The Business of Hypnosis: What Hypnotists Really Make

How Much Can I Make? — Real Jobs. Real Stories. Career Insights

Professional hypnotist Tommy Giorlando joins host Mirav Ozeri to demystify the practice of hypnosis, distinguishing between theatrical stage

Key takeaways

• Tommy Giorlando has over 20 years of experience in both stage hypnosis and clinical hypnotherapy.
• Stage hypnosis performances can earn between $1,000 and $5,000 per show.

Main topics

• Mechanics of the hypnotic state
• Stage hypnosis vs. Clinical hypnotherapy

Notable quotes

Hypnosis is the utilization of the imagination toward a focused purpose.

Conclusion

The episode offers a deep dive into how hypnosis serves as both a prof

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) Tiger Woods used hypnosis for his focus. Mike Tyson used hypnosis for his focus. Even the Chicago Bulls in the 90s, it was guided meditation, but guided meditation is a form of hypnosis. Speaker 2 (0:16) Hi, welcome back to How Much Can I Make? I'm your host, Mirav Ozeri. What if someone could change the way your brain thinks without medication or use of therapy? Today's guest is Tommy G. Rolando. a professional hypnotist with 20 years experience both as a hypnotherapist and a stage performer. We're going to unpack how hypnosis works, what it can actually do, and whether this unusual profession can really make a living. Let's turn to Tommy and find out. First of all, thank you so much for willing to participate and come on the show. I really appreciate it. I'm so excited because I'm so curious about hypnosis. So why won't we start with you telling me how you first introduced to hypnosis? Speaker 1 (1:07) My first experience with hypnosis was seeing hypnosis shows at my high school. Actually, Kevin Lapine, he's a very well-known hypnotist in Las Vegas. He went to my high school. He graduated years before I did. But he would come back and do fundraiser shows for the drama department and some of that. And I always thought it was staged. I always thought it was fake. It was like the drama kids, right? I did too. The kids who were in theater already. They were the ones who would go up and volunteer. And to me, that was like, oh, yeah, I can see why they're doing that. They're the ones who are good actors and stuff. And so whatever. So I thought it was all fake. And then I found a friend of mine I found out was a hypnotist and he had been doing shows. And I basically called him a con artist in a nicer way. But I was like, oh, you're one of those. OK, OK, I see how it is. And he goes, well, Tommy, are you willing to be wrong? And I was like, sure, hypnotize my buddy over here. So he hypnotized my friend Andrew. Mike Brody was the hypnotist's name. Great guy. So he hypnotized my friend Andrew. And Andrew came out of it going, holy crap, can I learn this? Can I, like, help you, like, with something? Can I pay you in some way? Like, I'm really good with computers and all that kind of stuff. So Mike's going, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll work something out. And so I was the test subject, and it worked. And I remember he hypnotized me when I sat down. He goes, okay, here's what I'm going to do. He hypnotizes me. He goes, now at the count of three, you're going to sit up and you're going to say bow wow automatically without thinking. It's just going to come out of your mouth. And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, that's dumb. Why would I do that? Like, that's just dumb. He snaps his fingers. I sit up and I'm like looking at him. He goes, Tommy, how are you feeling? And out of my mouth spills bow wow. And I was like, oh, Speaker 2 (2:50) man. Oh, you yourself heard. What was going through your mind? I mean, what did you feel? Did you feel like you were going into a different realm? Speaker 1 (3:00) No, it's just like, you know, being really relaxed and really focused and kind of in your own thoughts, like in your own mental space. I heard everything he was saying. I heard everything he was telling. He was teaching Andrew while he was hypnotizing me. So I was hearing what he was saying. It was kind of just like if I was closed my eyes and I'm zoned out, but I'm still hearing everything. Speaker 2 (3:24) And that's when you became a believer in hypnosis. Speaker 1 (3:27) That's when I became a believer. And it wasn't like a clear bow-wow was what really sold me. It was like this bow-wow. It just kind of happened. And I was like, wow, that's so interesting. Mike started working with me. Andrew and I started practicing together. We practiced a lot that first year. I just fell in love with it. I started doing street hypnosis everywhere I could. I was practicing on classmates. I was a senior in high school, so I was practicing in class, like getting in trouble. You know, all that kind of stuff. And I just fell in love with the stage aspect of it, the comedy, the fun things I could do. I was making water bottles taste like Sprite, you know, and that kind of stuff. It was so much fun. I wasn't even scratching the tip of the iceberg of the whole thing at that point, but I was hooked instantly. Speaker 2 (4:10) So then you started to do shows. Speaker 1 (4:13) Yeah. Yeah, the next year I started doing shows. Yeah, paying shows. I was doing like senior all night parties for graduates and post-prom parties and graduation parties and all kinds. It was pretty much high school stuff because I was a high school age, right? I was like 18 at that point. Speaker 2 (4:28) And in order to do a show, do you need any kind of certification or something? No. Speaker 1 (4:34) Certifications are made up by the certifier. I'm not saying they're not valuable to learn a skill and to have that certificate that says I learned this skill, but... There really is not a it's it's not like there's any real oversight to it. So there's not a need for like certification for that. Now, nowadays, you have to be insured to do shows. Oh, Speaker 2 (4:54) you Speaker 1 (4:54) should be insured. It's very stupid to do a show and not have insurance. Any performer should have insurance for what they're doing because people sue for all kinds of things. But no, there was no certification for any of it. And that's actually why I wouldn't even touch hypnotherapy, as I thought at that time that you needed to be certified, that you needed different skill sets, that you needed to understand things on a deeper level than what I knew. Speaker 2 (5:19) We're going to get to the hypnotherapist, which is highly interesting. But before I do that, I want to know, are there people that are impossible to hypnotize? Speaker 1 (5:28) I mean, there are people who fight it. There are people who choose not to be hypnotized. They'll kind of disingenuously say, prove, you know, hypnotize me. And they don't actually follow the instructions, so they won't be hypnotized. Anyone who has the ability to think, though, anyone who has the ability to use their imagination in any capacity has the ability to be hypnotized. And we're all hypnotized on a daily basis anyway. Speaker 2 (5:54) What do you mean? Give me an example. Speaker 1 (5:55) Everything around us, if you're using technology today, you are hypnotized a whole lot of your day probably. If you're mindlessly scrolling, you know, they call it doom scrolling, you're hypnotized. You're zoned out. You're focused in on something else. The world around you kind of gets blocked out for a time and you are hyper suggestible to new information. You're receiving information. The interesting thing about hypnosis is it's a scientifically verified phenomenon. It's medically proven. you can measure the effects with an EEG. You know, you measure the brainwave frequencies with all of that. Hypnosis is really in that low alpha and into the theta brainwave frequencies. And so we go into alpha just when we close our eyes. You close your eyes, you're instantly in mid alpha. It's just one of those things because the brain is then processing things differently. You're not utilizing the glucose the same way in your brain. You're sending that different areas because when we're visually seeing things, it's not that I just see pictures in front of me, right? It's spatial. I'm basically defining everything that I'm seeing. I'm analyzing. There's a whole lot that happens within the eye and in the brain. And so if we cut that source off and we close our eyes. we're actually experiencing it differently. We don't need to use the resources within the brain that we were previously using. Those can be reallocated. And that's why if we're driving somewhere new, we've never been before, we turn the radio down because we can hear better or we can see better when the radio is turned down, right? There's less stimuli hitting us, right? And so we can focus better on what needs to be focused on. And so it's really, that's that entry level into hypnosis in general. Speaker 2 (7:33) Let's say I come to you and I tell you, listen, Tommy, there's no way that I can be hypnotized. They tried to hypnotize me and it never worked. What would you do? First thing you'll ask me to do. Speaker 1 (7:45) I would ask you questions for you to ponder inward. There's a lot of misconception around hypnosis, first of all. Speaker 2 (7:53) Yeah, that's one of my questions. Many people say they Speaker 1 (7:55) can't be hypnotized because they weren't able to be hypnotized for a show. Speaker 2 (7:59) Right. Speaker 1 (7:59) And that's not the same thing. for a show they're looking to pick the people who are going to be the fastest and the ones who are going to have the biggest reactions because it's a performance right it's it's it's meant to be theatrical and so if i pick somebody from the audience who isn't giving me a big reaction it's not going to be as interesting if i find somebody who has a huge reaction and i kind of weed out the other ones that huge reaction person Could run the whole show themselves, right? But how do you Speaker 2 (8:29) pick those people from the crowd to know that? I do Speaker 1 (8:33) a few imagination experiments with them because that's really what hypnosis is utilizing is the imagination on another level. Speaker 2 (8:40) Okay. We Speaker 1 (8:40) all can remember back to when we were kids and we would play with our toys and we would engage with them as though they were the real things that they represented. If I was playing with my army guys, like my little toy soldiers, whatever, I was engaging as though they were their own. They were living. They were in their world. And I was using the amount. I'm making up the noises and I'm like hearing the voices in my head about it, you know, not like in a schizophrenic kind of way, but in a, you know, in that imaginative play kind of way. I was engulfed in that space. And that same. level of imaginative play is coming to play in stage hypnosis shows. It's kind of re-engaging that part of the mind that so many of us as adults forget to use, and it makes it more playful and fun, and it lets us block out the things that would hinder that experience. And so it just brings us zoomed in right there. And so I'm doing imagination experiments with them, telling them things like, you know, I'm getting their eyes