There was a moment during a keynote I gave at a conference in Innsbruck when something shifted in my understanding of what magic could be. I was performing a piece that combined elements of mentalism with a narrative I had written about decision-making under pressure — the kind of topic that connects naturally to the corporate audiences I work with through my consulting career. The piece had a climax that, when I described it afterward to Adam Wilber during one of our Vulpine Creations calls, made him pause for a long time before saying, “That is not the same category as a card trick.”
He was right. It was not the same category. And the reason it was not the same category is that the words — the actual script, the specific sentences I said in a specific order — were not decorating the method. The words were the method.
I will not and cannot describe how this works in any mechanical detail, because doing so would violate the most fundamental principle of this blog and of the magic community itself. But I can describe the experience from the outside, the way the audience experienced it, and the conceptual shift that made it possible.
The Third Level
In Pete McCabe’s hierarchy of scripting as method, which I have been exploring over the past two posts, Level Three is where the script becomes part of the method itself. McCabe describes this as the level most magicians are familiar with in at least one form, because it includes techniques that are well-known within the community. But what struck me when I first read his description was not the specific techniques — it was the principle behind them.
The principle is this: a sufficiently well-constructed presentation can make a simple event feel impossible.
Read that sentence again, because it took me three readings before I understood what it meant. A sufficiently well-constructed presentation can make a simple event feel impossible. Not a complex method. Not a clever gimmick. Not an advanced sleight. A presentation. Words. Framing. Narrative structure. The way you describe what is happening, why it is happening, and what it means.
At Level Three, the line between script and method dissolves. You cannot separate the words from the working because the words are the working. Remove the script and the effect collapses — not because the script was hiding something, but because the script was doing something.
The Door That Opened
My journey toward Level Three began when I moved from card magic into mentalism. This transition, which I have written about before, was driven by a growing fascination with the psychology behind magic — the way perception works, the way people construct narratives, the way the mind fills in gaps that the senses leave empty. As a strategy consultant, I am professionally trained to understand how people make decisions under uncertainty. Mentalism, I discovered, operates in exactly the same territory.
When I started studying mentalism — late at night in hotel rooms, watching performances and reading theory instead of sleeping like a reasonable person — I noticed something different about the relationship between script and method. In card magic, the script typically serves the method. You say things to justify procedures, to create engagement, to direct attention. The method is mechanical. The script is behavioral. They work together but they are separate systems.
In certain branches of mentalism, this separation collapses. What you say is not separate from what you do. The presentation is not layered on top of the method. The presentation is woven into the method so completely that the two become indistinguishable.
This was the door that opened for me in Innsbruck, and once it opened, I could not close it.
What the Audience Experiences
I can describe what the audience sees and feels at Level Three without revealing anything about how it works, because the audience’s experience is the whole point.
At Level Three, the audience experiences a performance in which everything feels transparent, open, and fair. There are no suspicious moments. There are no unexplained procedures. There are no moments where the performer’s hands do something that triggers the analytical mind. The entire experience feels like a conversation — a genuine interaction between two people in which something impossible emerges naturally from the interaction itself.
The audience does not feel tricked. This is the crucial distinction. At Level One and Level Two, the audience is aware, at least subconsciously, that they are being managed. The procedures have reasons (Level One) and the story is engaging (Level Two), but there is still an awareness that the performer is orchestrating something. At Level Three, that awareness disappears. The magic seems to arise from the situation rather than from the performer’s actions.
When I performed the piece in Innsbruck, the audience member I was working with said afterward, “You did not do anything. I made every decision myself. How is this possible?” That reaction — the sense that the magic happened without any apparent cause — is the hallmark of Level Three scripting. The method is in the words, and the words sound like conversation, and conversation does not feel like a method.
The Writing Process
Writing a Level Three script is fundamentally different from writing a Level One or Level Two script. At the first two levels, you begin with the routine and write a script around it. The method exists first, and the script is built to support it. At Level Three, the script and the method are developed simultaneously, because they are the same thing.
This required a complete shift in how I approach writing for my performances. Instead of asking “What should I say during this routine?” I started asking “What would I need to say to make this experience feel impossible?” Instead of layering words on top of actions, I was constructing experiences in which the words were the actions.
The practical process looked like this. I would sit in my hotel room — always hotel rooms, always late, always with the particular focused energy that comes from being alone in a temporary space with nothing to distract you — and I would write scripts that had no physical requirements at all. Just words. Just a conversation between me and an imaginary audience member. I would write the conversation, then read it aloud, then ask: at what point does the impossible thing happen? At what point does the audience member realize that something has occurred that should not have been possible?
If I could not find that point, the script was not working. If the point existed but was unclear, the script needed refinement. If the point was clear and felt inevitable — if the impossibility seemed to arise naturally from the conversation rather than being imposed upon it — then I had something worth developing.
I threw away dozens of scripts. Dozens. Most of them were technically functional but experientially weak. The impossible thing happened, but it felt like a trick rather than a miracle. The words were doing the work, but the work was visible. The audience would have said “clever” rather than “impossible,” and as Derren Brown wrote in Absolute Magic, “I feel something die inside me when I hear the response, ‘You’re very clever.’”
The Relationship Between Framing and Impossibility
One of the insights that Level Three scripting forced me to confront is that impossibility is not a property of events. It is a property of framing. The same event, framed one way, seems ordinary. Framed another way, it seems impossible. The event has not changed. The frame has changed. And the frame is made of words.
Consider this thought experiment. Suppose I tell you to think of a number. You think of a number. I tell you your number. That is remarkable, but within a certain frame, it is a puzzle — you wonder what technique I used, what tells you gave away, what information I extracted. The frame is analytical. You experienced something surprising but your mind immediately begins working to explain it.
Now suppose the conversation leading to that moment had been constructed so that you arrived at your number through a process that felt entirely free, entirely your own, and entirely uninfluenced. Suppose the conversation made you feel that I was not directing you at all, that I was simply talking, that the number was your choice alone. In that frame, the same event — I know your number — feels not surprising but impossible. Because within the frame you have been given, there is no mechanism by which I could have known. The frame excludes the possibility of technique. And when the frame excludes technique, only impossibility remains.
That is Level Three. The script constructs a frame in which the effect has no explanation. Not because the explanation is hidden, but because the frame is designed so that explanations do not fit.
What This Meant for My Keynotes
As someone who uses magic to enhance corporate keynotes rather than performing full magic shows, Level Three scripting was a revelation for practical reasons as well as artistic ones. My keynotes are about business topics — strategy, innovation, decision-making, leadership. The magic is woven into the content as illustration, as metaphor, as experiential demonstration. And at Level Three, the weaving becomes seamless.
When the script is the method, there are no procedural interruptions. There is no moment where the keynote pauses and the magic show begins. The magic emerges from the keynote content itself. A discussion about how we make decisions becomes a demonstration of how our decisions can be predicted. A conversation about pattern recognition becomes an experience of patterns that should not exist. The business content and the magical content are the same content, because the script serves both functions simultaneously.
This is the integration I had been searching for since I first started incorporating magic into my professional speaking. The early versions of my keynotes had seams — visible transitions where the speaker stopped and the magician started. Those seams always felt artificial, and the audience felt them too. At Level Three, the seams disappear because there is nothing to sew together. The keynote and the magic are one piece of fabric.
The Humbling Part
I want to be honest about something. Level Three scripting is extraordinarily difficult. Not technically difficult, in the way that a complex sleight is technically difficult. Conceptually difficult. Linguistically difficult. It requires a level of precision in word choice, sentence structure, conversational rhythm, and psychological understanding that I am still developing after years of work.
I have one piece in my working repertoire that I consider genuinely Level Three. One. Out of six routines, one operates at this level. The others are solid Level One and Level Two work — justified procedures, engaging scripts, effective performances. But only one reaches the point where the script and the method are truly inseparable.
That one piece, the one I developed through months of hotel room writing and rewriting and testing and failing, is the piece that gets the strongest reactions in my keynotes. It is the piece that audiences remember. It is the piece that prompts the follow-up conversations, the emails the next day, the “How is that possible?” messages that arrive weeks later from people who are still thinking about it.
One piece. Out of everything I perform, one piece operates at the highest level of integration between language and magic. And that one piece is worth more, in terms of audience impact and professional reputation, than the other five combined.
This is what McCabe’s hierarchy teaches: the ceiling on magic performance is not determined by how skilled your hands are. It is determined by how skilled your words are. And the ceiling on words is much higher than most performers realize, because most performers treat scripting as decoration rather than as architecture.
Level Three is where the script becomes architecture. Where the words are not adorning the experience but constructing it. Where the magic happens not despite what you are saying but because of it.
I found this level by accident in Innsbruck and have been working to reach it deliberately ever since. The journey is ongoing. The hotel rooms keep coming. The scripts keep getting rewritten. And occasionally — rarely, preciously — the words do the trick.