Our guest today was an award-winning comic with 20 plus years of onstage experience who graduated from college with a BA in theater and film. By his own admission, he was barely getting by doing standup comedy for bar gigs and B and C list comedy clubs. It wasn't until he caught another act, featuring a stage hypnotist that things began to change for him.
He taught himself self-hypnosis and gradually realized that his life began improving. He then retired from standup comedy, took a course in stage hypnosis and began thriving. He continued on with his training and he became certified with the National Guild Of Hypnotists. While pursuing this, he learned that hypnosis was more than just people using the power of the minds to be funny on stage.
It was also a powerful tool for self-improvement as well. About that time he discovered that he could successfully post content on YouTube, and has amassed an audience of 189,000 subscribers. despite despite being 52 years old. Around the same time he met and married the woman of his dreams, a former miss Utah.
I think it's safe to say that hypnosis has changed his life for the better. Without further ado, let's welcome, John Moyer.
Thank you, Greg. I appreciate it very much. That's one of the things a lot of people have said to me. When they see my wife and they see me and they go, now we know hypnosis is real, cause there's no way that you got a woman like that who was wide awake and conscious.
Awesome. Can you take a few moments and fill in the gaps from that intro and bring us up to speed with what's going on in your world.
Yeah. It was kind of a lot what you said in your intro. I went to school for theater and film with a screenwriting emphasis. And while I was in film school, I discovered standup comedy and it all seemed like it was in the same wheelhouse: entertainment and writing and being funny.
I graduated from film school. I went on the road doing standup comedy and I did that for over 20 years. My whole thing was I never really cared about being super famous. I never cared about being super rich. I just wanted to be able to live my life being creatively and, you know, not have to answer to the proverbial man.
I just kind of wanted to be in charge of my own time. And at the same time too, along the way, I had a couple of screenplays that were independently produced. Being on stage was kind of my first love my, my first passion. But one of the things about doing stand up comedy for me, and especially when it comes to the world of film is, you know, there's a saying that all drama is conflict or all conflict is drama. It's like when you watch Star Wars, there wouldn't be a Star Wars if there wasn't a Darth Vader, and if there wasn't a DeathStar and you had to go rescue the Princess. So my whole thing when it came to up comedy was Hey, if drama is conflict, then that's going to where that's where I draw from, for my material on stage.
So the more dysfunctional my personal life was, I'm like, oh, here, here's a joke. I can do this and I can make fun of this. I was kind of an angry comedian on stage. But while I was able to go on and tell jokes on stage and make people laugh, what was going on behind the scenes with my life is that I wound up going through a divorce.
I was a single parent. I was really unhappy with that situation. Of course I love my kids. Didn't mind being a single parent. Then there was this kind of this thing in the early two thousands where the model of standup comedy really changed from what it was when I started doing standup comedy in, the early to mid nineties. When I was doing standup comedy in the early to mid nineties, I would hear the headliners talk: the guys that girls that have been doing it for, 10, 15, 20 years, they talked about how the heyday for standup comedy for them was like the late seventies, the early eighties.
They said, what killed standup comedy for them was cable television. Because people kind of wanted to stop going, why would they go out to a comedy club when they could sit at home and watch comedy on TV: Evening At The Improv, Comic Strip Live, that sort of thing. The thing that killed for my generation early on was the Internet. It's changed definitely since then. But what had happened was, when MySpace really took off and became a thing; Comics were flocking to MySpace to promote themselves, to promote their shows. What a lot of comics would do is when they were going to a particular town, they would search for people, in that town that were listed under MySpace.
And they would go through and they would add all these friends and then they would promote their shows. So what wound up happening was that comedy became not necessarily not about who the funniest comedian was, but it was more like who was more famous relative to having followers on the internet and friends on MySpace.
I've a really good friend of mine that he owned several comedy clubs
