FBI CIA & Waking Hypnosis Secrets

FBI CIA & Waking Hypnosis Secrets

How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? Here the focus shifts to something a bit unexpected: "waking hypnosis" and tactical language skills drawn from FBI hostage work and intelligence training. Dr Will Horton talks through how everyday conversations can act like hypnosis with your eyes wide open, using ideas from Chris Voss, former FBI lead hostage negotiator, and Chase Hughes from the intelligence field.

You’ll hear how small shifts in wording – like getting someone to say "that’s right" instead of "you’re right" – can change the level of real agreement and compliance in a conversation. He unpacks "magic words" such as naturally, easily, effortlessly, notice, realise and aware, and shows how they can gently steer people’s thinking.

There’s plenty of humour too, including his favourite comeback to "I can’t be hypnotised" and his playful example: "The more you want to say no, the more you find yourself saying yes." The episode also looks at social drivers and why people chase significance, strength, approval, pity or intelligence, along with the fears that sit underneath each one.

Dr Horton links this to both NLP basics and advanced profiling, showing how understanding someone’s core driver can make communication, sales and influence feel like "magic". You’ll get a sense of his teaching style: question-led, story-heavy, and grounded in repetition of the basics, just like martial arts or sports training. He talks about reviewing core techniques again and again, whether in hypnosis, negotiation, or professional practice, to stop bad habits creeping back in.

If you’re curious how language patterns might help you shape habits, handle conflict or simply spot when a chat is about to go sideways, this session might give you a fresh way to listen to every conversation. What "one sentence" would you most want to plant in your own mind?