Fougou 35 - part 1

Here is the first part of my conversation with Olivier Nicoleau and Vincent Chaigneau for episode 35 of their podcast Fougou. You can listen to it here:

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Audio is only available in French, but here is a transcription:

Vincent Chaigneau:
Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 35 of Fougou, the slightly spicy magic podcast. As usual, I’m here with Olivier. Hi Olivier.

Olivier Nicoleau:
Hi Vincent, happy to see you again on this Sunday morning.

Vincent Chaigneau:
And there’s a good reason for that. Today, we’re welcoming someone who reads minds. Now, I know what you’re thinking. So does he, by the way—that’s his job. You’re thinking that mind reading isn’t really much of an achievement anymore these days. And you’re right. Today, your phone knows you’re going to give in before you do, your fitness app knows you’re going to have another piece of cheese. Everyone reads your mind for free now, and on top of that, they follow you everywhere. So choosing to do it onstage, voluntarily, in front of people who paid for a ticket—that’s a positioning choice. Our guest is Vincent Hedan. He’s a mentalist. Except this is where it gets interesting: he wrote a piece called I’m Not a Mentalist. So he’s a mentalist explaining that he isn’t a mentalist. In other words, he does the job, he’s won the awards, he has the career, but he refuses the business card. Which is actually pretty healthy. How many people today do a job while fully owning the fact that they do it? Very few. Anyway, his background: he was born in ’83. At seven, he was given a Gérard Majax magic set. Just to put that in perspective, that’s the age when other kids get a magic set, do two tricks, mess up the third one, and move on to something else. Not him. He kept going. For, like, 35 years. In today’s language, that’s what you call not knowing how to let go. Before that, he did ten years of theater, so he spent ten years saying other people’s words in front of an audience, then switched careers and started guessing other people’s words in front of an audience. Basically the same job—he just removed the author. That’s called optimization. In terms of results: first prize in mentalism in France in 2008, a very exclusive club in the United States, a medal in Canada, a world championship. So here we have a man who built an international career by convincing people he knew what they were thinking. Which is exactly what consultants do, except at least in his case the contract actually says “magic.” He’s also written books. One of them, appropriately enough, is called Your Mind Is My Playground. Which, when you think about it, is a fairly unsettling sentence to find on a book cover. But we invited him anyway. So, hello Vincent Hedan.

Vincent Hedan:
Hello, and thank you for inviting me onto your podcast, which I hope will make a good playground.

Vincent Chaigneau:
I think we’ve got plenty of questions for you, Vincent, so I suggest we jump straight in. Olivier is dying to discover Vincent the human being, rather than Vincent the paranormal, psychic mentalist. Go ahead, Olivier.

Olivier Nicoleau:
For people who don’t know, we should probably start by explaining that if we’re recording at this time, it’s because Vincent lives far away. Vincent, can you tell us where you live at the moment?

Vincent Hedan:
Well, I was born in France, as you said at the beginning, but I left France in 2022 to take a long trip through Asia and find a new home. I settled in the Philippines, in Manila, the capital, in 2023, and I’ve been living here ever since.

Olivier Nicoleau:
Was there any particular reason you chose that country?

Vincent Hedan:
It was kind of an accident, actually. The first time I spent a year in Asia, in 2022, I was looking for an alternative—a different way to live somewhere with a better environment. And I was really afraid of falling into the tourist trap. You know, you spend a week in Bali on the beach with a cocktail and you think life is amazing. Then you actually go and live in Indonesia and realize maybe it wasn’t for you after all, except by then it’s too late because you’ve already moved everything over there. So what I did that first year was spend one month in each country, deliberately trying not to be a tourist. I really worked, I ate the way people around me ate, took public transportation, and so on. I talked to people and tried to figure out what it would be like if you multiplied that by twelve, by twenty-four, by forty-eight—if you actually lived there permanently. There were a few countries I hated, a few I felt indifferent about, and then others I absolutely loved. One of the countries I liked was the Philippines, because people speak English here. It’s an official language, alongside the various dialects they have depending on the smaller islands they live on. And the visa is very, very easy to maintain, even as a tourist. Basically, you pay to stay—you renew your stay every month. Whereas in Thailand it’s very complicated; in Japan you can stay for three months, but becoming a resident there is very difficult. Vietnam is impossible. So there are difficulties on that front. And people here in the Philippines are lovely. Since they speak English, it also meant I could show them my magic, which is very different from the kind of magic traditionally done here. So I had a low cost of living, an easy visa, and a lifestyle you could almost think of as being on vacation, except every day. I’m not on the beach, because with skin as pale as mine it would be too risky for me to spend time there. But it’s a very pleasant way of life. So I stayed in the Philippines because, out of the whole catalogue of places I tried during that first year, it ended up being the best option for me.

Olivier Nicoleau:
Right, and we can clarify this for the listeners: when you say, “I stayed for a month and I was working,” you were working as a magician. You weren’t doing odd jobs or anything like that, you weren’t—

Vincent Hedan:
No, I wasn’t working at McDonald’s in Thailand. I wasn’t a digital nomad in the fashionable sense of doing stuff on a laptop. Although, in a way, I realized that I had actually become a digital nomad during Covid without going anywhere. Because when Covid hit France—and that was already five years ago now, so plenty of people have forgotten—we were all stuck at home. And at that point my work basically came down to translating magic books and distributing my own magic books. That’s when I realized that I was, quote-unquote, trapped at home—we were all locked down during Covid—but if I teleported myself to Berlin, Tokyo, New York, Bali, anywhere in the world, as long as there was an Internet connection, I could do exactly the same work. Except at the time I was living in Paris, which is practically the most expensive city in the world, with a disastrous rent. And, lockdown aside, my quality of life wasn’t amazing at that point either. So I thought, this is stupid. I actually have all the advantages of being a digital nomad. I’m not married, I don’t own a house—well, I was renting, but I didn’t own a house—I don’t have pets, I don’t have children, I don’t have a car, and yet I’m stuck in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Maybe I should go and see what life is like somewhere else, and if it goes well, I can think about turning that into a lifestyle. And if it goes badly, well, it doesn’t matter. I’m French. I can come back to France. Why not?

Olivier Nicoleau:
I suppose having studied languages helps when you’re thinking, “I’ll go and live in any country I want, as long as they speak English—I’ll manage.”

Vincent Hedan:
Yes, yes, that’s true. People sometimes ask me how to have this kind of lifestyle, in quotation marks, and it’s true that if you’re married with three children, a car, and a nine-to-five job, it’s very difficult to drop all of that overnight and become a nomad, or even relocate to the other side of the world. And the other thing is languages. I was lucky at first—or maybe lucky, I don’t know—to learn English at school. I hated it in the beginning, and then, like a lot of people, I did a one-week immersion stay in England, as a student guest. Something clicked in my head, and I started reading in English and watching films in English with subtitles, which at the time was impossible on French television. So I used DVDs to do that. And it’s true that the more I exposed myself to English-speaking culture through media that I personally cared about, rather than through whatever boring English lessons we may have had at school, the more passionate you become about the language when it comes through a film you like, a video game you like, a musician you like. That’s how my English really took off. And it’s true that if I didn’t speak English today, I’d lose probably sixty percent of my contacts almost overnight. I’m very, very lucky to be bilingual.

Olivier Nicoleau:
Now I understand your background better. You’ve done a lot of translation too.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes. I spent maybe ten years translating exclusively magic books, from English into French, as well as translating my own books from French into English. Because generally I always write in French first. From a literary point of view, it’s still the language I have the strongest command of, where I can get the most nuance and so on. Then I translate it into English. But when I was translating magic books by other authors, it was always English into French, because ideally, as a translator, it’s better to translate into your own language. I can translate, say, my own work into English, but the result will always be a little less natural than something written by a true native English speaker. So when I translated Banachek, Luke Jermay, and then a lot of others for Marchand de Trucs at the time, all those books were fairly easy for me to bring into French. And Ludovic at Marchand de Trucs almost exclusively sent me books about mentalism. So it was my specialist language pair, English-French, and my specialist field as well. That made me much more comfortable. Whereas if someone had asked me to translate Bobo, or a Rubinstein book, or a book on coin magic, I wouldn’t necessarily have had the technical vocabulary to do it. There are other people who do that much better. So I translated for ten years, and I think thirty or forty books came out that way. And it was very interesting, because people don’t necessarily realize how much work publishers put into choosing authors whose work will be worthwhile once translated into French. Banachek dates back to the 1990s, and by the time it came out in France there was this enormous time lag. You think, my God, it’s crazy that French magicians didn’t have access to that culture before. Luke Jermay is more contemporary. Even with other subjects—for example children’s magic—I don’t know whether there are many books on children’s magic translated into French. I translated a book by Danny Orleans, who is a very famous American magician. He and Silly Billy—David Kaye—are basically the two big children’s magicians in the United States. Danny Orleans writes his book on children’s magic, and Ludo sends it to me, and I say, “Yes, but this is children’s magic, and I hate children, and I don’t perform magic for children. So why are you sending me this?” He says, “Just take a look at the book anyway.” And he was right, because I read the whole thing thinking, forget that it’s for children, focus on the psychology. He also talks about marketing, dealing with clients, and so on. And it’s fascinating, because Danny Orleans used to be a schoolteacher. Since he trained to be a teacher, he knows that children’s psychology changes incredibly quickly. You both have children yourselves—Vincent, at least, I know you have children—so you know this. A child from zero to one is not mentally the same child as one from two to three. You can’t do the same magic show for children who are ten years apart in age, whereas you can do the same magic show for adults who are ten years apart, because those differences level out over time. Children’s psychology is a fascinating subject. There are people in France who do it very well too. And realizing that opens doors into adult magic or mentalism as well, because he talks about spectator management. And of course there’s nothing worse than a child with a five-minute attention span who doesn’t want to be there, is wired on sugar, and has no idea what’s going on. If you can manage that and transpose those lessons to mentalism, even if you’re a mentalist, you can read that book and extend what it teaches you.

Vincent Chaigneau:
Just a quick clarification for our listeners, perhaps. When you say you hate children, do you mean specifically in the context of magic, or just in general?

Vincent Hedan:
In general. No, no—I don’t have children, I don’t want any, it doesn’t interest me at all. But I like talking with people, the way we’re doing now, about somewhat interesting ideas. And it’s true that before—if I’m being generous—twelve years old, it’s difficult to have a very deep conversation. There are exceptional children, of course. Always.

Vincent Chaigneau:
“My child is very advanced for his age,” as parents always say. But we all have children in general. That’s it. “He’s very mature for his age.” Yes, yes, exactly.

Olivier Nicoleau:
And out of all those translations—because you mentioned Banachek, and I remember, since I live in the Netherlands, that in the magic shops I go to here, when I discovered Banachek it only existed in English. And I remember thinking, this is something France is missing. Then eventually, of course, it came out. But out of all those books, which one did you enjoy translating the most? Or rather, which one gave you the most?

Vincent Hedan:
That’s difficult. It’s difficult over a ten-year period, because Banachek is very important to me. The first volume of his trilogy is really interesting because he gives you very few routines. It might sound paradoxical to say that the value of the book is that there aren’t really any tricks in it. But what he actually gives you are effects—sorry, principles—at their source. Then it’s up to you to take that arsenal of tools and think, maybe I can inject this into this or that thing and make it my own, because they’re often open-ended mathematical or psychological principles. Whereas in the next two volumes you see those principles applied in routines by his friends; there’s a lot of collaboration. So that’s Banachek from a historical point of view: it’s interesting to know those things existed and to have them on hand as a reference, as a toolbox. My personal favorite would be Luke Jermay, because he was a huge discovery for me. We met, we became friends, he critiqued my show when I was performing it in Paris, so he gave me some very good advice. We worked together at various conventions, and he’s genuinely very pleasant to work with. And it was interesting to see someone young—he’s younger than I am—who had already defined his identity and his approach to mentalism so strongly, with tools of his own as well as older tools, like everything he did with David Hoy’s work in Touching on Hoy, which was also translated in the books. It was great to see an original universe that wasn’t yet another Derren Brown copy, or yet another copy of whoever happens to be the fashionable mentalist today. And then, more recently—because Luke Jermay was translated quite a long time ago now, almost at the beginning, ten years ago—the most recent thing I translated that shocked me, in a good way, was Phedon Bilek’s Orion. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read it, because it’s an enormous two-volume set. It’s right behind me on the bookshelf. We’re doing audio, but I can see it on the screen. And for people who don’t know Phedon Bilek’s work, there are a few videos on the Penguin website, or even online on YouTube. He works in a more intimate close-up setting, at least in the repertoire developed in Orion, although you can then adapt it for parlor and stage. But once again, it was interesting to see: oh, this is possible. You can explore that avenue, you can go in that direction. Quite a lot of his effects are almost propless. And his approach to the spectator is very conversational. He’s talking with the person, and things happen during that conversation. It’s very interesting to see that unfold. On top of that, he speaks French, so he was able to review the translation afterward and adapt whatever needed adapting, because one of the problems with mentalism is that it can be extremely language-specific. Sometimes translation becomes a nightmare because you think, well, the anagram doesn’t work here, or the wordplay that makes the psychology land doesn’t work. So we would discuss it with Ludo on the publishing side, or with the original author whenever possible, and adapt it.

Olivier Nicoleau:
I have to admit, Phedon Bilek’s work in Orion can be a little unsettling when you first read it. It isn’t easy, because it’s very personal work—it’s his approach to mentalism—and I think it’s very difficult to reach the same level he has in that area. But at the same time, what you’re saying is absolutely right: it shows you another possible path in mentalism, with a very adult approach. We were talking earlier about children and all that, but here you need to be with people who actually want to have deep conversations. This isn’t something you do at a wedding while everyone’s messing around and having a laugh. It’s something you’d almost do with friends around a table, people you know well, because you need to be able to reach a fairly deep level of intimacy. So it’s very different from what we’re used to seeing in the, quote-unquote, mainstream mentalism market.

Vincent Hedan:
And I think it’s very important for things like that to exist. It’s a bit like watching a Shoot Ogawa DVD, for example—he’s a god with coins and linking rings—or Ponta the Smith with coins as well, in Japan. I watched those videos, I watched the DVDs, and you think, my God, this guy is an alien. Technically, he’s operating on another level compared with the rest of the world. Or when you watch Yann Frisch, who isn’t necessarily a technician in the Shoot Ogawa or Ponta the Smith sense, but whose theatrical control and acting ability are exceptional. Seeing people explore a channel that hasn’t necessarily been explored before, literally going off the beaten track and pushing it that far—I love seeing that. In the same way that you might go and see films that explore very original themes or styles. Because we know we can make Fast and Furious 8. We know we can make Transformers 14. We know the mush that gets served to people is easy to manufacture with algorithms. We know that exists. And it’s the same in magic. Plastic crap, smartphones—we know that can be done. But seeing something original, something deeply personal, and discovering somebody else’s universe, I find that fascinating. Even if it’s only to know that it’s possible and that it exists, so that afterward you can define your own universe, either in reaction to it or by incorporating certain elements. I think it genuinely broadens your mind.

Olivier Nicoleau:
Absolutely. I had two more questions for you about translation, Vincent. The first is: was there one book that was particularly difficult to translate?

Vincent Hedan:
The most difficult book, maybe… There was one book I actually refused to translate because it was so difficult. I don’t know whether I’m allowed to say the title. For one thing, I’m not even sure I remember what it was called. I can’t remember the title right now, but Ludo sent it to me. I think the author’s last name was Wilson—not Greg Wilson, another Wilson, a Canadian whose first name I’ve forgotten. It had a red-and-black cover and the title escapes me right now. He sends me the book and I start translating it. Everything’s going well, it’s very intelligent, the material is great, mostly close-up. Then I reach one effect and I work on it for several days, and eventually I message Ludo and say, “I’m going to have to stop. I’m going to have to stop translating this,” because the entire effect and its explanation are written using English words built around the letter E. Yes. Deliberately. A bit like—I don’t know if you know the work of the Oulipo group, O-U-L-I-P-O. It’s a literary group that goes back a while; there were some major authors involved at the time. One of the books that came out of that movement was La Disparition, a novel written entirely without the letter A—or without the letter E—without… Anyway, this Canadian magician, Wilson, wrote that entire effect around the letter E. At the beginning he says, “I’m not going to use the letter E,” and then the little bastard does nothing but that afterward—the letter E is everywhere. So I message Ludo and say, “I can’t do this. This isn’t even translation anymore, it’s rewriting. It’s completely insane.” And I think the book was eventually translated by someone else. I don’t remember. So yes, there are books you simply have to turn down because of technical constraints. But the one I remember struggling with—in an enjoyable way—was a Max Maven book I translated, and I don’t know whether it has been released yet, so I won’t give the title right now. It contained a huge number of effects based on letters: words whose letters were rearranged, anagrams, things like that. And there, you simply can’t translate literally. Even if it’s just the names of countries in Europe, for example, almost all the names are different in English and French, with only a few exceptions. I did translate that one, but I practically had to rebuild the effects and the methodology and adapt the whole thing—which is what a French reader would have had to do anyway if they were reading the English edition. So yes, some books are harder than others to translate. To the point where now, when I write my own books in French, I make life easier for my future translator self by not planting nasty little traps that will be impossible to translate later.

Olivier Nicoleau:
Was there ever a book where translating it taught you more than you had learned when you first read it in the original language? Because you said you had read some of the books in English. Did you ever learn something new while translating one of them, or not really?

Vincent Hedan:
Generally, no. Either I had already read it, and if I learned something from it, it had already made an impression on me at the time. Or I hadn’t read it before translating it, and then as I translate and read it, I discover that person’s world and take notes. For example, one of the last books I translated was Spirit Theater, I think, by Eugene Burger. And again, you’re translating a book about spirit séances in the United States in the 1990s, in Chicago, and you think, this is so specific. Except it’s Eugene Burger, who is a historical genius, who worked with Max Maven—Phil Goldstein at the time—and others. So it’s packed with gems, incredible attention to detail, extraordinary audience management. It’s a subject I would never personally perform, but you learn an enormous amount just by discovering it.

Vincent Chaigneau:
Okay, and thank you for that answer. I suggest we move on now, maybe to some of your effects—the ones that made an impression on us, Olivier, the ones we particularly wanted to talk about. And since we’re talking about books, I suggest we start with what may have been the first effect of yours I ever performed, the first thing of yours I ever bought. I was really at the very beginning of my journey; I’d probably only been doing magic and mentalism for three or four months. And that was Babel. So this was probably the first time I spent a significant amount of money and decided to buy something that felt important to me. It was my first book test, and probably the book test I’ve performed the most ever since. So I wanted to hear your perspective on it: why did you create that particular book test? What led you to make that one rather than something else? Basically, what was the genesis of the project?

Vincent Hedan:
Well, it wasn’t the first book test I had released, because Haiku had been published years earlier. But again, Haiku belongs to a very specific world. It’s very niche; it’s an effect with a Japanese theme. Babel came from a need, and that’s often the case with the things I create—in fact it’s almost always the case. I think, I want to do this, and either it doesn’t exist at all or the versions that do exist don’t suit me. Sometimes, for example, there can be a language problem. Ted Karmilovich’s Mother of All Book Tests was only available in English at the time—and still is, actually. And back then I wanted a book test that was much more all-purpose than Haiku, in the sense that I could use it under virtually any conditions. Haiku is a bit like Phedon Bilek’s work in Orion, for example, or other types of routines. Or when I created the Devil’s Tarot, that was also very close to that kind of world: you have to settle in, you need the right setting to perform it. Babel, you can perform in a cafeteria at two in the morning when everybody’s drunk and it still works, because it’s very, very straightforward. There are a lot of principles in it. It lets you build the routine however you want. And I probably spent six months making a list of everything I wanted inside, because I thought, if I’m going to embark on writing an actual book for a book test, it absolutely has to contain everything. I don’t want to publish it and then think, damn, I forgot that—I wish I’d included that principle, that idea, that routine. So I spent a lot of time building a kind of skeleton, telling myself, I want this, I want this, I want this. I actually found my old notes yesterday, from—I don’t remember—2010 or something like that, maybe 2009. And I thought, okay, what have I liked in other book tests? What would I have changed if I had been the designer of that particular book test? How do we make this work in both French and English, since Babel exists as novels in both languages? Then the really big job was making all the different principles overlap, because there’s Flashback, there’s the long-word principle, there are memory effects that are very heavily embedded mathematically in the structure of the text. You can reveal page numbers, you can reveal the position of words, and so on. I think I literally had an Excel spreadsheet at the time that looked almost like mathematical formulas: if we want X and Y to be in the right place, then Z has to be positioned like this. Things like that, because I originally studied mathematics at university. And yes, I spent a year writing it, first in French. Then I said, this is all very nice, but I’m in Australia, so it’s useless to me. I need to make it in English, because I was a student in Australia at the time. So I had to do all the work again in English, because at that point it isn’t translation. You genuinely have to restructure the whole thing around the language in a different way. I’ve had people contact me from Spain and Germany after seeing Babel at a lecture and say, “We’d like to translate it.” I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s translation work. It would be rewriting, and you’d bleed doing it—it would be extremely, extremely difficult. And they all gave up. Nobody ever said, “I’m going to do it,” and then actually completed it. So really, to answer your question more directly, it came from wanting all of these things, plural—a lot of different things. It didn’t exist, at least not fifteen years ago. So I wondered: is it possible to make all these principles coexist inside the very limited space of one book? Let’s try. And that became Babel.

Vincent Chaigneau:
What you’re saying is interesting because it’s exactly why people might want to buy a book test, and it’s also exactly why a book test can be bad. Very often, when you start looking for a book test, you think, if I’m going to have a book test, it might as well do everything. Except I own plenty of book tests that do everything, and I never perform them. Because most of the time they’re absolute monsters—completely overengineered contraptions. And that’s probably the first mistake you can make when you design a book test that tries to contain everything: you end up with an absolute monster where you can’t actually do anything properly, where all the effects ultimately feel more or less the same, or resemble each other too much, or where if you perform them together you start exposing part of how the method works. And without wanting to flatter your work too much, there are only two I perform all the time: yours and the Close-up Book Test. Those are the only ones where I can find a real continuity, a real way of using all the effects. And in that respect I genuinely think the work was done intelligently: yes, there’s this effect, there’s that one, you can chain them together, you can take one and remove another without changing the nature of how the prop is used. And I imagine it must be an enormous amount of work to figure out how to interweave all those effects.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes. My general philosophy—because I’m an extremely lazy person—is to work like a maniac beforehand so that when I’m actually in front of an audience I can be relaxed and just solve problems. When I was building Babel, it was a nightmare, but it was fun too, because I enjoy moving puzzle pieces around and making them connect until you get the result you want. But once I had finished it, in my head I thought, okay, that’s it: the basic all-purpose book test problem is solved for me. I can keep this for twenty-five years. As long as I can use it, there’s no problem. What you were saying about overengineered monsters is interesting. One thing I like, when I’m trying to understand what we’re talking about, is drawing parallels with completely different subjects, because then you can see the connections while becoming emotionally detached from the original subject. And another classic area for overengineering is magic wallets. I’m not a huge wallet user myself, but I have friends who are addicts. Sadly, it’s an illness. We’re trying to help them, and it’s very difficult. But there are wallets that are a fire wallet, a mentalism wallet, a wallet that makes a dove appear—everything is in there, and you end up with an unusable leather brick. On top of that, people tend to be fairly minimalist these days when it comes to pocket space, so it becomes very complicated. And physically, it’s extremely difficult to make several wallet principles coexist intelligently. It has been done successfully in some cases. The JOL Plus Wallet, for example, is extraordinary for that. The Stealth Assassin is more mentalism-oriented, and it does that very well. Then you have wallets that only do one thing. Mark Strivings’ original SUC, for example, is brilliant, but it only has one function. It just happens to be a Swiss-army-knife kind of function that lets you do a lot of different things. Babel was the same. I wanted to be able to do one tiny effect if I only had thirty seconds between two trains, or a fifteen-minute routine if I needed to. Then it’s up to me to decide what the audience in front of me wants, what the atmosphere is like, how much time we have. Do I want to do only memory? Only divination? A mixture of the two? Prediction or no prediction? Because Babel lets you do all of that. And I also wanted something else, and this was incredibly important—I don’t know whether people fully understood it at the time. I didn’t want to fall into a huge trap for book-test collectors, or people like you who already own two, or maybe more, book tests. They own several, and generally someone who owns several book tests doesn’t own the same one several times. Because almost every book test currently available in magic is just one specific book. You have Doumergue’s, which is only Les Misérables; Abyss is only one novel, and so on. What interested me with Babel was being able to walk onstage, have fifteen books on a shelf, and tell people, “Take any one you want,” without having to bother with PATEO, a force, or magician’s choice. You take any one you like, and I perform whatever routine I want with it. Whereas a magician who owns several different book tests might have Abyss, Les Misérables, the Close-up Book Test—which is Doumergue’s one. That’s the— Oh, right, that’s the one. Sorry, I knew the title of the novel but not the name of the product. So you have three books created by three different creators. And what happens is that if you genuinely give the spectator a free choice, they freely choose whichever one they want. And then, horror of horrors, you’re forced to perform the routine the spectator has just decided to give you, because each book only lets you do one routine—or several routines that are specific to that book. And I don’t want my spectator deciding the content of my show, particularly when the show is tightly scripted, like the one I was doing in Paris around 2017–2019. So the idea was that in English and French you have fifteen books, you take whichever one you want, and on the inside they’re all the same. That’s the truly devious part. All the titles, authors and covers are different, but inside they’re identical. So you learn the routines you like, and then you decide what you want to perform for the audience, while they still feel they had a completely free choice. And I think it may be the only book test currently—maybe even historically—available in both English and French with that range of different titles, because Joshua Quinn had released the same basic idea in English, with the same book repeated under several different covers. But Babel is the only one that works in two languages, because, well, I’m bilingual, so obviously that helps.

Olivier Nicoleau:
You’ve lost me with book tests; that’s not really my specialty. No problem. We’ll convert you. I’m not sure you will. Why not? Because, first of all, like you said, they often become collector’s items—that’s what it makes me think of. They’re generally fairly expensive too. And first question: you were talking about Les Misérables, but wasn’t it The Art of War?

Vincent Chaigneau:
The Close-up Book Test 2 is The Art of War. The Close-up Book Test 1 is Les Misérables, yes.

Olivier Nicoleau:
Okay, right, that was just for my own information. When you say you have fifteen books onstage, you mean fifteen versions of your Babel book under different names—that’s what you were explaining. And that’s the bit I didn’t know; I was missing that information. It exists under different titles.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes. If you go to my website, there’s a page for Babel and in the menu you can choose. I actually had to cut the number down because Amazon blocked me for similar content. Basically they told me, “Okay, that’s enough—six copies of the same book, we’re stopping here.” I nearly got blocked, but I did manage to get six through. So I think on my French website you can choose from six different titles, and each title has a different cover and a different author. And what’s interesting too is that they come in different formats and thicknesses. Babel exists in 200-, 400-, and 600-page versions. The 200-page paperback is perfect for people doing close-up. If you put it in your jacket pocket, it takes up practically no room. Then there’s a 400-page version and a 600-page version as well, because onstage you may want a bigger brick of a book, just for the theatricality of the effect. So you can walk onstage with a small 200-page paperback, a 400-page A5-format book, and a giant 600-page version. And it’s very difficult for an audience to think, the person in front of me wrote the same book three times with different thicknesses, different covers, different titles, different formats. I don’t even have to tell them the books are different. They can physically see that they’re different, and they’re convinced. That makes the object feel even more innocent. And there are explanations in the instructions too. My friend Sean Taylor in Australia had an incredibly devious idea for convincing people that the book test he used—just one book, in his case—was completely normal. He walks onstage with the book already sitting on a stool somewhere. Then when it’s time to do the book test—he explains this in his book, and I think I included it in my instructions too—when he picks up the book he says, “Before we started, I asked if someone in the audience could lend me a book or two,” and he points somewhere randomly in the room and says, “Thank you for playing along.” Then he picks up the book and goes straight into the routine. Everyone in the room is convinced he has just pointed at the woman who lent him the book before the show. So he sells the book as completely ordinary, when in reality it’s Babel or whatever book test he happens to be using. It’s incredibly devious, but because he doesn’t make a big deal out of it—nobody’s going to start investigating it like a detective—it sails straight through onstage. And he convinces the audience that his book test wasn’t made by him. It’s extremely sneaky.

Vincent Chaigneau:
That’s funny, because I think in one of Max Maven’s last interviews he explained that he used to leave book tests lying around among the audience, disguised as ordinary paperbacks. Then he’d ask whether anyone had a book, and someone would “find” one, even though he was the one who had planted it there.

Vincent Hedan:
If you go to certain restaurants or cafés in Paris that have bookshelves, I invite you to look at the spines. I’ve planted my book in various places. Since I own loads of copies, every time I see a bookshelf I think, we’ll come back here someday—let’s put one in, just in case. And yes, once or twice I came back and someone said, “Oh, you do magic—can you show me something?” And I said, “I don’t know, I haven’t got anything on me. Wait, hang on, let’s try something with a book.” And of course I take Babel off the shelf, where it’s been sitting for three months. And then, well, that person kills themselves afterward because it’s very hard to process what just happened to them.

Vincent Chaigneau:
I admit, if that happens to you, you commit hara-kiri on the spot. Absolutely.

Olivier Nicoleau:
I think that’s a very funny anecdote. Just to come back to book tests for a second, isn’t EJO also like that, with several different covers? Although maybe it’s always the same format. Just to be complete for the listeners: EJO is in French. I think Magic Dream produced it at the time. And I think at one point they had six different titles—three or six, I can’t remember. There are a few different titles, anyway, both for version one and version two, which came out a year or two ago. I think they have two or three different models with the same content.

Vincent Chaigneau:
Staying with book tests, it’s actually quite funny because, apart from the latest one—and I’ll remind everyone that we started frightening you with the review of the latest one, which began in a certain way; we’ll come back to that—Haiku is quite specific, because it’s made up of little quotations, little proverbs—

Vincent Hedan:
No, Japanese poetry. It’s Japanese poetry. It’s a form of poetry, but it’s very different from what we’re used to in Europe—Italian, Germanic, German, French or English poetry—where you often have a long text with rhymes. Haiku is something much more concise, almost instantaneous. People often say it’s five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables, because there’s a very specific structure, a little like alexandrines. In fact they aren’t really syllables, because Japanese doesn’t use them in quite the same way. They use a counting unit called the mora—or “mora” as we call it when we transpose the concept into French. So yes, these are Japanese poems translated into French, or into English for the English edition, or German, because I released the German edition last year, I think. And that becomes a completely different effect. Sorry, I’m going off on Haiku, but it’s one of my favorite effects because it was my first creation. And I’m very attached to Japan culturally too, so that inspired it. When I released Haiku, it was almost a statement of intent, because at the time there were basically only book tests in the Babel vein or the Mother of All Book Tests vein: a novel, you choose a word inside it, and the performer reveals that word—or Larry Becker’s Flashback, for example. And those are great. They’re extremely versatile, they work very well. With Echo, incidentally, I was also able to push that principle toward something more emotional and personal. But Haiku was almost a response to this feeling of, I’m tired of revealing the word “bathtub” on page fourteen of a novel nobody actually cares about. I wanted the thing we reveal to matter to the person who chose it. So I asked myself: how do you put emotion into something as dry and arid as a book test, something so intellectual? And the almost obvious solution I chose was poetry. Because poetry is intrinsically emotional. In a way, poetry is a song without music. So when you ask someone to read poetry, provided they’re receptive to it and you’re in the right setting, the musicality of the text and the images that text evokes are going to affect that person. Especially because in Haiku you tell them, “Please feel free to change haiku if you don’t like the one you’ve found. Choose an image, a scene, that appeals to you, that speaks to you.” So when you reveal it, you’re no longer revealing “bathtub, page fourteen.” You’re revealing the image they have in their mind, which connects to a personal experience. And it becomes a completely different kind of experience, without overdoing it. An emotion. Then, of course, I had to find a method that would actually make it work, because that wasn’t obvious at first. And the method has changed, incidentally. For people who know the original vertical version with the ring or top binding, which C.C. Éditions also produced in a beautiful boxed set that is now sold out, the method changed because now it’s more like the paperback I have here, with a conventional binding down the side. The method is easier and slightly different. And it’s an effect I really enjoy performing when the setting is right, because you can have a different kind of impact on someone than simply presenting them with an intellectual challenge.

Vincent Chaigneau:
And then we move on from poetry. So after that you get to Babel, if I’m following the progression of your creations correctly. Babel is the more traditional kind of book test. And then we move on to Pi. And there we’re less in the realm of emotion.

Vincent Hedan:
Absolutely. It’s funny. There would be no point in making a fourteenth version of the same thing. And again, this one came from a personal interest. I was in Australia at the time. I was a student—no, actually I wasn’t a student anymore, I was working there, performing magic in a bar. And I used to have sessions like you have with friends—I’m sure you do the same—with Sean Taylor, an Australian mentalist whose work I later translated into French. He’s a brilliant guy and incredibly generous with his time and his ideas, originally English and now an expat in Australia. We have a session together. He shows me things that completely crush my brain, I go home and cry. And right at the end he says, “Wait, I’m working on something. I can’t show it to you yet. It has to do with pi.” And he leaves me with that. So I go home thinking, my God, what an insane tease. I had absolutely no idea what it was. I knew it was going to be serious because he’s always very, very, very serious about the things he works on. And it hit me even more because pi had been a personal interest of mine for years. For anyone who doesn’t know—or doesn’t remember—pi is the value connected to a circle: you know, 3.141592653, and so on and so on. The decimal expansion is infinite. So even just as a concept, from a presentation point of view, thematically, it’s fascinating. But I had actually been using pi as my password for all sorts of things for years. Don’t go trying it on PayPal now or anything; I’ve changed the password. It’s not a bad password when you’ve got that many decimal places. Not bad at all. Except I got my PayPal hacked because of it, because apparently it’s one of those values that isn’t quite as obscure as you think when people test passwords. They try 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 4, 5; and then pi, and so on. So I used pi to ten decimal places as a password partly to train myself to memorize it, which is why I know it by heart. And I thought, it’s crazy that I’ve had this theme in my life literally every day through my password and never thought of turning it into a magic effect. So Sean showed me his thing, we talked, and I thought, right, I’m going to work on the subject. The challenge was to have something to show him the next time we met, so we could compare our homework, basically—compare what we had each come up with. So I made my thing, and when we met again I had my prototype, he had his. Completely different methods—mine at that time was also completely different from the method I use today. His effect is brilliant. I think it’s still commercially available, but it’s much more of a stage effect than anything else. Mine was a totally different effect with a totally different method. We looked at each other and thought, well, great, these can coexist perfectly well. Then later I changed my method and simplified it into Pi Max. But I’ve been using this effect for a very long time. It’s much more intellectual than Haiku. My fear at the time was that it was an effect about mathematics, because when you ask people, “Do you know what pi is?” you have to remind them about 3.14 and all of that. And as you know, lots of people are allergic to mathematics because of what happens in classrooms. When you’re fourteen, you’re not necessarily interested in the subject; you couldn’t care less about math. So I was really afraid it would become yet another niche effect that only appealed to geeks, people who are heavily into mathematics, scientists and so on—which is a minority. But the more I performed it—and maybe you’ve had the same experience if you perform it too—the more I realized it isn’t an effect about mathematics. It’s an effect about infinity and memory. And those ideas speak to everyone. You can perform it for someone who left school at six years old. It doesn’t matter. They can still enter into the theme and accept the premise. All you need to tell them is, “Okay, pi is this.” Everything else is secondary.

Vincent Chaigneau:
For me, Haiku and Pi are two effects that are almost my nemeses. They terrify me, and I find them difficult to present. I’m incredibly drawn to both of them—they’re literally on the shelf behind me. I’m fascinated by them, I’ve worked on them, I’ve studied them, but I struggle to actually perform them. Haiku because I have trouble finding the right moment for it, and the drawing part absolutely terrifies me.

Vincent Hedan:
There’s a solution to that in the latest version of Haiku. You don’t have to do the drawings anymore. I won’t say too much, but let’s just say the drawings more or less make themselves, and all you have to do is take out the right one.

Vincent Chaigneau:
And that’s one of the reasons I went back to it not long ago, because the drawing part was no longer compulsory. I tried both versions too, because a new version came out recently. So I need to work on that new version, because I never managed to get comfortable with the first one. With the first version I was using the approach without a memorized stack. No stack. But in the meantime I’ve learned a stack, so with the new one I’ve moved to the stacked version.

Vincent Hedan:
Which stack do you use, if it’s a—

Vincent Chaigneau:
It’s… I’ve completely forgotten the name. It’s the stack by the two French guys. Damn it… oh for God’s sake, it’s right there too. I’ve got a French stack—

Vincent Hedan:
I know Claude Rix, but that’s just one person.

Vincent Chaigneau:
It’s the stack by… Ah, damn, the one that came with the flash— I can’t remember the creators exactly. The one with the elephant, there. Yeah, with the elephant. The elephant from Stack.phant.

Olivier Nicoleau:
You’ve mentioned it to me several times. Yes, that’s it. It was very easy to learn.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes, yes. It’s interesting because it isn’t actually that difficult to learn. It still requires memory work—you’re still memorizing fifty-two positions. But with a stack it’s the same philosophy I was talking about earlier: do a lot of work beforehand so you can relax later when you’re performing. It’s true that memorizing a stack can frighten people, but Simon Aronson used to say that nobody has ever successfully memorized a stack and then regretted it afterward. Once the work is done, the return on that work is so enormous, so gigantic. There’s so much you can do with it that nobody thinks, “I wasted my time.” You just have to get past that first hurdle of mastering it. And what happened to me actually connects back to translation in a way. Juan Tamariz—our legendary figure, mythical in magic—famously created his own stack, Mnemonica. Simon Aronson had the Aronson stack in the United States, which was dominant partly because of translation: the missing translation mattered. When Hermetic Press translated Mnemonica into English—I don’t remember what year, but relatively early—from Spanish, American and English-speaking magicians were able to adopt the system. And now Mnemonica is almost dominant throughout the English-speaking world, as well as the Spanish-speaking world, of course. French magicians, on the other hand, had to wait—I can’t remember how many years, but I think ten or fifteen—before finally getting a French translation, which is very well done now. I talked about it a little with Yves Carbonnier, who often goes to El Escorial with Tamariz and is of course an excellent French card magician. He told me that translation took an enormous amount of time because there are spelling effects, technically complicated terms, things like that. So I didn’t have access to Mnemonica in French when I became interested in memorized stacks, sometime in the early 2000s. And like an idiot, I created my own. Just as I did with Babel, I started by making a list of everything I wanted in it. Do I want spelling? Color separation? Mathematical properties? Connections to Si Stebbins, perhaps? And so on and so on. And I remember thinking at the time: we’re in France, it’s the early 2000s, there’s no point putting poker deals or poker structures into my stack the way Aronson and Mnemonica do, because French people don’t really play poker. You have to understand that in the early 2000s poker wasn’t a huge subject here. Then of course the following year, after I’d created my stack, there was the French championship—well, yes, the French championship—and then this huge development in Monaco and in the United States. Suddenly it became a major thing. French people started playing poker, Texas Hold’em, the version played at the world championships. And I thought, great, I’m screwed, because I’ve created and memorized a stack that has no poker built into it. So it was a nightmare. I went back to the drawing board and found poker structures by analyzing the stack manually at the time. And now, in a way, I don’t work on my stack anymore because I solved that problem for myself. I memorized mine; it does everything I want. When I see a routine in Mnemonica, or in Woody Aragón’s stack, for example, Memorandum, I can often adapt it to my own structure. And one of my projects for this year—finally, twenty years later—is to publish the first book on my stack, as a companion to a book about Mnemonica, because it would be stupid to die without ever publishing the thing. So we’re going to try to do that before the end of the year.

Vincent Chaigneau:
You’ve still got a bit of time, but was that the scoop you wanted to announce to us?

Vincent Hedan:
It’s not the only scoop.

Vincent Chaigneau:
To pick up the evolution of your book tests again, we’ve got Haiku, Babel, Pi, and finally—and this is where I wanted to get to, since you have a few clarifications to make about our review, especially Vincent’s comments—your latest book test, Echo.

Vincent Hedan:
I created Echo for myself two years ago. And again, it was the same thing: I need something, it doesn’t exist, okay, let’s go and make it ourselves. It came from being satisfied with Babel, but not wanting so many different principles coexisting inside the same book. I almost called Echo “Babel Mini.” I nearly gave it that name. Because in Echo, for anyone who doesn’t know, there’s only one principle: Flashback. And as you said in your review a few episodes ago, it’s true that this is surprising—the book test only contains one principle. But the idea is like Mark Strivings’ SUC, or owning a marked deck, or having a thumb tip: you have one tool, but then what can you do with it? How far can you push it, and how can you bring it to spectators in a way that is engaging and inspiring for them? Because Echo originally came into existence as a prop. I explain this in the instructions. I’d been invited by a friend who is a magician and also reads tarot to do tarot—not to do some little four-card tarot trick, but to genuinely read tarot for people who believe in it, who want a serious tarot reading and who aren’t there to be mocked or scammed or anything like that. I was already reading tarot, and years ago I had already published material on the subject using the Oracle Belline, a divination deck. And I thought, this is interesting, because this time it isn’t about doing magic tricks with a divination object. It’s about involving the spectator and pushing the divination side further with a magic effect, making the experience even more tangible and even more convincing for them. So I’m doing this, but I always have a bit of impostor syndrome because I don’t consider myself anything particularly special. And I thought: what could convince the people sitting in front of me, next to me, that I’m legitimate enough to give them a genuine tarot reading? I had met other people from that world who really are purely tarot practitioners; they have no background in magic at all. And some of them had published books on the subject, because it isn’t absurd—no pun intended with abracadabra—it isn’t absurd to publish on a subject if it genuinely is your field of expertise. So I knew people who had published on crystals, guardian angels, tarot, and so on. I thought, okay, let’s do that. Let’s publish a book about tarot. And originally there was nothing gimmicked inside Echo. It was simply a book about tarot with my name on it, used as a piece of character validation. People would look at the book, leaf through it while I was putting my deck away and so on. And I thought, I’m an idiot. I have this perfect object sitting next to me that people consider completely innocent, and I’m doing nothing with it. That’s stupid. So let’s rewrite it, this time putting Flashback into it. Flashback, again for anyone who doesn’t know, is a very direct principle that requires no memory, no sleight of hand, nothing. You riffle through the book, people look at a word on the page they can see, and you instantly know which word they chose. Then you can reveal it in various ways. So at the time I rewrote Echo around the Rider-Waite Tarot, because that’s what I was using. A week later, because the experience had been very convincing for people, my friend invites me back—but this time to do, what do you call it, tea-leaf reading, which is a completely different field. And I think, well, this really isn’t my subject. So let’s make an Echo about tea leaves to validate the character even more, because I felt very shaky in that area. The irony is that the next Echo coming out in a few weeks is the tea-leaf-reading Echo. Chronologically it was almost the first one I wrote. I’d kept it in reserve. So I release the book, and again, the content is entirely about tea-leaf reading; the other one is entirely about tarot. My name is on it, and Flashback is built in, but the words are different. Because it would make no sense if you riffled through a book about tea leaves and the word you landed on was “High Priestess” or “Wheel”—the Wheel of Fortune—because those words belong to the world and vocabulary of tarot. So Echo is the opposite of Babel. All the books look different and the content really is different too. But the effects and the underlying principle stay the same. It’s always Flashback, always the same four routines. And in the explanations I really emphasize: okay, it’s Flashback, but look how far you can take it. The audience can first see one effect, then a second effect, then a group effect, which is also described in the instructions. And it’s amazing how deeply you can affect people with such a simple principle, because in reality you’re talking to them about themselves—and that’s usually their favorite subject.

Olivier Nicoleau:
Your books are available on Amazon, and there are books written… sorry. There’s the magic book and the book… magic… I don’t know if—maybe they’re actually the same thing? That’s really my question. Is it the same book?

Vincent Hedan:
Yes, yes. The Amazon idea wasn’t originally mine. And this isn’t just me name-dropping, but I met David Blaine—I don’t remember what year—with Pi. I showed him Pi, he liked the effect, although he never ended up performing it, which is fine. And he said to me, “But is this a real book you can buy on Amazon?” I looked at him and thought, that’s not a stupid idea. Let’s work on that; that’s interesting. And I thought, yes, it should actually exist online. So Pi, for example, is available on Amazon for nine euros. People can buy the first ten thousand decimal places of pi on Amazon for nine euros. That’s the normal version. You cannot perform the effect with it. It contains the genuine decimal expansion of pi. That’s it. With Echo, Amazon lets me publish several formats. So there’s the format I personally use, the very practical 200-page paperback that’s easy to carry around. That one contains all the magic workings, and whether you buy it from me, from a magic shop, or from Amazon, it’s the same book. Exactly the same book. The difference is that people who buy it on Amazon don’t automatically receive the PDF instructions explaining the methods. Sometimes people buy it on Amazon, and that’s absolutely fine, then message me saying, “I bought it on Amazon and didn’t receive the instructions.” But you understand that if somebody who isn’t a magician buys the book on Amazon and automatically receives the secret instructions, that would be very strange. So if you buy it on Amazon, no problem: send me an email and I’ll send you the instructions. Same thing with magic shops. It’s also available on Kindle. On Kindle, of course, you no longer have the fixed pagination and structure that make Flashback work. It’s simply a book people can read on their tablet; you can’t perform the effect with it at all. And then there’s what we’d call a coffee-table-book edition in English—you know, a slightly larger, nice-looking hardback. So it exists in a larger format too. I don’t have one here within reach. Just to give you an idea, I’m showing you on camera: this is Astrology in paperback format. And this would be the size of the same book in the larger hardback format. That version can also do Flashback and all the effects, because sometimes a hardback is more visible onstage. But all the Echo books are available on Amazon because, again, the idea grew out of actually performing the effect in the real world. I’ve performed Echo many times, and I even did a convention in the Philippines that was entirely about divination. I had a little table with a small sign with my name on it, and everyone around me was selling crystals and strange things. I performed Echo for eight hours and filmed it—the videos are in the instructions and on my website—to test it on real people, asking myself: what happens when you offer this experience to people who genuinely want to believe, who are receptive to the theme? It’s true that French audiences can sometimes be difficult. I don’t know what it’s like in the Netherlands, but French people can question the experience itself. That isn’t really the case here in the Philippines. So I perform the effect, and lots of people say, “Where can I buy it? Where can I buy it?” Not the magic trick—they mean, “I want to read about tarot, I want to read about hypnosis, I want to read about the Devil. Where can I buy these books?” On Amazon, if you want, because I don’t carry any stock at all. So it’s quite funny: the book exists, rather sneakily, as a genuine book online.

Vincent Chaigneau:
Olivier, is there one of Vincent’s effects that particularly made an impression on you?

Olivier Nicoleau:
There are lots of things that made an impression on me. Because I saw your Secret Conference lecture, I think.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes, in 2015. And actually it’s a shame—I’ll take the opportunity to mention it. They filmed several lectures. They were beautiful, high-quality lectures, and I think the project has more or less stopped now. Which is a shame. Olivier—his first name was Olivier, but I’ve forgotten his last name. Olivier, yes, yes, exactly. Anyway, it’s a shame it didn’t continue.

Olivier Nicoleau:
So I saw that lecture. I remember your roulette routine with eggs. But I also have another image in my head—I may be mixing two different things up, that’s possible—but there was a trick that really impressed me. It was the one with the decks of cards, where you had two female spectators do some pretty incredible things. And that’s your book Multitude.

Vincent Hedan:
Ah yes.

Olivier Nicoleau:
That one really stayed with me. I don’t know whether it’s extremely mentalism-oriented, because it looks a lot like card magic. I’d be curious to know how you came to use that deck, because you didn’t just take this old existing principle and stop there—you really developed routines around it.

Vincent Hedan:
Yes, that was almost—I was going to say—a miracle, because it happened completely by chance. When I was much younger, and maybe you remember these too, I watched a lot of videotapes—VHS tapes, my God—called Best of [Artist Name] Seminar. They were produced by Joker Deluxe and Paris Magic at the time, with these yellow-gold covers. They had Juan Tamariz, Guy Hollingworth, Chad Long, Arturo de Ascanio… I’m forgetting half the names because I think they made eight of them. Vallarino was in there too, Giobbi. They were exceptional. The quality of that material was extraordinary. We were lucky, because later those VHS tapes were transferred to DVD. Maybe they’re available on demand now as paid downloads online, I don’t know. I grew up in a tiny village in France, in Charente-Maritime. There was no magic club, no specialist bookstore, nothing that gave you access to magic. And of course, because I was born in 1983 and we’re talking about 1994 or 1995 at that age, there was no Internet. So yes, we’re old. And it was very difficult—very difficult—to get access to magic at all, let alone high-quality magic, because there was basically nothing. It was a desert. Access was extremely difficult, especially in French. And at Joker Deluxe at the time, François Montmirel, Daniel Rhod, and Paris Magic with Guy Lore, I think, did something extraordinary. They had these exceptional artists coming to lecture in Paris and they thought, let’s film them and distribute the tapes so people can benefit from this material. There was also Les Étoiles de la Cartomagie Moderne, produced by… what’s the name of that shop? Duvivier’s shop in Paris—Mayette. The lineup was completely insane. Larry Jennings, major, major, major card magicians. So one day I watch the Juan Tamariz tape. He performs effects that absolutely destroy everybody in the room. It’s incredible. You already have Oil and Water, Neither Blind Nor Stupid, and lots and lots of other things. And near the end he basically says, “If you like, I’ll show you three little extra things.” Then he performs three effects that leave everyone in the room crying because what’s happening seems impossible. I later learned that he also performed one of them at MacMillan, which is a convention in England and also a competition that has been won, among others, by Christian Chelman and Derren Brown. So one year Juan Tamariz lectures at MacMillan and he opens with one of these effects. Four hundred people in the room watch it and everybody is devastated, because it seems impossible. The deck is shuffled, three cards are selected, he doesn’t look at anything, he asks no questions, and he reveals all three cards—which, to come back to what you were saying about Multitude being very card-magic-heavy, is genuinely a mentalism effect. It hit me like a truck. I thought, what is this thing? This is completely insane. He explains—and people can go and check the sources afterward—that it comes from The Jinx, and if I’m not mistaken it’s issue 28, from 1936, so it’s relatively old, almost a hundred years ago. And in 1936, in The Jinx—for those who know it—it’s this black-and-white magazine printed in a nearly unreadable typeface. Tiny chicken-scratch text all over the page. It’s horrible to read, but it’s packed with gems. And in there they say, “I’ve been exploring this principle for twenty years; here are a few ideas,” and then they just dump eighteen effects using the principle. Every one crazier than the last. But because there are no illustrations, and the effect is described in two lines and the explanation in four, most people completely overlooked it. The principle originally comes from Val Evans, although the basic idea goes back to Burling Hull around 1905. Juan Tamariz reads this and thinks, of course! Then he explores it. And because he’s Tamariz and he’s insane, he publishes a book called La Baraja Multiefecto, which unfortunately is currently only available in Spanish. In that book he describes one hundred routines using the principle. One hundred routines. The man is insane. Completely insane. And it isn’t like a Radio deck where every effect ends up with the card being the Nine of Clubs and it’s always basically the same thing. Here he genuinely explores the principle in every possible direction: coincidences, predictions, extraordinary things. So I read the book. At the time I didn’t speak Spanish at all. I bought it from an online magic shop in Chile, which shipped it from Chile to France, so I was trembling while I waited for the package to arrive. I receive this horrible photocopied thing with plastic spiral binding. It’s ugly as hell. And I think, I can’t understand this book because it’s in Spanish. So what do you do? Again, this is the early 2000s. There’s no AI or anything like that. I retyped the entire book by hand—well, by hand into Word—and then in chunks I pasted it into Google Translate, which was primitive at the time and translated things very, very badly. And there were limits. Of course there were; this was twenty-five years ago. There were length limits, so I couldn’t paste the whole thing in one go. I’m talking about a time that people under twenty… you know, all that. So I translated the entire book, paragraph by paragraph, into French. I pieced together what was going on through this mangled Spanish translation, and I thought, this is brilliant—but I wouldn’t have done it like that. And that’s where my routines started to emerge. I thought, we could do this, we could do that, which direction could we take this in? That’s how Multitude was born. The sixteen routines in it explore card magic, cheating demonstrations, mentalism—basically, what would I personally do with this principle? And what has been brilliant about it is that Pit Hartling, for example, in Germany, who is an absolute genius of card magic, also discovered the principle and took it somewhere else. Michael Weber in the United States, another genius, discovered it, read about it and took it somewhere else. It really is like a thumb tip, a marked deck or invisible thread. It’s a pure, clean, naked tool, and then you take it in whatever direction you want. It’s fascinating to see what people have discovered with it over the decades. And I may be preparing a volume two. There actually is a volume two that has been ready for years, but I haven’t released it yet.

Olivier Nicoleau:
Okay, so we’ll be able to pull Multitude back off the shelf and do some new things with it. At one point—and I don’t remember why, my memories are a bit old now—I mixed up two principles. The one you use in Multitude isn’t a Mene-Tekel deck, is it?

Vincent Hedan:
So, the Mene-Tekel deck—for anyone who recognizes the reference—is also described in Hugard’s Encyclopedia of Card Tricks. It’s an old book, but a gem. It’s described as a deck with short-long pairs: one long card, one short card, but they’re duplicates. Nine of Clubs, Nine of Clubs; Eight of Diamonds, Eight of Diamonds, and so on. So Mene-Tekel is short-long duplicate pairs. In a Radio deck, the short cards are all the same and the long cards are all different. The Multi-Effect Deck has the particular feature that the pairing is flexible. When Val Evans describes it in The Jinx, it’s described as, say, a Three of Clubs paired with a Two of Clubs—same family, one value apart. What I decided to explore in Multitude was literal paired values: for example Six of Diamonds with Six of Hearts, Three of Spades with Three of Clubs, because that lets you create much stronger coincidence effects with no setup. I also know there’s—what’s his name, I’ve forgotten now—but there’s something called the Cardiologist Deck. The Cardiologist Deck is basically a Multi-Effect Deck with the cards paired slightly differently. There are quite a few versions. When I said Burling Hull around 1905—I may have the date wrong, people can correct me in the comments—Burling Hull’s contribution is the short-card/long-card idea. Later people explored how you pair those cards. Other pairings, for example, use a total of fourteen or thirteen, somewhat like an Ultra Mental-type structure. So you might have, say, the Seven of Diamonds with—if I’m not saying something stupid—the Six of Diamonds, for example. Same family, and you derive the value using a count to thirteen. Is that the—? It’s possible. I admit I haven’t studied everything Craig Petty has released about prediction, because there’s an enormous amount of material coming out. It’s impossible. You simply can’t follow everything.

Vincent Chaigneau:
No matter how hard we try to review everything, we can’t keep up. Review—

Olivier Nicoleau:
You have an easier time reading The Jinx than keeping up with Craig Petty’s current output.

Vincent Chaigneau:
If I can jump in there, because Craig Petty is a bit of our favorite punching bag—we do like him, really—there was something that shocked me at the time. I don’t know if you saw it, but Craig Petty went after one of your books very harshly. Do you remember? You saw it? Yes, of course. Amnesia. He was saying—I don’t remember exactly what now—but I was really shocked. And more than anything, I saw virtually no reaction from the magic world. I thought, okay, maybe I’m the only one. Since I didn’t know the principle myself, I didn’t get involved in that debate, but—

Vincent Hedan:
I’m going to try to be diplomatic in how I answer this, because obviously you’re asking the person who was directly involved, on the side that took a bit of a beating. So I do have emotions attached to the subject, but I also have a fairly well-documented factual side to it. Amnesia was a project I had actually published years earlier under the name Mnemosyne. It described effects that began from a modified Mnemonica setup, a kind of Mnemonica three steps removed from the original. And with each effect you performed, the deck moved closer and closer to actual Mnemonica, until eventually you arrived at Mnemonica exactly as it is. At that point Mnemonica lets you do all sorts of wonders, and you can keep going with that tool. When I published Amnesia, the first part of the book was Mnemosyne rewritten from scratch, because the original had very, very few photographs and people got lost in the handling. It is, after all, a fairly traditional card-magic book. The mentalism I perform—or at least the mentalism I publish—is generally very approachable technically and mentally. Amnesia, or Rainman as well, which is a very complicated book, is different. It isn’t for everybody. I wouldn’t recommend it to complete beginners. With Amnesia you need a solid foundation in classic card magic: double lifts, false shuffles, things like that. So the first part of the book is Mnemosyne: how you start from a modified Mnemonica state that allows certain routines, and with every effect you move one step closer to Mnemonica. There are four effects like that in sequence. You get on the train and five stations later you arrive at Mnemonica. Then the second part of the book is about what you can do once you are in Mnemonica: my own routines that I had developed for Mnemonica, because I had a few. The very important feature of Amnesia is that although you’re using the Mnemonica stack, which is normally memorized, everything in Amnesia can be done without memorizing the stack. That’s one of the peculiar things about stacked-deck principles. A stack is a prepared deck that can then give you multiple outs or multiple possible directions. But sometimes you don’t actually need to know the order of the prepared deck for the trick to work. You need to know the actions: which card to cut to, how to move the packets, and so on. But the trick almost works by itself because of the deck’s setup. In this case the setup happens to be Mnemonica, but it could theoretically be another prepared system. So Amnesia is for someone who has Mnemonica, doesn’t use it much, doesn’t know it very well, or is interested in the subject and wants access to that gold mine without having to memorize it. Everything in the book—all eight effects—can be performed with no stack memorization whatsoever. You have to memorize the routines, obviously, but not the deck itself. And incidentally, another book I’m going to publish—not the next one, but two books from now—is also about Mnemonica, except that one goes deep into the weeds. You absolutely have to have Mnemonica memorized, and we go very, very far into mastering the complete architecture of the stack. That’s another project for this year. That isn’t the scoop either. I have another one. So anyway, I published Amnesia in French, then in English, distributed it, and it did well. People were happy with it. But maybe the mistake I made was not being clear enough. And yet there is an entire paragraph specifically on this point: we start from a modified state and move closer to Mnemonica step by step. It is literally written in the book. When Craig Petty reviewed it, I’m convinced he read the book because he talks about it like somebody who knows the contents. But either he skipped the paragraph in question, or forgot it, or simply doesn’t like the way I write—which he has every right not to like. I have no problem with people who don’t like me or don’t like my work, as long as they can explain why. People are entitled to opinions about things. What personally bothered me about Amnesia and Craig Petty’s review was that he said things that were… how would you say this in French? Biased? Well, he’s entitled to a bias, but he distorted—misrepresented. How do you say that in French? The guy’s getting stuck in a language that isn’t his own. He represented the contents of my book in a way that, in my opinion, was either malicious or erroneous. Whether it was deliberate or not, I don’t know. But he misunderstood, misinterpreted, or deliberately misrepresented parts of the book. His opinion is that I lied, that I told people the book was something it wasn’t. That is a very serious accusation. And the arguments he uses to support that case seem problematic to me because he relies on arguments that contradict his own documented opinions from previous videos. There are older videos where he says one thing, one thing, one thing—and then he says the opposite when he attacks my book. So I have a problem there, because not only is he presenting my book backwards, he’s also contradicting himself. That’s a serious issue.

Vincent Chaigneau:
That’s part of the whole problem once you start making a living from content creation. If you make your living creating content on the Internet, you need views, you need to build—let’s say—an audience. And building an audience can sometimes mean—not always, there are creators who do it extremely well without this—but it can sometimes mean being willing not to stay completely aligned with yourself, simply because you need things to work and you need to produce the kind of content your audience expects from you. Some people have convictions that are a little flexible. But that isn’t specific to magic. That’s human nature.

Vincent Hedan:
And anyway, the subject is so niche and so far in the past—it was five years ago—that ultimately it doesn’t matter very much. Especially since anyone who wants to find Amnesia can still get it on my website, and they still get the content regardless of anybody else’s opinion. There’s no problem. But there is perhaps a broader lesson we can draw from it, which is exactly what you just said about generating clicks or strong emotions through negativity. What interests me personally isn’t fighting against something. I don’t want to be against something; I want to be for something. Because if you define your position by saying, “I’m going to stand against this thing,” then the day that thing disappears because you’ve won your battle and eliminated your enemy, you no longer have a position. I learned that—we’re going to become a little intellectual for two seconds—from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten the title. He was a blind Argentine author from the last century, a fascinating man who also wrote about magic. It’s quite remarkable. I wrote a blog post about that on my website. And there’s this devastating short story in one of his collections. He’s Argentine, so there are lots of stories about—I can’t remember the French word for this either—sort of horsemen of the plains, fighting each other, a little Don Quixote-like in spirit. And there’s a revenge story. A man pursues someone across the plains for years and years. Finally he gets face to face with him out on the plain, they fight, and there’s this whole duel described beautifully. And you think, that’s it, he has finally avenged his father—or whatever it was in the story, I can’t remember exactly. And then at the end there’s this terrible sentence where Borges says something like: he has won, he has no enemies left, his life no longer has any meaning. Because he defined his entire life around revenge, negativity, fighting the other person. He never defined himself internally, on his own terms. Something external was defining him, and then he killed that external thing. I think that’s very serious.

Vincent Chaigneau:
That’s interesting, and it gives us a good bridge into the second part. Ultimately, you have an approach to mentalism—and you can feel it when talking with you, and you can feel it in your books when you read them—that is intellectual. Not in the negative sense of the word; you can feel that there’s thought behind it, there are references, sources, it’s intelligent in the sense that it asks us to care about substance rather than just form. Has your vision of mentalism, the way you approach it, changed recently because you now live in a different culture—in Asia, which isn’t your original culture? What has that brought you? What has it changed in you? Have you managed to analyze that?

Vincent Hedan:
It’s true that it affects a lot of things. I’ll skip the whole food side, local culture, politics and so on. But during that first year in Asia, from 2022 to 2023, several things really struck me. I’ll give you Thailand as an example, because it’s very particular. Thailand is a kingdom, so there’s a king—who doesn’t live in Thailand because he’s in Germany; I imagine life is more comfortable for him there. And because his face is on all the currency, on the banknotes, coins, and so on, and because the king there is sacred from a spiritual point of view—it isn’t merely political reverence—you cannot deface the currency. So if you use a banknote and perform a torn-and-restored bill, or you do cigarette through coin, the cigarette is going through the king’s face. Then it’s up to you whether you want to risk going to prison, and I haven’t heard many good things about Thai prisons. So you need to be a little careful. In the same way, in Thailand, not cheating but gambling is illegal. Obviously, it’s a law that gets bypassed everywhere because there are secret casinos and so on. But it also means it’s almost impossible to buy a deck of cards in Thailand. Very, very difficult. A standard one. Yes, yes—even a normal Bicycle deck in basic cellophane in a shop. There’s one shop I know in Bangkok that sells jokes and novelties and happens to have the children’s coloring book—you know, the magic one you riffle through—plus a deck of cards and a thumb tip. And the deck costs a fortune because it’s something unusual there; it’s a specialty item. But if you go to the Philippines, France, Germany or Japan and look in the children’s section, you’ll find magic sets for learning magic, beginner sets, and so on. In Thailand, that doesn’t exist. I checked every possible shop, Toys “R” Us and smaller children’s toy shops. There are no magic props, no Tenyo, nothing. So access to magic is more difficult. And that has a consequence I hadn’t anticipated: if people who are interested in learning magic don’t have easy access to it, there are inevitably fewer local magicians. And if there are fewer local magicians, the public isn’t frequently exposed to the art. So when you show up and perform magic, people know what magic is because the Internet exists—they’re not ignorant, that’s absolutely not what I mean—but they haven’t necessarily been exposed to the experience of being part of a magic audience. So the rhythms we may use to prompt applause, prompt reactions, get people to participate—that may not even be a concept they’re familiar with. “Oh, I’m supposed to participate in a show?” Normally there’s a fourth wall; it’s theater, there’s no interaction with the audience. That’s something you have to guide them into understanding. On top of that there’s the language barrier, which is another issue. So there’s that, for example: people there—in Thailand, and the Philippines is a little different—aren’t necessarily exposed to the same kind of magic, or sometimes to magic at all. That is changing. Patrick Kun, for example, is in Thailand. He’s a major magician who appears on television a lot, so people are being exposed to the idea. Similarly, in South Korea—I studied Korean for three years, lived there, and went back there traveling—there’s Charming Choi, there are plenty of people who have won at FISM. And because they won at FISM, they exposed their own country to magic, and it became more common. When I met—not Charming Choi, another Korean magician—at 4F about ten years ago, at the American convention, he was the first Korean magician I had ever seen performing close-up while genuinely interacting with the audience. That seems completely natural to me as someone coming from a Spanish, French, German kind of magic culture. We’re always interacting with people; they do things with us. He was the first Korean performer I had seen doing that. And I remember talking with Ton Onosaka’s son—Ton passed away some time ago—Satoshi Onosaka. I asked him, “If I come to Japan, is there any way I could do a lecture or a show?” And he said, “But you know, in Japan, mentalism doesn’t exist.” This was ten or fifteen years ago. Today, of course, there’s no problem. People perform it, there are channels about mentalism, no issue at all. The cultural problem is simply that people haven’t been exposed to the kind of proposition you want to bring them. So you have to build a sort of cultural bridge and meet in the middle, saying, okay, here you participate; we’re going to talk a little about your stories, you’re going to tell me things, I’m going to tell you things too, things are going to happen. You have to bring them into that. And that’s interesting.

Olivier Nicoleau:
Did you change anything in your repertoire because of that? Are there things you removed, or things you modified?

Vincent Hedan:
I did change things in my style, because my style is fairly—as you said—intellectual, cerebral, inward-looking. And that isn’t necessarily what audiences here are used to. The most widespread kind of magic in the Philippines for years has been parasol magic. You know, those gigantic umbrellas that appear. Personally, I’ve never quite understood the impossibility of producing a collapsible object, but that’s another subject. It’s a particular style. Those acts always surprise me, but hey, why not. So there’s a very strong visual element in what audiences here are accustomed to. And that’s interesting for me because my mentalism used to be very inward. My show was very black-and-white, minimalist, with very simple staging. Thanks to the Philippines—and my mentalism has benefited from this—I started asking myself how to make mentalism as visual as possible. Because very often the finale is, “Read the little piece of paper that has been inside the envelope from the beginning.” And theatrically, that’s a bit boring. It isn’t the most exciting thing in the world to look at. Since I did theater for ten years, I try to bring that side of things into it too. So there’s that visual aspect. Then there’s the way I give instructions. I realized that I break instructions down into much clearer steps when I give them here. Because even though they speak English and I speak English too, and I’m almost bilingual, I still have a slight French accent, while they’re more accustomed to a Filipino accent. So even that means I can’t go too fast, otherwise spoken language turns into mush and I lose them—or they lose me. So there’s the accent, there’s following instructions, there’s participation: you really need to guide people through all of that. And that’s also why Echo was created. Babel worked very well for me in Europe. When I brought it to the Philippines, I realized that saying, “Choose a long, interesting word anywhere in the book,” was actually a lot of information to throw at them all at once. Whereas with Echo it is literally: “Say stop anywhere. Look at the first word. Okay, got it.” And we gain access to the information in a way that is just as deceptive, but for them it’s mentally simpler to hold onto, which lets them participate more fully and emotionally in the experience. So in the end, Echo was created in the Philippines for exactly that reason.

Vincent Chaigneau:
And on those words, we come to the end of the first part of our interview with Vincent Hedan. I suggest you join us again very soon for episode 36. Until then, have a good evening, and we’ll see you soon.