PhD. 80 patents. CTO. GM… and mentalist. Why that mix changes everything.

I get the question a lot. Sometimes with genuine curiosity. Sometimes with a slightly puzzled smile. “You have a PhD, you’ve run companies, filed 80 patents… and you do mentalism?”

As if one cancels the other. As if scientific rigor and the art of perception belong to two separate worlds. It’s the exact opposite.

And one nuance matters: those labels aren’t lines on a profile. They’re years of real decisions, projects that move forward—or break—and human mechanisms that quietly steer everything underneath.

The turning point didn’t come from the stage

For more than fifteen years, I led technology innovation—Head of R&D, CTO, CEO—inside international organizations. From lab work to executive committees, everything relied on rigor: data, protocols, validation.

Then I co-founded a startup. And that’s when I learned something science doesn’t always teach you.

The best technology fails when decisions are biased. When communication stalls. When teams don’t follow—not from incompetence, but because nobody saw what was really happening in the room.

I’ve watched solid investments collapse because anchoring shaped the entire conversation from the very first sentence. I’ve seen brilliant projects die because risk aversion disguised itself as “strategic prudence.” And I learned to spot those moments when a team that looks “aligned” isn’t aligned at all—it’s simply silent.

Performance didn’t depend on tools alone. It depended on the quality of human decisions under uncertainty.

Mentalism as a language

I’ve practiced mentalism for more than thirty years—long before my leadership career.

For a long time, those two worlds ran in parallel. On one side: leadership, innovation, patents. On the other: the stage, perception, the craft of noticing what people don’t say.

The bridge formed gradually, because mentalism works with the exact mechanisms I kept seeing misfire in companies: attention, perception, trust, influence—and the way the brain manufactures certainty from incomplete information.

Cognitive science gave me the framework. Mentalism became my language to make those mechanisms visible.

Not a flashy language. A precise one.

On stage, in a few minutes, I can make 500 people experience what anchoring really does. What the illusion of control does to a group. How a “free” decision gets shaped by a frame nobody noticed.

No slide deck in the world can do that.

THE MENTALIST’S EYE

What I’m trying to create isn’t a “memorable moment.” It’s a shift: a lived experience, a mechanism made visible, then a simple mental model people recognize later—when it matters, in real meetings.

Neither a scientist doing tricks, nor a mentalist quoting Kahneman

I don’t recognize myself in either caricature.

I’m not a researcher adding a few stage effects to make a talk “more engaging.” And I’m not a performer sprinkling studies between demonstrations to borrow academic credibility.

My work sits in a very specific place: where leadership experience, scientific rigor, and the craft of perception intersect.

When I speak about decision-making on stage, I’m speaking about decisions I’ve had to make—under pressure, with incomplete data, facing boards and international investors. When I speak about influence, I’m speaking about negotiations I’ve led. When I speak about transformation, I’m speaking about technology pivots I’ve driven in six months under competitive pressure.

And when I show a cognitive mechanism to an audience, I don’t “illustrate” it. I make it appear—live—on them.

That mix is what changes the game. Not the résumé. The lived experience behind every minute on stage.

Why this matters for your leaders

A leader who attends one of my keynotes doesn’t receive a lecture on biases. They live an experience that feels uncomfortably familiar—because it mirrors their meetings—then they leave with mental models they didn’t have when they walked in.

Because I know what an isolating high-stakes decision feels like. Because I know the difference between real consensus and polite silence. Because I’ve lived that moment where the whole room nods… and something underneath doesn’t quite fit.

That credibility doesn’t come from a degree. It comes from the field.

And mentalism translates it into something the audience can’t ignore: a lived moment that involves them directly, a debrief that clarifies what just happened, and tools they can use the next day.

Convergence

Today, I also teach in engineering schools—and have for fifteen years. I’ve anchored my work in Brittany, and I operate across France and internationally.

If I had to summarize in one line: what’s invisible often governs more than what’s visible. Making it visible is my job.

YOUR LEVER

In 2026, the advantage isn’t having more information.

It’s improving the quality of attention, judgment, and decisions under pressure—where the invisible often steers the visible.

If you want to bring that perspective into your next offsite or executive session, that’s exactly what my Signature Keynotes are designed to do.

References

Here are the scientific studies and books underpinning this article.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [The essential overview of our two thinking systems: System 1, fast and intuitive, leads us to mistake fluency for truth; System 2, slow and analytical, kicks in far too rarely.]

Gigerenzer, G. (2007). Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. Viking. [The necessary counterpoint: heuristics aren't just traps — they are powerful adaptive tools. But their quiet efficiency is precisely what blinds us when they lead us astray.]

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231–259. [We don't know why we decide what we decide — and we construct post-hoc justifications in perfectly good faith.]

Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. HarperCollins. [Our judgment errors aren't random: they follow predictable patterns that can be exploited — for better or for worse.]

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Harvard University Press. [The accessible synthesis of learning science: testing yourself, spacing practice, varying contexts — everything that feels hard is what sticks best.]

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning. In Gernsbacher et al. (Eds.), Psychology and the Real World (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers. [The concept of desirable difficulties: making learning more demanding in the short term is what makes it more durable in the long run.]

Further reading

Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting Misinformation in the Human Mind: A 30-Year Investigation of the Malleability of Memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4), 361–366. [Thirty years of research on false memories: our memory doesn't record — it reconstructs, and can be steered by suggestion.]