Chris Jones: Hypnotizing Howie, Bombing w/ Bublé, & Why the Psych Ward Was a Plot Twist Worth Having

Chris Jones: Hypnotizing Howie, Bombing w/ Bublé, & Why the Psych Ward Was a Plot Twist Worth Having

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with Christopher Jones — Chicago's own, the only hypnotist ever to appear on America's Got Talent, whose clip hypnotizing Howie Mandel has over 22 million views, star of the Double Take series on Facebook Watch where he conspired with John Cena, Pamela Anderson, NeNe Leakes, and Steve-O to give unsuspecting superfans the surprise of a lifetime through hypnosis, and proud new father of a five-month-old who makes several unscheduled appearances throughout the recording. Chris came up from the South Side of Chicago, studied Sociology and Psychology in college, calling himself a "social engineer with deviant motives," was voted most likely to become a priest in his all-boys Catholic high school, went to college and promptly revised that plan upon discovering the gender ratio, got a master's in Therapeutic Recreation, watched a hypnotist on campus one night, chased him through the parking lot, got a book recommendation he had to scrape $60 together to buy, and never looked back. His mentor Fred Winters opened the floodgates. Then he drove 600 miles in a brand-new Prius with 17 miles on it to watch Salish perform in Southern Illinois, introduced himself while the man was eating pizza, and eventually made him the honorary uncle of both his daughters.  The Howie Mandel story gets a full breakdown here, and it is more interesting than the clip suggests. The suggestion wasn't some general command to shake hands — Chris built it entirely around Howie's specific comfort condition. Howie shakes hands when everyone is wearing gloves. So Chris framed it that way, and when Heidi Klum started screeching in Howie's face, it didn't matter. Howie still thought everyone was wearing gloves. The frame held. Heidi's volume was irrelevant. Howard Stern apologized to Chris afterward. Chris's voice cracked audibly when it worked, and he still sounds slightly amazed recounting it. Then there was Michael Bublé, who did not cooperate. Then there was the green room immediately after, where Chris swore into a chain-link fence while a show psychologist stood nearby with a clipboard. Then there was the bar afterward, where he sat between a Britney Spears lookalike and an Oprah lookalike, pretty drunk, eliminated from a national talent competition, thinking: I don't understand my life. Then there was Lawrence Fishburne saying "nice job, young man" in the green room on a different TV appearance, and Chris being so embarrassed by a bad set that he said God bless you and walked directly out the door next to a Rolls Royce. The conversation goes everywhere it wants to go. They talk about why framing a suggestion around someone's specific psychology is the whole game, in stage work and in clinical work alike — Chris is currently helping a smoking cessation client and describes his intake process in detail: listen, listen more, ask what you're not telling me, wait, then politely destroy every excuse still standing. They talk about the ethics of combining mentalism and hypnosis and where the line is between theater and manipulation. They talk about diversity in the hypnosis world and a people of color panel at HypnoThoughts where everyone disagreed with each other immediately, which Chris points out is entirely human and probably inevitable. They talk about Larry Garrett, who hypnotized Saddam Hussein's son's limp away before September 11th happened and then had a very interesting conversation with the CIA afterward. They talk about why the best magicians in history have disproportionately been Jewish, which spirals into Exodus and Moses and snake-eating snakes. Chris also shares that his wife told him he couldn't marry her until he had a therapist. He got one. He now tells people he will encourage his daughters, if they ever marry a man, to make sure he has a therapist too. He said it without drama and clearly means it. And then he closes with the thing that actually lit him up: get a passport. He went to Honduras as a chubby sixth-grader with a 36-inch waist, walked everywhere, ate rice and orange juice and cheese, came home with an eight-pack, and realized for the first time that he had muscles. He has been going back to the world ever since. Three quotes from Chris worth writing down: "I framed it around his comfort level. If she's screaming in his face, it doesn't matter — because he still thinks everyone's wearing gloves." "I'm gonna teach you how to hypnotize yourself. I'm gonna teach you how to get out of your own way. Look at the finish line. The hurdle's gonna be there — you just step over it." "Wherever you go, people are people. If God's giving you suffering, say thank you for the suffering. I'm sure I'm gonna learn a lot more from it than from pleasure." Connect with Chris Jones: Website: chrisjoneshypnotist.com Facebook: facebook.com/chris.jones.114372 Chris performs his live show "Yes, And... Hypnosis" at the iO Theatre in Chicago, combining improv games with real audience hypnosis, and is a regular at Zanies Comedy Club. He's also available for corporate events, college campuses, and private events nationwide — booking form on his website For therapeutic work (smoking cessation and more): reach out through his website or social channels — he works on a donation basis  Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]

John Launius: Fragrance Hypnosis, the Way of Incense, and Taking You from Woo-Woo to Wow-Wow

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with John Launius — certified hypnotist, Komoto (Master of Ceremonies in the Japanese incense tradition), martial artist of 44 years, fragrance expert of equal tenure, and one of the most genuinely original practitioners in the hypnosis world — for a conversation that moves from Nobel Prize-winning olfactory research to $660 half-grams of wood that produce the mental clarity of a month-long meditation retreat in a single breath. John is presenting at HypnoThoughts Live this year on Scent in the Subconscious, and by the time this conversation is over, you will understand exactly why that room is going to be full. John's origin story starts at age nine, with a bloody nose earned defending his brother, a martial arts teacher burning what he now calls bad incense, and a mother who kicked his door open when she smelled smoke coming from his room. Four years of studying world religions and incense later, a chance encounter at a childhood friend's house — going downstairs for a glass of water in a 19th-century three-story home — put him in front of a Japanese incense master who asked him what he knew about the tradition, liked his answers, and offered to teach him. For the next ten years, John studied under her formally. About a year before her death, he earned the title of Komoto. He has been working at the intersection of fragrance, healing, and consciousness ever since. The science underneath the work is real and growing. Scent is the only one of our five senses that does not filter through the thalamus before reaching the limbic system — the seat of memory and emotion. That direct line is why a single inhale can unlock a feeling from thirty years ago before the thinking mind has time to intervene. Buck and Axel won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for identifying where human olfactory receptors actually are and how aroma signals travel into the brain, and the research has been accelerating ever since. John came across a poster in a jetway at a UC San Diego research station asking whether smell might be a cure for Alzheimer's. He wasn't surprised at all. His practice, which he calls fragrance hypnosis, starts with a Natural Preference Survey — a document that maps the client's scent library based on their background, culture, and lived experience — before a single fragrance is introduced. He uses the survey to identify which molecules are already encoded in the client's nervous system as comfort, safety, and resource, then builds the session around those, layering in additional fragrances based on the presenting challenge. For veterans and first responders dealing with PTSD and TBI, the work often involves the inverse: identifying the trigger fragrances (diesel, burning hair, medicinal smells) and carefully building new associations around the pre-trauma scent memories that can serve as anchors for re-regulation. He was sent a veteran who came in openly skeptical — told John directly that the whole thing was two letters — and who by session three was apologizing. The crown jewel of the personal incense journey is Agarwood, the rarest and most expensive incense wood in the world, running between $1,500 and $3,500 a gram. John recently paid $660 for half a gram from a trusted vendor, which he considers a deal. A thirty-minute session with Agarwood, he says, produces the mental clarity of a thirty-minute meditation in a single inhalation — not a high, not a sedative, but a genuine quieting of extraneous thought that takes most practitioners years of sitting practice to access. A transcendental meditator of twenty years who traveled seven hours to work with him described the experience in about forty-five seconds and couldn't find a longer sentence. John closes with the phrase he's been using for thirty-five years when someone calls what he does woo-woo: his job is to take you from the woo-woo to the wow-wow. And as a Komoto, he makes a promise he takes seriously — to lead without imposing his will. Hypnosis, he says, makes the weak stronger and the strong stronger. All he needs is a powerful yes or a powerful no. Everything else follows from there. Three quotes from John worth writing down: "Scent is the only sense that does not filter through the thalamus. It goes directly to the seat of memory and emotion. That's why fragrance can have a more immediate impact on the subconscious than almost anything else." "Your entire life, you have a whole library of fragrances related to your memories and emotions. Every single one of them is in there, waiting." "My job is to take you from the woo-woo to the wow-wow. Once I do that, you've integrated it." Connect with John Launius: John presents at HypnoThoughts Live 2026 on Scent in the Subconscious — additional links and resources will be in the Whova app before the conference Free 45-minute hypnosis consultation: reach out through his social channels or conference presence to schedule John works with individuals, veterans and first responders through the Special Operations Charity Network, and high-profile clients in business and entertainment privately — in person in St. Louis and remotely with clients who source their own fragrance supplies in advance website: www.Shihan-Wellness.com [http://www.shihan-wellness.com/] Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]

Jeff Broomfield: The Outside-In Theory, Soul Realignment, and Why Your Hypnotist Might Be Unhypnotizing You

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with Jeff Broomfield — hypnotist, former thrash metal guitarist, print industry veteran, Figment the Dragon enthusiast, and the man behind jeffbroomfield.com — for one of the most wide-open, philosophically alive, and quietly warm conversations the show has had. Jeff joins from Canada wearing a Figment shirt and with a Figment stuffed toy perched on his shoulder like a parrot, which sets the tone immediately: this is someone who takes imagination seriously enough to wear it. Jeff came up through the graphics and printing industry, where he spent years studying light, color, and imaging at a professional level — and where he first started noticing that things weren't quite what they appeared to be. You can't actually see light. You can only see its reflection when it hits something. That observation became a doorway into Carl Jung, into projection, into the outside-in theory that now forms the spine of his entire practice. The outside-in theory is simple and unsettling in equal measure: from birth, we are conditioned by religion, culture, family, and society to believe we are not enough — that our instincts need to be suppressed, our authenticity needs to be managed, and that authority lives outside us rather than within. Jeff's argument is that most people are already in a trance when they walk through a hypnotist's door, and that the real work isn't putting them into one. He asks every hypnotist he meets the same question: when you're working with a client, do you ever feel like you're actually taking them out of a trance? Most of them say yes. The conversation covers a lot of ground. They dig into Jung's mirror — how everything that triggers us in other people is a reflection of something unresolved in ourselves — and Ryan turns it on himself in real time, wondering aloud whether his irritation at a peer charging $14.95 for a $2,000 hypnosis course is really about his own history of being taken advantage of. Jeff doesn't let him off the hook easy. They talk about the Rebel Reflex and why you can't tell someone what they need to change — you can only create the conditions for them to find it. They talk about grief as quicksand, about cutting toxic strings, about the soul realignment work Jeff does after clearing the emotional bucket: taking clients into their own inner light and watching the smile arrive on their face when they find it. Seventy-year-old women telling him they've never felt love like that before. They also talk about the woman with three months to live whose son had just died of a fentanyl overdose — who transferred her trust from her oncologist to Jeff, lived six more years, and whose ex-boyfriend reached out to thank him for the time they got back together. They talk about the collective consciousness and why you can't walk on water alone when everyone around you is still certain you can't. They talk about Dr. Emoto and frequency and love as the open guitar string — the note that everything else is a suppressed version of. And Jeff closes with the one thing he most wants people to know, delivered while leaning into the camera with a smile: be yourself. If I can get here from playing Slayer in a thrash band while people called me a Satanist, so can you. Three quotes from Jeff worth writing down: "When you're hypnotizing your clients, do you ever feel like you're actually taking them out of a trance? Because that's what we're really doing." "You are a being of love and light. That is your soul. That is who you are. Everything else is suppression." "Be yourself. That is what love is. Once you love yourself, you love everybody else. You can't truly love other people until you love yourself." Connect with Jeff Broomfield: Website: jeffbroomfield.com YouTube: youtube.com/@JeffBroomfield Jeff presents at the Michigan International Hypnosis Conference in September and the Toronto Hypnosis Conference in October — topics include the Outside-In Theory and spoon bending with the power of your mind (yes, really — reach out to find out more) Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]

Dr. Michael Harris: The Lost Secrets of NLP, Forbidden Hypnosis, and How He Reversed Diabetes in Six Months

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with Dr. Michael Harris — Doctor of Clinical Hypnotherapy, NLP practitioner, author of five books (and counting), trainer, and the man behind drmichaelharris.com — for a conversation that starts in a Fort Worth construction company in the pre-internet era and ends with Ryan signing up for the Nonverbals course and both of them agreeing to a part two. Dr. Harris trained with Robert Dilts, Tim and Kris Hallbom, Suzi Smith, Nick LeForce, and Steven Gilligan, worked alongside Steve Andreas on a shared client, has stories about Dave Dobson that nobody else has, and spent years working with USA Gymnastics Junior competitors before semi-retiring, meeting his wife during COVID lockdown, and deciding to build what he calls a new wild bunch. His origin story runs through a construction company where he noticed a vast communication gap between the C-suite and the rank and file, found an ad in the back of the Green Sheet for a communication class, called his company owner to get reimbursed for a weekend course, and came out the other side feeling like someone had pulled the curtain back on language. He never stopped pulling. Personal training company, 17 lead singers, sold it, played golf for a year, got bored, heard about a hypnotist named Dr. Mike who made a fortune doing stop smoking and nothing else out of a wrapped minivan, ended up writing a check to a small university in Huntington Beach to do their master's and PhD program, sat in a lawn chair in a bare apartment with a train 150 feet from his front door at 4am making a threshold decision to finish his dissertation on Sleepnosis or go get a job. He finished it. Here we are. The conversation goes deep in every direction. He walks through his approach to well-formed outcomes, with a fourth question that most NLP trainers skip: does this align with your core values? Before the old NLP version asked what's preventing you from having this now, which collapses all the energy you just built. He explains the six representational sequences that determine how someone actually succeeds, not just VAK but the specific order that completes the loop, using the example of a kid who didn't sit down to play chess but stalked the board. He covers the ecology check, the double-bind presuppositions Bandler and Grinder borrowed but never fully taught, how every presenting problem maps to a hypnotic phenomenon the client is already running on themselves, and why Dave Dobson's concept of dehypnotizing people is still the most useful frame for all of it. He also tells the Samantha story: a gymnast competing in one out of four events when he met her, working with a coach who was slowly demolishing every girl in that gym, and the moment the following season when she changed gyms, came back in, said she had a goal but didn't want to tell him what it was, and he ran the whole well-formed outcome content-free. Then there is the diabetes story, which Ryan asks to keep going even though they're running over time. Blood sugar at 441, A1C at 13.2, a doctor on the phone at 7am asking why he wasn't in the hospital. Six months of daily self-hypnosis, talking to his liver, talking to his pancreas, and most importantly clearing every trace of bitterness. Metaphorically, he points out, Type 2 diabetes is the body's inability to accept sweetness. He reversed it. His endocrinologist is perplexed. His next goal is his eyesight. They close with automatic writing, idiomotor signals, and a plan for part two. Three quotes from Dr. Harris worth writing down: "The primary focus of my self-hypnosis was eliminating every trace of bitterness in my life. Metaphorically, Type 2 diabetes is your inability to accept sweetness. What is the opposite of sweetness? Bitterness. So I worked on that." "Everybody is already in trance. The only question is whether it's the trance you want to be in. Dave Dobson called our job dehypnotizing people." "I want to create a new wild bunch. Train people up and empower them to fly higher than I ever dreamed." Connect with Dr. Michael Harris: Website: drmichaelharris.com Free 30-minute consultation: email through his website Free Mastermind: email to join the list, get access to full recordings and club pricing ($300 per course vs. standard rates) Free book: Hidden Agenda (teaches how presuppositions work in media and news) — ask for the link when you join Books on Amazon: Forbidden Hypnosis (Volumes 1 and 2), Ericksonian Alchemy, The Lost Secrets of NLP, and companion presupposition books for attorneys and analysts — search Dr. Michael Harris Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]

Holly Stokes: The Miracle Code, Placebo Surgery, and What Else Is Possible

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with Holly Stokes — international bestselling author, Master NLP Coach Trainer, National Guild Hypnosis Trainer, speaker, and the Brain Trainer herself — for a conversation that moves from autoimmune disease to placebo surgery to the Wright Brothers to Ryan laughing while his dentist drills out a tooth, and somehow all of it connects. Holly co-owns the Life Harmony Wellness Center and Training Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, has worked with thousands of clients over 20 years rewiring the brain out of old habits, fears, stress, and self-sabotage, and has been quoted in Shape Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and Active Times. She is presenting at HypnoThoughts Live on Intuitive Hypnosis Mastery. Her origin story is dramatic in the best way. She was a professional whitewater rafting guide and wilderness backpacker for a decade — her actual job was camping — when she started noticing unexplained bruising and eventually received a diagnosis of an incurable autoimmune condition. The symptoms included an allergy to sunlight. For an outdoor girl who lived in sunshine, the diagnosis was devastating. Western Medicine's answer was: suppress your immune system and hope for better drugs. Holly's answer, pieced together over years of applying hypnosis, NLP, herbalism, and systems thinking to herself, was different. She is now medication-free, symptom-free, and back in the sun. Her book, The Miracle Code, is her practical account of how she got there. The conversation builds a coherent argument from the ground up. Stress is not just a feeling — it's a biochemical event that floods the body with hormones that affect everything from pain response to immune function to sleep. Eighty percent of the stress most people experience comes from their own thinking, not from their circumstances. Trauma encodes not just the event but the meaning the mind assigns to it, and it's the meaning that keeps the stress response running long after the original event is over. Those meanings become identity-level beliefs — the I'm-nots, as Holly calls them — and those are the stickiest ones to shift because the unconscious mind argues for them the way it argues for anything it has claimed as self. Then she gets into placebo surgery. A knee surgeon wanted to know which part of his procedure actually drove recovery, so he set up three groups: one group got the full procedure, one got part of it, and one got a sham surgery with an incision but no physical intervention. Followed up at two and five years, all three groups healed equally well. Holly's read on it: the doctor may not be the agent of healing so much as the permission structure for it. The body already knows how to heal a cut without a band-aid. The question is what else it's capable of when given the right conditions. Ryan's dentist visit the day before the recording becomes a perfect live example. He went in expecting dread, shifted his mind deliberately, laughed through the drilling, and watched the bill drop from $1,100 to $500 to zero in three conversations. Holly just nods. That's the whole thesis. She also walks through her change structure formula — the iceberg model of conscious versus unconscious mind, how to identify the brain tangles underneath any presenting symptom, and why Intuitive Hypnosis Mastery means not needing a specific script for every issue because the deeper structure of change is always the same. She closes with a centering technique she does with every anxiety client: tapping gently on the chest, and saying out loud, even though I feel this stress, I come back to my center now. Past tense version too, because the unconscious holds history. Three quotes from Holly worth writing down: "If you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them." "80% of the stress people experience every day actually comes from their own mind. Not their circumstances. Their thinking." "What else is possible? That's the question. Whatever you're facing — are you open to something more? Are you open to the solution?" Connect with Holly Stokes: Website: thebraintrainerllc.com Book, placebo effect documentaries, and free Keys to Self-Healing video: thebraintrainerllc.com/book Holly presents at HypnoThoughts Live on Intuitive Hypnosis Mastery — she also teaches NLP, hypnosis, and coaching skills through her training center in Salt Lake City Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help [ryan@trancewell.help]