The most powerful magical moment I have ever created on stage did not involve a single prop.
No cards. No coins. No envelopes, no markers, no blindfolds, no borrowed objects. Nothing in my hands. Nothing on the table. Just me, a microphone, and a story I told at a keynote in Salzburg about a conversation I had with a stranger in an airport lounge three years earlier.
The story lasted about four minutes. By the end of it, the room was silent in a way that I recognized from my best magical climaxes — that particular quality of silence where the audience is holding its breath not because they are confused but because something has shifted in their understanding of what is possible. And then the applause came, not the polite applause of appreciation but the spontaneous applause of people who have been moved.
There was no trick. There was no method. There was no secret. There was only a story told in a way that made the audience feel something impossible had happened.
This is Level Four.
The Summit of the Hierarchy
Pete McCabe’s hierarchy of scripting as method, which I have been exploring across the past three posts, reaches its summit at Level Four: words alone create a magical experience. McCabe describes this as the level where there is no method at all — no props, no sleights, no gimmicks, no procedure. Just a presentation so powerful that the audience feels they have experienced something magical.
If Level Three is where the script becomes part of the method, Level Four is where the script replaces the method entirely. The magic is not hidden in the words. The magic is the words. The experience of impossibility is generated entirely by the narrative, the framing, the emotional architecture of what the performer says.
This is the level that most magicians dismiss as “not really magic.” And I understand the dismissal. If you define magic as the creation of impossible effects through secret methods, then a story without a method is not magic. It is storytelling. It is performance. It is perhaps rhetoric or theater or persuasion. But it is not magic.
Except that it feels like magic to the audience. And the audience is the only judge that matters.
The Story in Salzburg
Let me tell you about the story, not because the content is unusual but because what it did to the room is relevant.
The story was about a conversation with a woman in an airport lounge — Vienna to London, a route I fly frequently for business. We were both delayed. She was reading a book I recognized, and I made a comment about it, and we started talking about decisions. She told me about a decision she had made twenty years earlier that had changed the trajectory of her entire life. A left turn instead of a right turn. Not metaphorically — literally. She had been driving to a job interview and taken a wrong turn, ended up in a part of the city she had never visited, seen a sign in a window that made her stop, walked in, and the conversation that followed led to a completely different career, a different city, a different life.
The remarkable part was not the coincidence. Coincidences like this happen to everyone. The remarkable part was how she described the moment of the wrong turn — the specific sensory detail, the way time seemed to compress, the feeling she had of being directed by something she could not name. She said, “I did not decide to turn. The turn decided me.”
I told this story in the keynote as part of a segment on how our major life decisions are rarely as deliberate as we believe them to be. The story was true. The details were accurate. There was nothing fabricated or exaggerated. And yet, when I finished telling it, the room reacted as if I had just performed a revelation.
Why?
Because the story, told the way I told it — with careful pacing, with strategic pauses, with the accumulation of specific sensory detail, with the slow build toward a phrase that reframed everything that came before it — created the sensation of impossibility. Not logical impossibility. Emotional impossibility. The audience felt, for a moment, that the fabric of ordinary experience had been lifted and something underneath had been glimpsed. The same feeling that a great magical effect produces. The same catch in the chest. The same suspension of the ordinary.
No method. No trick. Just words, arranged with care, delivered with conviction.
Why This Works
Derren Brown wrote a sentence in Absolute Magic that I have returned to more times than any other single line in my study of magic: “The magic is the process, it is what causes the effect. The effect is just the part that we see.”
At Level Four, this idea reaches its logical conclusion. If the magic is the process — if the real magical experience lives in the cause rather than the effect — then a story that creates a powerful sense of cause can produce a magical experience without an effect. The audience does not need to see a card change or a coin vanish or a thought revealed. They need to feel the shift. They need to experience the moment where reality bends. And a sufficiently powerful narrative can create that shift using nothing but language.
The mechanism, as far as I understand it, is emotional transportation. Psychologists use this term to describe what happens when a narrative is so immersive that the listener temporarily loses awareness of their physical surroundings and enters the world of the story. During transportation, the listener’s critical faculties are reduced. They are not analyzing. They are experiencing. And when the narrative reaches its climax — the moment of the wrong turn, the phrase that reframed everything — the listener’s emotional response is not mediated by skepticism. It lands directly.
This is the same mechanism that makes Level Two scripting effective: cognitive resources are occupied by content rather than analysis. But at Level Four, the effect goes further. At Level Two, the script covers the method. At Level Four, the script generates the experience without a method to cover. The transportation is so complete that the audience arrives at a place that feels impossible, not because they have been fooled but because they have been moved.
The Keynote Connection
This insight has profound implications for how I use magic in my professional work. I am not a full-time magician. I am a strategy consultant and startup founder who co-runs Vulpine Creations with Adam Wilber. My performances happen in the context of corporate keynotes and conference presentations. The magic is woven into business content. And Level Four scripting means that the most magical moments in my keynotes can happen during the business content, not during the magic sections.
When I tell a story about a strategic decision that led to an unexpected outcome — a real story, drawn from my consulting experience — and the story is told with the same precision, pacing, and emotional architecture that I would apply to a magic routine, the audience experiences wonder. Not the wonder of “how did he do that?” but the wonder of “how is that possible?” And the second question is deeper than the first, because it does not have a method to pursue. There is no trick to figure out. There is only the experience of having glimpsed something extraordinary in the fabric of ordinary life.
I have found that the most memorable moments in my keynotes are increasingly the Level Four moments — the stories that produce the magical sensation without any magic. The audiences remember these moments more vividly than the actual magic effects, because the stories connected to them emotionally in a way that transcended the analytical framework of “a man doing a trick.”
This does not mean I am abandoning props and methods. The actual magic effects serve a crucial function in the keynotes — they provide concrete, visual demonstrations of principles that the stories introduce conceptually. The effects make the abstract tangible. But the stories make the tangible extraordinary. The two work together, and the Level Four moments are the connective tissue.
Learning to Trust the Words
The hardest part of Level Four scripting, for me, was trusting that words alone could do the work. My background in magic is built on the satisfying certainty of methods — you do this, and that happens. There is a mechanical reliability to a well-executed routine. The method works every time, regardless of the audience, regardless of the venue, regardless of your emotional state. It is engineering.
Words are not engineering. Words are organic, responsive, fragile. A story that produces transportation in one room may fall flat in another. Pacing that works with one audience may be too slow or too fast for another. The emotional architecture must be rebuilt each time, adapted to the energy of the room, calibrated to the audience’s mood and attention and willingness to be moved.
This scared me. I am an engineer by temperament — a consultant who likes frameworks and predictable outcomes and systems that work. Trusting words to do the work of methods felt like removing the safety net and hoping the audience would catch me.
I practiced the way I practice everything: alone in hotel rooms. I told stories to empty rooms. I practiced pacing by recording myself on my phone and listening back, cringing at the parts that felt rushed, the parts that felt indulgent, the transitions that clunked instead of flowed. I timed pauses. I experimented with where to place the key phrase — the one that reframes everything — and found that the placement matters enormously. Too early and the reframe does not have enough material to reframe. Too late and the audience has already constructed their own frame and resists the new one.
The practice was different from practicing a routine. There was no mirror work, no angle checking, no repetition of physical sequences. There was only language, rhythm, and the invisible architecture of meaning. It was the most challenging and the most rewarding practice I have done.
The Continuum
I want to be clear that McCabe’s four levels are not a hierarchy of value. Level Four is not “better” than Level One any more than a symphony is “better” than a song. They are different tools for different purposes. A routine that operates at Level One — with justified procedures and clear logic — can be devastatingly effective. A Level Two routine with an engaging script can produce standing ovations. A Level Three piece where the script is the method can create the most impossible-feeling magic in your repertoire.
Level Four is simply the furthest point on the continuum — the place where the prop disappears entirely and only the performer remains. It is not always appropriate. It is not always effective. And it requires a level of writing skill and performance craft that I am still developing, slowly, show by show, story by story.
But knowing that the continuum exists has changed how I think about every level. Level One scripting is stronger when you understand that words can do what methods do. Level Two scripting is more intentional when you understand that engagement can replace analysis entirely. Level Three scripting becomes more ambitious when you see that the destination is a place where words alone create magic.
The hierarchy is not a ladder. It is a lens. It teaches you to see your scripts not as accessories to your methods but as forces of equal or greater power. And once you see them that way, you cannot unsee it.
I stood in a room in Salzburg and told a story about a woman in an airport, and the room held its breath, and when it was over, they applauded not because I had fooled them but because something had shifted. Something that words had shifted. Something that no method on earth could have shifted more powerfully.
That is Level Four. And it is, I believe, the frontier where magic and storytelling become the same art.