A few nights ago I used my polling software to run an audience interaction during a college show. The software tracks the number of respondents, so it gives me a reasonably accurate headcount at any given moment in the show.

At the start of the show: 171 students.

At the final voting item of the night: 66 votes.

I had lost more than half my audience over the course of a seventy-five minute show. And this wasn’t an anomaly. I just completed a four-show swing through college campuses, and at every single show I lost somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of the audience before the night was over.

I’ve been performing at colleges for over twenty years. I have never seen numbers like this.

Some Context

College shows are different from most other entertainment contexts in one important way: nobody paid to get in. The show is funded either through orientation budgets or student activity fees that all students pay as part of their enrollment. There are no tickets. There’s no financial commitment that keeps someone in their seat.

Because of this, I’ve always had a handful of students leave mid-show at college gigs. A few people drop in to check it out, decide it’s not for them, and head out. That’s always been normal. It’s always been a handful.

What’s happening now is categorically different. This isn’t a handful. This is half the room.

And the pattern is specific. It’s not a sudden exodus at one moment. It’s a gradual bleed that starts about fifteen minutes into the show and continues steadily all the way to the end. They mostly wait until my back is turned (trying, I think, to be polite) and they head for the door at the close of a bit, while I’m setting up the next one. Of course I turn around before they make it out, and I see them. Every time.

One Cause Is Never the Whole Story

I want to be careful here, because one of the things I’ve learned over a long career is that when you’re facing a real challenge, the solution almost never involves just one thing. And that’s because the cause almost never reduces to just one factor.

So I’m not going to tell you this is entirely an audience problem, and I’m not going to tell you it’s entirely a show problem. I think it’s both. And I think there’s a third factor too, which is a broader cultural shift in how this generation of college students relates to live entertainment.

Let me take each of these in turn.

The Attention Span Problem

I read an article a while back from a college professor describing something he’d started seeing in his classroom: students who couldn’t sit still for a one-hour class. They’d get up, claim a bathroom break, and disappear into the hallway to be on their phones. Not all of them. But enough that he felt compelled to write about it.

I think some of the students leaving my show are the same students. They are simply not wired, at this moment in their lives, to sit with a single piece of live entertainment for seventy-five minutes without the option to scroll, skip, or switch. They’re not leaving because they hate the show. They’re leaving because sustained attention to anything feels genuinely uncomfortable, and the friction of staying has started to outweigh the pull of the content.

This is a real phenomenon and it’s not going away. The current cohort of traditional-age college students grew up with content designed to compete relentlessly for their attention in ten-second increments. A seventy-five minute live show with no pause button is a fundamentally different ask, and some of them aren’t up for it.

What I Have to Own

Here’s the part I’ve been sitting with, and I think it’s important to say it plainly: I have to look at my own show.

I don’t believe I’m losing half my audience because my show is failing. But I do believe there are things I can do better, and this pattern of bleed is forcing me to think seriously about what they are.

Pace is the first thing I’m looking at. The bleed starts fifteen minutes in and is heaviest during the transitions between bits, the moments when I’m setting up the next thing. Those transitions may be taking longer than they need to. For an audience that is already primed to disengage, a slow transition is an open door. Tightening the pace between bits, reducing the setup time, keeping the energy moving even when I’m not in the middle of a routine… all of this is worth serious attention.

Content is the second thing. I’m thinking about whether some of my bits need to be more vibrant, more emotionally immediate, more likely to fire off a strong reaction quickly. This audience responds to chaos and surprise and genuine feeling. If any part of my show is sitting in a lower register for too long, I’m giving the restless ones a window. I need to close more of those windows.

I’m not going to pretend I have this figured out. But the self-examination is non-negotiable. If you’re seeing the same bleed I’m seeing, I’d encourage you to ask the same questions about your own show before you conclude the problem is entirely outside your control.

The Bigger Picture

Here’s what I keep coming back to, and why I felt the urgency to write this now.

Attendance at live events on college campuses is already at the worst levels I’ve seen in my career. Schools that used to bring five hundred students to a show are now bringing a hundred. That decline has been real and sustained, and most of us who work the college market have been managing it for a few years now.

Audience bleed is a new variable on top of that existing decline. And when you layer them together, you start arriving at a genuinely alarming picture: schools are paying for shows that begin with a fraction of the audience they used to have, and then losing half of that fraction before the show is over.

At some point, the people who control those student activity budgets are going to do the math. They’re going to look at the cost of hiring an act like ours against the number of students who were actually in the room at the end of the show, and they’re going to ask whether that math still makes sense. And if we haven’t been asking ourselves the same question and doing something about it, we’re going to be caught flat-footed when they do.

We Have to Start Talking About This Now

I don’t have a comprehensive solution. I’m working on my own show, thinking hard about pace and content and what this audience needs from me that I haven’t been giving them. That work is mine to do.

But this isn’t just my problem. If you’re working the college market, you are almost certainly seeing some version of this. And if you’re not seeing it yet, you probably will.

We cannot take the position that this will pass on its own. The attention economy is not going to suddenly reverse course. College attendance at live events is not trending back upward on its own momentum. The students we’re performing for have been shaped by a media environment that is specifically designed to make sustained engagement with any single thing feel unnecessary and optional.

We have to adapt. We have to be honest with each other about what we’re seeing. And we have to start that conversation now, before the budget holders start having it without us.

I’d genuinely like to know what you’re seeing at your shows. Drop a comment. Let’s figure this out together.

What I’m about to share is entirely anecdotal. I have no data. I have no study to cite. I have no clinical framework that explains what I’ve observed or confirms that my interpretation of it is correct.

What I have is twenty-plus years of standing in front of audiences of young people, watching who shows up, who comes on stage, and what happens when they get there. And I have a background as a former high school English teacher and college student affairs professional that gives me, I think, at least some useful lens through which to look at what I’m seeing.

I’m raising this because I feel compelled to. Not because I have answers. I don’t. But I’ve seen this pattern so consistently, for so long, that staying quiet about it feels like the wrong choice.

What I’ve Watched Change

When I started performing in 2004, my college and high school audiences were broadly representative. By my visual assessment (and I acknowledge I can’t account for nonbinary audience members simply by looking) my crowds were roughly sixty percent female and forty percent male. That felt natural.

Over the years that followed, something started shifting. Slowly at first, then more noticeably. The young men in my audiences began to thin out. Today, at most of my college shows, I’d estimate the audience is closer to eighty percent female and twenty percent male.

But the audience numbers aren’t even the most striking part.

When it comes to who volunteers and comes on stage, the shift is even more pronounced. At most shows today, my stage is ninety percent women and ten percent men. And the men who do come up are rarely major contributors to the show. The vibrant energy, the creativity, the full inhabiting of the hypnotic experience that I used to see regularly in young male volunteers is largely gone. The ones who do come up seem somehow less present. Less willing to go all the way in.

I don’t know what that means. But I’ve seen it night after night for years, and I know it means something.

A Memory from Graduate School

When I try to make sense of this, my mind keeps going back to a period in my own education.

In 1996, I was finishing my undergraduate degree in English education and beginning a master’s in secondary education. This was a moment when the educational community was engaged in a serious and overdue conversation about how boys and girls were treated differently in the classroom, and what effect those differences were having on their development and success.

One book that kept coming up in those discussions was Mary Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls,” published in 1994. Pipher, a psychologist, had identified what she called a “girl-poisoning culture.” She described a society that was actively working against adolescent girls, eroding their confidence, distorting their self-image, and silencing the bold, fearless selves they’d been as children. The book became a landmark. It spent three years on the New York Times bestseller list and genuinely shifted the national conversation about how we support young women.

I remember sitting in those graduate education classes, surrounded by people who took seriously the responsibility of becoming educators, and feeling the weight of what Pipher was describing. The attention that followed—in classrooms, in curriculum, in institutional policy—was real and meaningful and, I believe, genuinely necessary.

But I’ve been wondering lately whether something got lost in how we applied it.

The Pendulum and the Either/Or

Here is my tentative, unproven, entirely speculative theory. Take it for exactly what it is.

I wonder if educators and institutions got so focused on saving the selves of adolescent girls that they implicitly assumed boys were doing fine. That the attention and support directed toward young women was so sustained, so well-intentioned, and so necessary that it crowded out the equivalent conversation about young men. Not because anyone wanted boys to flounder, but because our culture has a deeply ingrained tendency toward either/or thinking. We identify a crisis, we mobilize to address it, and in doing so we sometimes leave the other side of the equation unexamined.

Girls need support and boys need support are not competing statements. They can both be true simultaneously. But so rarely in our public discourse do we actually treat two things as simultaneously true. We pick one. We fund one. We build curriculum around one. And the other waits.

I wonder if what I’m seeing in my audiences is, in some small and indirect way, a downstream consequence of that. Young men who have grown up in institutions that were, with the best of intentions, more focused on the development and empowerment of the young women around them. Young men who may have absorbed, over years of schooling, a quieter message: that their inner life, their creativity, their willingness to be vulnerable and expressive in public, wasn’t particularly the point.

And now those young men sit in the back of my audiences, or don’t come at all. And the ones who do come on stage seem somehow smaller inside than the young men I used to see up there twenty years ago.

What This Means for Us as Performers

I want to be careful here not to overstate what I’m observing or to suggest that I’ve identified something that researchers and educators have missed. I haven’t. I’m a hypnotist with a sample size of one career.

But I do think there’s something worth sitting with for those of us who perform regularly for young audiences.

The young men who are in our audiences may need more from us than we’ve been giving them. Not in a programmatic, educational way (we’re entertainers, not counselors) but in the way we invite participation. In the way we model what it looks like for someone to be fully present, fully expressive, and fully unguarded in front of a room full of people. In the way we make it safe for a young man to raise his hand and try something that feels genuinely vulnerable.

A hypnosis show, at its best, offers everyone in the room a glimpse of what it looks like to set down the weight of self-consciousness and just be. That experience is available to young men too. But they have to feel welcome enough, safe enough, and engaged enough to reach for it.

I’m not sure I’ve been doing enough to make that invitation clear.

I Don’t Have Answers. I Have Questions.

I’ve been performing for over twenty years. I’ve hypnotized more than thirty thousand people. And I genuinely do not know what is happening with young men right now, or whether my observations connect to anything larger, or whether I’m reading patterns into noise.

What I know is that the stage looked different in 2004 than it looks today. And the difference isn’t just demographic; it’s energetic. Something has changed in who shows up and in what they bring when they get there.

I’m curious whether any of you have noticed the same thing. Whether you’ve had your own version of this observation, sitting with it, not sure what to make of it. Whether you’ve found ways to reach the young men in your audiences that I haven’t thought of.

This is the kind of conversation I think we should be having with each other. Not because I have something to teach anyone about it. But because I’ve been watching it happen for a long time, and I finally felt like I had to say it out loud.

Where did the young men go? I don’t know. But I miss them on my stage.

I had to find a graphic artist to design the shirt. That cost money up front. Then I had to find a screen printer, which meant a minimum order, so I was financially committed before a single customer had raised their hand. I picked up the order, brought the shirts home, and stacked them in a corner of my basement. I hauled inventory to shows. I set up a table in the back of the room after the curtain call, when half the audience was already heading for the parking lot.

For people who wanted to order from my website, the infrastructure was even heavier. I needed a merchant account to process credit cards. When an order came in, I packaged the shirt myself, drove to the post office, and shipped it.

I ended up with about a hundred shirts in my basement and almost nothing moving. I gave some to friends. Some to family. Gave a few away at shows just to get rid of them. The money I lost wasn’t devastating, but the effort, the full logistical weight of the whole operation, was completely disproportionate to what I got back. I quietly stopped.

That was roughly twelve years ago. What got me back into it was a routine.

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It felt like an arrival. A dressing room with my name on it (or at least a room set aside for me) was one of those unmistakable signals that you’re a real entertainer now. Not just someone who does shows, but someone who gets treated like a performer. I was genuinely tickled. I understood in that moment why performers talk about green rooms the way they do.

And then I stopped using them. Because I realized that for what I do, the green room is working against me.

Why the Green Room Exists

For most performers, the green room serves a genuine and important purpose. It’s a space to get mentally prepared. To collect yourself, find your focus, and get into your performance state before you walk out and do your thing. A musician runs through the set in their head. A comedian sharpens their timing. A speaker finds their center.

What all of these performers have in common is that their success doesn’t depend on the specific people sitting in the room that night. The musician plays the same songs regardless of who shows up. The comedian delivers the same material. The speaker gives the same talk. The audience is the recipient of the performance, but they aren’t the raw material of it.

For a hypnotist, that’s completely inverted. The audience isn’t just receiving the show. The audience is the show. The people sitting in those seats are the performers, and which of them come on stage, and how willing they are to go there with you, determines everything about what happens in the next hour.

Sitting in a green room while that audience assembles is leaving your most important pre-show work undone.

What You’re Actually Doing Out There

When I work a room before a show, I’m not conducting interviews or auditions. I’m not running a checklist of who seems hypnotizable. What I’m doing is much simpler and much more important than that: I’m connecting with other human beings.

I’ll move through the room and make small talk. Ask if they’ve ever seen a hypnosis show before. Ask if they’ve ever been hypnotized. Ask if they’d ever be willing to try it. I’m not listening to the answers as much as I’m feeling for the energy underneath them. What I want to know isn’t what they think about hypnosis; it’s whether there’s a chance to build real rapport with this person. Whether that sense of connection, given a few minutes and some genuine attention, might become a willingness to volunteer when the time comes.

That kind of connection can’t be manufactured from a stage. It happens in proximity, in ordinary conversation, before the show begins and before anyone is performing for anyone else. The green room makes it impossible.

The Mystique Argument (And Why It Doesn’t Hold)

The counterargument I sometimes hear goes like this: if you’re out in the room chatting before the show, you lose your mystique. Your authority. The sense that you’re something apart from the ordinary people in the seats.

I think that argument is a relic. It belongs to an older model of what a hypnotist is supposed to be: the mysterious, slightly forbidding figure who commands the room from a position of elevated separateness. That persona might have worked in the era of the pocket watch and the dramatic induction. It doesn’t match modern audiences.

Something has genuinely shifted in the relationship between performers and audiences over the past couple of decades. The barrier has come down. Audiences today feel a closeness to performers, a sense of access, that didn’t exist in the same way before. You can see it everywhere: people calling out requests at concerts, yelling at comedians, engaging with performers on social media in ways that feel personal and direct. Crowd work has become one of the most celebrated elements of live comedy precisely because audiences want to be in it, not just watching it.

This isn’t entitlement, exactly. It’s a shift in expectation. The wall between the stage and the seats has gotten thinner, and audiences now experience that closeness as part of what makes live performance worth attending.

For a hypnotist, this shift is pure opportunity. The closer your audience feels to you before the show starts, the more willing they are to go somewhere unusual with you once it does. Pre-show access isn’t a threat to your authority; it’s the foundation of the trust your show depends on.

What to Do Instead

Arrive early enough to be genuinely present before the audience fills in. Not rushing through a sound check with five minutes to spare, but early enough to settle into the space and be ready to engage when the first people walk through the door.

Move through the room. Don’t plant yourself at the front or stand near the stage. Go where the people are. Sit down next to someone. Ask a simple question. Let conversations develop naturally. You’re not working the room in the salesperson sense. You’re just being present and human in a space that will shortly become your stage.

Pay attention to energy, not answers. Notice who lights up when you talk to them. Notice who seems curious versus guarded. Notice the person who says they’d never get hypnotized but is leaning forward when they say it. That information is gold, and it’s only available to you if you’re in the room to collect it.

If a venue offers you a green room, thank them and use it to store your gear. Then go be with your audience.

The Show Starts Before the Show

Every other entertainer on the bill that night can afford to wait in the green room. Their show is in their head, and it travels with them wherever they go.

Yours is sitting in the audience. Go find it.

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My father kept a garden my whole life growing up. When he retired, he knew himself well enough to know that he couldn’t sit still. He was a classic type A personality, and the idea of retirement as rest was never going to work for him. So he became a farmer.

He grew thirty-five varieties of fruits and vegetables and sold them at a farm stand in the driveway. It was a real operation. He brought to farming the same focused, driven energy he’d brought to his career, and he loved every minute of it.

He passed away recently, at eighty-five. Even as his health was declining, he still had about half an acre planted. The farm stand was long gone. He was growing far more than he could ever use himself, but he couldn’t stop. He gave the rest away to the neighbors. Growing things was simply what he did, right up until the end.

When he passed, I looked out at that half acre and knew I couldn’t let it go to weeds. His last garden had to be harvested. It felt like the right way to honor him. So I’ve been out there, day after day, weeding and picking and tending it all.

And I’ll be honest with you: I do not enjoy it.

The Difference Between a Garden and a Farm

I’m not a farmer. I’m a gardener.

When I bought my first house, I put in a garden. I’d learned from my dad over the years, and I genuinely loved it. The pleasure of walking outside right before dinner and picking something fresh, cooking something vibrant and alive. That scale suits me. The intimacy of it. The manageable relationship between the effort and the reward.

But what I’m doing in my dad’s half acre is something different. It’s not a hobby anymore. It’s an undertaking. The scale has shifted, the demands have multiplied, and the experience of it has changed completely. I’m not tending a garden. I’m running a tiny farm. And I’m doing it without the orientation of a farmer, which means it costs me more than it gives me.

A gardener and a farmer both grow things. They share the same fundamental knowledge, work with the same soil, face the same weather. But the relationship each has with the work—the scale at which they operate, the energy they bring, the way they experience the demands of it—is profoundly different. And you cannot fake the farmer orientation if you’re wired as a gardener. The work itself will tell you.

Which One Are You as a Hypnotist?

I did not come to entertainment hypnotism as a hobby. From the moment I started, I knew I was going to make it my business. I approached it with a farmer’s orientation. Not because I consciously chose that framing, but because that’s how I’m wired when it comes to this work. The scale, the systems, the constant attention to growth and output, the willingness to do the unglamorous work that keeps the whole operation running. All of it felt natural to me in hypnotism in a way that it simply doesn’t in an actual field.

Twenty-three years later, I’ve hypnotized over thirty thousand people and generated over a million dollars in revenue. I’m not sharing those numbers to impress anyone; I’m sharing them because they are the harvest of a farmer’s approach applied consistently over a long time.

Now I want to ask you the same question I’ve been sitting with in my dad’s garden: when it comes to entertainment hypnotism, are you a gardener or a farmer?

Not which one do you want to be. Not which one sounds more impressive. Which one are you, honestly, right now, in the way you actually approach this work?

What Each One Actually Looks Like

A gardener hypnotist loves the craft. They love the show itself. The induction, the suggestions, the moments of genuine surprise on stage. They perform when the opportunity presents itself, and they do it well. But the business side of it—the marketing, the follow-up, the systems, the constant tending of relationships and pipelines—feels like labor in a way the performing doesn’t. They may do it out of necessity, but it costs them something. It doesn’t come naturally.

A farmer hypnotist approaches the whole enterprise, the craft and the business, as a single integrated operation. They think about yield. They think about seasons and cycles. They plant things now that won’t produce results for a year. They do the unglamorous work without resentment because they understand that the harvest depends on it. The scale doesn’t drain them; it motivates them.

Neither of these is a character flaw. They’re different orientations, and they produce different careers. The gardener hypnotist can have a genuinely beautiful relationship with this work; performing regularly, doing it well, finding real satisfaction in the craft. The farmer hypnotist builds something larger, but the scale comes with its own demands and its own costs.

The Only Thing That Actually Matters

If you’re a gardener, that’s okay. Really. A gardener who knows they’re a gardener can build a perfectly satisfying career in this field, one that fits their actual relationship with the work, that doesn’t demand more than they want to give, and that lets them show up fully for the parts they love.

What’s not okay is telling yourself you’re a farmer when you’re not. Because the farmer’s approach—the systems, the scale, the relentless tending of things that aren’t immediately rewarding—doesn’t work if the orientation isn’t genuinely there. You can’t grind your way into a farmer’s relationship with the work if you’re wired as a gardener. You’ll just exhaust yourself in someone else’s field.

The mismatch between who you are and what you’re asking of yourself is where the real damage happens, not in the honest acknowledgment of which one you actually are.

My dad was a farmer to his core. He was still planting things at eighty-five because that orientation never left him. I’m out in his field right now honoring that, doing my best, and being reminded every day that I am not him in this particular way. I’m a gardener here.

In hypnotism, I’m the farmer.

The question is: which are you? And more importantly: do you know?

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The phone rang, and when I answered, a representative from an events management company introduced herself and began explaining why she was calling.

Her company had been hired by one of the largest beer brands in the United States to produce a major event tied to the Super Bowl. The whole thing was hush-hush. She couldn’t tell me much. What she could tell me was that the brand had run a hugely successful Super Bowl campaign the previous year built around a single idea: being open to new experiences. Up for whatever. The follow-up campaign was going to take that concept and turn it into a live event.

The plan was this: fans of the brand could submit a YouTube video explaining why they should be chosen to attend the event without knowing what the event actually was, where it would be held, or what would happen when they got there. Five hundred people would be selected. They would each get to bring a friend. All they had to commit to was showing up and being up for whatever came next.

The event itself, she explained, would be a full weekend, essentially a private festival for the contest winners, with music, entertainment, and experiences across two days. Her team had found my YouTube channel and loved the concept of my interactive hypnosis show. They wanted me to perform a full show in the independent theater they were renting for the weekend. And they wanted me to spend an hour the following day doing street hypnosis. They wanted me to walk up to contest winners, ask, “Are you up for whatever?” and hypnotize them on the spot if they said yes. (There were going to be camera crews all over the place for the whole weekend.)

I said yes immediately. Of course I did.

And then she asked me what my fee would be.

The Number

At the time, I was working primarily in the college market. My average fee was around $1,500 per show. I was getting there. Building momentum, developing the show, but I wasn’t commanding top-of-market rates yet, and I knew it.

So when she asked for my fee, my brain did the fastest and least sophisticated math possible: this is a corporate thing, so double it. Three thousand dollars.

There was a moment of silence.

And then, in a tone I immediately recognized as surprised—not offended, not hesitant, surprised—she said, “Okay. We can do that. Actually, why don’t we make it thirty-five hundred?”

In that instant, I knew.

I had way undervalued myself. The surprise in her voice wasn’t surprise that I was asking for too much. It was surprise that I was asking for so little. A project of this scale, for a brand with this kind of budget, attached to a Super Bowl campaign? I should have come in somewhere between five and seven thousand dollars at minimum. Maybe more. I’ll never know what the ceiling actually was, because I never got anywhere near it.

The Weekend

I took the $3,500. And I want to be honest: even knowing I left significant money on the table, the experience was worth every bit of what I didn’t charge.

They flew me out. They flew my guest out. They put us up in a private condo for the entire weekend. And then they dropped us into one of the most extraordinary event lineups I have ever been part of.

Lil Jon. Kool and the Gang. Vanilla Ice. Several of the top electronic dance DJs of the moment. Magicians. Viral internet personalities. A world champion beatboxer. Comedian Chris Distefano. An incredibly diverse, high-energy weekend of entertainment for a thousand people who had shown up not knowing what they were walking into.

I performed my show in the theater. I did the street hypnosis the following day. It remains the single best booking experience of my career, not just for the show itself, but for what it felt like to be part of something at that scale, alongside performers at that level.

And the whole time, a quiet voice in the back of my head kept saying: you are worth more than you charged for this.

Two Problems, Not One

When I look back at that phone call now, I can see that I was actually dealing with two separate problems at the same time, and I didn’t have a solution to either of them.

The first problem was that I didn’t fully know my value even within the market I was already working. I was building toward the top of the college market but hadn’t arrived there yet, and so my internal sense of what I was worth was still calibrated to where I had been rather than where I was going. When you’re undercharging in your primary market, that number becomes your psychological anchor. It distorts everything you quote from it.

The second problem was that I had absolutely no framework for quoting in a market I’d never worked. I had no contacts in the corporate events world. I had no idea what a brand of that size typically paid for entertainment. I had no reference points at all. So when she asked for a number, I grabbed the only thing I had available: my college rate, doubled. And I hoped it was in the right ballpark.

It wasn’t even close.

What I Should Have Done (I Think)

Here’s where I want to be honest with you: I’m still not entirely sure what the right move was. But reflecting on it now, I can see two options that would both have been better than what I did.

The first is the one I wish I’d had the presence of mind to take in the moment: slow the conversation down. Something like: this sounds like an incredible project, and I want to make sure I put together the right proposal for something at this scale. Can I follow up with you tomorrow? That buys you twenty-four hours. In those twenty-four hours you can research the client, understand the scope, figure out what events like this actually pay, and come in with a number that reflects the actual market rather than a panicked estimate made under pressure.

Nobody loses a legitimate lead by asking for a day to prepare a proper proposal. If anything, it signals professionalism. The call was real. The project was real. She wasn’t going to hang up and move on because I asked for twenty-four hours to put something thoughtful together.

The second option is what I’d call the stranger market multiplier: deciding in advance that when you get a call from a world you don’t know, you apply a rule rather than improvising. Triple your known-market rate. Maybe more. Quote high and let the client’s reaction be your data. Her tone when I said three thousand dollars told me everything I needed to know about where the budget actually lived. A number like seven or eight thousand might have landed exactly the same way.

What I actually did was have neither tool available. I didn’t slow the conversation down because I was afraid of losing the lead. And I didn’t have a pre-decided rule for unknown markets because I’d never thought about it before that moment. So I grabbed the only number I had and doubled it, and it wasn’t enough.

The fear of losing the lead is what killed me. It rushed me into a quote I wasn’t ready to give, in a market I didn’t understand, on a timeline that served the anxiety of the moment rather than the value of the opportunity.

What Would You Have Done?

I’ve shared this story because I think the problems it illustrates are universal. Every performer who has ever taken a call from an unfamiliar market has felt some version of what I felt in that moment: the excitement, the uncertainty, the pressure to say something, the fear that hesitating means losing.

But I genuinely don’t think I have all the answers here. I know what I did wrong. I’m less certain about exactly what I should have done instead, and I’m curious what you think.

Would you have asked for more time before quoting? Would you have gone in high on instinct and let the client’s reaction guide you? Do you have a system for quoting outside your primary market that you’ve developed over your career? Have you had a moment like this one, where you heard the surprised tone and knew immediately you’d left money on the table?

I’d genuinely love to know. Drop a comment below. This is exactly the kind of conversation I think we should be having with each other.

Because the call is going to come. The question is whether you’ll be ready for it.

I started performing in 2004. Over the past twenty-two years I’ve done shows at colleges, corporations, fairs, festivals, fundraisers, and post-proms across the United States. I’ve stood in front of audiences of fifty and audiences of fifteen hundred. Conservative estimate: over 150,000 people have seen me perform.

I cannot contact a single one of them.

No email list. No subscriber base. No owned audience of any kind. Every one of those 150,000 people walked out of a show, and I had no mechanism to stay in their world. They saw something extraordinary (or at least I hope they did) and then they were gone. And so was the relationship.

I tried, once. Around 2010 I started building a list. I didn’t set it up correctly, never developed a real strategy around it, never figured out what I was actually going to say to the people on it or why they’d want to hear from me. It limped along for a while and then I gave up and deleted it. And then I just… didn’t try again.

There are very few things I genuinely regret about my career. The way I’ve handled, or failed to handle, my email list is one of them. It is, from a pure business standpoint, the biggest mistake I’ve made.

I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to make it too.

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If Mark Twain is the most quoted American writer (half of which, as the joke goes, he never actually said) then Terry Stokes might be the Mark Twain of stage hypnotism. Terry is, by most reasonable assessments, the most famous American stage hypnotist. His career spanned five decades. He was the king.

He’s also one of the most quoted. I know Terry personally. He’s been generous to me in this business, and I have a great deal of respect for him.

Which is exactly why what I’m about to say needs to be said carefully.

There is a line that gets attributed to Terry and repeated constantly in our community, particularly at moments when a hypnotist is explaining away a show that didn’t go well, or justifying a practice that deserves more scrutiny than it gets. The line is: it’s your job to be an entertainer.

I’ve heard Terry say something like this at conferences, and I understand what he means when he says it. The problem is that what he means and what people take it to mean have drifted very far apart. And the practice that quote gets used to justify—off-mic cueing—is something I think deserves a direct, honest look.

What Off-Mic Cueing Actually Is

For readers outside the profession: an off-mic cue is when a hypnotist moves the microphone away from their face and quietly directs a guest on stage to do something specific. The audience can’t hear the instruction. What they see is the guest “spontaneously” producing a behavior or a reaction, but that behavior didn’t emerge from a hypnotic state. It came from a direct, private instruction.

It happens most often when the hypnosis isn’t fully working. The guests on stage aren’t deeply enough under to generate organic, genuinely hypnotic material, so the performer quietly feeds them the bit instead of facilitating it. The show continues. The audience laughs. Nobody in the seats knows the difference.

And the hypnotist, if pressed later, might tell you: it’s my job to be an entertainer.

What Terry Was Actually Saying

Here’s where I want to be fair to Terry, because I think his actual argument is more nuanced than the shorthand version that circulates.

The version of this idea I’ve heard Terry articulate is something like: as a hypnotist, your job throughout the show is to give your guests suggestions. An off-mic cue is, technically, a suggestion; one that you happen to be delivering without speaking into the microphone. The delivery method changes. The fundamental act, directing a hypnotized person with language, does not.

There is a certain logic to that. And coming from someone with Terry’s depth of experience and craft, I take it seriously.

But I think the argument gets picked up by people who are missing the most important part of it, and used in a way that Terry almost certainly never intended: as a blanket justification for substituting showmanship for hypnosis when things get hard. And that’s where I have to part ways. Not with Terry, but with what his words have become in the hands of others.

The First Problem: What the Audience Thinks They’re Watching

An audience at a stage hypnosis show has a reasonable expectation: that what they are watching is hypnosis. Not a comedy show. Not an improv performance. Not a directed skit where the hypnotist is quietly feeding lines to participants. Hypnosis.

When a hypnotist relies heavily on off-mic cueing to generate the show’s material, they are presenting something to the audience that isn’t what it appears to be. The audience is entertained, yes. But they are entertained under a false impression about what they’re witnessing.

I think that matters. The wonder of a hypnosis show, the thing that makes it different from every other form of entertainment, is the genuine astonishment of watching a real person respond to suggestion in ways that bypass their ordinary self. When that’s real, it’s extraordinary. When it’s directed, it’s theater. There’s nothing wrong with theater. But you should probably tell people that’s what they’re watching.

The Second Problem: What You’re Doing to the Person on Stage

The guest who volunteered for your show came up because they were curious, or brave, or caught up in the energy of the room. They sat down in that chair and trusted you with something genuinely vulnerable: their state of mind, their self-consciousness, their willingness to be seen doing something unexpected in front of people they know.

When you off-mic cue someone who isn’t deeply hypnotized, you are doing something different from what they think is happening. They may believe they’re responding from some internal hypnotic state. They’re not. They’re following a quiet instruction from a person with a microphone who needs them to produce something for the show. The power dynamic in that moment is worth sitting with.

There’s also a subtler cost. The guest who gets off-mic cued through a show doesn’t get the actual experience of deep hypnosis. They get a performance. And they leave having been used for entertainment rather than genuinely served by the process they came up for.

The Third Problem: What It Does to You as a Hypnotist

This is the one that I think gets discussed least, and it might be the most consequential in the long run.

Every time a hypnotist reaches for an off-mic cue because the hypnosis isn’t working, they are choosing a workaround over a solution. The real question—why isn’t the hypnosis working? what do I need to do differently?—never gets asked. The show gets saved in the short term. The skill gap that caused the problem remains.

Telling yourself it’s your job to be an entertainer is a very comfortable way to avoid the harder truth: I need to get better at this. The rationalization closes the loop before growth can happen. And a hypnotist who learns to paper over weak hypnosis with cueing and comedy never develops the deeper craft that would make the cueing unnecessary.

What Makes Hypnotism Special

Here is the core of what I actually believe, and what I think gets lost when the entertainer-first argument takes over.

When you create a strong, genuine hypnotic state, your guest on stage has everything they need already. Their imagination is active and accessible. Their critical faculty is quiet. Their inner creativity, the stuff that normally gets filtered and suppressed and second-guessed, is right there at the surface, available, ready to respond. You don’t have to feed them the bit. The bit emerges. Your job is to create the conditions for it to emerge, not to manufacture it when it doesn’t.

That organic emergence is the thing. It’s why hypnosis shows can produce moments that no scripted performance could replicate; because nobody planned them. They came from a real person in a real state, responding genuinely to a suggestion. The audience can feel that authenticity even when they can’t explain it. And they can feel its absence, too, even when they can’t explain that either.

If you have to off-mic cue someone, the honest read on that moment is: the hypnosis isn’t there yet. That’s information. It’s telling you something about your induction, your rapport, your pacing, your selection of volunteers. Listen to it. Don’t paper over it.

Back to Terry

I want to end where I started, because I mean this sincerely: I don’t think Terry Stokes is wrong. I think the people who use his words as a permission slip are wrong.

A hypnotist who is truly excellent at their craft, who creates deep, genuine states and knows how to work within them, is also, by definition, an entertainer. The two things are not in competition. The hypnosis, done well, produces the entertainment. You don’t have to choose between them.

The shortcut version of it’s your job to be an entertainer, the version that gets quoted in the parking lot after a rough show, has it exactly backwards. Your job is to be a hypnotist. Be a great one, and the entertainment takes care of itself.

That’s what I think Terry meant. And I think he’d agree.

Rashid reached out to me recently through Instagram with a question I’ve been thinking about ever since: what skills should a beginner focus on most when developing a strong stage performance?

The key phrase, to me, is stage performance. Not the show itself. Not the hypnosis. The performance.

That distinction matters because most of the advice available to aspiring entertainment hypnotists is about the mechanics of hypnosis: inductions, suggestions, how to handle resistant subjects. That’s all important, but it’s possible to have solid hypnosis skills and still put on a weak performance. The two things are related but not the same.

When I think about what actually separates a strong stage performance from a mediocre one, three things come up every time: personal energy, timing, and cognitive bandwidth. None of them get talked about enough. Here’s what I mean by each one.

Personal Energy: It’s More Than Confidence

The easy version of this point is “be confident on stage.” That’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Confidence is a prerequisite. What I’m talking about goes deeper.

A strong stage performance requires alignment. You have to know—clearly, specifically, at the level of genuine conviction—what you are actually doing when you perform. Are you there to amaze people? To make them laugh? To inspire them? To give them an experience of something they’ve never felt before? These are different intentions, and they produce different energy on stage. The audience can feel the difference even if they can’t articulate it.

The performance has to be a culmination of how you think about entertaining people and how you think about hypnosis itself, dovetailing together into something coherent. When those two things are aligned, when your philosophy of entertainment and your philosophy of hypnosis are pointing in the same direction, you can inhabit the performance rather than execute it. That’s where real stage presence comes from.

A lot of hypnotists are missing this. They genuinely want to entertain. But what they’ve built isn’t really a show; it’s a collection of bits they learned by watching other people’s performances, strung together without a unifying intention underneath. There’s no rhyme or reason to what they’re doing because they haven’t asked themselves the foundational question: what am I actually trying to do up here?

Answer that question clearly, and you can bring the audience into your energy rather than hoping they show up on their own. Leave it unanswered, and you’ll always be performing at them instead of with them.

Timing: The Skill Nobody Teaches

Timing might be the least discussed skill in entertainment hypnotism, which is strange because it’s one of the most visible differences between a good show and a great one.

There are really two layers to timing in a hypnosis show. The first is structural: knowing when to keep going with a bit versus when to wrap it up and move on. Every bit has a peak, a moment where it’s producing its best reactions, and then it starts to descend. Leaving a bit at its peak is a skill. Staying too long past it is one of the most common mistakes I see in this field. The audience will tell you when the energy is dropping if you’re paying attention.

The same principle applies to individual guests on stage. You develop an instinct for when you can get something special out of someone in the moment, when there’s more there if you push a little further, versus when it’s simply not going to happen and the right move is to move on to someone else. Chasing a guest who isn’t delivering costs you momentum. Reading that situation accurately and pivoting quickly is a timing skill.

The second layer is delivery. The small ad-libbed comment. The glance at the audience. The raised eyebrow at exactly the right moment. These things, timed correctly, can produce outsized responses from a room. Timed wrong, or not used at all, and you’re leaving real performance value on the table.

The reason timing is hard to develop is that you can’t really work on it in isolation. You can only develop timing when you know your material and your show structure so thoroughly that you’re not spending mental energy tracking what comes next. Timing is what becomes available to you when the fundamentals are running on their own. Which brings me to the third thing.

Cognitive Bandwidth: The Hidden Bottleneck

Most hypnotists don’t think about this at all. I’d argue it’s the most important of the three.

Your brain can only process so much at any given moment. Every decision you have to make consciously during a performance—what comes next, how to handle this guest, where to stand, what to say—consumes a portion of your available cognitive bandwidth. The more of that bandwidth is consumed by the mechanics of running the show, the less of it is available for everything that makes a performance actually great: observation, creativity, spontaneity, presence.

When a performer is operating near the ceiling of their cognitive capacity, it shows. They’re not really present in the moment. They’re managing. They’re thinking about what they’re doing rather than inhabiting what they’re doing. The show might be technically correct and still feel flat, because the performer isn’t actually there.

The solution is front-loaded. When you have done the work, when you have the hypnosis skills down cold, when you know your show inside and out, when the structure and flow are so internalized that you could run them in your sleep, then the facilitation side of the show can run on something close to autopilot. The cognitive load drops. And what fills that newly available space is where the magic lives.

You become a better observer. You catch the moments you would have missed when you were busy managing. You have room for the well-timed comment, the instinctive pivot, the creative choice that wasn’t in the plan but was exactly right. And something else happens too: you can be joyful. Not performing joy; actually feeling it. The show becomes genuinely fun for you, and that comes through in everything.

That’s the flow state. Your energy lifts. Your guests on stage feel it. The audience feels it. The whole room shifts into something different from what it was ten minutes ago. That shift is what people remember when they leave.

But you cannot get there by trying harder in the moment. You get there by doing the work before the moment. The flow state is not a performance technique. It’s the reward for preparation.

The Answer to the Question

So: what skills should a beginner focus on when developing a strong stage performance?

Get clear on your intention first. Know what you’re actually trying to do up there before you worry about anything else. Build your hypnosis skills and your show until they’re genuinely solid (not good enough, SOLID) because that’s the only way to free up the cognitive space that performance requires. And then pay attention to timing: in your bits, in your guests, in your delivery. Watch for the moments. Trust yourself to respond to them.

The hypnosis is the foundation. The performance is what you build on top of it.

And the flow state is what happens when the foundation is finally solid enough to stop thinking about.

HypnoThoughts has always done something that most hypnosis conferences haven’t managed: it built a genuine community. Not just an audience, not just a marketplace, but a tribe of people who actually want to be in the same room together. That’s rare. And it’s the reason a move to Atlanta isn’t a risk. When people are coming for each other, the city is almost beside the point.

But the move also landed at a moment when I think a lot of us are quietly asking whether the conference model itself still makes sense.

The Problem With How We’re Doing It

Let’s be honest about the landscape. There are seven or eight hypnosis conferences happening across the United States each year. Most of them follow the same basic template: a hotel ballroom, a lineup of familiar big-name speakers, breakout sessions, a vendor hall, maybe a gala dinner. The faces at the front of the room are largely the same from event to event. The content overlaps more than any of us want to admit.

I’m not saying these conferences are bad. Many of them are run by people who genuinely care about the profession. But the model they’re all operating from is a revenue model: how do we sell enough tickets, attract enough sponsors, and book enough names to justify the overhead? That logic pushes every conference toward the same shape: bigger, broader, more. A smorgasbord designed to attract as many different kinds of professionals as possible.

The result is that a lot of us are getting less out of conferences than we used to. We go, we see people we like, we sit through some sessions that hit and some that miss, and we come home with a stack of business cards and maybe one idea that sticks. The ROI, professionally and personally, keeps getting thinner.

Meanwhile, the conferences multiply. And they compete for the same speakers, the same attendees, the same slice of a market that isn’t growing fast enough to support all of them.

What We Actually Want From Each Other

Here’s what I think is true, even if we don’t say it out loud: most of us go to conferences for the hallway conversations. For the dinner where someone says something that changes how we think about what we do. For the feeling of being around people who get it, who live inside the same questions we do.

We don’t need a ballroom for that. We need the right people and enough time and the right conditions.

I have been part of a membership community for RV owners that I think has figured something out worth borrowing. They run one large national gathering per year, but the rest of their calendar is built around what they call hangouts. These are small regional weekends, maybe twenty to thirty people, built around a specific local experience. A weekend in a small Texas town where the group tours and actually helps bottle at a bourbon distillery. A weekend in the Pacific Northwest doing something specific to that landscape and culture. A weekend in Maine eating lobster and checking out the blues festival. Twelve or so of these throughout the year, two or three days each, region by region.

The experience at the center of each hangout isn’t just entertainment; it’s a container. Something shared and specific that gives people something to bond over, not just beside. The people who participate don’t just describe these weekends as fun. They describe them as formative.

I keep thinking: why aren’t we doing something like this?

What This Could Look Like for Us

The infrastructure already exists. We have a bunch of conferences spread across the country, run by people with event experience, community relationships, and existing audiences. The national equivalent is already there: HypnoThoughts Live!

What’s missing is the regional layer. Imagine what it would look like if that changed.

A weekend in New Orleans built around the psychology of belief, suggestion, and cultural ritual, with time spent actually engaging with the history and traditions of a city that has always understood altered states. A weekend in Nashville centered on performance and stage work, maybe including time with a performance coach or a session with musicians who work with stage fright. A weekend in Sedona focused on trance, nature, and mindfulness practice. A weekend somewhere with a strong medical community that goes deep on clinical applications and includes a conversation with practitioners outside our field: pain specialists, oncology nurses, therapists who work with trauma.

Thirty to fifty hypnotists. Two or three days. A focused theme. A shared local experience. Real time together.

The professional development would be deeper than almost anything a large conference delivers, not because the content would be more sophisticated, but because the conditions for learning would actually be right. Small groups create accountability. Shared experience creates trust. Trust creates the kind of conversation where people say what they actually think and learn something they couldn’t have gotten from a lecture.

And the fellowship—the thing we all say we’re going for anyway—would actually happen.

The Call

Here’s what I want to say directly to my colleagues who run conferences: you don’t have to choose between doing good work and making money. But you do have to choose between competing and collaborating.

Right now, every conference in our space is essentially running the same play. You’re all fighting for the same speakers, the same attendees, the same limited attention. That’s a race with no real winner, and it’s exhausting. The stress of constantly trying to get bigger—more tickets, more sponsors, more names on the marquee—is visible. We can feel it in the events themselves.

What if you stopped competing and started dividing the calendar?

What if a handful of conference organizers sat down together and said: we’re going to run one big national event, and then we’re each going to take a region and run two or three small weekends a year in our territory? Not massive productions. Not financial gambles. Manageable events with lower overhead, where you can actually be present instead of running logistics all weekend.

You’d reach people who’ve never come to your events before because the event is at a scale that feels accessible, built around an experience that sounds genuinely compelling rather than another conference. You’d have less stress. You’d probably enjoy it more. And the people who attend would leave with something real.

The hypnosis community doesn’t need more conferences doing the same thing. It needs a model that matches what we say we value: genuine connection, focused growth, and the kind of trust that only comes from real time together.

The infrastructure is already there. What’s missing is the will to use it differently.

You’ve been to a hypnosis show. Maybe more than one. You sat in the audience and watched other people go up on stage and do ridiculous, hilarious, inexplicable things, and some part of you thought: that looks incredible. I wonder what that feels like.

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The second one is dramatically more efficient.

A client who rebooks you is a client you don’t have to market to, pitch, or convince. They already know what you do. They’ve already taken the risk of hiring you once. When they call back, the sale is essentially made before the conversation starts. Over the course of a career, a high rebook rate is one of the most valuable things you can build.

In my experience, five factors drive that rate more than anything else. Here’s how I think about each of them.

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I’ve been doing this for over twenty years. I’ve had guests on stage who became drill sergeants, pirates, opera singers, motivational speakers, world-class athletes, and fearless dancers. I’ve watched quiet, reserved people command a room of five hundred. I’ve watched people who told me before the show that they’d never be able…

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That’s not false modesty. It’s just an honest assessment of where I was. I had the interest. I had the foundational knowledge. What I didn’t have was repetition. I hadn’t done the reps on inductions, on pre-talks, on suggestibility tests, on managing a group of people in hypnosis and moving them through a sequence of suggestions. Those skills only come from doing them, over and over, until they stop feeling like skills and start feeling like instincts.

The question was: where do you get those reps without a paying audience in the seats?

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I ended that piece with a tease. I said the skeleton of the routine was staying the same, but what was inside it was going to change completely.

This is that article.

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