, but I do use a lot of equipment.

I have one absolute criterion. I'm not saying everyone else has to follow it, but it's one of my personal rules—I have a few rules like that that I try to stick to. The technology absolutely has to be invisible from the spectator's point of view, because in a performance that's the only point of view that matters.

So I will never do effects that visibly happen on a phone screen, even if the phone is borrowed, even if you're using some fake Google page or fake Wikipedia page. And sometimes that pains me because, for example, Justin, my friend here in the Philippines, does Acronym a lot. It's an effect using Wikipedia and things like that.

I studied science and some programming, so I'm fascinated by engineering. From an engineering standpoint, the construction of that app and the mechanism working behind it are extraordinary, as are other apps of the same kind. But the technology is visible.

For lots and lots of reasons that I've explained on my blog—you can go read it there—I wrote an article called “10 Reasons Technology Is Killing Your Magic.” I deliberately gave it a very clickbait title to hook people. But I also happen to think my argument is right, so I allowed myself to go for it.

I don't want visible technology.

Now, I actually have several of these things in front of me because I thought we might talk about them. We've already seen the little screen. This isn't an advertisement; unfortunately I paid for all of this myself.

I use Notifier a lot because, since I don't use a visible phone, I can't look at my phone to receive information. So I need another way to obtain that information secretly. That can be a small display, or the Illuminati remote vibrating—for example, to tell me the result of a die—or things like that.

Connected dice, lots of people know those. We already saw the hidden phone inside the table. I have the slates right beside me. There are lots and lots of interesting tools.

One category I like very much—and in this case I'm not loyal to one brand because there are at least four products I can confidently say work very well—is impression pads. There is PITATA, IARVEL, Labco's MindBuster, and... what do I use? No, sorry, the fourth one is Audience Wonderland, which apparently makes the best one, but it's also the most expensive. You need the budget for it. Apparently it's fascinating. Two friends of mine own it and swear by it; they say it's extraordinary.

What I personally use a lot is the PITATA MemoPad. I've taken mine apart, for those who don't know it. When you buy it, it comes in something like this format—not exactly this, but close. Inside, it's basically a tiny circuit board the size of a playing card, almost exactly the same dimensions. Unfortunately it's thicker than a playing card, but you understand why: there's a battery, all the electronics, everything.

That means you can hide it almost anywhere.

I beg you in the name of every god not to hide it inside a deck of cards. It's such a waste to have a tool that powerful and use it only to ask somebody to write “Eight of Hearts” on it. You're really limiting yourself unnecessarily.

I hide mine inside a notepad that's so thin and light—because the electronics weigh almost nothing—that it's impossible to suspect anything is inside. If somebody writes or draws anything, the information can go to the little display in my pocket, to my phone, or even to a writing slate if I want to turn it into a prediction.

I use that a lot because it's extremely reliable.

Another advantage of PITATA—and perhaps others too; I haven't tested everything—is that it's compatible with several apps. If you use MysterSmith, it works. If you use Illuminati's UniFi, it works. If you use PITATA's own app, it works. I'm not going to demo it because I'm not here to sell them, but...

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
...it works very well. What do you actually use in your shows? You have the small one, and then you have a larger one you've hidden inside a big A4-size notepad?

Vincent Hedan:
That also connects back to what we were discussing about AI.

What's interesting now with these pads is that most of them also have handwriting recognition. Before, if the spectator had terrible handwriting and you couldn't decipher it, you were stuck. Now AI can turn the writing into typed text.

So you get much better recognition. That's almost a purely mechanical technological advantage: you receive cleaner information, which is nice.

But there is also an interesting presentational and scripting side to it.

I've tested this and people laugh, but at the same time they're amazed. I live in the Philippines and I'm French, so there's a double language barrier, and everyone understands that immediately. I have a face that will never look as though I belong to this country. People recognize me in the street—well, not “recognize me” personally, but they recognize that I don't belong to the country.

So when I perform something for them, they know I don't speak their language.

Recently I tried something that I found funny, and I'm going to use it more and more because it adds another barrier to the presentation. I tell them I can read thoughts and all that, and I ask them to think of any word in their own language—Tagalog or one of the local dialects, because there are so many islands and languages here.

They write the word on the PITATA pad.

Because I'm using AI behind the scenes, the system first recognizes what they wrote as letters. Then I tell the system, essentially, “Don't send me that original word because I don't know what it means.” Let's take an example: if they write something like “Magandang...” or “Maga...” meaning “hello,” I don't want the original local-language word.

The system recognizes the handwriting mechanically, then AI translates it into French or English depending on what I want at that moment. On my screen, I see “hello,” or “horse,” or “star.”

Then I can apparently read their mind in English so they understand what I'm saying: “I think you're thinking of the word star—étoile in French,” or whatever. And they freak out because I've read a thought that existed in their own language.

Which makes sense presentationally: if you're reading their thoughts, of course the thought exists in their head in their native language.

You can build some really fun scenarios around that.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
And you've never had any nasty surprises with electronics? Any horror stories?

Vincent Hedan:
No more nasty surprises than when I'm not good enough and mess up a double lift or something like that.

The mistake is always human. The machine only does what you told it to do. It isn't programmed to improvise.

I've had failures, of course, but after enough testing I've always eventually understood why. It's a battery you failed to account for, or some other predictable issue.

Magicians are normal people most of the time, and I think they project a degree of magical thinking onto technology. They think, “It's technology, therefore it's magic. It's going to work by itself,” because they don't understand how it works.

Ask me how a car or a computer actually works and I don't know. These things are too complicated for me now. So you don't know how Bluetooth works, how the battery works, how the system detects the tip of your pen moving across paper. You simply think, “They told me this works. It cost fifteen hundred euros. Presumably it's going to work.”

Then when it fails, you go, “I don't understand,” and complain.

A lot of people don't realize, for example, that human bodies are mostly water. Every human being in a theater is basically a big bottle or bag of water surrounding you. And water is terrible for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and radio signals.

I use RFID sensors, for example, to know which card has been chosen. If three people happen to form a wall like defenders before a penalty kick and physically block the signal, I know I'm not going to receive anything on my screen. I'm screwed.

So you have to become aware of the staging of radio waves in your show and in your interaction with the audience.

You can't walk to the far end of the building, go into the bathroom, close three doors between yourself and the participants, and still assume you'll receive the signal.

There are practical considerations. Using these tools requires a kind of technological re-education.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
So when you're writing a show, do you plan B options? If the technology fails for whatever reason, do you have something ready so you can immediately recover?

Vincent Hedan:
Sometimes you can build in a safety net.

I'm trying to think of an example. With the PITATA pad, for instance—let me show you. This is the notepad. The thickness at the bottom, where I'm holding it horizontally, is the part containing the electronics. It's already extremely thin.

But there's still enough space inside the notepad for pages and covers. What I've done is include an old-fashioned sheet of carbon paper. That's something we use for duplication pads.

The pen I use has a hard point—it's not a felt-tip—so it has enough pressure. If the spectator writes on the second-to-last page before the electronic section, what they write is duplicated through the carbon paper underneath.

So if nothing comes through on my display, I can say, “Okay, let me take the pad back.” I turn a page and get a peek at the carbon copy.

Since we're on the subject, I'll mention something very briefly. It's also on my blog. I made a short video called “The Hierarchy of Peeks.” I think the link is something like hedan.fr/peek1. In that video I explain that there are degrees of separation that make the deception behind a peek stronger or weaker.

Let me give you an example.

Julien Losa—you had him on here, you've already talked with him—uses billets, center tears, and things like that a lot. I don't use those methods much at all because I'm bad at them and I don't want to spend time working on those techniques. Justin does them extremely well here. I find them annoying.

Suppose you hand someone your business card or a piece of paper and they write something on it. Then afterward you have to say, “Hang on, let me take back the thing you wrote on,” in order to tear it up, put it in your pocket, or secretly perform a center tear or obtain a peek.

That's structurally problematic because you're taking back the very object they wrote on. There is no degree of separation: “You wrote something on this; now I'm taking it back.” It works most of the time, especially if the audience isn't looking for another explanation, but it's not ideal.

Now imagine a notepad with carbon paper. You hand the whole notepad to the person, they write, tear out the page, keep the page, and return the notepad to you. They retain the actual surface they wrote on. You only recover one of the tools that was involved in writing. That's one degree of separation.

Electronics can give you two degrees of separation—or effectively infinite separation. They take the pen, take the pad, write, and keep everything in their hands all the way until the end of the show, while you still receive the information elsewhere.

At that point people's noses start bleeding because there is almost no plausible explanation left.

Of course, there's a price attached to that. A center tear costs you a piece of paper or a business card. A carbon impression system costs, I don't know, maybe five euros for carbon paper from Amazon. A PITATA pad is around five hundred euros, I think. An Audience Wonderland system is something like fifteen hundred. So you're immediately in a different budget range.

There are lots of interesting tools. I simply try, whenever the performance conditions are otherwise identical, to use the tool that gives me the greatest degree of separation.

So that's one answer to your question about backup systems: my pad has the carbon page.

There are other examples. I had another one in mind. Yes: I use playing cards fitted with RFID tags. When you place one over the sensor, the screen tells you, “They chose the Eight of Diamonds.”

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Is that the scale thing?

Vincent Hedan:
No, not the scale. It's something called Second Sight. You can use scales too, but that's much riskier because a playing card doesn't weigh very much.

The Second Sight sensor is roughly the same size as the remote control. I feel like I'm doing an electronics commercial now. This is ridiculous.

For around 199, you get the Second Sight sensor. It's a tiny little box. You can hide it in a book, inside a table, even in your sleeve, and pass objects over it.

Imagine you have ESP cards. I don't have them here right now, but you get the idea. You pass an ESP card over the sensor; it's tagged, and you instantly know whether the participant chose the circle, square, cross, wavy lines, and so on.

But in addition to being RFID-tagged, my ESP cards are also marked on the back with a marking system that tells me their identity.

I want to use the electronics because, again, I can be far away. They put the card in a box, the box has a false bottom hiding the sensor, I'm fifteen meters away, and I receive the information. That's incredible.

But if the electronic system fails, I can still say, “Okay, keep the card flat, face down, so I can't see it,” and directly read the marking on the back.

Sometimes that's possible; sometimes it isn't.

If a connected die doesn't send you the result, you're dead. There is no real out. You can say, “Let's try again,” or, “I'm getting a bad...”

I literally say to people when I do the die effect, “Let's see whether I have a good connection with you.” They have no idea what I'm talking about—but I am literally testing the connection. I need to see whether their bodies are going to block the signal.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
That's brilliant because it makes you laugh internally, but nobody else knows why.

Vincent Hedan:
Exactly. It's a little private joke I make for myself sometimes.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
I had some questions people sent me to ask you, about Devil's Tarot and about book tests. Book tests are obviously a major part of your work. Is that something you're especially passionate about? And how do you see the form evolving? There are so many book tests on the market now. I don't remember exactly how the question was phrased because I just wrote a note to myself, but I think that's the idea.

Vincent Hedan:
I don't know whether I have a full “philosophy” of book tests, but this actually reconnects with the other question you asked about how I create things. It's often...
Vincent Hedan:
...that I think, “I want to do this.” Once you decide your sources of inspiration don't necessarily have to come from magic, you sometimes have ideas where the ideal solution you want simply doesn't exist. Or at least it doesn't exist in exactly the form you want.

Book tests obviously existed long before me. We have records going back to the third century. And if you look at the market, there are enormous numbers of them now—and more every year. That's not going to stop.

Although there's a terrifying question behind that: people don't read anymore, they're on TikTok. Will the physical book still make sense ten years from now? Are we going to hold up a book and people will say, “What is that object? You cut down a tree and put sheets of paper inside it? What is this? I don't understand. Is this some kind of attack on nature, or are you trying to do a magic trick?”

But more seriously, to answer your question about book tests, I think it comes partly from my background. My mother is a storyteller, my father read a lot too. So there was always a strong reading culture around me. My brother reads a lot, my sister too. We're all book people, even now. There are books all around me.

So when you create, you naturally ask yourself, “What do I like?” If you love drawing, you'll create things involving drawing. Yves Carbonnier loves cooking—boom, his work goes in that direction. I loved reading, so: books.

Borges has memory demonstrations in his stories—he wasn't a magician at all, but he described memory feats involving books. That inspires you. You think, “That's cool. But this effect doesn't exist.”

Babel, for example, was the first relatively traditional book test I created. For anyone who doesn't know it, it looks like a novel. I think I only have the English versions here because I don't live in a French-speaking country.

There are several different novels—my camera has moved, it'll come back in a second. Each novel contains the same internal text, but the covers, titles, and authors change. So you can say to someone, “Here are six different books. Which one do you prefer?” They're secretly all the same, which gives you complete control behind the scenes.

One of the features inside Babel—the memory demonstration—comes directly from Jorge Luis Borges.

Let me go back to him very quickly so people understand the inspiration. Borges was born around 1890, I think. So he was a young man in the period before World War II. He wrote, he read, he lived and breathed literature. He was director of the National Library of Buenos Aires for years.

The problem was that his eyes were failing. He had a degenerative eye disease, which is the ultimate irony when you're both a reader and a writer. Your eyes abandon you completely. Like Hayao Miyazaki, creator of Studio Ghibli, and like Stephen King, who is also gradually going blind. Nature abhors... I was going to say nature abhors a vacuum, but no—nature is a bitch. It's horrible.

So Borges became blind, but he still had stories in his head. What do you do when you're blind and you never learned Braille well enough to write your stories down? He had an amanuensis who came to his home every day.

He would spend his days alone in his apartment composing entire stories in his head down to the commas, because he dictated the punctuation too. Then someone came every day and took dictation of whatever he had created.

It's almost like the Pythia of Delphi—he becomes an oracle, pouring the story out orally. That's also one reason his prose is so readable: there's a very oral quality to his writing. The assistant wrote everything down and it went to the publisher.

That's also one reason he wrote mostly short stories. It's easier to create relatively short texts than six-hundred-page novels when all you have is your brain and the night to store them in.

So even his creative process is fascinating.

In one of the books I discussed on my blog, written by one of his assistants—he had several over the years—the assistant describes what it was like to live through this almost mystical experience.

He says Borges could suddenly decide, “We're not writing today. Today we're going to read. You're going to read a book to me because I can't read anymore. Go to the fourth shelf. Take the third red volume from the left.”

The man is blind, but he has mapped his entire library in his head.

“Take that book. Page 245. Eighth paragraph. Start there, because that's what I want to read today.”

He knew the map of all his books. An absolutely insane memory palace.

And I thought, “Okay. I want to do that.”

I want a spectator to open a book and for me to say, “Okay, that page has this many paragraphs. Each paragraph has this many lines. Name any word and I know exactly where it appears on the page,” and so on.

There's an effect like that in Babel. You open Babel anywhere. You read a little bit of the story, maybe from the first paragraph, and I can tell you, “There's a character named Sophie, there's something involving basketball and the entrance to an apartment building,” and describe exactly where you are in the story.

That came from Borges, not from magic. I saw something he could apparently do and thought, “That's completely insane. I want to do that.” At the time, the effect didn't exist in the form I wanted.

Other people later used similar approaches, and some independently rediscovered the same territory. Shawn Farquhar had a Sherlock Holmes idea, a kind of back-to-back book effect, that he created a few months after seeing mine. We're friends, so there's no problem. We talked about it: “You know where this comes from. This looks an awful lot like what I showed you at 4F last year.” That's fine. Ideas circulate. There's also something collegial about that.

So that's Babel.

Pi—we're doing these in reverse order now—came from the idea of creating an effect around pi, which at the time had genuine personal significance for me. It used to be my password—not anymore—for PayPal and lots of other things.

Then my friend Sean Taylor, whose work I've also translated into French, is an outstanding mentalist in Australia, a member of the PA, a brilliant guy, and he was working on the same subject. He told me, “Hey, I've found an idea using pi.”

And that annoyed me slightly because pi was “my” subject—though I'd never told him that, so obviously he couldn't know. He had already created something around “my” subject while I hadn't done anything because I'd been lazy.

So I went home and created Pi, partly in response to that. His version is also very good and is available on his website.

But the first book test I created was Haiku.

Haiku came from a genuine act of rebellion at the time. I didn't want a book test where you shuffle a deck or roll two dice and they tell you “page 84,” then you reveal the word “bathtub” on page 84. Nobody cares. That's not interesting in a show unless you build a very specific presentation around it.

I went back to the historical source. In my research, I discovered that one of the earliest documented book tests witnessed by someone involved a performer apparently reciting—or rather divining—lines from Virgil, the ancient poet.

I thought, “That's interesting.” If you're divining poetry, what you reveal has a literary quality. “Bathtub, page 84” doesn't exactly inspire dreams. It's not very interesting.

But if you're revealing poetry, there is emotion, an emotional connection, and musicality in the writing itself. That can be much more interesting.

And at the time I was completely obsessed with Japan, so naturally I moved toward haiku. The dots connected themselves.

So I created Haiku, where you reveal Japanese poetry that speaks to the spectator and creates an image in their mind. The idea was to create something highly thematic and personal.

Babel came later because I thought, “I still need something a bit more versatile for weddings.” You're not necessarily going to sell Haiku to a corporate committee. Japanese poetry may not be the subject they want at that moment.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Right. And I also liked the little object in the close-up version, in quotation marks. It was intriguing.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes. Same story: I was watching a lot of Japanese anime at the time and I saw this object because it's an ordinary everyday object in Japan. They use it for taking notes or memorizing things, like flash cards.

I see the object in an anime. Then I walk into a store in Paris called Muji, which is very well known now but was still relatively new at the time, and I see the same object there. I buy it.

So now I have an object I recognize from Japanese animation, maybe I have Japanese poetry in my head, and then I have the idea of a book test. The pieces connected a little like that.

That brings us back to my creative process.

What I've identified is that I consume enormous amounts of... well, I try to experience things, but especially cultural material: films, literature, music, and so on.

Everything we consume gets memorized in some way. In my head, I visualize each thing as a puzzle piece.

The problem is that you don't know how many pieces you have, you don't know what picture they're supposed to form, and you don't know when the final puzzle will be complete.

So you have a pile of pieces: some green, some red, some strangely shaped, and you have no idea where they'll go. I probably have pieces in my head from when I was ten years old that won't become useful for another fifty years.

Then one day you think, “Hang on. The Japanese notepad piece, the Japanese poetry piece, the book-test piece—those three fit together.” Boom. Suddenly you have an image and the project comes out.

Sometimes something like the Christmas story or the Hiroshima story sits in my head for ten years before it reaches paper or the stage, because I simply didn't have the last connecting pieces yet.

The latest book test I released last year took me a full year because I worked on it every month for a year. It's called Echo, and it followed Devil's Tarot.

Devil's Tarot was about using real Tarot in a practice that combines magic with divination and so on. Maybe we'll talk about that later.

I created it because here in the Philippines I'd been invited to give Tarot readings. I thought, “Okay, this will be interesting. Let's see how we can approach that.”

In Thailand I'd also been invited to work for several months in a voodoo bar. Every evening I did Tarot divination combined with magic, and I saw how the two could connect.

I started asking myself ethical questions. At one point I thought, “How could I make my Tarot-slash-mystical-magician persona more credible?” Because I don't personally believe in these practices, so I was looking for a form of credibility.

I thought, “What if I'd written a book on the subject?”

Since then I've attended a Tarot convention here several times, run by a Filipino-American who is quite established in the field. He has written books on the subject himself. If you're a yoga expert, you might well have written a yoga book to share your ideas. Same principle.

So this copy has my name on the cover. The versions you buy from my website don't have my name, because why would your prop say Vincent Hedan? For me, it makes sense that my personal copy has my name.

Echo is also, for the first time in my work, a book test that can genuinely be read cover to cover. It's a real readable book. You can even find it on Amazon as a Kindle edition. I've shown it to people and some of them have said, “That's an interesting subject. I'm going to buy the Kindle version and read it.”

But secretly, the physical book is gimmicked to use the Flashback principle.

For anyone who doesn't know Flashback, you riffle through the book like this, you catch a glimpse of a word, and the same word appears mirrored on the opposite side in a way that lets me obtain it. So I take a very quick peek—here, for example, I see the word “accept”—and later I can reveal that you're thinking of “accept.”

From that single principle, I developed four routines and a bonus, all explained in the instructions.

So Echo and Tarot work well together. I can perform Echo first to test how receptive people are to that world, then move into more serious, deeper Tarot. Or the reverse: I give a Tarot reading, sense that you don't really believe it, say, “Okay, let me convince you with this,” perform the book test, then return to the Tarot afterward.

They're independent tools, but they complement each other very well.

I wrote one around Tarot because of Devil's Tarot. Then I thought, “Yes, but Tarot isn't the only occult subject.”

So I released twelve different Echo books, one each month: astrology, numerology, Tarot of Marseille, Rider-Waite Tarot—because those are two different Tarot systems—palmistry, tea-leaf reading, hypnosis... Hypnosis is less occult, obviously, but I had friends at the Comédie Saint-Michel who performed a hypnosis show, and I thought, “Wouldn't it be great if they had written their own practical book on hypnosis?” Boom: we write a hypnosis book.

If you talk about hypnosis or do pseudo-hypnotic conditioning in your show, you can use the book test alongside it and it fits perfectly.

There are other subjects too.

My goal obviously isn't to write twelve books so you buy all twelve. That makes no sense. What's your theme? If your theme happens to be one of the Echo subjects, great—you now have another tool that fits your character.

Because performing Tarot and then suddenly doing the Haiku book test makes no sense. They're completely different themes, different characters. Don't do that.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
But it was a smart idea to create twelve themes like that, because it means almost everyone can find one that fits them.

Vincent Hedan:
After that I created a higher level at the end of the Echo project called Echo VIP.

The idea was: “Okay, my personal books have my name on the cover because I want to establish authority on the subject when I present it. You buy a standard Echo with a fictional author's name. But maybe this subject is genuinely part of your life and expertise, enough that it would make sense for your own name to be on the book.”

At that point the process becomes different. I rewrite whichever existing Echo title you choose.

For example, I had one client who worked in meditation. I won't say his name so he can keep that private. But he practiced meditation clinically and seriously. He genuinely knew the subject; he wasn't pretending for a show.

He said, “I want the existing meditation version, but I want it rewritten with my name on the cover.”

So I rewrite the internal text while preserving the underlying principles so the book test still functions. I create a custom cover that only he has, put his name on it, publish it through Amazon, and send him ten copies so he has replacements as they wear out.

Now he owns a real book carrying his name on a subject where he's genuinely an expert—and on top of that, he can mentally destroy people with it because the Flashback principle is hidden inside.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
That's cool. Speaking of your work, there's a very interesting question: do you think you'll ever publish something about your own memorized deck stack? That's what I was going to ask too. See? We're connected.

Vincent Hedan:
People have been asking me that for twenty years.
Vincent Hedan:
And I'm annoying because I always give the same answer: “Yes, maybe next year.” And I've been saying that for twenty years.

I created my stack in 2004, I think. Maurice remembers because he was part of the same research group and contributed to the process. I'm sure other people in the chat know about it too.

I created the stack for the same reason I create a lot of things: “I want to do something. The thing I want doesn't exist. Fine, I guess I'll have to build it myself.”

At the time I was using Christian Chelman's Brainstorm stack, which is an excellent stack for many things. He uses it devastatingly in Blitz and Overblitz, in his lecture and in his books. It's brilliant. It works somewhat like Si Stebbins—or more accurately like Eight Kings—with a mnemonic phrase controlling the order of the deck, and then he found routines embedded in that structure.

At the time, Mnemonica hadn't been published in French, and my English wasn't strong enough to access the literature comfortably. Aronson was the same: a little too far away for me linguistically.

The functions I wanted in my own stack came from watching a lecture by Michael Vincent, the brilliant English card magician. In his Best of Michael Vincent lecture, I think produced by Minard, he performs an effect called Intuitive Speller. “Épellation intuitive” would probably be the French translation.

That lecture may still exist somewhere on DVD. I wonder whether there's an official website selling the DVDs or even authorized downloads. It's a brilliant lecture with a lot of close-up material. François Montmirel and Daniel Rhod were producing those with Paris Magique at the time. There were incredible lectures: Guy Hollingworth, Ascanio, Chad Long, Vallarino...

Anyway, I saw Michael Vincent perform this insane effect and thought, “Okay, I want to do that—but easier, and with any playing card,” because in his version he forced the card used in the effect.

So I created my stack for that purpose. Then I developed routines around it. I never imagined anybody else would care because, like most things I create, it was simply a personal tool.

Then I started showing it to other people, and they told me it had functions that didn't exist in other stacks. So yes, I eventually started thinking, “Maybe it is time.”

When I first seriously started working on the book in 2008, I was in Australia and still a student. I got distracted by other things and by ordinary life problems.

But the biggest obstacle was this: I have roughly 120 routines built around my stack now, because I've been using it for a long time. And they need illustrations.

Back then, illustrating all of that was horrible. You had to take photographs or video, then ask someone to turn those into drawings. It was expensive and complicated.

What has changed recently is AI.

Even before AI, I think I illustrated Amnesia in a somewhat similar way. You could take a photograph and use intelligent filters in Photoshop. It wasn't artificial intelligence yet, but the filters were powerful enough to transform photographs into drawings.

My books are printed in black and white on white paper, and photographs often look terrible in that format—big heavy black blobs. I like old Tarbell-style illustrations, hand-drawn ink lines. I wanted to recreate that visual language.

Photoshop helped, but it was still long and tedious. Everything had to be processed individually.

Now, with AI, we're finding ways to turn photos or video into genuinely beautiful hand-drawn-looking illustrations at a speed that makes the idea of putting five hundred drawings into a book realistic.

Before, that simply wasn't financially realistic, or it would have taken far too much time. And unfortunately I don't have the talent to draw them myself.

So projects of that enormous scale are becoming easier to imagine because we now have tools that help deal with the volume of work.

So: maybe soon.

I originally imagined it as one book. The problem is that I think a lot of people won't care. I'll publish it and they'll say, “Oh great, another new stack. Why should I memorize this one instead of another one?”

And I tell people openly: if you're hesitating and considering Mnemonica, go for Mnemonica. The literature is extraordinary. Again, I have blog articles about this on my site.

What matters in a memorized deck stack isn't primarily that it's famous or that it's easy to memorize. “Easy to memorize” is one of the worst arguments in the world.

It's like telling somebody they should choose a bicycle only because it's easy. If you only ever do things that are easy, you end up doing nothing difficult or worthwhile. Sometimes you have to pay the price physically or mentally.

And with memorized decks, Aronson said something like this in his essay Memories Are Made of This: nobody has ever made the effort to memorize and truly master a stack and then regretted having done it.

It's a mountain you never regret climbing.

You suffer. I'm not going to lie: the beginning is a little painful. But once you reach the top, you don't think, “No, I shouldn't have done that. Climbing this mountain was a mistake.” Nobody does.

People abandon the climb halfway through, yes. But once you reach the top, you understand what it unlocks. It can seem incredibly complicated, but it gives you access to an insane amount of material.

Let me take the example of...

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
I don't know whether we can mention one of your creations without giving too much away.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes, yes, you can. I know where you're going.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
For example with Pi, having Mnemonica already mastered makes the whole thing massively easier. I learned Mnemonica before I learned Pi.

Vincent Hedan:
Exactly. After that—I don't want to say there is no effort left, but there's almost no additional work.

People are going to think this is a sales pitch, but I say this in lectures and whenever people ask me about it.

You also have to be careful because people misunderstand what it means to “know” a memorized deck.

There is knowing what a stack is. There is knowing a stack. And then there is mastering a stack.

Too many people think, “Yes, yes, I add three, rotate the suits, therefore I know my stack.” No. No, no.

If you can't recite the deck as quickly as your phone number, and if you can't immediately give me the position of any card and, conversely, the card at any position without breaking into a sweat, you still have work to do before you have access to all the stack's functions.

There are plenty of routines that don't require you to know the stack. Amnesia is a book I wrote where, if the deck is physically in the correct order in your hands, everything works even if you don't know the order by heart.

Then there are routines where you genuinely need to know the stack, like Pi.

So when people struggle a little with the memorized-deck version of Pi Max—because there are several versions, including versions without a stack—I tell them: if you truly master your stack, we can test that in thirty seconds. Recite the deck. Give me two or three positions and two or three cards.

If you master the stack, I give you the Pi Max book coded for your stack. Five minutes later, you can go onstage and perform the routine.

Because in the memorized-deck version of Pi Max, the method is basically: recite your memorized stack in front of the audience.

That makes me laugh because the method is almost obscenely audacious. I'm literally doing the method right in front of you, indirectly.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Pi Max is brilliant. But you do need to master the stack. It definitely tests your knowledge a little. Especially, in quotation marks, the second phase, which is probably the most complex part.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes, you really do need to know it very well.

But there are tools for that too. The instructions include a link to a training app.

And coming back to what we were saying about artificial intelligence: I studied programming, science, math and all that, but I was never especially good at programming. So for years I couldn't provide Pi Max users with a proper serious training app.

Then AI suddenly made it possible for idiots like me to code something acceptable.

The Pi Max training app was coded by me saying—probably to ChatGPT at the time—something like, “I want this program to do exactly this, inside a very narrow, controlled, playful and educational framework.”

The app you use was coded by AI.

Without AI, you wouldn't have that free training tool, and that tool makes the learning process enormously easier. So AI has definitely removed some major barriers.

Simon says in the chat, “Legend has it you know several stacks.”

The legend says that, at one point, yes. Not anymore.

I'm currently brushing up on Mnemonica again because I'm working on something new.

But very quickly—and this also connects to inspiration—I studied linguistics too. My chosen languages were English and Korean. I was also required to study Indonesian, and we touched a little on Thai, Hebrew, and languages written right-to-left, just to experience different systems.

One interesting thing in linguistics is that the more languages you know, the easier it becomes to learn a new one, because languages belong to families.

If you've learned French and Italian and then start Spanish, you already have lots of structures to hold on to.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Because the Latin roots keep coming back.

Vincent Hedan:
Exactly. They're Indo-European languages, so they're related.

And when you've learned some Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, it becomes easier to find footholds in the others too. Korean and Japanese developed in relation to Chinese linguistic influence, and they share a great deal of vocabulary.

They don't write the words the same way, but toshokan means “library” in Japanese; dogwan is “library” in Korean. Toshokan, dogwan—you can hear where the relationship comes from. Chinese has the related root too. The writing systems differ, but the sounds reveal historical connections.

Then languages drift over time. Canadian French isn't identical to French in France because the communities were separated for years.

So while I was studying linguistics, I thought: maybe memorized decks work the same way.

At the time I knew Brainstorm and my own stack. Brainstorm is partially derivable, so it's relatively easy. I thought, “Let's learn Mnemonica on top of those and see what happens.”

I wanted to investigate two things.

First: do bridges appear? Once you know two stacks, do you get ideas you would never have had with only one? More knowledge, more tools—maybe it creates something new.

For me, the answer was basically no. Rainman was originally supposed to use two different stacks simultaneously, which was mental suicide. It was absolutely unmanageable, so I abandoned that immediately.

And in twenty years I've never found an idea that genuinely requires two or three different memorized stacks. I haven't found one, anyway. Maybe someone else will one day, and that would be great.

The second question was whether stacks become compartmentalized in the brain the way languages do.

If I'm in “Mnemonica mode,” will I accidentally confuse it with my stack? Or Aronson? At one point I had three layers in my head: mine, Mnemonica, and Aronson.

And the answer was: never.

When you're speaking English, a random Japanese word doesn't suddenly come out of your mouth for no reason. Your brain doesn't usually scramble languages arbitrarily.

The same thing happened with the stacks.

So academically, I found that interesting, although the experiment didn't produce any useful magical discovery for me in the end. But I don't want that to discourage anyone from trying, because perhaps someone else will discover something I didn't. That's how you sometimes find ideas nobody else would have thought of.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
There was also a question about translation. Do you still do translations for other people?

Vincent Hedan:
Now I limit myself to translating my own work.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Because for a while, on top of all your projects and creations, you translated a huge number of books.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes. I was very lucky to meet Frantz at CC Éditions, then later Ludo at Marchand de Trucs. I translated for several publishing houses.

I did professional translation for roughly ten years. I don't remember exactly, maybe thirty or forty books for Ludo in total. And there are still some books that I know have been translated but haven't been published yet. They'll come out eventually. He's extremely busy too and does a huge amount of work.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
He's published an enormous amount. So you've slowed down on that side now.

Vincent Hedan:
I don't do anything anymore except my own translations, because it's a lot of work.

But it was fascinating, because when you translate somebody's writing, you discover the way their mind works.

Luke Jermay and Banachek, for example—that's how I first discovered both of them. Later I met them, and Luke became a friend and someone genuinely precious to me because he's extremely intelligent. He's far too young to be that intelligent and talented. It's irritating.

Translation gave me access to that kind of thing.

And sometimes you discover material you never expected to appreciate. Earlier we mentioned Luke Oseland and digital magic, which I assumed I would hate. Then I discovered an intelligent guy doing it thoughtfully.

Another revelation I mention to people—because they sometimes overlook it—came when Ludo at Marchand de Trucs sent me a book to translate.

Normally he was sending me Luke Jermay, Banachek, Phedon Bilek with Orion, or McGill on hypnosis, things like that.

Then one day he sends me a book titled something like Danny Orleans' Children's Magic and I'm thinking, “What the hell is this?”

To be a good translator, you need several things. You need to speak the source language reasonably well, otherwise you don't understand what you're reading and can't translate it. You need to speak the target language even better, otherwise what you produce is garbage. And you also need to understand the subject matter.

I wouldn't accept a book about a branch of magic completely foreign to me, because I wouldn't know the technical vocabulary.

And now he's sending me a book about children's magic. I already hate children, and on top of that I don't understand the field particularly well, so I'm surprised.

He tells me to look at it. I read the book, obviously, before translating it—and I nearly fall off my chair.

Because if you read that book while temporarily forgetting that it's about children, what you're actually reading is marketing, age-based psychological analysis, and audience management during a show.

Children are very particular. I don't like them, but they have fascinating psychological profiles.

Danny Orleans was a schoolteacher, so he genuinely knows what he's talking about. He dealt with children academically and professionally. One of the core ideas in the book is that children at different ages don't have the same psyche, the same understanding of the world, the same internal model of reality.

A three-year-old does not understand the world the way a five-, six-, or seven-year-old does. Every parent knows this. At that age, the developmental jumps happen incredibly quickly, level by level.

So what he writes is fascinating. He says, “I don't perform the same effects—or at least not in the same way—depending on the children's age.”

I did catastrophic children's magic when I first entered the professional magic market. Someone would say, “Okay, there are two hundred kids in the room, ages three to thirteen. Good luck.” Then they'd throw you into the room and it was a nightmare because the audience wasn't segmented at all. The parents were in the back drinking, they didn't care, they were delighted somebody else had the children for an hour. It was always catastrophic.

Danny Orleans understood that properly. He segments audiences. If necessary, you do several shows for different age groups. No problem.

And he has a very intelligent approach. A child has an extremely short attention span. They don't necessarily listen to all your instructions, though in children's magic you shouldn't give them too many instructions anyway.

There are many parallels with a mentalism spectator: you need to capture their attention, tell them a story, make sure they understand the instructions without pulling them out of the story at the same time.

Once you see those parallels, the book almost becomes a bible of mentalism because it's entirely about the psychology of the people in front of you. It's fascinating.

And I discovered that because I was translating it.

Even very simple things: sometimes a method flies past adults because no adult thinks about it. Do the same thing for a child and they'll immediately say, “No, that's easy. You did this.” Their model of the world is different.

Think about peekaboo. When you cover your face, very young children haven't fully developed object permanence. Your face is hidden, therefore in their experience it almost ceases to exist. You can't make an object vanish and expect an impressed reaction if the audience doesn't yet have object permanence in the relevant way.

There are things that simply don't work at particular developmental stages.

I'm going to have to take a quick comfort break for two seconds, if you don't mind. I'll be back as quickly as possible. You can prepare questions behind my back. See you in a minute.
Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Questions behind his back. I don't know whether any of you have more questions; we'll try to cover everything overall. And if there are questions we don't get to, Vincent can answer them later in the Facebook comments.

I'm looking through the ones we haven't answered yet. And while we're taking this little break, a quick reminder that next week we have a live on Tuesday and another on Thursday at 9 p.m.—Tuesday with the creator of Titans, and Thursday the return of the Koum case with our friend Anthony Chenot. So next week is going to be busy too.

I think we've answered quite a lot of questions already. Simon's question too. I think we all have the same disease: too many books.

Steeve Marion:
Yes, yes, for people who love books, definitely. There was also a question about your future projects. Mental Theater has just come out, of course.

And Nico and I really recommend it because it's a great book. Do you have future projects coming up, things you're planning?

Vincent Hedan:
I don't have any scandalous announcement to make. But yes, my rough plan was to release Mental Theater and then finally work on the book about my memorized stack, because as we were saying earlier...

I'd love everybody to adopt my stack because obviously I think it's the best one. Everybody thinks their baby is the smartest.

But publishing that book as a single project seemed a little crazy, especially because there is a very particular concept inside my stack that doesn't exist in any other stack, yet the concept itself can be adapted to other stacks.

So I thought maybe the right approach would be to publish two independent books, and people wouldn't need both.

One book would say, “Okay, you want Vincent Hedan's stack, this concept, and everything built around it.” That would be the book for my stack.

But people who already use Mnemonica could buy a Mnemonica-specific book containing essentially the same concept, except adapted to Mnemonica.

I actually did that adaptation years ago. A few people—Maurice among them, Pascal Fadi, his friend Tony Corgan in La Rochelle, and others—use that concept in table-hopping to perform certain effects.

I developed the concept for my own stack, but because I was in a research group with people using Aronson, other stacks, or Mnemonica, I also experimented with adapting it to those systems.

So I could publish a Mnemonica version for people who have already dedicated years of their lives and their memory to a stack, which is completely legitimate.

And for people who don't yet have a memorized stack, or who are willing to be seduced by another proposal, there would be the same central idea adapted to my own stack.

That was the plan. I had vaguely intended to begin writing it this summer.

Then, unfortunately, Juan Tamariz passed away.

I have to admit that put a temporary brake on my motivation for the book. I had met him when he came to Vannes, I think in 2009. He gave an extraordinary lecture and appeared in the gala shows during the convention held in Vannes that year.

I showed him a couple of things. And of course there was an emotional connection for me because Multitude comes from him. My work with memorized decks comes from him. Tamariz planted the seed for an enormous number of things, for an enormous number of people.

I used the Perpendicular Control extensively in my memorized-deck work, and of course his theory is magnificent.

So he passed away this summer. He was a very old gentleman, so it's not as though a ten-year-old fell off a bicycle. But it still hurts. And it made me put the project down for a little while.

You also ask yourself, “Do I really want to publish this book one month after his death?” It didn't necessarily feel right.

I'll keep working on it. I've been working on it for twenty years anyway.

Steeve Marion:
And we'll ask you the question again.

Vincent Hedan:
Exactly. Ask me again in another twenty years and we'll be ready.

I also liked the anniversary idea: “My stack after twenty years of practice.” Tamariz did something similar in a way. Mnemonica, even in Spanish, was published quite late compared with how long he had already been using the stack. And now we have a very good French translation of it.

So that's one project.

Then there are projects that have been lying around for years because, honestly, I'm lazy. I'm busy doing other things, so I don't necessarily push every project all the way through the pipeline.

But Multitude 2 and 3 practically already exist, because there are many other applications of Val Evans' Multitude deck principle. The first book had sixteen routines. For years I've had additional material scattered across notes—the famous puzzle pieces again.

At this point I mostly need to put all the pieces on the table, assemble the picture, and put it into an album. So those books are almost ready.

There are several things like that where I just need to say, “Okay. We're doing this now. Let's start.”

At the moment I'm also working on something that may interest French readers a little less: I've realized we finally have tools that allow me to translate my books into other languages in a respectful and effective way.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Because you can do French and English yourself, in quotation marks.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes. And I enjoy doing those, so I do them myself and can control everything.

But German, Spanish, Italian, even Japanese—those are languages that interest me enormously but that I can't directly control at a professional level.

Now we're finally reaching a point where it may be genuinely possible to do that properly. I've sent German, Japanese, and Spanish editions to friends who speak those languages, and they've told me, “Yes, this is good. This is publishable. Go ahead.”

So now I'm thinking, “Okay, let's work on that.” Which means the entire catalogue has to be done.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
That's a huge job. But does that mean you have no plans to come back to France or Europe?

Vincent Hedan:
Never. No—I'm joking. I left in 2022.

At first I half expected the whole thing to fail. I thought something would go wrong: I'd have a financial problem, a medical problem, whatever, and I'd end up having to come back with my tail between my legs, completely defeated.

But now it's 2026 and it's been four years.

For a while I considered coming back next year, in 2027, because I thought, “I've released a huge amount of material since I left, but I haven't shown it to French magicians face to face.” They've seen videos and references to the material in online lectures, but I haven't physically lectured there.

There are clubs I haven't visited in five, six, sometimes seven years. The CAMP club, which I love, is one I haven't visited in a very long time.

I was supposed to go in spring 2020—I don't want to get the year wrong—and we all know what happened in spring 2020. We were all politely invited to stay home.

Because of Covid, everything was cancelled. I had around ten dates planned in France, plus Austria, the United States, Canada—everything disappeared at once.

So yes, I had thought about 2027. Then I remembered that 2027 is a French presidential-election year. People may be preoccupied with things other than attending a magic lecture.

I'm not going to get into politics because that's not what we're here for. But French infrastructure can sometimes become a little unpredictable around major national events. Maybe more French people will end up coming to join me in the Philippines instead.

So I thought, “Let's wait and see what happens.” It may not be the most stable period for trains and logistics, so maybe we wait.

That said, if somebody pays for the plane ticket, I'll come. It's roughly 800 euros round trip plus the hotel. No problem. We spend an evening together and I go home.

It has been a long time since I came back.

I'm lucky that Manila, as the capital of the Philippines, is very international. I didn't move to the other side of the world in order to spend all my time talking to French people, so I don't actively seek out the French community, even though they're here and they're very nice.

But there are French restaurants, Japanese restaurants, restaurants from everywhere. If I want to talk to friends, the Internet exists—we've just demonstrated that it works very well. Same with family.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Still, it would be really cool to see you giving a lecture again, maybe appearing at festivals or conventions.

Vincent Hedan:
Oh yes. The Belgian conventions have always been incredibly kind to me too. It would be great.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Maybe you send an email, say you're coming, and we organize something. Because once you announce you're coming, you're going to get a lot of requests and end up touring everywhere.

Vincent Hedan:
That's very kind of you to say. Maybe there are also people thinking, “You were far away for a reason. You don't need to come back that quickly.”

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
No, but seriously, that's cool.

I'm looking at the time because I know there are scheduling constraints. We've already done the first two hours. There are probably many things we won't have time to discuss because I need to... It's true that we haven't really talked at all about the Tarot side of your work, even though you mentioned it earlier. There's a question connected to that.
Vincent Hedan:
Well, I don't want to force the subject.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
No, no, but we keep almost getting to it and then moving away again.

Vincent Hedan:
It was a subject that felt slightly controversial to me at the time, because it connects with what we were saying earlier about giving yourself permission to do things.

I don't personally believe in any of this. My mind is very scientific. But the subject interested me because, years ago, when I created Oracle Belline, I realized something obvious.

If you reveal that somebody is thinking of the Four of Clubs, that's impressive. But if you reveal that they're thinking of a card representing Love, Family, or another emotionally loaded theme from the Belline divination deck, there are two impacts.

There's the intellectual impact: “How did he know I was thinking of that?” But there's also an emotional impact: “I have a real relationship with that card, with that theme, and you've touched something personal through it.”

When I was traveling around Asia as a nomad, I spent some time in Thailand. One evening I was looking for a bar to have a drink and found a place run by an American from New Orleans—which is a city with an extraordinary spiritual culture, with voodoo and all these different traditions mixed together.

This American guy was a retired serviceman, and his Thai wife was both a ghost hunter and a Tarot reader.

And when I say “ghost hunter,” I mean she was genuinely paid tens of thousands of baht—which is, what, two euros—to go into houses and remove ghosts when people suspected possession or something similar. She was paid serious money to do that.

That's what I meant earlier when I said there is still a genuine cultural bedrock of deep belief in a city like Bangkok. Those things can still exist there.

So the guy had built this entire bar around voodoo.

I walked into the place, looked around, and thought, “This is a theater waiting to happen.” He simply hadn't connected those dots.

I showed him the connected die, then some more traditional card material, and he said, “We need to talk. You're doing interesting things. My wife isn't always here to do Tarot readings because she works elsewhere in the provinces. Come in when she's away and perform something.”

Out of respect for the venue, I thought, “I'm not going to walk into a voodoo bar and do sponge balls and a flaming wallet. I'll try to create something that fits the theme of the place.”

So I pulled out what I'd previously developed around Oracle Belline and adapted it to the Rider-Waite Tarot, which is more dominant in that country. The same ideas work very well with Tarot of Marseille too.

Almost by accident, I adapted my repertoire to the venue—and suddenly it took off.

The reactions were incredible.

After each demonstration, the questions weren't, “How did you do that?”, “Can I see what's in your sleeve?”, or “Let me examine your deck.” Instead people asked, “Were you born with this gift?”

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
It's always such a fascinating world.

Vincent Hedan:
Completely. And it has been since the dawn of time—literally the dawn of time.

Because you have to realize: if these kinds of practices still exist today, in the age of AI, Wi-Fi, 5G in our pockets, phones that can do absolutely everything, then there is clearly a human need to connect with these themes.

Again, I don't personally believe in them, and I'm not endorsing the practice. I explain that in Oracle Belline and also in Devil's Tarot.

There is a real ethical problem in this field.

A lot of people who practice Tarot or other occult systems genuinely believe in what they're doing. They believe in the magic of it, in the deep power of the cards—and some still use that belief in harmful ways.

Then there are many others who don't believe at all and are genuine con artists who exploit people financially or physically.

So I had to ask myself: do I have the right to do this? How am I going to do it? What am I going to answer when somebody asks, “Did your mother give you this gift?” or “Can you speak to the dead?”

I had to find a lot of answers for myself.

I haven't necessarily given all of those answers here because they're deeply personal. You need to find your own answers.

But I encourage people to ask themselves those questions.

It's the same as Haiku. You can't perform Haiku, tell people they're Chinese poems, and claim you found the book in Benin. You have to inhabit the subject. You need to know at least a little about what you're talking about when the subject has a real existence in people's lives.

People know Tarot. If you pull out a card and say complete nonsense about it, somebody can tell you, “No, I saw another Tarot reader last week and she told me something completely different.”

So you need to study the subject at least a little. That's what I explain in the book.

The Rider-Waite Tarot is useful for that reason. I now keep one near me all the time.

Tarot of Marseille, which is very well known in France both as a card system and for divination, is highly symbolic. You see swords, coins, cups, and so on. There aren't necessarily strong pictorial scenes on every card.

With Rider-Waite, every card is like a painting.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Yes, it was designed that way.

Vincent Hedan:
Exactly. One of the people who worked on it, Pamela Colman Smith, was an illustrator. Waite hired her specifically to create the images.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Right, okay.

Vincent Hedan:
She wasn't necessarily a mystic first and foremost, even though she had beliefs of her own. The mystic said, “I need illustrations; make them for me,” they went away together to work on it—there's a whole fascinating history behind the deck.

And that makes Rider-Waite very useful if you don't know how to read Tarot yet. You can look at a card and ask, “What's happening in this image? What's the scene? What's the atmosphere? What's the mood?” Then you can start connecting the dots.

There's another beautiful thing about this environment.

Earlier we talked about hecklers and people in France trying to dismantle a magic effect when confronted with the impossible. When you're performing for an audience that believes in—or at least enjoys—this occult world, they're usually not there to tell you you're wrong or that you're lying.

I was very afraid of feeling like an impostor. I thought people would say, “You're not a real psychic. This is fake. We're going to destroy you for pretending.”

But that's not what happened at all.

People were so kind and welcoming that I had to revise my own prejudice—the attitude of, “I don't believe any of this, therefore these people must be idiots.”

They're not evil people trying to destroy the world. They're often genuinely kind people.

When I went to that Tarot convention, I met almost nothing but nice people. Some were a little lost, sometimes desperate and searching for answers, but still interesting people.

Then sometimes it drives you insane because I've had “real Tarot readers,” in quotation marks—if such a thing can exist—give me demonstrations.

I watch and think, “You just performed a magic trick for me.”

There's a procedure like a magic trick, then a revelation at the end—the same structure—except they're using zero sleight of hand because they don't care about technique. The meaning connects itself through the interpretation of the cards.

And you think, “Okay. So you don't work on technique, you don't work on presentation, it still works, and you get a stronger reaction. Maybe there is genuinely something worth studying here.”

For anyone unfamiliar with the field, I really think it's worth exploring because it's extremely enriching and very, very interesting.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
I really loved Devil's Tarot too. It was genuinely...

Vincent Hedan:
And I talk about this in the book for people who are a little afraid of the subject.

One film I love is The Gift, directed by Sam Raimi, who also made Evil Dead and Spider-Man. In French it's called Intuitions.

Cate Blanchett is in it—you know, Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. She's originally an Australian actress, and she plays a psychic.

She uses ESP cards for divination, which is obviously complete nonsense from a methodological point of view, but that doesn't matter. The theme is there.

And I asked myself: does Sam Raimi believe in this stuff because he made a film about it? Is Cate Blanchett fascinated by the occult because she plays a psychic?

No. She's an actress, he's a director, and it's a story.

So as performers, we're allowed to represent a practice without endorsing it as true.

To take an extreme example—and I don't think he'll mind—Christian Chelman has stories, and I do too, but he has a particularly clear case. He has bizarre-magic routines set around World War II that use artifacts marked with a symbol that is obviously problematic.

He isn't presenting that material because he endorses the ideology associated with the symbol. He presents it because the magical story built around the artifact is fascinating.

So there is a difference between interpretation and proselytizing.

I don't proselytize. I'm a performer. I portray a practice. I'm not there to tell the audience the practice is true or false.

Personally, I think it's false.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
That's incredibly interesting, and honestly I think we could almost do a second live just about that subject. We're a little constrained by time, but this has genuinely been a real pleasure.

Since we are constrained by time, I just want to mention one thing before we wrap up. We've answered quite a few questions. If we missed yours, don't hesitate to leave it in the comments. As I was telling you, Vincent will still have access afterward, and people watching the replay will see the comments too. We must have missed some questions, so apologies in advance. Maybe we'll have time to answer them afterward.

Vincent Hedan:
I wanted to give one last gift to the people who stayed until the end. We've been going for almost three hours. I'm fine; we can keep going, but I know Nicola has to leave.

For anyone who's stayed until the end, here's a gift. For one week, if you go to my website and use the code “alliance”—like Alliance, where we are now, but in lowercase because otherwise it doesn't work—you get 20% off any order for one week.

So for anyone who stuck with us for all this time, there you go.

Steeve Marion:
That's really kind, thank you very much.

And honestly, it has been an enormous pleasure having you here. We've wanted to have you on for quite a while. Nico and I have been talking about it for months. So it really was a huge pleasure to finally have you—and we love your work too.

Nicola Damien-Deramaix:
Tomorrow we'll repost the replay with all the links to everything we talked about: your website, your blog, and so on. To make it easy, it's hedan.fr for everything.

Thank you so much for this. I know I'm annoying, but you really have to come back because it was genuinely such a pleasure having you.

Steeve Marion:
Absolutely. We'll do more live sessions around your news and your next releases. It really was a great pleasure and an honor to have you. This was very, very cool.

And thank you to everyone who's been with us since ten o'clock this morning. We can all go to Mass now.

Have a great Sunday, everyone. And thank you again, Vincent. For you it's evening now. What time is it there, almost seven p.m.? So have a great evening, Vincent.

Vincent Hedan:
Thanks again for the invitation. And thank you to everyone who followed along. We'll meet again in the comments afterward.

Thank you, thank you. Ciao, ciao everyone. Bye.